Desperate Acts

by Don Gutteridge

  Desperate Acts

  A Marc Edwards Mystery

  by

  Don Gutteridge

  ISBN:

  Published by Bev Editions at Smashwords

  Copyright 2015 Don Gutteridge

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  About the Author

  Other Books in the Marc Edwards Mystery Series

  Excerpt From Desperate Acts

  ONE

  “So, tell me about this Shakespeare Club,” Marc Edwards said to Brodie Langford as they left Sherbourne Street and turned west onto Front. “Why not simply take up with the amateur players who hang about Ogden Frank’s theatre?”

  Brodie grinned before answering – to let Marc know that he was aware of the deliberate naiveté of the remark. They had become fast friends over the preceding seven months, and enjoyed the kind of gentle teasing which that sort of bond encourages. “We are as fine wine to plain vinegar,” he said, squinting into the October sunset that bathed the broad lakeside avenue in shimmering waves of gold and vermilion. “Our sole purpose is to read, discuss and otherwise venerate the Bard, and only the Bard.”

  “I suspect the great man himself would feel more comfortable among a troupe of actors, however sweaty and thick-tongued,” Marc said.

  “Very true. But we do occasionally stoop to acting out a scene or two – by way of illustration, of course.”

  “Of course. You wouldn’t want to tear a scene to tatters, not with the likes of Sir Peregrine Shuttleworth keeping a close watch on the proceedings.”

  Brodie laughed. “I find my membership in the club about as amusing as you do. And just as incongruous and unexpected. But, then, if you had told me a year ago that I would be where I am today, I would have called the asylum-keepers to come and get you.”

  “You’ve come a long way in a short time,” Marc said, his tone now as serious as it was full of admiration for this remarkable young man of nineteen years.

  Orphaned at the age of thirteen and subsequently raised by his dead father’s law partner in New York City, Brodie Langford had, in the past two years, suffered an abrupt and scandal-ridden uprooting from his native land, followed by a constrained and circumscribed existence here in Toronto with his young sister and their beloved guardian, Dick Dougherty. Brodie had idolized Dougherty – in spite of the man’s questionable past in New York – and had felt more and more responsible as the health of his “uncle” had deteriorated under the strain of exile and ostracism. Even so, Brodie had managed to secure a position at the Commercial Bank, where he had impressed his skeptical superiors and thrived. Then, just when life had begun to offer him a glimmer of hope, he and Celia had been orphaned once again – in the most sordid and tragic circumstances.

  “You know, don’t you,” Marc said, “that I heartily approve of everything you’ve done since your Uncle’s death, the manner in which you’ve conducted yourself and the wise decisions you’ve made for you and your sister?”

  “Much of which has been the result of your avuncular advice,” Brodie said, only half-teasing. Marc was not yet twenty-nine, and, while recently made a father, he was not quite ready to accept the more senior role of elderly advisor.

  “Well, you look every inch the gentleman tonight,” Marc said. “If a young man with a New York twang can ever pass for such in Her Majesty’s colonies.”

  Brodie was wearing a dark frock coat cut in the latest style and a matching top-hat that served not only as proof of his affluence and taste but also as a startling contrast to his blond hair, pale complexion and almost transparently blue eyes. In his right hand he swung a silver-tipped walking-stick with a handle carved like a wolf-s head, as if he disdained in the vigour and pride of his youth to have it touch the rotting sidewalk or assist his striding in any discernible manner.

  “I hope you don’t think me too forward or presumptuous in agreeing to take part in the club’s activities?” Brodie said as they strolled past the City Hall, which faced Front Street at the foot of the market. “It was Mr. Fullarton’s idea. He thinks it’s time for me to move out into society and make my mark.”

  Horace Fullarton was the manager of the Commercial Bank, Brodie’s superior, and very much the young man’s champion. In fact, Marc had heard elsewhere, Brodie was being groomed as Fullarton’s right-hand man. With the death of his guardian and the subsequent inheritance of both his father’s estate and his guardian’s (to be shared equally with Celia when she came of age next year), Brodie had become suddenly rich, with plenty of money to live sumptuously for the rest of his life – without working a single day. And although he was now wealthy and independent enough to move back to the United States (anywhere but New York, that is), he and Celia had decided to remain in the city their guardian had chosen for their exile after his ignominious banishment. And, more compellingly, Richard Dougherty, the “uncle” they had worshipped since childhood and who had become a second father to them, was buried here. Who else was there to place flowers upon his wide and lonesome grave?

  Nonetheless, here or abroad, money was money, and oodles of it generally seduced its possessor into a life of leisure and moderate debauchery. But Brodie was American, not British. He saw himself becoming a man who would do something in the world. With his father’s charm and a mind keen for business, he had cared not that he had begun as a lowly bank clerk. He believed in his own abilities, and was Yankee enough to think that social class was something you chose. Nor did his unexpected wealth alter his determination to succeed on his own in the financial arena. (It had not yet occurred to him that he had the wherewithal to found his own bank.) His principal concession to wealth had been to move him and Celia out of their rented cottage on Bay Street into a two-storey brick residence on Sherbourne Street north, in a area where houses with spacious parkland about them were being constructed as quickly as the new middle-class itself. Their cook and butler, who had been Dougherty’s day-servants, followed them faithfully, and settled into the servants’ quarters of Harlem Place, as they had named their new home.

  “By rights, I should really be tagging along with you to Robert’s place,” Brodie said as they crossed Yonge Street and paused to admire the play of sunlight and shadow on the perfectly still waters of Toronto Bay, framed by the island-spit that gave the city its splendid harbour. There were no houses of any kind on the south side of Front Street to block the view or suggest that the bustling capital was anything but comfortable with being a “seaside” port or otherwise concerned that its parliament buildings, its most prestigious domiciles and its commercial heart was thus visible and vulnerable. “I must admit, Marc, that while I understand the significance of the current political debate – how could I not, knowing you and Robert as I do? – I am nevertheless unable to sustain a proper interest in
it.”

  “There are, of course, other reasons for a bright and not unhandsome fellow to visit Baldwin House with me,” Marc said. Such an allusion to Brodie’s love life might have drawn a blush a few months ago, but the young man’s obvious success at winning over Diana Ramsay had left him immune to the older man’s teasing.

  “Diana has taken her charges out to Spadina for a few days – to enjoy the country air while this Indian summer lasts,” Brodie said.

  Miss Ramsay was governess to Robert Baldwin’s four motherless children. Robert shared one half of Baldwin House with his famous father, Dr. William Warren Baldwin, and ran his legal practice, Baldwin and Sullivan, from the other half. Spadina was their country residence. Robert was slowly becoming as well-known as his father, both of them heavily involved in promoting political and social change that the conservative clique who had ruled the province for thirty years labelled “radical,” “subversive,” and “anti-British.” Marc was headed for the Baldwins’ parlour for an evening meeting of half a dozen Reform-party stalwarts, during which a critical strategy for the fall session of the Legislative Assembly was to be hammered out.

  “Would I be foolish to suggest that you and Miss Ramsay are beginning to take each other seriously, despite the frightening discrepancy in your ages?”

  Brodie didn’t blush, but he gave Marc a mocking chuckle. “She’s not yet twenty-three, hardly a candidate for spinsterhood. And I’ve been told I look a good deal more than nineteen.”

  “But it is getting serious?”

  “Yes. But I doubt you’ll be hearing the banns read any time soon. I have the means to support a wife, all right, but I am determined to do well at the bank – I feel I owe it, and Mr. Fullarton, a great deal. He had faith in me before I had faith in myself. I expect to devote the next two years at least to fulfilling the promise he has seen in me. Furthermore, Diana has become devoted to Robert’s children over the past year, and she is determined to remain their caregiver until the youngest, little Eliza, is of school age.”

  “Despite the dictates of her heart?”

  They were approaching Bay Street, where Marc would turn north a few paces and find himself before the elegant, colonnaded residence of his friend and fellow barrister.

  “I admire her loyalty, and we are quite content to keep each other company, as we do now, for the foreseeable future,” Brodie said with all the fearless certainty of youth. “We understand each other completely, for in a way we are both orphans.”

  Marc stopped. “I knew Miss Ramsay was here in Toronto on her own, but I was unaware she had no parents back in Montreal.” As someone who had lost – and found – several parents, Marc was uncommonly interested in the subject.

  “She has an older brother and his family there. He raised her and made sure she was well educated, but both her mother and father died of cholera when she was nine or ten.”

  “And like you, also, she is more or less exiled from her home city?”

  “Not quite, though I see what you mean. Robert, you remember, was passing through Montreal in 1836 on his way home from Ireland. Charles Ramsay’s father had been an acquaintance of Dr. Baldwin, and Robert looked the family up when he arrived there in December of that year. He was much impressed with Diana, who made it known she was looking for a position as governess or tutor. So, when the children’s regular governess resigned to get married a year ago last July, Robert wrote immediately to Charles. Who, it seems, was more than delighted to let his sister go off on her own to the wilds of Upper Canada.”

  “And the rest is history, eh?” Marc smiled.

  Brodie gave his elaborately knobbed walking-stick a drum major’s twirl. “Well, I’ll leave you and Robert to solve the problems of state. I’m off to The Sailor’s Arms to see if I can prevent the assassination of Julius Caesar by his faithless followers. Or something like that.”

  “I’d keep an eye on Cassius, if I were you.”

  ***

  Marc walked slowly up the east side of Bay Street. It was not yet a quarter of eight. He was early, as he often was, and reluctant to abandon the warm and unseasonable sunshine flooding Front Street behind him. In the steep shadow of Bay Street, the autumn air was chill, with the foretaste of winter in it. The Baldwins’ manservant answered his knock and showed him into the parlour. Taking his coat and hat, he assured him that Dr. and Mr. Baldwin would be along in a few minutes. Marc sat down before the fire, as comfortable in this room as he was in his own home.

  Which was where his thoughts now mutinously drifted, despite the importance of the evening’s agenda to the very future of the province. For Briar Cottage was the place where he felt most himself – after a youth spent and misspent in an aborted career as solicitor, followed by a boring (and then a bloody) stint in the 24th Regiment of Foot – interspersed with occasional, free-lance investigations into serious crimes. Much of this most recent sense of belonging was due to Beth, the love of his life, and the hourly presence of Maggie, their six-month-old daughter. Having expected to be presented with a son, Marc had thought that it might be quite a while before he “took” to Maggie. But the period of estrangement had lasted only the length of time it had taken the newborn, asleep in his arms, to open her eyes and say hello with them. Beth was now back at work, supervising the operation of her King Street business, Smallman’s – a millinery shop and adjacent dressmaking establishment. Three mornings a week she and the baby, accompanied by their servant Charlene, drove down to the shop and stayed there until mid-afternoon. Maggie was the principal attraction among the seamstresses in the dressmaking section of the enterprise, and appeared none the worse for the ordeal.

  This domestic harmony had been doubly welcomed, for the past few months had been among the most frantic and anxious of Marc’s life since his harrowing experiences during the uprising of ‘37. On the personal side, his long-time friend, Major Owen Jenkin, had retired from the army and come to Toronto to attend Maggie’s christening and to look for a place to live – as close to the Edwards as possible. But three days after the ceremony, he had had a heart attack while out walking with Marc, and had died in his arms. On the public side, while studying for his bar exams and apprenticing law under the tutelage of Robert Baldwin, Marc had had to make increasingly more time to compose leaflets, pamphlets and broadsides for Robert and his “Durhamites,” the self-appointed group of politicians and their associates who were trying to rouse the populace in support of the recommendations of Lord Durham’s Report. The hard-line conservatives and Tories, with their fists on the levers of power, were dead-set against them. With rallies and counter-rallies, fulminating editorials from either side of the press, veiled threats, and outright intimidation, it had been both an exhausting and an exhilarating summer.

  Somehow Marc had managed to deal with his grief and squeeze out enough hours to prepare for his final exams – and still reserve a few precious moments each day to watch Maggie try out yet another variant of her brand-new smile and, later, to hold both of his lady-loves close to him in the warm, breathing darkness of their mutual room. Last month he had been called to the Bar, and was now a full-fledged barrister. Surely his adoptive father, Uncle Jabez, would have sat up in his English grave and smiled at the sight. Both had been proven right. Marc had known at twenty that his reckless and adventurous spirit would find no satisfaction in a stuffy solicitor’s office, shuffling paper, as Uncle Jabez had done for two decades. So he had abandoned the Inns of Court for the Royal Military School at Sandhurst. Which decision had brought him here to this outpost of empire – to war, love, marriage and, fortuitously, to police work. The latter had rekindled his interest in the law, not that of a clerk’s cubicle but the grand theatre of the criminal courtroom. Brodie’s guardian, Dick Dougherty, had been one of its finest practitioners, a model and an inspiration for Marc. So, the adopted son of Jabez Edwards of Kent, England was at last a lawyer, here in the capital of Upper Canada!

  Robert Baldwin had immediately offered Marc a position in his own fi
rm, but he had not yet accepted (though he had indicated he would be ready to “fill in” there, should the need arise). Marc felt, for the time being at least, that he wanted to be free to move his life and his talents wherever they would do the most good. And right now, assisting the Durhamites in their struggle for responsible government was paramount. Nor did anyone know how long the struggle might take or in what directions it might lead. A bloody rebellion had been fought over the issue already, and Marc had more compelling reasons now than ever to make sure that another one wouldn’t be necessary.

  And just yesterday morning, Beth had whispered to him the news that she was once again pregnant.

  “Ah, Marc, you’ve arrived early,” Robert Baldwin said, coming into the room with his father. “What a surprise.”

  ***

  Brodie continued along Front Street at a leisurely pace. While he was looking forward to his evening at the Shakespeare Club – his third such evening since he had been persuaded to join by his supervisor, Horace Fullarton – he never hurried this pleasurable stroll eastward along Toronto’s bayside avenue. Looking left, one’s sensibility was stroked by the subtle, natural tints of the water, the gently treed island, the silts and sands of the shoreline, and the vast skies that seemed to hold them all in place purely for the benefit of those observing their wonders. Then, glancing right, the eye took in the architectural niceties of the city’s most expensive and ostentatious residences – Somerset House and the Bishop’s Palace being the most prominent of many. Farther along at John Street stood the twin parliament buildings, where during the upcoming sessions the fate of the colony would be decided. Nearing Peter Street, Brodie picked up his pace. On the far corner, facing the bay, sat The Sailor’s Arms, site of the weekly meeting of the Shakespeare Club.