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

Martinez looked surprised to see Lane and asked, “Is Mrs. Renwick here?”

Before Lane could answer, Ivy said wearily, “Yes. Come in, Sergeant.”

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Lane said, starting through the door. “Let me know if you need anything, Mrs. Renwick.”

“Oh, can you stay? Can she stay?” She turned to Martinez. “I’d prefer it.”

Surprised, Lane came back into the room and waited for the sergeant’s response.

“She can stay,” Martinez said, “but I’ve come to tell you we now know you have not been entirely honest with us, and I’ll have to take you down to the station to answer a few questions.”

Ivy sat down heavily and looked at her hands.

“If you could get whatever you need, Mrs. Renwick,” Martinez said patiently.

Ivy stood up and went to the desk and pulled out the hotel stationery and scribbled something on it. “Mrs. Darling, this is the law office for the business back home. Could you call them, ask them to recommend a legal firm down here, and ask them to send someone immediately to the police station?” She turned to Martinez. “I won’t answer questions until a lawyer is there.”

Nodding, as if this were par for the course, Martinez said, “That’s fine ma’am. We’ve picked up Mr. Edward Renwick and will be speaking with him for some time, I expect.”

Lane followed them out and stood on the sidewalk, waiting for the sergeant to help Ivy into the back of the car.

“Sergeant Martinez,” she said when he had closed the door, “what shall I tell the cleaning woman, Chela Ruiz? Will you be interviewing her?”

“Oh, right. No, I don’t think I’ll need to at this point. You’d best call Mrs. Renwick that lawyer. She’s going to need one.”

Chapter Eleven

Wednesday morning, Ames and Terrell sat in Ames’s office. Ames was tapping the desk with his pencil, and Terrell was waiting, his book open.

“Clearly Barney was not a very nice man,” Ames said. He was troubled by what Tina had told him, which was, in retrospect, not much. But she knew Watts and hated him, and then there was what April had said about Watts and young girls. He’d known Tina. Known her how, exactly? What had Watts done that made Tina hate him?

“Yes, sir,” said Terrell. “A history of a penchant for young girls, which for the most part is not in itself against the law, but it becomes less and less savoury as he gets older. His wife is a good ten to fifteen years younger than he is, and, in fact, was sixteen when they met, and now we hear he may have been engaged in something with the girlfriend of one of his workmates. And, of course, who belongs to those pretty clothes in the bag?”

“None of this is going to feed the baby. He was robbed, let’s say by his passenger, but died what appears to be a natural death. We should concentrate on that,” Ames said. “Maybe we were asking the wrong question at the ferry. We need to ask the guy on the ferry if there was a female foot passenger going over to Harrop that day. But it could have been any hitchhiker, really. We’re just thinking it was a woman now because of the clothes. Whoever it was must have walked some distance or caught a ride.”

“Could we put a notice in the paper and on the radio for anyone seeing a man or woman walking on the road on Monday to contact us?”

“Yes. Then let’s go see Finch. If he was arguing with him about a woman, it’s possible the woman with Watts was Finch’s wife. Then I’ll go back out and talk to the ferryman. I might give the scene another look as well. I’m puzzled about the keys.”

When Terrell had gone off to the offices of the Nelson Daily News, Ames sat for a few minutes more looking at his notes and then decided he needed a cup of coffee to stimulate his thinking.

“Oh, I’m glad you’ve come in,” April said as Ames walked into the diner. She held up a coffee pot and he nodded. “I called my sister to ask”—and here she dropped into a near whisper, looking at the elderly couple sitting at one end of the counter—“about you-know-who. She said he had a real reputation, thought he was the bee’s knees. He even was rumoured to have practically forced girls to . . . you know. And she’s pretty sure he put at least one girl in the family way. Most of the girls in town learned to stay away from him. According to Sis, he even propositioned her, and she told him where to go.”

“You don’t say. Thank you for calling her.” He could see from the way April hovered that she’d have liked to hear more from him, but it was an ongoing investigation. He was relieved when she was summoned to another table. Besides, he was always slightly embarrassed about the amount of sugar he put in his coffee. He stirred in his customary three spoons and gave himself over to thinking about this new indication of the victim’s unsavoury personality.

Back at his desk, Ames scribbled some notes and thought about Tina. Was she one of the girls Watts had “forced,” or even put in the family way? He thought of Tina with a secret child somewhere and dismissed the idea, though the thought of it produced an unpleasant sensation between anger and grievance. Aware that his anxiety about Tina could distort his thinking about Barney Watts’s death, he pulled his notepaper toward him and tried to sort what was on it. He had become convinced that a system of note taking he’d learned from an officer in Vancouver might yield results.

He folded the paper in half lengthwise and on the top of the left-hand side he wrote: b. WATTS, DEATH. Underneath he detailed the finding of the car, the tyre marks indicating a sharp and precipitous turn, its final position,