Murder in Focus

by Medora Sale

By now they were around the slight bend in the road and in full view of the front of the Georgian house. Sanders stopped a couple of houses away and turned with his back to it. He was looking in apparent amazement at the beauty of a rock garden filled with tiny spring flowers, pointing at various specimens as he talked to Harriet. “Keep a little behind me,” he said. “If anyone comes out, you won’t be noticed. But tell me what you see.”

  She turned from contemplation of the rockery to looking at Sanders. “You were wrong, you know,” she said conversationally. “Someone is home. He’s coming out of the house right now. He’s tall and big, as tall as you are and broader in the shoulders, I would guess. Sandy-haired, but I can’t get a proper look at his face. There it is. Sort of north-of-England cheekbones, if you know what I mean.”

  Sanders glared down at her. “North-of-England cheekbones! What in hell are you talking about? Is he alone?”

  “No,” said Harriet, nodding her head in agreement. “You know, darling, my brother was right. I don’t think we’d have any trouble turning that back section of the yard into a sweet little rock garden like this.” Sanders stepped back, startled at her words, and saw a woman moving briskly toward them, trying to keep up with a young and energetic standard poodle on the end of a leash. “Now a medium-to-tall, dark-haired gentleman in a very conservative suit is coming out,” said Harriet as soon as the dog walker had passed. “Ah, the black limousine that just went by is pulling up to collect him. And right behind him is a woman. It’s Anna Maria Strelitsch again. What in hell is going on?”

  “Have they all left yet?” asked Sanders. He began to move his head to the left.

  “Wait. They’re all in their cars now. Don’t turn yet. There. They’ve rounded the corner. Now you can turn around.”

  “Let’s go,” said Sanders, and started walking quickly toward the house.

  “Who in hell were all those people?” asked Harriet.

  “How should I know,” snapped Sanders, exasperated. “I couldn’t even see them.” He strode up the walk, took the steps two at a time, and rang the doorbell as if he were summoning a whole houseful of recalcitrant servants. They waited, listening to the bell peal through the empty rooms. “There’s no one home.”

  “And now we just look and see if they accidentally left a door open around in back?” said Harriet innocently.

  Sanders laughed for the first time in a while and began circling the house, heading left past the attached garage. He peered at the thin grass and dank weeds that grew in the narrow passage between the fence and the building—not so much as a tin can or piece of paper. He turned and shook his head. Harriet was crouched in front of the garage, working at the latch to the overhead doors with her fingers, growing visibly more and more frustrated. “They’re locked,” she said.

  “Of course they’re locked,” said Sanders. “Here, let me try,” he said, drawing out a bunch of keys and using one to pry at the lock. In less than a minute he was shoving the door up and back. “It’s easier if you have something to force it with,” he added apologetically. “My partner, now, he can pick locks with the best of them, but I have to rely on brute strength.”

  Harriet appeared not to hear him. She followed him into the garage and looked around briefly. It was empty of anything but a few garden implements. Sanders looked for the connecting door into the house—he preferred privacy when breaking into houses—but the original builders seemed to have forgotten to supply one. Undismayed, he followed Harriet out to the back garden and reassessed the situation. It could have been worse. Windows had been left open both downstairs and up. Fresh-air fiends, then. His eyes narrowed as he contemplated the problem. If he stood in the rose bed, then Harriet should be able to stand on his shoulders, push the downstairs window open a bit wider, and wriggle her narrow frame through. “Hey,” he yelled, “come out of that bloody shed. I need you to crawl in this window here.” He watched her walking across the garden and tried to calculate her weight. “And take your shoes off before you try it, too.”

  The two of them walked slowly through the ground floor, from the dining room where Harriet had just managed not to destroy a delicate walnut table as she went hurtling in, to a small sitting room in front, then into the massive hall and the formal living room on the other side of it. “Nice house,” said Harriet at last. “You wouldn’t think someone who lived like this would want to steal my pictures, would you?”

  Sanders shook his head. “We don’t know that he did. In fact, we don’t know that he has anything to do with anything, do we? Maybe Bartholomew just got invited to a party here.” Sanders punctuated his remark with a wave of the hand around him. The living room told them nothing. Like the other rooms they had been through, it seemed to be devoid of anything personal, even a magazine or a half-read book. They went up the sweeping staircase two steps at a time and paused in the equally large hallway on the second floor. They looked at the two closed doors leading into rooms at the front of the house and then at each other. “Split up?” said Harriet. Sanders shook his head. “This one, then,” she said, and headed left. It took them only a minute to go through the bedroom. Every piece of clothing was in scrupulous order; each drawer and shelf was arranged so that one could find anything in seconds. Nothing was concealed. The small bathroom that the room shared with the one behind it also contained no secrets: towels, shaving things, soap, tissues and toilet paper, a bottle of aspirin, nothing else. Harriet tried the other door, glanced briefly into the room beyond, and backed away. “Empty,” she said. They walked out the way they had come and into the room on the other side of the hall.

  For a study it was profoundly disappointing. The desk drawers were empty, except for a small pile of brochures advertising clothing and sporting goods. Sitting on top of the desk was a much-thumbed mailing list, which Sanders automatically put in his pocket, but considering that it contained the names of several major department stores, he didn’t have much hope for it.

  The silence of the room was broken by an indignant cry. “My slides,” said Harriet as he was finishing his brief survey of the desk. Her eye had gone past him and lit on the wastepaper basket. “All my goddamn slides are sitting in that basket. Find me a box or something to put them in.”

  “Wait,” he said, his professional instincts surging to the fore. “Leave them.”

  “And look here,” she said, paying no attention to him at all and walking over to the bookcase in the corner. On the top of it lay a pile of black-and-white prints of buildings in Ottawa in a messy heap, and in front of it sat a carton whose stenciled label proclaimed that it had once held rum bottles. It was filled with strips of black-and-white negatives, curling in a wild and neglected mass, like worms in a bait can. “Christ almighty,” she breathed. “If those negatives are scratched, so help me. Are there any envelopes or anything like that, sheets of paper, maybe, that I can put them in? For chrissake, John, give me a hand. I have to get them together.”

  Peter Rennsler finished the last quarter cup of coffee in his thermos, closed it tidily up again, and concealed it in the dead leaves in the hollow in the woods he had been occupying for the last two and a half hours. He rose cautiously to his feet. He was like a cat, steel-sprung and able to move from complete repose to total readiness in the gathering of a muscle, and now he slipped noiselessly and almost invisibly out between the trees to the roadway. He waited for a truck carrying new men to pass, and headed up the road a couple of hundred yards to the disembarkation area. At the checkpoint he handed his new set of papers to the irritated-looking sergeant who was attempting to position the influx.

  “You didn’t come with my lot,” the sergeant said suspiciously, glancing from Peter to the paper in his hand.

  “Uh-uh,” Peter grunted, shaking his head. “Special transport.”

  “You’re pretty late. The conference started a couple of hours ago. Do you know where you’re supposed to be positioned?”

  “Tha
t’s right,” he said, in a voice nicely calculated to be not quite insolent, the voice of a hard-to-replace specialist talking to a dime-a-dozen sergeant. Taking back his orders, he buttoned them into his pocket and trudged with an air of boredom into the secure area. He headed for a huge pine tree, bare for the first fifteen feet or so and thickly branched at the top. He bent down, buckled the lineman’s spurs hanging from his belt onto his boots, and climbed the tree as casually as he would have ascended a set of stairs. He settled himself into the first solid branch facing the house and prepared, once again, to wait.

  “Who’s that?” asked a soldier standing nearby. He had been watching the ascent with mild curiosity as he swatted ineffectually at the black flies swarming around his head.

  “Some hotshot sniper,” muttered the man standing beside him.

  “Some rifle, you mean,” said the first enviously. “When did they start issuing those?”

  “Jesus, how in hell should I know? They raided the museums to get the shit they handed out to us,” he replied bitterly. “He probably knows somebody. Catch those bastards spending any money on us.” He slapped the back of his neck. “Christ, these fucking black flies! Let’s get the hell away from this patch of bog before they chew us to bits. Did you know you could die from black fly bites?”

  “Weren’t we supposed to stand here?’ said his companion, looking around nervously—perhaps for signs of authority, perhaps for a murderous cloud of black flies.

  “Who the hell knows where we were supposed to stand? They don’t have bloody x’s painted all over the ground, do they? Come on. The flies won’t be as bad over there—it’s not as swampy,” he said in a voice that was almost kindly. “For chrissake, if you count the guy in the tree those assholes have put four of us covering the same goddamn ten square feet of bush. That bastard over there from the Mounties can cover our position. Can’t you, mate?” he called. And Corporal Bill Fletcher lifted his rifle in response.

  Corporal Fletcher felt a sense of relief at having some sort of semiofficial duty to carry out besides that of watching a sniper sit in a tree. His torment at having to cope with two contradictory sets of orders, one from Sergeant Carpenter, who would rip Fletcher’s guts out when he found out the corporal wasn’t carrying them out to the letter, and one from higher up, with its much more terrifying authority, was enough to make him oblivious to the damp, the chill, and the swarms of black flies in this swampy section of the woods. He rubbed his hand across his neck automatically and was surprised to notice that it came away covered with blood; nervously he leaned his rifle against a tree trunk and wiped the blood away from hand and neck with his handkerchief. If he’d had any brains, he reflected, he would have covered himself with insect repellent before coming out here.

  He put the disgusting piece of cloth away and picked up his rifle again. He balanced it on his hand lovingly, and then checked the sight out against the sniper’s back. It was a beauty. With this weapon, he could blast the soldier’s rifle out of his hand as soon as he raised it to fire; there was no need to do anything so crude as kill him. For here, if truth must be told, lay the real source of his discomfort. Pride. Corporal Fletcher had case after case of medals—many bronze, several silver, and some treasured gold—hiding modestly in his drawer, medals that he had won for marksmanship. It offended him to kill a living target as if he were some two-bit hood with a shotgun dug into his victim’s belly. That was a butcher’s job; he considered himself an artist. But obedience was stronger than his pride, and if they wanted this man dead as soon as he fired on someone, he was certainly capable of carrying out the order. He sighed unhappily and wiped his bloody handkerchief across his neck once more.

  Harriet had finished stacking the prints neatly so that their surfaces would not be damaged. “I can sort them later,” she said, stepping back. “I wonder if that’s all of them. It’s hard to tell. Did you find me some envelopes for the negatives?” she asked in the same detached mutter, and it took Sanders a moment or two to figure out that the question had not been rhetorical.

  “Envelopes? For chrissake, Harriet, we’re committing half the crimes against property in the book, and you’re worried about finding envelopes? Just dump everything in that box and we’ll do something about it later. In the meantime, let’s get the hell out of here.” Suddenly a door slammed, and he stiffened. “What in hell is that?” he murmured unnecessarily.

  “It sounds to me like someone coming home,” said Harriet coolly, and picked up the box of negatives. She put them on the desk, inserted her fingers into the edge of the curling mass, and gently pushed it to one side. She gestured fiercely at Sanders to get her the stack of prints, which she slipped carefully into the space she had just created against the side of the box. “There.”

  “What do you mean, there?” said Sanders.

  “We just take this box and slip down the back stairs—all these houses have back staircases—and out the kitchen door to the garden. We can climb over the fence into a neighbor’s yard if we have to.”

  He took five seconds to find a flaw in the plan, failed, and nodded. “If you insist on bringing that stupid box, give it to me,” he whispered. She shook her head. “Stay behind me, then,” he added, and glided over to the door.

  “Gladly,” murmured Harriet, and picked up her box.

  The broad upstairs hall was empty, although they could hear footsteps clearly enough on the polished wood floor beneath them. The main stairway was in front of them, taking up the center space to the right. To its right were the enormous bedrooms they had already explored; no staircases there. The most likely spot for such a thing would be down a narrow corridor to their left, across from the rear bedroom.

  Sanders moved gently across the hall to the railing that protected them from pitching into the foyer; a board creaked and he silently cursed the owner of the house—what was her name? Mrs. Smythe?—for not falling prey to broadloom. He glimpsed the top of a head, surmounted by thick, dark, slightly graying hair, and ducked back to the relative obscurity of his place by the wall. This time he moved as rapidly as he could, sticking close to the wall to get away from creaking boards, until he made it into the narrow corridor. Harriet followed behind, her running shoes making slight squeaking noises as she tried to advance with silent haste. The cardboard box in her arms, although insignificant in weight, hampered her seriously by its clumsy bulk, and twice, unable to see the surface in front of her feet, she misjudged where she was and bumped noisily into something.

  There was one closed door in the middle of the corridor and a pair of doors facing each other at the end of the hall. The stairs. One set to the third floor, one to the kitchen. Sanders cautiously turned the handle of the door to his right and opened it silently. He stopped so abruptly that Harriet slammed the box into his back and swore.

  “What the hell?”

  “Get back,” he said tightly.

  “Come on, John,” she whispered, giving him a nudge with the carton, “let’s get the hell out of here. I think I made a bit too much noise back there for comfort.”

  “That’s easier said than done, I’m afraid,” said a voice she did not recognize. “Inspector Sanders would have difficulty moving forward, Miss Jeffries. He would have to walk through me, I’m afraid. Just as you would have to walk through my friend here if you wanted to go back.”

  Harriet spun around and found herself staring into the barrel of a small pistol held in the hand of an elegantly dressed, handsome, middle-aged man with dark, slightly graying hair. He made a slight bow. “Fräulein,” he murmured. The gun never strayed from her abdomen.

  Peter Rennsler glanced at his watch and settled himself more firmly into his perch. His hold on his weapon was still light, his arms still relaxed and easy. The first session should be over in a few minutes, he reckoned, although there was a certain inexactitude about the hour when the talks were expected to finish for the day. From where he was sitting, he could fire
straight into the window of the limousine as it moved up the slight rise past the guarded entrance gate. Behind him, the man who was to create the diversion that would let him slip away again had arrived and set up his position. He frowned. He didn’t like plans that depended on the actions of others. For their completion or for their success. But he had allowed himself—foolishly—to be talked into this one. And he particularly didn’t like plans that involved weapons at his back. He sighed lightly—it was too late now—and shifted position a hair’s-breadth to relieve a slight tightness in his thigh.

  The dark-haired man reached over to his right and opened the door beside him. “Please, Fräulein,” he said with a grin of mocking courtesy. “You do not need to stand in the corridor. If you would go in there,” he gestured sharply in the direction of the doorway, “and put down that ridiculous box, I am sure that we would all feel more at ease.” Harriet glanced helplessly back at Sanders. His nod was almost imperceptible. She shook her head in confusion and walked into the room. “Sit down on the bed, please, Miss Jeffries. We are very pleased to see you; we had lost track of you temporarily. The person assigned to follow you is very impressed but frustrated by your driving skills. If we had realized that you were so reckless on the roads we would have hired a more professional driver.” He smiled. “It was enterprising of you to find us. Perhaps in a while you will tell us just how you managed to do it. That would be most interesting.” He stood by the door as she stalked into the room, put down her box, and perched on the edge of the bed. The room was starkly furnished: a small dresser made of drab, light-coloured wood; a narrow, sagging bed, stripped down to its grubby mattress; a narrow, boxy, dark brown desk; and a couple of straight-backed chairs filled the available wall space. It reminded her of the cheap and smelly boarding house rooms she had lived in during those days when success and prosperity had seemed impossible dreams. The sense of unreality was sharpened by the heavy curtains that covered the one window, creating a dim twilight. Their captor reached over and turned on a bright overhead light; then with contemptuous impatience he kicked the box of prints under the bed. “Now, Inspector, I will relieve you of the weight of that—” He reached into Sanders’s jacket and removed the pistol from its holster, slipping it into his own pocket. “And if you would be so kind as to follow her example—” A rough push in the diaphragm and Sanders found himself sitting, breathless, beside Harriet.