White Heat (28 page)

    Jono
Toolik was already backing towards the door with his hands in the surrender
position. 'You know what? Just forget it.'

    Not
long after he left, the science station plane wheezed overhead and Derek
grabbed his parka, pulled on his police baseball cap and went outside to the
detachment All Terrain Vehicle, ATV, following the Otter's progress through low
cloud towards the landing strip.

    DeSouza
beamed and greeted him like an old friend.

    'Nice
little settlement you got here.'

    Derek
nodded. He didn't think the professor meant to sound quite so patronizing.

    'We
aim to please,' he said.

    DeSouza
laughed.

    Over
a lunch of caribou steaks, in the detachment's little dining nook, DeSouza
filled the two policemen in with the science station's plans for the summer
season. As he talked, his mood grew sombre. The news was all budget cuts and
cancelled programmes. Now that NASA had abandoned its plans to send a manned
flight to Mars, he said, it would be much more difficult to secure funding in future.

    'Years
and years of hard work and when we're this close to some significant
breakthroughs.' He drew the finger and thumb of his right hand into a pinch.

    
Stevie
shot Derek a look that said:
this visit is less fun than I expected.

    They
finished up lunch and Derek lit a cigarette.

    'I
guess you never found that hunter guy,' DeSouza said. It was part question,
part statement.

    Derek
shook his head. 'Officially he's missing, presumed dead.'

    'Any
links to the other guy, Wagner, was it?'

    'Andy
Taylor worked for him for a while but if you're asking me if the deaths are
connected, I'd have to say no, except in so far as the High Arctic's a
dangerous place to be clueless.'

    DeSouza
flicked his head at the pack of cigarettes on the table.

    'Mind
if I have one?'

    Derek
pushed the carton across and held out a light. He had the feeling they were
about to hear the real purpose behind the professor's visit.

    DeSouza
sucked in the smoke. 'Reason I came.'

    Doing
his best to sound casual, Derek replied, 'And there was me, thinking it was for
the mental stimulation.'

    DeSouza
smiled and got back to business. 'No major crisis, nothing like that, only
something we need to sort out. Between ourselves.'

    Derek
and Stevie exchanged glances. Derek took a last drag on his cigarette and
stubbed it out. He wanted to look more serious, focused.

    'It's
the glasshouse.'

    The house
had been erected a few years back, before DeSouza's time, to investigate
whether crops could be grown up beyond the 70th parallel using nothing but
solar energy and a water recycling system. The experiment had been a failure
and after a few years, the project had been abandoned, though it was still
officially part of the station's programme.

    'I
guess it would have made sense to have taken it down. I thought about it but
the logistics sucked.'

    The
glasshouse stood on an inaccessible bluff overlooking the Colin Archer
Peninsula, looking like some freakish transplant from another world. It was
miles from the main station complex. Someone must once have thought the bluff
was a good place to put it, but no one was going to own up to that now.

    'Thing's
a bit of an eyesore, but it doesn't represent any significant kind of
environmental contaminant, so I'm cool about it,' Derek said.

    'When
did you last visit?'

    'Up
on the peninsula there?' Derek thought back. It must have been years ago. 'A while,'
he said.

    'That
explains a lot,' DeSouza said.

    Derek
wasn't following. 'Like?'

    'Like
why some loser was able to set up a weed factory in there.'

    Derek
tried not to look as stupid as he was feeling. He'd had no idea about any
factory. Weed wasn't a huge problem on Ellesmere, in the sense that it didn't
cause any public order problems, but it did keep young men stuck inside instead
of going out on the land and for that alone Derek felt its use was to be
discouraged.

    DeSouza
tipped his head. 'Hydroponics, the lot.'

    For a
moment Derek felt as though DeSouza might be questioning his competence, then
he remembered that the glasshouse was officially the station's thing. This was
on DeSouza as much as it was on him.

    'Any
idea who's responsible?'

    DeSouza
shrugged. 'Two of ours in it for sure. We did a spot search at the station.
They've already been sent back down south, contracts cancelled. But they
couldn't have got as far as they did without local help.' His lips pursed,
projecting regret. 'We've cleared out the marijuana plants, the hydroponic
equipment. It was all quite primitive. But I guess that's no surprise up here.'

    'Anything
to go on?' Derek asked.

    DeSouza
leaned into his daypack and drew out a large, tatty-looking metal flask. 'Found
this among the plants. Someone's repaired the shoulder strap, used sealskin
ties. Kind of a giveaway, don't you think?' He handed it across for inspection.

    Derek
turned the flask over in his hands and felt his heart take a break. There was
no mistaking it. This was the Nashville Predators thermos he'd given Joe
Inukpuk a few years back. Still, he wasn't about to tell DeSouza that. He liked
the fellow, but he
was
still
qalunaat.

    'We'll
see what we can do,' he said. 'The two employees, your guys, any police action
down south?'

    DeSouza
shook his head. 'Counterproductive. Far as I'm concerned, it's been dealt with
at our end. But one thing I want to be clear about, I won't have drugs around
the station. They mess with motivation, everything. I won't allow it.'

    Derek
didn't much like the way DeSouza was today, telling him how to do his job. Not
after the last time, and the professor's ill-tempered lecture about wanting to
be left alone to work without interference. He put DeSouza's attitude down to
stress. The fellow clearly had a lot on his plate.

    'Uh
huh,' he said non-committally. 'I got that.'

    He
waited for DeSouza to leave then went out on the land to give himself a chance to
think. The visit had left him antsy and irritable. Chasing petty drug dealers
wasn't what

    Derek
had in mind for himself. And he didn't appreciate any
qalunaat
telling
him how to be native police. You couldn't just go around arresting people or
sending them down south. It didn't work that way. Besides, he already had a
pretty good idea who the culprit was and the kid wasn't about to cause any more
trouble.

    He
decided to check on the build-up of moraine around the edges of the small
outlet glacier that pushed into the sea just to the east of Kuujuaq. The snow
had blown or melted off the land and the breakup was in full swing out on the
sea ice. The glacier had shrunk so much that heaps of loose rock were left
dangerously exposed on either side. Most Inuit would avoid going anywhere until
the ice cleared in August; those who had a particular reason to go to the
interior might be tempted to risk travelling on the glaciers until they reached
one of the major ice fields or the two or three trans-island passes. This
particular glacier, though, was a killer. But, for now, there was nothing Derek
could do except to post some notices around town warning travellers to give the
place a wide berth, at least until the moraine was more settled.

    While
he was out, Derek thought he would clamber up to the plateau to check what was
happening with the lemming population. Misha's arrival had taken up so much of
his time and energy that he'd had to put off the idea of writing the feature
for one of the southern newspapers.

    Over
the past few weeks he had wondered whether he'd done the right thing, welcoming
her back. He was beginning to come to the conclusion that during their period
apart he had allowed himself to spin stories about their romance that didn't
altogether fit the facts.

    As he
reached the top of the plateau, his eye alighted on movement in the willow. A
handful of ptarmigan rose up and fanned out over the Sound. The willow itself
appeared restive, in constant motion, and the ground beneath the twigs was
littered with lemming droppings and the tell-tale fragments of sedge leaf where
the rodents had been feeding. He could feel his interest in the swarm reviving
and made a mental note not to allow himself to get so slack again. He needed to
be ahead of the pack on this.

    On
the journey back across the muskeg to Kuujuaq, he made up his mind to take no
further action in the matter of the glasshouse. It might have been Joe's flask
on the scene but Joe wasn't the sort to have come up with the idea by himself.
His brother, Willa, probably had some hand in the operation. But what did any
of it matter now? Joe was dead, the glasshouse had been emptied and the
distributors sent back where they came from. Next time he was in Autisaq he'd
have a word with Willa, but that was all. In a week or so, he'd radio DeSouza
and let him know he'd sorted the problem.

    He
swung open the door to the detachment to find Stevie peering into the back of
his computer.

    'Oh
hey there, D. Damn machine's bust. You'd be doing me a favour to take a look.'
As Derek paced across to the constable's desk he saw quite clearly what the
problem was. During the course of Jono Toolik's visit, someone, probably Toolik
himself, had inadvertently kicked the power cable and the plug was half-hanging
out of the electrical socket.

    'Go
check for dogs, Stevie, I'll have a look at this while you're out.'

    The
constable got up and Derek sat down in his chair, pretending to inspect the
computer. He waited until Stevie had left then nudged the plug back in the
socket with his foot. The machine pinged awake and started rebooting. When
Stevie returned not long afterwards Derek was back at his desk finishing his
spring patrol report.

    Stevie
said: 'You got that sucker rumbling.' He gazed at the screen. 'Picture's even
back.'

    'It
just needed a boot,' Derek said.

    Stevie
sat back down. 'Damn right it did. A jackboot.' A sudden thought came into his
head. 'Oh, D, I forgot. While you were out, that strange woman came round.'

    'Edie
Kiglatuk?'

    Stevie
nodded. 'Yeah, that's the one.'

    'What
did she want?'

    Stevie
shrugged. 'She seemed to think we'd ignored her messages. She was pretty mad,
said she would be doing some fishing down at Inuak for two sleeps and you'd
better go visit or . . .' He tailed off.

    'Or
what?'

    Stevie
stared pointedly at the back door. Misha was back from her studio, a stormy
expression on her face.

    'Hey,'
he said.

    She said:
'Where have you been? I needed help with my sculpture. Now is ruined.' She
sliced through the air with her hand.

    Derek
remembered that slicing motion from before. He also remembered he didn't like
it much. He heard himself heave an involuntary sigh and felt his stomach
clench. Stevie shot him a look of solidarity. Misha specialized in
three-dimensional representations of clouds that she sculpted first in
modelling clay then had forged in bronze. According to her, the work was a
postmodern exploration of the terrible lightness of being, whatever that meant.
Recently she'd experimented by modelling the clouds in fox fur stretched over
wire, but this was a two-person job, requiring a helper, in this case, Derek,
to hold the wire frame while Misha stretched the pelt.

    'Well,
I guess I'd better be getting on home,' Stevie said, pulling his outerwear over
his jacket. 'You two have a lovely evening.'

    'Uh
huh,' Derek said, forging a fragile smile.

    It was
not a lovely evening. Having been locked out of the apartment by Misha, Derek
spent the night in his office chair and woke up early, stiff as frozen seal
meat and about as lively. Rubbing the circulation back into his legs, he
recalled first that Edie was expecting him at Inuak, then that she'd tried to
contact him several times while he'd been out on patrol. In all the excitement
of Misha's arrival he'd completely forgotten to get back to her. He guessed
she'd found out about Joe's little horticultural business and wanted to make
sure Derek didn't intend to stir anything up over it. In any case, it would be
a relief to get away for a day or two.