Murder in the Family

by Jeff Blackstock

  Dieter’s visit provided Dad with an opportunity to show off his prowess in German, a language he’d worked very hard to master while in Switzerland. “You don’t know how much satisfaction it gives me to be able to speak to Mum’s family in German,” he told me. I picked up most of what was said; I understood a bit of German from having heard it around the house for so many years.

  “Now, there’s a smart guy,” Dad said, as our entire family watched Dieter and Traudl pull away in their smart French rental car to continue their trip.

  “He certainly is,” Ingrid said.

  “It’s really too bad we don’t have a professional in the family,” Dad mused. Dieter was an engineer, in keeping with his family tradition.

  “What do you mean?” Julie asked.

  “Well, you know, it would be nice to have one of our kids be a doctor, a lawyer, a professor.”

  How sad, I thought—to tell your kids you’re disappointed with them, because they’ll never be doctors or lawyers or professors. And how insensitive, especially to Doug, who everyone knew wasn’t going to make the grade by our father’s yardstick of success.

  Later on, Bibi Fischer arrived from Buenos Aires on her way to Denmark. What a flashback to the past—to another life entirely. Yet strangely, Bibi never mentioned, at least in my or Julie’s or Doug’s hearing, anything about Argentina, the estancia, or Mom, with whom she’d supposedly been friends. Some part of me hoped that she might have said how sorry she was about Carol’s passing. It was as if our time in Argentina had never happened, as if Mom had never lived.

  Bibi was, however, more than frank about other matters.

  “Peter says hello. I know he still loves me, because he told me so from his girlfriend’s apartment in Copenhagen,” she said, as she waltzed into the dining room, where the rest of us were waiting.

  “Oh, Bibi, really!” Dad said, in his disapproving, not-in-front-of-the-children tone.

  “Terribly sorry. I forgot that Mr. Blackstock is a very proper and important man and doesn’t appreciate these sorts of comments,” Bibi said. All of us except Dad joined in a hearty laugh.

  “Well, I have my own plan,” Bibi continued. “On the plane to London, I sat next to an English radio show host, Roger Best. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.”

  “Roger Best!” Julie exclaimed. “He’s the heartthrob of daytime radio—in the tabloids all the time. You don’t mean you sat next to the most eligible bachelor in London?”

  “I do mean it,” she said, knowing she had us hanging on her every word. “He’s very good looking and probably still in his early thirties. He asked if he could visit me here. I think he must be crazy—here I am pushing fifty!”

  Bibi was being overly modest. She was still a tall, svelte, stylish blonde, and very sexy.

  “Well, Ingrid. Do you think that would be possible? He gave me a newspaper article about his show, with his photo. Here it is.”

  Ingrid took a good look. “Wow, he is handsome. I’ll have to get my hair done.”

  “Don’t be silly, Ingrid!” Dad said.

  “If you think I’m going to look frumpy for this guy, you’re crazy.”

  Two evenings later, Roger Best (not his real name) showed up in his late-model Jaguar wearing a sports jacket, open-collared shirt, and jeans. Bibi and Ingrid were both dressed to the nines—makeup, jewellery, cocktail dresses, heels. They could have been going out to the West End. Even Julie got dolled up for the occasion. All three women looked pretty nice. Dad said hello to Roger Best, then retired to his study with an expression indicating just how tiresome he found all this fuss.

  Dad was a contradictory mixture of propriety and even prudishness in public, libertinism in private. He had, for instance, some liberal, let’s say European, views about nudity. Some evenings that summer, after the younger kids had gone to bed, he’d tell us it was “skinny-dipping time.” With the lights dimmed appropriately, Ingrid and Dad, along with Doug, Julie, and me, would splash around the pool in the altogether before enjoying a nightcap.

  Ingrid’s English friend—I’ll call her Marjorie—was an occasional visitor at Longmoor. Marjorie was a woman in her mid-forties, slightly older than Ingrid, who had worked as a secretary for years and was now completing her studies to become a barrister. Living in West Byfleet, a bedroom community for London commuters, Ingrid got lonely for conversation, especially girl talk. Marjorie was, in her own words, “Ingrid’s confessor.”

  When I went to London, I’d sometimes meet Marjorie for a drink and get feedback about Ingrid and Dad. “George has worked very hard to become a somebody, and now he is a somebody. But Ingrid feels quite alone out there, and I’m the one she talks to,” Marjorie told me over a martini at the Savoy.

  “I guess Dad has some communication problems with my stepmother,” I suggested.

  “George doesn’t communicate with anybody.”

  Later, I learned from Ingrid herself one of the subjects they weren’t communicating about. She’d been trying to have another baby—a son, to be precise—but things weren’t working out. She’d had a miscarriage. Extremely upset, she’d taken the fetus to her doctor in a jar. Evidently, the doctor had no bedside manner and even less empathy, and he told her bluntly to dispose of the fetus as she saw fit.

  “But that was my son,” Ingrid told me in tears.

  I felt sorry for her and gave her a hug.

  Why the baby needed to be a son, I didn’t ask. But I could imagine. My mother had given birth to sons, while so far Ingrid had produced only girls. In her mind, she seemed to feel she had fallen short. Yet I’d never heard, and Ingrid didn’t mention getting, a single word of regret or sympathy from Dad about the miscarriage. If he hadn’t been in a hurry for more children in New Orleans, he certainly wasn’t at this stage in his life.

  As it turned out, there would be another child, some five years later, and a son at that.

  Marjorie told me about another problem Ingrid was having with Dad. Ingrid had to pester him about giving her enough money for expenses—tradespeople whose bills were overdue, late school fees, kids’ clothing, spending money for herself. I could certainly believe that. Dad always thought other people should carry the load where family expenses were concerned. In the case of Doug, Julie, and me, our relatives, especially Grandma and Grandpa, had taken us in for weeks and sometimes months at a time without any financial help from Dad. But he’d received plenty in handouts from his mother, and at one time the family trust used to pay his taxes.

  Ingrid’s family helped them out with creature comforts and far more besides. That summer, I got the first inklings of just how much help she and Dad had received from her relatives. The jewellery that had so impressed me in New Orleans, Ingrid confided, had been paid for by her family, not her husband. I also discovered they’d lent Dad the money to buy Longmoor. Ingrid’s older brother, now the patriarch and chief custodian of the family fortune, had organized the transaction. Years later, he’d complain bitterly to me about the difficulties of trying to obtain repayment from Dad.

  * * *

  —

  DURING MY VISIT I learned more about the family from Julie. She was worried about Doug.

  “He tries so hard to please Dad and gets treated as if he’s worthless,” she said. “Same with Mum, even though he can’t stand her. It’s so heartbreaking.”

  “How about you?” I asked. “How are you doing? How’s life at boarding school?”

  “Boarding school is boarding school. I’m just glad to be away from home. I have some girlfriends there. In a couple of years I’ll write my A-levels and be off to uni [British slang for university] and out of the house for good. I can’t wait.”

  “What about during the holidays?”

  “Mum is constantly putting me down. The other day, the gardener was looking at me, and she gave me a tongue-lashing for wearing a skimpy T-shirt. I hadn’t meant to do a
nything wrong. It was a warm day. This is supposed to be our house.

  “And I overheard her say she thought I was going to be ‘a giant.’ I can’t help it that I’m taller than her. I can’t stand it. And Dad does absolutely nothing.”

  I didn’t take that crap from Ingrid anymore, so I didn’t need Dad’s intervention. But at fifteen, Julie wasn’t quite there yet, and she could have used some support from her father.

  * * *

  —

  TOWARD THE END of that summer, Doug and I travelled in France. Dad had arranged for him to take a job in Provence providing personal care for an elderly man. Travelling on his own, Doug arrived to discover Dad’s arrangements were much more tenuous than he’d been led to expect. After a couple of days, he was summarily dismissed and found himself on the street, suitcase in hand, in a strange village where he didn’t speak the language.

  It worried me when I heard this, and I travelled to the Côte d’Azur to join him. We met at the family villa of a recent girlfriend of mine. With a swimming pool high on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean, it was an idyllic setting—idyllic and extremely boring. My friend had to spend most of her time completing an art portfolio for her studio class in the fall, while everyone else in the family sat around doing crossword puzzles.

  Feeling trapped, Doug and I packed up and took the train to Cannes, where we spent a few days camping out on the beach. After the police searched and harassed us and other young travellers, we moved on to an abandoned house, where we squatted for a few days. I loved the adventure of it.

  When Doug and I arrived back at Longmoor, we found brochures and application forms for the Canadian Army laid out neatly on Doug’s bed. He’d end up spending the next two decades in the military. This was our father’s formulaic way of dealing with Doug: if he wasn’t, in Dad’s opinion, showing an aptitude for anything, send him off to the army in his grandfather George’s footsteps.

  (As he’d prove later, Doug had a great knack for sales and marketing. With encouragement from friends and family, including myself, a little inheritance money from Grandma and Grandpa, and hard work, he’d parlay that talent into a successful real estate business.)

  As I turned my back on Longmoor and flew toward Toronto, I was relieved to be putting my father and all his troubling contradictions behind me. From now on, I’d be my own man. I was going to keep my options open. The last thing I wanted was to get trapped—whether in a humdrum job, a house in the suburbs, or smothering family expectations. No thank you. I was going to live free as long as I could. Not knowing where I was going was a secondary consideration.

  Of course, life wouldn’t let me off the hook so easily.

  14

  JULIE’S DISCOVERY

  MY LIFE CHANGED with a phone call from my sister.

  It came in late fall 1979, eight years after my English summer. I was studying law in London, Ontario, and Julie was living in Kingston. She’d just been in Toronto helping Grandma sort out Grandpa’s papers after his death a few months earlier. Grandma was having a tough time coping with his loss.

  It was a very sad day for all of us when Grandpa died. Life had dealt him a shitty hand (I was yet to discover just how shitty), and he’d played it like a prince. He had shown unwavering love and devotion to us. He was in a coma for the last few days of his life, so I never had a chance to tell him how much he meant to me.

  On the day Julie phoned, I returned to my apartment after classes to find a message from her on the answering machine. She didn’t say why she’d called, just that she’d phone back later.

  I made myself a mug of coffee and sat at the kitchen table to review my Christmas exam schedule. Still in my first term in law school at the University of Western Ontario, I was trying to stay focused on my studies. Even so, I found my mind wandering—to Marie, my beautiful girlfriend of several years and soon to become my wife, currently off in New York City managing an art gallery. It was a dream job for a young curator, which we’d agreed she couldn’t pass up. But I could hardly wait for the Christmas holidays, when I’d be staying with her in New York.

  And I thought of Julie. I felt proud of her. At Dad’s insistence, she’d had to spend a year at finishing school in Switzerland, where she’d learned how to make cocktail-party conversation, do the foxtrot, and boss the maids around. What a waste of time for someone who disdained everything that finishing school represented. Escaping to Canada, she’d completed her BA at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, at twenty-three. While at Queen’s, Julie gained a further measure of independence when she married a handsome chemistry graduate student, but not before Dad turned their wedding in Toronto into a grandiose affair at St. Paul’s, on Bloor Street—known as having the longest aisle in Toronto—with limousines and a big reception at the family club. Grandma had recently sustained a fall, and with Grandpa gone, she was unable to attend her granddaughter’s wedding. Julie and her new husband went to see Grandma before the reception. According to my godfather, Bill Dafoe, Julie looked eerily like Carol herself walking down the aisle on George’s arm. Perhaps it was just as well our grandparents weren’t there.

  After Grandpa died, Grandma went quickly downhill, becoming increasingly forgetful and less able to manage. This would turn out to be the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease. With me in law school, and Doug newly married himself and posted to the Canadian military base in Lahr, West Germany, Julie would go to Toronto and help Grandma. She’d consult me on certain things, but she was doing all the work.

  The phone rang, and it was Julie. I was glad to hear her voice. She was back home in Kingston, calling from the apartment she and her husband rented.

  “I had quite a time talking to Grandma,” she told me. “It was a challenge trying to sort through boxes and boxes of Grandpa’s papers. And I found something really startling.”

  “Really? What?”

  “There’s an autopsy report. It shows how Mom died.”

  I felt my stomach lurch as though a trap door had sprung open beneath me. After twenty years of not knowing exactly what had happened to Mom, some dark hints from Grandpa, strange whispered rumours, and Dad’s apparently definitive statement that no one ever discovered the cause, the question mark around her death had slowly faded from view. It had never totally disappeared, just receded into the background of my consciousness.

  “Okay,” I replied, feeling a distinct foreboding.

  “Are you sure you’re ready for this, Jeff? It’s pretty shocking.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “It was arsenic poisoning.”

  I dropped the phone and ran to the toilet to retch over the bowl.

  After a few minutes, I picked up the phone again. At first, I could barely speak. But as I regained my composure, one word came out.

  “Dad,” Julie and I said simultaneously.

  Suddenly, a lot of things made sense.

  Julie described for me what had happened. She’d been taking a break from tidying up, having tea with our grandmother in her living room, when out of nowhere Grandma said, “You know that Carol died of arsenic poisoning.”

  Dumbstruck, Julie asked, “What do you think happened, Grandma?”

  “She was murdered. We’re convinced your father did it. You kids weren’t supposed to find out.”

  With Julie’s prompting, Grandma explained. After Mom died, Grandpa repeatedly asked Dad for more information, only to be put off, over and over. Eventually, as Grandpa had told me when I was sixteen, Dad claimed—no doubt hoping to put an end to the questioning once and for all—that in the end, the doctors thought Mom had contracted some kind of tropical disease in Argentina.

  Grandpa just didn’t believe it, Grandma said. He conducted his own investigation by corresponding directly with medical officials in Montreal, without letting her know. Afterwards, Grandma found him increasingly morose and withdrawn. She asked him why, but he wouldn
’t tell her.

  Months passed before Grandma persuaded him to say what was wrong: the coroner’s office in Montreal had given him a copy of the autopsy report.

  Julie listened as Grandma described her horror at her daughter’s protracted suffering and painful death—a horror compounded by the certainty that she’d been murdered. Our grandparents could only conclude that Dad had killed her. This explained, as far as they were concerned, why he’d been lying to them. And it made them fear all the more for Julie and Doug, who were then, in 1964, still living with the man they believed was Mom’s killer.

  Julie said our grandparents’ lives were never the same after that. We now realized the true extent of the anguish they had been living with all those years.

  Grandma showed her the steel box where Grandpa kept his file of documents from Montreal, but it was locked, and Grandma couldn’t remember where the key was. Anxious to see the documents for herself, Julie began what she described as “the most frantic search of my life.” She spent the entire night rummaging through every nook and cranny in the apartment until finally, at 5 A.M., she found a key that fit the lock.

  As soon as she opened the box, the words “arsenic poisoning” jumped out at her from one of the documents. Julie said her first reaction was to realize that she’d known it all along—seeing the words only confirmed her worst fears. The toxicology report was there too, and the exchange of letters in July 1964 between Grandpa and officials of the Montreal coroner’s office. The correspondence made it unequivocally clear that, after performing the autopsy, pathologist Dr. J.P. Valcourt found that Mom had died of “acute arsenic intoxication.”

  In a note, Grandpa had written “Diefenbaker”, the prime minister at the time Carol died, and the names of his ministers of trade, foreign affairs, and justice. While there is no evidence Grandpa thought they were complicit in a cover-up, he may have been contemplating taking his investigation to the top of the Canadian government.