I looked around, but could see no houses. ‘Neighbours?’
‘There’s a tiny village beyond that stand of trees.’ John pointed. ‘Something right out of a picture book. Pretty little houses, well-kept gardens, and one small farm, right on the edge of the village.’
Alan picked up something in his voice that I missed. ‘And that’s where the trouble happened?’
John looked sharply at him. ‘You must have been one super cop in your day. Yes, there was trouble. Serious trouble. Silas’s hawks got out. The farmer lost a lot of his chickens.’
‘Oh, no!’ I realized I was almost shouting. I modified my tone. ‘They were killed?’
‘Some killed, others hurt so badly they had to be destroyed. What made it even worse was that the chickens were more-or-less pets. Bantams, some of them, that the farmer’s kids had raised from eggs.’ He hesitated. ‘And there was a kitten …’
This time I couldn’t speak.
‘And you don’t think Silas had anything to do with it,’ said Alan.
‘I do not. For a start, Silas has taught me a bit about raptors. The red-tails will almost never go after chickens, for all they’re nicknamed chickenhawks. They prefer small rodents. The kitten, now … well, that’s a possibility. Sorry, Dorothy.
‘However, the villagers are not of my opinion. Most of them are transplanted city folks who don’t know one bird from another. They think he let them out on purpose, to pay them back for their harassment. And there has been harassment, certainly. Nasty anonymous letters. Threats to sue, claiming his “disgusting property” lowers their property values.’
‘Well, the place is fairly sordid, I have to admit.’ I made a face. ‘Not just the hovel he calls home, but the surroundings. It wouldn’t hurt him to get rid of some of those weeds and trim the trees. It’s not as if he has a job, and taking care of two birds can’t be a full-time occupation.’
‘No. But the place isn’t as badly kept as you think. He has a very productive vegetable garden behind some shrubbery. Well laid-out, kept clean as a whistle. He just doesn’t want anyone to know about it. Maybe he’s afraid of thieves, but I think the main reason is to keep his neighbours angry. That keeps them afraid of him, and he revels in that.’
‘I can understand why they’re afraid!’ I said warmly. ‘He certainly doesn’t have a warm and fuzzy personality. And yet – someone who would name his hawks Harry and Ron – there’ve got to be some redeeming qualities in a man who’s read Harry Potter, unless that’s not the reference.’
‘It is. He would never admit it, but he has the whole series stuck away in that hovel of his. You wouldn’t think to hear him talk that he was even literate, but that one time I went in with him, I saw what I’m almost certain was a diploma, stuffed under a chair cushion. There’s a story there somewhere, but if anyone’s ever heard it, I haven’t.’
‘What do you think happened?’ asked Alan. ‘With the escaped hawks, I mean. There was a padlock on that door.’
‘He put that on after it happened. He said the birds came back the next morning. They are, after all, trained to return to him. He was extremely upset, of course, but he says he didn’t know what had happened until the police came. Meanwhile, unfortunately, he had calmed the hawks and attached the padlock.’
I groaned. ‘So when he claimed someone had set the birds free, the cops pointed to the lock and were sceptical.’
‘No, that isn’t quite what happened. Silas is a canny fellow. When the police came, wanting to see the birds, saying they’d caused a lot of trouble, Silas pointed to them, now quietly on their roosts. He showed the padlock and said they couldn’t possibly have got out, that there were a lot of wild hawks around, and why blame his birds? He got quite combative about it, and of course there was no proof either way. The police had to back down.’
We got in the car, and John drove very carefully out of the shrubbery, turned around, and drove with great care back to the main road.
When we could stop clinging to our seats and conversation was possible, I asked, ‘How did you get into it? You’re retired.’
‘Yes, but the local authorities know me, of course. They seemed to think I could get him to talk to me, I don’t know why.’
Alan and I looked at each other. ‘I think I know why,’ Alan said. ‘They knew you’d treat him fairly and with compassion. And he could work that out, too. That said, he still doesn’t seem exactly cordial with you.’
‘He talks to me. He let me bring you to see him. He even showed you the birds. Trust me, for Silas, that’s cordial.’
‘So you went to see him,’ I persisted, ‘and what happened?’
‘I had no idea how to approach him. I’d heard all the stories, the slammed doors, the insults, the drawn knife.’
‘I’d have thought a good ole over-n-under would be more his style.’
John guffawed. ‘And you’d be right, Dorothy, but as it happens he doesn’t own a gun. Had one, but when they told him he had to have a licence, he refused to fork over for a licence – with a good deal of well-chosen invective about interfering bureaucracy, I’m told. He did once threaten to set the birds on an especially critical neighbour, but I doubt he’d ever actually do that. Afraid the birds might get hurt! Anyway, I went to see him, and of course the first thing I saw was the lovely mews. They really are models of their kind; I’d done a little research, and I knew. So when he spotted me and came out, breathing fire, I admired them. Sincerely; he’d have spotted flattery in an instant. He was very suspicious. He could tell I was a cop, or had been. There’s something about us, I suppose, Alan.’
‘So I’m told. Stigmata that never go away.’
‘It’s the look of authority,’ I put in. ‘You’ve lost some of it over the years, but when you start thinking like a cop, it shows again.’
‘Well, he kept saying his birds never got out except when he flew them, which was every day, and his neighbours were all lying – er – expletives, and he left them alone and he expected them to do the same, et cetera. And that was it, for the first visit.’
‘But you went back.’
‘Several times. It wasn’t at all easy to convince him I wasn’t out to get him. He’s not a trusting fellow.’
‘Something’s made him that way,’ I pontificated. ‘Something’s happened to him to sour him on the world. Nobody’s born belligerent.’
‘We-ell, maybe. I’ve known a few … well, anyway. I finally made him understand that I was just trying to get at the truth of what happened, and he opened up and admitted that his birds had been out that night. He said he found them in the morning, back on their perches but dishevelled. The doors were open, both of them.’
‘Both?’ Alan frowned.
‘There’s an inner door into the cages themselves, a safety feature. That’s how the hawks were able to get out – both doors open. There were feathers here and there, not their own.’
‘So he must have known.’ Alan was leaning forward, intent on the story.
‘Of course he knew they’d been out. He can tell a hawk from a handsaw, or hawk feathers from chicken feathers. He swears, though, that somebody else let them out, and put some chicken feathers in their cages, to make trouble for him.’
‘He’s obsessed with those birds,’ said Alan. ‘He would lie for them.’
‘He would. He has done. But I don’t think he’s lying about this. You get a sixth sense about that …’ He glanced back at Alan.
‘You do. I was sometimes wrong about that, but not often, not after I’d been on the force for a few years. Body language, among other things. I could spot a liar, though I didn’t always know what he was lying about.’
John nodded, then slowed down. ‘This is one traffic feature you might not know, either of you. At a busy crosswalk, there are traffic lights. They turn from green to a blinking amber, warning you to slow and watch for pedestrians, and then to red, when the walker is ready to cross.’
He drove on down the road, speeding up slightly
, though not a lot, as we were now in a small town. ‘Do pedestrians normally have the right of way?’ asked Alan. I wanted to know, too. I might be doing most of the driving, and truth to tell, I was a bit nervous about it.
‘Yes, at an intersection or a crosswalk. Not in the middle of a block. That’s jaywalking. They do it, of course. And they step out into an intersection without ever looking.’ He shrugged. ‘Just like people anywhere. Where was I?’
‘Liars,’ Alan and I said together.
‘Yes. With Silas, it isn’t so much body language as his persistence. Every time I see him he wants to talk about the intruder, the one who set his birds loose. He would drop the subject if he were afraid of being caught out in a lie. And then there are the birds. You’re right, Alan, his devotion to them amounts to an obsession. He would protect them with his life, quite literally. And letting them fly free that way, with no supervision, is extremely dangerous for them. They could have been shot. They could have caught diseased prey. They could have got tangled up with barbed wire. He would never have risked that, no matter how much he hates his neighbours.’
‘So.’ I thought about all that. ‘So someone else hates him, and his birds, and hoped the raid would land Silas in jail and his birds … I suppose they’d be killed?’
‘Probably. But you see, I have a different idea. I think the raid was another in the series. Not aimed specifically at Silas, but intended to spread hatred and strife throughout the community.’
‘That’s sick!’
‘Yes. We may well be dealing with a diseased mind.’
‘Which can be the hardest sort of villain to catch,’ said Alan gloomily. ‘Their actions make sense, and form a pattern, but it’s a pattern only they can see, and a logic only they can follow.’
‘Right.’
And we returned to Victoria in gloomy silence.
SEVEN
We settled down in front of the fire with a drink when we got to John’s house, the late afternoon having turned chilly. ‘I wonder if it’s thinking about rain?’ I asked – one of those meaningless comments meant to fill a silence.
‘It almost never rains here in the summer,’ said John. ‘That’s one reason I moved here. We’re careful to conserve water. It’s a mark of honour to have a brown lawn.’
‘Oh, yes, I remember Judith saying something about that.’
Silence again.
Alan set his drink down, not quite with a thump. ‘John, I think it’s time we set out on our own. Unless there’s something more you need to tell us about the situation?’
I didn’t wait for John’s quick denial. ‘What I want to know, John, is why you and Amy both shy like startled horses whenever her “acquaintance” in IT is mentioned?’
He sighed. ‘I should have known you’d notice. You’re both way too sharp. It’s nothing, really, just that he happens to be her ex-husband, and they don’t have a very good relationship. It was not one of those so-called friendly divorces.’
‘Battles over the kids?’
‘Not principally. There’s only the one daughter. He fought about that, of course, but mostly it was the other great divorce hurdle, money. He has a great deal of it, you see, and he was not over-eager to share. Would either of you like another drink, or shall we have a bite to eat?’
And we’re not going to say any more about it. Period. He didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to. We repaired to the kitchen, had a sketchy meal, and spent the rest of the evening talking about arrangements in the morning.
‘There’s more,’ I said to Alan as I climbed into bed.
‘Yes, but we may have to find it out for ourselves. If we want to. It’s a bit of a mystery, but it may prove irrelevant.’
‘As, according to you, something like ninety per cent of all information you turn up in an investigation proves in the end to be.’
‘Maybe not ninety. Maybe ninety-five. Good night, love.’ He turned off the light, burrowed into his pillow, and went straight to sleep.
That was a skill he’d learned in his long years as a policeman. Time off for R-and-R could be in short supply in the middle of an investigation. If there was an hour that could be spared for sleep, it had to count.
I’d never been a policeman. Nor a mother, another profession that often curtails rest time. I’ve never had the gift of instant slumber, even when exhausted. I lay there and worried, eventually dropping into a troubled slumber fraught with disturbing dreams.
I was groggy in the morning, of course, but some good strong coffee and a glance at the morning paper restored a modicum of intelligence. I scanned it for any more peculiar little crimes, but there was nothing except a possible abduction attempt, averted by an intelligent child who refused to get into a car without the family password. Good for her.
Back to the business at hand. ‘We need,’ I said to John, ‘a list of all the incidents, preferably in chronological order.’
He smiled. ‘I thought you might.’ He handed me a piece of paper. ‘I printed this out this morning. I’ve listed all the details we have, but they’re pitifully few, as you see, and there are several approximations. The thefts of the plants, for example. There was really no way to determine exactly when they were taken, only when they were discovered to be missing.’
‘Mmm.’ I was studying the list. Aconite and oleander missing. Death camas. I looked up. ‘Death camas? What on earth does that mean?’
‘Oh, Judith didn’t tell you about that? Camas is a native plant here, or rather two plants. One is a pretty blue wildflower in the lily family. The other looks very similar, but it blooms a little later, and blooms white. That’s about the only way you can tell them apart, though they’re a different species. The roots of the blue one are edible, once used by the First Peoples as a staple food. But the roots of the white one, looking just like the roots of the blue one, are deadly poison. Hence death camas.’
I began to see where this was going. ‘So someone found some and dug them up.’
‘Bingo. The third theft of highly poisonous plants in the space of two or three weeks. And the most difficult. Not from the point of view of security. Butchart is much more careful about that. But few people know where the death camas grows, and fewer still could find it, except when it’s blooming.’
‘And it wasn’t, when it was stolen?’
‘No. So someone knew exactly where it was and knew its properties.’
‘Three different kinds of highly toxic plants stolen, and then not used. Apparently.’ I tried to make some sense of that, failed, and went back to the list. Letter bombs. Various acts of vandalism. Damage to tents occupied by the homeless. And then the release of Silas’s hawks. ‘They’ve been escalating, haven’t they? From petty theft right up to murder. Oh, all right, murder only of chickens and a kitten, but still deaths. Will the next be an attack on a human?’
‘You’re assuming,’ said Alan in his policeman mode, ‘that all the incidents are the work of one person, or a group acting as one person. That’s not necessarily the case, you know.’
‘I know, but we have to start somewhere.’ I was getting a bit testy.
‘The local police have considered the matter quite carefully, Alan, and come to the same conclusion, if you can call it that. Maybe it’s one person, for some obscure motive. Or maybe these are unrelated episodes. The varying nature of the crimes makes that more likely, along with the apparent absence of motive in several of them. But there is one thing that does tie them together.’
He paused, and Alan nodded. ‘They’re well done.’
‘How can you say that!’ I was ready for battle. ‘Theft, malicious damage, killing – well done?’
‘Well done from the criminal’s point of view, love. No one’s been able to trace anything. No clues. No leads. Perfect crimes.’ Alan glanced at me and changed the subject. ‘John, you asked us to come because you thought we could help. Now that we have some idea of what the problem is, tell us what you’d like us to do.’
‘Nose around.
I can’t make it any more specific than that. I’ve been authorized to give you a small expense account; admission to some of the places you’ll need to go isn’t cheap.’
Authorized by whom, I wondered, but didn’t ask. John might be retired, but his contacts with the Mounties and the local police might allow him a few perks. Or maybe it was coming out of his own pocket. We’d worry about that later.
‘I want you to talk to people, visit sites of the incidents. I want you to take a couple of those walking tours of Victoria that I mentioned and ask all the questions you think a pair of green tourists might come up with.’
I nodded. ‘Straight off the turnip truck. I can do that. Alan might have a little more trouble. He looks and sounds so bloomin’ intelligent and well educated.’
‘’Oo, me? Yer’ve got the wrong bloke, mate!’
His Cockney was pretty good, considering. Much better than mine. But I could do a pretty good down-home Hoosier when I put my mind to it.
John laughed. ‘You’ll do. I don’t need to ask you to check in frequently; I know you’ll tell me if – when – you learn something interesting. Now, here’s a bit of cash to go on with until you can get to an ATM. Keep an accounting log for me, please. Disguise the case of champagne as something else.’
‘A kilo or so of cannabis?’
‘Ha, ha. Now, if you’re packed up, let’s get you over to Sue’s place. I’ll show you on the map where the walking tours start, and then you’re on your own.’
‘I thought you were coming with us.’
‘No, I decided I want you to form your own impressions without my explanations. You can’t possibly get lost. Your guide will see to that. And you’ll have a great time!’
EIGHT
We hadn’t thought to ask John about parking in downtown Victoria. It was easy enough to find the Visitor Centre where the walking tours began; John had pointed it out to us on that quick drive through Victoria. Parking the car was another matter. I finally had to ask a passer-by, who directed me to a lot. By the time I’d handled that hassle, we were almost late for the start of the afternoon tour.
Death in the Garden City Page 5