“Gin a body kiss a body,” the inebriate below kept asking, each time louder, “Need a body cry?”
Harris turned. A sharp rebuke might work with tellers, but he saw no profit here in giving his feelings the run of his tongue. “Your information is faulty, inspector,” he said quietly. “I never proposed.”
“A great mistake.”
Would it, Harris silently wondered, have made a difference? Perhaps he had only spared himself the humiliation of a refusal. She had unnecessarily returned every book of which he had ever made her a present—not love poetry or sentimental novels either, but works of natural science, in which subject she had shown an early and tenacious interest.
“Forgive my impertinence,” said Vandervoort. “Was her finger slender?”
“Yes.”
“How would you describe her otherwise, as of the date named?”
“Five foot four inches tall—nearer eight stone than nine—eyes green, hair chestnut brown.” The trick was not to remember the details, but to keep them sufficiently objective. “Creamy, clear complexion.”
“Any distinguishing marks?”
Harris hesitated to mention the sweet, dark mole on her neck to the left of the nape, though it had been plainly visible whenever she wore evening dress and her hair was up. Asking himself what Theresa would say settled the matter. She would never have seen the point of withholding such information where a life might be at stake. Harris answered the question.
Vandervoort, who was neither taking nor consulting notes, heard about the mole with a smile. “Go on,” he said.
“Mr. Crane must have told you all this.”
“What about her nose?”
“Straight and strong.”
“Mouth?”
“Of course, she has a mouth. If it helps to know, there’s a slight gap between her upper central incisors.”
“Have mercy, Mr. Harris. I only got three years of school.”
“Front teeth. The mouth itself appears to turn down somewhat at the corners.”
“Ah. A discontented expression.”
“It doesn’t appear so. She’s not conventional-looking, bu . . .”
“A beauty for all that.”
“By common accord, yes—a radiant, spirited one.”
“Impetuous?”
“Impatient at times perhaps,” said Harris, “like all of us. Have you any more questions?”
“No,” Vandervoort replied. “You’re free to go.”
Harris stayed. “How many men are assigned to this case?”
“I’m not at liberty—”
“Are any policemen devoting their full attention to the search?”
“This I will tell you. We have in this city fifty constables, under the immediate supervision of five sergeants. Each constable has to look after the policing needs of eight hundred citizens. Now depend on it, every man is aware of Mrs. Crane’s disappearance and can be counted on to keep his eyes open.”
Every Morgan, thought Harris, every Devlin. “And what provision has been made for the possibility that she has already left the city?”
“You can address any further enquiries to Mr. Henry Crane.” Vandervoort’s grin unravelled. “Now you’ll have to excuse me. I’m wanted elsewhere.”
“Just a moment. The lighthouse keeper you arrested—yesterday he was positive that Mrs. Crane had been killed. Ask him if he saw her.”
“You can’t be thinking the contrabandists killed Mrs. Crane?” The inspector opened the door and held it for Harris.
“If she had stumbled on their activities—”
“I know my felons, sir. These are businessmen, not murderers.”
When Vandervoort left the building, Harris went back down to Station No.1 and asked again for the sergeant. Morgan answered evasively. Devlin let slip that the sergeant was under lock and key and not able to be seen, though plainly to be heard.
“All the girls they smile at me,” rang out from the farthest lock-up cell, “a comin’ through the rye.”
Harris escaped onto the scorched yellow dust of the square. The heat beat down on his shoulders and rose through the soles of his shoes. Holding his top hat between the sun and his eyes, he stared down Wellington, Front and Palace Streets and up Nelson to where Jarvis began north of Queen. Vandervoort had vanished, but the Waterloo veteran still sat in the shade of the portico. Perhaps those moist eyes were not as empty as they seemed.
“Two minutes ago a tall, red-haired man in checks came out this door,” said Harris as he put another coin in the high shako hat.
“Flemish name—I forget what.”
“Did you happen to notice which way he went?”
“He’s gone for a glass at the Dog and Duck, same as every day at five.” The veteran pointed to a hotel entrance on West Market Square.
Shame on Vandervoort! He was late this afternoon, a disappointment to his friends. But sarcasm would not do. Harris’s indignation and anxiety required release in action. He decided against the Dog and Duck and started home to change into clothes he could ride in. The veteran called him back.
“Take that second sixpence of yours,” he said. “I ain’t a paid spy.”
Banshee was put through her paces, culminating in a three-mile gallop west along the lakeshore. The seven minutes and a half it took her wasn’t her best time, but close to it. Harris had bought her for endurance and disposition, not speed.
He stretched in the saddle and wiped his forehead as the horse picked her way through the scrub pine at the mouth of the Humber River. Their approach sent a brown-and-buff wader flying off in a zigzag with a rasping cry. Less easily distracted than the snipe, an osprey continued to hover on beating wings just above the water’s surface.
The birds and—more particularly—the variety of wildflowers had drawn Theresa to the Humber Valley often before her marriage. Harris began to work his way upstream, if not inch by inch then yard by yard. In less than three hours, night would fall.
Where the banks were too spongy to ride, he guided Banshee over the shale and limestone stream bed. He stopped to question fishermen. He dismounted to inspect footprints, bread crusts, paper scraps, and every other sign of human passage.
The vale north of Bâby Point had provided most of the items for Theresa’s botanical inventory, so he took extra time to survey this ground on foot. Names he could no longer match to plants ran unbidden through his head—painted cup, viburnum, helleborine.
Suddenly, he heard the leaves rustle behind him. He grabbed a fallen tree branch and spun around just in time to see the retreating red-brown back of a snowshoe hare.
As the shadows lengthened, Harris left the valley. He rode back to Toronto in the dark, making fruitless inquiries at every inn along Dundas Street. During the intervals, he reflected that such random leisure-time excursions stood no chance of leading him to Theresa. He would willingly have left the search to others—to the authorities, to the experts. If only such people existed.
He had prolonged this afternoon’s interview with Vandervoort in the continually frustrated hope of receiving some assurance of official diligence or competence. For all his