by Iona Whishaw
She set about preparing for the Armstrongs. She spread the little table on the porch with a tablecloth she’d brought from France with blue flowers on it; forget-me-nots. How ironic. She’d come to King’s Cove to forget, but now she knew she never would. Perhaps it was better. You don’t leave yourself behind. But you can build on what you have. She would not lose what Angus had meant in her life. Maybe it would just soften in time. And then she severely told herself to think of something else. Especially after seeing Angus again. Loving him had been a colossal waste of time.
“Hellooo,” came Eleanor’s voice from the doorway.
“Come in!” Lane called back happily. A distraction and, she realized, her first proper guest, if you didn’t count Harris guzzling her brandy after they found the body. They peppered her with questions about why she’d been taken away, but she persisted in making light of it.
“But what was the cell like? I can’t imagine what a jail cell is like in Nelson. Was if full of the local inebriates?”
“It was very bare, with clean linen and curtains. Curtains in a cell, can you imagine? They let me be in a little office from breakfast on. I had a view out the back window, and could see all the people who were at liberty parading about the street. Now enough about me!”
Eleanor gave up and said, “Well, you’ll never guess what’s happened! It has burst on the scene like fireworks just this very morning. I so wish you could have been in the post office to see the effect!”
“How could something earth-shattering happen in the time I’ve been gone?” asked Lane, surprised.
“I’m with you there. I would have said nothing ever happens here, till people began fishing bodies out of the creek! But it is quite shocking, even though it’s not a body. Harris has given in to Mather and is selling him that parcel of land up behind the Hughes’ that Mather’s been trying to get at for thirty-five years! They’ve been practically at war since about 1910 about it, if not before. Now, suddenly, he capitulates!”
At that moment, there was a knocking at the door and Ames came through the house to the porch. Lane stood up, surprised. “Constable, You’re back. You remember Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong? They’re just sharing some local news. You’ve reconsidered about the tea?”
“I do,” he said. “Good afternoon. Listen, Miss Winslow, I just popped back to padlock the door. No, no tea thanks. I have to get back. At this rate I won’t be back till four.”
“Thank you again for driving me out, Constable Ames. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help.”
“Nope, not a thing. But I mean it, Miss Winslow—no! On that other matter, I mean.” He looked severely at her and she covered a smile. A cheerful twenty-four-year-old could only look so severe. She promised him she would do as she was told, but today she had a new consciousness that she had reached her threshold of doing what she was told by men, even harmless young men who really only meant well.
When she and Kenny and Eleanor had sat in silence until they could hear the car disappear up the road, Eleanor turned to Lane. “What did he mean with all that ‘no’ business?”
“I had this idea that I thought might help to catch our murderer. He wasn’t terrifically keen. He thought it might be dangerous, and you know, I believe he is right.”
“What sort of idea?” Kenny asked, clumping his cup down into its powder-blue saucer and sloshing tea around. He leaned forward, his medusa-like eyebrows dancing with curiosity.
“It was nonsense, really, and now that I’m here I can see how dangerous it is. I was going to have you let everybody know, in a gossipy sort of way, as they were trooping down to get their mail, that the police had found something in the car and were going back to get their kit to investigate. That might cause whoever it is, if it is someone here, which I have reason to believe now, to sneak back to the car to try to get rid of the evidence. Then I’d see who it was. But really, on consideration, I don’t really feel like being confronted with a murderer all by myself.”
“We’d be nearby,” suggested Eleanor pluckily.
Kenny looked at her with raised eyebrows. “The ‘nearby’ to which you refer is five good minutes’ trot from here. She could be dead by then. And how would we know she was being confronted by the killer; do you imagine she’d ask him to just hold on while she rang up the neighbours? No, Miss W., I must throw my vote in with the police on this. You are not to do anything as stupid as that.”
“All right. Keep your hat on. I’ll behave. But tell me more about this land business; why is it such a momentous thing?”
“My dear, this whole place has been in the grip of the conflict between these two old idiots since they were young idiots. Mather wanted to build a mill even before the first show, and Harris wasn’t going to let him do it with his land. I don’t think he’s motivated by any love of keeping the countryside green and peaceful, he just couldn’t stand Mather getting ahead in any way. No one can think of why he would suddenly change his mind.”
WHEN DARLING, FROM his office window, had watched Ames come out onto the street below and usher Miss Winslow into the car and drive off, he wanted to turn around and find that Dunn was gone. But of course, Dunn was not. He was sitting very still as if waiting until Darling could again give him his complete attention. Darling sat down opposite him on his side of the desk, a position that he hoped perhaps would put Dunn into the supplicant position. Dunn seemed as superior as ever.
Dunn had been thinking about Lane. Bringing himself back to life was bringing her back to life, in a way. He’d never meant for anyone to get hurt when it all began. It was work, after all. And it was work now. He thrust to the back of his mind the extraordinary slip of falling for her quite as much as he had. Her loveliness still made him ache. She had been so full of beauty at nineteen. Full of beauty. He meant that. Not just that she was beautiful to look at, to touch, to dream about. She was beautiful in her joyful innocence, her intelligent love of difficult poetry, her optimistic desire to be of use. And even the pain she covered was a poignant attraction to him.
But work was work and now she was needed. She would forgive him, surely. He’d seen her change over the course of the war; the beauty never diminished, but something inside her grew, not hardened exactly, but pragmatic, competent. He sensed, probably correctly, though he’d taken himself out of the picture earlier than he’d have liked, that she had developed a sense of her own independence. She had been slightly clearer about her boundaries with each passing year. One day, he was sure, she would suspect his ease of manner or his absences, and begin to demand the truth. The train incident had cut everything short. He still felt stupid even now. How could he have been careless like that? He had imagined a hundred times meeting her after the war, on a street somewhere, seeing the betrayal in her eyes, having in some way to be accountable for all of it, and having to explain the train.
“It’s too bloody bad, really. She used to be quite compliant. And jolly useful.”
Appalling. Darling felt his jaw locking, and the word kept repeating itself in his head. He had absolutely nothing to say to Dunn’s complaint about the loss of Miss Winslow’s compliance.
“Do you think there is anything else you will require of me?” he managed after some moments.
“Well yes, I suppose I’d better see your corpse, just to make sure it is Jack Franks. The photos leave little doubt, but since I’m here I’d better cross the t’s and dot the i’s.” He stood up, making even this movement seem like the upper class drawl with which he spoke.
In the morgue, Darling turned on the overhead electric light and stood back while Dunn surveyed the body. The Englishman reached into his inner jacket pocket, pulled out a fountain pen, and used it to push the head slightly to get a better look at the welt-like stain behind the left ear. He wiped his pen with his handkerchief and replaced it in his inner pocket. “It is Franks, all right. Post-mortem?”
“Struck, likely unconscious, pushed into a creek to drown. We think the business end of a rifle, pe
rhaps pre–first war vintage, or a metal bar, something of the sort. But someone who surprised him. Is there anything else you can tell us about this man? You have been remarkably spare up till now.”
“Nothing that will have any bearing on his death. He did not share with me why he wanted to come here, beyond saying he was in search of family, but he was most keen. He took two months’ leave to resolve whatever it was. As I mentioned, his own, or rather his adopted parents died in the Blitz. Perhaps a cousin or an uncle had emigrated and it was his last relation, or indeed, he thought he might find his own parent. I could not tell you more than that.”
And obviously don’t want to, thought Darling. He’d met people he’d suspected of being intelligence officers from time to time in the course of the war because of his bombing missions. He’d never liked their easy charm and habitual evasiveness.
Even when Dunn had left, Darling still did not know whether he was going to continue to try to recruit Miss Winslow back or not. This infuriated the inspector as well. He sat at his desk, glumly moving his ink bottle and papers around the desk, lining them up this way and that, as he did when he was trying to solve a difficult case. It was a form of doodling, he supposed.
In the end he knew that what he felt was akin to bereft. He could not have said why. He’d had this feeling a few times since he’d been on Civvy Street, and now here it was back. He wondered if it was from spending time again with an English officer. In some ways it brought back the camaraderie he had experienced during the war—the excitement, at least of the early years, before he’d been wounded. He was not one for self-deception. This bout now was about Miss Winslow. If he was truthful, with the hectoring Ames out of the room, he’d confess to himself that he’d been much taken with Miss Winslow. He was relieved to be able to release her, as he hadn’t liked her for the crime, but would have been prepared to follow through. Well, there were still the fingerprints to be gone into, but he was certain she was right. Hers wouldn’t be there, and likely not the killer’s either. Surely he’d have worn gloves, his work till now having been so elaborate.
He imagined her with Dunn and immediately felt his face flush with anger. The English expression “he’s queered that pitch” came unbidden into his head and he dismissed it with embarrassment. He didn’t know how he felt about Miss Winslow, he decided, but he knew she’d been ill used by Dunn, who talked about her in the most callous terms. Surely she deserved more than that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
January, 1915
REGINALD MATHER GOT UP EARLY, as he had all the days since the others had left. John Armstrong and his cousin Robin Harris had gone to join up. He knew it would have broken Kenny up to see his brother off at the wharf, climbing on to the steamboat with a khaki bag slung over his shoulder. He imagined Lady Armstrong putting on a braver face than her eldest son. Elizabeth standing alone to one side, slender and weeping, a shawl wrapped over her coat because the November chill was made colder by this parting, her hair falling out of its knot and across her face. The Hughes girls would have been there as well; Gwen had a thing for John Armstrong. They wouldn’t be crying. Their mother wouldn’t allow it.
In fact, Reginald had not gone to the wharf that morning to see them off to Nelson; it would have highlighted his own inability to sign up. He really did have a gammy leg, he thought defensively. But he imagined the scene. He knew somehow that it marked a turning point in their lives. The place was quiet enough at the best of times, everyone hard at work on their homesteads and orchards and, let’s be frank, avoiding one another. Now the Bentleys, who lived in a damp and somewhat porous cabin on the upper road behind the Hughes’, had given up and moved into town. There was more work there now that so many younger men had signed up, and Ted Bentley had never made a success of living out here. The same was true of the Anscombs, with that unhealthy mother and all those children. They had abandoned their draughty, dark house and failing orchard and moved somewhere—to the coast, perhaps—where there was work at the docks.
A thick silent snow had settled on the cove, as eternal as an ice age. The morning unfolded before him as he sat at his table by the window, a mug of tea cooling, the sun coming slowly to light over the hill, sending shoots of pink light along the glistening surface of the unmarked snow. Alice had taken the boat into town and would not be back for two days. A nerve specialist. She had insisted on going alone. He decided he relished the temporary, undemanding solitude. His dog Jonesy lay near him in front of the Franklin stove, head on paws, his eyes fixed on his master. When Reginald stirred, Jonesy’s head popped up. This was what he waited for. He stood and stretched, his paws spreading out to grip the dingy hearth-rug, and then waited, his tail swishing with guarded hopefulness. Reginald took up his wool coat and reached for his cane.
He moved first to the barn to see to the horses. They snorted great plumes of white breath at him as he broke the ice on their trough and shovelled out the stalls. It was as he was coming out of the barn and looking across the snow-covered garden that he saw the figure of a woman struggling on the icy surface of one of the ruts on the road. She was encased in a big coat, a wool shawl around her head; she looked drowned in wool, she was so slight. She held her skirts over her boots so that they interfered less with her progress. She stopped when she reached the gate to Reginald’s house and stood, panting clouds. She paused indecisively and then she saw him approaching the gate from the barn up behind the right of the house.
“Mrs. Harris,” he said, pulling open the wooden gate. Jonesy, sensing traffic was going the wrong way for his walk, sat down in the snow with a humph. Elizabeth Harris hesitated a moment and looked around, as if there might be someone in this empty snow landscape watching her, and walked hesitantly through the gate. Inside the house, she took her shawl off but not her coat and sat nervously on the edge of the chair Reginald offered her near the fire. “Alice is in town for a couple of days. Will you have tea? Or coffee? I’ve got some on the stove,” he asked, and he turned to the kitchen where she could hear him scooping water into a kettle from a metal bucket, so he did not see her shake her head. Jonesy had settled back on to his hearth-rug.
Reginald put the kettle on to the Franklin and opened the grate to push in another piece of wood. Sparks flew out of the embers. Elizabeth Harris sat very still as if she did not dare to look around. “Now then,” said Reginald, “how are you getting on down there without Robin? Have you heard from him?”
“He sent one letter from Halifax where they’re training. I guess they will ship out soon.”
Reginald looked at her, really, for the first time. He knew she had come from a large, poor, and unhappy family in town. He had seen her father holding forth in the bar on the few trips he had made there. He was a despicable man; an egocentric drunk, roundly disliked. Now here was one of his long-suffering children. She could have been pretty, if she were better fed, or smiled, Reginald decided. She had scarcely improved her lot by marrying Harris! He felt a stirring of protectiveness. She must have staggered up the hill, a mile and a half from the Nelson road where her wood-frame house kept watch at the King’s Cove turnoff, for something. “Do you need anything? It’s been bitterly cold. Have you enough wood?”
“I have wood, thank you. Robin left me with a big pile and I’m pretty good with an axe. It’s just that I haven’t got no water. I suppose it’s frozen. I’ve been melting pots of snow.” Reginald was about to say that he too was melting buckets of snow, that it was not unusual in the winter, when he saw that her eyes had welled up. She looked down to cover it, and wrung her hands in her lap. She looked small and fragile and utterly alone. For Reginald the moment held an eternal quality. His heart swelled, and his world encompassed, suddenly, only the two of them. He felt a nobility he had not experienced before.
He reached out and took her hand and said, “Come now. Let’s see what we can do, eh?”
THE SUN, ABOUT half an hour after Ames had left, was now shining full on the tea drinkers on the porch of the pleas
antly haunted house. Eleanor, who had extremely pale skin, in the Edwardian style that must have been the chief influence of her youth, said she thought they ought to go in and sit in the sitting room. It was cool in the house because of the blow-through from the French doors through to the main door of the house, which Lane had left open. She was slightly surprised, but pleased that Eleanor had not said that they’d better leave. She dug her hand into the cookie packet and pulled out another handful to put on the plate. Kenny seemed to be enjoying the chocolate biscuits particularly and she wanted to keep them talking, something they seemed inclined to do. They had moved on from the momentous land-selling news, perhaps because nobody wanted to think about the implications, that Mather might at last build his bloody mill, and they were once again on the murdered man. All the distraction of the conversation suited Lane; she did not want to think about Angus and talking, she earnestly wished, would make him vanish forever from her mind.
“Why would someone come here all that distance, that’s what I don’t understand,” declared Eleanor. “How would he know about this place? Had he bought a piece of property? Was anyone selling anything, Kenny, besides Harris?”
Kenny shook his head. “Don’t know of any property for sale.”
Lane said, “Maybe we are going about this the wrong way. Let’s start with the people here. Maybe the answer is here. Who has connections still in England? Who is selling land, as you asked? Who has secrets?”
“My dear, who does not! But the trouble is, I should think they are boring little secrets. I mean, Mather’s wife is mad, we all know that, though we all pretend she’s not. There’s the business with Robin’s wife, but no one knew really what happened there and it was a long time ago. There’s whatever Bertolli might have brought with him, because again, we are all pretending he came out because he could compose in the peace and quiet of our little community. The Hughes are two ladies left maidened by the first war and their vigorous but blameless mother, and could not have one whole secret between them. There’s Ponting the prospector in the log cabin out on the Kaslo road. His secret is a claim he’s been mining for twenty years with no visible result. There. And of course, Mather and his son don’t get along, and none of us is supposed to know about that either. Or that Mather has been planning since before the war, the first one, mind you, to turn his land over to the lumber people. We admit, we were afraid for a few years, but he turned out to be hopelessly bad at business. No one has ever come here to see any of them, and it puzzles me why anyone should have now.”
