A Match Made for Murder Read online

  “For my sins. Chief is off on health leave, poor fellow, so I’m more or less in charge of the whole operation now.” Galloway had released Darling’s hand and now opened his arms as if he were planning to embrace Lane, his face wreathed in smiles. Instead, to her enormous relief, he offered a hand to shake.

  “Mrs. Darling, what a pleasure. Fred, you dog! Where did you find this lovely creature? She must be a saint, putting up with your gruff self.” Still holding her hand and pulling her close, he said in a stage whisper, “Always took himself too seriously.”

  Thank heavens, Lane thought, if this man’s unbridled enthusiasm was the alternative. She had just retrieved her hand when she became aware of a woman standing perfectly still behind their host. Lane nearly gasped at her beauty. She had jet-black hair, pale skin, and piercing blue eyes; she was wearing an emerald-green silk dress that was fitted to her slender waist and then hung in an exquisite flare of silk that seemed to catch the light. Blimey, she thought, I could be meeting Vivien Leigh.

  “This is the wife, Priscilla,” Galloway put his arm around his wife’s shoulder and pulled her into the group. “My old chum, Fred Darling. He’s a police inspector now, up in Canada.”

  Priscilla smiled and offered a hand. “You’ll have a lot to talk about, then. Please do come in. It’s still warm enough that we can have drinks on the patio.” She spoke with a clipped English accent, her voice pitched low.

  Lane wondered if she modulated her voice and adopted this posh accent, which couldn’t quite hide her Cockney roots, deliberately, to add a little weight to her delicate frame. With a touch of regret, Lane reflected that Priscilla’s pretense made her seem more vulnerable, not less.

  The house had a spacious rambling quality that made it feel, Lane thought, extremely expensive. The foyer was tiled and dropped two steps to a sunken living room full of English chintz furniture; it was in sharp contrast to the Spanish Colonial feel of the house itself, but together the two styles somehow seemed to work.

  “Come, Lane. Let’s get the boys out onto the patio, and you and I will put the drinks together. Martinis? G and Ts? What’s it to be?”

  “A couple of G and Ts,” Galloway said. “That do you, Fred? And don’t let Fernanda near them. Hasn’t got a clue,” he confided to Darling, leading him through French doors out to a patio illuminated with gentle light from candles set on a large dark wood table near a tiled fountain that burbled in the centre of the courtyard.

  In the kitchen a plump, middle-aged woman in a blue uniform and white apron and cap was assembling something on the counter.

  “Fernanda, did you put the glasses out as I instructed?” Priscilla wasn’t unkind, exactly, but she spoke in a peremptory manner that caused Fernanda to turn toward her mistress but not look at her.

  “Yes, Mrs. Galloway. They’re on the tray. I cut some limes for you.” A plate of cut limes, releasing their citrus fragrance into the kitchen, sat by the tray upon which glasses, a bucket of ice, and a bottle of tonic sat next to a luminescent blue bottle of gin.

  “You’re very beautiful,” Priscilla said, turning to Lane and then beginning her preparations with the gin. “When did you come over?”

  Lane glanced anxiously at Fernanda. It would have been unthinkable in her household not to thank the servants. Absolute courtesy had been her grandmother’s gold standard. She gave her a quick smile and was rewarded by Fernanda turning away to open the oven.

  “I came over right after the war, in the spring of ’46. Gosh, only last year! I feel like it’s been ages since the war ended. I bought myself a little house in the middle of nowhere. You?”

  “And collared a very handsome man. He looks kind, for a policeman. Is he?”

  “Yes, very kind,” Lane said. She saw Priscilla’s neat sidestepping of the question about her own background and wondered suddenly if it was her husband who expected her to disavow her London roots. “What can I do?”

  “Fernanda, are the canapés out?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I put them on the table.”

  “Can you stick a sliver of lime on each of the glasses, Lane, then we’ll be ready to hop.” Priscilla put the drinks on a small silver tray and led Lane toward a door that opened onto the courtyard. “Are you planning to have children?” she asked.

  “I haven’t given it a thought. We’ve only just got married.” Perhaps Priscilla herself was thinking about it, Lane speculated.

  The courtyard smelled of orange blossoms from trees Lane could just see in the shadows beyond the light. Over them, the dark velvet night sky was beginning to populate with stars. Lane, looking skyward, was about to exclaim at the loveliness of the place when Galloway spoke.

  “To old friends and new ones. Cheers.” The ice in the glasses gave a soft rattle, and the four of them touched rims. Galloway winked at Lane and drank.

  “Not bad, Pris. You’ll get the hang of it. A touch more gin in the next one,” Galloway said, and then he laughed. “My girl used to pull pints in a London bar. Met her during the war. Makes a fine gin and tonic, I think you’ll agree.”

  “Very good, indeed,” Darling said.

  Lane smiled and lifted her glass, thinking the ratio of gin could not go any higher. She glanced at Paul Galloway and realized she was trying to place him in some social context. She had at first found his accent almost soothing—sounds of home, she realized—but there was something else. A sense of superiority, she thought, or was it simply confidence? She was surprised when she turned toward Priscilla to see her hostess looking flushed and angry, but in another moment, Lane attributed this to the uncertain light.

  Chapter Two

  Sergeant Ames would never have known about the crime if he hadn’t, after some considerable thought, found an excuse to drive out to the Van Eyck garage near Balfour. The temperature had dropped suddenly, and though it was sunny, he was sure he could smell the first snow in the air. The stand of pale-skinned aspens behind the wooden house and garage still had a few hardy yellow leaves clinging to them after a good wind the night before.

  Ames was grateful it hadn’t snowed yet. He pulled up onto the grassy parking area in front of the garage in the maroon car he drove for the Nelson police and tried to look nonchalantly like a man with a car in need of service. Instead of seeing Tina Van Eyck and her father hard at work on the car currently parked in the service bay, he found them standing in front of one of the two large, newly painted doors to the service area. Marring the new dark, barn-red wooden door was the word Bitch scrawled in messy black paint.

  Tina turned as Ames got out of the car and put her hand up to shade her eyes from the bright November sun. Her blond curly hair was wrapped in its usual workday turban, and she had a wool shirt of thick brown plaid over her boiler suit.

  “It’s hardly a police matter,” she said by way of greeting. “Dad, did you call him?”

  “No, I didn’t. Good morning, Sergeant. You see what’s happened. We never had this sort of carry-on before the war,” Marcus Van Eyck said. He looked more anxious than his daughter, who just looked cross.

  “Good grief!” said Ames. “When did this happen? What does it mean?”

  “You have to ask?” Tina said with no little sarcasm.

  “No, I didn’t mean that.” Ames felt himself blushing and unsettled by his own fumbling response to Tina’s obvious anger. “I meant why did someone do this?” Most of his previous meetings with this competent, self-assured lady mechanic had made him feel like a blithering idiot. It still surprised him that she’d agreed to come with him to Darling’s wedding the month before.

  “It happened sometime in the night,” her father said. “Paint’s dry.” The mechanic walked along the edge of the building, moving the long yellow grass aside with a stick, searching for something that might help him understand why this had happened. He went around the side of the garage and exclaimed, “Aha!”

  Tina watched
him, frowning. “I wish he’d leave it. I don’t want you involved. The police are unlikely to do a blind bit of good, in my experience.”

  But Ames hurried after her father. “Don’t touch anything, sir.” He found Mr. Van Eyck looking down at a small can of paint and an old paintbrush that was worn nearly to the end. It looked as if a fleeing vandal had tossed them there, splashing paint against the wall and over the ground where the tin had fallen.

  “Here. I’ve got a box in my car. I’ll collect this stuff and bring it back to the station. We can see if there are fingerprints.” Ames took a large blue handkerchief from his pocket and scooped up both the brush and the metal handle of the paint can and carried them to the car. Hesitating for a moment about how he was going to unlock the trunk with one hand full, he turned and found Tina approaching the car.

  “I wish you wouldn’t concern yourself with this,” she said.

  “I’ll just have a look-see. Maybe we can track it down. This is vandalism, and it is my job after all. You don’t want it happening again. You wouldn’t mind getting my keys, would you? In the ignition . . .” He felt sheepish in the face of her terseness. But she was angry, he reminded himself. He tried to imagine someone writing Bastard across his office door, but somehow it wasn’t the same.

  Tina came back with the keys and pushed and turned the latch to get the trunk open. There was a small wooden apple box in the trunk in which he kept a pair of clean and carefully folded overalls in case of a messy crime scene. He watched her remove them and fold them next to the box. Then he deposited the evidence, deciding to leave his handkerchief in place.

  “Since Dad claims he didn’t call you, it means you came out on your own. Was there something you wanted?” Tina asked as she handed Ames back his keys.

  “Well, the car. I mean, I thought I could ask you, or your dad of course, to give the car a once-over, you know.” It sounded ridiculous even to him.

  “No doubt the police department has a contract with one of the local garages, which, I assume, you’d like us to break? Was there something needing the feminine touch? The transmission, the carburetor?”

  Ames, wondering now how he had imagined anyone would buy his excuse for coming out, stood silently looking at his shoes, his finest two-toned brogues, and felt acutely embarrassed that he’d worn these on purpose to impress. A girl less inclined to be impressed by a pair of shoes, he realized, he was unlikely to meet.

  “I did wonder,” he tried. “You know, because of last month and the wedding . . .”

  “Look, Sergeant, if you manufactured this flimsy excuse to come out here and ask me out, let me put your mind at ease. I had a good time at your boss’s wedding, but it was a once-only thing. I don’t even know why I agreed to go with you, to the wedding of a policeman at that. For one, we’ve got nothing in common, and for two, I’ve got work to do. Or do you think I should meekly give up my job and flit around you like a butterfly?”

  Stifling a desire to point out that they weren’t that different, Ames said, “But I don’t want to get you out of your job. Why would you think that?”

  “You’re a man, aren’t you?” She smiled suddenly, as if her anger over the sign was dissipating and had been replaced by the amusement of baiting Ames.

  “Well, yes. But I still don’t see how it follows that I want you out of your job.” If he was honest with himself, he would admit that when he first met Tina Van Eyck in the summer, he’d held the firm view that a woman should not put a man out of a job, as Tina’s return from England had put a young mechanic out of work in her father’s garage. A conversation with Lane Winslow, a rescue by Miss Van Eyck over the matter of a flat tyre, and an almost accidental date had shifted his view somewhat.

  “Look,” Tina said, “I have a couple of school friends, with good office jobs in town, who’ve been handed their pink slips. You know what they were told? That they ought to be happy to get back to their kitchens. That if they really need to work, they should try to find jobs more suited to women. I don’t mind the fellows coming back to their jobs, nothing wrong with that. But not every girl wants to hang around in a kitchen. I don’t.” She looked pointedly at him, sounding, perhaps, a warning note. “And as for that . . .” She pointed at the garish insult on the bay door. “That sort of thing can’t put me off. I lived through the London Blitz. Poor Dad is more upset than I am. And, if you want the naked truth, I’ve got no use for the police.”

  Ames saw that Mr. Van Eyck was coming out of the garage with a can of red paint, and, at a loss for an adequate response to Tina’s words, he moved to approach him. “Sir, could you hold off on that? I’d like to go back to town and get my camera and snap a photo of it. This guy may be aiming this just at your garage, but he may go on to deface other properties. It would be good if we had a record.”

  “Oh,” Mr. Van Eyck said uncertainly, looking at his daughter. It was clear he wanted to spare her feelings by removing the offensive word.

  Tina walked Ames back to his car. “You don’t have to take a picture,” Tina said in an angry whisper, glancing back at where her father was putting the paint down. “I already know who did this. It’s a guy from near Willow Point. Barney Watts. He came with a car a couple of days ago, ignition trouble. He seemed nice, but the minute my dad was out of sight he made a pass at me. I gave him what-for, and he said some rude things. I haven’t told Dad.” Tina stopped and looked down, kicking at a clump of grass with her foot. “I don’t want my dad to think he needs to be looking out for me.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Ames protested gallantly.

  “I know. It’s just the usual stupid stuff. But Dad would be upset. I don’t want to have to try to calm him down as well.”

  “If I can get the man’s address, I could go see him, but I still don’t want you to clean off that paint, sorry, till I record it, just in case this Barney fellow isn’t the one. Did you hear a car or anything during the night?”

  “Just forget about it. I don’t want anything done. And no, I didn’t hear a thing. There was a pretty good wind, so I don’t think we would have heard if someone had driven up. Anyway, I told you. Leave it. Dad and I will paint the garage and get on with our lives.” They stood silently and watched Mr. Van Eyck leave the garage and go into the house. They both spoke at once, “I heard . . .” she said, at the same time as his “I don’t think . . .”

  “You go first,” Ames said.

  “I was just going to say I heard your boss is away. Are you running the show? What were you going to say?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Yes, they went to Arizona, so I’m as in charge as anyone in that place lets me be. The boys give me the gears from time to time, but they’re okay.”

  Tina stood with her hands in her pockets and smiled again. “Look, it’s a free country, so you can take the picture, because I do understand it might not be him and you have to have some record,” she said. “But don’t go see him. It would just make it worse. Trust me, police involvement will only muck it up. I can handle this.”

  “I don’t exactly hold with the idea that not confronting a bully will make him stop. That’s what the police are for. In fact, it’s why I’m a policeman. It’s against the law to deface other people’s property. Simple as that.”

  “Yeah, well, I confronted him when he thought he could paw me, and that’s the result,” she said crossly, indicating the garish message on the garage door.

  Ames drove back to town, his brow furrowed. He’d never really thought of how much of that sort of nonsense women like Tina had to put up with from men. If he were honest, he always assumed it was part of the deal. Men, he readily admitted, were awkward around women and probably didn’t have a clue how to get their attention. He certainly found it awkward every day of the week. But there was a continuum. He was at one end with his fancy shoe gambit, and the men who thought women were there to be pawed, and worse, were at the other end. Worse, when he
thought of domestic disputes that sometimes reached the police. He was embarrassed to be anywhere on that continuum. He wasn’t sure he was getting the whole story from Tina. And why her sudden antagonism toward the police? But there was one thing he was sure of: he felt a strong desire to protect her, and that didn’t seem to be wanted either.

  He thought about Miss Winslow, or Mrs. Darling really, now, and Darling. They seemed to have plunged into their relationship at some deeper level right from the get-go. He would have said from watching them that they seemed to be friends. Of course, Darling was always wanting to protect Miss Winslow. It was hard to make the switch, but she didn’t like being protected much either. Ames drove off the ferry ramp on the Nelson side, disconsolately singing “You made me love you . . .”

  “This is all right,” Lane said, reaching across the table for Darling’s hand. They had stayed in bed late and, afterward, had opted to have breakfast outside under the shady overhang of the interlaced branch ramada, looking out at the lawn and garden and listening to a fountain splashing somewhere nearby. They sat before the scant remains of their scrambled eggs, bacon, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. “I’ve never had juice like that in my life. I never want to leave.”

  “How would poor Ames take that?” Darling asked, drinking. It wasn’t orange juice but Lane’s auburn hair spread across the pillow in the morning sunlight that made him have thoughts of never wanting to leave. He brought himself back and put his empty glass on the table. “So, what are you going to do while I’m with Galloway?”

  “Lie around, I expect. I’ll finish the Arizona Daily Star, there’s an interesting article about American football that might help me understand it, and then go explore that bookshelf, with a view to lounging by the pool.”

  “Think of it as rugby with armour. Look, I’m sorry about this. I didn’t feel I could turn down his invitation to see his office and discuss the sorts of cases they deal with here.”