Morgan sat down again, feeling queasy. What was he doing here? he thought in Miranda’s voice. He hated when the words in his head seemed to come from her. Morgan got up and puttered around the room. He needed to know this man if he was to understand his death. He needed to distance himself.
Feelings of ambivalence toward Griffin bothered Morgan. He was better with ambiguity. Ambivalence demanded choice, and he preferred hovering between.
That was how Miranda understood him, how she explained his mind. He suspected this was a projection of how she saw herself. It didn’t cross his mind that he saw himself reflected in her.
They had been together for more than a decade. They fitted together like long-time lovers who were afraid if they ever got married the vital uncertainty between them would dissipate and they would lose their separate identities.
Both of them had a poor view of marriage, Morgan from limited experience and Miranda by extrapolation from all the constrictions she thought she could see in the lives of friends and in the smug, dreary life of her sister in Vancouver. Morgan feared what he knew and Miranda what she knew nothing about.
Their first case working together had been a grisly execution. When he saw her walk through the door at the crime scene, an unconventionally pretty young woman with a steely look in her eyes, he had been surprised. He was never quite sure why.
“Where did you come from?” he had said. “I just finished doing federal time.” Since that got no reaction, she added, “RCMP, Ottawa.”
“I don’t need a personal history. Do you ride?”
“Horses? Had to learn.”
“Did you like it?” he asked.
“Being mounted?”
They exchanged glances, and that was the last time in her life Miranda tried to be one of the boys.
“Do you like horses?” he asked, not because he was interested but to get them over the hump.
“I didn’t try out for the Musical Ride if that’s what you’re thinking.” She surveyed the ghastly scene surrounding them.
“How long?”
“In the Mounties? Three years.”
“Posing for pictures with the governor general?”
“And once with the queen. I’m photogenic. The scarlet doesn’t bleed out my natural colouring.”
“You might have been good in the Musical Ride.”
“Not very.”
“You would have ended up working traffic detail.”
“Or crowd control,” she said. “I decided murder would be preferable.”
“You’re in the right place.”
“They sent me up from the shop.”
He had never heard police headquarters described as the shop.
“Superintendent Rufalo said I’ll be working with you.”
“Morgan.”
“Yeah, I know. Miranda Quin. With one n.”
“Didn’t know you could spell it with two.”
“Quin?”
“Miranda.”
“You can’t. Oh …” She smiled, feeling relaxed.
Beside them on the floor were four bodies, hands bound with duct tape, three with tape over their mouths, their throats slit, rigid in grotesque postures of death, having squirmed in their own pooling blood until each had expired. The fourth had been decapitated and was lying separately as if the others had been forced to witness his death before submitting to their own. An object lesson of short duration.
“It’s a Chinese name,” Morgan said.
“It’s Ontario Irish.”
“China’s first emperor was Qin. With one n.”
“I doubt he spelled it phonetically.”
“Second century BC.”
“How do you know that?”
“Six thousand terra-cotta warriors guard his tomb.”
“Oh, him,” she said. “Where’s the guy’s head?”
“Over there in the garbage bucket under the sink, with coffee grounds and eggshells dumped over it. Whoever did this stayed for breakfast. I told forensics not to touch it until you got here. Welcome to the city of love and adventure.”
“Good to be here,” she had told him. “It’s like I’ve never been away.”
Morgan walked around Griffin’s den and sat again in what was beginning to take on the familiarity of a habitual posture, in what felt like his own chair, and pondered. That was his way: the resolution of the most recalcitrant mystery could usually be found in the life of the victim, especially in cases of first-degree murder. Let the observations accumulate, bits of information gleaned from the way the deceased got by in the world, and eventually, unforced, they would fall into place and the killer would be revealed in their pattern. That was how he liked to think of the process, and it worked often enough to reinforce his assumption.
Why, he wondered, was this guy writing notes to himself about language? They were obviously part of a larger discourse. He looked around for a likely repository and reached for a coffee table book called Koi Kichi on the floor beside the chair. The title translated as Crazy for Koi, the koi keeper’s compleat companion. He knew the book well. Anyone interested in koi knew Peter Waddington’s book. He opened it seemingly at random, but as he anticipated the pages parted where another piece of yellow notepaper lay awaiting revelation:
Dogs can be trained to obey simple commands such as “sit” and “stay.” Yet if the command giver is lying in front of the television and gives the command to sit, the dog ignores it. Why? Because the dog has been taught by a person who normally stands while giving the command. It responds not to words but to a complex gestalt of sound, gesture, posture, circumstance, after considerable training. If any one factor is significantly altered, the dog is baffled.
Exceptional dogs may in their desire to please or avoid the commander’s displeasure adapt an appropriate response to what is perceived as a new gestalt after a certain amount of trial and error. Then, as likely as not, they will sit directly in front of the television. This is probably not an expression of innate perversity.
What does this tell us? Perhaps not much about dogs, beyond the fact that they are neither as smart nor as perverse as we think.
To apply the word learning to the behavioural modification of dogs is no more appropriate than to suggest a computer thinks or an equation resolves. The language of mathematics, of digital machines, and of dogs, is not language at all, but we have no other word to describe their function in response to human volition.
Morgan was dismayed by the revelation of an engaged personality, by the casual wit. He was intrigued with how he had known there would be a note in Koi Kichi. He picked up another koi book from the table beside him and flipped it open, but there was nothing inside.
Restless, he wandered back into the subterranean labyrinth. Complex patterns of shadows playing against walls weathered rough by age re-created in his mind something of the sinister melodrama in Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors, where he had last seen Susan in London before he returned to Canada. Morgan had spent the preceding year and a half tramping through Europe. He lived on Formentera for a couple of months, just across from Ibiza, ensconced in the ruins of a Martello tower, writing. For a brief time he thought he would be a writer. He worked in an Ibizan taverna for the entire summer, seldom letting the travelling students who were doing soft drugs in the courtyard know he spoke English.