Grave Doubts (6 page)

How on earth did the paper get the story in time for the morning edition? It had to have been called in, but by whom? Headquarters? Highly unlikely. The coroner’s office? They never release information unless in the aid of an inquest. Certainly not Miranda. He and Miranda avoided publicity — it interfered with their work. Even though as a team they were a minor legend among their colleagues for eccentric efficiency, they had managed to avoid the kind of celebrity that subsumes individual cases in a running account of the detectives who solve them. It would not have been Officer Naismith. That left Dr. Hubbard or Professor Birbalsingh.

It was no surprise, then, that the forensic anthropologists were mentioned by name, each spelled correctly. Everything else in the article was tantalizingly macabre, yet intriguingly vague. This account was fed to a desk reporter by someone in sufficient authority to be credible and skilled in the art of public relations. It was not presented as a crime story but as an historical curiosity. The readers’ empathy was encouraged not for the victims but for the scientists involved in resolving their identity — scientists whose determined expertise would unlock the secrets of their morbid embrace.

Annoyed by the
Globe
article, Morgan grabbed his coat and set out for Cabbagetown. As he walked along Harbord
Street into the heart of the U of T campus, he tried to stabilize the source of his ire, which hovered somewhere between amused irritation and genuine anger. The publicity was proprietary, a declaration by the forensic anthropologists of ownership. Good for them; damn their sense of entitlement.

In front of Hart House, he stopped to dump snow from a shoe, balancing precariously on one foot. He stared intently at a gritty lump of ice. His father had taught him the secret of balance, how to put on socks in a standing position: fix your gaze on a particular spot and the wavering stops. His father taught him to splash cold water on the back of his neck in the morning to eliminate grogginess, to spit on his shoes for the final polish, to savour the taste of authentic ginger beer, to discriminate among newspaper comic strips, to use chopsticks, to blow his nose without a tissue — snorting through one nostril at a time, pressing the other — when no one was watching.

Morgan looked around at the architectural dissonance that skirted University Circle. Nothing had changed in twenty-two years. In this season, the buildings looked bleak, the flowerbeds were like burial mounds, and the shrubs were tangles of dried sticks or clumps of bedraggled green. After a night of sleet, followed by a cold turn that left the air crisp, the sky an intense winter blue, and the white a translucent gathering of all the colours in the spectrum, the snow-covered lawn glistened in comical contrast.

The main door into the anthropology laboratories was locked but Morgan called building maintenance on a campus emergency phone and when someone showed up he flashed his badge and was admitted without being asked for an explanation. He was not expecting so much activity behind closed doors on a weekend, as he searched for the forensics lab — graduate students at their Sisyphean labours, earning
their meagre stipends. Time off, he surmised, is for faculty — unless they have just been presented with disentombed cadavers in pristine period dress.

A slightly manic young man in a lab coat directed him to the location of Professor Birbalsingh’s newest project, chuckling as he walked off in the other direction. Morgan had attended graduate school for a week before dropping out to study criminology at a community college. With a novitiate’s grasp of academic procedures and obligations, he felt a tenuous connection to the young man’s vaguely demented detachment. For years he had imagined returning to university, with the idea of eventually teaching. He knew that his brain was too restless, however. He liked having a mind with a mind of its own.

He pushed the door open without knocking and entered a room that, despite the gruesome paraphernalia, was quite unlike Ellen Ravenscroft’s austere aerie in the heart of the city. Death, here, was not an end in itself, as it was at the morgue. It was an object of conjecture, subsumed by the conventions of an academic discipline. While cool, the room was almost cheerful. The blinds were only half drawn. Dust motes swirled in sunlight reflected from the snow outside. The bodies, which were lying on autopsy trays, had been separated and stripped of their clothing. Both Dr. Hubbard and Professor Birbalsingh were intent on the male at the moment. A graduate assistant was meticulously cleaning plaster dust and debris from the hands of the female on the adjoining table. On a stainless-steel counter behind them, a wooden box the size of a valise sat ominously.

Before his observation of the scene could be considered a covert activity, Morgan coughed to announce his presence. The professor didn’t look up and the student focused more intently on her work, but Shelagh Hubbard turned around and, recognizing who it was, smiled warmly.

“Sorry to bother you,” Morgan said.

“No bother,” she answered. “The Inquisitive Detective,” she declared, as if it were a title. “You couldn’t resist.”

“Actually, I wanted to know about the newspaper story.”

“The newspaper?”

“There was a write-up in the
Globe
this morning, with just enough detail to promise a follow-up. I assume you were the source, Dr. Hubbard.”

“Shelagh, please. We’re not formal around here.”

Her eyes swept the room, then she nodded in the direction of the naked bodies and whispered, “Except for him, the Obsessive Professor.”

“I heard that,
Miss
Hubbard.”

“He is disciplining me, detective. I am ‘doctor’ at the museum, ‘professor’ at the university, and ‘Shelagh’ to my friends. I am ‘
Miss
’ only when proclaiming my marital status or incurring the wrath of my mentor.”

“Shelagh, the story?”

“Didn’t they mention you? I’m so sorry.”

“To get into the early edition, you must have called before you got to the scene.”

“A romance doomed to endure beyond death. It seemed opportune —”

“Or opportunistic.”

“If you’d prefer. In museums and anthropology, he or she who hesitates doesn’t get the grant. Shape the story and the money comes in — a straightforward equation. We’re not curing cancer here; we’re recovering the past.”

“Isn’t it beyond recovery, by definition?”

“We illuminate the past from a present perspective — is that better? Isn’t that what you do, as well, in the detecting business?”

Morgan smiled.

“You haven’t been here all night, have you?” he asked.

“We have,” said the stolid professor, without looking up.

Shelagh Hubbard glanced at her mentor, then addressed Morgan. “I virtually dictated the story from the way Professor Birbalsingh described it. I was precise — perhaps a little inventive, but not dishonest.”

“And yet, surprisingly vivid,” said Morgan.

“Read carefully, Detective,” said Sheila Hubbard with a modicum of pride. “You’ll find mostly the piece is about atmosphere, the grotesque in our midst, death at the doorstep. It’s tabloid melodrama, upgraded for the
Globe
with good grammar and compound sentences.”

Morgan regarded the woman with a begrudging admiration. She was not about to apologize.

“And the clothes,” he asked her, shifting direction. “They seem remarkably well-preserved.”

“They are museum quality,” she said, and she smiled enigmatically. “I’m hoping we can spruce them up a little and steal them away from Professor Birbalsingh for the museum’s permanent collection.”

The graduate student came over to where they were looking down at the articles of clothing laid out on a table. “I’m betting they were put on after mummification occurred,” she said.

“Impossible,” said Dr. Hubbard. “The drying-out process took place because they were sealed into an airless closet, Joleen. They may have been dressed after they were dead, but their crypt was clearly undisturbed until we opened it yesterday.”

The graduate student did not appear intimidated, nor particularly dissuaded, but said nothing. Morgan considered the implications of a lengthy delay between death and the
memento mori
tableau. He wondered: was the arrangement
meant to inflict humiliation on the dead? To provide grisly satisfaction for the killer? To symbolize the transcendence of love for the lovers’ accomplice? To taunt posterity with an impenetrable mystery?

Shelagh Hubbard had rejoined her colleague, and the two of them huddled over the headless corpses, conferring in whispers. The graduate student lingered beside Morgan. He introduced himself.

“And where are you from, Joleen?”

It was his favourite question, the way others will ask a stranger, What do you do? or, How do you like the weather? He needed to know where people were from. He was so completely a creature of one city, it connected him to the larger world.

“Cabbagetown,” she said. “That’s right here in downtown Toronto.”

“I know where Cabbagetown is,” he said quickly, staring at her for a moment, trying to place her within the social spectrum — tenement or townhouse?

“Working class, poor,” she declared, as if reading his thoughts. She was neither defiant nor ashamed; it was like saying she was brunette or a woman. “And what about you?”

“The same.”

“What are you two on about?” asked Shelagh Hubbard, turning around as if she were coming up for air.

“Common ancestry,” said Joleen with a laugh.

“Common heritage,” Morgan amended. She was of Chinese extraction — Morgan hated the brutal and trivializing term, “extraction.” They were both from Cabbagetown.

“Joleen, eh? Did your parents ever go to Nashville?”

“When your last name is Chau and you don’t live in Chinatown, you get called ‘Joleen.’ It’s about trying to fit in, avoiding the ethnic thing.”

“You draw from a counter-ethnicity,” said Morgan, rolling the name Joleen through his mind with a country cadence.

“I like that,” said Shelagh Hubbard. “You could have been an academic, Morgan, the way you make up your own jargon. There’d be a publication in that: ‘Crossing Over: Second-Generation Immigrants and Counter-Ethnicity in Naming Their Offspring.’”

“I’m seventh-generation, actually,” said Joleen.

“I’m from Vancouver, myself,” said Dr. Hubbard, as if her declaration made sense. “We’d better get back to work,” she continued. “We can’t leave everything to Professor Birbalsingh. You can watch along if you want, Detective.”

“The clothes,” said Morgan. “How did you remove them?”

“Very carefully. The limbs articulated with gentle persuasion. Hers were easier than his.”

“They didn’t have underwear on,” said Joleen. “She didn’t even have bloomers.”

“They weren’t invented yet,” said Dr. Hubbard.

“Open-crotched culottes. Whatever. She wasn’t wearing anything under her petticoats. Neither was he — no underwear under his trousers. The frock coat is fine worsted but his pants are a really coarse twill. You can bet they didn’t get dressed like that on their own.”

“The clothes are as valuable as the lovers themselves,” Shelagh Hubbard observed.

“I doubt they would have agreed,” said Morgan.

Shelagh Hubbard smiled enigmatically.

“And the bodies?” he asked. “They’ll be examined and recorded and then shelved, I suppose.”

“We really should get back to work.”

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“We? Anything at all. The cause or causes of death. They might have died separately. You could help us track down
their identities, Detective. Not that it really matters, but it might give us insight into why they were killed. I doubt we’ll ever know by whom.”

“It matters. Without names, they’re generic,” Morgan observed. “Without a story, they’re artifacts.”

“I think you’d make a better poet than professor,” said Joleen.

“Thank you,” said Morgan.

“We’re looking for anomalies,” explained Shelagh Hubbard. “Discovery through difference: what is out of place, what distinguishes these individuals from others, who are they now? As bodies, they’re generic, yes, but as artifacts they are a present phenomenon, one which we need to study, Mr. Morgan.”

“Sorry. Carry on, by all means. I’ll just take a peak in the box.”

“Those are the heads. I think it would be better if you left them alone for now. We need to examine them in laboratory conditions.”

“We’re in a laboratory,” he said as he lifted the top off the box. The heads had been carefully arranged side by side, protected from sliding about during transportation by a black, velvety material that bunched up between them. He instinctively reached down to suppress the material so that they could seem more together.

Shelagh Hubbard placed her hand on his arm, trying to draw him back. “These must be considered scientific specimens. If you don’t mind.”

“I do, actually.” He pulled away. Unsure whether he was joking or trying somehow to restore a little of their lost humanity to the dead, he said, “The least we could do is set the box up on its side so they can observe what they’re missing.” He could hear Joleen suppress a giggle.

“Don’t be absurd,” said Shelagh Hubbard. She fixed her gaze on Morgan with an intensity that made him shudder. She seemed able to turn her allure on or off like a wilful chameleon. Her pale eyes had taken on a predatory lustre and the death’s-head appearance of her high cheekbones, accentuated by her blond hair pulled back tightly against her skull, seemed suddenly, dangerously exciting. In spite of his better judgment Morgan felt drawn in, wanting vaguely to please her, uncertain what was required.

She stood unnaturally close. He tried to hold his ground. He thought he felt the curve of her breast against his chest as she turned slightly to the side. She turned again, and this time there was no mistake. She was using sexuality as an instrument of intimidation. She leaned into him. He flinched, then to her surprise he pushed forward, pressing his body against hers. For the briefest moment they stood torso to torso in an armless embrace. He could feel her breasts, both of them, the tight roundness of her belly, her upper thighs. He did an instant inventory, then she turned and stepped away as if nothing had happened.