Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (304 page)

“This break is very new. Almost no wear from the weather and no dirt inside. Even the outside is clean. But the metal top …” He looped the rusted metal ring around his finger. “Is very old.” He sat back on his heels to study the scene.

“So what you’re saying is that this jar has been here a long time. Years?”

“Yes, years.”

“But it was broken very recently?”

Jethro nodded. “But I think it was inside a cairn — this pile of rocks has also been disturbed recently — so it was protected.”

Green’s heart began to hammer. “You mean someone deliberately hid this jar years ago, and just recently it was found and broken open?”

“To get what was inside,” Elliott added.

“What would someone hide inside a jar like this?” Green asked.

Elliott shrugged. “Typically mementos, notes left for others to find, a token to mark their reaching the summit.”

“But it could be something more,” Green said. “Scott’s grandfather left a cryptic clue in his will that pointed to this spot. Maybe up here, he left another clue. More coordinates, or directions, or a map.”

Sullivan snorted, but Jethro didn’t react. He reached to move some of the other pieces of glass. Belatedly the policeman in Green snapped to attention.

“Don’t touch those! Brian, we need to photograph these, bag them, and tag them.” He saw the bafflement on the others’ faces. “A precaution. In case this ever turns into a crime scene.”

Jethro and Tatso spent most of the afternoon searching far and wide along the periphery of the ridge, looking for tracks. The other three chafed under the forced inaction, but Jethro was adamant.

“Better to get this right than to spend days going in the wrong direction.” He gestured out over the folding hills. “There is a lot of room for mistakes.”

Knowing he was right, Green stifled his grumbling and walked over to the rise to phone Sharon. She sounded weak and far away, but he hoped that was just the weak signal.

“We’re all fine down here,” she insisted. “Much better now that I know Hannah’s not in trouble on the river somewhere.”

He looked out over the steep, rocky ravines and suppressed a twinge of worry. Sharon didn’t need anything else to fret about.

“But Mike, will you please phone Ashley before I get out the voodoo doll? She claims she has stuff you should know.”

“About what?”

“About the other campers. She wouldn’t tell me. You know Ashley — knowledge is power.”

After Green hung up he immediately phoned Ashley. There was certainly no problem with the connection this time. Her shriek could be heard fifty feet away by Sullivan, who smiled in sympathy.

“I’ve been waiting for days, Mike! Days! Did you phone
her
? Pardon me for being catty, but I am the mother here.”

“Sharon said you had information?”

“Oh, and I’m supposed to give it to you before you even tell me whether my daughter is dead or alive?”

“She’s alive,” he said, rubbing his temples. “I’m really sorry, Ashley. You’re right, I should have called before this. But I’m sitting on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. Satellite phone connections are iffy and I had no news till now.” He filled her in on the discovery of their base camp, omitting the flash flood and the broken glass jar. “We’ve found their tracks. We’re going to follow them and find them, believe me.”

“Oh.” Ashley managed a sob. “The other families have been calling me demanding to know what’s going on. It was driving me crazy.”

“They’re worried too, Ashley.”

“Well, I didn’t hang up on them, if that’s what you think. Jesus, Mike.”

“What information did they give you?”

“I don’t think they’re going after the mine. Pete’s sister called me from some island somewhere. She’d been doing more checking on Pete. When I mentioned the mine, she said Pete was a real eco-nut. He’d never want a mine up there. He and his prof had a big fight over it.”

Green fished his notebook from his day pack
and flipped it open. Scott had also had an argument with that professor. “What exactly did she say about the fight?”

“I don’t really get all this scientific stuff, Mike. You know that. It goes in one ear and out the other.”

“Try.”

Her sigh lasted a full five seconds. “It’s something to do with temperature and how it freezes and thaws the ground, and how the ground is thawing more and more up north. This geology professor was studying what happens to the rocks near the surface. Pete and Scott have the same prof — Valencia. Anyway, Pete found out the prof owned shares in some mining company —”

“What’s the name of it?”

Another sigh, this one short and impatient. “I don’t know, Mike! Northern something. Anyway, Pete freaked out.”

Green felt the frustration of being thousands of kilometres away. Ashley was the most unreliable of witnesses but he had no way of verifying her story. But if she was correct, it added a new twist to the tale.

“Give me the sister’s number.”

“Like I said, she’s on an island somewhere, Mike, and doesn’t seem in a hurry to get off it. Unlike Daniel Rothman’s sister, I should tell you. Another one who’s been driving me crazy. I don’t know what’s with these sisters. I wouldn’t care less if my brother fell off the face of —”

“What about Daniel’s sister?” Green was watching Jethro out of the corner of his eye. The tracker was squatting in the short grass at the far end of the ridge, poking it with his tracking stick. Green sensed a potential breakthrough.

“You finally call me and then you hardly give me —”

“Ashley! What?”

“She wants to come up to join you.” Green thought he heard a hint of triumph in her voice. “She doesn’t think you guys from Ottawa know what you’re doing. She’s a doctor and did some training up north. She thinks she can help, and she’s the type who doesn’t take no for an answer.”

Green rolled his eyes. Just what they needed. “She’s wasting her time. She won’t be able to reach us.”

“Don’t count on it,” Ashley said. “I bet she’d parachute in if she had to.”

Green mouthed a silent curse. In the distance, Jethro rose and turned to them. “Listen, Ashley, I gotta go. I suppose a doctor might come in handy.”

“She’s a shrink. Good luck with that.” With a triumphant laugh, she hung up.

Jethro was beckoning to them. As they gathered up their gear to follow him, Green filled in the others. “When we stop for the night, I’ll try to reach Daniel Rothman’s sister, to tell her not to come,” he said. “But with this trail getting colder by the hour, we have no time to lose. If Jethro has found something, we’re going on.”

Jethro had found the most microscopic trace of human passage — a dried twig broken in two places about five inches apart. “About the width of a man’s hiking boot,” he said. “Look at the broken ends. Still quite clean, so it’s a fresh break. They passed through here. If we assume they were following a map or a compass setting, it’s likely they would head in a straight line that way.” He pointed down a steep ravine. “But they would also follow the path of least difficulty, so we’ll do the same. Me first. I’ll track as we go along. It will be slow, so …” He raised his eyes to Green, “patience.”

Shouldering their gear, they proceeded single file down the slope. Jethro picked a wavering route, avoiding steep drops, pockets of loose gravel, and boulders the size of trucks. Every now and then he would stop to study a stone or a low-lying bush. He’d point out the flattened leaves or the hole where a stone had been dislodged.

Sullivan seemed to hang on his every word. “How do we know it’s not an animal?”

“There are plenty of animals who take this path. You can see from the scat and the torn bits of grass where they have grazed. But only a human boot flattens grass like that.”

The sun was sinking below the mountain peaks by the time they reached the bottom of the ravine, deep in the woods. Mosquitoes closed in gleefully. By then every muscle in Green’s back ached and his legs quivered with fatigue. Despite bandages and moleskin, he knew his feet were a mass of blisters.

Even Sullivan looked weary. He leaned against a tree trunk and swatted bugs away as he took a long swig of water. For a moment Green’s pulse spiked with fear at his red face and laboured breathing. “We should stop for the night soon,” he said.

Jethro nodded. “We’re going to lose the light, no good for tracking. But I’d like to find their camp. They wouldn’t camp in here. It’s too dense and buggy, and they’d want to find water. Let’s see what’s ahead.”

Arms raised in self-defence, they ploughed along an animal track though the dense bush. Branches scratched their legs and whipped their chests. Their eyes struggled to adjust to the deep shadows. From up ahead the sound of rushing water grew from a murmur to a roar. In the damp, shaded underworld, blackflies joined the mosquitoes in their quest for blood. The bugs filled their eyes, ears, and noses. They were swearing, sweating, and exhausted by the time they emerged from the woods onto the rocky shore of a small stream. Sunlight burst through a gap in the mountains and lit the distant tree tops.

They stood staring in disappointment at the damp, boulder-strewn terrain. It was impossible to set up camp here.

Elliott dropped his pack onto a large flat rock. “We need a rest and some food. We’ll cook dinner, then scout upstream for a suitable camping spot. We still have some daylight left.”

“I don’t want to lose the trail,” Jethro said.

“We won’t. But they didn’t camp here, obviously. They’ll be looking for a good campsite just like us.”

They were silent through dinner, Elliott’s dehydrated stew this time. Their euphoria of the afternoon was replaced by exhaustion in every bone. Afterward Green just wanted to curl up on a rock and go to sleep, but he forced himself to follow the others up the creek bed. The sunlight had left the valley in twilight now, but the mountain peaks and clouds overhead still shone with gold.

After a few painstaking moments, the creek banks became steeper, and the trees grew gnarled and desperate as they clung to the rocks. Jethro paused to look up at a dip in a gentle slope high above.

“We have to go up there. I think that’s where they would camp. There are some trees for shelter but it’s high enough to see their surroundings. Away from the grizzlies and wolves that come to the stream for water.”

He led them away from the creek, back through dense forests, and upward in a seemingly endless climb over rocks and scrub. Green fell twice, scraping his knees and palms. He struggled to keep one foot in front of another. One more step. One more step….

Until finally the path opened up onto an unexpected ledge high above the creek. Flat and spongy with lichen and sage. The perfect camping spot.

“They were here!” Jethro cried in a rare show of excitement. Even Green could see the flattened sage and the tent peg holes in the rocky soil. A few charred branches lay on the ground. Relief and joy crashed over him in waves. When he sank to his knees to kiss the ground, the others didn’t even laugh.

They didn’t bother with a fire. It was a warm night, and their exertion had made them hot. They erected their tents, unrolled their sleeping bags, and fell into bed.

In the morning, Elliott was up early. He had sausages and eggs frying on the griddle and a full pot of coffee sitting on the fire by the time Green crawled out of the tent. Jethro had already gone out to scout the area but Sullivan was still asleep. Elliott greeted Green with a hot cup of coffee and a big smile.

“Eggs and a hefty dose of cholesterol to stoke the body for the day. Brings me back to my guiding days. A quarter century ago. Never realized how much I missed it.”

Green nodded. Every muscle screamed, but his mouth watered. “There is something to be said for this. Kill yourself during the day and the rewards seem even better at the end. Sleep, coffee …”

Elliott laughed as he shovelled eggs and sausages onto two plates. “We get awfully far away from it in the city, don’t we.”

“I was born in the city. Never saw a blade of grass till I was ten and went to a friend’s who owned a real house.”

“We get a lot of Europeans up here, looking for wilderness. There’s not much of it left in the world. That’s why we have to save it.”

Green looked around at the ragged peaks that cradled the valley. “Is there a lot of mining potential in these mountains?”

“Everywhere there is geological upheaval and instability, everywhere there are mountains, there are rich mineral deposits. Silver, copper, and zinc, all through here. Emerald deposits just west of here in the Yukon, diamonds to the north in the Barrens. And rare earth metals, tons of them, the hot new metals that we use in everything from cellphone circuits to aerospace coatings. That’s where the big money is today. Even now we’re in a fight to protect the headwaters of the Nahanni from mining interests. There is going to be a new national park, extending to Moose Ponds and protecting the whole watershed, the animals, the ground water, and the unique wildlife habitats.”

Green mopped up egg yolk with a chunk of sausage. “Oh, damn, this is good, Ian. Amazing what you can whip up with a bit of deadwood and an open fire.”

“This is the only way I can cook. My wife complains whenever she wants me to cook dinner I have to set fire to half the backyard.”

“I can relate to that. Only I don’t do it on purpose. The barbeque and I are only just making friends.” He waved his fork to encompass the mountains around him. “Do you think this area will be protected by the park?”

“Some of it. That’s the big question mark. There have been consultations with the Dene Nation, resource developers, tour operators like me, environmental experts, and other interested parties. We’re still waiting for the decision. The government has to decide how much of these mineral-rich mountains to leave open for mining, and how much to protect.”

“Not a reassuring thought,” Green replied, thinking of the government’s track record and its emphasis on jobs and money compared to environmental concerns.

Elliott shot him a grim look. “I’m not against all development, but it has to be sustainable and responsible. So far the companies have not shown they can be trusted to put the greater good of the environment ahead of jobs and profit margins. This river’s ecosystem is unique in the world, but it’s hard to get the rest of the country to care about a few caribou and a remote river they’ve never seen when they are losing their own jobs. But it’s nice to know these kids we’re following may be on our side.”