Death Delights (21 page)

After I’d cleaned up the kitchen and searched in vain for whatever memory had been triggered by the frying pan, I grabbed my shaving gear, some clean clothes and the plastic packet containing the two anonymous letters, packed my old overnight bag and locked up. My mobile rang as I was walking to the car and I stopped in the darkness of the palm jungle.

‘McCain?’ I said.

She only had to say hello and I knew who it was.

‘I was wondering,’ she said, and her voice trailed off. Overhead, I was aware of the rustling of palm fronds and the rich compost smell of rotting fungus in the dimness of the thick grove.

‘Yes?’ I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice.

‘I was wondering,’ she said, ‘if you’d let me buy you a coffee this time?’

I kept my voice steady and polite. ‘I’m sure that could be arranged,’ I said. ‘When did you have in mind?’

‘Sometime to suit both of us,’ she said. ‘I’m free most days.’

Days. She wasn’t free at night. The man in her life loomed at me so that when I next spoke, the coolness in my voice was genuine. ‘I’m away until tomorrow morning. What about tomorrow afternoon?’ I suggested. ‘Same place. We both know that.’

We agreed on four o’clock and I rang off. Despite all the weight of my various concerns and my irritation about the anonymous bastard who’d caused her to seek help from Relations Anonymous, I found my spirits had lifted as I drove to the Collins Club.

•

Pigrooter was already installed with his
Fin Review
and other newspapers, his cup of tea and his cognac when I asked if I might briefly join him. He extended an open hand and indicated the chair opposite him.

‘I found my daughter via the illegal House of Bondage,’ I said. ‘I suppose I’m here to thank you for the tip. But my daughter’s in Intensive Care this very minute. Heroin overdose.’

Pigrooter nodded. ‘A lot of them do that,’ he said finally. His pen was poised over the crossword and most of the little squares were filled with his large, slanting printed letters.

‘I’m out of touch in this city,’ I said. ‘I want the name of the dealer she’s been associating with. Get me that. I can do the rest.’

Pigrooter looked steadily at me.

‘I have reason to believe,’ I said, ‘that she could be in all sorts of trouble.’ I thought of her lying comatose in the Intensive Care bed and thought how silly those words sounded. To be in worse trouble, my daughter would have to be dead. And that was a distinct possibility if she’d ripped off a dealer. ‘I’ll owe you one,’ I finally said.

‘You’re with the
Federales
now,’ Pigrooter noted, saying that word in a mock Spanish accent. He leaned back in his chair and his belly lifted like a huge, deflating beach ball. ‘Not much use to me. I say that with respect,’ he added.

I knew what he meant. I wouldn’t have the local knowledge that he traded in.

‘You never know, though,’ I said, ‘when you might need something analysed. Some trace. Some tiny thing. Could make all the difference.’

Pigrooter considered, sipping his black tea and knocking back the last of the cognac. ‘Still off the booze?’ he asked me. I nodded. ‘Commendable,’ Pigrooter grunted, staring at the crossword as if I’d suddenly ceased to exist. I waited. This was all part of his game. ‘Getting anywhere with the mutilator?’

‘We’ve got some leads,’ I said. ‘It’s a confusing sort of case.’ I thought of the dead priest.

‘I’ll ask around, have a chat.’ He picked up his pen again, filling in a vertical word. Then looked up at me again. ‘It’ll cost you,’ he said, ‘one way or the other.’

I called in at St Vincent’s and sat beside my daughter. I could see that her mother had been there by the two little ceramic donkey vases, their tiny carts holding flowers on the table beside the bed. For years they’d sat on a shelf over the television set with Red Riding Hood and Little Bo Peep and a silly fellow in yellow pantaloons beside them. I leaned back in the chair, willing Jacinta to get better, to wake up. What were you up to, Jass? I asked her. Whose money is it? What’s going on? But these were only superficial questions. Beneath them lay the mystery of eighteen months’ absence and I wasn’t sure how much of that I wanted to unravel.

Jacinta’s pale face was turned towards me, her breathing slow and deep. With her hair now soft and brushed forward over her forehead, no make-up, and her lips softly open, she looked like a little kid again. Hell, I thought to myself, she
is
a little kid.  What do you know at fifteen? A lot more, I thought a while later as I walked back to my car, than I did at the same age. I remembered the gawky youth I’d been, inarticulate before, and even worse after the loss of my sister.

•

I had to go back to Canberra to complete several tests and sign reports that were needed by the police in cases that were about to hit the courts so I drove south again. As I swung through the gates, I noticed the doors to the hangar-like building we use to house large exhibits were open and I caught a glimpse of the 1968 Holden. The sight of it sent a shiver through me. I signed myself in and went straight to my office where I made a cup of coffee and finished and signed the reports. Then I took out the plastic packet with the second anonymous letter and Rosie’s old bear. I took the battered teddy to the Biology Lab where it would be screened and tested for her DNA so we’d have a reference sample to match against anything found in the Holden. Then I gowned and gloved myself and took both anonymous letters into one of the well-lit examination rooms. I opened the second one carefully over the white paper lining I’d placed on the table and gently unfolded it, spreading it with gloved fingers. It looked pretty much identical to the first one I’d received, except for the wording: laser jet print on bright white copy paper.

You think you’re so smart
, I read,
but you’re so full of shit you can’t see the forest for the trees. People like you have to be made to see the truth about yourselves. And it won’t be long
.

I put the two letters together. Since the advent of white copy paper, those examining questioned documents have gathered a formidable array of tests in the composition of paper. Sarah would be able to determine if these two sheets of paper had come from the same ream of A4 paper and if they’d been close together or separated in the ream. Refined investigation, but until we found
that
ream of paper in the possession of the very person from whom these letters had originated, all we’d have would be some very fancy results. We’d check them for fingerprints, naturally eliminating our own in case we touched anything injudiciously. Even if the letter-writer had worn gloves, there was a still a chance we might discover latent prints.

I took off my coat and hung it in the anteroom, thinking of my daughter lying in another very different sterile environment. I’d found a couple of minuscule flakes on the letters that looked like some sort of metallic substance and I fixed them for further examination. It was impossible to deduce what they were although I didn’t think they were paint. I handed the tiny traces over to Nigel who did most of the particle and fibre examination. ‘Don’t sneeze,’ I warned him. Although it was a joke, there wouldn’t be a bench worker alive, myself included, who hadn’t spent a fair bit of desperate time on hands and knees crawling around a laboratory floor, searching for the speck of evidence that had somehow jumped off the slide. And on which an entire prosecution case might well depend.

It was time for lunch and I didn’t feel like using the staff facilities, so I drove into town and ate a sandwich at a milkbar. I felt some apprehension about meeting Iona Seymour and realised I was what the Americans call ‘dating’ again. I was still surprised at my strong, personal interest in her. But from the moment I’d heard that voice on the tape at Kings Cross police station, I’d been attracted. This reminded me that I’d have to encounter Florence sooner or later. She’d be the person who would determine what if any DNA profiles or sequences might be derived from the Holden. I was very hopeful that there might still be something adhering to those old beer bottles.

I went out to the big garage and walked around the Holden. After all this time there was little likelihood of any fingerprint evidence remaining, though I could see where Fingerprints had dusted with red fluorescent powder. An alternate light source and filtered goggles revealed what could not be seen by the naked eye. I bent over and looked into the interior. Careful vacuuming, using a brand-new vacuum cleaner bag before anything else was done, ensured that the interior contents could be microscopically examined. Now red dust adhered to the steering wheel, window sills, interior and exterior door handles, the dash, gearstick, brake handle, anywhere, in fact, that a human hand might fall. If the abductor had left anything of himself in the way of clothing fibres or hairs, we’d pick them up. And the same went for Rosie.

I returned to my office and tidied up, putting the finished reports in the tray for posting. A tap on my door and Florence was suddenly there. Her reddish hair was pulled back from her face and she looked sombre in a black trouser suit.

‘I thought you’d want to know that we got lucky on the beer bottles. Saliva. It’s being amplified now. I did your sister first. She was all over that car.’

So, after all this time, there were still infinitesimal fragments of Rosie. I felt the wave of hope rise within me, mixed with sadness. I hated to imagine my sister’s time in that Holden. Rosie would have left skin cells, possibly hair with the follicle attached, other traces that I didn’t like to think about too much. I stopped myself going down that road by turning my attention to the traces left by the abductor or abductors. Saliva, by itself, has no nucleic component, but yields plenty of shed epithelial cheek cells.

But there was something else I had to address first. ‘Florence—’ I started to say.

She raised a hand. Her strong face was forbidding, mouth in a tight line, eyes narrowed. ‘I don’t want to discuss anything with you apart from work-related matters. Okay?’

Several thoughts flashed through my mind but the easiest thing was just to agree with her. ‘If that’s what you want.’

‘That’s what I want,’ she said, turning away. ‘I’ll let you know when the amps are ready.’ I heard her footsteps faintly tapping along the vinyl corridor and out of hearing.

I stood there, perplexed. But the wave of hope was sustaining me, lifting me above the awkwardness of Florence and her responses. If they’d got saliva from a bottle neck, there was a good chance we’d get a profile.

Before leaving for the day, I tried the number given me by Alix’s flatmate. This time I got an answering machine. But at least it was her voice. ‘Hi,’ I said, ‘it’s me. We’ve lost touch and I just wanted to say hello. I hope everything’s okay.’ I was about to leave my new phone number but I knew in that moment that it was too late now. The ‘convenient association’ had come to an end. I thought of Alix lying back naked on her dark red satin sheets, lazily watching me as I sketched her, alternating sunlight and shadow striping her fair skin through the venetian blinds of her bedroom. Despite everything, I felt a sadness and a chill somewhere near my heart. Another ending. Another connection severed. In that moment, it seemed that my whole life had been created out of negative forces—loss and the absence of loving women. But I couldn’t quite throw the phone number in the bin. I stashed it in the odds and ends bottom drawer on the right-hand side of my desk.

As I walked out of the building, I met Nigel, the particle man. With his slicked back dark hair and tiny moustache, he looked like a villain in a melodrama, rather than one of the smartest young scientists in the country.

‘I’ll have a result for you on those bits and pieces from that FU you gave me,’ he said, relishing the acronym for ‘forensics unknown’, ‘in the next couple of days.’ He ducked back to his room. ‘Smart time to take leave, doctor. The crime wave is supposed to be over,’ he called, ‘but we’ve had the busiest month on record.’

I decided not to stay overnight as I’d planned, but to drive back, even though I felt quite tired. I’d done this drive so often in my married days, I could do it asleep.

•

In three and a half hours I was in Sydney and although it was nearly eight, I called in on Jacinta on my way home. Genevieve was there, hunched in a chair beside our daughter and she whipped around when I walked in. The last few days had started to take their toll on my pretty ex-wife. She looked haggard and drawn and there was something new in her face I’d never seen before.

‘There’s been no change,’ she said to my unasked question. She turned away from me, to gaze on the still face of our daughter. ‘I lost Greg,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to lose this one.’

‘You haven’t lost Greg at all,’ I said, impatient. ‘He’s decided he wants to live with me for a while, that’s all. Sons often do that, for chrissake.’

As soon as I spoke, I regretted my reaction. Let her interpret the world in her negative way. It was no longer my business. It never really had been, except when I’d crashed into one of her interpretations. I walked around the other side of the bed. I could see Jacinta’s eyelids flicker and the shadow of something like a smile moved across her face, like the lightest of breezes. I touched the hand that lay across her chest.

‘It’s Dad, Jass,’ I said to her. ‘I’m here.’ I leaned over and kissed her, noticing a vein pulsing slowly at her temple. I stayed for a little while, but the atmosphere in the room was filled with Genevieve’s hostility so that when Bob rang, I was relieved.

•

I had no difficulty finding the Edgecliff crime scene because the police had cordoned off the entire street and even righteous citizens trying to get through with the shopping were having a hard time. Bob must have given my name to the uniform whose car blocked the road because as soon as he saw my ID I was ushered through. I noticed Bradley Strachan’s Audi double-parked outside number 389 View Street, a Tuscan-style mansion with a row of dwarf citrus trees in pots running each side of the flagstone path that led up to the entrance, and I heard his voice as I stepped through the handsome double doors of the entry. There seemed to be acres of softly lit marble and my eyes were drawn upwards to see the concavity of the dome high above, crowning the entrance area and suffusing it with greenish light. I became aware of a woman’s intermittent screaming upstairs, and the high-pitched repetitive sound reminded me of spurwinged plovers startled at night.