An Old, Cold Grave

by Iona Whishaw

  “We lost maybe an hour, and then we had to check everything over. That took some time.”

  “Hmm. A cost, then,” the judge mused and made some notes.

  Darling made a brief statement about being called out to look at the scene and his subsequent arrest of Erin. Then it was Erin’s turn. While she had looked frail and miserable as she listened from the bench where she sat, once on the stand she pulled herself erect and made a game attempt at looking defiant. Asked to explain her actions, the real logic behind it seemed elusive. She sat in silence for so long that people began to fidget and look to the judge.

  “My parents want me to marry Art,” she said, finally. “I don’t want to marry him. That is, it’s not that I don’t want to marry him, I just don’t want to marry.”

  “I’m having difficulty understanding why this led to you damaging a sawmill,” the judge said, frowning.

  “Symbolic, I guess,” the girl said. She appeared undaunted by the judge. Anger, Lane thought, or futility, seemed to have given the girl courage. “Paul works in a sawmill. He has to. His father is sick. That means he’ll always work in a sawmill, and I’d spend the rest of my life here, being a housewife. As it is, my parents are ashamed of me. They’re ashamed that I won’t be like other girls, just leave school and get married and have babies and be like everybody else. When I got in trouble, they even sent me to my aunt and uncle. They didn’t even want to have to look at me. Look at them, they can’t even look at me now.” Indeed, her parents sat with their heads down, her mother clutching a handkerchief.

  The judge sighed and took up the papers on the table and then put them down again. “And what would you do instead of marrying?”

  Lane frowned. The judge managed to squeeze a good deal of censure into this question, she thought, as if he disapproved of girls not marrying.

  “I want to go away to university. I want to study science. I’m actually smart. They’re ashamed of that too.”

  “You are not that smart, young lady, if you think breaking the law is going to get you what you want. I imagine your parents are ashamed of you for behaving in this wilful manner, especially as they are going to be financially inconvenienced. I am going to assess damages in the amount lost by the mill for the time it took for them to repair your mischief. Mr. Landy, once this sum has been determined, you will pay it. Miss Landy, you will take a job immediately that your school semester has ended and repay your parents. I recommend that you set more realistic goals for yourself, and marry as your parents wish, if that young man will still have you.” The gavel came down with a sharp finality. Erin’s mother approached her daughter where she sat, stunned, in the witness box. Mrs. Landy tried to touch her daughter’s arm. Erin shrugged her away impatiently.

  “I will pay back the money,” she said, looking up at her mother, “and then I will leave. You will never see me again.”

  OUTSIDE, ON THE quiet side street where Lane had parked, Lane and Darling stood next to her car. They had walked back from the courthouse in complete silence. Still, Lane could scarcely bring herself to speak. “That,” she finally managed, “was absolutely outrageous.”

  “Well . . .” Darling began.

  “Don’t make excuses, please. Please, not after telling me men can’t get convicted for beating their wives and children, and hearing that judge say that absolute nonsense to an intelligent girl who simply wants a life of her own. It’s no bloody wonder she wants to run away. If she calls me, I’ve a good mind to help her. You’ll no doubt be disappointed with that as well!” With that she got into the car, closed the door, and sat for a moment, fuming, trying to put the keys into the ignition.

  Then she rolled down her window. “Thank you for lunch, Inspector. I will let you know if I learn anything new about that hapless child.”

  He leaned down to speak to her, his hand on the roof of her car. “Please, Miss Winslow, Lane, please promise me you will stay away from that property and continue to lock your doors. Promise me.”

  “I’m angry, Inspector, not suicidal. As to promising you, how about you leave my safety to me? I survived the war, and I’ve no wish to die. That will have to do.”

  Darling watched her drive away, his heart torn asunder. He had been about to make an excuse for the judge. He was ashamed to admit it. He was about to babble about the law and the relatively minor consequence meted out to the girl, who after all had damaged property. He suddenly saw it the way Lane must see it: a gathering of social forces to repress the aspirations of women. How would he have felt if it were a boy being talked to in the same way? How could he think himself in love with an independent intelligent woman while accepting the status quo? He knew he hated how he saw women treated, he’d give himself that much, but suddenly now he felt himself culpable for he knew not what. Being a man. Not being able to stop this unquestioning power that men had over the lives of women. Seeing Erin as an unfathomable teenage girl who couldn’t behave, instead of someone who was genuinely suffering, afraid of the doors closing on her life forever. With a sinking heart, he turned to go back into the station. What woman with any fight or brains would put herself into the hands of any man?

  AT HOME, LATER, Lane sat before her fire with a glass of scotch and contemplated the hearing. The darkness had closed around the Cove, providing a quiet, peaceful sanctuary. She had been seething all the way home at the judge’s suggestion that the girl buckle down and do what her parents expected. He had so little understanding of how a girl like Erin might respond to being ordered to be quiet and do as she was told. Typical man, she thought crossly. The war is over, ladies, back to the kitchen. But it was the matter of shame that occupied her now. Erin had said her parents were ashamed, and Lane rather agreed with at least one thing the judge had said; it was likely they were ashamed their daughter had done something to drag them into court. But were they ashamed in the way Erin thought? A girl her age would have an idée fixe about her parents. But might it not be the other way around?

  Erin was ashamed of her parents, of her town, of the life she was expected to lead. Indeed of herself, perhaps, for behaving stupidly, when in fact she was, as she said, a very smart girl. Or the parents may feel shame themselves for being unable to understand or tame their clever daughter.

  Lane wondered about what role shame might have played in her own family. She thought that her father had probably been ashamed of her. Her sister was garrulous and charming. She had none of the introspection and sadness that crippled Lane and made her shy and nervous around her father. Her father wanted an entertaining and cheerful presence. Her sister was the perfect girl. Lane realized now that she was like the teenage Erin. Having decided her father was ashamed of her she had formed her own opinion of him, and probably all men, around that idea. Perhaps, instead, it could be turned around. Maybe her own father had felt powerless to make his daughter happy, and his initial frustration with himself had turned to anger against her by the time she was a teenager. It might have been himself he was ashamed of. Whatever it was, she thought, it had caused him to put his more difficult daughter out of his mind. And she could very well be wasting her life being suspicious of men for no reason. No, she had reason. She had loved fully and without conditions once before. It had gone badly. She would not willingly revisit that pain.

  She got up and stretched, closed the door of the stove on the embers of the evening’s fire, and took herself off to bed. She allowed herself a few moments of the onrush of feeling precipitated by thinking about Darling, and then she slept.

  This time, when she woke at four in the morning, it was not an attack of panic, something she had been troubled with since the end of the war. This time it was the burial of the child in the roof of Gladys Hughes’ root cellar. She had been right. There was shame involved there, she was sure of it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  DARLING, WHO FOR ONCE HAD resolved not to turn the anger he felt at himself on his subordinate, sat glumly in his office contemplating the boots and shirt. His thoughts we
re interspersed with heart-sinking memories of Lane’s face as he last saw it, outraged at the judge. Outraged at men in general. She was right. He should have more discipline. Especially where the situation was absolutely hopeless. He had categorically not wanted to fall in love, not after his own wartime experience with what he could only remember as humiliation. He would come home to civilian life and concentrate on work. The problem with finding a beautiful and brilliant woman is that she would be too intelligent to give herself over to the vagaries and pain of love.

  With an effort of will, he pulled his mind back to the forlorn battered boots. It would be difficult to determine if they were related to the little skeleton. He would have Ames take the boots around to the local cobbler and see if he could find out where they might have been made. He had, with great delicacy, measured what he could of the skeletal feet of the child in their lab, and determined that while the boots were likely a little big, there is nothing to say the child had not worn them. But there was nothing to say another child had not, either.

  He had promised that he would come out the next day to look around for the vagrant man. It would mean being with Lane. Would she have she gotten over her anger? It wasn’t the kind of anger you got over. He wasn’t even sure he’d be over his own shame by then. “That’s the bloody problem with being in bloody love,” he muttered under his breath. While he felt some relief in finally admitting that he was in love, hopelessly and deeply, he knew nothing good would come of it. It made a mess of everything. He longed for the early days of the previous summer when she had only been a beautiful suspect and he had had a hold on his emotions.

  “Sir?” Ames said, popping his head in the door, “Did you say something?”

  “Must you pop up like some blasted clown in a farce? I did not say anything. Quit being a useless blight on the universe and take these boots down to Noel Roberts’s repair shop and see if he can figure out where they came from,” Darling barked, his resolve to be nice shattered. “And see if you have any further news on Joseph Anscomb, Andrew Anscomb, or Isabel Anscomb. We’ll look like bloody fools if they turn out to be alive and well.”

  Ames saluted and took the boots. He was dying to ask his boss how lunch had gone, but judging by his mood, some breakdown in communication had once again occurred, and Darling was unlikely to welcome his curiosity. “Oh, by the way, I was going to make an appointment with an elderly lady called Chase. She is the only surviving sister, but she told me over the phone that she had no memory of the family at all. And Vancouver didn’t have much in the unsolved missing children portfolio for our era. A missing teenaged girl, but from the twenties, so no good to us,” Ames said. “And we haven’t received copies of the reports from Creston yet. And I’m afraid I’ve heard from most places, and there’s no news of either the Anscomb boys or the girl.”

  “Well, that’s just dandy,” Darling said gloomily.

  Ames was back within forty minutes with the boots in hand. Darling had used his absence to close up the file on Erin Landy. As happened so often with his cases, he wondered about what would happen later in the lives of the people he dealt with. What happened to girls like Erin Landy? He had a deeply ingrained belief that intelligent people found a way to overcome their difficulties, but now he wondered. Was it possible that the world was full of girls like her who had too much in the way of social and family expectations stacked against them?

  “He’s pretty sharp, that Roberts,” Ames said. “And had surprising information. He’s certain these boots were made in England, and while not a high-quality boot, it’s a reasonably good one.”

  Darling looked at them with interest. “Would that be unusual, I wonder, for a poor family at the time?”

  “Well, not if they’d gotten them from a poor box or a charity. Hand-me-downs given to a church for distribution to the poor.”

  “Makes sense. These Anscombs came out from Manitoba some time before 1910. It certainly appears they were poor as church mice. They might well have gotten things from charities. But, wait, we do have a link to England, I realize. Didn’t you say they had been assigned one of those Home Children? They were from England. What if this child was one of those? The boots could have come over with him. If the family had other children, they’d certainly have kept a good pair of boots if they could, even under those grisly circumstances. I think this, as meagre as it is, brings us closer to linking the death more certainly with the Anscomb family. It adds to my unease about who that vagrant is. If he arrived subsequent to our posting the story in the paper, it could even be one of the Anscombs. People do, we are told, revisit the scene of the crime. I’ve never seen it, but there’s always a first time. It’s too late now, but first thing tomorrow we drive up the lake to see about the vagrant. Now, if Miss Winslow could keep the hell away from him till then, I’d be very glad.”

  “You could telephone her, sir.”

  “Not bloody likely!”

  Ames sighed, held his tongue, and went off to write up his notes about the boots.

  “SIR, IT’S HERE.” Ames was waggling a brown envelope at Darling from the door of his boss’s office only an hour later.

  “Well, let’s have it then,” said Darling.

  Ames opened the envelope and pulled out some typewritten sheets. “It appears Anscomb, Henry, the father, was some sort of a patient at their new hospital, and he was being woken for his afternoon tea as usual by one of the staff, a young girl called Wendy Downing who had just started work there. She found him dead, and the determination was made that he’d died of a heart attack.”

  “That seems straightforward. What was odd?” Darling asked.

  Ames read on quickly. “Ah. It seems that the girl reported to the hospital authorities that something had happened earlier that day that made her suspicious. Apparently he never had visitors, but that day someone claiming to be the man’s son came. They had talked for a while, and then there was an argument loud enough to be heard by others. This Wendy Downing reported seeing the son storming out of the hospital slamming the door. She had been off to check on the patient, when she was called to change a bedpan elsewhere. After she found him dead and the report was written, she felt anxious enough to go back to the police to tell them all this. It seems they made a note of it but were satisfied with the report from the hospital.”

  “Track her down, Ames, if she still works there, see why she felt strongly enough to go to the police. I feel like something is missing.”

  Back in his office, Ames asked the exchange to put him through to the hospital in Creston. He was rewarded with learning that Wendy Downing did indeed still work there, though she was now Wendy Epping, having married, and was the head of nursing services.

  “Wendy Epping here,” said a voice.

  “Ah, Mrs. Epping. My name is Constable Ames, and I am calling from Nelson about a police report we have regarding the death of a Henry Anscomb back in 1930. Do you recall the incident?”

  Mrs. Epping had a soft, slightly quavering voice. “Oh my goodness, I don’t think I’m ever likely to forget, though I admit, it has not been uppermost in mind for some years.”

  “According to this report, you found him dead and ended up, about a month later, talking to the police because you were uncomfortable about something. Can you tell me what?”

  She sighed. “I was very uncomfortable, Constable Ames, but I ended up accepting what they told me: that he’d died of a heart attack. I was a young girl at the time, and they all seemed very certain. When I explained about the welt on the head, they said I probably got confused, and I daresay I did, though I must say, it is still clear in my mind even now.”

  “Welt?”

  “Yes, you see, when I went to wake him I saw a big angry red welt on his forehead, and I was going to ask him about it, only then he fell forward and his head banged the table, and I realized he was dead. I’m afraid I panicked and was screaming, and I didn’t think about it till later. When I did say something about it, they pointed out that he banged
his head on the table, which must have been what I saw. I think in all the fuss I must have decided I was wrong about it and must have seen it after he fell forward.”

  “And who was the visitor he had the argument with?” Ames asked, making notes.

  “That’s the other thing. He told me he was Mr. A’s son. I went afterward to double check the visitor register and it said ‘Bob Anscomb,’ so I assumed it was true. But that puzzled me right off the bat, because I couldn’t imagine someone’s son hitting him and leaving him like that. But of course the man had a weak heart. That’s why he was there in the first place. I imagine anything could have set him off, but I had it in mind he’d been hit. I remember that he lived in a rooming house and he said he had no family. That’s why I was extra nice to him. I felt sorry for him. I was happy when I learned his son had come to visit, but afterward I got the idea that maybe this guy was just passing himself off as a son. I remember telling the police that maybe a dangerous man was out there after having gotten away with killing old Mr. Anscomb. They said they’d follow up, but I don’t believe they ever did. At least they didn’t tell me if they did.”

  Ames tried to think of what else Darling might want to know and decided he’d got enough. “Thank you Mrs. Epping. Is it okay if we call again if there is something else?”

  “Yes, though I must say I’m surprised. Why is all this coming up now?”

  “Oh, we’re just following up in the course of another investigation.”

  “I see. Oh, Constable, before I hang up, I should tell you that old Mr. Anscomb sometimes gave the impression of not being all there. He’d talk to himself, sometimes as if he was having a conversation with some invisible person. Maybe from his past.”

  “That’s interesting. Do you remember any of what he said?”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t. I do remember thinking they were very ordinary things. Domestic conversations, ‘Put that over there,’ and things like that.”