“Welcome back.”
“Thanks.”
As they walked downstairs, trying to stay out of the way of forensic investigators intent on doing their job, and the coroner’s people, doing theirs, Morgan told Miranda he had to show her the pump room. Since the koi were in her charge, he said, she should get to know the system. She said she didn’t need to, that she would make arrangements for them. But Morgan wanted her to see the subterranean maze, wanted to show her the wine cellar and find out if they could get into the tunnel if indeed that was what lay beyond the other locked door.
“All in good time,” said Miranda. “We’ve got work to do.”
“You don’t want to go in there, do you?”
“Implying what?”
“Nothing. It’s part of the crime scene. It’s spooky. I kept running into myself, things I’d forgotten, ancestral memories, love and sex. Mostly love and sex. But you’ll be okay. I’ll be in there with you.”
She glanced at him with exasperation and affection. “Morgan, I’m not afraid of Kafkaesque cellars, and what-ever’s buried inside me is too deep to rise on a ramble down memory lane. Love and sex can wait. And speaking of secrets exposed, look what I found in her bag.” She slipped a worn photograph from an envelope and handed it to him. “It looks like her, doesn’t it? I’ve never seen a purse so organized. Everything else is connected to this address. Her secret identity must be exceptionally self-contained except for this — a carry-over from one life to the other.”
“But not this life to the next.”
“At least we know she had a life.”
“Maybe Eleanor Drummond was her secret identity. You know, not the other way around.”
Miranda slid the photograph back into the envelope. Somehow she felt closer to Eleanor Drummond now than when the woman was alive.
When they reached the den, Morgan puttered around the room, reading titles on book spines, running his hands over the miniature laboratory on the bar top, fingering a kit that measured chlorine and chloramines in water, observing his reflection in the window, gazing out at the ponds in the garden.
Miranda noticed that the roses were gone from the Waterford vase. She found their dried-out remains in a waste container under the bar beside the freezer and refrigerator. A conscientious floral enthusiast on the forensic team must have thrown them out.
They browsed. Forensics and the coroner had finished here while Morgan had been off with the fish in his charge. They had gravitated to this room because it was the only place in the house that suggested the presence, or absence, of a defined personality. Morgan found the living quarters as eerie as a deserted museum — everything arranged by design, institutionally antiseptic. Miranda ascribed the soulless quality to Griffin’s solitary occupation of his ancestral heritage. The house was a mausoleum where bodies had turned to dust and been vacuumed and polished into oblivion.
Miranda was aware that Morgan’s eyes were following her. As she sauntered about, she sensed the languid feeling of her skin against the inside of her clothes. She didn’t like it when men watched her without being implicitly invited, but Morgan was an exception. When she caught him looking at her that way, he was never embarrassed. He would smile with his eyes and say something distracting or just glance away.
Not wanting to confront his gaze, she walked down the hall to the bathroom. While she was there she thought she might as well pee. Her own brief rush of water startled her by the images it evoked of being in an undersea grotto. This was a very strange room — a combination of sensory deprivation chamber and comforting womb. She sat there, in no hurry, and recalled the thrill in diving deep among the banks of coral in the Cayman Islands, how sensual it was with the warm salt water enfolding. Her dive partners had varied through the week, but they hadn’t mattered, really. They were a presence off to the side as she had moved in gentle undulations of her body against the water’s caress.
Still sitting, she swung slowly on her pedestal, searching for a focal hook in the room, something to give her assurance that she hadn’t slipped into a different reality. The bathroom seemed so unconnected to anything else in the house. The tiles were green stone, not ceramic. Beneath the dull lustre a patina of crevasses and gouges betrayed their sedimentary origins. The floor tiles were a complementary grey and possibly a simulation of rock dust and glue, with a sheer surface to allow water from the open shower to slide into the drain.
By the drain, caught against the silicone gap between the lip of the metal and the surrounding stone, was a dried smudge the familiar colour of blood. She stood up quickly, arranged her clothes, and bent over to retrieve the bit of detritus, whatever it was, scraping it carefully into a small plastic envelope.
“Lovely,” Morgan said through the door that she hadn’t bothered to close, observing her, bottom uppermost. “Today it’s Calvin Klein, is it?”
She knew he was bluffing. She was wearing a sky-blue thong. It made her feel sexy to be a little outrageous under the tailored couture she affected for work. “Bad guess. Look at this.”
“Blood?”
“How could Forensics have missed it?” she asked.
“It happens.”
“Maybe you had to be sitting on the toilet …”
“Contaminating the crime scene?”
“Could have cut himself shaving,” she mused as she folded over the plastic pouch.
“A man? In the shower? I doubt it. There’s not even a mirror.”
“Do you want to put this in your Filofax? It’s your case.”
“I left it at home. Here …” He reached for the envelope.
“I’ll keep it for now,” she said, implying it might be safer with her. “Must have been Eleanor Drummond. I can’t imagine why she’d shower down here, though. She doesn’t strike me as the type to shave her legs at her lover’s. Or anywhere else …”
“No?”
“She’d wax. So, are you ready to go spelunking?” Miranda led the way to the cellar door but stood back and waited for Morgan to open it. Then together they entered the Gothic gloominess — as if, she thought, they had passed over into another dimension.
They went through a confusion of passageways down to the pump room. She looked around, listening to his guided tour, amused at his having worked it all out. As long as the fish were all right until she could figure out what to do with them, she wasn’t very interested.
They had once gone together to see a renowned magician at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. She had revelled in the illusion of an elephant disappearing from the stage. Morgan had wanted to know where it had gone, how it had been done.
“That’s not the point,” she had said. “It’s magic.”
But he had talked about the machinery behind the illusion for the rest of the evening over drinks and on the walk home. He was always fascinated by his own understanding. It wasn’t the system but how he worked it out that excited him.
“What’s this?” she said now, unravelling the fragment of lingerie from around the base of a brass spigot over the sink.
“Yeah, I noticed that. What do you think?”
“Well, it’s not his.