Grave Doubts (9 page)

“It is an admirable counterfeit, all of this, but there is an intriguing anomaly, and that, Miranda — if I may call you Miranda — is the poetry you wanted. This fraud paradoxically insists on being exposed — something hidden, a concealment, that yearns for revelation. This makes it a work of art. The whole project is designed for our appreciation, incomplete until it has been exposed.

“The key is the hanging cabinet: it was bolted in place, it is valuable. A salvager would be counted on to retrieve it. It would refuse to yield. The wall had to give way. The bodies were exposed not amidst rubble but in pristine condition — exactly, I imagine, as the killer intended. And there we are!”

Alexander Pope looked pleased with himself.

Morgan was excited by his articulate economy with words. The man was worthy of his namesake. Miranda was thinking, there is nothing poetic about murder, except in classical tragedy, or in revisionist history, or perhaps in a psyche twisted by unspeakable suffering. She said nothing.

Morgan was thinking, this is theatre not poetry. But is the killer a brilliant and haunted dramaturge, or merely some wretched soul on the edge of events who has set a story in motion and is now waiting in the wings to see how it all turns out? Are we part of the audience or part of the action?

chapter five
Port Hope

For the next two weeks, Miranda and Morgan scanned missing-persons files, tracked down false leads, and despite an absence of DNA records, eventually established probable identities. They found that neither of the deceased had any connection with the derelict house, and no relationship with each other. The cause of their deaths had not been precisely determined, nor, due to their mummified condition, could the exact time of their demise be established, especially since both were missing for some time before anyone noticed. The man was a traveller from the States, and no one at his home office even knew he was in Toronto. He had an ex-wife who wasn’t aware of his absence until a postdated cheque failed to be honoured, and who was the beneficiary of his modest insurance policy. He was Jewish and had never been associated with the Masonic Order. The woman was a fourth-year student at York University, ominously majoring in anthropology. She was from Liverpool, estranged from her family,
had recently emerged from a dishevelled relationship with another woman, and was a Mormon, not Catholic as the crucifix implied. Her former girlfriend, an agnostic, was shocked by her death.

The papers ran with the Hogg’s Hollow murders for a couple of days. Television coverage lasted only a few hours. When it turned out the dead were not actually lovers, the news media, following their prime directive to entertain, shifted attention to more accessible crimes and misdemeanours, where the blood was still warm and death was a thrill. The public appetite for horror was fickle. Without romance to keep the blood flowing, the story had the lasting power of a horror film, forgotten half way home from the theatre. It was as if the grisly events had actually occurred in the colonial past. They might have sustained interest for history buffs and the occasional misdirected forensic anthropologist, but otherwise seemed of likely concern only to police assigned to the case.

Miranda and Rachel Naismith became friends. One day when they were off duty they drove out to Port Hope in Miranda’s Jaguar. Lunching in a family restaurant on Walton Street that had booth-side jukeboxes and grey-flecked tables and served real raisin pie, they felt the time-warped atmosphere bode well for their intended visit to Alexander Pope. They were both fascinated by the man’s capacity to represent himself as being from an era that never quite was. Port Hope was the perfect setting for an adventure through time, straddling as it did so many periods in its diverse architecture and casual gentility.

The downtown area was Ontario vernacular, shorn of the garish paraphernalia of twentieth-century merchandising. Three- to five-storey red-brick buildings hovered close to the street, interspersed with the occasional civic edifice
of quarried stone. Victorian cornices and casements, pediments and paint — all were revealed in parochial splendour, celebrating the town’s pride in its historical past and aesthetic present.

Driving a circuitous route to Pope’s place on the outskirts, Miranda and Rachel shared their admiration for old houses, from modest mansions topped with widow’s walks to painted-brick cottages tucked behind white picket fences. Most of the older homes bespoke a lovely merging of civic responsibility, architectural self-consciousness, and horticultural vanity. It occurred to Miranda as they drove past a well-kempt cemetery that even the dead in Port Hope maintained decorum.

As curiosity began to seem an exercise in delayed gratification, they veered away from the town and after ten minutes of exhilarating lakeshore landscape they turned into a long driveway and drove up a hill to Alexander Pope’s fine old house, which was set in brooding isolation behind a shrouding of foliage. The building itself was a marvel of austere congeniality on the outside, and conveyed the promise of esoteric pleasures within.

Waiting at the door on the side porch, which was partially enclosed as a shed, Miranda stared into the shadows beside them. There was what appeared to be the entrance to a wood-fired sauna. A stack of dry maple firewood. Various tools for gardening and building. A chainsaw. She felt the thrill of connection on seeing a couple of compressed-air tanks leaning against the wall.

He’s a diver, she thought.

Alexander Pope was a man of wide-ranging pursuits, as well as of arcane skills, esoteric knowledge, eccentric apparel, awkward charm, and stellar lineage.

She was going to mention the scuba gear to Rachel but something in the other woman’s muted excitement made
her keep silent. The two of them were like teenagers calling on the mysterious boy in the big house who had just moved into the neighbourhood. When the inner door opened, they breathed deeply in unison, as if something magnificent were about to occur.

Alexander greeted them through the storm door like old friends. He recognized them instantly and invited them in. After brief chatter he gave them a tour of the house. He identified old locks, small cabinets, hinges, and latches, and with unexpected candour he showed them how to distinguish original sideboards and dressers and tables from reconstructions. He showed them replicas he had himself contrived, with meticulous attention to detail. Even hidden joints, places, and materials never meant to be seen, bore the artisan’s signature devotion to successful dissembling.

Since the surrounding grounds were too soggy from the spring thaw to be negotiated, he explained the exterior of the house while they sat in front of the kitchen fire. He described how the Georgian lines were so well-served by painted wood siding made to represent ashlar blocks, which came to light when the layers of clapboard and aluminum had been peeled away.

On the outside, restoration had been scrupulously governed by Pope’s desire for authenticity. Inside, he had taken liberties, moving or eliminating walls to achieve an airy yet intricate effect that allowed him copious wall space against which to display his country furniture.

All in all, Alexander Pope seemed to have eliminated the Victorian era. Everything around him had been made by, or honoured, the settlers from the Old World and up from the States who displaced native inhabitants in the area, or was unabashedly contemporary. The lighting was modern, not tacky reproductions of old lanterns and lamps, the plumbing
and appliances were not coyly disguised. The panes in his twelve-over-twelve windows were rippled with age, although the glass had been set into newly built versions of old frames.

They sat on ladder-back chairs — brought up during the Revolution by United Empire Loyalists — at a harvest table from Ile d’Orléans before the fall of New France, with the robust patina of a dozen generations etched deeply into its broad, blackened boards, and drank instant coffee. It was better than Rachel’s, Miranda thought, but not much. How can you ruin instant coffee? Perhaps it was never meant to be endlessly boiled.

Alexander Pope asked Miranda for a progress report on the Hogg’s Hollow investigation, affecting a gravitas that Miranda found curiously winsome. Rachel laughed at him. He seemed not to notice. After eliciting particulars that from his perspective were extraneous, such as the identity of the victims and the finer points of their execution, he let the matter drop, cracked open a bottle of cooking sherry, and they spent the rest of the afternoon talking antiques.

Several times the possibility of murder as an art form arose, invariably embedded in a historical context, and drifted away amid talk of aesthetics and artifice, antiquities and architecture. They might have been in another time, or out of time entirely. It was a most pleasant occasion, thought Miranda as they drove back to Toronto, each woman silently savouring what they had shared.

The Port Hope foray occurred on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter. Morgan had mysteriously taken his leave a couple of days earlier. He would only admit to a return date, later the following week. Miranda guessed he was heading south. The Cayman Islands, perhaps. That’s where she had gone scuba diving several years back, living aboard a dive boat and earning Open Water and Advanced PADI
certification. He had subsequently promised he would dive with her some day, although she wouldn’t have held him to it. Knowing Morgan, she suspected he had snuck off to learn on his own so that he could keep up with her.

The visit to Alexander Pope was in some way related to her partner’s absence, she suspected, although it had arisen in conversation with Rachel as simply a fun thing to do. She could not remember which of them first brought it up, but they had both taken it on as a pilgrimage — not to the man, but for the sake of the lovely odd values and grace he embodied.

Back at her desk the next week, Miranda was still annoyed with Morgan. The autopsy reports finally came in: they suggested both victims had died from a profound breakdown of the autonomic system, in all probability by protracted exposure to heat without adequate hydration — symptoms, according to the medical examiner’s report, consistent with a slow death in the central Sahara.

Miranda shuddered. She phoned the medical examiner’s office and asked for Ellen Ravenscroft.

“I enjoyed the report,” she said. “Nice prose style; a touch ornate.”

“Which report would that be, love?”

“The Sahara Desert. That was good.”

“It was a particularly trying job. Onerous, very onerous. Have you ever been to Guanahuato?”

“Where?”

“Guanahuato. It’s in Mexico. No, I don’t suppose you have.”

Miranda wondered why she had called.

“They put bodies on display in the Museo de los Mommias. There’s a natural mummifying effect from the sand where the townspeople bury their dead. If no one pays the cemetery fees, after ten years the bodies are disinterred. The
interesting ones go into the museum, the others are tossed out. It’s electrifying, walking among them.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Curiosity, love — about the poor sods who maintain the exhibit. Can you imagine working there? Like being a coroner’s apprentice without the autopsies. I’m not much interested in a replenishing stock of dried-out corpses scavenged from reusable graves, despite my choice of professions, but when I was prying through the insides of your closeted lovers I couldn’t help thinking about the state-employed ghouls of Guanahuato. You should visit sometime. They have an annual Cervantes festival.”

“They weren’t lovers.”

“No, I expect they weren’t. We found traces of mould on the male’s skin. He’d been processed and placed on hold for a while before she came along. The poor thing had none on her at all, so they were probably encrypted as soon as she was prepared. Anyway, love, as I was working I recalled Guanahuato, bodies arranged for morbid amusement. It’s a form of play, Miranda. Playing with the dead. Your killer is a fatalist with a warped appreciation for the absurdity of the human condition. Let’s make death perform — it performs. You’re looking for someone utterly lacking in empathy, someone who has an impoverished emotional life, inflexible religious beliefs, or none at all, and a fecund imagination.”

“Thank you, Detective Inspector Ravenscroft. And the Sahara?”

“That was for colour. Guanahuato wouldn’t have worked. You know why? I’ll tell you why. Neither of your lovers was dead before the process of mummification began!”

“Oh, Christ!”

“A killer with a mind like the mind of God. You know the fall from Eden is all about making us live out our lives,
knowing we’re dying from the moment of conception. Not that I believe all that. Not the religious part. I’d say your murders are virtually incomprehensible from a mortal perspective. But so is life.” She paused. “Medical examiners carry on conversations with the dead, you know. We’re filled with deep thoughts. Let’s get together. I hear Morgan’s deserted you.”

“He’ll be back next week. I’ll call.”

“Do.”

“Bye.”

Miranda had no intention of calling, and Ellen Ravenscroft had no expectation that she would. Somehow, Morgan as an issue of playful contention between them had opened a minor rift. It was not so much that Miranda wanted Morgan as her lover — she was pretty sure she did not. But she did not want the medical examiner to have him, either. Miranda at her desk was an uncommon sight. Superintendent Alex Rufalo noted her presence, looked at his watch, and chortled to himself. With Morgan away, she was spending more visible time in the office. Usually the two of them were off by themselves — freelancing, he called it; working the field. You never knew when they might turn up, day or night.

Aware of being watched, Miranda caught Rufalo’s eye and smiled with what she imagined was non-invasive congeniality. She didn’t want to pry but she wanted him to know she was there, if he needed her. Nurturing be damned, she thought, and went back to work. She was reading Morgan’s inspired version of the Hogg’s Hollow murders.

Rachel Naismith leaned against Miranda’s desk, waiting to be noticed. She was in street clothes and carried a small pack or knapsack, as well as a purse. Miranda was intent on Morgan’s account, which he had written up for her benefit as if it were a piece for
The New Yorker
. Without taking her eyes
from the page, she said, “He writes more like Truman Capote than Dashiell Hammett.”