‘Yes, did we talk. . I mean did we talk. . we had a lot to talk about, a real lot to talk about, years to catch up on.’
‘Did she indicate she felt to be in danger?’ Yellich asked. ‘Did she say that someone was out to harm her?’
‘No,’ Blanche Lecointe shook her head slowly, ‘she didn’t but you know, for all that we talked, and we had a lot to talk about, she was always a very guarded and a private person. She had a social life that I wasn’t allowed to be part of.’
‘Any friend in particular?’
‘Sally Brompton. She was a co-worker at the realtor’s. They would go out together two or three nights a week. I reckon Sally Brompton will be able to tell you more that I can about her private life. She worked for Andrew Neill Realtor. .’
Ventnor scribbled the name in his notebook. ‘We’ll pay a call on her.’
‘They’re in Barrie near the terminal.’
‘The terminal?’ Ventnor queried.
‘The bus terminal on Simcoe Street, very near your hotel,’ Marianne Auphan explained. ‘I’ll let you have a street map, already, you’ll need it.’
‘Thanks.’ Ventnor smiled briefly and held eye contact with her.
‘So,’ Yellich rested his arms on the tabletop, ‘probably a bit of a difficult question, but what can you tell us about your half-sister’s death?’
‘No. . it’s all right and essential that you know. She died of exposure one winter.’
Marianne Auphan groaned and put her hand to her forehead, ‘One of those? It happens each winter, all across Canada. . it’s so tragic. . cometh the spring, cometh the grief.’
‘Yes,’ Blanche Lecointe repeated, ‘One of those. Her body was found near Bear Creek in Ardagh Bluffs. .’
‘It’s quite close to here,’ Marianne Auphan explained, ‘and also quite a similar housing development mixed in with spruce plantations. You can seem to be well out in the boonies. . out in the country, yet you are just a short walk from someone’s house or from a main road.’
‘I see. . ironic though,’ Yellich commented.
‘Ironic?’ Blanche Lecointe turned and glanced at him.
‘Well, that was how the lady using your half-sister’s identity died, of exposure in a cold spell, in an open area beside a canal. . not in woodland but. . nonetheless, she died of exposure.’
‘I see what you mean, but Edith had no connection that I knew of with Ardagh Bluffs or with anyone living there.’ Blanche Lecointe glanced out of her window. ‘I well remember the last night I saw her, dressing up in her finery and she a middle-aged woman. She was going out on a date like an excited teenager. It was winter. Snow had fallen. More was forecast. She didn’t come home. I filed a missing person’s report forty-eight hours later, then. . nothing. . nothing. . nothing until the thaw, it was about this time of year when her body was found. It had lain under the snow all winter.’
‘That is what I meant by “one of those”,’ Marianne Auphan explained to Yellich and Ventnor. ‘Come each thaw. . come each spring. . all across Canada missing person’s reports are closed. Sometimes there is evidence of foul play but mostly it is misadventure. . accidental. . very often young men walking home with too much drink inside them, they take a short cut through an area of woodland, succumb to the alcohol, lay down or collapse, snow covers their body and keeps it covered.’
‘I see. Tragic,’ Ventnor said.
‘It’s Canada. . and it’s any country with heavy snowfall.’
‘Dare say,’ Yellich echoed. ‘So can we please go back a little further if possible? What do you know of her life before she turned up so unexpectedly at your door?’
‘Not a great deal. She did talk a little about it, but not a lot. The foster home sounded more like an institution than a foster family. It seemed that it was a large house full of children supervised by a single foster mother. Then she was with the nuns. . she didn’t talk about that at all. . and that says a lot.’
‘I see. . and yes, it does.’
‘It was out at Aldersea, the foster home, I mean.’
‘That’s an easy drive from Barrie,’ Marianne Auphan turned to Yellich, ‘by the side of Lake Simcoe.’
‘Another lake?’ Yellich replied.
‘Same one really. Barrie is on Kempenfelt Bay but Kempenfelt is a bay of Lake Simcoe.’
‘I see.’
‘So. .’ Blanche Lecointe continued, ‘Edith told me she left the nuns at sixteen years old so she must have been very vulnerable, no family. . no money. She moved to Toronto to live in the big city. I swear it never had any attraction for me. I always thought that Toronto is such a mess of a city. . not like Montreal. I could live in Montreal. I really could live in that city. She returned to Barrie when she was in her thirties.’
‘Did she marry?’
‘No. Well, she never said she did. . Edith never had a ring on her finger. . and she used her maiden name. She had a warm personality all right. So neither of us are or ever were catwalk models but we were still not bad looking. She had a warm personality like I said, she was a very giving sort of girl. She had no career to pursue, just had office skills, which are good enough but hardly a substitute for a family. So you’d think she would be hungry for marriage, but no, she never did marry. Two spinster half-sisters we,’ Blanche Lecointe smiled, ‘that was us.’
‘Where did she live before she turned up at your door?’
‘Dunno,’ Blanche Lecointe inclined her head, ‘that will be one for Sally Brompton. I believe she could answer that question.’
Driving away from Blanche Lecointe’s house along Wattie Road, Marianne Auphan said, ‘It’s looking like murder. I didn’t want to say anything in there but it’s a common method of murder here, all over Canada really, pour alcohol down someone’s throat. . or some other substance, carry them outside in a snowstorm, leave them somewhere, some semi-remote place. . and a stand of spruce at Ardagh Bluffs is ideal. Just perfect. . near at hand and not easily overlooked. Without a witness or a confession all the coroner can do is return a verdict of “death by misadventure” but in not a few cases we have our suspicions.’
‘I’ll bet,’ Yellich replied from the front passenger seat. ‘I’ll bet you do.’
‘Sometimes. .’ Auphan manoeuvred the car to avoid a pothole in the road surface.
‘You’re thinking of something?’ Yellich turned to Marianne Auphan, as she straightened the course of the car.
‘Yes, I am thinking of something and I am still angry, very angry about it. Last winter a sixteen-year-old girl went out dressed in a party dress, no top coat or hat, didn’t get back home by the designated hour and her father refused to let her in, wanted to teach her a lesson about timekeeping, he told us, but it was subzero. . for all the clothing she was wearing she might as well have been naked. .’
‘Oh. .’ Yellich groaned.
‘We don’t know what happened to her, not exactly, and we probably never will, but in her desperation she most likely accepted a suspect lift from a stranger, anything to get out of the cold. Her body was found thirty miles away and so the next time her parents saw her she was on a slab. Some lesson about timekeeping. I wanted to prosecute but our top floor vetoed it. Dare say they were right. This girl was their only daughter, only child in fact. He might have been a bit of a hard father but in his own way he loved her very much. His grief and guilt were genuine and his wife left him over the incident. Just packed her bags and walked out on the same day they identified her body. No purpose to be served by prosecuting, so the top floor said. Now I think that the top floor was right but then. . back then I wanted to throw the book at him.’
‘Understandable.’
‘But here,’ Marianne Auphan pointed behind her, indicating the Lecointe house, ‘here someone wanted Edith out of the way so they could use her passport. . here is deep suspicion. We need to reopen the file on Edith Lecointe’s death, already.’
Carmen Pharoah woke early. She lay in bed in her small but functional new build flat on B
ootham and listened to the city slowly awakening around her, the milk float whirring in the street below her window, stopping and starting and accompanied by the ‘all’s well’ sound of the rattle of milk bottles in metal crates, of the different, deeper whirr of the high revving diesel engines of the first buses, and the distant ‘ee-aw’ sound of a passenger train leaving York Station to go north to still dark Scotland, or south to London and the home counties where the day had already dawned.
She thought, as she lay under the freshly laundered quilt, of the other life she had once had, of the other life she had felt forced out of. She and her husband, both Afro-Caribbean, both overcoming prejudice by professionalism, observing the advice her father-in-law gave her and her husband upon their engagement, ‘I am proud of both of you, very proud, but you’re black, you’ve got to be ten times better just to be equal’. And how they were ten times better! Both ten times better, both employed by the Metropolitan Police, she as a Detective Constable and he as a civilian employee, a Chartered Accountant, assisting in managing an annual budget of millions of pounds.
Then. . then. . what was it called? She turned and lay on her back looking up at the ceiling. ‘Survivor guilt’, that was it. . that is the phrase, ‘survivor guilt’. Those who survive feel guilty for having survived. The awful news was broken gently by one of her senior colleagues. Her husband could not have known anything, he had said, death must have been instantaneous and the accident wasn’t his fault. . not his fault at all, that they would be prosecuting the other motorist of course and then leaving her to face dreadful widowhood when she was still short of her thirtieth birthday.
Then she had, soon after the funeral, transferred to the north, to Yorkshire. She had chosen Yorkshire because it has a reputation of being cold and unforgiving in terms of its climate and landscape and its people are also, it is rumoured, hard and unforgiving; no one, it is said, can bear a grudge like a Yorkshire man. An ideal place for a guilt-laden survivor to live until she feels the penalty she must pay has been paid.
In full.
‘Got a hit.’ Marianne Auphan leaned on the lightweight doorframe of the office which had been designated Yellich and Ventnor’s office accommodation for the duration of their visit. She smiled a smug, self-satisfied smile and held up a sheet of paper. ‘The prints of the deceased, that is your deceased, whose name is not Edith Lecointe, she is known to us.’
Yellich sat up and smiled, ‘She is?’
‘She is.’ Marianne Auphan advanced into the cramped office which overlooked Highway 400. Ventnor also displayed a look of intrigue.
‘Yes, the latents belong to a felon called Heather Ossetti. She has previous for minor offences but it’s her all right, a regular feloness. She was convicted in Vancouver for shoplifting twenty years ago. Not known to the Barrie Police, not known to Ontario Province Police, so I went national.’
‘Good for you,’ Yellich smiled though not fully understanding the Canadian system of data filing; city, province, national. .
‘Nothing violent though. . receiving stolen goods, non-payment of a fine. . she went to jail for that. So it’s a strange pattern of previous convictions given that she is a murder suspect and not reading like the sort of person that someone would want to starve of food before murdering them. She’s just a petty crook according to this profile.’ Marianne Auphan sat in the one vacant chair in the office and as she did so she glanced out of the window at the towering grey clouds above Highway 400 and the houses glimpsed between the trees beyond the freeway. ‘Snow in the sky,’ she said, ‘that’s a snow sky.’ She turned to Yellich. ‘So how do you want to handle this?’
‘Two pronged, I think.’ Yellich turned from the window after studying a ‘snow sky’ of black mountainous clouds which seemed to be descending on the town on the bay. ‘You’ll be reopening the file in respect of the death of Edith Lecointe, I assume?’
‘Yes, already activated. The file is being sent up from archives and I have talked it over with Aiden McLeer. He fully shares my. . our concerns and suspicions.’
‘I see, well, it’s your pigeon, you are the Barrie Police and as agreed, you have tactical command but if you’ll permit, I would like to investigate the background of Edith Lecointe. She was not a criminal, is not a suspect so it would not be a criminal investigation as such. I can do that alone with your permission and approval. At some point she must have crossed paths with Heather Ossetti. . when I find that point I stop. . and consult your good self.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Perhaps you two could investigate Heather Ossetti? We both need to know who she is. . or was. . I mean that both the Barrie Police and the Vale of York Police need to know about her, so let’s use one officer from each force and at some point our inquiries will converge.’
‘Yes. Agreed.’ Marianne Auphan and Ventnor nodded to each other and then looked at Yellich. ‘Yes, that sounds neat and sensible.’
‘I’ll need a car,’ Yellich said. ‘Can you provide one for me, please?’
‘No problem. We’ll let you have one of our unmarked vehicles. Fuel up here when you need to do so. Do you want to fly solo?’
‘Yes,’ Yellich smiled. ‘I’ll squeal if I need help, but solo is preferable in the first instance. I’d be happier on my own on this one.’
Marianne Auphan took Ventnor to Hooters Bar on the shore of Kempenfelt Bay. Upon entering they were greeted by the Hooters girls in figure-hugging white vests and red shorts who cried out, ‘Hi, welcome to Hooters’ as they entered.
‘I thought you might like it here,’ Auphan smiled at Ventnor, who sat at a polished pine table by the window which overlooked the bay. ‘It’s very American. . in fact it is an American organization.’ She sat opposite him and Ventnor noticed her large brown eyes dilate as she held eye contact with him. ‘Just what a Limey needs,’ she added with a soft smile, ‘an injection of genuine North American culture.’
‘Appreciated.’ Ventnor looked around him. He saw that the bar was doing good business. It was perhaps, he thought, about half full and it was still early in the day. Large muscular men ate large portioned cheeseburgers and French fries and drank chilled beer served eagerly and efficiently by the Hooters girls. ‘And if this is North American culture,’ he said as a Hooters girl slid up to their table to take their order, ‘then it’s something that this Limey can get used to. I promise I wouldn’t put up any kind of fight at all.’
‘Good,’ she smiled, ‘so welcome to Barrie, Ontario province.’
Later, before returning to the police station, Auphan and Ventnor walked side by side along the shore of the bay, not talking, but occasionally their shoulders would rub gently.
Sally Brompton revealed herself to be a short woman, well presented in terms of her own dress sense, wearing ‘office smart’ clothing and large spectacles. She had a round face, close cropped hair. She had painted her fingernails in loud red paint and wore ‘sensible’ shoes, feminine but with a small heel. She talked with Yellich in one of the interview rooms in the realtor’s office in which she worked. Yellich had been unsure exactly what a ‘realtor’ was and had been afraid to ask but from the photographs of properties for sale on the wall of the foyer of the building in which Ms Brompton worked he surmised that ‘realtor’ was Canadian for estate agent. It was in much the same way that he was disappointed to find that Canadians have ‘tires’, not ‘tyres’, but he was equally relieved to find that a lawyer is a barrister or a solicitor and not an ‘attorney’ and that a cheque is a cheque, not a ‘check’.
‘Oh my. . oh my,’ she repeated as she sank further back into the yellow armchair, ‘oh my.’
‘Bit of a shock. I am sorry.’ Yellich spoke softly.
‘You could say so, though I haven’t heard about her in a while. Losing her life in the snow. . it happens a lot in Canada. . but now you tell me there is more to it. . something sinister.’
‘At this stage it is only a possibility.’
‘We thought it was an accident but now you t
ell me someone stole her identity and went to England with it. What sort of theft is that?’
‘Callous,’ Yellich suggested. ‘Perhaps callous is the word.’
‘Yes, callous. . callous. . so callous. So, how can I help you?’
‘By telling me all you can about Edith Lecointe, as you recall her, and anything she told you about herself. We have spoken to Blanche, her half-sister, but Blanche told us that Edith was a private person and told her little of herself.’
‘Yes, she was very quiet like that.’ Sally Brompton paused and looked to her left and out of the interview room window as a white single-decker Barrie Transit bus arrived at the small bus terminal and ‘knelt’ on its suspension to allow the egress and ingress of passengers with walking difficulties. ‘We became friends when she arrived here to work. We were both of the same age. . we are. . we were lucky to have an employer who doesn’t discriminate. I still am. If you are a clerical worker you have a distinct advantage in the job market if you are young and pretty. Most employers like an attractive typist or two to set their office off but Mr Neill, he seeks efficiency above anything else, so we got a position here. I think. . no, I know, Edith felt her lack of advancement in life more than I did. She had no family as you probably know. . no husband. . no children. . but I am fulfilled in that sense, soon to be a first time grandparent. So I don’t mind a lowly old job but Edith, all she had was a lowly old job. She wanted more out of life than life had given her. But Edith, she got asked out by older men. . or men of her age but she seemed unable to settle, unable to commit. She was wounded, I think.’
‘Wounded?’
‘In here,’ Sally Brompton tapped the side of her head, ‘or maybe here,’ she pointed to her chest. ‘She wasn’t insane, nothing like that, but just damaged emotionally. She had difficult years, a bad start in life.’
‘Yes, she was fostered, was that a bad experience for her? Did she ever tell you about that?’
‘Well, she didn’t talk about it or about the time with the nuns and that’s always a sign of something bad. . you must assume what you must assume.’
Deliver Us from Evil hay-20 Page 13