Harrington D’Arcy had faded from his mind. This was not a failure of imagination on his part, but submission to the power of hers. The bleeding man was well on his way to becoming fiction. Apart from a general sense of apprehension, Morgan felt worrying about Miranda was a response too personal, too intimate, for comfort.
It was only her first full day there, so perhaps she was still getting her bearings. He had suggested renting a Jeep and driving out to Rano Raraku, the volcano quarry. It was not far — the whole island was a tiny triangle in the vast Pacific, six miles by eight by twelve. Morgan did not think in metric. His idea had been for Miranda to counter the strangeness of such an amazing place by starting with the familiar. The cover of every book about the vaunted mysteries of Easter Island, every appropriation of images to sell credit cards and cosmetics, featured shots of moai on the outside slopes of the quarry where they stood, inexplicably abandoned, while over the centuries silt had built up to their shoulders. They gazed, pensively, incomplete, over the savannah to their intended platforms bordering the sea.
Morgan would like to have been there. The disjunction, particularly at Rano Raraku, between the powerful presence of the past and a full understanding of how it had all come about, had created in Morgan an oddly intense feeling of serenity. If he were a religious man, he might have described the feeling as mystical. He was moved, literally, beyond words. He hoped Miranda wouldn’t reduce it all to historical hypotheses. Sometimes it was better to live with mysteries than to resolve them.
Perhaps she was still asleep, washed by the westerly breeze through an open window, dreaming of being exactly where she was. Morgan was surprised that he found the image of Miranda in the tranquil embrace of the Hotel Victoria vaguely erotic. Quite suddenly, he got up and strode out of the interrogation room, out of Police Headquarters, into the midday Toronto sun.
An hour later, he was meandering across the manicured grass in front of the clubhouse at the Royal Toronto Yacht Club, which yesterday had seemed so imposing and now struck him as an embarrassingly misplaced anachronism. Perhaps it was being here on his own, without the mediating effect of Harrington D’Arcy, but the antebellum enclave of privilege now seemed a little sad, like a fat man who smokes.
He made his way past the colonnaded portico to the Pemberly. It was still cordoned off with yellow tape strung across the pilings, but no one had thought to post an officer to keep watch. It was assumed the entire premises were secured. And they were: from ethnic interlopers, class jumpers, women of a certain sort, but not from murderers, embezzlers, politicians and lawyers, or world-class sailors.
Morgan had the heart of an anarchist, but the mind of a cop.
He did not want to change anything because that wasn’t his job. The world worked the way it worked, and when it didn’t, then it was up to people like him to get it working again. He stepped on board the Pemberly and felt it rock gently against its moorings. Morgan’s knowledge of boats, particularly yachts, was from books. You don’t grow up among the working poor in old Cabbagetown familiar with halyards and spinnakers, bowsprits, and transoms. Sheets and shrouds were to cover the living and the dead, not to catch the wind.
When he stood on the foredeck and gazed down at the hatch, something seemed askew. The hatch was locked from the outside. Under him was the fo’c’sle locker; why wouldn’t it be secured from within? He went below and made his way past the head and a large locker into the forward hold. There were no bunks, as he had expected, only a stowage area.
He realized he was wrong about the lock. The hatch was used for passing things through, probably sails, so an outside lock was appropriate. Still, as he ran his fingers around the mahogany combing beneath the hatch, he felt dents in the wood and by shifting his position he could see gouges that a screwdriver might have left in an attempt to pry the hatch open. Flecks of varnish came off on his fingers. The damage was very recent.
Someone, a woman, he suspected, had been forcibly confined down here. D’Arcy would know his own boat; he would know how much force it would take to smash through the fo’c’s’le or companionway hatches. They were wood, thick enough to withstand the forces of water lashing the boat in a storm — but they were only wood, mahogany, and they could be broken from inside with a few sharp blows from a winch handle, an elbow, or even the blunt end of a screwdriver. Most places can be broken out of, if you are willing to break things. A woman is less likely than a man to resolve the dilemma of her confinement through violence. It is not about the nature of women, but how they are taught restricting conventions as absolutes. The truth is, wood breaks, glass breaks, it would not have been difficult to escape from the belly of the Lion.
Miranda would be irritated by the sexist assumption. She would counter with a statement of resonant ambiguity: we live in an age, thank God, when even absolutes are uncertain. She would conclude that the person locked below, without deference to gender, was either incapacitated or lacking imagination, or both. The autopsy indicated Maria had consumed alcohol. She might have been up to no more than a haphazard effort. She likely anticipated a hangover, not death, or she would have tried harder. He could hear Miranda’s words in her own voice.
Morgan looked around for the screwdriver and found it against the foot of a berth in the main cabin. As he leaned over to pick it up he smelled Fleurs de Rocaille. She had certainly been there, lying on this berth, not long before dying. He touched where she had been, and withdrew his hand with an instinctive rush; the mattress was still warm. But of course it was not; it was his own body heat reflected from the Ultrasuede cover.
Morgan was seized by a sense of connection with the dead woman. The rich gleam of highly finished mahogany brightwork, the blue mattress covers on the three berths, the brightly coloured cushions and small pillows, the diminutive curtains drawn away from the portholes, the gleaming brass fittings, polished chrome instruments, and spotless galley with a stainless-steel stove on gimbals and woven tea towels folded neatly in a slot, all signified a distinctive taste. The confined space of the cabin was an expression of personality and Morgan felt certain it was not the work of a nautical designer, nor that of Harrington D’Arcy.
There was a gallery of framed photographs screwed into the forward bulkhead. Morgan had noticed them before. What seemed to be generic sailing pictures now resonated, since he had seen duplicates in the D’Arcy home. There were expected shots of the Pemberly under full sail, heeling perilously close to the wind, with canvas taut, the skipper’s hand on the tiller with an iron grip; and of the Pemberly moored against a series of familiar and exotic backdrops.
In one of the action shots, professionally dramatic in black and white, there were two people in the cockpit. Harrington D’Arcy could be identified, braced against the combing on the high side. Morgan peered this way and that until he confirmed that the other figure, wearing the skipper’s cap with her hand on the tiller, was Maria.
He recalled thinking of D’Arcy as the sole owner. If the Pemberly had been moored at the Port Credit Yacht Club down the lake, he might have assumed it was a family boat. In fact, he recognized the Port Credit clubhouse in the background of one of the pictures. He had been there a few years ago on a case that proved to be a suicide masking a murder. There was something familiar, if generic, about the tropical setting of another picture. Then he realized it was not the Pemberly in the foreground, but a two-masted ketch, a small ocean sailor of about the same size. Both D’Arcys were in the cockpit. Behind the ketch was the semblance of a harbour, little more than a bay, edged by a few buildings and a sparse scattering of palms. And, indistinctly, near the centre, a shadowy rectangle, the back of a moai facing a soccer field across the gravel road. He could not see the road or the field in the photograph, but he knew they were there.
Easter Island, the village of Hanga Roa. The Rongorongo on the mantle was a souvenir, not an auction-house acquisition. The D’Arcys had sailed there in the ketch, probably east from Tahiti. They would have stopped at Pitcairn along the way, before the long haul to the most isolated island in the world. He had not thought of it
