A Lethal Lesson, page 28
Terrell pulled up a chair. “It is more logical, on the face of it, that it was Mackenzie. They might easily have gotten into a quarrel when they’d been drinking, there was the rankling money issue, and who knows what insults were traded, and God knows what else. If on the other hand it’s Miss Scott’s car that’s done the hit and run, we have to look for a Mr., or Miss, if we like Keeling, X. Someone who hit Miss Scott and stole her car. Then, sometime in the course of the night, drove it all the way to town and beyond, hit Gaskell, and then drove the car most of the way back, abandoned it, and went . . . where? Are we back to looking for the elusive Miss Keeling?”
“It’s a sorry old world if people go around running each other over because they’ve borrowed money and haven’t returned it,” commented Ames. “I’m not sure about Miss Keeling, but I certainly had the feeling that Mackenzie was not telling the whole truth. The car is damaged in the right sort of way, or right enough, anyway. He drove the car to Castlegar, and our corpse met his end on the road between Castlegar and Nelson. That’s a lot of coincidence gathering in one place. I’ll bring him in for questioning tomorrow. It’s a confounded nuisance that Miss Scott can’t remember things properly, and we still have no idea where Miss Keeling is!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Friday, December 5
WENDY LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW. It wasn’t Rose. A woman got out of the car. She’d left the engine running and the headlights on. She was just a dark shape in the glare of the light. She could see her coat and the outline of a pillbox hat with netting pulled across her face. Wendy turned away from the window, perplexed. Who was this? It must be someone coming for Rose. Relieved now, she went toward the door, just as it burst open.
“I didn’t bother to knock,” the woman said. She stood in the doorway and shook her head. “So, it’s little Miss Wendy, at last!”
Wendy could only stare at her, her brain scrabbling around trying to make sense of what was happening. In a thousand years she would not have expected a woman to come looking for her. If she’d been sent by either her father or her uncle, she certainly didn’t look the part in those fancy clothes. She desperately wished she could see her face. Then she saw that a stocky man in a thick camel coat and a black fedora pulled low over his eyes stood behind the woman holding a revolver. She heard herself say, “Oh,” and could feel the blood draining from her face. The desk with the telephone was just behind her. If she could talk to whoever these people were, delay them. She backed up two steps.
“Who are you? I don’t think I know you.” Another step.
“You don’t need to know me.”
“Do you want Miss Scott? Only she’s not here.”
Another step. “Uh-uh. No, you don’t!” The woman darted forward. “Get away from there.” In a flash she was by the phone and yanked the cord hard so that it loosed somewhere inside the wall and came up in her hand. She threw the damaged cord down so that it fell behind the desk. She looked quickly around the room and saw the suitcase standing by the table. “Going somewhere? How convenient. I’ll take you. Get that.” She waved her gloved hand at the suitcase. The man with the gun was standing in the room now, with his weapon trained right on Wendy’s midriff.
Wendy bent to take up the suitcase and in the same moment that she thought of swinging it at her attacker the woman must have thought the same thing. She reached over and pulled it from her hand.
“Give that to me. Now go. Hands up, and out the door.”
Unable to think of another tactic, Wendy went slowly out the door and stood, looking at the car. If I get into that, I may never come back, she thought.
“Move it!” the man said. She felt the gun through her coat and went slowly down the three stairs.
“I don’t understand. Who are you? Did they send you?”
“I have no idea what you mean. Get in,” the woman ordered.
“But where are you taking me? Who are you?” I should shut up, Wendy thought desperately. I will only make her mad.
“It doesn’t matter who I am. I’m afraid that what matters here is who you are. You’ve been hard to track down.”
The man handed his gun to the woman and pulled some silk rope out of his pocket and pushed Wendy around so that she was almost lying face down on the hood of the car. With terrifying efficiency he bound her hands behind her, and then yanked her upright and shoved her into the back of the car. Wendy managed to duck just in time to avoid hitting her head. She fell sideways so that she was sprawled across the back seat, and then struggled to right herself.
The man got into the driver’s seat, and the woman got in beside him. She turned to face Wendy, training the gun on her. Wendy, upright now and slumped against the window of the back door, stared at her captors. She desperately wished she could see the woman’s face.
The car started, and immediately the wheels began to spin. The driver swore and took his foot off the gas, and then repeated the procedure with the same result. The woman turned her graceful head in his direction and said, “For God’s sake, Arnie!”
“It’s easy for you to say; you don’t have to drive in this crap!”
“Just back up into new snow and then drive forward slowly. We’re not in the Le Mans here,” the woman said impatiently. She turned to face the front and put the gun on her lap, as if she had no further concern about the prisoner in the back. Somehow Arnie managed to begin a slow and steady crawl up to the main road.
Wendy eyed the woman, her mind desperately trying to understand who she might be. Had her father finally found her? The thought of this added to her fear. “Is this about my father? My uncle? Did they send you?”
The woman glanced back at her and then back at the road. “I thought so,” she said with a kind of triumph. “You do know!”
“I do know what? Where are we going?” She could hear her own voice high-pitched with fear. Arnie was driving way too fast for the snowy conditions. She had felt the beginnings of a skid several times. Even the headlights seemed to barely make a dent in the inky darkness of the night. She looked at the woman, trying to assess her. Even in the dim light emanating from the dashboard, she could see that her clothes were expensive, and she wore pearl and diamond earrings. Only now could she smell an expensive scent over the cigar smell oozing from Arnie’s coat. Chanel. Lizzy at her rooming house had had a precious bottle of it, and she used to let Wendy sniff it.
“Don’t play stupid with me.” The woman was angry, and she turned to glare at Wendy as the car swerved.
Who was she? Wendy looked at Arnie. Who was he for that matter? For a wild moment she thought it must be a case of mistaken identity. This woman must want someone else. But how had she found her way so specifically to the cottage? Had she mistaken her for Miss Scott? Did this woman mean to kidnap Rose for some reason? Wendy took a deep breath and closed her eyes. But no. The woman had said, “So it’s little Miss Wendy, at last,” when she had burst into the cottage, with that thug waving his pistol. How could this woman be from her father or her uncle? It made no sense. She had to find a centre of calm; if she could only get her to talk, to explain.
“SIR, THAT CAR is battered up enough that it’s possible Mackenzie could have hit Gaskell.” Ames was standing in the doorway of Darling’s office the next morning, still holding his hat and coat. “I’d like to bring him in.”
“You think he hit him just to keep his car and avoid paying him back? That seems a little desperate on the face of it. But they both are heavy drinkers.”
“Well, yes. But think about it. Gaskell is hit on the Castlegar road, as if for some reason he’s walking back to town from there. Mackenzie is off supposedly picking up his mom, so he’s kind of in the right place and it’s kind of the right time. But what if none of that is true? What if they’d both been drinking as usual, and gotten into another fight?”
“‘Kind of’ doesn’t bring home the bacon. Why is Gaskell out there, to start with?”
Ames warmed up to his topic. “Mackenzie has taken him. He doesn’t want to lend Mackenzie the car, so Gaskell drives him to Castlegar to pick up the mother and is going to drive him back.”
“And then Mackenzie says to him, ‘Just hop out so I can take the wheel and run you down.’ Search the car, bring him in, by all means.”
“Right, sir.”
“And what about the other car? Nothing on that? I thought the Van Eycks were going to look at it.”
“Oh, yes. Sorry, sir, they did. That car, by the way, belongs to Miss Scott. Terrell tracked that down last night. Anyway, it too hit something, in fact, so badly that the radiator was damaged. Miss Van Eyck thinks the damage on Miss Scott’s car is more consistent with having hit someone, but it is a much bigger problem. Gaskell has a damaged car, right place, right time, and he’s been in a dispute with Mackenzie. But Miss Scott was busy being knocked out, which means someone must have swiped her car, maybe Keeling.”
“Who popped out to the Castlegar road to mow down Gaskell,” concluded Darling, with a touch of sarcasm. “I think I like the Mackenzie theory better.”
“Whoever was driving Miss Scott’s car appeared to be returning it, and probably had it break down right where we found it. Could be Miss Keeling. We still don’t know where she is. And let’s not forget her real name is likely Irving, for whatever that’s worth.”
“It could be worth something, or maybe not. Nothing was found against her as either person. But there’s a first time for everything, including homicide. If she was driving, where did she go after she abandoned the car? There was no suitcase in it, and we know that she cleared out all her things. Was her anger about Samuel reason enough to want Gaskell dead? She’d only been here a couple of weeks. Could she have worked herself into a murderous rage at him in that time? Yes, but Mackenzie is much more likely. It’s a lot less complicated, and he was in all the right places, as you’ve pointed out, and they seem to have had a long-running dispute of some sort. Well, go get him, then,” Darling said impatiently. The phone on his desk jingled.
It was O’Brien. “Sir, there’s someone down here about the teacher business up the lake. He wants to see someone in charge.”
Darling couldn’t remember ever feeling less in charge of any case. “Go on, then. Send him up.” He could hear O’Brien saying, “Mr. Irving, you . . .” as he hung up the phone.
He stood up as a weather-beaten man in his late fifties knocked on the door and peered in tentatively. He could, Darling thought, amending his initial impression, have still been in his late forties; he’d clearly had a hard life. Deep bags under his eyes, clothes that looked frayed. He’d not shaved in a couple of days.
“Come in. I’m Inspector Darling. How can I help?” Darling said, indicating the seat in front of his desk.
“Irving. I’ve come about Miss Wendy Keeling. I saw a missing persons notice. She might be my daughter. That is, she isn’t my daughter. But she might be in trouble.”
Absolutely grand, thought Darling. More completely incomprehensible, nonsensical material to add to this case. Stifling a wince, he said, “I see. Can you say what you mean when you say she is your daughter, but also is not? And what sort of trouble? Wait—Irving. Your daughter is Wendy Irving?”
“She was my wife’s daughter by . . . never mind about that. I took her to live with my brother in Williams Lake who’s a bit of a holy roller, and she ran away when she was sixteen because they were going to marry her off to some old reprobate who already had a wife. Can’t say I blame her. My brother tried to get me to help bring her back, but I decided the best thing I could do is warn her they were looking for her. I did find her finally earlier this year. I tracked her to a rooming house initially, but the woman there wouldn’t give me the time of day. I waited and asked one of the other girls. She told me Wendy was calling herself Keeling. I think I decided in that moment to just leave her alone. If she had the will to get away and set herself up in a new life, then more power to her. But I guess with the years I still wanted to find out. She was teaching in Saanich, on the Island there. Didn’t want anything to do with me. Smart girl, as it turned out. I’d cleaned up my act by then, gone off the booze, but she wasn’t to know that.”
“But you’re not her father. Who is?”
“My wife apparently wasn’t happy with me, well, again, looking back I can’t blame her either, what with the drinking. Anyway, she took up with this guy, and then came running back when she was up the spout. Expected me to bring up the brat. And then she buggered off. I couldn’t handle the kid on my own. That’s why we went to my brother. My family belongs to a pretty religious group, but the trouble is my brother went off the deep end. Said he’d been hearing God talking to him and told him to keep his wife and kids on the farm. They never went anywhere, even to school. My Wendy was the one teaching them.”
“She ran away at sixteen. And you’re convinced that the missing Miss Keeling is the same person.”
“This bloody woman tracked me down to try to get me to tell her where Wendy was back in November. I didn’t trust her and kept mum, but she suspected Wendy had changed her name too, so she had a pretty good network, I imagine. My brother had tried for a while to find Wendy when she first ran away, but then gave it up. The old guy was plenty mad, but in the end, my brother was just happy he’d got rid of her. He was convinced she was full of sin because of her mother. It makes me laugh that his own two children have run away from that nut farm as well!”
“Who is the woman who came to see you?”
“Turned out it was Devlin’s wife. Rolling in dough. You know, Harry Devlin. He’s running for parliament. I didn’t even know who my wife’s lover had been till that woman came around.”
Darling tried to brush aside the Byzantine details of the man’s story to search his own memory. His brother in Vancouver might have mentioned Harry Devlin the last time he’d had a letter from him. He was Miss Keeling’s father? That opened up who knew what possibilities.
“So what you’re saying is that this Devlin is Miss Keeling’s father, and his wife has been trying to track her down.”
“Looks that way. I didn’t even know she had moved here. Doesn’t surprise me. The point is that woman, Mrs. Devlin, seemed pretty intent on finding her. I went to see Harry Devlin himself to find out what was up, and to see what sort of man my wife thought was worth wrecking our marriage for. Pretty confident sort of bastard. Running as a Tory, in a by-election. No surprise there. What surprised me is that he didn’t even seem to know about her, Wendy, I mean, or at least the fact that his wife was looking for her.
“Next day I got hold of someone in the Education Department, and they told me she’d been assigned to a school out here somewhere. I thought if I telephoned her, I could just warn her, but it took some work to get the number and then they said the phone was out because of the snow or something, and then I just dropped it because I knew she wouldn’t thank me for tracking her down. Then I saw the missing persons notice a couple of days ago in an old paper. I got a bit worried. Thought I better come out.”
“Was that on Saturday the sixth?”
“That’s right.”
Darling did not control his wince this time. “So, you are suggesting Mrs. Devlin has spirited her away? For what purpose?”
“That must be obvious! For some reason she got it into her head that my daughter knows who she is and will make trouble while Devlin’s running for office. That woman is ruthless and ambitious. I wouldn’t put anything past her. I think Wendy might be in real danger.”
Afterward Darling sat in contemplation, his chair swivelled around so that he could look at Elephant Mountain, as he often did when he wanted to move his thinking along. This man, Irving, said he had tried to call his daughter twice and was told the phone was down. When Lane had talked to Lucy, the telephonist, she had said there had been a call from a woman the afternoon before. This call took on a new significance.
“HARRY DEVLIN SPEAKING.”
“Ah. Mr. Devlin. This is Inspector Darling from the Nelson Police. Do you have a couple of moments?”
“The what police?”
“Nelson, in the West Kootenay. I’m hoping you might be able to help us with a case we are working on.”
Devlin frowned at the view of English Bay. A steady rain had been falling and the bay was buried in mist. He had a brass desk lamp that threw a warm light across the papers he had been working on when Darling’s call had been put through. It provided a little cheer.
“Yes?”
“I wonder if you are familiar with a Miss Wendy Keeling?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m the head of a large firm and I’m in the middle of a political campaign. I meet a lot of people, so I don’t say it’s impossible, but I don’t remember that name.”
Was he being evasive? It was hard to tell on the telephone.
“She’s a young woman who teaches at one of the local schools and she’s disappeared.”
Devlin thought he understood, and he wheeled his chair around so that he could lean forward on his desk and reach for his fountain pen. “Ah, I see. You are hoping I have some political clout in your area. That I can do something to get more law enforcement to help with the search? It’s not my district, but I can certainly see if there’s anything I can usefully do.” Helping out with a missing person couldn’t hurt his profile with the voters.
