turning on lights as she went.
“Personally, I think it was suicide,” Eleanor Drummond repeated to Morgan as if the possibility had just crossed her mind.
“Everything suggests he wasn’t anticipating the end,” Morgan said. “Books laid out to be read, shoes by the sofa — it all gives the impression of a man who had no intention of dying.”
“Perhaps that’s what he wanted us to think.”
“And why would he want us to think that?”
“So you’d think it was murder.”
“Which I do.”
“Drowning in a pond doesn’t seem like murder, Detective.”
“Dead men don’t drown. He probably died in this room.”
She looked away, out to the garden. She shared the habit of all beautiful people, inviting him to assess her without seeming to stare.
There was no way she would have been able to manoeuvre a man to the pond, dead or alive, without leaving skid marks on the grass and bruises on the body from hefting him over the retaining wall. Morgan was certain there would be no bruises. Griffin’s clothes weren’t twisted on his limbs, his body seemed inordinately relaxed. The fish weren’t spooked.
She didn’t strike him as a person who would work with an accomplice. Eleanor Drummond might have the capacity for murder, he thought, but judging from her disinclination to express appropriate emotion, probably not the desire.
Morgan thought of the koi. They weaved the shadows, wefts of colour sliding through warps of dark clear water. He lapsed into wordlessness, his mind occupied with images.
Awkwardly, the woman withdrew a cigarette, then glanced around. Seeing no ashtrays, she slipped it back into the package and set the pack down on the coffee table. She settled back on the green sofa as composed but on edge as if she were in an oncologist’s waiting room.
Miranda reappeared, stepping through the massive doorway back into Griffin’s retreat. She had been uneasy, almost anxious, in the rest of the house. It felt unnaturally empty, as if the ancestral ghosts haunting its spaces and furnishings hadn’t yet embraced their newest arrival. In the den, perhaps because the dead man’s predilections appeared on display, the ghosts seemed more accommodating.
“Would you excuse me?” said Morgan abruptly, addressing Eleanor Drummond while gesturing to his partner for help. “Detective Quin will have some questions. I’m needed outside …” His voice trailed off as he closed the French doors behind him. He took a deep breath of the evening air, annoyed with himself for having offered an explanation to account for his exit.
Activity in the garden had faded with the evening light. He walked over to where the body bag lay on the ground sheet, with a solitary attendant standing vigil. Morgan nodded.
“Waiting for the Black Mariah,” explained the corpse’s companion. “The ME ran out of gas. It didn’t seem I should leave the guy here on his own.”
Morgan was taken by the man’s innate courtesy. “It’s okay. See what you can do inside.” As the officer was about to disappear under the shadows of the portico, Morgan changed his mind. “Yosserian, go on out front. Show the medical examiner where to come when he gets here. Where did you get the body wrap?”
“Left over from the multiple last week in Cabbage-town.”
“You’re not supposed to be driving around with those.”
“Yeah,” said Yosserian.
Morgan knelt beside the remains of Robert Griffin and unzipped the bag to the shoulders, peeling the synthetic material back in dark folds. The pallor of death, highlighted by the lights from the house, gave the visible remains an appearance of antique marble, like the toppled bust of a Roman senator. Morgan stood and contemplated the nature of human flesh. He thought of the bust of Homer in a poem he imagined he had forgotten.
Strange, this had happened and nothing had changed. A man was mysteriously dead and it made no difference. Usually by now Morgan’s mind was teeming with intimations, possibilities, connections. But here was a death for which no crowd gathered.
The medical examiner came around through the walkway, led by Yosserian, the body’s self-appointed keeper. “Is that you, Morgan?” she asked, trying to penetrate the gloom.
“You ran out of gas?” said Morgan. He moved close enough so that Ellen Ravenscroft could see it was him, then shrugged agreeably and turned away.
She squatted by the body. “All right then, love, I’ve got work to do.”
Morgan gazed into the closest pool, the fish now indistinct wraiths deep below the surface. The low green pond down by the ravine appeared brackish in the dying light. He walked over to it. It smelled fresh. Why no water flowers, no grasses around the shoreline?
He tried to block out the banal chatter between Yosserian and the ME. They were arguing about the body bag. He listened to the water and thought he could hear the hush of its limpid surface as it settled against the earth. His mind seemed both empty and filled until in the distance he heard a siren and returned to himself in the garden.
When a diver appeared by the lower pond, Morgan watched for a while. Her light, as she submerged, transformed from a shimmering cone to a glowing green cor-sage, then a vague flicker, until it extinguished in the opaque depths, only to reappear again here and there as she groped her way to the edges. It made him queasy, watching her hand reach up through the murk to signal her assistant the direction of her quest.
“She won’t see anything in there,” said the assistant, standing tall as if the higher perspective would let him see deeper. “This kind of thing is by touch alone.”
Morgan felt claustrophobic. He nodded and retreated to the upper pool. The diver had already checked this one thoroughly, moving gently among the fish, and come up with nothing.
By the time Miranda joined him, Ellen Ravenscroft had left with the body, the diver was gone, and the night sky was flushed with the lights of the city. The water in front of them was black, like anthracite sheared from its motherlode. Morgan remained motionless, staring into the impenetrable depths. Miranda moved close enough that they could feel the body heat between them, but they didn’t touch. They were comfortable with silence.
Eventually, she said, “It’s strange, that huge house, it’s creepy. Except for the den the place could have been decorated by committee.”
“Or successive generations of Rosedale matrons.”
“A committee of ghosts.” She reflected on the secrets implied by the water’s dark surface, then returned to her previous theme. “There’s no evidence anywhere of his so-called mistress, no lingerie under the bed, no scented shampoo in the shower.”
“Has she gone?”
“Yeah. We’ll connect in the morning.” She paused. “Why mistress, not girlfriend?” She paused again. “You know, he wouldn’t walk across the yard in socks.”
“No. He wasn’t wearing a tie.”
“So?”
“Well,
