“One hit,” he proclaimed as he pulled the sprung lock to the side and pushed on the door. It refused to give way.
“Morgan, the padlock wasn’t holding anything. This whole system is a Foucauldian model.”
“Where did he come from? What about Freud?” Morgan was more comfortable with Freudian allusions. Michel Foucault was just coming into vogue in North American academic circles about the time Morgan absconded to Europe. About the time Miranda was beginning her studies in language and thought.
“Look,” she said, “the original lock is a Victorian antique. We have dead bolts, an Edwardian refinement. The padlock was obviously a transitional device, say, from the 1930s. Then someone installed a standard key lock around the time I was born.” Trying not to look smug, she retrieved the penlight gingerly from his mouth and squatted to look at the keyhole. “You should be able to manage this.”
A little sheepish, he reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet from which he withdrew a stiff length of wire. Then he bent to the task while she held the light to illuminate his progress. “There,” he said finally. “Am I redeemed?”
She was about to make a religious quip when he swung the door away from them into the darkness.
“Voila, a tunnel!” he said. But he didn’t go in. The intense ray of the penlight was easily swallowed by the shadowy void. “I’ll bring a better light tomorrow, but for sure this connects the estates.”
“There’s nothing sinister about that. They used to belong to the same family. This might have been a servants’ passage. They probably shared kitchen facilities. These aren’t mansions, Morgan, just really big houses. I wouldn’t call them estates.”
“From Cabbagetown, they’re estates.”
“Let’s go check the morgue. We might find out more about Griffin, and Eleanor Drummond will be settled in by now.”
“We’ve got to feed the fish.”
“How many times a day?”
“Three or four. I’ve fed them twice already.”
“Let us withdraw from this foul place,” she said as if quoting Shakespeare.
He wasn’t quite sure if she was.
6
Shiro Utsuri
Morgues were emergency rooms for the dead. Their clients were admitted, processed by triage, and released. Morgues didn’t use architectural illusions to dissemble. They opened directly onto side street pavement; they seldom had waiting rooms apart from a makeshift cluster of chairs. There was no casual traffic through a morgue. It was a place always of profound mystery, where forensic resources were brought to bear on the expiration of human beings, to capture their untoward moments of death.
When Morgan and Miranda arrived, they passed a teenage girl standing by the soft drink machine who turned away from them in a sort of innocuous slouch. As they walked through a glass door and down a brightly lit hallway in the direction of muffled voices and the sounds of small whirring motors, the girl’s reflection suggested resignation, as if she had been waiting for hours.
The medical examiner was Ellen Ravenscroft. The coroner was just about to start work on Eleanor Drummond. She dismissed an assistant and conferred briefly with Miranda and Morgan, directing them to some items on top of a stainless-steel cabinet and papers on a desk, then she drew the cover away from Eleanor Drummond’s body and folded it neatly for reuse.
Miranda stood back a little so that her head and shoulders were out of the illumination cast by the low-slung lights. She was sure no one enjoyed an autopsy, but Morgan and the ME seemed to regard the body about to be splayed open with clinical detachment. The worst was when it was a child. Miranda found it easiest when the body was so badly mangled that it didn’t resemble a person.
She had never before been acquainted with the victim in a murder investigation. Robert Griffin, who was filed somewhere in the bank of drawers along one side of the crypt, she knew only as a corpse, despite her intimate connection with his private affairs.
Miranda moved so that she could see past the obstruction of her colleagues. She shuddered. Despite the gaping hole in the woman’s abdomen, for an absurd moment she was struck by how very lovely Eleanor Drummond appeared. Here was a woman who knew how to be naked — and dead. Miranda half suspected she had prepared, with the art of a ghoulish courtesan, for the intimate examination now underway.
Her body was groomed to perfection, her makeup was done with finesse, and her physique was toned and lotioned with loving care. There were no tan lines, she knew enough to stay out of the sun, her legs were entirely clean of hair, her pubic triangle was neatly trimmed, and the down on her belly and arms was soft in the harsh light like a fine mist sprayed on freshly cut flowers.
How could someone be more vulnerable, Miranda thought, than lying naked on a stainless-steel tray, examined only as human remains? Even if the body didn’t know it was happening, it was happening. Miranda wanted to cover the woman. She related to her now — while alive there had been an impossible distance between them. Miranda had only had a bikini wax once in her life, and that was before she had gone to Grand Cayman. She felt sad and oddly exhilarated by the strangeness of a woman who seemed to be so much in control despite the circumstances.
As the ME leaned into her job, the illusion collapsed in soulless procedures of cutting and probing.
“Was she a smoker?” Miranda asked the ME.
“Never.”
“Then why did —”
“Stage business,” said Morgan. “The worse the script, the more smoking there is.”
“Playing out her role as mistress?”
“Was she?” asked the ME.
“His mistress?’ said Miranda. “Apparently. Did she ever have a baby?”
“Yes, not recently, but yes.”
The medical examiner described the superficial appearance of the body in detail, speaking into an overhead microphone and to them at the same time. Miranda turned to the items on the cabinet. She picked up a nail file with a tortoiseshell handle. “Anything unusual about this?”
“Yes,” said the ME. “There was blood and tissue adhering to the tip.”
“It was lying in the pool of blood when we found her,” said Miranda.
“This was more than watery blood. It was as if the nail file had been used as a weapon except —”
“Maybe defence?”
“No, the tissue is hers, and there’s enough to suggest it penetrated more than skin-deep. If it had gone right in, though, the roughness of the file would be rich with details. It’s relatively clean. And there’s no separate wound.”
Miranda put the nail file back and approached the cadaver again to observe the procedure.
“Look at this,” said Ellen, holding the flesh open. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The damage pattern suggests a deliberate separation of organ from organ, mutilating each in a prescribed sequence. Meticulous but brutal. It doesn’t make sense.”
“An exercise in methodical torture?” suggested Morgan.
“Jack the Ripper?” the ME said. “Punishment and pain? I don’t know. More like cruel efficiency. Almost as if she were helping him along.”
“You assume it was a male?”
“It’s a generic thing, Morgan.” The ME winked. “Like women are ships.”
“Is