Reluctant Detective

Title page

by Finley Martin

The Acorn Press
Charlottetown
2012

Copyright

The Reluctant Detective © 2012 by Finley Martin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without
the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright
Licensing Agency.

P.O. Box 22024
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
C1A 9J2
acornpresscanada.com

eBook design by Joseph Muise
Cover design by Matt Reid
Cover photography by Melissa Buoute

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Martin, Finley
The reluctant detective / Finley G. Martin.

ISBN 978-1-894838-86-3
I. Title.

PS8626.A7696R45 2012 C813'.6 C2012-901250-5

The publisher acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada
through the Canada Book Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage,
the
Canada Council for the Arts Block Grant Program and the support of the
Province of Prince Edward Island.

Dedication

To my wife, Brenda Martin, for her patience and support

Prologue

So this is what dying feels like
, she thought.

Wilhelmina Anne Brown was neck-deep in the black water and
all but invisible under a black night sky. The cold crept in slow
measures up her arms and legs; her mouth and cheeks grew numb, and an alarm pulsed soundlessly deep within her.

She had lost track of how long she'd been in the water, but it
had been long enough to realize that she was losing the feeling in
her limbs. In fact, she wondered if she still possessed any control
over them at all. She could climb the ladder to the wharf just a few
feet above her head, but her stalker might still be lurking nearby.
Instead, she tried to move her leg, if only to prove that it still could
move. It flexed and straightened i ctself again, but she couldn't see
it and, because of that, her confidence wavered. A doubt took root. Perhaps she had only imagined it moving. Perhaps it was a phantom motion. A delusion. A desperate final grasp at hope.

More minutes passed. The wind kicked up ripples. The water
slapped against the wharf's retaining wall and the ladder to which
she clung. The sound of it was frenzied. Like manic laughter. It
created an endless watery hysteria that made her want to scream.

Then she heard soft scuffing footsteps amid the dirt and sand on the concrete deck of the wharf above her. He was coming back. If he found her, he would kill her.

Anne's mind stumbled over her thoughts like a drunkard staggering across cobblestones, and she searched desperately through the
handful of choices left to her: she tried to picture herself climbing
up, running, and taking a quick bullet in the head; she imagined letting her hands go and slipping peacefully into an icy sleep; and she
envisioned herself doing nothing at all… just waiting for whatever happened… giving up… surrendering even. It made no difference.
She knew that whatever she decided to do… or not do… it would all come to the same result – the end of her life.

Dying is dying is dying, isn't it?

The logic of that notion registered some meaning because she held it in her head for a long, long while, but thinking seemed so difficult now. The sense of it seemed a fingertip away. It rolled over and over
in her mind, but came to nothing. Finally, she discarded the idea altogether, and fell back on the one conviction that spoke with an
impassioned voice within her:

…but I can't die.

Anne's thoughts fled to her daughter Jacqui, who was heading into high school. Then to the faces of friends – Dit, Ben, and Mary Anne – which passed in quick succession. Then to her Uncle Bill.

Would he be disappointed?
she wondered.

A blanket of melancholy washed over her as the vision of her daughter filled her mind again. It had a strange warmth to it. She
felt relaxed… almost at peace… and she smiled a frozen smile.

1

Growing up, Anne's life had been effortless. Born on Prince
Edward Island, she had moved to Ontario with her parents when
she was just a year old. Her family was of tight-knit Irish stock.
Her father had managed a trucking company in Ottawa's west end.
Anne had hung around with a respectable pack of friends, made the
honour roll most of the time, and earned a second-string place on
the soccer team. Life had been a pleasant, progressive middle-class
tale until her luck changed and her life began to unravel. All in
one year, between her twentieth and twenty-first birthdays, she'd become a widow, an orphan, and a single mother.

The first tragedy to strike had been the death of her husband.
Jack, a foreign correspondent attached to the Red Cross in war-torn
Croatia, was killed when a mortar round fell short of its village
target. Anne had been pregnant at the time, and five months later she gave birth to her daughter, Jacqueline. Two months after that, she received a phone call from Quebec police, informing her that both parents had died in a motor vehicle accident.

Anne felt abandoned and worn down by so much heartbreak but, more than that, she was worried – worried that she wouldn't find
the means to take care of herself and worried by the challenge
of raising her baby girl all alone. There were no soft shoulders to
cry on in Ottawa anymore and, if there had been, she wouldn't
have sought them out. She was too proud for that – “too proud to beg, and too proud to look weak,” her Uncle Bill had once said. So for a handful of years she worked as a receptionist. She balanced that with motherhood and night-school courses. It took six years
to put her life in order. By then she had worked her way up the
employment ladder from an anonymous Girl Friday to a respected
claims investigator for an Ottawa insurance company, a job she liked and a job she was good at. However, all of that fell apart one evening when her boss's supervisor pinned her in her office chair
and pawed her relentlessly until she jammed her fingernail into the
corner of his eye. He left the office angry, confused, and maimed.
She left the office shaken, humiliated, and fired. At thirty-one she was back in limbo.

Weeks dragged on as Anne's misconduct complaint against her
former employer, Dominant Insurance, crept through Ontario's
human rights bureaucracy. Her small reserve of money dwindled.
Jobs in the capital city dried up, and Anne's future and that of her
daughter looked bleak. It was around this time that Anne received a call from Uncle Billy.

Bill Darby was no longer a cop. He had retired from the Ottawa Police Department as a detective sergeant in 1994, moved back to his boyhood home of Prince Edward Island, and started a business. The lettering on his office door read
Darby Investigations and Security
.

The private detective business had been something of a novelty on the Island when Bill returned. Sure, there had been a few security
companies around. They'd mostly filled uniforms to make an
appearance at hockey games or Legion dances or special concerts to protect the sober public from the stupidly drunk. Not too many
years before, the Island had been touted as that unique Canadian
place where one could find a church at every crossroad. It had been
a place where characters like those in
Anne of Green Gables
still
baked their own bread and would be ashamed to wash clothes on a Sunday. It had been a place where farmers could run their horses along empty beaches, where crime was a novelty, and where potato blight had been the headline news for six straight months. However, all this changed.

Some blamed it on the bridge. Construction of the Confederation Bridge, the world's largest bridge over ice-covered waters, ended the Island's isolation. It brought more tourists and more shoppers and more jobs, but it also brought more unsavoury elements – con
men, gamblers, drug dealers, and opportunists of every deviance.
They believed that an enterprising crook could get here, make a
score, and get away lickety-split before anyone knew better. The
grudging tolerance and even romanticism that had grown around the reputation of PEI's bootleggers and rum-runners did not carry over to the new breed of criminal entrepreneurs. And police seemed less able to arrest and prosecute them. Nor were they just the petty thieves and the village vandals of years gone by. As a result, Islanders began to feel more vulnerable, less comforted by the vigilance
and concern of their neighbours, and less well-served by their
government. Faces were strange now. Suspicions grew. As a result,
it became a time when a good private investigator could make a
living, especially one who already had a pension to tide him over a long start-up period.

In the years that followed, his business, if not thriving, operated in the black. There was a steady trickle of customers. Bill needed
a receptionist, someone to help out a bit in the office and with
whatever else came up.

“Why don't you come down here,” he asked Anne. “Pay's not great,
but nobody starves on PEI. And there's no rat race like in Ontario. I get some insurance investigation work once in a while. You're used to that stuff. Flexible hours. Better place to bring up Jacqui.
And a name like Wil-hel-min-a would hardly raise a local eyebrow. Whaddya think? Deal?”

It took no more convincing than that for Anne to cut her ties with
Ottawa and move her family to Prince Edward Island. There had
been few ties to cut – few that she would miss, anyway – and it had been time for a fresh start.

Four years later, those distasteful memories of Ottawa and
Dominant Insurance seemed no more real than the fanciful shapes discerned in a pile of clouds. On Prince Edward Island she'd found a security she had not enjoyed for many years. A contentedness. Life
had become an easiness of days. Comfortable. Predictable. Sweet
even. And she was happy.

Darby's office was in a second-floor walk-up in Charlottetown.
Looking out the window, Anne could see the Confederation Centre
of the Arts behind a screen of trees and shrubberies across the street. When Darby had first set up shop there, the street had
housed a cluster of little nondescript shops and ho-hum association
offices on the ground floors, and even more obscure low-rental offices and tiny apartments above. Eventually, these old brick and stone buildings were deemed historic. Art galleries replaced the shops; chic restaurants displaced the associations; and Celtic or
British pubs filled the spaces between. The city had chipped in and
restored the concrete street with cobblestones, installed period
street lamps, and widened the sidewalks for patio dining. Renaming
the street Victoria Row only encouraged landlords to boost rents to match the
nouveau chic
income and image of the tenants.

Darby would argue that he was neither
nouveau chic
nor well-to-do. His bank manager would have agreed. Darby Investigations and Security should have gotten the boot from that prime location, but for one thing. Darby was hired to right a wrong. It was a special job
for the owner of his building. The owner's wife, the bookkeeper, had run off with a building contractor who had sucked the blood
out of her husband's bank account with inflated expenses. When the dust had settled on Darby's investigation, alimony was moot, and the contractor, rather than face fraud charges, corrected the errors
in his billing. In the end, the wife smouldered; the contractor was
relieved; and Darby's landlord was as pleased as Scrooge on Christmas Day. Also, though he may have regretted it as years passed, the landlord paid Darby for his services by lowering his rent and fixing it into perpetuity, his way of declaring his eternal gratitude.

Anne smiled remembering that story. Billy loved to tell it. Her
smile fled at the ringing of the office telephone.

“Darby Investigations and Security. This is Anne speaking. How may I help you?” Her voice was perky, clear, resolute.

There was an emptiness on the line.

“Hello?' she asked again.

“Anne, this is Ben. I've got bad news. Billy's dead.”