“Didn’t that strike you as odd, a murder suspect determining who should investigate the crime?”
“He suggested, Morgan. I determined. And it did not cross my mind that he was a suspect. Is he?”
“Yes. He virtually insisted on it.” Morgan grimaced at his own break with procedural decorum as he confessed: “We had breakfast together.”
“He can be charming, can’t he?”
“Dangerously so, it appears. And yes, I do have my doubts, but at this point he is the only suspect we have.”
“Fill me in.”
“I’d rather not, Alex. Right now, I’d like to keep you out of the loop, for your own sake. He’s disappeared.”
“D’Arcy! Disappeared?”
“Like the Cheshire Cat.” Inappropriate: he left no smile in his wake.
“You want me to stand down?”
“From your job? Heavens, no. The accessory bit was just to get your attention. Why do you think he asked for us?”
“You and Miranda? Because you’re the best. That was his assumption, not mine. It was my decision, though, not his.”
“Let’s put modesty aside and assume he’s right — about us — that means he wants to get caught.”
“If he did it, Morgan.”
“Yeah.” Morgan was thoughtful. “Or it could mean the opposite: a back-handed compliment. If we can’t crack the case, no one can. Get by us and he’s home free. Or, of course, it could mean he’s innocent.”
“Anything else? No? Good. And by the way, you keep saying us. Your partner is out of the country.”
“Yeah.”
“Let me know if there’s anything you think I should …” He didn’t finish his sentence.
As Alex Rufalo left the room he looked back. Morgan was still lost in thought. Rufalo closed the door firmly behind him.
Morgan sat slouched at the interrogation table for more than an hour, letting facts and impressions swirl in his mind. He felt like he was caught at the edge of a whirlpool, unable either to break free or plunge through. This was a case where Miranda’s capacity for deduction would be invaluable. Revising his water imagery, he thought of pebbles tossed in a pond, their ripples confusing the surface — she was good at inferring who threw them from their intersecting patterns.
But she was busy by now on her novel. Her story about the man bleeding in her bed who claimed to be Harrington D’Arcy had faded from his mind. This was not a failure of imagination on his part, but submission to the power of hers. The bleeding man was well on his way to becoming fiction. Apart from a general sense of apprehension, Morgan felt worrying about Miranda was a response too personal, too intimate, for comfort.
It was only her first full day there, so perhaps she was still getting her bearings. He had suggested renting a Jeep and driving out to Rano Raraku, the volcano quarry. It was not far — the whole island was a tiny triangle in the vast Pacific, six miles by eight by twelve. Morgan did not think in metric. His idea had been for Miranda to counter the strangeness of such an amazing place by starting with the familiar. The cover of every book about the vaunted mysteries of Easter Island, every appropriation of images to sell credit cards and cosmetics, featured shots of moai on the outside slopes of the quarry where they stood, inexplicably abandoned, while over the centuries silt had built up to their shoulders. They gazed, pensively, incomplete, over the savannah to their intended platforms bordering the sea.
Morgan would like to have been there. The disjunction, particularly at Rano Raraku, between the powerful presence of the past and a full understanding of how it had all come about, had created in Morgan an oddly intense feeling of serenity. If he were a religious man, he might have described the feeling as mystical. He was moved, literally, beyond words. He hoped Miranda wouldn’t reduce it all to historical hypotheses. Sometimes it was better to live with mysteries than to resolve them.
Perhaps she was still asleep, washed by the westerly breeze through an open window, dreaming of being exactly where she was. Morgan was surprised that he found the image of Miranda in the tranquil embrace of the Hotel Victoria vaguely erotic. Quite suddenly, he got up and strode out of the interrogation room, out of Police Headquarters, into the midday Toronto sun.
An hour later, he was meandering across the manicured grass in front of the clubhouse at the Royal Toronto Yacht Club, which yesterday had seemed so imposing and now struck him as an embarrassingly misplaced anachronism. Perhaps it was being here on his own, without the mediating effect of Harrington D’Arcy, but the antebellum enclave of privilege now seemed a little sad, like a fat man who smokes.
He made his way past the colonnaded portico to the Pemberly. It was still cordoned off with yellow tape strung across the pilings, but no one had thought to post an officer to keep watch. It was assumed the entire premises were secured. And they were: from ethnic interlopers, class jumpers, women of a certain sort, but not from murderers, embezzlers, politicians and lawyers, or world-class sailors.
Morgan had the heart of an anarchist, but the mind of a cop.
He did not want to change anything because that wasn’t his job. The world worked the way it worked, and when it didn’t, then it was up to people like him to get it working again. He stepped on board the Pemberly and felt it rock gently against its moorings. Morgan’s knowledge of boats, particularly yachts, was from books. You don’t grow up among the working poor in old Cabbagetown familiar with halyards and spinnakers, bowsprits, and transoms. Sheets and shrouds were to cover the living and the dead, not to catch the wind.
When he stood on the foredeck and gazed down at the hatch, something seemed askew. The hatch was locked from the outside. Under him was the fo’c’sle locker; why wouldn’t it be secured from within? He went below and made his way past the head and a large locker into the forward hold. There were no bunks, as he had expected, only a stowage area.
He realized he was wrong about the lock. The hatch was used for passing things through, probably sails, so an outside lock was appropriate. Still, as he ran his fingers around the mahogany combing beneath the hatch, he felt dents in the wood and by shifting his position he could see gouges that a screwdriver might have left in an attempt to pry the hatch open. Flecks of varnish came off on his fingers. The damage was very recent.
Someone, a woman, he suspected, had been forcibly confined down here. D’Arcy would know his own boat; he would know how much force it would take to smash through the fo’c’s’le or companionway hatches. They were wood, thick enough to withstand the forces of water lashing the boat in a storm — but they were only wood, mahogany, and they could be broken from inside with a few sharp blows from a winch handle, an elbow, or even the blunt end of a screwdriver. Most places can be broken out of, if you are willing to break things. A woman is less likely than a man to resolve the dilemma of her confinement through violence. It is not about the nature of women, but how they are taught restricting conventions as absolutes. The truth is, wood breaks, glass breaks, it would not have been difficult to escape from the belly of the Lion.
Miranda would be irritated by the sexist assumption. She would counter with a statement of resonant ambiguity: we live in an age, thank God, when even absolutes are uncertain. She would conclude that the person locked below, without deference to gender, was either incapacitated or lacking imagination, or both. The autopsy indicated Maria had consumed alcohol. She might have been up to no more than a haphazard effort. She likely anticipated a hangover, not death, or she would have tried harder. He could hear Miranda’s words in her own voice.
Morgan looked around for the screwdriver and found it against the foot of a berth in the main cabin. As he leaned over to pick it up he smelled Fleurs de Rocaille. She had certainly been there, lying on this berth, not long before dying. He touched where she had been, and withdrew his hand with an instinctive rush; the mattress was still warm. But of course it was not; it was his own body heat reflected