Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

“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 frac
ture.”

  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.”

  Chapter Five

  Front Street

  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.”