Death Delights (33 page)

I was standing in the middle of a library, with books reaching from floor to ceiling, lining the walls. This must be a most valuable cache of rare titles, to be hidden behind a steel grille in this way. I walked slowly, reverently, around the high-ceilinged room. The titles were forbidding. I pulled one out—a heavy clothbound edition with nearly a thousand pages entitled
Psychiatric Disorders and Priestly Orders
. I opened it at random.
A clergyman must take great care when dealing with the hysteric woman parishioner
, I read.
On no account allow oneself to be alone with this person. At all times ensure the presence of a third party
. I opened it at the front cover to find its author’s name, Reverend Wesley Morton-Smythe, DD BA (Hons) Cambridge. I put the reverend gent’s work back on the shelf and walked around, looking at the rest of them. The other titles were in similar vein. Books of sermons, books of biblical exegesis, prayer books, hymn books, different versions of the Bible, shelf after shelf of the sombre volumes, all of them many years old, dated, moralising, Victorian attitudes, now only curiosities. I couldn’t imagine them having any value to Iona or anyone else for that matter. Maybe they had belonged to her father or the ex-husband. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would bother to secure them like this, with a heavy duty security gate.

I was about to go downstairs to find Iona when I noticed a tiny annexe off the library. I peered in and found a narrow bed, a large old-fashioned trunk with P & O stickers fading and peeling from it and a small fridge with some toiletries on the top of it in the corner. I opened the fridge and stared in surprise. Several bottles of stout lined the inner door and the shelves were stacked with trays of meat, steak and chops on white plastic trays, covered in foil. I remembered the shopping I’d seen in Iona’s trolley, the odd sensation I had when lifting eggs out of the pan. I stood, staring at the meat while things fell into place. What was all this meat doing here? Iona was a vegetarian yet that day when I’d contrived to meet her in the small supermarket, she’d had rashers of bacon in her trolley.

I shivered. A sudden chill had descended on the room and I was eager to be out of that sepulchral space. I hurried out of the library, closing the security gate and the crystal-knobbed door behind me. Every instinct in me was firing on over-drive and my white-hot mind strained to work out what was going on. Where was my hostess? Had she found another knife? Downstairs, I found that the bottom floor, too, was deserted, as empty as the
Marie Celeste
. I picked up the small port glass she’d drunk from and pocketed it.

The front door stood slightly ajar and I closed it on my way out. Her car was gone.

•

I crashed for an hour at home then had a shower and tried to make sense of what I’d seen. I was suddenly starving, and scrambled some eggs on toast, wondering why Iona had a fridge stocked with meat.

Did she creep into that library, gorge herself on flesh, read morbid psychopathology and fuel herself for murder?

I cleared away the plates and checked my messages. Florence’s cool voice came first, with no greeting. ‘I’ve got a male result from that FU from one of the beer bottles,’ she said. ‘Male. I’m doing the others today.’ I made a note to myself to check this Forensics Unknown sample against the reference sample from Bevan Treweeke sent to the lab by Bradley Strachan. Then came the message that pushed everything else out of my mind and had me spilling the coffee I’d made all over my kitchen floor. I stood there, listening, my chest heaving, trying to keep my guts from going into spasm, while I played Kapit’s words again.

‘You’ve got something of mine,’ he said. ‘If you want to see your son again, do what I tell you.’

I listened as he told me what to do. I didn’t need to write anything down. In my heightened state, his words burned into my mind like a brand. I played the tape over and over again. Then I raced out to the car and screamed around to the Italian restaurant down the road.

‘Greg’s not in tonight,’ said the woman looking up from the till. ‘His father rang up for him.’

‘Someone rang?’ I said stupidly.

‘His father,’ she told me.

I couldn’t say anything. I ran outside, diving back into the car, driving the short distance home in black-out.

I ran inside again. My legs went weak and I stumbled against the table, then onto the chair. It really was true. John Kapit had snatched my son from me. For a second or two, I think I went blind as shock closed the world around me. Then my thoughts became tumultuous, spinning and racing. I’d dragged my son into this filthy world I work in. I should have been smarter. Covered my tracks better. A thousand ‘if onlys’ started playing in my head. I smashed my hand onto the table to stop them. I went to ring Bob, but my hand faltered over the mobile. I couldn’t trust Bob. Not in this. He would want to follow the protocols, take the appropriate police action. I could even hear him agreeing with me not to take it further, but then putting the phone down and immediately organising an SPG operation behind my back, because it’s exactly what I would have done had the situation been reversed. All of my training told me to ring Bob. Don’t do this alone, my instinct told me. But my training was not who I was in those frantic moments. I was only Greg’s father, determined to bring him home, unwilling to do anything to jeopardise him.

I drove round to Charlie’s, let myself in with the key that lived in the petunia pot, went straight to the hall cupboard and pulled out the gym bag. I opened it, checking the money. It lay dusty in its plastic coverings and I thought how meaningless it was compared with the brilliance and beauty of my son. That John Kapit could equate the two caused me to hate him even more and I swore that one day, I’d even things up between us. I re-zipped the bag, keeping my mind on what I was doing, because the hatred and rage building up in me seemed ready to explode. In retrospect, I understood what terrible danger Jacinta had been in, why little Renee had died, and what a blessing it was that my daughter lay comatose in a hospital, far away from consciousness, away from John Kapit. I had no doubt that it was only this contingency that had saved her life so far. Just for a moment I hated my wife more than I’ve ever hated anyone in the world—even Kapit himself. I longed to punish her, and hurt her with everything I knew.

It was in this mood that I drove back to my place, unlocked a box stashed at the bottom of one of my sealed cartons and pulled out a prohibited item. Many years ago, I’d taken the Colt .45 automatic pistol from under the passenger seat of a crim’s car and never got round to handing it in. I knew I was breaking the law but right now I was very pleased that I had. I remember how I’d smiled at the gun amnesty, and the way many good citizens had handed in their weapons. I’d always kept it hidden and no one in the world knew of its existence apart from myself. Now, its blued surfaces cooled my sweaty hands as the eight rounds snapped into the magazine.

With the pistol carefully in position in the gym bag, between wads of cash, I drove to the Newtown address Kapit had given me. I could think of nothing else other than getting my son back safely. The other investigations currently in my life no longer existed. The loss of job and reputation meant nothing. On that drive, something deep changed in me and I knew I would never be the same again. I had crossed over into another territory where love, hatred, vengeance and justice were no longer abstracts, but a furnace that burned within me.

Going by Kapit’s instructions, I recognised the ‘For Sale’ sign out the front of the narrow single-storey grey and pink terrace and pulled over. Aware that I was probably being watched, I waited by the kerb, gathering my resources. In that moment I realised something. Kapit hadn’t mentioned the accounts book. I made a decision. I took the book out of the bag and stowed it under my car seat. This gave me leverage even though I was giving him back his money. There was no doubt in my mind that I would kill John Kapit if needed and that I would do whatever was necessary afterwards.

I got out of the car and picked up the bag from the passenger side. I crossed the road and went through the open gate of the cottage, past the long grass of the narrow front garden, ducking a thorny bougainvillea as I stepped up onto the veranda. I pushed the door as I’d been instructed to do and stepped inside. In the gloom of the deserted place, I saw the front room on my left where Kapit had told me to leave the money. I looked around. Dusty floorboards, stained plaster ceiling, a piece of masking tape holding the dirty glass of the window pane in position and a dusty table against the wall. I could sense the place was empty, but I knew Kapit’s courier wouldn’t be far away. He was probably watching me right now. You don’t leave over two hundred grand sitting very long in a deserted house. I slipped the Colt out of the bag and into my pocket where its weight was a comfort. I could wait here until whoever was watching the place got curious about why I hadn’t come out and jump him when he came in, force him to lead me to his master, or I could do what Kapit told me I’d need to do if I wanted to know where Greg was. I really had no choice. I had to be at the agreed place for the phone call.

I left the gym bag on the table and drove back to the house of my failed marriage. Genevieve wasn’t home but I still had a key even though I’d never wanted to use it. I let myself in and waited in the kitchen, putting Kapit’s accounts book on the counter beside the sink, looking through the archway into the living room, barely seeing the clusters of new china ornaments that encrusted every possible surface. I couldn’t keep still. I picked up the book and put it down again. I walked from room to room, sitting briefly on Jacinta’s shrine bed then visiting Greg’s room which smelled of him and the gel he used to flatten his hair. On the wall were photos of him from the sporting successes I’d been too busy or too far away from to attend. I walked up to one where he was standing, sharing a soccer trophy with his team and the presenter, his face alight with joy. I could just see Genevieve in the background and Jacinta, small and sullen beside her. I couldn’t remember where I’d been that day. Except that I wasn’t there. I was rocketed backwards in time to the day I was in a car with a pennant or a certificate of some sort, and somebody else’s father was driving me home. I had a terrible glimpse of something huge and dreadful: that because of who I was, of where I’d come from and what I had become, both of my children were paying in different ways. And so was I.

I waited, but the phone didn’t ring. I looked at my watch. It was past the deadline Kapit had nominated. I waited more, prowling and pacing, glancing in at the bedroom Genevieve and I had shared for all those years, some part of me pleased that she had this coming to her for the way she’d played into Kapit’s hands. I wondered if she was at the hospital or somewhere with Kapit, all unwitting and playing the sweet thing to him the way she used to do with me. I wondered how she’d feel when she realised how well and good he’d fucked her. And her children. But this triumph was hollow and empty. They were my children, too.

An hour passed before I came to accept that Kapit wasn’t going to ring. Something had gone terribly wrong. I hunted through the phone book and eventually found his number, but all I got was his message bank. I smashed the phone down. Maybe I should have handed over the accounts book, too. I cursed myself for not having done it when I’d had the chance. How could I live with myself if anything happened to Greg? I’d have to ring Bob now. I should have done that in the first place, I told myself, and maybe Greg would have been here with me now.

I drove back to my place with Kapit’s accounts book under my seat, the Colt in my pocket and a mind full of terror for my son.

The first thing I saw as I walked past the cypresses and the alarming noisy mynahs was that my unfinished watercolour was lying trampled on the ground. Someone had deliberately stamped on it and dragged it along with dirty shoes. Then I glanced at my back door and stopped in alarm. It was not quite closed. I could see the barest strip of the pale inner doorframe. My first thought was that my house had been broken into again. Or maybe Greg had come home in some miraculous way. My hopes lifted for a second. I put my hand on the weight in my pocket and crept towards the door. I stood there a moment, straining to hear anything. But nothing stirred inside. It was utterly still. For some reason, the crime scene at Centennial Park and Frank Carmody sliding down the wall covered in his own blood came into my head. When I realised why, my mouth dried in fear. The smell of human blood was in the air.

My heart contracted. My son. Dear God no. Please. Not Greg. Not my boy.

I remained frozen a moment or so longer, until I could bear it no more. Then with a roar, I bashed the door open, racing into the house, switching the light on, screaming his name, kicking out, my eyes frantically searching the room. Someone lay stretched out on the floor near the dining table. My heart lurched with terror, then relief. It wasn’t Greg.

I remained where I was as the relief washed all over me. The man was lying on the floor, the shoebox of photographs and postcards scattered all over and around him, grotesque and oversized confetti.

I couldn’t tell if he looked like Harrison Ford or not from the expression on his face, arms flung out, his lower body awash with blood, and legs drawn up as if to hide the terrible damage between his legs. But I knew what was there, or rather, what wasn’t there. And even though I had detested the man who lay there on the floor, I’m not sure that I would have wished this death on him. I don’t know how long it was before I grabbed my phone and hit the buttons with shaking fingers. As I talked to the emergency services, my eyes finally focused on the wall opposite. The photo of the unknown youth was gone from the wall.

Within minutes, my apartment was ablaze with Crime Scene lights, police and ambulance personnel. I didn’t care about Kapit, all I could think of was getting my son back safely. Bob arrived together with Stan Lovell from the Drug Squad and I found myself making another confession to my friend about the deal I’d made with Kapit. ‘He was going to ring me at Genevieve’s place,’ I said, ‘to tell me where to find Greg. I waited and he didn’t ring.’ I was only vaguely aware of a Crime Scene officer squatting and labelling a small breaking tool that lay on the floor near the door.

‘You should have told me,’ said Bob. ‘You know what the rules are. You can’t do something like this by yourself.’ He swung round on me and his eyes blazed. ‘That is so typical of you,’ he said. I’d never seen him like this before.

‘I just wanted to get my boy back.’ I felt my voice shake on the last few words. ‘That’s all I was thinking about.’

‘That’s why you should have rung me. You could have let us do all the other thinking for you, Jack,’ said Bob more gently, ‘that’s our job.’ It was the closest Bob got to an ‘I told you so.’

‘I waited and waited for his call,’ I repeated, ‘but he didn’t ring.’

We both turned and looked back into the room where the dead man lay, surrounded by the professional attendants of violent death. ‘Because he was here,’ said Bob.

‘He was here,’ I repeated. ‘And so was someone else.’

Bob didn’t say anything, just made another cryptic entry into his notebook. Sometimes I think cops do that simply to have something to do with their hands, like smokers light up, and women used to flirt with fans in years gone by. I was awash with powerful emotions. Any pleasure that the bastard Kapit had well and truly got his deserts was overridden by my overwhelming concern for Greg. Bob suddenly put into words what I’d been trying not to think about.

‘Whoever came here,’ said my friend, ‘didn’t come to kill John Kapit.’

A thrill of terror shook me from head to foot and my agitation increased. I was the one who habitually sat at that table, tending my stored-up cases, my sad, boxed history. It should have been me lying there with my cock and balls cut off. I imagined the strong figure in the red jacket, the long blonde hair hiding face and features, creeping into my house, with no reason to think that the man at the table wasn’t me. Maybe by the time she’d realised her mistake, it was too late to stop. Maybe in the struggle and the poor light, she’d never noticed.

‘Take a look at this,’ Stan Lovell called and we joined him at the door to see the shredded wood around the lock where the door had been prised open. ‘Looks like Kapit broke in, left the door slightly ajar and sat down to wait for you. The killer only had to walk in.’

I wanted to be out of all the fuss and the stench of blood so I went out the back and paced up and down the unfinished brickwork of the patio while Bob asked questions of the Crime Scene people. Someone offered me a cigarette and I took it without thought, nearly vomiting on the first draught, throwing it underfoot and stamping on it, wondering what had happened to the fifty-a-day man I’d once been.

‘Why was he here?’ I asked.

‘You don’t fit the profile at all,’ said Bob who’d joined me outside.

‘I meant fucking Kapit!’ I yelled. Bob edged over to me. ‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d be more worried about your other visitor.’

Bob’s words shocked me into appreciating the danger of my situation. It wasn’t the first time a killer had stalked an investigator. I recalled the rabbit-in-the-headlights photograph of myself. With a moderate amount of determination, anyone could have found out where I lived. At any another time, without the harrowing absence of my son, I’d probably have been terrified at this development.

‘You must know something,’ said Bob. ‘Something so dangerous for the killer that you became a target.’

Frustration, fear and anger charged through my system. ‘For Chrissakes, Bob, I don’t know anything! We don’t know anything about the killer—’ I stopped, lost for words. ‘It’s a fucking joke to suggest that we do.’

‘I’m not laughing,’ said Bob, ‘and you shouldn’t be either.’ His sober words calmed me somewhat, reinforcing my own conclusions, slowing me down. ‘That dead man lying in there was supposed to be you,’ he added.

I took a deep breath. I needed to stay sane and grounded, for my son’s sake, and not to be spinning out like I had been over the last few hours. I desperately needed rest, although the idea of that seemed impossible. From inside my house, I could hear a burst of the laughter that accompanies grisly crime scenes, as investigators find a joke to relieve the pressures of dealing with violent death. I fought the urge to run in there and yell at them all, tell them all to get out, drop what they were doing and help me find Greg.

‘Let’s turn to Kapit for the moment,’ said Bob. I tried to bring my whirling mind into line. ‘Kapit knew you’d be out,’ Bob said, looking up from his note taking.’ ‘He knew you’d be taking the money back to him at Newtown.’

I remembered the book under my seat in the car. But I couldn’t stay with the conversation. ‘Where is he, Bob?’ I said to my friend. ‘What has the bastard done with Greg?’

I had an irrational urge to go in and kick the dead body. I understood how soldiers might want to tear an enemy’s body to pieces in revenge for hurting the people they loved. Bob put a hand on my arm. ‘Let’s go to your place’—he corrected himself—‘to Genevieve’s place. You’ll have to tell her what’s happened. She might know where Kapit could have taken Greg.’

We walked down the side of the house and the scent of cypress and salt was strong in the warm air. ‘I think you should seriously think about moving,’ Bob said, as we climbed into his car. ‘Or at least get some decent security at your place.’

On the way, we diverted to Newtown. The door of the ‘For Sale’ cottage was still unlocked and, not surprisingly, the bag of money was no longer on the table. Kapit or his cat’s-paw would have struck within seconds of me leaving the premises.

At Lane Cove, Genevieve screamed and shrieked that I was lying about Greg and lying about Kapit and it was only Bob’s presence that restored some sort of emotional order. I waited, trying not to say something I’d regret, focusing my attention on a little white and gold shepherdess with silly smiling sheep crowding around her legs and who was inexplicably carrying a watering can.

Eventually, when Genevieve had become half rational, Bob started on her. I made an attempt to question her, but Bob’s look and half-raised hand in my direction stopped me.

‘… anywhere at all,’ Bob was saying. ‘Any mention of a property, a flat, business?’

‘John didn’t discuss his business with me,’ she cried. ‘And he wouldn’t have hurt Greg. He wouldn’t. He
liked
Greg.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He liked Jacinta too. He liked her so much she’s been living with him for the last couple of months. Your handsome boyfriend’s a dealer. He probably started your daughter’s using.’

The implications of this information were horrible and my estranged wife’s face was stricken as she took it in. ‘No,’ she said finally, beyond hysteria. ‘That can’t be right. That’s not true. You’re making that up.’

‘You’d better believe it,’ I said. ‘He tracked our daughter down all right, months ago.’

I let that sink in. I didn’t want to ask myself why John fucking Kapit had found Jacinta when all my efforts had failed. ‘He made a fool of you, Genevieve. And all the time, you’re crying on his shoulder, thanking him for all the work he’s doing searching for our daughter. Showing your appreciation.’

I couldn’t help kicking the door of the bedroom and Genevieve jumped up in a rage that now included everyone as well as me. I walked outside, away from the explosion. Crickets shrilled in the darkness. I know I shouldn’t have said what I’d said, but a bitter pressure had demanded release.

‘I can’t think! I can’t think with all this going on!’ I could hear my wife screaming inside. ‘Leave me alone. Get out and find my son. If he’d stayed here with me, none of this would have happened.’

I waited till Bob came out, joining me with a nod. ‘Let’s get going,’ he said.

•

Next day every property and known associate of John Cleever Kapit was visited. With Bob beside me, I talked to people who all had something to say about him. I spun from one door-knock to the next, my head swirling with crazy
déjà vu
feelings and scenes from eighteen months ago and twenty-five years ago. But we came no closer to finding where Kapit might have been holding my son. The newspapers published the ‘grave concerns’ police held for missing teenager Greg McCain. And it didn’t take them long to link him with Jacinta McCain, who’d run away eighteen months ago. My fury rose as I read and then reread Merrilyn Heywood’s piece, ‘Lightning
Does
Strike Twice’, about my children going missing. She had this all mixed up with Kapit’s murder, and wrongly attributed Jacinta’s return to his efforts, casting Kapit in the role of heroic PI who devoted his life to tracking down missing girls, as well as being the stalwart in the life of grieving mother, Genevieve McCain, abandoned by her philandering husband, and now facing the horrors of a missing child for the second time. It pissed me off that she’d taken this tack without talking to me. I made a mental note to forcefully disabuse Ms Heywood of her opinions at the next opportunity.

I went to the Collins Club but there was no aqua Bufori sports car and no Pigrooter in the corner. The freckled bar attendant put me straight. ‘He’s away for a few days,’ he said. ‘There’s a big boar giving some cocky a hard time.’ He tapped a colour snap stuck to the mirrored bar. ‘Took Mountbatten with him.’ The pig dog smiled out of the picture, its chest shielded by a studded leather breastplate, sitting cheekily on an enormous upturned tusker. I turned away.

‘You Jack McCain?’ the barman asked and for a second, I felt some foolish hope.

I turned and nodded.

‘Marty said to remind you about that business arrangement if you came in.’ How could I forget, I thought, as I walked away. I could hear Bob’s voice from the old days saying, ‘Cheer up. When things get really bad, they can only get worse.’

To counter the negative thoughts, I went to an AA meeting and came away feeling comforted by the wisdom I’d heard there. I knew I could face whatever the future held. No matter how difficult it seemed, millions of other humans had been there before me.

At home, I stood looking at the mess. I didn’t want to stay here anymore, yet I felt I couldn’t leave while Greg was missing. His pokey little bedroom here, his crop circle on the floor near the television, were palpable evidence of his existence. I couldn’t move out, not just yet. The Crime Scene people had taken the bloodstained rugs away with them and had vacuumed the floor searching for trace particles. Bob had arranged for cleaning contractors. I picked up poor old Kuan Ti from where he lay awkwardly and straightened his pole-knife. As I set his heavy metal base in its accustomed place on the table I found myself thinking a pathetic prayer: Kuan Ti, I said, god of detectives,
do
something.

Someone knocked on the door and for a second I thought it might be my son. But it was Charlie who pushed the door open. He came in and put his arms around me. I’ve never been a hugger and always avoided this sort of thing, but now I stood there, letting my brother’s arms encircle me, feeling bereft and helpless.