Chapter Two
Sergeant Ames would never have known about the crime if he hadn’t, after some considerable thought, found an excuse to drive out to the Van Eyck garage near Balfour. The temperature had dropped suddenly, and though it was sunny, he was sure he could smell the first snow in the air. The stand of pale-skinned aspens behind the wooden house and garage still had a few hardy yellow leaves clinging to them after a good wind the night before.
Ames was grateful it hadn’t snowed yet. He pulled up onto the grassy parking area in front of the garage in the maroon car he drove for the Nelson police and tried to look nonchalantly like a man with a car in need of service. Instead of seeing Tina Van Eyck and her father hard at work on the car currently parked in the service bay, he found them standing in front of one of the two large, newly painted doors to the service area. Marring the new dark, barn-red wooden door was the word Bitch scrawled in messy black paint.
Tina turned as Ames got out of the car and put her hand up to shade her eyes from the bright November sun. Her blond curly hair was wrapped in its usual workday turban, and she had a wool shirt of thick brown plaid over her boiler suit.
“It’s hardly a police matter,” she said by way of greeting. “Dad, did you call him?”
“No, I didn’t. Good morning, Sergeant. You see what’s happened. We never had this sort of carry-on before the war,” Marcus Van Eyck said. He looked more anxious than his daughter, who just looked cross.
“Good grief!” said Ames. “When did this happen? What does it mean?”
“You have to ask?” Tina said with no little sarcasm.
“No, I didn’t mean that.” Ames felt himself blushing and unsettled by his own fumbling response to Tina’s obvious anger. “I meant why did someone do this?” Most of his previous meetings with this competent, self-assured lady mechanic had made him feel like a blithering idiot. It still surprised him that she’d agreed to come with him to Darling’s wedding the month before.
“It happened sometime in the night,” her father said. “Paint’s dry.” The mechanic walked along the edge of the building, moving the long yellow grass aside with a stick, searching for something that might help him understand why this had happened. He went around the side of the garage and exclaimed, “Aha!”
Tina watched him, frowning. “I wish he’d leave it. I don’t want you involved. The police are unlikely to do a blind bit of good, in my experience.”
But Ames hurried after her father. “Don’t touch anything, sir.” He found Mr. Van Eyck looking down at a small can of paint and an old paintbrush that was worn nearly to the end. It looked as if a fleeing vandal had tossed them there, splashing paint against the wall and over the ground where the tin had fallen.
“Here. I’ve got a box in my car. I’ll collect this stuff and bring it back to the station. We can see if there are fingerprints.” Ames took a large blue handkerchief from his pocket and scooped up both the brush and the metal handle of the paint can and carried them to the car. Hesitating for a moment about how he was going to unlock the trunk with one hand full, he turned and found Tina approaching the car.
“I wish you wouldn’t concern yourself with this,” she said.
“I’ll just have a look-see. Maybe we can track it down. This is vandalism, and it is my job after all. You don’t want it happening again. You wouldn’t mind getting my keys, would you? In the ignition . . .” He felt sheepish in the face of her terseness. But she was angry, he reminded himself. He tried to imagine someone writing Bastard across his office door, but somehow it wasn’t the same.
Tina came back with the keys and pushed and turned the latch to get the trunk open. There was a small wooden apple box in the trunk in which he kept a pair of clean and carefully folded overalls in case of a messy crime scene. He watched her remove them and fold them next to the box. Then he deposited the evidence, deciding to leave his handkerchief in place.
“Since Dad claims he didn’t call you, it means you came out on your own. Was there something you wanted?” Tina asked as she handed Ames back his keys.
“Well, the car. I mean, I thought I could ask you, or your dad of course, to give the car a once-over, you know.” It sounded ridiculous even to him.
“No doubt the police department has a contract with one of the local garages, which, I assume, you’d like us to break? Was there something needing the feminine touch? The transmission, the carburetor?”
Ames, wondering now how he had imagined anyone would buy his excuse for coming out, stood silently looking at his shoes, his finest two-toned brogues, and felt acutely embarrassed that he’d worn these on purpose to impress. A girl less inclined to be impressed by a pair of shoes, he realized, he was unlikely to meet.
“I did wonder,” he tried. “You know, because of last month and the wedding . . .”
“Look, Sergeant, if you manufactured this flimsy excuse to come out here and ask me out, let me put your mind at ease. I had a good time at your boss’s wedding, but it was a once-only thing. I don’t even know why I agreed to go with you, to the wedding of a policeman at that. For one, we’ve got nothing in common, and for two, I’ve got work to do. Or do you think I should meekly give
