Murder in Focus (7 page)

“Was he?”

Carpenter shook his head, worried-looking. “It doesn't seem possible. I can't imagine him getting drunk, not under the circumstances.”

“And what do you make of the rest of it?”

“The description? Except for the height and weight, maybe, it could have been faked. Hair, scar, even eye colour.” Carpenter shrugged. “But we'll keep an eye on the case. It's going to leave me pretty shorthanded out there, though, if I divert anyone over to it,” he said, worried.

“Administration is giving us extra people,” said Deschenes. “In the meantime, do what you can.”

The pub was, if anything, even darker than it had been the day before. Sanders rushed over to grab a table close to one of the dim wall lights and almost crashed into their waitress from yesterday and her full tray of drinks. She paused, recognized them, and grinned with excessive cheer. “Hey, guys. Welcome back,” she cried, as though they were her oldest and most valued customers. “You want the same? Two pints of Smith's?”

“Sure,” said Sanders. Harriet was too busy stowing her equipment safely into the corner to concern herself with such questions.

“What a phenomenal memory,” said Sanders, “Do you think she knows what everyone has, or are we particularly memorable?”

“It's good for tips,” said Harriet, her head in her knapsack and her voice muffled. “And she has bloody little else to think about. You ever work as a waiter?”

He waited until her back began to straighten, and shook his head. “I have one question about all this,” said Sanders when her head emerged up above table level once again.

“All right. What is it?” asked Harriet, smiling politely at the waitress as she swept their beer down in front of them with a flourish.

“Who carries your equipment and guards the camera case when you haven't managed to pick up a footloose police officer?”

“Ah,” Harriet said. “That's a very sad story.” And she took a healthy mouthful of beer. “I had an assistant, wonderful girl, named Jane, good eye, tall, strong, very clever. Gesture hysterically and she knew exactly what you wanted. She was getting pretty good in the darkroom, too.” Harriet looked up mournfully, her dark hair hanging down over one green eye.

“What happened to her?” asked Sanders.

“She fell in love with a painter, a bad painter, and went all broody on me. Then she discovered she was pregnant and moved to Montreal to be with the infant's father. And thus was one of the world's best photographic assistants destroyed.” She flipped the hair back out of her eye. “I sometimes even hope that she'll become fed up with his horrible paintings and come back to me, infant and all.”

“Did she live with you?” asked Sanders casually.

Harriet raised an eyebrow at him and then shook her head. “No, that isn't the reason why I yearn for her to come back. She's more a work object than a love object as far as I'm concerned. Although, of course, one grows fond of a good assistant—the way you grow fond of a good camera.” She sighed. “Then, since my life was totally disrupted anyway, I decided to come back to Ottawa. I'd had this project in mind for a while, and I scurried around and found a few paying assignments in the city to keep me going until the book is finished. So here I am. Sublet my Toronto apartment, rented out my studio space, and drove up in February. I was thinking of settling here permanently—this is where I grew up, and I like it—but I'm not sure there's enough of my kind of work to keep me going here full-time.”

“So you've decided to move back to Toronto?”

“Well,
decided
is too strong a word. I'll probably go back. Sometime.” She shook her head. “Who can predict what anybody's going to be doing in six months' time? Or six minutes' time? Look at that guy over there—not literally, my friend the inquisitive police officer—he'll think I'm talking about him.”

“But you are.”

“Of course I am. You know what I mean.” Amusement crinkled the corners of her eyes. “He's sitting in a bar, surrounded by noise and jollification, and what's he doing? Flipping through a trashy novel, pretending to read it. Did he anticipate at lunchtime that he was going to be sitting here—”

“How do you know it's trashy?” interrupted Sanders.

“Did you know you were a very irritating person? Let us assume for the sake of discussion that it is trashy. Why sit in a bar drinking overpriced draft beer in order to read trash? Or not read it? He seems to have trouble concentrating. I'll bet that pint cost him more than the book.”

“He's probably meeting someone,” said Sanders. “And experience has taught him that she's always late.”

“Then why does he never glance at the door in passionate anticipation? The only direction he's been looking in so far is over here, at us.”

“Well, try this one. He's one of your devoted admirers,” said Sanders. “And he's hoping you'll get rid of me so he can pick you up.”

“Idiot,” said Harriet. “He doesn't have much of a chance, anyway. I can't stand pale, weedy redheads. You want to go with me while I drop the film off at the lab? That's something else Jane would have done.”

“Don't you develop it yourself? I'm disillusioned,” said Sanders. “What about those movies with photographers up to their elbows in chemicals in the darkroom? While sinister portraits of gruesome murders being committed gradually emerge from the blank paper. You know the kind.”

“Not Ektachrome,” she said. “Colour,” she added when she saw his blank look. “Positive colour—you know, slides. Labs just throw it in a machine and it's ready in three hours. I'm not a big enough outfit to run my own colour lab. If you like, I'll take you to my darkroom one of these days and show you some black-and-white developing, though, just to prove that I'm genuine.”

“That's an intriguing possibility,” said Sanders cautiously.

“Actually,” she said, drawing out the word and then hesitating. “I have a more intriguing possibility. Do you like music?”

“Is this a test question?”

“No, of course not.” She paused. “Well, I suppose it is. Before you answer, I'll give you a clue to what you're getting into. Anna Maria Strelitsch, the violinist, is playing at the Arts Centre tonight—Mozart and some moderns, I think—and I have two tickets. Good tickets. But I'm not going to take you if you're going to hate it. I refuse to have my evening spoiled by someone squirming in agony—or falling asleep—beside me.”

“Hey, what makes you assume I'd squirm?” he said defensively. “I like music. It sounds wonderful. And I only fall asleep if I've been up all night. What about you? Are you going in those disreputable jeans and that peculiar jacket?”

“No call to throw rocks at my working clothes. I wouldn't be much use scrambling around the landscape in a tight skirt and high heels with no place to store my bits and pieces. But don't worry, I'll get dressed up. You won't recognize me.”

“Fine,” he said. “How about dinner first?” he asked casually.

She picked up her beer and put it down again. “It would be wasted on me,” she said at last. “I hate eating in a rush. It puts me in such a foul mood I can't even taste what I'm eating. I'll go and get dressed and meet you in front of the Arts Centre at twenty to eight. We can eat later. That way you're sure not to fall asleep.”

“Well, all right,” he said. “Don't you want me to pick you up?”

“No need,” she said. Her voice was cold. “I'm a big girl. I can find my way around the city by myself.” A slight smile failed to remove the sting in voice and words.

“Right,” he said abruptly. He stood up, irritated, grabbed his raincoat, and then waited with heavy politeness while she rescued all her bits and pieces from the floor. “I'll see you in front of the Arts Centre at twenty to eight.”

“If you insist on being gallant,” she said, “you can carry the tripod and camera case back to the car.” This time the smile was close to looking real. “And I thought you were coming with me to drop the film off.”

Sanders scooped up the two items and followed Harriet out of the pub. As they were leaving, the man with the novel snapped it shut, losing his place, slipped it into his pocket, picked up his own coat, and followed them out.

He paused in the door to look around, then strolled nonchalantly after them in the direction of the parking garage where Harriet had left her car. Just as he was about to cross the road a tour bus pulled up to the curb and forty-four camera-carrying tourists spewed onto the pavement around him. By sheer numerical force they carried him back a good ten feet in the direction he had come from. By the time he fought his way out from the center of the throng, Harriet and Sanders were nowhere in sight.

Andrew Cassidy looked at his watch and began restoring the material on his desk to the folders he had taken it from. 6:05. He should be able to work his way through the rest of Steve Collins's files now without the irritating necessity of explaining his presence to every clerk and junior word-processing assistant in the entire intelligence service. Not that what he was doing was any of their business, of course, but that didn't seem to stop anyone.

He walked down the empty corridor until he reached Steve's office, pulled the key out of his pocket, and walked boldly in. Last night he had stayed late enough to inventory file names. Tonight he was going to have to see if they contained anything of interest.

At 7:15 he heard a noise in the corridor and looked up, yawning and unworried. Right now, he would have welcomed an armed robbery to relieve the tedium of reading through these files. The noises stopped. Probably the cleaning staff, thought Cassidy, and turned back to his reading. Just as he began to work up a new sense of speed, however, the door was flung open. “What in hell are you doing in Steve's office?” said a hostile voice. It was Betty Ferris, who spent most of her days in the duplicating room.

“Hi, Betty,” he said. “Sorry about this. I'm just clearing things up in here. We've got to check out what he'd been working on recently. In case there are things that haven't been finished up.” He shook his head impatiently. “For God's sake, don't look at me like that. I was asked. I'm not just snooping. And what are you doing here this late?”

“I often work late,” she said. Her voice had little expression. “I got in the habit. It sort of makes up for the mornings I can't get in on time because of Stacy. Anyway, I saw a light on in here, and I wondered who was pawing around in Steve's stuff.”

A new light on Steve presented itself to Cassidy. And quickly formed itself into a comprehensible picture. He leaned back and examined the woman more closely. Maybe not everyone's ideal, but now that he looked, palely beautiful and certainly intelligent. Underemployed at the moment, running errands, making coffee, and doing everyone's photocopying. Mother of a small child, as well, he remembered. Losing Steve must have been a blow. “Sorry,” he murmured. “I'm trying not to paw, as you put it, but it's the only way we'll find out what in hell is going on—why someone killed him. And why might tell us who.” She still stood where she was, looking angry and suspicious. “Look, Betty, an awful lot of this seems to be out-of-date reports and stupid memos. You wouldn't know where he kept his current files, would you?”

Betty shrugged. “In with the rest of the stuff in there, I suppose,” she said. “I don't know where else they'd be. You want some coffee? I've got it ready in my office.” He shook his head and watched her as she slipped quietly out of the room.

The last note of the Mozart Violin Concerto died slowly away, and the violinist lowered her hands to her sides, bow and violin forming a delicate frame around her. She bowed, head down, and a river of blonde hair cascaded over the front of her white dress. Applause surged up through the hall. She straightened up, flipped her hair off her face with her bow hand, and smiled broadly. She raised both arms high above her head, gestured to draw her accompanist into the general enthusiasm, and skipped off the stage to a startled burst of laughter.

“Extraordinary, isn't she?” asked Harriet as she stood up. “Do you like to mingle, go outside, or stay perched during intermission?”

“Let's go outside and catch pneumonia. There isn't anyone here to mingle with, as far as I'm concerned. I don't know Ottawa's cultural elite.”

She grabbed his hand and made a break for an exit door. “Come on, there's a path through here,” she hissed. Suddenly his hand tightened on hers and he stopped dead, bringing her headlong rush to a jerky halt. “What the hell?” she muttered, and looked up. Someone tall and dark-haired, with a thin face like an anxious weasel, was blocking their path.

“Good evening, Inspector. I didn't expect to see you here.”

“Ah . . . Inspector Higgs. Miss Jeffries. We came to see the violinist. I suppose you came to see the bigwigs.”

An amused smile crossed Higgs's face, and Sanders realized that the man might even be relatively pleasant some of the time. “Something like that,” Higgs admitted. “At least, I'm not here for pleasure. Or not
just
for pleasure, at any rate. Not my favorite sort of assignment, either. Any potential bomb throwers in this crowd, do you think?” he asked suddenly.

“I'd go for one of the Austrians,” said Harriet, and both men turned to look at her, surprised.

“The Austrians? Which ones are they?” asked Sanders.

“Judging by the voices around us, I'd say that the hometown contingent is pretty strong. Place seems to be stiff with Viennese.”

“How can you tell?” asked Higgs.

“It's the funny-sounding German. You can't mistake it.” Harriet smiled pleasantly at Higgs and started across the lobby. “Happy hunting,” she whispered as she went by him.