THE news of Morrison’s death came from the Deputy Minister, who walked into my office while I was absently stroking Jerry’s ears and reading a newspaper spread out on my desk.
I was at my own desk, in my own shop. I didn’t work for Jill Bryson any more and could stroke a cat and read a newspaper in my office any time I felt like it.
Still, when Bryson appeared in my doorway, I pushed the newspaper aside and removed Jerry from my lap. It seemed only polite. Jerry stalked off in a huff with his tail in the air.
Bryson, in her late forties, was tall, slim, and, as always, elegantly dressed. She had closely cut blondish hair and cornflower blue eyes that gleamed at her victims through round rimless glasses. A prime example of the bright, upwardly mobile career women gradually displacing males in the senior ranks of the Public Service, she was especially adept at verbally skewering the pumped up little “special” assistants from the Minister’s Office.
There are two Ottawas. One is the expanded city of nearly a million people toiling in the revitalized high-technology sector, the soup-to-nuts service industry, and light manufacturing. They live in sprawling suburbs and inner neighbourhoods, some gentrified and some not. The other Ottawa is the federal government insider world of the nation’s capital, its population supplied by the universities, and its epicenter the gothic stone buildings on Parliament Hill overlooking the confluence of three rivers.
Bryson was firmly entrenched in government Ottawa and had learned to be skilled in the day-to-day skirmishes of the higher echelons. Outsiders may see such contests as elegant verbal fencing matches between reasonably civilized individuals. But some very nasty wounds are inflicted.
Anyway, I found myself suddenly sitting more or less at attention that drizzling mid-April Thursday evening.
“Hello, Conn.”
“Deputy.”
“No need for that now. Just ma’am will do.”
She smiled to show she was kidding.
“Please, Jill, take a seat. Coffee? There’s a car club bunch coming in about half an hour for a technical session but otherwise I’m fine for a chat.”
Bryson looked dubiously at the battered wooden chair in front of my desk but sat down anyway.
“No, no coffee, but thanks, Conn. This won’t take long.”
It was somewhat puzzling to see her at all. We’d been colleagues of sorts, it was true, and had dealt with more than one crisis together. But we were far from being friends. Deputy Ministers tend to socialize with each other at catered house parties in Rockcliffe and the Glebe, Ottawa’s wealthiest blue blood neighbourhoods. Minions such as I had been, from the lower levels of the public service, aren’t usually invited, unless it’s to deliver a confidential document.
Bryson turned in her chair and gazed through my office’s internal window at the cars in the shop.
“They’re like sculptures, really. Beautiful.”
It was doubtful that the Deputy was a car gal as such, though word was she invested in art and had a good eye. I waited some more.
“I was sorry to hear about your wife, Conn. I think I was in Geneva at the time …”
They all loved to mention being in Geneva, Switzerland, where many international organizations are headquartered. Flying off to meetings there at taxpayers’ expense is seen in the public service as a sign of arrival. Brussels or Washington will do in a pinch.
“I got your card. Thank you.”
There really wasn’t anything else I cared to say.
“I’ll come to the point. Remember Rodney Morrison?”
I nodded. Rodney Morrison was hard to forget.
“Well, he’s dead.”
This was a surprise and went a little way toward explaining why the Deputy had dropped by. Morrison was our Cabinet Minister’s Executive Assistant when I last knew him, fearsome and ferocious in meetings and allegedly sought after as a dinner guest on the Hill for his malicious wit.
“How?”
“He was in a car in Gatineau Park, parked in a lot near one of the lookouts. Quebec Sûreté found him on routine patrol. He killed himself by running a hose from the exhaust pipe to the window, apparently.”
“When was this?”
“They found him around 1 a.m. Tuesday morning.”
“I didn’t see this in the news.”
The media don’t always report suicides, but I would have thought the death of someone of Morrison’s prominence on the Hill would have been noted.
“No. Well …” Bryson started to say, but then resumed gazing at the shop’s interior.
A few things began to occur to me. In the first place, the concept of Rodney Morrison committing suicide was strange in itself. With a few choice words, he could lower the temperature drastically in a room full of officials, as I’d witnessed. But he was basically an ebullient person, and, although people can become depressed due to sudden illness or other reversal of fortune, it still seemed extremely out of character.
“Thanks for coming here especially to tell me, Jill, but …”
“Why am I here?”
Bryson grinned fully this time, showing perfectly white teeth and that appealing little gap between her front incisors.
“Your invoice was in the glove compartment of the car he was found in. The car is leased to our department.”
She handed me a piece of paper I could have identified from a mile away, an invoice headed with our own Britfit logo. It showed that we had charged $607.73, all taxes included, to service a blue 2006 Jaguar S-Type early in January, just over three months ago. The mileage was listed at 103,367 kilometers. Parts replaced included various cooling hoses and the serpentine belt.
I couldn’t remember this car at all. And it was decidedly odd for a government car to have been in to our shop for service in the first place. Government cars tend to be large, discreet General Motors or Ford products, and we never saw them here. True, by the time of this model, the Jaguar company had been taken over by Ford, before that beleaguered firm unloaded it to a company in India. But a Jag S-Type seemed too flashy and expensive looking to flaunt at the taxpayers as a government fleet car in my opinion.
It was definitely our invoice, though. And Dougald had initialled it as having completed the work. Then I remembered where I’d been that week – in Arizona, the North American Mecca of rust-free classic cars, abandoned projects, and parts. The crates full of my pickings from Phoenix and Scottsdale had finally been cleared by Border Agency customs officials and were in our basement now.
“The car’s at the Sûreté garage across the river, and they’re finished with it. I’d like you to look it over. Service it, whatever. Then we’ll allocate it back to the car pool. We’ll use it to carry around our more prestigious visitors from overseas.”
“And that’s all?”
“Sure. Public Works can trailer it here tomorrow. They’ll have a requisition or whatever you need.”
It seemed straightforward enough. But something was niggling at the back of my mind, like the piece of music you start humming but the title escapes you.
I returned to the subject of Morrison’s suicide.
“It’s hard to believe. Any idea why?”
“I don’t have all the details, but the Sûreté is satisfied. Apparently there had been a tiff with his significant other, and Rodney stormed out. He had been getting a little … erratic at the office – looked like he’d had too many late nights, alcohol on his breath, that sort of thing. Oh, and he’d left a note in the car, so that seems to clinch it. Anyway, since your shop had done the work on this car before, we might as well have you do it now.”
There didn’t seem to be any reason to turn this job down.
Bryson looked at her watch and I glanced at the office clock on the wall above her head. The Triumph club members would be arriving in a matter of minutes.
We walked outside together. Cambridge Street looked better in the dark after a rain than it did in broad daylight. Two hundred yards away, traffic whizzed by on the elevated Queensway highway that bisects the city from east to west.
We strolled over to an idling dark gray Chevrolet Caprice. I noted the chauffeur’s silhouette in the driver’s seat.
“Thanks for coming yourself,” I said.
She smiled, and we shook hands.
“Your shop is on my way home and your lights were on. Good to see you, Conn. You look well. The Jaguar will be here sometime tomorrow.”
She paused.
“I know I don’t have to mention this, really. But you know me: I like to keep things clear. You’re still bound by the Act. No need to talk about Rodney’s demise to your old friends in the media, hmm?”
She slipped into the back seat behind the driver, pulling a Blackberry from her purse. The Caprice murmured away.
Within minutes, the Triumph club technical session was under way. About a dozen mostly fifty-year-old men started arriving, some in their roadsters and some in SUVs or more workaday cars.
In my standing-room-only office, I showed them a video of an interior strip-down and stressed the importance of labelling everything, no matter how obvious the purpose.
I took apart a seat from a TR4A to show them how to stretch a new cover over the base. First comes contact cement – on the cover, not the foam – and then you gradually pull and stretch until the piping lines up at the edges. I answered some questions and smiled and nodded at points raised by others. There was a hubbub of talk, and then suddenly I was swilling out the remainder of the coffee from the maker into the washroom sink, tossing half-eaten muffins into the garbage, filling Jerry’s bowls, switching out more lights, and locking up.
It was getting on for 9:30 p.m. I walked around to the rear compound, unlocked the gate, slid it open, ducked into the driver’s seat of the ’56 British Racing Green MGA, and started it up, still puzzling over something Bryson had said about Morrison.
As I automatically scanned the gauges for temperature and oil pressure while the car warmed up, I remembered chatting idly with Morrison once in the twelfth-floor Minister’s Office boardroom while we waited for other officials to appear. I couldn’t remember what we were supposed to have been meeting about – probably some minor crisis that would end up being a one-day wonder like most of them.
I visualized him flapping his hands about, and remembered his chuckling about his lack of everyday skills.
“Albert does everything. I can’t cook, can’t hammer a nail, can’t drive …”
If Rodney Morrison couldn’t drive a car, what was he doing alone and dead in a government Jaguar in Gatineau Park?