I ponder telling him of my own skill with line and lure, but think the better of it: Fishing persons — fishers? — are not always fond of amateur depleters of resources.
Back in my room, I call Margaret’s number. No answer. No messages from her on the hotel voice mail. She is clearly not prostrate with grief at my absence. A black thought: Is there someone else?
I gaze out into the gloom of downtown Vancouver. Rain pelts my gargoyles. How fare the evil spirits that beset George Rimbold? He answers after a few rings, his voice unnaturally strained — this worries me.
I tell him that my trial is whizzing along and I expect to see him on the weekend.
“I don’t think I’ll make it to the fair.”
“Nonsense.”
“Too much merriment going on. It will only depress me. I just bought some real estate, Arthur. First piece of land I’ve ever owned.”
“But that’s excellent. Where is it?”
“Plot in the cemetery.”
“I hope, George, this is your macabre sense of humour at work.”
“Don’t worry, Arthur, it’s a long-term investment.”
To cheer him up, I entertain with a few nuggets from the trial — with some success, I think, because he becomes more spirited in conversation. Finally I ask if he has recently chanced upon Margaret. He has not, but he asks how my weekend evening went with her.
“I offered my heart. It wasn’t summarily rejected, but is being held for inspection.”
“Sure and she will never return it. She shares your feelings, Arthur, but a lady doesn’t blurt them out. She demands to be wooed and pursued.”
That, in turn, pumps up my own spirits.
My taxi takes me over Lions Gate and passes by a welter of malls and shops before finding the sanctuary ofJonathan’s quiet street, a comfortable neighbourhood of sturdy frame houses buried in the urban rain forest. I alight at 141 Palmer: neo-cubist architecture, three split-levels cascading down a gentle decline that ends at a small gully — dry now in September, though a running brook when Annabelle and I were Jonathan’s dinner guests a few winters ago.
I proceed up a stone walkway to the door from which naked, painted Kimberley Martin fled on a cold November night last year. He’s going to kill me. A nasty dramatic touch or a hasty improvisation? It seems too bizarre that Jonathan would have uttered a death threat, yet unlikely she would make that claim unless her mind had gone careening out of balance.
Augustina’s sporty Porsche is in the driveway behind Jonathan’s sedan, and it is she who greets me at the door, a glass of wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other, a smoky kiss plump on my lips. I have grown increasingly fond of this excellent person, but I fear for her foolish heart — I have noted it seems to flutter when Jonathan is near.
In the kitchen, bending to a built-in oven, is the accused in an embroidered blue apron. How domestic he appears. Steaks sizzle on a Jenn-Air grill; vegetables are steaming in a colander. Jonathan has arrayed various herbs and seasonings on his workspace — like many bachelors, he seems an accomplished chef.
“What a sordid scene of wanton lust this afternoon, Arthur,” he says. He mimics Wally: “‘Poor thing, do you think you can cope?’ I’ve met him at a couple of bar functions — he has a repertoire of bedroom jokes. Beneath the shiny new PC paint job lurks the same old lecher.”
Despite the strain Jonathan must feel, he manages to maintain his cynical sense of humour. I have a sense he has recently resolved some kind of inner struggle, though I also pick up a worrying tone of defeatism. Can it be that he has lost hope, found the peace of surrender? I pray not. It is a contagion I dare not allow to infect my unsatisfied need to believe in his innocence.
He pours me a Perrier and ushers us to his study. “Don’t offer to help. I’ll call you when it’s ready. I’ve already shown Augustina about; she can be your guide.”
His library evidences a catholic taste in literature, along with much history and philosophy and, of course, law. A poetry corner: the complete works of Ovid and Virgil in the ancient language. A three-volume set of Shaw’s collected plays, plus a single edition of Saint Joan, a thin paperback, looking rumpled and misused, some pages bent. As I riffle through it, a large red smudge catches my eye: Scene Nine.
Augustina studies it. “Not blood. It’s lipstick. Shameless.”
What to make of this? Anything? Clearly, this script was roughly handled during the amateur theatrics of November twenty-eighth. But Kimberley knew her lines — why would her lipstick be in this book?
“Seize the evidence,” I tell her softly. “Don’t mention it to Jonathan just yet.”
“Why?”
“In case it. . compromises his defence.” Although I’m not sure why it would.
Wordlessly, she puts both copies of the play in her briefcase, then continues showing me about.
“This is the chair where she passed out, quote unquote,” Augustina says.
An overstuffed armchair, a matching couch by it. Over here, a large built-in desk, with a Selectric typewriter. Beside it, a review copy of some heavy tome about law in the Middle Ages. Framed on the wall, a photograph of a smiling, confident-looking older man in hunting gear, holding a dead pheasant by the neck, a bottle of champagne in the other hand.
“Viscount Caraway,” says Augustina. “Jonathan says the picture tells it all; he thinks it’s funny. He says he only recently brought the photo out from hiding. He and his father have had some kind of a rapprochement.”
“How has his father reacted to all of this?”
“With pride, I think.”
The viscount was in the news again, I recall, shovelling coals of hell and damnation upon Whitehall for selling Ulster out to Irish popery. It strikes me as cynically apropos that Kimberley Martin is Roman Catholic.
My tour takes me to the fireplace: a spent condom and a few linen sheets met their doom here on November twenty-seventh. Jonathan’s panicky incineration of evidence may yet serve him poorly at this trial.
Augustina leads me through the living room — original art on the walls: modern, confusing to my eye — then down to the billiard room: the table covered, cues stacked neatly. A shiny varnished bar — the cocaine chopping block.
Our tour then takes us to the upper level, to a spacious master bedroom with a queen-sized brass bed. Here is where Kimberley did it with Jonathan, as the girls of Mop’n’Chop might put it.
French doors lead to a sundeck at the back. A large window looks out upon a mature weeping willow, obscuring Dr. Hawthorne’s house, about forty feet away.
“This is the closet where her clothes were all neatly hanging. That’s the suit she put on.” Hidden in the back. “The ensuite. Nice big bath, a Jacuzzi. Over here, the dresser drawers she snooped in, where she found the famous tie.”
Augustina gets up onto the bed, lies face down, her legs splayed, her feet touching the second-to-the-end bedposts, raising a comely blue-jeaned rump. “Try it, Arthur. Oh, I forgot, you’re in love with someone else. Actually, it would be really hard if she were resisting. On her back, yeah, no problem. So why would he have tied her facedown? Obvious. So he could spank her. I didn’t say that.” But she abruptly becomes solemn. “Arthur, do you believe he’s innocent?”
I hedge: “Innocence is irrelevant. We defend, juries judge.”
“Yeah, I know all that, but what’s your gut reaction — is he innocent?”
“I want to believe he is.” But I sense that is not enough for her, too vacillating and weak. “Beyond a moral certainty, I cannot say, but I am determined to give him the benefit of doubt.”
That seems not to satisfy her at all. Her face clouds. “He’s been terribly wronged, Arthur.”
I dare not suggest to her that her judgement might be impaired by the tenderness she obviously feels for the haunted soul we defend. Yet, I, too, have grown in my regard for this brother in pain — almost more than I dare to admit.