Does Your Mother Know?

by Maureen Jennings

  “We’re not really getting at anything, Lisa. You know how it is with police officers. We don’t like unanswered questions, no matter what the case is.”

  She studied his face for a moment. “So you say, but there’s something on your mind, I can tell. What the hell is it?”

  Gillies looked over to me. “Your call, Christine.”

  Lisa hadn’t sat down and she was between me and the sun. I shaded my eyes so I could see her better. She returned my gaze, her eyes a bit anxious but not abnormally so.

  “The MacLeans said the car was a small red Vauxhall. There was a car accident not too far from here, which involved such a car. A rental. A woman was killed and the other woman... The other woman is somebody I know. We’re trying to locate her.”

  “My God. Who was it, Gill? Tourists?”

  “The woman who was killed was Sarah MacDonald.”

  “Sarah! What the hell happened?”

  “The car went off the road at the Dail Beag turn. She was thrown out.”

  “Well, I regret to say I’m not surprised. Sarah’s been in at least two accidents that I know of because she was inebriated. I’m amazed she still had her driver’s licence. But still... the poor woman. Have you contacted Janice?”

  “Yes, we tracked her down. She’s on holiday in Tenerife, but she’s getting here as soon as she can. Janice is Mrs. MacDonald’s only daughter,” he explained to me.

  Lisa stared at me. “You said the other woman was somebody you knew.”

  “Yes, she lives in Canada. She was a visitor here.”

  “But she didn’t die?”

  “We actually don’t know for certain. There was no sign of a second body at the crash site, and she seems to have disappeared.”

  “What does this have to do with Tormod?”

  “Probably nothing, except that it would seem that their car was here on Friday night. Did he mention to you that Mrs. MacDonald was coming over? Or any other visitor?”

  “No, he didn’t. And I’m surprised she was here. She’s an estate agent, and they had a tiff because he didn’t list his house with her. Not at big thing, but she seemed to feel he owed her.”

  “I didn’t know he was selling his house,” said Gillies.

  “Everybody wanted it kept quiet. You know how sensitive the crofters are about property changing hands, especially to incomers. In this case though, they’ll probably be happy about it. Coral-Lyn’s father has bought this place, and they’re going to build a quote, religious centre, unquote here. Apparently, the intention is for it to be quite grand.” She smiled a little. “At least as grand as you’ll get with the wee kirk.”

  “I hadn’t heard a word. When did all this happen?”

  “Not more than a week ago. Tormod was going to rent a flat in Stornoway and move at the end of June. He didn’t really want to leave this place, mind, but given his state of health, it seemed wise for him to be in town.”

  Abruptly, she flopped down into the other chair and ran her hand through her hair so that it spiked up even more. “I’m really sorry to hear about Sarah. She was a nice woman, especially when she was sober.”

  “Given what you’ve said then, it might have been a business matter that brought her out here?” I asked.

  “Tormod didn’t mention it.”

  “Would he have? Mentioned it, I mean?”

  She bristled at my question. “What you’re asking is did we have the kind of relationship where he’d share those things with me or was I just the gamekeeper?”

  “I’m not asking if you were sleeping with him.” I can play ‘guess the literary reference’ as well as the next English major. “My question was without subtext.”

  I must have passed a test of some sort, because she softened. “I told you I was his paid companion. Exactly that. No more and no less. I kept him company. He was lonely a lot of the time. He didn’t make friends easily. He was divorced a long time ago, and his ex-wife lives in New Zealand with their daughter. His son, Andy’s dad, died in 1999, and Andy was his only grandson. Since Miss Coral-Lyn came on the scene, he hasn’t been around that much.”

  “As you were his companion then, he would share his day-today life with you. Who came over while you were away, that sort of thing.”

  “Yes. Exactly that sort of thing. Daily minutiae. But I haven’t been here for two weeks, because I had exams and my nose was in my books.”

  “When did you last talk to him yourself?”

  “Last Sunday. I rang him up. He didn’t say anything then.” Again she gave me a shrewd glance. “Is this missing woman in trouble with the law?”

  “I’m not here officially if that’s what you mean. However, she has apparently left the scene of an accident, which is an offence.”

  There was a silence. Gillies raised his eyebrows at me. I stood up, a bit stiff in the hips from the hard bench.

  “Lisa, I’d like you to do something for me. You don’t have to. As I said, I have no official role here whatsoever, but it would satisfy my curiosity.”

  She cocked her head slightly. “What?”

  “I’d like to walk through the house with you, and I want you to look around as carefully as you can and tell me if there is anything at all that seems out of place. It doesn’t matter how unimportant it might seem, just anything that isn’t where you’d expect it to be, or on the other hand anything that is missing.”

  She grimaced. “Hey, I’m not that observant.”

  “You’ll be surprised. You know the house well.”

  She was openly studying me now. “You’re implying there’s something shifty gone down. He was a sick old man; he died, as expected. End of story.”

  I had no alternative but to tell her. “I truly have no idea if something else has occurred, but I am anxious about a few things. The missing woman, the one involved in the accident, is my mother, although I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that under your hat for now.”

  She whistled through her teeth. “Did she know Tormod?”

  “Not as far as I know. Did he ever mention a Joan Morris to you?”

  “Never.”

  “Anyway, believe me, I’m not implying anything. It’s just my training. To be useful, the kind of observation I’m asking you to make should happen right away.”

  She got to her feet. “All right, where do you want to start?”

  “At the front door. No, I should say outside the front door. From the gate.”

  Gillies got up. “Do you want me to make notes?”

  “Thanks.”

  Lisa said something to him in Gaelic, and he laughed. I hate it when people do that, as I suspected she was making a joke at my expense. Once again however, he showed himself the consummate gentleman.

  “Lisa was teasing me. She said I’d make a good secretary.”

  “Oh really?”

  I was sure she’d said more than that. She tapped my arm.

  “You’ll have to learn the Gaelic if you stay around here. It’s our language.”

  “I think I’ll have to out of sheer self-protection. Otherwise I’ll get paranoid that people are laughing at me.”

  Gotcha. I headed for the door. “Let’s start shall we?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Nowadays, profilers have been glamourized too much for my taste. We’ve acquired an image as supersleuths, who can read invisible writing and come up with an astounding prediction about possible perpetrators. Ha, Watson, you missed the yellow stains on the man’s fingers and the crumbs of tobacco on his chest. We’re looking for a heavy smoker who uses unfiltered cigarettes and probably has lung cancer. The job, in fact, is more varied than the public thinks, because in Canada we don’t have many serial killers. Some people think it’s the inherent goodness of the Canadian character, which may be true, but it’s also to do with the relatively small population. One of the areas of expertise a profiler is supposed to have is scene-of-crime analysis. However, we need front-line cops to feed us information. One of the things I was good at when I
was with the detective division was the crime-scene inspection, which was what I was doing at the moment with Lisa. This usually happens before the clever dicks from forensics get in there, and really it’s a variation of the “What’s wrong with this picture?” question. A classic old chestnut, but one that still happens, is when a bad guy kills somebody, then tries to make it look as if the murder was committed by the proverbial “intruder.” You’d be surprised how easy that is to detect. But you need somebody in that sort of inspection who has been in the place before — a spouse, a friend, a neighbour. I’ve walked into rooms that were so filthy and chaotic you’d swear an army of vandals had been ripping through, only to learn from the landlord that that’s how the person had always lived. Once, I entered a small apartment in an upscale building on the water-front where a man had been found dead from strangulation: plastic bag over his head, a cord wrapped tightly around his neck. The apartment was so denuded of anything but the most basic plain furniture that my first impression was that there had been a burglary of thorough proportions, and the man had been killed by the thieves. This turned out to be far from the case. The man was an ex-monk, who lived out his former vow of poverty, gave most of his considerable salary away to charity, and was into dangerous autoerotic practices. No burglar, no murder.

  As a stranger on the scene, you really cannot always tell what is right or wrong with the picture. Basic rule: never make assumptions until you’ve got all the facts. Second basic rule: intuition is one of your most valuable tools. Third basic rule: intuition married to experience is the best partnership. Frankly, at the moment I was struggling with all three rules. This looked like an ordinary case of death by natural causes — that is, from disease that was known about beforehand. However, my intuition was beeping like a metal detector on a beach, although at the moment I couldn’t say why. Joan fitted in here somewhere, but whether that was coincidence or a presage of very bad news, I didn’t know. I should add, though, that one other thing you do have to watch out for if you are a police officer is an overactive imagination. Or to put it less charitably, it’s all too easy to get jaded and suspect everything of having a criminal taint.

  Gillies, Lisa, and I went outside and walked down the path to the gate. It was quiet out here except for the mewing of the gulls, which swooped around to see what was going on. The sun had made up its mind to stay out, and the freshness of the air was almost as heady as the single malt in my tea.

  “What do you want me to do?” asked Lisa. She was trying to hold down some excitement, no doubt drug-induced.

  “Take your time. Don’t worry about whether you’re right or not, just try to react without censoring yourself. I suggest you walk towards the house slowly and take note of whatever you see that seems out of place or changed from the last time you saw it.”

  She started towards the door, me a step behind, Gillies behind me.

  Just before the threshold, she stopped.

  “Do the flowers count?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She pointed at the right-hand flower bed. “I can’t be certain, but I thought there were more mums than that.” She stooped down. “Yes, see? Some of the stalks have been snapped off. I didn’t do it when I was here last, because I wanted them to come up a bit more.”

  “Would Tormod have picked them?” I asked.

  “He never has before. I think he considered it unmanly to care about flowers.” She looked around some more and frowned.

  “Yes?” I encouraged

  “Oh sorry, nothing to do with this. I just noticed the rose bush by the house has given up the ghost. Too cold last winter. It’s hard to grow roses over here.”

  “Let’s go inside then, if you think there’s nothing else.”

  She pointed to a lean-to attached to the side of the house.

  “Do you want to see in the shed? He worked in there.”

  “Sure.”

  The door wasn’t locked, and we went inside. The shed was larger than it first appeared and was the kind of workspace that would make sense to the worker and nobody else. To my eyes, it was a complete mess. Bits of wool and cloth were scattered all over the floor, odd-sized drawers were balanced precariously on various sets of shelves. Holes in the plank walls were patched with newspaper or masking tape. Fluff lay thick on every surface. The shed seemed to also serve as a storage area, and a few car parts and tractor tires had found their way into the corners. An older-model Suzuki motorcycle was standing just inside the door, and there were a couple of bicycles propped up against the wall. The big rusty metal loom itself stood in front of the only window at the far end of the shed.

  “Tormod was a weaver by trade,” said Lisa. She grinned slightly. “See that motor? He wasn’t supposed to have it. His work goes to the mill and is advertised as ‘made the traditional way,’ but it’s so hard on the legs to work those pedals that he couldn’t do it. He installed this auxiliary motor and didn’t tell anybody.” She went closer to the loom. “Och! He’s cut off the cloth. When I was here last he was working on a big commission for somebody on the mainland, but it wasn’t close to being finished.”

  The severed strands of wool hung down dispiritedly from the stretchers.

  Lisa shrugged. “Either that’s something out of place or he got in more work than I would have thought and sent it off.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “I don’t know. He told me he had about three more weeks minimum, but some days he wasn’t well enough to do a single row.”

  “Would it be anywhere else in the shed?” Gillies asked her.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. He always sent off the finished pieces right away. Those are discards over there.”

  There was a pile of colourful scraps nearby.

  “Do you know who had commissioned the material?”

  “No. He just said it was somebody from the mainland. Does it matter?”

  Again the edge of impatience was in her voice.

  I didn’t answer. At this point I had no idea. I was just trolling for information.

  “That’s it then. I can’t say any more.”

  We started to leave.

  “Whose motorbike is that?” I asked.

  “Mine. I park it in here.”

  “And Mr. MacAulay owned the bicycles?”

  “One of them is Andy’s. The clunker belonged to Tormod. He liked to bike when the wind wasn’t too fierce. He gave up his car last year.”

  An expression of sorrow distorted her face for a moment, but she was determined not to give in to tears. She deliberately turned away from me, as if studying the scene again. I waited, as did Gillies.

  “The place is such a mess, it’s hard to know if anything is out of place or not. And I didn’t come out here much. It was his domain.”

  There were some mugs sitting on the windowsill and an empty beer bottle. There was also a strong odour of stale cigarette smoke.

  “Mr. MacAulay smoked, did he?”

  “He wasn’t supposed to, and he made out he’d quit, but I always suspected he was coming out to the shed when he got desperate.”

  Once again she was halted by her memories, but she shook them off.

  “Let’s go into the house then,” I said.

  Gillies led the way and opened the door for us. Lisa went in. I followed, then stood to one side while she looked around the living room. The smell of death was still bad.

  “First impressions?” I prompted her. “Looks the same as it usually does, although he did tidy up the newspaper, I see. He usually left it on the floor, no matter how much I ragged on him.” She looked over to the kitchen. “And the kitchen’s tidy. He’s done all his dishes and put them away. Something he never does. He despised doing the dishes.”

  “Would you check to see if they’ve been put back in their right places?”

  She went over to the cupboards that flanked the far wall of the kitchen and began opening the doors.

  “It seems all right, although I woul
dn’t swear on a Bible. Cups aren’t on the proper shelf, but they are in the right cupboard. But like I said, I was usually the putter-away, not him.”

  I followed her past the dividers that partitioned off the kitchen. The telephone was on the wall, the coils of the cord stretched to straightness, presumably so the receiver would reach the table. Pasted above the phone was a card with numbers on it. I saw the words DOCTOR and AMBULANCE.

  “Nothing else I can see,” said Lisa. “No, hold on a tick.”

  She walked over to the small white trash bin in the corner and lifted the lid. “I just remembered something.” She reached into the bin and took out a bunch of yellow mums. They were still quite fresh. “Ha! I told you some of the flowers out front had been picked,” she said, showing them to me.

  “By the looks of it, somebody threw them away almost immediately.”

  “I wonder why. Maybe he picked them, then decided he didn’t like them after all. He said flowers made him sneeze.” She shrugged and dropped the flowers back into the bin. “It doesn’t have to be significant, does it?”

  Her excitement had evaporated, probably because of the memory of discovering the body. I didn’t blame her, but I didn’t want to stop now either.

  “Let’s keep going. Will you walk around the living room?”

  She did so, me a few paces behind again so I could get my own impressions. Gillies didn’t say anything, but I wondered what was going through his mind. What is driving this woman? He wasn’t to know that what was propelling me wasn’t just professional curiosity and the need to tie up loose ends. What was niggling away in the back of my mind was the persistent question: Given the contents of her suitcase, was Joan paying a visit to my own father? Hey, maybe there’d be a strip of DNA readout lying around somewhere.

  Lisa halted in front of the dining-room table, which was bare of litter. A single blue glass vase stood on a tartan placemat.

  “Same thing — tidier than usual. He always read the paper while he ate his lunch, but it never occurred to him to put it in the fireplace box when he’d finished.”