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Ecw Press - Anne Emery

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605 pages

English

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Go back to the beginning of the Collins-Burke mysteries with this collection, which includes the first three novels in the award-winning series: Sign of the Cross, Obit, and Barrington Street Blues.

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	17 novembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773051260
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

SIGN OF THE CROSS
A Mystery
ANNE EMERY
for J and P
CONTENTS PART ONE Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 PART TWO Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 PART THREE Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Acknowledgements
PART ONE
Chapter 1
He looked into her eyes when she stopped him to ask
If he wanted to dance; he had a face like a mask.
Somebody said from the bible he’d quote.
There was dust on the man in the long black coat.
— Bob Dylan, “The Man in the Long Black Coat
I
Gargoyles. I hardly notice them anymore. Gargoyles are a part of your life when you’ve spent your entire career in the criminal courts. The creatures you see leering out at you from the Halifax Courthouse on Spring Garden Road are technically known as grotesques, fang-baring faces that were set in stone when the building was constructed in 1863. A plaque on the building describes the “vermiculated stonework; it looks as if worms tunnelled through it. I’m not surprised.
Thursday, March 1, 1990 was a typical day at the courthouse. I had managed to get my client off unexpectedly at the conclusion of a three-day trial on charges of assault, extortion and uttering threats against his old girlfriend’s new boyfriend. His gratitude lay unspoken between us. He swaggered from the building, trailed by three teenage girls in leggings and stiletto heels.
“Congratulations on the acquittal, Monty! I turned at the sound of a voice as I was leaving the courthouse and saw our articled clerk coming out behind me. Petite, sharp-faced and keen, Robin Reid wore a lawyerly black suit that looked too big on her. I nodded absently in response. “Though I have to say, she went on, “I didn’t think much of the judge’s remarks about our client. ‘Well, Mr. Brophy, you’re free to go. The system worked. If I see you in my courtroom again you may not find the system so benign.’ What kind of attitude is that to take to a man he just declared not guilty?
“It’s the attitude of a judge who knows I outlawyered the prosecution and knows he’d be overturned on appeal if he convicted my client.
Robin and I left the courthouse and crossed Spring Garden Road to the city library, where someone had built a snow fort around the statue of a striding, heavily masculine Winston Churchill. I was on a hopeless quest for a children’s book with a character named Normie. My wife and I, in the afterglow of a magnificent performance of Norma at La Scala, had named our baby Norma after the noble druid at the centre of the opera. With sober second thought, neither of us liked the name for anyone under forty. The best we could do was “Normie after that. Now seven and wondering why she wasn’t named Megan like everybody else, she had looked askance at my brave assertion that there were lots of Normies in the world. She issued a demand: “Find me a book with somebody named Normie in it. It can be an animal; it can even be a bug. But,” she warned darkly, “it better not be a boy! I was met with a sympathetic shake of the head yet again at the children’s desk.
As we left the library, Robin returned to the acquittal of our client, Corey Brophy. “But Corey didn’t do it, Monty! You demolished the Crown witnesses on cross-examination; their stories fell apart.
I looked at her with surprise. “Of course he did it. You haven’t seen the file and you’ve never met the client. But that’s over and done. Now, tomorrow we have — Well! I spoke too soon. Looks as if you’re going to meet Corey after all.
Robin turned to follow my gaze across the street and saw my newly released client being manhandled by two police officers in the driveway of the courthouse. He twisted around and caught sight of me. “Are you just going to stand there, Collins? You’re my lawyer, for fuck’s sake. Get over here!
I sighed and crossed the street. Short, skinny, and scabious with a patchy goatee, Corey was the picture of belligerence.
“What’s going on, Frank? I asked one of the cops.
“Mr. Brophy is under arrest for assaulting his ex-girlfriend.
“Corey, give me a call after you’re processed, I told him. “In the meantime, keep your mouth shut. No statements. The other cop bundled him into the cruiser for the trip to the station.
“This must be a record for you, Monty, Frank remarked. “Your client reoffending —
“Allegedly reoffending!
“— What is it, twenty-five minutes after he was released?
I didn’t tell him my record was a guy reoffending twenty-five seconds after his release; he had been overheard threatening one of the witnesses before he even left the courtroom.
I glanced at Robin as we started back to the office, and was about to speak when she said: “You’ve got that ‘Robin, you’re such a bleeding heart’ expression on your face again. You think all our clients are guilty.
“And yet I defend them. Year after year after year. I looked into her eyes. “So come on now. Who’s the bleeding heart?
Yes, criminal practice had its aggravations. But at least with the usual run of petty criminals, I could forget their existence as soon as I was out of sight of the gargoyles. In the kind of case I dealt with, there was no mystery involved; you knew all too well what went on at the crime scene. You knew your client was there. Your only hope was that he had kept his mouth shut when the police showed up. Soon, although I didn’t know it yet, I would be involved in a case I would not be able to shake when I left the building. Or even when I closed my eyes to sleep. For the first time in my career I would be flying blind, unable to fathom what was behind the brutal murder of a young woman whose body had been carved with a religious sign and dumped beneath a bridge. And the client? My mother had a saying: “Be careful what you wish for.” For years — decades! — I had been longing for a client a cut above the poor, uneducated, hopeless, heedless, unstable individuals I usually represented. A client more like . . . more like me. Well, I was about to have one. Be careful what you wish for.
The next day my firm’s senior partner, Rowan Stratton, slipped me an envelope containing newspaper clippings about the murder and said we’d speak about it on the weekend.
The victim was Leeza Rae and she was twenty years old when she was killed. On February fifteenth, a Department of Public Works crew spotted her body on scrubby, rocky ground beside a service road under the A. Murray MacKay Bridge, still known, twenty years after its construction, as the “new bridge. It is one of two bridges joining the cities of Halifax and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The crew radioed the information to the Halifax Police Department just after three in the afternoon. Leeza was wearing an oversize black plastic raincoat with a hood. This had not been her attire when she was last seen alive, leaving a dance at St. Bernadette’s Youth Centre in downtown Halifax. News stories gave the cause of death as a fractured skull, believed to have been caused by a heavy, blunt instrument. The police stated that the victim had not been killed in the spot where she was found; the body had been dumped there after death. One report quoted an unnamed source as saying the body had been “tampered with.
I skimmed the clippings and put them aside. Rowan had asked me not to discuss the murder with anyone until we spoke. Why the secrecy, I wondered.
II
Saturday morning was bright and crisp, a beautiful day for a family outing. I picked up the phone.
“What? came her answer.
“Well, I see today is starting off like all your other days.
“And I see you are still in need of a remedial class in, one, when to call and, two, when not to call. It is eight-thirty in the morning. We are, or were, sleeping in today because the children don’t have school. It’s Saturday. Far be it from me to encourage mindless consumerism, but I think it’s time to acknowledge the invention of an item known as the fridge magnet. I have invested in four of those for you and have utilized them to stick a calendar on your refrigerator. That calendar, had you consulted it, would have told you that this is the weekend, and you might then have surmised that we would be catching up on our sleep.
“For once I have to agree with you. You should catch up on your sleep. What do you do, by the way? Keep your tongue in a jar of acid beside your bed at night?”
“Why not? It would be more attractive than what I used to see when I opened my eyes in the morning.”
“All right, all right, enough pillow talk. I was calling to see whether the kids might like to come with me this afternoon for a drive.”
“They’re with me this afternoon. Now let me go so I can get back to sleep and forget about this interruption.” Click.
That of course was my wife. A failed social worker. Think for a moment about social workers. My perception of them is that they tend to be very accepting of human error, very non-judgmental, as they say. My wife, Maura MacNeil, had been in her last year of the Bachelor of Social Work program when it was decided that her “particular set of skills and abilities could be best directed to other challenges.” That was one version of events. Maura’s version was more succinct: “They turfed me out.” She had directed her abilities to the law and was now a professor, teaching poverty law. Scourge of the right, she was hardly more popular with the left, owing to her stubborn refusal to accommodate herself to the emerging sensitivities of the nineties. Politically correct she would never be. She and I had been living apart for years.
So. No children for me today. I wrestled briefly with the temptation to go back to sleep myself, then spend the afternoon with cronies in the Midtown Tavern. Instead, I passed the day doing household chores that were months overdue.
That evening found me in the library of Rowan and Sylvia Stratton, who lived in an elegant house overlooking the sparkling waters of Halifax’s Northwes