Birbalsingh grunted as he manoeuvred his soft body to get a better perspective on the male. Hubbard was opposite, hovering over the woman. It was as if they had divided the victims according to gender.
She looked up at Morgan, then at Miranda, then back at Morgan.
“Goodnight, Detectives,” she said.
Miranda sensed strain in the woman’s smile. Possibly the police had overstepped their bounds in retrieving the heads. Perhaps in placing the heads they had undermined procedural objectivity by performing their small ritual of empathy and defiance.
Miranda didn’t much care. She was ready to go home.
Rachel Naismith saw them to the door.
“Thanks for dropping in,” she said.
“We’ll do it again, sometime,” said Miranda.
The two women exchanged a quick embrace, while Morgan walked by himself toward the car.
Miranda caught up and, slipping on the sidewalk, grabbed his arm to recover. He walked her to the driver’s side. Morgan stood back and waited until she pulled away from the curb, but he still got an icy soaker as he climbed in beside her. It had been an adventure; they both felt somehow winter was over. They drove into the darkness, at its bleakest just before dawn.
CHAPTER THREE
The heavy wet snow that accumulated during the night made Yonge Street treacherous. Morgan sat back, white-knuckled, fatalistic but hopeful as Miranda negotiated her way through ruts of turgid slush and gave wide berth to a blue-beaconed truck spewing sand that bore down on them from the other direction near Eglinton. It was the only vehicle they encountered on the desolate streets all the way to the Annex. She was a good driver, relatively speaking, and fervently protective about her car. She would deliver him safely to the door for the sake of her vintage Jaguar.
Weird and wonderful, he thought. Her devotion to the car, like her commitment to her teenage ward, Jill Bray, was a perverse response to heinous crimes. It was astonishing the satisfaction both had brought to her life. She would never have purchased such a car on her own; nor would she by choice have begun parenting with a feisty and resilient survivor of horrific abuse, a child-woman whose story strangely mirrored her own. The car was an act of defiance; Jill was an affirmation of love.
When she pulled up in front of Morgan’s condo, he echoed his invitation of the previous evening. “Do you want to come in?” As if to make it more enticing, he added, “Until the streets are cleared? For an early breakfast?”
She looked as if she might be considering it.
“If you want to sleep, I’ll take the sofa,” he said.
“That clinches it,” she responded. “I’m off. I want to sleep through the day in my own bed. You know what I was thinking?”
When she turned to address him, the indigo instrument lights cast her features in an eerie pallor. She looks sculptural, he thought. Her face is like alabaster in moonlight.
“I was thinking about Heathcliff and Catherine.”
“I’m not surprised,” he said.
He was tired, but sat back against the leather of the deep bucket seat.
“Don’t relax too much. But it just crossed my mind while I was driving: Wuthering Heights was published in 1847.”
“You know that why?”
“You’re not the only one who stores away bits of esoteric information.” She paused. “I looked it up.”
“Never give away your sources.”
“Okay, we have two people. We assume they were lovers — ”
“Assume?”
“Maybe it was a macabre joke and they were famous for hating each other. Anyway, there they are, posed like Heathcliff and Catherine, post-mortem. Only Wuthering Heights hadn’t come out yet.”
“And?”
“And nothing. It just means no one was emulating Emily Bronte.”
“Same with Auguste Rodin. ‘The Kiss’ was a century later. But what about Dante? The Divine Comedy was written five centuries before the murders took place.”
“That’s stretching it, Morgan. Our culture-conscious killer would never count on someone getting the connection, and certainly not cops.” Miranda found the notion that police don’t read, listen to music, enjoy art, attend theatre, or cook like gourmands extremely irksome. It did not bother Morgan. “Maybe the way they’re posed is not an allusion to anything, just inspired depravity.”
“Inspired depravity!”
“I sort of feel guilty they’ve been disturbed,” she said. “Don’t you?”
“Not really. They’ve been locked out of time; now they’re back in.”
“That’s very profound, and sad.”
“Let’s say the former and call it a night.”
“G’night, Morgan.”
“Phone if you work it all out. If you see Jill, give her my love. And thanks for the ride.”
She waited until he unlocked his front door, which years ago he had lovingly painted with fourteen coats of midnight blue. It gleamed a putrescent brown in the reflected light of the city at dawn. Miranda shuddered and drove off, giving a reckless beep on the horn. She was suddenly so exhausted she could hardly guide the car through the ruts, and she concentrated on the promise of a warm bed with fresh flannel sheets.
Morgan closed the door. He was thinking about Rodin’s sculpture. While he got ready for bed he pondered the problem, if it could be considered a problem. How can there be such discrepancy between an artist’s intent and the accepted response to his art?
As he lingered in front of the bathroom mirror, he envisioned “The Kiss” in its various manifestations: plaster and terra cotta and marble and bronze. An image of the desiccated corpses in Hogg’s Hollow intruded but was displaced by the full-size plaster maquette he had seen with Miranda while they were playing hooky from work at the ROM. It was a ghostly white apparition in a room full of chalky anatomical figures on their way to more permanent representation in metal and stone. A ghost among ghosts.
Catching sight of himself reflected amid the images shunting through his mind, he relaxed and briefly attended to the mundane necessities of brushing his teeth and washing. He lifted his pyjamas, black moose strolling on a red background, from a hook on the back of the bathroom door and walked stark naked up to his bedroom where he stood, shivering, lost again in contemplation.
He was so tired, nothing made sense, and after becoming thoroughly chilled he put on his pyjamas and climbed into bed. He curled around himself and breathed deeply, lifting the covers for a moment to let a defining burst of cold air penetrate his cocoon, then he sealed them snugly around his shoulders and almost immediately drifted into a deep slumber.
Morgan awakened to the insistent ring of the telephone. He picked up the receiver on the night table but there was only a dial tone. Maybe he had dreamed it was ringing. Light rising from the window downstairs indicated it was mid-morning, but he was not interested in getting up.
He rolled over on his back without looking at his watch or the alarm clock on the dresser and drew the covers close. He had tried an eider-down duvet someone once gave him, but preferred the weight of thick wool blankets, which seemed to modulate their proffered warmth according to his needs, rather than smothering him with the indifference of feathers. Snug, breathing the cool air of the room, he tried to reconstruct his last dream.
Inevitably, it evaded coherence. There were images of wizened corpses entwined as intimately as their clothing allowed, of skulls with their features contorted into the tight grimace of mockery at the fears of the living, of plaster and bronze torsos and severed limbs, of flesh mounded and shapeless, waiting to be formed into bodies. There was a diorama contrived at Hogg’s Hollow with meticulous care to convey mystery, and a confusion of intent and response. There were intimations of genius, and no question about murder. Heathcliff, Rodin, romantic love, death…