Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (38 page)

“My youngest is a sergeant in the army. He’d be about your age. Although of course I don’t know if the ranks are the same in the police.” She broke an egg into the bowl. “I’m going to make you boys some apple pancakes for lunch. None of my children have stayed on the farm. It’s true all around here. All the children have gone to the city for better jobs. Soon there will be no one left farming the land. You can’t make a living on a hundred-acre farm nowadays, and the children find the life too hard. I’m not blaming them. I don’t think things are the same as when I grew up. When I was a girl, you only knew the towns and the people right around you. Who even got to Ottawa, let alone saw what life could be like in Hollywood or Paris. Today communities are losing that bond. Families are moving out, and incomers are buying up the land to escape the city. Ironic, isn’t it? But no matter how long a stranger has been here, he’s a stranger if he wasn’t born on the land. Silly, really. I liked Ruth, and I was glad for her friendship, but a lot of people wondered about her. They knew she’d grown up in London in a fancy house before the war, and they wondered why she would marry a drunken foreigner and come to live a poor life in a small Ottawa Valley town. People left here, they didn’t move here. Folks wondered that they never showed up for church except Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday at St. James Anglican. It raises eyebrows and suspicions, I can tell you. I always meant to speak to Ruth about it, but—well, the time never seemed right.”

The sweet fragrance of butter and cinnamon filled the air as Mrs. MacLeod dropped the batter into the pan. Green’s stomach contracted emptily, distracting him from the questions he wished to ask. With an effort he forced his mind back on track.

“Did you know them when they lived in Renfrew as well?”

She shook her head. “We did most of our shopping in Eganville, which is closer. Only occasionally did we go into Renfrew, and never to their hardware store. But some of the folks around here knew of them, and that’s how the rumours spread.”

“What rumours?”

“Oh, I meant about her fancy house in London and them not going to church. There’s even a rumour one of the children was not baptized.”

Hardly a crime in today’s day and age, Green thought but behaved himself.

“What did Ruth tell you about her life in England and about meeting Eugene?”

“Not much. She was very loyal to Eugene and seemed to act like everyone thought the worst of him. She said both her parents had died just after the war, so she really had no reason to stay in England. She had a brother, but he’d been killed in the war. Eugene was the big mystery, though.”

Green glanced up sharply. “How so?”

“Ruth confided to me once that he had no idea what his life had been before the war.”

Five

May 13th, 1940

Three days three nights blurred together by my fear.

Eyes shut, ears tuned to every sound.

Her screams, the sibilant hush of Marzina’s voice,
the squeak of bedsprings and footfalls around the room.

Dimly from down below, the drumming of hooves up to the gate.

Later Marzina weeps in prayer, rosary beads clicking,
And a black terror swamps me.

I drown, washed numb by my liebling’s screams
until a thin wail wavers out through the door.

They invite me in to the miracle, swaddled in white,
And she wraps tiny fingers around my thumb.

Smiles and vodka all around, but new sadness in the farmer’s eyes.

His own two sons kidnapped to serve the master race.

Deutschland has devoured us, left only the old and powerless.

We must hide you, Tadeuzs says, erase all sign that you are here.

So the farmer and I begin to dig.

“This case gets weirder
and weirder,” Green remarked as they headed back towards the OPP station in Renfrew. “Now we’ve got a dead German World War Two vet who claimed he didn’t know who the hell he was.”

“You don’t really buy that crap, do you?” Sullivan asked.

“Maybe he really doesn’t remember. The stuff we’ve learned about sexually abused kids—about them blocking the whole thing from memory—that tells us anything is possible if the trauma is horrible enough. War’s a horrible trauma, for sure, but the question is—is it horrible enough? As Don Reid said, lots of men went through the war.”

Sullivan grunted but drove in silence, hunched over the wheel, his brows drawn down over his eyes.

Green frowned at him. “You were pretty quiet back there. This is your home turf. You should be full of impressions.”

“That’s the problem,” Sullivan muttered.

“What does that mean?”

Sullivan shook his head. “Nothing. Just brings back memories.”

“Come on, didn’t you have one of those idyllic, big family, down-on-the-farm types of childhood?”

“You got part of it right.” Sullivan glanced over. “Let’s forget it. You’re right, this is getting weirder and weirder.”

“I wonder what Gibbs has unearthed about Walker’s immigration record. I want you to call him when we get back to Renfrew.”

“Hey! You know Gibbs will run circles for you. Don’t ride his ass.”

Green let the silence lengthen, but Sullivan’s mood piqued his curiosity. “Tell me, are things as bad as people say about these country cliques? About the importance of religion and lineage and sticking to your own kind.”

Sullivan nodded. “Especially with the old timers. It’s opened up now, with the younger generation coming and going, but when I was growing up, boy, it was the Poles, the Irish and the Protestants, and you bloody well toed the line. But I can tell you, a hell of a lot of nasty, unChristian stuff went on in the name of religion and Christian morals.”

Tell me about it, Green thought wryly.

By the time the two detectives arrived back at the Renfrew OPP station, Karl Dubroskie had been waiting for over two hours. The farmer paced the outer hall in his mud-caked boots, which looked ludicrously oversized on his spindly legs. An old army peacoat hung open over his sunken chest, and his blue eyes glowered in his leathery face. Green realized that any chance for a friendly, cooperative interview had long vanished.

“You boys from Ottawa might think I got nothing better to do than sit here watching the clock tick, but I do. I got snow fencing to patch and cows to milk, so you got ten minutes and you better make it good.”

Green dispatched Kennelly to bring a pot of coffee and ushered Dubroskie politely into the little interview room at the rear. The farmer looked around the barren room with grim satisfaction. “I sat in this very room the last time I set foot in this station, to talk about Walker beating up my cousin. I don’t know why you want to see me about that, I got nothing to say. Everything I know I told Wells, and that was piss all. I got no reason to lie. Walker…he was nothing to me but a drunken old Polack, and I wasn’t even sure about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean ‘what do I mean’?”

“What weren’t you sure of?”

Dubroskie looked bewildered as he tried to retrace his steps. He grew sullen. “I don’t know. Just he didn’t act very Polish, that’s all.”

“In what way?”

Dubroskie fidgeted, then gestured vaguely with his hands. “He didn’t act like we were…together. He didn’t even seem to like us.”

Green kept his face impassive as he proceeded. “What about your cousin? What kind of man was he?”

“He didn’t start it, if that’s what you’re saying. He’s a hardworking guy that just wants to stay out of trouble. He had plenty of it back in Poland, and he’s just trying to make a good life.”

“What kind of trouble did he have in Poland?”

Dubroskie’s eyes narrowed warily, as if he’d sensed too late a trap. “My cousin’s a good, honest man and a fine Canadian citizen. If you got any questions about him, you go ask him yourself.”

“Oh, I’d be happy to, Mr. Dubroskie,” replied Green cheerfully. “If you’ll be so kind as to give me his full name and address.”

Once Dubroskie had left the room, Sullivan turned to Green in dismay. “You’re not going to go all the way to Hamilton. Jules will never approve the travel request. He’d kill us if he knew we were out here pounding the pavement. He’d kill us if he knew we’ve invested good time on a guy MacPhail says died of natural causes.”

Green grinned as he shrugged on his parka. “Well, you only die once, right? Besides, it’s on our own time, and I’m paid to make executive decisions. I’m making one.”

Sullivan had opened his mouth to escalate his protest when there was a sharp knock on the door, and Kennelly stuck his head in.

“We’ve got a guy here who used to be a good friend of Howard Walker’s. You said you wanted background witnesses. He’s one of the few we could find.”

Green looked at his scowling colleague and shrugged. “What the hell, we’re here.”

Jeff Tillsbury proved to be a sensitive, articulate man in his mid thirties who had gone to Guelph University to study Veterinary Medicine. He had opened a practice on his return to Renfrew ten years earlier and had kept in sporadic touch with Howard throughout the intervening years. If he thought there was anything odd about two Ottawa police officers making routine background inquiries into the deceased’s “state of mind”, he gave no sign as he delved candidly into the family’s past.

“Howard will be very upset by his father’s death,” he said. “He didn’t get along with him—actually, that’s an understatement. By the end he hated his father as much as he loved him. I have never seen Howard so upset as when he’d just been dealing with his father. They hadn’t spoken for five years, and Howard told me that as far as he was concerned, he no longer wanted anything to do with his father. He kept in touch with his mother through his sister but refused to call or write to the house.”

“Do you know the reason for this rift?”

“Yes.” Jeff hesitated as if weighing how much to betray a confidence. “Howard married a Jewish girl he met at McGill. Not only Jewish, but wealthy, and her father was very influential in the Montreal Jewish community. From what he told me, I gathered his father was very upset.”

Beside him, he felt Sullivan fidget awkwardly, but Green had long ago learned not to let personal reactions show through.

“Did his father attend the wedding?”

“Oh, no. Howard said his father wouldn’t be caught dead in a synagogue. In any case, he wasn’t well enough. I went. I was the only one from around here whom Howard invited. It was a beautiful wedding, and his wife seems very nice.”

“Were Howard and his father on good terms before the marriage?”

“As long as I’ve known Howard, Detective—and that’s about thirty years—his relationship with his father has been difficult.” Jeff ran his long-boned fingers over his thinning scalp and frowned in search of words. “No one—not Howard’s mother, not his sister—really understood how his father used to torture Howard. Maybe if Howard had been thicker-skinned, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But Howard was a sensitive kid. He liked poetry and wild birds. He cried when kids picked on him in school. And they sure did. They picked on him for having an immigrant father, because he was half Catholic—we went to the public school—and of course for just being a sissy. They picked on him because he was small and skinny.” Jeff shook his head wryly at the memory. “We were both small and skinny.”

Green nodded, remembering. He’d been small and slight as a boy too, and the inner city streets had been a cruel training ground in the concept of might is right. It hadn’t influenced his decision to join the police, but he had to admit to a secret twinge of satisfaction whenever his rank and profession cowed some swaggering brute into submission. “That can be pretty rough on a boy.”

“Yes. Whenever Howard came home from school in tears, his father would throw him back outside with an order to beat the kids up and not come back till he did. He called him an old woman, so Howard learned to keep his hurts to himself and lie to his father about how many boys he’d beaten up. His father seemed to despise all the qualities about Howard that made him really special—his gentleness, his compassion, his moral sense. Howard could never seem to do anything right in his father’s eyes. He could never seem to please him. His father was tremendously moody, I noticed that even as a kid. One day he’d take Howard and me into the back of the shop and show us some beautiful new fishing lure. Another day he’d bite our heads off and throw us out of the shop. He scared me. I hated to go over there. I can’t imagine living with him! Howard was always trying to second-guess him, to anticipate his moods and avoid at all costs something that would set him off.”

Green jumped into the flow of memories. “How did Howard’s mother figure in all this?”

Jeff shifted his lanky body in the chair and stroked his bald spot. “She tried to keep the peace, basically. Tried to coach the children on how to avoid aggravating their father. I do remember at times she tried to act as a buffer—you know, she wouldn’t tell her husband that someone had stolen Howard’s hat or dumped his bike in the ditch. With the bike incident I remember it backfired on her, and he accused her of turning the children against him. There was a scene in the back of the shop that day. I was there helping Howard after school, and I remember his father screaming at her and throwing merchandise around. Everyone was hiding behind the shelves. Howard was mortified. He never would discuss the incident with me.”

“Did his father beat him?” Sullivan had been taking discreet notes and spoke for the first time since the interview had begun. Green was startled, not only by the unexpected interruption but also by the tightness in Sullivan’s tone.