by Iona Whishaw
“Interesting approach. What do you think about what you have so far?”
“Well, I’ve only questions so far, haven’t I? It’s peculiar; they all seem, on the outside, to have everything in common, because they live in this tiny community with its little, very local history, yet they are as different as anonymous Londoners, all living in a giant metropolis. And of course I don’t know enough to really connect them because I am so new here.”
“The point being that he belongs to someone here. I see. Why do you think the connections between people here might be important? They’ve all lived here a long time. There must be myriad connections that have no bearing, I should have thought.”
Lane sighed, realizing he was probably right. The connection between the stranger and someone at King’s Cove was the crucial missing information. “Perhaps, though, there is something in the connection any of these people had with what they call so affectionately ‘the old country,’ which, by the way, is to them an Edwardian bastion that no longer exists. You should see teatime around here. There hasn’t been a tea like that in Britain since the teens!” She laughed, and Darling, who had been standing with his hands behind his back looking at the map, looked up to catch the loveliness of that sound.
“And do you know what binds any of these people to the old country?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t really. For example, I know that Mather, up here,” Lane pointed to the top of her road, “is reputed to be a remittance man. He’s sixty at least. He must have come out as a young man. He has a nearly thirty-year-old son. Would anyone still be remitting money to him? His wife is from there and she’s a little off kilter. Either one of them could have relations in England who might come looking for them.
“And Kenny and his brother, John, who died in the first war, came out as children with their mother and father. She owned this house. Harris is their cousin, on the father’s side, or something. Harris was in France; he shipped out with John, and he was the only one who came back, and he came back pretty late.”
“Aha,” said Darling, getting into the spirit of the thing. “Did either John or Harris have an entanglement? Is Franks the result of something that went on during the war? It might explain why Harris came back so late. He was wounded, I know that, but that doesn’t preclude an entanglement.”
“Isn’t your corpse about twenty-eight or so? He’d have been born around 1918. That wouldn’t have given either one of them a lot of time. That leaves the Hughes. I can’t think when the Hughes came out. The two ‘children,’ who are both in their sixties, must have been born in Britain because they still have traces of nice West Country accents, but I know nothing else about them. Certainly neither of the spinster sisters seems a candidate for having rushed off in shame to have a baby in England, especially with a war on.”
“There’s quite a lot of scope there. And the Bertollis? Decidedly not old country.”
“Yes, well. I’m not in favour of them. I’m not clear why they left Brooklyn, though my brain is full of cliché ideas about Italians from that part of the world. I don’t see how they could be connected with an English victim. Besides, I like Angela; she’s fun.” She was not to know what Darling had discovered, that Bertolli had come from a violent past and had changed his name to escape it.
“I am intrigued with your methodology. It would appear to be a line of inquiry, anyway. Do you have women in your police forces in Britain?”
“There should be more. Lots of women working in offices, though, thanks to the war. We’re quite clever, really.” Darling smiled at this, but Lane did not respond in kind. She was looking out the window at the sky where clouds flitted past, as hard to pin down as the unknown stories of the people at King’s Cove. “The thing about this is that we can only see the most obvious outward connections. What we don’t know are the deep rivers of relationship and conflict that exist between people. Why is Harris so bitter, or Mather so angry?” Darling turned his gaze from her profile to the diagram on the floor. These lines of inquiry of a man out to look for family were the very ones he had had. And yet, it was still the case that the only known connection of the victim was, in fact, to her. Was he being hoodwinked? His policeman’s instinct that the most obvious answer would always turn out to be the right one was taking a beating. He still didn’t think Lane Winslow was a killer. It occurred to him that he could add to the information she had about Bertolli. Of course he could not. They were not, after all, going to pool information. He felt his dishonesty in knowing he would get what he could and give her nothing.
Lane leaned against the door frame with her arms crossed and shook her head. Her hair had traces of shimmering red in the sunlight. Darling looked away. He did not, after all, know she was in the clear, and he didn’t want his judgment clouded.
“Oh!” Lane’s hand flew to her mouth, as she thought of something.
“You have something?” Darling asked.
“Well, yes, sort of. There are all those connections to England, but we haven’t really listed anyone who was there. Most of them have never been back, but maybe there is something in those who have been there recently, or at all; say because of the war.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. Who here fought in this last one?”
“That’s the problem, really. No one. They’re all either too old, or too young, or were excused, like Sandy Mather was to brush up on his agronomy. But Harris was there in the first show, and Kenny Armstrong’s brother. He died over there. Could this have anything to do with that?”
“Franks was only a baby by the time that one ended. And I think you are forgetting someone.” He wondered when it was out why he’d said it, and was sorry.
Blushing, Lane bent down, wrote, “Old Country,” and wrote her own name, followed by Harris’s and John Armstrong’s. “All right. You’ve made your point. I’m not out of the woods. Perhaps we’d better go downstairs.”
“Perhaps we ought to go and talk to the postmistress, then,” he said, ignoring her fit of pique, but he made no move to the stairs because Lane was still in the doorway.
Lane turned as if to go down the stairs and said, “And speaking of not out of the woods, there’s still the matter of the car in my barn. How it got there. Who put it there. Whoever put it there is our murderer. I still think we could flush him out if I put it about that you’ve found some evidence in the car.”
“We haven’t found evidence in the car,” Darling said.
“But we . . . I, could suggest you had,” Lane said, starting down the stairs.
“Aside from the fact that it places you in danger, it is unethical.”
Lane stopped on the landing at the midway point of the descent and turned to look at him. “Ethics, is it? I’m surprised.”
“Why, because I’m a policeman? I don’t happen to like lying. Once you start, you can never quite erase the stain and it keeps spreading. I see criminals do it, and they’re never very good at it because one lie leads to another. That’s how we eventually catch a lot of them.”
“That’s jolly Baden Powell of you,” she said a little crossly, because she was embarrassed to realize that it was exactly because he was a policeman that she supposed he would have no trouble lying. It also made it sticky if she were to tell the lie instead. “I suppose it never occurred to you that we are all in some danger until this man is caught.”
Darling laughed. He had moved in front of her and was now holding the front door open for her. “Do your prejudices know no bounds, Miss Winslow? Policemen lie. Men murder. What about Mrs. Mather from up the road? She’d be quite mad enough to kill someone. Indeed, from the stories I’ve heard, I’m surprised she hasn’t managed it yet. Oh. Could you lock your door, please?” He realized that it was unlikely that people locked their doors in King’s Cove but he was disturbed by her idea that not finding the killer put them all in danger possibly, as well.
They walked in silence along the path and across the footbridge. Darling felt . . . he wasn’t sur
e how he felt. Perhaps alarmed at how much he was enjoying himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
ELEANOR TOOK A MOMENT TO answer the knocking on the frame of her screen door. The house door was open and Inspector Darling and Lane could see through the kitchen to the little hall, where sunlight poured like a river along the floorboards from the back door toward the kitchen where it was swallowed in the shadows. She came in through that back door, wiping her hands on her flowered apron.
“Lane, Inspector! Come in.” She was smiling—the smile, Darling thought, of the absolutely innocent. How lovely it must be to have nothing on your conscience.
“Sorry to barge in on you like this,” Lane was saying, “but we thought you might be able to help. We’ve been trying to sort out who might be related to whom, past-history-wise.” Eleanor looked at the two visitors, her smile now having a tinge of delight at being in on something.
“I’d put us on the back porch, but the sun is beating down on it just now. Come into the sitting room. It’s cool in there. Ah, Kenny, there you are. Will you take our guests into the sitting room while I rustle up some tea?” Darling put up his hand as if to say there was no need, but Eleanor was already shooshing them through.
Lane had been in this room once before. It had the classic feel of a formal Victorian room that was never used. The air hung as if it were poised to stir again only when someone came in. There was a window bench piled with faded silk-covered pillows and, along one wall, a low bookshelf with books that surely had last been touched the day they were placed there. A glass cabinet displayed tiny figures, a sword, some medals, and a small, silver-framed photo of a beautiful woman in Edwardian dress.
But it was not this picture that arrested Lane’s attention. It was the wall of photos she had not noticed when she had last come. She moved closer to look at them.
There were seven in all, placed in a row, as if telling a long-forgotten story. First a picture of a small, wood-frame building, a wisp of smoke rising from the chimney. It was a sunny winter’s day, and a small group of smiling children stood, formally posed, before the front steps. They were muffled in thick coats and were all, including two young girls, wearing heavy laced boots. Most looked to be in very early adolescence. Though she wanted to linger on the faces of each of the children, Lane moved to the next photo. It was an unusually unposed and natural scene of a group of people packing apple boxes in front of a large barn. She guessed it would have been before the war, 1912 or so. Were these older versions of the children in the previous picture? She guessed they must be. Beside this was a photo of a house picnic, which she realized had been taken on the lawn in front of her own house. An older woman sat on a rattan chair and younger people were spread about on blankets on the grass. The Hughes girls, a much younger Kenny and Eleanor, perhaps Lady Armstrong in the chair, Harris, and perhaps his wife? A younger Reginald Mather.
The contrast between this happy moment and the next picture made her suck in her breath. It was a stark, almost apocalyptic scene of devastation; a brooding, smoking photo of a burned-out landscape. For a moment she wondered if it was a picture from some European battlefront and then she remembered the fire of 1919. It was incredible to realize that this beautiful community had suffered such devastation only twenty-eight years before. The picture had been taken from the main road and looked up past the Harris house, which stood like a startled survivor among burned-out stumps of trees. No wonder he was so bitter.
Kenny’s voice brought her out of her contemplation. “I don’t know why that’s the only picture I took. The whole place was a mess. It’s almost an irony, this picture, because Robin never seemed to get over it. The rest of us, well, moved on, I suppose. I sometimes wonder if he’d have been able to free himself if I’d not captured that particular scene.”
Darling was positioned in front of the picnickers. “Why do we not do this sort of thing anymore?” he wondered. “Who is this woman?” He was pointing at the one celebrant who did not look happy to be there. She was slight, and had her hair pulled back in a severe way that emphasized a kind of fragile beauty, but one blighted with permanent distrust. She sat with her legs tucked under her, looking dutifully at the camera, unable, perhaps, to bring herself to obey the photographer’s cheerful command to smile.
Kenny peered at the picture, tilting his head back to settle the image into the frame of his glasses. “That is Robin’s wife. She’d only married him that year. Miserable little thing. We weren’t in the least bit surprised she’d abandoned ship when Robin enlisted. She endured all those winters on her own. No electricity, having to cut wood and live, I dare say, on practically nothing. We tried to help her; Reg did a lot for her, I believe. But it was no life for a young woman. What did surprise me is that she never went home to her people in Nelson. She just vanished.”
“Heavens. I thought it must be one of the Hughes daughters. She looks so familiar,” Lane commented. “She’s quite pretty, really. It must have been tough, a young woman out here on her own.”
Inspector Darling laughed. “No irony there?”
“I have a motorcar, electricity, and running water. Hardly the pioneering life!” Lane retorted. She turned back to Kenny. “No children?”
“No, thank heavens. She’d not have managed even what she did, if she had little ones to look after.” Eleanor had come in with tea and stood looking at the photo. “Although . . . come, sit. I made some biscuits. Oatmeal with lemon.”
Settled onto the settee and chairs, which were surprisingly comfortable, perhaps because they were so rarely used that they didn’t have that squashed-down feel the chairs in the Armstrongs’ kitchen had, Darling and Lane both spoke at once. “I wonder,” said he as she said, “Although?” He courteously waved a hand. Lane smiled and turned to Eleanor.
“You said ‘although.’ Although what?”
“Well,” Eleanor said, drawing out the word, “it’s one of those features of a tiny community like ours, isn’t it, gossip? At the time we all wanted to help Elizabeth. Even the Hughes, though there were all women in that house. No one in the Cove was alone, except Elizabeth, so naturally we tried to support her a bit. She wouldn’t take anything from anyone. She told me one day—she was a very crabby little thing—that everyone laughed at her and treated her like she didn’t belong. I was a little cross. There was a war on. Our John was overseas, and Robin of course, and some of the men from families along the lakefront. I can’t remember now if I said anything to her but she came up for her mail only every couple of weeks and I was trying to be nice to her, but I did begin to notice that others were giving her a wide berth. The Hughes girls began to be sniffy about her and made remarks about wondering what would happen if Alice and Elizabeth turned up to pick up their mail at the same time. But of course they wouldn’t have, because Alice was away in Victoria for much of the war. Reg always said she was in Nelson seeing a cousin, but it was more than that.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” asked Darling.
Kenny waved a hand dismissively. “All nonsense, really. Reg Mather used to go round and give her a hand. Especially that first winter. It was bitterly cold. I used to stop on my way down to the lake and try to help and she always sent me away, but Mather did seem to have an in with her. In any case, she was gone by the late summer of 1917. We didn’t really know she’d left, except we noticed after a couple of months she hadn’t been along to see about the mail. I stopped by Harris’s house and the place was deserted. She’d done a decent job of shutting the place down. I found the key under the mat.”
Eleanor looked at Kenny impatiently. “Meaning, there was a rumour that Reg had been seen coming back from Elizabeth’s place quite late sometimes. No one liked to say it out loud because people here aren’t mean-spirited, really, but there always lingered a suggestion that Reg and Elizabeth might have had a fling.”
Darling put his cup down, thinking how delicious the tea seemed to be from these fragile “best” cups, in this decorous, time-forgotten drawing room
. “What about Sandy?”
“What about Sandy? Oh, might he . . . good grief, no. He’s Alice’s through and through. She wouldn’t put up with that sort of thing from Reg for a second. That’s why it’s difficult to believe in the fling business. Reg is, if the truth be known, a little afraid of her. Sandy’s always been a surly, unhappy boy. I pity any woman who ends up with him!” Eleanor laughed, so that she did not see, in the shadowy room, the slight reddening of Lane’s face.
“And just one thing more, Mrs. Armstrong. We were going to ask you about the mail, in case this man was coming here to see someone. You would have noted any odd mail perhaps?”
“It’s pretty much what you’d expect. Most people get the Nelson newspaper, a few bills. Harris gets a veteran’s pension cheque every couple of months from the old country, Mather has an aunt or something who used to write very irregularly . . . sometimes years apart. He just got one from her today. It was stuck in a bag somewhere because the stamp was franked in England in April. The Hughes ladies used to get mail from the old country but not so much anymore. I expect most of their relatives have died. The only really odd thing is that the Bertollis almost never get mail from the States. You’d think they’d be getting quite a bit, as our most recent residents, but he’s only had one letter in the last couple of months.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
DARLING HAD LEFT AND LANE was sitting at her little desk just at the time that Reginald was sitting at his. She, at least, had no guilty conscience other than the mild guilt that attends to having puttered away the morning and finding herself trying to write at two in the afternoon, when she knew she was better first thing in the morning. She had typed one line:
Clouds have banked, have banked and rolled
And thundered, she might have written, for at that moment a distant rumble announced itself. She abandoned her poem and gazed with a familiar combination of delight and a slight thrill of atavistic fear as the clouds piled and moved over the lake toward her. They might get a proper storm. Blimey! The windows upstairs. She’d left them open when she and Darling had been going across to the post office. She rushed up the attic steps and arrived just as the first massive drops of rain began to slant into the room. She pulled the windows shut and then stood panting to watch the storm. Lightning added to the theatre and she unconsciously began to count the seconds between lightning and thunder. A wave of nostalgia and sadness engulfed her. Her grandfather had so often rousted her out of bed and made her, with her grandmother protesting in the background, go up to the roof of the house in storms, no doubt risking their very lives. She would stand with her hand gripping his, at once fearful and thrilled while he extolled the wonders of nature at its rawest. These episodes always ended the same way. She was rubbed to a tingling with a towel by her irritated grandmother, put into a new nightie, and given a large cup of chocolate. And then, tucked into her bed again, she felt more wonderful than at any other time; warm, renewed, tranquil, and she slept the sweetest sleep of all.
