Death in the Age of Steam (13 page)

“Will you be able to tell if these fragments came from the same body as the arm?” he asked Lamb. He naturally hoped they did, having already concluded from the position of the bracelet and the coarseness of the hairs that the arm was not Theresa's.

“No indeed!” snapped Lamb. “I'm no clairvoyant.”

“But there can't be any doubt,” said Vandervoort. “They were found less than two miles apart. And then there's the axe.”

Ignoring him, Lamb continued less waspishly to Harris, “Anatomical analysis alone won't even tell us if all these
are
from the same body. What can be observed is that this pelvis,” he pointed to a dish-like object, “is almost certainly a woman's. You can see from this fragment of the pubic arch. It's rounder and wider than a man's.”

“Pubic arch?”

“Here, Mr. Harris.” The professor pointed without embarrassment to the location of the structure on his own anatomy. “Although, in a man, it forms an angle rather than an arch. I can also say that none of these new bones appears to be from the right arm. Further conclusions must wait on measurement . . . Clavicle—5 1/8 inches . . .”

While he was measuring, Harris turned to Vandervoort.

“What axe, inspector?”

From a side pocket of his tweed jacket, Vandervoort took an object wrapped in a charred scrap of green fabric. Merrily, he
prolonged the mystery. Twice he asked if Harris were sure he wanted to see inside. Finally the package was set on the bench and the cloth folded back to reveal an axe head with the charred stump of a new wooden handle protruding from it. A stain appeared to have burned onto the blade.

“Blood,” said Vandervoort with a flourish.

Harris glanced at the professor.

“Sternum—just a moment . . .” Lamb set down his notebook and used his ruler to lift the axe blade so it caught the lamplight. “Looks like it,” he said, “but whether human or animal blood there's no way of saying. Even using the microscope.”

“If ever you get a really straight answer from Dr. Lamb,” chuckled Vandervoort, “then you can bet your mother's teeth you're on to something. Tell me about the arm, professor. I suppose you have already made a full report to our nosey friend.”

While Lamb was reporting in scientific language, and again in plain words, Harris looked at the lengthening list of measurements. Through his damp white shirt, he felt for the point where his neck joined his shoulder. The clavicle, he thought, was the collarbone—but where did it start? Over five inches sounded long. He eased the ruler out of Lamb's hand.

“Details are all well and good,” Vandervoort was saying, “but what matters is the pattern. Mrs. Crane leaves home. She's attacked and killed. The killer tries to cover his tracks by burning her remains and the weapon. Tries, but doesn't do a very thorough job. Have you found anything to contradict that story?”

“I have not had
time
to. You don't seem to appreciate, inspector, how long it took simply to strip these three arm bones. Then, before I get to the hand, you bring me a whole other bag of tricks.”

“These at least are clean,” Vandervoort pointed out.

“Splendid. Now, if you want an expert opinion on these, leave them with me.”

“Of course, but so far you can't say I'm wrong.”

Lamb wearily acknowledged that, insofar as he had been able to
assess, the dimensions of all bones and bone fragments in both sets were not inconsistent with their forming part of a single skeleton. Vandervoort seemed satisfied.

“If I'm not interrupting,” said Harris, “I should like to ask Professor Lamb whether a woman of five three to five five with a five and one eighth inch clavicle would appear broad-shouldered.”

“That, I think, would be fair to say.”

“Stocky rather than slim?”

“Definitely.”

“Then,” Harris declared, “it's not Mrs. Crane.”

Vandervoort pulled a goatish face. “Well, Dr. Lamb,” he said, “you have had a long day, considering that I dragged you out of bed this morning at four o'clock. Mr. Harris and I shall go and let you get on with your work. Oh, and you might want to look at that bit of green cloth too. It's devilish like the sleeve we found the arm in.”

Harris noted the
we
and foresaw that it would soon slip into
I
. When that happened, there would be no more comradely sharing of information, and every question would again in all likelihood be turned back with another question. To make the most of the momentary opening, he took the opportunity of walking south with Vandervoort.

The College Avenue, stretching from the university grounds to Osgoode Hall, was closed at night. They settled for Park Lane, which hugged the avenue's east side fence and borrowed the dignity of its parade of chestnut trees. A landau with jingling harness passed them at a trot, its occupants doubtless heading home from Sunday dinner at one of the new uptown villas. Otherwise, the city under the night clouds was as still as a fiddle in its case.

Just waiting, Harris thought, for the note-making to resume, the music of commerce.

“Pity about the smuggling charge,” he said. It seemed a safe bet that this was the case Lamb had earlier referred to as having fallen through.

“There was no way of knowing.” Vandervoort drank from his tin flask. “I made sure Mr. Harvey Ingram didn't have any daughters in service to the Attorney General's household or any second cousins on City Council. He friggin' near ruined one alderman tea merchant by getting lushed up and letting the light go out in a storm.”

“You mean the winter before last,” said Harris, “when the
China Queen
went down?”

“Beaches black with pekoe leaves till spring . . . Now I'm told our beloved old campaigner has ‘friends' in the first rank of capital and clergy, men on whom his claims are ‘not to be inquired into.' Hush!” Vandervoort drank. “Never mind—this Crane business will make me. I've got a body now. In due course, I'll get a felon.”

“The body,” said Harris, “isn't Mrs. Crane's.”

“Fond memories—”

“Even apart from the question of size,” Harris interrupted, “the arm is an obvious decoy.” He was appropriately grateful to Ingram's anonymous backers, but their interference in the course of justice would be for nought if Vandervoort were to spend all his time looking for Theresa's murderer instead of for Theresa. “Yes, a decoy. Why else leave it with an utterly distinctive bracelet—which incidentally the owner didn't wear on that wrist—then lug the body two miles off to burn it? Someone wants it believed that Mrs. Henry Crane,
née
Theresa Ruth Sheridan, is dead.”

Vandervoort drank. “With respect, sir, you are not one of the parties I have to convince.”

“Don't you have to convince yourself?”

“I believe in results.” The whisky was starting to make the inspector weave as he walked.

“What about Professor Lamb?” said Harris. “Aren't you going to have him out to the shed?”

“Waste of time. You saw what he was like at the Rouge with all his picture taking. Brilliant mind, of course, but how far does it get you? Everything is maybe this, maybe that.”

Harris gave Vandervoort a cigar to distract him from his flask. “How far do you expect this case to get you, Inspector? Deputy chief? Doesn't that go by political connections rather than by results?”

At this, Vandervoort stopped walking altogether and talked about the police. Although audibly less sober than when he had narrated his discovery of the burned-out shed, he made more sense. Familiarity had given these thoughts a shape. Harris, who had the impression of eavesdropping, would not in any case have risked interrupting.

Results were what would count in future, Vandervoort prophesied, while not denying that today's force still ran on connections.

Personally, he had always depended on some of each. The son of Niagara farm folk, he had started early talking to anyone that could offer him a less laborious life. As a young night watchman on the second Welland Canal, he had discovered who was pilfering construction supplies, thus recommending himself for the railway police when work started on the Great Western. Unspecified services were performed for G.W.R. directors, who also happened to figure on Toronto's City Council. So Vandervoort's name came up when it was decided to hire a city detective—an anomalous post on what in the mid-fifties was a betwixt and between sort of force.

A wave of arson had temporarily loosened the purse strings, though the same council had economized since. As the city's population had grown, they actually reduced the number of constables. Everything went by the aldermen's whim. No policeman could be engaged, dismissed or even suspended without their say-so. Accountability, they called it.

Not that Chief Sherwood was much for suspensions or reprimands in any case. A quiet, good-natured man, the chief. He didn't even like to insist on the dress regulations, with the result that the uniformed police were scarecrows more or less.

There had been
some
sprucing up, for change was in the air. Police failure to cope with a pair of recent Orange riots had set
the ball in motion. One alderman had even proposed that Orange Lodge members be excluded from the force. That had been voted down, of course, and Parliament in May had backed away from its plan to take provincial control of the police, but a British-style board of police commissioners was still a strong bet to replace City Council in the running of things. The next chief could be an army man.

Harris's eye followed the iron grill-work that for half a dozen blocks ruled commercial and residential Toronto off from the leisured walkways, grass boulevards and carriage parade. And all the while he listened and thought that—whatever improvements the future held—in the time he had to find Theresa this maddening, temporarily loquacious man was the best he had to work with in the way of official support.

“I should not want to be chief,” snorted Vandervoort, coming round at last to the question asked, “much less his deputy. Keeping constables on their beats? How anybody can do that—with the human material we have to work with . . . You're always fighting human weakness. For the detective now, like me, human weakness is an ally. You frequent the criminal classes. You work on their weaknesses. Bend their elbow, bend their ear, grease their palm, twist their arm, tweak their nose. Above all, loosen their tongue. Before they know it—” his fist sprang shut, “—they're yours.”

About the coming changes, Vandervoort had mixed feelings. He saw the necessity for a modern, professional police, and yet he feared that would mean a shorter leash for himself. Hence, his desire for advancement. His sights were set on Inspector of Licences, which carried an official remuneration of three hundred pounds a year—double what the city already paid its detective inspector and a hundred more than it paid the deputy chief—although salary was only one consideration. Harris was left to imagine what the others were, but he doubted they would have any very improving effect on Vandervoort's character or his liver. In recent years, the regulation of liquor had become an exclusively municipal affair.

Overhead, a current of air teased the chestnut leaves. Vandervoort took hold of the metal fence with both hands and stared into the confined Avenue. Perhaps he was just drunk and tired, but his stance suggested that for him this near side of the barrier was the cage.

“I can see myself in a couple of years,” he said, “taking the air out there in the back of my own open carriage.”

Harris didn't bother to point out that in a couple of years the fence would almost certainly have been dismantled to facilitate crosstown traffic, George Brown's
Globe
newspaper having mounted a vigorous editorial campaign to that effect.

“What if out there on the Avenue,” he remarked instead, “you were to meet Mrs. Crane?
After
having convinced her husband, the aldermen, and a jury that she was dead.”

Vandervoort turned sharply. “What are you saying?”

“Merely that your position will be more secure if we find the correct solution to this mystery than if we settle for a momentarily plausible one.”

Vandervoort muttered grudging assent or suppressed a curse. They continued walking south.

“I wondered,” said Harris, “if you would ask Mr. Crane and Dr. Hillyard about the fracture. Neither of them want to talk to me.”

“How secure is your own position, Harris?” It was the first time Vandervoort had dropped the
mister
. “Do your employers know how many hours you spend on the trail of another man's wife?”

“I trust I could explain myself to their satisfaction.” All the same, Harris reflected, to do so would cost time. Perhaps he was pressing the policeman too hard.

“I don't say we can't work together,” offered the latter, “but remember this is detective work, not banking. That means I call the tune.”

From these words and the inspector's quickened pace, Harris gathered that there was further work for them that very evening. They loped south to Front Street.

Among the brick villas ranged along the north side, Sheridan's alone showed no flicker of lamp or candle. Its emptiness seemed
amplified by the extraordinary amount of glass in its symmetrical façade. Each of the nine sash windows carried eighteen large panes, all dark.

Vandervoort turned in at the low gate, crossed the unweeded front garden and climbed the three steps that led from it to the semicircular porch. Harris followed, bewildered.

“Are we going to break in?” he asked.

A street lamp caught the triumphant gleam in the inspector's eye as from an inside pocket he produced a large, discoloured key.

“From the burned shed?” said Harris. “But there's no keyhole.”

Vandervoort looked. The key in his hand moved forlornly over the blank white surface of the door.