A Deceptive Devotion

by Iona Whishaw

  Ames was in the morgue looking at the face of a man of indeterminate age who looked like his last few years had been difficult. He was gaunt and had an unkempt stubble on his chin as if he had been able to shave only intermittently. His hair was thinning and lank. “What’s his name?”

  The attendant looked at the label on the dead man’s toe. “Goo something . . . Gusarov, Bogdan.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Nothing obvious. He’s pretty undernourished. Most likely natural causes. Post-mortem still to be done.”

  Ames nodded. “Where was he found?”

  “No idea. I just look after them. Check upstairs.”

  Ames considered. It wasn’t the man Darling was looking for. He’d have to go and find out if the party his boss was looking for was alive somewhere. “That’s okay. Thanks for the time.”

  “You’re welcome. Thanks for the visit. It’s usually pretty quiet down here.”

  Ames got off the Hastings streetcar at Campbell and walked south. The church he had been directed to was a few blocks down and across from Georgia Street, and while he wasn’t a connoisseur of churches in general, this one was quite beautiful on a sunny afternoon. White paint with a striking sky-blue bulb on the top with a cross on it. He hoped someone was there. The front door looked locked, and rather than try it, he went around to the back, hoping there might be some sort of office. He was in luck. The door was ajar, and when he climbed the steps and knocked, a heavily bearded middle-aged man in a black robe appeared.

  “Yes?” He was smiling with what struck Ames as cautious politeness.

  “I’m Constable Ames.” He fished into his breast pocket for his identification. “I’m just trying to locate a Russian gentleman, and I wonder if you can help.”

  The priest nodded. “I am Father Petrov. What is the name of this man?” He had replaced polite with guarded. He had a strong accent, and pronounced each word carefully, as if he were still practicing English.

  Ames pulled out the scrap of paper he’d written the man’s name on and read it. “Vassily Mik . . . Mikhailov. Sorry. I can’t say it very well.”

  The priest reached for the paper and read it. “Why would you be interested in this man?”

  “My boss in Nelson is, actually. Apparently, his sister is looking for him.”

  “And why should he be here if she is all the way in Nelson?”

  “Yes, sorry. Apparently, she came here from China and someone told her he had left here and gone farther inland to Nelson. I just need to find out if he was here, or what you can tell me.”

  “And her name?”

  “Oh, gosh. Sorry. Countess something. I didn’t write it down. I think my boss just wants to find anything he can to help her.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to tell you we will not be much help. I have never heard of this man. He might not even have been a true believer. If that is the case, he would never have come here to the church.”

  Ames, who’d wanted to have something to give Darling, was disappointed. “Oh. Well, thank you very much for your time.” He put on his hat and offered his hand to the priest. He was at the bottom of the steps when the priest called out.

  “Listen. I will ask around. Better me than you. People in my community are very suspicious and fearful of the police and people they don’t know. No one will tell you anything. Where can I reach you?”

  Buoyant again, Ames bounded back up the stairs and waited for the priest to find pen and paper, and gave him the number of his rooming house and the Nelson Police along with Inspector Darling’s name.

  Father Petrov walked Ames back to the sidewalk, watched him go back up the street toward Hastings, and tightened his lips.

  Lane was sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee and a book when she heard the countess coming through the French door.

  “Good morning, Miss Winslow.”

  “Please,” Lane said, getting up. “Sit here. May I get you tea? Coffee?”

  “Tea, thank you. I slept very well. It must be the air.” Orlova settled cautiously into the canvas deck chair. “I will paint today. I will start with this view.” Lane’s guest was wearing a wool skirt and a cream-coloured blouse and heavy beige stockings. She pulled a black hand-knit cardigan around her body and sat looking out at the lake.

  While Lane was making the tea, she struggled with the details of being a host. How long had her guest been travelling? Should she offer to do her laundry? Would she want to visit the local people with her? Would she want to nap in the afternoon? On Wednesday, Lane was scheduled to meet the vicar with Darling. Would Orlova wish to come into town? On Saturday Darling was scheduled to come out to spend the day with her. How would they include her? She poured water over the tea leaves and then idly wondered if she ought to haul her samovar out of storage in the attic, and in the same instant rejected the idea. If she examined her motives, she guessed that she was being churlish—not wanting to establish any comforts that would make her guest stay longer. Right, she thought. Let’s start at the beginning. Breakfast. She had lovely eggs from Gladys Hughes’s chickens, and a boiled egg and piece of toast was the place to start.

  She topped up her coffee and then put the tea and some sugar next to Orlova on the metal table she had brought from France when she first moved here.

  “Why did you come all the way here?” Orlova asked Lane.

  “I just wanted to do something new, I suppose. I can’t go back to my childhood home in Latvia. I don’t really want to be in England. So here I am.”

  The countess turned and looked at her. She was holding her mug of tea in both hands, warming them in the cool air of the morning. Lane looked up and was held by the penetrating dark eyes that examined her. She’s intelligent, Lane thought. What could she have been if she had not spent her life in privilege? Then she looked away. It was not like she had been doing much with whatever intelligence she had, since settling into her comfortable country life in King’s Cove.

  Countess Orlova sat back and looked out at the lake. The sun skittered across the water, and light was beginning to climb up the mountains on the opposite shore, changing the charcoal shadows of the morning into the blue-green of the day.

  “I never wanted to leave my home,” she said. “When the revolution came, I lived with my family in our home by the Neva. My father was a count, but he worked for the diplomatic corps. My own husband, a count also and a major in the tsar’s army. I had a child, did I tell you? A little girl. She died of diphtheria in 1917. I moved back to my family and was so bereft that I did not think of what was going on outside until the day they came.

  “The only reason I am alive today and not rotting in some prison is because my brother and I were out riding. I did not want to go or do anything because I was inconsolable, but he had begged me so much that I agreed to go with him. It was like something out of a story. There is a little hill behind our house, and we had ridden up from the river to the top of that hill and we saw it. Our house surrounded by soldiers, our servants, our farm workers pulling our possessions out the doors and throwing them into the yard, going through them, shouting, taking whatever they wanted.

  “You can’t even think when you see something like that. You can’t comprehend the sudden end to all you’ve known. I wanted to rush down, find Mother, make them stop. But my brother held me back. He took me to a cabin in a wooded area of our land where he used to go drinking with his friends sometimes, and he told me to wait. When he returned, he had peasant clothes for me to wear and some food, and he said we had to leave. With the confusion of the revolution and the war, we were able to get out. And that was that. So here I am, drinking your tea.”

  Ignoring her own curiosity about how Orlova had filled the intervening thirty years, Lane said, “I am so sorry, Countess. I just think of Russia today as being the Soviet Union, impregnable, socialist. My own grandparents had their hou
se taken over but were allowed to live there until they couldn’t stand it anymore, so they returned to Scotland with what little they had. But to think about how it began, the countless agonizing stories like yours . . .”

  Orlova sighed and shook her head. “It is in the past. We must carry on, have a purpose. My purpose is to find my brother, and bury him or look after him, whichever will be required of me. And now, you must help me out of this chair, or I will remain here all day.”

  Chapter Five

  London, August 1947

  “He’s disappeared, sir.”

  The director looked up. “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “I mean, we sent someone to the contact point at the Yugoslav border near Trieste, and he wasn’t there. Our man asked around discreetly, and there was no sign he’d ever been there.”

  “Thank you. That will be all,” the director said.

  When his secretary was gone, the director rose abruptly and stood looking out the window at the clouds gathering above the buildings across from his offices on Curzon Street and put his mind to trying to frame the next steps. Thanks to Lane Winslow, a possibly very useful ageing Soviet agent had asked for sanctuary in England, and now it would appear they’d bungled it somehow. It was a sacrifice, and it had better be worth it. Regardless of the sequence of events, he had to try to assess how they might be exposed by this. What did this Aptekar know about the workings of British intelligence? And what was he, the director, losing in the way of Soviet clandestine knowledge? All he had in hand was what Winslow had told him: that she had told Aptekar nothing but that she had no intention of becoming a double agent, and in turn, the Russian agent had offered to come across and retire in England—but had given her nothing.

  Had his contact been pulling the wool over his eyes? Perhaps that agent never had any intention of crossing. Perhaps it was a ruse to test the porousness of British intelligence. It was infuriating that he had no way of knowing if he could trust his contact. The agency was already under the gun because they didn’t seem to be able to keep up with the machinations of their counterparts on the other side. The Soviet state security apparatus, the MGB, was evolving fast, changing tactics. It didn’t seem to be interested in labour unions or other ways to spread socialism on foreign soil. Since the thirties, they had been setting their sights on turning high-profile members of British society for the express purpose of strengthening the Soviet hand over the West, and there was no indication that they were going to stop. It was these latest names he had bargained for. Otherwise it would all have been for naught.

  He would have to get hold of Lane Winslow and ask her to go over everything that had transpired in Berlin between herself and Stanimir Aptekar again. He wouldn’t go himself this time. He had a man in Vancouver he could send, though he regretted this; he still had fond memories of his long wartime affair with her, despite her palpable dislike of him now. In fact, he was happy that he could inconvenience her, when all she wanted to do was get away completely and forever from her old life. No doubt she saw herself immersed in domestic bliss with that prat Frederick Darling. The director’s ability to disrupt the lives of people far away pleased him, and he turned, optimistic again, and pushed the call button on his desk.

  “Better bring in the Yugoslav file,” he snapped into the microphone. Might as well make it look good, and in any case, he might have missed something. He was surprised not to have heard from his contact.

  “And that’s it, sir,” Ames finished. “I mean, someone might get hold of me, but the priest didn’t make it seem very likely.”

  “Well, it was a long shot. I’ll send you out a picture of him anyway. I’ve got others out with the RCMP.”

  “What about the dead guy, sir?”

  “What about the dead guy, Ames? He’s dead, and he’s not our man. What are they teaching you out there, anyway?”

  Ames cleared his throat nervously. “You’re the one who always told me that coincidences should be paid attention to. I just wondered if it was important that just when we’re looking for a Russian, one turns up dead.”

  “I also always told you that sometimes coincidences are just coincidences,” Darling pointed out. But he was thoughtful; Ames had stumbled into the right idea from time to time in the past. “Why? What are you thinking?”

  Asked directly like that, Ames was suddenly not really sure what he was thinking. “I think I was thinking that it might matter how the guy here was killed. I mean if he died of starvation, and he could have by the look of him, then okay, it probably means nothing. But what if he was murdered? Then you have something more like one man missing and one murdered.”

  Darling made a noise that sounded like acknowledgement. “When are they doing the post-mortem?”

  “I can find out, sir.”

  “Do that and get back to me. How are your digs?”

  “I have a very sweet-looking landlady who is as ferocious a woman as I’ve ever met. No visitors, no food if you’re late, no smoking, no drinking, and a sharp rap on the knuckles if you don’t make your bed on the way out.”

  “It’s good for you. Your mother is much too indulgent. Nose to the grindstone, Ames. We’re paying for you to get this promotion. And keep away from girls with flower names!”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ames cheerfully. When he hung up, he left the telephone booth and put his hands in his pockets and turned toward Cordova Street, where the Vancouver Police were housed, and began to whistle.

  The couple lay, familiar and lazy, in the afternoon heat, which was only slightly mitigated by the shade of the tree they stretched under. The air carried the sweet scent of cottonwood. The blanket they lay on was disordered.

  “I wish this would never end,” the woman said, her arm across her lover’s chest.

  He turned and propped his head on his hand. He could feel the pebbles in the sand under his elbow. “It wouldn’t have to if you just left him. You don’t even have children. There’s nothing to keep you there.” His voice, starting soft, began to take on frustration as it did whenever the subject came up.

  The woman pulled away from him, lying back with her arm across her forehead. “You know I can’t. He, well, you know what he’s like. Let’s just leave it and not ruin what we have. Please. He’ll be hunting again soon, and we can be together then, like usual.”

  The man did know what he was like. They had been friends and had hunted together. That was before he’d fallen for the soft and gentle promise of his friend’s wife.

  “I hate him,” the man said simply.

  He stood up and began to put his clothes to rights.

  “You have a Russian lady staying with you?” asked Eleanor, surprised. “You must bring her around. How long is she staying?” She looked up as the door to the post office swung open, and Mabel Hughes came through. “Hello, Mabel. Lane has a Russian lady staying with her. She was just about to tell me about it.”

  Lane smiled. Her neighbours in King’s Cove included Eleanor and Kenny Armstrong, who nurtured her and fed her tea and sandwiches like loving grandparents, and the Hughes ladies, Gladys in her seventies and her two daughters, Gwen and Mabel, in their late fifties, who were vigorous no-nonsense women in rubber galoshes who created the most divine gardens. She had grown extremely fond of them and used to the intense gossip they all indulged in.

  “Well, it’s just an odd series of circumstances, really,” Lane said. “She apparently lost track of her brother and is trying to find him. She turned up at the vicar’s in Nelson, and he hadn’t had time to find her anything, so she’s staying with me. She’s busy painting a picture of the lake as we speak. She doesn’t speak much English, so she was a bit reluctant to come out and meet people. She does very nice watercolours. She showed me some she brought with her from China.”

  “China! And a missing brother. How interesting!”

  Trust Eleanor to leap to t
he mystery, Lane thought, smiling.

  “You’ll need more eggs,” pronounced Mabel practically. “And we none of us fool ourselves that you cook very much at your house. You’d better have a few vegetables and some bread as well. We’ve bottled the beans, and always have more than we can eat.”

  “You’re not far wrong there,” Lane admitted. “But I’m going to pull up my socks on that front. I bought proper food in town, and I intend to produce proper meals. You’re very kind, Mabel. I will buy the vegetables from you as I do the eggs. I may need to get a few recipes as well.”

  “When are you going to need a few recipes for that nice inspector of yours is what I ask myself,” Mabel said, nodding her thanks to Eleanor for the bundle of mail, and then turning to Lane.

  Eleanor leaned over the counter with interest. She’d been wondering the same thing but was much too respectful of Lane’s privacy to ask it in the public venue of the post office.

  Lane was acutely conscious that she had told no one in King’s Cove about her upcoming marriage, especially when it was less than a month away and to be conducted in King Cove’s own St. Joseph’s, the little Anglican church by the creek near the turnoff to the Nelson road. The vicar came there most weeks to conduct a service. Had he hinted anything? She doubted it. He was a man of utter rectitude and restraint. She supposed the rumour mill was fed by the fact that Darling had been visiting her so often over the weekends. She longed to say something now, especially as she hoped to invite everyone anyway, but she felt she couldn’t until she’d told Angela Bertolli, her great friend who lived on the upper road, and Eleanor herself, who seemed as fond of Lane as her own grandmother in Scotland was.