They had worked together in homicide long enough they were inured to the grotesqueries of death, but murder fascinates. You start with a corpse and work backward, he reflected, until the victim's demise is the inevitable outcome of what you've unearthed. A metaphysical inversion: you turn the quest for the meaning of life on its head. You search for the meaning of death.
Morgan stood still in the gloom of the lamplight, contemplating the pictures in his hand. When he had closed the door after Miranda disappeared, he had determinedly reinserted himself into the travails and triumphs of ancient Persia. Minutes later, his concentration broken by the arbitrary execution of a mosquito, unaccountably alive in the wrong season, he found himself on his feet, motionless, irritated by his desire to resist whatever it was she was up to.
He wheeled about and strode into the glare of the kitchen. Taking a beer from the fridge, he returned to the living room, flicked the lights on full, and settled into the wingback chair he had years ago released from captivity at a thrift shop on Jarvis Street and had been meaning to have reupholstered ever since.
He spread the photographs across the coffee table and leaned forward to examine them, trying to avoid his own shadow. Then he sat back, keeping the pictures in his peripheral vision, and as the hours rolled by he opened his mind to a montage of images: images of sex and death, of Upper Canadian pioneers, of Darius, Xerxes, and the invasions of Greece, all scudding through at random velocities.
The photographs offered three perspectives on the same tableau. One was from across a room that was evidently in the process of demolition. It showed a sizeable cavity or closet that had been revealed where rotting plaster and clumped layers of wallpaper were sheared from a wall, and inside on the floor there was an ominous rumple of shadows. In the next picture, taken from the doorway of the hidden closet, the bodies of a man and a woman lay closely together, and somehow, paradoxically, they seemed chastely intimate.
In the third, the bodies had been removed to the larger room and were laid out on display for the camera, still with their limbs entwined. On the back, pencilled in Miranda's handwriting, were the words, "Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff."
Curiously, nothing was noted about the missing heads.
Morgan turned the other two pictures over, but they were blank. It was getting late. He telephoned her anyway. A sleepy voice answered.
"Morgan?"
"How did you know it was me?"
"Who else?"
"It's only eleven —"
"— forty-five."
"Talk to me," he said.
"Did Heathcliff have a first name?"
"Miranda?"
"I thought you'd be interested."
"Possibly."
"They're still at the scene," Miranda said. "Headless. The superintendent wants forensic anthropologists to see them in situ. But tenured scientists don't work the night shift."
"Whoever moved them must have already looked for the heads. They shouldn't have been moved. Amazing they didn't come apart."
"They're frozen in an eternal embrace, Morgan. Like sculpture, flesh turned to bronze."
"I hope someone has the imagination to bury them like that."
"In the Yorkshire dales?"
"Maybe the English won't take them. They've got enough old stuff already."
"They took the Elgin Marbles!"
"The Parthenon looks better without them. Less cluttered."
"Good night, Morgan."
"Oh, no! No way. We're going up there."
"Come on!"
"We're going headhunting; I'll be over in fifteen minutes."
"Morgan, go to sleep."
"You wouldn't have offered the temptation if you weren't prepared for the consequences."
He could hear her smiling.
"How do you know, up there?" she said. "Up where?"
"They're wearing town clothes but the room is country."
"Keep going."
"See the fragments of plaster?" he continued as if she had the photographs in front of her. "They're dangling on horsehair from hand-split, swamp-cedar lath. You can see the crown moulding is local design, wood not plaster, and the baseboard is original. Upper Canadian, transitional farmhouse. Too bad they can't salvage it. I'd say we're talking about somewhere on the northern margins of early Toronto — before 1834 when it was still Muddy York — up around Hogg's Hollow, east off Yonge. Within hearing distance of Highway 401."
"Sometimes you're fun, Morgan. See you in half an hour. Bring coffee."
She hung up the phone and rolled over, pleased with herself. She had almost fallen asleep, waiting for his call. She knew, for all Morgan's interest in pioneer cabinetry and oriental rugs and exotic fish and Arctic exploration and Easter Island and language acquisition and the history of ideas, that nothing got him going like an unresolved murder. And if they were absorbed in a mutual interest, her own disposition unaccountably mellowed.
She stretched languidly. Morgan would be closer to an hour getting there. She had time to enjoy the warmth of the room before preparing herself against the penetrating dampness outside. He refused to buy a car and trudging through accretions of icy slush from the Annex over to Isabella would take its toll. He would be late, chilled to the bone, and grumpy. Grumpy was different from morose. She could laugh at grumpy, and he would laugh back.
She was wearing only a T-shirt and men's boxers. One of the advantages of a condo over rental is that she controlled her own thermostat.
Miranda had lived in the same place as a student. When she returned to the city after three years in the RCMP, she discovered the building was being converted to private ownership and snapped up her old apartment. Partly it was for nostalgia — the reassurance of familiar terrain — and partly it was her fondness for varnish on the balustrades checkered by time, worn marble stairs, paned windows, and porcelain fixtures. Consistency was the hobgoblin of little minds! Someone said that. Probably Swift or Pope. It sounded eighteenth century-ish.
She thought of herself as "urban contemporary," perhaps because she grew up in a village. Morgan was raised, impoverished, in Cabbagetown, just south of where she lived now, back when it was in transition to becoming an upscale address. He was a gentleman by nature not birth, and endearingly unkempt, but not shabby.
Her intercom buzzed.
"Morgan?"
"Yeah?"
"You're here so soon."
"I took a taxi."
"You never."
"I did. Are you going to let me in?"
"Did you bring coffee?"
"Yes."
She buzzed him in, then unlocked her door.
She was in the bathroom, dabbing sleep wrinkles out of her face with icy water, when he called from the kitchen.
"Do you want milk in yours? I asked for double-double but they're both black with no sugar."
"Good," she mumbled, applying lipstick as a token gesture. "Help yourself. I'll stick with black."
She walked out into the kitchen.
"You look good when you're sleepy; very ethereal."
"Like the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw. Brunettes can't be ethereal; we're alluring."
"Seductive."
"In your dreams, Morgan."
She did look attractive,