As soon as I set foot back in the detective office, I was told Inspector Sanderson was waiting for my report. I stormed into his glass-walled office, and before he could get out his first question, I said I wanted to see an autopsy report on Nora Britton.
Sanderson lit one of his filthy pipes and to make matters worse told me to shut the door. I didn’t quite.
“The coroner didn’t think any autopsy necessary,” he said. “Clearly an accidental fall. Asked what I could expect when a woman was allowed to swan around up on a scaffold. Blithering fool.”
“Has he released the remains to the family, sir?”
“If he has, he’ll have to get them back. I’ve told his chief we need a post-mortem on this lady. And if she’s already been buried, he’ll have to issue a warrant to disinter. So you believe Mr. Hutchinson?”
“I believe there was nasty talk about the deceased, but that’s a long way from murder. The church sanctuary was locked from the inside at the time of death, and no one else was found inside when the rector and the caretaker broke in. So it’s unlikely she was pushed off that scaffold. If the autopsy results rule out poison, I don’t see any reason to investigate further.”
Inspector Sanderson pinched his lower lip and looked at me from under his black eyebrows. I was afraid I was now going to be reassigned while we waited for those results. None of the cases Sanderson was likely to put me on held the promise of useful work. At one end of the class spectrum, an Atlantic-hopping baroness claimed to have had jewellery stolen from her suite at the King Edward Hotel, an investigation much better suited to Detective Sergeant Rudy Crate with his authentically plummy English drawl. At the other end, our department had for the past week been watching a suspected bawdy house on Chestnut Street, an assignment already boring Detective Sergeants Nichol and Lazenby to twitching distraction.
“While we’re waiting, though,” I said, “I could just check up on the source of the poison threats, a man the rector thinks has some sort of police record.”
“All right, Paul. That shouldn’t take long. Then see if Rudy needs a hand.”
I shut the inspector in with his pipe smoke on the way out.
“You may like the smell of rotting fish,” said the detective at the desk next to mine, “but for the sake of the rest of us do you think you could find somewhere else to store your picnic?”
Parsons was pointing at Nora Britton’s knapsack, which I’d left on the floor by my chair. In the stuffy detective office, the stink was pretty bad.
I hoisted it up onto my desk and undid the metal catches. Inside I found a Thermos half full of what smelled like coffee and two wax paper packages. One contained a sandwich, with a couple of bites taken out of it. The contents were some sort of grey paste. Perhaps tuna salad. In the other I found three hermit cookies and enough crumbs to suggest Nora Britton had eaten the fourth. If the autopsy showed the painter had been poisoned, we’d want coffee, sandwich, and cookies all tested. I considered sending them immediately to the province’s one-man crime lab, Professor Dalton Linacre at the University of Toronto. But he was cruelly overworked by police departments around Ontario and had as well responsibilities to the chemistry department he headed. We detectives had been warned not to make him do tests on spec. To oblige my neighbour, I took the repacked knapsack down to the evidence lockers.
Back upstairs the department files smelled of nothing worse than dust. I quickly found that Jordan Stillwater’s record of contacts with the police didn’t amount to much — charges dating back to the Prohibition years just ended. It seemed that as a pharmacist Stillwater had sold some customers alcohol without the requisite doctor’s prescription or had sold more than prescribed. That period had made criminals of a lot of us; if I personally had never got my rye from a drugstore, it was only because it would have spoiled the taste for me to think of it as medicine.
While I was at it, I checked police records to see if Jordan’s grandson had ever come to the attention of the law, and here I found something more serious. In 1924 the ex-sailor had participated in a brawl at a dance and had been fined for the crime of common assault. Then in 1926 he was suspected of beating up a Chinese restaurant owner who was employing a Caucasian girl in his kitchen. Archie admitted removing the woman from the premises. He had evidently removed her with some force as she was subsequently treated for a broken arm. No charges were laid in either case because of the two victims’ refusal to testify. The investigating officer was of the opinion that the woman’s silence was due to the influence of her parents, who were appalled to find out where she’d been working and overjoyed to have her out.
Archie sounded like a nasty piece of work. I’ll admit I couldn’t see this brawler as a poisoner, even though he might have had access to restricted substances through his pharmacist grandfather. No, from what I’d read and seen, men that used poison to murder tended to be schemers rather than scrappers, scholarly types — often doctors like Cream or Crippen. I wondered if there might be another way Archie could have killed Nora Britton and left her body inside a church locked from the inside. It seemed impossible — unless he’d been hiding inside the church Tuesday morning when the rector broke in and managed to escape unnoticed. I hoped a post-mortem on Nora Britton could be performed this afternoon. I might pursue the Archie Stillwater angle if no trace of poison was found.
I looked up from my desk to see Inspector Sanderson striding towards me. From the furrows in his high forehead I surmised I wasn’t going to be seeing an autopsy report any time soon.
“Paul, I’ve just been on the phone to the coroner. He says Nora Britton’s remains were released to the next of kin Wednesday morning. He’s in the process of issuing a warrant to get them back, but it’s Friday afternoon and I’ve no faith in his sense of urgency. You’d better get in touch with Herman Koch and warn him not to have his wife buried in the meantime. He doesn’t appear to have a phone, so you’ll have to go round.”
Constable Nanos’s report was still on my desk. I scanned it for the address of the deceased. “Would that be Elizabeth Street?” I asked.
“No, Strachan Avenue south of King. As near as I can make out, it’s between the Mercer Reformatory and the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, on the site of the old Central Prison. His residence and studio appear to be in the former prison chapel. I haven’t been able to discover an actual street number, but you’ll find it.”
“By taxi, sir?”
“Streetcar,” said the impatient but thrifty inspector.
Friday was payday, so I was able to pick up my slim packet of banknotes on the way out to buy a paper and catch the King car.
The long ride out gave me an opportunity to see how the Daily Dispatch had reported last night’s fight. There was no article, just a record of the result with no suggestion that either Wellington or Hardcastle was bent. That didn’t mean Lariviere had some hold over the publisher, but you had to wonder. Meanwhile, Ruth’s big breakthrough onto the front page would have to wait. I hoped I’d live long enough to see it.
It was past four o’clock by the time I found the prison chapel, the weather still clear, sunny, and just about cool enough for mid-October. Isolated in the middle of an assortment of newer sheds and factories, the soot-stained red brick structure looked about fifty years old. The plain hipped roof carried no spire or cross. Only the tall, round-topped windows on the second of two storeys suggested a hall suited to a gathering of worshippers. The rectangular footprint of the building was broken here and there by the stumps of projecting walls, walls that would have connected the chapel to the now-demolished remainder of the Central Prison.
I walked all the way round the building and found three doors. My knocking at two of these went unanswered. The third was opened by a woman with curling, dark hair, held off her face by a man’s cloth cap of indeterminate colour. Her face was lined, her arms muscular. She looked me over while resting her hands in the pockets of a clay-spattered, blue-checked house dress. She told me that Herman Koch’s door was on the opposite side of the building. I told her Mr. Koch didn’t appear to be home.
“Was it about having your portrait painted?” she asked in a deep, husky voice.
“Do I look as if I could afford it?” I admit I was entertained by the thought.
“I don’t judge people by their clothes,” said the woman. “But if you don’t have the cash for a three-quarter length in oils, you might still consider a charcoal head for a hundred dollars.”
“Or a terra cotta bust?”
She wiped the back of her right hand across her upper lip. “Even if you were serious, I haven’t the time. Are you a bill collector?”
“Does Mr. Koch get many visits from them?”
The woman shrugged, her lips pressed tight. Time I came clean.
“Detective Sergeant Paul Shenstone,” I said. “Mr. Koch is not in any trouble with the police, but it’s urgent I see him.”
“Ernestine Lopez. Herman likes to paint by natural light, so if he isn’t home now he soon will be. He’s only got an hour and a half till sundown. If you want to wait in my studio, you can. The partition wall between his space and mine isn’t up to much. We’ll hear when he comes in.”
Detective Sergeant Parsons liked to say that a Mr. Lopez out on Woodbine made Toronto’s best cigars, but Ernestine denied having any kin north of the Rio Grande.
I followed her through a ground floor storage area. By the light a few dirty windows let in, we picked our way among life-size and larger sculptures in plaster and stone. Some were of animals. Those of men and women were for the most part either nude or in uniform. We mounted a set of concrete stairs to the former sanctuary. This space was divided in half by a transverse plank wall that stopped well below the high ceiling. On the near side of the partition, Ernestine Lopez had organized her studio and living space. She pointed me to a wooden kitchen chair and went promptly back to work on a yard-high model of an infantryman bowed in sorrow over a grave marker. Rather than grieving bare-headed, the soldier wore his metal helmet. I understood that his position was meant to be still vulnerable to enemy fire and that he would be returning to his battle station. To pay tribute to his comrade, he had snatched from the struggle the briefest moment. The image was wrong in some ways, the cross too official-looking, too precisely engraved. Still, I felt — across the gap of gender and situation — the compassion that guided Miss Lopez’s hand.
“For a war memorial?” I asked.
“No guff!” She was using a tool to deepen a crease in the sleeve of the soldier’s tunic.
“Where?”
“Buckland Lake, Ontario. You won’t have heard of it — so small you could drive through and miss it. But still eight names to list on the pedestal.”
I said nothing. I was thinking of the cost to such a small community of those eight deaths, with the cost of a statue on top. Marking their loss, but also their pride.
Ernestine filled in the silence. “Their loss, my gain. Painters could be war artists, recording the action and the wreckage. Then, a year after the Armistice, not needed anymore. The appetite for sculpture is just getting started and won’t run its course for years yet.”
And a painter with a German name, it occurred to me, might not even have found work as a Canadian war artist. Sales to the National Gallery in Ottawa, while good for the reputation, couldn’t be frequent. Ernestine Lopez made it sound as if Herman Koch, unlike herself, had not enough work. He wasn’t too busy, at least, to take on new portrait commissions. I wondered if he had been financially dependent on Nora Britton.
“Did Mr. Koch’s wife live here with him?” I asked.
“He’ll answer that if he feels like it.” Ernestine Lopez nodded at the plank wall, on the other side of which someone had just started to pick out a tune on the piano. “There’s no way through. You’ll have to go downstairs, out, and around to the other door. I’ll tell him to let you in.”
I thanked her. The music stuck in my head on my way around. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
A stocky man, five or six years my senior, met me at the door. Herman Koch’s eyes were bloodshot and showed a lot of white below the pupils. He wore a green knitted tie and a brown corduroy suit, one that looked like he’d had it on for many months. Although his brown hair was receding around a widow’s peak, he retained a shabby, bohemian glamour.
“Mr. Koch,” I said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Did you know Nora?”
“No — I’m investigating her death. Can we go up to your studio?”
Koch stepped outside and locked his door. “You can say what you have to say out here.”
His voice was firm and calm with no trace of a foreign accent. I went straight to the point.
“Have Nora Britton’s remains been buried?”
“No.”
I was glad to hear it. Next of kin, however composed they appeared once their loved ones were in the ground, almost invariably got upset at the prospect of disinterment.
“Where are they?”
“Buffalo.”
“Buffalo, New York?”
“Yes.”
“Is she being buried there?” I couldn’t make this out. Her birth family was supposedly in Aurora.
“No.”
He was playing with me, but I’d rather this than have him walk back inside his studio and slam the door in my face. While I was thinking how to get him to open up, I took my flask out from an inside jacket pocket. I sipped some whisky and handed the flask to Koch. He put it to his lips and drained it, returning it to me neck down to rub it in that he’d left me dry. I saw him smile for the first time.
I smiled back. “When did you send Nora’s remains to Buffalo?”
“Tuesday afternoon.”
“What for?”
“To have her cremated.”
I felt a hole open in my stomach. I took Koch at his word about the cremation. I’d read of cadavers sent to Buffalo just because no crematorium was yet operating in Ontario. The one slight ray of hope arose from my certainty that he was lying about how soon Nora’s remains had gone. The coroner hadn’t released them, according to Inspector Sanderson, until Wednesday morning. Perhaps when I arrived outside his studio, Koch was returning from making the shipping arrangements.
“The cremation has to be prevented,” I said. “The coroner is ordering an autopsy.”
“Too late,” said Koch. “It’s already happened. An autopsy wouldn’t serve any purpose anyway.”
“Give me the phone number or at least the name of the crematorium.”
“I don’t know anything about it. Bates Burial Company here in Toronto handled all the arrangements.”
I left him without a word, making my way at something between a walk and a run to the nearest business on Strachan Avenue. The John Inglis Company boiler factory granted me extensive use of one of their phones. My first call was to police HQ at City Hall. I got one of the detective sergeants there to phone every crematorium in Buffalo with a view to preventing Nora Britton’s remains from being destroyed. It was my good fortune to pass this task to Harry O’Brian, one of my younger and more reliable colleagues. I figured he had as good a chance as anyone of getting Inspector Sanderson to authorize the long-distance charges. Next, I called Bates Burial Company, who unsurprisingly had never heard of Nora Britton or Herman Koch. Then with the help of the City Directory, I started in on all the other undertakers in the city, working from Koch’s neighbourhood outward. Telford Squires acknowledged having Nora Britton’s remains picked up from the morgue at Grace Hospital on Wednesday and held at their Dufferin Street funeral parlour while arrangements were made to send them out of the country. The late Miss Britton’s casket had been put on a Buffalo train this morning and picked up in that city by a hearse from the Buffalo Cremation Company for transfer to their facility on Delavan Avenue. I had hopes that the cremation might have been held over from Friday to Monday. Perhaps there was a backlog of bodies to be burned. Perhaps the staff of the Buffalo Cremation Company had wanted to start the weekend early. I was about to phone them when an Inglis clerk informed me there was a call for me from Detective Sergeant O’Brian on another line. We were, Harry reported, an hour too late. Nora Britton had been the oven’s last client of the day and the week.