“This is personal. I’m just trying to clarify a few things in my mind.”

  “Yes, of course, poor man.” She laid a benevolent hand on his wrist. “I know exactly how you feel.”

  Cardinal asked the questions he knew Delorme would have already asked. Catherine had expressed interest in photographing the view from her apartment building; a date was arranged, Ms. Cathcart let her in and went off to rehearse with the Algonquin Bay Players.

  “Did you see Catherine a lot? Up at the school, I mean?”

  “Not really. Just bumped into her now and again. Said hello. That kind of thing. We weren’t palsy-walsy or anything. Just cordial. I admired her from a distance, I suppose you could say. There was something beautifully self-contained about Catherine.”

  That was true, Cardinal knew, when she was well.

  “So you wouldn’t know about her other relationships up at the college.”

  “No. I have my own little province in Theatre Arts. Doesn’t overlap terribly much with photography.”

  “Did you ever see her with a stranger? Or anyone else that seemed out of place around the college?”

  “No. She was usually alone or with students when I saw her.”

  “Did you ever see her upset with anyone? Or anyone upset with her?”

  “Never. I mean, people worried about her, you must know that. And, well, sometimes other instructors had to fill in for her. But I’m sure they accepted that this was not a matter of caprice.” Ms. Cathcart touched her forehead with elegant fingertips. “Of course, she did have rather a contretemps with Meredith Moore.”

  “Tell me about that,” Cardinal said. He had heard Catherine’s side of the story many times.

  “Oh, it was just college politics as usual. Control of a department becomes available, out come the knives. Really, the Borgias have nothing on academics. When Sophie Klein got hired away by York University, both Catherine and Meredith wanted to run the art department. They were probably equally qualified: Catherine had more honours for her creative work, but Meredith had an edge in administrative experience. The stupid thing was, Meredith seemed to take it as a personal affront that Catherine would even apply. I mean, she seemed to think the crown should have just automatically descended upon her anointed head, God knows why.

  “And Meredith was not above pointing out Catherine’s, um, psychological vagaries as a disqualifying factor. There was even a rumour that the dean had received a copy of Catherine’s medical records anonymously, but that smacks of urban legend, at least to me. The outcome you know.”

  “Meredith got the job.”

  “And I always admired the way Catherine handled it. She never said a bad word about Meredith, or expressed any resentment. But Meredith …”

  “But Meredith what?”

  Ms. Cathcart flashed a thin blade of smile. “You know what they say: people can never forgive you the wrongs they’ve done you. I’m sure Meredith would have loved to have Catherine replaced. She could barely stand to be in the same room after that, and was always sniping at her behind her back. Dry old stick.”

  And yet, when he went to see her, Meredith Moore was graciousness personified. She clasped Cardinal’s hand in both her woody little palms, looked him in the eye and said, “It’s such a shame about Catherine. Such a tragedy.”

  “Have you found somebody to teach her courses?”

  “In the middle of the semester? Not likely. We have somebody filling in, but it’s not the same as having the person who prepared the course.”

  “I’ve heard you weren’t particularly happy with Catherine. That you were probably looking to replace her.”

  Meredith Moore had a brittle appearance at the best of times: hair that looked as if it might break off, and a face of fine crepe. Cardinal could almost hear the crackle as she set her mouth in a thin line.

  “Whoever you heard that from,” she said, “did not know what they were talking about. Catherine had nothing but excellent evaluations, and her photographs were highly respected.”

  “So you weren’t looking to replace her.”

  “I was not.”

  “How would you characterize your relationship with Catherine? How did you get along?”

  “Fine. We weren’t close friends, but I’d say we had a collegial relationship. I have to say, I know you’re a policeman and maybe the manner sticks with you whether you want it to or not, but this feels very much like an interrogation.”

  “You said Catherine’s student reviews were excellent. Do you know if there was any student in particular who was giving her trouble? Someone who might have taken offence at a low grade?”

  “Not that I know of. And I rather doubt it. She was a good teacher, but an easy marker. Some people are too severe, some are lenient. I try to be somewhere in the middle myself. Catherine was on the lenient side, I think she’d agree with me on that.”

  That was true, Cardinal knew. Catherine hated to give anyone who made the least effort a bad grade, and would get upset when she had no choice.

  “Did you ever have a student come in here, upset, and ask you to change a grade Catherine had given?”

  “No. Mind you, it’s too early in the semester for people to be worried about failing.”

  “Catherine wanted to be chair of the department too.”

  “She certainly did. She made a strong case for herself.”

  “I imagine that could put quite a strain on your ‘collegial’ relationship. Did it?”

  “Is that what Catherine said?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “It’s safe to say it made us both a little tense. That’s understandable, don’t you think? I don’t imagine the police department is free of competition.”

  “Well, no one’s gone off a roof so far.”

  Ms. Moore’s mouth opened with an audible snap. “You think she killed herself because she didn’t get chair?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Good. Because she showed no ill effects from it that I’m aware of. And Catherine was a—well, a sensitive soul, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes. Did you see her the day she died?”

  “I saw her in the hall here, around lunchtime. She was heading into her noon class.”

  “What about in the evening?”

  “She doesn’t teach on Tuesday evenings.”

  “That isn’t what I asked.”

  Ms. Moore was turning red, but from the set of her mouth it was the heat of anger, not embarrassment.

  “The answer is no.”

  “Were you here at the school?”

  “I was at home watching The Antiques Roadshow. Look, I don’t know how to say this to you. I’m sorry about what happened to Catherine, I truly am. But my sympathy does not extend to being cross-questioned like a criminal.”

  “I realize that,” Cardinal said, and headed for the exit. “Criminals don’t like it either.”

  33

  DOROTHY BELL WAS BUNDLING up the newspapers for the recycling when an article caught her eye. She spread the paper out on the kitchen table and peered at it nearsightedly. According to the article, over two hundred mourners had attended Perry Dorn’s funeral. Perry Dorn, it said, a recent graduate of Northern University, had had many friends and the respect of his professors. The newspaper quoted several people who had known him.

  “He was a very generous guy,” one said. “Whatever Perry had, he’d share it with you. Even when he was broke.”

  “Always looking out for others,” said another.

  “A very sharp intellect,” according to a professor of mathematics. “You had to work hard to keep up with Perry.”

  The reason the Algonquin Lode was giving the funeral so much space, of course, was that Perry Dorn had shocked the community by blowing his brains out in a laundromat.

  Long subject to depression, the paper said.

  “But lately he seemed to be getting better,” said a fellow student. “He was looking forward to doing graduate work in Montreal. He was very excited about McGill.”

  One of the subheads read “Romantic Reversals,” and under this a former roommate stated that Perry Dorn had had a tendency to become emotionally entangled with unattainable women. “The shame of it was, he could have had lots of girlfriends. There were lots of girls who would have gladly gone out with him, he was so smart and gentle. But he always went for the ones who weren’t interested. Then he’d get depressed and wouldn’t eat or sleep or even talk for days. It could get kinda spooky.”

  Shelly Lanois, the young man’s sister, said only: “We’re all too devastated to comment.”

  The name Perry Dorn didn’t mean anything to Dorothy Bell, but she might have recognized his face in the picture sooner had he not been wearing the graduation cap. It hid his prematurely thinning hair, but it did not hide the scrawny chicken neck, the outsized Adam’s apple, the deep-set, mournful eyes of the young man she had seen several times in the waiting area outside her husband’s office.

  The moment she did recognize him, her heart began to pound. A young man on the verge of graduate school chooses instead to end his life—and in a spectacular manner. A young man who had many reasons to be happy and optimistic. A young man who had been a patient of her husband’s.

  When Dorothy had first met Frederick—well over thirty years ago now—she had been deeply impressed by his intelligence. She had been no slouch herself, winning excellent marks in nursing school, but he had the kind of brilliance she had known she would never possess. He was dark and handsome—no beard, no specs—with a charming array of nervous tics. Even in his twenties he was a bit of a star at the London hospital where they worked.

  When one day he asked her to go out to dinner with him, she had trouble forming the words to answer him. She turned around to look behind herself, to see if there were some other young doctors in the hallway who were in on the joke. But there was no one.

  Neither of them had any money in those days. He took her to an American-style joint on the King’s Road with jukeboxes and bottles of Heinz ketchup in each booth. Hamburgers were an exotic treat in London in those days. Long after they were married, Bell told her that the place had turned out to be much more expensive than he had anticipated. He had had just enough to cover the meal, no tip.

  “Never dared set foot in there again,” he liked to tell friends when he recounted the story. “Too embarrassed.”

  From the first, Dorothy enjoyed his intelligence and his sense of humour. He liked her sensitivity, and the way she could transform a dreary duplex apartment into a real home. They were so contented that they saw no reason to disrupt the pleasantness of their life with children. That, at least, was the way Frederick had put it. Dorothy would have liked to try, but she sensed from things he said that he was not a man who would enjoy fatherhood.

  She could still think back on those first few years with nostalgia. They amused themselves with weekend forays to obscure English villages and the odd walking tour.

  Gradually—she couldn’t have said when it started exactly—the early happiness began to be marred by a certain instability in Frederick’s professional life. He had been overjoyed to be on the staff of the Kensington Clinic; it had a great reputation, and he was lucky to be there. But after only eighteen months he’d suddenly announced that they were moving to Swindon, where he was going to join the Swindon General Hospital. It was a pleasant enough place to work, and Dorothy enjoyed the other nurses there, but it had seemed a considerable step down. This was not a view she aired aloud.

  It was while at Swindon that Frederick was investigated for over-prescribing. As he had explained it to her, all he had done was prescribe a tricyclic for a depressed patient, hardly an exotic line of treatment, but the patient had almost immediately swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, also prescribed by Dr. Bell. The bereaved family claimed Bell had ignored obvious cries for help, that the boy should have been hospitalized. The hospital’s inquiry merely found him somewhat lax in follow-up, and gave him a reprimand. Even so, he had been outraged.

  “Idiots,” he had cried. “Morons. What do they know? Depressed people kill themselves all the time. For all they know, that kid would have been dead months ago if it wasn’t for me. Suicide is what depressed people do. Hiding their intentions is also what depressed people do. They get good at it. If the charge is that I failed to read his mind, fine. I plead guilty.”

  Of course, reading minds is exactly a psychiatrist’s job, Dorothy thought, even at the time. But Frederick was her husband and she stood by him, sharing his outrage. The young doctor had been so grateful that this early adversity strengthened their marriage.

  Despite this episode, Frederick managed to find himself a better position soon after, this time in Lancashire, at the Manchester Centre for Mental Health. It suited him much better. They became active in the community, made many friends, gave enviable parties. Just when Dorothy had begun to think they were really set, really secure, the Centre informed them there would be another inquiry into Frederick’s practice. The hospital had become concerned by the number of suicides among the patients under his care.

  But it was brief and largely exculpatory. No abnormalities were found in his prescribing. If anything, he made less use of drugs than his contemporaries.

  “We over-prescribe, in my opinion,” he told the committee. “I believe the optimum treatment for depression to be a combination of psychotherapy and medication. Neither alone is enough, not for severe cases, but the risks of relying on medication are high, because the treatment proceeds at the speed of the drug rather than at the speed of the patient’s capacity to heal.”

  In this, he was ahead of his time. By then he was known as one of the foremost authorities in England on the causes and treatment of depression. He took on a Herculean caseload, and specialized almost exclusively in depression. This, the review committee noted, was bound to result in a high number of suicides among his patients.

  Still, Frederick had been offended by the whole debacle. “The insult, the ingratitude,” he said over and over again. “The incredible stupidity. They have to mount a committee of inquiry to discover the obvious: sad people kill themselves.”

  Soon after, the couple had emigrated. Despite the hospital’s clearing of her husband, Dorothy had found her faith in his abilities shaken. She knew enough of hospital politics to know that the administration would be quite capable of keeping a lid on scandal. When, in the course of packing, she discovered a letter from the National Health Service announcing that it was beginning proceedings for yet another investigation—this one into the entire term of his practice from Swindon to Manchester—she had been thoroughly shocked.

  The letter was dated just after the Manchester investigation, and yet Frederick had said nothing.

  She could not bring herself to discuss it with him. She did not want him calling her idiot, moron, fool. But from the moment of their arrival in Toronto, Dorothy Bell had told herself that, without snooping, she would keep a closer eye on what happened with her husband’s caseload. Obviously, patient confidentiality precluded her knowing the names of most of his patients. Occasionally, though, she would overhear him on the phone. And a couple of times, when someone had died, he had said to her, “Patient of mine. Poor fella.”

  She noticed that he clipped the obituaries.

  Frederick never took to Toronto, and after a short stint at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre he had accepted a post with the Ontario Hospital at Algonquin Bay. He told his wife he was sick of city living, that he wanted to live in a smaller town, and she had no reason to disbelieve him.

  That had been two years ago. But since then Dorothy had become aware of three suicides under her husband’s care: Leonard Keswick, a social services administrator; Catherine Cardinal, a teacher and photographer; and now this Perry Dorn. All three had been in the paper, one because he had been charged with a crime, one because she had been found dead next to a brand new building, and the last one because he had killed himself in such a public manner. It was hard to admit, but Dorothy knew it was likely there were more.

  And this young man, this Perry Dorn. Why had Frederick not mentioned that he had been a patient? It had been all over the news and the local paper. An expression of shock or dismay might have been in order, but he had said nothing, not a word.

  Dorothy put the article aside and finished tying up the last of the newspapers. It was time to do the grocery shopping, before the late afternoon rush. On her way out, she paused in front of Frederick’s closed office door. You couldn’t hear much through solid oak, but she could hear his voice, and quieter responses from a patient. He didn’t have a patient now; the next one wasn’t due for another half-hour. No, no, he was watching a recording of a session. He did that a lot.

  She had asked him about it once: why did he go over his sessions so much?

  “Self-improvement,” he said in his jaunty way. “You’re never too old to get better. When I replay sessions, I see subtle cues I missed, body language I didn’t notice at the time. And of course, it helps me remember things better.”

  It’s gone way past self-training, she thought as she locked the front door behind her. Frederick now spent every spare minute watching his recordings, retiring to his office late at night when other people might be reading or watching television or getting ready for bed.

  There was something unhealthy about it.

  34

  POLICE CHIEF R. J. KENDALL did not tend to be a harsh man. Cardinal had seen him give members of the force second, third, even fourth chances when he himself would have yanked badges and guns. But Kendall was also inconsistent to the point where you wondered if inconsistency was a policy with him, a way to keep staff on their toes. When provoked, he would shout abuse loud enough that the whole station could hear. Then a week later he’d be saying what a good job the former malefactor was doing.