“You think I stole a boat?”

“No. I’m talking about the one that was stolen from you.”

“Oh,” he said, sadly. “You’re here about Brenda Cameron.”

“I am.”

“That poor girl.”

“Mr., um, Swallowflight, I don’t suppose you still have the boat, do you?”

He was swirling his tea lightly in his hand. “I still have it,” he said. “I don’t use it, though. I can feel her on it.”

“What do you mean you can ‘feel’ her?”

“The room where a person dies… something lingers there. That’s all I mean.”

“Where is the boat?”

“They were here, you know. They did all this already. In 2002. For two weeks I was a suspect. How do you think that felt?”

She put the tea down with a neat clack on the tabletop. “It must have felt good when they ruled you out.”

“I was out of the city when she died.”

“I know all this, Mr. Swallowflight. You’re not a suspect.”

He sighed, blowing his cheeks out. He didn’t look so peaceful anymore. “People respect me here,” he said quietly.

“Where is it?”

“Under the back deck.”

She stood up, her forearms tingling. “Let’s go.”

He led her out around the side of the house to the back. Hazel cast a look over the water. It would have been easy for Brenda to take the ferry from downtown and walk along the shoreline to the bottom of 6th Street. Swallowflight’s backyard was open to the water, but the house itself blocked a view of the rest of the street. Stealing a rowboat from his yard under the cover of darkness would have been child’s play. He leaned under his deck and was about to pull the boat out when she stopped him. “Do you mind putting these on?” she said, passing him a pair of latex gloves she’d pocketed in the station house. “I’d drag it out myself, but I have a bad back.”

He looked at the gloves uneasily, as if they implicated him in something, and then put them on. He went under the deck and she heard the sound of a metal hull scraping against the white pebbles that lined the dark space underneath. The simple rowboat emerged behind him. She watched the knobs of his spine shifting. The boat was a flat-bottomed number with a white fibreglass interior. There was no seat. “Where does a person sit in this thing?” she asked.

“Milk carton,” he said. “You want that, too?”

“No,” she said. “This’ll be fine. How long have you had the boat?”

“I found it junked at the back of Hanlan’s Point about six years ago. Bottom was rusted through in a couple of places and I put this insert in.” He ran his latexed hand along the white interior. “I sealed up the rust and riveted this into place, but it still leaked.”

She got down on her knees and looked closely at the insert. It followed the contours of the boat, including the three runnels in its bottom. But she could see he’d done a poor job of sealing it and the bottom of the insert was springy rather than tight against the hull. There was a slip-proof pattern on it which matched the mark on Brenda Cameron’s forehead. “Do you still have the oars?”

He went back under the deck and brought out two standard wooden oars, their metal pins dangling from midshaft. She gestured that he should put them down on the grass and she kneeled over them, blinking to clear her eyes, and stared hard at one of the shafts. After three years of disuse, they were covered in a thin layer of dust and the varnish was cracked. Thin edges of it stood up where it was beginning to flake away. Examining these oars would be like trying to dust sand for fingerprints and she blew as lightly as she could at the surface to loosen the dust. The translucent layers of varnish rattled like dragonfly wings.

She stilled her attention to take in just a couple of square inches of the oar. Flecks of grit and thin filaments of fibre came in and out of focus among the yellowy parchment-like varnish. Some of the fibre was bits of old spider webbing, or dust strung up in some strange order. But there were also tiny strands of black fibre as well. She narrowed her eyes and tried to filter out everything but the black and as she did, more of it appeared, like a detail popping out of a landscape. She saw it accumulating – tiny black exclamation points – until it became a pattern and the pattern was heaviest in the middle of the oar, the thin part, and then its density diminished as she traced it down toward the blade. The marks stopped about six inches from the end of the blade. She turned to the other oar, but it was clean and she stared at it a moment until she realized she was looking at the wrong side. She used two sticks to turn it over: the same pattern – almost a mirror image – of black fibre ran down the shaft to within six inches of the end of the blade. A drop of rain hit the oar and instantly the fibres within the drop leapt to life.

“Mr. Swallowflight, did you lend this boat out to friends, or would you say you were the main person to use it?”

“A lot of people used it. Not these days, though. Back then.” She stared at the oars. He leaned in closer behind her. “What is it?”

“A murder,” she said, wiping her cheek. The rain was beginning to come down heavier. “Can I use your phone?”

Ilunga was standing far behind his desk, as if he wanted to vanish through the wall behind him. His right arm was crossed stiffly over his chest and he seemed to be choking the life out of his left bicep. He was furious. On the phone, he wouldn’t even entertain dispatching any of his SOCO people. If she wanted to talk to him, she’d have to come in, and then he hung up. Now he was looking at her as if trying to decide what part of her to rip off first. “I told you to go home.”

“And I think we told you we don’t need your permission to investigate a crime in Ontario.”

“This isn’t Ontario, this is Toronto.”

“Superintendent, are you hiding something?”

His mouth was half open, like he was going to reply, but then he sat and dragged Cameron’s folder toward him. “Where are the pictures that go with this file?”

“I have no idea.”

“We interviewed this Swallowflight faggot, we examined the boat – it’s all in the file, Detective Inspector – we found the dead girl’s earring in the boat and we made a ruling of suicide. We found the girl’s fingerprints on the bloody oars, as well as Swallowflight’s – which you would expect, it being his boat – however he was in New Orleans the entire month taking a course in…” He flipped angrily through the file. “In self-hypnosis. Which skill it would seem you have an advanced understanding of.”

“She was drowned in the boat, not in the lake.”

He stared at her.

“The marks on her forehead. They came off the bottom of the fibreglass insert Swallowflight used to seal the hull.”

“She hit her head on the way out of the boat,” said Ilunga.

“How does she hit her head on the bottom of the boat? Do you jump out of a boat backwards? Try to see what you’re saying. And the marks are not abrasions.” She took the victim’s photo out of her pocket and slid it across the desk. He looked at it, then at her, and then back down at the picture. “This is an impression. Someone held her head down. One inch of water in the hull was all it would have taken.”

“Then put someone else in the boat, Micallef. Give me a second person on that boat and we can talk.”

“I think I can.”

“How?”

“If your forensics people fingerprinted the oars, then I presume they noted the presence of black fibres? They were all over the oars.”

“The presence of only one type of fibre is proof that Cameron was alone in the boat. The fibres are trace transfers. She rowed the boat out, the oars brushed up against her sweater. Then she stopped the boat, bumped her head on the bottom of it fumbling about while flying on alcohol and sedatives, and then she jumped out. And drowned.” He shoved the picture back toward her. “You think I’ll do anything to close a file, don’t you?”