“Colin was at home with me all that night. The police questioned him, you know. They came to the house and questioned him. You should know all this.”
“I know it,” said Hazel.
“Then what are you doing to get him home?”
“Everything we can.”
Claire Eldwin searched Wingate’s face, hoping to find reassurance there, but she came up empty. Quietly, she said, “What’s ‘everything’?”
She’d decided to spare Claire Eldwin the details for now. She already looked like she was going to faint. “Everything,” repeated Hazel.
They led her down the back hall that passed behind the pen and Wingate showed her out of the station house. Hazel took him aside and asked him to follow her and make sure she got home. He went to his cruiser and followed Eldwin out of the parking lot. Hazel watched them pass through the rain down Porter Street on their way toward the highway, Claire Eldwin hunched over her steering wheel, her eyes blank. The woman had already seen too much, Hazel thought, and now there was this, an uncertainty more awful than any she’d experienced with her husband before now. She watched the two cars moving off toward the house in Mulhouse Springs.
She went back to her office and sat behind her desk. She checked the website one more time, but the camera had been turned off and the site returned a black square, a fitting monument to the entire case. It had been a case about faith, bad faith and broken hearts. She wondered silently to herself how often in the last ten days images of love destroyed had passed through her mind, her own hopeless love for Andrew, the broken marriage that was Colin and Claire Eldwin, Wingate’s murdered partner, the unimaginable sadness that had driven Joanne Cameron to tie the last of her hopes to a rogue cop who probably loved nothing but his own convictions. She realized that she’d allowed herself to think of the relationship between Bellocque and Paritas as a sort of silver lining for Joanne Cameron: someone to love in the midst of her grief. But as soon as she had that thought, she recognized that it, too, was a lie: the affair between the two of them was strictly business. Cameron had been right all along insisting he wasn’t her boyfriend.
For some reason, this thought ticked over into an image of Wingate following Claire Eldwin home, the both of them driving slowly, like a cortege without a body. She fixated on the image of the two cars, and in her mind’s eye, she saw two other cars… She fumbled for her notebook and read through her notes from the Barlow and Paritas interviews. Barlow had mentioned her clients had arrived in separate cars and Paritas – Cameron – had confirmed it when she’d angrily denied that she and Bellocque lived together. She should have paid much more attention to that deniaclass="underline" they didn’t live together, they had never been lovers, and now she realized it was important. She hurriedly got Wingate on the radio. “Come back,” she said.
“I’m not in Mulhouse Springs yet.”
“I know where Colin Eldwin is being held.”
32
“It’s the first thing we should have thought of when we figured out her name,” Hazel said, signalling her turn onto Highway 121. “We slipped.”
“We had other things on our plate.”
They’d found nothing under Cameron’s name in Gilmore, but the third real estate office they’d called told them a Joanne Cameron was paying the rent on a house let to a Nick Wise. Hazel had practically levitated out of her seat. “Too tidy for their own good,” she said.
“Unless they want us to find them,” said Wingate.
The clicking of the turn signal did time with the windshield wipers. They’d taken an unmarked vehicle, but in the increasing downpour she doubted anyone would have made them anyway. She turned east and took the car up to 140 kilometres per hour, holding the wheel tight.
“And meanwhile, another day has gone by and god knows what kind of shape Eldwin is in,” she said.
They reached Highway 191 in fifteen minutes and turned north. It sounded like demons pounding the roof of the car. The address was 28 Whitcombe Street in Gilmore. They passed Goodman’s falling-down rented shack on the way into town, slowing down to get a look. It was dark, as expected. She knew instinctively that he’d never return to that place. Three years waiting for a sign. That was how strong his conviction had been, how strong his obsession. Not even grief has that kind of staying power, Hazel thought. He’d divided his time between Toronto and Gilmore waiting for Eldwin to show his hand. It hadn’t mattered to Goodman if the hand held something or not: he’d only wanted a reason to act.
And he’d gotten to Hazel. She was the perfect mark: a small-town cop with a willingness to go off the grid if the job demanded it. And she had daughters… it was as if she’d been made to order for them: just smart enough, just blind enough. She didn’t want to admit it, that perhaps she was in this car, arrowing through the pouring rain on a hunch, for Martha’s sake. Would justice for Brenda Cameron pay a tithe to the angels on her daughter’s behalf? She had to tell herself she was motivated only by the desire to see justice done for its own sake, but then she heard Ray Greene saying you can’t be a maverick and a leader at the same time. She wondered how often she’d have to push that voice away from now on.
She considered what it meant to have only her and Wingate’s faith now driving the case. She’d made enemies of all her backup: Ilunga with a severed hand and Danny Toles hung up like a dummy. She knew Willan was only a phone call away and was collecting news about dinosaurs from any and all comers. Any of her recent moves could spell a dishonourable discharge for her: this was the ever-present thought, the awareness that the end-of-days was near.
She blamed the weather for making her thoughts extraoppressive. She had to focus on the task at hand and not think of the kinds of forces arrayed against her. The end of her career was supposed to be a source of pride for her and those she had worked with, those she had served. But she feared she was about to go out like her mother, hounded by innuendo and haunted by pride. But ex-mayor Micallef was immune to regrets. She was one hundred percent backbone. Hazel’s back was made of lesser stuff.
They drove slowly down Whitcombe in the centre of town. It was just off the main drag, a quiet side street. They pulled over a few houses away and as soon as they stopped, the noise of the rain intensified. It bounced hard against the unmarked’s window and hammered down through the newly green trees. The drops seemed to leap out of the asphalt, blown sideways by the wind. But however bad the weather was, the dusk-like light offered them the best cover they could have asked for.
There was an MX-5 Miata in the driveway at number 28. “That counts as sporty,” Hazel said.
“The car and the house aren’t a guarantee of anything, you know,” said Wingate. “If they had the presence of mind to rent two houses up here, they could have rented a third. She knew we were going to find her name out eventually.”
“Well, if I’m wrong about this, I’ve got nothing.”
He wiped the fogged windshield. The humidity in the car was making them sweat. He stared up at the house across the street from them. It was a rickety-looking bungalow with a couple of sagging balconies. The house was dark and looked uninhabited. “So, what are we waiting for then?”
She was concentrating on the house, trying to fix it as a space in her mind. She presumed there was a door in the back as well. Probably the better one to get access to the basement. “Did you notice a van at the Bellocque house?” she asked. “Pat Barlow said he was driving a white van.”
“I didn’t see any vehicle at all.”
“And it’s not here.”
“Does that mean he’s not here?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think we should wait awhile. See if he shows. I want to be sure they’re both here when we make our move.”
Ninety minutes passed. She had cars out trolling for sign of the van, but the infrequent reports she was getting suggested no one could make out the breed of a dog beyond twenty metres. Time and the weather were working against them.