Law and Order
Harris remained anchored to his desk through the noon hour, interrupting work only for a taste of cold pigeon pie and a glance at the day’s papers. In addition to Sheridan’s funeral, the disappearance of his daughter was at last being reported. Police were said to be investigating. Harris thought he would stop by the chief’s office after four to see what headway was being made.
When Harris and Murdock deposited the ledgers in the vault at closing time, the cashier asked his accountant to be particularly on guard in future against any attempt at unauthorized inspection of them.
Earlier in the afternoon, as every Wednesday afternoon, those of the bank’s directors resident in Toronto had met to decide who might borrow from the branch. Harris’s duty was simply to present the applications. The Toronto directors murmured approval of Newbiggins’s guarantors and granted him his loan—despite doubts as to whether, during its term, construction of Conquest Iron Works could even begin. On his way downtown after work, Harris walked past the Front Street site. As he had suspected, it lay between a church and the villa of an influential alderman. A more promising source of dandelions than of stoves and rails!
East of Yonge Street, Harris approached the busiest part of the Esplanade. There the principal docks and markets clustered, not to mention the principal beggars and eccentrics. At the entrance to the new south St. Lawrence Market, which to spare the public purse was also made to serve as City Hall, sat a vacant-eyed individual with a placard reading, “Veteran of Waterloo.” Harris bent over and placed a sixpence in the hat by his side. The man might have lost his legs forty-two years ago to a French cannon ball, or more recently in a Toronto construction accident. The exposed pink stumps were real enough.
The portico under which he sat, like the building as a whole, followed the Italianate fashion as far as could be squared with Protestant parsimony. Inside, a compact entrance hall led straight to the police office. Neither the chief nor his deputy was there. Harris proceeded downstairs to Station No. 1, which because of the slope of the land towards the lake looked out on the courtyard of the fruit and poultry market. The only windows, at the far end of the prisoners’ airing room, admitted a dulled but insistent odour of sun-ripened chicken guts.
The near end of the basement housed, on the one hand, the building’s central heating apparatus in a closet of its own and, on the other, the policemen’s room. Stretching roughly parallel to the west or right wall of the latter, an eight-foot-long table served as a counter. Behind it sat hunched a fair young constable, clinging to an unsteady steel pen and holding the tip of his tongue between his teeth. He did not look up. With painstaking deliberation, he was recording a woman’s complaint regarding her neighbour’s privy. She wore a bolt of cloth in skirts alone, which vied in splendour with the abundant plumes and ribbons on her hat. She insisted, in a voice both affected and familiar, that she was known to the lawmakers. Harris had more than enough time to look around.
Although the station was not five years old, cracks were already opening in the walls as the building settled into the wet clay and sand of the harbour beach. Some of these fissures had been whitewashed over but not filled. Others had been patched with a conspicuous grey-green paste. From a rack of guns on the west wall, an expensive padlock—one Harris knew to be pick-proof—hung open and useless. As for the pine plank floor, it was swept remarkably clear of dust and littered with cherry pits. Everything was halfway right. The place was fairly cluttered with good intentions.
Presently Constable Devlin with his one polished boot emerged from the farthest lock-up cell. Harris tried to catch his eye. Appearing not to recollect their morning encounter, the constable crossed the airing room to the table and seated himself in front of a pile of fresh cherries. These he placed in his mouth one after another, expelling the pits in the direction of a tin spittoon.
“Hi, Devlin,” Harris called with more energy than hope. “Is your sergeant around at all?”
Devlin looked up quizzically, but was spared answering when two other men came clattering down the stairs into the room. One was the melancholic lighthouse keeper from the peninsula. He wore a navy jacket and army trousers. The other was John Vandervoort, yesterday’s bogus procurement officer, frowning as if he had just been found out.
The light keeper cleared his throat, presumably to make a formal charge of fraud before the constables. But what was this? A plainly unrepentant Vandervoort clapped him on the back, knocking the breath out of him before he could speak.
“Lock this man up, Devlin,” said Vandervoort, shoving his winded companion behind the table. “The charge is smuggling and trafficking in smuggled goods. Morgan, write it up.”
“Two Gs or one, inspector?” said the blond constable, turning to a fresh page in his book.
Inspector. Harris wondered if he had heard correctly.
“It ain’t smuggling, John.” The accused wiped the sweat from his forehead with a shaky hand. “On my word as a seasoned campaigner, we’ve got this treaty with the States now. A recip—reciprostity treaty.”
“You mean, ‘reciprocity,’” the female complainant corrected self-importantly. Haughty grey eyes cast icicles from under her hat brim in the light keeper’s direction. “Now I really must ask you to wait your turn.”
Vandervoort reached inside his frayed check jacket and pulled a six-shooter from his belt. Everyone but the seated constables took a startled step back. Morgan’s pen froze in the air with a drop of ink quivering at its tip. Gunfire seemed imminent. As soon as Vandervoort had the weapon out, however, he let it swing by the trigger guard from his thick forefinger.
“Harvey Ingram,” he said calmly, “I ask you before witnesses here—Constables Morgan and Devlin—ma’am—ah! Mr. Harris—I ask you whether this item which I purchased from you is grain, coal, timber, pork, or any other product of the earth such as falls under the terms of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854? Just shake your head now. That’s right. You all saw that?”
“I see nothing,” pouted the female complainant. “I didn’t come here to be a witness to anything.” So saying, she decided to postpone her business to a quieter occasion, lifted her copious skirts and swept up the stairs out of sight. No one begged her to stay.
“This is—rather—a manufactured product,” Vandervoort continued, thrusting the gun under the lighthouse keeper’s nose. “In point of fact, it is a thirty-six calibre Colt Navy revolver made in Hartford, Connecticut, and as such subject to import tariffs under the laws of Canada. Have you any proof that such tariffs have been paid? I didn’t think so.”
“You’ll never make it stick, John,” said Ingram in a vague, quite unthreatening voice.
Perhaps he too believed he had friends among the lawmakers. Otherwise, Harris thought, he was unlikely to be found at the Gibraltar Light for some time. Vandervoort was making a convincing case.
“This gun and its fellows didn’t come ashore through the port of Toronto where tariffs are levied, did it?” asked the inspector. “Oh, no—no indeed! Instead it was landed Monday night at a signal from your light on the south beach of the peninsula. Why there and then? Precisely to avoid the attentions of Her Majesty’s customs office. Think that over while you sit in your cell.”
Of course, if Ingram were a criminal, his opinion of Theresa’s fate might have to be reconsidered. Perhaps, thought Harris, the lightkeeper had been speaking from something besides drunken morbidity.
“Now, Devlin,” the inspector went on, “this gun is evidence, so you’re to keep it under lock
