22. about the Company’s financial mis-management.

Weaden had gone over the top in his sympathetic treatment of Jeffrey and Richard firmly believed that his Report was biased in Jeffrey’s favour.
At another place, Luke Dawson wrapped his still hot Lee Enfield in its cloth and slipped it back into its guncase. That should do the trick he thought. He should stay right away from other people’s family matters that don’t concern him. He’s been poking his nose in where it don’t belong. Just who does he think he is anyway? Coming over from England and all that and asking lots of questions about dead people. Why can’t he just go away and leave it alone? Let them rest in peace.
Luke was a hermit. He had never married and lived deep in the woods far up from Camp V Pond. Even when the fly were at their thickest he still chose to ignore them and cut himself off from other people. He had lived like this for 43 years and didn’t know any other way. Folk in Wild Bay might see Luke about once or twice a year if they were lucky. He was a curiosity to them and to the visitors who had started to come, now that The Trans-Labrador Highway was touching the edge of their small town. He came in to collect his winter stores in about early October. He would bring his furs and skins in to exchange whenever he wanted to. On other occasions nobody really knew why or when he would come. He would just turn up unannounced. It was strange because somehow or other, he always seemed to know all the local gossip.
Luke was the bastard son of Olga and Kevin Quigley. Conceived on the same night that James and Emily had died, he never knew them. Apparently they had just up and left him in the middle of one night on the doorstep of the Dawson’s house. They disappeared and nobody had the slightest idea where they had gone.