‘I can’t. The moment we heard back from the pathologist, Chouinard closed the case. If there’s no case, that means there’s no case number. What do I tell people? We’re talking about my job here.’
‘All right,’ Cardinal said. ‘Forget I asked.’ He got up and retrieved his jacket from the chair. He stood in front of the window, doing up the buttons. Outside, the sky was still an otherworldly blue, and the fallen leaves made a duvet of ochre and gold.
‘John, no one wants to believe the person they love killed themselves.’
‘You missed a spot,’ Cardinal said, pointing to the window. Two little girls were playing in the leaves next door, wriggling around in them like puppies.
‘You don’t have to do this. There’s no need to find a culprit. It’s not your fault she’s dead.’
‘I know that,’ Cardinal said. ‘But maybe it’s not Catherine’s fault, either.’
All the next morning, Delorme couldn’t get Cardinal out of her mind. She had a stack of reports to excavate, various assault and burglary charges to follow up, and a rapist who was coming to trial the next week. Her best witness was getting cold feet, and the whole case was threatening to come apart.
And then Detective Sergeant Chouinard dropped a new one in her lap.
‘You’re gonna get a call from Toronto Sex Crimes,’ he said. ‘Looks like they’ve got something for us.’
‘Why would Toronto Sex Crimes have something for Algonquin Bay?’
‘They’re envious of our worldwide reputation, obviously. Anyway, don’t thank me. You’re not going to like this one.’
The call came half an hour later, from a Sergeant Leo Dukovsky who claimed to remember Delorme from a forensics conference in Ottawa a couple of years earlier. He’d been giving a talk on computers; Delorme had been on a panel discussing accounting.
‘Forensic accounting?’ Delorme said. ‘That would make it almost ten years ago. I must’ve done something awful for you to remember me after so long.’
‘Nope. I just remember you as a very attractive French person, with a –’
‘French-Canadian,’ Delorme corrected him. She was willing to be charmed, but there were limits.
Sergeant Dukovsky didn’t waver for a moment. ‘– with a very French name and no accent whatsoever.’
‘Why? You think we all live in the backwoods? Talk like Jean Chrétien?’
‘That’s another thing I remember about you. Kinda prickly.’
‘Maybe it’s something you bring out in people, Sergeant. Did you ever think of that?’
‘See, that’s just the kind of remark that makes a man remember you,’ Dukovsky said, ‘when he has some really nasty work to be done. Although you may end up actually liking this one. It’s going to be a lot of plodding, but the payoff – assuming there is one – could be pretty good. We’ve been monitoring child pornography on the Web for a long time now. One particular little girl keeps cropping up. She was around seven when we first started seeing her. We think she might be thirteen or fourteen by now.’
‘She’s showing up in different settings? With different abusers?’
‘No, it’s always the same guy. Naturally, he’s pretty careful to keep his face out of the pictures. But it always seems to be the same few locations. We’ve been trying to isolate elements in the background – furniture, views out windows, that kind of thing.’
‘And you think she lives in Algonquin Bay?’
‘Either lives there or visits there. We’re not a hundred per cent sure. The stuff’s already on its way to you by courier. Let us know what you think. If it is Algonquin Bay in the pictures, we’ll do everything we can to help you, but obviously the case would be yours. Now aren’t you glad I remembered you?’
But not even a phone call like that could distract her for long; John Cardinal kept invading her thoughts. His desk was right next to hers, and it was extremely unusual for him to miss a day of work. Even when his father had died, he hadn’t taken more than a day off. It might be good for the department, she figured, but it was probably on the whole a weakness rather than a strength to be incapable of leaving your work.
Delorme recognized that she herself was much the same. She got bored on her days off, and when the end of the year rolled around, she usually had a couple of weeks’ vacation pay coming to her.
She looked at the photograph of Catherine on Cardinal’s desk. She must have been at least forty-five in the photograph, but retaining more than her fair share of sexiness. It was there in the slightly sceptical gaze, the glint of wetness on the lower lip. It was easy to see how Cardinal had fallen in love. But what have you done to my friend? Delorme wanted to ask her. Why have you done this unforgivable thing? Then again, why does anybody do it? She could remember several recent cases off the top of her head: a mother of three, a social services administrator, and a teenaged boy, all dead by their own hands.
Delorme opened the notebook she had found in Catherine’s car, a small standard-issue spiral with Northern University printed on the cover. Judging by the contents, it had served as a sort of catch-all. Phone numbers and names were scrawled at odd angles alongside recipes for mushroom bisque and some kind of sauce, reminders to pick up dry cleaning or pay bills, and ideas for photographic projects: Telephone series – all shots of people on phones: pay phones, cell phones, two-way radios, kids on tin cans, everything. And another: New homeless series: portraits of homeless people, but all fixed up and dressed in good suits, point being to remove as much of their ‘otherness’ as possible. Some other way? Less contrived? On the next page she had simply written: John’s birthday.
Delorme had the pen as well. It had been in Catherine’s shoulder bag along with the notebook. A simple Paper Mate, with very pale blue ink. Delorme wrote the words personal effects on a sheet of paper and compared it with the notes. It was the same ink – as far as one could tell without a lab test.
And then there was the note itself. The handwriting appeared to be the same as that in the notebook. The minimalist J in John, the t in other crossed and looped over the h in both the notebook and the suicide note. That terrible note, and yet the handwriting did not appear to be any more emphatic or wobbly than the rest of the jottings. In fact, the note was a good deal neater, as if the decision to die had brought with it an untouchable calm. But you had a good man, a loving, loyal husband. Why did you do this terrible thing? Delorme wanted to ask her. No matter how much pain you were in. How could you?
She placed all three items in a padded envelope and sealed it.
A few hours later that envelope was open on the kitchen table of John Cardinal’s house on Madonna Road. Kelly Cardinal was watching her father carefully flip through the spiral notebook. The sight of her mother’s handwriting made Kelly’s heart liquefy in her chest. Every now and again, her father made a note in his own notebook.
‘How can you stand to look at that stuff, Dad?’
‘Why don’t you go in the other room, sweetheart? This is something I have to do.’
‘I don’t know how you can bear it.’
‘I can’t. It’s just something I have to do.’
‘But why? It’s just going to make you crazy.’
‘Actually, it’s making me feel better in a weird way. I have something to focus on other than the simple fact that Catherine’s …’
Kelly