LATER that night, over a wee dram or two, I had a long talk with Isabelle, bringing her up to speed on all that had been happening. I had Jerry on my lap while I sat in a wing chair near Isabelle’s recliner. Mozart was playing quietly on her old mahogany stereo unit – Isabelle had stuck to her 33 rpm vinyl records despite newer technology – and it felt cozy and relaxing amid the clutter of her living room, dimly lit here and there with soft pools of light from a few brass standard lamps. Sap was spitting from the maple and birch logs in the fire I had set to take off a late April chill in the room. Wind rattled the age-distorted window glass. It was about 9:30 p.m.
Jerry was purring. He still looked pretty rough, although his fur was growing back where he’d been shaved to treat burns and cuts. The stub of his tail was still bandaged, but he’d lost the bucket around his neck. He looked piratical with only one eye, but evidently had no trouble finding his auxiliary food bowls in Isabelle’s kitchen. I’d had to lift him up to my lap. Although he could walk fairly well on all fours even with the right rear leg still splinted and bandaged, he was pretty wobbly. I rubbed behind his tattered ears and stared at the flames.
“So you’re seeing the lawyer on Thursday?” Isabelle asked.
“Yes, with JP, his girlfriend, and JP’s parole officer.”
She asked me for more details about the Jaguar club president.
“Well, he’s very rich. Made a lot of money out of high-tech stocks before everything crashed. He’s difficult to deal with: huge ego, arrogant … you know the type.”
“Oh yes, oh yes.” Isabelle paused. “What about family? Children?”
I didn’t really see the relevance of this, and shrugged.
“Humour me, Conn. What do you know about his family?”
“Well, I have seen his wife; she was with him at a car show once.”
Then I remembered he had a son.
“He was at the shop once.”
“How old?”
I recalled a youth who waited for Bartlett in Marjorie’s tiny plant-filled waiting area while Bartlett was instructing me about the needs of his black E-Type in for a regular service or cleaning or both a year ago. They’d left in a taxi that Bartlett had Marjorie order for them.
“Eighteen? Maybe a bit younger. Bartlett’s probably in his late forties.”
I remembered having some pity for the kid. Self-conscious, on the gawky side, he’d basically scrunched down in a chair in Marjorie’s small office hiding behind one of the car magazines we keep for customers to read while waiting. It couldn’t be much fun having Bartlett for a father, especially if you were a sensitive teenager.
“What are you getting at, Isabelle?”
She turned to look at the fireplace flames, her bright blue eyes shining in the reflection.
“Funny things happened when I was at Bletchley …”
The efforts of thousands of men and women, among whom Isabelle numbered, working at the UK Government Code and Cypher School established in 1939 to decrypt Axis messages, most famously those generated by the German Enigma machines, have only recently been publicly recognized. Isabelle was one of many selected on the basis of speed in puzzle solving in a specially designed recruitment test.
She had recently told me that a medal had been approved, nearly seventy years later, by the British Government for surviving members of the more than ten thousand people who had worked at Bletchley Park at some point or other during World War II.
Knowing Isabelle, the medal would just end up in a box somewhere with her Order of Canada and other awards. Isabelle rarely spoke about her wartime experiences unless pressed. She and her fellow recruits could say they were merely following orders in keeping quiet about their work as they had formally been sworn to secrecy at the time. After all, Winston Churchill himself referred to these code breakers as “my geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.”
“It was chaos there, really,” she said. “We had to work in these chilly huts most of the time. My hands still ache from that cold and damp. There were cots to rest on, and we had lockers for our purses and things in the nearby boarding school that was acquired as the place had to expand.
“With so much coming and going, night and day, it was surprising in a way that there weren’t more thefts. But one Wren lost five pounds out of her wallet that she swore had been there, in her purse, and secure in her locker.
“Why she had such a large amount … perhaps … yes, it was coming on to Christmas of ’42. We were glad to see the end of that year. She made quite a fuss, couldn’t blame her really. We all had to be interviewed, our whole shift. I was quite annoyed, couldn’t really spare any time since we were just starting to get the ‘Lorenz’ material solved.
“At any rate, it turned out her own wee daughter had taken it from her purse that morning. She, the Wren, Gladys? Aye, Gladys it was … She was terribly sorry to waste everyone’s time. We didn’t see much of her after that.
“These days, of course, they’d call it an ‘attention-getting device’ or some such rubbish, but do ye see my point, Conn?”
“Bartlett’s son, you’re thinking?”
“Well, if it wasn’t JP who took the wallet out of Bartlett’s car, who did? Who else would have access to the car? I presume Bartlett keeps it in his garage at home when he isn’t driving it.”
“But why? I’m sure the kid doesn’t want for money from his parents.”
Isabelle turned back to stare at the flames.
“Sometimes children resent their parents if they feel they are spending too much time and energy on other things. In the case of an eighteen-year-old boy, like young Bartlett, when puberty is running rampant, and there are too many rules … Perhaps his father spends more time playing with his car than talking to his son.”
“But how did the wallet end up in JP’s apartment?”
This was still the damning fact against JP.
“Does Bartlett’s son know JP? He likely at least knows who JP is since his father’s car is in your shop quite often, and the boy’s been at your shop at least once that you know of. You said JP shares an apartment with other young men, but is hardly ever there himself. What if the Bartlett boy knows where JP lives, even knows one of the roommates? It doesn’t take long to open a cupboard under a sink and hide a wallet there when the friend you’ve dropped in to see has his back turned.”
She asked whether Bartlett kept a lot of cash in his wallet.
“I don’t know, but it would be in keeping with his personality to carry wads of cash. And lots of people have the habit of tossing their wallets into their glove compartments and locking them in if they don’t think they’re going to need them. He always paid us by cheque, using a booklet from his briefcase.”
I pieced together Isabelle’s theory.
“So the actual thief, say it’s Bartlett’s son, went to the hardware store in Maniwaki to … establish that the credit cards were in circulation, knowing full well that the card-issuing companies had been alerted, then planted the wallet in JP’s apartment, knowing that his father had registered the complaint already against JP. The police would be looking at JP right away once aware that someone tried to use one of the cards, would search his apartment as a matter of course and find the wallet.”
This explanation was definitely worth pursuing at our session with Derek on Thursday, if not sooner. I took another sip from my glass of malt and put it on the oak plant stand next to the wing chair. Jerry stirred in my lap. I had stopped scratching behind his battered ears as we had been talking, and he gave me a one-eyed glare.
I stood up, placing Jerry on one of the few free areas of Isabelle’s faded Persian rug, and stirred the logs in the fireplace.
At that point, I heard a key in the front door lock, and Sandy burst in. At the sound of the door opening, Isabelle had reached toward her cane collection in the urn she kept close to her chair.
“No need to whack me with a cane, Isabelle,” Sandy said. “We’ll be out of your hair this weekend, don’t forget.”
I could feel the ear-to-ear grin on my face at seeing Sandy, hair tousled from the wind, her vivid eyes gleaming. She strode up to me and touched me gently on the chest.
“Move over, Conn. It’s cold out there.” She was rubbing her hands in front of the fire.
I looked over at Isabelle who smiled at me over Sandy’s shoulder. Sandy turned around, unbuttoning her coat.
“Jane no trouble? I had a lovely drive in the Miata, Conn. Soon have the top down, we’re going to have lots of picnics in the summer. Ooooh, is that scotch? I’ll go get some. Anyone need a refill? Ooooh, it’s nice to be home … Well, it’s home ’til the weekend, anyway …”
At that, she strode out to the kitchen.
“I told you she was a lovely gel, Conn.”
“Yes, you did.”
“You and your wife, you didn’t have children.”
“No.”
“Any particular reason? Do you mind me asking, Conn?”
“No, not at all. We tried, but Liz … She just kept miscarrying. In the end, it was cancer in the uterus that killed her.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to …”
“It’s okay. We talked about adopting, but somehow I think the … impetus? … just wasn’t there. Liz had her own career, too, in the bank. Anyway, we didn’t. It’s a regret, but perhaps just as well.”
She moved closer to me on the couch.
“Does Conn mean anything? I mean, is it a name like, oh I don’t know, Timothy, meaning son of a tinsmith or something like that?”
“Oh. I didn’t realize that’s where Timothy came from.”
“No, really …”
“Well, my dad said for the Scots it meant ‘free man.’ For the Irish, it means ‘chief.’ They both use it. But what does Sandy mean? Daughter of a beachcomber? Girl who always needs to wash her feet?”
She gave me a push.
“You always do that. Turn my questions about you back to me. I’ve told you all about what happened with my husband, about Jane …”
I got up, put on another disc, an old acoustic Neil Young this time, and freshened our scotches.
“I’m not trying to be evasive, Sandy. It’s just the way I am, I guess. More comfortable asking questions than answering them. Asking questions was always part of my job when I worked in government …”
“Hmm. Okay … And your wife, Liz – she died about three years ago?”
“Yes, just about.”
“Hmm.”
“Yes, I guess that’s part of it. I’m still a bit … careful.”
We just sat for a while, listening to the music and sipping our drinks.
She turned to me.
“About this party …”