Not A Clue

by Janet Brons

  To Chantal

  ONE

  January 1998

  Canada

  In early January 1998, a rare and devastating weather system exploded over central Canada. Freezing rain pelted the area for some eighty hours, toppling ice-laden trees and causing massive power outages. Southern Quebec and eastern Ontario suffered the full brunt of the storm. While the lights were out in Ottawa intermittently for days, outlying areas and much of the Quebec region were left in darkness for weeks, even months. Then the temperatures plummeted.

  RCMP Inspector Liz Forsyth arrived back in Ottawa from London, England, in the late afternoon of Sunday, January 4. She was looking forward to a week off following the intense and exhausting investigation into the murder of Natalie Guévin, Canada’s chief trade commissioner in England.

  Liz took a taxi to her home in Aylmer and watched, mesmerized, as the windshield wipers slapped at strange, heavy rain. It had grown dark. There was an oppressive silence as she tried to unlock her back door. The only sounds were rain falling on frozen snow and the odd creak of a heavy branch overhead. Liz’s door lock was frozen shut. She was now very cold and more than a bit unnerved as she stood on the porch with her luggage at her feet. She felt about in her purse for her lighter and held it up to the lock. The flame looked pathetic in the darkness, but eventually the lock defrosted sufficiently to allow her into the house. She was wet through, and frozen. And the hydro was out.

  She had planned to get something to eat and then go to bed to shake off her jet lag, but the food in her fridge was spoiling fast and the house seemed to be getting colder by the minute. The taxi driver had told her that this, apparently, was just the beginning. She blinked back unbidden tears, feeling suddenly very alone and frightened. Just as quickly, she told herself to “do something.” Sometimes taking action, any action, was the way to start dealing with a situation. She remembered she had candles in the kitchen junk drawer. She managed to feel her way around and eventually got a fire going in the wood stove. Luckily she had bought some wood this year and it was neatly stacked in the garage. It had been meant for cozy winter evenings curled up on the couch, not as a means of survival. She piled as many logs as she could by the stove and made a sandwich of stale, semi-thawed bread and peanut butter. It was no use trying to call her landlord for assistance—he and his wife were on their annual Florida vacation. She piled blankets and her warmest coats onto the couch. Liz wasn’t planning to trade the relative warmth of the living room for her freezing bedroom. Thanks to the jet lag, and despite the conditions, she quickly fell asleep.

  England

  Stephen Hay turned off his TV set but continued to stare at the blank screen. The detective chief inspector had been watching, with mounting concern, news reports of the severe ice storm affecting central Canada. He knew that his former colleague Liz Forsyth lived somewhere on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, across from the Canadian capital, and that the area was being clobbered by a massive, unprecedented ice storm. He had been thinking rather a lot about Forsyth since her departure and was now becoming alarmed about her welfare. The BBC was reporting major power outages in Ontario and Quebec and running surreal footage of power transmission towers reduced to rubble by the weight of frozen rain.

  He had grown what he would describe as “quite fond” of Liz Forsyth during her time in London. She was smart, funny, and a fine policeman. Woman. Whatever. Damned good at her job. They had become close during the Guévin investigation, and he had been sorry to see her go. They had both been a bit nervous and tentative at her leaving. He had driven her to Heathrow, given her a quick kiss on the cheek and a “bon voyage, Forsyth,” before she headed through airport security. As he drove back to his home in Pimlico, the words “bon voyage, Forsyth” continued to mock him. What a bloody stupid thing to say, he thought. But then, he asked himself, what should I have said? “Why don’t you stay here, then?” That would have been bloody stupid. So what am I supposed to do now? Invite her to a vacation in the Bahamas or something? Not exactly his style, and more than a bit presumptuous. Nothing had actually been said, let alone done. Although doubtless the Bahamas would look very appealing to her at the moment, if things were as bad as they seemed on television.

  Hay wandered into the kitchen to refill his coffee, his thoughts on the ice storm. He finally decided to phone her and hoped that the phones would be working. He remembered that landlines usually remained in operation even when the electricity went out. It was just these nuisance mobiles that refused to function without electricity. Hay had obtained Liz’s home phone number before she left—he wasn’t completely daft. He lit a cigarette for courage and was reaching for the phone when unexpectedly it rang.

  Superintendent Neilson’s voice sounded strained, and he was speaking rapidly. “We have a body. A young woman on a pathway behind the Mallard Council Estate in Battersea.”

  Hay took down the particulars, called Detective Sergeant Wilkins, and crushed out his cigarette. As he slammed the front door shut he realized that it was the middle of the night in Canada anyway.

  The coroner and her team, along with Dr. Shelly, the forensic pathologist, were on site when Hay and Wilkins met at the murder scene. In a doomed attempt to create a bit of green space behind the apartment towers, some bushes and a small plot of grass had been planted some time ago, obviously left untended ever since. The body had been discovered by a group of foreign students, who had seen a foot protruding from one of the bushes on the pathway. “I thought it was a mannequin,” said a whey-faced Dutch youth when later interviewed. “We didn’t believe it was real. We were, you know, sort of laughing. Then Adrien grabbed the foot and realized it was … flesh.”

  Already crime scene tape surrounded the site and unidentifiable people in white coveralls and masks were going about their gloomy business. The woman was lying on her side and, thought Wilkins, looked as if she had merely curled up and gone to sleep. She seemed quite peaceful. Long, dark hair draped her neck and shoulders. She was Caucasian, she was unclothed, and she was overweight. On her right hip was some sort of tattoo in dark blue ink. Wilkins squatted down for a closer look. No, not a tattoo. It appeared to be something like a signature—a word beginning with F, but the rest was illegible. A great many pictures of the mark were taken in case the ink, or whatever it was, rubbed off in transit. Or was rinsed away by the thin drizzle that had just begun.

  DS Wilkins, regarding the peaceful features of the victim, murmured to himself that she didn’t look dead.

  “Oh, she’s dead alright,” said Dr. Shelly, with a small smile at Wilkins. “Look here.” Hay and Wilkins drew closer as the doctor bent over and opened one of the girl’s eyes. He held a magnifying glass to it, asking, “See those red dots?”

  Wilkins nodded, and Hay said, “Asphyxial death, then?”

  “Appears to be,” agreed Shelly. “Petechiae,” he said to Wilkins, referring to the red dots in the dead girl’s eyes. “Clear sign of asphyxiation.”

  “So, strangulation?” asked Wilkins doubtfully. He had seen a couple of victims of strangulation already during his career, and they hadn’t looked nearly so peaceful as this.

  Shelly shook his head. “There are none of the grotesque facial distortions that occur with strangling,” he said, shaking his head briefly in disgust. There were still sights that Shelly, despite his experience, found disturbing.

  “Drowning’s a possibility,” he continued, “although we’re some distance from any body of water and there’s no indication the body has been moved. Of course that’s your department. Could also be smoke inhalation, drug abuse …”

  “Drug abuse?” asked Wilkins.

  “Yes. Opioids can slow the system down so much that cause of death looks like asphyxiation. But there are no needle marks on her arm
s or legs, nor even in the places where users try to hide needle marks, like between the toes or fingers. But we’ll need toxicology to definitively rule it out.”

  Shelly straightened up and arched his back, admitting to himself that his lower back pain was worsening.

  “Smothering then?” pursued Hay.

  “That’s what I’m thinking at the moment,” Shelly said, “although it’s rare in adult victims. And pretty damned difficult if the person is conscious and struggling. We’ll get more from the autopsy, of course.”

  “Anything under the fingernails?” Hay asked.

  “Nothing visible. But we’ll examine them under the microscope.”

  Hay nodded. “What’s your best guess at time of death?”

  “Probably sometime last night, but for now, at least, I can’t be more precise,” Shelly said. “It was a mild night, though.” He glanced up at a sky that was now spitting out large drops of rain. “At least the weather shouldn’t have influenced rigor.”

  With a nod from the coroner, several of the white-sheathed crew rolled the victim onto her back. The hair fell away from her face. She seemed very young to Hay, although he had realized that people in general seemed a lot younger to him these days. His own doctor seemed to be about twelve.

  While the victim was completely naked, even devoid of jewellery, Hay noted that she must have usually worn a watch and had been left-handed—there was a strip of skin on her right wrist that was lighter than the rest. She wouldn’t have gotten any type of tan in London in January. Had she been travelling?

  Apart from the body, nothing appeared particularly striking about the crime scene. There were no nearby tire tracks; several sets of muddy footprints seemed to be smeared into one another; there was considerable disturbance of the mud around the body. Perhaps, wondered Hay, when she was taking her clothes off? Or when they were being removed by someone else? An intensive search of the vicinity was underway but nothing had yet been found to provide any idea of her identity. Eventually Hay and Wilkins left the experts to prepare the body for transport. There was little else they could do there.

  Early the following morning, Paul Rochon scanned the headlines of the various British broadsheets and tabloids on his desk. Rochon, Acting High Commissioner of the Canadian High Commission in London, was usually the first in the office. Back when he was a very junior officer in the Canadian diplomatic corps, he’d hated walking into a full-blown crisis on arrival at the office and so chose to get in as early as possible. The habit hadn’t left him throughout his decades of service.

  This morning, the papers were full of the forthcoming council elections, the looming bus strike, and the British prime minister’s visit to Southeast Asia. A couple of articles referred to the murder of an as-yet unidentified young woman behind a housing estate in South London. For some reason, that story stayed with him during the morning meeting of the programme heads and a mid-morning courtesy call from the newly arrived High Commissioner from Malaysia.

  Rochon dialled the extension of the Head of Consular Affairs, Angela Mortenssen.

  “Angela.”

  “Paul? Hi. What’s up?”

  “Just wondering about that woman you were telling us about in the morning meeting. The one who’s been calling from, where, Montreal, yes? Trying to find her daughter?”

  “Yes, well, there’s not a lot we can do for her. The girl, Sophie Bouchard, hasn’t registered with us and the mother doesn’t even know if she’s in England. She last heard from her when she was in Paris. Christmas Day.”

  “Did you see the item in the papers about a young woman found murdered yesterday? Behind some council estate?”

  “No,” acknowledged Angela, “but we’ve been up to our eyeballs dealing with those Canadian kids involved in that car crash in Sheffield.”

  “Of course,” said Paul.

  Angela cocked her head. “What is it, Paul? Something about the missing girl?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied slowly. “Do we have a physical description?”

  “I think so. Let me check my notes.” She pulled a sheet of paper from a desk covered in sheets of paper and sticky notes and continued. “Yes, about five foot two, long dark hair, brown eyes. Eighteen years old. A big girl, according to the mother.”

  “Okay, thanks,” replied Rochon, and hung up the phone. He checked his phone list and placed a call to Scotland Yard.

  Hay was poring over the crime scene reports from the homicide. Nothing seemed unusual in the surroundings except, of course, for the body of a naked young woman. An empty cigarette package, a used condom, a half-empty bottle of cola. Hay smiled wryly, wondering why the reporting officer chose to describe the bottle as half-empty. Not half-full? The shrill ringing of his desk-phone startled him from his philosophical ruminations.

  “Chief Inspector, the Acting High Commissioner from the Canadian High Commission, a Paul Rochon, is on the line. Will you take it?”

  Hay waited for the call to be transferred, and recognized Rochon’s familiar, lightly accented voice.

  “Detective Chief Inspector. Paul Rochon, from the Canadian High Commission.”

  “Of course,” replied Hay, “and please, it’s Stephen. How are you keeping?”

  “Not bad, thanks. This ‘acting’ thing is keeping me busy since they sent High Commissioner Carruthers home last month.”

  “No doubt,” said Hay. He’d heard that Carruthers had been unceremoniously recalled to Ottawa.

  “What I’m wondering about,” continued Rochon, “is this murder I’ve been reading about in the papers. Is it something that you’re dealing with? It’s just that, well, there’s a woman in Canada who’s been calling our Consular people and is urgently trying to track down her daughter. Apparently, the last she heard from the girl was at Christmas, and she was supposed to be heading to London. Have you identified the body yet?”

  “No,” replied Hay. “So far she’s just a Jane Doe, as far as we know. You might be surprised how many of them there actually are. Do you have a description?”

  Rochon passed on all the information that he had about the missing girl, which didn’t amount to much.

  “I realize there’s nothing you can do,” said Rochon. “We don’t even know if she’s in England.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open at any rate,” said Hay.

  “Okay,” said Rochon. “Thank you, Stephen.” Rochon hung up. He still felt uneasy. But what to do now? He sighed and went back to reviewing the draft political report on his desk.

  Canada

  A couple of days into the storm, Liz was still without power and loath to leave the house for fear of the fire going out. Driving was treacherous; she left her Honda in the garage, but she needed food and had to retrieve her mixed-breed dog, Rochester, from a nearby kennel. She managed these outings on foot, but walking seemed almost as dangerous as driving. Rochester was beside himself with joy when she claimed him, but she realized at once that he wasn’t himself. He was anxious and needy, clinging to her, and by no means his usual bouncy, gregarious self. It took Liz a while to figure out what was wrong. Surely a dog would not be upset about a power failure or even by the lack of accustomed warmth in the kennel.

  Liz realized what the problem was during one of their walks. It was eerily quiet as they slipped along the icy sidewalk. Then she recognized what was missing: the usual background hum of electricity running through the power lines. That was what was upsetting Rochester—the disappearance of something that, to his acute hearing, had been constant and familiar background noise.

  She had checked several times on her closest neighbours, Marg and Bill Green. While Liz was at work, they often dogsat Rochester at their home, where he spent his time playing with their ageing poodle. The only reason Liz had resorted to placing Rochester in a kennel when she was unexpectedly dispatched to London in December was that the Greens had been visiting family in Nova Scotia.

  An elderly couple, the Greens were resilient and self-reliant. They seemed to be
faring better than many at present. They had two fireplaces and just under a cord of wood in their garage, so their house was kept quite warm. Being of an earlier and less privileged generation, they had taken to heart the caution that food and water should always be on hand in case of an emergency. They’d even had the foresight to purchase an emergency generator a few years back, so although Liz felt obliged to check on them from time to time, she realized they were probably doing better than she was. She invited them over one evening for a dinner of steaks cooked on the barbecue, trying to make a party of it, but she sensed they would probably be happier in their own home. It was, after all, warmer than hers. And so the evening had finished early.

  “What a time to take a vacation,” she muttered to herself. Rochester had followed her through the back door into the kitchen following their walk, and both of them were dripping onto the well-worn hardwood. She pulled off her boots and wiped the dog’s paws on his towel. Rochester looked at her, faintly wagging his tail. He tipped his head, clearly asking, “Now what?” Liz patted him absently on the head and took off her ski jacket. She had several layers underneath, which were necessary even inside the house. She was being judicious with her store of firewood, having no idea how long the power would be off. The electricity came on occasionally, providing some relief for an hour or two, but would shut down again just as quickly.

  At least the phones were still working. Headquarters had phoned to see if she was alright; they were phoning all the staff, which Liz appreciated. But no, she wasn’t needed back in the office and could remain on “vacation.” She was a bit disappointed by this but supposed it was prudent to stay home. Now that she had Rochester and some provisions, she wouldn’t need to go out for some days. Emergency crews and the military were out trying to get trees off power lines and help people who were stranded; the emergency vehicles were the ones in need of the roads.

  Liz had been able to reassure her mother in Calgary and her sister in Vancouver that she was safe and sound. She knew these things usually looked worse on television than they actually were, but even she had to admit that this was pretty bad. Normally healthy, upright bushes were bent at crazy angles, weighed down by layers of ice coating their branches. She had heard on her emergency radio that some enormous power-transmission towers around Montreal had collapsed from the weight of the ice and been rendered utterly useless. Tall trees in her own back yard had lost large limbs; she was grateful that her house was not directly underneath any of them. Nevertheless, the sound of branches cracking and crashing during the otherwise silent nights was frightening.