‘We think gas canisters for a heater or cooker exploded in one of the houses,’ Lieutenant Reeve said. ‘And the fire spread to a stockpile of snowmobile fuel and generator diesel which caused another much larger explosion and a devastatingly intense fire. No one at Anaktue survived. I’m sorry.’
She felt knifed by love; winded by the sharpness of it. The sensation was oddly familiar; a harsher version of the pain she’d felt in their early days, long before marriage and a child, before there was any tangible security that he’d still be with her tomorrow. And time was no longer stretched out and linear but bent back on itself and broken into fragments so that the young man she’d loved so passionately was as vividly recalled and equally present as the husband she’d argued with eight days ago.
She remembered the low winter sun slanting through the windows, the slow quiet voice of the philosophy professor, the thick walls of the lecture hall cushioning them from the cawing of birds outside. Later, he would tell her they were starlings and dunnocks. He was sitting a few empty places away from her. She’d seen him twice before and had liked his angularity; his way of walking quickly and preoccupied, as if his mind was dictating his pace; the sharp planes of his face. When she clicked her knitting needles he’d glanced towards her and their eyes had a jolt of irrational recognition. Then he’d looked away as if looking any longer would be a reproof for the clicking. When the lecture finished he came over to her as she put her knitting away, baffled.
‘Is it a snood for a snake?’
‘A railing.’
Later he said he thought she was barmy but wanted to give her the chance of a defence.
‘You’re a fruitcake, right?’
That was your idea of giving me a defence?
‘An astrophysicist,’ she’d said.
He’d thought she was joking, then he’d seen her face.
‘A knitting astrophysicist in a philosophy lecture?’
‘I’m learning about the metaphysics part of physics. In Oxford you can do a joint degree. And you?’
‘Zoology.’
‘So what are you doing at a philosophy lecture? Apart from questioning my knitting?’
‘Philosophy’s important.’
‘To animals?’
‘To how we think about animals. Ourselves. Our environment and our place in it.’ He caught himself and looked abashed. ‘Not normally so heavy. Not so quickly.’
‘I’ve come a long way to do heavy quickly.’
Her school had been brutally underachieving. She’d survived it by becoming hidden and anonymous; fortunately, her high-cheekboned, small-breasted looks had no currency with teenage boys. She’d hugged the secret of being clever close to herself, deliberately underperforming in exams until A levels when she’d spectacularly pulled a glittering four As out of a bag everyone presumed contained a collection of unshiny Cs and Ds. She’d had to hide her nerdiness for years, now she was celebrating it.
She put away her long thin piece of knitting.
‘Eight o’clock. Outside the UL. I’ll show you.’
Lieutenant Reeve leaned towards her and she realised that they were both sitting at a table, opposite one another; she hadn’t remembered sitting down. He was handing her something.
‘A state trooper from Prudhoe found it at the scene. He brought it to us to show you. From the initials inside we think it may be Matthew’s?’
She stroked the touch-warmed solid metal of his wedding ring. Inside were hers and Matt’s initials; half of the first line of a vow. She felt the second half of the vow under her wedding ring imprinted on the soft underside of her finger.
‘Yes, it’s his,’ she said.
She took off her wedding ring and replaced it with Matt’s, which was much too big for her finger. She put hers on again, hers now keeping Matt’s safe, because maybe one day he might want to wear it again. It was impossible for him to be dead, not with that knife inside her; not with Ruby sitting next door. She could not – would not – believe it.
She saw Lieutenant Reeve watching her hands.
‘He takes off his wedding ring when he’s working. Puts it somewhere safe.’
The explanation Matt had given to her, weeks ago, when she’d spotted his bare ring finger in a photo he’d emailed to Ruby. Thankfully Ruby hadn’t noticed.
She didn’t tell Lieutenant Reeve that she hadn’t believed Matt’s excuse.
A few hours after the philosophy lecture, already dark, they’d walked away from the historic part of town, inhabited by students and tourists, to a retail park on the edge of a housing estate, the tarmac and concrete impersonal, the shadows forbidding. He saw that there were knitted tubes around signs and railings and a bike rack. He hadn’t been beguiled solely by luminous eyes, long limbs and generous smile, but by soft wool around hard metal, yarn colouring aluminium and steel in stripes and patterns.
She told him that she was part of a group of guerilla gardeners, stealthily changing concrete roundabouts into small flower meadows in the middle of the night, but she hadn’t done that for a little while.
‘Only so many roundabouts?’ he’d asked,
‘The wrong time of year to plant,’ she’d replied. ‘And you can’t garden in lectures.’
‘So is this your secret passion?’ he asked.
‘Knitting snoods for railings? Fortunately not.’
‘So?’
But she didn’t trust him enough yet to show him.
Lieutenant Reeve was unsure whether to put a comforting hand on hers but felt awkward as he started the gesture. She was being so dignified, none of the fuss he was expecting. Unfair, fuss; he meant emotion he wouldn’t know how to deal with; grief.
‘A plane saw the blaze yesterday afternoon,’ he told her, thinking that she’d want details. He would in her place.
‘The pilot flew over Anaktue just before a storm hit. The North Slope Borough state troopers and public safety officers mounted a search and rescue mission, despite the storm and terrible flying conditions. And they kept searching until the early hours of this morning, but tragically there weren’t any survivors.’
‘Yesterday afternoon?’ she said.
‘Yes, I don’t have any more details, I’m afraid. It was the state troopers and PSOs in the north who were on the scene.’
‘He phoned me yesterday. Matt phoned me. At five pm Alaskan time.’
She’d known it all along but now she had the proof. As the policeman made a phone call she remembered fragments of their conversation as they’d walked back towards their colleges together and how all the time another conversation was going on, in the way he leaned in closer to her, the way she subconsciously matched her pace to his; she noticed the faded checked collar of his shirt against his neck, with the protruding Adam’s apple, as if he was still in the process of being formed, this man-boy.
He saw the harsh street lights land on her brow and cheeks and mouth, and
saw the woman she would be in ten years and it was just like that, he told her later. Bam! A magic trick. A miracle. The woman I want to be with.
She’d had less confidence in his imagined future. But as she walked with him she felt the solitariness of her old life, the one in which she was the oddity, the only person in her family and school and estate to go to university, recede a little behind her.
Chapter 2
In the remote northern community of Prudhoe Bay, Captain David Grayling was alone in his office, bone-heavy tired. The electric lights were glaring down and he longed for the gentleness of daylight. Two more months till there’d be a morning here. It eroded a man’s soul. He was thinking about Timothy. Was it because of Timothy that he’d become paternal towards the young officers in his charge, as he knew everyone thought? He’d always seen himself more as the musher of a team of enthusiastic young huskies, holding the lead lines to guide them in the right direction, a canvas Dog Bag on his sled in case any were injured and needed carrying to safety.
But at Anaktue, he had been neither father
figure nor musher. The men had seen him vomit, over and over, each corpse appalling him anew. The storm had raged over the blackened village, their chopper only just able to land, the wind chill biting at their faces like a half-starved animal. Blow winds and crack your cheeks. They’d set up their blindingly bright arc lights, glaring into the wrecked houses, illuminating the barely recognisable charred remains of men, women and children. To Captain Grayling, the darkness surrounding their lights had seemed infinite.
They’d worked in silence, a whole team of men, most of them still boys to Grayling, not talking or joking; no banter to shield them as they bagged and photographed and documented. ‘You sulphurous and thought-executing fires’. Lear’s words creeping into his mind, but a blasted heath was a soft option compared with Anaktue and thought-executing fire was only true for those who died; those who had to sift through the charred carnage would think far too much.
Years ago, a working lifetime, Grayling had wanted to go to university and study literature. But his father had wanted him to do something not ‘namby about with poetry’. It was a criticism that had hit home. He’d thought if he was going to do something, then it would be something that would benefit his beloved Alaska. For a little while, he’d hoped to do medicine but couldn’t master the necessary chemistry so he chose to be a state trooper. He was the only one on the training course for whom it was a second choice. He discovered three weeks in that he had the wrong kind of brain to be a state trooper, filled as it was with all sorts of irrelevant information and ideas. So he cleaned it out, ridding it of what he no longer needed (a moot point as to whether he’d ever needed it). So he hadn’t thought of the blasted heath for years. But Anaktue was different. Anaktue delved into some deep part of him that couldn’t be cleaned out.
When they’d seen the scale of the disaster, and when the storm had eased enough, more state troopers and PSOs had joined his team. Grayling himself had led the search party for survivors. Using a search beam on the chopper, they’d done a radius around the village, moving further and further out, but found no one. Grayling had been informed that there were twenty-three people in the village. He only stopped searching when the troopers at the village had counted the remains of twenty-four bodies. Grayling would have to find out the identity of the twenty-fourth victim.
Finally, the sickening business of it all was done. He was the last one out, taking the lights with him in the chopper. Behind him, Anaktue turned invisible in the blackness.
Later today he had to give more press interviews to journalists, in their heated, well-lit TV and radio studios, who would sleep without nightmares.
His phone rang and he was put through to Lieutenant Reeve from Fairbanks. It was about Matthew Alfredson, their twenty-fourth victim, whom they’d identified from computerised visa records; the wildlife film-maker, whose wedding ring Grayling had found glinting in the wreckage. Everything else had been destroyed, metal twisted into ugly shapes, but this one ring remained a perfect eternal circle. Grayling knew from his brief foray into chemistry that platinum could withstand intense heat but this undamaged ring still seemed little short of miraculous. It hadn’t been found near any of the bodies so although the metal was an unbroken circle, Grayling surmised that the marriage itself was less enduring and he’d hoped he was right, because it might lessen the tally of grief.
But at five o’clock yesterday, while they were searching through the charred remains of Anaktue, this man had phoned his wife. How could this be possible? My God, was this man still out there somewhere, alive? He needed to talk to the wife.
To Yasmin, Captain Grayling sounded like an archetype of state trooper, his voice self-assured and deep. She imagined him broad-shouldered and rugged-faced to match his voice.
‘Did your husband tell you where he was?’ Captain Grayling asked.
‘No. But I think he was at the airstrip, waiting for a taxi plane. Lieutenant Reeve said there was a storm yesterday afternoon and terrible flying conditions, so the taxi plane wouldn’t have come. He might still be there.’
‘We searched a wide area which included the airstrip.’
‘It was dark though surely, and stormy, you could have missed him?‘
He heard the hope in her voice, this grasping at a different outcome, and felt sharp compassion for her.
‘The airstrip is flat and pretty easily visible,’ he said. ‘We had powerful lights and we went over it thoroughly.’
He didn’t tell her that he’d flown over it himself, half a dozen times, checking and rechecking.
‘Does he use a snowmobile?’ he asked.
Anaktue was miles from anywhere, across virtually impassable terrain, so it was surely the only option, but he needed to be sure.
‘Yes.’
He had asked his team to piece together the heat-softened fragments of snowmobiles. Those fragments would now be frozen solid.
Yasmin remembered Matt telling her and Ruby that he’d bought a snowmobile from a villager who’d wanted to upgrade. She’d thought it strange that Inupiat men hunted caribou using snowmobiles, but Matt hadn’t found it odd.
‘Do you know how many snowmobiles were at the village?’ Captain Grayling asked.
‘Three,’ she replied. There was Matt’s, the new upgraded one and one that belonged to a villager working at the wells at Prudhoe Bay. She and Matt had spoken about it; a safely neutral subject in front of Ruby.
She waited for Captain Grayling to say something and in the silence knew that they’d found three – the remains of three – at the village. So he wasn’t on his snowmobile, alive and well and at this very moment almost at Fairbanks, about to burst in, with hugs for Ruby and she could tell him she loved him. But it had been absurd to think he could get all the way to Fairbanks by snowmobile. She was just so impatient now to see him.
‘He could have been travelling by dog sled,’ she said.
A few weeks ago, he’d emailed Ruby about going out with an Inupiaq man on a sled pulled by huskies. She’d doubted his enthusiasm, not understanding why anyone would want to travel by sled in arctic temperatures, but maybe his enthusiastic tone had been genuine.
‘The kennels were also destroyed in the fire,’ Captain Grayling said.
‘He could have been away on a filming trip when there was the fire and taken the dogs with him.’
‘Filming trips in midwinter?’ Captain Grayling asked. ‘In the dark?’
‘He’s making a film about the wildlife in Alaska during winter. He was really just using Anaktue as a base.’
She didn’t say how sceptical she’d been about Matt’s reason for staying at Anaktue; or that she hadn’t confronted him. But he could have been telling her the truth.
‘Even if he was on a filming trip,’ Captain Grayling said, ‘surely he’d have come back to Anaktue, or the airstrip, in time to get to Fairbanks to meet you?’
‘Something must have gone wrong with the sled or a dog,’ she said.
‘You said your husband didn’t tell you where he was when he called?’
‘No.’
‘Any clues at all as to where he was?’
‘No.’
‘Can I ask what he did say to you?’
‘We didn’t speak.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘We lost the connection before he could say anything.’
‘He didn’t say anything at all?’
‘No. As I said—’
‘So how do you know it was him?’
‘It was two in the morning in England and he’s the only person who calls me at that time. We often lose the connection. He has a satellite phone and needs a clear line of sight to the sky. Or maybe his phone just ran out of charge. As he hasn’t called again I think that’s the most likely.’
‘Could it have been someone else ringing you. Maybe a wrong number?’
‘No. It was him.’
She didn’t tell Captain Grayling how surprised she’d been that Matt had called her. Apart from that terrible call eight days
ago, he’d virtually stopped phoning her, though he steadfastly emailed Ruby. During a rare phone call between them a month ago, she’d accused him of not bothering any more and he’d told her that he couldn’t phone her from Anaktue, he had to trek for two miles and climb an icy ridge to get a satellite link. Oh, and it was also winter so pitch black when he made the trip and at that moment he was speaking to her in minus thirty. She hadn’t pointed out that he did that trip every time he sent an email to Ruby, which was frequently; just glad that he did. There’d been a storm yesterday. It would have been an even harsher journey.
She wished she could believe in some rewind in their relationship, unknown about by her, which meant he walked for two miles in the arctic cold and dark to speak to her, but knew that wasn’t true. She didn’t know why he had called her, especially when she was getting on a plane with Ruby in just a few hours’ time and he’d see her face to face.
‘Which satellite phone company does your husband use?’ Captain Grayling asked.
So he intended to check out what she’d told him with Matt’s phone company. She gave him the name of the company and hoped it wouldn’t delay their search.
She waited to feel some kind of relief but none came. Perhaps, after all that anxiety, she needed to actually touch him to feel relief.
She hadn’t yet asked either Lieutenant Reeve or Captain Grayling if Corazon was a victim of the fire. She hadn’t wanted to say her name.
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