“WE WERE EXPECTING YOUR WIFE to be here,” Bamfield said. They had settled into the spacious sitting room and were seated on sofas and easy chairs for the war-room meeting. Bamfield was a party executive and was not amused to be short a person. He’d put a pile of papers on the coffee table, and now anticipated the discomfort of leaning forward out of the deep sofa to try to reach them when he needed them. It was undignified. Why hadn’t he said they should use the dining room table?
Devlin’s campaign manager, Ed Barber, looked in anxious appeal at Devlin.
“She’s visiting her mother. She was due back last night. Let’s just get started. I can tell her anything we discuss,” Devlin said. He was covering his anxiety well, he thought. He had no idea where she was, only that she’d said she’d be back in a few days. She’d taken her car. He’d found her behaviour of late stranger and stranger and had begun to have a vague fear that it might somehow affect his campaign. The call with that inspector from Nelson had rattled him badly.
“We’re not here to tell you things, Devlin. We’re here to make sure we know everything there is to know about you, so we have no cock-ups during the election. It’s a few days away.”
“I assure you, there is not a single skeleton in any Devlin closet. You can look till you’re blue in the face. In fact, why are we having this meeting? Does every prospective politician have to submit to this sort of nonsense?” Devlin was not as nonchalant as he sounded or looked. His wife’s behaviour and the revelation of a grown daughter somewhere were both factors he had not expected, and had no control over.
“Obviously we vetted you,” Bamfield said. “It’s just that we’ve found something that might be a matter of concern. And I must say, the fact that you have been mum on the subject is, yes, a concern. What else are you not telling us, I wonder.”
Devlin could feel his face redden. Had that bloody Irving said anything to anyone about the girl? “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” he said angrily. He got up and went to the decanter on the sideboard and poured himself another scotch. He did not offer it to anyone else.
“Your wife, Devlin.”
Amazed, Devlin turned to look at Bamfield. “My wife? What’s she got to do with the price of tea in China?” Not the illegitimate daughter?
“Her family. Not comme il faut, I think you’ll agree. We’re going to have to come up with a strategy, that’s all. Agree on a story, to put it more crudely.”
Barber looked at Devlin’s face, and his heart sank. It was abundantly clear that the poor sap had absolutely no idea what Bamfield was getting at. And neither had he, which made it worse. For the first time he began to wonder if he’d hitched his wagon to the wrong star.
Bamfield must have seen the same thing. “For God’s sake, sit down, man. You can’t be all that ignorant! No need to panic. We just have to come up with a plan.” But he was thinking how damaging it would be to have to jettison this candidate. Good-looking, successful, from a sterling business empire, money poured into him already—it would be a bloody shame, that’s all.
Devlin was back on the sofa, watching Bamfield, waiting to hear what was coming, his mind going desperately over every meeting he’d ever had with a member of Serena’s family. Every dinner, every cocktail party, every Christmas. Of course, he knew some members of her family had their fingers in dubious pies, but had he ever directly heard anything? Had he ever directly benefited? Her father was wealthy and ran a completely respectable furniture-manufacturing company, that much was true. Her mother was a notable society hostess. His own father would have approved of her in every way. They could not possibly imagine he and Serena were directly tainted? A tiny misgiving lurked in the back of his mind. He’d met her at a not particularly respectable club. Would they make something of that?
“They have a good front, the Lees, and if there was only that, we’d be sitting pretty. Unfortunately, there’s her brother and, worse, her uncle and cousins. I dug it up in no time, so you can bet the other side are probably already on to it.”
“I don’t understand. Her brother is a lawyer. He has a very successful firm.” Devlin pushed his hair back fretfully.
“He does indeed. The most lucrative part of his practice is defending gangsters,” Bamfield said, waving his empty glass at Barber, who hopped up to fetch the decanter of scotch.
“But that’s not a crime, surely? An attorney is going to have unsavoury clients. It’s part of the deal.”
“Yes, it’s all very well, but unfortunately some of them are his, and her, relations. In fact, it’s worse than that. We suspect that her father is in it up to the gills. His company is a front for a sizeable enterprise—gambling, prostitution, you name it. And at least one probable hit man.”
Devlin felt pinned to his seat. How had he not known the extent of her father’s “businesses”? Had he been so swept up in her beauty and society connections and busy with work that he hadn’t seen? Well, yes, obviously. Or had he known in his heart and just ignored it? He stood up convulsively and began to pace.
“If what you say is true, I can’t see how we can possibly cook up a ‘story’ to cover it. I can’t believe what you say is true. Serena must not even know the extent of it, or she would have told me. She would never have let me go this far into a campaign without telling me.” But uppermost in his thoughts was this: he’d been a complete fool over her.
The noise of the front door opening caused Devlin to jump. He opened the sitting room door and ducked into the foyer. His wife was there, pulling off her gloves. He had to tell her; she couldn’t be ambushed like this.
“You can rest easy about your bastard daughter,” she said. Too late he realized he’d left the door open. “I’ve taken care of her; Oh, don’t look at me like that. It’s just a couple of days, till after the election.”
THE NURSE KNOCKED and then put her head around the door. “You have a visitor, Miss Scott.” She was young and cheerful and missed the look of weariness that crossed her patient’s face as she lay back and closed her eyes.
“Who is it? If it’s that policeman, I don’t think I want to see him.”
“Rose? It’s Wendy.” Wendy Keeling, wearing a long, dark blue winter coat and a hat to match, stood by the bed for a moment and then sat on the chair. She took off her gloves and reached for Miss Scott’s hand.
“Wendy!” Miss Scott sat up and took both her colleague’s hands in hers. “Where did you go? I couldn’t find you. I thought he—” She fell back onto the pillows again, tears springing into her eyes. “It’s all been so dreadful! A kind of nightmare! When I found you gone, I—”
“Shh, shh. It’s all right. You see? We’re both in one piece.”
“But the children, what happened to the children? I’ve been in here, and I didn’t know where you were.”
“It’s fine. A very nice woman, a Miss Winslow from King’s Cove, has been teaching them. They are all perfectly happy. I will go back after the Christmas holiday. Everything will be as it was. The main thing is for you to get better. Has your fiancé been to see you?” At this Wendy glanced around, as if he might be hiding somewhere.
Miss Scott took her hand and shook her head ruefully. “There is no fiancé. I made him up.” She put up her hand to forestall the question she saw forming on Wendy Keeling’s lips. “I had to. I knew they wouldn’t let me go early unless it was something like marriage, and I had to leave. I had to. I couldn’t take it anymore.” She brought her sheet up to her eyes to staunch the tears. Wendy pulled open the drawer in the white enamelled side table and found a box of tissues and handed her one.
“The police told me about the horrible notes you were getting. Rose, why didn’t you tell me? I had no idea. We could have told the police. He could have been stopped.”
Shaking her head, Miss Scott said, “He came into the house last July. I found him there, he nearly—” More tears. Then she turned on Miss Keeling. “Where did you go? How could you have left me to deal with him on my own?”
This outburst was loud enough to cause the nurse to come in and ask if everything was all right, and to remind the visitor that the patient should not be overexcited as it was bad for her heart.
Wendy sat back and wondered what she could possibly say. It would do Rose no good to learn she herself had been kidnapped and would possibly have been killed if she’d not escaped. She leaned forward, laying a comforting hand on the bedclothes. “I am sorry, Rose. I should have told you. I was going to go see my mother. I didn’t quite get there, but I will go now, over the holiday.”
“Your mother? But you told me your mother was dead.” Miss Scott seemed to forget her own troubles for a moment.
“I thought she was, and then I got a note from my father to say she was alive and living on the coast.” She had. From the man she had always thought of as her father, Zeke Irving. He had left it with the police in Nelson, because he knew, he said, that she wouldn’t want to see him. Not after everything. But he was pleased to see she’d made something of herself and was sorry they couldn’t have spent more time together when he saw her last. Apparently the police had located her mother, and he was sure they would tell her where she was. By now, he said, she probably knew he wasn’t her real father. He’d tried to phone her to tell her to watch out for Devlin and his wife but hadn’t got through. He hoped she’d understand that he had tried his best.
She’d wondered, when Inspector Darling had handed her the envelope from Irving, what she felt now that she knew who her real father was, and she was relieved to find it had not much shaken her view of Zeke Irving or herself. She had spent ten years on her own, constructing a life for herself. But she could not hide from herself that she wanted to see her mother, to ask her why she’d left. She pushed Harry Devlin far away in her mind. Maybe one day. She took a breath and turned back to her friend.
“I’m going to my mother too, as soon as I’m better,” Rose Scott said listlessly, turning to look toward the window, where the afternoon was already darkening for another long winter night. “In Manitoba. She’s alone on the farm. I doubt I will teach again.” She turned back and looked at Wendy. “I’ll never marry either. I lost the man I loved. He went missing, you see, in Holland. A friend from my unit wired me last spring to say he was dead. It was at about that time he started up, Gaskell, you know, with his notes and insinuations. I think he’d been in the house before, gone through my drawers, my mail even. He started saying I was an ‘army whore.’ He must have seen my letters. But it doesn’t matter now. He’s dead. I killed him.”
THE RESTAURANT WAS quiet, with only one older couple sitting at a table near the back.
“That’ll be us one day, eating dinner at five o’clock,” Darling said, nodding toward the couple. “Hello, Signor Lorenzo, it is good to see you. Do you mind having us descend on you this early?” Darling took off his hat and shook hands with the restaurant owner with something approaching affection. He thought of Lorenzo’s restaurant as the place where he had truly begun to be aware that he was falling in love with Lane.
“Inspector, Signora! You can come here any time, any time.” He seized Lane’s hand and kissed it. “You are more beautiful than even before!”
Lane, embarrassed by the Continental treatment of her hand, and his compliments, said, “My husband says one day we will be old and wanting to eat early like those people, but I was about to tell him that we already are! Something smells wonderful.”
She sat in the chair Lorenzo pulled out and brushed a fall of hair away from her eyes. Lorenzo, her coat over his arm, said, “The inspector, he will get old soon with that terrible police job, but you will never get old, Signora.”
“That’s you told,” Lane said, when Lorenzo had disappeared to procure the veal piccata that was today’s special. “But you needn’t upset yourself. I will still love you when you are old.”
“You don’t know that. I could become extremely cranky when I get old. You will want to push me over for some perennially cheerful specimen, like Ames.”
“I don’t know about that. Could your crankiness get any worse than it is already? I haven’t pushed you over yet. Now, has anyone been able to get the ink off that poor man’s face?”
“Poor man, my umbrella! He’s a hired thug. No, it’s worse than that; he’s not hired. He’s a relation of Serena Devlin, the wife of the would-be politician. He owed her a favour, apparently. He’s singing like a canary, as I believe our American brethren say. He’s a bit cross because he was apparently given the fairly easy job of keeping an eye on Miss Keeling until such time as Serena gave new instructions. However, he went off into town for more cigarettes and whisky, and returned to find her gone. He followed her footsteps in the snow for a fair bit to see which direction she was going, at great inconvenience to himself and his expensive Italian shoes, and realized from his map she was headed toward the school. It was very obliging of the local community to put a jaunty sign at the turnoff saying, “Balfour School.” It occurred to him she might seek refuge there. And, by the way, he evinced a grudging respect for your spirited defence. The Vancouver Police are picking up Mrs. Devlin. I don’t fancy her husband’s chances now. This was all to cover up the fact that he had an illegitimate daughter, or at least delay the news getting out. The by-election is on Friday. She just wanted to get Miss Keeling out of the way so no one in the opposition or the press dug her up. She would certainly have been better off leaving well enough alone. How are your ribs?”
Lane reached around to feel where she’d been grazed by a bullet on her honeymoon and winced with a quick intake of breath. “It would perhaps have been better if I hadn’t fallen over the desk trying to retrieve the gun, but nothing a good glass of wine won’t put right.” She was sure Lorenzo would have just the thing, in his secret stash.