Death in a Darkening Mist Read online

  THE PHONE ON Darling’s desk jangled, pulling him out of his reverie. He’d been gazing at the snow in the morning light, now thick over everything except the street, which had just been ploughed in the last half-hour, allowing cars and trucks to crawl slowly into their day. His pant legs were still wet from the walk down the hill.

  “Darling,” he said into the receiver.

  “Inspector. It hit me the minute I woke up. Trotsky!”

  “Good morning, Miss Winslow.” He had a sudden mad urge to say, “You have Trotsky there now as well as Charles Andrews?” but said, “Trotsky, as in Leon?”

  “Yes. He was murdered by Stalin. Well, not by Stalin himself, but not by a bespoke Russian agent, either. He was murdered by his own secretary, a Mexican.”

  “Ah. What you are saying is that we might not be looking for a phantom Soviet agent at all. But for something more homegrown.”

  “Well, it would be a lot easier than spiriting someone into the country and then trying to get them out again, even if you used Alaska or the north coast somewhere.”

  “You seem to think our borders very porous.”

  “Aren’t they?”

  “Yes, well. You’ve given us something to think about. We need to find a Canadian with a button missing. It’ll be much easier now. Thank you for that.”

  “No need to get shirty, Inspector. How’s the snow there?”

  “Deep and crisp and even. What about there?”

  “Same. Nothing will move around here. Well, except me. I’ve acquired a pair of old snowshoes from the Hughes ladies and I’m going to go out on them. Good luck with the Canadian assassin.”

  “By the way, you were right about the weapon. A Welrod MK II.”

  “Ah. You got that from your chums, as you call them, in England.” There was a silence after this.

  “Miss Winslow,” Darling hesitated, then plunged. “Is it true that bank clerk Charles Andrew has been out to see you five times?” He knew he was being small, emphasizing “bank clerk.”

  There was a longish silence. “Barely two. I feel like I’m back in the firm. Are you collecting intelligence about me? You’ll be bored stiff in no time, I assure you.”

  “I’m sorry. No, it’s that he’s the son of my housekeeper, and she was rattling on. Apparently you’ve made quite a conquest there.” He left this hanging in the air.

  “Fantastic,” she said. “I was beginning to think I was a hopeless case.”

  “You will be if you lumber yourself with him,” Darling said. Did he sound as bothered as he felt? He hoped not.

  But he did. Lane smiled at her old phone, thinking now that she might never change it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  IN THE END, LANE DID not venture out on her snowshoe adventure that day. Instead, she took from the shelf by the little table where she kept her typewriter some paper, a roll of tape, a pile of index cards, and three well-sharpened pencils, and went into the sitting room, surveying where she might set up her workspace. In the summer she had used the great expanse of the floor in her attic room for the same purpose, but it was unheated. On the floor in front of the Franklin, she decided. It would give her plenty of room and she would be warm. Moving her easy chairs and rolling up the Turkish carpet, she exposed the pine floor. It would need a sweep, but that accomplished, she spread the paper out to create a large rectangle of blank space for her to think onto.

  How would she work? A list of questions? Or using her wartime strategy of lining people and facts on mental shelves? It was geography that seemed to her to be paramount. Zaharov had come all the way from Russia via New Denver to be shot at Adderly. Someone else had come from somewhere to shoot him. The Bertolli boys might have seen him. She and they had come from King’s Cove to be a part of it. At what she thought might be reasonable distances apart, both to give her room for placing cards and to roughly indicate actual distance between the places, she wrote: Adderly, New Denver, and for good measure, and along one edge, Nelson. She could gather miscellaneous facts under this heading. She added King’s Cove. It would do to note that Angela’s boys had been interviewed as well.

  Under Adderly, why not start with the actual killing? She took an index card and wrote:

  Strelieff/Zaharov shot with Welrod MK11. Weapon rare; issued 1943 specifically for the Resistance. How did it get here?

  Killer escapes out back way and goes where? Loses coat button. What colour? Must ask Darling.

  After some thought she added:

  Where is the gun? In the lake, or is assassin planning another strike? If so, against whom?

  She moved to New Denver:

  Cabin of Strelieff/Zaharov. 6 years. Found: 2 books, Tolstoy, English papers, diary, photo of Marina, 1 suitcase. Diary: only student notes.

  She stopped and sat back on her knees. That diary . . . there was something about that diary. What was it?

  She replayed that first visit to Zaharov’s cabin from the beginning. Yes! There it was. His entry in September, something like, “Will I be able to stay here?” What happened in September? she wrote, and then thought about the second visit, when they went to ask Barisoff specifically about Zaharov’s arrival more than six years before. Hadn’t he said? Yes, Zaharov went into town in September and came back uncommunicative. She wrote this down along with the question, What happened in Nelson? Why had Zaharov gone into town? Maybe it would help to know what he’d gone in to buy. She could ask Barisoff. She might even attempt that blasted road on her own.

  Second Suitcase: 3 drafts of articles possibly for state newspaper (which one?), ID card confirming Pavel Zaharov, note from M.

  She stood up and looked at the layout from above. Where would the killer have gone? In a vehicle, certainly, not on foot. Was that photo of the tire tracks relevant here, or was that just Darling making Ames suffer? If it was the killer, it meant he had been driving ahead of them, perhaps back towards town.

  Looking at the route she’d drawn roughly from Adderly up to New Denver, she made a note of Kaslo. Could he have left from there? Wasn’t there a boat that went from there to somewhere? Likely that boat travelled back up the lake towards Nelson, and probably not late in the afternoon. If he did go that way, where would he go? It would depend on whether he was a Soviet agent or a Canadian in the pay of the Soviets. Or someone local who had gotten into some sort of fight with Zharov and exacted revenge, though the use of a gun like the Welrod would be unlikely. Still, that made three possible killers. So he might have escaped up the lake towards Kaslo or New Denver if he was a local, or a Soviet hiding in some unused trapper cabin. She shifted her focus to the possibility of the escape being made towards Nelson. It is more likely, she decided. There’s a ferry that leaves Balfour, or there’s Nelson itself, a good-sized town. If he was from there he could escape into his own life without a trace.

  She toyed with the idea of the man being a local man from Nelson. Is that what had frightened Zaharov? Had he recognized the killer when he was in town in September? But no. Zaharov was a man who’d come all the way from Leningrad, no doubt sneaking over borders, to hide in a tiny community in British Columbia. If he actually recognized someone he feared might kill him, he would have left immediately. He certainly had the personal resources, if not the financial ones, required to slip out of one life and go into another. He would surely do it again if he sensed a credible threat. She was musing on how he might do this when her phone rang. She waited to make sure it was the two longs and a short that were for her.

  “King’s Cove 431.”

  “Miss Winslow, hello! It’s Charles Andrews. It’s my day off and I’ve just been out to see my aunt. I’m here in Balfour. Can I stop by?” He wasn’t snowed in at any rate, she thought. She hesitated. It was odd that she had just spoken to Darling about Andrews and his visits, or his non-visits more like, and now here he was. She would much rather have been left alone with her thoughts, but perhaps a distraction would help her see things more clearly. And it would annoy Darling, she thought rebe
lliously.

  “Yes, go on. I don’t know what the roads will be like, though.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. My baby can handle anything!”

  While she waited, she thought about what Zaharov had said in his diary in September. Should she call Darling about that? Yes. It was important. It was the only evidence they had that Zaharov had felt uneasy about something.

  “Thank you, Miss Winslow,” Darling said over the phone a few minutes later. “Especially as it seems to correspond to Barisoff’s story about the trip into town in September. Could he have recognized his assassin? Have you been doing one of your maps?” He had experienced her geographical approach to sorting problems in the summer, when the body had been found in her creek. It had intrigued him as a system because the writing down of disparate information in her peculiar way seemed to open the consciousness to connections not seen before.

  “Yes, I have. It’s all over the sitting room floor. While you’re trying to sort that out, I’ve got to tidy up. I’m about to have a visitor.”

  “Oh, who?”

  “Charles Andrews, of course. He’s visiting his aunt, and he’s stopping by here. That will be the third time, if you are keeping a count. I shall give him a cup of coffee.”

  “How very pleasant that will be. I’d better let you get on with it.”

  “Goodbye, Inspector. Let me know if you need anything else,” Lane finished brightly.

  “HEY, CHARLIE, THAT was about you!” said Lucy, swinging around in her chair at the telephone exchange.

  Charles Andrews was at the register paying for a small box of chocolates to take to Lane Winslow, up the lake. He looked into the alcove where Lucy worked the wall of phone lines that served the local area.

  “What was? And should you be listening?”

  “I didn’t mean to.” She pouted. “I don’t usually, but I think that English lady is working on a mystery again. It was all over the lake in the summer, you know, about that guy who got killed at her place. She was just talking to the police in Nelson about an assassin or something. Anyway, my ears perked up when I heard your name. You can’t blame me.”

  “How did you hear my name in relation to an assassin?”

  “Not that, silly. It was about you going to visit her. Should I be jealous? You seem to be buying her some chocolates.”

  “No, you should not, my sweet. I’m just being nice to one of my customers. And you should stop listening in on other people’s conversations.”

  Damn, he thought, as he turned out onto the road from the store that served as gas station, telephone exchange, and local grocer. He would have to be more careful. Why had he taken his flirtation with Lucy so far? Sylvia Allen was being intolerable as well. She didn’t seem to get it that it was over. It wasn’t his fault that Lane Winslow was so attractive. And what was she up to anyway? He remembered reading in the paper about that murder up at the Cove. She never mentioned to him any time she was in the bank that it had anything to do with her.

  She was beautiful, but he should be careful. He wasn’t even strictly sure about why he’d come out to see her. He was in an agitated state of mind because of the money he was now sure Featherstone himself was taking. Should he say anything to her? What would it accomplish? At the moment he had Featherstone where he wanted him. It was buying him time. Best leave it, he resolved, as he drove away from the gas station.

  LANE HAD CAREFULLY spread the rug over her papers and put the coffee on to percolate. She was now wishing she hadn’t said he could come. She would much rather finish her map and go along to the Armstrongs’. They hadn’t heard an update from her in days. The sharp rap on the window of her front door some twenty minutes later heralded the arrival of Charles Andrews, bundled in his camel coat and thick scarf. Realizing she had not shovelled between her gate and the house, she looked down in alarm at his feet, but he was unbuckling his overshoes and revealing perfectly dry brogues.

  “Good morning, Miss Winslow. What a day! And I can smell that coffee you promised. Here.” Andrews handed her the chocolates. He sounded overly upbeat, even to himself.

  “Thank you. That’s very kind,” Lane said, trying to sound pleased. She took his coat and hat and hung them on the blackened brass hooks in the hallway. In a fit of house pride in the summer she had thought of polishing them, and then decided she liked their faded look, their whisper of the past of this house.

  “It’s good of you to stop by, Mr. Andrews. It’s considerably out of your way, in weather like this.”

  He had followed her through to the sitting room and now stood gazing out her window towards the lake, flecked with diamonds in the sun, the snow-covered sweep of her lawn, untouched and pristine.

  “This is a gorgeous view. No wonder you live out here,” he called to where she was at work mustering the coffee in the kitchen. He turned and scrutinized the contents of her bookshelf. He wasn’t much of a reader himself, no one in his family was, so he was a little daunted. Rows of Penguin books by authors he’d never heard of: Maugham, Wodehouse, Dickens . . . well, he’d heard of him . . . a massive encyclopedia of music, and dictionaries, French, Russian, English. No surprise there, he thought. He turned sharply at the sound of her voice behind him.

  “Do you like to read, Mr. Andrews?” she asked, carrying a tray with the coffee fixings and a precious few of the ginger cookies she’d been given by Eleanor Armstrong. She felt a slight frisson of irritation at having to give any up to this visitor. He was a big man. He might scarf the lot.

  Andrews made his way to the chair she indicated to him. She noticed how pronounced his limp was. A kind of drag of his left foot. It seemed worse today.

  “I don’t have that time, really. I mean, I get to the paper, but my work at the bank doesn’t leave much time for books.” His work at the bank was driving him to drink, he thought. Featherstone was being more unbearable than ever. Still. He’d put him in his place.

  “Well, doubly kind that you’ve taken time on your day off to come see me. I hope you aren’t here to say my inheritance cheque bounced?” She wondered if she should mention what she’d heard about the possible embezzling but knew instantly that that would be completely inappropriate. Definitely police business. And who knew if the embezzler was not Andrews himself? She mentally shook her head at this over-boiling of her imagination. He seemed like a very open and cheerful young man. Not her idea of an embezzler.

  “No problem there! It must feel very nice to have that sort of security.”

  “Yes, it is. I hardly live like a pasha, but I want for nothing. How are you finding life now that you are back home?” None of her business really, she knew, but his limp engendered a vaguely maternal concern for him.

  He didn’t seem disinclined to talk about it. “My mom’s been great, and I’ve been pretty good about doing my physical therapy. I was a mess at first, I don’t mind saying. I didn’t know how people would accept me. I used to ski and all that. Now I’m really not up to much in that department.” He followed this with an enthusiastic, almost nostalgic description of his career in basketball at his high school, and his summers of baseball. He was like, she thought, a rather overgrown adolescent. How old would he have been when he enlisted? Nineteen, as she had been? Somehow, in him, the experience of war seemed to have arrested his maturing process.

  “I’m sure all your old girlfriends from school were happy to mother you!” She smiled.

  “What about you?” he asked, feeling that at the moment the girl business was complicated, and not liking this feeling of not having the upper hand. He needed a plan, and it bothered him that he had come out here on what now felt like a desperate whim.

  “What about me?”

  “Where were you during the war?”

  “Oh, nowhere important. I had a very dull job in an office in London!”

  “You seem to speak all kinds of languages,” he said, pointing at her bookshelf. “It must be very dull out here for you.”

  “Plenty interesting,” she s
aid. “I’m learning about apple harvests, and snowshoeing, and all about how to be a Canadian. Never fear. I’m not bored.” Except, she thought, just at the moment. How could a man this good-looking be quite so uninteresting? This was followed by a rather long silence in which they both drank coffee. Finally, he spoke.

  “Well, you’re a very pretty woman.” He paused for a moment, while Lane was beginning to resolve that the visit should end, and then he continued, “You should be careful.”

  Now whatever did he mean by that? Careful about what, or whom? At the moment it was Charles Andrews himself who posed the most immediate threat, if only of boredom. “Now then, Mr. Andrews. You are very kind, but I must be off. I’m expected at my neighbours’ for lunch, and they are quite punctual about that sort of thing out here in the wilds. Thank you for coming all the way here.”

  She held his coat for him while he buckled up his rubber boots. How did these young men on bank clerk salaries afford these nice camel coats? she thought, handing it to him. She watched while he buttoned it up.

  “Rats,” he exclaimed, holding out his coat for her to see. “My button is coming unsewn. What a nuisance. My mother usually double-sews all the buttons on my clothes. She must have missed this one.” He pulled at a couple of other buttons, as if he would see more evidence of his mother’s neglect. “Perhaps you will come out to supper with me one day when you are in town?” he asked, feeling as if he was trying to recuperate something that he’d lost.