LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

      "Must be from Waterloo County. An Ontario Quin."

      "And this is Officer Naismith —"

      "Whom I have already met. Delighted," he said, bowing slightly. She regarded him warily, lifted her lip in a feigned snarl, and bowed in return. They shared a smile between them.

      "The pleasure was mine, Mr. Pope. I've always admired your bulls." No one got the joke. "Papal bulls? Encyclicals? Pronouncements? Don't you hate that? It's been a long night."

      "It is four-thirty-five," Alexander said. "In the afternoon. Saturday. March, I believe."

      "If you want to go, Officer Naismith, we'll cover," Morgan offered. "You need some downtime."

      "Hardly," she said. "But I'll heat up some coffee if you'd like. I've still got a bit left."

      "No thanks," said the other three simultaneously.

      "Now, Mr. Morgan," said Alexander Pope. "You said on the telephone there were anomalies here. You found two bodies in this closed-off closet, except for their heads, which fetched up in the laundry chute. I am to understand the dead couple were in an intimate embrace, rather in spite of mutual decapitation. I suppose there was a third party involved. Someone contrived what purported to be an ancient crime, but it seems it was not. And you want my opinion about what, precisely?"

      There was a touch of the carnivalesque in the air. Pope was relishing his role as forensic antiquarian, Rachel was giddy from sleep deprivation, Miranda was distracted by lingering sensuality that refused to coalesce around particular memories or desire. And Morgan was happy. He had been drawn out of winter lethargy by a macabre spectacle so wondrously devised, where the anonymous victims were dramatis personae and the mysteries of death itself were on theatrical display.

      The transition to serious work was abrupt. Alexander took out a Swiss Army knife and pried off a small slab of plaster from the edge of the hidden closet. He set the plaster on the floor and gently crushed it under the ball of his foot, then leaned down with surprising grace for such a tall and angular man and retrieved a few remnants of dust-dry powder and strands of fibre. He turned to the wall cupboard that was leaning against a pile of splintered lath, squatted down, and examined it closely. He smiled appreciatively, turned it over, and scrutinized the back, fingering the bolts that had been embedded in a stringer running between the studs of the original door frame. He drew a penlight out of his hip pocket and entered the closet, disappearing in the sudden darkness as he moved under the eaves. He emerged and walked over to the laundry chute, stuck his hand in with the flashlight, then squeezed his head through the restricted opening and looked down, then up. He extricated himself, rose to his full height, and smiled beatifically.

      "Someone has done remarkably fine work," he pronounced. "There's a paradox, though. Everything has been meticulously contrived to seem in keeping with the age of the house. The plaster is a good imitation, slaked lime with horsehair binding, aged well, and layered with paint and paper. A lot of thought went into this project. The only woodwork that shows — the baseboard across the bottom where the door had been — is authentic. I assume the culprit took it from one of the other rooms. The filler, the paint, and the blending are spot on. But the inside of the closet has been sealed with a contemporary potion — Polyfilla, I expect.

      "The lath over the sealed door and the chute must have been lifted from another room as well, even another house. It's all hand-split swamp cedar, but tacked on with old nails that have recently been cleaned. The chute, of course, was a rather ingenious dumbwaiter to bring wood upstairs for the fire. This house predates cast-iron stoves, which were evidently a later accoutrement. There is a fireplace here, hidden inside the gable-end wall. A stovepipe was later forced through into the chimney. Another goes up through the roof in the hall, above the dumbwaiter shaft. The chute was lined for laundry quite recently, possibly between the wars, and blocked off at floor level only in the last fortnight or so.

      "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

Скачать книгу