‘She was murdered.’
‘I don’t ever hear nothing about that.’
‘In England. She was living in England when she was murdered already.’
‘So that’s why I haven’t seen her, that’s why I didn’t even hear of her being iced. England . . . you know I’ve never been there.’
‘So, you and Heather?’
‘Yes, just a couple of lowlifes, real losers . . . skanks, thieves . . . anything for a fast and easy buck, that was the Ossetti/Hoskins gang.’
‘Being a skank isn’t easy money.’
‘Yeah, but you don’t know that until you’re in and once in, it’s not so easy to get out and it becomes a way of life more than a job to do but eventually the younger women push you off the turf. That’s what happened to me and Heather Ossetti. That’s when we took to thieving . . . then we got thrown in the can, had to happen eventually . . . then we came to Ontario, looking for a new start. Heather comes from round here, so I came too. That’s why we settled in Barrie . . . Heather knew the town. Didn’t do me any good because this is how I live. You see how I live. You see how I live, I’d be better off on a croft in Donegal. She was murdered in England?’
‘Yes. The British Police believe a Canadian guy followed her there, tracked her down and did the business.’
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph.’ Jordana Hoskins inhaled deeply and reached down beside her and pulled a can of beer from a pail of cold water which stood beside the chair. ‘Fridge is out,’ she explained. ‘I’m on welfare, I can’t afford to get it fixed or even buy another used one.’ She heaved the ring pull off the top of the can with what Ventnor thought was a masculine grappling of her fingers. ‘Not too early for the first beer of the day and a good reason to start.’
‘That’s one way of putting it, already,’ Marianne Auphan replied. ‘So who did she annoy . . . do you have any idea? She rubbed someone up the wrong way.’
‘Heather . . . well . . .’ Jordana Hoskins paused and looked down at the threadbare carpet at her feet.
‘It won’t have come from you.’ Auphan read Hoskins’s mind.
‘I’ll end up the same way as her if it does.’
‘Understood. Mum’s the word. She had stolen someone’s ID when she died, she was running scared.’
‘I just hear things . . . some things I just hear. OK?’
‘OK. So what did you just hear?’
‘Well, Heather, she wasn’t a real close buddy of mine. We did get into badness together but we were never close. Heather, she has, she had, an evil streak, you know. I mean well evil; she had the devil in her. I seen it once or twice and it, you know, it really frightened me. She was well angry about her start in life in a children’s home near here . . . but she had . . . she was born with devil in her.’
‘Which home?’
Jordana Hoskins drank the beer. ‘On the coast of Lake Simcoe, can’t be that many. If it’s still there, those places open and close down again like stores that don’t pay.’
‘Did she ever mention a woman called Edith Lecointe? She’d be about Heather Ossetti’s age, already.’
‘And mine. Be . . . ? Is she dead also?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph.’ Jordana Hoskins took another large drink from the can. ‘Is there no end to it?’
‘Edith Lecointe,’ Marianne Auphan pressed, ‘did she ever mention that name, already?’
‘Not to me. Why?’
‘It was her ID that Heather Ossetti stole. She was calling herself Edith Lecointe when she was murdered. And other names. She even had a passport in Edith Lecointe’s name.’
‘Did Heather kill her for it?’
‘Don’t know. Edith Lecointe was found frozen to death; her death was recorded as accidental.’
‘She killed her for it.’ Jordana Hoskins spoke matter-of-factly.
‘She did?’
‘Yeah. I saw it in her eyes most often but sometimes in what she did also. I can’t say too much but that’s got Heather Ossetti’s fingerprints all over it. Get hold of their birth certificate, or a copy of it, any other useful documents and then kill them and you can take their ID. Simple. But clever in a way. Then you leave the area and go where nobody knows the person whose ID you have stolen. Moving to Toronto or Windsor would be good enough; you stay in Ontario that way . . . but England . . . England . . . that is making sure, already. That really is making sure. She would not have gone to England unless she was frightened. Really well scared. Just look up the death of Nathan Fisco, three, four years back. Then you’ll see what I mean about her fingerprints.’
‘Nathan Fisco.’ Marianne Auphan took her notebook from her handbag and scribbled the name on a blank page.
‘Guy in his fifties.’
‘About three years ago? In Barrie, already?’
‘Yes. In Barrie.’
Hennessey stopped at his pigeonhole and took the papers which had accumulated therein out and stood and read them. He found the usual circulars about office economy, requesting staff to write on both sides of a sheet of paper, use second-class postage and make all phone calls after two p.m. whenever possible. The papers also contained a reply from the National Police Computer in respect of his query about Malpass, Ronald and Sylvia. There was, it read, ‘nothing known’. George Hennessey found that he trusted Matilda Pakenham’s intuition, honed by her worldly experience of suave monsters, and growled, ‘Not yet . . . nothing known . . . yet.’
Somerled Yellich strolled along the uneven brick sidewalk at the junction of Bayfield Street and Dunlop Street. This was, he found, the central or ‘downtown’ area of Barrie and was much smaller and quieter than he had envisaged it. An old hotel stood on the corner with a sign on the front of the ‘V’ shaped building dating it to 1876; it was three storeys with a flat roof, disproving, thought Yellich, the builders’ maxim that ‘flat roofs don’t work’ because this particular flat roof had clearly worked for nearly one and a half centuries. Further along Dunlop Street were similar flat roofed buildings which also appeared to date from the mid to late nineteenth century, behind which were late twentieth century apartment blocks that towered over the original buildings. To his right was the lake shore, a modern piece of metal sculpture, the ‘spirit catcher’, with components which swung in the breeze, and a cannon which sat forlornly on a piece of waste ground as if abandoned and forgotten by the army. Closer at hand a silver-haired woman had backed herself into the doorway of an unused building and stood talking to herself, youths placidly panhandled despite signs warning that it was an offence to do so. A white police car was parked carelessly outside the small police station in the bus terminal building with one front tyre up on the kerb and the other three tyres on the road surface. Yellich was particularly struck by the large number of morbidly obese people and also the large number of people who needed some form of walking aid, and all, he thought, too young, far, far too young to be one, or need the other.
Marianne Auphan drove Ventnor to Mapleview West. ‘It’s like the Pied Piper visited with Barrie one time already,’ she calmly explained, ‘played his flute through downtown and lured all the services out of the city to the suburbs. You want anything, you don’t go downtown, you go into the suburbs . . . bars, shopping malls, it’s all in the suburbs and folk here work in Toronto for the main . . . they don’t need no downtown. I don’t like the dead heart but hey, services in the suburbs are what folk want.’
‘So I see.’ Ventnor glanced at a complex of shops next to a Honda retailer.
‘A few industrial complexes but not enough to support the city. Barrie’s wealth is limited to Toronto or dependent on Toronto.’ She pulled into a large car park and halted the car as close as she could to the entrance of a single storey modern looking bar called Dusty Jack’s. Inside Dusty Jack’s she walked up to the bar and sat on one of the high chairs. Ventnor sat next to her. A jovial young blonde in black tee shirt and slacks asked if she could help them.
‘Two Buds.’ Marianne Auphan ordered for both of them.
The girl brought two bottles of Budweiser and two chilled glasses and placed them on beer mats on the highly polished wooden bar. Marianne Auphan said, ‘Thanks,’ and the girl smiled and revealed perfect glistening white teeth and said, ‘You’re welcome . . . enjoy your beer.’
‘I figured that woman was right,’ Marianne Auphan forwent the chilled glass and drank straight from the bottle and did so deeply, taking large masculine draughts rather than small ladylike sips, ‘it’s not too early for the first beer. Unless you want to work some more, already?’
‘Not particularly.’ Ventnor also drank from the bottle.
‘I got cut off here one time.’ Marianne Auphan smiled at the memory.
‘Cut off?’
‘One of my girlfriends got herself out of a bad situation with a mad Irishman she was hooked up with, not married but they’d pooled their money to buy a house, so not easy to get out, but she did so. So then a bunch of us girls brought her here to celebrate, so we drank until we got cut off . . . wouldn’t serve us any more . . . cut off and me a cop, already.’
‘I see.’ Ventnor glanced round the bar. Tables were set for meals with four places at each table. A few booths along the far wall were occupied by couples or two or three men. Four televisions were installed high up on the wall, all four tuned to the same channel which, at that moment, was showing a murderous fight between two huge ice hockey players, during a match, which rapidly escalated until all the players became involved in the brawl and the referee lost his balance and sprawled on his back on the ice.
‘So,’ Marianne Auphan put the beer down on the bar, ‘we can stay here until the last dog is hung, or we can go to my place on Veterans Drive.’
‘The last dog?’
‘Until they stop serving, but that’s not until two a.m. My apartment’s just twenty minutes’ slow drive away.’ She sipped her beer. ‘Well, it’s what we’ve both been thinking since we met, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Thomson Ventnor replied in a shaking voice. ‘It is what we’ve been thinking, already.’
George Hennessey found himself drifting off to a pleasant sleep when the noise jolted him into waking watchfulness. It had, he thought, been a pleasant evening. As was his normal practice, he had returned home to his house on Thirsk Road in Easingwold to be met by an excited Oscar. He had then taken a mug of steaming hot tea into the back garden and, whilst standing on the patio, sipping it, had told his late wife of his day, knowing that she was hearing him, listening to every word. Later he had eaten a simple but wholesome meal of pork chops and as his meal settled, had read a readable yet scholarly account of the Russian convoys during the Second World War. The author was, he found, able to evoke the freezing conditions and the mountainous seas and Hennessey learned that a near miss of a high explosive shell during the Second World War could still sink a ship by ‘springing’ its plates. Later, his meal settled, he had taken Oscar for his customary evening walk and had then walked alone into Easingwold for a pint of brown and mild, just one, before last orders were called. Later still he was about to succumb to a well-earned sleep when he heard the noise.
It was the sound of a motorbike being driven at speed along Thirsk Road, possibly, he believed, by a young man who thinks ‘it’ can’t happen to him, or in these days of endless leisure possibly, Hennessey pondered, by a ‘grey biker’ who might see only frailty and senility ahead of him and so was careless of other road users, prepared to take the risk that ‘it’ might very well happen. In either case, the sound transported Hennessey back to the Greenwich of his boyhood when ‘it’ had happened to his elder brother. He recalled how Graham had lavished loving care on his silver Triumph, of how Graham would take him for a ride on Sunday mornings out from Greenwich, across the river at Tower Bridge, back across Westminster Bridge, round Blackheath Park and home. Then there was that horrible, horrible fateful night when he, abed, heard Graham kick his machine into life and listened as he drove away down Trafalgar Road, straining his ears to catch the last decibel of sound. Then there were the other sounds: ships on the river, the Irish drunk walking up Colomb Street, beneath his window, reciting his Hail Marys. Then, then . . . that knock on the door, that distinct police officer’s knock, tap, tap . . . tap . . . the hushed voices, followed by his mother’s wail and his father coming to his room, fighting tears, to tell him that Graham had ‘ridden to heaven’, to ‘save a place for us’.
Then there was the funeral. The first summer funeral of Hennessey’s life and he saw how alien, how incongruous it was to conduct the ceremony of the hole and the stone when flowers are in full bloom and butterflies and bees are in the air; then there was the inadvertently insensitive playing of ‘Greensleeves’ from the ice-cream van, unseen, but close by. Two decades later he was to have the same feelings as he scattered his wife’s ashes in the garden at the rear of his house, also on a summer’s day. His father, by contrast, had had the fortunate good grace to die in the winter of the year and Hennessy thought it so fitting, so very fitting that the coffin was lowered into rock hard soil amid a snow flurry.
Hennessey had lived with the gap in his life where an elder brother should have been and always for him was the question, what manner of man would he have been? At the time he died, Graham had worried, if not alarmed, his parents by announcing his plan to leave his safe job at the bank and go to art college and there to specialize in photography so as to become a photographer. George Hennessey was certain that for his brother it would not be the sleazy world of the fashion photographer or the sniping world of the paparazzi but rather, for Graham, it would be the noble world of photo journalism, where a single image can alter a world opinion. He would have married, George Hennessey believed, successfully, he would have been a good father and a good uncle to his nephew Charles. He would have been a brother George Hennessey would have loved and would have been proud of . . . all the might haves, and all the would haves, and all the could haves, and all the never will knows all taken from him because of a patch of oil on Trafalgar Road all those years ago. The thoughts . . . the demons then, that night, kept whirring and whirling around Hennessey’s mind, torturing him, until the beginning of the dawn chorus, when sleep mercifully rescued him.