by Iona Whishaw
“BLAST,” DARLING MUTTERED, putting down the receiver.
“Sir?” Ames said. They were preparing to go out to the Cove to have a look around for Miss Winslow’s vagrant the next morning. Far from being the lovely sunny day the weatherman had predicted, a steady, grey spring rain was falling, giving Darling the feeling that nothing would go well. Ames on the other hand, was buoyed by the fact that he could wear his new dove-grey raincoat, a sharp British model for which he’d been saving up. As usual, his subordinate’s good spirits plunged Darling further into gloom. He was scarcely even comforted by his usual satisfaction that Ames would have to cover up his fine oxford leather shoes with unsightly black rubber overshoes.
“Miss Winslow is not answering. I wanted to let her know what time we’d be out.”
“No doubt off detecting, sir, doing your bidding,” Ames replied, taking Darling’s hat off the rack and handing it to him.
“Are you going to be insufferably cheerful all day? Doubtless it is consequent upon a tryst with one of your flower girls.”
“I did go to the pictures with Violet last night, sir, if you must know. And had a nice dinner with your chum Lorenzo, who asked after you, by the way. He was very excited about you bringing her to lunch the other day. ‘The inspector, your boss, and his lovely non-compliant Miss Winslow.’ Of course I can’t do his accent justice,” Ames said.
“No indeed, you cannot,” Darling said. “And I’ll thank you to keep your offensive insinuations to yourself for the remainder of the journey.”
“Sir.”
ON THE WAY out they reviewed what they knew. Added to the possible domestic violence visited on a child in Manitoba and King’s Cove by the senior Anscomb, they also had the possibility of his suspicious demise at the hands of his eldest son. “What if Bob Anscomb was the one who hurt the child? We have some evidence of his temper already,” suggested Ames.
“Yes, that’s what I’m worried about. What if this so-called vagrant is Bob Anscomb himself, back to visit the scene after reading about it in the papers? What doesn’t tally is that according to what Miss Winslow learned, he was by all accounts quite protective of the younger children. If this vagrant isn’t him, I think we’re going to have to track him down directly when we get back. A person can care about his family and still have an ungovernable temper. If he did lose his temper and beat his father, he’s out there somewhere, having gotten away with it. He could be quite dangerous and perhaps has accumulated a record as a result of his temper. We’ll have to look into that. He might be able to tell us the whereabouts of the younger siblings.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“DRIVE STRAIGHT TO MISS WINSLOW’S. I know we’re supposed to be looking for the vagrant, but I’ll be easier in my mind if I know she’s where she’s supposed to be,” Darling said, as they reached the King’s Cove turnoff.
“Well, in fairness, sir, you did ask her . . .”
Darling put up his hand. “Did I ask you for any sort of commentary?”
“No, sir,” said Ames, barely chastened.
They were not immediately discouraged when they saw that Lane’s car was not in the driveway, because it was possible she was now using the barn to keep it out of the elements, though the gate being open might have given them pause. The rain had become a steady, soaking downpour, and the men ran to the shelter of the overhang at the front door and knocked. They could see through the glass panes that the hallway was deserted, but Darling knocked one final time and the door slipped open. Stepping inside, he called, “Miss Winslow?”
“She’s obviously out, sir. We might as well get going on looking around for the vagrant. Though if I were a vagrant I’d be taking shelter, which means he’ll be harder to find.”
“It means you’ll have to get your feet wet looking into abandoned sheds,” Darling responded. He knew they should get on with it, but he felt uneasy. Why was Lane’s door barely closed? “You stay here. I’m going to take a quick look around.” He walked down the hall, glancing into the bedroom. The bed was made and the curtains were open. In the kitchen, he was surprised to see nothing whatsoever indicating that a breakfast had been consumed or even contemplated. He put his hand on the kettle and on the coffee percolator; both were cold. Her handbag was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs. In the sitting room he saw that the door to the Franklin was open, but it too was cold. Perhaps she’d been planning to light it. He saw the basket she used for wood and kindling was gone. Relieved, he went back into the hall.
“She’s gone for some wood,” he said, feeling silly about how anxious he’d been. “Run along to the woodshed and give her a hand.”
Ames turned and went outside, standing and looking toward her outbuildings. With a sigh he plunged into the weather and made for the barn. “She’s not here, sir,” he called out. “Her car isn’t here either.”
Alarmed now, Darling returned to the car. “Drive to the Armstrongs’. She might be there.”
KENNY ARMSTRONG WRINKLED his brow and pulled out his watch. “It’s gone ten thirty,” he said. “Only I tried to call her last evening at around seven to ask her over for a bite. I tried again at eight thirty, still nothing. If the Bertollis were here, I’d know she’d be over there, but they’ve gone off to the States for a holiday. I don’t expect them back for another couple of weeks. Eleanor has been holding their mail.”
“She could have been with someone else? The Hughes?” Darling suggested.
“Unlikely. They are early-to-bed early-to-rise sorts. Even their Christmas party was over before nine.”
“We mustn’t panic just yet,” Eleanor said brightly. “I’ll telephone Gladys and you can pop down to see Robin Harris. Sometimes she goes along there. I think she feels a bit sorry for him after everything. I’m sure by the time you get back she’ll have come home and we’ll all feel silly.”
Ames was made to get out, slosh up the drive, and knock on Harris’s door, but to no avail. As they were about to turn at the church to go back to the post office, Darling suddenly said, “Go straight up here. I think this runs past the Bertollis’ property, and that abandoned house is farther up past that. My one hope is that she’s gone there, no doubt looking for the vagrant, or feeling sorry for him, or something against my sternest warning to leave him to us. She’s an absolute menace!” he concluded darkly.
EVEN MABEL, WHO of the three of them was most attached to the pigs, was not pleased to be donning her thick oiled jacket and hat to provide their daily ration of slops. She looked skyward as she stepped onto the ground, now squelching beneath her feet in the downpour. There appeared to be no let-up in sight. With her head down she hurried past the root cellar and the garage and took the downward slope of the path to the sty. She didn’t even hear him the first time, because she was looking intently at the small pig house and wondering if it was keeping out the water, as it should. It was only when the man stepped out from behind the barn and held her arm, his finger already at his lips indicating she should keep silent, that she realized he was there.
Dropping the bucket in fright, she tried to back away, but the man held her firmly. “Shh, please. Please. I’ll do you no harm. It’s Mabel, isn’t it? It’s you?”
Mabel looked at him, her eyes wide. Was it his voice? His eyes were still unchanged in spite of the years and the messy growth of hair and beard. Whatever it was, it gave her strength to pull herself out of his grasp. “You? What are you doing here? No, get away. Don’t touch me.” She stopped and looked past him toward the house.
He grabbed her arm again. “Mabel, please. At least let’s stand under the roof. I need to know something.” She allowed herself to be pulled under the overhanging roof at the back of the garage, which afforded a very imperfect defence against the clattering rain, but she moved a few feet away, still staring at him, trying to see the young man she once knew. He was not used to living rough; she could see that. His clothes were decent and the beard was short, as if he simply hadn’t shaved for some weeks.
&nb
sp; “Was that you in the woods? Have you been watching the house?”
“I’ve been watching for you, Mabel. I wanted to see you. I hoped you would talk to me . . . tell me . . . Only now . . .”
“Talk to you about what? Why are you here?”
“I read the paper, about the body found in the cellar. I had to come, you can see that?”
Mabel looked back down the path toward the root cellar, where the tarpaulin was sagging. The rain was beginning to let up. She started to back away, but the man held her arm again. To her horror, he seemed to be crying. “I looked, Mabel. All them years, I hoped he’d be found.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by coming here. Who is that in there? Is it little Andrew?” Mabel could feel herself going white with horror.
“Mabel!” it was Gwen, calling from the porch. “Mabel, Kenny’s called. They can’t find Miss Winslow. She hasn’t been here, has she?”
Mabel swallowed and then called back, “No, haven’t seen her.”
She turned back to speak to the man, to tell him he had to leave and never come back, but he was running away from her, slipping and falling, swallowed up by the grey.
LANE’S HEAD ACHED like nothing she’d ever experienced before, throbbing above her eye like a manic engine. She reached up and winced, pulling her hand away. A massive swelling had developed and it hurt like the dickens. It was pitch dark and very cold, reeking of damp earth. She could hear rain pounding relentlessly on wood somewhere in the distance. She stood up slowly, but even so felt herself sway, so she reached out, her hand landing on an earthen wall. The dirt floor felt cold. She was missing a shoe. She was afraid she would faint and she put her head down, trying to breathe deeply. Bending made her aware of how bruised most of her body felt. How long had she been out already? There was no light visible at all. Was it nighttime? She felt slowly along the wall and scraped her shin on something metallic. She cried out in pain and frustration, clutching it. God, how had she got here? She reached out carefully with her hands, trying to feel her way, moving her feet gingerly to avoid another collision and hoping she’d find the other shoe.
She remembered now. She’d seen light in Angela Bertolli’s kitchen. She’d stopped and gone onto the porch. Why was she at Angela’s house at all? Had she been going back to the Anscomb house for some reason? She remembered thinking she’d missed something. Maybe she thought she’d find something. But why Angela’s? That was all she remembered. “Well, obviously it wasn’t Angela,” she said out loud, her words sounding flat in the enclosed space. She remembered Darling, suddenly, telling her to be careful. Perhaps this wasn’t quite what he had in mind, she thought ruefully. She had a flash of him saying, “I told you so,” and felt a combination of embarrassment and anger. Where the bloody hell was she? She felt around with her stockinged toe and it bashed against something hard. Reaching out and then down with an oath, she found that it felt like not quite a ladder but very steep stairs. That was something, anyway.
The wooden stairs creaked as she carefully felt her way up the steep incline. When she was near the top, she heard a sharp crack and felt the structure shift. Frantically she reached out, hoping to feel the door she was anticipating would be there. She had a vague sense of having done this already once. She wondered if her injuries were from falling down the stairs . . . or being pushed. Her relief at feeling the doorknob was short-lived. The door was locked and felt as solid as granite. She turned and sat nervously on the top step, hoping the whole thing wasn’t about to come apart, but reluctant to go back down to the perils on the ground. She banged on the door and began to shout.
“Hello! Help! Is anyone there? Hello!” but only silence greeted her efforts. In retrospect she questioned her initial desire to shout for help. If the only person around to hear her was the person who banged her up in here, it was unlikely to do her any good to have him notice her.
In the stillness after her initial desperate clamber up the stairs, the darkness pressed in, and the pain in her body seemed suddenly to be the only thing in the world. Her ribs ached, her head throbbed, and she was becoming aware of a growing feeling of nausea. That’s all I bloody need now, she thought, anger momentarily besting her very real and growing fear. Fear was nothing new. It was amazing how quickly it overwhelmed, she thought. But fear had a purpose. They’d been taught that in the service. The job of fear was to clarify the mind and stimulate all the resources of survival.
She closed her eyes and let her fear become that clarity. She had parked her car in the driveway. No, wait, go back. Why was she there in the first place? She had seen light in Angela’s kitchen and thought it was her, back from holiday.
What kind of light? Not as strong as her full electric light. A flashlight? The light wobbled, like a flashlight, and the rest of the house was dark. She must have become uneasy because if they were home, she would have heard the children, there would have been lights blazing all over the house. Those bloody dogs would be barking. They had left them at a farm in Balfour. She remembered thinking that maybe they hadn’t picked them up yet. Had she paused? She remembered knocking on the kitchen door now. No one had opened it. Why had she not simply gone back to her car? She knew the answer to that. It would not have been like her to back away. She must have thought it was the vagrant and wanted to confront him, especially if he were helping himself to Angela’s house and supplies.
She had a fleeting thought that it was this single-mindedness that made Darling uneasy. It led to a lack of caution. Had she found the door open and gone in? She stayed with the question, trying to envision what she must have done, and was rewarded with a fleeting image of falling forward, the knotted rag rug on the kitchen floor rushing at her. So she had not seen her assailant. He must have been behind her. It was unnerving to find bits of dark space in her memories. She hoped it was simply that she was concussed and they would come back. It worried her that she had lost her edge. She had avoided this sort of ludicrous situation during the war with a finely tuned nervous instinct for danger. Now, here she was, locked into some sort of bloody basement, not knowing if it was night or day!
Still, she reasoned, she was at Angela’s and she had parked her car near the road. If someone began to miss her, they would see it. They would know she was here, somewhere. Then, with a precipitous sinking of her heart, she realized that he, if it were the vagrant, could have swiped her car. In which case there would be no trace of her at all. Lane tried to pierce the darkness, but it was total.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
AMES PULLED THE CAR UP in front of the deserted house. In the rain the house projected an unrelieved darkness and abandonment. “I wouldn’t take shelter here if I were a rat,” observed Ames, opening his door.
“No sign of her car,” Darling said. “We’d better go have a look. I would not put it past her to try to find him.” He went onto the porch and cupped his hands against the murky windows, but saw no sign of life. The door was locked.
Ames, in the meantime, had gone around the back and found, as Lane had, that the kitchen door was open and he went inside. “Miss Winslow?” he called into the dark silence.
Outside again, he saw Darling emerging from a small outbuilding. “Nothing in the house, sir. She’s right. It’s a miserable place. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was haunted, like she said.”
“Not here either.” Darling moved to the larger shed set farther back at the edge of the yard. He opened the door, and as he stepped inside, he saw that someone had been here recently. There were footprints in the earth beside the door. They were filling with water and beginning to fade. Not small, but not large enough to be a man’s foot. He stopped momentarily, not wanting to obliterate this slender evidence of Lane possibly having been here, feeling an almost overwhelming sense of sadness and anxiety. “Where the bloody hell are you?” he whispered.
Ames stood outside watching him, rain dripping off the rim of his hat, still looking annoyingly debonair with his new raincoat, a circumstance that made Darli
ng feel the full force of his own impotent fury. He knew now, absolutely, that Lane was not on any errand but somewhere in trouble.
“Not bloody here. We’re going back to the Armstrongs’ and we’re going to phone everybody around who is on the telephone. You are going to go to every house that is not and down to the waterside. We are looking for anything, but in particular, her car and that blasted vagrant.”
IT WAS A car; she was certain of it. She could hear it going past, on her left, as if it were on some distant roadway. With a cry of frustration she heard it fading. She had a momentary impulse to shout for help, but knew that was pointless. Better to think. There were only two roads possible: the one that went past the front of the Bertollis’ log cabin, or the one that went along the side, up to the Anscomb house, and straight down again to the Nelson road. She tried to imagine how the basement would be oriented. The house was built on a slope; it was possible that it was shallower toward the back. No, that didn’t help. She couldn’t remember a basement at Angela’s, but there must be one. The stairs would logically go down into the highest part of the basement. If that was true, these stairs likely were pointing toward the road at the front of the house. In which case the car was going up past the side of the house, in the direction of the abandoned property.
Lane waited. She had moved down the stairs and was sitting with her feet on the ground. She had lost all sense of time, of day or night. She wondered how her body had become so bruised. Had he thrown her down the stairs? Then she remembered thinking she’d gone up those stairs once already. They were rickety. Perhaps she herself had fallen. She closed her eyes and waited, listening intently. She was only in this dark and silent moment, waiting for the sound of the car returning. At last it did. She willed it to slow, to stop. Whoever it was had gone up to the Anscomb property.