Other books by Michael Blair
If Looks Could Kill
A Hard Winter Rain
Overexposed
The Dells
Depth of Field
True Believers
Copyright © 2017 Michael Blair
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Author’s Note: The following is a work of fiction. Many of the locations are real, although not necessarily as portrayed, but all characters and events are fictional and any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Debbie Geltner
Book design by WildElement.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Blair, Michael, 1946-, author
The evil that men do / Michael Blair.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-988130-37-8 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-988130-38-5 (epub).--
ISBN 978-1-988130-39-2 (mobi).--ISBN 978-1-988130-40-8 (pdf)
I. Title.
PS8553.L3354E95 2017 C813’.6 C2016-907015-8
C2016-907016-6
Printed and bound in Canada.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts and the Canada Book Fund, and of the Government of Quebec through the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles.
Linda Leith Publishing
Montreal
www.lindaleith.com
For Pamela
Part I
Chapter 1
The late, great Isaac Asimov once wrote, “Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” Had I any inkling that within a fortnight of my return to Montreal I’d learn just how troublesome that transition could be, I’d have jumped on the very next plane back to London.
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Riley. I’d tell you my full name, but then I’d have to kill you—if you didn’t die laughing first. I was forty-three years old and for two decades had lived a more or less grasshopper existence, going pretty much where the wind blew me, working at whatever struck my fancy. With the exception of a couple of years in South Africa with a marine salvage company and a couple more years flying for a small air-freight operation in the outback of Australia, it had been mundane stuff. I’d spent the last three years on the west coast of Scotland co-managing a small trekker’s inn and pub at the foot of Ben Nevis, while trying to write a book. A novel, not another travel book. But enough about that.
And enough about me.
On a rainy Friday evening in early June, the night after I got home, I borrowed Rocky’s old pink Volvo and drove out to the Château du Lac hotel in Hudson, an upscale bedroom community strung out along the south shore of the Ottawa River, about sixty kilometres west of Montreal. When I went into the hotel bar, Nina Sparrow and her two male bandmates were already on stage, producing a lot of sound from guitar, keyboard and drums. The bar was packed, but I found a vacant chair at a table occupied by two men and a woman, all in their early twenties, sharing a pitcher of beer.
“Mind if I join you?” I asked, shouting to make myself heard over the music.
“Help yourself,” one of the men shouted back.
I nodded my thanks and sat down. The woman, a chunky, vulnerable-looking blonde with acne scars and too much eye makeup, favoured me with a smile, then dismissed me completely. I ordered a draft from a harried waitress and sat back to enjoy the show.
Nina Sparrow and her mates played rock, hard. Nina’s voice was clean and powerful, at one moment cool and smooth and sexy, the next moment raw and edgy. She was slimmer than when I’d last seen her four years before, and more toned. She’d had her belly button pierced and appeared to have a new tattoo or two. And she’d adopted a new look. Her black hair was cropped and gelled to a sleek cap, emphasizing the sculpted angularity of her face. Sneakers and jeans had given way to low-heeled black boots, hip-hugging black leather pants showing a lot of muscular midriff, and a brief black leather vest with a single snap fastener below her small, flat breasts. She played her low-slung black Stratocaster with considerable energy and under the lights her arms and upper chest glistened with perspiration. I liked the look. So, I suspected, did most of the males in the audience, perhaps hoping for a “wardrobe malfunction” if the snap of her vest popped. I later learned that the snap was fake, though, for show only: the vest zipped up the back.
Her drummer and keyboard player were new. Dressed in T-shirts and jeans, both were at least a decade younger than Nina—who, I realized with a mild shock, was thirty-six—but they were good, complementing her raunchy guitar without overwhelming her vocals. She couldn’t see me, of course. The stage lights made it impossible for her to see anything beyond the first row of tables.
A few words about Nina and me. While we were growing up Nina Sparrow had been my virtual kid sister. Her parents, who’d lived next door to my parents, were doctors and militant social activists. Between their work with Médecins sans frontières and their commitment to various anti-you-name-it movements, they travelled extensively, and almost from the day they brought Nina home from the hospital, my mother had looked after her while they were away.
Nina was eight when she started taking piano lessons. They were paid for by her parents, of course, but she practiced on my mother’s old upright, the same piano on which I’d learned to play. I don’t remember when she took up the guitar, but it wasn’t long before she surpassed me on both instruments. She practiced more than I ever had. For me, music was a hobby, at best an avocation. For Nina, it was a passion.
A few weeks before leaving Scotland I’d received an email:
You are cordially invited to the launch of
Nina Sparrow’s new album
Songs from Waterville
at the Château du Lac Hotel,
460 Main Road, Hudson, Quebec,
Friday, June 7, 8 p.m.
No cover. Bring your friends.
The text was accompanied by an image of the album cover, a photograph of a row of colourful houses along a stony, curving beach, with blue sky and rolling green hills in the background. I’d recognized the location: the village of Waterville in County Kerry in southwest Ireland. I’d stopped there overnight a year or so before, on a bike tour of the Ring of Kerry with Isla Taggart, my on-again, off-again Scottish girlfriend—who had, incidentally, become permanently off-again a few weeks before I left. Such is life.
The set ended and the house lights came up to enthusiastic applause. “Thanks, people,” Nina said, leaning into the mic, breathing hard. “See you in fifteen, okay? Meanwhile, you can buy copies of the CD at the bar.”
She racked her guitar and draped a towel around her neck. I started to get up, but sat back down when she went to a table near the foot of the stage. The table was occupied by a woman with a thick mane of coppery red hair, a girl with identically coloured but shorter hair who could only be the woman’s daughter, and a broad-shouldered man with saturnine features and neatly barbered dark hair. With a sudden frisson of surprise, I recognized the woman, even though I hadn’t seen her in twenty years. Her name was Teresa Jardine, and we’d lived together for six months or so in the mid-90s, before I’d been smitten by wanderlust. It had been a tempestuous relationship that hadn’t ended well, for the most part thanks to me. I experienced a momentary flutter of panic that the girl might be my daughter, but she looked too young, no more than fourteen or fifteen.
I felt a powerful urge to get out of there bef
ore Terry recognized me, but someone sitting behind me called out Nina’s name. Nina turned. A camera flashed. She smiled and waved, then locked eyes with me. Her face lit up—then, almost as quickly, darkened.
Oh-oh, I thought, bracing myself.
I got up again as she worked her way through the room, hip-weaving between tables, exchanging high-fives and acknowledging accolades from people in the audience. I wasn’t sure whether to expect an embrace or a punch, prepared myself for either, or both. She stood in front of me for a moment, looking up at me, hands on hips, conflicting emotions playing across her elfin
features. Then her deep violet eyes filled and she leapt up, wrapping her arms around my neck and clasping her legs around my hips. A stab of pain lanced through my right knee. I’d banged it up five weeks earlier during a mountain rescue operation that had gone sideways when one of the rescuees, a London dentist, had panicked, sending us both tumbling.
My knee held, though, as Nina, leaning back and looking me in the eye, said, “You bastard.”
She kissed me, long and hard, crushing my lips against my teeth, while the trio with which I’d been sitting gaped. After the initial shock, I surrendered to the inevitable and kissed her back.
“Goddamn you,” she said against my mouth. She unwrapped her legs and I lowered her to the floor. She weighed next to nothing. Even in her boots she was a foot shorter than my six-foot-three.
People were staring. A few clapped or whistled.
“So I guess you’re not still angry with me,” I said.
“Who says I’m not?” she said. “Shit, Riley, you just fucking took off.” She sighed. “But it’s what you do, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said, guilt twisting in my guts. “I suppose it is.”
“All right,” she said. “No point in going on about it, is there? Dead horses, spilt milk, and water under half-burned bridges, right?” She stood on her toes and kissed me again, a sisterly peck on corner of my mouth. “You look like hell, by the way.”
“Thanks,” I said, fingering the ridge of scar tissue on my cheekbone, also a consequence of the rescue gone awry. I’d broken my nose again, too—for the third time, I think. I’d told Nina all about it during one of our Skype sessions. “You never were too bright, were you?” she’d said.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’d be here?”
“I was flying standby. I wasn’t sure I’d make it.”
“Well, your timing sucks. I’m back on stage in ten minutes and I gotta pee first.” She smiled at the people with whom I’d been sitting. “Are these folks friends of yours?”
“We just met,” I said.
“Okay if I steal him?”
“Go ahead,” the woman said with a shrug. Her indifference made Nina’s smile grow wider.
As I lifted my travel jacket off the back of the chair, Nina took my hand and started to drag me toward the table at which Terry Jardine sat with the red-haired girl and the broad-shouldered man. I dug in my heels.
“What’s wrong?” Nina said.
“That’s Terry Jardine.”
“Yeah. So?”
“I don’t think she’s going to be very happy to see me.”
“It’s okay. I’m sure she’s forgiven you.” I wasn’t, but I let her lead me to Terry’s table. “Look who I found,” Nina said.
“Hello, Terry,” I said.
Terry Jardine’s eyes widened with surprise. “Riley. My god. It’s been a long time.” The girl’s expression was open and curious, but the man’s gaze was wary. “How are you?” Terry said.
“I’m well,” I said, as Nina abandoned me to use the bathroom.
“Sit down,” Terry said, gesturing to the spare chair between her and the girl. “Please.”
“Thanks,” I said, hanging my travel jacket on the back of the chair.
“Rebecca,” Terry said to the girl. “This is Riley. He’s an old friend. Riley, this is my daughter Rebecca.”
“How do you do, Mister, uh, Riley,” the girl said, offering her hand.
I took her hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Rebecca. And just Riley is fine.”
Terry turned to the broad-shouldered man. “And this—”
“Lawrence Thomason,” he said, interrupting her, holding out a big, soft-looking hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise,” I said.
Despite the soft appearance of his hands, he had a good grip. So did I, though, having worked with my hands for most of twenty years. We exchanged smiles and called it a draw.
“Nina told me you’ve been living in Scotland,” Terry said.
“That’s right. Got back last night. How have you been, Terry?”
Lawrence Thomason made a sound in his throat that might have been a growl or a sour laugh.
“Did I say something wrong?” I said.
“No, no,” Terry said, giving Thomason a stern look. “I’m well, thank you. You look like you’ve been in an accident.”
Before I could explain, Nina and her bandmates took to the stage. Turning on the amps, they ripped into their set with a credible cover of Pink Floyd’s “Money.” It didn’t take long for Nina to work up another glow of perspiration. She played her Strat with far more body language than David Gilmour ever had.
Terry’s daughter Rebecca was rapt, eyes bright, bopping in her chair and singing along. She was dressed similarly to Nina, in black jeans and a vest, but the vest wasn’t as minimal as Nina’s and she wore a blouse under it. I didn’t see any piercings, but she had a small seahorse tattoo on the inside of her left wrist. She was a very pretty girl, but then so had her mother been. Still was, I thought.
Terry smiled when she caught me looking at her. Lawrence Thomason glanced at me, a smile stretching his mouth but leaving his eyes untouched. I returned his smile, wondering if he was Terry’s husband or boyfriend. He didn’t seem her type. Then again, after twenty years, I had no idea what her type was.
When the song ended and the applause began to die down, Terry’s daughter looked over her shoulder at me and said, “Cool, eh?”
“Very,” I said.
“How long have you known Nina?”
“All her life. We more or less grew up together.”
“Cool.”
Nina introduced the next song as a track from the new album, then launched into a lively ballad with Celtic undertones. It seemed to be about a shipwrecked sailor in love with a milkmaid. For the song, she finger-picked her guitar in the style of Mark Knopfler. That was followed by a bluesy number called “Grasshopper Man.” She winked at me as she sang:
Come dance with me, my grasshopper man,
Dance me around your heart.
Make love to me, my grasshopper man,
Make love to me before we part.
Come back to me, my grasshopper man,
Come back to me, never more away to go.
Terry looked at me with a knowing smile, and I felt the heat rise in my face.
I wondered when—and how—Terry and Nina had become friends. Nina had just turned sixteen when Terry and I moved in together. She hadn’t liked Terry at all. She was jealous, Terry had told me, which I’d thought ridiculous, Nina was just a kid.
Had I really been that callow and self-absorbed? Yes, of course I had. My treatment of Terry was more than ample proof. I squirmed with embarrassment as I glanced at her. Nina had said she’d probably forgiven me. I half hoped she hadn’t. I didn’t deserve to be forgiven.
My knee was beginning to stiffen, and when I shifted position to ease the ache, my thigh pressed against Terry’s. She glanced at me and moved her leg out of contact.
“Sorry,” I said, leaning toward her to be heard over the music.
“Don’t worry about it,” she replied.
It was then that I noticed a man a few tables away, sitting by himself, ba
ck to the wall. In his late forties or early fifties and more than a bit scruffy, he was staring at Terry. It was not a friendly or admiring stare. I would have understood the latter. His look was almost palpably hateful. I was shocked by the intensity of it.
Lawrence Thomason followed my look. He glared in the man’s direction for a moment, then leaned close to Terry and spoke into her ear. She stiffened and her expression turned bleak. She didn’t look at the man, though. She was looking at her daughter, eyes shining as tears began to form.
Thomason said something else to her. Her expression hardened, and she shook her head, almost angrily.
“Is something wrong?” I asked her.
“No.” She shook her head without looking at me. “No, it’s nothing.”
Thomason glowered at me.
Now what, I wondered, was this all about? I’d soon find out.
“So, folks,” Nina said, blowing into the mic at the end of her final set. Perspiration glistened diamond-like in her hair and ran in little silvery rivulets down her chest and between her breasts. “That’s it for us. Hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed playing. Give it up for Daniel LaRose on keyboards and bass and Phil Couture on drums. Be sure to pick up a copy of our CD at the bar. But don’t go ’way. After the break, the Skid Marks will be rockin’ the house down till one.”
With the help of a long-haired, overweight man in his fifties, Nina and her bandmates packed up their equipment. After humping their gear out to their van, Nina came back to the table, towel around her neck, drinking from a large bottle of spring water. I vacated my chair so she could sit down between Terry and Rebecca. I dragged another over and straddled it backwards behind and between Rebecca and Nina. As she cooled off, Nina donned a frayed and faded jean jacket.
“You were great,” Rebecca said to her.
“Thanks, sweetie.” Nina put an arm around the girl’s shoulder, hugged her and kissed her cheek. “Man, I stink, though,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
“Rebecca’s right,” Terry said. “You were great. And you smell fine.”
The Evil That Men Do Page 1
