Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

“She was not murdered by Mr. D’Arcy.”

  “No, you’re quite possibly right. And he may be in danger himself.” That thought had not occurred to him before, that the wife’s murder might presage the husband’s, assuming he hadn’t killed her.

  “You may come in. What do you wish?”

  Morgan simply asked to look around. He was not sure what he was looking for, just something, whatever, an entry into the labyrinth.

  In the library, there were photographs on the mantle in silver frames, some of the Pemberly under full sail and at anchor. In the centre of the mantle, there was a piece of wood the shape of a paddle blade, inscribed with hieroglyphs. Morgan immediately recognized Rongorongo, a script devised by the people of Easter Island, which they reproduced for the tourist trade although, now, sadly, no one was able to read it. This example is particularly good, he thought. The wood was riddled with wormholes and the surface appeared very old, not weather-worn, but had a powdery sheen, creating an illusion of authenticity. He reached out and touched it. The surface was surprisingly hard. He traced a line of glyphs with his fingertip.

  This was the second time he had touched an original piece of Rongorongo. Only the previous year he had come across another in private ownership that was peripheral to a murder investigation. It belonged to the original owner of Miranda’s Jaguar, a nasty man capable of unspeakable crimes; a low-profile lawyer like D’Arcy, but unremarkable as a consequence of limited achievement, not professional strategy.

  Morgan surveyed the room until his eyes came to rest on a stone carving sitting in the shadows, also from Easter Island. The ubiquitous moai with furrowed brow, pursed lips, and eyes gazing vacantly into the emptiness. He marvelled at how such a remote place, so distant from the Western world, could have had such an impact on cultural consciousness. He guessed that Miranda would bring him either a smaller replica of Rongorongo or a diminutive moai, modest enough to be carried in her hand luggage.

  The library seemed, like the rest of the house, to be without gender and with no indication of children, although there was ambient warmth to the furnishings. It was clearly a room frequented by the D’Arcys. In addition to books, there were magazine and newspaper racks, a small stack of the Guardian Weekly and The Economist, a tray with decanters of madeira and port, and kindling to start a good fire once autumn set in.

  Wandering into a study off the library, he saw an answering machine blinking and touched the play button. There were calls from a nail salon, a dry cleaner, and two from Maria D’Arcy’s husband, asking her to call him, without saying where. The office was hers. It was more distinctively an expression of personality than the library, not feminine in any recognizable way, yet it clearly bore the imprint of a woman. For one thing, there is the faint scent of Fleurs de Rocaille, Morgan thought. Also stacked neatly, were back issues of Vogue, Architectural Digest, The Walrus, and Vanity Fair.

  He played the machine again, this time he focused on her own message. It was warm but precise, first in English then repeated in her native language — he assumed it was the same greeting as he did not speak Portuguese.

  He slipped the tape from the machine and put it in his pocket.

  When the woman he had described to himself as older let him out, he wondered, older than what?

  He walked out of Rosedale past the subway station and turned south on Yonge Street. Morgan walked everywhere when he could. He knew the D’Arcys better now, enough to know how little he knew of them. The lives of strangers were simple to understand, summed up by an item of clothing, a vocal inflection, the twist of a smile, incongruous movement — but the more someone was revealed, the more impenetrably complex they became. At the death scene, the D’Arcys were stereotypes; in their empty study, they became real.

  Wherever Harrington D’Arcy was, it was not illegal to grieve in seclusion. Unless, of course, being a widower was a self-inflicted condition.

  When Morgan got back to headquarters, he took the tape to a technician and they listened together until the technician got bored. Morgan wrote down what Maria said in English. He checked out the nail salon — she had missed her appointment, and the dry cleaners, who wanted him to pass on the message that the stain on her cashmere sweater would not come out. He listened to her voice over and over, and the more he listened the more empathy he felt for her, although he couldn’t determine why, exactly, except that she had been alive.

  He asked a colleague with the surname Gonzales to come in. “Manuela, could you listen to this? See if it’s a word-for-word translation.”

  She listened intently.

  “It’s not a translation, I mean, it’s her own language she’s speaking. The statements are equal, but not quite the same. And it’s not Portuguese.”

  “No?”

  “It’s Spanish. I know Portuguese, Morgan. My grandmother and my father speak it at home. This is Spanish. I don’t really speak either but I understand both.”

  “She’s from Brazil, it should be Portuguese.”

  “Who? Is this the woman who died?”

  “Yeah, Maria D’Arcy.”

  “I think she is not from Brazil. Perhaps from Chile, maybe Peru. She speaks like a South American, and not Portuguese, not on this tape. Maybe she had Spanish friends, maybe it’s for them.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” he said, retreating to his desk to think things over.

  Morgan decided that when the errant Mr. D’Arcy turned up, he could straighten this out. He would have to come in from the cold on his own, though. His employees weren’t going to turn him over. Under a glossy veneer of professionalism, D’Arcy’s staff had given an ominous impression of loyalty, as if, from the receptionist on up, they had sworn a blood oath of some sort, or belonged to a cult.

  Sitting back with his feet on the desk, he perused the medical examiner’s report. As Ellen had said, a skin swab turned up traces of poison: coniine and pancuronium, along with a blend of talcum powder, and minute particles of ground glass. She had appended a note explaining that the mixture would be rapid acting, the symptoms post-mortem would indicate death by asphyxia, the talc was an adherent and would bind with the the glass to create nearly invisible lacerations to allow the poison a subcutaneous entry into the system. A similar concoction had been used over the last decade or so in Papua New Guinea, on Madagascar, and also in Dublin, according to her research. No probable connection.

  No mention was made of the break-in or of the body being washed down by ghoulish intruders. That was speculation, based on the scent of wildflowers that was no longer there. But the report was unequivocal: Maria D’Arcy had been murdered.

  Morgan walked to the door marked Superintendent of Detectives and pushed it open.

  “Come on in.”

  “No,” said Morgan. “Not here.”

  “What do you mean, not here?”

  “I need to talk to you about Harrington D’Arcy.”

  “Yes.”

  “I need to interview you.”

  “You what?”

  “Could we go somewhere else?”

  Morgan turned and led the way to an interrogation room. Rufalo followed like an animal in pursuit. As soon as Morgan closed the door, Rufalo wheeled on him. “What the hell!”

  “Easy, sir. I need to ask a few questions.”

  Perhaps it was Morgan’s ironic deference or his own ingrained respect for procedure, but Rufalo became immediately conciliatory.

  “Of course,” he said. “Whatever I can do.”

  “Let’s sit down,” said Morgan.

  “I’m not a suspect, am I?” said the superintendent cheerfully, trying to relieve the tension.

  Morgan did not smile. “No,” he said. He paused. “But you might be an accessory.”

  “Good God, Morgan. The man called me. He told me his wife had been murdered. I am a policeman, that was a reasonable thing for him to do.”

  “He was sure it was murder?”

  “There was no doubt at all.”

  “He called you at home? You
called me from your place?”

  “Yes …” Rufalo gazed around the room for a moment, seeming to see it for the first time as an unfamiliar and oppressive place. “He and my wife are business associates, both lawyers. The legal community at their level is small. We’ve met a few times. He wasn’t asking for favours.”

  “One favour?”

  “He did ask specifically for you, yes.”

  “Didn’t that strike you as odd, a murder suspect determining who should investigate the crime?”

  “He suggested, Morgan. I determined. And it did not cross my mind that he was a suspect. Is he?”

  “Yes. He virtually insisted on it.” Morgan grimaced at his own break with procedural decorum as he confessed: “We had breakfast together.”

  “He can be charming, can’t he?”

  “Dangerously so, it appears. And yes, I do have my doubts, but at this point he is the only suspect we have.”

  “Fill me in.”

  “I’d rather not, Alex. Right now, I’d like to keep you out of the loop, for your own sake. He’s disappeared.”

  “D’Arcy! Disappeared?”

  “Like the Cheshire Cat.” Inappropriate: he left no smile in his wake.

  “You want me to stand down?”

  “From your job? Heavens, no. The accessory bit was just to get your attention. Why do you think he asked for us?”

  “You and Miranda? Because you’re the best. That was his assumption, not mine. It was my decision, though, not his.”

  “Let’s put modesty aside and assume he’s right — about us — that means he wants to get caught.”

  “If he did it, Morgan.”

  “Yeah.” Morgan was thoughtful. “Or it could mean the opposite: a back-handed compliment. If we can’t crack the case, no one can. Get by us and he’s home free. Or, of course, it could mean he’s innocent.”

  “Anything else? No? Good. And by the way, you keep saying us. Your partner is out of the country.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me know if there’s anything you think I should …” He didn’t finish his sentence.

  As Alex Rufalo left the room he looked back. Morgan was still lost in thought. Rufalo closed the door firmly behind him.

  Morgan sat slouched at the interrogation table for more than an hour, letting facts and impressions swirl in his mind. He felt like he was caught at the edge of a whirlpool, unable either to break free or plunge through. This was a case where Miranda’s capacity for deduction would be invaluable. Revising his water imagery, he thought of pebbles tossed in a pond, their ripples confusing the surface — she was good at inferring who threw them from their intersecting patterns.

  But she was busy by now on her novel. Her story about the man bleeding in her bed who claimed to be Harrington D’Arcy had faded from his mind. This was not a failure of imagination on his part, but submission to the power of hers. The bleeding man was well on his way to becoming fiction. Apart from a general sense of apprehension, Morgan felt worrying about Miranda was a response too personal, too intimate, for comfort.

  It was only her first full day there, so perhaps she was still getting her bearings. He had suggested renting a Jeep and driving out to Rano Raraku, the volcano quarry. It was not far — the whole island was a tiny triangle in the vast Pacific, six miles by eight by twelve. Morgan did not think in metric. His idea had been for Miranda to counter the strangeness of such an amazing place by starting with the familiar. The cover of every book about the vaunted mysteries of Easter Island, every appropriation of images to sell credit cards and cosmetics, featured shots of moai on the outside slopes of the quarry where they stood, inexplicably abandoned, while over the centuries silt had built up to their shoulders. They gazed, pensively, incomplete, over the savannah to their intended platforms bordering the sea.

  Morgan would like to have been there. The disjunction, particularly at Rano Raraku, between the powerful presence of the past and a full understanding of how it had all come about, had created in Morgan an oddly intense feeling of serenity. If he were a religious man, he might have described the feeling as mystical. He was moved, literally, beyond words. He hoped Miranda wouldn’t reduce it all to historical hypotheses. Sometimes it was better to live with mysteries than to resolve them.

  Perhaps she was still asleep, washed by the westerly breeze through an open window, dreaming of being exactly where she was. Morgan was surprised that he found the image of Miranda in the tranquil embrace of the Hotel Victoria vaguely erotic. Quite suddenly, he got up and strode out of the interrogation room, out of Police Headquarters, into the midday Toronto sun.

  An hour later, he was meandering across the manicured grass in front of the clubhouse at the Royal Toronto Yacht Club, which yesterday had seemed so imposing and now struck him as an embarrassingly misplaced anachronism. Perhaps it was being here on his own, without the mediating effect of Harrington D’Arcy, but the antebellum enclave of privilege now seemed a little sad, like a fat man who smokes.

  He made his way past the colonnaded portico to the Pemberly. It was still cordoned off with yellow tape strung across the pilings, but no one had thought to post an officer to keep watch. It was assumed the entire premises were secured. And they were: from ethnic interlopers, class jumpers, women of a certain sort, but not from murderers, embezzlers, politicians and lawyers, or world-class sailors.

  Morgan had the heart of an anarchist, but the mind of a cop.

  He did not want to change anything because that wasn’t his job. The world worked the way it worked, and when it didn’t, then it was up to people like him to get it working again. He stepped on board the Pemberly and felt it rock gently against its moorings. Morgan’s knowledge of boats, particularly yachts, was from books. You don’t grow up among the working poor in old Cabbagetown familiar with halyards and spinnakers, bowsprits, and transoms. Sheets and shrouds were to cover the living and the dead, not to catch the wind.

  When he stood on the foredeck and gazed down at the hatch, something seemed askew. The hatch was locked from the outside. Under him was the fo’c’sle locker; why wouldn’t it be secured from within? He went below and made his way past the head and a large locker into the forward hold. There were no bunks, as he had expected, only a stowage area.

  He realized he was wrong about the lock. The hatch was used for passing things through, probably sails, so an outside lock was appropriate. Still, as he ran his fingers around the mahogany combing beneath the hatch, he felt dents in the wood and by shifting his position he could see gouges that a screwdriver might have left in an attempt to pry the hatch open. Flecks of varnish came off on his fingers. The damage was very recent.

  Someone, a woman, he suspected, had been forcibly confined down here. D’Arcy would know his own boat; he would know how much force it would take to smash through the fo’c’s’le or companionway hatches. They were wood, thick enough to withstand the forces of water lashing the boat in a storm — but they were only wood, mahogany, and they could be broken from inside with a few sharp blows from a winch handle, an elbow, or even the blunt end of a screwdriver. Most places can be broken out of, if you are willing to break things. A woman is less likely than a man to resolve the dilemma of her confinement through violence. It is not about the nature of women, but how they are taught restricting conventions as absolutes. The truth is, wood breaks, glass breaks, it would not have been difficult to escape from the belly of the Lion.

  Miranda would be irritated by the sexist assumption. She would counter with a statement of resonant ambiguity: we live in an age, thank God, when even absolutes are uncertain. She would conclude that the person locked below, without deference to gender, was either incapacitated or lacking imagination, or both. The autopsy indicated Maria had consumed alcohol. She might have been up to no more than a haphazard effort. She likely anticipated a hangover, not death, or she would have tried harder. He could hear Miranda’s words in her own voice.

  Morgan looked around for the screwdriver and found it
against the foot of a berth in the main cabin. As he leaned over to pick it up he smelled Fleurs de Rocaille. She had certainly been there, lying on this berth, not long before dying. He touched where she had been, and withdrew his hand with an instinctive rush; the mattress was still warm. But of course it was not; it was his own body heat reflected from the Ultrasuede cover.

  Morgan was seized by a sense of connection with the dead woman. The rich gleam of highly finished mahogany brightwork, the blue mattress covers on the three berths, the brightly coloured cushions and small pillows, the diminutive curtains drawn away from the portholes, the gleaming brass fittings, polished chrome instruments, and spotless galley with a stainless-steel stove on gimbals and woven tea towels folded neatly in a slot, all signified a distinctive taste. The confined space of the cabin was an expression of personality and Morgan felt certain it was not the work of a nautical designer, nor that of Harrington D’Arcy.

  There was a gallery of framed photographs screwed into the forward bulkhead. Morgan had noticed them before. What seemed to be generic sailing pictures now resonated, since he had seen duplicates in the D’Arcy home. There were expected shots of the Pemberly under full sail, heeling perilously close to the wind, with canvas taut, the skipper’s hand on the tiller with an iron grip; and of the Pemberly moored against a series of familiar and exotic backdrops.

  In one of the action shots, professionally dramatic in black and white, there were two people in the cockpit. Harrington D’Arcy could be identified, braced against the combing on the high side. Morgan peered this way and that until he confirmed that the other figure, wearing the skipper’s cap with her hand on the tiller, was Maria.

  He recalled thinking of D’Arcy as the sole owner. If the Pemberly had been moored at the Port Credit Yacht Club down the lake, he might have assumed it was a family boat. In fact, he recognized the Port Credit clubhouse in the background of one of the pictures. He had been there a few years ago on a case that proved to be a suicide masking a murder. There was something familiar, if generic, about the tropical setting of another picture. Then he realized it was not the Pemberly in the foreground, but a two-masted ketch, a small ocean sailor of about the same size. Both D’Arcys were in the cockpit. Behind the ketch was the semblance of a harbour, little more than a bay, edged by a few buildings and a sparse scattering of palms. And, indistinctly, near the centre, a shadowy rectangle, the back of a moai facing a soccer field across the gravel road. He could not see the road or the field in the photograph, but he knew they were there.