by Iona Whishaw
“Could . . . could I see some identification?” Ames wasn’t sure he was on solid ground with this one. And it might make him seem more suspect. What the hell were they suspicious about?
“My God, you are a pill. Here.” The short one pulled out his warrant card and showed it to Ames. Geoffry Carston, RCMP ID—with ID standing for Intelligence Division, Ames supposed.
“Come on, Dave, show him yours.” The second man languidly pulled his card out of his coat pocket and held it up. David Segal, RCMP ID.
“Now then, would you mind telling us why you’ve been tramping all over the place visiting Russians?”
“I was asked to inquire about a Russian man by my boss in Nelson, Inspector Darling. Apparently an old lady has turned up there looking for her brother. She’s some sort of refugee.”
“Lot of those around,” Carston said glumly. “And?”
“Well, nothing doing.”
“What sort of nothing doing?”
“I mean, no one has seen her brother, and as a matter of fact, no one has seen her either, which I thought was strange.”
“Did you now?” the smoking one asked, leaning closer to Ames over the table. “How was that?”
Ames was silent for a moment. He felt a rebellious desire to not tell these pushy men everything, but he knew that that made no sense at all. They were clearly all on the same side. Maybe he was just cross about being sandbagged in this way. If he told them everything, he might get to go home to his boarding house and pack. Carston, the wrestler, stirred impatiently.
“My boss told me that the old lady supposedly had been all over Vancouver looking for him, the brother I mean, and I was surprised when I went to the only two Russian communities in the city and they hadn’t seen her at all. But then, well, that’s it, really.”
“He’s a smart one, eh? So you thought something might be wrong, and?”
“Well, I got a call from one of the churches and I spoke to a very frightened man who said the man in the picture, the brother, was a Soviet agent who’d interrogated him none too kindly back in the thirties. With the dead Russian in the cooler here, it just seemed like too much of a coincidence.”
Both men sat up. “What dead Russian?” Carston asked.
Ames hesitated. It wasn’t his dead Russian, after all, even though he’d been the one to notice that he might not have died naturally.
“There’s a dead guy in the cooler here in Vancouver. He might not have died naturally. I lost interest when I found out he wasn’t the man I was looking for.”
Best not tell them about his little discovery, Ames thought. No doubt the coroner here would take the credit for it.
“Segal, look into that, will you?” Carston said. Segal got up, grinding the stubby remains of his cigarette into the tin ashtray, and left the room.
“So what’s this about a Russian woman in, where are you from?”
Ames suspected his interrogator was being annoying on purpose. He knew perfectly well where Ames was from. “I only know what my boss told me. She’s elderly and she’s lost her brother.”
“Only it seems like she lied to your boss, eh? She never was around here looking for him, according to you, so what’s she doing all the way over in Nelson? Who’s the person who called you from the church on Seventh Avenue?”
Look at that, Ames thought. He knows where I’m from and he knows the priest called me from Seventh Avenue. What else does he know? With a sudden chill, he understood he’d been followed for who knows how long.
“Father Dmitry. But I expect you already know that. Is there anything else I can help with? Only I have to go home and pack. I have a train to catch.”
“Not so fast. I need to see your photograph, the one you’ve been showing around.”
Ames reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and extracted the photo. Carston took it and gazed at it, his mouth working. He pointed at the man leaning on the car.
“So this is the guy that is supposed to be the agent? The one who beats people up?”
“I can only tell you what that man told me.”
“Hmmm,” said Carston. He slid the picture into his own pocket and then got up and stretched, banging his chair noisily into the wall behind him.
“Hey,” Ames said. “I need that.”
“No, you don’t, you’re going home now. I’m sure your boss has one you can use. So, thanks. And stay away from things that don’t concern you. If you read the news instead of just the funny papers, you’d know this. There’s a war on.”
Carston put his hands in his pockets and tilted his head, looking at Ames, who was now standing like a child waiting to be allowed to leave.
“Don’t get me wrong. To me you look just like what you say you are, but others might not think so.” He shook his head, his face set in a look of sympathy. “They’d be asking themselves why a young man like yourself, a low-ranking policeman with a salary to match, is running back and forth talking to Ruskies. ‘What’s he doing?’ they’d be asking themselves. ‘What’s he passing back and forth?’ So I’d be careful. I’d pack my bags and go straight home. Get back to your regular life, enjoy your sergeant’s salary. You don’t have to do anything special to show you’re as innocent as you seem. We’ll keep an eye on you.”
Ames had wanted to be first out the door, but Carston preceded him, giving him a friendly pat on the back on his way out. Ames, feeling slightly wobbly, sat down with a thump. They just, if he wasn’t mistaken, suggested he might be some sort of spy. His anxiety gravitated to anger. He tried to still the persistent suggestion his mind was offering that this was all Darling’s fault. All he wanted to do was come out to Vancouver, take his course, write his exam, and get home, and now he was suddenly a perfectly innocent citizen who was being watched, apparently. “There’s a war on,” Carston had said. He hadn’t heard that since the actual war had been on. What sort of war? Feeling a sudden surge of resolve, he made his way to the library, which was very nearby on Main Street. It would calm him down before he had to phone Darling. He didn’t trust how he was feeling just yet.
Darling sat back, looking out the window, tapping the desk with his pencil. Lane sat opposite him.
“You said you wanted to discuss one problem,” she said. “Now it’s two. You’re concerned about what my countess is up to, and now you think there’s a man running around King’s Cove with a bayonet that he knows how to use. Anything else I should know about? I’m not finding this all that relaxing. And I’m sure my neighbours, as plucky as they are, and as apt to come together to pass buckets of water in a chain during an emergency, are not either.”
“I never said it was a bayonet. We don’t know what it is.”
“As to his running around King’s Cove, you don’t know, really, that Mr. Brodie was not killed by someone who wanted him dead, specifically. It’s a singular circumstance, in my view, that he was killed way out in the bush in a place where no one could have known his whereabouts unless he’d been followed. It doesn’t follow that whoever it is will now proceed from house to house executing people. He could have done that right at the beginning without the trouble of crashing about in the underbrush.”
“That’s a funny word to use, executing.” Darling turned back to Lane. He had mostly stopped being uneasy about her former life, but her use of the word “execute” once again stirred his anxieties about what sort of life she’d been used to. “Is there something about what I’ve told you that makes you think the man was executed?”
“That clean cut, I suppose. I don’t know much about throat-cutting, of course, but I suspect people often make a mess of it. People in general are not expert killers, even with military training. You’d be surprised how many shots taken during the war missed altogether. From that we can surmise that the average civilian, or even the average veteran, who doesn’t know how to shoot properl
y, or has surprised someone during a robbery and has no time to think and so on, is unlikely to go around murdering people in quite this way. This seems to me to show that the killer had time, and the element of surprise, perhaps, and a very high, not to say professional, level of skill.”
She pulled her chair closer and drew a line on the desk with her finger. “Let’s say this is the creek. You found the man on this side, where he might have been sitting in the shade of that big outcrop you mentioned, maybe even dozing, if this was an afternoon killing. He must not have heard whoever it was until it was too late. If he was the intended victim, he must have been followed by someone very patient who waited until it was safe to sneak up on him. If he was a random victim, then he must have stumbled on something someone didn’t want him to see, or maybe was trying to protect. A cache of money, for example. Has a bank been robbed recently? It might tell us something about the circumstances.”
“It doesn’t tell ‘us’ anything. It tells me and my men something. You don’t come into it. All I need you to do is be careful, and while you’re at it, find out what is going on with your guest. She is not what she seems.”
“I’m not sure I entirely agree with you. She seems like an old lady, and indeed, she is. Maybe she didn’t go about trying to find her brother in Vancouver the way you or Ames, professional policemen, might have.” Lane stopped there. She knew in her heart she wasn’t entirely convinced herself. The question she had about whether Orlova was pretending not to speak English was niggling, but if there was really nothing to be concerned about, she didn’t want to add to Darling’s anxieties. She’d keep an eye on her guest, and obediently stay near the house for the time being. “Darling, I survived the war, and I do know how to look after myself.”
“I dare say, but you can’t be satisfied with her story about asking around Vancouver for her brother, when no one has heard of her. You can carry on being plucky if you want, but you can’t fool me. You know that there’s something not quite ‘comme il faut,’ as they say, about her story or her for that matter. And with a lunatic armed to the teeth running around in the bush, I confess I’m not entirely comfortable with the whole set up.”
“I promise to be as careful as can be. We still don’t know her story isn’t true. She has expressed genuine sadness about the possible fate of her brother. I don’t think she’s making it up. You can’t expect a woman who’s been running from danger and possible death to be entirely honest, even in a situation you and I think is safe.” There. She’d done her best to reassure Darling, but she would be on her guard. “Now let’s get down to brass tacks. Have you asked Ames to be your best man yet?”
“Certainly not. I didn’t want to disrupt his studies. Who knows how he’ll react.”
“Time is ticking by. I’ve asked Angela to stand up for me. She is, as you can imagine, over the moon and planning something that will equal the upcoming wedding of Princess Elizabeth.”
Darling groaned. “I rather thought we were having a quiet wedding. If you’ve unleashed Angela—”
“I haven’t ‘unleashed’ her. And anyway, there’s a limit to the damage she can do with the resources at hand in King’s Cove. The worst that can happen is that Eleanor Armstrong and Mabel Hughes will fight over who makes the cake. Have you asked your brother and his fiancée and your father?”
“Not yet. I will though, I suppose,” said Darling, “but it’s a long way to come.”
“They will come for you. I bet no one thought you’d ever marry!”
“I bet you’re right. I suppose you’re planning to invite the whole of King’s Cove?”
“I can’t invite one and not all the rest, even Reginald Mather and his mad wife. Who will you invite from here?”
“Ames,” Darling said. He looked to the sky. “God, I can’t believe I’m saying that. Can you imagine the best man’s speech? The rest are going to have to stay back and man the station. I’m sure they’ll get together and buy me a cup of coffee when it’s all over.”
“I think we should have Lorenzo and Mrs. Lorenzo, don’t you?”
“Yes, I was thinking about that. I’m certain he had us married in his imagination from the first moment he saw you. Will they be able to leave their restaurant? Will they be offended if we don’t ask them to cook something? All these social niceties. I’m not cut out for this sort of thing.”
“I wonder if they could make a cake? They’d have to haul it up the lake in the back of their little van or whatever they drive, but it would save us from a falling out between Eleanor and Mabel.”
“You know, he might feel honoured to do it. Good idea. I’ll ask, shall I? But you’ll have to take care of things down at your end, at the Cove. We’d better have this situation in hand by then. I won’t be easy till we’ve found this beastly man with, as you so quaintly put it, the bayonet.”
Ames was seated, finally, at a library table with a pile of papers going back to 1945, which he’d gained access to after the rather clumsy start of asking the librarian if there’d been anything in the papers about Russians lately. After learning that ships from Vladivostok and other eastern Soviet ports were coming to Vancouver to get repairs, and that the local churches had organized a big picnic on Russian Orthodox Easter—on a different day from what he thought of as regular Easter—Ames was reminded that there was indeed a state of unease between Canada and the Soviet Empire, but who didn’t know that? We’re fighting the communists and all that, after all. The librarian had come up to him as he’d explored, without success, anything that might account for his peculiar afternoon.
“Is this any good?” she said.
Chapter NINETEEN
December 1918
The first awareness that Tatiana Orlova had was of the sound of some metal object falling. She tried to open her eyes, but one was completely covered over with something. Only an oily yellow blur was visible through the other one. She tried to talk, but her throat felt as if it had been laid out to dry in the sun.
“We thought you might not make it,” said a male voice in a matter-of-fact tone.
She did not recognize the voice. She had no energy or will to respond. Where was she? She moved her hand toward the bandage over her eye, but felt it pulled back.
“Nuh-uh. You’ll hurt yourself. Just try to lie still.”
Tatiana turned her head toward the voice, trying to open her one uncovered eye, but it made her head thunder, and she closed it again, leaving her skull motionless on the pillow.
“Don’t try to talk. You’re lucky we found you. In one regard, we might have been too late, but that comrade of yours that you work with saw what was happening and managed to get away to get help. It was fortuitous, really. We’ve had our eye on you.”
Tatiana tried to understand how she was feeling. The pain in her head wiped out any other sensation. She tried to imagine what she’d been saved from, and if she was even happy about it. She wasn’t. It would have been better if her rescuers had left her to die. She was sure, even without remembering anything about her life before this painful moment, that she probably had no real reason to live.
Darling was looking at a file of some local murders, trying to find any evidence of another death similar to Brodie’s when his phone rang. Irritated, he pick up the receiver.
“Darling.”
“Sir, I’m on my way home on the morning train.”
“Goody. Did you flub that exam?”
“I don’t think so. I was finished before most of the other people,” Ames said.
“That’s not necessarily a good sign. When do the results come?”
“They said a week or so. But it’s what’s happened since the exam that I’m calling about.”
Darling frowned and pushed the file aside. There was nothing in it that was helpful. A few unsolved murders, mostly old, mostly firearms or ersatz weapons like bats, and nothing similar i
n the solved ones. “You just wrote the thing this morning.”
“Yes, and right after it I was wrangled into an interview room by a couple of RCMP heavies and, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say, interrogated.”
“You mustn’t be rude about our colleagues. Why? What have you done? I wonder if I should have left you alone in the big city.”
“If I’d done something in the big city, the Vancouver Police could have taken care of it. These guys said they were from the RCMP Intelligence Division. They wondered why I’ve been running around the city talking to Russians. And they swiped my photo of the old lady’s brother.”
“Now that is interesting. Did they say what they were concerned about?”
“I’ve gone over and over it in my head, but they were peppering me with questions, without telling me anything. They implied I might be on the take to augment my lousy constable’s salary. I think they were suggesting I might be some sort of spy.”
“This better not be a ploy to get a raise. Did they have you followed?”
“That’s what I don’t know. They certainly knew where I’d been and when. I can’t make out if they had their eyes on the local Russians and saw me visiting, or if, maybe, one of the Russians is reporting back to them.”
“For God’s sakes, Ames. Can’t I let you off the lead for five minutes? Okay, listen, haul out that little notebook of yours and use your time on the train home to write down every single thing about your Russian investigation. Let’s see if we can make head or tail of it when it’s all on paper. And include the questions the heavies asked you. When you get back, there will be no lollygagging. There’s work to do. I have an unsolved crime here that might, I say might, be along the lines of an execution. That idea, by the way, ludicrous for our gentle part of the world, comes from your friend Miss Winslow.”
“Yes, sir. I went to the local library to look at some back issues of the papers. I think I might have found out why the RCMP is fidgety. Last year there was a big spy scandal, and Canada, Britain, and the US all arrested a bunch of people in a big spy ring. We might not have known about it except some Yank reporter talked about it on the radio. The prime minister apparently set up a commission of some sort to investigate how this all happened. I bet the heavies are part of the commission’s work. They seemed to be trying to root out as-yet-undiscovered spies. I certainly felt as though I was being rooted out. Apparently, there’s a general fear that the commies are trying to get at our nuclear secrets.” He paused. “Something one of the heavies said made more sense after that. He said, ‘There’s a war on.’ He meant between Canada and Russia.”
