A Match Made for Murder

by Iona Whishaw

  Darling sat, holding her hand, realizing the importance of this moment. In his heart he did not believe he would ever really learn about the details of her war, and yet these few had been shaken out of her by . . . he wasn’t really sure what. Perhaps by being shot herself?

  “What did happen to him in the end?”

  Lane looked down and took a deep breath. “That’s the thing, you see. He was shot as we were fleeing. They did come back. He was behind me and he went down. I lay, terrified, waiting for my turn, but they disappeared on the bike again. I realized, of course, they hadn’t known about me, so they hadn’t bothered to look any further. They must have figured out that they’d missed one and gone back for him. I have believed it was my fault ever since.”

  “How could it have been? You know that, surely.” He wanted to say that it was nonsense, but he’d seen policemen suffering the same sort of trauma after violent incidents, and he knew logic didn’t come into it.

  She so wanted to tell him. How before she’d left on that particular mission, she’d been offered a revolver and had said absolutely not. If the Germans had found her, it would have been the final proof that she was not the local French girl she was pretending to be. She’d have been done for. She wasn’t the only one. Lots of the women didn’t want them. The great advantage for the women of special operations was that the enemy never believed women would do the work they did. If they were armed it put them in much greater danger. Claude had told her the British were useless if they did not come with guns, but he had been angry about his friends. She had only come with information, she didn’t even know what kind, it was all coded, but he wasn’t having it. She had always thought, if only she had been armed, he might have been spared.

  “Do I?” she said. “I think I do. But guilt doesn’t hang on reason. It is a great dark pool inside that reminds you, in your blackest moments, that you were spared and someone else wasn’t. I don’t think I quite know yet how to live with it.”

  Darling pulled both of her hands into his. “I think what I fear most is that one of the ways you live with it is to constantly put yourself in danger, until one day . . .”

  “Look, darling. Let me clear one thing up: I’ve always been like this. Do you think I would have signed up for the sort of work I did if I wasn’t a little inured to the danger? And though I tell you I’m not sure how one lives with that sort of guilt, I have lived with it. I have turned my face firmly to the future, hoping that time would do its healing-all-wounds best. I couldn’t have married you if I didn’t believe in that. But I do sometimes have very bad nights, and I think the loss of that man is why. I should perhaps have told you what happens to me sometimes, but I don’t know when it will strike. I think I worried that what happened today would usher in another episode of nighttime horrors. Perhaps I should have told you before. You might not have wanted me under the circumstances.”

  “I’m afraid there are no circumstances under which I would not want you,” Darling said.

  “And if it’s any consolation,” Lane pushed on, not wanting to accept the glow of warmth his words caused her just yet, “I actually think today I realized a little bit more that his death was not my fault. I don’t think it means I’m over it completely, but it really is the first time I’ve seen more clearly that it is, oh I don’t know, not about fault and more about circumstance. For example, I refused to take a weapon. It was the right choice. And even if I had had one, it would have been nearly impossible for him, say, to shoot and actually kill even one of his pursuers, speeding as they were on their motorcycle, and for all I know he wasn’t a very good shot. He certainly wasn’t army trained. So, you see, I think I’m beginning to understand logic might actually come into it.”

  Darling sat back and looked at the dining room with its hushed atmosphere and thick white tablecloths. Outside, lanterns illuminated the paths to the rooms and suites, and the fountain was lit, the water playing and catching the light. “Not much of a honeymoon,” he said, “what with one thing and another.”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t anything to compare it to. It was better than poor Mr. Renwick’s. With everything else going on in his life, the crowning tragic insult is that he should have been killed simply because he was mistaken for someone else. What do you think will happen with Ivy and the hapless brother-in-law?”

  “Once it’s clear neither of them had anything to do with the death, I suppose they’ll be off back to Wisconsin. She looks like someone who eats brothers-in-law for breakfast. She’ll land on her feet and before long we’ll be reading about her in the business section of the newspaper. Do you mind terribly about the extra day?”

  “Not at all. Once we’ve done our statements, I intend to spend the entire rest of the day in a lounge chair reading Zane Grey. Better late than never, I always say. What I’m wondering about is what will happen to Meg.”

  Chapter Thirty

  When they arrived at the police station the next morning, the place was abuzz with activity. Galloway’s office was crowded with policemen—Lane was happy to see one woman among them—all going through his drawers and boxing and labelling things. Martinez led them to his desk and asked them to sit down.

  “Thanks for coming down. I know this held up your trip back home. Everything is ready for you,” Martinez said, sitting heavily in his chair. His exhaustion was palpable. “How are you doing, Mrs. Darling?”

  “Quite all right,” Lane said, smiling. “It was a flesh wound. I imagine I’ll have sore ribs for a while, and then it will be like it never happened.”

  Martinez nodded.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “There’s a shawl I want to get before I go. I’ll cheer myself up with that. In fact, I was on my way to buy it when I got pulled into that car.”

  “You’re taking it very well, ma’am.”

  “For what it’s worth, Sergeant Martinez, I thought you were very brave. I imagine it took everything you had to stand up to your boss like that.”

  “Thank you. Just my duty, and I have Inspector Darling to thank, I think, for the photographs. They arrived in an envelope yesterday from the Santa Cruz Inn. They were brought by a cab driver.” He pulled out the envelope in which the pictures had come and removed two of them. “I guess you’d like these?”

  One photograph showed Lane and Darling standing, arm in arm, squinting very slightly from the sun, in front of the door of the San Xavier del Bac mission church door. In the second one, they were laughing at something. Priscilla Galloway had caught them as they prepared for the more formal picture, a lovely natural shot of them happy in each other’s company. Lane held this second picture an extra moment. What must it have been like for Priscilla to look through a lens framing two people in a world so far from her own?

  Martinez pulled out a third picture and held it up. “The rest were more or less variations on this theme.” The photograph showed a crowded restaurant full of smoke and people laughing and drinking. On one side the corner of a stage was visible, and just beside it were Griffin and Galloway talking cozily together, holding cigarettes and martini glasses. “It’s how I realized what must have happened to my notes on the case. Galloway was protecting Griffin, in exchange for, I’m not sure what, but we’re bound to find out. You know, I had no idea he was married. Galloway knew though. He sure wasn’t going to tell me. And when the Renwicks turned out to be a perfect fit for the crime, he must have thought he could keep Griffin out of it.”

  He reached for a file and now placed two pieces of paper in front of Lane and one in front of Darling. “These are your statements from yesterday. Could you just read them and sign there at the bottom? Let me know if anything needs to be changed.”

  This task accomplished, Martinez wished them the very best of luck, and Lane and Darling made their way into the street. It was sunny, but significantly cooler temperatures in the shade spoke of the coming winter.

  “I really would lik
e to buy a shawl I saw. I know where the shop is. Do you mind?”

  “I don’t, but I’m going with you,” Darling said firmly.

  They had packed everything they could and were about to head to the pool for a last swim when there was a tentative knock at the door. Lane went to open it and found Rex Holden on the welcome mat.

  “Mr. Holden, how lovely to see you. I thought you’d packed up and gone home. Do come in. We’re just packing ourselves. We’re off tomorrow.”

  Holden took off his hat and held it in his hands. “I’ll surprise you I think, but I wanted to thank you. Meg has come back to me.”

  Lane looked at him with gratifying surprise. She was certain Meg would have been charged with something. Perhaps she had been freed in exchange for information about Griffin. “Goodness. That’s good news? I’m sorry about sounding doubtful, but I’d have thought perhaps you felt well rid of her.”

  Holden smiled sheepishly. “I know now what was going on. I could have filed charges of some sort against her, but she called me from the police station and asked to meet me. She said she was going to get on the Greyhound bus, and then changed her mind. She confessed to me all about the scheme. It was a bit humbling, really.”

  “But you’ve taken her back?”

  “Well, that’s why I’ve come. She told me how you two had made an escape down the hill and she said something you did made her change her mind. No, no. I don’t need to know what it is. But you know, at heart she’s good, and I think she genuinely cares for me. I don’t know. I’m not getting any younger, and she makes me happy. I imagine the law will be quite forgiving now she’s talked about James Griffin’s activities. They only asked that she be prepared to appear at his trial to testify, and then they’ll let her go. She’ll get a divorce and we’ll get married, legally this time.”

  Lane smiled. “I think you’re right about her. And she’s terribly brave. She rescued me when she didn’t have to, and she was very plucky clattering around in the desert in the middle of the night. And you know, she stood up to Griffin’s quite ferocious gunman when she saw him shoot me. And she did say she cares for you. I told her to leave her purse behind when we were running away, but she wouldn’t hear of it. You gave it to her, she said.”

  “That poor kiddie,” Ames said, surveying the collection of things taken from the Watts house. “Look at this stuff. I don’t understand how a mother could carry on like this. Did she really think she’d get away with it? That she and Sadie would live happily ever after?”

  Terrell picked up the blond wig and then put it back down next to the poison Amy Watts had used to kill her husband. “I don’t really understand it either. I wonder if she was just going along, doing one thing at a time, and not thinking about the possible consequences. She finds that little purse of Miss Van Eyck’s carefully saved in the shed. She sees a letter from an ex-cop that threatens to expose her husband’s ‘involvement’ with Tina if he ever contacts him again. She doesn’t know about the background of the rape. She just thinks he’s really going to run away with Miss Van Eyck. She conceives somehow the idea that she can kill him and blame Miss Van Eyck, and as she goes along, each step seems to go without a hitch. If she’d managed to kill Miss Van Eyck as well, she probably would have assumed her troubles would be at an end.”

  Ames shuddered involuntarily. “It’s no wonder he was jammed against the driver-side door like that—he was trying to get away. Miss Van Eyck could so easily have been next, though that handkerchief trick would have been much harder to pull off if she wasn’t behind Tina the way she had been behind her husband. I bet she had her gun when she killed her husband as well. Perhaps made herself known, told him she had a gun, and he’d better do what she wanted. Made him drive to the ferry; he tried to shake her by driving towards the water, but she made him turn and then she applied the cloth while the car was still moving. I suppose she was squeamish about shooting and thought she could use the same method with Tina.”

  “Well, Miss Van Eyck wasn’t killed, sir. That’s the main thing. You know, I have a theory about the locked car doors.”

  “Just one of the things that didn’t make a lot of sense. What is it?”

  “Well, typically, as Mr. Gillingham said, strychnine doesn’t kill right away, and even subduing him and suffocating him, she might have been afraid that he might somehow survive if someone found him in time. She might have thought that locking the car doors and taking the keys would slow down any would-be rescuers.”

  “And identify her as his attacker. Well, she’s not talking, even to her lawyer, apparently, so it’s as good a theory as any.”

  “I’ll catalogue all this stuff, shall I?”

  “Yes, thanks, Constable. And good work.”

  Terrell smiled, and it crossed Ames’s mind as he watched him leave the office that April wouldn’t have a chance against that smile.

  “I still can’t understand how I was taken in by him,” Darling said. They were in the dining car having lunch as the train hurtled across the desert heading west. They had left the inn that morning after saying goodbye to Chela and had been driven to the station by Raúl, who had insisted on it. “It’s really shaken up my sense of myself. What other ghastly misjudgements have I made or will I continue to make? I mean, it was right in front of me. The way he talked about women, even the arson arrest. When I think about it now, I can see it was hurried. He probably thought he had the right man, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, but now I see that for him arresting someone was proof of guilt. He never questioned his own judgement for a second. I feel nothing but embarrassment when I think of those things now. What did I think that was? Manliness? Or at least a kind of manliness, maybe.”

  “What were the good things about him?” Lane asked. “Maybe they outweighed the bad, made it seem trivial.”

  Darling nodded, digging his fork into a piece of chocolate cake. “This is quite good. One of us should learn to make it. I bet Mrs. Hughes could teach you. Or me,” he added. “That’s a kind question, so let me think,” Darling continued. “He was generous, high energy, and extremely kind to me, certainly, as the new man. It seemed as though he was loyal to the force and the men. He was quite easy to like, really. I suppose he could have changed over the years, through the war, and I wouldn’t have seen it. He certainly was not a well man towards the end. He was someone who seemed to think he had complete control of things, and then clearly began to unravel. I wondered at first how he thought he’d get away with it all. I imagine now that he’d gone down the road of kidnapping you to find out where Priscilla was, and didn’t foresee the rest of it but had supreme confidence in his own ability to ride it out. Even on the side of the road he was scheming. He would pretend he’d arrested Idaho, charge him with your kidnapping, and maybe even get rid of Martinez for insubordination. He didn’t know about the photographs, and he didn’t count on Martinez not backing down. Old Mackenzie was in charge in Nelson when Galloway was there. Had been for twenty years. Poor man had to come back and take the helm again during the war because I was in the Air Force. I wonder what he thought of Galloway.”

  “I think,” Lane said slowly, “I think it is easy to like someone who is energetic and generous. They do not invite suspicion because they appear to be completely open. I do it all the time. Perhaps as one gets older one can see past that more often. Are you worried you have some innate lack of judgement that will hurt your police work?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think I’m feeling guilty because it’s clear now he was on the take in Nelson as well, though I guess we’ll never know exactly what Watts thought he had on him. According to Ames, Watts regularly ran through his pay, and was heavily in debt, which is why he was trying to get money out of Galloway. But most of all I feel guilty because he managed to carry you off like that. If I’d never brought you here, we could have had a perfectly pleasant honeymoon in Niagara Falls or somewhere. Isn’t that what normal p
eople do?”

  “On the whole, I think I like that you can suffer such self-doubt. I expect it’s what makes you more thoughtful and relieves you of the burden of always thinking you are right about everything. I’m sure it’s why I fell in love with you.”

  “Good job, you two.” Darling was at his desk with Ames and Terrell lined up before him.

  “Thank you, sir,” Terrell said. “Sergeant Ames is the one, if I may say so.”

  “Very creditable, Constable Terrell. Ames has said the same of you. I’m not sure I can take much more of this self- effacing goo, so the two of you can run along and find some more crime to fight.” Darling waved his hand dismissively and stacked the considerable pile of papers that comprised the report on the Watts murder.

  Ames, earnestly hoping for a respite from crime fighting for a day or two, collapsed on the chair in his office. He’d managed to stave off any reflection about yet another catastrophic failure in his romantic life by occupying himself with tidying up the loose ends on the Watts business and learning from Darling about the fate of Galloway in Tucson. He had felt it was only fair that Tina Van Eyck should know that the policeman who had dismissed her so cruelly had got his own comeuppance. Firmly putting aside the officiousness and insensitivity he was certain he’d shown during the investigation, and the embarrassing “Thank God!” that had flown unbidden from his lips when he’d seen Tina evidently in one piece in front of the fire at the Bertollis’ cabin, Ames had made the trek up the lake to the garage.

  Mr. Van Eyck had brightened at the sight of him pulling up in front of the now pristine bay doors gleaming in the snowy morning, but Tina had looked decidedly unwelcoming and had thanked him coolly for taking the trouble of coming out. And that was that, he thought. He could not shake his feeling that this failure was harder than the others.