Murder in Focus (23 page)

“The baby's always crying,” the woman replied dispiritedly. “But I'd better go have a look at her anyway. Sorry I couldn't have been more help.”

“Now you've made me feel like an absolute bitch,” said Harriet as she stormed down the steps. “That poor creature in there is obviously crazed with exhaustion and I kept her at the door trying to locate a nonexistent person living at a nonexistent address. What in hell are you up to?”

“Think of it as a change from listening to a baby cry. Now all we have to do is drift quietly back to the house and see what's going on. It looked pretty quiet as we went past it in the cab.”

“What are we going to do when we get there?” asked Harriet, trying to drift as convincingly as she could.

“Ring the doorbell. If no one answers, we'll go around to the back and break in.” Sanders began to drift more briskly.

“I don't believe this,” said Harriet. “And you an officer of the law.”

“When people are after you for murder,” said Sanders. “I've noticed your outlook changes. The thought of a little B and E somehow doesn't seem so important.”

“Anyway, what makes you think they'll be out?” she said skeptically. “You seem to be assuming that we'll have the place to ourselves,” she added.

“Because it's three-thirty, and if something or other is going to happen at five, then they're probably running around doing whatever it is. If they are home, then we've probably screwed up completely and this place has nothing to do with anything—your pictures, Bartholomew's notes. Nothing.”

By now they were around the slight bend in the road and in full view of the front of the Georgian house. Sanders stopped a couple of houses away and turned with his back to it. He was looking in apparent amazement at the beauty of a rock garden filled with tiny spring flowers, pointing at various specimens as he talked to Harriet. “Keep a little behind me,” he said. “If anyone comes out, you won't be noticed. But tell me what you see.”

She turned from contemplation of the rockery to looking at Sanders. “You were wrong, you know,” she said conversationally. “Someone is home. He's coming out of the house right now. He's tall and big, as tall as you are and broader in the shoulders, I would guess. Sandy-haired, but I can't get a proper look at his face. There it is. Sort of north-of-England cheekbones, if you know what I mean.”

Sanders glared down at her. “North-of-England cheekbones! What in hell are you talking about? Is he alone?”

“No,” said Harriet, nodding her head in agreement. “You know, darling, my brother was right. I don't think we'd have any trouble turning that back section of the yard into a sweet little rock garden like this.” Sanders stepped back, startled at her words, and saw a woman moving briskly toward them, trying to keep up with a young and energetic standard poodle on the end of a leash. “Now a medium-to-tall, dark-haired gentleman in a very conservative suit is coming out,” said Harriet as soon as the dog walker had passed. “Ah, the black limousine that just went by is pulling up to collect him. And right behind him is a woman. It's Anna Maria Strelitsch again. What in hell is going on?”

“Have they all left yet?” asked Sanders. He began to move his head to the left.

“Wait. They're all in their cars now. Don't turn yet. There. They've rounded the corner. Now you can turn around.”

“Let's go,” said Sanders, and started walking quickly toward the house.

“Who in hell were all those people?” asked Harriet.

“How should I know,” snapped Sanders, exasperated. “I couldn't even see them.” He strode up the walk, took the steps two at a time, and rang the doorbell as if he were summoning a whole houseful of recalcitrant servants. They waited, listening to the bell peal through the empty rooms. “There's no one home.”

“And now we just look and see if they accidentally left a door open around in back?” said Harriet innocently.

Sanders laughed for the first time in a while and began circling the house, heading left past the attached garage. He peered at the thin grass and dank weeds that grew in the narrow passage between the fence and the building—not so much as a tin can or piece of paper. He turned and shook his head. Harriet was crouched in front of the garage, working at the latch to the overhead doors with her fingers, growing visibly more and more frustrated. “They're locked,” she said.

“Of course they're locked,” said Sanders. “Here, let me try,” he said, drawing out a bunch of keys and using one to pry at the lock. In less than a minute he was shoving the door up and back. “It's easier if you have something to force it with,” he added apologetically. “My partner, now, he can pick locks with the best of them, but I have to rely on brute strength.”

Harriet appeared not to hear him. She followed him into the garage and looked around briefly. It was empty of anything but a few garden implements. Sanders looked for the connecting door into the house—he preferred privacy when breaking into houses—but the original builders seemed to have forgotten to supply one. Undismayed, he followed Harriet out to the back garden and reassessed the situation. It could have been worse. Windows had been left open both downstairs and up. Fresh-air fiends, then. His eyes narrowed as he contemplated the problem. If he stood in the rose bed, then Harriet should be able to stand on his shoulders, push the downstairs window open a bit wider, and wriggle her narrow frame through. “Hey,” he yelled, “come out of that bloody shed. I need you to crawl in this window here.” He watched her walking across the garden and tried to calculate her weight. “And take your shoes off before you try it, too.”

The two of them walked slowly through the ground floor, from the dining room where Harriet had just managed not to destroy a delicate walnut table as she went hurtling in, to a small sitting room in front, then into the massive hall and the formal living room on the other side of it. “Nice house,” said Harriet at last. “You wouldn't think someone who lived like this would want to steal my pictures, would you?”

Sanders shook his head. “We don't know that he did. In fact, we don't know that he has anything to do with anything, do we? Maybe Bartholomew just got invited to a party here.” Sanders punctuated his remark with a wave of the hand around him. The living room told them nothing. Like the other rooms they had been through, it seemed to be devoid of anything personal, even a magazine or a half-read book. They went up the sweeping staircase two steps at a time and paused in the equally large hallway on the second floor. They looked at the two closed doors leading into rooms at the front of the house and then at each other. “Split up?” said Harriet. Sanders shook his head. “This one, then,” she said, and headed left. It took them only a minute to go through the bedroom. Every piece of clothing was in scrupulous order; each drawer and shelf was arranged so that one could find anything in seconds. Nothing was concealed. The small bathroom that the room shared with the one behind it also contained no secrets: towels, shaving things, soap, tissues and toilet paper, a bottle of aspirin, nothing else. Harriet tried the other door, glanced briefly into the room beyond, and backed away. “Empty,” she said. They walked out the way they had come and into the room on the other side of the hall.

For a study it was profoundly disappointing. The desk drawers were empty, except for a small pile of brochures advertising clothing and sporting goods. Sitting on top of the desk was a much-thumbed mailing list, which Sanders automatically put in his pocket, but considering that it contained the names of several major department stores, he didn't have much hope for it.

The silence of the room was broken by an indignant cry. “My slides,” said Harriet as he was finishing his brief survey of the desk. Her eye had gone past him and lit on the wastepaper basket. “All my goddamn slides are sitting in that basket. Find me a box or something to put them in.”

“Wait,” he said, his professional instincts surging to the fore. “Leave them.”

“And look here,” she said, paying no attention to him at all and walking over to the bookcase in the corner. On the top of it lay a pile of black-and-white prints of buildings in Ottawa in a messy heap, and in front of it sat a carton whose stenciled label proclaimed that it had once held rum bottles. It was filled with strips of black-and-white negatives, curling in a wild and neglected mass, like worms in a bait can. “Christ almighty,” she breathed. “If those negatives are scratched, so help me. Are there any envelopes or anything like that, sheets of paper, maybe, that I can put them in? For chrissake, John, give me a hand. I have to get them together.”

Peter Rennsler finished the last quarter cup of coffee in his thermos, closed it tidily up again, and concealed it in the dead leaves in the hollow in the woods he had been occupying for the last two and a half hours. He rose cautiously to his feet. He was like a cat, steel-sprung and able to move from complete repose to total readiness in the gathering of a muscle, and now he slipped noiselessly and almost invisibly out between the trees to the roadway. He waited for a truck carrying new men to pass, and headed up the road a couple of hundred yards to the disembarkation area. At the checkpoint he handed his new set of papers to the irritated-looking sergeant who was attempting to position the influx.

“You didn't come with my lot,” the sergeant said suspiciously, glancing from Peter to the paper in his hand.

“Uh-uh,” Peter grunted, shaking his head. “Special transport.”

“You're pretty late. The conference started a couple of hours ago. Do you know where you're supposed to be positioned?”

“That's right,” he said, in a voice nicely calculated to be not quite insolent, the voice of a hard-to-replace specialist talking to a dime-a-dozen sergeant. Taking back his orders, he buttoned them into his pocket and trudged with an air of boredom into the secure area. He headed for a huge pine tree, bare for the first fifteen feet or so and thickly branched at the top. He bent down, buckled the lineman's spurs hanging from his belt onto his boots, and climbed the tree as casually as he would have ascended a set of stairs. He settled himself into the first solid branch facing the house and prepared, once again, to wait.

“Who's that?” asked a soldier standing nearby. He had been watching the ascent with mild curiosity as he swatted ineffectually at the black flies swarming around his head.

“Some hotshot sniper,” muttered the man standing beside him.

“Some rifle, you mean,” said the first enviously. “When did they start issuing those?”

“Jesus, how in hell should I know? They raided the museums to get the shit they handed out to us,” he replied bitterly. “He probably knows somebody. Catch those bastards spending any money on us.” He slapped the back of his neck. “Christ, these fucking black flies! Let's get the hell away from this patch of bog before they chew us to bits. Did you know you could die from black fly bites?”

“Weren't we supposed to stand here?' said his companion, looking around nervously—perhaps for signs of authority, perhaps for a murderous cloud of black flies.

“Who the hell knows where we were supposed to stand? They don't have bloody x's painted all over the ground, do they? Come on. The flies won't be as bad over there—it's not as swampy,” he said in a voice that was almost kindly. “For chrissake, if you count the guy in the tree those assholes have put four of us covering the same goddamn ten square feet of bush. That bastard over there from the Mounties can cover our position. Can't you, mate?” he called. And Corporal Bill Fletcher lifted his rifle in response.

Corporal Fletcher felt a sense of relief at having some sort of semiofficial duty to carry out besides that of watching a sniper sit in a tree. His torment at having to cope with two contradictory sets of orders, one from Sergeant Carpenter, who would rip Fletcher's guts out when he found out the corporal wasn't carrying them out to the letter, and one from higher up, with its much more terrifying authority, was enough to make him oblivious to the damp, the chill, and the swarms of black flies in this swampy section of the woods. He rubbed his hand across his neck automatically and was surprised to notice that it came away covered with blood; nervously he leaned his rifle against a tree trunk and wiped the blood away from hand and neck with his handkerchief. If he'd had any brains, he reflected, he would have covered himself with insect repellent before coming out here.

He put the disgusting piece of cloth away and picked up his rifle again. He balanced it on his hand lovingly, and then checked the sight out against the sniper's back. It was a beauty. With this weapon, he could blast the soldier's rifle out of his hand as soon as he raised it to fire; there was no need to do anything so crude as kill him. For here, if truth must be told, lay the real source of his discomfort. Pride. Corporal Fletcher had case after case of medals—many bronze, several silver, and some treasured gold—hiding modestly in his drawer, medals that he had won for marksmanship. It offended him to kill a living target as if he were some two-bit hood with a shotgun dug into his victim's belly. That was a butcher's job; he considered himself an artist. But obedience was stronger than his pride, and if they wanted this man dead as soon as he fired on someone, he was certainly capable of carrying out the order. He sighed unhappily and wiped his bloody handkerchief across his neck once more.

Harriet had finished stacking the prints neatly so that their surfaces would not be damaged. “I can sort them later,” she said, stepping back. “I wonder if that's all of them. It's hard to tell. Did you find me some envelopes for the negatives?” she asked in the same detached mutter, and it took Sanders a moment or two to figure out that the question had not been rhetorical.

“Envelopes? For chrissake, Harriet, we're committing half the crimes against property in the book, and you're worried about finding envelopes? Just dump everything in that box and we'll do something about it later. In the meantime, let's get the hell out of here.” Suddenly a door slammed, and he stiffened. “What in hell is that?” he murmured unnecessarily.