Barrington Street Blues Read Free Page B

psychiatric history and had occasionally been violent in the past. Who knew what might have provoked him to kill Scott and turn the gun on himself?
    That was another thing, the gun. There had been no indication that Leaman had ever used or possessed a gun. The police had not been able to trace it. It was an unusual weapon in this day and age, a German Luger P-08, which was already being replaced by another weapon before the end of World War Two. This one was almost certainly stolen, but no collector had stepped forward to claim it. There were no complete fingerprints on the weapon apart from Leaman’s. There were smeared prints, which could have belonged to Leaman or somebody else. This, to me, served to support the suicide theory. Typically, if someone wanted to commit murder and make it look like suicide, they wiped the gun free of prints, then placed it in the victim’s hand. Guns used by people like Leaman tended to be passed around; if his had been the only prints on the gun, that would have struck me as suspicious. There was no detectable gunshot residue on Leaman, but there was a handwritten note in the file, probably scribbled by a detective after conversation with an expert: “Recoverable residues generally do not persist on skin for very long . . . residues may be absent for any number of reasons.” I knew there had been freezing rain the morning the bodies were found.
    In the end, the police had left the file open. With no witnesses and no evidence of a third person at the scene, they could not establish a double murder. The medical examiner’s and autopsy reports weremeticulous in describing the gunshot wounds; they did not come to a definitive conclusion as to whether or not Leaman’s wound was self-inflicted, but the M.E. put it down as a probable suicide. That was good enough for me. And it would remain good enough, as long as we weren’t faced with a witness popping up later to say there was somebody else at the Fore-And-Aft that morning.
    â€ 
    â€œCollins. Have you forgotten?” It was the Undersigned, the most pompous partner in our firm, who never referred to himself as “I” or “me” but as “the Undersigned” in his correspondence. He had slicked-back fair hair and a perpetually irritated expression on his face. He was vibrating impatiently at my door in his imitation English suit of clothes. Our founding partner raised a condescending eyebrow at the Undersigned’s back as he passed by in his real, and threadbare, English tweeds, which he had probably brought over with him when he immigrated in 1945.
    I had indeed forgotten. It was Thursday, April 18, the day my firm was taking me to lunch to celebrate what they considered to be my finest achievement. I had just been named a Queen’s Counsel. I hadn’t even applied for the honour; the Undersigned had. He — his real name was Vance Blake — had taken it upon himself to cobble together my curriculum vitae, and some kind words from references, and submit an application on my behalf after shoving the forms on my desk and having me sign them when I was distracted. I had promptly forgotten all about it. But Blake had not. In his view, the more Queen’s Counsels the firm had on its letterhead, the better.
    So we all trooped down the hill to the waterfront, to Wiggin-staff’s, a self-consciously upmarket bar and dining room favoured by certain members of the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society. We took up all the tables overlooking the harbour and ordered drinks. I watched through the window as a sailboat bobbed along like a toy on the choppy water; it was dwarfed by a massive container ship heading up the harbour to the Ceres terminal. Once the pre-luncheon drinks were in our hands, a toast was raised to me.
    â€œTo Montague M. Collins, Q.C.”
    This was met by the insufferable “hear, hear,” which I always associated with mutton-chopped Victorian pomposity.