by Iona Whishaw
LANE SAW SANDY leave her gate and go toward the post office. With that relief that comes of nearly being safely home, she ran as quietly as she could down the road to the gate, left the road, and pushed the gate open. She had just done this when she stopped to listen. She could hear the sound of the tractor from the direction of the Hughes’ on the hill. Harris, on his way to the upper orchard. She started down the path, the tall grass brushing along her legs as she passed her barn, but stopped again. The tractor had stopped. She was no expert, and certainly had not been here long enough to know the patterns of the daily comings and goings; nevertheless, it seemed strange that the tractor had started up and then so quickly stopped.
It was only when she was pushing open her door that she finally heard the tractor start up again. It was closer than she had thought, maybe at the bottom of the road from the Hughes’, where the road divided. The gears ground as he turned the corner, and then the noise began to recede.
Lane washed her hands in the kitchen and poured herself an enormous glass of water. She was surprised to see that her hand shook slightly. She wanted to run upstairs and look at her map again but she thought she should phone the inspector.
A nervous frisson shook her as she stood in front of the phone. Her ridiculous strategy of trying to trap the murderer by putting it about that there was a clue in the car—now that the police were coming back, she could see it for what it was. Dangerous nonsense. Now, having seen Sandy by the old garbage dump, she realized that if she’d trusted to events, a real clue would have come along. Of course, this might not be anything. She shouldn’t let her mistrust of Sandy lead her to cast aspersions on him. She could imagine an outraged Sandy, in the full knowledge that she had phoned the police about him. He would be unbearable and she would be stuck in this tiny community with him as a constant neighbour. And then her thinking went the full circle. Her instinctive distrust of him was right and she knew that everything might be of significance.
In the hallway, cast in shadow against the morning light pouring in the front door, she stood in front of her phone and rehearsed what she would say. The line was silent when she picked it up, no one on the party line, so she turned the crank and waited for the operator. “Yes, Nelson police station, please,” she said. The phone clicked as the call was being put through. Lane leaned against the wall as she waited. It was very unrestful to talk on this phone, she thought. You had to face the trumpet so you could neither sit down when you used the phone, nor even lean against the wall once you had someone on the line. The romance of its antiquity was wearing off. She should get a proper phone.
“Nelson police,” said an officious voice.
“Inspector Darling, please.” She waited another long few minutes, aware now of a crick in her back, probably from squatting in the bushes spying on that blasted Sandy. When Darling came on the line, she studiously avoided thinking anything particular about the timbre of his voice, though it had a kind of deep resonance she had earlier found pleasant.
“Inspector. I wonder if you will be out this way?” This sounded a bit wet, but she hoped he would see through it.
“I will, as a matter of fact.” He paused. “It is not the first time today this has been suggested to me.”
He sounded . . . something . . . cross? Could he have found out about her subterfuge with Eleanor? She felt her face flush, and it seemed clear to her now that she was a first-class idiot for doing it when he’d said not to. “No. It’s . . . it’s the raspberries. I’ve planted them. I thought you might like to see them.” Now they, or she at least, were being ridiculous, but she could not risk the party line.
There was another brief silence, and then. “An hour and a half, say? I have another interesting variety. Perhaps I’ll bring that along as well.” She exhaled slowly, relieved. He had understood.
Unless the operator at the exchange in Balfour told all and sundry what calls were being put through to whom, thought Lane, they should be okay if anyone had picked up their receiver during this little conversation. Heartened by not being told off by Darling, and wondering with delicious curiosity what new information he had, she forgave her ancient telephone and, banishing all thought of a lovely, sparkling new instrument intruding perhaps on the sanctity of her sitting room, or taking up space in the kitchen, she climbed the stairs to the attic. She had an hour and a half to figure out why Sandy, if it were he, might have wanted to kill a complete stranger.
ALICE CHOSE NOT the road but the old path that had been used by the Cove’s children when they were young and visited each other’s houses. It ran behind the fields and along the base of the hill that loomed behind their house and climbed gently until it attained the higher reaches of the fields behind the Hughes’ hilltop farm. She knew where Harris would be at this time in the late morning; he worked his upper orchard with that damn noisy tractor. The orchard that Reg had been aching to get off him because it butted up against a good chunk of forest that he dreamed of logging. Dreaming. That was Reg. Her walking cane tangled in the long grass nearly obscuring the now-unused path, and she swished at it impatiently, like a farmer with a scythe.
Somewhat out of breath, she reached the top of the hill, and looked through the neatly planted apple trees. She couldn’t see Harris’s tractor, but in that moment, a sudden silence told her he’d turned it off, perhaps to have a bite. It was funny, she grumbled to herself, how a steady noise sinks into the background and you didn’t notice it till it stopped. She could remember the blessed relative silence of the men using horses to plow their little fields; it was probably the reason they went to apples. Too much work for them. She made her way down the rows until she spotted the yellow tractor at the edge of the field.
Harris was perched on the shaped metal seat with a sandwich in his hand and a thermos of tea at his feet. He was chewing as if he was only given five minutes for lunch, gulping back the food with washes from his thermos. He didn’t hear Alice until she was practically upon him and he nearly jumped when he saw her.
“What are you doing here?” he barked.
Alice banged the tractor tire with her cane. “Get off that thing,” she demanded, “I’ve got something to say to you.” Seeing that she wasn’t actually armed made him feel slightly safer, but he nevertheless got down on the opposite side, so as to keep the tractor between them. “I know what Reg has been up to. He’s been at it with your wife.”
Harris frowned at her. This declaration was disorienting and he struggled to place what it meant. He looked around, he wasn’t sure why, perhaps in the hopes of seeing someone else so he would not have to deal with her alone. He wasn’t sure how to respond. Finally he said, “Alice, I don’t have a wife. Haven’t had one for nearly thirty years. Left me. Remember? ’17 or ’18.”
Alice’s face clouded momentarily, and she looked down at the ground. “I’ve seen the letter,” she said. “I’ve seen the letter,” she repeated more strongly, as if on surer footing. “That’s why she left. They’d been at it. That trollop of yours.”
Harris swallowed, his mouth working. He was beginning see what she might mean, and with it came a dawning, hollow sense of rage. “What are you saying? That they . . . while I was at the front? When? Are you crazy? What letter are you talking about?”
“I’ve seen it, see. He was out, probably visiting the trollop, and I saw the letter about the baby. Yesterday. It was on his desk.”
Feeling like he was going mad, Harris tried to sort out the time scheme. She was obviously mixing up times, memories.
He’d had no idea she was this far gone. Did it mean there was a letter? There must have been; she wouldn’t come all the way up here unless there was. He focused on that.
“Alice, tell me about the letter. What did it say?”
“It said that his bastard was going to come here, looking for Reg.”
She’d gone then; turned on her heel and walked back through the trees, swinging that cane. She had a vigour that belied the shaky grip she had on reality. Reg, he th
ought, had better be careful: she could get ugly and she was still strong. Left in the silence, Harris, unused to any complex feelings to deal with, now had what felt like a landslide in him. He leaned forward with both hands on the tractor and put his head down, as if this might steady his insides. He had no coherent thoughts, but only flashes of pictures. Himself in a trench and his wife’s letter in his pocket. She’d only sent one. He’d been ashamed somehow when he’d gotten it. The other fellows got letters from home full of love and tales of how the children were doing, or how much their sweethearts missed them. Hers had been two pages of cramped and juvenile handwriting complaining, as if, he thought, he’d started the war himself to make her life miserable. She was alone, she couldn’t cope with all the work, no one helped her, how could he leave her to try to manage on her own?
He chewed on the idea of a letter. From Elizabeth? From Reg? From whom? He regretted now that he’d chosen to deal with Alice by not responding in the hopes that she’d take her madness and go away. Was this a letter from the past, or a letter from right now? She had rolled time all together, and he could not sort what was when. Then he moved to her last statement. “It said that bastard was going to come here, looking for Reg.”
His next thought made him feel lightheaded, and he crumbled slowly to the ground, and sat, trying to get his breath. He looked up the row of trees, in the direction Alice had gone, and wondered who else she might tell.
THE ATTIC WAS cool because Lane had opened windows on both sides of the room, and a breeze was blowing through. She was sitting with her back against a sealed crate. Perhaps, she thought, when all this was over, she’d get at some of the boxes. She couldn’t even imagine now what they could contain that she’d want, she was so used to living in the simplicity of just having the bare minimum around her. The map lay before her, and she wanted to draw other things on it. A suitcase, for example. The dead man must have had one. The murder weapon, which had still not been found. The other shoe. It now felt like days since she’d set off to find the shoe, though it was a matter of a few hours. In her heart, as she looked at the card with Sandy’s name on it, she believed it was him. It was all over but the arresting, she thought, and Darling was probably forty minutes away. Her map had had its day. But it was all very unsatisfactory, she thought. She hated guessing. She wanted to know, to have solid proof. Why would Sandy kill Franks? Well, for that matter, why would anyone? There were only two possibilities about this death that might, but only might, suggest some sort of motive. One was that Franks had been an agent of the British government, had blotted his copybook somehow, and been done in by some shadowy agent who’d long since left, and the second, highly speculative, was that Franks had been Elizabeth Harris’s son, if the similarities in the photo were to be believed. But neither of those led directly to Sandy. She sat up. Could Elizabeth Harris have been pregnant with Franks when she left here? She did a quick rough calculation, and saw that she could have been. That suggested someone here had made her pregnant. It was 1916 or 17. Who were the eligible candidates? Kenny Armstrong? She thought not, but struggled to keep him on her list, just to be fair. One shouldn’t jump to conclusions simply because one liked someone. Reginald Mather. Mather! Mather who had helped Elizabeth get through the winters while Harris was gone. Hadn’t Mabel and Gwen said as much? So Franks is making a pilgrimage to find his father, only for some inexplicable reason, he ends up dead before he even finds him. She couldn’t see how just yet, but this way of looking at it brought Sandy a little more into the frame. After all, Franks is potentially suddenly promoted from rank outsider to Sandy’s brother. But was he the one? Was she overreacting to the business of Sandy being in the forest? Perhaps he’d just thrown out garbage. He did creep about. Was he violent enough to kill someone? He could, she supposed, have had his way with her on that ghastly fishing trip when she rejected his ridiculous proposal. But even in the midst of that incident, she had felt in her heart that what Sandy really was, was pathetic. Could that make him a killer?
But what about Harris? He too, suddenly, began to come into focus as a potential. After all, Elizabeth had betrayed Harris, let’s say with Mather. This thought made her stand up and wander across the room to look out her window toward the barn, as if looking outside would open new avenues in her mind. She felt a flush of guilt and anxiety. Though she hadn’t told Darling on the phone whom she suspected, she was unnerved by the idea that she might be wrong. She would hate to have made him drive all the way here, when even now she had talked herself into not only seeing Sandy as the man they were looking for, but potentially implicating Harris as well. And why not Mather while we are at it? Perhaps the sudden appearance of a son he didn’t know about and didn’t want would be extremely inconvenient to him.
And there was the matter of how Franks was killed. Should she be going at it from that angle first, instead of trying to pin it on someone right away? He was hit with a hard, probably metallic object and then, very likely, moved and pushed into that awkward position in the creek, where he died of drowning. It is a fairly elaborate way to get rid of someone, she thought. It speaks of it being unplanned, spontaneous. Someone, say Sandy, gets into an argument with Franks and hits him with . . . the business end of rifle? No, that’s not very natural. If you were going to use a rifle to hit someone instead of using it to shoot them, you’d likely drive the butt end of it into a head. If done thoroughly enough, the killer would not have had to resort to drowning. Or did the killer think he’d done the job and was simply trying to get rid of the body?
She wondered how often people would go and check the weir. If it was once or twice a year, it was possibly a reasonable place to hide a body. Could the killer not simply have driven the body down to the lake and heaved it in? Eventually the body might fetch up considerably higher up the lake, carried by the quite powerful river that ran through the middle of the lake. It could have been washed up on a completely deserted shore and never have been found or, if found, it would never have been associated with King’s Cove. It would be dismissed as a drowning, resulting from a fall off a cliff or a boat. Did the killer panic and take the first alternative that presented itself? Or did the killer think through the whole thing and deliberately put Franks into the weir. But why? And then, somehow, all the bits and pieces started coming together. Who had been blamed immediately? She had. The paper with the name found in Frank’s pocket, the car mysteriously ending up in her garage. Even the fact that the body was in the weir that fed into her property. She felt herself blanch. The killer had targeted her. He wanted her to be arrested. That, without a doubt, pointed at Sandy. He was still furious at her rejection of him. She shuddered at the kind of obsessive arrogance one would have to have to take such revenge on someone.
Well, I’ve added to the number of possibles, I suppose, she thought, now weary. She hadn’t explored the British agent angle. Funnily, they’d be the most likely suspects, if Franks had gotten into some sort of trouble. Angus Dunn hadn’t said anything and seemed genuinely puzzled when he identified the body, but he was a master of deceit. She flushed angrily. First Angus and then Sandy. Were there no decent men around? And finally, of course, lest she forget her recent humiliation, there was her very own self, and she had never made contact with him at all before someone had bumped him off. She sighed. At least she knew she hadn’t done it. She paced and then leaned back against the window. She would be glad when Darling got there. She wanted to talk through her thinking with him.
She glanced at her watch. Nearly two. She should go down and put the kettle on, but was stopped dead in her tracks, because at that moment she heard a noise through the open window. Suddenly nervous, she stood with her back to the wall between two windows and breathed. There was the sound again. A scraping noise. She risked a quick look into the yard. The near door to the barn was open. So soon! She moved away from the window, her heart banging. She should wait and see who it was. The scraping sound again. With utmost care she turned again to look carefully through the windo
w. Sandy. She heard, and simultaneously felt, a loud crack and a shower of glass. She threw herself to the floor. He had a rifle, and he’d seen her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
ANOTHER SHOT, THIS TIME EMBEDDING itself somewhere in the wall of her house. She manoeuvred herself to the door on her hands and knees, trying to avoid shards of glass. She must telephone someone. Who? Darling would have left and been on his way. Kenny. No. It would put him in danger if Sandy was running mad with a rifle. Having reached the stairs, she dashed down them, made for the phone in the hallway, and then crouched down in a hurry. Her glass-panelled front door would allow anyone outside to see in. Lane felt a little silly about ducking about in her own hallway in this dramatic fashion. With anxious looks toward the outside, she found Mather’s number on the wall and, willing her hands not to shake, she turned the handle; three longs.
“KC 283,” she heard.
“Reginald, Lane. Listen . . .” But the line disconnected.
REGINALD HAD ONLY been back ten minutes and had found Alice gone. Now the phone. He shouted, “Hello! Hello!” But he could hear nothing. He slung the receiver back on the phone with another epithet, and strode out the front door, banging it pointedly. He’d heard shots. He knew it must be someone phoning about Alice again. How had she found the rifle? He went into the barn and reached above the door where he’d hidden it after the incident at the Bertollis’. Gone. He looked around, puzzled. How had she gotten it? She’d have needed the ladder, which was in the shed. Alice could never have moved it. He looked quickly around; a chair? And where was bloody Sandy? He usually handled this sort of business with Alice. She seemed to be more docile with him.
He was about to get into the car when the next sound made him stop. It was Alice, calling him from behind the house. He hurried out and around the side of the house. There she was, looking querulous, wanting something. She looked as though she’d been out, an unusual circumstance lately, but she was here now. The relief of this was quickly overshadowed by the next thought. Someone was shooting down the road, near the post office. Who had his rifle and where was Sandy? He had arrived home from Nelson feeling like his insides had been hollowed out. There seemed no doubt that the dead man must be his son. His resemblance to Elizabeth was too striking. It was somehow apt, he thought, as he backed his car, still warm from the trip to town, that the whole world should be upended at this moment, for certainly, his had been.
