Still Waters

by John Moss

  STILL WATERS

  STILL WATERS

  A Quin and Morgan Mystery

  John Moss

  A Castle Street Mystery

  Copyright © John Moss, 2008

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Editor: Michael Carroll

  Design: Jennifer Scott

  Printer: Webcom

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Moss, John, 1940-

  Still waters / John Moss.

  ISBN 978-1-55002-790-7

  I. TITLE.

  PS8576.O7863S84 2008 C813’.6 C2008-900691-7

  1 2 3 4 5 12 11 10 09 08

  We acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Printed and bound in Canada.

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  For Bev, as always,

  For Tobi Kozakewich,

  For Bea and Julie and Laura,

  For Margaret Atwood,

  whose wicked candour was taken to heart,

  And for Morgan and Miranda,

  who are real, as only fiction can be.

  1

  Water Weavers

  The dead man with comb-over hair fanning away from his skull was floating face down in the fish pond. Although still unidentified, he was appropriately dressed for a Rosedale garden. Another pond, closer to the ravine, settled into the landscape as if a ground depression had been filled with primordial sludge. Windows in the large house looming over the scene were empty, the curtains half-drawn. Aside from the police, there was no one around, not a gardener, no family, no maid. Most houses in this part of Toronto’s Rosedale had domestic help. At 7:15 each weekday morning women of colour spread out from the subway station, through the tree-lined streets, along the red brick sidewalks, and into the private worlds of the gentry by blood and by money. An hour later pickups arrived with Dutch names on the sides, carrying men wielding rakes and mowers, and in winter, shovels and buckets of sand and salt. By now the workers had gone home, the owners had returned, children had changed out of school uniforms and were doing homework, and prepared dinners had been taken from refrigerators. It was quiet in Rosedale in the early evening in Indian summer. But it was preternaturally quiet in this garden, even with all the police activity. In the unseasonable heat, among dappled shadows, it was like being underwater.

  Miranda Quin knelt against the limestone parapet. As the body swung by, she reached out to draw it closer.

  “Don’t touch him!” David Morgan, Miranda’s partner, said.

  “I wasn’t. I can’t see his face.”

  She prodded the dead man’s shoulder until his profile lolled into view, washed pale and streaked with light. There was nothing about his bland features to connect with, but death made his face seem familiar. As he drifted across her reflection, Miranda flinched. It wasn’t the intimation of her own mortality — she had a working relationship with death — but something inexplicable, like vertigo, seemed to rise inside her. A mixture of horror and panic, strangely tempered by a flutter of relief, all held in check by the need to sort out her feelings before revealing them.

  Morgan stared into the depths of the pool. He was captivated by the fish weaving the water with eerie striations of light. The body on the surface was a minor distraction — not to the fish playing in the dead man’s shadow — but to Morgan, whose current enthusiasm was imported koi. “Japanese,” he murmured. “From Niigata.”

  “Caucasian,” Miranda responded. “From Rosedale.”

  “Ochiba Shigura,” said Morgan. “The big one near his ear.”

  Perhaps it was, she thought.

  “Ochiba Shigura,” he repeated. He had never before said these words out loud. “It means ‘Autumn leaves falling on still water, I am sad.’” He paused. “They know this guy. That one’s a Utsuri. What about you?”

  “What? Know him? Why would I?” She surprised them both that she found his question invasive.

  Morgan shrugged. “It’s a folly.” He took in the entire garden with a sweeping glance. “This guy spared no expense to make it look natural.”

  “There’s nothing natural about gardens,” Miranda declared. Were she not preoccupied by the gnawing within, they might have wandered into a discussion about the vanities of landscape architecture. Instead, she forced herself to focus on the corpse. She bent closer and felt a surge of revulsion.

  There were no visible wounds.

  She looked back at Morgan through a veil of shoulder-length hair. “You’ve been studying fish?”

  “Koi,” he clarified. “I’ve been reading.”

  “Good timing.”

  His personality and looks coincided, she thought. Unkempt, tousled. Features bold enough to cast shadows. Dark eyes, highlights when he smiled, sometimes exposing, more often concealing. Good body, tall, lean but not lanky. Good hair, all there. Fiercely intelligent.

  They had made love once but preferred to be friends.

  “Look at them,” he said. “They’re disturbingly beautiful …”

  “To us or each other? They’re carp. Genetically manipulated scavengers.” She rocked back onto her feet, grasping his arm to pull herself upright.

  “Expensive carp.”

  She envied his esoteric diversions. Persian tribal carpets, Ontario country furniture, vintage Bordeaux, now Japanese fish. She suspected he could evade himself endlessly. After more than a decade working murders together, she wasn’t sure why.

  He hadn’t noticed her suppressed anxiety. That pleased her. It also annoyed her. She tried to imagine her bathtub. She usually had showers. “Morgan,” she announced as if it were a point of contention, “water moves counter-clockwise.”

  “Not in Australia.”

  She extended an open hand toward the corpse. As he moved slowly around the pool, the dead man seemed to rotate on an unseen axis.

  “He’s turning the wrong way,” said Morgan.

  “Exactly. And he’s floating.”

  “Yes he is. Very postmodern — he’s part of the garden design.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Dead’s easy, dying is hard.”

  She couldn’t tell from the sun glinting in his eyes whether he was being thoughtful or quoting Oscar Wilde. Or Dashiell Hammett.

  “Not that hard,” she said. “He was probably unconscious when he entered the water. Otherwise he’d be on the bottom.”

  “I knew a kid in grade one. He used to scare hell out of Miss Moore by holding his breath till he fainted.”

/>   “You remember your teacher’s name?”

  “And the kid’s — Billy DeBrusk. He died in Kingston.”

  “Maximum Security or Collins Bay?”

  “He was an accountant. Secondary drowning in a triathlon. His lungs flooded a day after the race, filled with bodily fluids in his sleep. He got kicked in the swim.”

  “I didn’t know you could drown in bed.” She paused. “Did he win?”

  Morgan loved the way her mind worked, convinced it was in complementary opposition to his own, which needed channels to contain the discursive energy. He thought a lot about his own mind. It was a place to visit and explore. It wasn’t where he lived.

  “Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones before she walked into the Thames,” said Miranda. “That way, it was out of her hands. Like diving from the Bloor Street Viaduct. You commit, then you wait. Death happens. It’s not your fault.”

  “She drowned in the River Ouse in Sussex, not the Thames. She left a note to her husband, saying, ‘You have given me the greatest possible happiness.’ Do you think you could drown yourself?”

  This bleak sense of dread inside her, was that what it felt like? But there was also the unsettling sensation of release. Release tinged oddly with guilt. No, I could not.

  “Whoever called it in —” Morgan began.

  “Left him floating. Must have known he was already dead.”

  “How?”

  “Perhaps patience.”

  There was something bothering her, he thought. Macabre humour was either a mask or a masquerade. His own humour ran more to wordplay and irony.

  “You sure you don’t know him,” he said. Stolid silence. “It could have been called in by the person who killed him.”

  “That’s an idea,” she said, indicating by her tone she didn’t consider it likely.

  They contemplated the pool; the sun was low in the sky, so there was little reflection. It was difficult to separate the surface from the depths, except close to the floating corpse, and out near the centre where twin columns of fine bubbles mushroomed from the darkness below.

  “There has to be a pump somewhere processing the water through a filter system,” Morgan said. “Pushing clockwise.”

  Morgan looked around, but there were no outbuildings in the yard. He glanced up at the neighbouring house. Only its upper storeys were visible above the high stone wall separating the properties. Someone looking across would have to be in the attic to get a decent view of the ponds. The windowpanes in the attic gable glistened in the early-evening light.

  Spotlessly clean, he thought.

  “It must be in the basement,” said Miranda. “The filter. I doubt the other pond has one — it looks like pea soup. Soylent green.”

  “Charlton Heston.” He affirmed her allusion. “Nutrition from human remains.”

  A uniformed officer approached and asked if the body could be moved.

  “Wait for the coroner,” said Morgan. “No, take him out. Make sure they’ve got pictures. Be careful with the fish.”

  The uniformed officer wandered away to get help.

  Miranda contemplated the dead man, wondering if his secret lives somehow intersected with her own, long before death had brought them together. “They’ll go deep. It must be nine or ten feet.”

  “Three metres, think metric” said Morgan conscientiously. “Even if it’s heated, they need the volume to stabilize against temperature fluctuations.”

  Metric came in when Miranda was a child; Morgan was five years older. He insisted that Fahrenheit generated a skin response, and Celsius was only numerical.

  “We’ll need to drain it,” she said.

  “No.”

  “We’ll send in a diver then. Do you think there’s a difference between a pool and a pond?”

  “I’d say a pool is hard-edged and clear.” He looked down toward the ravine. “The soylent pea-souper, I’d call that a pond.”

  “You’re okay with a diver?”

  “Yeah, it’s better for the fish. There’s a fortune in there.”

  She smiled at the presumption of authority. He had seniority by several years, but they were both detective sergeants. Usually, she was in command. He preferred it that way.

  Miranda strolled off toward the house, then circled around and walked out past the murky green pool into a narrow grove of silver maples that soared defiantly against the urban sky, their foliage blocking out the banks of office buildings and the CN Tower. From a vantage by the sudden slope of a ravine, the city reappeared at close quarters. This was how the rich lived. In Toronto at least. Miranda didn’t know rich people anywhere else, and in Rosedale only when they were murdered, or as happened more often than people might think, when they did the murdering.

  A police crew worked beneath her, combing among the overgrown rubble below the property line for anything out of place: a gum wrapper but not a Dom Perignon cork; a footprint, freshly broken twigs but not cut branches; evidence of urgency, not the residue of a carelessly cultivated life.

  She gazed up into the leaves of the maple trees, vaguely expecting a revelation. That was how it occasionally happened, and she would walk out and surprise Morgan with an accounting that seemed to come from nowhere. This time all she saw were blue-green edges shifting softly in the freshening breeze of early evening.

  Generally, Morgan was the more intuitive one. He gathered random particulars until everything fell into place, while she extrapolated an entire narrative from singular details. She was deductive. Like Holmes, though Morgan wasn’t Watson. More like Moriarity, she thought, but one of the good guys.

  Morgan remained by the pool. He knew almost every fish by its generic name. He recognized a young Budo Goromo with markings the size of a cluster of grapes, Cabernet Sauvignon with the bloom still on. Its other name might have been Bacchus, he thought, or maybe Lafite or Latour. Morgan got sidetracked for a moment, rifling through the files in his mind for the names of First Growth Bordeaux. This would be the garden of a Bordeaux drinker. Premier grand crus. Not Burgundy. These fish had been too carefully selected. Burgundy was always a risk.

  And its third name is known only to God.

  He shuddered. Morgan wasn’t a believer, but the familiar phrase, whether as an epitaph for the Unknown Soldier or casually applied to fish in a Rosedale garden, sent a chill of loneliness through him.

  “Have we heard who he is yet?” Miranda asked. She had been standing close for several minutes, watching him think.

  Morgan shrugged. Neither of them carried a cell phone. Access meant control. Sometimes she compromised. Self-reliance wasn’t always enough.

  “Margaux,” said Morgan, apparently addressing the Budo Goromo. He was pleased. He had retrieved the name of another Bordeaux grand cru.

  Miranda couldn’t remember which Hemingway grand-daughter hadn’t committed suicide, Muriel or Margaux. One of them starred in a Woody Allen film.

  Side by side they stared into the pond, intent on their separate reflections, while a surreal tableau was enacted around them. In a flurry of quiet activity the investigating team searched out myriad anomalies that would make the immediate past comprehensible. The grounds, a luxuriant green, though summer was gone, had been cultivated by generations long dead. The more distant past made the crime scene merely a passing disturbance.

  The Ochiba Shigura disappeared into the depths and then returned, swimming slowly against the dead man’s face, back and forth in a kind of caress or secret language. A powerfully proportioned Showa the size of a platter nibbled at the fingers of his left hand, which draped low in the water, though the body itself rested stolidly on the surface as if buoyed from below.

  Miranda settled on the retaining wall with her back to the pond. She looked at the huge brick house that opened onto a portico one storey below street level across the back, embracing the garden with an intimacy that belied its grand proportions. Miranda tried to penetrate the architectural layers of the house, finding clean Georgian lines nearly
obscured by unseemly Victorian flourishes and superfluous Edwardian columns and porticos. She decided the house had remained in the same family over the years, the changes accruing as each generation imposed its own taste on the last, and the next.

  She twisted around as the dead man swung by and gently tugged at his jacket collar. The corpse shifted, brushed against the edge of the pool, and slumped over onto its side. In a rush of water it settled on its back, floating face up, open eyes limpid, opaque.

  Miranda flinched, her breath caught in her throat.

  Again she was struck by the sickening familiarity of death. Something happened to human features in extremity. The very obese, the emaciated, faces contorted in pain or by fear, and faces in absolute stillness, bore similarities in kind. Fat men looked alike; corpses resembled one another like kin.

  Morgan bent close to examine the dead man’s face, then leaned away as if coming to a dissenting judgment about a celebrated portrait after evaluating the brush strokes. They watched while the body drifted away from the wall and slowly rolled over again.

  “That’s better,” said Morgan when the face was no longer visible. “His name is Robert Griffin. He’s a lawyer.”

  “Really?” said Miranda. “And you know that because?”

  “He was news about a year ago.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “Rich. There was a piece in the Globe and Mail buried beside the obituaries.” He chuckled at the pun. “It wasn’t a big enough story to make television.”

  “But you recognized him wet?”

  “Yeah. They used a file photo. He looked sort of dead already. He spent a fortune at Christie’s in London for an artifact from the South Pacific.”

  “And that was newsworthy?”

  “Something called Rongorongo, a wooden plaque from Easter Island about the size of a small paddle blade with writing on it.”

  “Rongorongo?”

  “It’s filled with opposing rows of hieroglyphs. It’s the writing that’s Rongorongo, not the board, and the people from Easter Island can’t read it now. No one can read it. They still carve replicas, and no one knows what they say.”