Death of a Raven (4 page)

Chapter 4

On the Wednesday of that week, after Robin had convinced me that driving on the right side of the road and staying alive could be achieved by the majority of British drivers, I hired a car. Or rather I rented one, as the man in the garage described the transaction. With difficulty I persuaded him that the vehicle I required did not necessarily have to be large enough to play a game of baseball in, and emerged cautiously from the forecourt with a product of the land of the rising sun.

Emma had offered to lend me the family pick-up that was used to take gear to their boat but I declined without offending her. Never borrow cars, Daws always stressed. Now, with Andy’s death still haunting me I was going to do as I was told.

I made myself go to Quispamsis. Right away, not giving the coward within time to make excuses for not doing so. Until I had shared a little in Andy’s last moments, seen the road as he himself had seen it seconds before he died, stood at the spot where it had happened, he would remain only a shadowy figure in my memory, merely a man with whom Peter had worked to help found a boys’ club.

Not for one moment had I imagined that the site of the accident would be easy to find, cherishing the thought, the nearer I got to Quispamsis, that looking for it was entirely my own idea so no one would blame me if I failed after a short search and my nerve deserted me. Then, quite suddenly, I came upon it.

The blazing car had started a small fire — small by Canadian standards, that is — a narrow band of forest destroyed some fifty yards long. The point of impact had been a large spruce, now dying from a shattered trunk and looking as though it was keeping vigil, slightly bowed.

I stepped from the car into an uncanny silence, the only faint sounds the breeze occasionally whispering through the peeling bark of the birches and, in the far distance, a bird singing the same sad four notes. It reminded me of the responses to a litany.

Grass had begun to grow again on the scorched earth but was not yet tall enough to conceal twisted scraps of metal that had dropped from the burned-out vehicle when it had been removed. Then — Oh, God! — I saw a blackened shoe. I bent down to touch it but found myself unable to do so.

Standing quite still I thought of Carol, Andy’s wife, eight months pregnant with their first child, her condition preventing her from flying over for the funeral. Andy’s remains had been cremated after a short service at the Anglican Church in Port Charles and his ashes sent back to England. I could think of nothing more ghastly than to wave goodbye to your husband, and then a short time later receive all that was left of him contained in a small urn.

A brightly coloured woodpecker startled me by flapping noisily into the dying spruce above me. It drummed into the blackened bark searching for insects. I thought of Andy, a strong presence that you couldn’t ignore, a force to be reckoned with. In appearance he had strongly resembled Patrick but his black hair had been straight not curling and this, coupled with a rather solemn manner, had caused Peter to nickname him “The Raven.”

I sat in the car for a while, thinking of nothing at all, numbed. Then I drove back into Port Charles. When I arrived at the city boundary it was still only two in the afternoon so I went into a Tim Horton’s doughnut cafe and drank coffee. I wasn’t hungry.

“Have a nice day,” chirped the girl behind the counter as I left.

Hartland brought Redding and Lawrence home for dinner again that evening and judging from her frosty manner towards him, again without giving Emma prior warning. I fully sympathised. She seemed to be taking her task of watching over the frigate programme personnel very seriously.

I sat next to Earl Lawrence at dinner. It was difficult not to take an immediate and strong dislike to him for he held in lively contempt anything or anyone who wasn’t Canadian. He appeared to regard the DARE team as little more than office juniors to do his bidding. I gathered from his conversation that he had little time for his boss: Redding, either.

“Awful about Quade,” I remarked, aware that he didn’t possess the kind of intelligence to suspect me of setting a trap for him.

“Yeah,” he replied slowly. “But we all have to go sooner or later.”

“He was a good driver,” I persevered. “Didn’t drink either.”

“The suspension’s not so good on Yank cars as you guys are used to at home.”

I recovered from the remark so amazingly free from malice. “Is that a fact?”

“Yeah,” he said again. “Some are risky on our roads. When folks buy them they usually get the suspension stripped out and replaced with something a lot stiffer. Hit a bump in the damn things and you’re off the road before you know where you are.”

“D’you think that’s what might have happened to Andy?”

His mouth reassumed its usual sour twist. “Lady, I’ve no idea what happened to him. Why don’t you hold a seance and find out?” 

I’m thicker skinned than he could possibly know. “I’m surprised no one’s mentioned murder,” I murmured.

“Why should they?”

“You’re aware of the threats that have been made. And you know as well as I do that he wasn’t the kind of man to die driving himself into a tree.”

“He was like a big kid,” Lawrence said. “And talking of big kids …”

I followed his gaze to the open door and the man just entering the room. Several impressions crowded into my mind: Emma’s cheeks assuming a faintly pink tinge, Hartland frowning and, if anything, going a shade paler, Robin smiling behind his hand, the anticipatory gleam in Paul’s eyes. This person was, apparently, some kind of catalyst.

“Lee!” cried Emma. “I’m so glad you could make it after all.”

“Leander Hurley,” whispered Robin in my ear. “Liaison Officer, Canadian Navy. According to McAlister, he
is
the Canadian Navy.”

I had already worked out for myself that nothing in North America is on a small scale but this did not prepare me for Hurley’s six foot six or thereabouts, bright red curly hair and blazing blue eyes. Most certainly, I immediately decided, the Vikings
had
discovered the New World.

“I hope you didn’t bring Freddie beer again,” Emma said primly after he had apologised for becoming fogbound during a sea trial in the Bay of Fundy.

“What else has the poor guy to enjoy?” Hurley said in a tone that, for him, was probably a whisper. He then eyed the assembled gathering and I quailed in anticipation of another hand crusher. But when he picked me out he strode over to bestow upon my fingers a quaintly old-fashioned kiss. Definitely a man to be watched in every sense, I thought, smiling back.

“A real live English author,” he said, giving me a calculating stare. Later I discovered that he looked at everyone like that at the first meeting. There was no real brainwork behind it. It was a bit like the beam from an unmanned lighthouse.

Wishing that he would let go of my hand and aware of a tiny frown between Emma’s immaculately plucked eyebrows, I said, “Surely there are plenty of writers in Vancouver.”

Hurley looked at Robin and then back to me again.

“Am I right?” I asked, taking back my hand.

“Surely you are ma’am,” he replied, and from his wary manner I knew he thought we had been gossiping about him.

“I’ve been listening to the radio,” I told him. “People tell me I have a good ear for remembering accents.”

He gave a satisfied nod. “Then where would you place our Freddie?”

“He talks like a parrot from a deplorable background,” I said, and everyone laughed.

“Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” mimicked Robin but went quiet when I gave him a look.

Detecting continuing undercurrents I answered Hurley’s questions about my writing and then, after dinner, he joined Robin and me in one corner of the lounge. Unlike the Nasonworth contingent he was not interested in talking shop and I began to wonder if Emma or her husband had dropped a hint to him that Robin was not the engineer he was pretending to be. In a way Hurley
was
like a child, eager for knowledge. He laughed easily, which is not to say that he laughed at anything and everything, but he explored for humour and, finding it, injected a little more of his own. No one, I mused wryly, could be more of a contrast to Earl Lawrence. There did not seem to be one iota of spite in him, but something about him did make me wonder if he was putting on an act.

I went to bed early, thinking about the presence of listening devices in every room and the more I thought about it the angrier I became. On the first night, undressing, I had wondered how sensitive they were and whether one could suffer from indigestion without losing one’s social reputation in New Brunswick. Then other aspects of this quite unwarranted snooping had occurred to me.

On that night I had switched on the bedside clock radio and found CBC’s classical music station. When the door of my room had opened and closed soundlessly at a little after midnight I had not been alarmed, and had merely turned up the volume slightly. Conversation in the circumstances had been impossible and I had been helpless with laughter initially at my visitor’s contrite expression after the fright I had had. During the first movement of a symphony and after I had forgiven him, he had made love to me with breathtaking urgency. We had not dared speak. So there had been only Beethoven and that sweet, sweet strength.

*

I felt the business of the security surveillance within Ravenscliff, while not directly related to my brief, to be sufficiently interesting to be worth investigating. I had already drawn a diagram of the house, both upper and lower floors, marking exactly where everyone slept. It had not seemed necessary to make a separate drawing of the basement, or rumpus room as it was called, and I had merely noted that McAlister and Paul were bunking down in a partitioned corner of it, the one nearest another woodburner. Redding and Lawrence, of course, went back to their hotel and on the Friday afternoon of that and every subsequent week, flew back to Montreal for the weekend. As it happened, after an incident on the first Thursday after I arrived, the invitations to dinner ceased altogether.

It had become fairly obvious that Lawrence thought the armed protection of the DARE team a waste of time. Whether he was the type of man to relish argument or whether the tension of being shepherded around by an armed guard became too much for him was difficult to decide. When he  began to bait Robin I found myself unable to interest myself in his reasons, only condemn his stupidity.

To be fair, everyone had been drinking steadily, before dinner, during and afterwards. One could not fault David Hartland’s generosity with alcohol and I was beginning to wonder if it was his practical solution to the increasing tension within his household. With or without this purpose in mind he was pouring rye for himself and his colleagues and had left a bottle of Scotch within range of the Britishers. The trio from DARE were becoming more indiscreet by the minute; Robin and I frankly agog.

McAlister, his accent mellowed until he sounded like a television advertisement for the golden product of the glens, said, “We could always stick a harpoon on the front end and then they could sell it as a whaling ship.”

Paul Rogers, recounting a meeting he had attended that day to Margaret Howard, “So I said to this guy, if you don’t build in any safeguards and then shove twenty-five thousand horse power down one prop shaft instead of two then you’re going to bend the bloody thing.”

Ouch, I thought, that was a dig at Nasonworth whose fame in the engineering world up until these heady days of frigates had depended on the production of flight simulators.

“The difference,” Robin observed thoughtfully, “between pranging the boat on the jetty and a screen lighting up with pretty coloured words — ‘Oops, try again.’”

McAlister and Rogers cried with laughter at this point and even Margaret smiled widely, stirring things even more by directing her gaze straight at Hartland.

“Big joke,” growled Lawrence.

“Speaking personally,” said McAlister, “I’m just voicing an idea that came to me since a conversation with one of your senior consultants yesterday.”

“Along the lines of what?” enquired Hartland smoothly. “That they ought to be submarines.”

Redding was in the process of taking a mouthful of whisky and almost choked. “Rubbish!” he exclaimed when he could speak.

“The whole idea of frigates calling the tune is obsolete,” McAlister continued. “We found that out in the South Atlantic.”

“Britain isn’t scrapping her frigates,” Redding pointed out.

“We’ve got nukes.”

On reflection I’m sure that McAlister hadn’t intended to sound so smug. But he was still talking.

“It’s political. I know it’s political — you know it’s political. The all Canadian dream: a maple leaf on everything. Even on the bog paper, which comes from China.”

Here, unfortunately, Hartland remembered that he was British and chuckled. Robin, disastrously, got a fit of the giggles. This does not happen very often and I continue to pray that he will soon grow out of it. Worse, the drink activated his imagination, normally strictly dormant.

“And the hoard brooded,” he intoned. “‘Verily we need advice,’ they murmured. ‘Let us seek wise council from the wizards across the eastern sea,’ they muttered. ‘Verily
they
would not have got into this turmoil,’ they cried. ‘All will soon be perfect!’ they bellowed. And all were suffused with a great euphoria.