Peter Turnbull - Deliver Us from Evil

‘I see. . ironic though,’ Yellich commented.

‘Ironic?’ Blanche Lecointe turned and glanced at him.

‘Well, that was how the lady using your half-sister’s identity died, of exposure in a cold spell, in an open area beside a canal. . not in woodland but. . nonetheless, she died of exposure.’

‘I see what you mean, but Edith had no connection that I knew of with Ardagh Bluffs or with anyone living there.’ Blanche Lecointe glanced out of her window. ‘I well remember the last night I saw her, dressing up in her finery and she a middle-aged woman. She was going out on a date like an excited teenager. It was winter. Snow had fallen. More was forecast. She didn’t come home. I filed a missing person’s report forty-eight hours later, then. . nothing. . nothing. . nothing until the thaw, it was about this time of year when her body was found. It had lain under the snow all winter.’

‘That is what I meant by “one of those”,’ Marianne Auphan explained to Yellich and Ventnor. ‘Come each thaw. . come each spring. . all across Canada missing person’s reports are closed. Sometimes there is evidence of foul play but mostly it is misadventure. . accidental. . very often young men walking home with too much drink inside them, they take a short cut through an area of woodland, succumb to the alcohol, lay down or collapse, snow covers their body and keeps it covered.’

‘I see. Tragic,’ Ventnor said.

‘It’s Canada. . and it’s any country with heavy snowfall.’

‘Dare say,’ Yellich echoed. ‘So can we please go back a little further if possible? What do you know of her life before she turned up so unexpectedly at your door?’

‘Not a great deal. She did talk a little about it, but not a lot. The foster home sounded more like an institution than a foster family. It seemed that it was a large house full of children supervised by a single foster mother. Then she was with the nuns. . she didn’t talk about that at all. . and that says a lot.’

‘I see. . and yes, it does.’

‘It was out at Aldersea, the foster home, I mean.’

‘That’s an easy drive from Barrie,’ Marianne Auphan turned to Yellich, ‘by the side of Lake Simcoe.’

‘Another lake?’ Yellich replied.

‘Same one really. Barrie is on Kempenfelt Bay but Kempenfelt is a bay of Lake Simcoe.’

‘I see.’

‘So. .’ Blanche Lecointe continued, ‘Edith told me she left the nuns at sixteen years old so she must have been very vulnerable, no family. . no money. She moved to Toronto to live in the big city. I swear it never had any attraction for me. I always thought that Toronto is such a mess of a city. . not like Montreal. I could live in Montreal. I really could live in that city. She returned to Barrie when she was in her thirties.’

‘Did she marry?’

‘No. Well, she never said she did. . Edith never had a ring on her finger. . and she used her maiden name. She had a warm personality all right. So neither of us are or ever were catwalk models but we were still not bad looking. She had a warm personality like I said, she was a very giving sort of girl. She had no career to pursue, just had office skills, which are good enough but hardly a substitute for a family. So you’d think she would be hungry for marriage, but no, she never did marry. Two spinster half-sisters we,’ Blanche Lecointe smiled, ‘that was us.’

‘Where did she live before she turned up at your door?’

‘Dunno,’ Blanche Lecointe inclined her head, ‘that will be one for Sally Brompton. I believe she could answer that question.’

Driving away from Blanche Lecointe’s house along Wattie Road, Marianne Auphan said, ‘It’s looking like murder. I didn’t want to say anything in there but it’s a common method of murder here, all over Canada really, pour alcohol down someone’s throat. . or some other substance, carry them outside in a snowstorm, leave them somewhere, some semi-remote place. . and a stand of spruce at Ardagh Bluffs is ideal. Just perfect. . near at hand and not easily overlooked. Without a witness or a confession all the coroner can do is return a verdict of “death by misadventure” but in not a few cases we have our suspicions.’

‘I’ll bet,’ Yellich replied from the front passenger seat. ‘I’ll bet you do.’

‘Sometimes. .’ Auphan manoeuvred the car to avoid a pothole in the road surface.

‘You’re thinking of something?’ Yellich turned to Marianne Auphan, as she straightened the course of the car.

‘Yes, I am thinking of something and I am still angry, very angry about it. Last winter a sixteen-year-old girl went out dressed in a party dress, no top coat or hat, didn’t get back home by the designated hour and her father refused to let her in, wanted to teach her a lesson about timekeeping, he told us, but it was subzero. . for all the clothing she was wearing she might as well have been naked. .’

‘Oh. .’ Yellich groaned.

‘We don’t know what happened to her, not exactly, and we probably never will, but in her desperation she most likely accepted a suspect lift from a stranger, anything to get out of the cold. Her body was found thirty miles away and so the next time her parents saw her she was on a slab. Some lesson about timekeeping. I wanted to prosecute but our top floor vetoed it. Dare say they were right. This girl was their only daughter, only child in fact. He might have been a bit of a hard father but in his own way he loved her very much. His grief and guilt were genuine and his wife left him over the incident. Just packed her bags and walked out on the same day they identified her body. No purpose to be served by prosecuting, so the top floor said. Now I think that the top floor was right but then. . back then I wanted to throw the book at him.’

‘Understandable.’

‘But here,’ Marianne Auphan pointed behind her, indicating the Lecointe house, ‘here someone wanted Edith out of the way so they could use her passport. . here is deep suspicion. We need to reopen the file on Edith Lecointe’s death, already.’

Carmen Pharoah woke early. She lay in bed in her small but functional new build flat on Bootham and listened to the city slowly awakening around her, the milk float whirring in the street below her window, stopping and starting and accompanied by the ‘all’s well’ sound of the rattle of milk bottles in metal crates, of the different, deeper whirr of the high revving diesel engines of the first buses, and the distant ‘ee-aw’ sound of a passenger train leaving York Station to go north to still dark Scotland, or south to London and the home counties where the day had already dawned.

She thought, as she lay under the freshly laundered quilt, of the other life she had once had, of the other life she had felt forced out of. She and her husband, both Afro-Caribbean, both overcoming prejudice by professionalism, observing the advice her father-in-law gave her and her husband upon their engagement, ‘I am proud of both of you, very proud, but you’re black, you’ve got to be ten times better just to be equal’. And how they were ten times better! Both ten times better, both employed by the Metropolitan Police, she as a Detective Constable and he as a civilian employee, a Chartered Accountant, assisting in managing an annual budget of millions of pounds.

Then. . then. . what was it called? She turned and lay on her back looking up at the ceiling. ‘Survivor guilt’, that was it. . that is the phrase, ‘survivor guilt’. Those who survive feel guilty for having survived. The awful news was broken gently by one of her senior colleagues. Her husband could not have known anything, he had said, death must have been instantaneous and the accident wasn’t his fault. . not his fault at all, that they would be prosecuting the other motorist of course and then leaving her to face dreadful widowhood when she was still short of her thirtieth birthday.