Something Fishy (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-Three

Jameson had her search warrant, but went into the dome before it came – you couldn't wait for that sort of thing. It took too long out here in the sticks.

There had been no clear crime that she knew of. She took it all in, in one selective gaze. There were the batteries ringing the dome. There was a table and a chair in the central area and a single bed at the back. Sparse furnishings. A pile of dirty laundry by the side of the bed. Almost hidden to one side – a desk.

She pulled open the top drawer.

Bankbook. Bill statements.

Of no interest.

Second drawer – a pathetic few notes from Fiona:

Dear Newtie.

Jamieson thought that alone might be a motive to kill her.

I'm s'till thinking about las't night. Our firs' time agether. It wuz wunnerful. An s'o were u.

It was signed Fiona with a heart over the “i.”

Why had he kept them? He seemed to have nothing but contempt for her.

Possibly of interest.

Third drawer – the mother lode.

Plain brown envelopes. She opened the first and slipped out a photographic sheet.

Porn?

Definitely of interest. And baffling.

The sheets appeared to be photographic negatives, until she adjusted her mind to what her eyes were seeing. Then they made sense – and, at the same time, no sense at all.

She was looking at a series of ultrasound photographs of fetuses.

She opened each envelope, one after the other.

Different fetuses. At different stages of development. Envelope one. Week one. A series of babies whose lives were just starting – a glimmer, a speck in the womb. Envelope two. Week two. Like tiny tadpoles. Weeks three, four – little fishies swimming in the amniotic fluid. With each envelope, the babies inside grew and matured. For they were clearly more than fetuses by about eight weeks. They were babies. Tiny and forming. By six months, some were picking their noses, sucking their thumbs, clasping their hands, and scratching themselves.

Living a life inside the womb, thought Jamieson, as she slipped the photographs back inside the envelopes. Yet we don't remember. Why don't we remember? Or do we, in some way? She closed her eyes for a moment and reached back, tried to imagine herself floating in the womb. She couldn't give herself up to the sensation. She shook her head and returned to her pragmatic self.

The important question was what was Fanshaw doing with these ultrasound images? He wasn't a doctor, was he? He'd never said what his field was, but she knew from Hy that he'd been a botanist.

Why did he have these images at home? Why had he kept them? What was their significance? She intended to find out. She shoved the envelopes under her arm and took them straight to the hospital. She was interested to see what his blinking eyes would say about these. It could be more than a simple yes or no. Those eyes might speak volumes.

She was certain the ultrasounds did.

Gus was gazing with wonder at the printouts Ian had made her of her daughter, Dot's six-month ultrasound, taken three months before. The baby was clearly a girl.

“How she done that, I don't know.” Gus smiled up at Ian. “Took me eight tries to get a girl and she comes up with one first time out. Not a moment too soon, mind. She's past the age for it.”

Gus could read family resemblances in the image.

“Long fingers like me Ma,” she said to Ian, as they gazed at it together.

The computer that Ian had given her so that she could Skype with Dot, and that was unused otherwise, beeped. He hit the keyboard. An image filled the screen.

Dot.

And Baby Dot, as Gus had begun to refer to her much-anticipated grandchild.

“My land,” said Gus, standing and shuffling over to the computer. Ian pulled a chair out for her, and turned the video on, so that Dot could see Gus.

Dot beamed, her usually tousled hair even more so. She hadn't taken the time to pull a brush through it, thought Gus.

“Six pounds eight ounces.” Dot nuzzled the baby's head. “Ten fingers. Ten toes. And the prettiest little face.” She pulled the swaddling down to show a smooth pink face with a button nose, rosebud lips, and glazed eyes staring out of half-closed lids, fighting sleep.

“Two hours and fifty-six minutes old.”

Gus reached out to touch the newborn's button nose. She ached to touch, to hold her first grandchild.

“You'll be bringing her home before she's too much older.”

Dot smiled. “Yes, Ma, I will.”

“For good.”

“Maybe not for good. We'll see.”

“Bundle her up there. She'll be cold.”

“Ma, it's seventy-five degrees in this room.”

“But what with it being that cold and all outside, it's a different seventy-five than here. A colder seventy-five.”

Dot sighed and smiled.

“What will you be calling her? Ernestine after your grandmother? Mabel, maybe – she was your favourite auntie.”

“No, Ma. Her name is August.”

“That's not a name, that's a month. 'Sides, it's July. That makes it confusing.”

“After you, Ma.”

“So you'll be calling her Gus, then? Never did like the name myself.”

“Not Gus. August.”

“See if that sticks. It'll be Gussie in no time.” But it wouldn't. Gus could never get over having called her “Little Dot” all these months, and that's what she would keep calling her.

Gus was well pleased – Dot could tell by the way she held herself and the secret smile on her face.

Little August began to fuss.

“Gotta go, Ma. Time for a feeding.”

She did that disappearing act Gus disliked so much. One moment on the screen, the next off, as if she'd vanished from the world.

Gus looked up at Ian, fiddling with the keyboard.

“Fancy that. A grandmother, finally. And I'm old enough to be a great grandmother.”

She didn't shuffle back across the room. There was lightness in her step, and when she reached her purple chair, she picked up her knitting. Booties done. Mitts complete. Now a set of warm wool leggings and sweater. She'd be needing them where she was, poor little tyke.

Gus shivered as she bent forward to see the stitches on her needles.

Ian slipped home to call Hy.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Something stirred in Fanshaw's eyes as Jamieson pulled out the first ultrasound. Each time she pulled out another, his eyes flickered.

“Are you prepared to talk about these?”

Two blinks.
No
.

Off to a grand start. Jamieson stood her ground, refusing to sit down and make him more comfortable. She was a good reader of body language, but his body, encased in a cast, wasn't talking.

“Is this a private collection?”

One blink.
Yes
.

She shuffled through them.

“Is it important that this one is sucking his thumb?”

One blink.
Yes.

“And this one scratching?”

One blink.
Yes.
They were important to Newton. Life in the womb, of a kind most people didn't remember. He did. But Jamieson didn't know that, and he couldn't express it. Not to her. Not now.

In spite of the positive responses, Jamieson didn't feel as if she were getting anywhere. What meaning could these ultrasounds possibly have?

She would have gotten nowhere at all if Ed, the nurse in ICU, hadn't walked into the room.

“Newton. They told me you were here. Boy, you're in rough shape.”

Ed paid no attention to the message in Fanshaw's eyes, which were moving back and forth, trying to get Ed to notice that there was a Mountie in the room.

“You know him?” Jamieson asked.

“Yeah, we studied ultrasound technology together a few years back.” Big smile. “Quite a few years back.” He tugged on the small gold loop earring in his left ear.

She turned to Fanshaw, tapping the brown envelope in the palm of her hand.

“So these are not personal. Professional?”

Two blinks.
No.

One blink.
Yes.

“Which is it, yes or no?”

Ed peeked over her arm.

“Oh, those. He was always taking those home. He talked about wanting the whole set, didn't you Newton? Patients were willing to let him have copies.”

“Why? What for?”

“Maybe because he was nearly aborted at close to six months, but he wouldn't come out.” Ed laughed. “At least that's what he told us. Was it true, Newton?”

One blink.
Yes.

A series of blinks, indicating what? Panic? Loss of control. How reliable was this way of communicating – and for how long?

Hy and Ian had begun a wide search for Newton on the Internet and were gazing, speechless, at what they'd found.

Spread across the screen, an article from
Time
magazine archives.

Fanshaw versus Fanshaw,
the headline read, with the subhead:

Dad wins custody of test tube baby, but he's not the dad…

“Look at that.” Ian sat down and read off the screen: “Newton Fanshaw was an early product of artificial insemination, one of the earliest. The test tube conception was successful, but the marriage was not.”

Hy leaned over his shoulder and, a faster reader than Ian, scrolled down, summarizing.

“His mother divorced her husband when Newton was one year old. The presiding judge, a Catholic who didn't approve of artificial insemination, made a custody ruling against the biological mother in favour of the non-biological father.”

“Wow. That must have caused a big fuss back then. Early fifties. Fathers almost never got custody – and non-biological fathers?”

“It explains a lot.”

“Like what?”

“You know him better than I do. You've had an actual conversation with him, but look at the guy. Thin, pale, bloodless, emotionless, not surprising in a person created in a test tube.”

“It wasn't quite that…”

“Squeezed out like mustard from a tube then.”

“In some cases, it might be preferable and more effective.” He grinned, and then his face took on a serious expression.

Hy broke in before Ian could launch into a long explanation of the methodology involved in artificial insemination in the late forties and early fifties.

“I know it's not scientific. It's a feeling. It may be psychological on my part. I bet it's psychological on his, too – to know that you weren't created by passion –”

“Don't forget hate, greed, lust…”

“I know, but those are all emotions, at least. Human emotions.”

“There's emotion in desiring a child, seeking any way to have one. That was a pretty brave and adventurous route to take back then.”

“Still, the child can't feel it in his blood and in his bone.”

“Nature or nurture? I'm inclined to think with Newton it was nurture.”

“Maybe. Who calls their kid Newton?”

Ian pushed the chair back and stood up. The late-day sun was streaking into the room and tipping Hy's red curls with golden sunshine.

“Glass of Chardonnay?”

“Not now. Print up that info, would you? I gotta find Jamieson.”

Before she did, Hy had to get rid of the journal. She could tell Jamieson what was in it – she'd copied out bits of it – but she had to allow her Mountie friend to access the information legally, so the evidence could be used. It couldn't come from her. It had to come from Anton.

She had waited until the right moment. It seemed that Anton never left the house. When finally he did, she propped the book against the back door and scurried away.

When Anton came home and saw it, he realized it hadn't reached Jamieson, as he'd hoped. It would have to, to give her the evidence she'd need to charge Newton Fanshaw with murdering two women.

The journal had one more journey to make.

John Constable was bored.

He sat at his big new desk in his big new office in Charlottetown and studied the ceiling, looking for imperfections in the drywall and crown moulding. He found a few, but nothing too irritating, although now that he'd spotted them, his eyes kept returning to them.

He had no idea that he'd been put out to pasture because no one wanted to work with him.

It was said in the force that he'd been promoted from constable, only because his colleagues hated to refer to him as Constable Constable. It sounded so ridiculous.

It didn't get any better as he rose through the ranks to become Superintendent Constable. That not only sounded ridiculous, it was confusing.

He sighed.

There was nothing for him to do. Nothing much for any of them to do here. Seemed a waste of RCMP expertise and training to have a detachment at all, dealing with drunks and petty thieves. Until recently, there had only been one murder on Red Island in decades. Until recently. At The Shores. So cut off it might be a different island. So many murders it might be New York City.

Constable leafed through the files on his desk, and found them. They'd been there, gathering dust, before he arrived. But now he remembered them. Sheaves of paper reports from The Shores. He'd been there for a dangerous dinner. He sat up and began to read.

He was poring over them when his secretary brought him his mid-morning coffee, still hard at it when she came in to ask him if there was anything he wanted before she went to lunch. He waved her away.

He was very fond of his lunch, but he wasn't hungry today. He didn't even glance up when his secretary brought him his afternoon coffee, and, at the end of the day, he gathered up the papers, shoved them in this briefcase and took them home.

That raised eyebrows. Superintendent Constable taking work home?

Hardly. The pages were mostly blank. That's what he'd been staring at most of the day. He was astounded.

At that, at the insubordinate entries – and at the fact that there had been two more deaths at The Shores, possibly murders. And no one had paid any attention.

He'd found something to do.

Hy arrived at the hospital, just as Ed and Jamieson were leaving Newton's room. Newton's eyes said he wasn't happy about them leaving, to reveal his secrets to each other, but there was no way he could stop it.

Ed was leading Jamieson to a Quiet Room. When she saw Hy tripping down the corridor, Jamieson tried to wave her away. Hy had a fistful of papers she was waving at Jamieson, and barreled her way into the room behind them. Maybe when Jamieson saw this, she wouldn't be so hard-assed when she found out what Hy had done with the diary. Or that there was a diary.

“McAllister, this is a police investigation. You have no right to be here in this room with someone who may turn out to be a witness with evidence.”

“But I've got evidence. Besides, Ed knows me.”

“I do, indeed,” said Ed, beaming. “This lady pulled her friend from the jaws of death some years back. Yup. Jaws of death, she did. I'd trust her anywhere with any piece of information.”

That gave Jamieson pause. Hy had also pulled her from the jaws of death a couple of years back. She softened just long enough for Hy to get in the wedge.

“Read this.” Hy shoved the sheaf of papers into Jamieson's hand. After the first paragraph, Jamieson had to sit down.

“Bizarre.” She lifted her head. “No. This is beyond bizarre.”

Jamieson held up the papers Hy had given her.

Ed grabbed them, taking her by surprise. She hadn't meant for him to have them. Oh well, it was a matter of public record. Hy had Googled it, for God's sake. Jamieson expected to see Ed's eyebrows rise, or some other sign of surprise.

“Oh yeah, I know all this.”

It was Jamieson who was surprised.

“When we were taking that course together in Halifax – well, he was in fragile emotional shape. We were neighbours in the university residence. He began confiding in me, late at night.

“His marriage had fallen apart. He tried to kill himself – right after he'd told me his life story – his AI conception, the divorce case. He left a suicide note, with his wedding ring scotch-taped to it, outside my door. I only found it because I went to have a midnight snack. He had barricaded himself in his room. I called the police and said I was going to break in, but they said, no, do nothing. Sit quiet until we get there.

“How could I do nothing? I sat outside his door, talking him down, listening to his story all over again. The police surrounded our dormitory for twelve hours, until he finally surrendered and they found a gun in the bathroom.”

“Loaded?”

“Loaded, but he wasn't going to use it. It was one long cry for help.”

“How do you know?”

“I went to visit him after on the psychiatric ward. He gave me a list of things he needed from his room. I found clothes, socks, his wallet, neatly laid out on his bed – all the things he would need in the hospital and to return home.

“He was in the psychiatric unit for a few days, then let out. He told his story to the local tabloid. The story of his conception. He said his mother's name was Mary, and his father Joseph.”

“Were they?”

“No.” His voice was flat. He was thinking back. “He said they were Mary and Joseph Christian. They weren't. He also said his wife's name was Mary Christian, but it wasn't.”

“Their real names?” Jamieson was writing furiously.

“I forget, but he was obviously operating under some kind of delusion. He always went by Fanshaw.”

“Birth name?”

“I think so. There was something odd about the name. He told me his mother married his father for his name, but she was the one with the money. He said she kept the name when she ditched the husband.”

“So she's Fanshaw, too.”

“Yes.”

But Viola was his mother. Hy wanted to scream it out. She couldn't explain the name either, but she was sure that Newton was “the parasite” in the journal, that he had read it and killed her because she had rejected him. Jamieson didn't know about the journal. How to tell her?

“Are you sure it was his mother's name?” Hy looked at Ed, watching Jamieson from her peripheral vision.

“There was something peculiar about it. The spelling.”

“When was this?” Jamieson's mind was in a race with her hand as she consumed page after page in her notebook.

“Let's see. Five years ago?”

“Would it matter?” Hy risked making Jamieson aware of her presence.

“I don't know. It might.”

“Mid-life crisis?” Hy offered. She coaxed a slight smile out of Jamieson.

“Whole life crisis, I'd say.” Jamieson looked down at the plain brown envelope. Should she? Hy was nothing if not helpful. It was good to be able to talk these things out rather than in isolation, where she'd been since Murdo had abandoned her.

She handed Hy the envelope.

“You'll see what I mean.”

Hy leafed through the ultrasound photos, pausing at the compelling ones, like the full face of a baby staring directly out of the womb and straight at her. It was eerie.

“What do you make of it?”

Jamieson shrugged.

“He said he remembered it.” Ed pointed at the batch of photos.

“Remembered what?” Jamieson

“Remembered being in the womb. The warm place, he called it. He says he remembers the spark of life when it lit.”

“There are people who say they can remember life in the womb,” said Hy. “Mostly nutters. But there have been scientific tests exposing unborn babies to music and finding they respond to that music when they're born.”

“I think if he could've, he would've crawled back in that womb,” said Ed. “I guess that's what he did when they tried to take him out.”

“Tried to take him out?”

“They got his twin. Guess they didn't know there were two of them until a month or so later. Too late, back then, to do anything about it.”

“A botched abortion?”

“You could say that.”

“Wanted. Not wanted by the biological mother. Raised by the non-biological father and non-biological mother.”

“How could that not affect a person?” Hy jumped in. “And the fact that he told it in relation to his suicide means it had a profound effect on him.”