Unholy Alliance (32 page)

A few minutes later Marc and his prisoner reached
the path that would take them to the manor-house. Harkness went
meekly, carrying his snowshoes. As they neared the rear entrance,
Marc heard the snap of reins across a horse’s back.

“This way,” he said to Harkness, and directed
him towards the circular drive in front of the house.

Just as they arrived, a horse and cutter
whirled out of the treed lane and came to a halt a few feet away.
Cobb stood up, dropped the reins, and grinned at Marc. Beside him,
hunched over and shivering, sat a slim, well-dressed gentleman.

Marc grinned back, indicated Harkness, and
said, “I’ve found us a murderer, Cobb.”

“And I got us a
bona-fidee
English
butler!”

While Cobb took a befuddled and half-frozen Graves
Chilton around to the servants’ wing and placed him in the capable
care of Mrs. Blodgett and the Janes sisters, Marc led Giles
Harkness through the front door and into the library. A few minutes
later Cobb came up the main hall to join them, followed by Garnet
Macaulay, who had spotted Cobb going past the dining-room. Without
providing any details, only some of which were known for sure
anyway, Marc indicated that the case was almost solved, and asked
Macaulay to alert Robert and Hincks. Together they were able to
convince the Quebecers that all would be well and that they should
remain ready some time later in the evening to receive final word
from the police in Toronto and, at last, be free to put their
signatures to the historic accord.

Marc and Cobb then spent the next hour
grilling Giles Harkness. Fifteen minutes into the interrogation,
Cobb went to the dining-room and asked Macaulay to send the
Struthers lad back along the Indian trail in the bush to the north
of Elmgrove until he came to an abandoned trapper’s cabin, where he
would find a horse tethered. Said horse was to be brought back to
the kitchen garden, where Cobb, a little later, would examine it
closely. As Marc had already surmised, Harkness had used the route
Macaulay had mentioned to Marc yesterday as his means of entering
and exiting Elmgrove and slipping unobserved to and from the city
by a roundabout route.

A half-hour later, after giving a thumbs-up
to Robert and Macaulay, Marc and Cobb then drove Harkness straight
to the jail on King Street. Hincks came along with them, having
volunteered to act as envoy for the news that would permit
LaFontaine to sign the agreement and seal the “unholy alliance.”
Magistrate James Thorpe was roused from his after-supper snooze and
persuaded to come down to the Court House and take the statement of
Giles Harkness, who seemed eager to confess or, as Cobb saw it, get
his side of the story on paper before the other fellow’s. While
Thorpe’s clerk, hauled out of church, copied out the formal
document for Harkness to sign, Cobb gave Marc an edited account of
his trip to Cobourg and the unmasking of Mrs. Jiggins and her plot
at The Pine Knot, excising certain extraneous details for the sake
of brevity. When he emphasized the limited knowledge, and
liability, of Mrs. Jiggins, Marc made no effort to probe him
further on the subject. For his part, the real Graves Chilton was
not of a mind to press charges of forcible confinement, though he
was heard telling Mrs. Blodgett in the Elmdale kitchen that she
must keep the cooking sherry well out of his reach.

So it was almost eight o’clock on a moonlit,
snowy Sunday evening when Marc and Cobb walked up to the front door
of the handsome brick residence on Jarvis Street and engaged the
ornate door-knocker. It took half a minute for the door to be
pulled slowly open by a middle-aged maid with a sallow complexion
and a surly demeanour. “Whaddya want?” she said, suspicion sitting
undisguised in her eye.

“We’re here to interview your master,” Marc
said politely. “Is he at home?”

“He is, but he ain’t seein’ nobody today. I
got my orders.”

“Please inform him that Constable Cobb and
Mr. Edwards are here to see him on official police business.”

“It’ll haveta wait till – ”

“We got a warrant from the magistrate,” Cobb
said sharply. “Yer master ain’t got a choice in the matter.”

The maid blinked, nodded her understanding,
and then without a word wheeled and started to trot away from them.
Cobb pushed the door open and stepped into the vestibule. “We’ll
just hang our coats an’ hats here!” he shouted after her.

By the time they had done so, they expected
the maid would have returned. But she hadn’t.

“Somethin’s fishy here,” Cobb said.

“I think you’re right. Let’s find the fellow
– quick.”

They headed down a dimly lit hallway, but
were met abruptly by the maid coming out of a nearby doorway. She
looked flustered, and decidedly unsurly, as she said, “Mr.
Winthrop’ll see you now.”

They stepped into what was apparently Ivor
Winthrop’s private sitting-room. Marc took in several leather
easy-chairs, grouped around a Persian rug – set before an
impressive, marble-topped fireplace, where two candelabra offered
the room a subdued but generous light. Winthrop, a prosperous
gentleman in a blue-velvet smoking jacket, was just turning away
from the hearth to face his visitors as they entered. The room was
gripped by a deathly chill, even though something was still flaming
on the grates.

“Good evening,” Winthrop said in a weary
attempt at good manners. His fleshy face with its jutting jaw was
ashen, haggard, as if he had not slept well in some time. “Please
excuse the chill . . . I – I fell asleep and let the fire go out.
But do sit down – Mr. Edwards, is it? Mr. Marc Edwards?”

“Yes, sir. I’m working on assignment with
Constable Cobb here, of the Toronto police.”

But Cobb did not acknowledge Marc’s
introduction. Instead, he brushed past Winthrop and raced over to
the fireplace, where he picked up a whisk-broom and began thumping
at the flames.

“What the hell are you doing?” Winthrop
cried, unsure whether he ought to be astonished or outraged.

Cobb ignored him. He kept swatting till the
fire was out, then reached down and, with two fingers of his right
hand, gingerly pulled into view several smouldering and charred
sheets of paper. He looked at Marc. “The writin’s mostly gone,
Major, but these ripped edges should match up nicely with the ones
on the ledger.”

“You have no right to interfere in my
personal affairs! This is an – ”

“We have every right, sir,” Marc said. “I
have in my hand a warrant for your arrest on a charge of
murder.”

“That’s – that’s preposterous!” Winthrop
looked shocked and frightened, but not truly surprised. His bluster
seemed to be merely bravado or, worse, the automatic response of
one accustomed to privilege and prerogative.

“It may prove to be so,” Marc said, “but only
if you sit down here and answer our questions truthfully.”

Winthrop sighed, stared at his accuser for a
brief moment, then sank back in the master’s chair. Cobb and Marc
sat opposite him.

“Well, let’s get this ridiculous nonsense
over with, shall we?” Winthrop said with a pathetic attempt at
making light of the situation. “Whom have I murdered, eh?”

“We have evidence to suggest that you have
committed two serious offences,” Marc said. “First, you perpetrated
a fraud on Mr. Garnet Macaulay of Elmgrove, which permitted you to
systematically steal information from him and his associates. And
secondly, for some inexplicable reason, you then arranged to have
your agent in Elmdale murdered.”

“And where would you get such evidence?”

“We have obtained a detailed confession from
another of your agents, Mr. Giles Harkness. He implicates you at
every stage of the operation.”

“Giles Harkness is a notorious drunk and
trouble-maker. Ask any barkeep in the city!”

“Nevertheless, his story is corroborated by
the known facts.”

“I’ll bet he spun you quite a tale!”

“He says you hired him to ride to Elmdale by
a circuitous route to rendezvous with the new English butler, whom
you had bribed to spy on the business meetings there. This
so-called butler made detailed notes of the negotiations and
brought these notes to Harkness, who in turn brought them straight
to you. You received separate documents on Wednesday evening,
Thursday afternoon and again on Thursday evening.”

“Did it never occur to you that a scoundrel
like Harkness, who, I’m told, had a grudge against Macaulay, was
not himself stealing information to peddle it to the highest bidder
in town?”

“The horse Harkness used belonged to you,”
Cobb said. “Yer name was burned inta the saddle.”

“And the three document-pages you just tried
to destroy, you’ll be surprised to learn, were ripped from an
accounts-book in the butler’s office. It will take some explaining
to suggest how they managed to get into your fireplace.”

“An’ Harkness told us he was bunkin’ in here
in a back room, where we got a search warrant to dig out his
earthy
possessions.”

“And that warrant extends to your
wine-cellar, where we expect to find other bottles of Amontillado
matching the type that killed your agent.”

“And any
loud-an’-numb
you might have
lyin’ about the place,” Cobb added.

“We also have a detailed statement from a
certain innkeeper outside of Cobourg,” Marc said, and watched
Winthrop flinch at the news that the police now knew about the
phoney butler and who had waylaid the real one. “Mrs. Jiggins,
bless her, found solace in a frank confession.”

Winthrop held up his hands as if to ward off
further blows. “All right! All right! I’ll tell you what you’ve
come to hear. My life is over anyway. And I’m not letting that
pusillanimous weasel, Harkness, off the hook!”

“That’s better,” Marc said, much relieved and
not a little saddened by the broken man he saw slumped before him.
“Would you like a drink?”

“Yes. Please.”

***

“Let’s start with the fraud,” Marc said when
Winthrop had a glass of whiskey safely in hand and Cobb had his
notebook out as if he really was about to record the interview. “We
have some idea of how the real butler, Graves Chilton, was waylaid
and a substitute put in his place. But we still don’t know who he
actually was. Would you mind telling us whom you hired to do the
spying and how you were able to carry off the ruse and set up the
espionage at Elmdale? Enlighten us, if you will.”

“As you wish.” Winthrop took a swig of
whiskey. “A lot of it was pure luck. All winter there have been
rumours of a possible meeting here in Toronto between Robert
Baldwin and Louis LaFontaine, a meeting designed to forge some kind
of coalition between the Nationalists in Quebec and our own
Reformers, what the Bishop called ‘an unholy alliance.’ He and
other leading Tories were eager to discover if there was any truth
to the rumours and were determined to do everything they could to
discourage such a meeting. Most of us thought the gathering would
be at Spadina or Moss Park. Elmdale was also mentioned, but we
tended to discount it because Garnet Macaulay, although a Reform
member of the Assembly and confidante of Baldwin, had lost both his
long-time butler and his stableman, leaving his household staff in
some disarray.”

“So how did you find out about Baldwin’s
plans?” Marc asked, though he was pretty sure how that had come
about.

“That’s where the luck came in. Two weeks ago
Saturday, the very morning after my Friday evening dinner at the
Palace and our discussion of these issues, Giles Harkness arrived
at my door.” Winthrop sighed and glared at his whiskey-glass. “I
should have thrown the blackguard out then and there. But he had
information I coveted. He had left his employ at Elmdale sometime
after his brother’s death and what he saw as his employer’s perfidy
in hiring some stranger from England to take Alfred’s place. It’s
absurd, but he actually thought he himself deserved to be the new
butler.”

“So he was seeking revenge of some sort?”

“Yes. Before leaving the estate, he used one
of his cronies in the household to gain access to Macaulay’s
private papers, where he read and memorized the recent
correspondence and memoranda he found there.”

“About the proposed meeting between Baldwin
and LaFontaine?”

“Yes. Harkness had the dates and locale, and
even the names of the Frenchmen coming from Quebec. But he also had
information on the new butler. He was to be Graves Chilton from
England. The fellow was already en route from London. Harkness was
subsequently told by his crony – Austin Briggs, I think his name
was – that Chilton had reached New York and would arrive at Elmdale
on Weller’s stage from Kingston on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday
of the next week.”

So, Bragg had rummaged through the letters in
the library and given Harkness what he needed to know, Marc mused.
As a favour to a good mate, perhaps, or merely because he too could
not abide Alfred’s being replaced by an outsider. That Bragg knew
nothing about spying or murder, Marc was still certain, though he
dreaded having to tell Macaulay about his manservant’s
disloyalty.

“What did you do with this information?” he
said to Winthrop.

“Nothing at first. I put Harkness in the
kitchen with some breakfast, and sat down to think. Here was a
Heaven-sent opportunity to infiltrate the secret meetings and get
information that would please the Bishop and his Tory associates,
information that could help prevent a political and economic
catastrophe.”

“Not everybody sees it that way,” Cobb felt
obliged to say.

Winthrop ignored Cobb, as he had studiously
tried to do from the outset of the interview. “I already knew in
general that a new butler was on the way. My brother Ethan in
Cobourg had an English butler, who had heard the news along the
grapevine that servants seem to have. This butler, Marcel Flett,
once worked for me years ago when I lived in Belleville, so I knew
him well. I knew he would leap at the chance I was about to offer
him.”