She got out a plate and put scones on it that she said came from a bakery in town. She made coffee as she talked and Raveneau ate a scone and drank a mug of coffee while Barbara offered pieces of what she remembered of the day Alan Krueger was murdered. She was nervous. It showed in her hands and voice and Raveneau wanted to put her at ease.
‘I brought the murder files with me. I didn’t bring them to show you crime scene photos but because I thought you might want to see what was written about you then.’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘So we start from the same place. They’re in the car. They can stay there or I can bring them in.’
His tactic was to show her everything written about herself and her ex-husband, Larry Benhaime. He wanted to get her off the defensive and break the pattern. Her family members could only be echoing what she had told them.
‘You can leave them in the car.’
‘OK.’
‘And I should say I understand much more than you may realize. I know Inspector Govich discovered we lied about the dinner and that made him suspicious. I would be too. The truth about that particular thing is rather bizarre but simple. Larry, my ex, is a contrarian. If you say yes, he’ll say no, and maybe not right away but sooner or later. He didn’t like your Inspector Govich and I think he told him that we ate dinner at that restaurant that I can’t even remember the name of just to be perverse. When you finally track him down in some bar in Hong Kong I think he’ll tell you he didn’t believe it was any of the inspector’s business where we ate dinner or when we came back to the hotel, or anything else about our honeymoon.’
‘I think they realized that, and from talking with Henry Goya the lie over where you ate dinner didn’t mean anything.’
‘We actually had a reservation and we had looked forward to eating there that night. But we got asked to come to the police station and then we were kept waiting for hours. That’s what made Larry angry.’ She shrugged. ‘We were young and it was a murder and we were tourists. If it happened now I’d have told you everything we know and we’ll talk to you again tomorrow if you want, but we’re leaving now.’
‘It was never about the dinner, Barbara. There were other things.’
‘Why did you go back to this case?’
‘We received a videotape that someone made of Krueger’s murder.’
‘You mean of the actual murder?’
‘Yes, and it’s been looked at and we believe it’s authentic.’
‘That’s quite astonishing. You couldn’t have seen that one coming.’
‘Definitely not, and now I’m going back through Inspectors Goya and Govich’s investigation. I’m retracing their steps. I have to first understand where they were coming from.’
‘Why would you do that if they didn’t solve it?’
‘Because they had leads and questions.’
‘Like Larry and me.’
‘I don’t know that either you or Larry were ever suspects.’
‘Of course you do, it’s why you’re here. If you hadn’t received the videotape when would this have finally been tucked away in a file cabinet?’
‘We never close an unsolved case.’
‘There’s a TV show where they say dramatic things like that. It’s not a very good one though and I’m more interested in real life. I’m going to put forward my theory of why you’re here. You’re here because you think the original inspectors were on to something about us, or you think it’s possible they were. You aren’t sure, of course, but you’re curious or you are entertaining the idea or maybe they’ve convinced you that they should have arrested us.’
‘They didn’t suspect you and Larry of killing Alan Krueger.’
‘As I said, I don’t believe that.’
‘And I brought the video — which you don’t have to watch because it is graphic — but I’m here with it because I’m hoping when you do watch it, if you do, that it’ll trigger a memory that will help me. It’s the killing with the shooter and you’re not the shooter and I’d say your husband is too tall.’
‘He is six foot three.’
‘So I hear.’
‘OK, Inspector, if it proves once and for all it wasn’t us, let’s watch it. Bring your coffee. I’ll bring the scones. It’ll be like a date. We’ll play it in the den. Do you watch things like this often at your police station?’
‘We don’t get many like this.’ As they walked into the den, Raveneau asked, ‘How long were you married?’
‘Too long. I’ve learned that I tend to recognize things long before I act. My daughter thinks medication could help that. What do you think?’
‘I try to avoid medication.’
‘Do you ever feel like your life is a series of connected failures?’
‘I know what that feels like.’
‘What Larry discovered during our marriage was that he liked being out of town and a long way away in a hotel in Asia where he would have a clean uncomplicated room to come back to and a time zone reason for not being able to call me, not to mention an expense account for dinner and drinking. It was perfect for him.’
‘Who was he working for then?’
‘He was a kind of accountant for our Revenue Service, looking for corporate fraud, that sort of thing. That’s probably in your files.’
Oddly, it wasn’t. She handed him the plate of scones and he handed her the CD.
‘What were you doing for work?’
‘Something very similar but more numbers oriented, and trust me working for Canada’s Revenue Service can’t be any more fun than working for the IRS.’
Raveneau broke off a piece of scone. He took another drink of coffee. She hadn’t asked the question he wondered about so much, why whoever sent this video held on to it for so many years. But she was going to say something more about Govich and Goya. He could feel that coming. Then it did.
‘Your Inspector Govich had a hunch about us that was free-floating. Like the man who is always suspicious of his wife. Now maybe that makes a good investigator, allowing that amorphous feeling to exist without a fact to attach to. When all he could find was the restaurant discrepancy, he let it attach there and Goya went along.’
‘When you found Alan Krueger’s body did you touch it?’
‘Larry did. He wanted to make sure he was dead.’
‘How close did you get?’
‘I had to turn away it was so awful.’
‘Do you remember the position of the body?’
‘No.’
‘Did you see what Larry was doing?’
‘Only when he first leaned over.’
‘Did he remove anything from the body?’
‘Such as?’
‘A wallet to see who the victim was.’
‘Don’t you think we would have said?’
‘Did he remove the wallet?’
‘Goodness.’
‘I’m thinking it would be natural to make sure the man was dead, and possibly look for ID.’
‘Most people would wait for the police, don’t you think?’
‘Most would, but perhaps your ex-husband didn’t and there wasn’t a wallet found on the body.’
‘I don’t remember anyone asking us about a wallet.’
‘Inspector Goya told me they asked you. There are notes in the file saying they did.’
‘Oh, well, I don’t remember.’ She added, ‘How well would you remember twenty-two years later?’
‘It would depend on how much of a mark it made on me.’ He gave her a moment. ‘I think the murder affected
