‘Yes, Jordana Hoskins was out by a few years but the drink does that to you, already.’
‘I have noticed.’
‘He died in a house fire, like I said.’
‘Witnesses?’
‘None. He was drunk according to the file, dropped a lighted cigarette on an alcohol soaked carpet and. . woosh. . but his lover at the time was. .’ Marianne Auphan let her voice fade to silence.
‘Heather Ossetti. . the fell Heather Ossetti.’ Ventnor sipped his coffee.
‘Yes,’ she nodded, ‘got it in one.’
‘Hardly a difficult question.’
‘So we’ll pay a call on his nearest surviving relative. I have phoned him, he is expecting us.’
‘OK, I’ll finish this first, if you don’t mind,’ Ventnor held up his mug of coffee, ‘can’t function without it.’
The young woman knelt and picked up the book of matches. It had, she thought, an interesting cover. She resisted the impulse to throw it into the refuse bag. Given what her employer had told her about the recent police visit she wondered whether it might have some significance.
The man parked his small van on the concrete apron and once again, being irresistibly drawn to the location, he looked over the blue and white police tape at the small workshop. He once again thrilled to the isolation of the vicinity; he savoured the location as he once again felt the power surge. He thought it was wrong, what he had read about why rapists most often let their victims live, because you cannot have a power disparity with a corpse. ‘Oh but you can’, he said to himself as the wind tugged at his coat collar, ‘you so, so can’.
Kenneth Fisco lived in what Ventnor thought was a modest home in North Barrie, wholly brick built of light shaded material with a darker grey tiled roof. A Humvee stood solidly in the driveway and, being a fawn colour, blended sensitively, thought Ventnor, with the house bricks and the colour of the bricks of neighbouring houses. Kenneth Fisco showed himself to be a slightly built, clean shaven, warm of manner individual. His handshake Ventnor found to be light but not overly so, not a ‘wet lettuce’ shake, and his eye contact seemed to be genuine. It was, he thought, as if Marianne Auphan was introducing one of her friends to another. ‘Have you met Thomson? Thomson, this is Kenneth.’ It was, Ventnor felt, that sort of meeting. The interior of the house revealed itself to be similar to the outside: neat and clean and well ordered. A photograph of the Queen hung on the wall of the entrance hall: no Roman Catholic French Canadian he.
‘So, my father.’ Fisco settled back into an armchair after both Marianne Auphan and Ventnor had, at his invitation, taken a seat on the settee. ‘After all these years, finally there is some police interest. Has new evidence come to light?’
‘Probably,’ Marianne Auphan replied, ‘but more in the manner of a possible connection with other. . other incidents. We have in fact become very interested in Heather Ossetti.’
‘Oh,’ Fisco groaned and looked upwards at the ceiling, ‘that woman. . that. . female,’ pronouncing ‘female’ with a great and clear and distinct anger.
‘You didn’t like her?’
‘Oh. . it shows? No we didn’t. . not me, or my brother. . or my sisters. She was such a deeply unpleasant and dangerous woman and we were children then, we couldn’t defend ourselves and dad was always out of it with the drink.’
‘She was violent?’
‘More verbally than physically but we still had to learn how to duck.’
‘What happened?’ Marianne Auphan conducted the interview; Ventnor was content to remain silent.
‘Well, dad was a good man but only so far as his lights shone and unfortunately for his children they didn’t shine very far.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, he was an adequate provider, can’t fault him there, but he did take a good drink. He was also very needy, emotionally speaking. . I got that impression. I still have it really; I think that mother was a woman with five children, one of whom was her husband.’
‘I have come across similar, already.’ Marianne Auphan spoke with a low, knowledgeable tone. ‘It happens. . or husbands with wives who are more akin to daughters. . very stressful and causes dysfunction in the family.’
‘Yes, well mother died in a car wreck. She was a passenger, wholly the fault of the driver of the other car. After that dad lost the plot, really lost it, found it difficult to hold down a job. . really started drinking very heavily and began to bring all sorts of women home, one being Heather Ossetti. . but unlike the others she hung around, she stayed for months. For some reason our chaotic rundown old house was good enough for her to call home.’
‘Hiding, do you think?’
Fisco paused. ‘No, no I wouldn’t say that. I think, looking back, that it was more in the manner of somebody taking the rough with the smooth.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning she put up with our messy household because it was a meal ticket. Father had a lot of money from mother’s life insurance payout. When Heather left, he had nothing. He, stupid man that he was, that needy little boy inside him, had allowed her to be a co-signatory on his checking account. There were weekly withdrawals, all made out to cash. It was also our inheritance. I admit it would not have gone far between the four of us. . what would have been left when father died, but it would have been something. She kept him well supplied with booze until his account was empty and it was then that he died in a house fire.’
‘What do you remember about the fire?’
‘Nothing at all about the fire itself, we were not there. We returned to a burnt out shell. It’s still there, the burnt timbers. . damn well planned though, the fire I mean.’
‘Oh?’ Ventnor sat forward. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You English?’ Fisco asked, pleasantly.
‘Yes. We’re interested in Heather Ossetti also. So. . what do you mean by well planned?’
‘It seems like it was, looking back, with the wonderful twenty-twenty nature of hindsight.’
‘So what happened?’
‘It was summer. She had bought a whole load of camping gear and she drove us to the coast.’
‘The coast?’ Marianne Auphan queried. ‘From here?’
‘Lake shore. .’ Fisco turned to her. ‘I don’t mean the ocean, I mean down by Lake Simcoe at Safe Harbour, near here. It had some significance for her I think but she never explained what it was. So she bought a heap of camping gear, ran us down to Safe Harbour at the shore of Lake Simcoe and left us to fend for ourselves. We were in no danger. . except from the mosquitoes, it being summer, but you learn to cope with them. . keep a smoky fire going, the flying tigers don’t like smoke. There were other campers around and it was a lake so there were no tides to get caught out by. She said it was for our character development and our drunken old father just went along with it. . and we were children then. What we thought didn’t matter. We really had no say in anything once Heather moved in.’
‘How old were you?’
‘That summer? Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen and twelve. Mother worked hard, harder than my wife. We, my wife and I, we plan to space our children. But. . that summer. . each weekend was always the same; piled the gear and the kids into the back of the station wagon, down to Safe Harbour area on Friday and dropped us off. Towards the end she didn’t even leave the car, just made sure we had everything we needed, that it was all out, and drove off. She’d collect us on the Sunday at about five p.m. Looking back, I now believe that she was getting us out of the way, not just once, on the weekend in question, but establishing a pattern. You see I reckon that she figured that if we kids were away only for the weekend when father died, it would look suspicious, but if we were away every weekend on a character building number then it wouldn’t look so suspicious.’
‘That’s a good point,’ Marianne Auphan said, ‘it goes to premeditation. . very calculating.’
‘That’s what I think. But what was. . what is still very suspicious, really very suspicious, is that the old man only ever used to drink beer, just Budweiser out of cans or bottles. . non-flammable no matter how much he spilled, but on that weekend the carpet was soaked with whisky, so it turned out when the police and the fire service investigated. Then there were all the empty whisky bottles in the garage, they appeared from nowhere that weekend. They were not there when we went camping on the Friday but were there when we came back on the Sunday, giving the authorities the impression that father was a long term whisky drinker. . which, of course, is
