The End of the Line Page 6

  “Any jealousy?”

  “You mean someone that might have been passed over for the top job?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not that I know of. You’d have to ask around.”

  “I will,” said Durrant. He reached for his crutch and pushed himself to standing. Wilcox looked relieved that the barrage of questions had come to an end. He made as if ready to stand.

  “I have one more question for you, if you don’t mind.”

  “What is it?”

  “How well did you get on with Mr. Penner?”

  Wilcox rose from his chair and put his coffee cup down on his desk. “We got on very well. Deek was like a brother to me, a good man. I chose him because of his honesty and commitment. I asked a lot of him, and he always came through for me.”

  Durrant regarded Wilcox standing before him. For a man who had just lost a brother he seemed well composed, but then, Durrant knew that the men who worked along the CPR had lost many such comrades to accidents and that they learned to simply move on. He imagined that might well be the case here. “Thank you for your time, sir,” Durrant finally said.

  “It was no trouble at all.”

  “Now, I believe its time for me to have a closer look at Mr. Penner himself.”

  • • •

  The two men stepped outside of the station, Durrant hurrying to pull his gloves on. He followed Wilcox across the station platform.

  Durrant observed that Wilcox walked straight and tall, a man of considerable confidence and poise. Durrant had to work hard to keep up with the brisk man. They crossed the yard behind the station and came to the shed where the cadaver of Deek Penner now lay. Durrant paused before the plank door and reached into his trousers for the key to unlock the cast heart lock he had placed on the door late the night before. He swung the door open and a band of light from the bright day fell across the vacant space. The room smelled of split wood and earth, and in the shadows next to the west wall lay the body of Deek Penner. The canvas tarp was pulled up over the man’s face and concealed his torso and legs, but the fingers from his left hand hung down below the oilcloth’s edge. He turned and said to Wilcox, who hovered close behind, “Would you mind fetching a lantern?”

  The general manager snorted in the crisp air as if he was put out by being sent on a common errand, but he wordlessly disappeared in search of the lamp.

  Durrant stepped into the shack and crossed the frozen floor to where Deek Penner lay atop a stack of cordwood. He waited a moment for Wilcox to return, leaning his crutch against the split rounds of pine that scented the air with a heady aroma. There was no stench from the body as yet, the temperature having remained well below freezing these past three days. Should the weather turn, however, decomposition would start and the cadaver of Mr. Penner would soon foul the small room.

  Without looking he heard Wilcox return, the snow outside the shack crunching beneath his boots.

  “Your lantern, Sergeant,” the man said behind him. “I’ll just hang it here,” said Hep, suspending the lamp from a square nail in a crude ceiling joist. It cast a sickly yellow light over the room that made the quarters feel close and stifling despite the cold.

  Durrant took hold of the heavy tarp with his left hand and pulled it slowly back from Deek Penner’s head. As he did so, he watched from the corner of his eye for any change in expression in the eager Wilcox as the man stepped up to his side. If there was a change, Durrant could not detect it.

  Penner’s face was caved in so badly that he was likely unrecognizable to any but his closest friends. Congealed, frozen blood had pooled in the sockets of his unseeing eyes and coated his face. Any visible skin was frozen white, and his hair was tipped in a ghostly frost.

  Durrant had seen his share of dead men in the decade he had been a North West Mounted Police officer, but he had never seen a man so brutally murdered.

  “Is this the first time you’ve seen the body?” Durrant finally asked Wilcox.

  “No,” said Wilcox. “When his body was found, I was called to the scene. I dare say, Sergeant, that it was far worse to be the first to come across a man so recently murdered.”

  “Does this bother you?”

  “Of course it does!”

  “You don’t seem too put out by it.”

  “Just ’cause I’m not blubbering doesn’t mean I don’t care about his death.”

  Durrant continued to consider the corpse before him. The murder of Deek Penner was an act of rage, of ferocity, he thought. He said to Wilcox: “Whoever did this is a monster. This is no simple murder. Whoever killed this man didn’t just want him dead. They wanted him mutilated.”

  “There’s no argument about that, Sergeant,” said Wilcox looking around him as if the killer might be within earshot.

  “There doesn’t seem to be any question about how this man died. Blunt force. He’s been bludgeoned. Only question is by what . . .”

  “There are a hundred things in a camp like this that could be used to kill a man.”

  Durrant turned back to the corpse and pulled the tarp all the way back. Wilcox stepped forward with the lantern and shone the light into the darkened room. “You go through his pockets?”

  “I did not.”

  “Has anybody?”

  “Not that I know of. Maybe the killer did. He ain’t been left out for others to pillage, I can assure you. We had him locked up in your barracks before you came last night.”

  “From this point on, Mr. Wilcox, I am the only one to have access to Mr. Penner’s remains. I alone will hold the key to this building.”

  “As you wish,” said Wilcox.

  “Now, sir, I will take some time alone with Mr. Penner. Please arrange to have Doctor Armatage join me. We need to conduct a more detailed examination of Mr. Penner’s remains before any decomposition takes place.”

  • • •

  Durrant had begun to take measurements of the fatal wounds to Deek Penner’s face and head when he heard a cough at the door to the shack. His left hand reached for the revolver in his pocket and he turned quickly in the darkness to see the shape of a man darkening the portal.

  The man laughed. “What kind of greeting is that for an old friend?” asked the man, stepping from the bright light of day into the gloomy shed.

  “Hello, Saul,” said Durrant.

  “Hello, Durrant.” The man stepped up next to the Mountie and, without hesitation, extended his left hand. In his right hand he carried a small black leather satchel. Durrant took the man’s hand in his own and grasped it firmly.

  “Nice to see a friendly face,” Durrant said, regarding the man. He was tall and thin and wore a pencil moustache that curled up at the corners above a narrow beard. The rest of his face was cleanly shaven and dark with a winter tan.

  “Likewise, I’m sure.” The man smiled broadly and turned to regard the corpse.

  “Dewalt didn’t tell me it was you who was acting as physician in this God-forsaken wilderness.”

  “I don’t think he knew, to be perfectly honest.”

  Durrant nodded. “He’s as thick as ever.”

  “Be generous, Durrant. I haven’t exactly made my presence known to all our former comrades at arms.”

  Durrant nodded. “The last I heard you were the attending physician at some eastern facility. York?”

  “Kingston. I grew weary with city life. Adventure was what drew me to medicine. And freedom.”

  “Freedom to freeze your arse off, Saul.”

  The doctor laughed again. “And you? The last I heard you were stationed at Fort Calgary.”

  “Still am. Steele has asked me to look into this case because Dewalt is too busy with the Blackfoot and with the bootleggers. Frankly, Saul, I’m happy for the distraction.”

  “Not enjoying sorting the post and collecting customs?”

  Durrant shook his head.

  “And how is the leg?”

  “It’s fine,” he said, his mood darkening.

  “Well, come by my q
uarters and we’ll have a look.”

  “I said it’s fine.”

  Armatage laughed again. “Durrant, you can play the tough with everybody else in this camp, but it was me who sawed off your leg. And it was me who sewed you back together after your adventure in the Cypress Hills. You can’t play the rogue with me. Plus, you must come by. Evelyn will be asking after you, and you must see Oliver. He’s four years old. And of course, you’ve not yet met our little Ben.”

  Durrant stared at the body before him. He drew a deep breath which slowly seeped between his pursed lips.

  “It will be alright, Durrant,” said the doctor quietly, laying a hand on Durrant’s left arm.

  “Now,” he said cheerfully, “let’s have a better look at Mr. Penner here, or at least what’s left of the chap, shall we?”

  The two men began their examination of the body. Armatage removed his thick leather gloves and opened his black satchel to withdraw a set of forceps. Durrant noted the strong odour of peroxide that accompanied the opening of the doctor’s bag, and was immediately transported back to the Regina hospital where the man had attended to his amputation. It was a most unwelcome sense of déjà vu.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any question about the cause of death?” asked Durrant, forcing himself back to the present.

  Armatage was using the forceps to remove something from the cavity on Penner’s face. He shook his head. “No, not much question. If I was in Kingston, we could open him up and look at the liver and the stomach and the other organs for signs of poison; it’s always possible that he ingested something earlier in the evening that allowed his killer an easier time with his task, but it seems irrelevant to our purpose here.”

  Durrant nodded. He could hear the sickly sound of the flesh on the dead man’s face sticking to the bone where Armatage was picking at the foreign object. “So,” said the doctor, holding the forceps before him, a tiny rusty fleck of metal in their grasp. “What we have here is a situation where both the zygomatic bone and the maxilla have been all but pulverised. I’d say the first blow caught him lightly here,” said Armatage, pointing to the man’s right cheek with his left hand. His fingers were long and thin and looked ghostly in the yellow light. “I say this because of how this fragment of bone,” and again he pointed to the maxilla, “is concave, and this one,” and here he indicated the frontal bone, “is protruding over the zygomatic bone.”

  “But he was hit more than once?”

  “Oh yes, I’d say at least three or four times, maybe more. It’s hard to tell. Too much damage to frontal and temporal bones to be certain, but after he was dead, he was hit at least once or twice. I’d say the first blow stunned him, and the second blow killed him. Can’t be certain.” The doctor pointed to the cavity where Deek Penner’s right eye would have been. “You can see bone shards here. Lots of them. Being frozen like this helps a little because the blood hasn’t carried the fragments too far from where they started out.”

  “What can we tell about the attacker by this?” asked Durrant.

  “He would have been strong enough to wield a heavy object. The blunt side of an axe. Maybe a sledge. Could be lots of things around this camp, Durrant.”

  “Would he need to be exceptionally strong?”

  “I don’t think so,” replied the doctor. “Once our boy Deek was on the ground, it would have been a matter of lifting and letting the weapon fall. Like splitting cordwood.”

  Durrant breathed heavily. “Not exactly like splitting cordwood.”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “No indication that this was an axe blade ?”

  “No. The wounds were made with a blunt object. This was a crushing blow, not a cutting blow.” Armatage pointed to the rents in the flesh of the man’s face. “You can see here the skin has been bruised where it was broken. Nothing here to suggest an axe.”

  Durrant looked at the doctor. “So just about any man in this camp could be responsible?”

  “Based on the nature of these wounds, I’d say yes.”

  “And what have you got there?” asked Durrant, his eyes fixed on the forceps.

  “Well, it looks like a fleck of metal of some kind. Rusted, so that when the weapon connected here,” the doctor pointed to the concave shape around Deek Penner’s right temple, “it flaked off.”

  “So now all I have to do is find a sledge, pry bar, or hammer in this camp with a fleck missing from it and I’ve got my man.”

  The doctor smiled at him. “Are you suggesting that will be a problem, Sergeant?”

  Durrant took the lantern from its peg and held it near the cadaver. He stooped a little to examine the body more closely. “Is this consistent, Saul?” asked Durrant, pointing with his twisted right hand at the flecks of blood on Penner’s coat.

  Armatage bent and looked closely at the man’s heavy winter coat. There was a fine spray of blood around the collar and heavier spots of frozen blood on the chest and shoulders. “You know, Durrant, it’s hard for me to say. I’ve never examined a body this badly mutilated. I’ve looked at a few poor devils killed when their horses kicked them in the face, but this is something else all together different. And frankly, Durrant, we here in the Dominion are a little behind our cousins to the south when it comes to how we examine a cadaver for this sort of evidence.

  “So I’m only surmising when I say this, but I’d guess that this spray of blood is consistent with the man having first been hit while standing up. If this man was upright up for the first blow, you’d expect a fair amount of blood to spray across his own shoulders, face, chest, even his arms, wouldn’t you? When he was on the ground, there would be some too, as well as across the snow all around him. But my guess is that it would spray out in a different direction.”

  “The men who recovered the body would have tracked up that snow pretty good in the process,” grumbled Durrant. “Not much evidence left on the scene.”

  “No, not on the scene,” said the doctor.

  Durrant looked at him. “But the killer?”

  “I believe you’ll be looking for someone with blood on his coat, Durrant. Maybe on his trousers and boots too, depending on where he stood.”

  “And from the first blow?”

  “I’d say, given the pattern of blood on our boy Deek, that the killer could not have hit him without getting a fair amount of blood on his own coat.”

  Durrant returned his gaze to Deek Penner’s corpse. “I guess I’ll have to pay a visit to the laundry, won’t I?”

  Armatage nodded his agreement. “And maybe to Tom Holt’s store to see if anybody has replaced a coat in the last few days.”

  Durrant said, “Give me a hand, will you?” He hung up the lantern again and turned back to the body. “I want to check his pockets. It will be easier for you than me,” Durrant said, holding up his twisted right hand to illustrate his point.

  Armatage smiled a narrow smile and put down his forceps. He dug his hands into the pockets of Deek Penner’s trousers. Durrant watched him. The doctor came out with a handful of blasting caps and fuse wire, and a crumpled up sheet of paper.

  “What have you got there?” said Durrant.

  Armitage smiled. “Looks like some of Deek’s tricks of the trade. Caps and fuse.”

  “The note?”

  Armatage opened it and scanned it. “It’s a wire. It’s in code.”

  “Let’s have a look,” Durrant said, taking it in his left hand and holding it up to the light.

  “It’s not the NWMP code, that’s for certain,” said the doctor, “unless you’ve changed it in the last two years.”

  “We haven’t. I don’t recognize it. Penner was just a foreman. What would he be doing with a coded wire?” asked Durrant.

  “I’m just a doctor, Durrant. You’re the investigator.”

  Durrant was quiet a moment, holding the folded sheet of paper up before the flickering light. While the message was a mystery, the name at the bottom was clear: the wire was from a man named Kauffman. It was
possible, thought not probable, that within the code’s secret message was the key to Deek Penner’s death.

  FIVE

  THE WIRE

  WHEN DURRANT FINALLY PULLED THE tarp back over the disfigured face of Deek Penner and shouldered the door of the shed shut, it was nearly noon. He had told Armatage that he wanted some time alone with the body, and the doctor had smiled and nodded and left wordlessly. Before Armatage reached the door Durrant said, “Saul, I have to ask . . . Where were you on the night Mr. Penner was murdered?”

  Armatage’s smile broadened. “Durrant, you haven’t changed one bit. I was at Banff Station. Repairing a man’s shattered tibia. He had been crushed when the load he was hauling in a push cart shifted and came down on him. I came back on the train the day before you arrived.”

  Durrant nodded. “I had to ask.”

  “Of course you did.” Armatage’s smile remained generous. He turned and left the shack without another word.

  Left alone in the cold room, the light of the lamp flickering above his charge, Durrant spent the better part of an hour examining Penner, making sure that nothing had been overlooked. In particular he was looking for something obvious—like a gunshot or stabbing wound—that might lead him in another direction. In the end, there was only one conclusion: Deek Penner’s life had ended suddenly and violently, with a crushing blow to the head and face. The man’s hands were scratched but not bruised, and there was no blood or skin under his nails, meaning that it was unlikely that the killing blow had come at the end of a long struggle or fight. Penner had been taken by surprise.

  Once he had covered up the man, Durrant had looked again at the folded sheet of paper and its unknown code scrawled on it. He knew well enough that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of codes in common use across the telegraph service that now stretched from the Atlantic shores all the way to the end of steel. The NWMP had their own that he was proficient in. The CPR also used a common code that Durrant knew well, having sent and received cables for the last year in Fort Calgary. This one, however, was a mystery to him. He folded the sheet of paper and placed it in his breast pocket for future examination.