I used to dread flying because I dreaded having to tell lies. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a very accomplished liar. If asked, I lie about where I’m going, where I’ve been, and whatever I did while I was… wherever I might allegedly have been. My pants have not, so far, caught fire. My point is – I don’t want to be asked, and I resist putting myself in a position where I might be. Purists would suggest that I try just… telling the truth. But try telling somebody beside you in a plane that you’ve just flown into town to kill somebody, and see what happens next. Telling the truth can be complicated, too.
Some people are extroverts. They call themselves “people” people, like it was a hybrid word: people-people. Like beriberi. They like to chat. They’re interested in sports, or hobbies, or, God help us, politics or religion. What is it about the sight of my unattended ear-hole that leads those people-people to want to pour drivel-drivel into it? I mean, if you’re a ‘people-person’, shouldn’t you be able to tell when a given other person just wants to be left alone? Un-talked to? You’d think so. But, for many of these folks, it isn’t their interest in other people that drives them – it’s a need to keep silence at bay. What they don’t understand, is that I am paid very large sums of money to solve the exact problem of how to live without hearing from someone like them, ever again. However, I try very hard not to do volunteer work in my own field. It’s unprofessional. For the guy beside me on my flight home, I would have made an exception.
It was a long flight, for starters. We were heading back into the teeth of an already long winter – did I mention that, despite my name, I absolutely loathe winter? He had the window seat, but arrived last, with his hands full with a large iced coffee, and carry-on luggage that he couldn’t manage to stow until he had first spilled his coffee on me. So, the flight began with profuse apologies, and once the ice was broken, so-to-speak, he did. Speak, that is. I learned that his name was Malcolm but he went by Mal; I learned about his sales business, his golf membership and golf scores, his wife and his wife’s sister and her gall-bladder problems, and their family cottage in Muskoka, and his partner’s wife, who was apparently, hot for him. Around the end of the second hour, I briefly fantasized about crushing his windpipe, just to get some peace, but another part of me figured, what the hell, he’s just talking a lot about himself and his life: typical extrovert. So, I tuned him out, for the most part, until we got to the awkward silence.
It wasn’t awkward, to begin with, it was blessed. He finally quit talking. For almost half an hour, he said nothing at all. And he drank two quick scotches, still silent. And then he asked a question.
“Have you ever thought about killing somebody?” he asked.
Besides you? I thought to myself. All the time. But I lied.
“I’m sure most people have thought of it, a time or two,” I said. “But I have it on good authority, they arrest you for doing that, in civilian life.”
“What if you could do it, without getting caught?”
“Everybody gets caught,” I said. Except me, I thought.
“You said, ‘in civilian life’. Does that mean you were in the military?” he asked.
“Several years,” I said. “Home and overseas.”
“How long?”
“Long enough, and then some,” I said.
“You ever killed anybody?”
“New topic, please,” I said.
“So, you have.”
“Sorry?”
“Killed somebody. You have.”
“I don’t talk about it.”
“Is it difficult?” he asked.
“Not very, actually. I got to be pretty good at it. All different kinds of ways. You could use a wire, or a blade, or a sniper rifle, even explosives. Lots of different ways you could do it, if you’ve been trained. You know, I read a story in the paper, a Canadian sniper took out a guy from just over three kilometers away. Now, that’s a trained guy. An expert. Ordinary guy like you, he’d probably have to get up close, just start blasting. Who were you planning to kill?”
No answer.
“Ok, don’t tell me.”
Mal just smiled.
“Is that how you suggest I’d go about it?” he asked.
“The affair? I assume you know how.”
“No, the killing part,” he said. “Is that what you’d do?”
“If you were writing a film script,” I said. “In real life, everybody gets caught. They arrest you, throw your ass in Millhaven, or Warkworth, or Collins Bay, or some other kind of prison, with the big walls and the razor wire. I wouldn’t advise it, Mal, really I wouldn’t.”
“Ok. But… just hypothetically. How would you go about killing somebody, and them not know it?”
“Oh, they generally know when they’ve been killed,” I said. “I mean, there’s blood. There’s pain. Darkness coming, shortness of breath, then absence of breath. However fleeting, people generally have an instant, between the act and the actuality, when they understand that you’ve killed them. Sometimes they see it coming. Sometimes they fight back, make it more of a struggle. You and me, mano-a-mano, like that. But people generally know. Hypothetically, I mean.”
“I see. So, there’s no way to do it, they don’t see it coming?”
“Well, you could try a Perils-of-Pauline kind of thing… tie your wife and your partner to a railway track. But they’d hear the train coming, and see it before it got there. You know? Like in the silent movies?”
“Sorry. I never had that much time for the movies,” Mal said. “I had a son, I spent his childhood years teaching him how to play baseball, how to fish, how to hunt, how to be a good man. And I had my work, even before this current business. All those years, I never went to a movie. Not once. Never felt the need.”
“So, what did you do, before sales, that took up so much of your time?” I asked. I was getting interested, in spite of myself.
“Intelligence,” Mal said. “I worked for CSIS, and then, for Mossad. It was very time consuming, and I was away from home a lot. Like you must have been, in your military days.”
“I guess you do have a good idea, what it might have been like,” I said. “But then, you must have had some training of your own, how to kill people? Why ask me about my thoughts on the subject?”
“Never too late to learn things,” Mal said. “Until it is. Too late, I mean. I’ve spent a lot of my life, learning things I never thought to learn, or wanted to. All that learning. It made my head hurt. Mostly, worth it. But after my son died, I kind of, just… lost interest.”
“What did you do instead?”
“Took my pension. Started my company. And my number one occupation, you might say, was research. I spent a lot of years just digging into the disease that killed my son. As a volunteer, you might say. Did you ever do any volunteer work?”
“Can’t say as I have,” I said. “Been tempted, a time or two. But the billable work, that’s always my number one thing. When I’m not working, I like to party. Relax on a beach. Mostly I never volunteered for anything. You learn not to.”
“You do at that,” Mal said. “So, you always work for your pay? A professional?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe you can give me your card, before we split up,” Mal said. “I might need to reach out, get some help.”
I handed him my card, the one that said, Tadeusz (Ted) Winterkill, Human Resources Management. Specialist: Offshoring and Outplacement.
“You can call me,” I said, “if you ever need my kind of help. Offshoring, or like that. I mean, not that hypothetical stuff we were just joking about.”
“I know what you mean,” Mal said.
“Unless, of course, you’re getting a lot of calls from an air-duct cleaning outfit,” I said. “For them, I would totally make an exception.”
Mal grinned but said nothing.
We had another stretch of awkward silence. The flight crew were starting to push carts up and down the aisles, and the aircraft was starting to make a slow turn. We had about an hour left, I guessed, before final approach.
“What was it, killed your son?” I asked. I suppose I should have known better.
“Some terrible, wasting disease, I thought,” Mal said. “Hit him like a train. Later, I discovered, it was some kind of industrial poisoning. He was in the cement industry – some by-product. Thallium, it turned out to be. Found in the post-mortem. It was odd, though… nobody ever established how he’d come into contact with it. We looked, and we looked, and we looked, but we could never prove that he’d been anywhere that he could have been exposed to it in those quantities.”
“Must have been hard to take,” I said. I can do sympathy, just as well as the next sociopath.
“You have no idea,” Mal said. “It killed his mother. She was gone herself, four months after we buried Denver.”
“So your wife is actually dead, then. You won’t be tying her to the railway tracks, in your movie, I mean.”
“No. Not really,” he said.
“And your son’s name was Denver?” I said. “Unusual.”
“Sophie was a big John Denver fan,” Mal said. “But for some reason, John seemed too common for her. She chose the last name to go first. Comes down to it, anybody can be named anything. Like Winterkill – how’d you land with a name like that?”
“I chose it. Literally. My own name was un-pronounceably Polish. I got tired of hearing it mangled. So, I chose Ted instead of Tadeusz, and I chose Winterkill, because I liked gardening, once upon a time. It has a kind of ring to it, in my line of work. Exposure to winter conditions. Like the weather and the body, growing cold. For a while, I even carried a card advertising forestry services, but really, who gives a shit about trees? I know I don’t. I gave that up, chose something else.”
Mal nodded.
“Ears are popping,” I said. “We’re finally on approach.”
“Been a long flight, eh?” Mal said. “But it’s been a slice, getting to talk to you. You probably have no idea.”
“Likewise,” I said. Liar, liar.
“Still, though,” Mal said. “I’ve got to say, personally, some things are really, really worth doing, even on a volunteer basis. Oh, I know – you’re probably a lot more introverted than me. A very private individual. But us extroverts, even we have to do what the gods command, at the end of the day. Think about it, anyway.”
Mal blew his nose and looked down at his hands. They were shaking, a bit. He looked pale, but he reached into his pocket for a pill bottle, shook a couple into his other hand, and then swallowed them.
“Feeling airsick,” he said. “Or a touch of flu or something. But I can sleep when I get where I’m going.”
He got me to help lift down his bags, then he promptly tripped and had to be helped up. He was looking distinctly grey, and I never saw him again. I’d have liked to. I thought we might have had a little business to transact. But I heard later, he died – just keeled over on the airport shuttle, and popped his clogs. Maybe he’d not been feeling well, right from the get-go.
I never even properly unpacked, though, before I began to feel a little, and then, a lot, rough around the edges. Some virus, maybe, or food poisoning. I got in the door of my condo, and there were the two working girls I’d had the concierge let in, waiting for me. They smiled, expectantly; I rushed right past them, into the can. Barely got my trousers down, and started crapping my brains out. Ohmigod, I was feeling rough.
“You want we should leave?” one of them asked me. The blonde one. “Only, you don’t look like you’re gonna be, ya know, up too much?”
“Yes,” I said, as the chills hit me. “Go. Go. I’ll pay you later. No, wait…” I peeled a wad of cash out of my wallet. “Take this, and call me in a couple days.”
That’s when the vomiting started. I was so ill, I thought I might die, and feared that I wouldn’t, as the saying goes.
Mind over matter, I told myself. You haven’t tidied up, after your trip. That will never do. I sort of, almost, got started with unpacking, then I had to rush back to the can. Going off at both ends, so to speak. And fever. And shakes. And pain. Whatever this was, I prayed that it would pass quickly.
I think I spent close to a day or even two without leaving my condo. I barely left the john. Somewhere, in there, my phone rang. It went unanswered. It rang again, an hour or so later, and then somebody came and pounded on the door. I was too weak to answer it, but I called out.
“Help me,” I said. “I’m sick.”
They kicked the door in. It was the police.
“Mr. Winterkill,” one of them said to me. “Are you alright? Do you need a doctor?”
“Hospital,” I said. “Sick as a dog. Why are you here?”
“Do you know a guy named Malcolm? Shared a flight with you, all the way from Vancouver?”
I nodded.
“Yes,” I said. “I heard he died. Was on the news. Food poisoning, maybe? Something… I may have caught… whatever he had.”
“Poisoning,” the officer said. “More than one variety. He died on the shuttle bus. He never even made it to emergency, he just died. So, we had to look. His autopsy turned up a massive dose of poison, a regular cocktail of poisons. And it looked like he’d swallowed them, deliberately.”
“Suicide?” I said. “Not sick?”
“Oh, if he’d lived, he would have been sick to death, anyway,” the officer said. “We’d like to talk to you about that.”
“Oh. God. Excuse me,” I said. And retched and retched. “Get me a doctor. I’m sick. I’m so sick.”
“Did you know this Malcolm character, previously?” the officer said.
“Never met him before. Wouldn’t shut up. Talked and talked and talked. Spilled coffee on me. Clumsy idiot.”
“After he died, the Officer of the Coroner searched his belongings, as well as his… person. And his personal effects. They discovered a letter, which is when they called us.”
“Who is us?” I said.
“I’m Sheldon. That’s Geordie, over there. We’re with the homicide squad.”
“Whatever you think I did, I wasn’t there,” I said. “I certainly didn’t kill this Mal character, even though I thought of it. The mouth on him. He never stopped talking.”
“He tell you about his son? Denver?”, Geordie asked.
“Mentioned him,” I said. “Why?”
“Maybe you should have paid more attention,” Sheldon said.
“Nothing to do with me,” I said.
“You killed him, Mr. Winterkill,” Sheldon said. “Poisoned him, in fact. With thallium.”
The fuck. I remembered that case. Maybe. Wasn’t the only time.
“I never did,” I said, weakly. I was about twenty seconds too late, saying it, to be really convincing… but I was trying hard not to vomit. “He said that, in his letter? That I killed his son?”
“He did,” Geordie said. “Said it. Documented it. Pointed us toward a whole file, in fact, full of evidence. Documented right back to the guy who paid you for it. Who is also dead, as it happens. But shot, not poisoned, like you.”
“Poisoned?” I croaked. “I’m poisoned?”
“To be precise, Mr. Winterkill, you’re completely fucked. By the way, this’d be a first for us – interviewing the murder victim. But I guess you’d like to read it, what he’s done to you, in his own words. He went to an awful lot of trouble to set you up. I made you a photocopy.”
He handed me the paper.
Dear Mr. Winterkill, it read. I hope this letter finds you really, really ill, because by the time you receive it, I will be dead, and you will be on your way to hell. I know you killed Denver, my son, my dear boy. I’ve left a file that proves it, but I wanted you to know why and how I’ve killed you. And killed myself, for that matter. The iced coffee I spilled on you contained two ingredients: compound number one is a common horse liniment, called dimethyl sulfoxide. It has trans-dermal properties. When I spilled the iced coffee on you, it carried the second compound through your skin, directly into your body. That is a rare and deadly isotope called polonium-210. It’s the same thing the Russians used to kill Alexander Litvanenko. The cyanide will take me first, so all that’s left is to tell you, your end will not be pretty. Or pleasant. It will get worse, believe me. Much worse. And then, worse again. I wanted you to know, before you go, that you are suffering for my son, and I wanted to repeat myself because it will annoy you: some kinds of volunteer work are absolutely, utterly, worthwhile. Goodbye, and good riddance. Vengefully, Malcolm.
“Do you want us to transport you to hospital now, Mr. Winterkill?” asked Geordie. “Or should we wait a few days, see how you’re feeling? But hey, look out the window. It’s snowing. Ain’t that great?”
“Just perfect,” I said.
by 
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