A Killer in King's Cove

by Iona Whishaw

  LANE TOOK A couple of breaths. There’d not been a shot for a few minutes. That was good. But it didn’t answer the question of where Sandy would be now. The ringing of the phone startled her, and then she realized it was her number. Praying for she knew not what, Lane picked up the receiver.

  “King’s Cove . . .” she began but she got no further. She felt something hard pressed into her neck.

  “Put that down,” commanded a quiet voice. Sandy’s quiet voice. Reaching her hand slowly toward the hook, she replaced the earpiece and waited, her heart in her mouth.

  He came alongside her and, leaning the rifle against the wall, he pulled her two hands behind her and tied them, she couldn’t see with what. It felt like a scarf of some sort. He kept her facing away from him, her head turned uncomfortably and pressed against the wall. Then he took up the rifle and pointed it under her chin.

  “Sandy, what . . .”

  “Ah!” he cautioned, “I’ll do the talking, don’t you think? That’s the trouble with women since the war. Thinking they’re in charge. You want a strong man to take charge of you, don’t you? You missed your chance. You could have had me but you were too good for me.”

  He was sounding mad, Lane thought, ranting, like he had in the car. Maybe ranting was as far as he was going to go. But no. He’d been shooting. He’d seen her in the attic. He had been trying to shoot her. Her eyes swung toward the front door as if she could locate him back out there, still firing at her. He’d been in the barn, looking at the car. She’d been right. It was Sandy. She tried to calm herself, to look again toward the window.

  “Don’t bother. There’s no one there to rescue you. I was just out there, or did you miss me? I know I missed you! I thought I’d better come in and not risk missing again. Perhaps you would have been happier with that man who came here, eh? One of your own kind. I saw his identification. But you know that, don’t you? British. Probably had a fancy accent. Mind you, I didn’t get to hear it. That idiot Robin heard it. He had your name in his pocket, like he was looking for you. A boyfriend, was he?”

  Lane shook her head in confusion, little convulsive movements, and found Sandy had moved so that he could look into her eyes. She tried to imagine what she could see there; fear? Anger? Triumph? She’d read somewhere during her service that the impulse to kill broke down when you could make a personal human connection with the enemy; look into someone’s eyes, see the common humanity. It hadn’t worked in occupied France. It didn’t seem to be working now. He was staring into her eyes, and she could detect only his obsession with himself. She could see in his eyes the cold calculation that she, in a way she could not yet fathom, was an impediment he needed to rid himself of. And what did he mean, Robin had heard Frank’s accent? Somewhere in her head, her brain was carrying on trying to understand the implications of what Sandy was saying. What she couldn’t understand was why he was there with her. Why did he want to kill her? He’d said she knew he’d seen Franks’ identification.

  It couldn’t have been long, but already her hands and shoulders were beginning to hurt from the unnatural position he’d forced them into. She waggled her hands to test how tightly they were bound. A faint hope. She could feel no play whatsoever in her wrists. What had he used?

  He shook her violently. “I’ll let you know when you can close your eyes, Miss Winslow. Indeed, I will close them for you when the time comes. In the meantime, why don’t you tell me about this dashing lover who came looking for you?” He leaned in at these last words, whispering them into her ear. She could feel his breath, and recoiled. Why would he have connected the stranger with her? Of course; the paper with her name.

  “I don’t know anything about him,” she ventured, her voice feeling unfamiliar to her.

  “Funny. He knew about you.” He let this rest in the stultifying heat of the passageway. Lane could feel sweat sliding from under her hair and down her neck.

  “Sandy, did you . . .”

  “No, no, no. I ask the questions here. I thought I made that clear.” He laughed. “Anyway, I’m just pulling your leg. I know he wasn’t your lover. You’re too cold for that sort of thing. In fact, I know who he was. He was my dear old father’s other son. Now isn’t that something?”

  So, it was true and Sandy had found out. Then why was he turning on her?

  “You’ll be wondering how I know this. You’ll be wondering how he ended up dead. In fact, it’s your bloody wondering that’s caused all the problems. This whole thing is your fault.”

  “Sandy, I don’t know what . . .”

  “Ah . . . please, no denials. I know you think you worked it out. You followed me in the forest. Yes, you’re surprised that I saw you.”

  He must have seen her coming out of the forest from the quarry, followed her and watched her make the call to the Nelson police station, and she hadn’t known. Some spy she was, she thought ruefully. At the same time she could feel the gun at her neck. Would he use it? Could he? Lane wondered if she could keep him talking . . . until what? Perhaps the house agent was right, she should have bought a nice little place in town. Then at least someone would hear if she screamed.

  Sandy shook her again like a naughty child. “Come now; I want to know how you worked it out.” Everything she said seemed to irritate him. He was looking for a specific answer. He would not be satisfied until he had it but she hadn’t got an answer. She felt a surge of rage. His bloody vanity! He had to know, because it was inconceivable to him that he could have made a mistake. He really was quite mad, she thought, her rage contracting into a ball of fear.

  UP THE HILL, at the Hughes’ house, the nearly religious observance of a regular lunchtime had been complied with and Mrs. Hughes was heaving herself out of her chair to return to the garden. Misunderstanding her intention, her youngest daughter, Gwen, rose quickly and said, “Don’t bother, Mummy, I’ll take care of the tea things.” Mabel, the elder, was already in the kitchen seeing to the bread.

  Scooping everything on to a lacquered tray, Gwen scarcely listened to her mother’s retorted, “I was going to see to the lupines, if you must know.”

  Gwen was feeling a degree of rebellion. The electricity in the garage had been on the blink and she’d been finding it a confounded nuisance, for that was where she enjoyed her one little indulgence, wood turning, and it was too dark, even on a summer’s day. She was going to phone Robin and get him to come along and look at the wiring. Of course her mother and sister laughed at her, but they didn’t mind eating salad out of the bowl she had turned for them! She picked up the phone and was annoyed to find someone was on the line. Gingerly she hung up so that whoever it was might not think she was listening. As she washed the dishes, it occurred to her that she had not immediately heard who it was. There were only two possibilities: the Armstrongs or that new woman, Miss Winslow. Neither of them seemed, as far as she could tell, prone to long chatting. She’d try again in a few minutes.

  The dishes upended in the drying rack, and the dish mop wrung out and hung, Gwen went into the hallway again. She had a frisson of annoyance that Mabel was now in the spare room, just off where the telephone was hanging, and seemed to be sorting through piles of mothballed clothes. As soon as Gwen picked up the receiver, Mabel popped her head around the door. “Who are you calling?” she said, but Gwen ignored her.

  With the instrument against her ear, she could tell that the phone was still engaged, but it was strange, because the voices seemed to be coming from far away. A male voice. “I’ll do the talking,” it said. She heard no answer, and in a few seconds, something else, though she couldn’t quite make it out.

  “Gwenny, you shouldn’t be listening to other people’s conversations,” Mabel said to her. “The whole democracy of this place depends on . . .” but Gwen did something unthinkable, she waved her hand frantically to shush her sister.

  Mabel frowned, and advanced toward the phone. “What . . .”

  This time Gwen put her hand on the speaking device and said, very quietly an
d deliberately, “Shh! Please.”

  The voice was louder now, and Gwen could hear more distinctly. “. . . you’ll be wondering how he ended up dead . . .” said the voice. It sounded strident, boastful even. Who was it? There was another long silence.

  With her hand still covering the phone, she whispered, “I think there’s something wrong. I think . . .” and then she suddenly understood what she thought: “I think someone has their phone off the hook, and they don’t know it.”

  “Yes, well, that doesn’t give you the right to listen in. What do you mean something’s wrong, anyway?”

  “Shh,” whispered Gwen once more, and closed her eyes to hear better.

  What she heard made her go pale and feel faint. “Sandy, please . . .”

  This voice Gwen knew, by its very strangeness to her. She carefully hung up the earpiece, praying that the click would not be audible.

  “Mabel, I think Miss Winslow is in trouble and I think Sandy Mather is with her. We’ve got to do something.”

  “What are we going to do? We can’t telephone anyone.”

  “Let’s go down to Kenny!” Gwen said decisively and hurried to the mudroom to put on her boots. “Come on! There’s no time to lose.”

  Mabel, following her sister in some confusion, said, slipping into her own boots, “But Kenny can’t phone anyone either; he’s on the same line as we are!”

  “Yes, but he’s a man. He’ll know what to do.”

  Mabel stifled a “Ha!” to this last observation and together they descended from their hill along the winding verdant path to the Armstrongs’, both of them thinking grimly that they wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sandy Mather were up to no good.

  PULLING IN TO the gas station at Balfour, Ames was retaining a dignified silence. Any word he said would break the dam and unleash a torrent of recrimination from Darling, he knew. Fred Bales, the proprietor, came out of the shop, wiping his hands on the back of his pants. He leaned down to peer at Ames. “Fill up?”

  “Yes please,” Ames answered, keeping his gaze on the road next to the station. It was three miles to King’s Cove, and he could not wait to get there. Being crammed, for that is how it felt when his boss was in this sort of mood, into the car with Darling for the length of the drive, had been an ordeal. He had meant to gas up the car, but how was he to know there would be this imperious summons to bolt up the lake on a moment’s notice? There were other crimes in the district, and he had been attending to them. The robbery of the tobacconist from the night before, for example, which had tied him up for most of the day, since the shopkeeper had been certain, incorrectly, as it transpired, who the culprit was.

  Darling, for his part, knew his power was in not speaking. In any case, he would not have known what to say. He only knew that he had to be in the Cove at once, and the agonizing fifty minutes on the road, followed by the revelation that they were nearly out of gas, had thrown him into an explosive humour. The tension had begun in town, when he had tried, over a period of an hour, to reach Ms. Winslow on the telephone to tell her he was leaving later than he’d planned. The final time he had been certain she picked up the receiver, but no one had answered his anxious, “Miss Winslow? Is that you?” repeated several times. Of course he knew it was the fault of the rickety phone she had, but it had filled him with an urgency he could not explain, which added a savage edge to his order to Ames to get them to the Cove as quickly as possible.

  Now they were parked in front of the gas pump in Balfour, waiting for Fred Bales to come back with their change. In the interim, an elderly woman with a shopping basket on her arm and a brown scarf tied around her head had gone into the shop. No doubt Bales was attending to her, thought Darling. Dear God! He pushed open the car door and strode to the shop just as Bales was coming out the door. They nearly collided.

  “Did you want something else, sir?” asked the proprietor, surprised.

  “Just my bloody change, thank you,” and, seeing the slightly wounded look on Bale’s face, Darling added, “We’re on police business.” He took the proffered change and leaped back into the car. A car went by on the road, kicking up a cloud of dust. Shutting the door quickly, Darling barked, “Now get a move on!”

  “Sir, I think that’s a rental from Nelson. In fact, it almost . . .” but he was cut off.

  “I am, as always, astounded by your powers of observation, Ames. Now that we have identified the various motorcars on the road, perhaps you could get us on to it and up to the Cove sharpish?”

  “Sir,” said Ames.

  “WHAT I MEAN, Sandy,” Lane had lowered her voice and was trying to force some sort of soothing quality into it. “What I mean is, I think you were very clever because I hadn’t worked it out. I hadn’t worked it out at all.” They had moved to the bedroom just off the hall from the phone. This turn of events had really frightened her but all he had done was throw her roughly to the floor so that she could sit up leaning against the bed. He must have been as tired as she was of the uncomfortable tableau they made leaning awkwardly against the wall. The bedroom was the nearest room. He had taken her vanity chair and he sat on it now, the gun in the crook of his arm, still pointing unnervingly at her. She was more comfortable, but she cursed inwardly that they were so far from the telephone. It was a long shot, anyway. She didn’t know if the phone had latched all the way down, or had stuck, leaving the line open as it usually did. Someone would have to pick up their phone, try to make a call, hear the line was engaged, and perhaps even hear bits of this mad conversation. No one had come bursting through the door to rescue her. There would be no chance, now that they were out of earshot.

  Sandy’s expression didn’t change, but she felt a slight, nearly imperceptible shift in the atmosphere. Then she immediately doubted this. In the war she hadn’t thought twice, hadn’t second-guessed herself. She’d trusted her instincts immediately. She’d never had time to think. It had been too long. Her wartime sangfroid had deserted her. But he really did seem slightly less belligerent with his next question; indeed, almost petulant.

  “Why were you following me?”

  “I wasn’t following you at all. I’d gone back to the creek to try to work out what had happened and I saw the path on the other side of the weir. It looked overgrown, but I wanted to see where it led. I’d found the quarry with all the old rubbish in it and then I heard something . . . you . . . and hid.” She was going to stop there, wondering what else she ought to say and then she said, trading on her earlier instinct, “You must have been astonishingly quiet when you were following me. I didn’t have a clue.”

  Her captor smirked. “I’m good at that. I can go anywhere in these forests like an Indian. I know all the secret places.” They sat in silence for some moments. She didn’t want to encourage any meditation on any secret places in the forest, in case he devised a plan that ended with her being dumped in one of them. She plunged ahead.

  “It must have been really shocking to find your father had another son.” She was about to add that that was the real thing she’d worked out, because the dead man had looked so much like his mother, but then she worried she would anger him. In his unstable frame of mind it was best if he were in charge of the conversation.

  “Nothing my father would do shocks me. But I was pretty mad when I found out about him. I know he was planning to put him in my place. He’s a bastard. That’s why Harris and my dear old father hate each other. I always thought it was the land that Harris wouldn’t sell, but it was because my father had a go at Harris’s wife when he was away in the war.”

  “Are you sure Harris knew about this affair?”

  “Of course he knew. My mother knew. That’s how I found out. If she knew, he must have. See, that’s another thing. My mother is as crazy as a loon. He did that to her. It drove her crazy when she found out. But you know what, dearie? We aren’t going to be led down the garden path by you. I want to know why you did this to me!”

  Now Lane was genuinely puzzled. What had she done? Or
what did he think she had done? She wanted to say “I don’t know what you mean” again, and then thought he’d become angry, and she was hoping to calm him down while she thought of a plan. “Sandy, what I don’t understand is, why did you kill him? You really don’t believe your father would have put you aside for him, do you?” She hoped he wouldn’t detect that she was trying another garden path. Anything to keep him talking. To her horror he suddenly sobbed.

  “That’s the whole point, you stupid cow! I didn’t kill him! Harris did. He hit him with his bloody tractor iron; it was hard enough to fell a bull. All I did was get rid of the body. But you, you stupid, miserable, bitch, you’ve been trying to pin it on me! Me!” Lane lay back and shut her eyes. Harris had hit Franks, then, but Sandy had put him in the creek. She mustn’t say the man had died of drowning. She had to keep him talking. “Sandy, look, this is silly. Why do you think I was trying to pin it on you? If you didn’t kill the man, then why all this? It’s completely unnecessary and if the police . . . well . . . this sort of thing wouldn’t help your case at all.”

  KENNY ARMSTRONG FURROWED his brow, and then wiped it with his handkerchief. “Are you quite sure, Gwen?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Go listen to it yourself!” Kenny moved toward the screen door into the front of the house. He’d been under the hood of his new truck. Not that it needed his attention, but he liked being under the hood, sniffing that new engine smell, and fondly wiping away bits of oil.