Death in a Darkening Mist

by Iona Whishaw

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  DARLING AND SCOTT STOOD SILENTLY on the porch of Mrs. Andrews’s house, each lost in his own anxiety about the task ahead. They could hear hurried footsteps coming in response to their knocking. When she opened the door she looked grey and exhausted, as if she hadn’t slept.

  “Inspector, you got here quickly! I only just phoned a couple of minutes ago. Please come in. Goodness, I hope you can help. I’ve been beside myself. Charles didn’t come home last night. I have such a bad feeling about it.”

  Darling glanced at Scott in some surprise and said, “We didn’t know you had rung through. We were on our way to see you. May we come in, Mrs. Andrews?”

  Something in his tone caused her face to blanch. She put her hand to her breast and faltered, “Something’s happened. Oh God, I knew it!” Tears sprang into her eyes.

  “You’d better come and sit down, Mrs. Andrews. I’ll get Scott here to make some tea.” Mrs. Andrews sat heavily in an armchair, and Darling sat opposite her on the sofa, leaning forward, clasping his hands together, thinking how to begin.

  “I’m afraid I do have bad news. Your son was in an accident last night,” Darling began.

  Mrs. Andrews choked back a sob and clutched her handkerchief. “Is he . . . is he . . . ?”

  “I’m afraid he died, Mrs. Andrews. His car went over on a dangerous section of road. The conditions were very bad, though we aren’t fully sure at the moment what exactly caused the accident.” Darling could hear Scott in the kitchen looking for a cup, rattling in the silverware drawer.

  “His car . . . oh, I knew the minute he got that thing . . . I told him.”

  “Is there someone we can call?”

  Mrs. Andrews sat silently, her face a mask of shock and anguish. Darling waited quietly, letting her begin to take in the horror of her loss. There was silence from the kitchen now, so that all that was audible in the sitting room was the ticking of the clock on the mantel. After a few moments, Darling repeated his question about calling someone to sit with her. She turned and looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time.

  “My . . . my neighbour, Arlene, Mrs. Henderson, I guess. Oh, my poor boy!” There was a renewed bout of sobbing, and Scott came in with a cup of tea.

  Darling took the cup and placed it near her on the table. “Come on, have some of this. Is your neighbour’s number by the telephone?”

  Mrs. Andrews nodded numbly but did not touch the tea. Darling made a motion with his head and Scott went to place the call.

  Darling struggled with how to ask what he knew must be asked. Putting his hands together in front of him on the table, he said, “Can you tell me, did you notice anything different about your son lately? Was he going out more, did he receive mail you wouldn’t have expected, anything out of his usual routine? For example, where was he going last night? He was most of the way to Adderly when the accident occurred. Would that be usual for him?”

  Mrs. Andrews’s face contorted in anger. “What do you mean? What are you saying? No, he wasn’t doing anything unusual. He was a good boy. He was going to Kaslo, he said. Featherstone was sending him to look into opening a branch of the bank. It was a great responsibility. He was so good. He never forgot me. My son was . . .”

  Darling noted the instant and angry response his question produced.

  “I wonder if I could ask where his room is. I need Scott to go over it, just to see if we can pick up any clues about what might have happened.”

  Suddenly going passive, Mrs. Andrews sat stonily, looking down at her cup of tea. “You will find nothing there. My Charles was a devoted and loyal son. Devoted! Now he’s . . . he’s died, and you’ve come here to besmirch his memory.”

  “I’m so sorry. It’s a dreadful situation. But we have reason to believe that perhaps he’d gotten a little in over his head, perhaps with gambling debts. We aren’t sure, you see, how exactly the crash happened. Being able to just look over his room will be very helpful.”

  Mrs. Andrews again fell silent. Darling motioned to Scott, who quietly went down the hall, stopping briefly at the first room and then disappearing into the second.

  “Gambling, is it now? My boy, gambling? He worked hard. He was getting a promotion. He got bonuses. Gambling. How dare you?” Her eyes blazed with impotent anger. “Did he suffer?” she asked Darling after a moment, her anger seemingly forgotten.

  “No, it would have been instantaneous,” he said softly.

  Mrs. Andrews twisted her handkerchief convulsively, looking at a photograph of her son in uniform, clearly taken before he shipped out. “I prayed every day for him to come home from the war. God sent him back to me with that dreadful wound, but alive. But now . . .” she trailed off, as if speechless before the monstrous betrayal of her god.

  Scott came back into the sitting room, giving Darling an imperceptible shake of the head.

  They stayed on, waiting until her neighbour came, not wanting to leave her alone. The silence was broken only by her quiet, hopeless crying. Darling found a shawl and put it over her shoulders, but she seemed to have sunk into herself and be very far away. At long last they heard footsteps on the stairs, and Scott leaped up to let the neighbour in. As they walked back to the car, Darling felt relief at being out of that claustrophobic situation of mourning and loss. And in the end he had failed to fully convey his concerns about her son’s activities. Fair enough, he thought. We don’t really know anything for sure yet.

  “THEY’VE GOT THE car up,” said Ames. “It’s possible, no, likely, that the brake had been tampered with. Fortunately, the brake mechanism was somehow ripped loose in the car’s descent, including part of the rubber brake fluid hose, though it’s a mess. That’s the only section that could realistically have been cut, so they went over it very closely. There is evident of a small V-shaped incision. Side cutters, maybe? It was pretty neatly and cold-bloodedly done, because whoever did it would have known that the fluid would eventually drain out and the brakes would fail, possibly miles away, where nothing could be traced back.”

  “They seemed to work fine until he tried to stop the car from going into a slide. Miss Winslow said he’d been pumping on the brakes to no avail.” Darling wondered at his own anger. He should, he thought, feel relief that she was safe, that she had saved herself, and that wretched Sylvia for that matter, but what he felt he could hardly name. A sort of confused fury. It felt clear from her description of events on the way back from Adderly that someone had wanted her or Andrews dead—or both of them, even. Andrews had deliberately picked her up and was driving her to who knew where to talk to who knew whom because she spoke Russian. What if someone meant to kill them both? Ames had brought the preliminary report on the car, along with his notes from the bank, when Darling had returned from the agonizing job of telling his housekeeper that her only son was dead.

  Deciding his report from the bank could wait, Ames said, “It’s amazing that she got them both out alive. Smart lady.” He, too, was covering up his real relief. “She’s like Wonder Woman,” he added, pleased with the idea.

  “For God’s sake, Ames, will you shut up.”

  Ames clamped his lips together, stifling another comment. Relief made him cheerful, but it seemed to make his boss unreasonable. But he thought he knew why. He himself had woken that morning looking at life anew. He thought about the years he and Andrews had been friends; the slightly unhinged, giddy playing days of their childhood and the exhilaration of adolescence. That mixture of admiration and misgiving he’d always had, they all had, really, for Andrews’s good looks, his athletic prowess, his dangerous personality that was so attractive to girls. Ames suddenly felt a new sense of gratitude for whatever reserve he had that had kept him from completely emulating his friend. He wondered if this was what it felt like to grow up. He felt he would never forget the final loss of this friendship. The details of the night before were fresh in his mind, replaying over and over like a movie.

  ON THE DRIVE the night before to find
Andrews and Lane, Darling had been silent and dark, only opening his mouth to curse the slowness of their progress. They had seen the glow of the car at the base of the cliff from the other side of the steep valley. Ames had heard Darling draw in an anguished breath. Ames had stopped the car, the cold smacking them as they’d gotten out and moved, slipping on the icy skid marks, towards the edge of the cliff. They had stood and looked down. A fire still burned, throwing a small circle of hellish crimson light onto the lake. The skeleton of the car was black and illuminated by the flickering red light. Ames had begun to shudder, wanting to say something, but not knowing what. Charles Andrews was down there. He could scarcely comprehend what that meant to him. And then with a constriction of his chest, he realized it was possible Miss Winslow was down there. He had turned to look, stricken, at Darling.

  Darling had been unreadable. Finally, he’d spoken in a flat, official voice.

  “Adderly is a short distance ahead. We’ll find a telephone there.” He’d gotten into the passenger seat of the car, pulling the two sides of his overcoat viciously across his lap, and had sat, staring straight ahead.

  “We don’t know that Miss Winslow was with him, sir. Bertolli might have been mistaken,” Ames had said, aware that he was just trying to convince himself. Darling had not responded.

  It was as they had been approaching the first houses on the outskirts of Adderly that Ames had thought he caught sight of something moving slowly on the road ahead. His mind had gone first to the thought of bears because they were right in the middle of the road, and then realized bears should be hibernating. He’d felt a wave of shock go through him when he’d realized it was the stooped figures of two women.

  “Sir, look!” he’d said to his boss. At that moment the figures had come fully into the beam of the headlights and one of them turned and put one arm out to shield her eyes from the light.

  “My God, Ames, what is this?” Darling had cried, pushing the car door open before Ames had stopped, relief flooding through him. The women had been bundled into the car, Lane crying out when Darling attempted to take her arm to support her into the car.

  “Sorry,” she’d said weakly. “Broken, I think.”

  Sylvia had lain back on the seat, her eyes closed, her hands over her abdomen, overcome with exhaustion.

  “There’s a hotel in Adderly. I need to get her out of the cold, on to a bed,” Lane had said when the car had been moving forward for a few moments, slowly now, as if Ames feared for the new burden they had taken on.

  He remembered now how strange it had been to take in that Charlie had died, and had nearly taken Sylvia and Miss Winslow with him. It was a welcome distraction to be ordered about by Darling: “Take notes, call the station, go back to the site.” It had stopped him from imagining those last moments when Charlie knew he was going over the edge, from imagining the sound of the car crashing downward. From thinking that Charlie might have been alive, trapped in the car, unable to get out as the fire started. It had been, he thought now, the worst night of his life.

  “AMES, YOU ARE still lingering. Can you not find something useful to do? You’re a policeman, for God’s sake,” barked Darling, pulling his constable out of his reflections.

  “I wanted to tell you what I found at the bank.”

  “The bank can wait. We need to talk to people now, while it’s fresh. Get some carnations and go to the hospital and try to find out from that unfortunate woman if she can remember anything about why Andrews was dragging them up the lake. And while you’re at it, find out who killed him by tampering with his brakes. I’ll expect a report by lunchtime.”

  Ames ventured a wan smile and saluted. His chief hadn’t completely lost his sense of humour then. As he turned to go, Darling spoke again. “The trouble with Wonder Woman, Ames, is that she’s an interfering busybody, and fancies herself some sort of crime-stopper, so everyone is out to get her.”

  When Ames had gone, Darling sat unhappily at his desk. He reflected on his ghastly visit to poor Mrs. Andrews. He hadn’t had enough information then to say he’d been murdered. Or worse, that Andrews could himself have been a murderer. When she had asked if he had suffered, the kindest thing to say was that he hadn’t, and Darling said it. It was a relief, if such a feeling were possible under the circumstances, that he could tell her no more. To learn that her war-hero son had very likely been engaged on a murderous mission set by some Soviet handler would be a shock that she would likely not endure. Indeed, he thought, she would not have believed it, so firm was her view of her son as her golden boy. If there was an inquest, it would come out, he knew, but she had enough to deal with now.

  And really, he thought grimly, what proof had they that it had been Andrews who had killed Zaharov? He could not help feeling they had bungled the whole investigation. What if whoever had cut the brakes, and this now seemed the inevitable conclusion, was responsible? Hindsight, the curse of all failed enterprises. When the weapon and jacket were found, they were, perhaps, too quick to retrieve them. Perhaps they should have set up a surveillance of the cabin. He crumpled an empty envelope that uncharacteristically still lay on his tidy desk and threw it angrily and accurately at the wastebasket in the corner. Even with his penchant for second-guessing himself, he knew it was a ridiculous idea. Who would have watched the cabin? He had no one to spare, and though Miss Winslow seemed to enjoy lurking about in forests, he could hardly have asked her to suffer an endless vigil in the snow. Scott had gone as quietly as possible through the various drawers and the wardrobe, he had looked under the bed, but the search had yielded nothing. It looked, he said, like a room cleaned and tidied daily by a doting mother. Of course, it was possible that Andrews had used the cabin where the gun had been found as a hiding place for any evidence of his secret life.

  Darling longed to go to King’s Cove. He had a perfectly good excuse; they needed every bit of information they could glean to try to make sense of what had happened and why. The temperature had risen slightly, leaving the streets more slushy than snowy, while preserving the picturesque draping of snow across the hilly landscape, and he guessed that the road up the lake would be quite passable. Sighing, he gave himself over to reason and logic and decided he would have to conduct the interview over the phone. He was about to ask to be put through to King’s Cove when he remembered her old clunker of a phone. She would have to stand uncomfortably in the hall holding that damn earpiece with her one good hand.

  At that moment his own phone rang and he picked it up with an irritable, “Darling.”

  “Inspector, Winslow here.”

  “Why are you talking in surnames like some private-school boy?” he asked, trying to keep the lift of elation out of his voice.

  “I thought it an efficient way to identify myself. You’re a busy man. Anyway, I’ve always liked that school-boy habit. If I had my way, I wouldn’t use my first name at all.”

  “That would save me a lot of time. How are you doing, anyway? Your arm?”

  “It’s all right. It does rather dictate how you sleep, and makes the most ordinary tasks unnecessarily complicated. Kenny and Eleanor Armstrong made me breakfast and brought it over. It was lovely. I suspect kindness tempered by curiosity. But it’s made me think and try to organize everything I can remember. I’m coming up to town to see poor Sylvia in the hospital, and I have to . . . stop by the bank.” Darling wondered at Lane’s hesitation, especially given their renewed interest in the bank. He pushed back the now familiar rise of suspicion that the mysterious parts of Lane’s life engendered. He still had to interview her. “Because I remembered,” she added. “He said something about my money and it being Featherstone.”

  “Can you make anything of that?”

  “No. Could I come by the station and you can just put me through my paces so I make sure I’ve remembered everything?”

  “You can’t drive, surely?”

  “Oh, that’s all right. Angela is driving me. I’ve told her she is the hero of the piece for sending you an
d Ames after us. She’s quite excited about the whole thing. She promises not to hang about, though. She has shopping to do. In a couple of hours? I want to stop and see Sylvia first.”

  “Ames is there now, trying to get whatever she can remember. But perhaps she’ll be more open with you than that brutish policeman.”

  “Poor Ames. I don’t envy him the task. She was completely unconscious when I got into the car. I’d like to know what sequence of events led to that!”

  “As would we all. Ames says you’re like Wonder Woman.”

  “Does he? How kind. I must dig out my coronet and wear it up to town.”

  DARLING, REMINDED OF the idea of breakfast during his conversation, realized he’d not eaten any, and now it was very nearly lunchtime. He met Ames coming back into the station as he was leaving to the diner.

  “Come, Ames. Breakfast.”

  “It’s eleven-thirty, sir,”

  “Don’t be pedantic, Constable. We’ll take a booth and you can tell me what you’ve learned.”

  As luck would have it there was a booth near the window and the next-door booth was empty, as it was not quite the hour for the noonday rush. Ames thought a second breakfast would be quite agreeable, if only to get the smell of hospital out of his system, and he was pleasantly surprised to see that Darling appeared to be in a better mood since he’d left him earlier that morning.

  “There’s not much, sir. She was drugged for much of the time,” Ames began, recounting his visit with Sylvia. “She says she had gone to see him about the baby to demand that they marry, and she’d arrived just as he was leaving. He had two suitcases and alternately tried to get her to go away and placate her. She threatened to make a scene so he took her in the car and was going to drop her at her house. She wasn’t having it. Apparently her folks chucked her out. They haven’t even come to see her in hospital. Anyway, she went to sleep in the back of the car. She has a vague memory of something being put over her mouth, but nothing else till Miss Winslow was talking to her, and then suddenly Miss Winslow opened the door and pushed her out of the car. She had no idea when or how Miss Winslow got into the car. She does remember knowing that the car had gone out of control and was sliding.”