Ted Wood - Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

I touched the closest man on the shoulder. "Lend me your jacket, please." He slipped it off, puzzled, and handed it to me. I said, "Thanks. Easy, Sam." People started shouting again as soon as Sam was quiet and the girl waved her piece of paper and went on chanting. I tossed her the jacket. She caught it reflexively with her left hand. "Put it on, you'll catch cold," I told her.

She stared at me blankly, as if she were coming out of a trance, then began to shiver. She slipped her arms into the jacket sleeves, clamping her banner between her knees in a gesture that was pure Charlie Chaplin. While she held it there I could read the bottom line that I hadn't noticed before. It was Canadian League of Angry Women.

Up on stage the Reeve was booming away and I looked up and shook my head. Then I nodded to the DJ and made a little conducting gesture with my hands. He read me and put some rock record on his machine. I touched the girl on the elbow and led her away toward Puckrin's office. The crowd stood back, the way a hockey crowd does when a player goes to the dressing room to have stitches put in his head.

Walter Puckrin was at the door, blocking it with his body, protecting the Legion money. He stood aside and the girl went in dejectedly. Her head was hanging and all her venom and energy had drained away. She looked deflated, like prisoners you see in newspaper photographs of trials.

Val Summers came out of the crowd, her mask pushed up on her head like a perched butterfly. She was carrying a bundle of clothes. I nodded to her and she followed the girl and me into the office and shut the door. She handed me the clothes.

"I guess these are hers. They were around the edge of the stage."

"Thanks." I turned to the girl. "Put these on, please." Walter opened his mouth to say something but I said, "We'll wait outside while she dresses. Mrs. Summers will keep an eye on your money." He shook his head disbelievingly and followed me out. We stood with our backs to the door, ignoring the questions from the crowd.

Carl Simmonds came up to me, excited. "I think I got a shot of somebody in outdoor clothes, at the back of the stage. I'm going home to print it up for you. I'll call here when it's done."

"Try the station first, I may be down there with this prisoner. And thanks, Carl."

He left a moment later. Val opened the office door and handed me the suit coat. "You can come in now."

I handed the jacket back to its owner and went back in. Putting some clothes on had made the girl less unattractive. She looked almost pretty in her green skirt and soft white blouse. "That's better," I said. A policeman has to be a father figure sometimes, it softens people up to answer questions.

Walter started to bluster something but I caught his eye and he stopped, bending instead to recount his money. I stood looking at the girl for perhaps thirty seconds, wondering if she would start to speak and give anything away, but she stayed grimly silent, looking at me and then away, being brave. I realized what I would have to do. It's a bit less than legal, but it was the only move that made sense.

"Tell me your name, please?"

All she said was, "Fascist!"

"Have it your own way." I turned to Val, dropping her the shadow of a wink. "Mrs. Summers, I am about to arrest this person. We have no matron on staff at Murphy's Harbour. I'm asking you to volunteer to stay with her until she is locked up. I don't want any false accusations made about the way she is treated."

It was deliberately formal but I guessed the other woman was part of some activist group or other and would be well primed about the best ways to make trouble. The first thing to do is holler "Rape." That muddies up the water so you can get away with anything less than murder.

I spoke to the woman in the green skirt next, again making it deliberately formal. "Until your name is revealed, I am calling you Jane Doe." There was no answer so I rhymed off the caution and the new Charter of Rights routine.

She didn't answer. Instead she crossed her arms and stared at the floor as if waiting for the firing squad. Before I could ask her anything, the door behind me burst open and a man of about sixty came in with a woman ten or fifteen years younger right behind him.

"What's going on?" He spoke hoarsely and his face was veal-white, drained of blood. I wondered if he had a heart problem.

"Are you Mr. Carmichael?"

He didn't get a chance to answer. His wife did it for him. I'd heard the local gossip that said she was once an actress. Whatever the truth, she was in charge of this scene. "Look at this, for sweet Christ's sake," she shouted. "The only cop in this hole in the ground and he's standing around in here with two broads and an open rye bottle." She swung her expensively blonde-dyed head to me and demanded, "Why aren't you out looking for our daughter?"

"Our," I noticed. She must be the girl's stepmother, overcompensating for some hidden hatreds. "I'm conducting an investigation in here. If you want to shout, wait outside."

She opened her mouth to crank up the volume a little higher but her husband touched her arm. "Easy, Dot." It was the tone of voice I would have used with Sam. She stopped and looked at him, ready to spring into action again if he didn't make something happen at once. He came further into the room and sat down. His hand was shaking as he adjusted his chair.

"I'm Frank Carmichael. It's my daughter who vanished out there."

"Where have you been since?" It's a policeman's question-shocking, but fair. He waved it aside with a thin hand. It wouldn't be too long before his blonde wife was spending the insurance money, it seemed to me.

"I have angina. I'm afraid the shock was a bit much for me. My wife was administering my medication. We were in the cloakroom."

His wife had picked the bones out of my question and she suddenly roared again. "Are you suggesting we had something to do with what happened?"

I ignored her. "I'd prefer to talk to you somewhere private, but there isn't anywhere else." Mr. Carmichael nodded again and moved his jaw forward, rolling his nitro pill around under his tongue, I imagined. I filled him in on my theory that his daughter had gone voluntarily, which indicated to me that this was some kind of practical joke she was playing and not a real abduction. His wife objected again.

"Are you accusing…"

"Please be quiet. You're upsetting your husband." I guess nobody had spoken to her that way since she left the chorus line. She almost bit her tongue.

"I am about to check the license number of the getaway vehicle. Give me one minute on the phone." I picked up the receiver, hoping that the snow hadn't brought the lines down.

I was lucky. A minute later I'd learned that the Toyota had been stolen late that afternoon from a ski resort south of here. If I'd been back to my office within the last couple of hours I would have seen the number on the teletype. I filled in the operator on what had happened and gave him a description of Nancy. I looked up at her mother. "What kind of coat did she have on?"

"She came here in a calf-length raccoon," she said.

"Check if it's still in the cloakroom, please."

She looked surprised at being asked to run errands and her husband said, "You can identify it, dear. These people couldn't."

It was quieter without her. I asked Carmichael, "Have you ever seen this woman before? Is she a friend of your daughter's?"

"If she is, she's a stranger to me." He was calmer now. The nitro had taken hold and the hoarseness was leaving his voice as the pain receded. I studied him as I spoke. He had the lean, city look of big business, but there was a toughness under it. He had been a soldier once, I'd learned that in local gossip. After the war he had come back and studied geology on a veteran's grant and had made a big strike in the late forties. From there he had gone into business in Toronto. His clothes told me that much, but his face looked rugged and there was a white crease in the hairline above his ear, the kind of gouge a bullet makes. He had come closer than this to death a long time ago.