Until the Night by Giles Blunt Page A

murder. If he did, there’s no way in hell he’s going to tell a cop where to find her. No way in hell. My guess is you’re right: Detective Delorme, through no fault of her own—did everyone hear that? through no fault of her own —gets Mr. Priest’s motor going. He was playing with her, trying to get a rise out of her. There’s no way he knew what he was stepping into. Because, like you say, nothing connects him—so far.”
    “That sound credible to you?” Chouinard said to Delorme.
    “Yes,” Delorme said. “But I wish it didn’t.”
    “All right. Loach is running Lacroix.”
    “Oh, for Christ sake,” Delorme said.
    “Cardinal, you’re gonna be lead on Flint. But I—”
    “D.S., Lise got this whole thing rolling. You can’t—”
    “I just did.” He got up and pointed his pen at Delorme. “And you know why. You want to run an investigation for me, you learn to do it right. In the meantime, consider yourself lucky you’re still on any case at all.”

From the Blue Notebook
    There is a night within the night. Even in the temperate latitudes, even in nights of the duration we would consider “normal,” there can be a time, an hour or two, that might be called the night within the night. The hour when a wife discovers she can no longer pretend to love her husband. The hour when a young man judges that the world is not going to hand him the life he yearns for, and it seems preferable to end the one he has.
    It was early April. Arcosaur was still jammed in the ice pack. Arctic dawn was yet to come. We were a skeleton crew, the first rotation of scientists having yet to arrive. Before Rebecca, in other words.
    Wyndham, Vanderbyl, his grad student Ray Deville, and myself. Beyond this, we had Paul Bélanger the cook, Murray Washburn, our facilities manager, Hunter and, of course, Jens Dahlberg. It had been a long day. We were in the mess. If we hadn’t had Paul there to make meals at regular hours, we probably would have warped into a forty-eight-hour cycle, which ends up being less productive than it sounds.
    The weather had been foul for days. Horrendously cold, with a wind that could not be borne. But now the wind had dropped and the stars came out in their millions. The cold was deep and vast. Finally we could work outside again.
    We put on many layers and our thickest downs and thus broke a cardinal rule of Arctic labour: if you’re warm when you venture outside, you will soon be too hot. We overworked and sweatedhard all day, eventually staggering into the mess one by one, stinking and exhausted and damp. We probably consumed three or four thousand calories each at dinner.
    Paul gave us a long and obviously prepared speech about pitching in to do dishes because we were eating as if we were three times our actual number. Paul himself had been working with stove and oven all day, and now his pies and cakes were vanishing before his eyes. As he lectured us, he bundled himself into his parka and raised his hood, wrapping the lower part of his face in his scarf. He looked like an astronaut going EVA, even though he and Hunter shared a cabin between the mess and the radio shack, which meant he had to travel about ten metres.
    Jens Dahlberg sensibly went off to bed soon after, but the rest of us sat on, not talking. We were in a group lassitude brought on by shared exhaustion and the heat of the stove. We had passed that point where exhaustion skirts the edge of weeping and goes beyond it. Even Vanderbyl, who had reserves of energy that made one occasionally suspect a secret supply of Dexedrine, sat angular and expressionistic, one elbow on the table, cheek to palm, and the dead stare in his eyes of the terminally numb. Wyndham was asleep, chin on chest, quietly snoring. Ray Deville was scribbling urgently in a notebook, the sound of his pencil like the scurrying of a mouse. I’ve no idea what he was writing, but I suspect it was not academic.
    Had one of us fired a shotgun into the air, I don’t think