When he had asked the hotel manager all the questions he decently could, he went in to dinner and—as the dishes came and went—chatted with the waiter. Marthe Laurendeau had been in residence since the start of the spring legislative session. She had come to perfect her English and had stayed on to continue her studies when Parliament recessed and her mother returned home. A quiet and serious young woman, Mademoiselle seemed refined and rather shy. She ordered veal filet whenever it was on the menu.
As she began to take shape for Harris, he regretted having wished the grisly arm to be hers.
That she was a horsewoman came as news to the waiter, who believed she kept no mount at the hotel. Harris confirmed this with a stable hand before proceeding to the University Park.
By eight o’clock, light and strollers were draining from its green expanse. Robins, whose conversational song reminded Harris of summer evenings at his parents’ home, were left to skim the lawns and pick their supper from the moist earth.
No sod had yet been turned for University College. Indeed, no design had yet been approved for the £75,000 building. The chemistry laboratory meanwhile occupied a one-room frame structure, freshly painted in mustard yellow. It looked too tidy ever to have housed pigs. It smelled too foul.
Lamb came to the door in shirtsleeves and an embroidered waistcoat. Harris may have been exaggerating the smell, which turned out to be no more than the waxy adipocere churned up with strong vinegar, a general decaying mustiness, spirits of hartshorn and kerosene from a pair of hanging lamps. Beneath them, a work bench ran the length of one wall. Amid the instruments and bottles strewn there, three cleanish bones lay on a marble slab as if for presentation.
“Sit here, Mr. Harris,” said Lamb, indicating a stool as might a brusque maître d’hôtel. “I won’t show you the hand, which I have not had time to strip the flesh from yet, but these bones may interest you.” He stood pointing at the largest of the three. “Note how the humerus is severed at the upper end—not pulled whole from the shoulder, mind, not chewed by an animal, but chopped with an axe.”
“As we surmised,” said Harris. “Before death or after?”
“There’s no way of knowing. The dimensions tell us something, however.” The professor stretched a measuring tape along the thinner of the two remaining bones. “Ulna—9 21/32. If normally proportioned and not a freak, our victim would have been a man of unremarkable stature or a tall woman. Between five foot three inches and five foot five in the latter case—possibly an inch more in the former.”
Victim. Harris absorbed the word in silence. Theresa’s height had fallen in the middle of the range mentioned.
“And here is news,” Lamb continued cheerfully as he picked up the final item on display. “The radius shows evidence of a fracture.”
The bone looked whole to Harris, but then the combination of the subject matter and the atmosphere was starting to make him light-headed. “Not a fracture sustained during the . . .”
“Certainly not. An earlier break, quite healed but imperfectly set.”
“How much earlier?”
“Months or years. You see this slight change of direction here? And the mark—not a crack, more of a scar.”
Harris steadied himself against the edge of the bench. “Could we step outside a moment?” he asked.
They stepped outside. Theresa’s eighth night from home had fallen calm but cloudy. There would be no stargazing at the observatory next door. From another provisional college building across Taddle Creek rose the stirring strains of a Baptist hymn.
“Some of my colleagues,” Lamb remarked, “have to show that a non-denominational university need not be a godless one. If anyone challenges you, you can say we have been studying scripture.”
After several gulps of leafy park air, Harris asked whether the deviation in the radius would have made an observable difference in the living arm.
“You mean,” said Lamb, “would the arm have looked crooked?”
“Yes, or been so weakened that the person would have noticeably favoured it—avoided heavy work and so forth?”
“Not necessarily. I believe the chief significance of the fracture—about three and a half inches above the right wrist—is as follows. If such an injury were to figure in the medical history of Mrs. Crane, it would tend to confirm that the arm is hers.”
“It doesn’t,” Harris blurted out in relief, before remembering that he had no idea what injuries Theresa might have sustained since her marriage. “That is, I don’t know. The break was an accident, was it not?”
“We can’t be sure of that,” Lamb replied.
Harris shuddered. An assault could have been a warning if Theresa had had any friend to help her heed it.
“Mr. Crane—has he seen the—um—remains?”
“Not while they have been with me,” said Lamb. “The only gentlemen I receive here are ones that have saved me from drowning. Shall we go back in?”
Automatically, Harris shook his head—no. “By all means,” he said with effort.
Inside the shed once more, his eye first caught a gleam of lamplight on precious metal at the far end of the work bench. He got permission to pick the bracelet up. From the eight silver medallions linked by pairs of the finest silver chains, certainty flowed like a current into his hands. He could name the remaining four cities before he turned the ovals over. Lisbon, Marseilles, Naples, Madrid. He even seemed to know the tracery of scratches. The bracelet was Theresa’s.
She had worn it on her left wrist, though.
“Professor Lamb,” he said, “what did you find out from those hairs?”
“Less than I had hoped. They are neither too fine to be a man’s nor too coarse to be a woman’s.”
“But coarser than average for a woman?”
The note of eagerness seemed to irritate Lamb. “Average?” he said, fussing with the brass wheels on his microscope. “Averages are easy for you money men. You sum ten interest rates and move a decimal point. Simple arithmetic. Anthropometry is not so simple. Have you any idea how many hairs I should have to pluck from how many arms just in order to tell you what’s average for Toronto women, let alone the sex in general? They would lock me up before the job was properly begun. What I can tell you is that the shafts of the Rouge Valley hairs are thicker than those drawn from the identical square inch of my wife’s anatomy. Whether Mrs. Lamb is an average woman I have no way of judging. She is to a normal degree modest, however. I know you’ll be discreet.”
The Lambs were expecting their sixth child, or was it their seventh? It had been mentioned at the bank during the loan discussion. Harris approached the improvident, affectionate man bent over the microscope and humbly asked if he might take a look.
While he was looking, the door rattled against its bolt.
“Open up, Dr. Lamb,” boomed a voice Harris recognized as Vandervoort’s. “I’ve brought you the rest of the puzzle.”
Chapter Five
Front Street
Boisterous and dishevelled, Vandervoort entered, brandishing a soiled white cotton flour sack that rattled as he moved. His dust-stiffened red hair stuck out at all angles. His whisky breath blared like a fanfare above the symphony of laboratory odours and quite drowned them out when he turned in momentary surprise towards Harris.
“Ha! If it isn’t our amateur detective, looking neat and solemn as ever. Well, stay if you like. See what has turned up.”
Vandervoort told a rambling and prolix tale that was at the same time marred by irritating omissions, but the gist of it was that