A Killer in King's Cove

by Iona Whishaw

  Kenny gazed at his wife after this lengthy speech and said, “Could this be about Robin?”

  “I don’t see how. It was so long ago. Nearly thirty years.”

  “What about Robin?” Lane asked.

  “Well, it’s just that Robin had married a girl from town before he signed up; around ’13 or so, and when he came back she’d left. We never really knew why. She was a miserable thing, though pretty in a wet sort of way. I think she resented being left alone with all the work. Did she leave before or after the fire, do you remember?” Kenny turned to Eleanor.

  “Well, the fire was in June of ’19, you remember, the lightning. She was already gone by then. I think she left right around the armistice. No, I lie, it was earlier. We just noticed she stopped coming to the post office. We didn’t think much of it at the time, since we knew Robin had stopped writing to her by halfway through 1917. She just stopped bothering to come there and if anything did arrive, Kenny would drop it off on his way down to the wharf. I can’t remember now, was she at the party we had that November for the end of the war?”

  Kenny shook his head. “No. Definitely not. Then we had that ruddy fire and we had too much else to think of. I remember Robin coming back, though, and finding her gone and the orchards burned to a crisp. Between that and the war, he never really did recover from any of it.”

  That night, in the dark, Lane thought about the darkness in human lives. She had locked the door, resenting the need to do it, and now she lay on her side looking across the nearly completely dark space to where the window framed yet more night. Somewhere out of the darkness of someone’s life, a young man had materialized and been killed. Why? And, she thought ruefully, somewhere out of the darkness of my life, Angus had materialized. She closed her eyes and journeyed down the pathways where Angus had been in her life, but found she felt nothing. A little hardness perhaps, like the thin crisp layer of salt left on a beach when the sea recedes. And then she slept.

  WHEN SHE WOKE she was amazed at the depth of her sleep. She stretched and looked out the window and saw that the light was tempered by cloud. Perhaps today there would be rain. She put on her robe and luxuriated in this feeling of having rested so completely. The kettle made a metallic scraping on the stove and it sounded new and beautiful. The smell of the electric ring had a familiar tang, which she felt at that moment that she loved. Pushing open the French doors into the uncertain weather of the morning, she gloried in the banks of clouds building on the mountain across the lake. They were like Constable clouds. Rich, familiar, eternal in some way. She felt a giddy sense of freedom, as if she had said goodbye to some nameless impediment to her happiness and was beginning a new life.

  The kettle screeched and she turned back in to make tea. She would begin in a proper organized way to look at what had happened here. She thought she should begin her day as usual, with poetry, but today it seemed irrelevant, as if it were Aspirin for a fever she no longer had. While the tea was steeping in the dark green pot that Lady Armstrong had kindly left her, she cleared everything off the kitchen table and then stood back and looked at the blank expanse of scrubbed wood. What could she put on there, if this were the plane upon which this human tragedy had taken place? She wondered if this was like Algebra, a subject she had struggled with, while she had mastered all the intricacies of Russian case endings. Did she have enough information to solve for x, where x is the killer?

  Her typewriter was on its little side table with foolscap piled neatly on the shelf beside it. She took several sheets of paper and laid them out on the table until the entire surface was covered. The pencil she wanted, an hb drawing pencil, sat lead side up in the tin by the paper. She sharpened the pencil into the wastebasket by her table, which did not even contain balled-up paper rejections of her own ideas. It waited patiently, and now received the shavings produced by her penknife. She must stop thinking of the things around her as chiding her, she thought, and then she stood before the table.

  She pulled forward her stack of foolscap and then decided this was all better accomplished when she had dressed and eaten properly. A faint roll of thunder came across the lake from the phalanx of clouds along the mountain. Perfect! A day to stay in and work on a puzzle. The cozy feeling of childhood rainy days came over her as she went to change.

  Back at the table, a warm flannel shirt on to keep out the chill from the rain pelting outside, she gazed at the blank slate before her. Should she work with her shelving? On the whole, though a quick inward glance told her that she had unconsciously continued to place things on the various levels of shelf, this system was more for storing information. What she needed was more in line with a map. Should she start with the dead man? Where would she put him? In the middle? No, that would determine the shape of the connections and they were unknown. If this crime had its roots here, then she must lay out the denizens of King’s Cove. It must be a map of the place itself: put people where they lived around the square of road that linked the community, and leave room for information to be written in by each name.

  She started on the lower right, drawing a faint line to show the Nelson road, following the lakeshore going north and then, veering sharply left, the road up to King’s Cove. At the intersection of the two roads she wrote Robin Harris at the physical spot where his house was, facing onto the Nelson road, this location somehow symbolic of his own angry, isolated distance from the rest of the Cove residents. She followed the road up and wrote in Church where it sat at the junction of the corner of the square that made up the complete circuit of the King’s Cove settlement; straight ahead led up to the Bertollis’, and left led around to the turnoff to her place and the post office. She decided to follow the road up to the Bertollis’. She had never driven up this road, though she had driven down it when she had picked up Angela and the boys for a trip to Balfour for ice cream. She mentally drove it now, and wrote David Bertolli and Angela Bertolli separately. She continued around, writing everyone’s name separately—the connections that had to be written in would be to individuals, because somewhere here was an individual who had killed the man in her creek.

  When she had done all of this, she studied it. Now she would need to write in what she knew and find a way to draw out the connections. She would need more space. What she needed was a war room. She’d once been in one when she’d been summoned by her commander, in the middle of a meeting. They had had everything laid out on a massive table. She looked ruefully at her kitchen table. She couldn’t leave it here. The wall of the second bedroom? She began to realize she could not leave it where it would be easily seen, as, technically, the crime could have been committed by anyone, and though she hadn’t got a lot of visitors, people did come round. She could put it, she decided, on the floor of the attic. No one went up there but her. Well, Eleanor Armstrong once, to close the windows, but that wouldn’t likely happen again.

  Lane numbered each of the pieces of paper, piled them carefully in order, and mounted the stairs to the attic, having collected a box of tacks from her work shelf. She was already attached to the creak on the third and fourth stairs. They were like two notes in a song. In the attic, the rain seemed more present, because she could see it pelting outside the windows on all four sides and hear it drumming on the roof. It increased her sense of snugness, of being safely ensconced in her own private aerie. She pushed her remaining unpacked boxes to the edge of the room, clearing an empty space on the floor. Here she laid the pages back out in order. Now she would have room for written pages to be placed near the people to whom they applied. She liked the ability that having the map on the floor gave her to stand above and see it with a bird’s eye view, and felt that this would help in her thinking. She remembered very early morning flights into France, when she had memorized the maps of where she would be going, and could look down from the aeroplane and see the features below. For the details of maps, she had a nearly perfect memory. She wondered now if Dunn had even known that about her.

  There was something so
patronizing about his approach to her even now. She sat down heavily on a wooden crate she’d moved near the window and looked out at her view, green and dripping, the fragrance released by the rain evident even through the closed windows. Low cloud seemed to gather in the basin of the lake and partially obscure the mountains. She would love the ever-changing moods of this place as long as she lived here. She had begun the creation of a world that had nothing to do with him. Could he really have believed she would come back?

  Lane remembered herself at nineteen when she’d met him. She’d loved his confidence. She’d put herself entirely in his hands, as though she had found some sort of stability and guidance that had been lacking in her life. She grunted ruefully. Absent father, dead mother, indulgent grandparents, a lengthy series of governesses. She’d practically brought herself up; no wonder he’d been so important. She’d fallen for him completely, and the habit of loving him had never left her during the whole course of their war together.

  But now, as she thought of herself in this relationship, she realized she must have been changing where he had not. She was nineteen when she had started with him and twenty-five when the war ended. He always treated her the same way, she saw now. Commanding, indulgent of her, an absolute expectation that she would do what he asked. He had required perfect secrecy of her. She had never questioned it, or doubted him. He must have a good reason. Only his death had freed her from this. She had been devastated and rudderless for a time. But had she not discovered in herself something new? She was strong and self-reliant. And she’d gotten quite clever about the job. She’d been asked to work with some new girls toward the end of the war, and she had realized, as she taught them the ropes, that she had been very good. She taught them how to memorize information and find their way around maps and translate that information into details on the ground and how to avoid detection by the authorities and what to do if they were discovered where they shouldn’t be.

  These were skills she’d been learning during the length of the war, but Angus had not seen her change. How could he? He had no idea what she did. He thought she worked as a secretary. Flushing, she shook her head. No, of course, he knew all along, just as he’d known where to find her to send Jack Franks after her. She could not completely take in this new knowledge. It was almost more shocking than finding him not dead, knowing that he’d been in intelligence the whole time, no doubt dangling her like a puppet who could not see her own master. But she saw now, as she looked out across the sky over the mountains, where the grey shifted and moved, that if she looked back across her own life, she had always had this core of strength and survival. She had learned self-protection at the hands of a greater master than Angus: her own distant, demanding, self- and work-obsessed father. Angus was just like him, really, only nice to her. Had she read somewhere that women take lovers that mirror their fathers? Freudian trickcycling! She turned and looked back at her map. She hoped that Angus had been taken aback by her self-determination. She felt sure she’d shaken that self-satisfied sense of what the world would do for him.

  Now, the rest of her life was waiting for her. Back to work! Lane had index cards piled beside her on the floor of the attic. She moved the original list onto discrete index cards so that she could place them around the map. Her map, she decided, probably wasn’t accurate in terms of distances, but it represented a good picture of everyone she knew to be living around her. She began to write. Harris—what did she know about him?

  Bad-tempered, she added to her list, and then with a slight touch of remorse, she wrote, Sad, because in her heart she felt his temper came out of all his losses. She pinned the card on the floor by the location of his house at the edge of the Nelson road. There was room left on the card and she realized she was letting her emotions dictate the choices. She felt sorry for him; that was not necessarily a good basis for finding a murderer. Then added, On same creek as I am.

  Next, she drove, in her mind, up the curved road and, after a brief hesitation, chose to turn as if going to her part of the settlement first. She stopped at the church. Should she say anything about it? You never knew what might be important. She wrote, Vicar does service 11:00 every Sunday, otherwise locked. Then she followed the road down to the post office but stopped at her own driveway, sighed, and began to write on a new card, New, British Secret Service, body found on property, car found in my barn, victim was British Secret Service, victim had Winslow name on person, and punched the pin into the card firmly by her property. No wonder I was arrested, she thought, looking starkly at the facts in this way.

  For the Armstrongs she hesitated. Really, as if they could be involved! But she wrote anyway. Has truck (means to transport body), has control of mail incoming and outgoing. Here she hesitated. Was there a mail angle here? Had someone in the community received any mail from the victim announcing his arrival? Had someone here sent a letter out that might have brought the man here? Eleanor Armstrong looked at every piece of mail as she put it into the wooden slots; she would notice if there were unusual letters, and while she wasn’t a gossip in the usual sense of the word, she certainly would be interested and would remember anything unusual. Lane would need a separate pile of cards; a sort of to-do list. On a separate card she wrote, Ask Eleanor about the mail. Anything else about the Armstrongs? She realized she knew little about them really, except, she thought ruefully, that she already loved them. Brother John died in first war, she added, finally.

  She moved up the hill to the Hughes’. Three old ladies. Really. Still, she took up a card and waited for inspiration. She could not think of anything that would make them in any way likely to be involved. Finally she wrote, Gwen affianced to John Armstrong and, as an afterthought, because she realized she was just trying to accumulate what she knew about people, she added, Thought Harris’s wife interested in her John. It was controversial anyway, though how it could possibly involve a murder thirty years and one war away she could not fathom.

  She moved, then, up the road to the Mathers’. Here were some local controversies, surely. To her original list she added Mather, remittance man. Honestly, she thought, one of the Mathers ought to be dead, killed by one of the other Mathers, not some complete stranger. She realized she should have a separate card for each member of the family, so under Mrs. Alice Mather she wrote, Unstable (shoots at imagined cougars) and then wondered what else she knew. Nothing, she decided. Sandy: also unstable, bitter, self-aggrandizing, made an appalling pass at her. Did he spy on her?

  Next to the Bertollis she wrote, Moved from New York 3 years ago. It struck her that, in a way, this single statement was the most damning. New York was one of the great cultural centres of the world. Why would an accomplished musician and composer move to an isolated corner of the continent to live in a log cabin, a gussied-up one, to be sure, and teach high school thirty miles away (along a dirt road) every day? Now she realized she did have other facts. She took a card and wrote Elizabeth Harris; from town, unhappy, set her cap at people? John? For surely Gwen and Mabel must have meant Elizabeth Harris when they had spoken to her. Disappeared sometime in, say, 1917?

  By this time her knees were beginning to go from sore to numb from kneeling on the wooden floor. Lane sat back, cross-legged, and remembered that old Mrs. Hughes had had thick sponge knee-pads strapped to her legs when she’d visited them. That’s what she needed. She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall. A band of sunlight streamed on to the floor where her map was and the brightness had tired her. There were so few people here, and from the outside, the mysterious Bertollis aside, she was so far above the others on the scale of suspicion, that she thought everyone must be saying so. She imagined a map on everyone’s floor, with her name underlined in red grease pen. Of course, people didn’t know that she had been in the service, or that the victim had been. Were they all talking about her? The most she had heard is that they were inclined to blame the “Yank,” but of course they wouldn’t talk about her in front of her. The point was that, as obvious as it mus
t be that she was the culprit, she wasn’t, which left someone else.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  WHEN DUNN HAD LEFT, DARLING felt vaguely as if he’d been in some sort of manly competition, only without rules or object. It was an unpleasant reminder of the quiet test of strength that being a Canadian in Britain had been. Most of his comrades had been brilliant fun, but some British officers seemed to think you were something they’d found discarded in a hedgerow. It brought out the masculine competitiveness in him. He’d found ways to subvert the superiority, through under-the-breath comments and a bare compliance with commands. Two hours with Angus Dunn had brought back his natural colonial pit bull.

  He sat glumly at his desk and tried to focus on what little new information he had gotten about the dead man, rather than on the words he’d overheard. “I loved you,” she’d said. He couldn’t shake the feeling of that moment and he couldn’t shake the words. A sign of extraordinarily bad taste on her part, he thought petulantly. And worse, he couldn’t shake the fury at Dunn’s attitude toward her. Compliant indeed. A man who valued compliance in a woman was no man at all, he thought. Dunn was a bastard. How an intelligent woman like Lane Winslow . . . He pushed back his chair and decided he needed the comfort of whatever Lorenzo had on offer. He didn’t expect Ames back for at least two hours, and he realized he was ravenous.