Tight Corner: A Capital Crime

By Roger White

A murder mystery set in Ottawa, Canada, where gothic Parliament buildings dominate a landscape riddled with backstabbers and cocaine sniffers.

Conn Anderson, a former public servant, has turned a passion for old English sports cars into owning a shop, Britfit, that repairs them. All he wants to do is run his business -- that and get to know his landlady's niece a whole lot better.

Everything is going swimmingly until a mysterious government-leased Jaguar is destroyed on the premises by an arsonist, the shop's resident mouse catcher is kicked nearly to death, and someone tries to run Anderson off the road.

As the body count mounts, Anderson is drawn deeper and deeper into the dealings of a government document production ring that feeds on the most vulnerable members of Canadian society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BPS Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781926645643

Roger White

Roger White is an Austin-based magazine editor and freelance writer. He has published numerous articles in magazines and newspapers in Texas and throughout the Southwest. White graduated summa cum laude from the University of Texas at Arlington with a journalism major and English minor. He worked as a sportswriter and columnist in Dallas-Fort Worth before moving to Austin to edit a statewide education magazine.His writing has won various professional and university awards, including Indiana University’s Roy Howard National Award for Public Affairs Reporting, the Press Club of Dallas Katie Award for Magazine Features, Education Writers Association National Special Citation for Education Reporting, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Ralph McGill National Scholarship, and the Columbia School of Journalism National Award for Column Writing. White writes a weekly humor column, entitled “This Old Spouse,” which appears in several newspapers in Texas. The column is also online at oldspouse.wordpress.com. This blog currently has 1,000 followers and counting

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Chapter 1

THE news of Morrison’s death came from the Deputy Minister, who walked into my office while I was absently stroking Jerry’s ears and reading a newspaper spread out on my desk.

I was at my own desk, in my own shop. I didn’t work for Jill Bryson any more and could stroke a cat and read a newspaper in my office any time I felt like it.

Still, when Bryson appeared in my doorway, I pushed the newspaper aside and removed Jerry from my lap. It seemed only polite. Jerry stalked off in a huff with his tail in the air.

Bryson, in her late forties, was tall, slim, and, as always, elegantly dressed. She had closely cut blondish hair and cornflower blue eyes that gleamed at her victims through round rimless glasses. A prime example of the bright, upwardly mobile career women gradually displacing males in the senior ranks of the Public Service, she was especially adept at verbally skewering the pumped up little special assistants from the Minister’s Office.

There are two Ottawas. One is the expanded city of nearly a million people toiling in the revitalized high-technology sector, the soup-to-nuts service industry, and light manufacturing. They live in sprawling suburbs and inner neighbourhoods, some gentrified and some not. The other Ottawa is the federal government insider world of the nation’s capital, its population supplied by the universities, and its epicenter the gothic stone buildings on Parliament Hill overlooking the confluence of three rivers.

Bryson was firmly entrenched in government Ottawa and had learned to be skilled in the day-to-day skirmishes of the higher echelons. Outsiders may see such contests as elegant verbal fencing matches between reasonably civilized individuals. But some very nasty wounds are inflicted.

Anyway, I found myself suddenly sitting more or less at attention that drizzling mid-April Thursday evening.

Hello, Conn.

Deputy.

No need for that now. Just ma’am will do.

She smiled to show she was kidding.

Please, Jill, take a seat. Coffee? There’s a car club bunch coming in about half an hour for a technical session but otherwise I’m fine for a chat.

Bryson looked dubiously at the battered wooden chair in front of my desk but sat down anyway.

No, no coffee, but thanks, Conn. This won’t take long.

It was somewhat puzzling to see her at all. We’d been colleagues of sorts, it was true, and had dealt with more than one crisis together. But we were far from being friends. Deputy Ministers tend to socialize with each other at catered house parties in Rockcliffe and the Glebe, Ottawa’s wealthiest blue blood neighbourhoods. Minions such as I had been, from the lower levels of the public service, aren’t usually invited, unless it’s to deliver a confidential document.

Bryson turned in her chair and gazed through my office’s internal window at the cars in the shop.

They’re like sculptures, really. Beautiful.

It was doubtful that the Deputy was a car gal as such, though word was she invested in art and had a good eye. I waited some more.

I was sorry to hear about your wife, Conn. I think I was in Geneva at the time …

They all loved to mention being in Geneva, Switzerland, where many international organizations are headquartered. Flying off to meetings there at taxpayers’ expense is seen in the public service as a sign of arrival. Brussels or Washington will do in a pinch.

I got your card. Thank you.

There really wasn’t anything else I cared to say.

I’ll come to the point. Remember Rodney Morrison?

I nodded. Rodney Morrison was hard to forget.

Well, he’s dead.

This was a surprise and went a little way toward explaining why the Deputy had dropped by. Morrison was our Cabinet Minister’s Executive Assistant when I last knew him, fearsome and ferocious in meetings and allegedly sought after as a dinner guest on the Hill for his malicious wit.

How?

"He was in a car in Gatineau Park, parked in a lot near one of the lookouts. Quebec Sûreté found him on routine patrol. He killed himself by running a hose from the exhaust pipe to the window, apparently."

When was this?

They found him around 1 a.m. Tuesday morning.

I didn’t see this in the news.

The media don’t always report suicides, but I would have thought the death of someone of Morrison’s prominence on the Hill would have been noted.

No. Well … Bryson started to say, but then resumed gazing at the shop’s interior.

A few things began to occur to me. In the first place, the concept of Rodney Morrison committing suicide was strange in itself. With a few choice words, he could lower the temperature drastically in a room full of officials, as I’d witnessed. But he was basically an ebullient person, and, although people can become depressed due to sudden illness or other reversal of fortune, it still seemed extremely out of character.

Thanks for coming here especially to tell me, Jill, but …

Why am I here?

Bryson grinned fully this time, showing perfectly white teeth and that appealing little gap between her front incisors.

Your invoice was in the glove compartment of the car he was found in. The car is leased to our department.

She handed me a piece of paper I could have identified from a mile away, an invoice headed with our own Britfit logo. It showed that we had charged $607.73, all taxes included, to service a blue 2006 Jaguar S-Type early in January, just over three months ago. The mileage was listed at 103,367 kilometers. Parts replaced included various cooling hoses and the serpentine belt.

I couldn’t remember this car at all. And it was decidedly odd for a government car to have been in to our shop for service in the first place. Government cars tend to be large, discreet General Motors or Ford products, and we never saw them here. True, by the time of this model, the Jaguar company had been taken over by Ford, before that beleaguered firm unloaded it to a company in India. But a Jag S-Type seemed too flashy and expensive looking to flaunt at the taxpayers as a government fleet car in my opinion.

It was definitely our invoice, though. And Dougald had initialled it as having completed the work. Then I remembered where I’d been that week – in Arizona, the North American Mecca of rust-free classic cars, abandoned projects, and parts. The crates full of my pickings from Phoenix and Scottsdale had finally been cleared by Border Agency customs officials and were in our basement now.

"The car’s at the Sûreté garage across the river, and they’re finished with it. I’d like you to look it over. Service it, whatever. Then we’ll allocate it back to the car pool. We’ll use it to carry around our more prestigious visitors from overseas."

And that’s all?

Sure. Public Works can trailer it here tomorrow. They’ll have a requisition or whatever you need.

It seemed straightforward enough. But something was niggling at the back of my mind, like the piece of music you start humming but the title escapes you.

I returned to the subject of Morrison’s suicide.

It’s hard to believe. Any idea why?

"I don’t have all the details, but the Sûreté is satisfied. Apparently there had been a tiff with his significant other, and Rodney stormed out. He had been getting a little … erratic at the office – looked like he’d had too many late nights, alcohol on his breath, that sort of thing. Oh, and he’d left a note in the car, so that seems to clinch it. Anyway, since your shop had done the work on this car before, we might as well have you do it now."

There didn’t seem to be any reason to turn this job down.

Bryson looked at her watch and I glanced at the office clock on the wall above her head. The Triumph club members would be arriving in a matter of minutes.

We walked outside together. Cambridge Street looked better in the dark after a rain than it did in broad daylight. Two hundred yards away, traffic whizzed by on the elevated Queensway highway that bisects the city from east to west.

We strolled over to an idling dark gray Chevrolet Caprice. I noted the chauffeur’s silhouette in the driver’s seat.

Thanks for coming yourself, I said.

She smiled, and we shook hands.

Your shop is on my way home and your lights were on. Good to see you, Conn. You look well. The Jaguar will be here sometime tomorrow.

She paused.

I know I don’t have to mention this, really. But you know me: I like to keep things clear. You’re still bound by the Act. No need to talk about Rodney’s demise to your old friends in the media, hmm?

She slipped into the back seat behind the driver, pulling a Blackberry from her purse. The Caprice murmured away.

Within minutes, the Triumph club technical session was under way. About a dozen mostly fifty-year-old men started arriving, some in their roadsters and some in SUVs or more workaday cars.

In my standing-room-only office, I showed them a video of an interior strip-down and stressed the importance of labelling everything, no matter how obvious the purpose.

I took apart a seat from a TR4A to show them how to stretch a new cover over the base. First comes contact cement – on the cover, not the foam – and then you gradually pull and stretch until the piping lines up at the edges. I answered some questions and smiled and nodded at points raised by others. There was a hubbub of talk, and then suddenly I was swilling out the remainder of the coffee from the maker into the washroom sink, tossing half-eaten muffins into the garbage, filling Jerry’s bowls, switching out more lights, and locking up.

It was getting on for 9:30 p.m. I walked around to the rear compound, unlocked the gate, slid it open, ducked into the driver’s seat of the ’56 British Racing Green MGA, and started it up, still puzzling over something Bryson had said about Morrison.

As I automatically scanned the gauges for temperature and oil pressure while the car warmed up, I remembered chatting idly with Morrison once in the twelfth-floor Minister’s Office boardroom while we waited for other officials to appear. I couldn’t remember what we were supposed to have been meeting about – probably some minor crisis that would end up being a one-day wonder like most of them.

I visualized him flapping his hands about, and remembered his chuckling about his lack of everyday skills.

Albert does everything. I can’t cook, can’t hammer a nail, can’t drive …

If Rodney Morrison couldn’t drive a car, what was he doing alone and dead in a government Jaguar in Gatineau Park?

Chapter 2

I prefer things to make sense and, after a fashion, they had been doing so earlier that Thursday, April 16. Going over the accounts receivable with Marjorie was a start.

The objective of my incisive, pointed questions was to elicit firm answers demonstrating that the business was healthy. Believe me, when your business is repairing old English sports cars, you want facts that demonstrate good health. And Marjorie was providing them, sort of.

And through the internal glass window of the office, I could see signs of definite activity.

Dougald had the head off the engine of the dark gray XK150S Drophead and was peering in at the entrails, giving an effective demonstration of an expert sucking his teeth upon viewing an impossible job.

Two bays over, Reg was replacing the wheels of the green MGA, having just finished his work on the brakes.

The ’61 Mark II Jaguar, entering its third week with us as an alluring fixture on the main hoist, was still going nowhere. We were waiting to refit its radiator, which was being re-cored by the specialist we use. Outside on the forecourt, partially sheltered under our shop’s roofing and out of the worst of the April drizzle, were the bread and butter cars of our work: two MGBs, a TR6, and a Frogeye Sprite. Both ’Bs were ready to be collected by their owners after minor tune-ups and oil changes, while the Triumph and the Sprite needed closer looks for misfiring and a slipping clutch respectively.

JP, our delivery man, trainee apprentice, and general dogs-body rolled into one, was still out in the Land Rover supposedly picking up my Arizona crates of parts from the Border Agency depot near the airport.

And Jerry, our resident black-and-white alleged pest controller, was yawning on his favourite car seat cushion near the washroom.

All in all, a normal, sensible Thursday at Britfit.

But then some would say that operating such a business in a city like Ottawa, where our northern latitude winter puts a stop to open-topped sports car driving for almost half the year, is a senseless idea in the first place.

Except for this: The city and surrounding area are full of retired and semi-retired public servants who now had the financial wherewithal to acquire cars they used to have, or dreamed of having, back when they still had hair that grew straight out of their heads instead of being combed over their bald patches.

There are half a dozen clubs in the city dedicated to each of the main English marques, each club numbering at least a hundred members. We were starting the season that would see, every weekend for at least another six full months, car shows and rallies, show and shine concours d’élégance competitions, and organized tours and outings. Baseball-capped, gray-bearded drivers and their moderately enthusiastic female navigators would be joyfully puttering anywhere and everywhere about the countryside in their MGs and Jaguars after a long hibernation.

We weren’t the only repair garage for these cars in the area. At least five other competitors around and about were chasing the same customers. But we had carved out a solid niche through word of mouth, which is a prerequisite in a business like this. Dougald and Reg were veteran mechanics who knew their way around these lumps of compound curves that had been designed by artists’ eyes but assembled by trade union hands to a price.

Marjorie was a key element of our modest success. There’s nothing like a saucy receptionist with a caustic Manchester accent for making owners feel apologetic for having complained about parting with their money. She invariably took pity on them, though, offering them a seat and a cup of tea in a corner of her office that she’d repainted herself over a weekend and decorated with classic car posters and filled with plants.

My own standard speech to red-faced men squawking about their bills goes something like this:

Look, you bought this MG (or Jaguar, or Triumph, or Austin Healey, or Morgan, or Lotus, or Bentley) because you love it, not because it’s reliable. If you want reliable, get a Miata.

We guarantee our work, and our customers keep coming back. While not rich since taking over the business some two years previously, I was solvent. The first year, as I tried to make sense of Dougald’s financial situation, was the most difficult.

Dougald was close to retirement by then. He had apprenticed at Britfit as a young man when the streets of most Canadian cities, and many others in countries around the world, from Australia to Zanzibar, were clogged with all manner of English cars. Selling millions of Austins, Morrises, Triumphs, Vauxhalls, MGs, and so on, the British enjoyed a huge market share.

The death of their car industry is well documented. Add militant trade unionism to management lassitude and complacency, stir in German and Japanese aggression in marketing excellent products, dilute with good old American know-how, and you got Brits in a stew. They lost their initial advantage, especially in the crucial North American market, and moved to the bottom of the food chain.

By the time Dougald, working alone, was considering closing the doors for good, Britfit was certainly not humming with activity – even though he did have a few loyal clients left, including me.

At that point, I had left the federal government, and, armed with a healthy severance package, decided it wasn’t too late in life to take a chance on running my own business.

My family had emigrated from England to Canada when I was a lad, and I had grown up with a Gilbert and Sullivan soundtrack and a Peter Sellers–driven sense of humour. As an English sports car fan from the time I could speak, I had enthusiasm and a modicum of knowledge about the cars. I also had some public service experience in management and a definite need to fill the hours.

Dougald had the expertise and a core client base. Once we’d got a few false starts with some new personnel out of the way, things started to pick up. I’m not terribly comfortable with active marketing, but attendance at a few key car club meetings handing out business cards and a gradually expanding positive reputation by word of mouth were seemingly doing the trick. Now in our third year, we were doing okay.

In response to my questions this day, Marjorie was incorporating much rolling of her eyes, the odd giggle and shrugging of shoulders into laconic answers along the lines of:

Well, I’ve left two messages reminding him of his bill, haven’t I? and They say the container was delayed at the Southampton end, but should be in Montreal next Tuesday, and He’s sent another e-mail asking when it’ll be ready because he’s booked in for a paint job elsewhere in ten days.

All right, Marj, I’ll put the kettle on.

I fussed about in our galley, while Marjorie attended to the ringing phone. Then I headed across the shop floor to consult Dougald for a few minutes.

A third-generation Canadian, Dougald O’Neill was the son of dairy farmers of Irish heritage who first settled in the upper Ottawa Valley. Growing up, Dougald had shown an aptitude for fixing farm machinery, which eventually led him to car mechanics half a century ago.

Anything but cows, he told me.

Now seventy years old, Dougald was short, compact, and very strong and fit. He was quiet, a member of his church choir, married to Molly for fifty years, and a devoted gardener. Over two years ago, when I had raised the idea with him about buying his business, stressing that as far as I was concerned I couldn’t do it without his staying on, he asked for a couple of days to think about it. He left his answer on my telephone answering machine.

Conn, it’s Dougald. Give me a call, boss.

In the ensuing months of paperwork, licensing, meetings with my bank manager, accountant, and lawyer, and endless faxing and city hall maneuvering, he never hesitated in seeing the ownership changeover through to completion.

We kept the original name of the business, Britfit, after bandying about some alternatives using various combinations of our names. It simplified the changeover process, and I kind of liked it. Running a British car can give you fits of temper, for sure, as illustrated by some well-known jokes about problem-plagued Lucas electrical wiring, with which most of these cars were originally equipped. Many owners sport t-shirts with Lucas – Prince of Darkness lettering on the front, for example. In fact, owners who tamper with the wiring, adding fog lights or radios incorrectly, often caused electrical problems themselves.

In any event, we preferred to think that the name reflected that we were making Brit cars fit for use.

When the day finally came that we were able to pin our first licence to operate under new ownership on the office bulletin board, we had a little celebration. An ounce of Jamieson’s each in a plastic cup.

Boss?

Dougald, please, I’m putting in the money, but you kept this shop going by yourself for so long I’d rather you just call me Conn.

Dougald looked thoughtfully at the cup almost lost in his large freckled fist. It always took him awhile to say things, which is unusual, in my experience, in a man of Irish descent.

Conn, I think you saved my life here. I have Molly, and my garden, and the singing, so I do. But I’ve got to keep working.

We finished the whiskey bottle around midnight. By then the volume of the shop’s radio, tuned to a golden oldies station, was pretty loud and our voices hoarse from our duets. But we were both in the shop the next morning, in our overalls, pulling the rear axle off a Triumph Spitfire very, very slowly and carefully.

How’s it looking, Dougald? I asked now about the XK150S.

"The lobes are gone, the chains are