Vandervoort looked as if he would not mind posing, but Lamb didn’t ask. He merely laid a foot-rule on the sand in front of the arm to give an idea of scale. He slid a glass plate into the back of the camera then removed the lens cap. Glancing between a pocket watch in his left hand and the shifting clouds above, he exposed the plate for more than five minutes.
Harris meanwhile made more footprints. He tramped about impatiently, not looking at or seeing anything in particular. He was inclined to believe in Lamb, but was at the same time hoping that Lamb would find that he had underestimated the period of the limb’s immersion, by even as little as a week. Surely, an expert could go that far wrong without disgrace.
The professor at last removed his photographic plate. When he loaded a second, Vandervoort voiced concern for the public purse. One photograph, he said, would be quite enough. Lamb went ahead anyway, uncovering the lens for twice as long.
Collecting himself somewhat, Harris took this opportunity to show Whelan the tracing of Elsie’s sketch. The Pickering constable didn’t believe he had ever seen the subject.
“Is it her arm then?” he asked.
Harris had no reply.
“Well, whoever the poor lady was, bless her soul, her other parts had better not go turning up in the township of Pickering.”
When Harris asked if the lower Rouge were considered a dangerous place, he was harangued about the increase in lawlessness generally, short-sighted paring of police salaries, and the drunken rowdiness of railway crews in particular—although they had last month finally moved on to Darlington. Ending on a more cheerful note, Whelan said that at least the valley was no longer frequented by wolves and bears. “The only beasts today are the two-legged kind.”
Leaving Lamb to wrap the arm for transport, Vandervoort ambled over with a cadging gleam in his eye. He looked altogether too comfortable.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a cigar, inspector?” Harris inquired dryly.
Vandervoort’s face fell. “I was about to ask you the same,” he said. “Afraid I smoked the last of Lamb’s—but we might try Whelan.”
Poor Whelan, who was busy hoisting the dinghy’s sail, had not even managed to bring his trousers. Harris said he would sooner hear what the police knew of Mrs. Crane.
“We’ve been down that road before,” said Vandervoort.
“But something must have turned up in the last four days. Look here, Inspector, you seem happy enough to have been told about this find. Let’s work together.”
Vandervoort shook his head. “I saw it at Sheridan’s funeral,” he said, “when you tried to protect my informant from me. You’re an enterprising sort of man, Isaac Harris—and one that will not mind his own business.”
“Could you not tell me—?”
“I’ll tell you this. I’ve questioned your lighthouse keeper sober, and I’ve loosened his tongue with drink. I’ve turned him upside down and inside out. He knows nothing of any harm Mrs. C. may have come to.”
“And did you,” Harris pursued, “offer him the inducement of leniency in the matter of the contraband revolvers?”
“That’s out of my hands. Ask no more.”
Harris saw from a purplish tint suffusing Vandervoort’s countenance that he was about to anger the detective. The professor’s brains would in any case make for better pickings.
The first breeze in over a week had crept up on the lagoon and was ruffling its surface. Waves from the lake pushed through the gap beneath the trestle. A sharpish gust brought Lamb over.
“I 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.”