“You find ’em first.” Vandervoort was losing patience with the key, which he continued to twist and jiggle in the lock. “The fire must have bent the metal out of—there!”
The door swung inward.
“The key to her father’s house! Now you’ll have to believe she’s dead.”
In the back of Harris’s mind, it registered that Vandervoort did feel the need to convince him. Later he would be flattered. Right now he was too busy castigating himself for not having sooner sought out the testimony of Sheridan’s housekeeper.
No one ever mentioned her. He knew of her existence only from that latest talk with Small. There had been no such person at the period when Harris had been a visitor here, Theresa having filled the office. There had of course been other servants—whose supervision, he recalled, had occasioned some friction between father and daughter.
“Papa, the man’s a thief!” Theresa had burst out one evening when a new gardener’s praises were being sung before Harris, and sung again. Eyes twinkling with reasonableness, her father asked what harm it did if the odd turnip went astray. Theresa, exasperated to the point of laughter, said it wasn’t that. She had found two silver watches freshly buried between the strawberry plants. Sheridan’s brow darkened only briefly. “I wonder,” he said, “if he thought he could grow grandfather clocks.” The gardener’s tenure was as brief as his predecessor’s, and his successor’s, but Sheridan liked to point out that the rate of job change was high everywhere in this restless decade. He had felt he was made a monkey of no oftener than anyone else.
Now there appeared to be neither gardener nor housekeeper, neither a maid to air the rooms nor even a watchman to protect all those panes of glass until the estate could be settled. No one. Vandervoort led the way inside as if he didn’t expect the house to be anything but deserted.
Harris followed by the light of a lung-searing Promethean match. A second, no less pungent, lit the gaselier that hung above the long centre table. Only then did the pent-up domestic perfumes of laundry, plaster, dried herbs and wood embers begin to impose themselves. Comforting enough aromas normally, but not tonight. Was Harris’s nose not yet recovered from the laboratory, or was he possibly letting the recent death two floors above colour his sense of smell? Neither explanation quite satisfied him.
The kitchen occupied the entire western half of the basement, except for a narrow servant’s bedroom at the front. Harris went to have a look at it while Vandervoort rummaged inexplicably through the cupboards.
There was no gas in the servant’s room. Harris lit an oil lamp that stood on an otherwise bare pine chest. Its drawers were empty. So were a row of pegs on the back of the door. So were the wide sills of the two windows that gave into wells directly below the drawing room windows. He flicked the curtains back in place.
Rooms like this were often furnished with a cot no wider than a ladder. Sheridan had provided a full-width bed, its head tucked for winter warmth into the corner nearest the bake oven. Wide as it was, the bed did seem unusually low. Perhaps to correct a wobble, pieces had been sawn from each leg in turn, to the point where the yellow and brown coverlet all but swept the uneven brick floor. Harris looked under the coverlet at the bare straw tick and then under the bed. He found not even a stray thimble.
When he turned back into the kitchen, Vandervoort wasn’t there, but could be heard stirring in one of the storage rooms in the other half of the basement. Looking for liquor more than likely. Harris bristled briefly, then took a deep breath. Being pilfered—“involuntary charity”—seemed almost to amuse the Sheridan he had known.
He took another breath. After the tidy bedroom, the kitchen truly did smell wrong. Behind the domestic odour lurked a sourness. Approaching the massive black cooking stove that had been set into the original fireplace, he lifted the lid of each of the pots and kettles. He worked his way around the room, inspecting crocks and churns and all the dishes in the floor-to-ceiling dresser. Everything was clean. When he looked up to see what food or laundry might be hanging from the ceiling, he stepped backwards into a slat-backed chair. He felt tired and clumsy and out of ideas.
Turning to straighten the chair, he saw he had knocked off its back a discoloured square of material that had been draped there. He picked it up. It was sticky. A sniff confirmed it was the source of the sour odour.
The housekeeper had cleared out so thoroughly and left the kitchen so generally shipshape. Why, Harris wondered, had she not washed this pudding cloth before she went?
He sniffed again, more searchingly. His nose could detect nothing beyond the week’s development of mould already noted. Suet pudding, he thought. He folded the grey and viscous rag inside a clean dishtowel for ease of carriage back to Lamb’s laboratory. He might just have a look upstairs first.
Vandervoort—his flask topped up with imported whisky—intercepted Harris on the bottom step. “No warrant, you understand.”
When the accountant Septimus Murdock reported next morning to help open the vault, he seemed not just his normally gloomy self but a man in pain. His chin with its smudge of Napoleonic whiskers was trembling more than usual. Out of his pasty, pear-shaped face, his moist brown eyes cast Harris what could only be interpreted as reproachful glances.
With coaxing, Murdock admitted a newspaper story had upset him. There for the moment Harris left it.
He had been alarmed himself to read—once he got past the advertisements that monopolized the front page of the Globe—that over the weekend one of the bank’s directors had been robbed and beaten on the road between Kingston and Brockville. Crippling head injuries made the man unfit for further business. Since it was nearly ten months until the next shareholders’ meeting, the remaining directors would be choosing a replacement.
The bank had been attacked. Its officers naturally felt threatened. Then again, the accountant rarely dealt with the directors. Perhaps it was the story of the Rouge Valley arm that had Murdock rattled.
Sunday night Harris had returned home from Front Street to find stuck under his door some journalist’s request for an immediate interview on the subject, whatever the hour. This request he ignored. He was a little out of sorts at Lamb’s reluctance to receive—or even smell—his latest discovery, but most of all he was exhausted.
Harris’s refusal to be interviewed did not of course keep his name out of the papers. It just resulted in the publication of less accurate information. “Mr. Isaac Harris, head cashier of the Provincial Bank of Canada”—that would sit well in Kingston. The cashier of the Toronto branch had better write them an explanatory note.
Probing the matter further at the noon dinner hour, he discovered it was neither the exaggeration of his credentials nor the grisly nature of his discovery that Murdock held against him. Rather it was his cooperation with those “Orange rogues” on the police force.
“Better have a seat, Septimus. Not there. The armchair is more comfortable.”
“You think I’m an old woman, but you don’t know what it’s like to have your children taunted in the street. I’m afraid almost for them to leave the house.”
Aware that no child escapes taunting on some score, Harris nonetheless felt his heart tugged. He took another of the green leather chairs in front of the desk and tried to be rationally reassuring.
“There is Orange violence in Toronto,” he said. “Remarkably little of it is directed against the city’s Catholics. Now wait before you answer. Let us look at the facts. Last summer two volunteer fire companies fought each other on Church Street and attacked the police. That was Orangeman against Orangeman. Twelve days later, as a result of some bawdy-house mêlée, a fire brigade demolished an American circus. A week ago, merchant-publican Luther Casey had his wharf and warehouse burned—”
“By Orangemen.”
“His fellow Orangemen—to whom in their