It’s nothing at all like home, she thought, changing her mind as the taxi pulled up a gentle incline to the Hotel Victoria. While she unpacked in the simple room with white plaster walls and a window opening west toward Tahiti and New Zealand, she wondered where such a notion had come from. Perhaps the island was not lush like the background in a Gauguin painting, nor wondrously strange, despite the giant statues for which it is known throughout the world, but it was definitely alien territory.
Miranda realized she was standing by the open window, staring into the empty distance, thinking about times lost and about home, feeling lonely.
There was a faint knock on the door.
“Come in,” she said, assuming it was the elderly gentleman who had let her the room.
She turned as the door swung open, but no one was there. Although it was midday, the corridor was dark and cool and she could feel the gentle rush of air. She walked to the doorway. On the floor of the corridor to the side of the door, a man’s body was slumped in deep shadow. A pool of blood, drained of colour in the murky light, spread out from the body on the smooth cement floor.
She knew he was alive from the stillness of the body in its awkward posture, the muscles not yet settled into their final grip on his contorted frame.
It was the Englishman.
She squatted beside him and gently rolled him over. His eyes were open.
“Hang on, there,” she said. “You’re not dead yet.”
She thought she detected the glimmer of a smile. In his eyes. They searched her face.
“How’d you get here?” she said. She did not expect an answer. She had seen enough of violent death to recognize someone at the precarious edge. He tried to focus on her, his eyes widened, he nodded assent, as if claiming he had got there himself, as if he were declaring he was not about to slip over.
“You’ve been shot,” she said.
His eyes closed, then opened again.
“No? You’ve been stabbed. A knife. Let’s see. Under the ribs.” She probed gently beneath his blood-soaked shirt. “Good,” she said. “Only once. It’s not sucking. You’re not spitting blood. It missed your lungs. In broad daylight. Drying blood, you opened the wound getting here. Where from? Not far. Down the hall —”
She slipped away from him and instinctively strode down the hall to an open door, forgetting she was unarmed, and swung into a room, the duplicate of her own except for the unmade bed and congealing blood on the floor.
Satisfied his attacker was gone, she returned to the Englishman. He seemed to have rallied and was trying unsuccessfully to turn onto his side.
“I wasn’t trying to catch him, you know,” she said as she lifted under his shoulders and began to drag him out of the corridor. “I just wanted to know he wasn’t lurking around to attack me, too.”
“So,” he coughed. “Preemptive,” he said. “Bad strategy.”
“Hush,” she said. She forced him to lie back, then hauled him across the floor, and, with great difficulty, onto her bed.
“We’re going to owe the Hotel Victoria for clean sheets,” she said.
“Honeymoon suite,” he murmured.
“What? Oh, quaint,” she said. “God,” she added, “you do attract trouble. But I doubt you’re going to die, not today. Let’s get a doctor in here.”
“No,” he said, and passed out.
* * *
Usually, when Morgan entered the granite edifice that was Police Headquarters, he felt soothed by its vast public spaces that led to a warren of offices, calmed by the pink of the stone and the jet transparency of the glass slabs that mirrored the city. Today he felt stifled and claustrophobic at his desk. After lunch with colleagues in the food court across the street, where he tried to be congenial and failed, he returned to his paperwork, out of sorts.
The telephone rang and he ignored it.
The telephone persisted. He picked up without saying anything.
“Morgan?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said.
“It’s Miranda.”
“Sounds like you’re in the next room.” He was suddenly cheerful. “So how’s Easter Island? You found a suitable distraction, yet?”
“Well, I do have a strange man in my bed.”
“Good for you,” he said with what he knew was excessive good cheer.
“And he’s unconscious.”
“Not good.”
“And bleeding.”
“Not good at all.”
“And I think he’s a spy.”
“A spy?”
“Yes.”
“Is he dying?”
“Probably not. I dressed the wound. Morgan, talk to me.”
“Have you called the police?”
“The Chilean police do not inspire confidence. They paid me a visit in Santiago. In the middle of the night, Morgan. I thought they would kill me.”
He was alarmed.
“And they didn’t?”
“Hilarious. It was scary. They were looking for him.”
“Who?”
“This guy in my bed. They say he’s Harrington D’Arcy.”
“Who’s they?”
“The Chilean cops. Carabinaros.”
“Miranda.”
“Yes.”
“He’s not.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“You know who Harrington D’Arcy is, don’t you? His wife has just been murdered — she’s dead and her husband thinks it was murder, or he wants us to think it was murder. He might be the murderer. I think he might want us to think that, too. It’s my case. And you could help. What’s that perfume you used to wear, the expensive one?”
“Rare, not so expensive. It was Fleurs de Rocaille. Morgan, what on earth are you talking about?”
“Fleurs de Rocaille, yeah. Someone broke into the morgue and washed it off her body.”
“Whose body? Broke into the morgue? To steal her perfume? Morgan, you are making no sense.”
“You’ve got a guy on the verge of expiring in your bed and the only thing you know for certain is that he is not Harrington D’Arcy.”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re making sense but I’m not? Sorry I can’t help, I don’t know who he is, either. Otherwise, how’s it going down there?”
“It was good talking to you, Morgan.”
“You,