Five o’clock on the morning of April 21, 1926 found me walking Toronto’s waterfront and contemplating stowing away on a lake freighter. I had still not phoned the inspector. Much as I’d learned about the case since last speaking to him, there was nothing I wanted to say. Ivan MacAllister and Robert “Tinker” Taylor both should have been named as suspects in Digby Watt’s murder, but to do so would have seemed to me a sellout of fellow soldiers. Now I was afraid Sam Godwin would turn out to be the third survivor of that bad shell before Ypres, the Sam who that day had spoken—in a roundabout way—of castrating Digby Watt.
Nor did I care to reveal the new dirt on Olive, that she too seemed to have a motive going back to the war and to Digby Watt’s profitable manufacture of shells.
Then again, I didn’t believe I could excuse myself from the case without having to face Sanderson’s awkward questions. I’d wanted to be a detective in order to make my corner of the world a little fairer, but in this case I had to see justice on the side of the vigilantes. Patience in adversity, Edith said, was the theme of the little book Digby had taken to carrying. I couldn’t see that he had known much in the way of adversity—not until getting shot. Perhaps he’d been praying his victims be sent patience so they wouldn’t rise up against him.
The more I learned about Digby Watt the less I wanted anybody punished for his murder. This could not be explained. Better to disappear.
Not on the water, however. I remembered why, twelve years before, I’d joined the infantry rather than the navy. It wasn’t the fear of drowning. You could drown in a trench. But on land—wet or dry—you were never far from women. Leave might be granted and could sometimes be earned. And, if not, a wound of the right sort could bring you within hours into the company of pretty nurses. I’d soon learned not to wish lightly for wounds, too many of which were of the wrong sort altogether, but the only ship I ever pined for was the troop ship that would bring me home.
I caught the first streetcar of the morning back to my apartment, where a bath, a shave, a pot of coffee and a change of clothes gave me as much new hope as I could expect without a drink. It was certainly a day to be alert. I stowed my flask in a dresser drawer before I left for the house on Linsmore Crescent.
It was still early, and Digby Watt’s onetime sweetheart had not yet left for work. She and her aunt—introduced to me as Amelia Prentis—expressed alarm at my early unannounced appearance, but I assured them I simply had some follow-up questions. Mrs. Prentis, still in her housecoat, left the living room to me and her niece. Olive wore a green dress even dingier in tone than her brown one and sported no corsage. Her initial manner was suspicious but less distant than yesterday. Otherwise, she looked as I recalled her. We seated ourselves as before, she on the chesterfield, I in the wing chair nearest the hall. It didn’t occur to me either time that this meant turning my back to the door.
“Miss Teddington,” I began, “did you have a sister that worked for Peerless Armaments in Hamilton?”
She blinked and swallowed hard. I saw the grief that had been altogether absent the day before when we had been discussing Digby Watt.
“Yes. I did.”
“And did she die as a result of that work?”
Olive nodded.
“Tell me about it.”
Olive bit her lip and looked down at her hands where they lay knotted in her lap.
“Did something explode at the plant?”
“No. Oh, no, it was no factory accident. She knew a girl that lost a finger when a fuse went off, and another who got her hair caught and pulled out in a lathe, but Janet . . .”
“Not an accident. Murder then?”
She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands.
“Savagery, at least. No policeman wanted to hear—not at the time.” Tears continued to mist Olive’s eyes, while a cruel little smile tugged up the corners of her lips. “Funny, isn’t it?”
This healthy young woman’s self-righteousness was beginning to grate on me. No, I hadn’t had a sibling die, and I respected her loss. But when it came to savagery, I could tell her first-hand stories that would send her screaming from the room with her hands over her ears.
“I’m not laughing, Miss Teddington. What was the crime?”
“Rape. Violent rape.”
Still a hard word for a young woman to use in mixed company. Now we were getting somewhere.
“At the plant?” I asked.
“On her way home. There were two men, wearing caps pulled low and scarves up around their faces, but Janet knew who they were. The father and son that ran the gas station, one too old to fight in the army, one too young. So they used to say. They had enough fight in them to break my sister’s nose.”
“And why wouldn’t the police take her complaint?”
“All because it was six in the morning she got off work instead of six at night.”
I begged her pardon.
“Girls on the night shift had to take their chances, the constables said. There was a war on. It was a policy not to report or prosecute attacks on female munitions workers so that recruitment for night work at the plant wouldn’t suffer. Digby’s plant.”
This was a new one on me, but then so many crazy things had been done for the sake of Saving Civilization that I don’t know why I was surprised. I imagined myself, a policeman, behind the counter early one morning when this battered and violated young war worker had to be given the cold shoulder. Could I have carried out my instructions? Then I remembered—no need for imagination—myself an infantryman, again in the morning, preparing to go over the top. Never mind the bad shells; had the good shells, the ones that cut the wire to make possible the advance of my platoon—had those shells been bought at such a price?
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What happened to her?”
“She had a sweetheart overseas that she had been saving herself for. She couldn’t write to him as if nothing had happened. And she couldn’t tell him. It would have been hard enough for her to admit what happened, even if the criminals had been brought to justice. Officially, though, there was no crime. Of course, it wasn’t till later that I worked this out. I shared a bedroom with her. I was six years younger, barely twelve in 1916 when this happened, so I was told almost nothing at the time. Janet stopped working night shifts. Then, ten weeks later, she was ‘in hospital’. Then she was dead. All my mother would say was that an operation had gone wrong. We weren’t to speak of it, to anyone, ever.”
Olive’s voice, while it wobbled a bit, stayed on the rails.
“What happened to her assailants?” I asked.
“The boy joined up and was killed. I think at Passchendaele. The father, last I heard, still runs Billings and Son in the north end. My family left the neighbourhood.”
“If you could snap your fingers,” I said, “and make Billings disappear from the face of the earth, would you do it?”
She looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. Then her features settled thoughtfully.
“The thing is,” she said at last, “I never could snap my fingers.” Her right thumb moved noiselessly over her right middle finger.
“That’s good enough,” I said, snapping my own fingers. “I would.”
“I don’t have to see him. He has disappeared—from my life anyway.”
“And Digby Watt? Did you want him gone, after what his plant did to Janet?”
“Gone? Out of my sight, yes. Dead, no.”
“But you had a reason for wanting him dead.”
“I suppose so.”
“Then you lied yesterday, Miss Teddington, when you told me you had no reason for wanting him dead.”
“These are police tricks. I held him responsible for what happened to Janet. In my shoes, that might be a reason for you to want him dead. But it wasn’t a reason for me.”
“Did you kill Digby Watt?”
“No.”
“Miss Teddington, why did you come to Toronto last fall?”
“To make a new start.”
“Were you living with your parents before you came?”
“With one or the other. My parents separated after Janet’s death. Neither household has been what you’d call easy to live in.”
“Did any member of your family ever speak of settling scores with Janet’s killers?”
“No!” Agitation was beginning to raise the pitch of her voice. “They’re not like that. They don’t think like that.”
“Did you come to this city with the intention of finding and confronting Digby Watt?”
“Not at all. Please—I didn’t know his name before I met him at the church. I didn’t even think of there being a man—a man like Digby—behind Peerless Armaments.”
“Try again,” I said. “I want the truth.”
“I believe Olive has answered your question, sergeant.”
Caught out in my first attempt to browbeat the girl. That’d teach me in future to keep my back to the wall.
I turned and saw Aunt Amelia, dressed for work in cream blouse and black jacket and skirt. She was a heavyset woman with a forbidding set of jowls and a flicker of nervous benevolence around the eyes. I didn’t know how long she’d been standing in the doorway.
“Come in, Mrs. Prentis,” I said, rising.
“I was wondering, sergeant, how much longer you were going to be. Olive and I have to get down to the shop. If you need more time with her, could you perhaps continue the interview there?”
“It shouldn’t be long,” I said, hastening to offer her my chair while I shifted to a rocker by the electric hearth. “Please join us.”
“Well . . .” Aunt Amelia sat, evidently in two minds about it.
“Mrs. Prentis, can you tell me why Miss Teddington came to live and work with you last fall?”
“I asked her to. With my husband gone, I needed help in the shop.”
“Before Miss Teddington’s arrival, did you know Digby Watt?”
“No, we didn’t move in the same circles.”
“What about at church?”
“My aunt and uncle were Anglicans,” said Olive. “She only started going to Danforth Avenue United when I came.”
The older woman nodded agreement on both counts.
“You had heard of him, though, Mrs. Prentis?”
“Oh, yes. In the papers, on the radio.”
“Mrs. Prentis, did you associate Digby Watt in any way with the death of Miss Teddington’s older sister Janet?”
Aunt Amelia, who had been sitting on the edge of the wing chair, allowed her shoulders to sag slightly and the chair back to take a little of her weight. Her voice, however, remained clear and definite.
“No,” she said.
“You do know what I’m talking about?”
Aunt Amelia blinked anxiously. Olive stared at the carpet.
“Yes,” said the aunt at last. “I know the story, but I never held Digby Watt responsible. He didn’t want Janet to suffer what she suffered.”
Olive looked at her incredulously.
“You knew all along? You knew, Aunt Amelia, before I ever came to live here that Digby Watt owned Peerless Armaments? You knew all the time I was walking out with Digby?”
“Yes, Olive, I knew. But he owned a dozen companies, each with hundreds of employees. He couldn’t look after each and every one and make sure none of them came to harm.”
“You knew, and you let me go out with him. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Don’t upset yourself now, Olive. You know you get easily upset. We won’t discuss this now.”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Prentis,” I intervened, “but I’d like to hear an answer to your niece’s question.”
“Oh, sergeant, I’m sorry you have to stir up this ancient history. When you think of all the pain my sister’s family has been through . . . That’s just what I brought Olive to Toronto to get her away from.”
“You just said you asked me here because you needed my help,” declared Olive.
“I thought we could help each other. But really, Olive, I wanted what was best for you. I would have been nothing but pleased for you if you had left me in order to marry Digby Watt.”
Olive’s mouth worked speechlessly.
“And why,” I insisted, “did you not tell Miss Teddington about Digby Watt’s connection to Janet?”
“In the first place, I did not see a connection. In every business, accidents happen. Things occur which are neither foreseen nor wanted by the proprietor.”
“As your employee,” said Olive, “I guess I’ve been warned.”
“Olive! When you calm down, you’ll see how unjust that is. Why don’t you go and lie down? I’ll make do on my own this morning.”
Olive’s eyes narrowed. Without another word, she left the room. Unflinchingly accepting her angry looks, Aunt Amelia watched her go.
“She’s a good worker, sergeant, but she’s young—young even for her age. She sees the world in very cut and dried terms. To bring up the subject of Peerless Armaments would only have poisoned her mind against Digby—who was, from all one hears, not just a successful man, but a kind and generous one.”
“Wasn’t it inevitable, Mrs. Prentis, that she’d find out? In fact, it only took an hour with his children.”
“I hoped that by the time she found out, she’d be so fond of him that it wouldn’t matter, or wouldn’t matter so much. We have to keep hoping, sergeant. We have to look to the future, not dwell on the pain of the past, don’t you think? Surely the war taught us that, if nothing else.”
It’s amazing with what assurance people draw the lessons of war.
“All I know,” I said, “is that past pain is the bread and butter of a murder investigation.”
“Then you must investigate people who live in the past.” Amelia Prentis patted her auburn hair, from which all suspicion of grey had been artfully excluded. “I understand that everyone you interview is not a suspect. Truly I do. But still, I find it strange that you should want to question my niece twice in two days. Yes, she broke with Digby, but she would never have killed him.”
“Do you have any idea who did?”
“I don’t, sergeant.”
“Do you or your niece have a gun, Mrs. Prentis?”
“No, why would we?”
“You have a shop. You take in cash, I suppose. You might feel you wanted to protect it.”
“This is Toronto, not the wild west. No, I never felt the need. I’m much more likely to lose money by having the shop closed during business hours.”
“Have you ever shot a gun?”
“Yes. My father used to take me hunting. He thought it was part of living in this country, so he insisted on teaching all of his children to shoot.”
“And grandchildren?”
“That I wouldn’t know.”
“I didn’t see a garage. Do you or your niece have a car?”
“No, sergeant, neither of us drive. My shop is within walking distance, at Danforth and Coxwell.”
“I’ll make a point of looking in,” I said. “The night before last, between one thirty and two thirty a.m., were you and Miss Teddington both home?”
“Yes, certainly. And asleep.”
“What time did you last see her that night?”
“It would have been close to ten.”
“Could she have gone out after ten without your knowledge?”
“Impossible. I sleep with my bedroom door open, and the head of the stairs is just outside.”
Her voice was clear, calm, authoritative. I couldn’t help thinking what a credible witness Amelia Prentis would make. A formidable obstacle to any case against Olive.
“Could you have gone out without her knowledge?” I ventured.
“I could have, but I wouldn’t have left her alone at night. Certainly not without telling her. I promised my sister to take care of Olive.”
“And did your sister or her husband know Olive was seeing Janet’s former employer?”
“I have to go now.” She stood up, giving a brisk tug to the bottom of her suit jacket.
“Nevertheless,” I said.
“The answer to your question, sergeant, and it is the last one I’ll answer, is no.”