The Reluctant Detective Read online

  by Finley Martin

  The Acorn Press

  Charlottetown

  2012

  The Reluctant Detective © 2012 by Finley Martin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  P.O. Box 22024

  Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island

  C1A 9J2

  acornpresscanada.com

  eBook design by Joseph Muise

  Cover design by Matt Reid

  Cover photography by Melissa Buoute

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Martin, Finley

  The reluctant detective / Finley G. Martin.

  ISBN 978-1-894838-86-3

  I. Title.

  PS8626.A7696R45 2012 C813’.6 C2012-901250-5

  The publisher acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Canada Council for the Arts Block Grant Program and the support of the Province of Prince Edward Island.

  To my wife, Brenda Martin, for her patience and support

  Prologue

  So this is what dying feels like, she thought.

  Wilhelmina Anne Brown was neck-deep in the black water and all but invisible under a black night sky. The cold crept in slow measures up her arms and legs; her mouth and cheeks grew numb, and an alarm pulsed soundlessly deep within her.

  She had lost track of how long she’d been in the water, but it had been long enough to realize that she was losing the feeling in her limbs. In fact, she wondered if she still possessed any control over them at all. She could climb the ladder to the wharf just a few feet above her head, but her stalker might still be lurking nearby. Instead, she tried to move her leg, if only to prove that it still could move. It flexed and straightened i ctself again, but she couldn’t see it and, because of that, her confidence wavered. A doubt took root. Perhaps she had only imagined it moving. Perhaps it was a phantom motion. A delusion. A desperate final grasp at hope.

  More minutes passed. The wind kicked up ripples. The water slapped against the wharf’s retaining wall and the ladder to which she clung. The sound of it was frenzied. Like manic laughter. It created an endless watery hysteria that made her want to scream.

  Then she heard soft scuffing footsteps amid the dirt and sand on the concrete deck of the wharf above her. He was coming back. If he found her, he would kill her.

  Anne’s mind stumbled over her thoughts like a drunkard staggering across cobblestones, and she searched desperately through the handful of choices left to her: she tried to picture herself climbing up, running, and taking a quick bullet in the head; she imagined letting her hands go and slipping peacefully into an icy sleep; and she envisioned herself doing nothing at all… just waiting for whatever happened… giving up… surrendering even. It made no difference. She knew that whatever she decided to do… or not do… it would all come to the same result – the end of her life.

  Dying is dying is dying, isn’t it?

  The logic of that notion registered some meaning because she held it in her head for a long, long while, but thinking seemed so difficult now. The sense of it seemed a fingertip away. It rolled over and over in her mind, but came to nothing. Finally, she discarded the idea altogether, and fell back on the one conviction that spoke with an impassioned voice within her:

  …but I can’t die.

  Anne’s thoughts fled to her daughter Jacqui, who was heading into high school. Then to the faces of friends – Dit, Ben, and Mary Anne – which passed in quick succession. Then to her Uncle Bill.

  Would he be disappointed? she wondered.

  A blanket of melancholy washed over her as the vision of her daughter filled her mind again. It had a strange warmth to it. She felt relaxed… almost at peace… and she smiled a frozen smile.

  1

  Growing up, Anne’s life had been effortless. Born on Prince Edward Island, she had moved to Ontario with her parents when she was just a year old. Her family was of tight-knit Irish stock. Her father had managed a trucking company in Ottawa’s west end. Anne had hung around with a respectable pack of friends, made the honour roll most of the time, and earned a second-string place on the soccer team. Life had been a pleasant, progressive middle-class tale until her luck changed and her life began to unravel. All in one year, between her twentieth and twenty-first birthdays, she’d become a widow, an orphan, and a single mother.

  The first tragedy to strike had been the death of her husband. Jack, a foreign correspondent attached to the Red Cross in war-torn Croatia, was killed when a mortar round fell short of its village target. Anne had been pregnant at the time, and five months later she gave birth to her daughter, Jacqueline. Two months after that, she received a phone call from Quebec police, informing her that both parents had died in a motor vehicle accident.

  Anne felt abandoned and worn down by so much heartbreak but, more than that, she was worried – worried that she wouldn’t find the means to take care of herself and worried by the challenge of raising her baby girl all alone. There were no soft shoulders to cry on in Ottawa anymore and, if there had been, she wouldn’t have sought them out. She was too proud for that – “too proud to beg, and too proud to look weak,” her Uncle Bill had once said. So for a handful of years she worked as a receptionist. She balanced that with motherhood and night-school courses. It took six years to put her life in order. By then she had worked her way up the employment ladder from an anonymous Girl Friday to a respected claims investigator for an Ottawa insurance company, a job she liked and a job she was good at. However, all of that fell apart one evening when her boss’s supervisor pinned her in her office chair and pawed her relentlessly until she jammed her fingernail into the corner of his eye. He left the office angry, confused, and maimed. She left the office shaken, humiliated, and fired. At thirty-one she was back in limbo.

  Weeks dragged on as Anne’s misconduct complaint against her former employer, Dominant Insurance, crept through Ontario’s human rights bureaucracy. Her small reserve of money dwindled. Jobs in the capital city dried up, and Anne’s future and that of her daughter looked bleak. It was around this time that Anne received a call from Uncle Billy.

  Bill Darby was no longer a cop. He had retired from the Ottawa Police Department as a detective sergeant in 1994, moved back to his boyhood home of Prince Edward Island, and started a business. The lettering on his office door read Darby Investigations and Security.

  The private detective business had been something of a novelty on the Island when Bill returned. Sure, there had been a few security companies around. They’d mostly filled uniforms to make an appearance at hockey games or Legion dances or special concerts to protect the sober public from the stupidly drunk. Not too many years before, the Island had been touted as that unique Canadian place where one could find a church at every crossroad. It had been a place where characters like those in Anne of Green Gables still baked their own bread and would be ashamed to wash clothes on a Sunday. It had been a place where farmers could run their horses along empty beaches, where crime was a novelty, and where potato blight had been the headline news for six straight months. However, all this changed.

  Some blamed it on the bridge. Construction of the Confederation Bridge, the world’s largest bridge over ice-covered waters, ended the Island’s isolation. It brought more tourists and more shoppers and more jobs, bu
t it also brought more unsavoury elements – con men, gamblers, drug dealers, and opportunists of every deviance. They believed that an enterprising crook could get here, make a score, and get away lickety-split before anyone knew better. The grudging tolerance and even romanticism that had grown around the reputation of PEI’s bootleggers and rum-runners did not carry over to the new breed of criminal entrepreneurs. And police seemed less able to arrest and prosecute them. Nor were they just the petty thieves and the village vandals of years gone by. As a result, Islanders began to feel more vulnerable, less comforted by the vigilance and concern of their neighbours, and less well-served by their government. Faces were strange now. Suspicions grew. As a result, it became a time when a good private investigator could make a living, especially one who already had a pension to tide him over a long start-up period.

  In the years that followed, his business, if not thriving, operated in the black. There was a steady trickle of customers. Bill needed a receptionist, someone to help out a bit in the office and with whatever else came up.

  “Why don’t you come down here,” he asked Anne. “Pay’s not great, but nobody starves on PEI. And there’s no rat race like in Ontario. I get some insurance investigation work once in a while. You’re used to that stuff. Flexible hours. Better place to bring up Jacqui. And a name like Wil-hel-min-a would hardly raise a local eyebrow. Whaddya think? Deal?”

  It took no more convincing than that for Anne to cut her ties with Ottawa and move her family to Prince Edward Island. There had been few ties to cut – few that she would miss, anyway – and it had been time for a fresh start.

  Four years later, those distasteful memories of Ottawa and Dominant Insurance seemed no more real than the fanciful shapes discerned in a pile of clouds. On Prince Edward Island she’d found a security she had not enjoyed for many years. A contentedness. Life had become an easiness of days. Comfortable. Predictable. Sweet even. And she was happy.

  Darby’s office was in a second-floor walk-up in Charlottetown. Looking out the window, Anne could see the Confederation Centre of the Arts behind a screen of trees and shrubberies across the street. When Darby had first set up shop there, the street had housed a cluster of little nondescript shops and ho-hum association offices on the ground floors, and even more obscure low-rental offices and tiny apartments above. Eventually, these old brick and stone buildings were deemed historic. Art galleries replaced the shops; chic restaurants displaced the associations; and Celtic or British pubs filled the spaces between. The city had chipped in and restored the concrete street with cobblestones, installed period street lamps, and widened the sidewalks for patio dining. Renaming the street Victoria Row only encouraged landlords to boost rents to match the nouveau chic income and image of the tenants.

  Darby would argue that he was neither nouveau chic nor well-to-do. His bank manager would have agreed. Darby Investigations and Security should have gotten the boot from that prime location, but for one thing. Darby was hired to right a wrong. It was a special job for the owner of his building. The owner’s wife, the bookkeeper, had run off with a building contractor who had sucked the blood out of her husband’s bank account with inflated expenses. When the dust had settled on Darby’s investigation, alimony was moot, and the contractor, rather than face fraud charges, corrected the errors in his billing. In the end, the wife smouldered; the contractor was relieved; and Darby’s landlord was as pleased as Scrooge on Christmas Day. Also, though he may have regretted it as years passed, the landlord paid Darby for his services by lowering his rent and fixing it into perpetuity, his way of declaring his eternal gratitude.

  Anne smiled remembering that story. Billy loved to tell it. Her smile fled at the ringing of the office telephone.

  “Darby Investigations and Security. This is Anne speaking. How may I help you?” Her voice was perky, clear, resolute.

  There was an emptiness on the line.

  “Hello?’ she asked again.

  “Anne, this is Ben. I’ve got bad news. Billy’s dead.”

  2

  Billy lay in a casket which was couched in a small mountain of flowers at the Daley Funeral Home in Charlottetown. The viewing room was brightly lit. Anne and Jacqui were the only close relatives, and they would have been the only ones in the receiving line if Anne hadn’t begged Ben Solomon to stand with her and her daughter. She couldn’t bear for them to be alone up there. Ben had been Billy’s partner in Ottawa, and his best friend. He, too, had moved to PEI. Now he was Detective Sergeant with the Charlottetown Police.

  Ben was not a tall man, but he stood head and shoulders above Anne. She seemed dwarfed by the heap of flowers and the enormity of the casket and, dressed in a simple black dress, she seemed to shrink even more. She held Jacqui’s hand throughout most of the ceremony. The rims of her hazel eyes hinted at redness, but her voice remained strong.

  A steady current of acquaintances, a few retired cops, friends still on the force, and former clients signed the book, viewed the remains, offered the usual platitudes to Anne, Jacqui, and Ben, and made a donation to one of Billy’s three favourite charities on their way out.

  One of the last visitors, an old woman, stopped at the casket for longer than most. She looked at the corpse, neatly dressed in his best navy suit, and said, “Billy, you look just like yourself, God luv ya.” Then she turned toward Anne. “What killed him, dear?”

  “A heart attack,” said Anne. “He had just turned sixty.”

  “That’s too, too young. I’d say it’s the cigarettes. Maybe the coffee, too. He never took up with the tea,” she added. She was a tiny woman. She shuffled her cane impatiently from one hand to the other. The whites of her eyes bulged as if struggling to see better.

  Who the devil is she? Anne wondered.

  “I’m Delia McKay, Billy’s great aunt… by marriage, that is. I remember him smokin’ out behind our chicken house in Caledonia when he was twelve. Roll yer owns. No one could afford bought cigarettes then.” Delia smiled. “I always liked him. Where ya gonna put him, dear?”

  “There’s a family plot in Iona.”

  “I’ll visit him there, then. If you need anything…” She stuck out her hand.

  “Thanks…” Anne felt a piece of paper being pressed firmly into her hand. Anne started to ask about it but, by then, Delia had moved on to Jacqueline. So she slipped it into her pocket.

  “And this beautiful child looks like Billy’s second-oldest sister, God rest her soul.” Fourteen-year-old Jacqueline’s lips moved in a soundless thank you, but her eyes widened like someone facing a barking dog.

  “I’m Ben Solomon, a good friend of Billy’s.” Ben extended his hand over to the old woman and saved Jacqueline from more speechlessness. The old woman studied him closely.

  “That’s not an Island name.”

  “No ma’am. I’m from away. Ontario.”

  “Ohhh,” she said. Ben caught the note of wonder and relief in her voice at the same time as he saw the glint of pity in her eyes.

  The funeral was out of St. Dunstan’s Basilica the next day. Billy would have been pleased at the turnout at the church, Anne thought. Interment was in Iona, a country crossroads in the hill country in eastern PEI. It was a long drive out, 60 kilometres. There were half a dozen cars in the funeral procession.

  The graveyard was neatly kept. A wrought iron gate marked the entrance to two acres of grass and four dozen stone markers. A wave of melancholy swept over Anne as her sedan swung into the cemetery. This is where her parents were buried.

  It was the first time that she had been here, and she felt a bit guilty about it. Losing Billy was like losing her father a second time. She had kept her composure until now. Later, seeing the casket lowered next to her parents’ tombstones, and seeing another handful of tilting markers with Darby carved into them, loosened something inside her and tears flowed uncontrollably. The rest of the ceremony was a blur of tears.
r />   Jacqui clung onto her mother’s right arm. Anne felt a bony hand squeeze her left elbow. It was Delia McKay’s.

  “There, there, dear! It’s all right.” Delia’s eyes blinked away some redness, and her mouth drooped lopsidedly. “You’ve only just come home. That’s all.”

  Anne pulled herself together before they reached Charlottetown. She grew stronger as the miles passed, and even managed to share a laugh with Jacqui. They pulled the car into a parking space near Victoria Row. They had planned to meet Ben Solomon, Dit Malone, and a few others for a drink at The Blue Peter, a pub on the ground floor, below Billy’s office. It had been his home away from home.

  At mid-afternoon the pub was nearly empty. The others had already arrived. Anne’s eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the dark atmosphere, but she pointed herself and Jacqui in the direction of a large round booth in the corner. Mary Anne MacAdam, the pub’s owner, was always careful to keep it unoccupied if she knew they were coming.

  “’Bout time you got here,” said Mary Anne. She was mid-forties, freckle-faced, full-figured, and had the confidence of a national bank. “You get behind a horse and buggy out in the boonies?”

  “We just took our time,” said Anne. “It’s really beautiful country out there.”

  “What can I get ya?”

  “Whatever they’re having, I guess, and a Coke for Jacqui.”

  “Shot and a beer it is then.” And she hurried off to the bar.

  “Oh God, I should have ordered white wine or something.”

  “It’ll do you the world of good,” said Ben. “But if you have to lay blame, Sparky here is the troublemaker.” He pointed to Dit, sitting in his wheelchair at the open end of the round booth. “You thought he was just another typical Irish guy, but he’s Polish on his mother’s side. Shot and a beer is a national tradition.”

  “And it’s bad luck to ignore tradition,” added Sarah Solomon, Ben’s wife.