Death in a Darkening Mist

by Iona Whishaw

  Barisoff was standing on his porch when Wakada brought his truck to a stop. Wakada waved and jumped out into a bank of snow. He was about to suggest Barisoff shovel the road a little better, but the Doukhobor spoke first. “Bad grind gears,” he said reprovingly, waving his hand at the engine.

  “Bad shovel road,” he countered. “What’s this about the police coming here?”

  “Come in. Is bad.”

  Wakada listened with dismay as Barisoff recounted the story of Strelieff’s death at the hot springs in his broken English, feeling a growing anxiety.

  “So the police think you . . . ?”

  “No, no, not me. Girl what is speaking Russian help them understand. But now no one know who. I lock every night the doors. Is make no sense, whole thing.”

  Wakada’s invitation to Barisoff to come to his home for a meal the next day was accepted, though reluctantly, as though the Russian was afraid to leave his place in case something happened in his absence. It was on the way back to his own farm that Wakada thought of the suitcase.

  AMES THREW THE newspaper onto Darling’s desk. “The paper’s got hold of it, sir. ‘Death at the Hot Spring.’”

  “Great,” his boss said glumly, “that’s all we need. I’d rather hoped we could keep it down. We don’t want the Doukhobors thinking we are letting people murder them. In any case, we don’t think the victim’s from here at all. If Miss Winslow is right, he’s a proper Russian, and as usual when she gets involved we have no idea who the victim is.”

  “We can hardly blame her for that.”

  “Sadly, you are right. And even with someone to blame, if we think he’s a Soviet citizen, then our way lies in perilous waters indeed. We’d have to involve Ottawa, embassies, God knows what all.”

  “Maybe we didn’t ask enough of the right questions when we were out to see Barisoff. If we now believe Strelieff was not a Doukhobor from Saskatchewan, then maybe there are more details we could have gotten about when he first arrived in New Denver. Something he might have said to Barisoff when he first came that might reveal more.”

  Darling raised his eyebrows. “Is this what it’s going to be like when you begin to show signs of thinking? Happen, as they say in England, you’re right.”

  “Speaking of England, should I organize Miss Winslow? You could apologize to . . .”

  “Stop right there, Ames. And how many times have I told you not to perch on the side of my desk. You are not a parrot.”

  Not that apologizing hadn’t crossed Darling’s mind. Still, there was no need for her to be so sensitive, he told himself defensively. Though, in truth, she’d had a bad time of it. All that business of that repellent handler, turning up here in the summer trying to get her to come back to England. She’d had enough of being pushed around, he knew. This progressive train of thought led to his waiting until Ames had gone back to his office and calling her himself.

  THE NEXT MORNING, while Ames was seeing to the gas in the car, Darling sat and mused. He knew he should be musing about Strelieff, if that was his name, and his untimely death, now a week old, but it was Miss Winslow who occupied his thoughts. He wanted to disengage her from this, or any other, business. Their relationship was too difficult. He seemed to go from gentleman inspector to bastard in no time when he was with her. At the same time, she was intelligent, seemingly honest, and meticulous, so far, in the work he had put her to. Was it the nature of her work in the war that unnerved him? Her secrecy? Both, certainly, then he chided himself. We’ve all been through a war and been called upon to fight. Why should what she did be worse than what he did? Because she was a woman? Did he think women should stay prettily at home, above the fray? Rubbish. Gloria hadn’t.

  Gloria. He had not thought about Gloria since he’d been back. He moved firmly away from that line of thinking and turned his mind again to Miss Winslow. Was it her refusal to be his subordinate? No, that would be too ghastly. He could not admit that of himself. In fact, he liked her independence. He was just coming round to a part of the truth, that from the time he’d met her in the summer over that business of the body in her creek he had been unaccountably buoyed just by the sound of her voice . . .

  The jangle of his desk phone interrupted him before he could make any more dangerous admissions to himself. “Darling.”

  “There’s a Mr. Wakada on the phone, sir.” It was the front desk man.

  “Put him through.”

  “Hello, Inspector. This is Hiro Wakada, I live up near New Denver.”

  Darling took his feet off his desk with a thump. “Yes, Mr. Wakada, how can I help?”

  “It’s probably nothing, but, well, I happened to stop by Mr. Barisoff’s place today and he told me about what happened to the other fellow, Strelieff. I’m sure it’s nothing, now that I think of it, but anyway, I’ll tell you now I’ve got you. When my son went off to school in Alberta this year, Strelieff lent him a suitcase because we’d given all of ours away to the Japanese who were leaving the area. We decided to stay, you see. Anyway, about a month ago he drove up to my place in a state because he wanted the suitcase back. He seemed very anxious about it. Said he’d given us the wrong one. I told him Ben was coming back soon and would get it back to him. He seemed to accept that, but you could tell he was anxious. I sent a note to Ben to make sure he brought it back and ask him if there had been anything in it, but he said no. Anyway, the damn thing is coming back with Ben in two days.”

  “Will you be coming in to town at all, Mr. Wakada?”

  “Well, yes. I’m picking Ben up at the train in Nelson. I have to buy him a new suitcase anyway, so we could drop Strelieff’s by the station, if that works.”

  “Thank you. It does. What do you do up in New Denver, Mr. Wakada?”

  “I’m farming for now. Wanted to study law, but well, here we are.”

  “Law? It seems a shame to waste those interests. As you can see, we have plenty of crime around here.”

  “It’s all water under the bridge, Inspector.”

  “Well, thanks for calling, and I’ll expect you day after tomorrow, is it?”

  “See you then.”

  WAKADA PUT DOWN the receiver feeling, for nearly the first time he could remember, a sense of pleasure in talking to anyone in authority.

  “THANK YOU FOR being available, Miss Winslow,” said Darling, turning to where she sat in the back of the maroon Ford. She had decided on this trip that sitting in the back was better for her nerves; she could sit on the side of the car away from the cliff edge on the way out. Ames glanced at his boss. Was he being extra courteous? It would make a change. He approved.

  “What else can he possibly offer?” asked Lane. She wondered if she would ever get used to this road. It would be a shame not to. The hot springs were lovely when there weren’t bodies strewn all over the place.

  “I think what we want to do is tax Barisoff’s memory about when Strelieff first arrived in New Denver. After six years it’s going to be tough, I know. I certainly can’t remember what I was doing even last year. But still. When he first got there, did Barisoff put him up till the other house was refurbished? What had he brought with him? This business of the suitcase he gave Ben Wakada is interesting. Do either of you recall seeing a suitcase when we were searching his house?”

  Lane mentally reviewed her visit to the wardrobe. The suits on hangers, the folded clothes under them. She had a knack for remembering the placements of things that she saw, but she had been waylaid by the photograph. Had she missed something? No. She did not think there had been suitcase. She then turned her mind to the space under the sink. No.

  “We assume a second suitcase, I guess, because he had been upset he’d given away the ‘wrong one,’ yes? You know, I didn’t look under the bed, but it seems an obvious place to put a suitcase.”

  Stifling a “That’s the only place you didn’t look, then, when you were supposed to be going over the paperwork?” Darling said, “I did look under the bed. Thoroughness like that is part of our train
ing. There was nothing there. We’ll give the place a good going-over again, including any spots missed by you, Miss Winslow.” He could not seem to help himself, he reflected, glancing at Lane. But she was beaming back at him in the friendliest possible manner.

  “Any news on the gun?” she asked.

  “We’ve requested information from the police in London. I feel quite chummy with them now, after the summer. The question will be, if you are right about the Welrod’s limited production, who could have gotten their hands on one?”

  “Europe was a shambles after the war. Anyone could have got anything. Welrods were often delivered to isolated areas. French farmers for whom they were never intended could still have some.”

  “Excellent. Not only do we have to worry about Russians, but we could be facing a murderous French farmer. I assume you speak French as well, just in case. Ames, you’re driving too fast.”

  “HOW DID HE arrive? I think he took a ride from someone coming from town. The train would have dropped him in Nelson. Barnes dropped him off here after his store closed. Probably because I was the nearest farm,” Barisoff said.

  “Can you ask him what the man had with him,” Darling asked. They were gathered around Barisoff’s simple wooden table, in the single room that served as eating and sitting room, Ames and Lane at each end and Darling and Barisoff at the sides. The polite pretence that Barisoff required a translator was a little puzzling to Lane, but she decided it was what he wanted. He felt more comfortable speaking in Russian, and it eliminated the possibility of misunderstanding. Certainly it reduced unnecessary hostility, as well, she thought, since he’d obviously taken a shine to her.

  Light from the small windows slanted across the table, throwing the rest of the room into shadow. Barisoff sat with his back to the window, and Darling wished he had arranged it so that he was facing it. He would have liked to have been able to see Barisoff’s face better. By some instinct he did not believe Barisoff was his man, but at this stage, no one could be ruled out.

  “It was May, so he wasn’t wearing a coat. I remember that.” Barisoff closed his eyes. “He got out of the truck, and went to the back and took two small suitcases out, like that.” Here he pointed at the suitcase they had found, after some difficulty, hidden, probably deliberately, by its location, in the woodshed. What had he feared? It was a small, battered leather suitcase.

  “There was a second one?”

  “Yes, definitely. He had one in each hand.”

  “Do you know what happened to the other one?”

  “He told me he gave it to the Japanese fellow, Wakada, for his son to take to college, after the war, when everyone left the barracks.”

  “Did he say anything else about that?”

  “No. What would he say? He gave him the suitcase, that’s all I know.”

  “Tell us what you can remember about when he first arrived. What did he say about himself? What did he talk about? Did he stay with you?”

  Barisoff turned to Lane. “What do these people think I am, a machine?”

  She smiled at him. “Just whatever you can remember, any small detail might help them. They need to know more about him to try to understand why someone might have killed him.”

  Barisoff humphed and continued, “He told me he was from Saskatchewan and he had some sort of lung illness and found the winters there too cold. He thought it would be better here. I told him he was going the wrong way, that things had just got very bad for us, with our farms broken up and us trying to keep our community together when we were all scattered. He said he knew but he didn’t mind going his own way. He didn’t like politics. I remember this because I felt the same way. We commiserated because we were both widowers, and I said I had a cabin at the back through the little wood and we could fix it up and he could stay there. He’d have to help with the garden, and maybe pick up work now and then. He spoke even worse English than me. I remember that. We fixed up the cabin enough to be liveable and he moved in with his two suitcases.”

  “Did anyone come to visit him?”

  “How should I know? I didn’t see anybody, except the local people. When he started working with the children he went out. Who he met there, I couldn’t say.”

  “If I may, Inspector?” said Lane, holding up her hand. She then continued in Russian, “Mr. Barisoff, was there anything at all about him that made you wonder, made you think he might not be Doukhobor? Anything in his language, or how he talked about things?”

  With his lips pursed, Barisoff leaned back in his chair and looked up. In the silence Lane was impressed that neither policeman interrupted or asked what she had said.

  “Now that you say it, maybe. He didn’t seem very religious, though I couldn’t say why I thought that. I was surprised by that big book he had.”

  “War and Peace?”

  “Yes, that was what he told me it was. I couldn’t see a farmer having that, but I just thought maybe things were different in Saskatchewan. Anyway, it was good for us, because he could help our children learn to read the Russian bible.”

  Lane was about to explain in English what he had said, when he added, “Oh, and I thought I saw him smoking once. But only once. I thought it was strange, but then everybody around here smokes—we are the only ones who don’t; we don’t drink either. Maybe he picked it up. It was this, maybe, that made me think he wasn’t religious.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He’d changed recently. It might have been near the end of September; he took my truck to town. I had to give him a list. His English was really bad. He was very quiet when he came back. He just left the truck and the keys and went to his cabin and closed the door. He didn’t even help me unpack. He barely said anything. I thought maybe he was tired, so I left him. By next day he seemed fine. I asked if he was all right, and he said he was. And then this week, he seemed hesitant about our usual Thursday trip to the hot springs, but in the end he decided to go. Too bad. He should have stayed home. But fate is like that, you cannot run from it. It will always find you.”

  FATE HAD TAKEN a turn for the worse for Featherstone, who now sat, his lips set glumly, staring at the door through which the vicar had just gone. He took in a great breath of air and then reached for a file from his inbox and opened it, but he did not look at it. The vicar had suggested that someone in the bank was quietly embezzling money from the savings accounts of old people who, generally, would not look at their accounts from one year to the next. There was a rap on his door.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  Filmer tentatively opened the door and looked across the threshold. “The file you requested, sir.”

  “Well, don’t stand there. Bring it over. And shut the door on your way out.”

  He couldn’t think about the bloody file just now. He had to think how to proceed. Andrews was the most likely candidate. A consummate idiot. Very convenient, his absolute ineptness with figures. Very convenient, indeed, for him. He picked up his phone. “Filmer, get me the Peabody and Hughes accounts,” he barked.

  Filmer hadn’t even had a chance to sit down at his desk before his phone rang. He hung up his receiver and rolled his eyes at Andrews.

  “I could hear him from here! On the warpath again?” Andrews asked.

  “Yup.”

  September 30, 1946

  The stationer’s in Nelson was quiet. He selected ten copybooks and two boxes of pencils. He momentarily thought of pens and ink, but rejected them on the principle that the children might end up using their energy struggling to control these rather than on learning their printing. He was just going around the shelves towards the cash register when the door swung open and a young man in a camel coat careened into him.

  “Gosh, I’m sorry! I slipped just outside the door here and couldn’t stop. Are you all right?” The young man had taken off his hat and looked with concern at Strelieff.

  “Thank you. I am fine,” said Strelieff, resuming his progress towards the clerk.

  “Say, you’re Russian
, aren’t you?” said the young man, pointing at him with his hat. “I can tell the way you talk.”

  “Nyet. Doukhobor,” Strelieff countered. He did not look at the young man but pushed through and put his purchases on the counter.

  “Same difference, eh?” the young man said jovially. “Whereabouts do you live?”

  Strelieff handed his money to the clerk and then had to wait while his purchases were wrapped. Tipping his hat without responding to the young man, he left the shop, the noise of the bell on the door ringing in his ears, even after the door had slammed. He hurried along the sidewalk, his heart pounding, then realized he’d parked the truck in the other direction. He darted around the corner and looked back towards the stationer’s. The young man had come out of the shop carrying a small paper-wrapped parcel. He stood on the street looking in the direction of the truck.

  Thinking he could go around the block to cut back to the truck, Strelieff glanced once more up the street and saw a woman come out of the hairdresser’s and approach the young man. They embraced and laughed. Strelieff leaned back against the wall, relief making him almost weak in the knees.

  “Was the truck okay?” Barisoff asked when Strelieff rolled it back up the drive.

  “You should put oil in it. You drive it too much without looking after it. The groceries you wanted are inside. I have to go. I have work to do.”

  “Not even coffee?”

  “Later.”

  Once in his house, Strelieff closed the door and looked nervously out the windows. He pulled one of the suitcases out from under his bed and put it on the kitchen table. From inside he removed a small handful of papers and looked wildly around the house, and then looked again at the suitcase. The stove he’d lit that morning for water exuded the warmth of banked charcoal, and he toyed only for a moment with burning the papers.