A Deceptive Devotion

by Iona Whishaw

  “Darling indeed. It’s me. I’m sorry to interrupt your progress on your paperwork.”

  “You interrupted it long before you called. I was thinking happy thoughts of being married to you.”

  Darling could see her, standing in her hallway speaking into that ridiculous ancient trumpet telephone, her chin tilted up to reach the horn, her auburn hair falling back behind her ear, the light from her front door catching her beautiful cheekbones, and her green eyes full of light and humour. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever encountered, and he was going to marry her.

  “Ah. You’ll get over that when we are married, and the sober reality of it hits home,” Lane said. “As it happens, I’m not calling idly. At least I think I’m not. I’ve just had a call from Mr. Stevens, our padre.”

  “He’s found a reason why we two may not be joined in holy matrimony?”

  “You do have a one-track mind. No. He’s found an old Russian lady and doesn’t know what to do with her. She doesn’t speak a word of English, and she keeps showing him a picture of a man and saying he’s dead. I mean, I think that’s what she’s saying. When the vicar told me the word she keeps using, I realized it must be that.”

  “Miss Winslow, if it is your intention to clutter up our wedding with dead bodies, I would like to register my protest now.”

  “Very funny, Inspector. No. I am coming up to town to visit the vicarage to help the vicar and the old lady understand one another. I’m merely telephoning you to let you know I’m coming up, and to warn you in the off-chance that there’s something fishy about the man in the photograph being dead. If that’s what he is.”

  “Well, let me remind you that many people are, perfectly legitimately, dead. And now I intend to get back to my paperwork and not spend another moment thinking of you. Anyway, why are you wasting time talking to me? The poor vicar must be beside himself trying to communicate with her.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. He’s plying her with cake. I’ll come by and see you in any case?”

  “Yes, you will.”

  “Ah, at last!” the vicar said when Lane appeared at the door. “Please do come in.” There was an imploring quality to the “please” that suggested the last hour had been a strain.

  Lane followed him into the sitting room where a small, neat, and aristocratic-looking woman, easily, Lane thought, in her late sixties, sat very upright on the edge of the two-seater sofa, as if she could not let her guard down. She had her hands in her lap, and she looked up with an almost supercilious air when Lane appeared, as if Lane had better explain herself. There was a depth and alertness to the Russian woman’s eyes that belied her age. Lane smiled at her, in part out of courtesy, but in part because she was genuinely delighted to meet a type of person she never thought she’d meet again: a Russian aristocrat.

  “Madam, my name is Lane Winslow. I am most pleased to meet you,” she said in Russian.

  At this the woman looked at Lane with surprise and relief.

  “Countess Orlova,” the woman said, offering a gloved hand. “I am pleased you have come. I cannot make this gentleman understand me.”

  “I will do what I can. My friend, the Vicar Stevens, called me, but I live an hour away. I’m sorry it has taken so long. How may I help?”

  There was an almost happy familiarity to speaking Russian again, a language she had spoken equally with English as a child.

  “I have come in search of my brother.”

  She reached into a small black handbag and pulled out a photo. Lane took it. The man in the picture was standing next to a car that would have been an absolute luxury in the twenties. Long, sleek, a pale colour with a black convertible roof. She did not recognize it but thought it might be German. The man, dressed in hunting clothes, appeared to be in his mid-forties and was looking directly at the camera. He was handsome, with perhaps sandy hair parted in the middle, and he had, Lane thought, a wary expression. The car appeared to be on a gravel driveway with a bank of trees behind it.

  “Where was this taken?” Lane asked.

  “In Shanghai, in 1922. We fled there and found some refuge in an émigré community.”

  “But you have come here?”

  “The curse of Communism is coming to China as well. One has to go somewhere.” Here Countess Orlova looked toward the window as if this was one more inadequate refuge she was forced to endure. “My brother disappeared about ten months ago, and I managed to trace him to Vancouver.”

  “But you think now he has come here?”

  “This is what I learned from the Russians there. Many are White Russians, still supporting tsarist pretenders who are waiting for the return of the empire. They collect money for this purpose. They are fools.” The countess said this bitterly. “They are throwing twigs at a fortress wall. I am afraid that my brother has become involved with them and that, as a result, he is dead.” She glanced at Lane and then looked down again.

  Why? Lane wondered. It is as if she doesn’t think I’ll believe her. She has been a refugee. It must have been very hard for her. Refugees are so much flotsam and jetsam scattered on the perilous shores of political changes. Hard up and considered a nuisance wherever they go.

  “What makes you think he might be dead, Countess?” Lane asked.

  Orlova turned away at this question and was silent. Finally, she said, “Just call me ‘madam,’ please. ‘Countess’ is so formal. In Vancouver they lost track of him. He disappeared. Someone suggested he might have come here. That he was running. They said he was being pursued by Soviet agents.”

  Lane had a momentary thought that this was ridiculous, but a Soviet agent had engineered the killing of a Russian dissident right in the local hot springs the previous year. Canada, which had seemed to her such a refuge, so far away from the torments of European upheavals, now felt much too close to the world.

  Seeing the vicar shift impatiently on the chair by his desk where he had been watching this exchange, Lane said, in English, “Madam Orlova is in search of her brother. She seems not to be sure if he is dead or has managed to come here. I’m not really sure how we can help her. I can take her to the inspector so that he can look at her picture and perhaps broadcast it around the area. Oh, gosh. And I wonder if she has someplace to stay?”

  “I could, of course, canvass around the area, but it might take some time . . .”

  Making a few mental adjustments, Lane decided there was nothing for it.

  “She can stay with me until something turns up.” She turned back to the countess and spoke again in Russian.

  “I have a friend who is in charge of the police here. He can help find your brother if he is anywhere nearby. I propose that we stop by and see him, and then you must come and be my guest. I’m afraid I live very far out of town, but it is beautiful and quiet.”

  “Why must I see the police? I don’t wish to.” Madam Orlova seemed to recoil and delivered this in an aggrieved tone.

  “He is a very good man. The police here are not like those in the old country. You need not fear them,” Lane said, knowing that that was not always necessarily true, but confident, in any case, of her policeman.

  Suspicious, Countess Orlova indicated reluctant consent to the plan by turning her mouth down at the corners and standing up and waiting by the door while the vicar took up her two small, battered valises. Lane opened the car door for her and then turned to look at the vicar.

  “Thank you so much. I suppose the inspector can help to find her brother if he’s even around here, and then we’ll have to see what she’s intending to do. If you do hear of any place, please let me know. And I guess we’ll see you next week.”

  Lane and Darling were scheduled to meet the vicar to discuss their wedding plans, and no doubt take some religious instruction, on the following Wednesday afternoon.

  “Yes. Well, good luck. Very nic
e to meet you, Countess Orlova.” The vicar leaned down to address Lane’s passenger with a slightly forced smile that suggested Lane would need all the luck he had wished her.

  Orlova turned her head slightly and inclined it toward the vicar.

  “Be good enough to thank him for the cake,” she said, unsmiling. “He is most kind.”

  “The countess liked the cake and thanks you for your kindness,” said Lane, getting into the car.

  “You’ve done what?” Darling asked through pinched lips, looking past Lane with a fixed smile at the countess. “Are you mad?”

  “A little, yes, I’m afraid,” Lane allowed. “But it shouldn’t be for long. The vicar is hard at work looking for a suitable place for a gentlewoman down on her luck. In the meantime, she has to be somewhere. Now, for the business at hand. She has a photograph of her brother, whom she is seeking. She has followed his tracks all the way from Shanghai and believes he might be here.”

  Lane moved to Madam Orlova. “I have explained to Inspector Darling about your brother, as far as I know it. May I have his photograph to show him?”

  The countess clamped her hands tightly on the top of her handbag, as if she meant to deny the request, and then slowly opened it and pulled out the picture.

  “It is an old picture, tell him. It is almost twenty-five years old, but he does not look so terribly different. He is called Vassily Mikhailov.”

  “Can you spell that?” Darling asked. He wrote the name down and then took the picture and studied it. Expensive car, expensive suit. The air of a confident man. Where his jacket was open, a heavy watch chain hung from inside his vest to his waistcoat pocket. “May I keep this picture for a couple of days? I need to make copies to share with my colleagues at the Mounted Police.”

  The older woman frowned at this request. “Why is this necessary? He has seen it. What more does he need? It is the only artefact I have of my brother. Can he not just show it to these other policemen here?”

  “I understand, Countess. But he will bring it back to us, or I will come myself and get it. This is a very big country, as you know. Like Russia. The police that operate outside this town will need to have his picture.”

  “How do I know he is not just collecting evidence to arrest me?”

  This distrust of the police was genuinely earned, Lane thought. They had been relentless in their pursuit of the aristocracy and eliminating White Russians or any other resistance to the revolution.

  “He would have no cause to arrest you, madam. Even if you managed to come here illegally, I am sure that you could be granted status as a refugee. His prison cells are very tiny. He has plenty of local criminals to fill them with.”

  This remark elicited a slight smile, and Orlova inclined her head in a little nod.

  The business concluded, Lane said, “We’d better be off. I’ll have to stop and get some proper food if I’m to have a guest, and I’m sure the journey has been tiring.”

  “It will be good practice for you,” Darling said. “We shall want proper food, I expect, when we are married.”

  “Ha! And don’t forget next Wednesday. Mr. Stevens is expecting us. No. I won’t kiss you. My guest will think we are in cahoots.”

  “I can’t wait to get into proper cahoots with you,” Darling said.

  “Goodbye, Inspector.”

  Chapter Three

  Darling watched Lane help Countess Orlova into the car down on the street below his window and shook his head. She was always impetuously close to offering people refuge in her beautiful house with the view of the lake in King’s Cove, but this time she’d actually done it. He shouldn’t be annoyed, he knew. It wasn’t his house after all, but the prospect of having Countess Orlova looming like the Queen of Spades over his visits and, more importantly, the preparations for his wedding, was discomfiting. The wedding was October 18. Less than a month away. The vicar would surely have found a place for her by then.

  He was on the verge of shouting “Ames!” when he recalled the other fly in his ointment. Ames was away. Instead he put his head out the office door and shouted, “Oxley!”

  “Sir?”

  The young man who was temporarily occupying Ames’s desk appeared in the hall. Oxley had transferred to Nelson from somewhere in Ontario—Darling was at a loss to remember where—just after Ames had left to go to Vancouver for his sergeants’ course. He was shorter than Ames, and compact, with black hair brilliantined into submission, and a respectful tone that Ames had never managed to achieve. Darling wasn’t sure it was an improvement.

  “I need this photograph replicated, and I’d like it sent to the RCMP divisions in the area, along with the message that we are looking for this man who has gone missing. Oh, and can you get me an extra for Ames? And try not to ruin the photograph. It belongs to an old lady who’s attached to it.”

  “Sir,” Oxley said, infusing into the word a sense of reproach that he’d ever damage anything.

  This accomplished, Darling took up his hat and went down to the front door. “Going off to send a wire,” he said to O’Brien, the desk sergeant.

  “One of the boys can do it for you, sir.”

  “Thanks. I need the walk.”

  “Missing Ames, aren’t you, sir,” O’Brien said, very nearly winking.

  “Certainly not. And I don’t have to put up with any backchat from Oxley,” Darling said.

  “Yet,” muttered O’Brien under his breath as he watched Darling go out the door.

  Once outside, Darling indulged in trying to weigh how September created its own magic. That heat that could be, no, is, summer, and yet the cool suggestion of melancholy, or perhaps a coming out of the doldrums into a fresh, clean time of change and possibility. He had studied literature at university before the death of a friend during a bank robbery pushed him to become a police officer. He remembered a line of poetry: “Sorrow and scarlet leaf, sad thoughts and sunny weather. Ah me, this glory and this grief agree not well together!” An American, he recalled, a translator of Dante. Parsons? But it was not grief he felt but elation. Not just because of his wedding but because he realized that this turn into the fall always filled him with elation.

  He entered the train station and approached the telegraph window. A small girl in a green dress and a little white hat, swinging her legs on the bench, sat with her mother. He guessed, from the lack of luggage, that they were waiting for someone to arrive. Darling winked at her, and she smiled shyly and pulled closer to her mother.

  “I need to send a wire, please,” he said, leaning down to the level of the man sitting behind the grill. He gave the address. “Ring me. Stop.” He looked at his watch. “Three PM. Stop. Darling. Stop.”

  That dispatched, he walked the short distance to his favourite dining establishment, Lorenzo’s Restaurant. It was early afternoon, and the dining room was empty. Lorenzo was setting out cutlery for the evening seating.

  “Inspector! So good to see you.” Lorenzo greeted Darling, as he always did, with enthusiasm, and then looked toward the door. “Alone today?”

  “I’m afraid your Miss Winslow couldn’t stay in town today. She has a guest to attend to. Unfortunately, I can’t stop either. I just wanted to check something with you. Last year you mentioned that among the people who come here there are Russians. Is that still the case?”

  “A few, yes. They are, how would I say? Very European, maybe. For example, old clothes, but very good. They are not practical like the local farmers, the Doukhobors. I know that man who works sometimes at the court, he comes.”

  “Ah. Mr. Stearn.”

  Darling had visited Mr. Stearn, the official court translator, the winter before. He’d been keen to keep Lane Winslow away from any official standing in the case of the death of a Russian, and he had sought out Mr. Stearn to do the translating for his interviews with local Russian speakers. He wa
s a somewhat querulous older man who had refused the long drive along snowy roads to New Denver and seemed to have a strong prejudice against Doukhobors. Darling didn’t look forward to another interview with him, but he was a place to start.

  “Thank you, Lorenzo. I shall pay him a visit,” Darling said, putting on his hat and turning toward the door. Then he stopped. “Did I say, by the way, that Miss Winslow and I are to marry?”

  Lorenzo put down the knives he was holding and clutched his hands together, his face wreathed with delight.

  “Oh, Inspector! This is the best wonderful news! Wait, please,” he said, waving his hand, and rushing toward the kitchen. “Olivia, please come, important news!” he called into the open door.

  Olivia, Lorenzo’s wife, came out into the dining room pushing a dark strand of hair away from her face. She wore a white apron tied around her slender and wiry body and a smile that lit up her striking features.

  “The inspector has just told me the most beautiful news, my dear. He and Miss Winslow are going to be married! Eh? What did I always say?”

  “Tanti auguri, Inspector! Lorenzo always say you must be in love. Now I see is true.” Olivia shook Darling’s hand. “She is so beautiful and such a kind face. Bravo!”

  Still warmed by the effusive happiness of Lorenzo and his wife, Darling made his way back up the hill toward the station. Should he have said anything? He would like to have invited them to the wedding, but he and Lane had not really discussed the guest list, and he worried that it was a lot to ask to have them close the restaurant and drive all the way to King’s Cove. He reasserted his dour inspector mien as he approached the station. He’d told no one there yet. He wasn’t sure entirely why. He looked at his watch. He had time before Ames called to pay a visit to Mr. Stearn.

  “Keys, O’Brien,” he said. His desk sergeant, amazingly, seemed to be going through some files, doing police work for a change.

  “Going up the lake, sir?” O’Brien asked him, winking.

  “If you wink at me one more time, Sergeant, I’ll have your stripes. I will be back in half an hour. You better have that lot done when I get back.”