Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  On joining the river, he began asking at mills, which at first were nearly as frequent as the inns on Yonge Street. Sawmills predominated, though the white pine had mostly been logged out. Forward-looking owners were also having their wheels grind corn or card wool. Shrubs and trees of no commercial value still lined the riverbanks, but this was far from wilderness. One surmised that Crane’s opposition to Theresa’s visits was based on the lengthy absences they entailed rather than on anything sinister or threatening about the valley.

  Towards eleven a.m., Harris reached a place in the fourth concession of Scarboro Township where the stream flowed east, sharply south, then sharply west again. Over this peninsula, the homey smell of damp sawdust lay thick as porridge. Picking his way between piles of fresh lumber, he dismounted at the open end of a long frame shed. Inside, the rising and falling blade was tearing through a log so clamorously that—rather than speak—he simply touched the elbow of the older of the two men at the machinery and with an interrogative hoist of his eyebrows gestured to the doorway.

  The bearded miller nodded and followed agreeably enough, but once outside responded to every question with a noncommittal grunt. An unproductive morning had its disheartening cap.

  But wait—what if the man could not hear, if his saw had ruined his ears? Harris unfolded the portrait.

  “Mrs. Crane,” said the miller with surprising force. “She used to ride here often. In the concession road and down the valley or up the valley and out the concession.”

  “Last Sunday?” Harris bellowed.

  “She had a black mare, skittish, but a treat to look at. I tried to buy it for my daughter.”

  “Was Mrs. Crane here last Sunday?”

  “Um.”

  Harris found a stub of pencil in his jacket and wrote the question on a corner of the tissue paper.

  “No, like I said. In the spring, she and another lady, but not since May or April.” The miller gave the coins in his pocket a wistful, indiscreet rattle of which he was doubtless unaware. “I would have paid sterling too,” he said, “no paper money.”

  Continuing the interview would have been awkward enough even if the man had been willing to acknowledge his deafness. Harris approached the helper.

  A young immigrant working to bring his betrothed out from Cork, he became cooperation itself on learning that Mrs. Crane’s parents had come from that very county. Of her mount’s markings he gave a detailed description. It fit Spat exactly. In declining the miller’s offers, Theresa had reportedly said the animal was too old and nervous to change stables. The other lady was remembered as dark and fine-featured. The Irishman had not caught her name, nor had he understood anything the horsewomen said to each other. They seemed not to be speaking English. Not Gaelic either. Neither had been seen for weeks.

  Harris accepted a slice of pork pie and a glass of cider for his lunch before pursuing an old settlers’ road down the east brink of the river. Thirty-foot cliffs shut out any glimpse of the wheat fields and orchards he knew lay to either side and above him. On occasion he would clamber out of the valley to ask well-rehearsed questions at farm houses. Then he would rejoin the Rouge none the wiser. What kept him going was that no one south of the fourth concession could swear that Theresa had not ridden this way last Sunday.

  Afternoon passed into evening. He had just left the last mill on the river when the rain began again, tentative and caressing at first. By the time he thought of his cape, his clothes were soaked through.

  The valley grew swampy and desolate in its final mile. Enormous steps carved at one point into the cliffs from top to bottom constituted the only sign of human passage. These Harris recognized as the terraced graves of a long-abandoned Seneca Indian village. They were not a comforting omen. Nearer Lake Ontario, the aggrieved shrieks of gulls began to drown out the patter of raindrops on willow leaves.

  Then Harris turned the last bend and found himself facing a wall of earth, a great hand pressed over the river’s mouth. This must be the embankment of the Grand Trunk Railway. In fact, a narrow outlet spanned by a trestle had been left for the Rouge water to escape to the lake, but the flow was too great and the river had backed up into a lagoon. Its waters had drowned a frame factory building labelled, “COWAN’S SHIPYARD: 2 & 3 masted schooners built to order.”

  So, another blind alley. Wet and saddle-sore, Harris concluded that the best place for him now was in front of his own fire with a glass of something warming at his side. First, though, he stopped to mop the water from his face and pull his hat brim lower. Standing a moment in the stirrups, he stretched his legs and redistributed his weight. Before his inattentive eyes, two gulls picked and tore at a long white fish that lay on a patch of sand at the foot of the railway trestle. The G.T.R. wasn’t yet accepting passengers or freight west of Brockville, but this section of the line seemed to be complete.

  Harris settled back in the saddle, preparing to move on. Which end of that fish, he wondered, was the head and which the tail? No, the head must be missing. That end was ragged and torn.

  Wearily he tried again to make sense of what he was seeing. It was long and pale, but it was not a fish. Where the tail fins should have been were fingers.

  The inside of his stomach began to twitch. Harris was daring enough in a physical sense and not too squeamish to clean and dress the game he killed, but that was a sportsman’s courage—not a soldier’s—and he had no practice in dealing with severed human limbs.

  Only by ignoring this twitching was he able to urge Banshee forward into the water and across the lagoon’s sandy bottom. The scolding gulls hoisted themselves into the air and spiralled tightly over their interrupted meal.

  Harris could bear to look at it only in glances. Bone seemed to be exposed below the elbow as well as at the shoulder. His first thought was to stop further pillage by burying the remains, but perhaps the topography should be disturbed as little as possible until seen by official eyes. At the water’s edge he dismounted and unrolled his oilskin. As he covered the arm, he glimpsed clinging to it green shreds of cloth and circling the wrist a bracelet of silver medallions. The edges of the cape he weighted down with stones.

  He did not believe it was Theresa’s arm. There were thousands of miles of green cloth in the world. The bracelet . . .

  Remounting a little queasily, he picked his way up the valley in the fading light. If he could only get away from this place, he should be able to think. The place went with him, however. The barest whiff of something rancid and waxy seemed to have rooted in the back of his throat and to be growing there. His nausea made even Banshee’s gentlest gait insupportable.

  He got down and vomited. The waxy taste was still there, but he felt steadier—steady enough, at least, to realize that he had no idea where to report his discovery.

  The last mill was shut this Saturday evening and empty. In the taverns at the east end of the Kingston Road bridge, advice would flow like stagger juice, but anyone asking for a constable would face insistent questions. Harris accordingly turned west at the bridge, back towards Toronto. A talk with the Rouge Hill toll collector some half a mile later did nothing to deflect him from his course.

  The toll booth consisted of a faded, two-storey frame house with a roof that extended north across the highway to a blank supporting wall on the other side. The collector had had enough experience with sneaks and bullies to appreciate the difficulty of finding the police. The nearest lived in Highland Creek, but that was Scarboro and this was Pickering. The Pickering lock-up might as well have been on the moon. You would never get a constable out at night anyway.

  Harris continued townwards. The pine-planked surface of the Kingston Road clattered horribly beneath the horse’s hoofs—an ear-splitting amplification of the agitation in Harris’s breast. He quickly switched over to the dirt shoulder. The panic followed him, merely growing more stealthily in the dark and lonely night.

  The remains were not Theresa’s. Someone must tell him that. He feared, with a fear approach
ing a certainty, that no one would.

  When he reached Market Square, mad fiddle music was spilling out of taverns and breaking against the austere face of Toronto’s dark and all-but empty City Hall. Down in Station No. 1, an unfamiliar constable kept vigil. He denied any knowledge of Inspector John Vandervoort. Harris could try coming back on Monday.

  Harris tried the Dog and Duck. The taproom was so dimly lit that the elk and whitetail trophy heads along the wall were mutually indistinguishable. Indeed, gloom seemed to clothe the few women present more effectually than their gowns which, as far as Harris could see when he began moving from table to table, all had buttons undone if not actually missing. Overheard conversations between them and their companions often touched on “going upstairs.” Impeded by modesty, but more by the dark, Harris completed his tour of the room without finding his man. He applied to the proprietor.

  Vandervoort was known to that individual as a dedicated drinker, though by no means a troublesome one. Indeed, his patronage was an asset at licence-renewal time. This was as candid as Harris could wish, but when he asked about tonight in particular, the bluff hotel-keeper turned smarmy.

  “Don’t see him, I’m afraid. He’ll be sorry to have missed you.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  “Couldn’t say, sir. I might just get a message to him, though, if it’s urgent.”

  “It’s urgent that I see him,” said Harris—but he was again assured that a message was the most that could be undertaken.

  At the stable of the less furtive-looking hotel next door, Harris left his horse to be watered and fed. Returning to the bank on foot, he changed into dry clothes and wrote a letter detailing the discovery of the arm. He asked the inspector to meet him as soon as possible under the Rouge River G.T.R. trestle, where Harris promised to remain until Sunday noon. He then packed a knapsack for a night in the open. Nagged by doubts as to whether the letter would be received or acted upon, he next proceeded to the Union Station at the foot of York Street and sent the Pickering constable a telegram, a copy of which he added to the envelope for Vandervoort.

  Back in the Dog and Duck, a leering fiddler was scraping out “Pop Goes the Weasel.” One of the pudgier of the unbuttoned women was using her right index finger and left cheek to sound the pops, more or less on cue, and to show her freedom from constraint. These moist little explosions did nothing to revive Harris’s long-dead appetite. Notwithstanding, he providently bought some dark stew of unknown composition to take with him and, dodging the murky dancers, managed to place his sealed envelope in the hotel-keeper’s hands.

  Once outside, he waited twenty minutes in the shadows across the square on the chance of being able to follow the courier. When none emerged, he rode—teeth gritted—back out King Street towards the Kingston Road.

  Memories of the gulls’ yellow beaks, a fish with fingers, the smell, the waxy taste pushed against him as he advanced. He saw nothing of the countryside. This time he barely heard Banshee’s hoofs hammering upon the plank road. He felt he could not go back there, to the beach beneath the railway trestle—but he had to.

  The arm must not be disturbed. This was the one sure beacon in a night of doubt.

  Whose arm? Where was the rest? As horse and rider trotted on, the wind of their passage whispered unanswerable questions into Harris’s too-willing ear. Whose arm? How severed?

  He found himself wondering too who was the fine-featured dark lady, the one that used to ride in the valley with Theresa, the one he had heard of at the mill. A cruel hope tempted him. Perhaps not Theresa, but she . . .

  He rode on, still doubting that he could go back to that shrouded lump of torn and soggy flesh.

  He was back.

  The rain had stopped, though clouds still hung over the mouth of the Rouge. Frogs and crickets whined and belched into the gloom. Harris bit the glass head off a Promethean match, which exploded into flame. He lit the paraffin candle in the tin lamp he had brought and approached the weighted oilskin. It was just as he had left it.

  Chapter Four

  Sleeping Rough

  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.