Morgan turned the other two pictures over, but they were blank. It was getting late. He telephoned her anyway. A sleepy voice answered.
“Morgan?”
“How did you know it was me?”
“Who else?”
“It’s only eleven — ”
“- forty-five.”
“Talk to me,” he said.
“Did Heathcliff have a first name?”
“Miranda?”
“I thought you’d be interested.”
“Possibly.”
“They’re still at the scene,” Miranda said. “Headless. The superintendent wants forensic anthropologists to see them in situ. But tenured scientists don’t work the night shift.”
“Whoever moved them must have already looked for the heads. They shouldn’t have been moved. Amazing they didn’t come apart.”
“They’re frozen in an eternal embrace, Morgan. Like sculpture, flesh turned to bronze.”
“I hope someone has the imagination to bury them like that.”
“In the Yorkshire dales?”
“Maybe the English won’t take them. They’ve got enough old stuff already.”
“They took the Elgin Marbles!”
“The Parthenon looks better without them. Less cluttered.”
“Good night, Morgan.”
“Oh, no! No way. We’re going up there.”
“Come on!”
“We’re going headhunting; I’ll be over in fifteen minutes.”
“Morgan, go to sleep.”
“You wouldn’t have offered the temptation if you weren’t prepared for the consequences.”
He could hear her smiling.
“How do you know, up there?” she said. “Up where?”
“They’re wearing town clothes but the room is country.”
“Keep going.”
“See the fragments of plaster?” he continued as if she had the photographs in front of her. “They’re dangling on horsehair from hand-split, swamp-cedar lath. You can see the crown moulding is local design, wood not plaster, and the baseboard is original. Upper Canadian, transitional farmhouse. Too bad they can’t salvage it. I’d say we’re talking about somewhere on the northern margins of early Toronto — before 1834 when it was still Muddy York — up around Hogg’s Hollow, east off Yonge. Within hearing distance of Highway 401.”
“Sometimes you’re fun, Morgan. See you in half an hour. Bring coffee.”
She hung up the phone and rolled over, pleased with herself. She had almost fallen asleep, waiting for his call. She knew, for all Morgan’s interest in pioneer cabinetry and oriental rugs and exotic fish and Arctic exploration and Easter Island and language acquisition and the history of ideas, that nothing got him going like an unresolved murder. And if they were absorbed in a mutual interest, her own disposition unaccountably mellowed.
She stretched languidly. Morgan would be closer to an hour getting there. She had time to enjoy the warmth of the room before preparing herself against the penetrating dampness outside. He refused to buy a car and trudging through accretions of icy slush from the Annex over to Isabella would take its toll. He would be late, chilled to the bone, and grumpy. Grumpy was different from morose. She could laugh at grumpy, and he would laugh back.
She was wearing only a T-shirt and men’s boxers. One of the advantages of a condo over rental is that she controlled her own thermostat.
Miranda had lived in the same place as a student. When she returned to the city after three years in the RCMP, she discovered the building was being converted to private ownership and snapped up her old apartment. Partly it was for nostalgia — the reassurance of familiar terrain — and partly it was her fondness for varnish on the balustrades checkered by time, worn marble stairs, paned windows, and porcelain fixtures. Consistency was the hobgoblin of little minds! Someone said that. Probably Swift or Pope. It sounded eighteenth century-ish.
She thought of herself as “urban contemporary,” perhaps because she grew up in a village. Morgan was raised, impoverished, in Cabbagetown, just south of where she lived now, back when it was in transition to becoming an upscale address. He was a gentleman by nature not birth, and endearingly unkempt, but not shabby.
Her intercom buzzed.
“Morgan?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re here so soon.”
“I took a taxi.”
“You never.”
“I did. Are you going to let me in?”
“Did you bring coffee?”
“Yes.”
She buzzed him in, then unlocked her door.
She was in the bathroom, dabbing sleep wrinkles out of her face with icy water, when he called from the kitchen.
“Do you want milk in yours? I asked for double-double but they’re both black with no sugar.”
“Good,” she mumbled, applying lipstick as a token gesture. “Help yourself. I’ll stick with black.”
She walked out into the kitchen.
“You look good when you’re sleepy; very ethereal.”
“Like the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw. Brunettes can’t be ethereal; we’re alluring.”
“Seductive.”
“In your dreams, Morgan.”
She did look attractive, rumpled. Sometimes he was very aware she was a woman.
“Doesn’t that make you think of erectile dysfunction?” she said.
“What?”
“Wuthering Heights.”
He grimaced.
Once, in this same apartment, they had made love. He remembered, looking at her now, that it was good, but they never tried it again.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We can drink these on the way.”
“No, just a sec, I need milk to cool it down. What’s it like outside?”
“The usual.”
“Cold, wet, and the sky is radiant?”
“Glowing putrescence, like a painting by Turner. Let’s go.”
In Miranda’s car, they reviewed what they knew about the case. It wasn’t their case but they were already committed. It wasn’t anyone’s case, really. It was a matter of historical interest, not criminal justice.
Miranda asked Morgan to dig her cellphone from the depths of her purse and call headquarters to let them know what they were doing. His own was, inevitably, battery-dead and in his sweater drawer along with anachronistic cuff links and a gold, hardly used wedding band.
“We happened to be in the area,” Morgan explained to Alex Rufalo, their superintendent, and after a brief exchange dropped the phone back into her bag.
“We’re not the only ones who work late,” he said.
“We’re not working, remember?” She paused. “Rufalo went home before I left. There must be something up to bring him back in. The office as sanctuary, no?”
