Postmark Berlin Page 5

  “I am truly sorry.”

  “Yes. So. What was she like when you saw her at SMU, when she made this request?”

  “She was concerned about something, no question,” he acknowledged.

  “Oh, I think we can agree on that, Father Burke.”

  “But she gave no indication of what had her troubled.”

  “That would be typical of her, I suppose. She was a strong woman, not one to be skittish or complaining of this or that little thing. Well, she had to be strong to get out of Communist East Germany in 1974. Escaped through a checkpoint in the Berlin Wall.”

  “Right, I knew that. She didn’t tell me about it, but I heard it somewhere. How did she manage that? Thousands tried.”

  “She has this little scar. You may have noticed it above her left eyebrow. That’s a souvenir of the day she escaped. Meika never liked to talk about it, always wished she could forget it all. She had worked for months, and paid dearly, to get false papers giving her nationality as Belgian — papers for her and her daughter, Helga — and giving a date when she had supposedly entered East Germany. When her contact finally produced the papers for her, it took her weeks to steel herself to approach the border. She would start out, come close, and then lose her nerve. But finally the day came. Up she went to the guard post at the checkpoint, clutching her little girl’s hand and trying to look as if she didn’t have a care in the world. The guard scanned the documents and the photos, looked up, and glared at her. She nearly had heart failure. Finally, the guard let them go. She started the long walk across the bridge over the railroad tracks, the bridge from east to west, fighting down the temptation to run for her life. She nearly made it. Then they opened fire on her. A woman and a five-year-old child! Someone had caught on that Meika wasn’t who she claimed to be; there was something wrong with her identity papers. She took off at a run. Tripped and fell, and that’s how she cut her forehead. But thank the Lord she got her feet onto the ground of the French sector of Berlin.”

  “What a terrifying ordeal for her,” Brennan said. “She must have had nightmares ever since.”

  Hubert raised his voice for the first time. “If you think she took her own life because of that ordeal, I can assure you she would not have done that! So —” He turned his head away from Brennan and fell silent. Then, after a long moment, he regained his stony composure and said, “It was twenty-two years ago. She got out from behind the Iron Curtain and made a new life for herself here in Canada. But of course, as you may know, her daughter did not survive the trip.”

  Oh, God. “What happened to the child? Was she injured during the escape?”

  “No, nothing like that. The plan was to get out of East Berlin and stay in West Germany until Meika could arrange to immigrate to the United States. But Helga had been sick, weak — under-nourished, I expect — and died before Meika could complete the arrangements and book a flight across the Atlantic. A very painful subject for my wife, as you might imagine. So painful that, as I later heard, she did not talk about it at all for the first couple of years she was in this country. Just kept it inside her. By the time I met her at the end of the 1970s, she was able to speak of it, but just barely. Anyway, Meika came to Canada instead of the U.S., got to Toronto, earned her master’s degree and PhD in physics, and then came to Halifax to teach at Saint Mary’s. She is — was — when will I ever get used to the past tense for my wife? — she got deeply involved in the arts and music, and her charitable works, charities for children, and lived a beautiful life.”

  “I know. In the short time I knew her, I admired her greatly. Commodore Rendell, I regret with all my heart that I failed to see her Tuesday night.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t an hour before Brennan had company again. And if Mrs. Kelly had been wound up over the arrival of the widowed naval commander, she was positively feverish about the appearance of two plainclothes Halifax detectives in the doorway. She bustled around them, offering tea and cake, coyly asking if they were allowed to indulge while on duty, but Brennan led them up to the privacy of his room.

  When they were inside with the door shut, the detectives greeted Brennan. He knew one of them, Detective Sergeant Piet Van den Brink. “Hello, Father Burke. Let me introduce you to my partner, Detective Sergeant Ailsa Young. Ailsa, this is Father Brennan Burke.”

  Brennan knew Van den Brink from various ecumenical Christian gatherings over the years. He was one of the representatives of what Brennan thought of as the Dutch Reformed Church, but which was actually the All Nations Christian Reformed Church. Van den Brink was in his early forties, tall and slender with blond hair and light-blue eyes that appeared to scan everything and miss nothing. Brennan knew he had come to Canada from the Netherlands in his late teens. He spoke with a fairly strong Dutch accent.

  If Piet Van den Brink looked typically Dutch, his partner looked as if she had just sailed in from Scotland, with her strong facial features, short curly dark hair, and deep blue-grey eyes.

  Piet began the questioning. “You know why we’re here, Father.”

  “Yes, I do. It’s dreadful what happened to Meika Keller. As you obviously know, she and I saw each other at Saint Mary’s late on the afternoon of that Tuesday, the sixth.”

  “Yes, that’s what we heard. Can you tell us what happened?”

  “It would have been around five o’clock, when each of us had finished teaching for the day. She asked if she could come and talk to me. We agreed on ten o’clock, after a charity event wrapped up that evening. A fundraiser for Symphony Nova Scotia. She came to the parish house at the agreed time, and I was not here. I had . . .” There would never be a time when this would not be an excruciating admission. “I had gone out with my brother, who was visiting from New York. We went out for a few scoops, at O’Carroll’s, and I completely forgot about Meika.” Brennan stopped and took a deep breath. “I let her down on the most crucial night, the last night, of her life. All I know is that she was concerned about something. I have no idea what, because I didn’t show enough concern about one of my parishioners to remember to show up for the meeting. You can probably imagine how I feel about that.”

  “Yes, I can imagine how it feels for you, Father. But we are all human and we all make mistakes. There are many things we forget to do, all of us, and usually there is nothing catastrophic as a result. Your fault is no greater than it would have been on any other occasion of forgetting.”

  “Thank you, Piet. Officer. But it doesn’t feel that way.”

  “I know.”

  Detective Sergeant Young nodded in what appeared to be sympathy with his distress.

  Brennan wasn’t sure how much the police would be willing to reveal, but he ventured a question anyway. “Did she . . . is it known how she died?”

  “Actually, we know very little so far, Father. A man jogging through the park spotted her body in the water. The shallow water at the beach. The witness had a cellular phone and called us. It appears that the cause of death was drowning, but of course it will be up to the medical examiner to determine that.”

  “Yes, right.”

  The detectives then asked how long Brennan had known Meika Keller, and he went over the history with them. He repeated that she had been concerned about something that night, but that was the only time he had ever seen her worried or distracted. “And then I left the university and came back here. And, well . . .”

  Van den Brink said, “That was the last you saw of her. So, the last person to see her alive, as far as we know right now, was your housekeeper, Mrs. Kelly.”

  Brennan fought down the unworthy thought that the best thing that could happen in this terrible situation would be the sight of Mrs. Kelly dragged out of the parish house in handcuffs and charged with the murder of Meika Keller. He immediately sent up a silent Act of Contrition for this low and unworthy imagining.

  “We
’ll go down and have a word with her.”

  “Of course, yes.”

  “An excitable person,” Van den Brink said.

  “She is that.”

  Piet

  Excitable indeed. Piet remembered a line he had heard. Perhaps back when he was learning English in preparation for his family’s immigration to Canada, and he had compiled a list of common sayings and proverbs. No man is a hero to his valet. Well, poor Father Burke was no hero to his housekeeper. The woman knew nothing more than that Meika Keller had come to meet Burke and that it fell to the housekeeper to deliver the bad news that Father Burke was not there. Piet wondered whether Meika Keller got a regretful “he’s not in” or whether she got the joyous glint in the housekeeper’s eye that was all too apparent to the detectives. However it was imparted to Meika Keller, it was the only piece of evidence the housekeeper had to offer. Yet she endeavoured to keep the police in attendance as she made various broad hints about Burke, with a hand gesture meant to signify “drinking” and another gesture to denote the aiming of a gun, when she tried to spin a line of gossip about the priest’s family in Ireland. Piet and Ailsa finally got away, leaving the woman vibrating with excitement in the kitchen.

  “Well,” said Ailsa when they were back in the car, “we have one in favour of suicide in that house, and the other hoping — guiltily perhaps — that it was a homicide.”

  “Brennan Burke’s a good guy. Can hardly blame him for hoping it wasn’t suicide after he failed to show up and listen to whatever she wanted to unload on him.”

  “True. And the housekeeper! She loathes Burke for some reason; she’d love to see him fall on his face over this.”

  “That would make her day, no question, though ‘loathe’ might be too strong a word. But she strongly disapproves of him, no mistaking that. I’ve met him a couple of times at church events, Catholic-Protestant gatherings. He likes his liquor, and that didn’t serve him well on this occasion, but he’s a good man. Good priest, from everything I’ve heard.”

  “Maybe her nose is out of joint because he never invited her along to O’Carroll’s!”

  O’Carroll’s. The name of the place brought back a painfully embarrassing memory for Piet. It was Saint Patrick’s Day, two years ago. He had been to a conference the day before with representatives of several of the Christian denominations in the province, Brennan Burke among them. They got to chatting, and Brennan mentioned Saint Patrick and a get-together at O’Carroll’s for the event. Piet, against his better judgment and against all the teachings of his strict old pastor back in the Netherlands, decided to attend. And it was a fun evening. At first. Brennan was there along with some other local Irishmen, and there was a band playing the traditional music of their culture. They were rousing tunes and everyone was singing along, even Piet after a while. After a few drinks, to be more accurate. It never ceased to amaze him the capacity some people had for alcohol. Unfortunately — why was it unfortunate? Why not fortunate? — Piet had no such capacity. He was not a drinker; he came from a long line of non-drinkers, their attitudes formed by the ultra-strict church they had attended in the old country. His fellow cops needled him about it, and people teased him about being from “sin city.” Amsterdam, they meant, with its world-famous red-light district, cannabis cafés, and all of that.

  “All of that” was precisely why Piet’s father had packed up the family and left Amsterdam for Pictou County, Nova Scotia, where there was a strong Presbyterian community of upright, hard-working Scots so much like the upright, hard-working Dutch of whom the Van den Brink family was an exemplar. Piet’s father had known all about Pictou County because his sister had been a war bride. She had met her Canadian soldier husband at the time of the liberation of the Netherlands. The Canadians were much loved by the Dutch, none more than Major Donald David MacKenzie, who took Jozefien Van den Brink for his bride. Given the background, an avoidance of alcohol had been instilled in Piet since birth. And he had seen the effects of it on family life and human behaviour: violence and crime. The few times he had broken out of his teetotalling lifestyle and had a glass of beer or hard liquor, he had not enjoyed it. Didn’t even like the taste. Not even, if he was honest, the taste of Heineken. And on the night of Saint Patrick’s in 1994, he had become violently ill after four glasses of Guinness stout and some kind of Irish whiskey. The only thing that saved him from complete mortification was that he had made it to the toilet before losing the contents of his stomach. He had slunk out of the bar after that, never mentioning the incident.

  Piet shook off the humiliating memory and returned to the present. He looked over at Ailsa and thought, as he so often did, how lucky he was to have her as his partner. When he first made detective, he had been teamed up with a guy he couldn’t stand — a rigid, humourless older cop who barely offered a word of conversation when they were on duty together. Ailsa was the opposite of that. She and Piet were around the same age, early forties, and her conversation wasn’t limited to the job. They soon discovered that they both had teenage children, and those children had strong views about their respective cultural backgrounds. In Piet’s case, not surprisingly, his son Luuk wanted nothing to do with the stern, self-denying lifestyle his family had brought with them to Canada. Ailsa’s teen daughter, on the other hand, was mortified that her mother barely knew a word of Gaelic, and the young girl had taken up the language and Highland dancing with great enthusiasm. So Piet and his partner were never short of topics for conversation.

  Turning his mind to the subject at hand, the Keller case, Piet reflected that he had not been entirely forthright with Father Burke, telling him that the medical examiner would determine the cause of death. In fact, Piet had received the autopsy report late Friday afternoon. The medical examiner confirmed that the cause of death was drowning, but the other injuries were noted in the report: abrasions and some broken skin on the hands, and swelling of the lips. There was a laceration — a cut — on the lower lip, left side, which would have bled to some extent.

  Ailsa mentioned Burke and said, “He’s in for some anguish on this one. Everything points to suicide. So far. It looks like a drowning death. But those injuries to her hands and her mouth . . .”

  “Defensive wounds possibly, the marks on her palms, but more likely the kind of scraping of the skin that might have come if she’d been handling rough material. Rocks perhaps somewhere on the shore. Maybe she tumbled about and cut her lip.”

  “But, of course, we don’t know yet whether she went into the water of her own accord or whether someone pushed her in. What we need is a witness, somebody to say he saw her at the park or on the shore somewhere else farther out. She could have jumped or fallen, or been pushed, into the water from a cliff, or one of the islands. The outer harbour is what, eight kilometres?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  They pulled in to the long, low red-brick police station on Gottingen Street and parked, but neither of them made a move to get out of the car.

  Ailsa said, “Meika Keller’s arrival in this country came after quite a terrifying scene in Berlin. Escaped through one of the checkpoints. She and her wee daughter were shot at as they fled. I wonder if something in her past in Germany might have reared up again. Unlikely, I know, but . . .”

  “Long time ago, though, Ailsa. Hard to imagine anyone holding a grudge after all this time, especially now that the old regime has collapsed.”

  “I know. But I asked Constable Fraser to check with her family and the people at Saint Mary’s to see whether she had received any worrisome calls or letters, that kind of thing. Let’s get in there and see if Fraser turned up anything on that score.”

  Constable Archie Fraser reported that there were no letters or calls to the victim’s home or office from Germany or anywhere else overseas. She did not have a cellular phone.

  “Now we know,” Piet said, “that Meika Keller and her husband were boating enthusiasts. Well, the hu
sband is commander of the naval fleet, after all! Though someone had to explain to me, Archie, the meaning of the name of his yacht. The Busman’s Holiday. I understand that it means a holiday that is much like one’s own workday. But anyway, there were no ghost ships floating in the harbour that night with no one left on board. Unless you came up with anything there?”

  Fraser shook his head. “Apart from the big tanker that’s always here, the fire tug and other tugs, coastal defence vessels, you know, the regular ships we always see, there were no unusual vessels in the harbour. One of the frigates was in, the Charlottetown, I think. But there was nothing that went out from the Squadron, I mean the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron, where Keller and Rendell have their sailboat, or from any of the other clubs or marinas. Though somebody could have had a boat tied up at home and gone out for a late-night winter cruise — we can’t rule that out completely.”

  Chapter IV

  Piet

  At home the next evening, Sunday, Piet got a call from the station. “Sir, we received a tip over the phone. Possible witness to an incident involving Meika Keller.” Half an hour later, Piet and Ailsa Young were sitting in the Cole Harbour apartment of Carl Dickson, a twenty-one-year-old university student who had something to tell them about the night of February 6.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call you guys sooner about this, but, well, the girl I was with that night, Jeanine, she was away and she just got back, and I wanted to compare notes with her. To see if what I remember was accurate and all that. I didn’t want to go off half-cocked and call you if it didn’t have anything to do with . . .”

  “Don’t worry about that, Carl. Why don’t you just tell us what happened?”

  “I was with a couple of my buddies at Peddler’s Pub on Tuesday night, and we got talking to a bunch of girls at the next table. I was really hitting it off with one of them. It was funny because when the night started, I was kind of pissed off. My buddies and I have this thing where one of us is the designated driver, and we did this on rotation. And that night it was supposed to be Da — one of the other guys, but he’d started drinking right after supper. So, it was me as the driver again. But it turned out great because of this girl at the next table, Jeanine. Anyway, it was getting late and I wanted to take off with Jeanine, but I’d promised these other guys a lift home. But they let me off the hook and said they’d get a taxi. So, I got to drive her home.”