by Iona Whishaw
“Well, I haven’t had the shock you’ve had but I don’t like to be unsociable.” He accepted a glass and urged Harris and Lane to carry on. “Now, what do you mean, a body? Whose?”
“We’ve no idea, evidently,” said Lane, looking at Harris.
“Wow,” said Dave. “Nothing ever happens around here, and now this. I suppose that’s why my water wasn’t affected, because I get mine farther up. But what about Reggie and Kenny? Wouldn’t it have affected them?”
Lane could see Harris bridle, possibly, she thought, at what Harris probably assumed was the Yank familiarity of adding a diminutive to everyone’s name. “On a different creek,” he barked.
David nodded and sipped his brandy.
“You were on the Somme, weren’t you?” Lane asked Harris, hoping to get him on to something that would keep him from disapproving of them until the police arrived.
“That’s right, a lieutenant, not that it’s any of your lookout.”
“Oh, that’s right. Old Mrs. Hughes told me you’d served with John Armstrong, Kenny’s brother.”
Harris directed a thundering look at her. Too late, Lane remembered that he became angry at any mention of serving with Kenny’s brother.
“What I can’t make out is who the heck it could be,” Lane reflected, hurriedly giving up on diverting Harris. “We’re miles from anywhere, and there are only nine families here. Unless he’s one of us, someone’s come a long way to get plugged.”
“I don’t think you have to look far to figure it out, do you? Bloody Americans.” Harris looked darkly at Dave. “It’ll be one of them. Who knows where those people have come from and what they’re running away from? You mark my words. They’ve run away. The rest of us came out here to grow apples. What’s he here for? The climate? Rubbish!”
This appalling breach of good manners dismayed Lane. She cast an anguished look at Dave, who merely waggled his fingers in a “don’t worry, what more can you expect from Harris?” sign.
It was true enough about the apples. There were orchards arching over the hills all around the community. She had a whole basement full of wooden boxes and labels ready for the fall pick, and a good half-acre of Delicious apples to contend with when the time came.
Lane sighed and looked back at Harris, who was glaring at Dave. “Really, Lieutenant. We’d best leave all the speculation to the police, as you yourself said, don’t you think?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THEY HEARD THE CARS LONG before they pulled into the grassy driveway. Traffic was so rare that she could hear cars climbing the hill from the main road as a sudden interruption of a silence she wasn’t really aware of until someone pushed through from the outside world.
She had expected police cars but, instead, two men were getting out of a maroon, four-door Ford and behind them, an ambulance van was pulling up. Lane and Harris waited outside the door to the house. Dave hovered behind them, aware of his status as a non-witness. Both men had suit jackets, ties, and hats. Lane thought they must be expiring in the heat. She moved toward them.
“Hello. I’m Lanette—Lane, actually—Winslow. I made the call. This is Lieutenant Harris. We were together when we found the body, and this is Dave Bertolli, who lives farther up the creek and has come to help.”
The foremost man took his hat off to reveal a head of thick russet hair, which Lane thought must be a little long, strictly speaking, for the police. But of course, she was new and had never met a Canadian policeman. He was clearly young, but had something about him that was old, or maybe weary. She’d seen the look so often, and it was not surprising. The war had ended only one year before. She wondered if he’d been a fighter pilot, though she could not have said why she thought this. His eyebrows had a worried set to them over an intelligent face.
He reached out his hand. “Inspector Darling. This is Constable Ames. You live far enough out, don’t you? I don’t think anyone from our department has been out this way since before the war, if then. We have some medicos with us to move the body. He is dead, I suppose?”
“As a doornail,” Lane said, before she’d realized it might not be so appropriate to word it just that way. Her “Brit” way of dispelling unpleasantness with language might be frowned on here. After all, they still didn’t know who it was and, in spite of Harris’s protestations, the dead man’s face had not been visible from the angle at which they’d seen him, so it might very well be a member of a local family. “Sorry,” she added hastily. “Yes. Quite dead.” Had the inspector’s mouth twitched slightly? The constable cleared his throat in a way that suggested the suppression of a laugh. He was certainly not the stolid, middle-aged, constable sidekick of English detective fiction. He looked to be in his early twenties and had the untroubled, alert air of the young, scenting adventure. He will not have been in the war—at least not in the fighting, Lane thought.
“What’s that?” Harris asked, his irritation seeming to take hold of him again. “Yes, course he is. Drowned. You’d better let me show you the way. You can stay here,” he said to Lane. “No need for you to go through it all again.”
Inspector Darling glanced at Lane, a tiny spark of a glance. He was reassuring her, she thought, and then felt a quick flush and looked down. She reminded herself that she had long ago learned that you cannot assume what someone else is thinking. Where she’d been, such assumptions could be fatal. He could quite easily have been glancing at her to agree with Harris that she should stay.
What in fact he was saying was, “Since you both found him, I’d sooner you both came along. You may have observed different things. I’ll ask you to stay behind, Mr. Ber . . .”
“Bertolli,” Dave said helpfully. “No problem. I’ll go off home and wait to hear the results.”
“You can’t put a woman through this sort of thing, Inspector. I can give you any information you need,” Harris said, his commanding way in full sail.
The inspector nodded, as if to indicate he understood, and said, “Nevertheless, if it’s not too much trouble. The young lady looks quite capable of handling this. No one need be present when we remove the body. Do we need to drive the van somewhere?” he asked, indicating the ambulance men.
“Yes, I suppose. It’s up the road just by the junction,” Lane said, “The body is well in along a path at the creek, so the van will have to just stay on the road by the path.”
Darling lifted his chin at the ambulance men, who returned to the van, ready to follow them to the junction. “Ames, camera?”
“Yup,” said this young man, holding up the apparatus.
Harris led the way, with Lane directly behind him. The two policemen drew up the rear. As they approached the beginning of the path upward through the birch trees, Lane stopped. “I’m sorry, we walked here earlier and I’m afraid we were not thinking so much of finding a body as finding out why we’d got no water. We’ve trampled the place up. If there is evidence to indicate how the body got here, I’m afraid it will be a mess.”
At this point the inspector, who was carrying his hat in his right hand, waved it over his head and called out irritably, “Lieutenant Harris, could you stop please?”
Harris, who was a good ten feet ahead, pulled around and called out, “What?”
“Stop please. Right there. Thank you. Miss Winslow was just telling me something. Yes, go on,” he said, turning to her. He was very close, and she saw that his eyes were charcoal; but perhaps they were black and picking up the slight green that seemed to suffuse the copse in the reflected sunlight.
“When we went up earlier there was a very strong smell of the skunk cabbage. It grows along the banks of the creek. Lieutenant Harris broke a leaf with his stick, but I noticed that some other leaves had been broken as well, farther along. I noticed it because of the smell and I thought initially that he must have broken several leaves in his swipe but I saw he could not have reached the others, as they were across to the other side. I thought at the time a bear might have gone through. We have quite a few in t
he mountains just around us and they come down to eat our berries and rifle through the garbage.”
“Can you show me?” He led her past the bemused Harris and down to the stand of water with the skunk cabbage.
“The exchange is through there to the right, and the broken plants are just there behind it. You can’t really see it as well from there because there is a lot of brush along the edge of the creek. I don’t think there is a path on the other side of the creek, so however the body got here, I suppose, it must have come along this same path we’re on now.” They walked farther and came to the edge, where the creek was rapidly climbing to the level of the clearing where they were standing because of the blockage. The police immediately moved toward where the body was lodged, but Lane was looking across the creek. There was very little by way of a bank on the other side and a forest of dense pines seemed to start up almost immediately. There really didn’t seem to be a path on that side. “Now that I think of it, I can’t make out why the plants should be trampled over there. Do you see, Harris—there are skunk cabbage leaves broken along that edge.”
“Ames, pictures please,” said the inspector, looking closely to where she had been pointing.
“Rubbish,” said Harris suddenly, from his position behind Ames. “Obviously it’s bears. Inspector, Miss Winslow is very new here. Doesn’t know the lay of the land. I can’t be here all day, I’ve got to get the water running, get on with my work.”
“All in good time, Lieutenant. Miss Winslow, were you first to arrive here?”
“Yes.”
“And is this exactly what you found?” He indicated the body. She moved gingerly past the inspector and Harris. The water still poured over the barrier, which was faced away toward the downward flow of the creek, and the body was still there, its trailing arm and the back of its head and upper body the only things still visible.
“This is it, really. When I leaned over enough to see what was blocking the water from getting through, I saw him. The creek bank was a little lower, of course.”
“Do you know him?”
“No. I mean, I’ve never seen the back of that head before, I don’t think. I was talking about it with the lieutenant. He must be someone from somewhere else, but how he came to be murdered here . . .”
Darling, who’d been leaning forward to have a look, stood up and turned to her. “So, you think it’s murder, do you?”
“Inspector, really,” she said, waving her hand at the impossibly placed corpse.
Darling smiled slightly and looked up to where Ames was waiting with his camera at the ready. “Ames . . .”
“I know,” said the constable. “Pictures, please!” And he got to work.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“MISS WINSLOW, COULD I TROUBLE you to return carefully up the path with Lieutenant Harris and wait at your house? Ames and I will need to go over the scene, but I should like to ask a few more questions.”
Harris frowned at this. “How long are you going to be? I’ve a busy day.”
The inspector looked around, as if calculating the time it would take, and then said mildly, “I don’t think we will detain you too long. Will you excuse me now?” He turned away and stood with his back to them on the path, gazing at the body, the arm of which still delivered a stream of water musically into the creek, as if it were some macabre limb on an Italian fountain.
“Come on, Lieutenant. There’s still some brandy. We both need something,” Lane said, starting back toward the road. Harris gave a last dark look at the two policemen and followed her.
AMES, IN THE meantime, had been snapping photos, and was now crouched near the body, shooting the details of its insertion into the wooden structure. “It would have taken work to get the heavy, limp, dead weight of a body into this position,” he observed.
“You don’t think he died here, then?”
“Very funny, sir. At the very least he would have to have been unconscious when he was put here. No one would willingly get into a thing like this.”
“In an amazing turn up for the books, you could well be right, for once, Ames. Further to the work of stuffing him into this wooden whatever-it-is, there would have been the work of carrying him here, presumably from that road. Nothing much left of footprint detail with all the tramping back and forth, but I think we would see a different pattern on the path if he’d been dragged here.” Darling gazed at the path leading to the edge of the water, which was creeping ever higher because the outflow was being dammed by the corpse.
“I’m not sure about that, sir. It’s been very dry and that path is quite grassy. The problem is that we don’t know how low this part of the creek normally is. The normal bank of the creek might have shown us something but it’s completely under water now.”
Darling grunted agreement. “What about Miss Winslow’s skunk cabbage? Didn’t she say plants had been trampled along the far edge?”
On the far edge of the pool that had formed by the backed-up water, the ground sloped gently down from what appeared to be dense forest. There was no immediately evident pathway emerging from the underbrush and trees, but it was certainly the case that there were some large, yellow-green leaves lying with their tips now trailing in the water, still wafting a vague, skunky scent of protest. Darling wondered momentarily if he should direct Ames to remove his shoes, roll up his pant legs, and wade across to investigate. As much pleasure as this would have given him, he decided against it. Feeling a slight sense of anxiety that he might be missing something by not going over, he decided in favour of the odds that a person wanting to get rid of a body would be more likely to take an easy, established route than crash about through the underbrush. In a community like this, you could, he reasoned, probably carry bodies around at all hours of the day and not risk being seen. If it had been done at night, it was even less likely that one would take a difficult route to get rid of a body. “Perhaps Lieutenant Harris was right; maybe it was bears. Let’s get the van boys to pack him out. Take some more snaps, Ames, as that is happening.”
Ames, innocent of the near-plan to make him take off his beautifully polished brogues, already insulted by having to walk about on the dusty road and so dangerously near water, bolted up the path to where the two men in charge of the van were smoking and talking quietly. “Okay, boys, you can fish him out now.”
Darling and Ames stood back at the edge of the road watching the anonymous folds of canvas be carried past them to the van. The body seemed scarcely to have shape, though the two men tasked with carrying it were clearly hot from the exertion of bringing it awkwardly up a small path. When the body had been stowed for its final ride back to Nelson, Darling banged a couple of times on the back of the ambulance van to send it on its way. Dangling his jacket over his shoulder, he said, “Shall we go along to Miss Winslow’s?”
A rhetorical question, Ames decided, if he had ever heard one. “First ones at the scene, and a fairly out-of-the-way scene at that. What are the odds one of our two is behind this?” Darling mused as they walked. Ames was momentarily distracted by the growing accumulation of dust from the road on his shoes, but then he looked sharply at his superior.
“An old man and that slip of a girl? Neither one of them could manage hauling the dead weight of the corpse of a healthy young man across the country and jamming him into that contraption.”
“Maybe not either one . . . but both together.”
Ames shook his head. “What circumstance could ever bring those two together to commit a murder? It’s ridiculous, if I may say so, sir.”
“That, and many other questions, are yet to be answered, Ames. That’s where we come in; two open-minded investigators. Or rather, one open-minded investigator and a second, blinded by the sight of a pretty face. Get out your notebook, Ames.”
“Aha, then you agree she’s pretty!”
Darling had no response to this but a disapproving pursing of his lips, a comment lost on Ames, who in spite of the deteriorating condition of his shoes was cheerf
ul again after scoring, he believed, a point on the inspector.
Lane greeted them at the door, upon which they had knocked though it stood open, and led them to the kitchen, where Harris sat gloomily on a chair that seemed too small for him. She pulled a bottle of beer out of the refrigerator and held it up. “I’m sorry, we’ve no water just now. This at least will be cold and not full of germs.”
“Yes sirree!” said Ames. “I’d love some beer.” He looked at Darling, wondering if he was going to stand on a point of drinking on the job . . . in this heat! Thankfully Darling gave a nod. Lane indicated the chairs and the two men sat down while she cleared the brandy glasses off the table. “Unless you’d like some of what we had earlier?” she said, indicating the brandy glass.
“Beer will be fine, thanks. And then I think I’ll need to just collect some information from each of you separately. Is there a place Ames and I can ask each of you some questions?”
Thus it was that Lane found herself outside on the porch on a canvas deck chair watching the play of the changing shades of water on the lake, with a copy of Leave It to Psmith in her hand. She needed something amusing to read just now. It would be her turn when they had finished asking Harris whatever it was they needed to ask. She imagined him answering in his brusque “you’ve got no business asking me these things” tone of voice. But in fact, Harris was on very good behaviour, perhaps because he liked talking about himself and had precious little opportunity to do it anymore.
“How long have you lived here, Mr. Harris?”
“I came over when I was a boy, just after the Armstrongs came. My parents were dead so I was sent to live with them. Lady Armstrong was my aunt and Kenny and his brother were my cousins. 1903, I think. I was ten.”
“Do you have a family?”
Harris shifted in his chair. “No. I was married. My wife buggered off in 1918 just at the end of the war while I was still overseas. I’ve managed perfectly well on my own. Keep to myself, pick my crop, ship it off, live off the proceeds. Get a small . . .” And here he stopped.
