H&Y20 - Deliver Us from Evil (14 page)

Webster made the supper that evening, as was usual in the winter months, while his wife ran her fingers over the Braille book she was currently reading. She longed to cook for her husband but he was adamant, it was just far, far too dangerous for her to work with heat and boiling water. In the summer a well prepared salad was most welcome for him to come home to but in the winter, when hot food was needed, then he did the cooking, and did so at his insistence.

That evening he took Terry for his walk. The long-haired Alsatian was a happy dog, as are all dogs who have jobs to do, but guiding Joyce throughout the day was no substitute for exercise, and he needed his ‘off duty’ time to wander and explore the dense woodland close to where the Websters lived. Reginald Webster watched the lithe and placid dog as he wound his way in and out of the frost-covered landscape and again marvelled at his wife’s courage, facing her blindness with such stoicism. All the worse because at the time of the accident she had been studying fine art at university. She thought herself fortunate because, of the four people in the car that night, it was only she who had survived.

Humble.

Again, his wife made him feel very, very humble.

Thomson Ventnor drove home and changed into a lightweight Italian suit and a white overcoat. He took a bus to the outskirts of York and walked slowly up a long driveway to a large nineteenth century house and opened the front door. He was met with a blast of excessively warm air which he always thought could not possibly be healthy. He signed in the visitor book and climbed a wide, deeply carpeted stairway and entered a room in which a number of people sat, all still and quiet, apparently not interacting with each other at all. In one corner of the room a young woman gently moved an electric razor over the face of an elderly man. She and Ventnor nodded and smiled at each other. Another elderly man, seated in the opposite corner, grinned in recognition of Ventnor, but by the time Ventnor reached him, the man had retreated somewhere within his mind and all Ventnor could do was to sit beside him and say, ‘Hello, dad.’

Having stayed at the home for half an hour and talked to the staff about his father’s wellbeing, Ventnor left the building and took a bus into York. He wandered from pub to pub having a pint of beer in each and eventually fetched up at Caesar’s Night Club. He got into conversation with a woman who had forced herself into a dress that was too small and too short for her and had a trying-hard-to-be-nice smile. He thought she had the worn look of a retired lady of the night, or perhaps of someone trying to put something unpleasant behind her, but it was at least female company and she seemed interested in him. When the closing lights came on she said, ‘See you around?’

‘Yes,’ Ventnor replied, holding eye contact with her. ‘Don’t know when. I’m going to Canada tomorrow, don’t know when I’ll be back . . . it’s an open-ended trip.’

‘Well, that’s a new one,’ she snorted as she grabbed her handbag and twisted off the bar stool to begin, on unsteady legs, to walk across the floor towards the exit sign.

‘It happens to be true’, he said to himself. ‘Only found out myself a few hours ago’.

It was Friday, 02.00 hours.

FOUR

Y
ellich thought that Aiden McLeer did indeed look like a Canadian, whatever Canadians are supposed to look like. McLeer was well built, broad chested, muscular, neatly dressed in a grey suit with a red tie over a white shirt. He was short-haired, but not crew cut, and was clean shaven. He had an air of affability about him, Yellich found, which mixed wholesomely with an attitude of politeness, humility and gentleness. He had a slow but very masculine way of moving and Yellich thought that had he not been an officer in the Barrie Police Homicide Unit, he would have been clad in fur, trapping for beaver in the vast, snow covered wilderness. McLeer, Yellich and Ventnor sat in McLeer’s office in the Barrie Police headquarters on Sperling Drive, Cundles East, Barrie, which had transpired to be a newly built building of brick walls with vast window areas, under a pale green painted roof of metal sheeting. The flagpoles stood in a small traffic island in front of the building; the one to the left had a flag flying the red maple leaf of Canada, the second, the emblem of the Barrie Police. McLeer’s office, air-conditioned, at the front of the building, looked out over the rear of a large Zehrs shopping mall that Yellich and Ventnor were to find was pronounced ‘z-hears’. The rest of the police station was bounded by Highway 400 from which came the constant hum of car tyres rotating at speed over the road surface.

‘I read over the report your boss faxed to us yesterday. It made very interesting reading. Our chief has asked me to head up at our end.’ McLeer had a soft speaking voice with a distinct Canadian accent. He was not a migrant, definitely first, second or even third generation Canadian, possibly more. He was, Yellich immediately found, a man who seemed to be at peace in his own country.

‘Yes, sir,’ Yellich responded quickly. He felt a little on edge, he felt eager and keen to make a good, and also a lastingly good, impression amongst the Canadians.

‘Aiden, please,’ McLeer smiled at him. His eyes were warm, sincere, blue.

‘Thank you. I am Somerled,’ Yellich replied, ‘S.O.M.E.R.L.E.D., pronounced “Sorley”. It’s Celtic, quite old I believe.’

‘I was going to ask,’ McLeer grinned. ‘It’s a name I have never come across before.’

Thomson Ventnor added, ‘Dare say you’ll find that I have another strange name.’

‘I do.’ Again a warm smile.

‘It’s also unusual, but it’s only a north of England variation of Thomas. I am the third Thomson Ventnor.’

‘Interesting.’

‘You grow up with an unusual name,’ Yellich explained, ‘and after a short while it just becomes . . . well, ordinary. You do learn to live with it getting remarked upon each time you meet someone new, but that’s easily coped with.’

‘I can imagine.’ McLeer clawed his mug of coffee in a meaty paw and added, ‘I thought Aiden was a little unusual, but as you say, after a while . . . Well, the report . . . we can talk about unusual names later.’

‘Yes,’ Yellich sat forward, ‘dare say we’d better get down to business.’

‘Indeed, well the report seems clear enough.’ Aiden McLeer held the fax in his left hand. ‘A lady who is . . . who was not who she claimed to be and who was murdered, possibly by a Canadian male who travelled to England for the express purpose of said murder. She further seems to have taken the identity of a Canadian lady who once lived in the city. Seems about it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘The Canadian link, the Canadian connection is clear . . . the Barrie connection is clear . . . and you have no local suspects?’

‘None, sir . . . sorry, Aiden. None, Aiden. She didn’t seem to be particularly integrated in the legitimate community apart from her socially isolated marriage, but our boss, Mr Hennessey, has unearthed information that she was well submerged in the criminal milieu of York.’

‘Yes, he said so . . . to the complete ignorance of her husband.’

‘Yes, sir, she is, she was, a lady who led multiple lives. She seemed to be trying to disprove the notion that you “can’t be all things to all men”.’ Yellich sipped his coffee but yearned for tea. ‘Her husband knew her only as a suburban housewife, keeping house for him. Yet when she did leave the house alone, she went out to engage in crime . . . and she became known to the York underworld as “Becky”.’

‘How did her husband react to that news?’

‘He didn’t,’ Yellich replied flatly. ‘Or he hasn’t yet.’

‘You mean he doesn’t know . . . yet?’

‘Yes, sir . . . Aiden. “Yet” being the operative word. He’ll learn of her true nature eventually but, at the moment, Mr Hennessey is leaving him alone with his grief and his mourning, an important process for him to go through. He needs time and space to go through it.’

‘Yes, that is very thoughtful and very sensitive of your Mr Hennessey.’

‘I think so,’ Yellich smiled. ‘I like working for him . . .’

‘And there is also the issue of the Canadian man who was apparently stalking her . . . and he is your prime suspect.’

‘Well, looking for her, sir . . . rather than stalking her.’

‘Yes . . . better, stalking means something else . . . yes, and the implication is that he found her and left her on a canal bank to die of exposure. Cold winter you are having.’

‘Unusually so, Aiden, confess this is warmer than we expected.’

McLeer glanced to his left out across the low-rise roof of Zehrs to the still bare trees and the blue sky beyond. ‘Yes, seems spring is early this year, but don’t get fooled. It will freeze tonight. That’s why you can walk out in shirtsleeves right now but the lake is still iced over. When the sun goes down the temperature will drop like a stone. This warmth won’t hang around; if you’ve brought your thermals with you, you’ll need them this evening.’

‘I see,’ Yellich followed McLeer’s gaze. The bare tree branches said it all for him. He was pleased he had indeed brought warm clothing. ‘Small town,’ Yellich observed. ‘Seems so . . .’

‘Yes, Barrie is quite small but,’ McLeer smiled and shrugged his left shoulder, ‘it’s enough to keep us busy. Our buckets are full every Friday and Saturday night. So you have no local suspect for the murder of . . . the lady in question?’

‘None . . . none at all, Aiden. All signs point to the Canadian gentleman who was trying to track her down. He paid cash wherever he went so as to avoid leaving a trail for us to follow and the photofit . . .’

‘Yes,’ McLeer picked up the photofit, ‘square-jawed, bearded, no distinguishing features at all . . . there’s many like him in Barrie.’

‘More’s the pity.’

Ventnor glanced casually out of McLeer’s office window and watched a young woman in jeans and a sweater push a young child in a buggy along the pavement beside Zehrs and he thought that he could be viewing a similar street scene in York, or indeed anywhere in the UK, except that, when she crossed the road, the young woman looked left before looking right.

‘Well,’ McLeer sat back in his chair and interlaced the fingers of both hands behind his head. ‘Not a lot to go on but we have solved cases with less to go on and we rise to the challenge. So, tell me, gentlemen, how’s your French?’

‘Non-existent,’ Yellich admitted.

‘Same here,’ Ventnor added, with a distinct note of apology in his voice. ‘Why?’

‘Ah . . . the English,’ McLeer smiled a broad smile and released his fingers and placed his meaty hands gently on his desk, ‘you expect everybody to speak English but you do not attempt to learn other languages. Not true, I know, but I have heard that said of the English many times.’

‘We don’t really have the incentive to be fair,’ Yellich said defensively, ‘English being the international language, especially of commerce and air travel.’

‘Fair enough, but the reason I ask is the name, Piers . . . Piers, you see, is French, and one of the names the deceased used was Edith Lecointe. Lecointe is French also. If I know Canada, if I know my country, I think we will be venturing into the French Canadian community. Mainly it is centred in Ottawa and the rest of Quebec province but we have our fair share of French Canadians here in Ontario . . . people . . . families . . . and I mean whole kinship groups for whom French is the language of choice. They are well integrated, they have not formed a ghetto or been forced into an enclave but they still form a distinct and separate group of citizens. Piers might well be an alias but the choice of Piers as a name would be a choice made by a French Canadian. Did he use a car when in the UK?’

‘Yes, he did, we believe, a hire car, but no one took a note of the registration number,’ Yellich explained. ‘No one had any need to do so. And he wasn’t caught on CCTV. Where he went was a bit remote for CCTV . . . even in the UK.’

‘And paid in cash. He was a man who clearly put a lot of effort into covering his tracks. I can see why you are suspicious of him.’ McLeer paused. ‘Seems to me we will need a French-speaking officer. I speak a little. It is expected of our officers to be as bilingual as possible but my French is not good enough if there is a possibility that we are going into the French Canadian community . . . the French Canadians have developed their own form of French which makes French purists cringe.’

‘I see,’ Yellich said for want of something to say in reply. ‘Interesting.’

‘Not to worry, I have an officer in mind but she has authority in this matter, she has tactical command. This is a Barrie Police investigation. We must agree on that now.’

‘Understood,’ Yellich nodded. ‘And agreed.’

‘Clear as a bell,’ added Ventnor, ‘protocol will be observed.’

‘Cooperation will be of the fullest, of course, and we are keen to know how come Edith Lecointe’s or Avrillé’s name was used . . . like, where is she now? There may be a heap more to this than the murder which occurred in England.’

‘Absolutely, as is always the case.’ Yellich raised his eyebrows and settled back in his chair. ‘Yet the lady was frightened. She was scared of something or someone. She was in hiding, going out in disguise and doing what she could to raise hard cash and we don’t know who she was, because neither her fingerprints nor her DNA are on our database.’

‘None on ours either.’ McLeer pronounced ‘either’ in the American way of ‘ee-thuer’ which grated on the ears of Yellich and Ventnor who both pronounced ‘either’ and ‘neither’ as ‘I-ther’ and ‘ni-ther’ as they had been taught and as they believed was the right and proper pronunciation. ‘So,’ McLeer continued, ‘we have to find out who Edith Lecointe or Avrillé is . . . or was.’

‘It’s the only place we can start,’ Yellich offered.

‘Yes, yes it is. How are you feeling?’

‘Tired.’ Yellich forced a grin.

‘Yes, you would be.’ McLeer looked at his watch. ‘Four p.m. . . . your body clock is at eight p.m., just a few hours’ time difference at the moment. Usually it’s five but we put our clocks forward two weeks before you do and back two weeks earlier also. So there are two two-week periods each year when we have a four-hour time difference, once in the spring and once in the fall but even so, four hours is still four hours and after a long flight. Is the hotel to your liking?’