“It’s interesting, though, isn’t it?”
“Doesn’t exactly solve the mystery.”
“Which one? About language and consciousness, or about death?” She smiled slyly as if she had been caught in a thought-crime. “Did you see the Rongorongo?”
“I saw you admiring it. You’ve got to wonder what’s locked up in a language that no one can read.”
“Precisely,” she said. “But it’s not the language that’s indecipherable. It’s the script. You can understand why a guy with a doctorate in semiotics might want to own it if he had the money.”
“And then he stores it beside a brolly stand with a clutch of old canes!”
“Strange guy, our lawyer-philosopher.”
“Yeah,” said Morgan. “So why would someone kill a philosopher. I mean, lawyers, even Shakespeare said ‘kill all the lawyers,’ but a semiotician?”
“Morgan, this note? It contradicts its own declaration.” She wanted to go on. Words shaped thoughts in Miranda’s mind; she wanted to let them out. But Morgan was back with the fish. She wanted to talk about language and writing, about Rongorongo, about speaking with the dead.
Morgan was bent over, peering through reflections of the night sky into the obsidian depths, but all he could see was an illimitable absence of light.
“You want something to eat?“ she asked. “Come on. The koi aren’t going anywhere. Tomorrow they’ll tell us their secrets. Tonight they’re in mourning, draped in black.”
“Fish and chips or sushi?”
Over dessert Morgan offered a discourse on carpets. The Kurdish runner in the den: antique, its pile worn, a tribal rug, coarse wool, natural dyes. The indigo blue a desert lake; abrash, the hue variations, like water under the desert sky. Persian. He didn’t say from Iran. Carpets had more longevity than nation-states.
He went on to describe the Qashqa’i hanging as a wall piece behind the wingback chair.
She interrupted. “The runner! Why would a valuable carpet on a slate floor not have an underpad?”
Morgan smiled. He had read about rugs, subscribed for a couple of years to Hali, the opulent trade journal from England, had learned about designs and dying, weaving on hand looms by nomads, on village looms for the rich, about symbols and patterns, trading and auctions. But it hadn’t occurred to him that there should be an underpad beneath the Kurdish runner.
“So we have a carpet problem,” he said. “Mystery upon mystery. Do you think she did it?”
“Eleanor Drummond? She had access, possibly motive — all mistresses have motives for murder. I doubt she did it.”
“No,” he agreed.
“She delivers herself, or a version of herself, as someone too self-possessed, too emotionally self-sufficient, to bother killing her lover. It was a business arrangement.”
“The murder?”
“No, her life.” Miranda tinkered with her cutlery.
“So who do we think did it?”
“We don’t know, do we?”
“I think the koi are the answer,” he said. “Maybe we should have drained the ponds.”
Miranda ordered coffee, black, for both of them. He usually took double-double.
“You should have seen the diver in the lower pond,” said Morgan. “She virtually disappeared. For goodness’ sake, it swallowed her whole. Twenty thousand gallons of pea soup.”
When he said “for goodness’ sake” and “my gosh” and “holy smoke,” she liked him best. “How do you know that?” she asked.
“I saw her. She had to feel her way, like being submerged in soylent green.”
“The gallonage, how do you know that? Nobody knows twenty thousand gallons.”
“Grade ten geometry,” he said. “It’s easy to calculate.”
“Geometry was in grade eleven.”
“I know about what interests me — or maybe I’m interested in what I know about. Koi interest me. Carpets interest me. A good carpet on slate, that interests me. Wine interests me. Really good wine, premier grand cru, brunello di montalcino, trockenbeerenauslese.” Each designation he enunciated with an appropriate accent — French, Italian, stage German. “I read about the stuff. I don’t drink it.”
“Who came from the Coroner’s? Was it Ellen Ravenscroft? She seems to turn up whenever you’re on a case.”
“Uncanny coincidence. I’m a homicide cop, she’s a coroner.”
“Come on …”
“She’s earthy. I like her. What did you think about Eleanor Drummond?”
“Definitely not earthy. I can’t imagine that woman in ‘snuggle’ mode even on a rental basis.”
“She’s stunningly beautiful.”
“Yeah, like a magazine layout — she looks airbrushed. Seriously, you found her attractive?”
“Yes and no. More yes than no.”
“It’s time to go home,” she said, shifting in her chair.
As he rose to his feet, Morgan reached over and gave her shoulder a companionable squeeze. She flinched. He didn’t seem to notice, but she was surprised. It wasn’t him; it had something to do with the dead man in the pond. She couldn’t see the connection. She settled back.
“Think I’ll stay for a bit. No, really. Good night, Morgan.” She watched him walk away. “You can stay, too, if you want,” she added softly as he wandered away through the tables.
He waved backward with a small hand gesture, then she heard, trailing off in the ambient din as he approached the exit, “There’s got to be a Chagoi.”
And he was gone.
2
Parrotfish and Barracuda
Miranda’s condo on Isabella Street was Gothic by neglect, not design. The fountain in the courtyard hadn’t seen water since the Great Flood. The fascia drooped behind gingerbread swirls; acid-worn gargoyles leered over down-spouts that leaned precariously away from the eaves.
In the lobby she paused to pick up her mail and press her own buzzer before letting herself in. Years ago whimsy had turned into ritual; she felt reassured, knowing the sound was filling her empty apartment. She carried a scaled-down 9 mm Glock semi-automatic in a shoulder holster or holstered against the small of her back, or in her bag when it was too hot to wear a jacket, but she had no desire to use it. The buzzing would scare away burglars; and sometimes she could sense the reverberations still lingering to welcome her home.
Miranda was fond of the old place. The stair treads were worn marble, the wood trim was walnut, darkened by age, the fixtures were bronze. There was an air of decadent longevity rare in the centre of the city. She had lived here as a student when the building was still apartments. It was seedy enough to seem subversive but structurally sound and aggressively urban.
When she returned to Toronto after three years away, she had raised a down payment, retrieved her furniture from storage, and moved back in. It was as if she had never been away. She felt toward her apartment the kind of myopic affection usually reserved for an appallingly inappropriate lover — of whom there had been several, she thought as she paused at the foot of the stairs to jettison flyers into the trash bin.
The bin was overflowing. It, and having the walkway shovelled in the winter, were the only perceptible services for the condo fee. There was no lawn to