Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  “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 alderm
en, 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 monopolize
d 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—”