Peter Turnbull - Deliver Us from Evil

‘And mine. Be. .? Is she dead also?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph.’ Jordana Hoskins took another large drink from the can. ‘Is there no end to it?’

‘Edith Lecointe,’ Marianne Auphan pressed, ‘did she ever mention that name, already?’

‘Not to me. Why?’

‘It was her ID that Heather Ossetti stole. She was calling herself Edith Lecointe when she was murdered. And other names. She even had a passport in Edith Lecointe’s name.’

‘Did Heather kill her for it?’

‘Don’t know. Edith Lecointe was found frozen to death; her death was recorded as accidental.’

‘She killed her for it.’ Jordana Hoskins spoke matter-of-factly.

‘She did?’

‘Yeah. I saw it in her eyes most often but sometimes in what she did also. I can’t say too much but that’s got Heather Ossetti’s fingerprints all over it. Get hold of their birth certificate, or a copy of it, any other useful documents and then kill them and you can take their ID. Simple. But clever in a way. Then you leave the area and go where nobody knows the person whose ID you have stolen. Moving to Toronto or Windsor would be good enough; you stay in Ontario that way. . but England. . England. . that is making sure, already. That really is making sure. She would not have gone to England unless she was frightened. Really well scared. Just look up the death of Nathan Fisco, three, four years back. Then you’ll see what I mean about her fingerprints.’

‘Nathan Fisco.’ Marianne Auphan took her notebook from her handbag and scribbled the name on a blank page.

‘Guy in his fifties.’

‘About three years ago? In Barrie, already?’

‘Yes. In Barrie.’

Hennessey stopped at his pigeonhole and took the papers which had accumulated therein out and stood and read them. He found the usual circulars about office economy, requesting staff to write on both sides of a sheet of paper, use second-class postage and make all phone calls after two p.m. whenever possible. The papers also contained a reply from the National Police Computer in respect of his query about Malpass, Ronald and Sylvia. There was, it read, ‘nothing known’. George Hennessey found that he trusted Matilda Pakenham’s intuition, honed by her worldly experience of suave monsters, and growled, ‘Not yet. . nothing known. . yet.’

Somerled Yellich strolled along the uneven brick sidewalk at the junction of Bayfield Street and Dunlop Street. This was, he found, the central or ‘downtown’ area of Barrie and was much smaller and quieter than he had envisaged it. An old hotel stood on the corner with a sign on the front of the ‘V’ shaped building dating it to 1876; it was three storeys with a flat roof, disproving, thought Yellich, the builders’ maxim that ‘flat roofs don’t work’ because this particular flat roof had clearly worked for nearly one and a half centuries. Further along Dunlop Street were similar flat roofed buildings which also appeared to date from the mid to late nineteenth century, behind which were late twentieth century apartment blocks that towered over the original buildings. To his right was the lake shore, a modern piece of metal sculpture, the ‘spirit catcher’, with components which swung in the breeze, and a cannon which sat forlornly on a piece of waste ground as if abandoned and forgotten by the army. Closer at hand a silver-haired woman had backed herself into the doorway of an unused building and stood talking to herself, youths placidly panhandled despite signs warning that it was an offence to do so. A white police car was parked carelessly outside the small police station in the bus terminal building with one front tyre up on the kerb and the other three tyres on the road surface. Yellich was particularly struck by the large number of morbidly obese people and also the large number of people who needed some form of walking aid, and all, he thought, too young, far, far too young to be one, or need the other.

Marianne Auphan drove Ventnor to Mapleview West. ‘It’s like the Pied Piper visited with Barrie one time already,’ she calmly explained, ‘played his flute through downtown and lured all the services out of the city to the suburbs. You want anything, you don’t go downtown, you go into the suburbs. . bars, shopping malls, it’s all in the suburbs and folk here work in Toronto for the main. . they don’t need no downtown. I don’t like the dead heart but hey, services in the suburbs are what folk want.’

‘So I see.’ Ventnor glanced at a complex of shops next to a Honda retailer.

‘A few industrial complexes but not enough to support the city. Barrie’s wealth is limited to Toronto or dependent on Toronto.’ She pulled into a large car park and halted the car as close as she could to the entrance of a single storey modern looking bar called Dusty Jack’s. Inside Dusty Jack’s she walked up to the bar and sat on one of the high chairs. Ventnor sat next to her. A jovial young blonde in black tee shirt and slacks asked if she could help them.

‘Two Buds.’ Marianne Auphan ordered for both of them.

The girl brought two bottles of Budweiser and two chilled glasses and placed them on beer mats on the highly polished wooden bar. Marianne Auphan said, ‘Thanks,’ and the girl smiled and revealed perfect glistening white teeth and said, ‘You’re welcome. . enjoy your beer.’

‘I figured that woman was right,’ Marianne Auphan forwent the chilled glass and drank straight from the bottle and did so deeply, taking large masculine draughts rather than small ladylike sips, ‘it’s not too early for the first beer. Unless you want to work some more, already?’

‘Not particularly.’ Ventnor also drank from the bottle.

‘I got cut off here one time.’ Marianne Auphan smiled at the memory.

‘Cut off?’

‘One of my girlfriends got herself out of a bad situation with a mad Irishman she was hooked up with, not married but they’d pooled their money to buy a house, so not easy to get out, but she did so. So then a bunch of us girls brought her here to celebrate, so we drank until we got cut off. . wouldn’t serve us any more. . cut off and me a cop, already.’

‘I see.’ Ventnor glanced round the bar. Tables were set for meals with four places at each table. A few booths along the far wall were occupied by couples or two or three men. Four televisions were installed high up on the wall, all four tuned to the same channel which, at that moment, was showing a murderous fight between two huge ice hockey players, during a match, which rapidly escalated until all the players became involved in the brawl and the referee lost his balance and sprawled on his back on the ice.

‘So,’ Marianne Auphan put the beer down on the bar, ‘we can stay here until the last dog is hung, or we can go to my place on Veterans Drive.’

‘The last dog?’

‘Until they stop serving, but that’s not until two a.m. My apartment’s just twenty minutes’ slow drive away.’ She sipped her beer. ‘Well, it’s what we’ve both been thinking since we met, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Thomson Ventnor replied in a shaking voice. ‘It is what we’ve been thinking, already.’

George Hennessey found himself drifting off to a pleasant sleep when the noise jolted him into waking watchfulness. It had, he thought, been a pleasant evening. As was his normal practice, he had returned home to his house on Thirsk Road in Easingwold to be met by an excited Oscar. He had then taken a mug of steaming hot tea into the back garden and, whilst standing on the patio, sipping it, had told his late wife of his day, knowing that she was hearing him, listening to every word. Later he had eaten a simple but wholesome meal of pork chops and as his meal settled, had read a readable yet scholarly account of the Russian convoys during the Second World War. The author was, he found, able to evoke the freezing conditions and the mountainous seas and Hennessey learned that a near miss of a high explosive shell during the Second World War could still sink a ship by ‘springing’ its plates. Later, his meal settled, he had taken Oscar for his customary evening walk and had then walked alone into Easingwold for a pint of brown and mild, just one, before last orders were called. Later still he was about to succumb to a well-earned sleep when he heard the noise.