Death in a Darkening Mist

by Iona Whishaw

  She stretched and got up. Later, she would sort these various motivations among different mental shelves, according to plausibility. On reflection, she wondered why she would bother, as no one would be consulting her on the matter. Perhaps it was just her way of dealing with things. She certainly kept things she’d experienced during the war neatly put away, for all that they were now tumbling into her dreams every night.

  Once dressed, she decided today would be a writing day. When she’d done enough she’d shovel a bit of a path so she could get across to the post office. She had started a story about her grandmother as a young woman, and had hit a snag when she realized that what she thought was the complete story actually left a great deal of room for invention. It made her think about all the stories she had been told by her grandparents. They were centred around incidents, but there was never any sense of how the principals in the stories got into these situations, or how they got out. Granny and the soldier in the woods, Grandpa and the Gypsies. She was ambivalent about making the stories too biographical, but that left her the dilemma of fictionalizing people who were still alive. Who was she kidding? No one was ever going to read them anyway. When she had walked herself a good way down the road to doing something else with her day, the phone rang. Two longs and a short. Her ring. She went into the hall where her ancient trumpet phone hung on the wall. With the wooden receiver to her ear she said, “KC 431,” into the trumpet.

  “Lane, darling, it’s Eleanor. Are you coming along this morning?” Eleanor and Kenny Armstrong were the postal service for King’s Cove and lived, on a non-snow day, five minutes away, across her yard, over a little footbridge, and along the driveway to their cottage. The house Lane lived in had belonged to Kenny’s late mother, Lady Armstrong, and was now, much to Lane’s undiminished delight, her very own.

  “Surely you’ve no mail now? I was going to come after I’d shovelled the path.” Kenny collected the mail in his new red Ford truck down at the wharf, which was a mile straight down to the lakeside from where they were, along a narrow and twisting road. He went three times a week to meet the steamboat that docked there.

  “No . . . but . . . a cup of tea? You can shovel anytime,” Eleanor said.

  “Go on then, why not? I’ll be right over. I just have to get into my snow gear for the trip.”

  Tucking her dark blue wool trousers into her thick socks, she laced up her boots, donned her red plaid jacket, and went happily into the snow, which was soft and powdery and came, in places, up past her knees. By the time she knocked on the door of the Armstrongs’ cottage, the exercise and the bracing cold had made her face rosy and put her in a buoyant mood.

  She banged her boots on the heavy rope doormat and greeted the welcoming Eleanor with a wide smile.

  “Splendid day! I think this must be my favourite time of year,” Lane said.

  “Yes, well. It’s a long winter out here. I’d reserve judgment till you’ve lived through a whole one!” In the kitchen, they found Kenny in his favourite chair watching the kettle intently.

  The Armstrongs did their cooking on a wood stove that exuded a snug warmth into the small cottage kitchen that Lane envied. She would never get that from her electric stove, as much as she loved the convenience of turning a switch and not having to order and split even more wood than she already did for her sitting-room Franklin. She took up her usual chair, a rattan affair with deep though somewhat squashed pillows that made her wonder how they ever got visitors out of their house. There was a prominent portrait of George V in all his moustachioed splendour above Eleanor’s chair, and under it a photograph of a more diffident George VI. The balance of the pictures around the kitchen were of generations of Scotty dogs, both watercolors and fading photographs. Their last one had died during the war, and they had not replaced him yet. Lane knew that in the formal sitting room, there was a luminous silver-framed photo of Kenny’s brother John, who had died in the Great War.

  Lane, resting an elbow on the wooden table, watched as Kenny poured boiling water over the tea leaves and set out the teapot, which was covered with a Scotty-patterned tea cozy. Milk and sugar were organized, and cheerful sky blue cups and saucers distributed; the tea strainer, meanwhile, sat in its silver frame, looking immodestly aristocratic, a remnant from Lady Armstrong’s effects.

  “Well?” said Kenny.

  “Well, what?” she said innocently.

  “What’s all this about Adderly yesterday?”

  “Angela has been at you already?” asked Lane, pouring milk into her cup and stirring in two generous teaspoonfuls of sugar.

  “She called this morning. Amongst the harrowing description of the trip along that beastly road, there was something about someone dying at the hot springs? She didn’t like to say too much.”

  “Didn’t she? Is that tea ready?” Lane said, drawing out the misery. Kenny splashed some tea into each of the three cups and then sat waiting expectantly.

  “Someone did die, yes. In fact, it was rather awful. I was the second one to see the body. We had to wait ages for the police, as you can imagine, and the local doctor was quite cross about the whole business.”

  “Yes, but why did you stay up there when Angela came home with the boys? She was really in a state about leaving you.”

  “I had to stay to help. The poor fellow who found his friend dead doesn’t speak much English. They are Doukhobors, apparently. I speak a little Russian.”

  The three of them sipped tea, Kenny slurping his noisily from a cup that looked like a child’s toy in his massive hands.

  “Quelle surprise,” he said, because he was beginning to think that nothing this woman could do would surprise him. “Why the police, though? Wouldn’t a doctor have sufficed?”

  “I’m quite, quite sure that Angela told you it wasn’t a natural death.” Eleanor and Kenny had the good grace to look slightly sheepish. “He was shot, as a matter of fact.”

  Eleanor wrinkled her brow. “Who would shoot a Doukhobor? They are admittedly different from most of the people around here, but they are pacifists and wouldn’t hurt a fly. What dispute could there be amongst a people that believes in communal land?”

  “See, I was wondering that too. I don’t know much about them, but I know there are, or were, pacifist groups in Russia of one kind or another. In Russia I’m quite sure the state would get rid of people they deemed a threat to the Revolution, but surely that can’t be true here in Canada. Perhaps there are some internal politics in this group.”

  Kenny harrumphed. “Things aren’t going too swimmingly between the government and these people. They wouldn’t sign up for the fight, and the government didn’t like their communal approach to things. They busted them up just before the war. But even at that, I can’t see a government agent deliberately shooting an unarmed and naked Russian.”

  “Ah . . . so Angela mentioned he was naked, did she?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  FRIDAY MORNING, THE BOOTHS WERE all taken, so Ames and Darling were at the counter in the café for their working breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast with heavy white mugs of coffee. Perhaps it was the snow that drove everyone into the warmth and chatter of the café before they started their workday. Darling poured a generous amount of cream into his coffee, a concession to the relief from the deprivations of poor coffee and uncertain availability of cream at his wartime air force base, and watched in disapproval as Ames heaped three spoonfuls of sugar into his cup.

  “It’s not good for you, all that sugar. Your teeth will rot.”

  Ames produced an enormous healthy-toothed smile, and in the next moment ducked his head down to focus on stirring his coffee, dismay briefly written on his face. Darling looked up to see what had inspired this sudden flight of the amiable Ames, and saw that April, the object of Ames’s summertime romance, was backing through the swinging doors from the kitchen with what he very much hoped was their breakfast; it would serve Ames right to have to face up to his negligence. April placed Darling’s plate carefull
y in front of him with a bright smile, and then dropped Ames’s plate down, just loudly enough to register displeasure.

  “What’s the name of that nice girl at the bank you’re seeing?” asked Darling when April had retreated. “Something flowery . . . you seem to always go for flower names. Anyway, you should be more careful. There won’t be a restaurant or business left in this town safe for you if you keep this up.”

  “Sir,” was all he got back. Then, “I gather the post-mortem will be taken care of today?” Ames spread strawberry jam on his toast with quiet dignity.

  “Yes, but I can tell you what we’ll be told. He was felled by a bullet to the head, probably by a man who materialized out of the fog wearing a black coat and then disappeared. And unless I am mistaken, our Miss Winslow may be exactly right. The victim was executed. Not a very lady-like thing for her to know, but then, she is, in that regard at least, not very lady-like.” Focused as he was on murder, he was too busy to acknowledge an unspoken anxiety that had lodged itself in his mind since his first encounter with Miss Winslow. If he hadn’t been, he would have had to admit that he knew very little about her, other than what she was willing to share. Her wit and intelligence were fully engaging, but she spoke nothing about her past. What had her wartime duties with the British Government required of her? Had she been innocently fishing about in France for information to help the troops, or had her duties extended to more sinister pursuits?

  “We will have to drive all the way to New Denver to look over the victim’s house. At least it’s stopped snowing,” said Ames.

  “It would be splendid to find a photo of someone else’s wife dedicated to him with love, but I doubt we will prove that lucky. Perhaps the house will already have been ransacked by whoever did this. They might have left clues. Though given the professionalism of the murder, I fear not. The house will be exactly as he left it yesterday. Unless we find out why he was shot in the back of the head at a public swimming pool, we will have some difficulty uncovering who did it. We’ll have to talk to everyone in the locale, get what we can from the Mounties in Saskatchewan. I’ll put in a call when we get back. No. You will, now, while I’m getting the translator. Keep you off the phone with Lily or whatever her name is. Maybe we’ll have a better idea of his age and so forth from Gilly. We did see those scars. There may be other markings on him we didn’t catch in the darkness. And unless we are complete incompetents, I didn’t see an exit wound, which means there should be a bullet to help us identify what he was shot with.”

  “What about Miss Winslow, sir?”

  “What about Miss Winslow? You’re not proposing to inflict your attentions on Miss Winslow, now, are you?”

  “You’re a real card, sir. No, I mean, will she be translating for us?”

  “Certainly not. There must be someone more suitable up to the task, someone associated with the courthouse. Anyway, we cannot involve a civilian in this. She’s been put to enough trouble.”

  “Okay. But I bet she wouldn’t mind,” he said.

  THE INSPECTOR’S EFFORTS at the courthouse were frustrating. There was indeed someone who translated, a retired gentleman who might be willing to go along with Darling to New Denver, but he, Darling, would have to contact the man personally as he was fussy as to what work he took. He lived a mile out of town in a small cottage and was not in the best of health. He had a telephone, but didn’t like to answer it. Darling found Ames at his desk trying to make his needs understood to a functionary in Regina, and signalled him to hand over the car keys. Ames pulled the keys out of his jacket pocket and said, “One moment, sir,” to the person at the other end of the line. Setting his face in a look of surprise, he said, with his hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver, “You are going to drive somewhere?”

  “Yes, Ames, I am. I’ve driven before. I shall try to cope on my own.” Darling snatched the keys from Ames and said, “I should be back in half an hour. See that you get that done by the time I’m back.”

  Though it had stopped snowing, the streets had not been ploughed, and the snow remained untouched in some places, as though people were afraid to drive on it. This gave the roads slightly more traction, but it was still slow going. He bloody well better be at home, Darling thought. The translator, a Mr. Stearn, took some time to come to the door. He appeared to be well into his seventies and had the aspect of a man who never got visitors or left his house. The secretary at the courthouse had told Darling that Stearn, like so many others, had come over from Russia around 1917 after Bolsheviks had taken everything he had. “Yes? Can I help you?” Stearn asked in a tone that suggested there was some doubt that he could. His English was softly accented in a way that rounded out his words, but the high pitch of his voice conveyed a sense of grievance.

  “Mr. Stearn. My name is Inspector Darling, from the Nelson police detachment. I understand you are able to translate Russian? I need to interview some people up in New Denver, and wonder if you could help out.”

  Stearn, who spoke through the screen door, made no effort to let Darling in. “Do you mean I would have to attend with you in New Denver?” he asked anxiously.

  “Yes, that’s the idea. I need to speak with a few of the farmers there. I understand you’ve had some experience with this from your work in the courthouse.”

  “I don’t think I can do it. I don’t like to travel in automobiles. Not in this weather. And you don’t know about those people, either. No. I don’t think so, no.” The elderly man began to close his inside door.

  “Do you know of anyone else?” asked Darling, his heart sinking.

  “Well some of them speak what you call the King’s English, you know. You can get them to speak for themselves, but I wouldn’t trust them, and I wouldn’t go up there unarmed either.” With this the door closed and the inspector was left to contemplate the unsatisfactory way the day was unfurling. On the plus side, he decided as he descended the rickety porch to the snow-covered street, he would not have to travel all the way to New Denver with that unhappy specimen making what would most certainly be desultory conversation.

  Back at the office he tossed the car keys onto Ames’s desk with a clatter. “Nothing doing,” he remarked grumpily.

  “Shall I phone Miss Winslow?” asked his partner, happy to again pocket the keys.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ON THE SAME FRIDAY MORNING, Charles Andrews was having a bad time. He had not slept well the night before, and had had to fend off anxious incursions by his mother about how tired he looked. Consequently, he was very nearly late and had slipped in the door of the bank just in the nick of time. He began his workday by tackling an account he’d tried to sort out two days earlier. The numbers were simply not adding up, pull as he might on the lever of his adding machine. He was conscious of his responsibility to be accurate where the accounts of their clients were concerned, and he cursed his lack of training. This morning he was also cursing having gotten this job. He had enlisted at the beginning of the war when he was just out of high school, and during the war years had never given any thought to what he would do afterwards. He knew in his heart that life in the military suited him, but his badly shot-up left leg put paid to that. He could not in a million years have imagined himself tethered to a desk in a bank. It did not suit any version of his imagined self.

  Later that morning he delivered the bothersome file to Featherstone’s secretary, mentally crossing his fingers, and returned to his desk to tackle another one. He winked at Ames’s current girl, Vi, as he went by, and she responded by turning away in irritation. The clock above the front doors showed a disheartening 11:15. Ages before lunch, and ages more before quitting time. He had planned to go to the bar with Ames after work, but the policeman had called it off tonight, freeing him up to do what he now anticipated with almost a sense of hunger—sitting in on the card game that would be going on down by the rail station. With relief he saw that several customers had now lined up, and he went to the teller’s window to open. The one thing he did enjoy was th
e dealing with customers. He would be happy to help customers all day and let the Filmers and Harolds, who had desks on either side of him, do what they were trained for. He suspected that the reason he hadn’t been fired yet was because the customers liked him.

  Winter darkness was beginning to set in when he looked again at the clock. 4:00. Only another forty-five minutes till they closed and locked the doors, turned off the lights, and bade each other goodnight. He had, had, had to get out. He wondered how he would survive until closing time. So engrossed was he with this musing that he was not aware of Featherstone breathing fire behind him until he heard his name bellowed.

  “Andrews!”

  He struggled to stand up, as he might have done when his name was shouted in this tone by a sergeant. His left leg was stiff and did not take kindly to this sudden jumping up.

  Featherstone was holding a file. With a sinking heart Andrews realized it was the file from that morning. “Sit down and don’t get up till you fix this shocking piece of work. I’m not running a bloody charity here, you know. Any more of this sort of thing and you’re out. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Sir,” Andrews said to Featherstone’s retreating back. He sank into his chair and opened the file, nodding at Filmer, who’d sent him a sympathetic glance. Perhaps he’d help, Andrews thought. He should never have tried to fudge the numbers. He would have to go back and find the error.

  Filmer, studious and kindly in his dark-rimmed glasses, waited until the door of Featherstone’s office closed and then he wheeled his chair over to Andrews.

  “Here, give that to me. Look busy. I’ve finished what I was doing.”

  Andrews handed over the file, feeling a burst of gratitude for his colleague. He should do something for Filmer. Invite him to join his card game, take him for a drink. But when Filmer packed up each night he went home to a wife and kid. He’d seen them one Sunday. Happy as clams. Perhaps a present for the little boy. He sat now and tried to imagine himself in that domestic role. His most steady girl had been Sylvia, but she’d become a little clingy of late. He thought about Lucy, up the lake, their trysts at the cabin. He knew he was courting disaster there. In any case, he deserved a better class of girl. A Miss Winslow. He’d have his money soon, then he’d quit playing cards. He’d be in with a chance there. They could leave, go to the coast.