Lloyd sipped his cappuccino and took a bite of his croissant.
“You seem preoccupied, darling,” said Anne-Marie, looking lovely in a low-cut white top and a short denim skirt opposite him, her dark hair framing the delicate oval face, those tantalizing ruby lips. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” said Lloyd. “Nothing at all. But I think I might have to fly back to Toronto today. Just for a short while.”
Anne-Marie’s face dropped. She was so expressive, showing joy or disappointment, pleasure or pain, without guile. This time it was clearly disappointment. “Oh, must you?”
“I’m afraid I must,” he said, taking her hand and caressing it. “I have some important business to take care of. But I promise you I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“And we’ll look into getting that house we saw near Spanish Beach?”
“I’ll put in an offer before I leave,” Lloyd said. “It’ll have to be in your name, though.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I know. Tax reasons.”
“Exactly. Good girl.” It was only a little white lie, Lloyd told himself. But it wouldn’t look good if he bought a new house in a faraway city the day after his wife died in a tragic explosion. This called for careful planning and pacing. Anne-Marie would understand. Marital separations were complicated and difficult, as complex as the tax laws, and all that really mattered was that she knew he loved her. After the funeral, he might feel the need to “get away for a while,” and then perhaps Toronto would remind him too much of Laura, so it would be understandable if he moved somewhere else, say Vancouver. After a decent period of mourning, it would also be quite acceptable to “meet someone,” Anne-Marie, for example, and start anew, which was exactly what Lloyd Francis had in mind.
Detective Bobby Aiken didn’t like the look of the report that had landed on his desk, didn’t like the look of it at all. He worked out of police headquarters at 4 °College Street, downtown, and under normal circumstances, he would never have heard of Laura Francis and Ray Lanagan. The Beaches was 55 Division’s territory. But these weren’t normal circumstances, and one of Aiken’s jobs was to have a close look at borderline cases, where everything looked kosher but someone thought it wasn’t. This time it was a young, ambitious beat cop who desperately wanted to work Homicide. There was just something about it, he’d said, something that didn’t ring true, and the more Bobby Aiken looked at the files, the more he knew what the kid was talking about.
The forensics were clean, of course. The fire department and the Centre for Forensic Sciences had done sterling work there, as usual. These gas explosions were unfortunately commonplace in some of the older houses, where the owners might not have had their furnaces serviced or replaced for a long time, as had happened at the house on Silver Birch. An accident waiting to happen.
But police work, thank God, wasn’t only a matter of forensics. There were other considerations here. Three of them.
Again, Aiken went through the files and jotted down his thoughts. Outside on College Street it was raining, and when he looked out of his window all he could see were the tops of umbrellas. A streetcar rumbled by, sparks flashing from the overhead wire. Cars splashed up water from the gutters.
First of all, Aiken noted, the victims hadn’t been husband and wife, as the investigators and media had first thought. The husband, Lloyd Francis, had flown back from a business trip in Vancouver — giving himself a nice alibi, by the way — as soon as he had heard the news the following day, and he was doubly distraught to find out that not only was his wife dead, but that she had died in bed with another man.
No, Lloyd had said, he had no idea who the man was, but it hadn’t taken a Sherlock Holmes to discover that his name was Ray Lanagan, and that he was a sometime actor and sometime petty crook, with a record of minor fraud and con jobs. Lanagan had been clean for the past three years, relying mostly on TV commercials and bit parts in series like Da Vinci’s Inquest, before the CBC canned it, and The Murdoch Mysteries. But Aiken knew that didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t been up to something. He just hadn’t been caught. Well, he had definitely been up to one thing — screwing Lloyd Francis’s wife — and the penalty for that had been far more severe than for any other offense he had ever committed. He might have been after the broad’s money too, Aiken speculated, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to get that now.
The second thing that bothered Aiken was the insurance and the money angle in general. Not only were the house and Laura Francis’s life insured for hefty sums, but there was the post-production company, which was just starting to turn a good profit, and Laura’s inheritance, which was still a considerable sum, tied up in stocks and bonds and other investments. Whoever got his hands on all of that would be very rich indeed.
And then there was Lloyd Francis himself. The young beat cop who rang the alarm bell had thought there was something odd about him when he had accompanied Lloyd to the ruins of the house. Nothing obvious, nothing he could put his finger on, but just that indefinable policeman’s itch, the feeling you get when it doesn’t all add up. Aiken hadn’t talked to Lloyd Francis yet, but he was beginning to think it was about time.
Because finally there was the one clear and indisputable fact that linked everything else, like the magnet that makes a pattern out of iron filings: He found out that Lloyd Francis had spent five years working as a heating and air-conditioning serviceman from just after he left school until his early twenties. And if you knew that much about gas furnaces, Aiken surmised, then you didn’t have to bloody well be there when one blew up.
Lloyd felt a little shaken after the policeman’s visit, but he still believed he’d held his own. One thing was clear, and that was that they had done a lot of checking, not only into his background, but also into the dead man’s. What on earth had Laura seen in such a loser? The man had petty criminal stamped all over him.
But what had worried Lloyd most of all was the knowledge that the detective, Aiken, seemed to have about his own past, especially his heating and air-conditioning work. Not only did the police know he had done that for five years, but they seemed to know every job he had been on, every problem he had solved, the brand name of every furnace he had ever serviced. It was all rather overwhelming. Lloyd hadn’t lied about it, hadn’t tried to deny any of it — that would have been a sure way of sharpening their suspicions even more — but the truth painted the picture of a man easily capable of rigging the thermostat so that it blew up the house when someone turned it on.
Luckily, Lloyd knew they had absolutely no forensic evidence. If there had been any, which he doubted, it would have been obliterated by the fire. All he had to do was stick to his story, and they would never be able to prove a thing. Suspicion was all very well, but it wasn’t sufficient grounds for a murder charge.
After the funeral, he had lain low in a sublet condominium at Victoria Park and Danforth, opposite Shopper’s World. At night the streets were noisy and a little edgy, Lloyd felt, the kind of area where you might easily get mugged if you weren’t careful. More than once he’d had the disconcerting feeling that he was being followed, but he told himself not to be paranoid. He wouldn’t be here for long. After a suitable period of mourning he would go to Vancouver and decide he couldn’t face returning to the city where his poor wife met such a terrible death. He still had a few colleagues who would regret his decision to leave, perhaps, but there wasn’t really anybody left in Toronto to care that much about Lloyd Francis and what happened to him. At the moment, they all thought he was a bit depressed, “getting over his loss.” Soon he would be free to “meet” Anne-Marie and start a new life. The money should be all his by then too, once the lawyers and accountants had finished with it. Never again would he have to listen to his wife reminding him where his wealth and success came from.