by Linda Moore
“I have proof, Ralph. I have Peter King’s recent detailed research on this. Research that is far more thorough and up-to-date than what Aziz had in that file. Research that indicates that the bulk water that Aqua Laben was after was to be obtained through a very sweet deal being arranged by your client right here in Canada’s Ocean Playground!” I turned to face Spiegle. “Because of your position here, you were able to facilitate access to Nova Scotia water for this German corporation at a cost of next to nothing, and you intended to personally profit by it when it was sold on the world market in the form of Aqua Laben bottled water. Would that be considered, let me see, a conflict of interest? Or maybe just plain illegal? In fact, isn’t that an indictable offence?”
I glanced quickly around the room. McFadden was narrowing his eyes at me. His cheek was twitching. Arbuckle was clearly enjoying the show. I knew I couldn’t drop the ball now—I kept going.
“And Mr. Spiegle, the real reason that you went to see Peter King that Sunday in October was because the jig was up. He had already obtained a temporary injunction, and his next step would be to call you up on the carpet and expose your second identity and your position with Aqua Laben. A conflict of interest that could cause you to lose your job, and probably land you in jail for quite some time. Isn’t that right, Carl—or should I say Heinrich?”
“I need to speak to my client.” McFadden shouted. “What is this Heinrich stuff? What’s she talking about?”
“Oh good question,” I said. “It’s a question with a very long answer. But the short answer is Heinrich Brunner, isn’t it Carl? A name that you come by somewhat honestly because it’s the name of the man that took you in when you were orphaned. And that man was Greta King’s father.”
I stopped short and looked at Arbuckle. “Oh, my god.”
“What is it?” Arbuckle asked.
I got up and paced around the room for a moment to try and think clearly. I was nodding my head every few seconds as the picture began to come into focus. I knew they were all looking at me like I’d just lost my mind, but I needed to put it all together and I really didn’t want them to take a break.
I looked at Arbuckle again. “Bear with me. I just want to go over the story of that afternoon in October one more time.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake! This is beyond reason!” McFadden threw up his hands.
“Sorry to tax your patience, but we have your client’s version and we have Greta King’s version, but neither of those is the truth. When you arrived in the garden, Mr. Spiegle, you did help Peter out with some tasks, just as you said. One of which was trimming the arils from the yew tree. Peter likely even explained to you why he was doing it: to prevent small animals and birds or neighbourhood children from poisoning themselves.
“At the same time, you were trying to talk to Peter about the Aqua Laben deal and he adamantly refused to back down and give you a break. That upset you—understandably. King had already been instrumental in the collapse of the Europa deal with the City. Then he had turned around and forced Europa out of the privatization scheme you were involved with in West Africa. And now, this very lucrative secret arrangement was going down the toilet, and you were about to get nailed. So, when Peter suggested that you come inside for some coffee, or for a taste of Greta’s rosehip tonic, you agreed. As he headed in, you followed, taking a pocketful of those freshly trimmed arils with you.
“When you got inside, Peter went to wash his hands and Greta offered you some tonic sweetened with apple juice. She was just ready to turn on the blender when someone came to the front door. So she turned it on, and left it with you. Then she left the kitchen. And that was the perfect opportunity—you added the arils to the tonic in the blender, and blended them in. Then you poured it all into the glass, set it on the counter and waited.
“When Peter came downstairs and re-entered the kitchen, you told him that Greta had prepared you the tonic, but you’d rather have coffee. He poured you some coffee and you invited him to drink the tonic instead, and, without hesitating, he picked up the glass and drank the tonic down, then set the glass by the sink. And that’s how you engineered the death of Peter King.”
Spiegle was shaking with rage by the time I finished my version of the story.
“He was a self-righteous bastard!” he seethed. “He deserved it—he took everything from me.”
“Everything? You mean, money, power and Greta?” I asked.
“Don’t say another word Spiegle!” McFadden said. “What’s going on here Arbuckle? I’ve heard enough of these outrageous fantasies.”
I ignored McFadden and pressed on. “You do mean Greta, don’t you? She was yours once, wasn’t she Carl? When you moved into that house, you two became deeply involved with one another. And then her father committed suicide and everything fell apart.” He looked at me. I could see him struggling hard to cope with the force of the truth as it began to come forward. He had his fist pushed up against mouth, as if to stop the words from coming out. But they came out anyway.
“At first, she blamed herself. Then she blamed me. But I…I didn’t know. How could I know? He had never told me.”
I decided it was time to take the leap. “Heinrich Brunner hadn’t told you that he was your real father. Isn’t that what you mean?”
There was a pause as we all looked at Carl Spiegle.
“Yes. I was his son.” He was gripping the table. “I was his son,” he said again.
Arbuckle suddenly rose from his chair. “Carry on,” he said and left the room.
McFadden leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his belly. There was no choice now but to listen.
“So Heinrich Brunner had a secret liaison with your mother?”
“He’d met my mother years before,” Spiegle continued. “He worked on the trains during the war, keeping the rail line going between Germany and Italy. It was one of the reasons that Hitler never invaded Switzerland—the Germans needed that line. He met my mother on the train. Like so many others, she was escaping from Germany into Switzerland and he helped her, found her a place to live in a small village. After the war, she stayed on. I was born in 1950. He often came to visit us, right up to the mid sixties when she died. But I never knew that he was my father.”
The door to the meeting room had opened and Greta was standing there with Arbuckle.
Spiegle turned his focus to her and continued talking. “When my mother died, I was fifteen years old and I had no one, so he brought me home to his family, to the big farmhouse on the outskirts of Zurich. He told everyone I was an orphan from one of the villages, and as far as I knew, that was the truth.”
Arbuckle moved further into the room and got one of chairs. He set it over by the wall across from Spiegle and Greta sat down in it. She pulled herself up straight and looked directly at him. Her jaw was tight.
“You promised me you would never talk about this to anyone—ever,” she said.
“It’s too late, Greta. This can’t stay hidden forever. Besides, we were innocent when it began! All we knew was that we needed to be together from the moment he brought me there. We were completely connected, weren’t we? Admit it!”
There was a pause. I looked over at her. She began to speak to him. She was dredging it up after years of denial and it wasn’t easy, but she had begun to talk. Her voice sounded completely different, perhaps because she was finally speaking the truth.
“A year after you moved in, my father caught us sleeping together,” Greta said. “It put him into a panic. He tried to stop us, but we didn’t understand what the problem was. It seemed so simple to us. It was August and we just flew out of that house every day into the sunshine and went everywhere together.
“And then one night we stayed out all night. By that time my mother had figured out who you were; she could see the resemblance between you and my father. And when we came home early that morning, she sat us down at the kitchen table and she confronted my father with the truth. And my father broke down and c
onfessed. He told her all about your mother and he told us that we were half-brother and sister. And then he went out of the house and across the road into the forest and shot himself with the old World War II revolver he had always carried on the trains.
“It was horrible. We didn’t know what to do. I was ashamed. I felt so very guilty. I didn’t know what to say to my mother. I couldn’t look at Carl anymore. I couldn’t even look into a mirror.” Greta’s shell was cracking. She began to weep silently.
“What happened then?” I said to Carl.
“Greta went away to school almost immediately. She wouldn’t let me come and see her in France and then later she went to England and met Peter. She married him. I tried to reach her, but she was determined to cut me out of her life.”
“Until you came here?” I said.
“No!” He paused and looked at Greta. “Long before that she found me—in Europe.” Greta was staring down at her knees. Her hands were on her temples as she listened. “It was maybe fifteen years ago. I was working in Germany and she tracked me down. I was using the Brunner name. I have a right to that name; it was my father’s name after all,” he said directly to me. “Suddenly, there she was again. I couldn’t believe it. It was like my life had been on hold waiting for her.”
“But why?” I said to Greta. “Wasn’t it long over?”
She shook her head. “I thought it was. But it came back on me like a curse. I was compelled to find him. When we saw each other, it started up all over again.”
“Every couple of years she would come to Europe and see me for two or three weeks and then she would leave me and go back to her life. Then there was a job posting for the City Planning department here and she pleaded with me to apply. She said she needed me to be near her. So I went after it and I got it. But when I got here, suddenly it was a different story. She was terrified that her husband would find out about me. And the irony was that I ended up in direct opposition to her husband anyway, for reasons that were entirely unrelated to her and me. Peter King became my true nemesis.” He stopped and there was silence in the room.
There was nothing more to say.
Arbuckle solemnly wrapped up the day at that point. He suggested we meet with Greta in the morning to address some remaining questions.
“Well, that was…the real thing,” I said. We stepped into the observation room to see Harvie. Daniel was there as well.
“I called Daniel in,” Harvie said. “I thought it was important for him to be here.”
“When did you arrive? Did you hear everything?”
“I heard part of the story about how my grandfather met Carl’s mother,” he said. “I’d like to go and see my mother now.” Arbuckle called the sergeant to take Daniel to see Greta.
“You knew, Roz. How did you figure it out?” Harvie asked.
“Synchronicity,” I said. “Life imitates art yet again.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, people always say that art imitates life, but the truth always comes to me the other way around. Like, this play I read last night helped me today to see into the enigma of Greta and Carl, to have insight into the complexity of their relationship. It all came together in a kind of flash. I knew that Carl must have done the murder and that his impulse to kill Peter went much deeper than thwarted water contracts.”
“How about we grab a drink?”
“Excellent idea. I’m still dizzy from the force of this long-buried truth pushing its way into the light.”
Chapter Thirty
The following morning, Arbuckle, Harvie and I met early. We needed to get answers out of Greta about the theft of the file and the assault on Aziz. Arbuckle and Harvie would work out what the murder charge against Carl would be, as well as taking a careful look into the information that had surfaced about his second identity. It was obvious there needed to be a major probe into all his water resource schemes—and that could take some time.
“Looks like we’ll need you to stick around the Prosecutor’s Office to help with this research, Roz,” Harvie said.
Nothing could have made me happier. It was the change I’d been looking for, and, under Peter King’s influence, I felt like I was becoming a warrior in the Water Wars.
Arbuckle and I went in with Greta at ten o’clock, while Harvie observed.
“Thank you for co-operating yesterday, Mrs. King,” Arbuckle said. “There are just a few details to clear up.”
She nodded and looked down at the table.
“After your husband’s funeral, did you meet up with Carl Spiegle in Europe?”
“Yes, in Paris. He initiated the meeting. I was in London. He wanted me to come and talk with him about our situation. He believed that everything would be easy, that with Peter gone, we could just be together. That’s what he’d always wanted.”
“What was your response?”
“I couldn’t comply. I was very distressed by Peter’s death, and for me there was something so much deeper standing in the way; yet I had always been so vulnerable to anything Carl wanted. Part of me is still that fifteen-year-old girl who fell down a well. Anyway, because I was resisting, Carl got enraged and told me how Peter had set out to destroy his career. Then he revealed how he had impulsively made the poisoned tonic for Peter, and how shockingly quickly Peter had died.
“I was horrified. I accused him of destroying the only person I had ever truly loved—the person who had saved my life when I was a young woman in despair. Carl retaliated, saying that if I hadn’t begged him to come to Halifax he would never be in such a dreadful situation now.
“I had to admit he was right. It was my fault. I had ruined everything for him. He also blamed me for allowing Daniel to start the private investigation, saying it led to terrible complications for him.
“I felt trapped. I called Daniel and he said there were papers to sign, so I immediately booked a flight out of there. Then Carl got word from those two miscreants he had hired. When he found out they had taken the actress, he knew they were completely out of control. He suddenly appeared at the airport. He was coming back with me. I couldn’t stop him.”
“So, when you arrived back here, you went directly to your house.”
“Yes. It was quite late. I was shocked to discover that Carl had allowed one of his gang to set himself up in the house—he had been interrogating the boy, Aziz, about what he knew, what he had done with the information. Later that night the boy somehow managed to escape. Carl wanted him caught and brought back.”
“But we know now that he was pursued, beaten and left for dead in the railway cut,” I said.
“Yes, and then the culprit went after you, I believe,” she said.
“That’s exactly when I had my little encounter with Scarface,” I replied.
“Then the next morning, early, the other one showed up with the girl, and they couldn’t get anything out of her so they wanted me to talk to her. I couldn’t go along with it. I made a decision to walk away from everything.”
Arbuckle and I looked at each other. This tallied with what McBride had witnessed.
“So how did you get drawn back in? Why did you steal the file?” I asked.
“It’s the story of my life, isn’t it? Carl couldn’t leave me out of it. After he was arrested that afternoon at the house, he called me on my cellphone. He begged me to help him. He told me he had heard from this…Scarface, who had called him from the hospital. He told Carl where he thought the file was—in your bedroom closet under the floorboards—and he also said he had found out that Aziz was still alive and in the hospital, but apparently in a coma.
“Carl asked me to try and get the file and told me if Aziz came out of the coma to do something to shut him up. I asked him how on earth he expected me to do that. He said that he had made more of the poison with the arils that night at the house, intending to use it on the boy when they caught him. He said it was in a small jar in the freezer.
“He said I had put him in this terrible position and
now I could save him. I felt as though I had no choice. I decided to do this last thing for him then leave, and let the chips fall.”
“So I know how you got the file—but tell us about the poisoning of Aziz,” I said.
“After I left you that night, I took a cab to my house. I was amazed that I had succeeded in getting the file—it had been easy. So I called the hospital and found out that Aziz had in fact come out of his coma and that he was doing quite well and could take visitors the following day.
“I found the concoction in the freezer—just as Carl had said—and put it out to thaw. In the morning I took the little jar with me to the hospital. I introduced myself to Aziz as Peter King’s wife and he was happy to meet me. He chatted to me a bit about Peter. Then he went into the bathroom with the assistance of an orderly. That’s when his breakfast arrived. I quickly stirred the poison into what looked like tapioca. When he came back to the bed, I made my excuses and left. I’m very glad that he lived—and not just for my sake.”
“Thank you Mrs. King,” Arbuckle said. “That’s all we need for now.”
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“Mr. Greenblatt and I will be preparing the charges against you. Daniel said he has found you a lawyer who can start on Monday—and that’s a very good thing. Your involvement in all this is certainly not as serious as that of Mr. Spiegle, but it will be grave enough. Your co-operation here will work in your favour.”
That was it. They took Greta back to her cell. We watched her go. “She seems lighter now, doesn’t she?” I said.
“Relieved,” he said.
Harvie came into the meeting room. “That was a good week’s work. You saved the taxpayers a lot of money and the Prosecution Service a lot of time. And you were instrumental in that, Roz.”
“It’s uncanny,” Arbuckle said to me. “You seem to have the mind of a criminal.”
I realized he was teasing me. Getting to know Arbuckle was turning out to be a treat.
Harvie told me I’d exceeded my research quota for the week and gave me the rest of the day off, and I reminded him that we had an important date that night. “It’s the Hamlet opening!”