A Lethal Lesson, page 30
Eleanor pulled the door open and looked alarmed at Lane’s expression. “What is it, my dear? What’s happened?”
“It’s Miss Keeling. She’s turned up in a dreadful state. I have her in the car. Do you mind awfully just having her here to warm up and get some food down her?”
“Goodness!” cried Eleanor looking past Lane at the car. “Kenny, come help!”
At this point Alexandra emerged from somewhere at the back of the cottage and began to bark, alarmed perhaps by the worry in the voice of her mistress.
Between them Kenny and Lane supported Miss Keeling into the cottage where Eleanor took over with blankets and slippers and cups of tea. Kenny walked Lane back out to the car.
“Can you phone my husband straight away? Something dreadful has happened to her, but she wants looking after before she is made to talk. And . . .” Lane hesitated. “And she may be needed to help the police with their investigation into that hit and run.”
“Oh. Well, you don’t worry about a thing. You go along now. We’ll look after everything.”
Suffused with the warmth and utter reassurance of having the Armstrongs as her neighbours, able, she was sure, to handle absolutely any crisis, Lane made her way back to the school in a perplexity of questions. Uppermost in her mind was, where had Miss Keeling been for more than a week?
NO CHILDREN HAD yet arrived at the school when Lane returned, so she continued with her preparations for the morning. She decided on the blackboard for the thermometer, and she hung it on a nail and wrote down the temperature as it was now, when only she was in the school, shuddering at the low number: forty degrees. She walked briskly back and forth, trying to keep warm, setting out the foolscap, pencils, and rulers, with a view to making a graph to map the changes in temperature in the hour from when school started.
DARLING AND AMES stood looking at the road map that covered the distance between Castlegar and Nelson. “We found Gaskell’s body about a mile this side of the falls,” Darling said, pointing. “So the hit and run was behind where Mackenzie claimed he was when that car sped by. If he was telling the truth, which I doubt. He could be throwing a speeding car at us to put us off the scent.”
Ames considered. “That’s true, sir. That’s exactly how I see it. I think we’ve got enough to charge him.”
“Do you indeed? You’re pretty confident.”
“He’s clearly lying about something, sir. And he was in the right place at the right time.”
Darling nodded and made a “hmm” noise. “Unless he’s lying about something else. Do you believe his story about borrowing the car?”
“No. I think he took it, collected a very drunk Gaskell, and somehow managed to get him out of the car and run him down. As I said, right time, right place, car all banged up.”
“Go ahead and charge him. I think you’re right. It still leaves the pesky problem of Miss Scott’s car, abandoned and banged up.”
Ames had gone back to his office, and Terrell now stood at Darling’s door. “Sir, it occurs to me that if it wasn’t Mackenzie who hit Gaskell—”
“So you believed Mackenzie?”
“I wouldn’t go that far, sir. But we have to take into account the possibility that there was indeed a speeding car. I’m just wondering if it is Mr. X or, indeed, Miss Keeling in Scott’s car.”
“Granted. You were saying?”
“Yes, sir. If it wasn’t him, and it was someone driving Miss Scott’s car, then to get back to where the car was abandoned, they’d have to take the ferry from Nelson to get to the north shore. Shall I go check with whoever was on shift that night? Mackenzie said he got back to town around ten thirty, so that should help establish when that speeding car would have gotten the ferry.”
“Yes. Why not?”
“AMES!” DARLING SHOUTED ten minutes later, slamming down the phone, and getting up so hurriedly that his chair nearly toppled backward. It fell back onto its front legs with a bang and Darling reached for his coat and hat.
“Sir?” Ames was in the doorway.
“Yes, blocking the doorway. Very useful in an emergency. Hat! Coat! Keys! Miss Keeling has been found. Now maybe we’ll get to the bottom of this schoolteacher business, at last.”
Ames, who had just been on the point of putting everything in place to charge Mackenzie, stumbled back and then turned to get his things from his office and follow his boss down the stairs. “Who found her?”
“We’re off up the lake to King’s Cove,” Darling snapped to O’Brien who had halfway lifted his bulk off the stool.
Once in the car, and moving along Baker Street, Ames tried again. “Who—” he began.
Darling pulled his coat impatiently across his chest. “Do you have to ask?”
“No! Really, sir? Miss Winslow? Golly, that is—”
“Just drive, Ames. If I need any insightful observations from you, I’ll ask for them.”
Darling maintained his silence until they were off the ferry on the north side of the lake. “If you must know, she found Miss Keeling sleeping in the school this morning. She took her to the Armstrongs’, where she now is, apparently recovering from cold and hunger.”
“In the school! That means she’s been nearby the whole time. I wonder where she’s been? And why she went away?”
“Let’s not wonder. Let’s pick up the pace a bit and go find out, shall we?”
Darling wanted quiet to consider the situation. No matter what he was working on, there was Lane. Doing the right thing, of course. He would concede that. She got the woman to safety and did not try to find out anything. She had her priorities right. But honestly, it was diabolical.
Miss Keeling was sleeping in the Armstrongs’ bed when Darling and Ames arrived, more than an hour after they set off. Ames had doggedly refused to speed beyond what the chains and packed snow on the road would allow for safety.
“Oh, do come in, Inspector, Sergeant,” Eleanor said when they arrived at the door. “Shh, Alexandra, they’re not here for you!” She took Darling by the elbow and ushered him in and stood by to let Ames duck through the door. “The poor woman was in a frightful state. We’ve fed her and she’s had a hot bath and is asleep now. I’ve resisted the urge to throw out her clothes. Please. Sit down. I’ve got the kettle hot and some lovely raisin bread we can toast.”
Darling could almost feel Ames lighting up at the suggestion of a snack and settled his own expression along more dour lines in contrast. The Armstrongs kept a couple of rattan chairs in the kitchen where they normally spent their leisure time in front of the stove, and Darling and Ames were now invited to sit in them. “Did she say much about what happened to her?” Darling asked.
“We didn’t want to press her too much. She was shivering and then got a bit weepy, poor thing,” Kenny said. He was at the counter cutting the promised slices off a loaf of bread.
Eleanor busied herself with the tea, and then set cups and saucers on the table for the policemen. “I gather she must have been forced in some way. She kept asking where she was and looking out the window as if she expected to be found by someone. Of course no one’s going to find anyone here in King’s Cove!”
“She did mention this was better than the basement she’d been in. She wondered what day it was. She said you lose track of time in the dark.” Kenny had put the slices of raisin bread into the wings of the toaster, and now watched them closely.
“Basement?” Darling said, surprised. “She’s been kept locked in a basement. Whose? No mention of how she might have got away?”
“Nothing, I’m afraid. I didn’t like to ask. She seemed quite traumatized.”
Darling stirred his tea thoughtfully. Had she been beaten? Was this some sort of sordid sex crime? If Gaskell were still alive, he might have supposed him quite capable of such a crime. Unless he had kidnapped her, but got himself killed before he could, what, kill her? Certainly if he’d kidnapped her and then got himself killed, she’d have been abandoned until someone found her, or she died of starvation. “Did she say anything about the man who kidnapped her?”
“Oh!” said Eleanor with a little cry. “But that’s odd, you see, because when she was looking so anxiously out the window, she did say, ‘What if she finds me again?’ She. I didn’t think till just now how peculiar that is.”
“A woman?” exclaimed Ames. He nodded gratefully at Kenny who had put a plate with a fat slab of perfectly toasted raisin bread before him and pushed a plate of butter and some raspberry jam after it. “Well, there’s one for the records!”
Darling took in a thoughtful breath. Who would kidnap Mrs. Devlin? According to Irving, she had an uncle who might have been capable. But why after all this time? They’d driven all the way out to King’s Cove, and he didn’t want to spend hours waiting for Miss Keeling to wake up. There was nothing for it. They’d have to wake her. She could sleep after they’d gone. “I think—” he began, but he was interrupted by the appearance of Miss Keeling herself at the door to the kitchen.
She was dressed and had a thick cardigan pulled around her that seemed miles too big and was wearing a pair of slippers obviously lent her by the Armstrongs.
“I expect you want to talk to me.”
If she’d been weepy and shivering before, she certainly appeared self-contained now, Darling thought. He stood up and offered his chair and pulled out a wooden kitchen chair for himself.
“More tea, my dear?” offered Eleanor.
“You’ve been so kind. I’m all right for now. It’s been heavenly to have a hot bath! I feel almost myself again.”
“This is Inspector Darling of the Nelson Police, and Sergeant Ames. Why don’t you have a little chat? I’ve a good deal to see to in the mailroom,” Eleanor continued. She nodded fiercely at Kenny, who got up as well and put on his hat and thick wool sweater.
“That pile of wood out there won’t split itself!”
Alexandra looked from one to the other and opted to follow Eleanor through to the post office.
Darling cleared his throat. “I understand you are Miss Wendy Keeling, teacher at the Balfour school?”
“Yes, that’s right. My real name is Irving, but I’ve used Keeling since I was sixteen. I’d run away from home, you see, and didn’t want to be found.” She shuddered. “I thought I’d been found when that car turned up, always waiting near the school. I was packed, ready to leave. Then, well, she came. I still have no idea who she is, or why she wanted me locked away.”
Ames took notes and Darling coaxed the story out of the teacher. It came in fits and starts. And culminated in her being pushed down into a basement. Yes, food had been left for her, and she’d found a four-quart can of water. A man who had been left to guard her gave her more food from time to time, but he didn’t talk to her except to tell her to be quiet. “I was terrified that he was going to attack me, but he seemed more interested in doing anything else but sit around guarding me. He kept driving off somewhere.”
No explanation had been given except that it would be over in a few days. It had certainly lasted longer than that.
“Did you know what she meant by a few days?” Darling asked.
Keeling shook her head. “I had no idea what that meant, and less idea who she was. She was rich, I can tell you that. The car was expensive, her clothes were expensive. She seemed to have some fixation about my father, but I couldn’t make sense of it. I asked if my father had sent her, but in reality I couldn’t imagine in a million years how my father, a man with no money and addicted to drink, would even know someone like her, let alone have the wherewithal to ‘send’ her to get me. But she did seem very focused on my father. I ran away from a very religious family when I was sixteen. I was sure it must have something to do with that. I’ve been afraid of that for all these years because I feared they might kill me for running away. Then I began to remind myself that that was the fear of a child. Through the years when nothing happened, I began to feel I was safe, after all, but then my father followed me to Saanich. I wouldn’t talk to him. I got this job and thought I was safe here, and then I began to see someone was watching me. I was terrified all over again. I was about to run away. I’m embarrassed to say it, but I couldn’t control my fear. Then she turned up.”
“How did you get out?”
“I began to be really frightened, besides being filthy and cold, because the idea of being left or forgotten there became more and more terrifying. She went away and left me there, and I honestly had no idea how long it was. Her thuggy sidekick was often not there, and I always feared he’d drive away one day and never come back, and I’d be left to starve. I dreamed that I heard people outside once, talking, and I tried to call out, you know how you do in a nightmare, and then I forced myself awake, but there was nothing. There were no windows, but last evening I felt a cold breeze coming from the door to the coal cellar, and one of the doors to the coal chute was open. It wasn’t before. I’d tried so many times to push it, but it felt as though it had a bar across it to keep it shut and I couldn’t budge it, and now, suddenly it was open. I managed to crawl out. I didn’t want to go down the road in case she or that man came back so I thought if I could go through the woods, I was bound to find something, a house, another road. I covered up my tracks from the house to a sort of shed and then clambered around in the snow for what felt like most of the night.”
Darling thought about the sheer folly of going into the bush in an out-of-the-way place like this in the dark but said nothing. She’d been very, very lucky. She described how she’d climbed for a good part of the night, when the terrain had started to descend and then she saw the schoolhouse through the trees close to dawn. She thought she’d get down to the store to get help, but she knew the store wouldn’t be open, and she’d been exhausted. She’d been terrified the woman would look for her there after finding her gone, and knew nothing until that new teacher came, who appeared to be handling the school now.
“Miss Winslow,” Ames offered helpfully. “She’s the inspector’s wife.”
“Yes, thank you, Sergeant,” Darling said repressively. He was contemplating the nearly inadmissible thought that the wife of a very wealthy and well-known businessman had somehow engineered the capture of Miss Keeling. Under his orders? Was Devlin directing the proceedings? Was Serena Devlin acting on some desperate idea that she had to get Miss Keeling out of the way?
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
TERRELL SAT MUSING AT HIS desk. The person who’d manned the ferry the night of the fifth had said there’d been a bit of a rush in the period between ten and eleven that night. He assumed people, seeing the increase in the snow, were probably deciding to get back home and not stay in town as long as they usually might. He wasn’t watching too closely because he was pretty bundled up himself. He thought that he’d seen a car with a dent in the bumper getting off on the north shore, as he stood on the side of the ramp holding the chain. No, he hadn’t seen the driver, or even given it much thought. It was just that the dent was pretty substantial and stood out in the headlights.
Terrell thought it safe to assume that might have been Miss Scott’s car. Mackenzie, also driving a dented car, would have had no reason to cross to the north shore. But who was driving it? Not Miss Scott, lying knocked out. Miss Keeling? Frustrated that the ferryman had not seen the driver, Terrell went to the front to see O’Brien.
“Where is everyone?”
“Dashed off up the lake. Apparently that missing teacher has turned up.”
THE CHILDREN WERE very keen on the thermometer experiment. They pushed together to see if having all of them standing right around the thermometer would cause the air to warm up more quickly. Finding that the thermometer had crept up a bit, they were at their desks copying the graph Lane had put on the blackboard. Lane smiled at the ability of the children to feed off each other’s enthusiasm. Randy put up his hand. “Can I try writing with ink? I never got to before.”
Lane considered. Drawing a graph might be a messy proposition in ink. “I tell you what. I’ll prepare the ink and pen, and let’s see how you get on in pencil, and then you can do it over in ink.”
Happy with this, Randy set back to work and Lane went to her desk to open the bottle and prepare the pen.
“Remember, it started out at forty degrees when I was here by myself. Rafe, can you check now?”
Rafe peered at the thermometer from his front-row desk, and then got up to look more closely. “It’s fifty-two!”
“Excellent. After you’ve done this, let’s see if we can make it even warmer by jumping up and down. Why might that make it warmer?”
“’Cause you get hot when you jump around?” suggested Rolfie.
“That sounds right,” Lane said. “Maybe if we get warm, we’ll warm the room up even more.” She went to stand by the window. It was a lovely winter’s day, drifts of snow with sun reflecting exuberant light through the trees.
Happily, it would soon be time to light the stove. As novel as the experiment was, she was cold, and the ever-present thought of Miss Keeling spending an icy night on the bench added to her desire to light the stove and get back into the routine.
Where had Miss Keeling been? She hadn’t appeared to have any idea. Somewhere within walking distance, though, Lane thought. She wished now that she’d at least ascertained which direction she’d come from. She would do it after school. Even with the children messing around outside during their break, she should find the trail of the teacher’s progress coming out of the woods.
She was about to turn away to see how Randy was getting along with his pencil, when she saw a car driving toward the school. She’d just begun to speculate who might be coming to the school at this time of the morning, when it stopped a good hundred yards away on the road, and a man got out. He wore a long camel coat and a black fedora. It struck her momentarily that the clothes looked expensive, but he didn’t. Any contemplation of his grizzled facial features was wiped away in an instant. He had reached his gloved hand into his pocket and removed a revolver. The man who’d kidnapped Miss Keeling had come to find her.
