LANE HAD ABANDONED HER LETTER to her grandmother. She could not seem to muster any thoughts that would not alarm her. She been reading Yeats in the hopes that it would inspire her to some useful poetry. Her notebook stood by her, ready with a sharpened pencil set in the dip of the spine. She closed the book with a sigh. For all his angst and beauty, his concerns of unrequited love and the Irish question seemed far from what she had about her right now, and she knew you were to write about what you know. What she knew is that a man had been killed somewhere nearby, by someone unknown, and dumped in her creek, and that in the most bizarre circumstance imaginable, he had been travelling about with her name in his pocket. What kind of poetry would that make? Dead you lie like a fallen leaf trapped in an eddy. No, that last word cannot be two syllables, it just cannot. Creek. Too matter-of-fact. Water. Two syllables again, but soft ones. Maybe that was the trouble. Eddy was too hard. Water. There.
Dead you lie like a fallen leaf trapped in the water
Drifted, danced by the wind off a distant tree
Down like a small sinner to a lonely slaughter
With only one word, and it was word of me.
No . . . for me. It made more sense.
Not Yeats, but enough to get her going for today. It was as she was settling paper into the typewriter that she heard the knock. “Oh dear.” She hoped it was not Angela; she really wanted to work today and she couldn’t bear to say no to Angela. She could see through the glass in the door that it was Darling and Ames.
“Inspector Darling, Constable Ames. You got my message! Do come in. Please let me get you a drink of something, Constable Ames. You don’t look at all well.” But they did not come in. Ames looked down like a guilty child, but Darling, looking down as well, had more the look of a man wondering what his next step ought to be.
“Miss Winslow. I think you’d better come with us for a moment. We’ve something to show you. Perhaps you should get a pair of shoes,” he added, noticing her golden legs ending in bare feet. He wished he hadn’t. They waited on the front step for her to return with a pair of gym shoes slipped loosely over her feet. She hadn’t bothered to tie the laces.
“Have you found something?” She tried to sound pleased, interested, but there was something in the demeanour of these two that made her feel quite suddenly cold. They walked up toward the barn and then around to where the pens were. “Oh,” she said, “I saw this this morning. This is why I called, I suppose.”
“What is it? What did you see?” asked Darling, stopping and watching her curiously.
“The way these pine needles are scattered, as if someone did it deliberately. To be frank, it made me extremely nervous, especially after the shoe business. I felt . . . feel like someone has been here . . . at night. I can’t see the point of it. Or who would be taking the trouble, unless . . . Well, I wondered if someone were trying to incriminate me.”
“Why, I wonder?” His voice retained a calm, steady tone that seemed to be withholding any judgment.
“Honestly, Inspector, I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it. I’ve only just arrived here. Am I an easy target? There are people in this community who do not take well to newcomers, but it’s a very elaborate way to scare someone off.”
“Perhaps we could open the doors now? Ames looked in the window and saw a car parked inside. Can you tell us about that?”
The sense of dread she had felt when she saw the mood of the policemen at her door cascaded into waves of fear. She looked at the barn doors and saw what she had not seen in the morning: the padlock was there but was hanging open. How had she not seen that? She would have looked, seen the car. “I can’t believe I didn’t see the lock. I mean, it’s the reason I phoned you. I was out this morning and I saw what I thought were tracks, only they ended here, so I think I was thinking that someone had driven in last night, messed things about to frighten me, and then left. I did glance at the barn door, but it looked like the padlock was undisturbed.” She felt now like she was jabbering. She must seem as guilty as sin to these two men with their carefully non-committal expressions. Feeling suddenly faint, she reached out and leaned against the barn with one arm. Hanging her head, she wondered if she’d be sick, but then decided she would not. That would be feminine weakness taken too far, she thought rebelliously. She was better than that. “If there is a car in there, I did not put it there, Inspector,” she said finally. She turned toward the doors and then stopped, looking uncertainly at the policemen, before turning to slip off the padlock and pull the doors open. It surprised her that they came open easily, with only a slight drag on the ground. They had been well made. But none of that mattered because there, with its headlights facing them, was a black DeSoto.
“It’s got local plates, sir,” Ames said.
June 27, 1946
Franks woke feeling groggy from a deep sleep when the conductor knocked on the compartment door. “We’ll be pulling in in ten minutes, sir,” he said, touching the brim of his cap.
Pulling himself upright where he had slumped in his sleep, Franks looked blearily out the window at the passing countryside. More trees. What extremes, he thought. All those thousands of miles with no trees, and then nothing but these dense, impenetrable layers of blue-green forests on either side. He had read that travelling across eastern Russia was much like this. With relief he noted that the train was now running along a river on one side, or a lake. He pulled out his map to look at where Nelson was located. He imagined a primitive mining camp sort of place and sighed. His mother had come from here.
The station was hardly primitive and he was pleasantly surprised. It was late morning and the air had a clean, golden tang to it. Nelson appeared to be built up a long, steep hill, and the road outside the station was bustling with cars, most of them pre-war. He was directed to the ymca when he asked about a place to stay, and he took his small suitcase and started up the hill. As he walked away from the station and turned back to look at it, in one respect the sight confirmed his prejudice. The station and the rail yards adjacent to it were bustling with activity. Lumber was piled on waiting cars and floating in logjams in the water just beyond. Small tugboats were bustling on the water. It reminded him of the magazine advertisements for immigration to Canada. Great forests and lakes and opportunities. As he reached the top of the hill and was looking down what appeared to be the main drag, he stopped to take off his jacket. It was hot. It surprised him. Canada. Hot. He tried to imagine himself immigrating here.
Established in a small room in the YMCA, he felt himself ironically at home, for he stayed at the Y in London when he was there. A home for the rootless, he thought. He was as without connections here as he was there. He slept well, happy that for the first time in days he was not in a moving train. In the morning, he went to a little restaurant and had a hearty breakfast of eggs and bacon. A full English. With an approximation of the Union Jack flying over what looked like a stone courthouse, he could well be in some rural English town.
He went about trying to hire a car and found a garage just off Baker Street where he was given a bedraggled ten-year-old DeSoto convertible. He was aware that he would have to cope with driving on the right-hand side of the road, but there would be little traffic, he assumed. Leaving his suitcase on his bed, he took some papers and drove carefully to the ferry that crossed the lake to the road out to King’s Cove. The few times he passed a car it still startled him to have them racing by on the wrong side, but eventually he settled in to the drive.
He was surprised by the grandeur of some of the properties along the lakefront, and then inwardly chided himself for his prejudices about the colonies. He had expected it to be all rather wild, he supposed. When he arrived at the turnoff that had been described to him at the little store in Balfour, three miles from King’s Cove, he turned up the road and suddenly he realized he had no idea what to do next.
NO ONE SPOKE. Finally, Lane walked around the car slowly, looking to see if anything had had to be moved to accommodate the car. Rakes and shovels of various shapes were hung on spikes on the wall, and a rusted horseshoe hung over the inside of the doorway, mocking, she thought, her luck, which seemed at the moment to be going from bad to worse. She had walked around to the driver’s side door and was reaching her hand out to open it when Darling stopped her.
“If you don’t mind, Miss Winslow, I think we’ll handle this.” She pulled her hand away, as though from a flame.
“Yes, of course.” She stepped back into the light at the edge of the large doors and looked again at the ground around the door, where all that could be seen now were their own scuff marks. “I don’t understand this. How could someone get this in here without my knowing?”
Ames looked with interest at Darling, his eyebrows raised as if to say, “Well, how could they?”
Darling ignored him and looked at her. “Are you saying that you have never seen this car before?”
“I certainly jolly well am! And I know it wasn’t here before because I’ve looked in the windows. I was waiting for a good day to get in here and have a real look around. I imagine most of it is forty years old. Except this car. It’s probably fifteen years old.” She waved a disparaging hand in the direction of the DeSoto.
“Nineteen thirty-three at a guess, not bad on your part, miss!” said Ames, cheerfully, ignoring the repressive look Darling shot at him, his earlier morose mood somehow lifted by Lane’s obvious puzzlement about the car.
“Please go and collect the fingerprinting equipment from the car, Ames. Handles, footmarks on the running boards, anything on the dash. Miss Winslow, may we go into the house? I do have a few questions.”
“I bet you do!” The whole episode had awoken a contrarian streak in Lane. It was bad enough having a body clogging up her drains and now someone—and she found she had stopped feeling afraid and that her anger was closer to the surface—had moved what was probably the victim’s car into her barn. Probably the person who killed him in the first place. She opened the door into the hallway and invited Inspector Darling to walk through with an impatient wave of her hand.
“Miss Winslow,” he said, when they were settled at her kitchen table, “I cannot help feeling that you have not been entirely honest with us. Failure to tell us everything you know could seriously hamper this investigation.”
“But I have. Everything. I don’t know the man, I don’t know the car, and I don’t know how the car got into my barn. And if you insist on thinking I did this thing, you will be seriously hampering your investigation, because whoever did it is running around out there, no doubt thinking of some other way to place the blame on me.” She got up and poured two glasses of water and set them with a bang on the table. The sunlight shone at an angle on them, making them cast a luminous reflection along the white tabletop. “Last night . . . no, it’s ridiculous!”
“What is?”
“No. It’s nonsense. What else do you want to know?”
“What about last night? Anything, however small, could be of assistance.”
“Well, this couldn’t.”
“Try me.”
“Very well. The latch on my attic window is broken, so the windows open on their own. Kenny likes to say his dead mother, Lady Armstrong, lives in my attic and she has a propensity to open my windows. A bit of fun. But the windows opened in the middle of the night a day or two after you found the body, and it was when I was up there that I saw the torchlight in the forest. That was how I found the shoe, as you will recall. Last night they swung open again and the noise must have woken me. I went up, and this time decided not to close them. It was a warm night, and there was no wind to bang them about. I looked out but could see nothing but darkness, so I went back to bed. But someone must have been busy putting the car in barn.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand how this window business might have any relevance. Are you saying that these windows open when something is going on, or needs to be brought to your attention, or something like that?”
Lane leaned back in her chair. She hadn’t made that connection herself, and yet now that he had, she wondered. Was Lady Armstrong helping her? Rubbish. No need to add a supernatural dimension to an already impenetrable problem. “God, it’s obviously nonsense. All I can really tell you is that I didn’t hear the car going in there, and I have never seen it before. Sometimes I dream of cars in the distance, but I can’t even recall if I dreamed that last night, or the night before.”
Darling got up and walked to stand in front of the French doors. He was completely puzzled by her apparent surprise at the turn of events. The sun cascaded across the lawn, and he looked at it with longing. The days continued to be beautiful, as if this were some epic summer in a child’s memory. He put his hands into his pockets and watched the tops of the trees outside. He loved the way the tops of trees stroked the sky. When he spoke again, it was as if he were musing out loud. “Usually when someone commits a murder, they are finishing a story that began in the past. They are getting, or more likely finding they are not getting, an inheritance, or taking revenge for an old slight. They are someone inconvenient who has turned up. They can come suddenly out of the smoke of the very war we’ve just been through to finish something or seek justice. This man, in spite of your protestations, Miss Winslow, was very likely seeking you. He had your name in his pocket, unless our beavering murderer put that in his pocket to begin this trail of clues that leads to you. What would your guess be?”
“No. My guess is no. The beavering murderer, clever that, given the dam he created in the creek with the body, did not write on that paper. It is more likely that he took everything out of his pockets if they could identify him, the corpse I mean, and had a bit of luck when he found that paper. He left it in and has been doing his Boy Scout best since then to set it up so I look guilty.”
Darling frowned, surprised. “I’m sorry, are you saying that the man, in effect, was looking for you?”
Lane looked past him to the sweep of her lawn and the distant view of the lake. She knew that she was close to losing this view, this garden, this sanctuary from all she’d been through. “The trouble is, I’ve been wondering if it’s possible, but I cannot say anything. I’m sorry, but there is nothing I can do about that. But you must believe me when I tell you, I do not know this man, nor did I kill him.”
Darling came away from the French doors and carefully pushed the chair he’d been sitting in under the table, as though he were cleaning up. “I’m going to see how Ames is getting on with the car you’ve never seen before. Perhaps in the interim you could pack a bag. I really don’t see how I can avoid taking you in.”
SANDY CLEARED HIS throat and with only a slight hesitation knocked on his father’s small office door. He had rarely gone in there, except as a very small child, and he had been quickly fetched out by his mother. His father was not to be disturbed. He was working. What on earth at? Sandy wondered now. Mather had bought some land, had drawn some sketches, but in twenty-eight years, Sandy had never seen a single result. The war had come and gone, he had gone and come back again, and still his father sat in his office and made plans for a business that never seemed to materialize.
“Yes?” came an almost suspicious answer.
“Father, may I speak to you?” Sandy had determined, absolutely, that he would be calm. He stood with his feet braced behind the still-closed door, as if preparing to weather a blast. He wondered why, at his age, he had to continue to feel like a six-year-old before his father.
“Yes, all right. Come in.” It was the voice of a man who could spare only a couple of minutes. Sandy pushed the door open and saw his father, as he had expected, sitting at his desk poring over a map. He had situated his desk so that the natural light from the window illuminated the work surface. He looked up, frowning. “Yes? What do you want?”
Sandy’s immediate thought was that his father was too cheap to use a desk lamp.
He stood before his father with his hands behind his back, as if he were in trouble with the dean of the agricultural college he’d attended in Vancouver. “Father, I have a few thoughts about this logging thing.”
“Sit down, will you? You’re blocking the light. What thoughts?”
Having pulled a chair close to the other side of the desk, Sandy leaned in and pointed at the map. “There really seems to me to be no reason we couldn’t get started. Why don’t we just begin harvesting the trees? We could truck them in to one of the mills between here and Nelson. That would give us enough capital to build our own small mill in, say, a year’s time. The whole province is in a post-war boom. In Vancouver they are building houses a mile a minute. Heck, they’re building houses all up and down the outskirts of Nelson. I mean, no one wants to move this far out of town, but lots of servicemen want nice, new little houses for their families near town. We’d be mad not to capitalize on this.”
Mather sat forward, his elbows resting on the map and his hands clasped together. He regarded his son silently for a few moments after this speech, and then leaned back. “I know what’s behind this, you know. You must think I’m stupid. Or mad. This is a scheme to get your hands on the money. I know you. You think if you work with me I’ll reverse my decision—include you in the business. You think I haven’t thought of how to get my own bloody business going? Do you think that I need you?” He delivered that “you” as if Sandy were something unpleasant underfoot.
Sandy stood up and stared down at his father. Why had he bothered? He was finished now. Why had he bothered with any of it? He would leave, move back to Vancouver. His father could deal with Mother. He could sit on his useless land making his useless plans. When he finally died, well. We’ll see then. He felt himself in the dead, quiet centre of a hurricane of rage. But he savoured the triumph of his next statement. “I just came to tell you that I got Harris to sell.”
Mather looked stunned. “What rubbish is this? Why should he suddenly agree to sell after nearly forty years?”
“It doesn’t matter why. You should be happy. We can get that damn mill up and running. And if you don’t, I will.”
“You know,” said his father, looking at him coldly, “you are as mad as your mother. I see that now.” He resumed looking at his map, trying to hide the elation he felt. Sandy was right. It didn’t matter why. It was going to be his, at last. The only misgiving he had was how on earth Sandy had managed it.
Sandy walked out the front door, letting the screen door slam behind him in the thick quiet of the hot afternoon. He was surprised at what he felt. He had imagined that when this moment came, when he finally stood up to his father on an equal footing, he would feel some kind of stormy rage, but what he felt instead was a grim clarity and inner calm. It pleased him to think himself so in control. He walked out behind the house to an upper path that skirted the top border of their property. It dropped down to run parallel along the roadway about where Lane’s house was, and eventually joined the driveway to the post office.
He would walk and sort out what his next move would be. He could leave—he should leave. Go back to Vancouver and wait out his father. He didn’t know what was in his father’s will. But he knew the outcome, didn’t he? When all was said and done, he would get the property. His mother, if she survived him, would be completely incapable of running the place. He was initially surprised, he remembered, to learn how much money his father had amassed—but, once he thought about it, he realized it wasn’t that surprising. After all, his father was a cheap bastard. He felt an inward tug. He should leave, but he needed to be here to watch over things.
By this time, his walk had brought him parallel to the driveway that pulled into Lane’s place. He stopped, half pretending he hadn’t come to this spot on purpose. The policemen’s car was in the driveway, parked next to her Ford. He could hear voices. He strained to hear what they were saying, but he could just hear the rise and fall of an indistinct male voice. What he saw next was what mattered. Lane was carrying a small suitcase and walking between the two policemen. The door was opened for her and she got into the back seat. Sandy watched without moving until the policemen’s car had disappeared around the corner. He could hear its progress right down to the Nelson road.