“You’ll let me know as soon as you find Michael, won’t you?”
“Yes. I’ll come and tell you myself.”
“There’s a good, sweet side to Michael, you know. We grew up in a decent family and went to a proper school.”
But it hadn’t kept him from becoming a gambler and a cold-blooded killer.
Marc’s instinct was to barge into the card game at Hepburn’s and wreak havoc. But reason soon prevailed. His first duty was to inform Chief Sturges that Cobb’s sighting and pursuit of their quarry had been misguided. Then he would ask Sarge to go up to Government House to convince Sir George to dispatch a party to Port Sarnia to check out the Badger cousins. At the same time, the hunt for the villain would have to be broadened again to include the surrounding townships. Marc was also concerned about the rumour mill, which Una Badger had alluded to. While those involved in the manhunt had been told that Badger was wanted for killing a woman and that Lord Durham himself had taken a special, but unspecified, interest in the matter, such a facile and patently incomplete explanation had fuelled local speculation. Even now such rumours could be doing Durham as much harm as the truth about Ellice’s involvement might.
Chief Sturges took the news about Badger with stolid resignation, a legacy of his Cockney upbringing and long service in Wellington’s army and Robert Peel’s London constabulary. While not commenting one way or the other on Marc’s claims regarding Hepburn, he readily agreed to send Gussie upstairs to fetch Magistrate Thorpe. Grumbling about having his mid-day meal disrupted and about a “lot of bloody fuss over a common hooer,” Gussie trotted off to the adjoining chambers. The chief then left for Government House.
Marc sat down at Gussie French’s table and, pulling rank, consumed the clerk’s bread and cheese. Moments later, Magistrate Thorpe came in, shook hands with Marc, and sat down opposite him. Gussie was left cooling his heels in a hallway.
In as concise terms as he could manage, Marc outlined his theory of the murder. Michael Badger, in debt to the dicers up at the Tinker’s Dam and fearing for his safety, arrived on Monday morning at Madame Renée’s to tap his favourite source for cash in order to preserve his knees and perhaps his life. As it turned out, most of Irishtown, including Mrs. Burgess’s girls, were at the Queen’s Wharf welcoming His Lordship to the city. Luckily he found Madame at home, alone. When Mrs. Burgess refused to give him a farthing, the desperate Badger somehow got word to Alasdair Hepburn that a plot, which the latter had hatched in anticipation of the earl’s arrival and to which Badger had been till now an unwilling party, was suddenly operative. Hepburn, in possible collusion with other Tory sympathizers-Marc did not yet name them-got young Handford Ellice drunk and possibly drugged, and drove him to Irishtown after the gala. From there he was dropped off at Madame Renée’s. The plan was for Badger, who had stolen a key for the hatch, to slip into the brothel when the house was quiet and the couple were fast asleep, and cause some kind of mayhem in order to have Ellice found in a low-life stew-producing a sex scandal to discredit Lord Durham and his already morally tainted entourage. Initially in the plot purely for money, Badger agreed to carry out his part, but once inside that room, his rage against Mrs. Burgess and his abnormal fear overwhelmed him. He stabbed Sarah McConkey with the dagger he knew lay under her pillow. Perhaps horrified at his own actions, Badger went to Hepburn on Tuesday morning looking for his blood money and, finding him out, and afraid or forbidden to go to Hepburn’s bank, he left a secret note, which Una Badger fortuitously read and whose incriminating contents she could attest to.
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’.”
THIRTEEN
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.