Next morning, I found Inspector Sanderson no more convinced than I was that the rumour of threats against the life of the painter Nora Britton would lead anywhere. Nonetheless, the source of the report — rector of the church where the mural was being painted — was owed the courtesy of a face-to-face interview with a detective. Was social status the ace of trumps for the inspector? You never heard that from me, but he was always aware of a citizen’s place in the pecking order and tried to accommodate it. For my part, I’d have been just as happy to speak to a street sweeper. Anything to get out of the office on my own.
Christ Church Grange Park lay a half-dozen blocks or so west of City Hall along Queen Street, not many minutes at a brisk walk. A morning temperature hovering around fifty degrees meant I wasn’t going to work up a sweat.
As I walked, I took note of the people I was sharing the streets and sidewalks with. It was a habit formed at the start of my police career when I pounded a beat. Today, though, there was something more. I was still sore about the rigged fight I’d paid to see last night. And had taken a girl to, a new date I’d wanted to impress. Jack Wellington had no reason I knew of to be afoot on Queen Street this morning, but I didn’t want to miss him on the off chance he was. I scrutinized every face.
To my left, south towards Union Station, lay the many office towers and sites where more towers — but taller — were scheduled to be built. Stenographer-typists and clerks of various descriptions went scurrying across my path in that direction to arrive ahead of their overlords — men sauntering along after them in morning coats and starched shirts with detachable stiff collars. One of the few benefits of the Great War was the coming into vogue of soft shirts with sewn-on soft collars. These were what we soldiers had been issued, and if they were smart enough for the city’s military heroes, they would without question do nicely in peacetime for those of us that didn’t have the misfortune to be chairman of the board.
The people I passed, those walking east towards Queen and Yonge while I walked west, likely included sales clerks, their pace quickened by the necessity to arrive at the shops in time to open the doors to the public.
The magnets drawing pedestrians north, to my right, were more varied. Lawyers were hastening into Osgoode Hall to argue their cases in one of the handsome courtrooms; well-dressed students were pressing into the lecture rooms of the Hall’s law school. Just behind the pillared and porticoed Osgoode Hall, however, and behind the stone towers and turrets of City Hall, all the way up to the hospitals on College Street stretched a neighbourhood known as the Ward, the city’s most notorious slum. Not a tenement-house slum typical of many a metropolis. Instead, in the Ward you’d find streets full of once respectable, now disintegrating, single-storey frame or roughcast houses with the addition of shacks inexpertly cobbled together from scraps and shoehorned into the miniature back yards. For fifty years, these had been the first dwellings of immigrants, impoverished refugees who paid low rents and got nothing back by way of maintenance or repairs. The land was valuable and becoming more so every year as the city grew, but few of the residents owned the premises they occupied. The landlords lived in Rosedale or Forest Hill. Comfortably remote from the smell and squalour, they were simply waiting for the chance to sell dear to some institution or company that required a site in the heart of town.
Men heading in or out of the Ward were, if lucky, factory or construction workers in denim overalls. Those denied salaried employment because they were unskilled or spoke or worshipped strangely might be ragpickers, bootleggers, or bookies’ touts. The women would sew or take in laundry, which they hung out to dry in sooty alleys. Some sold scrawny chickens or rabbits raised in spaces already crowded with children that just kept coming. More surprising than the seediness of many of the Ward’s residents was the carefully brushed and scrubbed appearance of others. Their clothes might be ill-fitting castoffs, but they took pride in looking clean and decent when they stepped out onto Queen Street.
Someone had told me that the Ward was where Jack Wellington had grown up. Jack Kaplinsky he was then. Unlikely, though, that he still had family here. As the old sheds got bulldozed, the evicted Jews and Italians had been moving west, into the Kensington Market area on the far side of University Avenue. Now that block was in turn becoming the sardine can of the least well off.
It was in this “New Ward,” not far from the art gallery, that I found Christ Church Grange Park. I made the mistake of referring to the detached house behind it as the manse, but the Reverend Eric Hutchinson put me straight on his doorstep, before I’d even been shown into his study.
“You’re betraying your Presbyterian background there, Mr. Shenstone. The Church of England in Canada calls this the rectory. We need not get into the difference between a rectory and a vicarage. That distinction has meaning only in the Church of England proper.”
Inspector Sanderson had warned me that Hutchinson was known for his precision of mind and could also be long-winded, but that I should hear him out. I’d also been told not to infer that the man lacked drive or ability from the fact that at age seventy plus he was still a priest and not a bishop.
A black-and-white photograph of the rector behind a radio microphone bearing the letters CFRB hung prominently on one study wall, while another was decorated with one of him pouring a glass of milk for a girl in a torn dress under a sign reading “Downtown Children’s Clinic.”
He seated me at the dining room table that served him as a desk and took a place opposite. Before either of us spoke, there was a moment of mutual summing up. He would have seen in me a clean-shaven, brown-haired, brown-eyed man of thirty-five years, a bit short for a cop perhaps, but someone otherwise meeting popular expectations in terms of physique. Someone you might put on a tug-of-war team, though not heavy enough for the anchor. My wardrobe was far from dapper. Some policemen wore plain clothes as if they were a uniform — made-to-measure if they could stretch their pay that far. The elderly Detective Sergeant Parsons came to mind. My grey ready-to-wear suit needed a pressing; the four-in-hand knot in my tie was never chokingly tight. From what he could see, Eric Hutchinson might have concluded that my shoes under his table needed polishing. He wouldn’t have been wrong.
Meanwhile, looking across the table, I noted that the rector had white hair, large ears, and creases bracketing his firm mouth. The flesh of his face was lined with experience, but taut. His neck appeared to fit neatly within his starched clerical collar. Neither stout nor emaciated, he sat erect and still except for his pale hands, which restlessly nudged about the table before him two or three hand-written pages of notes. What I’d noticed first about his appearance, though, before any of this, was his silver-rimmed pince-nez spectacles, a style which had been common enough towards the end of the last century. On an older face today, they could look like a stale holdover. Not on him. Perhaps it was the sharply focused copper-brown eyes behind the lenses.
I kicked off the interview on a formal note. The public expected it.
“Mr. Hutchinson, I’m advised you have information relevant to the death of Nora Britton. Something you didn’t mention when you telephoned the police to report finding her body, or afterwards when Constable Nanos came to the scene.”
“Just so. Why didn’t I speak up? At first, I was too shocked at seeing her lying crumpled on the floor of the chancel. In life, she didn’t give the impression of being a small woman. She had a quiet radiance that seemed to fill the space around her. But in death she looked no bigger than a child. A dead child — there is no more pitiful sight. And then, later, when I had my wits more about me …” The rector’s resonant voice trailed off, but he quickly adjusted his pince-nez and resumed his professorial air. “Mr. Shenstone, I’ve always disliked being the retailer of tittle-tattling gossip, and what I heard may be no more than that. So I said nothing. Only when I saw Nora’s death written up in the papers as unequivocally an accident did I experience a change of heart. I felt angry on her behalf. It was as if she wasn’t getting her due from any of us, and who was I to put my aversion to telling tales out of school above her need for justice?”
“I understand that this gossip so-called took the form of threats. Who made them?”
“Detective, how much do you know about Nora Britton and the mural commission?”
Questions were mounting up into a log jam. I added one more: “Do you plan on answering me eventually, Mr. Hutchinson?”
“Indeed, yes.”
“Swell,” I said. I was prepared to give the rector all morning as long as we were getting to the bottom of this death. I was in no rush to get back to the office. “You haven’t had another change of heart?”
“Nothing like that, Mr. Shenstone.”
“All I’ve read is the constable’s report. It doesn’t give the background.”
“Allow me to supply it. The previous church on this site, the old St. Pancras, burned down forty-three years ago.” Hutchinson shifted his notes and looked to confirm that the number he’d mentioned was accurate. A small smile told me it was. “The present structure is a late Victorian replacement, a third larger than its predecessor. But there was a price to be paid for the enlargement. As this area was already built up, the new east wall had to be constructed flush against the glove factory next door. The customary east window behind the altar was out of the question. Instead, it was suggested that a mural be painted on that wall. In 1910, the Art Gallery of Toronto — at the time called the Art Museum of Toronto — moved into the old Boulton house, known as the Grange. Art-loving members of our congregation, wishing to celebrate our proximity to this cultural institution, moved to have the new St. Pancras renamed Christ Church Grange Park. In this atmosphere, the mural idea gained in popularity, but still with no agreement on a subject or how such an ambitious painting was to be paid for. Meanwhile, the change of name proceeded with little expenditure and, not coincidentally, little debate. Then came the war — among the many consequences of which was to give the mural project an urgency and a theme. Almost from the moment of the Armistice, there was talk of a suitable memorial for the twenty-eight men of the congregation who fell in France and Belgium. Last year, one of our more affluent parishioners — yes, we do have them, as well as the poor — moved beyond talk. Sir Joseph Deane undertook to sponsor a competition to see who could come up with the best design for an east-wall painting that would honour our war dead.”
“And Nora Britton won,” I said, to nudge the narrative along.
“Not the first competition.” Hutchinson seemed to take a grim satisfaction in the complexity of his tale. “Not Nora Britton — her husband. I should make it clear that the judges were instructors from the most respected academies — the Ontario College of Art, the Slade School, the Art Institute of Chicago. And the judging was blind. The judges knew nothing whatever about the entrants, nothing outside the submissions themselves. Their choice of the best design was unanimous. I can see you have a question, detective. Go on.”
“Why did Mr. Britton not get the commission?”
“Exactly. And the answer is: because his name is not Britton, but Koch.”
Hutchinson pronounced it koc. “Spell that please,” I said.
The rector did so. “And his birthplace is Hanover, Germany. When the winner was announced, the protests began. We had a mural committee consisting of myself, Sir Joseph Deane, and two other parishioners — who, truth to tell, left everything to us. Members of the congregation told the committee that the verdict of the judges must be set aside. Our boys had been killed by Germans, and it would be a travesty and an insult to let a German paint their memorial. May I ask if you served overseas?”
“Four years, infantry,” I said. “It’s no secret.”
Still, not many people asked anymore. It wasn’t often that I thought of those four years as one continuous stretch of time, the hours of waiting in barracks or a trench, the shelling and the poison gas, the named battles and the lightning raids, all strung together. All that time our enemies had been Germans, all right, but I never could feel one with the German-haters. If I harboured any distaste for the people and their names, it rarely came to my attention.
“I was too old to offer my services as a chaplain,” Hutchinson continued. “There was work to do on the home front, of course, but I’m uncomfortable criticizing the attitudes of men like you, who faced the foe directly. One of the loudest voices raised in opposition to letting Koch paint the mural was that of a young man who’d served in the merchant marine. Every moment he was on the water, he lived with the fear of being torpedoed, aware that if he survived the sinking of his ship there would be no room on the attacking U-boat for prisoners and that none would be taken. I told Sir Joseph that I didn’t think a sermon from me on turning the other cheek would be enough to allow the winning design to be executed and received in the proper spirit of solemn remembrance. I could see that such a sermon was needed, right enough, but judged it best delivered once the dust had settled and passions cooled.”
“And what did Joe Deane think?”
I had just managed to place the sponsor of the mural competition. Joseph Deane, the pulp and paper man, president of Chapleau Forest Industries. It was said that Joe wouldn’t know a forest if he were lost in one, and had certainly never made the five-hundred-mile trip to the town of Chapleau. He may never have been farther north than the cottage country of Lake Simcoe. His days were spent cultivating world markets, acquiring smaller or ailing concerns, and generally making deals on the stock exchanges of Bay Street and Wall Street. He’d done well enough at it to donate miles of paper for recruiting and bond posters during the war. He’d even paid for the advertising talent that made those posters so persuasive, and for these contributions had been awarded a baronetcy in 1916 or ’17. Soldiers’ jokes about city-slicker Joe were generally good-natured; he could have been one of the war profiteers and wasn’t.
“Sir Joseph,” Hutchinson insisted with some severity, “asked me to call a meeting of the congregation. He knew it would be contentious. Even his own sister, Mary-Maud Deane, was against the Koch design.”
Before the rector could get farther, the study door was knocked on and immediately opened by a full-figured, fiftyish woman in a pink apron smudged with flour.
“Mr. Leavitt is here again about the Children’s Clinic, Eric. He said you were expecting him.”
Hutchinson got up and went to speak to her in an undertone. “Very well, my dear,” he concluded before she left the room and he returned to his chair. To me, he said, “This man is a lay representative of the Goel Tzedec synagogue. I was not expecting him specifically this morning, but his visits at any hour no longer surprise me. His congregation can’t seem to abide the health and nutritional aid Christ Church is providing to his poorer coreligionists, even though they need it desperately.”
“The mural meeting, Mr. Hutchinson,” I reminded him. “I assume it was decided to hold a second competition.”
“Not then and there. Before we got that far, the gathering broke up in rancour. Oh, it started pleasantly enough. Sir Joseph Deane arrived in a jovial mood — confident that a man like himself, accustomed to subduing to his will the money men of New York, would find little challenge in guiding a parish meeting out of error. He started his remarks with evidence that Herman Koch is an artist of the first rank. Paintings of his have been bought by the National Gallery. Paintings of his were chosen to represent Canada at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley — where they attracted favourable notice from The Times. The Christ Church mural design was thoroughly up to this standard, impressing the three judges with its beauty and power. But, Sir Joseph said, the congregation didn’t have to take his word for the quality of Herman Koch’s work: he had brought with him a magic lantern projector and slides of Koch’s paintings together with those of two leading contemporaries for comparison. That’s when a grandfather in the front row called out, ‘Never mind the slides; the man’s German.’ Sir Joseph affably challenged the gathering to look carefully and see if they could distinguish the works of the Canadian-born Lawren Harris or the British-born Frederick Varley from those of the German-born Herman Koch. He pointed out that Koch had come to Canada with his parents in 1896, at age nine.”
“Did Herman Koch ever apply for naturalization?” I asked.
“I was just coming to that,” said the rector. “He became a British subject and Canadian citizen when he turned twenty-one, the earliest he could legally do so.”
“Go on.”
“Well! At this point in the meeting, a leading member of the congregation, son of the Methuselah in the front row and father of that merchant sailor I mentioned earlier, said — here, I’ve written down his exact words — ‘Naturalization of an individual does not make him a Canadian in the true sense of the word. He may be naturalized, but he does not come in on an equal footing in any sense.’ This gentleman went on to say that asking Koch to paint the memorial mural was ‘like asking the relatives of a murdered man to accept a memorial or tomb constructed by the cousin of the man who committed the murder.’
“Our church wardens both agreed. One, an art collector in a minor way, claimed the style of Koch’s design was Germanic, not British in the least. Sir Joseph knew his brief and wasn’t about to yield a single point. He replied that Lawren Harris had studied art for four years in Berlin and that it was much more likely that his work showed German influences than that they should be found in the work of a painter who had received his artistic education exclusively in North America. Chicago, Montreal, and New York.
“In the end, however, evidence and reason stood no chance. A war amputee, who before 1914 had been a telephone lineman and keen amateur football player, said that a mural designed by a German-born artist would dishonour our war dead, and that he’d sooner spit on it than look at it. Plainly the tone of the assembly had become too intemperate to allow for the viewing of Sir Joseph’s slides. Herman Koch’s design, however admirable, was now a lost cause. As a way out, I suggested we award the mural commission to the runner-up in the competition. Sir Joseph wouldn’t hear of it; he didn’t want to sit in his pew week after week confronted with artwork that the most perceptive judges of painting had certified second rate. When he’d delivered that ultimatum, my only course was to calm passions with a moment of prayer and adjourn the meeting. Do you smoke, Mr. Shenstone?”
Hutchinson opened a silver cigarette box and tilted it in my direction. I shook my head.
“Bad lungs,” I said. “Don’t let me stop you, though. I can see your flock’s a handful.”
“I wouldn’t put it quite that way. But, as I’m sure you’ve found for yourself, every group — however well-conducted in general — has its unstable elements.”
“What happened next?”
The rector adjusted his pince-nez and continued with his lighted cigarette in one hand and his notes in the other.
“The turmoil in our parish reached the bishop’s ears, and he telephoned to ask me how I intended to calm the waters. I told him and told our committee I could not permit Mr. Koch’s design to be executed, even if turning it down meant the loss for Christ Church Grange Park of a very valuable gift. I was prepared to hear Sir Joseph say he would be taking his largesse to another church. St. Simon-the-Apostle is actually closer to his home. My suspicions were misplaced: Sir Joseph Deane is a bigger man than that. Disappointed as he was, his first concern was that Herman Koch receive the promised prize money of $500. I agreed that was only just, at the same time pointing out that we still had to make some provision for memorializing our war dead, even if only by attaching a bronze plaque to a wall of the chancel. Sir Joseph then offered to sponsor a second competition, the conditions of which would stipulate that entrants must have been born in this country or in one of the countries with whom we were allied in the war.”
“I understand that Nora Britton was born in Aurora, Ontario. Is that correct?”
“A village thirty miles north of here. Yes, that’s what I told the constable that came to the church on Tuesday morning.”
“And she won that second competition?”
“Once we had screened candidates for eligibility, the judgement of artistic merit was again blind. An altogether different trio of experts agreed that the best design was that of Nora Britton.”
“Do you have a copy of the design here?”
“Sir Joseph Deane has a copy. You’d have to see him about it. I couldn’t even give you a description, but he’ll enthuse about it and point out its many excellences. He’s just as keen on this idea for the memorial mural as he was on the one before. Perhaps more so: he recognized Miss Britton as an artist that had painted sympathetic streetscapes and portraits in the poverty-stricken neighbourhoods of our own parish. The mural committee breathed a sigh of relief.”
A happy ending, I thought, if you didn’t take later events into account. I understood that a long road remained to get us up to the winner’s death three days ago.
“Pin down some dates if you have them,” I said. “The announcement of the results of the two competitions for a start.”
Hutchinson put out his cigarette and re-sorted his notes. “April 1, 1926 for the first and for the second February 2, 1927.”
“Eight months ago. And when did Miss Britton actually start work in your church?”
“This past August. Not incidentally a time when church attendance falls off and some of what I’ve called our unstable elements are out of town.”
“These elements objected to Nora Britton’s getting the mural commission?”
“Not immediately. Well, there were murmurs that such a large and important job should have been given to a man. And the murmurs gained currency when members of the congregation met Miss Britton for the first time. As I say, she was small even for a woman. Doubts were raised as to whether she’d have the strength to execute a painting of over four hundred square feet. But our Women’s Auxiliary raised their voices for her loudly enough to drown out the early naysayers. No, the real trouble started later. In May of this year, someone brought it to the congregation’s attention that Nora Britton was married to Herman Koch. Neither artist had made any secret about the marriage, and it was mentioned in passing from time to time in various periodicals. But the objectors among us are not the sort to follow art news closely. The fact that Miss Britton was indeed the wife of Mr. Koch was exclaimed upon as if it had taken industrious sleuthing to break through a conspiracy of silence and bring this scandalous connection to light.”
“Was the marriage taken as a disqualification?”
“It seemed to license the know-nothings to pronounce Miss Britton’s design ‘Teutonic in conception.’ It was even suggested that the design was not Nora Britton’s at all, but rather her husband’s. In any event, it was totally out of accord with how ‘we British people’ think of our dead.”
Hutchinson raised an ironic eyebrow and looked for a reaction. I nodded him on.
“A fact conveniently overlooked is that many of our parishioners are not British at all but hail from a variety of European countries. Some are from the Far East. Not a few are former Catholics or Jews.” The rector waved a hand to one side. “Well, we handled the mural dissenters differently this second time around. No meeting was called. Sir Joseph Deane was adamant that we stick to our guns. I myself advised the church wardens that I should not want to continue as rector of Christ Church Grange Park if Nora Britton were deprived of the commission. In two or three weeks, the clamour died down. I heard no more complaints through the spring and summer. Which brings us to September.”
“What happened last month?” I asked. Having done without breakfast as an economy measure, my stomach was starting to think of lunch.
“When the people that had taken a vacation from church in August returned after Labour Day, they were disturbed to find a scaffold erected at the east end of the chancel. The mural became less theoretical and, for the few anti-German zealots, more threatening. This was when I heard language that, in the light of Nora Britton’s death, I now think it my duty to report.”
“Did these threats come from the family you alluded to — the sailor, his father, and grandfather?”
“Principally.”
“It’s time to tell me their names, Mr. Hutchinson.”
“Stillwater. Archie Stillwater is the sailor.”
“And what did you hear him say?”
“That women are no good with heights. Most likely ‘Frau Koch’ would fall off her scaffold and break her neck, and Christ Church would be rid of her. He’d even be happy to climb up there with her and show her the dangers.”
“And did he seem in earnest?”
“He might claim now he was making a joke, but I didn’t take it as one. Mind you, I don’t imagine he actually pushed her to her death. She was alone when we broke into the sanctuary and found her. All the doors had been locked from the inside.”
I got the rector to look up Archie Stillwater’s address for me. He didn’t make a fuss about it. Then I asked what else he’d heard of a similar nature.
“Archie’s grandfather, Jordan Stillwater, is a retired pharmacist. He lives at the same address. Some think he’s getting senile; others say he’s just outspoken. He said, not to me but in my hearing, that his work had taught him how to prepare poisons the police had no way of detecting, and that if he wanted to he could rid Christ Church of this German-loving … woman. He used another word I won’t repeat. He was addressing one of the church wardens, a man Mr. Stillwater thought opposed to Miss Britton’s being granted the commission.”
“How about the amputee, the man that talked of spitting on Mr. Koch’s mural? Was he equally opposed to letting Nora Britton do the job?”
“His name is Carl Moretti. I didn’t hear anything from him one way or the other. All the same, I’ll jot down his address for you too.”
“Any nastiness from anyone else?”
“A few grumblings, no explicit threats. I should assure you that hostility to Miss Britton was by no means universal. I’d say rather that most people, when they actually met her, took to her right away. Some became ardent admirers.”
“Including you,” I said.
“Including me,” Eric Hutchinson replied simply. “I have a photo here I’ve been meaning to frame and hang with the others in this room.”
The rector went to a bookshelf and between a Bible and a hymnal found a manila envelope. From it he drew an eight-by-ten-inch photo and looked at it a moment with a softened expression on his face before handing it to me. It was of the rector and a woman, both in profile, standing in a church. The picture showed him pointing up to the left at what I thought must be the wall to be decorated, the east wall of the chancel. At his side, a half step back and nearer the camera, Nora Britton was looking where he pointed. She was indeed small and striking. Dark, straight hair was pulled tightly back from a centre part into a chignon low on the nape of her neck. If a face appeals to you, as hers did strongly to me, it’s usually a waste of breath to try to break it down into the constituents of beauty. Other people may have no use for a straight nose, full lips, a clean jaw line, and pale, unblemished skin. All I can say is they looked good on her. She wore a loose white smock with wide lapels and cuffs, wore it unbuttoned and secured around the waist by a man’s wide leather belt. Under her right arm she held a portfolio case.
“What you can’t see in the photo,” Hutchinson said, “is that she was kind and soft-spoken, quietly courageous, and immensely talented. I want to do what I can for her. I wish it were more.”