With barber’s scissors he trimmed his side whiskers to just below his ear lobes. Beards and moustaches were becoming fashionable since the war, but not for bank cashiers. Harris’s work clothes, mostly black, differed little from what he had worn to the funeral—a morning coat replacing the full-skirted frock coat. And for the office he usually put on a coloured waistcoat, a dark blue watered silk this morning. He tied a matching cravat in a loose bow around the high collar of his white shirt.
What shade, he wondered, was that riding habit she had worn? A muted, vegetable-based green or one of the vivid new chemical dyes?
His toilet made, he carried his coffee down the elliptically spiralling staircase and managed to answer the most pressing of yesterday’s correspondence before his staff, all but Septimus Murdock, arrived at eight thirty. The accountant had been instructed to go straight to the docks to meet a shipment of money from head office.
Arrangements had been negotiated with Kingston in ciphered telegrams. Security from theft and punctuality of delivery were Harris’s two overlapping concerns. He wanted the notes, coins and bullion in the vault well before the branch opened its doors to the public at ten. As the steamer chosen had been due this morning at seven, this requirement should have posed no problem.
And yet the two-horse, iron-plated van didn’t pull up in front of the bank until ten past nine. The police constable engaged as a guard had been late, a winded Septimus Murdock explained as he lowered himself cautiously from his seat between the driver and his boy.
“But where is the constable?” asked Harris.
The burly accountant’s chin quivered, as did the timid imperial that adorned it. Harris waited for him to speak.
“Isaac, he insisted on being locked inside with what he called the loot.”
Sure enough, when the padlock was removed from the heavy rear doors, a sharp-featured young man leaped out, pointing his single-shot Enfield carbine in all directions. Handled this way, the short rifle was a sufficient threat to the life of any individual bystander. For the purpose of fending off a raid, however, Harris would have preferred to see a double-barrelled shotgun. While the president of the Provincial Bank liked to repeat that there had never been a daytime bank robbery in North America, Harris knew it was just a matter of time. In tandem with Toronto’s prosperity, its crime rate was on the rise.
Constable Devlin, whose school had been the city’s docks and alleys, understood the situation perfectly. As a public servant, however, he was not at liberty to say what his understanding of the situation was. It was no part of his job to spread panic. Reaching inside his unbuttoned blue tunic to scratch his chest hair, he did explain—in a tone both knowing and aggrieved—that a shotgun was too heavy to carry about in this heat. Harris smelled no fresh whisky on the constable’s breath and noted that at least one of his boots had been recently polished. This was by no means the dregs of the force.
Under Devlin’s sporadically watchful eye, it took over an hour to get the money unloaded, counted, recounted and signed for. The bars of precious metal were few and quickly weighed, but the gold coins were the usual jumble of French five-francs, British sovereigns and American eagles, plus the new Canadian pounds and twenty-five-shilling pieces. The silver coins were even worse.
The bulk of the shipment consisted of new banknotes of all denominations. When van and constable had left, Septimus Murdock gave sixteen-year-old bank messenger Dick Ogilvie one of the crisp, clean bills to hold.
“Ever have as much as fifty dollars in your hands, Dicko?” he asked.
Ogilvie admitted this was the first time, but swore it would not be the last. One of the tellers laughed.
“But if this is fifty dollars,” said the boy, puzzlement clouding his freckled face, “why does it say, ‘The Provincial Bank of Canada, Kingston, promise to pay to bearer on demand twelve pounds, ten shillings currency at their office in Toronto’?”
Murdock snatched back the banknote. “Because, my young friend,” he scolded, “that’s what fifty dollars is worth—as anyone working in a bank ought to know by now.”
Harris pointed out that they were already half an hour late in opening and that it was high time to get some of the new notes into circulation.
Later in the morning, he glanced out his office window and noticed Dick Ogilvie sweeping the back stoop while waiting for other commissions. Harris pulled up the sash and beckoned him over.
“Don’t let people make you feel ashamed for asking questions,” said the cashier. “I ask a lot myself.”
The boy’s curly brown hair would have looked very well if he had not tried to plaster it flat with water. “May I ask another then, sir?” he said.
He wanted to know why the bank could not let him keep the fifty-dollar note. It would cost them so little in ink and paper to print a replacement. Harris told him that the gentlemen who owned the bank were putting half a million pounds into it and that the government allowed them to print paper to a face value of no more than three times that amount.
Ogilvie’s lips moved soundlessly as he did the arithmetic. “So once they’ve printed their six million dollars, they can’t print any more?”
Harris nodded. “By the time you are cashier, the preponderance of north-south trade under the Reciprocity Treaty will have made pounds and shillings obsolete. We’re just fortunate that the States uses yards and feet instead of metres or we should have two systems of linear measurement as well.”
“I should like to be cashier.” Ogilvie straightened his broadening shoulders inside his short black jacket. “Only when I’m older, I’m supposed to go into business with my dad.”
“What business is that, Dick?” Harris was surprised to find he did not know.
“Undertaking—he’s quite prominent. He arranged the funeral you attended yesterday, sir. It’s just that I can’t see myself taking orders for caskets day in day out.”
“I suppose that’s what your father was doing Sunday afternoon.” Harris recollected that funeral arrangements had been Crane’s excuse for not riding with Theresa.
Again the boy looked puzzled. “Oh no, sir.”
Although Murdock had come into the office to announce a visitor, Harris was suddenly unwilling to let Ogilvie go.
“Did Mr. Crane not call on Sunday?” he asked.
“That was Saturday night.”
“You saw him then?” Harris was sure Crane had said Sunday. It was too soon to have forgotten.
“Not only that, Mr. Harris. He would not have been received on Sunday. My dad’s very strict about the Sabbath.”
“To be sure.” Harris pulled the window down to within three inches of the sill and took, without really seeing it, the letter of introduction Murdock handed him.
The sight of the president’s signature at the bottom of the page brought Harris back to the business at hand. The letter asked him to extend every courtesy to Mr. Joshua Newbiggins, whom he invited in without further delay.
The cashier’s office was well-appointed for courteous reception. Oil copies of notable European paintings hung about in gilt frames. Two deeply upholstered armchairs and a matching ottoman faced the cashier’s desk, beside which a cabinet held a bottle of vintage port and a box of tea.
Newbiggins drank neither, appearing to derive his principal stimulus from his own conversation. He was short, round, flashily dressed and talkative. He talked about the desirability of new industries now that Toronto was becoming a rail hub. At present an importer of Pennsylvania coal, he proposed setting up an iron works, for which he had already acquired a property on Front Street. Demolished the Georgian villa that had occupied it too.
Harris