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Dan stepped off the plane in Vancouver completely exhausted yet at the same time elated. He was home. In just a few hours he would be back on his boat, breathing the cool, damp air of the north-west coast, inhaling the scent of pine and cedar drifting on the breeze, hearing the familiar rhythms of the sea as it broke on the shore. He had spent the first hours of the interminable flight thinking of what he had learned in Australia, the last hours thinking about the thefts in Canada, and he now felt it was beginning to come together—but only beginning. He still had nothing definite.
In between he had slept a little and dreamed of Claire. Now, as he moved through the long corridors of the Vancouver terminal, he found himself thinking of Walker. Where the hell was he? Bryce had told him he had checked himself out of the hospital after the surgery and no one had heard from him since.
***
THE SAME CONSTABLE who had met him before, met him again and drove him to the same office, where the same Interpol men sat at the same table. Dan handed them his notes and gave them his verbal report, watching for raised eyebrows and quickly hidden smiles as he repeated the stories he had been given.
“So you’re saying we’re dealing with ghosts and spirits?”
Dan looked at the officer who had spoken.
“No,” he answered. “I’m saying we’re dealing with some very smart people who are using the cultural beliefs of the local indigenous people to steal their traditional artefacts.” It was a realization that had come to him during his hours on the plane and from the puzzled looks around the table, it was not something that had occurred to them here.
“Think about it. You and I may not believe in spirits and ghosts, but they do. So if someone dresses up like a spirit—maybe uses a wig, or a costume with long stringy hair on it . . . Hell, even if he uses a bedsheet and makes a few moans, then it would be easy to convince everyone in the village.”
“But surely that would take more than one person.” It was the Inspector who spoke. “So are we looking at a group of collectors working together? An organization created to get what they want?”
“No. At least I don’t think so.”
Dan couldn’t say why he felt so certain it was a single person masterminding these thefts. Like so many cases he had been on, the solution started with little more than a hunch, a feeling. If he thought about it, he would probably say it grew from tiny seeds planted in his subconscious that sprouted and grew into an idea. A word here. A description there. A name perhaps, or a series of occurrences that didn’t quite fit.
“So you think it’s just one guy flying back and forth between these two countries?” The man who spoke had grey hair, wore a dark suit and thick, black-framed glasses that distorted his eyes. He pointed to a pile of file folders stacked on the table beside him. “Must have a fast plane and a pretty good network of spies.”
“Maybe it’s a network of spirits.”
This time it was the youngest of them and he followed his words with a nervous giggle.
Dan ignored the comment as did the rest of the group. “There are certainly a lot of people involved, both here and in Australia,” he said. “But I think it’s one person directing it all.”
“Any ideas on who or where?”
“Not really, but I think he or she has recruited not only some very good, and in some cases very violent thieves, but also some officials, certainly customs agents and maybe even police.”
A silence fell around the room.
“You have any proof of that?” Again it was the Inspector.
“Not yet,” Dan answered. “But think about it. These items are being stolen from remote locations, all places difficult to get in and out of, and they need to be moved. That means they have to be packaged and shipped. Someone—and probably a few someones—have to be turning a blind eye.”
Several of the group had followed the Inspector’s lead and begun scanning Dan’s report.
“You seem to mention Snake Island quite often.”
“Yes. There’s something going on there that I think might be linked to the theft on Bathurst Island, but when I tried to ask about the guy who owns it, I got stonewalled.”
The Inspector frowned. “By who?”
Dan smiled. “Colin Harbinson. He’s the Deputy Commander at the Darwin office of the Northern Territory Police.”
***
THE RCMP FLOAT PLANE flew him back to Port McNeill that evening and he struggled onto his boat, his body aching and his head pounding. Many hours later he awoke, made himself a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, and took it up to the wheelhouse. His coffee cooled and his toast got soggy as he stared out over the float at the dark sea. At the fine rain slanting down like strands of fine silver. At the intricate pattern of the trees on the mountain slopes. Letting it all flow back into him after his time away. A long time later he started the engine, released the lines and headed out. There was a tiny cove he and Claire had visited several times before. It was a place that would be both quiet and deserted at this time of year, where his frayed nerves would have a chance to find the peace he craved.
It was four o’clock in the morning when he reached the cove and stepped out onto the deck again. He took a breath of the cool, sea-scented air and felt his spirits lift as the stress of the last few days fall away. His eyes searched the darkness for the familiar outlines of spruce and cedar stabbing up into the night sky, for the glimmer of surf along the shore, and when he finally saw it he knew for sure that for him, this was home. Australia had its own beauty: the red soil, the eucalyptus trees, the mangroves, the beaches, the birds, but this was where he belonged.
As soon as it was light enough to see, he lowered the dinghy and rowed himself ashore. The tide was going out, and the exposed seaweed glistened in the soft light of dawn. Clams announced their presence with a soft pop as they cleared sand from their siphons and out beyond the narrow entrance, a rocky islet floated on a silver sea.
He sat on a log under the drooping branches of a cedar tree, letting his thoughts drift. He had given the Interpol people everything he could think of, both facts and hunches, but he knew that his comment regarding Harbinson would make their job more difficult. In the natural order of things, Harbinson would be their liaison, but if, as Dan had intended, the man now had a question mark by his name, they would have to find some other way to continue the investigation. He had pointed them towards the aboriginal police, given them both Wally’s and Ernie’s names, but both of them worked under the authority of the Northern Territory Regional Police which Harbinson ran. It wouldn’t be easy to get past him. Dan had also mentioned Waru, although he doubted the man was in a position to help, and as he worked so closely with Claire, Dan would rather he not be involved. Both the remoteness and the distances involved made it even more complicated than it would usually be, and all he could do now was hope he had given them enough that they could continue what he had started. There was nothing more he could do there to help until the case was solved. He needed to get back to the people here. His people.
The thought made him smile. When had they become ‘his people’? Certainly not ten years ago, or even five. Then they had simply been people that existed on the edges of his awareness, people he knew little about, people he might have to investigate or even arrest one day. Now they were his family, his friends, their safety important to him, and that was thanks to Walker.
Walker. Where the hell was he? Even someone as mentally tough and stubborn as he was could not possibly have returned to the life he had been living so soon after surgery. A healthy man without Walker’s problems would take weeks of physio to get back in shape. For Walker, it was more likely to be months. Maybe years.
After his arrival in Vancouver Dan had borrowed a police car and driven to the Capilano Reserve, but the cousin who had taken Walker in for the surgery said he had neither seen or heard from him since. There was no one else Dan could call.
A salmon jumped a few feet from shore. It was spawning time, when the returning fish swam hundreds of miles upstream, battling the currents, fighting the rapids, until they arrived at the spawning grounds. Watching the ripples left behind made Dan think about the effect thefts such as the ones he was investigating had on the various communities. They weren’t simply the loss of something irreplaceable, passed down over generations and holding treasured memories, although they were certainly that. But they were also much more. These thefts stole the history of a whole community. An entire people.
As he had learned at Tsatsquot, Charlie’s mask didn’t belong to Charlie alone, even though he was the only one who could dance it. Every family in the village, every individual from the eldest to the youngest, was inextricably connected to it. It represented their story, confirmed who they were, and its loss set them adrift, disconnected from their past.
But while he understood both the scope and the pain, he couldn’t allow himself to dwell on it. The question he had to answer was why someone would take them. Was it a collector with a particular passion for traditional indigenous regalia? But then why the throwing stick and the rattles? They were certainly traditional, but the Australian people hadn’t used a throwing stick in a long time and did not consider it sacred, and here on the coast of British Columbia, the rattles, while holding an important place in ceremony, were not the most important part of regalia. A bentwood box might be appreciated simply for the skill it took to make it, but an incised stone? And where would a Pukamani pole fit in?
None of it made sense. The items stolen were not famous works of art that a collector could sit and admire, maybe share with close friends with similar taste and low moral character. Nor were they unique gems, or exquisite jewelry, to be desired simply for their rarity. These items would show their age, perhaps with faded paint or with cracks and chips: the Pukamani pole was in a state of disrepair, well on its way to returning to the earth. No, he was missing something, and he needed to figure out what that something was.
The mist that filled the air dampened his skin and he could almost feel his pores, dried out by both the arid air of Australia and the recycled air on the plane, open to accept it. He stretched out his arms in welcome as the raucous cries of a flock of gulls drew his attention to a bloom of phosphorescence on the water, its presence announcing a school of fish.
Phosphorescence wasn’t common here on the west coast, and when it occurred few looked beyond its almost magical appearance, but it spoke of something far greater—water currents, plankton, algae and crustaceans—and it had the power to call both fish and birds from vast distances. As he stared at it, he felt the beginnings of an idea nibble at the back of his consciousness, but, like the phosphorescence, it dissolved almost as quickly as it had appeared.
A coastguard helicopter flew low overhead, the beat of its rotors filling the air with noise and bending the tree-tops as it lifted over the peak of the island. This late in the year Dan figured it had to be checking on fishboats working out of season, but it made him think of those other helicopters he had heard about, although not yet seen. All of them had been designed and built by a company in Argentina and sold by a company in the Dominican Republic which was owned by a man whose daughter lived on Porcher Island. A daughter who had given herself a name from the Voudou pantheon, which in turn had provided the design painted on at least one of the Canadian helicopters and possibly the one from Snake Island too. Those facts in themselves proved nothing, but when he added in the glimpse he had caught of what he thought was the same design in Harbinson’s office, it certainly made it all worth checking into—and it was the only practical thing he had.
While he had been sitting there letting his mind wander, the sun had risen above the trees and now its light shone on the droplets of water still clinging to the branches after last night’s rain, turning them into sparkling diamonds. He was wasting time. He needed to get back to work. A murdered man’s family were waiting for answers.