“To mark the chapter, the same way Dot marked ‘Strange Jest’? Although I read through chapter thirteen twice, and it’s about a visit the main character takes with a friend. I can’t figure out the link.”
“It might not mean anything,” Wes said. “Dot’s organizational hierarchy is scattered at best.”
“True, although I feel there must be something about Abigail.” She shrugged. “I can’t figure it out, but maybe it’ll come clear later.”
They picked through their treasure for items with the most relevance. As well as the first letter they’d found from Allan, there was one from Dot to her husband with an intriguing postscript.
I promised I’d do it and I will. You know I’ve never broken a promise to you, love. Except about the cats, which of course I had never planned to keep.
“There’s the promise,” said Nadine. “The one she mentioned to Brent, but we don’t know what it’s about.”
They turned to the photo of Dot in the porcelain frame, and a quick search showed that Werner and Knapp had been a popular Ottawa photo studio until it closed twenty years ago, another victim of digital photography. It proved Dot had been in the capital, but that could be for a variety of reasons that had no bearing on their search.
Next were the highlighted obituaries. “What if she left these to taunt me personally?” asked Nadine. That would be so unfair, as she had nothing to do with obits now.
“I wouldn’t put it past her, but they might not be entirely targeted to you.” Wes held out one about a woman who collected fridge magnets.“One of Dot’s short stories features a similar character.” He went to Dot’s shelf and pulled out a book, which he passed to Nadine. “There’s also a story about a man despised by his entire family.” He tapped another obit. “Like Robert Giles here.”
“Dot was underlining one when we talked to her in the conservatory, and she told me I needed to look deeper into what made people come alive.” Nadine sat down with a thump. “Did she leave them as red herrings?”
“They could be, or she simply collected them for inspiration. I found a bunch with folders grouped in categories. The Computers folder from the 1980s was especially hilarious.”
She put the obits to the side. “Let’s assume they’re not relevant and move on.” After the Monica Olway blackmail story, the next set of clips were from the social pages, covering galas and events, which they had found along with news clippings about places ruined by infrastructure projects. “Not really a match to the gala stuff,” Nadine said, reading about a bridge that destroyed a small town.
“I noticed that too.” Wes looked thoughtful. “Some of them were federal projects, and Wilson was briefly the minister for the public works portfolio. He had access to a lot of information and decisions. Then there’s this guy.” He pointed at a man in the background of one shot.
The face was familiar. “Matt White?”
“Rumored patriarch of the country’s biggest crime organization, who masqueraded as an honest developer through the White Group for decades.”
“Damn.” She looked through the photos. “Here he is again. It looks like he’s in all these clips. These seem like projects he’d be involved in and would make a killing on. Construction. Development.”
“They do.” Wes pulled forward the last set, about professional and financial misconduct by government officials. “Here are clippings about people who ended up on the wrong side of the integrity commissioner and sometimes the law.”
“These articles are all from theHerald,” she said. “Written by a staff reporter.”
“Can you find out who wrote them?” he asked.
Nadine checked the dates and shook her head. “Our online platform would list the writer internally, but these are from before it was implemented.”
That started a flurry of research and phone calls until they’d found the common denominator. At one point, all those people had worked for or with John Wilson and been involved in large-scale infrastructure projects. Many of them had died (of natural causes, Nadine was relieved to note), and the rest they couldn’t find contact information for.
“That’s not enough,” said Nadine. “Politics is a small world, and it’s natural they’ll have worked with him or adjacent to him and those projects. He does seem to find people with flexible views of the law and process who have a bad habit of getting caught though.”
“Fall guys?” asked Wes. “Fall people?”
“Maybe.”
They debated various theories to no avail.
Nadine was the one who summed it up. “We have a bunch of obits Dot used for research and one, Abigail Spencer, that might be relevant, but we can’t find anything unusual. We have a promise from Dot to Allan about a secret that is almost certainly about telling the truth about what inspiredThirty Pieces of Silver.”
“I think we can confidently say John Wilson is involved, that he’s the inspiration for James Walton, the antagonist inThirty Pieces, which fits with what we learned from Monica Olway, who he claims tried to blackmail him, and anecdotally from his ministerial portfolio. We also know organized crime might be involved via Matt White, and extrapolating from that, there might be some shadiness in how contracts were handed out or decisions made, which might also explain those vacations Wilson went on.”
“I wish Monica would go on the record.” Nadine rolled hershoulders, feeling the ache in her neck. “We still don’t know exactly what happened, by whom, or Dot’s involvement, and most of our evidence is a bunch of clips that would mean nothing if they hadn’t been collected together.”
“At least we know it’s Wilson we’re building a case against, but we need more,” Wes agreed. Then he smiled. “I’m racking up those points.”
“Great,” said Nadine without enthusiasm.
