Grave doubts qam-1

by John Moss

  As he lingered in front of the bathroom mirror, he envisioned “The Kiss” in its various manifestations: plaster and terra cotta and marble and bronze. An image of the desiccated corpses in Hogg’s Hollow intruded but was displaced by the full-size plaster maquette he had seen with Miranda while they were playing hooky from work at the ROM. It was a ghostly white apparition in a room full of chalky anatomical figures on their way to more permanent representation in metal and stone. A ghost among ghosts.

  Catching sight of himself reflected amid the images shunting through his mind, he relaxed and briefly attended to the mundane necessities of brushing his teeth and washing. He lifted his pyjamas, black moose strolling on a red background, from a hook on the back of the bathroom door and walked stark naked up to his bedroom where he stood, shivering, lost again in contemplation.

  He was so tired, nothing made sense, and after becoming thoroughly chilled he put on his pyjamas and climbed into bed. He curled around himself and breathed deeply, lifting the covers for a moment to let a defining burst of cold air penetrate his cocoon, then he sealed them snugly around his shoulders and almost immediately drifted into a deep slumber.

  Morgan awakened to the insistent ring of the telephone. He picked up the receiver on the night table but there was only a dial tone. Maybe he had dreamed it was ringing. Light rising from the window downstairs indicated it was mid-morning, but he was not interested in getting up.

  He rolled over on his back without looking at his watch or the alarm clock on the dresser and drew the covers close. He had tried an eider-down duvet someone once gave him, but preferred the weight of thick wool blankets, which seemed to modulate their proffered warmth according to his needs, rather than smothering him with the indifference of feathers. Snug, breathing the cool air of the room, he tried to reconstruct his last dream.

  Inevitably, it evaded coherence. There were images of wizened corpses entwined as intimately as their clothing allowed, of skulls with their features contorted into the tight grimace of mockery at the fears of the living, of plaster and bronze torsos and severed limbs, of flesh mounded and shapeless, waiting to be formed into bodies. There was a diorama contrived at Hogg’s Hollow with meticulous care to convey mystery, and a confusion of intent and response. There were intimations of genius, and no question about murder. Heathcliff, Rodin, romantic love, death…

  “What are you thinking about, David? Where is this going?”

  Corpses beheaded, enclosed in an airless crypt, the death of romance. He said nothing.

  “Turning death into metaphor isn’t murder, David. Perhaps murder preceded, but the display is romantic. Don’t you see? Get rid of the heads, let the bodies embrace. It is passion over reason, David, as it should be.”

  His wife was leaning across a kitchen table, challenging him. He had not seen her in a dozen years and they had been divorced even longer. He knew he was in a dream. He felt defensive. He roused himself, trying to wake up.

  “Stay here, my darling. Don’t leave me. We can work this out together.”

  He stifled an answer, refusing to give her presence validity.

  “Don’t you love me? Do you love me?”

  He had no answer.

  “Talk to me, David. Tell me about loving forever. Show me the perfect kiss. How delightful, David — an eternal instant. How abysmally sad.”

  He tried to find her eyes, but they were empty sockets. Her lips were tightly clenched but the voice was clear and unnervingly familiar.

  “Two heads, David, kissing forever. It’s all in the head. Reason over passion, don’t you see? Drop two heads down a chute, no telling what they’ll be up to, perpetually falling. Didn’t you ever wonder about heads in the guillotine basket? Between decapitation and the end of consciousness, did they exchange glances? What secrets and jokes passed among them, David?

  “Was that our problem, David? Minds and bodies didn’t come together? We couldn’t tell secrets from jokes!”

  Morgan spoke at last and his voice was like thunder.

  “I do not love you, Lucy…”

  The sound of his words resounding through the loft awakened him. He rolled over and stared at the ceiling, inconsolably lonely.

  Thoughts gathered of the ring and the crucifix and gradually filled the emptiness. Did the conjunction of such potent talismans lead to death, or was death merely the prelude to staging the scene in anticipation of eventual discovery? What variables were manipulated for our benefit, he wondered, and what for the author’s own? And what were the gratuitous contributions of history, of time passing? He could have no way of knowing our ways of seeing, so far in the future.

  Morgan tried to reconstruct the character of the killer. That seemed the key to understanding his crime. It would have taken considerable strength to manhandle the corpses, even if they had been killed and prepared on the premises, which seemed probable. He would have had to understand something of carpentry and plastering. It’s unlikely a woman of the day would have known these things, but an observant male might be familiar with the procedures without himself being in a trade.

  Given the killer’s morbid imagination, combined with meticulous patience and sanguinary determination, he must have been fairly mature — most likely a British immigrant, as were most of his neighbours — and literate. He would have grown up reading the Graveyard Poets in England, or at the very least been an aficionado of Italianate novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho. His tableau has all the elements. But it is a Gothic mystery in reverse: it invites a kind of archaeological speculation rather than fostering terrors and suspense.

  The cabinet! It had been placed over the sealed opening of the crypt; it had been bolted to the wall. Like an ostentatious padlock on a hidden door. It invited discovery, exposure of the secrets it purported to conceal. This was a flourish of the criminal mind, fiendishly confident, taunting posterity.

  Morgan had come full-circle: character and crime were inseparable.

  He was fully awake now, but not rested. After getting up for a pee, he settled back under the covers. It was a day off and a Saturday. The two didn’t always coincide. He thought he might walk over to the old neighbourhood later on, if the sidewalks were cleared. It had changed profoundly, yet it was still called Cabbagetown, and here and there he could see remnants of when it was a sprawling, working-class slum.

  On the margins it had degenerated into a needle park of prostitution and derelicts. But in the heart, among the designer townhouses transformed from dilapidated tenements, he could see a familiar wall or a window, and suddenly he would be back with his dad, walking him to the streetcar on the way to school, or racing around corners and churchyards with other kids, pretending they had bikes.

  Morgan smiled at the ceiling. He did not think of himself as having a deprived childhood. Fred and Darlene did what they could. They were in a subclass now known as “the working poor.” His dad was employed at the Toronto Transit Commission streetcar yards and his mother picked up seasonal jobs, usually around Christmas when she could get work in restaurant kitchens, and in the summers when she did housecleaning for people in Rosedale away at their cottages.

  He did not actually know what his father did with the TTC. Whatever it was, it was the same job he started with forty-five years before retirement — the same job he so desperately missed for the following three years until he died. Some of his friends at his wake said that he died of a broken heart.

  He was not present at his own wake. Darlene waited until he was buried before she invited a bunch from the yards over for beer and sandwiches, along with their wives, most of whom she had never met.

  His mother had her own friends. They were denizens of Cabbagetown, like herself, proud of their British heritage, narrow-minded and loving. Children were the focus of their lives, and as the children grew up, the women grew fat and smoked as if tobacco were oxygen, and many of them drank. He shrank from his generalization, knowing how close it was to the truth.

  Morgan surprised his teac
hers and puzzled his parents by staying in school and by winning a scholarship to the University of Toronto, and even more by accepting. The only one not surprised was Morgan. At seventeen he knew he was smart. He knew his parents were smart as well, and that made him bitter. Whenever he purged himself of esoteric facts over dinner, they were indulgent, if sometimes baffled. But when he explained to them the most complex aspects of high-school science or the arcane intricacies of literature and history, they immediately understood.

  Not that they talked a lot, especially to each other. For the most part Darlene and Fred lived parallel lives in a mean environment and conversed mostly through their son. When I left, he thought, they had nothing to say.

  He moved into a grotty room on St. George Street close to campus. His most intimate associates were a band of mice whose presence he entertained with grudging congeniality. After catching one in something called the Mouse Motel and watching it lurch about, trying to free its feet from the gluey substance on the miniature floor, he abandoned all thoughts of extermination, kept his food securely stored, and occasionally bought the mice cat kibble for treats.

  In the summers he worked at high-paying roughneck jobs in the north, and while he visited his parents from time to time he never again stayed overnight. By the end of his four years as a student, he had almost fallen out of the habit of visiting them altogether. In the winter of his last year the three of them got drunk in a squalid familial gathering he never wanted to repeat.

  He didn’t tell them about graduation. At the end of the summer he left for Europe in search of a personality that would bring the disparate parts of his being together. After two years he came back. His father died soon after his return, and his mother died a year later.

  Morgan’s mind teamed with small images of a world gone forever. He could smell the tobacco scent of his mother making corned beef and cabbage, her hair wisping down over one eye. He could hear the tired stomping of his father coming up the front steps, see himself running to the door to meet him. He could feel the safe embrace of his bedroom, listening to the television drone downstairs while reading about dinosaurs or space travel or pyramids, and later, as he got older, about cultural theory and quantum mechanics.

  Morgan pulled the covers close around him; he was homesick.

  The telephone rang and he answered it and again there was only a tone. He must have been asleep. He was not sure if it had actually been ringing or if he had dreamed himself awake.

  He dialled Miranda’s number. A sleepy voice answered.

  “Did you call me?” he asked.

  “Who? Morgan, no, I’m asleep. And I will be again if you’d go away. I’m gonna hang up.”

  “You’ve never hung up on anyone. You couldn’t.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  Click.

  Well, anyway, he thought, it wasn’t her calling. He lay back and waited. After a few minutes, the telephone rang; this time it was real.

  “Morgan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it anything important?”

  “What?”

  “Your call?”

  “No.”

  Click.

  He looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty.

  He got up, showered, and dressed. After a large breakfast to compensate for the lack of sleep, which included more than his usual ration of bacon and several extra pieces of toast, he settled onto the blue sofa to read. He fingered the book on Persian history without opening it. It was a bit of what Miranda would call “a snare and a delusion” — a 1985 reprint of a nineteenth-century text, with a new, tooled cover embossed in gold, not published to be enjoyed but to be admired.

  He filed the book on a shelf and retrieved his Saturday Globe and Mail from the turgid slush on his stoop. It was the only paper he had delivered — his weekly fix of news, commentary, and culture. Not necessarily light reading, but an eclectic diversion for a couple of hours.

  Morgan always read the paper sequentially, from front to back. Miranda declared she had never encountered such absurdity. No one reads newspapers in order. They weren’t even designed that way. Sometimes he was intentionally perverse.

  On page ten he came across a short article headline BONES OF CONTENTION. Cute, he thought, then blanched when he realized the story was about their doomed lovers at Hogg’s Hollow.

  How on earth did the paper get the story in time for the morning edition? It had to have been called in, but by whom? Headquarters? Highly unlikely. The coroner’s office? They never release information unless in the aid of an inquest. Certainly not Miranda. He and Miranda avoided publicity — it interfered with their work. Even though as a team they were a minor legend among their colleagues for eccentric efficiency, they had managed to avoid the kind of celebrity that subsumes individual cases in a running account of the detectives who solve them. It would not have been Officer Naismith. That left Dr. Hubbard or Professor Birbalsingh.

  It was no surprise, then, that the forensic anthropologists were mentioned by name, each spelled correctly. Everything else in the article was tantalizingly macabre, yet intriguingly vague. This account was fed to a desk reporter by someone in sufficient authority to be credible and skilled in the art of public relations. It was not presented as a crime story but as an historical curiosity. The readers’ empathy was encouraged not for the victims but for the scientists involved in resolving their identity — scientists whose determined expertise would unlock the secrets of their morbid embrace.

  Annoyed by the Globe article, Morgan grabbed his coat and set out for Cabbagetown. As he walked along Harbord Street into the heart of the U of T campus, he tried to stabilize the source of his ire, which hovered somewhere between amused irritation and genuine anger. The publicity was proprietary, a declaration by the forensic anthropologists of ownership. Good for them; damn their sense of entitlement.

  In front of Hart House, he stopped to dump snow from a shoe, balancing precariously on one foot. He stared intently at a gritty lump of ice. His father had taught him the secret of balance, how to put on socks in a standing position: fix your gaze on a particular spot and the wavering stops. His father taught him to splash cold water on the back of his neck in the morning to eliminate grogginess, to spit on his shoes for the final polish, to savour the taste of authentic ginger beer, to discriminate among newspaper comic strips, to use chopsticks, to blow his nose without a tissue — snorting through one nostril at a time, pressing the other — when no one was watching.

  Morgan looked around at the architectural dissonance that skirted University Circle. Nothing had changed in twenty-two years. In this season, the buildings looked bleak, the flowerbeds were like burial mounds, and the shrubs were tangles of dried sticks or clumps of bedraggled green. After a night of sleet, followed by a cold turn that left the air crisp, the sky an intense winter blue, and the white a translucent gathering of all the colours in the spectrum, the snow-covered lawn glistened in comical contrast.

  The main door into the anthropology laboratories was locked but Morgan called building maintenance on a campus emergency phone and when someone showed up he flashed his badge and was admitted without being asked for an explanation. He was not expecting so much activity behind closed doors on a weekend, as he searched for the forensics lab — graduate students at their Sisyphean labours, earning their meagre stipends. Time off, he surmised, is for faculty — unless they have just been presented with disentombed cadavers in pristine period dress.

  A slightly manic young man in a lab coat directed him to the location of Professor Birbalsingh’s newest project, chuckling as he walked off in the other direction. Morgan had attended graduate school for a week before dropping out to study criminology at a community college. With a novitiate’s grasp of academic procedures and obligations, he felt a tenuous connection to the young man’s vaguely demented detachment. For years he had imagined returning to university, with the idea of eventually teaching. He knew that his brain was too restless, however. He liked having a mind
with a mind of its own.

  He pushed the door open without knocking and entered a room that, despite the gruesome paraphernalia, was quite unlike Ellen Ravenscroft’s austere aerie in the heart of the city. Death, here, was not an end in itself, as it was at the morgue. It was an object of conjecture, subsumed by the conventions of an academic discipline. While cool, the room was almost cheerful. The blinds were only half drawn. Dust motes swirled in sunlight reflected from the snow outside. The bodies, which were lying on autopsy trays, had been separated and stripped of their clothing. Both Dr. Hubbard and Professor Birbalsingh were intent on the male at the moment. A graduate assistant was meticulously cleaning plaster dust and debris from the hands of the female on the adjoining table. On a stainless-steel counter behind them, a wooden box the size of a valise sat ominously.

  Before his observation of the scene could be considered a covert activity, Morgan coughed to announce his presence. The professor didn’t look up and the student focused more intently on her work, but Shelagh Hubbard turned around and, recognizing who it was, smiled warmly.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Morgan said.

  “No bother,” she answered. “The Inquisitive Detective,” she declared, as if it were a title. “You couldn’t resist.”

  “Actually, I wanted to know about the newspaper story.”

  “The newspaper?”

  “There was a write-up in the Globe this morning, with just enough detail to promise a follow-up. I assume you were the source, Dr. Hubbard.”

  “Shelagh, please. We’re not formal around here.”

  Her eyes swept the room, then she nodded in the direction of the naked bodies and whispered, “Except for him, the Obsessive Professor.”

  “I heard that, Miss Hubbard.”

  “He is disciplining me, detective. I am ‘doctor’ at the museum, ‘professor’ at the university, and ‘Shelagh’ to my friends. I am ‘ Miss ’ only when proclaiming my marital status or incurring the wrath of my mentor.”