The Calling

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  'You're going to be fine, honey,' said Terry Batten.

  '—but I know. My head is like a computer that someone has smashed with a rock.'

  He looked back to the doorway, where both women stood watching them. He smiled at the mother. 'I very much doubt that,' he said. 'Would you be comfortable being alone in your room with me, Rose? Without your mother or your aunt?'

  'Alone?' said Terry. 'I'm not sure if I—'

  'I don't care, Terry,' said the girl. Neither woman reacted to this odd familiarity.

  'We can bring you some hot water, Doctor. If you think you'll need any.'

  'I'm not a doctor,' he said, turning sharply to Grace in the door. 'I told you that.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'I want hot water, but not scalding.'

  The two women closed the door. He heard them walk to the top of the stairs and start down. He returned his attention to the child. 'You fall down,' he said.

  'One doctor told me I'd be safest in bed, but I fall out of bed too.'

  'Of course you do,' he said. He took one of her little hands in his and ran his fingertips over the thin veins on the inside of her wrist. 'Tell me, Rose, what happens before you have an attack? Do you see light? Do you smell or hear anything?'

  'I sometimes smell something.'

  'Hmm,' said Simon. He held her chin and gentled her mouth open. 'What is the smell?'

  'Scrangle eggs.'

  He released her jaw. 'Do you like scrambled eggs, Rose?'

  'Not any more.'

  He laughed, soothingly. 'Do you like tea?'

  'I'm only eight. I don't drink tea.'

  'Perhaps today you will.'

  He looked at the girl's eyes. The eyes of children were usually clear, as if made of polished glass. Rose's brown eyes looked pale, the irises had the aspect of a watercolour painting that had been tainted with a drop of fluid after drying. They were runny.

  Grace knocked on the door and he opened it, taking a tray from her. She glanced anxiously at her niece, but Simon stepped in front of her to block her view. He listened again to her footfalls in the corridor. 'Think of your body as a garden,' he said to Rose. 'Does your mother keep a garden?'

  'She does.'

  'What happens if weeds grow?'

  'The plants don't get water.'

  'That's right,' he said. He opened his valise and traced his fingers over the vials attached to its sides with elastic ribbons. He pushed the hammer on its side to get to a row near the bottom. Mistletoe. Across from it, powdered yew-berry seed, a poison. He took them both out and unscrewed their lids. 'Would you like to smell?'

  Rose leaned forward and put her nose into the mouth of one of the vials. She screwed up her face. 'Horrid,' she said. 'I'm not drinking any tea made from that.'

  'I will adulterate it – slightly – with honey. Just for you.'

  'I don't want it,' she said, and he simply smiled at her, a smile from the world of adults, saying your disobedience will be allowed in theory, but not in practice. She watched him crush a couple of tiny green leaves between his thumb and forefinger, and sprinkle it into the cup her aunt had brought up on the tray. Then he dropped in a minuscule pinch of the white yew-berry powder. He poured steaming water on it.

  'The leaves are mistletoe, like you have at Christmas. Do you know it, Rose?'

  'You kiss because of it.'

  'Indeed. But that is a silly application of mistletoe. It is a much more noble plant than that. The Druids practically worshipped it.' She shrugged. 'It grows on the bark of certain trees – a true parasite deriving one hundred per cent of its nutrient from living flesh. The Druids would climb an oak tree under the first full moon of the new year, and cut a piece of mistletoe from the bark with a golden knife. It was considered a protective herb. If so much as a leaf fell on the ground during the ceremony, they would wail and cry out that their great nation would become victim to misfortune. You can imagine how tightly the man in the tree held it.'

  'Were they elves?'

  'No.'

  'They sound like elves.'

  'Your seizures are a symptom, rather than the illness itself. The mistletoe will establish a beachhead in your nervous system and prevent the communication of the wrong signals from your brain to your muscles.'

  'So I do have a tumour?'

  'You may. If you do, the yew-berry powder I've put in here will deal with it.' She looked at the cup of steaming liquid in his hands, less now with fear than with curiosity. 'Honey, then?' he said.

  'Yes,' she replied. 'If I have to.'

  'You don't want to have got out of bed for nothing.' He went to the door and called down for a jar of honey and a teaspoon. Grace came up with it.

  'Have you diagnosed her?' she asked.

  'Yes,' said Simon. 'She has seizures and falls over. Leave us now.'

  He poured a tiny dram of honey into the tea and passed it to the girl. She stared at the mixture with contempt. 'Do you know how to sing, Rose?' he asked her. 'This is a cup of tea that tastes nicer when you sing to it.'

  Before nine, he was on his way again, having performed his ministrations and said his blessings. The MacDonald house was quiet when he left it. Very peaceful, indeed.

  He was less than forty kilometres from Ottawa when he next stopped. This was Chamberlain, at the dividing line between Renfrew and Linnet counties. Population 2,100, said the sign. He checked the map that he had printed off the web. The house he was looking for appeared to be near the centre of town. He parked in the municipal lot, and walked with his valise to the address.

  When he rang, he had to wait a long two minutes before he heard the clunk and shuffle of Michael Ulmer's walker coming to the door. At last it opened, and Simon considered the kind, slack face of his host. 'You're right on time,' said the man. He was not yet thirty, although he had wasted so considerably that his body was that of a man three times his age. Simon's heart went out to him – to have your youth stolen so brazenly by a disease, that you should wear it on your skin like the mark of Cain.

  'I am. I'm grateful to be welcomed into your home.'

  'I'm not sure you're welcomed,' said the man. 'But you're needed. Come in.'

  Simon closed the door behind him, locking it with the chain. At eleven-thirty, he heard a knock on the door and he froze in silence. After a minute, he heard footsteps moving down the walk away from the house. He went to one of the living-room windows and pulled the curtain back slightly to see a man in a black parka walking along the sidewalk. He was carrying a little black kitbag, a miniature of his own. A Jehovah's Witness, perhaps. Imagine building a church out of whomever wanted to join it, Simon thought. He and his brother had always been more discriminating than that. At noon, he searched Mr Ulmer's fridge and found a bunch of parsley, which he moistened with the juice of a lemon and ate. At two-thirty, Mr Ulmer was ready. Simon photographed him and thanked him. As luck would have it, the house was already so immaculate – but for the faint, hanging odour of cigarette smoke – that there was nothing for him to do. He was pleased when he found that the ones he visited had taken his directives seriously, although he imagined in Mr Ulmer's case that the cleanliness of his house was a result of hired help. Just the same, it confirmed for him that he had not made a mistake in choosing Mr Ulmer, or indeed any of them, and it deepened his joy that he was there with them to give succour, to save them. As he had been saved in his own life. He was repaying his debt, and it filled his heart with happiness. And for this reason especially, his entire morning and early afternoon, both with the MacDonalds and with Mr Ulmer, twenty-nine, had been very agreeable indeed.

  5

  Sunday, 14 November, 8:15 a.m.

  Detective Howard Spere slapped an envelope down on Micallef's desk. 'I was planning on spending today watching football with my sons, but you know what I do when you say jump, Hazel.'

  'Yeah, Howard, you say it can wait until Monday.'

  'She's still going to be dead tomorrow.'

  'And you can tape your football game.'


  'You're welcome.'

  She unwound the string on the back of the envelope and pulled out the post-mortem report. She scanned the summary. 'Hyoscyamine? Humulene? These are drugs?'

  'Sort of,' said Spere, wedging a thumbnail between two of his front teeth. 'They're compounds found in belladonna and hops.'

  'She was drinking?'

  'No ... this was medicinal hops. In plant form. They found bits of matter in her stomach that she'd ingested just prior to death. Both plants are sedatives.'

  'How strong?'

  'In the quantity of belladonna they found in her, probably very.'

  'So you're telling me she was anaesthetized?'

  'I'm saying she probably didn't feel a thing. She was as high as a kite. But neither of these compounds killed her. This did.' He put his finger on a word at the bottom of the report.

  'Amatoxin.'

  'You ever heard of the destroying angel?'

  'No.'

  'It's a mushroom. Amanita bisporigera. The most poisonous mushroom on the planet: the amount that would cover the surface of a dime one-tenth of a millimetre thick would be enough to kill her three times over. It's a hepatotoxin.'

  'English, Howard.'

  'Shuts down the liver and kidneys almost instantly.'

  Hazel cast her eyes over the report again and her mouth turned down. 'Are you telling me that Delia didn't die of blood loss?'

  'The amatoxin is fully metabolized. He bled her after she was dead.'

  Hazel closed the folder and sat back down in her chair. 'How do you get the blood out of a person's body when their heart isn't pumping it any more?'

  'You suck it out.'

  'Jesus, Howard. Who is this guy?'

  'There's more. She'd been fasting, too. There was nothing in the bowel, clean as a whistle. I gave her to Jack Deacon at Mayfair Grace. He said she probably hadn't eaten in three days.'

  Hazel lifted the pages of the report, noting the pathologist's charts with the measures, the weights of Delia Chandler's internal organs, and she thought, it comes down to this: the body in its constituents with their poorly kept secrets. Only a living person can refuse to tell the truth. Delia's heart was a little smaller than average, she noted. She'd make sure not to mention that to her mother.

  'So she arranges with the killer in advance?' she said, thinking out loud. 'And according to his instructions, she begins to fast. He arrives, prepares this anaesthetic cocktail, and knocks her out. He delivers the death blow with the amatoxin, then he drains the blood from her body to remove as much trace of the poison as possible, and then slits her throat to make it look like a murder.'

  'Because it's not a murder?'

  'Well, at the very least it's not the murder it appears to be, is it? A corpse with a slit throat but the cause of death isn't blood loss ...'

  'He tries to hide what he's done.'

  'Maybe,' she said.

  'You think maybe this is an assisted suicide?'

  'No. I can't get to that.'

  'So it is a murder. Whether he slits her throat or not.'

  'I know, Howard. But why kill her and then do her violence? Why would he want it to look like he attacked her? Maybe we come up with the profile for a psychopath and that's what we start looking for. But he's not a psychopath, is he? He's something else.'

  Spere had leaned back in the chair on the other side of Hazel's desk. He stared at the ceiling. She thought she could smell onions. 'I don't know. On one hand, no one who isn't a wack-job could have done this. But on the other, he knows what he's doing. He's skilled enough to put her under with two powerful sedatives and then kill her with mushroom powder. He drains her blood, but he's got to know he's not covering his tracks. He knows the Amanita is going to turn her kidneys into raisins. So he's in control. Maybe he is a doctor.' He fell silent a second and Hazel, knowing there were times it was wise to let Spere keep talking, waited him out. 'Someone with an urge to kill, but he can't do anyone who just walks into his office. He's going to get caught that way. But he can make arrangements—'

  '—how though?'

  'I don't know. But say he's promised her that he can cure her, or maybe just relieve her pain, and she goes for it. She doesn't know what belladonna is. And once she's under, he has a romp. Maybe he doesn't like to fight with them, or hear their screams.'

  'I don't think so. I think she knew everything that was going to happen to her. I think she agreed.'

  'You think she agreed to die?'

  'She was already terminal, Howard.'

  'Yeah, but no one agrees to die like this. Unless they're as nuts as their killer.'

  'No forced entry, no struggle, the place is immaculate. Explain any of that to me.'

  'So is this a murder or not, Hazel? At the very least, can we decide what we think it is?'

  'It's a murder. It doesn't matter what he calls it or what she thinks she's agreed to, if she's agreed to anything. It's what it looks like to us. Don't you think?'

  'Do you really care what I think, Hazel?'

  'Yes, Howard. I care. You feel better now?'

  Spere shrugged deeply – his head almost disappeared into his shirt – and pushed his way out of the chair. The effort triggered a fit of wet smoker's cough. She was always glad when it was time to say goodbye to him. He held his hand out for the report. 'I gotta make a copy of this. I'll bring it

  back.' 'Make one for Greene.' Spere shut the door behind him, and she picked up her phone. 'Melanie? Tell Jack Deacon at Mayfair Grace I want to see him. I'm going to drive down there now.'

  'Got it, Inspector.'

  'Did you do your cougar homework?'

  'I did.'

  'And?'

  She heard a shuffling of paper. 'Cougars or pumas – Puma concolor – are large, tawny or greyish brown carnivores—'

  'Just the part I need to know, Mel.'

  'Okay. They are indigenous to Ontario. But they see them mostly north of here.'

  'How north?'

  'Two, three hundred kilometres.'

  Hazel tapped her pencil tip on her blotter. Little dashes like knife-marks appeared under the nib. 'Fine. Send two officers down to Kehoe River then, okay? Find out who's lost their pet kitty, and make sure Ken Lonergan behaves himself. But call

  Deacon first.' She pulled her jacket off the back of the chair and went out into the pen. Greene wasn't in yet, but there was a uniformed cop she didn't recognize, sitting at the desk beside Ray's, tapping on the keyboard. She went and stood behind him, and after a moment, he stopped typing and put on his cap. He stood up and faced her, hands at his sides.

  'Do I know you, officer?'

  'DC Wingate. Ma'am,' he said. He changed his mind about his cap and took it off again. 'Inspector.'

  'DC who?'

  He coughed into his hand. He looked like an elongated boy scout to her – a six foot one boy scout, mussed yellow hair and freckles, in the wrong uniform. She saw Ray Greene enter through the front of the station. 'Just stay there,' she said to the young officer. She met Greene at the counter. 'Does the name Wingate ring a bell for you?'

  Greene squinted at her. 'Wingate. His name come up on something?'

  'Not exactly,' she said. 'But he's standing over there with his cap glued to his chest.'

  He looked past her. 'Oh God,' he said. 'Wingate. He's here? I thought he was coming next week.'

  'For what, Ray? Are we having a jamboree?'

  'From Fifty-two. Downtown Toronto. He's replacing Hunter.'

  The officer had sidled up to the counter. 'Yes,' he said. 'Fifty-two Division.'

  'We got a replacement for Hunter?' said Hazel in complete disbelief. 'Now how the hell did that happen? I thought Mason was waiting for us all to die off.'

  'We put in the paperwork,' said Greene. 'I guess he didn't notice.'

  'Thank God for the right hand's relationship with the left. So you're actually here to work for us?' Wingate smiled, and Greene held his hand out to shake. Hazel looked the officer over. How did a kid
this young get made detective? She offered her hand, and he put a cool, ever-so-slightly clammy palm into hers. Looking at his name tag, she asked, 'Is it James or Jim, then?'

  'James is fine.'

  They walked back toward Greene's desk. 'You picked a hell of a day to start,' she said. 'Has anyone caught you up?'

  'I heard on the way. I'm not supposed to begin until tomorrow, but I thought I'd come in and see if I could be useful.'

  'You psychic?' said Greene.

  'No, sir.'

  'Then you're in about the same boat as the rest of us.' They stood there behind the front desk, awkward now that introductions were over, and Wingate cast a glance back toward the safety of his desk, but stayed screwed to the spot.

  'What were you up to at your desk, DC Wingate?' she said.

  'I hope you don't mind, but I asked Miss Cartwright over there for Dr Deacon's email. I had a question for him.'

  'I don't mind at all.' She smiled. 'God, I'm going to call you "son" if I'm not careful. Did he write you back?'

  'I hadn't finished my email. I wanted to ask him his opinion on which of the injuries killed her. I glanced at Detective Spere's report, which said there was some blood on her. So it occurred to me that, maybe, she—'

  'None of her injuries killed her, officer,' said Hazel.

  Wingate slowly closed his mouth to a thin line. 'Sorry,' he said. 'I didn't mean to get ahead of myself.'

  Greene had opened his copy of the report and was scanning it. 'What do you mean she didn't die of her injuries?' he said.

  'She was already dead before he did any of that violence to her. From a mushroom.'

  'A mushroom,' repeated Ray Greene.

  They followed Wingate back to his desk. The message had been started Dear Sir. Hazel saw a toothbrush beside the keyboard. 'Have you got a place to stay, James?'

  'My landlady isn't expecting me until tonight.'

  'So you came here to work?'

  'Is that all right?'

  'I can't possibly promote you until at least Thursday.'

  'Ma'am?'

  'She has a rather dry sense of humour,' said Ray Greene, leaning over Wingate's keyboard to erase his salutation, 'which is to say it's hard to know when to laugh.' He stood straight again and gestured at the computer screen. 'Jack Deacon works for us, so there's no need to kowtow. Just say, "Jack".'