The Man Who Killed by Fraser Nixon Page A

The Pater received postcards from San Francisco, Montana, London, then nothing. No one knew.
    After I returned from service my father sent me to a local college where we adopted Oxford bags and played golf between semesters. I’d picked up enough chemistry and biology to be accepted for medical studies here in Montreal, just in time for Jack to show up out of the blue, claiming to be enrolled in Divinity, one of his jokes, belike, but one never knew. Perhaps the Pater’s influence over him and a wish to atone. For what? Go ahead, Mick, and pound sand.
    Jack and I were Methuselahs amongst the stripling freshmen two years ago but we weren’t alone; my classes were filled with former soldiers playing catch-up after the war. Four semesters was all it took for me to be out on my ear, out in the cold. I was too damn old now, twenty-seven, child of the last year of the last century. No, that wasn’t correct. The century properly started in 1901, the year Queen Victoria died and took all the old certainties with her.
    Unconsciously my fingers mimed the movements of preparing a solution, muscle memory. A steel hypodermic filled with release. Put the thought out of your head. Look at the marks on your pale skin. Smoke a healthy cigaret. Distract yourself. Think of what honourable work you can turn to, think about who you are, where you’re from. You’re the son of a Presbyterian minister born beside the Cariboo Road. You spent your childhood in mining camps and at the mouth of the Fraser, a motherless boy on the shore of the sea with a wild child for a friend, a changeling, a cuckoo’s egg taken under the Pater’s wing. Jack, brother and bane, wide and expansive where you’re narrow and small. Do yourself a favour: stare out the window into the city and a world spinning out of control. You’re nothing, not a mechanic of the human machine, not a son or a lover but a criminal, a shortterm ex-soldier unbloodied in war, an Irish Protestant, the worst of all worlds.
    I picked up the ’phone again and screwed my courage to the sticking place. Into my ear came the operator’s nasal voice, an electric screech as the connection plug was fitted into its hole on the board and a click as the receiver was picked up at the other end of the line. The same maid answered.
    â€œMay I speak with Miss Laura Dunphy, please?” I asked.
    â€œAnd whom shall I say is calling?”
    â€œProfessor Edwin Drood, McGill University.”
    â€œOne moment, if you please.”
    The maid sounded like a Scotch domestic cleared from the Lowlands to serve different masters on the igneous North American rock. A new indenture, wearing wool while her mistress was clad in silk. Laura copper-haired and cool-eyed, the cat of the house. A muffled sound and then her, her voice low and thrilling.
    â€œHello?”
    â€œWhat’re you doing tonight?” I asked.
    â€œWho is this?”
    â€œIt’s me.”
    Silence. Then: “I thought that you would understand how I felt when I failed to accept your last invitation.”
    â€œThat’s the best you can come up with?”
    â€œHonestly, this is too tiresome.”
    â€œNot like dancing,” I said.
    â€œI am sure that I do not know what you mean.”
    â€œThink about it.”
    â€œMichael, you are threatening to become a bore. Have you anything purposeful to say?”
    â€œLaura, you’re not talking to Little Boy Blue here. There’s a strong possibility I might be leaving town for good and I’d like the chance to see you before I go.”
    â€œAnd where are you going?”
    â€œFar away.”
    â€œI’m afraid that I am not at liberty to see you.”
    â€œâ€˜My love swears that she is made of truth, and I do believe her though I know she lies.’”
    â€œMichael, stop this.”
    I hung up. Full stop.
    Depression seized me. I opened the window and smelled snow. I thought of my revolver and