Who Sings for Lu? (16 page)

Ushered in by a constable with poor conversational ability, Claire found Detective Sergeant Kevin Ahern even more unsettling the second time of meeting, the way he ran eyes up and down her body and his charming greeting did not match the overt appraisal.

‘Mrs Chadwick. A surprise seeing you. Not an unpleasant one I might add, even if the circumstances are.’

Not his natural voice, she thought, but she got straight down to business. Had Anna’s mobile phone at the ready, clicked over to the photo file and the specific image she wanted him to see, handed it to him.

He glanced at the image. ‘It’s not very clear. Am I supposed to get this?’

‘I think it’s the woman who was involved with the attack on my daughter.’ That got his attention.

He studied it for quite some time. As she did study him, trying to figure what made the man tick: a giant of a man, clearly with a problem concealing his sexual desire. In such a job as investigating sex crimes? Twice he looked up and each time for an inappropriate length of time. The type who never believed even his wildest hope was impossible.

‘It’s a bad picture, taken at night. Cell phone cameras don’t work that well at night.’ His eyes again, almost undressing her it felt.

‘I was hoping you might have a scientific process to enhance the image,’ she said, aware of a tremor in her voice.

‘It will still be the same angle, Mrs Chadwick.’

‘Or,’ she had an alternative, ‘you could make a public statement that you have photographs captured on my daughter’s mobile? Might flush this woman out.’

‘From where to where, though? Not as if she’s hiding behind a bush in the Botanic Gardens, ma’am. We searched every blade of grass. We want either a lead or something forensic.’

Deeply disappointed, Claire was left speechless.

‘Our biggest problem is your daughter is not talking.’

‘You’re not suggesting she is doing this willingly, are you?’

‘Didn’t mean that. But until you call us to say she will talk, that she remembers, well, anything, we are at a standstill. Well, not exactly a standstill as we have officers questioning every regular visitor to the park.’ Slight pause. The eyes again.

‘Can the picture be analysed forensically, blown up?’ Claire asked.

‘Forensic is more for hair samples, DNA, fibres, microscopic stuff. Your girl hasn’t improved?’

‘No,’ Claire said. ‘She has not.’

‘That’s a shame. Such a beautiful young woman.’

She could have easily said, yes. But he was so blatant in the way he looked her over, made her flesh crawl.
The man is a detective investigating a sex crime with my own daughter the victim?

‘So you’ll go public with the shot?’ she insisted.

‘Sure. In every major newspaper — and we’ll see what we can do about the local weeklies. There’s a lot of feeling about this case.’ He glanced at the image again. ‘People in this country love the horse racing game.’ Claire wondering if that was necessary.

‘Guess you thought you’d found something?’

‘Yes. More than thought. I truly believed it was a breakthrough.’

‘Sorry, but I doubt it very much.’ Ahern fiddled with his jaw. ‘My sources tell me your husband is still in Sydney.’

‘Your sources? You’re keeping tabs on my husband?’ Claire close to aghast. ‘He’s not one of the people you’re after.’

‘They say he’s hired private investigators — to do our work. Chumps
who are more often than not failed cops and/or debt collectors.’

My, there was feeling on this subject. ‘It could be said he is enhancing your enquiries, could it not?’ She was pleased with her quick comeback, given Riley hadn’t told her a thing.

‘The hell he is. If it gets out, or they fluke something, we’ll just look like stupid mugs who can’t do our job properly.’

Her eyes narrowed before she gave them permission to feign normality. ‘And I suppose that’s more important than catching those who committed this beastly act against our daughter?’

That got the man up from behind his desk, and huge he was.

‘Tell you what’s important to a cop,’ he said. ‘Wanting respect. From the criminal class and, most of all, from members of the public just like you. To know we’re appreciated for doing a bloody hard job catching every type of knave, brigand and knockabout God ever created.’ He drew breath. ‘Is that too much to ask?’

At least it took care of the sexual want in those eyes. She straightened to her own — though considerably shorter — full height.

‘I do appreciate what police officers do. If you can take a copy of the photograph, I would prefer to keep my daughter’s mobile in my possession.’

‘Certainly, ma’am.’

Claire felt he stood a few intimidating moments longer than necessary, as if forcing an appreciation he had failed to elicit naturally. A thoroughly unpleasant man.

Her mother used to say, things can get worse even in our worst times. So prepare yourself for when it comes. But who ever expects it?

Four hours driving home from Sydney, trying to keep herself together, fighting off the images of Riley naked and the woman too; their shock, yet human nature at work in the instant they turned on her.
On me!
The innocent party.

Trying to keep her mind on the immediate. Sue staying at the house to be with Anna, not expecting her back till tomorrow. Claire had meant to surprise her husband, not just by turning up unannounced, but with intention of making love. To tell him,
Don’t let what we have be spoiled by what happened to Anna.
She’d thought of tossing aside all her inhibitions and showing her husband that if he had one person to always count on, not least in a crisis, then she was the one.

That was why she’d turned up at his hotel, so seedy she struggled to believe Riley could be living there. The Asian receptionist was most reluctant to give his room number and insisted she must call him. But handing over her driver’s licence, credit cards bearing her photograph, Claire said she was in no mood for being messed around and insisted on being given a key. The receptionist muttered something in her own language and shrugged her bad attitude. So Claire thought.

So much she wanted to share with Riley: her suggestion that they
plunge themselves into their business to take their minds off their daughter’s suffering; that they work hand in hand to get Anna back from the twilight zone but still try to live as before. They must, or the rapists had scored more victims. But her immediate goal was simply to make love with her husband, reconnect, have a good cry afterwards — and maybe even he would too. Thank God she hadn’t opened the door and called, surprise!

Now Claire understood his guilt, why Anna blamed him for being so close yet so far from where she was attacked. He had been with another woman — possibly this woman — at the time.

Trying to remember if the woman was good looking. No idea of why that was of paramount importance. Was she younger? Yes, to both. Okay, why were looks and younger age so important? No rational reason, it just was. Part of the process of losing: confirmation of unpalatable facts.

How quickly the woman had regained her composure. Pretty good when the two were stark naked, though they were not actually having sex, just lying there, maybe just after or just before, in the stifling heat —
sans
air conditioning — putrid with cigar smoke. And with Riley a die-hard anti-smoker, how strange he’d choose a woman who smoked — let alone cigars? Till Claire saw the object in the ashtray on Riley’s side of the bed. His nakedness, more than the woman’s, was an obscenity. Him smoking another affront. As if part of the secret life he’d been living and to hell with what happened to Anna being the reason — excuse, more like it.

Found the presence of mind to ask the woman, ‘Are you a hooker? Or his lover?’ The need to know that more than anything. Not sure why: a hooker still insulted the wife as well as the stricken daughter, since it meant the woman came from a sordid world of drug addiction, paid sex and worse.

‘I am not a hooker,’ came the reply, sounding — the nerve of it — affronted. Then asking, ‘Now, do you mind at least turning your back?’

Yes, Claire did mind. She would not turn around and stand there like a school dunce in the corner while the two guilty ones dressed, regained their dignity and their composure.

‘I think you’ll find I have less interest in your body than my
husband,’ she said, amazed at her own composure.

She stayed five minutes, long enough to see the woman — God knows what her name was — off the premises.

So this woman was his lover. That made for double insult since it suggested previous liaison, likely numerous times. Inferring a relationship, an exchange of verbal intimacies, laughter, fooling around at silly stuff even middle-aged couples do under the sheets. Which hurt more than thought of their sex, fucking, love-making, whatever they called it. A whole lot more. Extra-marital sex was basically about genital pleasure for the man. Every woman understood this. But making love and with, one could presume, more abandon than what Riley enjoyed with her — now that hurt.

What if this woman’s appeal to Riley was conversational?
What does that say about me?
Claire wondered.

Considered sending Sue a text, but she couldn’t help a Jennings awareness of how unsafe it was to text while she drove. So she called instead and regretted it immediately. Lying that her mobile battery was nearly flat, she ended the call with Sue in the middle of saying something. Afraid she’d burst into tears, or succumb to the urge to scream. Several hours of driving might be time enough for a woman to find strength.

How could he?
she railed.
And what of our Anna, the awful journey she is on? My husband wants to be bonking someone while this nightmare continues? The hurricane has hit our home and all he wants to do is fuck another woman?

How could he indeed, and how long had he been doing it? Why at a time like this, the very worst of their lives, would he have gone to the arms of another woman?

That empty, nauseous feeling. Utter failure as a wife, a person.

She kept retching, going from hot to cold. The sense of disbelief like being in a car crashing and unable to do a thing about it. Not Riley living in a crumy two-star hotel, not him and another woman naked, him smoking a cigar as if to put the final nail in, ignoring what he loved most in the world other than Anna, his beloved horses. Never mind his stated feelings for his wife. Lies, all lies. Their whole life made a lie.

Other than the odd mild doubt after one of his flirting episodes if he’d had too much to drink at a party, she had never considered he was unfaithful. Oh yes, she’d sniffed the perfume a while back, adding one and one to get her dear friend Sue, but she was wrong: not Sue’s chosen fragrance. Appalled at herself for doubting her best friend.

Claire arrived home to find — true to her mother’s saying — matters even worse. She should have noticed something different when she punched the security number at the front iron gates. Straw’s recorded voice asked, ‘Residence or farm?’ She’d never been asked that before but of course she said residence.

Nothing different, same tree-lined driveway, paddocks with their magnificent equine residents, the big but understated house up on the rise, and yet something felt not right. A noticeable drop in farm activity, perhaps, since this place went 24/7. Something else caught the corner of her eye, but she had other things to worry about now. Lots of other things, including gathering herself.
I must.

In to Sue, who held a filled glass of her family wine, pointed sombrely at a pile of papers on the kitchen bench. ‘The fat bloke has been and gone,’ she said.

‘Sandy Tulloch?’

‘Swooped down next door in his helicopter, your loyal employee Straw drove him here and waited while he came in demanding to see Riley. I said you were both in Sydney, he could have saved himself the trouble and just phoned. Bugger him. He left these papers and says the same will be delivered in person to Riley when he finds him.’ There Sue took a deep breath. ‘Claire, I think you’ve lost your business.’

‘Riley will fight,’ Claire said. For a second forgetting her new discovery about her husband. Managed to say, ‘I feel sorry for the staff. But it was coming. Don’t blame Straw. This is the only life he knows, and he’ll go to whoever controls it.’

‘You both worked so hard.’

‘We have a lot of money in the bank, enough to last us several lifetimes.’
We? Us?
‘How is Anna?’

‘Same. Ate half a piece of toast and half a boiled egg. But,’ she went on, ‘didn’t Riley give Straw a hundred thousand dollar bonus?
Shouldn’t he do the right thing now and resign rather than work for this fat creep?’

‘She drinking?’ Claire wasn’t being sidetracked, not even by thoughts of their long-serving employee being possibly disloyal.

‘Got a glass of Fig Shade down her.’ Sue found a grin. ‘Told her a tale about the anorexic young woman who didn’t drink and turned into a bird hatchling with googly eyes and scrawny neck. And couldn’t even squawk. I know, not very funny. But at least she had the ghost of a smile.’

‘Thanks so much, Sue. You’re a good friend.’

‘Mate it’s called in this country. And you’re a good mate too. A bloody good one. Now, let’s have a drink.’

Fighting to keep herself together while Sue filled a second glass from the fridge, Claire noticed in the refrigerator door a bottle of Riley’s favourite, Cristal. Suddenly realised she had never shared a bottle with him, he had never suggested it, just the two of them. Always when company was here, an attractive woman to show off to, their twice yearly visitors from France. But never themselves, the Chadwick couple.

‘He did say the house is exempt from the contract clause,’ Sue informed. ‘Smoked a cigar inside, right here in the kitchen. The arrogance of the man.’

As if Claire needed mention of cigar smell. ‘I thought he was quite a good man. But then … Sue …?’

No need to say further, her friend stepped forward with her arms outstretched, and after she’d had a cry Claire told her the news.

‘Can I say something really frank?’ Sue, during their second bottle.

‘You always do, except I’ve never known you to ask.’ Claire did feel a little better.

‘Some of us saw this in Riley.’

‘And you didn’t tell me?’

‘Rule is, the innocent party is always last to know because she or he doesn’t want to know. Sorry, kid. I really am.’

‘Kid? That’s a laugh. His dolly bird looks hardly thirty.’

‘Bet she’s not as nice looking as you.’

‘I’m plain compared.’

Looked like Sue was about to say something then changed her mind. ‘Oh well, he doesn’t know what he’s screwed up. Fucking men and their dicks.’

‘If only that’s all it was, Sue. I could work my way through that.’ And she could, she was certain. ‘I think what happened to Anna was merely the catalyst. There is more to come from our Riley Chadwick.’

‘Easy now. How much more do you want to go through?’

Claire sighed, all of a sudden overwhelmed with everything. ‘Any more of those matey hugs going?’ she said.