The Taken Read online

  “I’m a computer person,” said Portman. “What do you need?”

  “I just told you what I need.”

  Wingate stepped forward. “If you could just make us printouts of the emails, with full headers, that’d probably do for now.”

  “Hey, no problem,” said Portman, and she flounced behind the desk. Hazel got up and stood in the window, trying to control the urge to smack the girl. Portman disconnected the computer from a scanner, then unplugged the scanner and plugged in a printer, connected the USB cable from the printer to the computer and tried to print the two emails. “Whoops,” she said, “wrong cable. Hold on.” She fiddled for a couple of minutes, failed to find the problem, smiled emptily at Wingate, and called in an associate, a gangly guy with a mass of uncombed hair and a worried expression on his face. He fiddled with the cables for a couple of minutes before plugging the printer into the right sockets.

  “Okay Mizz Portman, that should, that should do ’er.” He almost hit the doorframe on the way out.

  “He has a crush on me,” said Portman.

  “Well, you’re adorable, aren’t you?” said Hazel.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “And you run a tight fort,” she added.

  “Well, there you go,” said Portman, handing Wingate the printouts. “Let me know if I can be of any more help.”

  She hop-skipped to the office door and opened it for them, relieved to have the visit over and done with. Hazel stopped halfway out. “One more thing, Mizz Portman.” The young woman waited behind the officers, a benign smile on her face. “Regardless of when the next chapter comes in, don’t print it.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You heard me. I don’t want you to publish another word of this story unless you have permission, personally, from me.”

  She looked to Wingate, hoping for a sign that Detective Inspector Micallef was joking. But she found no assurance in his eyes. “Well, I can’t do that,” she said. “I mean, I can send you the story as soon as we get it, but our readers are expecting -”

  Hazel took a step back into the office, and Portman quickly retreated. “What your readers are expecting is seven interesting things to do with celery and cream cheese. But if you run any more of this story without my permission, you’ll be directly interfering with an open police investigation. Do you want to do that?”

  “I, I’d have to ask Mr. Sunderland for permission to -” She stopped talking, staring at Hazel’s eyes. “If it’s that serious…”

  “If I even see a mention of ‘The Mystery of Bass Lake’ in tomorrow’s paper, I’m coming back here, alone. And your office crush won’t be any use to you if things go wrong in here again. You understand?”

  “I understand,” she said, making violent little metronomic nods with her whole face. “No story Thursday.”

  Hazel offered her hand, and the girl took it immediately. “Nice talking to you,” she said.

  Wingate walked with his hands in his pockets, his face pointed straight up the sidewalk. “What?” she said.

  “You ever heard the saying that you catch more flies with honey?”

  “Are you going to turn into my mother now, James?”

  “No.”

  “Because one is too many.”

  “It’s not Rebecca Portman’s fault she works for a man you hate. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “You’re the one who called her a fly.”

  “It’s your call.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “It is my call.” She looked at her watch. “I don’t think we can wait any longer to get news from Claire Eldwin. We better go up and see her. You call and make sure she’s there, but don’t tell her why we’re coming.”

  He got out his cell and dialled. There was no answer. “I’ll keep trying her,” he said.

  They turned down Porter Street and headed for the front doors of the station house. She walked into the detachment with her head down and went straight to PC Eileen Bail. “Tell me the web sequence now shows a map to where that guy is being held.”

  “Not quite.”

  “Not quite?”

  “It just happened,” said Bail. She turned the screen to Hazel and Wingate. It was a solid dark frame now. But something was shuddering. The camera was pulling back slowly.

  “What is it?”

  “Blood,” said Bail. “It’s blood, I think.”

  The zoom out took a full two minutes, revealing a number of shapes as it went. When the image was revealed, it was seven letters about fifteen inches high, and they spelled out the words SAVE HER. The letters were slowly flowing down the wall. They watched the image repeat a number of times. Hazel felt sick to her stomach. “Are you sure it’s blood?”

  “I don’t want it to be,” said Bail. She waved Sergeant Renald over. He was a trained SOCO officer. “What do you think?”

  He stared at the display. “‘Save’ who?” he asked.

  “Tell us if you think it’s blood,” said Wingate.

  Renald put his face close up to the screen. “The top edges are hardening as the fluid is washing down,” he said. “See the darkening line at the top of that round shape?”

  “Paint would do that,” said Hazel.

  “Paint dries,” said Renald. “Blood clots. Look at the lumps forming.”

  She wanted to puke. “Jesus Christ.” There was a whirring, tinny noise coming from somewhere, and she turned her head to listen to the speakers built into the computer, but the sound wasn’t coming from the video.

  “So, ‘save’ who?” Renald repeated.

  She pulled her head away from the computer but she still saw the letters bleeding down the wall in a basement somewhere. “That’s it,” she said, talking to the room. “I’m getting heartily sick of being the dog wagged by the tail. I want control, people – let’s everyone get working on what’s happening here. This town can go without parking tickets for a while until we figure this out.”

  Bail said, “I don’t think any of us know where to start.”

  “Begin by thinking it through. By the end of the day, I want one good idea from each of you… does everyone… what the hell is that sound?”

  The irregular, metallic noise was coming from somewhere behind her. Without another word, she pushed into the back of the pen and went in the direction of the sound. It wasn’t a fan, it was too loose, too rattly. No one stopped her as she made her way to the coffee station behind Windemere’s desk. There, beside the creamers sitting in their little plastic tub of ice, in a cage, and spinning a tiny exercise wheel at top speed, was the mouse that had popped out of the box. There was a small black scab on its lower lip. Its fur had faded to pale pink. Windemere was standing beside her. “We named him Mason,” she said. “We gave him a bath, which he didn’t much like. But he’s a lot better now.”

  Wingate was standing beside her. “Do you think someone is asking us to raise the dead?” he asked.

  She put her hand into her pants pocket and pushed past the little pill-shaped ball of tinfoil between her thumb and finger to her car keys. She passed them to Wingate. “Go see Claire Eldwin. Right now.”

  “On my own?”

  “On your own. And come back with some answers.”

  14

  Claire Eldwin lived thirty kilometres away in a town he’d never heard of, Mulhouse Springs. There were so many small towns in this part of Ontario that he figured you could live here for thirty years and not find them all. He was driving along Highway 79, to the west, below Gannon. There was a road every five hundred metres leading to cottages. If you owned a cottage up along here, then you were from away. It was like having another country nestled inside this one and he could see how the summers changed what home felt like for those who actually lived here.

  The disconnect between this landscape and what sometimes went on in it was still hard for Wingate to accommodate. In Toronto, it didn’t take a great effort to sense the seething chaos that moved beneath the surface of civilized life in the city. Th
ere was always something on the verge of happening: as an experienced police officer, you could scent it under the patina of order. You could almost move yourself to its contrapuntal beat, be in the right place just as something was about to happen.

  Only in the neighbourhoods where there was enough money and white skin to presume a kind of harmony did crime ever surprise you. Although not enough: there was always someone breaking down, a domestic that went ugly, someone craving silverware. Even so, his life at Twenty-one Division was truly clockwork: a drug bust at ten, a stolen bike at noon, a gunshot at two, high-school students threatening more than mere unrest at the Eaton Centre at exactly three-fifteen.

  But here, here in Westmuir County, everything had a fugitive nature. You couldn’t read those closest to you, and this was because everyone’s guard was down. (Well, except for Hazel. He felt naturally closer to Hazel than anyone, precisely because she was slightly paranoid.) And because it seemed no one had anything to hide, and not even the police lived in a state of alert suspicion, it was possible to run the kind of plot they were caught in now: someone using a lake, a newspaper, the internet, and colourfully wrapped packages to tie a leash around an entire police force and tug it in the direction they wanted it to go in. It made him wonder if someone had specifically chosen Westmuir to bring all this stuff to life. It was worth a thought.

  He’d called Eldwin’s house again on the way up and found the wife at home. She didn’t seem particularly surprised that he wanted to see her in person, just gave him proper directions and rang off. That only confirmed his theory. In Toronto, the police don’t call ahead, and what’s more, if they did, both sides of the conversation would hang up and immediately begin forming dire anticipations. Claire Eldwin, he found when he arrived, had put on the kettle.

  She came to the door in a shiny gold housecoat with pale blue jeans underneath, and she was smoking a handrolled. Out of habit, he sniffed the smoke and checked off the tobacco box mentally. She blinked at him in her doorway, looking him over with interest and gripping the doorframe like she was going to twist it out of the wall.

  It was a big house for two people, he thought, but it looked small because it was stuffed with furniture and knick-knacks. Either Eldwin or his wife collected obsessively. Cloth flowers, paperweights, small busts of famous composers, colourful replicas of birds in tiny gold cages. It all crowded in, making the rooms seem darker. She led him to an oval dining room table in wood that looked out onto a big garden full of larger, but equally extraneous, baubles. Cement arches, birdbaths, four little doghouses scattered along the serpentine flagstone paths that wound toward a stone fountain in the middle of the yard from its edges, looking as stranded as a ship run aground. There wasn’t a dog to be seen anywhere. He stood at the window as Mrs. Eldwin made tea. “It’s a quiet week,” she said. He looked at her quizzically. “You’re wondering why I have so many empty doghouses, aren’t you?”

  “It occurred to me.” There was something strange about that yard, he thought. It wasn’t just its busy emptiness, it was something else…

  “I sit dogs,” she said. “It was crazy busy over the long weekend, but there’s no one now. I had a St. Bernard, a Brittany spaniel, and a chihuahua for three days.”

  “Sounds like a Disney film.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  He turned away from the window. She was pouring hot water into a teapot. “How long have you lived in Mulhouse Springs, Mrs. Eldwin?”

  “You don’t look like your phone voice,” she said. “You sound like a small man on the phone, but you’re not.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I think.”

  “It’s a compliment.”

  He sat, accepting tea from her. “Well, thank you. You didn’t answer my question.”

  “We moved a year after the wedding.”

  She was at the very least extremely drunk. He could tell she’d been drinking when he spoke to her on the phone. A drunk interview could be good, but if you needed any of it later in court, someone might argue that the statements were unreliable. Still, he needed to know the basics. “And the wedding was when?”

  “What?”

  “When did you get married, Mrs. Eldwin?”

  “September… two thousand and one. It’ll be four years this fall.”

  “And before Mulhouse Springs, where did you live?”

  “ Toronto,” she said.

  “And why did you folks move up here? Mulhouse Springs isn’t exactly Yonge and Bloor.”

  “It was Colin’s decision,” she said, coming to the table. “He wanted more space.”

  “For what?”

  “To ‘think,’ he said.” She gave a nasty little laugh. “Writers, huh?”

  “What does he need to think about that he couldn’t think about in Toronto?”

  Her face suddenly became serious. “I’ve stopped asking.”

  Wingate put a cube of sugar into his tea and stirred it. “Tell me more about Colin.”

  “Like what?”

  “Who do you think he went to see in Toronto?”

  “Someone probably wanted to hire him to ghostwrite a computer manual. Or a biography of their cat.”

  “Is that how he makes a living?”

  She laughed that knowing, exasperated laugh again. “Make a living? Colin’s been working on the Great Canadian Novel for fifteen years. From long before I met him. He’s never published anything that actually had his name on it. You know, before the Westmuir Record.”

  Wingate nodded. An unpublished writer and a dog-sitter had bought this house? “How did the two of you meet?”

  Claire Eldwin reached behind her and took a pouch of Drum off the countertop and began to roll herself a cigarette. “In a class. Nine years ago. He sometimes fooled one of the colleges into hiring him to teach a continuing studies class.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “You know, adult education. Most institutions of higher learning have a cash cow on the side called ‘continuing studies.’ It’s evening classes taught by alcoholics and sexual deviants to anyone with a pulse and a chequebook. His class was called Get Published Now. You know the saying those who can’t, teach, right?”

  “I’ve heard it said.”

  “There’s a corollary: those who can’t teach, fuck their students on the side. That’s how we met. Romantic, huh?”

  “Well, you married him.”

  She lit the cigarette. “Guilty.”

  “And now you think he’s having an affair.”

  “Colin is always having an affair.”

  “He sounds like a super guy. What’s his novel about?”

  “Damned if I know. It’s the Great Canadian Novel. It’s probably about the snows of yesteryear. I can hardly wait. Do you want a drink?”

  “No, thank you. Do you know where your husband’s staying in Toronto?”

  “All I know is that it’s warm and wet.” “Mrs. Eldwin.”

  She stood and went into the kitchen and took a bottle of Grand Marnier out of the fridge. “This stuff gives you a wicked hangover and then you have to drink more of it to get rid of the hangover. It’s the perfect consumer product. Imagine making yourself necessary.”

  “I just want to get this straight,” he said. “The people who called your husband on Friday offered him a job, is that right?”

  “That’s what I understood.” She leaned on the counter. “Why are you so interested in my husband, Officer? Just lay it on me: what’s he done?”

  “He hasn’t done anything as far as we know. It’s just that… we think he might be in some trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “We’re not sure.” She looked at him, seemingly lost in thought. “Did you ever hire that PI?” he asked.

  “Your boss offered to be of use, so I didn’t. Should I have?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You don’t think my husband is fucking some bimbo, do you?”

  He hesitated a moment. “No, Ma’am. I don
’t.”

  “Well, you don’t know him, trust me.”

  “It doesn’t sound like I’d want to.”

  “No…” she said, rubbing an invisible mark off the counter-top. “You’d like him. Everyone likes him. He tries to be good.”

  “Is that why you tolerate his behaviour?”

  “I don’t tolerate it. I live with it.”

  “You’ve got plenty of choices, Mrs. Eldwin. You could leave him. You could kick him out. Hell, you could kill him.”

  She gave him a weird look. “You know, he tells me I should. Sometimes I think he’s just trying to preempt my anger, but I know he thinks he doesn’t deserve me.”

  “Do you think that?”

  “Everyone deserves their fate. You know that story about the rattlesnake that asks the horse to carry him across a flooded river?”

  “I haven’t heard that one.”

  “Snake says, Take me to safety, and the horse tells him to forget it, he’ll bite her if she lets him near. The snake says, If I bite you, we both die, and the horse sees his point and lets him get on her back. Halfway across, he bites her. You’ve killed us both, she says, why did you do that?”

  “Because it’s my nature,” said Wingate.

  “Right. How can I hate him for his nature?”

  “You don’t have to love his nature, but you don’t have to live with it, either.”

  She finally poured herself a drink. “You talk like a man who’s never been in love.” He watched her drain the Grand Marnier in one long draught. “You get used to being bitten when you’re in love. You find yourself getting used to the poison. You even start to crave it.”

  She was pitiful. He couldn’t rule out that she was crazy enough to tie her own husband to a chair in their basement and chop off his hand. Maybe Claire Eldwin was the “her” that needed saving. “Do you mind if I take a look around?”

  “Hey, mi casa, etcetera.”

  He thanked her and got up from the table, went down the hallway behind the living room. It was a nicely appointed house with some decent paintings on the walls and shelves of books and CDs. The house spoke of people who spent money easily. So where did it come from? There were bookshelves in the hallway full of paperbacks and piles of magazines with their spines hanging over the edge of the shelves. He picked one off the top: a copy of People from a couple of years ago. He pushed the door open that led into the master bedroom, with its neatly made bed. He was out of Mrs. Eldwin’s view now, and he pulled on a pair of black gloves and opened the closet doors. Four seasons’ worth of slacks and pants and dresses and dress shirts hung from a bar. He ran his hand along the shelf above and then quietly clapped the dust off his gloved fingertips.