FOR THE BOAT RIDE to Crieff Island, Inspector Sorensen and Sully wore yellow slickers with POLICE printed on the back. She wore her father’s old slicker and cap from the boathouse.
They sat in silence on vinyl truck seats bolted to the deck, the inspector on the seat in front of hers. She’d made it clear why she was there, and the inspector had nodded and turned away. Since then he had not spoken to her, but once in a while she caught a quick appraising glance from him. Eventually he turned to her.
“And why do you think that Danny needs moral support, Mrs. Bradley?”
“Because dealing with the police is always unsettling, and it helps to have someone in one’s corner. Always, even when one has nothing to hide. I think you know that, Inspector.” She smiled at him.
At times the boat passed through patches of mist thick as rain. Water settled on her eyelashes and beaded on the worn edge of the baseball cap. There was no colour to the world but shades of grey, and the only sounds came from the engine below deck and from water lapping against the hull. On one occasion the boat slowed, then stopped and sounded its horn. Out in the fog another horn responded, and moments later the dark shape of a boat slid across their path and disappeared again. They moved on.
“Did you see that?” said the inspector to her. “How does he know what’s out there, where he’s going? In this muck. Does he have radar?”
“I don’t know. Let’s ask him. Danny! The inspector is asking if you have radar on this boat.”
Danny laughed at that. “Radar. Nah. It’s always a tad foggy in this patch, but we’re going slow, and I got my ears and eyes and a sounder and this.” He tapped the compass housing. “Anyway, she’ll clear up in a few minutes.”
At the island they tied up to the floating dock, then ducked under the police tape and climbed the ladder to the cribbed dock. There were large brown stains on the planks. In some places they were congealed, in others they’d soaked into the wood grain.
“Nobody step in that,” said Sorensen. “Maybe stand over there, out of the way.” He reached into his pocket and took out a pair of plastic gloves.
She watched him move among the stains. Twice he went down on both knees and then moved along like that, judging where to set hands and knees, at times bringing his face close to the planks, tracing something with a finger.
Then he stood up.
“Danny,” he said. “Be careful where you step, but come and look at this. This imprint here, it’s from a shoe with a smooth sole, probably leather, and a rubber heel plate. A dress shoe, I’d say, fairly small for a man’s foot. Do you know anyone who wears shoes like that around here?”
“Is that all blood?”
“Probably. Do you know anyone with shoes like that?”
“Not around here. It would be dangerous in a boat, a shoe like that. No traction in it.”
“All right. Stand back again.”
Sorensen took a flat tool from his pocket and knelt and scraped up blood. Where it lay like uncured paint he put smears of it into different plastic bags. He stood up and looked around.
“Danny, if anything fell in the water here and floated, which way would it drift?”
Danny pointed with his chin. “That way. Probably. Unless there’s a storm. And even then.”
Under low power they nosed slowly along the shoreline of the island, often with the engine just in idle. Danny kept having to slip it in and out of gear while Sorensen took his time studying where the water lapped on land.
They saw driftwood, seaweed, crab shells, bits of plastic. Yellow seafoam. But then, around the turn into a small cove, Sorensen pointed.
“There! See that? Go as close as you can and hold the boat in place. How deep is it here?”
“Shallow enough so I’ll need to watch the prop.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Sergeant,” the inspector said to Sully. “You see that clump of seaweed and those three reeds sticking up, and the black thing behind it half submerged?”
Sully looked. “That over there. Yes, I do, sir.”
“So put on gloves and go get it for me.”
And Sully took off the slicker and his uniform and shoes and stripped down to his shorts. He did it without hesitation and without looking at anyone. At the stern ladder he waited for Danny to shut off the engine and then he climbed down and waded ashore, paddling with his gloved hands in ice-cold water up to his hips. Another strong local boy with a good chest and shoulders. All-round strength of muscle and bone and sinew from working with boats and ropes and axes all their lives. Shovel work in the gravel pit during high school summers, the hardest work of all.
Andrew had always admired them, had wanted to be strong like these boys and probably a bit wild and reckless like them too. To be accepted by them and later by his military friends as more than a come-from-away from the city. They’d worked out with that bucket filled with lead net weights that was still in his room. Danny could hold the bucket with one arm straight out for nearly two minutes. Andrew had told her that, quite in awe. They’d been in their late teens then, and she’d been able to hear them up in Andrew’s room, counting and laughing, and the rattle of the weights and the thump of the bucket.
When Sully came back he was carrying a black shoe. At the stern ladder he passed it to the inspector, who held it up in gloved hands for Danny and her to see.
It was a man’s left dress shoe, a leather loafer with a pointed toe cap and a narrow bangle of yellow metal across the instep.
“Do you know anyone who wears shoes like that?”
“In the city, yes,” she said. “But not around here.” While Sully dried himself off with a towel Danny had given him, Sorensen turned the shoe this way and that to study it. Then he put it in a plastic bag and set it out of the way in a corner on the wheelhouse floor.
The sun was out now, warm and clear. A wall of fog toward the mainland and dark clouds and tendrils of rain far away to the east.
On the way back she asked Sorensen if she could take a closer look at the shoe. He gave her his gloves, and she put them on and took the shoe out of the bag. It had an elevator heel, and it was handmade in Argentina. It would have been expensive.
“A bit of a vain man,” she said, “who wanted to appear taller than he was. Size eight and a narrow foot. Less than medium-sized for a man. A fairly common shoe in any big city, I’d say. Perhaps on a Latin or Mediterranean foot. But not on a banker or an Anglo businessman. They like brogues with fancy toe caps.”
Now he was looking at her with interest. “Go on.”
“And there’s blood inside it. Under the insole where it’s coming off. See? And more brown all the way inside and under the instep. A shoe full of blood, I’d say.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
“What did the children have on their feet? There were running-shoe prints on that dock.”
“Yes, running shoes. We’re going to find out whose blood all that is. The kids’, and from that shoe almost certainly someone else’s too.”
She put the shoe back in the bag and peeled off the gloves and set it all on the wheelhouse floor.
“Danny says they were shot.”
“Yes, they were. From up close, with a powerful handgun. The bullets had full metal jackets, so they didn’t deform much and punched right through him and into her. We think she was standing close behind him. Maybe he was trying to shield her with his body. We know they died from the same two bullets because the pathologist found one embedded near her spine, and he had a hunch and sent the bullet to the lab and in the grooves and cracks in the copper they found traces of the boy’s blood. I can tell you all that because it’s in the medical report and as his lawyer you could easily find it out yourself.”
Danny was not far away and she imagined he could hear all this. Later, when the inspector was sitting down, she joined Danny in the wheelhouse. He looked grim.
“Margaret, to tell you the truth—I know I said okay yesterday, but now you being here doesn’t feel right to me any more. I guess I don’t really want you gett’n involved, like asking him anything or talking on my behalf. I know you told him about moral support, but even that, I’ve decided I don’t want it. Don’t need it. I’ll tell Mom the same thing. She shouldn’t even have called you. I’d rather handle this on my own.”
“Really? Are you sure? I’m here now.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be, is what I’m saying. Yes, I am sure. I got nothing to hide, and I don’t want him to think that maybe I do. That guy doesn’t miss a thing. He’s like a bloody hawk.”
She hesitated. “You’re really sure, Danny?”
“I am.”
“All right. Let me know if you change your mind.”
She turned away from him and sat down and hugged her knees and looked out to sea. Water rushing past. She wiped mist from her face and rubbed her hands against her skirt under her slicker, pulled the cap down even further, and stared out to sea again. Worn threads hung from the peak of the cap, water beading on them.
She looked at her watch. Ten past four. She’d talk to Aileen, and then if she hurried she could probably still make the evening flight back to Toronto.
“Inspector.” She tugged at his slicker, and he turned around and rested one arm on the back of the seat.
“Have you found out who these children are?”
“No. And they’re not really children. Forensics thinks they’re about twenty years old. No, we don’t yet know who they are. Or where they’re from. We’re trying to find the parents.”
“The parents. Of course. And if you can’t find them?”
He shrugged.
When the boat was docked she asked him for his card. He reached under his slicker, took out a card and passed it to her.
“And you?” He held out his hand. “Your card?”