Bloody Relations (22 page)

“I'll be the soul of discretion, sir.”

Durham smiled, then his expression darkened. “What if it turns out that none of the whist players is involved? What if it was someone else at Spadina who drove Handford into town?”

“But it had to be someone in that card room,” Marc insisted. “That's where Mr. Ellice spent the last two hours before his disappearance.”

“I thought so, too. So I sent word to Wakefield to get a list of all the guests seen by the staff in that room at any time after ten o'clock.”

“How many are we looking at?”

“Well, excluding the women and several gents too arthritic to move without help, about eight.”

“You have the names, sir?”

“Yes, but not one of them resides in the city. Three are from Brantford and west, two from Port Hope, and the other three from Niagara and beyond.”

Marc did not reply. The futility of following up these possible leads needed no gloss put upon it.

Durham took a last puff on his pipe. “What will you do tomorrow besides interview Finney?”

“Cobb and I are going to Sarah's funeral at ten. I intend to keep a close eye on the women of the two brothels, who may be there. I want to study the dynamics of their relationship, if I can.”

“Funerals and weddings often compel people to reveal their true selves, eh?”

“Exactly. Then I'll go to Finney's.”

“I've been promised more troops to search for Badger. Sir George is more than eager to help. I have been impressed, I must say, with the absolute discretion of you and your policemen.”

“Thank you. How much longer have we got before—”

Durham frowned. “Tomorrow night at eight o'clock, Magistrate Thorpe and Chief Constable Sturges are to appear in my office here, at which time, failing the discovery of the real killer, I shall turn Handford over to them.”

“I'm sure that won't be necessary,” Marc said, wishing it were so.

•  •  •

BETH WAS WAITING FOR MARC. CHARLENE,
sensing excitement in the air, reluctantly went off to her room, where she contrived to sit reading very close to her door. Some cold roast, cheese, bread, and a flask of cider awaited Marc on the sideboard.

“No good news,” Beth commented, watching him eat.

“I'm afraid not. Badger's still on the loose. I'm going to wait until morning to fill you in on all the details of the day. Right now I'm tired and discouraged. Perhaps in going over things with you tomorrow, I'll be better able to compose my notes, and one of us might even think of something that's been overlooked.”

“All right, love, I understand.” Beth poured herself a glass of cider. “But I have several things to tell you that can't wait.”

“About Ellice? I know most of it already. His Lordship was very pleased with the miracle you worked on his nephew this afternoon. After you left, his aunt was able to engage him in conversation and at least begin to convince him that he too is a victim in this business.”

“I'm glad, for Handford's sake. But there's more.”

Marc was not sure whether he should be anxious or excited. “Did he tell you something important that happened at Madame Renée's?”

“He gave me a description of his nightmare.”

“About stabbing you.”

“About pulling the knife from my neck.”

“I don't quite follow. Are you saying he has no memory—even in his fantastic nightmares—of pushing the knife in?”

“I am. His nightmare, which he's had over and over, was of pulling the knife
out
.”

Marc reached across and clasped Beth's hand. “This could be critical to the case,” he said with rising excitement.

“I thought it must be but didn't see how.”

“Cobb and I have been mystified as to how the killer could have managed to plunge a dagger through Sarah's throat, pull it out, then reach over and place it in Ellice's hand without getting her blood on him or tracking through it as it spouted onto the bed and the floor. Now I think we know.”

“Handford himself pulled the knife from Sarah's throat, then?”

“I'm sure he did, half-consciously, in a drunken doze, perhaps assisted by a little laudanum administered out at Spadina. We may never know for sure the exact sequence of events.”

“So the killer could've just stabbed Sarah and run?”

“I'm certain of it now. It was enough that Lord Durham's nephew be discovered naked beside a murdered prostitute and covered with her blood. Ellice unwittingly capped the deception by pulling the knife out, as any human being would have done in those circumstances, drugged or not. Which means that one of the women could have committed the act without bloodying herself or even waking the others.”

“Or anybody with a way to get in and out of that little door.”

Marc sighed. “Yes. We have added another detail to the picture, but it doesn't point us in any one direction.”

He swallowed the last of the roast. Beth hadn't stirred. “There's something else you need to tell me, isn't there?”

“Yes. It's not directly connected, like the nightmare business, but Lady Durham wanted you to know.”

“Wanted me to know what?”

“When I left Handford's room, Lady Durham led me into her sitting room and told me something about her nephew, something not even her husband is aware of.”

Marc felt the hair rising on his neck as Beth told the tale.

When Handford Ellice was fifteen, he was caught in the stable with a girl by his mother and a visiting prelate. The young couple were naked and basking in the afterglow of their sexual exertions. If the girl had been a servant or the daughter of a tenant, money would have exchanged hands and the matter been soon forgotten. However, the girl was the youngest daughter of the neighbouring squire, eighteen years of age, and a willing participant, it seemed. While this sort of indiscretion was bad in and of itself—considering the lustre of the Ellice name, the petty ambitions of the squire, and a priest's witnessing the transgression—the girl was found to be black and blue on every part of her body not normally camouflaged by clothing. Distraught at being discovered thus, the girl alleged that Handford and she had been often in that loft and that after sex, which she claimed he always initiated, he routinely beat her, being crafty enough to whack her with his riding crop only where the bruises wouldn't show.

Handford—stuttering, confused, ashamed—protested that this was only their second encounter and swore that he had never hurt the girl. When he had inquired after her bruises, she just laughed, he said. The upshot of all this was a stalemate in which the entire matter was hushed up and satisfactory accommodation reached. The squire received ten acres of prime hunting ground he had long coveted and the shocked prelate was given a living at the discretion of Bear Ellice, the lad's illustrious and absentee father. The Ellices of course got to retain their respectability.

Marc let the incriminating details accumulate before he said, softly, “Does Lady Durham believe her nephew was a sadist? And could be one still?”

“She doesn't want to believe it. You just said yourself she spent all day convincing him he couldn't have killed Sarah.”

“Yet she wanted me to know, even though Lord Durham himself does not?”

“Yes. She thought you should. She wants to have the truth for herself, awful as it may be.”

“Even if it means I have to go up there tomorrow evening and tell her that her nephew is not only a murderer but a species of madman?”

“I think you have to consider it a possibility.”

Neither of them slept well that night.

M
arc made his way along King Street to the police quarters at the rear of the Court House. There, referring to his notes and under the baleful watch of Gussie French—who resented any official document not transcribed by his own pen—he brought Chief Sturges up to date on the investigation. In turn, Sarge told him that the search for Badger would be intensified within the city. Ten supernumerary constables had been called in from the city and surrounding county, and a dozen snitches had been given cash advances to reinforce their loyalty to the Crown and its immediate objective. If Badger were still here, the chief vowed, he would be flushed from cover before sundown.

With this guarantee to buoy his spirits, Marc carried on to John Street and the Mechanics' Institute. He found a modest crowd of mourners gathered for Sarah McConkey's funeral and Cobb waiting for him in the stuffy vestibule.

“All the ladies are in there,” he said with mild reproach. “They decided they might as well get on with it.” It was clear that Cobb felt that his time and Marc's would be better spent in the hunt for Badger.

“This will likely be a waste of effort, Cobb,” Marc said, “but I
want to see who's here and how they react to one another. We may get a different perspective on Mrs. Burgess and the girls.”

“Which ain't exactly evidence,” Cobb muttered.

“I want you to stay near the back of the hall and scrutinize every face. You never know who might decide to show up.”

They entered the hall. To Marc's surprise the main room of the former Mechanics' Institute, austere even in the days when it was a hub of self-improvement, had been transformed into something not unlike a simple house of worship on a back concession. Benches formed rows of pews and great sprays of freshly cut roses adorned tables along the windowless walls. Below the front wall, with the mid-morning sun pouring through its single, tall, plain window, a makeshift platform and lectern had been arranged to provide an altar. A casket of gleaming hardwood, the kind normally reserved for those rich enough to purchase ostentation, sat before it, bedecked with sprigs of wildflower. Behind the lectern, fussing with his Bible and notes, stood the minister, a youthful-looking chap, meagre of stature but fired with holy purpose and the zeal to propagate it. Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them, Marc thought gratefully.

There were more than two dozen mourners. In the rear rows sat several families unmistakably of Irishtown: the women in touchingly inapt bonnets and drab hand-me-down dresses, the men in suit coats a size too large or small, the children scrubbed but otherwise unaltered. The second row from the front was occupied by women, housewives whose spouses couldn't or wouldn't come, tenants or neighbourhood acquaintances of Mrs. Burgess most likely. With a pang of guilt Marc realized that whatever its troubles and traumas, the ragtag and motley collective of Irishtown was still a community. Madame Renée's was not, as he had first thought, an isolated bastion in a random and hostile terrain.

The proof of such a conclusion lay before him as he observed the scene in the front row: Norah Burgess and Madame Charlotte stood embracing each other. Tears had excavated runnels in Charlotte's pancake makeup, but Norah Burgess, her face unsullied by cosmetics, looked utterly devastated. She trembled as she clung to her rival, and the latter eased her onto the bench and held her till she steadied. On either side of the older women and filling the front row, their employees sat with quiet dignity, despite the almost comic effect of their efforts to temper their flamboyant working attire with black bits of shawl, scarf, or cowl.

Marc took a seat in the back row. Cobb meanwhile perched on a dusty stove near the entrance and, satisfied that no grieving lover or drooling assassin had intruded upon the ceremony, proceeded to catnap. The Reverend Solomon Good, whose booming voice emerged almost miraculously from his narrow chest, began the service with a long and soulful prayer, of which Cobb caught only intermittent phrases concerning Mary Magdalene, casting the first stone, and the bounteous compassion of God's only begotten son.

Cobb was unaware how much of the service he had dozed through when an alien sound to his left brought him almost awake. It was the click of a door latch being opened and closed. It took him a half-minute to get his mind in gear and ten more seconds to come to the conclusion that someone had just joined the mourners.

Although in the shadow of the far rear corner opposite Cobb, the figure was obviously tall, well built, and intent on remaining unobserved and unidentified. Despite the warmth of the day, it wore a loose-fitting coat and had covered its head and hair with a flowered scarf. It was peering around the room, looking for someone or something. The congregation by then was standing, and the hall was swelling with their voices raised in song and the hope of heaven.

“Jesus!” Cobb hissed to himself, “it's Badger!” He sprang forward but managed only to stumble and alert the target. By the time Cobb regained his footing, Badger was out the door. Cobb did not think to call out to Marc; he simply gave chase as he had done a hundred times before in the execution of his duties. Blinking in the sudden sunlight of John Street, he looked quickly up and down the road and spotted the culprit running awkwardly into the service lane that backed onto the houses and shops along Wellington Street to the south. In seconds Cobb was up to full speed, a pace that never failed to be underestimated by fleeing felons. He wheeled into the alleyway. Badger was only thirty yards ahead, weaving and stumbling among the half-dozen carts, assorted donkeys and their masters, and the usual flotsam of these much-travelled lanes.