Until the Night (5 page)

We were less than eight hundred miles from the Pole.

“Hunter” was a translation of a nine-syllable name no English-speaking person could even remember, let alone pronounce. Hunter told me it actually meant “hunter with impressive penis” but he hadn’t liked to adopt the second noun for everyday use. He was a cheery, chatty sort, always showing me photographs from the
Antarctic and other expeditions he’d been on. I think it was because he knew I was a former bush pilot and was under the mistaken impression that I was cut from the same rough-and-ready cloth. All his photos had been taken on sunny days.

There aren’t that many photographs from Arcosaur, and most of the ones I’ve seen look black-and-white. But they are not’ it’s simply a reflection of the weather, which was so often overcast. The tallest object in every shot is the sixty-foot radio mast, barnacled with instruments. One becomes inured to the crudeness of an ice station. I don’t notice it in memory, only in photographs. Empty fuel drums. We made no effort to corral them. They got blown from place to place like so much tumbleweed until they got snowed into place, some canted on end, others lengthwise.

We set boards on top of spent drums weighted with sea water, creating an elevated walkway between the radio shack and the lab and the sleeping quarters. Even so, we sometimes had to clear away high drifts. I remember a shot of Rebecca—it must have been a warm day—sitting on the walkway, the antenna rising like an ugly Eiffel Tower in the background. She is eating an apple and mostly has her back to the camera. Her red down vest the only colour in the picture. Dark hair lifting in a slight breeze.

There’s another one of Ray Deville, looking shaggy and unshaven in front of one of the
AARI
buoys. He’s going down on one knee, arms spread wide in the classic posture of the big Broadway number, huge grin on his face. Next to the buoy sits a Nansen sled loaded with crates of dynamite destined for the seismic ridge and a series of reflection experiments. The picture is the only instance I can think of where Ray is smiling.

Somewhere online there is a shot of the supply plane landing. Sky pale grey at the zenith, deeper grey at the horizon. The snow and ice scalloped and torn into strips of grey on grey, almost white in the foreground. The whitest object is a cloud hugging the NE horizon. It isn’t a cloud at all, of course, but a windstorm. Wyndham stands in the middle of the shot cradling a twelve-gauge. We were having a lot of trouble with bears at the time.

Rebecca. Seated in the pale wash of light from one of the porthole windows. It’s not a photograph—I was never a photographer
and have frankly never understood shutterbugs—but the image is as fixed in my mind as a studio portrait: Rebecca in jeans and that ivory turtleneck, reading a volume of poems. I’m noodling calculations in my notebook. I’ve been growing increasingly alarmed at some of the findings, and I’m trying, not very hard at this moment, to find the errors.

I don’t know anyone who reads poems, I say.

She doesn’t respond. The place is silent except for the thrum of the generator. It’s early in a new six-week rotation and everyone is somewhere else, perhaps watching a video of a ball game that took place weeks ago. Perhaps working. People fall into odd patterns when there is no night. The first day there is a kind of exhilaration at the unlooked-for escape from the dark. Many stay up until fatigue finally drives them to bed and a fitful sleep. Scientists go out at all hours.

I put aside the notebook and stand before her and slip my hand into the masses of curls. The warmth of her face against my wrist. She doesn’t move. Doesn’t look up.

Do you always just take what you want?

I can’t, in this case. That would be your heart.

It’s taken.

That’s not how it looks.

Lots of things are more complicated than they look.

She has her finger under the next page, ready to turn. The paper trembling. There are pencil marks next to a couple of lines of verse:
Let me break/Let me make/something ragged, something raw/Something difficult to take
.

I remove my hand from her hair and lean down. So close I can smell her hair, her skin, the ghost of cedar from her sweater. I know she can feel my breath on her ear as I whisper one word.

Vostok.

3

A
SSISTANT
C
ROWN
A
TTORNEY
G
ARTH
R
OMNEY
took a stack of files from a cabinet and put them into a cardboard box that was open on his chair. After eight years as a prosecutor, he was being elevated to the bench of the Superior Court. “I can’t tell you how good it feels to transfer these cases to someone else. Two more weeks here and then I have a month in Tuscany,” he told them. “And next time you see me I’ll be on the bench, with a very good tan.”

Cardinal told him why they were there.

“You’re nowhere near a subpoena. The fact that you had a date a year ago with a woman who is now missing does not make you a suspect, even if you’re Leonard Priest.”

“The missing woman looks a lot like Régine Choquette.”

“Ah, yes. Régine Choquette.” Romney moved the box of files to the floor and sat at his desk. He opened a manila folder and quickly closed it again. “Régine Choquette broke my heart. I would’ve loved to nail Leonard Priest for that—if we’d had the evidence.”

“I thought we did,” Cardinal said.

“I know you did. But you’re not the one whose ass is in a sling if the judge decides the Crown has brought a meritless charge.”

“We had an eyewitness who put Priest at the scene. He saw Priest and Reicher coming down the path to the boathouse just as he was leaving.”

“You’re referring to Thomas Waite. But Thomas Waite did not see Régine Choquette. He
claimed
he saw Leonard Priest and Fritz Reicher. And then his memory got mysteriously foggy.”

“Yes, because a few weeks earlier, Leonard Priest had Reicher dress up like a Nazi and tie the guy up and beat him within an inch of his life. Priest’s idea of foreplay. Waite was convinced he’d be dead if he hadn’t managed to escape.”

“Prior action. Not admissible unless the defence brought it up, and Priest’s lawyers were far too smart for that. Plus Waite did not report the incident when it occurred.”

“That’s not unusual for victims of sex crimes,” Delorme said.

“Look, the guy changed his mind and there’s nothing I can do about that. It’s irrelevant now anyway, seeing as he’s dead.”

“What? When did this happen?” Cardinal said.

“I don’t know, six months ago. Blood clot, apparently.”

“But there was Fritz Reicher,” Delorme said. “In his statements to us he said the whole thing was Priest’s idea. Priest ordered him to shoot.”

“Courts are extremely reluctant to convict where the sole evidence is the testimony of an accomplice—especially a murdering accomplice. And that’s when they’re under
oath
. Fritz Reicher was not under oath when he made those statements, and you seem to forget that he recanted and then refused to ever open his mouth against Priest again.”

“We had Priest’s prints at the scene,” Cardinal said. “That alone—”

“From a previous
occasion
,” Romney said. “Priest never denied being there. Never denied having sex in that horrible place. He just denied being there on the night in question.”

“We could have gotten Reicher to turn,” Delorme said. “To go back to his initial statement. You could have offered him a better deal.”

Romney laughed. “Did you ever meet Reicher?”

“Once in chambers for depositions, that’s all.”

“Fritz Reicher—aside from having a remarkably low IQ—was a known fantasist, and that’s putting it kindly. All sorts of claims about his background and huge ideas about the future, both unencumbered by any connection to reality. He would have made the world’s worst witness—he had the affect of a zombie and an accent right out of the Berlin bunker.”

“The Luger was found at one of Priest’s sex clubs,” Cardinal pointed out.

“A club where Reicher was
employed
. He had twenty-four-hour access to the Ottawa club. And they were Reicher’s prints on that gun, not Priest’s. Please. I know you both as first-rate investigators, but it was a weak case against Priest two years ago and it’s a lot weaker now.” Romney stood up and transferred the cardboard box back to his chair. “I frankly don’t even know why you’re here.”

“Because you and I have presented a lot of cases together,” Cardinal said, “and we usually see eye to eye. It wasn’t like you to give Priest a free pass.”

Romney slammed a stack of files into the box. “The Charter of Rights and Freedoms gave him the free pass. The facts gave him the free pass. Do you seriously think I’d not press charges if I thought we had a case? You think the guy paid me off or something?”

“I might,” Cardinal said, “if it was somebody else. But you enjoy winning too much.”

“Exactly. And now I get to enjoy judging.”

Delorme had been in front of the mirror for more than half an hour, going systematically through the work side of her wardrobe. She pulled out one of her more sober ensembles. Grey suit, white open-collar blouse—probably the most unsexy outfit in her possession. She had worn it to court more than once.

She considered the effect.

She took off the jacket and exchanged the blouse for a silky dark top. Still prim, but with a lot more neck and throat. She changed her mind again and went for severe.

Leonard Priest was mostly known for his former association with an English fusion band called Ward Nine. He was not the front man—that honour had belonged to a berserker named Patch who had died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-two—but Priest had been a solid rhythm guitarist and the only member with the slightest head for business. Ward Nine’s
flame had burned but briefly, and once Patch was gone the flame expired and the fans went home.

After Priest moved back to Canada, he turned his business acumen and entertainment know-how to the creation of a series of highly successful nightclubs in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Other types of clubs followed, and one or two restaurants. His business presence in Algonquin Bay amounted to a single enterprise, a modest English-style pub called the Quiet Pint. The local paper had interviewed him when it opened and asked him why a nightclub mogul—a man with flourishing enterprises in big cities—would choose to come back to the north, even if he was from there originally. He wanted a refuge, he had said. He loved the quiet of the north. It reminded him of his childhood.

The pub was on a side street, a few doors from the public library. The small parking lot was empty and Delorme parked right by the building, under a sign that promised
No Television!

She had come to the Quiet Pint once in the course of the Choquette investigation, never as a patron. It hadn’t changed: dark wooden booths along one wall, scattered tables in the centre and a couple of plush banquettes at the front. A gas fireplace put out considerable heat. Two young couples were giggling in one of the booths and a middle-aged man sat at a centre table, but the only other people in the place were the bartender and a waitress crisply turned out in a white blouse and a very short plaid skirt. A jukebox was playing Blue Rodeo at low volume. Quiet pint indeed.

Delorme sat toward one end of the bar under a hanging light and ordered a glass of red wine. She pulled a sheaf of papers from her briefcase. She read a memo on staff parking, another on cubicle decoration, and an office circular, impossibly prolix, concerning a New Year’s charity event.

“Can I buy you a drink?”

It was the man from the centre table. He had an elongated, hound-dog face, with the eyes of one who expects rejection.

“No, thank you,” Delorme said, and patted her papers. “I really have to read this stuff.”

“Why would anyone try to work in a pub?”

“It’s where I want to work.”

“Uh-huh. Sure.”

The man went away and Delorme watched in the bartender’s mirror as he left the pub. Another couple joined the four in front and the noise
level went up a notch. The music had switched to Sarah McLachlan and Delorme was on her second glass of wine when Priest came in. She remembered this about his routine from two years ago: nine o’clock he would come in and sit at the end of the bar for an hour.