we haven’t talked about that.”
“Have you told Legal Affairs?”
“They’ll pull me off the case.”
“So don’t tell.”
“I have to. I’m just stalling.”
“How come?”
“It’s not much of a murder as murders go. A dead guy in a fish pond. And the world goes on.”
“Yeah, except —”
“I’m the guy’s executor.”
“Executrix.”
“Even if I turn him down, I’m compromised.”
“Not so, unless you did it.”
“What?”
“Killed him.”
“I didn’t even know him.”
“And that’s the real mystery.”
“Morgan, I swear to God I don’t remember the guy.”
“He knew you.”
“Or thinks he did.”
“Could he have possibly known you’d be investigating his death?”
“I don’t see how.”
“Neither do I.”
“Clairvoyance? Conspiracy? Coincidence?”
“Concupiscence!” she added to his list. “I’m not sure what that means, but it alliterates.” She didn’t know if alliterate was a verb.
He looked at her and thought about Freud. “Concupiscence means sexual desire.”
“Yuck.”
“Listen, I checked him out on the Web last night. Couldn’t find much on Griffin personally — a rich lawyer, no record of ever pleading a case in court, not listed in the current Who’s Who, no club memberships. I found more about the property than him, and the family. He was called to the bar in 1966, so he was a lawyer before he got into linguistics. He received a Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of Toronto. ‘Language Acquisition and the Descent of Man.’ Two copies of his dissertation are in the Library and Archives Canada, one copy registered with the Library of Congress in Washington, two copies in the Robarts Library at U of T. Published privately in a limited edition of fifty. No ISBN. You’ll be handling a sizable estate. This house is older than you’d think. The family were in the mill business. They owned a feed mill and a carding mill in the Don Valley — paved over now. Woollen mills at one time and even a shingle mill. And farmland. They owned a good chunk of prime nineteenth century Rosedale, and several more grist mills in southwestern Ontario — your part of the world. I checked out the architectural drawings for this place. Do you know there’s even a registered plan for the fish garden? A son and heir, probably Griffin’s grandfather, built the Tudor monstrosity next door, made it bigger than the old man’s, built a stone wall between them, then put in a gate, which looks as if it hasn’t been opened in a century. He even drew up plans for a sheltered passageway, a tunnel affair, to get back and forth in inclement weather.”
“Inclement?”
“Inclement weather.”
“You know,” she paused, looking at the Ochiba, trying to see what he saw, “someday the words that swirl inside your skull are going to explode.”
“Implode.”
“You know what you know, Morgan, and then you die.”
“That’s Presbyterian. Which I am not, by the way, not practising.”
“You don’t need practice to be a Presbyterian. There’s no point. Isn’t that the whole point — there is no point?”
He smiled. John Calvin in a nutshell, and from an Anglican.
“What’s a Kumonryu?” she asked.
“Spell it. Your Japanese is terrible.”
Miranda spelled it. She hadn’t mentioned Griffin’s email about caring for the koi.
“Known also, I think, as the dragon fish,” said Morgan. “The Kumonryu changes colour as it grows, becomes dark and furtive, dissembling behind a progression from silver to platinum to pewter. You can never be sure with a dragon fish that it is what it seems.”
“Sounds like people I’ve known.”
“The dark side eventually takes over. A bland little fish becomes a creature of the shadows — the darkness is offset by radiant flashes of white, reminders of lost innocence.”
“Dragons can be complex,” she said. She couldn’t always tell when he was quoting some esoteric text and when he was constructing his own modest parallel universe.
He didn’t pursue her Kumonryu query. Sometimes the suppression of curiosity was strategy, sometimes carelessness or indifference.
Inside the house, in the den, they examined bins of chemicals behind the bar — sodium thiosulphate, salt, a canister of potassium permanganate. It had all been catalogued by the forensic squad.
“It’s like a medieval alchemist’s place,” Morgan observed.
“More like a drug lab.”
“I don’t think so. This is how lawyers with fish fetishes live.”
She reached down to open the door of a refrigerator under the bar. It was stocked with diet ginger ale and plastic bottles of something which, as Miranda read aloud from the label, turned out to be an aquaculture management product containing non-hazardous and non-pathogenic naturally occurring microbes, enzymes, and micro-nutrients. “If they’re naturally occurring, why are they in plastic bottles?” There was a side-by-side freezer. She opened it. “Shrimp, and space for more shrimp. Ice cubes.”
“Shrimp?”
“Treats for the fish.” She looked down at the carpet. “Morgan, you knew this was antique and Kurdish from Iran. Persia. And I knew that you wouldn’t keep a rug like this on a slate floor without an underpad. The other carpets in the house — he has a beautiful collection — are on wood floors, all of them on pads. Or displayed on the walls. So, what’s happening here?”
“Damned if I know.”
“And damned if you don’t.”
“Now that’s Presbyterian,” he said. “Let’s go find the Chagoi.”
“First, let’s talk carpets.”
After a tour of the house to show him the carpet collection, which was even better, according to Morgan, than she had imagined, they wandered back out to the garden, chatting about carpets and fish and dead lawyers. Here was a
