Seaweed on Ice

by Stanley Evans

  Baldy shrugged. His wife increased the TV’s volume—canned laughter resounded from a sitcom.

  Raising my voice I said, “Well, thanks for your time. There are many dangerous people on the streets. Without the help of citizens like yourself the fight against crime would be hopeless.”

  I said good night. I could feel his eyes on me as I left his house.

  I went back to my car, but instead of driving away I started the engine and let the heater keep me warm for a few minutes. A car crunched by, its headlights boring yellow cones into the light, whirling snow. I decided to risk a look inside Ellen’s house.

  I tried my pass keys, found one that opened the back door and entered. With my flashlight aimed at the floor, I moved through the house and into the living room. When I raised my flashlight, myriad tiny reflections suddenly shone in my eyes and glittered across walls and floor and ceiling. The effect was unnerving, until I saw that the reflections emanated from a collection of natural quartz crystals on the mantel.

  The tiny five-room house, like the garden shed, was neat and clean. The bedroom reminded me that Ellen had worked as a nurse: the sheets on her bed were stretched as tight as—as tight as the blankets that had covered Isaac Schwartz’s bed!

  Excitement flooded through me. I moved around, opening and closing drawers, taking things out and putting them back the way I’d found them. I looked inside Ellen’s bedroom closet, jam-packed with elegant and expensive clothing, including a black lambswool coat. I saw a large metal deed box on a high shelf and lifted it down. It contained about 20 manila folders filed alphabetically. The file marked “T” was stiff, tied with a red ribbon. I was about to glance through it when I heard a car pull in to Ellen’s driveway.

  I stashed the deed box, hurried out the back door with the file tucked under my arm and hid behind the cedar hedge. The Monte Carlo was parked in the driveway. I watched as Ellen moved through the house, turning on lights.

  Even sooner than I’d expected, Baldy was banging on her front door. I stayed out of sight around the corner, but I could hear him giving her the lowdown on the visit from Constable Bird. I crept forward for a look. She was wearing flat-heeled shoes and looked even tinier than before. She didn’t invite him in, and after their brief conversation Baldy returned to his own place. Well, I’d got what I wanted. Now Ellen knew for sure that Nosey Bird was closing in on her.

  My feet felt like blocks of ice by the time I got back to my car. I needed to talk to someone—someone I could trust.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  “You’re crazy,” Bernie said.

  We were in his kitchen with two snifters of brandy before us. It was after midnight, too late for coffee. Bernie’s wife had not looked happy when she’d said goodnight and headed up to bed.

  “I’ll try to keep it simple,” I told him. “When Lofthouse asked me to get involved with Mrs. Tranter, I balked. I didn’t trust him. Against my better judgement, I let him take me to her house. While I was there, Lofthouse asked Grace Sleight and me to witness the new will.

  “I didn’t see anything wrong with that. It seemed above board. But Lofthouse wanted me to evict Richard Hendrix as well. I refused because I felt I was being manipulated. Next morning Lofthouse went to Savage, complaining I wasn’t doing my job properly, so Savage ordered me to co-operate. After that, several things happened. Mrs. Tranter was murdered. Sammy Lofthouse was murdered. Grace Sleight was murdered. I was attacked in Swans parking lot—”

  “Wait a minute,” Bernie said. “How’d you know Grace was murdered? We only just found her body.”

  “A little bird told me.”

  Bernie shook his head. “I don’t want to know.”

  “You need to know,” I said. I pushed the “T” file across Bernie’s table. He opened it and took a good long look at the Old Master drawing it contained.

  “I found that in Ellen Lemieux’s house tonight,” I said. “If we include the Isaac Schwartz killing, we’re talking about four actual murders, plus one attack. The thing these crimes have in common is, what?”

  “Ellen Lemieux,” Bernie said without missing a beat.

  “Correct. Give that detective a cigar.”

  “I think I’m starting to get it now,” Bernie sighed.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  On Monday morning I finally phoned Chief Mallory. We had a long, reasonably amicable conversation and arranged a day and time to meet. But before anything else on this day I was going to visit the Gorge shell-midden project.

  Over the millennia, the shells from countless clam, mussel, abalone and scallop dinners had been dumped at this site by my ancestors. The shells leach calcium carbonate and create ideal conditions for preserving organic materials. The Gorge dig was already a major stir. Fragments of woven baskets, human bones, wooden pegs, arrow and harpoon points and an almost intact cedar cape had been unearthed. In addition, archaeologists had uncovered the floor of a house and hearth. Carbon dating had proved that this particular site had been intermittently occupied for more than two thousand years.

  Bad weather had slowed but not stopped the progress. Keep-out signs were posted everywhere, but I had a reason for visiting, and entered the site.

  The site was being mapped and surveyed in two-metre squares marked by taut yellow strings. Squares had been dug to various depths through layer upon layer of compacted shell. Shovels, trowels, wheelbarrows and measuring instruments were everywhere. University of Victoria students and others were dumping loads of earth onto sifter screens, shaking out loose dirt, tossing aside detritus and carefully preserving everything of possible significance. When the diggers saw an Aboriginal approaching, they stopped working. A bearded student flapped his wrist and told me to clear off. I switched on a disarming smile. Evidently not disarming enough. The bearded man ran ahead of me to a construction trailer parked onsite and hammered on its door. Dr. Tweed emerged.

  Doc Tweed and I go back a long way. About once a year he treats me to lunch in return for speaking to his students about Coast Salish mythology and art and trying to answer their questions. When Tweed recognized me, he relaxed visibly. We shook hands. The student apologized and returned to his work.

  Inside the trailer was a meagre display of mussel knives, stone chips, fragments of carved wood and bone, and other small artifacts. So far, the prize discovery was an eight-foot house pole in the form of a human holding a paddle to his chin. The pole lay on the floor in the centre of the trailer, taking up most of the area. I was astonished by it and opened my mouth to say something, then thought better of it.

  “Take your time,” Tweed said. “I’ve been looking at it for a week. I still can’t make it out.”

  I leaned against the table. Outside, diggers were crouched, patiently chipping into my people’s history with trowels and dental instruments. I studied the pole some more. One thing was immediately obvious. “This pole,” I said, “isn’t Coast Salish.”

  “I agree. But if it’s not Coast Salish, what is it?”

  “It might be Tsimshian.”

  He smiled encouragingly. I said, “This is like the Whole Being poles that Dr. MacDonald dug up near Prince Rupert 40 years ago. I believe he found three of them. If memory serves, he proved that the Prince Rupert site had been continually occupied for 5,000 years, at least. My people probably settled this area less than 3,000 years ago.”

  Tweed’s eyes widened. My words had stunned him. After a hypnotic minute he shook his head. “Whole Being! My God, Silas, tell me more.”

  “Tsimshian warriors were crossing a lake in a canoe when they saw a creature from the Unknown World,” I explained. “Unknowns seldom visit our world, when they do they don’t like to be noticed. This unknown tried to trick the warriors by transforming itself into a log. In doing so it lost its power. The Tsimshians pulled the log from the lake and saw their own faces reflected in the water. They took the log ashore and found a human figure carved on the base. It was Whole Being.”

  I added, “I told that story to a Jun
gian once. According to him, Whole Being symbolizes the melding of the conscious and unconscious forces that endow humans with discretion and wisdom.”

  Tweed leaned forward and stared at me carefully. “And what do you think?”

  “All I know is, Whole Being is a Tsimshian crest figure. It’s not Salish.”

  There was a knock on the trailer door. “Come in,” Tweed called out.

  Another digger, a young woman this time, poked her head inside. “Dr. Tweed. We think we’ve found an occiput in IG-13.”

  “I’ll be right with you,” he answered.

  I pointed to the artifacts on Tweed’s table. “The Whole Being pole is magnificent, but where’re the rest of your finds?”

  “At the university, under lock and key. Somebody broke into this trailer a few nights back.”

  “What was taken?”

  “A human jawbone with teeth.”

  “What are you going to do with the Whole Being pole?”

  “Short term, we don’t know. Long term, our dream is to find the money to build an archaeology museum on campus.”

  We stepped out of the trailer and I headed back toward my office. I was crossing Pandora Street when my cellphone rang. It was Joan Wilson, calling me from the British Consul General’s office in Vancouver.

  “It’s about your enquiry regarding pre-war German embassy staff,” she said in her actress-like English voice. “Several such people are still hanging about here and there. But the chap I think you’d be interested in is Brigadier-General Sutcliffe. The general lives in Vancouver, as it happens.”

  “Is he willing to talk to me?”

  “Yes, quite willing. Give him a call and set up a meeting.”

  She gave me the general’s phone number. I thanked her and rang off.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Vancouver is only a 20-minute helicopter ride across the Georgia Strait from Victoria. The Terminal City Club is situated in the heart of Vancouver’s downtown business district, a few strides from Burrard Inlet. I left my hat and overcoat at the steward’s desk and went through to the Members’ Lounge. Apart from a maid flicking marble busts with a feather duster, the rambling place seemed deserted. The maid directed me to a numbered door with a reserved sign on its handle. I gave the door a discreet rap. Somebody shouted, “Come.”

  Brigadier-General Sutcliffe was a tall man in his mid-80s. He was extremely thin, with a large Roman nose set in a gaunt, narrow-boned face that would have looked cadaverous were it not for his all-weather tan. He was wearing an old but beautifully tailored suit, a brown and white shirt, and a Royal Artillery necktie.

  He had served at El Alamein with Montgomery. When the war ended, Sutcliffe was a brigadier. To the surprise of many, he resigned from the British army, left the land of his birth and migrated to Canada.

  He was sitting in a leather lounging chair, and as I entered he raised his glass and asked, “What will you have, Seaweed?”

  I sat down in a matching chair and said, “Thanks, sir. I’ll have what you’re having.”

  He poured me whisky from the bottle of Laphroaig at his elbow, pushed a water pitcher within my reach and settled into his chair to listen to my story. He did not interrupt me. When I had finished speaking, he turned his gaze toward the window and sat quietly for a minute, whisky glass in hand.

  When he faced me again, his eyes were flat and confused. “I have this queer déjà vu feeling,” he said. “The idea that things keep repeating themselves. It’s as if I’m doomed to keep retelling this story. Not to others, but to myself, so that things remain clear in my memory.”

  Sutcliffe poured another large Scotch for himself—his third. He was half a world and half a lifetime away from that room.

  “I have to explain some things about pre-war Berlin,” he said at last. “It isn’t easy to convey the atmosphere, because we’ve all got the benefit of hindsight. And hindsight, as we know, modifies feelings. Unless one is careful, hindsight modifies memory, too. The thing that younger generations don’t seem to understand is that before the war, Hitler was the most popular man in Germany.”

  “And he was slaughtering thousands of Jews.”

  Sutcliffe’s shoulders sagged slightly. “Of course,” he said. “But back then, many Germans turned a blind eye. They didn’t want to know what Hitler and his bully boys were up to. They preferred to believe that stories of atrocities to Jews and Gypsies were communist propaganda. They believed it because they wanted to believe it. The chief fears haunting ordinary Germans before the war were, first, communism, and second, unemployment. Hitler and his propagandists brainwashed the German people into thinking that Hitler was their only defence against rampaging socialist hordes. If you want to get a real sense of the situation, watch pre-war newsreel footage. See Hitler riding in the back of a limousine as he toured German streets, every sidewalk jammed with flag-waving true believers. In the ’30s, Hitler had the status of a god.”

  Sutcliffe had set his glass down on the table, but now he picked it up and downed its contents. I put my own glass to my lips and discovered to my surprise that it was empty. Sutcliffe, who might have been slightly drunk by then, splashed more Laphroaig into our glasses and continued with his story.

  “Before the war,” he said, “I was a military attaché in Berlin. The British ambassador was Benjamin Motlow. Hugh Baineston was a secretary, fairly senior. I got to know Baineston socially, couldn’t help it. Baineston had twin passions—art and parties. He was rich. Lancashire mill money. Half his income went on pictures and sculptures. Lady Dorothy was Baineston’s wife. They gave marvellous balls and dinners in their house at Dahlem. But stories get about, and some of the stories about the Bainestons were pretty rum. Hitler visited the Bainestons more than once and they made no bones about their feelings. They admired Adolf. They thought it was time Jews got a comeuppance. Anyway, the stories about Baineston got worse and drifted upstairs to the ambassador. There’s no doubt that Baineston conspired to have Jews interned and that he profited by it. Motlow called him onto the carpet.”

  The fire had burned low. Sutcliffe took pieces of wood from a basket and built the fire up while he recollected himself. Replacing the tongs, he said, “Baineston was ordered back to London. It was either July or August of ’39. Things were in a panic. Britain and Germany were days away from war. Sir Hugh and Lady Baineston left Berlin in a Mercedes motorcar. Baineston’s servant, a chap called Grainger, followed them along, driving a big Fiat lorry loaded with Baineston’s prize possessions.” Sutcliffe took another sip and continued, “The Bainestons never reached London. Perhaps they wasted too much time on the road and got jammed. Maybe they became embroiled in some nastiness, who knows? But the important thing is, the Bainestons never reached England. Presumably they got lost, either in Germany or in the Low Countries.”

  “What would have happened if Baineston had reached London?”

  Sutcliffe shrugged. “Don’t know. There are few precedents that I’m aware of, but, given the nature of his sins, I expect Baineston would have been drummed out in disgrace.”

  “Not much punishment for conspiring to eliminate Jews.”

  “True, but that rod would have been felt rather keenly by the Bainestons. Everyone’s hand would have been against them; there’d hardly be a soul in England would sit at their table after something like that.”

  “Who else knows this story?”

  “Very few people know it. With Baineston dead, the Foreign Office kept the lid on. No doubt there’s a record of the Baineston affair in Whitehall. Since these events occurred over 50 years ago, the officials might allow access to the necessary papers, if anyone’s interested.”

  I stood up and stared out of the window.

  “There’s a sequel to this story,” the general said. “In the ’60s I read a piece in the Times about Baineston. Apparently he had no kin and the baronetcy had died out. Baineston Hall was taken over by the National Trust. A sad end to what had been a fine old family.”

  “What
happened to the batman, Grainger? The man who drove the Fiat lorry full of art?”

  “I’m not sure. My guess is Grainger and his wife perished along with the Bainestons.”

  Then a new thought struck him. “I’m sorry, I’m getting on. Beginning to forget things. That batman’s name wasn’t Grainger. I remember now. It was Tranter.”

  I thanked Sutcliffe. When I left the room he was pouring himself another Scotch.

  The Burrard and Hastings area was jammed with traffic. I looked at my watch and started walking—the next helicopter to Victoria left in an hour. After unsuccessfully flagging a dozen passing taxis, I eventually caught one driven by a dignified, turban-wearing Sikh with a courtly manner. While driving he spoke in a melodious but mournful voice of the frequent muggings he risked while working Vancouver’s dangerous streets.

  “Move to Victoria,” I said, as he dropped me off at the heliport terminal. “We only have about one taxi-driver mugging a week over there.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A middle-aged man with a grey moustache was selling Street Newz outside a bank on Fort Street. He had a defeated man’s pallor. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been a skid-row drunk. Before that he’d managed a credit union. He waved a paper at me. I flipped him a loonie but declined the paper.

  Inside the Templeton Building, I rode the elevator to the top. Battle, Battle and Armbruster occupied the entire top floor of the building. I was told that Derek Battle was extremely busy, but when I told the receptionist who I was and she checked with him, he consented to see me immediately.

  I started to tell him my long, convoluted story. He left his seat and paced the floor as he listened, back and forth, hands behind his back, four strides and then a quick turn along the carpet. A tall, distinguished-looking man with white hair, vigorous in his movements. He wasn’t seeing anything alive; he was seeing history.