The Calling (33 page)

There was no movement in the room.

'I want to apologize to you all for the chaos
you've been operating under. Obviously nothing
could have prepared us for this. You've all been
consummate professionals, and no matter what
Mason tries to do to us as a team, your grace under
pressure these last few days, and your dedication,
will be the stuff of legend in this town.' She
scanned the men and women standing before her,
and Cassie Jenner, standing closest to her, passed
her a tissue. She'd spoken with force, her voice
unwavering, but she'd wept steadily. She refused
the tissue and stood before them all, her face red
and streaked and stared at them. 'I hope you understand
what it means to me, to have your support.'

'All due respect to Detective Wingate,' came the
voice of PC Peter MacTier, 'but welcome back,
Skip.' Under any other circumstance, she could
imagine the room breaking into applause, but
instead, she felt every eye on her, and she knew
there was not a dissenter among them. She
imagined their unity might have a salutary effect
on Mason when it came time to decide what to do
with her. Although she doubted it.

Wingate said, 'I've briefed the skip on what
Detective Sevigny learned, and although it isn't
exactly a break in the case, at least we know now
who we're dealing with. Have we heard back from
the credit card companies?'

'I've got it all,' said Sergeant Costamides. 'He
hasn't used a credit card since May. I guess he
thought better of taking it with him. But the last
thing he used it for was heavy-duty painkillers and
sedatives.'

'Broke his own rules,' said Hazel. 'Things must
have been getting bad at home.'

'He took out eight hundred dollars from a bank
machine in Norway House, and since then there's
only been one more withdrawal, in Pictou, for
three hundred. There's only two hundred left in
the account.'

'Let's hope he needs it soon,' said Wingate.

Her people, her mother's only hope, returned to
their desks. Phone tips had been coming in since
Saturday afternoon, but nothing had led anywhere.
Peter Mallick was not going to be caught by a stray
sighting. As the evening wore on, few of her people
spoke to her directly, but they would touch her as
they passed, keeping their hands on her for slightly
longer than necessary, to let her know they were
there, they were with her.

She stayed out of view as much as she could, in
her office or in the rear hallways. At shift change,
Wingate passed her in the hall, and in answer to
her unspoken question, shook his head.

'Every minute that passes could be her last one
on this earth. And we don't know.'

'Is there anything at all that I can do?' he asked.

'I need something to keep my mind occupied.'

He gestured with his chin to the pen. 'You want
a desk out there?'

'No. It'll distract them. How far behind are we
on reports?'

'I'm sure they're piling up.'

'Will you bring me some? I'm sure they'll have to
be redone, but it's better than pacing.'

She waited for him in her office, and he came in
with a cup of coffee and a white file folder. She
took both from him silently, and he stood in front
of her desk with his hands folded in front of him.
'It wasn't worth it,' she said. 'I ran him right into
my own house.'

'You don't know yet if it was worth it, Hazel.
Everyone out there is ready for when the next
thing happens, and you need to be ready too. Be
what it's hard to be right now.'

She filled her chest with air and let it out
heavily. 'Thank you, James.'

He left, and she pulled the incident reports
toward her. The folder contained the usual passel
of complaints, disputes, petty thefts and vandalism
that made for an average month in Port Dundas.
Hazel scanned the reports for names she knew and
came across three familiar last names, all sons or
grandsons of respectable people from the town and
environs. What would Percy Adamsen think of his
sweet grandson Arthur driving off with a full tank
from the Beaver gas station on Bethune Road? Or
Temperance McMurtry, dead now almost forty
years, what would she make of her great-grandson
Nicholas Grant, who'd been caught smoking a
bong in the shape of a breast in Centennial Park on
the previous Saturday night? Perhaps they wouldn't
be surprised at all: the younger generation always
appears to be headed for disaster anyway, doesn't it?

She wrote her notes in the files, setting aside a
couple for follow-up in an unimaginable future
when everything would be normal again. She felt
amazed at herself that she was even capable of such
an activity. She recalled that Nick Grant had hot-wired
a car out in Kenniston two years earlier and
made a mental note to visit him and speak to him
personally about the direction he was heading in. It
was hard to scare kids these days, though, and she
imagined if she did give him a talking-to that she'd
be fodder for comedy at Gilman High the very next
day. As she was plotting what she should do with
this young man, a swooping wave of terror
suddenly passed through her and she realized that,
for the first time in three days, she was not thinking
about her mother. The switch out of those
thoughts and then back into them came with a
sensation like an electrical shock.

Wingate knocked and came in. 'I thought you'd
like to see this one too,' he said. She reached across
for the folder he was holding and cast her eyes
down on it. 'You're kidding.'

'No.'

'After all this time, she files a report? She must
have been pretty upset to find out what happened
to her kitty.'

'It's not legal to keep a cougar as a housepet,' said
Wingate. 'She was hoping it would come home on
its own.'

Hazel closed the file. 'I guess that's not going to
happen.'

'I'm supposed to ask you what we did with the
body.'

'Ah,' she said. 'It went to the Metro Zoo for
study purposes. She'll have to call them.'

'One case closed.'

'Next,' she said.

At three-thirty in the morning, feeling her lower
back seize and unseize, she got up to walk through
the building. She went through the pen like a
ghost, unmarked, and passed into the back hallway
that led into the cells below, cells that were almost
permanently empty. Even their so-called worst
criminals (how she longed for those men and
women now: purse snatchers, drunk drivers, speeders)
were reasonable people: there was rarely a
reason to lock someone up. The first time the
Central OPS had tried to cut the size of the Port
Dundas force, her mother had been mayor, and
she'd shown her disapproval by insisting she be
locked in one of the cells. Hazel had been a cadet
at the time and had not been terribly impressed by
the stunt. But it worked: Central hadn't cut anyone.
That was 1973. Hazel recalled standing where
she was right now, watching her mother sitting in
the cell making a salad for her supper. She was
sitting on that very bench, cutting a tomato in her
hand into a wooden bowl. That's how she always
cut a tomato, Hazel thought in a wonder of
heartache, never with a cutting board, but in the
palm of her hand.

She walked back to the stairs gingerly, turning to
face them once to stretch out the back of her leg.
In the basement, the lights were off, and it was cool
and dark. She had the thought of letting herself
into one of the cells and curling up for a couple of
hours, but thought better of it and went back to the
ground floor. When she got there Wingate was
standing in the back hallway, his arms at his sides
and his irises as small as pinheads. He said nothing
but turned and began walking, and she knew to
follow him.

In the pen, they were all standing, as if to show
their respect. But they had their backs to her, and
two of them near the front of the room had their
guns drawn and trained on Staff Sergeant Wilton's
counter. The man who called himself Simon
Mallick was standing calmly in the waiting area in
front of the counter, his hands at his sides. She
stared at him as if she had in fact gone to sleep in
the cells and dreamed him. But he saw her and
stepped forward. 'Detective Inspector,' he said,
and she could hear two officers holding their guns
on him take their safeties off.

The small, silent group of men and women
parted as Hazel walked through them. The air felt
as if it had turned to syrup. She was worried that
Peter Mallick would vanish if she took her eyes off
him. 'Lower your weapons,' she said to her officers
as she walked past them, and then she was face-to-face
with him. His starving eyes were set in his
head like yellow jewels. He regarded her almost
expressionlessly, although (so the thought went
through her mind) he seemed faintly relieved to
see her.

'What have you done with my mother, Peter?'

He blinked slowly. 'My name is Simon.'

'What have you done with her?'

'I've brought my car,' he said. 'If you'd like to
come with me, I'd be grateful if you'd allow one of
your officers to handcuff you.'

'Handcuffing me isn't going to stop me from
killing you.'

'It would be unsafe for us both if we had an altercation
while I was driving.'

'Where is she?'

He folded his hands in front of himself. She saw
now that his left hand was wrapped tightly in discoloured
gauze the colour of a bruise. He looked
like a dying crow, his wings tattered, his stubbled,
piebald skull. 'I am as unhappy at this turn of
events as you must be, Hazel Micallef, but we need
each other right now, and time is not on your
mother's side, so please do allow one of your men to
prepare you for your trip.'

She heard Wingate's voice behind her. 'We can't
let you take her, sir. I'm sure you understand that.
But I'll be happy to accompany you and hear you
out. It's in everyone's best interest to ensure no one
else is hurt.'

'James—' Hazel began, but Mallick held his
hand up.

'James what?' he asked.

'Wingate.'

'Ah. Detective or Officer Wingate?'

'Detective Constable,' James said, coming closer
to the front counter.

'Were you part of the grand plan to draw me
back to Humber Cottage?'

'That's not important right now.'

'No, of course not,' said Peter Mallick. 'But you
must have had high hopes. I picture you squatting
in wait behind a juniper bush at three in the morning,
tasting your victory. Now look where we are.'

'We underestimated you,' said Wingate in a conciliatory
tone. 'We did. But you haven't made a
single mistake in your entire journey. So why make
one now? Take my gun. Cuff me. I'll go with you
willingly.'

'Is that really what you want, Detective
Constable Wingate?'

'It's the best solution.'

'Well, Detective Constable,' said the
Belladonna, his voice as soft and comforting as a
priest's, 'this is what I'd like to do. I'd like to slice
you from hip to hip and collect your steaming bowels
in a sack as you watched. And then, to put the
images out of your mind, I'll press your eyeballs
through the back of their sockets with my thumbs
until I feel them embed in your brain like candles
in a birthday cake.' He offered Wingate a very
small smile. 'I don't suppose you have any handcuffs
on you?'

Wingate turned away from the force of Mallick's
eyes. 'Skip, you put me in charge of this, you said—'

'Give me your handcuffs, James,' Hazel said.

'I can't let you go with this man.'

Like a mechanized toy, Peter Mallick suddenly
stepped forward and flung open the countertop.
Wingate leapt back and Hazel held her hand up to
warn the others to hold their fire. 'If anyone follows
us, I'll kill us both,' said Peter. 'Do you doubt me?'

'No,' said Wingate, his voice clenched in dread.

Hazel turned her wrists to him. Wingate
unhooked his cuffs from his belt and locked them
on her, put the key into Peter's hand. She saw from
the look in the detective's eyes that he wanted
some kind of permission from her, and she shook
her head deliberately from side to side. His face fell.

Peter Mallick pocketed the key and held his
ruined hand out to her. She went to him. 'Good
evening, one and all,' he said.

Tuesday 30 November, 5:30 a.m.

She'd been on these roads since she was a child.
Even with her eyes closed, she could have told the
distances, the sideroads, the feel of the asphalt or
the dirt beneath the tires. He could have driven for
half a day in any direction and she would still know
where she was.

He'd put her in the back seat, strapping her into
the middle seat belt, where he'd be able to see her
in the rearview mirror. There had been no point in
hooding her: he knew nothing would escape her
notice, seen or unseen. They drove north out of
town, onto the main highway, and he'd kept to the
main road for almost two hours. She'd seen signs
for North Bay, but he'd turned off east onto one of
the rural sideroads, and she imagined he was
making for Algonquin Park. It had been pitch-dark
when he left Port Dundas, but now the sunrise was
beginning to glow greyly on the empty fields, most
of them shorn of anything like life, and a few with
bare, snow-covered raw cornstalks lying in them
like a huge rabbit pelt. Then they'd passed into the
provincial park and the road narrowed. A canopy
of bare branches covered them.

He drove at exactly the speed limit. She noted
his movements were spare, concise. When he
lifted his good hand to clasp the turn signal, he
held it in his fist like a bar. The flesh over his
knuckles was the yellow of uncooked chicken skin.
The pointed bones in the back of his neck rose up
like nailheads beneath worn wood. She was being
driven to her fate by a skeleton.

She didn't know what was waiting for her at
their destination. There was no reason to think her
mother was still alive; Mallick knew Hazel had no
choice but to go with him. But whether her mother
was alive or not, she also knew she was going to die
tonight, and she told herself whether it was in payment
for her mother's freedom or in penance for
her death, it was an acceptable exchange. An
inevitable one.

It was fitting that she was here, that her life had
come to this moment. That she was sitting in a car
with a man whose plans, like hers, had come to
nothing. They'd set off on separate journeys with
entirely different goals in mind, but here they were,
their two paths become one, both broken in body
and mind. It was as if she'd become Peter Mallick's
twin. And now he would kill her as well, but not
out of love. She wondered how much of what was
left of the Belladonna could be measured in love
and how much in grief and rage.

She shifted quietly in her seat, her hands in her
lap, small thrills of terror horripillating her arms
and legs, and bent a finger into one of the handcuff
rings, thinking perhaps Wingate would have had
the presence of mind to leave one of the cuffs
unlocked. But he'd done it under Mallick's cold
glare, and she recalled the sharp, racheting
snick
that signified that she was properly restrained. At
least her hands weren't behind her back. There was
nothing to do but wait.

He'd spoken to her only a little on the way, asking
her if she was cold, asking her if she was thirsty.
She had answered no both times. He'd looked at
her in the rearview mirror when asking her these
questions, his eyes like marbles gleaming in a cup,
but other than that, he did not bother with her. He
had nothing to fear from her.

As the highway narrowed leading into the
provincial park, he'd said, 'It's a big country.'

His voice had come from the front seat as casual
as a cabbie's. Small talk. She decided to prod him.
'It would have been faster to fly.'

He said nothing more for fifteen minutes, and
she wondered if she'd only imagined the short
exchange. But then he said, 'If more people
travelled and saw the vastness of this country and
the people in it, it would humble them, I think.'

'Are you humbled, Peter?'

'You will call me Simon.'

'But Simon is dead, Peter.'

She saw the corners of his mouth turn up a little.
'To answer your question, all servants are humble.
But it humbled me more to meet so many friends in
so many different circumstances and to be of service
to them.'

She laughed, a short hiss between her teeth. 'You
took the deaths of these people from their families.
You made the end of their lives even more difficult.
How is that a service?'

She saw his eyes slide over her in the rearview
mirror and she saw in them the quick warmth she
knew he had shown his victims, a flicker of tenderness
he must have learned from his brother. Peter's
nature was colder; as a child he had lived too many
years without hope before being rescued and had
never truly come to live among people. She knew
this nature, had encountered it before in the few
men and fewer women she'd come across in her
policing work whom she would have called psychopaths,
people with no moral compass, whose lives
were guided by internal drives only. Being a
member of a church would have been very difficult
for Peter. She considered the effort it must have
taken for him to wear his brother's face and
wondered if she would see cracks in it. The murder
of Clara Lyon had been a tremor along that fault-line.
'You think I have a misplaced sense of
compassion,' he said.

'If that's what you would call it.'

'But I don't. It's not compassion at all.
Compassion
means to "suffer together". It's an
inactive state.'

'I see.'

'
Prayer
is active. You must participate. What I
have done is offered communion. It's a very different
thing.'

'You've just been murdering people willy-nilly,
Peter. Sorry to cut through the crap, but you can
feel free to tell yourself whatever you want.'
Outside, she watched a burnt farmhouse track past
in her window. She wondered if she could recall
the case, if anyone had been hurt or killed. But like
many of the cases that crossed through her station
house, she could not bring any particulars to mind.

'Your observances are just different than mine,'
he was saying. 'We both have our faiths.'

'God,' she murmured, 'to talk to you, you seem
sane.'

He turned in his seat, twisting his head back
over his shoulder, and she was eye-to-eye with him.
'I
seem
sane.'

'Watch the road—'

'Why don't you tell me what I am, Hazel?' He'd
begun to speed up. 'Since you've been studying me
for so long. I must be mad! Surely you think
me mad! Who am I? Say my name!'

'You're a brother-killer, Peter Mallick. And a
wife-killer, a mother-killer—'

He wrenched the car over to the side of the road
and her head smashed into the door. The next
moment, the door was open and he was wrenching
her out of the back seat. Where did his strength
come from? Her hips hit the snow-covered gravel
shoulder and there was a shattering deep inside her
and he dragged her into the middle of the road. She
twisted onto her side and brought her knees up to
her chest. He stood over her and she saw the last of
the star-filled night in the gloaming beyond him.
'Peter Mallick is dead,' he hissed. 'His small life
is over.' She spat a mouthful of blood onto his
shoe. 'Now, shall I make you part of my great work?'

'I don't care what you do to me.'

'Do you care about your mother?'

'My mother's already dead.'

'If you believe that, then why are you here?'

'Fuck you, Peter.'

He kneeled down in front of her and pushed her
over onto her back. He put a knee on her chest.
She could barely feel the cold. The blood was
flooding her limbs. 'How do you think your bravery
sounds to me, Hazel? When I've witnessed true
courage over and over again? You believe you're
willing to die, but you don't
need
to die. That's the
difference between you and them. They let go so
beautifully because they needed to. I gave them
their quiet, beautiful deaths and they accepted
them like benedictions.'

'I deserve to die.'

'I predict you'll do it screaming, meddler.' He
leaned into her and grabbed the front of her shirt,
pulled her to sitting. It felt to her as if her legs
had been cut off. 'You don't know what I am,' he
said.

'I do, though,' she said. 'You're the same as me.'
He glared into her eyes. 'You're pride masquerading
as justice.'

He pulled her to standing. She heard his knees
crack. She let him put her back into the car. 'Your
mother is alive,' he said.

They drove deep into the dark, pine-thick forest,
the snow spiralling in the headlights. Her head was
pounding and she could still taste blood. It felt as if
her pelvis had been replaced by a block of ice, but
she felt almost no pain at all. As he took a series of
smaller and smaller roads, she began to wonder if
she knew any longer where she was. They were
somewhere in the northwestern corner of the park,
but Peter was pushing off-road now, driving the
narrow spaces between trees, crossing roads
perpendicularly, taking their thin pathways and
then cutting back into trees. Branches lashed the
car, the shadows of snow-bent branches flickered
by in dark stripings. She wanted to ask him where
they were going and when they would get there,
but her tongue was thick with fear now, her words
boiled dry. Her cold bowels roiled.

At last, he hit a pebbled path and stayed on it. It
was almost seven in the morning now. Somewhere
in this world, people were sitting down to their
breakfasts in houses warmed by little fires. She
could not be farther from the comfort and safety of
anything she held dear.

In the distance, a small shack appeared as a dark
square against the base of the trees. He slowed as he
approached it, and then stopped at the door. He
pulled her to standing outside of the car. Smoke
rose up from the chimney. She believed now that
neither she nor her mother would ever be heard
from again, and the grief of knowing how her
children would suffer went through her like a
blade.

He stepped forward onto some flagstones leading
to the door, and Hazel knew her only chance was
now. She exploded forward, twisting and driving
her shoulder into his back, her whole weight
behind the blow, and it was like breaking down a
door that was already open: his body offered no
resistance. She felt herself propelled through the
air with him beneath her and when they hit the
ground, it was as if there'd been nothing to break
her fall. She felt a nauseating crunch under her and
the breath shot out of him. Silence beneath her, a
spasm in his legs. She smashed her forehead into
the back of his skull for insurance. She leaped up,
fell, scrambled to her feet again and looked around
frantically for something to smash her cuffs on.
There was a huge hunk of grey-and-white stone
beside the cabin and she ran to it and heaved her
wrists at it again and again, smelling the sparks as
they flickered up like tiny approximations of the
night sky she'd stared into the first time she
thought she was going to die this day. The cuffs
warped and bent, gouging her flesh, and there was
blood all over the rock. Finally, one of the clasps
sprang open and she pulled her swollen wrist free of
it and spun to see Peter trying to push himself off
the ground. She was to him in an instant, kicking
him in the ear with the tip of her boot, and then
she was at the door in a single movement, crying
for her mother and pounding the heavy door again
and again with the full force of her body. At last,
she stood back and kicked it in and there was a
darkness before her filling with dust from which no
sound emerged.

'Mum!' She rushed into the lightless cabin, the
air swirling with particles. It smelled bitter, like
boiled mustard greens. As her eyes adjusted, she
could make out a single table in the middle of the
room with one chair tucked under it, and dark
curtains over two windows, one to her right, beside
a stove, the other across from her. Beneath it, in
deeper shadow, there was a square shape, a bed, she
saw now, and on it a form. A slow, sweet reek was
making itself known.

She rushed to her mother's side and the smell
intensified. Insensate, Emily Micallef lay on
her back, her cheeks sunken, and Hazel saw her
mother's face slicked in stinking, black blood. She
slipped to her knees and heard her own voice
quietly crying out, the voice of a lost child. 'No no
no—'

'Get up.'

She saw him standing in the doorway, a solid
black shape, legs slightly akimbo. A needle of light
danced off the tang of a long, curving knife. She'd
seen her father use such a knife to gut fish when
she was a child. 'Go to hell,' she said.

'If you want her to live, you'll do as I say.'

Her mother's cold hand in hers. The dead hand.
She stood and faced him in the door. 'If I believed
what you believed, I'd make whatever deal you
asked for, Peter. But I don't. And whatever it is
you want from me now, you're going to have to
take it because I'm not offering it. You told me she
was alive.'

He'd stepped forward into the body of the room
and she heard a match scraping and saw the tiny
flare of a fire, then he lit a small oil lamp and the
room shimmered into being. His forehead was
matted with blood, his nose smashed against his
face. He showed no sign of being in pain. He was
otherworldly, calm, in utter possession of himself.
On the walls to her right, she could see a line of
pictures, pictures she knew from a cursory glance
were his victims. His own pictures of them. His
trophies. 'I did bring you here to make a trade,
Hazel. She's not dead.'

In the light, Hazel looked at her mother again.
Beneath the thin, closed eyelids, she saw a faint
strobing.

'She dreams,' said Simon. 'Feverfew for her pain,
enough to keep her asleep.'

'You drugged her? You
fucking
—'

'She is balanced on a line. The tincture of
licorice root to thin the blood, the feverfew for the
pain. But a dangerous combination. It can stop
the heart. An injection of oil of thyme will bring
her back, though.'