The Caldwell house looked like a cosy English vicarage right out of Masterpiece Theatre. I parked my 1998 Neon across the street among the BMWs and Audis, and, feeling vaguely ashamed of its unwashed state and the dent in the front right wheel arch, I walked up to the door.
Outside the house stood a huge old oak tree, and I wondered if it would provide an intruder enough cover from the nosy neighbors. Even so, anyone who wanted to get in would have to get past the heavy door, which Tony told me had been locked, bolted, and chained. There was no porch, just the dark, paneled door set in the sandy stonework. The key let me into a small hallway, and a second door led into the living room. The police had taken the carpet, leaving the polished wood floor bare.
Three of Tony’s photographs hung on the wall. They were very good, as far as I could tell. I’d expected modernistic effects and cut-up contact sheets, but two of the three were landscapes. One looked like a Beach sunset, showing the Leuty lifeguard station in effective, high-contrast black-and-white, and the other was a view of a rocky coastline, probably in Nova Scotia, where the cliff edges cut the land from the sea like a deformed spine. Again, Tony had used high contrast.
The third was a portrait signed by Valerie, along with what I took to be her lip prints, dated two years ago. She was posing against a wall, just head and shoulders, but there was such sensuality about her Bardot-like pout and the way her raven’s-wing hair spilled over her bare, white shoulders. There was something about the angle of her head that seemed to challenge and invite at the same time, and the look in her dark eyes was intelligent, humorous, and questioning. For the first time in the case, I had a real sense of the victim, and I felt the tragedy and waste of her death.
Upstairs, I rummaged through her bedside drawers and checked out the walk-in closet, but found nothing I didn’t expect to. I assumed the police had already been through the place before me and taken anything they thought might be related to the crime. On the other hand, if they believed they had caught the criminal and had enough evidence against him, then they wouldn’t go to the expense of an all-out, lengthy crime-scene investigation. Not exactly CSI; they’d leave their lasers and Luminol at home. Valerie’s clothes were high-quality designer brands, her underwear black and silky. I felt like a voyeur, so I went back downstairs.
Next I moved into the kitchen, where the parcel of books still lay on the table, brown paper and string loose around it. The books, first editions of early Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, were from an antiquarian dealer in Halifax, I noticed, and the string was a quaint, old-fashioned touch. The only thing missing was the knife itself, which the police had taken as evidence.
The door opened onto a back stoop, and my intrusion scared off a flock of red-throated house finches from the bird feeder. Judging by the untidy lawn surrounded by its flagstone path, neither Tony nor Valerie had been very interested in gardening. At the far end, the lawn petered off into bracken and roots where the ravine threatened to encroach, and finally the land dropped away. I walked to the end of the garden and noticed that the ravine was neither too steep nor too overgrown to be inaccessible. There was even a path, narrow and overgrown, but a path nonetheless. You certainly wouldn’t have had to be a mountain lion to gain easy access from the back.
The ground had been hard and dry at the time of the murder, I remembered, and we’d had a couple of heavy storms in the last week, so there was no point in getting down on my hands and knees with a magnifying glass, even if I had one. I stood at the end of the lawn for a while enjoying the smell of the trees and wild flowers, listening to the cardinal’s repetitive whistling and the chip-chip sounds of warblers, then I went back inside.
Fine. Now I knew that it was possible for someone to get up and down the ravine easily enough. But how about getting into the house? I sat at the kitchen table toying with the string. I could think of no way of getting through a locked screen door without leaving a trace, unless it were either open in the first place, or somebody had opened it for me. Valerie might have opened it to someone she knew, someone she felt she had no reason to fear. If she were distracted by her anger at Tony, her surprise at seeing a friend appear at the back door would surely have overruled any caution or suspicion she might otherwise have felt. On the other hand, if the door was locked when the police arrived, that was a problem.
As I sat twirling the string around my fingers and idly glancing at the two first editions in their nest of brown paper, I became aware of a niggling discrepancy. It was unconscious at first, nothing I could put my finger on, but as it turned out, it was on my finger. I unraveled the string and tried to fasten it around the books. It didn’t fit. Much too short. I looked around on the floor but saw no more, and I could think of no reason why either Tony or the police would secrete a length of string.
I went over to the screen door and examined the catch, which looked like an upside-down earlobe, and surely enough, when I looked closely, I noticed scuff marks around the narrow neck. Making sure I had the house keys in my pocket, as an experiment I opened the door, hooked a length of string over the catch, then shut the door, standing outside, holding the string. When I tugged gently, the catch engaged and the screen door locked. I let go of one end and pulled the string towards me. It came free.
I still had nothing concrete, no real evidence, but I did have the solution to a very important problem. If Valerie had let someone in through the back, whoever it was could easily have killed her, left the same way, and locked the screen door from outside. Now I knew that it could be done.
4
Jacqui Prior, my next port of call, lived in an apartment off The Esplanade, close to the St. Lawrence Market, the Hummingbird Centre, and all the wine bars and restaurants that had sprung up around there. I found her in torn jeans and a dirty T-shirt, lustrous dark hair tied back in a ponytail, busily packing her belongings into boxes she had clearly picked up from the local LCBO store. While she seemed surprised to see me, she was also curious. She said she was just about to take a break anyway and offered me a cup of Earl Grey, which I gladly accepted.
There was a superficial resemblance to the photograph of Valerie Pascale I had seen at Tony Caldwell’s house, but Jacqui seemed somehow unformed, incomplete. She had the kind of face that was beautiful but lacked personality. I imagined that was probably what made her a good model. She must be the kind of person who would shine and sparkle in front of the camera, given a role to play. Her olive skin was smooth as silk, perfect for beauty soap, shampoo, and bath oil commercials, and I could imagine her looking wholesome in a way that Valerie Pascale didn’t.
“Where are you moving to?” I asked.
“I’ve found the perfect little house in Leaside.”
“Leaside? Won’t that be a bit quiet for you after all this?”
She smiled, showing perfect dimples. “I like things quiet. I need my beauty sleep.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that, so I sipped some Earl Grey.
Jacqui frowned. It could have been real, or it could have been a model’s frown. I didn’t know. “It’s awful about Valerie and Tony,” she said. “I feel terribly responsible in a way, but I don’t see how I can help you.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “People do what they do. I’m just not convinced that Tony Caldwell did what he’s been accused of.”
“Oh? What makes you think that?”