A Killer in King's Cove

by Iona Whishaw

  Well, she thought grimly, putting her car into gear and driving off the wooden ramp of the ferry onto the road for the long drive home, there will be no danger of any sort of falling. King’s Cove would be a guarantee of that, and she was, she decided, satisfied with this.

  EPILOGUE

  October 11, 1946

  “NOW THAT IS LOVELY!” EXCLAIMED Angela, who had walked into the church carrying a thick bundle of golden grasses for the pots at the front of the church by the first pews. Eleanor had produced a beautifully embroidered white silk cloth for the altar, and they had piled apples and gourds in among the flowers and a few sheaves of barley. There were two bushel-baskets of vegetables just inside the door. Lane and Eleanor beamed at the compliment and stepped back to look.

  “Your first Harvest Festival, my dear. The vicar will do a very nice service. I think we need this just now, don’t you?” Eleanor brushed the detritus from organizing the barley off the front of her apron. “The tea afterward is always lovely. I’m so pleased that Gladys and the girls decided to throw it. We used to have the loveliest teas in their garden before the war. It’ll be quite like old times.”

  Lane thought about Sandy, away in Vancouver in prison, and the wreck that was Robin Harris, back in his house, more embittered, unreachable. Put that against Alice Mather, who suddenly appeared to be quite normal, while Reginald seemed to shrink inside himself. “Perhaps not altogether like old times,” she said. “Listen, I must get back. I promised myself I’d work today.”

  Angela protested, “You said you were coming up to my place for a drink!”

  “I know, I’m so sorry, Angela. It’ll keep. Tomorrow, yes?” She felt, in the crisp, autumn chill of the afternoon, that she wanted to be alone. She felt the most haunted during this season, she decided. When the past and present lingered together, when she felt pulled to solitude.

  The air was clean and cool, and though the leaves had not yet started their autumnal journey to the ground, the smell of smoke from the chimneys foretold the coming of she knew not what, in the way of winter. Perhaps it would be like Latvia: encased in white, clean, and quiet. As she walked up the hill, buttoning up her red and black lumberman’s jacket, a purchase she’d delighted in on her last trip into town, she wondered how she would be when the snow came; she recoiled a little inwardly at the prospect that the snow would plunge her into homesickness. Now then, she thought, you didn’t come all the way out here to wallow in nostalgia.

  In the house, she lit the fire and made herself a drink. With a book in hand she sat in her armchair and put her feet up on the grate. She tried to imagine writing about the war, tried to imagine what she would say. But it was impossible—too close, too incomprehensible, especially here. Of course, she thought ruefully, the war does come all the way here. People like Harris carry it around inside them, where it still has the power to strike. What did she carry? Nothing like Harris, she decided; his must have been a bloody awful war. She couldn’t imagine any more what it was like to be at war.

  The fire was blazing, and it was late, nearly six, when Lane woke with a start from her slight doze. Someone was knocking on her door. She pulled her feet off the grate, her legs stiff, her feet over-hot, and glanced at the clock and then outside. It was beginning to get dark; she felt a slight sadness at the memory of the long days of summer, but at the same time an exhilaration at the prospect of the coming winter. She could see a man’s figure through the panes in the door, and though he was obscured by the coming night, she thought for a moment it had the air of Inspector Darling, and then dismissed that as impossible.

  “Inspector,” she said, surprised, looking past him up the drive. She’d not heard his car. “I hope you’ve not found new evidence that puts me in the frame after all.”

  “I had a matter to see to in Ainsworth, so I thought I might drop by. I brought you this.” He held up a large paper bag. Nothing in his face betrayed that last moment they’d been together on the steps of the courthouse.

  She looked with surprise at the bag, but did not take it. “You’d better come in.” She stood aside to let him in, and then watched him as he moved down the hall to the sitting room. Her heart was pounding, probably, she told herself, from suddenly jumping up out of a doze.

  She moved the second armchair to a position by the fire. He took off his hat and coat and then stood with them, unsure. “Here, I’ll take those. Please sit down. Scotch?” Lane put the hat and coat on the couch and then occupied herself getting a glass and a bottle of scotch from a cabinet by her newly filled bookshelf. She had her back to him and fumbled with the stopper in the bottle. She poured a splash of scotch into the glass and, with a deep breath, took it to him. “I should have asked if you wanted water.” He shook his head and took the glass.

  “Are you having one?”

  “Yes, all right, why not?” She made her own drink, still waiting, somehow, to know why he had really come.

  “I thought you might have left, you know, gone back to England. My constable is your slave and he has been pining for you, so you can imagine that when he saw you in town at the dry goods store last week, I was obliged to hear all about it.”

  “Ames? Really? How extraordinary. I should have paid him more attention.” She settled in to her armchair, stretching her legs toward the fire. “So you’ve come to see if it’s true? That I’m still here, I mean.”

  “I’ve come to bring you these blasted raspberry canes, since you are still here and possibly staying after all. I have also come to see if you’ve any insight into the whole business of your countryman’s untimely death. Aside from Harris’s confession that he poleaxed him with his tractor crank, we got very little else on why—except that he thought he was a British agent. I’ve wanted to kill a few British agents myself, but the prosecutor seemed uncurious about why and I was sorry he dropped his line of questioning when he got his man, as it were. I thought, you know, you living here among the natives, might be in someone’s confidence and have found out more than we got at the trial. And, of course, perhaps the inestimable Director Dunn told you something about the fellow’s life prior to his arrival here.”

  In the flickering firelight dusk of the sitting room, Lane felt herself smile and then crossly stopped herself. It would not do to be pleased to see this slight evidence of Darling’s—could she think it?—jealousy of Angus Dunn. If only he could know the depth of her utter indifference to Dunn and the relief she felt when he finally agreed to leave. Or the fervour of her hope that she would never see or hear from him again.

  “I did learn a bit from Kenny and Eleanor. It’s really a story about war. Amazingly, Harris, who has been an absolute recluse since he was released from hospital after his heart attack in the jail . . . you know the doctors said he should stay in town and they offered him a little bedsit or something so he could be near care. He wouldn’t have it. I can’t help feeling he just wants to die. He’s been in a kind of purgatory for nearly thirty years, living with this. Anyway, he made his way up to Kenny and Eleanor’s one evening; I’ve been taking whatever mail he has and dropping it off at his door, because he never comes out of the house. On that night, he seems to have made a confession of sorts. He and Kenny are cousins, you know, through Old Lady Armstrong’s brother who died in South Africa before Harris came out. He was very young; maybe ten. It must have been a frightful trip for a young child to undertake, but he was sent here to live with the Armstrongs. He was always dour, according to Kenny, even as a child.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder, losing his parents and being packed off to a strange place at such an age.” Darling was leaning back in his chair so that he was angled toward her, and she could see the gentle flicker of the fire reflected on his left cheek.

  “I have some sense of such strangeness. I lost my parents, well, the one that mattered, when I was very young, but thank God I was raised by my grandmother who had been with us the whole time. Anyway, according to Kenny, Harris became more standoffish as he got older and they were all v
ery surprised when he turned up with a wife whom he’d married by special licence in town. She was the daughter of the man who ran the dry goods store and was a very undernourished and overworked specimen, by all accounts. She was not more than eighteen and arrived in the spring and could not have known what trading her town life for a rural life was going to mean, especially in the winter. Though they all knew her father seemed intent on working his children to death; perhaps it was her chance to get away. Then that summer, war was declared and Harris and John Armstrong signed up and were gone. So then the details get scarce, but when Harris came up to see Kenny last month, suddenly out of the blue, this is what he told him. He and John were in the same regiment. I think it was mostly made up of experienced soldiers, but John and Robin were no doubt tough young men because of their work here. Anyway they survived to the Somme and then, during a charge, John was struck down. It was dark, early morning I suppose, and they were under a brutal barrage. Robin stopped, of course, and saw that John was wounded, not dead, and could hear him saying ‘please.’” Here Lane stopped and tried to stop herself from tearing up. She had imagined it so vividly as Kenny told it and he too had barely been able to continue past this moment. She took a breath and continued, “But they were under such fire and he could feel the press of men charging up behind him that he didn’t stop, you see. He kept going. He thought somehow he could go back for him later, but at the end, John was found where he had fallen, in the mud, among the dead.”

  She stopped. Dusk had turned to darkness and the only light now was that of the fire. She was acutely aware of Darling sitting in the next chair, watching her. He had not interrupted the story but the one time, and now sat in silence. She glanced at him and then away again quickly. “They were victorious that day and Harris was wounded, shot in the leg and, like all the survivors, got some sort of a service medal for taking down a German machine gun blind. Then things got peculiar. Everyone was demobbed in the winter of ’18, and they all came pouring back. Kenny and Eleanor and poor Old Lady Armstrong had gotten the official notification of John’s death, but there was nothing whatever about Harris. He had been taken to a hospital on the south coast somewhere to recover and then had disappeared, and he didn’t come back till nearly 1920. When he did come back, the fire of ’19 had just happened, and his orchards had been hit particularly hard and his wife had disappeared. In fact she’d left in ’17, telling no one where she was; just vanished one day without a word. Here they all thought she’d gone back to her family, but Kenny didn’t see her when he took the steamboat up to town, as he wanted to offer her some help, though she had refused this throughout the war. When Harris did get back, he became positively misanthropic and had bad shell shock. He never spoke of the war, or told anyone where he’d been for so long. It turned out, though, that he had been full of fear that one day someone would come and take him because he’d left John dying and had done nothing for him. He would pick up his vet’s cheques at the post office every quarter, apparently always afraid that one would not be a cheque but a warrant of some sort. In all those years he must have been wracked with guilt and this blind, unreasoning terror that this one act, this failure to act, I suppose, would catch up with him.

  “He couldn’t know that no one blamed him. John must have been mortally wounded, so he would have died anyway. And in a way, with the arrival of poor Franks, it did all catch up with him. Franks just stopped at Harris’s to find the way to where Elizabeth Harris, his mother, had come from, or maybe to find his father. He must have asked for where Harris lived, and then said, according to what Harris confessed to Kenny, ‘It’s all right, I’m from the British government,’ or something, showing him his identity card because Harris seemed so horrified about being asked for by someone with a British accent. I suppose we’ll never know exactly why Harris struck him. He only said he did.” She shuddered. “It’s the war, isn’t it? What are we all carrying around from that? I get very bad dreams sometimes. Dreams of fire and darkness; I’m there again, only I can’t remember what I’m supposed to be doing; the numbers of the codes are muddled. What ghastly thing is going to suddenly pop up years from now?”

  Lane could hear Darling move in his chair and looked over to where he sat, eyes illuminated by the flickering firelight, watching her thoughtfully. It won’t do, she thought, this suddenly intimate confessional atmosphere. It won’t do at all, and she got up and walked to where the desk lamp stood on the side table and pulled the chain, lighting the room. “I’m about ready to have an omelette and a piece of toast; very French, will you join me?”

  They sat in the armchairs eating the omelette off their knees. The preparation of it had steadied Lane’s sudden emotional tumult. After a brief silence Darling returned to the case.

  “There is a kind of tragedy here that reminds me of some Greek play. All the roots of a later evil planted inadvertently in the past . . . John Armstrong falling on a battlefield long ago and far away; Franks cursed from his very conception to die on a distant shore.”

  “Literature has lost a star, Inspector, by your choice of policing! But yes, the story of Franks is astonishing . . . According to Eleanor there had always been a story about Reginald Mather and Harris’s wife, Elizabeth, floating around, but her disappearance, the war, the devastating fire of ’19, and just the passing of the years made the whole thing fade away, until Alice got hold of it somehow, and told Harris. And of course the embarrassing and near-fatal coincidence that Franks and I were in the same business, as it were.”

  Darling scooped a last buttery morsel of omelette onto his toast and munched thoughtfully. “You know, it’s always a relief to solve a case, to understand how the story unfolded. This whole thing could have had several other outcomes; Harris could have killed Mather, when he discovered he’d been made a cuckold; Alice could have poisoned Mather’s dinner when she discovered she’d been betrayed. Your pal Sandy could have killed Franks for being a long-lost son, come to take away his inheritance.”

  A combined laugh and shudder escaped from Lane. “He’s not my pal,” and then she hesitated. Darling didn’t know about that awful fishing trip and he wasn’t about to, she decided. She was embarrassed to her core just thinking of it. “But he did end up killing poor Franks, didn’t he, without realizing it, no doubt, knowing his turn of mind, thinking he could get something out of Harris . . . ‘Here, I’ll take care of this body if you finally concede and sell me the land you’ve refused to sell my dad all these years.’ In a way, to get back to your Greek tragedy analogy, he was Fate’s unwitting tool.”

  “So much for the peacefulness of country life,” sighed Darling, pushing himself out of his chair. “To be honest, it seems to me there is still enough bitterness left in this community to erupt again. Are you sure you’re entirely safe living out here?”

  That question having been greeted with only a smile, they stood now at the door. Holding his hat, Darling went out and stood on the doorstep, and after a long moment said, “You are staying then?”

  “In spite of the dangers you have raised, I shall have to, I suppose, to take care of those blasted raspberries,” Lane said, with what she felt must be an absolutely transparent breeziness.

  Darling put his hat on, and turning into the night said, “Ames will be pleased.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  It is my husband, Terry Miller, who brings his intelligence, wisdom, and understanding of human nature to bear on our many discussions, during long walks, about the behaviour and lives of my characters. His support and delight have been unfailing. A written acknowledgement on its own is inadequate—but even so, I offer him my deepest gratitude.

  I would like to thank Sasha Bley-Vroman, Lorna Duncan, and Ruth Chaulk, the readers of this book’s first incarnation. I must also extend my gratitude to my many readers who have been so encouraging. It is for you I write.

  Thank you also to the wonderful staff at TouchWood Editions for bringing this dream into being.

  Iona Whishaw was born in Briti
sh Columbia, and, after living her early years in the Kootenays, spent her formative years living and learning in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the US. She travelled extensively for pleasure and education before settling in the Vancouver area. Throughout her roles as youth worker, social worker, teacher, and award-winning high school principal, her love of writing remained consistent, and compelled her to obtain her master’s in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Iona has published short fiction, poetry, poetry translation, and one children’s book, Henry and the Cow Problem. A Killer in King’s Cove is her first adult novel. Her heroine, Lane Winslow, was inspired by Iona’s mother who, like her father before her, was a wartime spy. Visit ionawhishaw.com to find out more.