Читать книгу Death in the Age of Steam - Mel Bradshaw - Страница 11

Boisterous and dishevelled, Vandervoort entered, brandishing a soiled white cotton flour sack that rattled as he moved. His dust-stiffened red hair stuck out at all angles. His whisky breath blared like a fanfare above the symphony of laboratory odours and quite drowned them out when he turned in momentary surprise towards Harris.

“Ha! If it isn’t our amateur detective, looking neat and solemn as ever. Well, stay if you like. See what has turned up.”

Vandervoort told a rambling and prolix tale that was at the same time marred by irritating omissions, but the gist of it was that after landing Constable Whelan and dispatching the arm to Lamb for analysis, the inspector had made some inquiries in the Rouge Valley area and had heard about a shed that had burned down Tuesday night.

“Where was this exactly?” said Harris.

“Between Port Union and Highland Creek. On one of those abandoned farms, you understand. Nothing anyone paid any attention to at the time.”

Harris understood. Many an immigrant signed a lease before discovering he wasn’t cut out for agriculture. Often as not, he would drift into town leaving untended and unregretted whatever crude structures he had managed to knock together. A vagrant’s cooking fire or vandal’s torch might easily claim them without alarming the neighbours.

“Now that shed—I went round for a look, and that shed was not empty when it burned.” Vandervoort shook his sack.

The dry clicking sound it emitted brought a pained crease to Lamb’s broad forehead.

“If you’ve brought me bones, inspector,” he said, “I would as soon you didn’t reduce them to bone chips.”

“Bones,” said Vandervoort, emptying his haul harum-scarum onto the work bench. He wasn’t clumsily drunk, just too pleased with himself to be inhibited by professorial objections. “Bones and more bones, and that’s just a start.”

Among other large pieces, half a human skull tumbled out. Clean and dry as a nutshell, and—from what anyone could tell in that foul chamber—odourless. It wasn’t repugnant to the senses, but alarming enough in its way. The nut had been someone’s brain. Harris approached warily.

“Will you be able to tell if these fragments came from the same body as the arm?” he asked Lamb. He naturally hoped they did, having already concluded from the position of the bracelet and the coarseness of the hairs that the arm was not Theresa’s.

“No indeed!” snapped Lamb. “I’m no clairvoyant.”

“But there can’t be any doubt,” said Vandervoort. “They were found less than two miles apart. And then there’s the axe.”

Ignoring him, Lamb continued less waspishly to Harris, “Anatomical analysis alone won’t even tell us if all these are from the same body. What can be observed is that this pelvis,” he pointed to a dish-like object, “is almost certainly a woman’s. You can see from this fragment of the pubic arch. It’s rounder and wider than a man’s.”

“Pubic arch?”

“Here, Mr. Harris.” The professor pointed without embarrassment to the location of the structure on his own anatomy. “Although, in a man, it forms an angle rather than an arch. I can also say that none of these new bones appears to be from the right arm. Further conclusions must wait on measurement . . . Clavicle—5 1/8 inches . . .”

While he was measuring, Harris turned to Vandervoort.

“What axe, inspector?”

From a side pocket of his tweed jacket, Vandervoort took an object wrapped in a charred scrap of green fabric. Merrily, he prolonged the mystery. Twice he asked if Harris were sure he wanted to see inside. Finally the package was set on the bench and the cloth folded back to reveal an axe head with the charred stump of a new wooden handle protruding from it. A stain appeared to have burned onto the blade.

“Blood,” said Vandervoort with a flourish.

Harris glanced at the professor.

“Sternum—just a moment . . .” Lamb set down his notebook and used his ruler to lift the axe blade so it caught the lamplight. “Looks like it,” he said, “but whether human or animal blood there’s no way of saying. Even using the microscope.”

“If ever you get a really straight answer from Dr. Lamb,” chuckled Vandervoort, “then you can bet your mother’s teeth you’re on to something. Tell me about the arm, professor. I suppose you have already made a full report to our nosey friend.”

While Lamb was reporting in scientific language, and again in plain words, Harris looked at the lengthening list of measurements. Through his damp white shirt, he felt for the point where his neck joined his shoulder. The clavicle, he thought, was the collarbone—but where did it start? Over five inches sounded long. He eased the ruler out of Lamb’s hand.

“Details are all well and good,” Vandervoort was saying, “but what matters is the pattern. Mrs. Crane leaves home. She’s attacked and killed. The killer tries to cover his tracks by burning her remains and the weapon. Tries, but doesn’t do a very thorough job. Have you found anything to contradict that story?”

“I have not had time to. You don’t seem to appreciate, inspector, how long it took simply to strip these three arm bones. Then, before I get to the hand, you bring me a whole other bag of tricks.”

“These at least are clean,” Vandervoort pointed out.

“Splendid. Now, if you want an expert opinion on these, leave them with me.”

“Of course, but so far you can’t say I’m wrong.”

Lamb wearily acknowledged that, insofar as he had been able to assess, the dimensions of all bones and bone fragments in both sets were not inconsistent with their forming part of a single skeleton. Vandervoort seemed satisfied.

“If I’m not interrupting,” said Harris, “I should like to ask Professor Lamb whether a woman of five three to five five with a five and one eighth inch clavicle would appear broad-shouldered.”

“That, I think, would be fair to say.”

“Stocky rather than slim?”

“Definitely.”

“Then,” Harris declared, “it’s not Mrs. Crane.”

Vandervoort pulled a goatish face. “Well, Dr. Lamb,” he said, “you have had a long day, considering that I dragged you out of bed this morning at four o’clock. Mr. Harris and I shall go and let you get on with your work. Oh, and you might want to look at that bit of green cloth too. It’s devilish like the sleeve we found the arm in.”

Harris noted the we and foresaw that it would soon slip into I. When that happened, there would be no more comradely sharing of information, and every question would again in all likelihood be turned back with another question. To make the most of the momentary opening, he took the opportunity of walking south with Vandervoort.

The College Avenue, stretching from the university grounds to Osgoode Hall, was closed at night. They settled for Park Lane, which hugged the avenue’s east side fence and borrowed the dignity of its parade of chestnut trees. A landau with jingling harness passed them at a trot, its occupants doubtless heading home from Sunday dinner at one of the new uptown villas. Otherwise, the city under the night clouds was as still as a fiddle in its case.

Just waiting, Harris thought, for the note-making to resume, the music of commerce.

“Pity about the smuggling charge,” he said. It seemed a safe bet that this was the case Lamb had earlier referred to as having fallen through.

“There was no way of knowing.” Vandervoort drank from his tin flask. “I made sure Mr. Harvey Ingram didn’t have any daughters in service to the Attorney General’s household or any second cousins on City Council. He friggin’ near ruined one alderman tea merchant by getting lushed up and letting the light go out in a storm.”

“You mean the winter before last,” said Harris, “when the China Queen went down?”

“Beaches black with pekoe leaves till spring . . . Now I’m told our beloved old campaigner has ‘friends’ in the first rank of capital and clergy, men on whom his claims are ‘not to be inquired into.’ Hush!” Vandervoort drank. “Never mind—this Crane business will make me. I’ve got a body now. In due course, I’ll get a felon.”

“The body,” said Harris, “isn’t Mrs. Crane’s.”

“Fond memories—”

“Even apart from the question of size,” Harris interrupted, “the arm is an obvious decoy.” He was appropriately grateful to Ingram’s anonymous backers, but their interference in the course of justice would be for nought if Vandervoort were to spend all his time looking for Theresa’s murderer instead of for Theresa. “Yes, a decoy. Why else leave it with an utterly distinctive bracelet—which incidentally the owner didn’t wear on that wrist—then lug the body two miles off to burn it? Someone wants it believed that Mrs. Henry Crane, née Theresa Ruth Sheridan, is dead.”

Vandervoort drank. “With respect, sir, you are not one of the parties I have to convince.”

“Don’t you have to convince yourself?”

“I believe in results.” The whisky was starting to make the inspector weave as he walked.

“What about Professor Lamb?” said Harris. “Aren’t you going to have him out to the shed?”

“Waste of time. You saw what he was like at the Rouge with all his picture taking. Brilliant mind, of course, but how far does it get you? Everything is maybe this, maybe that.”

Harris gave Vandervoort a cigar to distract him from his flask. “How far do you expect this case to get you, Inspector? Deputy chief? Doesn’t that go by political connections rather than by results?”

At this, Vandervoort stopped walking altogether and talked about the police. Although audibly less sober than when he had narrated his discovery of the burned-out shed, he made more sense. Familiarity had given these thoughts a shape. Harris, who had the impression of eavesdropping, would not in any case have risked interrupting.

Results were what would count in future, Vandervoort prophesied, while not denying that today’s force still ran on connections.

Personally, he had always depended on some of each. The son of Niagara farm folk, he had started early talking to anyone that could offer him a less laborious life. As a young night watchman on the second Welland Canal, he had discovered who was pilfering construction supplies, thus recommending himself for the railway police when work started on the Great Western. Unspecified services were performed for G.W.R. directors, who also happened to figure on Toronto’s City Council. So Vandervoort’s name came up when it was decided to hire a city detective—an anomalous post on what in the mid-fifties was a betwixt and between sort of force.

A wave of arson had temporarily loosened the purse strings, though the same council had economized since. As the city’s population had grown, they actually reduced the number of constables. Everything went by the aldermen’s whim. No policeman could be engaged, dismissed or even suspended without their say-so. Accountability, they called it.

Not that Chief Sherwood was much for suspensions or reprimands in any case. A quiet, good-natured man, the chief. He didn’t even like to insist on the dress regulations, with the result that the uniformed police were scarecrows more or less.

There had been some sprucing up, for change was in the air. Police failure to cope with a pair of recent Orange riots had set the ball in motion. One alderman had even proposed that Orange Lodge members be excluded from the force. That had been voted down, of course, and Parliament in May had backed away from its plan to take provincial control of the police, but a British-style board of police commissioners was still a strong bet to replace City Council in the running of things. The next chief could be an army man.

Harris’s eye followed the iron grill-work that for half a dozen blocks ruled commercial and residential Toronto off from the leisured walkways, grass boulevards and carriage parade. And all the while he listened and thought that—whatever improvements the future held—in the time he had to find Theresa this maddening, temporarily loquacious man was the best he had to work with in the way of official support.

“I should not want to be chief,” snorted Vandervoort, coming round at last to the question asked, “much less his deputy. Keeping constables on their beats? How anybody can do that—with the human material we have to work with . . . You’re always fighting human weakness. For the detective now, like me, human weakness is an ally. You frequent the criminal classes. You work on their weaknesses. Bend their elbow, bend their ear, grease their palm, twist their arm, tweak their nose. Above all, loosen their tongue. Before they know it—” his fist sprang shut, “—they’re yours.”

About the coming changes, Vandervoort had mixed feelings. He saw the necessity for a modern, professional police, and yet he feared that would mean a shorter leash for himself. Hence, his desire for advancement. His sights were set on Inspector of Licences, which carried an official remuneration of three hundred pounds a year—double what the city already paid its detective inspector and a hundred more than it paid the deputy chief—although salary was only one consideration. Harris was left to imagine what the others were, but he doubted they would have any very improving effect on Vandervoort’s character or his liver. In recent years, the regulation of liquor had become an exclusively municipal affair.

Overhead, a current of air teased the chestnut leaves. Vandervoort took hold of the metal fence with both hands and stared into the confined Avenue. Perhaps he was just drunk and tired, but his stance suggested that for him this near side of the barrier was the cage.

“I can see myself in a couple of years,” he said, “taking the air out there in the back of my own open carriage.”

Harris didn’t bother to point out that in a couple of years the fence would almost certainly have been dismantled to facilitate crosstown traffic, George Brown’s Globe newspaper having mounted a vigorous editorial campaign to that effect.

“What if out there on the Avenue,” he remarked instead, “you were to meet Mrs. Crane? After having convinced her husband, the aldermen, and a jury that she was dead.”

Vandervoort turned sharply. “What are you saying?”

“Merely that your position will be more secure if we find the correct solution to this mystery than if we settle for a momentarily plausible one.”

Vandervoort muttered grudging assent or suppressed a curse. They continued walking south.

“I wondered,” said Harris, “if you would ask Mr. Crane and Dr. Hillyard about the fracture. Neither of them want to talk to me.”

“How secure is your own position, Harris?” It was the first time Vandervoort had dropped the mister. “Do your employers know how many hours you spend on the trail of another man’s wife?”

“I trust I could explain myself to their satisfaction.” All the same, Harris reflected, to do so would cost time. Perhaps he was pressing the policeman too hard.

“I don’t say we can’t work together,” offered the latter, “but remember this is detective work, not banking. That means I call the tune.”

From these words and the inspector’s quickened pace, Harris gathered that there was further work for them that very evening. They loped south to Front Street.

Among the brick villas ranged along the north side, Sheridan’s alone showed no flicker of lamp or candle. Its emptiness seemed amplified by the extraordinary amount of glass in its symmetrical façade. Each of the nine sash windows carried eighteen large panes, all dark.

Vandervoort turned in at the low gate, crossed the unweeded front garden and climbed the three steps that led from it to the semicircular porch. Harris followed, bewildered.

“Are we going to break in?” he asked.

A street lamp caught the triumphant gleam in the inspector’s eye as from an inside pocket he produced a large, discoloured key.

“From the burned shed?” said Harris. “But there’s no keyhole.”

Vandervoort looked. The key in his hand moved forlornly over the blank white surface of the door.

“It’s an old house,” Harris murmured. “In the twenties—”

“Yes, yes—always a servant,” Vandervoort rejoined quickly, showing he was quite familiar with aristocratic ways. “We’ll try the back.”

At the back, a sunken flight of stone steps led to the basement. Although it was much darker here away from the street, Vandervoort hurtled down them and got the key into what Harris remembered as the kitchen door. The lock would not move.

“Speaking of servants,” said Harris, wondering that the house had been left untended, “ought we not to have a word with them?”

“You find ’em first.” Vandervoort was losing patience with the key, which he continued to twist and jiggle in the lock. “The fire must have bent the metal out of—there!”

The door swung inward.

“The key to her father’s house! Now you’ll have to believe she’s dead.”

In the back of Harris’s mind, it registered that Vandervoort did feel the need to convince him. Later he would be flattered. Right now he was too busy castigating himself for not having sooner sought out the testimony of Sheridan’s housekeeper.

No one ever mentioned her. He knew of her existence only from that latest talk with Small. There had been no such person at the period when Harris had been a visitor here, Theresa having filled the office. There had of course been other servants—whose supervision, he recalled, had occasioned some friction between father and daughter.

“Papa, the man’s a thief!” Theresa had burst out one evening when a new gardener’s praises were being sung before Harris, and sung again. Eyes twinkling with reasonableness, her father asked what harm it did if the odd turnip went astray. Theresa, exasperated to the point of laughter, said it wasn’t that. She had found two silver watches freshly buried between the strawberry plants. Sheridan’s brow darkened only briefly. “I wonder,” he said, “if he thought he could grow grandfather clocks.” The gardener’s tenure was as brief as his predecessor’s, and his successor’s, but Sheridan liked to point out that the rate of job change was high everywhere in this restless decade. He had felt he was made a monkey of no oftener than anyone else.

Now there appeared to be neither gardener nor housekeeper, neither a maid to air the rooms nor even a watchman to protect all those panes of glass until the estate could be settled. No one. Vandervoort led the way inside as if he didn’t expect the house to be anything but deserted.

Harris followed by the light of a lung-searing Promethean match. A second, no less pungent, lit the gaselier that hung above the long centre table. Only then did the pent-up domestic perfumes of laundry, plaster, dried herbs and wood embers begin to impose themselves. Comforting enough aromas normally, but not tonight. Was Harris’s nose not yet recovered from the laboratory, or was he possibly letting the recent death two floors above colour his sense of smell? Neither explanation quite satisfied him.

The kitchen occupied the entire western half of the basement, except for a narrow servant’s bedroom at the front. Harris went to have a look at it while Vandervoort rummaged inexplicably through the cupboards.

There was no gas in the servant’s room. Harris lit an oil lamp that stood on an otherwise bare pine chest. Its drawers were empty. So were a row of pegs on the back of the door. So were the wide sills of the two windows that gave into wells directly below the drawing room windows. He flicked the curtains back in place.

Rooms like this were often furnished with a cot no wider than a ladder. Sheridan had provided a full-width bed, its head tucked for winter warmth into the corner nearest the bake oven. Wide as it was, the bed did seem unusually low. Perhaps to correct a wobble, pieces had been sawn from each leg in turn, to the point where the yellow and brown coverlet all but swept the uneven brick floor. Harris looked under the coverlet at the bare straw tick and then under the bed. He found not even a stray thimble.

When he turned back into the kitchen, Vandervoort wasn’t there, but could be heard stirring in one of the storage rooms in the other half of the basement. Looking for liquor more than likely. Harris bristled briefly, then took a deep breath. Being pilfered—“involuntary charity”—seemed almost to amuse the Sheridan he had known.

He took another breath. After the tidy bedroom, the kitchen truly did smell wrong. Behind the domestic odour lurked a sourness. Approaching the massive black cooking stove that had been set into the original fireplace, he lifted the lid of each of the pots and kettles. He worked his way around the room, inspecting crocks and churns and all the dishes in the floor-to-ceiling dresser. Everything was clean. When he looked up to see what food or laundry might be hanging from the ceiling, he stepped backwards into a slat-backed chair. He felt tired and clumsy and out of ideas.

Turning to straighten the chair, he saw he had knocked off its back a discoloured square of material that had been draped there. He picked it up. It was sticky. A sniff confirmed it was the source of the sour odour.

The housekeeper had cleared out so thoroughly and left the kitchen so generally shipshape. Why, Harris wondered, had she not washed this pudding cloth before she went?

He sniffed again, more searchingly. His nose could detect nothing beyond the week’s development of mould already noted. Suet pudding, he thought. He folded the grey and viscous rag inside a clean dishtowel for ease of carriage back to Lamb’s laboratory. He might just have a look upstairs first.

Vandervoort—his flask topped up with imported whisky—intercepted Harris on the bottom step. “No warrant, you understand.”

When the accountant Septimus Murdock reported next morning to help open the vault, he seemed not just his normally gloomy self but a man in pain. His chin with its smudge of Napoleonic whiskers was trembling more than usual. Out of his pasty, pear-shaped face, his moist brown eyes cast Harris what could only be interpreted as reproachful glances.

With coaxing, Murdock admitted a newspaper story had upset him. There for the moment Harris left it.

He had been alarmed himself to read—once he got past the advertisements that monopolized the front page of the Globe—that over the weekend one of the bank’s directors had been robbed and beaten on the road between Kingston and Brockville. Crippling head injuries made the man unfit for further business. Since it was nearly ten months until the next shareholders’ meeting, the remaining directors would be choosing a replacement.

The bank had been attacked. Its officers naturally felt threatened. Then again, the accountant rarely dealt with the directors. Perhaps it was the story of the Rouge Valley arm that had Murdock rattled.

Sunday night Harris had returned home from Front Street to find stuck under his door some journalist’s request for an immediate interview on the subject, whatever the hour. This request he ignored. He was a little out of sorts at Lamb’s reluctance to receive—or even smell—his latest discovery, but most of all he was exhausted.

Harris’s refusal to be interviewed did not of course keep his name out of the papers. It just resulted in the publication of less accurate information. “Mr. Isaac Harris, head cashier of the Provincial Bank of Canada”—that would sit well in Kingston. The cashier of the Toronto branch had better write them an explanatory note.

Probing the matter further at the noon dinner hour, he discovered it was neither the exaggeration of his credentials nor the grisly nature of his discovery that Murdock held against him. Rather it was his cooperation with those “Orange rogues” on the police force.

“Better have a seat, Septimus. Not there. The armchair is more comfortable.”

“You think I’m an old woman, but you don’t know what it’s like to have your children taunted in the street. I’m afraid almost for them to leave the house.”

Aware that no child escapes taunting on some score, Harris nonetheless felt his heart tugged. He took another of the green leather chairs in front of the desk and tried to be rationally reassuring.

“There is Orange violence in Toronto,” he said. “Remarkably little of it is directed against the city’s Catholics. Now wait before you answer. Let us look at the facts. Last summer two volunteer fire companies fought each other on Church Street and attacked the police. That was Orangeman against Orangeman. Twelve days later, as a result of some bawdy-house mêlée, a fire brigade demolished an American circus. A week ago, merchant-publican Luther Casey had his wharf and warehouse burned—”

“By Orangemen.”

“His fellow Orangemen—to whom in their intoxicated state, it now appears, he had denied more drink. In all of this how are Catholics more victims than any of the rest of us who value a civilized community?”

Murdock shook his heavy head. “We’re intimidated, Isaac. Remember, we’re in the minority. There are three of you to every one of us.”

“Oh, I hardly count as a Protestant,” Harris protested weakly. Geology and zoology had by painless increments displaced his ancestral faith, such as it had been—but he knew that made him no less alien to Murdock, who continued as if Harris had not spoken.

“The thugs need not attack us directly. We have eyes to see that anyone opposing their power can become a victim. Even a Member of Parliament.”

“You mean William Sheridan?”

“Perhaps a rising man of business is right to court their favour and—and help them hide their crimes, but it saddens me all the same to see you do it. I must get home to dinner.”

“Just a minute,” said Harris. “A week ago, the very first time I saw you after the event, you hinted there was sinister significance to William Sheridan’s dying on July 12.”

“I knew it then, and I’ve got the details since. You’ll never read them in the press.”

“Would you mind eating here?” Last night’s visit to Front Street had sharpened Harris’s hunger for such details. He had previously made three or four such requests, when reports from their branch had been commanded at short notice. Each time Murdock had nodded dutifully. Today—in the absence of bank business—the accountant hesitated, sighed and nodded. Orange roguery? A futile topic, his dumb show implied—but, to his shame, irresistible. As usual, Dick Ogilvie was sent to advise Mrs. Murdock and bring back from a neighbouring café sliced ham, meat pie and a jug of ginger beer.

“Septimus,” said Harris, on returning to his office, “you admit the daily papers are unreliable.”

Murdock shrugged as if the thing were obvious.

“Then please don’t judge me by what you read there. They say I found Mrs. Crane’s arm. That’s false. I found an arm, which remains to be identified.”

“They say nothing at all about William Sheridan. What a great heart that was! I would have attended his funeral myself if it had been at the Cathedral.”

“Yes, well, Mr. Sheridan found St. James with its reserved pews too plutocratic for his liking. What should they be saying?”

“Holy Trinity is in the most Protestant ward in the city, and the way things are, a Roman like myself would not have felt particularly welcome.”

Harris did not stop to list the French Canadian mourners, Murdock’s co-religionists to a man. “Septimus, what should the papers be saying?”

The repetition of the question gratified the accountant and unnerved him. “Ask Sibyl Martin,” he stammered.

“Who is she?”

“For the last three months of his life, William Sheridan’s housekeeper.”

Harris had been pacing. Now he went dead still, though his pulse was off at a gallop. He felt as if he had been tracking through deep woods a quarry he might have seen by no more than a quarter turn of the head.

“Where,” he asked carefully, “will I find her?”

“That’s a question, isn’t it?”

“Septimus.”

“I don’t know, Isaac. No one seems to know, and no one seems to have been looking.”

The housekeeper’s arm? A fearful joy tickled Harris’s throat. To cover his unsettling eagerness for a human sacrifice, he said, “You think after killing him she fled.”

“Or is being hidden,” said Murdock. “If you ask me, she killed them both.”

“Sheridan and . . .”

“Exactly. Father and daughter.”

The theory was breath-catching, but quickly fell apart when the accountant could give no account of what Sibyl might have done with Theresa’s body. Burn it? Where? Not in Scarboro, surely. How was she to have got it there? Sheridan kept no carriage.

Murdock postulated accomplices—as many as necessary. He had never actually clapped eyes on the housekeeper and could give no indication as to her height or build. “Sluttish and sullen” was how rumour described her.

By the time their meal arrived, Harris had heard several more jeremiads, but no new facts.

“Look here,” he said once young Ogilvie had set two places at a gate-leg table and withdrawn, “what besides her disappearance makes you accuse this woman of murder?”

“She has a twin brother in the Provincial Penitentiary. Crusher Martin they call him.”

This detail made a stronger impression on Harris than he was willing to acknowledge. “I must say, Septimus, I don’t see much of my own brothers and sister. Should they hang for my crimes?”

“If you had killed a man, as Martin has, a less open-hearted individual than William Sheridan might well shy away from taking your twin into domestic service. Then again, Isaac, the woman herself worked until this past March in the house of the Orange Grand Master. Whose crime is that?”

“No one’s, as far as I know.”

Harris felt all the more need to defend Sibyl because of wishing her dead. He had to admit, however, that the man she would have been used to hearing reviled at the Grand Master’s as an apostate had indeed been a singularly unprejudiced employer. How had she come in contact with Sheridan? Murdock suspected intrigue, but perhaps the imprisoned brother had simply chanced to be a client. There was one person Harris would know where to find.

“Open your eyes, my young friend,” Murdock advised between mouthfuls. “This woman with criminal relations and an Orange past prepared William Sheridan’s last meal.”

“Poison? But Dr. Hillyard says he died of his old complaint, inflammation of the bowels.”

“And is Dr. Hillyard above suspicion?”

“Over the years he has had more opportunities to poison Sheridan than anyone. He would not have needed a servant’s help.”

“Then Sibyl Martin administered an irritant of some sort that brought on the fatal attack. Police were sent for the night he died.”

Harris dropped his fork. Drunk or sober, Vandervoort had never so much as hinted at this.

“To apprehend Sibyl Martin?” he said.

“Why else?”

“But how do you know?”

The clock ticked. A carter’s whip cracked outside the window as his team plodded by. Harris held his breath.

“A St. Michael’s altar boy carried the note.”

“Why didn’t you say so sooner?”

“For the boy’s sake,” said Murdock. “Did you know that William Sheridan bought a hundred iron bedsteads for the new House of Providence? Now don’t ask me for his name.”

“Mrs. Crane gave him this note?” Harris didn’t mention that the altar boy might have to testify at a coroner’s inquest.

“‘To the police with this as fast as you can,’ she said.”

“Who is this boy?” Harris demanded.

“Please, Isaac, I can’t—at least, not without leave from his father.”

“By all that’s just, get it!”

“I can’t at this moment,” Murdock spluttered. “He’s—”

“Tonight then,” Harris cut in. “For now tell me this—did the boy say how she seemed?”

“Not crazy or wild. Firm and angry, as she had every right to be. They had to kill her too.”

“I’m not convinced of that—but, Septimus, when you learn more, you must tell me. And in return—” As Harris spoke, he could see the fatalistic twist Murdock’s mouth was settling into. “In return, Septimus,” he said, “if I find Orange wrongdoing, I won’t keep it mum, come fire or flood.”

Murdock’s pastry-flecked goatee trembled, then his large head shook. “You don’t know what you’re undertaking, Isaac. Truly you don’t.”

Little bank business got Harris’s attention in the early part of the afternoon. His ears were still ringing from what Murdock had said.

If William Sheridan had been murdered, it was a tragedy not just for his friends and admirers but for all Canadians—the country’s first political assassination. Moreover, with agents of such butchery at large, was Theresa not in all the greater danger?

Eight days she had been missing. Harris had been looking for six, and she seemed farther away than ever. He would continue. He still had to write to Marthe Laurendeau. At the same time, bound to this office, how much could he do in the few hours a day it left him?

He needed help. The rest of the world had to continue to regard Theresa as missing, not settle back in the belief that her remains had been found. This was what Sibyl meant to him. He doubted that she had killed William Sheridan—a hard man to hate personally and, in opposition, little threat as a Member of Parliament. Harris wasn’t cool enough to put aside all speculation on the subject. The servant’s first interest, though, was as a missing person, not as a murderess. The presence of the unwashed cloth suggested that she had left the house abruptly. Left or been removed from it. If the bones Lamb held were accepted as most probably Sibyl’s, the search for Theresa would go on.

What was needed was a description, and Jasper Small seemed the readiest source. Harris was just writing his friend a note when Dick Ogilvie knocked and entered with a sealed envelope.

“On that pile,” said Harris, re-dipping his steel-nibbed pen.

Dick set it down quickly, trying to make his intrusion as brief as possible. The towering pile of unopened correspondence toppled across the polished surface of the desk, shooting its topmost member very nearly into Harris’s lap. His hand closed on the envelope just below the sender’s name, H. M. Crane. Small could wait.

July 21, 1856

Dear Isaac,

Have just identified bracelet as Mrs. Crane’s and fabric as that of the green habit she left home in. Professor Lamb may have further revelations. Still, am compelled to fear the worst.

Kindly overlook any incivility. I realize that only through your persistent and unselfish exertions has truth come to light. Thank you for that. Finding what you found Saturday must have been can’t have been easy. Yet better to know.

The loss of both father—for so I regarded William Sheridan—and wife has made this the hardest week of my life. Shall spare no effort to find her murderer. At the same time, business will not stand still. Leave for Chicago tonight.

Faithfully yours,

Henry Crane

The hasty scrawl with scratchings out breathed the same sincerity as Crane’s halting reading at the funeral. Whatever conclusions Harris had reached wavered. Theresa might have had a reason for wearing the cities-of-Europe bracelet on her right wrist. Finding her murderer could be all that was left.

Harris was reluctant to lay the letter down. The paper itself, he discovered, was agreeable to hold, thick and creamy between his fingers. The watermark was English, like the builder of Crane’s brougham. The stationery of a successful man.

Crane’s success carried all the more weight on an afternoon when Harris had allowed his own and his employers’ business to stagnate. He pictured Crane’s private railway carriage. Tonight it would be coupled to a train bound for the Collingwood dock, where Crane’s steamer would be waiting. Crane would rise above grief to get on with making money. The Board of Trade approved such dutifulness. Harris fell short.

Moodily, he flicked the creamy paper. Losing to Crane in love forced him to acknowledge the other man’s persuasiveness, but a lingering resentment, of which Harris was not in general proud, made him at the same time partially immune. “Spare no effort”—where then, just to start with, were the handbills?

From an inside pocket, Harris eased his flimsy portrait tracing and unfolded it carefully. With a pencil stub, he tried to darken a smudged line, the eager curve of Theresa’s upper lip. The paper tore. Crane’s stationery was instantly crumpled into as small a ball as the rich vellum would allow and dropped into a drawer. All the letter meant was an opening from the man Harris had most questions for.

The Ontario, Simcoe and Huron had no train till ten. Before turning to his bank correspondence, Harris sent Crane word that he would call on him at his office at four unless Harris heard otherwise.

At three fifty, he was passing through the heavily-columned entrance to the block Crane had built for himself on a part of King Street East recently levelled by fire.

“Mr. Crane is expecting me.”

“Mr. Crane has gone out of town, sir,” replied the porter. “Not five minutes since, his carriage was by to take him to the station.”

Scared him off, thought Harris without satisfaction.

“When will he be back?”

“See me in a fortnight, I believe he said. His secretary will know, sir. Second floor, first door on your right.”

Harris fled without wasting time on the secretary. King Street was the best in the city for hailing a cab, but by the same token the worst for making speed. To cover the half mile to the Union Station, Harris had the driver drop down to the Esplanade, where he could whip his horse up to a brisk trot.

They raced up beside a Great Western passenger train that stood straining for departure, steam up and nose to the sun. No private car was attached, but Crane himself stood on the front platform of one of the canary yellow carriages, in conversation with a conductor on the ground below. If Chicago still beckoned, it seemed the trip was to be overland via Detroit.

Harris had paid the driver and was climbing the carriage steps before Crane saw him.

“Why, Isaac . . .” Polite surprise, a tight smile.

“I wanted to catch you if I could,” said Harris, unhurried now that he was aboard. “One or two matters in connection with your note.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t time.” Over Harris’s head, Crane’s eyes flicked towards the conductor, who with a raised hand signalled the driver. “Next month, let us say.”

“I’ll ride as far as Hamilton with you,” said Harris. “That will give us an hour and a quarter.”

The engine’s whistle sounded two short strokes.

Crane still didn’t make room on the platform. The step gave him a height advantage of eight or ten inches.

“August,” he said, “would be better. I’ll be back in time for the inquest.”

The train was starting to move.

“When did your wife break her arm?”

“As a girl—didn’t you know?”

“You can’t ride there, sir.” The conductor, walking at a pace with the train, touched Harris’s elbow.

“He’s right, Henry. May I join you?”

Crane looked as if he regretted having broken his silence by writing. Perhaps he had done so only under pressure from MacFarlane and had feared more questions would follow.

“Excuse me, no,” he said. “I have an address to prepare, besides which, the subject of my letter is too painful for me to discuss just now.”

They had cleared the station, but were still travelling slowly enough for Harris to have jumped down safely. He did not jump down.

“What did you do, Henry, that Sunday afternoon when Theresa went out for her ride?”

Crane hesitated, then turned sideways to let Harris pass. “Perhaps you had better come in,” he said.

It seemed an awkward, over-courteous manoeuvre when the natural thing would have been for Crane to lead the way into the carriage. Squeezing by, Harris was aware of an untrimmed tuft of sandy hairs in Crane’s pink ear. Temptation seized him.

“Where,” he dropped into the ear, “is Sibyl Martin?”

He used the door frame to brace himself against being pushed back. That was presumably why Crane chose the opposite or lake side of the train to throw him off. Had Crane been able to get his full fourteen stone behind the shove, the distance across the platform been a half-foot less, or Harris’s wits a fraction of a second slower, the cashier’s chin would have been the first part of him to hit the gravel shoulder—which was now jogging by at more than ten miles per hour.

As it was, his right hand caught and briefly held the stair rail, or rather the iron newel. This swung him out facing the direction of travel. He got his feet under him, but was in too much of a crouch to run properly when he fell. He tumbled forward. Tucking in his head, he managed a somersault which made his spine feel as if it were being driven out through the back of his neck. When his feet came lowermost once again, he tried to get up. His left ankle twisted in the loose gravel. He pitched sideways and rolled over twice more. Coming to rest with a head-to-toe suit of bruises and with blood seeping through his shredded trouser knees, he looked for the train. Some hundred yards ahead it swung right past the water works and began to put on speed.

Harris wondered if he might have hung on, pulled himself back up the steps. Doubtful. Of doubtful value too. Did he think he could have bullied further revelations from Crane? Harris might be the more athletic of the two, but he was no wrestler, and Crane—having built much of the railway—was far likelier to have friends aboard.