stint helping Jacques strip the blue flowered wallpaper from their bedroom. He had attacked the task with a frenzy, as if determined to banish the mother’s ghost before he spent another night in the house. He’d been right; all the bedrooms held the memories of decades of family life. In one bedroom, they discovered lists of girls’ names carved on the window sill, and on another sill “DP loves...” with the initials vigorously scratched out.
“A teenage love affair that ended badly,” Isabelle joked as they sanded down the marks.
Jacques pointed to the lengthy list of girls on the other window. “This guy evidently didn’t take his grandes amours so seriously.”
After two bedrooms, even Jacques agreed they’d both breathed enough dust for one day, and he headed into the city to check paint stores. The afternoon was still crisp and sunny, so Isabelle retrieved her shovel and returned to the thicket. Tearing up the weeds and decaying planks, she encountered more slugs and earwigs than she ever cared to, and she was about to give up in disgust when her hand struck something hard. She dug around it and levered the shovel under it until she finally unearthed a small tin can with the lid rusted on tight. It rattled when she shook it, as if there were several loose objects inside. Soot smudged her hands where she had gripped it, and the label was illegible beneath the black. She studied the hole it had come from. This was no accident. The hole was deep and clearly covered by charred floorboards. Someone had deliberately lifted a floorboard and buried the can underneath.
She remembered the man she’d seen rummaging around here in the thicket. Perhaps he was looking for this! She felt a flutter of excitement. It might be jewellery or coins, perhaps something even more valuable. This is an old home; an ordinary artifact might be worth a lot of money. Whether she kept it or turned it over to Robert Pettigrew, she would decide later, once she’d seen what it was.
With the help of some oil and a screwdriver, she began very slowly to work the lid loose. It was stubborn and loosening it took an interminable time. Finally, with one last pop, the lid came off. Isabelle peered inside and her eagerness died abruptly.
Six metal bottle caps, a white feather, a box of condoms, two slips of paper, a brass key, and the final object—a small white sphere. She turned the sphere over in her fingers curiously until she was looking at it head on, and saw two tiny holes and the remnants of a beak. It was the skull of a tiny bird.
Isabelle snatched her fingers away as if they’d been burned. The bird skull tumbled into the dirt next to the can. Horror crawled over her skin, and she sat back on her heels, staring at the object, in the grip of an irrational fear. Had the man come back to the farm for this? For a dozen condoms, a bunch of useless junk and a bird skull?
She scooped up the contents, returned them to the tin and pressed the lid down tightly before heading into the house to find Sergeant Sullivan’s card. She wasn’t sure what the significance of the tin was, but she knew the police had better have a look at it.
Six
When Green arrived at the station the next morning, Brian Sullivan’s desk was deserted, but a young woman was parked outside his own office, clutching an envelope of material to her generous chest. She wore a hideous black and white checked pant suit and clunky black shoes and made no attempt to tame her frizzy red hair, but nevertheless, she managed to look cute. She looked about fourteen years old, although Green knew from her file that she was twice that.
Her baby blue eyes lit at the sight of him, and she stuck out an exuberant hand. “Inspector Green! Detective Sue Peters, remember?”
He took her hand in his, felt the smooth, firm pressure of her fingers. It lingered a little long, he thought, making a silent note to beware. He opened his door and nodded to her package. “You have something for me?”
“Yessir. The Sarge—Sullivan, I mean—told me to bring you this stuff. Thought you might like to see it.” She followed him inside, making no effort to detach the envelope from her breasts.
“And where is Sergeant Sullivan?”
“Got a call, went out to Ashford Landing.” Without an invitation, she kicked the guest chair out and plunked herself down in it.
Green surveyed the mountain of paperwork on his desk and the blinking message light on his phone. “What’s the material about?”
“Stuff from Ident, mostly pictures from the Ashford Landing scene. The Sarge said there wasn’t much new, but you’d want to look at it all anyway.” Still she clutched the material as if it were the Crown jewels.
He nodded to his desk brusquely. “Thank you. Just leave it there, I’ll look at it in a minute. Did the sergeant assign you anything else to do?”
Her lips curved up in a grin. “I’m working with Gibbsie, trying to find those three brothers. Quite the nice little riddle, eh, sir? Which one’s the guy who took the swan dive off the tower?”
Green glanced through his open door into the squad room to see Gibbs hunched over his computer, tapping furiously. “That’s the basis of a lot of detective work, Peters. The sooner we know who the man is, the sooner we can begin tracing his movements and figuring out how he died. You’d better go help, Detective.”
It took her a couple of seconds to get the hint, but finally she parted with her prize, dropped it on his desk and headed over to Gibbs. Green uttered a short, silent apology to the faithful, hard-working detective, waited until Peters was well out of sight, then snatched up the envelope.
Five minutes later, he tossed the reports aside with frustration. Sullivan was right; not much there. Yet even the lack of evidence was telling. Not the slightest trace of blood had been detected on the top of the tower, which made it unlikely that any of the victim’s abrasions had been sustained in a struggle up there. The contour and markings on the fatal head wound matched those of the rock beneath his head, confirming MacPhail’s theory that the fall itself was the cause of death. The small piece of fabric that had snagged on the parapet had been sent to the RCMP lab for formal analysis, along with the jacket from which it had presumably ripped, but Cunningham had found the torn section at the back of the hem where it seemed to fit.
Green fed the CD of crime scene photos into his computer and watched as his screen filled with meticulously ordered shots—overviews, middle views and close-ups of every single item of evidence found at the scene. Green studied the views of the body, trying to picture it in the physical surroundings of the church. The man lay on his stomach with his legs splayed and his head facing the tower. His head was twisted to one side, almost touching the stone base. Ident had done a very thorough physical search of the vicinity and had photographed a dozen cigarette butts, a decaying tennis ball, a few old candy wrappers and an ice cream cup. Everything looked at least a month old.
The next series of photos was a scrupulous record of the church tower, from each latent fingerprint on the ladder to the colourful collection of bird droppings on the parapet. The fabric from the jacket had been found on the top of the wall directly above the body. Green studied the photo carefully. The fabric had snagged on the inner corner of the wall where it had crumbled, leading Cunningham to speculate that in the act of hoisting himself up over the wall, the victim had pressed against the wall, dislodging some old mortar and tearing his jacket. Cunningham was still trying to match all the latents lifted from the ladder, but he was leaning towards suicide.
Green leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes, trying to visualize the victim’s last movements, but the photos weren’t enough. The suicide theory didn’t feel right yet. Once Ident had finished there, he needed to go to the scene, to walk through the steps the man had taken, in order
