bridge, advice would flow like stagger juice, but anyone asking for a constable would face insistent questions. Harris accordingly turned west at the bridge, back towards Toronto. A talk with the Rouge Hill toll collector some half a mile later did nothing to deflect him from his course.
The toll booth consisted of a faded, two-storey frame house with a roof that extended north across the highway to a blank supporting wall on the other side. The collector had had enough experience with sneaks and bullies to appreciate the difficulty of finding the police. The nearest lived in Highland Creek, but that was Scarboro and this was Pickering. The Pickering lock-up might as well have been on the moon. You would never get a constable out at night anyway.
Harris continued townwards. The pine-planked surface of the Kingston Road clattered horribly beneath the horse’s hoofs—an ear-splitting amplification of the agitation in Harris’s breast. He quickly switched over to the dirt shoulder. The panic followed him, merely growing more stealthily in the dark and lonely night.
The remains were not Theresa’s. Someone must tell him that. He feared, with a fear approaching a certainty, that no one would.
When he reached Market Square, mad fiddle music was spilling out of taverns and breaking against the austere face of Toronto’s dark and all-but empty City Hall. Down in Station No. 1, an unfamiliar constable kept vigil. He denied any knowledge of Inspector John Vandervoort. Harris could try coming back on Monday.
Harris tried the Dog and Duck. The taproom was so dimly lit that the elk and whitetail trophy heads along the wall were mutually indistinguishable. Indeed, gloom seemed to clothe the few women present more effectually than their gowns which, as far as Harris could see when he began moving from table to table, all had buttons undone if not actually missing. Overheard conversations between them and their companions often touched on “going upstairs.” Impeded by modesty, but more by the dark, Harris completed his tour of the room without finding his man. He applied to the proprietor.
Vandervoort was known to that individual as a dedicated drinker, though by no means a troublesome one. Indeed, his patronage was an asset at licence-renewal time. This was as candid as Harris could wish, but when he asked about tonight in particular, the bluff hotel-keeper turned smarmy.
“Don’t see him, I’m afraid. He’ll be sorry to have missed you.”
“Where’s he live?”
“Couldn’t say, sir. I might just get a message to him, though, if it’s urgent.”
“It’s urgent that I see him,” said Harris—but he was again assured that a message was the most that could be undertaken.
At the stable of the less furtive-looking hotel next door, Harris left his horse to be watered and fed. Returning to the bank on foot, he changed into dry clothes and wrote a letter detailing the discovery of the arm. He asked the inspector to meet him as soon as possible under the Rouge River G.T.R. trestle, where Harris promised to remain until Sunday noon. He then packed a knapsack for a night in the open. Nagged by doubts as to whether the letter would be received or acted upon, he next proceeded to the Union Station at the foot of York Street and sent the Pickering constable a telegram, a copy of which he added to the envelope for Vandervoort.
Back in the Dog and Duck, a leering fiddler was scraping out “Pop Goes the Weasel.” One of the pudgier of the unbuttoned women was using her right index finger and left cheek to sound the pops, more or less on cue, and to show her freedom from constraint. These moist little explosions did nothing to revive Harris’s long-dead appetite. Notwithstanding, he providently bought some dark stew of unknown composition to take with him and, dodging the murky dancers, managed to place his sealed envelope in the hotel-keeper’s hands.
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.
Chapter Four
Sleeping Rough
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
