by Iona Whishaw
“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand how this window business might have any relevance. Are you saying that these windows open when something is going on, or needs to be brought to your attention, or something like that?”
Lane leaned back in her chair. She hadn’t made that connection herself, and yet now that he had, she wondered. Was Lady Armstrong helping her? Rubbish. No need to add a supernatural dimension to an already impenetrable problem. “God, it’s obviously nonsense. All I can really tell you is that I didn’t hear the car going in there, and I have never seen it before. Sometimes I dream of cars in the distance, but I can’t even recall if I dreamed that last night, or the night before.”
Darling got up and walked to stand in front of the French doors. He was completely puzzled by her apparent surprise at the turn of events. The sun cascaded across the lawn, and he looked at it with longing. The days continued to be beautiful, as if this were some epic summer in a child’s memory. He put his hands into his pockets and watched the tops of the trees outside. He loved the way the tops of trees stroked the sky. When he spoke again, it was as if he were musing out loud. “Usually when someone commits a murder, they are finishing a story that began in the past. They are getting, or more likely finding they are not getting, an inheritance, or taking revenge for an old slight. They are someone inconvenient who has turned up. They can come suddenly out of the smoke of the very war we’ve just been through to finish something or seek justice. This man, in spite of your protestations, Miss Winslow, was very likely seeking you. He had your name in his pocket, unless our beavering murderer put that in his pocket to begin this trail of clues that leads to you. What would your guess be?”
“No. My guess is no. The beavering murderer, clever that, given the dam he created in the creek with the body, did not write on that paper. It is more likely that he took everything out of his pockets if they could identify him, the corpse I mean, and had a bit of luck when he found that paper. He left it in and has been doing his Boy Scout best since then to set it up so I look guilty.”
Darling frowned, surprised. “I’m sorry, are you saying that the man, in effect, was looking for you?”
Lane looked past him to the sweep of her lawn and the distant view of the lake. She knew that she was close to losing this view, this garden, this sanctuary from all she’d been through. “The trouble is, I’ve been wondering if it’s possible, but I cannot say anything. I’m sorry, but there is nothing I can do about that. But you must believe me when I tell you, I do not know this man, nor did I kill him.”
Darling came away from the French doors and carefully pushed the chair he’d been sitting in under the table, as though he were cleaning up. “I’m going to see how Ames is getting on with the car you’ve never seen before. Perhaps in the interim you could pack a bag. I really don’t see how I can avoid taking you in.”
SANDY CLEARED HIS throat and with only a slight hesitation knocked on his father’s small office door. He had rarely gone in there, except as a very small child, and he had been quickly fetched out by his mother. His father was not to be disturbed. He was working. What on earth at? Sandy wondered now. Mather had bought some land, had drawn some sketches, but in twenty-eight years, Sandy had never seen a single result. The war had come and gone, he had gone and come back again, and still his father sat in his office and made plans for a business that never seemed to materialize.
“Yes?” came an almost suspicious answer.
“Father, may I speak to you?” Sandy had determined, absolutely, that he would be calm. He stood with his feet braced behind the still-closed door, as if preparing to weather a blast. He wondered why, at his age, he had to continue to feel like a six-year-old before his father.
“Yes, all right. Come in.” It was the voice of a man who could spare only a couple of minutes. Sandy pushed the door open and saw his father, as he had expected, sitting at his desk poring over a map. He had situated his desk so that the natural light from the window illuminated the work surface. He looked up, frowning. “Yes? What do you want?”
Sandy’s immediate thought was that his father was too cheap to use a desk lamp.
He stood before his father with his hands behind his back, as if he were in trouble with the dean of the agricultural college he’d attended in Vancouver. “Father, I have a few thoughts about this logging thing.”
“Sit down, will you? You’re blocking the light. What thoughts?”
Having pulled a chair close to the other side of the desk, Sandy leaned in and pointed at the map. “There really seems to me to be no reason we couldn’t get started. Why don’t we just begin harvesting the trees? We could truck them in to one of the mills between here and Nelson. That would give us enough capital to build our own small mill in, say, a year’s time. The whole province is in a post-war boom. In Vancouver they are building houses a mile a minute. Heck, they’re building houses all up and down the outskirts of Nelson. I mean, no one wants to move this far out of town, but lots of servicemen want nice, new little houses for their families near town. We’d be mad not to capitalize on this.”
Mather sat forward, his elbows resting on the map and his hands clasped together. He regarded his son silently for a few moments after this speech, and then leaned back. “I know what’s behind this, you know. You must think I’m stupid. Or mad. This is a scheme to get your hands on the money. I know you. You think if you work with me I’ll reverse my decision—include you in the business. You think I haven’t thought of how to get my own bloody business going? Do you think that I need you?” He delivered that “you” as if Sandy were something unpleasant underfoot.
Sandy stood up and stared down at his father. Why had he bothered? He was finished now. Why had he bothered with any of it? He would leave, move back to Vancouver. His father could deal with Mother. He could sit on his useless land making his useless plans. When he finally died, well. We’ll see then. He felt himself in the dead, quiet centre of a hurricane of rage. But he savoured the triumph of his next statement. “I just came to tell you that I got Harris to sell.”
Mather looked stunned. “What rubbish is this? Why should he suddenly agree to sell after nearly forty years?”
“It doesn’t matter why. You should be happy. We can get that damn mill up and running. And if you don’t, I will.”
“You know,” said his father, looking at him coldly, “you are as mad as your mother. I see that now.” He resumed looking at his map, trying to hide the elation he felt. Sandy was right. It didn’t matter why. It was going to be his, at last. The only misgiving he had was how on earth Sandy had managed it.
Sandy walked out the front door, letting the screen door slam behind him in the thick quiet of the hot afternoon. He was surprised at what he felt. He had imagined that when this moment came, when he finally stood up to his father on an equal footing, he would feel some kind of stormy rage, but what he felt instead was a grim clarity and inner calm. It pleased him to think himself so in control. He walked out behind the house to an upper path that skirted the top border of their property. It dropped down to run parallel along the roadway about where Lane’s house was, and eventually joined the driveway to the post office.
He would walk and sort out what his next move would be. He could leave—he should leave. Go back to Vancouver and wait out his father. He didn’t know what was in his father’s will. But he knew the outcome, didn’t he? When all was said and done, he would get the property. His mother, if she survived him, would be completely incapable of running the place. He was initially surprised, he remembered, to learn how much money his father had amassed—but, once he thought about it, he realized it wasn’t that surprising. After all, his father was a cheap bastard. He felt an inward tug. He should leave, but he needed to be here to watch over things.
By this time, his walk had brought him parallel to the driveway that pulled into Lane’s place. He stopped, half pretending he hadn’t come to this spot on purpose. The policemen’s car was in the driveway, pa
rked next to her Ford. He could hear voices. He strained to hear what they were saying, but he could just hear the rise and fall of an indistinct male voice. What he saw next was what mattered. Lane was carrying a small suitcase and walking between the two policemen. The door was opened for her and she got into the back seat. Sandy watched without moving until the policemen’s car had disappeared around the corner. He could hear its progress right down to the Nelson road.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE ROOM WAS NOT SINISTER. This surprised Lane. Interrogation, after all, is a sinister-sounding procedure. She was seated at a small wooden table with Darling opposite and Ames on her right at the end of the table, his ever-present notebook in hand. There was a window behind her with fluttering green curtains, through which a pleasant, herby summer morning smell wafted. Darling had a little sheaf of papers, which he squared the edges of. She wanted to see what was written on them: questions? Results of their investigation to date? She hoped it was facts and not speculation. Facts, she felt sure, would sooner or later result in truth, but speculation could lead to assumptions, and her fear was that in the space between what questions she could answer and what she could not answer, assumptions would result in her being put in the frame.
She looked at Darling now, as he read the first page. Was he the kind of man who would collect facts and assemble them into some kind of truth, or was he already forming questions that would begin with “Isn’t it the case that . . .” The former, she hoped.
“I hope you were reasonably comfortable, Miss Winslow?”
“Thank you. Reasonably. And thank you for the breakfast.” This had been served to her in this room and the remains had been cleared away.
“Miss Winslow, I will be asking you some questions now. Ames will be taking notes. To begin, can you tell me why you came out to Canada?”
Lane thought about this. She hoped that not every question would be so difficult to answer. Would she tell him of her tiredness after the war, the sadness at the loss of Angus that would not loosen its grip on her, the sheer randomness of picking not only Canada but the farthest reaches of it? “I think I just wanted to start a new life.”
“What was wrong with the old one?”
“I found I wanted to get away from bombed-out London and just go somewhere that hadn’t seen war, I suppose.”
“I see. Did you not leave family behind? It’s an unusual move for a young woman to come all this way alone.”
“My parents are both gone.” Yes, that was easier than My mother is gone and we don’t know about my father. He has disappeared. “I have grandparents who moved back to Britain and they wanted me to be happy. I seem, at the moment, to be letting them down.”
“What do you mean by that?”
She felt her first stirring of anger. “Because, Inspector, instead of unpacking my boxes and arranging vases of wildflowers around my house, I am here, answering questions that seem to be leading further and further away from the dead man in my creek, itself a circumstance that has made me unhappy.”
Ames cleared his throat but said nothing.
Darling was unruffled. “I am trying to establish why you have come to British Columbia and how this must connect to that dead man, as the circumstances seem too coincidental to ignore. What did you do during the war?”
“I worked in an office.”
“What sort of office?”
“A procurement office.”
“Well, that covers a multitude of sins. Can you be more specific?”
Sighing with some impatience, Lane said, “No, I can’t. I typed at a desk all day and then went home and hoped a bomb wouldn’t fall on me.”
“With your international background, do you not have languages that might have been useful to someone?”
“I don’t know where you are going with this, Inspector. I speak French and Russian thanks only to my early upbringing. No one seemed to be in the least bit interested in this. They only wanted to know how fast I typed.”
“A waste of manpower. Do you not have a university education?”
“I do. It is where I learned to type.”
Darling made a note on the margin of the first sheet of paper, which Lane determinedly did not try to look at. “You came directly here from England, then?”
“No, I spent some time in France with a friend. I thought I might relocate there, but found I could not. I . . . just wanted something new.” Close. She’d been about to say that being in France made her feel still too raw.
Another note. Lane longed to look behind her out the window but instead sat with her arms folded and waited. She had sat through long episodes of questions by authoritative men during the war. She was used to that, but at least then she was required to recall everything she had seen and heard, and she saw the use of it. There was a war on. She wanted to tell Darling again that he was wasting his time; that while they sat, whoever was responsible was back at the Cove, perhaps covering his tracks or finding new ways to throw suspicion on her, but she was surprised by his pointed determination and did not want to raise his suspicion further by appearing to try to evade his questions.
“In Paris?”
“No, in the Dordogne. My friend breeds horses.”
“Your friend, a man?”
“No, Inspector. A woman. A childhood friend.” Good God. Was he going to pursue the idea that the dead man was her lover? She hadn’t thought of this angle and felt herself colouring from a rush of anger. She waited.
“You have something you wish to add?” He had taken his eyes off the paper and was looking at her closely.
“No, I assure you, nothing whatever.”
“I will need her name and address. Ames will collect these from you when we are finished here. Let us move to your arrival in Canada. Why did you come here? It is far from Europe. Quebec might have suited you better. You speak French and it is a shorter journey to visit your country.”
“I read books and brochures. And when I visited Nelson I saw the advertisement for the house in King’s Cove in the newspaper. I asked the agent to show it to me and I loved it. I am not, before you ask, running from a demon lover or some dark past, though I did fancy a break from war-torn Europe. I consider this to be my country now, by the way. May I have some water?”
To her surprise, Darling looked stricken. “I do beg your pardon,” he said. “Ames, could you?” Ames leaped out of his seat as if his young body had been caged in it and disappeared out the door. Darling said, “Miss Winslow, please feel free to stand.”
Lane got up, stretched her back, and went to stand by the window.
“It’s a pretty little town. Nesbitt, the agent, wanted me to stay here. He said I would be safer. But I grew up in the countryside. I have always felt safe in the countryside. Little did I dream he might be right, though I suppose murders happen even in Nelson.”
Behind her Darling made no comment to this but she could hear his pencil scraping over the paper again. The door opened and she turned to see Ames coming in with her glass of water. She felt extraordinarily grateful to him, as if her imprisonment were beginning to take hold and she must hang on to any kindness.
“I have just looked over my notes. Can we go back to the outfit you worked for in London? What was the name of the company?” Darling had resumed his quiet, searching demeanour.
Lane breathed deeply and expelled the breath. She wanted to close her eyes so she could concentrate. Here it was. In all the previous debriefings she’d done during the war, she’d never had to lie. In this moment she understood the implication of the oath she had taken. She was not prepared for it. If she made up a name, it could be checked. If she were vague in her answer, she would sound evasive. Silence seemed the best option. She chose it.
“You cannot remember? Can you tell me who your boss was?”
“Inspector. I had hoped that when your questions brought us all to British Columbia, we might begin looking at the problem at hand. I, though I am innocent in every way of that man’s
death, had hoped that perhaps skillful questions on your part might get at something I had not remembered, or that I had noticed but hadn’t seen the value of. I must confess, I am beginning to feel like poor Joseph K. in Kafka. What you are doing is pointless, Inspector.”
“I think you might leave the progress of this interview to me, Miss Winslow. I have made a note that you have refused to answer my questions. I believe these questions to be relevant to the investigation; indeed more so, since you seem unable to answer them. You leave me no choice but to detain you further. I have, incidentally, sent away to my contacts in Britain for any information they might be able to provide. This should be here at any moment. Perhaps we will make better progress then. Ames. Could you walk Miss Winslow back to her quarters?”
In the hallway, Lane muttered, “Pompous ass!” under her breath.
“I know what you mean, Miss. Is there anything you need?”
“Writing paper. I might as well do my correspondence while I am here.”
Back in the office, Ames found the inspector sitting gloomily at his desk. “One-nothing to her, sir?” he offered cheerfully. “By the way, who is Kafka?”
“Shut up, Ames.”
THE NEXT MORNING the director alighted from the train with much the same relief that Franks had, though he had not taken the train right across the country, but only from Vancouver. He was in a hurry, and he’d flown from London to Montreal and thence to Vancouver. The town looked respectable after all, though being on a train, even from Vancouver, impressed upon him the ridiculous lengths Lane had gone to escape. Escape from what? he wondered now. Perhaps there was something in her family life. He found a small hotel, which provided him with a room on the fourth floor and a view of the mountains on the other side of the lake. Getting instructions from the desk clerk, he walked along the sunny streets until he found the police station. A man in uniform at the long wooden expanse of desk greeted him. “Can I help you, sir?”
