The Dutch Wife by Eric P. McCormack Read Free Book Online Page B

want to see him?”
    The Judge shook his head. “I had no desire whatever to see him,” he said. “But the Law Society’s made it mandatory that we consult with these so-called experts before sentencing.”
    “Ah,” she said. She was aware that in a few days her father would be passing sentence on a serial murderer, Joshua Simmonds, the so-called “Calendar Killer.” The case had been made notorious in every newspaper across the country. Rachel, like most of the young women in the province, had followed it with fascination mixed with relief.
    – 7 –
    THERE WERE TWO REMARKABLE THINGS about Simmonds, the murderer of a number of women throughout Eastern Ontario. The first was that he used a very old-fashioned method—the garotte. The second was that he performed his murders on the first day of each month, selecting only women unfortunate enough to have names associated with the month in question.
    Hence the nickname the Calendar Killer.
    The initial murder of the sequence, for example, took place in a rooming house in Queensville on the first of April. The victim’s name was April Smithers, a youthful prostitute. She was discovered on top of her bed with a leather garotte still round her neck. The page of a wall calendar with the date circled in red ink lay beside her. She was fully clothed and had not been otherwise molested.
    The Queensville police only began to understand that this was the beginning of a series on the morning of the first of May. That was when a young woman who worked at her father’s farm, two miles out of town, was found murdered in the cowshed. A garotte was still in place, a red-circled calendar page was pinned to her blouse. Again there seemed to be no overt sexual element to the crime.
    Such was the pattern of the killings. They went on for several months, the next victims being June Lavigne, Julia Tompkins and Augusta Strathy.
    But the end was near.
    In late August, James Bromley, a provincial highways inspector and sharp-eyed amateur naturalist, returned from a three-month visit to Australia, where he’d been studying road construction in extreme climatic conditions. While he was abroad, he’d heard nothing about the serial murders in his homeland. Now, he recollected something he’d observed just before leaving for Australia—which happened to be the very week before the killing of Elspeth May. He’d been inspecting surface wear and tear on a rural road near the May farm when he’d spotted an unlikely bird in a bush nearby. He was almost sure it was a blue-spangled oceanic grebe, thousands of miles from its natural aquatic habitat.
    The bird flew into some trees and he couldn’t resist following it, keeping as quiet as possible so as not to disturb it. He saw it perch on a branch and found himself a hiding place from which to watch it. He had barely settled down when, to his surprise, he saw that another man had been lurking in a nearby clump of trees. This man, unaware of Bromley’s presence, was now stealthily heading out towards the road. Bromley himself stayed on for another ten minutes, fascinated by the grebe.
    Now, all these months later, having returned from Australia and heard about the serial killings, Bromley thought it might be wise to contact the police, for he had recognized the face of the man he’d seen that morning near the May farm.
    A dozen officers immediately went to the Station Hotel in downtown Queensville. They burst open the door to the first-floor room of Joshua Simmonds, a permanent hotel resident. He was a forty-year-old scrivener in the Public Records Bureau—where Bromley had often seen him in the course of reporting to the Department of Roads. In a cupboard in Simmonds’s hotel room were several home-made leather garottes and a familiar wall calendar with missing pages.
    He was arrested and charged with the murders.
    NOW THAT THIS LOATHSOME CREATURE had been caught, the police were anxious to interrogate him. Simmonds seemed just as anxious to