James Carol: The Quiet Man

‘Clearly not.’

‘Did he try to find you?’

‘I guess so, but I can’t say for sure. The only thing I can be certain of was that he never found me. Not that I expected him to. Idaho might as well be a million miles from Vancouver. And Nordman is pretty much off the grid. Then there’s the fact that we’re in a different country. Those were the main reasons I moved here. Well, that and Brett, of course. I was confident that Billy would never find me. And even if he had, there’s no way that I was going back.’

‘Were you ever allowed in his office?’ Winter asked.

‘No, that was his space. If the door was shut I was supposed to leave him alone. I didn’t mind at first. I was struggling to get work, so we were living off of the money that he was earning. And it made sense. He needed peace and quiet to do his work. But as time went on, I began to wonder what he got up to in there.’

‘Were you ever tempted to sneak in and take a look?’

‘Of course I was tempted, but the door was always locked when he wasn’t at home.’

‘What about the attic?’

Cathy gave him a confused look. ‘What about it?’

‘That’s where Billy was building his bombs.’

‘Not while I was living there. And I know that for a fact. I needed to get something out of there just before I left. There were no bombs in there, just junk.’

Winter hesitated. ‘I’m really parched. It’s all this talking. Would you mind getting me some coffee, please?’

Cathy got up and went inside, her footsteps tapping across the old wood. Anderton waited until the porch door had swung shut before turning to face him.

‘ I’m really parched. Nobody says that any more, not unless they’re taking part in a remake of Gone With the Wind . And if you’re dehydrated, water is better than coffee. But it takes time to make coffee, so I start wondering why you want Cathy out of the way. What’s on your mind?’

Winter smiled. ‘I want to take Cathy back to Vancouver. We can use her to draw Gifford out. He was clearly obsessed with her, and this was an obsession that ran deep. It isn’t going to disappear overnight.’

‘You think he’s still in love with her?’

Winter shook his head. ‘Anderton, he was never in love with her. Gifford’s a psychopath. A narcissist. He is incapable of loving another person. You need empathy to do that and he doesn’t have any.’

‘But he tried to kill himself. Surely that proves he had some feelings for her.’

‘He tried to kill himself because he didn’t want her to leave. She fulfilled a useful function in his life. If she’d left, it would have inconvenienced him. Pathologically pragmatic, remember?’

‘But to attempt suicide?’ Anderton shook her head. ‘I just don’t see it. It’s too extreme. He didn’t go across the wrist, Winter, he went up the vein. That proves he was serious. I’m sorry, I’m not buying the “pathologically pragmatic” line. Not this time.’

‘That’s because you’re thinking like a normal person. Try thinking like a psychopath.’

Anderton was still shaking her head.

‘Okay,’ he went on. ‘So Cathy tells Gifford she’s leaving. The first thing he’s going to do is establish if this is an idle threat. It’s not, so he starts running scenarios. He needs to do something that will stop Cathy in her tracks, and he needs her to think twice about doing anything like this again. Slashing his vein is the perfect solution. Cathy is immediately invested in the situation. If he threatens to do this again, she’s going to spin back in time and see herself covered in blood trying to save him.’

‘But he could have died.’

Winter shook his head. ‘Cathy wasn’t going to let that happen. Yes, they’d just had a big fight, but as soon as he cut himself she would have been straight on the phone calling an ambulance. It’s what anyone would have done, and Gifford knows that. He would have been thinking about ambulance response times while he was cutting his vein open. And that’s another thing. He only cut one vein open. If he’d been really serious he would have cut open both arms.’

‘It’s still a huge risk. He’s gambling with his life.’

‘You’re still thinking like a normal person. Psychopaths are risk takers. The bottom line is that he wanted to stop Cathy leaving him. This was the solution he came up with. What’s more, it worked, at least in the short term.’

Anderton thought this over for a second. ‘Okay, I can see what you’re saying, but I’m still not a hundred per cent convinced.’

‘But you’re in the high nineties.’

‘Try the low nineties. Okay, let’s say we somehow manage to persuade Cathy to come back to Vancouver. What then?’

‘We get Charlotte Delaney to interview her. If Cathy goes on TV acting all tearful then that could be enough to persuade Gifford to give himself up. At the very least he might try and make contact with her.’

‘Okay, the first thing that’s wrong with that scenario is that it involves Charlotte Delaney, and anything involving Charlotte Delaney is never going to be a good idea. As for persuading Gifford to give himself up, that’s bullshit and we both know it.’

Winter smiled.

‘You want to put her on TV so Gifford goes after her. He’s obsessed and he’s angry. Seeing her again after all these years is going to tip him over the edge. As for what that looks like, or how much danger Cathy will be in, well, that’s another matter. I’ve got to hand it to you Winter. It’s a pragmatic solution to a tricky problem. It’s also a psychopath’s solution.’

‘We can keep Cathy safe. Play it right and she’ll never be in any real danger.’

‘But she’ll still be in some danger.’

‘Have you got any better ideas?’

Anderton shrugged and sighed. ‘At this stage, no. So how the hell do we persuade her to get on a plane and come to Vancouver? I mean, she didn’t even want to talk to us.’

‘Leave that to me.’

Thirty seconds later the porch door creaked open and Cathy came out carrying two mugs. She handed one to Winter, put the other on the table, then sat down. Winter looked over and waited for her to meet his eye.

‘We’d like you to come back to Vancouver with us.’

She shook her head. Her face was set and determined. ‘No. My life is here now. I’ll never go back there.’

Winter took out his cell phone and pulled up a picture of Isabella Sobek’s mutilated body. He held up the phone so Cathy could see the screen. Then he explained to her exactly what she was looking at, right down to the last detail.

Then he explained why it would be her fault if Gifford killed again.

Right down to the last detail.

It was almost six when they landed back at Boundary Bay. A headwind had pushed against them all the way, adding fifteen minutes to the return journey. This leg had taken a little over two hours. Winter was up front next to Dan. Anderton and Cathy were in the seat behind. Cathy hadn’t said a word since they’d left Nordman. She was locked into her own little bubble of misery, staring out the side window of the Cessna. In the end it had taken three photographs to break her. She eventually cracked when she saw an autopsy picture of Alicia Kirchner with her ribcage wide open.

The drive from Boundary Bay to the Shangri La took forty minutes. Nobody said a word for the entire journey. Nobody had said a word in the Cessna either, but the engine noise had made that an acceptable silence. This was anything but. The Mercedes was a quiet ride and you could barely hear the engine at all. Anderton had switched on the radio, but this just seemed to highlight how strained the silence was.