The ceiling was white, with a brown stain in one corner shaped like a boot.
He looked at it for some time before it occurred to him that the thing in the back of his left hand was a cannula. Through the window there was a gravel road, and a raven on a power pole, and a slope of spruce going up into cloud. It was light. It was always light.
“There he is,” said the nurse.
The nurse who had chipped the dog in May was a broad, brisk woman with reading glasses on a cord, and she had been in and out of his sleep all night like weather. He remembered her voice, quite close to his ear: if you try to get up again I’ll sedate you, and I’m allowed.
“What time is it?”
“Quarter past seven. Monday.” She took his wrist in her fingers and looked at the clock on the wall, not at him. “You came in at ten to one with a temperature of thirty-four point eight. You’re thirty-seven point nine now, which is the infection in that hand: devil’s club like a pincushion, and three of the holes gone bad. You’re on antibiotics.” She let go of the wrist. “Your ankle’s sprained, not broken. I’ve strapped it.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I wanted you flown out to Terrace, and the fog wouldn’t have it.” She hung the clipboard on the end of the bed. “Your dog’s on my step. He’s been there since one o’clock this morning, and he won’t come in and he won’t go away. I’ve given him water and a can of something, and I’m not doing anything else for him, because I’m a nurse.”
Dhillon came at half past seven. He had changed his shirt, and that was all. He had been at a desk under a strip light since one in the morning.
“Ruth rang me at four on Saturday,” he said. “On the dot. She read it to me off her calendar.” He sat down. “I’ve got your sock. In a bag, with the time on it in Ellie’s writing, in the exhibit locker, and nobody’s opening it until somebody tells me what’s in it and how it got there.” He looked at the nurse in the doorway. “Ten minutes. I need to know whether I’m minding a bottle of whisky.”
“Ten,” said the nurse, and went away.
Thorsen told it the way he would have wanted it told to him: once, in order, without opinion. The pad, Goat Creek, the bear. The hut, the radio and the climb, the barrel and what was in it. The dog and the jacket, and what was under the tape on its left sleeve. The lines he had copied, the sixteenth of August with the station number gone over twice, and here was the notebook. He had taken only the dropper bottle, and left the rest as near as he could to how it had been, except the lock. Then what she had said on the bar, with the dog growling at her: He’s never forgiven me for July. Sindre’s letter to Marj at the end of July: a nip on a hand. And on the bar, when she pushed her sleeve up, not a hand. Four holes in the inside of a left forearm.
Dhillon wrote, and did not interrupt. At the dog and the jacket he looked up once. At the forearm he underlined something.
Then the porch. Marj’s top step on the ninth of June, three field books in a dry bag, eleven days of clear water and high thorium, and the camp’s hands in her coolers. Don’t tell my father. Not yet.
“She came to you,” Dhillon said, “before she came to me.” He did not underline that. He looked at it.
“You’re telling me,” he said, “that she lied about a dog.”
“About which bite. July was a nip on a hand.”
“And her father. Ten to three, on the VHF, from the top station. He says so, and Ed Harker doesn’t lie.”
“She called him,” Thorsen said. “I believe that. I had a handheld behind that ridge on Saturday night and couldn’t raise a soul until I could see the repeater, and then it couldn’t hear me. Down at MC-1 Tanner talked to Ellie in the village as if she were next door. From MC-3 she couldn’t have called her father. From MC-1 she could.”
Dhillon looked at him. Then he wrote that down as well.
“And there’s a book with this June in it.” He closed the notebook. “Sindre’s been dead ten months. Who did June?”
“Paige Dolan quit in September.”
“I know when Paige Dolan quit. Dr. Harker’s coming in at nine. To make a statement about the search.”
“Are you going to ask her about anything else?”
“No,” said Dhillon. “I’m going to ask her about the search. Then I’m going to thank her for her help. Then I’m going to watch her go down to the float.” He put the notebook in his pocket. “At three this morning I added a man put down on a mountain with a dead beacon to my application for that tracker. If a judge signs it with his breakfast, Terrace sends me the data. Until then I’ve got a dog and a sock.” He went to the door, and stopped. “You did right. Leaving the rest.”
“I know.”
“I’m telling you anyway,” said Dhillon. “Nobody’s told me since I got here.”
Batt came at a little after eleven.
He did not come in. He came to the window and stood on the gravel with his hands in his pockets, and the dog came round the corner of the building and stood ten metres off and looked at him, and then Batt tapped on the glass.
The nurse was in the other room. Thorsen reached over, with the cannula pulling, and slid the window up a hand’s breadth.
“They’ve grounded me,” Batt said through the gap. “Coastal Ridge. Rang me at seven. Pending the inquiry. Transport Canada want the machine looked at. Inspector’s put an order on the whole show. Section fifteen. No work, nothing of Caldera’s flying. Rennick’s walking round like a man at his own wake.”
“Corey—”
“No. Listen.” He put his hands on the sill. “I drained it. The inReach. I left it switched on in my tent from Thursday, with the screen lit up, till it died. And the subscription on that kit was cancelled in May, I knew it was cancelled, I was there when Rennick did it. I gave you a dead box and told you which button to press.” He swallowed. “She said one night. She said, give him a cold night on the mountain and he’ll get on the ferry. Somewhere he’d look a fool. I picked the pad because you wanted to see it. I was going back at first light. I swear to God I was. I was in the machine at half four and the cloud was on the ground. When Amrit rang the camp on Saturday night I said weather, couldn’t get back in, first light. Which was true by then. I’d made it true.”
“Corey. Don’t tell me this.”
“Who else am I going to tell?”
“Dhillon.”
“I’m telling you first.” His voice had gone up, and he heard it, and brought it down. “Me and Celia. Since the summer before last. My wife doesn’t know.”
She had rung him on the Wednesday night, after Thorsen had been at him about MC-3, to ask what Thorsen was up to. He had not told her where he had left Thorsen until Sunday morning. She had gone white, and come up on Rainy’s first plane, and sat in the helicopter all day, and every time they came down the creek near the lake she had wanted him to put down at her hut.
“And I said, not there, you bloody idiot. Half the river on the search channel, a Mountie on the radio, and you want to land at your own hut in the middle of it and go inside? Who’s going to ask why?” He looked at his hands. “She sat with her hands between her knees. I didn’t know why she wanted it. I didn’t want to know.”
Thorsen let him go on.
“And last August. I put her down as MC-3 on the sixteenth. She asked me to. She said she’d billed Caldera for an MC-3 run the week before that she never did, and could I put her afternoon down as MC-3 and square it. Billing. So I did. I rewrote half that ticket anyway, for the drill. What was one more line.” He was looking at the sill. “I put her down at the MC-1 bench at twenty past seven that morning, before the first lift. She’d stayed over. She wanted the morning and the afternoon both, with the glacier lake letting go. That went off the ticket with the rest of the morning, and I never put it back.” He swallowed. “And at noon the kid grabs my arm over the canyon and asks who’s on MC-1, and I say nobody. I’d put her there myself. At five past two I went down with fresh ice and took her morning cooler. The kid was on the bar when I went over. He watched me put down. Picked her up at twenty to five. She was sitting on the cooler with her arm in her lap and the blood was running off her fingers. Talus, she said. Stupid. And I flew her up to camp and Bernie dressed it and I never—” He stopped. “I never added it up. I never let myself add it up. Ten months.”
“Stop,” Thorsen said.
Batt looked at him.
“I’m not a policeman. I’m a man in a bed. Anything you say to me is a story you told in a bar. Go across the road and say it to Dhillon, with a lawyer if you want one.”
Batt stood at the window a moment longer. The dog had not moved.
“She came in at nine,” he said. “Gave Amrit ten minutes on the search. Very helpful. Then she walked down to the float. Rainy took her home at ten.” He put his hands back in his pockets. “She kissed me on the cheek on the float. In front of everybody. First time ever, in front of anybody.”
He went away across the gravel. The dog watched him to the road, and went back to the step.
Ruth brought stew at one o’clock in a pot with a tea towel round it, and sat in the chair by the bed and watched him eat it.
“Moose,” she said, when he asked. “It’s stew.” She looked at the window, where the step was. “All winter on the burn pile, and now he lies outside the nurse’s door. When you’re done in here, you’ll come back to my house. Your room’s made up. He can sleep under the porch. He knows it.”
She took the empty bowl out of his hands and put it in the pot. “And they’ve shut the camp. Inspector. Half the young men in this village had a job up there. There’ll be a lot said at a lot of suppers about the agreement. Ed Harker sat in that band office every day from the nineteenth telling my council about sockeye, and went home Thursday. Now they all know what his sockeye cost them.”
She got up.
“Eat what Ellie brings you,” she said, “and do what the nurse says. I’ve known that nurse since she was born. She was terrible at fractions.” And she went.
Dhillon came back at ten past five and shut the door.
He had a laptop under his arm. He sat on Ruth’s chair with it closed on his knees.
“I’m not supposed to tell you anything,” he said. “You’re a witness. Everything you know before you testify, some lawyer gets to ask where you learned it.”
“Then don’t.”
“Corey Batt walked into my office at a quarter past eleven,” Dhillon said, “and asked for a lawyer, and I got him one on the phone from Smithers, and then he talked for four hours.” He looked at the laptop. “I can’t tell you what he said.”
“All right.”
“The judge signed at nine. Terrace sent the tracker data at two.” He opened the laptop. “That I can tell you about. It’s a machine. It’s not anybody’s word.” He turned the screen so Thorsen could see it, a map of grey contours with a thin red line on it, beaded every few millimetres with dots, and a column of times down the side. “Sixteenth of August last year. You’ve seen the ridge camera. You know about the morning, nearly. Seven twenty-two, before any of it, a landing at the bench pad above MC-1. Two minutes. It’s on no piece of paper anybody ever gave me. Here’s the afternoon.” His finger moved. “Thirteen thirty, KR-27, up the head of the creek. That’s Dr. Oakes going in, the way the ticket says. Fourteen oh five, a landing at the bench pad up the trail from MC-1. Two minutes on the ground. Fourteen fifteen, the camp fuel pad. And then it sits there. Fifteen fifty-five, KR-27 again, for Oakes, and back to the fuel pad by four. Sixteen forty, back at the MC-1 bench. Sixteen fifty-two, camp.” He took his finger off the screen. “There’s no MC-3. There’s no MC-3 anywhere on this day.”
Thorsen looked at the red line. It went down the creek, and up, and sat, and went down again.
“So he didn’t do it,” he said.
“So he was on a fuel pad at camp, five kilometres away, with two witnesses and a tracker, from quarter past two until he went to fetch Dr. Oakes, and on it again from four until twenty-five to five,” said Dhillon. “And she was where her photographs say she was. Iridium sent the camp’s August bill this afternoon too: Rennick on the sat phone to Vancouver from five past two till twenty past three, the way he said. That’s all a machine can tell you.” He shut the laptop. “Somebody else was at MC-1 that afternoon. And on the ticket, in his handwriting, it says she was at MC-3.”
Neither of them said the name.
“I let her go this morning,” Dhillon said, to the lid of the laptop. “She sat in my office and told me about the search, and cried a bit about the boy, and asked after you. Then she asked if Rainy could drop her into Otter Lake on the way home, to check her station, with the camp shut. I told her Goat Creek and the lake are a scene until further notice, because of your stranding. She said of course. Then she walked down to the float and went home to Alaska. And I let her. Because at nine o’clock this morning what I had was an American in a bed and a story about a dog.” He stood up. “That’s what I’ll be thinking about tonight. So you don’t have to.”
“I’d have let her go too.”
“I know,” said Dhillon. “That’s what’s annoying.” He put the laptop under his arm. “Major Crime’s sending a sergeant from Prince George. Wednesday. Fraser. He’ll have read none of it, and he’ll want to read all of it, and he’ll want to talk to you. Don’t make me look stupid.”
It was ten o’clock on Tuesday morning, which was seven in the evening in Ulsteinvik, when he rang Rune.
He did it from Ruth’s back room, on the edge of a single bed under a quilt made of old shirts, with the dog in sight under the porch.
Rune answered on the fourth ring. He said his surname, the way Norwegians do, and then, when he heard who it was, nothing at all.
“I’m at Dalgleish Landing,” Thorsen said. “I want to tell you some things, and then ask you for something. You can say no. You’ve said no before.”
“Yes,” said Rune. “I have.”
Thorsen told him.
He did not tell him about the hut, or the barrel, or the jacket, because those belonged to the police now, and because Rune would one day be asked by somebody what he had known and when. He told him about the river. About the creek at the mouth, brown and solid, and a side creek at dawn so cold it had taken the breath out of him and not given it back. About the log jam, and the log that had rolled, and the five seconds he had spent hanging by his arms over that water. He said that he understood, now, what it meant that the boy had come up only once. He said that he did not think anybody would have had time to be afraid.
Rune did not say anything.
Then Thorsen told him about the dog. That he had wintered at the dump and waited at the landing all spring. That he had gone down Goat Creek in front of Thorsen and come back for him every time, and found the line across the jam and barked from the far side until Thorsen came. That he was lying under a porch fifteen metres away right now, and Thorsen could see him.
“Sindre named him for a teddy bear,” Rune said. “Bamse. He sent a picture. My mother has it on the fridge.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Yes.” A long breath on the line. “What do you want?”
“In July last year your son sent your mother a picture from a creek,” Thorsen said. “A yellow back and a bottle on a rock. He wrote helping the water lady. I think he took more than one. I think he took close-ups. I think they’re in what Google sent you in April, in a folder for the twenty-second of July, and I think you haven’t opened it.”
Silence.
“How do you know I haven’t opened it?”
“Because if you’d opened it you’d have called me.”
There was nothing but the line, and a woman’s voice behind Rune, Hilde’s, asking something in Norwegian, and Rune answering her, short.
“I opened the first folders,” he said at last. “May. June. I saw the dog. I saw him laughing. Then I could not.” He stopped. “I am an engineer, Mr. Thorsen. I design ships. I can look at anything. I could not look at that.”
“I know.”
“You do not know.”
“No,” said Thorsen. “You’re right.”
A chair, a door, a smaller quiet. A keyboard. Then nothing for a long time.
When Rune spoke again it was in the voice of a man reading figures off a drawing to somebody at the other end of a bad line.
“Twenty-second of July. Fourteen pictures. A creek. Two of a woman in a yellow jacket from behind, crouching. Her hands. She has a filter, a syringe. Four pictures of a bottle on a rock. Brown glass. With a dropper. The label.” He stopped. “He has turned it to read the label. His thumb is in the picture.”
“What does the label say?”
Rune read it to him. Custom blend. The four elements. A lot number. Harker Environmental.
Thorsen closed his eyes.
“Now the sixteenth of August,” he said. “The last one.”
The keyboard again. A long breath, held and let go.
“Sixteenth of August. Thirty-eight pictures. From the helicopter, in the morning. A drill on a slope, in green bush. Men. A pipe in the ground. The first at a quarter to eight, the last at twenty to eleven. Then nothing until five past one. The camp. The dog in the back of a machine.” A pause. “Then two of the river. Brown water, very high, from up on something. Twenty-two minutes past one. That is the last.” He stopped. “There is nothing after. No woman. No one.”
So the morning was there, KR-31, the drill and the men and the hole, in a boy’s own hand, with the time on every frame. The afternoon was not. At the landing the only signal was on the big rock Celia had told him about, one bar of it, and two pictures of the river had gone up from there. Whatever he took after he came down, the sweater, the boat going away, had never left the phone. Whatever he had seen at the lower station at noon he had seen with his eyes, out of a helicopter window. There was no picture of the person in yellow, and there never would be.
“Send them,” he said. “Both folders. The files themselves, the way Google gave them to you. Not to me. To Corporal Dhillon, RCMP. Then to me, if you want to.”
“Why not to you first?”
“Because one day a lawyer is going to stand up in a courtroom in British Columbia,” said Thorsen, “and ask where these came from and who touched them. And the answer has to be: a boy took them, and his father sent them to the police.”
The line was quiet.
“Yes,” Rune said. “Yes. That is right.” And then, in a voice Thorsen had not heard from him before: “His thumb. He always did that. When he was a boy he would hold things up to show you, and his thumb was always in front.”
Dhillon came to the gate at two.
“Same lot,” he said. That was all, at first. Then: “I opened your sock this morning with Major Crime watching on a video call from Prince George, and I read the label. And at noon I got fourteen pictures from Norway, with the metadata, taken on the twenty-second of July at MC-1. Same blend, same firm, same lot. The sixteenth’s folder is KR-31 from start to finish, which the inspector’s going to enjoy, and then the river, and nobody.” He put his hand on the gate. “The bottle was there a year ago. Your sock didn’t make it up.”
“No.”
“I’m going to write that down for Fraser,” said Dhillon, “and then I’m going to sleep for nine hours.”
He went back up the road. Thorsen went in and sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in his hand. After a while it buzzed, once, and there was a picture on it, with no message. A creek, very green, very clear, before the flood; a rock; a small brown bottle on the rock, turned so that the label faced the camera. And in the bottom corner of the frame, out of focus and too close, pink and enormous, the ball of a young man’s thumb.