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Another bright autumn day greeted Morgan as he hurried down the steps of his Victorian postmodern condo. It was cool, almost crisp, anticipating the onset of the interminable stretch from the end of October through early December before winter set in. He resisted calling Miranda at home. When he checked in with headquarters, he only asked as an incidental question if she had been around. On his way to Robert Griffin’s house, he picked up two coffees at the Robber Barons.

There was no sign of her. The doors were locked. He sat on the edge of the pool and drank his coffee. He was just finishing hers, as well, when Eugene Nishimura strode down the steps through the walkway and into the dappled sunlight like a man entirely at home in his setting.

“Good morning, Mr. Nishimura.”

“Good morning, Detective Morgan. How are my koi doing today?”

“Fine. Our koi are doing just fine.”

“Fed them yet?”

“No.”

Nishimura walked over and scooped out a small canister of feed from the bin by the door. He sprayed it out across the closest end of the pool, then sat beside Morgan on the retaining wall to watch the flurry of colour as the koi crowded the surface to eat.

“I’ve heard from my people in Japan. It’s Wednesday there now. They’ve been making discreet inquiries, Mr. Morgan. We weren’t sure what we were getting involved in, and I thought it best not to make it seem like a police matter.”

“No, of course. And?”

“And there’s no report that the Champion of Champions is missing. The breeder was approached. He said, ‘Oh, yes, she was in the big pond, the soil was just right —’”

“The soil?”

“That’s what they call the combination of clay, natural waters, and the micro-climate that determines the worth of the fish.”

“Like Chateau Margaux is valued higher than its neighbour, Chateau D’Issan, and D’Issan is valued higher than the chateau next to that.”

“Just so, Detective Morgan,” said Nishimura. Drawing the conversation back to the matter at hand, he continued. “Only their skill in choosing what’s best from tens of thousands of fingerlings is more important. The owner of this breathtaking Kohaku whose simplicity is infinitely complex, who has the shape of perfection —”

“Mr. Nishimura,” said Morgan, “the name of the breeder?”

“His entire business is based on this fish. She is thriving, he assured my informant, in the opaque waters of his largest pond, high in the hills of Niigata. He can’t afford to acknowledge otherwise.”

“Do you think he knows she’s in Toronto?”

“Yes, he does. Otherwise he would have claimed insurance, either that or a national outpouring of sympathy. He knows exactly what’s in his ponds. But he doesn’t need her anymore.”

“He doesn’t?”

“Likely the breeder has a fix on her line. With a few generations of her offspring selected, she was no longer essential for his breeding program, so he sold her to someone with no need to broadcast his divine acquisition.”

“An ignominious outcome for the Champion of Champions.”

“I doubt she cares.”

“And you think Robert Griffin bought her legally?”

“More or less. It would be preferable for the breed-er’s reputation if the koi world assumed she was still in Niigata. Mr. Griffin was the ideal customer because he was discreet to the point of obsession.”

Morgan was fascinated by the contradictory notion of keeping a treasure concealed. He tried to connect the compulsive hoarding of beauty with the psyche of a rapacious voyeur.

“I doubt very much that he declared her true worth when she was processed through customs,” Nishimura continued. “I would say she came in with some of the lesser Kohaku. He probably brought some of these other prizewinners in the same way.”

Humility made Morgan uneasy: these were the Kohaku he and Miranda had proclaimed the best of the lot. “Do you think he was wheeling and dealing?”

“Selling for a profit? No. An unequivocal no. Otherwise I would have heard about him. I know the koi world. I would have known if he had sold even one really good fish. This man had money, so why bother with crime? He was an obsessive, reclusive collector. I mean, this guy was clinical. He was pathological.”

“I think you’re right, though I’m not sure we’ll ever know the full extent of his pathology.”

Morgan realized Nishimura had no idea about Griffin’s deviant behavior. He knew him only as a dead recluse found floating among fish of astonishing worth. The Japanese koi expert shrugged and asked to be let into the house.

“My partner has the keys,” Morgan felt compelled to explain. The house was open. Then he asked as they walked through the French doors, “Have you heard from her, Eugene? I haven’t been able to track her down for a couple of days.”

“She should be here right now. I told her I’d report back on my clandestine, um, inquiry.”

Now that wasn’t a word people used in real life, Morgan thought. He realized Nishimura was enjoying his part in a police investigation, especially one that combined murder with koi. Clandestine implied furtive. Appropriate perhaps, but it also suggested treachery. He should have said covert if he wanted to raise the level of intrigue.

“When did you talk to her?” Morgan asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe Saturday morning. I’ve got to clean out the vortex filters. I’ll let you know if she calls. I have my cell phone.”

Nishimura walked off toward the cellars, and Morgan settled into in his wingback chair. Why wasn’t Miranda carrying her cell phone? The green Jaguar was parked in the garage. Perhaps her phone was in the car.

He walked through the stone passageway past the wine cellar door to the garage. The car was locked. He peered through the windows. From the passenger side he could see a small corner of her handbag protruding from under the driver’s seat. The convertible top must have been lowered and then raised again, or she would have stashed it in the well behind her.

Even though he had been looking for the bag, he was disconcerted to find it. She suddenly seemed more vulnerable. He hoped she had her semi-automatic Glock with her, that she hadn’t turned it in while on leave, that it wasn’t locked in this car. With her wallet and phone! The bag had been there at least since Saturday. Reason struggled against panic, asserting that this was a spare and she was carrying another bag wherever she was.

It struck him that if the convertible top had been down since he had last seen her she would have been in a playful mood and distracted. It had to be Jill Bray. He guessed they had driven around together. Morgan knew Miranda was going over to Wychwood Park on Friday after dropping him off. He wished he had his own cell phone. He could at least call her number and see if hers was inside the car.

Morgan didn’t want to break in. That would seem irrationally preemptive, especially when she turned up safe and sound. If she was with the girl, with Jill, she was all right. If she had entered a sanctuary, a refuge of some sort, a secular retreat, or a spa … Maybe it didn’t seem necessary to let him know where she was. She was only his work partner and was officially on leave. It worried him that he fretted so much, as if his anxiety might cause bad things to happen.

Walking up the ramp and around the side of the house, he treaded a fine line between petulance and fear as he went back inside and called Molly Bray’s number. Victoria answered. He introduced himself and asked if Jill was home for lunch.

“She didn’t go to school yesterday or today, Detective,” Victoria explained, pleased to have the opportunity to speak to an adult. “I think her momma’s death has finally sunk in. She’s worse after talking to Miss Quin than before. She mostly just stays in her room, mostly sleeping, I guess. She keeps the door locked. I have a key, but I don’t want to disturb her grieving. Sometimes it’s better to grieve by yourself, even when you’re only fourteen.”

“You’ve seen my partner then?”

“She was here on Friday. And she was here again Saturday morning.”

“Saturday?” Morgan knew what Victoria would say next.

“Yes, sir. She and Jill went off together. Miss Bray without a proper jacket — these kids will catch their death of cold — and she came back around three.”

“Miranda and Jill?”

“No, sir, just Jill. She said Miss Quin dropped her off up the way, by the gates.”

“Could I speak to Jill?”

“I’ll see what I can do. I don’t think she’s talking to nobody right now. She’s so distressed.”

After what seemed like an interminable delay, a girl’s voice whispered, “Hello?”

“Jill?”

“Yes.”

“I’m David Morgan. I’m a detective, a friend of Detective Quin. We met —”

“I know. I remember.”

“Have you seen Ms. Quin?”

“She said I’m supposed to call her Miranda.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Saturday.”

“In the afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“Where, what time? Can you tell me about it?”

“She came here.”

“Did you go to Robert Griffin’s house?”

“Where?”

“Your mother’s associate. Did you go to his house? That’s where I’m calling from.”

“Yes.” She paused. “Miranda wanted me to see it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I came home by myself.”

“Didn’t you tell your housekeeper she dropped you off?”

“Yes.”

“Did she?”

“No.”

“Jill, how did you get home?”

“I left Miranda downstairs at Mr. Griffin’s house, then I walked up to St. Clair and came home by streetcar.”

“Why did you tell Victoria you got a ride home?”

“Because she worries.”

“Does she always worry?”

“Yes. But more now because she thinks I’m really upset.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

Morgan was thrown. When he met her at the morgue, the girl had seemed eerily strong, her voice modulated with an inflection of constrained hysteria but firmly under control. Now it was faltering despite her attempt to cover by being exceptionally terse. “You left Miranda here?”

“At Mr. Griffin’s … yes.”

“But I would have thought —”

“We parked the car in the garage. I think she was going to walk home, so I said I would, too. It seemed logical.”

“Logical?”

“I left her there. That’s the last I saw of her.”

“Jill, if you hear from Miranda, will you have her call this number? And I’ll give you my number at police headquarters. If you tell them it’s very important, they’ll know how to reach me.”

“Okay. I left her there downstairs.”

“Write this down.”

“I am.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

Morgan got off the phone, suspecting that Jill’s staccato responses concealed more than they revealed. For now his concern was Miranda, but Jill’s obvious pain resonated with the anguish of the girl he knew Miranda had been, the young woman Miranda had kept like a prisoner locked deep in some darkness inside.

From his perspective slouched in the wingback chair, Morgan surveyed the beautifully modulated subversions in the antique Kurdish runner. The woman who had tied these knots had challenged death with modest flourishes. Within the rigid parameters of tradition she had affixed an elusive signature, writing in symbols only she could remember. This rough rug, in Morgan’s eyes, was as exquisite as all the formal carpets he had ever seen.

Disturbing his reverie, Eugene Nishimura emerged through the corridor, carrying a bucket of sludge. “Too mucky to go down the drain,” he explained as he ambled across the Kurdish runner. Morgan flinched. “It’s from the skimmer pump filter.” He walked out. Nothing had slopped over.

By the time Nishimura returned, having dumped the muck over the embankment into the ravine, Morgan had rolled up the runner and placed it behind the sofa. Nishimura strolled through without speaking, leaving a spoor of mud bits behind him.

Reseating himself, Morgan spied at eye level another of Griffin’s notes. It was barely visible, poking out from the top of a book. A little reluctantly he got up, retrieved the note, and sat down again. This one was written as if it were part of a larger narrative: “I write so beautifully it breaks my heart, rereading what I have written and knowing that no one will decipher my words. Writing and reading are utterly separable. Rongorongo is a code. It conveys messages in the absence of meaning.”

Very enigmatic, thought Morgan. One of the messages of Rongorongo might be that a rich and reclusive degenerate could bury whole lives in a basement hideaway. More followed: “If critics are incapable of grasping what I do, it is not their fault but my own for being out of their reach. They cannot comprehend what they miss.”

Morgan telephoned the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto. There were no records of a book ever being published under the name Robert Griffin. They asked for a title; there might be something under a pseudonym. Then it suddenly came to Morgan that the notes meant nothing. He hung up abruptly.

Griffin had fantasized that he was the author of esoteric works beyond comprehension. Meanwhile he had written little missives about language and the nature of being. He had imagined a parallel universe made only of language where as a creature of words he might leap out of this world and come into his own over there.

The wretched old bugger hadn’t even been real to himself.

Morgan glanced over at the polished surface of the Rongorongo tablet. The hieroglyphs aslant to the light appeared as nothing more than random incisions. The curiously cavalier lodgement beside a cluster of walking sticks seemed somehow appropriate now.

He recalled from reading the Bible as a child, and from studying scripture in university, that he had always felt the real reason humans were driven from Eden was for naming the world. Language preceded knowledge of good and evil; words separated people from primal innocence.

He wished he could talk to Miranda.

In Miranda’s notion of unbelief, anything was possible. Perhaps even a God still in his garden beyond the limits of language.

He needed to talk to her. She would tell him he was being pompous or immature, or bring him to earth with speculation on where he was wrong. Where in the world was she?

The telephone exploded into sound, and he leaped to his feet, then realized it was on the table beside him. Grasping the receiver, he sank back into the chair.

“Miranda, where are you?”

“Morgan, is that you?”

“Miranda …” he repeated, this time unsure.

“It’s Ellen Ravenscroft.”

“Sorry. I’m expecting a call from Miranda.”

“Hasn’t she turned up yet?”

“No”

“I’m sure she’s okay, Morgan. She’s a very resourceful lady.”

“Yeah, she is.”

“Headquarters relayed my call. They said you’re at Griffin’s.”

“Yeah, waiting for Miranda.”

“I’ve got an interesting bit of news.”

“About Robert Griffin or about Eleanor Drummond? You haven’t released them?”

“Of course not. Miranda’s responsible for their funerals. Morgan, something crossed my strange little mind, so we pushed through some DNA tests.”

“The bit Miranda sent on from the drain? Was it blood?”

“It was blood, but no, it’s being processed. DNA from the bodies —”

“Eleanor Drummond is really Molly Bray.”

“Morgan, Griffin and Eleanor Drummond —”

“They’re both imposters?”

“No. But they’re related.”

“To each other?”

“He’s her father.”

“Whose father?”

“Robert Griffin is Eleanor Drummond’s father.”

“She’s his daughter?”

“It works either way.”

“Molly Bray, Eleanor Drummond, the woman who presented herself as Griffin’s mistress, she’s the man’s daughter?”

“You’ve got it.”

“I knew she had something on him. I was sure of it.”

“Morgan?”

“I knew it. When Molly became Eleanor, there had to be something to account for the radical shift in power.”

“Morgan, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sixteen years old, pregnant, Molly Bray searches the provincial records at Queen’s Park. She wants to find out about herself. She finds her birth registration papers. Elizabeth Clarke told us she was listed as the mother, and her doctor friend wrote himself in as the father. Okay, but Molly would have known that was unlikely. She called her grandmother, and the woman was in her fifties when Molly was born.

“So then Molly would have researched her own name. I don’t think she would have found any Brays in the Detzler’s Landing area, but she was a very savvy young woman. She would have traced the name in other villages where Griffin owned mills. She would have found Brays living in one of them. And I’m betting there was an Eleanor Drummond in the Bray’s family tree. So she figures Griffin is her own father as well as the father of her unborn baby. And she confronts him with the good news.”

So Miranda wasn’t the first, Morgan thought. Strange relief.

“I’m still trying to figure out where Detzler’s Landing is, Morgan! You’re talking about things I know nothing about, and it’s scary. It’s beginning to make a certain amount of sense, though. Not a lot, but I’m assuming she was pregnant with Jill, the girl waiting for her at the morgue. But why would she think to check out other mill locations?”

“I’m getting ahead of myself.”

“Then back up a bit.”

“Molly must have found information in township records, through the public library computer system, about the house where she grew up. She would have discovered it belonged to Robert Griffin. You with me?”

“Did it?”

“Yes.”

“I’m with you.”

“Elizabeth Clarke lived there rent free.”

“And she is?”

“A lovely old woman who drinks tea that tastes like pavement. It’s imported from England.”

“Lapsang Suchong.”

“We know Griffin bought her house in 1972, the year Molly was born. It was Elizabeth’s ancestral home. But she didn’t work and she was on her own. Maybe the doctor helped her out, but when Griffin offered to buy and to let her live there free for the duration of her life, she would have jumped at the chance. In turn she looked after the baby. That was the deal.”

“And Molly figured out the arrangement?”

“More so than her grandmother. Elizabeth Clarke may never have known that Griffin was the child’s father. She didn’t want to know. The baby was a godsend to a lonely woman.”

“Not all single women are heartbroken if a baby doesn’t turn up on their doorstep, Morgan.”

“No, but some might be. Let’s say she had a tragic love affair with the old guy, Dr. Howell. Maybe he married the wrong person, knocked up his housekeeper, and did the right thing. Then Molly became a bond between them. Genetics superseded by love. She was their child, as the certificates say. But she wasn’t. When Molly left, Elizabeth knew she had never really been hers.”

“That’s a very sad story.”

“Molly needed something more than a real-estate deal to explain the connection between Griffin and Elizabeth. She must have guessed she was the link between them. Her own name was a good place to start. That was the only thing she had from her natural mother. She had to find a Bray girl who would have been at a vulnerable age and within Griffin’s reach.”

“So he could seduce her?”

“Griffin didn’t seduce. He raped.”

“He raped the mother and he raped the daughter, and he made them both pregnant. That’s quite despicable.”

“It makes you want to weep for what happens in the world,” Morgan said. “And it makes you enraged.”

“I wonder what happened to the original mother. Do you think her name was Eleanor?”

“Probably. And her own mother’s maiden name was likely Drummond. There’s a strange continuity here between mothers and daughters, some related by blood, some by affection, and it’s not over yet. I’d say Eleanor Bray, Molly’s mother, moved on, with her past tucked away in remission. She’s out there somewhere living her life. She would have checked out Elizabeth Clarke — maybe old Dr. Howell made the actual arrangements. He might even have been involved in forcing Griffin to buy the old house. Sixteen years later I don’t imagine Molly much cared about tracking down her birth mother. She had no reason to be sentimental. And fourteen years after that she hoped the spiral of sex and death would collapse when she passed on responsibility for Jill to Miranda.”

“Oh, my goodness, love. It’s a funny old world. It’s always about sex and death, at least from this perspective.”

“From the morgue?”

“Story of my life. Sex and death. More of the latter, I’m afraid.”

There was a long pause.

“What made you suspect he was her father?” he asked.

“Coroner’s intuition. They were lying there side by side. I don’t know. Him, nondescript. Her, lovely even in death. But there was something … They had similar feet, long fingers, eye teeth the same, you know, an accumulation of details.”

There was another long pause. Morgan didn’t want to break the connection.

“So,” Ellen said at last, “confronted with the fact that he was Molly’s father, as well as being the father of her unborn child, Griffin had no choice but to look after her. It all came down to negotiating the details. And she became his mistress …”

“I doubt it.”

“And the murder-suicide, suicide-murder — all this, Morgan, doesn’t explain that.”

“No, there’s a huge gap between motive and intent. The intention? Well, she was confident we’d discover Jill’s parentage. So, to ensure that Jill was recognized as Griffin’s heir, to protect her daughter’s interests, and at the same time to keep Jill from finding out that her father was also her mother’s father, she counted on us to be just good enough at our jobs to reveal and obscure as directed, from beyond the grave. Motivation? Why start the ball rolling? It’s a mystery.”

“Gap? It’s more like a yawning abyss! The woman killed herself in the most horrendous way, Morgan. To endure such appalling pain, to put herself through that, there had to be something unthinkably worse that she was trying to obscure.”

“Yeah,” said Morgan. “There’s more to the story. Where the hell is Miranda?”

“I gotta go. My clients are getting impatient. You take care now. She’ll turn up one way or another. She always does.”

Morgan sank deeper into the cushions of the wing-back chair, aching from Miranda’s absence, wanting to toss these latest revelations and speculations around with her to see if she could sort them out, take them farther. His anxiety was becoming more focused, and curiously, as he worried about her, he needed her warmth to assuage his fears. Caught up in anxiety, he was hardly aware of where he was, and virtually went limp at the sudden sound of a voice out of nowhere.

“Well, don’t we look cozy.”

It wasn’t the utterance of a fiend or mischievous sprite but merely Mrs. de Cuchilleros speaking from an alarmingly unexpected position behind him.

“Hello, Detective Morgan! I thought you were outside.”

“No,” he said without looking around. “I’m not.” He needed a moment to construct in his mind what was happening. “Please come around where I can see you,” he finally said, remaining seated in the chair.

“Yes, certainly,” she responded cheerfully. “I would be happy to. I knew you were here somewhere. I wanted to speak to you.”

“How did you get in, Mrs. de Cuchilleros?”

“Through the tunnel, dear. Come along, Dolores. Dolores came with me, of course. I wouldn’t come alone.”

Morgan was nearly as disconcerted when the maid came into view and stood beside Mrs. de Cuchilleros, who had made herself comfortable on the sofa. He felt foolish. He hadn’t conceived of the passage between houses as going both ways.

“It’s not the easiest route,” he suggested.

“Oh, but it is, and here we are.”

“Do you often do this?”

“No. Not since my husband died. One time Mr. De Cuchilleros thought there might be burglars. Mr. Griffin was away, of course.”

“You must have been compelled to examine the place thoroughly.”

“Oh, yes, we went through the entire house.”

I’m sure you did, he thought. “Did you have a weapon?”

“Good grief, no. Just a flashlight. The late Mr. de Cuchilleros was a very accomplished boxer.”

“Boxer?”

“When he was a youth.”

“Good thing you didn’t run into a burglar.”

“Oh, yes, it would have been very unpleasant. My husband was a strong man even at seventy. He had an excellent physique. He lifted dumbbells every morning of our married life.”

“Mrs. de Cuchilleros, could you explain why you’re here? This is a crime scene.”

“We’re not going to contaminate anything, dear.”

“That’s not the point.”

“The Chinese boy is walking about like he owns the place.”

“Mr. Nishimura is a man, and he’s Japanese. He’s a Canadian of very long standing, he’s an authority in his field, and he belongs here by invitation of the police and the executor of the deceased.”

“Well, I wanted to speak to you personally.”

“Perhaps we should go outside,” said Morgan as he rose to his feet and shepherded the two women through the French doors.

“It’s chilly out here,” Mrs. de Cuchilleros said.

Dolores looked at her sympathetically but didn’t offer her cardigan, seeming to know the gesture would be wasted. Since Morgan didn’t offer his own jacket, the old woman braced her shoulders and marched over to the pool where her neighbour’s body had been floating when she discovered it from her aerie next door. She waited for her maid and Morgan to catch up, then made a declaration. “Dolores and I cleaned out the leaves.”

“You what!” Morgan was annoyed both at her presumption and at the triviality of her announcement.

“Dolores and I cleaned out the leaves.”

“You came here?”

“Early this morning, and we raked the leaves off the

top of his pond.” She paused for dramatic effect, then pointed at the green pond. “That one.” Ominously, she added, “It looks like mine … on the surface.”

“You’ve done this before?” asked Morgan, irritated by the way she was trying to position herself in a drama with pregnant pauses and curious inflections.

“I’ve only been here … once … since poor Mr. Griffin was found dead in his fish pond.”

“They’re all fish ponds.”

“Oh, no. I would say the two greenish ponds are ponds with fish in them and this one, where he was floating, that’s a fish pond.”

“Fair enough,” Morgan said, appreciating the distinction. “Did you come here through the house?”

“Yes, but we didn’t disturb anything. He had more leaves on his pond than we ever have in ours. It’s the trees, you know, and the wind. So I could see his needed caring for and I wanted to be neighbourly.”

“You did?”

“Yes, I did. Dolores came over with me and we skimmed all the leaves, but a few were waterlogged, and when Dolores tried to scoop them up, they sank. That’s when we discovered it.”

“Discovered what?”

“The discrepancy.”

“Mrs. de Cuchilleros, what are you talking about?”

“Be patient, Detective. Dolores’s net went down so deep in the water she reached the end of the long handle and could just scrape the bottom.”

“And?”

“And nothing. You see, that’s the point!”

He didn’t see, and nodded a solemn invitation for the comic relief to proceed.

“Well, we went home and had our morning tea. But then I began thinking. I asked Dolores if the pond froze around the edges last winter. Our pond, I’m talking about. It seems to come closer to freezing each year. Didn’t I ask you that, Dolores? And what did you say?”

“It seems to come closer to freezing each year,” the maid said.

“Mrs. de Cuchilleros —”

“Detective, you’re in such a hurry. I told Dolores we had to get a long pole. So we went out into the carriage house and found a long bamboo pole. And just as I suspected, our pond wasn’t as deep! That’s why it’s been freezing up.”

“Mrs. de Cuchilleros, where is this going?”

She smiled.

The old woman had read Agatha Christie, Morgan thought. She knew how these things worked. Pacing was as important as the details being revealed.

“Detective Morgan, the bottom of our pond is lumpy. The bottom of Mr. Griffin’s pond is smooth.”

Morgan was uneasy. He cocked an eye quizzically and waited for an unpleasant denouement.

“So there we are, Detective, prodding away with the pole, but it broke. We couldn’t get hold of anything. Then a few bits of plastic floated up.”

“From the lumpy bottom?”

“That’s how we would describe it, isn’t it, Dolores? Our pond, not Mr. Griffin’s.”

The maid nodded ambiguously. Dolores appeared to be more and more reticent as the story unfolded, as if she might avoid some grotesque revelation through affected indifference.

“Dolores,” Morgan pressed, “what do you think is down there in your pond, in the de Cuchilleros pond?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“I’ll tell you what’s down there,” said Mrs. de Cuchilleros.

“All right. What do you think is down there?”

“Dead bodies.”

Morgan had been afraid she would say that. He looked at the Filipino maid for confirmation and grimaced when she receded into inscrutability. In contrast Mrs. de Cuchilleros seemed to rise more and more with each passing moment to the role fate had cast upon her as central protagonist in a drama of unimaginable proportions. A small facet of Morgan’s mind clung to the serio-comic performance, even as a suffocating fear rose inside him for what lay ahead, a dread that must inevitably connect with Miranda’s disappearance.

Mrs. de Cuchilleros smiled solemnly, the way people did at funerals, and lowered her voice to a whisper as if she feared being overheard by the dead. “I felt down there with a rake — we taped a garden rake onto the handle of a hoe — and I could feel things. They felt slippery and mucky. We stirred up a lot of clay. There are bodies covered in silt and clay and wrapped in plastic. I didn’t want to puncture anything, so I let the rake slide around, but I could feel them. I don’t know whether they’re cut up into pieces or not. It’s hard to tell with a rake.”

Morgan grasped for alternative explanations, but nothing took hold. Details and patterns careened through his brain in slow motion as if he were in a car spinning out of control and a part of his mind was poised off to the side, waiting to see how everything turned out.

Griffin had forced himself on Miranda. Before that, on Molly’s mother, and after, on Molly, his own daughter. This history alone, foreshortened by the intensity of the moment, seemed proof of the man’s rapacious depravity. A whole range of ghastly scenarios radiated out from the probability that Robert Griffin was responsible for multiple murders and that Eleanor Drummond had known about his homicidal proclivities.

Molly Bray had become part of her assailant’s world. She had brought up her daughter with Griffin’s resources and assumed strange authority in his life. Was her control not only through using the sordid particulars of her birth like a weapon, but in knowing he was a serial killer, knowledge that would implicate her in his crimes? If power corrupted, wielding power over evil might corrupt absolutely.

Morgan was intrigued, as his ideas coalesced, that he had immediately accepted the explanation offered by Mrs. de Cuchilleros for the unnatural contours at the bottom of her pond. There was a ghastly inevitability to the revelation of profligate death. The bodies, he was sure, were there.

And Miranda was part of the equation, an inextri-cable and vital link between Molly and her mother, between Molly and her daughter. Among the convoluted relations revealed about daughters and fathers, the release of Miranda’s suppressed memories was strategic. Molly, playing with death like a puppeteer, had died with the conviction that Miranda would fiercely protect Jill’s interests.

Morgan turned directly to face Mrs. de Cuchilleros. “We’ll drain the ponds. We can do yours from over here. I believe they connect.”

“Oh, my goodness!” she gasped. “Really?”

She was stunned, faced with the sudden possibility that what she imagined was real. It was as if she had been anticipating the relief of being scolded and sent home. Morgan’s response had thrown her into giddy confusion. She grasped Dolores by the arm, obviously wanting to withdraw.

“My goodness is right,” said Morgan. “You’ve been a great help.”

Mrs. de Cuchilleros seemed to have suddenly aged, and Dolores glanced furtively around like an anxious tourist yearning for something familiar.

“You should leave now and make sure the door in the tunnel isn’t locked. The police will need to get back and forth. And please unlatch your gate so we have access from the street.”

“I don’t know what we’ve got ourselves into, Dolores. Come along now. It was very nice talking to you, Detective Morgan.”

He grimaced at the woman’s genteel formality as the old woman took her accomplice by the arm to steady herself. Leaning precariously forward, they made their way to the French doors and disappeared into Griffin’s den.

Mrs. de Cuchilleros’s closing words drifted back to him. “I believe we both need a nice cup of Tippi Assam.”

Morgan forced his way through the undergrowth outside the pump room and rapped on the glass of the low window to summon Eugene Nishimura. Then he went back to the formal pool and watched the fish weaving colours in the transparent depths. When Nishimura appeared, they both gazed into the water as Morgan explained the situation, looking up at each other several times to confirm the horror of their expectations.

They discussed how best to drain the slime-green water. The simplest thing, Nishimura suggested, was to pump it over the bank from Griffin’s pond. Assuming they were connected, that would empty the de Cuchilleros pond with the least disturbance. They would have to check both ponds, anyway, smooth bottom or not. Nishimura had a portable two-inch pump in his van that could keep ahead of the natural seepage.

Eugene Nishimura got started on that while Morgan went in to call headquarters. He explained to Alex Rufalo that he thought he had multiple human remains and asked the superintendent to notify the coroner’s office.

After he got off the phone, he walked through the tunnel and out into the de Cuchilleros garden. The water level in the widow’s pond was already beginning to recede. He called over the wall to Nishimura but couldn’t be heard above the sputtering of the pump’s gasoline engine. Shrugging, he went back to Griffin’s place to check that Nishimura was removing the fish, which he was, transferring them to the formal pool.

Morgan returned to watch the water drop slowly down the clay edges of the de Cuchilleros pond. He splashed the water periodically with a rake to make sure the fish swam through to the Griffin side. Turning, he saw Mrs. de Cuchilleros and Dolores, side by side in the dining-room window, each of them holding a bone china cup of Tippi Assam. He waved and they waved back.

By the time a lump at the bottom of the pool emerged into open air, the place was swarming with police personnel, a forensic team, an emergency unit from the fire department, and a squad of coroner’s people, including Ellen Ravenscroft, to whom he nodded without speaking.

Everyone watched in horror as the water receded and the extent of the atrocities became apparent. At first it looked like a series of clay drumlins rising from the depths, the long thin deposits of silt from a glacial retreat. As glistening contours of limbs and torsos and heads took shape, Morgan grieved. He mourned because no one had missed these girls and women enough to resolve the circumstances of their disappearances.

Just as he had immediately accepted that Robert Griffin was a serial killer, Morgan knew with certainty that the man’s victims were female. How many had gone missing each year from the streets, how many would have leaped at a ride in a sleek convertible, driven by a man getting on in age who would easily be satisfied and undoubtedly generous? He might just want to bring them home to talk.

Someone turned a hose on the pile with a gentle spray. Morgan’s assumption that they were female was confirmed as body after body separated in the wash from the mass, each of them wrapped naked with plastic sheeting and duct tape, in various stages of dilapidation. Their flesh seemed shrivelled to the bone despite the water. Decay had been arrested and the effects of putrefaction had been controlled by the clay silt that shrouded each body in layers stirred up by the fish, season by season over years, and by the coldness of the water and its continuous flow through the soil, leaching through the embankment into the ravine.

Morgan felt an overwhelming loneliness. It should never have happened this way to these human beings, most of whom were known only to God. He was drawn, he wanted to hold them, and he was repelled by what they revealed of human depravity and the human condition. Morgan gazed away, up into the foliage of the silver maples, then down into the gaping hole. His eyes were dry, his mouth was dry. He could taste his own blood.

On impulse he looked around and saw that Mrs. de Cuchilleros and Dolores were absent from the window, but striding toward him from the direction of the door below the carriage house was the young woman he had last seen at the morgue. Before he could stop her she was at his side. He tried to steer her away from the hellish scene, but she was focused on him. Her eyes were raw and her expression was resolute. She had clearly been coping with demons of her own.

“Jill, for goodness’ sake, you shouldn’t be here!” he declared.

“I need you to come with me, Mr. Morgan.”