“It’s not as simple as that.”
Before Hephzibah could explain further, a thin, grimy man slapped some change on the counter. He was clutching a roll of stained material, which Andi saw was a sleeping bag, and had an old canvas bag slung over one shoulder. Andi assumed he was homeless.
“Can I have a coffee, Hep?” He had a high-pitched voice, and as he spoke, flashed broken brown teeth. He was standing a few feet away from Andi, but a stench of faeces and urine wafted in her direction.
Hephzibah pulled a face. “Geez, Brian, when was the last time you washed?” She set down a cup of coffee in a paper to-go cup. “Take it outside.” She waved at him to take his change.
Andi had seen Hephzibah be much kinder to homeless people, and it seemed unlike her to be so dismissive.
“Who was that?” she asked as the man grabbed his coffee without a thank you and slouched outside.
“Brian McIntosh,” Hephzibah answered.
“McIntosh?” Andi opened her mouth to ask more questions, but Harry and the fishermen, grumbling about “that stinkin’ rummy”, filed inside to get refills from Hephzibah and take seats around Slippery Steve.
Harry acknowledged Andi with a nod.
Slippery Steve waved his hand at Harry. “Who is this?” he asked, looking at Andi.
“She’s the girl from the Gazette,” Harry answered, before Andi could introduce herself. “Mason’s been getting all the media attention, I thought it was about time we got some.”
“And the Gazette counts as media these days, does it?” The man smiled, but it wasn’t pleasant.
The sound of a police siren diverted his attention, wailing near to the café. As if jolted by an electric force, the homeless man, Brian, leaped up and started to run. In his haste he overturned the table and dropped something out of his pocket.
The fishermen and Hephzibah laughed.
“Brian always has that reaction around police,” Hephzibah explained to Andi, who didn’t see the joke.
Andi went outside and set the table upright. She saw that Brian, in his haste to avoid the police, had dropped his phone. She held it up for Hephzibah to see.
“Almost certainly not his,” Hephzibah called to her. “Take it to the—” Her suggestion was drowned out by another blast from the police siren.
“That’s weird. There must be an accident.” Hephzibah joined Andi outside and walked down the boardwalk.
“Hey, something’s happening over at the fish plant,” she called back to Andi.
Andi felt the stolen phone buzz in her hand. She looked at the screen, and one word announced a call: HADES.
Before Andi could think about that coincidence, she heard the trill of her own phone from deep in her purse.
She rummaged with one hand and shoved the other phone in her pocket, mentally making a note to take it to the detachment later.
She held her phone to her ear.
“Where are you?” Jim’s voice demanded.
“At Hephzibah’s,” Andi said. “Harry asked me—”
“Get over to the old fish plant,” Jim interrupted.
“What’s going on?” Andi asked.
“There’s a dead body,” Jim said. “And this time, it’s human.”
Chapter Twelve
In a small town, rumours spread like grass fires, and twice as fast, Andi discovered.
After Jim’s phone call, she’d taken off running towards the fish plant. She could hear Hephzibah calling after her, but Andi knew there wasn’t any time to explain.
Andi slowed to a walk when she saw a woman sitting on a chair outside the bait and tackle shop, across the road from the fish plant. Already a small group of people were gathered around her. As Andi got closer, she saw the woman was Peggy Wilson, owner of the only motel in Coffin Cove. Her dog was by her side and whining as Peggy alternated between covering her face with her hands and gesturing furiously towards the fish plant.
Andi looked from Peggy to the fish plant, knowing she didn’t have much time before the police arrived.
Andi made a decision. She could hear what Peggy had to say in a few minutes. Right now, she wanted to see as much as possible for herself.
The police were already at the scene. The police cruiser was parked outside the fish plant, and the driver door had been left open. There was nobody in sight, so Andi walked to the fish plant door, pushed it wide open and stepped inside.
It took a few moments for Andi’s eyes to adjust to the dim light. The smell of decay hit her nostrils. There was a dark mound on the floor, and Andi could see it was the dead body. There was a metallic odour, mixed with the stench of faeces. Andi saw stagnant pools of blood that had seeped out from under the corpse and were now congealing on the concrete floor. How long had the body been here?
Andi had seen dead people before. She’d been to the scenes of traffic accidents and gang shootings on the mainland. But usually, she only caught a glimpse before the first responders ushered her away.
Where are the police now? she thought, expecting someone to stop her at any minute. The place was eerily quiet.
Andi moved forward, her stomach churning. Her legs felt a little unsteady, and she willed herself to focus.
The body was male, Andi was certain. He was face down on the concrete, an arm thrown out to his side at an impossible angle. Andi tiptoed around him, making sure not to step in the blood. She crouched down to get a closer look. One side of his face was mottled with patches of purple lividity.
Andi gasped as she saw the other side of his face and head was reduced to clumps of shattered bone and bloody tissue.
Andi swallowed hard, trying not to gag, but she let out a small cry as she realized she knew the dead man. Although his face was destroyed, she recognized his jacket.
A gunshot wound? Andi looked around to see if there was a weapon lying near the body. Could he have done this to himself? She couldn’t see a gun, but she felt her stomach heave again when she saw dark patches of blood splatter on the wall in front of the body.
Andi covered her mouth with her own jacket and steadied herself with two deep breaths.
“Be professional,” she muttered to herself as she pulled out her phone and took two photos. She had just changed the mode to video recording when she heard footsteps.
“Hey, get away from there!”
Andi looked up to see a police constable standing over her. Even in the dim light, she could see his young face was white. He was holding his hand over his mouth. Andi was instantly sympathetic. It had taken enormous willpower for her not to vomit or run from the building.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” The young constable bent forward, and put his hands on his knees. For a moment, Andi thought he might be sick again.
“I’m Andi. The door was open . . .”
“You have to leave,” he said, his voice shaky.
Andi didn’t argue. She could see the constable was distraught, and Andi knew he’d be in trouble. He’d left a dead body lying in an unsecured building and allowed a reporter to trample over a potential crime scene.
“I’m going right now.” She had everything she needed anyway.
* * *
Jim got to the fish plant just as RCMP officers from the Nanaimo detachment were cordoning off the parking lot. So they’d already called out the big guns, Jim mused. It was more than the small Coffin Cove detachment could handle.
Three police cruisers were blocking the entrance. Jim could see one older officer with his hand on the shoulder of the constable from Coffin Cove. The young lad was bent over slightly.
He must have been first on scene, and judging by the way he looked, it must have been bad. Especially if this was his first dead body.
Jim looked around for Andi but couldn’t see her. He frowned. This was a chance for Andi to shine. Was she hung-over again?
A group of people had gathered around Peggy Wilson, who was sitting in a chair outside Bill Richard’s bait store. Bill gestured for Jim to come over.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.” Peggy’s voice was agitated. “I thought Rocky was chasing a rat so I went in the fish plant to get him. And then . . . then I saw the body.” Her voice dropped to a dramatic whisper. “I felt frozen, I couldn’t move. And then I just screamed at Rocky to come now, and then I just ran here.” She buried her head in her hands.
Jim knew this wasn’t the first time Peggy had told her story. Anything she was saying now would be embellished as more people joined her audience. Too late for any accurate information from a key source for the story. How irritating.
“Jim!”
Andi touched his elbow and gestured for him to move away from the crowd. Jim followed her, hoping she had questioned Peggy before the crowd had gathered.
“It’s Pierre Mason,” Andi said.
“The dead body? Is that what Peggy’s saying?”
“No, that’s what I’m saying. And look for yourself.”
Andi thrust her cell phone under Jim’s nose.
“How the hell . . .” he began to say, horrified at the image he was seeing, but Andi interrupted him. “Never mind that. It’s Mason, isn’t it? Is that a gunshot wound?”
Jim looked closer and couldn’t help flinching. It wasn’t pleasant. Eventually he looked up.
“Yes, I think it is Mason. Hard to tell for sure, not with most of his face blown off.”
“But the wound? Is it a gunshot wound?”
Jim ignored Andi’s impatient tone and looked closely again.
Eventually he nodded. He’d seen the aftermath of a hunting accident once before.
“I’m sure as I can be from a photo. The coroner will confirm, of course. And the crime scene guys.”
Andi was looking at him strangely. It took a minute before he realized what she was thinking.
“You didn’t see a gun,” he stated.
She shook her head.
“Pierre Mason was murdered.”
Chapter Thirteen
Adrian Palmer slammed his cell phone onto his desk in irritation. Another fisherman whining about payment. How the hell did these calls get through to him anyway?
“Everything OK?” Brenda, his secretary, appeared at the door. She had a bored expression on her face and they both knew that she didn’t care if he was OK or not. Brenda was the one non-negotiable that Nikos, Mr Palmer senior, had insisted on before signing Hades Fish Co. over to his son.
Adrian had hoped that Brenda would leave of her own accord, but dear old Dad had virtually guaranteed that she would be a fixture for the next twenty years. He’d even made her salary and yearly increases non-negotiable.
“I’m fine, thank you, Brenda.” He smiled as winningly as possible. “Maybe just a fresh coffee?”
No way was he going to tell her about the call. He was certain that she spied on him and reported back to Nikos.
“No problem, dear.”
He winced. She never called him “Mr Palmer”. It was either “Adrian” or “dear”, no matter how many times he corrected her.
“It’s more professional if you call me Mr Palmer in front of visitors, or even the fishermen,” he’d said just yesterday for the thousandth time.
“But if I do that,” she had replied seriously, “they would think I was talking about your father, and I wouldn’t want to disappoint anyone, eh, dear?”
It was infuriating. Brenda had been with Hades Fish Co. since his father started the business back in the seventies with one reefer truck. She helped him buy the fish at the docks and deliver to restaurants and stores all over the Lower Mainland. She had an impressive memory, never forgetting a fisherman’s name, or his crew, or even his family. When Hades expanded into three refrigerated trucks and then a warehouse, and then the immaculate processing plant situated on prime riverfront real estate, it was Brenda who worked sixteen hours a day with Nikos Palmer.
Adrian often thought his father spent more time with Brenda than his family. He remembered his beautiful dark-haired mother, Iris, with a pang. She never complained.
“Your father works so hard so we can have all the nice things we want,” she used to say fondly, whenever her hot-tempered son ranted about his father.
It was true, Adrian had to admit.
Hades provided him with a private school education, brand new clothes, the latest electronic gadgets and, according to Brenda’s blunt assessment, “an enormous sense of entitlement”.
Adrian recalled with a shudder the time when his father dispatched Brenda to bail him out of jail after a drunken party at a friend’s house. Full of booze and bravado, he’d tried to kiss and grope a female RCMP officer. As she cuffed him, his friends were still whooping and cheering, but when he got to the jail cell, sobriety and panic set in.
Adrian was horrified when Brenda showed up the next morning. She acted as if bailing her employer’s son out of jail was all part of the job, driving him in silence back to his house.
Just as he was about to get out of her car, mumbling a half-hearted “thanks”, Brenda touched his elbow.
“You’re breaking your parents’ hearts,” she said. “You really are an entitled piece of shit. I hope for your sake that you grow out of it. Soon.”
It took a month for his father to say more than a few words to him, and for punishment, Adrian was assigned to the processing line of the fish plant for the entire summer.
He remembered the horror of those weeks. Dressed in the same overalls and hygiene bonnets, he’d been indistinguishable from every other worker in the plant. For twelve-hour shifts, his job was to scrape out the fish eggs or roe from the bellies of the salmon. The boats docked beside the plant, and heavy hoses sucked up tonnes of slippery shining salmon from the bowels of the vessels and deposited them on steel conveyor belts. The fish then efficiently trundled around the plant, as fast hands sorted, cut and scraped before they slid into large freezers. There was no time to chat (although Adrian didn’t want to make friends), and apart from the official breaks, there was no time to slack off. If he missed a fish, the supervisor would scream at him, compounding his misery and humiliation. And despite the heavy-duty gloves that fit all the way up his elbows, fish blood and slime managed to seep in.
At the end of each shift, Adrian stood in the shower, turning the temperature to scalding hot and scrubbing his skin to get rid of the fishy stench. At the end of the summer, his father clapped him on the back.
“Well done, son. I’m proud of you.”
For the life of him, Adrian still couldn’t understand why a father would be proud of his son being covered in blood and filth every day.
Sat at his mahogany desk, and lost in his nightmare for a moment, he involuntarily brought his hands up to his nose and sniffed, half expecting pungent fish slime. He was relieved when all he smelled was his expensive sandalwood hand lotion.
He was, thankfully, jolted back to the present when Brenda walked in (without knocking) and set a mug of coffee on his desk.
“Thank you, Brenda,” he said, without hiding his annoyance, as he picked up the mug, wiped up the ring of moisture with a scented tissue, and set it back down, this time on a branded coaster. “Can you please send in Amy?”
“Of course, dear.”
Why won’t that woman dress properly for the office? he wondered again, watching Brenda stride out of the room. He had never seen her wear anything to work except jeans and a plaid shirt.
During his first week as CEO, he’d gathered the staff together and, using an hour-long PowerPoint presentation, outlined the future of Hades Fish Co. under his bold leadership.
Bored with the new logo concepts and office furniture designs, the plant manager interrupted after an hour and asked if there were any plans to offset the recently announced cuts in quota, and whether there would be any lay-offs.
“No lay-offs at all,” Adrian answered smoothly, not sure what the man was referring to, having not read any DFO announcements, even though Brenda had handed him a stack of paper to read “to bring him
up to speed”. He’d binned it all. Luckily, he had Steve Hilstead, his newly appointed director of operations, to deal with that.
Steve cut the staff in half over the next few months, and installed a new part-time employment policy, which meant that Hades wasn’t on the hook to pay benefits or holiday pay.
With the budget surplus, Adrian bought a new Audi and employed Amy as his personal assistant and digital marketing manager.
Amy sashayed into the office now, with her brand new company iPhone at the ready. For the next few minutes, Adrian and Amy discussed the social media strategy, and she took a few candid black-and-white photos of Adrian studiously gazing at a piece of paper on his desk, and one five-second video of him striding around the office with a phone to his ear, his brow furrowed in concentration. They mused about the captions for a few minutes and settled on #leadership and #dedication. Amy glided out the office to update the company’s Instagram, and Adrian decided it was time for a late breakfast.
Adrian’s father used to be a daily customer at the Steveston Café at the end of the main street. He arrived each day, 6 a.m. sharp, and held court with the steady stream of fishermen who ate bacon sandwiches and drank steaming hot mugs of black coffee, laughing, joking and exchanging fishing tales. Occasionally, when Adrian was little, his father would shake him awake early and take him for breakfast, feeding him fried eggs on toast and shushing the men when the tales got too lewd.
The café was still there, attached to the bar and hotel. The facade was undergoing renovations to fit in with the new trendy vibe of the village. But inside, it was still the same Formica seats, plastic tablecloths and familiar plates piled high with fried food.
Adrian hadn’t been in there since his father handed over the business. He knew Nikos still went for breakfast a few times a week, hungry for company since Iris died, but Adrian avoided even looking in the café’s direction, disliking the accompanying pang of guilt. He knew that Brenda sometimes joined his father there to tell tales, he assumed, so why would he give them the satisfaction?
He smoothed down his tie and walked in the opposite direction, along Moncton Street, the heart of Steveston Village, then made a turn towards the waterfront. He was always filled with pride to enter the brand new Hades Bistro, with vaulted ceilings, faux-industrial chrome fittings and a gourmet menu. It had been his vision to diversify his father’s business and acquire a seafood eatery in Steveston, and opening the bistro was his main focus when he took over from Nikos. His project was a perfect fit with the trendy artisan atmosphere of “new Steveston”. These days, the narrow streets were more likely to be blocked by a film crew and movie sets than pick-ups piled with nets, traps and fish totes.
COFFIN COVE a gripping murder mystery full of twists (Coffin Cove Mysteries Book 1) Page 8