halfway across the harbour he could see the top of the Gibraltar Point lighthouse through a cleft in the trees, poised on the southernmost side of the big island. He had never been there. As a kid growing up among the tenements of Cabbagetown, he thought of Toronto Island, the islands, as distant outposts, like Florida in winter or Muskoka in summer. Places other people visited.
He found the Lion easily enough, moored bow-out in an open slip within hailing distance of the clubhouse, which hovered like a stately ghoul behind a sweeping facade of columns and verandahs. The name Pemberly was embossed across the transom in block letters, black with gold edges. And, of course, the woman’s body exposed to the morning air, propped up in the open cockpit, left him in no doubt that he was in the right place. Curiously, the few people moving about — a couple of groundskeepers, staff from the clubhouse preparing for breakfast, several deckhands of indeterminate age and gender — were completely ignoring the murder scene, although the unnatural stillness of the woman proclaimed she was dead to even the most casual observer.
Perhaps it is a matter of maintaining decorum, he thought, gazing across the manicured lawn at the Toronto skyline in the distance. How close to the city, and how very far. Another world, other times, crystallized in an institution as oppressively charming as a gangland funeral.
The body was not quite warm, but that may have been because she was dressed only in a bikini, and the air was cool, even for August. Raven hair, golden skin, lithe physique. If a corpse could be described as elegant, this was an elegant corpse.
There were no marks. As a courtesy, Morgan pressed his fingers to her jugular to confirm that she was dead. Then he turned to the man with the clipped grey moustache and jaunty cravat who was sitting across the cockpit, scrutinizing his every move as if committing Morgan’s actions to memory for future reference. He must be a lawyer, Morgan thought.
Morgan looked around, expecting to see a forensics team and medics or someone from the coroner’s office. There were only the two of them, three, if you counted the dead woman.
“You called Rufalo, yourself,” Morgan observed.
“Yes. My name is D’Arcy. Harrington D’Arcy.”
“Well, Mr. D’Arcy,” said Morgan. Given the name of the boat, he almost expected the corpse to be Elizabeth Bennett. “Your friend seems quite dead.” Sometimes using the wrong word to describe a relationship revealed the unexpected.
“She is not my friend, she was my wife.” It struck Morgan as interesting how precisely the man shifted her into the past tense. In Jane Austen, marriage is forever. “I asked Rufalo to have you come ahead,” said Harrington D’Arcy. “Your backup will be here on the next ferry.”
“If properly attired,” said Morgan.
“Quite,” said Mr. D’Arcy, failing to see the humour.
“You asked for me, personally?” Morgan wondered if the term ‘backup,’ was meant to be manipulative. The man was a lawyer. He wondered why his “backup” would take the club ferry, not the police launch?
“You have a sound reputation.”
“No, that would be my partner. I simply have a reputation. And why do I not know you, Mr. D’Arcy, if you are so well connected?”
“Because I am successful enough to afford the luxury of remaining anonymous. I do not need to be known.”
“Corporate law, hostile takeovers?”
“Indeed. Venture capital. Acquisitions. We try to keep the hostility minimal.”
“Would you care to explain what happened?”
“I would if I could. That is why I requested you, because I cannot. And I do realize how compromising this all might appear.”
“By all, you mean the death of your wife?”
“And the facts, Detective Morgan. There are no witnesses to her death, I have no alibi, I do have a motive — several, in fact. It was a September-December affair. She’s younger than I am, but not as young as she looks. We were tiresomely unhappy. She was promiscuous, I am bisexual, when I bother at all. Quite unsuited. She was generally well liked, very kind to the less fortunate and a generous patron of the arts — and I am regarded as ruthless. By my friends in the profession. My enemies are not so charitable.”
“Did you?”
“Kill her? Good Lord, no. I don’t even know how she died. I woke up at dawn, came up for a morning’s pee over the side, it is always quite satisfying to piss publicly in such an august place as the Royal Toronto. And there she was. I slept on board alone through the night. God knows where she came from. I called in to your superintendent immediately, of course.”
“Did you touch her?”
“Well, yes, obviously. I thought she was sleeping off a binge, I shook her damned hard and I dressed her. Apart from that, no I did not touch her.”
“But you dressed her?” Morgan asked, looking at the string bikini and noting that the top, such as it was, was green and the bottom was tropical blue. “She was naked when you found her?”
“No, of course not. She had on her bottom piece, but her top was absent.”
“You heard nothing. It must have been light when she was —” Morgan paused. He could see no harm in allowing D’Arcy’s story veracity, for the time being, “— when she was brought on board. You heard nothing?”
“No mystery there. I sleep with ear plugs.”
Morgan gazed at the man. Yes, perhaps, he thought. But when he had first stepped onto the boat it rolled under his weight and halyards rattled against the mast. You’d have thought someone carrying a corpse would waken a sleeper below. You would have thought a distraught husband wouldn’t have the detachment to shave. Mr. D’Arcy, aboard the Pemberly in the lee of the stately RTYC mansion, seemed quite in control and very well groomed.
* * *
Miranda looked around for the handsome Englishman when she disembarked at São Paulo and was ushered to the business-class lounge with a crush of other transients. Perhaps he had remained sitting and she had missed him in the bustle of baggage retrieval from overhead bins and the thronging masses moving up from steerage. She settled in with a gourmet breakfast of croissants, Swiss cheese, and prosciutto on a linen napkin and picked up her Heyerdahl book.
It had occurred to her that the Englishman might be going to Easter Island, as well. She was restless. She put the book back in her travel bag and pulled out the comics Morgan had given her. Scrooge McDuck from January 1988 was on top. She opened to the panels on the first page and was immediately engrossed, the way she used to be as a child reading Archie, with the voices inside her head.
The storyline was predictably silly, but there were a few brief passages referring sympathetically to the tragic past of the Rapanui people and there was a jarring reference to the brief visit of Captain Cook in 1774. It was like the cartoonists were using an elaborate code to deliver intimations of another story, not about ducks and their dog-faced adversaries, but about actual people in an actual place.
She turned to Batman, September 2003. Far from Gotham, the Caped Crusader was locked fist and fang with nefarious nasties among the moai when, suddenly and arbitrarily, there was an historical reference to the terrible plight
