A Deceptive Devotion

by Iona Whishaw

  Now then. Time to be practical. She held her cup with both hands to warm them and drank her tea. What she could know for sure was that Ames had found a radio transmission device in the car where the spare tyre should be. First question: who used that car while he was away? Or maybe the first should be, were the police instituting some new equipment? They ought to, they were jolly useful, as she knew only too well. She had trained people in occupied France to use a version of these transmitters that had been developed in Britain.

  The other thing she knew was that Countess Orlova, her innocent dear old thing, had one as well. She had seen it. Lane’s mind wandered back to the tension of trying to carry on as if last night were a normal evening. The supper together, the nightcap, the goodnights, her own long sleepless night.

  One obvious conclusion, however implausible, was that Orlova was communicating with someone right inside the police force. If that was the case, Darling had to be warned. She wished now she’d said something to Ames as he’d left, a warning to Darling, maybe.

  A second, less mystifying conclusion was that the transmitter in the police car was genuine equipment that Ames, recently back, simply had not been briefed on, and Orlova was in contact with someone else. This one made more sense, though here, on a beautiful peaceful morning in out-of-the-way King’s Cove, it seemed almost impossible. But Lane herself had been warned by the British consul, Hunt, that a Russian spy might be on the run, and might turn up here.

  Her first thought had been that Orlova was here to watch for Aptekar, but if so, to what purpose? What did Aptekar have that they would want so badly? Hunt had said Aptekar had never turned up at the meeting place. She was certain from her last interaction with Aptekar in Berlin that he was absolutely genuine in wanting to defect. She had believed him when he told her that he intended to retire from the whole game. She saw that this had led her to think, perhaps mistakenly, that he was being pushed out, and no longer had a serious role to play. The world order had changed, and fresh new people would be on the job. But maybe he did have something important that both sides wanted.

  A more worrisome question, perhaps, was how had he been betrayed? No one could have known his plans to go to the Yugoslav border, unless he’d been followed. No, Hunt had said he never even arrived there. Something had gone wrong earlier.

  Lane looked at her watch. It was nearing eight on a Thursday. The sternwheeler would be coming in with supplies and mail. Kenny would drive his truck down to meet it in another hour. She wanted desperately to go to the Armstrongs’ where she would phone Darling. The idea that among Orlova’s deceptions was that she spoke English after all, loomed larger. She no longer trusted that Orlova might not understand her phone calls. But she could not do anything to arouse her guest’s suspicions. She would have to wait, carry on with the morning routines.

  Everything became a matter of suspicion. Why had Orlova’s plans for a room in town fallen through? Was it coincidence, or had it somehow been engineered so that she would have to stay here, with Lane, waiting, as Lane now guessed, for Aptekar.

  The French door opened, and Orlova came out, pulling her black sweater around her. “Good morning, my dear. What a lover of the fresh air you must be! It is quite chilly.”

  “Ah, Countess. Good morning. Let me put the water on. I am having tea today. I know, it is cooler. I think I am clinging to the idea that if the sun is shining it is still summer. The winter will close in soon enough!” Lane got up, smiling. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Very, as always. I am thinking today that I will paint something more wild and natural. Perhaps it is this feeling of the autumn. It is so elemental, is it not? I have certainly done justice to the gardens, so I think I may leave them.”

  Inside, Lane filled the kettle again and put it on the stove. “Constable Ames seemed delighted with his picture. It was so kind of you to give it to him. He told me his mother would be thrilled.”

  Madam Orlova sat at the table and folded her hands. She smiled at Lane. “He reminded me of someone I used to know. Tall, young, handsome. So long ago. A story from another life.”

  Lane poured water over the tea leaves.

  “How romantic. Can you tell me about it?” She glanced at the clock. And could your story last another hour? she wondered hopefully.

  “It is nothing really, when I think about it. He was a young man in the military. I met him at a perfectly dreary ball my parents threw. He was not like the other men my parents thrust at me. He was intelligent, surprising, even. I was already engaged to one of those bores, but my fiancé was away that night at his father’s estate. The young officer had that clear-eyed, almost innocent look of your young policeman.”

  Orlova put sugar into her cup and poured the tea over it and stirred. “I took him as my lover, of course, and then pushed my parents to bring my marriage forward, for the obvious reason. I pretended I could not be separated from Orlov for another minute. Orlov was a good man, dull as the others sadly, and he fell afoul of the authorities after the revolution. My child died of diphtheria. I decided I must get out, together with my brother. There.”

  Your brother, the ferocious MGB interrogator, Lane thought. “You never saw the young man again?”

  “No. It is better that way. I never had to tell him he had a little girl who died, and I can keep forever the memory of him as he was when I first met him. Did you never have an unhappy love affair? Someone like you, so beautiful, in all the chaos of the war?”

  Uncannily like what did happen, Lane thought, but she shook her head.

  “There was someone I thought I might have loved once, but it was short-lived, and I was very busy during the war. Men were very flighty creatures then, and I was young. Now, well, there is the inspector.” She got up and took a loaf of bread from her breadbox and put a frying pan on the stove. “Now, what do you say to a little breakfast? You’re going to need it if you are going farther afield today. And I’d better get a start in the orchard or my neighbour will be very cross with me.”

  “You are very, very lucky. I wonder if you know how fortunate, to find real love.”

  “I do,” said Lane. “I do, indeed.”

  At the post office Lane leaned against the counter. She knew the mail, having just arrived, would still be in the canvas bag it travelled in, but she had to get to a phone she could trust slightly more than her own.

  “You look all in, and it’s barely nine in the morning,” Eleanor said. Alexandra barked helpfully from the floor by Eleanor’s feet. The postmistress leaned over and picked up the puppy and pushed her through the window. “Here, you can cheer up our Miss Winslow. So what’s the matter, dearie?” she said when the dog transfer was completed.

  Lane, under a barrage of cheerful licking and sniffing, said, “Something odd has come up. I didn’t sleep a wink, I’m afraid. I’ve come over pretending to get the mail, but I really need to use your phone to call Darling.”

  “Nothing that will jeopardize the wedding, I hope?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that.”

  “Anyway, you won’t need to pretend about the mail. I had just fished this out of the bag before you came. A beautiful hand!” Eleanor handed the letter through to Lane, who had become preoccupied with socializing with the puppy. “You’d better come around to the kitchen,” Eleanor said.

  Lane put Alexandra down and went out of the post office and into the kitchen. Kenny Armstrong was pushing some wood into the stove. “A sight for sore eyes,” he said by way of greeting. “I’ve got the kettle on.”

  “She can’t be fussing around with cups of tea. She needs to use our telephone,” Eleanor said, emphasizing the word “our” in a conspiratorial way.

  Kenny looked pleased by the sudden mysterious turn in the conversation. “You don’t say? I better show you through.”

  The Armstrongs’ phone sat on a tiny table just inside the sitting room.
It was certainly not the ancient trumpet model that Lane had in her hallway, but it, too, was old and dated from the mid-twenties. After Kenny had dialled through to the exchange in Balfour, Lane took up the instrument and asked for the Nelson Police Department, knowing full well that Lucy, the girl who worked the exchange out of the Balfour store, would no doubt go on a mad spiral of speculation about whether Lane was involved in another crime, or if this was the continuation of what she liked to tell her friends was the romance of the century.

  While she waited, Lane looked at her letter and, with a gasp, realized that she was holding a missive from Stanimir Aptekar, franked at the post office in Nelson the afternoon before.

  Lane stood in the sitting room, looking unseeing through the window while she waited to be put through. Finally, she heard Sergeant O’Brien.

  “Nelson Police, O’Brien here.”

  “Good morning, Sergeant. Is the inspector alone? It’s Miss Winslow. Please don’t say my name out loud, just put me through to him if he’s alone.”

  Darling picked up the phone. He’d been puzzling about their failure to find Brodie’s hunting rifle, either at the scene or in Taylor’s shop. But he was also puzzled by the knife. Anyone with brains would have tossed a knife in the lake, or hurled it far into the bush. Why keep it with the bloodied shirt? He was in the process of going through the murder in his mind and was mentally following the murderer out of the forest to his car. They hadn’t searched his car.

  “Yes?”

  “Is Ames with you, sir?” O’Brien had already established that the recent occupant of Darling’s office, Oxley, was even now at the corner desk on the main floor, trying to pull open the bottom drawer, which always stuck, which is why the desk was never used.

  “No, Sergeant, he’s not. If you wanted him why didn’t you ring through to him?”

  “One moment, sir.”

  “Inspector, darling. It’s me. Are you alone?”

  “Not you too. What’s going on?”

  “I’m at the Armstrongs’, using their telephone. I’ve called to say you’re right. There’s something very wrong with the countess. She has the companion piece to the radio found in the back of your police car.”

  Darling had not been expecting this. So much so that he found he couldn’t make sense of it at all. “Wait.” Then Darling glanced at his office door. It was ajar. “Don’t go away, I’m going to shut the door.”

  Lane waited, her brain whirring, following radio signals between King’s Cove and Nelson, then where? In a bewildering moment she imagined Angus Dunn, picking up his phone, catching the signal that had crossed the country, crossed the Atlantic.

  “Okay, now start again. Your countess has the same radio equipment as that from the back of the car.”

  “Yes.”

  “No. I still don’t understand. Are you suggesting that she is in touch for some reason with a member of this force? She doesn’t even speak English.”

  “Who’s been driving that car since Ames has been away? Oxley. A recent member of your force. Where did he come from, again?”

  Frowning, he tried desperately to fit two completely unmatched pieces of a puzzle together.

  “Ontario somewhere. But why in God’s name would they have to be in secret radio contact?”

  He’d bloody well better find out where Oxley had come from, he thought, and if he spoke Russian.

  Lane was silent for a moment, looking down, as puzzled as he was. She had put the letter she’d received on the telephone table, and her eyes lit on it now. She tucked the receiver between her shoulder and her ear.

  “Just wait,” she said. She pushed her thumb along the edge of the envelope and pulled out a single note-sized piece of paper.

  I will take the boat on Saturday to King’s Cove. Meet me at the landing. SA

  “Oh,” Lane said.

  “‘Oh’ what?” Darling asked.

  “I thought I might know why she’s here. I think it’s confirmed. It doesn’t explain Oxley. But it explains, well, that’s the trouble. I don’t think I can say.”

  “You don’t think you can say? You don’t think you can say? I have some sort of interloper on my police force and you’ve got, whatever the hell she is, and you can’t say?”

  “Darling, try not to be upset. I need to think.”

  “No!”

  “No what?”

  “No, I will not try not to be upset. This is ridiculous. Outrageous, even. Is this your stinking Official Secrets Act rearing its head again? Because it’s intolerable.”

  “Look, I understand why you’re angry. I just—”

  “Do you?” Darling interrupted. “Well, that’s just splendid. We should get along like a house on fire! Maybe we should get married.”

  “I was going to say, I just need to think through this. You should try to find out about Oxley. Where he comes from. All I can tell you is that he’s here on purpose. And I suspect he’s here for the same reason she is. I’m not sure why they are in contact with each other. I need to make another phone call. I promise I’ll call you back and tell you everything I can. Look, there’s nothing I can do to change this right now. You have to trust me.”

  It sounded weak, even to her.

  A sarcastic remark struggled for utterance in Darling, but it came to him that this was the moment, really. The true test. He knew she had a past. He knew she was obliged to keep secrets. He knew that if their life together was to work, he would have to trust her. Did he trust her? He knew in his heart of hearts that he did.

  “I do,” he said simply. “But you understand that this may be directly impacting my force here, and possibly even my current murder investigation since Oxley has been part of it. So, step on it, would you?”

  “Oh, by the way,” Lane said, trying to make it sound as casual as possible, “what was Raymond Brodie wearing?”

  Frowning, Darling stared at the receiver. The complete change in tone threw him. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, was he wearing anything brown?” Lane paused. “Only when I was up at the site where you found him, there appeared to be a tiny scrap of brown cloth.”

  Lane saw the cloth in her mind’s eye, suddenly, and didn’t continue.

  Darling was rendered almost, but not quite, speechless. “Come again?”

  She toyed with mounting a defence, and then thought, hang it, I’m free to do what I want, after all, and so she tried a more direct tack.

  “You’re not intrigued by the possible evidence I found?”

  “I am, as a matter of fact. I’m intrigued that my eager beaver Oxley didn’t see it, but then again, it turns out he’s maybe not a real policeman. I am more intrigued by what the devil makes you want to go and nose around a crime scene. I mean it, Lane, I genuinely don’t understand. And it makes me worry, and worry makes me angry. How are you to be kept safe when you carry on like this?”

  Lane thought for a moment. “Do you think it is your job to keep me safe?”

  “I’m marrying you. Isn’t that one of the manly tasks?”

  “I don’t see why. Who kept me safe before? Why should marrying me add to the burden of your tasks in life?”

  “It’s what you imagine, isn’t it? The strong man protecting and feeding his family.”

  “Is that what we’re doing?” Lane asked, with a ping of anxiety. “I don’t have any experience with the sort of man you’re describing. My father was hardly around. I always thought it was our cook who protected and fed us. I’m a little afraid that you are going to feel obliged to make yourself into that sort of man. I don’t think it would be good for us, do you? How would your feelings about me change if you had to become some sort of protector?”

  Darling sighed. She was right. What they had together right now was based on two full people coming together, interested
in each other, independent, in love. The very thing he must have fallen in love with in the first place. He’d thought marriage would simply bring them together without changing that beautiful balance, but now he could see that somehow their being married, combined with his absolutely understandable, as he saw it, anxiety about her safety, was adding up to something else. Unmarried he would be anxious and frustrated, yes, but married he might become anxious and controlling. This would fundamentally change how he felt about her.

  “My God,” he said quietly. “You are, annoyingly, right. I almost feel a little ashamed, but it’s a dilemma. How can I stop worrying if you are going to continue to, well, be you? I think I must be allowed to worry, as part of the bargain.”

  “Yes, I think I can allow that. It is your worry, after all. I have no right to it. And I must be allowed, as you so succinctly put it, to be me. A fair bargain?”

  “A fair bargain,” he said. “The poor vicar. He missed the boat entirely. This is what we should have been hashing out in his claustrophobic office.”

  “Should we tell him? He can get to work on it with his other couples. ‘How marriage may make you into completely different people and change how you feel about each other.’”

  “It would stop people wanting to marry altogether. He’d be out of business,” Darling said. “And along those lines, do you still want to marry me?”

  She smiled. “I do,” she said.

  “I’m relieved. I expect Lorenzo is already planning the cake.”

  “Oh,” Lane said. “Sorry, did you tell me that the dead man wore brown? Only I just suddenly thought of something.”

  “I didn’t, no, and he wasn’t. Now what?”

  “You know what, darling, it’s all right. I’ll call you back. I have to check something. No point in creating anxiety for no reason.”

  Lane put the receiver back onto the phone and took a deep breath. She may have saved herself a dressing down from Darling, but what she realized was much more grave.