No Cherubs for Melanie (41 page)

Samantha had reached another level of depression, and had the feeling she was headed lower. Every time she had thought things couldn't get worse, they did. Bryan caught her hand in an attempt to comfort her but she whipped it away. Only her father's warm hand would have been a comfort.

Goose Bay, like most northern trading posts, was simply a grander version of Bear Lake settlement with the addition of a tin shack hospital. The tiny mortuary was overflowing. Six month's worth of bodies from a single plane crash had stretched the refrigerator beyond bursting point; Margaret's body, surrounded by bags of ice from the local store, had been left on a gurney.

Samantha had made up her mind that she would identify her father's body — it was her duty. But when it came to it she asked Bryan if he minded doing it for her.

“I have to do the identification, anyway,” he said. It was force policy ever since one enterprising officer's wife had bilked the Force's insurance company out of millions with a forged death certificate from some remote holiday isle. “Let me see him first and I'll see what he looks like,” he added, hoping for his own sake that he wasn't about to walk into a real-life version of a chain-saw massacre.

The mortuary's rubber doors had hardly swung shut behind him when he bounced back out and gave her a smile that was sort of crooked and confused. “It's not your dad.”

“Not Dad?”

“Not unless he's turned into a Chinaman.”

“What?”

“They're both Chinese.”

But Samantha had already accepted the fact of her father's death; it wasn't that simple to twist her mind around such a diametrically opposed concept. “You must be mistaken?” she said, not even daring to consider that Bryan might be right. She was not even willing to hope that he might be right.

“Look for yourself then,” he said, swinging the rubber door wide.

Illogically sensing that Bryan was deliberately winding her up she barged past him.

As she stood over the body of the Asians she was left with the feeling that someone was playing Russian roulette with her mind.
Click
— another empty chamber spun into place. But what would happen the next time?

“Where is he?” she mumbled, more confused than ever.

The local policeman, a multi-chinned, grand-fatherly figure with a crew-cut, who took every wheezing breath as if it were his last, had seized the Chinese men's possessions: bloody lumps of bears, and accompanying videotapes, all sealed in heavy-gauge plastic bags.

“We should watch the videos,” suggested Bryan. “There might be some clues.”

Samantha was in no mood to watch videos. “How can you, Peter?” she stomped. “I want to leave now. Dad's still out there somewhere; he could be alive.”

The town's policeman was shaking his furry-football head. “He wasn't in the plane, Miss. There wouldn't have been room for another passenger.”

“Are you sure?” queried Bryan, having difficulty believing.

“Dead sure,” he replied, with a poor choice of words. “And the trackers only found two sets of footprints.”

“What about his suitcase? An old brown —” Samantha began.

The policeman was already shaking his head again. “There was no suitcase, and no room for one either.”

“That does it,” said Bryan. “We're watching the videos.”

There was something artistic about the opening shot as the lids of a dopey black eye flickered in response to the touch of a finger. “See, this bear is still alive,” said the voice of the commentator, though none of the viewers understood the Cantonese. The shot widened to take in the rest of the animal as the big knife hovered over the bear's belly. It could easily have been a clip from
All Creatures Great and Small
if the characters had been speaking with Yorkshire accents, but
James Herriot could never have stomached what was about to happen.

“I don't want to watch any more,” said Samantha, retching, as the knife dug into the still moving bear, then she escaped from the doctor's office to the near-normality of the mortuary waiting room.

“Samantha. Are you all right?” asked Bryan, finding her slumped on a bench in the waiting room with her head buried in her hands.

“Feeling a bit faint actually. I think I should eat something.” She looked up, her tight face showing the scars of mental torture. “What day is it Peter?” What time, what year, what century, she wondered, staring at her fingers. She hid them quickly — the nails had gone.

“Stop the world, I want to get back on,” she added listlessly, as if she'd had enough.

“It's Wednesday.”

“Where the hell is he?” she screamed, as if someone had just plugged her fuse back in. Annoyance was rapidly overtaking concern and she broke down in frustration. “I feel like I'm playing chess on a dartboard,” she sobbed, and he caught her in his arms. She twisted away. “What happened to the bear?”

“Ah…”

“Don't tell me, I don't want to know.” But feminine inquisitiveness got the better of her. “Did they kill it?”

“Yes, they killed it,” he said, deliberately neglecting to tell her how the knife had sliced open the living bear's gut and how the Chinese commentator had broken into an excited babble. “Whoa — take a look at that,” he seemed to be saying as a small latex hand poked around inside the pulsating mass. “What a stomach, and look at that duodenum. Get a load of that peritoneum. Is that the gall bladder? Yes, I think it is, I think we've found the
gall bladder. Wow, would you take a look at that beauty. A real snip — if you'll pardon the pun — at only forty-five thousand bucks.” Then something the size of a human thumb was dangled in front of the camera and an identification tab was tied around it. Movement stopped for a few seconds as the bear's heart gave up, then the camera swung to each of the giant paws in turn as they were butchered at the wrist.

Samantha's mind was all over the place. A sinister knife-wielding man was carving up bodies while her father was being chased by a bear.

“Hang on,” she shouted, pulling herself together as thoughts clunked into place like a row of cherries. “Do you realize what this means?”

Bryan wasn't even in the same book, let alone the same page.

“He's still on Margaret's island,” she continued with absolute certainty.

“But we were there, Samantha. We would have seen him, or heard him.”

She was shaking her head. “No. No wonder the Indians were spooked. He
is
there — at least his spirit is.”

Peter Bryan realized what she was saying. “You mean he's…”

“Dead, Peter. I can see it all. He must've discovered what the Chinks were up to and tried to arrest them. They killed him and were trying to get away when they crashed.”

“But where does Margaret fit in?”

“I'm still working on that,” she said after a thoughtful pause. “But she must be involved or she wouldn't have got Stacy and the others to lie.”

“Unless…” Bryan breathed, catching on. “Unless
the dealers were holding your dad hostage and made Margaret go to the settlement with the message.”

“Possible… But we must get back to the island.”

DS Phillips was still in the doctor's office, embroiled in a turf war with the local policeman who was insisting on retaining the videotapes as evidence. Unswayed by the detective's argument that smuggling was a federal offence, the local man could see media headlines and an almost certain promotion coming his way if he kept control of the case.

Samantha exploded through the door and burst into the conversation. “We have to go back to Margaret's island immediately.”

“But…I…” Phillips floundered. He had expected to be investigating a straightforward plane crash and had been unprepared for Asian smugglers, Indian rituals, and female lawyers with errant fathers and PMS. He put his foot down. “I'm not doin' anything more until I've got clearance,” he said, and meant it.

Time dragged for Samantha and Bryan while the detective sergeant sought permission to return to the island, but breakfast in the hospital's homely cafeteria was a diversion from their concerns. Samantha appeared on the verge of collapsing from hunger, but said she couldn't eat a thing when a plateful of scrambled eggs, ham, and hash browns was placed in front of her. Bryan had other ideas and threatened to force it down her throat. She ate, insisting that she was going to throw up. She didn't.

The cafeteria was a revolving door of coffee snatch-ers; no one lingered long enough for more than a cheery, “Hi! How'ya doing?”

“OK,” replied Bryan to the first enquirer, feeling
anything but OK; realizing he and Samantha were the talk of the hospital, he switched to, “So-so.”

DS Phillips popped in to grab a coffee and said, “I'm still waiting folks,” forestalling the inevitable query.

Samantha wanted to scream.

“Thanks,” said Bryan getting up and wandering around the cafeteria walls to browse an exhibition of modern landscapes by a local artist; to raise funds for a new ambulance according to the note attached to a Maxwell House collecting tin.

“What do you think?” called Samantha, turning her nose up at bubble-gum pink hills and trees that could have been puddles of projectile vomit.

“They are by someone called Louisa Martini Corella Thornton-Fink,” he read off a handwritten biography taped to the wall.

“But what's your opinion?”

He sat down with a shake of his head. “Anyone who needs that many names has little else to offer. Anyway,” he added, “I like to think that the artist can do better than me; I've seen five-year-olds do better than that.”

The detective sergeant had taken his coffee, leaving them depressed in their private thoughts. Samantha wanted to think about her father but she couldn't get the bear video to leave her alone. She found herself looking into Bryan's eyes, wanting to ask, “What happened?” Wishing now that she had forced herself to watch it.

Bryan, his mind mired in images from the video, picked up the unspoken inquisitiveness in her look and broke the ice.

“They were after the gall bladder and the bile…” he started, as if she should know where his mind was.

“Bile!” she gulped, tasting it in the back of her throat. “Whatever for?”

“It's a hundred times more valuable than gold in the
Far East,” he said, repeating the local policeman's words. “Five hundred quid a gram.”

“But what the hell do they do with it? It's puke, they can't make it into jewellery?”

“Some of it's used for treating gall stones and liver disease apparently, but most of it's taken as an aphrodisiac.”

“I'd expect to fuck for a fortnight at that price.” She shook her head disbelievingly.

Bryan might have laughed, but he was surrounded by too much darkness; Miss Thornton-Fink's weirdly distorted windows on the world weren't helping.

The counter assistant wandered smilingly to their table with a steaming pot. “More coffee, folks?”

“Thank you,” Samantha nodded.

“Saw you looking at the pictures,” she said to Bryan brightly. “What d'ye think?”

As if needing to make a final re-evaluation, he looked around for an appropriate half-truth. “Overpriced rubbish,” he said, giving up; he'd had enough of half-truths.

“Oh!” Louisa Thornton-Fink's face slipped faster than a share in a dodgy gold mine and she tramped back to the counter without refilling his cup.

“Boyfriend trouble I 'spect,” Samantha whispered knowingly, with a nod, as Louisa's sobs reached them from the kitchen a few seconds later.

DS Phillips returned. “ 'Kay folks. The boss has given the green light, so I'll just grab a coffee for the pilot and we'll head back to the island.”

The instant screech of their chairs on the polished linoleum floor set teeth on edge.

“It isn't a big island, so you two and the pilot should be able to check it out in a couple of hours,” he carried on as he poured the coffee himself, the distraught artist still hiding out in the kitchen. “Meantime, job number one for me is to see if I can find anything to ID the Chinamen.”

Monday and Tuesday had been one long nightmare for Bliss. In the cave's darkness he had fought off demon after demon, real and imagined. The real ones were only insects and, although they lanced and stung him in the most painful places, none was dangerous. But the demons in his mind were deadly, more than once bringing him to the verge of lunacy. Margaret, the bear, and Superintendent Edwards conspired to keep his mind in turmoil, but Margaret was his biggest adversary and he fought her off repeatedly.

Sometime Tuesday a vision of Sarah drifted back, but the omnipresent spectre of Margaret chained her to a bed and pulled off her limbs, one by one, blood everywhere, then she ripped off his ex-wife's head, leaving only her naked torso, dumped, like Eddie, on a pile of rotting carcasses.

Margaret had flown away a million times in Bliss's mind after killing Sarah on Sunday. She had escaped.
She'd killed her sister, mother and Sarah, then flown away with the Asians. He had watched them go as he'd dropped back into the water. “Dive, dive, dive,” he'd shouted to himself, certain one of the Chinese men would look down out of the cockpit window and see him floundering in the water, but his lungs hadn't recovered from either the exertion of retrieving the knife or his frenzied attack on the float and all he could do was pray.

The plane had risen effortlessly into the sky stealing his precious knife, and he'd slumped despondently into the water watching it all the way to the horizon before dragging himself back to the beach, exhausted. His sanctuary in the pit was so impossibly far it might as well have been on the moon and, too drained to be concerned about the frightful images of mutilated bears, he'd crawled into the cave, made a nest of leaves under the killing table, and squirrelled into it.