By the Time You Read This

36

CARDINAL WOKE UP THE next day, and Catherine’s absence sucked his breath away, as if his bedroom were adrift in space and someone had thrown open the airlock.

As he stumbled through his morning routine—toast and coffee and the Globe and Mail—he forced his thoughts toward work, toward Delorme’s case of the child pornographer, Arsenault’s series of break-ins.

At one point he looked up from his newspaper and stared into the emptiness across the table.

“I don’t want to think about you,” he said. “I don’t want to think about you.”

He went back to the Globe, but could not concentrate; his eyes were scratchy from a night of fitful sleep. The sooner he got into work, the better. He put his plate in the dishwasher and tossed the rest of his coffee down the kitchen sink. He rushed through his shower, threw on his clothes and headed out.

The mornings were getting crisper now. There was a scent of winter, a hint of ice, even though there was not yet any ice on the lake, nor would be for another month or so. He shivered in his sports jacket. It would soon be time for a heavy coat. The sky was dazzling blue and he thought of how Catherine would have loved it. Her PT Cruiser sat empty in the driveway.

“I don’t want to think about you,” he said again, and got into his Camry.

He was backing out of the drive when a car pulled up and blocked his exit. Paul Arsenault rolled down the window and waved a gloved hand.

“Morning!”

Cardinal knew he must have something good. No way Arsenault would stop by before work unless he had something pretty tasty to share. Cardinal got out of his car and went over to Arsenault’s window.

“Thought I’d stop by so we don’t use up any of that precious Police Services time.”

“You get something interesting?”

“Well, yes and no. I don’t know how you’re going to take it.”

“Just give it to me, Paul.”

“In the end, I got it from the Immigration database—and no, I’m not going to tell you how. We got a British national, moved here a couple years ago.” He handed a printout through the window.

It showed two thumbprints. The photograph above them was kinder than the general run of such documents. In the curly hair, the salt-and-pepper beard, it captured the canine amiability of the man. Frederick David Bell, MD. When Cardinal got to work, he called Bell and arranged to meet him on his lunch hour up at the psychiatric hospital.

He drove out along Highway 11 and turned in at the all too familiar driveway of the Ontario Hospital. Cardinal had been here countless times—professionally, because it often housed criminals, and personally, because of Catherine. Usually when she was booked in here, it was the dead grey month of February.

The red brick building was nearly lost amid the glory of the leaves. A crisp wind blew over the hilltop, and the poplars and birches dipped their heads like dancers. All of Cardinal’s history with the place blurred into one long ache, all the times Catherine had been taken here because she was manic and spouting some loony idea as if it made perfect sense, or because she was so depressed she was an inch away from sliding a razor across her wrist.

He took the elevator to the third floor. Dr. Bell’s door was open. He was in his chair, looking out over the parking lot and the hills beyond. He sat very still, and Cardinal was put in mind of a dog at the window, waiting for its owner to return.

He knocked—loudly, with the intent to startle—and was gratified to see the effect. Bell’s shoulders shot up and he turned around. He stood up when he saw Cardinal.

“Detective. Please come in. Have a seat.”

Cardinal set his briefcase on the floor and sat down.

“You were right about the cards,” he said. “They weren’t from a murderer.”

“No, I thought not.”

“They were from a guy I put in jail for fraud a few years back.”

“Well, that makes perfect sense. Fraud is such a sneaking, knavish thing. Fits in with the style of the poisoned pen. And did he lose his wife as a result of your efforts?”

“Yes. You were right about that too.”

“Probably not by suicide, though.”

“No. But how would you know that?”

“Because—at least on the face of things—the shame in such a case would be all with the criminal and not the criminal’s family. Different story if, say, the crimes were a long-standing series of sexual assaults, or racist violence, something a spouse might be expected to know about, or at least suspect. Do you have something else for me? Is that why this sudden trip up here? I was thinking, just before you arrived, that it would be painful for you to come up here. All the memories of Catherine.”

“It doesn’t make any difference where I am.”

Cardinal opened his briefcase and pulled out Catherine’s suicide note. This time he handed the doctor the version that had been through the ESDA machine. It was encased in plastic, the writing a ghostly white script on a background of graphite, Catherine’s small prints dotting one edge and a fat splotch of thumbprint at the bottom.

Dr. Bell put on small reading glasses and peered at the note. “Mm. You showed me this before. I see it’s now been processed in some way.”

“Right again, Doctor. And that’s your thumbprint at the bottom.”

Cardinal was watching Bell’s face for any reaction, but there was none. Of course, he was a psychiatrist, trained to keep his own emotions hidden while others wept and wailed.

Bell handed the note back. “Yes. Catherine did show me such a note a few months ago.”

“Funny, you didn’t mention that when I brought it to you last week.”

Dr. Bell winced and removed his glasses, massaging the bridge of his nose. Without the thick lenses he looked oddly vulnerable, a lemur in daylight.

“I’ve gone and put my foot in it, haven’t I. Detective, I’m so sorry. I admit I wasn’t keen for you to know I’d seen this. I was afraid you’d think I’d been negligent in some way, that Catherine had written a suicide note in a pitch of agony and I had blithely ignored it.”

“Now, why would I think a thing like that?” Cardinal said. “After all, it’s only a suicide note. She only has a history of serious depression.”

“Well, of course, now you’re angry—”

“She even shows you the note, hoping against hope that somehow you will help her with these terrible urges. You have a little chat, and at the end of the hour you hand it back.”

“It’s easy to make it sound bad in retrospect.”

“And during the next three months, as these suicidal thoughts are apparently building up and building up, and Catherine is coming to see you two or three times a month, you never see fit to admit her to hospital. You don’t even see fit to call me in for a consultation. After all, I’m only her husband, I’ve only lived with her for decades, why should you bother to let me know? So, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, Catherine is doing fine. You, on the other hand, happen to know she’s planning to kill herself, and you choose to do nothing about it.”

“Detective, you’re making exactly the sorts of assumptions I was afraid you’d make. I labour in the fields of grief and despair—with people who are unbearably depressed. Sadly, they often want to end their lives and sometimes they succeed. It’s no one’s fault. Families get upset and they can rush to judgment. I’m sure it happens in your line of work too. I read in the paper that the Dorn family is extremely upset with the way the police handled that young man’s suicide.”

“The difference is, the officer did everything he could to stop that guy.”

“And I did everything I could to help your wife.”

“Allowing her to carry around a suicide note for three months. So that one night, when she’s in the middle of an interesting photographic project, on impulse, she pulls it out and jumps.”

“Detective, I’ve been dealing with depression for over thirty years now, and believe me, at this point there’s nothing that would surprise me. The only certainty with this disease is that it will surprise you.”

“Really? Personally, I’ve always found it hideously predictable.”

“Forgive me, Detective, but clearly not. You didn’t see it coming any more than I did. As to her using a note she’d written earlier, it’s most likely an example of Catherine’s thoughtfulness. She wanted to use words she’d written when she was not too overwrought, a note that would express her feelings less harshly than something scribbled in the heat of the moment. Most suicide notes, as you probably know, are not full of concern for those left behind.”

“Did you even think about calling me after she wrote that note?”

“No. Catherine was not upset when she brought it in. We discussed it as we would a dream or a fantasy. She was emphatic that she had no imminent plans to harm herself.”

“I believe her. I would have seen it coming.”

“You’re still suggesting there’s some other explanation for her death? The original reason you suspected she might have been murdered was that you were receiving those nasty cards in the mail. You thought that only someone who had killed your wife would do such a thing. And so you tracked down the person who wrote them, and it turns out he hasn’t killed anyone. Isn’t that right? Or am I missing something?”

I’m off my game, Cardinal thought. The shrink has me nailed: I have no hard evidence. Nothing.

“She wasn’t upset the day she died,” was all he could manage. “She gave no sign that she was thinking of suicide.”

“Over the years, she gave every sign. I’ve read her medical records, Detective. Catherine has stayed in this hospital more than half a dozen times—once for an episode of mania, but all the other admissions were for unmanageable depression. All those times she was feeling that she wanted to die, that suicide was the only way out for her. It seems clear to me that she decided to actually do the deed when she was in a relatively lucid state, when she could carry it out with some degree of control, some forethought.”

“I would have seen it coming,” Cardinal said again, knowing how lame it sounded. Catherine, what have you done? What have you done to me?

“Surely, in your line of work, Detective, you’ve had occasions where people miss the obvious about people they live with?”

Cardinal thought of the mayor and his trollop of a wife. Am I that blind? Does everyone know the truth but me?

“Is it not possible, Detective, that you, in your grief, are missing what is obvious to everyone else? Why not allow yourself the possibility of being wrong? You’ve lost your wife, your thinking is bound to be clouded at best, and who wouldn’t be subject to the palliative effects of denial? The nasty cards were sent by a resentful ex-con; there’s no reason to believe anyone killed your wife. I knew Catherine for going on two years, and I can’t imagine her having any serious enemies. You’ve known her for decades—have you come up with anyone who might have a motive?”

“No,” Cardinal said. “But motives aren’t always personal.”

“Psychopaths, you mean. But there’s no reason to suppose this was the work of a serial killer. Especially not one who had handy access to her suicide note and could leave it behind at the scene of the crime.

“If you believe Catherine was murdered, then knowing that she wrote a suicide note three months earlier would not have prevented it. If you believe she committed suicide, then you have nothing to investigate, unless you intend to sue me for malpractice. As I say—and as you say—she gave no indication she was intending such an act. None. And so I treated the note at face value. It was the answer to a question I posed to her.”

“What question was that?”

“We were talking about the reasons why she hadn’t killed herself, despite years of emotional suffering. Her biggest reason was what it would do to you—to you and your daughter. My question was, What would you say to your husband if you did commit suicide? What would you say in a note? I wanted her to articulate the feelings right then and there, but Catherine didn’t answer me. She said she would have to think about it. And then, to my surprise, she brought a note in, next session. As you see, it clearly expresses her love for you.”

Cardinal’s throat felt swollen shut. And then, to his horror, he found that he was weeping.

“You might think about taking some more time off,” Dr. Bell said gently. “Clearly, you haven’t yet had time to grieve properly. Maybe you should consider allowing yourself that kindness.”