Turncoat

by Don Gutteridge

  THREE

  Up here, about a hundred yards,” Erastus Hatch hollered back to Marc, pointing to a trail of sorts.

  “You’d have to know it was here to find it,” Marc said, catching up and drawing his horse to a halt beside the constable’s.

  “Joshua Smallman was born and raised in these parts. He knew where he was going all right.” Both men nudged their horses forward into the drifts between the trees.

  “Then you don’t accept the story that he became disoriented in the blizzard and wandered into the deadfall in a fit of panic?”

  “You’ve been reading the magistrate’s report,” Hatch grinned. They had met less than an hour before, but Marc was beginning to like him already and, prematurely perhaps, to trust him. “I don’t think Child himself believed what he wrote there. But it was the only conclusion that made sense.”

  “You think he met with foul play, then?”

  Hatch waited until Marc was abreast of him and they had paused to let the horses rest. He turned to look directly at him before answering. “To be frank, I don’t. Major Barnaby, the surgeon, came out here with Child and me on New Year’s Day after the alarm was raised. Barnaby’s an ex-army man and a good tracker. We were able to pick up Joshua’s trail despite a little overnight snow, and it led us where we’re headed right now. The three of us found the body. Charles looked him over real careful here at the scene and later at his surgery in Cobourg.”

  “He died when the deadfall struck him?”

  “Possibly, but more likely some time afterwards. His neck wasn’t broken. Poor bugger probably froze to death.”

  “But why was he out here?”

  “I said I didn’t think there was foul play, but I also figure he didn’t trot out to this old Indian trail to enjoy the scenery on New Year’s Eve, leaving his daughter-in-law and guests to fend for themselves.”

  “So you do believe he was coming to meet someone. A secret rendezvous, of some kind.”

  The horses plunged forward again, wheezing and protesting.

  “Or he was out here in search of something.”

  “It would have to have been bigger than a moose to be seen in this stuff.”

  Hatch laughed, as he had often since their meeting at his house earlier in the afternoon. By temperament and build, the man had been destined to become a miller or smithy. He had a broad, wind-burnished face with a raw, unfinished look to it. That was true of so many of the native-born out here, Marc thought, even though their parents most probably had been undersized, underfed émigrés fleeing famine and persecution. Even their accents vanished, it seemed, in a single generation.

  “Don’t make sense, does it?” he said.

  They dismounted and, with some difficulty (most of it on Marc’s part), laced on their snowshoes. The horses had done all they could.

  “This is where we found Joshua’s big roan,” Hatch said. “Despite last night’s blow, you can still see where the poor beast thrashed about.”

  “Nothing had been taken or tampered with?”

  “Nothing. And Joshua was carrying no money, according to his daughter-in-law.”

  “Bathsheba Smallman.”

  “Everybody around here calls her Beth. You’ll get a chance to ask her yourself. The Smallman farm’s right next to the mill. What she told the inquest, though, was that Joshua told her he’d got a message and had to go out. Nothing more.”

  “You found no note or letter on him?”

  “No. And neither Beth nor any of the neighbour guests at the party remember any note being delivered.”

  Marc took his first giant steps on the raquettes, amazed to find himself on top of the snow. He felt the same light-headed exhilaration that might have come from waltzing on a cloud or striding over a Cumbrian lake—that is, until he tipped sideways into a drift and had to be hauled out by the grinning Hatch.

  “You can’t tell a snowshoe how to behave,” he said, not unkindly. “Let it take you with it and you’ll be fine.”

  “You could still follow Smallman’s trail this far on that morning?” Marc said once he was upright and moving again.

  “Just faintly, but clear enough. Till we came round this cedar.”

  They stopped. A few feet ahead the massive boles of several trees formed a natural aisle that any hunter or wayfarer would be foolish not to enter. Even now the scene before them was peaceful and innocent under the fresh snow: except for the huge log that stuck up odd-angled out of the drift at the base of the arch. They moved cautiously towards it, as if its murderous power were still somehow extant.

  “Was there any sign that the contraption had been recently re-rigged?” Marc said, staring down at the brute log and the tangle of rawhide rigging that had provided the trigger for its lethal drop.

  “None. As you can see, it’s the kind of trap the Mississauga Indians used to make when these were their prime hunting grounds. The rawhide is old and quite dried out. Joshua was just unlucky, I figure. Nine times out of ten this rope’ll snap when it’s hit and leave the deadfall in place. Still, the log is designed to fall when the shim is given the slightest shock.”

  “You searched the area all around here for other footprints or signs of human disturbance?”

  “Yes—once we’d recovered from the shock of seeing one of our dearest friends lying there dead and stiff.”

  “I’m sorry,” Marc said. “I must remember he was no stranger to you.”

  “As soon as he came back to help out on the farm after his son’s death last year, we took him into our company. He was one of us. He joined us every Wednesday evening he could.”

  “Us?”

  “The magistrate, the major, me, and Durfee, the postmaster. He was supposed to be with us on New Year’s Eve over at Child’s. It’s a sort of gentleman’s club, made up of like-minded citizens, you might say.”

  “Loyal Tory gentlemen,” Marc said with a slight smile.

  “That’s right,” Hatch said, taking no offence.

  “You were all there, then?” Marc said, more abruptly than he’d intended.

  “Could one of us have been floundering about out here, you mean? Lurking in the shadows like Madame Guillotine?”

  “No, of course not. Anyone else would have had to come in along the same route that Smallman did, and that means tracks—deep hoof marks or snowshoe tracks.” He was staring back at the turbulence his own raquettes had left in the snow. “And you found no tracks beyond the trap?”

  “We went carefully on ahead for a good twenty yards or more. Then we fanned out in a circle twice as wide. Nothing. Not even a rabbit track. Our friend died out here alone, looking for someone or something. Even so, who could have known or predicted that he would take this particular route? Or that the damnable device would work, if someone were obliging enough to blunder into it? It hadn’t been touched for years.”

  After a pause Marc said, “What’s beyond that ridge up there?”

  “That’s the rim of the cliff before it drops down to the lake,” Hatch said, suddenly more alert.

  “The frozen lake,” Marc said.

  THE TWO MEN STOOD ON THE ridge and stared out at the endless, ice-covered stretch of Lake Ontario, more vast than most of the Earth’s seas. A little farther to the east, it would be frozen completely across its thirty-mile breadth, and on any Sunday afternoon you would be able to see cutters and sleighs and homemade sleds sliding merrily in both directions between the American republic and the British province. Families pulled apart by borders and politics and memories of the War of 1812 reconvened as soon as the lake froze, as if humanity was meant to be without division or dissent.

  “You figure somebody may have come up here from the ice?” Hatch said.

  “It’s thick enough to hold a horse, even a sleigh. And the highway at Crawford’s Corners can’t be more than a quarter of a mile from the shoreline, can it?”

  “True enough. That would explain why we only found Joshua’s tracks coming in here. But how would anybody coming up
along the lakeshore know exactly where he was? You’d have to be an Indian or a wolf.”

  “What’s that down there? To your right. Looks like an inlet or a little bay to me.”

  Hatch’s eyes lit up. “That’s Bass Cove, a favourite fishing spot in the spring.”

  Marc began to move along the ridge in that direction, raquettes in hand. Then he stood straight up and didn’t move until Hatch had joined him. He pointed to a shadowy indentation in the escarpment just below them on the wooded side of the ridge. “I think we’ve found our rendezvous,” he said.

  Together they scrabbled down to a ledge that was invisible from above but easily seen from the woods just below. They pushed through a dark entranceway into a low, cramped, but otherwise habitable cave. They waited until their eyes had adjusted to the murky, late-afternoon light before commenting.

  “We aren’t the first visitors here besides the bears,” Marc said.

  “These ashes were made by more than one fire,” Hatch added, holding up a tin cup and a blackened soup spoon.

  “And something’s been stored here at some time or other,” Marc said from his crouching position at the far side of the cave. “I can see the ridge-lines in the dirt: crates or barrels, I’d say.”

  Outside again, Hatch said, almost to himself, “Still, we don’t have the foggiest idea of whether anybody was waiting here for Joshua Smallman two weeks ago. And if they were, they might just’ve been as friendly as hostile. Until we know why he came out here, we’re just spittin’ in the wind.”

  But Marc was already edging along away from the mouth of the cave, bent low like a hound on the spoor. Hatch was tempted to chuckle at the ensign’s antics but didn’t.

  “Come over here, Constable Hatch.”

  “Only if you call me Erastus, or just plain Hatch. I’m only a part-time, supernumerary constable, and under duress to boot.”

  From their vantage point they had an unimpeded view through the evergreens to a spot somewhere on the trail they themselves had made: their tracks were clearly visible.

  “That’s the trail all right,” Hatch said, puzzled. “But the deadfall’s farther down.”

  “On the other side of that patch of evergreens. You can just see the limbs of the big oak it was attached to.”

  “But if someone was standing here that night—in his snowshoes—looking down and waving Joshua on, he would’ve come straight up this open stretch and missed the trap.”

  “Look at the size of the drifts down there,” Marc said. “They’re deep, but not deep enough to cover the trees that’ve been knocked down by storms or something. See how they’re blocking the way?”

  “Knocked down by lightning,” Hatch said, spotting the telltale blackened branches and stark, splintered trunks poking through the snow. “You figure somebody stood here and encouraged Joshua? Maybe even pointed to the left, knowing the Indian trail went that way and—”

  “Knowing that the deadfall was just ahead at the next bend.”

  “Possible,” Hatch said slowly. “Still, it sounds a bit far-fetched. Two maybes don’t make a certainty.”

  “Could a person who was really expert on snowshoes have gone down to the trap from here, come back up again, and then whisked away all signs of his tracks?”

  “Oh, I think so, ’specially if there’d been some additional snow to cover the brush marks. But you’re forgetting one important thing: anybody meeting Joshua here that night might just as easily have been a friend.”

  “Then why didn’t he walk down to the trap to help the man? He couldn’t have been sure that Smallman was killed outright. And that horse of his would have been making a hell of a racket. They can smell death, I’ve been told.”

  “That’s so, but we’re still guessing that somebody was actually here.”

  “Not now we aren’t,” Marc said. He was hunched over a place where the ledge broadened slightly. Hatch leaned over his shoulder. The webbed signature of a pair of raquettes stared up at them as clean-edged as a palm print. The sheltering rock had kept it almost free of drifting snow and untouched by the recent squall driving off the lake.

  “And look at this,” Hatch said. “A stem broken off a clay pipe, right beside it.”

  He handed it to Marc, who gazed at it thoughtfully, then tucked it into his tunic.

  “Every man and most boys in the township’ve got a pipe like that.”

  Marc was still thinking. “What are the odds of any two residents of this county being out in such a godforsaken place in the dead of winter on separate and unrelated errands?” he said.

  “You know what all this means, then,” Hatch said solemnly.

  “I do,” Marc said. “We’ve got a murder on our hands, or something damn close to it.”

  THEY MADE A MORE THOROUGH SEARCH of the cave with the aid of an improvised torch but found nothing more of interest. The place seemed to have been used over an extended period of time, months perhaps, as a temporary storage depot for whatever it was that needed to be hidden, possibly guns or rum. Access to it would have been via the ice-bound lake, where the slope, being exposed to frequent snow squalls, would leave no trace of the traffic over it. Marc himself scrutinized the deadfall trap, but there was not a piece of bark bared or twig snapped off to indicate any tampering had been done to ensure its working on cue.

  “I have to believe you’re right,” Hatch sighed as they turned west onto the Kingston Road and headed back towards Crawford’s Corners. “Someone, a smuggler or an insurrectionist, was standing up there when poor, unsuspecting Joshua came up the Indian trail. There doesn’t seem to be any other reason for a man to stand on that exposed ledge and puff on a pipe except to get a view of the trail and anybody on it. And if he didn’t intend to kill Joshua, then he left him in the snow to die, which amounts to the same thing in my book.”

  “And His Majesty’s,” Marc said.

  “How do you plan to proceed with this?” Hatch said, alluding to the lieutenant-governor’s warrant that Marc had shown him. “I gather you don’t intend to involve Sheriff MacLachlan in Cobourg?”

  “Not right away,” Marc said. “Now that we’re almost certain we have a crime of some sort here, wouldn’t it be wiser to let people think everything’s all right as is, especially those with something to hide?”

  “But you’ll have to question folks, won’t you?”

  “When I know a lot more than I do now.”

  “You’ll have to tell Beth Smallman,” Hatch said, in a tone halfway between command and entreaty.

  “Probably. I’ll work that out when I see her.”

  “You can walk over there in the morning, if you like. And tomorrow being Wednesday, I can just cart you along to the weekly meeting of the Georgian Club, as we call it. You’ll get all the background information you need there. In the meantime, it’s getting late, and a man of my girth and wit requires a regular intake of his daughter’s cooking.”

  “Better than army rations?”

  “What isn’t?” Hatch laughed. “And you’ll be wanting to meet my Winnifred. She’ll be back from the quilting bee by now and wondering where the hell I’ve gotten to.”

  The not-unhandsome daughter, Marc mused. Would she prove handsome enough to account for the prolonged stay of a visiting ensign—perhaps one of her dead mother’s distant cousins from the Old Country?

  On their right as they passed the intersection of the highway and the Pringle Sideroad, Hatch pointed to a quarry-stone house just visible through a screen of trees. “That’s Philander Child’s establishment. He’s a county magistrate, but most folks just call him the Squire. We’ll be going up there tomorrow night.”

  “And that must be the local tavern.” Marc indicated a square-log cabin of considerable size, gabled like a true inn. Nearby were several semi-detached sheds and one rambling livery stable.

  “One of them. The respectable one. Run by James Durfee and his wife. You’ll meet James tomorrow night.”

  “He’s the postmaster?”
/>   “That’s right.”

  “Then I’ll need to meet him now,” Marc said.

  AFTER INTRODUCING MARC TO DURFEE SIMPLY as a visiting gentleman from the garrison and a protégé of Sir John Colborne’s, Constable Hatch took his leave and rode across the intersection, or “corners,” towards the mill and his house next to it. If James Durfee was meant to be impressed by Hatch’s remarks, he restrained himself admirably. He was a plain-speaking man, born in Upper Canada but of Scots extraction, with a ready smile qualified only by a pair of watchful dark eyes.

  “We don’t get many soldiers on furlough this far from Muddy York, as we used to call Toronto before she took on those citified airs,” he said. “Despite the obvious attractions hereabouts.”

  Marc smiled as he was expected to. “I’m here on official business,” he said, accepting with a nod the wee dram offered and seating himself on one of the wooden chairs scattered about the outer room, which no doubt served as the principal drinking quarters of the inn. A plank bar and tapped keg of beer stood nearby. At this moment, Marc was the only customer.

  “Business of a pleasant sort, I trust,” Durfee said.

  “I’m not at liberty to say much about it at the moment, but Hatch is bringing me to your club meeting tomorrow night. I’ll have a lot more to say then.”

  “Ah,” Durfee said, downing his whisky. “You’ll be most welcome. But it’s not been the same club without Joshua Smallman.”

  “You knew him well?” When Durfee gave him a quizzical look, Marc said quickly, “Hatch told me about the tragic accident.”

  “I see. And tragic it was. Joshua and me grew up in the Cobourg area, you know. Joshua went off to York when he was twenty, married, and did well in the dry goods trade. Then when his son, his only child, turned his back on the business, there was a falling out of sorts. Jesse, poor bugger, came here when this township was first opened up—to become a farmer and show his father he could make it on his own.”