BACK at Isabelle’s property, I parked the Cooper in plain view outside the garage. After locking the car, I opened the garage door, stared at the empty space where the Healey had been, then looked at the bits of the Riley for a minute or two. I opened up a stepladder and climbed up to the garage’s twofoot-high loft.
There was just enough light coming in from the garage door entrance to allow me to identify the suitcase I was looking for from among the various boxes and bags of my stuff. I carried it down, left the stepladder in its position under the loft, closed and locked the garage door and carried the suitcase into my living room.
When my father had died, I had inherited, as the eldest son, his Scottish dancing regalia, among other things. I was now looking at his kilt, sporran, stockings, dancing shoes, a beautifully filigreed black dress jacket, plus a formal white shirt, suspenders, and a hat with ribbons.
For some moments, fingering the soft Anderson plaid of his kilt, I was lost in memories. As children, we would sneak onto the stairs to watch as our parents and the other kilted men and white-frocked women danced in sets of eight in the ground floor rooms, rugs rolled up and furniture pushed aside, the record player sounding out strathspeys and reels into the early hours. Our old house shook with stamping feet, laughter, and music. It seemed like ages ago, a happy, less complicated time.
I sighed and rummaged deeper into the suitcase and found what I was looking for. The skean dhu dagger is worn mostly for show, the blade only five inches long, designed to be tucked into a Scotsman’s stocking, a jewel on the top of the handle to catch the light while he capers. I pulled the knife from its scabbard and thumbed the blade. It would do, with a little sharpening.
Back in the garage, I started the grinding wheel, which was bolted to the workbench. In a few minutes, I had a vicious little weapon for close quarters. But what else? Certainly no gun – rifle or pistol.
I went back into my flat and dragged the bag of golf clubs out of the cupboard near the flat’s front door. For some reason – length of the shaft, weight, and angle of the blade – I shot most accurately with the seven-iron anywhere between 130 and 140 yards from the green. I took it upstairs and placed it beside my easy chair in the living room.
After a moment’s reflection, I went back down to the cupboard, pulled the five-wood out of the golf bag, and put it next to the bedside table within easy reach. Then I had another thought. Back in the downstairs hallway, I pulled out the golf bag for the third time.
Later, around 6 p.m., I went over to Isabelle’s. Angela answered the door and led me into the kitchen on tiptoe as Isabelle snored softly in her padded chair.
“Angela, we’re going to have company in about an hour. I’ll be back around 7 after you and Isabelle have had dinner.”
“Sure, Conn.”
She looked puzzled, but returned to her work in the kitchen.
I went for a walk around Isabelle’s property. Aside from her old house and my mews on the other side of the driveway, her fourteen-acre spread consisted of some fields, now fallow, that she rented out to a neighbouring farmer who grew fodder for his cattle every other year. Behind Isabelle’s house, the fields extended out of sight, backing onto adjacent ones owned by this farmer. I walked over to a barn some one hundred yards behind Isabelle’s house.
It was a peaceful sort of building, about ninety years old, massive in the gathering dusk, and in reasonable shape with a green metal roof and only a few gaps where sideboards had rotted here and there. As I opened a creaky side door, pigeons scattered up to the highest point in the loft thirty feet or so above my head.
It smelled of old oil, hay, and ancient manure. The farmer who worked Isabelle’s property stored a tractor and cultivating rig in the main area. Worn harnesses hung from hooks along a line of stalls on the ground floor. I climbed a rickety ladder up to the hayloft, disturbing the pigeons once again. Crossing to the west wall of the loft, I peered through a knothole at the fields behind. The sun was starting to set, tingeing a smattering of small clouds pink on their undersides on a pretty spring evening. I looked at my watch again and retraced my way back down the ladder and out of the barn.
Back at my flat, I turned on the lights and dialed the number Sandy had given me for the London hotel she was staying in. The desk put me through to her room, and after four rings I got voice mail. I didn’t know what to say and put the phone down after a few moments.
RCMP undercover Corporal Dennis Cooke rumbled down Isabelle’s driveway on a shiny black Harley Davidson V-Twin around 7 p.m. The spring weather had brought out the bikers as well as our sports car customers.
Cooke pulled off his helmet and gauntlets still astride the bike, reached into his shirt pocket underneath his leather jacket, and showed me his identification.
He appeared to be about twenty years old, sporting closecropped black hair with a mustache struggling to grow under his nose.
“Can I put the bike in there?” he asked, nodding toward my garage.
I thought a second. The bike should definitely be out of sight since its presence would be a giveaway to Public Works man that someone else was on the property. Besides, it was too nice a machine to be exposed to any overnight spring rain.
“Tell you what, “I said. “I think the barn over there is the better spot.”
He nodded, and I followed him along the track to the barn I’d looked around earlier behind Isabelle’s house. We found a good dry spot for the Harley well out of the way of the farmer’s tractor and cultivator and he left his gloves and helmet on the seat.
Sitting in Isabelle’s living room, looking incongruous and awkward in his biking leathers on one of Isabelle’s fragile sofas, he peered around the room in the gloom while Isabelle, Angela, and I stared at him.
“So, I’ll basically stick to the ground floor. I’ll try to keep out of your way, Ma’am,” he said, looking at Isabelle who glanced at me and pursed her lips.
“That’s fine, lad. Have ye had yer supper yet?”
Cooke blushed and looked down at his boots. Isabelle rolled her eyes at me then fixed her blue searchlights back on Cooke.
“Angela here will give ye a meal in the kitchen now before she goes.”
“Well, Conn, I’m hoping that wee fella is up to the job,” Isabelle said after Cooke left for the kitchen.
I was less than confident myself.
“I’ll call Martello tonight. Sorry about involving you in all this, Isabelle.”
She flapped a hand dismissively, and then rested it on one of the canes she kept in the urn beside her chair.
“Have ye heard from Sandy, Conn?”
“No, she’ll be tired out from the drive today … and I’m not sure she’ll want to talk to me much right now anyway.”
“Well, don’t get ahead of yerself. One thing at a time.”
I returned to my flat across the laneway after Angela left in her old Neon. She’d return at her usual time of 7 a.m., ready to get Isabelle under way for the day and, no doubt, to prepare Cooke a huge breakfast under Isabelle’s orders after his long, hopefully watchful night.
I reached Martello on the cell phone.
“Tony, this Cooke guy. He seems like a nice kid and I like his Harley. But is this the best you can do?”
Tony sighed on the other end of the line.
“Conn, my commander is not happy with us providing you with anyone in the first place. He thinks Ottawa PD should be doing the lion’s share of tracking down Public Works guy, not us. He wants me to stick with the PR card and the foreign passport investigation. And he is definitely peeved about what he’s calling ‘tying out a goat’ at your place. I was lucky to get anybody at all at this notice, and after Cooke finishes his shift tomorrow morning, I’m going to have to pull in some big markers to get anyone else at all.”
“But with all the technical expertise at your disposal, can’t we set up something more sophisticated here, cameras, heat imaging, whatever, than a guy who can’t even grow a mustache?”
I was getting a bit hot here with Tony, admittedly.
Tony took a breath.
“Conn, let me remind you I wanted you out of the picture in the first place. I can’t get the authorization for a full-blown AV surveillance for something like this. We don’t know what this guy’s goin’ to do, whether he’ll even show up. We’re going on your say-so and I’m taking enough of a risk as it is.
“Look, on that, we may have at least a name soon. I got a message from Phillips who spent most of the day over at Public Works with Tate trying to track down some paperwork about the Jag purchase. He also talked to their personnel people over there. He’s going to call me back tonight according to his message, and I’ll keep you posted. Just hang tight and keep your ears open.”
Tony was now chuckling. I reflected that if I ever got out of this mess, I’d get my ears operated on so they didn’t stick out so much.
“Oh, and by the way, don’t be fooled by young Cooke’s looks. He’s trained, well trained, capice?”
We hung up, and now a part of my anatomy not connected to my ears was growling. I microwaved a mild curry out of a box, which at least took the edge off.
As I washed up the dishes and cutlery, I stared thoughtfully out the galley kitchen window at the darker black of the barn about one hundred yards away. The moon was waxing, on this, the fourth of May and the sky was clear and bright with stars. A breeze was tossing some of the branches of the pine trees close to the barn.
Just after 9 p.m., my landline rang. I trotted to the unit in the hallway and looked at the call display screen. It was not, as I’d hoped, showing the 519 area code of a London hotel number, but an 819 number in Quebec across the river.
I picked up the cordless receiver, and was soon listening to JP’s excited chatter.
I managed to elicit the news from him, over the course of the next hour, that everything was ticking over at Britfit with Dougald and Reg busy servicing cars, moving them in, and shipping them out. In for a major tune-up was a tasty giant Jaguar Mark IX from one of the Jaguar club’s members.
Flaming Fleming had taken Marjorie out to lunch again, and Jerry, back in the afternoon after having the splint removed from his hind leg at the vet’s, had promptly trotted down to the shop’s basement and caught and killed a mouse. This was all good.
“Alors, we are fine, boss. But when are you back?”
I started to speak, but JP interrupted before I could begin.
“Anyway, boss, I must tell you … the Lagonda …”
JP had been busy tracking down Hollywood actor Lawrence Cross. He had found out some basic information on the Internet using Marjorie’s office computer “on my lunch hour boss, don’t worry” including a studio head and shoulders portrait that matched the photo Michelle had found.
But it was a chance remark by Michelle about her oncle after work at the flat they now shared that led to further phone calls to other relatives, then a visit earlier this evening to a ninety-three-year-old maiden aunt called Tante Madeline that led to quite a story.
Lawrence Cross was long dead, killed by crashing his small airplane into a movie theatre, ironically, in downtown Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1956. By then aged fifty-seven, he had been virtually forgotten in Hollywood but was still wealthy enough from a string of romantic and swashbuckling films to indulge himself in cars, aircraft, and other toys.
“No listing of cars he owned, boss, that I can find yet, but he liked racing and went all over the world. I will keep checking. But listen to this …”
“Wait, JP …”
I put down the handset on a table, walked to the front window of my flat that faced Isabelle’s house, and stared out at it for a few moments.
I returned to the phone and picked it up again. I had seen Cooke’s silhouette in Isabelle’s window looking in my direction from about fifty yards away. We’d exchanged a wave. He must have heard the same sound I had.
“It’s okay, JP. Just the wind. This sounds good, if he liked to race and collected cars. A Lagonda would fit.”
“Oui, oui, but I t’ink it is stronger than that …”
Lawrence Cross had apparently been a very busy lad in the ladies’ department, criss-crossing the globe by land, sea, and air to put notches on his cane of conquests between marriages, five in all. It had taken several glasses of wine before Tante Madeline, wizened but apparently still with a gleam in her eye, had confessed to JP and Michelle in the Wakefield, Quebec, seniors’ home earlier tonight that Lawrence Cross often spent time in her arms in Quebec over a twenty-year period.
“Which explains, boss, why the car is in Quebec in the first place,” JP said.
Well, well. I tried to do the math. If this woman was ninetythree now, born in 1916, she would have been only forty years old in 1956, the year Cross was killed. If he first started crossing the border into Quebec in search of love in the cottage country north of Ottawa in, say, 1935 or ’36, driving a Lagonda of that vintage, Tante Madeline would have been about twenty years old. A two decade on-again, off-again affair between a saucy young French-Canadian woman and a mobile, oversexed film star? Not unheard of by any stretch.
“What else did she say, JP?”
“It was a bit difficile … she is quite deaf … mais she said he took her to Montebello in a big fast open car one time. She was … giggles? Giggling?”
Montebello, on the St. Lawrence River, is known for its huge eighty-year-old hotel, formerly owned by Canadian Pacific, made entirely of logs. It still packs in well-heeled tourists now and would have made a wonderful head-turning destination for an enamoured couple in a fast car.
“Seems like a long drive, though, from Hollywood, JP.”
“Mais he had homes all over the States, Conn, in upstate New York, Vermont, as well as California.”
It was all making sense. Upstate New York on the US side of the St. Lawrence River was a playground for wealthy Americans. Bridges and ferries would provide easy access to the Canadian side and on into southern Quebec, a drive of only two hours from Cornwall, Ontario. Before World War II, Americans and Canadians could cross back and forth between the countries with ease, especially an American film star in a flashy and expensive sports racer.
I sighed. Those were the days. In our post-9/11 world now, even the most innocent trip across the border could turn into an interrogative hassle. We had indeed lost something.
I thought some more.
“Did Tante Madeline … did she know the Lagonda was in Quebec, and why?”
“Non, she had no idea, and was vague? … yes, vague about when he stopped coming, or why the car is here. She started falling asleep then.”
“Does Michelle’s uncle know anything about all this part of it? And who is this Aunt Madeline anyway? Who is she the aunt of?”
“You know, Conn, there is something funny still, I think … I will talk to Michelle some more. But look, your lawyer, he sent a fax to the shop today to do with the car.”
JP had wrested this document from Marjorie and offered to send it to me now by fax since I had a fax machine at my flat. He offered to run out to his local twenty-four-hour convenience store that offered a faxing service. After getting the co-ordinates from him, including the daytime phone number, of the Lagonda club’s secretary in England, which he found on the Internet, I ended the call with JP and switched my fax machine on.
I checked my watch. It was 10 p.m. and still too early to call anyone in the UK at what would be 4 a.m. Tuesday morning there.
I decided to check in with Cooke before doing anything else.
We murmured into our cell phones.
“Mrs. McCloud … she’s asleep in her chair. She’s a nice old lady.”
“Don’t be fooled, Corporal. She’s got a mind like a steel trap. But yes, she’s a fine person. By the way, are you armed, Corporal?”
“Oh sure, sure. I have a pistol … and I’ve set up a few little things for the doors and windows. You?”
“No gun, but I think I’ve got the entrances covered here, too,” I said.
“Okay … my Sarg says this guy’s a head case.”
“Yes. But he’s very good at covering his tracks. He’s probably killed two people and is likely a crack addict, sampling his own wares.”
“Ouch. That stuff will make you crazy big-time. By the way, that barn out back …”
Corporal Cooke suddenly took a huge jump up in my estimation.
“Yes,” I replied. “From the barn back it’s all fields that eventually open up on a concession road at a mirror-image property. I’d come that way, too.”
“Yeah. Well, okay, see you in the morning, Mr. Anderson.”
We clicked off our cell phones, and at that point my landline started ringing. Again I trotted over to look at the call display, but again, it wasn’t Sandy in London. JP was sending me Derek’s letter.
I was suddenly tired of technology. I walked around the flat, making a few preparations. By now, 11 p.m., I was running out of gas. I poured a short measure of Islay malt, topped it up with tap water, and sat in my darkened living room, only one small lamp turned on at my shoulder, looking over Derek’s legalistic language of admonitions to the Lagonda club.
It was riveting stuff, and would have scared me to receive it, but I turned out the lamp and fell asleep anyway.