John Moss - Grave doubts

Morgan set the crowbar down, preparing to explore, but Miranda shunted him aside.

“This one is mine,” she said. “What’ll you bet there’s a board jammed across to stop things falling through to the cellar.”

She extended her arm fully down into the hole, grimaced as she made contact with something, and carefully lifted her arm out of the chute. Her hand was entwined with long tendrils of human hair. Suspended from the hair was the mummified head of a young woman, skin taut against the skull, lips drawn in a haunting grimace, membranes in her eye sockets catching fragments of light.

“Morgan,” she said. “Could you get the other one?”

Morgan tried to look in but his own head cast a shadow. He reached down, blindly, careful not to rip his flesh on splintered lath, and suddenly flinched. Steeling himself, he grasped the short-cropped hair of the remaining skull. He pulled it upwards and through, into the room.

Miranda was still holding the woman’s head cradled in the crook of her arm. Without exchanging words, both of them carried their grim loads over to the bodies.

Professor Birbalsingh and Dr. Hubbard stood aside while Morgan and Miranda kneeled and propped the heads against the necks from which they had been severed.

When they rose to their feet, the floorboards shivered and the heads lolled to the side. The detectives smiled shyly at each other. They had at least made a gesture to acknowledge the victims had once been alive.

Taking his cue from Miranda, who seemed quite pleased with herself but ready to leave, Morgan announced, “Well, folks, our work’s done here. It’s time for us to call it a night.” He felt strangely uplifted, as if the pieces of a lingering murder investigation were finally coming together, and at the same time he felt cheated, knowing it wasn’t theirs.

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.

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.