Still Waters

STILL WATERS

A Quin and Morgan Mystery

John Moss

A Castle Street Mystery

Copyright © John Moss, 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Michael Carroll

Design: Jennifer Scott

Printer: Webcom

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Moss, John, 1940-

Still waters / John Moss.

ISBN 978-1-55002-790-7

I. T
ITLE
.

PS8576.O7863S84   2008        C813'.6              C2008-900691-7

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We acknowledge the support of
The Canada Council for the Arts
and the
Ontario Arts Council
for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the
Government of Canada
through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program
and
The Association for the Export of Canadian Books
, and the
Government of Ontario
through the
Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit
program, and the
Ontario Media Development Corporation
.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.

www.dundurn.com

For Bev, as always,

For Tobi Kozakewich,

For Bea and Julie and Laura,

For Margaret Atwood,
whose wicked candour was taken to heart,

And for Morgan and Miranda,
who are real, as only fiction can be.

The dead man with comb-over hair fanning away from his skull was floating face down in the fish pond. Although still unidentified, he was appropriately dressed for a Rosedale garden. Another pond, closer to the ravine, settled into the landscape as if a ground depression had been filled with primordial sludge. Windows in the large house looming over the scene were empty, the curtains half-drawn. Aside from the police, there was no one around, not a gardener, no family, no maid. Most houses in this part of Toronto's Rosedale had domestic help. At 7:15 each weekday morning women of colour spread out from the subway station, through the tree-lined streets, along the red brick sidewalks, and into the private worlds of the gentry by blood and by money. An hour later pickups arrived with Dutch names on the sides, carrying men wielding rakes and mowers, and in winter, shovels and buckets of sand and salt. By now the workers had gone home, the owners had returned, children had changed
out of school uniforms and were doing homework, and prepared dinners had been taken from refrigerators. It was quiet in Rosedale in the early evening in Indian summer. But it was preternaturally quiet in this garden, even with all the police activity. In the unseasonable heat, among dappled shadows, it was like being underwater.

Miranda Quin knelt against the limestone parapet. As the body swung by, she reached out to draw it closer.

“Don't touch him!” David Morgan, Miranda's partner, said.

“I wasn't. I can't see his face.”

She prodded the dead man's shoulder until his profile lolled into view, washed pale and streaked with light. There was nothing about his bland features to connect with, but death made his face seem familiar. As he drifted across her reflection, Miranda flinched. It wasn't the intimation of her own mortality — she had a working relationship with death — but something inexplicable, like vertigo, seemed to rise inside her. A mixture of horror and panic, strangely tempered by a flutter of relief, all held in check by the need to sort out her feelings before revealing them.

Morgan stared into the depths of the pool. He was captivated by the fish weaving the water with eerie striations of light. The body on the surface was a minor distraction — not to the fish playing in the dead man's shadow — but to Morgan, whose current enthusiasm was imported koi. “Japanese,” he murmured. “From Niigata.”

“Caucasian,” Miranda responded. “From Rosedale.”

“Ochiba Shigura,” said Morgan. “The big one near his ear.”

Perhaps it was, she thought.

“Ochiba Shigura,” he repeated. He had never before said these words out loud. “It means ‘Autumn leaves
falling on still water, I am sad.'” He paused. “They know this guy. That one's a Utsuri. What about you?”

“What? Know him? Why would I?” She surprised them both that she found his question invasive.

Morgan shrugged. “It's a folly.” He took in the entire garden with a sweeping glance. “This guy spared no expense to make it look natural.”

“There's nothing natural about gardens,” Miranda declared. Were she not preoccupied by the gnawing within, they might have wandered into a discussion about the vanities of landscape architecture. Instead, she forced herself to focus on the corpse. She bent closer and felt a surge of revulsion.

There were no visible wounds.

She looked back at Morgan through a veil of shoulder-length hair. “You've been studying fish?”

“Koi,” he clarified. “I've been reading.”

“Good timing.”

His personality and looks coincided, she thought. Unkempt, tousled. Features bold enough to cast shadows. Dark eyes, highlights when he smiled, sometimes exposing, more often concealing. Good body, tall, lean but not lanky. Good hair, all there. Fiercely intelligent.

They had made love once but preferred to be friends.

“Look at them,” he said. “They're disturbingly beautiful …”

“To us or each other? They're carp. Genetically manipulated scavengers.” She rocked back onto her feet, grasping his arm to pull herself upright.

“Expensive carp.”

She envied his esoteric diversions. Persian tribal carpets, Ontario country furniture, vintage Bordeaux, now Japanese fish. She suspected he could evade himself
endlessly. After more than a decade working murders together, she wasn't sure why.

He hadn't noticed her suppressed anxiety. That pleased her. It also annoyed her. She tried to imagine her bathtub. She usually had showers. “Morgan,” she announced as if it were a point of contention, “water moves counter-clockwise.”

“Not in Australia.”

She extended an open hand toward the corpse. As he moved slowly around the pool, the dead man seemed to rotate on an unseen axis.

“He's turning the wrong way,” said Morgan.

“Exactly. And he's floating.”

“Yes he is. Very postmodern — he's part of the garden design.”

“He's dead.”

“Dead's easy, dying is hard.”

She couldn't tell from the sun glinting in his eyes whether he was being thoughtful or quoting Oscar Wilde. Or Dashiell Hammett.

“Not that hard,” she said. “He was probably unconscious when he entered the water. Otherwise he'd be on the bottom.”

“I knew a kid in grade one. He used to scare hell out of Miss Moore by holding his breath till he fainted.”

“You remember your teacher's name?”

“And the kid's — Billy DeBrusk. He died in Kingston.”

“Maximum Security or Collins Bay?”

“He was an accountant. Secondary drowning in a triathlon. His lungs flooded a day after the race, filled with bodily fluids in his sleep. He got kicked in the swim.”

“I didn't know you could drown in bed.” She paused. “Did he win?”

Morgan loved the way her mind worked, convinced it was in complementary opposition to his own, which needed channels to contain the discursive energy. He thought a lot about his own mind. It was a place to visit and explore. It wasn't where he lived.

“Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones before she walked into the Thames,” said Miranda. “That way, it was out of her hands. Like diving from the Bloor Street Viaduct. You commit, then you wait. Death happens. It's not your fault.”

“She drowned in the River Ouse in Sussex, not the Thames. She left a note to her husband, saying, ‘You have given me the greatest possible happiness.' Do you think you could drown yourself?”

This bleak sense of dread inside her, was that what it felt like? But there was also the unsettling sensation of release. Release tinged oddly with guilt.
No, I could not.

“Whoever called it in —” Morgan began.

“Left him floating. Must have known he was already dead.”

“How?”

“Perhaps patience.”

There was something bothering her, he thought. Macabre humour was either a mask or a masquerade. His own humour ran more to wordplay and irony.

“You sure you don't know him,” he said. Stolid silence. “It could have been called in by the person who killed him.”

“That's an idea,” she said, indicating by her tone she didn't consider it likely.

They contemplated the pool; the sun was low in the sky, so there was little reflection. It was difficult to separate the surface from the depths, except close to the floating corpse, and out near the centre where
twin columns of fine bubbles mushroomed from the darkness below.

“There has to be a pump somewhere processing the water through a filter system,” Morgan said. “Pushing clockwise.”

Morgan looked around, but there were no outbuildings in the yard. He glanced up at the neighbouring house. Only its upper storeys were visible above the high stone wall separating the properties. Someone looking across would have to be in the attic to get a decent view of the ponds. The windowpanes in the attic gable glistened in the early-evening light.

Spotlessly clean, he thought.

“It must be in the basement,” said Miranda. “The filter. I doubt the other pond has one — it looks like pea soup. Soylent green.”

“Charlton Heston.” He affirmed her allusion. “Nutrition from human remains.”

A uniformed officer approached and asked if the body could be moved.

“Wait for the coroner,” said Morgan. “No, take him out. Make sure they've got pictures. Be careful with the fish.”