The charter came in under the cloud at a quarter to eleven on Wednesday, a small twin with its lights on, and put down on the gravel strip above the village in a spray of rain, and a man got out with a briefcase and no hat.
Thorsen watched it from Ruth’s porch. The man turned up the collar of a coat made for a city where it rained less, walked the whole kilometre down from the strip, and arrived at Ruth’s gate with water running off his eyebrows, and looked at the dog under the porch, who looked back at him.
“Mr. Thorsen,” he said. “Dave Fraser. Major Crime, Prince George. Is this dog going to let me in?”
“I think so.”
“You think so.” Fraser looked at the dog a moment longer. Then he came up the path, not hurrying, and up the steps, and the dog watched him do it and put his chin back on his paws. “Good. I’ve had a morning.”
Ruth gave him a towel, a mug of tea and the kitchen table, and went out to her garden in the rain.
Fraser was compact and grey at the temples, with a wide pleasant face and very clean hands. He took a recorder, a yellow pad, two pencils and a small folding knife out of the briefcase, and sharpened one of the pencils into a saucer before he said anything at all.
“I’ve read Corporal Dhillon’s file,” he said. “On the plane. It’s a good file. He’s very angry with himself for letting a woman get on a floatplane, which he was right to do.” He laid the pencil down beside the pad, square. “Now I’d like to hear it from you as if I hadn’t. From the day Mrs. Eiksund called you, in order, and when I ask a question it isn’t because I think you’re lying. It’s because I want to hear how you say it.” He pressed the button on the recorder. “You were a police officer, Mr. Thorsen. You’ll know what this is.”
“It means I’m a witness.”
“And that you’ll be cross-examined on every hour of your life since the eighteenth of April. You’re related to the deceased.”
“Distantly. His grandmother is my father’s cousin.”
“That’ll come up.” He wrote something. “You are not an investigator in this matter. You won’t speak to Dr. Harker, or to anybody about her except me. If somebody comes to you with something, you’ll send them to me. You won’t go up that creek. You won’t go near that hut. And you won’t be in a room when I interview anybody.” He looked up. “I’m sorry to put it like that.”
“I’d have put it the same way.”
“Dhillon says you said so on Monday. I wanted to hear it in your voice.” He picked up the pencil. “The eighteenth of April. What time did she call?”
It took five hours. Fraser asked the same questions three times, from three directions. At half past two, when Thorsen had got as far as the barrel, Fraser put the pencil down.
“The jacket,” he said. “You put it on.”
“I was shaking. I’d been in the rain since three.”
“How long did you have it on?”
“A minute. Less.”
“And the dog.”
“Backed away. Hackles up. Growling.” Thorsen looked at the window. “When I took it off he came and lay on my feet.”
Fraser looked at him without writing.
“I’m going to write that down exactly as you said it,” he said. “And then a defence lawyer is going to stand up and say Sergeant, are you asking this jury to convict a woman on the opinion of a dog. And I’m going to say no.” He wrote it down. “But I’m glad I’ve met the dog.”
The Guardians’ office had a hand-lettered sign on the door that said BOOTS OFF OR I WILL KNOW. Ellie had put three chairs in front of the biggest screen. She had, Thorsen noticed, combed her hair.
“Sit,” she said. “I’m going to do this once, properly, and then you can ask me things. Sergeant, you can ask me things. Thorsen, you can sit there and look intelligent.”
“You’ll hear nothing here you couldn’t read in Ellie’s letters to the EAO,” Fraser said to Thorsen, setting the recorder on the desk. “That’s the only reason you’re in the room. I’m saying it for the recording.”
Ellie put up a chart: a grey band of dots running left to right, three seasons of it with gaps for the winters, and under it a green band, lower and flatter. “Dissolved zinc at MC-1. Grey’s Harker Environmental, every sample since the baseline began. Green’s ours. Same station, our sampler, our lab in Burnaby, on as many of the same days as we could get there.” She tapped the grey. “Up and down. That’s what a glacial creek does. If you showed me only this I’d say fine, that’s a river.”
“Thing one.” The screen became a table. “Take her number and take ours away. Same day, same station. Do it for zinc, manganese, uranium, thorium. Most days you get nothing much, the kind of difference two labs always have. On her high days you get this.”
Four columns, a dozen rows, and the rows were the same. Not the same size: the big days bigger, the smaller days smaller. The same shape. Manganese twenty-five, zinc six, uranium one, thorium point three, or half that all the way across, or double.
“Those four come off different minerals,” Ellie said. “Carbonate, sphalerite, the thorium and uranium stuff. They dissolve at different rates on different days, and a river never keeps them in a fixed ratio. Never.” She sat back. “That isn’t a river. That’s a recipe.”
Fraser wrote recipe on his pad.
“Thing two. Thorium.” A single column. “Thorium’s the stickiest thing there is. In a silty creek every bit of natural thorium is on the silt, and the silt stays on the filter. Our dissolved thorium has been under detection on every sample for three summers. Less than a hundredth.” She tapped the next column. “Hers on the high days is point three. Sitting in filtered water as if it was poured in after the filter.” She looked at Fraser. “Because it was.”
“Is that possible naturally?”
“Anything’s possible in a river,” said Ellie. “That’s what she said in March. Flow, timing, methods, different labs. And it’s all real. That’s why the EAO took her answer and filed it, and why I went on sampling. Thing three.” Another table. “Her field blanks are clean. Lab water, handled exactly like a sample. Our bottles from the same day are clean. So it isn’t her bottles and it isn’t the river. Now fluoride. Fluoride comes out of a separate bottle that you never acidify, because the acid wrecks it. She doesn’t put anything in that one.” Two numbers, side by side: 0.62 and 0.61. “Same as ours, to the second decimal. The only bottle she doesn’t touch is the only bottle that agrees.”
“And thing four,” Fraser said.
Ellie looked at him with something like approval.
“Thing four is why. At Mink Creek’s hardness the province’s zinc guideline is about seven and a half. With her numbers the creek goes over it on its own most Augusts. When a creek does that, BC sets a site-specific objective off the baseline, round about the ninety-fifth percentile, and that’s the line the mine gets to run at for sixty years.” She shrugged. “Every high day she cooked raised the line. Only the high days, mind. Nobody looks twice at a big number on a big day.”
“I can tell you what she cooked it with,” Fraser said. “Corporal Dhillon sent a few drops of what’s in that dropper bottle to your lab in Burnaby on yesterday’s plane, with a constable sitting beside the cooler. They rang me at seven this morning.” He read it off his pad. “Five per cent nitric. Manganese, twenty-five milligrams a litre. Zinc, six. Uranium, one. Thorium, point three.”
Ellie looked at her table for a while.
“That’s exactly what was left over when I took ours away,” she said.
Fraser turned a page. “Dr. Harker wrote to you on the ninth of June, and to Corporal Dhillon and the EAO the day after. She says somebody at camp has been into her coolers. She sent her field notes to show the lab was wrong. And on the ninth of June she sat on a step in Nesvik and showed the same notes to Mr. Thorsen.”
Ellie did not look at Thorsen, which he was grateful for.
“I know what she sent me. I’ve read it every night since.” She put up a table: two columns of turbidity, side by side, four dates. “That’s hers, off her letter. That’s mine. Same morning, same station, my meter a metre from hers on the gravel. Ninth of July: she’s fourteen, I’m a hundred and ten. That creek’s never been clear at that flow in its life. She wrote her gauge down honestly, and then she wrote a clear morning beside it.” She tapped the next column. “And these are Rainy’s manifests. Seven of her high days, the coolers went from the creek to the Beaver that afternoon and were on her own bench in Nesvik by supper. They never slept in Imogen Oakes’s shack. They’re high anyway.” She sat back. “Nobody at that camp touched those bottles. Whatever’s in them went in on the bank.”
Fraser wrote it down. Then, without looking up, he said to Thorsen, “She came to you before anybody had asked her a single question.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not a woman with a problem in her coolers,” said Fraser. “That’s a woman getting her story in first. With the notes to go with it.” Fraser took a photocopy out of his briefcase, a page of Thorsen’s notebook, and put his finger on a line.
“A flow of a hundred and twelve,” he said. “At MC-3. On the sixteenth of August. Is that possible?”
Ellie did not even look at the screen.
“MC-3’s never seen a hundred and twelve in its life,” she said. “It’s a trickle off the ice. That’s MC-1 in August.”
Fraser asked her who had taken the samples. She showed him the chain-of-custody forms, scanned, every one, filed with the EAO: a box on each with the sampler’s signature. For most of the summer of 2026 the box said P. Dolan in a round careful hand. For 2027, all of it, the box said C. Harker.
Fraser went through the 2026 forms one at a time. He stopped at one and asked Ellie to make it bigger. It was the sixteenth of August. MC-3. Sampler of record: P. Dolan. He asked Ellie to send him the full set, and she said she already had, at eleven o’clock, and he said thank you, and wrote something down, and Thorsen saw that it was two dates: 22 July and 16 August, and beside the second, a word he could not read and did not need to. Paige Dolan had been in Juneau.
The EAO’s compliance officer called at six, on Ellie’s laptop, from an office in Victoria with the blinds half down: a young man in rimless glasses, used to being careful in writing and now being careful out loud. He was not, at this stage, in a position to say what the Guardians’ data meant.
“But I’m in a position to look,” he said. “I’m ordering a compliance inspection under section forty-nine, with audit split-sampling at MC-1 and MC-2, on Thursday the eighth of July. Jointly with the Upper Dalgleish Guardians, under our section fifty agreement. Every sample taken three times, same water, same minute: her lab, ours, the Guardians’. And we inspect the stations. The instruments, the huts, everything at the site.”
“Caldera gets told,” Fraser said.
“Caldera is told. They have to be.” He pushed his glasses up. “Sergeant, I’m aware there’s a police matter. I’m not going to do anything in this file I wouldn’t do if there wasn’t one, in either direction. The notice goes to the company tonight.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you to hold it.”
When the man from Victoria had gone Fraser sat looking at the dark screen.
“Thursday the eighth,” he said, to nobody in particular.
Thorsen had promised not to be an investigator. He looked at the screen too.
Canada Day at the Landing was a barbecue behind the school and a flag on the RCMP office that Dhillon put up himself at eight in the morning because there was nobody else to do it. At two o’clock Fraser came and fetched Thorsen from the folding chairs.
“Crown counsel,” he said. “Leah Mandel. She’s at her cabin. She’s going to give me twenty minutes on a holiday, and she wants five of them with you, about the bottle.” He looked at Thorsen’s ankle. “Can you do the hill?”
“Slowly.”
“Then slowly,” Fraser said, and walked beside him the whole way at the speed of a man with a sprained ankle, without remarking on it.
The RCMP office smelled of floor polish and burnt coffee. Fraser put the phone in the middle of the desk on speaker and sat on one side of it, and Thorsen sat on the other, and Dhillon leaned in the doorway with his arms folded.
Leah Mandel had a quick, dry, slightly hoarse voice, and behind it there were loons. Thorsen had not heard a loon since Stone Bay, and he missed what she was saying.
”—and I’m on my dock with a beer and a mosquito coil, Dave, so don’t take it personally if I swat. Is the American there?”
“He’s here.”
“Mr. Thorsen. Good afternoon. I’m going to ask you some questions you won’t like, and then I’m going to say some things to Sergeant Fraser in front of you, and I’m doing that on purpose, because you were a detective for nineteen years and you’ll understand them, and then perhaps you’ll stop hoping. All right?”
“All right.”
“You found a bottle in a barrel in a hut on a lakeshore at twenty to one in the morning, in the dark—”
“In the grey. You can’t read a map by it. You can read a label.”
“In the grey.” A loon called. “And then you put it in your sock and inside your shirt and carried it, alone, for, what, twenty hours, through the bush, across a creek, across a log jam, past a bear, with a fever. Nobody saw you take it. Nobody saw where you took it from. Nobody saw it again until you handed a sock to a Guardian in a boat. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“So when defence counsel says you brought that bottle into the country in your luggage, Mr. Thorsen, what do I say?”
“Fourteen photographs,” Thorsen said. “Taken on the twenty-second of July last year at MC-1 by Sindre Eiksund. With the metadata. The same bottle, the same label, the same lot. Sent by his father to Corporal Dhillon.”
There was a pause on the line.
“Yes,” said Mandel. “That’s what I say. And that’s the only reason I’m still talking to you.” Something splashed. “That’s your five minutes. Thank you. Stay where you are, I want you to hear the rest. Dave.”
“Leah.”
“You want charge approval.”
“I want to talk about it.”
“Then let’s talk about it.” Her voice did not change at all. “You’ve got a boy who went into a river in flood and came out in Alaska, and an ME who says drowning. No witness to anything. A pilot who rewrote his own ticket and now tells you a different story because he’s frightened. A camp that lied to the RCMP for ten months. A consultant whose data look funny, which is a regulatory matter, and a dog that doesn’t like her, which isn’t any kind of matter.” A loon. “A woman at a creek, a dog bite and a lie about which arm. That’s a manslaughter I’d lose today.”
Fraser did not argue. He wrote something on his pad.
“The data,” he said.
“The data are lovely. I like the data. The data get you false-information counts under the Environmental Assessment Act. Do you know what those carry?”
“Tell me.”
“Provincial counts. Six months at most. You can’t extradite on them. Not won’t. Can’t. The treaty with the Americans is more than a year in both countries, or nothing.” She let that sit. “Fraud is different. Fraud over five thousand dollars is section three-eighty, and she stood to take a six-hundred-thousand-dollar success fee and four hundred thousand shares from Caldera, and behind it Pallas, by deceit. Fraud is extraditable. So is the homicide. And I’m not approving either of them today, Dave, because what I’ve got for fraud is a graph, and what I’ve got for the homicide is a graph and a dog. Get me the supplier. Get me the order for that blend and the lot record with her firm’s name on it, and get me whatever’s in that camera folder the Guardians are sitting on, and then call me.”
“And if you approve them? Next week?”
“Then I write to Ottawa, and Ottawa writes to Washington, and a judge in Alaska holds a hearing, and her lawyer appeals, and the Secretary of State thinks about it.” The voice was not unkind. “Months, Dave. In a good year.”
Fraser put the pencil down.
“So she has to be arrested in Canada,” he said.
“So she has to be arrested in Canada,” said Mandel, “on reasonable grounds, by you, without any help from me, and without a charge I’ve approved, and then you bring me what you’ve got and I decide. That’s how it works. You know that. I’m saying it for the American.” The loons had stopped. “And Mr. Thorsen?”
“Yes.”
“When she is arrested, if she is, and some officer sits down with her, you will be in another building. In another valley, preferably. If I hear you were in the room I’ll throw the whole interview out myself.”
“I understand.”
“I believe you,” Mandel said. “It’s a holiday. Go and eat a hot dog.” And the line went dead, and there was only the hum of the office fridge, and Dhillon in the doorway, looking at the floor.
He went down to the river afterwards on his own, slowly, and sat on a bench at the top of the float with his foot up on a fender somebody had left there.
Down on the float two boys were arguing about who would hold a skiff’s bow line, and their father settled it by holding it himself.
Mandel was right. He had known it in the grey at the hut with the bottle in his hand, and that was why he had taken only the bottle.
And he thought, for no reason he could at first have given, about Ed Harker at the wheel of the Kittiwake on the flats in June, with the net going out over the stern and the silt line across the sea, and Ed with his hand on the new engine’s cowling as if it were the flank of a horse.
He had never asked who paid for it. Ruth had told him on Monday, over the stew, without knowing she was telling him anything: Ed at her table the week of the council, talking about his daughter. First year in her life Celia’s had money. Paid the deposit on my engine and put her name on the loan.
He had said it, Ruth said, the way a man says his daughter is a doctor.
He thought about it now.
Fraser came down the ramp and stood beside the bench with his hands in the pockets of his inadequate coat.
“She has to come to us,” he said.
“She will.”
Fraser looked down at him.
“You’ve promised not to tell me things,” he said. “I’ll ask you anyway. Why?”
“Thursday the eighth,” Thorsen said. “An inspector’s going to open that hut. She knows what’s in it. She can’t let him.”
Fraser looked at the river.
“Then I’d better have a judge by tonight,” he said, “and something for her to find when she gets there.” He turned to go up the ramp, and stopped. “That’s not me telling you anything, Mr. Thorsen. That’s me talking to a river.”