Vices of My Blood (5 page)

Chapter Seven

T
HE DAY HAD BEEN
more like November than March, as almost every customer had remarked to the cabbie, who had pulled his muffler up around his face for protection. His latest fare, a man in a hurry to get to Union Station, had asked him to whip up the horse, twenty-five cents extra if he made his train on time. Later, trying to tell his wife what had happened, the cabbie, Mick O’Leary, admitted that he hadn’t seen the child’s hoop as it came rolling across the road in front of him until it was too late.

“Where’s there a hoop, Lal, there will a boy surely follow, but that lad dashed like a devil out of the other place, right into me path. I pulled up Jeb as smart as I could, but we was already out on the canter. He reared in the shafts so I afeared he might break the leads and bolt. Then this woman let out the most God-awful scream I ever did hear.
Timmy!
Or maybe it was
Tommy!
I don’t know. Then the man I’d picked up, who in my mind is the one responsible, so help me God, this fellow leaned his head out of the window and yells, ‘Stop. You’ve run over a child. Stop at once.’ Which he didn’t need to shout because that’s what I’d already done. We was right outside the Golden Lion and of course all the customers were just coming in or out. There was two or three other coachmen outside waiting for their missus, but do you think they’d so much as step down to give a fellow a hand? Not them. All of them, three it was now I think, all of them sat like they was Lot’s wife. ’Course, I jumped down right smart to see the worst. The woman, who it turned out was the boy’s ma, was on her knees trying to see underneath the carriage. My fare had got out too and he was down there looking.

“I can tell you, Lal, those were some of the worst moments in my life. I could see this lad lying still as a dead cat. There was blood coming out of his mouth and I swear I didn’t know as he was quick or dead. I said a Hail Mary I can tell you. ‘Move your carriage forward, but don’t deviate an inch to either side,’ said the fare, who was a bossy sort of cove. So I got Jeb’s bridle and walked him on. He was a trembling poor beast, what with the pulling up that had torn his mouth and this woman carrying on to wake the dead, which we all thought she might need to do. But there was quite a crowd gathering now, and I heard somebody say, ‘Look, his eyes are fluttering. He’s alive.’ The woman tried to pick him up, but Mr. Bossy stopped her and lifted the lad himself. ‘We need to lie him down somewhere,’ he says. And wouldn’t you know, one of the la-di-das said, ‘Bring him into the shop. There’s a couch.’ That was noble of her, seeing as how the lad was bleeding and covered with mud and some horse plop. I could tell as soon as I saw the look on that clerk’s face that he wasn’t too pleased with the idea. But no, she had to be a good Samaritan. Wasn’t going to cost her anything if he ruined the furniture. She had a walking stick with a silver head and she waved it in front of her, like Moses at the Red Sea, no I’m not blaspheming, that’s how she did it.” He demonstrated to make his wife laugh. “Well, everybody moved aside and the man carried the lad into the store. I tied up Jeb and followed quick as I could. ‘Give him air,’ says Mrs. La-di-Da. So Mr. Bossy – they deserved each other, in my opinion – laid the boy on the velvet couch. And it
was
velvet, blue velvet. I wager it hadn’t seen so much filth in all its born days. And all this time, you understand, the mother is sobbing and carrying on that she can’t lose him too. Not so soon. Then I paid attention to the fact that she was in mourning. Mr. Bossy tries to calm her down.

“‘He’s not dead, madam. Look, Tommy, or Timmy,’ whatever it was, ‘open your eyes.’ And the lad did, which made his mother scream more than if he’d died on the spot.

“‘What happened?’ asks one old geezer and I knew I was going to get it in the neck. I just knew it the way Mr. Bossy glared up at me. ‘It was your fault,’ he says. ‘You were driving recklessly.’ As if it weren’t him that’d told me to whip up my horse. ‘It was an accident,’ says I, but I knew I weren’t going to get much sympathy from this lot. They see us cabbies as some species of low life like you might find under a rock if you was ever to turn it over, which in their case they wouldn’t do without a gardener.

“‘He should get to a physician,’ says the old geezer. The number of people who suddenly promote themselves to captains never ceases to amaze me. So the lad tries to sit up, scared I suppose. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to see a sawbones either. You come out worse than when you went in, if you ask me. But sitting up made him yelp out with pain, like a little dog, and that set his mother off again. The lad whispered something and Mr. Bossy leaned down with his ear next to the boy. ‘Say that again.’ Well, I knew what the boy was trying to say without he needed an interpreter. I could tell by looking at them that they didn’t have a penny to rub together. Clean, mind you. She’d dressed them both as decent as she could, that was obvious.

“So Mr. Bossy addressed the first good Samaritan, like they was of like mind. ‘He says they can’t afford to go to a physician and he’s quite all right, thank you.’ But he didn’t look all right to me. He had a goose egg over his eye the size of the knob on the woman’s cane and who knows as he hadn’t broken some bones that we couldn’t see. ‘Nonsense,’ says Mrs. Good Samaritan.

I could tell by the Moses act earlier that she was a woman who got her own way. Probably has a dozen servants and fart-catchers.” O’Leary saw the expression on his wife’s face. “Sorry, my dear, but you know how I feel about women like that. Anyways, she reaches into her reticule and pulls out a five-dollar note. Yes, five dollars. ‘Here,’ she says to the widow who’d stopped wailing a bit by now. ‘Here. Take this and pay for the doctor.’ ‘Oh no, ma’am, I couldn’t possibly. He’ll be right as rain in a minute.’ At which point the lad started to heave like he was going to do a big toss-up. And did that turn Mr. Clerk’s face green, I can tell you. But the lad kept it down and Mr. Bossy says to the widow, very stern like he was a magistrate, ‘My good woman. I understand you are a decent woman and you have pride. But you must put that aside for the sake of your son. Look,’ he says. ‘Where’d you live? We’ll get the lad to your house.’ ‘Oh,’ says she, snivelling again. ‘I don’t live in Toronto. I’ve just arrived from Chatham and I haven’t got a place yet.’ ‘Just as I suspected,’ says Mr. Bossy. Then he snatches off his own fedora. ‘Tell you what, why don’t we do a go-around right now. Get you enough money for a night’s lodgings at least and the fee for a physician. What do you think, ma’am?’ he asked Mrs. Silver Cane.

“Well, she was a bit uppity because she had been the first one to come up with the five dollars and she wanted all the glory. But before you know it all the ladies were dipping into their purses and dropping money into the hat. I tried to get a good look at how much was in there when it came to me. Yes, I had to put in something, they’d have had my hide otherwise. I reckon there was close to a hundred dollars. I made sure Mr. Bossy gave it all to her and some didn’t fall into his own pocket on the way. Somebody piped up and said that I could take them to the closest doctor, which I thought was a right cheek. They didn’t offer to pay my docket, I noticed. But by now, Timmy seemed somewhat improved. So Mr. Bossy helped the lad to stand up and he showed he could walk all right. ‘You’re lucky,’ says this man to me, wagging his finger. As if it were my fault. The boy were the lucky one, if you ask me. He could have been killed. As he hobbled by, he looked up at me with his big brown eyes. ‘Sorry for all the trouble, sir,’ he says. ‘But can I have my hoop?’ Fortunately, somebody had already got it and straightened it out.

“Ah, you’re forever saying I’m down on the human race, Lal, well all this kindness would have warmed your heart. Mr. Bossy says as how he’ll escort the lad and his ma. ‘What about your train?’ I asks. ‘You’ll have missed it by now.’ He gives me a look. ‘There are more important things in life than catching a train,’ says he, and I know he also means than getting a fare. So off they went. I hung around a bit, in spite of the nasty looks I was getting from the clerk. I hoped I’d pick up some business, but most of that lot have their own carriages and I got not a nibble. Besides, they all wanted to sit around and talk about what just happened, which was probably the most excitement they’d had since the undermaid fell down in a fit in the scullery.” O’Leary took a deep pull on his pipe and eyed his wife, who was sitting quietly in the inglenook with her mending.

“So what do you think of all that, my dear?”

Mrs. O’Leary bit off the end of the thread. “I’d say it was a queer from beginning to end.”

O’Leary laughed and puffed out smoke at the same time, which made him cough. “I thought as how you wouldn’t be fooled,” he said, his eyes watering.

“Are you going to report them?”

“Nah. It’s not my tit that they milked, was it?”

Chapter Eight

I
T WAS ALMOST TEN O’CLOCK
by the time Murdoch returned to his lodgings. He was dead tired, famished, and in decidedly low spirits. The house was in darkness, but when he let himself in, he saw there was a light in the kitchen. A smell of sausages lingered in the air and he hoped there were some left. Since Mrs. Kitchen had packed her and her husband off to Muskoka to see if they could cure Arthur’s consumption, one of the new lodgers, Katie Tibbett, had taken over the cooking. And truth be told, however fond he was of Mrs. Kitchen, the one thing Murdoch didn’t miss was her cooking. Katie was a good cook and now he looked forward to coming home to tasty meals. Murdoch, his old friend Charlie Seymour, and Amy Slade, a schoolteacher, were the others who now boarded in the house and they paid Katie a small wage in exchange for housekeeping duties. She was the young mother of twin baby boys and would be destitute if it weren’t for this arrangement.

Good food wasn’t the only reason Murdoch liked being at home these days. Charlie, a sergeant at number four station, was a bachelor whose taciturn speech belied an intense and passionate nature. They had great animated discussions about life, death, and God, not to mention bicycles. Murdoch knew it was Charlie’s night to be on duty at the station, but he wished he was available to talk to.

And then there was Miss Amy Slade. They had met in January, when she had asked for his help with a police matter that involved one of her pupils. Murdoch found himself in a constant turmoil of feeling, which had started almost as soon as he met her. If he were to be honest with himself, which he didn’t particularly want to be, he had to admit that it was partly because of Amy Slade that he hadn’t proposed marriage to Mrs. Enid Jones.

The kitchen door opened and the woman in question emerged. She was in a quilted red house gown and her hair, usually so neatly confined, was loose about her shoulders. Murdoch almost missed the peg on the coat tree as he went to hang up his coat.

“Good evening, Will. You are very late tonight. You must have been working on a case.”

She wasn’t at all uncomfortable about the casualness of her dress, which paradoxically made him more so.

“I was indeed.”

“Come into the kitchen. Katie has left some delicious toad-in-the-hole in the warming oven. Your case must be a difficult one, by the look of you.”

He followed her, marvelling yet again how she was able to pick up his mood so easily. He also marvelled at the beauty of her fair hair, which was thick and curly and reached almost to her waist. All this marvelling made him irritated with himself. He was as fickle as water, pining for one woman after another.

As if on cue, Amy turned to him and gave him a rather enigmatic smile. “I picked up a letter from the post for you today. I believe it’s from Mrs. Kitchen.”

“Oh, good.” Murdoch rubbed his hands together with excessive zeal. He didn’t want Amy to think he was waiting on a letter from Enid.

The envelope was on the table, propped up against the salt cellar.

“Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll get your supper.”

This was not usual for Amy. She’d made it clear from the beginning that in her view, men and women were equally capable of making a meal, getting it out of the oven, and cleaning up after themselves. This was all new to Murdoch and he was still getting used to it. Frankly, he’d rather liked the way Mrs. Kitchen and then Enid had looked after him.

He headed for the stove. “That’s all right, I can do it … Ow.” He’d underestimated the heat of the warming oven and the plate was hot.

“Use the teapot holder,” said Amy. She didn’t jump up to help him. He did as she said, gripped the plate, and came back to the table. The toad-in-the-hole looked delicious, the plump sausages sticking out through the pastry, the gravy thick.

Amy sat across from him and leaned her elbows on the table. With her hair unpinned in that way, she looked like a young girl. The house gown was fastened to the neck, but the sleeves were loose and she was revealing her bare forearms, well shaped, pale-skinned with a smattering of freckles.

He speared one of the sausages. “How were the twins today?”

“They were a bit mardy. Katie says they are teething. You’d better be prepared, they might wake you up tonight.”

“I’d better put cotton wool in my ears then.”

“You already look exhausted, Will. What has happened?”

“Let me feed the beast within first, then I’ll tell you.” He picked up the letter, immediately getting gravy on it. “Damn.”

“Shall I read it to you while you eat?”

“That’d be swell.”

Too late he realized Mrs. Kitchen might have made a reference to Mrs. Enid Jones, her former lodger. Or worse, some shrewd comment about the new boarder, Miss Slade. But Amy was already slitting open the envelope and it would seem churlish, if not suspicious, to snatch the letter away from her. He gave a little mental prayer and concentrated on stuffing pastry into his mouth.

Amy began to read. “‘My dear Will. Life here continues to be quiet. Now that I have a routine, my work is not arduous. I am not used to giving orders to other people, but that is what I am supposed to do so I do it. The girls are for the most part industrious and honest, thank the Lord. I am happy to report that Arthur continues to gain strength. He frets at the idleness as he puts it, but it is obvious the air and rest are doing him good. I would never have known what fresh air really is if we hadn’t come here. Toronto is dirty indeed. The patients are weighed every week and he has actually put on two pounds. We celebrated by a little party with the others on his floor. We were all wrapped up against the cold because, as much as possible, everybody stays on the veranda for the air. Arthur complained that if the consumption doesn’t get him, the cold will, but there are hints that spring is coming and that will be more comfortable. He says to tell you he misses the smell of your tobacco and especially the evening talks you used to have. There is a young boy two beds down who is only seventeen, and he is the most ill of all of them. The nurses shake their heads at us behind his back, meaning he is a hopeless case. Arthur has taken him under his wing and is telling him the stories of your cases and how you solved them. The boy’s name is John and he begged me to tell you that when he is better, he would like to come down to Toronto and meet you. He’d like to be a police officer. I say my prayers that this might be. How is everything in the house?’” Amy paused and Murdoch braced himself. Here it comes. Amy continued. “‘How is Mr. Seymour? And that poor young girl with the babies? Is Miss Slade behaving herself?’” Amy stopped reading. “Why would she say that? What sort of impression did I give her?”

Mrs. Kitchen had met Amy once just before they were leaving for Muskoka. The schoolteacher had been wearing her pantaloons and jerkin and even though her manners were impeccable and she was very well spoken, Beatrice had been shocked.

“It was your, er, your Rational Dress. Mrs. K is quite conservative.”

Amy sighed. She had experienced such reactions many times. “She signs off by saying, ‘I say my rosary constantly. Remember us in your prayers, Will. Yours sincerely, Beatrice Kitchen.’”

They were both quiet for a few moments, Murdoch thinking about Arthur and the precariousness of his life. Then he picked up his plate and stood up. “I’ll make a pot of tea.”

He lifted one of the lids from the stovetop and dropped in a piece of coal to build up the fire. While they waited for the water to boil, he started to tell her something of what had happened that day. He had too much respect for her to treat her as if she were a potential hysteric, so he told her about the murder, glossing over the more horrendous injuries but sparing nothing else.

She straightened in her chair. “What a dreadful thing. I do pity his wife. Do you have a notion as to the culprit?”

“It looks very much like a thief. Howard wore a silver pocket watch, but it is gone. His boots were also taken. I don’t know if anything else is missing yet.”

“Who found him?”

“One of the parishioners. A woman by the name of Sarah Dignam. She was coming for a prayer meeting.”

“Poor woman.”

“Indeed. She is dreadfully upset.”

He hesitated, wondering whether he should share his thoughts about Miss Dignam, but they seemed rather unfair and he had tangled with Amy before about denoting strong emotions in women as hysteria.

“It’s funny, after I left her I was reminded of this chopper I knew at the camp. His nickname was ‘Monk’ not because of any pious habits, far from it, but because we all thought he resembled a monkey. He had abnormally long arms and short bandy legs and masses of hair all over him.”

Amy smiled. “Surely it wasn’t a physical resemblance to Miss Dignam that made you think of him?”

“Hardly. Brodie was something of an outcast, but he found this stray dog about the camp and he became a changed man. He loved that mongrel and became friends with any other chopper that paid attention to the little creature. There was a lot of snickering behind his back, as you can imagine with that bunch of hard hearts, but they wouldn’t have dared say anything to his face because Monk was far too tough.” Murdoch started to fold the tea towel. “Anyway, what came back to mind so vividly was the night he discovered his dog, Paddy was its name, was missing. He was beside himself. We weren’t supposed to leave the camp after dark because it was too dangerous, but I couldn’t stand to see him so I agreed to go with him in search of Paddy.” Murdoch hesitated, not sure how much he should tell Amy, but she was obviously listening intently and he could feel how much he wanted to unburden himself. He’d never told anybody the story before. “We didn’t have to go far because we soon picked up a trail of blood leading off one of the runs. Paddy had managed to drag himself to the shelter of the trees. He must have been attacked by a coyote because his ear was half off and he had several deep bites on his head and legs. The worst was the one at his throat.”

“Oh how dreadful.”

“It was. At first I thought he was dead, but Monk dropped to his knees beside him and Paddy moved his head and tried to lick his face. Brodie just recoiled in horror and he yelled at me. ‘I can’t bear it. We must do something.’ I tried to tell him that the dog would die soon enough, but Paddy whimpered and tried to crawl toward him. Brodie screamed and before I could stop him, he reached for a nearby stone … with two blows, he dispatched the creature on the spot.”

Amy was gazing at him, her hand to her cheek in horror.

“After that he cried, clutching the dog to his chest, rocking back and forth … I didn’t know what to do or say. Finally he stopped and I persuaded him to bury the little mongrel, which we did.”

“Oh Will, that is such a sad story.”

“There was an expression in Miss Dignam’s eyes and the way she cried for those few moments that reminded me of Monk when we first found the dog and he knew he’d lost him. It was as if a door had opened up into the sorrow of all their lives.” He averted his eyes. “My God, that sounds fanciful.”

Amy reached out and touched his hand. “No, it doesn’t at all. I had a pupil once whose mother died suddenly, influenza I think it was, the girl was about twelve years old. When she came back to school, we happened to be studying
Romeo and Juliet
. The girl wasn’t a particularly good student or had never before shown much response to Shakespeare, but this afternoon when we got to the passage where Juliet dies, she burst out crying. I couldn’t soothe her. She was only a child, but she had known much loss in her young life.”

Murdoch smiled at her gratefully. “Monk left the camp at the end of the season and I never saw him again. We never talked about poor Paddy … I was also troubled by the way he killed the dog.”

“I suppose it could be considered as an act of mercy. The dog must have been suffering.”

“He was, but Brodie went into a kind of panic as if the sight was more than he could bear. Whether that was for the dog’s sake is debatable. I hope I’m never faced with a situation like that.” Murdoch shuddered. “I still have nightmares about it.”

At that moment, the kettle began to whistle.

“Good timing. A cup of tea will hit the spot,” said Murdoch and he got up and went over to the stove. While the tea was poured and sipped, he resumed his narrative of the day’s events.

“I spent the evening going through Howard’s personal portfolio. He was very organized and everything was filed under subject matter, including sermons, church business. There was quite a bit of correspondence and minutes of meetings about the installation of a new water closet. Apparently, the proposal was controversial. There were those who thought it was a ridiculous expense and the earth closet was quite adequate and those who thought it would enhance the public standing of the parish to have such a fine piece, not to mention being more suitable for the older members of the church.”

Amy smiled. “Surely the poor man would not have been killed over the matter of a water closet?”

“Let’s hope not. I saw the new facility and it is indeed very handsome and probably cost a lot of money. As far as I can tell Reverend Howard was generally keen to improve the church furnishings. But except for minor quibbles from a few of the elders, I couldn’t find any evidence that somebody was sufficiently enraged to murder him over it.” Murdoch poured them each more tea. “The letter opener told me nothing new other than that the thrust was a single one, made hard and deep. There was no sign of footprints inside or out. So that’s it for the silent witnesses. As for human witnesses, that was equally as unproductive. Crabtree and Fyfer questioned as many people in the area as they could, but so far nothing at all has emerged. It was such a dismal day, there was hardly anybody out to see anything. The murderer came and went without a trace. He might as well have been a spirit.”

Amy blew on her tea to cool it. “You’ve been saying
he
all the time when referring to the culprit. Do the injuries preclude a female attacker?”

He reflected for a moment. “The letter opener had been thrust into his neck very deeply and then I’d say he was kicked hard when he was on the ground, but he would have been defenceless by then. So, no, alas, we cannot at this point eliminate the possibility it was a woman who killed him. The coroner, who is a woman by the way, said she will do a post-mortem examination in the morning. I’ll attend that. Sometimes there are surprises.”