Mattress, thought Morgan, but said nothing. She was an interesting anomaly, not because she was the mistress of a flaccid man with a comb-over but because she obviously didn’t need to be. She was addressing Miranda. He turned away. There was a jousting so subtle neither woman seemed aware of it, and it didn’t include him.
“Griffin didn’t like mistress,” the woman said. “I rather like it myself. Lover is just too depressing.”
“Was he depressed?” Miranda asked with a hint of aggression.
“Why, because he killed himself? He wasn’t a man to die from excessive emotion.” She paused. “From business perhaps. He never talked about business.”
She made it sound like suicide could have been a tactical ploy.
“It’s unexpected, if that’s what you mean,” she continued. “But not surprising. Robert was a very secretive man, but he could be quite impulsive.”
The woman studied the black plastic bag, tracing the zipper line as if it were a wound. Her features softened, then she glanced up directly into Miranda’s eyes, her dispassionate aplomb instantly restored. For a moment Miranda felt an unnerving bond between them.
“With some people, you know, you can’t really tell,” said the woman.
“What?” Morgan asked. “If they’re dead?”
“Whether they’re depressed,” she said. “I suppose he might have been.” She smiled as if forgiving herself for a minor oversight.
Miranda looked at her quizzically. The woman didn’t seem concerned about a display of grief. Perhaps that would come later. Perhaps, more ominously, she had dealt with it already. Or sadly, thought Miranda, she felt nothing at all.
“Do you have access to the house?” Miranda asked.
“Do you mean, have I keys? Yes, of course.”
“Then perhaps we could look inside,” said Morgan.
“Of course,” said the woman. Touching Miranda on the arm, she casually amended her assessment of the victim’s mental stability. “He sometimes took Valium.”
“Sometimes?” said Miranda. “It’s not an occasional drug.”
“He said he had trouble sleeping.”
“And did he?”
“We didn’t sleep together, Detective. I’m not his widow.” She seemed vaguely amused by her own witticism. “My name is Eleanor Drummond.” She held her hand out to Miranda, then Morgan.
The woman was gracious without warmth, as if they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and she a lapsed Catholic. Some people offered their names as an invitation, but with her it seemed more like a shield or a disguise.
They introduced themselves in turn, both fully aware Robert Griffin’s mistress had taken the initiative.
Together the three of them walked beneath the trellised portico to a set of large French doors, which Eleanor Drummond unlocked. “Did you need permission to enter?”
They stepped into a room busy with artifacts.
“No,” said Miranda.
“But if it was suicide?”
“This was murder,” said Morgan.
Eleanor Drummond’s eyes narrowed for a moment, but she said nothing.
The room was large and cluttered, with massive doors leading away on either side and into the interior depths of the house. It seemed cramped; it was the room of a man who needed to see what he thought, piled on shelves. Morgan felt vaguely embarrassed, the way he did gazing at an open cadaver.
Windows flanked the French doors along the outer wall. There was a fireplace, there were shelves against the other walls packed with hardcover books, with the occasional oversize volume stored horizontally on top of the rows. Books with pictures of koi lay open on the sofa and floor in cross-referencing piles. There was a small pile of books beside a wingback chair that faced out with a view of the garden. A slender Waterford vase sat poised on one of the bookshelves with three wilted long-stemmed roses. The walls were adorned with antique guns, animal heads and old maps, aboriginal masks and photographs of blurred shadows, likenesses of nightmares. There was a bar to one side littered with koi paraphernalia, water-testing potions, gauges for testing salinity, ammonia, oxygen quotients.
“Odd that it was locked,” said Morgan.
“Maybe he went out another door and walked around,” suggested Miranda.
“In his socks?”
A pair of dress shoes sat neatly on the floor, facing away from the sofa. The shoes had been removed by a man at rest, not parked there on his way outside.
“He usually used the wingback,” said Eleanor Drummond as if they were piecing together the same puzzle.
Morgan motioned for her to sit, then took a seat opposite. Miranda drifted away and, despite the forensic specialists coming in through the French doors, the woman focused on Morgan as if there was no one else in the room.
Miranda usually found books comforting. At first she had thought the room was a sanctuary, but as she wandered around she found it unsettling. What she had initially taken to be evidence of personality was actually its absence.
The shelved books were arranged by subject matter. She arranged her own books by colour and size. There was a cluster of postcards tacked to a bulletin board. On the obverse side they were blank. Sometimes the most telling story was no story at all. The opulent vulgarity of the Waterford vase attracted her eye. It was Victorian and still had a Birks label affixed to the base. There was no radio, no outlet for music. There were no paintings, only a pair of diplomas, a couple of studio graduation portraits. On a shelf an unlikely sequence of ornamental porcelain ducks was arranged next to some antique etchings in whale ivory.
“Scrimshaw,” said Morgan, glancing in the direction of her gaze.
She nodded. Looking down at the colourful runner beneath her feet, the coarse wool blunt with age, she wondered if it was good. Morgan would know. Must be antique, she thought. Not much resilience. And no underpad.
Close by the fireplace was a ceramic bin, out of which an array of walking sticks protruded at odd angles. She noticed a flat wooden blade leaning against the bin which, on closer examination, appeared to have hieroglyphs etched into its surface. My God, she thought, gently tracing her fingers along the rows of figures running its length, this was half a million dollars. She held it aslant to the light, trying to capture the inscrutable shadows.
It saddened Miranda to realize that Easter Islanders couldn’t possibly afford to repatriate their heritage. How could they compete with museums or with a wealthy collector from Rosedale who was too feckless to put it on display?
Did Rongorongo have any meaning if its meaning was lost?
Morgan watched her scrutinizing the hieroglyphs. Her auburn hair and slightly aquiline nose, lips poised in concentration rather than pursed, hazel eyes squinting to make out the writing, as if by peering more carefully she could understand what it said, all made her appear like an actor playing the role of detective: detached but absorbed, quietly confident, attractive but not distracting, hints of a strong personality bringing the scene into focus.
He returned his attention to the dead man’s mistress. She was both subtle and flash. Maybe Griffin preferred the word lover to make them seem equal; she preferred mistress to affirm the divide.
Morgan fidgeted while they talked. He watched more than listened. Eleanor Drummond seemed not to know she was being interrogated, and yet revealed virtually nothing.
Miranda tried several doors before finding a staircase that was surprisingly steep and narrow, leading up to the main part of the house. She ascended the stairs and rambled from room