Children in the Morning (41 page)

The next scene in the movie was Beau sitting in his office, tie off, feet up on the desk, reading a legal tome. The phone rang. He answered, answered again, then listened. We heard a voice, which could have been male or female, telling him the brother didn’t do it.

The police should have looked harder, should have expanded their search to the outskirts of town. Had Beau ever heard of an old creep by the name of Edgar Lampman? No? Well, Beau might be interested in what Lampman had buried in his backyard. Click. The scene faded out with Beau sitting there in silence, telephone receiver in his hand.

After that, we saw Beau at the door of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment in Lunenburg, and then it was Beau’s car and an rcmp cruiser pulling into the yard of a small, ratty-looking brown bungalow.

The camera followed the Mounties and Delaney as they entered Edgar Lampman’s house and looked around. A shabby brown chesterfield had stuffing and a spring sticking out. Where you might have expected to see a coffee table, there was a television propped up on plastic milk cartons. The cable for the tv came in through a corner of the front window; it served as a makeshift clothesline for a pair of dingy underwear and work socks. In one corner of the room was an old wooden desk, with a model of a World War Two-era bat-tleship and an ancient manual typewriter on it. The police opened the desk drawers. A close-up of one of the cops showed his eyes narrowing in response to something he had found. He drew a pile of news clippings from the drawer, cleared a space on the desktop, and spread them out. They were news stories about Cathy Tompkins and the man who had shot her. One small news item, circled in red, reported a rumour that Adam Gower was coming back to town.

The scene switched to Lampman’s backyard, where the Mounties moved towards a small mound of earth and grass. A bit of careful dig-ging produced a manila envelope, which had been sealed with duct tape at both ends. Words were printed on the envelope with red and black marker, in large block letters: “personal and private!!!! to only be open after my death!!!!” The envelope was photographed, dusted, and otherwise processed, and in a later scene we got to see the contents: a brown leather wallet with darker brown stains, a pewter or silver ring in the design of a skull and crossbones, and a letter, 266

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which Lampman had composed for posterity: “Let the world know the truth. And Cathy Herself. I done it for her. I killed that scum with my bare hands! I bided my time. I knew he’d come back to the scene of the crime, so I tricked him to go into the woods and I said

‘Scum, now you die!’ This here is his skellating ring off his finger.

This here is his own blood. I told ‘somebody’ but nobody believed I had the guts!!!!”

Following that scene, we returned to Beau’s office, where two rcmp officers stood by as Beau pulled out his file on the Gary’s General Store case. In reality, this would have been several bankers’

boxes full of documents, but in the movie it was a buff folder. He opened it, and sifted through some papers until he came to a yellow legal pad. The camera zoomed in on his handwritten notes. There were drawings and doodles in the margins, including a drawing of a skull and crossbones ring, which had apparently caught Beau’s eye while he was interviewing Gower before his trial. Lampman had taken the ring off Gower as a souvenir. Beau and the Mounties stared at the pictures. They had their man.

I was curious about Edgar Lampman, and wanted to see what he had looked like in real life. I ejected the Hollywood version and stuck the local news documentary into the vcr. I pressed fast-forward until I got to Lampman. He was a bizarre individual who affected, with some success, a rakish air. His appearance was distinguished by a white goatee and a supercilious expression on his face. He wore a navy pea jacket; a yachtsman’s cap sat at a jaunty angle on his head.

He lived on a combination of welfare and long-term disability benefits; I inferred that his disability was of a psychiatric nature. On cheque day, he would go into Gary’s General Store and load up on provisions. Cheque day inevitably turned into jail night. He would head to the local tavern, get drunk, tell tall tales of his past exploits, real or imagined, then threaten someone, throw a punch or pull a knife, and be carted off to jail for the night.

Lampman’s past exploits, the real ones, included a long and occasionally violent criminal history. He had been in the navy, but had been dishonourably discharged for undisclosed reasons. He had served short sentences in prison for theft, fraud, and common assault. His longest stretch was four years for terrorizing his ex-wife 267

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and her new boyfriend; Lampman had kept them tied up in the basement of the woman’s house for two nights, feeding them dog food, threatening them, and inflicting minor cuts on their faces and arms with a knife. He walked out and left them there. On the third day of their captivity, their cries attracted the attention of a passerby, and they were freed.

I turned off the video and reflected on what I had seen. I thought about Lampman and about Cathy Tompkins’s brother, Robby. I thought about Beau Delaney’s dedication to the defence of the innocent, and the guilty.

Edgar Lampman wrote that he had tricked Gower into entering the woods along the 103 Highway. The beating of Adam Gower, to the point where he was unrecognizable, did not speak to me of trickery. To me it was an act of uncontrollable rage, the anger of someone who cared very deeply about Cathy Tompkins. Would Lampman have felt that strongly about a young girl he knew only from his occasional visits to the general store? The documentary had showed an arch sort of individual, who seemed to enjoy the eccentric image he cultivated. He was a violent man, to be sure. He had served several years in prison for the forcible confinement and wounding of his ex-wife and her boyfriend.

If ever there was a crime of passion, it was a jilted lover’s lashing out at an ex-wife or girlfriend who had moved on to another man. Yet, Lampman’s actions in that case were those of a torturer, who toyed with the couple either for revenge or for his own gratification. He inflicted frightening but minor wounds, kept this going for two nights, then walked away. What was missing from that crime was the element of rage. The kind of wrath that was let loose on Adam Gower.

The man who did that was a man whose emotions were laid bare, someone who couldn’t stop himself from what he was doing. Someone like the brother of a young girl whose life had been destroyed by the man who shot her. Had Cathy’s brother committed the crime after all?

The jury had thought so. Was the Lampman angle a set-up? Delaney had received the information from an anonymous caller. Was that caller Robby Tompkins, or someone acting on his behalf?

There was something else that bothered me about the Delaney movie and documentary: the skull ring that was found in Lampman’s stash of souvenirs from the murder of Adam Gower. Had anyone 268

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ever come forward and said Gower had worn such a ring? Not that I could recall. How then had the police connected the ring with him?

Through Delaney’s sketch of it. Lawyers, like so many other people, occasionally doodle on paper while they’re waiting for something to happen. I remembered noticing the little cartoons drawn by Gail Kirk, the Crown attorney prosecuting the Peggy Delaney murder case. She tended to do this when her co-counsel was handling a procedural motion, or when we were waiting for the judge to come in.

She did not do it when she was listening to a witness on the stand.

The only time I heard Beau Delaney’s pen scratching paper was when he was scribbling a note to tell me what to do in court, in case I forgot. Beau didn’t draw pictures in the courtroom. And I was willing to bet he didn’t do it when he was sitting across from a client in his office, taking down information and wanting to move him out so the next client could move in.

All of this painted a picture for me. It told me Delaney knew perfectly well that Cathy’s brother Robby wasn’t innocent. And Delaney didn’t care. The way I saw things now, Delaney acquiesced in the Lampman frame-up, even helped it along with the fiction of the skull ring, redoing or inventing notes and adding drawings of the ring.

Delaney was determined to save Robby Tompkins, whom he viewed as another victim of the Gary’s General Store shooting, someone who did not deserve to sit in jail for a murder he committed in a fit of grief and fury.

†

“I know about Robby Tompkins. I want to hear the full story.”

Delaney went perfectly still as he faced me across the desk in my office on Friday morning. He didn’t speak.

“If the Crown is determined to appeal your acquittal and if they dig into your background, the tangled protective web you wove around Robby Tompkins could unravel, and you could be hit with all kinds of charges arising from that.”

He finally found his voice. “Let it be, Monty. Leave it alone.

Edgar Lampman is six feet under, and the Tompkins family has suffered enough. This stays buried. Period. Now if that’s all you have to 269

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say, I have work to do. You may have called this meeting, but I’m adjourning it. Good day.”

He got up and walked out. I wasn’t about to chase him down Barrington Street, so I let him go. I tried not to dwell on the ramifi-cations for Delaney, for me, and for the Tompkins family, if the true story got out.

(Normie)

I always thought of Father Burke as being really big, but not after I saw him standing in front of Mr. Delaney, with Mr. Delaney looming right over him and talking down into his face. Father didn’t look so big anymore and I was scared for him. Because it looked as if Mr.

Delaney was yelling. Except he wasn’t. He was talking so low that I couldn’t hear what he said, but you could tell he really wanted Father Burke to pay attention and do whatever Mr. Delaney wanted.

This was at school on Friday, and the grade fours were going from math to gym class. I was straggling behind because I knew Richard Robertson was going to be standing up in front of the grade six class reading a funny story and making faces to go along with it, so I wanted to peek into his classroom to see him doing it. But the door was closed, and I couldn’t very well go up and peer inside and everybody would look up and see this face pressed up against the window gawking in, and they’d laugh at me. So I didn’t. But that’s when I heard great big loud footsteps down the corridor behind me, and I turned around. Mr. Delaney had caught up with Father Burke, who had just come into the corridor carrying a prayer book, the kind with the coloured ribbons to mark your place.

Even if I hadn’t been able to see the expression on Mr. Delaney’s face, I would have known there was something going on, because I could sense strong feelings around him and coming out of him. I can’t explain it, but it was like being in a big, dark storm with lots of wind.

Father Burke put his hand on Mr. Delaney’s arm, and I could tell he was trying to calm him down. I wondered if Father had done something that got Mr. Delaney all upset, or made him mad. Anyway, they started walking away, out of the school, with Father Burke in 270

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front and Mr. Delaney behind him. That’s when I got even more scared. Was he going to clobber our priest on the back of the head? Or take him somewhere and beat him up? That’s not the kind of thing I would normally think about people, but the storm of feelings around Mr. Delaney made me think something scary might happen. I even wondered if I should call the cops, or tell one of the teachers. But if it turned out to be nothing, I would be in trouble for being a tattletale and not minding my own business. So I went to gym class and was almost late for the first lap around the room. After that, I asked if I could use the school phone, and I called Daddy to tell him about what I saw. But all I could do was leave a message because he wasn’t there.

(Monty)

I had no intention of letting Delaney off the hook. I didn’t want to stir things up, or do anything to draw attention to the elaborate criminal justice coup he had orchestrated all those years ago. But I wanted to know the story, so there would not be any surprises out there if the court ordered a new trial for the murder of Peggy Delaney.

First, though, I had to focus on an emergency injunction hearing in Supreme Court — the last thing anyone needs on a Friday afternoon. My firm’s client wanted to tear down a row of Victorian townhouses and put up a parking garage; the local heritage group wanted an injunction to stop the demolition. I did my best, but wasn’t the least bit sorry when we lost, and the buildings were given a reprieve. When I got back to the office, I took my stack of phone messages and returned the calls. One was from Normie during school hours. I tried the choir school, but she had already left, so I called Maura’s number. Normie answered on the first ring.

“Daddy! Maybe nothing happened to Father Burke, but you should check!”

“What, sweetheart?” I tried to keep the alarm out of my voice.

“What do you mean?”

“Mr. Delaney came to the school, and I could tell there were bad feelings whirling around him, and he was standing over Father Burke and made him leave the school and go somewhere!”

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