by Iona Whishaw
“Dottore. Good to see you!” Lorenzo called out through the window from the kitchen. “Today no soup, but very nice pasta with pomodore. Sit down.” Darling looked about and realized with some delight that all the window seats were taken. Maybe things would look up for Lorenzo sooner than later. The customers seemed to be from the local railway and at least two were speaking Russian. Ah. The English speakers were still not coming in. Well, good for the Russians and anyone else who did. Everyone else was missing a damn good meal.
The cheerful Italian sat down opposite Darling after putting in his order. “How are you doing? You look a little—I like this word I learn today—‘discombobulated.’ My art teacher give me that one.” He rolled the bumpy syllables of his new word around in his mouth with special gusto.
“Nothing gets past you, Lorenzo. I had to let go of my chief suspect today and she is on her way home up the lake with Constable Ames right now. I met a very unpleasant man from England and I am no further along in solving this crime. Discombobulated is a good word. Things are all over the place and I can’t put them in any pattern.”
“But I see that you are happy to let this woman go, no? I see that. I am not wrong about this sort of thing.”
Darling felt himself colouring slightly and cursed himself and Lorenzo. “Do you think women ought to be compliant, Lorenzo?”
Lorenzo sat back in his chair and looked thoughtful and was about to speak when his wife called through the window, “Service!” He smiled at Darling and gave a little shrug as he got up to get the plate of pasta. He placed the steaming plate before his customer and put beside it a bowl of Parmesan cheese. “We just grate this today. Is fantastic.” He came back to hover by the inspector. “Now. This compliant business. I don’t think so a woman can be compliant. I know, is supposed to be. Obey the husband, all that, but you know what I think? You can’t make no life with a woman like that. Look at Mrs. Lorenzo, beautiful and smart. No, Dottore. You just gotta be careful you not too compliant. It’s not good if one person is stronger than another. That’s my advice. For when you get a woman, eh?” He winked, a cliché of an Italian waiter.
Inspector Darling was back at his desk when Ames arrived. The food had improved his mood considerably, and he found himself thinking more pragmatically about whatever slim evidence Dunn had given him about the dead man. It wasn’t much. Franks had asked for leave to come to Canada, but hadn’t said why, except that Dunn understood it was about possibly finding family. Okay, then they’d have to find out who in King’s Cove might have been this man’s family. And why, if he had family there, they’d choose to bump him off. Dunn would be catching the morning train the next day. Darling wondered if the man had told him everything he could. He doubted it. It seemed beyond belief that someone had worked for Dunn and his people and not been vetted thoroughly. Still. It could happen. If Franks himself had not known he was adopted until his parents died in the Blitz, it was possible his employers had not known either.
“Sir. Package delivered.”
“Ames, could I remind you that we are not in a bad movie, in spite of the necessity of having to deal with that bastard, Dunn.”
Ames raised his eyebrows slightly. There was clearly and infuriatingly much that had gone on that day that he didn’t know. “Sir?”
“Well, he only came out to make sure no one was breaking his Secrets Act. It’s annoying that we’ve got someone who knew and, indeed, employed the dead man and he’s got nothing whatever to contribute. He came to make sure everyone was keeping quiet and to get Miss Winslow back in the harness.”
“The harness, sir? Did she work for him as well?”
“Yes, she did, Ames. She was some sort of operative during the war, though she did not realize he was pulling all the strings. This much I got out of Major Dunn, not her. She has proved to be a good little employee and has told no secrets. I’m sure he was very much relieved. Still, he exonerated her, sort of, leaving us suspectless.”
“Ah, well that accounts for it.”
“Accounts for what, Ames? I’m tired of everyone around me being cryptic. Don’t you start!”
“I mean, the operative thing. She’s pretty keen to solve the crime because, frankly sir, we’ve not done much. As she points out, she’s worried that someone has it in for her, seeing as they went to so much trouble to pin it on her. She came up with a scheme, but I said absolutely not. I told her, under no circumstances.”
With a tug of anxiety, Darling frowned and said, “What sort of scheme?”
“I thought I’d have another look at the car while I was out there, and she got the idea that if she told the old lady at the post office that I’d found evidence and was going back to get the evidence kit, the old lady could casually tell everyone that came through for their mail, and it would spread like mad and the criminal would come to try to do something to the car, and Miss Winslow would see him and nab him. I told her she was crazy, sir.”
A wave of panic swept through Darling. “God almighty, you don’t think she’d do that do you?” Compliance suddenly seemed to him an ideal feminine virtue.
“I don’t think so, sir, but she is very determined to get this solved.”
DARLING GRABBED HIS telephone and dialled. “KC 431,” he barked at the operator, and then drummed his fingers impatiently on his desk while he waited. “Ah. Miss Winslow. Inspector Darling here.” He paused, clearing his throat. “Yes, fine, thank you. Listen, Ames just got back from dropping off the raspberry plant. I find I’ve sent the wrong one. Could you just hold off on planting it?”
When he had hung up, Ames queried, innocently, “Who is in a bad movie, sir?”
“You can laugh all you like, Ames, but as a matter of fact, she understood exactly what I meant. She told me she would wait now before she planted them.” He organized papers on his desk to restore his dignity, and sent Ames off to check the day’s post.
SHE HAD RUSHED downstairs from her list-making when she’d realized the phone was for her. She was surprised and a little pleased to hear Inspector Darling’s voice. Missed me already, she thought. “How are you?” she said into the horn, suddenly embarrassed by this thought. He wouldn’t be phoning except about the case. She felt herself both smile and redden at his next comment. Ames had told him what she had talked about doing. When she saw it through Darling’s eyes, she saw that out here, alone, trying to trap a murderer was perhaps not the best idea she’d ever had. Raspberries again. She thought she would say, “Don’t worry, I won’t do anything stupid,” but if they were really performing for any listeners on the party line, she’d better play it to the hilt. “I was going to give the shrub to the Armstrongs, but I won’t now, I’ll wait. Thank you, Inspector.” She felt a twitch of regret as she hung up the earpiece and clicked it into place. When this business was over she’d get the hook the earpiece hung on fixed.
THE DAY OVER, Darling drove back up the hill to his house on 6th Street. It seemed particularly empty as Mrs. Andrews worked only three days a week, and this was not one of them. Usually he loved the emptiness. He would pour a glass of scotch and stand by his large front window and look out at the town descending below to the edge of the water. From where he was he could see the little ferry that constantly went back and forth in the seven-minute ride that took traffic onto the Nelson road. The one that went past the King’s Cove turnoff. Today these musings were unsatisfying. He had a constant fear now that Miss Winslow would do something idiotic, and he needed something, anything, that would help them understand why Franks had come to King’s Cove.
He had been dozing, after some considerable time of tossing and turning, sleep eluding him, when he’d finally gone to bed after one of Mrs. Andrews’s glutinous and tough beef stews, when he woke up fully. Of course. He’d been blinded by fury and hadn’t done the most obvious thing! He looked at his bedside clock. It was 2:30. The morning train left at 8:20.
At 8:00 he was pacing in the small waiting room at the station, feeling slightly bleary at the interrupt
ion of his night’s sleep; he’d tossed until at least 4:00 before he dropped into an uneasy slumber. At 8:10 he saw Dunn approaching the station. He was carrying a small suitcase and looked like someone used to travel. Darling stood up and called out, “Major Dunn. A moment, please.”
Angus Dunn raised his eyebrows, somehow conveying a sense that he found it in very bad taste to be accosted at a train station. He paused but did not put down his bag. “Yes, Inspector?”
“You can do something for us when you get back to Britain, if you’d be so good. Franks, you believe, was out here to look up relations. Would you go to Somerset House to look at his birth certificate? If he found he was adopted, he must have gone there himself. There may be something there for us. And could you wire us?”
Seeing Dunn sigh as if he were being unnecessarily imposed upon, Darling added, “Someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to attach Miss Winslow to this business. She lives thirty miles out of town by herself in a small and somewhat isolated situation. If we do not get to the bottom of this and she chooses to go off on her own to solve the problem, we cannot protect her. In any case, I do not like civilians messing about in murder cases. You could be extremely helpful. Otherwise we will be faced with a lengthy process of writing to Somerset House and waiting for an answer you could provide in a fraction of the time.”
An “All aboard!” from the platform caused Dunn to look away. “I don’t think the Miss Winslow I know would do that. A bit too timid, but very good at doing what she was told. But I see your point. All right, then. I’ll be back on the eighth, and will wire you shortly after.”
Darling pursed his lips thoughtfully. “You know,” he said, “the Miss Winslow I know would. I can see that and I’ve only known her five minutes. Well, thank you, Major Dunn. I shall expect your communication. Good day.” He touched the brim of his hat and turned away. Damned if he was going to shake his hand! He left the station without a backward glance, but then stood at the top of the hill watching the train pull away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
TWO DAYS HAD PASSED SINCE Darling had seen off Dunn. He knew it would be easily a week or two before he could hear from him, if Dunn flew to London from Montreal, and that was only if Dunn went to work immediately when he got back and wired the information, or telephoned, though trunk calls had been unreliable lately. The days had continued hot for July, and they were saying August promised to be hotter. The overhead fans in the station were entirely inadequate to the task, even at 9:30 in the morning, providing nothing more than a sluggish moving of hot air in whorls around the sufferers below. Ames was up in the Slocan Valley investigating some livestock robberies and Darling sat glumly at his desk before the neatly organized piles of paper that provided whatever information they had about the King’s Cove killing.
His gloominess was intensified by a nagging sense of guilt about having arrested Miss Winslow because he was sure, he did not know how, that she was quite, quite innocent of this crime, despite what the paper in the piles before him said. He mollified his guilt by telling himself crossly that it was his job as a policeman to gather evidence and make arrests based thereon. This he had done. No one could fault him, not even himself.
On the other hand, there was the evidence. It was real, indisputable, and piling up. His old boss MacDonald would have had her trussed up and into court by now. What if she was guilty? He could imagine MacDonald sneering at him right now. He would be telling him he’d been swayed by a pretty face. Was that why he thought her innocent? No, it was, in a way, a greater weakness than that; it was his visceral dislike for Dunn. If Dunn thought her innocent and was abusive and dismissive of her, he could go one better; he could think her innocent and treat her properly.
Disgusted at the boring daily round of this internal struggle, he stood up, pushed his blameless chair roughly out of the way, and went to stand at the window of his second-floor office. From it he could see the street below and, over the two-storey buildings across the way, the top of Elephant Mountain across the river. It rose like a cooling mirage against the azure sky behind it and it seemed to call to him of escape; from the town, from the cares of his world. It spoke of a clean, pristine Eden where sunlight did not fall in leaden streams onto overheated tarmac, but filtered gently through trees that cooled and soothed.
In truth, he knew, in spite of one recent torrent, the lack of rain was causing all that was green to go yellow and that the danger of forest fires was sharply rising in his little Eden across the river but he would, he decided, choose nature over the city this day, at least. He pulled his jacket off the hook and folded it over his arm. It was a formality. He would not wear it. He pulled his hat onto his head, seized a notebook and a camera, and bounded down the stairs to the main floor.
He told the desk sergeant he would be out for several hours, and soon was barrelling on the open road up the lake with both his windows open, hoping he would not meet much in the way of dust-producing traffic. There was no point in denying to himself that he was going to King’s Cove and had been unconsciously planning it all along. There was a murder to solve and he wanted to solve it. Sitting around waiting for telegrams was not the way. He felt an excitement that reminded him of his early days, when he was the Ames of a team with old Inspector Macdonald—young, unruffled by conscience, or a war. The fact of Miss Winslow he tried not to think about, though the image of her thoughtful face and cascades of auburn hair seemed to hover like a backdrop to his musings. He did review many times a day her attack on that prat, Dunn. He told himself that it was because he loved seeing Dunn taken down a peg, but he suspected that what he loved to recall was the pure, sublime outrage on the face of Miss Winslow; it seemed to him, in a world of manners and cloaking of true feelings, a moment of abiding truthfulness. Real outrage, genuinely delivered.
It was nearly eleven when he arrived at the turnoff. He slowed the car, changed gears for the sharp, uphill turn, and caught sight of Harris lumbering along in his tractor, evidently returning from somewhere up the hill behind his house. He must have been out early if he was coming home now. Darling thought of the different rhythms of his urban life. The predictable routine of getting up, walking to a café for breakfast; the noise and early morning energy of others like him, reporting to offices somewhere. Here, he imagined, one’s time somehow had an extended shapelessness to it that was dictated by when the sun came up and when it set as its two most determining factors, and not the hour-by-hour consciousness he had developed.
He slowed down as he approached the Winslow driveway. What was his plan? He still wasn’t sure. He would present himself, he decided, as wanting to ask a few more questions and look again at the car, which he knew he’d neglected. Thus fortified with a sketch of a plan, he pulled up in front of her gate and wondered at the protocol. Did one leave the car pulled off the side of the road, or did one get out, open the gate oneself, and drive in? Was that like going into a house without knocking? For Pete’s sake, he was a policeman! He parked the car, unhooked the gate, and walked down to the house.
The door by the great blue spruce was open. He knocked on the frame of the screen door and called out, “Miss Winslow? Hello?” He waited, listening, and was rewarded by footsteps apparently coming down a staircase. Miss Winslow appeared on the other side of the screen door, and seemed momentarily nonplussed. She was in a pair of khaki shorts and a rumpled, white, cotton short-sleeved shirt. Her hair was drawn back off her face in what looked like a hasty bid to get it out of the way. They looked at each other through the screen for only a moment and then the spell was broken by Lane.
“Inspector Darling! I was not expecting you. Please, come in.” She pushed the door open and stepped aside to let him through. Darling felt an uncomfortable momentary turmoil in those seconds of looking at her before she spoke and so he became officious. “I’ve come out to ask a few follow-up questions, if you’ve a few moments, and I’d like to go and look again at the car in your outbuilding.”
Lane sighed. She ha
d been in the grip of some ungainly feelings for that brief moment as well. These, particularly because she had so recently been reminded of what a dead loss men in general were, made her cross. His pompousness was, in a way, a relief. He too was a dead loss. She turned and led him through to the kitchen and, dutifully but not warmly, asked if he would like some iced tea. She had become addicted to this concoction as made by Angela, with plenty of sugar, and had a glass jug handy in her refrigerator, which she had made for her continued work in the attic. His arrival, in fact, had interrupted a new line of thinking; she had begun to believe that the connections between the residents of King’s Cove might hold a key.
It is difficult to keep up a completely official front when one is hot and thirsty. Darling took his hat off and said, “Actually, thank you. That would be lovely.” They sat in silence, drinking from blissfully cold, dewy glasses, and Darling realized he hadn’t really got any particular questions organized to ask her. He had formulated something finally and began, “I wonder . . .”
But at that moment she too spoke, “I’ve been doing . . .”
A sputtering of apologies followed and Lane said, “Listen, Inspector. I realize this cannot be comfortable for you, seeing as I am sure I am still your chief suspect, and no doubt you are here finding ways to prove it so that you can put this all to bed. But before you bang me up, as they say, for this, I have worked on trying to figure out the local community. It is possible we could pool whatever knowledge that ass Angus Dunn provided you with and what I might have. As to that car, well, your young Constable Ames kiboshed my plan to draw the murderer out of hiding, so you can do what you want with it.”
This speech concluded, she sat back and looked with an uncompromising expression at Darling. He looked down and very nearly smiled. “I believe I have been the ass, Miss Winslow. I should start by saying good morning; that was the bit I missed when I first arrived. Secondly, I appreciate your candour. I do not, as it happens, particularly favour you for this murder, though as you say, the evidence is pretty overwhelming. I am extremely anxious to get it solved, as I am tired of the man’s body in the downstairs morgue. I am most happy to look at anything you might have regarding the locals. And, finally, I too was horrified by your plan and for once I agree with Ames. Let’s talk no further about that!”
