Death in the Garden City

by Jeanne M. Dams

  I took all that in and then gingerly opened the kitchen door nearest me and stood in the doorway.

  There was lots of activity, but it wasn’t the sort one usually sees in a kitchen. I supposed the floor had been examined first, because the officers went about their work without watching where they stepped. The pantry door was to my left, closed and sealed with police tape. That was obviously still off limits until the forensics people had done their work. Well, the caterers wouldn’t need it, since they would bring their own supplies. I scanned the room.

  Aha! There was a substantial knife block on one of the islands, whose stainless-steel surface was otherwise clear. There were no knives in the block. I wondered why the police hadn’t taken block and all. Perhaps it was a built-in part of the island. Unusual, but sensible in a facility that was used by outside groups.

  Cupboards. Drawers, none of which were big enough to hold tablecloths. Good. I hoped they were stored in the pantry.

  Sinks. None was close to the pantry. That would have made it more awkward to clean up bloodstains, or anything else, for that matter. But perhaps the pantry served also as a broom closet, with a mop and pail handy. That would be unusual, though. In the States, I thought I remembered dimly, cleaning supplies in a commercial kitchen could not by law be stored near food.

  A big commercial dishwasher, the conveyor type, stood against one wall, taking up a lot of space. You could wash a knife in that monster, and it might not have blood even in the cracks anymore. But you couldn’t do it inconspicuously. If the monster was anything like the one in my college dorm kitchen all those years ago, it made a lot of noise in operation, and produced a great deal of steam. No, the murderer had probably taken the knife away. Tricky, given the shape of the thing, and the razor-sharp blade. It would slit through any pocket lining like butter. Well, maybe it was wrapped in something.

  Assuming, of course, that the weapon was indeed a boning knife. I was breaking Sherlock’s rule and speculating way ahead of my data.

  Alan tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Seen enough?’

  ‘Until I can get into the pantry, yes. Parts of my theory are working out very well, but I wish the pantry were closer to the place the body was found.’

  ‘I’ve had an idea about that. Did you know that there’s an outside door at the end of that inconvenient little hallway?’

  ‘Good grief! The place is just lousy with doors! Why on earth did they make it so hard to keep secure?’

  ‘If you look closely, you’ll see it wasn’t built all of a piece. It’s been added onto over the years. I don’t know the history of the building, but it’s my guess that it began life as just a village hall, or something of that sort. Then when they began to hold larger and larger events here, the kitchen was added, or expanded. Then they added the stage, and then I would suspect that the fire officials stepped in and said they have to have another exit close to the stage.’

  ‘It’s not much of a stage – just a platform, really. No backstage, no flies – they couldn’t stage a play here, or anything of that kind.’

  ‘No, just lectures and limited musical performances. They couldn’t fit in a full orchestra, but a dance band or, heaven help us, a rock group would work. But my point is that there is a door at the end of that virtually unused passageway. So if I were going to murder someone in the pantry, I’d take the body out through the loading-dock door and back in again by way of the forgotten door.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been locked?’ I asked, frowning.

  ‘Probably, but it can be opened from the inside.’

  ‘You’re positing an accomplice.’

  ‘Well, love, I don’t see how it could have been done by one person. That is, if it was done the way you suppose. It isn’t easy to move a body, and Hartford was a solidly muscular man. If one has to do it in a hurry, and by stealth, the task becomes much harder.’

  ‘Do the police accept my theory?’

  ‘According to John, they’re giving it due consideration. The stains on the pantry floor tend to support it. On the other hand, they could be something besides blood, and there’s the locked pantry door to deal with.’

  ‘I do wish I could see the pantry.’

  ‘That won’t happen until those stains are analysed. It’s being rushed through. This is, as you of course realize, a high-profile case.’

  ‘Yes, just because Hartford was such an “important” man. Never mind that he was an egomaniac and a sociopath! While the murder of Elizabeth George, an ordinary good person, gets put on the back burner.’

  ‘Simmer down, love. You know quite well that the police can only do so much, and they do have to pay attention to public opinion. They’ll find Elizabeth’s killer soon. Especially if, as we believe, he or she was one of Hartford’s minions. They’re likely to be in considerable disarray now that their boss has fallen victim himself.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose. How soon do you think they’ll be done here? The police, I mean?’

  John joined us. ‘In another hour or so. Of course the pantry will still be sealed off. Now look, both of you. I’ve been on my feet for longer than I wanted to be. I can’t keep up this pace the way I used to. It’s getting on for lunch time. Suppose we go find something to eat, and compare notes. Unless you want to look around some more, Dorothy.’

  ‘No, I’ve seen what I need to see, until I can get in the pantry. Lunch sounds like a good idea.’

  John knew of a good Chinese place not far away, so we got a table in a secluded corner, ordered a huge platter of dim sum, and fell to.

  ‘I don’t know what most of this is,’ I said when I had taken the edge off my appetite, ‘but it’s delicious.’

  ‘Yes, I thought it would be a good antidote to our conversation, which may not be so delicious.’

  I nodded. ‘John, Alan and I have lots of theories, and a certain amount of support for them, but nothing in the way of real, solid evidence. But before we even get into that, how’s Harold? How did he react to the return of his knife?’

  ‘With the reserved dignity that I’ve come to expect from the indigenous peoples. Many of them, perhaps most, have good reason to fear and despise the white invaders who stole their lands and their way of life, and whose diseases wiped out whole tribes. But they are a proud and wise people who realize that showing their real feelings is not only demeaning, but can be dangerous. So they are courteous, but distant. It is remarkable, I think, that Laura and Harold were so accepting of Teresa. The pure-blood peoples are not always so kind to the Métis.’

  ‘I think the old lady – I have the greatest difficulty thinking of her as Laura – I think she has lived so long and seen so much that she’s become wise. An elder of her tribe, except I don’t suppose women can be elders. Anyway, she took to Teresa right away, and apparently what she says, goes. I am so glad you were able to give Harold a clean bill of health. I have the feeling things might have got a bit ugly otherwise.’

  ‘You could well be right. The trouble is, having lost Harold as a suspect in Elizabeth’s death, we have no one else. The only other faint possibilities, Silas’s birds, have been exonerated completely.’

  ‘Well, that’s one of the things we wanted to talk to you about. We had a long talk with Silas yesterday and found out a good deal about his background – very interesting.’

  Alan and I gave him a précis: Silas’s early life, his education, his ambitions cut short by Paul Hartford’s criminal activities. ‘We are not certain it was Hartford,’ Alan cautioned. ‘The description of his way of life fits, but we have no more than that to go on.’

  ‘Alan may not be certain,’ I retorted. ‘I am. But as I said, there’s no proof you could take to court.’

  John drummed his fingers on the table. ‘As it happens, there might actually be some evidence. One of the things we do, as of course you know, Alan – “we” being the police – one of the things we do when investigating a homicide is an extensive search into the victim’s background. That’s much quicker and easie
r now than it used to be in the days before the Internet. And we – well, they, but I’m counting myself in for the duration – we found out quite a lot about Paul Hartford. He was’ – John hesitated – ‘not an entirely admirable character.’

  ‘Which comes as no surprise to anybody,’ I said sourly. ‘Especially you and Amy.’

  ‘His character, no. Nothing we could learn about his character would shock us. But I confess I was somewhat surprised at how near he’d skated to the wrong side of the law. And sometimes just slightly over the edge. One of those incidents might well be the one you’ve just described.’

  I leaned forward eagerly, so eagerly that I knocked over my cup of jasmine tea. ‘Really! Tell.’

  ‘Don’t get all excited. It won’t lead anywhere, except to shore up your ideas. It was a long time ago, in the eighties. There was a drug raid on one Silas Varner; he was arrested for possession of a considerable quantity of cocaine, the drug of choice back then. He had no previous criminal record, though he’d been on the radar for a time years earlier, when he was part of the hippy scene in Nelson. So they brought him in, and he was tried and convicted even though he swore up and down he had nothing to do with it, that it was planted there by a woman.

  ‘Well, one of the officers working the case had some doubts about it. The evidence was there, quite enough to convict Varner, but the officer knew a little about the “back to the land” crowd and didn’t think Varner fit the profile of a drug dealer.’

  ‘He doesn’t,’ I said firmly. ‘A little pot, okay, maybe. When he was young. But he really is tied to the land, to nature. Even back then he wouldn’t have wanted to poison himself with that rot.’

  ‘Well, this young officer – what was his name? I’ve lost it, but he was of your mind. So he started keeping an unobtrusive eye on the woman in the case.’

  I nodded. ‘Delilah.’

  John smiled. ‘Is that what Varner called her? Appropriate. I gather she was a … er … the sort of woman who preys on men. I never saw a picture of her, but the descriptions were graphic. At any rate, when she started using a little too much of the poison herself, and became unreliable as a dealer or go-between, her partners in crime threw her to the wolves – so of course she did the same to them. And one of the people she accused of being in the game was––’

  ‘Paul Hartford,’ Alan and I chorused. ‘So,’ I continued, ‘now you – they, I mean – can bring her in and get her to tell her story.’

  Alan shook his head. ‘For one thing, Dorothy, what good would it do? Hartford can’t be called to account for anything now. And for another …’ He paused, looking at John, who nodded.

  ‘You guessed it. The woman’s been dead for years, an overdose. Perhaps an accident, perhaps suicide, perhaps murder lest she say too much. At any rate …’ He raised his arms. ‘Too late. Way too late.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The waiter came and cleaned up the spilled tea, and brought some more. We went ahead with our dim sum. ‘Now that you have some real evidence against Hartford, won’t it make it easier to round up some of his hangers-on? The ones who presumably have been carrying on his campaign of minor terrorism?’

  ‘But we have no real evidence of Hartford’s criminal activity,’ said John patiently. ‘We have a very old report of some remarks by a woman who is now dead. No court on earth would admit that as evidence of anything. And as we keep having to remind ourselves, Hartford is dead. What he may or may not have done many years ago is moot.’

  ‘But we know what he did!’

  ‘Dorothy, you know as well as I do that the police often know quite well who perpetrated a crime, but cannot find enough hard evidence to make a case. It’s one of the great frustrations of the job.’

  I shoved my plate away. ‘Okay. Yes, I get that. And much as I’d like Hartford shown up as what he was, I suppose it wouldn’t do any good in the end. At least now he’ll never be an MP, thanks be to God! But the people who did his bidding, his bully boys – they need to be tracked down and prosecuted. Elizabeth George and her family, her tribe, deserve justice.’

  John started to speak, and I held up my hand. ‘I know the police are working on it, except right now most of their resources are being devoted to the Hartford murder. And I get that, too. But there’s one tiny lead to Elizabeth’s murderer that we haven’t followed up yet. I’ll swear that Silas Varner saw something, or someone, when he was out with his birds that day. If Alan agrees, and if it’s okay with you, I’d like to go up tomorrow and talk to him about it. Who knows – it might be some use.’

  Before we went to bed that night I remembered that I’d intended to call Jane, but again I’d left it too late. Morning would do.

  So the next morning Alan and I went to the early service at the sweet little church we’d found, and then headed up the now-familiar road to Silas’s refuge. ‘I wish he had a phone,’ I grumbled as mile unrolled after mile. ‘I would hate to make this trip for nothing.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful drive. If the old man isn’t at home, we can always drive back to Duncan for some lunch, and shopping.’

  ‘It’s Sunday. Don’t know if the shops will be open.’

  ‘The restaurants will be, anyway. Live in the moment, love.’

  Duncan, as we passed through it, presented a festive air. The streets thronged with people, and maple leaf flags hung from every building, every lamp post, gaily red and white.

  ‘What on earth?’ asked Alan in puzzlement.

  ‘I don’t … oh yes, I do! Canada Day! John said it was July first, and that’s Wednesday. I’ll bet they’re starting a bit early, just as we do in the States for the Fourth.’

  ‘There’ll be no lack of things to do, then, if Silas isn’t home.’

  He wasn’t. We bumped slowly over the terrible road, parked in the bushes, and walked up his drive, or the rutted path that did duty for a drive. There was no noise from the mews, so we walked around the back to their open-air enclosure and peered.

  There were two windows I hadn’t noticed before, one into each side of the mews. Both were open, hinged at the top and hooked up to the outside wall. We could easily see that the birds were not there.

  ‘Drat! He’s taken them out to hunt.’

  ‘Yes. He did tell us he flew them almost every day. He’ll be back. I’ll go up to the house and leave a note for him, Dorothy, shall I, while you wiggle the car out of the shrubbery. We can have some lunch in Duncan and come back. If you want to do that, of course.’

  ‘You bet I do. Do you suppose, if we gave him a mobile, he’d use it?’

  ‘I very much doubt it. He wants to keep the world at bay as much as he possibly can.’

  It was early for lunch, but even so, with the crowds thronging Duncan, it was a while before we could get a meal. Then, not knowing how long Silas might be out, we roamed a bit, doing some window shopping, but not entering any of the shops, which were filled with tourists eager to spend their money.

  ‘I have a certain sympathy with Silas’s misanthropy,’ I said after a large man, hurrying out of a shop, cannoned into me and nearly knocked me flat. ‘People en masse are sometimes not very lovable.’

  ‘I agree. Shall we go back and see if he’s returned?’

  We stopped at a bakery and picked up some cookies and a loaf of wholegrain bread as a present, and set off.

  We were lucky this time. Silas had returned, and greeted us with what, for him, was cordiality. He looked a little less shabby than usual, and for a wonder, he didn’t smell.

  ‘Saw your note,’ he said, sounding embarrassed. ‘Cleaned up a bit. Come on in. Mind the rabbits.’

  Rabbits? Then I saw the canvas bag sitting on the dry sink. Several paws protruded. I averted my eyes.

  ‘Don’t s’pose either of you ever ate rabbit stew,’ he said with a grin.

  ‘You suppose wrong,’ said Alan. ‘My father was a fisherman, but my grandmother lived on a moor, and rabbit was an important part of her diet, especially just after the war when foo
d was in very short supply in England. She was a good shot, and a good cook. Her rabbit stew was some of the best food I ever ate. Did your birds catch those for you?’

  ‘Yes, one each. Didn’t want to eat them – weren’t hungry – just enjoyed the catch. And ma’am, before you get to feelin’ bad for the rabbit, or judgin’ my hawks, have you ever seen a cat catch a mouse just for the sport of it?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I was just being foolish. Hunting is the way of the world.’

  Silas nodded. ‘Ever since Eve ate that apple. Before that, maybe everybody lived in peace together and ate grass or whatever. In this world, it’s kill, and eat, for survival.’

  Well, Silas knew a lot about survival. Alan cleared his throat. ‘Mr Varner, we have a few more questions for you.’

  ‘You can call me Silas. Reckoned you didn’t come just for my company.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But another time, if you’ll allow it, we’d like to come just for your company. This time, because we feel guilty about pestering you so much, we brought you a treat. I know you can cook, but when we were here before I didn’t see any way for you to bake, so we brought cookies and some bread.’

  ‘I’m partial to good bread, and I don’t know when I’ve last had cookies. Home-made?’

  ‘Well, no. A bakery in Duncan. But they’re good – I sampled one on the way here.’

  ‘I’ll make some tea to go with them.’

  We settled as we had before, on piles of books with me afforded the only chair, and munched companionably for a little while. Then Silas took the lead.

  ‘Questions, you said. Let’s have ’em.’

  ‘Just one, really. Dorothy and I both had the feeling that you knew something about the day Elizabeth George died. We have, by the way, pinned down the way she died, or rather the police have. She was attacked with a knife used to carve wood, one with a shape that looks quite a lot like a bird’s talon. That’s why she was at first thought to have been attacked by a raptor, but only for a few hours. The coroner knew at once that no bird had caused those wounds, and we have now identified the knife.’