Death in a Darkening Mist

by Iona Whishaw

  The bedroom was as austere and tidy as the rest of the house. A single bed with a collapsing mattress, rough flannel sheets, and three wool blankets. The wardrobe, which she opened cautiously and peered into, feeling as if she were intruding into Strelieff’s personal life, was of dark, heavy wood. One suit, some white shirts, and folded on the floor of the wardrobe what looked like trousers, sweaters, and some underwear, both winter and summer. The suit, black, was made of wool, and was hanging against the wall of the wardrobe. She reached up to feel the quality of the cloth and was surprised by its softness. As she handled the sleeve she heard a whispered sound of paper falling, and reached behind the carefully hung trousers, feeling for what might have fallen. It was a photograph of a woman. Astonished, she stepped nearer the window to look at it. Where had it fallen from? There were signs on the back of yellowed tape, which she confirmed when she pulled the suit aside to look more closely at the back of the wardrobe.

  The face in the photo was that of a young woman, but had been taken with the formality of a nineteenth-century photograph. She appeared to have dark hair, cut just below her ears, and it was difficult to read from her unsmiling face what she might have been like. Indeed, she looked almost frightened, as if unused to having her picture taken. She was wearing a white blouse with a bow tied at the neck and a black suit jacket. In spite of the severity of the pose, Lane could see that she was quite beautiful. What would she be? Twenty-five? Turning it over again she could see that the tape had covered some spidery writing, but it was clear enough to read: From Marina, 1937. Was this a lover?

  She was roused from her thoughts by the sound of Darling and Ames coming back into the house. She felt a twinge of guilt. She should be at her post, not here in this silent bedroom.

  “Inspector,” she called out as she walked back into the main room. He turned from where he’d been reading her notes at the table and watched her approach. She paused. What was he seeing in her? He seemed to be searching her face as if she herself were under review.

  “I’m sorry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone into the room. I know you probably wouldn’t want it touched, but I did find this.” She held out the photo, hoping she would not be required to reveal the searching about in the wardrobe that led to its discovery.

  Darling took it and turned it over. “1937. What is written here?”

  “From Marina.”

  “Miss Winslow, does Barisoff speak enough English for Ames to ask him about this photo?”

  “I think so, yes. I believe he understands a good deal more than he lets on.”

  “Ames, please go to Mr. Barisoff and see if he recognizes this photo. And while you’re at it, didn’t he mention having a son? Could you find out where he is too?” He turned back to Lane when Ames had left. “Was the photo inside one of the books, Miss Winslow?”

  “No, actually, it was stuck to the back of the wardrobe. You can see where the tape was.”

  Darling suppressed a smile. “I was going to get my useful dogsbody, Ames, to search through the pockets and so on, but you seem to have gotten the jump on him. What do you make of Strelieff so far?” He waved his hand at the neat pile of books and her notes.

  “I haven’t quite finished. I’ve not looked through those newspapers, but they are in English, so I’ll discount them for the moment.” She moved to the papers and picked up the pile, revealing a Webster’s dictionary. “Ah. He was working, at a guess, on his own English. There is a grammar primer for children as well. I would say he was an educated man. Two volumes of Tolstoy, one of which lays out his radical views on pacifism. And War and Peace here could be the kind of book to have on a desert island, to be read and reread if you had nothing else. His own writing in this notebook, handwriting I mean, is very fine, though unfortunately it contains little to illuminate who he was. It seems to be entirely devoted to notes about what he would teach the children. I would like to be able to perhaps go through the notebook at home, with more time, just in case.”

  “I think we can manage that. We had no luck outside in the woodshed or the outhouse, and of course everything is snowed over, so there is little to see lying about the grounds. It is rare to find so little of the personal, especially in a house lived in for some six years. It is as impersonal as a room in a rooming house. It is as though he was here, but not here.”

  “That’s why I wonder about Marina. Though it does not say ‘with love’ or anything sentimental, she was a beautiful young woman in 1937, and he seems to have hidden her picture.” She sat down on one of the wooden chairs. “Why hide the picture? He’s miles from anywhere here. He seems to have erased himself almost completely, but cannot give up this one thing.”

  Darling took off his hat and placed it on the table. Pulling out the other chair he sat and ran a hand through his hair. Lane looked away in consternation at what felt like the sudden intimacy of this movement.

  “Perhaps,” he said quietly, “he loved her.”

  New Denver, 1940

  “Why? Why are you letting him stay there? It was meant to be mine.”

  “I know, and I am sorry. But you can stay here, with me. What is wrong with this?”

  Barisoff’s son, Anton, stood and angrily pushed the chair back so that it fell over with a crash. He picked it up and banged it upright, then began to pace back and forth in the small room. His father sat watching him, his hands folded before him on the table. His son suddenly seemed like a trapped grizzly. Barisoff had the air of a man waiting for a storm to pass.

  “I don’t want to stay here with you. I am a grown man. I want my own house. The house you promised me. This man is a stranger. He is nothing to you! I don’t understand why you have to be the one to help him.”

  The old man shrugged. “It is God’s will. He is a brother in need. We have and he does not. We are meant to share.”

  “That’s the trouble with you! It’s God’s will, it’s God’s will. That’s your answer to everything. This all used to be ours. We really shared then, we were a community, remember? Look at us cowering on little pieces of land that used to belong to all of us. We are pushed around by everybody and it’s God’s will. Why is God willing that everyone in this country be protected by laws and we aren’t? Why are we so special?”

  “The Japanese are pretty special as well,” his father reminded him. “They have lost everything.”

  “And they’re probably sitting around saying it’s God’s will too. I’m not taking this lying down!”

  “My son, you are confused. You cannot with one voice say that you want to return to our communal way of life and in the next say that you must have your own house. You are not being logical.”

  A few moments later, Barisoff sighed. The sound of the front door slamming had given way to silence. So much for peace. His son, he knew, was confused. Life was not as it had been. Like everyone, he thought, his son missed the certainty of his childhood. His own childhood lived in his mind with such vividness. All that happened from the moment he was wrested with his family from the motherland was a jumble compared to the great expanse of peace and beauty that was his childhood in Russia. From the moment he sat on the cart with the other children who were too young to walk the distance, surrounded by bundles of all they owned, and watched their farms fall away into memory, there had been constant movement. It was remarkable to him that in a way his son’s experience mirrored his own exactly. His son had known the peace and security of their communal endeavours, had learned the value of work and the love of God, who had provided this rich land for them to live on. Then the disruption, the moving, the demands of the government, the changing laws, the broken promises. He supposed he had just given up, really. When his wife died, everything had changed. God meant for his people to face these struggles. He was telling them, This is My will. God, he saw now, did not intend that nothing should ever change, but rather, that everything must change, and that they must keep their faith in every new circumstance. And his faith told him with no uncertainty that he must help
Strelieff.

  CHAPTER NINE

  USING THE DIRECTIONS PROVIDED BY the protesting Barisoff, they continued along the same road towards Slocan, to a farm where Barisoff’s son, Anton, lived and worked. His father had said to Lane as they were getting into the car, “He can have nothing to do with this. Nothing. He hardly knows the man.” Lane had tried to reassure him that the police needed to cover every angle; that it was all just part of procedure. She thought, as they made their way along a bumpy road, how much human suffering was caused by that neutral word “procedure.” Was he worried that his son might have been responsible for this?

  They found the farm, and the woman who answered the door directed them suspiciously to an outbuilding where the sound of steady axe blows told them wood was being split and stored for the stoves. The young man stood still when he saw them, his axe in his hand. He watched, frowning, as they approached.

  “Are you Anton Barisoff?”

  The young man swung his axe into the chopping block. “What of it?”

  “I’m Inspector Darling, this is Constable Ames, and Miss Winslow, our translator.”

  “You won’t need her. Thanks to you I speak better English than my own mother tongue. Has something happened to my father?” Why else would the police come? “Or have you come to tell us we can’t live here either?”

  “Is there somewhere we can sit and talk? Your father is fine, but we do need to ask you some questions.” Darling sounded mild, kind even, Lane thought.

  The young man looked towards the house. It was considerably larger than his father’s. They could hear women talking and some children shouting in delighted, high-pitched voices.

  “We can go in the outside summer bakehouse. The house is full. It is baking day. It is hardly warm but we can sit,” the young man said. Darling nodded.

  “I WILL NEED to start by asking you where you were Thursday afternoon.”

  Chairs had been pulled off the rough wooden table and they were now seated in the covered, but otherwise open, area that constituted the summer kitchen. Large stone ovens, dormant in the winter, occupied one wall, providing a rudimentary sense of protection from the elements.

  “What’s happened?” His face hovered between worry and aggression. Lane could see the resemblance to his father in his eyes and the shape of his chin. How had he come to live here, away from his father? she wondered.

  “The man who lives in the cabin near your father has died. He was killed when they went to Adderly, which I understand they do every Thursday.”

  The young man looked down, his face unreadable. “Is my father all right?” he asked finally. “Killed how? Was it a hunter or something?”

  “Your father is fine. He is shaken by the loss of his friend, whom he found shot to death in the change room. We are presuming that Mr. Strelieff was targeted. Can I ask again about your movements Thursday?”

  “Where would I be? Look around you! There is work everywhere. You know nothing about us, do you? The idea that I would take up a gun for any purpose is ridiculous.”

  “We are pursuing every possible lead.”

  “Well, you can pursue elsewhere. Or perhaps you’d like to just arrest me and have done with it. You’ve already reached your conclusion.” Anton glowered at them.

  Darling sighed and asked, practising extreme patience, “Do you know of anyone who might have been an enemy of your father, or Mr. Strelieff?”

  “I cannot account for Strelieff, but Father has no enemies, unless you count me. We do not get along. He is a kind old man who just wants to help. I warned him that helping a complete stranger could lead to trouble, and now it has found them. But he thought he was doing the right thing. God wills it, he told me. God has been busy again, I see.”

  “Can anyone verify that you were here?” asked Ames.

  The young man was silent, looking away.

  “No,” he said finally. “And I don’t want the people here bothered. You will have to believe me when I tell you that the last thing I would ever do on this earth is hold a gun in my hand. Anyone could tell you I’ve never had a gun. If you aren’t going to arrest me, I would like to go to my father.” Anton stood, his large hands clutching the back of the chair.

  There was a period of silence. Ames wrote some notes and Darling considered his next move.

  “Mr. Barisoff, did you leave your father’s farm because of Mr. Strelieff?” Lane asked suddenly.

  “Yes,” he said simply. “My father offers kindness to strangers before his own son.”

  “Did you meet him?”

  “I did. I did not trust him. No. I won’t say I did not trust him. I did not trust the story he told. He said he was from Saskatchewan, but he looked terrible, like he had been on the run. I asked my father how did he know the man was not running from a murder he committed. My father, in his typical way, said he trusted in God. He gave him a house I expected to be mine to live in. Now, you see, this is the outcome.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Barisoff, but I must search this house,” said Darling.

  So it was that five women, four children, and one old man came to be standing outside in the snow, talking fearfully and quietly in Russian, while Anton, Darling, and Ames went through the house.

  Lane longed to talk with the women, but the barrier between them seemed immense, historical. They were dressed in long skirts with kerchiefs tied around their heads, their aprons reaching the tops of their boots. They were like the older women she had known as a child, still clinging to the fashion of their childhoods in the nineteenth century, only these women were clearly children of the twentieth century. It must have been like this, she thought, all over Russia. Czarist troops going through houses while people stood outside. It shocked her suddenly to be part of it. The children stood nearby, watching her, and she smiled.

  “Do you like the snow?” she asked in Russian, and was rewarded with nods and one or two smiles. “I used to love it when I was your age too.”

  One of the women turned to the children and told them to go collect wood, and they scurried off, fearful again. Lane stood with the women, the silence between their worlds absolute. Finally, Lane turned to the woman nearest her, who seemed, but for her clothes, as if she might be close to her own age.

  “It is baking day today, I understand. I wish more than anything I knew how to make bread.”

  The young woman glanced at the others and asked, “Did your mother never teach you?”

  “No. She died when I was a child.” At this the women lost some of their reserve, shaking their heads and looking at her with sympathy.

  “That is sad. A child needs its mother,” the young woman said. “You should come here. We will teach you. Our bread is very good. Everyone wants some.”

  “Thank you so very much. It would be such a lovely thing to do. It would be like going home.” Lane was quite moved by the invitation. It amazed her that she could be in the forests of Canada and meet people so like people she had known in another life.

  BACK ON THE road towards Kaslo, Ames tilted his hat back and said, “Well. Is he our man?” Their search of the house had produced nothing but an increase in bad feeling towards the police.

  “Miss Winslow? You seem like a student of human nature,” Darling offered affably, turning to look at her in the back seat, where she had insisted on sitting for the drive home.

  Lane would have preferred not to be drawn. She was not a student of human nature. Indeed, looking back at her life she decided her rarified upbringing, her absent parents replaced by servants and doting grandparents, gave her no capacity to judge people at all. “I wouldn’t like to say, really, but I’m thinking about the gun again. I was in the tunnel, so I might not have heard the report of a gun at all, but the children didn’t hear it either, and at the shallow end of the pool they were right by the dressing rooms. Though I suppose we would have to budget for them shouting and splashing into the pool. But the shot was taken close up, and there was no exit wound, I think you told me. That suggests a
very specific type of weapon. Purpose-built, even, for that sort of work. How likely is it that young Anton could get his hands on something like that?”

  Ames glanced at his boss, who would have liked to have told him to take that smug expression off his face. “He did not really account for his movements Thursday,” Darling said, “and no one else in that household was prepared to say.” Talking to the rest of the household, consisting of a very old couple, their three daughters, a niece, and four grandchildren, after an unrevealing search of the house had been frustrating in the extreme. They did not, or would not, speak English, and offered nothing but shakes of the head to his translator when asked if they could vouch for Anton’s movements.

  “Oh! I actually know where he was,” Lane said apologetically. “The women told me while you were searching the house. They’ve invited me to come learn to make bread, and in the course of conversation they told me he’d been away for the last three days in Grand Forks. He’s courting a girl there.”

  “Well why the blazes didn’t they tell me when I asked them?” asked Darling. “Ames, turn the bloody car around. We’ll have to find out who he saw there. And keep your eyes on the bloody road!”

  “I’ve only been in Canada five minutes, and I’ve never heard of Doukhobors before now, but I’m going to hazard that they are not over-fond of the authorities,” Lane said.