at them,” he said. “They’re disturbingly beautiful …”
“To us or each other? They’re carp. Genetically manipulated scavengers.” She rocked back onto her feet, grasping his arm to pull herself upright.
“Expensive carp.”
She envied his esoteric diversions. Persian tribal carpets, Ontario country furniture, vintage Bordeaux, now Japanese fish. She suspected he could evade himself endlessly. After more than a decade working murders together, she wasn’t sure why.
He hadn’t noticed her suppressed anxiety. That pleased her. It also annoyed her. She tried to imagine her bathtub. She usually had showers. “Morgan,” she announced as if it were a point of contention, “water moves counter-clockwise.”
“Not in Australia.”
She extended an open hand toward the corpse. As he moved slowly around the pool, the dead man seemed to rotate on an unseen axis.
“He’s turning the wrong way,” said Morgan.
“Exactly. And he’s floating.”
“Yes he is. Very postmodern — he’s part of the garden design.”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead’s easy, dying is hard.”
She couldn’t tell from the sun glinting in his eyes whether he was being thoughtful or quoting Oscar Wilde. Or Dashiell Hammett.
“Not that hard,” she said. “He was probably unconscious when he entered the water. Otherwise he’d be on the bottom.”
“I knew a kid in grade one. He used to scare hell out of Miss Moore by holding his breath till he fainted.”
“You remember your teacher’s name?”
“And the kid’s — Billy DeBrusk. He died in Kingston.”
“Maximum Security or Collins Bay?”
“He was an accountant. Secondary drowning in a triathlon. His lungs flooded a day after the race, filled with bodily fluids in his sleep. He got kicked in the swim.”
“I didn’t know you could drown in bed.” She paused. “Did he win?”
Morgan loved the way her mind worked, convinced it was in complementary opposition to his own, which needed channels to contain the discursive energy. He thought a lot about his own mind. It was a place to visit and explore. It wasn’t where he lived.
“Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones before she walked into the Thames,” said Miranda. “That way, it was out of her hands. Like diving from the Bloor Street Viaduct. You commit, then you wait. Death happens. It’s not your fault.”
“She drowned in the River Ouse in Sussex, not the Thames. She left a note to her husband, saying, ‘You have given me the greatest possible happiness.’ Do you think you could drown yourself?”
This bleak sense of dread inside her, was that what it felt like? But there was also the unsettling sensation of release. Release tinged oddly with guilt. No, I could not.
“Whoever called it in —” Morgan began.
“Left him floating. Must have known he was already dead.”
“How?”
“Perhaps patience.”
There was something bothering her, he thought. Macabre humour was either a mask or a masquerade. His own humour ran more to wordplay and irony.
“You sure you don’t know him,” he said. Stolid silence. “It could have been called in by the person who killed him.”
“That’s an idea,” she said, indicating by her tone she didn’t consider it likely.
They contemplated the pool; the sun was low in the sky, so there was little reflection. It was difficult to separate the surface from the depths, except close to the floating corpse, and out near the centre where twin columns of fine bubbles mushroomed from the darkness below.
“There has to be a pump somewhere processing the water through a filter system,” Morgan said. “Pushing clockwise.”
Morgan looked around, but there were no outbuildings in the yard. He glanced up at the neighbouring house. Only its upper storeys were visible above the high stone wall separating the properties. Someone looking across would have to be in the attic to get a decent view of the ponds. The windowpanes in the attic gable glistened in the early-evening light.
Spotlessly clean, he thought.
“It must be in the basement,” said Miranda. “The filter. I doubt the other pond has one — it looks like pea soup. Soylent green.”
“Charlton Heston.” He affirmed her allusion. “Nutrition from human remains.”
A uniformed officer approached and asked if the body could be moved.
“Wait for the coroner,” said Morgan. “No, take him out. Make sure they’ve got pictures. Be careful with the fish.”
The uniformed officer wandered away to get help.
Miranda contemplated the dead man, wondering if his secret lives somehow intersected with her own, long before death had brought them together. “They’ll go deep. It must be nine or ten feet.”
“Three metres, think metric” said Morgan conscientiously. “Even if it’s heated, they need the volume to stabilize against temperature fluctuations.”
Metric came in when Miranda was a child; Morgan was five years older. He insisted that Fahrenheit generated a skin response, and Celsius was only numerical.
“We’ll need to drain it,” she said.
“No.”
“We’ll send in a diver then. Do you think there’s a difference between a pool and a pond?”
“I’d say a pool is hard-edged and clear.” He looked down toward the ravine. “The soylent pea-souper, I’d call that a pond.”
“You’re okay with a diver?”
“Yeah, it’s better for the fish. There’s a fortune in there.”
She smiled at the presumption of authority. He had seniority by several years, but they were both detective sergeants. Usually, she was in command. He preferred it that way.
Miranda strolled off toward the house, then circled around and walked out past the murky green pool into a narrow grove of silver maples that soared defiantly against the urban sky, their foliage blocking out the banks of office buildings and the CN Tower. From a vantage by the sudden slope of a ravine, the city reappeared at close quarters. This was how the rich lived. In Toronto at least. Miranda didn’t know rich people anywhere else, and in Rosedale only when they were murdered, or as happened more often than people might think, when they did the murdering.
A
