Death in the Age of Steam (6 page)

“This I will tell you. We have in this city fifty constables, under the immediate supervision of five sergeants. Each constable has to look after the policing needs of eight hundred citizens. Now depend on it, every man is aware of Mrs. Crane's disappearance and can be counted on to keep his eyes open.”

Every Morgan, thought Harris, every Devlin. “And what provision has been made for the possibility that she has already left the city?”

“You can address any further enquiries to Mr. Henry Crane.” Vandervoort's grin unravelled. “Now you'll have to excuse me. I'm wanted elsewhere.”

“Just a moment. The lighthouse keeper you arrested—yesterday he was positive that Mrs. Crane had been killed. Ask him if he saw her.”

“You can't be thinking the contrabandists killed Mrs. Crane?” The inspector opened the door and held it for Harris.

“If she had stumbled on their activities—”

“I
know
my felons, sir. These are businessmen,
not
murderers.”

When Vandervoort left the building, Harris went back down to Station No.1 and asked again for the sergeant. Morgan answered evasively. Devlin let slip that the sergeant was under lock and key and not able to be seen, though plainly to be heard.

“All the girls they smile at me,” rang out from the farthest lock-up cell, “a comin' through the rye.”

Harris escaped onto the scorched yellow dust of the square. The heat beat down on his shoulders and rose through the soles of his shoes. Holding his top hat between the sun and his eyes, he stared down Wellington, Front and Palace Streets and up Nelson to where Jarvis began north of Queen. Vandervoort had vanished, but the Waterloo veteran still sat in the shade of the portico. Perhaps those moist eyes were not as empty as they seemed.

“Two minutes ago a tall, red-haired man in checks came out this door,” said Harris as he put another coin in the high shako hat.

“Flemish name—I forget what.”

“Did you happen to notice which way he went?”

“He's gone for a glass at the Dog and Duck, same as every day at five.” The veteran pointed to a hotel entrance on West Market Square.

Shame on Vandervoort! He was late this afternoon, a disappointment to his friends. But sarcasm would not do. Harris's indignation and anxiety required release in action. He decided against the Dog and Duck and started home to change into clothes he could ride in. The veteran called him back.

“Take that second sixpence of yours,” he said. “I ain't a paid spy.”

Banshee was put through her paces, culminating in a three-mile gallop west along the lakeshore. The seven minutes and a half it took her wasn't her best time, but close to it. Harris had bought her for endurance and disposition, not speed.

He stretched in the saddle and wiped his forehead as the horse picked her way through the scrub pine at the mouth of the Humber River. Their approach sent a brown-and-buff wader flying off in a zigzag with a rasping cry. Less easily distracted than the snipe, an osprey continued to hover on beating wings just above the water's surface.

The birds and—more particularly—the variety of wildflowers
had drawn Theresa to the Humber Valley often before her marriage. Harris began to work his way upstream, if not inch by inch then yard by yard. In less than three hours, night would fall.

Where the banks were too spongy to ride, he guided Banshee over the shale and limestone stream bed. He stopped to question fishermen. He dismounted to inspect footprints, bread crusts, paper scraps, and every other sign of human passage.

The vale north of Bâby Point had provided most of the items for Theresa's botanical inventory, so he took extra time to survey this ground on foot. Names he could no longer match to plants ran unbidden through his head—painted cup, viburnum, helleborine.

Suddenly, he heard the leaves rustle behind him. He grabbed a fallen tree branch and spun around just in time to see the retreating red-brown back of a snowshoe hare.

As the shadows lengthened, Harris left the valley. He rode back to Toronto in the dark, making fruitless inquiries at every inn along Dundas Street. During the intervals, he reflected that such random leisure-time excursions stood no chance of leading him to Theresa. He would willingly have left the search to others—to the authorities, to the experts. If only such people existed.

He had prolonged this afternoon's interview with Vandervoort in the continually frustrated hope of receiving some assurance of official diligence or competence. For all his professional discretion, the inspector had revealed that his department lacked any procedure for finding people, that they had as yet no likeness of Theresa, that no one was actively looking for her, that suspicious circumstances were not even to be investigated. Nor was it evident that Crane was making up for police deficiencies. Crane seemed content to throw suspicion on Harris.

The horse trotted on, hoofs as regular as a heartbeat. Farmland was giving way to town. The houses drew closer to the road and to their neighbours. Burghers taking the night air on their stoops could call to each other and to passersby, though gas-fuelled street lamps didn't yet come out this far.

One day Toronto would be well lit and well policed. So much stood to reason. What baffled Harris was the weight of obligation he felt settling upon himself in the meantime. His normally reliable good sense counselled him to flinch, to shrug the burden off, but his pulse was beating louder than such counsels. Harris had never known the imperiousness of his own heart. He was afraid he was about to.

When he had delivered Banshee to Randall's boy for grooming and made sure her manger was full, he went to look for Jasper Small. At nine p.m., however, Small could not really be expected to be home, still less at his law office. At an oyster bar, more likely, the resort of men of fashion. As it happened, no oyster bar had seen him, nor had his favourite billiard parlours, nor indeed was he to be found in any public establishment that could be reached by closing time.

Back in the cashier's suite, another night passed, slowly. Next day at noon, Harris tried again, walking north of Queen Street on Yonge to the end unit of a short row of Georgian yellow-brick houses.

He had first come here nine years ago in the winter of 1847, before he had been employed by the bank. At his father's instigation, he had been working to establish the York County Millers' Association and had needed advice on a matter of legal incorporation. He had heard that William Sheridan was one of the best lawyers in the province, and by no means the most expensive, but that Sheridan might not be available, as he was devoting more and more of his time to politics.

On that January morning, the first thing the eighteen-year-old Harris had heard when he opened the street door was a cascade of angry abuse.

“If you would make a supreme mental effort, Mr. Small,” a deep Irish voice thundered, “you would realize that I have a coach to catch to Montreal. What bloated idea of your own
importance could have made you think that I have so much as a second to spare on your flea of a client's libel action?”

Harris had leaped back down the steps, flagged down a horse-drawn omnibus descending Yonge Street, and held it the thirty seconds more it took a chunkily handsome man in his mid-forties to burst into the street. A second, boyish figure, vapour ballooning from his startled mouth, followed as far as the top step. Sheridan was waved a farewell he didn't look back to see with a handful of the papers he had not had time to read.

Returning the salute on his behalf, Harris bundled his quarry aboard the omnibus. Together they rode it to where it turned east along King Street. Then they ran and slid the two remaining blocks to Weller's Stage Office on Front Street. Sheridan already had his ticket to Montreal. Harris took one as far as Pickering, which he judged would give him time and to spare to explain his problem.

As the coach runners skimmed over the frozen roads, Sheridan relaxed inside his furs. He understood what the York Millers wanted and saw no particular difficulty in doing it. He said something about the beauty of the Canadian winter and how much he enjoyed sleighing—not as far as Montreal, to be sure, which was where Parliament happened to be sitting—but in short spurts. Did Harris have a horse and sleigh of his own? No? Then he must take Sheridan's out for a turn sometime, out on the bay, with a team in tandem.

Harris smiled at the extravagance.

“I mean it,” the lawyer protested. “You'll see. Life's so full of pleasures, my young friend. I'm a jackass to let my temper get the better of me the way it did back there. It will be the death of me.”

“I don't know about that, sir,” said Harris, crossing several degrees of intimacy at a bound, “and I don't know much about law—but if the flea of a client had opened that door instead of me, I suppose there might have been another libel suit in the offing.”

“Slander, Mr. Harris, for verbal insults. I'd have put nothing so damaging in writing.”

The young lawyer Sheridan had left gasping on the doorstep that day later became his partner and Harris's closest friend.

Today Jasper Small was to be found in Sheridan's room rather than his own, ostensibly cleaning up Sheridan's affairs. Letters and documents covered both the open front of the writing desk by the door, and a fully extended gate-leg table in the bay window. A wavy-haired man of roughly Harris's age was moving these papers about without appearing to sort them in any way. Small's fleshy moon of a face and pale grey eyes made him look the dreamer even when delivering an elegantly conclusive argument in court. Whether his present task absorbed him Harris found hard to tell.

“Dine with me, Jasper.”

“I can't,” said Small. “Oh, hang it, I shall. The Trafalgar House has received a shipment of the most amazing claret.”

The firm of Sheridan and Small having a progressive reputation, Jasper felt at liberty to wear a bowler in place of a top hat. His morning coat was impeccably cut and pressed, as were his matching loose trousers. An extra-elaborate tie knot was his only real touch of dandyism.

Harris had no criticism to make of Small, and yet as the two emerged onto the plank sidewalk, he realized he had come expecting too much. While more composed than on his return Wednesday night from the Humber Valley, he felt as tense as a drawn bow. He wanted Small to provide all the answers and reassurances that had so far eluded Harris himself.

“Sorry for your loss,” he mumbled, to at least get that out of the way. “There was no chance to speak at the funeral.”

Small shook his head as if he could not believe what he was about to say. “I took the old man papers to sign Friday afternoon. He was on the mend. No more pain in the gut, he says. The next day off he pops.”

“Oh? You don't think his death was natural?”

Harris had heard no suspicion of this—none, that is, but Septimus Murdock's. And what did the accountant
not
suspect? Belonging to the Roman Catholic minority in a Protestant town
could only reinforce the apprehensiveness of his temperament, and his noting the “significant coincidence” of Sheridan's death with the Glorious Twelfth was all the easier for Harris to dismiss in that Murdock had so far refused to be more explicit.

Orangemen did have reason to dislike Sheridan. Although a Protestant Irishman himself, he had joined Robert Baldwin in trying to outlaw the Orange Order back in the days of Governor Metcalfe. Sheridan's rhetoric at the time, moreover, had been far less temperate than Baldwin's. But dislike was one thing, murder another. Besides, this dispute was thirteen years old. Drunken brawls might be a Toronto Orange tradition. Long-nurtured grudges and stealthy vendettas, as far as Harris knew, were not.

Nor did Small appear to have foul play in mind.

“Natural to be sure,” he replied. “As natural as quack medicine. I'm just not convinced it resulted inevitably from his illness.”

Harris asked who had been Sheridan's physician.