24.

THE PLANE FROM SARNIA TOUCHED DOWN in London at eight ten in the evening. Dusk shrouded the surrounding farmlands with a velvet haze as the Dash 8 swung down to land. The terminal was brilliantly lit and once inside Verena suppressed an urge to shield her eyes as she emerged from the winding corridor into the arrivals area. As usual after time spent in the bush, so much lighting struck her as garish and unnecessary. Easily a dozen people were on hand to greet the passengers, but Borrowman was not one of them.

Even if he had been at the airport to meet the early afternoon flight on which she was originally scheduled, he wouldn’t have waited around this long. She’d called his number from the Bracebridge airport, then again from Toronto and finally from Sarnia, but his cellphone remained inexplicably turned off. Nevertheless she scanned the waiting faces and was aware of a hollow sense of disappointment as she continued on to the exit without him.

She’d switched flights at the last minute. Intuition, as much as an accumulation of small observations, had made her uneasy about one of the passengers who’d boarded the plane with her in Bracebridge. A man in his mid-thirties travelling alone, his small, pointed black beard and high Slavic cheekbones reminded her of someone from the past. Eventually it came to her. Comrade Lenin, she thought, on the dock of the shipbuilders’ yard in Murmansk, about to unleash the Russian Revolution on an unsuspecting world. The picture hung in the auditorium of her school in Belgrade, inspiring reverence and loathing in equal parts among the students. In the Toronto departure lounge he turned up again, booked on her flight to London. She noticed that he never looked at her directly, unlike the other men who stared openly at her long blonde plait and her dancers’ legs under the short schoolgirl skirt.

He’d seated himself two rows behind her, unfolded a Globe and Mail and was submerged from sight. Ten minutes into her wait, she went out into the aisle to try Borrowman, and when she returned she purposely chose a seat out of his line of vision. After a few minutes he too moved, again to a position from which he could see her but she could not see him without turning her head. It might have been coincidence but then again it might not. She shivered as the old Eastern Europe of mistrust, fear, and betrayal closed in on her. She couldn’t shake a sense of what if. What if the police had put public transportation under surveillance as soon as they’d been informed of the murder?

When the call came for boarding, she timed her approach to the gate so that she’d be the last passenger through. Comrade Lenin, it appeared, had similar plans. With a show of politeness, he stepped back and motioned her to precede him. She started forward and the attendant held out her hand.

“Boarding pass, please.”

Verena stopped and gave a little sound of annoyance. “My book! I forgot my book,” she exclaimed, and went to retrieve Sleep Is for the Rich from the seat where she had purposely left it. She took her time stowing the book in the outside pocket of her backpack, obliging Lenin to make his way through the gate ahead of her.

“Miss?” called the attendant. “If you’re ready?”

“Thanks. I’ve changed my mind,” Swinging her backpack over her shoulder, Verena walked swiftly out of the lounge.

One hour later, Air Canada Jazz found her a seat on the plane to Sarnia. But from Sarnia to London, all the flights were booked. The best they could do was put her on standby. She’d ordered coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich at the fast food counter and five hours later there’d been a no-show on the supper-hour plane.

The London air enveloped her with its familiar hint of damp as she stepped out of the revolving door. Squaring her shoulders, she headed for the taxi stand. She’d called Borrowman at intervals all afternoon, finally switching from his mobile to the house landline. Normally one of the boys picked up. Or Elaine herself would snap an irritable “Yes,” resentful because she was cooking supper. Instead, the answering machine took her call and Verena hung up without leaving a message.

The last time Borrowman had failed to meet a flight on her return was at Christmas. Raymond had been playing a horn solo in the school concert and on that occasion he’d called ahead to let her know. She sank onto the back seat of a taxi, hauling her pack after her.

“Springbank Road,” she told the driver. “I’ll tell you where to let me off.”

“You have good flight?” asked the man politely. He had a Middle Eastern accent, like so many of the drivers nowadays.

“Long,” she said in a non-committal tone that discouraged further conversation.

Everything combined to make her apprehensive and unsure: Lenin and her circuitous route home with no Borrowman at the end of it, his phone switched off and no-one answering at the house. A variety of scenarios played themselves out in her head. The Cell uncovered and Borrowman taken in for questioning. Although that wouldn’t explain the absence of Elaine and the boys. If they were absent. She wouldn’t put it past Elaine to be at home, checking the call display and opting not to answer.

Verena made her way around to the rear of the apartment building, something she did when she was feeling more than normally paranoid, and let herself in the back entrance.

An oblong rectangle of light inside indicated that the door to the superintendent’s ground floor apartment was standing ajar. The usual smells of stale cooking and cats prevailed, but something was missing—the sound of television. Mrs. Ivanovich appeared in the doorway in her rusty black skirt and a man’s white shirt. In her arms she cradled an enormous bewhiskered cat the colour of November fog, while two smaller cats wreathed themselves around her legs.

“Ah, Verena. I thought it must be you.”

“Hello, Mrs. Ivan.”

“Before you go up, it’s better you know. You had a visitor.”

“Now?”

“Three, four hours ago. She’s gone now. I made sure.” She tipped the cat onto the tiles and shooed them all back into her apartment the way she might have shooed chickens into a henhouse.

“Come.” She gestured. “Let us go up together. It will be shock for you.”

“Shock?”

“You will see. Come,” and she chivied Verena up the stairs.

“The police?” Verena asked and her heart began to pound. Thank God the Henry was still up north with St. Denis.

“No. Not the police.” For all her bulk Mrs. Ivanovich moved surprisingly quickly. They reached the first landing, strewn as usual with litter and loud with television gunshots from behind the door of number five, and started up the last flight of stairs. “A woman. She didn’t tell me her name. She said you would know.” She nudged a fast food carton aside with her man-sized Nikes as they approached Verena’s apartment. “Pigs. You want me to use the pass-key?”

But Verena was already turning her own key in the lock. When the door swung open she thought she might be hallucinating.

Everything looked familiar and yet jarringly strange, as though the apartment had been transported back to the past. Her few pieces of furniture lay overturned, closets and cupboards gaped open with their contents pulled out and scattered across the floor. She eased the backpack from her shoulders.

“A woman did this?”

“Tall. Skinny, wearing a nice suit. She talked like a schoolteacher.”

Elaine, she thought. It must be. But why? They might not be friends, but they weren’t enemies. Unless…. She frowned. Unless in the meantime she’d heard about Asher wanting a divorce and decided it was Verena’s fault. She couldn’t know that their relationship was mostly confined to Verena’s head. A fact Verena admitted to herself only in moments of abject honesty.

She would almost have preferred a visit from the police. At least that would have been something she deserved.

“She wore glasses?” she asked, just to make sure.

“Small, like half-moons.” Mrs. Ivanovich sent her an oblique look. “Do you know this woman?”

“Yes.” She picked up her good winter coat but with nowhere to put it, she let it drop. Even the hangers had been tossed from the closet. Shards of china and glass winked from the kitchen floor. Mrs. Ivanovich indicated the broom leaning against an overturned chair.

“I started to sweep. Then I thought I better meet you downstairs. Warn you.”

Verena nodded. As superintendent, Mila Ivanovich felt responsible. Strangers didn’t get by her as a rule; it was the reason some of her tenants chose to live in the old building in spite of its slow-running drains and flaking paint. People like Mr. Aziz on the floor below, who was rumoured to be in Canada illegally, and a couple of single women who lived in fear of being tracked down by their former partners.

In the sink with its handle smashed off was the mug with a loon painted on the side, a gift from Borrowman and still coffee-stained from the morning she’d left for Algonquin. Elaine hadn’t touched anything edible, she noted—what little there was in the fridge and the cupboards. Frugal housewife, volunteer with Oxfam and diligent promoter of Eat Local campaigns, she wouldn’t have been able to bring herself to waste food. A twinge of contempt broke through the blankness that gripped her and Verena moved into the living area of the apartment.

“How did she get in?”

“She had a key.”

The only other key in existence was Borrowman’s. How had Elaine gotten hold of it? He wouldn’t have given it to her, Verena told herself. Even if he were angry with her, John would never betray her in that way.

It took her a minute to recognize individual objects amid the jumble on the living room floor. Her glacier poster had been torn from the wall. Poking up like a mast from the shipwreck of bricks and planks was her lamp. She spun around to check the aquarium.

The stand had been knocked over. Lying on its side on the water-soaked shag was the tank. And the tiger barb? Verena dropped to her hands and knees and scrabbled amid the pebbles. She found him in death as so often in life, half-hidden by vallisneria grass. His eyes were dulled and his rainbow colours all but extinguished. For the first time a flame of pure anger licked through her.

She could have killed now. She could have picked up the Henry and sighted through the lens at Elaine’s smartly-coiffed head and without compunction pressed the trigger. Verena leaned back and forced herself to draw a deep breath. Perhaps Borrowman was right to be reluctant to let her loose with a gun.

Mila Ivanovich stood wringing her big work-roughened hands. “I got here too late. It was already dead.”

“What made you come up?”

“Mr. Aziz telephoned me to complain. He said there was a noise like a drunken party coming from the ceiling. I said, that was not possible. Verena Vitek does not drink, does not have parties.”

Verena stood up. “And when you got here?”

“Already from the stairs, I hear dishes breaking. When I open the door, this woman shouts and picks up a plate to throw at me. She thinks I am you. I ask who she is, and she will not say. ‘Ask Verena! Ask Verena! She knows!’ So I tell her to get out or I call the police.”

Their eyes met and held.

Mrs. Ivanovich shrugged. “I did not call. No good comes from calling the police. It only causes bigger troubles and makes lawyers rich. But she does not know that, so she leaves.”

Verena nodded, relieved about the police. She started picking things up at random. Her parents’ photograph with the glass shattered, her clock radio with the dial smashed, the blue skirt she’d worn to Francine’s that evening, torn from hem to waist. The door to the bathroom was closed, she noticed.

“Was she in there, too?”

Mrs. Ivanovich looked apologetic. “She wrote on the mirror. I did not clean it. In case…”

“It’s evidence.” Verena nodded, her hand on the doorknob. “Don’t think you have to stay. I can manage…”

“Nothing good on TV tonight. I will make some tea for you.” Unexpectedly, she chuckles. “If you have cup that is not broken.”

“There’s a tin mug in my backpack.”

“I will find it.” Mrs. Ivanovich was already heading for the kitchen. “Are you hungry? I will make sandwich, too,” she called over the sound of running water.

Verena, standing in front of the medicine cabinet, stared at the lipstick-red letters swirling across the mirror. BITCH. IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT.

“I had supper at the airport,” she called back. A lie, but she remembered there was no bread.

What was all her fault, she wondered? The hatred vented seemed out of all proportion to anything that had passed between her and Asher. But what did she know about human relationships? Verena wet a sponge and wiped the mirror clean. Dumped in the old lion-footed bathtub were the contents of the cabinet: a tin of Nivea, a bottle of cough syrup past its expiry date, a container of Advil, and a box of Band-Aids. The lot had been doused with a sticky translucent substance that proved to be her shower gel. She transferred everything to the plastic bag that lined the waste basket and returned to the living area.

Whatever the cause of Elaine’s fury, she’d been thorough.

Not even the mementos Verena had saved in a tin cakebox were spared. She pulled them out from between the bricks and planks: a crumpled brown manila envelope containing her report cards from Salem and the shredded remnants of the corsage her father gave her on the day of her graduation. A few photographs, torn in half. Her birth certificate and her Canadian citizenship papers defaced by black marker. Picking and sorting, Verena became aware of a creeping sense of shame.

It was the same feeling she’d first experienced as a child, after the soldiers had gone and she was let out of the closet and found her parents weeping and the house ransacked. She herself had not cried. Not even when she found the stuffed bear she slept with during the night with his belly slashed open and the kapok spilling out. She was too young for sentimental attachment, but not too young to feel exposed and humiliated, although she could not have given those feelings a name. She hid the bear under her bed. Her mother had retrieved him and stitched him back together, wiping away tears as she did so, but Verena had never touched him again.

Movement by the fish tank made her look up. The door to the landing must have been open because there was the grey Tom, in the act of fastening his teeth around the tiger barb. Mrs. Ivanovich, emerging from the kitchen, swore in Ukrainian and made a grab for him. The cat growled in his throat and retreated behind the stand, yellow eyes gleaming.

“Let him,” said Verena. “He might as well have it.”

“You are sure?”

She shrugged. “He was a killer himself, the tiger barb.”

Mrs. Ivanovich placed her tin mug in front of her. “Tea. Strong, lots of sugar.” She stood over Verena and watched her drink.

Afterward they set the tank back on its stand, scooped up the pebbles and grasses with a dustpan and dumped them in. They rounded up the coat hangers, bundled the clothes back into the closet and the dresser drawers, and finished sweeping in the kitchen. Anything damaged or broken Verena stuffed into garbage bags. Violated goods—the sooner she was rid of them, the better. She’d been lax. She should never have accumulated so much in the first place. With possessions came attachment, and with attachment, inevitably, came loss and grief. That went for people, as well as objects. She’d become too attached to Borrowman, too dependent on him. Now she was being punished for it by his absence and the withdrawal of his support when she needed it most. It was an old lesson, but one she was having to learn all over again.

They set the garbage bags, bulging and tightly tied, out on the landing. Mrs. Ivanovich said she would take them down with her. She swept the cat out the door and gave Verena a penetrating look from her deep Slavic eyes that always seemed to be looking over great distances.

“If you want, I can stay.”

“Thank you. I’m fine now.”

“If you have trouble, call me.” Her gaze roamed a final time around the apartment. “Is this because of a man?”

“Yes.” One way and another.

Hoisting a bag in each hand, Mrs. Ivanovich nodded. “Men are the root of evil. Not money—men. Wars, betrayal, beatings. All done by men. Even if women sometimes do bad things, they do them because of men. Is it not so?”

“Usually,” agreed Verena, conscious that she herself was proof.

“Better to live with cats.”

Verena shut the door as Mrs. Ivanovich’s heavy footsteps retreated down the stairs. She felt an overpowering tiredness, a desire to sink down and close her eyes.

She turned to her backpack and began to empty it. The day had been as long as two, and she was still missing sleep from last night. The act of killing Li Chen had played over and over in her head, festering like a scab to be picked at, during the hours she sat in the Toronto and Sarnia airports. She missed Borrowman. There was no one to debrief her, to tell her that she had performed well, that she had done the right thing for the best of causes, and that it would all turn out as it was meant to.

She shed her clothes, stiff with dirt and sweat, and fished the bottle of shower gel out of the mess in the wastebasket. Just enough remained for her to work into a lather. After her shower she spread her sleeping bag on a dry section of carpet in front of the sliding door, releasing a smell of woodsmoke and pine. She did not try calling Borrowman again, but she placed her cellphone within reach in case he might still try to call her.

The crowns of the poplars moved restlessly above the balcony railing, illuminated by the ghostly light of neighbouring apartments. Tomorrow, she thought as her eyes fell shut, tomorrow she would decide what to do.