“Unlikely!”
“But what if?”
“Then it will come back.”
“Do you think you could have a real relationship with someone you don’t know?”
“I saw a woman on the subway once when I was a kid, and she looked like I thought my mother could have looked if the world was different. I think of that woman sometimes, even now. She stayed the same age while I’ve grown old and cranky and my mother grew old and cranky and died. That woman I never knew has been a shaping influence in my life, and I just saw her once standing on the Rosedale platform, not even on the train. I was the one passing through.”
“You wanted to become a Rosedale matron?”
“Good night, Miranda. We’ll sort this out in the morning.”
He didn’t wait for her to respond but hung up gently. She wandered into the bedroom and turned out the lights.
The screen saver was still on. She sat in front of the computer, stared into the vacuity of a virtual undersea world, and let the computerized parrotfish transform in her mind to real fish swimming beside her in crystal-clear water, butting their beaks against coral to free up nutrients, sliding lazily between dimensions like colourful ideas drifting at random, hovering asleep against boulder outcroppings, darting toward her bubbles, and swinging away in disdain from their urgent ascent.
Breaking from the sensual languor that was closing around her, withdrawing her hands from between her thighs where they had settled palms out, afraid the soporific of sex with herself might bring on nightmares, she punched up her email account. She dragged the entire bundle of new messages into the delete folder. As they flicked from view, a return address caught her eye. Retrieving the message, she slotted it back to the in box. The vaguely obscene Anglo-Saxon resonance of kumonryu. ca was overridden by the hint of something mysterious, and the message opened on the screen, confirming her instincts. It was a note from Robert Griffin.
Enough for one night, she thought. After skimming Griffin’s detailed instructions on the care of his prize fish, which struck her as a not very odd directive, given their current relationship, she opened her Web browser and wandered from site to site, looking at koi, looking at fashion design websites, coming back to koi, looking at travel destinations, and more koi, until her personality was soothingly extinguished among worlds of pure information. Leaving the monitor on, she lay down and faded into a sleepless torpor that lasted until dawn broke open the day and she fell into herself once again.
3
Chagoi
The 911 call was from an elderly woman who had a clear view of the Griffin garden from her attic. She admitted it readily to the officers who came to her door early the next morning, and she ignored their query about why she hadn’t given her name. The woman made it clear it would be an impertinence to ask why she had been in the attic. She enjoyed being interviewed. She didn’t know Robert Griffin, she said, though her house had once belonged to his family.
As neighbours, they had exchanged occasional pleasantries, and when her husband died, Griffin delivered flowers in person. It was several years since they had last spoken. He employed cleaning and gardening services that came every week. And he had a friend.
His friend visited on a regular basis, usually midweek, late afternoon, and never stayed over.
Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros had observed nothing unusual on the day of Griffin’s murder. She referred to “he” and “him” when he was alive as if that were his name, finding in the pronouns an appropriate distance from the sordid events and their tantalizing details. She couldn’t imagine how the “remains” — said with the relish of an habitual Agatha Christie reader — how “it,” as she thereafter referred to the body, depriving Griffin in death even of gender, got into the pond. She just glanced out, and he was dead. She felt it was her civic duty to inform the police. The uniformed officers assured her she had been very neighbourly and that real detectives would call by if there were any more questions.
When Miranda arrived at the Griffin place with two black coffees and cinnamon-raisin bagels, toasted, with light cream cheese, Morgan was beside the upper pond, talking to the officers who had interviewed the woman next door.
She handed Morgan his coffee and bagel. Information at this point was sparse. She had checked on the way over with Ellen Ravenscroft. A preliminary examination confirmed no evidence of significant wounds or bruises. A superficial cut on the forehead, nothing more.
Miranda sat on the limestone parapet. After a while, Morgan joined her. They consumed their breakfast without talking. Why would someone practise law on his own? she wondered. Why semiotics? It wasn’t a middle-aged hobby. She couldn’t get a grasp on Griffin as a living person, only as a corpse. Why would someone want to work homicide? Things like that just occurred — here they were, Morgan and her, hovering on either side of forty, with murder in common. At the moment, with the chimerical Robert Griffin in common. No, not a chimera; he was real. Yet she connected with him only in death.
Sometimes it happened that way. Both of them felt tremulations on occasion, returning to a crime scene where they had seen a locket around the neck of a derelict beaten to death, emptiness clutched in the dead hand of a rape victim. This was different. It wasn’t empathy she felt, but a strange anxiety. Despite the lack of emotional hooks, Griffin’s murder had taken on an eerie life of its own.
Was he the architect of a plot gone awry, or a victim of malevolence beyond his control? There was a lot of money involved, there was his stunning asexual mistress, there was Miranda’s connection, there were the koi.
Miranda had absorbed more than she had thought the previous night, reading about koi on the Net. She had checked out Chagoi and wasn’t convinced that every good pond would have one. She thought she could tell a Sanke from a Showa, a new-style Showa from an old. The intensity of black pigmentation against slashes of red on vibrant white was more intricate on the actual fish, and as they carved elusive patterns through the water she faltered, not sure she could tell one from another.
“We’d better feed them,” she said.
“I did.”
“How did you get into the house? I have the keys.”
“There’s food in the bin by the door.”
“And you knew how much, of course. Nice Sanke, that one.”
“Which one?”
“The big one.”
“Which big one?”
So, she thought, those two were Sanke. The other big guy, the length of her arm with black on its head, had to be a Showa.
“I like the Showa best,” she said. “Old-style. Lots of black.”
“Sumi,” he said. “Black is sumi, red is hi.”
“What got you going on koi, Morgan? It’s unusual even for you.”
“A magazine cover in one of the big box stores. I was grazing through the magazine section, looking at gardening journals —”
“You don’t garden.”
“I know, but it was spring.”
“Right.”
“I saw the word koi in bright orange letters across the top of a magazine for the English country gardener, and I didn’t know what koi meant —”
“You would hate that.”
“So I’ve been reading. Good thing, too.”
“For sure — if this is a crime about fish.”
“Exactly.”
“I was on the Net last night,” said Miranda. “Emailed an old friend of mine,