nosey-parker,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you clean up Yonge Street instead of bothering decent people?’
‘I’m not arguing, madam. Chain it up and keep it chained up.’
‘Interfering bastards,’ she said. ‘Here, Luba.’ She got the dog on a chain and allowed herself to be hauled away, cursing through the smoke. Salter looked around, but the word had spread. All the dogs were now on leads. He went on his way satisfied, telling himself, as always, that he didn’t mind the dogs, it was the owners he didn’t like.
He felt much more ready to meet Mrs Summers.
Stouffville Avenue is several blocks south of the park, and Salter still had some time in hand when he arrived at Summers’s house, so he strolled by it at first on the other side of the street. It seemed to him a genuine old house that had been tarted up, like so many in a district which was festooned with the signs of building renovators and architects. It was a small white house, and from the front it looked like an old cottage with a single bedroom under the roof. From the side, Salter could see that there was a new bit stuck on behind, adding at least two more rooms, one on top of the other. The front yard had been dug out and bricked in to make room for a car, even though a driveway led past the house to the back. Salter recognized the marks of a white-painter, someone who saw a perfectly good house as an opportunity to take it apart and make it into something else. He had suffered from this himself as Annie had called for more (or less) light, another bathroom, a new kitchen, and much else. Salter refused to lift a finger to help on the grounds that he was a policeman, not a carpenter, and he objected to the cost, but Annie had found the money anyway, and no longer asked him to lend a hand. The results were always pleasant, but he still fought each new suggestion bitterly.
He wondered how much Summers had done of all this, and how much he had had to put up with. Salter crossed the street and walked down the drive to the white picket fence enclosing the back yard. A woman was kneeling with her back to him, fiddling with a plant. The yard would have met with Annie’s approval. Around a central grass plot were a lot of different coloured flowers, several of which looked familiar from his own back yard, a surprising number of them in bloom considering that frost was still hanging about the suburbs. The grass was littered with gardening tools. A lot of work here, thought Salter. Against the house a small patch was sown with vegetables—tomatoes and lettuce—which would ripen at the same time that they could be bought in the markets for next to nothing, the reason Salter always gave for not planting any himself.
He coughed and the woman looked up. She was thin, in early middle-age, with pretty silver hair.
‘Inspector Salter,’ he said.
‘Yes, I know. Come in,’ she said, pointing to the gate. She threw her trowel on the grass with the rest of the tools, tossed her gloves after it, and let him in through the back door, into a kind of sunroom furnished with white wicker.
‘In here,’ she said. ‘Do you want coffee or anything?’ It was not an offer, but a request to know if it was now his coffee-hour, and was it her duty to make some.
‘No, thanks,’ Salter said. He waited for her to sit down before sitting opposite her.
‘Would you mind if I asked you some questions about your husband?’ he began.
‘Ask the questions, and I’ll tell you. I don’t know who killed David, or why, and I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me.’
This is not going to be much fun either, thought Salter. He said, ‘The Montreal police have asked us to help them, and we have nothing to go on.’ Salter paused. Should it be ‘nothing to go on with? What did ‘nothing to go on’ mean? Would the fat chairman be interested?
Mrs Summers was waiting. Salter continued, ‘He was found in a hotel room with a fractured skull, after, apparently, a good night out with his colleagues.’
‘A perfect murder, then. How can I help? I was here in bed.’ She was not so much hostile as indifferent, continually looking out at her garden.
‘There was one clue, ma’am.’
‘The killer dropped his Esso card?’
‘Not quite. But there was a glass with lipstick on it in the room.’
She said nothing, as if this was no news to her, and stared at her garden.
Salter decided to give her time to respond, and he looked around, taking in the details of the room. It was agreeable and untidy: a tin of shoe-polish seemed at home on an end-table, the top of the television was a storage space for a pile of magazines, and a tea-towel hung over the back of an armchair. House and garden had the air of being left in mid-task, like the Marie Celeste.
Eventually she said, ‘So he had a woman in his room. Who was she, do you know?’
‘We don’t know, ma’am.’
‘Nor do I.’
‘It doesn’t surprise you, ma’am?’
‘He was a big boy. Your age. You guess.’
‘I’m trying to. Did he have any women friends you knew about?’
‘Marika Tils. He was fond of her, all right.’
‘Anyone else.’
‘Not that I know of, Inspector. Last week I’d have been certain, but now I don’t know. You people come across all kinds of secrets, don’t you? As far as I know, or knew, David didn’t have a mistress, nor did he hire prostitutes to do things I wouldn’t do for him. That help?’
‘That’s very helpful.’
‘Good. We had a fair sex life, and he had me often enough to make me pretty sure he had no one else on the side. But at your age you guys get funny, I hear. So, if you are searching for a woman, let me see, how can I help, yes, look for one with teeth marks on her.’
Salter said nothing.
She continued. ‘Yes, he liked to bite—ears and neck, mostly, but he would take a nibble anywhere. Otherwise it was pretty conventional—missionary position except for Father’s Day, when I got on top. I expect we had a sex life much like yours, Inspector.’
Salter said patiently, ‘Did he have any enemies?’
‘Nothing fierce. He sometimes called this or that colleague an asshole, to me, in private, but I expect you do that, too, eh, Inspector? He wasn’t very tactful to them, either, so a lot of people were wary of him. How about you, Inspector? Are you careful of your tongue?’
‘His colleagues have mentioned a feud with Professor Dunkley.’
‘Oh no.’ She broke her pose and sat forward. ‘Oh no. Don’t go off on that track. He and Dunkley were poles apart, and Dunkley is an asshole, but he wouldn’t kill anyone. He’s nasty enough to, but he couldn’t justify it within his moral system or his political ethos, or whatever. Oh no. Dunkley doesn’t believe in violence.’
‘Then why did they dislike each other?’
She looked round the room. Then she said, ‘Maybe I should make some coffee after all. I’d like some. Then I’ll tell you David’s life story,
