A Killer in King's Cove

by Iona Whishaw

  “How often do you run up to town?” Ames asked suddenly, his cheeriness forming a sharp contrast to her dark and foreboding thoughts.

  She didn’t, she reflected, pick up an ounce of suspicion from him; it was just Darling who seemed to view her with a jaundiced eye. “Once a week,” she very nearly snapped and then felt churlish. She added after a few moments, “I might wish it were less, as it seems to take the whole day somehow, though it is less than an hour’s drive. I pick up things for the Armstrongs—get in supplies. It’s lovely to have all the things one could never get in London during the war. I think that’s why I go up so often. I’m like someone who’s been starved, I’m constantly afraid it will all be gone by the time I get there.”

  “Boy, it’s bad enough living in Nelson. I couldn’t stick it out here, as pretty as it obviously is. Me, I’d like to move out to the coast, but my parents are here and they’re getting on, in their fifties, and I don’t think I can leave them.” This made Lane laugh. She thought of her ancients: Gran in her nineties and various vague sorts of second cousins in their eighties.

  “Fifties! I should think you could go away for a bit and they’d just muddle through. Would you still be a policeman if you went to the coast, Victoria, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes. I love the job. But I’d go to Vancouver. That’s where all the action is.”

  “Well, I’m finding I’m getting quite enough action out here,” Lane declared. “I came out to get away from people and, well, just get away, and instead I get bodies turning up in the creek. It’s not restful. I had hoped to write.” She was sorry the minute she’d said it, and more sorry when she glanced over and saw Ames looking at her, interest manifest on his face.

  Perhaps, he thought, she will tell me she writes thrillers. “Really! What do you write?”

  Bother. She could scarcely answer this question when she asked it of herself. “I used to write before the war. I was reading literature at Oxford and wrote a little poetry. I’d like to try my hand at a novel.” It was just as well she didn’t tell him she had also been reading languages. That would lead to more curious questions that would potentially lead where she did not wish to take him, or anyone here.

  “That’s fantastic!” he said, and she reminded herself to take note of the hyperbole in the expression of people in North America. She had met a few Americans in London and they too went in for exclamatory outbursts. “I wouldn’t mind writing a book one day. About my work as a policeman, maybe. It’ll have to be in a few years. We don’t get a lot of what I’d call intriguing crime around here. Mostly homicides after people have been drinking when they come in out of the bush. Mail robbed off the steamboats or trains. Pretty dull stuff.”

  “Well, now you have a really intriguing murder. Maybe this will make the grade one day.” It was certainly intriguing her. Her mind, momentarily diverted by the charming young Ames, went plummeting back to her situation. What if she did know the dead man? It would add to the evidence that he had come out expressly to see her. Curse Darling, she thought angrily. How can he possibly imagine me killing someone? Of course she understood. He was thorough, he didn’t know her, it was his job. It was a nuisance because he had a face she trusted. It was an open face, the face of a man who was intelligent. She liked the slightly worried cast of his eyes.

  “He’s not bad, you know, Darling.” Ames said. Lane felt herself flush, as if she’d been caught nosing through someone’s papers, something she had, in fact, done in the past, though she had never become comfortable with it. “He’s sarcastic at times, usually at my expense, but he’s smart. I mean, he really seems to understand how people work. You always know he can get to the bottom of things.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Lane said, trying to recover from the feeling of having her mind read. “At the moment, it would appear that I could really use someone who can get to the bottom of things.”

  IN THE POLICE station, Darling was waiting for them, his hat and the manila envelope with the incriminating photo in his hand. “We shall have to go down to the morgue, I’m afraid, Miss Winslow. I’ll take over from here, Ames, if you’d be kind enough to take this envelope back up to my office.” Darling handed over the manila envelope.

  When they were before the sheeted hump that was the body, Darling looked over at Lane, for a brief second held her gaze, as if he was looking for something there, and then he turned back to the body. “I hope you will not find this disturbing, but we must know if you can tell us anything about this man.”

  “I assure you, Inspector, that I shall only be disturbed if I find I do know him, not simply because he is a corpse. These I have seen before.”

  “Have you indeed? Nursing?”

  “No. Can we get on with this?” She found the room, though it was icy cold, stifling with the smell of formaldehyde. Darling nodded at the attendant and the sheet was drawn back to the man’s chest. Lane was surprised to see he was without the tweed jacket that had initially given her that sense that he must be English. But, of course, he was naked because they had done some sort of post-mortem. She didn’t know what this would consist of and was grateful she had only to look at his face.

  It was difficult to tell the age of a man who’d been dead and kept cold. There was an ageless quality she’d seen on the dead soldiers in France. The faces of the dead seemed to lose all personal character and become almost like clay models of human faces. She’d been afraid she would be startled if she recognized him but it was an enormous relief to realize instantly that she did not. He looked young, thirty or under, certainly, and still, she thought, even without the tell-tale clothes, he looked English. He had a thick head of boyish hair parted on the side like the boys at Oxford had before the war. Had he fought? Her eyes wandered momentarily over the parts of him that were exposed. She couldn’t see anything to indicate that he had or hadn’t.

  “Well, Miss Winslow?” His voice was subdued, cool, like the atmosphere of the room.

  “No, Inspector. I have definitely not seen him before. I wonder if he was enlisted.”

  “We found no evidence of any wounds that might indicate some connection with the military. We were hoping we might send the description and a photo to the War Office. The coroner indicated there was a weakness in the lungs. This might have kept him out, but it will still be worth a try. Let’s go back upstairs.” He opened the door and stood to let her pass. “Are you all right? I could offer you a cup of coffee, or tea if you’d prefer. You’ve had a long drive and . . .” He waved his hand at the now-covered body of the mysterious victim.

  Lane went through the door and into the murky hallway of the basement where the morgue was. She could see the door leading to the alley at the side of the building, the light coming weakly through the grubby window. But it looked inviting for its sense of escaping from the dense, cold atmosphere of the morgue. As they mounted the stairs, her fantasy of bolting to the alley unfulfilled, she wondered why he was telling her so many details. He was relating them as though to a colleague, yet she knew herself to be a suspect though he had never once said so to her. Perhaps he was letting her know that he intended to follow up on finding out who the dead man was and that she might yet be found to be connected to him. A kind of friendly warning.

  When they had gained the main foyer of the station, she sighed and turned to the inspector. “I know you think I have something to do with this. For all I know, you do not believe me even now when I tell you I do not know him. Hence perhaps your kindly musing that you’ll be sending his details along to the War Office. If you could but see it, it is as much in my interest as it is in yours for us to discover who he is; why he had a paper with my name ostensibly on it and how he came to be dead in the creek near my property.” She clicked open the catch on her handbag to find a handkerchief with which to wipe her hands, which the visit to the dead had left feeling unclean. But in the second after her outburst, she thought she saw a shadow fall across Darling’s eyes, as if the reproof had landed home.

/>   “That cup of tea?” was all he said in the end, and his gaze was once again placid when she looked up.

  “On the whole, I think not. I will take advantage of my extra trip to town to pick up some groceries. Thank you. If, that is, I am free to go?”

  “You are, Miss Winslow, but I will ask you not to leave the province until this matter has been settled.” He smiled at her and thought, as she disappeared down the steps to the street, that he might have just heard her say, “Not bloody likely,” under her breath. But maybe not. It’s what he would have said in similar circumstances.

  SEIZING HIS CUP of coffee, Reginald Mather got up from the table and went out the kitchen door on to the back porch. Irritably wiping the hand on which the coffee had sloshed, he took a deep breath and reminded himself that after all this time, he’d learned to take this business in stride. His wife—he knew people called her “Mad Mather,” and in his secret heart he did too—was still holding forth inside, as if he had never left the room. He knew it was her condition, but he still found it unbearable when she went off. The sheer spiteful energy that flamed in her when she had a bad bout was staggering to him.

  The theme was familiar. If he had never taken her from her home in England, she would have married someone who would have amounted to something, she would have, she would have, she would have. And now, increasingly, “You and your dreams of millions. We just had a war and you could have made millions if you’d had your famous mill up and running.”

  “What I could have done if I’d never clapped eyes on you!” he muttered to himself. His Labrador, Rufus, had been on the alert since he stepped out and was up, tail wagging, looking expectantly at him. Reginald gulped the last of the coffee and took his stick out of the umbrella basket. “Come on, then,” he said, and the two set off up the path into the forest.

  This walk, he thought, was his last comfort, his secret refuge. His escape. He was gratified, as he crossed the upper meadow, a small clearing that had been created when it had been logged sometime late in the last century for the abandoned log house at the edge of his property, to see the cloth markers nailed to the trees up ahead. This is where the mill would go. Turning to look back down the hill, he could see in his mind where the road would wind, bringing logs from all over the properties he had, or would have.

  He felt the same surge of excitement at the thought of what he would accomplish and this brought with it the sense of injustice he felt because he’d not been able to get the prime pieces of land he wanted. That’s the reason he’d not been able to build the mill. He was beginning to think of it as a chess game between him and the rest of the world. It still galled him that he had lost two prime properties: twenty-five acres on the south slope that had gone to that bastard Harris, who had planted more bloody apples on some of it, and the old homestead land the Yanks had got. There were eighteen prime acres where he had planned to start planting pine in the old orchards and fields. In both cases he’d been outbid. But he still relished what he had, all his original forty acres he’d acquired as a young man when he’d come in 1905, and his quiet additions adjacent to his original property over the years. It was completely unfair of Alice to go on about his failure to have the mill built—to accuse him of being a failure.

  He’d never forgotten the shame and fury he had felt when he’d been sent over: a young man disgraced. It had not been his fault the girl had died; he had never asked her to get rid of the baby. He’d been accused of being unfeeling, of bringing shame on the family. Here, surrounded by his growing acres, his plans for industry, he still sometimes felt the agony as if it were only yesterday. He had loved the girl, Emma. Beautiful, unhappy, soft Emma. It was an explosion in him, this love, because he realized he’d had no idea of love before her. Certainly no one in his family: not his brooding, angry father, or the rigid aunts, so full of their theories about children needing to be corrected and civilized.

  Some days he sat at the top of the meadow, even forty-five years later, and caressed the agony he had felt, standing in the drawing room, his father and aunts arrayed before him in a phalanx of disapproval. It was early evening, the light beginning to fade, a time of day when he had always sunk to his lowest. It was thus, the light behind his judges and executioners so that they were obscured and menacing, that he had heard of her death, and his supposed complicity in it. His banishment, delivered by his father, he scarcely took in, because he was in the grip of a wave of fear and grief that made him feel as if the floor had opened and he was sinking endlessly downward. Even now, in his sixties, he clung to that first feeling of despair because it disproved the central lie they had told about him: that he was unfeeling. And here was Alice, accusing him of being incompetent.

  He had loved Alice, after a fashion. She was something when she was young! The one and only time he’d been back home, in 1910 to bury his father, he went back victorious, a landowner. The cool reception he received from the aunts almost delighted him. He knew they were afraid he’d come back to stay. That they themselves might now be out of a home. By all rights, his father’s house was his now. But he had built his own house, had his own land, all bought with the remittance money they’d sent, which he was sure they thought he’d squandered. He said nothing to ease their minds. Let them suffer their maiden fears of being homeless. And then came Alice—vivacious, forward, strong.

  They’d met one windy day when he was walking the coastal path, his usual strategy to get away from the aunts during his long stay. This was the girl for the colonies! She was chafing at the confinement of waiting for marriage or some cataclysmic event to get her out of her overprotective parents’ house. The matter was settled within a month and, much to the relief of the aunts, he was back to Canada. It took less than a year for him to realize that it must have been a relief to her parents as well, for lovely Alice began to show mood swings that could not be passed off as normal, or attributed to the depression of being away from home, or to her being pregnant. But when she was up, as he thought of it, the Alice he’d been so smitten by was still there. She was full of ideas and was clever enough to make them happen. In fact, it was she who first had the idea that they should forget the orchards. It was a revelation when she said it. In the horror of the fire of ’19, like everyone else, he had lost ninety percent of his crops, and she suggested that the answer was to plant fast-growing evergreens for milling.

  And then there was their useless son, Sandy, who couldn’t stick to anything. He’d gone out to the coast to do agriculture at the university and had botched it, enlisted in the war and botched that, and had, disgraced and without seeing a minute of the fighting, come back, supposedly to help. In his darker moments he knew he had to face the truth. Sandy had inherited whatever it was Alice had. He had been a little moody as a boy, but now, in his twenties . . .

  Barking brought Reginald back from his ruminations. There were bears sometimes that came down to the garbage dump. He whistled to get the Labrador back at heel and turned down along the path that skirted an upper orchard belonging to Alec Hughes, as he still thought of it, though Alec had been dead for thirty years. This forested sweep was the last strip of property he’d been able to afford. He might as well get down to the post office. This was another day Alice would not be able to go, and just as well. He wanted to know what people were saying about their little murder.

  It had been three, or was it four, days since the body had been found on the Winslow girl’s property. He’d seen the police arrive the day before, and felt a grim satisfaction. They would go after the Yanks. They had to. No one in his right mind would think she was capable of such an act. He had been surprised to see the car turn south toward her house, but no doubt they were back to look at the scene of the crime. He’d heard the two cars leave an hour later.

  Usually he was the only one at the post office, but today the locals seemed to be tumbling out of the small space. A saddled horse that he recognized as belonging to Glenn Ponting, the local prospector, looked up from his attention to the
long fronds of grass at the edge of the road as he went by. Old Lady Hughes was standing halfway out of the doorway talking to the prospector, who was evidently on his way in. Glenn never seemed to come in from the cabin he had near the road to Kaslo. Angela was leaning on the counter talking to Eleanor and shaking her head. Lane was standing next to her with her arms folded and her mail already in her hand. There was no doubt what everybody was talking about. “Ladies,” he said by way of greeting when he got inside. Angela was clearly caught mid-sentence and stopped abruptly.

  “Don’t stop on my account. I’m sure you are talking of our local corpse. What else is there? Have you reached any conclusions? Eleanor?” he asked, indicating he was ready to receive his mail.

  Eleanor leaped away from the window and disappeared into the back where she had, earlier in the day, sorted all the mail into individual slots. “Here you go, dear. Something from the old country. Looks as if they’ve been held up somewhere. The postmark is from April.” She handed through a little pile of envelopes. “Is Alice doing well?”

  “Fine.” He felt a flash of irritation. He imagined that they thought it was all somehow his fault his wife was unstable. “Well, ladies, what do you make of it?” He turned to Angela.

  “If only we knew!” said Angela, clearly still in the grip of the initial thrill of it all. “No one knows the man! Well, I mean, Lane doesn’t. We obviously haven’t seen him.”

  “It must have been gruesome for you, my dear, to stumble on such a thing. I’m sure old Harris was no help!”

  Lane smiled noncommittally at this. “It was an unusual afternoon; I’ll give it that. All I wanted to do was water my flowers.”

  “Nothing ever happens out my neck of the woods,” Glenn Ponting muttered glumly through his old-fashioned prospector’s beard, and turned toward the door with his mail.