Grave Doubts (27 page)

“Jill,” Morgan said, awkwardly. “Good to see you. Good to see you, too, Justine.”

The two girls rushed him, Jill throwing her arms around his neck and giving him a smoochy kiss on the cheek, Justine hugging them both and blowing kisses into the air.

“Do you know this man?” said the tallest girl.

“No,” said Jill. “But isn’t he handsome!”

“He’s my mother’s boyfriend,” Justine announced.

“Your mother is married,” said the tall girl. “I met her, remember? And your father.”

“Well, he would be if he could.”

“Actually, he is the favourite boyfriend of my official guardian,” said Jill.

“Morgan!” said the tall girl. They, of course had heard of
Miranda and Morgan and some of the sordid details of Jill’s past. That is how she chose to maintain control of her own narrative: by being forthright about the publicly known story, and perversely whimsical about the details.

Before Morgan could mumble that he was not Miranda’s boyfriend, the other girls gathered around him. Justine maintained a proprietorial grasp on his arm. He was embarrassed by the attention, and several times tried to excuse himself. Finally, he explained that he was on duty and really had to get going.

“Murder,” Justine announced. “Murder is Morgan’s business.”

Morgan took Jill gently by the arm and said, “Walk along with me a bit.” The others, even Justine, picked up the hint and fell back.

Once they were out of earshot, Jill said, “I know what you’re going to say.”

“What?”

“Miranda is death on smoking.”

“But she’s not as much against it as I am.”

“Oh.”

“I thought you had more sense.”

“I do.”

“Then —”

“It’s not about sense, Morgan. It’s peer pressure.”

“Bull!” He couldn’t help but smile. “Peer pressure is no match for intelligence and a modicum of imagination.”

“Right. Actually, I’ve been conned by subliminal advertising. Did you notice cops in movies smoke?”

“Only the ones who can’t act.”

“Yeah. Dumb, eh?”

“Really dumb, Jill.

“So okay, let’s make a deal. I’ll never have another cigarette if you bribe me. And Justine. You have to bribe her, too.
You see, what happens is, like a girl in my dorm, her parents wrote her a cheque for a thousand dollars when she turned twelve, and postdated it a decade ahead. If she makes it to twenty-two without smoking, it’s hers. Neat, eh?”

“And what if she smokes? How would her parents know?”

“She’d tell them.”

“Simple as that.”

“Simple as that. Being a rebel and a renegade and a maverick doesn’t mean you’re dishonest, Morgan. So how about it? Wanna bribe me?”

“Sure.”

“How much?”

“Twenty.”

“Each?”

“Each. But I pay you now. Then it’s your problem, not mine.”

“Agreed. I agree for Justine, too.”

Morgan took out his wallet and handed her two twenties. She took them and tucked them down the front of her blouse just as a police cruiser pulled to the curb. She leaned up and kissed him. “Love ya,” she said, and she strolled with an exaggerated swing of her hips back to her friends.

“A little young for you, buddy,” said a voice from the cruiser. The driver leaned forward to look up at Morgan through the passenger window. “Detective Morgan! Still, she is a bit young.”

“Officer Yossarian.” Morgan was amused and a little disconcerted by Yossarian’s assumption. “You found me.”

“No, sir, I wasn’t looking. Just cruising.”

“Can I use your radio?”

“Sure. Where’s your cellphone.”

“At home with my gun.” Morgan slid in beside Yossarian. He waved to the girls, who were clustered together in
excitement. The cruiser made his credentials more authentic. “Let’s drive,” he said.

“Groupies?”

“Yeah, well, you know. It goes with the job.”

“Me, I like working uniform.”

“Yeah. I never did it.”

“You started in plainclothes?”

“Yep.”

“I’m going back to school.”

“Yep, good idea,” said Morgan. They were driving up Mount Pleasant and Yossarian wheeled left onto Lawrence Avenue. “So where are you taking me?”

“Dunno. Are you working?”

“Yeah,” said Morgan. “I was thinking.”

“You got a case I should crack for you.”

“If you’ve got time.”

They bantered until they got to the Yonge Street intersection.

“Pull over here,” said Morgan. “I’ll walk down Yonge for a while. Do me a favour: call my partner, tell her where I am, and tell her I’m working.”

“Sure thing, Detective. Keep thinking. You take care, now.”

Morgan got out and ambled south down the east side of the street to enjoy the foliage along the cemetery boundaries and the TTC lines where the subway is elevated to ground level and the tracks carve through green ravines. He was deep in thought, but aware of his surroundings. It troubled him that the Shelagh Hubbard murder had not been resolved. They couldn’t lower the curtains on the Hogg’s Hollow drama until her file had been laid to rest. Initially, there had been a certain relief over Shelagh Hubbard’s death. There would be no more horrific tableaux. But as time passed, he and Miranda both
struggled with the lack of resolution. She wanted to understand. Morgan wanted closure.

They kept in daily contact with the regional OPP through the woman in charge, who was the sergeant at the scene when they had gone up to check out the abandoned car. They had had several routine cases after that: one in Rosedale — a situation that was euphemistically described as justifiable homicide. Politically sensitive. No charges were laid. There was a shooting in Yorkville, and another on lower Jarvis Street. Both saw the demise of pathetic outsiders — social misfits murdered by friends. Arrests were made without incident. The paperwork for all three cases was staggering.

Morgan had fled the office earlier in the day, before Miranda got in. Sitting hunched over his desk, images kept intruding on words. He was haunted by the memory of Shelagh Hubbard when they saw first her inside the stone crypt. For a fraction of a second he had thought it was the sanctified body of a dead saint! Perhaps he saw Lucy, he wasn’t sure. Marie Celeste seemed to obscure the edges of identity, even when she wasn’t there. Perhaps that’s what a saint does, he thought. He wanted to avoid Miranda until the images sorted themselves out.

Despite the early onset of summer, the case had turned cold. The confusion of saints and sinners refused to unravel. The OPP had focused on Alexander Pope for a while, but as Morgan pointed out, the guy was a harmless eccentric. Sure, his prints and residual bits were everywhere in what was formerly the Church of the Immaculate Conception, but the place was, in effect, his studio. There wasn’t so much as a fleck of skin, a fingernail paring, a loose hair on the elevated chancel near the opening in the stone floor — apart from his DNA adhering to the slab where they had lifted it away when they opened the crypt. Morgan’s was there as well. There was,
indeed, a connection between Pope and the murder victim, but he had been her teacher, not her mentor, and more recently his involvement was at Morgan’s request.

Alexander Pope, himself, was apparently undeterred by the macabre turn of events. Miranda talked to him several times on the phone, getting progress reports on his project. Officer Peter Singh dropped in on him periodically and let Morgan and Miranda know how he was doing. Morgan envied Pope — a man consumed by his work to the exclusion of anything else; an artist obsessed.

In London, the Chamber of Horrors affair was already forgotten. Once the tabloids realized the Canadian involvement, they lost interest. Few Britons knew the notorious Dr. Crippen had practised in London, Ontario, where he refined his lethal techniques before dispatching so many English women to their untimely departures. Canada is too culturally bland to inspire much interest, even in murder, thought Morgan, wondering whether it was the fickle British or Canadian diffidence that made it so.

In Toronto, the Hogg’s Hollow murders had slipped from the public mind into the irretrievable past. Despite the fact that the bodies were of recent vintage, the whole affair was smothered by a general indifference to the city’s colonial heritage: it was as if they really had been long-dead lovers, not unfortunate strangers visiting a modern metropolis.

In Owen Sound, and all the way from Meaford in the east to Southampton in the west, and north to Wiarton, the reputation of Officer Peter Singh had spread like a rumour. Even his parents were now firm supporters in his choice of career, despite his father’s earlier disappointment that he had not gone into the military, or at least the RCMP.

In Beausoleil the deconsecrated church was once again a cultural curiosity. The significance of the frescoes had been
greatly enhanced by renewed secular interest in Sister Marie Celeste. The true pilgrims came only in the dead of night and eventually stopped coming even then, but museum curators and art historians were received by appointment during the day.

“Whoa, Morgan! Where are you going?” It was Miranda, stepping out the door of Starbucks just over from police headquarters on College. “Talk about a man lost in thought.”

“No,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about anything. My goodness, I’ve walked all the way down from Lawrence Avenue. Holy smokes, that’s a walk.”

“I knew you’d be coming. Yossarian called. Said you were determined to walk the length of Yonge Street. Thank God you turned south. Come in for a coffee — take a break from your travails and travels. I’ll buy you a cappuccino.”

“How long have you been waiting?”

“I figured you’d walk the distance, so I didn’t come over ’til maybe twenty minutes ago.”

After they settled in with their coffees, Morgan asked, “What’s up?”

“Well, I had a call from Sergeant Sheahan.”

“Who?”

“OPP. In charge of the investigation at Beausoleil.”

“So, what’s Sergeant Sheahan got to say?”

“Nothing. That’s the point. Nothing, nada. They found DNA traces at Shelagh Hubbard’s. Our Hogg’s Hollow bodies were processed at the farm, for sure. Beyond that, nothing. They’re virtually closing down their investigation. That’s what they mean when they say ‘leaving it open, pending further developments.’”

“Yeah. So where does that leave us?”

“With a mystery of unknowable proportions.”

“They’re the worst kind.”

“Or best. The most mysterious mysteries are best.”

“For whom?”

“There’s got to be something to connect with,” said Miranda. “If it won’t deconstruct, it’s indecipherable. There has to be a way in.”

“My dad used to say, ‘If it ain’t broken, you can’t fix it.’”

“A wise man.”

“And Ellen Ravenscroft once said ‘The hardest autopsy is when nothing seems wrong.’”

“Except the patient is dead.”

“Yeah, the client.”

“Is that what they call them? ‘Clients’?”

“I dunno,” said Morgan. “But ‘patient’ implies recovery.”

“‘Client’ implies payment for services rendered.”

“Dead people. Let’s say they call their clients ‘dead people.’ And they do get paid, just not by the dead people. By taxpayers.”

“I do not like to think I pay Ellen Ravenscroft’s salary. I prefer knowing she pays mine.”

“Miranda?”

“Yes?”

“Why did you waylay me here? I could have been to the harbour by now.”

“And then what?”

“I would have turned around and begun to walk north.” He sipped his coffee. “Let’s go back to our theatrical analogy. Shelagh Hubbard was creating drama, recording the scenes she created; killing was an extension of the authorial imagination.”

“Okay,” said Miranda. “Then someone else cleverly reduced her to one of the characters in a narrative that swallows up hers. A meta-narrative.”

“And disposing of her as an aesthetic diversion, her killer
subsumes her achievement, such as it was, into his or her own.”

“We sound more like literary critics than detectives, Morgan.”

“Okay, but if we see the whole thing, her grisly machinations in London and Toronto, and her disappearance, her death, and the Gothic disposition of her body, all as part of the same story, one continuous narrative by several authors, where does that lead us?”

“Exactly. Where? A single text; so what?”

“How did she die?”

“Poison.”

“Where?”

“At her farmhouse.”

“How did the blood get in her car?”

“The killer, her killer, put it there. Drained a bit during embalming, kept it fresh.”

“Same story as if she had written it, to this point. The killer wanted her death to be gentle, her car to be found. They wanted us to think she had staged her own abduction. Left the heat on in the house. Moved the bicycle. Arranged all the details, even the blood. Why?”

“To buy time.”

“Exactly. To buy time. Why? To merge their stories, to make her an inextricable part of the revised script. To process her corpse, to encrypt it beneath the altar.”

“There’s no altar. The chancel. But why there? To implicate Alexander?”

“To subsume her in a story larger than her own but under the killer’s control, to give it the mythic status of Sister Marie Celeste. Why the odour of violets?”

“To make her seem like a saint.”

“Or! To make sure her body was discovered.”

“In a saint’s grave.”

“Exactly,” said Morgan. “A diabolical irony: drop a depraved killer into a saint’s tomb. With flamboyant finesse.”

“Why?”

“Why not? Whoever is devising the plot enjoys the perversity.”

“Remember,” said Miranda, “the literary thing — the writer getting off on his own creation — it’s only an analogy. The killer as a killer is real.”

“Whose creation is not yet complete. It’s not over, so we wait.”

“That could be dangerous,” Miranda said, and she smiled.

“Yes,” said Morgan. He didn’t smile.

chapter fourteen
Penetanguishene

Miranda left police headquarters early to miss the Friday traffic. Morgan was working at home, but when she called him he wasn’t answering. This didn’t mean he was out — he could have been in the bathroom or he was just being perverse. Sometimes when she left a message, he would pick up midway through, explaining he was screening his calls. From whom? Whoever. But she was used to checking in with him. She felt reassured if he knew where she was. She turned outside the building and looked back up at it, thrilled at how articulate architecture can be, enjoying the fact that she worked within this splendid postmodern extravaganza where glass and multi-hued granite the colour of the Canadian shield create shapes in the eye that celebrate through artifice the natural world. She loved working in a building that spoke so eloquently of great things over small, like a medieval cathedral. Not, she thought, like skyscrapers, which celebrate the tyranny of commerce and trade.