Death of a Sunday Writer (11 page)

She explained.

“His name. Try both names.”

She tried ‘Trimble' again, then ‘David.' No good.

“Maybe he wrote it down, the way people write their social insurance number and bank machine number. Did you look in his wallet?”

Lucy retrieved the wallet from the envelope she had left in the drawer, reminding herself that she had to dispose of his tie-pin and cuff-links, as well as his glasses. In a secret compartment, behind a leather flap, she found one of Trimble's cards. On the back were numbers: his social insurance number, his bank account number and, she guessed, his bank machine access number. There were no words.

“You aren't supposed to keep your bank machine
number in the same place as your credit card, are you? You're supposed to memorise it,” Lucy said.

“A lot of people write it down, just in case. See, that means David probably wrote the secret word down somewhere.”

She took the wallet apart now, hunting for a slip of paper with a word, any word. Together, she and Tse searched the surface of the desk, among the scraps of paper, the lists, the notes, the telephone numbers, but no likely code-word jumped out at them.

“Try ‘password.'”

“This is hopeless.” She tried it anyway.

“David was a bettor,” Tse said. “When you name a horse, you always find a name that is related to its parents. What is son of ‘diary'?”

She tried ‘calendar.'

“‘Entry,'” Tse said. “‘Date,' ‘month,' ‘private,' ‘birthday.'”

She tried them all. No good.

Lucy moved on to the next file, titled ‘Ledger.'

Tse hung over her shoulder.

The first entry was
Spittles, 500, Vikings
followed by the date. There followed eight similar entries, each one consisted of two names separated by a number, then the date.

“They are bets,” Peter said. “See. Argos. Vikings, Dolphins, Eskimos — they're all football teams. The figure is the bet.”

“And the first word?”

“That's the guy who made the bet.”

Lucy pointed to one of the names: Tse. “Do you know him?”

“There's two hundred of us in the telephone book.”

“They are very large bets, aren't they?”

“No. Large sums, maybe. Not large bets.” Lucy rolled the page.

“That's a big one,” Tse said, pointing to a figure of 1000.

“What's it all about? Was David really a bookmaker?”

Tse laughed. “He was a drop. People dropped off bets. David passed them on to the bookie.”

“You must have seen them. They must have been in and out of the office.”

“They used the telephone.”

“Did they trust each other?”

Tse laughed. “Oh, no. But they always paid up. The bookies paid up right away, and the customers in the end.”

“I see. I think I'd better talk to the bookmaker. He might have all kinds of anecdotes about David.”

“You don't know who he is, or where to find him.”

“I know who might know.”

“You be careful.” Tse's response was automatic.

“That's what everyone's saying. I might as well be back with Geoffrey.”

Tse left, and Lucy moved to switch off the computer, instinctively saving the file even though the text was not modified.

This nudged her into a second instinct, and she searched the desk drawers for a soft disc, found one, copied the ledger, then, as an afterthought, copied the memoir onto the same disc, then put the disc, unlabelled, back in the drawer.

The Trog had not called yet, and this was making her
anxious in a way rather different from what she would have felt six months before. She was grateful to him but she knew now that he had served his purpose. She had decided not to be his occasional lady in Longborough any longer, to move on, and she wanted to tell him so. Since The Trog was her only experience outside marriage so far, she did not know if there was some conventional way of breaking these things off, a way that preserved everyone's self-respect. She was fairly sure it would come as no surprise to him: lately they had sometimes found little to talk about after he had described his mission, and once he had fallen asleep before she got into bed, and she hadn't woken him up. But she did want to see him for the last time, to tell him it was over. And also she hoped he was all right.

Geoffrey had not yet turned up, but Lucy knew she hadn't heard the last of him.

Two days later, Lucy drove back to Longborough to look for Jack Brighton's client, the boy who had come to Longborough from England in 1940. At this stage, she was keen to show Brighton how reliable she was. If she was going to be able to pay the Toronto rents and keep her house in Longborough, she needed any work that Brighton wanted to farm out.

She started at the library, first picking up a piece of tortiere and some salad from The Moveable Feast so that she could share the lunch hour with her old colleagues, but she felt somewhat like a college student reluctantly home for the holidays. This was where she used to live, and never would again. Already, they were talking about problems, in the library and with each other, that had occurred after her departure. She had expected more of a response when she walked in, but while everyone was friendly, they were also working, and she felt slightly out of it all.

The boy's name was Brian Potter and the uncle had the same name, which meant either that the uncle was the mother's brother-in-law, or that the boy was illegitimate. Lucy found seven Potters in the telephone book, and called them all, one by one, but none of them acknowledged being related to the boy Brian in 1940. Next she planned a call on the Bell office to look at the Longborough telephone books from 1940. If that didn't work, she would have to make a list of the town's oldest inhabitants and go door-to-door, trying to jog a memory. While she was planning all this, one of the Potters called back to say that his father had just told him that there used to be a family of Potters who owned a farm nearby, and their only daughter had married a man named Denton. Lucy should give them a try. The farm was south of Longborough, near the race track. Lucy looked up the Denton's farm on the municipal rolls, and worked out a route.

At one time she could have reached the farm by simply driving south from Longborough, and then east at the right concession road, but a new highway with limited access had been built between the town and the Denton's farm, destroying the natural crossroads. Lucy got lost on a clover leaf and ended up at a community college in the south-east corner of the town. A lot of new directions, and an hour and a half later, she turned onto a rutted gravel track that led up to some unpainted farm buildings.

As she pulled up, a dog approached her. It was shaped like a very long dachshund, but it was whitish-grey and hairless and it moved as if it was jointed in the middle like a wooden fishing lure. Lucy opened the car door and the
animal drew close, sliding back its lips, silently. Lucy pulled her leg in and closed the door. A woman opened the back door of the house and shouted, and the dog wriggled back.

“Youse can get out now,” the woman shouted to Lucy. “Don't try to touch him, though.”

Nothing was farther from Lucy's mind. She stepped carefully past the dog, which so far had simply peeled back its lips to uncover its teeth, without uttering a sound. Lucy called to the woman. “Mrs. Denton?”

“Who wants to know?” Now the woman came forward and passed Lucy to aim a kick at the dog, which was approaching again, but the dog stayed an inch out of range, its teeth still exposed. Lucy had had time to consider the implications of the rutted farm-track, the unpainted buildings, the rusting machinery, the wreckage of a burned car, and the woman's stained dress and broken slippers, and decided that the words ‘detective' or ‘lawyer' might have associations that would put this woman on her guard. “I've been asked to find out who lived here fifty years ago,” she said.

The woman turned her head and shouted to someone inside the house. “We did,” she said, turning back to Lucy.

“Is your name Potter?”

“It was, fifty years ago.”

“I'm working for a law firm in England. I'm enquiring after someone named Potter who lived here then. It's something to do with establishing a relationship.” Lucy tried to hold her new briefcase open on her knee while she looked for a document.

“You wanna come in?” the woman asked. She leaned back into the doorway. “Henry, we're comin' in,” she
yelled and waited for a reply, making Lucy wonder what Henry could be doing that required such warning.

In spite of having had a great-grandfather who had homesteaded near Belleville, Lucy's only experience of rural life was limited to an occasional visit to a farm owned by a lady in her Longborough book club, a farmhouse that glowed and twinkled with the polish that had been applied to the brass and woodwork, and smelled of basil and mint and apples, and heather in the bedrooms. Until now, this, for Lucy, was a farm house. The interior of the Dentons' house, the kitchen, at least, which was as far as she got, stunned her. First there was the sour smell that hung in the air like an invisible fog, and then the sight of its cause. Henry Denton sat in his undershirt and overalls, drinking beer out of a bottle, watching a bowling game on television.

There was a kitchen table and some chairs. Clothes, a lot of clothes, especially boots, were piled in the corners of the room, spilling towards the centre. A sink was full of dishes, and at one end of the counter — Lucy found it hard not to stare at this — a pile of earth and potatoes had been dumped, like a corner of a field brought indoors, to be used as needed.

The woman shouted over the noise of bowling balls knocking against pins, “Turn that goddam thing off,” and twisted a chair out from the table for Lucy, then sat down herself.

“You want a glass of water or something?” the woman asked. Lucy shook her head, wanting most to get out into the air. “As I said, I'm here just to find out what happened to a boy named Brian Potter,” she said. “He came here in 1940 from England.”

She felt a current of caution run between the Dentons.
These were people with a tradition of something to hide, whose response to any question was, first, “Who wants to know?” and then “Why?” But, on the other hand, they always allowed for the possibility that the stranger asking the questions might not be from an area of government which they routinely lied to, but someone who might just possibly have information to their advantage.

“Who wants to know?” Mrs Denton asked. “Will you turn that fucking thing down!”

Denton pressed the clicker four or five times, producing a sequence of explosions of colour and noise, until he found the mute button. “We're in a will,” he said to her in the silence that followed, looking sharply back at Lucy, daring her now to deny it.

“That right?” Mrs. Denton asked.

“I'm enquiring about a boy named Brian Potter,” Lucy repeated.

“That was my maiden name,” Mrs. Denton reminded her. “Potter.”

“He was last known to be residing at this address, according to the English lawyers.”

There was a long pause while the Dentons considered the implications of any reply they might make. Then Denton nodded to his wife. “He never lived here,” she said. “He was sent here to get him away from the war. He was my dad's nephew, so they say. Would have been my cousin.”

“So what gives?” Denton asked, sucking thoughtfully on his bottle.

“Would have?”
Lucy queried, ignoring him.

Now Mrs. Denton had come to the conclusion that she could safely reveal her next bit of information. “He died,” she said.

The whole visit — the decayed farm, the obscene dog, the squalor of the kitchen — now coalesced for Lucy into a single horror: that there was a ten-year-old boy buried on the farm. She felt as if until now she had been playing about in imitation of her favourite reading, but now she was on the edge of a genre she had never enjoyed, in which detection is quietly mixed with nightmare.

“Here?” she asked.

“He never got here. Story is, my dad went to meet the train he was supposed to be on and some Red Cross woman told him the kid had died on the train coming from Halifax.”

This could be checked. So the only horror was what she had already seen in the kitchen. “You sure?”

Denton said, “Hey, Missus. Did the kid have any brothers or sisters?”

“I know nothing about that. Do you have any documents to prove his death?”

“Who was it just died, then?” Denton asked.

“His mother, I think.”

“Must have been a bit long in the tooth.”

Lucy said, “In her eighties, I would think.”

“No husband?”

“I think she must have been alone.” Lucy thought of a way of giving Denton something to think about. “It could be that she died in poverty and they are looking for someone to pay the bills, the funeral costs.”

Denton shook his head. “Everything's free over there. Guy told me. Funerals, stuff like that. The government pays.”

“She may have had debts, though.”

“Could be.” He looked at her, concentrating, his mouth pushed slightly forward in a tight ‘O', very much, Lucy could not help noticing, like a protruding anus. “Might have had a few bucks, too,” he added.

Mrs. Denton came down the stairs carrying the family papers in a cardboard box. “Be in here, if anywhere,” she said. She hunted through the modest archives, then held up a letter. “Here we are.”

It was from a hospital in Quebec, regretting to have to relate the sad news that Brian Potter, aged ten, had died on the trip from Halifax. He had been taken from the train to a rural hospital and died the next day.

Lucy said, “This letter is addressed to the next of kin. Why do you have it?”