by Iona Whishaw
“Good afternoon, Constable. This is Lane Winslow at King’s Cove. I’m looking for Inspector Darling.”
Ames felt himself brightening up. It was a blistering hot day and he’d had nothing to celebrate on the robbery on 5th Street. “Aren’t we all? He’s off at the post. Can I help at all?” he said hopefully.
She hesitated. The thought came to her that King’s Cove was on a party line. Anyone could be listening. Every instinct she had rebelled at the idea.
“You know, I was just hoping to find out from him about the name of the raspberry variety he was going to recommend. He said he thought they might be available locally. I’ll catch up with him later.”
“Raspberry variety?” Ames said, genuinely puzzled. And then he thought he saw what might be going on. These country telephone systems were all on party line. Did this mean she’d found something? “Of course. I remember now. I couldn’t help you there, but I saw him leafing through a catalogue so he probably has what you want. I’ll tell him.”
“Thank you, Constable Ames. Goodbye then.” She hung the receiver back onto the hook with a feeling of relief flooding through her. Clever Ames! And then further, a feeling of having perhaps nearly made a mistake. What was she going to tell Darling, after all? It had been her intention to come clean about her thoughts about the paper with her name on it. But how much could she really tell him? The Official Secrets Act swore her to silence in perpetuity. And yet her silence kept her on the top of the suspect list. Or would she mention that she had a vague sense that someone had come on her property at night? She cursed inwardly at the impulse to call the inspector, and felt utterly stupid about the raspberry business. It was going on for noon, and though it was a little too early for lunch, she felt in need of head clearing. She would walk over to the post office and see if Eleanor or Kenny were disposed to chat and offer her the ubiquitous cup of tea.
To leave the French doors open or not? It felt a ridiculous question, but Lane’s new anxiety, no, her prudent caution, changed everything. She closed the doors and with a slight pang of sadness, threw the bolt and made her way to the front door. She didn’t see Sandy until she’d very nearly run into him, where he stood on the landing by the spruce tree.
DARLING, BACK IN his office from a walk to the drug store, and holding a message picked up from Will at the front desk to call New York, was not a little puzzled by Ames’s greeting.
“Miss Winslow called about the raspberries, sir. If it is not too much trouble, she would like you to give her the name of the variety you had recommended to her on your last visit.”
“Raspberries, Ames? What are you babbling about?”
Ames smiled delightedly and parked his behind on the corner of his superior’s desk. “I know, sir; brilliant, isn’t it? She’s a cool one, that’s for sure! Thinking on her feet like that. You don’t get that every day from the ladies.”
“You don’t get anything every day from the ladies, Ames. And you can get off my desk. Now what’s this about?” In truth, Darling knew nothing about Ames’s private life, where for all he knew, Ames did very well by the ladies. It was a world that seemed so far in his past. He felt old. A war can wear you down, he thought. It was the great divide between him and people like Ames, who, really, was only six years younger than he was, but they could have come from different epochs.
Ames was undaunted by Darling’s grouchiness and removed himself to a chair. “It’s the party line, sir. All those rural phone systems are set up on a party line. Here in town we might worry about the operator listening in but we don’t, because it’s a busy system and they don’t have a lot of time. But there, they have the telephone exchange at Balfour, and she probably has time to work on her nails all day, and a party line system so anyone can pick up a receiver and have a good listen if they’re bored. They’re only supposed to pick up the phone if it’s the right ring, but heck, why not? Obviously, she heard something on the line and decided to be a spy, and pretend she was wanting something else. It took me a minute to get it, but it was thrilling, I can tell you!”
“You need to get out a bit more, Ames, you’re too easily thrilled. Now get out of here.” So astonished was he by the raspberry situation that he’d not taken off his jacket and hat, and these he now threw onto the rack before settling into his chair. When Ames had closed the door behind him, Darling picked up the phone and then put it down again. If she was worried about being overheard, he should himself be careful. Up until now they’d not spoken of anything crucial on the phone. In fact, up until now she’d been his number one suspect, and frankly, still was, regardless of what he got back from Scotland Yard. He’d wired a detective there with whom he’d served in the RAF, and told him to expect the envelopes. Why would she be phoning him again? He’d been surprised by her once already, at her quick call at the finding of the shoe, but it was in her interest to look helpful. In fact, it was his experience that sometimes criminals couldn’t help being helpful. They deluded themselves into thinking it made them look innocent. Hence the ambiguity in the statement “Helping the police with their inquiries.”
He picked up the receiver again and dialed the operator. While he waited to be put through, he worked on the raspberry approach, which he decided would have limitations. Was this going to mean another trip out to the Cove? Ames would be difficult to shut up if it did. He oppressively banished a slight stir of happiness at the prospect of going out there again and then realized he’d been hearing the phone ringing for some moments with no one answering.
“There appears to be no answer at that number. Would you like another?”
“No, thank you.” Hanging up, he sighed and scooped up some papers on his desk, lining up the edges, which in truth had already been perfectly aligned. He wasn’t bloody well going out there. He’d wait. The corpse was keeping cool. It could wait. In the meantime, he’d put that call through to New York. He didn’t really suspect David Bertolli of much, with all the evidence heading so pointedly in the direction of Miss Winslow, but it would be as well to learn what he could.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“OH!” LANE EXCLAIMED, NEARLY JUMPING out of her skin. “Sandy.”
“I was just stopping by to see how you’re getting on,” he said.
Lane heard a falter in his voice, and thought—no, knew—that it was a lie. She could have sworn he’d had no intention of knocking on her door. He was lurking and she’d surprised him. She felt a swell of anger. Had he done this before? When she thought she’d heard something when she had been by the creek, had it been him? She shook off these suspicions as being unbearable. All this business with the body and people sneaking on to her land. Having the ghastly Sandy lurking would be too much.
“I’m fine, thank you.” She locked the door and then said firmly, “I’m going out now to the Armstrongs’. Thank you for your concern.”
“Yeah, well. You know. A woman alone with all this going on. It must be hard so I thought . . .” He left his sentence unfinished. He looked peevishly at her as she turned to go.
“I’m only trying to help,” he concluded.
“That’s so kind. I’ll be fine. Excuse me.”
She did not hear the exact imprecation he muttered as he watched her walk firmly toward the path across to the post office road, but she imagined it was uncomplimentary. When she was through the trees, she looked back. She could see him moving up her driveway and back toward the road. Her heart was thumping. What did it mean? They had barely been on speaking terms since the godawful fishing trip. She wanted to go back to the house, lock herself into it, and think, but she was committed to going to Kenny and Eleanor’s now, and feared Sandy might reach her gate and then look down the road to see if she’d gone into their cottage. She created a shelf in her mind for Sandy and, right next to it, a shelf for the incursions into her property. She must have time to think it all through.
IN THE DAYS since the murder, the residents of King’s Cove had gone into a pretense of things being “back to nor
mal.” The vicar had asked everyone to pray for the soul of the unknown man during his homily, which had centred largely on the tending of gardens in anticipation of the harvest. Good for the time of year. And for some untroubled residents, it was back to normal, but for others, even the pretense was becoming difficult. Harris had suddenly had a return of the old nightmares and could not sleep. Bertolli had thought he had at last found normalcy, but saw now how it would only take something like this to bring it all crashing down. Reginald, Alice, and Sandy lived in the same household, but in three completely different universes of troubled anxiety. Only Alice’s troubles seemed to her to be unchanged.
Reginald had increasingly given himself over to long walks, from which he returned encased in bitterness at the failure of his idea to thrive, all because Harris was being a bastard about the purchase of the land. He should never have lost that bid. And now Sandy was becoming more and more peculiar. The boy had taken to disappearing for long stretches of time at night. No doubt sniffing after that new woman. Well, he might as well. She had a nice piece of property and he wasn’t getting one inch of land from him.
AND LANE COULD not settle. She returned from the post office with nothing to show for it. Eleanor and Kenny must have gone together somewhere, as his red truck was gone. She had written to her gran and begun to tell her about her new life, but she had spent ages staring at the blank page, wondering what to say about what was happening now. Of course, she could not worry her. Her gran had no knowledge of what her granddaughter had done in the war. She’d assumed that Lane was just what she said: the secretary to a minor, desk-bound military official in London. Lane couldn’t now tell her she was mixed up in a murder. She put down her fountain pen. But she wasn’t, was she? The murder had taken place on her land. Maybe, or he’d been dragged from somewhere else. Where else? But now because of the note, she was the one being dragged right into the centre of it.
WHILE LANE WAS glaring at her blank piece of paper, Darling was hanging up the phone with something like a triumphant bang. “Ames, we’ve got something.”
“Have we, sir?” He looked up from his filing.
“None of your disrespectful tongue, my lad. While you’ve been frittering your time away, I have been gathering information. I think things are looking up. I’ve been on the phone to New York.”
“New York, sir! What time is it there, anyway?”
“Three in the afternoon. I’ve learned something about that character, Bertolli. But his name isn’t Bertolli, it’s Agostino. He’s a composer all right, but his family harbours one or two malodorous characters. It would appear his clan have some rivals and these same rivals are picking off his relations like cans on a fence because of one of them did in a member of the rival family. He’s on the run here. Well, to be fair, in a protection program.”
“Your language is very colourful when you are excited, sir. I thought we were pursuing inquiries based on our victim being English. What bearing have New Yorkers to this case, would you say? Well, besides the obvious advantage of their putting Miss Winslow in the clear.”
“I’ll not be put off by your insinuations today, Ames. Our victim may be English. But he may also be a New Yorker who bought a well-made jacket in a store on Fifth Avenue. We’ve not heard back from England yet and in the meantime, we’ve at least one member of the community with something to fear. What if our corpse is someone dispatched to dispatch Bertolli? It is worth a go. Go saddle up the steeds! And while we are there, perhaps you can look into Miss Winslow’s raspberry problem.”
MEANWHILE, IN LONDON, it had been the end of the day, or the beginning of the evening, if you were at home and preparing to sit down to dinner. Smithers and the director were not. They were sitting glumly together in Smithers’s office looking at pros and cons. Franks was dead and there seemed little reason to indulge in an elaborate cover-up. Indeed, it would seem best not to, since they could not be sure his death was random. If it was related to his work, one of them ought to be over there to oversee what was going on. Just in case. The trouble was, Franks hadn’t been very important. He didn’t speak Russian and had transferred over from wartime communications to peacetime communications. He was an analyst, looking for patterns from translated documents. It was a job any semi-intelligent Oxbridge graduate could do. It seemed inconceivable that anyone would go to the trouble and expense of a trip to Western Canada to bump him off. Unless he’d become entangled with the other side—but would the Russians want an unimportant and somewhat peripheral agent? Yes, why not? He might be disgruntled about being no one special, and would perhaps find an offer attractive.
Even without the presumption that Franks might have been a double agent, it was nevertheless going to be beastly complicated. The fact that Winslow, a former agent, was somehow involved added an unexpected and troubling dimension. The director shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t think, sir, that she did this. But the fact that they are asking about her means that she is a suspect. We don’t know what she will say to protect herself. It will look extremely bad for us if there are garish headlines about ‘British Spy Murder Mystery’ in some local Canadian paper. We’d look like parents who can’t control their children.”
“You are the one that brought them together in the first place with your scheme to recruit her back to us, and no matter what you say, her reluctance to stay here in the first place was strong enough that she could have killed the messenger to get out of it. All right, I grant you she didn’t seem the type, but I don’t think we can afford to have Canadian plods stumbling all over the place. You’re going to have to go. That’s all there is to it.”
Which is how the director found himself flying over the pond to Canada.
“WHILE WE ARE out there, Ames, we will devote some more time to looking for the car, if there is a car. And we will ask Miss Winslow a few more questions about her past. I can’t help feeling that she is giving us a somewhat rehearsed version of her life story.”
Ames said nothing, but smiled slightly. They were driving up the hill that took the road away from the lake for a brief climb. At the point where the road turned, there was a magnificent lakeside property, with a great sweep of sandy beach. The house itself was mock Tudor and was situated among trees that opened into a lawn that met the sand and the lake. Ames wondered what it would be like to live in that kind of luxury. His rooms in town, in the home of one Mrs. Pettigrew, were probably a lot easier to take care of. And closer to the cinema and the shops.
“We don’t have any idea how this man got out there,” Darling was saying, “but he did, so either he drove himself, in which case someone has hidden his motor, or destroyed it, though that sounds like work, or someone drove him there. He had her name in his pocket. Let’s say he comes here with a direct view of meeting her. He calls her from town when he arrives on the train, she comes out and picks him up, waits till his back is turned, and coshes him with a rifle butt.”
“Sir, I thought we were driving out there just now to follow your New York gangster theory.”
“I’ll be following the New York gangster theorem, Ames; you will be following the mysterious English visitor theorem. I’ll drop you off at the turn and you pop down to visit Miss Winslow, and I’ll go up to Bertolli. When you are done, you can walk up to meet me. It’s only a mile. The walk will do you good.”
“Here’s what I don’t understand, sir,” said Ames, ignoring the jibe. “If Miss Winslow went to all the trouble you describe, why would she make the mistake of leaving anything in his pockets? Whoever did this clears out the man’s wallet, handkerchief, keys, bits of sales slips or whatever else he has in his pockets, and leaves just the one paper. If anything, it seems to me that someone could be trying to throw suspicion on her. What if that piece of paper was never his in the first place? What if it was deliberately put there by the murderer?”
Darling was silent. Ames, in truth, was speaking his own greatest hope. If he was honest, he wanted to believe what his eager constable was pr
oposing. She had seemed genuine in not knowing the victim. He had a hard time believing that she could be responsible for murder, but he distrusted his motives.
She had struck him as intelligent and honest. Someone who knew about the hardships of life; he admired, he had to admit, her striking out to make a life for herself on her own, far out in the country. Still, he would not allow his judgment to be clouded, nor would he be goaded by Ames’s insinuations. Ames was young, and he could not imagine admiring a woman without the suggestion of a romance in it. Darling had long ago given up on any idea of romance. That conceit of youth had been blown away by the last few years at the front. He kept firmly away from any thought of Miss Winslow’s striking beauty.
“That is why, Ames, we are going to explore all the options. You may be right, in your Pollyanna optimism, but we are policemen, and we must follow every lead—lead where it may.”
AMES WATCHED THE maroon car drive up the road and then turned down toward Lane Winslow’s house. He was surprised by how the quiet, green landscape seemed to open something in him and free it. Hands in his pockets, he sauntered down the road, practically on the point of whistling, feeling like a young boy again, going out to play on his own. He arrived at the driveway leading down toward Miss Winslow’s white house and stopped, wondering for a moment if he should continue down the road to the post office to see who might be gathered there. It was early. They’d made good time out from town. He realized he was trying to avoid going to see her because he didn’t feel like interrogating her. It was unnecessary, in his view. Still. Must be thorough.
Taking a deep breath, he lifted the chain off the post and swung the gate open. He could see her little green Ford, parked where he had seen it before, up against the door of the unused outbuilding. He saw that there was an overgrown path on the east side of the weathered grey wooden structure and thought he might go around behind it. They hadn’t been able to get around to the back from the other side because the path had been obscured by a sturdy growth of broom, but he saw that it would be easier from this side. He imagined it must simply bring one to the other side of the building and he could walk from there down to the house. His legs swooshed in the long grass that had grown up in the narrow space between the building and the fence along the west side of the upper field, where Lane had been musing that very morning.
