It was then that Marc spied a large spruce branch lying a few feet away in a drift. There were a few spruce trees scattered throughout this mainly cedar grove, so he glanced about for the source of the broken branch. He found a tall spruce a little to his left, not far from the branch, and looked up to see where – and how – it might have come down. What he saw was much more interesting. Eight feet above him, partly obscured by the branches holding them in place, sat a pair of snowshoes. “Chilton’s” progress and its method became instantly clear. The snowshoes would have gotten him across to the hay-barn, while the spruce branch dragged behind would wipe away their imprint. Marc had seen this trick done during his first investigation four years earlier.
Leaving the raquettes where they were, Marc ploughed his way slowly towards the little barn, scrutinizing the surface just ahead of each step. The recent drifting evidently had obscured the faint swishing pattern of Chilton’s spruce-branch, for even at close range Marc could see nothing but a smooth blank surface. However, his assumption was confirmed when he neared the barn, where the building itself had blunted the drifting effect of the north wind. There in the very shadow of the barn he spied the unmistakeable pattern of that camouflaging branch. “Chilton” had snowshoed this far at least, and hidden his trail nicely.
Which suggested that his accomplice had waited for him in the hay-barn. To reach it undetected he would have had to approach from the cover of the bush, probably on snowshoes as well and dragging a branch behind him. However, when Marc pushed past the north side of the barn to examine this route, the extent of the drifting here made it impossible for him to determine whether it had in fact been used. Farther off towards the edge of the woods he could see where Cobb and Withers had tramped along on Friday morning looking for signs of intrusion, but even the keenest eye would not have picked up any cleverly camouflaged snowshoe tracks, if indeed someone had entered the estate here to rendezvous with the butler-spy.
It was in the midst of this thought that he heard a sound – from inside the barn.
He inched his way back until he was standing in front of the barn’s only door. He gave a series of irregular knocks, as if it were some code. There was no response for thirty seconds or so. He repeated the sequence of knocks. From inside came a tentative whisper:
“That you, Chilton?”
In what he hoped was a reasonable approximation of the butler’s voice, Marc replied, “Yes. Open up.”
Again there was a lengthy pause. Then the door-latch was cautiously slid back. Marc didn’t wait. He pushed inward with all his strength. The door jerked open, and a male figure was flung backwards with it. In the half-light all Marc could see was the underside of two upturned snowshoes.
He stepped inside, bent over the stunned man, pulled him up by his coat-collar, and plunked him down on the nearest bale of hay. He was a short, wiry fellow with a stableman’s strength, but the sight of Marc’s six-foot frame blocking the light and his escape route was enough to convince him to remain seated. In lieu of resistance, he opted for bravado.
“Who the fuck are you?” he snarled shakily.
“My name is Edwards. I’m with the Toronto police. And you have to be Giles Harkness.”
“What of it? I ain’t done nothin’ the police need to get bothered about.”
“That remains to be seen. What are you doing skulking about this estate?”
“I work here. I got a right to be anywhere I like.”
“You left your employment over two weeks ago, and since then you’ve been overheard making threats against your former employer.”
“What’re you gonna do, arrest me fer trespassin’? How do you know I ain’t come to visit Struthers or Bragg?”
“Quit avoiding the obvious. Just now you were expecting Graves Chilton to be outside that door, not Struthers or Bragg. It is five o’clock, and that was your rendezvous time each day, wasn’t it? Chilton arrived with an envelope, handed it to you, and you snowshoed back into the bush and made a run for the city to deliver the news. We’ve known all about it, we just didn’t know – till now – where the drop-off was and to whom.”
“It ain’t against the law to carry messages!” Harkness cried, but most of the bravado had dissolved as Marc had zeroed in on the truth. “I had no idea what was in them envelopes,” he added with a whine and a desperate glance at the solitary door. “Honest!”
“Last Thursday at two-thirty you received an envelope from the butler, delivered it, and returned again at five o’clock. But this time you not only received, you delivered, didn’t you?”
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
“You delivered a little gift for Mr. Chilton, a bonus for his success at getting three envelopes to his betters in town: one on Wednesday and two on Thursday. You brought the good butler a bottle of Amontillado sherry, didn’t you?”
“So what? The gentleman we worked for asked me to deliver it. Is that a crime too?” Harkness’s bluster was increasing in proportion to his anxiety.
“You don’t know, do you?” Marc said with a slow, quizzical smile.
“Know what?”
“Your Graves Chilton is dead. He died early Friday morning. The Amontillado you gave him had enough poison in it to fell an elephant.”
Harkness went chalk-white, and began to tremble. “You’re lyin’! We was just tryin’ to make him woozy – enough to get him fired.”
“That’s irrelevant. Whoever put the poison in that wine and the man who delivered it are both guilty of murder, and will hang,” Marc said in the tone he used to badger a hostile witness in court.
“I ain’t gonna hang fer this! It wasn’t my idea! None of it!”
“Then you had better give me the name of the man who is responsible.”
***
A few minutes later Marc and his prisoner reached the path that would take them to the manor-house. Harkness went meekly, carrying his snowshoes. As they neared the rear entrance, Marc heard the snap of reins across a horse’s back.
“This way,” he said to Harkness, and directed him towards the circular drive in front of the house.
Just as they arrived, a horse and cutter whirled out of the treed lane and came to a halt a few feet away. Cobb stood up, dropped the reins, and grinned at Marc. Beside him, hunched over and shivering, sat a slim, well-dressed gentleman.
Marc grinned back, indicated Harkness, and said, “I’ve found us a murderer, Cobb.”
“And I got us a bona-fidee English butler!”
FIFTEEN
While Cobb took a befuddled and half-frozen Graves Chilton around to the servants’ wing and placed him in the capable care of Mrs. Blodgett and the Janes sisters, Marc led Giles Harkness through the front door and into the library. A few minutes later Cobb came up the main hall to join them, followed by Garnet Macaulay, who had spotted Cobb going past the dining-room. Without providing any details, only some of which were known for sure anyway, Marc indicated that the case was almost solved, and asked Macaulay to alert Robert and Hincks. Together they were able to convince the Quebecers that all would be well and that they should remain ready some time later in the evening to receive final word from the police in Toronto and, at last, be free to put their signatures to the historic accord.
Marc and Cobb then spent the next hour grilling Giles Harkness. Fifteen minutes into the interrogation, Cobb went to the dining-room and asked Macaulay to send the Struthers lad back along the Indian trail in the bush to the north of Elmgrove until he came to an abandoned trapper’s cabin, where he would find a horse tethered. Said horse was to be brought back to the kitchen garden, where Cobb, a little later, would examine it closely. As Marc had already surmised, Harkness had used the route Macaulay had mentioned to Marc yesterday as his means of entering and exiting Elmgrove and slipping unobserved to and from the city by a roundabout route.
A half-hour later, after giving a thumbs-up to Robert and Macaulay, Marc and Cobb then drove Harkness straight to the jail on King Street. Hincks came
along with them, having volunteered to act as envoy for the news that would permit LaFontaine to sign the agreement and seal the “unholy alliance.” Magistrate James Thorpe was roused from his after-supper snooze and persuaded to come down to the Court House and take the statement of Giles Harkness, who seemed eager to confess or, as Cobb saw it, get his side of the story on paper before the other fellow’s. While Thorpe’s clerk, hauled out of church, copied out the formal document for Harkness to sign, Cobb gave Marc an edited account of his trip to Cobourg and the unmasking of Mrs. Jiggins and her plot at The Pine Knot, excising certain extraneous details for the sake of brevity. When he emphasized the limited knowledge, and liability, of Mrs. Jiggins, Marc made no effort to probe him further on the subject. For his part, the real Graves Chilton was not of a mind to press charges of forcible confinement, though he was heard telling Mrs. Blodgett in the Elmdale kitchen that she must keep the cooking sherry well out of his reach.
So it was almost eight o’clock on a moonlit, snowy Sunday evening when Marc and Cobb walked up to the front door of the handsome brick residence on Jarvis Street and engaged the ornate door-knocker. It took half a minute for the door to be pulled slowly open by a middle-aged maid with a sallow complexion and a surly demeanour. “Whaddya want?” she said, suspicion sitting undisguised in her eye.
“We’re here to interview your master,” Marc said politely. “Is he at home?”
“He is, but he ain’t seein’ nobody today. I got my orders.”
“Please inform him that Constable Cobb and Mr. Edwards are here to see him on official police business.”
“It’ll haveta wait till – ”
“We got a warrant from the magistrate,” Cobb said sharply. “Yer master ain’t got a choice in the matter.”
The maid blinked, nodded her understanding, and then without a word wheeled and started to trot away from them. Cobb pushed the door open and stepped into the vestibule. “We’ll just hang our coats an’ hats here!” he shouted after her.
By the time they had done so, they expected the maid would have returned. But she hadn’t.
“Somethin’s fishy here,” Cobb said.
“I think you’re right. Let’s find the fellow – quick.”
They headed down a dimly lit hallway, but were met abruptly by the maid coming out of a nearby doorway. She looked flustered, and decidedly unsurly, as she said, “Mr. Winthrop’ll see you now.”
They stepped into what was apparently Ivor Winthrop’s private sitting-room. Marc took in several leather easy-chairs, grouped around a Persian rug – set before an impressive, marble-topped fireplace, where two candelabra offered the room a subdued but generous light. Winthrop, a prosperous gentleman in a blue-velvet smoking jacket, was just turning away from the hearth to face his visitors as they entered. The room was gripped by a deathly chill, even though something was still flaming on the grates.
“Good evening,” Winthrop said in a weary attempt at good manners. His fleshy face with its jutting jaw was ashen, haggard, as if he had not slept well in some time. “Please excuse the chill . . . I – I fell asleep and let the fire go out. But do sit down – Mr. Edwards, is it? Mr. Marc Edwards?”
“Yes, sir. I’m working on assignment with Constable Cobb here, of the Toronto police.”
But Cobb did not acknowledge Marc’s introduction. Instead, he brushed past Winthrop and raced over to the fireplace, where he picked up a whisk-broom and began thumping at the flames.
“What the hell are you doing?” Winthrop cried, unsure whether he ought to be astonished or outraged.
Cobb ignored him. He kept swatting till the fire was out, then reached down and, with two fingers of his right hand, gingerly pulled into view several smouldering and charred sheets of paper. He looked at Marc. “The writin’s mostly gone, Major, but these ripped edges should match up nicely with the ones on the ledger.”
“You have no right to interfere in my personal affairs! This is an – ”
“We have every right, sir,” Marc said. “I have in my hand a warrant for your arrest on a charge of murder.”
“That’s – that’s preposterous!” Winthrop looked shocked and frightened, but not truly surprised. His bluster seemed to be merely bravado or, worse, the automatic response of one accustomed to privilege and prerogative.
“It may prove to be so,” Marc said, “but only if you sit down here and answer our questions truthfully.”
Winthrop sighed, stared at his accuser for a brief moment, then sank back in the master’s chair. Cobb and Marc sat opposite him.
“Well, let’s get this ridiculous nonsense over with, shall we?” Winthrop said with a pathetic attempt at making light of the situation. “Whom have I murdered, eh?”
“We have evidence to suggest that you have committed two serious offences,” Marc said. “First, you perpetrated a fraud on Mr. Garnet Macaulay of Elmgrove, which permitted you to systematically steal information from him and his associates. And secondly, for some inexplicable reason, you then arranged to have your agent in Elmdale murdered.”
“And where would you get such evidence?”
“We have obtained a detailed confession from another of your agents, Mr. Giles Harkness. He implicates you at every stage of the operation.”
“Giles Harkness is a notorious drunk and trouble-maker. Ask any barkeep in the city!”
“Nevertheless, his story is corroborated by the known facts.”
“I’ll bet he spun you quite a tale!”
“He says you hired him to ride to Elmdale by a circuitous route to rendezvous with the new English butler, whom you had bribed to spy on the business meetings there. This so-called butler made detailed notes of the negotiations and brought these notes to Harkness, who in turn brought them straight to you. You received separate documents on Wednesday evening, Thursday afternoon and again on Thursday evening.”
“Did it never occur to you that a scoundrel like Harkness, who, I’m told, had a grudge against Macaulay, was not himself stealing information to peddle it to the highest bidder in town?”
“The horse Harkness used belonged to you,” Cobb said. “Yer name was burned inta the saddle.”
“And the three document-pages you just tried to destroy, you’ll be surprised to learn, were ripped from an accounts-book in the butler’s office. It will take some explaining to suggest how they managed to get into your fireplace.”
“An’ Harkness told us he was bunkin’ in here in a back room, where we got a search warrant to dig out his earthy possessions.”
“And that warrant extends to your wine-cellar, where we expect to find other bottles of Amontillado matching the type that killed your agent.”
“And any loud-an’-numb you might have lyin’ about the place,” Cobb added.
“We also have a detailed statement from a certain innkeeper outside of Cobourg,” Marc said, and watched Winthrop flinch at the news that the police now knew about the phoney butler and who had waylaid the real one. “Mrs. Jiggins, bless her, found solace in a frank confession.”
Winthrop held up his hands as if to ward off further blows. “All right! All right! I’ll tell you what you’ve come to hear. My life is over anyway. And I’m not letting that pusillanimous weasel, Harkness, off the hook!”
“That’s better,” Marc said, much relieved and not a little saddened by the broken man he saw slumped before him. “Would you like a drink?”
“Yes. Please.”
***
“Let’s start with the fraud,” Marc said when Winthrop had a glass of whiskey safely in hand and Cobb had his notebook out as if he really was about to record the interview. “We have some idea of how the real butler, Graves Chilton, was waylaid and a substitute put in his place. But we still don’t know who he actually was. Would you mind telling us whom you hired to do the spying and how you were able to carry off the ruse and set up the espionage at Elmdale? Enlighten us, if you will.”
“As you wish.” Winthrop took a swig of whiskey. “A lo
t of it was pure luck. All winter there have been rumours of a possible meeting here in Toronto between Robert Baldwin and Louis LaFontaine, a meeting designed to forge some kind of coalition between the Nationalists in Quebec and our own Reformers, what the Bishop called ‘an unholy alliance.’ He and other leading Tories were eager to discover if there was any truth to the rumours and were determined to do everything they could to discourage such a meeting. Most of us thought the gathering would be at Spadina or Moss Park. Elmdale was also mentioned, but we tended to discount it because Garnet Macaulay, although a Reform member of the Assembly and confidante of Baldwin, had lost both his long-time butler and his stableman, leaving his household staff in some disarray.”
“So how did you find out about Baldwin’s plans?” Marc asked, though he was pretty sure how that had come about.
“That’s where the luck came in. Two weeks ago Saturday, the very morning after my Friday evening dinner at the Palace and our discussion of these issues, Giles Harkness arrived at my door.” Winthrop sighed and glared at his whiskey-glass. “I should have thrown the blackguard out then and there. But he had information I coveted. He had left his employ at Elmdale sometime after his brother’s death and what he saw as his employer’s perfidy in hiring some stranger from England to take Alfred’s place. It’s absurd, but he actually thought he himself deserved to be the new butler.”
“So he was seeking revenge of some sort?”
“Yes. Before leaving the estate, he used one of his cronies in the household to gain access to Macaulay’s private papers, where he read and memorized the recent correspondence and memoranda he found there.”
Unholy Alliance Page 24
