Death in a Darkening Mist

by Iona Whishaw

  After that first phone call he’d sat, uncomprehending, trying to remember the woman this man claimed was his mother. It must have been, he decided, the only time in his life that he had truly lost himself. She must have been one of the women on some committee that welcomed officers home. He had been drunk. He remembered that, even after twenty-eight years. Everyone had been happy to be home. Only he had been sorry to see it end. Perhaps that was why. He had been unhappy, and wanted to forget. The only thing he could remember was that she had been married.

  The second phone call had made him feel as if his blood was draining away. He had known then that it would not end, and he could lose everything.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Moscow

  THE TIME AT THE DACHA had been restful, agreeable. The wives had been left in Moscow. It had not even been hard to persuade them, and in any case, some could not leave their jobs or their nearly grown children who seemed to continue to need them. Now, back in the office the men sat in silence, waiting for Berenson to read what was on the telegram.

  “This was wired last night,” he said. He knew it was a bully move to make them wait, but his degree of satisfaction made him smug. With a few delicate pulls of spider-fine strings across a continent, he had engineered this outcome, gratifying on levels they would never understand. He read, “Sold cabin. Stop.”

  “Then we are done with the idiot,” said Vagin, leaning back in his leather chair and nodding with relief. “Kobe will be pleased. Comrade Stalin likes loose ends, however small, tied up. Now, what about the girl?”

  “What about her?” Berenson asked, but in truth he had been thinking about her as well. “I checked with Aptekar. He knew her father, as it turns out. Worked for the British. He’s dead, poor bugger.”

  “If that is the case, it seems logical. She already has form,” Vagin said. “She can’t have been happy if she left the service. She could be persuaded, no? Why don’t you get the man on to it?”

  “If he could get her out to the coast, she might be persuaded. Aptekar can take care of the details. He’s there now, to settle with this man. He can find a way to make contact with her. If she is really disenchanted with her keepers in London, and is even a little homesick, we could be successful, who knows? Worth a try.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “I’VE JUST HAD A LONG-DISTANCE call from London,” Darling said to Ames, whom he’d summoned from his little office down the hall. “Miss Winslow was, as usual, right. Zaharov was a journalist, according to the Russian desk, but he wasn’t anything to do with intelligence. From what they were able to find out, it seems he was a sub-editor of some sort and appeared pretty regularly in Pravda until about 1937, and then just disappeared. They suspect he was destined for a gulag. As far as they could tell he was a typical Soviet journalist . . . a party faithful, so he must have strayed from message. They did remark that he appeared to come from a more educated background than a lot of the journalists.”

  “Why is that important?” asked Ames. “Aren’t all journalists educated?”

  “I don’t know that it is. In any case, according to what we learned via Miss Winslow, he possibly got in trouble for what he was writing and had to leave the country. How he came up with a scheme to hide out among Russian speakers in Canada I don’t know, but he did, and here we are.”

  “So we have a motive, possibly, but still no suspect. And if Miss W is right, that this was some sort of elimination perpetrated by the Soviets? We may never know. What about his family? Will they want his remains?”

  “Oh, yes, they were able to pass along some information there too. He was an only son, both parents died between the wars. Evidently he was married, and his wife divorced him in absentia and is happily married to someone else. No children from that first union. No record of his death. He just disappeared. I doubt anyone wants him back.”

  “Wow. Those Russian desk people are pretty good. I wouldn’t want them looking into my life. You wouldn’t have any secrets!”

  “You haven’t got a life, Ames. And you certainly have no secrets. Everyone in town knows about you and your flower girls!”

  “I’m going to ignore that, sir,” Ames said pluckily. “If the killer is a Russian national, he may well have come and gone. But if, as Miss W suggests, it was some local person in the pay of the Soviet government, then I’m guessing it is someone from here that no one would suspect. Someone living amongst us. Should we be thinking about someone behaving strangely suddenly? Getting out of their usual routine somehow?”

  “Ah, yes. If only we knew the routines of everyone in the region. It should be the work of a moment,” said Darling. “Actually, Ames, you may, miraculously, have a point. Let’s think through it. It’s likely to be someone who’s been abroad. There are lots of those, because of the war. So let’s say someone in the military. How many soldiers do you reckon, out of Nelson and environs?”

  Ames, feeling suddenly rather pleased with himself, said, “I don’t know, sir, but I’ll find out. I’m going to guess in the neighbourhood of a thousand from the region. Of those we will have to eliminate those who didn’t make it back, or had injuries that have crippled them in some way, and maybe those that fought in the Pacific.”

  “Incidentally, Ames, have you had a call from the bank yet?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, keep your eyes peeled. Aren’t you chums with that fellow Andrews?”

  IT HAD NOT snowed during the night, but the overnight cold had made the sidewalks icy. Some public-minded shopkeepers had spread salt along the sidewalk, but much of the going was treacherous. Ames had put on his overshoes, and was grateful for their grip. The sun lifted his spirits almost as much as Darling’s back-handed praise. He would start, he thought, at the library. He didn’t go there often, but he knew the librarian, Mrs. Fogarty, because she was a friend of his mother’s, and he knew her to be thorough in the extreme. She would know how to get the information he wanted.

  As he was crossing the street near the bank, he was surprised to see Violet emerging, her maroon hat tilted prettily over her brow. She did not look happy. Ames looked at his watch. It was barely after ten. Surely she should be inside doing her typing or filing, or whatever she did.

  “Violet!” he called, jumping on to the curb to avoid a car coming down the hill that didn’t look as though it was going to be able to stop. She turned and he could see that she had been crying. “Sweetheart, what’s the matter?” he asked, surprised. He’d never seen her cry.

  “I’ve been let go, is what’s the matter!” she said angrily, wiping tears away with her gloved hand.

  “What do you mean, you’ve been let go? Why?”

  “Oh, they said it was because they were over-staffed. I don’t think so! I knew they were up to something the other night. I saw them, heads together, scheming, fighting. I don’t know. Bastards!”

  Ames wanted to steer her into the café, so they could talk in a booth in peace, but he remembered April, and so took Violet’s arm and walked her around the corner, off the busy part of the street.

  “Who was meeting? About what?”

  “Well that’s just it, isn’t it? Charlie and that Featherstone suddenly as thick as thieves. Charlie was pointing at something and looked like he was giving Featherstone what for. It’s like they were equals. You could have knocked me over with a leaf when I saw that. Featherstone treats us all like slaves, including Charlie. In fact, especially Charlie. I was just putting things away in the filing cabinet. I couldn’t help it if I saw them, but I know I got fired because they think I heard something. I didn’t, more’s the pity!”

  “Sweetheart, you’ll get another job. Look at you! Who wouldn’t want a pretty thing like you!”

  “I’m going to have to tramp around in this snow and ice looking for something. My ma needs the money. I didn’t even stay to find out if I got any kind of severance, I was so mad. They owe me! Bastards!” she finished.

  “Can I help . . . ?” began Ames, bu
t she scowled at him.

  “No, you can’t. I’m going to buy a paper and then go home to read the adverts. I don’t know what Ma is going to say!”

  Thus rebuffed, Ames watched his Violet cross the road and head off to break the news to her mother. He made for the library, musing on Violet’s news. He would be very surprised to find Charlie was thick as thieves with old Featherstone. Charlie was quite happy to recount the outrages perpetrated by his boss the bank manager, who seemed to have been modelled on some Victorian throwback. More likely Vi got the wrong end of the stick. Given what he knew about Charlie and his boss, he was doubtless being raked over the coals for his bookkeeping.

  He was having a drink with Charlie later, so he’d be able to hear the full story. When Charlie had invited him he’d almost said no, but then thought he’d been harsh in his thoughts at their last meeting. Charlie was Charlie, after all, and they’d been friends a long time. He’d just stay away from talk of Miss Winslow, or any other girl. Who was he to judge? Was he, himself, very different? Darling certainly seemed to think he played fast and loose with the ladies. But then he wondered if he should cancel and take poor Vi out for dinner instead. He stopped and looked back at the road she had gone up, but then thought she wouldn’t want to. Maybe on the weekend, though.

  WHEN HE ARRIVED back at the station with the information that they were looking at approximately 1,100 young men from the area who had signed up, many as early as ’39, he was rather wishing he’d had a wager with Darling, he’d been so accurate in his guess. His high spirits were dampened immediately by the task ahead. Who were the men, how many had died, how many were too injured to embark on a life of crime, how many might have gone down that path, and most importantly, why and how. An invitation from a faraway empire, like the Soviet Union, to become an assassin was extremely far-fetched. Most of the men in the area came from farming or lumber or even mining backgrounds. A good many of them would not have had above a high school education.

  “Lots of them probably belong to unions,” suggested Darling.

  “I suppose, but can we assume that would make them Bolsheviks? And even if it did, shouldn’t they be targeting mine owners or something, not foreign journalists?”

  Their further deliberations on the complexity of the task ahead were interrupted by a call from the front desk for Ames. Darling listened and then turned to Ames.

  “What have you been up to now, Ames? There’s a hysterical girl downstairs wanting to see you.”

  Ames furrowed his brow. Vi must have changed her mind about telling her mother right away. “I better take this, sir.”

  “You better had, and in your office. I don’t want mine cluttered up with your tragedies. And hurry back. We’ve got work to do.”

  But it wasn’t Vi at all. It was Sylvia Allen, Charles Andrews’s old flame, and like Vi before her, she had obviously been crying. Wondering not for the first time why life dished up troubles in clusters, in this case weeping women, Ames invited her up to his office and got her a drink of water. “What is it, Sylvia? What’s happened?”

  “I couldn’t understand why we stopped going out. I went to see his mother, and she told me that she thinks he has found someone new, that he seems really in love with her. She said she was so sorry because she always liked me, but Charlie has gone out to see this new woman scads of times and it seems really serious to her. He keeps talking about how great she is. Well of course after that I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t! Only what will I do now?” She burst into tears.

  Surprised at this abrupt entry into the story, Ames squirmed with embarrassment and offered Sylvia his handkerchief, which she took and sobbed into for some minutes.

  “Why does he keep going out there to see her? And why does his mom say he is in love with her?” she wailed.

  “Look, you’d better start at the beginning. I thought you and Charles had broken up ages ago.”

  “He told you that? What a bastard! I’m going to have a baby, you idiot! I’ll lose my job. I don’t know how I’ll live. My dad won’t have me back once he hears about it.”

  Ames leaned back, alarmed. Good old Charlie had never told him anything about this. He’d put this girl up the spout and was now sniffing around after Miss Winslow. Sylvia was right. He was a bastard. One thing for sure, the whole thing had gotten way too big for him.

  “You have to tell your mother, at least. She might be fine. After all, you’re her daughter; she loves you.”

  Sylvia uttered a grim laugh. “You don’t know my mom. She does anything Dad says. She sent me to work during the war, but now the war’s over she wants me back. She doesn’t even know about Charlie; I can’t tell her about this. No. I’ve got to get Charlie back. It’s the only way. He has to marry me.”

  “Does he know about the baby?”

  “No. I was gonna tell him, but I left messages for him at home and at the bank and he never called me or came to see me. That’s why I finally went to his mom. She sorta liked me before the war but you could see she thought her Charlie was gonna do great things and she thought I’d hold him back, but we got quite friendly during the war, because we were both worried about him. She doesn’t know about the baby either, before you ask. It’d just prove her right, like I just did it to trap him.”

  “You can’t hide it forever. You’ve got to tell him. I know he’s a decent fellow. He’ll do the right thing. You’ll see.” He thought, as he offered this testimonial, that he actually wasn’t so sure about Charlie’s decency.

  Sylvia now went from tears to rage. “You would defend him! He’s seeing that other woman. He doesn’t give a damn about me. He goes out there all the time! You know when he first started cooling off and I asked him where he was going, he had the bloody nerve to tell me he was going up the lake to see an aunt he claimed lived there. His mother was the one who put me right. He doesn’t have any aunt out there! She said Charlie’s been going out all those times to see that English woman. You have to help me! You’re his friend, you’re always in that stinking bar together. You have to set him right, get him to marry me!”

  AMES ARRIVED AT the Larkin a little later than they’d planned, Darling having asked him to sit with him and go over the photos they’d taken of the tire tracks. He’d been cross about this last-minute request, but then had been captured by one interesting aspect of the photo. The treads had clearly been made by brand new snow tires. They themselves had been using chains the night of the murder, a much more common antidote to snowy roads. Filled now with a sense of hope that they might come up with a lead through one of the garages in town, or between Nelson and Kaslo, that might have installed snow tires lately, Ames was nevertheless wary when he spotted Charlie on his own at a table near the back of the room. There was, after all, still the business of Sylvia, and the even more puzzling business of his sudden devotion to Miss Winslow.

  “Sorry, pal, the boss kept me.” He signalled a girl with a tray full of brimming glasses of beer, the after-work drink of the locals, holding up two fingers. She winked, and he settled in. Charlie, he saw now, looked to have been there some time. His mouth had the familiar looseness it got when he’d been drinking heavily.

  They sat and smoked in silence, Charlie stretched languidly against the back of the bench, looking past Ames at the far wall. The noise was considerable. Ames saw Charlie’s mouth move just as there was a shout of laughter. He leaned in.

  “What?”

  “I said, isn’t life a bastard?” Charlie said, leaning towards the table and cupping his hands around the tin ashtray, which was already well filled. “And on top of everything else I’ve lost a fortune at cards. Oh well, I’ll be in the money soon.”

  Firmly putting aside an unbidden thought about the embezzlement call he still hadn’t had from the bank, Ames thought, she must have told him. “Are you going to do the decent thing?” he asked.

  Charlie picked some tobacco off his lip. “Oh. That. No doubt she came crying to you. It’s not up to me, is it?”

&n
bsp; Stunned by Charlie’s complete lack of concern, Ames sat and stared at him for a few moments. “Seriously. Is that your response? The poor girl is beside herself. She’s terrified to go home and she doesn’t know where to turn, and that’s the best you can do?”

  “For God’s sake! She’ll get a job. I’ve got problems of my own at the moment, thank you very much.”

  In that moment Ames saw that they were talking at cross-purposes. “Oh, you’re thinking about Vi. I know that wasn’t you. I’m talking about Sylvia. She must have told you.”

  Charlie’s face clouded and he leaned in closer. “Sylvia? What the bloody hell are you talking about? What’s Sylvia got to do with price of tea? I’m in no mood for parlour games, Ames.”

  Ames, in no mood for games himself, said angrily, “Sylvia is up the spout, pregnant, knocked up, in the club, and you put her there, you moron! And you have the bloody nerve to go sniffing round Miss Winslow.”

  Charlie stared at Ames. After some moments, a smile. “God. Absolutely the bloody end. Life’s an even bigger bastard than I thought.” And then he sank back against the bench and smoked, looking up towards the pall of smoke hovering above them, no doubt swirling upward with the trials of the other men who brought their troubles to this hotel bar. He scanned the room, now full. No one, he thought, not one of them, could know how bad things have gotten for me.

  “And what did happen with Vi? Why was she fired?” Ames’s impatience was reaching a peak. Charles had had way too much to drink, and he probably would get no sense out of him, but he owed it to Vi to try.