“Morgan, Morgan, Morgan. I could have had my way with you years ago, if I’d wanted.” She paused. “So tell me about the bikini, which is mismatched, by the way.”
They were still on the dock, waiting for the forensics people to stand aside.
He shrugged.
“She’s rather voluptuous.”
“Apparently.”
“Vivacious.”
“It’s hard to be vivacious and dead.”
“She’s stunning.”
“On the surface,” he muttered, stupidly.
“Is there another way, love?”
Morgan braced himself on the wire shrouds and eased Ellen aboard. He watched her examine the corpse, first very close without touching, then gently shifting and prodding.
“No bruises. Minor abrasions around her upper arms — you can see by the discolouration from her blood settling, pale side up, it confirms her posture, she probably died right here.”
“Of what?”
“Suffocation … an overdose … poison …”
“What about natural causes?”
“Morgan, you’re very unromantic.”
“But could it be?”
“Yes. That’s a possibility.”
“Then why does the husband prefer murder? He set up the scene, he called us. We’re here on the presumption of murder.”
“The presumption of murder, I like that. Good title for what’s-her-name’s mystery.”
“Yeah,” said Morgan. He wondered what sordid scheme the widower could possibly need to conceal by using murder as an alibi.
“Morgan, look closer at her face. Serene expression. Make-up, a perfect mask. Except for the eyes — look at the creases. This woman was crying when she died. Someone has done her make-up after death, someone who knows what she’s doing.”
“She?”
“Could be a professional, a mortician. Make-up artist with a film crew.”
“At sunrise?”
“Time and a half for overtime.”
“When did she die? The husband told me he tried to shake her alive — that would be the abrasions on her arms — but he claims to have been down below until dawn.”
“It’s after ten, now. I’d say four, five hours ago. Whatever I find, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Yeah, call me. I’m going to wander around here for awhile.”
“For sure, might as well take advantage. It really is a world apart, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Morgan, looking across the harbour at the city, which seemed to be floating like an island of towering facades between water and the late summer sky.
“You take care, love. I’ll call.”
Morgan stepped over onto the dock and felt the gentle sway of the Lion as his weight shifted, and heard rasping high in the shrouds where the mainsail halyard slapped against the mast. He liked the sounds of sailing, although they were not part of his personal history. Perhaps in another life.
Morgan spent the rest of the day wandering around the RTYC, admiring boats, sidestepping guano deposited by innumerable seagulls, ducking overhanging branches of ancient willows, his mind skipping back and forth from the dead woman in the bikini to Miranda, on her way to a wind-swept island in the South Pacific. After lunch, back in the city, digging through files of old newspapers, financial papers and journals, scoping out Harrington D’Arcy. The dead woman’s name was Maria. A Brazilian heiress. The details were vague, the wealth implied. The D’Arcy wedding had been so exclusive even the Globe and Mail was uncertain of the guest list, although it received restrained coverage in the Financial Times and a paparazzi photograph in Vanity Fair.
The few photographs of Maria D’Arcy were difficult to read. It was as if each had caught a separate aspect of her personality, although she was identifiably the same person. Like a signature, he thought; always the same and invariably different — too much the same, and it was fake. She was certainly not fake, he thought. Intriguing, yes, and from her pictures somehow inscrutable. He found himself liking her, she was familiar and exotic at the same time. Her pictures invoked the scent of wildflowers and sun-drenched pebbles — the lingering smell of her perfume that was caught in the air around her corpse although he had not focused on it at the time.
* * *
In the dark and brutal instant it took for Miranda to assimilate the unknowns, her mind swarmed with facts, as it often did when she needed to dissociate from raw feeling. President Salvador Allende was an elected Marxist. Augusto Pinochet was the general who overthrew him. Pinochet brought relative prosperity, he established a totalitarian reign of terror, it lasted two decades, the disparu numbered over four thousand. The coup took place on September 11; another September 11. Allende shot himself in his office, within walking distance of this room. It was an act either of desperation or martyrdom. The fascist Pinochet was now out of power, but he was alive. He presently lived within walking distance of this room.
The two figures looming at the foot of her bed smoked in silence, cigarettes illuminating their distorted features with each inhalation in a macabre gleam. They did not know she was awake. Or perhaps they did. She kept her breathing even. They said nothing.
Miranda mentally reached for her Glock semi-automatic, which was secure in her gun locker at Police Headquarters in Toronto.
She wanted to laugh at the absurdity, she wanted to scream, she wanted to absorb every detail: muted light pushing against her curtains from the quiet street outside, the smells of a tropical city at dawn, of American tobacco, and the sound of her own breathing. She wanted to be calm, fully present at her own execution. She tried to suppress fear; fear breeds futility. She suppressed rage; rage would make her more vulnerable. She wanted to cry. She could do nothing, feel everything. She waited.
A cigarette arced onto the carpet, was ground into the fibres in a small conflagration of sparks. A hand touched her foot through the sheet. Gently, like a lover, trying not to startle. She flinched involuntarily and drew herself up against the headboard, with the sheet wrapped around her. Contact had been established. In a moment, pressing their advantage, they would turn on a bedside light so that they could see her better than she could see them.
“Hola,” said a man’s voice, surprisingly high-pitched and cheerful.
Miranda said nothing.
The bedside light flicked on.
“You are Mrs. Miranda Quin?” He spoke English.
She said nothing.
“We regret this intrusion, Miranda Quin, we must do what is necessary.” In spite of his soothing voice, this sounded ominous.
“You are naked beneath your cover, is it true?”
Miranda’s sense of her own vulnerability ratcheted up by several degrees.
“We must ask you to get dressed. We will watch.”
She pulled the sheet closer, then realized this might seem enticing and fluffed it away so the contours of her body disappeared in oblique planes of shadow and light.
“We must watch, Mrs. Quin. You are a policeman, yes? You might have the gun. You might be well trained in the martial arts, you might be hazardous. Possibly you would run away.”
“Naked?”
“Please. You get dressed in your clothes.”
“Where are