Still Waters (10 page)

She did, and that was the beginning of Morgan's first affair, which after ten days burned out because they had nothing to say to each other. She taught him about a woman's body as if she were much older, and he felt secure enough that he learned with awkward enthusiasm more than he could have imagined and far less than he needed to be a good lover. It didn't occur to him to resent her experience.

Their last night together, after she finished the late shift and before he went to his morning class, they both knew their relationship had run its course. In a gesture to make the finality of their parting less certain, he invited her to a lecture he would be giving in two months.

“What are you talking about?” she asked him.

“It's by invitation. My philosophy prof asked me to speak at a graduate seminar. It's a big deal. They don't usually let undergraduates speak.”

“What's it gonna be about?”

“Heidegger …”

She smiled benignly, drawing him to her. “You really are sweet.”

A couple of months later he stepped up to the podium in a lecture hall at the university before anyone else was in the room. His topic had aroused considerable interest, and Father Harris, his professor, had asked if he would mind opening his presentation to a larger audience. Morgan was thrilled. He looked out across the rows of empty seats. He wasn't at all nervous. He was sure of his material and confident of his ability to deliver. This was a prelude, he thought, to a career in the professorial ranks.

Father Harris came in and chatted with him. A few students entered and gathered in clusters toward the back of the room.

“It's always this way,” Father Harris assured him. “Lecture halls fill up from the back.” Father Harris was enough to make Morgan want to be Catholic, even though he was already agnostic.

Morgan glanced up the aisle as a flash of brilliant red appeared at the back of the hall. He looked away, then back again. It was Donna, and she was dressed for a party. She waved and manoeuvred precariously on stiletto heels down the incline to where he was standing with the lectern between them. He stared at her with his mouth open, completely thrown. Father Harris reached out his hand and introduced himself. Donna smiled a huge red smile and curtsied slightly. She had never before talked to a priest.

Struggling to regain his composure, Morgan was too flustered to say anything. Donna leaned around the
lectern and kissed him on the cheek. The scoop neck of her dress gaped open. He could feel the smudge of her lipstick like a scarlet letter glowing on his skin as she moved slightly away, being uncertain of the protocol such an occasion demanded.

“I'm proud of you,” she said.

Father Harris took her arm in a proprietorial way, bowing slightly. He smiled at her as if she were an old friend of the family. She gazed up at him and smiled her red smile, and turned and smiled at Morgan. Her eyes dazzled blue in the lights of the hall.

“Won't you join me, Donna?” asked Father Harris. “We'll just give David a few moments. Even the most experienced of us gets a little anxious before giving an important lecture.” He led her to a seat beside his own, making a clear and subtle show to the audience who had understood in the last few minutes that she was his guest.

The presentation was well received and led indirectly to the offer of a scholarship to do graduate work. At the informal reception following his lecture, Father Harris kept Donna by his side, and when the evening began to subside, he called her a taxi and paid the driver in advance. As she was going out the door, she turned to catch Morgan's eye and mouthed the words “Thank you” with her full red lips as if it were the best day of her life.

Morgan was ashamed of himself for weeks afterward and went off to plant trees, then on to his adventure in Europe, without picking up his degree.

Donna,
he thought now,
whatever happened to you?
As he stirred uneasily in the embrace of the wingback chair in Griffin's house, he imagined Donna's big red lips and blue eyes and blond mane of hair with its dark
roots surrounding her oval face, and he felt wistful, knowing she would never have thought he had done anything wrong.

Abruptly, Morgan rose to his feet, breaking the bond between himself and the residual personality of Robert Griffin, leaving memories of Donna behind.

Morgan leaned over the ceramic box to examine an old board with worn edges, placed alongside it with casual artifice as if the owner were trying to subvert its value. He ran his hand lightly over the etched surface, feeling the hieroglyphs with his fingers.

So that was what half a million felt like, what words felt like when their meaning wasn't known.

Morgan sat down again, feeling queasy. What was he doing here? he thought in Miranda's voice. He hated when the words in his head seemed to come from her. Morgan got up and puttered around the room. He needed to know this man if he was to understand his death. He needed to distance himself.

Feelings of ambivalence toward Griffin bothered Morgan. He was better with ambiguity. Ambivalence demanded choice, and he preferred hovering between.

That was how Miranda understood him, how she explained his mind. He suspected this was a projection of how she saw herself. It didn't cross his mind that he saw himself reflected in her.

They had been together for more than a decade. They fitted together like long-time lovers who were afraid if they ever got married the vital uncertainty between them would dissipate and they would lose their separate identities.

Both of them had a poor view of marriage, Morgan from limited experience and Miranda by extrapolation from all the constrictions she thought she could see in the
lives of friends and in the smug, dreary life of her sister in Vancouver. Morgan feared what he knew and Miranda what she knew nothing about.

Their first case working together had been a grisly execution. When he saw her walk through the door at the crime scene, an unconventionally pretty young woman with a steely look in her eyes, he had been surprised. He was never quite sure why.

“Where did you come from?” he had said. “I just finished doing federal time.” Since that got no reaction, she added, “RCMP, Ottawa.”

“I don't need a personal history. Do you ride?”

“Horses? Had to learn.”

“Did you like it?” he asked.

“Being mounted?”

They exchanged glances, and that was the last time in her life Miranda tried to be one of the boys.

“Do you like horses?” he asked, not because he was interested but to get them over the hump.

“I didn't try out for the Musical Ride if that's what you're thinking.” She surveyed the ghastly scene surrounding them.

“How long?”

“In the Mounties? Three years.”

“Posing for pictures with the governor general?”

“And once with the queen. I'm photogenic. The scarlet doesn't bleed out my natural colouring.”

“You might have been good in the Musical Ride.”

“Not very.”

“You would have ended up working traffic detail.”

“Or crowd control,” she said. “I decided murder would be preferable.”

“You're in the right place.”

“They sent me up from the shop.”

He had never heard police headquarters described as the shop.

“Superintendent Rufalo said I'll be working with you.”

“Morgan.”

“Yeah, I know. Miranda Quin. With one
n
.”

“Didn't know you could spell it with two.”

“Quin?”

“Miranda.”

“You can't. Oh …” She smiled, feeling relaxed.

Beside them on the floor were four bodies, hands bound with duct tape, three with tape over their mouths, their throats slit, rigid in grotesque postures of death, having squirmed in their own pooling blood until each had expired. The fourth had been decapitated and was lying separately as if the others had been forced to witness his death before submitting to their own. An object lesson of short duration.

“It's a Chinese name,” Morgan said.

“It's Ontario Irish.”

“China's first emperor was Qin. With one
n
.”

“I doubt he spelled it phonetically.”

“Second century BC.”

“How do you know that?”

“Six thousand terra-cotta warriors guard his tomb.”

“Oh, him,” she said. “Where's the guy's head?”

“Over there in the garbage bucket under the sink, with coffee grounds and eggshells dumped over it. Whoever did this stayed for breakfast. I told forensics not to touch it until you got here. Welcome to the city of love and adventure.”

“Good to be here,” she had told him. “It's like I've never been away.”

Morgan walked around Griffin's den and sat again
in what was beginning to take on the familiarity of a habitual posture, in what felt like his own chair, and pondered. That was his way: the resolution of the most recalcitrant mystery could usually be found in the life of the victim, especially in cases of first-degree murder. Let the observations accumulate, bits of information gleaned from the way the deceased got by in the world, and eventually, unforced, they would fall into place and the killer would be revealed in their pattern. That was how he liked to think of the process, and it worked often enough to reinforce his assumption.

Why, he wondered, was this guy writing notes to himself about language? They were obviously part of a larger discourse. He looked around for a likely repository and reached for a coffee table book called
Koi Kichi
on the floor beside the chair. The title translated as
Crazy for Koi
, the koi keeper's compleat companion. He knew the book well. Anyone interested in koi knew Peter Waddington's book. He opened it seemingly at random, but as he anticipated the pages parted where another piece of yellow notepaper lay awaiting revelation:

Dogs can be trained to obey simple commands such as “sit” and “stay.” Yet if the command giver is lying in front of the television and gives the command to sit, the dog ignores it. Why? Because the dog has been taught by a person who normally stands while giving the command. It responds not to words but to a complex gestalt of sound, gesture, posture, circumstance, after considerable training. If any one factor is significantly altered, the dog is baffled.

Exceptional dogs may in their desire to please or avoid the commander's displeasure adapt an appropriate response to what is perceived as a new gestalt after a certain amount of trial and error. Then, as likely as not, they will sit directly in front of the television. This is probably not an expression of innate perversity.

What does this tell us? Perhaps not much about dogs, beyond the fact that they are neither as smart nor as perverse as we think.

To apply the word
learning
to the behavioural modification of dogs is no more appropriate than to suggest a computer thinks or an equation resolves. The language of mathematics, of digital machines, and of dogs, is not language at all, but we have no other word to describe their function in response to human volition.

Morgan was dismayed by the revelation of an engaged personality, by the casual wit. He was intrigued with how he had known there would be a note in
Koi Kichi.
He picked up another koi book from the table beside him and flipped it open, but there was nothing inside.

Restless, he wandered back into the subterranean labyrinth. Complex patterns of shadows playing against walls weathered rough by age re-created in his mind something of the sinister melodrama in Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors, where he had last seen Susan in London before he returned to Canada. Morgan had spent
the preceding year and a half tramping through Europe. He lived on Formentera for a couple of months, just across from Ibiza, ensconced in the ruins of a Martello tower, writing. For a brief time he thought he would be a writer. He worked in an Ibizan taverna for the entire summer, seldom letting the travelling students who were doing soft drugs in the courtyard know he spoke English. He liked the power of linguistic invisibility. He ran with the bulls in Pamplona and felt foolish for doing so; he didn't even like Hemingway very much. He travelled to Turkey where he spent a month hanging out in the bazaar and learned about carpets, especially about Anatolian kilims from across the Bosphorus.

“I have a baby,” Susan told him in Madame Tussauds.

He felt a stab of betrayal. “Congratulations.”

“Congratulations,” she echoed.

There was a long silence. They both looked at the grotesque effigy of a Jack the Ripper victim, her blood glinting in the directed light. Susan was smiling.

“Congratulations,” he said again tentatively.

“He's a lovely boy, David.” She smiled up at him, her auburn hair falling away from her face. “I call him Nigel.”

“Oh,” said Morgan with unseemly relief. “I'm sorry.”

“What, that he isn't yours, or that I call him Nigel?”

He wanted to marry her, he wanted to take her to Australia, he wanted her to meet Darlene and Fred.

“You just needed to know,” she said.

“Can I see him?”

“He's with my parents in Kent. I have a picture, fairly recent.”

She showed him the picture without releasing her grip, bending with him into a light beam shining on the
macabre tableau so that he could make out the ambiguous features of a baby.

They hugged a long goodbye outside Madame Tussauds. After walking down Baker Street a bit, he turned and called to her, “What's his name again?”

She walked back to him. “Nigel.”

“What's his real name?”

“It doesn't matter, David. Names are just names.” Susan glanced to the side. “I love you, David. Do take good care.” Then she had touched her finger to his lips, turned, and walked away.

Tears now unaccountably clouded his vision as he approached the great oak door at the end of the passage leading to the farthest corner of the foundation. Morgan had tried it before, and it had been locked. He was at an impasse. The door led to Mrs. de Cuchilleros's place if it led anywhere. The projected walkway between the houses hadn't been abandoned, just moved underground. It would have to come out in her carriage house or connect to her basement or go up into her garden. Was that how Griffin had crossed over in those early mornings when Mrs. de Cuchilleros said she had found him beside her pond, standing vigil — a memorable description? And then she had said he would simply disappear.