Death in a Darkening Mist

by Iona Whishaw

  She took his hand for an imperceptible moment and let it go again, as if conscious of the public arena they were in, and said quietly, “Yes, I’d like that.”

  HE TURNED TO watch her from time to time on the drive back to London. It was a warm afternoon for October, and she had the window wound down and was leaning out, letting the wind catch her hair. Was this love? Yes, or something close to it, he decided. It seemed to him a miracle when they’d met at the officers’ drinks evening in the mess. There was something—he could not describe it as anything other than familiar—about her from the first moment he saw her, as if he should have known her, somehow. In fact, he knew very few people in Britain, besides his fellow pilots, and the few of his countrymen who had come over with the RCAF. Sometimes he worried that the intensity of his feeling for her, and his mad desire to hear her talk and laugh, made what they had a cliché of the wartime romance. Caution to the wind, tomorrow we may die. All he knew, really, was that he had an abiding sense of gratitude that she accepted him, that she did not hold back either her intelligence or her affection in those small moments they had stolen together.

  The owner of the hotel near Earl’s Court station asked no questions, but perhaps few did in wartime, for all Darling knew. They were handed the key to a room up three flights of nearly dark stairs, and Darling opened the door of their room tentatively, pushing at it as if he feared there might be something unpleasant hiding inside. It was a dingy room with a bed and a dresser, the dominant theme of which was brown. The bathroom was somewhere down the dark hall. Gloria went to the window and opened the curtains and pulled up the blackout blind. The sun, though modified by a nearly unequal struggle with the atmosphere of the city, shone bravely on the top of the buildings opposite. She looked at her watch.

  “It’s just gone four. Shall we do something fun like go find a cream tea?” she asked brightly.

  Darling had put down their cases and stood looking around the room in a state of some dissatisfaction. This was not the choice he would have made for a tryst. He latched on to the idea of the tea, and they closed the blind and locked the door. He could stave off for a while longer what he felt would be a turning point from which there would be no going back.

  “I bet the whole place is full of spies,” she said when they were back on the stairs. “Look at it. One light bulb for the whole stairwell. You can’t see your hand in front of you. And it’s got a peculiar smell.”

  “Do spies smell peculiar?” he asked.

  “Of course they do. How else shall we ‘nose them as we go down the hall to the lobby’?”

  “I thought that was Polonius’s corpse.”

  “Exactly. He was spying on Hamlet, may I point out, which is what got him into trouble. I can’t see why German spies would be any different.”

  “More careful, one would hope.”

  They were already at the lobby, and he wondered that they had not kissed yet, but there was something in her brightness that seemed slightly brittle, as if she, too, wanted to put off the moment. She laughed, causing the man at the desk in the lobby to look at her suspiciously. In his experience married couples did not laugh. And the woman was wearing khaki trousers, something of which he disapproved. But the couple were out the door before he could think of what to say, and they had paid in advance. Best leave it. His Annie would have his tea ready about now, anyway.

  Later, Darling would ask himself over and over what had happened over their cream tea. It was early in the war, and you could still get scones with jam and butter, and it should have been fun. But the conversation had turned without warning. Was it her jaunty “What will you do when this show is over?” that had done it?

  “I imagine I’ll go back to Canada. I was in the police force before I trained as a pilot. We—”

  “I,” she said, interrupting him, “want to go out to South Africa. It’s all happening there, isn’t it? I’d like to be a bush pilot like that Hatton fellow. Did you read Out of Africa? He was the lover of that Danish Countess who wrote it. Terribly dashing. I was devastated to learn he was killed. I wanted to meet him.”

  “We have plenty of bush for piloting where I come from in British Columbia,” he offered. He felt as if he were on a hill that had suddenly become gravel, and he was sliding slowly down, unable to get purchase.

  “Canada? My dear, the cold. I’m afraid I am something of a tropical flower.” She was silent for a long moment stirring her tea with concentration. “You didn’t think . . . ? I mean, I thought you would be, I don’t know, more promiscuous.”

  Darling felt himself colour, embarrassed to be caught so on his back foot, feeling suddenly as if love and honour were rather naive. He looked into her magnificent blue eyes, at the billows of gold hair pinned up away from her face, a face that now bore a discomfiting expression of kindness. “I am prepared,” he said, “to be as promiscuous as required.”

  She reached out and took the hand that now rested on the handle of his tea cup so tentatively and stroked it.

  “You know, on the whole, I don’t think you could, do you? It would be dangerous for you. With this war, well, who knows what will happen to any of us.”

  Darling could muster no response to this, knowing its truth. He’d lost the appetite for scones. He was overwhelmed with a pall of sadness, as if they both had lost something. He had been pulled in whole, with no warning from his own subconscious. He had allowed himself to love her because, well, the obvious reasons; she was beautiful, certainly, but she was intelligent. She did not doubt she was his equal, and he found that more attractive than anything else about her. He thought, with some sadness, that he would not be so lucky again. And then the rueful thought, not lucky this time either.

  “Perhaps I should run you back to your flat,” he said finally.

  “Would you? But what about the night? You surely don’t want that little man to keep the payment. You should stay, at least.” Her evident relief was a further condemnation.

  “I don’t know. He could use it to buy light bulbs for the hall. And I might drive back to the coast tonight.”

  “You can’t possibly drive at night with your headlamps on. Every German bomber for miles will come for you. Please don’t be silly.”

  “I intend to drive with my lights off. It’s about the level of danger I can handle, don’t you think?”

  “Frederick, it’s not like you to be bitter,” she said with a light smile.

  “Well then, perhaps you don’t know me as well as you thought. It might well be like me.”

  THE MAN AT the front desk, seeing the couple leave again with their bags, was unable to enjoy the satisfaction he should feel at whatever had caused the failure of this affair, for he felt certain now it was that. He was inwardly preparing a defence to avoid giving the wing commander back his money for the night, but when they did not even stop at the desk—they just walked out with a terse “goodnight”—he almost felt positively disposed to them. There was a war on, after all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE MORNING AFTER SHE PHONED in the information she had gotten at New Denver, Lane was not in the mood for pursuing either the mystery of Zaharov’s death or her own writing career. The day, sunny and crisp, fairly cried out for activity. Having mastered her snowshoes reasonably well, she was ready for a real expedition. She had gotten instructions from Kenny for getting out to the old log cabin above Ponting’s place. It could be reached by going north, past the abandoned house that lay farther up the road from the Bertollis’. There should, he said, still be a faint track visible through the forest from the side of that house.

  Lane took the same path through the forest and across the meadow that she usually used to get to the Bertolli house when she wanted to avoid the road and, if she was truthful, having to pass the Mathers’. Their house occupied the corner plot of land where the road turned at a right angle, and apart from the smoke drifting from the chimney, it could be empty, as its occupants never seemed to come out any more. Alice Mather might be
behaving now, but she was unstable and known to go out shooting at imaginary cougars, as she had earlier in the summer and had practically ended up on the Bertollis’ porch, and Lane couldn’t face Reg’s coldness, as if somehow what happened in the summer had been her fault. Meeting him at the post office and being snubbed was bad enough.

  She crossed the road, an easy walk because the traffic had flattened out the snow, turned right past the Bertollis’ house, and then up the road that led to the last house in the settlement. Nothing had been up or down this pristine snow-covered byway. By the time she reached the top, she’d had to remove her wool scarf and tuck it into her rucksack. Catching her breath after the climb, she surveyed the abandoned house. A family had lived in it until just before the Great War, but had been unable to make a go of it, and they’d packed up and moved, it was rumoured, to the coast.

  It could be a beautiful house, Lane thought. It was low and rambling, wood framed with a generous porch that wrapped around three sides. Trees had been cleared to allow for an open garden space. There was something desolate about it, though, as if its previous owners had only known misery. Of course that was utter nonsense. She was imagining things. She turned to look down the road, taking in the view anyone sitting on the porch would have. Well, it wasn’t her view, certainly, but because they were at the top of a hill, they would have seen the downward sweep of the forest, and the tops of the mountains on the other side of the lake, if not the lake itself. There was a faded, hand-painted For Sale sign nailed to the gatepost. She wondered if Nesbitt, the realtor in town who had sold her her place, had this in his folder of estates on offer. It certainly would have done him no good to show it to her. She’d been in love with her house the minute she saw it, and no amount of anxiety on his part about a woman alone in the wilderness could have dissuaded her from its purchase.

  Around the right of the building she saw what Kenny had meant about a path. It wound past an outhouse. Not plumbed then, she thought, a little smugly, thinking of her gleaming modern bathroom. Even in the mounds of snow, the dip of the path was clear. It wound away to the northeast and slightly downhill. The stillness and quiet filled her heart, as the way took her in and out of shafts of sunlight and shade. The soft crunch of the snow under her snowshoes and the rough, close sound of her own laboured breathing from the exertion were replaced with utter stillness when she stopped from time to time to catch her breath and listen to the eternal silence.

  When the cabin finally came into view she looked back, and realized she had come some considerable distance down a long open sweep of meadow. Her footprints curved back upwards and disappeared into the trees. She calculated that she must be somewhere above the large bend in the road north from King’s Cove to Adderly. That meant that the cabin that could be seen from the road, the trapper Ponting’s cabin, was somewhere below this one. What had she come, two, three miles? She was pleasantly exhausted and pleased to see that the cabin, still a short distance below her, not only had a small porch, but an upended box placed against the wall. The low westerly winter sun shone fully on this part of the porch.

  She paused, watching the cabin for signs of life. Ponting had said he’d seen smoke. She wished she’d asked Eleanor how long ago that was. It certainly showed no signs of life now. It stood, a silent relic of a bygone time, listing slightly into the snow that lay around it. It was 2:30. It had taken longer than she thought to get here. Half an hour to rest and have lunch. The sun was setting before five these days, and she didn’t relish, however much she loved solitude, being alone in the forest in the dark.

  It was quick work to go down the hill. She sat on the snow-covered stairs to remove her snowshoes, and then climbed on to the porch, still nervous in case there might be someone there. But the tranquility was absolute. She cupped her hand on the small, murky window and saw only darkness inside. Then, craving the light, she sat on the upturned box and leaned gratefully against the wall, closing her eyes and lifting her face to the sun, allowing an image of her father as she had last seen him to take shape in her mind.

  She woke with a start, aware only that the sun was gone and she was sitting, nearly congealed, in a cold shadow. What time was it? Past 3:30. She’d been asleep for an hour. Rising stiffly, she stretched and then stamped her feet. The damp warmth from her socks seemed to have turned to ice. Her thermos had one slug of tepid tea, which she now downed, and then, perhaps thinking a few minutes in the cabin and out of the descending temperatures would make it possible for her to start back, she tried the door. It swung inward revealing a single room, folded in shadow. A stone hearth against one wall, a small table and a long low bench on the opposite wall. It seemed even colder inside than it had outside. She felt bad about trespassing, though the interior gave an initial impression of having been long abandoned. There was nothing in the way of utensils—cups, plates, pans. Propped in the corner of the room, she saw a bundle that might have been a thin cotton mattress of some sort with a flannel sheet and grey blanket rolled messily together. Had someone been here recently, or was this some mouldy artefact from the long-departed owner? With an increasing unease about intruding in this comfortless place, Lane turned to go and at that moment saw a black coat hanging by the door. How funny, she thought, for someone to leave a coat all that time ago. She touched it as if to see if it would conjure up a story about its absent owner, and then was surprised when she realized it was not as old as she thought. She pulled the coat open and saw the satin lining. It, too, was almost new. None of the fraying she would expect in an old, abandoned coat.

  She looked nervously around, as if she expected the owner to come at any moment and catch her red-handed prowling about the cabin. The sleeves, she thought, would be worn if it were old. She lifted the sleeve and gasped. There was one black button, and a dangling thread where a second should have been. She dropped the sleeve as if it was on fire. Now her anxiety had moved into fear. This was not an old, abandoned coat. It had been hung here recently. She gingerly felt the outside of the nearest pocket. Nothing. But the second pocket was heavy. She moved so that she could look into the pocket without disturbing too much what was inside. It was a bundle wrapped in leather. She pulled back and leaned against the door. Though she knew with certainty what she had found, she quailed at dragging the police up the lake for nothing. She reached carefully into the pocket, wondering if fingerprints showed on chamois leather, and gingerly pulled at the edge of the bundle until it revealed the dark glint of metal. She had practised wrapping a facsimile of this very weapon many times in a leather casing just like this one during the war. Her heart pounding, and careful not to touch the metal she had exposed, she hurriedly rewrapped the gun and put it back into the pocket, then tried to arrange the coat into what she hoped was a natural position.

  She wanted nothing more than to be as far away from here as possible. Glancing around the inside of the darkening cabin, she lifted the latch on the door and went out on to the porch, pulling the door carefully closed behind her. Lane stood breathing quickly on the porch. She could see her own prints leading up the hill and back into the woods. How would people normally get here? Surely not with a two-hour slog through the snow from King’s Cove. She walked over to the edge of the porch to where she could lean over and see the back of the property. The sun was already well behind the forest, and the long shadows of the trees reached ominously towards her. No one had been here since the last snow, but an indentation showed a distinct path leading up towards the cabin, certainly from the Adderly road. If the cabin was in use, there must be some evidence of it from the road somewhere.

  As she strapped herself back into her snowshoes, she looked with misgivings at the path she’d already made coming down to the cabin. If the owner of the coat came back any time soon, she had left clear evidence of having been there. She imagined being followed by the black-coated assassin, and looked nervously out at the silent forest, now in deep shadow. There was nothing for it. She would have to go back the way she’d come, and pray there
would be a new snowfall that evening, though nothing in the perversely blue sky indicated any such rescue.

  She arrived panting at the top of the hill and stood on the edge of the forest. Looking at the evidence of her frantic flight she suddenly wondered if she should have taken the coat with her. What if the killer came back, saw her tracks, and seized the coat to hide it elsewhere, knowing that his hideaway had been found?

  “Damn,” she muttered out loud. It was really too late to go back. She must hurry back to her house and phone Darling. He’d have to come out immediately to get it. It would be dark by the time she made the phone call, let alone by the time he drove out. Still, that same darkness might prevent the coat’s owner from returning to the cabin. If he’d hung the coat there immediately after the killing, it had already been there for some time, undisturbed. Having talked herself into this logic, she hurried homeward until she got to the road outside Angela’s cabin. Would it be quicker for her just to kick off the snowshoes and go round by the road? Yes, she decided. The shortcut was well and good in the summer, but in this snow . . . and she was exhausted now and sick to death of snowshoes.

  It was fully dark by the time she was stepping into her hallway. She tore off her jacket, dumping her rucksack onto the floor, and rang through to the exchange.

  London, August, 1943

  “It’s good of you to show up, Winslow,” Commander Jenkins said acerbically, interrupting a demonstration he was making with what looked like a bicycle pump to the small group of agents gathered on wooden chairs before him. The room, all dark panelled walls with oily yellow light coming in through two small murky windows, took a moment to come into focus after the bright sunshine on the street.

  “Sorry, sir,” she said and slid into a chair at the back, willing herself to breathe away her embarrassment. A couple of the men smirked, but she got a rueful smile of sympathy from Thompson in the row just in front of her. She knew most of the men couldn’t understand why a woman was doing this work. She never allowed herself to be bothered by them, and in any case, their opinions seemed trivial next to her grief at Angus’s death, barely a month old, which descended over her like a miasma, greying every waking moment, dampening every pleasure. Indeed, making her late today, because she had been beset suddenly with sorrow as she stood before the mirror in her bedsit. She had sobbed, sitting on the edge of her bed, her fists clenched, terrified of being overwhelmed. She had told no one. The affair had been secret, and her grief must be too. She applied cold compresses when the wave had passed to bring her eyes to passing normalcy, resigned to being late to the briefing.