Mikado Murder - Riverside Mysteries, #3

Behind a painted Japanese flat in the stage-left corridor, Rupert Dalloway is dead.

He was the best director the Riverside Gilbert and Sullivan Society had ever had. He was also, in the considered opinion of nearly everyone who had worked with him across the previous three months, the kind of man who uses other people's finest work as raw material for his own brilliance — and calls the result a creative dialogue with the material.

Dr Alex Moreton, Classics lecturer at a university on the Swan River foreshore, has been quietly noticing Dalloway since week one of rehearsal. She plays Yum-Yum with the ironic precision Dalloway describes as technically accomplished, if one enjoys watching someone drive a bus through a sonata. She notes this observation in the margin of her score without distress. Aristophanes had written characters like Rupert Dalloway in 414 BCE, and the academic literature on where they ended up is extensive.

She also has ninety seconds to her cue. She makes her entrance. She sings. She finishes the show.

A Question of Voices

Reading is what Alex does. Not only ancient texts — the Menander fragment on her office desk, the palimpsest requiring three more years of patience — but people, situations, the syntax of an argument, the signature of a mind. She has spent twenty years training herself to hear the voice behind the page: the individual cadence that survives time, translation, and the determined effort to conceal it. A first-century Alexandrian scholar and a twenty-first century correspondent can share the same intellectual tic, the same grammatical preference, the same way of moving from the particular to the general that is, once you have recognised it, unmistakeable as a fingerprint.

When Detective Sergeant Quinn — precise, direct, running a new unit whose existence is itself a question she prefers not to examine — brings her eleven anonymous letters found in Dalloway's desk drawer, Alex begins reading them the way she reads everything else: slowly, from the beginning, looking for the voice.

What she finds is not one voice. It is two.

"Alex Moreton is the detective I have been looking for. Not damaged. Not haunted. Not in recovery from anything. Simply very good at what she does and quietly at home in her life. That turns out to be more interesting than tortured. Dark academia at its most considered." [Quote]