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.
“Even if he had,” Lamb replied, “the shock and loss of blood must have been fatal.”
So further explorations could wait. The broad, blind expanse of the professor’s back was suddenly irksome. Harris ungratefully considered bundling his companion into a stagecoach in order to nurse alone the cooling embers of his hope.
Lamb half turned in the saddle. “You referred to the deceased as a woman,” he said. “We can’t assume that.”
Harris begged his pardon.
“I may not be able to say for sure even after I get a chance to weigh the bones. I’ll certainly want to scrutinize those hairs under a microscope.”
“How soon can you do all that—all that weighing and scrutinizing?”
“The coroner would normally give me a week to ten days.”
“The sleeve and bracelet could be a disguise,” Harris admitted without conviction. Ten days was a long time to go on searching in a state of uncertainty.
“Come now,” said Lamb. “The dress is female, but we must no more base our conclusions on such externals than you bankers do when you decide to extend credit, or to refuse it.”
Still digesting Lamb’s revelation, Harris did not rise to this bait.
“Incidentally,” the professor added, “I took your good advice.”
“Oh?” Harris was starting to wonder who besides Theresa, male or female, had disappeared in recent weeks.
“I approached the Hon. Robert Baldwin. He has agreed to petition the regents of the university to pay me more.”
“You couldn’t have made a sounder choice,” said Harris, remembering his manners. “Not only did Mr. Baldwin’s government found the university, but he is the one man in Toronto who never breaks his word.”
“Present company excepted, I hope.”
“Professor Lamb,” Harris pleaded, “could you not hasten or somehow expedite your examination of these remains? So long as any chance remains that Mrs. Crane is still drawing breath, every moment is precious.”
The green shoulders under Harris’s nose shrugged unencouragingly.
Soon after, the end gable and two-storey verandah of the Half Way House came in view on the right of the plank road. When Banshee and her riders stopped for refreshment, Lamb slid from the saddle unaided.
“The chemistry laboratory,” he said, brushing sweat from his straight upper lip, “is at present housed in a far from weatherproof pig shed in behind the Provincial Observatory. Look in on me this evening if you like.”
On reaching the cashier’s suite in the early afternoon, Harris moved from room to room like a man who can’t remember what comes next. He took a bottle of brandy from the dining room sideboard. He left the bottle in the pantry. He opened wardrobe doors, then instead of hanging up his clothes threw them over chairs. Perplexed by this behaviour, he supposed it had something to do with having passed a night in the open on top of five anxious days. Presently he wandered down the corridor to his bedroom, fell on his bed and slept.
He plunged straight into the deepest slumber and ascended gradually. Anxiety returned before fatigue lifted. Waking took forever. Thrashing about the middle ground, he found himself buffeted by more extreme emotions than blew through either his workaday mind or his dreams. He had schooled himself since entering on a business career, and more particularly in the past three years, to give his feelings play within a range not much wider than the arc of the pendulum in his tall mahogany clock. Now, while the wind outside made noisy sport with an ill-secured shutter, his pendulum swung full circle.
Through 180 degrees, he conceived of Theresa as dead. He walked behind the glass-doored hearse, his gaze fixed on the floral tributes piled on her casket. Panicled
