He started to get up, but Marc’s next burst of speech knocked him back, dazed:
“I believe, sir, that you knew Richard Dougherty or that, in the least, you realized that he knew who you were and what despicable things you had been up to on your visits to the Manhattan Gentleman’s Club, and that, as you said, you didn’t know he had come to Toronto. But what a shock you got when you spied him in the foyer of the legislature two days before his death. You must have panicked, and then started to cast about for some way to silence him. He hadn’t seen you, but you knew it was just a matter of time before he figured out who you were and what a corrupt hypocrite you’d turned out to be. By chance, your wife’s cousin was prompted by Dr. Strachan’s sermon that Sunday to do away with the so-called sodomite alluded to by the Archdeacon. Somehow, you got wind of his intention and not only helped him plan the crime but provided him with that scurrilous note and fifty American dollars, which we found in his shack. You even tore off the bottom half of that note so it might look as if some escaped lunatic had killed in a mad frenzy. You, sir, are an accomplice to murder!”
Cobb was almost as amazed as McDowell. Marc had played all his cards at once. McDowell sat open-mouthed, flushed, unable to speak, his anger poorly camouflaging the fear in him. His lips moved, trembled, but shaped no words of rebuttal. He’s gonna confess, was Cobb’s thought. Marc kept his gaze locked onto McDowell’s face.
Finally McDowell was able to speak, in a shaky voice that would not have carried over the front benches of the Assembly. “Your temerity is as outrageous as your accusations. They are nothing but wild speculation. You have not a shred of real proof.” The high colour was draining from his face as he began to get control of his emotions. His voice had regained some of its arrogant presumption. “And if you so much as whisper a word of these foul claims abroad, I’ll have you dragged into court and sued within an inch of your life. Furthermore, when I apprise Sir George of this Reform-inspired plot to publicly disgrace me and thus cripple our opposition to the Durham proposals, you will be lucky if you are not horse-whipped and placed in the stocks.”
There was as much bravado in the retort as bravura, but the accused, within a hair’s breadth of capitulating, had weathered the storm. The major, Cobb had to admit, had led with his trump, and lost.
McDowell got up, still trembling but buoyed by a surge of adrenalin and a renewed confidence. “Hudson! Show these gentlemen out!”
But it was not Hudson who now stood in the open doorway. It was Mavis McDowell. And the look upon her face would have made a stone weep.
TWENTY SIX
She walked past Cobb and then Marc as if they were not visible, and stood before her husband.
“Why, Mowbray?” she said in a hollow, pinched voice. “I need to know why.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” he said. “I was just – ”
“I heard everything. I’ve been standing at the door for ten minutes.”
“Then you heard a lot of nonsense from these – ” He stopped in mid-sentence and stared at her, uncomprehending.
Her face was devastated, cadaverous – the more so because she was not able yet to force out an ameliorating tear. “I thought we were in this together, saving the province from our enemies, getting you elected, setting up house here in the seat of power. It was all we shared, wasn’t it?”
“But – but we still do!” he stammered, looking much less sure of his ground now and not certain how he should handle this crude interruption. “You don’t for a moment believe – ”
“I resigned myself to having no children to comfort me in your many absences,” she continued, as if he had not spoken, in a toneless voice devoid of any passion and all the more terrible and pitiable for that. “I got used to sleeping alone. I pretended not to know of your unspeakable cravings because I loved the good things in you, the things that needed nurturing, that I thought would flourish when we agreed to start again, as partners; when you made those promises to me on your mother’s grave.”
McDowell’s head bobbed and snapped back as if his wife’s words were a prizefighter’s blows. He tried to tear his eyes from her remorseless gaze. Desperately he shouted to Marc, “Pay no attention to her. She’s been ill with a fever for two days now. It’s made her delirious. Hudson!”
Mavis McDowell had already turned to Marc. “I have the piece of torn paper you’ve been looking for,” she said.
“The bottom half of the note?”
“She’s crazy! You mustn’t listen to her! Hudson! Muriel!” McDowell tried to grab her hand, but she jerked away in disgust.
“I keep every tidbit of cloth and paper I find about the house, and Muriel does the same. I keep it all in a basket in my sewing-room. When it gets full, I give it to the Sunday school at St. James, for the children to make religious crafts and toys out of. I remember Muriel emptying that waste-bin over there, as she does every Monday morning. That little piece of paper will be in my basket.”
She turned to leave, and staggered. Cobb caught her by one arm.
McDowell had collapsed in his chair. He let his head drop into his hands, and he began to sob. “I’m so sorry,” he mumbled into his fingers, but he did not look up.
“Cobb, please take Mrs. McDowell to her sewing-room and fetch Muriel to her,” Marc said. “And have a peek in that basket.”
“Right,” Cobb said. “But from the look of him, I don’t think we’ll need no scrap of paper.” He guided Mavis McDowell slowly out of the room.
***
“Are you ready to tell me about it?” Marc said to McDowell when the latter had composed himself enough to speak.
He nodded. “You were right about my seeing Dougherty in the foyer that night. I almost fainted from the shock.”
“So you knew him by sight?”
“He was famous in New York, or notorious, depending on your viewpoint. I was in the courtroom when he took on Tammany Hall and fought them to a draw. I was an admirer of his, if you can believe that.”
Marc was pretty sure why, but let McDowell continue.
“We all heard the rumours about his domestic arrangement, so I wasn’t surprised when he showed up that September night in the club – in the special rooms at the back.”
Marc was surprised, however. “So you were actually there the night the boy died in one of the anterooms?” It wasn’t, then, merely a question of McDowell’s name appearing on Dick’s suspect-list: the two men had come face to face.
McDowell hung his head. But the sudden need to tell his story, to purge himself of whatever sins he had committed, however despicable, was too strong. Without looking up, he said in a wobbly voice, “I was in the pleasure-pad.”
“Jesus!” Marc exclaimed, not hearing Cobb come in and stand near the doorway. “It was you who killed that innocent boy!”
“It was an accident, a horrible accident. We’d done that bit with the dog-collar a dozen times. The lad enjoyed it! It was his specialty.”
Marc felt like collaring McDowell and throttling him, but he knew that he must remain perfectly still, like a priest in the confessional.
“I ran out! The outer room was full of regulars. All hell broke loose. I spotted Dougherty as I rushed by. He was the only non-member there. I didn’t know if he had seen my face clearly or if he knew who I was. I still don’t.”
“But your friends at Tammany Hall managed to hush the whole affair up?”
“Yes. They even closed down the brothel for a few weeks. But when no-one, including Dougherty, followed up with an official complaint, they reopened it.”
“And you were back in New York two months later. Where you learned from your Tammany contacts that Dougherty had been secretly gathering evidence about the abuse of these boys, and that he even had affidavits.”
“We nearly shat ourselves when we heard about this. But you don’t know Tammany Hall.”
“I’m learning quickly.”
“They framed Dougherty, I was told, and made a deal with h
im. He vanished. But the club members knew it had been a close shave. They shut down the special wing – for good.”
“And you decided it was safer to stay home?”
“Yes. I came back and tried to save my marriage.”
“And the province.”
McDowell managed a grim smile.
“So whether or not Dick recognized you outright or had merely put your face to one of the names on his roster of pedophiles, you could not take a chance on his remaining alive?”
“I am not a murderer. I didn’t murder that boy in New York. I have done penance for that sin, and others, ever since. I have tried to be a prop to my suffering family and to become a productive citizen of my country. But I was in a state of panic that Saturday. I didn’t sleep a wink all night. Fortunately Mavis was busy Sunday afternoon and evening – after the morning service. Late in the day, with Hudson and Muriel away on their evening off, I went into the kitchen when I heard a noise, and discovered Reuben Epp there. He wasn’t drunk, but he had been drinking. There was a madness in his eyes that sent chills up my spine. He started ranting and raving right away. He said the Archdeacon had condemned the Yankee lawyer and begged his parishioners to rid the town of such vermin. I had heard the sermon, so I knew what he was babbling on about. I tried to calm him down, but he got more and more agitated. He said that he knew exactly where and when Dougherty would be walking in the morning, and that he was going to carry out God’s will by killing the man, after which he intended to hang himself. He went on and on about what a worthless life he had led and how he wanted to end it all by doing one good, shining deed.”
“Surely it was just talk – ”
“I thought so, too. But gradually I became convinced he meant it. He had come to our house to see if his cousin or I would write the word ‘sodomite’ on a piece of paper. He wanted to leave it on the body to show the world what he had done and why. And who had inspired him.”
“Dr. Strachan.”
“As I realized that he was determined to do this, one way or another, I was suddenly struck with the idea of helping him along. I suspected that the note was crucial to his plan. I was also aware that when the drink wore off or the initial fervour subsided, he might yet get cold feet.”
“So you agreed to write the note?”
“Yes. We were alone in the house. I brought him in here. I got out a calligraphy pen and in red ink, resembling blood, I scrawled out the word he wanted.”
Marc wondered if McDowell had noticed the irony in that gesture, but said, “To suggest a religious fanatic?”
“Or a lunatic from the asylum here.”
“And you tore it in two to further suggest the killer’s state of mind?”
“No. Epp ripped it out of my hand before I could blot the ink! I tossed the torn section in my waste-bin and forgot about it.”
“But if he intended to hang himself, why did you give him fifty dollars? That’s a year’s wages.”
“I was pretty certain he would do the deed. But it’s one thing to stab a fellow in a religious fit but quite another to loop a rope around your neck and leap into space.”
“You hoped he would run away? Confirming his guilt and getting out of your hair for good?”
“I suggested Detroit or Buffalo. I promised him more money later. I knew if he were captured on the run that no-one would believe his wild story about an accomplice, even if he proclaimed he was my wife’s cousin.”
“But he killed Dick and then hanged himself. You must have thought then that you had miraculously escaped justice twice, once here and once in New York?”
“When Epp was found at home and charged with the crime, I was terrified that he would implicate me. But by nightfall he had hanged himself. I was free. It seemed like divine intervention, as if I had been chosen, despite my past sins and prodigal existence, to carry out some larger mission here on earth. I might have to pay later, but for the time being, God was backing me.”
“So you made no attempt to cover your tracks?”
“I had no need to. Mavis had assured me time and again that Epp had kept their secret – he was cunning enough not jeopardize his money-source. It did occur to me that I ought to locate that torn piece of paper, but Muriel told me she’d thrown the trash from this study into the kitchen stove. I knew nothing about St. James and the Sunday school children. I gave the crime no more thought until Cobb barged in here on Thursday. And then his meddling was stopped instantly by Sir George.”
Cobb coughed. So the lieutenant-governor had intervened with Sturges. He felt sorry for the chief.
“And Richard Dougherty was dead,” Marc said, the enormity of that truth striking him hard one more time.
McDowell looked up at Marc. “I wish I could say I regretted that fact. But I can’t.”
“Cobb will take you to the magistrate. If you like, I’ll stay behind and give what comfort and explanation I can to your wife. I shall be as discreet as possible.”
“I would be most grateful.”
“Come along, then,” Cobb said, feeling oddly deflated.
And just like that, it was over.
***
As he invariably did, Marc lay next to Beth and told her the whole story of the investigation. Maggie slept peacefully in the cradle nearby. Celia had returned to her cottage with Brodie, who would surely have much to say to his sister about their disrupted past, the revelations prompted by his New York adventure, and what the future might hold for them on their own in an adopted country. Cobb had taken it upon himself to conduct the dazed felon to the Court House, where – to the delight of Magistrate James Thorpe – he willingly signed a confession. After which Cobb was received at home with more than the usual portion of praise and admiration.
Marc knew enough not to edit out any details of his account in deference to Beth’s feminine sensibility: there was little in life that she had not experienced or did not wish to learn about. So it was nearly an hour, and close to midnight, when he finally finished.
“So this all started with the Reverend Strachan’s sermon an’ his denunciation of Dick?” Beth said with a contented yawn.
“Well, it’s true that poor Reuben Epp would not have been stirred to commit murder if he hadn’t heard that sermon. And McDowell, panicked as he was at seeing Dick, would not have had the courage to kill Dick on his own.”
“And all because Dr. Strachan was upset that Dick wrote a letter to support the Reverend Chalmers, who was falsely accused by Mrs. Hungerford?”
“That’s a reasonable inference.”
“An’ she did that, thinkin’ she could help her husband become rector when the Archdeacon is made bishop?”
“True. But she may have acted for nothing.” Marc smiled ruefully. “There’s no guarantee that Strachan will give up his rectorship – and the emolument it brings in – even if he becomes bishop. There’s a rumour going around that the Church in England is offering him the glory without the gold.”
“Either way, it don’t seem too Christian to me.”
“Sad, isn’t it? Also, we cannot underestimate the role played in all this by the horrible events that took place in New York a year and a half ago. Dick was a victim more than once.” Marc stifled a yawn. “You know what every element in this tragedy has in common, don’t you?”
Beth rolled over and rested her head in the crook of his arm. “Fanatics,” she said. “Too many fanatics.”
“Here and in the States – both. We’ve got Orangemen and outraged Tories on the right and, on the left, principled radicals like Mackenzie, who finally went over the edge. In New York, the Tammany Society was obsessed with keeping America ‘pure’ – free of foreigners – and they were willing to corrupt their own political process to do so. Eventually they found themselves having to cling to power by protecting pedophiles and murderers.”
“An’ poor Reuben took his pastor’s plea to heart. An’ Mowbray McDowell thought he was carryin’ out the Lord’s will.”
“God save us f
rom zealots.”
Beth closed her eyes. “We need more people like Robert. An’ you. It’s goin’ to be a long an’ difficult summer, isn’t it?”
“I can’t deny it. But we’re lucky. We’ve got each other.”
“An’ Maggie.”
“Ah, yes. My son,” Marc said with an ironic twinkle in his eye.
About the Author
Don Gutteridge is the author of more than 40 books: fiction, poetry and scholarly works, including the Marc Edwards mystery series. He taught in the Faculty of Education at Western University for 25 years in the Department of English Methods. He is currently professor Emeritus, and lives in London, Ontario.
Other Books in the Marc Edwards Mystery Series
Turncoat
Solemn Vows
Vital Secrets
Dubious Allegiance
Bloody Relations
Death of a Patriot
Or visit the Simon & Schuster Canada Website
Coming Soon in the Marc Edwards Mystery Series:
Desperate Acts
Unholy Alliance
Minor Corruption
Governing Passion
The Widow’s Demise
Available from Bev Editions
Excerpt From Desperate Acts
One
Toronto, October 1839
“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 nine 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.”
The Bishop's Pawn Page 24
