Vandervoort drank. “With respect, sir, you are not one of the parties I have to convince.”
“Don’t you have to convince yourself?”
“I believe in results.” The whisky was starting to make the inspector weave as he walked.
“What about Professor Lamb?” said Harris. “Aren’t you going to have him out to the shed?”
“Waste of time. You saw what he was like at the Rouge with all his picture taking. Brilliant mind, of course, but how far does it get you? Everything is maybe this, maybe that.”
Harris gave Vandervoort a cigar to distract him from his flask. “How far do you expect this case to get you, Inspector? Deputy chief? Doesn’t that go by political connections rather than by results?”
At this, Vandervoort stopped walking altogether and talked about the police. Although audibly less sober than when he had narrated his discovery of the burned-out shed, he made more sense. Familiarity had given these thoughts a shape. Harris, who had the impression of eavesdropping, would not in any case have risked interrupting.
Results were what would count in future, Vandervoort prophesied, while not denying that today’s force still ran on connections.
Personally, he had always depended on some of each. The son of Niagara farm folk, he had started early talking to anyone that could offer him a less laborious life. As a young night watchman on the second Welland Canal, he had discovered who was pilfering construction supplies, thus recommending himself for the railway police when work started on the Great Western. Unspecified services were performed for G.W.R. directors, who also happened to figure on Toronto’s City Council. So Vandervoort’s name came up when it was decided to hire a city detective—an anomalous post on what in the mid-fifties was a betwixt and between sort of force.
A wave of arson had temporarily loosened the purse strings, though the same council had economized since. As the city’s population had grown, they actually reduced the number of constables. Everything went by the aldermen’s whim. No policeman could be engaged, dismissed or even suspended without their say-so. Accountability, they called it.
Not that Chief Sherwood was much for suspensions or reprimands in any case. A quiet, good-natured man, the chief. He didn’t even like to insist on the dress regulations, with the result that the uniformed police were scarecrows more or less.
There had been some sprucing up, for change was in the air. Police failure to cope with a pair of recent Orange riots had set the ball in motion. One alderman had even proposed that Orange Lodge members be excluded from the force. That had been voted down, of course, and Parliament in May had backed away from its plan to take provincial control of the police, but a British-style board of police commissioners was still a strong bet to replace City Council in the running of things. The next chief could be an army man.
Harris’s eye followed the iron grill-work that for half a dozen blocks ruled commercial and residential Toronto off from the leisured walkways, grass boulevards and carriage parade. And all the while he listened and thought that—whatever improvements the future held—in the time he had to find Theresa this maddening, temporarily loquacious man was the best he had to work with in the way of official support.
“I should not want to be chief,” snorted Vandervoort, coming round at last to the question asked, “much less his deputy. Keeping constables on their beats? How anybody can do that—with the human material we have to work with . . . You’re always fighting human weakness. For the detective now, like me, human weakness is an ally. You frequent the criminal classes. You work on their weaknesses. Bend their elbow, bend their ear, grease their palm, twist their arm, tweak their nose. Above all, loosen their tongue. Before they know it—” his fist sprang shut, “—they’re yours.”
About the coming changes, Vandervoort had mixed feelings. He saw the necessity for a modern, professional police, and yet he feared that would mean a shorter leash for himself. Hence, his desire for advancement. His sights were set on Inspector of Licences, which carried an official remuneration of three hundred pounds a year—double what the city already paid its detective inspector and a hundred more than it paid the deputy chief—although salary was only one consideration. Harris was left to imagine what the others were, but he doubted they would have any very improving effect on Vandervoort’s character or his liver. In recent years, the regulation of liquor had become an exclusively municipal affair.
Overhead, a current of air teased the chestnut leaves. Vandervoort took hold of the metal fence with both hands and stared into the confined Avenue. Perhaps he was just drunk and tired, but his stance suggested that for him this near side of the barrier was the cage.
“I can see myself in a couple of years,” he said, “taking the air out there in the back of my own open carriage.”
Harris didn’t bother to point out that in a couple of years the fence would almost certainly have been dismantled to facilitate crosstown traffic, George Brown’s Globe newspaper having mounted a vigorous editorial campaign to that effect.
“What if out there on the Avenue,” he remarked instead, “you were to meet Mrs. Crane? After having convinced her husband, the aldermen, and a jury that she was dead.”
Vandervoort turned sharply. “What are you saying?”
“Merely that your position will be more secure if we find the correct solution to this mystery than if we settle for a momentarily plausible one.”
Vandervoort muttered grudging assent or suppressed a curse. They continued walking south.
“I wondered,” said Harris, “if you would ask Mr. Crane and Dr. Hillyard about the fracture. Neither of them want to talk to me.”
“How secure is your own position, Harris?” It was the first time Vandervoort had dropped the mister. “Do your employers know how many hours you spend on the trail of another man’s wife?”
“I trust I could explain myself to their satisfaction.” All the same, Harris reflected, to do so would cost time. Perhaps he was pressing the policeman too hard.
“I don’t say we can’t work together,” offered the latter, “but remember this is detective work, not banking. That means I call the tune.”
From these words and the inspector’s quickened pace, Harris gathered that there was further work for them that very evening. They loped south to Front Street.
Among the brick villas ranged along the north side, Sheridan’s alone showed no flicker of lamp or candle. Its emptiness seemed amplified by the extraordinary amount of glass in its symmetrical façade. Each of the nine sash windows carried eighteen large panes, all dark.
Vandervoort turned in at the low gate, crossed the unweeded front garden and climbed the three steps that led from it to the semicircular porch. Harris followed, bewildered.
“Are we going to break in?” he asked.
A street lamp caught the triumphant gleam in the inspector’s eye as from an inside pocket he produced a large, discoloured key.
“From the burned shed?” said Harris. “But there’s no keyhole.”
Vandervoort looked. The key in his hand moved forlornly over the blank white surface of the door.
“It’s an old house,” Harris murmured. “In the twenties—”
“Yes, yes—always a servant,” Vandervoort rejoined quickly, showing he was quite familiar with aristocratic ways. “We’ll try the back.”
At the back, a sunken flight of stone steps led to the basement. Although it was much darker here away from the street, Vandervoort hurtled down them and got the key into what Harris remembered as the kitchen door. The lock would not move.
“Speaking