by Iona Whishaw
“Yes, of course,” she replied. In a few minutes she stopped, relief sweeping through her. The shoe was still there, looking more than ever in the light of day as if it had been dropped. If it had not been there its absence would have indicated that whoever it was had been back again. Just as quickly her anxiety was renewed. Not only did she have to worry about Darling’s puzzling attitude to her and this incomprehensible problem of the note, now she realized that she had become used to feeling safe so far from anywhere. But clearly someone had been right here on her land, who might be—no, was almost certainly—a murderer. She could see that the area around the shoe had been disturbed and realized with a sinking heart that the only disturbance visible would be what she had caused. Any ability to follow who might have come there in the night had been eliminated by her own reckless crashing about in the dark.
From where they were standing they could see Harris’s field stretching out and then down on the other side of the fence. Ames was already photographing the shoe and Darling was inspecting, Lane assumed, its position or condition or something. She looked across the fence to the other side, but it was impossible to see anything much but deep yellow grass and low fern and the purple spatters of what she thought of as wild sweet peas that tangled around the base of them.
“I think I must have been here and the light I saw was sort of over there, at eye level, and then I saw it moving that way.” She moved her arm to the left. “It was going down as well as away, and then it disappeared. I could see even last night that the person would have been heading across the field and down toward the road, I assumed to Harris’s house. Though in that case, why not cut down toward the right, which probably leads directly to the back of the house? Much shorter than going by the road. It would surprise me that he didn’t know about it, but it was three in the morning.”
“Thank you. We’ll take it from here. You may, if you would be so kind, return to the house. We will stop by on the way out.” Darling touched the rim of his hat, and went past her with Ames at his heels holding the bag and his camera.
Poor Ames, she thought, having to do all the heavy lifting. He didn’t seem to mind it. In fact he appeared to like his inspector. She was sorry to be ordered away. The heat of the afternoon filtering through the trees and the immediacy and intrigue of the shoe had begun to keep the other, darker, thoughts at bay. She turned and walked back up the path and down toward the house, gleaming white against the lawn and weeping willow that hung over a long-empty rock pond. She would revive the pond, she thought. Kenny might know how to do that. He’d probably built the thing in the first place. Now though, the security she had felt in this fresh new land was shaken. She would have to face it, have to follow Darling in to town, have to look squarely at the dead man and pray he was no one she knew, because really, no matter what, she was never going back.
“PUZZLING, SIR,” AMES declared as he and Darling were returning to where they had parked the car in Lane’s driveway.
“Yes, Ames. Well spotted. Murders in which the suspect does not walk into our police station to turn himself in usually are.” They had reached the car and Ames was opening the trunk to put away his camera bag and the shoe, which he’d wrapped in his handkerchief. “However, if you mean that the behaviour of Miss Winslow is puzzling, I must concede. Still—” he said this with sudden resolve “—we’d better go down the hill and have a chat with Harris. Run and tell Miss W. that we will be back in due course. Let’s see if she does a bunk while we’re gone.” He didn’t really think she would, he decided, which added to every puzzling aspect of the case.
“Now then, Ames. Let us contemplate this shoe business. We have found one shoe on the path but not the other and furthermore, this shoe was not there when we went up to see and retrieve the body. We would have seen it. Well, unless Miss Winslow moved it last night, which she has assured us in her meticulous way that she did not.”
Ames had backed the car into the road during this speech and now reflected on Miss Winslow. “You know, sir, she shows some familiarity with policing. Didn’t she say she is a writer? Perhaps she writes crime novels.”
“Shoes, Ames. Shoes.” But Darling made a mental note to ask Miss Winslow that very question.
“Right. Well, are they the dead man’s shoes? And if they are, were they taken off after he was killed and if so, why? Where have they been up to now? And this is the part I don’t get, sir: why only one?” He drove slowly back toward the Nelson road junction, as if wanting to give this conversation sufficient time.
“Good questions, Ames. A for effort. Let’s see what we learn from Mr. Harris.”
“GOD, WHAT A depressing place,” Ames said, looking around at the neglected garden and peeling house.
“Yes, thank you, Ames,” Darling said. At that moment Harris appeared at the door of the barn.
“Mr. Harris, good morning. I wonder if you could spare us a couple of moments?” Darling said.
“I haven’t got all day,” was the reply.
This caused Ames to look around. Though the house was positioned with a view of the lake and looked like it had been built to house a family, the bleakness of it was the dominant note. Harris, he decided, had nothing but time.
“Miss Winslow has just told us that she saw someone on your property at about three in the morning, walking about in the brush with a flashlight. Can you tell us anything about this?”
“I tell you what I told her. It is absolutely fantastical rubbish. This is a quiet and long-standing community. People do not fumble about in the underbrush in the middle of the night.”
Darling switched tactics. He would not, he decided, bring up the fact that a shoe that had not been seen on the path on the first visit to the scene now had appeared there. It was possible that this man, angrily fisting and unfisting an oily cloth in a way that suggested either nervousness or a desire to pop him one, could have been the one moving shoes in the middle of the night.
“Do you live here alone, Mr. Harris?”
“What bloody business is it of yours?”
Darling was pulling for the pop in the nose theory. “We are trying to solve a murder, Mr. Harris, and someone was walking around your property last night with a flashlight, an activity that you have just told us would be nearly impossible to imagine in this traditional, well-run community, and if it wasn’t you, perhaps it was someone else in your household.”
Harris threw the rag viciously onto the floor of the tractor. “There hasn’t been anyone in my ‘household’ since my slut of a wife left in the first war.”
“Did you quarrel?”
“No, we did not quarrel. I was not here; there was a war on, in case you’ve forgotten. I suppose she got tired of being alone and buggered off.”
“So you came back from Europe and found her gone? When did you get back?”
Harris stood squarely in front of Darling and seemed to pull himself up to some new, menacing height. “That question can have absolutely nothing to do with this business. I got back after the thankless job of serving my country in 1920 to find my wife gone and my orchard burned. Since then I keep myself to myself. I was not crashing about in the bush last night and I did not kill that man and I want you off my property. Now clear off!”
Darling tipped his hat and turned back toward the car. “Come, Ames. Please don’t leave the area, Mr. Harris. We may have a few more questions at a later date.” When he opened the door of the car, he put his foot on the running board and then looked back at the simmering Harris with a pleasant expression. “You’ve done well, sir, orchard-wise, if you found yourself burnt out. You must have worked hard to put it back together.”
And with that he was back in the car. “Back to Miss Winslow’s, please, Ames. What did you think of Mr. Harris?”
“Am I right in suggesting he seemed angrier than absolutely necessary? Why all this fuss about when he got back from the front? It’s ancient history, isn’t it? Nearly thirty years ago. Come to think of it,” Ames added brightl
y, “if he got back in 1920, that is, in fact, late. My dad returned quickly at the end of the proceedings.”
Darling turned to look at Ames with interest. He realized with a twinge of guilt that he too often employed his constable only as a foil for his jibes. Ames was quite a good young policeman. Perhaps he didn’t give him quite enough scope. “You know something I don’t?”
“Well, only this. I happen to know that there was a big fire here in 1919. Quite a lot of orchard burned as well as local forested land, and it set the apple industry back a bit. My dad again.”
“Well done. So he makes a large fuss over a couple harmless questions, and he comes back late from the war. Neither one is a hanging offence; nevertheless, it’s peculiar. Especially his trying to get us off the activities of last night. Remind me when we get back. I must send a wire to the War Office. There might be something in Harris’s war record.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Somme, France, 1917
“HURRY, WOULD YOU? I’M DYING of cold here.” Robin Harris flapped his hand at John Armstrong, indicating the thermos of tea John was holding. If he were to put his head over the edge of the trench, he knew he would see a strip of luminescent grey on the eastern edge of the horizon, directly behind the enemy line. Harris had been imagining it with a combination of longing and anxiety. That first light always seemed infused with the freshness of any new day, as if on this day, anything was possible. He used to love the mornings at home. Here the light turned quickly to a grey smudge and today’s light promised another “over the top.” The prospect made him fidgety and ill at ease with everything.
John took another noisy swig. Steam rose from his mouth in the semi-light. He handed the thermos across to Harris and wiped his mouth. The whistle was blown somewhere nearby in the murky light. “Bugger,” he muttered and leaned against the grimy, slatted wall of the trench.
“Bugger indeed,” replied his cousin Harris. He put the thermos down and shook hands. Then they were over. It seemed there was a long moment of silence, as if they ran in slow motion over a murky landscape, and then a burst of gunfire that exploded seemingly everywhere at once.
IN LATER YEARS, he would reflect that this was the last coherent memory Harris had of that day. The subsequent hours and weeks and months were lost. When he found himself in hospital in Sussex, he felt that he had literally found himself; that he woke up one day and he was in a strange place and it was a cool, sunny spring day.
He knew he hadn’t been unconscious the whole time, because chipper nurses were charging him with things he’d said. “Oh, now, that’s not what you said last week, is it?” He was very, very frightened to realize he had no idea. He became afraid that he was mad, or had been, and would not ask how long he’d been there, in case this madness was somehow confirmed on the face of some bemused intern. He found it strange that he knew exactly who he was, Robin Harris, lieutenant, Princess Mary’s regiment, King’s Cove, British Columbia, and that he had a wife named Liz, but he could not remember anything from the moment he shook hands with John and they were over the trench on that early morning.
Then it happened. He was in a session of “therapy” with a young doctor. He dreaded these sessions because he felt stupid and frightened. Dr. Rich evinced nothing but patience as he tried to tease away at Harris’s brain, and this infuriated him. Once Harris burst out, “Just send me bloody well home. What is this costing the British government, eh? What I don’t remember isn’t worth remembering.”
“Usually it will be something significant that is being cloaked by the unconscious. That is what we want to get at, Lieutenant. And as to the expense, don’t lose sleep. You are a war hero and were at the Somme, without you lot we’d still be out there or else I’d be conducting this session in German. Now let’s go back. John has his hand out toward you with the thermos of tea. Can you tell me what either of you said in that moment?” John’s hand is reaching, but there is no thermos. He is reaching up from the ground. Why is he on the ground? Robin feels himself backing away. Mud is grabbing at his boots. He falls and tries to scuttle backward on his behind. John’s hand is still there, his fingers splayed out, reaching. Is it John? He tries to stop the memory and see his face, but now it is unleashed, a flood. He has regained his footing and is running away from the hand. He hears John’s voice, calling, “Help, please.”
It’s the “please.” Robin slams his hands over his ears and closes his eyes. He can hear Dr. Rich through the blocking of his ears, indistinct. Suddenly it is the present that is fuzzy and the past, that moment, that is terrifyingly present. He can hear and smell and feel. It is mud, blood, a buzzing in his head he cannot shake. He gets the idea that by blocking his ears, he is trapping the memory inside, and he must get rid of it. He pulls his hands away and looks, mouth agape, around the room. It seems to work. The world rights itself slowly, though his heart is pounding as if he has been running.
The fool Rich is there, leaning forward, concerned. “What is it, Lieutenant Harris? Have you remembered something?” His notebook at the ready.
“No,” Robin muttered, “not a thing.”
London, England, April 15, 1946
Franks sat at his desk wondering, not for the first time, about the relevance of his work. He had the feeling someone up above him was making it all up as they went along. These secretive meetings and speculations about the motivations of a nation that a year ago had been an ally and now suddenly had become a sinister and unknowable threat. He’d understood the work during the war. Intercepting Nazi communications, muddling up their own to keep it from a clearly defined enemy with whom they were at war. He sighed. This made him want to go back to university and try again to become a dentist, or some equally uncomplicated profession. But of course one didn’t do that. His course was set and this was it. He’d been asked to go through a pile of “communications” and detect any pattern, to offer up an idea of what might be the underlying meaning. The papers, translations from Russian, had come from some other part of the organization that, again, seemed intent on keeping itself opaque, even to those who worked there.
His mind was not on it; it had to be admitted. When he’d first learned that his parents were his adopted parents, his sense of his place in the world had suddenly been rocked sideways and he had not recovered. Everything he did now seemed to have a false note about it, as if he must be living someone else’s life, as if he were holding a spot in line for someone he didn’t know. He had thought of rushing off to Cornwall to find his birth mother and he had balked at the last minute. It would make real something he couldn’t quite accept. He wondered if all adopted people felt this way, or if it was because he found out so late; if he’d known since he was young he’d have had a chance to adjust.
He had been seeing a girl he met toward the end of the war, but even this had faded. She had left in a huff from the café they were at one night, a month before, saying he was obviously seeing someone else, judging by his complete lack of interest in her. He wanted to tell her that the problem was that he was someone else, only he didn’t know who. Now, sitting at his desk, riffling through these nonsensical papers, he began to feel a tiny seed of resolve. This couldn’t go on. He had always paid attention to these small signals from inside and, though he didn’t know who he was, he reasoned that he was someone and that the signals, these instincts at least, were real. He would go to Cornwall, find his mother, and begin to make sense of his life. He would go see the director, get time off—explain to him what was going on. The director would probably think him pathetic but there was nothing he could do about that. In fact, the director, who seemed to know everything and had been his mentor, in a way, since he left the college, might know how he could find his mother. In fact, he suspected the man kept information about everyone who worked for him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LANE HAD WONDERED HOW IT would be. Would she be driven all the way into Nelson by Darling and Ames? But then they’d have to get her back. Their whispered conversation
outside the door, under her beautiful blue spruce, which suddenly seemed more precious for the sudden threat to her life here, resolved the matter. She would take her little green Ford with the agreeable Ames riding along with her, she presumed, to ensure her arrival at the station in Nelson. She brought her shopping basket with her, to lend some normalcy to the trip. After all, she herself went into town once a week. They were hardly likely to detain her there when she had nothing to do with this increasingly tiresome corpse.
She was going down the King’s Cove road, past St. Joseph’s, still and empty in the dappled afternoon sunlight, to the intersection of the main Nelson road. Darling was ahead of them. He had become opaque. Since they had returned to the house, the shoe bagged and stowed in the boot of the car, he had, if possible, an increased air of neutral courtesy. Would she mind very much accompanying them to town? She would not. In fact she’d offered to do so in the first place. She didn’t say this, of course, but she felt vaguely betrayed by his manner.
She pulled on to the road and struck by a dawning realization that made her feel quite ill. Of course: the sudden appearance of the shoe on her bit of path combined with the note. It wasn’t theoretical anymore with him. She assumed that when there was a murder they would review the possible suspects until they had evidence around which their theories could gather. It was gathering right around her. Riding with her was Ames, ostensibly to help her find the station at the other end, a task she felt might be well within her capabilities, as Nelson had only one main street.
Lane desperately wished she were alone. She had to face up to and work through what now seemed to her to be an unfair piling-on of odds. First there was the sheer ridiculousness of her suddenly being put right into the frame for a murder she could never have contemplated committing. And behind that, waiting like a lurking rat, was her greater fear that she had been found and was being called upon when she had expressly asked for, and been given permission for, a complete retirement from her service.