Side by side they stared into the pond, intent on their separate reflections, while a surreal tableau was enacted around them. In a flurry of quiet activity the investigating team searched out myriad anomalies that would make the immediate past comprehensible. The grounds, a luxuriant green, though summer was gone, had been cultivated by generations long dead. The more distant past made the crime scene merely a passing disturbance.
The Ochiba Shigura disappeared into the depths and then returned, swimming slowly against the dead man’s face, back and forth in a kind of caress or secret language. A powerfully proportioned Showa the size of a platter nibbled at the fingers of his left hand, which draped low in the water, though the body itself rested stolidly on the surface as if buoyed from below.
Miranda settled on the retaining wall with her back to the pond. She looked at the huge brick house that opened onto a portico one storey below street level across the back, embracing the garden with an intimacy that belied its grand proportions. Miranda tried to penetrate the architectural layers of the house, finding clean Georgian lines nearly obscured by unseemly Victorian flourishes and superfluous Edwardian columns and porticos. She decided the house had remained in the same family over the years, the changes accruing as each generation imposed its own taste on the last, and the next.
She twisted around as the dead man swung by and gently tugged at his jacket collar. The corpse shifted, brushed against the edge of the pool, and slumped over onto its side. In a rush of water it settled on its back, floating face up, open eyes limpid, opaque.
Miranda flinched, her breath caught in her throat.
Again she was struck by the sickening familiarity of death. Something happened to human features in extremity. The very obese, the emaciated, faces contorted in pain or by fear, and faces in absolute stillness, bore similarities in kind. Fat men looked alike; corpses resembled one another like kin.
Morgan bent close to examine the dead man’s face, then leaned away as if coming to a dissenting judgment about a celebrated portrait after evaluating the brush strokes. They watched while the body drifted away from the wall and slowly rolled over again.
“That’s better,” said Morgan when the face was no longer visible. “His name is Robert Griffin. He’s a lawyer.”
“Really?” said Miranda. “And you know that because?”
“He was news about a year ago.”
“Good or bad?”
“Rich. There was a piece in the Globe and Mail buried beside the obituaries.” He chuckled at the pun. “It wasn’t a big enough story to make television.”
“But you recognized him wet?”
“Yeah. They used a file photo. He looked sort of dead already. He spent a fortune at Christie’s in London for an artifact from the South Pacific.”
“And that was newsworthy?”
“Something called Rongorongo, a wooden plaque from Easter Island about the size of a small paddle blade with writing on it.”
“Rongorongo?”
“It’s filled with opposing rows of hieroglyphs. It’s the writing that’s Rongorongo, not the board, and the people from Easter Island can’t read it now. No one can read it. They still carve replicas, and no one knows what they say.”
Miranda had studied semiotics in university. She wondered if this accounted for the poignancy she felt for a language indecipherably encoded. She tried to imagine not being able to read your own writing.
Morgan continued. “The islanders, they call themselves Rapanui, the island is Rapa Nui, two words, they used to have joke tournaments. Koro ’ei.” He savoured the words. “Jest fests, the losers laughed, and had to throw a feast, a weird form of potlatch —”
“Morgan —”
“I think there are fewer than twenty authentic Rongorongo tablets around, pretty well all in museums. He paid half a million.”
“Well, Mr. Griffin!”
It pleased them to have arrived at the victim’s identity without resorting to actual research. They watched him drift by as if he might reveal more of himself if they waited.
“No shoes. He wandered out from the house in socks,” said Morgan, dispelling any doubt that this was the dead man’s home. “Where did Yosserian go? I thought they were hauling him out of there.”
“Mr. Griffin seems a little soft around the edges,” said Miranda, who didn’t work out but was trim. “Not in very good condition.”
“He’s dead,” said Morgan, who occasionally worked out but mostly skipped meals.
“I doubt if he even played golf. Too pallid to belong to a yacht club. Clothes not sufficiently stylish to suggest peer influence. I’d say he’s a loner. But don’t you think it’s peculiar, a high-priced lawyer, and I’ve never heard of him?”
“Cops and the law don’t always connect. Sometimes it’s a matter of luck.”
“You’d think he’d have some sort of a public presence, Morgan. Look at the house.”
“I’m not sure he had much of a presence at all. He looks exceptionally ordinary.”
“As you say, he’s floating in a fish pond. Let’s get him out before the family comes home.” Miranda turned to see that Yosserian was standing by with another officer, apparently not wanting to disturb their forensic deliberations. She caught his eye, and they moved forward.
“There’s no family coming home,” said Morgan. “They’d be here already. It’s too late in the season for Muskoka, everyone’s down from the cottage by now. The yard’s too orderly. No bikes, no barbecue. The big Showa wants food, he’s nibbled those fingers before. Look at that. The Ochiba — look at him nuzzling. They’re closer than family. These fish are Griffin’s familiars.”
“Familiars.” Miranda often repeated Morgan’s key words, sometimes to mock him but sometimes intrigued. “That’s creepy. With scales.”
“They don’t all have scales. Some of them are Doitsu.”
Miranda was equivocating about whether or not to give him the satisfaction of asking for an explanation when a stunning young woman emerged from the shadows of the walkway along the side of the house. She moved toward them with an air of belonging.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” said Morgan.
“She’s not family.”
The woman stood to one side and gazed at Robert Griffin as he was hauled over the pool edge and spread out on a groundsheet. While the officers manoeuvred the bag, she seemed to focus on the rasping of the zipper and the squishing liquid sounds as the body settled into its plastic receptacle. Then she spoke with deliberate calm. “You’re quite right, Detective. I’m not family.”
“Really,” Miranda said, realizing her disparaging comment had been overheard. The striking young woman was one of those people defined by style. Someone you had trouble imagining with a home life or childhood memories. A prosperous self-reliant urban adult of purposefully indeterminate age.
Somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-two.
She had the subdued flare of a woman who read Vogue to check for mistakes, Miranda thought. She probably subscribed to Architectural Digest, never travelled by bus, and arrived early at the dentist’s so she could read Cosmopolitan.
Miranda brushed imaginary creases from her skirt and straightened her shoulders inside her jacket. She glanced at Morgan. He shrugged almost imperceptibly.
“I take it you knew the deceased,” Miranda declared too formally as she gazed into the woman’s eyes, searching for personality.
“Yes,