Death in a Darkening Mist Page 7

  “Here you go,” Filmer said, interrupting his rambling fantasy. “It wasn’t so difficult. You’ve been here almost nine months now, Andrews. You ought to get a handle on this.”

  “Thanks, Filmer. I owe you one.” Andrews took the file and glanced at the clock. 4:30.

  Filmer stifled a comment about how many he was owed, but the truth was, he found Andrews very likable, and had never recovered from his almost hero-worship of him from their school days. Andrews was, after all, a war hero. Filmer had been two years behind him and had elected to go to college in Vancouver. He signed up late, but never got over to Europe. He couldn’t quite get over his guilt about missing out.

  “I’ll show you how to do it one Sunday,” Filmer said. He’d said this several times already, but somehow it never happened.

  FEATHERSTONE SAT FUMING at the now accurate file. The bank was empty. He’d heard the cheerful good nights being called out among the staff, and had felt a sense of relief at being alone. That was short-lived. Being alone meant thinking. Being alone meant trying to understand how things had come to this. Andrews represented a daily aggravation. Young, handsome, carefree. He was an appalling bank clerk, and he spent more time on the telephone than could strictly be accounted for by customer calls, but he was popular with everyone at the bank, especially the customers. They viewed him as a war hero because of that leg of his. Featherstone had no doubt whatsoever that Andrews had gotten that wound doing something stupid. It irked him to think of his own return from the first war. He came back to nothing, had to work his way up at the bank, study at night. None of this being handed a job on a silver platter.

  He had done the most dangerous jobs that war had dished out—sabotage, blowing up bridges, defusing bombs—and to this day, no one knew a damn thing about it. And yet, here was the past. His one mistake following him sickeningly down the years. He had said to the man, very clearly, on the telephone that night, “I won’t do it, do you hear me?” The man had hung up the phone, leaving Featherstone knowing he would have to.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LANE’S ANXIETY AT FINDING HERSELF once again in the car with the two policemen, on the ghastly bit of road she’d had to traverse twice two days before, was overwhelming, barely offset by what ought to have been a quiet delight at being found necessary after all. Saturday had dawned cold and crisp, and she was tense because she had never been past Adderly, and for all she knew there could be other heart-stopping sections of road to be traversed. She’d been relieved to see the chains on the tires. She tried to focus on what Ames was saying. In her view he ought to be concentrating on his driving, but he was full of questions and observations.

  “What do you do up there on a day like this?” he asked her.

  “Ames,” said Darling from the back seat, “could you save it for the people we have to interview later? Miss Winslow, amazingly, is not yet implicated in this particular death, and does not need to be interrogated.”

  So, he’s nervous about the drive as well, she thought with grim satisfaction. “I’m afraid, Constable, that it is quite dull. On a snowy day like this, I have breakfast and shovel a path to the post office. A couple of days a week I get my mail and a newspaper, if they’ve managed to hack their way through the weather, have tea with the Armstrongs, and come home to write. This evening I will probably have to cut some wood. Or perhaps I will take up snowshoeing so as to not have to shovel anymore.”

  “That’s no life for a woman, if I may say so,” Ames responded, unaffected by his boss’s admonitions.

  “I’ll tell you something that puzzles me, Inspector,” she said, turning to address Darling. “Why was the man lying on his back? Surely a shot to the back of the head like that would cause the victim to pitch forward? If you’re in a hurry to execute someone and get out, why take the time to turn him over?”

  “I’m not sure. We don’t know Barisoff didn’t turn him, do we?” asked Darling.

  “No. But I believe him. He was adamant he didn’t touch him. Might the killer have been looking for something? Of course the victim was naked. If the shooter had been looking for something he would have searched poor Mr. Strelieff’s clothes, which were hanging on the hook. Would he have wanted to, I don’t know, check to make sure he was dead? Or perhaps to make sure he’d got the right man?”

  “If, as you seem to think, our man was a professional assassin, would he not have made sure before going about in broad daylight shooting people?” Darling said this with a touch of sarcasm, but he was certainly listening.

  “I imagine it depends to some extent on why Strelieff was shot. I did make a sort of list this morning,” she added, slightly apologetically.

  “A list?” asked Ames.

  “A list of why you might want to execute someone. There could be a million reasons to kill someone, but if we’ve really decided this was an execution, there will be more specific reasons. Execution is not a crime of passion, it’s . . . it’s a kind of business-like crime, isn’t it, really?”

  Darling watched the side of her face closely from the back seat. Had she engaged in such business?

  “What sorts of reasons did you come up with, then?” he asked.

  She gave him the ideas from her list, which by this time had sorted themselves in order of importance. “Of course, we don’t really know if this was a hired assassin or someone doing his own work, but, to silence someone. What did the victim know that someone didn’t want out? Was he blackmailing someone? Revenge. Maybe he did something to someone that couldn’t be forgiven. To eliminate someone. Were there internal politics involved, or did the assassin or whoever hired him want land or a woman? Or something left over from the war. We’ll need to get some idea of the weapon.” Darling, considering her list, found it disturbingly reasonable and said, “Miss Winslow, I hope that you will be able to leave some of the policing to us.”

  Lane could not tell if he was being funny or serious, but she felt put in her place and lapsed into silence. She was brought out to translate, so translate she would, she decided, and concentrated on looking out the window. There had been no more hair-raising sections of road. They had passed a tiny town called Kaslo and were now proceeding up something that was barely a logging road. The snow was deeper and less travelled than on the road along the lake, requiring all of Ames’s skills to negotiate.

  Darling could sense the change in mood. Damn, he thought. “As to the weapon, we will have to wait till Gilly does his post-mortem. The bullet will perhaps reveal something.” But he received no response to this.

  New Denver, idyllic in the snow, was a village, though it had rows of very basic wooden housing that appeared abandoned. Ames drove the car up to what looked like the village store and stopped.

  “Well, sir, what now?”

  Darling looked about through the window. There were some neatly kept houses along the street, some with smoke pouring from chimneys. “We’d better go see if anyone in the store knows where Barisoff’s farm is, just to double-check the instructions he gave us. There are a lot of tiny byways in this area. I haven’t been here since before the war, and there were some Russians up this way then. I think all these barracky-looking things must be where they housed the Japanese. They’ve certainly gotten out in a hurry.”

  The store was an old-fashioned wood frame with barrels of grain and fruit and a wide variety of dry goods stocked in shelves behind a long wooden counter. At the noise of their arrival, a man came through from somewhere in the back.

  “Pretty cold out there. What brings you up here?”

  “I’m Inspector Darling, this is Constable Ames and Miss Winslow. We’ve actually come out looking for a Mr. Barisoff. I understand he has a farm in the neighbourhood.”

  “He surely does. It’s out of town a short ways going back towards Slocan. Go along about a mile, then turn right for a short distance. You can see the house from the road. Has something happened?”

  “Thank you very much. And Mr. Strelieff, is he nearby as well?”

>   “Yeah. He’s got a little house right on Barisoff’s property. Are they in some kind of trouble?”

  “Would you expect them to be?” countered Darling.

  “No, sir, that’s why I’m asking. Pretty quiet. In the summer and fall I buy some veg off them for my store. I had an accident last winter, and they both came and cut wood for me and helped the wife with the place. You’re going to have a problem talking to them. They don’t speak much English. Barisoff is okay at the basic stuff, but that Strelieff, he’s been here nigh on six years and doesn’t seem to have learned a word.”

  “That’s where Miss Winslow will come in. She speaks Russian. Thanks very much for your help. Could I get three of those Cadbury bars, please? I think chocolate would lift our spirits in this snow.”

  The shopkeeper seemed resigned to being kept in the dark about the reason for the police visit to his little town, and concluded the chocolate transaction cheerfully enough.

  They managed to locate the road that led to the farm, though Ames found it rough going. Barisoff had clearly not gone anywhere in his vehicle after he returned from the pool the night before, and the snow had all but obliterated his tracks. The road itself was deeply rutted, and Ames winced as they bumped along it. The small, wood-framed farmhouse looked as if it had not seen a coat of paint in years, if ever, but the porch was covered and smoke came comfortingly from the chimney. Ames parked the car next to the ancient truck, and they made their way up the steps, which had been shovelled that day, and on to the porch. The door was opened by Barisoff before they knocked.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Barisoff,” Lane said in Russian. “I think these gentlemen wish to speak with you again. Would that be okay?”

  Barisoff eyed them warily and then nodded. “Yes, yes. Come in,” he said in English.

  “Thank you. Would it be possible for you to show us to Mr. Strelieff’s house? We will need to search it, so we will not be troubling you very much, aside from your help to get inside,” said Darling.

  Lane translated this and asked, “Would his house be locked?” She herself did not bother with locking her door in her tiny community, but it was as well to know if he would have to look for keys.

  Barisoff shook his head, hesitating. “Of course, you must see his house. I can’t believe it. He was a good man. I’m not sure he kept the faith, but maybe things happened where he came from. His wife died, he told me. I know about this too. Maybe he questioned God for this, I don’t know. He taught our children in the evening sometimes. They are only allowed to speak English in the village school. He taught them in Russian, and how to read the bible in Russian. It is not my business to question what has brought a man to this place. Only now I’m thinking, what more was going on? Why did someone shoot him? Nobody here would do that.”

  Lane held up her hand to stop his flow of conversation, and turned and gave the two policemen as accurate a rendition as she could.

  “He could read and write?” Ames asked. “They often don’t,” he added as an aside to Lane’s look of surprise.

  “Yes, that’s why we had him teach Russian. Our children will forget their language one day, so we were happy to have him teach them.”

  They walked a path that had already been trodden both ways between Barisoff’s house and the one nestled in a wood about four hundred yards behind it. Barisoff must have been there in the morning. For what purpose? Darling wondered.

  “Miss Winslow, can you ask Mr. Barisoff if he has been in the house this morning, or last evening when he came home?”

  Barisoff did not seem upset by the question. “Tell him yes. I went this morning to make sure everything was all right. I looked briefly inside to make sure the tap was not on, or the fire burning. I don’t know why. It was just an instinct, I guess. I did not, before he asks, touch anything. Strelieff lived simply. Nothing looked different to me.” Lane translated, trying to keep the tone the same as the Russian’s.

  On their way down the path they passed a very small, low building with a metal chimney. It looked like it could encompass only one small room.

  “Is that a sauna?” asked Lane. “We used to have something very similar where I grew up.”

  “I built it. It is good like the hot water at the hot springs is good. It helps when things hurt.”

  Lane looked closely at it. Surely she could have one built on her property? What fun.

  Strelieff’s house was a smaller version of his neighbour’s farmhouse, but did not have a porch, just a small peaked roof over the door. An outhouse stood to one side of the house, and a small shed was at the back. A woodshed of some sort, Lane thought. Barisoff went to open the door for them when Darling moved forward.

  “Mr. Barisoff. If you don’t mind.” Barisoff stopped and stepped aside, letting the policemen go ahead into the house.

  “Can you thank Mr. Barisoff, and ask him to return to his house? We will take it from here.”

  Lane obliged and asked, “Shall I return with him as well?” Presumably this was getting into the territory of “police business” and she would be superfluous.

  Ames looked at her with something like sympathy, but they were both surprised to hear Darling say, “No. I think you’d better stay here in case we run into Russian material that needs to be identified. Do your read Russian as well as speak it?”

  Discarding several possible retorts about the excellent education she had had at the hands of her governesses, Lane, who in truth was pleased to be required for even this part, said, “Yes, I do.”

  The room they walked into was small and spare with an air of such emptiness that Lane fancied it must know its recent occupant was dead, as if the soul had gone out of it. Almost in recognition of this, the three intruders stopped and gave themselves up for a moment to the complete, hollow silence. Ames was the first to move, walking to a tiny window by a wooden table and moving the green curtain aside to let in more light. The room was furnished with a table and two chairs, a standing lamp with a beige lampshade stained with age, a bookshelf that had been used as much for a home for its few desultory books as for a storage place for pencils, newspapers, cigarette papers and tobacco, matches, and a small brown box, which proved to contain more matches.

  The unlit iron stove against the outside wall seemed to be chilling the room rather than providing any hope of heating it. There was one stuffed chair beside it that had seen better days, though incongruously, the fraying arms of the chair were neatly covered with very clean, white, crocheted antimacassars. The only other concession to comfort in the room was an oval rag carpet laid over the wooden floor boards. Two doors led out of the room, one to a kitchen and one to a tiny bedroom through the open door of which could be seen a single bed and a wooden wardrobe.

  Lane wanted to go through these rooms as well, but felt uncomfortable about shuffling around after the two policemen, and so turned her attention to the bookshelf. She was unclear about whether she would be in contravention of some police procedure if she moved things around and looked in boxes.

  “Is it all right if I have a look on this shelf? Is there anything I shouldn’t touch or move?”

  Darling considered her question for a moment, scanning the shelves. She wasn’t sure what he might be looking for, but he said finally, “No, you should be all right.”

  “May I use the pencil and paper he has here to make any notes?”

  “I don’t see why not. That would be helpful. Thank you.”

  Lane took a sheaf of yellowed paper, investigated the writing implements and selected a pencil that appeared to have been newly sharpened with a knife, and set these on the table, moving an enamel cup, which contained the remains of what might have been Strelieff’s last cup of coffee, to make room for her work. She started with the books, making note of the titles. There was, indeed, a bible in Russian. The New Testament had bookmarks, which she carefully leafed through, leaving them in place. They marked passages: the loaves and fishes, Sermon on the Mount, the Last Supper, and so on. There appeared
to be no other papers stuck among its pages. She made notes and set the book aside. There were two primers in English designed for young children. Had he used these to improve his own English? She leafed carefully through them but found nothing. There were two further books, both Tolstoy. A well-used copy of War and Peace and his treatise on pacifism, The Kingdom of God Is Within You. She had read the first, but only knew of the second, and this she now leafed through with interest. Tolstoy at his most passionate and unrelenting, she thought.

  A search through these volumes revealed nothing else and she turned to the last book on the shelf, which proved to be a hard-cover diary or notebook. This was more like it, she thought. They might get some insight into the man himself. The pages were neatly labelled with dates, beginning in the summer of 1942. Much to her disappointment, all of the entries seemed to be notes about lessons he would give the children. The entries ended abruptly in September of the current year. September 30, 1946. Will I be able to stay?

  This, at least, held some interest. What did he mean by it? Had there been a disagreement with his neighbour, Barisoff? Or had he felt threatened by something? She made notes. She stood up and stretched and realized that she could not hear Ames or Darling in the house. They must have investigated the rooms and were now somewhere on the grounds. She was surprised that she had not heard them leave. With only a small pile of newspapers left, which appeared to all be local papers in English, she decided to satisfy her curiosity about the rest of the house while the men were outside. The kitchen had a compact wood stove and open shelves with enough plates and cups for two. The sink, a roughed-up enamel affair, was nevertheless clean, and a dishtowel and a hand towel were hanging on a wire on the side of the shelving. A bar of brown and cracked soap sat in a dish beside the sink. He must have used the sink for washing himself as well as the dishes. He was a meticulous housekeeper, she decided. Everything had been tidied up before he left that day for his swim. A wooden box revealed a drying heel of brown bread, and a pale green glass butter dish sat next to it, the remains of the butter wrapped in the paper it had come in. Cloth curtains across the front of the sink covered a frying pan and two blackened pots, as well as a wooden box containing some potatoes, carrots, turnips, and a couple of apples. Was there an outside cellar with other foodstuffs? Eggs? Meat?