“Certainly, sir.” The clerk reached under the desk and pulled one out. He passed it across the polished cedar surface to Bushell. who had to hide a smile as he took it. He was used to the New Liverpool directory, a book thick and heavy enough to make a good bludgeon. By contrast, a skinny little pamphlet served all of Skidegate’s needs.
It did not, however, serve his. After going through it, he said to the clerk, “Could you give me some help, please? I see no listing for a local constabulary.”
“No, sir, you wouldn’t find that,” the clerk said. By the wary look in his eye, he didn’t much care to have anything to do with anyone interested in finding it, either. But, after a moment’s hesitation, he condescended to explain: “The Navy, sir, deals with such matters all over the island. Only fair, I think, seeing as Navy men cause most of our trouble. When the swabbies or the bullocks” - by which he meant the Royal Marines - “have nothing to do with it, they ship the villains across to Prince Rupert to let the civil courts handle things.” He had the air of a man who knew from experience whereof he spoke.
“Who is the commandant of the Navy’s - what would I call it? - security detachment, then?” Bushell asked.
“That would be Commander Hairston,” the desk clerk answered. “His offices are in the Naval Administration Building, close by the docks.”
“Back the way we came,” Bushell said with a sigh. “Well, I suppose we’ll get settled in here before we go pay him a visit.” He glanced over to Stanley and Crooke, who both nodded agreement. Bushell turned back to the clerk. “One last question: is the post office close by?”
“Just around the corner here and then down Carlotta Street half a block. You can’t miss it,” the clerk said, with the sublime optimism all locals show when strangers ask directions. The desk clerk shook his head in bemusement. “I get asked about bear and deer and salmon and eagles all the time, but never till now about constables and patrollers and post offices. Why’d you gents come to Skidegate anyhow, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“To hunt,” Bushell answered. Smiling grimly, he and his companions went up to their rooms, leaving the clerk scratching his head.
As the clerk had promised, the Skidegate post office was easy to find. That being almost the first thing that had gone right with the investigation, Bushell cherished it. He, Crooke, and Stanley took off their hats and unbuttoned their coats when they went inside; it might have been the beginning of summer, but Skidegate was cool and shrouded in mist and drizzle.
A plump, bald, red-faced man looked up from behind the counter. “Help you gents?” he said. He swept away what Bushell thought was a book of word puzzles; business at the post office did not seem brisk.
“I’m looking for the postmaster,” Bushell said.
“You’re not only looking for him, my friend, you’re looking at him,” the red-faced fellow answered with a chuckle that was half cackle. “Rob Pratson’s the name. Now what can I do for you?”
“Mr. Pratson, I hope you’re not given to gossip,” Bushell said, displaying the badge that identified him as an officer of the Royal American Mounted Police. Sam Stanley and Felix Crooke followed suit. Pratson’s watery blue eyes got wide. “Ain’t never seen one of those up here before, ‘cept in the cinema, and now here’s three all together. Ain’t that a thing and a half?” He remembered Bushell’s question. “No, sir, I don’t gab, not me. You can’t do it, not if you’re postmaster in a small town and you want to have friends.”
“Good,” Bushell said. “Not gossiping may involve your neck, not just friendships. Do you understand that?” At Pratson’s nod, he went on, “Now, do you remember receiving one or more packages, shaped about like this” - he used his hands to draw a long, thin rectangular solid - “to be posted to New Liverpool?”
“Oh, that I do,” the postmaster answered. “We’ve had a good many of those go through, past six months or so.”
“Have you?” That was the last thing Bushell wanted to hear. He didn’t tell Pratson what the packages contained; the fewer who knew of such things, the better. Instead, he went on, “Who’s sending them?”
“I’ve had packages like that from three or four people, sir, I have,” Rob Pratson said. “Don’t rightly recall none of their last names; they just go by Geoff and Patrick and Elgin and . . . what the devil’s that other one called? I ain’t seen him but once or twice.” The postmaster snapped his fingers. “Benjamin, that’s it! I think that’s it.”
Stanley and Crooke both had out notepads and were scribbling down the names, just as Bushell was.
“Do these four men live in Skidegate?” he asked hopefully. Maybe, just this once, something would be simple and straightforward.
But Pratson shook his head. “Oh, God bless you, sir, no they don’t. They’re up at Buckley Bay, they are. Far as I know, they’re the only four people up at Buckley Bay.”
“Where the devil’s Buckley Bay, and why are these four chaps the only people there?” Sam Stanley asked. By his tone, he was as sick of complications as Bushell was.
“Buckley Bay ain’t nothin’ these days - hasn’t been for years,” Pratson said. “Used to be a logging town over on the west shore of Masset Inlet, right about in the center of the island here. But ain’t nobody done any logging there since I was a sprout, and that goes back a deal of years, don’t it just. Till them four moved in, the buildings, they just got left to themselves to fall to pieces one bit at a time.”
“What do these four men do there, then?” Bushell demanded. “How do they make their living? How long have they been there?”
The postmaster shrugged. “Been there two, three years, I guess - that’s how long they been comin’ into Skidegate, anyways. They mail their packages, buy a few things down to the grocer’s shop or the ironmonger’s, head on out again. Dunno just how they get by. Hunting and fishing, I reckon, and I hear tell they take sightseers around sometimes, show ‘em the best spots for salmon and I don’t know what all. Whatever they do, nobody ever said they was lackin’ a quid they had need of.”
“Why does that last observation not surprise me?” Felix Crooke said. Pratson would not have known a rhetorical question had one come in to buy a stamp of him. “Dunno, sir, why don’t it?”
“Never mind,” Bushell said. “Thank you, Mr. Pratson - you’ve been very helpful. Let me repeat that you’d be wise to keep this to yourself. If you’re a married man, don’t even tell your wife.”
“Sooner or later, Myrtle will find out someways, and then I’m in the soup,” Pratson said resignedly. “But I won’t blab. Still and all, I wish you’d tell me what this here’s all about. What have them four fellers gone and did?”
“I don’t know yet,” Bushell said. “But I promise you: I’m going to find out.”
Commander Nathan Hairston was a big, bluff man with muttonchop whiskers and a walrus mustache.
“Pleasure to meet you gentlemen - pleasure,” he said as a sailor hurriedly brought a couple of spare chairs into his office. “Haven’t seen RAMs here since Hector was a pup. What can I do to help you?”
Bushell explained. By the time he was nearly through, Commander Hairston’s mouth had fallen open in amazement. He finished, “Do you know these men? Geoff, Patrick, Elgin, and Benjamin the postmaster called them. He didn’t recollect their surnames.”
“I don’t either, I’m afraid. I know the men you mean, or know of them, rather - so far as I was officially aware, they’d never given anyone a moment’s trouble.” Hairston shook his head like a man coming out of a showerbath. “Colonel, to be frank with you, the civilians hereabouts are mostly dull as dust, except every once in a while when they’ve had too much to drink. To think of this sleepy, godforsaken place involved in what has to be the most outrageous crime since the Duke of Philadelphia’s daughter was kidnapped fifty years ago ... I tell you, sir, I can hardly believe it.”