Murder in Focus (9 page)

“What do you mean?” asked Harriet from her perch on a large granite boulder. She had attached another lens to her camera and was focusing on a seaplane moored downstream from them in the river. “Do you like seaplanes?”

“The essence of pure enjoyment,” he said. “That's in answer to your first question. And I've never thought much about them. That's in answer to the second.”

“Well, I've taken a picture of it anyway,” said Harriet. “Whether you like them or not. Can you reach the beer?”

“Certainly,” said Sanders. He rolled over and extracted a bottle of beer from a small orange cooler. “How did you find out about this place?” he asked, propping himself up on his elbow to open the bottle and look around him. He was lying on the grass inside a circle of rocks that looked as if it had been built by Stone Age men of modest aspirations. He had placed himself strategically within reaching distance of Harriet and the cooler, which contained the remains of a picnic lunch, several rolls of film, and beer. To the east the river flowed away from them, swirling around the point; to the west thick shrubbery and trees hid them from the noise and smell of heavy traffic on the bridge to Hull. The worn grass and flattened beer cans testified that many others knew about this retreat, but on this sunny Wednesday they had it to themselves.

“Isn't it nice?” she said. “I found it when I was a kid. We used to have a house near the canal, and I'd set off every day in summer with a lunch and just go and look at things. Deserted corners were my specialty. I know lots more of them, too.” Sanders rolled over on his side to look at her, but by now she had twisted herself around and was contemplating the shoreline across the river through the viewfinder of her camera. “Hey, I didn't realize it was that late,” she said, pointing at a distant clock face.

“What about it?”

“If we leave now, we'll just make it out to the lab to pick up the Ektachrome and get back to my place before rush hour starts. Don't you want to see those pictures you helped take?” She glanced sideways at him and started picking up the empty bottles.

“Of course,” said Sanders, propping himself up on his elbow and watching the sun glint on her dark hair as she moved.

Andrew Cassidy was back in his own office at CSIS, with piles of material stealthily transferred from Steve Collins's filing cabinet stuffed into his hitherto empty bottom drawer. As he finished reading one document, he would drop it into a cardboard box beside his chair and pick up another. He reckoned he had enough here to occupy him until the end of the day, with plenty left in Steve's office to keep him busy until noon tomorrow. And then he was going to have to start thinking, because the pages of careful notes he had compiled so far wouldn't lead a cat to a mouse hole. The squeak of the door opening made him close the folder in front of him and look up.

“Oh. Hi, Betty. What's up?”

“It's Charlie Higgs. He's in my office and he wants to see you.”

“Damn,” said Cassidy. “What for?”

“About Steve, I expect,” she answered. “What will I tell him?”

“Anything. Tell him I've gone to Kenora for my sister's wedding and I won't be back for a week; tell him I got hit on the head and I'm still in a coma. Look, Betty, I haven't got anything to say to Charlie Higgs. He'll ask me what we're doing and I'll say everything we can and he'll know that means nothing at all and he'll get mad as hell. And I don't blame him.”

“I'll tell him you're out, shall I? Even though he knows you haven't checked out with downstairs?”

“Sure. He'd expect nothing less from me. He always thought I was an insubordinate son of a bitch. Thanks, love. I'll do the same for you someday.” And he blew her a kiss. “Oh—and Betty?” She turned back. “Is this all Steve had around? Because most of it isn't worth a pinch of shit. What about at home?”

She looked thoughtfully at him. “Well, as far as I know, that's it. But why would he tell me where his stuff was kept? You know.”

Her tone was dismissive, almost contemptuous, but she remained standing in the doorway with her head tilted slightly to one side and her hair falling carelessly across one half of her face, hiding her expression. Cassidy waited, afraid to move and break the mood, for her to say something else. But after a moment more, she flicked the hair off her face, nodded abruptly, and left. Maybe that meant he had kept things at home. It wouldn't hurt to check, even if it meant putting off the lovely Samantha one more time.

“Where are you staying in Ottawa?” Sanders asked as Harriet jumped into the car, dumped the envelope from the lab on his lap, and headed into the steadily thickening traffic.

“In the Glebe,” she said. “Near the canal. One of those miraculously lucky six-month sublets. Actually, I'm only a few blocks from Dow's Lake, practically in the country. It's nice.” As she was speaking, she made a right turn through a red light without bothering to stop, screeched into the oncoming traffic, and bucketed along the potholed road. “Bronson,” she said. “It's a little faster than Bank, I think. You know, this is where I learned to drive when I was seventeen. Around here.”

“They should have tried teaching you a little harder. Don't traffic laws impress you at all?” asked Sanders as she ran her second red light.

“Not at all,” she said. “Does my driving bother you? I've never had an accident. I'm probably much more careful than you are, friend.”

“No doubt,” he said, yawning and lapsing into semi-comatose silence until the car stopped on a shaded street in front of a big, dark red house.

“Hey,” she said, touching him lightly on the arm. “We're here. These are my temporary quarters, or at least the top half of it is. Or are. Like it?”

Sanders yawned again. “Not bad. It's not quite what I expected, though,” he said as he got out of the car. “Not nearly arty enough.”

“Come around to the back. We use the tradesman's entrance.” She pushed open a wooden gate that led into a large garden, and pointed with a flourish at a set of wooden stairs going up to the second floor. “Private entrance.”

The stairs led directly into the kitchen, and it was clear from one look at that room that no one had done anything to the house since it was built sixty or seventy years before. It had a huge old porcelain sink; an ancient, yellowed stove; and an antique refrigerator. The floor was wooden, dark, and stained with years of cooking spills. Sanders looked at it and laughed. “This reminds me of home,” he said. “Except that it's bigger and seems to have a better class of neighbors. And my ma isn't standing in front of the stove yelling at me.”

“Isn't it great?” she said. “Come in here.” She led him impatiently into a room off the kitchen that was being used as a study, walked over to an enormous wooden desk, and took the envelope from him. She ripped it open, extracted a small box, and began laying the slides that she took out of it onto a large rectangular structure with a milky glass top.

“What's that?” he asked.

“A light box,” she said. “Don't cops ever take pictures?”

“Of course we do. But we have these people called photographers, and that's what they're paid to do. Then the rest of us don't have to know anything.”

“Philistines,” she said cheerfully, and flipped on the switch. There was a long silence as she bent over the slides and examined each one. Just as Sanders had begun to think that there was something seriously wrong with them, she looked up and said, “Perfect. I am bloody good, you know. Look at that one—the one we did with all those people charging by me—it's awe-inspiring, that's what it is.” She pointed at the slide of the Supreme Court building.

“Where did those two come from?” asked Sanders. “I didn't see them standing there.”

“They came along between the time I was setting up and when I actually took the shot. See how far over they are? The camera was pointed in that direction,” she said, indicating the center of the building, “and yet it picked up those two guys. That Olympus twenty-four-millimeter shift is a beautiful lens. See how straight those lines are? You know, they probably didn't even realize that they were in the picture. I mean, if they saw us. Remember where we were standing? They would assume that anyone set up like that was taking a shot of the door.”

“Does that matter?” asked Sanders, curious now. “I mean, do you have to get someone's permission to take a picture of him? Of course, they're so small you wouldn't be able to recognize them anyway.”

“What do you mean? There's enough detail in that slide to blow it up to four by six feet and turn it into a mural. Here, let me show you.” She handed him a small object like a jeweler's glass. “Look at it through the magnifier. You'll see.”

Sanders clutched the magnifier to his eye and obediently looked at the slide. The two men, dressed in dark suits and clutching newspapers under their arms, were looking in the direction of the camera, as if they were trying to decide what to do about it. He looked at the hollowed cheekbones and wide mouth of the one on the right with a sense that he should know the man. But then, he was probably a politician and had his picture plastered over the papers two or three times a week. “You're right,” he said. “You can see their faces.”

“Most of the book is going to be done in black and white, of course,” she said. “But I wanted one really spectacular wide-angle shot in colour for the dust jacket. Or the editor does, I should say. What do you think? Splashy enough? Yet filled with Canadian restraint?”

“I'm impressed,” he said. “Maybe you really are a photographer. In spite of the lab.”

“Thanks,” she said casually, and switched off the light box, leaving the slides where they were. “Come into the living room and sit down. Can I get you a beer? Of course. Just a minute.” She led him into a large room with high ceilings and long windows and pointed him at an armchair. “There,” she said, “sit.” She handed him a newspaper. “Amuse yourself while I get the beer.”

Sanders looked idly down at the copy of the Ottawa
Citizen
lying in his lap. The news of the world seemed far away and insignificant right now. The headline told him that the latest provincial budget was going to hit smokers again, which meant nothing to him. He didn't smoke. Then, unfolding the paper so that the entire front page would be visible, he stared. There, beside a feature story on safety in the workplace, was a picture of someone he knew, someone he had seen recently. And that someone, whose name was apparently Don Bartholomew, was now dead. Murdered. Don. And he saw it all again in his mind in the bright colours of exhaustion. The drunken construction worker, the mynah bird, the man who took him away.

The man who took him away. High cheekbones, sunken cheeks, that mouth, those mean, son-of-a-bitch eyes. And the scar. “Hey,” he said to Harriet as she brought in a couple of bottles of Henninger beer. “Do you have a better magnifier? Can you make those slides bigger?”

“The detail is there,” she said. “I don't have a stronger magnifier, but I can throw the slide into the enlarger and we'll make it as big as you want. Which slide did you want to see?” She looked mildly curious, but not sufficiently so to ask why.

“The one with the two men in front of the court. I think I've seen one of them before.”

“I'll get it.” She was heading through the kitchen with the slide before he got to his feet. “Come through here,” she called, pointing to a door he hadn't noticed before that led out of the kitchen beside the back entrance. “It was the scullery,” she said. “It's small, but it makes a pretty workable darkroom.” She reached up and clicked on a light, and then took the plastic cover off an enlarger. “This ought to give you what you want. It's a secondhand Beseler I picked up here in Ottawa. It's a sweetheart. Almost as good as my new one at home,” she added. “These lenses are just about as sharp as the one I took the picture with. If it's in the slide, we should be able to see it.” She slipped the slide into the film carrier and turned on the light. The picture appeared, pale and distorted, on the easel below. She loosened a nut on the top of the enlarger and pushed the entire head gently back until it clicked solidly into place, now in a horizontal position. The picture gleamed on the freshly painted wall. “Okay. Flip off that light, will you? And I'll get this into focus.”

He leaned over her in the dark, distracted by the scent of her hair and her skin, but trying to concentrate on the image in front of them. Slowly the lines sharpened and straightened, the shadows gathered into themselves, and the highlights leaped up between them. And there, over on the left, was the man with the deep-set eyes, the hollowed cheeks, and those thick and sensuous lips. He was staring right at Sanders, daring him to take that picture. Beside him stood a fair-haired, tanned man, whose eyes were directed at his companion. “Which one is it?” asked Harriet.

“The dark one,” said Sanders.

“Who is he? Besides a mean-looking son of a bitch.”

“A murderer, I think,” said Sanders.

“I was wrong about one thing,” said Harriet finally, after they had looked in silence at the image for a long, long time.

“What's that?”

“About them not knowing they were in the picture. That one's looking straight at the lens and he doesn't seem very happy.” She fell silent again. “What do we do now?”

“Well,” said Sanders, “I suppose we can take this slide in to the locals. The Ottawa police'll be able to deal with it. After all—”

“The hell we do! This is my slide, John Sanders, and it's not going to spend the next three years kicking around some courthouse waiting for trials and appeals and God knows what and then finally come back to me in tatters years after the book is published.”

“I think they're actually looked after a little better than that,” he said mildly. “And I understand what you're saying, but this picture may be their best chance of finding out who he is. You can't just ignore that, Harriet.” He was trying to sound as calm and reasonable as he could. “Can you?”