Foul Deeds: A Rosalind Mystery (2 page)

Sophie was half-singing Ophelia's sad lament, and I started to drift. The Scotch had warmed me and I sank deeper into the couch. Molly closed her eyes and put her chin on her paws. Clearly anxious about McBride, she heaved a little sigh.

* * *

The carts of medication were rattling down the corridor, and McBride was dreaming there were clowns on roller skates coming after him like a gang of paparazzi. He knew he couldn't outrun them, so he was trying to call for help. But he couldn't make a sound—it was that old paralysis dream of his. If he could just open his eyes, he could save himself. He had to open his eyes. With enormous effort he managed it—just a little. Just enough to see the fluorescent lights of the hospital's hallway through the fuzzy blur. There was a dark form leaning in. A cop, maybe. He had schooled himself for so many years to play his cards close to his chest that he knew he mustn't say anything. He must stay silent to protect himself. The dark figure straightened and stalked away.

He closed his eyes again. Slowly, he began to recall what had happened to him—the voice calling out to him in the sleeting night.

“Who's there? McBride?”

“That's right.”

“You're right on time.”

“It's bitter out here. What have you got for me?”

“Back here—it's in the trunk.”

Then it must have been someone hidden behind the next car suddenly hitting him across the back of the head. He staggered away from the car and pulled out his phone, hitting the speed dial for Rosalind. He could hear the recording before he was hit again, hard. He yelped and tried to fight back but was fading fast, his knees buckling. As he went under, his face in the snow, he felt the phone being pulled from his hand.

And now, finally, he was surfacing and he found his voice, his words blurting out into the hospital corridor. “Molly. Where's Molly?” His mouth was dry. From a chair near the foot of his bed someone in a uniform stood up, moved towards him, and began to speak.

“The girl who found you. She took the dog. She said she'd come round to the hospital tomorrow to see how you're faring. You took quite a crack on the head there, buddy. Do you know who it was that did this to you? Can you answer some questions? Mr. McBride?”

The Girl Who Found You. That was a nice phrase; he liked it. It made him feel warm. He began to drift down again into the dark. The Girl Who Found You. Maybe there was something redeeming about life after all. You could get beat up and lie bleeding in an icy parking lot, and a girl would find you.

When Sophie and I picked
our way through the storm-stayed city
to the hospital the next morning we found McBride sitting up in a bed in the corridor of the over-crowded emergency ward. His head was bandaged and he looked very cranky. Though I was concerned and anxious, his appearance had me suppressing a grin.

“So why didn't you answer your damn phone?” he griped over the general din as we walked towards him.

“I was…the power went out. It was crazy. Are you alright?”

“Dandy.”

Oh boy, if looks could kill.

“McBride, this is Sophie. You met her and some other friends of mine at that cast party shindig last spring. Anyway, she's the one who found you last night.”

“So you're the one who's got Molly. Where is she?”

“McBride!” I exclaimed.

“What?”

“Rude, my god! Try ‘Thank you for saving my life Sophie.'”

“Oh no,” Sophie jumped in. “The credit goes entirely to Molly. She was making quite the ruckus—I mean, you would have frozen to death in that storm if not for her. And she's just fine, by the way, so don't worry. They wouldn't have let us bring her in here I don't think. Anyway, um—here….” Sophie reached in her bag and took out a tartan thermos. “I brought you some cowslip tea. It'll help you sleep. Really, it's so amazing.”

“I'm not much for the herbal tea,” he muttered. I cleared my throat and glared at him. “But yeah, thanks—that's…thoughtful.” He took the thermos and looked back at me.

“So how on earth did this happen to you?” I asked.

“I got tricked, sad to say. I got lured.”

“Seems like someone's trying to send you a message loud and clear.”

“
No mistake.” His reply was terse. It was obvious he wasn't interested in elaborating there in the hospital corridor. A hall speaker just above his bed was busy with pages for doctors, annoying electronic bell sounds, and various indecipherable announcements. Several teams had wheeled stretchers by in either direction, squeezing past us as we attempted to talk.

“I bet you just love hanging out here in the middle of all the action,” I said. “Were there a lot of accidents last night or is it always a zoo, I wonder.”

“All I can tell you is it's been non-stop crazy. Anyway, I'm out of here tomorrow morning.”

“Are you sure? They told you that, did they?”

“No, I told them that. Now you get Ruby if she's not already towed. You've got a set of keys don't you?”

“I do,” I said. “So, why don't I pick Molly up at Sophie's and come and get you—say around ten? You can catch me up on everything then.”

“I'll be ready.”

“Can we get you some water or anything?” I asked.

“Nope.”

There wasn't much left to talk about. I was anxious to get out of there and McBride was clearly not feeling particularly affable.

“Okay. Well. We'll go, I guess…Take it easy, eh.”

“You bet.”

“Bye McBride.”

“Bye Sophie.”

As we walked out of the hospital, I found myself apologizing yet again for McBride's annoying lack of social grace. But McBride had always been at his worst around my friends, and under the circumstances anybody would be in a lousy mood.

“You guys are pretty connected though, aren't you?” Sophie asked.

“Oh yeah—we've been through some wild cases together,” I said.

“How did you meet, anyway?”

“Well, he was a guest at one of my criminology classes that year I was doing the sabbatical replacement gig at Saint Mary's—I brought him in a couple of times to speak to the students. He was really great with the class, and we kind of got to be friends. So then he started hiring me to do little research projects for him. Eventually, I started doing a lot of the legwork—you know, the boring but necessary stuff. So there you go—we've been working together for almost five years now. I've learned plenty from him. He's a smarty-pants when it comes to the criminal mind. It's strange that he got suckered into that trap last night. I think he was behaving badly just now partly out of embarrassment.”

“Don't you think it's weird, Roz, that the whole time McBride was unconscious, you were too? I mean you passed out in the laundry room only a few minutes after he tried to call you—and you were probably coming to on that cold cement floor at the same time we found him in that parking lot. It's like some kind of parallel experience or something.”

“It's just a flukey coincidence, Sophie, that's all.” I was attempting to dismiss it but her observation was unsettling and gave me a little chill. I had often had the sense, when we were in the scary depths of some sordid investigation, that working for McBride might be the death of me.

Before going our separate ways, I told Sophie I'd be by to get Molly in the morning and she reminded me that there was a
Hamlet
rehearsal the next evening. “I'll be there this time. Promise,” I said. “What scenes are you working—do you know?”

She immediately began speaking Ophelia's lines to Polonius, “
My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, Lord Hamlet/With his doublet all unbraced
—”

I chimed in, “—
No hat upon his head; his stockings foul'd/Ungartered and down gyved to his ankles
.”

“That's the one,” she said. “What's ‘gyved' anyway, Roz?”

“Gyve is a fetter or a shackle, so ‘down-gyved' means undone—unfettered down to his ankles. Bare and exposed.”

“Well no wonder she's distraught,” Sophie twinkled. “His doublet's unbraced too; he's practically naked. I could handle it, but apparently Ophelia can't, or she would never make the mistake of
telling her father.”

“Yep,” I said. “And it's a big mistake because after that, things get a whole lot worse.”

I decided to head home before going to get Ruby out of the parking lot. I needed a little time to get my bearings. As I pushed my way through the snow on the porch and entered the house, I could see the cat sitting on the hall table just inside the door. If she'd had a watch on, she would have been looking at it.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “You had a cold and lonely night, but here I am at last—you'll be eating before you know it.”

She jumped down and headed straight for the kitchen, her ears flattened to make sure I was in step behind her.

The house was chilly. I reluctantly turned up the thermostat in the kitchen, imagining the old furnace voraciously gobbling litre after litre of expensive oil. There's got to be a better way to heat this behemoth of a house, I thought, cursing my father for the increasingly cumbersome inheritance.

“You know, Dad,” I said aloud, in case his spirit happened to be hanging around, “I could take a tropical vacation on what I spend on fuel. A long tropical vacation!”

Living alone was for the birds anyway. I should have tried to find a housemate. But past experiences of neurotic, messy, noisy students had made me gun-shy. The cat was enough to contend with. I loaded her dish with her favourite soft food, and she practically knocked me over purring and rubbing up against my legs. “There,” I said, holding her back so I could actually set the dish down, “life's not so bad after all, is it?”

She gave the food a brief inspection and then casually strolled away, sitting under the kitchen table long enough to let me know it had all been a set-up—she didn't really need me. But she went back and attacked it as I put the kettle on for a blessed cup of tea. While the tea steeped in the little blue pot, I could hear the heating pipes banging as the hot water moved through them and warmed the kitchen.

Okay Roz, I said to myself, make a list: shovel out the car, clean the snow off the porch and the front sidewalk, go downtown and get McBride's car, carry on with the Shakespeare work, and, oh yeah, The Case. McBride would really want that research done by the time I picked him up in the morning. Besides, I needed the money.

“Okay, I'm worried,”
McBride said as he lowered himself painfully into the passenger seat of my Peugeot sedan, Old Solid. You're the only person I know, he once said to me, who names your car but not your cat. His car, Ruby Sube (which I also named) had in fact been towed away, and now we had to go and pay a lot of money to get her out of hock. Molly had finally stopped leaping around him and we coaxed her into the back seat, but her nose was between us and she was panting eagerly, her eyes riveted to McBride.

“Molly, down!” I commanded. “Sit! Back!” All to no avail—selective hearing isn't confined to humans. McBride was no help. Oh well, I supposed she should be allowed this display of unabashed worship after the trauma. She probably thought she'd never see him again.

“Why?” I asked after we were finally settled.

“Why what?”

“Are you worried.”

“Well, whoever it was who took my cellphone, they've got a good record of my contacts, not to mention your number.”

“Okay. Start from the beginning,” I said. “What were you doing in that parking lot in the first place?”

“I got an anonymous call regarding some confidential skinny on the Harbour Cleanup deal. You know—the $350 million that was contracted to go to the Europa Conglomerate. Apparently, our client's father, the deceased Peter King, may have been instrumental in helping to put the kibosh on that deal, and diverting the funds back to local interests. From what I could gather, King seemed to be making it a personal mission to hamper their activities not only here but around the world. So anyway, this telephone contact wouldn't give me his name but did say he was a part-time clerk in Planning, that over the past few months he had collected some very intriguing information, and that he was concerned there had been a vendetta against our victim. He sounded legit, Roz, and this call felt like the break I was waiting for.”

“So you set up a meet to get the poop on the poop,” I said, “and instead you got a whack across the back of the head. But why would anyone risk a pre-emptive strike unless you were a real threat? And why just rough you up if they've already done a murder? Why not just get it over with?”

“Good questions but don't forget: As far as the police are concerned no murder was committed, so if they've been lucky enough to get away with that one they wouldn't necessarily want to commit another. But I do believe these thugs were out to scare me off, hoping to just bully me out of the way.”

“Well that's foolish! Obviously they don't know what makes you tick.”

“That's right.” McBride smiled for the first time. “Bring it on.”

“At least it makes one thing clear,” I said. “We do have a case here.”

“Right. So, how are you doing on those poisons?”

“I've got a list for you. It's interesting in light of the Yushenko case in the Ukraine with dioxin. I mean, maybe poisoning's back in vogue. The problem is, in order to prove anything we'd have to get enough evidence together to insist on an exhumation and an autopsy. Not popular—especially at this time of year.”

“Popularity's not my thing.”

“Really? Could have fooled me, McBride.”

We swung into the police compound and McBride handed me his driver's licence and registration and persuaded me to go in and do all the talking while he held a love-in with Molly.