Yes, love, Miranda said to herself, and smiled with something approaching affection. No matter how long they were here, she thought, something of the language stayed with them. Miranda nearly apologized for the gauche condescension, except that it was only a thought. Sometimes inflections from elsewhere lasted for generations; it was as if they were genetic.
They knew each other off duty and were almost friends — two professional women married to their jobs. When Ellen Ravenscroft went home on vacation, she came back with rollicking tales of trekking through Heathcliff country alongside strapping country gentlemen, her Yorkshire accent thickened almost back to the original. For Miranda a trip home at the most exciting meant soaking up a bit of illicit sun along the mill race out past the old grist mill, something, in fact, she wasn’t sure she had done since her teens.
She scanned the lab report until she found the anomaly she was looking for. “So there are traces of sodium thiosulphate in the water and not much chlorine.”
“That’s what you’d expect,” said Morgan. “Fish people use sodium thiosulphate to dechlorinate city water, which would have killed the Showa.”
“The what?” asked the ME. “The Japanese fish we found beside the… deceased. It was still alive, a Doitsu Showa, and a genuine beauty.”
“I’m sure.”
“But there are variations,” said Miranda. “Some of these samples, ones taken directly from the body, contain chlorine and chloramines.”
“Tap water,” said Morgan.
Miranda circled around the perimeter of the room as if she were taking a stroll, lost in thought. Morgan turned his attention to the autopsy. He knew when to leave his partner alone.
“Have either of you talked to the girl outside?” asked the ME.
“What girl?” said Miranda from the shadows. “The teenager in faded jeans, Birkenstocks, and a lavender silk shirt?”
“That would be the one,” said the ME. “She said she was supposed to meet someone called Molly Bray. There’s no Molly Bray here, living or otherwise. She said her mother left a note. Asked me if she could wait. She was flicking a lighter. I’d have shown her a smoker’s lungs if I had any lying about. I don’t relate well to young people. I was there once myself, but I grew out of it. If she’s still hanging around, could you guys deal with her? Maybe she’s just a death junkie.”
“You go talk to her, Miranda. You’re better with kids.”
“Yeah, okay. But I think you should know …” Miranda remained silent for a few moments until she had their interest, then declared, “Eleanor Drummond died by suicide.”
“No way,” the ME shot back.
Morgan was more circumspect in his response. “What makes you think that?”
“Elementary, dear Holmes. Have you ever read Yukio Mishima, the Japanese author?”
“Possibly.”
“You’d remember if you’d read ‘Patriotism.’ It’s a short story. I’ll bet she read it.” Miranda nodded at the body lying open in front of them. “Morgan, with Griffin we have a murder that pretends to be suicide. And now we have a suicide meant to look like murder.”
He waited.
“Yukio Mishima disembowelled himself in the same grisly ritual he described in his fiction. He knew exactly what he was doing. Seppuku. He had already been through it in words. Of course, he describes ritual suicide as an honourable thing. Yet somehow the fiction deconstructs in spite of the author. The warrior’s actions as he kneels and slides the sword into his belly and moves it through his pain in a prescribed pattern, severing his guts organ by organ, he and the author regard as ennobling, and eventually Mishima emulated his astonishing story.
“There is a woman, though — the warrior’s wife. She’s meant to be his necessary witness to affirm his nobility. After he dies, she methodically prepares the house for their discovery and then without fanfare takes her own life. A reader sharing Mishima’s fanaticism might find her role trivial. But to me her apparent passivity subverts the whole idea of seppuku. It’s just a game boys play when they come to the end of things.”
Morgan was fascinated by her leisurely exegesis, and baffled by its relevance to her bizarre revelation about the death of Eleanor Drummond. The ME was listening but proceeded with her work. They waited.
Miranda touched the arm of the corpse with the back of her hand as if the contact would somehow confirm her account. “Eleanor Drummond was both the warrior and the wife. She had to have read Mishima. I guarantee it. She understood the warrior’s unwavering commitment and she understood the humility needed for the ignominious death of the wife, leaving no explanation.”
“Even if it was suicide, why like this?”
“I don’t know, Morgan. Eleanor Drummond displayed utter conviction about the necessity of death. I don’t think the brutality was collateral damage. She needed to do it the way she did.”
Ellen put down the instruments she was using for the autopsy, turned, and leaned against the stainless-steel table. “What about the wound? This wasn’t done by Excalibur. Take a look inside, love. She was battered not sliced. And there was no warrior’s sword at the scene, not even a blunt one. How could she hide it? I can’t conceive of suppressing the agony. There was no evidence of drugs. Why in the world make suicide so bloody complicated?”
“Don’t know,” said Miranda with a trace of smugness that let Morgan know she was confident and probably right.
“Okay, shoot,” he said.
“I have no idea why she did it. That may be our real mystery. But her desperation must have been absolute. She wasn’t herself. We know that, literally. This was the ultimate act after years of ferocious dissembling. Ellen, did you notice her blouse wasn’t torn? That was the first thing that struck me. Maybe she was in control of her entire death scene.”
“You’re right,” said the ME. “Like it was lifted aside before the weapon went in.”
“She was fastidious,” said Miranda. “She rolled up the carpet. She could have just moved it aside, but she rolled it up and put it in the closet. She put her shoes neatly out of the way —”
“But not her jacket?” the ME interjected.
“She needed her jacket.”
“She did?”
Morgan found something deeply sensual in Miranda when she was totally caught up in extravagant thought; the raw intellectual energy released pheromones or something. He listened with benign, almost indulgent concentration. They were, all three, excited by where she was going.
“Okay,” Miranda continued, “she knows precisely what needs to be done. Everything is prepared. She lifts the aquarium down onto the chair. She kneels beside it. This isn’t so you won’t hear when it breaks, Morgan. It’s because she knows once she starts she won’t have the strength to pull it down from the shelf. She doesn’t know you’re there. She takes her nail file and jabs a hole in her abdomen to get things started. She puts down the file and pulls the aquarium over so that it breaks in front of her and spills water over her legs and lap. Then using her jacket to get a good grip — that’s why her jacket is scrunched up and bloody — she takes hold of a large shard of ice she’s made for the purpose. It’s about the size of a small sword. She inserts the end of the ice into the gut wound, but it won’t go in as easily as she anticipated. It takes all her strength to drive it through. There’s your bruising. Then she leans forward against the ice and works it in a predetermined trajectory among her lower organs. Her heart and lungs are still going strong, pumping the blood through her guts. The blood spreads in a sheet across her lap. With less blood in her head the pain eases and she slips into a kind of euphoria, gouges away as much as she can, falls