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

“You know, I drove out to a garage near Balfour, run by a guy called Van Eyck, the day before yesterday, and someone had painted the word Bitch on the garage door,” Ames began as they sat on the ferry across to the north shore. “The paint was already dry, so it had happened sometime in the middle of the night. The strange thing is that Tina Van Eyck, the daughter—who is a mechanic there, by the way—believed it was Barney Watts who’d done it. They’d had an unpleasant interaction when he’d brought his car in, and she thought he’d done it for revenge.” Ames said all this, carefully avoiding the embarrassment of his own dubious motives for going out there in the first place.

“Coincidence, surely. But I guess you didn’t want to ask Mrs. Watts about it when her husband had just died?”

“Yes. It seemed so trivial somehow, after he’d been found dead. Anyway, I don’t think Miss Van Eyck could really be so sure. It might have had nothing to do with him.”

“He was away a lot, so we were used to making do on our own,” Mrs. Watts said. They were sitting at the kitchen table with mugs of coffee. They could hear Sadie, her ten-year-old daughter, moving about in the room above them. She had been kept back from school for the day.

“Away doing what?” Ames asked quietly. Terrell had taken Ames’s usual place as note-taker, and Ames was finding it awkward sitting with his hands empty. It did mean, however, that he spent more time observing the woman than he otherwise might. Her husband had clearly been much older—but there was something weary about Amy Watts that aged her beyond her years. Perhaps some of it was grief.

“Well, there was the war. And then when he got back, he got a job at the cpr, mostly at the station in Nelson. He was a section foreman in the yard. And then he’d go for training sessions to the coast. Anyway. We got quite used to making do on our own.”

Ames looked around. Her repetition of the phrase “making do” suggested a stark, narrow existence. The kitchen was primly tidy and a little over-warm. Dishes were stacked neatly in the open shelves, and cups hung above the sink. A full wood box was tucked between the wall and the stove. A cat lay on a worn grey blanket folded near the other side of the stove. There were no dishes piled for washing, or surfaces cluttered with pencils or books. An empty laundry rack above the stove was pulled tight to the ceiling. Did she always keep it like this, or had grief made her try to find ways to keep busy?

“What about his health?”

“I don’t know. I never knew him to be really ill. A little winded sometimes after chopping wood. Recently he would come home and fall asleep right after dinner, but I assumed that was mostly because he’d been at the bar.”

“Who is his doctor?”

“We never had a doctor. Been lucky, I guess.”

“So he wasn’t taking any sort of medicine?” Ames asked.

“No.” Mrs. Watts drew the word out. “But now that you say it, I noticed lately that he wouldn’t eat like he used to. Kept saying he had no appetite or was too tired to eat.”

“How recently?” Ames asked. Terrell sat with his pencil poised over his notebook.

“The last month or so maybe? I honestly couldn’t say. Are you suggesting he was keeping some sort of health problem from me?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “It would be like him, actually. He always had to be the strong man. Nothing could ever touch him, he said, since he survived the war. I asked him about why he wasn’t eating at first, and he just told me to leave him alone. I stopped asking because he’d get mad.”

“Can we talk about yesterday? Was it a normal day for him?”

“Yes. We got up, I made breakfast for both of them, and then he drove off with Sadie. He wasn’t feeling well so I made him an extra hot cup of tea. He said he was getting a cold, now that I think of it, and I told him not to go to work, but he was adamant that he felt well enough to work. He drops—” she caught herself, “dropped Sadie off at the school down the hill every day. She usually walks back on her own with Betty Ann who lives farther up the road.” She clutched at her mug of coffee, kneading it with nervous fingers. “I don’t understand why he was over by the Harrop ferry.”

“So he never said anything to you about going over there—business with the railway, anything?”

“No. As far as I knew it was just a day of work.”

“Now, your husband . . .” Ames hesitated. He had sat in while Darling asked questions, but now confronted with having to ask personal questions, he felt as though he was watching himself, waiting to say the wrong thing and give offence. Luckily Mrs. Watts leapt into the silence.

“I was sixteen when I met him in ’36. He’d have been twenty-nine. We met at a church bazaar, which is a little ironic, considering neither one of us was a churchgoer. I was helping Mum with the jumble sale—I have no idea why he was there. The beer tent, I suppose. I went for a break. It was a hot day, and I went to sit on the grass under a tree. Same tree he was smoking under. I was bowled over, you might say, having a grown man pay attention to me that way. I knew he had a reputation, but I didn’t care. Eventually, well, we ‘had’ to get married. I’m not sure that was what he wanted. I think he’d been used to getting his way, if you know what I mean. He did tell me he had a steady girlfriend before we met, and I