sketch. She was laughing, a boat and a lake in the background. “That’s beautiful.”
“Charles Comfort. You heard of him?”
“My wife would have.”
“He rented the cottage next to ours one summer. Lugged that over the day he left. Worth a buck or two, actually.”
“Generous guy.”
“Something I’ve noticed-when you have a lot, people are always giving you things.”
“So you don’t mind if I take a look at your garage, the rest of your property here? It might help me get a handle on this guy.”
“Help yourself, Detective. Ottawa police did all that, of course, but you’re welcome to check it out-anything that’ll help.”
Cardinal took out a business card and wrote on the back of it before handing it to the senator. “This is not because you have a lot. That’s my personal cell number. In case you think of anything else. I mean it-call any time.”
The senator held the card in two hands by the corners and looked at it. “I have a notion this is another of those things they don’t recommend.”
Giles Blunt
Until the Night
From the Blue Notebook
And what is the going rate for dead Victorian teenagers? Dahlberg inquired. As his red beard grew thicker, he was taking on something of the look of Robert E. Lee.
I told him how Vanderbyl had presented two large hams to the Inuk, who cradled them in his arms like twins. How Vanderbyl had opened the door and released him once more into the night.
What does Hunter have to say about all this?
He’s beside himself that he slept through it. I guess we should have woken him.
Dahlberg was down on one knee beside the cot where we had placed the dead youth. This fellow can’t be from the Franklin expedition, he said. We’re nowhere near their last known location.
We talked about the various expeditions. The stray graves and markers. The three headstones on Beechey Island.
His clothes look too early for the Greely expedition, Dahlberg said. That was the 1880s-and didn’t they end up eating each other?
Frostbite had turned the boy’s face and hands deep purple.
Do you suppose others found him and took his outer garments? Dahlberg said. He can’t have lasted long like this.
Whoever he may have been, I said, you can’t do much for him now. But you need to look in on Ray. He’s acting a little… unsteady.
Dahlberg glanced at me over his shoulder. I can’t discuss him with you. He’s a patient.
I’m surprised Vanderbyl hasn’t said something.
If he had, I couldn’t discuss it with you. Dahlberg felt in the boy’s pocket. He pulled out a tiny coin and held it up in the window light. Sixpence, 1832, he said. He felt in another pocket and pulled out a compass. This time he stood up and we both examined it.
A Tinsly, Dahlberg said. They went out of business before the Gutta Percha Company. He opened the case and the needle swung first one way, then the other.
Wouldn’t have been much good, I said. Too near the magnetic pole.
Fire and food would have been the only things of use to him, and I don’t think he had either, poor bastard.
Dahlberg fussed with a camera for a few minutes. When he finally took an exposure, the flash left an afterimage, the dead boy’s face adrift in the frigid air.
8
The grounds of Senator Flint’s estate were beautiful even in the sombre light of mid-afternoon. The air smelled of wet snow and woodsmoke, and among the old oaks and maples there was a rustle and click of bare branches. Now, in the dimming of the day, the windows of the house were dark.
The garage, with its former chauffeur’s apartment, now a storage area, was a likely vantage point, but the family had noticed no unexplained footprints in the snow, and Ottawa detectives had found the alarm in working order, the locks untouched, the dust undisturbed. Cardinal had no reason to suspect them of incompetence.
The patio at the back of the house was partially cleared off. Cardinal stood between the recycling bins and the ambiguous shapes of furniture shrouded with snow. The property extended some five hundred metres, the rolling landscape interrupted by outcroppings of granite and stands of pine, the entire vista surrounded by a two- metre stone wall. To see over it, you’d have to be in a tree or a lineman’s cherry picker-distinctly uncomfortable prospects in the middle of an Ottawa winter. There were no houses close by. Through the trees beyond the garage he could make out just a single gable.
He went out through a side gate and walked along a winding road under a tracery of black branches. School was out, and the sounds of children and barking dogs carried over the stone fences, the wet roads. He rounded a curve and saw that the structure he had mistaken for the gable of a neighbouring house was actually an elaborate tree house, or rather what remained of one. The children for whom the structure had been built had no doubt long since gone away to distant schools, distant cities. He thought about his own daughter, pursuing an art career in New York, and the kinds of distance you can’t measure in miles.
He climbed up on the low stone fence. There were depressions at the base of the tree, foot tracks, since snowed over and rained over, that could be from the Ottawa police, or from someone else. There was no tree house mentioned in the scene reports they’d showed him. He hopped down and cursed as snow slithered into his galoshes.
From the far side, the tree house looked even more decrepit. One whole wall was gone, another sagged almost forty-five degrees away from the frame. The frame itself, at least from below, looked solid and well made. Access consisted of a series of wood blocks attached to the tree trunk with rusted spikes. Some of the lower ones were missing.
Galoshes proved to be less than ideal climbing footwear, and Cardinal had to take it slow. He paused on each block, hugging the wet tree. It was only when his head was just below the tree-house floor that he could see over the senator’s stone wall. Even then, the back of the garage blocked any view of the house.
Cardinal pulled himself up, the edge of a one-by-eight digging into his knee, and then he was kneeling on the floor. No sway, no creak. A couple of floor planks were missing, and he got to his feet and tested the others before putting his full weight on them.
There was no view of the Flint residence. It was blocked by the one wall of this spavined structure that remained completely solid. Off in the opposite direction, where the wall was missing, he could see a mansion of brick and stone. Cardinal was not a man who nursed any interest in how the wealthy lived, but he was-or had been for many years-a man with a passion for woodworking and cabinetry. After Catherine’s death, with the move from their house to an apartment, he had put his tools in storage, unable to part with them for good. Well-made things spoke to him, and he allowed himself a moment of envy of whoever lived in such a beautifully constructed house.
A piece of tarp hung from a small hook that had been screwed into the old four-by-four of the frame. The hook looked new, as did the tarp when Cardinal lifted it up. Matching hooks, three of them, had been screwed into the opposite post. He stretched out the tarp and hung it by a corner grommet from the top hook. It made a makeshift fourth wall that hid him from view. He was now the sole tenant of six square feet of country property. Handyman’s dream, as the real estate ads liked to put it. Amenities included a two-plank “table” supported by two diagonal planks underneath and a crippled chair with a rush seat, usable in an emergency but badly in need of more rushes.
