Death in a Darkening Mist Page 5

  Gaining the yard from a path that opened onto the field, she felt a heightened sense of caution. There was a door into the house from the side of the building, but she moved carefully around the back, towards outbuildings that now came into view. What she saw raised the bile in her throat: a dog lay dead on the circular path it had made in the dirt yard from running as far as its lead would allow, the rope used to tie it to a post still attached to its bloodied neck. Had that been one of the shots? She scanned the windows, but all of the shutters were still closed, making the building look blind. She would have to attempt the door. Hugging the wall, she moved back around to the door and pushed. It swung open, throwing the day’s grey light into a darkened kitchen. She gasped, her hand covering her mouth. Three figures lay face down in a ransacked room, their hands tied behind their backs, and each with a bullet wound to the head.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LANE SAT IN SILENCE. SHE could not think how to answer Darling’s query. Had she seen executions? Yes. She saw them still, she thought, in one way or another. She knew Darling had been in the RAF. He had seen his share of God knew what. She knew the survival rate of bomber pilots was shocking. He must have lost people, perhaps been shot down himself. She did not want to burden him with anything she had carried here from her time in Intelligence. And though he knew something of her previous life, she was still bound by the Official Secrets Act. She hoped he would take her uncertain silence as confirmation that she had seen such killings.

  Finally, she said, “You see a lot in a war.”

  Ames got into the car with a curse at the weather. “I’m glad I put chains on,” he remarked, turning on the engine and slipping the car into gear. The headlights sprang to life, flooding the dense, snowy woods that surrounded the parking area with yellow light. “Here goes. Hang on to your hat!”

  “That won’t do much good if we go over edge into the lake,” Lane said, trying to make light of her gnawing fear of the dangerous part of the road they must take. They left the safety of the tiny town and its environs and started along the curved and narrow road, with its drop-off into the lake far below, even more anxiety-provoking because the snow made it difficult to tell where the road ended. Lane, now on the rising cliff-face side of the equation, was pleased to note that she was not as afraid as she had been, even under the more dire circumstances of the darkness and the thick snow.

  They drove in silence, inching around the bends in the road, hoping to meet no oncoming traffic, when Darling suddenly called out, “Stop!”

  The startled Ames pumped the brakes and pulled the car to a halt, leaving the engine running and the headlamps on as a warning to any oncoming traffic. “Here, sir? Why?”

  “Yours is not to reason, Ames. What do you see?”

  “A bloody . . . oops, sorry, Miss Winslow, a very dark night and a lot of snow, and a great black hole right here on my left that is the sheer drop to the lake.”

  “There’s been a car here since the recent snowfall,” said Lane. “Is that what you meant?”

  “Observation, Ames. The main weapon in a detective’s toolbox. Perhaps in time you will attain the skills of a Miss Winslow. Yes. A vehicle has been along this road quite recently. The snow was untouched as we left Adderly. Someone drove onto the road from somewhere nearby.” He opened the door and got out on the driver’s side, then called back into the car. “Miss Winslow, the flashlight in the glove box, please.”

  In the car Ames and Lane sat and watched him peer at the tire tracks in the road ahead.

  “Sorry, Constable,” Lane said.

  “Not to worry, Miss W. His lordship there likes to make fun of me. It helps him think.”

  Back in the car a moment later, Darling handed the flashlight back to Lane. “It most certainly had to have come out onto the road from somewhere near here. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying attention so I didn’t see where the tracks started, and we’ve driven over them now.”

  “It could be a householder from one of these places on the edge of town,” Ames suggested reasonably.

  “Perhaps if we back up . . .”

  “No, sir. Perhaps if we don’t,” said Ames, both alarmed and obdurate.

  “Well, if we aren’t backing up, I need a snap of the tracks. You can just see the tread if you hurry.”

  Lane’s relief at not having to take any part in backing up in the dark on a treacherous, slippery, snow-covered road was enormous. She and Darling sat in companionable silence watching Ames grumpily aim his apparatus at the tire treads in the road ahead of them. “It’s probably nothing,” Darling said finally, “but no harm in collecting what we can.”

  “Were you able to collect anything else at the scene?” Lane asked.

  “One button, possibly lost when it snagged on the brace for the stairs, as he was escaping under the building and down past the stairs to the lot. And no guarantee that it’s his button. What’s aggravating is we don’t know if there was a car there. You likely weren’t hearing anything from where you were. Who else was in the pool? Anyone coming along up the stairs and across the boardwalk that fronts the dressing rooms might have been seen by people in the pool, but the swimmers had all decamped by the time we got there. And all of this is assuming your chum Mr. Barisoff is not the murderer.”

  “I didn’t see who was in the pool, other than shapes in the mist. But the children were there. Angela checked on them before she joined me,” Lane said. She looked at her watch, the face just visible in the light cast back into the car by the headlights. “It’s just on six. Even in this we might get to the Cove before eight. We could surely talk with them. I don’t think she sends them to bed much before nine.”

  It was shortly after seven when they turned up the road towards the little settlement of King’s Cove. “Will you need me along?” Lane asked Darling. She was exhausted from the tension of the drive home, but she hoped he’d say he did.

  “Depends. Do the children speak Russian?”

  “No, then,” she said austerely. “If you drop me off at my gate I’ll telephone Angela and tell her you are on your way.”

  “NICE TO SEE Miss Winslow again, don’t you think, sir?” asked Ames amicably. He had nursed a conviction, ever since they had met Lane Winslow in the summer over the discovery of a body in her creek, that she would make a perfect mate for his boss. The drive to the house where Angela lived with her husband, David Bertolli, and their three boys was familiar to them, though they had previously done it under summer conditions. The new snow was soft and eternal under the headlights, as if no one had ever gone up this road.

  Darling was not to be drawn in. “It’s dark, it’s snowing, we’ve been dragged across the country to look at a naked man who was apparently the victim of some sort of execution, we’ve conducted an interrogation in a foreign language, and instead of being home with a good book and a cup of cocoa and one of Mrs. Andrews’s rock-hard cookies, we’re out here about to question a bunch of children. I’ll be honest, I’m not thinking of the social niceties just at the moment.” This withering speech was followed by a quiet curse from Ames as he found he’d nearly driven past the house. Darling’s mood lightened considerably when he realized that they would have to walk in the dark along a snow-covered path from the road to the house, and that would put Ames and his nice overshoes back into the snow. “Come along, Ames, and bring your little book!”

  If Darling were actually honest with himself, he would realize that he was in some way pleased to see Miss Winslow. He had not seen her since he had had an omelette and a glass of whisky with her in front of her fire back in October, during which time they had done a post-mortem of the business of the body in the creek. He had caught himself several times in the intervening weeks trying to think of a pretext to make the long drive out to King’s Cove to see her. He suffered a lingering embarrassment about the whole business—about having arrested her. She’d had a bad time with a man. That much he’d learned.

  She’d want nothing to do with men, he was certain, and
in any case, though Ames could not know it, he could not contemplate any relationship either. Not after all that had happened in the war. No, it was clear to him that he simply enjoyed being in the company of someone who was intelligent and had a sense of humour. One thing he was sure of: he was not going to see her involved with this current business.

  “I don’t know why she couldn’t have come along. She’s a friend of the family, after all.” Ames was sounding aggrieved, but it was mainly because of the now snow-laden cuffs of his trousers.

  The Bertolli dogs, two benign-looking collies, had commenced barking energetically from inside the house and now burst on to the porch as the door was opened. Ames hesitated, but the beasts made no move to bound on to the path to get at them, so he took heart and continued, anxious to get into the dry house.

  “Come in, come in!” bellowed Dave Bertolli over the dogs. “Shut up!”

  “Quite like old times,” murmured Darling from behind Ames.

  Bertolli produced a small hand broom for them to brush the snow off their clothes and shoes and Angela urged them in from just inside the door. “I put the coffee pot on the minute I got Lane’s call. Come in. The children are upstairs putting on their pyjamas but will be down in a moment. They’re quite thrilled about being questioned by the police!”

  “They’re ghoulish, the lot of them,” said her husband. “You’d have thought the circus had rolled into town the way they carried on about someone being found dead in the change rooms. They’re really disappointed no one would let them see the body. What I don’t know is if they can be of any help.”

  “It’s very good of you to see us. The coffee is most welcome,” said Darling as he and Ames removed their coats.

  Angela took some chocolate cookies from a tin and laid them on a plate to go with the coffee. When the children had come down, and were severely restricted to one cookie each, they sat at the kitchen table in a row, looking at the policemen expectantly. They were introduced as Philip, Rolfie, and Rafe. They were clearly brothers, but Philip’s dark hair made a helmet of thick curls around his eager face, while the other two boys had straight hair, which in Rolfie’s case flopped over his eyes. The youngest, Rafe, seemed small for his age, but had a thoughtful expression that made Darling suspect he was very intelligent. They proved to be both shyer and more observant than Darling had expected.

  “We think that someone might have come up the stairs from the parking lot and walked across to the change rooms about the time you were in the pool. I understand your mother came to make sure you were all right and then went back to be with Miss Winslow in the cave. After that, do any of you think you might have seen someone?”

  The children sat in silence for a few moments, watching Ames holding his pencil above his notebook. Finally the middle boy, Rolfie, said, “I was gonna do a cannonball in the pool, and a guy was going to the men’s change room, so I waited so I wouldn’t splash him.”

  “Yeah, I saw him, he was going from the cave to the change room,” said Rafe.

  “No, not him. There was another one. This one wasn’t in a bathing suit. He was dressed,” said Rolfie.

  “Do you remember if he stopped in to pay at the window?” asked Darling.

  “No, I don’t know about that. I just saw him walking. I watched him because I was waiting for him to go inside.”

  “Do you remember anything about how he looked?”

  Rolfie thought for a moment, his brothers watching him expectantly as the new expert in this matter. “I don’t think I know what he looked like or anything. He had a long black coat on and a hat, I’m pretty sure of that.”

  “Was he carrying anything? A bag for his swim things?”

  “No, he didn’t have anything. But he might have had gloves on.”

  “You have a very good memory. Do you think you saw him come out afterwards?”

  The children looked at each other and finally Rolfie said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I thought he would come in the pool, but we were fooling around so I’m not sure. Then we got told to get out and we went to change. Our mom had all our stuff so we changed on the other side.”

  “And do you remember anything about the other swimmers who were in the pool with you?”

  “Most of them were in the deep end, I think. We always have to stay in the shallow end. I don’t think anybody got out of the pool or anything. Maybe everyone was gone by then,” Philip said. “Just that guy who came from the cave.”

  Suddenly the youngest child, Rafe, said, “What happened to him, mister? I mean the dead guy. Did he get sick?”

  Darling was nonplussed. How to explain murder to a child? He had an abiding distaste for lying to children, but at the same time, these were not his children, and they were about to go to bed. He did not want to be responsible for any nightmares.

  “We aren’t certain,” he finally said. “That is why we are hoping we can find out who else might have been there, in case they saw something. You boys have really helped us. You see? Constable Ames has written down everything you said. I think it will be very important to us.”

  The three boys looked pleased about this, and were allowed to stand at the door with their parents as they said good night to Darling and Ames.

  THE NEXT MORNING dawned with the promise of sun, and it revealed to the inhabitants of King’s Cove a magnificent world of billowing snowdrifts and pine branches hanging low with the weight of glittering whiteness. This was Lane’s first real winter snowfall in her new home and she was entranced. She went down her hallway and gazed out her glass-panelled front door. It was remarkable, she thought, that she had slept so well. So many nights she woke at some ungodly hour, shaken from her sleep by nightmares of darkness and fire. They, much to her dismay, had become worse, not better, with each passing month away from the war. During the war she had had longing dreams of places that were almost like those of her childhood, and then she would wake into the darkness of war. Now it was the other way around. Her theory was that perhaps her mind knew it was safe now and was disgorging itself of all the horror and tension of those six years. You would not imagine, she thought, that after seeing a man who had been shot to death, you would sleep like a baby. She looked up the attic stairs as she passed them and smiled. At least Lady Armstrong, whom she thought of as the friendly ghost of this house, did not seem as keen on opening the windows in the attic during the winter as she did in the summer. Lane had discovered in her first weeks that though she would close and latch the windows, they would become mysteriously flung open in the night. Eleanor, the postmistress, believed her mother-in-law’s ghost was the culprit. She had, Eleanor said, loved fresh air to a fault in life.

  In the kitchen Lane filled her percolator with water and spooned coffee into the filter. She loved the simple pleasure of this ritual. Soon the coffee would be bobbing into the lid, sending its smell through the kitchen. She sliced bread and put one piece into each wing of her toaster, closed the wings, and plugged the device in. By the time one side of the bread was toasted and she’d flipped it, the coffee would be done. Her wooden table sat in front of the French doors to her back porch. She had spread the table with one of her French tablecloths and now carefully put out the butter dish and the jam that Eleanor had given her. It was, she knew, perfectly possible for her to descend into gobbling her food leaning against a counter, as she had for the last six years, but she wanted to make a point of being civilized. Outside her window the porch was covered in a clean thick layer of snow, and beyond it the snow carpeted her descending lawn, her shrubs, and the trees. The lake shone, untouched, and beyond that the mountains behind the lake, which had been deepening layers of blue, now gleamed white and gold in the morning sun.

  She managed not to burn the toast, and now sat with her breakfast and thought about the dead man. There was something clinical in the whole thing. This was not a crime of passion; there had been no raised voices, no struggle or banging about in those tiny wooden dressing stalls. Would she have heard it if
there had been, from where she was in the tunnel? Probably not. But someone would have. She wondered what the children had told Darling and Ames, and found she was still a bit cross at being left out. On the whole, she believed she had been right. This was like an execution. An elimination. Why would you eliminate someone? She reached across to her writing desk, which she had stationed in the corner by the window, because she had thought the view and the fact that the kitchen was a working room would inspire her to write. On it was her typewriter, still largely neglected, a glass full of obsessively sharpened pencils, and a neat pile of paper. She took a pencil and a sheet of paper, moved her toast plate to one side, and sat musing for a moment.

  Revenge, she thought, and wrote this, though as a motive it implied a passion that did not entirely fit the situation. Still, there was the business of revenge being best served cold. To silence someone. If, perhaps, the person knew something you didn’t want known, or they were blackmailing you. They were inconvenient. They were after the woman you wanted, or the job, or the land you were trying to buy. There’d been a bit of that right here in King’s Cove, though it had not, in the end, been the reason for the death of that poor young man in her creek this past summer. That had had its roots in war, in a way. Had this? A war had just ended, after all. But her understanding was that Doukhobors did not go to war. Still, she wrote it down; it didn’t do to leave anything out. Politics? Eliminating an opponent. She did not know about the internal politics of this group. On the surface of it, it seemed an unlikely way for a pacifist to settle things, but whoever it was knew where to find the victim and when. That suggested someone within the community.