by Iona Whishaw
“A man shouldn’t be put into that situation,” Mrs. Castle said angrily. She stood up and said, “Wait here. I found a photo. You can barely see the number. A red plate. Sticks out like a sore thumb on that yellow car.” She went into the house and came out with a small black-and-white photo of a man standing beside a car, one hand on the hood. “I had to tear the place apart, but I knew it was in here somewhere. That’s Carl. It was taken early this year.”
Darling took the picture and looked closely. The licence was just visible, enough of it to give to the RCMP. “Can we keep this? It will help us.”
As they gained the main road bound for King’s Cove, Darling said speculatively, “I don’t know, Amesy. Did you think her protests were a bit much? She didn’t seem surprised to know he’d been laid off. Well, no. Maybe that was news, but I have the feeling she no longer thinks he’s dead in a ditch.”
“No. How can you say that? She seemed upset to me. Anyway, it is a bit weird, sir, you must admit,” Ames added.
“No, I don’t. What is?”
“It doesn’t seem right, a woman being able to take a man’s job like that.”
“It is 1947, Ames. Women can do all sorts of things. I knew women who flew planes and fixed them. We may have found the source of your problems with women.”
“Very funny, sir. But even they don’t agree with it. You heard her.”
“If that show was genuine, then it’s possible Mrs. Castle is bitter because it was her baby boy that got put out of a job. I daresay if she had a daughter she might feel differently. Still, I think you might share your views with Miss Winslow. See what she has to say.”
This caused Ames to fall silent.
“Shall we ask her what she thinks?” Darling persisted.
“You wouldn’t,” Ames said. They’d arrived at the base of the hill up to King’s Cove. “Down to the wharf or up to Miss W’s?”
“Better go up. She’ll have to show us what she’s seen.” As Ames turned the car at the sharp corner up to King’s Cove, Darling continued, “It’s interesting that you don’t want Miss Winslow to know what you think. It may suggest that you should examine your attitudes. Isn’t your Violet doing a job in the bank that men usually do?”
“But a mechanic, sir. It’s . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Dirty? Unfeminine? You should have seen some of the mechanics I knew! They cleaned up very well. Too bad you were stuck here during the war, Ames. You would have a wider view of the world. Miss Winslow, for example, I have learned, is extraordinarily capable.”
Ames thought about Violet in the bank. It had been a man’s job. Mostly still was. Violet herself had said she was anxious to marry and quit the job. That was how it ought to be. But his boss was right. Miss Winslow was another kettle of fish altogether. It made him think, that’s for sure.
Lane heard the car coming up the road and, assuming it would be them, was ready at the top of her driveway. The evening was still warm, and she was wearing a white cotton shirt and a pair of fern-green shorts. Darling’s heart turned over, seeing her standing at her gate, her arms crossed, smiling at them. Her skin was golden from the sun, and her auburn hair was drawn back and tied with a scarf.
Ames shook his head and muttered, “Wow.”
“Good evening, gentlemen. Lovely night for the beach. Ames, how are you? Is the inspector treating you well?”
“You know he’s not, miss.”
“Poor dear.” Lane climbed into the back seat. “When we’ve finished down there you should come over to the post office and see the new puppy before you go. She’s absolutely scrumptious. They’ve called her Alexandra after what Eleanor calls our ‘dear king’s late grandmum.’”
As Ames backed the car onto the road, Darling said, “Amesy here thinks women ought not to be mechanics.”
“Sir! You promised!”
“Did I? I don’t think I did. In fact, he’s rather against women working at all if they take a man’s job. What do you think?” Darling turned and looked back at Lane, resting his eyes on hers, feeling like it was home.
It was difficult, she thought, not to lean forward and kiss him. Instead she sat back and looked out the window. “I think it’s a question that should be treated seriously. On the level of the individual cases, a man, who is expected to support his family, needs to have a job. What if he comes home, as so many have, and finds a woman doing that job? Logic says she should leave it, because in the natural order of things, there’s a man somewhere who can support her. But what if she has no man? What if she has an old parent to support, or her man was killed, and she has children?”
“Ames?” said Darling, raising his eyebrows at his constable.
“I hate this road,” Ames said, beginning the winding, narrow descent to the lake.
“And I think the final question is, what did we learn from the war? Hitler kept most women out of the workplace before the war and made little use of them during it. England on the other hand had every able-bodied woman in a job, and England won. Forget the messy end of the war when an awful lot of women had to leave jobs. I think it might say something about a society where the intelligence, skills, and energies of every citizen are put to the wheel.”
“There, Ames. Something to think about, eh?” Darling smiled genially.
“Thank you, sir. We’re here.” Ames pulled the car up next to the apple shed and jumped out to open Lane’s door.
Lane led them down the sandy embankment onto the beach. “I stowed it under here so the children wouldn’t get at it. Oh.” They had arrived at the base of the wharf, but the boat was, most evidently, nowhere to be seen. “Well, that’s funny. I put it right under here. You can see it’s been dragged out. The oar is gone as well.”
Darling looked out at the lake, as though he expected to see someone rowing away. “Could it have been taken by someone local?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. People don’t usually swipe other people’s boats around here, though I suppose someone could have taken it for a joy ride.”
“Not much joy with all that dried blood in it,” Ames said. “Look, you can see it’s been dragged to the water.”
The rowboat had evidently been pulled along under the wharf to the water’s edge. The water lapped gently at the dissolving ridge marking the boat’s progress in the sand.
“Well,” said Darling, walking out from under the wharf into the light, “if it isn’t someone helping themselves, then it’s someone who wanted the boat back and knew it was here. I bet it’s been hidden somewhere along the lake and we’ll never find it. Or more likely, it has been burned or scuppered.”
“Or what was in it.” Lane put her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God. Could someone have followed the boat, or been looking for it, and then watched us pulling that poor man out and sending him to hospital? That means . . .”
“Right again, Miss Winslow. That’s exactly what it means. Fast as you like, Ames. We need to get to a phone.” Darling ran back up to the wharf and leaped into the car, Ames and Lane behind him. “Come on, Ames, no time to waste. If that man hasn’t died of the unnatural cause of being shot, he’s very likely still in danger.”
Lane’s phone behaved and Darling was put through to the hospital.
“That patient is still unconscious, poor kid,” the nurse informed him. “But at least he had a visitor. The visitor was asking for Joe Smith, and of course we didn’t know what he meant. We don’t have a Joe Smith here, but when the visitor described him, I realized who he meant. He didn’t stay long. He said he was a cousin of the patient, who had gone missing a couple of days ago, and that was why he was checking the hospitals. Said he’d be back in a couple of days. He’s a logger so he doesn’t get to town much.” The nurse paused. “There was a funny thing. When I came in to check the patient’s vitals, the visitor was going through the little drawer
by the bed. He said Joe was a fellow logger and had the key to a locker they share. I told him we didn’t find any key. I asked him to give me the man’s full name. He said it was Joseph P. Smith. He didn’t know what the P stands for. I’ve got it on his file, anyway. I was tired of calling him John Doe—that’s a name for a dead man. I did ask him how the poor kid got shot.”
Darling frowned and looked at Ames and Lane. “What did the visitor say?”
“He said he didn’t know. He heard there’d been an argument at a bar. He didn’t even know where. He seemed in a hurry to leave. He said he’d come back, but I told him the poor guy has very little hope. He’s been going downhill since the surgery.”
“Can you tell any visitors that might come again that the patient is too ill to be seen? I’ll have a policeman assigned to sit outside the room. Can you do that for me?”
“A policeman! Oh . . . did I do something wrong? He seemed like a nice enough guy. Pretty nicely dressed, for a logger, now I think of it.” The nurse sounded worried.
“No. It’s all right. Just taking precautions.” Darling hung the earpiece on its hook, muttering “Bloody phone” under his breath, and turned to his waiting companions to share what he’d learned.
“Boat taken, well-dressed man going through the drawer. And how did he know the victim was in the hospital with a gunshot wound? He was there, whoever it was, or knows someone who was. What was he looking for? What have we missed?” Ames asked. “Because aside from that letter, I didn’t find anything unusual in that horrible bag.”
“And on the other hand, we have the missing Carl and his oh-so-protesting mother. Can they truly not be connected?”
“You doubted her?” Lane asked Darling. They had walked out and were standing in the driveway. The golden dying light of the day was showing its final finery on the tops of the trees, but the air still held a close and soothing warmth.
“Inspector Darling thinks she protested a bit too much about her son losing his job to a woman,” Ames said, climbing into the driver’s seat.
“I can’t help feeling she’s lying about something,” added Darling. “Either she knows he was let go, or maybe she knows for certain he’s not dead somewhere, though I must say her distress about his being missing seemed genuine enough.”
Lane stood in the driveway, relishing the feel of the slight breeze that moved the warm air soothingly across her bare arms. She listened till she could no longer hear the progress of the police car out of King’s Cove. She wondered when she and Darling would feel comfortable in front of Ames during what she suspected would be one of many, many partings. They could be sitting now on the porch watching the light fall behind the far mountains on the other side of the lake, Scotches in hand if . . . if what? They were a normal couple? If they were married? At that thought she felt a surge of almost fear. Wondering at her own response, she turned and walked back to the house.
“You fell in love with a policeman,” she reminded herself out loud, and then imagined that instead of Darling, she had a puppy greeting her when she came into the house. Very sweet, and it wouldn’t talk nonsense. She’d talked with Darling about getting a dog in the winter. Maybe it was time to act.
Early the next morning, when Angela had given in to the exhortations of her three boys and was lying on the wharf trying to warm up after her early dip in the lake, Philip, playing on the beach with the others, cried out, “Hey, Mom! Look what I found!”
He was holding up a small metal pin, a blue circle with a bright red swastika in the middle.
CHAPTER NINE
Lane sat on her porch early the next morning, Thursday. The days of the week had meant nothing during the war, and they meant nothing in particular now, except she wondered if they ought to. A reasonable independent income meant that she did not have to work, but it also meant her time did not have the shape it had had when she worked for intelligence. Though not on a Monday to Friday schedule then, she nevertheless had had furloughs during which she had taken the train to Oxford to visit friends or had gone out at night to noisy, smoky clubs.
Deciding that she could celebrate a day with no pressing obligations by not weeding her garden, she sighed contentedly and sipped the cup of coffee she held in both hands. She looked at her view from the lawn that stretched out below her, across the forest at the edge of her property and out to the lake. She loved to watch the morning move like a sparkling river over the lake and up the mountains on the other side. It was cool still, and she was wearing her green cardigan. Her mind was divided between the knowledge that the crushed shell in the egg cup next to her was the remnant of the last egg she had in the house, and the fate of the young man they’d found on the beach. She wondered if they had let themselves be carried away by the idea that someone would come and try to finish the job.
She opened one of the two books she’d brought out to read. Before leaving England after the war, she’d gone to her favourite bookstore and scooped up armloads of books and packed them into the crates that would be sent on when she had found a home. The crates contained her complete set of PG Wodehouse, her dictionaries of French and Russian, and several novels in each of those languages, including, she’d been unhappy to see when she unpacked them, Madame Bovary, which, when she’d read it during the war, she had found tiresome with its powerless, wilting heroine. Perhaps she could give shape to her weeks by rereading Bovary and learning to see her in a different light. Lane had spent the time since she’d returned from her latest trip to England pulling the last of the books out of the crates and putting them into her built-in bookshelves. Earlier in June she had gone to be with Darling when he’d been called back to London to account for the wartime crash of his Lancaster, and she’d had a visit with her grandparents in Scotland, where she’d introduced Darling to them. They’d been delighted with him, but she could see they wished she would stay in Scotland. As much as she loved them, she knew she belonged here.
The book arranging had been a firm notice to the universe that she was here to stay. Her trip back to London, a city she adored, had taught her that she had cast her lot with Canada, and she intended to make her life there. She felt a freedom in her new home that she had never felt in London, though she had lived there on her own with no parents to placate. She knew that the limitations she had felt there were caused by her war work, but her return to England had served to show her that she could not shake that feeling of being controlled and overlooked, especially as many of her friends and colleagues had simply continued their work for British intelligence and had switched from fighting the Nazi menace to fighting the communist menace. A brush with her old handler had been the final straw.
She had been stricken when she pulled from the crate a copy of Pippi Longstocking. She had bought it to give to a friend who had just had a baby girl, but both had died in the bombing in 1942. It reminded her that for some people “back to normal” would never occur again. She had opened the book and seen the inscription she’d written, “To darling little Sally.” She had put the book first on the shelf that contained all of her favourite books so that she would never forget.
She had purchased a number of books she thought she ought to read—“duty” books. One of these was on her lap now, Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love, but instead of reading she was gazing out at the lake. She had hoped the clearly biographical book, with its bevy of girls trying to sort out their lives and find mates, would hold her interest. She turned the corner down on page five, wondering vaguely how she’d read that far and what she’d missed by being distracted, then closed the book and took up Animal Farm, another duty book. It looked earnest and took her mind back to the egg problem.
She would go along to the Balfour store and pick some up. She knew that Gladys could supply her eggs, but Fred Bales got his eggs from Mrs. Castle, and in her mood of feeling lucky to be alive, Lane wondered what fears Mrs. Castle must be enduring because her son had disappeared. The
sun had completed its work of lighting up the lake, which now sparkled below, and the cardigan, no longer necessary, was left on the chair when Lane went into the kitchen to check her clock. Nearly nine. The store would open at nine.
Fred Bales was sweeping the front steps when she pulled up. His black Lab, which often lay on the road, had stationed itself between the gas pump and the shop door. He pulled himself to a sloppy sitting position and thumped his tail on the ground when he saw Lane, who went over and stroked the top of his head. Maybe she should get one of these, she thought.
“Usually he’s lying in the middle of the road,” she commented, smiling at Bales.
“Morning, Miss Winslow. That’s when the sun gets over there. He should be making himself a nuisance to passing traffic at about noon. I can’t seem to break him of the habit. The police nearly ran over him the other morning. They were in a big hurry. I hear there was something at the wharf . . . a young fellow in a rowboat.”
Lane knew perfectly well that he had “heard” from Lucy, the girl who worked the telephone exchange out of the back of the store. “Yes. Kenny and Angela and I were fishing when we found him. He was nearly dead, but I hear he’s still clinging to this world.”
“That’s good, anyway.” Bales put the broom against the wall. “What can I do for you?”
“I just need some eggs,” Lane said.
“Now that’s the very thing I don’t have. I usually get them from Mrs. Castle down at the farm, but she hasn’t got a car since that son of hers drove it off somewhere. I’m supposed to go down to the farm and fetch them, but I haven’t had time.”
“Oh. Well, I could do it. I need some anyway. I could go down and get some for myself, and bring your supply back here. Two birds.” And a third, Lane thought with satisfaction, because now she would get to meet the lady herself.
“Well,” said Bales, “if you don’t mind. That would be helpful. I’ve hired a young fellow to pump gas and do the odd job around here, but he’s not coming back till next Tuesday. My last one quit and went out to the coast.”