The Taken Read online

  The Taken

  Inger Ash Wolfe

  The eagerly awaited second novel from the author of the widely acclaimed debut mystery The Calling.

  DI Hazel Micallef is still recovering from back surgery when a report comes in that a body has been found in a nearby lake, snagged under several feet of water. But as DC Wingate says, the whole thing is way too eerie. The first installment of a story has just been published in the local paper: a passage that describes in detail just such a discovery. Real life is far too close to fiction for coincidence.

  The second novel featuring Hazel Micallef is a stunning and suspenseful exploration of the obsessive far reaches of love. It will confirm Inger Ash Wolfe as one of the best mystery writers there is.

  Inger Ash Wolfe

  The Taken

  The second book in the Hazel Micallef Mystery series, 2009

  To the Eclipse Café,

  with thanks for the corner

  Love never dies a natural death.

  – Anaïs Nin

  Prologue

  What always broke his heart was the way they dressed themselves. Divorcées in wedding gowns slumped behind the wheel in their garages; stockbrokers in Armani hanging from basement joists; the jilted plunging from rooftops drenched in cologne or perfume, as if to say their wrecked bodies still had more to offer in death than anyone had ever known in life.

  This one wore a pair of black jeans over Blundstone boots, a faded green T-shirt, and a black wool sweater. A thin leather cord served as a necklace from which a silver lamb hung, her only piece of jewellery apart from a gold hoop edged with a curlicue design, like a Sufi sun, dangling from one ear. He pictured someone giving her that lamb and wondered what had been meant by it. That she was innocent? That she needed protection? Obviously, it hadn’t been enough.

  They’d pulled her up onto the grass, and the discoloured lakewater drained from inside her pantlegs, a thin, greyish trickle that ran down between the green stalks. He couldn’t help thinking that the roots of the grass would gratefully take in this water, insensate to its origin, because it had been a dry summer and grass was oblivious to what came from it or what returned to it.

  The photographer was taking pictures. The girl would never know. Her story was only just beginning to be told. You lived your life, making choices that you thought would become the plot of your life as you wanted to live it, but the fact was, someone else always wrote the end. It was no mystery people hated movies where the protagonist died: who needs that kind of realism?

  He didn’t want to imagine what she’d been through, but he was like a receptor that has no choice what signal enters it. He imagined the cold, pressing lake, the way water holds you, its molecules tight against your body. She’d probably heard it was a peaceful way to go: it wasn’t. Even if you want to die, your body resists. You know breathing is the only way to make it work, but you don’t want to, you can’t. And then you begin to change your mind, you want to live because you’ve never felt pain like this, but it’s too late, the screaming in the blood has started, the brain starving for oxygen, and you fight, using up all your reserves, the urgent craving for air gets worse. You’re just an animal now, one in the wrong element, you flail for the surface, the sun fractured into diamonds above you, but finally you breathe and for the thirty seconds, before the water adulterates your blood and makes your heart a double ruin, the agony is unnameable, your mind is a fiery mass, you really die, you feel every moment of it. He kneeled down beside her. All that terror was over now, but she still wore the surprised expression he’d seen too many times on floaters. She was no older than thirty.

  For the rest of his life, she would be dead. She would miss all the changes that would have come to make her think twice about what she’d done. He, himself, would go through depression and contentment, joy and agony. He would fail, he would thrive, and still this girl, like all the others who couldn’t give life one more day, would be gone. What he tried to do for them in death always felt like an empty triumph, but at least he would try to do it. Tell me everything, he said to her in his mind. Tell me the truth and I’ll let it be known.

  1

  Thursday, May 19

  Glynnis Pedersen’s house was full of clocks. There were silver mantel clocks with lunar white faces, wall clocks made from antique car parts, clocks created from the refuse of old metal advertisements, a couple of small digital clocks, one grandfather clock in the front hall that no longer worked, and, beside the bed in the basement apartment, an LED motion clock that displayed a message in mid-air between two prongs. This one Glynnis had programmed to read “Rise and Shine!!” which message it displayed no matter one’s state of wakefulness. For Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef, once a Mrs. Pedersen herself, it only served as a reminder of whom, exactly, Glynnis Pedersen was rising and shining with.

  To have to take charity from a hated person was bad enough, but to do it out of necessity entailed a diminishment of one’s sense of self that Hazel found hard to accept. She knew loss of pride was an occupational hazard for those who were proud, but did it have to mean being vanquished as well? Sometimes it seemed to Hazel that the situation she found herself in was one concocted for her by the Greek gods. To punish what, she couldn’t be sure. But she had a feeling she was going to find out.

  She was now a tenant in her ex-husband’s house. The roots of this strange situation were in an evening she’d spent the previous fall with him at The Laughing Crow. It was there, over drinks, that she’d hinted she might need some extra-marital nursing if her damaged back finally gave in. She’d asked him to imagine her eighty-seven-year-old mother carrying her to the bathroom. He’d fairly blanched at what she was asking him, and Glynnis, hearing of it, laughed at it as if it were a harebrained scam cooked up by one of her drug-addled clients. But then December had happened. A serial killer had drifted through their town like a deadly gas. A murder under her own roof. And a night in the bone-chilling cold and dark that left her back shattered and her mother nearly dead. Remembering, the events lined up in her mind with a kind of dreadful inevitability, but that didn’t make them any more believable. She’d had emergency surgery, but by the end of March it became clear that, in the words of her specialist, her back had “failed.” Your first surgery is your best chance, your second is your last, was something Dr. Pass had been fond of saying, but he’d stopped saying it in March. By that point, last chances were all Hazel had.

  She and her mother had lived together not unpleasantly in the house in Pember Lake for over three years, since her divorce from Andrew. But the pain was keeping her from work, and more than once after the new year her mother had supported her on frail shoulders and taken Hazel to the bathroom: the hyperbolic scenario she’d described to Andrew boiled down to something real. Emily had finally gone to Andrew and Glynnis and laid it out. She characterized the discussion as “brief.”

  “I used legal language so they’d understand it,” she explained to Hazel. “I said the statute of limitations on marital duties was five years and that it covered all pre-existing conditions.”

  “How did Glynnis like that?”

  “She was smiling so tightly I thought her lipstick would squirt off her little lips.” Emily smiled herself, that wicked smile that said she’d been in charge her whole life. “That woman has a mouth like a cat’s anus,” she said. “Andrew understood though.”

  “And?”

  “They’ve given their tenants a month’s notice. Family, they said.”

  “Well that’s nice,” said Hazel. “At least we’re still family.”

  She lay in bed, staring at the small, high window in the wall opposite. The suggestion of late May sunlight was faint, but her mother had assured her it was there. She popped the lid of the little orange vial she
was gripping in her fist and put the edge of it against her bottom lip. The thick, white pill tumbled onto her tongue. Sometimes she chewed it, this salty, bitter capsule. It worked faster this way, and the truth was, it had a little kick on it if it went down pulverized. It was now ten days after her second operation. She was taking three of them a day and there were two more refills on the label of the little orange vial. Sometimes the pain came back before it was time for the next pill and she’d take it early, send it like a fireman down a pole, the alarms shrieking everywhere. The one she’d just taken was already working: its promised six to eight hours of relief had begun with the May light outside the tiny window suddenly thickening. Glynnis might have had her clocks, but she had her pills, and they told the time with utter accuracy.

  In her current state, she had more in common now with her younger daughter, Martha, that beloved and feckless child who kept Hazel more or less in a state of constant worry. Jobless, loveless, dogged by depression and incapable of making a constructive choice, Hazel sometimes wondered if Martha’s problems were selfmade, or if they were genetics. Looking at either side of the family (Andrew? Emily?) it was hard to credit heredity, but shipwrecked and miserable as Hazel was, she had to wonder if there wasn’t some kind of tendency in the blood to fall apart. Maybe only on the Micallef side. She hadn’t seen Martha in a couple of months, and she’d been careful to keep upbeat on the phone with her: no point in getting the girl more worked up than she normally was. Hazel knew that Martha teetered on a thin line when it came to her mother: on one side was resentment for everything Hazel did and had to do for her, on the other was a savage terror of loss. It meant shielding her, softening reality for her. And with her elder daughter, Emilia, living out west, it meant that Hazel felt even more alone than she needed to. But such were the facts of her motherhood.

  Her own mother came down the stairs bearing a tray. Andrew’s beef stew, one of three things he cooked, all in the key of cow. Emily put the tray down beside the bed and arranged the pillows behind her daughter’s back so she could sit up straight enough to eat. It was this routine three times a day: the prisoner brought her meals. “Glynnis too tired to cook?”

  “She’s got a late night,” her mother said.

  “He should keep tabs on her.” She accepted the bowl of steaming stew and the end of a crusty loaf. “She’s got a wandering eye.”

  “That’s wishful thinking.”

  Hazel tucked into the meal. Everyone had a beef-stew “secret;” Andrew’s was Guinness. The only real secret was time. Given a pound of stringy, nigh-inedible beef, a few cups of water, two mealy potatoes, and maybe an onion, anyone with six hours could make a perfectly edible stew. She leaned forward to put the fork in her mouth and her scarred lower back resisted her. The pain was different than it had been before either surgery: it wasn’t sharp, like there was broken glass rattling around in her; it was deep and resonant. Seated in her marrow. She had to breathe through it. “You eat?” she asked her mother.

  “I kept Andrew company.”

  “Are you working both ends against the middle?”

  “What’s the other end, Hazel?”

  “Glynnis.”

  “I gather that makes you the middle.” “I’m always the middle, Mother.”

  “May 26 you get to be the middle, Hazel. Birthdays and anniversaries only. All the other days you’re on the outside looking in, like the rest of us.”

  “You had to remind me, huh?”

  “Sixty-two,” said Emily. “My little girl is finally going to be a woman.”

  Emily continued to leaf through the growing pile of magazines beside the bed. Celebrity rags, local newspapers, travel magazines with colourful full-page pictures that teased Hazel with hints of a future out of bed. She ate in silence as her mother idly flipped the pages of one of the celebrity magazines. She held up a picture of a woman no older than twenty, one of the new crop of pop stars whose names neither of them could ever remember. She was parading down a street in Hollywood in a dress big enough to cover a volleyball, almost, with a grease-soaked paper bag in one hand and her purse slung over her shoulder. A tiny dog with a pointy face poked out of the top of the purse. “In a just society,” said Emily, “almost everything this child is doing would be illegal. She should be arrested, stuck in a housecoat, and made to listen to Guy Lombardo records until she smartens up.” She held the page up to her daughter. At that age, the worst either of Hazel’s daughters had ever done was wear torn jeans, listen to Madonna, and occasionally puke hard lemonade all over the bathroom. How did girls like this one get so lost? Did people get lost quickly, or did it happen over time?

  Emily collected the tray off the bed. “You want dessert?”

  “No.”

  She held up a newspaper. Thursday’s Westmuir Record. “You read this yet?”

  “It’s probably the same as last Thursday’s. Not to mention Monday’s. But leave it.”

  “You’re falling behind on your papers. You don’t want your news getting stale, do you?” Hazel laughed at the thought of events passing so quickly in Westmuir that you’d have to make an effort to keep up. “At least it’ll pass the time without your having to resort to staring at pictures of nearly naked girls eating hamburgers.” Apart from the biweekly visits from Detective Constable James Wingate, the Record was her only window on the world she lived in. The paper that had been a thorn in her side for all of the previous fall was now necessary to her sanity. She held her hand out for it.

  “What are you going to do now?” Hazel asked.

  “I told Andrew I’d do the crossword with him.”

  “I should have seen Andrew’s facility with those things as a sign.”

  “Of what?”

  “That he knew how to disguise himself.”

  Emily Micallef patted her daughter’s hand. “If he didn’t, he’d be the only man on earth who lacked the talent.” She put Hazel’s fork and napkin in the bowl and moved the bowl into the middle of the tray. When she got to the door that led to the upstairs hall, Hazel called to her.

  “Mum?”

  “What is it?”

  “Ask him to come see me. Please?”

  “Read the paper,” Emily said. “They’ve already started the summer short story. The Record’s gift to us all for putting on our best May-long-weekend faces.”

  Hazel glanced at the headline – “Welcome Cottagers!” – and immediately put the paper down.

  2

  Friday, May 20

  Detective Constable James Wingate did not like being in charge of anything. His whole life, he’d been a brilliant follower of instructions: he’d been born to carry out the orders of others. He’d sometimes wondered if this made him some kind of perfect soldier, if, in another time and place, he’d have been the tool of a lesser regime. He knew he had it in him to cross the line; he’d been inspired at times by anger. But a righteous anger, he told himself, usually carried out a just vengeance.

  Following orders had landed him in temporary charge of the Port Dundas OPS detachment, much to the mostly silent discomfort of many men and women his senior. He’d been the new guy when he arrived from Toronto only six months earlier and his nature had permitted him to navigate the many twists of fitting in to a new place. But with her deputy, Ray Greene, gone, he was the one OPS Central had turned to to hold the fort while DI Micallef got back on her feet.

  He played messenger as best he could, but he knew even his biweekly visits to the house on Chamber Street did not disguise the fact that he was actually in charge. He came back bearing her instructions, but the other officers knew he had her blessing in most things to do as he saw fit. He wrote out the weekly schedule, heard out differences of opinion, assigned the beats, and approved time off. The only thing he didn’t do was sit in Hazel’s office. His co-workers accepted his strange ascent only because failing to do so would add to their CO’s suffering. But Wingate could feel their resentment simmering.

  Luckily, the late winter and early spr
ing had been quiet in Port Dundas. Life had returned to the normal Hazel had described to him when he first arrived. The weekly B & E, the biweekly domestic, the monthly car theft. It was so regular here that the older cops joked they should have sign-up sheets for perps to fill in before they committed the quota of smalltime offences they dealt with in the county. Once in a while something would crop up that would knock them out of their rituals, and the meeting room would fill for an hour while they discussed what to do. They’d get Hazel on conference call and try not to picture her bedbound as she listened and responded to the case. In early April, there’d been a rape in Silltoe, halfway to Humber Cottage on the 121. A sixteen-year-old girl had been thrown from a car, naked and unconscious. She’d had no memory of what had happened to her. They listened to Hazel’s silence from both sides of the table, her breathing audible in the little black console. “Jesus,” she finally said. “Are we sure she’s not protecting someone?”

  “Who would she want to protect?” PC Ashton had said.

  “The assholes who presumed she’d be found dead by the side of the road?”

  “Do you have daughters, Adrian?”

  “No.”

  “Girls this age think whatever happens to them is their fault. In my day, it was unthinkable to report a rape. If you got into trouble with a guy, it was your own damn fault. Things haven’t changed as much as we like to think.”

  Wingate leaned forward over the speakers. “I really think this girl doesn’t remember a thing.”

  “Get one of her girlfriends into the room. Have her tell the victim that no one thinks what happened to her is her fault. Tell her the whole school is sick about it and everyone wants these monsters to pay. See what she says.”