by Linda Moore
She looked across the table at me. “Daniel said you told him there were arrests made at our house today. That is shocking news.”
“Have you been there since you got back to town?”
“Not yet.” An impressive, steady liar.
“Well, there were, in fact, two arrests at your house today.”
“Good lord! What happened exactly—do you know?”
“My partner and the police pursued one of the men to your house. The other one was already there. That’s where they were arrested.”
“And what do you know about these two men? Who are they? What were they doing there?”
The questions were to the point. She wanted to know what we knew.
“I’m not sure yet who they are,” I said.
“I’m wondering how these people got into my house in the first place. Was it broken into? At the very least you must have their names.”
“I’m sure Detective Arbuckle has all that information by now. I strongly suggest you see him tomorrow; he’ll answer your questions. And he’ll have questions for you, things that you can shed light on.”
The telephone rang. I looked at it.
“Please go ahead,” she said. “Where is your washroom?”
“Go out in the hall and then just at the top of the stairs.”
I picked up the phone.
“Hello.”
“Roz, it’s Harvie.”
“My god, you’re still awake?”
“I’m working. But listen, Daniel King just called me.”
“I spoke to him a little while ago and I told him you might be involved with the prosecution. He said he remembered you very well.”
“He had questions about the case, wanted to know who we were going after.”
“And what did you say?” I was suddenly apprehensive that Harvie had told Daniel about Spiegle and Greta’s apparent involvement with him, and that Daniel had passed it on to his mother.
“I told him I was tied up and couldn’t answer his questions tonight but would be in touch soon. I wanted to speak with you and McBride before informing him of anything. I mean, he’s your client.”
“Good thinking, Harvie,” I said quietly, “there are things we need to keep to ourselves for the moment. Listen, he did reach Greta and she is actually here right now paying me a visit, so I should go.”
“Really? You’re not in any difficulty are you? Do you want me to come over?”
“No, she seems harmless.”
“Okay, we’ll talk tomorrow.”
We rang off. I could hear Greta coming down the stairs. I met her in the hall.
“You found it all right?”
“Yes, and thank you for the suggestion about seeing Detective…Arbuckle was it?”
“Yes. It’s very important. Your son initiated our investigation, but now it’s moving into the hands of the police and the Crown. So I’m sure you can understand that we need you here. Where are you staying in the meantime? Are you at a hotel?”
“I’m alright, thank you. It’s very late and I’ve taken enough of your time. I’ll go now.”
You came to see me and you haven’t gotten a scrap of information, I thought.
“Do you want a cab?”
“No, I’ll walk. I can flag one.”
“It’s a bit dangerous to be walking around here, especially in that coat,” I said. “There have been random swarmings and robberies. Please, let me call one. Or I could drive you somewhere. You didn’t tell me where you are staying.” Never give up, I thought.
“I’ll be fine. It was nice to meet you, Rosalind.” She opened the door.
I knew I’d kick myself if I let her go without at least finding out how to get hold of her.
“Greta, I know I haven’t been very forthcoming. What we know at this point is just the tip of the iceberg, but I can give you some information about what the men were doing at your house and tell you the name of one of them—that is, if you’ll tell me how I can reach you.”
She paused, then said, “I can give you a cellphone number.” She closed the door again.
“That would be excellent. I thought you didn’t have one.”
“That’s how Daniel reached me tonight,” she said. “He knew I didn’t take it to Europe, but now that I’m back, I’m using it again.”
“Would you mind writing the number down for me?” I indicated the notepaper on the hall table.
She wrote it down and handed the piece of notepaper to me.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Now it’s your turn. Tell me what you know about the men.”
“Alright,” I said, watching her face. “A woman was abducted from her apartment yesterday morning, treated brutally and eventually taken to your house. The men were interrogating her because they believed she was in possession of some incriminating information that could implicate one of them in your husband’s murder.”
“What do you mean—what kind of information?” Her demeanour was still cool, but I sensed a little increase in her heart rate.
“Business stuff, I think. Your husband often got in the way of powerful people getting what they wanted. The man who was calling the shots in this abduction incident is the focus of the incriminating information. He was one of the men arrested. His name is Carl Spiegle. Do you know him?”
She didn’t flinch. “Where might I have met him?”
I was tempted to say Zurich but I didn’t want to put her on the run.
“Through your husband possibly…This man works for the City, as a Planning Supervisor. You never heard Peter mention the name Carl Spiegle?”
I saw a moment of decision cross her face. “I don’t know him,” she said.
“That’s all I can tell you at this point,” I said. “We’re still working on it. But back to your phone for a moment. You said you didn’t take it with you to Europe.”
“That’s right.” There was an edge of impatience to her voice. “What would be the point of dragging it around over there? It wouldn’t work.”
“Exactly. I get that. So I must have misunderstood you. I was sure you said you hadn’t been to your house since you returned to Halifax, but you must have been back there to pick it up.”
Caught. I could see it in her eyes.
“I—a friend had it.”
“So you’re staying with a friend?”
“You’ve got the number. Call me if you need me.”
She was gone.
“Wow,” I said aloud as I turned the deadbolt. I took a deep breath. She’d been wearing expensive perfume—Chanel—probably purchased in Paris during her recent assignation with Carl Spiegle. She had really dug herself in. Risky to lie and say she didn’t know Spiegle when it would be easy to prove otherwise. McBride said that when she left the house, she had told Spiegle it was over. So why not take the opportunity to help put him behind bars? It didn’t make any sense. I was missing a piece of the puzzle.
“Now can I go to bed?” I asked the cat, who had wandered into the hall from the kitchen, licking her chops. I put Greta’s glass by the sink, switched off the kitchen light, and turned down the thermostat. “Come on,” I said and trudged upstairs with the cat following.
Chapter Twenty-one
Six hours later, I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling in the dawn light thinking about all the things that were going to be accomplished that day. Harvie was going to speak with the Chief Crown Attorney to find out how much involvement he could have in the investigation. In conjunction with the police he was also going to get the ball rolling on the exhumation of Peter King’s body. Arbuckle was going to begin the interviews with Spiegle, zeroing in on the murder of Peter King. The two thugs would each have a string of charges brought against them for their various assaults against Sophie, Aziz, McBride, and myself.
McBride would soon be on his way over to my place to review Aziz’s file before we took it up to Arbuckle. After our visit to the police station, he and I were going to the hospital to see
Aziz. Progress, I thought. At long last.
Fortunately, Sophie and I didn’t have rehearsal until the following evening. Monday was almost always the day off—or, as the actors called it, the “dark” day.
And, oh yes…Greta! Her visit of the previous night felt so surreal. What’s the best next step, I wondered. I had the feeling that calling her on her cellphone would prove fruitless. We could ambush her at the bank while she was signing papers, but could we force her to talk to the police? McBride would have to figure it out.
I closed my eyes. The cat stretched and stood up. She walked all the way up my body and stood on my chest, looking at my face. I opened my eyes again.
“Okay,” I said. She purred in response, sensing that food was in the offing.
McBride and I were sitting in my kitchen over a cup of tea an hour later. I was filling him in on Greta’s late-night visit, which he found perplexing.
“What an odd thing for her to do,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, that Greta’s one crazy cat, I think. No offense,” I said to the cat. “I had the impression that Daniel had encouraged her to talk to me. She told me she hadn’t been to her house since she’d arrived in town, which as you and I know was a lie. She must have come to see me to find out what we know. Anyway she left just as mysteriously as she arrived.”
“And what information did she actually get from you?” McBride asked.
I explained the story of our little exchange—her phone number for the information on the abduction and the name of one of the men arrested, Carl Spiegle, whom she denied knowing or ever having met.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” McBride said. “Well listen, it’s almost nine. Let me get a look at the Aziz file and then we’ll take it up to Arbuckle and find out what his plan of attack is with those three.”
“Great. I just have to get myself together. Why don’t you wash these up and I’ll be right back down with it.” I smiled and pushed my teacup towards him.
I went up to my room and pulled out a warmer sweater to wear. It was looking a little nasty outside—that lovely rain-snow-ice combo Halifax does so well. I put the sweater on and brushed my hair. Then I went over to the closet and pushed aside the shoes and boots with my foot. I bent down and pulled the old pine floorboard up.
At first I couldn’t believe it. Then I reached in and felt around. My heart went into my mouth. “Oh my god,” I said aloud.
“McBride—” I called from the top of the stairs.
“What?” I could hear the dishes clinking around.
“We’ve got trouble.” I sat down on the top step.
He walked into the hall with the tea towel in his hand and looked up the stairs at me.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s gone. The file’s gone.”
We just stared at one another. Then he took the stairs two at a time, sprinted past me and into my room. I followed, hoping, as he did, that I’d made a mistake.
“It’s definitely not there,” he said. “You’re sure you didn’t move it after they pulled Scarface out of here?”
“No. And I hadn’t even gotten to the point of lifting the board when you knocked him down, so of course I just assumed it was still there. When I tidied up the lamp and the table, everything looked just as we’d left it. Sophie came back with me yesterday but other than that, no one’s even been here, except….” I trailed off and looked at him.
“Greta.” We said it together.
“That’s it,” he said. “Now her little visit makes sense. Did she come up here?”
I nodded reluctantly. “She went up to use the bathroom when I took a call from Harvie.”
“Bingo,” he said.
“But how would she know?”
“Scarface must have told Spiegle where he thought it was, and Spiegle must have told her. They’ve been in touch with each other somehow. Boy, they really don’t want that evidence to surface.”
“The thing is, Aziz would still have all those original journal entries and probably a copy of the DVD and everything else in the file. The evidence still exists right? And for that matter, when he gets well, he can be brought forward to testify.”
“This could be bad for Aziz—”
“You mean, Aziz is now a target,” I said.
“No time to waste.” He jumped to his feet.
“Your car or mine?”
“Let’s take Ruby. Come on Molly!”
At the hospital, we took the elevator to the sixth floor and followed the signs to the ICU, where Aziz had been recovering from his coma.
Even from a distance I knew something was wrong. At the end of the hall we could see a cluster of people around a bed; it looked like a scene straight out of ER. We picked up our pace.
“Oh Christ, it is him,” McBride said.
Aziz appeared to be in extreme agony. He was clutching at his stomach and retching violently. A young nurse came rushing out of the room and quickly headed down the hall to her left.
“What’s happened to him?” I said running along beside her.
“Sorry. No time.”
“Look, I’m a criminologist, and he’s a victim in a case we’re working on.”
“We’re not sure what’s going on. He was doing so well, but now—violent nausea and he may be going into heart failure.”
“Arrhythmia?”
“Yes.”
She had opened a locked door and was rapidly wheeling out a piece of equipment that I recognized as an electronic defibrillator.
“Did he have any visitors this morning?”
“A woman. Less than an hour ago. She was very nice, said she was his boss, I think.” We were moving quickly back towards the room.
“Fur coat?”
“That’s right.”
“It’s poison,” I said bluntly.
“What?” The nurse looked straight at me for the first time.
“It could be taxine,” I said. “From the yew.”
She shook her head and picked up her pace. I pursued her.
“Look I know it sounds crazy, but it’s not. It is possible that this woman had access to that substance. In a high concentration it works very fast, is easily absorbed. Was he eating breakfast at the time?”
“Yes he was. Okay, I’ll tell the doctor,” she said, wheeling the defibrillator into the room. Everyone leaped into action to get the machine ready.
McBride was across the hall on a pay phone to Arbuckle.
“He’s on his way,” he said, hanging up.
The door opened again and an older man—black, with piercing blue eyes—came out and looked at me.
“You said something about poison?”
“Yes, I did,” I said, speaking fast. “Taxine from the yew. Can start with severe stomach pain, nausea, then there’s an arrhythmia and the heart fails. No known antidote, except recently some vets swear by heptaminol. It’s a chloride of some kind. It’s animals who usually get in trouble—eating the yew leaves. Maybe call a vet! Oh, and I’ve also read about calcium channel blockers being helpful. Pump the stomach to reduce the amount of poison going through the system.”
“We’ve done that.”
“That’s all I know,” I said.
Quite understandably, he was looking at me with a combination of astonishment and suspicion. But he asked no questions, just turned and flew back into the room.
I looked at McBride. “She was here. She must be insane.”
I could see the doctor giving specific instructions to several people. Someone immediately got on a telephone. A couple of minutes later, a technician came flying down the hall and entered the room.
Meanwhile, Aziz was still fighting for his life. More jolts from the defibrillator.
Arbuckle hadn’t wasted any time. He appeared from around the corner and rushed towards us.
“How is he?”
“He might not make it,” I said. “The stuff’s deadly.”
“What stuff?”
“
It looks like taxine, from the yew. The same thing that I think killed Peter King. It sounds like Greta paid Aziz a visit this morning.”
“You know, we have all three of those guys locked up and I didn’t think we’d need someone here to watch over Aziz. But obviously I was wrong.”
“Well, since you’re beating yourself up, I have a confession of my own,” I said. “Greta paid me a visit last night, and—are you ready?—she managed to steal the evidence file.”
“She paid you a visit?” Arbuckle said. “Why didn’t you call me?” He was clearly annoyed.
“I thought I could handle it,” I said. “I didn’t know until this morning that the file was missing.”
“Look, the important question is: where is she now?” McBride said.
“The bank?” I offered lamely.
“My guess is the airport,” Arbuckle said.
The door opened and the doctor reappeared. “I think he’s stabilizing. We gave him an injection of heptaminol. It may have helped.” The doctor was breathing hard, as though he’d just run a marathon. He went back in to the room. I looked through the narrow window on the door. Aziz appeared somewhat calmer now, and was breathing more regularly.
“Oh god, we might have gotten here just in time.” I was shaking.
Arbuckle was on his phone. I heard him asking someone to check with every airline flying out of Halifax to find out if Greta King was booked on any flight.
“If you have to prioritize, check flights to Montreal, Toronto, New York, and London first. Do this immediately and call me back on my cell.”
He snapped his cellphone shut and looked at us. “I’m going to the airport now. She might not be there, but if she is, I’m going to head her off at the pass.” He spun on his heels and walked away at a clip.
After the doctor confirmed that Aziz was out of the woods we left the hospital. McBride said he’d connect with the bank to find out if Greta had a specific appointment that day.
“What about you, Roz?” he asked as he dropped me off at home.
