not a Dom Perignon cork; a footprint, freshly broken twigs but not cut branches; evidence of urgency, not the residue of a carelessly cultivated life.
She gazed up into the leaves of the maple trees, vaguely expecting a revelation. That was how it occasionally happened, and she would walk out and surprise Morgan with an accounting that seemed to come from nowhere. This time all she saw were blue-green edges shifting softly in the freshening breeze of early evening.
Generally, Morgan was the more intuitive one. He gathered random particulars until everything fell into place, while she extrapolated an entire narrative from singular details. She was deductive. Like Holmes, though Morgan wasn’t Watson. More like Moriarity, she thought, but one of the good guys.
Morgan remained by the pool. He knew almost every fish by its generic name. He recognized a young Budo Goromo with markings the size of a cluster of grapes, Cabernet Sauvignon with the bloom still on. Its other name might have been Bacchus, he thought, or maybe Lafite or Latour. Morgan got sidetracked for a moment, rifling through the files in his mind for the names of First Growth Bordeaux. This would be the garden of a Bordeaux drinker. Premier grand crus. Not Burgundy. These fish had been too carefully selected. Burgundy was always a risk.
And its third name is known only to God.
He shuddered. Morgan wasn’t a believer, but the familiar phrase, whether as an epitaph for the Unknown Soldier or casually applied to fish in a Rosedale garden, sent a chill of loneliness through him.
“Have we heard who he is yet?” Miranda asked. She had been standing close for several minutes, watching him think.
Morgan shrugged. Neither of them carried a cell phone. Access meant control. Sometimes she compromised. Self-reliance wasn’t always enough.
“Margaux,” said Morgan, apparently addressing the Budo Goromo. He was pleased. He had retrieved the name of another Bordeaux grand cru.
Miranda couldn’t remember which Hemingway grand-daughter hadn’t committed suicide, Muriel or Margaux. One of them starred in a Woody Allen film.
Side by side they stared into the pond, intent on their separate reflections, while a surreal tableau was enacted around them. In a flurry of quiet activity the investigating team searched out myriad anomalies that would make the immediate past comprehensible. The grounds, a luxuriant green, though summer was gone, had been cultivated by generations long dead. The more distant past made the crime scene merely a passing disturbance.
The Ochiba Shigura disappeared into the depths and then returned, swimming slowly against the dead man’s face, back and forth in a kind of caress or secret language. A powerfully proportioned Showa the size of a platter nibbled at the fingers of his left hand, which draped low in the water, though the body itself rested stolidly on the surface as if buoyed from below.
Miranda settled on the retaining wall with her back to the pond. She looked at the huge brick house that opened onto a portico one storey below street level across the back, embracing the garden with an intimacy that belied its grand proportions. Miranda tried to penetrate the architectural layers of the house, finding clean Georgian lines nearly obscured by unseemly Victorian flourishes and superfluous Edwardian columns and porticos. She decided the house had remained in the same family over the years, the changes accruing as each generation imposed its own taste on the last, and the next.
She twisted around as the dead man swung by and gently tugged at his jacket collar. The corpse shifted, brushed against the edge of the pool, and slumped over onto its side. In a rush of water it settled on its back, floating face up, open eyes limpid, opaque.
Miranda flinched, her breath caught in her throat.
Again she was struck by the sickening familiarity of death. Something happened to human features in extremity. The very obese, the emaciated, faces contorted in pain or by fear, and faces in absolute stillness, bore similarities in kind. Fat men looked alike; corpses resembled one another like kin.
Morgan bent close to examine the dead man’s face, then leaned away as if coming to a dissenting judgment about a celebrated portrait after evaluating the brush strokes. They watched while the body drifted away from the wall and slowly rolled over again.
“That’s better,” said Morgan when the face was no longer visible. “His name is Robert Griffin. He’s a lawyer.”
“Really?” said Miranda. “And you know that because?”
“He was news about a year ago.”
“Good or bad?”
“Rich. There was a piece in the Globe and Mail buried beside the obituaries.” He chuckled at the pun. “It wasn’t a big enough story to make television.”
“But you recognized him wet?”
“Yeah. They used a file photo. He looked sort of dead already. He spent a fortune at Christie’s in London for an artifact from the South Pacific.”
“And that was newsworthy?”
“Something called Rongorongo, a wooden plaque from Easter Island about the size of a small paddle blade with writing on it.”
“Rongorongo?”
“It’s filled with opposing rows of hieroglyphs. It’s the writing that’s Rongorongo, not the board, and the people from Easter Island can’t read it now. No one can read it. They still carve replicas, and no one knows what they say.”
Miranda had studied semiotics in university. She wondered if this accounted for the poignancy she felt for a language indecipherably encoded. She tried to imagine not being able to read your own writing.
Morgan continued. “The islanders, they call themselves Rapanui, the island is Rapa Nui, two words, they used to have joke tournaments. Koro ’ei.” He savoured the words. “Jest fests, the losers laughed, and had to throw a feast, a weird form of potlatch —”
“Morgan —”
“I think there are fewer than twenty authentic Rongorongo tablets around, pretty well all in museums. He paid half a million.”
“Well, Mr. Griffin!”
It pleased them to have arrived at the victim’s identity without resorting to actual research. They watched him drift by as if he might reveal more of himself if they waited.
“No shoes. He wandered out from the house in socks,” said Morgan, dispelling any doubt that this was the dead man’s home. “Where did Yosserian go? I thought they were hauling him out of there.”
“Mr. Griffin seems a little soft around the edges,” said Miranda, who didn’t work out but was trim. “Not in very good condition.”
“He’s dead,” said Morgan, who occasionally worked out but mostly skipped meals.
“I doubt if he even played golf. Too pallid to belong to a yacht club. Clothes not sufficiently stylish to suggest peer influence. I’d say he’s a loner. But don’t you think it’s peculiar, a high-priced lawyer, and I’ve never heard of him?”
“Cops and the law don’t always connect. Sometimes it’s a matter of luck.”
“You’d think he’d have
