Grave Doubts (31 page)

Morgan sat down in the big armchair. Had Rachel forged Shelagh Hubbard’s journals? Had she written them in the first place? For the final versions did she use a variety of inks to create the illusion of authenticity? Handwriting analysis had not been done on the volumes found at the farm. A cursory comparison with Hubbard’s academic notes seemed sufficient verification of authenticity, since their authorship was never in doubt. Now it appeared, in all probability, Rachel Naismith, with the collusion of Alexander Pope, had created both sets. How much of the content were they responsible for? Was there a possibility Shelagh was innocent?

He rose abruptly and picked up the photograph of the three of them together in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Now what he saw in their eyes was not a play of possession or submission but the sinister glee of conspirators. He looked again. Conspiracy? Lust? It was simply a street photographer’s snapshot of three friends — probably, by their demeanour, summer residents not tourists, leaning against each other in a piazza in the heart of the city.

Morgan set the picture down on the countertop with the others and shuffled them into neat, random piles. They would be there when he returned with a warrant, once things fell into place. He snapped off the light and was surprised that the room remained fully illuminated. The sun was well over the horizon; the day had begun.

He wasn’t sure whether Miranda and Rachel had planned to connect with Alexander Pope. He knew, now, with a
certainty, the three of them would be together. His breath quickened and, after a quick tour of the house to fix it in place in his mind, he slipped out the side door, got into his car, took a deep breath, and drove down the long driveway, turning right on Lakeshore Road and then right again, up to the 401. After a few kilometres, he veered north to Highway 7 and cut across the top of Toronto to avoid the morning gridlock, then turned north. He was on his way to Penetanguishene.

chapter sixteen
Wiarton

Miranda crawled from the tent just after dawn. She walked out onto the point of land, feeling the offshore breeze riffle her hair, and looked back along the sound to the east, where, from low on the horizon, the sun skimmed the waves like a red rubber ball. The whimsical images that bobbed in her mind belied her feelings of apprehension. She had not been diving in several years and while she was certified, she was far from confident. She had no experience in wreck-diving, which called for a whole different order of expertise. Being in enclosed spaces underwater ran counter to the freedom of movement that drew her to the sport in the first place.

Still, her friends were anxious to give it a try. The Tobermory wrecks were a world-class site. She didn’t want to let them down. It was the kind of dubious adventure that, once into it, would be incredibly exciting, like rock climbing or whitewater kayaking — neither of which she had any desire to do.

It was her father who used to describe the morning sun as shining bright like a red rubber ball. Then he would utter the mantra, “Del Shannon from Rapid City, Michigan,” and take strange satisfaction in how the words and the image and the emotional response they evoked were in perfect, private harmony. She had never heard the song; it wasn’t something her parents would actually have owned. She could feel the warmth of her father’s grin and with it came a terrible emptiness as she wondered what they might have been to each other had he lived.

She sat perched with her knees drawn up and her arms clasped around them, rocking gently against the cool stone. She turned to watch Rachel struggle through the zippered door in the tent vestibule, crawl out onto the pine needles, stand up and stretch, then amble slowly toward her in her oversized teddy-bear pyjamas, rubbing sleep from her eyes and stepping with exaggerated caution over dry grass tufts growing from clefts in the stone. Rachel sat down beside her. Neither of them spoke, and together they rocked in rhythm to the waves lapping against the sheer wall of the granite shore.

As the sun pressed higher in the sky, Miranda rose to her feet.

“You want coffee?” she offered.

“Sure,” said Rachel. “I’ll help. I hate lighting the stove — I’ll measure out the coffee.”

“It’s in little bags.”

“I’ll count them. Two, right?”

Miranda smiled broadly at her friend. Apprehension about the events ahead passed from her mind. Diving, done properly, was an exhilarating sport. She was excited by the prospects ahead.

Morgan stopped for a coffee on the outskirts of Newmarket, due north of Toronto. He patched through to Alex Rufalo, asking for a response to his Scotland Yard query the night before requesting a scan of Madame Renaud’s employment records extending back ten years.

“It’s coming through now,” said the superintendent. “Don’t go away.”

Illogically, Morgan followed the directive literally by sipping his takeout coffee in the restaurant parking lot. It occurred to him he might reach Miranda through Peter Singh in Owen Sound. He did not feel justified in calling the OPP to track her down. At this point there was nothing substantive to suggest she was in danger, although the case was building exponentially in his mind, implicating her companions in multiple murder. He was sure the three of them were together. Officer Singh could unofficially intervene, cut Miranda apart until Morgan could get to the scene.

Rufalo came back on the radio. “Morgan, there’s no earlier record that Hubbard worked at Renaud’s. Nothing under her own name.”

“I knew that,” said Morgan.

“But how about this to stifle your disappointment….”

“What? Say on.”

“Your good friend, Alexander Pope, did!”

“Did what?”

“He worked at Renaud’s — for eighteen months in the early nineties.”

“Aha!” Morgan exclaimed.

“‘Aha’ what?”

“I’ll fill you in later. Gotta go. Could you run a background check for me on Officer Rachel Naismith?”

“One of our guys?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll get someone on it. Check back in an hour. Are you on your way to Georgian Bay? Do you want me to contact the Provincials?”

“And say what? Not yet. I don’t know what you’d tell them.”

“Morgan, something else that might interest you. Your friend Alexander Pope — it seems the church property is in his name. He is the registered owner of the crime scene in Beausoleil.”

Morgan signed off, his mind racing as he wheeled onto the highway. An oncoming pickup swerved to miss him without slowing down as the driver leaned on the horn. Morgan hardly noticed. He was assimilating the new information into a sequence of probable events, with Alexander Pope displacing Shelagh Hubbard as the pivotal character. Given that her journals were apparently counterfeit, a new possibility pressed inexorably forward. It still seemed likely the Hogg’s Hollow murders were Hubbard’s project, and it was certain that Rachel was inextricably linked to the revelation of her crimes, but the centre of power was shifting to Pope. He had worked at Renaud’s during the period now established as the time when the first set of murders occurred. Although his involvement in Hubbard’s murders was peripheral, and his connection with the disposal of her remains was circumstantial, it seemed to Morgan a virtual fact that he was responsible for the deaths in the wax museum and the presentation of his victims on public display.

Trying his best to think and drive at the same time, Morgan wished Miranda were riding at his side. She was better at deductive reconstruction from limited materials. Where, he wondered, would she go with this? How would she fill in the gaps? The narrative demanded a bridge between London and Florence. How did a Canadian on a postdoctoral fellowship
who took a hands-on course in London from a Canadian expert in constructural duplicity end up in her instructor’s arms, apparently sharing his affection with a younger version of a policewoman from southern Ontario? It had already occurred to him that Rachel was a lesbian or bisexual, even that she and Miranda were having an affair. Were the two women in Florence lovers already, before they got there? Unlikely. The prior connection was between Shelagh and Alexander. There was nothing to suggest Rachel had a history in London, nothing to link her to Shelagh Hubbard before the snapshots in Tuscany.

Suppose, Morgan thought, trying to think like Miranda, the senior two of the threesome had become lovers while she was taking his course in London. It ended bitterly, or perhaps in an aura of doomed inevitability. Pope went to Italy. He had arranged for Shelagh Hubbard to study facial construction in wax simulations at his former employers, perhaps as a parting gesture to assuage his remorse for leaving her behind, or perhaps to ingratiate himself if it was she who spurned him. No, the latter is unlikely, given the eventual course of events.

Passing a couple of trucks, then applying the brakes to keep a third truck between him and a police cruiser scanning for speeders from the side of the highway, Morgan contemplated the brutal irony that Alexander Pope, who elevated fakery to a fine art, should reverse the procedure by transforming the patently unreal effigies of dead murder victims into genuine cadavers. Then, he wondered, suppose in her nocturnal ministrations, cleaning and repairing the wax effigies after their daily exposure to public scrutiny, Shelagh Hubbard discovered his macabre sport? Rather than recoiling, perhaps driven by obsessive love, she was inspired to have found a way back into his heart. She pursued him to Italy, armed with the
capacity to renew their relationship on a different and, given their morbid dispositions, ironically revitalized basis.

Why was he in Florence? The answers to that were hanging on the wall in his sanctum sanctorum. He was studying to replicate some of the greatest painters in the Western world, having in effect moved from reconfiguring dead faces of real people to creating authentic reproductions of people long dead. As well as refining his talents with oil on wood and canvas, he undoubtedly studied frescoes. Already an authority on the subtleties of plaster, it would have been impossible to resist the study of tinting techniques at the home of the Renaissance masters.

As for Rachel Naismith, she would have been in Florence to study art in her own right, perhaps under the tutelage of Alexander Pope, an accomplished artist who spoke the same language. Quite possibly. Her talent as a calligrapher, her history at the University of Western Ontario, combined with the irrefutable evidence of her close relationship in Florence with Hubbard and Pope, insisted on her culpability in the subsequent murders. How so, Morgan was uncertain.

What an unholy threesome, he thought, especially appalled by Rachel. Did she know, then, standing arm in arm with her lovers for the snapshot, that the bond between the other two was on the dark side of death? Morgan felt an intense sense of betrayal, and mounting anger for the dreadful abuse of Miranda’s friendship. What could have driven Rachel to immerse herself in such malevolence? Was she on the road to depravity from childhood, the victim of a psychopathic mutation in her developing personality? Did her immersion in the dissociative world of Florentine aesthetics somehow exacerbate an already-screwed-up nature? Was the overwhelming time warp of immediate access to the sinister beauties of Renaissance culture enough to make her open to
deadly seduction? Did the other two seduce her on the banks of the Arno, or she them? Did she somehow complete their perverse relationship, bringing them closer together, making the banalities of evil seductive? Or did she insinuate herself into the perverse dynamics of their existing affair to feed her own appetites?

Morgan cut north on old Highway 11, the continuing extension of Yonge Street that divides Ontario into east and west, to pick up the most efficient route to the Nottawasaga region of Georgian Bay.

He became aware that he was searching for ways to exonerate Rachel, and recoiled from the creeping sympathy that might compete with his concern for Miranda, who, having displaced Shelagh Hubbard in the unholy dynamics of a new and dangerous threesome, was surely in grave danger. He reached for the radio, determined to contact Peter Singh and ask him to drive over to Beausoleil or, if necessary, to the campground outside Penetang.

Alexander Pope was lounging on the front steps of the church when the women arrived with their camping gear strapped to the back of Miranda’s racing-green Jaguar.

“You want to leave your car here?” he asked, unbending his long limbs and strolling to the side of the car. “I’ve called Tobermory. We’re set up with a boat and full gear for you two. I told them we’d be there by a little past noon.

“Thanks,” said Miranda. “I’ve got a lot of work piling up. I think I’d like to head back tonight. What about if you two ride together as far as Owen Sound and we’ll drive the rest of the way together? I’ll leave my car there so we can cut south on the way back.”

“Sounds fine to me,” said Alexander Pope. “It will give Rachel and me a chance to catch up on old times.”

“Since March?” Miranda exclaimed.

“In detail,” said Rachel. “Don’t worry, we’ll find things to talk about. We’ll talk about you.”

Miranda smiled uneasily. She suspected perhaps there was a subtext to the relationship between the other two she did not grasp, and ascribed her anxiety to feeling a little left out. On the drive over from Penetanguishene, Rachel had come up with the suggestion, herself, that she ride with Alexander as far as Owen Sound. It had seemed entirely reasonable, but now Miranda felt herself resenting the petty betrayal of her friends. Somehow the three of them broke down into a configuration of pairs. They were not all three friends together. Like teenagers, she thought. In any permutation of their affections, one of them was invariably left in the cold.

She had decided early that morning she needed to get back to Toronto. She loved camping and had reconciled herself to the day’s adventure, but she felt an indefinable sense of urgency. Something was not quite right. She suggested they head back after diving. Rachel seemed content with the revised plan.

By the time Morgan reached Peter Singh, he was less than an hour from Georgian Bay. He had anticipated having difficulty explaining what he wanted Peter to do: see that she’s okay and stay with her. To Morgan’s surprise, this was not received as an unreasonable request. He felt a rising affection for the young officer and told him he’d explain when he got there.