Death in the Age of Steam (23 page)

The
Cytherean
's after deck was rising and falling on a long, sickening swell. Harris had not noticed before. He steadied himself against the end of one of the long, arching trusses that kept the 200-foot wooden hull from snapping in half. He fixed his eyes on the horizon. The lake's south shore was no more now than a blue line above which rose Niagara Falls' cloudy exhalation. Harris looked back in dismay over the days lost to an all-out search.

“When I collected my bag of bones,” Vandervoort continued, “I did see a scrap of dun fabric that might have belonged to her. Thinking nothing of it, you understand. By the time I went back for it, someone had been tampering with the site.” The inspector's boot nudged Harris's. “Foot size very like your own.”

The buttermilk arrived in two crystal goblets the inner surfaces of which it had, with the motion of the ship, coated to the very rims. The only taker, Vandervoort noisily drained both glasses.

“Of course,” he said between gulps, “if we had the constables to do it, we should have posted a guard over that charred rubble until a coroner's jury could have a look.”

Later, when Harris's queasiness had abated, the two men sat indoors. Between their deep leather chairs stood a low chess table with dark and light squares of wood set into its surface. A circular depression in the centre of each square kept the pieces in place as the ship rolled over the waves.

Harris asked why there had as yet been no inquest. Had Crane's travel schedule occasioned the delay? Not altogether, Vandervoort protested. The arm had been discovered in Ontario County and the other bones in the County of York. There were jurisdictional questions to settle.

As to where Theresa had got to, Vandervoort was sure Harris knew better than he. That bay horse, for instance. And what had Harris been doing in Niagara? On all fours, apparently. And why was he in such a hurry to get back to Toronto? Having shared his information, Vandervoort was seeking reciprocity.

“I'll be taking closer interest in your movements in future, Isaac Harris. A fortunate accident that we met!”

“Do you play, Inspector?” Harris gestured to the chessmen drawn up in starting array between them. He had just noticed that those with the paler finish—those that moved first—stood on his side of the table. He was going to have to stay one good step ahead of Vandervoort. If he did happen to pick up a trail in Port Hope, he wasn't convinced it would serve Theresa's interests to lead the police along it to her.

Vandervoort made a throat-clearing noise and underlined his disgust by resting the sole of his boot on the edge of the table, which would have tumbled over had it not been bolted against rough weather to the floor of the salon.

“That's no pastime for men with blood in their veins,” he said.

“How so?”

“You labour mightily attacking the cockalorum there.” After an instant's hesitation above the white queen, Vandervoort's thick index finger and thumb singled out the white king for a rough tweak. “You strip away his guards. You check him. And then, if you win, you don't even get the joy of taking him off the board.”

“You corner him,” said Harris.

“You never lay hands upon him,” the policeman countered.

“No need,” Harris persisted. “You trap him so he can't escape—unless he traps you first.”

“Too deep for me, Harris, and too standoffish for the times we live in. Bloodless damned foolery!”

Presently a steward reported sighting the twin spires of Holy Trinity Church and attempted to answer passengers' questions as to the duration of the Toronto stopover. He found it hard to
be precise. There were a hundred crates of peaches to unload, after all, and soft fruit could not be rushed.

Mention of Holy Trinity roused Harris, evoking a snatch of hymn, the pink shine from Crane's inclined head, the clank of an iron coffin against the hearse's wheel. The best use of Vandervoort might be to get him questioning Dr. Hillyard's findings. A metal coffin would preserve better than wood. It was perhaps not too late for an autopsy on William Sheridan.

“Sibyl was an embarrassment, wasn't she, Inspector? William Sheridan tried to curtail Orange influence, and she had ties to the Grand Master himself. If Sibyl were a murderess, the whole Order would be implicated. Christopher Hillyard is a sash wearer too, of course, to say nothing of City Council and your own force.”

“I'm not,” said Vandervoort with a hint of proud independence, before remembering his ambitions. “Not yet.”

“You must have your doubts then. What I'm wondering is whether a murder investigation might not uncover an unrelated motive and thereby lift suspicion from the Orangemen more effectively than the current smothering operation.”

“You're thinking Mrs. Crane killed her father,” Vandervoort brutally replied.

Harris glared. Having just that morning learned how it felt to be shot at, he would gladly have subjected his interlocutor to the same experience. How had he sat with this man?

“I hope you meant that as a joke,” he managed to stammer. “No father and daughter were ever more attached.”

“Three years ago, perhaps. But he may not have liked the idea of her leaving her husband, and she would have needed money to do it in any style. Did I mention that valuables were missing from the strongbox under Sheridan's bed?”

“You did not. Was the lock forced?”

“There would have been no need with Sheridan dead, now would there? She could have taken the key from around his neck—”

“Preposterous!”

“Oh, yes, banknotes, share certificates . . . Your friend Mr.
Small can tell you what all if he has a mind to.”

The state of Jasper's mind was not at present a reassuring object of contemplation. At their lunch on July 17, five days after his partner's death, he had given no intimation that Sheridan had been robbed. Possibly by then he still had not inspected the box. As for Theresa, she would never have killed her Papa, but once he was dead, might she not have borrowed against her inheritance? The more funds she had, the farther afield Harris might be obliged to seek her.

“What do you say,” asked Vandervoort. “You have a great many thoughts you're not sharing, and I may as well stick with you until you do.”

“You may as well fly to the moon.”

To preserve the fiction that he was landing in Toronto, Harris went to collect his morning coat from the steward's pantry above the engine room. The throb through the floor was slowing.

“Where do we go first?” said Vandervoort, practically underfoot. “The bank?”

“They no longer employ me.”

“Their loss. Where do you live then?”

“The American Hotel, where I intend to have a bath. If you're thinking of following me into the tub, I would just as soon you obtained an arrest warrant and threw me in a cell.”

“No question of that,” said Vandervoort. “I'll wait.”

The old Fort York Garrison's palisades and the Queen's Wharf swung into sight out the port windows, followed by the beach where the city's Baptists held their immersions. The
Cytherean
was entering Toronto Harbour.

People always swarmed to the gang-boards long before the ship was docked and gave themselves a quarter hour of being jostled off their feet for the sake of a two-minute head start in disembarking. Harris was no less critical of this habit today when he had reason himself to be among the first ashore. He wanted time in which to elude Vandervoort.

In the shuffling crowd, it was inevitable that Harris would again be recognized as the shipwrecked sailor.

“Mister,” one of two chubby boys screwed up his courage to ask, “are you a runaway slave?”

“Don't be simple,” jeered his companion. “Slaves are coloured, like the stewards.”

“Yeah, well Billy was on a steamer picked up a runaway slave. From Mississippi.”

All the time that the
Cytherean
was nudging into her berth at the Yonge Street Wharf, Vandervoort talked about crime and how most of it in this city was traceable to alcohol. Drunk and disorderlies were the rule. Tavern and street brawls, noisy whores, the occasional arson. Gunshots were rare enough to attract notice, and drinkers so careless about covering their tracks that even capital cases called for little in the way of detective work. True mysteries—like Mrs. Crane's disappearance—might not develop above three times in an entire working life. You had only to solve one to make a name.

The boards dropped, releasing passengers into the city—and harbour smells back into the cabin. Harris stepped briskly across the Esplanade towards the three-storey block of yellow brick at Yonge and Front. He picked out his window and picked up his pace. Let Vandervoort keep up as he might.

At the hotel desk, Harris waited while departing guests were informed that the Kingston steamer was late today and that they might still make it if they hurried. He then settled his account for the week he had been away, collected his mail and declined Vandervoort's offer to accompany him to his room. It all seemed to take an hour. While Harris was climbing the front stairs, he overheard Vandervoort ask about the location of the back ones.

One flight up, Harris's room faced the harbour. With no time even to change his trousers, he went straight to the window. Beside it, he had noted, a drain spout ran down the outside wall. As he threw up the sash, he caught sight of Vandervoort standing just below on the street corner with views of both south and west faces of the building. That the inspector would wait peacefully in the lobby had been too much to hope.

Three hundred yards to the south, the bustle around the
Cytherean
was subsiding. Peach crates lined the wharf. Down-lake goods and passengers were practically all aboard.

Harris dragged his bed across the door. Unlocking a trunk, he removed his eight-gauge side-by-side and a flask of black powder. He poured in as much as he judged the weapon would stand.

No time to stuff cotton in his ears. Even though he was using no shot, he checked quickly that the street below was clear before discharging both barrels simultaneously out the open window. The noise was all he desired and more.

He dared not show his face to see if Vandervoort had taken the bait. When he listened at the door, his ears were still ringing so badly that he was afraid he would miss the footfalls on the stairs. He caught them—four boots—by pressing the side of his head to the polished floor. Back to the window.

As he lifted his right leg over the sill, he seemed to remember from some boyhood escapade that this wasn't the way. He pulled the leg back. Sticking out his head and trunk instead, he turned and sat on the sill, then used the hooked-back, louvered shutters to pull himself to a standing position. Sturdy hardware, he thought. Something to be said for a first-class hotel.

There would be excited voices in the hall by now. The door would be pounded, rattled, and opened soon enough with the clerk's key. The bed would not hold long after that.

Harris reached his right hand across to the spout and glanced down it. It didn't seem like much to slow his descent. Still, he could not risk a free drop to the plank sidewalk. He would need both ankles for running.

A rough seam between lengths of pipe bloodied his hands as he slid, but the sting only goaded him to greater speed as he dodged and leaped piles of rubbish across the Esplanade. If anyone were shouting after him to stop, he didn't hear.

The first airborne sound to reach his clearing ears was the
Cytherean's
deep whistle of departure.

All eyes were on the desperate character pelting headlong down the wharf. Fleeing, it seemed, the scene of some crime.

A stevedore's foot went out to trip him. Harris vaulted over it and stepped handily across the bare two feet of frothing sewage that separated Aphrodite's side-wheeler from shore. He later learned he owed his luck to the blast of his own shotgun, which had made the inquisitive deck hands slow to cast off.

The purser's reception this time would have frozen flame.

“Before I can sell you a ticket,
sir
, you will have to explain to the captain the circumstances of your coming aboard.” The very braid on the purser's jacket bristled.

The captain was less prim, but when it came out that the importunate companion Harris had been trying to leave behind was John Vandervoort, the very John Vandervoort with whom the captain had stolen fruit as a boy—why, then it was irrevocably decided to turn Harris over to the constabulary at the first port of call. By 1:15 a.m. they ought to make Port Hope. Authorities there could telegraph Toronto to learn if there were grounds to hold him.

Harris was welcome in the meantime to book a stateroom, which he would have to guarantee not to leave. Alternatively, accommodation could be arranged in one of the rope lockers. A bond of fifty dollars was settled on.

“Purser, a receipt for our friend if you please,” said the captain, counting out the banknotes. “Pleasant sailing, Mr. Harris.”