Cook, who had tried every remedy within her power in the form of making all of Lucy’s favourite foods, now harrumphed. “If she had something real to do, she wouldn’t have time for all this tragedy. Who hasn’t been disappointed in love? I was. No doubt you will be. But do we crumble to pieces? No, we’ve got work to do, and we get on with it. And she’s been overindulged. Typical youngest. She should be more like her sisters. They wouldn’t be making such a fuss.”
Tilly sighed. She herself risked a bit of disappointment because the boy from the post office who rode his bike around the village and environs making deliveries had recently smiled at her more than once. “But she’s in love,” she said.
“Don’t you start! I’ve seen that boy making sheep’s eyes at you! If they’ve gone out, you’d best go clean up and air that girl’s room. It’s the first day she’s been out of it in a week.”
“THERE’S FATHER,” MARY said. The door of the carriage near the far end of the platform had opened, and their father had gotten down the steps and was now pulling his bag after him. “He looks tired, poor dear. Darling, please, let’s try to cheer him up a bit. It would make him so happy to see you in a better frame of mind.” She pulled Lucy along the platform and took her father’s bag. “Hello, Papa. We’re making you walk home. I hope that’s all right. Hastings has the trap here, so you won’t have to carry your bag.”
Mr. Browning looked at them both and tried with all that was in him to smile. He was, after all, glad to see Lucy out of the house. He kissed her cheek with a little extra tenderness. Perhaps the fact that she’d agreed to walk to the station meant that she would be able to bear up, though he himself could scarcely imagine how he was going to.
They were on the upper path near the crest of the hill that had the views that swept all the way to the sea. The wind had picked up a bit and seemed to be carrying the clouds away so that the water glinted in the distance like a rim of silver along the earth’s edge. Lucy had gone ahead to the top and now stood, her arms wrapped tight around her, gazing out at the view.
“Father, what is it?” Mary asked. She’d pulled him to a stop and turned him to face her.
Browning looked at the ground and shook his head. “Not now. Later. When she has gone to bed. It is worse than you can imagine.”
“Worse? Worse? What is? Father, you are really frightening me. Has something happened to Aggy?” She clutched at him, this new idea filling her with horror. Ahead they could see that Lucy had now turned to look down the path toward them.
“Are you two coming, or what?” Lucy called.
Mary felt a momentary sense of relief . . . she was seeing a tiny glimpse of the normal Lucy, but then turned to her father again and whispered, “Father.”
“Aggy is fine. That is . . . please, not now. Poor Lucy.” He pulled away and proceeded up the path, leaving Mary filled with misgivings. She could see him take Lucy’s arm and kiss her again, and watched Lucy reward him with a little smile. She should be happy, Mary thought, but she could make no sense of what her father was saying. Aggy was all right, but not all right? And why “poor Lucy?”
HIGGINS WAS IN the judge’s chambers, pacing.
“It’s no good Higgins. I agree with you completely that your client has some rights even if he did shoot his gunner. I’ve gone all the way up to Sir Denton in the Home Office and asked him what we just fought a bloody war for if people can just be spirited away and their rights denied. He was not to be drawn. He reminded me that your client is not a citizen of this country, and it is a matter of security. And before you ask, I haven’t the first foggy clue what he meant by that.”
“Then, m’lud, I’m going to the Canadian High Commission. They can take it straight to the Home Office.”
“I wish you luck. Your client is facing a heinous crime of murdering one of his own men in the middle of a battle. A young man of eighteen. I shouldn’t think the Canadians will be in the least bit interested in pulling him out of the soup.”
“What about the court date?” Higgins demanded.
“I am assured the client will be present.”
“I have a right to receive his instructions and plan his defence.” Higgins said.
The judged winced nearly imperceptibly as if he found the lawyer’s persistence in bad taste. “Higgins, you do go on about rights. There are things that may trump some rights. I’m not privy to them, but there you are. I’m assuming you are looking into his defence even without him, and he will get a fair trial with an impartial British jury. I can’t think what more you want. If you will excuse me, I’m expected for the afternoon sitting.”
Higgins stood on the street, his jaw working. Should he go to the High Commission? Was the judge right? His Honour was clearly not partial to his client. Should he be asking for the judge to be recused? Perhaps he’d better go see Donaldson and find out how that Winslow woman was getting on with the witnesses.
DONALDSON OPENED THE door. “You’d better come in,” he said to Higgins. “I’m skipping tea and going right to a drink. Care to join me?”
“Why? What have you found out?” Higgins asked, stowing his hat on the shelf and putting his briefcase on the floor.
The two sat glumly in front of the fire with glasses of Scotch, as Donaldson relayed what his wife had told him on the telephone about their misadventure.
“There is something very dark going on here,” opined Higgins. “I’ve just appealed to the judge to have whoever moved Darling away to produce him, and he told me he’d tried. He’s been warned off, I think. Sir Denton mentioned ‘security.’ With witnesses dying all around us, I can’t see who is secure.”
“I don’t want Sandra out there. It was all a bit of a lark, the two of them going off to find a sympathetic witness. She thought it was anyway. I wasn’t convinced, but I let her go. Now look. And she as much as told me on the phone I could go fly a kite, she wasn’t coming home till they’d seen the last man in Sussex. They’re seeing him tomorrow, evidently.”
Higgins, who was unmarried, did not approve of spirited women. “She seems to be under the influence of Miss Winslow. That woman is alarmingly determined to save Darling. Her faith in him is touching, but I fear she is in over her head on this one. And it wouldn’t be the first time a man has deceived a woman.”
Donaldson looked up at this. “You think he might be guilty?”
“Well, of course, I accept my client’s version of events. But someone is making a great effort to confuse the matter. Mind you, that doesn’t prove in and of itself that he isn’t guilty of something.”
“I wouldn’t have thought it of him, Higgins. Fred has always been a very straight shooter. Honest, forthright, practical, perhaps a little trusting. There was a business of a woman during the war. He was too guileless to see he was being played. But he’d never shoot one of his own men. Never.”
Higgins got up and stood with his back to the fire. “Trusting. That’s interesting. Has he trusted where he shouldn’t? I’ve read that damn report he submitted on the crash over and over. He is extremely clear, he takes responsibility for being shot down, for God’s sake, and he takes responsibility for the loss of his men. Then he gets a Distinguished Flying Cross for getting the rest of them to safety. The whole report is exemplary, but now that I think of it, it is entirely from his point of view. Well, of course, it has to be, but what I’m getting at is this: what were his men up to? Maybe one of them saw how Evans died. Maybe one of them did it, for all we know.”
“Really, Higgins. You’re grasping at straws. It was a crash situation. They’d all be bracing and hurrying to save themselves if they survived. Why has no one brought up the obvious? That Evans was shot by the enemy. After all, they came under fire. It’s inconceivable that a young airman, by all accounts popular with everyone, and respected—he was good with that gun—would be killed by one of his own crew members.”
“No. Of course. You are right. I am grasping at straws, but I just thought, you know, what if one of them was a bit
mad and saw it as a way to get out of the whole show and needed to kill Evans so as not to be seen? An ‘I’ll get out in the confusion’ sort of thing. You’ve seen some of these men with shell shock and battle fatigue. They don’t think straight, some of them.”
“Even so, why would that lead to what’s happening now? It’s like somebody knows something, and now people are trying to engage in a cover-up by pinning it on Darling. If it’s just about an airman trying to go AWOL, it doesn’t make sense. And I wish bloody Sandra was back. I don’t like this one bit.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
AMES STOOD IN FRONT OF the church in Harrop. It was another beautiful day, and the white church gleamed in the sunshine. For a moment he wished he were a painter, catching the thin line of shadow that delineated the lower edge of each wooden siding board. He looked at his watch. It was 12:10. How long would a Mass last? The burble of the creek splashing cheerfully over the rocks on its way to the lake drowned out the sound of whatever might be happening inside. He was hoping to again meet the man who had given Agatha Browning’s sister a ride to see if he remembered anything else, and was also hoping to catch Father Lahey to see if he could think of any reason she might have run away from the village rather than toward it.
Vastly unfamiliar with the notion of churches in general, Ames was wondering if the proceedings, which according to the sign began at 11:30, would take an hour, in which case he had twenty minutes to stroll down to the water’s edge and admire the lake, when the door of the church opened. A few elderly people, some of whom he’d interviewed, hobbled down the stairs clutching the banisters and nodded at him warily. Ames waited for the first of them to descend and then started up the stairs into the church.
“Morning, Constable. Any luck so far? Did you talk to that lady?” It was the very man he wanted to see, who was retrieving his hat in the vestibule.
“You know, we haven’t been able to find her. Can you think of anything else she might have said? How long she was staying, where she lived, anything?” Ames asked.
The man shook his head. “We had plenty of time in the car getting to the ferry and coming over. I know she told me she hadn’t seen her sister in forty years, and I might have said, ‘Why so long,’ or something. What did she say to that? I know! She said, ‘It took a long time to find her.’ Of course I was dying to ask why she’d lost her, but it didn’t seem to be any of my business. I just said, ‘Well, you’ve found her now, and I can point you right to her cabin.’ She did say she’d come from the old country, but not where exactly.”
Ames found Father Lahey in a room behind the alter hanging up his cassock.
“Ah. Constable Ames. I didn’t see you among the congregants.”
Ames laughed. “No. I’m afraid I’m a godless Anglican.”
“Some of my best friends are Anglican,” Father Lahey said. “I’m sure to God it is all the same.”
“No. I’m really godless. This is the first time I’ve set foot in a church since my cousin’s wedding.” He followed Father Lahey as he completed his rounds for locking up the church. “Father, I did want to ask you something. What strikes me as very odd is that Mrs. Browning, having been wounded by the assailant and apparently having enough time to attempt something of an escape, even in her condition, decides to head away from the village, instead of toward it where she might have raised the alarm and gotten some help. And up a hill for that matter. Can you think of any reason she might have done that?”
Father Lahey stopped midway through straightening the alter cloth and looked perplexed. “I hadn’t thought of that. It’s very strange, all right. Perhaps she was just in shock and dazed from the attack, not knowing what she was doing.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s possible . . . I’ve never been in that kind of shock, but I can’t help thinking some survival instinct would come over you, and you’d run to safety, not away.”
“Maybe, for some reason, she thought she would be safer doing what she did. Hiding, for example. The woods are denser. Running toward the village, she’d soon be in the open.” Father Lahey mused.
“But she’d be more likely to meet someone,” Ames said.
“Have you seen anyone wandering around here the times you’ve been here? You could shoot a cannon down the street at any time of day and get no one. They stick pretty close to home, the few people that live here.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Ames said. “I think I’ll wander back up to the cabin and just have another look around.”
“I’d go with you,” Father Lahey said, “but I’ve got a one o’clock in Kaslo. Good luck.”
Ames turned to go down the stairs and was just passing the priest’s car when Father Lahey called out.
“Constable. I was just thinking, if I were attacked by someone bent on robbing me, say, here in the church, my instinct, I’m almost certain, would be to protect the host at the altar. It is the most sacred thing here. I know it wouldn’t really save it, especially if I’d been wounded and was bleeding to death, but it made me wonder if she was protecting something? Let’s say that because she finds she’s not so badly wounded she can’t run away; she runs toward something she wants to protect.”
AMES STOOD IN the thickly wooded place Agatha Browning had died, thinking again how lucky they were to have found her at all. The underbrush was so dense that few people would attempt it. Sighing, he began to look around. Would she have staked a claim around here? If so, where? Would it be an actual stake, saying “Browning’s Claim”? He would have to find something out about how people stake a claim. Probably you registered it somewhere. He would have to check at the mining office in town. Father Lahey had said he didn’t know if she ever did anything with her claim. In any case, a claim was really a bit of ground, so you wouldn’t be able to “rescue” it. This forest and the surrounding land possibly belonged to the company that was considering reopening, so she might not have been able to claim anything here.
He pulled up a piece of grass and, speculatively chewing on the end of it, walked back through the silent and shadowed forest to his car. No signs of the deadly drama disturbed its cool and fragrant stillness, as if the crime had never happened.
Back in town he greeted O’Brien at the front desk. “Any calls?” he asked, as he pushed the swing gate into the main part of the station.
“Nope. It’s Sunday. Who’s going to call you? I’m assuming you mean someone from England. But this came for the boss.” He held up a letter. “When’s he coming back, by the way? Not that we don’t trust you!” O’Brien added with a wink.
“Mail on a Sunday?” Ames asked. The letter appeared to come from England. One of Darling’s vet buddies, probably.
“Not the mailman, actually. A guy came in with it about an hour ago. Apparently he lives a few doors down from the inspector, and he was tearing up an old catalogue from the winter and he found this letter stuck inside. He brought it here because he hadn’t seen any lights at Darling’s house and assumed he’s been away. Anyway. You can throw it on his desk.”
Wondering at the vagaries of Royal Mail Canada, Ames looked at the envelope. It looked like it had been sent back in March. Definitely from a buddy, but Ames didn’t recognize the name. He put the letter into Darling’s in-tray, and then went into his office and put his feet up on his own desk, after only a momentary temptation to put them up on Darling’s desk.
LANE AND SANDRA got out of the train in Victoria Station. It was bustling with Sunday day trippers. The weather had been fine, and people looked happy and carefree. Lane longed to feel carefree—anything but this gnawing fear. To get to Sussex, they were going to have to change in London. “Let’s just go home,” Lane had said as the train trundled through the outskirts of the city. “I think I need to meet with Higgins. I’m really frightened by what happened to Salford. I know it may have nothing to do with this, but I keep having this fear that something we may do in the way of talking to one of these people would put them in danger.”
Sandra had be
en relieved. She had told Rudy, her husband, that she was going to see it through, but she wasn’t feeling as plucky as she’d let on. “We could drive to Horsham in the car. I’m sure Rudy would drive us, and he’d feel better if he was with us,” she’d said.
Agreeing to meet the next day as soon as she had contacted Higgins, Lane now lay on her bed in her old room staring at the ceiling, her feelings in turmoil. It suddenly came to her that she had lain in this same spot, brokenhearted, when she had heard reports of Angus’s death four years before, reports that had been deliberately planted to deceive her. Now she was again in a state about someone she loved, on the same bed, staring at the same ceiling. Only Darling was alive. He had to be. She sat up, her breath caught. Could he too have been killed? No, she told herself, willing herself to control the panic she was feeling, Salford, after all, had committed suicide, or could even have simply tripped and fallen into the path of the train. And yet, she thought, the whole thing had the same whiff of deception.
She looked at her watch. Only ten in the evening. An unbearable number of hours till Monday morning when she could call Higgins at his chambers. She cleared off the small writing table by the curtained window and took out her stationary. Map time. What places and people were involved? France somewhere; the plane crash; London; two crew members, Watson and Anthony; Norfolk; Salford, recently dead; Belton in Sussex. She stopped, wishing she had index cards she could write on and move around. She started again.
At the top of a page she wrote “France 1943” and underlined it. Underneath she wrote,
Plane crashes, two crew members die. Evans after getting out, of gunshot wounds, Jones in the plane, body never found.
She underlined “gunshot wounds.”
On another page she wrote “London” and under that,
Watson alive, but warned off.
She reviewed her interaction with him. Had he seemed surprised when she said Darling was being accused of shooting Evans? He had. That was something anyway. Neville Anthony. Says he saw Darling shoot Evans. Why? And why wait four years? Could she get to him to find out?
It Begins in Betrayal Page 13