The Dutch Wife (6 page)

That word, like a hangman’s noose, choked her. “Yes, I have,” she managed to say. She believed it was as much for his sake as her own.

He looked at her so sternly she couldn’t tell whether he believed her or not.

Just then, a voice called from the doorway of the bar.

“Rachel!”

It was Jeremiah Webber. He signalled to her that he’d be with her in a second.

The plump-faced soldier looked at her with sudden understanding, got to his feet and stumbled away without another word.

Webber ordered beer at the bar then came and sat down. He saw she was upset and thought it was because of his lateness. He promised to keep her amused for the remainder of the day. She told him she suddenly didn’t feel well and asked him to take her home.

– 5 –

THAT FALL, ON AN OVERCAST MORNING,
Rachel Vanderlinden had gone to City Hall to pay a bill. She was there for a half hour. As she was leaving through the main entrance, she saw a cluster of people, including a policeman, on the sidewalk outside looking up at the clock tower where a flagpole jutted out. She looked up too. A man was hanging from the pole by his arms, looking down. He must have climbed the stairs inside and squirmed out through one of the apertures.

Rachel couldn’t bear to watch and hurried away. But she’d only gone twenty yards along the sidewalk when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the man let go. He plummeted down and struck an ornamental iron fence-post. Even though its tip was quite blunt, the force of his fall caused it to impale him through his chest.

In spite of herself, Rachel stopped to look. The policeman, with the help of two of the men watching, tried to detach the body. The jumper had been killed instantly and there was a lot of blood everywhere, so the men weren’t careful. One of his legs seemed to have been broken and flopped around loosely as they lifted him off the post. They laid him on his back on the sidewalk and the policeman tried to straighten the leg out. The entire limb came away in his hand—a wooden contraption with leather straps. Rachel moved a little nearer. Though the head of the dead man was at a strange angle and there was blood from his mouth and nose, she could see it was the soldier who’d told her about the death of the man she loved.

“Does anyone know him?” the policeman said.

“I’ve seen him around,” said one of the men who’d helped.

“Do you know his name?”

“It was Floyd McGraw,” the man said. “He was crippled in the War. He’s had a rough time since he came back.”

Rachel walked away quickly. Floyd McGraw. She’d suspected that was who he was ever since he’d spoken to her in the York. She’d thought of trying to find him, telling him he wasn’t to blame either. But she hadn’t, and now he’d died, certain there could be no forgiveness. Yet she wasn’t excessively sorry for him. In that aspect of her character, she realized, she was perhaps the true daughter of her father, Judge Dafoe.

– 6 –

THE JUDGE’S ANCESTORS WERE DUTCH FARMERS
who had domesticated the stubborn northern wilderness. He himself had been too frail for farm work, so he’d been encouraged to stay on at school. He eventually became a lawyer and set up a very successful practice in Queensville, with its wealthy grain merchants and elegant houses along the Lake shore—one of which he lived in. At the age of forty-five, in spite of his chronic bad health and against his doctor’s advice, he accepted an appointment to the Provincial Bench. He soon became infamous as the sternest of judges—“Judge Rope” was his nickname. The long hours he put in took so much out of him, he was warned by his doctor of the risks of a heart attack. Defence lawyers used to say that if Dafoe’s heart were to be attacked by anything, it would most likely be by the rat that lived inside it. The Judge was aware of this witticism and enjoyed it.

To the surprise of his colleagues, he decided to marry, at the age of fifty. He chose for his wife Anke Oltmans, the available daughter of an immigrant Dutch merchant. She was a short, robust woman who reminded him of one of those figures in a Rubens painting. She devoted her life to looking after his needs.

Their marriage seemed quite satisfactory to observers and was indeed so to the Judge himself.
A Dutch Wife,
he called her. “You can’t go wrong with a Dutch Wife,” he liked to say.

Their daughter, Rachel, was born in due course. But after three years, Anke—who seemed so robust—caught measles from the baby, faded rapidly and died.

Thereafter, Judge Dafoe became his daughter’s slave. This slight man, whose face was like a skull with only the flimsiest covering of flesh (the first sight of him used to terrify prisoners in the dock), was the most loving of fathers. It was as if the entire quotient of love he was capable of was heaped together in a single load and bestowed on his daughter. The sight of her would bring a smile—a death’s head smile—to his face. And the more indulgent he became towards her, the more aloof and unsociable he became to the rest of the world. “If you get along too well with people,” he would tell Rachel as she grew older, “it’s a sign of weakness.”

ONE NIGHT, WHEN SHE WAS SEVENTEEN
and had just completed her formal schooling, the doorbell of the Judge’s house rang. He was in his study, so Rachel answered the door.

Under the porch light she saw a young man of middle height with a thin face and hair that was quite long, but tidy. His face was slightly pock-marked, like one of those modern paintings she’d seen in the Art Gallery. Altogether, she thought he looked the way an artist was supposed to look. He even carried a pad of paper. Some pencils stuck out of the top pocket of his coat.

“My name’s Rowland Vanderlinden,” he said. “The Judge is expecting me.” He was a quick, nervous speaker.

“Come in,” she said. “I’m his daughter, Rachel.”

He seemed surprised to hear that, as she knew many others were surprised that Judge Rope could possibly be anyone’s father. She took him up to the study and left him with the Judge. An hour later, she was reading in bed when she heard her father let the visitor out.

AT BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING,
she asked him about the previous night’s visitor.

“Vanderlinden?” her father said. “He’s an anthropologist. Writes down every word you say. But at least he was on time for his appointment, and that’s unusual.” The Judge was renowned for his punctuality. He had a clock even in the bathroom.

“An anthropologist?” She wasn’t sure what that was.

“It’s one of those newfangled so-called sciences,” he said. “They seem to come up with another one each year. He works at the Museum in Toronto and teaches a course at the University.”

“Why did you want to see him?”

The Judge shook his head. “I had no desire whatever to see him,” he said. “But the Law Society’s made it mandatory that we consult with these so-called experts before sentencing.”

“Ah,” she said. She was aware that in a few days her father would be passing sentence on a serial murderer, Joshua Simmonds, the so-called “Calendar Killer.” The case had been made notorious in every newspaper across the country. Rachel, like most of the young women in the province, had followed it with fascination mixed with relief.

– 7 –

THERE WERE TWO REMARKABLE THINGS
about Simmonds, the murderer of a number of women throughout Eastern Ontario. The first was that he used a very old-fashioned method—the garotte. The second was that he performed his murders on the first day of each month, selecting only women unfortunate enough to have names associated with the month in question.

Hence the nickname the Calendar Killer.

The initial murder of the sequence, for example, took place in a rooming house in Queensville on the first of April. The victim’s name was
April
Smithers, a youthful prostitute. She was discovered on top of her bed with a leather garotte still round her neck. The page of a wall calendar with the date circled in red ink lay beside her. She was fully clothed and had not been otherwise molested.

The Queensville police only began to understand that this was the beginning of a series on the morning of the first of May. That was when a young woman who worked at her father’s farm, two miles out of town, was found murdered in the cowshed. A garotte was still in place, a red-circled calendar page was pinned to her blouse. Again there seemed to be no overt sexual element to the crime.

Such was the pattern of the killings. They went on for several months, the next victims being
June
Lavigne,
Julia
Tompkins and
Augusta
Strathy.

But the end was near.

In late August, James Bromley, a provincial highways inspector and sharp-eyed amateur naturalist, returned from a three-month visit to Australia, where he’d been studying road construction in extreme climatic conditions. While he was abroad, he’d heard nothing about the serial murders in his homeland. Now, he recollected something he’d observed just before leaving for Australia—which happened to be the very week before the killing of Elspeth May. He’d been inspecting surface wear and tear on a rural road near the May farm when he’d spotted an unlikely bird in a bush nearby. He was almost sure it was a blue-spangled oceanic grebe, thousands of miles from its natural aquatic habitat.

The bird flew into some trees and he couldn’t resist following it, keeping as quiet as possible so as not to disturb it. He saw it perch on a branch and found himself a hiding place from which to watch it. He had barely settled down when, to his surprise, he saw that another man had been lurking in a nearby clump of trees. This man, unaware of Bromley’s presence, was now stealthily heading out towards the road. Bromley himself stayed on for another ten minutes, fascinated by the grebe.

Now, all these months later, having returned from Australia and heard about the serial killings, Bromley thought it might be wise to contact the police, for he had recognized the face of the man he’d seen that morning near the May farm.

A dozen officers immediately went to the Station Hotel in downtown Queensville. They burst open the door to the first-floor room of Joshua Simmonds, a permanent hotel resident. He was a forty-year-old scrivener in the Public Records Bureau—where Bromley had often seen him in the course of reporting to the Department of Roads. In a cupboard in Simmonds’s hotel room were several home-made leather garottes and a familiar wall calendar with missing pages.

He was arrested and charged with the murders.

NOW THAT THIS LOATHSOME CREATURE
had been caught, the police were anxious to interrogate him. Simmonds seemed just as anxious to confess. He said he’d been planning the murders for a long time. He found the addresses of potential victims in the Public Records Bureau, concentrating on those who lived near his home base. He’d scout them out and even get to know some of them personally in advance of the murders.

On completing the twelve-month cycle, he’d intended to progress to some other interesting patterns, such as days of the week (he’d already found women named Tuesday and Wednesday); trees (Acacia, Olive, Laurel); colours (Amber, Blanche); flowers (Violet, Rose, Anthia, Tulip); and celestial objects (Celia, Stella). As part of his preliminary research, he’d found a “Name Your Baby” book quite invaluable.

He regretted, he said, the fact that he’d killed only women. But as his interrogators could see, he himself was quite a small man, so men would have been too difficult. He had considered children as an option; but he happened to be very fond of children and didn’t think he would have the stomach for it.

As for his use of the garotte, he believed it was much more intimate than a weapon such as a knife or a gun. The last thing he wanted was for his victims to feel their deaths were impersonal.

But
why
had he killed the women at all? That was what the police investigators, preoccupied with motive, wanted to know. What was it that drove Simmonds to kill anyone in the first place?

The murderer seemed genuinely surprised at the question. The killings were only meant to be a game, he said, an entertainment to cause a little bit of a distraction for the general public. Nothing grabbed people’s attention like a mysterious murder or two. Nothing would convince him that they hadn’t enjoyed the whole thing and weren’t, in fact, grateful to him for putting on a good show.

The police had to be satisfied with that. When Simmonds eventually went on trial, his lawyer tried to persuade him to plead not guilty on the grounds of insanity. Simmonds was offended at the very idea. He himself took the stand and appealed to the jury’s sense of fun. That same day, after less than ten minutes’ deliberation, they found him guilty of multiple murders in the first degree.

– 8 –

“WHAT DID YOUR VISITOR HAVE TO SAY
about Simmonds?” Rachel asked her father. She sipped her coffee, wanting to hear more about Rowland Vanderlinden, without seeming too curious.

The Judge sighed. “Nothing that should have surprised me,” he said. “These intellectuals always seem to find criminals more valuable than ordinary citizens. He went on about what he calls ‘a ritualistic aspect’ to the murders. He thinks they might come from some deep-rooted impulse Simmonds himself isn’t aware of. He said it would be worthwhile keeping such a creature alive—a lot might be learned from talking to him further.”

“How odd,” said Rachel.

Her father smiled. He was wearing a red-and-white-striped shirt with a red tie. Rachel thought he looked like a peacock with a skull for a head.

“I told him we could talk to Simmonds forever and it would be useless. How can you get rational answers out of a madman? He made a note of that. He made notes on everything.”

“Did he himself have an answer?” Rachel said.

“If you can call it an answer,” said the Judge. “He said he was opposed to capital punishment, but that if society insists on executing Simmonds, it certainly shouldn’t be by hanging.”

“Really?” said Rachel.

“Not by hanging, or strangulations or poisonings, or any kind of bloodless method.” Her father smiled at the memory. “He said all the great civilizations of the past believed that if a man is to be executed, his blood must flow, or else his spirit won’t escape. Then all kinds of social problems would be the result.” He shook his head, smiling at her. “Can you imagine hearing such superstitious nonsense from an educated man? Of course, Vanderlinden denies he really believes it literally—just that we ought not to disregard long-held customs too lightly.” The Judge put his coffee cup down with a clatter. “I told him this kind of thing might be all very fine down in the jungle somewhere. But not in a modern society. We believe in morality and the protection of our citizens. Hanging’s too good for the likes of Simmonds.”