by Mel Bradshaw
“Desolate, old man. I haven’t a sixpence. Say, you know the woman that fell off a scaffold while painting a mural at Christ Church Grange Park?”
A lame diversion if I ever heard one. “Sure,” I said. “The coroner has ruled it an accident.”
“The parish priest phoned our inspector to report that the dead woman had been the object of threats.”
“Oh?” With a missed breakfast staring me in the face, I hadn’t much appetite for office gossip.
“Sanderson means to have you look into them as soon as you show up for work tomorrow morning.”
“I’d better be on time then.”
Rudy grinned, but I meant it. What started as gossip had turned into a job.
The threats could be the work of a crackpot, perhaps a poor loser. I seemed to recall that the deceased’s mural design had won a competition with a sizable purse. As I rode the streetcar home that evening — Thursday, October 13 — I was ready for the assignment to lead nowhere. But it was a life and death matter, and it reminded me of why I’d wanted this work in the first place.
At the same time, the feeling was growing on me that — whether I liked it or not — my art education was about to begin.
Chapter 2
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 coreli
gionists, 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.”