Unholy Alliance (31 page)

After lunch, while Charlene and Jasper took
Maggie sledding, Marc brought Beth up to speed on the case. But the
walk to the church had tired her more than she would admit, and he
heard her snoring softly in her rocker in the midst of a most
insightful summation of the known facts and various conclusions
that might be drawn from them. An hour later, he asked Jasper to
hitch Macaulay’s horse to the cutter, kissed Beth and Maggie
goodbye, and headed out to Elmgrove.

He took a roundabout route, going west for a
block, then north, and finally circling back to King Street and
pointing the horse eastward. At the estate he found Macaulay by
himself in the library. The Quebecers were in their rooms napping
or reading before afternoon tea was to be served at five
o’clock.

“I feel I’ve just weathered the Battle of
Waterloo,” Macaulay sighed. “But LaFontaine has been as good as his
word. I’ve not heard a single complaint and no-one’s threatened to
leave. However, as soon as they’ve eaten, they’ve asked for us all
to assemble here – for the showdown.”

“And we’ve got nothing positive or new to
tell them,” Marc said gravely. “They’ll have no reason to sign our
accord and little incentive to hang around Toronto waiting for an
inquest that can spell nothing but trouble for them.”

“Cobb’s snitch wasn’t able to locate
Giles?”

“Not yet. But if he
is
in the city,
Nester will find him.”

Just outside the front window they heard a
shout of “Whoa!”

“Thank God,” Macaulay said. “Robert and
Francis have arrived.”

“Someone else to share the gloom with, eh?”
Marc said.

“I’ll go and say hello,” Macaulay said.

Marc sat by himself for a few minutes and,
once again, tried to think of anything he or Cobb might have
overlooked. Nothing came readily to mind. He got up and stared out
at the snow-covered driveway, willing Cobb to appear. But, of
course, he didn’t. Perhaps the Quebecers would wait until it got
dark about seven o’clock before giving up on the police, and the
Reformers of Upper Canada.

Macaulay came back into the room.

“Robert and Francis are taking their things
to their rooms. They’ll join us in a minute.”

Marc nodded, but he hadn’t actually heard
what Macaulay had said to him. He suddenly knew what had been
overlooked, what had been nagging at him for two days. “I’ve missed
something that could be important,” he said.

“You have?” Macaulay said, much excited.

“Yes. We’ve been assuming all along that the
three pages missing from the butler’s ledger, which we now know
contained details of our private discussions, had been torn out of
the book and removed by the killer.”

“Why else would they be torn out?” Macaulay
asked, somewhat deflated already. “Surely you were right in
concluding that the ledger was the perfect hiding-place for those
notes on our meetings. If the impostor removed them himself, he
risked their being discovered – by one of us or one of the staff,
who have access to his rooms and legitimate reason to go there.
And, remember, we haven’t found those pages anywhere.”

“True, but what if the impostor were
funnelling his notes to those on the outside
as the meetings
progressed
? A sort of meeting-by-meeting summary?”

“I did think of that, Marc, but Cobb and
others, including me this morning, have walked the periphery of
Elmgrove and found no evidence of anyone coming or going. You’re
not implying that someone came down the front lane?”

“Think back to Thursday, Garnet. We met at
eleven to finish our discussion of step one, and then we broke for
a working lunch. Did Chilton, as I’ll call our impostor for the
moment, not ask for permission to go to the stable to check on a
supply problem?”

“That’s right. He thought Struthers guilty of
something or other.”

“But Struthers denied that the butler ever
got there.”

“My word! You think this Chilton might have
been delivering a page of notes to someone out there who could
spirit it away to Toronto? To one of our opponents?”

Marc nodded. “Did Chilton not also take a
fifteen-minute constitutional every evening about five
o’clock?”

“That’s right. As he did on Wednesday and
again on Thursday.”

“I’ve at least got to check out the
possibility that some sort of relay system was set up to
systematically steal vital information from us. After all,
insinuating a phoney butler into Elmgrove was a complicated, bold
and risky venture: there had to be a powerful motive behind
it.”

Macaulay frowned. “You’re not going to accuse
Struthers, are you? He’s absolutely trustworthy.”

“Don’t worry, Garnet. Desperate as I am, I’m
not about to jump to conclusions. I’m just going for a walk, a
fifteen-minute constitutional.”

***

After dressing for the outdoors, Marc left the house
by the back door, the one off the rotunda and the one the impostor
had probably used on Thursday in the early afternoon and again at
five o’clock. Struthers or his son had shovelled much of the snow
off the well-used path that led to several nearby sheds and a
chicken-coop and, farther to the northeast, to the stables and the
Struthers’ cabin just beyond it. The constant tramping of the
Elmgrove staff during their various duties had left the path a
hard-packed walkway threaded between two-foot banks. Marc felt the
sting of the north wind on his left cheek as he made his way past
the chicken-coop and into the open space before the cedar grove a
few yards ahead. He crossed the rutted lane that Robert’s sleigh
had used to enter the estate unobserved from the bush on its
northern border last Wednesday. He was grateful for the shelter of
the cedar windbreak when he reached it, but as yet no particular
plan of action had presented itself. He had thought that by putting
himself in the butler’s overshoes, so to speak, he might get some
flash of insight into how those ripped pages could have been
smuggled out of here and into the hands of one or the other of the
Tories in the city proper.

He was thinking so intently that he stumbled
over the edge of the bank on his left. As he straightened up,
facing the cedar windbreak, he spotted a rumpling of the snow just
past the nearest tree. It struck him then that “Chilton” could have
jumped the bank easily and vanished into the grove without a trace.
Who would go in there in ordinary circumstances? Marc hopped over
the bank himself and stepped knee-deep into the drifts that linked
cedar to cedar. While the trees had acted generally as a buffer
against the prevailing wind and drifting snow, random gusts over
the past few days had created an eddied effect within the grove
itself. In the narrow open spaces between trees Marc could see
whorls and zigzag patterns sculpted by these variable gusts, but
these were not enough to camouflage completely the telltale marks
of human footprints. Obscured as they were here and there, Marc was
still able to track them through the grove to its northern edge, a
distance of about twenty yards.

He stood panting between two cedars, and
stared due north. From where he now stood to the far edge of the
estate he estimated to be forty or fifty yards. Up there, the bush,
with the lumber road just inside it, was thick with spruce and
cedar. But directly between him and the bush sat the small hay-barn
he had noticed on their arrival last Wednesday morning. It appeared
“Chilton” had thrashed his way through the cedars to this spot. But
if he had come this far, then how he got over to the barn or how
his accomplice had got here from there was not easy to determine,
for the snow over the intervening space was unmarked. The
occasional drifting of the past two days would have filled in some
part of any footprints but not enough to cover them up. Reluctantly
Marc had to admit that no-one had walked to or from this spot.

It was then that Marc spied a large spruce
branch lying a few feet away in a drift. There were a few spruce
trees scattered throughout this mainly cedar grove, so he glanced
about for the source of the broken branch. He found a tall spruce a
little to his left, not far from the branch, and looked up to see
where – and how – it might have come down. What he saw was much
more interesting. Eight feet above him, partly obscured by the
branches holding them in place, sat a pair of snowshoes.
“Chilton’s” progress and its method became instantly clear. The
snowshoes would have gotten him across to the hay-barn, while the
spruce branch dragged behind would wipe away their imprint. Marc
had seen this trick done during his first investigation four years
earlier.

Leaving the raquettes where they were, Marc
ploughed his way slowly towards the little barn, scrutinizing the
surface just ahead of each step. The recent drifting evidently had
obscured the faint swishing pattern of Chilton’s spruce-branch, for
even at close range Marc could see nothing but a smooth blank
surface. However, his assumption was confirmed when he neared the
barn, where the building itself had blunted the drifting effect of
the north wind. There in the very shadow of the barn he spied the
unmistakeable pattern of that camouflaging branch. “Chilton” had
snowshoed this far at least, and hidden his trail nicely.

Which suggested that his accomplice had
waited for him in the hay-barn. To reach it undetected he would
have had to approach from the cover of the bush, probably on
snowshoes as well and dragging a branch behind him. However, when
Marc pushed past the north side of the barn to examine this route,
the extent of the drifting here made it impossible for him to
determine whether it had in fact been used. Farther off towards the
edge of the woods he could see where Cobb and Withers had tramped
along on Friday morning looking for signs of intrusion, but even
the keenest eye would not have picked up any cleverly camouflaged
snowshoe tracks, if indeed someone
had
entered the estate
here to rendezvous with the butler-spy.

It was in the midst of this thought that he
heard a sound – from inside the barn.

He inched his way back until he was standing
in front of the barn’s only door. He gave a series of irregular
knocks, as if it were some code. There was no response for thirty
seconds or so. He repeated the sequence of knocks. From inside came
a tentative whisper:

“That you, Chilton?”

In what he hoped was a reasonable
approximation of the butler’s voice, Marc replied, “Yes. Open
up.”

Again there was a lengthy pause. Then the
door-latch was cautiously slid back. Marc didn’t wait. He pushed
inward with all his strength. The door jerked open, and a male
figure was flung backwards with it. In the half-light all Marc
could see was the underside of two upturned snowshoes.

He stepped inside, bent over the stunned man,
pulled him up by his coat-collar, and plunked him down on the
nearest bale of hay. He was a short, wiry fellow with a stableman’s
strength, but the sight of Marc’s six-foot frame blocking the light
and his escape route was enough to convince him to remain seated.
In lieu of resistance, he opted for bravado.

“Who the fuck are you?” he snarled
shakily.

“My name is Edwards. I’m with the Toronto
police. And you have to be Giles Harkness.”

“What of it? I ain’t done nothin’ the police
need to get bothered about.”

“That remains to be seen. What are you doing
skulking about this estate?”

“I work here. I got a right to be anywhere I
like.”

“You left your employment over two weeks ago,
and since then you’ve been overheard making threats against your
former employer.”

“What’re you gonna do, arrest me fer
trespassin’? How do you know I ain’t come to visit Struthers or
Bragg?”

“Quit avoiding the obvious. Just now you were
expecting Graves Chilton to be outside that door, not Struthers or
Bragg. It is five o’clock, and that was your rendezvous time each
day, wasn’t it? Chilton arrived with an envelope, handed it to you,
and you snowshoed back into the bush and made a run for the city to
deliver the news. We’ve known all about it, we just didn’t know –
till now – where the drop-off was and to whom.”

“It ain’t against the law to carry messages!”
Harkness cried, but most of the bravado had dissolved as Marc had
zeroed in on the truth. “I had no idea what was in them envelopes,”
he added with a whine and a desperate glance at the solitary door.
“Honest!”

“Last Thursday at two-thirty you received an
envelope from the butler, delivered it, and returned again at five
o’clock. But this time you not only received, you
delivered
,
didn’t you?”

“What’re you talkin’ about?”

“You delivered a little gift for Mr. Chilton,
a bonus for his success at getting three envelopes to his betters
in town: one on Wednesday and two on Thursday. You brought the good
butler a bottle of Amontillado sherry, didn’t you?”

“So what? The gentleman we worked for asked
me to deliver it. Is
that
a crime too?” Harkness’s bluster
was increasing in proportion to his anxiety.

“You don’t know, do you?” Marc said with a
slow, quizzical smile.

“Know what?”

“Your Graves Chilton is dead. He died early
Friday morning. The Amontillado you gave him had enough poison in
it to fell an elephant.”

Harkness went chalk-white, and began to
tremble. “You’re lyin’! We was just tryin’ to make him woozy –
enough to get him fired.”

“That’s irrelevant. Whoever put the poison in
that wine and the man who delivered it are both guilty of murder,
and will hang,” Marc said in the tone he used to badger a hostile
witness in court.

“I ain’t gonna hang fer this! It wasn’t my
idea! None of it!”

“Then you had better give me the name of the
man who
is
responsible.”

***