Morgan looked around, but there were no outbuildings in the yard. He glanced up at the neighbouring house. Only its upper storeys were visible above the high stone wall separating the properties. Someone looking across would have to be in the attic to get a decent view of the ponds. The windowpanes in the attic gable glistened in the early-evening light.
Spotlessly clean, he thought.
“It must be in the basement,” said Miranda. “The filter. I doubt the other pond has one — it looks like pea soup. Soylent green.”
“Charlton Heston.” He affirmed her allusion. “Nutrition from human remains.”
A uniformed officer approached and asked if the body could be moved.
“Wait for the coroner,” said Morgan. “No, take him out. Make sure they’ve got pictures. Be careful with the fish.”
The uniformed officer wandered away to get help.
Miranda contemplated the dead man, wondering if his secret lives somehow intersected with her own, long before death had brought them together. “They’ll go deep. It must be nine or ten feet.”
“Three metres, think metric” said Morgan conscientiously. “Even if it’s heated, they need the volume to stabilize against temperature fluctuations.”
Metric came in when Miranda was a child; Morgan was five years older. He insisted that Fahrenheit generated a skin response, and Celsius was only numerical.
“We’ll need to drain it,” she said.
“No.”
“We’ll send in a diver then. Do you think there’s a difference between a pool and a pond?”
“I’d say a pool is hard-edged and clear.” He looked down toward the ravine. “The soylent pea-souper, I’d call that a pond.”
“You’re okay with a diver?”
“Yeah, it’s better for the fish. There’s a fortune in there.”
She smiled at the presumption of authority. He had seniority by several years, but they were both detective sergeants. Usually, she was in command. He preferred it that way.
Miranda strolled off toward the house, then circled around and walked out past the murky green pool into a narrow grove of silver maples that soared defiantly against the urban sky, their foliage blocking out the banks of office buildings and the CN Tower. From a vantage by the sudden slope of a ravine, the city reappeared at close quarters. This was how the rich lived. In Toronto at least. Miranda didn’t know rich people anywhere else, and in Rosedale only when they were murdered, or as happened more often than people might think, when they did the murdering.
A police crew worked beneath her, combing among the overgrown rubble below the property line for anything out of place: a gum wrapper but not a Dom Perignon cork; a footprint, freshly broken twigs but not cut branches; evidence of urgency, not the residue of a carelessly cultivated life.
She gazed up into the leaves of the maple trees, vaguely expecting a revelation. That was how it occasionally happened, and she would walk out and surprise Morgan with an accounting that seemed to come from nowhere. This time all she saw were blue-green edges shifting softly in the freshening breeze of early evening.
Generally, Morgan was the more intuitive one. He gathered random particulars until everything fell into place, while she extrapolated an entire narrative from singular details. She was deductive. Like Holmes, though Morgan wasn’t Watson. More like Moriarity, she thought, but one of the good guys.
Morgan remained by the pool. He knew almost every fish by its generic name. He recognized a young Budo Goromo with markings the size of a cluster of grapes, Cabernet Sauvignon with the bloom still on. Its other name might have been Bacchus, he thought, or maybe Lafite or Latour. Morgan got sidetracked for a moment, rifling through the files in his mind for the names of First Growth Bordeaux. This would be the garden of a Bordeaux drinker. Premier grand crus. Not Burgundy. These fish had been too carefully selected. Burgundy was always a risk.
And its third name is known only to God.
He shuddered. Morgan wasn’t a believer, but the familiar phrase, whether as an epitaph for the Unknown Soldier or casually applied to fish in a Rosedale garden, sent a chill of loneliness through him.
“Have we heard who he is yet?” Miranda asked. She had been standing close for several minutes, watching him think.
Morgan shrugged. Neither of them carried a cell phone. Access meant control. Sometimes she compromised. Self-reliance wasn’t always enough.
“Margaux,” said Morgan, apparently addressing the Budo Goromo. He was pleased. He had retrieved the name of another Bordeaux grand cru.
Miranda couldn’t remember which Hemingway grand-daughter hadn’t committed suicide, Muriel or Margaux. One of them starred in a Woody Allen film.
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?”