an habitual Agatha Christie reader — how “it,” as she thereafter referred to the body, depriving Griffin in death even of gender, got into the pond. She just glanced out, and he was dead. She felt it was her civic duty to inform the police. The uniformed officers assured her she had been very neighbourly and that real detectives would call by if there were any more questions.
When Miranda arrived at the Griffin place with two black coffees and cinnamon-raisin bagels, toasted, with light cream cheese, Morgan was beside the upper pond, talking to the officers who had interviewed the woman next door.
She handed Morgan his coffee and bagel. Information at this point was sparse. She had checked on the way over with Ellen Ravenscroft. A preliminary examination confirmed no evidence of significant wounds or bruises. A superficial cut on the forehead, nothing more.
Miranda sat on the limestone parapet. After a while, Morgan joined her. They consumed their breakfast without talking. Why would someone practise law on his own? she wondered. Why semiotics? It wasn’t a middle-aged hobby. She couldn’t get a grasp on Griffin as a living person, only as a corpse. Why would someone want to work homicide? Things like that just occurred — here they were, Morgan and her, hovering on either side of forty, with murder in common. At the moment, with the chimerical Robert Griffin in common. No, not a chimera; he was real. Yet she connected with him only in death.
Sometimes it happened that way. Both of them felt tremulations on occasion, returning to a crime scene where they had seen a locket around the neck of a derelict beaten to death, emptiness clutched in the dead hand of a rape victim. This was different. It wasn’t empathy she felt, but a strange anxiety. Despite the lack of emotional hooks, Griffin’s murder had taken on an eerie life of its own.
Was he the architect of a plot gone awry, or a victim of malevolence beyond his control? There was a lot of money involved, there was his stunning asexual mistress, there was Miranda’s connection, there were the koi.
Miranda had absorbed more than she had thought the previous night, reading about koi on the Net. She had checked out Chagoi and wasn’t convinced that every good pond would have one. She thought she could tell a Sanke from a Showa, a new-style Showa from an old. The intensity of black pigmentation against slashes of red on vibrant white was more intricate on the actual fish, and as they carved elusive patterns through the water she faltered, not sure she could tell one from another.
“We’d better feed them,” she said.
“I did.”
“How did you get into the house? I have the keys.”
“There’s food in the bin by the door.”
“And you knew how much, of course. Nice Sanke, that one.”
“Which one?”
“The big one.”
“Which big one?”
So, she thought, those two were Sanke. The other big guy, the length of her arm with black on its head, had to be a Showa.
“I like the Showa best,” she said. “Old-style. Lots of black.”
“Sumi,” he said. “Black is sumi, red is hi.”
“What got you going on koi, Morgan? It’s unusual even for you.”
“A magazine cover in one of the big box stores. I was grazing through the magazine section, looking at gardening journals —”
“You don’t garden.”
“I know, but it was spring.”
“Right.”
“I saw the word koi in bright orange letters across the top of a magazine for the English country gardener, and I didn’t know what koi meant —”
“You would hate that.”
“So I’ve been reading. Good thing, too.”
“For sure — if this is a crime about fish.”
“Exactly.”
“I was on the Net last night,” said Miranda. “Emailed an old friend of mine, a marine biologist in Halifax. I asked her about the water swirling in the wrong direction. She’s one hour ahead of us, so I got my answer this morning before I left home.”
“We figured it was the filter.”
“Yeah, but do you know why? It returns perpendicular to the wall to create a current, so the fish are always swimming. To keep them in shape. It can probably be reversed, so they swim both ways.”
He chewed his bagel and sipped his coffee, resisting what to him seemed an obvious quip about swimming both ways. “Have I ever met her?”
“No, you don’t know everyone I know, you know.”
“I know.”
They walked over to the lower pond. It was skirted by rocks placed with casual artifice as if by the hand of a thoughtful god. Set off against shrubbery, grasses, moss, and well-placed Japanese maples, close under the towering silver maples, there was a lovely decadence about it, haunting, like a Southern mansion from Faulkner drifting toward ruin.
“Must be a spring down there,” said Miranda. “And enough seepage through the embankment to keep it fresh.”
“Must be,” said Morgan. She was right, of course. There had to be considerable flow if there were no filters or even an aerator.
“It’s lined with bentonite clay.” She settled down on her heels to scoop a handful of muck from below the waterline.
Of course, he thought.
“I’ll bet there are fish in there,” she said. “The diver missed them.”
Of course: still water, the clay, freshness, the opacity.
“Have you ever tried to catch hold of a fish when you’re underwater? You wouldn’t even see it in here. A perfect growing environment for prize koi.” She scraped the clay off her hand, rinsing in the opaque water.
“There’s apparently a grate of some sort along the fence side,” said Morgan. “The diver didn’t think it went anywhere, part of an old drainage system. She said there was no current. Maybe fish were hiding behind the grate.”
They walked back toward the house, agreeing the best fish might be hidden in the lower pond.
Like diamonds in a vault, a mink in cold storage, a stolen painting kept under the bed. Like a bottle of 1967 Chateau D’Yquem buried in the deepest recesses of a wine cellar, too valuable for an honest cop to consider drinking.
“‘Fallen rain on autumn leaves,’” said Miranda as they stopped by the formal pond. “That’s what Ochiba Shigura means. There’s nothing about ‘I am sad.’ I checked it out.”
He repeated the phrase. Then he added, “Nice, what you can do with words when you don’t know their meaning. It’s the most beautiful, the Ochiba Shigura.”
“A little
