A Deceptive Devotion

by Iona Whishaw

  “Ah. Miss Winslow. Good morning. My name is Felix Hunt.”

  An English voice. Lane frowned and then turned to look at the kitchen. She could hear Orlova turn the tap on.

  “Miss Winslow?”

  Lane turned back to the phone. “Yes. I’m sorry. Who did you say you are again?”

  “Felix Hunt. I work at the British Consulate in Vancouver.”

  “I see.”

  But she didn’t. She could think of no reason she should be contacted by anyone at the consulate.

  “I’d like to come out to see you. It shouldn’t take above an hour.”

  “You are coming from Vancouver?” She shook her head, trying to feel less groggy.

  “No. I should have explained. I’m here in Nelson. I was asked to come by and just, well,” he hesitated, “clarify a few things. Is there a place we can go where we will be . . . uninterrupted?”

  Dunn! she thought, feeling herself come fully awake.

  “I see,” was all she offered.

  She was fully conscious of her guest in the kitchen. Dunn, her deceptive and manipulative ex-lover, now in charge of, she guessed, counter-intelligence at MI5. She had thought, hoped, that she had seen the last of him during the summer when he had tried to manipulate her into returning to work for him as a double agent with a promise to save Darling, who had been wrongfully arrested for a wartime murder. Instead, she had brought the British a defecting agent, Stanimir Aptekar. Why could she never seem to get clear of Angus Dunn?

  “Would you be able to see me today?”

  Stilling with great effort a desire to ask if they had no working telephones in Vancouver, she said, “What time were you thinking? I have a guest at the moment, and we are expected somewhere for lunch.”

  They weren’t, but Eleanor could always be counted on to provide a lunch.

  “Ah,” he said. “When then?”

  Conscious suddenly of her anxiety about Orlova, she could feel herself revert to the secrecy she’d been used to when dealing with British officials. Her guest, she reminded herself, might understand more English than she was letting on.

  “Oh, I see. You want to see the wharf. You won’t need anyone to show you where that is. It’s about an hour out of town. Just before you get to the King’s Cove turnoff. You’ll be able to see the sign just ahead of you. There’s a little lane that goes down toward the water on your right. Just follow that.” She stopped and listened, and then added, “About three, I’d guess, all told.”

  “Are you saying you will see me at three?”

  “That’s right,” Lane said, trying to sound bright. “Good luck. No, no trouble at all. Oh, and say hello to Marion for me. Bye now.”

  She knew her deception was unnecessary, but it came to her naturally, a circumstance that made her cross.

  “I have put the tea on, Miss Winslow,” Madam Orlova said, coming to the door.

  “Good idea!” Lane said. She retrieved her robe from the bedroom and padded down the hall to the kitchen. “Someone wanting direction to the wharf where the steam boat docks. I completely overslept. How did you sleep?”

  “Like the dead,” said Orlova. “It was cool this morning, but the sun is already warming everything up. I am very determined. Today I will not move from the bottom of your garden. The light is wonderful, and I have seen the angle of your house I would like to paint.”

  “Yes. Of course. Wonderful. And perhaps today we will hear if anyone has any news about your brother.”

  “Or if that priest of yours has found me a place to stay? I am sure you would like your house to yourself again.” Here Orlova’s seemingly cheerful mood seemed to dissipate, as if it had been merely put on. She wrung her hands and sighed. “I am so worried about poor Vasya, if I tell the truth. When this is over, I don’t even know where I will go. I feel as if there is no home in this world.”

  Lane was stricken again by her guest’s troubles. “You are most welcome here, for as long as it takes. You remind me that you too are facing your own kind of sorrow and anxiety.”

  Orlova shrugged in a way Lane remembered so well from Russians she knew as a child. A tilting of the head with downturned lips, as if to say, “We are powerless against the fates.”

  Lane watched Madam Orlova from the window. The old lady sat with her board on her lap, and at that moment, she had a pencil in her hand and was drawing with confident sweeps, looking continuously up to the house. It must be wonderful to have such focus, Lane thought, to be able to lose yourself in a task and have something beautiful at the end of it. To be able to forget your sorrows if only for an hour. She had been made to sketch as a child by one of her governesses who believed it was what young ladies should do, but neither she nor her sister had exhibited any talent for it, though Lane had enjoyed sitting outside trying. But she had preferred to read, and her sister had preferred to be out in the stables. She picked a pillow up from the window seat, gave it a couple of pats and put it down. Somewhere, at the very same time as she was enjoying the peace of a sunny day, she thought, poor Mrs. Brodie was suffering the horror of losing her husband to an act of unspeakable violence.

  She would make her bed and try not to think of the fate of the sheet she had provided for the transport of the hunter’s body. Then she would go investigate her much-neglected stand of apple trees. Robin Harris, who lived down the hill from her, had been quite scornful of her apple crop. He had shown her that the trees were already being taken over by pests and various sorts of who knew what. But she could at least still get some apples off them. There were some early apples already ripe. She would attempt a pie. She started toward the bedroom and nearly got entangled in her guest’s black sweater, which had slipped off the back of a chair onto the floor. Scooping it up, she stopped at the guest room and worried for a moment about whether it would be rude to intrude on her guest’s privacy by barging into her room, and then she thought there would be no harm in laying the sweater neatly on the bed.

  She certainly had no cause to complain about her guest. She washed her own clothes in the sink, though Lane had offered the washing machine, and hung them neatly on the clothesline. Stockings, blouse, underwear. The bed was made with military corners, her hairbrush and personal items were lined up neatly on the little dresser. She had Lane’s copy of The Government Inspector by her bed. Suitable reading for a woman disillusioned by politics. Lane put the sweater on the bed and was about to leave when she saw that one of the two suitcases Orlova had come with was standing behind the dresser. It must be the one where she kept her paints. Unsure why, really, she leaned over to look under the bedspread and then stood up again, and surveyed room. It was a sparsely furnished room. A bed, a bedside table, a dresser she had cleared two drawers of, and a chair from the kitchen. Lane had provided a small pot of daisies to brighten up the otherwise austere look of the room. She opened the closet door a smidgeon, feeling fully guilty now, and glanced at the two dresses and jacket hanging neatly. She closed the door quickly and beat a retreat from the guest room, closing the door behind her. She stood, momentarily nonplussed. Madam Orlova was outside in her front yard painting. But of course, she would have taken her paints out in her suitcase. She turned her mind instead to the disturbing circumstance of the phone call from Mr. Hunt, apparently from the British consulate.

  It was only as she was getting dressed that she recalled something that the man had said: “A place we could go where we would be,” Lane remembered his hesitation, “uninterrupted.” Why would he think they would be interrupted in her own house?

  Felix hunt had put down the phone and sat on for a moment in the phone cabinet off the hotel foyer. Lane Winslow had been pretending to talk to a friend. Was this a sign that she was covering something up; had she learned something about her guest? Or was this just the natural caution of an ex-British agent?

  “Ames.” Darling looked at his watch. “Sho
uldn’t you be writing your exam?”

  “Yes. It’s in half an hour. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “I’ve been thrashing about in the high bush finding dead hunters, not that you should concern yourself about it in any way.”

  “Oh. That’s interesting,” Ames said, wishing his exam was over and he was back at his post helping Darling.

  “Yes, it is, Ames, and unless you have something equally interesting, I have to go meet with the grieving widow to find out more about who might have wanted to cut her husband’s throat.”

  “Ugh. Sorry, sir. But this is about the Russian thing, and I thought it was surprising. First, when I took the picture around to the priests in the two parishes that seem to serve most of the Russians here, no one had heard of that Madam Orlova, and no one had ever seen her brother. I thought that was surprising for a start because you told me she’d been looking for him here. Then I got a call from one of the priests. One of the men who’d seen the picture when I was showing it around came to see him saying he had seen the man before and was really afraid and didn’t know if he should say anything. The priest persuaded him to talk to me. According to him, the man in the picture you sent me is a member of the Soviet secret police, and he had been interrogated by him when he was arrested back in Russia. He was really scared because he was worried something would happen to him, even here in Canada.”

  Darling frowned. This was not how he thought the thing would go at all. His mind leapt to Madam Orlova. Was she who she said she was?

  “This is unexpected, Ames.”

  “Yes, sir. There’s more.”

  “You have been busy. Go on.”

  “That dead Russian, the one who supposedly died of a heart attack? The pathologist caught me in the hall yesterday and told me that I had been right about there being something funny about the rash on his neck. He’d decided to have a closer look, took some sort of scraping and analyzed it. It apparently contained a deadly poison that may have caused the heart attack. They’re moving the death into the ‘suspicious circumstances’ category.”

  “This shows you stumble into being clever from time to time, but it does not necessarily suggest any connection with the secret policeman.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Unless—”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking, sir. What if the secret policeman is actually here in Canada and the dead guy recognized him? That would mean the man who spoke to me was correct to be anxious.”

  “You’ll need to get the Vancouver Police Department involved. Your job is to get your exam done and get the hell back here. Give them the photo, tell them what you know, and good luck. I’ll need to think about the whole thing from this end. It’s a nuisance, with this murder to deal with.”

  Darling hung up the phone, paused for a moment, his lips set in a grim line, then stood up and got his hat off the hat stand. He had not shared with Ames his now-growing anxiety. He sat back down and stared at the phone. If Lane’s guest was not quite who she said she was, she had to be rooted out of there. Reaching for the receiver, he was about to dial, and then he put it down again. He would have to be careful. Resolved, he put his call through.

  “KC 431, Lane Winslow speaking.”

  “Lane, don’t talk. Just listen, make the right kind of noises.”

  “Oh, hello,” Lane said. The second time in one day she had to pretend on the telephone.

  “Ames has dug something up in Vancouver. That picture your guest is showing around may be her brother, but according to at least one frightened man, he is an MGB interrogator.”

  “Yes, of course,” Lane said, glancing down the hall.

  “I’m due out at Mrs. Brodie’s, but we’d better call the vicar to see how he’s getting on with finding a place for her. She may not be all she seems.”

  “Oh, yes. A good deal more in my cupboard. I’ll take care of it.”

  Darling hung up. Whatever that was supposed to mean. He’d warned her.

  “Oxley!”

  Silence.

  Darling went into the hall and looked into Oxley’s temporary office, then he went downstairs. “Where’s Oxley?”

  “Washing the car, sir. He’s around in the alley. He’s quite thorough. He’s been out there for ages.”

  Boy Scout, thought Darling again. “Too bad. We’re going up that long dusty road to interview the widow.”

  “You sound pleased, sir,” O’Brien said, not a little pleased himself, at the thought of all that work going to waste.

  “I am a bit, yes. And I see it might rain. We can blame him for that, and all.”

  Mrs. Brodie looked as though she had slept only fitfully. She sat at her kitchen table in front of a cup of coffee, and though she reached for it from time to time, she did not drink. Her cousin, who was introduced as Arlene Taylor, leaned against the sink, arrayed in a clean starched apron, looking the complete antithesis of the dishevelled and listless widow.

  “I’m sorry to intrude, Mrs. Brodie,” Darling began. He had asked Oxley to find a seat behind him somewhere for his note taking, so that she did not feel overwhelmed by the two of them.

  Mrs. Brodie only shook her head, either to say it was all right, or she wasn’t ready to cope. Her cousin came to stand by her and put her hand on her shoulder.

  “Can this wait, Inspector? You can see the state of her.” But Mrs. Brodie patted her cousin’s hand.

  “It’s all right,” she said quietly.

  “Mrs. Brodie, can you think of anyone who would want to harm your husband?” Darling asked.

  Tears sprang into her eyes and she shook her head again. “I knew you would ask me that question. I lay awake all night, knowing there was no one. Everybody,” she hesitated, “loved Ray, they did. I wanted to think of someone. I wanted this to make sense.”

  Darling nodded. “Can you—”

  “Nobody even knew exactly where he went,” she said. “He must have met someone up there. They must have fought or something. What about that man who found his horse? Maybe he was up to something and Ray ran into him.”

  “We will be looking into every circumstance, Mrs. Brodie. Most people are murdered by someone they know, so we always like to start in the middle of the circle. Is there no one he has ever had a dispute with?”

  At this the cousin turned away and looked out the window. The sky had greyed over so that it felt as though an untimely dusk was encroaching. Both women sat silent.

  “Mrs. Taylor?” Darling asked the cousin. There was something in her movement that seemed to Darling like an attempt to stifle something.

  She turned back, her arms crossed tightly. “Things haven’t always been that great between Ray and my ex-husband.”

  Mrs. Brodie put her hand on her mouth. “No, Arlene. That . . . you can’t.”

  “Can’t I? It was okay with us all pretending before. But this is different. Ray is dead. God, he’s not even my husband, and I feel like I’ve got more sense than you!” She walked over to the table and pulled out a chair. “The truth is, Inspector, that my husband and Cassie here had an affair about five years ago. It wasn’t a good time in any of our lives. Cassie and Ray managed to get through it, but we didn’t. In fact, I couldn’t wait to get rid of my husband. I couldn’t wait to get rid of Cassie, either, if you want to know the truth.” Then she shrugged. “But blood is thicker than water.”

  Darling glanced at Mrs. Brodie, who was staring at her hands in her lap, and then addressed Mrs. Taylor again.

  “Does your ex-husband—what is his name?—live in the area?”

  “Verne Taylor. No. He moved into town. He has that boat repair shop just off Lakeside.”

  “Have they spoken recently, do you know?” He looked at the widow.

  “I don’t think so. Why should they?” Mrs. Brodie said, looking up
. Her words contained a challenge. “But you’re barking up the wrong tree if you think it’s Verne. He wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

  “Just his wife,” said Mrs. Taylor, folding her hands on the table and looking away from her cousin.

  “Just to be clear, Mrs. Brodie, your husband did take his rifle with him?”

  She frowned. “Yes. He was hunting. Why?”

  “We haven’t found the gun,” he said. “Do you know what kind it is?”

  “I think it was an Enfield S something. What do you mean you haven’t found it?”

  Oxley’s pencil could be heard scraping over the page in his notebook.

  “It was not at the scene, nor was it with his horse, or anywhere near where the horse was found.”

  “Then whoever did it, took it,” said Mrs. Taylor.

  “That may well be, though he did not die of a gunshot wound,” said Darling. “The weapon used was a knife. Did he have a hunting knife?”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Brodie, looking white. “Yes, I think so. I don’t really know what he takes, but no hunter would go without a knife, would he?”

  Strictly speaking he hadn’t heard from Gilly as to what sort of knife had made the wound, nor the possible position of the victim when it happened. He got up, and Oxley, taking the signal, stood as well, closing his notebook. Rain was beginning to patter on the windows. Even in the house, the drop in the outside temperature was palpable.

  “We will keep you posted as we go along, Mrs. Brodie. Please feel free to call the police station at this number if you think of anything at all that may be relevant to the investigation.”

  As they were leaving, Oxley turned and touched the brim of his hat. “My condolences, ma’am.”