Cold Justice (13 page)

Georgie looked at Ella. ‘I have to go.’

‘That’s fine,’ Ella said. ‘I might be in touch again later. Thanks.’ She went back to her car.

‘Yes or no?’ Control was shouting down the phone.

‘I’ll find Freya.’

Georgie hurried into the Emergency Department and found Freya slumped in a chair in the corridor. ‘You been seen yet?’

Freya shook her head.

‘Control’s got a cyanosed meningococcal in Bondi and wants to know if we can go.’

‘Where’s the detective?’

‘She just left.’

‘Tell him we’re on it.’ Freya pushed herself to her feet.

They hurried from the ED, Freya slowing a little at the door, Georgie repeating the medical centre’s address before hanging up.

‘You sure you’re okay to go?’ she asked Freya as they got into the ambulance.

‘Must’ve just been cramps,’ she said. ‘Buckle up.’

‘You don’t need me to drive?’

‘Make sure it’s tight.’ Freya gunned the engine.

They tore from the driveway with lights flashing and siren screaming. Georgie braced herself against the door and glanced over at Freya. She did look better. Thank goodness. Cyanosed legs with meningococcal was bad. If the girl didn’t get IV antibiotics soon she could very well lose those legs, if not die. She might die anyway.

She felt the ambulance lurch under acceleration and knew Freya was thinking the same thing as her: Bondi was really too far away.

The path to Ronald Gordon’s house was terracotta pavers edged with lavender bushes. Ella climbed the four timber stairs to the door thinking about Georgie. She seemed genuine, and Ella had to admit feeling disappointed that the letter could be a hoax. Still, one step at a time.

She drew a breath and knocked.

A balding and grey-haired man opened the door a crack, said ‘No, thank you,’ and closed it.

She knocked again, and when he looked out frowning she held up her badge. ‘Detective Ella Marconi. Are you Ronald Gordon?’

‘Oh. Sorry.’ He opened the door fully. ‘Sorry. Yes, I am.’

She smiled. ‘Were you living here twenty years ago?’

His eyes widened. ‘You’re here about the Pieters boy. I was the one Georgina came to. I called the ambulance and waited with her until they came.’

He looked down the sunlit street towards the place where Tim was found. Ella looked as well. There were trees blocking the view but she wondered how many had been there back then.

‘Please come in. Can I offer you coffee?’

He showed her to a cream velvet lounge in a spotless lounge room and went into the kitchen. A ginger cat lay Sphinx-style on the carpet and stared out the French doors at a starling on the lawn.

Ronald brought in a tray and put it on the coffee table. ‘Milk?’

‘Black with one, thanks.’

He handed her the cup. ‘Can I ask you, how is Georgina? Do you know?’

‘She’s well. She’s actually a paramedic.’

‘Oh, good for her.’ Ronald rested his cup and saucer on his knee. ‘What about the boy’s family?’

‘As you’d expect.’

‘It’s so sad. And to think it was never solved. But now you’re looking into it again?’

Ella nodded. ‘I wanted to ask you what you remember about that morning.’

‘Well, first of all I was woken up by the banging on the door. I thought it was kids – kids mucking around, I mean – and went down to give them a piece of my mind, and threw the door open and there she was.’

He had a distant look, as if seeing it all again.

‘She was just about crying, but trying to be brave,’ he said. ‘She was holding her little dog and first I thought he might have been hit by a car. I said, “Is he okay?” And she said, “There’s a boy down there.” The tone of her voice . . . it chills me now to think of it. I was confused, I didn’t understand. I said, “What boy? Is somebody bothering you?” She said, “I think he’s dead.”’

His hands shook. Ella took his cup and put it on the table next to her own.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I asked where, and she pointed down the road, and for some reason I thought maybe
he’d
been hit by a car and I told her to come inside and I rang the ambulance and found a blanket, because all I could remember of first aid was to keep them warm. I got dressed very quickly, and she had already gone back out when I came back downstairs. I followed her down the street. She was still carrying her dog, holding him tight, up to her face. I had the blanket. I couldn’t see anybody on the roadway, which seemed strange, then the ambulance came along. She pointed to where the boy was, in the long grass as it turned out, and the ambulance went down there and the officers got out and went to see him. We went close, but not too close, and stayed near the back of the ambulance. She was still holding her dog. I wanted to say something to her – as the adult in a distressing situation, I felt that was the right thing to do – but she seemed very contained, and in the end I couldn’t think of anything. So we just waited, and then the officers came back. They thought I was her father and spoke to me first. I said I hadn’t seen him, that she was the one. They looked after her really well, they said the kind of things that I had wanted to say.’

Ella nodded.

‘They called her parents, and when they turned up they thanked me. Her mother was trembling. I felt it when she shook my hand.’ He looked out at the lawn. ‘She sent me a card that Christmas, thanking me again. Though I did nothing.’

‘You helped her daughter when she needed it.’

‘Anybody else would have done the same.’

‘But you were the one who did. No wonder her mother wrote to you. It meant a lot.’

He dashed his knuckles across his eyes.

‘Mr Gordon,’ she said gently, ‘no doubt the detectives asked you this at the time, but did you see anything or anyone odd that morning? Or can you recall hearing anything strange the night before?’

‘Not a thing,’ he said. ‘I wish I did. I wish I could help.’

‘How thick were the trees out there at that time? Could you see the location?’

‘There were more shrubs, so you could see even less than you can now, actually. If a car was there at night you’d see some of the headlights, I suppose, but certainly that night I noticed nothing.’

‘None of the neighbours either? You didn’t hear anything on the neighbourhood grapevine later?’

‘No. They talked about it all the time though. It really shook people up. Such a young boy, and being murdered. This is a quiet street. Things like that happen in other places. People wondered what the world was coming to. And then with Mrs Oldham too, it was just terrible.’

‘That must have been upsetting.’

‘She lived just up the way,’ he said. ‘Lovely old stick. Busybody, but give you the shirt off her back. Terrible to think that somebody could creep into our community and wreak such havoc and not one single person sees or hears a thing.’

Not one person that we know about, you mean.

She smiled at him. ‘Thank you for your time.’

The traffic was thick and slow. Freya twisted the wheel, revved up and over median strips, roared down the wrong side of the road while flashing the headlights at oncoming cars just in case they couldn’t see the two-tonne vehicle hurtling towards them, and swore the whole time.

‘Oh, look at this moron. Oh crap, what’s he – oh shit.’ The driver in front hit the brakes. ‘Idiot!’

Freya locked it up behind him but managed to yank the ambulance to the side. There was a bang as she hit a street sign, which slammed the mirror back against the body. ‘Still alive over there?’

Georgie dropped the window and pushed the mirror back into place. ‘So far.’ She gripped the seat as another dithering driver ahead of them propped then accelerated then tried to climb onto the median. ‘How much further?’

‘Too far.’ Freya hit the horn to change the siren from wail to yelp, then pressed on it hard as another driver started to nose out of a parking space. ‘What are we, invisible? Silent? Jeezus.’

Georgie snugged up her seatbelt and thought about the case ahead. The doctor should have the girl on oxygen, should have alerted the Children’s Hospital at Randwick that she was coming in, might have even cannulated and taken bloods. This was not a case where they would muck around on scene; it’d be in with the stretcher and out again asap, load and go. Put the monitor on in the back, do whatever else her symptoms required, but the main thing was to get her to hospital quick smart. Meningococcal was a bastard and could kill you as soon as look at you.

They approached a red light and Freya braked. At the last second it turned green and she accelerated to go through, then a little yellow car shot out of the side street and into their path.

‘Oh fuck.’

Georgie cringed in her seat, expecting the bang and crunch of metal on metal, seeing how they’d hit the back corner of the yellow car and spin it across the street, how they’d be spun as well and end up wrapped around a light pole, and they’d be trapped in the wreck, and they’d never get to their ten year old with meningococcal, but the yellow car squeaked past just in time.

Freya’s knuckles were white on the wheel. ‘Did that just happen?’

‘Maybe we should slow down.’

‘Ten years old and cyanosed. Plus he ran the red.’ Freya screeched around a corner. ‘We’re nearly there.’

‘You just said it was too far.’

‘Well, whatever.’

‘Then how about slowing down? It’s my life in this cabin too.’

‘Chrissake,’ Freya said. ‘We’re not about to die.’

‘We might be.’

‘Stop with the fatalism, okay? I’m trying to concentrate.’

‘Thirty-three, what’s your ETA?’ Control asked.

‘Three to five,’ Freya said, and Georgie repeated it into the mike.

‘Thanks, Thirty-three, doctor is enquiring.’

‘Any update on patient’s condition?’ Georgie asked.

‘Patient is conscious and cyanosed. Doctor has asked if you would hurry.’

‘Thirty-three copy.’ Georgie hung up the mike.

Freya barked laughter. ‘Yeah, cos we’re only cruising now, aren’t we.’ She blasted the horn at a slow driver.

Georgie rubbed her forehead and thought about the patient. She’d seen a couple of bad meningococcals before, one a four-year-old boy who was drowsy with the typical rash on his chest, the other a girl of nine with severe photophobia and headache who developed the rash on the way to hospital. The boy had lived, though he’d lost three fingers and five toes. The girl had died. How bad were you if you were cyanosed already?

Freya tramped on the brake outside a low brick building where a dumpy woman waved frantically from the doorway. Georgie called on scene to Control, then jumped out and grabbed the Oxy-Viva.

‘Quickly!’ the woman called, then rushed inside, letting the door slam before Georgie reached it.

She yanked it open and went in. The waiting room was full of people but there was no sign of the woman. One of the waiting patients pointed down a corridor to the left.

‘Thanks,’ Georgie said.

She found them in the third room on the right. The young girl lay on the bed looking frightened, while a grim-faced doctor, complete with dangling stethoscope, dictated a letter to the woman who’d waved them down out the front and was now attacking a computer keyboard at the desk. ‘In conclusion –’

Georgie went to the patient. ‘Hi, I’m Georgie. How are you?’

‘Okay.’

‘She’s not okay, she’s cyanosed,’ the doctor snapped.

The girl was covered from the waist down by a blanket. There was no oxygen mask, and no cannula in her arm. She didn’t look sick. Georgie put her hand on her forehead, then rested her fingers on her wrist to take her pulse.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Kim.’

‘Can you please get going? The mother’s already left and she’ll be wondering where you are.’

Georgie heard Freya wrestling with the stretcher in the narrow corridor. ‘It’ll just be a minute till we’re ready.’

‘No, now,’ the doctor said.

‘I really can’t until the stretcher’s in.’

The doctor huffed and went out into the corridor, followed by the woman. Georgie heard Freya say, ‘Please don’t yank it.’

She smiled at Kim. ‘What happened?’

‘I told Mum I had a headache, and we didn’t have any Panadol so she brought me here. Then the doctor went all funny about my legs.’

‘What’s up with them?’

Kim kicked the blanket off and Georgie saw that her skin was blue in patches. It didn’t look like cyanosis though.

‘It comes off, look.’ Kim licked her thumb and rubbed her leg. ‘I told him but he didn’t listen. And Mum panicked and wouldn’t listen either.’

Georgie wet a paper towel at the sink and wiped it across Kim’s leg. She smelled sunscreen as the blue came off.

‘What have you been up to today?’ she asked.

‘We went to the beach,’ Kim said. ‘We’re staying in a motel and the bedspread is that colour. I think it rubbed off on me when I was playing.’

Georgie got another paper towel and cleaned off the rest of the dye. She heard the doctor bark at Freya in the corridor and Freya’s voice grow tight. She opened the Oxy-Viva and got out the sphygmomanometer and took Kim’s blood pressure.

‘How’s your headache now?’

‘Gone.’

‘Feel sick at all?’

‘Nope. I feel good.’

Georgie squeezed her arm. ‘Hang on there a sec.’

She went to the doorway. Freya was stormy-faced at the far end of the stretcher as the doctor and his assistant tried to pull the near end into the room.

‘I’m telling you, it won’t make the turn,’ Freya said.

‘We don’t need it,’ Georgie said. ‘It’s not cyanosis.’

‘That girl is critically ill and needs urgent transport immediately,’ the doctor said.

‘It’s dye,’ Georgie said.

Freya let go and the stretcher hit the wall and dented the plaster. The woman muttered something and ran her fingers over the spot while the doctor fixed Georgie with a cold stare. ‘I have requested –’

Georgie held up the blue-stained paper towels. ‘She had sunscreen on her legs and it’s leached colour from the motel bedspread. She’s fine. She doesn’t even have a headache any more.’

The doctor didn’t look at the towels. ‘I’ve requested urgent transport and that’s what I want.’