Murder At The Mendel (24 page)

I didn’t watch any more. I didn’t have to. I’d seen enough. The man on the floor was Stuart Lachlan, and the woman
who first beat him and then guided him into her body was Nina Love. My heart was pounding, and the blood was singing in my ears, but I didn’t hesitate. I knew what I had to do. I pushed the eject button and threw the tape into my bag. I went upstairs, put on my ski jacket and boots, got into the Mercedes and drove to Stuart Lachlan’s house.

CHAPTER

13

By the time I turned off the University Bridge the place behind the scar on my forehead was aching so badly I thought I was going to have to pull over. I could hear my mother’s voice: “Nina may have fooled you, Joanne, but she never fooled me. She never fooled me.”

“Shut up,” I said, “just shut up. Let me work this out.” The tape was terrible, but I couldn’t let my horror over the video of Nina blind me to the significance of the tape itself. I had no doubt about the identity of the person who had held the camera. After all, I’d been in her sights myself New Year’s Eve. Clea Poole had been everywhere with her video camera during those last days of the old year – “Mouse and her faithful Brownie,” Sally had called her.

The tape was the missing piece in so many puzzles. Its existence explained Stu’s sudden change of heart about Taylor’s custody. (“Sally, did you sell your soul to the devil?” I had asked, and she had laughed. “No, to a mouse.”) The tape was the explanation for the envelope of money Nina had taken to Izaak Levin’s – not as an advance on a favourable book review, as Stuart Lachlan had told Nina, but
to keep a humiliating image of himself buried. He had succeeded; Stu’s sexual practices were not a matter of public record. But increasingly it looked as if a worse image of him was about to emerge: the image of a man who had coldbloodedly murdered three people because they stood in the way of how he believed his life should be lived.

I had no plan when I rang the doorbell of the Lachlan house on Spadina Crescent. Somehow I had to warn Nina so we could get Taylor out before … Before what? I didn’t know. My mind was numb. I couldn’t seem to think beyond the next moment. No one came to the door.

“Please, please, please,” I said, as I rang the bell again, but there was only silence and the sound of the blood singing in my ears. I followed Clea Poole’s route to the backyard: down by the stone wall, past the stand of pine trees, along the snowy flagstone walk.

I banged at the back door. I think I knew there’d be no answer. I pulled the keys to the Mercedes out of my bag. They were on a chain with other keys. I tried one that looked like a house key, and first time lucky, the kitchen door opened and I was inside.

On the round oak table by the window were the remains of breakfast: three juice glasses, a half-empty milk glass, three porridge bowls. I wondered if Goldilocks had felt as scared as I did. I called Nina’s name, then Taylor’s. Finally, tentatively, hoping there would be no answer, I called for Stuart. There was nothing but silence. As I moved through the house, I felt a coldness in the pit of my stomach. The living and dining rooms were immaculate, but in the bedrooms the beds were unmade, and drawers and cupboard doors gaped. It looked as if they had left in a hurry.

I left Stuart’s study till the last. I don’t know what I was afraid of – a scarlet letter marking the place on the rug where Stu and Nina had performed their strange act of love? I had
to steel myself to open the door, but there was nothing there. An innocent room filled with books and family pictures, a display case where Stuart’s mother’s collection of Royal Doulton ladies smiled and poured tea and bowed to one another, and over the mantel the portrait of Sally and Taylor, mother and daughter.

On the desk there was a telephone with an answering machine. I pressed the button to hear the message they had recorded for callers. No clues to where they had gone there; it was the same message I’d heard a dozen times over the winter. “This is Stuart Lachlan. Nina and Taylor and I are unable to come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name …”

I pushed the button again. “This is Stuart Lachlan. Nina and Taylor and I …” I pulled open Stuart’s desk drawer. Shoved inside, not hidden, was a square envelope, the twin of the one I’d found on the Mercedes. I opened it. There was a note:
THE CAMERA SAW WHAT YOU DID
. There was also part of a photographer’s contact sheet with eight proofs of pictures on it. I recognized them immediately as the ones the woman Anya had taken the night of the dinner.
THE CAMERA SAW WHAT YOU DID
. The camera saw, but I couldn’t. The proof of Stuart’s guilt was in my hand, but I couldn’t see it. The pictures were so small I couldn’t make out anything beyond the identity of the people at the table. Sally was in all of them: sitting between Stu and Izaak and looking miserable; leaning across Stu to say something to me; looking up at the camera as Nina stood behind her; scowling at Izaak as Stu leaned across her plate. I looked at that last picture again. It had to be the one. I couldn’t make out what Stu was doing, but I thought I could see his hand close to Sally’s plate.

“You’re a killer, Stu.” I tried the words aloud. They sounded right. “Well, you’re not going to win this time, Stuart. I’m going to find you, and I’m going to make sure you
pay.” I picked up the phone book and found the number of the city police. On the other end of the line, the man’s voice told me Inspector Mary Ross McCourt was unavailable, could he help. I thought of what would happen next. The search for Stuart and Nina. The media announcements. Nina’s private life suddenly becoming public knowledge. I imagined Nina somewhere answering the door, and strange men in uniforms surrounding her, questioning her. What Stuart had done was not her fault. She loved him. I remembered the videotape. The thought of strangers sitting in a dimly lit room in police headquarters watching Nina’s nakedness made my stomach turn.

“Can anyone else help you?” the voice on the other end of the line asked.

“No,” I said, “no one can help me,” and I hung up. There was a personal telephone directory on the desk. How did you list your own summer house? I was halfway through the alphabet when I thought about S for Stay Away Lake.

The phone rang a dozen times before it was picked up. The voice on the other end was Nina’s. It seemed like a good omen. I hadn’t thought where to begin, but I knew I had to keep her from reacting in case she wasn’t alone.

“Nina, it’s Jo. Is Stuart there with you?”

“No, he’s out taking Taylor for a walk down by the lake, but I can get him. Joanne, is something wrong?”

“Yes, Ni, something’s wrong. Something’s terribly wrong. You have to get Taylor and come back to the city right away.”

“Is there a problem with your family?”

“No, my family’s fine. Ni, please get back here.”

“Joanne, we just got unpacked. Stuart’s exhausted. I can’t ask him to turn around and drive back to the city. He needs time to heal.”

“Fuck Stuart,” I said. “Nina, you and Taylor have to get out of there. I know I’m not making sense. Too much has
happened. It looks like Izaak Levin isn’t the murderer after all. Ni, prepare yourself for some terrible news. I think Stuart is deeply implicated in the murders. You have to get out of there.”

The silence on the other end of the line lasted so long I was afraid that Stuart had come into the room. But finally Nina answered me.

“Joanne, come and get me. Come and get us both. If Stuart has done what you say he did, I’m afraid of what will happen if I try to leave. Please, Jo. I’ve never asked much of you, but I’m asking this. Please, please come and get us.”

The area behind my scar was throbbing. A steady beat of pain. I closed my eyes, and the image of Nina was there, lovely, loving, caring about me when no one else did. The one constant in my life.

“Of course,” I said, “Ni, just hold on. I’ll be right there.”

“Do you know the way?”

“I can find it.”

“If you start now, you’ll be here before dark. Taylor and I will be at the dock waiting for you. Don’t worry about driving across the lake. I know it’s been warm, but the man at the crossing says the ice is safe. We’ll be waiting.”

It was a three-hour drive from the city to the Lachlan cottage on the island at Stay Away Lake. Three hours to think about the unthinkable. Sally’s death was the perfect solution for Stu: no more problems about custody; no more threats to blow him out of the water over the stupid book he’d written. With Sally dead, Stu had it all. But he wasn’t going to get it. When I saw the turnoff sign, I was filled with relief. It was almost over.

I looked at the lake. The ice was the colour of pewter, but there were dark places, too. There are often wonderful legends about these northern lakes, but the story of how Stay Away Lake got its name was not appealing. Local people said
that at the turn of the century a madman lived on the island where the Lachlans later built their cottage. He killed anyone who came near the island and he dumped their bodies in the water – a dozen in all, they said, before finally he turned his rifle on himself. The legend was that at night you could hear the voices of his victims calling up their warning from the lake bottom: “Stay away. Stay away. Stay away.”

The old man at the landing was not as sanguine about the ice as Nina had been. “It’s been warm and the ice is punky,” he said. “If I was you, I’d leave my car doors open, in case I had to make a quick getaway out there.”

So I drove with the doors of the Mercedes open, and thought about the lost souls a few feet beneath me in the weedy darkness, crying out their warnings.

Finally, I made out the point where the Lachlans had built their cottage and I saw Nina and Taylor, two small figures in bright ski clothes standing on the dock in front of the boathouse.

I stopped the car at the far end of the dock. I didn’t like the look of the ice closer to shore. Taylor ran out to meet me.

“Your car doors are open,” she said. “We watched you drive across, and your doors were open all the way. Did you forget?”

“It’s just the way you drive on ice,” I said, “to be safe.”

“You wouldn’t want to go through,” she said sagely. “You’d hurt all the fish down on the bottom waiting for spring.”

“I was careful,” I said. “No one got hurt. I promise.”

Nina hadn’t moved. She was still standing in front of the boathouse. Taylor and I walked to her. I didn’t like the way Nina looked; she was composed but very pale. Her ski jacket was a brilliant blue. When she’d bought it, she’d asked me if the style was too young for her. That day, as she’d stood in the Ski Shoppe slender and glowing with happiness, I’d said, “Nothing will ever be too young for you.” I couldn’t have said that now.

“Are you ready?” I asked her.

Her eyes widened. It seemed as if she had just noticed I was there.

“No,” she said in a low, flat voice, “I’m not ready.”

“Nina, we have to go.”

She raised her hand as if she were warding something off. “I have to look at him. I have to tell him that I know what he did. I have to finish it.”

She turned and went into the boathouse. I followed her. It was dark in there and cold. The air smelled of fish and dampness, but intermingled with the lake smells was the scent of Nina’s perfume. When she opened the door on the other side, a shaft of pale light came toward me, but she was in darkness.

“Ni, I’m coming with you,” I said.

When she answered, her voice was terrible.

“No, Jo. This is private. Just for me alone. Please, go and stay with Taylor. She’ll be frightened. I’ll be back. I can’t just walk away from him.” She stepped outside and pulled the door shut after her.

I walked through the boathouse. Taylor was waiting at the end of the dock. She had the mass card from Sally’s funeral in her hand. I’d left it on the dash of the Mercedes. I came and looked over her shoulder at the picture on the front: Sally’s present to me. “Hang on to it, it’s the only picture I ever did of Nina. She’s so beautiful I could almost forgive her.” Beside me, Taylor traced the perfect circle that enclosed Sally and Desmond Love.

“Did Nina put them there?” she asked.

“What?” I said stupidly.

Her voice was small and patient. “Did Nina put Sally and my grandfather under the water?”

I looked at the picture. Sally’s golden head bent toward Desmond Love’s – they had never needed anyone else.

Daughter and father, absorbed, happy, complete, as together they built sand castles in the perfect circle of their private world.

In that moment I knew.

“Get in the car, and no matter what happens, stay there. I’ll be back for you. I promise. Just stay there.”

I ran through the boathouse. The scent of Joy lingered like a memory. I was halfway up the hill when I heard the first shot. It sounded dry and inconsequential, and then I heard the second.

At the top of the hill, the lights from the cottage shone yellow and welcoming in the dusk. A place to come home to.

When I got to the door I was overwhelmed with a sense of déjà vu so violent it was physical. Another cottage. Another night. Thirty-two years before. And I had stood there looking past Izaak Levin into the cottage, and I had seen …

I had seen exactly what Nina Love had planned that I would see. Hilda McCourt had quoted Graham Greene: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

That had been my moment. If I hadn’t gone back to my cottage for my shoes, I would have been the one who walked in and found them. But it was Izaak who found them. I was late. She had taken a risk with that poison. My father said that another half hour would have tipped the balance. But, of course, I would never have made Nina wait another half hour. She knew I would come. She knew she could count on me to make her plan work. And it had worked. Des was dead. Sally had been so shattered she was easily disposed of, and Nina was rich and free of an invalid husband and a daughter who would always be her rival. She had taken a risk, but she knew the risk was minimal because she had me.

And now she had taken another risk. I knew she was behind that door waiting, waiting for me to come in, so the
performance could begin. She knew she could count on me. Whatever story she told me, I would believe. I would swear to.