A Match Made for Murder by Iona Whishaw (top 10 best books of all time txt) 📗

been loud and very near. There was the low boxwood hedge between where they stood and the pool area, and a fence with a much higher planting of boxwood along the far side of the pool. That must be the road behind there, she thought. The growing scream of sirens became audible.

Where was Ivy Renwick?

Chapter Four

Ames was finishing up some paperwork on a robbery at a local mining office and was feeling guilty that he’d not gotten out to photograph the garage door at the Van Eycks’ as he’d promised. The call had taken up the whole morning because the burglar had unexpectedly not made an attempt at the safe but had gone through papers, pulling open drawers and scattering the contents across the office, and the secretary had been trying to figure out what, if anything, had been actually stolen. He was nonplussed at the knock on his office door.

“Constable Terrell. Do you have something on this break-in?”

“No, sir, but there’s been an accident on the road just before the Harrop ferry. I’ve already contacted the ambulance service.”

“Right,” Ames said, jumping up to reach for his coat and hat. “Come with me. Casualties?” he asked, as they clattered down the stairs.

“The woman who called it in said there was one man in the car. She was a bit hysterical. She said she approached because the car was in a ditch, like the driver had lost control, and she said the man looked unconscious. She was coming off the ferry and saw it just before the main road. Car doors are locked. She apparently lives nearby and rushed home to make the call.” By this time, he too had retrieved his coat and hat and was holding the car keys up.

Ames reached for them and then pulled his hand back. “Would you like to drive?”

“Yes, sir, if you like. I haven’t driven this vehicle. Any peculiarities I should know about?”

“As a matter of fact, there’s a kind of glitch when you throw it into reverse,” Ames said, opening the door to the unfamiliar passenger seat. His anxiety about someone else driving what he thought of as his beloved car was somewhat ameliorated by what he considered a very proper question from Terrell.

As they drove the curve around the bottom of the hill the Nelson hospital was perched on, they heard the sound of a siren. “Should hit the ferry at the same time,” Terrell said. A sleety rain began to fall, and he leaned forward slightly as the wipers worked inadequately to clear the windshield.

The ferry was heading away from town, bobbing on the dark green choppy water toward the north shore. They clearly had just missed it.

Terrell turned off the engine, and he and Ames sat watching it, the wake looking almost luminescent on the dark surface of the water.

“And that’s that,” Ames said. “Hurry up and wait.”

“I have my thermos of coffee, sir,” Terrell said, holding it up. “And two cups.”

“That’s pretty forward thinking of you, Constable. Any cookies?”

“No, sir. But I’ll make a note for next time.”

They sat, companionably drinking coffee, sweet and milky, just as Ames liked it. He looked about him at the bleak darkness of the lake and the gloomy bank of forest on the other side. It was a cold and deeply misty day. The kind of day that made it seem like the coming winter would last forever. He could see patches of snow already visible between the trees, and he sank into a kind of impatient melancholy. He wanted to ask Terrell about himself but wasn’t sure how to go about it. They’d never had a coloured officer on the Nelson force. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d ever met a coloured person at all.

“Nice country, sir. It reminds me a little of Nova Scotia.”

Pleased at this opening, Ames said, “Is that where you’re from? How’d you find yourself all the way out here? I mean . . .” But whatever Ames thought he was going to say next eluded him, and he quickly felt flustered.

Terrell smiled. “Not too many of my kind around here, is what you’re thinking. I just wanted a change of scene. It’s a big country. I heard there was an opening here, so I came.”

“Right,” said Ames quickly. “Right, well, have you, I mean, how are you finding it with the uh—”

“Oh, the guys are okay, sir. The inspector is great, everybody.”

“Oh. Well, good.” Ames thought about people’s ability to be casually offensive about others in general, but polite when confronted with actual individuals.

“So you trained in Nova Scotia?”

“I was with the West Nova Scotia Regiment in the last two years of the war. Military police and reconnaissance. I was at university before that.”

Ames nodded and opened his window to turn out the last drops of coffee in his mug. He shuddered and looked at his watch. He wished he had cigarettes, but his mother, perhaps because of the coughing and spitting death of his father, had made him promise never to take up the vile habit, as she suspected cigarettes were to blame. He smoked sometimes in the bar after work with the other fellows, but he could never really break his promise and take it up full-time. It would have provided a bit of spurious warmth now, though. Constable Terrell looked like a non-smoker.

The hubbub of the police taking over the scene and pushing gawkers away found Lane standing with the blond woman who was still distraught. Her husband, who had produced a blanket to cover the body, had been working his way around the melee to reach them but had been held back by a police officer.

“Thank you,” Lane said. “You did the right thing.”

“I’ve never been so frightened in my life! I was just saying hello to him and . . . that . . . that awful noise . . . the way he fell like that . . .” She began to sob with