by Mel Bradshaw
We both ate and Deane drank. The potato salad, grated carrots, and pink roast beef were terrific. I went easy on the hot mustard.
“What did you want to tell me, Sir Joseph?” I said.
“Eric Hutchinson said you wanted to see Koch’s mural design.” Deane pointed over my shoulder.
I turned and stood up to face the wall behind my chair. If I’d noticed the painting hanging there at all, I certainly hadn’t connected it with Koch. The only other work of his I’d seen was the one of a gale on Georgian Bay, and that scene contained no people. This painting was executed in the same imprecise, patchy style as that landscape of his, but looked older — perhaps because of its religious topic. How old I couldn’t say, but like something I might have seen in a church in Flanders during the war or in Cologne when my regiment occupied that city after the Armistice. In a meadow dotted with wildflowers (including the inevitable poppies), Koch had placed two female figures to either side of a sarcophagus. The stone lid had been dislodged and turned partway. Above this opening, and appearing to have emerged from it, hovered a radiant male figure with arms extended horizontally and bent skywards at the elbows. Of the two women, the one on the left was weeping. Her face, partially hidden by the hood of a slate-grey robe, was turned down towards the base of the sarcophagus, on which was engraved a maple leaf. The figure on the opposite side of the grave was not looking at it, but up at the resurrected man. She wore the same grey cloak as her sister, but the hood had fallen off her tilted-back head, and her face in profile was full of wonder and peaceful joy.
For me, death is final, and there’s nothing left for the survivors but mourning or forgetting. But Koch’s representation of Grief and Hope struck me dumb. It was the best possible memorial for a church. Not only that, but — in spite of my most considered conviction — I wouldn’t have thought kindly of anyone that tried to destroy the vision of the woman on the right and plunge her back into the agony of the woman on the left. I thought of fallen comrades, seasoned brother officers and recruits fresh from Ontario farms and towns, the best of soldiers and the best of friends. I tried to imagine how sweet it would be to be able to believe them all whole and happy in a better place.
Deane allowed time for all this to sink in. Eventually he said, “There was a Frenchman on that first panel of judges. He swore that for conception and execution you wouldn’t find a better painting of this kind in any country.” He shrugged. “The relatives of the Christ Church war dead didn’t like to see the risen man wearing nothing but a loincloth, thought it disrespectful somehow. I’m told the Germans have a different attitude to the unclothed body.”
“It’s a swell picture,” I said, “but it was Nora Britton’s design I asked the rector about.”
“Ah — now it exists in several versions. I have one I haven’t framed yet.”
Deane went to a wooden filing cabinet behind his desk and returned with a watercolour sketch, which he set beside my plate.
The layout was familiar to me from the vandalized painting in Nora’s studio. So too the style. In the watercolour, the outlines were even cleaner than in the oil version, the colours clearer. Seeing it so soon after a work of Koch’s further heightened the sense of contrast.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Deane.
I thought the answer too obvious to need saying. I was looking more closely at the individual figures.
“So which would you choose, Shenstone? Koch’s or Britton’s?”
I waved away the question. “I’m no judge of art.”
Privately, I was thinking I’d choose his for the wall of the church and hers for my apartment wall. Nora, impossibly lovely in her pauper’s dress, stared at me out of the picture, while at her side in the uniform of my regiment and with an infusion of backbone stood the studio-wrecker and failed robber Lou Sweet. On the other side of the central cross, I saw Lou’s Rose for the first time in the dress of her native Belgium and beside her — not Koch as in the studio oil, but a beefed-up, rejuvenated Sir Joseph Deane. Deane and no mistake, with cleft chin and ballooning hair from which all trace of silver had been removed.
“Koch’s is great,” said Deane, “but I appreciate the way Nora Britton honours our heroes with good, crisp lines. I wish I’d known her when we were designing war bond posters.”
“When did you first meet Nora Britton?”
“Not till after she’d won the contest. Last February. God, Shenstone, I can’t believe she’s gone.”
I gave him a moment, then asked, “How much did you see of her in the eight months from last February till her death?”
“Quite a bit,” Deane said, while the look on his face said, Not nearly enough. He cleared his throat and continued. “There were arrangements to be made about her schedule and her expenses and so forth. I represented Christ Church Grange Park in most of those dealings with her. There were also some fine points of the design to be ironed out.”
“Would you meet once a week?”
“Not so often. Perhaps every two weeks. I did have her around to the house to meet the family. And then, when I found out she was living on her own, to eat with us from time to time.”
“Did she have any closer friend than you? Perhaps someone she saw every day.”
“You mean a man?”
“Or a woman — a confidante, someone I could ask about the fine detail of her life.”
“No, I don’t think so. I never heard there was anyone like that, of either sex.”
“How often did you sit for her?”
“Just once. She was busy finishing up other commissions and clearing the decks for our project. During that one three-hour sitting, she made a lot of sketches, but nothing came of it.”
“Except this.” I passed Nora’s watercolour to Deane and pointed to the image of him holding the Lewis gun.
“That’s not me.” My host blushed. “Is it? Well … maybe.”
“You know it is.”
His foolish grin broadcast the middle-aged man’s delight at being petted by a younger woman.
Deane hurried to explain. “She was playing a prank. This would never have made it up onto the church wall. I told you there were design points to be ironed out. One of them had to do with her choice of her husband as a model for this machine gunner. It was her way of taunting the Christ Church congregation for their prejudice. Of course, I told her she couldn’t do that. The mural would have been defaced for sure. This sketch was her way of paying me back.”
“You had a playful relationship with Nora Britton.”
“When I do business with people, I make friends.”
“You bought two canvases from her for five hundred dollars each. How businesslike a deal was that?”
“I likely paid a little more than she’d have got elsewhere. I still think I made a shrewd investment.”
Deane pointed towards an oil hanging over his desk. It was perhaps one of the ones Lou Sweet objected to. It depicted a house with a broken window and crumbling stucco siding. Construction debris littered the sagging porch, and the front door hung from one hinge. And yet the scene was bathed in gentle sunshine. The soft colours made the slum inviting.
Deane summed up the contradictions. “Too pretty some would say, but I believe it shows a warm heart.”
“The other painting you bought was a nude.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Can you show it to me?”
From the sharp look Deane gave me, I suspected this was the moment when he started to wonder if he’d been smart to ask me over. Why had he asked me? I was still in the dark. He hadn’t yet told me anything about Nora’s death.
“The other painting I bought is a portrait of Eric Hutchinson — not a nude, I assure you. I loaned it to the Christ Church Ladies Auxiliary for their meeting room. The rector can arrange for you to see it next time you’re over that way.”
“You won’t object if I phone the rectory from here to confirm the purchase date?”
“What hangs on
that?”
“I’m talking about two paintings you bought this month, October 3. One was a streetscape, which you’ve shown me, the other a nude.”
“You sound as if you believe you’ve seen some sales records of Nora’s.”
“I have her journal, found in her studio. Can you advance any reason why she would have recorded there that she had sold you a nude if she hadn’t?”
A moment of silence followed, broken by the explosive ring of a very loud telephone bell. Deane answered, then asked me to step outside a moment. This was the call he had been waiting for. He invited me to prowl around the rest of the rooms on the ground floor if I was interested in contemporary art.
As I left Deane’s study, I was frankly more interested in whether the room had a second exit through which he might give me the slip. There were no other doors I could see, but the possibility of movable wall panels and secret staircases wasn’t altogether to be ruled out in the homes of the rich: I’d heard about Sir Henry Pellatt’s former home, Casa Loma.
Perhaps I was exaggerating Deane’s determination to avoid questioning, but it did seem to go beyond run-of-the-mill prudery. I chose a room to wait in that had a window on the same side of the house as the study. Opening the window, I sat on the ledge, prepared to follow if Sir Joseph left the house. It was no more than five and a half feet from the sill to the ground, an easy drop even for a shortish man not in his first youth.
After five minutes or so, I relaxed my guard to the extent of turning on the light and inspecting my surroundings. I was confident that I’d still notice if Sir Joseph tried to bolt. I found I was in the dining room. I counted fifteen paintings hanging on the walls. Some of them depicted northern forests — possibly not the ones Deane had enriched himself by cutting down. These were daubed with the loose, energetic brushstrokes I associated with Koch. More of the paintings, however, were portraits in a sharper-edged style, pictures of women prominently among them.
In time Deane came to find me. He mentioned the artists’ names — Jackson for the forests, Newton for the portraits — before inviting me back into his study. A fresh burst of cordiality suggested whatever deal he’d negotiated on the phone had gone his way.
“Look, Shenstone, I asked you over because of my regard for Nora. Some thought she was risking her life on that scaffold. Not me — for me her death was a bolt from the clear blue. Grief can make you cruel: I find myself wishing death had struck any one of her critics instead.” Deane’s jaw tightened. A look of steel came into his blue eyes, which a moment later — just as suddenly — were glittering with moisture. “Anyway, tonight I wanted to commend you for looking into what happened and to help you every way I can. The thing is, modern artists and collectors understand the importance of life drawing. I was just afraid a policeman like yourself might see truthful depictions of the human body as smut.”
“Try me,” I said.
“I didn’t see how showing you this picture could help your investigation, but I guess I should let you be the judge of that.”
Deane went to a massive, dark wood wardrobe in a corner of the study. He opened one creaking door and, pushing aside some winter coats hanging inside, he drew from the back a framed painting roughly three feet tall and half as wide. When he brought it under the light and propped it against his desk, I saw it was a portrait of a woman in a northern landscape of rocks and pines with a lake in the background, all conveyed in the sharp detail I had come to associate with the artist. Nora had once again taken herself as her model. She stood on a rock, looking over the viewer’s right shoulder at something that absorbed her attention — perhaps some hill or bird or person she contemplated painting. One hand rested on her hip; the other hung loosely by her side. She made no attempt to hide her firm, round breasts or thick, dark pubic hair. She wore nothing but a pair of white canvas tennis sandals. The day was warm and, to judge from the even blue surface of the lake, windless. She had perhaps just risen from sunbathing. Her skin was lightly and uniformly tanned.
I thought this picture had more vitality to it than Nora’s other portraits, the ones I’d seen. When she painted other people, she seemed to be trying to build them up into something more than they were in life. But she knew herself and didn’t need to exaggerate her energy or potential. For even though this scene was quiet, I felt the woman at the centre of it was crackling with purpose.
“Were you in love with her, Sir Joseph?” I was nearly so myself, and believed it must have been impossible for anyone that had known her in life not to be.
“I’ll tell you how I happened to acquire this,” said Deane, as if he hadn’t heard. “It was submitted for the art show at the Canadian National Exhibition this August. And the CNE selection committee turned it down. They said they already had one or two nudes, for which they were expecting to get a good dressing down from the more straitlaced gallery goers. Nora’s painting was liable to cause even more of a rumpus — first and foremost because it was a self-portrait and might incite indecent advances against the artist herself. And there were other touches that prevented it from being regarded as a nude in the classical sense. Those tennis shoes changed it from a nude into a depiction of a naked woman. Likewise, the lacquer on her nails.”
“Huh?” I looked more closely and realized red varnish had been applied to Nora’s fingernails. “What’s that got to do with the price of fish?”
“It’s modernity raising its ugly head,” said Deane. “It spoils the classical illusion and prevents us from imagining we’re seeing an Aphrodite of the Canadian Shield.”
“So when the CNE wouldn’t show it, you bought the picture and hid it with the mothballs.”
“Let me tell you, Shenstone, people are always asking if I’ll loan some of my collection of paintings to one show or another. Next time, or one time soon, I’ll say, ‘Only if you hang Sunny Lake along with them.’ It won’t stay in the shadows for long. In time, I expect it’ll hang in the National Gallery in Ottawa.”
“When did you last see Nora Britton, Sir Joseph?”
“She died the night of October 10 or early in the morning of the eleventh, didn’t she? I remember I saw her in the afternoon of the fifth. I dropped off a cheque to cover the cost of some paints she’d had to buy. Then she was here for lunch on Saturday, the eighth. I didn’t see her after that. She wouldn’t let my chauffeur drive her back to her studio afterwards. Said it would make her too conspicuous in the Ward. Strange now to think of how when I walked her to the streetcar stop I was talking with her for the last time.”
“So you didn’t see her on Monday, October 10?”
“No.”
“Did you or anyone in your house ever give or send her food?”
“She won’t have been poisoned by anything she got from us.” Suddenly Deane was a porcupine with his quills up. Quickly, though, he recovered and proceeded more amiably: “Still, that’s the avenue to explore. If she was murdered in that locked church, it must have been by poison. I’ll tell you something else too. Everyone that knew Nora knew she didn’t like shopping or cooking or organizing meals. So people were always giving her things to eat. She had half the female parishioners of Christ Church Grange Park baking treats for her. When she ate here, we always sent her home with leftovers.”
“What leftovers did she take with her on October 8?”
“Nothing noxious, you can bet.”
“All the same,” I said. “Put it down to police thoroughness.”
“Cook may know.” Deane went to his desk phone. “I’ll have her send up some coffee as well.”
“Could you ask her also if to her knowledge any additional food or drink was sent to Christ Church for Nora Britton on Monday, October 10?”
After talking to his cook, Deane reported back that his sister had organized the food packages for Nora and that answers to my questions would have to wait until Mary-Maud returned from The Vagabond King.
While waiting for the coffee I asked Deane if he knew of anyone that might want to k
ill Nora Britton.
“I heard some of the silly things the Stillwaters were saying, but the only one I’d suspect would be young Archie. He has a violent past. You mightn’t think poison would be his style, but he is cook on a freighter.”
“Which was on the upper lakes from October 8 till after Miss Britton’s death. Anyone else on your list of suspects?”
“There was a man named Lou Sweet that had it in for her, but I thought she’d won him over by giving him a job. Besides, I can’t see him as a poisoner.”
“I know about Sweet, Sir Joseph. I’m just wondering if during one of your meetings with Nora Britton, she might have mentioned any threats or enemies, information she mightn’t have given anyone else.”
“I don’t think I was intimate enough with her for that. She was very discreet. Perhaps you should talk to her family. Do you have the use of a car?”
Deane had touched on a sore point. I was freelancing this weekend, but even on assigned investigations detective access to Toronto police vehicles was far from automatic. And farther still if the vehicle was to take an investigator out of town.
“Which family member would you suggest I speak to?” I asked.
“All of them. She told me her father owns a dry goods and women’s wear store on Yonge Street. Her mother is apparently a force to be reckoned with in the Women’s Auxiliary of Trinity Church. And they have another daughter, a high school teacher — still living at home, but city-educated and quite modern in her outlook. In awe of no one, whether baronets, parents or — I daresay — policemen.” Deane grinned, plainly admiring of such cheekiness. “I met her last month when she came down on a visit.”
“I might get authorization for a long-distance phone call.”
“You can call from here. In full privacy, of course, and at no cost to you or your department. But better than that, why don’t you borrow one of my cars? I suggest you go tomorrow morning. You’ll be sure to catch them just after church.”
