The Bone Seeker (13 page)

Klinsman, Fielding and Saxby rode in a jeep while Edie and Derek brought up the rear on their ATVs. At Lake Turngaluk they waved briefly to Joe Oolik then turned off towards Glacier Ridge and up onto the bird cliffs. To the south, the waters of Jones Sound shimmered silver in the summer sun and in the far, far distance, where the earth curved, heat trembled the craggy coastline of Devon Island. The journey, which Saxby said had taken him and Namagoose an hour and a half to complete on foot, lasted less than fifteen minutes.

Saxby led them towards a sheltered area, surrounded by low rock, where there was a fire ring and a number of beer cans. Burnt remains of a small animal lay scattered over the site, but there was no sign of Saxby's knife.

‘Maybe someone took it?' Saxby offered, scoping about.

‘You say you left here and went back directly to camp?' Derek said. A raven wheeled overhead and landed on a bank of rotting snow a short distance away. Saxby nodded a yes.

‘Show us the route.'

Saxby pointed out a path in the willow with his hand.

Derek eyeballed the soldier. ‘We're going to walk that route, soldier, and you better hope we find that knife.'

Anxious to get on, Klinsman asked if the interview was done and moments later Edie and Derek watched the three men disappear down the track back towards the camp.

After they had gone Derek and Edie walked the route. They did not find the knife.

•   •   •

By the time they got back they were both hungry. Edie made tea and nibbled on a caribou ear while Derek chowed down on a bowl of ramen noodles.

‘You think they did it together?' she said.

‘Could be. Saxby didn't ship out to Alert till Monday so they had Sunday to work up a consistent story.'

‘You seem real sure Namagoose is the one,' Edie said. She hadn't yet been able to ditch the version of events in her head that had Martha with a secret boyfriend or that something had happened to her on Friday afternoon between leaving school and the time Silliq saw her crying on the wall.

‘You got any better ideas?' Derek said. ‘You saw how Namagoose is. A blowhard. He admitted to having sex with Martha the evening before her death and he was seen arguing with her the day she died. He said himself he was trying to fix up another date with her. When she refused he got mad and killed her. Man has a violent temper. What cost him a place in the special forces. Oh, and by the way, I checked out that special forces training. Turns out it includes an intensive course in Eskrima, Filipino martial art. Hand-to-hand knife combat. Namagoose knows his blades.

‘You saw the view from their fire ring. Right over the bird cliffs. They could have spotted Martha collecting eggs and invited her to come cook them, share a beer maybe. Kind of kiss-and-make-up for Namagoose's shitty behaviour outside the store. They even had the knife on them. Maybe Saxby participated, maybe he just watched. We lean on him a little more, I think we'll get to the truth.'

This all made sense. So why, in Edie's reckoning, didn't it tell the whole story?

‘What about the photograph?' she asked.

‘One of them is obviously lying about the camera.'

Edie's throat tightened. ‘The picture was taken before the
unataqti
even arrived.'

‘Forget the photograph, Edie. It doesn't prove anything either way.' He raised his bowl to his lips and finished off his noodles.

Edie watched him with a growing sense of alarm. Was the pressure on him to close the case getting too much, she wondered? Wasn't the first rule of a police investigation to keep an open mind?

‘Her purse was full of make-up. She was meeting someone. Then Silliq sees her a couple of hours later crying on a wall. And Namagoose mentioned a boyfriend.'

‘Well, he would, wouldn't he? Look, it's been a long day. I've still got prep for the arrival of the supply ship to do, plus I'll need to check with Luc that we're all set for Anna and the forensics guy tomorrow.' He went over to his desk and started shuffling some papers. ‘You could check with that takeout place next to the Shoreline Bar, see if anyone remembers Namagoose and Saxby coming in with Martha on Friday night? After that, why don't you take the evening off? There's not much else we can do till tomorrow. I'll come find you if anything happens.'

The sky was now a matt-grey sheet. On the corner by the store and the school building, Edie stopped to think. Derek's haste to close the investigation bothered her. She'd seen that he was a brilliant investigator when he wanted to be but she'd also noticed that he sometimes had to be reminded not to take the easy road. It hadn't helped that Klinsman seemed to be encouraging him to tie the case up quickly. The colonel was obviously eager to resolve the investigation as quietly and painlessly as possible so that he could get back to the main event. Maybe Namagoose and Saxby
were
the killers but, in the absence of conclusive evidence, the Ellesmere Island Police owed it to Martha to investigate every possible scenario with equal vigour. You didn't fix on a hunting ground until you'd explored all the terrain.

•   •   •

The eatery Derek liked to refer to as the ‘takeout place' – and most locals knew as the Shack – was a summer business Tom Silliq's wife Susie had set up in an old fishing shed behind the Shoreline Bar. Edie had been there a couple of times when she'd first arrived and was living in the cabin. She and Susie had got chatting once or twice. Susie was a straight talker, unusual among Inuit, and Edie guessed she'd seen a thing or two, being married to Tom. Susie explained that in past
summers the Shack had catered mostly to the scientific expeditions passing through the settlement and to men coming into town to pick up supplies, but this year she'd expanded the operation in the hope of attracting
unataqti
from Camp Nanook. Mostly, Susie managed the Shack on her own, with the help of her and Tom's grown-up daughter, Louisa. This summer she'd taken on another pair of hands for the weekend evening shift, a young southerner by the name of Rashid Alfasi, who worked a day job taking weather readings at the meteorological station.

‘Some folk are a bit sniffy I gave the job to an outsider,' she said to Edie one time. ‘Say he can't be trusted.' Then she'd roared with laughter and added, ‘They say the same about you too.'

Straightening herself up now, she said, ‘You need to ask Rashid about last Friday. I was too busy in the kitchen.' She slapped her thighs, keen to get on with her work. ‘He's renting the doctor's old cabin, you wanna find him.'

•   •   •

Rashid Alfasi's house was an announcement that he hadn't lived long in the north. None of the usual mess of dog kennels, hunting equipment, drying fish or sealskins stretched on racks, no old and rusted equipment, homebuilt storm shutters, vehicles cannibalized for their parts. She walked up the steps and knocked on the door, figuring that Rashid, being
qalunaat
, wouldn't appreciate her just walking in. When there was no answer, she let herself into the snow porch, opened the inner door and stood on the doormat.

The living room was more homely and colourful than she'd anticipated. On the floor there were richly woven rugs of a kind Edie had never seen before. The surfaces were covered with tiles and ornate glasses, reminders, she supposed, of home. There was a powerful smell, part floral, part spicy.

A door at the back opened and Rashid emerged, looking dishevelled and still half asleep. He wrapped himself more tightly in his robe, embarrassed to have been caught napping.

‘Migraine,' he said, by way of explanation. He was a slight, thin young man, in his mid-twenties, the fuzzy down of youth still on him.
From the yellow tan of his face and hands and his dark, straight hair you might at first mistake him for an Inuk, but the bony angularity of his form and his slender, beaked nose marked him out as an outsider. A pair of searching eyes suggested the penetrating intelligence beneath.

‘You're the teacher,' he said. He pointed to her feet. ‘Please take off your boots.' His manner was polite and tentative. Something moved across his face when she told him why she'd come.

‘Please sit down while I get dressed,' he said. Edie took a seat at the table while Rashid disappeared behind the door. A few minutes later he reappeared dressed in a tracksuit, asking if she'd like to try some Moroccan tea. When she said yes he went over to the kitchenette and put on some water to boil. She watched him opening a cupboard and reaching for two tiny, elaborately decorated glasses and a small, bulbous teapot in what looked like brass. She imagined his long, slender fingers handling the meteorological instruments. The orderly type then, meticulous.

‘What do you need to know?' he said.

She dived into the pocket of her summer parka, pulled out the picture of the dead girl and passed it to him. He took it and looked shaken for a moment, then he gave a small, sorry smile and passed the photo back.

‘I heard about that. It's horrible.'

‘Did you know Martha?'

‘Kuujuaq's a small place.' He rubbed a hand across his face. ‘But most of the time I'm on my own up at the weather station or I'm fishing at the trout lake. I like to go up on the cliffs sometimes. I wouldn't say I really
know
anyone.' He tailed off. ‘That was kind of why I took the Shack job. To stop myself becoming a hermit.'

‘Susie told me you were working the evening shift on Friday.'

‘That's right,' Rashid said, ‘but I only take the money, wash up, that kind of thing.'

‘I heard Susie's a great cook,' Edie said.

‘I'm Muslim, so I prefer to handle halal food. Which up here means I'm pretty much restricted to fish.' He peered inside the teapot, stirred
the contents and put the lid back on. Edie looked about. She was suddenly struck by how different his world was, how completely alien to everything she knew. Yet here they were, in her world, drinking tea together.

‘Where are you from?'

‘I was born in Vancouver,' he began, ‘but my parents came from Morocco. I hope you like it sweet.' He began to pour the tea, using a swinging motion, almost as though he were conducting. It had an unfamiliar herbal taste. Mint, he said. It reminded him of home.

She sipped a little more tea to be polite then took out the mugshots of Namagoose and Saxby that Klinsman had given her.

Rashid peered at the pictures and swallowed, hard. Yes, he said. Martha had come into the Shack with the two men on Friday evening around 7.30.

‘Did she seem distressed at all? Anything to suggest she might have been under some kind of pressure, maybe that she didn't want to be with those fellas?'

He took a sip of tea. ‘No. They were all drunk but I got the impression she was right where she wanted to be.' Something in his tone caught Edie off guard.

‘You don't approve of drinking?'

His voice was suddenly animated. ‘You see what alcohol does to people up here and have to ask me that?' He shrugged, warming his hands on the tea glass and bringing them up to his temples. ‘Look, all I meant was, it seemed like she was having a good time.'

‘You notice where they went when they left?'

He lowered his hands then shook his head.

‘How's about on Saturday?'

Rashid looked up. ‘I was off sick on Saturday night.' He pointed to his head.

Edie left Rashid's house surer than she'd ever been that there was something they'd missed. Derek had been too keen to accept Charlie Salliaq's view of Martha as the helpless victim of two predatory men but the Martha Edie knew was both smarter and more worldly than
this version of the story suggested. The Martha she knew was an actor in her own life, a woman with a plan. Namagoose's story had got closer to the real Martha. And Rashid had corroborated it.

As she walked back down the path a group of
unataqti
were standing at the shoreline daring one another to walk into the water. She hesitated for a moment or two, watching them, then she made her decision.

•   •   •

The skinny husky cross that Markoosie kept as a birder was lying in the dust under the porch. It looked up at her approach and rumbled menacingly, but made no attempt to confront her. She walked up the steps, hesitating at the door into the snow porch. The blinds were open and through the window she could see Alice hunched on the couch with her daughter's arm around her. They appeared to be talking. On the other side of the room, Charlie was at the table with his head in his hands. Markoosie sat beside him. As she reached for the door handle, Lizzie seemed to catch the movement in the corner of her eye and wheeled around. She came to the inner door and cracked it open.

‘This isn't a good time.'

‘It's you I want to talk with. It won't take a moment.'

The girl looked put out.

‘Lizzie, this is really important. Are you
sure
your sister didn't have a boyfriend?'

Lizzie folded her arms defensively across her chest and tipped her head towards the broken fragments of her family. ‘Look at us, Edie Kiglatuk. Do we look sure of anything right now?'

For a moment they both stood their ground, then, sighing, Lizzie said, ‘Come back another time, OK?'

With that she swung the door shut, leaving Edie standing at the top of the steps, unsure what to do or where to go.

She decided on Chip Muloon's house. It was late now, and the air was thick with insects and the summer smell of tundra honey but every so often freezing wind gusted off the sea as a reminder, if any were needed, that up here on Ellesmere Island the ice was never far away.

Her lover was up, listening to music and drinking bourbon. She went over and kissed him on the lips.

‘You get a kick out of keeping a fella guessing?' He was teasing but there was an edge to his tone.