A Match Made for Murder Iona Whishaw (pride and prejudice read .TXT) 📖

hear her captor moving about, opening and shutting drawers, slamming cupboards. Then his footsteps approaching. She jumped away from the door and stood by the bed.

The man unlocked the door and threw a small yellow tin of aspirin on the bed beside her. “It’s all I could find,” he said, as if the search been an irritation that was making him late. He closed and locked the door again.

She wished she had charge of the key, particularly if her captor was spending the night. But then she heard footsteps going way from her. The front door opening and then closing. Was that another key turning in a lock? She put her ear to the door. The car starting and then slowly disappearing back along the road up the hill.

Kicking the door in irritation, she considered her situation. She was in the American southwest, locked in a log cabin with nothing but a sandwich for company, and soon it would be dark. She wished now she’d chosen a Zane Grey at the inn library. Surely something in one of those books would speak to her situation.

“Mr. Van Eyck,” Ames said, surprised. “You’d better come upstairs.”

Terrell settled him into a chair at the desk and Ames sat down and watched him, clasping his hands on the desk. “Now, what’s all this?” he asked, and then thought, God, I’m starting to sound like O’Brien.

Marcus Van Eyck looked nervously at Terrell, who had remained standing.

“I’ll get another chair from the next office, sir,” Terrell said, “and bring my notebook.”

Mr. Van Eyck sat looking down at his hands, his mouth working. He looked up when Terrell came back in with the chair and shifted his own chair slightly to make more room. The noise of the scraping of the chair on the floor was loud in the expectant silence.

Ames was about to speak when Van Eyck spoke up. “You mustn’t be hard on Tina. She doesn’t even know.” He looked at Ames in a way that suggested he was appealing to him personally on her behalf.

“Doesn’t know what, Mr. Van Eyck?” Ames asked. He was genuinely puzzled.

“She doesn’t know that I know. I’ve known for years. Her mother told me just before she died in ’37. She didn’t think it was right Tina should have that burden all on her own. I should have done something then, but then the war started, and Tina left, and I suppose he must have too. When it was all over and she was back, it was like the whole world had changed, wasn’t it? She was like a new person, that’s for sure. Confident, sure of herself, a heck of a mechanic. If she had any kind of a bad time in the old country, she’d learned how to handle it. I didn’t give it one thought till she had that argument with that Watts the other day.”

Ames sat for a moment after this rush of words. He could hear Terrell’s pencil on the surface of his notebook. Where to start? “So when you say you knew, do you mean about what happened to Tina when she was just out of school?”

“Being raped by someone? I know you’re reluctant to say the word, Constable Ames, I mean, sorry, Sergeant Ames. I was. I couldn’t bear to say it or even think it, but when I saw her with him, I knew he must be the one. She was like a wolverine. I was proud of her, Sergeant, and I thought, if she can bear it and defend herself like that, I’ve got no right to pretend it was anything but what it was. Honestly, it’s like they say, ‘a little child shall lead them.’ I felt powerless before, and then I knew I could never leave her alone with it ever again.”

“But you didn’t tell her you knew?” Ames clarified.

“Oh, God no. Can you imagine what it would have felt like for her to know her father knew something like that had happened to her? When I woke up the next morning and saw that word smeared across our bay doors, something snapped.”

“Can we just take a step back, Mr. Van Eyck? Were you aware she’d come here to the police to report the—the rape?”

Van Eyck nodded and took a big intake of breath. “Yeah. She, the wife, I mean, told me that. By the time my wife told me, that bastard had left the police, but I never forgot his name, Galloway, Sergeant Galloway.” He cleared his throat, as if he was unused to such a barrage of talking.

“Let me get you a glass of water.” Terrell stood and put his notebook on his chair. Ames and Van Eyck sat quietly. They could hear Terrell walk to the top of the stairs and call down for one of the constables to bring water and then return, trying to sit as unobtrusively as possible, taking up his notebook again.

“So, can you tell me what happened on the day Barney Watts was killed?”

Van Eyck took a deep breath, as if he’d been preparing for this moment. “I checked the address we had for him in our records, and I drove there the next day and waited on the road to see if he would come down. When he did, I followed him. I thought he would head into town to work because he told me he worked in the rail yard, but I think he saw me. He drove away toward the north. He knew I was after him. He tried to get away by turning down the road to the ferry and realized he was trapped. I pushed him off the road and he was dazed. That’s how I got in and I killed him. There. I’m prepared to sign a statement.”

The door opened cautiously, and a glass of water was produced. Van Eyck took it and drank it down in three gulps and then put the glass down and looked expectantly at Ames.

Ames rubbed