MABEL DROPPED THE UTENSILS FROM lunch into the water and was reaching for the dish mop, when a movement at the top end of the driveway caught her eye.
She put the mop down and narrowed her eyes trying to see more clearly. Someone appeared to be approaching the top of their driveway in an enormous black car; she didn’t recognize it. As she watched, the person drove about a car length past the fence that marked the beginning of their spacious yard, surveyed their property, glanced briefly at the house, and then backed away, executing a quick turn. The car disappeared around the corner to the road leading down the hill. Hurrying into the boot room, Mabel pulled on her wellies, heavy jacket, and scarf, and took up her walking stick. Followed by the excited spaniels, she marched across the garden, the dogs romping onto the icy snow, and up the long driveway.
Whoever it was had disappeared down the road and onto, she assumed, the main road. She could hear the car faintly in the distance. The dogs began to bark, looking into the empty orchard adjacent to the road. She walked toward the road and looked along the length of it. Who the blazes drove a car like that?
Wondering if it was remotely possible that their conversation at lunch might have conjured the hapless Sandy, the only person who had been known to skulk around on other people’s property, Mabel shook her head and started back to the house.
Gwen came to the door to watch her kicking the snow off her boots. “What have you been playing at?” she asked.
“Someone in a huge black car drove right into our driveway, pretty as you like, gave us the once-over, and then drove off, if you must know. It gave me quite a turn. I thought for a moment it might be Sandy. They haven’t let him out, have they?”
“After a year? I doubt it.”
“Who else would sneak about like that?”
“You don’t know it was someone sneaking. It could be someone just got lost. After you’ve finished the dishes and we’ve hung up the sheets to air, let’s pop down to the post office and see if anyone else has seen anyone. Don’t tell Mother just yet. She’ll only accuse you of imagining things,” Gwen said, with a tone that suggested she was wondering about that herself.
“WE’LL HAVE TO canvass the neighbours,” Darling said. It was the end of an unfruitful day. “Miss Scott remembers nothing. The Education Department knows nothing against Miss Keeling. It was miserable on Friday, and Saturday for that matter, depending on when this all happened. Most sensible people would have been indoors. I’ll stop by the immediate neighbours of the teacher’s cottage on my way in tomorrow morning.”
Darling got up and stretched, reaching for his coat. It was already dark outside, though it was only 5:30. He had a momentary thought about 5:30 pm in the summer, still a long day left to enjoy. Now it felt as though it was long past his dinnertime already.
Ames nodded. “Do you want me to meet you out there?”
“No. You’re fine. We’ll organize where we go from here when we get back here tomorrow.” Downstairs he met Terrell, who was just heading out.
“Ah, sir. The man from the Legion. A bit too much to drink. He’s sleeping it off in a cell. I’ll charge him with mischief in the morning. He isn’t up to understanding much now.”
Darling nodded. “Good man. What’s his name?”
“Frank Dixter. He works at a heavy-vehicles garage just up the road to Castlegar.”
“Not one of our regulars. And, happily, not the garage we take the car to. Right, well, see you tomorrow.”
While Darling waited for the ferry to make the trip up the north shore of the lake, a faint dusting of snow began to fall, the still-small flakes dancing in the ambient light of the street lamp and the headlights of a car pulling up behind his. He thought about Terrell and wondered where he lived, and if he cooked, or had a room with a nice motherly landlady. Ames, he knew, didn’t cook but had a nice motherly mother who looked after him. Though Darling had met her once, he had never set foot in Ames’s house. He had a vague feeling it was up the hill from the station somewhere on the east side of town. It was, perhaps, his own very new domestic arrangements that sent his mind off in this direction. Private life, he thought, was blissfully private. He had no real wish to know how the men under him lived, and he abhorred the thought that they might know, or even think, about how he lived.
Of course, it didn’t stop him from mildly abusing Ames on the subject of his continuing to live with his mother, but the sergeant seemed to take it in good part. After all, he wasn’t married, and his mother didn’t seem to interfere in his life much, though he assumed she hoped he would marry soon. He shifted into gear as the last vehicle came off into town and smiled in the darkness of the car. Ames looked likely to remain a well-cared-for bachelor for some time unless he could regulate his love life.
Terrell was different. He was young, certainly, perhaps not much older than Ames, but he was less boyish, somehow, more serious and earnest. He’d been in the war, that was part of it, but Darling wondered if another part of it was the need to not stand out, an impulse to excel at his job to reduce the amount of prejudice he must experience. Or maybe Terrell just had the makings of a damn good policeman and was of a naturally serious disposition.
I’m no psychiatrist, Darling thought. I ought not to go around assigning motivation for people’s behaviour when I know nothing about them. He was sure Lane would have gotten to the bottom of Terrell after an hour of knowing him.
Ought he to treat Terrell differently? All the crew of his Lancaster bomber took a certain amount of ribbing from him, regardless. They had been an excellent group of men, and he had been their commander. The ribbing was a way, perhaps, of softening that power of absolute command invested in him by the air force. He could see, looking back, that if he’d left any single man out of this relationship, that man might have felt isolated, not part of the crew. A continued formal courtesy to Terrell might also make him not feel part of the crew at the police station. It was likely that Terrell just wanted to be treated like any officer on the Nelson Police force, and not have to constantly salve other people’s feelings about his background. Terrell, after all, was Terrell. Anything that might trouble others about him was their problem.
DARLING AND LANE had washed the dishes and now sat in the armchairs pulled up to the Franklin wood stove with pre-bed whisky in hand.
“It surprised me to suddenly remember today that the mirror in the bathroom of the teacher’s cottage was cracked. Did you notice it when you went through the house? I don’t think I took it in because it must be the door of a cabinet, and nothing had been pulled out or messed about in the bathroom. I was thinking about an old fairy tale about a cruel snow queen who cursed people to see bad things in a mirror when they looked at themselves.”
“‘The Snow Queen,’ of course. The whole thing makes sense now. Why didn’t I think of that? We should be able to get on with the arresting tomorrow,” said Darling, reaching over to stroke her hair, its chestnut colour highlighted by the flicker of flames in the stove.
“You laugh now, but you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your face when I solve the whole thing. The teacher’s bathroom mirror, if I may explain more thoroughly without further heckling from the audience, was cracked, but not completely broken. The rest of the house was really knocked about, things swept off the counter and broken, things thrown everywhere and so on. But the bathroom only had that cracked mirror. It made me think of someone looking at it and cracking it angrily with a hairbrush, as if she didn’t like what she’d seen.” The hairbrush image seemed suddenly clear to her, as if she remembered it from somewhere.
“Well, if it was Miss Keeling in her guise as an assault and battery expert suddenly looking at what she’d become, I suppose,” Darling said. “Good grief. We’ve gotten through the whole of dinner and I didn’t ask about your first day as teacher. How did it go?” Darling suddenly felt his neglect acutely. He’d come in, sniffed about at the dinner arrangements, and launched into his day. They’d had a long discussion about his thoughts about Terrell, to which she’d said, “Of course you must treat him as you do anyone else. I, and the other women I worked with, spent a good deal of the early days of the war being treated either derisively or with kid gloves because people were worried about our being women. It’s annoying, apart from everything else. It leaves room for people to assume you can’t do as good a job, for example, or, alternatively, are getting special privileges. Later on, it was much better. There was a war on, people knew what we could do, and we all mucked on together, pretty much as equals. Some never got over it, of course, but lots did. If Terrell is a good policeman, and everything you tell me suggests he is, he should come in for all the usual treatment you mete out to everyone else, God help him.” Darling had seen the absolute logic of this.
Lane told him about her day at the school. In truth she’d come home exhausted, but, at the same time, stimulated. She’d surprised herself. Never having been exposed to children particularly, aside from Angela’s boys, who formed a self-entertaining society of their own, she was pleased to discover she really quite enjoyed them. They were unguarded, in a way. You knew what you were getting, unlike with adults.
“They were really very helpful. I was stumbling about trying to pretend I was in charge, and at every turn there was a reminder from one of them about what the normal classroom routine was. It seems children are quite conservative and like to see the regular way of doing things maintained.”
“How do you know they weren’t pulling your leg?”
“No, they weren’t. I was told that not everyone was old enough to use ink, that we must say a prayer at the beginning of each day, and that we were to do penmanship exercises before copying anything from the board.” She paused. “I find it hard to believe anything ill about Miss Keeling. The children, all of them, really like her. That means, I think, that she is a very genuine person. Children would know instantly if someone was pretending to be something they weren’t.”
“You put an awful lot of faith in the wisdom of children. I should have thought they could be duped like anyone else. In fact, they are sometimes, by people who wish them ill.”
“Yes, of course.” Lane thought for a moment, feeling her own naïveté. Darling’s police experience must have included some dire examples of this. “In this case, it’s a feeling, I suppose. They believe they have given their trust to someone who is trustworthy, someone they know really likes them and won’t hurt them. It is clear from what Angela said that Miss Scott ruled with a kind of benevolent dictatorship, but the way the students talked about Miss Keeling, it seems as if she was more relaxed, but still in charge, if you know what I mean. The grown-up in the room.”
IN THE MORNING, Darling slowed down at the turnoff that would lead to the teacher’s cottage. Though he did not like to admit it, Lane’s mirror observation had stuck with him. It was an anomaly, like the bedroom that had not been ransacked. The violence of the destruction in the rest of the cabin suggested that whoever did it would have smashed the mirror hard enough to knock all the glass out. Unless of course it had been cracked all along. That was the trouble with investigating this sort of crime. You never quite knew what you had to take into account.
Instead, he drove forward to the next road and bumped down on the icy snow and pulled up before a modest house, the front door of which opened onto a large porch facing the lake. It must be lovely to sit out there in the summer, he thought, rapping on the screen door. In the silence he turned and looked out toward the lake. The sun was finally beginning to throw light on the mountains across the water. It looked like the beginning of another sunny, icy day.
He heard the inside door open, and he turned and touched his hat. Obscured slightly by the screen, a woman in a green bathrobe and a turban covering bobby-pinned curls asked him cautiously what he wanted.
“Inspector Darling, Nelson Police. We are investigating a situation that occurred during the weekend next door, and I’m wondering if you heard or saw anything unusual between, say, Friday afternoon and Sunday night?”
“Them teachers,” the woman said.
“What is your name?” She looked like someone who was past having school-aged children.
“Mrs. Merchant.” She glanced in the direction of the cottage. “Don’t see much from here. That man on the other side, his house is built closer. No doubt he sticks his nose in.”
Darling looked as well. A solid bank of aspen would obscure the cottage in the summer, and even with the leaves off for the winter, it was difficult to see the cottage clearly. Its front door faced the road, not the lake.
“In what way?”
“He’s a nasty piece of work. Sue, that’s his wife, made a run for it, but he wouldn’t let her take the child.” Unpleasant, to be sure, but this wasn’t moving his particular business this morning forward.
“Do you know either of the teachers, Miss Scott or Miss Keeling?”
“I don’t have no kids in school. I don’t involve myself in things that aren’t nothing to do with me.”
Belying, Darling thought, her apparently intimate knowledge of the marital troubles of . . . he realized he hadn’t asked the man’s name.
“What is the name of the neighbour on the other side?”
“Gaskell. He works the Nelson ferry.”
Darling took out a card and held it up. Only then did Mrs. Merchant open the door an inch and he slipped it to her. “Can you telephone if there is anything you remember?”
She looked at the card. “Why? What’s happened to them?”
Darling touched his hat. “Thank you, Mrs. Merchant.”
GASKELL’S HOUSE WAS rundown. That it had been painted once was evident, but the little paint remaining was peeling, and the yard was full of rubbish: a rusted barrel, some sort of engine parts, just showing under their cover of frozen snow. The stick of a broom or mop was thrown onto the surface of the snow. The house looked empty. No smoke from the chimney. Gaskell must be at work, and the child at school. He’d leave a card. He climbed the stairs to the narrow porch. A rusted chain attached to the house suggested there might have been a dog once. He shuddered. A beastly life for a dog. The curtains were all closed. He took out a card, unscrewed the cap of his pen, and was about to write a note asking the occupant to contact him, when he saw the curtain move and a small face stare out at him. Darling smiled encouragingly and then knocked on the door frame. The curtain closed. He wondered if he’d scared the child away, but then he heard someone struggling with the door.
A little boy stood in the doorway, holding a tattered quilt around his body. He looked at Darling but said nothing. He was pale and slender.
“What’s your name, then?” Darling asked, squatting down to get at eye level.
“Samuel.” Not Sam. Samuel.
“I’m Inspector Darling, from the Nelson Police, Samuel. Would you like to see my card?” He pulled it out of his inside pocket and held it up to the screen door. The boy pushed the screen door open and looked at the card.
“My father isn’t home,” he said. But Darling scarcely heard him. Not only was the boy undernourished and unkempt, he had a black eye that was beginning to turn ugly shades of blue and green. It looked a good three or four days old. If his father had given him that, he might clam up if he asked him about it.
“Not at school today?” Darling pitched his voice in a friendly tone.
“I was sick.”
“I see. Who is looking after you?”
The boy hesitated. “I’m okay now,” he said finally.
“Can I come in?” Darling asked.
Samuel opened the door and held it. The house was freezing. The door opened directly into a kitchen with a tiny table and three chairs. A window above the sink faced out toward the lake. No beauty seen through it could make up for the cold and disarray inside the house. A box of cereal lay overturned, and clearly empty, and a jar of peanut butter sat open with a spoon in it. There wasn’t much left. An empty milk bottle stood on the table by a glass.
Darling saw no fridge and continued through a narrow door to a sitting room. The bleakness was intensified by closed curtains and an ancient, dirty, and worn area rug. Blankets were piled on a collapsing brown sofa and a book lay turned over on the top of the pile. Robinson Crusoe. Darling picked it up.
“Are you reading this?”
Samuel nodded. “I got some other books, but I read them all. This is my favourite one.”
Darling looked at the fly-leaf. “To Darling Samuel, with love from Mother.” He looked around the dark room. “Is your mother at work?”
“She’s gone right now. She’s coming back. She left at my birthday.”
“Oh! When is your birthday?”
Samuel smiled. “September 10. I turned nine.”
Blimey, Darling thought. It was December. His mission to discover if anyone in the house heard or saw anything at the teacher’s cottage was abandoned. “And your father? Is he at work? He works at the ferry, doesn’t he?”
The boy was silent for a moment. “He never came home. I was scared some of the time.”
AMES AND TERRELL were having breakfast at the café. “I always eat the same thing every time. Scrambled eggs and toast and some coffee. I’m afraid April thinks I’m a little predictable in my habits.”
“Sounds good to me.” Terrell smiled. “Except I take a little less sugar in my coffee, sir.”
Ames smiled. “You, my mother, my ex-girlfriend. Everyone has something to say to me about the sugar. I saw Dixter leaving this morning. Didn’t like our hospitality?”
“I feel kind of sorry for him. He has a whopping hangover. He never even said goodbye.”
“I bet his wife won’t be too happy either. Drinking in the Legion seems to be an occupational hazard. Someone usually has to get tossed out. I heard that in the thirties there was a huge donnybrook and the then boss got a good punch in the solar plexus. I’d like to see someone try that with Darling!”
Terrell smiled. “No kidding! What do you think about this teacher business?” he asked. They were sitting at the counter where they could see the cook’s head bobbing up and down behind the window. Two plates were put up, but April was seeing to someone in a booth.
“It’s hard for me to imagine a young woman bashing someone over the head and running off. But I guess it happens.” He could imagine that under severe enough provocation Tina Van Eyck, the mechanic at her father’s garage near Balfour, could do it, but he still resisted the thought that women could be violent in that way. After all, Tina had had a lot of provocation the month before in a recent murder case he’d been in charge of, and she hadn’t knocked anyone’s block off. He shook his head. It had looked like things might improve in that quarter. For reasons that baffled him still—and had made him a bit of a laughingstock at the station—she had brought him flowers after that case in November. It wasn’t a romantic gesture, really. She’d asked to see him, thrust the flowers into his hand, and said, “Thanks.” He had tried a couple of times to invite her out, but she had put him off. He was beginning to feel it didn’t pay to be soft on a hard girl.
“Sir?”
“Sorry. A million miles away.” Only twenty. Should he try driving out there one afternoon? That hadn’t gone at all as he had hoped last time. “Oh, thanks,” Ames said. April was winking at Terrell and pushing Ames’s breakfast toward him.
“You know, I’m wondering if Miss Keeling was also a victim. She’s a good decade younger than Miss Scott. Maybe the assailant kidnapped her.” Terrell didn’t say for what purpose, and Ames didn’t ask.
“You’re suggesting a random sort of attack by a stranger. A man knows there are women alone, robs the house, knocks out the older teacher, and carries off the younger one. The thing is, there’s that threatening note directed at one of them. I’m headed out after breakfast to see if I can find any more.”
“Good point, sir. I’m not surprised Miss Scott didn’t remember the assault, but I’ll tell you what surprised me: Darling said she remembered everything else about her life, but not that she’s getting married.”
Ames piled eggs on his toast. “You think that’s significant?”
“Isn’t that an important thing? Especially when you’re her age and you think you might not ever marry?”
April was standing by the coffee machine waiting for it to fill. She looked at them and shook her head.
Ames saw her. “What?”
“Men always think women want nothing in life but to get married.” She turned and poured three cups of coffee for the noisy group at the booth. “What did we fight a war for, anyway?” she added on her way past them with the tray.
Ames chewed his lip and looked at Terrell. “You fought the war. I missed it. Is that what you fought for?”
Terrell breathed in the scent of his unsweetened coffee and gave a little speculative nod. “Maybe, in part.”
April interrupted any further speculation. “Would you look at that! I never thought I’d see the day.”
Both men turned in time to see Inspector Darling coming into the café with a little boy who looked like he could use some breakfast and a good wash.
Ames leaped up. “Sir?”
Darling lifted Samuel onto the seat next to Terrell. “Samuel, this is Constable Terrell, and this is Sergeant Ames. The constable is going to make sure you get a good breakfast. A big mug of coffee for me, please, April.” Darling collapsed beside the boy.
“Are you real policemen?” Samuel asked. “Can I have hot chocolate?”
April, a look of distress in her eyes, leaned forward and said, “You certainly can. Would you like some scrambled eggs and . . .” she turned to the kitchen, where the cook had stopped proceedings to watch what was unfolding at the counter, and mouthed something. He gave a small nod. “And pancakes?” April finished.
ON THE WAY back to the station, Darling responded to Ames’s unasked question with barely compressed rage. “He’d been left there, on his own, no heat, little food, and for who knows how long. Possibly since Friday, and it’s now Wednesday. When I asked him why he hadn’t telephoned someone he said he mustn’t because it would make his father angry. He says he did hear something next door, as it happens, sometime in the evening after he got home from school. He saw a black car leaving, because it had got stuck in the snow and its engine was revving, and he went to look out the window.”
“On his own, in this cold?” Ames glanced back at the café, seeing only the reflection of the street on the window.
“You might well ask. He told me there had been food in the house, but he’d certainly eaten his way through most of it. We’re going to have to talk to child protection. Apparently it’s not the first time. There’s a local family that took him in once because their child went to play with him and found him alone. He said his father got angry and told him not to go begging at other people’s houses.”
“No mother?”
“Mother left a couple of months ago, if what he says is accurate. He’s a very intelligent little chap. Reads widely of all everyone’s favourite children’s books. I expect that’s the mother’s doing. I brought some along. He has a bag in the car.”
They pushed open the door of the station. O’Brien lumbered off his stool and approached with a sheet of paper. “You’re not going to like this, sir. Hit and run. Victim deceased.”