She came in with someone she knew, there were no signs of forced entry or a struggle, they went up to the study … No, she came in first, went up to the study, took off her shoes and jacket, went down, let someone in, and brought him back upstairs. Why? What were they doing? There doesn’t seem to be anything in progress, no papers spread out on the desk. The computer wasn’t turned on. She wouldn’t have taken off her shoes if he had come in with her in the first place. Too casual. It had to be someone she knew really well.”
“Why was the carpet in the closet? Why do you think the assailant was a man?”
“Could have been a woman, but there was a lot of force. What would he have used? It was a blunt instrument, which is an oxymoron. And isn’t it strange that there seemed to be only one point of entry. Like he thrust it in, working his weapon inside her without withdrawing, tearing her apart —”
“We’re talking about murder, Miranda. You make it sound like rape.”
“Yeah, well, it must have been a miserable way to die. The assailant would have been a mess. But there’s no evidence of someone cleaning up, no trail of blood when he left.”
“Unless he came prepared. Maybe the killer was wearing one of those painter’s jumpsuits. She’d be a bit suspicious. I think —”
“Seriously, Morgan. There’s not a print, not a smudge, not a smeared footprint on the floor. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the aquarium fall. Maybe he broke it on purpose after he killed her, used the water to dilute the blood so it would flow over marks of a scuffle and leave us with nothing. Is the penis a blunt instrument?”
“Speaking generically?”
She shrugged, her gesture muted in the converging shadows, the stifling gloom.
When they reached the oak door, Morgan took her penlight and checked the padlock. Instead of handing the penlight back, he clasped it in his teeth and struck the lock a glancing blow with the hammer, calculated to set its innards askew, with his free hand held ready for whatever might spring forth.
“One hit,” he proclaimed as he pulled the sprung lock to the side and pushed on the door. It refused to give way.
“Morgan, the padlock wasn’t holding anything. This whole system is a Foucauldian model.”
“Where did he come from? What about Freud?” Morgan was more comfortable with Freudian allusions. Michel Foucault was just coming into vogue in North American academic circles about the time Morgan absconded to Europe. About the time Miranda was beginning her studies in language and thought.
“Look,” she said, “the original lock is a Victorian antique. We have dead bolts, an Edwardian refinement. The padlock was obviously a transitional device, say, from the 1930s. Then someone installed a standard key lock around the time I was born.” Trying not to look smug, she retrieved the penlight gingerly from his mouth and squatted to look at the keyhole. “You should be able to manage this.”
A little sheepish, he reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet from which he withdrew a stiff length of wire. Then he bent to the task while she held the light to illuminate his progress. “There,” he said finally. “Am I redeemed?”
She was about to make a religious quip when he swung the door away from them into the darkness.
“Voila, a tunnel!” he said. But he didn’t go in. The intense ray of the penlight was easily swallowed by the shadowy void. “I’ll bring a better light tomorrow, but for sure this connects the estates.”
“There’s nothing sinister about that. They used to belong to the same family. This might have been a servants’ passage. They probably shared kitchen facilities. These aren’t mansions, Morgan, just really big houses. I wouldn’t call them estates.”
“From Cabbagetown, they’re estates.”
“Let’s go check the morgue. We might find out more about Griffin, and Eleanor Drummond will be settled in by now.”
“We’ve got to feed the fish.”
“How many times a day?”
“Three or four. I’ve fed them twice already.”
“Let us withdraw from this foul place,” she said as if quoting Shakespeare.
He wasn’t quite sure if she was.
6
Shiro Utsuri
Morgues were emergency rooms for the dead. Their clients were admitted, processed by triage, and released. Morgues didn’t use architectural illusions to dissemble. They opened directly onto side street pavement; they seldom had waiting rooms apart from a makeshift cluster of chairs. There was no casual traffic through a morgue. It was a place always of profound mystery, where forensic resources were brought to bear on the expiration of human beings, to capture their untoward moments of death.
When Morgan and Miranda arrived, they passed a teenage girl standing by the soft drink machine who turned away from them in a sort of innocuous slouch. As they walked through a glass door and down a brightly lit hallway in the direction of muffled voices and the sounds of small whirring motors, the girl’s reflection suggested resignation, as if she had been waiting for hours.
The medical examiner was Ellen Ravenscroft. The coroner was just about to start work on Eleanor Drummond. She dismissed an assistant and conferred briefly with Miranda and Morgan, directing them to some items on top of a stainless-steel cabinet and papers on a desk, then she drew the cover away from Eleanor Drummond’s body and folded it neatly for reuse.
Miranda stood back a little so that her head and shoulders were out of the illumination cast by the low-slung lights. She was sure no one enjoyed an autopsy, but Morgan and the ME seemed to regard the body about to be splayed open with clinical detachment. The worst was when it was a child. Miranda found it easiest when the body was so badly mangled that it didn’t resemble a person.
She had never before been acquainted with the victim in a murder investigation. Robert Griffin, who was filed somewhere in the bank of drawers along one side of the crypt, she knew only as a corpse, despite her intimate connection with his private affairs.
Miranda moved so that she could see past the obstruction of her colleagues. She shuddered. Despite the gaping hole in the woman’s abdomen, for an absurd moment she was struck by how very lovely Eleanor Drummond appeared. Here was a woman who knew how to be naked — and dead. Miranda half suspected she had prepared, with the art of a ghoulish courtesan, for the intimate examination now underway.
Her body was groomed to perfection, her makeup was done with finesse, and her physique was toned and lotioned with loving care. There were no tan lines, she knew enough to stay out of the sun, her legs were entirely clean of hair, her pubic triangle was neatly trimmed, and the down on her belly and arms was soft in the harsh light like a fine mist sprayed on freshly cut flowers.
How could someone be more vulnerable, Miranda thought, than lying naked on a stainless-steel tray, examined only as human remains? Even if the body didn’t know it was happening, it was happening. Miranda wanted to cover the woman. She related to her now — while alive there had been an impossible distance between them. Miranda had only had a bikini wax once in her life, and that was before she had gone to Grand Cayman. She felt sad and oddly exhilarated by the strangeness
