A Killer in King's Cove

by Iona Whishaw

  “A small what, Lieutenant?”

  “Pension. Army pension.”

  Ames glanced up from his notes. Harris seemed uncertain, suddenly. “I see. I’m not meaning to pry; I’m just trying to get a complete picture of the community. Did most of the original people come around that time?”

  The gruff demeanour was back. “Between 1888 and about 1904. Then this last crop that arrived just now. The Yanks. God knows why they are here. Running from something, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Was your family running from something?”

  “Certainly not! My relatives were fascinated by the thought of the Dominion of Canada. They wanted a more adventurous life. In the end, after trying logging, they settled on apples. They grow best around here—pears as well. You need to go farther west for peaches and cherries. A bloody fire in 1919 wiped out the forest and most of the orchards before it stopped. I wasn’t here. I was late getting back. Wounded. Found the wife gone, the orchards gone, most of the forest gone. Lucky to still have my house.”

  Ames, ever relegated to taking notes, was scribbling shorthand across the table from Darling. “Can you tell me, Lieutenant Harris, how does the business of the creek work? How many households obtain their water from the creek?”

  “There are two creeks in King’s Cove. One feeds the north side, that’s this creek, and one feeds the south side, that’ll be the Armstrongs, the Hughes up the hill, and Mather, up the other way. This creek I’m on feeds the Bertolli crowd, this house, and myself. There’s a family that had the place at the very top of the road, but they left, oh, before the Great War, to sort out some family matters. Haven’t seen hide nor hair since then.”

  “I see. That’s why only you and Miss Winslow noticed anything wrong with the flow of the water. How is the water diverted to the different households?”

  “It’s pretty simple really, there’s a wooden trough constructed, almost like a small dam, and water is collected and then diverted into where it needs to go. The diversion where the body was found divides in two and sends water off to the two places. The Yank gets his water farther up the creek. Usually there’s more water in the creeks but it’s been pretty hot, so the creeks have gone down a bit. That’s why the body there affected the supply.”

  “You must have to worry about that sort of thing—dry spells, overly rainy spells, silting up, and so on?”

  “Generally it’s not been bad. We have screens as the water gets near the houses, and larger screens near the top to stop leaves and so on. But I usually go up a couple of times a year to clean the place up. Now with this Miss Winslow, I can see I’ll be looking after hers as well. Can’t think what possessed a woman to come out here alone. It’s madness. She’ll be gone by next spring, I’ll bet any money. Won’t stand the winter!”

  Ames smiled behind his notebook. He would bet money she could stand any amount of winter. He looked across at Darling, but the inspector seemed to be thinking of what more he ought to ask.

  “You say you do not know this man, Lieutenant Harris. Did you see him arrive here? Hear any cars you didn’t recognize?”

  Harris gave a long sigh, suggesting, Darling thought, that he’d had enough. He followed this with a pause, indicating what? Darling wondered. “I did not get to see his face, did I? Anyway, this seems to have happened at night. I’m afraid I sleep like a log, Inspector.”

  “What makes you believe it happened at night?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Anyone dragging bodies around would be seen during the day.” Ames scribbled. Darling took a moment to look in silence at Harris. “Have you, during the course of the day, run across a car parked or abandoned anywhere?”

  “Really, if I had, it’s the first thing I would have said, isn’t it? A strange car here is very rare and we’d notice it, any of us, right away.”

  Darling stood up. “I expect you’re right. Thank you, Lieutenant. If you think of anything further, would you call the police station in Nelson? The exchange will put you through. Ask for me or Ames here.” His stance suggested to Harris that he was being dismissed.

  “It’s the bloody Yanks, you mark me!” Harris grumbled as he left.

  Darling watched him until he had passed the barn, and noticed he favoured his left leg. He felt almost a kinship with him for a fleeting second. Back from a war and nothing much to show for it all. He certainly seemed to have it in for the American, however. Darling made a mental note, in case it mattered later.

  He stepped on to the porch and was taken by the view, as everyone was the first time. The overwhelming impression was one of multiple shades of blues and greens: the intense blue of the cloudless, now mid-afternoon sky. The layering of sunlit and shaded greens of the mountains rolling down toward the far shore of the lake. The water glinting and shimmering emerald and turquoise reflections of the sky and mountains, and the near, brighter greens of the lawn and shrubbery of Miss Winslow’s garden. Darling, who lived in a small house in town with, admittedly, a nice view of Nelson and the lake from his hillside vantage, took his eyes from this much grander display of nature at its most beguiling and turned back to the task at hand. Miss Winslow had been sitting in a green canvas deck chair with a Penguin book, which he was tempted to try to identify, and now she looked up at his appearance.

  “Ready for me?”

  “Yes, if you don’t mind. It shouldn’t take long.” He was reluctant to go back in to the kitchen, which had now taken on the air of an interview room. But they did and when they had settled and Lane had her hands folded in front of her and was looking at him expectantly, he began again. Ames had dropped his chair back on to four legs from the two he’d leaned back on in the interval, and was now poised with his pencil. “You’ve been here how long, Miss Winslow?” asked Darling.

  “Barely a month. I came out to see the place in April and bought it without a second thought.”

  “Where had you been living before?”

  Lane considered this question. She did not really think of herself as living anywhere. More just staying places, trying them on to see what fit. “Just before I came out to Canada, I was in France for about six months, and before that I was in London, where I worked during the war.”

  “Are you from either of these places?”

  “I’m from . . . well, my family are English, but I was born in Riga. I went to school in England, obviously. My father was in the, ah, diplomatic corps.” That had better do, she thought.

  “Quite a varied life, Miss Winslow. With all those exotic addresses at your fingertips, what on earth brought you here? You seem to have gone as far away from home as you could get.”

  Home. That was the trouble, really. Home was elusive. She felt most at home in Bilderingshof where she had been a child, but it was a vanished world. Her mother was dead, she hadn’t seen her father since she had gone up to university—she had no idea where he was—and her grandparents had had to share their house with a bevy of Russian officers who gave no indication they’d be moving. Her grandmother and grandfather had finally moved back to an ancient family home in Scotland, a land as unfamiliar to them as Canada was to their granddaughter. Though Lane had been to school in England, it certainly didn’t feel like home to her either. She had decided, on the basis of a poster, to come out to British Columbia. It showed a woman standing on a hill with fields and snow-covered mountains behind her and a great, endless blue sky. A new, clean, uncomplicated country with no blood in the soil from centuries of wars. It was ironic that the first thing to confront her was a corpse, bleeding into her water supply. She shuddered. All right, he hadn’t been bleeding, but metaphorically, his life had bled away.

  “I saw a wonderful poster, if you must know, and thought how beautiful it looked. I was right, I think.”

  Darling looked at her. He would have liked to ask if she would not be lonely so far from everything she knew and living among what were patently people who were significantly older and by all indications more bad-tempered than she was. Not relevant t
o the case, he supposed. He also had a nagging feeling about why someone would come this far. Was she running from something?

  Like Harris, she had not heard a car at night, and had no idea why a man would come to die in her creek. Then, for a fleeting moment she remembered the car in her dream, and was about to dismiss it. “Funnily, I did dream about a car in the distance. I often dream of that, though, so it probably has no bearing on this.”

  “What time might that have been?”

  She tried to imagine when it might have been. Her nights were such a dark confusion to her. “I couldn’t say, I’m afraid. I . . . I didn’t wake up from that dream. When I do wake at night I check the clock. A habit I should stop. It doesn’t help anything, really.”

  Darling pondered the troubled look on Miss Winslow’s face. Guilt? Or something he himself recognized all too well: trouble sleeping. “Thank you, Miss Winslow. I’m going to go along and talk to some of your neighbours. If we need anything else, we will contact you. Can you write your phone number here, please?”

  When Darling and Ames were halfway up the path toward the car Ames said, “Good trick, sir, getting her number like that.”

  “Shut up, Ames.”

  Darling and Ames were tucked back into their maroon roadster and about to back the car out onto the road. “Wait,” Darling said. Ames stopped the car and the two of them stared at the outbuilding by the gate. “What is that, I wonder? It’s not a barn exactly, is it?” He got out of the car and stood gazing at it. “Come on Ames, walkies.”

  The outbuilding looked grey and brittle in the afternoon heat. The front had a couple of small windows at ground level that were so completely encrusted with dust that you could scarcely see into the place. A second set of windows about fifteen feet up indicated a second floor, perhaps. A door with a rusty padlock stood on the right. It was clear it had not been opened for what looked like years. They walked around the right of the building to the windowless wall that faced the main house. Darling stopped and looked down the slight slope. There were several large trees in the fifty or so yards between this outbuilding and the house. From this angle the large blue spruce nearly obscured the little landing and the door. Around the third side, the building took on more of an aspect of barn. There was a large set of double doors that would open outward and a small side door, and again, a couple of filthy windows. An assortment of unused animal pens was outside, a shed full of wood, and a chopping block.

  Darling inspected the ground. “Looking for something, sir?” inquired Ames.

  “Yes, Ames. I’m a detective. I am looking for something. You might emulate me in this, if you don’t mind. At the moment I’m looking to see if anyone has been moving things in and out of this building. Would you care to speculate on this?”

  Ames smiled at this. “Very funny, sir. And no, no one has. The ground has a thick covering of pine needles and dirt and I’d say these doors had not been opened for at least a season.”

  “Very good, Ames. You may yet turn into a sleuth.”

  They found they could not walk easily around the fourth side of the building because of a great deal of underbrush, and so retraced their steps to the car.

  Once out on the road, the car was facing toward the post office. “We’re missing a car at this point, unless Tweed Jacket was dropped off here, or brought here by a local. Let’s take a little drive around here and see what we can see,” said Darling. The post office lay only two hundred yards down the road, which ended in a large grassy area where it was evident cars would be parked by people visiting or picking up their mail. Armstrong’s red truck was parked between the house and an underground outdoor cellar. “You could put a body in the back of that truck quite handily,” Ames observed.

  An older woman came to the screen door at the sound of the car and waited, smiling, with her arms crossed across her aproned chest.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am,” said Darling. “I’m Inspector Darling, this is Constable Ames from the Nelson police. You are?”

  “I’m Eleanor Armstrong and Kenny, my other half, is working around the back. Can I help?”

  “Perhaps you can. We need to ask you and your husband some questions. Is the truck yours?”

  “It’s my husband’s. Kenny uses it to bring the mail and so on up from the wharf. In the season we help people get their apple boxes down to the boat. Ah, here he is now.” Eleanor had by this time been joined by Kenny, who was carrying a small handsaw and wiping his forehead.

  “Goodness, what’s happened? I heard all the vehicles over the way.”

  “This is Inspector Darling, and he needs to ask some questions, dear. Won’t you come in, Inspector?”

  “Thank you, we’ll be fine here. Have you heard or seen a strange car at all in the last few days? Anyone come here you don’t know? I see you are the local post office. You might be in a better position than most to have seen anything out of the ordinary.”

  “What’s the trouble?” asked Kenny. “And no, I’ve heard nothing unusual. No new cars. I’d spot those in a jiffy.”

  “Would you mind if we just had a peek at your truck, sir?”

  Darling watched Armstrong’s face as he waited for the answer. “Yes, of course.” Armstrong began to move toward the truck, his face now puzzled. He pulled open the driver’s side door but the two policemen had walked to the back and were peering into the wooden box shoved against the cab, now empty, where he sometimes threw the sacks of mail if the weather was bad. The younger one with the camera was making notes and then took a photograph.

  “Can I ask what this is in aid of, Inspector?”

  “We were called out by Miss Winslow, your neighbour. She found a body in her creek. Are you on the same creek as she is?”

  Eleanor Armstrong had joined them, perplexed by this sudden interest in the truck.

  “A body? Whose body? Oh dear, this has never gone and happened in her creek! Oh God, I hope it wasn’t one of the neighbours! Was it a suicide, Inspector? Poor Lane! I haven’t heard or seen a soul that doesn’t usually clutter up this place.” Eleanor Armstrong delivered all of this in one breath.

  “We do not believe it was a suicide, Mrs. Armstrong. It looks a good deal like murder.” He turned to the taciturn Kenny, whose brow was furrowed in what could have been thought or disapproval. “Anything you could add, sir?”

  But Kenny was stuck back at Darling’s suggestion of murder. “Murder? At King’s Cove? It’s ridiculous, unthinkable! It wasn’t Harris, was it? I know a few that would want to murder him!”

  “We’re not on the same creek, by the way,” said Eleanor.

  “Yes, of course,” interjected Kenny Armstrong. “Sorry. Bit taken aback by this. Poor Lane. Must go and see to her after this. Let’s see. Today is Sunday. I make a run to the wharf three days a week, Monday, Thursday, Saturday, for mail and any supplies that have been sent up from town, but I only go down the road you must have come up and then across the Nelson road, about thirty yards along, to the road that goes down to the lake. I’ve not gone up any of our other roads for weeks, so things could get past me. Certainly no one strange has been here.”

  “Unless you count the locals!” Eleanor said.

  “What do you mean by that, Mrs. Armstrong?” asked Ames, his notebook poised.

  “Nothing, really. Most of the people around here have been here since before the Great War. Some people’s peculiarities intensify in a remote region like this after many years.”

  “She means they’re stark raving mad!” snorted Kenny. “But I dare say they are harmless. There has never been a murder here since we were here. I came over with my parents when I was a lad in ’92. That house Miss Winslow lives in used to be ours. My mother lived in it till just a few years ago. We’re delighted to have her there, I must say. She’s improved the look of the place no end! Nice woman too. Writes. Poor thing. Is she all right?”

  “She seems fine. It was she who found the body, along with a Lieutenant Harris. He was with her this morning. I spok
e with them just now,” Darling said, inclining his head to indicate the direction of Lane’s house.

  “Oh, blimey! Kenny, run over there and rescue her this instant!” exclaimed Eleanor, her hand on her forehead. “Lieutenant indeed!” she added.

  Having been given a little hand-drawn map to the rest of the roads and settlements at King’s Cove that Kenny sketched on the back of an envelope, Darling and Ames were now cruising slowly along the upper road.

  “A useful truck, certainly, but again, dragging a body about the place? Could either of them have managed it?” Ames, as usual, was beginning his list of favourites and non-starters for the crime. Darling, who was thorough and never put anything past anyone, had nevertheless been impressed over the last year by how accurate Ames’s instincts about people had been. Grudgingly, he was inclined to agree with Ames’s assessment of the Armstrongs as candidates, but he merely grunted noncommittally. The long, rutted driveway that seemed to have experienced mostly tractor use ended in an attractive mock Tudor with flowerbeds around it. A couple of outbuildings were visible, and at least one dilapidated roadster, circa 1920, parked on a lay-by. It looked as if it hadn’t been used in some years. There was no sign of activity.

  There was a deep silence when they got out of the car and no sign of anyone. “These people are, no doubt, out about the business of their orchards,” said Darling.

  “What do you have to do with an orchard at this time of year, sir?” asked Ames, peering up the long sweep of orderly rows of trees.

  “Spray them? Irrigate them? Weed them? My degree was in literature and history, Ames, and I buy apples out of a wooden box at the greengrocer in Nelson. How they get there, I’ve no idea.” An inspection of the car confirmed that it had not been driven for many years. A rusted gas cap was half-open and grass and weeds had grown up around the wheels and woven through the spokes.