There was an Old Woman (19 page)

“Let's try that panelling next,” I said, straightening up with more difficulty than I'd have imagined. Smiling at the absurdity of it all, Chris began to rap the panelling with his knuckles. I picked up a gavel with a brass plaque on it and started at the bottom end. I don't know what we were listening for, to tell you the truth. All I heard from the wall was the occasional dropping of plaster from the old lath behind it. When our rapping got to the same square, we gave up. The whole area sounded the same, but whether that meant there was or was not anything concealed behind it, neither of us could guess.

“We could rip it off,” Chris suggested. After a moment, I shook my head.

“No sense in it, Chris. He'd have had to rip it off every time he needed it. I couldn't find a spring or button or release of any kind. There's no part of it mounted on hinges as far as I can see.”

“Too many Saturday matinees when you were a kid, Benny.” Chris patted his pocket to see if he had cigarettes, then thought better of it. “You think there's a hidyhole behind those books up there?” I looked over at the rather pinched bookshelf, which leaned heavily to the history of the kings and queens of England. I didn't think that Ramsden would gut the text of these icons of his philosophy for his blackmailing needs, but a row of old legal tomes at the top looked like greener fields.

“Try those,” I said, pointing. He moved a captain's chair to the bookcase and stepped up on it. That put him a little higher than top shelf. Above the books, he found something. It looked like an old-fashioned filing box, with a slightly rounded side to make it resemble a book about fifteen inches long. He handed it down so that he could continue his inspection of the law books.

On the spine end of the file was the name “Phoenix” and in capital letters, “Invoices.” I could just make out the faded copperplate script: A to Z Orders 1918–1919.” I tried to open it, like a book, but there was a catch to be released. When I did that, I could smell mildew and nearly eighty years of use as I lifted the lid. Inside was a set of files divided by tabs marked with the letters of the
alphabet. I lifted one,
G,
at random and found a few letters to Ramsden from various people whose names started with that letter. There were business as well as personal letters bearing dates in the recent past, quite contrary to the information on the spine. Among the
G
's I could see no sign of blackmail. I looked further. Thinking of Orv and his problem, I dipped into the
W
's. Here I found a letter from Orv, dated three years ago. It was a request for a meeting on an unnamed subject. In pencil on the top of the letter I read: “put off to October. See Montgomery.” I looked among the
M
's. There was nothing with a Montgomery on it. “Montgomery” must be something outside the file, an
aide-mémoire.

“These books are all solid,” Chris complained from on high.

“I may be on to something,” I said. “Give me a minute.” I sat down in Ramsden's chair behind his desk and went through more of the files. Quite a few of the letters had pencilled notes on them. A few of these referred the searcher on elsewhere: “See French,” “See Crerar,” “See Horrocks,” “See Bradley.” In each case the file contained no letters from any of these named references.

Chris had come down off the chair and was glancing at the pictures on the wall. He turned a couple of these around to see if there was anything stuck on the backing. “He collected letters from a lot of famous people,” he said, looking at some letters mounted between plates of glass.

“Shut up, Chris!”

“How long are you going to be? I think we should have a go at the cellar.”

I knew I was close to some sort of answer, but I couldn't see it. I looked a little further, collected a few more dead-end references to McNaughton and Patton. As I closed the file, I asked Savas: “What do all these names have in common: Patton, McNaughton, Crerar, Horrocks, Bradley and French?”

“Horrocks is an English drink, isn't it? And French is mustard.”

“You're cold,” I said. “They're all top-ranking officers in the British, Canadian or US armies. Montgomery was a Field Marshal, Omar Bradley and George Patton were American generals.”

“Never heard of French,” Chris admitted.

“That's the First World War.”

“So, what's that prove? He was a nut on the military, wasn't he?”

“Yeah, he was the official historian of the Royal Grantham Rifles. I only heard that last night.”

“One of the people I was talking to said that he set up the regimental museum, which goes back to Butler's Rangers, whatever they are. He still has the run of the place, or did have, until he got run through with the Union Jack. Like I said, he was a nut on the military. I'm going to look at the basement. Wanna come?”

“I'll join you in a minute. First let me see where this stuff leads to.”

“If you don't hear from me in ten minutes, stamp twice on the floor.” And he was gone. I reviewed what I'd seen in the file and then got up and started wandering around. Maybe the evidence we were looking for was in the basement. Chris has as good a nose for evidence as I have and his was trained. Mine was just born that way. I looked at the empty socket in the flagstand. I remembered where I'd seen the missing flagstaff last. I thought, irreverently, of shish kebab. I looked up at the pictures, more to clear my head than anything else.

Behind the flags hung a letter from General Sir Brian Horrocks. It was addressed to our friend and dated in 1960. It was about some action that had been fought around Arnhem in 1944. I turned the letter over. There was nothing on the back. I replaced it and began to notice other letters mounted in a similar way, between plates of clear glass. There was one from General Omar N. Bradley (retired) about General Patton and one from Patton to someone I'd never heard of. It had a stamp at the bottom showing that it had belonged to a collection. Above the small fireplace was the letter I was looking for: Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. I moved the captain's chair and took the letter down. It was a single note from the field marshal, now retired, to Ramsden. It thanked him for his letter, the sentiments expressed in it, but offered no new information. It was the sort of letter that would drive a historian mad. It was a written equivalent of “no comment.” Still, the ego of our friend was such that he preserved the letter and its envelope between
the two pieces of glass. Even as an autograph, it would be a hard piece to brag about. I turned it over.

This is where I got a surprise. Fitted neatly behind the field marshal's note was a second piece of paper. It was about the same size as the note I'd just read, but the paper was newer and of a different quality. The two pieces of glass had been joined together with dark tape. I took my little red pocket-knife and split the panels apart. I was right: besides the envelope, there were two pieces of paper. The one I hadn't read began:

The Beacon,

20 Queen St,

Grantham, Ontario.

Dear Edge …

and ended:

As ever,

Yours sincerely,

Harlan Ravenswood

The date was 1965. The body of the letter concerned the setting up of a trust fund for someone called Catherine Chestnut, who from the description was clearly a minor. The letter went into details of support payments to a woman called Renée Chestnut of Toronto. The payments to the older woman were to continue until the woman
either married or died. The payments to the child were to continue as long as the child remained in an institution of higher learning or until she was twenty-five, whichever occurred last. Then, a lump sum of one hundred thousand dollars was to be paid to her from the investments made by the trust, giving her also at that time whatever assets remained in the trust or their cash equivalent.

The “Edge” in the salutation of the letter was Egerton Garsington, the manager of the Central Branch of the Upper Canadian Bank. He was cautioned to use utmost discretion in keeping the name of the benefactor secret. He was told that under no circumstances was Ravenswood's name to be mentioned to either of the beneficiaries. The letter was dated 2 February 1965.

“That would make her about thirty,” I said, thinking out loud. There was much here for speculation, but I had no time to get on with it. There were all of those other preserved letters from famous military men to examine.

Quickly I pulled down all of the glass-encased letters and placed them on Ramsden's desk. I stamped heavily on the floor twice. It was easier pulling the plates of glass apart sitting down at Ramsden's desk. It didn't take me long to get a system going. There was a hidden document of some kind with each of the military letters. I placed each hidden letter with its soldier in a separate pile. One was a note from H.P. Kelmscott, a former member of the Ontario Legislature to a young woman who was addressed in language that could hardly be described as parliamentary. There was a cancelled cheque signed by
the head of the biggest paving company in the whole district to a well-known Mafia figure in Hamilton. After looking quickly at the first three, I soon tired of the titillation. Let Savas worry about blackmail in the Niagara Peninsula. I stamped on the floor again. There was no immediate response, but in a minute I heard footsteps on the cellar stairs.

Savas had wisps of cobwebs spread on top of his hair He looked suddenly aged.

“Take a look at this, Benny!” he said, smiling and panting at the same time. He put three piles of printed pamphlets on the desk on top of my recent discoveries. One was a stack of white supremacist garbage, the one in the middle made many allusions to
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
and the third appeared to be aimed at all groups except those who shared the guilt for burning the cakes with King Alfred the Great. “There's a mailing list that comes with this stuff, Benny. I'm glad I went down there.”

“But it doesn't give you any names to put on your most-wanted list, does it?”

Chris wiped his face with a handkerchief. “I guess he could have been unpopular among the oppressed nations, Benny. I can't say I'd blame …”

“I can see where you're going, Chris. Forget it! This stuff,” I said, lifting his pamphlets off my surprises, “is more to the point.”

“What have you got?”

“You wanted to find blackmail? I got blackmail. What else can I do for you?”

“Lemme see!” He moved his big head around to look over my shoulder. I lifted the items one at a time and passed them to him.

“They were hidden behind the letters. I guess he read Poe after all,” I said, addressing the last bit to myself. Chris let out a few long, low whistles: his way of showing delight and surprise. He couldn't help grinning.

“You know, Benny, this is great stuff! Just great!” He pounded me on the back. He meant it as a sign of praise, but his angle was bad, and I felt myself being nailed into Ramsden's chair.

“Glad you like it.” I got up and tried to put the material into a pile so that Chris could slip them into a file he'd brought with him.

“I think you've hit the mother lode of stuff here, Benny. It moves your friend Kogan a lot farther down our list of suspects. That's what you wanted, isn't it?”

Chris was right. That's what I was after. But now, I was encouraged to think there might also be a lunch in it as well.

TWENTY-ONE

Chris's cousin runs a kebab parIour on Academy Street where I'd eaten with both Chris and Pete a few years ago. It was usually a busy place because of the activity around the bus terminal, but that Sunday it was all but closed when we got there. I couldn't see anything hot on the stove while Chris was exchanging “Yahsoos” and bear-hugs with his cousin and his wife, who'd been reading the weekend papers in back, but in a matter of minutes we were tucking into soft roast lamb and big potatoes and gravy. I declined the offer of shish kebab. Chris was in a great mood, joking with his cousins in Greek and with me in English, whenever he remembered that I wasn't fluent in his mother tongue.

The lunch was welcome, filling, but the conversation was not much help to me from a business point of view, although I learned a bit about spring-irrigated fields lying near the north coast of Cyprus. Even when I got him to talk shop, Chris, for all his dancing eyes and grins, was not telling me much I didn't know already. Temperley had been killed late Monday, some time after the grave was opened in the late afternoon. He'd been killed by two shots from an eight-millimetre piece of some kind. “Our
guess is that it was a Japanese Nambu automatic, a handgun used in World War II,” he said. That's when he reminded me that my pal Kogan had spent some years in the army and might have brought home a few illegal and unregistered souvenirs.

“So? We're back to Kogan, are we?”

“Just a remark in passing,” Chris said breezily. “An observation, if you will. It's not the sort of piece you see every day.”

“Tell me, Chris,” I asked, just after Savas smiled at the good taste of roast potatoes in his mouth, “why was Newby trying to see Ramsden? What was that all about? And how was it Newby so conveniently had keys to let him in when Ramsden failed to hear him at the door?”

“That's a no-no, Benny. Let me just say that we were satisfied with his reasons. They had business. He had the keys from a while back when Ramsden had the house on the market, after his wife died. Newby had the key on his ring.” All in all, Chris was feeling pretty good about himself, judging by his generosity with the information he had. Giving up information went against all of his inclination and training. Getting news from a cop is like trying to push a piece of string.

As I walked up Academy to St. Andrew, I found time to ponder the other pieces of information that Chris had parted with. According to the post-mortem report, Ramsden had been killed between eight and ten in the morning. I was thinking about that when I stopped in the middle of the street. For a minute I didn't see the gaudy Christmas
display in the window of a furniture store I was facing or hear the honking of a half-ton pick-up truck with a bent fender that had come to a stop less than five metres from where I'd suddenly rooted myself. When the driver added his voice to the sound of the horn, I returned to reality.