The Calling (28 page)

'Their deaths have changed them.'

He heard her crying softly. 'Would you do for me
what you did for them? If I asked you?'

'Are you asking me?'

She was silent a long time. He listened to her
breathe. 'You never told me your name.'

'You can call me Simon.'

Friday 26 November, 10 p.m.

They stood on the street watching the preparations.

A handful of local officers had arrived the day
before, and their unmarked cars had been parked
on the side streets near the Batten house since
Thursday morning where Hazel had ordered them
to go. Everything would be on foot now. She had
seven men, five from Renfrew, and three of her
own officers. Two of the local men – Constables
Fairview and Glencoe – had once trained as sharp-shooters,
but they were so rusty (the lack of
demand for sharpshooters in eastern Ontario being
such that not one of them had ever been called on
to use their training) that Hazel ordered them onto
a firing range in Hawley Bridge to practise shooting
tin cans from three hundred feet.

Once
Canadian Crime Stoppers
had agreed to
Wingate's request for assistance, things had begun
to happen quickly. The segment played three times
a day on each of Tuesday and Wednesday and they
were prepared to let it go in heavy rotation until
something happened. They expected that someone
would recognize him somewhere east of Ontario
and they'd simply close in on him. He needed gas,
he needed food. But they also held out the faint
hope that he'd see the segment himself and react.
They'd been lucky.

During the week, information about the
Mallicks had finally begun to filter in. The two
men had lived in Port Hardy for almost twenty
years. Neither had a criminal record, nor did they
turn up in any of the credit bureau, social service or
medical records they could get access to. Although
many people they spoke to had heard of the
Western Church of the Messiah, it was not
registered as a charity in the province of British
Columbia, and there was no information on the
sect. A web search brought up nothing.

The remote shack was in both their names;
they'd bought it outright for $9,800 in cash in
1996. Before then, they'd lived in Victoria, in a
house on Asquith Street. In 1977, their first year at
the address, provincial records showed both men
had changed their names to 'Mallick'. Before then,
Peter had been 'Welland', and Simon 'Kressman'.
Why had they done this, and were the two men, in
fact, related? Wingate's digging found that the
Welland and Kressman names were both adoptive
ones: their father had died when Peter was five and
Simon eleven and the brothers had been separated,
Simon going to a family named Kressman in the
Interior of B.C., Peter to the Welland family of
Milk River, Alberta. His adoptive parents had been
murdered in 1976, when Peter was sixteen. And
then his brother had legally adopted him. Their
father's name had been Gordon Mallick. There was
no trace of the mother.

So the elder had taken in the younger, had
brought him home as it were, after the death of his
adoptive parents. Peter's vocational trail was
almost impossible to follow: it appeared that he'd
worked for the post office briefly in the eighties,
but apart from that, his worklife must have been
peripatetic, a hand-to-mouth cash-in-an-envelope
existence. Simon was in no records they could find
at all. The silence of his history seemed to be in
keeping with the establishment of a church they
also could find no record of. If Peter Mallick had
lived a crazy-quilt life, the fabric of Simon
Mallick's life was gossamer.

That morning, they'd found out what was in the
packages that Jane Buck had been dropping off at
the Mallick shed. Sevigny had packed them into
his rental car in Port Hardy and itemized the
contents before returning to Sudbury. Hazel
couldn't think of the kind of trouble they'd all be
in if it were ever discovered that one of her officers
had removed evidence from a crime scene. But in
her heart, she was glad for what he'd done.
'Slippers, books, Delia's duvet cover, a Bible,
muffin tins—'

'Muffin tins,' said Hazel.

'I can't explain it.'

'The kinds of things you might want to have
around while you're getting over your death?'

'Some of them came with cards,' said Wingate.
'The cards are creepy.' He passed Hazel some scans.

'Please accept this small token of gratitude from
me. I look forward to meeting you.' Hazel squinted
to read the signature. 'Elizabeth Reightmeyer. She
was going to need a lot of makeup for that meeting.'

'I beg your pardon?' said Wingate.

Hazel leaned back and pulled a red folder from
the middle of a mesh basket and passed it over the
table. 'She's the one with the railroad spike
through her brain,' said Hazel. Wingate declined to
open the woman's file.

Hazel flipped through the scans. One showed a
sympathy card with the lines,
Sincerest regrets for
your loss
. 'Christ,' she said, 'you're right about
creepy.'

'Detective Spere says he thinks these were payments
of a sort. Shows of goodwill.'

'We just call him Howard,' said Hazel.

'He asked me to call him detective.'

She passed the sheaf of paper back to him. 'Well,
all of this is informative, but it's sort of moot now,
isn't it?'

'It's good to know more about him.'

'Once the dreams start, you'll regret what you
already knew about him.' She'd looked at her
watch then. It was coming up on five o'clock.
There was a skeleton crew in the station house. It
was time to get ready. 'Have you eaten?'

'I was just going to go home and make something.
Clean the place up a bit.'

'Good idea,' she said. 'I'm going to try to get
some rest. It could be a long night in Humber
Cottage.'

'They've all been long nights. I'll see you back
here in an hour?'

She'd driven home on the cell the whole time,
checking in with Renfrew, with Terry Batten. For
the last two days, she'd spoken to Rose's mother six
or seven times, calling her to reassure her with
details of how their plans were coming, or taking
calls in which Terry's first words would often be
tearfully unintelligible. 'This time tomorrow,'
Hazel had told her after lunch that afternoon,
'there'll be nothing in the world left to threaten
you except the tantrums of an eight-year-old.' A
couple of times, she'd even taken Rose's calls.
'Terry is absolutely hysterical,' she said in one of
them. 'I don't know what I'm going to do with her.'
As she pulled onto her street, Hazel was saying to
the girl's mother, 'Six more hours, Terry. You've
been braver than any of us.'

At home she'd smelled proper food cooking and
heard voices when she stepped through the door.
When she poked her head around the corner from
the kitchen, she saw her mother and four other
women sitting at her dining-room table. Was it an
intervention? No, Hazel realized, it was poker
night. Her mother was hosting. She gestured to her
furiously from the cover of the kitchen, and
her mother, a displeased look on her face, got up
and came over. 'Why didn't you tell me you were
doing this tonight!'

'It's on the calendar, Hazel,' her mother said.

'I need this kind of noise tonight like ...' She
couldn't think of what she needed it like. A
murderer visiting a little girl? 'Look, can you maybe
finish up and go to Clara's? I need
one
hour of peace
and quiet.'

'I am not asking my friends to pack up in the
middle of their supper and move on. And anyway,
Paula Spencer is late, as usual. Do you plan on
giving her her supper when she shows up and then
playing stud with her?' She stared her daughter in
the eye. 'I thought not. Go shower. You smell like
a locker room.'

'Fine,' said Hazel, throwing her hands up. She
stepped forward into the dining room. 'Clara,' she
said, waving. 'Grace. Margaret. Mrs Eaton.' Sally
Eaton did not approve of Hazel calling her by her
first name. 'Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to say
hello.'

The women called their greetings.

Hazel stepped back into the kitchen. 'There. I
was nice. Now you can repay me by keeping it to a
dull roar. And by making me a plate of whatever it
is you old ladies are eating.'

'There's a salad in the fridge.'

'Christ, Mother.'

'Go shower and rest. I have to put the pie in the
oven.'

She leaned into her mother, her voice strained.
'I'm catching a killer and you're baking pie and
playing nickel poker? Do you think you might cut
me just a little bit of slack?'

'We don't play for nickels, dear,' her mother had
said, and then switched the stove to 250 before
walking back to her friends.

It was dark and snowing hard. Wingate had
brought three trays of coffee from town, and she
watched him passing them out. In her doorway,
Terry Batten was refusing his offer. She'd been
standing in her parka on her front step staring at all
the activity around her house and occasionally
shooting Hazel a look. 'She's one angry lady,' said
Wingate.

'Do you blame her?'

'She wants to know how many men are going to
be in the house.'

'I'm thinking five guys in radio contact at all
access points coming toward the house from the
town itself and the highway' – she turned to look at
a house behind her – 'one of the shooters there
and a second one on the neighbour's roof. That
leaves three constables, not including you and me.'

'So three in the house?'

'Four. I want you there, James.'

'Where are you going to be?'

She beat her hands together for warmth. 'It's not
a good idea for me to be there. You've built some
trust with her and if I'm around too much, she
might change her mind.'

He nodded. 'You're going to have to go in there
eventually. We can't hold a briefing out here on
the lawn.'

'I know,' she said. She looked at her watch. It
was nine-thirty now. 'He told Rose midnight. But
with the snow coming down and the roads the way
they are, we might be here all night. I'm going to
do a final briefing at ten-thirty, and then I want
everyone in position and ready to go right after
that. We're just going to have to deal with the
cold.'

'Should I tell Mrs Batten all that then?'

Hazel looked toward the house. Terry was still
standing on her front stoop. She was smoking
a cigarette with her arms crossed. 'No, I'll tell
her.'

She crossed the lawn to the girl's mother, who,
when she saw Hazel coming, turned sideways and
cast her gaze up the street.

'I don't suppose you have another one of those,'
she said.

Terry Batten took a deep drag and passed Hazel
the pack without speaking. 'I know this wasn't an
easy decision for you.'

Terry laughed bitterly. 'You mean dangling my
daughter in front of a killer?'

'She's been magnificent, you know. Perfect.'

'Yeah, well, maybe we'll put that on her gravestone.
She was magnificent
.'

The cigarette tasted strange in the cold. 'In
about an hour, if it's okay with you, we're going to
bring everyone into the house and go over what
we're doing here one more time. There are going to
be three constables with you in the house, including
one in Rose's room. I'm leaving James Wingate
with you too, so if there's anything you need, he
can get it for you.'

'Your bagman has a talent for the sweet talk.'

Hazel put her hand on Terry's arm and gently
turned her to face her. 'I don't want you to change
your mind, Terry, but I want you to know that one
word from you and we can move both you and Rose
to somewhere safe and we can try to take him without
Rose here.'

'You think he's that stupid? Don't forget, I met
him. He'll probably smell you guys from a hundred
kilometres out.'

'That's not going to happen.'

'It doesn't matter if I change my mind anyway.
Rose has made hers up. She wants to see him
again.'

'He's not going to put a foot inside your house. I
promise you.'

Terry threw her cigarette out into the snow,
where it briefly sizzled and went out. She set her
eyes on Hazel's. They were burning with rage. 'You
shoot him dead, Inspector, you hear? I don't care
about your due process. I won't ever be able to sleep
again if I know he's alive and thinking about what
we did to him.'

'Where he's going, Terry, it doesn't matter what
he thinks about.'

'He tried to kill my child, you know.'

'He saved your child.'

'Yeah,' she said, 'but now he's coming back to
put her out of her "misery".' She pushed past Hazel
and put her hand on the doorknob. 'You have
children, don't you, Detective Inspector?'

'I do.'

'Knowing what he can do, would you want him
in jail or in the ground?'

'I hear you.'

Terry paused at the door and stared at Hazel. 'I
want you to see her. You've been skulking around
out here all day, but I think you need to see her. So
you understand
fully
what you've asked us to do.'

She held the door open for Hazel and followed
her into the house.

* * *

During the day, they'd wanted Rose to take a nap
to make it easier for her to stay up as late as the
operation required. 'The excitement will keep me
up,' she'd told Wingate. When Hazel walked into
the kitchen, the girl was sitting at the table eating
a plate of oatmeal cookies and drinking camomile
tea. She looked as fresh as a daisy.

'Hazel!' she cried out in delight, and leaped up to
hug her.

'Hello, Rose. It's wonderful to see you again.'

'Cookie?'

'Thank you,' said Hazel, and took one. She sat
across the small table from her. 'I wanted to tell you
how very brave we all think you are.'

'Brave means you're scared but not showing it.
I'm not scared.' Terry had taken the seat between
them and was rubbing her nose with a tissue. '
Terry
is being brave,' she said. 'But I don't need to.' She
patted her mother's hand. 'Do you want to see a
drawing I made?'