Morgan was appalled. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” he said. It was the only time he had ever called him that.
He wanted to hug his father, to forgive him for making him do it.
“Don’t be sorry,” his father said. Then to Morgan’s surprise he started jabbing away at his son’s instinctively raised fists. They were adversaries again.
“What’s my name, boy?”
His father never called him “boy.”
“Fred!”
“That’s right, David. Know who you’re fighting. Always know.”
With sudden deliberation he reached through and landed a glancing blow against the side of his son’s head, but leaving himself open, so that Morgan rolled with the punch and came up underneath with a solid blow to his father’s chin.
“Good God, David. You’re a little bugger.”
Morgan stared at him sullenly, daring him to strike back. His father got up off his knees, rising to his full height. Morgan stared up at him. This was his father again.
“And never lose your temper. If you do, you’ve lost the fight.”
When his father reached out to tousle his hair, Morgan flinched infinitesimally.
“Now get the hell out of here,” his father said as he stripped off the socks from his son’s clenched fists. “Go out and save the world from bullies.”
Morgan remembered his father standing tall and powerful in the middle of the living room, but he also remembered the terrible sounds of him wheezing and coughing up tobacco-soaked phlegm as Morgan strutted out the front door.
While they were stopped at the Yonge and Eglinton intersection, Miranda glanced over to see if he was going to break. He seemed relaxed.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay, tell me what’s going on, Morgan. You win.”
“Win what?”
“Whatever. You can’t set the rules if you don’t know the game.”
“My goodness,” he said. “You only coin cliches when you’re riled up about something.”
“Aphorisms. You can coin an aphorism. I’m not riled up.”
“But you would like an explanation.”
“No.”
“No?”
“They’re not old, are they! They’re recently deceased. The whole thing was a set-up, wasn’t it? A gruesome illusion, a joke? Right?”
“You’ve got it.”
“You’re kidding!”
“For sure.”
“Is it our case?”
“It is.”
“Oh, well done, Morgan.”
“I dropped into the forensic pathology lab this morning.”
“Because you had nothing better to do on a Saturday off?”
“I wanted to talk to Dr. Hubbard.”
“Come on, Morgan. She’s got cantilevered tits and Olive Oyl hair. Not your type at all.”
“No?”
“She looks like a raunchy popsicle.”
“I can’t picture it.”
“Morgan, if she ever let her hair down, her cheeks would sag to her chin.”
He had never known Miranda to be so bitchy. She had good instincts, and she didn’t hesitate to judge by appearance, but usually she was subtle. A cocked eyebrow, the trace of a smile. She was incisive but seldom unkind. And she was usually right. He, in contrast, saw neither what people wanted others to see, nor what they wanted to hide. He did not believe in the concept of self as a coherent entity. He saw personality as process, something revealed over time.
Often their conclusions converged, although his were less static than hers, and while they evolved slowly they were more open to revision.
“Is something bothering you?” he asked.
“Why?”
“You don’t seem yourself.”
“Do I ever?” she grinned. “I was looking forward to lazing in bed,” she said. “Dreaming good dreams, spending a lovely while on my own.” She continued to smile, without looking over at him. She had awakened blissfully distracted, like she had made love through the night, but her phantom lover had departed, and she could not remember his name. “So, what’s going on?” she asked.
“We missed it. They missed it. The medical examiner missed it. We were royally duped — by a master of the macabre. It’s all very Gothic.”
“Damn it,” she said. “I knew the clothes fit too well.”
By the time he explained as much as he knew, they had pulled up in front of the house in Hogg’s Hollow, which looked more dilapidated by daylight, somehow more sad, as if shunned by the neighbouring houses. There was a van parked slightly askew in the driveway. The name “Alexander Pope” in exquisite hand-script on the driver’s door proclaimed the owner a person of profoundly good taste, either too modest to add a line declaring his profession or so confident it was not deemed necessary.
As they walked by, Morgan peered through the side windows and saw, lying in casual disarray, odds and ends of antique paraphernalia. There was a pair of hand-forged fire irons, were three or four swing arms from the inside of fireplaces, and a couple of iron pots and a kettle. There was a copper cauldron from central Sweden, an old import. There were cardboard boxes brim-filled with ancient nails, a brace of decoys, part of a dry sink, a box of door latches and hinges, and random lengths of painted pine. There were shadows and colours and contours Morgan would have loved to have explored. He was a natural at rummaging through obsolete treasures.
“The name’s familiar,” said Miranda. “A short poet; rhyming couplets; a gardener.” What else, she wondered? “Didn’t he say ‘brevity is the soul of wit’?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Shakespeare said that. Pope said ‘Wit is the lowest form of humour.’”
“He must have been having a bad day. This is another Pope, I take it.”
“This one lives in Port Hope. I asked him to meet us. I didn’t think he’d be here already.”
They paused at the door. Morgan’s guest had obviously gone in.
“Do you remember? We talked about this guy in Yorkville.”
“Last summer, in the coffee house. The architect.”
“The ultimate expert in colonial house restoration and the simulation of rustic antiquities.”
“‘The simulation of rustic antiquities’! Sometimes you talk in quotations. Does he write poetry?”
“If you ask him nicely he might pen you a few short lines.”
“Perhaps about corpses and crypts.”
When they opened the door, standing immediately inside with his back to them was a man who in fact was exceptionally tall and quite angular. He was wearing a Fair Isle sweater that had once been a work of art and now threatened to disintegrate if he moved suddenly — which, by his current posture, seemed unlikely.
Without turning around, the man said, “She won’t let me in, Mr. Morgan. This woman seems ready to draw her weapon and I’m not properly armed. Do you suppose you could help?”
Obscured by his lanky frame, Rachel Naismith was revealed by her voice. “Everything is under control, Detectives. He insisted on entering without authorization.”
She edged around so that Alexander Pope had to step into the living-room rubble to get out of her way.
“He’s tall as God, but not as convincing. I invited him to stand very still and he complied. Says he’s here on your invitation. Refused to wait in his van.”
“I saw no reason to remain outside,” he said. “I’m assuming you outrank her, Detective Morgan. Do tell her to stand easy. I’ve never been at a crime scene before, but even here I would hope common civility applies.” Morgan smiled. Here was someone totally comfortable with the persona he chose to project to the world, arbitrary as it was. His intonation and syntax were vaguely English, yet Canadian-born. In a few brief sentences he showed the residual inflection of a genuinely colonial sensibility. Once we were British, thought Morgan. Some still are.
Miranda gazed up at the man in admiration. Everything about him was authentic, she thought. His precarious sweater, his worn corduroy pants, his steel-toed workboots unlaced at the ankle, his three-day beard, and his unkempt steel-grey hair all went together with a fine eye for texture and colour. He held himself proud — he was immaculately clean, his clothes were well-cared-for, despite their deteriorating condition. He could have stepped off the pages of a women’s magazine — the splendid model of an aging bohemian.