A Match Made for Murder

by Iona Whishaw

  Darling, who felt fully unconvinced about not worrying, grunted and then issued directions for her to hurry home.

  Lane was dropped off in front of an imposing set of buildings far west of the town.

  “Not the round one, ma’am. That’s for the tuberculosis patients. Do you want me to wait for you? Visiting hours are over; they’ll probably kick you out.”

  “Oh, yes. Please. Do you mind?” Lane said gratefully.

  A nurse at reception looked primly at the clock on the wall. “You’ve left it quite late. There won’t be time for a long visit.”

  “I know. I’m terribly sorry. The person attending my friend called me and asked me to come right away. Sister Yelland I think her name is.”

  The receptionist smiled suddenly. “I nursed in England during the war. We say nurse here, not sister. If she called you, it must be important. Up the stairs on the left to the second floor to our critical ward. We’ll look the other way if you need a bit more time.”

  Lane pushed through a set of swinging doors, feeling the claustrophobia the smell of hospitals evoked in her.

  “Nurse Yelland?”

  A tall, angular woman, made taller and more severe- looking by her starched cap and tightly pinned hair, looked up when Lane introduced herself. “You’ve come. Thank you. She might still be awake. She’s been going in and out of sleep. Morphine does that.” Yelland got up and indicated that Lane should follow.

  “But what happened to her?” Lane asked. “Was it a car accident?”

  Yelland turned to face her and said stiffly, “It wasn’t a car, and it wasn’t an accident.”

  “But what, then?”

  “I cannot say. Mrs. Galloway refused to say. When Mr. Galloway came in, he said she’d had a bad fall. Slipped on a rug at the top of the stairs. That is what we have on our records.” She turned to continue down the hall and then stopped. “She needs rest and quiet. Please don’t be too long. I just want her to know she has a friend.”

  Lane was ushered into a room where the dominant colours were pale beige and green. It was disheartening in its starkness. She stifled a gasp of dismay. Priscilla lay on her back with her eyes closed and her arms outside the covers. Her face was swollen and bruised, her left eye inflamed and puffed shut. Her arms were black and blue, and there was a bandage on her right arm.

  Lane pulled up a chair as quietly as she could and gently took her right hand. “Priscilla? It’s Lane Winslow.”

  Priscilla opened her one undamaged eye and turned her head slightly, with a groan. “They’ve doped me up. Why are you here? I told them not to call you unless it was an emergency.”

  “Dearest Priscilla, if this is not an emergency, I don’t know what is. What happened?”

  Closing her eyes, Priscilla was silent for a moment. “I’ve lost the baby, I know it. I can feel it gone. They haven’t told me, but I know.”

  Lane felt herself blanche. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were pregnant.” Lane paused. “Nurse Yelland said you fell down the stairs.”

  Priscilla attempted a smile. “Yes. My own mother used to ‘fall down stairs.’ Isn’t it ironic? It’s hereditary, it seems.”

  “Paul did this.”

  “Apparently he didn’t like me being pregnant. He didn’t marry me so I could ruin myself with brats.”

  Lane sat holding Priscilla’s hand, her mind in turmoil. There must be laws against this sort of thing, she thought desperately. After all, she had contact with a law firm now; maybe Priscilla could get lawyer.

  “You just have to think about getting better, now,” she said. “Do you have someone you can stay with?”

  Priscilla attempted a sarcastic laugh and groaned instead. “Paul is the assistant chief of police. Where would I be safe?” She attempted to adjust her body and then gave it up, grimacing at the pain. “The drugs seem to just make me dozy without actually dealing with the sore bits.”

  “Shall I get the nurse?” Lane asked.

  “Don’t bother.” She closed her eyes, and Lane wondered if she’d drifted off to sleep, but then her eye opened again. “He’s always terribly sorry.” Priscilla’s voice began to drag with the effect of the drugs.

  Lane pressed Priscilla’s hand, wanting to stroke her bruised forehead. “Get some rest now. I’ll come tomorrow.”

  Priscilla managed to turn her head slightly to look at her. “I dream sometimes of stealing that beastly car and driving to Phoenix and catching a plane. But . . . assistant chief of police . . .”

  “Ma’am,” Nurse Yelland put her head in the door.

  “Yes, of course,” Lane said. Outside she said to the nurse, “I’ll come back tomorrow. Is there anything I should bring?”

  “Some hope? She’ll be here for a week, easy. No doubt we’ll patch her up and send her home.”

  Lane started toward the stairs and then stopped. “Has she been here before?”

  Yelland shook her head. “Nope. But I bet she should have. There are some older bruises on her.” She approached Lane with contained fury. “He kicked her until she lost that baby. If you can do anything to get her out of there . . . and before you ask, I know who her husband is. A so-called rising star in the force. An anti-corruption crusader. Doesn’t that beat all? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be sharing this, but it makes me absolutely livid to see this sort of thing.”

  Darling and Lane sat in bed holding hands. “Why doesn’t she leave?” Lane asked. “I don’t understand it.”

  “Perhaps he controls the money. I think the fact you are the only person she could call suggests he controls who she sees. She must have no friends she can trust. And I expect she’s afraid. I wonder if that law firm you contacted would be useful here?”

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” Lane said.

  He turned to her. “I’m sorry, Lane. He’s an absolute bastard. How did I never see that? I’m going to have to re-think everything I know about him.”

  “I suppose men don’t talk about that sort of thing with each other. And he wasn’t married when you knew him.”

  “No. He wasn’t. Now I think of it, he was a bit of a ‘lad,’ I suppose. Somewhat loose talk about the ladies, that sort of thing. I suspect I wasn’t comfortable with it, but it’s what a lot of men did . . . do. I don’t think I ever imagined he would be capable of something like this.”

  “I have to do something,” Lane said.

  Darling turned to look at her. God almighty, he thought, what now? But he turned out the light and pulled her close.

  She lay awake long into the moonless night. Finally dozing, she woke with a start just past three, wondered at her wakefulness, and then remembered Priscilla. She lay staring into the dark, her innards in turmoil. Finally she rose, put on her cardigan and then her robe, and quietly opened the door to step outside.

  Shivering at the cold, she closed the door quietly behind her and went into the empty garden. She marvelled at the darkness and the riot of stars above her. The canopy of the sky seemed close enough to touch. They whirled above her in a way that made her think of van Gogh. She went to the pool area and lay on a deck chair so she could look upward, already feeling the cold would not allow her to stay out long in little more than a silk nightdress.

  It gives perspective, she thought. We are nothing in the face of this vastness, with our little problems and tiny short lives. But Priscilla’s problems were not little, and she had none of the advantage of perspective Lane had—only the claustrophobia of pain and closed doors. The idea came to her as she was getting up to hurry back to the room, driven by the cold. She would talk to Chela first thing in the morning.

  The night shift officers were beginning to stretch tiredly and stack things on their desks when Martinez came in.

  “Morning,” he said to Bevan, a young officer who had more than once wondered to Martinez why he had graduated at the top of his
class to spend his nights flipping a pencil at his desk, waiting for the phone to ring.

  “Sergeant. Pretty quiet last night,” Bevan said, “and no visits from the assistant chief, unlike a couple of nights ago.”

  “Good. You got to relax and catch up, then,” Martinez said, moving to his desk and then stopping. “What do you mean about the assistant chief?”

  “He was here the night before last. Came in late in a pretty bad temper. Closed himself up in his office. I heard him on the phone. I mean, I heard him raise his voice, but I didn’t hear what he was saying.”

  “What time was this?”

  “One, one-thirty? Stayed for about an hour and left again. I’m used to it now. He was here maybe two weeks ago storming around as well. Doesn’t talk to me. I’m nobody.”

  Martinez watched Bevan go back to his desk. He’s here practically on his own on the night shift. He shook his head as if to clear it. But the thought persisted. Had another cop taken his notes? Had Bevan? He’d gone over every possible thing he could have done with his notes, and he knew he would not have been careless. The inevitable conclusion meant someone else must have made them disappear. Had Griffin gotten to someone at the station? He’d open up a can of mental worms with this kind of thinking. He’d be suspecting everyone now.

  And why was the boss hanging around the station so late? Was it the Griffin case? He had said in no uncertain terms that he wanted a conviction. It was the one thing Martinez had seen Galloway really angry about. But who would he be on the phone with at that time of night? Maybe something at home. He’d seen Galloway with his wife at the Christmas parties. A beautiful woman. Galloway had joked more than once that she was a handful, whatever that was supposed to mean. He couldn’t imagine making remarks about his own wife at the police station. Martinez understood that the best policy for someone with his background was to be as correct as possible at all times.

  Martinez put Galloway out of his mind and used the momentary solitude in the main office to make one last search for his notes. He would have to begin recreating them and get something very solid on where Griffin was putting his money. He’d better let Galloway know what he suspected, though he knew it wouldn’t go over well. With a sinking heart he realized he would also have to interview the Renwick woman about the gun and try again to find out why Edward Renwick had been hanging around town four days before he claimed to have come. He had been promised a ballistics report that morning on the bullets they’d recovered from the victim. That should speed things up.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was desperate, Lane knew. And it could cause an irreparable break between herself and Darling. She had walked to the edge of the hotel property before he awoke and stood shivering in the morning cold, watching the golden edge of light on the Catalina Mountains. She had slept little and had felt the confinement of being in a hotel, however luxurious—and even, for a moment, the confinement of being with someone else. On her own, sleepless nights had been a fairly frequent occurrence, especially since the war had ended, and had ranged from long spells of vague anxiety to panic and attacks of violent shivering. She had struggled to try to understand the source of these attacks. Lord knew her intelligence work provided enough fodder for any amount of shell shock. She’d seen men incapacitated by it when she was a child. She never could have imagined she’d be coping with something similar.

  She sometimes felt she understood the root of her trauma. It must have originated with the murder of three people in a safe house by Bretagne nationalists in the spring of 1943. Lane’s assignment had been to liaise with members of the French underground at a safe house and deliver a coded message. The whole thing had been catastrophic. She’d arrived just after the people inside the farmhouse had been shot, and she had seen the shooters race away on a motorcycle. She’d been unable to protect a fourth person who’d been hiding when his mates were assassinated. But she always stopped short of reliving the whole thing, overwhelmed by the powerlessness and regret of never being able to go back and change what had happened. On her own, at home, she could turn on the light, read, warm up milk, go sit in front of the fire. At least there she could creep out to the sitting room or kitchen and not disturb Darling, though that had not been necessary in the brief weeks they’d been married. His presence did provide a comfort she had not fully expected, but she did not fool herself that her attacks of panic would be gone forever because she was certain that her own sense of guilt would never be gone.

  Her relief at seeing the grey light of morning under the edge of the curtain had been profound, and she’d gotten up, dressed quickly, and taken herself outside. She wanted more than anything, she thought, to tell as few lies as possible. Indeed, she had never lied to Darling. It terrified her to think of doing it now. It opened a great black chasm in her mind from which she feared there might be no escape. But what was the alternative? If she told Darling what she was planning, it would create a further rift between himself and Galloway. He would be forced, perhaps, to lie to someone else because of what she had done. She could not possibly put him into that position.

  The sun breasted the row of mountains, sending light spilling across the desert, suddenly shaping the peaks with gold and shadow. Praying that he would understand, that he would in the end agree there was no other solution, she turned away from the direct light of the sun. Whatever the outcome, she could not turn her back on Priscilla. The fallout with Darling would have to come later.

  There was hopeful news on two fronts the next morning at the Nelson police station. The first was word that Ada Finch had been located. Ada’s cousin in Lardeau had hidden her in a barn overnight and then got too frightened to keep up the secret and confessed to her mother, Ada’s aunt. She would be back in Nelson by the afternoon. They could interview her and her father, now that it had become a murder investigation, as soon as he had got her home.

  “The girl showed some enterprise. She apparently sneaked onto the steamboat and got a lift to Lardeau by water. Her father is driving over to pick her up. He’s pretty mad,” Terrell said, after taking the call.

  In addition, Terrell’s advertisements had prompted three calls to the police station. One was from a farmer down the south arm of the lake; he’d picked up a boy who had missed the school bus and brought him into town. Another call was from a man travelling between Kaslo and Nelson who’d seen a man on the road—he couldn’t quite remember where—but hadn’t stopped to pick him up. A description of the man was requested and given. A third call was from another driver who had seen the same man and had picked him up, about five miles out of town, and deposited him at the local Rexall drug store.

  Armed with the description, and restive over the personal turmoil the case was causing him, Ames took up his coat and announced that he was going to track down the second hitchhiker.

  “I’ll come with you, sir,” said Terrell.

  The sky had become heavy, and there was a smell of snow in the air as they crossed Baker Street toward the drugstore. The bell on the door rang as they went into the narrow, crowded space. A plump middle-aged woman turned to stare, mainly at Terrell, and then inched away toward the newspaper stand. The pharmacist was on a stepladder fetching something from a high shelf; he came down, putting a small box on the counter.

  “Gentlemen. I’ll just finish up here and be right with you.”

  Hoping that no one else would come in, Ames and Terrell waited while the transaction was finished.

  “Now then, what can I do for you, Sergeant? Don’t usually see you fellows in my pharmacy.”

  “We’re looking for a man who was dropped off here three days ago. He’d caught a ride into town.” Ames gave the description and the pharmacist nodded.

  “I saw the ad in the newspaper looking for information. That was Wilf Gunderson. I happen to know because he told me he’d missed Stewy’s bus and had to walk quite a ways before anyone stopped. He’s not in any trouble, is he
?”

  “Is he a regular customer?”

  “Yes, he gets his heart pills here. He’s not that old, but he’s had a dicky heart since he was a boy.”

  Terrell looked up from his notes. “Can you tell us where he lives, sir?”

  “He lives in a little homestead just this side of Balfour, before you get to that gas station. Lives there on his own since his wife died. Nicest guy you’d care to meet.”

  “Thanks very much.” Ames and Terrell both tipped their hats and went out to stand on the street.

  “I’m not too hopeful he’s our man,” Ames said, “but we’d better head out there. The nicest people you care to meet don’t usually go around murdering and robbing people. But he was on the road at the crucial time, so he might have seen something useful. I know we should really be stopping first to tell Mrs. Watts that this has become a murder investigation. I dread it, if I’m honest. And who knows? We might get something from Gunderson that will allow us to tell her we have someone in our sights. We’ll stop there on the way back. If we’re lucky, we can get back before it snows.”

  They’d crossed to the north side and had been driving for twenty minutes when they felt a dip in the temperature, Terrell turned up the heat. “Do we have enough information to even find the place?” he asked.

  “We’ll ask at the store. Mr. Bales is bound to know.”

  “Are you worried about Miss Van Eyck, sir?”

  Ames felt completely transparent. “All those women, Terrell. If the hitchhiker angle doesn’t pay off . . . now that it’s become a murder, I find it hard to imagine that Watts’s penchant for young girls wasn’t part of this. It seems there are some who have plenty to be angry about. There might be more out there who suffered the . . . treatment Miss Van Eyck did.” He could not bring himself to say so violent a word.

  “The question is, why now? If he’s been happily married for a decade, why would he be suddenly worried that Miss Van Eyck talked, and why would he end up murdered?”