Giles Blunt - The Fields of Grief

‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘I mean, not if you don’t want to. But this is interesting.’

‘What, for God’s sake? I can’t believe you’re messing with that stuff.’ Thinking, I sound like a teenager. I must be reverting under the stress.

‘As far as I can tell, this is Catherine’s handwriting.’

‘Of course it is. I can tell that, even upside down. She makes those funny loops on her t’s .’

‘And it’s written with this pen – or one just like it – on a page torn from this notebook.’

‘Surely your colleagues already determined that, Dad. Why? Do you think somebody else wrote Mom’s note for her?’

‘No, I don’t – not yet, anyway. But look. Come round this side.’

Kelly debated whether to just go into the other room and turn on the TV. She didn’t want to encourage her father, but on the other hand, she didn’t want to do anything that would make things worse. She got up and stood behind him.

‘See, what strikes me funny about this,’ Cardinal said, ‘is that the suicide note is not the last thing Catherine wrote in this notebook.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You can see the impressions back here, earlier on. They’re very faint, but you can just make them out when you hold the notebook at the right angle. Can you see?’

‘Frankly, no.’

‘You’re not at the right angle. You have to sit down.’

Cardinal pulled out the chair beside him and Kelly sat down. He tilted the notebook slowly back and forth.

‘Wait!’ Kelly said. ‘I can see it now.’

Cardinal held the notebook steady in the light. There at the top of a page of random notes was a faint impression of the words Dear John . Cardinal tilted it slightly. Lower on the page, Kelly could just make out any other way … Catherine . The middle was obscured by other notes, including a reminder for Cardinal’s birthday.

‘My birthday’s in July,’ he said. ‘Over three months ago.’

‘You think she wrote her note three months ago? I suppose it’s possible. Pretty weird to carry around a suicide note for three months, though.’

Cardinal dropped the notebook on to the table and sat back. ‘On the other hand, there could be some perfectly simple explanation: she wrote it out one day, intending to … but then she changed her mind. For a while, at least. Or maybe she accidentally skipped a page in her notebook three months ago, and then, the other day, she just happened to use the first blank page in the book.’

‘Out of a concern for neatness? Seems a pretty odd time to be worried about using every page in your ninety-five-cent notebook.’

‘It does, doesn’t it?’

‘But it’s her writing. Her pen. In the long run, what difference does it make what page she wrote it on?’

‘I don’t know,’ Cardinal said. ‘I truly don’t know.’

Cardinal had learned long ago that a detective thrives on contacts. In the overworked and underfunded endeavours of forensic science, the slightest personal connection can help nudge a case along quicker than the average, and an actual friendship can work magic.

Tommy Hunn had never been a friend. Tommy Hunn had been a colleague of Cardinal’s back in the early days of his career in Toronto, when he was still working Vice. In many ways, Hunn had been a police force’s nightmare: excessively muscled, casually violent, cheerfully racist. He had also been a pretty good detective right up until he got caught in a bawdy house by his own squad. He could have faced charges much more serious than conduct unbecoming had not Cardinal gone to bat for him at his disciplinary hearing. He wrote letters of support for him, and later, when Hunn was looking for a new line of work, a letter of reference. Hunn had gone back to school, and eventually managed to get himself into the documents section of the Ontario Centre of Forensic Sciences, where he had been leading an apparently honourable life ever since.

‘Hoo, boy, it’s Cardinal the friendly ghost,’ Hunn said when he answered the phone. ‘Got to be something really special. Otherwise, I say to myself, why wouldn’t he go through our central receiving office?’

‘I got a couple of documents for you, Tommy – maybe three. I’m hoping you can help me out.’

‘You wanna cut in, is that it? I gotta tell ya, John, we are hellaciously backed up down here. Only thing I’m supposed to work on these days is stuff that’s five seconds from being in court.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

All cops expect to have to repay any favour somewhere down the line, possibly decades later. Cardinal did not have to give Hunn any reminders.

‘Why don’t you tell me what you got,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘I have a greeting card with a piece of paper glued inside. On that piece of paper there’s a message that looks like it was printed out on a computer. It’s just two sentences long, but I’m hoping you can give me some idea where it came from. Frankly, I can’t even tell if it’s ink-jet or laser.’

‘Either way, it’s not going to get us very far without another printout to compare it to. It ain’t like the old days with typewriters. What else you got?’

‘A suicide note.’

‘Suicide. All this trouble, you’re working on a suicide? Goddamn suicides burn my ass. Anyone who kills themselves is just chickenshit, far as I’m concerned.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Cardinal said. ‘Complete cowards. No question.’

‘And selfish,’ Hunn went on. ‘There’s gotta be no more self-centred act than killing yourself. All these resources get called into play: your time, my time, doctors, nurses, ambulances, shrinks, you name it. All of this for someone that doesn’t even want to live. It’s just plain selfish.’

‘Thoughtless,’ Cardinal said. ‘Completely thoughtless.’

‘That’s when they don’t succeed. When they do succeed, they leave all this grief behind. I had a friend – best friend, actually – who ate his service revolver a few years back. I’m telling you, I felt like shit for months. Why didn’t I see it coming? Why wasn’t I a better friend? But you know what? He’s the lousy friend, not me.’

‘Yeah, you put your finger on it there, Tommy.’

‘Suicides, man, I tell ya …’

‘This one may not be a suicide.’

‘All right! Different story, entirely. Now you’re engaging my attention.’ Hunn put on his Godfather voice: ‘I’m gonna use alla my skills and alla my powers …’

‘I need this fast, Tommy. Like yesterday.’

‘Absolutely. Minute I get it. But if you’re thinking of using this material or any analysis I give you on it in court, you know you gotta go through Central Receiving, and Central Receiving don’t rush for nobody. God himself could come to them with a handwritten note on Satan’s letterhead and they’d tell him, “Get in line, bro.”’

‘I can’t go through Central Receiving, Tommy. I don’t have a case number.’

‘Oh, boy …’

‘But you come back to me with something good, and I’ll get a case number. Then I’ll jump through whatever hoops you need.’

There was a heavy sigh from the other end of the line. ‘All right, John. You’re giving me serious heartburn here, but I’ll do it.’

Nausea was not quite the word to describe what Delorme was feeling. The Toronto Sex Crimes Unit had sent her about twenty images; the package had been waiting for her when she came back from lunch. She had looked them over and was now wishing she hadn’t. The photographs provoked a reaction in her gut, as if she had received a solid blow to the belly. And then more complicated emotions set in – distress, almost panic, and yet at the same time an all but overwhelming hopelessness about the human species.