by Nelson Rusk
I installed the latch on the door and made sure it could hold in case... better not to think about it. I heated water on my tiny oven and poured myself a cup of tea. After a brief five minutes of procrastination from the heavy task ahead of me, I sat down at my work table and picked up where I had left off. Sighing for the long night that was sure to come, I began.
The Tale of Robert Muir, 1833-1834 (Continued)
Constable Thompson's Investigation
W hen they returned from their fateful trip to the Isle of Orleans, none of the three acolytes—Muir, Amherst, and McEntyre—was the same man. According to Robert Muir's confessions, the three shared a burden they avoided talking about at all costs, among themselves and a fortiori with anyone else. The only person they told their story to was Constable Eric Thompson. Son of a British merchant and a French-Canadian mother, he was in his first work experiences in the police and had just arrived from the academy. Mr. Muir had met him when he gave his statement in the investigation regarding the fire at Sir Long’s house. Constable Thompson had made a good impression on him. He was, according to the narrator, a man of great stature and unfailing probity, a character which, if one sticks to the story, sufficed to be in the good graces of Officer Muir.
When the two men met again to discuss the events on the Isle of Orleans, they avoided the police headquarters at Constable Thompson's request. Instead, their meeting took place in circumstances worthy of Don Quixote, in the evening, at an unmarked spot of the Plains of Abraham, a vast park that serves as Quebec City's green lung. Constable Thompson explained this need for secrecy by the fact that his trust in William Lancaster, the representative of the Governor in charge of the Quebec City police, was low and had only decreased since he entered Quebec City’s police force. According to reports from the time, Mr. Lancaster was selective in the resources allocated to ongoing investigations and, as Constable Thompson had noted, those concerning arsons were far from having the lion's share. For this reason, at the end of 1833, a surprising amount of suspicious fires remained unsolved. This unacceptable delay continued until early 1834.
Quebec police cell van, circa 1910.
As Robert Muir noted during their interview, Constable Thompson did not attribute these police failures to Lancaster's incompetence alone, but rather to his complicity with the arsonists. It should be added, as Mr. Muir himself points out, that Thompson never provided tangible evidence to support his claims. The man even suspected some of his colleagues in the department of hiding evidence rather than gathering it. Mr. Thompson's paranoia was difficult to explain in such a young and well-trained policeman. Mr. Muir, however, had just experienced events that made him doubt many things he took for granted and he, therefore, did not judge Mr. Thompson for his beliefs. From that moment on, the two men became colleagues in their research and close friends in adversity.
Following Robert Muir's presentation of the facts regarding his discoveries on the Island of Abraham to Constable Thomson, the latter began an investigation that would last until the fire at the Château Saint-Louis on January 24. According to Mr. Muir, Thompson faced many obstacles. His investigation permit issued by the King was withdrawn under false pretenses. From that moment on, another constable, chosen by Lancaster, accompanied him when he met witnesses and information sources. This complicated the task he had imposed himself of revealing the conspiracy of silence prevailing in the Quebec City police force. Discouraged, Thompson began investigating only minor details during his work hours and kept most of the real investigation for his free time, which he devoted entirely to this endeavor. He seemed to be possessed by this story. Upon reading the diary, I noted the same obsession among all who followed Robert Muir’s path in investigating Phillips.
In his account, Robert Muir then describes Constable Thompson's personal investigation. He learned the details of his research from the man afterward, and added many details with obvious pleasure, as if proud of the young constable’s efforts and insight. There seems to have been a strong bond between Mr. Muir and Eric Thompson. Muir mentions several times he saw Thompson as his younger brother Patrick. The latter died at sixteen from an accident that the narrator does not describe further than “stupid and unfortunate”.
During his investigation, despite his obvious goodwill, Eric Thompson saw several doors close in front of him. Either a series of fortuitous but unfortunate events befell the constable, or a malicious will deliberately prevented him from going any further. Some families of the abducted young women refused to talk to him from the outset or, if they did, later flip-flopped and shut up, without giving a reason. The police released a suspect arrested at the crime scene of an arson attack without even appearing, despite an overwhelming wealth of evidence. Fishermen found the body of the man, who had no reason to commit such a crime, a week later floating lifeless in the St. Charles River. A botched investigation concluded in a drowning. Few people involved in the case believed it.
Shortly thereafter, Thompson attempted to arrest a pickpocket in the lower town area. As he pursued the criminal, he was led through the shabby and shady maze under the cliff of Quebec City. The policeman later claimed the thief evaded him by disappearing into an alleyway directly overlooking the cliff and which offered no way out. Despite Thompson's search, he found no hidden passage. However, in the anguished silence of a moonless night, he thought he heard cries and songs from the rocky projections, revealing a human presence. Thompson made an official request to investigate the underground tunnels under Quebec City, in which he suspected that criminals and deviants moved discreetly in and around the upper city. However, a special order from a municipal court judge cut short this new avenue of research.
Constable Thompson's efforts were not all in vain. During his joint personal investigation with the police, he contacted the parents of all the missing and presumed dead girls. As mentioned, this route had proven to be a dead end. However, the father of a missing girl, Anne Lavoie, after having no news of the police investigation for two weeks after his initial statement, contacted Mr. Thompson.
On January 4, Mr. Pierre Lavoie arrived at Constable Thompson's house on Chemin Sainte-Foy in the Montcalm district. He was in an advanced state of intoxication and, as the constable later told Mr. Muir, he confided in Mr. Thompson about his daughter's abduction and death. According to him, shortly before her disappearance, she dated a young man named Marc Dubreuil. She had met him a few weeks earlier on her way to the market. Mr. Lavoie knew little about this young man. Since he seemed to come from a good family and the Lavoies' means were modest, neither Mr. Lavoie nor his wife objected to his hasty ways of courting young Anne.
Monument des Braves, on Chemin Ste-Foy, circa 1900.
Despite the obvious culture displayed by the young man and his spotless manners in society, Mr. Lavoie admitted to the constable that there was an aura around him he did not like at all. He could not specify what caused this apprehension in him, but he described with a vivid imagery the young man's gaze. It was a look that Mr. Lavoie had only seen in people who had had their measure of suffering—Mr. Lavoie was working as a henchman at the Hôtel Dieu Hospital—and who had lost hope in life. There was a moribund sadness in his eyes, born of an unhappy existence. For this reason, Mr. Lavoie did not conceive how the young man could be in love with Anne while being burdened by this obvious angst.
The grieving father admitted to other more down-to-earth motives for doubting his daughter’s lover. Indeed, the young man wore a pendant around his neck that appeared to be religious. Mr. Lavoie felt a certain unease when he realized that instead of a Christian cross, the young man displayed a pagan symbol. He later described it as a series of geometric shapes haloed with flames. This troubled Anne's father, who had always raised his daughter in strict observance of his ancestors' religion, a devoted and humble Catholicism, without ostentation. He did not see what Anne could find in this young man and sadly concluded that it was perhaps her way of escaping from the life of poverty and misery to which her poor fa
mily had confined her until then.
When Anne disappeared, in the wake of the series of kidnappings shortly before Christmas that year, Mr. Lavoie first attributed the disappearance to an escapade with the young man motivated by their chimeric love. However, as Anne's family had no news of her, the possibility of her subjecting her family to such an ordeal with the approaching holidays became less and less likely, given the empathetic nature of the young girl. When the police discovered the desecrated remains, they contacted the families of all missing women. Anne's fate then became clear, even if the detectives never found her belongings.
Mr. Lavoie told Constable Thompson about his descent into hell since the event, which was almost two weeks ago. He drank every night, after work, to keep the pain away, if only for a night. His features were drawn. Exhaustion and pain had engraved his face with more indelible marks than age ever could. Desperate to find the perpetrator of his daughter's abduction and torture, Mr. Lavoie approached Constable Thompson because he felt that he alone of the entire police department had been receptive to his pain. Mr. Lavoie found in the constable an ally and, together, they set out to find the mysterious young man, who had not contacted the family since the kidnapping. As the two men expected, the name he had used, Marc Dubreuil, was a fake. No one by that name and matching the young man's description lived near Quebec City.
Disappointed, the two men then tried to find the mail that Anne had exchanged with the young man, hoping to obtain a correspondence address. This venture proved more difficult than it should have been since an unknown party had robbed and vandalized the Lavoies apartment a few days after Anne’s abduction. The burglar took nothing but rather perpetrated senseless destruction and vandalism in the apartment. He did not spare Anne's room, which exacerbated the grief of the bereaved parents. After much research, the two men had to admit defeat: they found no trace of any mail between Anne and her suitor, or anything else that could have identified him.
A few days later, a happy twist of fate got in their hands an element that would allow them to get their investigation back on track. Against all odds, the postman brought a letter to the Lavoies that Anne had sent to her suitor. She had incorrectly stamped the mail, which the post office lost for several weeks. The postmen, having no other alternative, returned the letter to the sender. On this letter was the correspondence address of the addressee. The apartment was in the old St. Roch district, on the St. Vallier Street East, near the Côte d'Abraham.
View of the intersection between St. Vallier Street East and the Côte d'Abraham, circa 1885.
Early one Saturday morning, Mr. Thompson and Mr. Lavoie went to the address in question, on the second floor of an unsanitary building. The place was one of those slums typical of the neighborhood, an old building, cramped between the neighboring buildings, whose dilapidated landings and windows showed the apartment was abandoned. Nevertheless, recent litter covering the balcony and the cleared snow path to the entrance suggested the unmistakable presence of tenants. Curtains drawn on all windows prevented unwelcome intruders from peeking inside.
Wanting to determine the identity of the occupants before arriving at the door, the two men hid in a dark corridor leading to an inner courtyard that the sun did not reach. From there, it was possible to observe the comings and goings around the building. The wait before seeing signs of activity was short. A steady stream of sinister-looking men, alone or in groups of two, entered the building. Many would come out after a few minutes, others would spend several hours there. Most carried a bag in one form or another, and they always seemed heavier when leaving than when entering. As for the men themselves, they came from all walks of life. Even those who seemed to have financial means had a stealthy gait and showed in their faces the signs of an indefinable haunting. Although most of the individuals entering the building appeared to be of Canadian origin, some had a darker complexion that could only be Indian.
Constable Thompson and Mr. Lavoie took turns at their observation post throughout the day. The bustle around the building continued, even at suppertime, as the sun fell from the bleak January sky. Around 6 pm, a well-dressed man came out of the building. He looked everywhere around, then ventured eastward on the rue St. Vallier. When the man passed under a lamppost, Mr. Lavoie squeezed Constable Thompson's arm. He was the young man who had courted Anne. Thompson had a hard time holding him back, as the father wanted to satisfy his revenge, expressing himself in the harsh expressions of the French-Canadian lyrical repertoire. Keeping his cool, Thompson instead asked Mr. Lavoie to go pick up Robert Muir. The plan was to wait for the young man to return home to question him. As there seemed to be several people, Officer Muir would be welcome to help control them.
Mr. Lavoie needed about thirty minutes to reach Robert Muir in the upper town and then take him back to the apartment in question. Although not stated in his diary, Mr. Muir seemed already familiar with some elements of Officer Thompson's investigation, and had already met Mr. Lavoie since he recognized him and followed him without question. When they returned to the apartment, Thompson told them that the young man had returned. He had seen no one else enter the apartment, which meant that the flow of visitors had dried up. The time for action was upon them.
Armed with little more than a vague action plan, the three men crossed the disturbingly calm street. A light shone behind the drawn curtains of the apartment. Robert Muir stepped up the wobbly staircase, closely followed by Constable Thompson, then by Mr. Lavoie. The latter kept an eye on the street, stressed out by this situation so remote from his usual activities. Once on the balcony, which ran along the front and left side of the building, Officer Muir came to the door. Mr. Lavoie followed him. Thompson waved that he would stand by a window. Muir waited for the constable to signal that the window was unlocked then knocked hard on the moldy door. Taking advantage of the noise made by the knocks, Thompson lifted the window with a single movement, prepared to go through.
The following sequence takes place over only a few moments, but the narrator details it with an unrestrained enthusiasm. Even I, separated from the events by nearly a century, could do naught but also be caught up in the story. At the end of my seat, I continued reading the diary, riveted to Muir's words.
Breathing at a slow pace, Muir waited at the door, a knife bearing the mark of his clan in his hand. After an abnormal length of time, the latch unlocked and a silhouette appeared in the door frame. It was the man, Marc Dubreuil, as Mr. Lavoie had described to him. As soon as he saw this, Muir rushed at him with great force, grabbing him by the neck with one hand and, with the other, putting the knife to his throat. The young man was unprepared for such an assault. He backed away and collapsed violently against the wall behind him, followed by Muir. The wall, a simple layer of poor quality gypsum, receded across its entire width, sending clouds of dust into the air and further darkening the dim lighting of half a dozen candles.
As Muir rushed toward his opponent, Thompson entered the kitchen through a window. This room connected to the entrance hall, from which came the noise caused by Muir. Around Thompson, lying on the dirty kitchen floor, were three prostrate men with a long pipe in their hands. This was not the first time Thompson had seen such a scene. He recognized the habits and smell characteristic of an opium smokehouse. The sweet and fragrant smell of the drug hovered in the air, flooding the senses. As Thompson thanked the providence that these men were in a disabled state, a frenetic scream resounded to his left. From the corner of his vision, coming out of a shadowy alcove where he hid, a small, shaggy-looking man jumped out like a cat on his prey. A metallic flash of lightning ripped the air apart. Thompson dodged it only due to his most primal instincts, which pushed him away from the path of the blade, a large machete. The weapon hit the counter with a thud and remained stuck.
Thompson took advantage of the short break before his attacker dislodged his weapon to grab the man's forearms with his hands. The two fighters then danced an impossible waltz, arms in arms, the machete twirling in th
e air. Each tried to maneuver his opponent by force and bring him into a position where he could dispatch him. The man with an olive complexion swore at repetition in an unknown language. Thompson returned the favor with the liturgical blasphemies of his ancestors. A simple blunder freed them from their impasse. The fanatic tripped on an addict on the floor, falling back on the kitchen table, followed by Thompson. The table's legs immediately bent and the two protagonists continued to fall to the ground with a loud crash. The cultist's arm carrying the machete bore the combined weight of the two men and broke, emitting a dry noise. The contents of the table, a multitude of vases and jars filled with an unctuous and clear liquid, broke and emptied on the ground.
Shaking his head to recover his senses as his assailant howled in pain, Thompson got up as fast as he could, staggering slightly. From the entrance hall, he saw Muir coming into the kitchen, holding the young man in front of him with an inextricable arm grip. The prisoner had a deep cut on the scalp, from which a stream of blood flowed down his neck. His eyes, sharp and alert, were far from groggy, and rather expressed an unspeakable malice. There was no terror in that stare, which was as cheerful and arrogant as if the roles were reversed. Thompson put one knee on the back of his attacker, whose resistance was minimal after his initial frenzy. Mr. Lavoie came to join them in the kitchen, saying he had only seen a few drug addicts on the floor in the rest of the apartment. Thompson and Lavoie interrogated their prisoner while Muir kept his arms tied.
“We have nothing against you,” Thompson began reasonably. “We want the name of your leader. Tell us and we'll let you go.” The man did not answer. “We have evidence that you were involved in Anne's abduction. Unless I'm mistaken, you didn't commit the murder. You can still get away with it if you tell us who committed this heinous crime.
