All These Perfect Strangers (24 page)

But I don't want to cooperate any more. ‘Don't know.'

‘You don't know who saved your life?' he asks. ‘Don't tell me it's another stranger.'

I frown because I am not sure what he means.

‘You know, like the person who kissed you that night at the bar crawl.'

And for a moment everything is still. No man from the gift shop to distract us. I can't hear Ivy's heels click-clacking down the hall. There are just the two of us in here, playing games with my life.

‘That's right,' I say. ‘He was a perfect stranger.'

‘University must have been a big place with all these perfect strangers,' Frank says.

There is something funny about the way he says this. He means it as an accusation, but at the same time it is also the truth. Being amongst strangers was exactly what I had wanted and it's definitely what I got.

It is a long wait before Frank speaks again. I look down at my diary. I had worked so hard on it this week, underlining the sections I was going to read to him and practising it at home so that the jumps seem natural, so it sounds like I am telling him the whole story.

‘Did you go to Leiza's funeral?' he asks, eventually.

‘Only the memorial.'

It had been held in the Examination Hall, a barn-sized room that smelt of paper and disappointment. Despite it being the largest space on campus, so many people turned up that we were packed in together and latecomers had to stand outside.

For some reason, Frank doesn't seem to think the memorial was sufficient because he reminds me that I didn't attend Rachel's funeral either. He doesn't ask for an explanation or a response, but instead leaves the comment to hang in the air for me to contemplate.

Sometimes I wonder if Frank is very good at his job or whether he is just a doctor who didn't like the sight of blood. Once I asked him what his actual job description was and he told me it was to ask intelligent questions, which sounded like a complete cop-out. Surely, intelligent answers would be much more useful.

I shuffle in my seat and glance out the window. The shopkeeper is still not outside. He must be tucked away under the beady eye of his mother.

‘Did you cry?' asks Frank.

‘What?'

‘Did you cry at the memorial?'

‘No.'

‘There must have been people around you crying,' he comments, another implied criticism couched in deliberately non-judgmental language.

I think back to Emelia and her cronies who had sat in front of me, crying just enough to hold tissues under their eyelashes so their mascara wouldn't run. Rogan sat next to Emelia, looking worried. I heard she went straight to her Accounting tutor afterwards to try and get special consideration on her assignment because of it.

‘Leiza's parents didn't cry,' I say.

They had sat in the front row dry-eyed, staring at Marcus while he made his speech. Within two weeks, their lawyer would serve papers on the University.

‘Did you think they should have cried?'

‘Not if they didn't feel like it. People should act how they feel.'

‘How do you think they felt?'

Her father was angry. It sparked off him as he stalked down the aisle when the ceremony was over. He had left his wife stranded, having to deal with the long line of well-wishers mouthing platitudes before they returned to their safe lives. I remembered her face clearly. She was beyond crying. She was listening to each person tell her how sorry they were, and many of them were in tears, as though she was comforting them. But I understood that she had been hollowed out from grief, and that her egg-shell veneer was all that was left.

I try to explain this to Frank.

‘How did you feel?'

And I know I am expected to have some insight into my own lack of crying, that somehow I am hollow or angry, but I am sick of all this. So I don't tell him I felt a mixture of fear and guilt, or that very deep down I was almost relieved because I thought no one would even think about Rachel's death now.

‘Sad,' I say. ‘Just sad.'

Frank frowns but he doesn't push it. Instead he asks, ‘When was the last time you cried?'

I shrug my shoulders and think about making one up, but I can't find the words, so I sit there. I know exactly when it was. The day the policeman told me that the trial wasn't to go ahead. That they wouldn't need me as a witness. The day I decided I wouldn't do any more counselling.

Frank senses I am not going to talk about it, because he changes topics.

‘Have you written down anything about the events of three years ago in your diary, Pen, like we discussed?'

I don't answer him. Instead I stare at the fleck of white paint. I am sure it is getting bigger.

I can feel his eyes on me.

‘We don't need to talk about that. That isn't why I'm here.'

‘I disagree. I don't believe that what occurred this year is some kind of coincidence, that “bad things” just happen to you. I believe we need to explore what really happened before with that policeman. To talk openly about what your role was, not just put all the blame on Tracey. You need to face what you did or this pattern of behaviour may keep on repeating.' The words tumble out of him as if there is a lot more he wants to say.

I move my gaze from the wall to his face.

‘What pattern?' I ask.

There is a moment of silent confrontation, a battle of wills, before he looks away and starts scribbling something on my file. He doesn't answer me but instead talks about revisiting places from that night with Tracey. ‘It could assist you. Perhaps walk up The Hill,' he says.

When I leave, I tell Ivy that I can't make the next appointment and that I will call to reschedule.

I'll keep writing in the diary but I don't want to do this any more.

‘How did she die?' I asked Dale.

He sat there, a slight frown on his face, but not surprised. When you're a policeman, you probably have people asking that sort of question all the time.

Leiza's death was the only thing being talked about at college. Officially, all anybody knew was that it was suspicious and the police were investigating. Not even the residential assistants had been told more, Toby said to me over breakfast. We sat across from each other, food untouched. That morning alone, the day after her body had been found, I had heard three different stories about what had happened, each one worse than the last.

To get away I decided to do some study before my Torts lecture. I was getting behind in all my subjects, and at least in the silent area of the library, I could escape the conversations. So, when the first person I saw was someone who would actually know what really happened, I was in two minds if I should say hello. A bear of a man hunched over a small wooden table, tapping a pen on its surface, while pressing rewind and fast forward on a cassette deck in front of him. Dale. He had been missing lectures so I hadn't seen him since that night at the bar.

He took off his headphones in disgust and popped the deck. As he pulled it out, a long ribbon of tape dribbled from the cassette. He gave a grunt and looked up.

‘That's had it,' I said.

‘Got six more hours to listen after this one,' he said. ‘I need some coffee.'

While Dale chatted to the guy behind the counter, I sat on the decking outside. The sky was an almost-white blue. You could taste winter coming. The coffee shop, a demountable building next to the car park, was quiet. Before 10 a.m. was the student equivalent of dawn and most of the tables were empty. A stripy-shirted stockbroker of the future was demonstrating to his fellow striped-shirts how he managed to get airborne in Daddy's Porsche. Two lecturers were having breakfast while slagging off an article they hadn't written and a table of girls were discussing the front page of the newspaper. I could read the headline:
CAMPUS MURDER
.

‘I heard parts of her body were sliced off,' a dark-haired girl said.

‘It doesn't say that in the article.'

‘No, it's true. And there was a mark on her forehead, a cross or something.'

‘A ritual kind of thing?'

‘The Death Rider's cross,' said the first girl, and there were nods of agreement from the others.

‘Or it could be that psycho Screwdriver Man who ripped off that girl's ear,' said another girl. ‘Why isn't anyone talking about him?'

Their conversation was a mixture of horror and voyeurism. I wondered what would happen if I leant over and told them I knew that dead girl. Would they feel embarrassed? Probably ask me if I knew more about what had happened.

‘I don't care who it was,' said one with her back to me. ‘I'm never walking around campus by myself again.'

‘Me neither.'

‘I mean, it could have been any of us.'

I didn't know if that was right. None of it felt random to me. It felt very personal. Terrible things happening, getting closer. I slumped in my chair.

‘Forgot to ask how you wanted it, so got them strong and black,' said Dale, walking up to me, balancing two mugs. ‘In my job you learn not to risk milk.'

‘Let's move,' I said.

The girls fell silent and stared at us as we walked by, and once we passed there was furious whispering again. ‘He's a policeman,' I heard one say. ‘Wonder if he was there. If he saw her body?'

We sat out on a bench between the tennis courts and the soccer oval, tall gum trees surrounding us. Sipping the coffee, I almost choked.

‘Copper's special,' said Dale.

‘How much sugar?'

‘Enough to get you through a night shift or, alternatively, six hours of law tapes. You look like you needed it.'

He smacked his lips together as a joke. And that's when I asked him how Leiza had died. I hadn't meant to but I couldn't go on listening to the possible, the probable and the absolutely wrong. Better to know the truth.

‘You knew her well.' It wasn't a question, more of a statement.

‘Well enough,' I said.

‘Could tell by your face. These types of deaths leave their own kind of mark.'

I took a cautious sip, grateful we were sitting side by side. If he could really read faces, he might work out that a lot of the damage had actually been done by Rachel's death.

Dale blew on his coffee. ‘Too hot,' he said. ‘Usually put a bit of cold water in so you can drink it straight away.'

He scratched his nose and then rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand.

‘Night shift,' he said. ‘Should be asleep but I've missed too many lectures.'

I wondered if he was ignoring my question, and if I should pretend that I never asked it and we could talk about essays being due or how exams were only around the corner. But after a pause he said, ‘She was knocked unconscious by a blow to her head. Then she was cut with a sharp implement, probably a . . .'

‘Screwdriver,' I finished. The one detail all the different versions had in common.

He nodded.

‘But it was the bikers, wasn't it? The Death Riders must be the ones who killed her.'

Dale grimaced. ‘Where's the evidence? And why would they? Something like this is bad for business. They've been pretty smart, flying under the radar mostly, until now.'

‘But who then? Screwdriver Man?'

A slight shake of his head. ‘Up to now, I had my doubts that this Screwdriver Man even existed. I thought it was kind of like the university equivalent of the Boogie Man, a convenient scapegoat.'

‘What about all those attacks? What about Alice?'

‘I'm not saying they didn't happen. I just don't think one person did all of them. Outside of the balaclava and the screwdriver, nothing else was the same. He was big. He was small. Spoke with an accent. Had no accent. And the attacks themselves, they weren't that serious. I had them chalked up to the Death Riders' turf war, to be honest.'

I started to speak but he interrupted. ‘I know, I know, Alice was badly injured. But I've read the report. There was only one cut and she remembers him watching her and then letting her run off. Now, that's completely different to what happened last night.' Dale gave a sigh and stopped talking.

‘How did Leiza die?' I asked.

‘It would have been quick. She was unconscious.'

I knew by the way his voice changed that he was lying. I was getting the bereaved parents' version of events, breaking the ugly truth into smaller, more palatable parts to be digested over time. He was being the policeman who rings your doorbell and gives you the bad news, censored. In that moment, I realised I didn't want to know the answer to my question. Some things were too awful to imagine.

‘How do you cope with your job?' I asked.

‘It has its moments,' he said. ‘Murders like this take a layer of skin off. You don't forget them, that's for sure.'

‘But you sleep OK?' I had been thinking of my own lack of sleep, but looking at him I realised there were smudges of grey underneath Dale's eyes and even his moustache seemed to droop with fatigue. As he drank his coffee I noticed he was no longer wearing his wedding ring. I wondered what that meant, but now didn't seem the time to ask.

He gave a grim laugh. ‘Should be asleep now. Look, most deaths are car accidents, drunks fighting, sometimes a domestic. Not nice, but you can understand them. They don't make you question human nature. This one does.' He took another long drink from his coffee. ‘But don't worry. They'll get whoever did this.'

‘How can you be sure?'

‘Her family for starters. They will make sure the investigation gets all the resources it needs.'

Though none of us had known while she was alive, it had turned out that Leiza's grandfather, dead for some years, had been a prominent politician. Duncan Parnell was a name on plaques everywhere. My own town had the D. J. Parnell Oval where the local footy team played. It was hard to see how that was relevant but the news reports seemed to think it was.