Death in the Age of Steam (12 page)

“A ruffian violates her, a hanging offence. So he kills off the victim, who is also the only witness. Even if he is caught, they can't execute him more than once, and the murder decreases the chances he will be caught. Poor Crane is coming to the same conclusion.”

Strange optimism, Harris reflected—and yet his own hope was beginning to feel mulish. “Do you think,” he said, “you could get Henry Crane to talk to me?”

“Possibly.”

“Even if she is dead, circulation of her likeness could help locate her remains.”

“I'll have a word with Crane about it,” MacFarlane said.

Encouraged by these accommodating responses, Harris tried again to find out if Mr. and Mrs. Crane had been happy with each other. The temperature of the monastic chamber dropped several degrees at once. MacFarlane's eyes hardened to icy sapphires. His broad right hand rose in warning.

“That's a question one does not ask,” he pronounced. “This ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number' nonsense would spell the death of family life. A good marriage is one in which the husband provides and the wife obeys. The Cranes have a good marriage.”

Outside the heavily-leaded window, Kate MacFarlane and her girls were strolling back towards the house in solemn conversation while the boy chased the dogs in circles around them.

“In time,” MacFarlane continued, “their union would
undoubtedly have been blessed with heirs.”

“I gather Mr. Crane has suffered business reversals,” said Harris.

“As a chap who has never laid so much as a mile of track, I don't think I should go slinging mud at public benefactors like Henry Crane. You're out of date besides. The man is as sound as a board.”

Harris could overlook being addressed in this lofty way so long as he was being informed. “Your dealings with him saved him?”

“No dealings we may have had bear on Mrs. Crane's disappearance,” MacFarlane scolded before slipping back into his social mask of wide-eyed geniality. “Tell me, Harris, does anything at all rhyme with Crimea? I'm afraid I'll have to get back to this poem if it's to be done today. Do come again.”

“Allow me,” said Harris, having tried without success to get the conversation reopened, “to repay your kind advice by suggesting that you think twice before again acting as a guarantor for Mr. Joshua Newbiggins.”

MacFarlane blinked, slow perhaps to recognize the name. “Has he defaulted?”

“No, but his character—”

“Nor will he. Newbiggins is a man of push. His backers will prosper.”

Sunday evening, Harris dined in the city's most luxurious hotel. The meal began with mulligatawny soup, which every serious cook seemed to prepare and no two to agree on. Here ginger and chicken agreeably predominated. If the whitefish that followed might have been fresher, the filet of veal with tomatoes and horseradish sauce truly shone. After partaking of mashed potatoes, fresh vegetables and raspberry tarts, Harris turned away both the cheese tray and the dessert of jellies, nuts and brandied fruits. Even so, he felt in a businesslike way that he had now got through his eating for the week.

That benefit was incidental to his purpose in coming. The American, at Yonge and Front Streets, was the only hotel of its class in Toronto—though two more were soon to open with locations even more convenient to the Houses of Parliament. After four years in Quebec, the seat of government had returned. Politicians and civil servants could not be expected to accommodate themselves and their dependents in lodgings designed for travelling salesmen and farmers bringing cabbages to market.

Yes, Harris was told, Postmaster General Laurendeau and his daughter were indeed guests. At least they had been until twenty hours ago when they had embarked for Canada East on the Saturday night steamer. Harris registered this near miss as philosophically as possible. He noted down the family's forwarding address.

When he had asked the hotel manager all the questions he decently could, he went in to dinner and—as the dishes came and went—chatted with the waiter. Marthe Laurendeau had been in residence since the start of the spring legislative session. She had come to perfect her English and had stayed on to continue her studies when Parliament recessed and her mother returned home. A quiet and serious young woman,
Mademoiselle
seemed refined and rather shy. She ordered veal filet whenever it was on the menu.

As she began to take shape for Harris, he regretted having wished the grisly arm to be hers.

That she was a horsewoman came as news to the waiter, who believed she kept no mount at the hotel. Harris confirmed this with a stable hand before proceeding to the University Park.

By eight o'clock, light and strollers were draining from its green expanse. Robins, whose conversational song reminded Harris of summer evenings at his parents' home, were left to skim the lawns and pick their supper from the moist earth.

No sod had yet been turned for University College. Indeed, no design had yet been approved for the £75,000 building. The chemistry laboratory meanwhile occupied a one-room frame structure, freshly painted in mustard yellow. It looked too tidy
ever to have housed pigs. It smelled too foul.

Lamb came to the door in shirtsleeves and an embroidered waistcoat. Harris may have been exaggerating the smell, which turned out to be no more than the waxy adipocere churned up with strong vinegar, a general decaying mustiness, spirits of hartshorn and kerosene from a pair of hanging lamps. Beneath them, a work bench ran the length of one wall. Amid the instruments and bottles strewn there, three cleanish bones lay on a marble slab as if for presentation.

“Sit here, Mr. Harris,” said Lamb, indicating a stool as might a brusque
maître d'hôtel
. “I won't show you the hand, which I have not had time to strip the flesh from yet, but these bones may interest you.” He stood pointing at the largest of the three. “Note how the humerus is severed at the upper end—not pulled whole from the shoulder, mind, not chewed by an animal, but chopped with an axe.”

“As we surmised,” said Harris. “Before death or after?”

“There's no way of knowing. The dimensions tell us something, however.” The professor stretched a measuring tape along the thinner of the two remaining bones. “Ulna—9 21/32. If normally proportioned and not a freak, our victim would have been a man of unremarkable stature or a tall woman. Between five foot three inches and five foot five in the latter case—possibly an inch more in the former.”

Victim. Harris absorbed the word in silence. Theresa's height had fallen in the middle of the range mentioned.

“And here is news,” Lamb continued cheerfully as he picked up the final item on display. “The radius shows evidence of a fracture.”

The bone looked whole to Harris, but then the combination of the subject matter and the atmosphere was starting to make him light-headed. “Not a fracture sustained during the . . .”

“Certainly not. An earlier break, quite healed but imperfectly set.”

“How much earlier?”

“Months or years. You see this slight change of direction here?
And the mark—not a crack, more of a scar.”

Harris steadied himself against the edge of the bench. “Could we step outside a moment?” he asked.

They stepped outside. Theresa's eighth night from home had fallen calm but cloudy. There would be no stargazing at the observatory next door. From another provisional college building across Taddle Creek rose the stirring strains of a Baptist hymn.

“Some of my colleagues,” Lamb remarked, “have to show that a non-denominational university need not be a godless one. If anyone challenges you, you can say we have been studying scripture.”

After several gulps of leafy park air, Harris asked whether the deviation in the radius would have made an observable difference in the living arm.

“You mean,” said Lamb, “would the arm have looked crooked?”

“Yes, or been so weakened that the person would have noticeably favoured it—avoided heavy work and so forth?”

“Not necessarily. I believe the chief significance of the fracture—about three and a half inches above the right wrist—is as follows. If such an injury were to figure in the medical history of Mrs. Crane, it would tend to confirm that the arm is hers.”

“It doesn't,” Harris blurted out in relief, before remembering that he had no idea what injuries Theresa might have sustained since her marriage. “That is, I don't know. The break
was
an accident, was it not?”

“We can't be sure of that,” Lamb replied.

Harris shuddered. An assault could have been a warning if Theresa had had any friend to help her heed it.

“Mr. Crane—has he seen the—um—remains?”

“Not while they have been with me,” said Lamb. “The only gentlemen I receive here are ones that have saved me from drowning. Shall we go back in?”

Automatically, Harris shook his head—no. “By all means,” he said with effort.

Inside the shed once more, his eye first caught a gleam of lamplight on precious metal at the far end of the work bench. He got permission to pick the bracelet up. From the eight silver medallions linked by pairs of the finest silver chains, certainty flowed like a current into his hands. He could name the remaining four cities before he turned the ovals over. Lisbon, Marseilles, Naples, Madrid. He even seemed to know the tracery of scratches. The bracelet was Theresa's.

She had worn it on her left wrist, though.

“Professor Lamb,” he said, “what did you find out from those hairs?”

“Less than I had hoped. They are neither too fine to be a man's nor too coarse to be a woman's.”

“But coarser than average for a woman?”

The note of eagerness seemed to irritate Lamb. “Average?” he said, fussing with the brass wheels on his microscope. “Averages are easy for you money men. You sum ten interest rates and move a decimal point. Simple arithmetic. Anthropometry is not so simple. Have you any idea how many hairs I should have to pluck from how many arms just in order to tell you what's average for Toronto women, let alone the sex in general? They would lock me up before the job was properly begun. What I can tell you is that the shafts of the Rouge Valley hairs are thicker than those drawn from the identical square inch of my wife's anatomy. Whether Mrs. Lamb is an average woman I have no way of judging. She is to a normal degree modest, however. I know you'll be discreet.”

The Lambs were expecting their sixth child, or was it their seventh? It had been mentioned at the bank during the loan discussion. Harris approached the improvident, affectionate man bent over the microscope and humbly asked if he might take a look.

While he was looking, the door rattled against its bolt.

“Open up, Dr. Lamb,” boomed a voice Harris recognized as Vandervoort's. “I've brought you the rest of the puzzle.”

Boisterous and dishevelled, Vandervoort entered, brandishing a soiled white cotton flour sack that rattled as he moved. His dust-stiffened red hair stuck out at all angles. His whisky breath blared like a fanfare above the symphony of laboratory odours and quite drowned them out when he turned in momentary surprise towards Harris.

“Ha! If it isn't our amateur detective, looking neat and solemn as ever. Well, stay if you like. See what has turned up.”

Vandervoort told a rambling and prolix tale that was at the same time marred by irritating omissions, but the gist of it was that after landing Constable Whelan and dispatching the arm to Lamb for analysis, the inspector had made some inquiries in the Rouge Valley area and had heard about a shed that had burned down Tuesday night.

“Where was this exactly?” said Harris.

“Between Port Union and Highland Creek. On one of those abandoned farms, you understand. Nothing anyone paid any attention to at the time.”

Harris understood. Many an immigrant signed a lease before discovering he wasn't cut out for agriculture. Often as not, he would drift into town leaving untended and unregretted whatever crude structures he had managed to knock together. A vagrant's cooking fire or vandal's torch might easily claim them without alarming the neighbours.

“Now that shed—I went round for a look, and that shed was not empty when it burned.” Vandervoort shook his sack.

The dry clicking sound it emitted brought a pained crease to Lamb's broad forehead.

“If you've brought me bones, inspector,” he said, “I would as soon you didn't reduce them to bone chips.”

“Bones,” said Vandervoort, emptying his haul harum-scarum onto the work bench. He wasn't clumsily drunk, just too pleased with himself to be inhibited by professorial objections. “Bones and more bones, and that's just a start.”

Among other large pieces, half a human skull tumbled out. Clean and dry as a nutshell, and—from what anyone could tell in that foul chamber—odourless. It wasn't repugnant to the senses, but alarming enough in its way. The nut had been someone's brain. Harris approached warily.