“Oh, I hardly count as a Protestant,” Harris protested weakly. Geology and zoology had by painless increments displaced his ancestral faith, such as it had been—but he knew that made him no less alien to Murdock, who continued as if Harris had not spoken.
“The thugs need not attack us directly. We have eyes to see that anyone opposing their power can become a victim. Even a Member of Parliament.”
“You mean William Sheridan?”
“Perhaps a rising man of business is right to court their favour and—and help them hide their crimes, but it saddens me all the same to see you do it. I must get home to dinner.”
“Just a minute,” said Harris. “A week ago, the very first time I saw you after the event, you hinted there was sinister significance to William Sheridan’s dying on July 12.”
“I knew it then, and I’ve got the details since. You’ll never read them in the press.”
“Would you mind eating here?” Last night’s visit to Front Street had sharpened Harris’s hunger for such details. He had previously made three or four such requests, when reports from their branch had been commanded at short notice. Each time Murdock had nodded dutifully. Today—in the absence of bank business—the accountant hesitated, sighed and nodded. Orange roguery? A futile topic, his dumb show implied—but, to his shame, irresistible. As usual, Dick Ogilvie was sent to advise Mrs. Murdock and bring back from a neighbouring café sliced ham, meat pie and a jug of ginger beer.
“Septimus,” said Harris, on returning to his office, “you admit the daily papers are unreliable.”
Murdock shrugged as if the thing were obvious.
“Then please don’t judge me by what you read there. They say I found Mrs. Crane’s arm. That’s false. I found an arm, which remains to be identified.”
“They say nothing at all about William Sheridan. What a great heart that was! I would have attended his funeral myself if it had been at the Cathedral.”
“Yes, well, Mr. Sheridan found St. James with its reserved pews too plutocratic for his liking. What should they be saying?”
“Holy Trinity is in the most Protestant ward in the city, and the way things are, a Roman like myself would not have felt particularly welcome.”
Harris did not stop to list the French Canadian mourners, Murdock’s co-religionists to a man. “Septimus, what should the papers be saying?”
The repetition of the question gratified the accountant and unnerved him. “Ask Sibyl Martin,” he stammered.
“Who is she?”
“For the last three months of his life, William Sheridan’s housekeeper.”
Harris had been pacing. Now he went dead still, though his pulse was off at a gallop. He felt as if he had been tracking through deep woods a quarry he might have seen by no more than a quarter turn of the head.
“Where,” he asked carefully, “will I find her?”
“That’s a question, isn’t it?”
“Septimus.”
“I don’t know, Isaac. No one seems to know, and no one seems to have been looking.”
The housekeeper’s arm? A fearful joy tickled Harris’s throat. To cover his unsettling eagerness for a human sacrifice, he said, “You think after killing him she fled.”
“Or is being hidden,” said Murdock. “If you ask me, she killed them both.”
“Sheridan and . . .”
“Exactly. Father and daughter.”
The theory was breath-catching, but quickly fell apart when the accountant could give no account of what Sibyl might have done with Theresa’s body. Burn it? Where? Not in Scarboro, surely. How was she to have got it there? Sheridan kept no carriage.
Murdock postulated accomplices—as many as necessary. He had never actually clapped eyes on the housekeeper and could give no indication as to her height or build. “Sluttish and sullen” was how rumour described her.
By the time their meal arrived, Harris had heard several more jeremiads, but no new facts.
“Look here,” he said once young Ogilvie had set two places at a gate-leg table and withdrawn, “what besides her disappearance makes you accuse this woman of murder?”
“She has a twin brother in the Provincial Penitentiary. Crusher Martin they call him.”
This detail made a stronger impression on Harris than he was willing to acknowledge. “I must say, Septimus, I don’t see much of my own brothers and sister. Should they hang for my crimes?”
“If you had killed a man, as Martin has, a less open-hearted individual than William Sheridan might well shy away from taking your twin into domestic service. Then again, Isaac, the woman herself worked until this past March in the house of the Orange Grand Master. Whose crime is that?”
“No one’s, as far as I know.”
Harris felt all the more need to defend Sibyl because of wishing her dead. He had to admit, however, that the man she would have been used to hearing reviled at the Grand Master’s as an apostate had indeed been a singularly unprejudiced employer. How had she come in contact with Sheridan? Murdock suspected intrigue, but perhaps the imprisoned brother had simply chanced to be a client. There was one person Harris would know where to find.
“Open your eyes, my young friend,” Murdock advised between mouthfuls. “This woman with criminal relations and an Orange past prepared William Sheridan’s last meal.”
“Poison? But Dr. Hillyard says he died of his old complaint, inflammation of the bowels.”
“And is Dr. Hillyard above suspicion?”
“Over the years he has had more opportunities to poison Sheridan than anyone. He would not have needed a servant’s help.”
“Then Sibyl Martin administered an irritant of some sort that brought on the fatal attack. Police were sent for the night he died.”
Harris dropped his fork. Drunk or sober, Vandervoort had never so much as hinted at this.
“To apprehend Sibyl Martin?” he said.
“Why else?”
“But how do you know?”
The clock ticked. A carter’s whip cracked outside the window as his team plodded by. Harris held his breath.
“A St. Michael’s altar boy carried the note.”
“Why didn’t you say so sooner?”
“For the boy’s sake,” said Murdock. “Did you know that William Sheridan bought a hundred iron bedsteads for the new House of Providence? Now don’t ask me for his name.”
“Mrs. Crane gave him this note?” Harris didn’t mention that the altar boy might have to testify at a coroner’s inquest.
“‘To the police with this as fast as you can,’ she said.”
“Who is this boy?” Harris demanded.
“Please, Isaac, I can’t—at least, not without leave from his father.”
“By all that’s just, get it!”
“I can’t at this moment,” Murdock spluttered. “He’s—”
“Tonight then,” Harris cut in. “For now tell me this—did the boy say how she seemed?”
“Not crazy or wild. Firm and angry, as she had every right to be. They had to kill her too.”
“I’m not convinced of that—but, Septimus, when