The schumann proof, p.30
The Schumann Proof, page 30
“That’s interesting,” I said, trying to sound calm. “So have I.”
He went to his desk and sat down. “It seems I misjudged you.”
“And I you.”
“I asked for your discretion. This is hardly what I expected.”
“As I recall, your concern was about Mann’s gift to the Faculty.”
He picked up a slender gold pen and began tapping it on the desktop. “You’ve been enquiring into affairs that don’t concern you.”
“Pardon me if I don’t agree. The murders that occurred here concern me quite a lot.”
“Looking into them is a matter strictly for the police.”
“Whom I intend to assist as far as I can.”
The clicking of pen on wood continued. “You will not go to them.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me. You will not go to the police. Mr. Bryce’s misconduct with Siobhan Rawlings has no bearing on their investigation”
“I beg to differ.”
The pen-tapping stopped. Janssen spoke quietly. “Under no circumstances will I allow this to get back to Doug Rawlings.”
“Is that what you told Laura Erskine?”
He drew in a sharp breath. “I assured Miss Erskine the situation would be dealt with.”
“As apparently it was.”
A muscle twitched beneath his right eye. “This is none of your concern.”
“Forgive me if I don’t agree.”
His voice rose a fraction. “Stay out of this.”
“No.” The refusal came out sounding less confident than I wanted. Janssen picked up on it.
“Try to understand,” he said. “I had to make a decision based on what’s best for the Conservatory. Unless you hold a position like mine, you can’t begin to know how hard such decisions can be. I’m asking for your cooperation.”
“And I’m not giving it.” This time it came out firmly. “Not as long as the possibility exists that Laura Erskine died to protect your interests with Doug Rawlings.”
Janssen glanced down, toying with his pen again, rolling it delicately between his thumb and index finger. “That supposition,” he said, “is dangerously inaccurate.”
“I don’t happen to think so.”
“What do you intend to do?”
“I believe you already know.”
He began inspecting the backs of his hands, as if looking for flaws in his manicure. “It will be a mistake if you go to the police.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No, Vikkan, I’m telling you. Your accusation is absurd.”
“Let’s let the police determine that, shall we?”
He looked up, his eyes flashing. “Let it be, Vikkan,” he said, his voice perilously quiet. “An investigation into Mr. Bryce’s misconduct will have disastrous consequences for the Conservatory.”
“Why? Because Rawlings will find out Bryce has been fucking his not-so-innocent little daughter?” Janssen flinched at the obscenity. “Somehow, I doubt the police will care. And it won’t be Bryce’s affair that interests them. It’ll be your silence.”
He half rose. “Which has nothing to do with the murders!”
Only one word seemed adequate to the situation, and I used it as I made for the door.
“Bullshit.”
Rudeness, however justified, never comes easily to me. Call it a bourgeois hang-up, call it fear of conflict, call it what you will; I left the Conservatory with my heart pumping and palms sweating.
My first thought, when I reached the Rover, was to get in touch with Andrew. He’d said he’d be in later that afternoon. How late was later? I looked at my watch: three o’clock. He might be back now. I jammed the key in the ignition and floored two tons of bolted steel and dented aluminum into traffic.
There was no need to rush. Detective Inspector Andrew March hadn’t yet returned to Fifty-two Division.
“Tell him to call Vikkan Lantry as soon as he gets in,” I said, giving my number. “Do you have any idea when he’ll be back?”
“I’m sorry, sir. If it’s urgent, we can relay a message.”
My first instinct was to say yes, do that, but then I thought about it. How urgent was urgent? Urgent was saving somebody’s life, not knowing who’d killed them after the fact. I said “No, just have the inspector call me,” and left.
Standing outside, waiting to cross Dundas, I felt in my pocket for my keys and discovered I didn’t have them. Had I taken them into the police station? I didn’t think so. That meant I’d left them in the Rover. Not the brightest thing to do, since the doors have no locks.
When I got into the cab, I discovered something worse. In my agitation upon leaving the Conservatory, I had somehow managed to shove the key into the ignition upside down. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but there it was, teeth up. I swore aloud, figuring I’d never be able to get it out. I was wrong. It pulled out easily. The real problem came when I tried to start the engine. Instead of the roar of V-8 kicking over, all I got was the dispirited clicking of a dead solenoid. The inverted key must have kept the ignition circuit open all the time I was driving to Fifty-two Division. The starter would be fried.
I groaned. On top of everything else that day, the last thing I needed was the aggravation of compressing the jeep’s heavy motor by hand. I should have been grateful that I at least had that option, but I’d used the crank before and knew what lay ahead.
A few minutes later, panting with effort, smiling grimly at intrigued passersby and wincing from where the crank had smacked me on the wrist, I had the motor up and running.
I wondered where I’d find a new starter. Rovers have an affinity for Jaguar parts, but I didn’t want to pay the price. Thinking about starters kept me occupied while I headed along Dundas to Beverley, down Beverley to Queen, then along Queen toward High Park. The mental distraction proved temporary. Soon enough, my thoughts returned to Janssen.
What exactly had happened Thursday night?
I knew Spiers had told Janssen, during the meeting they’d both neglected to mention, that Laura and Mann were in Elly’s studio. Had he gone there afterward, knocking politely on the door, come to pay his respects to the Great Mann?
Laura had brought Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with her, a special treat to work on when she and Mann finished the Liederkreis. Had they already reached the fiendishly difficult fifth song when Janssen showed up? If so, it wasn’t unreasonable to imagine Mann inviting Janssen to take over at the piano. Laura would have gone along—regardless of ill-will between her and Janssen—out of respect for Mann.
At eight-fifteen, Russell Spiers had shown up, wanting to talk to Laura about her appointment the next day with music agent Howard Snelling. Spiers must have seen Janssen in the studio at that time. Why was he denying it? Did he think Janssen had done him a favour by preventing Mann from embarrassing the Faculty with his Schumann-Clara prank?
At eight-thirty, Laura had gone out for coffee. Whose idea had that been? Janssen’s? A strategy to let him deal with his victims one at a time?
While Laura was out, Mann had gone over to the window. Elly had warned me earlier against opening it, but clearly, that’s what Mann had done. His fingerprints were on the lock and frame, and traces of the herbal teas in his jacket had fallen to the ledge outside. Perhaps he needed the air. He hadn’t looked well the day before, and I remembered that the studio had been getting pretty stuffy even before I left.
What then? Had Janssen taken advantage of Mann leaning out the window to remove the bust of Delius from Elly’s bookcase? After Mann closed and relocked the window, had Janssen shown it to him, pretending to admire it, then simply waited for an opportunity to strike him?
When Laura returned, Janssen had probably been kneeling beside the body, concealing the battered skull. What had he said to her? Manns collapsed—call an ambulance? She’d have gone immediately to the desk, and Janssen—appearing helpful in that ineffectual way people have during an emergency—would have gotten up and come over. With her attention focused on the phone, Laura might not have even seen him pick up the paperweight he’d used to knock her unconscious.
But why then not kill her with the bronze bust? Why suffocate her, then conceal the means of her death with the same object he could have used to kill her in the first place? It made no sense. Just the same, that’s what he’d done, thoroughly ransacking the studio afterward and confusing things even further.
It must have annoyed him to discover he’d left the key inside the studio, especially since he was the one responsible for the security measures that prevented him from getting a copy without drawing attention to himself.
My guess was he’d dealt with his oversight immediately. At that time of night, most people going in and out of the Conservatory would be using the front entrance. He could risk a trip down the northeast staircase to the Philosopher’s Walk exit. The bust was only twenty centimetres tall, about the size of a litre of milk, easy enough to conceal under a jacket folded over his arm. Once outside, it was just a short stroll to the rear of the building. Hoisting himself up onto the odd little half-floor rise of basement at the back wouldn’t have presented much difficulty, and he must have suspected, if not known, that with the roofing repairs going on there, he’d find a ladder with which to reach Elly’s window.
A less coolly efficient person might not have thought of breaking only the upper part of the window in order to unlock and raise the lower pane. Equally, a less punctilious person might not have bothered to reclose it. But Janssen was exactly the sort of person who would think of both.
The traffic on Queen Street came to a sudden halt near Dufferin. A streetcar had come unmoored from its wires. It took the driver only a few minutes to reseat the aerial, but in that time, I considered my reconstruction of Janssen’s movements and arrived at the frustrating conclusion that no matter how accurate my suppositions, no matter how compelling his motives for murder, nothing by way of proof had yet showed up to place him in the studio on Thursday night.
My answering machine was blinking when I got home. I got a beer from the fridge and listened to the message.
“Vikkan, it’s Andrew March. I’ll be staying in Hamilton tonight. I’ll try to catch you later.”
I punched the off button and stared at the machine. A lot of good that did, leaving a message without a number. Some indication of what was keeping him wouldn’t have been out of line, either. Well, at least he’d said he’d call back.
I needed something to occupy me until then. A portion of the retaining wall I was repairing still needed dismantling, so I donned a pair of cut-offs and went outside to work, leaving the door open in case the phone rang.
I jimmied out the last stones and laid them carefully alongside the others, then started digging back the low embankment—the first step toward deepening the bed, installing drainage tile and putting the whole thing back together. I probably wouldn’t finish until some time next week.
I worked solidly for two hours, listening at first for the phone, then losing myself in the rhythm of digging. Around six o’clock, at the insistence of my stomach, I broke off, returning my shovel and crowbar to the small toolshed behind the carriage house. On the way, I noticed that the sumacs up front had proliferated well past the point of looking merely unpruned. I made a mental note to attack them the next day.
Andrew didn’t call while I was making supper. Neither did he call while I was eating. Nor afterward, while I was washing up.
Only a few of the boxes stacked against the wall remained to be unpacked. I opened them up, thinking to kill time, and found they contained only music, most of it unorganized. I didn’t feel like playing librarian just then, so I sat at the piano and tried practising. After a few listless scales, I gave up.
A session of bread making didn’t appeal either, but my last batch was finished, and a certain ever-present stickler for discipline wasn’t going to accept my buying bakery bread just because I wasn’t in the mood to make my own. I assembled the ingredients for a molasses-graham loaf—no kneading required—and set it to rise.
Why was Andrew staying in Hamilton? It couldn’t be for another day in court; tomorrow was Saturday. Why wasn’t he back, sifting through evidence, checking leads, questioning suspects?
And wanting to be with me?
I went to the back of the carriage house and sat at my draughting table. Rows of books stared down from the pressboard shelves. I picked one at random, a text on modern naturopathy, and started flipping pages. Vermifuge, aperient, sialagogue, antilithic... On any other day, I’d have found it fascinating.
Half an hour later, I checked my batter and transferred it to loaf pans. Still no word from Andrew. The bread would take forty-five minutes to proof. Time enough to stroll over to High Park, wander around, and prove to myself I wasn’t waiting for a call.
Somewhere around Grenadier Pond, I started humming the seventh Liederkreis song, the one Ulrike had sung a fragment of the day before. Deine Lippen selbst mir sprachen / Wörter, die ich kaum verstand... With thine own lips thou hadst spoken / Words of portent yet unclear...
By the time I returned home, the melody was well and truly stuck in my head. The silly concatenation of botanical nomenclature that scanned with it was there, too: cichorium, agropyron, betula, veronica—the herbs found on the ledge outside Elly’s window.
I was still singing when I put my loaves in the oven and forty minutes later when I took them out. The tune wouldn’t go away, even when I went back to the draughting table with the firm resolution to work on Evelyn’s book. I’d scarcely started when I found myself staring off into space again.
Deine Lippen selbst mir sprachen...Janssen... Wörter, die ich kaum verstand... I knew he’d been in the studio, killed Laura and Mann, but what proof was there?... Cichorium, agropyron... Would police forensics turn up something once they knew where to look?... Betula, veronica... Could anyone spend time in a room, commit murder, and leave no trace?... Strahlen hell die Nebel stachen... All around bright rays had broken...
I shook my head to clear it. The naturopathy text I’d put aside earlier lay open on the table. I started leafing through again. The boldface plant names and precise line drawings still didn’t grab my attention. Alfalfa, anise, barberry, couch grass, dandelion...
I turned to some glossy photos in the middle of the book. The switch from black-and-white to colour seemed to furnish the distraction I needed. The tune inside my head began to fade.
The silence proved shortlived. The instant that I registered the absence of the German words and Latin syllables, the reason for them having been there floated up to consciousness. I stared in disbelief at the book in front of me.
Proof—my brain had been telling me I had it all along. I knew exactly what had happened in the studio that night.
I laughed out loud. Despite the enormity of what I’d just realized, how could anyone ignore that the epiphany had come wrapped in poetic lines about sunlight breaking through the mist?
I needed to confirm just two things. The first I found without getting up from the draughting table. The second required a quick call to Elly.
No, she said in reply to the single question I asked, she hadn’t mentioned it. Not a word. Not to anyone.
“Vikkan! I’ve been wondering when I’d hear from you.”
The warmth of Evelyn St-Onge’s voice travelled down the wires. In the background, I could hear a dishwasher. She’d be in the big slate-floored kitchen, windows open, letting in the cedary Caledon night air.
“I was planning on coming up last weekend...”
“But there’s been some trouble. I know. Léo filled me in. How are you holding up?”
“Well, let’s just say it’s been an intense week. I’ll tell you about it when I see you. How are you doing?”
She hesitated. “I was over at the Pan-Abode today, airing it out. I wish you’d been here. It wasn’t easy, all alone.”
“Léo’s not there? I thought he’d gone up for the weekend.”
“No, he had to fly to Montreal. Family business. He should be back in Toronto by now if you need to reach him.”
“No, I just called to see if it was okay if I came up tonight.”
“Tonight? That would be wonderful. When are you leaving?”
“Soon, I think, but don’t wait up. I have a key to the cabin. I’ll sleep there.”
“Are you sure? If you’re only here for a short visit, I want you staying in the main house. There’s plenty of time to make up a room.”
“Save it for tomorrow. It won’t be like it’s the first night I’ve slept alone in the cabin.”
She caught something in my voice. “You’re sure you’re all right?”
“Can’t hide anything from you, can I?” I teased. “It’s nothing. Une affaire de coeur.”
“The detective?”
I couldn’t hold back a smile. “Léo has kept you informed. Don’t worry. I’m letting passion take over from good sense, that’s all.”
“Well, you can tell me about it tomorrow. How’s my book going?”
“Half way there. Would you like to see what I’ve got so far?”
“I should probably wait till it’s finished, but I’m too excited. Bring it along.”
I started packing as soon as she rang off—socks, underwear, and T-shirts in an overnight bag; transparencies and vellum pages in a large artist’s portfolio. A couple of macro lenses for the Pentax. Hiking boots. A flannel jacket. Toothbrush.
I probably shouldn’t be going up to Caledon, but I no longer felt like playing widow to the telephone. If a call were going to come, it would have by now. What I’d pieced together—the evidence the police would need to build a case—wasn’t going to change overnight. I’d call Fifty-two Division tomorrow, when Andrew got back.
Or maybe Sunday, when I got back.
I deposited my stuff in the back of the Rover and took out the crank. The air had turned thickly humid, and the always-temperamental engine proved singularly recalcitrant. After fifteen shoulder-straining revolutions of the metal rod, blisters started forming on my palms. I straightened up, caught my breath and went to the toolshed for a pair of gloves.
