by Iona Whishaw
Having found no one at home, as they turned and trundled back along the rutted road away from the Hughes property, Ames wincing at the sound of the scraping along the bottom of the car produced by the centre ridge of the road, Darling mused, “What do you suppose Mr. Armstrong meant by ‘stark raving mad’? Everyone, or just some of the locals?”
“Harris is odd, but more along the bad-tempered lines. I think it interesting that there’s never been a murder here.”
“Here, Ames. Stop. This, according to the Armstrongs, is where someone called Mather lives.” They were at the right-angle turn at the top of the road and, occupying a plot of land that appeared to fan out from the point of a corner, was a long, wood-framed, pale yellow house, a single storey with a porch across the front of it. Either side of the driveway on the other side of the gate was flanked with lawns and flowerbeds that showed evidence of pride and meticulous care. The beds were brimming with the colours of an English perennial garden.
Ames pulled the car out of the road to the front of the gate and they got out. The noise of the doors on the roadster shutting brought a man out on to the porch who shaded his eyes to get a better view of them. He appeared to be in his early sixties, and was now striding down the driveway toward them.
“Jiminy!” muttered Ames. “Everyone here is ancient. Poor Miss Winslow. Whatever was she thinking, coming out here?”
“Good afternoon, gentlemen. What can I do for you? Lost your way?”
Inspector Darling pulled out his police identification. Another English accent, he noted. “Good afternoon. We’re wondering if you saw or heard an unfamiliar car or vehicle yesterday or last night, anywhere in the area.”
“That is hard to say. Sometimes people turn up the King’s Cove road looking for someplace and drive through. But it’s pretty rare. I would have heard. Heard you coming since you left the Armstrongs’. No, I’d say not. Why? What’s going on?”
Darling turned to look down the road they’d come up. This corner location certainly afforded a sweeping view of the lower half of the settlement. Sounds must carry nicely up the hill as well. “We stopped by the Hughes’ up the hill from the post office, but they weren’t there.”
“Yup, I heard you do all that. They’re in their upper orchard right now. What is this about?” The man was showing a degree of authoritative impatience. Ames imagined he was the sort of fellow who saw himself as the de facto community leader, who thinks he ought to be told things first.
Darling ignored the question. “Does your water come from the same creek as Mr. Harris’s and Miss Winslow’s?”
“No, it does not. Now what’s this about?” The man’s eyebrows, just tending to bushiness, now collected themselves into an irritated ridge above his nose.
“A body was found in the creek, Mr . . . ?”
“Mather, Reginald Mather. Whose body? Which creek?” he added as an afterthought, looking nervously up the hill for a minute.
“We don’t know who. But it wasn’t your creek. And you’re sure about the car?”
“Of course I’m bloody sure.”
“What do you drive, sir? Might we have a quick look at it?”
Mather glanced back toward his barn. “A Morris. It’s in there. Why do you need to see it?”
“Just procedure. Thanks very much,” Darling replied pleasantly, starting toward the barn.
The Morris was a dilapidated vehicle of pre-war vintage. Ames asked to see inside the trunk. “This rifle, sir. Why do you have it in the car?”
Mather scowled silently for a moment. “My wife had gone in search of a cougar. Dangerous animals. My son brought her home . . . threw the gun in the trunk. I forgot to take it out.”
AS THE POLICEMEN backed out on to the road, Mather stood on the inside of his gate with both his hands resting on the top of it, holding the card upon which they’d written the number for the Nelson police detachment, should he “think of anything else.” He watched them drive slowly toward the Bertollis’ and felt a slow warming of satisfaction at the thought of the Yanks having to deal with the police. It mingled with a sense of disquiet that Sigmund Freud would have identified as something to do with his ego taking a beating by a policeman who didn’t know his place.
“Ames, stop the car.” They were a few hundred yards along the road toward where they had been told the Bertolli property was. The vehicle had no sooner come to a stop than the inspector was out and walking back along the way they had come.
“You! Can you stop, please?” he called out toward the field on their right. Ames got out of the car and looked in the direction Darling was calling. A man was looking at them at the far edge of the field, as if deciding whether to disappear into the nearby trees or obey the summons. Slowly he walked toward them. He was young, a fact that surprised Ames, as he’d begun to think the entire place was a retirement community, and he had the impression the man would be surly. He just looked like the kind of man they sometimes arrested after a night of drinking down a paycheque on a Friday. Ready to take offence.
The man climbed over the already broken-down wire and post fencing and stood looking at them. “Who are you?” he asked, as if he owned the place, Ames thought. He took out his notebook and pencil and flipped it open to a new page, a movement not lost on the young man, who cast him a disagreeable look.
“Inspector Darling, Nelson Police. This is Constable Ames. Now, I wonder if I might ask you the same question? Name?”
Ames looked studiously at his notebook. Darling was addressing this man in the meticulously polite voice he used for suspects. It was the first time he’d really brought out that voice on this trip. The surliness of the young man, no doubt, was the reason.
“Sandy. Why do you want to know?”
“Ah. Are you the son of Reginald Mather from just along the road?”
“Yes, for all the good that’s ever done me. What’s going on?” He was beginning to sound peevish.
“Is this part of your father’s land?” Darling waved a hand at the field out of which Sandy Mather had come. This seeming change of tack seemed to irritate the man even more.
“No, it’s not. The people who own it aren’t here anymore. I sometimes cut through it. Listen, what is this? I don’t have all day.”
“A body has been found in a local creek. We are trying to find out what we can. Where were you coming from just now?”
The young man looked behind him. “What creek? What are you talking about?”
“The one that feeds into Miss Winslow’s and Mr. Harris’s properties.” Inspector Darling waited politely. The other man had not asked about whose body it might have been. Perhaps not surprising. In a rural area, the health of the creek would be paramount. “Do you work the orchards hereabout?” Darling nodded his head toward a stand of what he supposed to be apple trees near a greying wood-slat house, which is where he supposed now that Sandy Mather must have been coming from.
“No I don’t, as a matter of fact. I’m planning to get a mill up and running . . .” Sandy seemed poised to say something else. “Whose body? Has someone here died?”
“We don’t know. Mr. Harris, who found him along with Miss Winslow, did not recognize him.”
Mather’s face clouded. “Harris? Why would he be stumbling around in the creek with that b . . . that woman?” Ames looked up from his notebook, his hand frozen. He could have sworn Mather had been about to say “bitch,” and he didn’t much care for it.
Darling, however, went on smoothly. “Have you heard or seen anything out of the ordinary, Mr. Mather? Met anyone you didn’t know? Heard or seen a car that would be unusual in this community?”
“No, I haven’t. Now I’d like to get home.” Sandy looked down the road toward his house. “I suppose you’ve been bothering my dad with this as well.” A slight tinge of satisfaction appeared to creep into his voice at the thought of his father so inconvenienced.
“We’ve been bothering everyone, Mr. Mather, as we are certain the body was the victim of a murde
r. Where did you say you were coming from just now?”
Sandy Mather seemed discomfited at this. “There’s a patch of timber down behind that house that runs down along the back road. I’m hoping we can get it. I was planning to write to the owners about it. We, I, am trying to identify the best stands of timber for the mill.”
IN THE CAR later, as they rolled slowly toward the Bertollis’, Ames said, “I didn’t like him, sir.”
“Nor did I, Ames. Wandering about looking at timber seems scant employment for a man of his age. I suppose we cannot suspect him merely because he is disagreeable.”
“He was extremely disagreeable about Miss Winslow; he was about to call her . . .”
“Yes, Ames. Very interesting, that. He’s already formed a negative opinion. He could have made some proposition to her about selling her stretch of timber for his putative mill, and she rejected the offer. Or indeed, he could have made advances of a more personal nature and been rejected. That would account for the level of bitterness. Still. One begins to scratch under the surface of a seemingly idyllic community.”
“A point in her favour, I must say,” remarked Ames.
At the opposite corner of the squared-off intersection of the upper road, before the road turned back down to meet the Nelson road, the Bertollis’ renovated log cabin perched on a low hill at the front of their property, surrounded by a shimmering stand of birch trees. Ames nosed the car along a narrow, rutted driveway that curved around a small creek to the back of the house. The cacophony of two un-ferocious-looking collies greeted them. Ames and Darling sat in the car watching them.
“I’ve never heard of a collie biting, sir,” suggested Ames.
“Why don’t you hop out and test your theorem?” countered Darling. In the end, they were saved the trouble by the man who exploded out the kitchen screen door onto the veranda.
“Shut up, will you!” he shouted, waving his arms in a shooing motion. The dogs evidently decided they’d done their job and sauntered around the corner to the other side of the house wagging their tails. Darling and Ames got out of the car.
“Sorry about that, Inspector. All done down at the Winslow place?” asked the man.
Now Darling had an opportunity to have a better look at Dave Bertolli. Dark, in his thirties, with the kind of urban vigour of a working-class shopkeeper.
“Come on in!” Dave held open the screen door, using a leg to keep the dogs out. “Get away, you! I was just making myself a cup of coffee, can I interest you in a cup?”
Darling nodded. “Yes, thank you. It’s been a long day.” They were invited into a narrow living room with an enormous stone fireplace that appeared to be part of the older log cabin. The windows had been enlarged and attached was an airy addition, which contained a wall of bookshelves, a grand piano, and on the outside wall, yet more windows. The sun streamed in, filtered into delicate golden shapes by the trees off the raised porch outside. The two dogs stood by the windows looking in, and then walked out of vision and collapsed onto the porch to await further excitement from another quarter.
When they were seated around the kitchen table, coffee in hand, Dave said, “Angela, that’s my wife, and the three boys were going to spend the afternoon at the beach with Lane—you know, Miss Winslow. I need to patch up the roof and I was going to get to work on it without the boys climbing all over everything. In the end, Angela decided to go ahead with the beach plan just to get the boys run down a bit. We’d be having a different conversation if they were here, believe me! They’re a handful. They wanted to stay, because they’re ghoulish little monsters, and hear all about the body. Once I left you at Lane’s I decided to boil up some coffee and enjoy the peace and quiet.”
“What do you do, Mr. Bertolli?” asked Ames.
“I write music. It sounds fancier than it is, trust me! I write commercial jingles and music for motion pictures.”
“Excuse me for asking, but this seems a strange, out-of-the-way place to come for that. Should you not be in California, or some other more central place for that sort of thing?” Darling asked.
Bertolli was silent for a few moments. “I have some pretensions to serious composing, I suppose, and I didn’t think I could stay on in New York. My late father wasn’t keen on my profession and left me the family business, and I saw a chance to get away. We imported olive oil, cheese, that sort of thing. My brother said he was willing to take it off my hands. I used the money to move out here. I like Canada. I used to read boys books about the Mounted Police. You know. Anyway, here I am.”
Shortly afterward, as Ames negotiated turning around in the small area where they’d parked the car for their return journey out the rutted driveway to the road, Darling said, “I didn’t believe that story for a minute, did you?” He didn’t wait for an answer, as Ames seemed to be concentrating on not backing into a pile of garden implements. “I can see wanting to go to Canada, but why not Quebec, or Nova Scotia, even, if you wanted to get well away? Still close to New York. British Columbia, in this case, is an overstatement.” He pursed his lips.
Ames seemed to have finally managed the transaction and they were bumping out of the driveway. “I wonder if old whatshisface, Harris, is right: cherchez les Yanks? His station wagon would be convenient for transporting our tweedy friend, if it wasn’t so crammed with junk,” he observed.
It was late afternoon when they were back in Nelson. They went downstairs to the morgue, to make sure their prize had arrived and take another look at him. The coroner would no doubt provide the details but the abrasion on the side of the head was interesting. They rifled through his pockets and found but one soggy and matted piece of paper, with which Ames was dispatched to the lab.
Now they spread a large piece of paper on the desk and took out the envelope with the hand-drawn map given them by Kenny Armstrong. “Let’s redraw this . . . wait. Let’s not. Go down to the Land Title office and get an ordnance map of the area. We’ll get an accurate look at the layout. There may be back roads, pull-outs, and God knows what-all we didn’t see. And pick up see-through map paper.”
CHAPTER NINE
“WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND IS how the fellow came to be jammed in there. I don’t understand any of it! Who was he? Why was he here? And once here, why was he murdered?” Kenny Armstrong was comfortably folded into his favourite chair with his feet propped up on the kitchen stove, onto which he’d just put a kettle. His wife and Lane had put away the dinner things and had joined him in the worn and perfectly bottom-shaped rattan chairs. Lane smiled. Kenny was in a state of sublime happiness. Someone he didn’t know had been murdered, right here in King’s Cove, and because the Armstrong house was fed from a different creek, he’d not even been particularly inconvenienced.
“I’m sure, my dear, that your mother saw the whole thing,” said Eleanor, spooning some black tea into her teapot. She brought out her china, as if a discussion of this dead stranger warranted the good tea things.
“Well, if she did, she won’t be saying much. She’s not walking about talking to you, is she?” Kenny addressed this question to Lane.
“No. Aside from opening the windows, she’s a very quiet house guest. Though when I think of it, she must see me as the interloper. Harris is a handful, isn’t he? All that huff and puff. I thought he’d explode when the inspector asked me to go first to show him the scene. He seemed to think I was quite dim. He fumed and fumed and didn’t look like he was getting any relief until he was asked to speculate on who it was, which neither of us could have said, as we only saw the back of his head.”
“Yes. As stuffed as a shirt can get. You know he fought with my brother in France.”
“Mrs. Hughes told me that. When I mentioned it to him, in an ill-fated attempt to make conversation while we waited for the police, he plunged into a dark, moody silence. It was foolish of me to talk about the war. It’s so personal. Of course you can’t make light conversation on the back of so much suffering. I was very sorry to hear your brother died over t
here, by the way. It must have been ghastly for you all.”
Kenny swung his legs off the stove, something he did with the grace and energy of a young man, though he would surely be in his sixties. He tipped the kettle toward the pot, and then stopped. “You know, she never said a word. I was broken up about it myself. He was a wonderful, gentle sort of chap. I was going to go, but he insisted. He said I needed to stay with our mother and run the orchard. I always felt horribly guilty about the whole thing. Then, after the fire of ’19, I couldn’t be bothered with the orchards anymore. I just planted a few trees for Mum.
“Harris, to be honest, was more of a mess when he got back. He had a lot of bad luck on top of just being demobbed and having shell shock. His orchard was all but destroyed in the fire and his wife couldn’t cope and left before he even got back. Poor thing disappeared. We thought she’d gone to her people in Nelson but word got back that she’d never arrived there. Perhaps she went to the coast and died of the influenza. He got his batsman to come over and help him get started, and shortly after they’d replanted the orchard, the poor fellow was killed when he got in the way of a tree they were felling. Harris wasn’t so difficult before all that. He could be moody when he was young, but his temper after the war was unbelievable. I had to pull him off Reggie one time. I thought he’d kill him, and it was over some imagined slight. Jumpy as hell too. That’s what it was! Alice Mather had been going around shooting things and he nearly went crazy. Now he’s older, and apt to live on his past glory and think that everyone else is stupid. He’s a cousin of mine, as a matter of fact.”
Lane frowned. “You know, it’s so funny about people like that. I was watching for a minute when we took the police back to the body. Harris looked quite green. He seems so hardened.”
“So you didn’t get a look at his face? The dead man, I mean,” asked Eleanor.
“Sorry, no. He had a nice tweed jacket though. Leather buttons. I don’t think he’d be very old. Under thirty-five, to judge by the physique and the hair.”
