by John Moss
“You have a tattoo, Morgan. I’m surprised.”
Her apparent intention was to deflect from the sexual, yet in acknowledging his body as an object of observation she heightened his awareness of their both being naked. She seemed absolutely relaxed in the red glow, sweat defining the shape and texture of her flesh, her legs casually apart, arms resting at her sides.
“I wouldn’t have thought you would. Anthropologically speaking, you don’t fit the profile.”
“That’s probably why I got it,” he said, for the briefest moment bemused by the reference to profiling. “It’s a Rapa Nui design.”
“Really? Let me see.” In a dark swooping motion she stood and settled close beside him. She clutched his shoulder and twisted him toward the light. Her breasts pressed against him as she drew him forward. He shuddered involuntarily. She seemed comfortable, resting against him so solidly they seemed in the heat to merge where they touched.
“It’s a bird-man,” she said.
“Tangata manu,” he clarified. Then he added, “It’s not cultural appropriation, it’s a tribute.”
“To whom? Ah, Morgan, you’re such a sweet rebel.”
She leaned into him, letting her hand slide over his body and fall onto his lap. Her fingers curled around his penis, briefly holding it like a fallen bird cupped in her hand.
“The little fellow is confused,” she said, giving a gentle squeeze and pulling it longer, then tucking it back.
Then, as quickly as she had descended on him, she withdrew.
Standing up, she reached for the ladle in the bucket and poured another splash of water on the stove through the grate.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “I’m just running in for a pee. You don’t want to stay in too long. You might shrivel up and never recover.”
She was out the door with it shut tightly behind her before Morgan had recovered from their close encounter, which had left him short of breath and oddly deflated.
Had she bolted the door? he wondered, trying to summon the sounds of the heavy door closing. He did not move, transfixed by the possibility.
He listened, immobilized by his astonishment at the absurdity of his predicament. He could hear the crackle of the fire underneath the floor. He felt parched. His throat constricted and his eyes clouded painfully. If the door was locked, the process of his mummification had already begun.
Morgan realized he was light-headed — he had been in for too long. He rose to his feet but his balance was off and he lurched back onto the lower bench, feeling the wood sear against his buttocks. The second time, he stood up more slowly, wiping the sweat from his eyes, and reached for the wood handle of the door. He pulled on the handle but it resisted. He heard a gut-wrenching slash of sound as iron bars slid against iron.
Suddenly, the door came alive against his hand and for a moment there was a tug of opposing forces. Then it swung outwards into the summer kitchen and there stood Shelagh Hubbard, wrapped demurely in her towel, which was tucked neatly in a fold over her breasts.
“It’s about time you came out of there,” she said. “For a man with a medium-rare complexion, I’d say you look overly cooked.”
“Shall we roll in the snow?” The bravado in Morgan’s proposal betrayed his relief at evading death and, equally, avoiding making an utter fool of himself.
“There isn’t any,” she said. “Let’s run naked under the stars.”
chapter eight
Countryside
“You didn’t!” Miranda exclaimed. “I thought you could take care of yourself! What if… What would have happened to my car? Mired at the bottom of a pond beside Norman Bates’s motel. With your head in the boot. My God, Morgan, how could you?”
“We say ‘trunk’ in these parts — those of us who don’t own vintage Jaguars.”
“Trunk is what would be left of your body after your paramour finished with it. The defective detective. What were you thinking? It’s obvious what you were thinking with!”
He grinned across the table at her. They were meeting for a coffee and Danish at Starbucks expressly so Morgan could fill her in on what he’d discovered during his unorthodox investigation of their principal suspect. He felt sheepish about admitting he had momentarily panicked in the sauna, yet it was a necessary prelude to confessing his ultimate innocence. First, he would allow himself to appear compromised, then admit to having further avoided her charms.
“So, you’re trying to tell me you didn’t sleep with her. What do I care, Morgan? You probably missed a golden opportunity, if you were up for it.” He exuded a boyish good cheer that irritated her immensely. “If you did sleep with her, I would imagine the conquest was hers, and if you did not, that was probably her doing as well. So tell me, were you good together? Either way, who cares?”
The odd thing to Morgan was that it had never come up as an issue, whether or not he and Shelagh Hubbard would be lovers. After running around like adolescents on the soggy lawn, leaving dreadful footprints to be rolled out later in the season, they had briefly returned to the sauna to warm up, then separately showered in the bathroom off the kitchen where they returned to dry un-self-consciously and make hot drinks of cocoa that they sipped in front of the dying fire. She rose first, leaned down, kissed him on the forehead, and retired to her ground-floor bedroom. After a few minutes, lingering to watch the embers fade and fall, glowing gold and vermillion, he had gone upstairs and crawled under the duvet where he slept soundly and wakened in the early light, feeling completely relaxed. He had not bothered to lock the bedroom door.
Miranda didn’t know whether to believe him or not. “You’re a bit of a whore, you know. Was it worth the effort?”
“Is it ever, Miranda?”
“It all sounds quite adolescent,” she said, and could not stop from reinforcing her previous disclaimer, “I don’t care what you did.”
“Good,” he said. “Then it’s settled.”
“Yes it is.”
“And what about you? Did you have a good weekend?”
“Yes.”
“At the zoo?”
“And otherwise.”
“Now, what does that mean?”
“It means I might have been whoring, myself.”
“Not likely.”
“You’re sweet, Morgan.”
“But foolish?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t think she did it — that’s my judgment after two days of foolishness.” They ordered more coffee and proceeded to sort through the facts and hypotheses. “There’s no pattern,” he said
“Not yet. The pattern will become clear when she does it again.”
“Don’t hold your breath. One funny thing she said —”
“Only one?”
“She made a point of telling me she had never been abused as a child.”
“What an odd thing to confess.”
“Yeah, over breakfast, she asked about my growing up, but it felt like an excuse to talk about herself, then she explained she’d never been abused, assaulted, molested, or in any way damaged, that she had had a thoroughly ordinary upbringing, absolutely average, absurdly normal.”
“Now, why would she want you to know all that?”
“Establishing her credentials as a psychopath manqué.”
“What the hell does that mean, Morgan?”
“A failure.”
“As a psychopath?”
“Perhaps a declaration that there is nothing in her background that would drive her to murder.” He paused for effect. “Or possibly the dead opposite — something more sinister: a declaration that she takes full responsibility for what she’s been doing.”
“You’d rather it wasn’t her.”
“I’d rather it wasn’t her.”
“She’s not a nice person, Morgan. Sometimes I worry about you. Do you really think she’s innocent?”
“An innocent, no. Innocent? Possibly.”
“I have my doubts.”
“Yeah, me to
o.”
“Grave doubts, Morgan.”
“You’re on shaky ground, you know. Guilt isn’t generally determined by personal animosity.”
“Nor innocence by affection. It seems to me you were the one on shaky ground.”
“You cannot convict someone for having a sauna,” he said.
“Not at all. I’ve had a few myself.”
“No, no, I mean owning a sauna. This is not about you.”
“But it is, perhaps, about you, since you managed to insinuate yourself into the middle of things, so to speak.”
“I mean, she has a sauna, so does Alexander Pope. That doesn’t make them killers.”
“Morgan, I survived my sauna at Pope’s with virtue intact. Rachel and Alexander and I did not compromise anything beyond the limits of modesty. Your friend’s sauna could easily be an oven for the mummification of human remains, even a chamber of execution. And she does own a coffin-sized freezer and she does live in an isolated farmhouse and she does have the requisite talents and arcane knowledge.”
“Circumstantial. Half her neighbours could be accused of the same. All those Torontonians with country retreats.”
“But not the professional training, nor the warped personality. There’s no such thing as a normal, average, ordinary childhood, Morgan.”
No, he agreed, there is not. He said nothing.
“Look,” she said. “We could send in forensics, but I doubt we’d find much at the abattoir. She’ll have cleaned up perfectly. It’s a matter of aesthetics.”
“Maybe she’s just a normal forensic anthropologist. You know, an intellectual more at ease with the dead than the living.”
“A vampire with very big breasts.”
“I found her charming. Gracious, intelligent, sensitive, good-humoured. Any of those sound familiar?”
“Morgan, she’s fucked with your mind.”
“What a nasty expression. She charmed my mind. I would much rather think she is innocent.”
“The last thing that woman is, is innocent.”
Miranda spent the rest of Monday and most of Tuesday going over the accumulated file, looking for missed connections and anomalies. She had been dividing her time over the past couple of weeks, working on other cases that were not in her portfolio, doing background for detectives more directly involved. She responded to inquiries from outside their jurisdiction — one from the FBI and a couple from Scotland Yard. She spent time off duty looking into private schools for girls. The housekeeper who looked after Jill was returning to be with her children in Barbados before they completely grew up. She had dinner with Rachel a couple of times and neither of them mentioned their intimate encounter, although they were comfortably affectionate in each other’s company. She called Alexander Pope from police headquarters to ask him esoteric questions about plaster and paint and the concealment of bodies, and stayed on the phone for over an hour, chatting about his latest reclamation project — the restoration of an infamous abandoned church north of Toronto as a museum of some sort, or a gallery. She dropped in on Ellen Ravenscroft at the morgue and they chatted amiably, but she found little had been revealed in the tissue tests they had run; the causes of death were still deemed extreme dehydration and asphyxia, but whether from a singular cause or a sustained condition was indeterminate.
She was annoyed with her partner. He knew it and stayed out of her way. After they’d left Starbucks on Monday, he had walked with her over to headquarters, but remained outside. She disappeared into the planes of glass and pink granite, while he stood on the sidewalk, admiring the postmodern architecture of the massive edifice, acknowledging to himself the possibility that the austere obscenities of modernism were at last giving way. A police building with a stream flowing from its centre was a blow for imagination and form over function. He spent the rest of the day walking.
Tuesday he got up early, had breakfast out, and walked some more. He was looking for something and it was locked inside. Wednesday morning he called Miranda. She was already at her desk.
“You busy?” he asked.
“No. Are you coming in?”
“Meet me for lunch?”
“Sure. You name the spot. Rufalo was asking what we were up to. He didn’t come right out and say, ‘Where’s Morgan?’ but he wanted to know.”
“He’s trying to get his mind off personal problems.”
“His or yours, Morgan?”
“Must be his. Did you tell him I’m out here doggin’ some leads?”
“Something like that. I told him you were hard at work, that something would break pretty soon.”
“I hope not another murder tableau.”
“Have you heard from your friend?”
The silence on the other end of the line declared his unease. She was not sure if it was with her or with himself. He had obviously moved on from infatuation. She would find out soon enough which way. They agreed to meet at the nondescript little Italian restaurant where she and Rachel had dined two weeks before.
Morgan found himself standing on the corner of Queen and Yonge. He leaned against an opaque glass wall. This was exactly where he had waited for his wife, nearly two decades ago, sheltering from the rain in the lee of the building, waiting motionless, four hours, knowing where she was, not knowing why she wouldn’t come, raindrops sliding down his cheeks into the corners of his mouth, salty, like tears.
Shelagh Hubbard was Lucy. In the middle of the night, last night, Morgan was startled from sleep by the shock of a recognition that had eluded him while awake. They looked nothing alike, but they were one and the same. The forensic anthropologist and his former wife. If Lucy had aged at half the rate he did, a preternatural possibility given her facile personality, she and Shelagh could be twins under the skin. One was full-figured with a head like death as a temptress; the other had the slender and sinuous body of a classical ballerina destined by demeanour always to play roles of betrayal and loss. Both could be ravishingly attractive and, with a shift in the light, a change of attitude, beautifully grotesque. They both embodied ambivalence, playing affection against anger, emotional austerity against blatant sexuality, sympathy against strength. Each was a siren to Morgan’s unfettered Ulysses.
All morning he wondered about the siren’s call. Was it the sound of his own weakness tolling in the chambers of his heart, or was it truly seduction, the melodic ululation of his heart’s desire? By the time he reached the restaurant, walking up Yonge Street, he was convinced that regret was a waste, that he had not stuffed up his ears but had listened, first to one, then the other. Their songs were the same. Surely, he thought, it’s better to wrestle with demons and sleep with the devil than not.
His line of reasoning, such as it was, collapsed when he saw Miranda sitting at a back table, patiently waiting. She smiled receptively. As he leaned down to her, she reached forward and with the back of her hand brushed gently against his cheek. He was startled for a moment, until she blew him a pouting kiss, and he decided he was forgiven. He would not tell her about the connection, the siren. He suspected she would understand. Instead, they would have lunch, talk about antiques and things. Maybe he would tell her about his tattoo, although it was unlikely.
Thursday; they met in front of Professor Birbalsingh’s office. The professor had pretty much lost interest when the bodies were declared modern. Postmodern, in fact, he had quipped. “It is not a question of contemporaneity,” he explained to Miranda when she had dropped in to interview him on her own while Morgan was away. “They are, of course, recently deceased. I am saying we would have discovered that, although perhaps not for a few more hours. A science like ours works incrementally, you know, building one small observation upon another and another, until sometimes we have constructed a dinosaur, Miss Quin, from an elephant’s remains. But eventually, the elephant will out, so to speak, declaring its trunk not a tail, despite our scientific efforts to the contrary.”
“Postmodern?” she had said.
“Indeed, Miss Qui
n.”
“Detective.”
“Detective Quin. I am sorry. Titles are so very important in my line of work and I am assuming in yours also.”
“They can be, yes.”
“Well, I am saying ‘postmodern’ because it strikes me as a crime that breaks all the rules. You know it is a nasty murder but you feel it is an estimable achievement, nonetheless. In spite of your capacity for empathy with the victims you admire the artistry of their rather hideous demise. You know, it was a scene of undoubted melodrama and of comic absurdity, but certainly presaged by tragedy, devised for ironic effect. All very academic, in fact. Four modes in one. My late esteemed colleague, Professor Northrop Frye, would have been very much pleased. Perhaps ‘pleased’ is not the most appropriate word.”
“So,” Miranda had said, fascinated by his convoluted assessment. “Our killer is an academic?”
“Dear me,” he responded, “I should say so, but that would perhaps be presumptuous. Not a university person, in the strictest sense, perhaps. No, quite unlikely. The university life does not leave room for such a flourish of imagination, I am afraid. Too many committees and subcommittees and granting agencies with juries. A project like this would die in the seminal stages.” He paused, raised his stentorian eyebrows, and added, “As, of course, it should.”
It had occurred to Miranda as he had been talking that Dr. Shelagh Hubbard fit the description. She had the academic credentials to be an adjunct professor, but she was employed outside the university, doing most of her work through the ROM. It was following this conversation that Miranda ran a close check on Birbalsingh’s associate and came up with her connection to Alexander Pope, studying methods of domestic construction in British colonial times. Otherwise, the woman’s curriculum vitae read like an academic prototype, and her personal dossier suggested life was a subsidiary activity to scholarly pursuits.
She liked Professor Birbalsingh and was happy to come along when Morgan suggested they interview him again, even though Morgan did not seem to have particular questions in mind.
