by Iona Whishaw
He reached the end of the building, pushed through the dense shrubbery, and came out into the open area between the house and the barn he remembered from the first day. There were small, empty animal coops and a woodcutting area. He noticed a little stagnant pond off to the left. A blue jay was making a racket overhead in one of the Douglas firs. Ames was starting down the path to the house when he stopped, frowning. The ground in front of the big doors of the barn seemed to be disturbed. He himself had looked at that ground on their first trip out and he remembered that it had been covered with a layer of evergreen needles that was clearly untouched. Strangely, it didn’t look logical. If the doors had been opened, the dust and dried evergreen needles that covered the ground would have been swept into the fan shape by the doors scraping the ground. This just looked as though the ground was disturbed. The evergreen needles were not lying cleanly on the surface as they had been, except, he realized, for when he and Darling had tramped on them in their initial inspection on the day they collected the body. They looked as though they’d been swept up and then somehow spread out again, leaving them covering the ground, but dusty. Perhaps Miss Winslow had thought to sweep them up and then changed her mind.
Almost tiptoeing, as if not to disturb the scene any further, Ames made his way to the dusty window on the right side of the door. He pressed his face to the encrusted glass and used his hands to cup his vision to block out the morning sunlight that streamed through the evergreen stand. His stomach lurched. Even through the grime on the window and the cobwebs growing thickly out of the corners on the inside, he could see that there was a small black roadster inside that had not been there when he and Darling had looked before. He stepped back, looking now toward the house, feeling furtive. He walked carefully back the way he’d come and leaned against the back side of the building.
What could this mean? Don’t be stupid, he told himself. It means that someone has put a car in the barn and tried to cover it up. Even a town-bred boy like himself could see that. If it were innocent, he would have seen the marks of the barn doors, some footsteps on that dusty ground. In fact, when he thought of it, even the footsteps he and Darling had left on their last visit had been covered over. He couldn’t go see her now. Darling had to know. He felt grimly foolish, taken in. If he was honest, he knew it was because she was so pretty. She just didn’t seem like the type.
Now, his anxiety heightened by not wanting to be discovered by her, he moved quickly back up the driveway to the gate and lifted the chain off as quietly as he could. It suddenly seemed as if the heavy chain was the loudest noise in the world. He looked back as he reclosed the gate, but did not see her. She must be in the house or around the front. He hurried up the road, now regretting the jacket and tie. It was warm and he had at least a mile to go to reach the Bertollis’, where he would have to tell Darling what he had seen.
“WHY DIDN’T YOU tell me?” Angela Bertolli was leaning against the kitchen sink with one hand over her mouth, looking at the two men sitting at the table.
“I . . . I didn’t want to worry you, or the boys. You’re happy here, aren’t you? The boys love it,” Dave Bertolli ended feebly.
“Worry me? Worry me? I’m not worried now; I’m scared to death. I knew your family was a little screwy. But this, the name change . . . How could you lie to me about your real name? How can any of us feel safe now?”
Dave Bertolli had no answer for this. He looked nervously at Inspector Darling, who had been watching the exchange studiously. Then he spoke again. “Look, if you think a guy is going to follow me all the way from New Jersey to this ridiculously out-of-the-way place, you’re crazy. And how would he have found me? How do I know? Because I had nothing to do with this! That’s how I know. I never saw the guy. I certainly didn’t kill the guy. I’m a musician, for heaven’s sake. I know I should have told you about what happened with Tony back in New York, but I promise you, it will never put us in danger. No one will come here to find a younger brother that everyone knows had nothing to do with anything. It doesn’t make sense!”
“I can tell you one thing, Inspector, he may be a liar, but Dave would never hurt a fly. Why do you think the kids are out there like little wild animals screaming and hanging in trees? He doesn’t like to tell anyone what to do.” David cast her a grateful look. When the police had gone, he might even tell her about the letter from his brother, saying someone might have found out about his alias. Whoever it was still would have no idea where he was. He knew he didn’t have to worry, but there was no point in complicating things by showing the inspector the letter. It was meaningless anyway, because whoever had killed the man in the creek, it certainly hadn’t been him. In a way he was relieved to be able to tell Angela the whole truth, though he knew he was in for a rough night.
Inspector Darling, having been forced to write his own notes, closed his little book and was standing up when they heard the hurried footsteps on the wooden porch and looked up to see a winded Constable Ames framed in the open doorway, his tie loose and his jacket slung over his arm.
“Ames. You were quick,” Darling said, glancing at his watch.
“Sir. I wonder if you have a moment . . .”
“Lots of moments, Ames, we’re done here for now. Could I ask you to stay in the area until this matter is cleared up?” Darling said courteously to the Bertollis, and he stood up to follow Ames back to where he’d parked the car at the top of the grassy driveway by the main road. On the way back to the car they waved at the children, who were taking turns swinging on a rope hanging from a beam in a rickety-looking barn.
“I wouldn’t be Mr. Bertolli—or Agostino—for anything just now,” Darling commented, settling his hat back on to his head. “Now what’s going on, Ames? You look, as they say, as though you’ve seen a ghost. No more bodies, I hope?”
“No. Not exactly. But I’ve found the car. I think. I mean, I think I’ve found the car.”
Darling stopped by the driver’s side door and looked at Ames, frowning. “And you don’t seem very happy about it.”
“Yes, sir. No, sir. Not exactly. I found it in Miss Winslow’s outbuilding.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LANE HAD ABANDONED HER LETTER to her grandmother. She could not seem to muster any thoughts that would not alarm her. She been reading Yeats in the hopes that it would inspire her to some useful poetry. Her notebook stood by her, ready with a sharpened pencil set in the dip of the spine. She closed the book with a sigh. For all his angst and beauty, his concerns of unrequited love and the Irish question seemed far from what she had about her right now, and she knew you were to write about what you know. What she knew is that a man had been killed somewhere nearby, by someone unknown, and dumped in her creek, and that in the most bizarre circumstance imaginable, he had been travelling about with her name in his pocket. What kind of poetry would that make? Dead you lie like a fallen leaf trapped in an eddy. No, that last word cannot be two syllables, it just cannot. Creek. Too matter-of-fact. Water. Two syllables again, but soft ones. Maybe that was the trouble. Eddy was too hard. Water. There.
Dead you lie like a fallen leaf trapped in the water
Drifted, danced by the wind off a distant tree
Down like a small sinner to a lonely slaughter
With only one word, and it was word of me.
No . . . for me. It made more sense.
Not Yeats, but enough to get her going for today. It was as she was settling paper into the typewriter that she heard the knock. “Oh dear.” She hoped it was not Angela; she really wanted to work today and she couldn’t bear to say no to Angela. She could see through the glass in the door that it was Darling and Ames.
“Inspector Darling, Constable Ames. You got my message! Do come in. Please let me get you a drink of something, Constable Ames. You don’t look at all well.” But they did not come in. Ames looked down like a guilty child, but Darling, looking down as well, had more the look of a man wondering what his next step ought to be.
“Miss Winslow. I think you’d better come with us for a moment. We’ve something to show you. Perhaps you should get a pair of shoes,” he added, noticing her golden legs ending in bare feet. He wished he hadn’t. They waited on the front step for her to return with a pair of gym shoes slipped loosely over her feet. She hadn’t bothered to tie the laces.
“Have you found something?” She tried to sound pleased, interested, but there was something in the demeanour of these two that made her feel quite suddenly cold. They walked up toward the barn and then around to where the pens were. “Oh,” she said, “I saw this this morning. This is why I called, I suppose.”
“What is it? What did you see?” asked Darling, stopping and watching her curiously.
“The way these pine needles are scattered, as if someone did it deliberately. To be frank, it made me extremely nervous, especially after the shoe business. I felt . . . feel like someone has been here . . . at night. I can’t see the point of it. Or who would be taking the trouble, unless . . . Well, I wondered if someone were trying to incriminate me.”
“Why, I wonder?” His voice retained a calm, steady tone that seemed to be withholding any judgment.
“Honestly, Inspector, I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it. I’ve only just arrived here. Am I an easy target? There are people in this community who do not take well to newcomers, but it’s a very elaborate way to scare someone off.”
“Perhaps we could open the doors now? Ames looked in the window and saw a car parked inside. Can you tell us about that?”
The sense of dread she had felt when she saw the mood of the policemen at her door cascaded into waves of fear. She looked at the barn doors and saw what she had not seen in the morning: the padlock was there but was hanging open. How had she not seen that? She would have looked, seen the car. “I can’t believe I didn’t see the lock. I mean, it’s the reason I phoned you. I was out this morning and I saw what I thought were tracks, only they ended here, so I think I was thinking that someone had driven in last night, messed things about to frighten me, and then left. I did glance at the barn door, but it looked like the padlock was undisturbed.” She felt now like she was jabbering. She must seem as guilty as sin to these two men with their carefully non-committal expressions. Feeling suddenly faint, she reached out and leaned against the barn with one arm. Hanging her head, she wondered if she’d be sick, but then decided she would not. That would be feminine weakness taken too far, she thought rebelliously. She was better than that. “If there is a car in there, I did not put it there, Inspector,” she said finally. She turned toward the doors and then stopped, looking uncertainly at the policemen, before turning to slip off the padlock and pull the doors open. It surprised her that they came open easily, with only a slight drag on the ground. They had been well made. But none of that mattered because there, with its headlights facing them, was a black DeSoto.
“It’s got local plates, sir,” Ames said.
June 27, 1946
Franks woke feeling groggy from a deep sleep when the conductor knocked on the compartment door. “We’ll be pulling in in ten minutes, sir,” he said, touching the brim of his cap.
Pulling himself upright where he had slumped in his sleep, Franks looked blearily out the window at the passing countryside. More trees. What extremes, he thought. All those thousands of miles with no trees, and then nothing but these dense, impenetrable layers of blue-green forests on either side. He had read that travelling across eastern Russia was much like this. With relief he noted that the train was now running along a river on one side, or a lake. He pulled out his map to look at where Nelson was located. He imagined a primitive mining camp sort of place and sighed. His mother had come from here.
The station was hardly primitive and he was pleasantly surprised. It was late morning and the air had a clean, golden tang to it. Nelson appeared to be built up a long, steep hill, and the road outside the station was bustling with cars, most of them pre-war. He was directed to the ymca when he asked about a place to stay, and he took his small suitcase and started up the hill. As he walked away from the station and turned back to look at it, in one respect the sight confirmed his prejudice. The station and the rail yards adjacent to it were bustling with activity. Lumber was piled on waiting cars and floating in logjams in the water just beyond. Small tugboats were bustling on the water. It reminded him of the magazine advertisements for immigration to Canada. Great forests and lakes and opportunities. As he reached the top of the hill and was looking down what appeared to be the main drag, he stopped to take off his jacket. It was hot. It surprised him. Canada. Hot. He tried to imagine himself immigrating here.
Established in a small room in the YMCA, he felt himself ironically at home, for he stayed at the Y in London when he was there. A home for the rootless, he thought. He was as without connections here as he was there. He slept well, happy that for the first time in days he was not in a moving train. In the morning, he went to a little restaurant and had a hearty breakfast of eggs and bacon. A full English. With an approximation of the Union Jack flying over what looked like a stone courthouse, he could well be in some rural English town.
He went about trying to hire a car and found a garage just off Baker Street where he was given a bedraggled ten-year-old DeSoto convertible. He was aware that he would have to cope with driving on the right-hand side of the road, but there would be little traffic, he assumed. Leaving his suitcase on his bed, he took some papers and drove carefully to the ferry that crossed the lake to the road out to King’s Cove. The few times he passed a car it still startled him to have them racing by on the wrong side, but eventually he settled in to the drive.
He was surprised by the grandeur of some of the properties along the lakefront, and then inwardly chided himself for his prejudices about the colonies. He had expected it to be all rather wild, he supposed. When he arrived at the turnoff that had been described to him at the little store in Balfour, three miles from King’s Cove, he turned up the road and suddenly he realized he had no idea what to do next.
NO ONE SPOKE. Finally, Lane walked around the car slowly, looking to see if anything had had to be moved to accommodate the car. Rakes and shovels of various shapes were hung on spikes on the wall, and a rusted horseshoe hung over the inside of the doorway, mocking, she thought, her luck, which seemed at the moment to be going from bad to worse. She had walked around to the driver’s side door and was reaching her hand out to open it when Darling stopped her.
“If you don’t mind, Miss Winslow, I think we’ll handle this.” She pulled her hand away, as though from a flame.
“Yes, of course.” She stepped back into the light at the edge of the large doors and looked again at the ground around the door, where all that could be seen now were their own scuff marks. “I don’t understand this. How could someone get this in here without my knowing?”
Ames looked with interest at Darling, his eyebrows raised as if to say, “Well, how could they?”
Darling ignored him and looked at her. “Are you saying that you have never seen this car before?”
“I certainly jolly well am! And I know it wasn’t here before because I’ve looked in the windows. I was waiting for a good day to get in here and have a real look around. I imagine most of it is forty years old. Except this car. It’s probably fifteen years old.” She waved a disparaging hand in the direction of the DeSoto.
“Nineteen thirty-three at a guess, not bad on your part, miss!” said Ames, cheerfully, ignoring the repressive look Darling shot at him, his earlier morose mood somehow lifted by Lane’s obvious puzzlement about the car.
“Please go and collect the fingerprinting equipment from the car, Ames. Handles, footmarks on the running boards, anything on the dash. Miss Winslow, may we go into the house? I do have a few questions.”
“I bet you do!” The whole episode had awoken a contrarian streak in Lane. It was bad enough having a body clogging up her drains and now someone—and she found she had stopped feeling afraid
and that her anger was closer to the surface—had moved what was probably the victim’s car into her barn. Probably the person who killed him in the first place. She opened the door into the hallway and invited Inspector Darling to walk through with an impatient wave of her hand.
“Miss Winslow,” he said, when they were settled at her kitchen table, “I cannot help feeling that you have not been entirely honest with us. Failure to tell us everything you know could seriously hamper this investigation.”
“But I have. Everything. I don’t know the man, I don’t know the car, and I don’t know how the car got into my barn. And if you insist on thinking I did this thing, you will be seriously hampering your investigation, because whoever did it is running around out there, no doubt thinking of some other way to place the blame on me.” She got up and poured two glasses of water and set them with a bang on the table. The sunlight shone at an angle on them, making them cast a luminous reflection along the white tabletop. “Last night . . . no, it’s ridiculous!”
“What is?”
“No. It’s nonsense. What else do you want to know?”
“What about last night? Anything, however small, could be of assistance.”
“Well, this couldn’t.”
“Try me.”
“Very well. The latch on my attic window is broken, so the windows open on their own. Kenny likes to say his dead mother, Lady Armstrong, lives in my attic and she has a propensity to open my windows. A bit of fun. But the windows opened in the middle of the night a day or two after you found the body, and it was when I was up there that I saw the torchlight in the forest. That was how I found the shoe, as you will recall. Last night they swung open again and the noise must have woken me. I went up, and this time decided not to close them. It was a warm night, and there was no wind to bang them about. I looked out but could see nothing but darkness, so I went back to bed. But someone must have been busy putting the car in barn.”