Death in a Darkening Mist

by Iona Whishaw

  “‘This boy, a Pioneer, died in the service of the proletariat. He is an example to young people across this great country. Imagine the greatness that is our future, when our young people, inspired by his, ah, sacrifice, driven by his pure belief in socialism, take their places as leaders. Then we will see the new dawn.” She paused. “Yet there are those in power who see the message of this boy’s life as one of obedience and control. He lost his life because he was not obedient, because his belief in the Revolution was greater than his fear of authorities. That is a true hero.’”

  “Really? People were meant to read this stuff? My eyes would bleed if I had to choke back that sort of thing in the papers with my morning coffee! Give me the Nelson Star any day!” Ames exclaimed.

  “I suppose it’s like most government propaganda. Everyone buys a paper, but no one actually reads it,” suggested Darling.

  “But someone does,” said Lane. “We did, for example, during the war, but more importantly, the Soviet government itself must have, to make sure their writers stuck to the message. These are state-controlled newspapers. Pravda, Isvestia, and many more just like them. Maybe they weren’t so keen on being hectored by Mr. Zaharov.”

  “He does seem to be practically recommending disobedience,” said Darling. “Uncle Joe wouldn’t have liked that, I’m sure.”

  “No indeed, and he’s covered most of the country with gulags to tuck away all the awkward dissenters. This Zaharov must have found out somehow that he was going to be targeted and he got out in a hurry.”

  “Who’s Uncle Joe?” asked Ames.

  “You should read the paper more often, Ames, not just spill coffee on it. Joseph Stalin, our erstwhile ally,” Darling said.

  “Would ‘Uncle Joe’ send someone all the way out here, the actual middle of nowhere, to finish off a lowly journalist?” asked Ames. “I mean, if he leaves the country and stops criticizing you in the papers, why not just leave it? Why risk an international incident by sending assassins to Canada?”

  “That is what I’m afraid of,” mused Darling. “If we are dealing with someone sent over to finish off Zaharov, it is, in the first place, doubtful we’ll ever find him. He will be skilled in getting in and out and is most likely long gone by now. In the second place, we will have to notify the government. No doubt they’ll come tramping around claiming we’ve made a mess of things, and should have called them before. I suppose we’ll have to contact them anyway, as we can’t deal directly with the Soviets about next of kin and so on, especially if he’s been killed by a government agent of some sort. I’m going to have to sleep on this. I think this is a classic damned if we do, damned if we don’t business.”

  “Good idea, sir. He’s not going to get any deader.”

  “How your powers of observation astound me, Ames. Miss Winslow, it looks like more snow. Are you sure you are all right driving back?”

  “I’ll be very careful, I promise,” said Lane, who felt a profound exhaustion stealing over her and wanted nothing more than to be by her own fire, thinking her own thoughts about the day, the letter about her father, about him.

  “Oh,” she said to Darling, who stood holding her car door open, his dark coat buttoned up to the neck against the cold. “In case you falter on this murder, there is a local outbreak of crime on your doorstep. Someone has been embezzling money at the bank. Two old ladies, at least, have lost significant sums from their savings accounts. I imagine Featherstone will be contacting you soon. I didn’t bring it up to him today as it is really not my affair, and he’s very off-putting. Doesn’t believe in women handling their own accounts. But the vicar told me. Likely an inside job, I believe you police call it.”

  “You don’t say. We haven’t heard from him yet. It sounds a perfect case for Ames. I think he’s friends with someone at the bank.”

  “WELL, SIR,” BEGAN Ames with a note of “how about that, then?”

  Darling raised his palm. “Uh uh. Nothing from you just now, Ames. Go be useful and put things in files, there’s a good constable. Oh, and expect a call from the bank. There’s been some embezzling going on, according to Miss Winslow. She seems willing to leave this bit of policing to us.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ANDREWS HAD SPENT THE DAY with the accounts. He really felt he was getting better. Perhaps buoyed by the knowledge that he would soon be out of it, he had suddenly pierced whatever barrier it was that kept him from understanding how the system worked. Filmer came up behind him.

  “The old man wants you,” he said. “Sooner you than me. He’s madder than ever these days.”

  “I was just enjoying myself. More fool me.”

  “Come!” said Featherstone at Andrew’s knock.

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t ‘sir’ me. We’ve had money go missing out of savings accounts. I’ve talked to the others. You’re what’s left. I’m going to assume, for now, that it is your colossal incompetence.”

  Andrews could make nothing of this. Not one other person had talked to him about this. Surely if Featherstone had been grilling people it would have gotten around the bank. He tried to think if anyone had been treating him differently. They would if they suspected someone inside their ranks.

  “Sir, I’m sure I don’t know . . .”

  “I’m sure you don’t. I am personally investigating all of the savings accounts that you have had anything to do with. If I find evidence that you’ve been embezzling funds, I shall be contacting the police. As it is, you’ll likely lose your job. Get out of here.”

  Andrews sat at his desk, his anxiety mounting as the impact of what Featherstone was saying took hold. He knew he wasn’t embezzling. Had there been a mistake or did that mean someone else was? Harold and Filmer seemed unlikely candidates. They both had families. Banking was their career. None of the girls worked that closely with the accounts. Now he was suspected. He shouldn’t even be here anymore. He didn’t know what to do about this added complication. Why had he not quit while he was ahead? It was the bloody business with that Winslow woman. He should have left it. He had thought he could do something there, improve his situation.

  He could hear the people around him sliding out their chairs, putting on coats. He glanced at the clock. Quarter to already. He nodded to Harold and Filmer, but he sat on. If Featherstone decided it was him, the police would get nosy. They’d find his gambling debts. It would make him look bad, more likely to steal money. He couldn’t afford that kind of exposure. He could leave; walk out of here tonight and not come back. But he couldn’t. He needed to be here. This was the number they had. He hadn’t received the word yet.

  What were the files he’d touched? He began a list. It was too long. What was a file he’d not worked on? Winslow’s. That money her father had left her. That had gone into a savings account organized by the manager. Featherstone’s door was still closed. Andrews still hadn’t put his file key in the safe. He fished it out from under his desk and made for the file cabinets at the back of the bank. If Featherstone popped out of that damn office, he could just say he was replacing a file and returning the key. Watson, Walter, Weston . . . Winslow. He pulled the file and limped back to his desk. His leg was playing up. He slid into his desk, adjusting his leg so that it was straight, and opened the file.

  Even he could see that there had been withdrawals three different times, quite close together, starting the day after she’d made the deposit. With a sudden inspiration he pulled out the file with the wire transfers he’d been asked to make by the manager. Typically he would hand one of the clerks the telegram form, and they would take it down to the telegraph office by the train station to put through. There were three amounts taken out of the account. He looked for these, leafing through the forms carefully. There they were; three of them with the exact same amounts as had been withdrawn from Lane Winslow’s account. The key thing is, she had not been in the bank. He knew that, because he always noticed when she was there, made sure he was the one she talked to. The last time she’d
been in was when she had deposited the money.

  He held the three papers in his hand, completely unable to understand what he should do next. He had been asked to send these three to someone called “Smith” in Vancouver. But only Featherstone handled the Winslow account. He heard Featherstone’s door open and the sudden realization of what must have happened fell into place. Fury obliterated the pain in his leg. Indeed, it obliterated thinking through a plan. He found himself in front of Featherstone, who was locking his office door.

  “You did this!” he shouted, holding the three telegraph forms in his hand. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but this money is not yours!” Hearing a noise, he caught sight of Vi, standing behind a file, looking at them, shock registering on her face. She turned and hurried away. He leaned in and whispered angrily, bending down so his face was close to that of the rigid Featherstone.

  “You did this, and you were trying to pin it on me. No doubt ‘Smith’ is some private account of your own. I don’t know what you’re up to, but this had better stop. I know now, don’t I? Play your cards right and I won’t go to the police about this. Do you understand?” He held the papers up close to the manager’s face, crumpling them. “You won’t be pushing me around any more.”

  Featherstone did not move. He could hear Andrews slamming his desk, locking it. Only when he heard him leave did he stir. He greeted the night watchman and then went out into the snow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  DARLING, AT HIS HOUSE ON the top of the steep hill that overlooked the town, sat in his armchair with his feet on an ottoman and a Scotch in his hand. He was looking at the twinkling of the town’s lights below him. In another week or so people would start to put up Christmas lights. Before the war he would have been smoking his pipe, as well, but Gloria had said it was a dirty habit. He missed the smell of pipe tobacco, but on the whole he was inclined to agree with her. Certainly his housekeeper, now energetically working the carpet sweeper behind him, would agree. He desperately wanted to be alone with his thoughts, now of all days, with possible Russian assassins to deal with, and . . .

  “I’ve made you a pork chop, Inspector,” called that lady from the kitchen, over the sound of the carpet sweeper being slammed into the broom cupboard. “It’s in the oven. Don’t leave it too long, or it will be dry.”

  It will be dry anyway, he thought sadly. He’d hired Mrs. Andrews to keep him tidy and cook his evening meals when he first returned from Europe, and he couldn’t recall a single meal that had been palatable. Poor old Mr. Andrews must have simply given up the battle, he thought. Still, he was happy to give her the work. Her husband had left her very little, and her son had come home injured. She had been very pleased when her son had gotten home. His shrapnel injury had given her a renewed purpose, and it wasn’t long before he was able to land a job at the bank. He wouldn’t be making a lot of money, but enough, along with her meagre pension, to keep them going. Perhaps after army rations, her food was a luxury to him.

  He jumped out of his chair to help her on with her coat.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Andrews, I’m looking forward to it. This is a nice new coat.”

  “My boy got it for me. He never forgets my birthday. I told him it was too much, but he said he was doing well at the bank. He was so low, you know, when he first got home, with that injury. He used to be very popular, especially with the girls, but he seemed to think no one would want a man with a limp.”

  “The adjustment of coming home is quite difficult, even without an injury. I’m sure in time . . .”

  “He’s a lot more cheerful just now, I can tell you.” Mrs. Andrews adjusted her hat, then sat on the bench by the door to put on her rubber overshoes. “He seems to be interested in someone, but I told him it was ridiculous. She lives way up the lake. There are plenty of nice girls in town. Mrs. Allen’s girl was sweet on him before, and she’s as pretty as a picture. In fact, I thought they’d taken back up again. I’m sure they were stepping out earlier in the year, but something must have happened. Now he has to go for some foreign girl who lives thirty miles away. Been up there at least five times to see her.”

  Both overshoes were now buckled up and she sat, winded by the whole effort, her handbag over her arm.

  “It’s that new Studebaker of his. He says it’s not enough just to run it around town. It needs to get ‘out on the road’ is how he puts it. I love my son, don’t get me wrong, but I think he’s showing off a little for that English girl. I’ve told him, ‘Bring her home to meet me,’ but he doesn’t. Now I ask you, doesn’t that sound off to you? I don’t know what they’re up to, but I’m beginning to think that a girl you can’t bring home to your mother is not all that respectable. Well, goodnight, Inspector. Don’t forget I’m not in tomorrow night. You’ll have to make do, I’m afraid.”

  Normally this would have been good news, but now Darling stood at his window looking at the darkness above the lights of the town thinking grim thoughts about bank clerks who could not possibly understand the value of what they were seeking. Snow had started falling again in earnest. He looked at his watch. Miss Winslow should have gotten home by now and would not have to drive in it. He quite surprised himself by his determination not to lose this time, though out loud he muttered, “Five times? She never said anything.”

  LANE STOOD NOW at her own sitting room window, watching enormous white flakes of snow falling out of the darkness of the early night. The silence was absolute. It was a winter’s night somewhere else in the great landscape of her memory. She longed for it to be morning, and to be out in it, playing back at her grandmother’s house, but she was sitting at attention in front of her dinner with her father and sister.

  “What’s the matter, miss, cat got your tongue?”

  What had she been asked to account for?

  “I wouldn’t bother with her, Papa. She never has anything interesting to say.” Her sister, Diana, opposite her, a waving strand of dark hair swept up on one side with an emerald green ribbon, watched her with something between contempt and triumph. Lane had never been able to understand then the secret of Diana’s fearless relationship with their father, and could not now. Perhaps it was being pretty and vivacious. As a child Lane had lived a vast internal life of imagination fuelled by books and her love of being outside. She saw now how she must have appeared to her father: timid, withdrawn, silent. Nothing, as her sister rightly said, interesting to say.

  With a sudden stab of pain she thought of Diana now, learning of their father’s death. Her sister had been close to their father. She would be devastated. If she allowed for Diana’s pain, she must allow for her own. She must allow for how she had loved him, how she had sat with him at the age of five, when he wept for their mother, when he was more her father because her sister was still in the crib. Of course, she realized, her sister would not remember the death of their mother, the darkness that descended on the house, the hurried removal to their grandmother.

  How she had taken to the snow then! The long winters and the endless landscape of snow, white, pure, filled with magical possibilities all the way to the horizon.

  A log fell with a clunk against the inside of the Franklin and roused her. She looked at her watch. Going eight. She should eat; her fallback, omelette and toast. But instead she took up a sheet of paper and wrote:

  Heaven opens in the cast light of snow

  White line, black sky, horizon’s knife

  I’ll stay just here watching the shadow

  Play along the angles of my life

  She’d given up poetry in favour of stories in the months since the summer, when she had felt closer to losing what mattered to her more than she had at any time during the turbulence of the war. This new life, this new chance, in this green and quiet place. Absurd, that, she knew. It was just that peacetime amplified danger, but she had felt a new urgency to write whatever she could, and the stories came easier.

  She would leave the poem now. It would percolate in its folder with the o
thers, but it made her wonder if that was her problem. She was a passive watcher of her own life. Things happened to her. Her mother and father happened, the war happened, Angus happened. Was Darling happening now? With him she acted as she had with all other things in her life, it suddenly seemed, only in reaction. All those moments of being defensive at something he said. No forward motion. That was her sister’s secret, she saw it now. She did not wait for things to happen, she took control. She seized her relationship with their father, and he responded. She did not wait for someone else to make a move. She would write to Diana in the morning, she decided, going over what she might say as she made her supper.

  Enough analysis, she thought as she sat down to eat. She pulled her armchair close enough to the fire to put her feet up on the edge of the grate and tucked into her omelette. She had the murder to think about, even if she wasn’t really part of the investigation. It would distract her from all nonsense. But the consolation of that was wiped out in the next instant. If they had some sort of Soviet assassin on the loose, she could well see that others, including, ultimately, her old bosses, might become involved. They had already made one attempt to bring her back, to play on her national feeling, making out she was indispensable. She had resisted and they’d let her be. She did not want anything to wake that beast again.

  She tried to picture the assassin travelling to Canada—how? It was not out of the question that he could sneak by sea to some part of Alaska, and down through the wilderness, and for all she knew was well away back by the same route. Stalin was infamous for his vengeful treatment of his real and supposed enemies. Look at poor Trotsky, got at right in his own home in Mexico City. The Soviets had gone from ally to enemy almost before the ink had dried at the end of the war. She sighed, decided against another log, and took her plate to the kitchen. She was behind, she knew, on whatever the latest was coming from the Soviets. Turning out the lights, she adjusted to the dark, and watched the snow falling outside her window, still visible because of whatever alchemy it was that caused snow to reflect light even in near darkness. The last thing she saw before she slept was Darling’s charcoal eyes, hers in the silent night.