Читать книгу Still Waters - John Moss - Страница 5

The dead man with comb-over hair fanning away from his skull was floating face down in the fish pond. Although still unidentified, he was appropriately dressed for a Rosedale garden. Another pond, closer to the ravine, settled into the landscape as if a ground depression had been filled with primordial sludge. Windows in the large house looming over the scene were empty, the curtains half-drawn. Aside from the police, there was no one around, not a gardener, no family, no maid. Most houses in this part of Toronto’s Rosedale had domestic help. At 7:15 each weekday morning women of colour spread out from the subway station, through the tree-lined streets, along the red brick sidewalks, and into the private worlds of the gentry by blood and by money. An hour later pickups arrived with Dutch names on the sides, carrying men wielding rakes and mowers, and in winter, shovels and buckets of sand and salt. By now the workers had gone home, the owners had returned, children had changed out of school uniforms and were doing homework, and prepared dinners had been taken from refrigerators. It was quiet in Rosedale in the early evening in Indian summer. But it was preternaturally quiet in this garden, even with all the police activity. In the unseasonable heat, among dappled shadows, it was like being underwater.

Miranda Quin knelt against the limestone parapet. As the body swung by, she reached out to draw it closer.

“Don’t touch him!” David Morgan, Miranda’s partner, said.

“I wasn’t. I can’t see his face.”

She prodded the dead man’s shoulder until his profile lolled into view, washed pale and streaked with light. There was nothing about his bland features to connect with, but death made his face seem familiar. As he drifted across her reflection, Miranda flinched. It wasn’t the intimation of her own mortality — she had a working relationship with death — but something inexplicable, like vertigo, seemed to rise inside her. A mixture of horror and panic, strangely tempered by a flutter of relief, all held in check by the need to sort out her feelings before revealing them.

Morgan stared into the depths of the pool. He was captivated by the fish weaving the water with eerie striations of light. The body on the surface was a minor distraction — not to the fish playing in the dead man’s shadow — but to Morgan, whose current enthusiasm was imported koi. “Japanese,” he murmured. “From Niigata.”

“Caucasian,” Miranda responded. “From Rosedale.”

“Ochiba Shigura,” said Morgan. “The big one near his ear.”

Perhaps it was, she thought.

“Ochiba Shigura,” he repeated. He had never before said these words out loud. “It means ‘Autumn leaves falling on still water, I am sad.’” He paused. “They know this guy. That one’s a Utsuri. What about you?”

“What? Know him? Why would I?” She surprised them both that she found his question invasive.

Morgan shrugged. “It’s a folly.” He took in the entire garden with a sweeping glance. “This guy spared no expense to make it look natural.”

“There’s nothing natural about gardens,” Miranda declared. Were she not preoccupied by the gnawing within, they might have wandered into a discussion about the vanities of landscape architecture. Instead, she forced herself to focus on the corpse. She bent closer and felt a surge of revulsion.

There were no visible wounds.

She looked back at Morgan through a veil of shoulder-length hair. “You’ve been studying fish?”

“Koi,” he clarified. “I’ve been reading.”

“Good timing.”

His personality and looks coincided, she thought. Unkempt, tousled. Features bold enough to cast shadows. Dark eyes, highlights when he smiled, sometimes exposing, more often concealing. Good body, tall, lean but not lanky. Good hair, all there. Fiercely intelligent.

They had made love once but preferred to be friends.

“Look at them,” he said. “They’re disturbingly beautiful …”

“To us or each other? They’re carp. Genetically manipulated scavengers.” She rocked back onto her feet, grasping his arm to pull herself upright.

“Expensive carp.”

She envied his esoteric diversions. Persian tribal carpets, Ontario country furniture, vintage Bordeaux, now Japanese fish. She suspected he could evade himself endlessly. After more than a decade working murders together, she wasn’t sure why.

He hadn’t noticed her suppressed anxiety. That pleased her. It also annoyed her. She tried to imagine her bathtub. She usually had showers. “Morgan,” she announced as if it were a point of contention, “water moves counter-clockwise.”

“Not in Australia.”

She extended an open hand toward the corpse. As he moved slowly around the pool, the dead man seemed to rotate on an unseen axis.

“He’s turning the wrong way,” said Morgan.

“Exactly. And he’s floating.”

“Yes he is. Very postmodern — he’s part of the garden design.”

“He’s dead.”

“Dead’s easy, dying is hard.”

She couldn’t tell from the sun glinting in his eyes whether he was being thoughtful or quoting Oscar Wilde. Or Dashiell Hammett.

“Not that hard,” she said. “He was probably unconscious when he entered the water. Otherwise he’d be on the bottom.”

“I knew a kid in grade one. He used to scare hell out of Miss Moore by holding his breath till he fainted.”

“You remember your teacher’s name?”

“And the kid’s — Billy DeBrusk. He died in Kingston.”

“Maximum Security or Collins Bay?”

“He was an accountant. Secondary drowning in a triathlon. His lungs flooded a day after the race, filled with bodily fluids in his sleep. He got kicked in the swim.”

“I didn’t know you could drown in bed.” She paused. “Did he win?”

Morgan loved the way her mind worked, convinced it was in complementary opposition to his own, which needed channels to contain the discursive energy. He thought a lot about his own mind. It was a place to visit and explore. It wasn’t where he lived.

“Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones before she walked into the Thames,” said Miranda. “That way, it was out of her hands. Like diving from the Bloor Street Viaduct. You commit, then you wait. Death happens. It’s not your fault.”

“She drowned in the River Ouse in Sussex, not the Thames. She left a note to her husband, saying, ‘You have given me the greatest possible happiness.’ Do you think you could drown yourself?”

This bleak sense of dread inside her, was that what it felt like? But there was also the unsettling sensation of release. Release tinged oddly with guilt. No, I could not.

“Whoever called it in —” Morgan began.

“Left him floating. Must have known he was already dead.”

“How?”

“Perhaps patience.”

There was something bothering her, he thought. Macabre humour was either a mask or a masquerade. His own humour ran more to wordplay and irony.

“You sure you don’t know him,” he said. Stolid silence. “It could have been called in by the person who killed him.”

“That’s an idea,” she said, indicating by her tone she didn’t consider it likely.

They contemplated the pool; the sun was low in the sky, so there was little reflection. It was difficult to separate the surface from the depths, except close to the floating corpse, and out near the centre where twin columns of fine bubbles mushroomed from the darkness below.

“There has to be a pump somewhere processing the water through a filter system,” Morgan said. “Pushing clockwise.”

Morgan looked around, but there were no outbuildings in the yard. He glanced up at the neighbouring house. Only its upper storeys were visible above the high stone wall separating the properties. Someone looking across would have to be in the attic to get a decent view of the ponds. The windowpanes in the attic gable glistened in the early-evening light.

Spotlessly clean, he thought.

“It must be in the basement,” said Miranda. “The filter. I doubt the other pond has one — it looks like pea soup. Soylent green.”

“Charlton Heston.” He affirmed her allusion. “Nutrition from human remains.”

A uniformed officer approached and asked if the body could be moved.

“Wait for the coroner,” said Morgan. “No, take him out. Make sure they’ve got pictures. Be careful with the fish.”

The uniformed officer wandered away to get help.

Miranda contemplated the dead man, wondering if his secret lives somehow intersected with her own, long before death had brought them together. “They’ll go deep. It must be nine or ten feet.”

“Three metres, think metric” said Morgan conscientiously. “Even if it’s heated, they need the volume to stabilize against temperature fluctuations.”

Metric came in when Miranda was a child; Morgan was five years older. He insisted that Fahrenheit generated a skin response, and Celsius was only numerical.

“We’ll need to drain it,” she said.

“No.”

“We’ll send in a diver then. Do you think there’s a difference between a pool and a pond?”

“I’d say a pool is hard-edged and clear.” He looked down toward the ravine. “The soylent pea-souper, I’d call that a pond.”

“You’re okay with a diver?”

“Yeah, it’s better for the fish. There’s a fortune in there.”

She smiled at the presumption of authority. He had seniority by several years, but they were both detective sergeants. Usually, she was in command. He preferred it that way.

Miranda strolled off toward the house, then circled around and walked out past the murky green pool into a narrow grove of silver maples that soared defiantly against the urban sky, their foliage blocking out the banks of office buildings and the CN Tower. From a vantage by the sudden slope of a ravine, the city reappeared at close quarters. This was how the rich lived. In Toronto at least. Miranda didn’t know rich people anywhere else, and in Rosedale only when they were murdered, or as happened more often than people might think, when they did the murdering.

A police crew worked beneath her, combing among the overgrown rubble below the property line for anything out of place: a gum wrapper but not a Dom Perignon cork; a footprint, freshly broken twigs but not cut branches; evidence of urgency, not the residue of a carelessly cultivated life.

She gazed up into the leaves of the maple trees, vaguely expecting a revelation. That was how it occasionally happened, and she would walk out and surprise Morgan with an accounting that seemed to come from nowhere. This time all she saw were blue-green edges shifting softly in the freshening breeze of early evening.

Generally, Morgan was the more intuitive one. He gathered random particulars until everything fell into place, while she extrapolated an entire narrative from singular details. She was deductive. Like Holmes, though Morgan wasn’t Watson. More like Moriarity, she thought, but one of the good guys.

Morgan remained by the pool. He knew almost every fish by its generic name. He recognized a young Budo Goromo with markings the size of a cluster of grapes, Cabernet Sauvignon with the bloom still on. Its other name might have been Bacchus, he thought, or maybe Lafite or Latour. Morgan got sidetracked for a moment, rifling through the files in his mind for the names of First Growth Bordeaux. This would be the garden of a Bordeaux drinker. Premier grand crus. Not Burgundy. These fish had been too carefully selected. Burgundy was always a risk.

And its third name is known only to God.

He shuddered. Morgan wasn’t a believer, but the familiar phrase, whether as an epitaph for the Unknown Soldier or casually applied to fish in a Rosedale garden, sent a chill of loneliness through him.

“Have we heard who he is yet?” Miranda asked. She had been standing close for several minutes, watching him think.

Morgan shrugged. Neither of them carried a cell phone. Access meant control. Sometimes she compromised. Self-reliance wasn’t always enough.

“Margaux,” said Morgan, apparently addressing the Budo Goromo. He was pleased. He had retrieved the name of another Bordeaux grand cru.

Miranda couldn’t remember which Hemingway grand-daughter hadn’t committed suicide, Muriel or Margaux. One of them starred in a Woody Allen film.

Side by side they stared into the pond, intent on their separate reflections, while a surreal tableau was enacted around them. In a flurry of quiet activity the investigating team searched out myriad anomalies that would make the immediate past comprehensible. The grounds, a luxuriant green, though summer was gone, had been cultivated by generations long dead. The more distant past made the crime scene merely a passing disturbance.

The Ochiba Shigura disappeared into the depths and then returned, swimming slowly against the dead man’s face, back and forth in a kind of caress or secret language. A powerfully proportioned Showa the size of a platter nibbled at the fingers of his left hand, which draped low in the water, though the body itself rested stolidly on the surface as if buoyed from below.

Miranda settled on the retaining wall with her back to the pond. She looked at the huge brick house that opened onto a portico one storey below street level across the back, embracing the garden with an intimacy that belied its grand proportions. Miranda tried to penetrate the architectural layers of the house, finding clean Georgian lines nearly obscured by unseemly Victorian flourishes and superfluous Edwardian columns and porticos. She decided the house had remained in the same family over the years, the changes accruing as each generation imposed its own taste on the last, and the next.

She twisted around as the dead man swung by and gently tugged at his jacket collar. The corpse shifted, brushed against the edge of the pool, and slumped over onto its side. In a rush of water it settled on its back, floating face up, open eyes limpid, opaque.

Miranda flinched, her breath caught in her throat.

Again she was struck by the sickening familiarity of death. Something happened to human features in extremity. The very obese, the emaciated, faces contorted in pain or by fear, and faces in absolute stillness, bore similarities in kind. Fat men looked alike; corpses resembled one another like kin.

Morgan bent close to examine the dead man’s face, then leaned away as if coming to a dissenting judgment about a celebrated portrait after evaluating the brush strokes. They watched while the body drifted away from the wall and slowly rolled over again.

“That’s better,” said Morgan when the face was no longer visible. “His name is Robert Griffin. He’s a lawyer.”

“Really?” said Miranda. “And you know that because?”

“He was news about a year ago.”

“Good or bad?”

“Rich. There was a piece in the Globe and Mail buried beside the obituaries.” He chuckled at the pun. “It wasn’t a big enough story to make television.”

“But you recognized him wet?”

“Yeah. They used a file photo. He looked sort of dead already. He spent a fortune at Christie’s in London for an artifact from the South Pacific.”

“And that was newsworthy?”

“Something called Rongorongo, a wooden plaque from Easter Island about the size of a small paddle blade with writing on it.”

“Rongorongo?”

“It’s filled with opposing rows of hieroglyphs. It’s the writing that’s Rongorongo, not the board, and the people from Easter Island can’t read it now. No one can read it. They still carve replicas, and no one knows what they say.”

Miranda had studied semiotics in university. She wondered if this accounted for the poignancy she felt for a language indecipherably encoded. She tried to imagine not being able to read your own writing.

Morgan continued. “The islanders, they call themselves Rapanui, the island is Rapa Nui, two words, they used to have joke tournaments. Koro ’ei.” He savoured the words. “Jest fests, the losers laughed, and had to throw a feast, a weird form of potlatch —”

“Morgan —”

“I think there are fewer than twenty authentic Rongorongo tablets around, pretty well all in museums. He paid half a million.”

“Well, Mr. Griffin!”

It pleased them to have arrived at the victim’s identity without resorting to actual research. They watched him drift by as if he might reveal more of himself if they waited.

“No shoes. He wandered out from the house in socks,” said Morgan, dispelling any doubt that this was the dead man’s home. “Where did Yosserian go? I thought they were hauling him out of there.”

“Mr. Griffin seems a little soft around the edges,” said Miranda, who didn’t work out but was trim. “Not in very good condition.”

“He’s dead,” said Morgan, who occasionally worked out but mostly skipped meals.

“I doubt if he even played golf. Too pallid to belong to a yacht club. Clothes not sufficiently stylish to suggest peer influence. I’d say he’s a loner. But don’t you think it’s peculiar, a high-priced lawyer, and I’ve never heard of him?”

“Cops and the law don’t always connect. Sometimes it’s a matter of luck.”

“You’d think he’d have some sort of a public presence, Morgan. Look at the house.”

“I’m not sure he had much of a presence at all. He looks exceptionally ordinary.”

“As you say, he’s floating in a fish pond. Let’s get him out before the family comes home.” Miranda turned to see that Yosserian was standing by with another officer, apparently not wanting to disturb their forensic deliberations. She caught his eye, and they moved forward.

“There’s no family coming home,” said Morgan. “They’d be here already. It’s too late in the season for Muskoka, everyone’s down from the cottage by now. The yard’s too orderly. No bikes, no barbecue. The big Showa wants food, he’s nibbled those fingers before. Look at that. The Ochiba — look at him nuzzling. They’re closer than family. These fish are Griffin’s familiars.”

“Familiars.” Miranda often repeated Morgan’s key words, sometimes to mock him but sometimes intrigued. “That’s creepy. With scales.”

“They don’t all have scales. Some of them are Doitsu.”

Miranda was equivocating about whether or not to give him the satisfaction of asking for an explanation when a stunning young woman emerged from the shadows of the walkway along the side of the house. She moved toward them with an air of belonging.

“Maybe I’m wrong,” said Morgan.

“She’s not family.”

The woman stood to one side and gazed at Robert Griffin as he was hauled over the pool edge and spread out on a groundsheet. While the officers manoeuvred the bag, she seemed to focus on the rasping of the zipper and the squishing liquid sounds as the body settled into its plastic receptacle. Then she spoke with deliberate calm. “You’re quite right, Detective. I’m not family.”

“Really,” Miranda said, realizing her disparaging comment had been overheard. The striking young woman was one of those people defined by style. Someone you had trouble imagining with a home life or childhood memories. A prosperous self-reliant urban adult of purposefully indeterminate age.

Somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-two.

She had the subdued flare of a woman who read Vogue to check for mistakes, Miranda thought. She probably subscribed to Architectural Digest, never travelled by bus, and arrived early at the dentist’s so she could read Cosmopolitan.

Miranda brushed imaginary creases from her skirt and straightened her shoulders inside her jacket. She glanced at Morgan. He shrugged almost imperceptibly.

“I take it you knew the deceased,” Miranda declared too formally as she gazed into the woman’s eyes, searching for personality.

“Yes, I did,” said the woman. Then, as if she were ordering a martini, she added, “I was his mistress. I still am, I suppose.” The woman smiled. “Wives become widows. There’s no past tense for a mistress.”

Mattress, thought Morgan, but said nothing. She was an interesting anomaly, not because she was the mistress of a flaccid man with a comb-over but because she obviously didn’t need to be. She was addressing Miranda. He turned away. There was a jousting so subtle neither woman seemed aware of it, and it didn’t include him.

“Griffin didn’t like mistress,” the woman said. “I rather like it myself. Lover is just too depressing.”

“Was he depressed?” Miranda asked with a hint of aggression.

“Why, because he killed himself? He wasn’t a man to die from excessive emotion.” She paused. “From business perhaps. He never talked about business.”

She made it sound like suicide could have been a tactical ploy.

“It’s unexpected, if that’s what you mean,” she continued. “But not surprising. Robert was a very secretive man, but he could be quite impulsive.”

The woman studied the black plastic bag, tracing the zipper line as if it were a wound. Her features softened, then she glanced up directly into Miranda’s eyes, her dispassionate aplomb instantly restored. For a moment Miranda felt an unnerving bond between them.

“With some people, you know, you can’t really tell,” said the woman.

“What?” Morgan asked. “If they’re dead?”

“Whether they’re depressed,” she said. “I suppose he might have been.” She smiled as if forgiving herself for a minor oversight.

Miranda looked at her quizzically. The woman didn’t seem concerned about a display of grief. Perhaps that would come later. Perhaps, more ominously, she had dealt with it already. Or sadly, thought Miranda, she felt nothing at all.

“Do you have access to the house?” Miranda asked.

“Do you mean, have I keys? Yes, of course.”

“Then perhaps we could look inside,” said Morgan.

“Of course,” said the woman. Touching Miranda on the arm, she casually amended her assessment of the victim’s mental stability. “He sometimes took Valium.”

“Sometimes?” said Miranda. “It’s not an occasional drug.”

“He said he had trouble sleeping.”

“And did he?”

“We didn’t sleep together, Detective. I’m not his widow.” She seemed vaguely amused by her own witticism. “My name is Eleanor Drummond.” She held her hand out to Miranda, then Morgan.

The woman was gracious without warmth, as if they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and she a lapsed Catholic. Some people offered their names as an invitation, but with her it seemed more like a shield or a disguise.

They introduced themselves in turn, both fully aware Robert Griffin’s mistress had taken the initiative.

Together the three of them walked beneath the trellised portico to a set of large French doors, which Eleanor Drummond unlocked. “Did you need permission to enter?”

They stepped into a room busy with artifacts.

“No,” said Miranda.

“But if it was suicide?”

“This was murder,” said Morgan.

Eleanor Drummond’s eyes narrowed for a moment, but she said nothing.

The room was large and cluttered, with massive doors leading away on either side and into the interior depths of the house. It seemed cramped; it was the room of a man who needed to see what he thought, piled on shelves. Morgan felt vaguely embarrassed, the way he did gazing at an open cadaver.

Windows flanked the French doors along the outer wall. There was a fireplace, there were shelves against the other walls packed with hardcover books, with the occasional oversize volume stored horizontally on top of the rows. Books with pictures of koi lay open on the sofa and floor in cross-referencing piles. There was a small pile of books beside a wingback chair that faced out with a view of the garden. A slender Waterford vase sat poised on one of the bookshelves with three wilted long-stemmed roses. The walls were adorned with antique guns, animal heads and old maps, aboriginal masks and photographs of blurred shadows, likenesses of nightmares. There was a bar to one side littered with koi paraphernalia, water-testing potions, gauges for testing salinity, ammonia, oxygen quotients.

“Odd that it was locked,” said Morgan.

“Maybe he went out another door and walked around,” suggested Miranda.

“In his socks?”

A pair of dress shoes sat neatly on the floor, facing away from the sofa. The shoes had been removed by a man at rest, not parked there on his way outside.

“He usually used the wingback,” said Eleanor Drummond as if they were piecing together the same puzzle.

Morgan motioned for her to sit, then took a seat opposite. Miranda drifted away and, despite the forensic specialists coming in through the French doors, the woman focused on Morgan as if there was no one else in the room.

Miranda usually found books comforting. At first she had thought the room was a sanctuary, but as she wandered around she found it unsettling. What she had initially taken to be evidence of personality was actually its absence.

The shelved books were arranged by subject matter. She arranged her own books by colour and size. There was a cluster of postcards tacked to a bulletin board. On the obverse side they were blank. Sometimes the most telling story was no story at all. The opulent vulgarity of the Waterford vase attracted her eye. It was Victorian and still had a Birks label affixed to the base. There was no radio, no outlet for music. There were no paintings, only a pair of diplomas, a couple of studio graduation portraits. On a shelf an unlikely sequence of ornamental porcelain ducks was arranged next to some antique etchings in whale ivory.

“Scrimshaw,” said Morgan, glancing in the direction of her gaze.

She nodded. Looking down at the colourful runner beneath her feet, the coarse wool blunt with age, she wondered if it was good. Morgan would know. Must be antique, she thought. Not much resilience. And no underpad.

Close by the fireplace was a ceramic bin, out of which an array of walking sticks protruded at odd angles. She noticed a flat wooden blade leaning against the bin which, on closer examination, appeared to have hieroglyphs etched into its surface. My God, she thought, gently tracing her fingers along the rows of figures running its length, this was half a million dollars. She held it aslant to the light, trying to capture the inscrutable shadows.

It saddened Miranda to realize that Easter Islanders couldn’t possibly afford to repatriate their heritage. How could they compete with museums or with a wealthy collector from Rosedale who was too feckless to put it on display?

Did Rongorongo have any meaning if its meaning was lost?

Morgan watched her scrutinizing the hieroglyphs. Her auburn hair and slightly aquiline nose, lips poised in concentration rather than pursed, hazel eyes squinting to make out the writing, as if by peering more carefully she could understand what it said, all made her appear like an actor playing the role of detective: detached but absorbed, quietly confident, attractive but not distracting, hints of a strong personality bringing the scene into focus.

He returned his attention to the dead man’s mistress. She was both subtle and flash. Maybe Griffin preferred the word lover to make them seem equal; she preferred mistress to affirm the divide.

Morgan fidgeted while they talked. He watched more than listened. Eleanor Drummond seemed not to know she was being interrogated, and yet revealed virtually nothing.

Miranda tried several doors before finding a staircase that was surprisingly steep and narrow, leading up to the main part of the house. She ascended the stairs and rambled from room to room, turning on lights as she went.

“Personally, I think it was suicide,” Eleanor Drummond repeated to Morgan as if the possibility had just crossed her mind.

“Everything suggests he wasn’t anticipating the end,” Morgan said. “Books laid out to be read, shoes by the sofa — it all gives the impression of a man who had no intention of dying.”

“Perhaps that’s what he wanted us to think.”

“And why would he want us to think that?”

“So you’d think it was murder.”

“Which I do.”

“Drowning in a pond doesn’t seem like murder, Detective.”

“Dead men don’t drown. He probably died in this room.”

She looked away, out to the garden. She shared the habit of all beautiful people, inviting him to assess her without seeming to stare.

There was no way she would have been able to manoeuvre a man to the pond, dead or alive, without leaving skid marks on the grass and bruises on the body from hefting him over the retaining wall. Morgan was certain there would be no bruises. Griffin’s clothes weren’t twisted on his limbs, his body seemed inordinately relaxed. The fish weren’t spooked.

She didn’t strike him as a person who would work with an accomplice. Eleanor Drummond might have the capacity for murder, he thought, but judging from her disinclination to express appropriate emotion, probably not the desire.

Morgan thought of the koi. They weaved the shadows, wefts of colour sliding through warps of dark clear water. He lapsed into wordlessness, his mind occupied with images.

Awkwardly, the woman withdrew a cigarette, then glanced around. Seeing no ashtrays, she slipped it back into the package and set the pack down on the coffee table. She settled back on the green sofa as composed but on edge as if she were in an oncologist’s waiting room.

Miranda reappeared, stepping through the massive doorway back into Griffin’s retreat. She had been uneasy, almost anxious, in the rest of the house. It felt unnaturally empty, as if the ancestral ghosts haunting its spaces and furnishings hadn’t yet embraced their newest arrival. In the den, perhaps because the dead man’s predilections appeared on display, the ghosts seemed more accommodating.

“Would you excuse me?” said Morgan abruptly, addressing Eleanor Drummond while gesturing to his partner for help. “Detective Quin will have some questions. I’m needed outside …” His voice trailed off as he closed the French doors behind him. He took a deep breath of the evening air, annoyed with himself for having offered an explanation to account for his exit.

Activity in the garden had faded with the evening light. He walked over to where the body bag lay on the ground sheet, with a solitary attendant standing vigil. Morgan nodded.

“Waiting for the Black Mariah,” explained the corpse’s companion. “The ME ran out of gas. It didn’t seem I should leave the guy here on his own.”

Morgan was taken by the man’s innate courtesy. “It’s okay. See what you can do inside.” As the officer was about to disappear under the shadows of the portico, Morgan changed his mind. “Yosserian, go on out front. Show the medical examiner where to come when he gets here. Where did you get the body wrap?”

“Left over from the multiple last week in Cabbage-town.”

“You’re not supposed to be driving around with those.”

“Yeah,” said Yosserian.

Morgan knelt beside the remains of Robert Griffin and unzipped the bag to the shoulders, peeling the synthetic material back in dark folds. The pallor of death, highlighted by the lights from the house, gave the visible remains an appearance of antique marble, like the toppled bust of a Roman senator. Morgan stood and contemplated the nature of human flesh. He thought of the bust of Homer in a poem he imagined he had forgotten.

Strange, this had happened and nothing had changed. A man was mysteriously dead and it made no difference. Usually by now Morgan’s mind was teeming with intimations, possibilities, connections. But here was a death for which no crowd gathered.

The medical examiner came around through the walkway, led by Yosserian, the body’s self-appointed keeper. “Is that you, Morgan?” she asked, trying to penetrate the gloom.

“You ran out of gas?” said Morgan. He moved close enough so that Ellen Ravenscroft could see it was him, then shrugged agreeably and turned away.

She squatted by the body. “All right then, love, I’ve got work to do.”

Morgan gazed into the closest pool, the fish now indistinct wraiths deep below the surface. The low green pond down by the ravine appeared brackish in the dying light. He walked over to it. It smelled fresh. Why no water flowers, no grasses around the shoreline?

He tried to block out the banal chatter between Yosserian and the ME. They were arguing about the body bag. He listened to the water and thought he could hear the hush of its limpid surface as it settled against the earth. His mind seemed both empty and filled until in the distance he heard a siren and returned to himself in the garden.

When a diver appeared by the lower pond, Morgan watched for a while. Her light, as she submerged, transformed from a shimmering cone to a glowing green cor-sage, then a vague flicker, until it extinguished in the opaque depths, only to reappear again here and there as she groped her way to the edges. It made him queasy, watching her hand reach up through the murk to signal her assistant the direction of her quest.

“She won’t see anything in there,” said the assistant, standing tall as if the higher perspective would let him see deeper. “This kind of thing is by touch alone.”

Morgan felt claustrophobic. He nodded and retreated to the upper pool. The diver had already checked this one thoroughly, moving gently among the fish, and come up with nothing.

By the time Miranda joined him, Ellen Ravenscroft had left with the body, the diver was gone, and the night sky was flushed with the lights of the city. The water in front of them was black, like anthracite sheared from its motherlode. Morgan remained motionless, staring into the impenetrable depths. Miranda moved close enough that they could feel the body heat between them, but they didn’t touch. They were comfortable with silence.

Eventually, she said, “It’s strange, that huge house, it’s creepy. Except for the den the place could have been decorated by committee.”

“Or successive generations of Rosedale matrons.”

“A committee of ghosts.” She reflected on the secrets implied by the water’s dark surface, then returned to her previous theme. “There’s no evidence anywhere of his so-called mistress, no lingerie under the bed, no scented shampoo in the shower.”

“Has she gone?”

“Yeah. We’ll connect in the morning.” She paused. “Why mistress, not girlfriend?” She paused again. “You know, he wouldn’t walk across the yard in socks.”

“No. He wasn’t wearing a tie.”

“So?”

“Well, his top button was done up. So he’s the kind of guy who prepares for death by taking off his shoes and tie but forgets to unbutton his shirt?”

“Do you own a tie?”

“One, utilitarian black.”

Morgan looked at her in the evening light. She had seen him wear his tie at funerals. Her hazel eyes gleamed silver and bronze from the surface reflection of light from the city. He pushed his hair back from his forehead, a habit from twenty years earlier, when it was longer and obstructed his view.

“Eleanor Drummond figured that Griffin wanted us to think it was murder,” Morgan said. “He locked himself out, then drowned himself, expiring among friends. She wants it to be suicide. Strange, most people would rather a loved one was murdered. Then they can grieve guilt-free.”

“She was trying to smoke in there! She seems an unlikely smoker.”

“Yeah, she tried with me, too.”

“I was out of the room for a minute and she lit up,” Miranda said. “Someone told her to put it out. She made quite a production of going down the hall to the bathroom.”

“She flushed the toilet?”

“I know, but they said they’d finished with it.”

“Mistress is a way of distancing herself, making sure we don’t think they were friends.”

“Or of convincing herself of the same.”

“Funny,” Morgan said. “The door being locked.” He paused. “There’s no Chagoi.”

“No what?”

“No Chagoi. I’ve read that every koi pond should have a Chagoi. It’s big and affable, wrinkled like gold foil.”

“Maybe it’s lying low.”

“A furtive Chagoi. No, it’s a personality fish. It mediates between species. It’s got the mind of a mammal. Extravagantly subtle. Billy Crystal wearing Armani.” He seemed pleased with the allusion.

Miranda glanced at his rumpled clothes and smiled. He would look good in Armani. She hadn’t noticed before, but he had a day’s growth of beard. Was it stylish, or had he forgotten to shave? Probably the latter.

“She didn’t know there were no ashtrays. She doesn’t look like a smoker,” he repeated.

“She doesn’t smell like a smoker. You ever kiss a smoker, Morgan? Like sucking garbage through a straw.”

“You used to smoke.”

“That’s how I know.”

“I never did.”

She wanted to kiss him right then and there. It wasn’t a sexual impulse, at least not directly, not rising out of the hollow inside. It was the need to connect, by touching someone intimately who actually gave a damn about her after the lights were out. Maybe a little sexual, she thought, and thinking so made it sexual.

“Hey, Morgan.” Maybe she should reveal her anxiety, the horror and panic and strange sense of relief.

“Yeah?”

“Did you notice the books?”

“The koi books? Or the others?”

“Not many people these days buy hardcover books except lawyers and scholars with grants,” said Miranda. “Did you see the degree?”

“Linguistics.”

“Semiotics.”

“Same thing.”

“Not.”

Miranda had been holding an envelope in her hand that she had picked up from the floor near the wingback chair. It was a piece of unopened junk mail with some writing scrawled on the back. She handed it to Morgan.

He walked over to read it in light streaming through the French doors that wavered as the forensic people inside moved about, finishing their work. “‘Language is immanent but has no material existence.’ Good opening. That’s how I feel most of the time. Here but not here.” He continued to read, mouthing the words with just enough volume that the hyphens were audible. “‘Language is imm-in-ent, preceding our being in the world; imm-anent, providing the dimensions of knowledge and experience. Language is consciousness, whatever the case.’ I doubt if he was much for small talk.”

“It’s interesting, though, isn’t it?”

“Doesn’t exactly solve the mystery.”

“Which one? About language and consciousness, or about death?” She smiled slyly as if she had been caught in a thought-crime. “Did you see the Rongorongo?”

“I saw you admiring it. You’ve got to wonder what’s locked up in a language that no one can read.”

“Precisely,” she said. “But it’s not the language that’s indecipherable. It’s the script. You can understand why a guy with a doctorate in semiotics might want to own it if he had the money.”

“And then he stores it beside a brolly stand with a clutch of old canes!”

“Strange guy, our lawyer-philosopher.”

“Yeah,” said Morgan. “So why would someone kill a philosopher. I mean, lawyers, even Shakespeare said ‘kill all the lawyers,’ but a semiotician?”

“Morgan, this note? It contradicts its own declaration.” She wanted to go on. Words shaped thoughts in Miranda’s mind; she wanted to let them out. But Morgan was back with the fish. She wanted to talk about language and writing, about Rongorongo, about speaking with the dead.

Morgan was bent over, peering through reflections of the night sky into the obsidian depths, but all he could see was an illimitable absence of light.

“You want something to eat?“ she asked. “Come on. The koi aren’t going anywhere. Tomorrow they’ll tell us their secrets. Tonight they’re in mourning, draped in black.”

“Fish and chips or sushi?”

Over dessert Morgan offered a discourse on carpets. The Kurdish runner in the den: antique, its pile worn, a tribal rug, coarse wool, natural dyes. The indigo blue a desert lake; abrash, the hue variations, like water under the desert sky. Persian. He didn’t say from Iran. Carpets had more longevity than nation-states.

He went on to describe the Qashqa’i hanging as a wall piece behind the wingback chair.

She interrupted. “The runner! Why would a valuable carpet on a slate floor not have an underpad?”

Morgan smiled. He had read about rugs, subscribed for a couple of years to Hali, the opulent trade journal from England, had learned about designs and dying, weaving on hand looms by nomads, on village looms for the rich, about symbols and patterns, trading and auctions. But it hadn’t occurred to him that there should be an underpad beneath the Kurdish runner.

“So we have a carpet problem,” he said. “Mystery upon mystery. Do you think she did it?”

“Eleanor Drummond? She had access, possibly motive — all mistresses have motives for murder. I doubt she did it.”

“No,” he agreed.

“She delivers herself, or a version of herself, as someone too self-possessed, too emotionally self-sufficient, to bother killing her lover. It was a business arrangement.”

“The murder?”

“No, her life.” Miranda tinkered with her cutlery.

“So who do we think did it?”

“We don’t know, do we?”

“I think the koi are the answer,” he said. “Maybe we should have drained the ponds.”

Miranda ordered coffee, black, for both of them. He usually took double-double.

“You should have seen the diver in the lower pond,” said Morgan. “She virtually disappeared. For goodness’ sake, it swallowed her whole. Twenty thousand gallons of pea soup.”

When he said “for goodness’ sake” and “my gosh” and “holy smoke,” she liked him best. “How do you know that?” she asked.

“I saw her. She had to feel her way, like being submerged in soylent green.”

“The gallonage, how do you know that? Nobody knows twenty thousand gallons.”

“Grade ten geometry,” he said. “It’s easy to calculate.”

“Geometry was in grade eleven.”

“I know about what interests me — or maybe I’m interested in what I know about. Koi interest me. Carpets interest me. A good carpet on slate, that interests me. Wine interests me. Really good wine, premier grand cru, brunello di montalcino, trockenbeerenauslese.” Each designation he enunciated with an appropriate accent — French, Italian, stage German. “I read about the stuff. I don’t drink it.”

“Who came from the Coroner’s? Was it Ellen Ravenscroft? She seems to turn up whenever you’re on a case.”

“Uncanny coincidence. I’m a homicide cop, she’s a coroner.”

“Come on …”

“She’s earthy. I like her. What did you think about Eleanor Drummond?”

“Definitely not earthy. I can’t imagine that woman in ‘snuggle’ mode even on a rental basis.”

“She’s stunningly beautiful.”

“Yeah, like a magazine layout — she looks airbrushed. Seriously, you found her attractive?”

“Yes and no. More yes than no.”

“It’s time to go home,” she said, shifting in her chair.

As he rose to his feet, Morgan reached over and gave her shoulder a companionable squeeze. She flinched. He didn’t seem to notice, but she was surprised. It wasn’t him; it had something to do with the dead man in the pond. She couldn’t see the connection. She settled back.

“Think I’ll stay for a bit. No, really. Good night, Morgan.” She watched him walk away. “You can stay, too, if you want,” she added softly as he wandered away through the tables.

He waved backward with a small hand gesture, then she heard, trailing off in the ambient din as he approached the exit, “There’s got to be a Chagoi.”

And he was gone.