It Begins in Betrayal Page 2

  Ames took out his notebook and began to make notes. Was the priest telling the whole truth? Ames had little experience of God or being guided, except by hunger. Would the priest have called the police if he himself had done this? It seemed unlikely and, having spent the last hour with the priest, Ames was convinced the man was sincerely distraught. Still.

  “Do you know why she first came out here?”

  “Believe it or not, she was prospecting originally. She ran into a spot of bother with a mill owner in the early days, but she kept herself to herself and staked claims well out in the bush. I don’t know that they ever amounted to much. To be honest, I think it was her way of pretending she was working. She seemed to have family money to live on, though she lived pretty simply. Usually wore denim overalls and rubber boots, though she dressed up sometimes to go to town.” The priest looked at her and shook his head. “I don’t know of any next of kin, before you ask.”

  Ames now hesitated. Mentally he was running over the list of what he ought to do, fearful that he might leave something out and have Darling’s wrath to deal with. Was there anything he’d missed? He’d taken pictures, including of the path she’d made in her flight, made notes. He would investigate the cabin, interview people. No doubt their pathologist, Ashford Gillingham, whom no one had called anything but “Gilly” for as long as Ames could remember, would be able to estimate when she’d died, but in spite of the dried blood he could see that she’d not been dead long enough for rigor mortis to have passed.

  “I’ll need to see the parish registry, and maybe you could make a list of any people in the village I should speak to. When I’ve got the boys to carry her out to the van, maybe you could show me to the cabin?” Was that all? He looked back at the two van drivers, who had followed them up and were sitting on a log in a clearing, smoking; the unseasonably hot June weather had already made the forest floor tinder dry.

  “Bill, Andy. Go get the stretcher, and put those out, you’ll set the whole place on fire.”

  The two men got up slowly and ground their cigarettes into the log. “Who died and made you boss?” one of them muttered.

  “I heard that,” Ames said. He turned back to the task at hand.

  He walked into the forest and stared at the body, trying to see it as his boss might, looking at details. He suddenly saw that it was a miracle they had a body at all. If she’d gotten farther up the hill into this tangle of trees, she might never have been found. The dark lines of trees climbing the mountain behind them were vast and indifferent. She could quite easily have become just another missing person.

  When the body had been removed from its awkward position, Andy and Bill put the stretcher down to rest before they made their way back to the van. Ames took the opportunity to look more closely at the victim. Now that he could see her face, he thought she had the deep lines of someone perpetually in a disagreeable temper. Her skin was rough, as if she gave no care to herself. Under her half-closed lids, the old woman had pale rheumy eyes. How well would she have been able to see? He leaned down and looked at her hands and became aware of what he had not initially noticed: the woman smelled as if she had not washed for some time. Her fingernails were thick and chipped. Aha. Blood. Not a lot. Possibly not even from the fingers themselves, but traces of darkening red, as if she’d scratched someone very badly.

  “SO, FLIGHT LIEUTENANT, or Inspector, if you prefer it. I’m going to take you through anything you can remember about April 20, 1943. Is this date familiar to you?” Jensen had a notebook open and, with slowness that aggravated Darling’s already growing misgivings, was affixing the cap of his fountain pen at the top. “Now then.” He looked at Darling, his eyebrows raised expectantly.

  “Of course it’s familiar to me. One is not likely to forget the loss of a couple of bright young airmen and a plane.” He frowned. It was jarring to be suddenly precipitated back into the war. “What’s this about?”

  “No need for concern, Inspector. I will just want you to take me through the events of that date. I may stop you from time to time to ask questions, or make notes.”

  “Yes, but why?”

  “I, I am afraid, am only the messenger, or the scribe, if you will. It is my understanding that we have had a request from the British government to gather a few facts so that the business can be closed up. Now then, can we start with the mission? What was the object of that day’s flight?” He prepared to write.

  “What do you mean, ‘closed up’? It was closed up when I made my report and spoke with the parents of that unfortunate boy.” Darling still woke some nights, jolted into heart-stopping panic by the sound of the explosion and the blinding eruption of flames. It was seared into his brain, he often thought, and he might never move past it, or the cry of Rear Gunner Evans’s mother at the news of her son’s death. The war office had taken care of notifying Jones’s next of kin, since he did not have living parents.

  “I’m sure there’s no need to be concerned, Inspector. Now, if we could get on. I am scheduled to take the morning train back to the coast for my flight home.”

  Darling got up and went to stand by the window with his hands in his pockets. He could see the ferry halfway along its little route that linked Nelson with the other side of the lake. He wondered what Lane, across the ferry and thirty miles down that road—which he had come to love for her being at the end of—was doing. At the beach with Angela and the Bertolli boys, he wouldn’t wonder. June had been fine and warm. And then with a slight frisson of guilt he wondered how Ames was getting on.

  “Inspector?”

  It was remarkable how this government man kept any impatience out of his voice. He was like a lizard, Darling thought. Persistent, cold-blooded, patient. He turned and began.

  “The morning of April 20, 1943, we prepared for a bombing raid over suspected arms warehouses in Germany . . .”

  CHAPTER TWO

  FATHER LAHEY WATCHED THE BODY being carried to the van, and only then crossed himself, shuddering slightly.

  “So strange, poor soul,” he said. “A dreadful, lonely death. I hope she is at peace with God.”

  “She wasn’t exactly alone, unfortunately,” Ames remarked. “Let’s hope God is in a mood to overlook her failure to attend church all these years.”

  “Oh, of course, she wasn’t alone. How dreadful!” The priest glanced around anxiously and then looked down toward where the few houses sat along the banks of the lake above the railway, which was hidden by the forest.

  The cabin belonging to Agatha Browning lay some way up from the village, along the old mill road, now nothing more than a forest path. They made slow progress along the route Agatha Browning took to escape her killer, as Ames walked carefully ahead, scanning the ground for signs of blood or disturbance. The path wound down past the north side of her small log cabin, which had darkened with the years. The nearby forest gave the cabin an aura of forbidding loneliness. A well-travelled trail led from the main route to the back of the cabin. They followed to where it passed by an outhouse set back some forty feet from the cabin at the end of the garden. There the ground was covered in dried blood. Lahey stood some distance away, with one hand over his mouth. Still feeling queasy, Ames took photos, wondering if the stains of blood would show up well enough.

  “It must have happened here,” he said. He followed the route from the outhouse to the cabin, with the priest tagging nervously behind him.

  Though the cabin was heavily shaded by the evergreens, there was a cleared area at the side and back of the property, which was now yellow with sunlight. He had a momentary urge to go toward the back of the house to escape from the gloom of the overhanging forest.

  “Had she ever been married, do you know?” Ames asked the priest. He had put out his hand to stop Lahey from going any closer to the house. Ames walked around to what appeared to be the front door of the cabin, but it was clear from the wear marks that she never used that door, but came in and out of her cabin through the back door that led onto the
small garden she had created. Who had come up this path to attack Agatha Browning? Had they knocked at that little-used front door? He stood well away and tried to see if the overgrown grasses around the base of the steps had been walked on. Yes, possibly. And when? And for that matter, why?

  “You know, I have no idea,” the priest responded. “Certainly there was no one since I came. She was older when she arrived after the war. She certainly could have been, perhaps, widowed? I won’t say she was completely unsociable . . . she did nod to people when she came to the village store, and as I say, I visited her more lately when I came up from town. We’d sit in her little garden here and chat. But I know I tried to ask about her former life, and she invariably cut me off. ‘Let the dead past bury its dead’ she used to say. But . . .”

  “But what?” Ames asked, pausing and looking at the priest.

  “Well, I just thought of this because it was unusual to begin with, and in light of . . .” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the spot where they had found her. “The last time I saw her, she said she might want to come to confession this next week. Of course I never ask why. I’m just grateful that people are wanting to square their souls with the Almighty. Especially in this case. I wondered if this was the beginning of her coming back to God.”

  “But she’s been killed before this confession,” observed Ames.

  “Yes, but I am confident God will take into consideration her intention, may he have mercy on her soul,” Lahey murmured.

  Mounting the three stairs onto a landing, Ames took out his handkerchief and pushed at the door. It swung open on well-oiled hinges. Behind him, the priest made as if to go in, but Ames stopped him. The room they were looking into was a sharp contrast to the peaceful-seeming atmosphere outside. The cabin had been completely turned over. The one table was knocked on its side, and two wooden box benches against the wall had all their contents—blankets, heavy clothes, books—pulled out and strewn on the floor. Dishes had been flung out of the cupboard by the stove and lay shattered on the floor, buckets were turned over, and a vegetable bin was upset. There was an entrance to a second room, and Ames could already see that it had gotten the same treatment as this one.

  “Father Lahey, I’m going to ask you to find me some sort of padlock. I’ll need to take a few pictures, but I want to lock the cabin down and return with my boss. We’ll need to go over the place thoroughly. I don’t want people wandering through here.” Back outside, Ames made some notes in his book. “Was she disliked by anyone in the village?” he asked.

  The minister was silent for a few moments and then cleared his throat, looking behind him down the path, as if fearful he would be overheard. “Was she universally popular? No. I don’t like to speak out of turn, really, and there are, you will appreciate my situation, things I couldn’t speak of that will have been shared with me by my parishioners.”

  “For Pete’s sake, Father. She’s been murdered. We have no idea whether someone came from somewhere else, or if the killer is still here—a member of this community, even. I would very much appreciate it if you told me everything you know that might have any bearing on her death.”

  “Yes, I see,” Lahey said, but was again silent. After a considerable time, he sighed and shifted his weight. “She lived here for over twenty-five years, Constable Ames. I can imagine in a small community like this there might have been tensions from time to time. I’d best get back and collect what information I can from the registry for you. I can tell you that nothing I have heard from anyone here extends to a murderous dislike of her.”

  While the priest was gone, Ames, annoyed at what he felt was the priest impeding his investigation, took pictures, walking carefully through the chaos so as not to disturb potential evidence. He saw a picture frame knocked over, glass shattered, on the floor in front of the narrow mantel by the small iron stove that occupied the back wall. He was surprised to see that the frame itself was silver. He knelt down and turned it over. The grainy sepia photograph showed three pretty young women, smiling for the camera and leaning over a fence at the base of a rising field with a few sheep and a whitewashed house with a dark roof along the ridge in the distance. The old country, he thought. It looked to have been taken in the early teens, he guessed. Was one of them Agatha Browning?

  Leaving everything as it was, he closed the door of the cabin and went round to the back. He took a deep breath, as if he’d not been breathing properly in the tumult left by whoever had done this. The garden, as the priest had said, was lovely. Ames didn’t know much about the names of plants, but he saw what he knew as daisies and some sort of rose bushes and some other tall flowers of a deep blue hue. Lupines? The name leaped at him from a buried memory of his grandmother’s garden. There was also a vegetable garden with carrots, beans, peas, and, he assumed, potatoes. There were two wooden garden chairs and a small table against the cabin, and a shed farther into the line of trees. The shed contained buckets, shovels, a scythe, and small hand tools. He wondered, with a touch of melancholy, who would use them now. He sighed. There was no evidence of carnage in this quiet garden.

  He turned toward the edge of the garden where the trees seemed to encroach, anxious to get back the space that had been cleared by this pioneering woman. He returned to the outhouse for a closer look. Behind it the ground was trampled and blood permeated the crushed grass. He could see that the trail of blood led into the woods they had just come through. He poked among the grasses and broken ferns for any sort of weapon, and then keeping well to the edge of the disturbed area, he carefully followed the trail back toward where she had gone, imagining her desperate progress into the forest. It appeared to him that Agatha Browning had been stabbed here and then, still alive, made the attempt to escape through the woods. The position of her arms suggested she had not been dumped, already dead, by someone trying to hide the body. Ames sat down on a squat wooden garden chair and began to fill out his notes.

  “Constable Ames?” The priest was returning from the village and called out to him from lower down on the path.

  Ames finished making a note of his suspicions and stretched his back out. He was tall, and sitting in an uncomfortable wooden chair was a strain.

  “I think it’s clear Mrs. Browning was not killed outright. She must have run to try to escape and been pushed over.” Ames frowned suddenly. “Father, where did she keep this car you told me about?”

  “She keeps . . . kept it parked just off the road where it turns down to the village. Now that you say it, did I see it there just now? Well, we can check on the way back down. That poor woman. If she hadn’t lived so far out, someone in the village might have heard her scream.” He took a deep breath and shook his head. “It’s my first, you know. This sort of death . . . usually I attend to people in a hospital, or on their deathbeds at home. Or, even the very worst, a sick child. But never a . . . a murder. It’s one thing in detective fiction, isn’t it? So horrific to think of someone dying in this desperate and futile attempt to outrun evil.” After a moment he held up a padlock and key. “I’ve brought you the lock, and I’d like to take some time and go through the parish papers more thoroughly. We possibly have more information about where she came from. Perhaps she still has family there.”

  Ames took the lock and then realized there was no hasp on the door, or any way to affix the lock. He wanted Darling to come and have a look. Could he leave the scene? “Does anyone have a telephone?”

  “I’m afraid not. If they reopen the mill, I expect they will have to.”

  “I need to drive back to town to collect my inspector. Would you be able to keep an eye on the comings and goings of cars into the village from your church? I’d like to try to keep people away till I’ve come back.”

  The minister nodded. “I can, of course. How long will you be? I generally go back to town by six.”

  “We’ll be back as quick as we can. What kind of car did she drive? I’ll look out for it on the way back to the ferry.”

  “
You know, I just don’t think I saw it. So strange.” Lahey’s eyebrows came together and he shook his head. “It is a very old thing, something from the twenties I’m sure. She must have bought it went she first moved out here. Dark green.”

  Ames stood on the steps contemplating the silence of the forest when the priest had gone. Sun dappled the ground through the trees, and the scent of the pine needles warmed in the afternoon heat conveyed a sense that nothing bad had, or could, happen in such a peaceful place. He made his way back down the path to where he had parked his car, trying to imagine how anyone could want to live in such utter isolation. The police car was the only one parked on the grassy edge of the road. He looked around and could see no old dark green jalopy anywhere, and yet this must be where she would normally park it. In fact, there was an oil slick just a few feet away, where the grass had given up the ghost. Ames made a note and then got into his car and drove it down the hill, happy to see the cable ferry on the village side.

  Once on board, he stepped out of his car and approached the ferryman, holding up his identification. The older man, with an unreadable face partially obscured by a scraggly growth of beard, coughed violently and then waited.

  “Has anyone unusual been across in the last twenty-four hours?”

  The ferryman turned his mouth down and thought. “They are all pretty unusual,” he commented. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his dripping nose. “That old lady, Browning, she went over to Nelson last night and hasn’t been back yet. I’d say that’s unusual. She usually goes up to town in the morning, back well before three. Anyone in the three days before that I couldn’t say.”

  “What time was this?” Ames asked, surprised. He would have said, at a guess, that the victim had been there at least overnight, if not a little longer.

  “Ten, I guess. On my last run.”