Innocent Murderer

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  He finally said, “I was in an accident eight months ago in the U.S. that damaged my optic nerve and left me colour-blind.”

  “Surely the doctor …”

  “I lied about my profession. It was easy to do. No questions asked and I didn’t go blabbing it. They didn’t know me from Adam. What can I say? I love my job. I don’t know how I’d survive without it.”

  “But all your passengers …” I was feeling like a broken record, what with Elizabeth’s epilepsy and now colour-blindness.

  “Why do you think I stick to the Arctic and the Antarctic?”

  “Yes, but you’d still run into traffic.”

  “My second mate covers for me. It works well.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He owed me a big favour. I saved his daughter’s life.”

  “Did Terry know?”

  He didn’t say anything, but then he didn’t have to.

  It was written all over his face. And I remembered how Terry had told him to take care of his eyes, that day on the bridge. Her tone of voice had not been solicitous, more like malicious.

  “That gives you a motive for murder, doesn’t it?” I said.

  He scraped back his chair and cleared his throat. “I can see you haven’t got anywhere on this case if you’re looking at me as a murderer. I’m sure there are plenty of others with better motives than mine.”

  He stood up but I stayed seated. “Such as?”

  He brushed some lint off his pants. “Owen, for starters.”

  “He’s her brother, for god’s sake. Why would he want her dead?”

  “I heard they were fighting over their parents’ estate.

  They went down in a plane crash about three months ago. Money can turn blood to water, even with the best of us, and Terry was no princess.”

  “Owen told me he stood to gain nothing from her death.”

  Jason raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

  “They were fighting and still working together?”

  “Yeah. Weird, eh? They seemed to feed off each other.

  There was a need there that wasn’t altogether healthy.

  She didn’t treat her brother very well, which was surpris–ing considering without him her writing career would’ve been dead in the water.”

  I looked at him curiously. “That sounds somewhat extreme since he was really just a glorified gofer.”

  “Ah, but no, he wasn’t.”

  “What is he then?”

  “Her ghostwriter.”

  I took a deep breath and said nothing, hoping he’d fill in the silence, which he did. “The book she wrote about her trial and being in jail. It was all Owen. I over–heard them arguing about it one day. She was mad as hell because he was demanding money. I don’t know if he was blackmailing her or what, but they were always fighting about something. I don’t know why they put up with each other.”

  “What about all the courses she teaches, the novels she’s written. He doesn’t help there surely?”

  “No, I don’t think he does. I’m not sure how she’s managed it, but what she writes now is good and dif–ferent. I’ve read her work and while Owen may have ghostwritten the non-fiction book, he sure as hell didn’t ghostwrite the others.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not. She must have just reached that point we all long for that breaks us through to another level.”

  He was looking out the window again and this time I turned and looked too. There was a spider in the corner weaving its web, hoping to snare itself a meal on the fifth floor. How the hell had it climbed so far and why did it think my window was a good place?

  I turned back to Jason. “Why did you really come today? You didn’t have to agree to a meeting.”

  He stood there biting his upper lip, chewing it half to death before he let it go. “Because I thought you should know that I don’t think Terry was who she seemed.”

  I waited.

  “She was a schemer and there was a side to her that scared me.”

  “The sleepwalking side?”

  He nodded. “When she went off her medication she’d walk and sometimes she would get violent and throw things around the room.” He sighed again. “It was an animal violence that scared me. But you know what scared me more?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t think Michael is the only one she murdered.”

  A few days later I was taking a break from work and going through the stuff that Derek had sent. There was an amazing amount of press coverage and lots of pic–tures of the murdered Michael. Turns out he had had a wife, Beth Grady, but there was almost no mention of her and no photos. I wondered why. I made a mental note to get Derek to find out more about her.

  I picked up another clipping; a photo of a group of people outside the courtroom. My eye was drawn to a dark-haired, good-looking man, clean-shaven and hov–ering on the edge of the picture as if he was waiting for something. I looked more closely. He seemed familiar. I groped around for a pen on my chaotic desk and slowly scribbled in a beard and mustache. I leaned back in my chair, looking at the photo, and put my legs up on my desk. Couldn’t be, I thought. I read through the clippings and then found the spot in Terry’s book about the first man on the scene being a good friend of Michael’s. Only she had used the name Lex. I knew him as Peter. I let the photo drop and looked out the window at a little chicka–dee that had sought shelter on my window ledge.

  I was lost in thought when I heard a female voice outside my door. Before I could get my feet onto the ground, in walked Martha. “How’s it going?” she asked as if there was nothing wrong.

  “Okay.”

  “Cordi, you’re as transparent as cellophane.”

  “I just don’t like to lose you, that’s all.”

  But it wasn’t all. Having to go through finding some–body new was proving more difficult than I thought, and not just because many of the candidates weren’t good enough, but because the three of us couldn’t agree on any who were. Martha’s last day was fast approaching and I was beginning to panic.

  Martha moved some file folders off my only chair and changed the subject. “What’s the latest on Sally?”

  “I talked to Owen and Jason.” I brought her up-to-date and then showed her the picture that now sported a beard and mustache.

  “Peter,” she said. “He’s a wily rogue, that guy. Wouldn’t surprise me if he killed Terry. He found Michael’s body after all.”

  The newspaper clipping and Terry’s book had told about Peter being the first on the scene in glorious, gory detail, but I wasn’t sure what Martha thought that had to do with Terry and Sally.

  “And why would he kill Terry?” I asked.

  “Because she knew about the gyrfalcon eggs.”

  “What are you talking about, Martha?”

  “You said yourself he was up in the Arctic studying gyrfalcons. Their eggs are worth a fortune in Saudi Ara–bia. What better cover for a poacher than a real orni–thologist from Carleton University.”

  I remembered the paper Peter had been reading on the plane and wondered. Martha’s suggestion had made me think twice, and after she left I sat staring at the tele–phone for a long time before putting a call through to Peter. He wasn’t there, but he called me back an hour later and we arranged to meet at his office the next day.

  I think he said yes more out of curiosity than any inter–est in Sally, but I may have been wrong. But gyrfalcons?

  I wasn’t so sure about that. I was more sure about his confirmed connection to Terry’s innocent murder.

  I managed to put the next day to good use, writing up a whole slew of new lab experiments for my animal behaviour course and helping one of my undergrads with some rarefied statistical analysis of his data. Peter had suggested 3:00 as the only time he had free, which was lousy for me because it meant I would be smack in the middle of traffic on the way home.

  Carleton University is on the way to the airport. I was lucky
to find a parking spot on a little dead end street nearby. It took me ten minutes to wind my way through to the Tory Building. I somehow got turned around and came at it from behind. I didn’t actually see it until someone pointed it out to me, because the back side is obscured by a small pine forest. I walked up countless stairs and entered the metallic looking building at the third floor. There was a great mosaic of a fantastical scene that looked like a landscape of silhouetted E.T.s, or maybe iPods.

  I walked up to the fourth floor and opened the door to the hall. The absence of any scent at all told me there were no labs on this floor, only offices. All the doors were either bright orange or royal blue, and the floor was tiled in pale yellow punctuated randomly by different sized squares and rectangles of multiple colours. I walked down the hall to Peter’s office. Plastered on the door was an enormous poster of a magnificent cliff face with a lone bird circling above. I was looking more closely to see if it was a gyrfalcon when the door suddenly opened and I was face to face with Peter. Except it wasn’t Peter. It was the clean-shaven man in the clipping.

  I think my mouth was wide open because he looked at me quizzically. “Haven’t you seen a man shave his beard before?” he asked, clearly enjoying my discomfiture.

  For lack of any other lifeline I offered my hand and he took it. “You look completely different,” I said.

  “I hope that’s a compliment,” he replied.

  I nodded like an idiot. He led me into his office and waved me to the only other chair in the room. It was a small office, though not as small as mine if you didn’t count my equally tiny outer office. I noticed his window looked out over a gravel-laden roof that hid the bottom three quarters of the pine forest from view.

  I sat down and waited for him to sit behind a beau–tiful cherry desk. I was dying to look underneath to see how it was made, but restrained myself admirably.

  “People can be fooled so easily by the addition or absence of a beard,” I said. He smiled and I went for the jugular. “Isn’t that what you did on the ship?”

  He stared at me, the smile gone and replaced by — what? A look of determination? Of anger? “What do you mean?”

  “You were part of Terry’s trial, weren’t you? In fact, you were the first on the scene.”

  He looked at me, unblinking, his face expressionless.

  I sat and waited.

  “So?”

  “Terry’s book says Michael was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?”

  Peter said nothing.

  “You wanted revenge on Terry, but you didn’t know how to make it happen. So you grew your beard and you waited, for years you waited, and when you learned that Terry was going on an Arctic cruise you figured you’d struck gold. You could throw her overboard and no one would know.”

  I waited for him to say something but he didn’t, so I continued. “But you couldn’t wait, so you confronted her while she was in the bathtub. You had words and your anger got the best of you. You drowned her and then you had to get rid of her. You carried her out of the suite intending to throw her overboard, but you heard someone coming. You had to act. Carrying a dead naked woman would raise questions. You dumped her in the pool.”

  “Where’s that leave Sally and the suicide note?” he asked.

  It was awfully quiet in his office, not even the hum of air conditioning.

  “You framed Sally.”

  “For what?”

  “For Terry’s murder. You realized what you had done wrong — that the bathtub water was fresh and the pool was salt. That the police would know. You came back and saw Sally trying to rescue Terry, but she failed. You found a note that Sally had written and you placed it where everyone would see it.”

  “What note could I possibly have found?”

  I had been hoping he wouldn’t ask this question as it was the only weak point in my scenario. There had to be something I was missing because it all worked, except for the note. I had no idea how he could have got a note written in Sally’s handwriting. I was saved from having to answer by his phone, which started ringing. He was on for so long, talking about an order for some sort of software, that I started to get up but he waved a hand at me and I sat back.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I must say, you have a wild imagi–nation, Cordi.” He picked up a file folder and flipped through it without seeing it. “I didn’t kill Terry and there are fifteen crew members who will vouch for that. I was on the bridge that night. Why don’t you believe the cops? Sally killed Terry and then herself because she was so dis–traught about Arthur.”

  I wasn’t getting anywhere with this line of thought, and I was a little surprised at myself for having con–fronted him like that without any evidence. But I was on a roll. I thought about Martha and her theory about poaching gyrfalcon eggs.

  “Maybe it had nothing to do with Terry and her trial,” I said. “Maybe it had everything to do with gyr–falcon eggs and Terry finding out.”

  Peter’s eyes widened and then he began to laugh.

  Wrong tactic. Nobody could fake a belly laugh like that, especially when it infected his eyes.

  “You do realize, Cordi, that these questions you are asking me are tantamount to harassment?”

  I didn’t answer, hoping he’d forget what he’d just said.

  “I did not murder Terry because she was blackmail–ing me over the poaching of gyrfalcon eggs. I am not, never have, and never will poach gyrfalcon eggs. Got it?”

  I got it. But I still had stuff to ask him and as he began to get out of his chair to escort me out of his life I asked, “Can you tell me anything about Terry’s trial?

  Anything not in the papers?”

  He didn’t say anything, but sat back down again with a thump.

  “Was she guilty?”

  The slamming down of the fist on the desk came so fast that I was totally unprepared and airlifted off my seat like a hovercraft. “As far as I’m concerned, and there are lots of people like me, she was guilty as hell.”

  “Why do you think that?” He looked like a man who had said more than he wanted to.

  “No. Sorry. I can’t answer any more questions,” he said rather too quickly. He pushed back his chair. “If you still think Terry was murdered I’d advise you to stop thinking it was me and look somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “There were about eighty tourists on board that ship and a slew of crew,” said Peter as he rose from his chair. “Try some of them.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The next two days I had to buckle down and do some work at the university. I was teaching a comparative anatomy lab where the students dissected three differ–ent animal species to learn the differences and similari–ties of their anatomy. It was smelly work because of the formaldehyde, and if you didn’t use gloves your hands wrinkled up, but it was satisfying too because it was all so elegant — the way we’re all put together, the similar skeletal comparisons, the muscles we have in common with other vertebrates. Of course, we weren’t dissecting human cadavers, but the comparisons were there.

  Before I knew it, Patrick was coming home. We hadn’t talked about his job in any of our phone conver–sations, but I wasn’t going to let that spoil our reunion. I hovered around the arrivals gate like a bird caught in a thermal. Then there he was. I flew into his arms even before he could put his luggage down. It was so good to be hugged, even with his hands full of other stuff, and even with the job hanging over our heads.

  Patrick was ravenous so we drove down to the Rov–er’s Return Pub on Richmond and ordered up a mess of food. While we were waiting for it to arrive he told me everything about his trip — except his job. I decided not to point that detail out to him. Instead I told him all about my suspicions concerning Terry’s and Sally’s deaths and what had happened to me since we last talked. When I was done he looked at me, the worry lines dig–ging into his face.

  “So why aren’t you being chased anymore?”

  “I think that whoever it is has the luxury
of biding their time for some reason. So it can’t be time sensitive. That explains the perfect failure rate. They’re waiting for an opportunity to present itself that will make it look like an accident. But I can’t figure out what’s driving them.”

  “So what you’re saying is that you don’t think they’ve given up?”

  I looked at Patrick and grimaced. “Yeah, I guess.”

  We sat in silence for a long time before Patrick finally said, “You know, I got a phone call from Duncan the other day.”

  That wasn’t what I was expecting. “In London?” I asked, surprised.

  He nodded. “He and Martha are really worried about you. So am I.”

  “Is this all about my near misses, because if it is …”

  “No, it’s not. At least, not directly. I think we all believe something happened to you here and on the ship.” I could hear the “but” lurking in his voice.

  “You had a bad winter last year, Cordi. Martha says there were a bunch of days when she had to cover for you. She almost ran out of excuses.”

  “I was sick.” I paused. “The university has a good sick leave policy. I just took advantage of it. There just weren’t quite enough days to cover me completely,” I fin–ished in a voice that signalled the end of the conversation.

  But Patrick barrelled on anyway. “I just thought it was the flu or a cold and you told me to stay away so I wouldn’t catch it — you were very persuasive. I came anyway, but you were somewhere I couldn’t go. You don’t want to go through another winter like that.”

  I had to laugh. Not because the things he was saying weren’t true, because they were. It was because I felt on top of the world and light years from feeling depressed. But if I was really truthful with myself it was because I was afraid to go and get help. Go figure. I wimped out and changed the subject. I’m very good at that. “Arthur is an actor too.”

  By the look on Patrick’s face he wasn’t too keen on changing the subject, but I told him what Arthur had said.

  “Sally sounds like a woman who took her job too seriously,” was all he said, and then added, “How long had the writing group been meeting?”