you say, he’s floating in a fish pond. Let’s get him out before the family comes home.” Miranda turned to see that Yosserian was standing by with another officer, apparently not wanting to disturb their forensic deliberations. She caught his eye, and they moved forward.
“There’s no family coming home,” said Morgan. “They’d be here already. It’s too late in the season for Muskoka, everyone’s down from the cottage by now. The yard’s too orderly. No bikes, no barbecue. The big Showa wants food, he’s nibbled those fingers before. Look at that. The Ochiba — look at him nuzzling. They’re closer than family. These fish are Griffin’s familiars.”
“Familiars.” Miranda often repeated Morgan’s key words, sometimes to mock him but sometimes intrigued. “That’s creepy. With scales.”
“They don’t all have scales. Some of them are Doitsu.”
Miranda was equivocating about whether or not to give him the satisfaction of asking for an explanation when a stunning young woman emerged from the shadows of the walkway along the side of the house. She moved toward them with an air of belonging.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” said Morgan.
“She’s not family.”
The woman stood to one side and gazed at Robert Griffin as he was hauled over the pool edge and spread out on a groundsheet. While the officers manoeuvred the bag, she seemed to focus on the rasping of the zipper and the squishing liquid sounds as the body settled into its plastic receptacle. Then she spoke with deliberate calm. “You’re quite right, Detective. I’m not family.”
“Really,” Miranda said, realizing her disparaging comment had been overheard. The striking young woman was one of those people defined by style. Someone you had trouble imagining with a home life or childhood memories. A prosperous self-reliant urban adult of purposefully indeterminate age.
Somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-two.
She had the subdued flare of a woman who read Vogue to check for mistakes, Miranda thought. She probably subscribed to Architectural Digest, never travelled by bus, and arrived early at the dentist’s so she could read Cosmopolitan.
Miranda brushed imaginary creases from her skirt and straightened her shoulders inside her jacket. She glanced at Morgan. He shrugged almost imperceptibly.
“I take it you knew the deceased,” Miranda declared too formally as she gazed into the woman’s eyes, searching for personality.
“Yes, I did,” said the woman. Then, as if she were ordering a martini, she added, “I was his mistress. I still am, I suppose.” The woman smiled. “Wives become widows. There’s no past tense for a mistress.”
Mattress, thought Morgan, but said nothing. She was an interesting anomaly, not because she was the mistress of a flaccid man with a comb-over but because she obviously didn’t need to be. She was addressing Miranda. He turned away. There was a jousting so subtle neither woman seemed aware of it, and it didn’t include him.
“Griffin didn’t like mistress,” the woman said. “I rather like it myself. Lover is just too depressing.”
“Was he depressed?” Miranda asked with a hint of aggression.
“Why, because he killed himself? He wasn’t a man to die from excessive emotion.” She paused. “From business perhaps. He never talked about business.”
She made it sound like suicide could have been a tactical ploy.
“It’s unexpected, if that’s what you mean,” she continued. “But not surprising. Robert was a very secretive man, but he could be quite impulsive.”
The woman studied the black plastic bag, tracing the zipper line as if it were a wound. Her features softened, then she glanced up directly into Miranda’s eyes, her dispassionate aplomb instantly restored. For a moment Miranda felt an unnerving bond between them.
“With some people, you know, you can’t really tell,” said the woman.
“What?” Morgan asked. “If they’re dead?”
“Whether they’re depressed,” she said. “I suppose he might have been.” She smiled as if forgiving herself for a minor oversight.
Miranda looked at her quizzically. The woman didn’t seem concerned about a display of grief. Perhaps that would come later. Perhaps, more ominously, she had dealt with it already. Or sadly, thought Miranda, she felt nothing at all.
“Do you have access to the house?” Miranda asked.
“Do you mean, have I keys? Yes, of course.”
“Then perhaps we could look inside,” said Morgan.
“Of course,” said the woman. Touching Miranda on the arm, she casually amended her assessment of the victim’s mental stability. “He sometimes took Valium.”
“Sometimes?” said Miranda. “It’s not an occasional drug.”
“He said he had trouble sleeping.”
“And did he?”
“We didn’t sleep together, Detective. I’m not his widow.” She seemed vaguely amused by her own witticism. “My name is Eleanor Drummond.” She held her hand out to Miranda, then Morgan.
The woman was gracious without warmth, as if they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and she a lapsed Catholic. Some people offered their names as an invitation, but with her it seemed more like a shield or a disguise.
They introduced themselves in turn, both fully aware Robert Griffin’s mistress had taken the initiative.
Together the three of them walked beneath the trellised portico to a set of large French doors, which Eleanor Drummond unlocked. “Did you need permission to enter?”
They stepped into a room busy with artifacts.
“No,” said Miranda.
“But if it was suicide?”
“This was murder,” said Morgan.
Eleanor Drummond’s eyes narrowed for a moment, but she said nothing.
The room was large and cluttered, with massive doors leading away on either side and into the interior depths of the house. It seemed cramped; it was the room of a man who needed to see what he thought, piled on shelves. Morgan felt vaguely embarrassed, the way he did gazing at an open cadaver.
Windows flanked the French doors along the outer wall. There was a fireplace, there were shelves against the other walls packed with hardcover books, with the occasional oversize volume stored horizontally on top of the rows. Books with pictures of koi lay open on the sofa and floor in cross-referencing piles. There was a small pile of books beside a wingback chair that faced out with a view of the garden. A slender Waterford vase sat poised on one of the bookshelves with three wilted long-stemmed roses. The walls were adorned with antique guns, animal heads and old maps, aboriginal masks and photographs of blurred shadows, likenesses of nightmares. There was a bar to one side littered with koi paraphernalia, water-testing
