It Begins in Betrayal

by Whishaw, Iona;

  “Sorry. He’s been moved,” the uniformed clerk at the visitor’s desk said.

  “What do you mean, moved? Moved where?”

  “I’ve no idea. Ask his legal man.”

  “But he can’t have been. He was due to get out on bail today.” Lane knew she was beginning to sound pleading. It would do no good with the automatons that seemed to populate the place, she thought, her anger and fear beginning to build. In any case, they had no power to help her.

  “Listen, love, I wish I could help. You’re a good-looking girl. I bet he wishes he could see you too. But there it is.”

  You, on the other hand, Lane thought, turning to leave, are an absolute, bloody ass.

  THEY SAT IN silence around the Donaldson table. “This is ridiculous,” Sandra said. “It’s like one of those spy novels Rudy’s always reading.” She felt a rush of feeling for Lane.

  “It’s absolutely unaccountable,” Higgins said. “I’ve grilled my chambers clerk, and he swears nothing has come for me to explain this change of status. I shall have to spend tomorrow doing whatever needs doing to track him down. After all, it’s Great Britain. Everyone is entitled to due process.”

  “Are they?” Lane asked. “I’ve seen more due process in the tiny town I live near in Canada. We’ll need to come up with a plan.”

  “I’m at work the next two days, or I’d be more helpful,” Rudy said.

  “Miss Winslow. I feel I owe you an apology,” Higgins said suddenly. “I confess that initially I thought you might be a detriment. When I examine what information we do have, it seems that most of it is due to you. The fact of Watson’s reluctance, the unaccountable release of information from the War Office. Your level-headed response to what must have been a blow to you today is telling. I’m going to have to be occupied with exerting my client’s rights, and I wonder now if you might be able to trace these airmen. I’ve no doubt that they will have been silenced as well, but we must get what we can. Something is very much amiss with this whole business.”

  “Mr. Higgins, there is no need for an apology. I should have barrelled on regardless, I’m sure. I like your cautious approach, as a matter of fact. It insulates us against too much optimism. The key thing for me right now is that Darling is innocent. There must be a way to prove it.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  France, April 1943

  WATSON RAN TOWARD THE BANK of trees, following the others, and collapsed with them on the ground, breathing hard. The last to arrive was Darling, who was looking from one to the other and then back toward the wreckage.

  “Bloody Germans,” muttered Anthony. He got up and moved toward the underbrush, and knelt down. Watson turned his attention back to the skip, who was asking for a damage report. He’d run to this spot. He must be all right. “Trouser leg torn,” he said, but swivelled his eyes toward where Anthony stood. He was saying something about the rear gunner. Someone was missing. He sat up out of his slouch and looked more closely in the semi-darkness, and heard himself beginning to count.

  “It’s going to blow! Move!” Darling’s voice burst through the fog, and Watson was on his feet, running. He could hear Salford just behind him, swearing under his breath. The explosion pummelled against them, making Watson feel like a giant hand had squeezed his chest and then hurled him away. He could hear gunfire. He lost track of Anthony, who seemed to have stayed till the end near Darling.

  “Allez, vite!” Watson swung around at those words and saw a man in a cloth cap signalling to them urgently. He looked around and saw Darling and Anthony had caught up with them. Darling gave a nod and waved at them to follow.

  “Better be a trustworthy frog,” he heard Belton say to him.

  “Where are Evans and Jones?” He asked.

  “Evans copped it. Don’t know about Jones. Haven’t seen him at all.”

  They were hurried past the farmhouse, its shutters closed and unwelcoming, to an outbuilding where they were ushered with frantic urgings by the farmer, down a steep flight of wooden stairs into the pitch dark. Watson breathed in a nearly suffocating breath of damp earth and rotting fruit. He could see a match struck, and light suddenly flooded the room, causing him to turn away and shut his eyes for a moment.

  “You stay, oui?”

  Darling began to talk in French, and he and the farmer had an urgent conversation. Nodding, Darling took the lamp and waited while the farmer climbed the stairs and closed the door above them. He set the lamp on a wooden crate. Watson looked around. There were barrels against the wall to their right, the source of the smell, he realized.

  “Well, we’ll have something to drink if we get stuck here,” he commented.

  “He’s going to return later with some food when it’s quiet,” Darling said. “In the meantime, we’ll have to figure out how to get back to England. Apparently he can also lay his hands on a wireless. We may be able to arrange some sort of pickup along the coast.”

  “I bloody hope so,” said Belton. “I don’t fancy climbing the mountains to Spain.”

  “I’ve confirmed Evans is dead. Our host, Gaston, said he’ll wait till it’s clear and try to recover him. Anyone seen Jones?”

  There was a silence after this. Watson thought about the moment they knew they were going down, but all he could remember was his own stumbling trajectory to safety.

  “Well, let’s hope he got away somewhere safe,” Darling said, sounding weary. “Try to get as comfortable as possible. I wish I knew what was bloody going on above ground.” He was silent. “Look, can we just go over everything now, while we might remember it? I felt an engine go out. But we must have been under attack because they were there, waiting for us, weren’t they? We seemed to be on course, Watson?”

  “Yes, sir. We were, sir.”

  “You’re right about the engine, sir,” Anthony said. His voice was tense and angry. “It’s so bloody noisy in those planes, I heard it the minute it dropped out.”

  “Jones came to check on me just before it happened,” Belton said suddenly, “and then he was on his way to the rear, to Evans. Something about coordinates. If they were both at the rear, I wouldn’t give them a hope in hell when we came down. It’s a miracle Evans got out. I’d put any money on Jones going up with the plane.”

  LANE SAT UP late into the night, her mind in turmoil, not letting her sleep. It was all part of the same picture. She turned on her light and went across the room to get her notebook and pencil. Back under the covers with the meagre pillow provided by Mrs. Macdonald propping her up, she began to write. Darling is brought to England and then arrested for apparently shooting his gunner. Watson the navigator is frightened and warned off, good chance the others were too. She’d track them down. Darling’s bail cancelled, and Darling suddenly not allowed visitors. Had he been moved somewhere else, or was she being lied to? He’d been moved, she decided. It is messy to increase the number of people needing to lie. The War Office couldn’t give them information, except secretly. Lane felt a flood of gratitude to Captain Hogarth and hoped her sudden release of the information they wanted was not also part of some plot. That was it, really. The whole thing felt like a plot, a conspiracy.

  She was about to write “why,” in big letters, when she wrote instead “what started it?” The whole thing had a wearily familiar tone to it. It was, she knew almost to a certainty, something to do with the intelligence branch. Only they would go to the trouble of manipulating all the players, and only if they had something important to cover up. If whatever situation could have been managed without “handling” it, they would have let natural justice take its course . . . no need to attract undue attention. It must be something big, something that had been lost control of. And it had to involve that plane crash.

  She wondered if she should warn Higgins to be careful, but she dismissed this out of hand. It would mean telling him that she suspected the intelligence branch, and that would lead to his knowing she’d been involved with intelligence during the war. Official secrets. She’d be arres
ted herself if she wasn’t careful. No. He had to proceed using the law to protect his client if he possibly could. Who knew, perhaps the judge had not been got at and would object to prisoners, even those up for murder, being disappeared.

  She thought about the one person who might be able to find out, who might be able to help, and knew, as certainly as she knew her own name, that she must avoid him. With a sinking heart she realized the impossibility of this. If he had traced her to Canada, he already knew she was back in Britain. God, he would know every bloody thing she did!

  With a semblance of a plan and an earnest hope that Sandra was as game as she seemed, Lane finally fell into a fitful sleep.

  AMES JINGLED THE car keys at O’Brien. “Want to come for a ride? I’ve got Maclean on the desk for the time being.”

  O’Brien didn’t have to be asked twice. “What’s up, then?” he asked as he climbed into the passenger seat.

  “I got a telegram from Miss Winslow with some information about Agatha Browning, but it isn’t doing me a blind bit of good. Her parents, her sisters, who died when. But I’ve been thinking about the mess in the cabin, and I feel like I didn’t explore it well enough. It was so destroyed that it was difficult to see past the mess, and Darling’s head was somewhere else, so he didn’t pick up on this idea either, and that is, where’s the evidence that there was someone else there? I fingerprinted the doorknobs, et cetera, and I got nothing, and I haven’t found the weapon. The car’s gone missing and I’ve alerted the RCMP detachments, but you could hide a car anywhere in the bush up any logging road and no one would ever see it again.”

  “So we’re going to see if we can pick up any evidence someone else was there?”

  “That’s the idea.” Ames drove on in silence, cursing inwardly that they’d gotten behind a truck that generated a level of dust that forced them to keep their windows shut.

  “Wonder how the boss is getting along,” O’Brien said. “Must be nice being on a continental holiday.”

  “I’m not sure how much of a holiday it is. More like official business. I imagine he’ll be back soon, and I’d like to get this solved. He might have some respect for me then,” Ames laughed. “Here we are.” He turned right down the road to the ferry landing, glad to be out of the stream of dust. The ferry was just pulling out from the other side. They had time to get out into the sun and take a breath of air.

  The sun, still in the east, slanted onto the lake, creating a canvas of sparkling water. The air was clean, and redolent with the smell of the evergreens that surrounded them and climbed up the mountain slope opposite them. The low chugging sound of the cable ferry making its way to them from the other side of the lake lent an air of an unhurried summer day to the morning.

  “Hard to imagine someone slashed to bits like that in a place like this,” Ames said, sighing.

  The cabin was how he’d left it—broken crockery on the floor by the sink, a bookshelf upset, chairs turned over. Only the photograph of the three girls was on the table, where Ames had left it after picking it up and righting the table.

  “How the heck are you going to find out if someone else was here? It’s not like they left a calling card.” O’Brien said, toeing a book that had been flung from the bookshelf.

  “Well, let’s imagine it was someone who came to visit and then the whole thing went off the rails. Would she give him some tea or something? Let’s pick up all these dishes, broken or not, and look for signs of use.”

  They took up a basket that had been sitting on the landing of the rear door and filled it with broken crockery. Anything not broken they carefully piled by the sink.

  “Looky here, Ames,” O’Brien said suddenly. “Someone’s had a tea party.” He was holding up a chipped cup in which there was a ring of what looked like dried tea.

  “Okay, let’s look for another. Either she just never washed her dishes or she did indeed have a tea party.” They found another cup, similarly marked, that had slid behind the door in the rampage. Behind the stove was a broken teapot that must have been in bad shape to start with, mouldy tea leaves resting on the side it had lain on.

  “So they got into some sort of donnybrook and then whoever it was grabbed a knife and chased her out to the outhouse, and they got into a wrestling match, and mine hostess was slashed. That pretty well it?”

  “Yes, and then she tried, wounded, to get away, so she couldn’t have been going that fast, and the other party followed and pushed her down. We don’t know if the trashing of the cabin was before or after . . . did everything get tossed around because they were tossing things at each other, or did the assailant come later and do over the cabin?”

  O’Brien took off his hat and scratched his head. “How old did you say this dame was?”

  “Seventy-something. She looks a hundred.”

  “So, she’s old, she’s wounded, she couldn’t have been moving too swiftly. If a man had done this, he’d have caught her and finished her off long before she got to where she died. Maybe it was an older man, or God help us, a woman.

  “Can you see a woman doing this? It’s not the sort of thing women do. Trouble is, we got nobody of any description coming over in the three days prior to finding the body. Talked to a kid called Nobby who ran the ferry while the regular guy was off and he says no one unusual came. So let’s say it’s a woman. She got over here somehow without being seen . . . Can you see a woman rowing across the lake in the dead of night? Especially if she was not bent on murder but was just coming to visit? She had to have come over on the ferry. What we know for sure is she, or he, dressed as the dead woman, drove that car across and disappeared. I’ve sent a description of that damn car to every RCMP unit in a hundred-mile radius, and nothing.”

  “Maybe you should concentrate on the car. I’m guessing she ditched it somewhere.” They were walking down the hill to where they had parked the car on the grassy slope of the road.

  “Needle in a haystack, O’Brien. Needle in a haystack!”

  They were just climbing back into the maroon Ford when a man hailed them.

  “Hey, you two here about that poor Agatha woman?” An old man walking a mongrel had stopped and was swatting at the grass with a walking stick.

  “That we are. I don’t remember talking to you. Did my colleague interview you? What’s your name?” Ames asked.

  “Ernie Jack, and no, I was not interviewed by anyone. I just got back from seeing my boy in Revelstoke. I just heard about what happened. Did you catch the guy?”

  Ames shook his head. “Not yet, I’m afraid. I don’t think you need to worry too much though. I expect he’s long gone.”

  The man laughed. “I’m not afraid. I got Marky here to watch out for me. Did you talk to that woman from the old country?”

  Ames, who had reached into his pocket to take out his notebook to ask a few questions, looked up.

  “What woman from the old country?”

  “That one I brought over here last week. Found her walking on the road and offered her a ride, just outta town there, near the ferry landing. I couldn’t make out where an old woman like that thought she was going on foot. When she told me she was looking for Agatha Browning, I told her I live here myself. Said she was her sister. I didn’t get her name.”

  “Her sister? Are you sure? And you brought her here? Can you describe her?”

  “Old. White hair. Kinda thin. Had a little suitcase with her. Blue eyes? Maybe blue. A bit like her sister’s. I wasn’t expecting to have to describe her to anyone. Nice enough. Told me she’d come a long way to see her sister. Hadn’t seen her in over forty years, she said.”

  “Can you remember anything else about her? What she was wearing?”

  “Oh gosh. A dress, a jacket maybe. A hat. I didn’t pay attention, if I’m honest.”

  Very helpful, Ames thought. “Colour of the dress?”

  The man twisted his mouth in thought. “Honestly, I couldn’t say. I’m not too observant.”

  No kidding, Ames thought.<
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  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  London, March 1907

  THE TEA ROOM AT CLARIDGE’S was subdued and cheerful, and the two or three couples dancing to the palm court orchestra made Agatha feel at once envious and guilty.

  “What are you thinking?” Alphonse asked, reaching for her hand.

  “That this is so terribly wrong. That we are breaking Lucy’s heart.”

  “Lucy’s heart was doomed the minute I saw you. You wouldn’t want me to go back to her. It would only make all our lives miserable. In any case, she doesn’t really know, does she? Only that I’ve broken it off.”

  “God, you’re obtuse sometimes! When she finds out, it will be an absolute betrayal!” Agatha looked away from him toward the window. The street, a bustle of horses, cabs, people, hawkers shouting, seemed unbearably noisy to her. It was too late to pull out of it all, and she knew it. She could never go back home where she would have to lie to her father, to her sisters.

  Alphonse watched her. The brim of her white hat framed the profile of her face, and he wondered if this was the time. She was distressed about her sister, but surely she could see that he loved her to distraction? He could put it right. He had bought a ring and he had only to pull it out of his pocket.

  “Agatha, my dearest, lovely creature. I have something to ask you. Please say nothing until I have finished. I know you are distressed on behalf of your sister. I understand it, but she will come to accept it in time. She will find someone else. There were heaps of young men interested in her when we were up at the MacPhersons’ that weekend.”

  Agatha turned to look at him. “It isn’t heaps of young men she wants. It’s you.”

  “But I love you. And you love me. You know you do. Please, Aggy, please say you’ll marry me.”

  Agatha looked down, her face flushing, and then looked up at him. “I came here against my own better judgment because I do love you. But I cannot possibly marry you. I’m surprised you could ask it of me. What would happen? We would settle into your house in Belgravia? And what about my family? I would be estranged from them absolutely when they came to know it was I who broke her heart. I have given you everything already. I cannot throw my betrayal right in the face of my poor sister.”