Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (71 page)

What had happened that afternoon to change his dogged determination into desperate flight? And what had he done in the three hours between his aborted CAS visit and his arrival at the rooming house? Had he learned something else? Had he tried to figure out another way to pursue the investigation? Had he approached another source of support? Not Janice Tanner or anyone in his therapy group, nor his therapists for that matter. Perhaps his family?

Green took out his notebook and flipped back to his conversation with Fraser’s sister. Ah-ha! Fraser had called her Wednesday, the very day he disappeared. It was all beginning to fit! He had called her after all these years of silence, not because he wanted to confess as she believed, but because he needed her help. But she too had rebuffed him. Who else could he turn to? After living so long as a recluse, what friends did he have left?

Out of the fringes of his memory popped the peculiar word “mistwalker”. It might be a code or a title, but it might be a nickname. Green flipped through Fraser’s address book, which was crammed with meticulous lists of people, none of them mistwalker. On a whim, Green accessed his favourite internet search engine and ran the keyword mistwalker. To his astonishment, nearly three thousand references came up. He scrolled through the first page rapidly; someone had written a fantasy book by that title, other instances seemed to refer to a character in a fantasy game and still others to Celtic mythology. As Green explored a few sites, he felt he was searching for the proverbial needle in an alien, unpronounceable universe. This was a job for Detective Bob Gibbs, the quintessential detail man, when he had nothing but time on his hands. Green needed a more practical way to track down the important people in Fraser’s life.

Because of Green’s woeful administrative skills, the printouts from the Fraser case were still strewn in piles on his floor. He picked up a fistful with a smile of triumph. This is why I never put anything away, he thought, not because I haven’t the patience, but because I know I’ll need it again.

He began scanning reports, and within half an hour he had ferreted out the names and addresses of half a dozen people who had testified on Fraser’s behalf, mostly teachers but hopefully also friends. He spent a further fifteen minutes cross-referencing the names with the Canada 411 database to make sure the addresses were up to date. Two people had disappeared from the database, and still another had too common a name to trace, but three teachers were still at the same address. Perhaps even at the same school, he thought.

Glancing at his watch, he saw it was already twelve o’clock. If he hurried, he’d catch the teachers still on their lunch break. He pocketed his notebook, holstered his radio and gun and grabbed his sports jacket off his chair. Downstairs he signed out an official car and headed outside, where a wall of heat assailed him. As quickly as it had come up, the storm had blown over, leaving a mist rising off the rain-slicked ground. It had brought no relief from the heat, however, and the harsh sun seared his eyes as it glared off the cars. He turned up the air conditioning and squealed the tires as he accelerated into the traffic.

In his fifteen years of frontline investigative work before he found himself increasingly relegated to his desk, Green had perfected an interview style based on the element of surprise. Never let a witness know you’re coming, never let him know what you’re going to ask next. Without benefit of forethought, people rarely produced clear and carefully constructed answers, and Green hoped a little more of the truth would slip out.

In this case, others might argue that after ten years, the innocent witnesses on his list would have no reason to suppress the truth and might benefit from some forewarning in order to hunt back through their memories for the details he needed. But Green was less interested in the events of ten years ago than those of last week, regarding which the innocence of the witnesses, if Fraser had contacted any of them, was far less assured.

Green ducked around cyclists and in and out of the sluggish noon hour traffic, which was further choked by tourists lost in the maze of Ottawa’s one-way downtown streets. He swung under the Queensway and backtracked alongside it over the historic Pretoria Bridge and up to Main Street. Here the traffic opened up a little as he headed out of the downtown core towards Old Ottawa South, an eclectic residential neighbourhood tucked in between the canal and the Rideau River. Green knew that the narrow, cluttered streets, the cramped lots and the aging brick houses were deceptive. Young urban professionals with double incomes, nannies and bright futures lived there with their fully equipped minivans wedged into narrow drives and their bicycles chained to front porches. He and Sharon had looked at properties here before emigrating to the Dreaded Vinyl Cube in the cow pasture, but they’d found they could barely afford the front porch. He was now secretly grateful, because he wasn’t sure he’d feel any more at home among this Birkenstock and
latte
crowd of civil servants and academics than he did among the high-tech hopefuls in Barrhaven.

At the time of his arrest, Fraser had taught a Grade One/Two class at the Duke of York Elementary School, which proved to be an ancient, listing brick edifice nestled in the heart of Old Ottawa South. Despite its threat of imminent collapse, it had been rescued from closure numerous times by its articulate and fiercely loyal parent community. Green parked the Taurus at the curb outside the main door and sat for a minute watching the children squealing and chasing each other around the muddy school yard.

His job didn’t take him into schools very often, and now he found himself thinking not so much of his pre-school son, but of his estranged teenage daughter, whose girlhood was little more than a conjuror’s figment in his thoughts, coloured by distant memory fragments of his own boyhood. Memories in which school yard laughter had more often sounded malevolent than innocent, in which the chasing had felt predatory and the little jabs had turned painful out of sight of the teacher’s indifferent eye. Now, however, as a testament to the changing times, a sharp-eyed teacher immediately detached herself from a gaggle of girls and approached him with a questioning frown.

“Can I help you?” she demanded.

In spite of his twenty years’ experience as a competent adult in authority, he felt a twinge of small-boy humiliation. Guilty until proven innocent, the way he’d always felt at school.

“Inspector Green, Ottawa Police,” he said, opening his ID . “Who’s in charge here?”

The woman’s eyes flashed in momentary alarm. She brushed a sweaty strand of hair back from her forehead and shielded her eyes from the sun as she searched the playground. “There’s Mrs. Allen, the principal.”

Another woman, older and immaculately sheathed in a blue dress with matching high heels, was already striding across the yard towards them.

“Can I help you?” Mrs. Allen asked, and there was no mistaking the frosty edge to her courtesy. This school staff was certainly on stranger alert, Green thought, and wondered if it was a legacy peculiar to this school or a reflection of modern times.

He repeated his introduction and suggested they continue the discussion in her office. Clearly unnerved but determined to appear in charge, Mrs. Allen led the way up the front steps and through the heavy wooden doors. As soon as he stepped into the creaky hallway and took his first breath of the stifling, mildewy air, Green wondered why the parents had fought so hard to salvage the place. It had narrow halls, cavernous ceilings, steep, dark staircases and more twists and crannies than a haunted house at the fair. The wooden floors sagged as if they’d borne the tread of a million little feet and creaked as if they could bear no more.

The principal squeezed her way between the desk and filing cabinet that passed for a secretary’s office and entered the tiny room behind, in which there was barely space for her desk and two chairs. She had made the best of it, though. The room was as immaculate and colour-coordinated as herself, with pale green walls, dark green desk and bookcase, grey chairs and a tasteful array of nature photographs on the walls. The bookcase held rows of binders bearing the school board logo, and on its top sat a tea tray with china pot and matching cups. Only the woman’s desk betrayed the frenzied demands of her job; it was covered with files, notes and memos which were rustling in the breeze from the fan she’d propped on the filing cabinet.

Mrs. Allen stacked the files hastily on the side of her desk as she shoehorned herself in behind her desk. “Final report cards,” she said with a tight smile.

Green thought of his own report cards, manila cardboard affairs filled with ominous Ds and comments about his wandering focus. “Looks like my desk,” he replied affably, as much to put himself at ease as her. “Makes me feel right at home.”

She was not reassured. “What can I do for you—Inspector, is it?”

Green opened his notebook. “There are three teachers I’d like to speak to who worked here a number of years ago. I’m not sure if they’re still here.”

“What’s this about?”

Green made a show of consulting his notes. “Linda Good, Virginia Pender and Ross Long. Are any of them in the school?”

She met his gaze. “I’d prefer not to divulge personal information without knowing the purpose of the request.” He sighed. Pissing contests with men were annoying enough, but why did some women, especially those fighting for the mantle of authority in what had always been a man’s game, feel they had to piss longer and further than everyone else? He decided to give her a morsel.

“I’m hoping they may have some information in a police inquiry which has nothing to do with the school, I assure you.”

“Nothing to do with the school,” she repeated, her eyes fixed on his. He knew she wanted more, but he said nothing. For a long, irritated minute she waited him out, then shrugged as if she’d lost interest.

“I don’t know the others, but Ross Long is here. He teaches Grade Five/Six, and you’ll find him upstairs in the class at the end of the hall. But I warn you, the bell rings in less than ten minutes.”

Green squeezed past the outer desk and made his way up the creaky staircase to the third floor, which was even hotter than the second. In the small, cluttered classroom at the end of the hall, he found a short, balding man with a walrus moustache and a stubby, pear-shaped body that jiggled as he scribbled science notes on the blackboard. He had opened all the windows and had two fans going, but still the room was an oven. The whir of the fans and the shrieks from outside obliterated all hope of a quiet interview.

Green introduced himself, and mindful of his ten-minute limit, cut directly to the point. “I obtained your name from the records of the Matthew Fraser investigation, and I saw that you testified on his behalf. Have you heard from him or had any dealings with him in the last couple of weeks?”

Green thought Ross Long flinched at the mention of Fraser’s name, but his denial was quick and sure.

“When did you last have contact with him?”

“Oh, not for donkey’s years.”

“In human terms—months, years?”

“God, yes. Must be going on eight years. I’ve hardly seen him since the trial.”

“Why is that?”

Long’s gaze shifted nervously outside, where the students were still cavorting on the soggy grass. A trickle of sweat ran down his cheeks and dripped onto the collar of his golf shirt. “Well, you know…went our separate ways, I guess.”

“But I thought you two were friends.”

“Not really friend friends. More like colleague friends. Hell, when you’re the only two guys in a staff room of women, you kind of stick together. What’s this about?”

“Did you work together long?” Green knew they’d taught together for four years, because it had been in the man’s statement, but he was curious to see how Long would characterize it now. In his official statement, Long had implied he and Fraser were close buddies who had lunch together, went for beers every Friday after work and even went on weekend fishing trips together when Long’s wife let him off the leash. Now Long was putting as much distance between the two of them as he could.

“He wasn’t here that long. Three or four years? He came here as a rookie out of teacher’s college, and I’ve been here since before the great flood.”

“How long ago was that?”

“What?” Long looked startled, then gave a nervous chuckle. “I’ve been here twenty-eight years. That seems like before the flood. I’ve seen lots of fads come and go, but now it’s gotten so you almost forget you’re supposed to be teaching kids because you’re so busy filling out forms. What’s this about, anyway? I thought all that stuff with Matt was long over.”

Green pondered what response would elicit the most cooperation without feeding the rumour mill. “There are some new concerns—” he began.

“You mean he’s done it again?”

“Again? But you said you thought he was innocent.”

“I did!” Long clamped his jaw tight, and his gaze flicked toward the door. “And—and I do. You just caught me off guard.”

“Off guard, sometimes the truth comes out.”

“It’s not that. It’s just you never really know, do you? Afterwards, all of us were looking back over the things he’d done. Picking apart all the innocent little things and—”

“Like what?”

“Well, like volunteering to run the intramural sports so he could spend lunch hours with the kids, and even organizing a coaching system so the older ones could help the little ones. He was always with the kids instead of in the staff room. We all thought it was because he was shy, and for a young single man, the staff room can be like walking into a room full of piranhas. But afterwards we got to wondering…well, you know.”

“You mean after the allegations?”

“No, after the trial, when he got off and I realized perhaps my testimony—our testimony—made the difference. During the trial, I said to myself, ‘I’ll just tell what I know, and the truth will come out in the end.’ And all I knew was that he was a nice guy, he seemed to love the kids, he devoted boundless time and energy to them, and they seemed to like him too. I never saw a single sign of trouble. There wasn’t a kid who didn’t want to play on the teams he coached, not a kid who came out of Grade One worse than they went in. Even the kids he drove home—”