A Killer in King's Cove

by Iona Whishaw

  Reluctantly turning away from the storm and these unrecoverable scenes of her childhood, she turned to go back to the kitchen. Cocoa at least she could have, she thought, for she’d bought a can of Fry’s on her last trip to town. She thought about her map, and what needed to be added. In her heightened emotional state, the sudden picture of Darling musing over the map, his face thoughtful, hair falling slightly over one eye, made her chest tighten. “Now then,” she said aloud, admonishing herself. Had the ghastly business of Angus taught her nothing? You cannot know another person, she thought, even with years. You cannot know another person enough to trust yourself in his hands. And you cannot trust just because you feel something is right. At nineteen she had believed in the rightness of her passion with every fibre of her being. Love will out. What blindness it induced! Just like the old saying. Well, not this time. At almost twenty-seven she knew better.

  The storm had so obliterated the daylight that even at three in the afternoon it was more like twilight. She switched on the light in the attic room and knelt down before the large sheet of paper, smoothing it out. They had left the pencil on the floor and she took it up, wondering what she could add. Over Harris’s name she wrote, Back 1919, orchards burned, wife gone. The mousy, unhappy woman who looked so out of place in the picnic group, looking directly into the camera with a kind of challenge, as if suspecting it might pull something on her. Then she paused over Reginald Mather’s name. Helped Elizabeth Harris when husband at front. This is what Kenny had told them. She wanted to have the picture right here in front of her. Reggie had been in the picture; young and very good-looking. Was he sitting near Elizabeth Harris? Of course not. She’d only just married Harris. But she needed to see that picture of Elizabeth again. She was the one who disappeared. There was a secret no one had plumbed.

  The storm seemed to be abating, moving past into the mountains behind King’s Cove, leaving behind a drizzle and a blanket of light grey cloud. It was a little before four; she could run across to the Armstrongs’ for another look. She stood up and stretched, but she could not eliminate a kind of tension in her that she now identified as excitement.

  It was Elizabeth Harris, she was sure of it. It all centred on her. What were the mysteries here? The obvious ones were why had this man Jack Franks come here, and how did he come to be killed, and where did Elizabeth Harris go suddenly in the middle of the war? And of course, why did Harris return a year later than everyone else from the war? Lane shook her head. She knelt down and wrote the questions on the side of the map, but as she stood, she reminded herself that feelings did not equal facts. Feelings of certainty had betrayed her in love, why should she trust them any more in this case?

  PERHAPS IT WAS the coming storm and its attendant change in barometric pressure, but the night after the meeting between the Armstrongs, Inspector Darling, and Lane, some people were having trouble getting to sleep. Reginald was worried about the letter he should have received three months ago heralding the arrival of his putative son, only no one had arrived, and now, in this unguarded time, he allowed for the possibility that the man who had been found dead might be his son. Impossible, his mind retorted. Who on earth would have killed a man who was coming to see him? He wished now that he had seen the body. The idea that the dead man might have been his son filled him with a new kind of despair. Every dream unfulfilled and now, here he was, an old man with a crazy wife and a useless son and nothing to show for all his schemes. One thought seized him: he must see the dead man. The police must have taken a picture or something, he reasoned. He would get hold of them in the morning. This led to new worries. Alice had not left the house in days. How was he to get her out so that he might telephone the Nelson police?

  SANDY LAY AWAKE in his room at the back of the house. He was thinking about Lane and trying to fight back the deep truth that she did not like him. Alice was awake too. She lay smiling because she’d found Reg’s letter and knew she’d been right all along.

  NOT ENJOYING HER share of sleeplessness was Lane, who was fighting it unsuccessfully. She listened to hear if the windows in the attic had come unlatched again, but there was only silence that pressed with a ringing in her ears. What had woken her? She opened and then closed her eyes and let her mind wander in the hopes that this would cause her to drift off. Instead of wandering, however, it seemed to focus in on the wall of pictures in the Armstrong sitting room. She felt haunted by that photo of the picnic on her front lawn. When she’d come home from her second visit to look again at the photo, she’d gone around to the front to imagine that afternoon so long ago. It felt so much a thing of the distant past. Two world wars had happened since then. But perhaps there could be another picnic, she decided. Later, when this bloody murder was out of the way. She imagined a photograph of a picnic in which every person at King’s Cove was arrayed on blankets. In later years, someone would point at someone in the photo and say, “Oh yes, that is the man who killed that unfortunate stranger who came here back in ’46.” Or woman, she’d thought glumly. Better wait till it was done.

  The flash of the bedside lamp Lane had finally switched on made her shut her eyes. Her clock, as she became accustomed to the brightness, told her it was 2:30 in the morning. She groaned. The awfullest time. Too early to pretend one was simply an early riser. She sat up and plumped the pillows up behind her. Her book lay on the floor where she’d dropped it. She was reaching for it when she stopped. That picture. There was something in that picture. She tried to reconstruct it. Lady Armstrong, Kenny, Eleanor, the Hughes girls, and Elizabeth Harris. She’d thought Elizabeth must be one of the Hughes girls initially, because she thought she’d recognized her. She’d never seen a picture of her, so why would she seem familiar?

  HARRIS, TOO, LAY awake. He was not surprised by this. He had been awake nearly every night since the business began. Suddenly and unaccountably, perhaps because of that interfering policeman, his bitch of a wife, Elizabeth, was on his mind. Where had she gone? She’d not gone home to her brute of a father. He’d checked. It was impossible to imagine her having the wherewithal to go anywhere. She’d just disappeared. Now, he wondered, was everything in his past coming back to haunt him?

  The second theme that wove through his midnight thoughts like a strand of curling smoke was wondering what was happening with the investigation. He was paying for his misanthropy now, he knew. He could not bring himself to change his normal pattern of never going to the post more than once a week and avoiding the society of everyone in the community. He had seen the police car coming and going, had seen the Winslow woman drive once in her own car, and once in theirs, and at this, had breathed relief. She had obviously been arrested. Why? Then he had seen her returned. He could make nothing of this. Had she been arrested because she was new? Nor had he seen the car towed away, though he was certain that the discovery of the car had sealed the woman’s fate. The good thing, he supposed, was that no one had come to talk to him after that day when they’d come to ask about whether someone had been in the forest at night. He had been shocked, initially, that someone should be moving about on his land. No one was up at that time of night, for God’s sake! His anxiety soared and he turned, irritated, onto his side, somehow hoping a change of position would make him feel better.

  What did it mean that that interfering woman thought she had seen him? There was nothing to see. Was she snooping? Had she seen anything? Why had her arrest not stuck? He resolved that, though it was a day early, he would go up to the post office. Eleanor would have news. She would want to know where he’d been. He’d say he’d been sick. It was none of her bloody business, anyway! As he rehearsed in his mind how he might casually ask for the information he wanted—a process that even in his imagination seemed awkward—he drifted, finally, off to sleep.

  THE MORNING DAWNED thick. There were heavy clouds massing to the west, but the sun still shone and the temperature was already warm, though it was only seven in the morning; the storm would come later, Lane surmised. She was on the ve
randa with a mug of coffee feeling sodden herself, with the exhaustion of her late-night wakefulness. She had finally dropped off to sleep, but had never acquired the knack of sleeping in and woke at the usual time. She clutched a mug of coffee in both her hands, looked warily up at the cloud-bank, and sighed.

  Was this a writer’s life? she wondered. Up early, fill the coffee pot, watch the coffee percolate while studiously ignoring the writing space, deliberately set up in a corner of the kitchen by the French doors so that she must see it every day, and respond by sitting at the desk, ready to work. But she could not shake the image of the picnic.

  The lawn swept before her, trees still throwing dark and elongated early morning shadows across its yellow-green surface. She imagined again the picnic scene on her lawn. Old Lady Armstrong seated erect and formal in her rattan chair and the others on blankets around her. The table by which she sat had plates of food, pitchers of something, glasses. Who had brought all this? Did she prepare it? No, it was a rural community. Everyone would have brought something. What was the occasion of the picnic? Dominion Day, perhaps. July first, 1912.

  With some determination she went back indoors, put her coffee cup into the sink, and went to her room to change out of her pyjamas. But her destination was not her little desk in the stream of morning sun, which now had a forlorn and abandoned air about it as motes of dust hung suspended in the light over the silent Remington typewriter; it was the attic, and her map of the residents of King’s Cove. She would go to the Armstrongs’, and she would add her new thoughts about it into the schema. Then she would phone Darling to discuss the picture.

  LANE MADE HERSELF a poached egg and watched the clock impatiently so that she could get over to the post office. She told herself it was to look at the pictures again. She reminded herself firmly that they were only pictures. The Armstrongs would think it odd, this third visit to look at the photo. At last, at 9:15, she thought it was late enough not to disturb the morning routines at the cottage, and too early for others to be down for the mail. If Eleanor was surprised to have Lane rapping on her kitchen door instead of coming in at the little post office, she did not show it.

  “Tea?” she offered.

  “I’m sorry about barging over so early. I wanted to look at the pictures again. Do you mind terribly?”

  “Gosh, no. Kenny’s up the hill helping Gladys fix her chicken coop roof, so it’s just us.” Eleanor led the way. “Have you thought of something else? Oh bother, there’s the post office. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Left on her own, Lane stood before the row of pictures again, this time focusing on the picnic. She reached up and took the framed photo off its nail, and walked with it to the window. It was a disappointing exercise. The light seemed to add nothing more to what she’d seen before. But that face, the familiarity of it, still pulled at her. It was as she was putting it back that it dawned on her: Elizabeth had the look of the dead man she’d seen on the slab. She moved quickly back into the light just as Eleanor came back.

  “You know, I think this picture of Harris’s wife resembles the dead man.”

  Eleanor came next to her and peered at the picture. “What can that mean?”

  “I don’t know. But if he were the son of Mrs. Harris, he would not be the son of Lieutenant Harris, is that right?”

  “Absolutely right. He’d been gone for two years when she left . . . Oh . . . I say, could she have left for . . . ?”

  “And if so, who is the father? It somehow makes it more real that the killer is, in fact, someone from here. And the killer is walking around trying to implicate me. I’ve a jolly good mind to go ahead with my plan. I feel like we are no closer to catching him.”

  “You know,” Eleanor reminded her, “it is the job of the police to catch him.”

  “Well, a fat lot of good they’re doing. Look at where we are. The inspector came out, did not move the thing one bit forwarder, and has gone back up the lake, leaving us to our fate.”

  Eleanor looked nervously out toward the kitchen. Kenny had come back and was pushing a log into the stove. “He’s not going to like this . . .” she said, in a way that signalled agreement.

  “Good! And while you get that round the place, I’m going to telephone Darling about the picture, and then go find that second shoe. It’s ridiculous that it should not have turned up yet. It wasn’t in the car and it wasn’t with its mate and it wasn’t on the path to the creek, along which the body had evidently been dragged. I’ll come by if I find something!”

  After leaving Eleanor to her task, Lane returned to her house. She detected in herself a slight but growing sense of unease. She had been eager, not to say schoolgirlish, when she and Eleanor had talked about their little scheme, but now, moving across the bridge and through the stand of birch trees that separated her house from the Armstrongs’, she felt vaguely vulnerable and caught herself looking around, as if she might see someone sequestered in the trees.

  She sighed heavily as she pulled a glass out of the cupboard for some water, her fallback whenever she felt even remotely out of sorts. This was a legacy from her grandmother, who believed a good dose of water was the answer to everything.

  First, the telephone. She stood before it, thinking of what she would say to the inspector: that she thought the picture of the young picnicking Mrs. Harris might resemble the corpse. She saw now how unsubstantial this was. So easy to be tricked by imagining one saw resemblances. She should go find the shoe first and then at least she’d have something substantial to say to him. She would not, of course, tell him about the resuscitation of the car scheme. She pushed aside guilt and put her mind to the shoe.

  It was nearing noon and at this time of year, night didn’t come till a little after ten. No one who would come to look at the car would come before dark, she felt fairly sure, so there would be no point to hanging about at the house waiting. She took off her sandals, found something more suitable for scrabbling about in the underbrush, and left the house, reluctantly locking the door.

  Once outside the house she stood, undecided, and then saw the barn through the trees at the top of the yard. That, at least, was a door that she’d better make sure was unlocked for this little ruse. She peered through the window of the door into the side of the barn. The police had wiped some of the thickest layers of dirt and cobweb off the outside surface of it when they came that first day looking for evidence. It was dark inside, though this window, and a couple of windows along the other wall, let in enough light to see the silvery metal bumpers of the car and the general outline. It would be impossible to see after dark. She shrugged. She supposed the murderer, should he be a member of this community, would come with a torch. She checked the padlock. It was not locked.

  Now, for the first time, she began to reflect on the journey of the car to her garage. Had the car been used to transport the body? It was not clear. She knew from what Ames had said in his unguarded chattering that they had found no evidence of the body having been in the car. The car, in any case, was not in her garage when they found the body, and it wasn’t entirely clear the man had not been walloped on his head as he stood by the weir, though why he would have been there, in such a difficult-to-find and out-of-the-way place, was an imponderable question. For a moment, she thought about trying to trace the journey of the car. She walked around to the large doors and looked closely at the ground. How had the car been moved here without her knowing?

  Lane walked slowly, looking intently at the ground, along the only path the car could have taken, around the trees that hugged the building, and up the side to where the path met her main driveway and out the metal gate. Her eyes were beginning to water with the effort, and she kept imagining she might be seeing tracks and then doubting what she saw in the blur of needles and grass. She went back and opened the doors to look at the car more closely. Mindful of not touching anything, she looked inside. Had she heard a car that night? With her troubled dreams of fire and the war, she could have dreamed of a car and not know
n it from reality.

  Once she had reached the road, it was impossible to distinguish anything on the now dried and much-used gravel surface. Shrugging, she headed up the road, and then into the underbrush along the path that led to the weir.

  She walked along the path, trying to put herself back into that same frame of mind as the very first day she’d made this walk with Robin Harris. It was all new then. She did not want to miss anything because she was making assumptions about having seen parts of it.

  She thought about how the first shoe had come all the way into her property: clearly and deliberately brought there. There was some sort of gamesmanship going on here, she thought grimly. First the body being moved, then the shoe, then the car. If the murder had been unpremeditated, the follow-up certainly had not. No good pretending it wasn’t. So, back to work. How had the body been brought? She stood up and continued along the path until she got to the creek, which now, returned to its original banks with the removal of the blockage, looked as innocent as any beautiful corner of nature could, as if human shenanigans could come and go, but nature took no interest.