They kept in daily contact with the regional OPP through the woman in charge, who was the sergeant at the scene when they had gone up to check out the abandoned car. They had had several routine cases after that: one in Rosedale — a situation that was euphemistically described as justifiable homicide. Politically sensitive. No charges were laid. There was a shooting in Yorkville, and another on lower Jarvis Street. Both saw the demise of pathetic outsiders — social misfits murdered by friends. Arrests were made without incident. The paperwork for all three cases was staggering.
Morgan had fled the office earlier in the day, before Miranda got in. Sitting hunched over his desk, images kept intruding on words. He was haunted by the memory of Shelagh Hubbard when they saw first her inside the stone crypt. For a fraction of a second he had thought it was the sanctified body of a dead saint! Perhaps he saw Lucy, he wasn’t sure. Marie Celeste seemed to obscure the edges of identity, even when she wasn’t there. Perhaps that’s what a saint does, he thought. He wanted to avoid Miranda until the images sorted themselves out.
Despite the early onset of summer, the case had turned cold. The confusion of saints and sinners refused to unravel. The OPP had focused on Alexander Pope for a while, but as Morgan pointed out, the guy was a harmless eccentric. Sure, his prints and residual bits were everywhere in what was formerly the Church of the Immaculate Conception, but the place was, in effect, his studio. There wasn’t so much as a fleck of skin, a fingernail paring, a loose hair on the elevated chancel near the opening in the stone floor — apart from his DNA adhering to the slab where they had lifted it away when they opened the crypt. Morgan’s was there as well. There was, indeed, a connection between Pope and the murder victim, but he had been her teacher, not her mentor, and more recently his involvement was at Morgan’s request.
Alexander Pope, himself, was apparently undeterred by the macabre turn of events. Miranda talked to him several times on the phone, getting progress reports on his project. Officer Peter Singh dropped in on him periodically and let Morgan and Miranda know how he was doing. Morgan envied Pope — a man consumed by his work to the exclusion of anything else; an artist obsessed.
In London, the Chamber of Horrors affair was already forgotten. Once the tabloids realized the Canadian involvement, they lost interest. Few Britons knew the notorious Dr. Crippen had practised in London, Ontario, where he refined his lethal techniques before dispatching so many English women to their untimely departures. Canada is too culturally bland to inspire much interest, even in murder, thought Morgan, wondering whether it was the fickle British or Canadian diffidence that made it so.
In Toronto, the Hogg’s Hollow murders had slipped from the public mind into the irretrievable past. Despite the fact that the bodies were of recent vintage, the whole affair was smothered by a general indifference to the city’s colonial heritage: it was as if they really had been long-dead lovers, not unfortunate strangers visiting a modern metropolis.
In Owen Sound, and all the way from Meaford in the east to Southampton in the west, and north to Wiarton, the reputation of Officer Peter Singh had spread like a rumour. Even his parents were now firm supporters in his choice of career, despite his father’s earlier disappointment that he had not gone into the military, or at least the RCMP.
In Beausoleil the deconsecrated church was once again a cultural curiosity. The significance of the frescoes had been greatly enhanced by renewed secular interest in Sister Marie Celeste. The true pilgrims came only in the dead of night and eventually stopped coming even then, but museum curators and art historians were received by appointment during the day.
“Whoa, Morgan! Where are you going?” It was Miranda, stepping out the door of Starbucks just over from police headquarters on College. “Talk about a man lost in thought.”
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about anything. My goodness, I’ve walked all the way down from Lawrence Avenue. Holy smokes, that’s a walk.”
“I knew you’d be coming. Yossarian called. Said you were determined to walk the length of Yonge Street. Thank God you turned south. Come in for a coffee — take a break from your travails and travels. I’ll buy you a cappuccino.”
“How long have you been waiting?”
“I figured you’d walk the distance, so I didn’t come over ’til maybe twenty minutes ago.”
After they settled in with their coffees, Morgan asked, “What’s up?”
“Well, I had a call from Sergeant Sheahan.”
“Who?”
“OPP. In charge of the investigation at Beausoleil.”
“So, what’s Sergeant Sheahan got to say?”
“Nothing. That’s the point. Nothing, nada. They found DNA traces at Shelagh Hubbard’s. Our Hogg’s Hollow bodies were processed at the farm, for sure. Beyond that, nothing. They’re virtually closing down their investigation. That’s what they mean when they say ‘leaving it open, pending further developments.’”
“Yeah. So where does that leave us?”
“With a mystery of unknowable proportions.”
“They’re the worst kind.”
“Or best. The most mysterious mysteries are best.”
“For whom?”
“There’s got to be something to connect with,” said Miranda. “If it won’t deconstruct, it’s indecipherable. There has to be a way in.”
“My dad used to say, ‘If it ain’t broken, you can’t fix it.’”
“A wise man.”
“And Ellen Ravenscroft once said ‘The hardest autopsy is when nothing seems wrong.’”
“Except the patient is dead.”
“Yeah, the client.”
“Is that what they call them? ‘Clients’?”
“I dunno,” said Morgan. “But ‘patient’ implies recovery.”
“‘Client’ implies payment for services rendered.”
“Dead people. Let’s say they call their clients ‘dead people.’ And they do get paid, just not by the dead people. By taxpayers.”
“I do not like to think I pay Ellen Ravenscroft’s salary. I prefer knowing she pays mine.”
“Miranda?”
“Yes?”
“Why did you waylay me here? I could have been to the harbour by now.”
“And then what?”
“I would have turned around and begun to walk north.” He sipped his coffee. “Let’s go back to our theatrical analogy. Shelagh Hubbard was creating drama, recording the scenes she created; killing was an extension of the authorial imagination.”
“Okay,” said Miranda. “Then someone else cleverly reduced her to one of the characters in a narrative that swallows up hers. A meta-narrative.”
“And disposing of her as an aesthetic diversion, her killer subsumes her achievement, such as it was, into his or her own.”
“We sound more like literary critics than detectives, Morgan.”
“Okay, but if we see the whole thing, her grisly machinations in London and Toronto, and her disappearance, her death, and the Gothic disposition of her body, all as part of the same story, one continuous narrative by several authors, where does that lead us?”
“Exactly. Where? A single text; so what?”
“How did she die?”
“Poison.”
“Where?”
“At her farmhouse.”
“How did the blood get in her car?”
“The killer, her killer, put it there. Drained a bit during embalming, kept it fresh.”
“Same story as if she had written it, to this point. The killer wanted her death to be gentle, her car to be found. They wanted us to think she had staged her own abduction. Left the heat on in the house. Moved the bicycle. Arranged all the details, even the blood. Why?”
“To buy time.”
“Exactly. To buy time. Why? To merge their stories, to make her an inextricable part of the revised script. To process her corpse, to encrypt it beneath the altar.”
“There’s no altar. The chancel. But why there? To implicate Alexander?”
“To subsume her in a story larger than her own but under the killer’s control, to give it the mythic status of Sister Marie Celeste. Why the odour of violets?”