Death Delights (37 page)

‘The scar,’ I said. ‘That scar you have?’

She lowered her eyes. ‘Years ago,’ she began, ‘when he thought I’d done something to hurt him, he attacked me.’ She looked up at me and over at Father Michael, who seemed bewildered by this part of the conversation.

I said nothing, letting the silence exert its own pressure and Father Michael sat back in his chair, eyes closed, either meditating or dozing.

‘You think I’ve been irresponsible. But it only happened once and it was such a long time ago. Then he got help.’

‘Help?’ I said. ‘What kind of help?’

‘Medication,’ she said.

That kind of help, I thought. Some sort of sedation to slow everything down, deaden the acuteness. A holding operation.

‘By the time we’d left Springbrook,’ Iona was saying, ‘he’d had a complete nervous breakdown. By that, I mean he hadn’t been able to cope with day to day living at all. He wouldn’t come out of his room, he wouldn’t speak to us. He wouldn’t let anyone near him except me. I tried to ask him what it was, if we could help him in some way, but he’d just push me away. We moved to Sydney and he spent some time in a psychiatric institution. He came out of that place a great deal worse, in my opinion, than when he went in. Various experiments had been tried on him, different drugs. Eventually, after a series of hospitalisations, he decided no one could help him. By that stage, my marriage was over and Julian came to live with me, in the house our parents had bought after my father retired from active ministry. My father died, my mother’—she paused and nodded to me— ‘as you know now, went into a nursing home where she’s been for a long time. They’re good to her. I visit when I can bring myself to it. We were never close. She was…’ Again, Iona stopped. ‘That is quite another story,’ she said, leaning forward to pick up her tea. She took a sip, put it down again and covered her face with her hands. ‘I don’t know where he is. I don’t know what he’s done. I suspect the worst.’ Yes, I thought to myself, you are right to do so. She took her hands away from her face and found a little lace hanky in a pocket, blew her nose and pushed her hair back again.

‘He lives with me but at the same time,’ she said, ‘he is a total recluse. He goes nowhere. He sees no one. He is terrified of the outside world. He even had a grille door installed inside the house, to lock himself away where no one could find him. He lives in what had been our father’s library. There’s a sort of alcove there. I’d hear him come out and use the bathroom. Sometimes he’d have a shower.’ She pulled out a photograph and handed it to me. I looked at it. I could recognise him as the same boy in the photograph I’d found in the box of postcards at Jeffrey Saunders’ place. He was younger in this, a slight smile on the lopsided face, a beautiful boy of about thirteen. I passed it back to her. ‘I love him,’ she said. ‘He’s my brother. I know what he suffered.’ Her eyes flashed the fire that I knew so well as she addressed the Fransiscan. ‘You people don’t know what you do to children’s souls and hearts with your hideous ideologies. The more sensitive and intelligent the child, the more the damage.’

Michael nodded, and I had the feeling he wasn’t just humouring her, but knew what she meant.

‘In our house,’ she continued, ‘God was a fascist dictator whose secret police were everywhere.’ She stood up and walked to the windows, pulling the curtain across because the sun was heating the room and falling on the lounge chairs. ‘So that’s how it was,’ she said, standing near the window, looking out. ‘While Julian’s been living with me, he’s read and studied in the library and written huge essays. He showed me one once and I told him it was wonderful. It was, if you like reading about the darkest Dionysian mysteries.’

I thought later I’d certainly pick her up on that one.

‘I taught music,’ she was saying, ‘I did my radio programs. Peter had been very generous when we divorced. I was able to manage quite well on my own. But I could never do any of the normal things women do. I could never invite a man friend back to the house.’

I interrupted. ‘But you asked me there,’ I said, ‘with him just up the corridor.’

Her eyes widened. ‘How did you know that?’

‘I didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work that one out,’ I said, more snappishily than I’d intended. I knew I’d have to tell her about what I’d found in the grilled library.

‘I liked you,’ she said, ‘And Michael said it was time I started to have a life of my own.’

Again I waited. ‘I began to get worried when I found he’d been into my room’—she looked away—‘and had been wearing my clothes. Even a wig I’d had for years and never used. I tried to talk to him about it, but he wouldn’t talk. I started keeping an eye on him because he was starting to do bizarre things. One day, I found him wearing our father’s clerical garb.’ Father Dumaresque, I thought to myself. ‘And,’ Iona was saying, ‘he was starting to go out at night. He’d never done that before.’ The way she said the last few words sent a shiver down my spine. ‘I’m not ashamed to say that I started following him,’ she said. I hoped she would take such a liberal view when and if I confessed my own actions in this area. ‘I bought him a mobile phone, so he could contact me, I told him, if he had an anxiety attack away from the house. But it was really for my sake, so that I could ring and check up on his whereabouts.’ I remembered the stake-out at Coogee Beach and the mobile ringing from a parked car. I brought my attention back to Iona.

‘I was horrified to find him going to the sort of brothel that caters to sadism,’ she said. ‘I checked up on it. I found out what sort of a clientele it attracted.’ She came away from the window and sat down at the edge of the chair, looking as if she were poised for instant flight. ‘It’s hardly surprising,’ she said, shrugging, ‘when God is a fascist, and caretakers become his gaolers and enforcers, pain and pleasure become hopelessly confused.’ Then she looked at me and her voice was tender. ‘That was when I saw your daughter going there one night. I knew her face so well. I’d been very touched by newspaper accounts. But at that stage, and even when we met later, I had no idea that you were Jacinta McCain’s father. When I rang the police with my information all I knew from the newspaper was that the girl’s father had been a police officer at one stage.’ There was no reason to disbelieve her. ‘By the time I’d found out who you were, Jack .
 
.
 
.’ she stopped.

‘Go on,’ I prompted.

But she wouldn’t be drawn. She drank more of her tea. ‘I wondered if my brother might be capable of killing men like those…’ Her voice faltered. ‘He had a violent hatred of any crime against children or young people.’ Although Julian Bower could not acknowledge his own destruction at the hands of the adults who had charge of him, he could see it quite plainly in other cases. ‘And yet,’ Iona was saying, ‘it was only a suspicion. He was out late on the nights of the killings. But he’d taken to being out late more frequently on other occasions, too. This suspicion kept tearing me apart. I started following him, seeing where he went. He just seemed to walk the streets like a ghost. Or he’d sit in a coffee shop till all hours. I’d go home exhausted. Doing that brought home to me all the life I’d wasted living as my brother’s keeper, to use a biblical phrase. I think I nearly had whatever a breakdown is myself. I had to take time off work, and my radio program suffered. I talked to a priest—Michael here.’ She indicated him with a slight nod in his direction. ‘He helped me understand I needed to be free. That I had to let go of my brother and make a life for myself. Last year I’d suggested to Julian that we should sell the house and go our separate ways.’

Michael leaned forward. ‘Iona was in a terrible bind,’ he said. ‘I advised her to tell the police of her suspicions, but to do it anonymously. That way, her mind would be at rest. If her suspicions were true, she was prepared to deal with the consequences of that. If not, it would mean great emotional relief for her.’

‘But then Jack started to suspect that
I
might be the killer,’ she said in that rich, trembling voice. ‘That was terrible. Because it brought him right up close to my brother. I was so afraid that I’d betray the poor soul. I was terrified when Jack told me he’d found a knife in the laundry. I remembered my father kept his fishing things in a box down there. But I feared that the knife blade might show more than bits of scales and fish skin. Somehow, I didn’t mind if the police came at him through an anonymous tip-off. But if I’d betrayed him directly, led them straight to him, I don’t think I could have lived with it.’ She shrugged. ‘I know that’s inconsistent and illogical.’ She looked over at me. ‘You probably despise me for that. It makes no sense. But that’s the truth. Michael has let me stay here while I sorted out what I was going to do next.’

Michael gathered up the coffee cups and I realised I hadn’t touched mine.

‘That’s it, Jack,’ she said. ‘Now you know everything.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘What about the afternoon you left the bedroom and vanished?’

Iona looked at her hands and clasped them. ‘I heard the sound of the grille door. It makes a very small, distinct sound. And I was frightened he’d find you. I didn’t know what might happen if he did.’

I shuddered to think of him passing the room in which I’d been so vulnerable. Iona must have seen my thoughts. ‘He would never have gone into my room,’ she said.

‘That’s not true,’ I found myself saying. ‘Your clothes, your wig. Your writing things. He helped himself to all of those.’

She was shaking her head vehemently. ‘Not ever while I was there,’ she said. ‘You were never really in danger that afternoon, but I couldn’t take the risk. I needed to know what he was up to.’

I pulled out the envelope addressed to her from my pocket and handed it to her. She glanced at it, frowned and looked up at me.

‘Where did you get this?’ she asked, slowly taking it.

‘I was at your house in a professional capacity. I found this and some other items.’

Iona paled. She shrank back into the chair, clutching the unopened letter. ‘What did you find?’ she whispered.

I looked at Michael who was watching me intently. I took a deep breath. ‘I found evidence of murder,’ I said. ‘Evidence of four murders, to be exact.’

Iona stared at me. Her face was like stone. Slowly, she handed me back the stiff white envelope. Her voice was barely audible; I had to lean forward to catch her words.

‘Open it,’ she was saying. ‘You open it. I can’t bear to.’

Reluctantly, I took the envelope from her hand and prised it apart. It was quite brief. The handwriting was ‘indistinguishable’, as Sarah would say, from that of the ‘Rosie’ letters and it was brief.

‘Goodbye,
’ I read aloud,
‘I should have done this years ago. I’m going to drop from a great height. And that will be the end of it.
’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Iona.

Michael stood and went to her, taking both her hands and for a moment I thought there was something else between them other than pastoral care. But he gently raised her. ‘Come on, Iona,’ he said. ‘Let’s walk. Let’s go out into the sun and walk down to the water and we can say a prayer for Julian.’

I took my cue and Michael showed me out. I was walking down the stone path when I heard her running down the hall, sobbing. ‘He was so beautiful,’ she was crying, ‘when he was a little boy. He shone like a star. They destroyed him.
He was so beautiful!’

I didn’t turn round but I heard Michael’s voice and the door closing again and all was quiet in the leafy street as I went to my car. The investigation into the mutilator murders was over as far as I was concerned. Now it was time for the law to move in and weigh up the evidence. I doubted if there’d be a trial. Not after that note and what I now knew about Julian Bower.

•

All I had to do now was make one last trip to Canberra. A decision had been simmering somewhere in me for a long time. I was going to take six months more leave if I could get it, and take Greg along if Genevieve agreed. We’d do a journey during the long school holidays. Maybe to the centre. Maybe to the top end. It would give me the chance to really start painting again. If Jass was serious about rehabilitation, we could perhaps visit her on the way. Maybe take her along for part of the journey if that seemed advisable. Somehow, the kids needed to learn how to live with each other. And I had to learn from them. And I wanted to revise a few things about living with myself as well. I had to come to terms with the fact that I’d never know what happened to Rosie.

‘So Julian would have known about Rosie’s disappearance,’ I said to Charlie, as we fitted the pieces together a few days after Iona’s revelations. He’d been feeling miserable alone at his place missing Siya.

‘I’m worried that I’m going to end up a lonely old man,’ he said.

‘Bring over some fish and chips,’ I suggested, ‘and eat with us.’

He did, arriving some time later.

‘It was the talk of the town for years and he only lived down the road,’ Charlie said. ‘Then the pressure builds as Iona tells him she wants to live her own life and sell the old house and he can’t handle it. The self-hatred becomes more externalised. He becomes homicidal. He starts looking for victims to revenge himself on. He uses the name of the girl who was abducted from his street and she becomes a symbol for him of the innocent victims of men like Gumley and Nesbitt and Carmody. It gives him the sort of self-righteous gloss he needs to excuse his savagery.’

‘Then there was Kapit,’ said Charlie, ‘who was supposed to be you. I’m glad you’ve ordered security grilles for your place now. Until they drag Julian Bower’s body out from somewhere, he could still be out there.’

Greg was almost back to his old self again. He’d been given a week off school if he wanted it, but he said he’d rather get straight back. ‘It’s good,’ he said pragmatically, ‘that Kapit’s kaput.’ He looked to me to see if I was going to react to his flippant pun but I said nothing. ‘That way, I don’t have to hang round wasting time in the witness box.’

I could see he was remembering all the times I’d had to do just that, the endless days in court, being sent home unheard, my cases being adjourned to a later date. The whole ponderous, cumbersome mess and muddle of the rule of law to which there is simply no alternative.