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before he did any of that violence to her. From a mushroom.”
    “A mushroom,” repeated Ray Greene.
    They followed Wingate back to his desk. The message had been started
Dear Sir.
Hazel saw a toothbrush beside the keyboard. “Have you got a place to stay, James?”
    “My landlady isn’t expecting me until tonight.”
    “So you came here to work?”
    “Is that all right?”
    “I can’t possibly promote you until at least Thursday.”
    “Ma’am?”
    “She has a rather dry sense of humor,” said Ray Greene, leaning over Wingate’s keyboard to erase his salutation, “which is to say it’s hard to know when to laugh.” He stood straight again and gestured at the computer screen. “Jack Deacon works for us, so there’s no need to kowtow. Just say, ‘Jack.’”
    “I think I’ll write him later,” said Wingate.
    He’d put his cap down on the desk beside the keyboard and Hazel picked it up and handed it to him. “You feel like a drive?”
    “Sure. Yes.”
    “Let’s go for a drive then.” She strode away from him, and he followed but quickly doubled back to toss his toothbrush into the desk drawer.
    “I’m not invited?” said Greene.
    She called back to him over her shoulder. “Do some work. Set an example. I’m taking the new guy to Mayfair.”
     
    They drove south on 41, farmers’ fields on either side of them, the brown cornstalks knocked over. Detective Constable Wingate sat stiffly in the passenger seat, looking straight ahead down the highway. Silence had never bothered Hazel, but she suspected Wingate was being polite, so she asked him where he was from.
    “Toronto born and bred,” said Wingate. “You know the city?”
    “Certain buildings.”
    “It’s not easy to like unless you were brought up there.”
    “You hoping to work your way back?”
    “I just want to be wherever I can do the most good.”
    She glanced over at him. “Okay. And what’s the real answer?”
    He met her eyes and she saw confusion in his. “That is the real answer.”
    “You have scout badges, DC Wingate, don’t you?”
    He laughed. “You want to guess where I keep them?”
    “In a cigar box underneath your bed?”
    “My mother has them. In an envelope in her sock drawer.”
    She remembered one of the questions they asked applicants at the academy.
What kind of relationship do you have with your mother?
they asked the men. Because good sons made fine cops. Ray Greene had brunch with his mother every Sunday. Drove out to The Poplars to get her, and took her to Riverside House for mimosas and pancakes. That was the only other woman in his life, she realized, apart from Michelle Greene, who had nothing to worry about, if you didn’t count the boredom of being married to a cop whose dull vice was playing the ponies. She tried to remember the question that had given her pause at her own interview. Thirty-two years ago now. Yes: Did she want to have a family? She’d said she did, and one of the interviewers had written it down.
    “There are hardly any women your age in Port Dundas,” she said. “Hard place for a young man to settle down.”
    “I’m not thinking about that right now,” Wingate said. “I have enough on my plate.”
    “Did you leave a girl in Toronto?”
    “No,” he said. “There’s no one right now.”
     
    At the hospital, they were given their visitor tags, and Dr. Jack Deacon came to collect them from the registration office. He was a man of quick gestures whose physicality communicated that at any given moment he might have to be somewhere else. But in fact
he was a patient, likable man. Hazel trusted him. “Spere caught you up?” he asked.
    “Bare bones,” said Micallef. “I want the whole tour.”
    Deacon brought them down to the basement and into the morgue. Wingate wiped his forefinger under his nose. “You can put on a face mask, son, but it won’t help.” The place smelled of industrial detergents and rotting meat, rather accurately. Deacon passed them each a