Ames frowned. “Did anyone unusual come over earlier yesterday, or the day or two before?”
“I couldn’t say. Kept to my bed by the missus with this cold. Fat lot of good she did me. Couldn’t wait to get back.”
“Who fills in when you’re sick?”
“Young Nobby from the gas station down the road.” With extreme patience Ames established that “Nobby” was not his real name, and that the gas station was all the way down the road in Balfour.
DARLING SURVEYED THE scene in the cabin, now thoroughly dusted for prints. “Do you ever think, Ames, about what could come charging out of the underbrush from your past to lay waste to whatever life you’ve imagined you’ve built up for yourself?”
Ames had experienced, if the truth be known, a few hiccups with his penchant for pretty girls, but his romantic life was now nicely settled on Violet from the bank down the street from the police station. He could think of nothing more troubling in his past than the continued cold shoulder from his last girlfriend, April.
“It was a rhetorical question, Ames. Please don’t bother trying to dredge up sordid episodes from your dating life. Tell me about your adventures today.”
As Ames talked, Darling made a few notes himself, relieved to have something solid and in the present to expunge, at least for the moment, the incomprehensible insinuations of the government man, who in his continued reassurances that this was nothing to be concerned about, raised in Darling the liveliest misgivings.
Ames, he realized with pleasure, was delivering the information he had collected that morning in an extremely organized manner. There was hope for him yet. Darling felt a slight twinge of guilt that he had not noticed in the past how clear a thinker Ames was. After inspecting the cabin, Ames took Darling along the ghastly trail where the dead woman had passed her last desperate moments.
“What do you make of it, sir?”
“What do you make of it, Amesy? This is effectively your scene, and I must say, for a puppy, you’ve done a decent job.”
So few and far between were these overt compliments from his boss that Ames smiled broadly.
“We’re not at a comedy review, Ames. Let’s have it.”
Ames pulled himself together and cleared his throat. “Well, sir, I think the most unusual aspect of this case is the missing car. The ferryman said that the old lady drove off late last night and has not been back. But she obviously did come back, only without her car. Which, since I think she died sometime yesterday afternoon, can’t be true. It must have been someone else. Certainly it appears she was planning to go somewhere.”
Darling looked down toward the lake. “Why do you say that?”
“Father Lahey. He said she never wore anything but dungarees and boots, but she was dressed up, which, according to him, she only did if she was going into town.”
“So she dresses up to go into town, let’s say, gets murdered before she can go, and later she drives her car onto the ferry and doesn’t come back. I see one or two problems with that scenario.”
Ames smiled ruefully. “Sir.” They stood silently for a moment. “Unless I’m wrong about the time of death. It could have happened after she got back. She met the murderer, brought him back with her, he killed her and drove her car away disguised as her.”
“Gilly might be able to furnish a time of death,” observed Darling. “Then we might more logically speculate about the sequence of events. If she didn’t drive to town to pick up her murderer, he would have gotten here some way other than by car; if he took Agatha’s car, we should be one car up.”
“I’ll check after to see if anyone has seen a car that they don’t recognize sitting around here somewhere,” Ames said. “I don’t think it was an outright robbery,” he continued.
“That’s interesting. Why not? The cabin has been searched from top to bottom by the look of it.”
“I know, but there was a lot of destruction. It feels, I don’t know, angry, as if the person was looking for something and not finding it. I think the victim may have surprised the person and then tried to hide before she was seen, but the killer did see her and found her there, behind the outhouse. I think there was a bit of a battle. I thought I saw blood under the right-hand fingernails of the dead woman. I initially thought the stab wound looked bad enough that she’d been killed outright, but the evidence of the blood by the outhouse and along the underbrush is that she tried to get away.”
“Well, well,” Darling said noncommittally. “You could be right. And then, you might not be. We’d better go chat with the few residents of this place. I expect Gilly will confirm your suggestion that she clawed at her attacker. It would be helpful to know we are looking for someone with some nasty scratches.”
GILLY, THE LACONIC pathologist upon whom the inspector depended, was even at that moment making notes and inspecting the body closely. He knew that Darling would be along demanding time of death details, and he was having difficulty. Anytime in the last forty-eight hours, he’d have said. He made notes and continued. He had recently taken to going out to crime scenes to evaluate the bodies in situ. It was unfortunate that he was absent at a family funeral this time. He would like to have seen exactly how she lay. The van boys had said they had had quite a nervous time of it fetching her out of the tangle of the forest. The area was full of half-buried sharp rocks and torn branches. The abrasions on her face and hands attested to the impact of some of that, anyway, but he would say that the wound, though initially appearing to be shallow, could have caused her to bleed to death. He could not see that her being pushed over alone would do the job, but it might if she was weak from loss of blood. Must have been dashed unpleasant, he thought, washing his hands. He’d go out to the drugstore for a soda to fortify himself for Darling’s return.
DARLING AND AMES walked back down to the village and found the priest in a small office behind the altar of the church. He jumped up to greet them.
“I’ve been going through the records, which are sparse at the best of times as they mainly concern themselves with the ecclesiastical goings on. Births, christenings, weddings, and deaths, and this is quite literally all I can find. I’ve written it down for you. It is an entry from May of 1922 that a padre called Vicar Derrick made: Agatha Victoria Browning, Whitcombe, Dorset. There’s not a single other entry that references her. Of course at the time, this place was a going concern with the mill here. There have been very few entries in the last few years.”
Ames took the sheet of paper from Lahey. “We are going to need to talk to the people who live here now. Can you give us their names and tell us where they live?”
“That won’t take long! There are not many families here, mostly older people who stayed on after the industry started to die down. It’s mostly holiday homes now. A more harmless bunch I think you will be hard pressed to meet. By the way, I didn’t see her old car in the usual place. I really don’t understand it.”
As they approached the first house they were to visit, names and locations in hand, Ames remarked, “I don’t think a bunch of harmless older people are going to be happy that there might be a killer lurking around.”
“With her car gone, we may be able to reassure them that he’s decamped and will leave them in peace. The question still puzzling me is how he got here in the first place.”
CHAPTER THREE
LANE PULLED HERSELF ONTO THE wharf and flopped, shivering, onto her towel. “It’s always cold getting out no matter how hot the day is,” she said to her friend Angela, who was sunning herself on a blanket while somehow managing to keep one eye on her three children. Philip, Rolf, and Rafe were collecting minnows in glass jars along the rocky edges of the beach below the wharf.
“That red bathing suit is very becoming on you. Has the inspector seen it yet?”
“Really, Angela. Have you nothing better to talk about? There’s big news in India about their independence, after all. Or, if you prefer something more local, Alice Mather apparently found a bear rummaging
through her garbage and didn’t shoot it.”
Angela sat up and shouted, “Not so far toward the point, boys! I want you where I can see you.” She looked with interest at Lane. “Did she? How do you know that?”
“Eleanor of course. I’m sure it will go out with every piece of mail she hands out today.”
“I have heard that her mister has locked up the rifle to keep her from any more mischief. She must have been furious to finally have a legitimate target and not be able to get at it. Now, when did you last talk to the inspector?”
Lane knew Angela meant well. It had been Angela’s goal for the last year to see Lane happily settled into a romance. She gave herself part of the credit for the budding relationship between Lane and Inspector Darling of the Nelson Police, and she was eager to see how it was progressing. It was not so simple for Lane. Love had been a treacherous road for her, and she had felt acute embarrassment over her own naïveté in the disaster that had been her four-year affair while she was working for intelligence during the war. She had never wanted to be in love again, and yet love had found her unexpectedly, in her new home in Canada. She could not see her very new and fragile relationship with Darling as fodder for light-hearted banter, even with her friend Angela.
She closed her eyes and felt the sun begin to warm her. In fact, though she would never, well, at least not yet, tell Angela this, Darling had taken to phoning her every evening, at the end of his day. She still loved the lift she felt inside when she heard his voice at the end of the line.
“What are you up to?” He had said last night.
“I’m leaning against the wall in my hallway talking to you.”
“You should get a new phone. You could be sitting in comfort by your Franklin.”
“I never want to give up this phone. Some of my favourite people call me on it.” She was, in fact, reluctant to give up her old-fashioned horn phone because she was astonished that an instrument that had been current when her parents were young children could still work.
“Am I?” Darling asked.
“Are you what?”
“One of your favourite people?”
She had wanted to keep up the banter, a safe harbour for them, but had been overwhelmed by a longing to have him there, with her. Then a ferry ride and thirty miles of dusty road between King’s Cove and Nelson seemed an impossible distance.
“I wish you were here,” she’d said.
There’d been a silence, and then Darling had said, “I’ll come Saturday. We’ll picnic by the lake. I may even kiss you. I’m desperate to kiss you now.”
“Really darling, what will the party-line people think?”
“They will think that I love you. And they would be right.”
LANE LAY LISTENING to the gently echoing lap of the water against the posts of the wharf and thought happily about Saturday. Three days away, and they would spend the whole day together. The distance had not begun to rankle completely, but she knew it would eventually. She dreaded that moment because she knew she could never leave her beloved white Victorian house or her endearing and eccentric neighbours in the idyllic peacefulness of King’s Cove, and Darling could never live thirty miles from his work as an inspector in the Nelson Police.
SHE GLANCED AT the clock in her kitchen when the phone finally rang that evening, much later than was usual. Ten o’clock. She had nearly given up and taken her book and some cocoa to bed. She could tell instantly that something was wrong.
“What’s happened?” Lane asked Darling.
He sighed. “Well, aside from the fact that I have, no, let me be accurate and get used to the idea, Ames has, a rather grisly murder near Harrop, I’ve had a strange visit today from someone ‘in the government.’ Frankly I’d far rather be working away on the murder. I’m sure it would intrigue you, though I don’t like the parallels. It’s an Englishwoman who’s been homesteading outside this tiny place since just after the Great War. I imagine she came here to get away from something just like you did.”
“Well, I’m not moving into town just on the off chance someone wants to murder me in thirty years! And why is this Ames’s case? Not that I’m not pleased for him . . . you never give him enough credit.”
“Ames had to go look into it because the government man came just as we were setting out. He managed to convey the message that I’d better stay right there and talk to him. Very peculiar. I may have to go back to bloody England.” He recounted his unsettling interview. “He was asking a lot of pointed questions about a crash I had in ’43. My plane was shot down at night, and I managed to bump it home in a field just behind enemy lines. All but two of us got out in one piece, but the Germans figured some of the crew had survived and came looking for us. My gunner, a nice, long-suffering young man who was extraordinarily good at his job, was shot and I had to leave him. A second man, Jones, was never found. He went up with the plane. The rest of us managed to get to safety with no small amount of help from a local farmer. We got home, I made a full report, and then I went to the boy’s family myself rather than leave it to the War Office. By good fortune, the farmer managed to recoup the boy’s body, so the family could have a proper funeral. I admit, I always thought I would have been questioned more closely about the loss of the plane. When it didn’t happen before I demobbed, I assumed it never would.
“Suddenly now, this absolute cartoon of a government functionary is making insinuations, but not making them, if you see what I mean. Implying by constant reassurance that this is all procedure, that I am guilty of something. Good God . . . it’s the kind of language I use myself with suspects. I can’t tell if they think I did something to the plane, or worse. Mishandling the business of the death of the crewmen, perhaps. So many people die around you in war, but that one still keeps me up at night. I think because Evans in particular was so young. I felt extremely responsible. He had a horrible job. A gunner is crammed into a tiny space, generally in the freezing cold. But he never complained. And he was good.”
“God, how beastly for you. What is the cartoon saying is going to happen?” Lane was going through an unfathomable series of emotions. They had never really talked about their wars, and this story elicited in equal measure fear for how Darling might have died, and relief that he had not. She also understood his ongoing feeling of guilt. She often woke up late at night from nightmares, unable to fall back sleep, assailed by waves of guilt . . . about what? She could never really remember in the daylight. And more pronounced than these feelings was anxiety.
She had a great deal of experience with secretive and suspicious deskmen, as she thought of them, who seemed to think themselves capable of monitoring and really understanding what went on in the field. She remembered the uneasy feeling she had sometimes that these people had control of her life in ways she would never understand. She often felt that her very safety could be compromised by some dark, political backroom machinations that people like her could never be privy to. Her relief when the war ended and she had turned her back forever on the intelligence branch had been profound. She realized she had come as far away as Canada to start a new life because she felt that none of it could follow her that far. What seemed to be happening to Darling upended this sense of safety, almost as much as having her wartime handler come all the way out the year before to try to take her back to something like her old job. New enemy, and all the same old deskmen in charge. She had not been interested, and the handler had left angry and disappointed. There was no getting away, apparently. She sighed.
“That’s the thing,” Darling said. “He ended by saying he would consult with whatever forces of hell sent him out in the first place and let me know, that I might have to ‘pop’ back to England to just clear up one or two things. I can’t help feeling like I am about to be under arrest. The whole thing has certainly shaken my smug policeman sense of superiority. I’m positively humbled. Didn’t you mention Kafka to me last year? That’s how I feel.”
“I’ll come up to town,” Lane said.
“No, don’t be silly. It’s late. I won’t be fit company. I expect to hear from him tomorrow, and then I’ll let you know.”
“Listen, darling, if you are going to be tossing and turning anyway, use the time to write down everything that you remember about that incident. Did you keep a copy of the report by any chance?”
She was right, of course. He wouldn’t sleep, and he’d be better off trying to organize his thoughts. In truth he’d have loved Lane to come up, but their relationship had not quite reached that footing yet, and he did not want the next phase of it to be dictated by some crisis he was having. “I did actually. We weren’t really supposed to, but I made a carbon copy because I wanted to make sure I remembered details if I was asked about it. Of course at that time I expected to be asked about the performance of the plane. My report is in a trunk in the attic. I’d better pull down the ladder and crawl up there.”
“Don’t fall down.”
“Will you visit me in the hospital if I do?”
“I would try to make time, of course. But the lake is lovely for swimming at this time of year. And I’m learning to garden from the Hughes ladies. I wouldn’t want to miss my lessons. How is Ames getting on? It must be galling for you to have him out there on the scene without you.”
Fighting back the image of her swimming, he said, “You’d be very proud of your Amesy. Very organized. I suspect with enough dumb luck he could even solve it.” Darling paused and said soberly. “He may have to if I have to go back to Blighty. I’ll tell him to call you periodically to discuss it. I know you don’t like being left out of any murder investigation.”
Oxfordshire, April 1943
“THERE YOU ARE, sir. I think he’s right,” Jones said, speaking of the briefing officer. “Coming in from the northwest might give us more of an element of surprise.” Jones thumped his finger on the area on the ordinance map immediately surrounding the warehouse target. “I have a photograph as well. It shows exactly what we’ll be looking for. It should be a doddle.” Jones pulled an aerial photo out of a manila envelope and put it next to the map.
It Begins in Betrayal Page 3