The Quality of Silence Read online

  His sat-phone had been at the bottom of his knapsack; out of charge since the beginning of his first trip with the huskies and useless to him when he’d discovered the villagers dead. But in that first storm, suffering from exposure and frostbite and desperate, he’d remembered an idea he’d previously dismissed as apocryphal.

  ‘I put the phone inside my clothes, against my skin,’ Matt signed. ‘I hoped body heat might warm up the battery, get some charge. I ran. There was a hill and I climbed it, as fast as I could. And I called you.’

  As he did so, he’d thought it was futile. But in the darkness and howling wind he’d had a link to her for a few seconds that crossed continents and oceans.

  ‘I lost the connection before I could speak to you.’

  Yasmin tried to disguise her emotions, signing to Matt, ‘He told me that he found your phone at the village.’

  She thought how close they’d come to this knowledge a little while earlier and wondered if it would have bought them any time or advantage. But she doubted it. They were in the middle of a wilderness with no means of escape or hiding or survival.

  ‘Where’s Ruby?’ Matt signed.

  ‘In the aputiak.’

  She was aware of Captain Grayling watching them, no longer paternally. She had backed a little away from him and maybe that was the moment he knew.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ Captain Grayling said. ‘I’ve been trying to do the right thing.’

  Nearby was a huge waste pit, the smell of poison spiking through the frozen air.

  ‘I never wanted you put in danger,’ he continued. ’You must believe that. We just needed the chance to explain to you, so that you’d understand why this accident can’t get out. If it does, then hydraulic fracturing might be stopped in the rest of the US. We’d never break free of wars in the Middle East. I couldn’t let that happen.’

  ‘You know Jack Deering?’ Matt asked.

  ‘We’re cousins. He’s prepared to offer you a huge amount of money.’

  ‘You think there’s a price?’ Matt asked.

  ‘No. I don’t,’ Grayling replied.

  Yasmin felt visceral anger towards him. ‘You said you’d searched for Matt.’

  ‘I did,’ Grayling said. ‘I thought then that there’d just been a terrible fire and someone might have escaped it. I only gave up searching when we’d found twenty-four bodies, one more than the number of villagers. Visa records showed that a Matthew Alfredson was staying at Anaktue. I found a wedding ring with his initials.’

  Yasmin thought that he must have been decent once and his voice still carried the remnant of that.

  ‘It was only later that night that Jack called me,’ Grayling continued. ‘He told me there’d been a freak accident at a hydraulic fracturing well and he’d paid one of his men to set fire to the village to cover it up.’

  On the bonfire, a piece of painted wood caught, sending sparks skittering up into the black sky, the ash as it burned out landing on Yasmin’s face mask.

  ‘The people at Anaktue were dead,’ he continued. ‘It was an appalling disaster. But I couldn’t change that. I thought it was right to try to prevent a further tragedy happening as a consequence.’

  He paused and the only sound was a hissing flame as flakes of snow landed on the bonfire.

  ‘Jack told me it was a unique combination of circumstances that meant the fail-safes hadn’t worked. I agreed with him that it would make it even worse if a chance in a million accident meant fracking was stopped across the whole country. He was right to think about the wider implications.’

  Perhaps he believed this story, Yasmin thought. Perhaps he was able to cast himself in a decent light.

  ‘You told me you’d found Matt’s phone,’ she said and thought he flinched from the anger in her voice.

  ‘I was sure he was dead. I thought believing in this phone call as evidence he was alive would just prolong your agony.’

  ‘You lied out of kindness?’

  ‘The phone was a distraction, a prop, something you needed to let go.’

  She thought she felt something ugly close to her in the dark.

  ‘You’d taken part in a cover-up and so you lied to protect yourself,’ she said.

  ‘No. I didn’t know who’d phoned you but I knew it couldn’t be him.’

  ‘Have you any idea what you did?’ she said, wanting to crack the reasonableness in his voice, wanting him to sound like the man he was.

  ‘I have to take some responsibility for that,’ Jack said.

  He was coming towards them, his black arctic clothes making him almost invisible in the darkness; only flames reflecting orange in his goggles marking his presence as he approached.

  He stood close to Yasmin, his voice quiet.

  ‘You frightened him when you arrived with your tale of your husband calling you. He phoned me straight away.’

  Jack’s voice was different, he must have disguised his accent at the airport and on the CB.

  ‘I told him the worker I’d paid to set the fire had seen a Caucasian man amongst the dead,’ Jack continued. ‘If I hadn’t told him that, he’d have got all his trooper pals and PSOs out searching for your hubby; all the toys out of the cupboard with their sirens and lights with him at the centre. He’d have taken his eye off the bigger picture.’

  She signed to Matt, telling him she thought Grayling might help them, maybe he wasn’t all bad. Jack took hold of her hands in his, holding them tightly, gagging her.

  ‘And then you came on the CB complaining about a tanker chasing you,’ he said. ‘Davey heard. Made the connection fairly fast. Phoned me on the sat-phone and got me to admit I hadn’t been totally straight forward with him. He wasn’t pleased, were you Davey? Still thought we were kids and you could give me a bollocking.’

  Yasmin pulled her hands away from his, but there was barely enough light from the bonfire to see by now so they wouldn’t be able to sign.

  ‘When I’d calmed him down enough so he’d listen,’ Jack continued, ‘I explained that I wasn’t chasing you but following you. I pointed out that Matthew Alfredson probably knew about the accident. And he was probably going to call his wife again. You would lead us to him and that way we’d have the chance to talk to both of you, explain what was at stake without a whole load of troopers getting in the way.’

  Yasmin thought Jack was enjoying himself and it wasn’t the enjoyment of power over them, but over Grayling.

  ‘But if Matt had phoned me again,’ she said to Grayling, ‘then I’d have known you’d lied to me.’

  ‘Not Davey,’ Jack said. ‘The state troopers. The police. You wouldn’t have known who to trust. I thought it would work to our advantage. And it’s not that far from the truth. Fracking has supporters in very powerful places.’

  ‘Why the hell did you go along with this?’ Matt asked Grayling. He’d felt the man’s decency, in the way he’d behaved towards them up until this point, and found it hard to reconcile with the man now standing a foot away from him.

  ‘I needed the opportunity to explain things to you,’ Grayling said. ‘I thought it was important to keep looking at the bigger picture. There was a greater good here and I had to keep hold of that.’

  ‘There was a storm,’ Yasmin said. ‘And we were out in it because he didn’t let us turn around.’

  ‘I told him I’d take care of you out on the road,’ Jack said. ‘Make sure nothing happened.’

  Yasmin didn’t think he was protecting Grayling, but again flaunting his power over him.

  ‘You believed him?’ Yasmin asked Grayling.

  Grayling was silent.

  ‘Because it fitted with what you wanted. Because otherwise you were compromised?’

  ‘I was looking for you,’ Grayling said. ‘Kept on searching until the chopper wouldn’t fly. A soon as the storm allowed it, I searched for you again. No one was meant to get hurt. I promise you. And no one is going to hurt you now.’

  ‘Is your helicopter broken?’ Mat
t asked him.

  Grayling waited before replying, ‘As I said, I just needed some time to talk to you, explain things—’

  Matt interrupted, ‘Have you radioed anyone? Is anyone coming?’

  Grayling didn’t respond. The wind blew ash from the bonfire, spiralling up against the falling snowflakes.

  ‘I am going to be with our daughter,’ Matt said and walked away from Grayling and Jack towards the aputiak. Yasmin thought that they allowed him to leave because there was nowhere for them to run to or seek help.

  ‘What location do the police have for us?’ Yasmin asked Grayling.

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘The one Jack gave, south of the Atigun Pass?’ she asked.

  Again he didn’t reply and Yasmin was sickened by him.

  ‘I wasn’t trying to catch you,’ Jack said to Yasmin, his voice soft in the darkness. ‘I just needed you to lead me to your husband.’

  But she’d already guessed why he hadn’t let her turn around. Once she reached the river-road that led to this place, he must have known where she was going. It was only then that he had fired at Ruby and her.

  She turned away from the men and went after Matt.

  As she walked towards the aputiak through the black icy landscape, she didn’t think about Jack or Grayling or what was happening now, but of the photo of stars Matt had sent her, and of him running with exposure and frostbite, a phone next to his skin, so he could hear her voice.

  Matt was coming out of the aputiak. She knew from the way he was standing, and then from his face, that something was terribly wrong.

  I’ve got my laptop open and I’m using its light to see the way ahead because I left the torch behind for Mum and Dad; it makes the snow and ice look greeny and I look at the greeny snow not at the dark. I’ve got Dad’s backpack on with the terminal, so it’s safe and dry and my laptop’s got Dad’s special cover on it and there’s clear plastic over the screen. It’s snowing, but only a bit. A fat flake landed splat in the middle of the screen but I just wiped it off with my mitten.

  I’m quite high because when I look down I can just see the bonfire, like it’s an orange dot. And near it is the aputiak and it’s a little yellow glow. If I keep the orange dot and the little yellow glow behind me, and I’m climbing up not down, then I’m going the right way and I’ll get to the top.

  The vast darkness surrounded them and somewhere out there was Ruby. Ten years old. Minus thirty. She had taken the laptop and terminal. If Jack and Grayling found out, God knows what they would do to her. They were mute with fear, bonded by something that was larger than love.

  If they went after her then Jack and Grayling would know that she’d gone, but how could they not look for her?

  Yasmin retched, her terror physical. Ruby was in danger of frostbite and hypothermia. What if they couldn’t find her? She would die alone.

  They saw shapes in the dark coming towards them. Jack arrived, pulling down his face mask; he was holding a gun. Behind him was Grayling.

  Matt thought of Siku in the aputiak. Only a child would do that, he thought; only a child would rescue a dead dog and bring it inside to look after it. And only a child would think to put a sleeping bag over it to make it look like she was there; as if that would work. Her innocence was terrible against these men.

  ‘Where’s your laptop with the photos on it?’ Jack asked Yasmin.

  ‘It was in the truck when it went through the ice.’

  ‘You’re not a good liar,’ Jack said and turned to Matt. ‘Your terminal? Is that in the igloo as well?’

  ‘The cold stopped it from working,’ Matt said. ‘So I just left it.’

  Jack started moving closer to the aputiak but Yasmin stood in front of him, barring his way.

  ‘Our daughter needs to sleep,’ she said. ‘She’s been terrified and she’s exhausted.’

  Maybe she should tell them the truth and then they could go and look for her. Because what threat was Ruby to them? She was ten, a slight little girl. Even if Ruby got the terminal and laptop working, and surely she couldn’t, not in the dark in minus thirty, on her own. But even if she did, who would she email? Who could she ask for help? Did she even know anyone’s email address?

  ‘I want to hear what you’ve got to say,’ Matt said to Grayling. ‘You told us you wanted to explain things, well, I’d like to know.’

  He thought the only way they could ensure Ruby’s survival was to stop these men going after her, to keep them talking, and Yasmin knew he was right. Even if Ruby wasn’t a threat, they’d still see her as a potential risk and go after her.

  ‘OK,’ Grayling said. ‘Let’s talk by the bonfire, let the child sleep.’

  It was as if he was doing a small kindness to make up for larger brutality. He turned to Jack.

  ‘That was always our plan,’ he said to Jack. ‘That we would explain.’

  They walked towards the bonfire; the last piece of debris was burning.

  ‘So what exactly happened here?’ Matt asked.

  ‘A well casing cracked,’ Jack said. ‘The blowback got contaminated. Probably with arsenic. Travelled as a plume down the river.’ His tone was undramatic, almost nonchalant. ‘First I knew was my foreman getting hysterical. All these dead animals and fish. It’s routine to have dead animals near a fracking site, but this was different. I knew there were Eskimos down river, sent one of my workers to check it out. Told him what to do.’

  Matt thought he saw a shape in the darkness and his eye muscles tightened to focus, but the shape was a shadow of the last flames of the bonfire, nothing more.

  ‘The people living in Anaktue boiled their water for drinking,’ Matt said.

  ‘Boiling just concentrates the level of arsenic,’ Jack said, his tone still neutral.

  ‘Are there any other people who—’

  Jack interrupted, ‘Just one Eskimo village that no one’s ever heard of.’

  ‘So you destroyed the evidence?’

  ‘I paid a man to light a fire. The snow did the rest.’

  ‘And here?’

  ‘My foreman panicked, fucking idiot, started dismantling everything. Lit the bonfire.’

  ‘He needn’t have bothered?’ Matt said.

  ‘There was nothing to show there’d ever been a problem. It’s a fast-flowing river, five perhaps ten miles an hour, the arsenic plume would’ve reached the Arctic Ocean and the river would have tested clean. But like I said, the guy panicked, made everyone pack up and leave; even destroyed the fucking road.’

  Yasmin was searching the darkness for Ruby and she knew it was an effort for Matt not to do the same; that he was forcing himself to look at Jack.

  ‘All of the waste ponds are full,’ Matt said to Jack. ‘Were they full before the arsenic leak?’

  ‘People aren’t always as safety conscious as they should be.’

  ‘So you dumped the poisonous blowback in the river?’ he asked.

  ‘Like I just said, people aren’t as safety conscious as they should be. Some of them are plain lazy.’

  ‘If the river flows at ten miles an hour,’ Matt said, ‘it would only have taken four hours for the arsenic plume to reach the village.’

  ‘No one realised in time to warn them,’ Grayling said and Yasmin thought

  she heard genuine sadness in his voice. She tried to see his eyes, hoping to find some charity there, but the dying light from the bonfire reflected off his goggles and she couldn’t see behind them.

  ‘The problem we have,’ Jack said. ‘Is that this isn’t a leak that poisoned a well, like most fracking accidents. People who make decisions on energy policy aren’t a load of hillbillies getting their water from a fucking well.’

  The bonfire was going out; the rig and the detritus of the fracking site were no longer visible in the darkness. Yasmin feared that soon there would be nothing to guide Ruby back to them. But it would be worse if these men went after her.

  ‘You said there was a good reason for covering this up,’ Matt s
aid to Grayling. ’I still haven’t heard it.’

  ‘A river’s different to a well,’ Grayling said. ‘Rivers move. If there’s an accident they can poison everyone downstream. Washington gets its water from a river. New York gets its water from a river. People will be afraid of poison coming out of their faucets. The people who decide our energy policy may be afraid too. They could stop hydraulic fracturing.’

  ‘You don’t think they’re right to be afraid?’ Matt asked.

  ‘No,’ Grayling said. ‘What happened here was a tragic isolated event. A whole series of things happened that shouldn’t have, and it was just a terrible fluke that the fail-safes didn’t work.’

  As she listened to Grayling, Yasmin hoped there was a slim chance that he hadn’t been lying; that after he had explained his bigger picture he would let them go and then they would find Ruby.

  ‘There’s a cost for every type of energy,’ Grayling continued. ‘We have to choose the one that has the lowest cost. Hydraulic fracturing gets fuel from right here, under our own land. We can’t be held to ransom for it. We don’t need to fight wars for it.’

  ‘What you need to understand,’ Jack said. ‘Is that Alaska protects the rest of the US. Always has done. First against the Commies and now against Arabs. We’ve provided fuel for America from regular oil wells and now from fracking too. The interior of Alaska’s got huge reserves just sitting there, under land that isn’t of any use for anything else. Two billion barrels of recoverable oil, eighty trillion cubic feet of natural gas. A bunch of Eskimos isn’t going to fuck that up for us.’

  Matt heard Jack’s aggression and pugilistic nature. He was a man who wouldn’t back away from a fight or an argument; maybe Matt could use that to keep him away from Ruby.

  Jack started walking towards the aputiak.

  ‘By “us” you just mean the USA?’ Matt said.

  ‘Other countries aren’t my problem,’ Jack said.

  ‘You think you’re patriotic?’

  Jack stopped walking. ‘No question about that. Fracking got our country out of recession. Made us independent. Strong. Can’t be leaders of the free world if we rely on foreigners for our energy supply.’ He carried on walking.