Читать книгу Death in the Age of Steam - Mel Bradshaw - Страница 10

Stretched on the sand, he managed to sleep till an overnight steamer clattered eastward down the lake towards Rochester or Kingston. Through the narrow gap in the embankment, he watched the sparks shooting from its twin stacks as it passed. You can incinerate a body or sink it. You can bury it or just leave it lying in the bush. Towards four thirty the sky grew pale behind the railway trestle, whose stark beams at dawn would have made a serviceable gallows.

As soon as it was light enough to collect firewood, Harris heated a cup of water for a shave. His toilet made, he inspected the valley floor and sides right the way round the lagoon. Then he clambered over the new railway embankment to look for signs of digging—a messy, unpromising business. All the earth was freshly turned. Nowhere was any grass disturbed, for none had yet had time to seed and grow. By nine he had finished the landward slope and crossed to the lakeward when from the direction of Pickering a dinghy hove in view. Two men pulled on a pair of oars each while a third, hatless and mostly bald, sat firmly gripping the gunwales in the stern. There was still no breath of wind.

The tall front rower wore red whiskers and faded tweeds, including a tweed cap with a button on the top. Harris climbed down to the sandbar to steady the nose of the boat as it grounded.

“So, Mr. Harris,” said Vandervoort, jumping out, “it’s plain you don’t keep bankers’ hours. Are all these footprints yours?”

Harris nodded. “The sand was quite smooth when I arrived. Here is the—here it is—this way.”

The inspector followed, crouching at the water’s edge to remove the stones from the oilskin.

“Watch where you put your feet now, Whelan,” he cautioned the disembarking second man, whose blue tunic looked as if it had been pulled on over pyjamas. “You don’t want to be walking on this.”

Once the cover was pulled back, there was no danger of Whelan’s walking anywhere in the vicinity.

“I’ll have a look around,” he announced with the assurance of someone not under Vandervoort’s orders, though he seemed willing enough to let the city detective take centre stage.

“Can you just help our scientific friend ashore first?” said Vandervoort. “Ah, French perfume.”

Harris clapped a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. This morning, however, he resisted the temptation to look away. In time, it had become possible actually to see the arm around or through the images it conjured up.

Vandervoort followed his gaze. “See anything you recognize?”

It was mostly white or the faintest pink, though mottled with darker patches, and too swollen to give any idea of its living thickness. The bracelet was so tight around it as to seem embedded in the flesh. Harris knelt and studied the four visible oval medallions, each of which depicted in intricate relief a European city. London, Paris, Dublin, Milan.

“I don’t know if this is a common pattern,” he said with difficulty. “William Sheridan did once buy his daughter something similar. Of course, she could have given it away.”

“Could she now? She used to ride here?”

“She and another lady.” Harris passed on the description he had got from the Scarboro sawmill. “In any event, you would not expect a woman going for a ride to wear this sort of jewellery.”

“Maybe she forgot to take it off,” Vandervoort casually suggested.

Theresa had been forgetful in just this way. Furthermore, had she intended to leave home, she would have taken as much of her jewellery as possible, if only to meet her expenses.

Rather than utter either of these two thoughts, Harris turned to ascertain what had become of the “scientific friend” and was surprised to recognize the chemistry professor who had come to the bank three days before. He wore the same old-fashioned green frock coat with full skirts and wide lapels. Even with Whelan’s help, he was having trouble leaving the dinghy. He seemed to be trying to climb over one of the thwarts, keep hold of both gunwales and carry a bulky leather case all at the same time.

Once his feet were planted on the sandbar, however, his queasiness left him, and he approached the arm without flinching. Vandervoort asked what he made of it.

“It has been in the water,” he said. His mouth formed a firm horizontal between sentences. “You can tell by the odour, quite different from decay on dry land. Oh, hallo, Mr. Harris. Not too long in the water, mind. The formation of adipocere is not far advanced.”

“Please, Dr. Lamb,” said Vandervoort. “I only went to a country school.”

“Come now, that fatty substance you smell that causes the bloating. Then again, the epidermis is mostly washed off, but not entirely. Do you see these patches of outer skin with the hairs still attached? Now compare these to the paler and quite hairless inner skin.”

Both Vandervoort and Harris took the hairs on trust.

“Going out on a limb, so to speak, I should say it has been immersed a matter of days, rather than weeks or months. Can’t tell much more until I get it back in the laboratory. First, though, it might be useful to take a photograph of it just as it was found.”

“Photograph!” said Whelan, whose reconnaissance had not taken him out of earshot.

“Don’t worry, constable,” said Vandervoort. “We are not going to hang it in your parlour.” To Harris he murmured, “Knows his cadavers, this Lamb. Foremost expert in the province and a great help to the department. When he writes his book, New York or Boston will hire him away from us in a trice.”

The professor had removed a tripod from his leather case and was settling upon it a camera that resembled a bottle on its side—a rosewood bottle with a square base, cylindrical brass neck and brass cap.

“I’m not going to pose with the thing,” said Whelan, “and that’s final.”

Vandervoort looked as if he would not mind posing, but Lamb didn’t ask. He merely laid a foot-rule on the sand in front of the arm to give an idea of scale. He slid a glass plate into the back of the camera then removed the lens cap. Glancing between a pocket watch in his left hand and the shifting clouds above, he exposed the plate for more than five minutes.

Harris meanwhile made more footprints. He tramped about impatiently, not looking at or seeing anything in particular. He was inclined to believe in Lamb, but was at the same time hoping that Lamb would find that he had underestimated the period of the limb’s immersion, by even as little as a week. Surely, an expert could go that far wrong without disgrace.

The professor at last removed his photographic plate. When he loaded a second, Vandervoort voiced concern for the public purse. One photograph, he said, would be quite enough. Lamb went ahead anyway, uncovering the lens for twice as long.

Collecting himself somewhat, Harris took this opportunity to show Whelan the tracing of Elsie’s sketch. The Pickering constable didn’t believe he had ever seen the subject.

“Is it her arm then?” he asked.

Harris had no reply.

“Well, whoever the poor lady was, bless her soul, her other parts had better not go turning up in the township of Pickering.”

When Harris asked if the lower Rouge were considered a dangerous place, he was harangued about the increase in lawlessness generally, short-sighted paring of police salaries, and the drunken rowdiness of railway crews in particular—although they had last month finally moved on to Darlington. Ending on a more cheerful note, Whelan said that at least the valley was no longer frequented by wolves and bears. “The only beasts today are the two-legged kind.”

Leaving Lamb to wrap the arm for transport, Vandervoort ambled over with a cadging gleam in his eye. He looked altogether too comfortable.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a cigar, inspector?” Harris inquired dryly.

Vandervoort’s face fell. “I was about to ask you the same,” he said. “Afraid I smoked the last of Lamb’s—but we might try Whelan.”

Poor Whelan, who was busy hoisting the dinghy’s sail, had not even managed to bring his trousers. Harris said he would sooner hear what the police knew of Mrs. Crane.

“We’ve been down that road before,” said Vandervoort.

“But something must have turned up in the last four days. Look here, Inspector, you seem happy enough to have been told about this find. Let’s work together.”

Vandervoort shook his head. “I saw it at Sheridan’s funeral,” he said, “when you tried to protect my informant from me. You’re an enterprising sort of man, Isaac Harris—and one that will not mind his own business.”

“Could you not tell me—?”

“I’ll tell you this. I’ve questioned your lighthouse keeper sober, and I’ve loosened his tongue with drink. I’ve turned him upside down and inside out. He knows nothing of any harm Mrs. C. may have come to.”

“And did you,” Harris pursued, “offer him the inducement of leniency in the matter of the contraband revolvers?”

“That’s out of my hands. Ask no more.”

Harris saw from a purplish tint suffusing Vandervoort’s countenance that he was about to anger the detective. The professor’s brains would in any case make for better pickings.

The first breeze in over a week had crept up on the lagoon and was ruffling its surface. Waves from the lake pushed through the gap beneath the trestle. A sharpish gust brought Lamb over.

“I don’t like the look of this weather,” he said. “I’m a hopeless sailor.”

“How are you on a horse?” asked Harris. “You’re more than welcome to Banshee.”

“So, I qualify for a loan after all,” the professor commented mildly.

Harris smiled at the reference, which eluded Vandervoort.

“I don’t know, really,” Lamb continued, “since your animal hasn’t yet made my acquaintance, whether I should feel quite safe without you there as well.”

Harris agreed to go with him and set about shortening Banshee’s stirrups. Lamb meanwhile stood and watched the loaded dinghy—Whelan working the sheet, Vandervoort at the helm—head into open water. As the wind lifted the professor’s coat skirts and sent his grey curls scuttling away from the smooth crown of his head to cluster over his ears, he expressed apprehension that the oilskin package and all his camera equipment would be lost “at sea.”

This risk appeared negligible compared to the ghastliness of transporting the limb by land, which it was in any event too late for Harris to propose. He helped the professor into the saddle and mounted behind him, reaching around his thick waist for the reins.

“On the row out,” said Lamb, “I managed to lose a perfectly serviceable beaver hat to the lake before there was any wind at all. I don’t know how I managed to cross the Atlantic—but, ever since I got off the boat from England, I’ve felt the great thing about Canada is that it’s not an island.”

Returning to Toronto consumed the balance of the morning. Banshee was unused to carrying double weight, Lamb uncomfortable with any pace faster than a walk. Harris had a unique chance to question the country’s top forensic scientist and took especial care that no sudden movement should result in such an eminent cranium’s being dashed open against a rock.

Lamb denied having ever met or seen Theresa. His curiosity and his official responsibilities were what had brought him out on the water so early on the Sabbath, a rather arbitrary day of rest in any case—if Mr. Harris didn’t mind his saying so. Not at all, Harris assured him. And Vandervoort? Lamb gathered that Vandervoort had had another case upon which he had been counting to secure advancement, but that that case had somehow fallen through. The inspector accordingly found himself in need of an alternative opportunity to shine.

Harris was interested, and at the same time preoccupied by a more urgent question he was afraid to ask. A pricking at the back of his neck kept making him want to turn around. He couldn’t be sure he had searched the valley thoroughly enough. What if, in the bushes just beyond . . . ?

“Professor Lamb,” he blurted out, “could the woman whose arm this is still be alive?”

“I’m no physician, but I doubt it. We don’t appear to be dealing with a surgical amputation.”

Harris saw the green-clad figure pulled roughly from her horse by unknown hands. She twists loose, tries to run, but trips over the long skirt of her riding habit. Thrown flat in the marsh grass, she looks up. The axe arcs high and falls.

It keeps on rising and falling.

“An attacker mad enough to inflict this wound would not have stopped there?” said Harris.

“Even if he had,” Lamb replied, “the shock and loss of blood must have been fatal.”

So further explorations could wait. The broad, blind expanse of the professor’s back was suddenly irksome. Harris ungratefully considered bundling his companion into a stagecoach in order to nurse alone the cooling embers of his hope.

Lamb half turned in the saddle. “You referred to the deceased as a woman,” he said. “We can’t assume that.”

Harris begged his pardon.

“I may not be able to say for sure even after I get a chance to weigh the bones. I’ll certainly want to scrutinize those hairs under a microscope.”

“How soon can you do all that—all that weighing and scrutinizing?”

“The coroner would normally give me a week to ten days.”

“The sleeve and bracelet could be a disguise,” Harris admitted without conviction. Ten days was a long time to go on searching in a state of uncertainty.

“Come now,” said Lamb. “The dress is female, but we must no more base our conclusions on such externals than you bankers do when you decide to extend credit, or to refuse it.”

Still digesting Lamb’s revelation, Harris did not rise to this bait.

“Incidentally,” the professor added, “I took your good advice.”

“Oh?” Harris was starting to wonder who besides Theresa, male or female, had disappeared in recent weeks.

“I approached the Hon. Robert Baldwin. He has agreed to petition the regents of the university to pay me more.”

“You couldn’t have made a sounder choice,” said Harris, remembering his manners. “Not only did Mr. Baldwin’s government found the university, but he is the one man in Toronto who never breaks his word.”

“Present company excepted, I hope.”

“Professor Lamb,” Harris pleaded, “could you not hasten or somehow expedite your examination of these remains? So long as any chance remains that Mrs. Crane is still drawing breath, every moment is precious.”

The green shoulders under Harris’s nose shrugged unencouragingly.

Soon after, the end gable and two-storey verandah of the Half Way House came in view on the right of the plank road. When Banshee and her riders stopped for refreshment, Lamb slid from the saddle unaided.

“The chemistry laboratory,” he said, brushing sweat from his straight upper lip, “is at present housed in a far from weatherproof pig shed in behind the Provincial Observatory. Look in on me this evening if you like.”

On reaching the cashier’s suite in the early afternoon, Harris moved from room to room like a man who can’t remember what comes next. He took a bottle of brandy from the dining room sideboard. He left the bottle in the pantry. He opened wardrobe doors, then instead of hanging up his clothes threw them over chairs. Perplexed by this behaviour, he supposed it had something to do with having passed a night in the open on top of five anxious days. Presently he wandered down the corridor to his bedroom, fell on his bed and slept.

He plunged straight into the deepest slumber and ascended gradually. Anxiety returned before fatigue lifted. Waking took forever. Thrashing about the middle ground, he found himself buffeted by more extreme emotions than blew through either his workaday mind or his dreams. He had schooled himself since entering on a business career, and more particularly in the past three years, to give his feelings play within a range not much wider than the arc of the pendulum in his tall mahogany clock. Now, while the wind outside made noisy sport with an ill-secured shutter, his pendulum swung full circle.

Through 180 degrees, he conceived of Theresa as dead. He walked behind the glass-doored hearse, his gaze fixed on the floral tributes piled on her casket. Panicled dogwood, trailing arbutus . . . His sobs shook bricks loose from houses of the quick. Even if he never saw her, he couldn’t bear the thought of her large, green eyes not turning towards a new sight—her soft lips not parting to utter a fresh thought. Or perhaps behind reason’s back, he had hoped to see her again, and now he couldn’t.

Lost, dead, worse than dead. Butchered. Thoughts of the pain and terror this imaginative young woman must have suffered—his Theresa—made him want to eat glass.

Grief needed no addition, and yet the casket he followed was William Sheridan’s too. Tears for each flowed together. Harris mourned a fiery old lion together with a child of energy, grace and light. Fate had dashed what was best in the age, its reforming heart, its questing spirit. The world was left to vermin. Harris fancied he felt them crawling through the mattress beneath him.

At the limit of misery, his spirits would begin to lift. Through the other half circle, someone else had been dismembered. Theresa lived. Amid the clamour of the wind, her footsteps sounded on the stair, her crisp tap at the door—which, try as he might, he could not rise to answer. What if she went away? No, there it was again—tap, tap. Now somehow she was inside the door, in the hall, in the room, on the bed. The nape of her neck nestled in his hand. Her smooth cheek pressed against his, and he was breathing the sunny scent of her hair. They were each other’s, no one else’s. For the first time in all his months of inhabiting the Provincial Bank’s string of opulent, empty rooms, he was at home.

Then men with black scarves wrapped around their hats came to lay her in a box.

He kept hoping for something like a thunderclap over Bay Street to wake him fully, but after an hour or two his inner storm simply played itself out. When he sat up, it was still Sunday afternoon. The blue and white porcelain wash stand looked cheerful enough against the yellow wallpaper. He poured water from the pitcher into the basin. He brushed his teeth with Atkinson’s Parisian tooth paste. Refreshed and on his feet, he knew the world contained decent people and his bed no bugs to speak of.

While water was heating for his bath, he answered bank correspondence. At the same time, part of him wanted to rush back to the edge of town and scour the landscape in broadening rings until he dropped. Somewhere, in one or more pieces, was the rest of a body.

Efforts to establish an agency of the bank in the city of Hamilton seemed frivolous by comparison. For the first time, Harris considered resignation. He would still have the rents from his real estate holdings in addition to his savings. On the other hand, neither his bank nor its competitors could be counted on to understand. Leaving one employer might foreclose his future with any. He tried believing that, whatever its origin, Vandervoort’s new interest in the case made drastic action on his own part unnecessary.

It was a hypothesis, at least.

The moment might still come for a prolonged, out-of-town search. Then Harris would have to decide. In the meantime, there were things he could do in Toronto.

Not all could be done on a Sunday. Harris wanted to ask the undertaker if he had buried William Sheridan with both his arms. From what bank messenger Dick Ogilvie had said Wednesday, there would be no point trying to raise the matter with his father today. The Sabbatarian mood was on the rise. Harris took care to date his letters as of Monday, July 21.

The MacFarlanes, he trusted, would receive him. Bathing and dressing quickly, he managed to reach their Queen Street West villa before the end of the tea hour. The servant showed him through to the garden.

Surrounded by three of her children and a pair of spaniels, Kate MacFarlane sat in the shade of a shrubbery. A viewer with stereoscopic photographs of Niagara Falls was being passed around. These were solemnly pronounced to be arresting and sublime, though the water was a woolly blur.

Harris returned Elsie’s sketch book, avoiding mention of his grisly discovery, and asked if anyone knew who Theresa’s fine-featured companion might be. A French-speaking lady, he suggested, recalling that the miller’s assistant had not been able to understand her.

“Mademoiselle Marthe!” Elsie exclaimed. “She was teaching Mrs. Crane French.”

“Yes, more of a teacher than a friend,” Mrs. MacFarlane briskly concurred. “We don’t really know her.”

“She came here once. I wanted to sketch her, but there wasn’t time.”

“Elsie, dear, take the viewer from your brother and show him how to put that stereoscope in properly before he bends it.”

No one seemed to know Marthe’s family name. Elsie had heard and forgotten it. Her mother suggested that Harris speak to Mr. MacFarlane, who was in his study.

Harris finished his tea before going in. Communicative and attentive on other subjects, Kate MacFarlane appeared to have cooled towards his search. He asked again about her last glimpse of Theresa. She would not speak of it. As he ambled across the scythe-cut lawn, he wondered what had happened to change her mind.

Above the loggia in the centre of the garden façade rose a broad semicircular tower reminiscent of engravings of Windsor Castle. Money could scarcely have bought more in the way of aristocratic pedigree. Transparent in intention, the trappings nonetheless had their effect. Although he had exchanged pleasantries with George MacFarlane at half a dozen soirées, Harris felt suddenly diffident. He followed a servant down an unfamiliar tapestry-lined hall with a sense that he was about to intrude on momentous deliberations.

Or perhaps the hall’s length simply allowed time to reflect that MacFarlane didn’t need the medievalism to inspire awe. Harris flattered himself that he knew how one became a Crane, the deals and compromises one made. Not so in the case of MacFarlane, who as early as 1840 had allegedly been worth £200,000 and who today could doubtless buy five or six Henry Cranes. To become a MacFarlane there weren’t enough business days in a lifetime.

A carpenter’s son, he had started trading sticks of wood. With each trade he acquired more cutting rights or property in what became Victoria County. Timber export made him a ship-owner, then a ship-builder. Some ships were simply dismantled in Britain for their timbers. Others returned with cargoes of textiles or of people he could settle on the land he had cleared. Rumour had it that he was either about to establish spinning mills in the Toronto area or about to buy a newspaper. He had contributed articles on business or culture to a variety of periodicals and, to lure immigrants, had written the novel Flora of Fenelon Falls, as well as a statistic-laden Guide to Canadian Opportunities. Mining and whaling also figured among his interests. Many more ventures he likely kept to himself, though he made no secret of financing and captaining his own company of militia.

A pair of gargoyles guarded the study door. Beyond it, Harris found an ample room lined with overflowing black oak bookcases. Behind the refectory table that served as a desk, the more than ample George MacFarlane rose from an ecclesiastical looking chair with a high, pointed back.

A senior member of William Sheridan’s generation, MacFarlane was tall, broad-shouldered and corpulent. His nose resembled an inverted ship’s prow. His offered hand was so large that Harris could barely grasp enough of it to shake. Blue saucer eyes gave him a deceptively ingenuous expression.

“Sit down, sit down. I was just scribbling a bit of verse on the Treaty of Paris for one of those competitions, nothing that can’t wait ten minutes.” His voice was both soft and gruff, like sawdust with splinters scattered through it.

He had been interested to hear that Harris believed he could find “our friend” Mrs. Crane and had asked his wife to refer any further inquiries to him. Above all, he didn’t want Elsie upset. In fact, the more quietly they worked the better. There were Henry Crane’s feelings to consider as well as those of society.

“I’m only doing,” said Harris, “what her own brother would do if he had lived.”

“Her brother?”

“A child cholera victim in ’32. You knew, surely.”

MacFarlane looked momentarily befogged. “The smaller the patient, the more fallible the diagnosis. I believe there was little of the disease you mention that year—or this far west.”

Harris knew better, and knew better than to point out that the cholera MacFarlane made light of could well have reached Canada’s shores aboard his own ships. He might have taken every precaution known to physic and still not have been able to stop it.

“In any case, Harris,” the older man resumed, his tone benevolent and admonitory, “a brother may do what other men may not. Consider the lady’s reputation. Consider your own. I need not remind you that people want only men they believe to be of the highest character to have control of their money.”

In Fenelon Falls, Harris silently wondered, did men of the highest character not look out for their friends?

“Believe me, Harris. In sixty years, no one has ever faulted me for excessive caution. Now let’s see what we can do within the limits of discretion.”

The French teacher was identified as Marthe Laurendeau, daughter of a cabinet minister from Canada East. MacFarlane didn’t know whether she had returned there or was still in Toronto. As for Theresa, he professed optimism, but his confidential view resembled the lighthouse keeper’s.

“A ruffian violates her, a hanging offence. So he kills off the victim, who is also the only witness. Even if he is caught, they can’t execute him more than once, and the murder decreases the chances he will be caught. Poor Crane is coming to the same conclusion.”

Strange optimism, Harris reflected—and yet his own hope was beginning to feel mulish. “Do you think,” he said, “you could get Henry Crane to talk to me?”

“Possibly.”

“Even if she is dead, circulation of her likeness could help locate her remains.”

“I’ll have a word with Crane about it,” MacFarlane said.

Encouraged by these accommodating responses, Harris tried again to find out if Mr. and Mrs. Crane had been happy with each other. The temperature of the monastic chamber dropped several degrees at once. MacFarlane’s eyes hardened to icy sapphires. His broad right hand rose in warning.

“That’s a question one does not ask,” he pronounced. “This ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ nonsense would spell the death of family life. A good marriage is one in which the husband provides and the wife obeys. The Cranes have a good marriage.”

Outside the heavily-leaded window, Kate MacFarlane and her girls were strolling back towards the house in solemn conversation while the boy chased the dogs in circles around them.

“In time,” MacFarlane continued, “their union would undoubtedly have been blessed with heirs.”

“I gather Mr. Crane has suffered business reversals,” said Harris.

“As a chap who has never laid so much as a mile of track, I don’t think I should go slinging mud at public benefactors like Henry Crane. You’re out of date besides. The man is as sound as a board.”

Harris could overlook being addressed in this lofty way so long as he was being informed. “Your dealings with him saved him?”

“No dealings we may have had bear on Mrs. Crane’s disappearance,” MacFarlane scolded before slipping back into his social mask of wide-eyed geniality. “Tell me, Harris, does anything at all rhyme with Crimea? I’m afraid I’ll have to get back to this poem if it’s to be done today. Do come again.”

“Allow me,” said Harris, having tried without success to get the conversation reopened, “to repay your kind advice by suggesting that you think twice before again acting as a guarantor for Mr. Joshua Newbiggins.”

MacFarlane blinked, slow perhaps to recognize the name. “Has he defaulted?”

“No, but his character—”

“Nor will he. Newbiggins is a man of push. His backers will prosper.”

Sunday evening, Harris dined in the city’s most luxurious hotel. The meal began with mulligatawny soup, which every serious cook seemed to prepare and no two to agree on. Here ginger and chicken agreeably predominated. If the whitefish that followed might have been fresher, the filet of veal with tomatoes and horseradish sauce truly shone. After partaking of mashed potatoes, fresh vegetables and raspberry tarts, Harris turned away both the cheese tray and the dessert of jellies, nuts and brandied fruits. Even so, he felt in a businesslike way that he had now got through his eating for the week.

That benefit was incidental to his purpose in coming. The American, at Yonge and Front Streets, was the only hotel of its class in Toronto—though two more were soon to open with locations even more convenient to the Houses of Parliament. After four years in Quebec, the seat of government had returned. Politicians and civil servants could not be expected to accommodate themselves and their dependents in lodgings designed for travelling salesmen and farmers bringing cabbages to market.

Yes, Harris was told, Postmaster General Laurendeau and his daughter were indeed guests. At least they had been until twenty hours ago when they had embarked for Canada East on the Saturday night steamer. Harris registered this near miss as philosophically as possible. He noted down the family’s forwarding address.

When he had asked the hotel manager all the questions he decently could, he went in to dinner and—as the dishes came and went—chatted with the waiter. Marthe Laurendeau had been in residence since the start of the spring legislative session. She had come to perfect her English and had stayed on to continue her studies when Parliament recessed and her mother returned home. A quiet and serious young woman, Mademoiselle seemed refined and rather shy. She ordered veal filet whenever it was on the menu.

As she began to take shape for Harris, he regretted having wished the grisly arm to be hers.

That she was a horsewoman came as news to the waiter, who believed she kept no mount at the hotel. Harris confirmed this with a stable hand before proceeding to the University Park.

By eight o’clock, light and strollers were draining from its green expanse. Robins, whose conversational song reminded Harris of summer evenings at his parents’ home, were left to skim the lawns and pick their supper from the moist earth.

No sod had yet been turned for University College. Indeed, no design had yet been approved for the £75,000 building. The chemistry laboratory meanwhile occupied a one-room frame structure, freshly painted in mustard yellow. It looked too tidy ever to have housed pigs. It smelled too foul.

Lamb came to the door in shirtsleeves and an embroidered waistcoat. Harris may have been exaggerating the smell, which turned out to be no more than the waxy adipocere churned up with strong vinegar, a general decaying mustiness, spirits of hartshorn and kerosene from a pair of hanging lamps. Beneath them, a work bench ran the length of one wall. Amid the instruments and bottles strewn there, three cleanish bones lay on a marble slab as if for presentation.

“Sit here, Mr. Harris,” said Lamb, indicating a stool as might a brusque maître d’hôtel. “I won’t show you the hand, which I have not had time to strip the flesh from yet, but these bones may interest you.” He stood pointing at the largest of the three. “Note how the humerus is severed at the upper end—not pulled whole from the shoulder, mind, not chewed by an animal, but chopped with an axe.”

“As we surmised,” said Harris. “Before death or after?”

“There’s no way of knowing. The dimensions tell us something, however.” The professor stretched a measuring tape along the thinner of the two remaining bones. “Ulna—9 21/32. If normally proportioned and not a freak, our victim would have been a man of unremarkable stature or a tall woman. Between five foot three inches and five foot five in the latter case—possibly an inch more in the former.”

Victim. Harris absorbed the word in silence. Theresa’s height had fallen in the middle of the range mentioned.

“And here is news,” Lamb continued cheerfully as he picked up the final item on display. “The radius shows evidence of a fracture.”

The bone looked whole to Harris, but then the combination of the subject matter and the atmosphere was starting to make him light-headed. “Not a fracture sustained during the . . .”

“Certainly not. An earlier break, quite healed but imperfectly set.”

“How much earlier?”

“Months or years. You see this slight change of direction here? And the mark—not a crack, more of a scar.”

Harris steadied himself against the edge of the bench. “Could we step outside a moment?” he asked.

They stepped outside. Theresa’s eighth night from home had fallen calm but cloudy. There would be no stargazing at the observatory next door. From another provisional college building across Taddle Creek rose the stirring strains of a Baptist hymn.

“Some of my colleagues,” Lamb remarked, “have to show that a non-denominational university need not be a godless one. If anyone challenges you, you can say we have been studying scripture.”

After several gulps of leafy park air, Harris asked whether the deviation in the radius would have made an observable difference in the living arm.

“You mean,” said Lamb, “would the arm have looked crooked?”

“Yes, or been so weakened that the person would have noticeably favoured it—avoided heavy work and so forth?”

“Not necessarily. I believe the chief significance of the fracture—about three and a half inches above the right wrist—is as follows. If such an injury were to figure in the medical history of Mrs. Crane, it would tend to confirm that the arm is hers.”

“It doesn’t,” Harris blurted out in relief, before remembering that he had no idea what injuries Theresa might have sustained since her marriage. “That is, I don’t know. The break was an accident, was it not?”

“We can’t be sure of that,” Lamb replied.

Harris shuddered. An assault could have been a warning if Theresa had had any friend to help her heed it.

“Mr. Crane—has he seen the—um—remains?”

“Not while they have been with me,” said Lamb. “The only gentlemen I receive here are ones that have saved me from drowning. Shall we go back in?”

Automatically, Harris shook his head—no. “By all means,” he said with effort.

Inside the shed once more, his eye first caught a gleam of lamplight on precious metal at the far end of the work bench. He got permission to pick the bracelet up. From the eight silver medallions linked by pairs of the finest silver chains, certainty flowed like a current into his hands. He could name the remaining four cities before he turned the ovals over. Lisbon, Marseilles, Naples, Madrid. He even seemed to know the tracery of scratches. The bracelet was Theresa’s.

She had worn it on her left wrist, though.

“Professor Lamb,” he said, “what did you find out from those hairs?”

“Less than I had hoped. They are neither too fine to be a man’s nor too coarse to be a woman’s.”

“But coarser than average for a woman?”

The note of eagerness seemed to irritate Lamb. “Average?” he said, fussing with the brass wheels on his microscope. “Averages are easy for you money men. You sum ten interest rates and move a decimal point. Simple arithmetic. Anthropometry is not so simple. Have you any idea how many hairs I should have to pluck from how many arms just in order to tell you what’s average for Toronto women, let alone the sex in general? They would lock me up before the job was properly begun. What I can tell you is that the shafts of the Rouge Valley hairs are thicker than those drawn from the identical square inch of my wife’s anatomy. Whether Mrs. Lamb is an average woman I have no way of judging. She is to a normal degree modest, however. I know you’ll be discreet.”

The Lambs were expecting their sixth child, or was it their seventh? It had been mentioned at the bank during the loan discussion. Harris approached the improvident, affectionate man bent over the microscope and humbly asked if he might take a look.

While he was looking, the door rattled against its bolt.

“Open up, Dr. Lamb,” boomed a voice Harris recognized as Vandervoort’s. “I’ve brought you the rest of the puzzle.”