by Anne Emery
“It used to be a base?” Piet asked.
“You wouldn’t know it to look around now,” Albert said, “but this was a big RCAF operation during the Second World War and for years afterwards. There were dozens of buildings, including a hospital, barracks, mess halls. A training centre for fliers from all over the Commonwealth.”
“I never heard about all this.”
“That’s because you’ve never chatted with the old ladies here who were young during the war! Brings a big smile to my mother’s face every time it comes up in conversation. She has fond memories of the men in uniform who thronged the city streets in wartime. She calls them the ‘dashing airmen,’ and they came from England, Australia, all over. The Moncton Flying Club — that’s what we used to be called — was a big part of it. Flight training school. But those days are long gone. So, when the brass came down from Ottawa, they didn’t come out here for the main event. The ceremony was in the city. And they dropped in to Number Five and the Wing.”
Piet’s face must again have betrayed his confusion.
“Number Five Supply Depot and the Air Force Association Wing, you know, chapter of the association. But they honoured us with a visit afterwards, and we put on a little reception for them. And, as I say, a few of our planes, two or three of them, were reserved for later that afternoon, early evening. There were a couple of the men who had been hitting the sauce earlier; you can be sure they weren’t getting anywhere close to an airplane!”
“Do you have any names for us? People who attended, the guys who were drunk?”
Glendenning shook his head. “No idea.”
“All right, so then what happened?”
“This is going to sound weird, because it may have been entirely harmless. You’re going to laugh. But we found a mug of tea with cold medicine, allergy medicine, in it! Not exactly Baron von Richthofen buzzing our airfield or shooting down our planes!”
“No, not exactly.” Piet laughed.
“We didn’t know whether somebody just had a cold, and this is the way he takes his medication, or whether . . . well, that particular medication puts you to sleep. You know the old warning, ‘Do not operate heavy machinery while using this product.’ There’s a good reason for that. We could not let anyone take a plane up if he was under the influence of a drug that would make him drowsy, or even fall asleep, while he was up there.”
“How did you discover the drug in the tea?”
“One of our staff was cleaning the glasses and mugs off the table and noticed the powder from a capsule, not completely absorbed in the tea. The club did not use coffee whiteners, the powdered stuff, so that wasn’t it. And it looked as if whoever had the tea drank only a couple of sips from it. Changed his mind about taking the medication in the middle of the day, or . . .”
“Or?”
“Or it was somebody else who slipped the capsule or capsules into the tea. And it didn’t taste right to the tea drinker.”
“Was there anything to point to that scenario?”
“I wasn’t working here at the time. I only started here two years ago. But what I was told was that our people went outside and asked everyone whether he had left a cup of tea unfinished. It sounded like a stupid question, I’m sure. But nobody owned up. Nobody said, ‘Yeah, I have a cold.’ Or ‘I’m allergic, and I put a bit of medicine in my tea and decided not to finish it.’ Or some of the people out there didn’t hear the question. Who knows? Anyway, out of what may have been an excess of caution, our people made up a story about bad weather coming in and ordered that all planes be grounded for the day.”
Glendenning looked a little sheepish telling the story, but then he said, “We had Department of National Defence officials here, and we had a couple of drunks who got a little belligerent about politics, defence policy or whatever it was. It made one of our management people nervous enough that he kept the tea and had it taken somewhere to be analyzed. He didn’t tell anybody till the analysis was completed sometime later. And if it had turned out to be a fairly harmless dose, he likely would never have mentioned it again. Would have felt foolish about doing it. But it turned out he was right to be concerned. There was the equivalent of nearly three capsules of the medication in the tea. So, whether it was somebody being careless with his own meds or, uh, one guy doctoring another guy’s tea, it was a good thing that we did not permit any flights that day.”
Piet and Ailsa were silent for a moment, taking this in. Then Ailsa said, “So, to ask the obvious questions: any idea who did it? And who was meant to drink it?” Glendenning shook his head. “Is there a log, or a register, showing who was to take out which planes?”
“Nothing from back that far.”
And then the Moncton cop, making no attempt to hide his displeasure, asked, “But the records existed at the time. Did anybody remember who was to take the planes up? It must have been a topic of conversation, surely.”
“As I said, I wasn’t here then. The man who was in charge then died a few years ago. Of natural causes!” Glendenning looked embarrassed. “The way things were organized then, the manager at the time, the man who has since died, would have been in charge of the records. I think he may have done a clean-up job. From what I heard, he made it clear that nobody was to mention the incident.”
Constable Comeau asked, “Was this reported to us? This incident, which could have been attempted murder?”
“Again, the former manager. It would have been his decision to, well, inform the authorities or not. But the Flight Centre did the right thing, kept everybody out of the cockpits, and all planes on the ground.”
Nobody spoke for a long moment. Then Ailsa said, “As Ray told you, we have a man charged with murder in Halifax.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Does that name mean anything to you, Lieutenant-Colonel Alban MacNair?”
“Never heard of him until I read about the charges in the paper. And then Ray told me MacNair had been posted to Gagetown at the time of the DND visit, and that he’d been stopped by the Mounties west of the city. Other than that, I don’t know anything. I wish I could be more helpful.”
“No need to apologize, Albert,” Ailsa assured him. “We wanted to check, just in case.”
* * *
Ailsa had arranged for them to meet her friend Shauna for a fast-food lunch. The local copper came along with them. They talked about the bizarre event at the flying club and then moved on to other subjects of conversation. Constable Comeau asked after Shauna’s husband, the Mountie, and they chatted about other people they knew. Comeau said the Moncton city police were on edge because they’d been hearing rumours that the force was going to be disbanded and replaced by the RCMP. “So, put in a good word with Keith for me, and maybe they’ll take me on!” Shauna tried to maintain the light-hearted tone and assured Ray Comeau that he’d look wonderful in the Mounties’ red dress uniform. They all said goodbye shortly after that, and Piet and Ailsa got into their car for the drive home to Halifax.
As soon as they were on the road, Ailsa said, “So. Was somebody targeted for murder? Or was somebody innocently taking too strong a dose of medication, a person who had no intention of getting into the cockpit of a plane that day?”
“That’s the sanest way to look at it. But let’s look at the most extreme case. If somebody had a grudge against the military, the unification of the forces, for instance, would he go so far as to murder a high-ranking officer or defence official? And if he did, wouldn’t there be a more efficient way to do it? Soldiers are trained in the art of killing, after all.”
“Which may be exactly why he tried it this way instead of shooting the man in the heart with an Army-issue weapon! This could look like an accident, carelessness on the part of the victim himself. And who knows? Maybe it wasn’t even planned. MacNair sees Colonel Blimp there, and MacNair’s out of his mind on booze, and he’s got some cold medication on him and d
oes something really stupid on the spur of the moment.”
“All we have relating to MacNair, Ailsa, is a roadside stop half an hour from here late that night. And he was taken to the RCMP detachment and he blew under point zero eight. So, he wasn’t piss drunk.”
“Of course, that could have been the amount left in his system after being on a bender earlier in the day, and maybe the night before.”
“Could have been. We just don’t know. He did have a souvenir of some kind in his car, a keepsake given out to those who attended the event at the club.”
Ailsa looked over at her partner. “I wouldn’t like to trot this case out in front of a prosecutor! But what we may have here — may have — is one death, and one intended death, that were meant to look like suicide.”
Monty
Monty was sitting in his office on Thursday morning, staring in disbelief at the file on his desk. After more than two decades as a criminal lawyer, he should have been beyond surprise by now. But this guy . . . The client was charged with stealing a car. He and two women had just been in the office. It went like this:
Client: “I don’t know nothing about it.”
Monty: “But a witness named Josephine and another named Phyllis say they saw you with the car. Who is Josephine?”
One of the women put up her hand. “I’m Josephine.” The client’s mother.
“I’m Phyllis,” said the other. His grandmother.
Still, the client would not admit he had the car.
Monty: “If they testify against you, it won’t go well for you.”
Client: “What if they don’t testify?”
Monty: “The Crown will subpoena them.”
Client: “So, what if they don’t testify?”
Monty: “They could be put in jail.”
Client: “How long would they have to stay in jail?” His own mother and grandmother.
But that wasn’t the only charge against this client. He was also charged with a stabbing.
Client: “I wasn’t there.”
Monty: “Where were you?”
Client: “Home.”
Monty to client’s mother: “Was he home?”
Mother: “Yeah. Except when he went out.”
Monty: “What time did he go out?”
Mother: “Uh, what time did the guy get stabbed?”
So, it was with relief that Monty took a call from Bill MacEwen from the Crown’s office about the Keller case. “Morning, Bill.”
“Morning, Monty. I spoke with Hubert Rendell about Meika not attending the opera in Vienna. Poor devil wasn’t too happy hearing that.”
“I’m sure, after everything else he’s had to deal with. Now another deception.”
“Right. And now it’s worse. Her passport is missing.”
This was getting better all the time. For Alban MacNair, not for the dead woman’s husband.
MacEwen continued, “Hubert said she always kept the passport with her other papers in a desk drawer in their study. And the way he said it, I had no doubt that she always kept her papers in order in the same place. It’s not there. And it’s not anywhere else in the house either, or in her car or her office. I don’t even like to think of the poor guy’s increasingly frantic search for the damn thing.”
“No. He’s had a rough go of it. And now the case has opened up. The implication is that wherever she went, and I think we can assume for now it was Germany, she didn’t want anyone to know about it. The question is why.”
“She wasn’t killed in Germany, Monty. Or Austria or Italy.”
“If she even went to those latter two places.”
“It happened here.”
“All right. Thanks, Bill. Talk later.”
Getting rid of a passport: that spoke volumes to Monty. She wanted to hide whatever information the passport contained about her travels, and she wasn’t planning to travel again any time soon. Wasn’t planning to go on living? Was that too much of a stretch in favour of Monty’s theory of the case?
Chapter XXII
Brennan
The massive state security complex in Berlin-Lichtenberg would have been overwhelming even if it had not housed such a sinister organization as the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. There were more than thirty buildings that made up the Stasi headquarters: big, ugly concrete blocks with long rows of windows that had looked out upon the terrified population. Walking around the enormous square in this eastern borough of the city, Brennan could well believe that the Stasi had over a million square feet of office space here.
“Gives you a whole new perspective, eh, Terry? Seeing this in person. And knowing that this is what L, the sender of the postcard, wanted Meika to see.”
“Christ. I’d give the secret police whatever they wanted, confess to anything and everything, just to stay out of there,” Terry said.
“True enough. I need architectural therapy of a quite different kind.”
“I hear you.”
So, Brennan spent the rest of Thursday afternoon visiting various historic churches in Berlin, and Terry went off to the Luftwaffe Museum, which, as its name indicated, was devoted to German aircraft. When they met up again, they had a fine supper at their hotel. Terry was bubbling over like a little boy about the planes he had seen, and he showed Brennan a sheaf of postcards depicting Messerschmitts and Junkers and Heinkels, and Terry’s new favourite, the Focke-Wulf 190, nicknamed the Würger or Butcher Bird. Brennan caught the enthusiasm — his enthusiasm, like his brother’s, was for the airplanes themselves and not the use to which they had been put — and hoped he might have time to go out there himself before he left the city. At supper, they limited themselves to one glass of wine each, in order to stay sharp for their assignation with the informer and spy Willy Horst Lehmann.
“When should we head over to the bar to meet Willy, Brennan?”
“We’ll leave it till later. We want him when his tongue’s been loosened a bit by drink. In the meantime, let’s go out for a nighttime walkabout.”
“Berlin by night. Sounds good.”
They left the hotel and were immediately enveloped in a thick, chilling fog. Undeterred, they headed roughly west. They passed a brutal-looking rectangle of a building, tall, awkward, and featureless except for a colourful mosaic of socialist life, which banded the structure at the third and fourth floors. But there was much more to behold of an architectural nature on Karl Marx Allee. Designed as the socialist showpiece of Berlin, the wide, impressive boulevard was originally named for Stalin. Lining the avenue were luxurious apartment buildings in the socialist “wedding cake” style, with columns, balustrades, and recessed balconies.
“Workers’ living quarters,” Brennan said to Terry, pointing at the magnificent houses.
“Somehow I suspect some were more equal than others, and only the most elevated of the equal got to live in there.” Terry affected a Hogan’s Heroes accent. “Only those in favour with the party were permitted to party there.”
“I suspect you’re right. But pleasing to the eye for those of us outside.”
They walked the entire length of Karl Marx Allee to the square known as Frankfurter Tor, then turned back. After a few minutes, Brennan looked behind him and saw a car some distance away down the avenue, parked at the side of the street with its lights extinguished. It was a taxi, and it seemed to him that he had seen the same car near Alexanderplatz when they started out, a light-coloured Mercedes with a slight crumple in the roof as if something had fallen on it. But there were thousands of taxis in Berlin and many of them looked alike, and many no doubt got battered in the line of duty. So, he chided himself for conjuring up images reminiscent of the East Berlin he imagined from the recent past. He said nothing to Terry, and they continued on their way. They turned into Lichtenberger Strasse and found themselves on a street called Singer Strasse, which delighted Brennan with h
is love of music. It was in that leafy little neighbourhood with its warren of crisscrossing streets that Brennan noticed Terry glancing in the direction of the car. It was idling at the curb, lights out, and it was partly hidden by a delivery van parked on the street. Or was Terry just looking around, like any visitor to the city? Was Brennan the victim of his own overactive imagination? He made a point of looking all about him, trying to get a good view of the car while he did so. Yes, the same cream-coloured, old model Mercedes. The angle did not permit him to see the flaw in the roof, if it was there, but it appeared to be the same car.
“Eyeing that cab, are you, Bren?”
So maybe he wasn’t alone in his fantasies. “I noticed it. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that taxi has been on the same zigzag trail you and I have been on for the better part of an hour. Now that we’re off the main drag, do you see a line of taxis or other traffic following this same route through the city?”
“You’re right. It’s not exactly a high-traffic area. But . . .”
“But nothing. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to put on a little pantomime, as if we are going to split up for now, and I’ll point you up the street. Then I’ll turn around. Play along with me.”
“I will. See if it has a dent in the roof.”
“Noted.”
With that, Terry made a show of looking at his watch under a streetlight. Then he raised his arm and pointed in the direction opposite to where the taxi was sitting, directing Brennan to some destination ahead of them. Terry then turned and started walking towards the block where the car sat idling. He gave Brennan a little goodbye wave as he did so. Brennan commenced walking towards the imaginary point indicated by his brother. A few seconds later, he heard an engine rev up, and he turned to see the taxi, lights now on, reversing around the corner into a side street, and then pulling out and taking off, leaving Terry in its smoky wake.