A CHARLIE SALTER OMNIBUS
A CHARLIE SALTER OMNIBUS
THE NIGHT THE GODS SMILED SMOKE DETECTOR DEATH IN THE OLD COUNTRY
Copyright © Eric Wright, 2003
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National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Wright, Eric
A Charlie Salter omnibus / Eric Wright.
(A Castle Street mystery)
Contents: The night the gods smiled — Smoke detector — Death in the old country
ISBN 1-55002-475-2
I. Title. II. Title: Death in the old country. III. Title: Night the gods smiled. IV. Title: Smoke detector. V. Series: Castle Street mystery.
PS8595.R58C42 2003 C813’.54 C2003-905003-3
1 2 3 4 5 07 06 05 04 03
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President Printed and bound in Canada.
CONTENTS
For Valerie
Douglas College is an imaginary college in a real city.
The characters, too, are fictitious, and any resemblance
to real persons is entirely coincidental.
CHAPTER 1
Charlie Salter usually woke up badly these days. The worst mornings were those after nightmares when it took him whole minutes to realize that he was awake in his own bed, that he had not killed anyone or committed any other desolating or irretrievable act. There were other bad ways of waking, including times like this one when he lay waiting for the memories of all his failures to fade into the daylight. His first failures at school (‘as soon as anything gets hard, you want to drop it’), his aborted university career (‘you never finish anything’), his first, foolish marriage which collapsed within a year, and finally, his failure at his job. Salter was a police inspector; he had been an inspector for five years and he would almost certainly remain one for another fifteen years until he retired, a long way short of his early estimate of himself. It was this last failure which burned at the centre of his waking world, illuminating the others as they emerged from the base of his skull.
His eyes opened and he set about making the world liveable again. Beside him, Annie slept on, and Salter shoved his hand under her nightdress (one of his favourites, a thick cotton one she had inherited from her great-aunt, more erotic in the act of being lifted than any negligee) and stroked her, casually at first and then methodically, until she opened her eyes. He continued to caress her, waiting for her to pull out of reach or offer herself to him. She did neither, simply lay there under his hand, awake now, but with her eyes closed. He stopped, and she said, ‘You are going to be late.’
He gave her one last squeeze, then pushed her on her back and rolled on to her, kissing her hard, grinding himself against her. This was all he needed. As his desire awoke (no failure here, yet) the ghosts of his other failures crept back underground for another day. Salter locked himself around her in a last playful hug, just for good measure, and sat up. The day could begin.
Downstairs, the door slammed. Seth, the younger of their two sons, had returned from his paper route. Seth was always back by seven o’clock. His fourteen-year-old brother, Angus, worked a double route and would arrive in another fifteen minutes. Salter swung his legs out of bed and stood up. ‘You want some juice?’ he asked. His wife turned away and pulled the covers up to her chin. ‘Yes, please.’
In the kitchen, Seth was already eating the granary-floor sweepings that were traditional in the family, a mixture of grains and nuts that Annie compounded from ingredients bought at the St Lawrence market, inedible to Salter, but preferred by the boys to anything else. Salter grunted at his son and poured some orange juice. He filled the kettle from the hot-water tap to make some coffee, and took the juice up to his wife.
She was half asleep again, and he stood watching her come to life. As everyone reminded him repeatedly, she was an astonishing forty-year-old, with the same absolutely flawless, fresh complexion, the same short, thick brown hair with no trace of grey, and most astonishing of all, the same brilliantly white teeth as she had when she was fourteen. She was not a beauty, but she was as perpetually radiant as an advertisement for her own cereal. As she sat up now and took her juice, the door slammed downstairs once again as Angus returned.
‘Big day?’ she asked.
‘No big days now,’ he said as he moved into the bathroom. ‘As far as I know, all I have to do is show some New York cops around the office.’ He lathered his face and tried to guess which of the seven disposable razors on the edge of the bathtub was the sharpest.
‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘You are always home on time.’
‘So you’ve said.’ Salter found a razor with an edge and began stroking off the stubble. Behind him, he heard her get out of bed and go downstairs. He finished shaving and put on his plain-clothes uniform: clean shorts and socks, yesterday’s shirt, blue tweed jacket, grey pants, dark blue tie with red geese, and black shoes. After a tour of the second floor in which he switched off six lights and one running tap, he went downstairs, switching off two more lights on the way, and opened the front door to let in the cat which was howling on the doorstep. The two boys were eating their cereal watching a cartoon on television, and Salter switched that off, too. The day had proceeded normally so far, from despair to irritation; there was only boredom still to come.
‘Duncan called,’ Annie said, when he was seated with the paper and his coffee. ‘He wants to confirm we’ll be down for July 1st.’
‘I wouldn’t mind doing something