Death in a Darkening Mist

by Iona Whishaw

  PRAISE FOR A Killer in King’s Cove

  “A good historical mystery with a cast of characters that will provide plot lines for the series to come. Iona Whishaw is a writer to watch.” —Margaret Cannon, Globe and Mail

  “Exquisitely written, psychologically deft . . . If you miss Mary Stewart’s sleuthing heroines, if you loved Broadchurch and its village of suspects, settle in, turn off the phone, and enjoy.” —Linda Svendsen, author of Sussex Drive and Marine Life

  “A debut mystery from an author destined for awards. A setting that is ripe for storytelling and a convincing gift for portraying the painful and challenging life for the survivors of the two world wars . . . Whishaw is an exciting addition to Canada’s fine roster of mystery writers.” —Don Graves, Canadian Mystery Reviews blog

  “The writing . . . conjures up nicely the ambiance of a 1940s west Canadian locale and develops in depth both the characters and their interactions.” —San Francisco Book Review

  “A Killer in King’s Cove is worth a look, especially as the author intends to reprise her lead character.” —Seattle Book Review

  “Iona Whishaw brings to life a rural country town from the 1940s—from the small post office that is gossip central to garden tea parties. She’s given Lane a potential love interest, the well-named Inspector Darling, and created an engaging, quirky cast of characters . . . the trip to King’s Cove is so entertaining . . . Despite Lane’s promise to Inspector Darling to not cause any more mayhem in town, we sort of hope she does!” —ReviewingTheEvidence.com

  For my son, Biski

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  An Old Cold Grave

  Chapter One

  CHAPTER ONE

  December, 1946

  THERE WAS A FAINT DUSTING of snow on the treacherous road, but more threatening were the dark clouds banking along the mountains. The road to Adderly wound sharply, so narrow in places only one car could go through, and for one long stretch was carved out of a seemingly sheer cliff that dropped hundreds of feet to the lake below. Angela drove it clutching the steering wheel and leaning forward as if this action would keep the station wagon anchored on the dirt road and heading in the right direction. Lane Winslow, who’d agreed to this trip on the grounds that it was to be a lovely day out at the local hot springs, wished she’d offered to drive—indeed was wishing she’d stayed safe at home. But that was because they’d reached the most terrifying section, and at the moment she was on the side that dropped over the cliff. Even Angela’s three rambunctious boys, Philip, Rolfie, and Rafe, were sitting quietly in the back, as if they knew their stillness was critical to everyone arriving alive at the swimming pool. Though it was barely eleven in the morning, the lake below was dark and brooding. Lane dared herself to look towards the edge of the cliff, just under her, and hoped that this was not the day she would die. She wasn’t to know that it would be someone else’s day to die.

  She forced herself to admire the shades of deep blues and greys in the roil of dark clouds, the water, the mountains, so that she would not think about whether they might encounter someone coming the other way and be forced into a dangerous standoff on this narrow road. The faint overnight snowfall had barely covered the ground, and clearly a vehicle had already been along here earlier. She shuddered to think about this road covered in a deep, slippery layer of snow.

  It was at this moment that Angela chose to glance at Lane and say, “Has that nice Charles Andrews from the bank come out to see you again?”

  Wanting to cry “Keep your eyes on the road!” Lane said through tight lips, “Yes. No. I mean, he’s been out twice. Oh God!” They rounded one last long curve and then she let out a long slow breath of relief when the precipice was exchanged for ordinary deep pine forest on either side. “Crikey! How do you drive that without losing your nerve?”

  “Don’t try to change the subject. Is he as nice as he looks? All that wavy blond hair must mean something.”

  “He’s perfectly pleasant, but you are making something out of nothing. His aunt lives nearby and he stops out to say hello. I feel a bit sorry for him. He got some sort of shrapnel in his leg, and he limps. He was in the 4th Infantry and got wounded just near the end. He used to be an athlete. It’s hard to live with the loss of your powers.”

  “That’s how it starts! You feel sorry for a guy, and then one thing leads to another.” Angela was actually winking. Even on this perfectly straight bit of road, Lane wished Angela would keep both eyes open.

  “Nothing is leading to anything, I assure you. He is not my type.” Lane was pretty sure this was true, though she could not precisely say why. He had come only a few days ago, before the snow, on a crisp, sunny day. She’d been raking leaves with a bedraggled bamboo rake she’d found in her barn when she’d seen his deep blue Studebaker pull up and stop outside her metal gate. He was wearing a long camel coat, and he removed his grey hat to wave at her. He reminded her of a well-cared-for cat. Things must be going well at the bank, she’d thought. It was not entirely kindly meant, she realized immediately, and was sorry. “Mr. Andrews, how nice of you to take the trouble!” she’d called.

  On his first visit a few weeks before, he’d just stopped by to say hello, and looked admiringly around her beloved house, but this time she had invited him in and made them both some cheese sandwiches. It had given her a chance to experience how truly charming he was. He had expressed a flattering interest in her, and had been large and comfortable in her kitchen in a way that made her think of his physical presence after he had gone.

  “Well, I think he is gorgeous,” Angela said.

  “That’s only because he’s always giving you money.”

  At last a small cabin appeared to their left, then a wooden house, and finally a tiny main street that, were it not for a few parked cars, could have been the main road of a ghost town. Not a single person was in evidence.

  Their object was the hot springs in the little mining town. The boys, the dangerous road behind them, began to jostle and pummel each other as they approached the town.

  “Can we go in the store?” they asked. They were passing a wooden building called Fletcher’s Store, but Angela drove on and turned up a steep incline where she pulled the car to a stop in a clearing.

&nbs
p; “After our swim,” she said.

  Lane got out and breathed away the tension of the drive, amazed at how relieved she was to be standing on solid ground, reminded, not for the first time, how being in a war, being dropped out of aeroplanes, does not take away the ordinary day-to-day fears that life serves up. Just below the parking clearing, through a bank of bare birch trees, she could see the quiet street laid out before her.

  “It’s like those pictures in magazines. It’s the Platonic perfection of a Canadian mining town. That store looks to be from the last century,” Lane said.

  The boys had run ahead, their towels trailing from the bundles under their arms, and were pounding up a long, trestled wooden stairway that took visitors from the parking area to the outdoor pool. They’d reached the first landing and were shouting at Lane and Angela to come on.

  “I’ll take us into the store after,” said Angela. “It’s very quaint. That and one other building, the hotel, were practically the only buildings to survive a big fire in the nineties. The boys like to buy chocolate bars there. You wait. We’ll be completely enervated after this and will need chocolate.”

  Doubting that Angela’s troop would ever be enervated by anything, Lane followed Angela up the stairs. At the top landing Lane saw, through a thick miasma of steam, the swimming pool and a long wooden building at one end. Change rooms, she supposed. Just dimly visible through the steam over the pool were one or two dark shapes decorously doing a breast stroke. Angela knocked on the wooden frame of a window labelled Tickets. After a brief struggle and an uttered obscenity, a short, cheerful artificial blonde finally managed to shoot the window open.

  “I should get Frank to oil the damn thing. Hello, dearie! I haven’t seen you and yours here for a good while! Who’s this?”

  “Hello, Betty,” said Angela. “This is Lane. She moved to the Cove in the summer. Lane, Betty—the doyenne of the Adderly Hot Springs.”

  “How do you do?”

  “Ooh—you’re English. You must fit right in with them others up at King’s Cove.”

  Lane, who, because of her international upbringing, wasn’t sure she really fit in anywhere, smiled at the middle-aged woman. Betty, squeezed into the brown wool jacket she wore against the cold, returned to the task at hand. “That’ll be ten cents all round, dears.”

  The change rooms were a series of little cubicles smelling of damp wood and lit only by two bare light bulbs in the passageway. The floor was slatted wood to aid drainage. She wished she had brought plimsolls to wear out to the pool area because the wood had a damp, unwholesome feel on her bare feet. As she hung up her clothing, Lane could already hear the boys splashing into the water and shouting. She wondered how the decorous swimmers were taking the addition of noisy children to their quiet, misty winter morning.

  She slid gratefully out of the freezing air into the white, murky depths of the warm pool. The air had a pleasantly sulphurous quality that made the experience seem vaguely medicinal. The miasma of steam was so thick that though she could hear the children, she could not see them across the pool.

  “This is heaven!” she exclaimed.

  “I told you,” Angela said.

  “And this is just directly out of the ground?”

  “I think so. You can’t see them, but the caves I told you about are over there. The water is much hotter in the caves. When we get too used to this we can go sit in there and parboil like a couple of eggs. Perhaps they add some cool water to bring the temperature down in the pool. We’ve been here when the snow is a foot deep, and we get all heated up and then roll in the snow.”

  “It’s a good thing your lads are such strong swimmers. I can’t see my hand two inches under the water. If anyone drowned here, you’d never find them!”

  It wasn’t, Lane decided, a pool for doing exercise laps. The steam prevented one from seeing far ahead, and in any case the temperature suggested a regime of just floating about. So she did, on her back, looking upward through the mist at the grey textures of the sky.

  “Come on. Let’s go to the caves.” She heard Angela from somewhere behind her.

  They climbed out of the pool up a calcium-encrusted ladder at the deep end and stepped over a thigh-high ledge into the mouth of a cave. The experience was like getting into a slightly too-hot bath. There was a ledge to sit on just at the entrance, and the two of them sank onto it, looking out at the winter morning behind them.

  “How far back does it go?” Lane asked. It was pitch-black only a few feet from the entrance. Water dripped from the ceiling. Somewhere she could hear a cascade splashing onto the surface of the water.

  “It goes all the way around and connects to the other cave opening. Maybe twenty feet to the back wall. You have to mind how you go, because it narrows towards the back and you can bump your head on the pokey bits. You can’t quite stand up, and it’s shallow, so you sort of float along on your belly. I’ve only done it once. You have to feel your way along. I’m always afraid of grabbing someone’s knee in the dark.” Angela stood up. “I’d better go check on the boys. It unnerves me when I can’t hear them. You stay here and bask. I’ll be right back.”

  Lane watched Angela disappear into the mist, calling out the names of her brood, and then she tentatively moved away from the mouth of the cave and came to rest in the dark at what she assumed was halfway along. The mouth of the cave shimmered, throwing light only a few feet in. The droplets from the roof of the cave fell with tiny echoes in the silence. Alone with her musings, her mind turned backwards, as if the darkness was pulling her into her childhood. Newfangled psychological claptrap, she scolded herself lazily. But there she was, in the Latvian winter, visiting a hot spring. Where? She closed her eyes to try to picture where she had been. She must have been very young. Who had taken her? Not her father. He was always away on “diplomatic” business. Madame Olga?

  “Da. Zdyes.”

  Lane’s eyes flew open and she peered into the darkness. Had she just imagined someone saying, “Yes. Here” in Russian? There was only silence. Her memory was a bit too vivid, she thought. Someone could come here for some good, old-fashioned Freudian regression. She began to move back towards the entrance, unwilling to regress just at the moment, when she heard it again, in Russian: “Ya zdyes”—I’m here.

  Lane moved back to the entrance of the cave and sat on the ledge to see if the speaker would appear. The voice had sounded closer the second time. Outside by the pool, she could hear the children as well as Angela exhorting them not to bother people and to stay at the shallow end. Through the mist they sounded far away, as if shouting from a dream.

  “Aha, Piotr, there you are. I’m going out now. I will see you at the café,” said the same voice in Russian, and simultaneously a bearded man with short, pale yellow hair rose directly in front of her, making for the entrance. From somewhere behind him she heard another voice.

  “Fine. Ten more minutes and I’ll be there.”

  The bearded man, as he emerged into the light, looked to be in his late forties, with a worried cast to his eyes. Or was it just the effect of adjusting to the light? He was muscular, and, perhaps because of the temperature of the water, a scar across the top of his arm stood out, a great red welt.

  “Excuse, madame,” he said in heavily accented English, climbing past her, out of the cave.

  For a moment Lane considered talking to him in his own language. It had unleashed such nostalgia in her to hear him speak the Russian that had surrounded her in childhood. But she held back. He could prove to be someone she didn’t want to know, or she might hold him up if he was in a hurry. Besides, if he were an English speaker, she probably would not have talked to him. Thus she sat, watching him splash along the edge of the pool, stopping halfway back to the dressing area to lift a handful of the sparse snow from the raised bank that formed that edge of the pool, vigorously rubbing his limbs with it.

  When he had disappeared into the mist between her and the dressing room, she sank back into the hot water until h
er chin rested on the surface. With her eyes closed, she gave in to the nostalgia of her childhood, of the Latvian winters and the saunas. That time suddenly felt more intensely real to her than the Charles Edwardses, or all the things that had crashed about her life since she had come to King’s Cove the previous June.

  She remembered the vast stretch of white country where she used to cross-country ski with her friends. Winter was her favourite time. The cleanliness and distance, the silence, and the aura of possibility that only the young could feel. Would she ever feel that again? She was barely twenty-six, but she felt ancient against the memories, as if the war had wrung her out and left only this shell that required her to sit, like an old woman, in a hot spring to ease the aches. Lane had worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service from the age of nineteen till the end of the war. There was plenty to be weary about, which was why she’d moved out to British Columbia. Here in the middle of nowhere she was free to be herself, she thought, with no tiresome blond bank clerks to bother with.

  Her melancholic reverie was interrupted by Angela, suddenly blocking the light as she climbed into the tunnel with a shudder. “Oof. I still have three boys, and they aren’t quite tired enough yet. If I sit in here and don’t interfere, another fifteen minutes should do it. They have the pool to themselves. They seem to have frightened the other swimmers away.”

  Lane was going to ask Angela about why there should be people speaking Russian here, but then worried that the second man, Piotr, might still be nearby, somewhere in the darkness of the cave, so instead she settled back in and sat with her friend in companionable silence. The boys were still audible in the pool, accompanied by the occasional splash, as one of them cannonballed into the water, to the cries of indignation by his brothers. When the sounds of the boys began to die down, Angela said, “Good. Now we can go. It’s going to take me ages to cool down!” They climbed over the ledge, and Lane looked back at the other entrance to the cavern, thinking that next time she would go and sit at that end. She wondered what had happened to the second man. Perhaps he’d walked by towards the change rooms when she was in her reverie.