Forty Words for Sorrow

The boy who had helped with Kelly’s luggage had now taken up a seat facing them. If Cardinal left, the kid would be sitting next to his daughter like a shot. I’m a possessive bastard, he accused himself, nursing these miniature panics over the women in my life. He was the same way about his wife, Catherine.

‘It was good of you to come home, Kelly. Especially in the middle of term. I think it really made a difference to your mom.’

‘Do you? Pretty hard to tell, she seems so out of it these days.’

‘I could tell.’

‘Poor Mom. Poor you. I don’t know how you stand it, Daddy. I mean, I’m away most of the time, but you have to live with it.’

‘Well, that’s what you do. Better or worse, sickness and health. You know how it goes.’

‘A lot of people don’t live by that stuff anymore. I know you do, of course. But Mom really scares me sometimes. It must be so hard for you.’

‘It’s a lot harder for her, Kelly.’

They sat in silence. The boy pulled out a Stephen King novel; Cardinal pretended to read the Star, Kelly stared out at the empty tarmac where thin flurries of snow swirled in the ground lights. Cardinal began to hope the flight would be cancelled, that his daughter would have to stay home another day or two. But Kelly had lost any affection for Algonquin Bay. How can you stand this dinky little backwater? she’d said to him more than once. Cardinal had felt the same at her age, but then ten years on the Toronto police force had convinced him that the dinky little backwater where he grew up had its virtues.

The plane finally arrived, a propeller-driven Dash 8 that seated thirty. In fifteen minutes it would be gassed up and ready to take off.

‘You have enough cash? What if you get stuck in Toronto?’

‘You worry too much, Daddy.’

She hugged him, and then he watched her wheel her carry-on through security (which consisted of two uniformed women not much older than she was) and head for the door. Cardinal moved to the window and watched her cross through the blowing snow. The boy was right behind her, damn him. But outside, brushing the snow from the windshield with his glove, Cardinal had condemned himself for being a jealous twerp, a smothering parent who couldn’t let his child grow up. Cardinal was a Catholic – a lapsed Catholic – and like all Catholics, lapsed or devout, he retained an almost gleeful ability to accuse himself of sin, though not necessarily the sin he had actually committed.

Now, the whisky sat half finished on the coffee table. Cardinal had drifted off. He rose stiffly from his chair and went to bed. In the darkness, images came: headlights on the lake, the body fixed in ice, Delorme’s face. But then he thought of Catherine. Although his wife’s circumstances were at this moment anything but happy, he forced himself to imagine her laughing. Yes, they would go away somewhere together, somewhere far from police work and their private sorrows, and they would laugh.

4 (#ulink_27137832-d9a7-5199-ba44-8ae648cdce80)

Don (short for Adonis) Dyson was a youthful fifty, trim and wiry as a gymnast, with a gymnast’s agile movements and sudden, graceful gestures, but as the detectives under his command never tired of pointing out, he was no Adonis. The only thing Detective Sergeant Don Dyson had in common with the carved Adonises found in museums was a heart as cold as marble. No one knew if he had been born that way or if fifteen years as a Toronto homicide detective had added frost to an already chilly disposition. The man hadn’t a single friend – on the force or off – and those who had met Mrs Dyson claimed that she made her husband seem drippingly sentimental.

DS Dyson was fussy, declamatory, bald and calculating. He had long fingers, spatulate at the tips, of which he was inordinately vain. When he handled his letter opener or toyed with a box of paper clips, those fingers took on a dangly, spidery aspect. His bald head, trimmed with a geometrically exact circle of hair at the sides and back, was a perfect orb. Jerry Commanda loathed him, but Jerry was intolerant of authority in general, a trait Cardinal put down to his Native heritage. Delorme insisted she could use Dyson’s head for a mirror to pluck her eyebrows – not that she did pluck her eyebrows.

That same mirrory dome was tilted toward Cardinal, who was seated in a chair placed at an exact forty-five-degree angle to Dyson’s desk. No doubt the detective sergeant had read somewhere that this angle was good leadership psychology. He was an exact man, with exact reasons for everything he did. A honey-glazed donut was parked on the corner of his desk, waiting for the clock to strike exactly ten-thirty – not a minute earlier, not a minute later – when he would consume it along with the Thermos of decaffeinated coffee beside it.

At this moment Dyson held his letter opener suspended between his outstretched palms, as if he were measuring his desk with it. When he spoke, he appeared to be addressing himself to the blade. ‘I never said you were wrong, you know. I never said that little girl wasn’t murdered. Not in so many words.’

‘No, sir. I know you didn’t.’ Cardinal had a tendency, when irritated, to become extremely polite. He fought that tendency now. ‘You only put me back on burglary as a spiritual exercise.’

‘Do you remember what kind of expenses you were running up? This was and is the age of cutbacks. We can’t pretend we’re the Mounties, we can’t afford it. You allocated all your investigative resources to this one case.’

‘Three cases.’

‘Not three, maybe two.’ Dyson numbered them on his flat fingers. ‘Katie Pine, I grant you. Billy LaBelle, maybe. Margaret Fogle, not at all.’

‘DS, with all respect, she didn’t turn into a toad. She didn’t vaporize.’

Again the fingers, the manicure displayed to advantage, as Dyson counted the reasons why Margaret Fogle could not be dead. ‘She was seventeen – far older and more streetwise than the other two. She was from Toronto, not local. She had a history of running away. For God’s sake, the girl went around telling everyone who would listen that nobody – nobody – would find her this time. And she had a boyfriend to hell and gone, Vancouver or some damn place.’

‘Calgary. She never got there.’ And she was last seen alive in our fair city, you bald blockhead. Please, God, just make him give me McLeod and let me get on with it.

‘Why are you resisting me on this, Cardinal? We live in the biggest country in the world – now that the Soviet Union has kindly dismantled itself – and three separate train lines run up and across this billion-hectare skating rink. All three of those lines intersect on our little shore. We have an airport and a bus station, and anyone going anywhere across this gigantic bloody country has to pass through our neighbourhood. We get more bloody runaways than we know what to do with. Runaways, not murders. You were spending department resources on phantoms.’

‘Should I go? I thought I was back on homicide,’ said Cardinal mildly.

‘You are. I didn’t mean to go over old ground, no point in it, but Katie Pine, Cardinal –’ here he aimed a flat finger at Cardinal ‘– with Katie Pine there was no evidence of murder, not a shred, not at the time. I mean, except for the fact that she was a child – obviously something was wrong – there was just no evidence of murder.’

‘No courtroom evidence, maybe.’

‘You were coming to me with disproportionate manpower, disproportionate office resources, and overtime that was completely unjustifiable. The overtime alone was stratospheric. I wasn’t the only one who thought so – the chief backed me totally on this one.’

‘DS, Algonquin Bay is not that big. A missing child, you get a million leads, everyone wanting to help. Someone pulls a knife in the movies, you have to check it out. Someone sees a young hitchhiker, you have to check it out. Everyone in town thinks they’ve seen Katie Pine somewhere: she’s at the beach, she’s at the hospital under another name, she was in a canoe in Algonquin Park. Every one of those leads had to be followed up.’

‘So you told me at the time.’

‘None of it was unjustified. That’s got to be obvious by now.’

‘It was not obvious then. No one saw Katie Pine with a stranger. No one saw her get into a car. One minute she’s at the fair, the next minute she was gone.’

‘I know. The ground opened.’

‘The ground opened and swallowed her up, and you chose to believe – without evidence – that she was murdered. Time has proved you right; it could just as easily have proved you wrong. The one incontestable fact was that she was g-o-n-e gone. A genuine mystery.’

Well, yes, Cardinal thought, Katie Pine’s disappearance had been a mystery. Sorry – I had a fantasy that policemen were occasionally called upon to solve mysteries, even in Algonquin Bay. Of course, the girl was Native, and we all know how irresponsible those people can be.

‘Let’s face it,’ Dyson said, inserting his letter opener precisely into a small scabbard and laying it neatly beside a ruler. ‘The girl was Indian, too. I like Indians, I really do. There’s a calmness about them that’s practically supernatural. They tend to be good-natured and they’re extraordinarily fond of children, and I’d be the first to say Jerry Commanda was a first-rate officer. But there’s no point pretending they’re just like you and me.’

‘God, no,’ said Cardinal, and meant it. ‘Different people entirely.’

‘Relations scattered to hell and gone. That girl could have been anywhere from Mattawa to Sault Ste Marie. There was no reason to be searching boarded-up mine shafts in the middle of the bloody lake.’

There had been every reason, but Cardinal didn’t phrase it like that. He didn’t have to; the point was nestled inside a more important one. ‘The thing about the Windigo mine shaft is that we did search it. We searched it the week Katie Pine disappeared. Four days after, to be exact.’

‘You’re telling me she may have been kept stashed away somewhere before she was killed. Held prisoner somewhere.’

‘Exactly.’ Cardinal suppressed the urge to say more. Dyson was warming up, and it was in Cardinal’s interest to let him. The letter opener emerged once again from its scabbard; an errant paper clip was speared, hoisted and transferred to a brass holder.

‘Then again,’ Dyson continued, ‘she could have been killed right away. The killer could have kept the body somewhere else before moving it to a safer place.’

‘It’s possible. Forensic may be able to help us with place – we’re shipping the remains to Toronto as soon as the mother’s been informed – but this is shaping up to be a long investigation. I’m going to need McLeod.’

‘Can’t have him. He’s in court with Corriveau. You can have Delorme.’

‘I need McLeod. Delorme has no experience.’

‘You’re just prejudiced because she’s a woman, because she’s French, and because, unlike you, she’s spent most of her life in Algonquin Bay. You may have put in ten years in Toronto, but you’re not going to tell me her six years as special investigator amounts to no experience.’

‘I’m not putting her down. She did a fine job on the mayor. She did a fine job on the school-board scam. Keep her on the white-collar stuff, the sensitive stuff. I mean, who’s going to look after Special?’