White Heat (9 page)

      After
supper of canned beef stew, Derek went back to his office computer to work on
his lemming project. The conventional wisdom in the scientific community was
that the four-year lemming population cycle was somehow independent of the
chief lemming predators, the fox, the snowy owl and the stoat, but, from his
own observations in the field, Derek had begun to suspect that the predator
population actually drove the cycle. It was a whole new angle on the relationship
between predator and prey and he knew he'd have to be extremely careful to get
his facts right before approaching anyone with a view to publishing his
findings. His email popped up. He scanned the messages, saw none from Misha and
buried his feeling of disappointment by getting up and making himself a cup of
tea. He sat down and typed Arctic fox population' into Google, then, on a
sudden, sickening impulse, deleted it and tapped in Misha's name instead. He'd
done this so many times, hating himself, but unable to stop. Some people got
addicted to internet gaming or porn, but with Derek it was Googling Misha. The
only comfort to be had was the fact that the intervals between each trawl had
grown longer. It had been three or four months since he'd last Googled his ex.

    A
familiar batch of thumbnails began to collect themselves together on the
screen. He scrolled through until he reached one he hadn't seen before. Misha
standing next to a man; they looked to have their arms around one another. Some
overwhelming impulse drove Derek to click on the 'enlarge' command and he found
himself staring directly into the eyes of a tall, blue-eyed, well-built
qalunaat
man with tremendous cheek bones. From the man's stance and Misha's
defiantly happy gaze there could be no doubting they were a couple.

    Derek
felt his stomach turn and his head grow light, as though he'd just been
launched from a rocket. Beneath the image he read: 'Tomas and Misha in
Copenhagen'.

    Derek
reached out and pressed the off button on the computer. The screen froze then
went dark, leaving the image of the couple burned on his retina. For a moment,
he wanted nothing more than to smash something. He stood up, went back into the
apartment and forced himself to lie on his bed until he felt more composed.

    He
was woken from his reverie by the sound of the detachment door bursting open
and a man's voice shouting: 'Palliser? Come out, you
uhuupimanga.'

    The
reek of cheap vodka followed the sound of the voice. Derek had been called a
lump of sperm before, but never on his own turf. He opened the door into the
office. In the light still streaming through the closed Venetian blinds he saw
Tom Silliq and Jono Toolik standing none too straight.

    'I
hope this is some kind of emergency.'

    'Emergency,
eh?' Tom shouted and, tottering forward, threw a poorly aimed punch. 'It will
be.' The man was cataclysmically drunk.

    'Now
then, fellas, go home,' Derek said, scouring the room to make sure neither he
nor Stevie had left a weapon on view.

    Silliq
and Toolik looked at one another. Silliq began to giggle. Taking advantage of
this momentary distraction, Toolik took another swipe at Derek but he managed
to dodge it.

    Figuring
it was probably safer to be outside, he headed for the door, only to be grabbed
on his way out by Silliq. As Derek pushed him away, Silliq swung his fist
randomly and, as luck would have it, it slammed into Derek's left eye. Shocked
as much as hurt, Derek felt himself stumble as

    Toolik
took another punch of his own, socking the policeman in the nose. Blood from
the nose wound sprayed onto Silliq's parka, and for a moment or two everyone
froze, uncertain what was supposed to happen next.

    Dimly
recalling snatches of the morning's grievances, Toolik opened his mouth and
said, approximately: 'Stay out of our business.'

    Then,
whirling about, he headed unsteadily for the door, belched and, with the
blustering dignity of the paralytic, made his way outside. Tom Silliq stood a
little while in the constabulary office, as if awaiting instructions, before
staggering silently after his neighbour.

    Derek
rushed for the door and locked it behind them. They'd be back sometime in the
morning, red-faced, semi- sober and deeply apologetic. He wiped his nose with
the back of his hand and was surprised at the amount of blood. His eye hurt
too, he realized, and since he couldn't see out of it he assumed it had closed
up.

    He
made his way to the bathroom in the apartment and was busy washing away the
ooze from his face when he heard a buzzing coming from the office. At first he
imagined Silliq and Toolik were back. Then, with some relief, he remembered
that Edie was supposed to be calling on the radio. He quickly washed his hands
of blood, picked up a hand towel and made his way into the comms room.

    'Edie?'

    'Hey,
Derek. How are you?'

    Derek
opened his good eye wide and stretched his mouth a few times to make sure he
could talk.

    'Just
dandy.' He didn't ask why she had chosen to call so late. He reckoned she had
her reasons.

    'Is
this a bad time?'

    Derek
pressed the towel against his eye and felt something pop.

    'Couldn't
be better.'

    There
was a pause, which Derek felt incumbent upon himself to fill.

    'This
isn't about the hunter fellow, the one who died, is it?'

    There
was an awkward kind of a sigh. Derek's head throbbed and his mouth felt dry,
his tongue brittle. He felt his brain sinking back.

    'You're
not sick, are you, Derek?'

    'No,'
he said. 'Not sick.' He liked it that she'd asked.

    'I'm
sorry,' Edie said. Her voice grew serious. 'I know this isn't exactly going to
make your day.'

    'Oh,
don't you worry about that, Edie,' Derek said. He raised his fingers to his
right eye. It was already swelling. 'I'm having a super time. Any case, you
might have noticed, the day ended a while back.'

    'The
business with Felix Wagner,' Edie went on. 'Truth is, Derek, I shouldn't have
signed that council of Elders' report.' She sounded tired and defensive. 'A
week ago I went back to where it happened. I walked around the spot, kind of
recreating the moment.'

    'Edie,
it's late,' he said, 'and you
did
sign, remember?' He was hoping to
shame her into going away, but she didn't take the bait.

    'The
bullet entered Felix Wagner from the front, at an angle from above. At the time
I found a footprint on the bluff above the beach, where the shooter must have
been standing. Zig-zag with an ice bear in the middle. I told the council but
it didn't make it into their report. Point is, Derek, there's no way Felix
Wagner was killed by his own bullet.'

    Derek
prodded his eye very gently.

    'No
one's complained about the council of Elders' report. Ask me, the matter's
closed.' The moment the words left his lips, he felt a bit ashamed.

    'Come
on, Derek.' She had this way of appealing to his better side, to his
conscience, maybe. No one else was able to tweak away at him the way she did.

    'Edie,
listen to me,' he said, in a last ditch attempt to justify his inaction. 'This
isn't Samwillie Brown. This Wagner fellow and his sidekick, they aren't our
people.'

    'With
respect, Derek, you're missing the point. Felix Wagner is dead. No one really
buys the story about the ricocheting bullet and the only other person we know
was at the scene didn't do it. You know how it is. No one comes or goes in or
out of these settlements without everybody knowing.'

    He
did know that. By God he did. You couldn't take a piss without someone having
an opinion on it. One of the many ironies of northern living. The tundra had to
be the only place in the world where there was everywhere and nowhere to hide.

    'So .
. .' Edie continued, 'whoever killed Felix Wagner is still here in Autisaq, or
somewhere nearby, most likely in one of the settlements or maybe out on the
land.'

    Derek
suddenly felt exhausted. He and Edie had stirred up a lot of bad will going
after Ida Brown. The elders had washed their hands of this one. You had to ask,
was it worth it?

    'Edie,
you're forgetting something.'

    'What?'

    Derek
took a long breath.

    'Nobody.
Gives. A. Shit. You have nothing to gain by going over this and you have a lot
to lose.' He felt a twinge of self-loathing as he said it, but he carried on
all the same. 'You'll stir up a load of politics and it won't go anywhere. No
one will co-operate.'

    There
was a short silence, then Edie came back on and in a low, resigned voice,
added: 'Including you, it seems.' The radio fizzled out.

    Derek
listened to the white noise for a while. She hadn't sounded angry, he thought,
only disappointed, which was worse. In any other world she'd be right, but this
was the Arctic and up here, however much he and the High Arctic Police and all
the other government agencies and NGOs and the do-gooders wanted to imagine
otherwise, the only rules that mattered a damn were the ones the land imposed
on those struggling to carve a living from it.

    He
went back into the apartment and stared at his eye in the bathroom mirror. It
was puffed and purple, the lid now completely obscuring the eyeball. Damn Edie,
he thought, she didn't even have anything real to go on. Even if what she said
was true, and Wagner hadn't been killed either by Andy Taylor or by his own
bullet, some Inuk hunter out on his own probably mistook Wagner for a caribou
or a bear and took a shot. When he realized what he'd done he'd panicked and
scarpered.

    Derek
climbed into bed and pulled up the covers but his eye was hurting and the
conversation with Edie had rattled him, so he got up, pulled on his Polartec
and insulated trousers, three pairs of socks, two scarves, two hats and his
mukluks and went out into the annexe which once served as a coal shed but was now
home to his lemmings. He flipped on the low-level lighting. The creatures were
asleep in the tank he'd kitted out to simulate the subnivean space where they
spent their winters in the wild. The last few years had been tough on the
little critters, the snow under which they usually passed the winter, not
hibernating exactly, rather sleeping and keeping warm, was beginning to rot too
early. It was collapsing inwards and crushing them in their burrows. This lot
would have died if Piecrust hadn't scented them out. For a few moments he just
sat there, watching them sleeping, so peaceful they could almost be dead.

    Edie
sat on her own in front of the TV, trying to cheer herself up with her
favourite supper of
maktaq
and sea urchins. The
maktaq,
thick,
chewy whale skin underscored with a layer of creamy, slightly sour fat, put her
in mind of the scent of the sea in summertime. She couldn't remember the last
time she'd eaten it.

    All
the Arctic settlements were being warned off marine mammal fat, but she was in
the kind of mood where she didn't care about PCB - polychlorinated biphenyl -
contamination. You couldn't see, touch or smell PCB and no one seemed able to
agree where it was coming from - theories varied from Russian nuclear plants,
through wartime radar stations to US naval submarines - and the warnings felt
abstract and nebulous. She didn't doubt that PCB caused the birth deformities
scientists claimed and she commended Robert Patma's efforts to get women of
childbearing age to restrict themselves to eating fish and caribou, flesh that
wasn't so contaminated, but there was nothing like
maktaq
to make you
feel at peace with the world and, in any case, Edie wasn't planning on having
any kids. She'd drunk her way through her most fertile years and now that she
was thirty-three and ready, at least in theory, to start a family, there was no
one to start one with. She wasn't bitter about it. She'd been a stepmother to
Willa and Joe for seven years and was as close to Joe as any human being could
be. She just wished she felt as attached to Willa, but somehow it hadn’t worked
out that way.

    The
conversation with Derek Palliser had unsettled her. She knew she'd become
overly insistent with him, displaying too much
ihuma,
the fieriness and ego
that had once made her such a good hunter and later, Sammy would say, a
difficult wife. The more rational part of her knew he was right. For once in
her life, she should just learn to toe the line. What did it
matter
exactly how Felix Wagner had died? On the other hand, Joe had set some dark
energy roiling in her belly and she knew she would not be content without the
answer. Perhaps being sober had made her more protective of a reality she'd
spent so many years avoiding. So here she was eating
maktaq,
despite
knowing it wasn't good for her. Pursuing this Wagner business wasn't good for
her either and yet, still she felt compelled to discover the truth.