“You’re reading Thor Heyerdahl,” she whispered. “Aku-Aku.”
“Yes,” he whispered back. “I am.”
Nothing evasive about that, she thought. Probably a spy.
“We are defined by our enemies,” he said.
“I beg your pardon!” She was alarmed that he had been inside her head.
“I thought you were trying to read the note —”
“No.”
“In my book, there, it says, ‘We are defined by our enemies.’”
“Heyerdahl said that?”
“No. This is an American first edition, Rand McNally, 1958, it was inscribed by a previous owner. It sounds very Oscar Wilde.”
Someone else might have said, “used book,” she thought. Someone else might have forgone the allusion to Wilde so early in a relationship.
“The scribbling of a bibliophobe — someone who dislikes books,” he clarified, with the relaxed authority of a person used to explaining his own vocabulary.
“It looks quite deliberate,” she said, suppressing her annoyance as she leaned over to get a better look at the angular script, then, aware of the awkward intimacy of her posture, she edged away.
“It doesn’t seem to bear any relationship to the text,” he said, smiling at her self-consciousness. “You recognized the book?”
“I’m reading it, too,” she said.
“What an uncanny coincidence.”
“I write in all my books,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with writing in books if you own them. It’s a sign of engagement, the bibliophile’s prerogative.”
She winced at her own words. She sounded like Morgan. She stood up abruptly, smiled coldly, and walked back to her seat, where she picked up her own copy of Aku-Aku, which was a later printing of the same Rand McNally edition belonging to the Englishman. Morgan had given it to her, passing it on from Alex Rufalo, their boss, who received it from an acquaintance of his wife. When she turned it over she realized it had been splayed open at the same page as his, but there was, of course, no note in the margin. Coincidences do happen, she thought. She stared at the photograph of the Norwegian adventurer and the enigmatic stone face of the moai that appeared to be gazing right through him, despite the empty eyes. Leaving the book open on her flight table, she leaned back and let her mind wander.
When she woke up the plane was circling São Paulo. She vaguely remembered dismissing the steward when she had been offered breakfast, even though she knew it was sure to be excellent fare. She was travelling business class for the comfort, not the food, and preferred to sleep through. She had a six hour layover in São Paulo and would eat in the lounge at the airport.
She looked ahead to see if her companion of the dark hours had read through the night but his seat was empty.
The seatbelt signs were on. The plane banked in rapid descent. He must have moved to a window seat for the landing. Thinking about him was unsettling and she censured herself for the sensations that were coalescing at the edge of her mind. Miranda knew she was an attractive woman, but this guy wasn’t travelling on points. He was the kind of man who hung out on the pages of Vanity Fair and romanced women a dozen years younger than herself who had record contracts, runway experience, or doctorates in psychology.
* * *
Morgan woke early, gradually, and the layers of sleep peeled away until he found himself staring at the framed poster from Rapa Nui, as Easter Island is called by the people who live there. The tinted line drawings of moai caught the morning light that drifted up through the open blinds on the lower level of his two-storey front window. The upper blinds had been jammed shut from the day he moved in, casting his sleeping loft in welcome gloom.
The telephone jangled, snapping him out of his morose reverie about monuments and mortality and the absence of Miranda. He missed her, it felt like being in the house of a dead relative after the funeral.
“Morgan?”
“Yeah. Alex?”
Since Alex Rufalo had become superintendent, Morgan usually addressed him by his title. It was early.
“I’ve got a murder for you, something you can handle on your own.”
Morgan said nothing.
“Over on Toronto Island,” Rufalo continued.
“You know who it is?”
“Yeah.” He did not elaborate.
“You know who did it?”
“No.”
“So, I go to the islands and look for a dead woman.” From the tone of Rufalo’s voice, Morgan somehow knew the victim was a woman.
“She was found on her husband’s yacht, a forty-two-foot sloop, wood hull, a classic, Lion Class, moored at the Royal Toronto Yacht Club. I’d start with him, he called it in.”
“You a sailor?” He was surprised by the superintendent’s ease with nautical terminology.
“No, I like boats. You’d better get going. Look for the Pemberly.”
Rufalo described it as the man’s yacht. The wife must be younger. Rufalo was curiously evasive. Morgan decided not to ask for clarification.
He hung up. The best bet would be to call a cab, but instead, after he washed up and got dressed, he walked over to University Avenue and took the subway to Union Station, then walked down to what was officially known as Harbourfront. There was a police boat waiting, but he decided on the club ferry.
“I’m sorry, sir, but you must be properly attired,” said a boat attendant dressed in grey flannels and a blue blazer.
“It’s seven-thirty,” said Morgan. “In the morning,” he added with emphasis. “What do you expect, pajamas?”
“Jacket and tie, sir.”
Morgan looked at the young man shrewdly, waiting for him to smile. When he realized the humourlessness of the situation, he flashed his police identity card and the young man backed off. Morgan regretted not carrying his Glock. There was nothing like a gun to test the esoteric traditions of the pampered class.
From halfway across the harbour he could see the top of the Gibraltar Point lighthouse through a cleft in the trees, poised on the southernmost side of the big island. He had never been there. As a kid growing up among the tenements of Cabbagetown, he thought of Toronto Island, the islands, as distant outposts, like Florida in winter or Muskoka in summer. Places other people visited.
He found the Lion easily enough, moored bow-out in an open slip within hailing distance of the clubhouse, which hovered like a stately ghoul behind a sweeping facade of columns and verandahs. The name Pemberly was embossed across the transom in block letters, black with gold edges. And, of course, the woman’s body exposed to the morning air, propped up in the open cockpit, left him in no doubt that he was in the right place. Curiously, the few people moving about — a couple of groundskeepers, staff from the clubhouse preparing for breakfast, several deckhands of indeterminate age and gender — were completely ignoring the murder scene, although the unnatural stillness of the woman proclaimed she was dead to even the most casual observer.
Perhaps it is a matter of maintaining decorum, he thought, gazing across the manicured lawn at the Toronto skyline in the distance. How close to the city, and how very far. Another world, other times, crystallized in an institution as oppressively charming as a gangland funeral.
The body was not quite warm, but that may have been because she was dressed only in a bikini, and the air was cool, even for August. Raven hair, golden skin, lithe physique. If a corpse could be described as elegant, this was an elegant corpse.
There