A Year Less a Day (24 page)

“I realize you're a home care nurse, Trina,” Rick says, peering deeply into his wife's eyes. “But I don't think you're expected to bring work home with you.”

“Shh ... Ruth will hear,” cautions Trina, wrenching her arm free. “Anyway, she's not one of my patients. She's just a friend who needs help. And you didn't complain when I told you.”

“When did you tell me?”

“The other night in bed.”

“I thought so. And was I asleep?”

“You can't blame me for that. You're always falling asleep when I'm telling you things.”

“‘No more strays,' I said, after the last one you brought home.”

“No,” Trina insists sharply. “You said, ‘no more stray goats.'
That's
what you said.”

“Trina. Nobody but you could find a stray goat in the middle of Vancouver, so when I said no more strays, I meant ... Oh, never mind. How long is she staying?”

“Not long,” Trina says as she bounds into his arms and kisses him lusciously. “Just until she goes back to jail.”

Jail is not in Ruth's immediate future if Hammer Hammett has his way and, in spite of Gwenda Jackson's insistence that Ruth be charged with murder, Inspector Wilson of the Vancouver police is floundering in his efforts to prop up the case against her. Ruth's apparent confession, on closer examination, has sprung a number of leaks, not least amongst them being the fact that the emergency room doctor had clearly diagnosed physical abuse in police custody as being a contributing cause of her condition. “That's called obtaining a statement of culpability under duress,” Hammett had smugly announced amid a further flurry of writs.

The discovery of a white Carrara marble urn inscribed, “Jordan A. Jackson Aged 40 years,” in the mausoleum of a funeral home by Mike Phillips and Trina had further bolstered Ruth's defence, although Jordan's mother had not been at all convinced, and insisted that her son's ashes should be put under the microscope.

“But what do you want us to look for?” Inspector Wilson had inquired, knowing that, short of a bullet or the blade of a dagger, it was unlikely that any evidence survived the furnace.

“Poison, of course. It's obvious—the bitch poisoned him for the money. Why won't you do anything?”

“Because two doctors certified he died of cancer, and we didn't find any evidence to the contrary.”

“What about the bloody knife?”

“We've checked that out, Mrs. Jackson. And the fact is that the DNA doesn't match Jordan's.”

Jordan's DNA had been obtained from his doctor, once Mike Phillips had tracked him down from the death certificate and passed the information on to Inspector Wilson.

“We ran a few tests and took a few samples when I first saw him,” Doctor Fitzpatrick had explained to Wilson. “Though, from his symptoms, it was obvious to me that his cancer was already well advanced. He was HIV positive as well, so he didn't stand a hope.”

“Why did he leave it so late?”

“Typical male bravado, Inspector,” said the doctor, looking Wilson up and down. “Most men assume it won't happen to them, and by the time they wake up, it's too late.”

According to Fitzpatrick, it was much too late by the time Jordan had sought diagnosis and, once he knew the situation, he had refused any treatment, saying that he didn't want to prolong his family's suffering any more than necessary. All he wanted to know was how long he had to live.

“I explained to him that there was a possibly that he might recover,” the doctor had told Wilson, though when the inspector asked if that was realistic prognosis,
the medic had shaken his head sadly. “No. Not unless you believe in miracles.”

“Not me,” Wilson had retorted. “I'm a cop. I don't even believe in the Easter Bunny.”

“Nor me,” the doctor had laughed, though he was willing to speculate why Ruth had continued to maintain that Jordan was alive after his death.

“There was no body,” he'd explained to Wilson. “He'd obviously slunk off like a dying cat so she wouldn't have to face his death. And that's why she didn't come to terms with it. He wasn't dead—not in her mind. It happens all the time when ships sink or buildings are bombed. Some relatives never accept the inevitable and spend years searching mental institutions and the streets, convinced that their loved ones have just lost their memories.”

Inspector Wilson may have nodded his concurrence with the doctor's view, though he couldn't get his mind off the fact that Ruth had a hundred thousand very good reasons to want Jordan to outlive the ninety-day qualifying period on the life policy.

The warm afternoon sun is turning the sky rose-pink as it sinks into the Pacific Ocean and Gwenda Jackson eulogizes her son in a Vancouver church.

“God always takes the best ones young,” Jordan's mother says at the memorial service, now that his ashes have been turned over to her.

There is a sparse congregation: Darcey and Maureen from the crossword gang, Cindy and a few members of the staff, and Trina Button—recording the event on a mini tape recorder linked to a microphone disguised as a pen in her breast pocket.

“Just in case the old witch says anything defama-tory against Ruth,” she had explained to Mike
Phillips, showing him the equipment she'd bought at a spy store.

“Good for you,” Phillips had said, and he had volunteered to spend the afternoon looking after Ruth, knowing that she had not been invited to attend and would not have been welcomed.

Across the Atlantic, in England, the sun had set without ceremony nearly six hours ago, just as a winter storm marched in from the west coast. Black clouds darken an already leaden sky as David Bliss drives back to Westchester from Liverpool, but at least he has eliminated all the surviving members of the Beatles' ensemble except for Geoffrey Sanderson. Daphne's Beatles' CD has somehow stuck on two tracks and will not eject itself from the car's player, so Bliss has listened to “The Long and Winding Road,” and “Drive My Car,” until he can stand it no longer, and he switches on the radio in time to catch news of the impending depression.

Thank God the snow has held off
, thinks Bliss, as he gingerly snakes the car around the unsalted roads on his way back to Daphne's, and as he parks in the street, he is surprised to find her house in complete darkness.

An icy blast tears at Bliss's clothes as he tries to find the right door key in the shadows. He is tempted to ring the doorbell, miffed that Daphne has gone to bed without leaving the porch light on, but decides not to. He gets the message. Daphne had thrown a huffy little snit the previous day when he'd said that he was planning to return to Liverpool on his own this time.

“Suit yourself,” Daphne had spat. “I've probably got plans anyway.”

“You can come if you want to, Daphne,” he'd said, backing down and attempting to console her. “But I just thought it would be a long day for you, that's all.”

“No, I understand perfectly, David,” she'd snapped. “As long as you realize that if your leg gives out, you won't have me to drive you this time.”

Bliss shouldn't have laughed, but he did, and is apparently paying the price as his frozen fingers fumble with the key in the darkness.

The front hallway is frosty and unwelcoming as he kicks off his shoes, and he shivers with a feeling of déjà vu, though he is unable to finger the cause. The hearth in the sitting room is cold and, unusually, Daphne has already laid the fire for the morning.
That's very strange
, he thinks, knowing that she generally leaves the embers to cool overnight.

“Daphne,” he calls, gently tapping on her bedroom door a few seconds later, with Missie Rouge noisily begging for food at his feet.

“What's the matter?” Bliss asks, lifting the crying kitten, and he's tempted to creep back downstairs to find the animal some food rather than wake his host. It's close to midnight, and she is obviously still angry with him but, as he stands on the cold landing, Bliss has a sudden feeling of dread that forces him to knock again, louder—much louder. “Daphne, are you all right?”

Twenty minutes later, with every light in the house burning brightly, Bliss is accompanied by Inspector Graves, the senior night-duty officer from Westchester Police Station, as they pore over Daphne's empty bedroom, seeking clues.

“It isn't like her at all,” says Bliss, pointing to the neatly made bed. “This hasn't been slept in, and it does-n't appear as though she's taken anything with her. Something serious has happened.”

Inspector Graves is unconvinced. “Well, there's no sign of a break-in, Dave. She's probably just gone out with a friend.”

“It's past one, and it's bloody freezing outside,” Bliss explains forcefully. “And they're forecasting a snowstorm on the radio. Where would she be in Westchester at this time of night?”

“There's a couple of nightclubs,” jokes Graves, though Bliss hasn't forgotten the sight of her bopping to the Beatles with an aging beatnik in Liverpool, and he asks Graves to send a couple of lads to check the clubs, adding, “You never know with Daphne.”

“Yeah. She's a feisty old bird all right,” reminisces the inspector, recalling the time when, as housekeeper at the police station, she'd torn a strip off the chief superintendent for washing his muddy golf shoes in the kitchen sink. “But there's probably a rational explanation. I think we can safely give her until the morning to show up.”

Bliss shakes his head and puts his foot down. “No. She wouldn't have gone anywhere without feeding the cat. Plus, she knew I was coming back tonight. She would have left a note. Something has happened to her.”

The search for Daphne starts with her friends, and Minnie Dennon doesn't waste a second. “I'll get a cab,” she'd cried as soon as Bliss had phoned, and she's standing on Daphne's doorstep fifteen minutes later—fully made-up and ready to roll. By three a.m., the rest of Daphne's friends have been rousted out of bed by the phone, or by a constable pounding on the door, but none of them admit to harbouring the missing woman or have any useful suggestions.

Alzheimer's, dementia, depression, dipsomania, and domestic violence are all easily discounted in Daphne's case. “She was absolutely fine yesterday,” insists Bliss, tiring from constantly having to excuse Daphne for her
failure to conform to the norms of octogenarianism. However, amnesia is not a condition that he can so easily discount. “She could have fallen in the street and hit her head,” he concedes, “but surely someone would have found her and taken her to a hospital.”

The hospitals have been checked as a priority, but have proven negative, and the local officers have seemingly exhausted all possibilities when Bliss has an idea.

“What if she's fallen asleep on a late-night bus?” he suggests, knowing that it's not unheard of for heavy-eyed passengers to nod off and be woken by the depot's cleaning staff in the early dawn.

It takes half a dozen policeman twenty minutes banging on bus doors and shining flashlights into the frosted windows to write-off that theory, and once the town's parks and public places have been checked, they have run out of ideas.

A canine unit and some reinforcements turn up a little after four, when the entire street is alive with activity as Daphne's worried neighbours huddle under heavy coats and blankets as they check their gardens, garages, and outhouses with flashlights and hurricane lamps.

The suddenness of the storm catches Bliss off balance and threatens to send him skidding along the icy pavement as he listens to Graves giving instructions to the dog handlers while they sit in the warmth of their vans. Then the snow begins and forces him back into the shelter of the house.

“That's all we need,” moans Bliss, already frustrated at the lack of progress and the repeated assurance by his country cousin that Daphne is safely tucked up in bed somewhere.

“Don't worry, Dave,” Inspector Graves has said at least ten times. “She'll be fine.”

The snowstorm begins in earnest just as the dog teams set their noses toward the woodland footpath at the end of Daphne's road. “It's like a scene from
Scott of the Antarctic
,” mumbles the inspector as the four men and two dogs are engulfed in the horizontally blowing wall of whiteness.

Ten minutes later, one dog team returns empty handed. “It's useless trying in this, guv,” the handler explains as he peels a layer of snow off his dog's snout. “It's a f'kin blizzard, and it's blowing right in his face.”

The other dog team is not far behind. The two men in blue and their black Labrador are barely visible in the solid white curtain of snow as they return with their heads down against the storm. “You'd need a Pyrenean in this,” says one of the men as he shakes a pile of snow onto Daphne's hall carpet.

As the flakes fall, so does Bliss's spirit. “If she's taken a tumble in the woods, she won't last long in this,” he says, anxiously peering out of the window into the frigid miasma of snow and ice, but there seems little anyone can do other than fill out a missing person report and wait for the storm to abate and the daylight to return.

“Date of birth?” asks the inspector, once he's taken her name and general description, but neither Bliss nor Minnie has any idea.

“It should be in her file at the police station,” Bliss suggests, though he doubts she was overly honest when she applied for the job. “But she doesn't look a day over sixty and sometimes I wonder if she's still a teenager.”

“Next of kin?” asks the inspector, and Bliss has to admit that he doesn't know that either.

“She never had children,” he is able to say with certainty, though as for other relatives, he has no idea.

Minnie has taken over the kitchen and is supplying ten officers and two dogs with Daphne's Keemun tea
and chocolate cookies with a little more gusto than the situation demands, and Bliss frowns his disapproval. “Minnie,” he calls as she hands around a loaded platter, “those are very expensive biscuits.”