Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

  Te Ave Teao poured them each a shot of Scotch in coffee mugs. She looked from Ross to Matteo. She felt a cultural kinship with Ross that she found disconcerting; he was far more of a mystery to her than the islanders and probably more dangerous. Matteo clinked his mug against hers and raised it high before taking a gulp. He was welcoming her. She liked him best.

  They talked very little. Miranda felt no urgency to understand her situation. Time was on her side; sooner or later they would have to explain. An hour passed and another and after several more Scotches the men dispersed to bunks against the walls, directing Miranda to sleep in the loft. She made a brief foray outside with the only lamp, then climbed the ladder, and, removing her sundress, sprawled out on a fresh sheet spread over a comfortable mattress that seemed to float in the moonlight. They would talk in the morning. She knew something of what these men were involved in, but they would clarify why she was part of it. She may not have been sent by a woman she’d never met, but she wasn’t here by accident.

  She heard someone moving around, the metallic click of a rifle, then nothing, just silence. After an interminable wait, she heard another click as the rifle was disarmed, then more silence, heavy like the dark shadows surrounding her in the loft of this strange little house, in the midst of this strange little war.

  She slept, dreaming furiously, and awakened at dawn.

  Feeling thick-headed from the Scotch and the confusion of the last few days, Miranda gingerly dressed and descended the ladder with extra care to avoid waking the others. She needed to go outside and then, if they were still asleep, she thought she might return to the comfort of the loft for another hour or two. She was feeling grubby, still in her underwear and sundress from the day before. At the bottom of the ladder she peered around into the shadows, and, not unexpectedly, saw her belongings from the hotel in a far corner, including a rather forlorn sheaf of comic books. It had not occurred to the men to offer her the opportunity to change before going to bed, and, oddly enough, it had not crossed her mind as a possibility.

  Still standing at the base of the ladder, she realized the room was ominously quiet. She walked closer to each of the three bunks in turn and discovered them empty. She opened the front door to let in some light and the brilliance of the rising sun startled her so that she stepped back a pace before venturing out into the yard amidst a scattering of irritated chickens.

  Well, at least I know we’re facing east, she thought. Unless dawn is different in the southern hemisphere. She hurried off to the outhouse beside a small drive-shed, but after being assailed by a wall of stale odour when she opened the door she slipped into the long shadow cast by the shed and peed in the open air, close to the spot she had used the night before.

  The car was still there, so they must have walked, or someone picked them up. The car was not locked, but there were no keys in the ignition, nor under the seat or in the glove compartment. Even if she could cross the wires, she had no idea where she would go. At this point, her role was to wait.

  Back inside the house she found coffee in a canister and with water from a large plastic thermos in the lean-to kitchen she brewed up a pot on the kerosene stove. As the small house filled with the aroma of fresh coffee, she sponged herself down at the kitchen sink, using brackish water from a hand-pump, and changed into a fresh outfit. She settled at the table with a mug of coffee and her makeup kit. There was bread on the table, but she was not hungry. Beside the bread there was a book. She hardly noticed it at first, it seemed so familiar. Then curiosity got the better of her and she picked it up, deciding she wanted to know whether this was the copy she got from Morgan, or was it the copy with the scribbled notes? It was the latter. She settled back and sipped her coffee and began to thumb through the book, looking for messages.

  5

  Te Pito O Te Henua

  Morgan read Maria D’Arcy’s suicide note over and over, trying to find an opening, some anomaly that would allow him into her mind. On the surface it was a characteristic blend of banality and despair. Her words expressed the self-absorbed anxieties of a person embracing death because she could think of no better alternative. The angular handwriting suggested strength of character; the message, vanity. He thought that suicides were victims of absolute solipsism. In the sad and contradictory rationale of self-annihilation, the world might be a better place when the suicide was gone because the world would cease to exist.

  The only peculiar thing about the note was that it was addressed to him personally. They had never met while Maria D’Arcy was alive. How could she anticipate his involvement in the investigation of her death? She must have known that it would be perceived as murder. If she were actually murdered, though, the note only proved that she saw it coming and felt some moral imperative to exonerate her killer.

  As he walked from the Annex over to Rosedale, Morgan ruminated about moral imperatives. Police work was invariably about morals. Lawyers and judges transcended morality, or slipped beneath it in the service of justice. Cops, however, even traffic cops, made moral decisions dozens of times a day. Sometimes foolish ones, sometimes kindly ones, sometimes wise.

  Morgan stood on the stoop of the seigneurial house in Rosedale with his back to the door. He stared out through the shrubbery, past the well-coiffed garden, beyond the red-brick sidewalk edging the quiet street that ran through the winding tunnel of shade stretching under a canopy of towering silver maples. This would be a good place to live if you had the money. Maybe the dead woman was happy. Maybe that was why she died.

  Morgan was still puzzling that one out when the door opened behind him.

  “Mister Detective, I see you through glass, you are waiting?”

  “Señora, yes, I was thinking.” He had taken her to be staff on his first visit. “Do you live here?”

  “I have my apartment over carriage house. It is at the garage, upstairs.” She evidently was not certain he would know what she meant by “carriage house.” The woman stepped back to let him in. She was dressed in black, not in a service uniform. She was wearing pearls. The strain on her face showed grief, but she was quite radiant.

  “You have found him?” she asked.

  “No, not yet.”

  “You have found what has happened to Maria?”

  “No,” Morgan repeated. “Not yet. I received a note. I would like something she has written to make a comparison. Perhaps we could go to her study.”

  “Of course, follow me. How you have received a note, she is dead?”

  “That is part of the problem, señora.”

  “Maria Pilar Akarikitea”

  “Señora aka-riki-te-a.” He broke down the syllables, then let their melody embed in his mind.

  There was nothing deferential about her as she turned and walked ahead of Morgan through the library into the study, but she did not object when he went through the drawers of a desk and fished out a small packet of letters tied with a faded blue ribbon. While she watched from the doorway, he compared the suicide note with one of the letters. The note was in English and the letter was written in what he assumed was Spanish or Portuguese. Each language asserted certain protocols of style: the Spanish, or Portuguese, had elegant flourishes, the English showed angular dips and rises. But they were in the same hand. He would take the letters with him, to be sure, but he felt a handwriting analyst would concur.

  “I will bring you some tea,” said the woman and vanished.

  Morgan sat down at the desk. Three revelations had occurred to him simultaneously, vying with each other for primacy. The woman was a member of the family. The letters conveyed a story of personal loss or estrangement simply by being in the desk of the person who wrote them. The suicide note was a fake.

  Back at his own desk, Morgan toyed with the note. It was clearly a fine sample of Maria’s handwriting. But the message was too perfect, in precisely the words one would expect if the writer had studied the genre in a forensic manual and then written in exact imitation. And the handwriting was very deliberat
e. The penmanship in suicide notes usually revealed the traumatized psyche by slanting askew.

  He picked up the letters and carefully slipped off the worn blue ribbon which had evidently been tied and untied many times. Maria Pilar had readily given her permission for him to take them downtown, but with tears in her eyes she asked for their safe return. It was then Morgan realized she was the murdered woman’s mother, information she had not offered on her own, but confirmed when he asked her. Each letter was in an envelope, but as he shuffled through them, he noticed they all bore Canadian stamps that had never been franked. The escalating denominations of the stamps indicated the letters had been written over a period of years. They had been sealed in envelopes ready to mail, then torn open, probably re-read, and stacked with their predecessors. They were all addressed to the same person on Isla de Pasqua, someone called Te Ave Teao.

  The telephone rang. It was Edwin Block.

  “Mr. Morgan?” he said. He wanted reassurance.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Eddie. From the ferry. How’s everything going?”

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  “Keeping busy?”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “Can’t ask for more than that.”

  “No, I can’t ask for more than that.”

  “You’re staying out of trouble? I guess in your job you would be. Dumb question.”

  “Yes, on all counts.”

  “Everything’s going fine?”

  “You asked that.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “Eddie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What is it?”

  “What?”

  “What did you call for?”

  “Well, they have a really good criminology course at Sir Adam Beck.”

  “So I hear.”

  “I was just wondering if you could, you know, write a letter for me? It’s too late to apply, sort of, but if I had a letter from you I could probably get in.”

  “Eddie, I don’t know you.”

  “Edwin Block. I work on the yacht club ferry.We’ve talked; I phoned you yesterday.”

  “I know who you are, Eddie, but I don’t know anything about you.”

  “That’s okay.” He paused. “I can still get into funeral directing. They have openings.” He paused again. “Could you write me a letter for that?”

  “I’d have to write a letter saying I don’t know you.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t think you have to know me. They need a character reference. Like, people aren’t dying to be a mortician.”

  “Good joke, Eddie.”

  “Yeah, like, people are dying to get into cemeteries.”

  “I’ve heard that one, too. Is there anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Goodbye, then, Eddie.”

  “Do I get the letter? Whoa, there goes the Tangata Manu.”

  “Pardon? Where are you calling from?”

  “Cellphone. I’m working. The T.M. crossed right in front of us.”

  “Tangata Manu?”

  “Yeah, it’s a boat.”

  “Is it a ketch?”

  “A ketch or a yawl. I can’t see for sure.”

  “Where’s the wheel?”

  “Not a wheel, it’s a tiller. Behind the mizzen. It’s a ketch.”

  “And Rove McMan is at the tiller.”

  “He is, Mr. Morgan. How’d you know that?”

  “I’m a detective, Eddie. Is the boat on the way in or on the way out?”

  “Just arriving, I’d say. Must have come in the Eastern Gap.”

  “Good, I’ll see you in half an hour. I’ll bring you a letter on police stationary, vague enough you can use it for criminology or undertaking or cooking school.”

  “I hadn’t thought about cooking school.”

  “Goodbye, Eddie.”

  Morgan hung up and jotted a quick note recommending Edwin Block for his adherence to rules, his initiative, and his persistence. Tangata manu, of course, was the name of Morgan’s tattoo. When he had visited Easter Island he had had a small bird-man figure etched into his upper arm. The Rapanui call the stylized image tangata manu. Similar figures were abundantly displayed throughout the island, sometimes as pairs in balanced opposition. They were an expression of what anthropologists call the bird-man cult, which was really, as Morgan understood it, a form of governance with theological underpinnings, not much different from the British parliamentary system in relation to the Church of England, but more egalitarian, and much more efficient.

  Tangata manu and komari, they were everywhere on the island, wherever there was a surface of exposed rock, a mound of stone, a rare slab of wood. Komari were stylized female genitalia, they looked like clamshells poised to spring open. It was a word, Morgan thought, less likely to be used to name a boat than tangata manu, although, God knows, boats were considered generically female.

  The Tangata Manu was the ketch in the photographs off Rapa Nui, the boat Rove McMan sailed home through the Panama, Morgan was sure of that.

  Miranda had laughed at Morgan’s tattoo. How James Dean, she had said, although neither of them associated Dean with tattoos. It was precisely because Morgan was so unlikely a person to decorate his flesh that he had done it. His father sported a crown and anchor on his forearm from his stint in the merchant marine during the war. She thought the innocuous perversity of Morgan’s rebellion was endearing.

  Just as he was about to leave for the Harbourfront, his phone rang again. He was tempted to ignore it, but it might be Miranda, explaining where she was and why she had changed hotels.

  “Morgan, here,” he said, expecting her to say, “yeah, I recognized the voice,” or some other hackneyed quip.

  “Detective Morgan, it is Gloria Simmons.”

  For a moment, Morgan was at a loss. “What can I do for you?” he said.

  “I’ve heard from Mr. D’Arcy.”

  “Oh, it’s Ms. Simmons. You do have a first name.”

  “I don’t know where he is, exactly.”

  “But you’ve heard from him.”

  “He’s on Baffin Island.”

  “You already told me that, Ms. Simmons. He’s working out the details of a mining deal. Zinc and copper, I think you said. The only zinc mine on Baffin is at Nanisivik on the shore of Lancaster Sound. At the very north end.”

  “You’ve obviously checked?”

  “Rumour is, Nanisivik is closing down. Not much incentive for wheeling and dealing with an international consortium.”

  “No. But they’ve discovered another lode, a few hundred kilometres to the southeast. That’s why Mr. D’Arcy was out of reach. They went in by helicopter. It’s very secret at this stage. No radio contact. There are billions of dollar at stake.”

  “Billions! And that’s why he left his wife on ice. Does he normally go into the trenches?”

  “Meaning?”

  “He’s a suit, a boardroom guy, he wears a cravat, does he usually work on site?”

  “Mr. D’Arcy does what he has to do, whatever it takes.”

  “Whatever it takes? Do you always call him Mister D’Arcy? Seems rather formal.”

  The curious enunciation of D’Arcy’s name, so precise and carefully non-sexual, he found both intriguing and oddly disturbing.

  “I received a call,” she said, after a polite silence that made it clear she was ignoring his invitation to discuss their relationship.

  “From him?”

  “No. That’s what is puzzling. It was from an Inuk guide named Simonie Ipellie. He said Mr. D’Arcy and two other men were picked up along the coast on Baffin Strait by small boat. That was yesterday. They never returned. There’s some rough weather out there, but they’re getting together a search party when it breaks. Mr. D’Arcy left instructions with Simonie Ipellie, he was to call me. And ask for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Yes.”

  “About what?”

  “I assumed you would know. I was just t
o make the connection.”

  “Well, at this point, I don’t know what I can do,” said Morgan. Harrington D’Arcy was accustomed to manipulating others. Usually people in business are more covert, using experts in public relations, or more crass, buying co-operation. It annoyed him that D’Arcy did not bother with subtlety, making the assumption that Morgan could be deployed like a piece in a chess game. “If you hear from him again, let me know.”

  “Detective Morgan, I’m flying north in a couple of hours.”

  “To Baffin?”

  “Yes. Do you want to come?”

  “Why?”

  “Because Mr. D’Arcy is missing. And you want him for murder.”

  “I thought you favoured the suicide theory.”

  “If she was murdered, I don’t think Mr. D’Arcy killed her. But I do think you will only find out who did through him.”

  “Not if he’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “He’s missing somewhere between Baffin Island and Greenland, he could easily be dead.”

  “I doubt he is dead, Mr. Morgan, but I believe he is in need of assistance.”

  “You’re very close, are you? You can sense his needs.”

  “Will you be joining me? The plane leaves from the Island Airport at noon on the dot.”

  “On the dot. Company plane?”

  “Yes.”

  “A jet?”

  “Yes.”

  “At noon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have a safe flight, Ms. Simmons.”

  Morgan gave Eddie Block his letter on the ferry going across to the RTYC and chatted with him about the relative merits of careers in police work and undertaking, but not as a chef. Eddie had no idea where the Tangata Manu would be moored. He had never been ashore at the club, not beyond the landing dock. Morgan inquired at the porter’s desk in the main building and was directed to an obscure site along a system of docks and dykes reserved for the less affluent or, perhaps, for those wishing a low profile.