Still Waters by John Moss

had a clear view of the Griffin garden from her attic. She admitted it readily to the officers who came to her door early the next morning, and she ignored their query about why she hadn’t given her name. The woman made it clear it would be an impertinence to ask why she had been in the attic. She enjoyed being interviewed. She didn’t know Robert Griffin, she said, though her house had once belonged to his family.
    As neighbours, they had exchanged occasional pleasantries, and when her husband died, Griffin delivered flowers in person. It was several years since they had last spoken. He employed cleaning and gardening services that came every week. And he had a
friend
.
    His
friend
visited on a regular basis, usually midweek, late afternoon, and never stayed over.
    Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros had observed nothing unusual on the day of Griffin’s murder. She referred to“he” and “him” when he was alive as if that were his name, finding in the pronouns an appropriate distance from the sordid events and their tantalizing details. She couldn’t imagine how the “remains” — said with the relish of an habitual Agatha Christie reader — how “it,” as she thereafter referred to the body, depriving Griffin in death even of gender, got into the pond. She just glanced out, and he was dead. She felt it was her civic duty to inform the police. The uniformed officers assured her she had been very neighbourly and that real detectives would call by if there were any more questions.
    When Miranda arrived at the Griffin place with two black coffees and cinnamon-raisin bagels, toasted, with light cream cheese, Morgan was beside the upper pond, talking to the officers who had interviewed the woman next door.
    She handed Morgan his coffee and bagel. Information at this point was sparse. She had checked on the way over with Ellen Ravenscroft. A preliminary examination confirmed no evidence of significant wounds or bruises. A superficial cut on the forehead, nothing more.
    Miranda sat on the limestone parapet. After a while, Morgan joined her. They consumed their breakfast without talking. Why would someone practise law on his own? she wondered. Why semiotics? It wasn’t a middle-aged hobby. She couldn’t get a grasp on Griffin as a living person, only as a corpse. Why would someone want to work homicide? Things like that just occurred — here they were, Morgan and her, hovering on either side of forty, with murder in common. At the moment, with the chimerical Robert Griffin in common. No, not a chimera; he was real. Yet she connected with him only in death.
    Sometimes it happened that way. Both of them felt tremulations on occasion, returning to a crime scene where they had seen a locket around the neck of a derelict beaten to death, emptiness clutched in the dead hand of a rape victim. This was different. It wasn’t empathy she felt, but a strange anxiety. Despite the lack of emotional hooks, Griffin’s murder had taken on an eerie life of its own.
    Was he the architect of a plot gone awry, or a victim of malevolence beyond his control? There was a lot of money involved, there was his stunning asexual mistress, there was Miranda’s connection, there were the koi.
    Miranda had absorbed more than she had thought the previous night, reading about koi on the Net. She had checked out Chagoi and wasn’t convinced that every good pond would have one. She thought she could tell a Sanke from a Showa, a new-style Showa from an old. The intensity of black pigmentation against slashes of red on vibrant white was more intricate on the actual fish, and as they carved elusive patterns through the water she faltered, not sure she could tell one from another.
    â€œWe’d better feed them,” she said.
    â€œI did.”
    â€œHow did you get into the house? I have the keys.”
    â€œThere’s food in the bin by the door.”
    â€œAnd you knew how much, of