“Well, well, the wandering minstrel!” Corporal Charlie Paterson said on the phone, and sang in a reedy tenor, ‘A wand’ring minstrel I, a thing of ra-a-a-ags and patches. . .’”
I wondered if he was always like this in the morning. The time was eight a.m., the day Thursday, about thirty-six hours after Morton Cavendish’s murder. I’d called to let him know I was back in Norman Wells and to ask if there’d been anything new overnight.
“Did Ottawa get you?”
“No, were they trying?”
“Trying, Jesus! The commissioner did everything except offer a reward and have dead or alive posters put up in the post office. The guy from Northern Affairs wasn’t so bad, but amongst all the umming and ahing I got the idea he wants to talk to you too. Where the hell’ve you been?”
“Maybe I better call Buster first.”
He pleaded, “Just tell me where you are, in case, ah, the superior officer you refer to gets me before you get him.”
“I’m at this Esso place, Mackenzie House.”
“Mackenzie House! Wait’ll the dirty muck-raking newspapers find out about yet another civil servant accepting favors! A guy with beaucoup opportunities to influence major environmental decisions! On the dole from the oil elite!”
“Holy God, Charlie,” I protested.
“Okay,” he said. “Better make your calls and call me back.”
It was a few minutes past ten in Ottawa. Buster came on the line.
“I understand you’ve been trying to get me, sir.”
He was calmer than Charlie Paterson. “Yeah, a few things happening. I hear you were in Inuvik yesterday but I missed you. What I wanted to say was, I told you originally to nose around about that missing aircraft. But now the Globe, the Star, the Sun, the Citizen, the Gazette, and every goddamn body else in the media business is making a big deal out of you being on the plane when Morton Cavendish got it. They’ve raked up every big case you been on. First, do you think there’s any connection between those drug guys taking off so fast, and Morton Cavendish being murdered?”
“Could be.”
“Were you working on that basis in Inuvik?”
“Partly.”
Drily, “Jeez, I’m not used to these long, comprehensive reports . . .” Then, “But if that’s the line you’re taking, keep right on. Hate to think that Johns guy is part of it, but . . . Anyway, I don’t want you to think that I’m pushed by the newspapers, because I’m not, and they know that you’ve been with Northern Affairs the last couple of years and are supposed to go to Leningrad, but the fact is a lot of people are fighting mad about this murder and we just can’t figure on pulling you out until there’s an arrest or at least some answers. I’ve been onto Northern Affairs, not to consult but just to tell them that you’re Inspector Kitologitak again as of now and until further notice.”
“Is that an order?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Damn it, Matteesie!” he said. “Thanks! We can talk about Northern Affairs again when this is over.”
“And sir, I should say one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“It simplifies matters a great deal.”
Meaning, now I didn’t have to be doing one thing while he thought I was doing another. I wasn’t just playing good dog, roll over and be scratched. Ever since that shot was fired into Morton Cavendish’s head, I’d been a Mountie again. I owed him, and I knew that better than anybody.
I phoned Bert Ballantyne, my superior in Northern Affairs. This was a big switch in my head from Buster with his jutting jaw and straight talk. I could see in my head Bert Ballantyne as he answered his phone: slim, short haircut, black horn-rimmed glasses, necktie in a Windsor knot, suit by Holt Renfrew, every inch a guy ready to move upward in the civil service. I told him respectfully that I’d just been talking to the RCMP commissioner.
“Yes,” he said. “Well, the bad news is I don’t think we can hold the Leningrad thing open. I’m sorry about that, but I hope you understand.”
I told him I did and would see him when this was over. Then I made one more phone call. It was a mad impulse, or maybe intuition that right now there was one other phone call I should make.
“Lois,” I said. “It’s me.”
I had rather expected an immediate complaint, but what she did was ask where I was, and when I told her, she asked, “Are you all right?” and without waiting for an answer, rushed on, “Oh, Matty, when I heard about you being on that plane when Morton Cavendish was shot, and what you did trying to stop the murderer, maybe taking a chance you’d get shot, too, I felt just terrible . . .”
She paused a few seconds and continued somewhat tremulously, “Ever since, I’ve been thinking about us, and about all the bitching I do when you’re home.” Another pause, a tremulous laugh, “And sometimes when you’re not.”
I simply didn’t know what to say, but I had to get something out. “Well, we can talk about that when I get home.”
“I’ll try to be better. Be careful. Come back to me.”
I hung up and thought of how Lois and I used to be. Couldn’t get enough of each other. For years now the opposite had been true. We could get enough of each other, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Yet marriage persisted. It’s a conundrum many face, men and women, and I didn’t have any more answers than I ever have.
Then Charlie Paterson was hammering on the phone-cubicle door and saying, “For God’s sake, time’s a-wastin’!”
I pulled myself together and pushed open the door. He didn’t use up time asking questions, commiserating about the Northern Affairs thing, making fatuous remarks about life is like that, and so on. What he did was fill me in, which is what I needed to jolt myself back to what had become once again my real world.
As I knew, yesterday there’d been no air search for either the murderer or the lost aircraft. “Weather today’ll make it two in a row. Still no radio signals. Also, no murderer.” He’d organized six local volunteers for a snowmobile search that had covered a fair amount of territory and found nothing significant. “But there is something. Maybe plenty. I’ll tell you about it while I’m showing you what there is to see. Get your clothes on and I’ll pick you up in the parking lot near the front door.”
In Inuvik the day before I’d gone straight from RCMP headquarters to the airport in the same German guy’s taxi. Travel in the North depends a lot on either planning well in advance, or getting lucky. I got lucky. An Esso Resources Citation, cruising speed 400 miles an hour, equipped to carry eight or ten passengers, flew north from Calgary three mornings a week and back in the evening. Usually the plane laid over for the day in Norman Wells. But as I walked into the Inuvik terminal an Esso flight was being called.
At the moment I could see only one guy, youngish, heading for the door leading to the tarmac. I called, “Pardon me!” (not an old Inuit saying, but one year the Mounties had sent me on a course to Princeton, you know). He stopped. Yes, he was with Esso. He could have modelled for one of today’s keen young oil execs in a Petroleum Council of Canada commercial. Bright-eyed, clean-shaven, short hair. Also courteous, as oil company people long ago conceded is good policy in the North, especially when talking to anyone with dark skin, some with eyes set at a slight angle.
“I’m with Northern Affairs,” I said, producing a card that testified to that side of my identity. “I have a watching brief for the department on the air search for the aircraft that’s missing and urgently need to get to Norman Wells. I wonder if . . .”
Watching brief. Maybe I’d been in Ottawa too long.
“Matthew Kitologitak.” he read from my card, and then smiled at me. “Not with the police any more?”
I’d hate to be trying to travel incognito with some carnally intensive blonde in this part of the country.
“Anyway, the answer is yes, we can take you,” he said. “Glad to.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Milt Lawton.”
Turned out that he’d been the sale reason for Esso’s flight extension to Inuvik today, here for a meeting with some administrators and elected officials from a group of northern communities. He was an adviser in the company’s public affairs department. Keeping up with the times was his business.
The pilot, grey-haired, tall, fit-looking, was standing a few feet away. We were introduced. He looked at me, appraising, and nodded. Then the three of us tucked our heads into our shoulders and leaned against the bitter wind and ground drift snow walking out to the aircraft.
This Milt Lawton had a very good grasp of how to conduct public affairs. With me, at least. I was tired and thirsty. We were scarcely airborne before he reached behind a seat and opened what looked like a cupboard door, muttering, “Wonder what we got here. . .”
What they had included my favorite rum, Mount Gay. He chose vodka. We poured good ones, which seemed to get the talk going. His university degree was in geography. He wanted to know what I did normally at Northern Affairs. I thought it wise to mention vaguely the Arctic Institute in Leningrad as one of my concerns. A lot of people I run into, immediately on hearing that sometimes I deal with Soviet concerns in the Arctic, tell me what some junior hockey player just back thinks of the food and accommodation. Somebody should tell those kids that not all the world’s cultures are based on that of Swift Current, Saskatchewan. But this guy, even though it turned out he had played hockey, said, “I envy you. Never been there.”
He went on to say that he was just back from two years working in Saudi Arabia. I’m always learning things about the world that I had never suspected and this was one: in common with some other oil people assigned to Saudi, where restrictions on normal Western lifestyles can be rather severe, he and his wife had lived in Cairo during his Saudi stint.
“It was just easier for her there,” he said, without elaborating. He’d flown to her there on weekends.
He mentioned the Morton Cavendish murder, saying earnestly the truth, that it represented a great loss to the North. He’d known Cavendish and went on to talk about him with affection. I recognized that this was no patronizing knee-jerk reaction, being pretty fine-tuned to that brand of white talk.
He didn’t know I’d been there when it happened. I didn’t tell him. There are advantages to being where the media is either no factor at all in daily lives, or has none of the unavoidably pervasive impact it has in big cities. We had our drinks and the hour passed quickly. When we were coming in to land I looked from the window nearest me. Lights along the Mackenzie at Norman Wells came closer and closer, twinkling like a mighty daisy chain against the snow-covered ice that ringed the drilling islands. The river bends west slightly here while keeping its general south-to-north course. The bright burn-off flare from the main Esso site marked the northwestern limits of the community’s seemingly careless space-eating sprawl. Dimmer lights from homes and cars and various business installations stretched for what seemed like miles, and probably was. As we touched down and rolled toward the terminal and stopped near where Cavendish had been murdered, Lawton said that his wife would envy him meeting Matthew Kitologitak. Imagine that. The world is a funny place.
He wasn’t getting off. “Gotta keep my seat by the bar,” he grinned. “Where’re you staying tonight?”
I said probably in a cot at the RCMP detachment.
“I think we can do better than that, if you want,” he said, glancing the question at me. I guess my expression said yes. He wrote briefly on a notebook page, which he tore off and handed to me. “Tell the cab to take you to Mackenzie House and hand this to the guy in the office by the door. They usually have some spare rooms.”
I had done as he instructed and was delivered by taxi, actually a nine-seater van, to a largish two-storey building near the centre of town. From the outside it was unexceptional; looking not unlike a spartan kind of hotel, which in a sense it was—living quarters mainly for Esso people coming to Norman Wells temporarily.
But it was spartan with a lot of differences. To the left of the main entrance a grey-haired man in a stylish cardigan sat at a desk with today’s Edmonton Journal spread out in front of him. He read Lawton’s note, signed me in, gave me a meal card and room key, told me that breakfast was served from seven to ten, and pointed toward a nearby room where he said I could find coffee and snacks twenty-four hours a day.
I carried my bag along a corridor past a bank of pay phones, then past a big lounge where some guys were playing pool on full-size tables and others in easy chairs were watching a hockey game on television. Another lounge room that I passed, empty, had an assortment of newspapers and magazines spread out on a table, plus, thoughtfully, an alternative TV set. Not everyone in Canada is addicted to hockey. I continued through a door, up some stairs, along to the end of the corridor and put my key in a door.
The room was narrow, utilitarian, industrial transit-house gothic. It was complete with one bed, three well-thumbed paperbacks, a well-worn pair of Greb boots a previous incumbent had left in a closet, a shower stall, towels, soap and a sign giving the rules of the house—which informed me that drinking alcoholic beverages in Mackenzie House was okay, but to keep the noise down because people on different shifts might be sleeping.
Accordingly, I was quiet. Decided not even to go get some ice in case it would clink too loud. I hadn’t realized until I had that drink on the plane that I was very tired. I took the Glenfiddich from my bag, poured a stiff one, added a little water, very little, and stood by the window looking out at a large open space of snow and not much else. The clump-like tracks of rabbits. The straight-line pussyfooting of a fox. I hadn’t eaten but as I stood there and sipped the drink I didn’t feel like going out again to find anything.
No food, and a second drink, might have been responsible for my uneasy night. I’d had nights like that before when I was on a case. I hadn’t really been on a case for a long time, but as I drifted in and out of sleep I was out in the bush with three other men in a blizzard. We had made a shelter against the wreck of an aircraft. It was damn cold. The other three were arguing but I couldn’t hear what about. Even while still half-asleep I was thinking this certainly wasn’t the kind of thing I needed to consult Dr. Freud about: I was hunting for three guys in a crashed aircraft, what else would I dream about? If I’d dreamed that I’d just scored seven straight goals to give the Montreal Canadiens a 9–8 win over the Edmonton Oilers, that would have required professional interpretation. After all, I’m a Toronto Maple Leafs fan.
I awoke to sounds of doors closing and boots clumping. I showered, dressed and, very hungry, found the dining room simply by following the crowd. While I moved my tray along the food-laden hot tables of bacon, sausages, ham, scrambled eggs (and a guy who’d cook eggs any other way you ordered), breaded fish, English muffins, hot cakes, French toast, hash browns and French fries, I ate a smoked sausage with my fingers. Then I was among the Danishes, muffins, every known packaged cereal, juices the same, coffee, cream, milk, hot water, tea (loose as well as bags).
I took my loaded tray to an empty table by a window and as I ate, watched as men moved along the line. They’d serve themselves grandly, meagerly, or in between, then look around for company and carry the tray to this table or that. Some glanced at me but none came to mine.
There weren’t many Dene or Metis that I saw, but that didn’t mean much; Norman Wells was about eighty percent white, I knew from someplace. Not like Fort Norman fifty miles south, which was almost all Dene and Metis. Maxine had said once, “In Fort Norman we got about two hundred and fifty people. No goddam”—smilingly—“Inuit at all, maybe twenty white people at the most.”
Some of the men, after eating, filled paper bags with fruit, doughnuts, muffins, cartons of fruit juice and milk. These must have been for between meals, because on a table at the end of the food line other well-filled bags were labeled with names, obviously pre-ordered lunches. I thought that if I was ever out of a job and hungry I would try to get on with Esso Resources at Norman Wells.
Finally so full of food that I could think about murder again, I’d made my phone calls and then Corporal Charlie Paterson was hammering the phone booth door. I went back to my room and zipped up my down vest, pulled on my parka, placed my fur hat squarely on my head with the ear flaps hanging loose. It was still a couple of hours before daylight. Outside, Charlie was waiting. I climbed into the van beside him.
“How about something to eat?” he grinned.
Ridiculous idea. He must have known.
As we pulled out of the parking lot the headlights of a line of school buses came the other way. I hadn’t noticed the Territorial school across the street the night before, just seeing another dark building. But you couldn’t miss it now, with all the life, bundled-up kids yelling and horsing around, kids leaping down from the buses to mingle with those who probably lived close and therefore were arriving on foot.
Charlie honked his horn and wound down his window to call, “Hi, there!” to a boy who looked about twelve.
“My kid,” he explained. “Good kid. Takes after his old man.”
“I don’t have any kids,” I said. “Yeah, you told me.”
I hadn’t told him, but that didn’t matter. Early in marriage I had cared, but got over it.
Snow mixed with sleet was rattling against the van’s roof in gusts. “Great goddamn search weather,” Charlie said. As we reached the town’s main street he turned right for a few yards and then left into the closest thing Norman Wells has to a commercial plaza. The parking area was a square of hardpacked snow and ice. Several cars and pickups and snow machines sat with vapor rising from the running engines. The lot was flanked on three sides by buildings set in the form of an open U; coffee shop, Bay store (tradition ally groceries and everything else from parkas to felt boot liners), Northwest Territories office, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Norman Wells Inn and others whose signs I couldn’t read in the dark.
“What are we looking for?” I asked.
“Just showing you the lay of the land. A guy fitting the general description of your buddy the murderer was here the day of the shooting, so he could be the guy the ground agent told us about who came in on the northbound flight. He started out with coffee and something to eat over at”—jerking his head in that direction—“the Norman Wells Inn. Sat by himself After a while, not long, the waitresses say, maybe thirty minutes, he went over to the pay phone, which rang a couple of minutes later and he answered it.”
“Waiting for a call at a specific time, right?”
The corporal looked at me. “Don’t know what I’d do without your Native intuition,” he said.
“I’m famous for it.”
“So I’ve been hearing—anyway, after the call he left. Nobody could say what he left in, as far as I could check. Or which way he went. But what seems to have been the same man arrived maybe fifteen minutes later at the Mackenzie Valley Hotel, which sort of sits by itself farther south along on the road you take to the airport. He had a double Scotch, then more coffee. After a while, same thing with the phone, he took a call on the pay phone there, again as if he’d been waiting for it. It was only a short call, the guy on the desk happened to notice.”
That might have been about the time Jules Bonner in Inuvik made what I’d thought must be a long distance call, from the number of coins he used.
“After that call,” the corporal went on, “he left. The desk clerk, a lazy bugger, did stroll to the window and notice that the guy was driving a Skidoo Elan. That’s the model you thought it was, remember? Lots of pep. The clerk noticed because he’s got one the same.”
I asked, “If it’s our guy and he’s not from here, where would he get the snowmobile?”
“Rented, for Chrissake,” the corporal said with what sounded like a tone of disgust, but not with me. “Somebody early in the day phoned the dealer here saying he was from Esso and wanted to rent a snowmobile that afternoon. The dealer thought it was a local call but probably it wasn’t. The guy showed up just a little while after the plane from the south came in, gave a name, no doubt phony, Esso tells me they have no record of a John Williams, paid a one-hundred dollar deposit, seventy dollars to be returned when he brought the machine back, and took off.”
“And never brought the machine back,” I said.
“You got it. Oh, yeah, and the dealer tells me it has a five-gallon fuel tank, meaning more range than the three-gallon jobs. Anyway, seems like it’s the same guy we traced until he left the Mackenzie Valley Hotel with the clerk watching. He said the guy turned right as if he was going back into town but a few minutes later an Elan went by in the other direction and he could’ve sworn it was the same guy. That time he definitely drove out of town.”
“Where does that road go?”
“If he went a bit and turned left, which we gotta figure he didn’t, it goes to the airport. If he keeps on going, it’s called the D.O.T. road. I’m going to show you.”
He circled the van to get back on the main road and turned left. A few minutes later he slowed at a driveway where a sign read MACKENZIE VALLEY HOTEL, a building whose lights we could hardly see through the snow and dark of a little after nine a.m. Then we drove on until we saw a sign pointing left, reading airport. He drove past that without turning and continued a bit until we came to another intersection. To our right a road sloped gently downhill toward the river. We turned left, away from the river.
“Now this road,” he said as we were driving along it a couple of minutes later, “can you figure out where we are right now?”
Best I could do was guess, but I did know the airport runway would take 737s, which meant it had to be close to 6,000 feet long.
“We must be on the edge of the airport, maybe close to the end of the runway.”
The van, just crawling along, stopped.
“Right. Now, if the guy on the snowmobile kept on going this way he coulda been heading for Nahanni Air’s float base, but there’s nobody around there in winter. Past Nahanni Air this road goes to the stone quarry where the oil company’s contractors get the stone to make the artificial islands they drill from. But nobody in his right mind goes up to the quarry just for fun. In winter, anyway. Which means there’s no reason for a guy on a snowmobile to go up this road by himself.”
“I have a feeling you’re going to say, ‘However . . .’” I said.
“Smart bastard. However, if he came this far, right where we’re stopped now, and turned left off the road he could go through that bit of bush”—we both looked that way but couldn’t see much except blowing snow—“he’d come out on the airport with the fence no problem because his end run had taken him around it. Then he could cruise along without lights to get so close that when the flight came in, all he had to do was move up a little, wait for the steps to come down and the people come out, then run over and do it.”
“Yeah,” I said. I could see the whole sonofabitching thing in my head, plainly. Too plainly.
“If” Charlie said, emphasizing, “that’s all if the guy we’re talking about wasn’t just some other guy who might not have come this way at all, but just kept right on going along the D.O.T. road to some shack out in the bush, into the arms of some husky dusky maiden.”
“Let’s pretend we’re talking about the murderer,” I said. “It’s more fun.” It also supported the idea that somebody masterminding this thing had arranged for him to come in here either from Edmonton or Yellowknife on the morning flight, and had phoned well ahead of time to arrange a snowmobile rental.
He started the van again. “I want to show you something else.”
We went uphill a few hundred yards further. Now I could see great chunks of windswept stone ahead and to the right; obviously, the quarry. Before getting there he turned left on what wasn’t more than a rough trail, deep ruts in the snow, the kind of place only a four-wheel drive vehicle like this one could go and hope to get turned around and out. Charlie went along that trail maybe a hundred yards, then braked and reversed into a sharp turn so that the back end of the van headed uphill and we were looking downhill.
Even with the snow I could see that we were on a shelf overlooking the Mackenzie. Below and to our right I could dimly see the airport lights, blinking through the squalls. Between us and the airport, even though there wasn’t much light yet, we could see a straight white line cutting through the bush like a chalk mark on a blackboard. It vanished in the distance in both directions. Everyone flying in the North along the Mackenzie sees miles of these straight white cutlines through the bush. Many were cleared originally in the 1960s for Canadian National Telegraphs but now were shared here and there by International Pipelines and in some places from about mid-January to mid-March, by the vital winter road. That’s the only time when ice at the river crossings is thick enough to hold big transports.
I stared at the outline, nodding, saying to myself, yeah, yeah. When he got that far after the murder, which way did he turn? I didn’t ask it but Charlie answered it anyway.
“Ned Hoare picked up the guy’s trail coming off the airport property,” he said. “He could do that because nobody else goes across the airport on a snowmobile. But the farther Ned went, the less he could be sure he was following the right track. At the cutline, of course, it was game over. Snowmobile tracks in both directions.”
These cutlines in summer are too rough to travel except on foot with a backpack. Winter is another matter. I knew the geography. If a cutline connects one community with another, like Fort Norman and Norman Wells, or even comes close, almost automatically it becomes a winter road. Transports large and small, normally limited by strictly local road systems, move supplies and equipment. Places that don’t have a winter road, like Fort Good Hope a hundred miles north, downriver, near the narrow part of the Mackenzie where it runs between high cliffs called The Ramparts, sign petitions and beefs to their legislative members. They feel that civilization is passing them by.
“So which way do you think?” I asked.
“Hard to say. If you weren’t trying to fool anybody, Fort Norman would be a piece of cake. Can’t ignore north, of course, but jeez that road north is tough. A truck slid off a cliff once this winter already.”
Anyway, Mountie detachments along the river both ways had been alerted. Any stranger would be getting very searching looks.
I asked, “Did you manage to fly the cutline yesterday at all?”
“Got a chopper up for about an hour before the weather forced us in. Saw some snowmobiles towards Fort Norman. Pengelly from the detachment there came the other way on his machine and checked them out. All local. Saw nothing to the north. Like I say, can’t rule north out, but if the guy went south, what time’s the murder, around five-thirty, he could have been in Fort Norman by midnight, except that he wouldn’t be that dumb.”
We were on the same wavelength. The fugitive couldn’t have expected to last long unspotted if he stayed in the open. If he ran without lights, which he probably did, he couldn’t make good time. If he ran with lights, say toward Fort Norman, anyone out to intercept him could stop and turn out his own lights and spot anything coming.
“I don’t think the guy would be heading for a settlement at all,” I said.
“So where?” Charlie asked.
“Some hideout, even a place he’d specifically fixed up himself in advance.”
“If he knew the bush,” the corporal mused, emphasizing the if, “he could stick it out for weeks or maybe months. I mean, an experienced trapper could, easy. Some of them do. Go out after freezeup and come back starving, eating ptarmigan and their goddamn dogs and, and, well, girl friends—”
“Charlie . . .” I protested, although none of the possibilities he had suggested was unprecedented. The old barren land trapper in Inuvik who’d declared in favor of dogteams over snowmobiles on the grounds that he couldn’t skin and eat a snowmobile had been making a fairly limited assessment of the disaster plans he might consider if the need arose.
I reran those few seconds frozen in time, the shots that killed Morton. “The guy was no trapper. Hell, I know trappers, how they smell, how they take half a day to decide to blow their nose. He was a killer, a guy with a plan. Now, what kind of a plan could a guy have to make sure that he got away fast and safe?”
“You tell me,” the corporal said.
I opened my mouth and then shut it again. I’d had the idea first the day before in Ted Huff’s office and hadn’t mentioned it, and still didn’t want it to sound like the solution until I’d thought about it more.
But the corporal was reading my mind. “Out with it,” he said. “When you get an idea you do everything but throw your arms in the air like a goddamn hockey player and do a little dance.”
“And here I thought I was pretty inscrutable,” I said.
“Out with it.”
I’d been hoping that he wouldn’t insist, because even while I’d been talking the idea had been developing some more.
Suppose the Komatik Air flight now listed as missing, but which had taken off with no stated destination, had been supposed to land somewhere not far from here and wait for a murderer arriving by snowmobile. Of course, that would mean the murderer was absolutely part of the drug gang on the run.
I said, “This guy would have had to have a lot of help, even on the basis of what we know of him. He knew he’d been seen, so no alibi would stand up for sure.”
“Yeah, go on.”
“So he’d have to have a deal where he’d get to a lake somewhere or someplace along the river, fast, and be picked up.”
“No goddamn plane is gonna land and take off in the dark!”
“It doesn’t have to be dark,” I said. “A plane could have been out there waiting for—hell, twenty-four hours. There’s hundreds of lakes and ponds. Maybe thousands.”
The possibilities didn’t really have to be spelled out. Charlie got the Komatik Air connection, or possible connection, right away, the one plane we knew of that had been down this way a day before the murder and maybe wasn’t missing at all, just misplaced.
“Shit,” Charlie said. “That’s too far-fetched.”
“You got a better idea?”
“No.” After a while he said rather respectfully, I thought, “So tell me more, oh shaman.”
“We ask the rescue people to go on with what they’re doing, as soon as they can fly, except to keep in mind that maybe these guys don’t want to be found. That would explain the lack of radio signals. Along the same line of thinking, if they landed on purpose rather than crashed, they might have camouflaged the aircraft with trees, snow, sheets, whatever, to make it less visible from the air.”
“Jesus,” Charlie said. “And I could be missing all this if I hadn’t resigned from the choir.”
“That’s not all,” I said. “Just in case the bunch from Inuvik isn’t in on it at all, maybe we should ask up and down the river if there’s any pilot who is, or was, supposed to meet somebody at a certain spot.”
With most trappers carrying two-way radios these days such pickups are common for a wide variety of reasons, from death in the family to a suddenly unbearable case of hemorrhoids to which the owner wished to bid farewell.
“That makes sense,” Charlie said. “Let’s get on it.”
He put the van in gear and started back down the road. By then it was near ten and there was a pre-dawn lightening of the landscape, a greying of the snow-filled overcast.
We rode in silence until we got to the police office and sat a moment outside. I was thinking, what’s next? So was he.
“I’d better go to Fort Norman,” I said.
“Anything particular in mind?”
“Well, it doesn’t seem fair to have two great brains in the same place, where some places haven’t got any at all.”
Grinning, “Too true. But what do you really have in mind?”
“Somebody has to find William Cavendish.”
It had been confirmed by the Fort Norman detachment that William had landed there Wednesday morning. Then he seemed to have vanished. Of course, he was on his home turf, relatives and boyhood friends sometimes being willing accessories to this and that. It wasn’t certain, either, that anyone would talk to me. The farther you get south the farther you are from Inuit country, and although we and the Dene got along a lot better than we had in olden times when they felt they ought to kill us because we looked different, and we thought we should kill them first, to avoid that fate, we still don’t always bend over backwards for each other.
“Nothin’s flying,” Charlie said. The radio weather forecaster had been droning on about the weather getting worse before it got better. Charlie waved a hand at the windshield bashing sleet and snow as evidence.
“Can you let me have your snowmobile?”
“Better you than me. But I can’t spare anybody to go with you.”
“Did I ask?”
I looked off to the south to where now, ever so faintly, I could see more signs of dawn. “Let’s get moving. I can use all the daylight I can get.”
That was good enough for him. “I’ll drop you at Mack House first and then go check for phone calls and load the snowmobile,” he said.
In my room I unpacked and got out the stuff I didn’t use unless I needed it. I needed it now. Stripped down, I regarded with regret my little brown pot belly. “The great lover,” I muttered aloud. I pulled on thermal longs, a thermal top, heavy socks, a wool shirt, then the wool pants I’d been wearing. My kneehighs were the best, leather with rubber sales and a felt liner. Down vest. In my parka pocket I tucked goggles and a new face-mask I’d bought, better than the old-type woolen balaclava. Designed much the same, with eye slits and a mouth-nose opening but made of some material that didn’t absorb moisture and fitted almost skin tight. Some things I didn’t have to worry about. Helmet, rifle, snowmobile tools, spare parts and other equipment would be in the machine or available. I packed the rest of my stuff in my carry bag. I might be in and around Fort Norman a while.
I felt no foreboding, only excitement. For a long time, it seemed, I’d been with people, most of the challenges, if any, cerebral. Now I was going out on my own where the challenges were the kind that come at you out of the blue. It had been years. I missed that.
The van was waiting outside for me, the detachment’s snowmobile loaded on its trailer. Before getting into the van I climbed onto the trailer. Charlie watched me with a little grin as I opened the snowmobile seat and made my inspection; a flashlight, pipe wrenches, spare sparkplugs and flashlight batteries, spare drive belt, pliers, screwdriver, airtight container of matches, a light block-and-tackle with nylon rope and pulleys with which I could pull myself out of trouble if I had to and could find a nearby tree, stump or rock as an anchor. A spare fuel tank, full, was strapped on the sled hitched behind along with canvas saddlebags containing two Thermoses and some plastic containers of sandwiches. Held by clips alongside the right side of the machine was a loaded rifle.
The corporal watched me during this check.
When I nodded, he nodded.
“There’s a two-way radio under the sandwiches,” he said. “Use it once in a while. Tell me what’s happening. I’ll run you out to the cut.”
On the way mixed sleet and snow fell more heavily, drifting in spots. A snowplow was working the main road. Charlie told me he’d learned nothing new on his trip to the office. The weather was going to continue bad, canceling search flights, so on the missing aircraft front, nothing. G division headquarters in Yellowknife would know as much about what was going on as I did. Or more. They or Ted Huff would be keeping Buster informed in Ottawa.
When we stopped on the road where the cutline came in at right angles, Charlie tipped the trailer into its unloading mode and I backed the machine and trailer-sled off. I pulled on my face guard and over it the crash helmet and goggles, keeping the engine at idle so I could hear what Charlie was repeating to me, raising his voice: “Pengelly will meet you a few miles out of Fort Norman.”
I nosed the machine off the side of the road, down the steep bank, through the ditch, and gunned it up the other side. Then I waved and was gone.
The mind is not greatly involved in a trip like that. The daylight was meager, no sun showing although it was supposed to rise up there in the murk somewhere at a few minutes to eleven. When the wind blew snow into brief whiteouts, I’d slow to a crawl. I hardly even glanced at the trails that led off into the bush. This close to the town there were too many to worry about. Anyway, this was Charlie’s territory. They’d be combing the bush on snowmobiles, their own and volunteers. On my mind all the time was my guess about the guy maybe heading for a place where a plane could land and pick him up.
But it would be tricky. The plane had to find the prearranged spot. Then the guy, not from these parts, had to find it. And it had to be where no one else was likely to stumble across it and screw up everything. The North for thousands of square miles was littered with small lakes, most of them unnamed. If one of them was in the plan, wouldn’t it have to be a lake shown on normal navigation maps? But wouldn’t that increase the chance of discovery?
I was assuming that the guy would stay on this, the east side of the Mackenzie, but why, I didn’t know. From the map I had in my mind I knew that the prospect nearest to Norman Wells was Kelly Lake. Farther south and closer to Fort Norman was Brackett Lake. Both okay for aircraft, but no cinch for a snowmobile because reaching either would mean getting through the Franklin Mountains. It seemed more plausible to me that there’d be someplace easier to get to but not obvious, meaning it would be known mainly to those who knew the area intimately. More and more, there were reasons to find William Cavendish.
As I bumped along, a feeling of peace gradually came over me. Much of my life, both before I signed on as a special and after, I’d spent time out in the bush or the tundra with snow machines or dog teams. On long trips I might have an objective many days away but the important thing was always just to get through the next few hours before night and food and sleep. On such a trip the mind roams free. I hadn’t felt this good for a long time, leaving behind conferences, memos, reports, the trying to convince others that this policy was good and that bad, being polite with deputy ministers and deferential with the political ministers who came and went like migrating geese.
The snow continued. Sometimes in a whiteout I would steer by the straight lines of bush on either side of me. I was in no rush. I had six or seven hours of light to go fifty miles. Easy.
In places the track left by other vehicles, trucks and snowmobiles, was drifted over, only to become visible again where it had been swept by the wind. Animal tracks showed as blurred dents crossing the trail in some patches of snow, leading to other places where they had been snowed over altogether.
A little more than three hours out I figured I must be approaching halfway. The snow had changed again to sleet that rattled against my goggles. I stopped and turned my back to the storm, happy that I was alone, out in the bush, nothing between me and God but the wind and the snow. I had seen no living thing since leaving Charlie. Just to hear my voice, to reassure the storm that I harbored no hard feelings, I said aloud, “Time for a coffee break”
And then, suddenly, I was shown how free I was feeling. A raven flapped out of a gust of snow, saw me, came back for a look, then headed heavily away again, and I yelled at it, my voice tiny against the vastness, “Raven! Raven! Why art thou forsaking me?”
The raven came back and sat in a tree, probably not because of my appeal but on sober second thought realizing that where there was man there would soon be garbage, something to eat.
I conversed with the silent raven further as I drank strong coffee from the Thermos and ate two good salmon salad sandwiches, heavy on salmon, mayonnaise and butter on thick firm bread. Red salmon cost six bucks a small tin up here, but Nancy Paterson had spared no expense. The raven was still waiting. I pushed the transmit button on the radio and said, “Kitologitak here. All clear. Over.”
Charlie answered in seconds. “Roger. Go man. Over and out.”
I left half a sandwich for the raven, stowed the food and drink, and climbed aboard. As I started up I looked back and saw the raven flapping down to pick up its share of the lunch.
About two hours after the social event with the raven I glimpsed something ahead. A northbound transport passed. Then through a break in the snow gusting across the trail I could see another machine coming toward me. I stopped, watching, conscious of the rifle there beside me. The other machine also stopped. I could see its pilot pull out binoculars and have a look before he waved and came on. When we got close and stopped there was not much to be seen through his face-mask, but he stuck out his hand. “Corporal Pengelly, sir. Fort Norman detachment. Everything okay along the way?”
“Just like a Florida beach.”
He laughed. “Yeah, really!”
“Any sign of William Cavendish yet?”
“Not a whisper. The thing is, with his father dead and all, no murderer caught, the people are a bit hostile where we’re concerned. He’s got to be in somebody’s house, but nobody is saying.”
“You mean he’s pretty well-liked, then?”
Pengelly nodded. “More by some people than his father was, as far as I can see. It seems to be one of those situations where the locals feel that Morton went high up and left them all more or less behind, especially William.” He shrugged. “That’s the idea I get, anyway. But we haven’t really pushed hard. No house searches. Couldn’t justify that.”
All very interesting, but the light was beginning to dwindle. Sunset was an hour or so away. Probably so was Fort Norman.
“So let’s get out of here,” I said. “You lead. I’ll try not to ram you from behind.”
I could see Pengelly’s teeth as he grinned under his face-mask. “I’d appreciate that.”
Back aboard waiting for him to turn around, I was contrasting his easy manner with the uptightness I’d known as a constable his age. If I’d been faced with an inspector, even a former inspector, in these circumstances I would have been yes-sirring like crazy.
He was no hot-rodder. I could see him glance back once in a while to make sure I was still with him. I drove almost automatically, thinking about William, an unreadable guy whom I’d met drunk and abrupt, even rude. Anyway, fairly objectionable. Could there have been something bugging him about lusting after Gloria even while maybe knowing that his father had beaten him to her? Did he really know that? If so, what would that do to his relationship with his father?
I simply couldn’t think of him as a man who would help others plot to kill his father, no matter what the provocation. That was instinct and I thought it was accurate. But against that I had to put the way he had acted. He had not visited the hospital at all after the night he’d taken his father there, had not been at the airport when Morton was being flown out, was not to be found anywhere the police in Inuvik had looked for him after his father had been murdered.
And his subsequent actions didn’t clarify anything. He’d have known at the very least there’d be questions. Such as, did he and his father come to blows that night? What was his explanation of the head bruise the doctor had noticed? When Morton collapsed, how long before the ambulance was called? Had William let anyone else know?
After that line of questioning, sooner or later it would have come down to his connection with the drug ring. Did he know that Christian and Batten had taken practically no luggage, but half a million dollars? Did he know where they went? Did he have any idea, even a suspicion, of who had killed his father?
As the questions went in circles in my mind, we putt-putted across the ice at the mouth of the Great Bear River and into Fort Norman on the Mackenzie. The buildings didn’t show their age all that much. It had been two centuries since fur traders of the old Northwest Company decided that where two rivers joined, there should be lots of business. Maybe I’d buy some postcards.