Giles Blunt - Until the Night

“I’ve got no reason to doubt this woman. Everyone agrees she and Laura were best friends. She said right off no one else knew about it.”

“Leonard Priest,” Delorme said. “Wow. This just got a whole lot more interesting. Man, I would love to nail that bastard.”

“Tell me about it. I thought I had him for Choquette.”

Regine Choquette had been murdered in a boathouse on Trout Lake. She was found chained to an overhead beam, and nude, except for a zippered leather hood that covered her face. The weight of the evidence suggested that an evening of highly charged sadomasochism had got out of hand and ended in her being shot between the eyes with a Nazi-era Luger.

“I never understood why the Crown didn’t charge him. It was Garth Romney, wasn’t it?”

“Assistant Crown. Yeah, it was Garth.”

“I remember that picture of him holding up that mask. Fighting the forces of evil.”

“Don’t get me started. Take a look in that envelope on the back seat.”

Delorme undid her seatbelt and reached around. She opened the envelope and took out two eight-by-tens.

“See any resemblance?”

“Both long blond hair, wavy. Both have brown eyes, natural eyebrows, good cheekbones. Could both definitely appeal to the same guy.”

“Both small framed as well. Five-two for Regine, five-four for Laura Lacroix.”

“But I thought Priest sold his house up here-after all the trouble.”

“Nope. And apparently he was in town this weekend. Miss Neff saw him at the Quiet Pint on Friday night.”

“Leonard Priest,” Delorme said again. “Wow.”

They drove up Airport Road and then took a number of smaller streets until they got to a dead end called Crosier Place. There was only one house, a tall cedar A-frame that to Delorme’s eyes looked as if it belonged in Switzerland. A Jaguar X-Type gleamed in the drive.

Cardinal pulled in and parked behind the Jaguar and switched off the ignition. Usually the two of them would decide in the car who would do most of the talking, but she got out and went straight up to the side door and pushed the doorbell.

Cardinal came up behind. “You in a rush?”

“Aren’t you?”

The door opened and Leonard Priest was there, holding a cellphone to one ear and looking annoyed. He snapped the cellphone shut and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “Yes?”

Delorme started to introduce herself, but Priest recognized both of them before she finished.

“No, thank you,” he said. “Don’t want any.”

Delorme stopped the door with her foot. “We just need to ask you a few questions.”

“I don’t care. Move your foot, you’re freezing the place out.”

“About Laura Lacroix.”

“I still don’t care. Now do me a favour and fuck off out of it.” A dozen years back in Canada had done nothing to soften the London accent. Not to mention the rock-star attitude.

“Mr. Priest, it’s just a few questions. A woman has gone missing-under violent circumstances-and we’re talking to everyone who knows her. Why make it such a big deal?”

This time Priest spoke to Cardinal. “You tried to put me away. And now you come round here expecting me to be delighted to see you?”

“No, I expected you to behave like an asshole,” Cardinal said. “You’re not disappointing me.”

Priest took out the cellphone again and pressed a button. “I have my lawyer on speed-dial.”

“Really,” Delorme said. “You must be so proud.”

“We’ll never get a subpoena with what we’ve got at this point,” Cardinal said in the car. “A single person’s hearsay that he once went out with Laura Lacroix.”

“I know. He knows it too. He has a great accent, though, I’ll give him that.”

“You know he’s actually from here originally, right? Moved to England with his parents when he was a kid. Moved back here after his band broke up. It’s funny who moves back here. Guy like that, you’d think he’d stay in London or Los Angeles or somewhere.”

Cardinal made the turn and headed downhill. He had to stop again at the highway intersection. It was a long light and they sat there in silence. Then it was finally green and they were on Algonquin.

“I seem to remember Priest made a pass at you during the trial,” Cardinal said.

“More than one.”

“Yeah, I think you might be his type. Regine Choquette and Laura Lacroix? You have the same colour hair, same colour eyes, about the same height. Same age too, pretty much. And look at their last names.”

“Choquette. Lacroix. Bon, donc, nous sommes toutes les trois Canadiennes-francaises. Trois soeurs. All French Canadians look alike now?”

“No, but all three of you do look French-Canadian.”

“You think I should cozy up to him? Dinner and a movie and wearing a wire the whole time?”

“Hell, no. He’d find the wire too fast.”

“Very funny.”

There is something ludicrous about a man shovelling snow in the Arctic. Wyndham had a photograph tacked above his desk of him and me doing just that. We were out there day and night, along with one or two of the others, sometimes with shovels, other times on our knees poking about with implements smaller than kitchen spatulas.

Snow cover on T-6 averaged about three feet. And yet the polar ice cap is a desert. Most areas receive less than eight inches of precipitation a year, but whatever comes stays. Snowstorms are most often a matter of blowing snow, not falling snow, but they can play havoc with a runway. Keeping the huts and equipment in running order fell to old Arctic hand Murray Washburn, but keeping our landing strip clear was the responsibility of Hunter Oklaga, an Inuit and former Army Ranger who was possibly the only man alive-and certainly the only man among us-who had parachuted into both the Antarctic and the Arctic, feats none of us yearned to duplicate. If anyone voiced discomfort with the environment, he would say, You’re crazy, man. You should try Laurie Island. Antarctica? Now, that’s cold. This is Miami we’re in here.

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.