by Iona Whishaw
“Lane, I don’t blame you. You are angry. I can explain why that happened. It was necessary . . . there were circumstances.” Angus had pulled up a chair and now sat near her.
“Yes, I bet you can explain. Always one of your great skills, talking.”
“Lane, this is not like you. This bitterness. You know what kind of business we are in. The fact is, after that business in France, we had to change our strategy.”
“One correction, Angus: you are in the business, apparently, though you never let on, did you? I am not. There is no ‘we’ here. I was an utter fool. There never was a ‘we,’ was there? What are you,” she looked at him critically, “early forties? I never thought about your age. You must have a wife, children.” It was a sudden sickening wave of realization that caused her to add, “You must have had them then.”
Angus said nothing.
She felt a sinking rage take her over and set her lips grimly. “You are a bastard, aren’t you? Who was this man you sent over for me?”
“Listen, Lane, darling, I would have given anything to change what happened.”
She held up her hand, palm warding him off. “No. Stop. Do you want to know what has changed in me? Night after night behind enemy lines by myself, while, it now turns out, you were at home with the wife and family. You dying. And now, when I finally have found a shred of peace and freedom, you come barging back into my life trying to manipulate me. You had no right . . . you have no right. Who was that man?” her eyes widened. “Did you have him killed so that I could be implicated and brought back? Did you do this to me?” She stood up and backed away from him.
Dunn leaped up and took her by the shoulders. “Look at me, Lane. How mad do you think I am? I cared about you and you were a damn good employee. You’re in a spot of trouble here and we need you back. Now stop this nonsense. There is really nothing sinister here.”
Lane looked up at him, feeling him holding her by the shoulders, smelling his familiar smell. “You ‘cared’ about me? ‘Cared?’ I care about the postman, for God’s sakes. I would have done anything for you, and I did, and now I discover that the whole time you were ‘handling’ me. You were, weren’t you? You were never a pilot at all.” She pulled away from him and went toward the door.
“Now, Lane, you know how it was in the war. The right hand not knowing about the left hand and all that. It’s all changed now. It’s a modern operation. You’d be brilliant and we need your skills. Come home. What on earth can there be here for you?”
Lane stood for some moments in silence, her back to him. Was she tempted? She could be back in London, back among her friends, the war over, restaurants brimming, theatres, music. But she had never wanted that life, she decided, and wanted with a passion what she had now. She felt a ferocity about how close she was to losing it and turned to look at Angus, her eyes hard. “I can’t really think how that would be any of your business. I loved you. What a fool I was.” She turned the handle and pulled the door open. Darling was leaning against the wall, his hands in his pockets. “We are finished, Inspector,” she said.
When Darling came into the room, he saw Angus moving away toward the window and Lane sitting, her face impassive, as though she was waiting for someone else to make the next move. He wondered what could have passed between them. He had heard only one sentence: Lane’s voice, “I loved you.”
“Major Dunn?”
Dunn turned, and Darling saw that his face was set in angry lines. “I have asked Miss Winslow to return with me to London. I assume there will be no difficulty with this?”
Darling did not see the tears of rage spring up in Lane’s eyes until he turned to address her. So that was how it was, he thought, seeing the tears. “Since you will be returning with Major Dunn, Miss Winslow, and in light of the information the major shared with me earlier, there is some doubt that you could have been involved. If we can clear you, through fingerprinting and so on, of the car, you will be free to go, and I shall not pursue any further investigation against you. There remains, however, the problem of the corpse, which I have on ice downstairs. I shall need as much information about him as I can get. We will need to continue our inquiry at this end.”
Lane angrily wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and looked at Darling. She had an appalling impulse to smile, but instead she said, “On the contrary, Inspector. I shall not be returning with the major. There is nothing for me to return to. And I was just in the process of trying to find out about the dead man myself. I confess, for a minute I thought the worst and assumed that Major Dunn had sent him out here to be killed so that he might have the means of persuading me to return. He has assured me this is not the case, but I’m not quite sure, you know, that I believe him.” She had completely recovered her aplomb, and now sat with her legs crossed in apparent comfort on the chair. She smoothed her turquoise skirt, folded her arms, and waited.
Dunn sighed and pushed his hands into his pockets. “Clearly everyone is reading too many thrillers. The facts themselves are most prosaic. He was a minor operative called Jack Franks who said he was coming out to find something out about his family. When his parents were killed in the Blitz, he somehow found out that he had been adopted. He had traced his roots to this godforsaken place, and I gave him a leave to explore this. It was fortuitous for me that this journey was bringing him here to where Miss Winslow was, as, in the new international climate, I find I need a person with her skills. I asked him to look her up and give her a note.”
“You knew I was here? How?”
“Really, Miss Winslow, it surprises me that you have to ask. We know where everyone is.” At this Lane turned away from him and then stood up.
“Inspector Darling. You have said you likely have no case against me. You have my fingerprints. You will certainly not find them on the photos taken of those in the car, and therefore I wish to collect my things and make my way home at your earliest convenience. No doubt at some point today you will have contacted any rental agencies in town that might still be missing a black 1933 DeSoto, and you will find it to have been let out to this unfortunate Jack Franks. I promise to stay put in King’s Cove, should your assessment change. Major Dunn also, I believe, has no means to compel me to do what he wishes, so I need not be detained on his account.” She turned and looked one last time at Dunn. “I most earnestly hope, sir, that you will find it possible to forget where I am from here on out.”
Darling called out into the main office. “Ames. Could you run Miss Winslow home?”
Lane walked past him, not looking back, her arms still folded across her chest and said with a tight smile, “How very kind.”
Ames drove in silence, contemplating his ill luck. On the one hand he had this opportunity to spend the next hour with this lovely suspect, whom he was relieved to learn was not so much a suspect anymore, but on the other hand, she was in a grim and silent mood. He longed to know what had transpired with the English type who’d arrived at the station in the morning. Something momentous, for certain, or he’d not be driving her home now. They were more than ten miles along the road before she finally spoke and it was not to relieve his curiosity.
“The thing that troubles me is that whoever it is, is still there. And they’ve gone to a lot of trouble to implicate me. Is it me they are after, or am I just a convenient new expendable person to get rid of? They aren’t dead keen on new people there, some of them.”
Ames eased off on the gas slightly, as if wanting to slow their progress back to King’s Cove. He was frowning. “Are you saying you might be in danger?”
“No, I don’t really think so; why should I be? But it’s a small place and one of the less than twenty people that live there killed this man. Why? You don’t kill people unless you feel threatened. Or you want something. Could it have been a simple robbery? Maybe we should be watching to see who starts living high.”
Laughing, Ames asked, “What would ‘high’ look like out there? The sudden appearance of a new tractor?” This was mor
e like it. She was talking. He clearly wasn’t going to get to know exactly what had happened with the man from London or why she’d been allowed to go home, but he was happy. He’d never really believed she could have been in it, though the car had rattled his confidence nearly completely. He glanced at her. She was leaning her elbow on the window and looking out at the passing lake. Her hair was blowing gently off her face, the light of the sun highlighting the beautiful lines of her cheek and nose. Out of his league, completely. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. She was too old for him, in any case. April at the café was more his speed. Nineteen and a lot less troubled than this glamorous woman. This, he just knew, was the woman for Darling. They had a thoughtful quality in common. And she was smart. He’d like a smart girl. Ames wasn’t so sure about a smart girl for himself.
“No. I think not a robbery. This man—his name was Franks, did Darling tell you that?—Franks came out there to find someone. He told Major Dunn that when he asked for leave. Dunn was that insufferable prig that came to see Darling,” she added, looking at Ames. She realized he probably hadn’t gotten the full story.
Glancing at her, Ames said, “Aha. You knew that man.” This whole thing beat the local business they usually had to deal with. “Is he the reason you . . .”
“That I emigrated? I used to work for him, he died, the war ended, and I left. Only he didn’t, obviously. He’s certainly the reason I won’t go back!”
Died. Wow. Here was a story, surely. He was going to ask about the dying but sensed she would not tell him. “I only was going to ask, is he the reason Darling decided to let you go?”
“Oh. Yes. I suppose so. I’m not one hundred percent in the clear, you know, but there seems to be a reasonable doubt about my motivation to kill a man I’ve never seen in my life and plant him in my own creek and hide his car in my own barn. Well, the prints will clear that up,” Lane said acerbically.
“We are looking a trifle incompetent here,” Ames agreed. He chewed his lower lip. “I’ll give the car another going over. I might have missed something.”
Lane said nothing for a while, and gazed out the window. Some few small farms were beginning to be built on the flats approaching Balfour. They were beautiful, with their green sweeps down to the lake. She wondered if she should have bought a property that would place her right at the lake’s edge, but then thought about her house and knew, it had to be that house, with that view, that busy ghost. “I didn’t think to ask. Were the keys in the car?”
“No. They’re still to be found. And the way things have been going, I bet you anything they’ll be found somewhere around your place. Let’s have a look when I get you back.”
“God, I wish I knew who was doing this. In a way, knowing it’s not me means we are ahead of the killer. If we could keep him convinced that you might still suspect me, he might be lured to continue his campaign. That gives me an idea. Since you haven’t moved the car, give the car another going over and maybe I’ll spread the news that you might have found something—that you’ll be coming back out with a forensic kit to check. The person who put the car in my barn may come out of the woodwork to try to cover up whatever he fears is still there.”
Ames looked at her with something between admiration and horror. “No, no, no. No. Absolutely not. You should not become involved in this. It is absolutely not safe. If the murderer is keeping an eye on things, he already knows you were ‘arrested’ and he may be feeling confident. He’ll get a nasty shock when he sees you back there. No. I warn you, I’ll tell Inspector Darling. He won’t have it either.”
“I’m not frightened of Inspector Darling.”
“Well, I am. He’ll have my hide. You’ve got to promise you won’t do anything stupid.”
“All right. Relax. I managed to survive the war. I’ve no intention of getting myself done in now.”
This raised a whole new line of thought in Ames.
“Who was that guy, then?”
“Just a man I used to know. Don’t bother, by the way. Why don’t you tell me about yourself? Do you have a young lady?”
Ames, though frustrated in his attempts to discover more about his mysterious and glamorous passenger, was young and easily brought to expound on his own enthusiasms and so, until they pulled into Lane’s driveway, he talked about April and how they’d met when he was investigating a robbery in the winter.
They sat for a minute in the silence of the car’s engine being switched off. Lane looked down the sweep of the grass to the house. She could feel a little pull of anxiety in her. Somehow the situation had turned a corner. It was clear now that it almost certainly was someone right here, around her, who had killed Franks. No one had followed him here. Well, one couldn’t know that for sure, she thought, but whoever might have followed him could have just finished him off in England. In her gut, she knew it was someone right here. Someone she met at the post office, perhaps every day, or had tea with, or met on her rambles on the forest paths.
The dead man, Franks, had been here to see someone; was it someone who didn’t want to see him? She couldn’t immediately see a reason why she should be in any more danger than she was before. After all, whatever motivated the killing really had nothing to do with her. Whatever end had been sought must have been achieved by his death. Yet, she felt somehow as if she were being pulled in. Franks had been in the same business she had. They had a common acquaintance—she would allow no more than this term—in Dunn. Whether she liked it or not, it did involve her, and whether Darling liked it or not, she would work to find out what had happened, if only so she could recover her sense of peace and safety. She sighed and pushed down the door handle. She knew this constant feeling of anxiety. She’d had it all through the war. She had hoped never to feel it again. Well, she wouldn’t be telling this fresh young policeman what she was feeling, that was for sure. He’d only go report it to Darling.
“Thanks for the ride. I’m going to make myself a cup of tea. I think you’d better have one before you go back. I’ll put the kettle on and we can search for the keys while it boils.”
Ames considered for a moment. “I’d love one but I’d like to get another look at the car, and I think I’ll head back. The boss expects me back for three. It doesn’t give me much time.”
In the house, Lane threw her overnight bag onto her bed and then went to stand in her sitting room. When he was gone she’d wash everything she was wearing and hang it in the sun to clear the aura of her jail cell nights. She pulled open the curtains to look at her beautiful view of her lawn and the lake in the distance. Then she remembered that she had not closed her curtains when she left. She turned to look at anything else that might have been moved when she heard the clanging of her phone.
“KC 431,” she said into the horn.
“Lane. Thank goodness! We’ve all been wondering. Sandy said he’d seen you drive off in that policeman’s car. They can’t have arrested you for this?” It was Eleanor. Relief coursed through Lane.
“No. Everything is fine. I spent a couple of nights in town. Thank you for tidying up and closing the curtains, Eleanor.”
“Well, we didn’t know what had happened, how long you’d be gone. You’re to come over here this minute for a cup of tea.”
“That nice young policeman is just going over . . . some things.” She realized they didn’t know about the discovery of the car. “I tell you what. Give me half an hour, and then you come over here. And bring Kenny. We’ll have a nice cuppa on my porch. I’m sure I have a lovely packet of English biscuits I picked up the last time I did a proper shop in town. We’ll have that.” She put the earpiece back onto the hook and jiggled it past where it stuck.
Lane couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her house now that she was in it. She put the kettle on and then went through the house flinging open curtains and ran upstairs to open the windows, calling out, “There, Lady Armstrong, I’ve saved you the trouble!”
She could hear Ames at the front door and she rememb
ered that they were going to look for the keys. “Anything new in the car?” she asked.
“Nothing. I looked under it, on the tire rims, under the seats. No keys.”
Leaning against the door jamb, she looked out over the yard. If the murderer had wanted to plant them, where would they be? Would he throw them somewhere outside here? No. Too difficult to find. “If I’m the person who wants to frame someone—well, me—I put the keys somewhere they can be found, but somewhere that looks as though they’ve been hidden. I might even try to get into the house to hide them there.” She looked anxiously into her hallway. Could someone have come in? She had locked everything. Except Kenny had come in, hadn’t he? No. It wouldn’t do. Kenny had come in because he had a key to the house. “Look. I know you want to get back. I will keep my eye open and telephone if I find them.” Ames looked at her, his face a picture of worry. “I don’t think you should stay out here. It’s not safe. Why don’t you come back to town till we’ve sorted this?”
“Thank you, Constable Ames. You are so kind. I absolutely will not be driven from my home. I don’t believe for a minute that the killer wants me dead. He just wants the blame deflected to me. Harming me would do him no good at all. I feel quite safe. Please let me know when the fingerprints have been compared. I know you will find nothing, but I will feel grateful to hear it from you, nonetheless. In the meantime, I will keep my ear to the ground and contact you if I learn anything. No doubt you and the inspector will need to retrench and figure out your next moves in this matter. I will be here if you need me.” After this deliberately plucky speech she watched Ames back out of the drive. She wished she felt all of the confidence that she had tried to show to him. It was logical, however, that whoever it was would not want to harm her. Nevertheless, it did not take away the anxiety that someone had her in his or her sights.
