A Year Less a Day (11 page)

“I know, I know. But it was lunchtime, and I thought he might like some of my cauliflower–banana soup. Honest, Ruth, he's not here.”

“Banana soup?”

“I ran out of cauliflower, but banana's the same colour. Anyway, he's not here, Ruth. We've looked everywhere. Cindy hasn't seen him either. He's gone.”

“Stay there. I'm coming back.”

“I gotta get the kids from school—the guinea pig's having babies—but Jordan's mother's on her way over. I found her number ...”

“Oh, for fuck's sake, Trina. Did you have to? Why couldn't you just do what you're asked for once?”

For the second time in two days, Ruth Jackson finds herself crying as she undresses in front of strangers.

“Everything?” she asks, trying to hang on to her panties.

“Everything,” says the police matron as she holds out a one-piece prisoner's suit. “Put this on, then sit over there and look straight into the camera.”

“But I haven't done anything,” blubbers Ruth, as another female officer sweeps up her clothes and carefully seals them in an evidence bag.

“Tell the judge, dear, not me. Just hold that board up under your chin and give us a wide smile.”

The camera's flash makes Ruth blink, but at least the picture won't end up as a centrefold in
Bazoomerama
.

“What happens now?” she snivels.

“More inquiries, Ruth,” says the officer with the bag. “But it's not my case. You'll have to ask the detectives in the morning.”

“Do you mean I have to stay here all night?”

“Yup.”

“But what about my husband? I should be out looking for him. He's dying. Why aren't you looking for him?”

“We are, Ruth. Believe me, we are.”

The officer is wrong—no one is actively searching for Jordan. However, his description is circulating around the city's press offices as the morning's headlines are decided. “Dying man disappears,” gets the most votes at the
Sun
, while the
Province
goes with “Police baffled.”

The
Province
, encompassing a more global view of law enforcers, has hit the nail on the head in this case, and a group of detectives sit around a table strewn with coffee cups, cellphones and dossiers, scratching their heads.

Inspector Bob Wilson, Sergeant Dave Brougham, and Constable Gunn, known universally as BB, are trying to stay alert after ten hours on the case. They had started with Jordan's mother on their backs, before Ruth had arrived home, but their investigations had stalled. With no sign of a struggle, and no scent of a body, there are few immediate leads.

“Let's see what we have, and we'll make a fresh start in the morning,” says Wilson, seeing the clock nearing midnight. “Give us the basics, Dave.”

“Jordan Artemus Jackson,” starts Brougham from his notes. “Male; forty years; five-eleven-and-a-half; owns a café in the ‘burbs with wife, Ruth, thirty-seven. She's clean as far as we can see, though I ran her mother: string of petty thefts, drugs, soliciting—but absolutely nothing after 1980.”

“Maybe she's done her mother in as well,” says BB.

“Doubt it ... She was only fifteen,” snaps back Brougham.

“What about you, BB?” asks Wilson, “What did you get from the staff?”

BB scans a statement on the table and paraphrases, “Cindy Cloud. Worked for them for a year or so. Here she says: ‘I haven't seen Mr. Jackson for months. I thought he was upstairs in the apartment.'

‘What about her?' I asked. ‘Any odd behaviour?' Now this is interesting. She writes: ‘Back in September, Ruth suddenly said that all the food in the place was poisonous and she chucked it all away.' ‘Was that before or after you last saw her husband,' I asked. ‘Just after,' she said, quite positively. Then she says, ‘Ruth told me Jordan was ill.'”

BB looks up, making sure he has the floor, then continues, “I asked her if Mrs. Jackson had told her it was cancer, and she said, ‘No, Ruth never mentioned cancer. She said he had a cold at first. I thought it was just a bad bug.'”

BB pauses while he skips ahead, then carries on. “This bit's interesting as well. ‘Did they ever fight?' I asked, and she said, ‘Yesterday morning there was a big commotion in the kitchen. I was busy and it stopped before I had a chance to investigate.' ‘And that was Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, was it?' I said. And she replied, ‘I suppose it was, although Ruth's usually pretty soft, so I was surprised.'”

“Interesting,” says the Inspector, but Sergeant Brougham jumps in, “Mrs. Jackson told me about that. Says she had a run-in with a money man over a loan.”

“OK,” says the inspector, “we'll get forensics to do the kitchen for poison residues first thing, and if there was a fight we should find something. Do we know if the guy will corroborate?”

“Working on that,” says Brougham.

“That's about all from the Cloud woman,” says BB, “She seems pretty straight—even remembered the last
day she saw him for sure. She says here, ‘It was the day Ruth said he was going for a hospital check-up in September.'” BB looks up to add a final touch. “I told her I found it strange she hadn't said anything to anyone about not seeing him around, but she said, ‘I just assumed he used the back door.'”

“Thanks, BB,” says Inspector Wilson before turning to Brougham. “What did you get from his mother, Dave?”

“An earful, sir,” he laughs. “God! Is she a strip of moose hide or what? I bet she would have lynched his wife if we hadn't been there. ‘Arrest her—she's a bloody murderer,' she was screaming up and down the street.”

“But what does she say in her statement, Dave? Stick to the facts.”

“The facts, according to her, are that her daughter-in-law murdered her son and fed his body to the macerator. The problem is, there isn't a macerator; I checked. She hasn't seen him since September either, and she's been there three times since.

‘First the fat bitch says he's getting his hair done,' Gwenda Jackson had bleated. ‘Then she told me he was at the wholesalers, and finally she tells me he's gone fishing.'

“The trouble is,” continues Brougham, “Ruth insists her husband was having treatment for his cancer and didn't want to worry his mother, so she had lied about where he was.”

“That would certainly make sense,” says Wilson, “If there was the slightest evidence that he had cancer.”

“And even she admits that there isn't,” pipes up BB.

Brougham carries on where he left off. “Most of the time his mother ranted on about how it was a plot to steal her money, then she came up with something really interesting. The night before last she was visiting a friend not far from the café. ‘I was playing euchre with
Mr. Ashbourne when he looked out the window,'” Brougham reads.

“Isn't that your Ruth?” Ashbourne had asked as he'd squinted into the shadows of the streetlights.

“I don't think so,” Gwenda had replied, not immediately recognizing the well-dressed woman.

“She was sort of disguised, her hair was all different, and she had funny glasses on,” she had told Brougham. “She looked like a tart—all dolled up. And her weight! She was a bloody ton before—then in September it starts falling off her. She didn't see me. She was getting into a cab, looking around, making sure no one saw her.”

“Do you remember the cab company?” Brougham had asked.

“We think we've traced the cab,” continues Brougham to his colleagues, “but the driver's in Hawaii until after Christmas.”

“I should be a cab driver,” mutters BB.

“Anyway,” says Brougham, “Mrs. Jackson doesn't deny getting a cab. She just won't say where she was going. Said it was private.”

Looking for more information, Brougham picks up Gwenda Jackson's hefty statement and zips through it. ‘She wouldn't let him phone me—too expensive ... she only married him for my money ... God knows what he saw in the fat bitch.'”

“Who else have we got?” asks Wilson, shuffling through the growing file.

“Erica, the cancer support woman,” says BB. “She didn't buy Ruth's story at all. Here she says, ‘I was suspicious because her husband didn't seem to have symptoms consistent with most cancers. I could only go on what Mrs. Jackson told me.'”

“The best we've got so far is the woman who discovered him missing,” says Brougham picking up Trina's
statement. “She's a case. She thinks he's just playing a joke on her. Mind you, she thinks everything's a bit of a joke. When I said I was having a hard time swallowing Mrs. Jackson's story, she offered to give me a laxative to clear out some room for it.”

“Trina Button,” he carries on as the laughter dies. “She's a home care nurse who was supposed to be looking after him, but it turns out she hasn't seen him since September either.” Brougham stops to chuckle to himself at the memory of their meeting.

The interview of Trina had taken a farcical turn because she had insisted on popping out of her chair at every opportunity to act out her story.

“I listened like this,” she had said, rushing to stick her ear to the interview room door, “But I didn't hear anything,” she'd continued, pulling a blank face.

“You don't have to show me ...” he'd started, but she had grabbed his phone and pretended to dial, “Then I called his mother, and she said straightaway that Ruth had murdered him.”

“Put the phone ...”

Trina had dropped the phone and rushed to peer worriedly out of the window. “I was scared. I didn't know how long Ruth would be. She was out with her new boyfriend ...”

Brougham looks meaningfully at his colleagues as he takes up Trina's story. “She claims Mrs. Jackson has been dating a policeman.”

“His name is Mike,” Trina had told him. “He must live around here. He's a regular ... He's strong, tall, handsome ...”

“That would apply to most of us ma'am,” Brougham had told her, though doesn't repeat it as he continues to the others. “Apparently they'd only been out a couple of times. Mrs. Jackson denies it, but Trina Button says they
were out together the night her mother-in-law saw her getting into the cab.”

“No wonder she didn't want to be seen,” says BB.

“That's what I said to Ms. Button.”

“It doesn't sound very good, does it?” Trina had agreed. “But her husband wasn't particularly nice to her—he never took her anywhere.”

“Could that be because he was in bed dying of cancer?” Brougham had suggested.

“Perhaps the most significant thing was Ruth Jackson's reaction when Trina Button told her that her husband was missing,” Brougham carries on. “Apparently she flew off the handle at the woman.”

“She was really angry at me for going in to his room,” Trina had admitted to Brougham. “She even swore at me on the phone, which wasn't like her at all.”

“She'd never sworn at you before?”

Trina had put on her thinking face in an effort to prove her voracity, then said, “Possibly. Only, most people swear at me, so I don't always take much notice ... Anyway, all I did was take a peek and she just erupted. Mind you, I'm sure that had nothing to do with him being missing. She was probably just upset because she'd found out he didn't have cancer.”

“Are you saying that she wanted him to die of cancer?”

“No. Not dragging on like that. She wanted it to be quick.”

“More like poison, perhaps?”

Wilson takes a final shuffle through the statements then says. “I guess that just leaves the suspect herself. What did she say, Dave?”

Ruth had been oblivious to her own perilous circumstances as she'd cried her way through the entire interview. “He's dead. I know he his,” she had wailed
repeatedly. “I should never have left him.”

“Do you want a lawyer?” Brougham had asked, offering her a tissue.

“I haven't done anything,” she'd insisted.

“Is that a ‘no'?”

“I haven't done anything, but I can't afford one anyway. Why won't you just find my husband?”

“What about your mother, Ruth. Could she help you out with some cash? You really do need a lawyer.”

“I don't have a mother. I lost her when I was fifteen.”

“Oh. Sorry ... Your father?”

“Lost him recently,” she'd said, though had been careful not to confuse the situation by explaining.

“And now your husband. That's more than careless, Ruth. Have you got any living relatives?”

“Only my mother, I suppose.”

“You just said she was dead.”

“No. I said I'd lost her.”

Brougham had pulled back, wondering if she should be hiring a psychiatrist in place of the lawyer. Ruth had seen the skepticism and explained. “She just took off one day and I never heard from her since.”

“And you didn't try to find her?”

“She wasn't worth finding.”

“I see. What about your father? Didn't he leave you anything?”

A lasting distrust of Liverpudlians with guitar cases
, she thinks, but merely shakes her head. “No.”

“She's still claiming he's got cancer,” Brougham carries on. “She thinks it has finally affected his brain and he's out there wandering around somewhere. “Who else knew he had cancer?” I asked her, but apart from the Button woman and Erica at the support group, she hadn't told anyone. “Well, where do you think he is then?” I wanted to know, and she gave me
some story about a place in Los Angeles where he might have gone for a cure.”

“Have we checked it out?”

“There's nothing to check out. According to her, he'd paid ten grand to some outfit on the Internet, but there's no record of it.”

“What about his computer?”