Don Gutteridge - Bloody Relations

The magistrate, who had taken many a shocking deposition in his day, showed little emotion during Marc’s ten-minute peroration. When Marc finished, Thorpe said matter-of-factly, “You’re suggesting this affair started out as a Tory plot to embarrass Lord Durham and inadvertently ended up as a murder?”

“I am.”

“But if Badger is guilty, why go to such lengths to demonstrate that he was, in effect, bribed to carry out what was intended to be no more than an elaborate and ill-advised prank?”

“A prank that could get Lord Durham recalled!” Marc was indignant.

“I’m speaking of the law here, Mr. Edwards. You yourself have just insisted that Mr. Hepburn’s plot was to lure young Ellice into at worst a compromising situation. Handford Ellice is an adult. He has a free will. He can say no to a glass of whiskey. So, unless you can prove that the lad was drugged and his comatose body literally dragged to the door of this brothel, you have no case against Alasdair Hepburn-for conspiracy, public mischief, or anything else.”

“I have testimony about the note.”

“Ambiguous at best, sir. After all, Badger was a sometime employee of Hepburn, and his sister’s been the household maid for several years. The mere fact that they communicated by letter is not an incriminating or even a suspicious activity.”

Marc was flabbergasted. He felt like accusing this blue-blooded Tory of protecting his own but bit his tongue instead.

“Don’t look so disconcerted, Edwards. If Lord Durham hired you to find the whore’s killer and disentangle Ellice from the mess, then it is to his advantage if Badger turns out, as you imply, to have murdered for purely personal motives. In that way, we can charge and hang him without any reference to who was sleeping beside the victim, since it’s irrelevant to the case. Nor has Badger any certain knowledge that it was Ellice. I take it that the madam is unaware of his identity?”

Marc nodded grimly.

“Well, then, Ellice is out of it, eh?” Thorpe gave Marc an avuncular and well-meant smile. “My advice to you is to leave the conspiracy stuff alone. It can only harm your effort to protect Lord Durham.”

“You are refusing, then, to give me a warrant to search Hepburn’s house and have him formally interrogated?”

“I am, but not for the reasons I just gave you as my personal advice. Until you produce Badger for me, you have not enough concrete evidence. No magistrate in the province would issue you a warrant on such flimsy grounds as you’ve provided.”

Marc sat too stunned to even nod his thanks to Thorpe for hearing him out or to say a courteous good-bye as the justice left the room. Still dazed, he thought he heard Cobb clumping up the walk. Marc hauled himself out of Gussie’s chair and went out to relay both the exciting and the galling news. As he closed the door behind him, he heard an exasperated squawk: “Where the hell’s my cheese!”

Sure enough, a constable was puffing red-faced towards the station, but it wasn’t Cobb. It was Ewan Wilkie.

“You’ve got news?” Marc asked, seeing Wilkie wide-eyed and abnormally awake.

“You gotta come, Mr. Edwards, sir,” he huffed, clutching his side. “I run all the way.”

“You’ve found Badger!” The world rolled upright again.

“Nestor Peck found him up on Jarvis Street. Cobb’s there now.”

“That’s great news, Constable. But why didn’t you and Cobb bring him down here? I need to question him.”

“That’ll be kinda hard, sir.”

“Why?”

“He ain’t breathin’.”

Marc hurried to the corner of Lot and Jarvis, where the twisting lane to the Tinker’s Dam and satellite shanties met civilization, and where Wilkie, now two blocks behind, had said the body of Michael Badger lay. Marc tried not to think about how hopeless their situation now was. Without Badger’s testimony, no legally warrantable link could be made to the conniving whist players. And unless he could force a confession out of one of them or anyone else who might be involved, even Badger might posthumously be exonerated. It was after all only Marc’s theory that connected Badger to the invasion of the brothel and the stabbing of Sarah McConkey. He realized, though, that the temptation for the police to pin the murder on a known scoundrel would be strong and, as Magistrate Thorpe had hinted, Ellice might be kept out of it entirely. But Lord Durham professed to be interested in the truth, and Lady Durham needed to have her own disturbing doubts about her nephew’s sanity and sexual conduct unambiguously clarified. If only Beth had not relayed the tale of Ellice’s sordid affair in his father’s stable, then perhaps Marc too would be willing to go along with the events that seemed to be unfolding in their own way, despite his best efforts to deflect them closer to a true trajectory.

Cobb waved to him from a spot on the lane to the Tinker’s Dam about twenty yards from the end of Jarvis Street. Marc slowed and walked disconsolately to his partner.

“Ya took yer time, Major.” Cobb was sweating in a brown suit coat that had replaced his soiled constable’s jacket, and his boots had been newly blacked and buffed. His hat had been tipped aside so that his spiked hair rose up like a terrified porcupine from its lair.

“Where is the body?”

“Good day to you, too.” Cobb pointed down the slope of a dry stream bed that wandered parallel to the path. “He’s been there a while. The stiffenin’ ain’t quite outta him yet.”

“Yet no one found him till now?”

“You can’t see him from the path unless you was lookin’ fer him.”

In fact Marc had to take two steps down the slope before he could clearly discern the corpse of the orange-maned giant they had been hunting since Tuesday. Badger lay on his back in the long grass where he had tumbled after someone had blown a hole in his chest where his heart had once been. The blow of the bullet must have knocked him straight backwards. He had likely been dead before he hit the ground. His arms were at his side, and although still stiff with rigor, they appeared to have been in a relaxed mode before death ended further gesturing. The eyes were open, gray and glassy, and the mouth as well, as if in surprise. The corona of golden-red hair sizzled with flies. Marc went down to the body, being careful not to disturb anything that might be evidence. Cobb was beside him. Wilkie clambered up to the path above but was content to look out for Dr. Withers, whom Nestor Peck had been sent to fetch.

“He could’ve stayed here till somebody smelt him,” Cobb said. “But I figure he was shot sometime in the night: rigid mortar and all that.”

Marc was bent over the corpse. “I agree. But look at all that powder on his shirt. The shooter couldn’t have been more than two or three feet away.”

“I forgot you seen a few bodies with bullet holes down there in Quebec.”

“And I’d guess that a pistol was used, but Angus Withers may be able to give us more to go on.”

“You plannin’ to solve this murder, too?” Cobb said with genuine surprise.

“It has to be connected with Sarah’s death somehow.”

“How do ya figure?”

“It’s just too convenient that a few hours before I began closing in on that traitorous crew of whist-playing Tories, my star witness is himself murdered.”

“But we ain’t a stone’s throw from the Tinker’s Dam and half the villains in the entire county.”

“You think one of those he owed money to did this?”

“That’s the most likely prop-up-hillity, ain’t it?”

Marc thought that over. “But if he was killed here in the dark, up on that path, and the killer was standing three feet from him, it doesn’t make sense.”