“Yes, indeed.”
“You realize, Mr. Harris, Kingston has become a backwater. Routing the Grand Trunk railroad three miles back of the port just nailed the lid on the coffin.”
“A hard blow to be sure,” said Harris, unable to see where this was leading.
Newbiggins sat back in his armchair and laced his ring-laden fingers over his stomach. “It can’t be long before head office moves to Toronto,” he said. “You could be head cashier.”
Harris owned real estate himself, a few residential properties acquired before the current boom. Their value had already doubled and bid fair to do so again, while their sites better suited any sort of commercial venture than the site Newbiggins had picked out for himself. Harris had, in short, prospects beyond the bank. Meanwhile, he considered himself as well housed and as honourably employed as any man his age in the city. He smiled politely.
“In point of fact,” Newbiggins confided, “I plan to discuss the whole question with the officers of the bank in the next few days. It would be a great help to me if you could have your accountant show me the records of your recent loans.”
“You had best discuss that with the president, sir. He’s kept fully informed.”
“My eye might pick up some significant details that his would miss. I know it’s somewhat irregular, Mr. Harris, but I should be working very much in your interest.”
The spacious office felt suffocatingly close. Through the barely opened window slid smells of dust and horse manure. Up and down Bay Street, carters on their way to and from the docks called to their weary teams.
“Let me be candid,” said Harris. His situation was unpleasant, but not difficult. “To be appointed to my present position, I had to post a bond. I have the strongest possible interest in transactions that are regular.”
Happily Newbiggins did not persist. His patent leather boots squeaked cheerily as he got up and adjusted his boldly checked jacket.
In the course of the leave-taking, it occurred to Harris that the little man had said railroad instead of railway. “How do you find life in Canada, Mr. Newbiggins?” he asked affably.
“Very much to my taste. People here aren’t as tall as in New York, but they have almost as much culture. Why, the very first week I was in the country, I was able to hear Miss Jenny Lind sing down at the St. Lawrence Hall. What drama she put into Bellini’s Sonnambula! Were you there?”
Harris nodded. He had been there with Theresa—four years ago, perhaps five, or even six. Time with her had been taken so much for granted. Somehow he assumed Theresa would wait for his elevation to cashier, assumed he had asked her to. He never actually had.
Miss Lind’s singing should have swept him into a declaration. If only he had let it! He recalled the soprano’s heart-piercing sweetness rather than, like Newbiggins, individual selections. The only detail of the evening to come back to him was that of Theresa at his side—eyes closed, lips parted as she soared with the Swedish nightingale—holding her bracelet of silver medallions to keep it from rattling.
Chapter Two
Law and Order
Harris remained anchored to his desk through the noon hour, interrupting work only for a taste of cold pigeon pie and a glance at the day’s papers. In addition to Sheridan’s funeral, the disappearance of his daughter was at last being reported. Police were said to be investigating. Harris thought he would stop by the chief’s office after four to see what headway was being made.
When Harris and Murdock deposited the ledgers in the vault at closing time, the cashier asked his accountant to be particularly on guard in future against any attempt at unauthorized inspection of them.
Earlier in the afternoon, as every Wednesday afternoon, those of the bank’s directors resident in Toronto had met to decide who might borrow from the branch. Harris’s duty was simply to present the applications. The Toronto directors murmured approval of Newbiggins’s guarantors and granted him his loan—despite doubts as to whether, during its term, construction of Conquest Iron Works could even begin. On his way downtown after work, Harris walked past the Front Street site. As he had suspected, it lay between a church and the villa of an influential alderman. A more promising source of dandelions than of stoves and rails!
East of Yonge Street, Harris approached the busiest part of the Esplanade. There the principal docks and markets clustered, not to mention the principal beggars and eccentrics. At the entrance to the new south St. Lawrence Market, which to spare the public purse was also made to serve as City Hall, sat a vacant-eyed individual with a placard reading, “Veteran of Waterloo.” Harris bent over and placed a sixpence in the hat by his side. The man might have lost his legs forty-two years ago to a French cannon ball, or more recently in a Toronto construction accident. The exposed pink stumps were real enough.
The portico under which he sat, like the building as a whole, followed the Italianate fashion as far as could be squared with Protestant parsimony. Inside, a compact entrance hall led straight to the police office. Neither the chief nor his deputy was there. Harris proceeded downstairs to Station No. 1, which because of the slope of the land towards the lake looked out on the courtyard of the fruit and poultry market. The only windows, at the far end of the prisoners’ airing room, admitted a dulled but insistent odour of sun-ripened chicken guts.
The near end of the basement housed, on the one hand, the building’s central heating apparatus in a closet of its own and, on the other, the policemen’s room. Stretching roughly parallel to the west or right wall of the latter, an eight-foot-long table served as a counter. Behind it sat hunched a fair young constable, clinging to an unsteady steel pen and holding the tip of his tongue between his teeth. He did not look up. With painstaking deliberation, he was recording a woman’s complaint regarding her neighbour’s privy. She wore a bolt of cloth in skirts alone, which vied in splendour with the abundant plumes and ribbons on her hat. She insisted, in a voice both affected and familiar, that she was known to the lawmakers. Harris had more than enough time to look around.
Although the station was not five years old, cracks were already opening in the walls as the building settled into the wet clay and sand of the harbour beach. Some of these fissures had been whitewashed over but not filled. Others had been patched with a conspicuous grey-green paste. From a rack of guns on the west wall, an expensive padlock—one Harris knew to be pick-proof—hung open and useless. As for the pine plank floor, it was swept remarkably clear of dust and littered with cherry pits. Everything was halfway right. The place was fairly cluttered with good intentions.
Presently Constable Devlin with his one polished boot emerged from the farthest lock-up cell. Harris tried to catch his eye. Appearing not to recollect their morning encounter, the constable crossed the airing room to the table and seated himself in front of a pile of fresh cherries. These he placed in his mouth one after another, expelling the pits in the direction of a tin spittoon.
“Hi, Devlin,” Harris called with more energy than hope. “Is your sergeant around at all?”
Devlin looked up quizzically, but was spared answering when two other men came clattering down the stairs into the room. One was the melancholic lighthouse keeper from the peninsula. He wore a navy jacket and army trousers. The other was John Vandervoort, yesterday’s bogus procurement officer, frowning as if he had just been found out.
The light keeper cleared his throat, presumably to make a formal charge of fraud before the constables. But what was this? A plainly unrepentant Vandervoort clapped him on the back, knocking the breath out of him before he could speak.
“Lock this man up, Devlin,” said Vandervoort, shoving his winded companion behind the table. “The charge is smuggling and trafficking in smuggled goods. Morgan, write it up.”
“Two Gs or one, inspector?” said