by Iona Whishaw
Much to Ames’s relief, a waitress he didn’t recognize delivered their mugs of coffee and scrambled eggs. He didn’t know how much more he could take of being angrily ignored by April.
“Is the baby all right?”
“Apparently. She’s not too happy about it, though. Charles is dead and her people don’t want her. She’s going to stay with a girlfriend when she gets out and try to decide what to do. A few days yet. She’s pretty banged up.”
“Suitcases,” said Darling, waving for a coffee refill. “Doesn’t that suggest he was going away? Did we find any?”
“The fire pretty well took care of everything but the body of the car. The trunk had sprung open. Suitcases could have fallen at any point in the descent and be at the bottom of the lake by now. The water is pretty deep along the bottom of that cliff.”
“So, he’s got suitcases, a clinging paramour, and he’s added Miss Winslow to the cargo. According to the little she said, she herself was meant to be going along, and had been got on board with the ruse about Sylvia needing help. Let’s try to imagine this without the complication of Sylvia. He’s equipped to go on a longish journey, but he stops to pick up L . . . Miss Winslow. How is he going to get her to come along? He no longer has the gun we took from the cabin. We know he had chloroform along. Surely that wasn’t his strategy. She’d fight like a cat.”
“Ah. There was a badly charred revolver in the glove box, which had practically melted shut, by the way.”
Darling mused and then said, “So he would take her at gunpoint to meet someone and leave her? Going on by himself somewhere? What if he had planned to go all the way to the Soviet Union? What would they want from her? Wait, of course, something to do with her previous employment. But what if Andrews had been instructed to get her, then whoever it was cut partway through the brake hose with the intention of killing them both? Let’s say we’re nearly certain about the brakes; Miss Winslow said specifically that he pumped the brakes to no avail. If the brakes work and you slam on the brakes in snow conditions, they tend to lock and the vehicle slides anyway. It sounds from her description like there was no brake action at all.”
“We’ll need to talk to her, sir. Can I take you up the lake?”
“Down, Ames. Pay the bill. Miss Winslow will be here in,” he consulted his watch, “about fifty minutes. We can ask her everything then.”
“Ah,” said Ames, the reason for the better mood explained.
“And the bank?”
“Yes, I’ll show you what I got when we get back. It’s mostly tedious bank correspondence, but now that I think of it, there were some odd things about my whole visit to the bank.”
Darling rubbed his hands together. “You, sensing odd things. Very detective-like!”
Back at Darling’s desk, the papers from the files were put aside, and the contents of the envelope were laid out.
“Yes?” said Darling expectantly. “What was so odd about your visit to the bank?”
Ames sat back. “For one thing, though Featherstone asked what Andrews had done, he did not seem surprised that Andrews was not there. But I suppose he must have thought that if the police were there, Andrews could possibly be under arrest. But still. If a trusted bank employee was under arrest, wouldn’t you make more of a fuss if you were the manager?”
“What are you suggesting, Ames?”
“I almost feel, looking back at his reactions, like he knew Charles wouldn’t be there. Is it possible that Featherstone was in on something going on at the bank? Good grief! Is that why Vi was fired?”
Darling nodded approvingly and said, “Should we bring young Vi in? Perhaps she can tell us more about her firing. And how things worked at the bank, for that matter. See to it, Ames.”
LANE HUNG UP the earpiece of her phone feeling, what? Dishonest? She had been so chirpy on the phone to Darling. She just knew she could not have borne telling him about her awful night. Hurrah for stiff upper lip-ism. Angela would be along in a moment, so she tried to collect herself. This arm-in-a-sling business was ridiculous. She could not even button herself into a coat, though she had managed everything else, gingerly un-slinging her arm and pulling a sweater over it with quiet yelps of pain. It seemed the easiest thing to do because she could not cope with buttoning up a cardigan. Angela would have to button her into her coat. She firmly decided, as she stood in the hallway waiting, her handbag in her one good arm, that Angela would also know nothing of her night.
ANGELA WAS SHOCKED at Lane’s desire to rush into town the very next day after the inconceivable disaster of the accident, exclaiming, “Horrors, Lane, are you sure? You should be in bed. Let me come there and look after you!” But Lane was firm on that subject as well.
“I need to go into town, Angela. I’ve things that want looking after.”
“You want looking after,” Angela grumbled.
AS THEY DROVE, Lane watched the white billows of the passing landscape of small farms intermittently cut through great dark stands of pine. The landscape she had chosen. Hers. How extraordinary that she had never suspected in her youth, or during those heady and jagged years of the war, that this quiet beauty lay waiting for her half a world away. But her earlier resolve was still present. She could not hide as if those years had never existed. Her thoughts centred around the money her father had left her. She was irritated to realize that somewhere in her subconscious she was already coming to terms with the idea of having his money. But she was firm in her resolution not to use it until she learned where it had come from. Besides, just because she had disliked and suspected him did not mean the money was ill gotten. After all, she’d been happy for her grandparents to have their portion. Still, she’d very nearly died last night. It would not do to have her money tucked away in a separate account that possibly no one who needed it could get at. She would move it into a proper account and make a proper will. If she managed to stay alive, and she learned where it had come from, she’d use it to improve her property. Invest in her new life. But she would also make sure her sister could have some if anything happened to her.
Her sister. She hadn’t heard from her since the middle of the war. It suddenly occurred to her that her sister might know about the origin of the money. Lane would write to her.
“Thank you for saving my life, Angela,” she said as they waited for the little ferry to take them across into town. “I hadn’t realized till this morning how attached I am to it.”
“Don’t be silly! By the sound of it you saved that poor pregnant girl and yourself! Stop it. You didn’t need me. You don’t need anybody! Where do you want to be dropped first?”
“Is that how you see me? As not needing anybody? I suppose that is how I must be coming across,” Lane said ruefully. “But I do, you know, I need your friendship.” The wooden ramp for the ferry came down with a bang and the operator waved them on. “I’d never have got my coat on this morning without you!”
Angela slipped the car into gear and bumped up the ramp, waving at the operator through the half-fogged window. She kept her face turned away for a moment, as if the operator winding the rope and lifting the ramp were the most fascinating thing in the world. “You’re an idiot,” she said, and Lane thought she saw her swallowing back tears.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
THE TELEGRAMS LAY SPREAD OUT on Darling’s desk, and he and Lane were looking at them silently, as if hoping they might suddenly jump up and reveal the answer to everything. In the tiny office next door Ames could be heard trying to persuade Violet to come down to the station.
“I have a feeling most of his conversations with women go like that,” Darling said.
Lane smiled, but commented, “Maybe after all, Andrews was just sending money to someone in Vancouver.”
“I’ve called through to Vancouver to get the bank to give us information about who the money was going to.”
Ames put his head around the door. “I’m just going up to get Vi. She doesn’t want to walk.”
“P
oor Ames,” said Lane when he’d gone. “He’s putty in that girl’s hands. Is he in for the long-term, do you think?”
“Yesterday I would have said no. He’s a flitter, from flower to flower, as they say. But he was quite chummy with Charles Andrews. They grew up together, and this whole thing may have hit him harder than he’s letting on. Might make him grow. He was . . .” Here, Darling paused. He had been about to tell her that Andrews had made lascivious comments about her to Ames, who’d been extremely offended on her behalf, but thought that she’d been through enough at his hands for the time being. “He was quite upset that she’d been fired,” he finished.
Lane glanced up at the pause and was discomfited to see Darling gazing at her. She had a sudden visceral sense of what it would be like to reach out to touch his cheek, and then felt herself colouring. It was her exhaustion, she decided. “It’s not an obvious code,” she said, seeking refuge in the telegram she had taken up from the desk. “It could be something they’ve made up between them. This is all supposing that these telegrams represent Andrews’s method of communication with his Soviet handler. You said you found nothing in his house, and I saw no papers in the cabin. If these telegrams aren’t some means of communication, we still don’t know—”
The phone rang and Darling answered. Lane sat back and looked around the room. The sunny watercolour of the lake she remembered from the summer still hung on his wall. Darling was saying, “I see, I see,” into the receiver. “Is he anybody?” Lane turned her attention back to Darling at this. “Could you look into him? He’s been receiving regular lashings of money from someone here. One every few days. Find out what he’s been doing with it.” He glanced at her, a trace of a wince playing on his face.
He thanked the person at the other end and sighed as he replaced the receiver. “That was the police in Vancouver. The address belongs to a perfectly normal person called Thomas Smith. It would appear we are looking at notifications about drearily innocent bank business.”
“Smith is a pretty dodgy last name . . . all the crooks use it, I understand,” Lane said.
“That’s not quite fair. I have an elderly neighbour called Smith. She gives me green peas from her garden.”
“Very likely an international criminal mastermind. You’ve probably been compromised by those vegetables. In fact, Mrs. Smith might be behind all of this.”
At that moment they heard a woman’s voice in the hallway demanding a cup of coffee rather peevishly, and then the door opened and Ames ushered her in.
“Miss Hardy,” said Ames.
Darling leaped up and pulled a chair forward for her, but she had leaned over and was looking at the telegrams.
“What are you doing with them?” she asked.
“I got them from Andrews’s desk. These were telegrams he was sending to someone in Vancouver,” Ames said.
“That’s not Charlie’s writing. That’s Featherstone’s. Why didn’t you just ask Charlie?” Darling glanced at Ames, who gave an infinitesimal shake of the head and a slight shrug.
Darling pulled the chair into place and said, “You’d better sit down, Miss Hardy. We need some information from you, and I’m afraid you haven’t been told everything.” Ames looked away with an expression that suggested that when this was all over he’d be in trouble with Vi yet again.
“Charles Andrews is dead. He died last night in a car crash.” At this Violet put her gloved hand to her mouth and uttered a little cry.
Lane dug in her handbag and found a clean handkerchief, which she handed to Vi. The girl took it without thanking her and held it in her hands, looking down. “I didn’t like him too much, because he always thought he was God’s gift, but that’s horrible. God, I need that cup of coffee. How did it happen?”
“We are still looking into it,” Darling said noncommittally, “but we did want to ask you about what led up to your being dismissed. Ames, could you get some coffee up here? I expect we could all use it.” He noted with some alarm that Lane was looking pale.
“I don’t actually know,” Violet said. “That’s the point. I saw the two of them, Charlie and Mr. Featherstone, having a really bad argument, and the next thing I know I’m out on my keister. Charlie was holding those, though.” She pointed at the telegrams. “I recognize them because when Featherstone would write them he’d make me take them to Charlie to send.”
“Can you remember anything at all that either of them might have said?”
“Now you’re asking me. Charlie was holding these squashed in his hand, and, wait, I did hear something like ‘not yours.’ He shouted it. I was stopped in my tracks, I can tell you, because nobody talks back to Mr. Featherstone! The old man yelled, ‘Mind your own business’ and then slammed his office door, but not before he saw me gawping at them like a fish. He came the next day to tell me I was out. Claimed there were too many employees. It still makes me furious to think of it!”
“Did he say anything else to you? Ask you what you’d overheard?”
“No. But he did say it was illegal for me to talk about bank business with anyone. I felt like he was trying to scare me. I just ignored him and went to the cashier to get my pay. I didn’t trust what I might say to him!”
“Why might Andrews have these telegrams in his desk if Featherstone actually wrote them?”
“That’s how it worked. Featherstone or some supervising clerk would handwrite a telegram and I’d pass it to Charlie to send down at the office. I think it was a way of keeping track of money being wired out in special circumstances.”
“Can you think of anything else unusual that might have occurred leading up to this argument? I imagine the bank was run in a pretty orderly, predictable way.”
“It has to be, doesn’t it?” The coffee had arrived, and she poured cream into her mug and added three spoons of sugar, stirring in a contemplative manner. “Can’t think of anything. I mean, I see you here, Miss Winslow, and Featherstone did ask to see the file on your savings account about a week ago. That was just after you came in to the bank, you know. You had quite a lot of money.”
Lane perked up at this. “My file? Why would he ask to see my file?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be that unusual. Maybe he wanted to check that Charlie had done the right thing. Charlie made a few mistakes, and he didn’t always behave like he was supposed to, either. He told us all at lunch break that you’d left a big pile of money at the bank. We aren’t supposed to discuss clients like that. But that was Charlie all over. The rules never applied to him. Poor guy,” she added as a grudging afterthought. “But even the phone call rule didn’t apply to him. No personal calls, that’s the rule, but a couple of weeks ago he started getting calls pretty often. Two days in a row once. And you could see they upset him. I heard . . . well, I shouldn’t say.”
“Heard what?”
“That he got that girl Sylvia pregnant.”
“Could the calls not have been bank clients?” Darling asked.
“Well, he liked to make out they were, if any of us seemed to be eavesdropping he’d make a big show of ‘I’ll take care of it right away, madam,’ but you could tell the way he slouched over the receiver it was personal calls.”
WHEN VI HAD been dispatched home, Lane and Darling once again found themselves alone. Lane had been somewhat resuscitated by the coffee, but her arm was beginning to ache, and she could feel the undercurrent of tiredness lapping at her consciousness. She checked her watch. She’d told Angela to come for her at two. That was still forty minutes, and she suddenly wondered how she’d make it.
“I think she’s perfect for him,” she said. “She’ll keep him on his toes.”
“Do you? Good luck to her. I’ve never managed it.” When Lane gave no answer to this other than a wan smile, he said, “Lorenzo doesn’t like compliant women. He, at least, likes to be on his toes.”
“I knew I liked him.” She leaned over and lined the telegrams up. There was no date on them, but she put them in the order of the denominations
being sent. “What would Charles have meant with ‘not yours’? Not his telegrams? Had he just snatched them from his boss? But if his boss wrote them, that wouldn’t be right. Not your job? Not your money? And why would Featherstone want to check on Andrews’s work with my account? Andrews didn’t set it up. Featherstone did it himself.”
“We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that you were nearly killed last night in a car that might have had the brakes interfered with. How might this money business be related? I’ve been going on the assumption that it had something to do with the assassination of Zaharov. What if Featherstone did it, for reasons entirely not to do with Uncle Joe, but because Andrews had found something out?”
“Have you seen Featherstone? He’s a hundred years old. I can’t see him crawling around under a car, in the snow, trying to cut a brake. Why should a bank manager want to murder anyone? It’s ridiculous. No one would be safe if bank managers started murdering people. What about the phone calls? Those could be his contact. He started getting them a couple of weeks ago, and they seemed to upset him. No, I like Mr. X, or should I say Gospodin X, for the brake cutting. Still, now that I think of it, there was the business of Charles Andrews saying something about Featherstone and my money. God, I wish I could remember what it was!”
She stood up, holding her broken arm gingerly with her good hand. Darling could see she was in pain, and opened a drawer in his desk and rooted around, producing a small bottle of Aspirin.
“You know, I think I will,” she said with some relief. “And I think I’ll go down and visit the bank. I’d intended to move some of my money out of that chequing account so that I could free it up. I don’t know why I didn’t when I first deposited it. I think I didn’t really trust where my father could have gotten the money. But if I’m going to make a habit of nearly dying, I’d best have it more available for my sister, who doesn’t particularly like me, but no doubt would use the cash if I was too dead to use it myself. Do you want me to keep my ear to the ground when I’m there? It’s the sort of thing I was trained for, you know.” She felt she was babbling, and pulled on what she could of her coat and suffered Darling to button it over her arm. He was close to her, pulling gently on the coat. She could feel his warmth, and her heart turned over.