Death Delights (35 page)

I put the fax down and walked into Greg’s bedroom, staring sightlessly at a plastic gilt swimming award that lay crookedly on his bedside table. Now I knew who’d written those nasty letters and where those traces had come from. I was stunned. Nothing was the way I’d thought it was, and despite my scientific understanding of how things work, I seemed to have very little understanding of human beings. Especially women.

I walked outside again, feeling sick. I stood near my ruined painting and thought that probably it hadn’t been John Kapit who’d trodden it into the ground. I walked down to the back fence again and the sad little playground where Staro had sat on the swing. And so had someone else, I thought. Someone who’s lost her job and wants to punish me. The swing fitting was making its eerie sound again, but now that I knew what it was, it didn’t sound eerie at all. She used to wear that glitter gel all over her breasts and belly in the late afternoon so that when the sun shone through the horizontal slats of the blinds in her bedroom, she sparkled and shone like a treasure. I tried to see it from her point of view. Had I treated her badly? Given her reason to hope for something more? I’d rarely made mention of my personal life to her. In fact, it was difficult for me to remember ever saying anything of a personal nature to her. She’d been as eager—I’d have to say, more eager—than I. How had I given her cause for such spite against me? I’d never made promises, I’d never even implied I’d see her again. Each of our times together could have been the last time, until either I or she rang again and made another date. It had been such a casual affair. It was she, in fact, who’d referred to herself as the ‘convenient association’, and I’d continued the joke. Except she hadn’t been joking. Another woman, another witch. My first sponsor had been right: I should have turned around and walked the other way.

I poked a clearing through the grevillea bushes, disturbing some noisy mynahs who briefly cried their alarm before resettling. I could see that someone had just vacated the swing, which even now was making smaller and smaller arcs towards finding the still point. I thought of Florence and how I’d never noticed her interest in me until it was too late to do anything except flounder and make everything worse. And now I was drawn to Iona Seymour. Before it’s too late, a voice in my mind said, turn and walk the other way.

Suddenly, I could hear Charlie’s voice. He was knocking on the back door and calling me. ‘Where are you, Jack?’ he was saying. ‘I’ve got Dad with me. He wants to talk to you. Can I bring him in?’

So now my father sat in the place Staro had just vacated.

‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, fiddling with his packet of tobacco, ‘about Greg. Charlie rang and told me. I wanted to let you know that .
 
.
 
.’ He stopped. ‘I wanted to let you know .
 
.
 
. I wanted to help somehow.’ He’d got dressed up for his trip south, with an old deerstalker hat I hadn’t seen since I was a boy, and his sports coat and the knitted tie made by a loyal P & C member years ago in his teaching days. He looked around the table and then the room. ‘I need an ashtray,’ he announced.

I found him a saucer. Charlie had brought some take-away Chinese food along with them. Here we are, I was thinking, the men of our family, together for the first time in years, but without my son. There was something of the feeling of a wake about it and I shivered at the notion. I distributed plates and spoons around, serving myself a small pile of rice I knew I wouldn’t be able to touch. I was thinking of my children, of how precious they were to me, how little I knew them.

‘You got that photograph with you?’ my father was asking.

I passed him the picture of Rosie smiling into the sunlit November of long ago. He pushed it away impatiently. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘not that one. The photo of the young fellow.’ I told him I hadn’t seen it since the day of Kapit’s murder. I hadn’t told him about that earlier and obviously Charlie hadn’t either. I hated to acknowledge how close that man had come to me, even though he’d died because of it. ‘I’ve remembered who it is,’ my father was saying. I was jolted back to the present.

‘Who?’ I said, more harshly than I’d intended.

But my father was off on a tangent of his own. ‘I dreamed about the bathroom at Springbrook, in the old house,’ he said.

‘Who is it in the photograph?’ I said, anger rising up in me.

‘You know how the ferns outside the window used to press up against the bathroom window?’ our father was saying, as if he hadn’t heard me.

My anger mounted until it was a fury. ‘
Who was it in the photograph?
’ I yelled at him. ‘For chrissakes just listen to me and answer my questions and if you can’t be helpful, you miserable old bastard,
piss off out of here!’

My father flinched as if I’d struck him in the face. Charlie looked taken aback. My heart was pounding at breakneck speed in my chest, filling my head with its sound. A warning came from somewhere that this is how men have sudden heart attacks, so I tried to calm myself, breathing deeply, practising some sort of detachment from the powerful anger.

‘I’ve done without you all my life,’ I said to him, ‘so don’t come here thinking you can do me any favours. It’s too little and it’s too late.’ I took a deep breath and controlled myself. But I wasn’t sorry for what I’d said. It had needed saying.

‘I remembered I caught a boy once, hiding in the ferns, perving on Rosie,’ my father was saying in a low voice, looking away from me. ‘And that’s when I remembered who it was. In the photograph.’

I turned to face him, too stunned to speak for a moment. ‘Snotty Kirkwood?’ I whispered.

‘No,’ said my father. ‘Julian Bower.’

Charlie was looking at me, then at our father, who sat desperately rolling a cigarette. ‘Why didn’t you ever tell anyone this before?’ I finally managed to say.

My father kept rolling the cigarette as if his life depended on it. He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘I only remembered today.’ He looked up at me a second, then looked away again, attention back on the cigarette paper which he licked along one side, pressed together, then put in his mouth. Charlie picked up the matches and lit it for him. He inhaled deeply. ‘It’s the sort of thing adolescent boys do all the time,’ he said. ‘Trying to spot girls in a state of undress.’

‘Except that this time, the girl went missing,’ Charlie said.

‘Why didn’t you tell the police this,’ I said ‘after Rosie went missing?’

‘I’m sure I did,’ he said.

My head was spinning as if the clouds of nicotine smoke were in my lungs, not my father’s. The fax machine started humming again and I walked over to it to give myself something to do. I glanced at the cover sheet and saw it was from Jane. I picked up the second page and stared at it. ‘Here he is,’ Jane had written underneath and I saw the twin peaks at the amelogenin marker of the DNA profile from the trace on the knife handle. Whoever killed Frank Carmody was male. I handed the graph to Charlie who took it without a word. ‘It’s him,’ I said, and Charlie knew exactly which him I meant. He looked at the graph, looked at me. ‘The mutilator murderer is a male after all,’ he said, and I nodded.

I completely forgot my father’s presence or that moments before I’d been homicidally enraged with him. Some huge burden of fear that I’d been carrying for weeks fell away and Iona was cleared to shine briefly in my memory. But not for long. My son’s absence brooded over everything else in my mind. I put the faxed profile in a large manila envelope and propped it up against the wall on the top of the sideboard. Then I rang Iona’s number but there was no answer.

As the number rang out, I noticed that our father was looking around, awkward and ill at ease. ‘Take him home, Charlie,’ I said, putting down the phone and together with Charlie, I helped him out of the chair he was sitting in.

‘Don’t forget your tobacco,’ I said, picking it up and shoving it in his pocket. He turned to me as if he were about to say something and I could see there were tears in his eyes. We stood in silence together for a moment and then I patted his arm. I noticed the little folder of paper matches lying near the ash-filled saucer. I picked them up, too.

‘Don’t forget your matches,’ I said to him.

When they had gone, I tidied away a few of the last things left out on the sideboard and there it was, the small, folded square of paper. Iona’s prayer. I picked it up and read it. As I read it my mood changed I became angrier and angrier. Although she wasn’t the murderer she was guilty as hell. Complicity is horrible. I slipped the prayer into my wallet and was putting it back into my pocket when my mobile rang and it was Bob. I prayed that it was about Greg, and that he’d been found safe and sound.

‘No,’ he said gently, ‘it’s not about your son.’

My heart rate went down and I listened to what he was saying. ‘We’ve turned up something. A bloodstained Tyvek suit.’ I pulled my mind away from my son and tried to make sense of what Bob was telling me.

‘Where does that fit in?’ I asked.

‘In a bin at Centennial Park actually,’ said Bob. ‘It’s on its way to Jane right now.’

The disposable Tyvek spacesuits that we wear in the labs are used for lots of different purposes. A light polyester one-piece overall, designed to fit all shapes and sizes, the spacesuits are often worn by crime scene examiners these days, where they serve to protect the investigator against contamination from his surroundings. I remembered the tall figure with the long blonde hair who had stepped out of the car as I waited near the Coogee fishermen’s club.

‘Do you remember when “Rosie” stepped out of the car at Coogee?’ I said to Bob. ‘Wearing the trademark red jacket and what had looked like floppy white trousers?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘A spacesuit. Then it can be dumped. Most of the blood would fall on the killer’s lower body. This one will have Carmody all over it.’

‘And maybe some of “Rosie”, too,’ I said.

•

On the drive to Annandale, a few things started falling into place. The shopping I’d seen Iona doing, the weird mix of vegetarian and meat, health foods and sugary biscuits. My unconscious mind had tried to present this observation to me on a couple of occasions, and I now understood why the eggs in the frypan had stirred something in my mind. Eggs implied bacon, and bacon was one of the things I’d noticed in her shopping trolley the day I contrived our chance encounter. Iona had been shopping for two people. Ring me, Michael had written on the post-it note and stuck it to the front door of her house. What could I conjecture from that? That she already knew his phone number indicated intimacy. But he didn’t have a key to her place. Or maybe he did, and had left the note on the way out after realising she wasn’t around. Was the library, which at first I’d thought to be the secret flesh-eating retreat of a spurious vegetarian, really the larder of another person altogether? Michael the meat-eater. The phrase kept playing through my mind.

Why does someone do the shopping for another person, I was asking myself as I slammed the car door shut and started to walk up the overgrown driveway, lifting rose canes out of my way. Usually, because they’re married to them, I told myself, but in this case, Iona’s ex-husband was in West Africa. A person is shopped for because they can’t do it themselves, because of illness, incompetence or some other problem.

But then I recalled the strong sense I’d had of decay when I’d first stood in front of the house. Though I hadn’t grasped the connection at the time, Poe’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ had come into my head—a tale of madness, involving a brother and sister and their decrepit mansion. With my understandable over-sensitivity concerning relationships between brothers and sisters, I’d been right on the money with this one. I knew I’d have to tell Charlie that, and maybe he’d make a footnote somewhere on his next journal publication, but I’d been distracted away from the truth I’d unconsciously picked up on day one. Iona had a brother, Julian, the young man in the photograph.

As I stepped onto the chequerboard tiles of the veranda, I found that the front door was exactly as I’d left it the previous day, closed but not locked. I opened it cautiously and stepped inside. I tried to sense whether there was anyone else here, but the dimness was ambiguous and the slight sounds I could hear might have been the house cooling at the end of a hot day. I crept up the hallway, pulling a pair of disposable gloves out of my pocket, putting them on, treading carefully with silent footfall, creeping through the deserted rooms, heavy with the scent of cedar and smell of damp. In the front parlour, where I’d eaten cucumber sandwiches, I saw that the newspaper with my startled face was still lying on the table, next to a take-away food container. And there was something else. I walked to the table and picked up an envelope which was addressed to Iona and underlined with a flourish. I didn’t have to send this one to Sarah. Even I could see it was the same expensive linen-based paper, the same French sepia ink and the same hand that had written the ‘Rosie letters’. The investigator in me wanted to seal it up immediately; the man wanted to rip it open. I stood there a moment until the professional won the day: I couldn’t afford any more complications. I slipped the stiff envelope into my pocket. Then I tiptoed up the staircase, step by step, hardly looking at the blue monkey painting, straining my attention ahead, trying to pick up the slightest movement in the air that would convey another presence. At the top of the landing I paused, before creeping to Iona’s bedroom and softly pushing the door open.

It was exactly as I’d remembered it, the long curtains, now dark as evening closed in, the portrait in the oval frame, the bed where we’d made love. I withdrew and made my way down the hallway, past the other two bedrooms until I came to the door with the crystal knob. I couldn’t help thinking of Bluebeard’s castle and I prayed that Bluebeard wasn’t home and armed with a knife, waiting for me. Slowly and cautiously, I opened it and stood a second, waiting. I saw the grille door behind was also slightly ajar. It made a sound as I pushed it, and I froze, waiting, too scared to move until I was certain I was quite alone. When I felt sure there was no one else in the place, I crept forward, into the library.