GILES BLUNT
The Fields of Grief

Dedication

To Janna

Epigraph

I know I could kill someone. I know

I could kill myself.

The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

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Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

Nothing bad could ever happen on Madonna Road. It curls around the western shore of a small lake just outside Algonquin Bay, Ontario, providing a pine-scented refuge for affluent families with young children, yuppies fond of canoes and kayaks, and an artful population of chipmunks chased by galumphing dogs. It’s the kind of spot – tranquil, shady and secluded – that promises an exemption from tragedy and sorrow.

Detective John Cardinal and his wife, Catherine, lived in the smallest house on Madonna Road, but even that tiny place would have been beyond their means were it not for the fact that, being situated across the road from the water, they owned neither an inch of beach nor so much as a millimetre of lake frontage. On weekends Cardinal spent most of his time down in the basement breathing smells of sawdust, paint and Minwax, carpentry affording him a sense of creativity and control that did not tend to flourish in the squad room.

But even when he was not woodworking, he loved to be in his tiny house enveloped in the serenity of the lakeshore. It was autumn now, early October, the quietest time of the year. The motorboats and Sea-Doos had been hauled away, and the snowmobiles were not yet blasting their way across ice and snow.

Autumn in Algonquin Bay was the season that redeemed the other three. Colours of scarlet and rust, ochre and gold swarmed across the hills, the sky turned an alarming blue, and you could almost forget the sweat-drenched summer, the bug festival that was spring, the pitiless razor of winter. Trout Lake was preternaturally still, black onyx amid fire. Even having grown up here (when he took it completely for granted), and now having lived in Algonquin Bay again for the past dozen years, Cardinal was never quite prepared for how beautiful it was in the fall. This time of year, he liked to spend every spare minute at home. On this particular evening he had made the fifteen-minute drive from work, even though he had only an hour, affording him exactly thirty minutes at the dinner table before he had to head back.

Catherine tossed a pill into her mouth, washed it down with a few swallows of water, and snapped the cap back on the bottle.

‘There’s more shepherd’s pie, if you want,’ she said.

‘No, I’m fine. That was great,’ Cardinal said. He was trying to corner the last peas on his plate.

‘There’s no dessert, unless you want cookies.’

‘I always want cookies. The question is whether I want to be hoisted out of here by a forklift.’

Catherine took her plate and glass into the kitchen.

‘What time are you heading out?’ he called after her.

‘Right now. It’s dark, the moon is up. Why not?’

Cardinal glanced outside. The full moon, an orange disk riding low above the lake, was quartered by the mullions of their window.

‘You’re taking pictures of the moon? Don’t tell me you’re going into the calendar business.’

But Catherine wasn’t listening. She had disappeared down to the basement, and he could hear her pulling things off the shelves in her darkroom. Cardinal put the leftovers in the fridge and slotted his dishes into the dishwasher.

Catherine came back upstairs, zipped up her camera bag and dumped it beside the door while she put on her coat. It was a golden tan colour with brown leather trim on the cuffs and collar. She pulled a scarf from a hook and wrapped it once, twice, about her neck, then undid it again.

‘No,’ she said to herself. ‘It’ll be in the way.’

‘How long is this expedition of yours?’ Cardinal said, but his wife didn’t hear him. They’d been married nearly thirty years, but she still kept him guessing. Sometimes when she was going out to photograph, she would be chatty and excited, telling him every detail of her project until he was cross-eyed with the fine points of focal lengths and f-stops. Other times he wouldn’t know what she was planning until she emerged from her darkroom days or weeks later, clutching her prints like trophies from a personal safari. Tonight she was subdued.

‘What time do you think you’ll get back?’ Cardinal said.

Catherine tied a short plaid scarf around her neck and tucked it inside her jacket. ‘Does it matter? I thought you had to go back to work.’

‘I do. Just curious.’

‘Well, I’ll be home long before you.’ She pulled her hair out from under her scarf and shook her head. Cardinal caught a whiff of her shampoo, a faint almondy smell. She sat down on the bench by the front door and opened her camera bag again. ‘Split-field filter. I knew I forgot something.’

She disappeared downstairs for a few moments and came back with the filter, which she dropped into the camera bag. Cardinal had no idea what a split-field filter might be.

‘You going to the government dock again?’ In the spring Catherine had done a series of photos on the shore of Lake Nipissing when the ice was breaking up. Great white slabs of ice stacking themselves up like geological strata.

‘I’ve done the dock,’ Catherine said, frowning a little. She strapped a collapsible tripod to the bottom of the camera bag. ‘Why all these questions?’

‘Some people take pictures, other people ask questions.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t. You know I don’t like to talk about stuff ahead of time.’

‘Sometimes you do.’

‘Not this time.’ She stood up and slung the camera bag, bulky and heavy, over her shoulder.

‘What a gorgeous night,’ Cardinal said when they were outside. He stood for a moment looking up at the stars, but the glow of the moon washed most of them out. He took a deep breath, inhaling smells of pine and fallen leaves. It was Catherine’s favourite time of year too, but she wasn’t paying attention at the moment. She got straight into her car, a maroon PT Cruiser she’d bought used a couple of years earlier, started the engine, and pulled out of the drive.

Cardinal followed her in the Camry along the dark, curving highway that took them into town. As they approached the lights at the Highway 11 bypass, Catherine signalled and shifted into the left lane. Cardinal continued on through the intersection, heading down Sumner toward the police station.

Catherine was headed toward the east end of town, and he briefly wondered where she was going. But it was always good to see her involved in her work, and she was taking her medication. If she was a little moody, that was okay. She’d been out of the psychiatric hospital for a year now. Last time, she had been out for nearly two years when she suddenly embarked on a manic episode that put her in hospital for three months. But as long as she was taking her medication, Cardinal didn’t let himself worry too much.

It was a Tuesday night, and there was not a lot going on in the criminal world. Cardinal spent the next couple of hours catching up on paperwork. They’d had the annual carpet cleaning done and the air was rich with flowery chemicals and the smell of wet carpet. The only other detective on duty was Ian McLeod, and even McLeod, the station loudmouth during the day, maintained a comparative solemnity at night.

Cardinal was putting a rubber band round a file he had just closed when McLeod’s florid face appeared over the acoustic divider that separated their desks.

‘Hey, Cardinal. I have to give you a head’s up. It’s about the mayor.’

‘What’s he want?’

‘Came in last night when you were off. He wanted to put in a missing-person report on his wife. Problem is, she’s not really missing. Everybody in town knows where she is except the goddamn mayor.’

‘She’s still having the affair with Reg Wilcox?’

‘Yeah. In fact she was seen last night with our esteemed director of sanitation. Szelagy’s on a stakeout at the Birches Motel, keeping an eye on the Porcini brothers. They got out of Kingston six months ago and seem to have the idea they can actually get back into business up here. Anyways, Szelagy’s reporting back and happens to mention he sees the mayor’s wife coming out of Room 12 with Reggie Wilcox. I was never keen on the jerk myself – I don’t know what women see in him.’

‘He’s a good-looking guy.’

‘Oh, come on. He looks like one of those Sears guys modelling the suits.’ By way of imitation, McLeod gave him a three-quarter profile with a fake-hearty grin.

‘Some people consider that handsome,’ Cardinal said. ‘Though not on you.’

‘Well, some people can kiss my – Anyway, I told His Worship last night, I said, look, your wife is not missing. She’s an adult. She’s been seen downtown. If she’s not coming home, that’s apparently her choice at this particular moment in time.’

‘What’d he say to that?’

‘“Who saw her? Where? What time?” Same questions anybody’d ask. I told him I wasn’t at liberty to say. She’d been seen in the vicinity of Worth and MacIntosh, and we could not file a missing-person report at this time. She’s at the Birches again with Wilcox. I told Feckworth to come on down, you’d be happy to talk to him.’

‘What the hell did you do that for?’

‘He’ll take it better from you. Him and me don’t get along so good.’

‘You don’t get along with anyone so good.’ ‘Now, that’s just hurtful.’

While he was waiting for the mayor to arrive, Cardinal made out an expense report for the previous month and wrote up the top sheet on a case he had just closed. He found his thoughts wandering to Catherine. She had been doing well for the past year, and was back teaching at the community college this semester. But she had seemed a little distant at dinner, a little impatient, in a way that might indicate some preoccupation other than her photographic project. Catherine was in her late forties and going through menopause, which played havoc with her moods and necessitated constant tweaking of her medication. If she seemed a little distant, well, there was no shortage of plausible reasons. On the other hand, how well do we really know the people we love? Just look at the mayor.

When His Worship Mayor Lance Feckworth arrived, Cardinal took him to one of the interview rooms so they could talk in private.

‘I want to get to the bottom of this,’ the mayor told him. ‘A full investigation.’ Feckworth was a lumpy little man, much given to bowties, and was perched uncomfortably on the edge of a plastic seat that was usually occupied by suspects. ‘I know I’m mayor, and that doesn’t give me the right to more attention than any other voter, but I don’t expect less, either. What if she’s had an accident of some kind?’

Feckworth was not much of a mayor. During his tenure, all the city council seemed to do was study problems endlessly and agree to let them drift. But he was usually an affable man, ready with a joke or a slap on the back. It was unsettling to see him in pain, as if a building one had grown used to over the years had suddenly been painted a garish colour.

As gently as possible, Cardinal pointed out that Mrs Feckworth had been seen in town the previous night, and there had been no major accidents that week.

‘Damn it, why is my entire police force telling me she’s been seen around town but you won’t say where or by who? How would you feel if it was your wife? You’d want to know the truth, right?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘Then I suggest you explain to me exactly what is going on, Detective. Otherwise, I’ll just have to deal directly with Chief Kendall, and you can be sure I won’t have anything good to say about you or that lunkhead McLeod.’

Which was how Cardinal came to be sitting in his car with the mayor of Algonquin Bay in the courtyard of the Birches Motel. Despite its name, the Birches was nowhere near a birch tree. It was not near a tree of any kind, being located in the heart of downtown on MacIntosh Street. In fact, it was no longer even the Birches Motel, having been taken over by Sunset Inns at least two years previously, but everybody still called it the Birches.

Cardinal was parked a dozen paces from Room 12. Szelagy was parked across the lot, but they didn’t acknowledge one another. Cardinal rolled the window down a little to keep the glass from fogging up. Even here in the middle of downtown, you could smell fallen leaves and from someone’s fireplace the comforting smell of wood smoke.

‘You’re telling me she’s in there?’ the mayor said. ‘My wife’s in that room?’

Surely he must know, Cardinal thought. How could it get to this stage – his wife staying out for days at a time and renting motel rooms – without his knowing?

‘I don’t believe it,’ Feckworth said. ‘It’s too tawdry.’ But there was less conviction in his voice now, as if seeing the actual motel-room door was beginning to shatter his faith. ‘Cynthia’s a loyal person,’ he added. ‘She prides herself on it.’

Cynthia Feckworth had in fact been sleeping her way around Algonquin Bay for at least the past four years; the mayor was the only one who didn’t know it. And who am I to tear off his blinders? Cardinal asked himself. Who am I to refuse anyone the sweet anaesthetic of denial?

‘Oh, she couldn’t be screwing someone else. That would be – if she’s letting another man … that’s it. I’ll dump her. You watch me. Oh, God, if she’s doing those things …’ Feckworth groaned and hid his face in his hands.

As if summoned by his anguish, the door to Room 12 opened and a man stepped out. He had the perfectly groomed look of a catalogue model: take advantage of our mid-autumn sale on men’s windbreakers.

‘It’s Reg Wilcox,’ the mayor said. ‘Sanitation. What would Reg be doing here?’

Wilcox ambled to his Ford Explorer with the slouchy, smug air of the well laid. Then he backed out of his space and drove off.

‘Well, at least Cynthia wasn’t in there. That’s something,’ Feckworth said. ‘Maybe I should just head home now and hope for the best.’

The door to Room 12 opened again and an attractive woman peered out for a moment before closing the door behind her. She buttoned up her coat against the chill night air and headed toward the exit.

The mayor jumped out of the car and ran to block her path. Cardinal rolled up his window, not wanting to hear. His cell phone buzzed.

‘Cardinal, why the hell don’t you answer your bloody radio?’

‘I’m in my own car, Sergeant Flower. It’s too boring to explain.’

‘All right, listen. We got a caller says there’s a dead one behind Gateway condos. You know the new building?’

‘The Gateway? Just off the bypass? I didn’t even realize it was finished yet. Are we sure it isn’t a drunk sleeping it off?’

‘We’re sure. Patrol on the scene already confirmed.’

‘All right. I’m just a few blocks away.’

The mayor and his wife were quarrelling. Cynthia Feckworth had her arms folded across her chest, head bowed. Her husband faced her, hands extended, palms out, in the classic gesture of the pleading mate. An employee was outlined in the doorway of the motel office, watching.

The mayor didn’t even notice as Cardinal drove away.

The Gateway building was in the east end of town, one of the few high-rises in an area that was breaking out in new strip malls every day. In fact the ground floor of the building was a mini-mall with a dry cleaner, a convenience store, and a large computer-repair concern called CompuClinic that had moved here from Main Street. The businesses had been open for a while, but many of the building’s apartments were still unsold. Road crews were working on a new cloverleaf to accommodate traffic to and from the burgeoning neighbourhood, if it could be called a neighbourhood. Cardinal had to drive through a gauntlet of orange witches’ hats and then detour by the new Tim Hortons and Home Depot to get there.

He passed a row of newly built ‘townhomes’, most still unoccupied, although lights were on in a few of them. There was a PT Cruiser parked in front of the last one, and Cardinal thought for a second that it was Catherine’s. Once or twice a year he had such moments: a sudden worry that Catherine was in trouble – manic and somewhere dangerous, or depressed and suicidal – and then relief to find it was not so.

He pulled into the Gateway’s driveway and parked under a sign that said RESIDENT PARKING ONLY; VISITORS PARK ON STREET. A uniformed cop was standing beside a ribbon of crime-scene tape.

‘Oh, hi, Sergeant,’ he said as Cardinal approached. He looked about eighteen years old, and Cardinal could not for the life of him remember his name. ‘Got a dead woman back there. Looks like she took a nasty fall. Thought I’d better secure a perimeter till we know what’s what.’

Cardinal looked beyond him into the area behind the building. All he could see were a Dumpster and a couple of cars.

‘Did you touch anything?’

‘Um, yeah. I checked the body for a pulse and there wasn’t one. And I searched pockets for ID but didn’t find any. Could be a resident, I guess, went off one of those balconies.’

Cardinal looked around. Usually there was a small crowd at such scenes. ‘No witnesses? No one heard anything?’

‘Building’s mostly empty, I think, except for the businesses on the ground floor. There was no one around when I got here.’

‘Okay. Let me borrow your flashlight.’

The kid handed it over and let Cardinal by before attaching the end of the tape to a utility pole.

Cardinal walked in slowly, not wanting to ruin the scene by assuming the kid’s idea of a fall was correct. He went by the Dumpster, which seemed to be full of old computers. A keyboard dangled over the side by its cable, and there were a couple of circuit boards that appeared to have exploded on the ground.

The body was just beyond the Dumpster, face down, dressed in a tan fall coat with leather at the cuffs.

‘I don’t see any of the windows or doors open on any of the balconies up there,’ the young cop said. ‘Probably the super’ll be able to give us an ID.’

‘Her ID’s in the car,’ Cardinal said.

The young cop looked around. There were two cars parked along the side of the building.

‘I don’t get it,’ the young cop said. ‘You know which car is hers?’

But Cardinal did not appear to be listening. The young cop watched in astonishment as Sergeant John Cardinal – star player on the CID team, veteran of the city’s highest profile cases, legendary for his meticulous approach to crime scenes – went down on his knees in the pool of blood and cradled the shattered woman in his arms.

2

Normally, Lise Delorme would have been irritated at being called in on her day off. It happened all the time, but that didn’t make it any less annoying to be hauled out of whatever you were doing. She had been at a pub, enjoying a particularly pungent curry with a new boyfriend – a very good-looking lawyer only a year or two her junior – whom she had met when he unsuccessfully defended a long-time thug Delorme had nabbed for extortion. This was their third date, and even though the concept of sleeping with a lawyer was extremely hard for her to accept, Delorme had been planning to invite him in for a drink when he took her home. Shane Cosgrove was his name.

It would have been sexier if Shane had been a better lawyer. Delorme actually thought his thuggy client should have gotten off, considering the meagre pile of evidence she had managed to put together. But still, he was good looking and good company and such men, single, were hard to come by in a place the size of Algonquin Bay.

When she returned to the table, Shane asked her if she needed to lie down, she had turned that white. Detective Sergeant Chouinard had just told her that the victim was John Cardinal’s wife and that Cardinal himself was at the scene. A patrol unit had called Chouinard at home and Chouinard had in turn called Delorme.

‘Get him out of there, Lise,’ he had said. ‘Whatever else is going on inside him right now, Cardinal’s been a cop for thirty years. He knows as well as you and me that until we rule out foul play, he’s suspect number one.’

‘DS,’ Delorme said, ‘Cardinal’s been absolutely loyal to his wife through a lot of –’

‘A lot of shit. Yes, I know that. I also know it’s possible he finally got fed up. It’s possible some little straw just broke the camel’s back. So get your ass over there and make sure you think dirty. That place is a homicide scene until such time as we rule out foul play.’

So there was no irritation in Delorme’s heart as she drove across town, only sorrow. Although she had met Cardinal’s wife on social occasions, she’d never gotten to know her well. Of course, she knew what everyone in the department knew: that every couple of years Catherine went into the psychiatric hospital following a manic or depressive episode. And every time Delorme had encountered Catherine Cardinal, she had wondered how that was possible.

For Catherine Cardinal, at least when she was well, was one of the few women Delorme had ever met who could with any degree of accuracy be described as ‘radiant’. The words ‘manic’ and ‘depressive’ – not to mention ‘bipolar’ or ‘psychotic’ – evoked images of the frazzled, the wild-eyed. But Catherine had radiated gentleness, intelligence, even wisdom.

Delorme, single for more years than she cared to count, often found the company of married couples tedious. In general, they lacked the spark of people still on the hunt. And they had an exasperating way of implying that single people were in some way defective. Most upsetting of all, many seemed not even to like each other, treating each other with a rudeness they would never dream of inflicting on a stranger. But Cardinal and his wife, married God knew how long, seemed genuinely to enjoy each other’s company. Cardinal talked about Catherine almost every day, unless she was in hospital, and then his silence had always struck Delorme as an expression not of shame but of loyalty. He was always telling Delorme about Catherine’s latest photograph, or how she had helped some former student get a job, about an award she had won, or something funny she had said.

But in Delorme’s experience there was something imposing about Catherine, something commanding, even when you knew her psychiatric history. In fact, it may partly have been an effect of that very psychiatric history: the aura of someone who had travelled into the depths of madness and come back to tell the tale. Only this time she hadn’t come back.

And maybe Cardinal’s better off, Delorme thought. Maybe it’s not the worst thing for him to be free of this beautiful albatross. Delorme had witnessed the toll on Cardinal when his wife had been admitted to hospital, and at such times she found herself surprisingly angry at the woman who could make his life a misery.

Lise Delorme, she cursed herself as she came to a stop at the crime-scene tape, sometimes you can be a hundred per cent, unforgivable, unmitigated bitch.

If Chouinard had been hoping his speedy dispatch of Delorme would prevent suspect number one from messing up a crime scene, he was too late. As she got out of the car, she could see Cardinal holding his wife in his arms, blood all over his suede jacket.

A young cop – Sanderson was his name – was standing guard by the crime-scene tape.

‘You were first on the scene?’ Delorme asked him.

‘Got an anonymous call from someone in the building. Said there appeared to be a body out back. I proceeded here, ascertained that she was dead, and put in a call to the sarge. She called CID and Cardinal got here first. I had no idea it was his wife.’ There was a trill of panic in his voice. ‘There’s no ID on the body. There’s no way I could’ve known.’

‘That’s all right,’ Delorme said. ‘You did the right thing.’

‘If I’d have known, I’d have kept him away from the body. But he didn’t know either till he got up close. I’m not gonna get in trouble over this, am I?’

‘Calm down, Sanderson, you’re not in trouble. Ident and the coroner will be here any second.’

Delorme went over to Cardinal. She could tell from the damage to his wife that she had fallen from a high floor. Cardinal had turned her over and was holding her up in his arms as if she were asleep. His face was streaked with blood and tears.

Delorme squatted beside him. She gently touched Catherine’s wrist and then her neck, establishing two things: there was no pulse, and the body was still warm, though beginning to cool at the extremities. There was a camera bag nearby, some of its contents spilling out on to the asphalt.

‘John,’ she said softly.

When he did not respond, she said his name again, her voice even softer. ‘John, listen. I’m only going to say this once. What we have here, this is breaking my heart, okay? Right now I feel like curling up in a corner and crying and not coming out till somebody tells me this isn’t real. You hear me? My heart is going out to you. But you and I both know what has to happen.’

Cardinal nodded. ‘I didn’t realize it was … till I got up close.’

‘I understand,’ Delorme said. ‘But you’re going to have to put her down now.’

Cardinal was crying, and she just let him. Arsenault and Collingwood, the ident team, were heading toward them. She held her hand up to ward them off.

‘John. Can you put her down for me now? I need you to put her back just the way she was when you found her. Ident’s here. The coroner’s going to be here. However this happened, we need to do this investigation by the book.’

Cardinal shifted Catherine off his knees and, with futile tenderness, turned her face down. He arranged her left hand over her head. ‘This hand was up like this,’ he said. ‘This one,’ he said, taking her other arm by the wrist, ‘was down by her side. Her arms are broken, Lise.’

‘I know.’ Delorme wanted to touch him, comfort him, but she forced her professional self to keep control. ‘Come with me now, John. Let ident do their work, okay?’

Cardinal got to his feet, swaying a little. Sanderson had been joined by lots of uniformed colleagues, and Delorme was aware of one or two people watching from balconies as she led Cardinal past the scene tape and over to her car. Bits of computer crunched underfoot. She opened the passenger door for him and he got in. She got in on the driver’s side and shut the door.

‘Where were you when you got the call?’ Delorme said.

She couldn’t be sure from Cardinal’s expression if he was taking anything in. Was he aware of the ambulance, its lights uselessly flashing? Did he see the coroner heading toward the body with his medical bag? Arsenault and Collingwood in their white paper jumpsuits? McLeod slowly pacing the perimeter, eyes to the ground? She couldn’t tell.

‘John, I know it’s a terrible time to ask questions …’ It was what they always said. She hoped he understood that she had to do this, probe the wound with the knife still in it.

When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly clear; he just sounded exhausted. ‘I was at the Birches Motel, in my car, with the mayor.’

‘Mayor Feckworth? How come?’

‘He was demanding a full missing-persons on his wife, threatening to go to the chief, the papers. Someone had to break the bad news to him.’

‘How long were you with him?’

‘About two and a half hours, all told. He came to the station first. McLeod can confirm all this. Szelagy, too.’

‘Szelagy was still staking out the motel on the Porcini case?’

Cardinal nodded. ‘He may still be there. He’ll have his radio off. You would too, if you were watching the Porcinis.’

‘Do you know why Catherine would be here at this building?’

‘She went out to take photographs. I don’t know if she knew anybody here. Must have, I guess, to get access.’

Delorme could almost hear Cardinal’s cop mind trying to click back into gear.

‘We should be checking out the roof,’ he said. ‘If that’s not where she went over, then we should be canvassing the upper floors. You should be, I mean. I can’t be involved.’

‘Wait here a minute,’ Delorme said.

She got out of the car and found McLeod over by the Dumpster.

‘Lot of crap all over the place,’ he said. ‘Looks like someone blew up a computer back here.’

‘CompuClinic’s out front,’ Delorme said. ‘Listen, did you see Cardinal earlier this evening?’

‘Yeah, he was in the office till seven-thirty or so. Mayor showed up around seven-fifteen and they went out together. Probably to the Birches Motel, where his wife’s been boinking the Sanitation Department. You want me to call the mayor?’

‘You have his number?’

‘Do I ever. Guy’s been bugging me all week.’ McLeod had already pulled out his cell phone and selected a number from a list that glowed lilac in his palm.

Delorme went over to the ident guys. They were down on their knees picking up small items and dropping them into evidence bags. The moon was higher now, and no longer orange. It lit the scene with a silvery light. A cool breeze carried smells of old leaves. Why do the worst horrors occur on the most beautiful nights? Delorme wondered.

‘You bagged her hands?’ she said to Arsenault.

He looked up at her. ‘Well, yeah. Until we actually rule out foul play.’

Collingwood, the younger member of the ident team, was extracting objects from the camera bag that lay a few feet from the body. He was young, blond, and laconic almost to the point of hostility.

‘Camera,’ he said, holding up a Nikon. The lens was smashed.

‘She was a photographer,’ Delorme said. ‘Cardinal said she went out this evening to take pictures. What else?’

‘Spare rolls of film. Battery. Lenses. Filters. Lens tissue.’

‘About what you’d expect, in other words.’

He didn’t reply. Sometimes it was as if you hadn’t quite hit Collingwood’s Enter button.

‘Found car keys in her coat pocket,’ Arsenault said, handing them over.

‘I’ll check out her car,’ Delorme said, reaching for them.

The coroner was getting up from the body, whacking dust from the lower part of his overcoat. It was Dr Claybourne, already balding in his early thirties. Delorme had worked with him a couple of times before. He had asked her out once, but she had declined, saying she was already seeing someone, untrue at the time. Some men were too nice, in Delorme’s view, too harmless, too bland. It was like being alone but without privacy.

‘What do you think?’ Delorme said.

Dr Claybourne had a ring of red hair round his pate, and pale, almost translucent skin. He blushed a lot, Delorme had noticed, which she put down to his complexion.

‘Well, she’s taken a terrible fall, obviously. And from the amount of blood, she was certainly alive when she fell.’

‘Time of death?’

‘I only have body temperature to go on at the moment, and the lack of rigor. I’d say she’s been dead about two hours.’

Delorme looked at her watch. ‘Which would put it at about eight-thirty. What do the measurements tell you?’

‘Oh, I’d have to bow to your forensics experts on that. She’s eight feet from the edge of the building. The balconies extend five feet. She could have fallen from a balcony, or a window.’

‘From how high, do you think?’

‘Hard to say. Somewhere around ten storeys is my guess.’

‘The building’s only nine. We should probably start with the roof.’

‘All right. I’m not seeing any evidence of foul play, so far.’

‘I have a feeling you won’t find any. The victim is known to me, Doctor. Are you aware of her medical history?’

‘No.’

‘Call the psychiatric hospital. She’s been hospitalized up there at least four times in the past eight years. Her last stay was about a year ago and lasted three months. When you’ve done that, why don’t we go up to the roof?’

McLeod was waving her over. She left Claybourne dialling his cell phone.

‘Feckless Feckworth was not happy to hear from me. I could hear the wife screaming at him in the background. Naturally I brought all my diplomatic and social skills to bear.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘His worship says Cardinal was with him at the Birches till nine-thirty. Szelagy says the same.’

‘You heard from Szelagy?’

‘Yeah, he’s off the Porcinis for the night. He’s on his way.’

Delorme went to her car. Cardinal was where she had left him, looking as if he had taken a large-calibre round in the gut. Delorme led him over to the ambulance.

The paramedic was a hard-looking woman with very short blonde hair. Her uniform was tight on her.

‘Victim’s husband,’ Delorme said. ‘Take care of him, will you?’ She turned to Cardinal. ‘John, I’m heading up to the roof now. Stay here and let these people look after you. I’ll be back in about ten minutes.’

Cardinal sat down on the folded-out tail of the ambulance. Once again Delorme suppressed an urge to put her arms around him, her friend in agony and she has to remain all business.

McLeod and Dr Claybourne went with her in the elevator to the top floor. Then they had to take the stairwell up another flight to a door marked PATIO. The door was propped open with a brick. McLeod found a switch and turned on the exterior lights.

The roof had been covered with pressed wood flooring, and there were picnic tables with holes for umbrellas. The umbrellas had been taken in; the autumn breezes were already too cold for anyone to enjoy sitting outside for more than a few minutes.

‘I can see why she might have come up here to take pictures,’ Delorme said, looking around. To the north, a string of highway lights wound up the hill toward the airport. Slightly to the east was the dark shoulder of the escarpment, and to the south, the lights of the city, the cathedral spire, and the Post Office communications tower. The moon was rolling out from behind the belfries of the French church.

McLeod pointed to an unadorned concrete wall, waist-high, that surrounded the roof. ‘Doesn’t look like the kind of thing you could easily fall over. Maybe she was leaning over to take a picture. Might want to look at what’s on her camera.’

‘The camera was in the bag, so I don’t think she was shooting when she fell.’

‘Might wanna check anyway.’

Delorme pointed in the direction of the moon. ‘That’s where she went off.’

‘Why don’t you examine it first?’ Dr Claybourne said. ‘I’ll take a look when you’re done.’

Delorme and McLeod, careful where they stepped, walked slowly toward the edge of the roof. McLeod said in a low voice, ‘I think the doc’s sweet on you.’

‘McLeod, really.’

‘Come on. Did you see the way he blushed?’

‘McLeod …’

Delorme approached the wall, head bowed, looking at the flooring in front of her. The area was well lit by the moon and by the roof lights. She paused at the wall and peered over, then walked slowly to the left, then back to the right beyond where she had started.

‘I’m not seeing any obvious signs of struggle,’ she said. ‘No signs at all, in fact.’

‘Here’s something.’ McLeod had spotted a piece of paper wedged under a planter and stooped to pick it up. He brought it over to Delorme, a lined page about four by six, torn from a spiral notebook.

It contained a few sentences, in ballpoint, written in a small, intense hand.

Dear John,

By the time you read this, I will have hurt you beyond all forgiveness. There are no words to tell you how sorry I am. Please know that I’ve always loved you – never more so than at this moment – and if there had been any other way …

Catherine

3

When Delorme got back downstairs, she found Szelagy just entering the lobby with a distraught woman in black: black skirt, black blazer, black hat, black scarf.

‘Sergeant Delorme,’ Szelagy said, ‘this is Eleanor Cathcart. She lives on the ninth floor, and she knows Catherine.’

‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ the woman said. She removed her hat and swept black hair from her forehead in a dramatic gesture. Everything about her seemed exaggerated: she had dark eyebrows, dark lipstick, and skin as pale as china, though there was nothing remotely fragile about her. Her pronunciation of certain words hinted at a cozy familiarity with Paris. ‘I let her into the building and she goes off the roof? It’s just too, too macabre.’

‘How do you know Catherine Cardinal?’ Delorme said.

‘I teach up at the community college. Theatre Arts. Catherine teaches photography there. Mon Dieu, I can’t believe this. I just let her in a couple of hours ago.’

‘Why did you let her in?’

‘Oh, I’d been raving about the views from my apartment. She asked me if she could come up and take photographs. We’re the only building of any height this side of town. She’s been talking about it for months, but we’d just recently set up an actual rendezvous.’

‘For her to come to your apartment?’

‘No, she just needed access to the roof. There’s a patio thingy up there. I showed her where it was and showed her how to prop the door open – it locks you out otherwise, as I’ve learned from bitter experience. I didn’t linger. She was working, she didn’t want company. The arts demand a great deal of solitude.’

‘You’re quite sure she was alone, then.’

‘She was alone.’

‘Where were you going?’

‘Rehearsal at the Capital Centre. We’re opening The Doll’s House two weeks from now, and believe me, some of us are not ready for prime time. Our Torvald is still on book, for God’s sake.’

‘Was Catherine showing any signs of distress?’

‘None. Well, wait. She was very intense, very anxious to get to the roof, but I took that as excitement about her work. Then again, Catherine is not an easy read, if you know what I mean. She regularly gets depressed enough to be hospitalized, and I never saw that coming either. Of course, like most artists, I’m somewhat prone to self-absorption.’

‘So, it wouldn’t surprise you if she committed suicide?’

‘Well, it’s a shock, I mean, mon Dieu. You imagine I’d just hand her the key to the roof and say, “Ta-ta, darling. Have a nice suicide while I just pop out to rehearsal”? Please.’

The woman paused, tossing her head back and looking up at the ceiling. Then she levelled a look at Delorme with dark, theatrical eyes. ‘Put it this way,’ she said. ‘I stand here thunderstruck, but at the same time, out of all the people I know – and I know a lot – I’d say that Catherine Cardinal was the most likely to kill herself. You don’t get hospitalized for a simple case of the blues, you don’t get slapped into the ward for a slight disappointment, and you don’t take lithium for PMS. And have you seen her work?’

‘Some,’ Delorme said. She was remembering an exhibition at the library a couple of years ago: a photograph of a child crying on the cathedral steps, an empty park bench, a single red umbrella in a landscape of rain. Photographs of longing. Like Catherine herself, beautiful but sad.

‘I rest my case,’ Ms Cathcart said.

Just as Delorme’s inner magistrate was condemning her for displaying an unforgivable lack of sympathy, the woman exploded into tears – and not the decorous weeping of the stage, but the messy, mucus-y wails of real, unrehearsed pain.

Delorme went with Dr Claybourne to the ambulance, where they found Cardinal still sitting in the back. He spoke before they even reached him, his voice thick and oppressed.

‘Was there a note?’

Claybourne held it out so he could read it. ‘Can you confirm whether this is your wife’s handwriting?’

Cardinal nodded. ‘It’s hers,’ he said, and looked away.

Delorme walked Claybourne over to his car.

‘Well, you saw that,’ the coroner said. ‘He identifies the handwriting as his wife’s.’

‘Yeah,’ Delorme said. ‘I saw.’

‘There’ll have to be an autopsy, of course, but it’s suicide as far as I’m concerned. We have no signs of a struggle, we have a note, and we have a history of depression.’

‘You spoke to the hospital?’

‘I got hold of her psychiatrist at home. He’s distressed, of course – it’s always upsetting to lose a patient – but he’s not surprised.’

‘All right. Thanks, Doctor. We’ll finish canvassing the building, just in case. Let me know if there’s anything else we can do.’

‘I will,’ Claybourne said, and got into his car. ‘Depressing, isn’t it? Suicide?’

‘To put it mildly,’ Delorme said. She had attended the scenes of two others in the past few months.

She looked around for Cardinal, who wasn’t by the ambulance any more, and spotted him behind the wheel of his car. He didn’t look like he was leaving.

Delorme got in the passenger side.

‘There’ll be an autopsy, but the coroner’s going to make a finding of suicide,’ she said.

‘You’re not going to canvass the building?’

‘Of course. But I don’t think we’re going to find anything.’

Cardinal dipped his head. Delorme couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. When he finally did speak, it wasn’t what she was expecting.

‘I’m sitting here trying to figure out how I’m going to get her car home,’ he said. ‘There’s probably a simple solution, but right now it seems like an insurmountable problem.’

‘I’ll get it to your place,’ Delorme said. ‘When we’re done here. In the meantime, is there anyone I can call? Someone who can come and stay with you? You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this.’

‘I’ll call Kelly. I’ll call Kelly soon as I get home.’

‘But Kelly’s in New York, no? Don’t you have anyone here?’

Cardinal started his car. ‘I’ll be all right,’ he said.

He didn’t sound all right.

4

‘Do those shoes hurt?’

Kelly Cardinal was sitting at the dining-room table, wrapping a framed photograph of her mother in bubble wrap. She wanted to take one to the funeral home to place beside the casket.

Cardinal sat down in the chair opposite. Several days had passed, but he was still stunned, unable to take the world in. His daughter’s words hadn’t organized themselves into anything he could decipher. He had to ask her to repeat herself.

‘Those shoes you’re wearing,’ she said. ‘They look brand new. Are they pinching your feet?’

‘A little. I’ve only worn them once – to Dad’s funeral.’

‘That was two years ago.’

‘Oh, I love that picture.’

Cardinal reached for the portrait of Catherine in working mode. Dressed in a yellow anorak, her hair wild with rain, she was burdened with two cameras – one round her neck, the other slung over her shoulder. She was looking exasperated. Cardinal remembered snapping the photo with the little point-and-shoot that remained the only photographic apparatus he had ever mastered. Catherine had indeed been exasperated with him, first because she was trying to work, and second because she knew what the rain was doing to her beautiful hair and didn’t want to be photographed. In dry weather her hair fell in soft cascades to her shoulders; when it was raining it went wild and frizzy, which pricked her vanity. But Cardinal loved her hair wild.

‘For a photographer, she sure hated getting her picture taken,’ he said.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t use it. She looks a little annoyed.’

‘No, no. Please. That’s Catherine doing what she loved.’

Cardinal had at first resisted the idea of having a photograph; it had struck him as undignified, to say nothing of the fact that the sight of Catherine’s face tore his heart open.

But Catherine thought in photographs. Come into a room when she was working and before you could open your mouth she had taken your picture. It was as if the camera were a protective mechanism that had evolved over the years solely to provide a defence for elusive, breakable people like her. She wasn’t a snob about photographs, either. She could be as ecstatic over a lucky snap of a street scene as over a series of images she had struggled with for months.

Kelly put the wrapped picture into her bag. ‘Go and change your shoes. You don’t want to be standing around in shoes that don’t fit.’

‘They fit,’ Cardinal said. ‘They’re just not broken-in yet.’

‘Go on, Dad.’

Cardinal went into the bedroom and opened the closet. He tried not to look at the half of it that contained Catherine’s clothes, but he couldn’t help himself. She mostly wore jeans and T-shirts or sweaters. She was the kind of woman, even approaching fifty, who still looked good in jeans and T-shirts. But there were small black dresses, some silky blouses, a camisole or two, mostly in the greys and blacks she had always preferred. ‘My governess colours,’ she called them.

Cardinal pulled out the black shoes he wore every day and set about polishing them. The doorbell rang, and he heard Kelly thanking a neighbour who had brought food and condolences.

When she came into the bedroom, Cardinal was embarrassed to realize he was kneeling on the floor in front of the closet, shoe brush in hand, motionless as a victim of Pompeii.

‘We’re going to have to leave pretty soon,’ Kelly said. ‘We have an hour to ourselves there before people start arriving.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Shoes, Dad. Shoes.’

‘Right.’

Kelly sat on the edge of the bed behind him as Cardinal started brushing. He could see her reflection in the mirror on the closet door. She had his eyes, people always told him. But she had Catherine’s mouth, with tiny parentheses at the corners that grew when she smiled. And she would have Catherine’s hair too, if she let it grow out from the rather severe bob of the moment, with its single streak of mauve. She was more impatient than her mother, seemed to expect more from other people, who were always disappointing her, but perhaps that was just a matter of being young. She could be a harsh judge of herself, too, often to the point of tears, and not so long ago she had been a harsh judge of her father. But she had relented the last time Catherine had been admitted to hospital, and they had been getting along pretty well since then.

‘It’s bad enough for me,’ Kelly said, ‘but I really don’t understand how Mom could do this to you. All those years you stood by her when she was such a loony.’

‘She was a lot more than that, Kelly.’

‘I know, but all you had to go through! Looking after me – raising a little kid practically by yourself. And all the stuff you put up with from her. I remember one time – back when we were living in Toronto – you’d been building this really complicated cabinet, full of drawers and little doors. I think you’d been working on it for like a year or something, and one day you come home and she’s smashed it to pieces so she could burn it! She was on some trip about fire and creative destruction and some manic rap that made no sense at all, and she destroyed this thing you were creating with such devotion. How do you forgive something like that?’

Cardinal was silent for a time. Finally he turned to look at his daughter. ‘Catherine never did anything I didn’t forgive.’

‘That’s because of who you are, not because of what she was. How could she not realize how lucky she was? How could she just throw it all away?’

Kelly was crying now. Cardinal touched her shoulder and she leaned against him, hot tears soaking through his shirt the way her mother’s had so often done.

‘She was in pain,’ Cardinal said. ‘She was suffering in a way no one could reach. That’s what you have to remember. Difficult as she could be sometimes to live with, she’s the one who suffered the most. No one hated her disease more than she did.

‘And if you think she wasn’t grateful to be loved, you’re wrong, Kelly. If there was one phrase she used more than any other, it was “I’m so lucky.” She said it all the time. We’d just be having dinner or something and she’d touch my hand and say, “I’m so lucky.” She used to say it about you, too. She felt terrible that she missed so much of your growing up. She did everything she could to fight this disease and in the end it just beat her, that’s all. Your mother had tremendous courage – and loyalty – to last as long as she did.’

‘God,’ Kelly said. She sounded like she had a cold now, nose all stuffed up. ‘I wish I was half as compassionate as you. Now I’ve gone and ruined your shirt.’

‘I wasn’t going to wear this one anyway.’

He handed her a box of Kleenex and she plucked out a handful.

‘I gotta go wash my face,’ she said. ‘I look like Medea.’

Cardinal wasn’t sure who Medea was. Nor was he at all sure about the comforting things he had just told his daughter. What do I know about anything? he thought. I didn’t even see this coming. I’m worse than the mayor. Nearly thirty years together, and I don’t see that the woman I love is on the verge of killing herself?

Prompted by that very question, Cardinal had the previous day driven into town to talk to Catherine’s psychiatrist.

He had met Frederick Bell a couple of times during Catherine’s last stay in hospital. They had not talked long enough for Cardinal to form much more than an impression of intelligence and competence. But Catherine had been delighted to discover him because, unlike most psychiatrists, Bell was a talk therapist as well as a prescriber of drugs. He was also a specialist in depression who had written books on the subject.

His office was in his house, an Edwardian monstrosity of red brick located on Randall Street, just behind the cathedral. Previous owners included a member of parliament and a man who went on to become a minor media baron. With its turrets and gingerbread, not to mention its elaborate garden and wrought-iron fence, the house dominated the neighbourhood.

Cardinal was met at the door by Mrs Bell, a friendly woman in her fifties, who was on her way out. When Cardinal introduced himself, she said, ‘Oh, Detective Cardinal, I’m so sorry for your loss.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re not here in any official capacity, are you?’

‘No, no. My wife was a patient of your husband’s and –’

‘Of course, of course. You’re bound to have questions.’

She went off to find her husband, and Cardinal looked around at his surroundings. Polished hardwood, oak panelling and mouldings – and that was just the waiting area. He was about to sit down in one of a row of chairs when a door swung open and Dr Bell was there, bigger than Cardinal remembered him, well over six feet, with a curly brown beard, grey at the jaw line, and a pleasant English accent that Cardinal knew was neither extremely posh nor working class.

He took Cardinal’s hand in both of his and shook it. ‘Detective Cardinal, let me say again, I’m so terribly sorry about Catherine. You have my deepest, deepest sympathy. Come in, come in.’

Except for a vast desk and the lack of a television, they might have been in someone’s living room. Bookshelves, crammed to the ceiling with medical and psychology texts, journals and binders, covered all four walls. Plump leather chairs, battered and far from matching, were set at conversational angles. And of course, there was a couch – a comfortable, home-style sofa, not the severe, geometric kind you saw in movies featuring psychiatrists.

At the doctor’s urging, Cardinal took a seat on the couch.

‘Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Tea?’

‘Thanks, I’m fine. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.’

‘Oh, no. It’s the least I can do,’ Dr Bell said. He hitched his corduroy trousers before sitting in one of the leather chairs. He was wearing an Irish wool sweater and didn’t look at all like a medical man. A college professor, Cardinal thought, or perhaps a violinist.

‘I imagine you’re asking yourself how it is you didn’t see this coming,’ Bell said, expressing exactly what had been running through Cardinal’s mind.

‘Yes,’ Cardinal said. ‘That pretty much sums it up.’

‘You’re not alone. Here I am, someone with whom Catherine has been discussing her emotional life in detail for nearly a year, and I didn’t see it coming.’

He sat back and shook his woolly head. Cardinal was reminded of an Airedale. After a moment the doctor said softly, ‘Obviously, I would have admitted her if I had.’

‘But isn’t it unusual?’ Cardinal said. ‘To have a patient who keeps coming to see you, but doesn’t mention that she’s planning to … Why would anyone continue seeing a therapist they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, confide in?’

‘She did confide in me. Catherine was no stranger to suicidal thoughts. Now don’t get me wrong, she gave no indication of any imminent plan. But certainly we discussed her feelings about suicide. Part of her was horrified by the idea, part of her found it very attractive – as I’m sure you know.’

Cardinal nodded. ‘It’s one of the first things she told me about herself, before we were married.’

‘Honesty was one of Catherine’s strengths,’ Bell said. ‘She often said she would rather die than go through another major depression – and not just to spare herself, I hasten to add. Like most people who suffer from depression, she hated the fact that it made life so difficult for people she loved. I’d be surprised if she hadn’t expressed this to you over the years.’

‘Many times,’ Cardinal said, and felt something collapse inside him. The room went blurry, and the doctor handed him a box of Kleenex.

After a few moments, Dr Bell knit his brows and leaned forward in his chair. ‘You couldn’t have done anything, you know. Please let me set your mind at rest on that point. It’s quite common for people who commit suicide to give no sign of their intention.’

‘I know. She wasn’t giving away objects that were precious to her or anything like that.’

‘No. None of the classic signs. Nor is there a previous attempt in her medical records, although there is plenty of suicidal ideation. But what we do have is an ongoing, decades-long battle with clinical depression, part of her bipolar disorder. The statistics are indisputable: people who suffer from manic depression are the most likely to kill themselves, bar none. There is no other group of people more likely. God, I almost sound like I know what I’m talking about, don’t I?’ Dr Bell held his hands up in a gesture of helplessness. ‘Something like this, well, it makes you feel pretty incompetent.’

‘I’m sure it’s not your fault,’ Cardinal said. He didn’t know what he was doing here. Had he really come to listen to this rumpled Englishman talk about statistics and probabilities? Clearly, I’m the one who sees her every day, he thought. I’m the one who’s known her longest. I’m the one who didn’t pay attention. Too stupid, too selfish, too blind.

‘It’s tempting to blame yourself, isn’t it?’ Bell said, once again reading his thoughts.

‘Merely factual in my case,’ Cardinal said, and could not miss the bitterness in his own voice.

‘But I’m doing the same thing,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s the collateral damage of suicide. Anyone close to someone who commits suicide is going to feel they didn’t do enough, they weren’t sensitive enough, they should have intervened. But that doesn’t mean those feelings are accurate assessments of reality.’

The doctor said some other things that Cardinal seemed to miss. His mind was a burned-out building. A shell. How could he expect to know what was going on around him at any given moment?

As Cardinal was leaving, Bell said, ‘Catherine was fortunate to be married to you. And she knew it.’

The doctor’s words threatened to undo him all over again. He just managed to hold himself together, like a patient fresh off the operating table clutching together his stitched halves. Somehow he blundered his way out through the waiting room and into the gold autumn light.

5

Desmond’s Funeral Home is centrally located at the corner of Sumner and Earl streets, which pretty much means anyone coming in or out of town has to drive past it, turning it into a daily memento mori for the citizens of Algonquin Bay. It’s not a pretty building, little more than a cement-block rhomboid, painted a cream colour to soften the severity of its outlines and lighten the darkness of its implications. Whenever Cardinal’s father had driven by, he would always wave and yell, ‘You haven’t got me yet, Mr Desmond! You haven’t got me yet!’

But of course Mr Desmond had got Stan Cardinal in the end, just as he had got Cardinal’s mother before him and would get every other resident of Algonquin Bay. The Catholics, anyway. There was another funeral home a few blocks east that got the Protestants, and still another, newer establishment that seemed to be doing a brisk business with recently deceased Jews, Muslims, and ‘others’.

Mr Desmond was not in fact one man but a many-personned entity whose sad but necessary tasks were vigorously carried out by numerous Desmond sons, daughters and in-laws.

As Cardinal stepped through the funeral home entrance with Kelly, thick clouds of emotion gathered in his chest. His knees began to tremble. David Desmond, a neat young man married to precision, shook hands with them. He wore a trim grey suit with just the right rectangle of perfectly starched handkerchief showing above the breast pocket. His shoes were gleaming black brogues more suited to an older man.

‘You have forty-three minutes before people start arriving,’ he said. ‘Would you like to go in now?’

Cardinal nodded.

‘All right. You’re in the Rose Room just over that way, the second pair of oak doors on the right, just past the highboy with the head-and-shoulders clock.’ The directions were delivered as if they were embarking on a journey of some miles instead of thirty feet of pastel carpet. In any case Mr Desmond Jr escorted them, and slid open the doors.

‘Please go right in,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here if you need anything.’

Cardinal had been in this room before and knew what to expect: walls a soothing dusty pink, matching couches and armchairs, tasteful end tables dominated by gauzy lamps that bathed everything in diffuse, benevolent light. But when he stepped through the doorway he stopped, emitting one syllable – actually a sigh, a sudden expulsion of breath not intended as speech.

‘What is it?’ Kelly said from behind him. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘I asked for a closed casket,’ Cardinal managed to say. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see her again.’

‘Uh, no. Me either.’

The two of them stood just inside the doorway. The room stretched into a rose-coloured tunnel, at the other end of which Catherine, impossibly beautiful, lay waiting.

Finally Kelly said, ‘Do you want me to ask them to close it?’

Cardinal didn’t answer. He crossed the room with slow, tentative steps, as if the floor might give way at any moment.

Years previously, when Cardinal’s mother had been laid out in this same room, the figure in the coffin had scarcely resembled her. The disease that had consumed her had left no vestige of the chirpy, strong-willed woman who had loved him all his life. And his father too, minus his glasses and his combative manner, might have been a complete stranger.

But Catherine was Catherine: the wide brow, the full mouth with its tiny parentheses, the brown hair curling gracefully to her shoulders. How the Desmonds had repaired the damage inflicted by the fall, Cardinal didn’t want to know. The left cheekbone had been completely smashed, but now here was his wife, face whole, cheekbones intact.

The sight yanked him into yet another dimension of pain. Pain was not a big enough word for this country of agony, this Yukon of grief.

A bend in time, and he was huddled on one of the pink couches, exhausted and sighing. Kelly was beside him, clutching a soggy ball of Kleenex.

Someone was speaking to him. Cardinal rose unsteadily and shook hands with Mr and Mrs Walcott, neighbours on Madonna Road. They were retired schoolteachers who spent most of their time bickering. Today they had apparently agreed to a ceasefire and presented a united front that was formal and subdued.

‘Very sorry for your loss,’ Mr Walcott said.

Mrs Walcott took a nimble step forward. ‘Such a tragedy,’ she said. ‘At such a lovely time of year, too.’

‘Yes,’ Cardinal said. ‘Autumn was always Catherine’s favourite season.’

‘Did you get the casserole all right?’

Cardinal looked at Kelly, who nodded.

‘Yes, thank you. It’s very kind of you.’

‘You just have to reheat it. Twenty minutes at two-fifty ought to do it.’

Others were arriving. One at a time they went to stand by the coffin, some kneeling and crossing themselves. There were teachers from Northern University and the community college where Catherine had taught. Former students. There was white-haired Mr Fisk, for decades the proprietor of Fisk’s Camera Shop until it was put out of business, like half of Main Street, by the deadly munificence of Wal-Mart.

‘That’s a great picture of Catherine, with the cameras,’ Mr Fisk said. ‘She used to come into the store looking just like that. Always she’d be wearing that anorak or the fishing vest. Remember that fishing vest?’ Nervousness was manifesting itself in Mr Fisk as jauntiness, as if they were discussing an eccentric friend who had moved away.

‘Nice turnout,’ he added, looking around with approval.

Catherine’s students, middle-aged some of them, others young and teary-eyed, murmured kind words at Cardinal. No matter how conventional, they pierced Cardinal in a way that surprised him. Who would have thought mere words could be so powerful?

His colleagues showed up: McLeod in a suit that had been cut for a smaller man, Collingwood and Arsenault looking like an out-of-work comedy duo. Larry Burke made the sign of the cross in front of the coffin and stood before it with head bowed for some time. He didn’t know Cardinal all that well – he was new to the detective squad – but he came over and said how sorry he was.

Delorme showed up in a dark blue dress. Cardinal couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her in a dress.

‘Such a sad day,’ she said, hugging him. He could feel her trembling slightly, fighting tears of sympathy, and he couldn’t speak. She knelt before the coffin for a few minutes, and then came back to give Cardinal another hug, her eyes wet.

Police Chief R.J. Kendall came, along with Detective Sergeant Chouinard, Ken Szelagy – everyone from CID – and various patrol constables.

Another bend in the afternoon, and now they were at Highlawn Crematorium. Cardinal had no memory of the drive out into the hills. It had been Catherine’s request that there be no church service, but in the will she and Cardinal had had drawn up, she had asked that Father Samson Mkembe say a few words.

When Cardinal had been an altar boy, all of the priests had been of Irish descent, or French Canadian. But now the church had to recruit from farther afield, and Father Mkembe had come all the way from Sierra Leone. He stood at the front of the crematory chapel, a tall, bony man with a face of high-gloss ebony.

The chapel was almost full. Cardinal saw Meredith Moore, head of the art department up at the college, and Sally Westlake, a close friend of Catherine’s. And he could make out among the mourners the woolly head of Dr Bell.

Father Mkembe talked about Catherine’s strength. Indeed, he got most of her good qualities right – no doubt because he had phoned earlier asking Kelly for tips. But he spoke also about how Catherine’s faith had sustained her in adversity – a patent falsehood, as Catherine only went to church for the big occasions and had long ago stopped believing in God.

The furnace doors opened and the flames flared for an instant. The coffin rolled in, the doors closed, and the priest said a final prayer. A doomsday bell was tolling in Cardinal’s heart: You failed her.

The colours of the world outside were unnaturally bright. The sky was the blue of a gas flame, and the carpet of autumn leaves seemed to emit light, not just reflect it – golds and yellows and rusty reds. A shadow passed over Cardinal as the smoke that had been his wife dimmed the sun.

‘Mr Cardinal, I don’t know if you remember me …’

Meredith Moore was shaking Cardinal’s hand in her dry little palm. She was a wisp of a woman, so dehydrated she looked as if she should be dropped in water to expand to her natural size.

‘Catherine and I were colleagues …’

‘Yes, Mrs Moore. We’ve met a few times over the years.’ In fact, Mrs Moore had fought a nasty battle with Catherine over control of the art department. She had not been shy about raising Catherine’s psychiatric history as an impediment, and in the end she had prevailed.

‘Catherine will be sorely missed,’ she said, adding, ‘The students are so fond of her,’ in a tone that implied the complete bankruptcy of student opinion.

Cardinal left her to find Kelly, who was being hugged by Sally Westlake. Sally was an outsized woman with an outsized heart and one of the few people Cardinal had called personally about Catherine’s death.

‘Oh, John,’ she said, dabbing her eyes. ‘I’m going to miss her so much. She was my best friend. My inspiration. That’s not just a cliché: she was always challenging me to think more about my photographs, to shoot more, to spend more time in the darkroom. She was just the best. And she was so proud of you,’ she said to Kelly.

‘I don’t see why,’ Kelly said.

‘Because you’re just like her, talented and brave. Pursuing a career in art in New York? Takes guts, my dear.’

‘On the other hand, it could be a complete waste of time.’

‘Oh, don’t say that!’ For a moment, Cardinal thought Sally was going to pinch his daughter’s cheek or ruffle her hair.

Dr Bell came up to give his condolences once more.

‘It’s kind of you to come,’ Cardinal said. ‘This is my daughter, Kelly. She’s just up from New York for a few days. Dr Bell was Catherine’s psychiatrist.’

Kelly gave a rueful smile. ‘Not one of your success stories, I guess.’

‘Kelly …’

‘No, no, that’s all right. Perfectly legitimate. Unfortunately, specializing in depression is a bit like being an oncologist – a low success rate is to be expected. But I didn’t want to disturb you, I just wanted to pay my respects.’

When he was gone, Kelly turned to her father. ‘You said Mom didn’t seem particularly depressed.’

‘I know. But she’s fooled me before.’

‘Everyone’s being so kind,’ Kelly said when they were back home. Troops of sympathy cards stood in formation across the dining-room table, and in the kitchen, the counter and table were heaped with Tupperware containers of casseroles, risottos, ratatouilles, meatloaves, tarts and tourtières, even a baked ham.

‘A nice tradition, this food thing,’ Cardinal said. ‘You start to feel all hollow and you know you must be hungry, but the thought of cooking is just too much. The thought of anything’s too much.’

‘Why don’t you go and lie down?’ Kelly said, taking off her coat.

‘No, I’d only feel worse. I’m going to put something in the microwave.’ He picked up a plastic container and stood contemplating it in the middle of the kitchen as if it were a device from the neighbourhood of Arcturus.

‘Even more cards,’ Kelly said, dropping a fistful on the kitchen table.

‘Why don’t you open them?’

Cardinal put the container in the microwave and faced the rows of buttons. Another hiatus. The simplest tasks were beyond him; Catherine was gone. What was the point of food? Of sleep? Of life? You won’t survive, an inner voice told him. You’ve had it.

‘Oh, my God,’ Kelly said.

‘What?’

She was clutching a card in one hand and covering her mouth with the other.

‘What is it?’ Cardinal said. ‘Let me see.’

Kelly shook her head and pulled the card away.

‘Kelly, let me see that.’

He took hold of her wrist and plucked the card from her hand.

‘Just throw it out, Dad. Don’t even look at it. Just throw it away.’

The card was an expensive one, with a still life of a lily on it. Inside, the standard message of condolence had been covered by a small rectangle of paper, on which someone had typed: How does it feel, asshole? Just no telling how things will turn out, is there?

6

The planet Grief. An incalculable number of light years from the warmth of the sun. When the rain falls, it falls in droplets of grief, and when the light shines, it is in waves and particles of grief. From whatever direction the wind blows – south, east, north, or west – it blows cinders of grief before it. Grief stings your eyes and sucks the breath from your lungs. No oxygen on this planet, no nitrogen; the atmosphere is composed entirely of grief.

Grief came at Cardinal not just from the myriad objects that had been Catherine’s: photographs, CDs, books, clothes, refrigerator magnets, the furniture she had chosen, the walls she had painted, the plants she had tended. Grief squeezed its way through the seams of the house, under the doors and around the windows.

He couldn’t sleep. The note repeated itself over and over in his head. He got up from his bed and studied it under the bright lights of the kitchen. Kelly had thrown out the envelope, but he retrieved it from the trash. The type was clearly the work of a computer printer, but there was nothing distinctive about it – at least, nothing he could detect with the naked eye.

Nor was there anything remarkable about the card itself. A Hallmark sympathy card and envelope was available at any drug or stationery store across the country.

The postmark showed the date and time – that would be the date and time it was processed, of course, not the date and time of mailing – and the postal code. That code, Cardinal knew, did not indicate the exact location of mailing, but the location of the processing plant where the card was handled. Cardinal recognized the postmark as Mattawa’s. He knew a few people who lived in Mattawa, acquaintances who could have no possible reason to hurt him. Of course, Mattawa was prime cottage country, lots of people went there from all over Ontario for weekends by the river. But it was well into October, and most people had closed their cottages for the winter.

Of course, if you wanted to disguise your true whereabouts, there was nothing to stop you driving to Mattawa and mailing a card from there; it was right on Highway 17, little more than half an hour from Algonquin Bay.

Lise Delorme was surprised to see him. It was Sunday, and he had caught her in the middle of washing her windows. She was wearing jeans with huge rips at the knees and a paint-stained gingham shirt that looked at least twenty years old. Her house, a bungalow at the top of Rayne Street, smelled of vinegar and newsprint.

‘I’ve been meaning to wash them since August,’ she said, as if he had asked, ‘and only just got around to it.’

She made coffee. ‘Decaf for you,’ she said. ‘Obviously you haven’t been sleeping.’

‘That’s true, but there’s a reason. I mean another reason.’

Delorme brought the coffee and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies into the living room.

‘Why don’t you ask your doctor for some Valium?’ she said. ‘There’s no point making things worse with lack of sleep.’

‘Tell me what you think of this.’ He pulled the card and envelope out of a manila folder and placed them on the coffee table. They were in a clear plastic sleeve, now, the card open, the envelope address-side up.

Delorme raised an eyebrow. ‘Work? How can you be bringing me work? I thought you were off for a week or two. Hell, if I were you, I’d be gone for months.’

‘Just take a look.’

Delorme leaned over the coffee table. ‘Somebody sent you this?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh, John. I’m so sorry. It’s so sick.’

‘I’d like to know who sent it. I thought you could give me your first impressions.’

Delorme looked at the card. ‘Well, whoever it is went to the trouble of printing out this two-line message instead of writing it by hand. That tells me it’s someone who thinks you might recognize their handwriting – or at least be able to match it up.’

‘Any candidates spring to mind?’

‘Well, anyone you’ve put in jail, of course.’

‘Anyone? I’m not so sure. You know, I put Tony Capozzi away for assault a couple of months ago and, sure, he’s pissed off, but I don’t see him doing something like this.’

‘I meant guys who are doing serious time. Five years or more, maybe. There’s not so many of those.’

‘And of those, it’s got to be someone who’s sophisticated enough – and persistent enough – to find out my home address. It’s not like I’m listed in the phone book. I’m thinking maybe someone connected with Rick Bouchard’s gang.’

Rick Bouchard had been one of the world’s natural-born creeps – even by the low standards of drug dealers – until he had been killed in prison a couple of years previously. Cardinal had helped put him there for a fifteen-year stretch and Bouchard, who, unlike most criminals, had many resources and a good deal of natural intelligence, had pursued him until the day he died.

‘Possible,’ Delorme said. ‘But how likely is that? With Bouchard dead and all.’

‘They know my address, and it’s their style. Kiki B. showed up at my door with a threatening letter a couple of years ago.’

‘But Bouchard was still alive, then, and Kiki has since retired, you told me.’

‘Do guys like Kiki ever really retire?’

‘Lots of bad guys are going to know your address. There’s the Internet, for one thing. And remember that idiot reporter a few years ago did a stand-up right outside your house? That was a huge case. Who knows how many people saw that?’

‘They didn’t use that clip nationally. I checked. It was just local.’

‘Local covers a lot of territory. John …’ Delorme took his hand between her warm palms, one of the few times she had ever touched him. Her face was soft, and even through the blur of pain – perhaps because of his pain – Cardinal thought her at that moment extraordinarily beautiful. He realized she must put on an entirely different face for work, armoured for the daily sarcasm festival of the squad room. Of course, so did he, so did everyone, but he had a sudden sense of Delorme, the only woman of the group, as a dolphin in a tank full of sharks.

‘It could just as easily be some sick neighbour,’ she said. ‘Somebody with a grudge against the police. It isn’t necessarily personal.’

Cardinal picked up the plastic folder. ‘The postmark indicates Mattawa.’

‘Yeah, well … Why don’t you let this go? It isn’t going to help you. It’s not going to make you feel any better. And you’d have to go to one hell of a lot of trouble. I’m not even sure you could.’

‘I was going to ask you to do it.’

‘Me.’ She regarded him, her eyes a little less soft.

‘I can’t do it, Lise. I’m involved.’

‘I can’t investigate this. It’s not a crime to send a nasty card through the mail.’

‘“Just no telling how things will turn out,”’ Cardinal read. ‘You don’t see that as a threat? Given the circumstances?’

‘Me, I’d call it a statement. About life in general. It doesn’t contain any threat of future harm.’

‘You don’t find it ambiguous, even?’

‘No, John, I don’t. The first part is obviously nasty, but it’s not a threat. The whole thing amounts to a sneer. You can’t go investigating people for sneering.’

‘Suppose Catherine didn’t kill herself,’ Cardinal said. ‘Suppose she was actually murdered.’

‘But she wasn’t murdered. She left a note. She has a history. People who suffer from manic depression kill themselves all the time.’

‘I know that …’

‘You saw it in her own handwriting. I searched her car afterward. I found the spiral notebook she wrote it in. The pen was there, too. You recognized it right away as her handwriting.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s not like I’m an expert.’

‘No one saw or heard anything suspicious.’

‘But the building just opened. How many people live there? Five?’

‘Fifteen of the apartments have been bought. Ten of them are occupied so far.’

‘It’s a ghost town, in other words. What were the chances of anyone seeing or hearing anything?’

‘John, there were no signs of struggle. None. I searched that roof myself. No blood, no scrape marks, nothing broken, nothing cracked. The ident guys and the coroner found her position on the ground consistent with a fall.’

‘Consistent with a fall. Meaning she could have been pushed.’

‘The autopsy didn’t show anything either. Everything is consistent with suicide. Nothing points to anything else.’

‘I want to know who sent that note, Lise. Are you going to help me or not?’

‘I can’t. The moment we heard back from the pathologist, Chouinard closed the case. If there’s no case, that means there’s no case number. What do I tell people? We’re talking about my job here.’

‘All right,’ Cardinal said. ‘Forget I asked.’ He got up and retrieved his jacket from the chair. He stood in front of the window, doing up the buttons. Outside, the sky was still an otherworldly blue, and the fallen leaves made a duvet of ochre and gold.

‘John, no one wants to believe the person they love killed themselves.’

‘You missed a spot,’ Cardinal said, pointing to the window. Two little girls were playing in the leaves next door, wriggling around in them like puppies.

‘You don’t have to do this. There’s no need to find a culprit. It’s not your fault she’s dead.’

‘I know that,’ Cardinal said. ‘But maybe it’s not Catherine’s fault, either.’

7

All the next morning, Delorme couldn’t get Cardinal out of her mind. She had a stack of reports to excavate, various assault and burglary charges to follow up, and a rapist who was coming to trial the next week. Her best witness was getting cold feet, and the whole case was threatening to come apart.

And then Detective Sergeant Chouinard dropped a new one in her lap.

‘You’re gonna get a call from Toronto Sex Crimes,’ he said. ‘Looks like they’ve got something for us.’

‘Why would Toronto Sex Crimes have something for Algonquin Bay?’

‘They’re envious of our worldwide reputation, obviously. Anyway, don’t thank me. You’re not going to like this one.’

The call came half an hour later, from a Sergeant Leo Dukovsky who claimed to remember Delorme from a forensics conference in Ottawa a couple of years earlier. He’d been giving a talk on computers; Delorme had been on a panel discussing accounting.

‘Forensic accounting?’ Delorme said. ‘That would make it almost ten years ago. I must’ve done something awful for you to remember me after so long.’

‘Nope. I just remember you as a very attractive French person, with a –’

‘French-Canadian,’ Delorme corrected him. She was willing to be charmed, but there were limits.

Sergeant Dukovsky didn’t waver for a moment. ‘– with a very French name and no accent whatsoever.’

‘Why? You think we all live in the backwoods? Talk like Jean Chrétien?’

‘That’s another thing I remember about you. Kinda prickly.’

‘Maybe it’s something you bring out in people, Sergeant. Did you ever think of that?’

‘See, that’s just the kind of remark that makes a man remember you,’ Dukovsky said, ‘when he has some really nasty work to be done. Although you may end up actually liking this one. It’s going to be a lot of plodding, but the payoff – assuming there is one – could be pretty good. We’ve been monitoring child pornography on the Web for a long time now. One particular little girl keeps cropping up. She was around seven when we first started seeing her. We think she might be thirteen or fourteen by now.’

‘She’s showing up in different settings? With different abusers?’

‘No, it’s always the same guy. Naturally, he’s pretty careful to keep his face out of the pictures. But it always seems to be the same few locations. We’ve been trying to isolate elements in the background – furniture, views out windows, that kind of thing.’

‘And you think she lives in Algonquin Bay?’

‘Either lives there or visits there. We’re not a hundred per cent sure. The stuff’s already on its way to you by courier. Let us know what you think. If it is Algonquin Bay in the pictures, we’ll do everything we can to help you, but obviously the case would be yours. Now aren’t you glad I remembered you?’

But not even a phone call like that could distract her for long; John Cardinal kept invading her thoughts. His desk was right next to hers, and it was extremely unusual for him to miss a day of work. Even when his father had died, he hadn’t taken more than a day off. It might be good for the department, she figured, but it was probably on the whole a weakness rather than a strength to be incapable of leaving your work.

Delorme recognized that she herself was much the same. She got bored on her days off, and when the end of the year rolled around, she usually had a couple of weeks’ vacation pay coming to her.

She looked at the photograph of Catherine on Cardinal’s desk. She must have been at least forty-five in the photograph, but retaining more than her fair share of sexiness. It was there in the slightly sceptical gaze, the glint of wetness on the lower lip. It was easy to see how Cardinal had fallen in love. But what have you done to my friend? Delorme wanted to ask her. Why have you done this unforgivable thing? Then again, why does anybody do it? She could remember several recent cases off the top of her head: a mother of three, a social services administrator, and a teenaged boy, all dead by their own hands.

Delorme opened the notebook she had found in Catherine’s car, a small standard-issue spiral with Northern University printed on the cover. Judging by the contents, it had served as a sort of catch-all. Phone numbers and names were scrawled at odd angles alongside recipes for mushroom bisque and some kind of sauce, reminders to pick up dry cleaning or pay bills, and ideas for photographic projects: Telephone series – all shots of people on phones: pay phones, cell phones, two-way radios, kids on tin cans, everything. And another: New homeless series: portraits of homeless people, but all fixed up and dressed in good suits, point being to remove as much of their ‘otherness’ as possible. Some other way? Less contrived? On the next page she had simply written: John’s birthday.

Delorme had the pen as well. It had been in Catherine’s shoulder bag along with the notebook. A simple Paper Mate, with very pale blue ink. Delorme wrote the words personal effects on a sheet of paper and compared it with the notes. It was the same ink – as far as one could tell without a lab test.

And then there was the note itself. The handwriting appeared to be the same as that in the notebook. The minimalist J in John, the t in other crossed and looped over the h in both the notebook and the suicide note. That terrible note, and yet the handwriting did not appear to be any more emphatic or wobbly than the rest of the jottings. In fact, the note was a good deal neater, as if the decision to die had brought with it an untouchable calm. But you had a good man, a loving, loyal husband. Why did you do this terrible thing? Delorme wanted to ask her. No matter how much pain you were in. How could you?

She placed all three items in a padded envelope and sealed it.

A few hours later that envelope was open on the kitchen table of John Cardinal’s house on Madonna Road. Kelly Cardinal was watching her father carefully flip through the spiral notebook. The sight of her mother’s handwriting made Kelly’s heart liquefy in her chest. Every now and again, her father made a note in his own notebook.

‘How can you stand to look at that stuff, Dad?’

‘Why don’t you go in the other room, sweetheart? This is something I have to do.’

‘I don’t know how you can bear it.’

‘I can’t. It’s just something I have to do.’

‘But why? It’s just going to make you crazy.’

‘Actually, it’s making me feel better in a weird way. I have something to focus on other than the simple fact that Catherine’s …’

Kelly reached out and touched his sleeve. ‘Maybe that’s exactly what you should be focusing on, rather than going over her notebook. It’s not healthy, Dad. Maybe you should just lie down and cry. Scream, if you have to.’

Her father was holding the notebook under the light that hung low over the kitchen table. He tilted it this way and that, first examining a blank page, and then a page with writing on it. His concentration was irritating.

‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘I mean, not if you don’t want to. But this is interesting.’

‘What, for God’s sake? I can’t believe you’re messing with that stuff.’ Thinking, I sound like a teenager. I must be reverting under the stress.

‘As far as I can tell, this is Catherine’s handwriting.’

‘Of course it is. I can tell that, even upside down. She makes those funny loops on her t’s.’

‘And it’s written with this pen – or one just like it – on a page torn from this notebook.’

‘Surely your colleagues already determined that, Dad. Why? Do you think somebody else wrote Mom’s note for her?’

‘No, I don’t – not yet, anyway. But look. Come round this side.’

Kelly debated whether to just go into the other room and turn on the TV. She didn’t want to encourage her father, but on the other hand, she didn’t want to do anything that would make things worse. She got up and stood behind him.

‘See, what strikes me funny about this,’ Cardinal said, ‘is that the suicide note is not the last thing Catherine wrote in this notebook.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You can see the impressions back here, earlier on. They’re very faint, but you can just make them out when you hold the notebook at the right angle. Can you see?’

‘Frankly, no.’

‘You’re not at the right angle. You have to sit down.’

Cardinal pulled out the chair beside him and Kelly sat down. He tilted the notebook slowly back and forth.

‘Wait!’ Kelly said. ‘I can see it now.’

Cardinal held the notebook steady in the light. There at the top of a page of random notes was a faint impression of the words Dear John. Cardinal tilted it slightly. Lower on the page, Kelly could just make out any other way … Catherine. The middle was obscured by other notes, including a reminder for Cardinal’s birthday.

‘My birthday’s in July,’ he said. ‘Over three months ago.’

‘You think she wrote her note three months ago? I suppose it’s possible. Pretty weird to carry around a suicide note for three months, though.’

Cardinal dropped the notebook on to the table and sat back. ‘On the other hand, there could be some perfectly simple explanation: she wrote it out one day, intending to … but then she changed her mind. For a while, at least. Or maybe she accidentally skipped a page in her notebook three months ago, and then, the other day, she just happened to use the first blank page in the book.’

‘Out of a concern for neatness? Seems a pretty odd time to be worried about using every page in your ninety-five-cent notebook.’

‘It does, doesn’t it?’

‘But it’s her writing. Her pen. In the long run, what difference does it make what page she wrote it on?’

‘I don’t know,’ Cardinal said. ‘I truly don’t know.’

Cardinal had learned long ago that a detective thrives on contacts. In the overworked and underfunded endeavours of forensic science, the slightest personal connection can help nudge a case along quicker than the average, and an actual friendship can work magic.

Tommy Hunn had never been a friend. Tommy Hunn had been a colleague of Cardinal’s back in the early days of his career in Toronto, when he was still working Vice. In many ways, Hunn had been a police force’s nightmare: excessively muscled, casually violent, cheerfully racist. He had also been a pretty good detective right up until he got caught in a bawdy house by his own squad. He could have faced charges much more serious than conduct unbecoming had not Cardinal gone to bat for him at his disciplinary hearing. He wrote letters of support for him, and later, when Hunn was looking for a new line of work, a letter of reference. Hunn had gone back to school, and eventually managed to get himself into the documents section of the Ontario Centre of Forensic Sciences, where he had been leading an apparently honourable life ever since.

‘Hoo, boy, it’s Cardinal the friendly ghost,’ Hunn said when he answered the phone. ‘Got to be something really special. Otherwise, I say to myself, why wouldn’t he go through our central receiving office?’

‘I got a couple of documents for you, Tommy – maybe three. I’m hoping you can help me out.’

‘You wanna cut in, is that it? I gotta tell ya, John, we are hellaciously backed up down here. Only thing I’m supposed to work on these days is stuff that’s five seconds from being in court.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

All cops expect to have to repay any favour somewhere down the line, possibly decades later. Cardinal did not have to give Hunn any reminders.

‘Why don’t you tell me what you got,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘I have a greeting card with a piece of paper glued inside. On that piece of paper there’s a message that looks like it was printed out on a computer. It’s just two sentences long, but I’m hoping you can give me some idea where it came from. Frankly, I can’t even tell if it’s ink-jet or laser.’

‘Either way, it’s not going to get us very far without another printout to compare it to. It ain’t like the old days with typewriters. What else you got?’

‘A suicide note.’

‘Suicide. All this trouble, you’re working on a suicide? Goddamn suicides burn my ass. Anyone who kills themselves is just chickenshit, far as I’m concerned.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Cardinal said. ‘Complete cowards. No question.’

‘And selfish,’ Hunn went on. ‘There’s gotta be no more self-centred act than killing yourself. All these resources get called into play: your time, my time, doctors, nurses, ambulances, shrinks, you name it. All of this for someone that doesn’t even want to live. It’s just plain selfish.’

‘Thoughtless,’ Cardinal said. ‘Completely thoughtless.’

‘That’s when they don’t succeed. When they do succeed, they leave all this grief behind. I had a friend – best friend, actually – who ate his service revolver a few years back. I’m telling you, I felt like shit for months. Why didn’t I see it coming? Why wasn’t I a better friend? But you know what? He’s the lousy friend, not me.’

‘Yeah, you put your finger on it there, Tommy.’

‘Suicides, man, I tell ya …’

‘This one may not be a suicide.’

‘All right! Different story, entirely. Now you’re engaging my attention.’ Hunn put on his Godfather voice: ‘I’m gonna use alla my skills and alla my powers …’

‘I need this fast, Tommy. Like yesterday.’

‘Absolutely. Minute I get it. But if you’re thinking of using this material or any analysis I give you on it in court, you know you gotta go through Central Receiving, and Central Receiving don’t rush for nobody. God himself could come to them with a handwritten note on Satan’s letterhead and they’d tell him, “Get in line, bro.”’

‘I can’t go through Central Receiving, Tommy. I don’t have a case number.’

‘Oh, boy …’

‘But you come back to me with something good, and I’ll get a case number. Then I’ll jump through whatever hoops you need.’

There was a heavy sigh from the other end of the line. ‘All right, John. You’re giving me serious heartburn here, but I’ll do it.’

8

Nausea was not quite the word to describe what Delorme was feeling. The Toronto Sex Crimes Unit had sent her about twenty images; the package had been waiting for her when she came back from lunch. She had looked them over and was now wishing she hadn’t. The photographs provoked a reaction in her gut, as if she had received a solid blow to the belly. And then more complicated emotions set in – distress, almost panic, and yet at the same time an all but overwhelming hopelessness about the human species.

The sights and sounds of the office – the click and slam of the photocopier, McLeod bellowing at Sergeant Flower, the tapping of keyboards and the chirping of phones – all diminished around her. Delorme felt a sob gathering in her chest, which she tamped down immediately. She had experienced something similar to this inner turmoil when reading certain news accounts: beheadings in Iraq, or the civil war in Africa where armed men raided villages, raping the women and chopping the hands off all the men.

She knew the acts captured in the photographs did not compare to mass murder, but the effect on her spirit was the same: despair at the depths to which human nature could sink. Even in a place the size of Algonquin Bay you heard of such pictures, but until this moment Delorme had never seen anything like them. There had been the case of a social services administrator the previous year, a man apparently well loved by his family and friends, who had been charged with possession of child pornography. But it hadn’t been Delorme’s case, and she hadn’t seen the evidence. The man had killed himself while out on bail – apparently out of shame, even though he had been charged only with possession of the material, not with manufacturing or distributing.

The pictures on her desk, Delorme realized, were actually crime-scene photos. The criminal had taken them himself in the course of committing his crime; the creation of child pornography was unique in that respect. The girl looked to be as young as seven or eight in some of them, still with puppy fat around her neck and cheeks; in others she looked closer to thirteen. She had a sweet, open face, pale blonde hair, shoulder length, and eyes almost unnaturally green, the colour emphasized, in several pictures, by the tears that flowed from them. There were pictures in a bedroom, pictures on a couch, pictures on a boat, in a tent, a hotel room. In one of the photos, a detail had been blurred out; a hat the little girl was wearing had been reduced to a blue and white smear.

The man was careful not to show his face, and so he became a collection of disparate details. He was the hairy arm, the furry chest; he was the sticklike legs, the freckled shoulder, the butt just beginning to sag. His penis, closely featured in many shots, looked scorched and red, though whether from abuse or bad photography it was impossible to tell. Delorme, no prude and no hater of men, thought it the ugliest thing she had ever seen.

It occurred to her that the man was not human; that he was mere animated flesh, a monster sprung from a madman’s lab. But the spirit-crushing truth, of course, was that he was human. He could be anybody, he could be someone Delorme knew. Not only was he human, he was also beloved by his victim; too many of the pictures showed her relaxed and grinning for it to be otherwise. He had to be either the girl’s father or someone very close to the family. That the little girl loved him, Delorme had no doubt, and it made her heart ache.

Toronto had sent two additional envelopes. The first contained exact copies of the photographs, but the girl and her abuser had been digitally removed. Now they were just unexceptional scenes: an out-of-style sofa, what looked like a hotel bed, the interior of a tent, a back yard with a grubby plastic playhouse – settings of no interest unless you knew what had transpired in them.

The third envelope contained just one picture, that of the girl wearing the hat, now enlarged into a close-up. The hat was a woollen toque, blue and white, no longer blurred. Delorme had no idea how the Toronto cops could have managed that, but she actually stopped breathing for a moment. She recognized the toque. Not all of the knitted wording was visible, but you could now clearly see ALGON…WIN…FUR. Algonquin Bay Winter Fur Carnival.

The phone rang.

‘Delorme, CID.’

‘Sergeant Dukovsky here. You finished throwing up yet?’

‘Sergeant, you may be used to this kind of stuff, but me, I feel like moving into the forest and living off roots and berries for the rest of my life.’

‘I know what you mean. And this guy is by no means the worst of what we get. These days we get pictures of infants, and they’re doing this stuff live.’

‘Live? I don’t understand.’

‘Streaming video. Guy gets himself a webcam and abuses kids online while his brethren around the world pay to watch.’

‘Oh, man.’

‘Unfortunately, some of those pictures we sent you have shown up in the same chat room as the live stuff, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it gives this guy ideas.’

‘Let’s hope we nail him before that. Tell me about the winter carnival hat. How did you manage to unblur it?’

‘We got a couple of 64-bit propeller-heads here, going gaga over this image-processing tool. Real bleeding-edge stuff. I asked ’em how it worked and boy did I regret it. They started blithering about filter deconvolution and Lucy-Richardson algorithms. I’m telling you, these guys eat Athlon chips right out of the bag.’

‘And I thought Photoshop was cool. Interesting thing here, the name of the carnival was changed a few years back to avoid protesters. It’s no longer the fur carnival, it’s just the winter carnival.’

‘That could be important. Only we don’t know when she got it or who from.’

‘In any case, it doesn’t mean the kid lives here. The carnival draws people from all over the world.’

‘Come on. Hordes of people are crossing the globe to attend the Algonquin Bay Fur Carnival?’

‘Not hordes. And they don’t come for the carnival, they come for the fur auction. We get buyers from the big furriers in Paris, New York, London, places like that. We even get Russians coming to check out the competition.’

‘You’re educating me here, Sergeant Delorme. I didn’t realize Algonquin Bay was such a hive of international commerce. Did you take a look at the picture on the boat – the one where there’s other boats in the background?’

Delorme shuffled the photographs, stopping when she came to the picture. It showed a cabin cruiser with lots of wooden trim, wooden floors, and comfortable-looking red seats with tuck-and-roll upholstery. The girl was lounging on one of these, wearing blue jeans and a yellow T-shirt. She was ten or eleven in this shot, grinning into the camera.

‘There’s a good reason why I missed this one,’ Delorme said. ‘It’s one of the pictures where he’s not doing anything to her. The kid looks happy.’

‘Check out the background.’

‘There’s a small plane with pontoons on it. And you can just make out part of its tail number. C-G-K.’

‘Exactly. It’s a Cessna Skylane and the whole number is CGKMC. Took us about five minutes cross-checking those letters with Cessnas and Algonquin Bay. We get a guy named Frank Rowley. I can give you his address and phone number, too. I hope I’m impressing you here.’

‘But the plane is just in the background. There’s no reason to think there’s any connection between the owner of the plane and the creep in the pictures, is there?’

‘No, but it’s a start. Believe me, we’ll hand you anything we get, minute we get it. In the meantime, maybe you can focus your logical French-Canadian mind on those pictures, spend some quality time with them, and narrow things down.’

‘What if we posted a picture of the girl – just do it like a missing-person picture? We could put her face up in the post office and hope somebody who’s seen her calls in. We’ve got to do something fast. He’s destroying this kid’s life.’

‘Problem with posting a picture is, the perp is most likely gonna see it before the kid does. Pedophiles aren’t usually violent, but if he thinks she’s gonna put him away for years, he just might kill her.’

9

Next morning, Kelly came into the kitchen in her running gear – black leggings, mauve sweatshirt with a tiny elephant stitched on it – and grabbed an orange off the counter. Catherine bought those oranges, Cardinal thought. Did you buy half a dozen oranges when you were about to kill yourself?

He poured his daughter a coffee. ‘You want some oatmeal?’

‘Maybe when I come back. Don’t want to lug any extra weight around. God, you look exhausted, Dad.’

‘You should talk.’ Kelly’s eyes looked puffy and red. ‘Are you managing to sleep at all?’

‘Not much. I seem to wake up every half hour,’ she said, dropping bits of orange peel into the green bin. ‘I never realized how physical the emotions are. I wake up and my calves are locked up, and I feel like a wreck, even though I haven’t done anything. I just can’t believe she’s gone. I mean, if she came in that front door right now I don’t even think I’d be surprised.’

‘I found this,’ Cardinal said. He held out a photograph he’d discovered buried in an album crammed with loose pictures, a black-and-white portrait of Catherine, aged about eighteen, looking very moody and artistic in a black turtleneck and silver hoop earrings.

Kelly burst into tears, and Cardinal was taken by surprise. Perhaps in an effort to ease his own grief, his daughter had been comparatively restrained, but now she wailed like a little girl. He rested a hand on her shoulder as she cried herself out.

‘Wow,’ she said, coming back from washing her face. ‘I guess I needed that.’

‘That’s how she looked when we met,’ Cardinal said. ‘I just thought she was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. The kind of person you’re only supposed to meet in movies.’

‘Was she always that intense?’

‘No, not at all. She made fun of herself all the time.’

‘Why don’t you come running with me?’ Kelly said suddenly. ‘It’ll make us feel better.’

‘Oh, I don’t know …’

‘Come on. You still run, don’t you?’

‘Not as often as I used to …’

‘Come on, Dad. You’ll feel better. We both will.’

Madonna Road was just off Highway 69, so they had to run along the shoulder for half a kilometre or so and then make a left on to Water Road, which skirted the edge of Trout Lake. The day was brilliant and clear, the air with a sharp autumn tang.

‘Wow, smell the leaves,’ Kelly said. ‘Those hills have every colour except blue.’

Kelly was not by nature a perky young woman; she was making an effort to cheer Cardinal up, and he was touched by it. He was indeed aware of the beauty of the day, but as they ran through the suburb, their steps seemed to beat in time with the words Catherine’s dead, Catherine’s dead. Cardinal felt the contradictory sensations of being both hollowed out and yet extremely heavy – as if his heart had been replaced by a ball of lead. Catherine breathed this frosty air too.

‘When do you have to be back in New York?’ he asked Kelly.

‘Well, I told them I was gonna take two weeks.’

‘Oh, you don’t have to stay that long, you know. I’m sure you need to get back.’

‘It’s fine, Dad. I want to stay.’

‘How about today? You have any plans?’

‘I was thinking about calling Kim Delaney, but I don’t know. You remember Kim?’

Cardinal recalled a big strapping blonde girl – angry at the world and very political. She and Kelly had been inseparable in their last years of high school.

‘I would have thought Kim would have ventured out into the big bad world by now.’

‘Yeah, so would I.’

‘You sound mournful.’ Cardinal accidentally brushed against a recycling bin. A Jack Russell bounced up and down on the other side of the fence, yapping elaborate canine threats.

‘Well, we were best friends for a while, but now I’m not even sure if I should call her,’ Kelly said. ‘Kim was the smartest girl at Algonquin High – way smarter than me – head of the debating club, delegate at the junior UN, editor of the yearbook. And now it’s like she wants to be Queen of Suburbia.’

‘Not everyone wants to move to New York.’

‘I know that. But Kim’s twenty-seven and she’s already got three kids, and she owns two – two! – SUVs.’

Cardinal pointed at a driveway they were just passing: one Grand Cherokee, one Wagoneer.

‘All she can talk about is sports. Honestly, I think Kim’s life revolves around curling and hockey and ringette. I’m surprised she isn’t into bowling yet.’

‘Priorities change when you have kids.’

‘Well, I never want kids if it means you have to check your mind at the door. Kim hasn’t read a newspaper in years. All she watches on TV is Survivor and Canadian Idol and hockey. Hockey! She hated sports when we were in school. Honestly, I thought Kim and I would be friends forever, but now I’m thinking maybe I won’t call.’

‘Well, here’s an idea. You feel like making a quick trip down to Toronto?’

Kelly looked over at him. There was a fine film of sweat on her upper lip and her cheeks were flushed. ‘You’re going to Toronto? What brought this on?’

‘Something cooking at the Forensic Centre. I want to deal with it in person.’

‘This is to do with Mom?’

‘Yeah.’

For a few moments there was just the sound of their breathing – Cardinal’s breathing, anyway. Kelly didn’t seem to be having any trouble. Water Road ended in a turning circle. The two of them slowed and ran in place for a few moments. Beyond the red-brick bungalows, with their neat lawns and rows of stout yard-waste bags, the lake was deep indigo.

‘Dad,’ Kelly said, ‘Mom killed herself. She killed herself and it hurts like hell, but the truth is she was manic depressive, she was in and out of hospitals for a long time, and it’s really, ultimately, not so surprising that she wanted out.’ She touched his arm. ‘You know it wasn’t about you.’

‘Are you gonna come?’

‘Boy, you don’t mess around when you set your mind on something, do you?’ She gave it a second. ‘All right, I’ll come. But just to keep you company on the drive.’

Cardinal pointed to a path that looped away through the trees. ‘Let’s go back the scenic way.’

All the way south down Highway 11, Cardinal could not think of anything but Catherine. Although think was not the word. He felt her absence in the beauty of the hills. He felt her hovering above the highway; it had always been the road that took Cardinal away from or back to Catherine. But she had not been there this time to wave goodbye, would not be there when he came back.

Kelly fiddled with the radio dial.

‘Hey, put it back,’ Cardinal said. ‘That was the Beatles!’

‘Ugh. I can’t stand the Beatles.’

‘How can anyone hate the Beatles? That’s like hating sunshine. It’s like hating ice cream.’

‘It’s just their early stuff I can’t stand. They sound like little wind-up toys.’

Cardinal glanced over at her. Twenty-seven. His daughter was older now than Catherine had been when Kelly was born. Cardinal asked her about New York.

For the next little while Kelly told him about her latest frustrations in trying to make it as an artist. New York was a hard town to be broke in. She had to share an apartment with three other women, and they didn’t always get along. And she was obliged to work at two jobs to make ends meet: she was assisting a painter named Klaus Meier – stretching canvases for him, doing his books – and also working as a waitress three days a week. It didn’t leave a lot of time for her own painting.

‘And doing all this, you never feel the pull of suburban life? The yearning for a small town?’

‘Never. I miss Canada sometimes, though. It’s kind of hard to be friends with Americans.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Americans are the friendliest people in the world, on the surface. At first I found it almost intoxicating – they’re so much more outgoing than Canadians. And they’re not afraid to have a good time.’

‘That’s true. Canadians are more reserved.’

I’m acting, Cardinal thought. I’m not having a conversation, I’m acting like a man having a conversation. This is how it’s done: you listen, you nod, you ask a question. But I’m not here. I’m as gone as the World Trade Center. My heart is Ground Zero. He wanted to talk to Catherine about this, but Catherine was not there.

He struggled to focus.

‘Somewhere along the line Americans invented a kind of fake intimacy,’ Kelly said. ‘They’ll tell you about their divorce the first time they meet you, or their history of child abuse. I’m not kidding. I had one guy tell me how his father used to “incest” him, as he put it. That was on the first date. In the beginning I thought everyone was really trusting, but they’re not at all. They just don’t have any sense of decorum. Why are you smiling?’

‘It’s just funny, hearing you talk about decorum. Unconventional girl like you.’

‘I’m actually pretty conventional, when you get down to it. I have a feeling it’s going to be my downfall as an artist. God, look at the trees.’

The drive to Toronto took four hours. Cardinal dropped Kelly at a Second Cup on College Street where she had arranged to meet an old friend, then he headed over to the Forensic Centre on Grenville.

As a piece of architecture, the Forensic Centre is of no interest whatsoever. It’s just a slab tossed up, like so many other government buildings, in the era when poured concrete replaced brick and stone as the material of choice. Inside, it’s a collection of putty-coloured dividers, tweedy carpet, and mordant cartoons cut from newspapers and taped above people’s desks.

Cardinal had been here many times, though not to the documents section, and the very familiarity of the place unnerved him. He was drowning in the deepest agony of his life; everything should have been changed. And yet the security guards, the rattling elevator, the plain offices, desks, charts and displays were exactly as before.

‘Okay, so we got three little items here,’ Tommy Hunn said, laying them out on the laboratory counter. Unlike the building, Tommy had changed. His hair had got thinner, and his belt was hidden beneath a roll of flab, as if there were a dachshund asleep under his shirt.

‘We got one suicide note. We got one notebook in which said suicide note may or may not have been written. And we have one nasty sympathy card with a typed message inside.’

‘Why don’t we start with the sympathy card?’ Cardinal said. ‘It’s not going to be related to the other two items.’

‘Sympathy card first,’ Hunn said. He put on a pair of latex gloves, removed the card from its plastic folder and opened it. ‘“How does it feel, asshole?”’ he read in a flat monotone. ‘“Just no telling how things will turn out, is there?” Cute.’

He held the note next to the window, tilting it to catch the light.

‘Well, it’s an ink-jet printer, I can see that right off. No idiosyncrasies visible to the naked eye. Not my eye, anyway. But let’s do a little detecting.’ He held a loupe to his eye and brought the note up to his face. ‘Here we go. Printer flaw on the second line. Look at the h’s and the t’s.’

He handed Cardinal the loupe. At first Cardinal couldn’t see anything, but when his eye adjusted he could make out a pale, threadlike line running through the crossbars of the h’s and the t’s.

‘The good news is, if a printer does something like that, it does it consistently. You notice there’s no flaw through the first line of type. But if we had another page the guy printed out, it would show the same flaw on the second line.’

‘How helpful is that going to be?’ Cardinal asked.

‘Without another sample to compare it to? Not helpful at all. And the bad news is, they change the cartridge, they change the flaws. Far as we’re concerned, it’s like they’ve bought themselves a whole new printer.’

Cardinal pointed to the notebook. ‘What can you do with these?’

‘Depends what you want to know.’

‘I’d like to be sure the note was written with the same pen as the rest of the notebook. And when it was written in relation to the last entries. If you open it to the one that mentions “John’s birthday”.’

‘John’s birthday. Ha! Maybe she was addressing it to you!’ Hunn flicked through the pages, then held the notebook up to the light the way he had the card. ‘Oh, yeah. You’ve got impressions here. I can make out “Dear John”. First thing we do is stick ’em both in the comparator.’

He lifted a wide door on something labelled VSC 2000.

‘Look through the window there, when I flick the switch. I can shine several different kinds of light on the samples, see what kicks up. Ink may look identical to the human eye, but even the same make and model of pen will show differences under infrared. The chemistry of different ink batches reacts differently. I can’t tell you how many fraudulent wills I’ve busted using this gizmo. “Dear John.” Gotta love it.’

Cardinal bent over to peer through the window. The writing on the pages glowed.

‘These are identical,’ Hunn said from behind him. ‘Same pen wrote the suicide note and the birthday note.’

‘Can you tell me which one was written first?’

‘Sure. First thing we do is stick it in the humidifier.’ Hunn put the notebook into a small machine with a glass front that looked like a toaster oven. ‘Just needs a minute or so. Indentations will show up way better if the paper is humid.’

The machine beeped, and he took out the notebook. ‘Now we’ll run a little ESDA magic on it, see what we can see.’

‘A little what?’

‘E-S-D-A. Electrostatic detection apparatus.’

This was a hulk of a machine with a venting hood on top. Hunn laid the notebook down so that the single page was flat against a layer of foam. Then he spread a sheet of plastic wrap over it.

‘Underneath the foam we got a vacuum that pulls the air through. It’ll hold the document and the plastic down tight. Now I take my Corona unit – don’t worry, I’m not gonna open my pants …’

Hunn picked up a wandlike instrument and flicked a switch. ‘Little mother puts out several thousand volts,’ he said over the hum. He waved it over the plastic sheet a few times. There was no change that Cardinal could see.

‘Now I take my fairy dust …’ Hunn shook what looked like iron filings out of a small canister. ‘Actually, these are tiny glass beads covered in toner. I’m just gonna cascade ’em over my set-up here …’

He poured the black powder over the plastic that covered the notebook page. The beads slid off, leaving toner behind in the impressions. There was a flash of light.

‘Now I got us a picture,’ Hunn said, ‘and we shall see what we shall see. Have these been dusted for fingerprints?’

‘Not yet. Why?’

‘The toner’ll often pick up prints – not as good as dusting powder. They have to be pretty good prints for it to work. Take a look.’

A photograph scrolled out of a slot. Cardinal reached for it.

There was a small dark thumbprint to the left of “John’s birthday”, which now appeared in white. There was a short straight line across the whorls where Catherine had cut herself in the kitchen years ago. Catherine’s thumbprint, where she braced the notebook on her lap. She was alive. She was thinking of me, planning for my birthday, imagining a future. Cardinal coughed to cover the cry that threatened to escape his throat. The impression of the suicide note was now complete, clearly inscribed in black toner. By the time you read this …

It’s her handwriting. You know it’s her handwriting. Why are you putting yourself through this?

‘Okay,’ Cardinal said. ‘So we know the suicide note was written on top of the later page, which makes sense. The later pages should have been blank when she wrote the suicide note. But can you tell if the ink on the later page, I mean the ink of the birthday note, is on top of the impressions left from the suicide note? Or underneath them?’

‘Oh, I like a man who thinks dirty,’ Hunn said. ‘Let’s pop it under the microscope. If the white lines of the birthday note are interrupted by black, that means the indentations were made at a later time than the ink.’ Hunn peered into the microscope and adjusted the focus. ‘Nope. We got black interrupted by white – ink over indentations.’

‘So the suicide note was definitely written before the birthday note.’

‘Definitely. I’m assuming you know when the mysterious John’s birthday occurred?’

‘Yeah. Over three months ago.’

‘Hmm. Not your usual sort of suicide, then.’

‘No. Can I keep the picture you took?’

‘Oh, sure. That way the original doesn’t have to be handled so much.’ Hunn pulled the original out of the ESDA machine and put it back in its folder.

‘Do one more thing for me, Tommy?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Pour some of that fairy dust on the suicide note too.’

‘You wanna check it for earlier impressions as well? You already have the birthday thing.’

‘I’d really appreciate it. My brothers in arms up north aren’t exactly on the team on this one.’

Hunn looked at him, pale blue eyes calculating. ‘Okay, sure.’

He repeated the routine of humidifying the note, securing it under plastic, charging it. Then he poured the powder over the plastic.

‘Looks like lots of impressions from notes earlier in the notebook. We can stick it under the microscope and be certain which ones came first, if you want.’

‘Look at this,’ Cardinal said. He pulled out the photo curling from the slot. The suicide note was now in white. But there was something else at the top of the photo, in the centre, outlined in black toner.

‘Quite a bit bigger than the other one,’ Hunn said. ‘And no scar. I’m no ident man, but I’d say you’re now dealing with a very different pair of thumbs.’

A little later Hunn walked him down to the elevators, where they waited in silence a few moments. Then the bell pinged, announcing the arrival of the elevator. Cardinal got in and hit the button for the ground floor.

‘Say, listen,’ Hunn said in the tone of one who has been turning something over in his mind. ‘That stuff isn’t connected to you, is it? I mean, personally? You wouldn’t be the John in the notebook, would you?’

‘Thanks for all your help, Tommy,’ Cardinal said as the elevator doors closed between them. ‘Much appreciated.’

Travelling back to Algonquin Bay the same day meant Cardinal and Kelly spent a total of eight hours together in the car. The ride back was quiet.

Cardinal asked Kelly how things had gone with her friend.

‘Fine. At least she hasn’t turned into a vegetable like Kim. She’s still involved in art, and she seems to have some idea of what’s going on in the world.’

Kelly twisted a strand of her blue-black hair as she stared out the window. Cardinal remembered how his own friends had changed at that age. Many had lost interest in him when he became a cop, and a lot of his Toronto associates wrote him off when he moved back to Algonquin Bay.

‘You never know about people,’ Catherine had said. ‘Everybody has their own storyline, and sometimes it doesn’t include us – usually when we wish it did. And sometimes it does include us – usually when we wish it didn’t.’

And what about now, Catherine? How do I deal with your being gone?

‘Like a cop,’ he imagined her saying, with the little half smile she gave whenever she was teasing him. ‘The way you handle everything.’

But it doesn’t help, he wanted to cry. Nothing helps.

They passed WonderWorld, a vast amusement park just north of Toronto with a fake pointy mountain and gigantic rides. Kelly asked him how things had gone at Forensics, but Cardinal mumbled something noncommittal. He didn’t want to see the look of pity and frustration in her eyes.

When Orillia was behind them, she said, ‘I suppose this means dinner at the Sundial?’

‘Unfortunately not,’ Cardinal said. ‘Sundial’s closed.’

‘My oh my. The end of an era.’

They had to settle for bland little sandwiches at a Tim Hortons.

It was dark by the time they got home. The hills and the trees were silent, a salve to the ears after the endless clatter of Toronto. Colder, too. A half-hidden moon lit tendrils of cloud that hung motionless over the water, the lake itself shiny and black as patent leather.

When Cardinal opened the front door, he stepped on the corner of a square white envelope. He picked it up without showing Kelly.

‘I’m going to take a shower,’ Kelly said, taking off her coat. ‘Nothing like a day in the car to make you feel grubby.’

Cardinal took the envelope into the kitchen, holding it by the corner. He switched on the overhead light and peered at the address. He was pretty sure he could make out a pale, threadlike line running through the M and the R of Madonna Road.

10

Cardinal had not noticed on his previous visit how thoroughly Dr Bell’s office was set up for the comfort of his patients. The large sunny windows, with their gauzy blinds bright as sails, the floor-to-ceiling walls of psychology and philosophy texts with their reassuring smells of ink and glue and paper, the worn Persian rugs, everything about the room conveyed stability, permanence, wisdom – qualities that psychiatric patients might feel lacking in their own lives. The place was a refuge from the mess of life, a cocoon that invited safe reflection.

Cardinal sank into the couch. He noted the boxes of Kleenex discreetly placed at either end, and on the coffee table – as much Kleenex as at Desmond’s Funeral Home – and he wondered how many times Catherine had sat here and wept. Had she also talked about her disappointment in her husband – who didn’t pay her enough attention, was not kind enough, or patient enough?

‘“How she must have hated you,”’ Dr Bell read from the latest sympathy card. “‘You failed her so completely.’” He looked at Cardinal over tiny reading glasses. ‘What was your reaction when you read that? Your immediate reaction, I mean.’

‘That he’s right. Or she. Whoever wrote it. That it’s true I failed her and she probably hated me for it.’

‘Do you believe that?’

The doctor’s mild eyes on him – not probing, not trying to X-ray – just waiting, bright squares of window glinting in his glasses.

‘I believe that I failed her, yes.’

What Cardinal could not believe was that he was talking to anyone like this. He never talked to anyone like this, except Catherine. Something about Dr Bell – an air of gentle expectation, not to mention the wiry eyebrows and all that corduroy – compelled honesty. No wonder Catherine liked him, although …

‘What?’ Dr Bell said. ‘You’re hesitating now.’

‘Just remembering something,’ Cardinal said. ‘Something Catherine said to me one time just after she had seen you. I could tell she had been crying, and I asked her what was wrong. How it went. And she said, “I love Dr Bell. I think he’s great. But sometimes even the best doctor has to hurt you.”’

‘You thought of that now because my question hurt.’

Cardinal nodded.

‘There’s a common saying in psychotherapy: It has to get worse before it gets better.’

‘Yeah. Catherine told me that, too.’

‘Not that one ever intends to make a patient feel worse,’ Dr Bell said. His hands toyed with a brass object on his desk. It looked like a miniature steam engine. ‘But we all build up defences against certain truths about ourselves or our situations – against reality, essentially – and therapy provides a place where it’s safe to dismantle those defences. The patient does the dismantling, not the therapist, but the process is bound to be painful nevertheless.’

‘Luckily, I’m not here as a patient. I just wanted to ask you about those cards. I realize you’re not a profiler …’

‘No forensic experience at all, I’m afraid.’

‘That’s all right – this isn’t an official investigation. But I was hoping you would help by giving me your opinion on what kind of person would write these cards. They were mailed from two different locations, but they were printed by the same machine.’

‘What exactly is it that is under investigation – officially or otherwise?’

‘Catherine’s d—’ Cardinal’s breath caught on the word. He still could not say that word about Catherine, even though it was more than a week now. ‘Catherine.’

‘You mean you don’t believe she killed herself?’

‘The coroner has made a finding of suicide, and my colleagues down at the station agree. Personally, I find it a little harder to accept, though you’ll probably tell me that’s just my defence.’

‘Oh, no, I would never say it was just a defence. I have great respect for defences, Detective. They’re what get us through the day, not to mention the night. Nor would I second-guess your expertise on matters of homicide. My own experience of Catherine makes me think it indeed highly likely she killed herself, but if evidence were to show otherwise, I would not try to argue black is white. Certainly a finding of accidental death would be much easier for me to accept. But you’re not thinking it was an accident, are you?’

‘No.’

‘You’re thinking she was killed. And that whoever wrote these nasty cards was behind the killing.’

‘Let’s just say I’m pursuing several lines of inquiry at the moment. I’d be willing to pay you – I should have said that right away.’

‘Oh, no, no. I couldn’t possibly accept payment. This is not my field. I’m happy to give you my opinion, off the record, but to accept payment would imply a commercial service offered with confidence. It most assuredly is not.’ Dr Bell smiled, eyes disappearing for a moment in fur. ‘That’s a considerable caveat. Do you still wish me to proceed?’

‘If you would.’

Dr Bell rolled his shoulders and shook his head. If you were going to have tics, Cardinal supposed, they weren’t the worst ones to have. The doctor picked up the first card and adjusted his glasses. He swivelled slightly in his chair, bringing the card into the light. Then he went still, a figure in a painting.

‘All right,’ he said, after some time. ‘First of all, what is the nature of someone who writes a note like this? Essentially, you’ve got someone who is sneering at you.’

‘A friend of mine used the same word.’

‘And the author is not even sneering at you in person, he’s doing it behind your back. Or she. Rather in the way of a child who calls someone names from a safe distance. He knows you can’t retaliate. It’s a cowardly, fearful sort of attack.

‘Whereas killing someone – killing someone is very personal and face to face. Usually. To link these cards with Catherine’s possible murder, you must assume the motive in both cases is the same: the goal is to hurt you, and Catherine was just a means to that end. Somehow, in order to hurt you, the killer first got hold of her suicide note – unless you’re thinking it’s not in fact her handwriting. Are you in doubt about the handwriting?’

‘For now, we’ll assume it’s genuine.’

‘Which would mean someone got hold of her suicide note. How could that be?’

‘I don’t know – at least, not yet. Please go on.’

‘He intends to hurt you by hurting her, perhaps follows her for a time. Possibly a good long time. Possibly snoops through her things and finds a suicide note she wrote on a particularly bad day. Possibly even finds it after she discarded it, who knows? In any case, he follows her on this night when she’s quite alone and pushes her off the roof, leaving the note behind to throw everyone off the scent. If that is in fact what happened, it seems to me the person capable of going through with all that – the stalking, the waiting, and then the final violence itself – is not the sort of shrinking violet who’s going to bother writing anonymous squibs. Am I making sense so far?’

‘I wish OPP Behavioural Science was this fast,’ Cardinal said. ‘Keep going.’

‘I would say in the case of the card writer you’re looking for someone who knows you. And I emphasize you as opposed to Catherine. He’s gone to the trouble of hiding his handwriting. And you say he’s mailed the cards from two different locations.’ Dr Bell sank back into his chair, rocking it with one foot propped on the coffee table, and resumed, ‘I’d say this is going to be someone nervous and withdrawn. Someone who feels himself – or herself – a failure. Almost certainly unemployed. Self-esteem deep in the negative zone. Also – to judge by the first card – someone who has suffered a great loss for which you are to blame. I imagine you’ve already considered the possibility, Detective, that this is someone you nicked?’

‘Mm,’ Cardinal said. ‘And there are a lot of those.’

‘Yes, but that “How does it feel?” That rings with a very specific intent, don’t you find? Someone steps on your foot, so you stomp on his. How does it feel? How do you like it? My point being, it’s not just someone you’ve imprisoned, but perhaps someone who lost his wife as a result of that imprisonment.’

‘We don’t keep statistics, but there’s probably a lot of those too. Marriages don’t tend to thrive on imprisonment.’

‘Nor on hospitalization, though I note your own admirable exception to this.’

Cardinal wanted to say, ‘I did my best, obviously it wasn’t enough,’ but grief closed its bony hand around his throat. He opened his briefcase and pulled out Catherine’s suicide note, the original encased in plastic.

Once again Dr Bell turned toward the window light. A few pensive scratchings among his sandy and grey curls, and then he went still again.

After a few moments he said, ‘That must have been painful to read.’

‘How does it read to you, Doctor? Does it sound genuine?’

‘Ah. So you do have doubts about the handwriting?’

‘Just tell me how it sounds to you, if you would.’

‘It reads exactly like Catherine. A deeply sad woman, often hopeless, but also capable of great love. I think it was that love that kept her going through depressions that by all rights should have proved lethal years earlier. Her main concern, and I heard this from her over and over again, was how it would affect you – apparently even at the end.’

‘If it was the end,’ Cardinal said.

11

Larry Burke was new in CID. He’d only been out of uniform a few months, in fact, and he very much wanted to make a good impression on his colleagues. He even worried that stopping into the Country Style at the top of Algonquin for a quiet lunch might be viewed as a complete cliché, the cop in the donut shop. But the truth was he didn’t give a damn about donuts, he just liked Country Style coffee. And they were making a decent sandwich these days, when you got down to it, so why shouldn’t he eat where he liked?

It was his favourite thing to do on his day off, stop into the Country Style with the Toronto Sun – you couldn’t beat the Sun for sports coverage – order himself a gigantic coffee and a chicken salad sandwich and linger for a good hour and a half. Today the sunlight streamed through the windows, and Burke was actually hot, even though it was a chilly October day. Outside, the hills were scarlet and gold.

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