Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (94 page)

The two detectives found Reginald Taylor holding court in what the nurse euphemistically called the games room. The air was hot, stale and smelled faintly of urine. Most of the occupants lined the walls in wheelchairs and turned blank, disinterested stares towards the door when the two walked in. Four men were grouped around a table near the window, playing cards.

“Reggie,” the nurse chirped. “You have visitors.”

Four faces swivelled towards the door, eager for the diversion, but Green had no trouble distinguishing the object of their quest. Reverend Taylor was a bony, shrunken bird of a man with liver-spotted skin and a tangle of white eyebrows. He was impeccably dressed in black with a white clerical collar, and his pale blue eyes danced as if amused by some private joke.

The merriment died as soon as Sullivan explained to him the reason for their visit.

“A body? In my church? Great Jiminy Cricket!”

“Not inside, Reverend. Outside. It appears he may have jumped.”

“Oh dear, oh dear. I always tried to make it a sanctuary. There is so much pain and hardship in the world as it is, don’t you think, Sergeant? Sullivan, is it? Catholic, I suppose. No matter, my son. We’re all God’s children, and the divisions we make are not the Lord’s. Suffer the children and all that... One of my flock, you say?”

“Reverend, we don’t know if it was one of your flock,” Sullivan began. “That’s—”

“No matter, they were all my flock. Everyone was welcome to hear the Lord’s word, that was always my belief, and—” The lilt of Newfoundland still clung to his vowels, and his grin held a hint of mischief. Green had never met a Newfoundlander without a rebel’s sense of humour. “If it made some of the families uncomfortable, well, they just had to adjust. Tried to drive me out once before, too. Lucky for me the pastor at Rideau Church of God was a fool—”

Green laid Ident’s digitally doctored photo of the dead man down on the card table. “Is this one of your flock?”

Taylor picked up the photo and gazed at it in a distracted way. His tangled brows knit further. “Well, of course, I haven’t had a flock in several years. How many, Nancy? Three?”

“Eighteen.”

Taylor looked shocked. “Nonsense. They drove me out, see, said I was too old, couldn’t handle the demands. Nonsense. That pastor at Rideau Church of God wanted the crowd. He’d been driving away congregants with his thundering about brimstone and hellfire, so he thought he’d better steal mine—”

“Reverend, do you know this man?” Green repeated.

Taylor shifted his gaze back to the photo and eyed it with surprise. “This man’s dead!”

“Yes, he jumped off the tower.”

“Now why would he do that? I always welcomed people, even the sick, the poor, the deranged. There but for the grace of—”

Green swore a silent prayer of his own for patience. But before he could speak, Nancy jumped in. “Reggie! The police haven’t got all day! Look at the picture.”

Meekly, Taylor peered at the photo and slowly wrinkled up his nose, as if he could smell the man. “Seen better days, I’d say.”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

“Never known them to be so dirty. Always a particular family. The mother kept them all well-scrubbed behind the ears, father wouldn’t allow so much as a fart indoors. Hard to imagine it could be one of them.”

“One of whom?”

“Could be, mind you. But with that beard and all that blood, well...” As if sensing Nancy’s imminent tongue-lashing, he nodded at the photo with some vigour. “Could be one of the Pettigrews. Don’t know which one. They all looked alike, and they were mere lads the last time I saw them.”

“Were the Pettigrews a family in Ashford Landing?”

“Oh, not in Ashford Landing. They had a farm just north of town off Number 2. Nice spread, backed on the river.”

Green glanced at Sullivan, who discreetly put his notebook away and slipped outside to verify the address. With any luck, they could stop by the farm on their return to Ashford Landing. Green took out his own notebook and returned to the brighteyed old man. “Did the Pettigrew family attend your church?”

“Pettigrews helped build it, every limestone block of it, back in 1896. Before my time, of course, but there have always been Pettigrews at Ashford Methodist Church, until that pastor at Rideau Church of God started his hellfire and damnation. What did you say your name was, my son?”

“Michael Green. Inspector Green.”

Taylor glanced at Nancy with twinkling eyes. “They make them younger every year, don’t they, Nan. All except you and me.”

Green smiled. He was over forty, and a little grey had just begun to pepper his fine brown hair, but his skin was still unlined, and a spray of freckles across his nose gave him a deceptively innocent air. Which came in handy when he wanted to go unnoticed.

“Irish too, are you?” Taylor persisted. “Mind, I’ve nothing against the Irish. Worked side by side with us to build up this country, and I’ve no patience for those who say otherwise.”

Green hesitated. In the city, his Semitic nose sometimes gave him away, but out in the country, Green suspected few of the old-timers would have ever met a Jew. Moreover, the reverend’s concept of religious diversity seemed to be more than a century out of date, and Green wasn’t sure the man’s welcoming attitude would extend that far. Instead of responding, he plucked the photo from the Reverend’s reluctant fingers, thanked the man for his help and headed gratefully towards the fresh outside air.

Sullivan was just coming back from the car. Across the road behind him, a solitary tractor was chugging slowly along an open field, and the smell of manure wafted over the road. Green wrinkled up his nose. “Let’s hope this Pettigrew family grows corn, not cows.”

Sullivan laughed. “That’s fertilizer, Green. Great stuff! The Pettigrew farm will be knee-deep in it, no matter what they grow.”

Fortunately, when Green and Sullivan turned down the long lane leading up to the Pettigrew farm house, there were no tractors to be seen. The country air was sharp and clean, despite a faint overlay of turpentine, a smell Green was all too familiar with these days. A minivan and a dusty turquoise Sunbird sat in the gravel drive and as Sullivan drew to a stop behind them, a tiny poodle burst through the front door, yapping.

A young woman strode out, waving her arms. “Chouchou, stop!
Assez!”

The dog raced around the car like a frenzied cotton ball, growling and snapping every time Sullivan tried to open the door. Green knew better, having become somewhat more versed in the canine psyche since acquiring his oversized Humane Society reject. He showed the woman his badge through the window and sat in the car waiting for her to capture her dog. By the time she pounced on it and shoved it under her arm, she was panting as hard as it was. As she approached the car again, the odour of turpentine grew stronger and Green saw flecks of white paint on her hands. She leaned against the car, her chest heaving and her cheeks flushed. Even in tattered jeans and
T
-shirt with a paint smudge on her nose, she was a sexy, vibrant woman.

“Sorry, officers. We just moved in, and Chouchou is...” She ended the explanation with a Gallic shrug. Her accent was slightly French Canadian, more in its cadence than its words. “He’ll be all right once he gets to know you. What is this about?”

The two detectives exchanged quick glances before Sullivan took the lead. “We’re looking for Mr. or Mrs. Pettigrew.”

She looked puzzled. “They were the previous owners, but they don’t live here any more.”

“Can you tell us where we might reach them?”

“We only met them one time. We communicated through a real estate agent.”

“
Qu’est-ce qui se passe?”
A reedy young man appeared around the edge of the house carrying a leaf rake. He was smiling, but behind thick glasses his gaze was wary. “What’s going on?”

“It’s the police looking for the former owners.”

The detectives climbed out of the car and introduced themselves. Sullivan handed them his card, then indicated his notebook. “For our paperwork, could you give us your names?”

Jacques and Isabelle Boisvert, the woman said, but they could be of little help since they had only met one of the sons.

Sullivan pulled out the photo. “Is this the son?”

Jacques took the photo and recoiled in dismay. “This man is dead!”

“That’s why we’re anxious to reach the family. Have you the name and phone number of the real estate agent you dealt with?”

Isabelle fetched a business card, which Sullivan took back to the car to make the call. The husband was eyeing the photo with almost morbid fascination.

“Could that be the son?” Green prompted.

He shivered and shook his head. “This man is more aged. The man we met was Robert Pettigrew, and he was only in his twenties. No beard, very pleasant-looking.”

“Perhaps this is the father. You never met him?”

“He was in hospital. He had a stroke, the agent said. That’s why the son had to sell the farm so fast.” He cast an anxious glance at the vast unkempt meadow that surrounded them. In the distance, a copse of maples flamed red and gold against the blue sky. “The whole place is falling to pieces. Like nobody takes care of it since twenty years.”

Green appraised the house with his new expertise in disintegrating buildings. On closer inspection, he could see the tell-tale signs. The house was a stately, red brick Victorian with a steeply pitched roof. Its intricate wood trim had once been white but was now a weathered gray, and its windows were caked with grime. Roof shingles were lifting, and the front porch listed dangerously to one side.

Isabelle had taken the photo and was studying it thoughtfully. As if hearing the bitterness in her husband’s voice, she gave his arm a quick squeeze. “We will make it beautiful, I promise you. Why don’t you take Chouchou in the back to work with you, and I will walk these gentlemen to their car.”

With one last weary glance at his wife, Jacques slumped back around the house with the dog under one arm and the rake in the other. An oddly lifeless man to have snagged such a tantalizing woman, Green thought. Quietly, she gestured to the photo as she walked.

“I have seen this man. I didn’t want to say in front of Jacques, because he is negative enough about this place. He’s from Vanier, and he finds it very isolating here.”

I’ll just bet, Green thought. It would be a massive culture shock to move to this pastoral desolation from the close-knit clamour of the francophone inner city. “Where did you see this man?”

Isabelle nodded towards the right of the grounds and began to walk. About a hundred feet in front of the house was a rundown, square-timbered barn, and beside it, a wooden shed of similar vintage. But in the far corner of the yard opposite was an overgrown thicket of brush. It was here that Isabelle stopped.

“Yesterday, after Jacques left for church, Chouchou began to bark at something. It was fog outside, and frost on the ground, but I’m positive it was this man. He was in the brush here, ducking down, trying to hide. I thought he was a bum, and I yelled at him. He took off.”

“In what direction?”

Isabelle gestured towards the maple woods behind the farm house. “He went into those trees, and it’s the last I saw of him.”

“What’s beyond the trees?”

“The river. But there is a path along the shore through the trees, and I guess he escaped that way.”

Green peered through the dying foliage of the thicket where the man had hidden. Raspberry canes and scrub had been allowed to grow undisturbed for years, but there were signs that someone had been there recently. A path had been trampled into the centre, and the weeds had been flattened as if someone had lain there. Gingerly, Green got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the thicket, praying that he wouldn’t encounter any crawly things. In the middle of the thicket, charred wooden planking had been strewn about, and the grass had been dug up in little patches all over.

It looked for all the world as if someone had been searching for something.

Green gazed out the car window at the passing fields, deep in thought. In the distance, the ribbon of maple trees was slowly fading into the horizon.

“We should send an eager young constable out there to see where that path through the trees leads to,” he said.

Sullivan took his eyes off the road long enough to follow Green’s gaze. His eyes revealed nothing behind his mirrored sunglasses, but his lips twitched in a smile. “It leads to Ashford Landing.”

“How do you know?”

“That’s the way the country works. Farmers usually leave a border of trees along the river, and in the old days they’d bring their produce to the village either by boat or along the river’s edge in the shade. The Boisvert farm is about two kilometres from town. Perfect distance for foot paths.”

Green looked at the straight, flat road ahead of them. Why would the man go along the shore, he wondered, and have to contend with mud, cow crap, underbrush and swamp when he could walk straight along the road? Green could think of at least one good reason—to avoid being seen.

“So in all likelihood,” he said, “when our guy ran away from the farm yesterday morning, he got to the river and headed to Ashford Landing. Two kilometres, you said? That should have taken him no more than half an hour, which means he should have reached town before noon. MacPhail places the death after four p.m.”

“But remember he could have fallen earlier and bled for hours.”

“Okay, but he still might have been lurking around town for a couple of hours, which means he could have been seen.”

They had reached the outskirts of the village and Sullivan eased his foot off the accelerator, allowing them to coast over the crest and down into the tiny commercial centre. They passed the general store and the gas station before spotting a big yellow real estate agency sign on the lawn of a Victorian manor house painted a striking Wedgwood blue.

Sullivan had reached Sandy Fitzpatrick on his cell phone from the car, interrupting him in the middle of a showing. The agent had agreed to meet the detectives back at his office, but there was no answer when they rang the doorbell. An old silver Grand Am was tucked at the rear of the house, but the main drive was empty. Through the bay window, Green could see a large office with maps papering the walls and print-outs littering every surface. Looking up at the rambling size of the old home, he guessed that Sandy Fitzpatrick probably lived above his offices.