The text stopped abruptly, but the writer had found his ruminations worth keeping, if only impaled on a cellar shelf. Morgan folded the note neatly and stuffed it in his pocket to show Miranda.
As he turned back into the subterranean labyrinth he had come through, made somehow macabre by light bulbs dangling against shadows, the notion of this as a mausoleum for his anonymous forebears gave way to images of the catacombs beneath poppy fields outside the walls of Rome. He half expected burial niches in the walls, an illusion the play of light and shadow on the rough foundation reinforced.
Morgan remembered how eerie it was that, for all the desiccated corpses and piled bones he had seen in the crypts of Europe, he had felt a stronger presence of death from the absence of human remains in the catacombs. Meandering at the back of a guided tour, past gaping small tombs cut into the lava rock, he had been struck by their emptiness as a mockery of resurrection, their occupants dust inhaled by cadres of tourists. He had felt the cold impress of mortality then, despite the relative warmth of the place. And he felt it now, the familiar chill, yet given the nature of his work and why he was here, morbidity seemed appropriate.
He stopped again at the wine cellar and peered through the double glass window, regretting not having a flashlight. Only in movies did flashlights appear from nowhere as the plot demanded. If he were in a movie, he would be a younger Gene Hackman. When the credits appeared, his name wouldn’t be there. He would still be inside the story. Closure was only for actors and authors.
It was in Europe that he had decided against graduate school, though he had tried it briefly when he came back. He went over for two and a half years, crossing both ways on the Stefan Batory, one of the last passenger ships not flaunting itself for the carriage trade. He hadn’t taken out student loans, having been on a scholarship and working in the north each summer, one year building a spur line into a mine, two years on road crew, and one year, the toughest and most lucrative, planting trees. Unlike his middle-class contemporaries, he finished university with money in the bank.
Trees paid his way through Europe. He was a high-baller, sometimes planting three thousand trees a day, and his savings, subsidized by illegal bar-tending jobs in London and for a while on Ibiza, meant he came home broke but debt-free.
In graduate school he felt distant from other students who had gone directly into their programs, and had little in common with the older students who were making meaningful career changes. He hadn’t picked up his graduate fellowship cheque by the end of the first week, so he just walked away. At the end of the next week he was enrolled in criminology at George Brown College. It had never occurred to him to join the police; it just happened.
His first autumn in London he met the woman he should have married. Susan. He married Lucy.
From the beginning, when Susan answered the door next to his, after he moved into a shabbily genteel bedsitter in Beaufort Gardens on the fifth floor of one of the last unreclaimed buildings in Knightsbridge, he called her Sue.
“Very Canadian,” she told him. “In England it’s with two syllables.”
She was amused, however, and agreed to join him for a Guinness at The Bunch of Grapes on Brompton Road.
He had never before had a friend like her, someone so emotionally complete. Through the long, wet autumn, winter, and spring, when he wasn’t working, they spent weeknight evenings in his room, which was smaller than hers and easier to heat. They were relatively impoverished — London was expensive and wages were low — but they talked their way through the seasons and hardly noticed. He realized, more than two decades later, he must have done most of the talking, while Sue listened with cheerful forbearance, filling gaps in his rambling narrative with self-deprecating anecdotes and funny explanations about the fine points of being English.
On the weekends she went home and Morgan wandered London. Some Saturday evenings he returned to his garret so exhausted by the miles he had walked that he fell asleep across the top of his lumpy single bed without undressing, pulling his thick Canadian coat around him, shoes still on for warmth. He slept until dawn, got up, peed in the rickety sink, splashed water on his face from the single faucet, brewed a quick cup of tea on his hot plate, and ventured out into the pale green spaces of Hyde Park to watch early arrivals, even in the dreariest weather, taking their morning constitutionals. Then he wandered for the rest of the day, and by afternoon began to anticipate Sue’s return so he could tell her about London.
They didn’t have a storybook romance; they didn’t fall in love with each other at the same time. He was in love with her now, though his memories of her had merged with Miranda. Sue was patiently in love for at least part of that year before he took off to the Continent. With her coppery red hair and refined complexion, gentle good humour, and patiently inquiring intelligence, she had been remarkably lovely. But Morgan had constructed his personality as someone astonished by the adventures that lay before him, desperately self-reliant and determinedly unattainable. He wanted to explode at the centre of the universe, while Susan remained generous and serene.
On and off, Morgan worked behind a bar most of the time he was in London, and Susan, as he now thought of her, held a demanding secretarial position with a boss called Nigel and a friend called Fiona, names that seemed eerily exotic. Class, the English pestilence, was never an issue between them. He was educated; Susan was elegant. Neither could place the other in a social hierarchy that made any sense. They had never been good lovers; both of them were relative novices. He was selfish and she was gracious, a bad combination. Their time together was defined more by warmth than by passion. He encouraged her to visit Canada, and she invited him to meet her parents. When Morgan was engaged to be married, he had dreamed Susan would turn up in Toronto. She did, briefly, but the timing was off. He had known even she couldn’t rescue him then.
Morgan became aware that he was comfortably ensconced on the bench opposite the wine cellar. He didn’t remember sitting down, but he was absorbed in the atmosphere of the place and it didn’t bother him that he had lost track of time. He forgot about Susan and London. They faded from consciousness like the particles of a dream.
“What is it, Morgan?” Miranda would say. “Where have you been?”
But he seldom answered. It didn’t seem important to sort out recollections from the swarming of information careening through the sometimes unfamiliar places in his mind. He wasn’t unstable, but wary of being too much himself.
The oak door leading toward the den opened this time when he gave it a vigorous shove, and he found himself in a short hallway with the small bathroom to one side. The door at the far end of the corridor leading into the den stood ajar. It was an exterior door made of steel, painted and panelled to look like wood. He had noticed the night before that it had a large lock with a dead bolt, which didn’t strike him as unusual, given that it probably led in from the garage. There was a patina of dents and scratches on the corridor side that advertised its serviceability.
Availing himself of the bathroom convenience, Morgan admired the absolute simplicity of the room. It was like being inside a tiled box — even the ceiling was tiled — and the toilet and sink were built in. The shower head draped like a pewter sunflower from high on a wall, and the shower stall area was defined only by a standing drain and a ridge in the tile on the floor. There was no mirror, there were no shelves, no pictures, nothing to intrude on the mind or distract the eye, and yet the overall effect was pleasing. Still, it didn’t encourage lingering. Maybe that was the point — a small architectural joke by Robert Griffin, perhaps not shared by anyone else.
The thought of Griffin made Morgan uncomfortable. This was the first point of connection he had felt with the victim. The passion for koi, he understood, and the books and the carpets, but comprehending the facts of a person’s existence was different from recognition of their secret whims. What other secrets were in this place hidden by the obvious? He stood and pressed a plunger panel that was flush to the wall over the toilet and walked away from the swirling noise, washing his hands and leaving the room without glancing back.
Morgan settled down in the den on what, from the comforting way the cushion met the weight of his body, he was sure would have been the favourite chair of the dearly