Snow Job by William Deverell

Author:William Deverell [Deverell, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781551993225
Google: 09BI_x9nraMC
Amazon: B00329UWHW
Barnesnoble: B00329UWHW
Goodreads: 10928432
Publisher: Random House LLC
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Nine o’clock Wednesday morning. In half an hour Thiessen would be joining the rest of the cabinet to debate a dying effort to stave off defeat the next day and an election that could send the Tories tumbling to a grab bag of seats. His was safe, maybe the safest in the country outside the Bible belt. Clara Gracey’s wasn’t, the Toronto burbs.

He could live with the likely scenario, Clara slip-sliding back into academia, good old boy Charley Thiessen elected to succeed her, maybe by acclamation. A spell as Opposition leader, winning applause with his jabs and quips, galloping to an easy win in the next election. Prime Minister Thiessen. Call me Charley.

He sat back, his sock feet up on his desk with its old framed photo of his younger mom, smiling down at little Charley in his Cub uniform. Who’d have known?

He’d run that scenario past her last night. “That’s my Charley,” she’d told him. “You are the man.” She hadn’t said one mean word about how he’d wrong-footed himself in the National Press Theatre — though it had featured on the nightly newscasts, Charley in his juice-stained shirt, his mouth opening and closing like a fish freshly landed. Rick Mercer had done a prime-time skit on the CBC, in a dripping red shirt.

He picked up the phone. “Send him in.” Crumwell, who’d called en route from Ogilvie Road with a promise of good news “that I’m sure you’ll enjoy.” Abzal Erzhan found hiding in the back room of a Montreal tenement? Arthur Beauchamp arrested smoking crack in a bordello? The consensus at CSIS was that Beauchamp’s kidnap scenario stank. Cooked up for a murder defence. That gasbag and his smirking put-down.

Crumwell slipped in like a thief, quietly closed the door.

“How’s that problem with your, uh, works, Anthony?”

“Much better. You wanted something on Arthur Beauchamp.”

“All you got.”

“I hope this isn’t too rich for your blood.” A rare, puckish smile. “He’s having an affair with a convicted felon.”

Thiessen almost slipped off his chair as he sat upright. “Are you putting me on?”

“Savannah Buckett, his farmhand. One presumes she’s progressed from raids on timber booms to a more intimate form of radical action.”

“You got proof? Photos? Tapes?”

“Nothing quite so graphic, but you can take it to the bank. God knows why our man on Garibaldi was so slow in forthcoming — Agent DiPalma is a bit reserved about such matters, a goody two-shoes — but it’s all over that island.”

Thiessen didn’t know exactly where Garibaldi was. He tried to picture it, barren, windswept, the mail packet pulling in twice a week, tobacco-chewing fishermen in their Wellingtons, slatternly housewives at their clotheslines gossiping with neighbours.

“Ms. Buckett is known to be publicly quarrelling with her partner, who is rarely seen on the island any more. But here’s the clincher: there’s an eyewitness to one of Beauchamp’s coital diversions with this young woman. One Robert Stonewell, a local businessman, caught them in bed.” An impish grin.

Thiessen couldn’t suppress a whoop of triumph. Revenge was his, sweet, sweet revenge.

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