by John Moss
Morgan tried to get a focus on her in the mottled light. He was a little confused, and he shrugged. “I think you have to explore the foundation before you can understand the edifice.” He thought that was suitably ambiguous — applicable to psychoanalysis, travel abroad, or their present location.
“There’s Freud again — you with your edifice complex.” She smiled as if she knew things beyond his grasp.
“This is a good place to think,” he observed. “Not necessarily out loud.”
“Okay. Let’s think. Eleanor Drummond wouldn’t have known you were down here. There was no car outside. She came in with someone she knew, there were no signs of forced entry or a struggle, they went up to the study … No, she came in first, went up to the study, took off her shoes and jacket, went down, let someone in, and brought him back upstairs. Why? What were they doing? There doesn’t seem to be anything in progress, no papers spread out on the desk. The computer wasn’t turned on. She wouldn’t have taken off her shoes if he had come in with her in the first place. Too casual. It had to be someone she knew really well.”
“Why was the carpet in the closet? Why do you think the assailant was a man?”
“Could have been a woman, but there was a lot of force. What would he have used? It was a blunt instrument, which is an oxymoron. And isn’t it strange that there seemed to be only one point of entry. Like he thrust it in, working his weapon inside her without withdrawing, tearing her apart —”
“We’re talking about murder, Miranda. You make it sound like rape.”
“Yeah, well, it must have been a miserable way to die. The assailant would have been a mess. But there’s no evidence of someone cleaning up, no trail of blood when he left.”
“Unless he came prepared. Maybe the killer was wearing one of those painter’s jumpsuits. She’d be a bit suspicious. I think —”
“Seriously, Morgan. There’s not a print, not a smudge, not a smeared footprint on the floor. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the aquarium fall. Maybe he broke it on purpose after he killed her, used the water to dilute the blood so it would flow over marks of a scuffle and leave us with nothing. Is the penis a blunt instrument?”
“Speaking generically?”
She shrugged, her gesture muted in the converging shadows, the stifling gloom.
When they reached the oak door, Morgan took her penlight and checked the padlock. Instead of handing the penlight back, he clasped it in his teeth and struck the lock a glancing blow with the hammer, calculated to set its innards askew, with his free hand held ready for whatever might spring forth.
“One hit,” he proclaimed as he pulled the sprung lock to the side and pushed on the door. It refused to give way.
“Morgan, the padlock wasn’t holding anything. This whole system is a Foucauldian model.”
“Where did he come from? What about Freud?” Morgan was more comfortable with Freudian allusions. Michel Foucault was just coming into vogue in North American academic circles about the time Morgan absconded to Europe. About the time Miranda was beginning her studies in language and thought.
“Look,” she said, “the original lock is a Victorian antique. We have dead bolts, an Edwardian refinement. The padlock was obviously a transitional device, say, from the 1930s. Then someone installed a standard key lock around the time I was born.” Trying not to look smug, she retrieved the penlight gingerly from his mouth and squatted to look at the keyhole. “You should be able to manage this.”
A little sheepish, he reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet from which he withdrew a stiff length of wire. Then he bent to the task while she held the light to illuminate his progress. “There,” he said finally. “Am I redeemed?”
She was about to make a religious quip when he swung the door away from them into the darkness.
“Voila, a tunnel!” he said. But he didn’t go in. The intense ray of the penlight was easily swallowed by the shadowy void. “I’ll bring a better light tomorrow, but for sure this connects the estates.”
“There’s nothing sinister about that. They used to belong to the same family. This might have been a servants’ passage. They probably shared kitchen facilities. These aren’t mansions, Morgan, just really big houses. I wouldn’t call them estates.”
“From Cabbagetown, they’re estates.”
“Let’s go check the morgue. We might find out more about Griffin, and Eleanor Drummond will be settled in by now.”
“We’ve got to feed the fish.”
“How many times a day?”
“Three or four. I’ve fed them twice already.”
“Let us withdraw from this foul place,” she said as if quoting Shakespeare.
He wasn’t quite sure if she was.
6
Shiro Utsuri
Morgues were emergency rooms for the dead. Their clients were admitted, processed by triage, and released. Morgues didn’t use architectural illusions to dissemble. They opened directly onto side street pavement; they seldom had waiting rooms apart from a makeshift cluster of chairs. There was no casual traffic through a morgue. It was a place always of profound mystery, where forensic resources were brought to bear on the expiration of human beings, to capture their untoward moments of death.
When Morgan and Miranda arrived, they passed a teenage girl standing by the soft drink machine who turned away from them in a sort of innocuous slouch. As they walked through a glass door and down a brightly lit hallway in the direction of muffled voices and the sounds of small whirring motors, the girl’s reflection suggested resignation, as if she had been waiting for hours.
The medical examiner was Ellen Ravenscroft. The coroner was just about to start work on Eleanor Drummond. She dismissed an assistant and conferred briefly with Miranda and Morgan, directing them to some items on top of a stainless-steel cabinet and papers on a desk, then she drew the cover away from Eleanor Drummond’s body and folded it neatly for reuse.
Miranda stood back a little so that her head and shoulders were out of the illumination cast by the low-slung lights. She was sure no one enjoyed an autopsy, but Morgan and the ME seemed to regard the body about to be splayed open with clinical detachment. The worst was when it was a child. Miranda found it easiest when the body was so badly mangled that it didn’t resemble a person.
She had never before been acquainted with the victim in a murder investigation. Robert Griffin, who was filed somewhere in the bank of drawers along one side of the crypt, she knew only as a corpse, despite her intimate connection with his private affairs.
Miranda moved so that she could see past the obstruction of her colleagues. She shuddered. Despite the gaping hole in the woman’s abdomen, for an absurd moment she was struck by how very lovely Eleanor Drummond appeared. Here was a woman who knew how to be naked — and dead. Miranda half suspected she had prepared, with the art of a ghoulish courtesan, for the intimate examination now underway.
Her body was groomed to perfection, her makeup was done with finesse, and her physique was toned and lotioned with loving care. There were no tan lines, she knew enough to stay out of the sun, her legs were entirely clean of hair, her pubic triangle was neatly trimmed, and the down on her belly and arms was soft in the harsh light like a fine mist sprayed on freshly cut flowers.
How could someone be more vulnerable, Miranda thought, than lying naked on a stainless-steel tray, examined only as human remains? Even if the body didn’t know it was happening, it was happening. Miranda wanted to cover the woman. She related to her now — while alive there had been an impossible distance between them. Miranda had only had a bikini wax once in her life, and that was before she had gone to Grand Cayman. She felt sad and oddly exhilarated by the strangeness of a woman who seemed to be so much in control despite the circumstances.
As the ME leaned into her job, the illusion collapsed in soulless procedures of cutting and probing.
“Was she a smoker?” Miranda asked the ME.
“Never.”
“T
hen why did —”
“Stage business,” said Morgan. “The worse the script, the more smoking there is.”
“Playing out her role as mistress?”
“Was she?” asked the ME.
“His mistress?’ said Miranda. “Apparently. Did she ever have a baby?”
“Yes, not recently, but yes.”
The medical examiner described the superficial appearance of the body in detail, speaking into an overhead microphone and to them at the same time. Miranda turned to the items on the cabinet. She picked up a nail file with a tortoiseshell handle. “Anything unusual about this?”
“Yes,” said the ME. “There was blood and tissue adhering to the tip.”
“It was lying in the pool of blood when we found her,” said Miranda.
“This was more than watery blood. It was as if the nail file had been used as a weapon except —”
“Maybe defence?”
“No, the tissue is hers, and there’s enough to suggest it penetrated more than skin-deep. If it had gone right in, though, the roughness of the file would be rich with details. It’s relatively clean. And there’s no separate wound.”
Miranda put the nail file back and approached the cadaver again to observe the procedure.
“Look at this,” said Ellen, holding the flesh open. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The damage pattern suggests a deliberate separation of organ from organ, mutilating each in a prescribed sequence. Meticulous but brutal. It doesn’t make sense.”
“An exercise in methodical torture?” suggested Morgan.
“Jack the Ripper?” the ME said. “Punishment and pain? I don’t know. More like cruel efficiency. Almost as if she were helping him along.”
“You assume it was a male?”
“It’s a generic thing, Morgan.” The ME winked. “Like women are ships.”
“Is that open to argument?”
“Accept it, Morgan,” said Miranda. “Informed opinion, linguistic convention — men do the killing unless otherwise noted. Is there a readout on the water and blood samples?”
“Yes, love, over there on the desk.”
Yes, love, Miranda said to herself, and smiled with something approaching affection. No matter how long they were here, she thought, something of the language stayed with them. Miranda nearly apologized for the gauche condescension, except that it was only a thought. Sometimes inflections from elsewhere lasted for generations; it was as if they were genetic.
They knew each other off duty and were almost friends — two professional women married to their jobs. When Ellen Ravenscroft went home on vacation, she came back with rollicking tales of trekking through Heathcliff country alongside strapping country gentlemen, her Yorkshire accent thickened almost back to the original. For Miranda a trip home at the most exciting meant soaking up a bit of illicit sun along the mill race out past the old grist mill, something, in fact, she wasn’t sure she had done since her teens.
She scanned the lab report until she found the anomaly she was looking for. “So there are traces of sodium thiosulphate in the water and not much chlorine.”
“That’s what you’d expect,” said Morgan. “Fish people use sodium thiosulphate to dechlorinate city water, which would have killed the Showa.”
“The what?” asked the ME. “The Japanese fish we found beside the… deceased. It was still alive, a Doitsu Showa, and a genuine beauty.”
“I’m sure.”
“But there are variations,” said Miranda. “Some of these samples, ones taken directly from the body, contain chlorine and chloramines.”
“Tap water,” said Morgan.
Miranda circled around the perimeter of the room as if she were taking a stroll, lost in thought. Morgan turned his attention to the autopsy. He knew when to leave his partner alone.
“Have either of you talked to the girl outside?” asked the ME.
“What girl?” said Miranda from the shadows. “The teenager in faded jeans, Birkenstocks, and a lavender silk shirt?”
“That would be the one,” said the ME. “She said she was supposed to meet someone called Molly Bray. There’s no Molly Bray here, living or otherwise. She said her mother left a note. Asked me if she could wait. She was flicking a lighter. I’d have shown her a smoker’s lungs if I had any lying about. I don’t relate well to young people. I was there once myself, but I grew out of it. If she’s still hanging around, could you guys deal with her? Maybe she’s just a death junkie.”
“You go talk to her, Miranda. You’re better with kids.”
“Yeah, okay. But I think you should know …” Miranda remained silent for a few moments until she had their interest, then declared, “Eleanor Drummond died by suicide.”
“No way,” the ME shot back.
Morgan was more circumspect in his response. “What makes you think that?”
“Elementary, dear Holmes. Have you ever read Yukio Mishima, the Japanese author?”
“Possibly.”
“You’d remember if you’d read ‘Patriotism.’ It’s a short story. I’ll bet she read it.” Miranda nodded at the body lying open in front of them. “Morgan, with Griffin we have a murder that pretends to be suicide. And now we have a suicide meant to look like murder.”
He waited.
“Yukio Mishima disembowelled himself in the same grisly ritual he described in his fiction. He knew exactly what he was doing. Seppuku. He had already been through it in words. Of course, he describes ritual suicide as an honourable thing. Yet somehow the fiction deconstructs in spite of the author. The warrior’s actions as he kneels and slides the sword into his belly and moves it through his pain in a prescribed pattern, severing his guts organ by organ, he and the author regard as ennobling, and eventually Mishima emulated his astonishing story.
“There is a woman, though — the warrior’s wife. She’s meant to be his necessary witness to affirm his nobility. After he dies, she methodically prepares the house for their discovery and then without fanfare takes her own life. A reader sharing Mishima’s fanaticism might find her role trivial. But to me her apparent passivity subverts the whole idea of seppuku. It’s just a game boys play when they come to the end of things.”
Morgan was fascinated by her leisurely exegesis, and baffled by its relevance to her bizarre revelation about the death of Eleanor Drummond. The ME was listening but proceeded with her work. They waited.
Miranda touched the arm of the corpse with the back of her hand as if the contact would somehow confirm her account. “Eleanor Drummond was both the warrior and the wife. She had to have read Mishima. I guarantee it. She understood the warrior’s unwavering commitment and she understood the humility needed for the ignominious death of the wife, leaving no explanation.”
“Even if it was suicide, why like this?”
“I don’t know, Morgan. Eleanor Drummond displayed utter conviction about the necessity of death. I don’t think the brutality was collateral damage. She needed to do it the way she did.”
Ellen put down the instruments she was using for the autopsy, turned, and leaned against the stainless-steel table. “What about the wound? This wasn’t done by Excalibur. Take a look inside, love. She was battered not sliced. And there was no warrior’s sword at the scene, not even a blunt one. How could she hide it? I can’t conceive of suppressing the agony. There was no evidence of drugs. Why in the world make suicide so bloody complicated?”
“Don’t know,” said Miranda with a trace of smugness that let Morgan know she was confident and probably right.
“Okay, shoot,” he said.
“I have no idea why she did it. That may be our real mystery. But her desperation must have been absolute. She wasn’t herself. We know that, literally. This was the ultimate act after years of ferocious dissembling. Ellen, did you notice her blouse wasn’t torn? That was the first thing that struck me. Maybe she was in control of her entire death scene.”
“You’re right,” said the ME. “Like it was lifted aside before th
e weapon went in.”
“She was fastidious,” said Miranda. “She rolled up the carpet. She could have just moved it aside, but she rolled it up and put it in the closet. She put her shoes neatly out of the way —”
“But not her jacket?” the ME interjected.
“She needed her jacket.”
“She did?”
Morgan found something deeply sensual in Miranda when she was totally caught up in extravagant thought; the raw intellectual energy released pheromones or something. He listened with benign, almost indulgent concentration. They were, all three, excited by where she was going.
“Okay,” Miranda continued, “she knows precisely what needs to be done. Everything is prepared. She lifts the aquarium down onto the chair. She kneels beside it. This isn’t so you won’t hear when it breaks, Morgan. It’s because she knows once she starts she won’t have the strength to pull it down from the shelf. She doesn’t know you’re there. She takes her nail file and jabs a hole in her abdomen to get things started. She puts down the file and pulls the aquarium over so that it breaks in front of her and spills water over her legs and lap. Then using her jacket to get a good grip — that’s why her jacket is scrunched up and bloody — she takes hold of a large shard of ice she’s made for the purpose. It’s about the size of a small sword. She inserts the end of the ice into the gut wound, but it won’t go in as easily as she anticipated. It takes all her strength to drive it through. There’s your bruising. Then she leans forward against the ice and works it in a predetermined trajectory among her lower organs. Her heart and lungs are still going strong, pumping the blood through her guts. The blood spreads in a sheet across her lap. With less blood in her head the pain eases and she slips into a kind of euphoria, gouges away as much as she can, falls to the side, and dies.”
The three of them stood close to Eleanor Drummond’s splayed cadaver, pressed together by the intimacy of a shared secret. Then, a little embarrassed, they separated emotionally, but stayed close, not wanting to lose what they had.
“Was it the tap water?” Morgan asked. “Is that what tipped you? I’ve heard of icicles as weapons before, or at least it’s out there in the realm of urban myth, but the meltwater always gives them away. The spilled aquarium was meant to cover it up. A bit cruel, though. She was willing to sacrifice that beautiful fish.”