Death in the Age of Steam (10 page)

Once outside, he waited twenty minutes in the shadows across the square on the chance of being able to follow the courier. When none emerged, he rode—teeth gritted—back out King Street towards the Kingston Road.

Memories of the gulls' yellow beaks, a fish with fingers, the smell, the waxy taste pushed against him as he advanced. He saw nothing of the countryside. This time he barely heard Banshee's hoofs hammering upon the plank road. He felt he could not go back there, to the beach beneath the railway trestle—but he had to.

The arm must not be disturbed. This was the one sure beacon in a night of doubt.

Whose arm? Where was the rest? As horse and rider trotted on, the wind of their passage whispered unanswerable questions into Harris's too-willing ear. Whose arm? How severed?

He found himself wondering too who was the fine-featured dark lady, the one that used to ride in the valley with Theresa, the one he had heard of at the mill. A cruel hope tempted him. Perhaps not Theresa, but she . . .

He rode on, still doubting that he could go back to that shrouded lump of torn and soggy flesh.

He was back.

The rain had stopped, though clouds still hung over the mouth of the Rouge. Frogs and crickets whined and belched into the gloom. Harris bit the glass head off a Promethean match, which exploded into flame. He lit the paraffin candle in the tin lamp he had brought and approached the weighted oilskin. It was just as he had left it.

Stretched on the sand, he managed to sleep till an overnight steamer clattered eastward down the lake towards Rochester or Kingston. Through the narrow gap in the embankment, he watched the sparks shooting from its twin stacks as it passed. You can incinerate a body or sink it. You can bury it or just leave it lying in the bush. Towards four thirty the sky grew pale behind the railway trestle, whose stark beams at dawn would have made a serviceable gallows.

As soon as it was light enough to collect firewood, Harris heated a cup of water for a shave. His toilet made, he inspected the valley floor and sides right the way round the lagoon. Then he clambered over the new railway embankment to look for signs of digging—a messy, unpromising business. All the earth was freshly turned. Nowhere was any grass disturbed, for none had yet had time to seed and grow. By nine he had finished the landward slope and crossed to the lakeward when from the direction of Pickering a dinghy hove in view. Two men pulled on a pair of oars each while a third, hatless and mostly bald, sat firmly gripping the gunwales in the stern. There was still no breath of wind.

The tall front rower wore red whiskers and faded tweeds, including a tweed cap with a button on the top. Harris climbed down to the sandbar to steady the nose of the boat as it grounded.

“So, Mr. Harris,” said Vandervoort, jumping out, “it's plain you don't keep bankers' hours. Are all these footprints yours?”

Harris nodded. “The sand was quite smooth when I arrived. Here is the—here it is—this way.”

The inspector followed, crouching at the water's edge to
remove the stones from the oilskin.

“Watch where you put your feet now, Whelan,” he cautioned the disembarking second man, whose blue tunic looked as if it had been pulled on over pyjamas. “You don't want to be walking on this.”

Once the cover was pulled back, there was no danger of Whelan's walking anywhere in the vicinity.

“I'll have a look around,” he announced with the assurance of someone not under Vandervoort's orders, though he seemed willing enough to let the city detective take centre stage.

“Can you just help our scientific friend ashore first?” said Vandervoort. “Ah, French perfume.”

Harris clapped a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. This morning, however, he resisted the temptation to look away. In time, it had become possible actually to see the arm around or through the images it conjured up.

Vandervoort followed his gaze. “See anything you recognize?”

It was mostly white or the faintest pink, though mottled with darker patches, and too swollen to give any idea of its living thickness. The bracelet was so tight around it as to seem embedded in the flesh. Harris knelt and studied the four visible oval medallions, each of which depicted in intricate relief a European city. London, Paris, Dublin, Milan.

“I don't know if this is a common pattern,” he said with difficulty. “William Sheridan did once buy his daughter something similar. Of course, she could have given it away.”

“Could she now? She used to ride here?”

“She and another lady.” Harris passed on the description he had got from the Scarboro sawmill. “In any event, you would not expect a woman going for a ride to wear this sort of jewellery.”

“Maybe she forgot to take it off,” Vandervoort casually suggested.

Theresa had been forgetful in just this way. Furthermore, had she intended to leave home, she would have taken as much of her jewellery as possible, if only to meet her expenses.

Rather than utter either of these two thoughts, Harris turned to
ascertain what had become of the “scientific friend” and was surprised to recognize the chemistry professor who had come to the bank three days before. He wore the same old-fashioned green frock coat with full skirts and wide lapels. Even with Whelan's help, he was having trouble leaving the dinghy. He seemed to be trying to climb over one of the thwarts, keep hold of both gunwales and carry a bulky leather case all at the same time.

Once his feet were planted on the sandbar, however, his queasiness left him, and he approached the arm without flinching. Vandervoort asked what he made of it.

“It has been in the water,” he said. His mouth formed a firm horizontal between sentences. “You can tell by the odour, quite different from decay on dry land. Oh, hallo, Mr. Harris. Not too long in the water, mind. The formation of adipocere is not far advanced.”

“Please, Dr. Lamb,” said Vandervoort. “I only went to a country school.”

“Come now, that fatty substance you smell that causes the bloating. Then again, the epidermis is mostly washed off, but not entirely. Do you see these patches of outer skin with the hairs still attached? Now compare these to the paler and quite hairless inner skin.”

Both Vandervoort and Harris took the hairs on trust.

“Going out on a limb, so to speak, I should say it has been immersed a matter of days, rather than weeks or months. Can't tell much more until I get it back in the laboratory. First, though, it might be useful to take a photograph of it just as it was found.”

“Photograph!” said Whelan, whose reconnaissance had not taken him out of earshot.

“Don't worry, constable,” said Vandervoort. “We are not going to hang it in your parlour.” To Harris he murmured, “Knows his cadavers, this Lamb. Foremost expert in the province and a great help to the department. When he writes his book, New York or Boston will hire him away from us in a trice.”

The professor had removed a tripod from his leather case and
was settling upon it a camera that resembled a bottle on its side—a rosewood bottle with a square base, cylindrical brass neck and brass cap.

“I'm not going to pose with the thing,” said Whelan, “and that's final.”

Vandervoort looked as if he would not mind posing, but Lamb didn't ask. He merely laid a foot-rule on the sand in front of the arm to give an idea of scale. He slid a glass plate into the back of the camera then removed the lens cap. Glancing between a pocket watch in his left hand and the shifting clouds above, he exposed the plate for more than five minutes.

Harris meanwhile made more footprints. He tramped about impatiently, not looking at or seeing anything in particular. He was inclined to believe in Lamb, but was at the same time hoping that Lamb would find that he had underestimated the period of the limb's immersion, by even as little as a week. Surely, an expert could go that far wrong without disgrace.

The professor at last removed his photographic plate. When he loaded a second, Vandervoort voiced concern for the public purse. One photograph, he said, would be quite enough. Lamb went ahead anyway, uncovering the lens for twice as long.

Collecting himself somewhat, Harris took this opportunity to show Whelan the tracing of Elsie's sketch. The Pickering constable didn't believe he had ever seen the subject.

“Is it
her
arm then?” he asked.

Harris had no reply.

“Well, whoever the poor lady was, bless her soul, her other parts had better not go turning up in the township of Pickering.”

When Harris asked if the lower Rouge were considered a dangerous place, he was harangued about the increase in lawlessness generally, short-sighted paring of police salaries, and the drunken rowdiness of railway crews in particular—although they had last month finally moved on to Darlington. Ending on a more cheerful note, Whelan said that at least the valley was no longer frequented by wolves and bears. “The only beasts today are the two-legged kind.”

Leaving Lamb to wrap the arm for transport, Vandervoort ambled over with a cadging gleam in his eye. He looked altogether too comfortable.

“You wouldn't happen to have a cigar, inspector?” Harris inquired dryly.

Vandervoort's face fell. “I was about to ask you the same,” he said. “Afraid I smoked the last of Lamb's—but we might try Whelan.”

Poor Whelan, who was busy hoisting the dinghy's sail, had not even managed to bring his trousers. Harris said he would sooner hear what the police knew of Mrs. Crane.

“We've been down that road before,” said Vandervoort.

“But something must have turned up in the last four days. Look here, Inspector, you seem happy enough to have been told about this find. Let's work together.”

Vandervoort shook his head. “I saw it at Sheridan's funeral,” he said, “when you tried to protect my informant from me. You're an enterprising sort of man, Isaac Harris—and one that
will
not mind his own business.”

“Could you not tell me—?”

“I'll tell you this. I've questioned your lighthouse keeper sober, and I've loosened his tongue with drink. I've turned him upside down and inside out. He knows nothing of any harm Mrs. C. may have come to.”

“And did you,” Harris pursued, “offer him the inducement of leniency in the matter of the contraband revolvers?”

“That's out of my hands. Ask no more.”

Harris saw from a purplish tint suffusing Vandervoort's countenance that he was about to anger the detective. The professor's brains would in any case make for better pickings.

The first breeze in over a week had crept up on the lagoon and was ruffling its surface. Waves from the lake pushed through the gap beneath the trestle. A sharpish gust brought Lamb over.

“I don't like the look of this weather,” he said. “I'm a hopeless sailor.”

“How are you on a horse?” asked Harris. “You're more than welcome to Banshee.”

“So, I qualify for a loan after all,” the professor commented mildly.

Harris smiled at the reference, which eluded Vandervoort.

“I don't know, really,” Lamb continued, “since your animal hasn't yet made my acquaintance, whether I should feel quite safe without you there as well.”

Harris agreed to go with him and set about shortening Banshee's stirrups. Lamb meanwhile stood and watched the loaded dinghy—Whelan working the sheet, Vandervoort at the helm—head into open water. As the wind lifted the professor's coat skirts and sent his grey curls scuttling away from the smooth crown of his head to cluster over his ears, he expressed apprehension that the oilskin package and all his camera equipment would be lost “at sea.”

This risk appeared negligible compared to the ghastliness of transporting the limb by land, which it was in any event too late for Harris to propose. He helped the professor into the saddle and mounted behind him, reaching around his thick waist for the reins.

“On the row out,” said Lamb, “I managed to lose a perfectly serviceable beaver hat to the lake before there was any wind at all. I don't know how I managed to cross the Atlantic—but, ever since I got off the boat from England, I've felt the great thing about Canada is that it's not an island.”

Returning to Toronto consumed the balance of the morning. Banshee was unused to carrying double weight, Lamb uncomfortable with any pace faster than a walk. Harris had a unique chance to question the country's top forensic scientist and took especial care that no sudden movement should result in such an eminent cranium's being dashed open against a rock.

Lamb denied having ever met or seen Theresa. His curiosity and his official responsibilities were what had brought him out on the water so early on the Sabbath, a rather arbitrary day of rest in any case—if Mr. Harris didn't mind his saying so. Not at
all, Harris assured him. And Vandervoort? Lamb gathered that Vandervoort had had another case upon which he had been counting to secure advancement, but that that case had somehow fallen through. The inspector accordingly found himself in need of an alternative opportunity to shine.

Harris was interested, and at the same time preoccupied by a more urgent question he was afraid to ask. A pricking at the back of his neck kept making him want to turn around. He couldn't be sure he had searched the valley thoroughly enough. What if, in the bushes just beyond . . . ?

“Professor Lamb,” he blurted out, “could the woman whose arm this is still be alive?”

“I'm no physician, but I doubt it. We don't appear to be dealing with a surgical amputation.”

Harris saw the green-clad figure pulled roughly from her horse by unknown hands. She twists loose, tries to run, but trips over the long skirt of her riding habit. Thrown flat in the marsh grass, she looks up. The axe arcs high and falls.

It keeps on rising and falling.

“An attacker mad enough to inflict this wound would not have stopped there?” said Harris.