The Bone Seeker by M. J. McGrath Page B

that too. In fact, whatever you find, you come tell us.’
    Oolik raised his head. ‘What if I don’t find anything? You want me to start somewhere else?’
    Derek and Edie exchanged glances. The lake bed was dotted with dozens of watery concavities. The killer could easily have thrown the murder weapon into any or none of them.
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    Back at the Kuujuaq Hotel, Sonia Gutierrez was scanning the decontamination contract on her laptop. She’d considered raising the issue at her morning meeting with the Salliaqs but Charlie was clearly in no mood to focus on anything but the murder investigation. She was looking for anything time sensitive in the programme of works, hoping to find some loophole that might force Palliser’s hand. Having helped draft it, she was pretty familiar with the contract, and couldn’t think of anything that might help her case. Her reading now only confirmed that. Beside her laptop, the pages yellowing, the print on them slightly fading, was the environmental impact report, which had been drawn up just before she’d taken on the case and with which she wasn’t so familiar. Checking through it now, it appeared that the contamination was all old, historical stuff from Glacier Ridge’s life as an active Cold War radar station. The station had been officially closed for twenty years and non-operational for thirty. It would be hard to go back to the courts and argue that any of the work was urgent from an environmental point of view. She considered it unlikely that a case on grounds of physical safety would be successful either. The site was three kilometres from the settlement and no one really went up there, so it would be hard to argue that the condition of the buildings on the site rendered them so unstable and dangerous as to make their immediate demolition a priority.
    All in all, it was disappointing and she was about to close the report when she noticed the sign-off. When she’d seen it before nothing had stood out. Then again, she hadn’t been looking. But now, she could see, there was definitely an anomaly. The report’s author, Dr Richard Price, had added ‘Environmental Impact Division, Department of National Defence’ under his signature. Yet, from her strong recollection, theenvironmental impact survey was supposed to have been carried out by an independent body. In all the years she’d been working with the department she’d never heard of an Environmental Impact Division and she was pretty damned sure no such division existed.
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    Edie and Derek decided to make a check of the area around the lake again. It was always possible that Edie had missed something the first time around. They moved slowly in circles, covering the ground in the Inuit way, looking for evidence as they went. The patches of broken willow Edie had first spotted were still there and they saw a dark stain that might have been oil from an engine and which she hadn’t noticed before. Nothing else stood out except a circular area of rubble over on the far side of the pool, on the outer boundary of the lake itself. On closer inspection, though, they decided it must have lain undisturbed for a long time because there were cotton grasses and sedges scrambling over the surface. After an hour or so, and without finding anything else, they drove along the track around the lake which led to the old, abandoned buildings of the Glacier Ridge Distant Early Warning radar station. For a while they wandered around here too, but the site was littered with half-demolished buildings, rusted metal and dead equipment and it soon became clear that, with only the two of them looking, it would be a miracle if they found anything. The sun was winding around the horizon towards the north. Before too long the heat would begin to leak from it, leaving only the blank light of late afternoon.
    Derek suggested