Seaweed in the Soup Read online

  “Have you written up your notes yet?” Bernie asked the young constable.

  Ricketts shook his head.

  “Give me your notebook.”

  Ricketts took a small spiral-bound notebook from a pocket and handed it over.

  After glancing inside the notebook briefly, Bernie said, “I’ll keep this for the time being. Go upstairs and find yourself a pen and a nice big sheet of paper. Write a detailed report of this whole incident, including the things that you’ve already told us. Then wait for me; I’ll look at your notes later and will probably have a lot more questions.”

  Ricketts looked sick when he went out.

  Bernie looked at me and said, “Okay, Silas. Time for me to go to work.”

  We were alone for the first time in several minutes. I said, “ The work can wait for a minute. What the hell’s going on with you?”

  Bernie stiffened. He leaned towards me, his chin out, breathing hard. This was a man at the end of his tether. He was ready to step over a line that would change things between us forever. His hands, dangling by his sides, balled into fists. Then all the fight drained out of him. His eyes closed, he relaxed visibly and jammed both fists into his pockets. His eyes opened. Instead of answering my question, he said, “Forget it, Silas. I’d appreciate a little help the next few days, that’s all.”

  “Because two Native women might be involved in this mess, and I happen to be a Native? Or is there some other reason?”

  Bernie relaxed, grinned, took his hands out of his pockets. He punched me lightly on the shoulder and said, “Because I need your help, pal. That’s all.”

  That was enough.

  In addition to the dead man’s bed, the room’s furnishings included a six-drawer tallboy, a seven-drawer oak desk and a large mahogany wardrobe. An old-fashioned washstand with a water pitcher and bowl stood in an ell beneath a small second window. A good-quality lightweight wool sport jacket and a pair of green pants, a white shirt and a pair of boxer shorts were draped carelessly across a ladderback chair standing beside the head of the bed.

  I went through the dead man’s pockets and found about two hundred dollars in twenties, tens and fives, in addition to a Swiss Army knife, a woman’s white handkerchief edged with red lace, and a flat brass Yale key. When we checked it later, the key fitted the back door of the house. Among the items in the desk was a child’s exercise book containing a multitude of names, initials, phone numbers, circled dates and a lot of writing in Chinese characters. We didn’t find the dead man’s wallet: there was absolutely nothing either in the room or in his pockets to tell us what his name was.

  Bernie worked his cellphone while I checked the wardrobe.

  A pair of freshly laundered brown coveralls, along with other pieces of the dead man’s work clothing, dangled from hangers incongruously alongside a large assortment of Italian silk suits, an Abercrombie and Fitch overcoat, a couple of Harry Rosen sport jackets, shirts and designer jeans. Expensive dress shoes, workboots, and a pair of bedroom slippers stood on a shelf at the bottom. Beneath the shelf were deep wide drawers containing neatly folded underwear, T-shirts, socks and sweaters.

  Bernie was staring at the corpse. “A snappy dresser,” Bernie observed. “And look at the polish on his fingernails.”

  I grinned. “Looks like he was doing okay, for a gardener.”

  We heard a vehicle come to a stop outside the house. Looking out the window, I watched another snappy dresser dismount from an unmarked police-edition Crown Royal. It was Inspector “Nice” Manners. Turning away from the window, I noticed a man’s highly polished black shoe partly visible beneath the blankets heaped on the floor at the foot of the bed. The shoe was a size eight with a black silk sock jammed inside it. When Bernie and I carefully moved the blankets out of the way, we found a matching shoe and the other sock.

  Footsteps sounded along the passageway, and Manners came into the bedroom. The last time I’d seen him, Nice Manners had been clean-shaven. Now he was sporting an RAF air-ace moustache. He was wearing a blue blazer, a white shirt with a faint blue stripe in it, tasselled loafers, and chinos. To the casual glance, he looked like a fading porn star or a polo-playing gigolo with his best years behind him, but Manners is actually one of Victoria’s senior detectives. Nice Manners is about five-ten. When I’m around, he pretends to be five-eleven. His moustache twitched when he sniffed the blood-tainted air. He said hello to Bernie, ignored me, hunkered down beside the corpse for a minute, then he stood up and put his hands in his pockets. He then looked me up and down with a smile devoid of warmth.

  Bernie brought Manners up to date. “Lightning Bradley’s been very helpful,” Bernie observed icily, adding, “When we got here Bradley was in the kitchen, watching the housekeeper destroy valuable evidence.”

  Manners raised his eyebrows.

  “She’d just finished washing several glasses, cups, plates and a bunch of silverware. A ton of DNA and fingerprints going down the drain, and there’s Lightning, smoking, drinking coffee and telling jokes,” Bernie elaborated. “What the hell are we going to do with him?”

  “How about a vertical transfer? Bump him to sergeant and ship him to the Oak Bay detachment, he’d fit right in,” Manners suggested derisively, articulating the popular fallacy that Oak Bay’s police force consisted of sleepy underworked seat-warmers.

  The cellphone in Manners’ pocket buzzed. He turned his back on us and spoke to someone in a low voice. Bernie was calmer by then. He seemed neither curious nor impatient. After finishing his call, Manners pointed at the corpse and said, “He’s supposed to be Ronnie Chew, a gardener, but look at his clothing. Look at his polished fingernails; if you ask me they’ve just been manicured.”

  Gravel crackling under wheels in the driveway told us that Serious Crimes was arriving.

  “Get on with it, Nice,” Bernie said. “Get this man’s fingerprints taken ASAP, and put them on the wire. We’ll need the K-9 team here as well.”

  Manners doesn’t like it when people call him Nice. He said sullenly, “It’s all arranged. Nicky Nattrass is on his way in the muttmobile.”

  Bernie handed Manners the exercise book that we’d found in the desk. “There’s what looks like Chinese writing in this. Get it translated; there may be things we can use. I’m going back upstairs. I’ll hold off questioning the housekeeper while you look around, then we’ll talk to her together.”

  Bernie was heading for the door when he remembered something. Turning back he said, “Who’s the duty ME?”

  Restlessly, Manners folded his arms. This caused the collar of his blazer to ruck up behind his neck. Manners may have been conscious of this, because he put his hands back in his pockets immediately. “Dr. Tarleton,” he answered. “There was a hit and run on Courtney Street this morning. The doc says he’ll get here as soon as he can.”

  “That’s not good enough, Nice,” Bernie retorted. “I want the doc here now, for the body temp. I want to know what time this man died.”

  Taken aback by Bernie’s hectoring tone and attitude, Manner’s transferred his annoyance to me. Glaring at me like the god of thunder, he said gruffly, “There’s something I need to discuss with CDI Tapp. You can go.”

  The tension and conflict existing between Manners and me had resurfaced. I didn’t care; I was just glad to get out of that room. Without troubling to suppress a smile, I tramped upstairs, went outside through a pair of wide French doors, and across the gravel drive to the garage.

  The first car that I looked at was Mrs. Milton’s twenty-year-old Corolla. After a perfunctory search, I turned my attention to a newish black BMW sedan. The shiny car reeked of cigarettes. Its ashtray, full of half-smoked butts, might provide some useful DNA when Forensics got around to checking it. Otherwise, the car was tidy with nothing lying on its leather-upholstered seats or cluttering its dashboard. The glove compartment also proved empty except for manufacturer’s handbooks. There was nothing in the car to say who owned it. I went back through the house, where I hear
d Bernie Tapp tearing more strips out of Lightning Bradley’s hide. Crime squad detectives and forensic specialists were coming and going.

  After writing some notes into my little black book, I went around to a sprawling flagstone terrace at the back of the house. Ten yards away, Mrs. Milton was seated inside a wisteria-draped gazebo, gazing into space, until she noticed that I was watching her. When I smiled, she turned away, her face registering a mixture of apprehension and aversion.

  Footpaths wound through well-tended flower gardens and downhill to a landscaped lower terrace, where a large swimming pool blended nicely with the marble statues, imported Lebanese cedars and weeping sequoias that adorned the property. I followed a series of curving balustraded stairways to the beach and gazed out at the Strait of Georgia, the large inland sea that separates Vancouver Island from the British Columbia mainland.

  Locally, the Strait of Georgia and Puget Sound are known collectively as the Salish Sea. The cities of Vancouver and Seattle are short ferry rides away from here. Small waves lapped the shore in a slight breeze. White triangular sails dotted the horizon. The day’s warm air carried the high midsummer reek of oceanic mud and rotting fish. Horse clams, buried in the sand, were shooting crotch-high jets of water here and there. Mount Baker’s immense volcanic peak rose up forty miles east, in Washington State.

  Constable Ricketts had been wearing cleated-sole boots. What I took to be his footprints—visible here and there on patches of wet sand—were being erased by a rising tide. If the women that Ricketts had been pursuing had passed this way, there was no evidence to show for it by then. Standing there under the mewling cry of gulls, I concluded that Ricketts—by heading north along the intertidal zone—had guessed wrong. The suspects had either gone south or were still hiding in the bush.

  I abandoned my speculations in favour of doing something concrete and used my cellphone to call headquarters. Bill Friendly was the duty sergeant that day. I asked Bill who’ d reported the suspicious females.

  “The caller was shy, he hung up when I asked him,” Bill replied. “Call display says he was Tudor Collins. He lives at 515 Collins Lane.”

  “Does Collins have form?”

  “No, Silas. Mr. Collins is a fine upstanding citizen. The Collinses have been in Victoria since the beginning of time. They used to own that porcelain shop on Broughton Street.”

  “Anything else you can tell me about him?”

  Bill laughed. “Isn’t that enough?”

  I put my phone away. Footsteps became audible above the heavy buzz of sandflies where Constable Ricketts was coming down the stairs to the beach. When he noticed me, he turned away and began to retrace his steps. I said, “Hold it, Ricketts.”

  He turned, one hand on the balustrade, looking down. “Sir?” he said nervously.

  “Have you made the notes that Chief Tapp asked for?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “You told Chief Tapp that you thought the women you were chasing would head north. Why north?”

  “I dunno,” he said, his voice slow and abstracted, as if his thoughts were focussed somewhere else. “It was just a guess.”

  “I wonder if perhaps you’d noticed something. Footprints in the sand, a broken branch?”

  Shaking his head, Ricketts came down the stairs.

  I said, “Tell me again about that bird or whatever it was that you saw earlier.”

  Ricketts frowned. He didn’t look me in the eye. He seemed slightly embarrassed. Seconds passed before he said, “It’s strange. I don’t know how to explain this without sounding foolish. I was alone in the woods. There had been no sign of the women and I was just standing quietly, waiting and listening. Suddenly I had a strange feeling that I wasn’t alone, that somebody or something was watching me. When I turned around, I saw a vague shape for a moment before it vanished. Since then I’ve been thinking, maybe I didn’t see anything. It might have been nerves, I might have just imagined it all.”

  “Do you think you could find the same place again?”

  “I expect so, Sergeant. It’s only a few hundred yards from here.”

  “Okay, let’s go. I’d like to have a look for myself.”

  We started walking. Olive-green seaweed with yellowish tips mantled the offshore rocks. A wedge of majestic white swans bobbed up and down in the waves. Leaves of decaying sea lettuce littered the beach like scraps of crumpled parchment. I said, “Describe the two women that you and Bradley saw on Echo Bay Road.”

  Ricketts looked at me sideways, but continued to evade my eyes. “They were a couple of Indian girls. Dark or sallow skin, there was nothing remarkable about either of them. They had the same skin pigmentation as you, Sergeant, if you don’t mind me saying so. They were just like the people I see hanging around the Native Friendship Centre. About 18 years old. Maybe 20. Nice looking girls, a little overweight. They might have been sisters or cousins. One of ’em was wearing a funny T-shirt. It said, Jesus loves you, everybody else thinks you’re an asshole.”

  I began to think about ravens and Tricksters.

  Ricketts had recovered from his earlier shock. Smiling absently, he led me away from the shore along a ravine studded with small trees and stunted shrubs. We began to ascend an incline where the brush thinned and the floor of the ravine became a loose scree of pebbly soil covered with leaf mould and scattered patches of lichen-covered rock. Towards the top, the incline steepened precipitously; our feet began to slide. After a struggle, we reached rimrock.

  Ricketts and I grabbed overhanging branches and we rested for a moment before Ricketts reached over the rim and used his free hand to part a clump of tall grass. Gazing across the rim, he said hesitantly, “I don’t see it now, but I know that the big rock where I saw something strange is close by.”

  I dragged myself up and over the rim, and on into a patch of coastal rainforest, where access through the dense tangle of green wilderness was restricted to animal trails and to whatever footpaths may have been cleared by determined hikers. Moss draped the surrounding trees like shreds of ragged green wool.

  Hearing a slight noise, I looked up through the sun-shot foliage and saw a squirrel clinging to the trunk of a big Douglas fir. The animal scampered from sight behind the trunk. After a moment, the squirrel’s nose reappeared. I watched it run out along a downward-sloping branch before it leapt into space and went from sight again. The breeze had stiffened into a wind and a fir cone struck my shoulder. The cone had not fallen from the fir tree. It had rolled off a sandstone boulder.

  The boulder, about the size of a small car, was partially shrouded by seed husks, fallen leaves and pinecones. I noticed an unnatural mark on the boulder’s weathered surface and dirtied my hands brushing it clean. Carved into the boulder’s front face were two petroglyphs, Native rock carvings that had been created by chipping and abrading with stone tools. The first was a life-sized anthropomorphic shape. A naturally occurring protuberance in the sandstone, suggestive of male genitalia, had been incorporated into the design. A second and much smaller petroglyph located below and to the left of the main figure showed a wolf, its gaping jaws held open by two pointed sticks.

  Ricketts scrambled over the rimrock and joined me. Sounding vindicated, he said, “This is it. This is the place.”

  Vancouver Island’s petroglyph sites are rarely, if ever, found away from water. Some petroglyphs are found in riverbeds and are only visible when water levels drop. Many are found on tidal beaches submerged by high tides. The petroglyphs that I was looking at had been created long ago, by a shaman or by a spirit quester seeking knowledge.

  For the Coast Salish, the vision quest is a turning point in life. When our youngsters reach puberty, they endure rigorous training in preparation for vision quests alone in the wilderness. This quest usually lasts for a number of days during which the initiate tunes into the spirit world. An essential part of the process involves fasting, sleep deprivation, and immersion in icy water to the brink of unconsciousness. Sometimes, not always, a guard
ian animal or spirit will then appear to the seeker in the form of a vision or a dream. After his vision quest, the youngster may be apprenticed to a shaman, a carver or a hunter. The vision quest may be a part of shamanism, or more exactly, an apprentice’s learning and initiation process under the guidance of a practising shaman. The shaman quest—its secrets and its search for power—is strongly related to petroglyphs because spirits—good and bad—dwell in certain boulders and trees.

  “Sheesh!” Ricketts said, after looking at the petroglyphs. “What are these things?”

  “Stone age rock carvings.”

  “They’re sort of crazy-looking, if you ask me.”

  Ricketts was right: most petroglyphs are a bit peculiar. The creatures portrayed on them are birds, shamans, monsters and fantastic spirits. Many have overtly sexual overtones. Apart from a very few examples, the locations of which have long been known, petroglyphs are rare on southern Vancouver Island, although they are numerous farther north and on some offshore islands. To put it mildly, I was very surprised to discover a previously unknown petroglyph site half a mile from a well-travelled urban road.

  Needing to take a leak, Ricketts turned his back on me and moved behind the boulder. “Holy Christ,” he said. “What the hell is this?”

  I went to have a look. Ricketts was standing with his dick in his hand, staring down at what at first sight appeared to be an old leather glove. Forgetting his bladder, Ricketts zipped up and bent forward. Up close, the object looked like a brown paper bag. It was about the same size and shape as a human hand. Before I could stop him, Ricketts had reached out for it. At the same instant, a heavy gust of wind roared in from the Salish Sea. Trees shook. Loose branches and other forest litter fell down from the overhead canopy. Instinctively, Ricketts and I covered our heads with our arms and crouched low. The wind continued to howl; we heard a terrific cracking noise. A big old cedar tree with two long overhanging branches was splitting down the middle. One branch fell noisily into the ravine. The old tree swayed unsteadily for a few moment and then fell towards us. The sudden effect was unnerving. Ricketts screamed. I jumped out of the way. The earth shook, and a cavity appeared where the tree’s rootball pulled out of the earth. The boulder shook a little and then moved slightly. After sliding downhill a few inches, the boulder came to rest. Ricketts’ panicked screams faded, and when I turned to look at him, the constable was disappearing headfirst into the root cavity. His head and shoulders were completely covered with loose earth when I grabbed his ankles and dragged him out.