A Killer in King's Cove

by Iona Whishaw

  Eleanor came to the door and threw it open. “Whatever is the matter? You two don’t usually clop down here at this time of day in your wellies.”

  “They think Miss Winslow is in trouble. They think Sandy is with her and . . . what do you think he’s doing?” He turned and addressed this to the two maiden ladies.

  “I think I heard him threatening her. On the phone, you see. It wasn’t hung up properly on her end, and I could hear voices.”

  Eleanor bolted out of the cottage. “Well, what are you doing standing around?” And she began to walk quickly up the road to the path that would take them to Lane. At that moment, they heard a car changing gear on the uphill just before the fork in the road. They could hear it turn and come down the hill. “That will be the police, maybe. Did one of you call them? That shows some foresight, anyway.” But she didn’t wait to hear the answer.

  AMES TURNED OFF the road to Miss Winslow’s driveway, but there was already a car there. “I could swear it is that rental motor that passed us,” Ames remarked.

  “Something very odd seems to be going on.” Darling pushed past Ames and around the gate, striding briskly past the barn and toward the house. But he stopped and turned back. The barn doors were flung open. Had she gone ahead and told that lie about them coming back to inspect the car? As he neared it, the west side of the house came into view, and he stopped as if hit by a jackhammer. “What the bloody, bloody hell is he doing here?” he said grimly under his breath. Ames shook his head. There, peering into the window of what must surely be Miss Winslow’s bedroom, was Dunn, who should, by all rights be back in Britain by this time.

  “Get down!” Dunn hissed in a loud stage whisper. Ames and Darling scuttled behind him and crouched below the window. “She’s in there with some idiot and he has a gun. I’m certain from the way the conversation is going that he was the one who killed our agent, Franks. We mustn’t startle him.” He looked back and then swore. “They’ve gone. Why the devil have you turned up here? Now I’ve lost sight of what is happening!”

  Darling, who was pretty certain that he was the one who should be doing all the why-the-devilling here, took command. “They haven’t left the house. Ames, take the veranda; I suspect they will have gone into the hall, if he is planning to take her out of the house, or the kitchen. I’ll go in the front door. Maybe you could make yourself useful and keep him from escaping out the window,” he added crossly to Dunn.

  HARRIS HAD SAT still, watching Alice trudging away from him through the orchard and back on to the road. It dawned on him that he didn’t know her at all. She was just Mad Mather. Perhaps that is the way everyone thought of him as well: Mad Harris. Well, he had plenty of bloody reason and maybe she did too. Elizabeth. What madness was in his young self that had made him take up with her? He could barely remember now what he must have been like at twenty or twenty-one. He’d seen her . . . where? At the feed store in town? Possibly. She was a dishevelled little thing, her poverty and misery written in her drab clothes and unbrushed hair. But she had some wild energy about her. He remembered his face flaming up as he watched her throwing a bag of oats onto her father’s wagon. Something in her physicality, he decided. How had he courted her? He was cheerful and he remembered she laughed. He didn’t recall that they went to the pictures. He wasn’t even sure there were pictures before the war. Maybe they’d eaten at the soda fountain. Had he had any warning? She was pleasant enough at first. She was used to work, but she’d said she didn’t want children. She would never go with him into town after they were married, in case she met her father there; she hated him, venomously, furiously. Then Harris had gone to the war and whatever he had been was burned away at the front. He had been fearful of coming home to her, that much he did remember, and when he finally made it home, her being gone and the land burned to a crisp around them all, in a way, seemed fitting. The whole world he’d known, seared away, but now, suddenly, here it was.

  Unbidden, there suddenly sprang up a picture of Reginald Mather and Elizabeth in bed. His bed, no doubt, as Alice would have been back up the hill in Reginald’s. The Reginald he saw moving his hands over the body of his young wife was today’s Reginald, older; sleeping with the last Elizabeth Harris ever saw. It was grotesque, and he shivered. Rage was growing in him slowly, like coals catching fire. All at once the life he had constructed out of the nothing that remained him all those years ago after the Great War revealed itself to him in its stark truth: empty, lonely, a terrible gulf between him and anyone else. He got off his tractor to crank it, and looked at the crank, amazed that he had forgotten what he’d done to that boy. He felt a wave of fear sweep over him and he dropped the crank into the grass. His hands were shaking as he picked it up. But it wasn’t this one, was it? Sandy had taken the other one. He said he’d take care of things. Just like his bastard of a father then. He’d been taking care of things, all those years ago, too.

  He could see Mather in the car, beginning to back it away from the barn. Mather would see him when he turned around. He could wait. He’d waited nearly thirty years, not knowing, not understanding, losing every last thing, and Mather had kept quiet and devoted himself to trying to get him to give up his land for that filthy lumber mill, as if, once he’d taken from him and gotten away with it, he would be easy pickings. That bloody boy had finally achieved what his father never could. He uttered a mirthless laugh. Mather had backed down the driveway without seeing the tractor until he was practically upon it. He shook his head uncomprehendingly, looking back toward the house, where Alice was now standing at the door, watching them. He half got out of the car.

  “What the bloody hell are you doing here?” he finally managed.

  “You screwed my wife?” Harris said, not really a question, he realized.

  Mather looked toward Alice and back again at Harris.

  Harris advanced, devouring the ground between them with his strides. “You slept with my wife while I was up to my withers in blood in France. You were here, cozy and warm, ‘helping’ my wife. And then, when you put her up the spout you made her disappear.” Mather had backed away and now stood on the other side of his Morris.

  Harris looked around wildly and his eyes lit on a heavy metal-tined rake leaning against a wooden wheelbarrow. He seized it and slammed it down on the car, denting the hood. “If you paid to get rid of her, I should be grateful, shouldn’t I? It’s the only bloody thing I’ve gotten from you in forty years!” He swung the rake sideways and slammed it into the windscreen. Mather threw up his arms to shield himself from the shattering glass.

  “Harris, I . . . I . . . have to go . . . my boy, he’s . . .”

  “Oh, yes, your boy. Which boy is that? That useless Sandy, or that other one? If I’m not mistaken that dead boy is yours as well. He looked just like her. I don’t know why I didn’t see it.” Mather looked at Harris. There was something wrong with what he was saying, he knew that, and he was afraid of what Harris might do with the rake, but he was terrified at every moment that he would hear gunshots again.

  “Robin, listen please. I’ve got to get down to Winslow’s. I think Sandy is down there with the gun for some reason. We can talk about this later.” He pushed past Harris and climbed into the driver’s side of the Morris, brushing glass off the seat onto the ground. Harris, with an energy that terrified Mather, darted around the other side of the car and began to break the passenger side window. Yes, it was right, thought Mather, that the whole world should come unravelled, and he slumped over the steering wheel, hoping that there would, at least, be no more shots.

  THEY WERE AT the table in the kitchen now. Lane had made tea. She was pushing the sugar bowl toward him, still being soothing, when she caught sight of a figure to one side of the French door on her veranda. She wondered momentarily how it had been accomplished so quietly, and then said, without looking back toward the door, “Sugar, Sandy? It’s best to have really sweet, strong tea when you’ve been upset.” Sandy was looking into his cup, his rifle across the table in
front of him. Lane was alert now; if someone was on the veranda, someone must be around at the front. Had they come into the hall already? It must be Darling and Ames. She hoped they would not make a splashy entrance; it might spook Sandy, and he still had the gun. She must avoid being in the line of fire or being taken hostage again. Could she get the gun away from him on any pretext? She thought not. He was stirring his tea with his left hand, and had the gun in a death grip with his right hand, and he was still in a volatile mood. She’d only got him this far because she’d pretended to believe that he hadn’t killed Franks and that nothing was going to be accomplished with her bound on the floor of the bedroom. They would go and have tea, and they would talk about how to get him out of this jam. After all, as he was innocent, it was no use making his situation worse. To her amazement, he’d bought it.

  She heard the creak in the hallway and glanced at Sandy. He didn’t seem to have heard; perhaps the sound of the stirring covered it up. Any moment from now someone was going to spring into the room to effect a rescue. She had to keep it calm. Or not. As the door of the veranda burst open, she shoved the teapot so that it rolled onto its side and deposited scalding tea onto Sandy. At once the room was mayhem. She reached for the gun just as someone jumped Sandy and pushed him onto the floor. Ames! She stood back against the stove, holding the rifle in her hands, and did not take her eyes off Ames, who was now snapping handcuffs on the swearing Sandy, until she felt someone gently tugging at the gun.

  “There, Miss Winslow. Shall I take that?” And she looked around to see Darling standing next to her, now holding the weapon.

  “Ah, you’re here about the raspberries” was all she said. How the whole thing ended, Lane would doubtless reconstruct later, with her cup of cocoa. There was a period of businesslike activity: a now mysteriously passive Sandy being led away in handcuffs, the sound of the car backing up the drive.

  Lane had reported, a bit shakily, what she had been told by Sandy. She assumed they would take Harris up as well.

  It hadn’t been difficult. They had met him coming down the road on his tractor. From where they stopped him they could see, near the top of the road, Mather standing looking at his car. They would find out in the course of the afternoon what had happened, and how it had been a corollary to the dangerous events unfolding in Lane’s house.

  Kenny and Eleanor and the Hughes all came out from behind the weeping willow where they had been hurriedly told by Darling to go, looking suspiciously at Angus as they left, still asking if Lane was going to be all right. Everyone gone but one. It was silent again, and she sat on the veranda with a scotch, deserved, she thought, and looked out at the lake. The light had a particular yellow intensity at this time of the afternoon. Soon the shadows would bleed across the lawn, the forest, the mountains, but the lake would still be reflecting the deep blue sky until the very last minute. She put her glass down on the little French table, and turned to Angus Dunn, who sat on the other side, his empty glass in his hand, in what she sincerely hoped was an advanced state of discomfort. She laughed inwardly. This sort of thing would never be his style. She was sure now that he must have a family and that that family lived somewhere in the countryside, but an English countryside, especially Kent, or Oxfordshire, or wherever he stashed them, would be nothing like this vast, lonely place.

  “Were you planning on staying? Only I’ve nothing set up. We could ask the Armstrongs if they could put you up.”

  “How long are you planning to keep up this cool front? You know why I’m here—I shan’t go without you. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble, you know. I was most of the way to Vancouver when I knew I couldn’t go back without you. Seems I was just in time to rescue you. It’s ridiculous, this colonial cowboy nonsense you’re going in for. You don’t belong here. You belong in England, putting your talents to use. Your country needs you. There, I’ve even pulled that one out, but it happens to be true.”

  Lane stood up. Who had rescued her? She couldn’t have said, though she knew she’d had a part in it. She’d seen Ames burst through the door, then Darling, then, even in the state she’d been in after pouring scalding water on Sandy, a kind of shock at seeing Angus. She could scarcely imagine what she was feeling now, with him sitting before her. She had overheard snatches of whispered and angry conversation between him and Darling as Ames was leading Sandy out of the house. They had been talking about her. What could Darling have said to elicit an angry “I have every right to her” from Angus? Now she was exhausted, enraged, she hardly knew.

  “Angus, I’ve had, as they say, a long day. I cannot see what I have done to be plagued by you, in my own home, far from any hope of being rescued. I told you when I met you in Nelson that I wanted nothing more to do with you or the service. You have been gassing on since the police left with that wretched young man about why I should go back and work for you. I don’t want to work for you or be like you; to lie so easily, to presume on people, or to use them. I shiver when I think how close I came to staying after the war. Now, please, please, get back in that motorcar and drive away out of my life.”

  He stood on her doorstep, under the great blue spruce, holding his hat in his hands, looking at the ground. He seemed to have understood that he had lost, yet appeared to be mustering one more plea. Lane was holding the door, waiting for him to turn and walk up the driveway to wherever he’d put his car. When he turned, she would close the door and go back to her drink. She would not stay and watch him leave.

  “I loved . . . love . . . you, you know . . .” He left the sentence hanging in the air.

  “You are absolutely unbelievable,” she said, smiling. “Now, get out.” She closed the door and walked back down her hallway, now nearly dark in the late afternoon, toward the light still pouring in from the open veranda doors.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  IT WAS RAINING THE DAY it all ended. It had taken until mid-September for the trial to get underway and now,

  after all that time, it seemed to end in no time at all. Lane stood on the stairs of the courthouse, struggling to unfurl her umbrella so that she could make her way back to where she had parked her motorcar. She could not wait to be on the road. Rain in town was bleak, she reflected, rendering everything into a landscape of greys, but out in the country it was soft, the greys ameliorated by infinite shades of green as the trees caught the shimmer of light in the drops of water.

  She had testified, something she’d been nervous about, fearful that she would get muddled under the badgering of lawyers, but, in fact, both sides had seemed doggedly interested in collecting tiny details: Had she seen what the victim was wearing, could she recall the time when she was on the road, how many minutes, how far, how dark, how light . . . ? These scarcely seemed to add up to the human drama that had unfolded before her in the summer. In the end, Sandy owned that he had gotten the idea to place the blame on Miss Winslow from the papers found in the victim’s pockets, all of which he’d burned but the one with her name on it. Yes, he’d planted the shoe in her property and at four in the morning had moved the car from Harris’s barn to Lane’s. No, he didn’t know what happened to the other shoe. Why had he fixed on having her take the blame? A long silence. It was because he’d promised Harris that he’d take care of everything. He got rid of the original crank in the old dump and fixed it so that no one could trace the death to Harris. He’d kept the keys. He’d thought he might have use for the car one day.

  Sandy was deemed to be responsible for Jack Franks’ death and would likely be sent to the coast to prison, and Harris had been charged with assault, for which he would likely serve very little time because of his age. The whole thing, conducted in a darkly panelled room whose high windows admitted only the dull light from the banks of grey clouds outside, was infinitely depressing.

  The umbrella had just sprung into life when she heard her name called. She quelled with irritation the pang she felt at the sound of his voice and turned, lifting her umbrella to address Inspector Darling.

&n
bsp; “Yes, Inspector?”

  He seemed momentarily at a loss for words, and then, finally, “Thank you for staying on and coming in to town to testify.”

  “There is no need to thank me. I assure you I was most mindful of the legal consequences of a failure to respond to a subpoena.”

  Darling looked down, rain beginning to drip from the brim of his hat. “When will you be off back to London?”

  She looked away, struggling with an anger she could scarcely comprehend. How dare he assume she would go back? “I’m not sure, you know. In the meantime, I will try, Inspector Darling, to cause no more mayhem in your patch.”

  The inspector stood for a long moment, but again seemed unable to think of anything to say. Lane wondered what she would say if he suddenly said something ridiculously unlikely like, “Please don’t go.” Well, he wouldn’t, of course, and why should she even think of it? She certainly had no interest in him. She still smarted from the angry conversation he and Angus had had about her as if she were an animal found on the street that had to be put somewhere. It would be good to be at home with her own thoughts, and Kenny and Eleanor’s or Angela’s if she got bored. Men were a confounded nuisance.

  “I’m relieved to hear you say so. My patch, as you quaintly put it, has plenty to occupy me without any contributions from your neck of the woods.”

  “Right, well. You’d better get out of the rain, Inspector. A sick policeman will do no one’s patch any good. Good day.”

  She began to descend the steps toward the street when she heard him call out. She turned and he came to the step just below the one she was on, so that his eyes were level with hers. “Miss Winslow, he cannot hold a candle to you.” And he turned and walked away.

  ON THE FERRY across the lake Lane stared at the rain slashing onto her windscreen. What had he meant? He could have said that Angus was not worthy, or not worth it. He could have said she was a fool to go back for a fool, but instead he had said Angus couldn’t hold a candle to her. She could not remember ever being compared equally to a man, especially not by a man. Now she felt guilty about how she’d treated the inspector. There was no need to be so cold, and there was no need at all to pretend she might even be thinking of going back to England. She would never go back, would never even consider it. How could he understand that she wanted only to be considered in her own right, and yet not understand that nothing would induce her to go back? Certainly not that prig, Angus. She tried to imagine Angus thinking of her as equal to him—to any man. It would be impossible; he had the superiority of men ingrained in every pore. He would not even think his own behaviour reprehensible, in taking her, young and vulnerable, to be his lover while he had a wife somewhere. With a shudder she realized there must have been others before her, and would likely be others after. Girls fell for that sort of confident domineering. She tried to forgive her young self for falling for him.