Death Spiral
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Praise for
Death Spiral
Shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award
“Excellent . . . perfect for the Second World War buff, as well as fans of good Canadian crime fiction”
Margaret Cannon,
Globe and Mail
“Nichol displays a provocative talent for writing that gets under your skin . . .
Death Spiral
deepens this rich capacity with stylish and edgy writing to give us a confrontational piece of addictive fiction.”
Hamilton Spectator
“Nichol has served up a fast-paced yet nuanced story that explores the cost of war on those who fight it, and demonstrates that the postwar home front was not without its own terrors.”
Sherbrooke Record
“Leave it to Nichol to find the right ending for this unforgettable story.”
The Halifax Chronicle-Herald
Praise for
Transgression
“Exciting and well written. I couldn’t put it down.”
Joy Fielding
“Nichol’s vivid prose, harrowing plot and the defiant Adele will keep readers invested in this love story–cum–murder mystery until the very last page.”
Publishers Weekly
“Nichol presents this can’t miss melodrama . . . with an eye as sensitive to petty humiliations as to life-changing catastrophes, and the result is an odyssey as piercing in its details as it is familiar in its outline.”
Kirkus
“The writing resonates with beautifully raw, tender insights.
Transgression
is writing that gets under your skin and remains there. It’s a must read.”
Hamilton Spectator
“This is a brilliantly constructed novel...Nichol perfectly captures the sense of hope and hopelessness of those in the midst of war, as well as the pain and terror that
continue after the war has ended. It is a heart-wrenching, haunting, beautiful book.”
Historical Novels Review
(editors’ choice)
“This is a fascinating novel of love amid the strife of war. Unalterable life decisions turn into regrettable
consequences and the author guides the reader through Adele’s journey and another concurrent drama, which opens in a small Canadian town in 1946. The ultimate mix of these two plotlines is absolutely riveting to the end.”
The Romance Connection
Praise for the Arthur Ellis Award-winning
Midnight Cab
“Takes the reader on a wild ride through the past, and into the mind of a mad man. Gripping.”
Kathy Reichs
“Plotting and pacing are superb...his dialogue is smart and real...But the characterization is where Nichol shines.”
Detroit Free Press
“This is an engaging thriller that never lets its meta-phorical foot off the clutch and races down mysterious roads, all leading back to the past, of course — with the aplomb of Harlan Coben. It also conjures up one of
the most sinister and unforgettable villains crime fiction has drawn in a long time.”
The Guardian
“...a compelling read.”
Sunday Telegraph
“Nichol’s elegantly simple and taut prose becomes addictive.”
Globe and Mail
Also James W. Nichol
Midnight Cab
Transgression
DEATH SPIRAL
JAMES W. NICHOL
McArthur & Company
Toronto
First published in Canada in 2009 by
McArthur & Company
322 King Street West, Suite 402
Toronto, Ontario
M5V 1J2
This eBook edition published in 2010 by
McArthur & Company
Copyright © 2009 James W. Nichol
All rights reserved.
The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the expressed written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Nichol, James W., 1940-
Death spiral / James W. Nichol.
ISBN 978-1-55278-896-7
eISBN 978-1-55278-921-6
I. Title.
PS8577.I18D42 2010——C813’.54——C2010-903936-X
The publisher would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for our publishing activities. The publisher further wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council and the OMDC for our publishing program.
Cover and text design by Tania Craan
eBook development by Wild Element
www.wildelement.ca
For Corporal James Shute
PROLOGUE
Death Spiral. You have no other choice. You have to let go.
They weren’t supposed to be there. Everyone on both sides knew the war was as good as over. Off my starboard wing a flood of Lancasters and B-17s surged along under a brilliant blue sky, light glinting off their wings like off the tops of waves. A slow tide of death over Germany.
It was the Messerschmitts that weren’t supposed to be there, hidden in the sun five thousand feet above and dropping down like diving seabirds. The Luftwaffe’s last gasp.
Fake your own death. Trust in the Almighty Spitfire. Flutter down like a leaf in October. Don’t pass out.
Arcing across the top of our bombers, flashes of gunfire under their wings, slicing through and disappearing into the silver tide. They were below us now. Somewhere.
“Great Jesus in the morning.” Wilson Mahoney’s voice crackled in my ears, “Wake the hell up.”
Two Lancasters began to trail smoke. A B-17 droning beside me rolled its huge white belly. An explosion of flames ballooned out of its side.
Keep your head lolled over. He can see you. Pray he doesn’t fire again. Sky spinning like a top. Horizon coming up fast.
Squadron Leader Mahoney slipped his lead Spitfire and headed down. “Everyone pick up your wing man. Don’t do anything alone, boys.” It was the last five minutes of his life. Soon there were dogfights all over the sky.
Where the hell is he? Where am I? Stick jerking between my legs like a mad thing, eyes popping, brain turning liquid, steaming like porridge on a cold winter day, frost on the kitchen window, late for school. Oh god, I’m going out.
Knocked one down, had another jumping in and out of my sights like a rabbit heading for the bluest blue. Now I had to concentrate as fierce as God on the first day of creation, death could come in all directions otherwise. Had to see everything, think of everything. Otherwise.
I’m dead. The world’s turned a kind of fluorescent green, instruments luminous in a sparkling haze, piss warm as a bath running up my belly and trickling across my chest. I’m hanging upside down. I can hear the drone of an engine somewhere faraway. The tops of evergreen trees are rushing past my face.
Going for a second kill, so locked in I forgot my wing man, an amateur’s mistake. Nothing now but blue sky and me and a retreating silver streak. Glanced at the fuel gauge. Tried to sneak a look at my watch. How long had I been flying?
And like a shadow falling, like a dream coming to life, the pilot I’d been waiting for for three years dropped in behind me. I threw the Spit into a screaming starboard sheer, fire licking below his wings now, lead tearing into my plane like some vengeful giant driving nails. Put her nose up, scrambled toward heaven, he was there, so close behind I could see his face. Another burst of fire, a final falling loop. Better than me. He was better. Three holes in my canopy. No choice. Play dead.
Brilliant sunlight and a rushing bright forest like green water where the sky should be. I reach out, touch the stick, turn her right side up. Just in time to soar over a rise, just in time to fly into a tumbling mass of the blackest smoke I’ve ever seen.
Wait to come out the other side. And wait. Dark as a grave. The motor dies. I can hear myself breathing.
CHAPTER ONE
The mayor and other assorted town dignitaries were standing on top of a baggage wagon in the bone-chilling January cold and even though the train was still moving and its brakes were just starting to make a screeching noise, the mayor gave the signal and the band struck up the first series of notes to “Hail the Conquering Hero.”
The train shuddered to a stop, a coach door swung open and a black porter leaned out into the music and the steam. Behind him, hesitating for a moment, peering out and looking a bit shocked and more than a trifle chagrined stood the last local soldier to return home from the war.
The crowd cheered, men brandishing their fedoras high in the air, women and children fluttering a forest of tiny Union Jacks and Canadian Red Ensigns. They’d been gathering at the train station and doing just that for over a year.
This particular day was special though, because this was the greatest hero of them all, looking splendid in his light-blue greatcoat, his officer’s cap, a black and shiny hospital cane caught by the crook and dangling from his arm. Flying Officer Wilfred McLauchlin. Spitfire fighter pilot. Trained on Hurricanes and Mark 9s. Fought in Mark 11s. And then in 1945, the upgraded Mark 14. Twelve kills.
“Hurrah!”
He began to make his way down the steep iron steps. His left leg dragged behind him. He had to tilt himself to the side to swing it forward. His left arm was trussed up in a black sling under his unbuttoned coat. The porter reached up to help. His father hovered behind him.
It seemed to take a long time to make the descent.
CHAPTER TWO
Wilf pushed himself up with his good arm, turned on the light and sat on the edge of the bed.
He’d been home for a week, a week of house parties and a banquet in his honour and hotel-hopping in crowded cars full of ex-servicemen, everyone laughing, everyone drunk. It sure was good to be home. That’s what he’d said when it was his time to stand up in the crammed and steamy community hall and make his thank-you speech.
“You can’t imagine,” Wilf had said, “just how good it feels to be finally home.”
The heavy gong of a grandfather clock rang through the empty house, a clock purchased years ago by his own grandfather, Taylor McLauchlin, Queen’s Counsel and Liberal Member of Parliament. Wilf listened as if he’d never heard it before. Two more times.
He picked up his cane and limped slowly over to the dresser mirror. A sleep-deprived man of only twenty-eight years stared back, hair so black it looked blue creeping over his ears, lean sensuous face, deep shadows under his eyes. Once upon a time young women had found him exotic-looking, or so they claimed. Scottish lasses with red hair and freckled faces. And English. And French. To laugh with. To dance with. To tumble into the nearest bed with, the world being on fire, anyway, or so they whispered to each other, they could all be dead the next morning, anyway.
Warm skin and warmer breath, thin girlish arms fiercely around his neck.
Wilf’s heart ached for those girls. His body ached.
And what did Chuck the Chopper used to say to all the lads? “Plenty of you left, mate, to do whatever you want.” And from deep in their recovery beds, each young face would look up at him with such great hope.
Wilf took a deep breath and smiled at himself, an exercise he’d been doing for close to two years, smiling into mirrors and trying to locate his old optimistic self. He turned away, limped out into the dark upstairs hall, hooked his cane over the back of a chair and with the same good hand picked up the phone.
“Number please,” the operator said.
“Two two one.”
“Is that you, Wilf?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Nancy Dearborn. Remember? I was three classes ahead of you.”
“Oh, sure. Hi Nancy.”
“It’s so good to have you home, Wilf.”
“Well, thanks.”
“I’ll put you through. Andy must be working nights, just like me.”
“Yes he is.”
“I’ll ring you through.”
“Thank you, Nancy.”
A phone rang at the other end of the line. And rang a few more times. After a while it was picked up. “Police station. Creighton here.”
“Hi, Creighton.”
“Hello there, McLauchlin. Are you still drunk?”
“That was three nights ago. I’ve been drunk twice since then. So what are you up to?”
“Nothing much.”
“How about picking me up? Must be time to go out on patrol.”
“Wilf, it’s three o’clock in the morning.”
“Time to secure the perimeter,” Wilf said.
By the time Wilf had wrestled his pajamas back off and his clothes back on, pulled his winter coat over his shoulders and struggled into his galoshes, Andy Creighton was pulling the police cruiser up to the front door.
Wilf made his slow way down the porch steps and through the dark frosty air, opened the passenger door and slid in.
“How’s it going?” Andy said.
“It’s going fine. I can’t sleep.”
Andy put the car in gear. A row of street lights glowed faintly in front of them. All the houses were dark. They began to glide down the snow-packed road.
“How are the brats?”
Andy grinned and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. “The brats are great.”
Wilf and Andy had been friends all their lives but, unlike Wilf, Andy hadn’t signed up at the beginning of the war. He was already the young father of one child and to further complicate matters Linda had gone and put another bun in her oven. Andy had enrolled in police college and joined the local force instead. It was an attempt to apologize for staying home while the rest of his friends went off to war; he was aware of this but it hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped. Dressed in his new uniform for the first time, creases freshly pressed by Linda, a shiny revolver buckled to his hip and patrolling Main Street, he’d felt like a joke.
“Can’t get over how tall Davey is,” Wilf said.
“Well, he’s seven now.” Andy, himself, was stocky and just tall enough to make the police force’s minimum standard.
“That’s what I mean. How could it be seven years?”
“What’s it feel like?”
“Seventy. Sometimes it feels like just a few days. It’s all buggered up.”
Andy and Linda had thrown Wilf a homecoming party. Once the crowd had left and Linda had gone up to bed, Wilf had said that he thought he’d stay the rest of the night on their couch. It seemed a reasonable idea since alcoholically speaking he was in a semi-comatose state anyway.
Sitting on a slant and half-asleep he’d begun to tell Andy about the hospitals in France and in England. It had struck Andy then that Wilf had been waiting all night for just this opportunity. Numerous steel pins and a steel plate were the only things holding his left hip together. Same with his left shoulder. Nerves completely and irredeemably severed up there but the blood flow was still good and so he’d decided to leave the arm attached. “It has sentimental value,” he’d told the surgeon, one Chuck the Chopper.
It was his loss of sight that had been the big mystery, though. He’d been found unconscious in his wrecked plane along some country road and his doctors had been telling him all along that there was no direct physical damage to his eyes. His blindness had been most likely caused by a concussion, some kind of trauma to the occipital lobe at the back of his head.
He’d been blind for close to three months and then suddenly there was a slit of peripheral vision one morning. It was as if an orderly had tiptoed into the room and had lifted up a corner of a blanket he’d been huddling under for all that time. Light slid in and lit up his mind with a kind of cathedral glow. By the end of the day he could make out his hospital room and his assembled doctors. Outside his window he could begin to see the world.
Wilf had tapped Andy on his wrist.
“What?”
“About my eyes?”
“What about them?”
“The thing is, I didn’t have so much as a bump on my head.”
Wilf had stared at Andy for a long moment as if he’d just told him the strangest thing in the world, and then he’d closed his eyes and fallen asleep.
“Nancy Dearborn is still single, at least she’s still using her maiden name,” Wilf announced.
They were driving past the high school they’d attended together until Andy had dropped out in Grade Twelve. A lonely light illuminated the front door.
“She’s still single,” Andy said.
“As I remember, she filled out a sweater in a very admirable way.”
“Still does. Twin peaks of unspeakable delights.”
Wilf laughed. “Really?”
“She’s engaged, though. Some guy from out of town.”
“How do you know they’re twin peaks of unspeakable delights?”
“I don’t. I’m just guessing.” The sound of Wilf’s familiar laugh reassured Andy. Maybe that was all Wilf had wanted. Or needed. To go for a ride, have a stupid laugh or two.
“I should ask her out. Find out for myself. Maybe she’ll break off her engagement.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Andy said.
They drove by the town’s hospital. All the windows were dark except for two brightly lit ones up on the top row. Wilf could see a nurse moving back and forth. Trouble up there, he thought. The breath-pinching pain in his left side surprised him. It always returned, about once every five minutes or so, and it always surprised him. He waited, caught his breath. “Then again, maybe I should just ask out the loneliest girl in town.”
“Bullshit.” Andy continued to concentrate on his driving, not wanting at that particular moment to look over at his best friend sitting a little askew beside him, his coat sleeve empty.
“My father took a train to North Bay yesterday,” Wilf finally said.
“Oh yeah?”
“He’s got some property case up there going to trial, he’ll be gone the rest of the week. Wants me to go down to the office tomorrow and look like I know something.”
“Sounds like fun. When are you going back to Toronto? Law school and all that?”
“I’m hoping by the end of the month.”
“I thought you’d stay in town for a while. Ambitious bastard.” Andy sounded genuinely disappointed.
“I want to get back into it. Can’t wait, actually. I’m excited about it. I need to restart my life.”
“Right,” Andy said.
Wilf went back to looking out the window. Random flakes of snow were suspending themselves in the passing street lights. Spiralling slowly down. Spiralling. It reminded him of a long time ago. Early morning hockey practice. Trudging down to the arena in the dark, equipment bag slung over his shoulder, a stick in his hand, half-asleep and already full of a soaring anticipation, a boundless joy.
“I’ll be all right,” Wilf said.
Andy turned to look. Wilf was smiling at him.
It was six o’clock in the morning and still dark by the time Wilf had had enough of driving around the town and drinking murky coffee in the police station. Andy dropped him off in front of his father’s house.
Wilf struggled up the stairs and without bothering to take off his clothes fell back on top of his bed. He was trying to find a way to sleep besides taking the sleeping pills his doctors had supplied. Horse pills, all the lads had called them, the size of small white pillows. He didn’t want to use them. He was already too dependent on his painkillers.
The large house was silent, sitting far back on its front lawn but still towering above the town’s most prestigious street. His home had always seemed silent except for the grandfather clock in the downstairs front hall. He’d been raised by his father and a succession of nannies, his mother having died when he was exactly three months old. He could still remember some of those women if he put his mind to it. He was trying to do that now in an attempt to drift off. All the lost faces.
The flyers he’d known, too. In particular, all the dead ones. All their names. It seemed important to remember their names. It wasn’t difficult to summon up their faces, Canadians, Brits, Yanks, each with their own particular tilt of head, the individual way they carried their shoulders.
All ghosts now.
And the Scottish girls. English. French. No names there. Faces, though. Their eyes blurring, so close to his own eyes. Drifting away. And the faint sound of a faraway motor. He could recognize the sound of his own plane anywhere. And the smell of petrol.
Water colder than he’d ever felt before was riding up his face. He was suspended on the crest of a great grey wave, legs scissoring madly, and falling down between chunks of ice. And riding up again, the tilted tail of his plane looming above him. Teeth beginning to chatter. Eyelids freezing together. Heart clenched like a fist.
Wilf woke up. His body felt frozen to the other side of his soul. He lay there gasping for breath.
He looked at his bedside clock.
He’d been asleep for less than half an hour.