Until the Night

by Giles Blunt

  Cardinal asked if he could come in and ask a few questions.

  “No, you may not. What’s this about?”

  “Maybe you could just tell me if you’ve seen your brother recently.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but why should I answer that question?”

  “He’s wanted for questioning in connection with a major crime.”

  “Rubbish. What crime?”

  “I’m sure you’ve read about the abduction and murder of Marjorie Flint and Laura Lacroix.”

  Ms. Durie laughed. “That’s so preposterous I don’t even have any response to it. Really, you have to find something else to do with your time, Detective.”

  “The man we’re looking for has a limp, and probably a prosthetic hand.”

  The regal facade faltered. Alison Durie’s slender, ringless hand levitated toward her throat, pale fingers touching her collar. “Even if he was the murderous creature you take him for, why would he do these things? How could he? Why? Many people limp, and my brother has no connection to these women.” She started to close the door.

  “Ms. Durie, wait. Did he ever talk to you about what took place up north? At the drift station?”

  “Karson would never kill anyone. And if you think he would ever harm a woman, you’re grotesquely mistaken. When he first came here after his release from prison, our mother was living out the last months of her life. He could not have been more attentive, more tender. Even two decades in prison had failed to destroy that. In any case, I haven’t seen him for at least two months now, and I’ve no idea where he is.”

  “I think you do. Tell me where to find him. If he’s innocent, that shouldn’t be hard to prove.”

  “How dare you say that? We have no reason whatsoever to trust the justice system. My brother served eighteen years and was denied parole repeatedly. Repeatedly. Well, now he’s out, he’s a free man, and it’s nobody’s business—not yours, not anybody’s—where he might be.”

  “He was denied parole because he showed no remorse.”

  “He showed no remorse because he was innocent. He was innocent then and he’s innocent now.”

  She closed the door and Cardinal stood there staring at it. He reached into his jacket and took out a business card and put it through the mail slot.

  When she woke up again, Hayley had the idea that she was somewhere near a place that sold motorcycles. Every ten minutes or so, from somewhere in the distance, there would come that ragged, ripping sound of an inadequately muffled engine.

  She was lying on her back on a sofa, too tired and dazed to move. She tried to turn her head, but a rush of nausea stopped her. The ceiling, country pine, was awash with light. It was light of a very particular softness combined with brightness, and it took her a while to register what it reminded her of. The ski chalet at Collingwood. The light was coming from snow. The motorcycles must be snowmobiles. She must be somewhere up north, perhaps near a lake, with the sunlight bouncing off the snow and filling this room.

  The terror came back as the drug, whatever it was, wore off. She could turn her head now. The man limped by her, shirtless, with a makeshift bandage around his rib cage. He sat down with a grunt of pain. After a while his breathing became heavy and slow. Sleeping.

  Her wrists, underneath her, were fastened together. Ankles too. The moment she worked at the bonds, a bolt of pain shot through her. Her wrists were already torn from trying to escape. She remembered the truck. She remembered the needle. Then nothing.

  The man woke up and rose from his chair with a gasp. Had he been shot? Could that have happened without her being aware of it? She listened to him moving about the house, or cottage. A fridge opening. A cupboard. Running water. And then the smell of toast, the clack of the toaster, the rasp of a knife spreading butter or jam. She had the feeling he knew his way around this cottage, this house.

  Hayley wasn’t sure if he could see her from wherever he stood at the moment. She worked at the gag with her tongue, strained her neck to stretch the fabric, worked at it again. It was the only thing that felt any looser.

  Sound of a chair scraping. Something falling to the floor. A curse. Then footsteps and the sound of a bathroom cabinet opening. The rattle of a pill bottle, then water running.

  She strained at the gag, lifted her head and turned her neck from side to side, forcing down nausea. Working at the fabric with her tongue, her chin, her jaw, she managed to get the gag out of her mouth. It was now tight against her lower lip. She would be able to scream.

  A scream would likely go unheard. It would also bring what? The needle—or perhaps worse. She raised her head to look around. Large chalet-type room. Books everywhere. A baby grand piano.

  The man came back, limping, slow. He came close, looking down at her. His eyes catching her gaze, moving to the gag. He leaned toward her, reaching for it.

  Hayley shook her head. “Please. No.”

  His eyes assessing her, the short chain of her potential moves, his face hawkish, weathered. A professor, perhaps. A judge. The eyes closed and the face paled, a hand clutching at the bandage. His limp worse as he moved to an armchair and sat down again, this time silently.

  Hayley gave it a few seconds. Then, “Is this your house?”

  The words hung in the air, a neon sign with no connection to the human relationship in this room: victim and murderer. They might have been here for social reasons, two strangers at a party. Hayley kept her eyes on the ceiling. He might be looking at her, he might be asleep.

  “So many books. I’m wondering if they’re all yours, but a lot of them look old. I’m thinking maybe they belonged to your family, your parents, I don’t know.”

  There was no response from across the room. A faint rustle as he changed his position, perhaps turned his head to look at her, or out the window. She was still afraid to look. A direct gaze might be too much, the shout that triggers the avalanche.

  “Books have always been important to me. I may be the last person to avoid the social media sink. It’s a problem for me sometimes. Students want you to be on Facebook, Twitter, but e-mail’s enough. It’s too much, in fact. Half my students seem to have no concept of a private world, and that seems sad to me, but maybe I’m just an introvert.”

  Hayley held her breath. If he was as intelligent as he looked, he would realize what she was trying to do. Poor little girl trying to make herself into a person, something harder to kill than a creature you know nothing about. But persons, people, full human beings, were exactly what this man had made it his business to kill.

  She forced herself to turn her head and look at him. He was seated in an armchair across the room, at an angle to her. His hands gripped the arms of the chair and he sat erect, something Egyptian about the posture. His eyes were open—she saw him blink—but he wasn’t looking at her. The expression on the sharp features—if it was in fact expression and not its absence—was one of incalculable weariness.

  “I don’t know anything about you—and maybe it’ll sound like dime-store psychology or obvious self-interest—but it seems clear that something terrible has happened to you. Maybe recently? Maybe a long time ago, I don’t know, but something terrible.” She thought of a creature on the edge of extinction, the last T. rex on earth, gasping out its final breaths in a jungle sheathed in ice.

  No response.

  “My parents had a lot of books too—still do. My father, anyway. He’s a scientist, but he never seemed to want me to be one, really. He always encouraged me to do artsy things. I used to write the most terrible poems and he would pin them up—even the depressing ones when I got into a Sylvia Plath phase, which is pretty funny when you think of it.

  “Poetry is so powerful you’d think you could tell from someone’s face if they read it or not. Respond to it. But I look at you and I have no clue. Do you read poetry? Have you ever?”

  He turned his face toward the window, sharp features outlined against that brightness.

  Hayley lifted her ankles and swung herse
lf up into a seated position. The room tilted and lurched and the urge to vomit was strong.

  Her moving got his attention, but he didn’t get up.

  “I read poetry,” Hayley continued. “I have a father. I was a little girl at one time, then a teenager. Now I’m a teacher. In other words, you could say, I’m nothing special. But that’s the thing about being human, right? You’re not required to be special. You’re only required to be human.”

  She talked on. The thought took hold that she would not die as long as she was talking. It was a common myth: the dancer who must keep dancing, the storyteller who must keep spinning tales, to keep fate at bay.

  “I read poetry,” she said again. “I tried to write it. I try to teach it, or at least the appreciation of it. I want to be a professor. I’d like to get married someday. At this moment, of course, all I want is to stay alive. Will you tell me your name?”

  He sighed, and shifted his weight a little in his chair, but did not look at her.

  “May I know who has imprisoned me, and why? No? I want to write a book. I’d like to write about Leonard Cohen. I would talk about Catullus and Villon, the Book of Psalms, poetry as song. But scholarly circles aren’t so big on him. He’s too easy and too popular. Atwood would be better. She’s kind of one of them, one of us, an academic even, though she’s not at a university. Of course, if I write about either of them, every English department in the United States will shut their doors on me forever after. Canadian literature is not a hot topic in New York or Chicago. But what can I do, I love poetry, and it’s the only thing I know anything about.

  “Except now I know how it feels to be terrified.”

  The man remained in his chair like an empty garment. Maybe begging was the best gambit, maybe get down on my knees and promise whatever sex or money or worship he wants. She could never have guessed, before this moment, the magnitude of her desire to live. It shrieked and shrieked in the room and yet the man did not hear it, seemed unaware of it—in no particular rush to harm, yet free of any desire to spare her little life. She was nothing more than any mosquito she’d ever swatted, any spider she’d ever drowned, tiny legs frantic as it circled the drain.

  A sob escaped her. The last thing she wanted.

  When his voice came, it was as dry as wind, wind through dry grass. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes. “Poetry. No. I don’t read poetry …”

  Hayley choked back her sobs, caught her breath, held it.

  “… but I knew someone. A long time ago. Someone who did.”

  Things happened relatively fast once Delorme got back to Algonquin Bay. Loach was on the phone when she walked into the station, but he hung up right away and pointed at her. “You! I want to talk to you right now.”

  “Good idea,” Delorme said. “Why don’t we go in here.” She reached in and switched on the lights in the meeting room. “I’ll be right back.”

  She went and tapped on Chouinard’s door and he followed her across the squad room, baying the whole way. Delorme said nothing. She held the meeting room door open for him and closed it behind him, and then there were two of them baying at her. She held up a DVD, and they both quieted down as she inserted it into the player and switched on the TV monitor.

  “What the hell are you up to?” Loach wanted to know. “I’m trying to run a major investigation and you go totally AWOL.”

  Delorme spoke to Chouinard. “I’m sorry, D.S. I know I called in sick, but I was actually working on the investigation. In Toronto.”

  “And who told you to go down to Toronto?”

  “Cardinal,” Loach said. “I know what’s going on. I have eyes.”

  “It’s ears you need right now,” Delorme said. “You have to listen closely.”

  The image came up on the screen. The crowded pub, and one inebriated detective climbing up on a stool.

  “That’s Chuck Rakov,” Loach said. “What the hell are you doing with a video of Chuck Rakov?”

  “Who the hell is he?” Chouinard said.

  “One of the worst cops I ever worked with. Took a while, but I finally managed to get that bastard gone.”

  Delorme had paused the video. “May I go on?”

  Chouinard nodded. She hit Play, and Rakov went into his Loach impersonation.

  “Hilarious,” Loach said, “but I don’t have time for this shit.” He got up and reached for the monitor.

  “Let it play,” Chouinard said.

  “Are you serious? Chuck Rakov is and was a total drunk.”

  “That’s not the good part,” Delorme said. “The good part’s coming up.”

  On screen, Rakov went into his French-Canadian accent. Even drunk, he had mastered the mimic’s art of instant transformation. The Toronto cop’s body was possessed by the spirit—and accent—of a thorough Québécois.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Chouinard said. “Tell me this isn’t happening. Tell me this is not the guy we’ve been throwing out a dragnet for.”

  “Wait a second,” Loach said. “We don’t know it’s him who called. Rakov’s a total asshole.”

  “An asshole who hates you,” Delorme said. “An asshole you got fired. An asshole the Toronto police have now charged with obstruction of justice and interfering with an investigation. I gave them your recording—they’ve already done the voice print.”

  “Bullshit,” Loach said. He appealed to Chouinard. “She’s just trying to undermine me. It’s ridiculous. I’m citing her for insubordination, for conduct unbecoming, for misusing police funds, for—”

  “Go home,” Chouinard said. “You’re not citing anybody.”

  “No. This is wrong.” Loach shook his head. “This is so, so wrong.”

  Chouinard looked over at Delorme. “Toronto Forensics confirms the voice?”

  “It’s definitely Rakov.”

  “You’re off the case, Loach. Go home.”

  Loach stood up. “You’re both wrong. I did the right thing. I made the right decision. Given what we had to work with at the time, I made the right decision.”

  “Go home.”

  After he’d put his business card through the letter slot of Alison Durie’s door, Cardinal sat in his car and tried to decide what would be his next step. It seemed unlikely that the all-units would result in a street cop or a highway patrol pulling over exactly the right van. It would be the OPP, if anybody. If Durie was planning to complete his revenge on that Arctic island, he had to be headed for an airfield.

  He opened his briefcase on the seat beside him and took out a photograph of Hayley Babstock. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight, a sweet age for a woman. Still enough of the student-age naïveté to be cute, but there was a confidence in those blue eyes as well. She would be a person with a good idea of her own capabilities. He took out his pen and wrote on the back of the photograph, This is Hayley Babstock. She is a teacher—and also the daughter of someone your brother has reason to hate. He got out of the car and went back up the steps to Alison Durie’s house and pushed the photograph through the slot.

  His phone rang as he was getting back into the car.

  “Drexler here. Are you a hunter, by any chance?”

  “No.”

  “I’m standing by the side of a road just north of King City, watching two guys rig a sling hoist under a dead moose. It wasn’t shot, though. It was hit by a white van.”

  “What’s going on? Is the girl okay?”

  “She’s not here. Neither is Karson Durie.”

  “Send me a picture of the van on my phone. Is there a logo on the side?”

  “I’m sending it now. Jesus, you should see the antlers on this thing—they’re winching him out of the windshield. Must weigh fifteen hundred pounds. I gotta say, I am often struck by the role of sheer luck in the lives of criminals—not to mention the lives of their victims.

  “Mr. Perpetrator—heading for an airfield five kilometres from here, where it turns out he has reserved a Twin Otter under an assumed name—has the bad luck to hit a moose. But lo, the wheel t
urns again, and he has the good luck to have a good Samaritan show up. This is bad luck for Mr. Samaritan, who has stopped his truck to help. “’Preciate it—please accept my .45-calibre thank-you card.’ The man is dead. He’s got two kids under the age of twelve and a wife gonna be wondering why he doesn’t answer his cell.”

  “We’re sure it was Durie.”

  “Well, there’s no prints from the gloved one, but this Babstock kid is one smart cookie. She left her fingerprints inside—they’re all over the back. Perfect prints, like she pressed ’em and rolled ’em just for us.”

  “Do we know what he’s driving now?”

  “Our Samaritan’s vehicle was a black Dodge Laramie.”

  “Should be easy enough to spot,” Cardinal said.

  “Should be. And was. OPP found it by the highway about forty miles up the 400, and now we have no clue what he’s driving. And no clue where he’s heading. At this point the man is an open case in at least three jurisdictions, and we have no idea where he is.”

  “Hold on, Art. I think we just got a break.”

  Alison Durie was crossing the street toward him.

  Delorme couldn’t wait to get out of the office again after her meeting with Loach and Chouinard. She could still hear them shouting at each other as she headed out the door. She drove up to the hospital and visited with Miranda Heap, who had regained consciousness. Her lips were swollen and she was groggy from the drugs, but her mind seemed perfectly clear. Perfectly clear, and perfectly made up. Did you listen to the phone messages? And you know who it is. Good. Did you get the receipts too? The photograph? Good. Son of a bitch thinks he’s going to be a judge …

  Delorme paid another visit to her house and found, as Miranda had expected, that Garth Romney had left another message. Darlene has been such a bad girl, my darling …

  “Yes,” Delorme said, “you have.”

  Then she went back to the station and made copies of everything.

  She sat across from Chouinard in his office as he leafed, grim-faced, through the receipts, shaking his head at what he was hearing through his headphones. Finally he took them off and muttered, “Garth, Garth, Garth … Misuse of funds, dereliction of duty …”