Grave Doubts (12 page)

“Is it worth getting Scotland Yard to check around?”

“I’ve already asked. The chap on the phone was absolutely charming, asked me to fax the paperwork and they’d get right on it, and wanted to know if I dated.”

“If you’re dated?”

“No, Morgan. He was flirting. It was quite flattering.”

“Desperate measures, given the Atlantic —”

“He said I should look him up if I ever got over. Constable Stenabaugh. He sounded quite handsome.”

“You are a desperate and fickle woman.”

“Rachel and I went out to see Alexander Pope.”

She knew that would surprise him, that they went together.

“He is a lovely man,” she continued. “And he has a breathtaking home. Pre-Victorian, I don’t know what you’d call it — Georgian Colonial, neo-American Federal. You’ve got to see it; you’d love the furnishings. Some of the paint must be ten layers thick, some of the pieces he’s made himself, right down to faking the paint. We stayed for a sauna. He’s a fascinating man. Beautiful body — he must be fifty.”

He looked at her quizzically. In his brief absence she had made new friends. He would not have anticipated the relationship with Officer Naismith. Miranda was generally slow in warming to women. Her explanation was a paraphrase from the old comic strip
Pogo
: “we have seen the enemy and it is us.” Pope was less unexpected. What Morgan had taken as the man’s pleasantly austere asexuality, he now realized, from the tenor of Miranda’s voice, was mistaken by women for smouldering passion refined through an aura of eccentric gentility.

Strange, he thought. We can’t both be right.

“Did you ask him for a list of people who might have the skills to close in the alcove?”

“Yeah. He laughed. He told me there’s nobody, apart from himself. And, he assured me, he was working in Arlington, Texas, through the fall and winter. It checked out. He’s got a major reconstruction project down there, where they’re anxious to pay for their past — unlike post-colonials who try to obscure it. He was on the job every day, seven days a week, for a full five months.”

“And they died during that time?”

“Ellen Ravenscroft wrote the report. She was sure they died in the depths of winter. Fairly sure.”

“How could she tell?”

“Micro-organisms; decomposition tables; schedules and charts of this and that. They have their methods. Once she knew what she was looking for, it was easy.”

“Ain’t that always the way!”

“We ran chemical analyses on the plaster ingredients and paint. It was like an alchemical inversion, Morgan: old ingredients newly mixed to look old.”

“What about sexual assault?”

“Tissues were too far gone —”

“This isn’t about sex, anyway. Not this one.”

“Wrong, Morgan. I think it is. Not the act of, maybe, but it has to be about sex. You wait and see. You don’t mount cadavers in a headless embrace without Freud in attendance.”

He smiled enigmatically.

“I thought you were in the Cayman Islands.”

“No,” he said. “No, I wasn’t.”

Miranda left for headquarters. Morgan planned to walk over to the university and talk with Hubbard and Birbalsingh. He took possession of his wingback again, settled down, and stared into the middle distance.

We wait, he thought. There are cold cases to deal with, and investigative legwork to be done for other teams, but we wait. There is no way to anticipate the killer’s next move. Will we even recognize it?

Of course, or he’s failed!

It’s bound to be different. Perhaps not a theatrical tableau, but if it doesn’t evoke the original, his genius is wasted.

To have his bodies remain undiscovered, that would have been failure. So, the sick diorama must have been set up
after demolition was approved by the city. But if we’re right, spurred on by his success the killer will reach for a cumulative effect. Then he’ll have, and we’ll have, a pattern.

That’s small consolation for the deaths in the offing.

Outside, Morgan surveyed the street. He lived in the heart of the Annex, surrounded by looming Victorian houses and well-kept between-the-wars homes with verandahs. It was well past the middle of April, buds were forming on the huge silver maples along the street, and the occasional willow showed the beginnings of green. Tiny lawns had been raked of winter debris and the pavement was swept clean of the gritty detritus that had accumulated through winter in ridges by the curb. A few crocuses and hyacinths poked upwards in flowerbeds, above tulips and daffodils that were secretly breaking out of their chrysalises in the cold earth below. Cars gleamed; in the winter there was no point in keeping them washed. Windows on houses were sparkling clean. Robins squabbled in the air and squirrels raced under cars, over lawns, leapt among branches in desperate games of hide-and-go-seek.

As he walked down to Harbord Street, he conjured with images of Rapa Nui, playing them through his mind against the backdrop of his neighbourhood in the Annex. Cabbagetown had changed. Suburbia was foreign territory. High-rise condos sapped the soul. But in the Annex, Morgan felt comfortable. The smell of barbeques in summer, the grating of snow shovels in winter, the excitement of spring, the slow apprehension of autumn, cars in all seasons parked bumper to bumper — these defined the dimensions of home. At any one point in the year, he was aware of it all.

Sometimes, among the most striking moai buried to the shoulder in ravines below the quarry, great statues leaning forward, gazing over the grasslands of the island toward the Pacific, he felt a vague longing for the more familiar world
against which his experience on Rapa Nui was shaped and measured. It was this merging of worlds within that made his adventure exciting and poignant. Travel is about being someplace and being away from someplace at the same time.

The moai that reached the coast were set on platforms called
ahu
, and they would have been given eyes of obsidian on polished coral and faced with their backs to the sea.

In his mind he could still see stone and wood tablets in the marketplace, meticulously etched with the island’s Rongorongo script by carvers who could not understand the writings of their ancestors, yet honoured the indecipherable glyphs by their scrupulous reproductions. He could see rich Polynesian complexions and luxuriant long hair, and a few mirroring variations of himself, slathered in sunscreen, shielded under the wonderfully familiar floppiness of an old Tilley hat. He could see the clean streets of Hanga Roa, the bustling village on the southwestern shore where virtually all of the island’s population live, and on the streets the occasional car and the horses and dogs and people vying for casual pre-eminence. All this mixed in a mental mélange with his perceptions of Toronto in the promising spring.

He had gone scuba diving while he was there. The young men at their shop in the small harbour had coached him in Spanish, which he did not understand very well, and in Rapa Nui, which he understood not at all. Still, he thought he had learned the basic skills on dry land, and when they took out a couple of New Zealand women who were experienced divers, he went along and the women explained details about clearing his mask and sharing the emergency mouthpiece, so that by the time they all toppled over backward from the boat into the pellucid blue waters within sight of the town, he felt giddy but confident.

The pain in his ears as he descended surprised him. He held his nose and blew, popping the pressure as he had been
told, and managed to arrive at the bottom, twenty metres down, with only modest qualms of incipient panic. He had come to rest on a patch of sand. He looked around and the others were hovering a few feet above rocky outcroppings, surrounded by curious fish. He fiddled with his buoyancy vest, shooting up, then dropping, eventually adjusting to zero, then he fluttered gently up and over the coral, forgetting his apprehension, in harmony with the exquisite undersea beauty surrounding him.

He knew nothing of nitrogen narcosis or the bends until he bought a PADI manual in English on the way home, and discovered how perilous such beauties can be. He felt a bit sheepish about being so foolhardy. He would tell Miranda, but later. He suspected he would be low-key about the entire trip. People resent the extravagant experience of people they know, admiring in strangers what they resent in their friends.

Crossing St. George, he entered the university campus proper. The Robarts Library behind him loomed as a warning to anyone seeking refuge among the more intimate quadrangles and passageways that connect the colleges that this was a formidable place. From the air, he had been told, the library had the shape of a phoenix rising. From the ground it was a slumbering leviathan, a hunkering mass of raw concrete and forbidding angles. Inside, it was a marvel of spaces and planes, with form following function like a medieval cathedral, both hiding and yielding its treasures with awesome disregard for human proportion. He was more comfortable on the meandering walkways that led past University Circle to the anthropology labs.

Joleen Chau met him at the door of the building. She recognized him immediately and commented on his tan.

“You are kind,” he said, “but it’s a layered sunburn.”

“Cuba?”

“No.” He paused, a little self-conscious. He wondered if he had chosen Rapa Nui for bragging rights. I can’t be that superficial, he thought, and responded aggressively, “Easter Island.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “Wow, are you lucky. I’ve actually applied for a postdoctoral fellowship to study the moai culture. How does a tiny isolated island mirror historical procedures in the rest of the world where social evolution was virtually contagious? Neat, eh? I need to get out of the library; I want to go and commune with the stone. Try writing that up as a research proposal.”

Morgan beamed.

“Of course, I could be wrong,” she continued. “The historical parallels might be imposed by outsiders like me. In which case, I publish something on the limits of anthropology, about cultural imperialism and stuff like that.”

“We’ll compare notes when you get back,” said Morgan, realizing immediately how pretentious that must sound, given that he had travelled as a tourist and she was armed with years of research and the analytic instruments of her discipline. “You’ll love it there,” he said. “It’s magic.” He could not help himself and went on. “The people are descendents of the moai; the statues and the petroglyphs and the Rongorongo are ancestral.”

She grinned. She knew what the word
Rongorongo
meant. “You’ve been reacting to Thor Heyderdahl,” she said.

“Yeah, and a few others.”

“We’ll talk when I get back. If I go. I really know nothing about the place except as a heritage site. How long were you there?”

“Ten days, plus two each way. Two weeks, altogether. You want to go soon.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’ve met Inuit from Baffin Island who say that every family up there consists of a mother, a father, two kids, and an anthropologist. Right now kids ride horses through the streets of Hanga Roa —”

“Streets?”

“Paved with brick. It’s a town. There are even a few taxis. Get there before the invasion, Joleen. Tourists arriving on luxury cruises are bussed around for a few hours of sightseeing; a couple of planeloads of visitors, mostly in transit from Chile to French Polynesia, stop over every couple of days; a handful of backpackers hang out, fired with imagination and a shortage of funds. The rest of the outsiders are academics! They’re there, studying the people, the language, the environment, the profusion of artifacts, the impact of tourism, you name it. It won’t be innocent for long. The Americans put in a high-grade landing strip a generation ago, in case they needed a rescue base for space shuttles in the empty Pacific. I understand Hawaii offers a summer course there for university credit. Go soon.”

“Thank you, Detective Morgan. God and the granting agencies willing, I shall. If you’re looking for Professor Birbalsingh, he’s working at home. It’s exam time and there’s a lot of marking to do. I think you might catch Dr. Hubbard in her office at the ROM. She’s heading out for her cottage later today. Marking. April is the cruellest month.”

“Breeding scholars out of discontent. What about you?”

“I have a teaching fellowship. Lots of marking. And I’m defending my dissertation next week. I’ve gotta go, but I’ll get in touch.”

“For sure,” he said, and he watched her stride off with daunting determination. As her slim figure disappeared around the corner of a building, he smiled to himself and felt oddly wistful.

Shelagh Hubbard’s door was open when he found her office after ambling among the Byzantine pleasures of the museum, each corridor leading to further treasures and delights, from explications of the ordinary to expositions of the wondrously arcane. Past the articulated bones of huge dinosaurs, dioramas of indigenous peoples, displays of early Canadian furniture, gemstones, and core samples, dead creatures in animated poses, the gleanings of empire from China and the Near East, he wandered, gradually closing in on the offices of resident scholars.

She was standing beside her desk, arranging piles of examination booklets and essays in a box.

“From this, you will determine their futures,” he said.

“Oh, hello,” she responded, turning with a radiant expression as if she had been expecting him. “How are you, Detective? I gather you’ve been away.”

“I’m back on the case.”

“That would be the case of the enduring embrace,” she declared, as if to establish that there was not another murder that might draw them together. “How are we doing?”

“Well enough, thank you.”

The blue of her eyes was intense and her hair was pulled back in a relaxed way so that her high cheekbones seemed softly beguiling. The fluorescent light of her office made her pale blond hair look ethereal. Far from the death’s head Miranda had seen in her visage, he found her alluring. She was wearing slacks and a modest sweater set that conflicted playfully with her extravagant figure. She seemed brazen and yet almost demure, an anomaly that Morgan found disconcerting.