‘No. Carry on to Stoke.’

Daniel nodded as if reprimanded and fixed his eyes on the road again. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing those photos again, but it served him right for bringing back the whole sorry affair. Maybe the Kinchuinick way was best. Maybe he should have kept his trap shut. But then he wasn’t really a Kinchuinick any more. He was a policeman.

Constable Benson, stamping his feet in the snow, raised a heavily-gloved hand to the Ford as they cruised past the taped-off site. Daniel waved back. It was wilderness up there. The Trans-Canada and the rail track sneaked over this high pass like intruders, as if they knew man had little right to be here and should think twice about leaving his mark. This was the highest point, and from here they could cruise all the way back down to Stoke, still trailing the city skiers as they slid about after the plough.

Craig had driven up and down here about two dozen times since the murder. If he was waiting for that movie-cop’s moment of divine inspiration he was going to have to wait a long time. Nothing about being there, about experiencing the physical presence of Wolf Pass and its inaccessibility to the pedestrian, lit a fire under his cold, empty ignorance.

This was new territory. There had only ever been one murder in his time in Silver. A pathetic, sad murder: a summer tourist battered to death in a rage by a drunk redneck from the mines up north, allegedly for insulting his girlfriend. Ugly and savage. Sylvia’s death had been neither. It had been what they described as peaceful. Craig disagreed. There was somehow more peace in brutality, a natural order where the ripping or tearing of flesh logically and visibly resulted in the escape of the human life-force from its prison of solid matter. The insidious creeping death in which the body was attacked from within was to him a thousand times more violent. He did not associate the hollow white cheeks of his once rosy-skinned wife with any form of peace.