Cold Justice (14 page)

Georgie exchanged a glance with Freya. ‘If we could call Kim’s mother and tell her the situation, I’m sure –’

The doctor took a step closer. ‘I insist that the girl be taken to hospital right away.’

There was a slight tremble in his voice. Georgie knew she was pushing it to hold out any further. Even this was risking a complaint – precisely what she didn’t need. ‘Okay.’ She tilted her head at Freya who nodded and started backing out with the stretcher.

The doctor grabbed at it. ‘We need that.’

‘She’s fine to walk,’ Georgie said.

Inside the room, she smiled at Kim. ‘How about we run you up to hospital and meet your mum?’

Kim slid off the bed with a smile. ‘I’ve never been in an ambulance before.’

Georgie zipped up the Oxy-Viva and took her hand. ‘Let’s go then.’

She looked at the woman as they walked past. ‘Could you bring that letter out when it’s done, please?’

Ella drove slowly past the scene. Still just a tree among other trees, long tangled grass, short shrubby bushes and not much else. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she felt that every time she was in the area she should drive past, so she did.

She turned at the roundabout and headed back to Pennant Hills Road, Tim’s uncle her next target. Her mobile rang and she saw her parents’ number on the screen. Answer or voice-mail? Voicemail. She was busy.

Alistair McLennan’s surgery was a plain brick structure on the fringe of the shopping village in West Pennant Hills. She had to park way down the street, and walked back past an enormous purple bougainvillea whose dropped flowers covered the foot-path. A path of grey railway sleepers led to the surgery steps and a bell tinkled when she pushed open the door.

A woman with dark eyes and grey hair cut short and sharp smiled up from behind the desk, and smiled even wider when Ella held out her badge and introduced herself.

‘You’re working on Tim’s case?’

Ella nodded. ‘Is Dr McLennan in?’

‘He should be back from his house call any moment,’ she said. ‘I’m his wife, Genevieve. Tim’s aunt. It’s nice to meet you.’

They shook hands.

‘I thought doctors didn’t do house calls any more.’

‘Not many do, that’s for sure.’ Genevieve looked past Ella to the street. ‘Here he comes.’

Dr Alistair McLennan was so tall his almost-white hair brushed the top of the doorway. He wore grey trousers and a light blue shirt and around his neck hung a thick black stethoscope with his name engraved on the stainless-steel bell. His hand was warm and freckled across the back, his grip firm.
A good doctor’s hand
, Ella thought,
one built to reassure
.

‘Good to meet you,’ he said.

In his office, he gestured for her to sit down and moved a plastic model of the human spine off to one side.

‘I hear you were Tim’s GP.’

He nodded.

‘Just out of curiosity,’ she said, ‘is there some kind of regulation that says a doctor can’t treat family members?’

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘For emotional reasons, in some circumstances it makes good sense not to, and as a GP I wouldn’t treat my wife or son. But Tamara and John were happy for me to take care of their kids and I was happy to do it.’

‘I guess there’s no problem with getting appointments that way.’

He grinned. ‘Or bulk billing.’

‘How often did you see Tim?’

‘Not often. They were fit, healthy kids. Josh had some problems, of course – he’s got a heart murmur I keep an eye on – but Tim and Haydee I only saw for the regular childhood illnesses. Chickenpox, mumps. Tim had a greenstick fracture of his left radius once. Tar and John called me and I took him to the hospital.’

‘Can you remember the last time you saw him as a patient?’

‘I can check.’ He moved the computer mouse. ‘I know it was within a few months of his death. Let me see . . . yes, it was on 7 September 1990.’

Six weeks before he died.
‘What was that for?’

‘Acne,’ he said. ‘Tim was concerned about his break-outs and Tar asked me to talk to him.’

Ella didn’t remember Tim’s skin being bad in the photos she’d seen. ‘What did you tell him?’

‘The usual stuff. It’s not your fault, it’s hormones, but you can help by keeping it clean and going slow on the junk food. I offered him antibiotics too, but he didn’t want them.’

‘Did he confide in you?’

‘Never,’ McLennan said. ‘You’re asking because of the gay rumour?’

‘About what Damien Millerton said in his statement, yes,’ she said. ‘You don’t believe it?’

‘I don’t think it was true at all, and unfortunately Tim isn’t here to tell what was really said that night.’

‘You believe Millerton was lying?’

‘I didn’t know him so I couldn’t say, but I knew Tim and I never got any indication that he might have been like that.’

‘What kind of indication?’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘I had a young man once as a patient and with him I knew. I just knew. Tim wasn’t like that. He was just an ordinary boy.’

Ella made a note and wondered why boys who were gay couldn’t be ‘just ordinary’ too. ‘He never talked to you about sex?’

He shook his head. ‘Boys tend to get their information from their friends. Asking an adult is the height of embarrassment.’

‘Let me ask you this,’ she said. ‘What would have happened in the family if Tim had said he was gay?’

He tugged the ends of the stethoscope. ‘It would have been fine.’

‘Really?’

‘Of course. He was Tar and John’s son, he was my nephew. He was a great kid and we loved him.’

‘Did he know that?’

He looked at her. ‘Tim was murdered. He didn’t kill himself because he was gay and struggling with coming out.’

‘I’m fully aware of that,’ Ella said. ‘I’m just curious about the family dynamic. Millerton said Tim was upset over an argument that had happened that evening at the family birthday barbecue. Do you remember that night?’

‘Again, allow me to point out that he didn’t kill himself over an argument.’

‘I’m aware of that too.’

‘It was merely a case of a moody teenage boy being annoyed with his family and wanting to be somewhere else, and those wishes coming up against the will of his parents.’

‘He was rude to your wife.’

‘He was rude to all of us,’ Alistair said. ‘Do you know many teenage boys, Detective?’

She smiled at him. Rude didn’t even begin to cover the attitudes of the boys that cops usually met.

He didn’t smile back. ‘Tim was taken by somebody and murdered. The argument had nothing to do with that, and I’m concerned about your apparent focus on it.’

‘We look into every angle,’ she said. ‘Even those that might not seem important or necessary to you.’

‘You’re right that it doesn’t seem important to me.’ He adjusted the position of the plastic spine. ‘Tamara told me about your aggressive attitude and, quite frankly, I am unimpressed. She is a grieving and unstable woman. If the fact that you’ve reopened the case isn’t difficult enough for her, you then treat her with so little respect.’

Ella said, ‘She wants the case reopened.’

‘She wants the case reopened with all the state’s detectives on it, you mean. She can’t have that and so this paltry effort just causes her more stress. Let me ask you straight out, Detective: what are the odds that you’ll solve this?’

‘It’s impossible to say.’

‘But I know you have a ballpark in mind,’ he said. ‘I won’t embarrass you by asking again, but we both know that the likelihood of identifying the culprit, let alone charging him, let alone gaining a conviction, is so small as to be laughable.’

Ella’s hackles rose. ‘We don’t investigate on the basis of likelihoods.’

‘Look at it through Tamara’s eyes,’ he said. ‘She put her hope in the detectives before and they failed. She’s managed to go on. Now it’s all being brought up again. What will happen when you fail too?’

‘I understand your concern for your sister-in-law,’ Ella said, ‘but it’s my job to find her son’s killer.’

Alistair’s clear blue eyes rested on her. ‘I hope for her sake that you do.’

At the Children’s Hospital Emergency Department, Freya let Georgie and Kim go in without her.

She paced the ambulance bay. She examined the truck’s side mirror. She looked at her watch and the way that time was rushing her so quickly towards tonight. She got back into the ambulance and tried to work out what an innocent person would say about the detective’s visit and how they would say it.

Georgie came out smiling. ‘Nice kid.’

‘Idiot doctor.’ Freya made herself loosen her grip on the wheel so her knuckles regained colour. ‘We almost got killed because of his incompetence.’

‘What can you do? At least the kid’s okay. Her mum practically jumped out of her skin to see her walk in.’ Georgie reached for the microphone. ‘Thirty-three is clear.’

‘Stand by, Three.’

Freya forced herself to rest a casual elbow on the wheel. ‘So what did the copper want?’

‘She asked what I remembered about that morning.’

‘Must be hard, so many years later.’

Georgie shook her head. ‘It’s like it was yesterday. I told her everything, though it was already all in my statement, and then she said somebody had sent her a letter about me.’

‘What?’

‘Thirty-three,’ Control said.

‘Thirty-three,’ Georgie answered.

‘Head to Randwick Nursing Home and I’ll get back to you shortly.’

‘Copy.’ Georgie hung up the mike.

Freya couldn’t think straight. ‘What kind of letter?’

‘It said she should talk to the girl who found the body.’ Georgie opened the street directory.

Freya’s throat was dry. ‘Was that all?’ she croaked.

Georgie ran her finger down the index of nursing homes. ‘That’s what she said. She seemed to think I knew more about Tim than I was letting on. I said I had no clue, and that the letter was probably written by Ross and the other idiots at Woolford.’

Of course, of course.
Freya tried to slow her racing heart.
It
must be that, because nobody knows anything.

‘Aha. Bond Street,’ Georgie said. ‘Know where that is?’

Freya grasped the key with a trembling hand. Nobody knew anything except her and Dion, and she hadn’t breathed a word, and there was no reason for him to either.

It had to be Ross Oakes. Had to.

SIX

C
allum stood by the pool in Tamara and John’s backyard. It was hot in the late afternoon sun and he knew he’d be sweatier than ever for the speech to the Chamber of Commerce tonight, but Josh was swinging his feet in the water and smiling up at him. He wasn’t going anywhere.

‘Mum was on the telly.’

‘I know.’

Callum didn’t know where Tamara was; she hadn’t answered his knock on the granny-flat door, but that didn’t necessarily mean she was sleeping off a tranquilliser haze. She might be busy upstairs in the house. She could be out shopping, or having cof-fee, talking and laughing with people. Or she might be watching him through the motionless granny-flat curtains.

A beetle paddled in circles in the water and he got the leaf scoop from its hook on the fence and rescued the thing, knocking the side of the scoop against the pebblecrete so the beetle toppled out. Josh laughed as it puttered off to the lawn. Callum replaced the scoop and thought about how much time he’d spent here over the years, how he’d probably been here more frequently after Tim died than before, for a few years at least. The end had come one day when he was seventeen. He’d climbed out of the water and stood on the pool deck, so aware of himself, the water trickling off his skin, the sun on his shoulders and back, just so conscious of being alive, when he’d heard a noise and turned to see Tar running from the back door towards him. Remembering the look on her face made him shiver still; he’d seen in her eyes first the belief that he was Tim and then the recognition, the awful, awful recognition, that he wasn’t. She’d tripped and fallen to her hands and knees and stayed there sobbing, and in an instant he’d gone from feeling godlike in his youth to knowing he was just a nervous boy in black Speedos, too nervous even to pat her shoulder, instead running past for help.

He’d realised then that he’d been co-opted by his father into a kind of replacement for Tim. As he’d grown older, he’d looked more and more like him – their build and their hair exactly the same. But even before that Alistair had sent him over to hang out, to fool around with Josh, and he remembered the time they’d been playing Star Wars: he’d been Vader in the black bedsheet and stifling mask, Josh in Tim’s old karate gear being Skywalker and fighting him on the landing, shouting at him to do the breathing, do the breathing, and Callum had felt strong arms wrap around him from behind. The mask had come off and he’d found himself in John’s tearful embrace. It had been uncomfortable, and after a moment John had let him go and walked away without a word, and Callum had known then, like he knew later by the pool, that for a moment it had seemed Tim was back home. It made him feel strange that when they looked at him they saw not their nephew but the space that Tim had left. He saw it in their eyes as he got his HSC, turned eighteen, then twenty-one, graduated from uni – all those milestones they should have had with their boy who looked so much like him.

He’d spoken to his dad about it once, asked him why he’d sent him over there so often.

‘Why do you think?’ Alistair had said.

‘Because you feel bad for them?’

‘Tamara’s your mother’s sister, of course I feel bad,’ he’d said. ‘But the reason is that there’s a silence in their house now, and if you can help ease suffering then you should.’

After the pool day, though, Callum had started to make excuses. He needed to practise the trumpet more; his HSC was coming up, he really should study harder; he had to research different unis and course options and carefully, painstakingly, fill out applications. Alistair had given him looks but said nothing, and over time he wasn’t going there a few times a week any more, or even once a week, but slowly dwindling to once a month and then less. Josh missed him, and used to call him up and ask when he was coming back, saying that Skywalker’s force was getting stronger and he’d now be able to beat Vader with his eyes almost completely closed. Callum had felt bad, but the memory of Tamara’s face by the pool kept him away.