Eric walked into the lodge and left Sam breathing in the cold air, watching him go. A glance to his left, at a brown car pulling up behind the taped area at the incident trailer, told Sam he still had his two companions with him. Let them watch, he thought. They could watch him as he lost his mind, his job, and in his worst nightmares, his family. Enjoy, he thought bitterly, and marched up the steps towards his beating.

* * *

The office was still full of RCMPs. Christ knows what they were doing with that trailer when most of them seemed to be hanging around here making calls and scribbling in note-books. Only one of the cops looked up when Eric crossed the office and Betsy rolled her eyes to Heaven in a call for sympathy as he passed her desk. Sitconski still wasn’t at his. Eric stopped and backed up to Betsy.

‘He didn’t show?’

She shook her head.

Eric raised an eyebrow, carried on to his office and shut the door behind him. The absence of their weird office assistant was no sorrow to him, but it was interesting. There was something wrong about Sitconski. Maybe the police should know he didn’t come in. Mind you, they must have grilled him last night, and his disappearance was not exactly front-page material. He seemed to come and go as he pleased. Eric didn’t hire the creep or he’d have kicked his butt out of here on day two, but Pasqual either didn’t notice his erratic attendance, or she didn’t care. He knew she just wanted to get into his pants.

So what was it that was wrong about the guy, because wrong was the word that formed itself in Sindon’s mind. Eric sat down on his revolving chair, swung around for a moment and let himself think about that. There was something about Moses Sitconski’s features that bothered him, even from the first time he saw him. They were plain, maybe handsome, but …

He rubbed the stubble on his chin. Yeah. That was one thing all right. No beard growth. His face looked like it was made of something else other than skin. Crazy. But yes, that was it. It looked like a pretend face. A kid’s face. Eric caught sight of his own sour, ageing face in the window reflection and realized how jealous that one would sound to a sober listener.

Tough. It was true. And he could never quite remember that face after Sitconski had left. All that was left was a vague impression. Did bland features do that to a person?

A negative personality. That’s what the management assertiveness course that Pasqual had forced him to attend, taught all the way through that waste of a week. He pictured that stupid red-lipped woman in the blue suit that had brayed at them in the banqueting suite of the Balfour Hotel, and he winced.