by John Moss
“Me too,” said a voice from the stairs. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
Ellen Ravenscroft, the medical examiner, stepped into the room, forcing the other four to realign themselves in relation to the bodies and the man on his knees who was engrossed in the details of wizened flesh and uncommon apparel.
“Surprised to see you two here,” said Ellen.
“Just ghoulish curiosity,” said Miranda. “It’s not official.”
“Not official?” Rachel Naismith exclaimed. “You’ve been drinking my coffee! And you’re tourists! For me, it’s a crime scene.”
Miranda introduced her to Ellen Ravenscroft. The two women did not exchange courtesies, beyond nods of recognition for their professional roles.
“I’m surprised they’d send a medical examiner on a case like this,” said Miranda. “I’d have thought the academics had it covered.”
“If it’s dead and there’s a chance it was human, it’s ours,” Ellen responded. “Just a formality, love, so I can fill out the papers.”
“No autopsy?”
“Not likely,” she said. “Excuse me.”
Morgan watched with admiration as the ME shunted the academic experts aside and squatted down to examine the bodies. “I’ll take a look here before you two start messing about.”
Professor Birbalsingh rose to his feet, harumphing with indignity, eyes flashing, muttering something about forensic anthropologists, but said nothing more. He hovered like a raptor tracking its prey until Ellen Ravenscroft glowered up at him and muttered “forensic pathologist trumps anthropologist,” backing the professor away.
“Did the police get pictures?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Officer Naismith
“That’s what brought us here,” said Miranda.
“Okay, let’s just see what we have — ”
“Be careful with that,” snapped Birbalsingh with a vehemence suggesting he was not used to his authority being usurped, especially by a non-academic and a woman. “It is a very fine cloak. You do not want to cause it damage. These are very good clothes.”
Without turning around, the ME announced, “I am Dr. Ravenscroft, coroner’s office. Who are you, love?”
“This is Professor Birbalsingh from the University of Toronto,” said his colleague. “I’m Shelagh Hubbard, cross-appointed from the ROM. We’re the forensic anthropologists here by request.”
“By request? Well, isn’t that a treat. They let you off campus. I went to York, myself.”
“For the suburban atmosphere, I presume.”
“You do, love, you presume,” she said, standing up. “The real York, as in Yorkshire. Not the nether regions of Toronto and certainly not the ‘New’ one — the five boroughs on the Hudson.”
“So, what do you see?” Miranda interjected to restore professional decorum, although Rachel and Morgan had been enjoying the repartee.
“They’re thoroughly dead.” Ellen Ravenscroft seemed to triumph in a declaration of the obvious. “Their heads are missing. I’d say that’s about it.” She nodded gravely. “They’re all yours, Professor Birbalsingh, Dr. Hubbard. If the heads turn up, kindly inform someone.”
“Anyone in particular?” Miranda asked.
“I’ve got my doubts about the heads,” said Morgan. “They weren’t in the crypt, so they’re probably converted to dust.”
“Well,” said Miranda, “apparently a conversion was called for.”
There was an awkward pause; then, remembering the cross and ring, Morgan chuckled and as soon as he did Rachel Naismith recognized the joke and chortled to herself. Ellen seemed indifferent to missing the point.
“I’m out of here, my friends. Give me a call, Morgan. We’ll talk about missed opportunities. Good night, Miranda. Good night, Officer.”
And almost as an afterthought she said over her shoulder, “Good night, forensic anthropologists. Let me know if you find anything.” And, finally, with a fading sigh, “Do call me, Morgan.”
Miranda rolled her eyes at her partner as Ellen Ravenscroft disappeared down the stairs. He looked away, he squinted back at her, mouthing an indecipherable phrase.
“What is it you’re trying to say, Morgan?”
He shrugged.
“Do you two want more coffee?” Rachel asked.
“Definitely not for me,” said Morgan.
Shelagh Hubbard stood up. “I’d like some coffee, if you wouldn’t mind, Officer. It couldn’t be worse than I make myself.”
“You’d be surprised,” said Miranda.
“Would he like some?” Rachel asked, nodding in the direction of the portly Professor Birbalsingh, crouched over his headless victim. “I’ve got lots. It’s been steeping all night.”
“I think he probably would,” said Dr. Hubbard. “Both black, no sugar.”
“That’s good,” said Rachel. “I didn’t bring extras.”
“Milk and sugar are necessities,” said Morgan, who preferred double-double, and had no intention of enduring more of the poisonous brew.
“Only for those who can’t do without.”
“That is a tautology,” he said.
“Yes it is,” she said, reassuring him.
She walked out of the room and suddenly there was thunderous clatter as if the stairs had collapsed. Miranda was closest and through the door in an instant, calling Rachel’s name.
Rachel waved from the gloom in the downstairs hall.
Miranda heard an embarrassed scramble behind her and wheeled around to see Morgan and Shelagh Hubbard jammed in the doorframe, in a comic simulation of the grotesque embrace on the floor. Miranda rolled her eyes and returned her attention to Rachel, who was waiting.
“You okay?” Miranda called. “What the hell happened?”
“It was only a loose step,” Rachel answered. “I skied my way down. You take care, any of you, coming down after me.” She craned forward to see the couple in the doorway frozen in place by their futile attempts to avoid pressing flesh.
Morgan and the anthropologist disentangled themselves and receded into the room. Miranda followed.
“I see you two are becoming quite friendly,” she whispered to Morgan, looking at Shelagh Hubbard.
The woman was preternaturally attractive; her pale skin and light blue eyes and long blond hair, pulled tightly against her skull, made her seem otherworldly, but not ethereal; less ghostlike than deadly.
Shelagh Hubbard bent down to exchange words with Professor Birbalsingh. He was closely examining the remnants of dried flesh at the collars of each corpse, something that held his interest more than anything the living could possibly offer. He nodded assent.
The woman took out her cellphone, explaining that since the cadavers had been inappropriately disentombed, they were vulnerable. She did not explain how or to what. Rapid deterioration, Miranda supposed; airborne bacteria, diseases of the dead. They needed to get the bodies to the lab at the university as soon as transportation could be arranged. Ambulance or hearse? Miranda wondered. Neither seemed quite suitable.
With the medical examiner gone, the forensic anthropologists were in charge. The police function was to offer assistance, guard the remains, and bear witness to the irrevocability of death. It was time, Miranda thought, for the ghouls to go home. She glanced at Morgan and saw that he was gazing at Dr. Hubbard, perhaps savouring the effects of their fleeting embrace. The woman was wearing perfume, Miranda realized; a subtle scent but inescapable. She had dressed for the occasion.
Miranda considered the implicit judgment about disturbing the bodies. Almost certainly the uniforms who answered the call had moved them only enough to identify the problem. Normal procedure would demand nothing be disturbed. But at some point, as Morgan had suggested, time intrudes and evidentiary materials simply become artifacts.
Morgan was lingering. He had a genuine interest in forensic anthropology. Little was revealed, however, by observing the mental activities of the two academics, who were scrutinizing and register
ing from their specialized perspectives. This must be how we appear, he thought, prowling the scene of a crime — cerebral and disengaged. He chuckled at the image as he admired Dr. Hubbard.
Miranda coughed throatily, seemed to listen for something elusive, then coughed again. Then she announced, “I’m going to scream.”
Morgan looked puzzled, tolerant.
She shrieked wickedly in variable pitch.
A racket from downstairs was followed by thumping footsteps, and Officer Naismith sprang through the doorway, her semi-automatic clasped in both hands. Everyone froze.
For a moment even the bodies seemed part of an allegorical danse macabre, with Rachel cast in the role of Death.
Then the tableau collapsed in laughter, much to the officer’s annoyance.
“Sorry,” Miranda said. “I should have warned you.”
Rachel looked down at her Glock semi-automatic, summoned an indignant smile, and tucked it back in its holster.
“Bang bang,” she said.
Good recovery, Morgan thought. He regarded Miranda with bewildered affection, and waited.
“Listen,” Miranda said. “You can hear the emptiness.”
Nice, thought Morgan, imagining the music of the spheres.
“I noticed when we were in the kitchen — I’ve never figured out why people say the word echo to hear an echo. I wonder what they say in Chinese.”
She had their attention.
“Okay,” she said. “Listen.”
She called, “Echo-echo-echo.”
They could hear a faint reverberation in the walls.
“There’s a laundry chute,” she said.
Yes, Morgan thought. You can hear emptiness if you know what to listen for.
“I remember the laundry chute in my grandmother’s house,” Miranda explained. “We’d holler up and down, and when they covered it over because they were afraid we’d climb in you could still hear where it was through the walls.”
Morgan picked up a crowbar from the floor next to the hanging cupboard. He walked along the main supporting wall, tapping. They could hear chunks of plaster skitter behind thick layers of paper and sift between the lath down into the hidden depths.
He stopped and looked out in the hallway. There was a brace at eye level supporting a brick chimney that rose into the attic — all that remained of an abandoned heating system when stovepipes had snaked through the different rooms during the winter. Beneath the brace a thickening in the wall. Morgan rapped on the protrusion. There was a hollow thud.
He went back into the bedroom, aligned himself precisely, and smashed the back of the crowbar against the wall. Shards of layered paper scattered, plaster flew, and lath shattered. Professor Birbalsingh muttered unhappily.
Once a hole appeared at laundry-chute height, Miranda stepped forward and tried to peer into the cavity. Choking on the dust, she pulled lath and plaster away with her bare hands. Morgan interceded with the crowbar. Rachel Naismith helped, and soon they had an opening big enough a person could reach in up to the shoulder.
Morgan set the crowbar down, preparing to explore, but Miranda shunted him aside.
“This one is mine,” she said. “What’ll you bet there’s a board jammed across to stop things falling through to the cellar.”
She extended her arm fully down into the hole, grimaced as she made contact with something, and carefully lifted her arm out of the chute. Her hand was entwined with long tendrils of human hair. Suspended from the hair was the mummified head of a young woman, skin taut against the skull, lips drawn in a haunting grimace, membranes in her eye sockets catching fragments of light.
“Morgan,” she said. “Could you get the other one?”
Morgan tried to look in but his own head cast a shadow. He reached down, blindly, careful not to rip his flesh on splintered lath, and suddenly flinched. Steeling himself, he grasped the short-cropped hair of the remaining skull. He pulled it upwards and through, into the room.
Miranda was still holding the woman’s head cradled in the crook of her arm. Without exchanging words, both of them carried their grim loads over to the bodies.
Professor Birbalsingh and Dr. Hubbard stood aside while Morgan and Miranda kneeled and propped the heads against the necks from which they had been severed.
When they rose to their feet, the floorboards shivered and the heads lolled to the side. The detectives smiled shyly at each other. They had at least made a gesture to acknowledge the victims had once been alive.
Taking his cue from Miranda, who seemed quite pleased with herself but ready to leave, Morgan announced, “Well, folks, our work’s done here. It’s time for us to call it a night.” He felt strangely uplifted, as if the pieces of a lingering murder investigation were finally coming together, and at the same time he felt cheated, knowing it wasn’t theirs.
Birbalsingh grunted as he manoeuvred his soft body to get a better perspective on the male. Hubbard was opposite, hovering over the woman. It was as if they had divided the victims according to gender.
She looked up at Morgan, then at Miranda, then back at Morgan.
“Goodnight, Detectives,” she said.
Miranda sensed strain in the woman’s smile. Possibly the police had overstepped their bounds in retrieving the heads. Perhaps in placing the heads they had undermined procedural objectivity by performing their small ritual of empathy and defiance.
Miranda didn’t much care. She was ready to go home.
Rachel Naismith saw them to the door.
“Thanks for dropping in,” she said.
“We’ll do it again, sometime,” said Miranda.
The two women exchanged a quick embrace, while Morgan walked by himself toward the car.
Miranda caught up and, slipping on the sidewalk, grabbed his arm to recover. He walked her to the driver’s side. Morgan stood back and waited until she pulled away from the curb, but he still got an icy soaker as he climbed in beside her. It had been an adventure; they both felt somehow winter was over. They drove into the darkness, at its bleakest just before dawn.
CHAPTER THREE
Cabbagetown
The heavy wet snow that accumulated during the night made Yonge Street treacherous. Morgan sat back, white-knuckled, fatalistic but hopeful as Miranda negotiated her way through ruts of turgid slush and gave wide berth to a blue-beaconed truck spewing sand that bore down on them from the other direction near Eglinton. It was the only vehicle they encountered on the desolate streets all the way to the Annex. She was a good driver, relatively speaking, and fervently protective about her car. She would deliver him safely to the door for the sake of her vintage Jaguar.
Weird and wonderful, he thought. Her devotion to the car, like her commitment to her teenage ward, Jill Bray, was a perverse response to heinous crimes. It was astonishing the satisfaction both had brought to her life. She would never have purchased such a car on her own; nor would she by choice have begun parenting with a feisty and resilient survivor of horrific abuse, a child-woman whose story strangely mirrored her own. The car was an act of defiance; Jill was an affirmation of love.
When she pulled up in front of Morgan’s condo, he echoed his invitation of the previous evening. “Do you want to come in?” As if to make it more enticing, he added, “Until the streets are cleared? For an early breakfast?”
She looked as if she might be considering it.
“If you want to sleep, I’ll take the sofa,” he said.
“That clinches it,” she responded. “I’m off. I want to sleep through the day in my own bed. You know what I was thinking?”
When she turned to address him, the indigo instrument lights cast her features in an eerie pallor. She looks sculptural, he thought. Her face is like alabaster in moonlight.
“I was thinking about Heathcliff and Catherine.”
“I’m not surprised,” he said.
He was tired, but sat back against the leather of the deep bucket seat.
“Don’t relax too much. But it j
ust crossed my mind while I was driving: Wuthering Heights was published in 1847.”
“You know that why?”
“You’re not the only one who stores away bits of esoteric information.” She paused. “I looked it up.”
“Never give away your sources.”
“Okay, we have two people. We assume they were lovers — ”
“Assume?”
“Maybe it was a macabre joke and they were famous for hating each other. Anyway, there they are, posed like Heathcliff and Catherine, post-mortem. Only Wuthering Heights hadn’t come out yet.”
“And?”
“And nothing. It just means no one was emulating Emily Bronte.”
“Same with Auguste Rodin. ‘The Kiss’ was a century later. But what about Dante? The Divine Comedy was written five centuries before the murders took place.”
“That’s stretching it, Morgan. Our culture-conscious killer would never count on someone getting the connection, and certainly not cops.” Miranda found the notion that police don’t read, listen to music, enjoy art, attend theatre, or cook like gourmands extremely irksome. It did not bother Morgan. “Maybe the way they’re posed is not an allusion to anything, just inspired depravity.”
“Inspired depravity!”
“I sort of feel guilty they’ve been disturbed,” she said. “Don’t you?”
“Not really. They’ve been locked out of time; now they’re back in.”
“That’s very profound, and sad.”
“Let’s say the former and call it a night.”
“G’night, Morgan.”
“Phone if you work it all out. If you see Jill, give her my love. And thanks for the ride.”
She waited until he unlocked his front door, which years ago he had lovingly painted with fourteen coats of midnight blue. It gleamed a putrescent brown in the reflected light of the city at dawn. Miranda shuddered and drove off, giving a reckless beep on the horn. She was suddenly so exhausted she could hardly guide the car through the ruts, and she concentrated on the promise of a warm bed with fresh flannel sheets.
Morgan closed the door. He was thinking about Rodin’s sculpture. While he got ready for bed he pondered the problem, if it could be considered a problem. How can there be such discrepancy between an artist’s intent and the accepted response to his art?