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Authors: Stef Penney
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where Doc Wade took his leave is dry–it is only the spring floods that cover it.
And yet there is a footprint on it. A dark, wet mark. Even in the dusk I see it. Perhaps Knox has arranged for a guardian after all. Who got bored and went for a paddle. I don’t believe it for a minute, so I creep softly down the side of the cabin, out of sight of the front door. All is silent. Perhaps I imagined it–I can no longer see the rock. I have brought a knife in my pocket, which I am now holding, rather more tightly than is necessary. It’s not really that I think for a moment the murderer would come back–for what?–but I creep on, one hand on the cabin wall, until I can listen by the window for sounds within. I stand there so long my leg goes to sleep, and I have not heard so much asa fly’s breath. I step up to the door, which is wired shut, take out the pliers and unpick the fastening. Inside is dim but I still pull the door closed, just in case.
The cabin looks exactly as I remember it, except that the bed is now empty. There is still an awful smell coming from the mattress and blankets, stacked up against the wall. I wonder who is going to wash them–or will they simply be burnt? His old mother is hardly likely to want them.
I start upstairs. It doesn’t look as though Jammet came up here very much–there are boxes and crates stacked against the walls, and dust blankets everything, showing where the men went yesterday, their feet rubbing little clearings where they stopped and peered at something. I put down the lamp and start to go through the nearest box, which contains his best clothes–an old-fashioned black coat and trousers, which I would say were too small for him. Did they belong to him when younger, or to his father? I sift through the other boxes; more clothes, some papers from the Hudson Bay Company, mainly relating to his retirement after ‘an accident incurred in the line of duty’.
Several items open doors that lead to Jammet’s other lives, before he came to Dove River. I try not to think about some of them too much: a pressed silk flower, for instance, faded with age–a token of love from a woman, or one he meant to give but didn’t? I wonder about the invisible women in his life. And here is a rare thing–a photograph that shows Jammet as a younger man, grinning his infectious smile. He is with several men I take to be voyageurs, all wearing neckerchiefs and capotes and squinting to varying degrees in the bright sunlight, clustered around a mountain of boxes and canoes, but he is the only one who could keep up a smile for that long. What occasion could have merited a photograph? Perhaps they had just beaten the record for a particularly gruelling portage. Voyageurs take pride in such things.
Having searched the boxes I pull them away from the wall. I am not sure what I think I might find but there is nothing other than dust and mouse droppings; the desiccated husks of wasps.
I go downstairs disheartened. I don’t even know what I am looking for, other than something that will confirm that Francis is nothing to do with this, which of course I already know. I cannot imagine what that might be.
I become aware that I am breathing thickly through my mouth as I go through his foodstuffs. The smell inhabits the whole building, worse than when he was still here. For the sake of thoroughness, so I will not be tormented in the night and have to come back, I stick my hand into the bins of grain and flour, and that’s when I find it. In the flour bin my hand brushes against something and I jerk backwards with a sort of yelp before I can stop myself, throwing flour everywhere. It’s a slip of paper torn from a larger piece, with numbers and letters written on it: ‘61HBKW’. Nothing else. I can’t really imagine anything less useful. Why hide a piece of paper in a flour bin if it has nonsensical letters on it, particularly if, like Jammet, you can’t read? I put it in my pocket before it occurs
And yet there is a footprint on it. A dark, wet mark. Even in the dusk I see it. Perhaps Knox has arranged for a guardian after all. Who got bored and went for a paddle. I don’t believe it for a minute, so I creep softly down the side of the cabin, out of sight of the front door. All is silent. Perhaps I imagined it–I can no longer see the rock. I have brought a knife in my pocket, which I am now holding, rather more tightly than is necessary. It’s not really that I think for a moment the murderer would come back–for what?–but I creep on, one hand on the cabin wall, until I can listen by the window for sounds within. I stand there so long my leg goes to sleep, and I have not heard so much asa fly’s breath. I step up to the door, which is wired shut, take out the pliers and unpick the fastening. Inside is dim but I still pull the door closed, just in case.
The cabin looks exactly as I remember it, except that the bed is now empty. There is still an awful smell coming from the mattress and blankets, stacked up against the wall. I wonder who is going to wash them–or will they simply be burnt? His old mother is hardly likely to want them.
I start upstairs. It doesn’t look as though Jammet came up here very much–there are boxes and crates stacked against the walls, and dust blankets everything, showing where the men went yesterday, their feet rubbing little clearings where they stopped and peered at something. I put down the lamp and start to go through the nearest box, which contains his best clothes–an old-fashioned black coat and trousers, which I would say were too small for him. Did they belong to him when younger, or to his father? I sift through the other boxes; more clothes, some papers from the Hudson Bay Company, mainly relating to his retirement after ‘an accident incurred in the line of duty’.
Several items open doors that lead to Jammet’s other lives, before he came to Dove River. I try not to think about some of them too much: a pressed silk flower, for instance, faded with age–a token of love from a woman, or one he meant to give but didn’t? I wonder about the invisible women in his life. And here is a rare thing–a photograph that shows Jammet as a younger man, grinning his infectious smile. He is with several men I take to be voyageurs, all wearing neckerchiefs and capotes and squinting to varying degrees in the bright sunlight, clustered around a mountain of boxes and canoes, but he is the only one who could keep up a smile for that long. What occasion could have merited a photograph? Perhaps they had just beaten the record for a particularly gruelling portage. Voyageurs take pride in such things.
Having searched the boxes I pull them away from the wall. I am not sure what I think I might find but there is nothing other than dust and mouse droppings; the desiccated husks of wasps.
I go downstairs disheartened. I don’t even know what I am looking for, other than something that will confirm that Francis is nothing to do with this, which of course I already know. I cannot imagine what that might be.
I become aware that I am breathing thickly through my mouth as I go through his foodstuffs. The smell inhabits the whole building, worse than when he was still here. For the sake of thoroughness, so I will not be tormented in the night and have to come back, I stick my hand into the bins of grain and flour, and that’s when I find it. In the flour bin my hand brushes against something and I jerk backwards with a sort of yelp before I can stop myself, throwing flour everywhere. It’s a slip of paper torn from a larger piece, with numbers and letters written on it: ‘61HBKW’. Nothing else. I can’t really imagine anything less useful. Why hide a piece of paper in a flour bin if it has nonsensical letters on it, particularly if, like Jammet, you can’t read? I put it in my pocket before it occurs
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