Dirty Weekend (24 page)

‘I thought you said the palynologist found some rare native orchid pollen? That could help us pinpoint the primary crime scene.’

‘Sadly,’ I said, ‘that evidence was compromised. Contamination by floral tributes at Tianna’s place. Our palynologist could probably make a reasonable case around prior deposition—’

‘Sorry?’ Brian said.

‘She could probably show that one type of pollen was laid down at an earlier time than the pollen introduced to the scene, but it’s still not the sort of clear-cut evidence that a jury likes.’

Brian grunted.

‘And before you go,’ I added, ‘there is no venue sixteen used by the partner-swapping group. I spoke to the person coded Blue and she denies knowing Claire Dimitriou.’ I gave Brian the details, rang off and returned to stirring the sauce and filling Charlie in about the arrest in the Tianna Richardson case.

‘What about the son?’ Charlie said when I’d finished.

‘Stepson?’ I said. ‘He’s definitely a possibility.’

‘Why not have a look at their family of origin?’ said Charlie. ‘That could help you close in on one rather than the other. If there’s a violent family background in one case and not in the other, I know which possibility I’d put the money on.’

‘Maybe one day we’ll get to that sort of sophistication,’ I said, ‘where we can run the factors through a program and come up with a statistical result. It might point us in the right direction quicker.’

When dinner was almost ready, I went to the bedroom door, intending to let Iona know. I knocked gently before going in. Iona wasn’t having a nap.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked, not prepared to believe my eyes.

Two suitcases lay on the bed, one of them filled to capacity, the other with an assortment of her clothing.

‘As you can see,’ she said. ‘I’m packing up.’

‘But you can’t!’ I said, ‘This is crazy.’

She paused in her folding of a large creamy jumper that I loved to see her wearing. ‘No, this isn’t crazy. What’s crazy is what I’ve been doing the last six months, Jack,’ she said gently. ‘Having the same conversation with you over and over. Waiting for you to give me some scraps of your time.’

‘Scraps?’

She nodded. ‘One picnic, duration two and a half hours nearly six months ago. Do you have any idea how many times you rang me to say you’d be home late? That I should eat alone? Most weekends you’re not here.’

‘But why suddenly now?’ I asked. ‘Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say. It’s not as if you haven’t expressed these concerns before.’

‘After the other night’s conversation .
 
.
 
.’ She paused, then said, ‘I realised I was turning into one of those women.’

‘What do you mean? That conversation had nothing to do with you. With us. I was talking about a case I’m working on,’ I said.

‘That’s right. And I had to ask myself the same question: why am I staying with a man who keeps hurting me?’

Her words hit me like a stunning blow. I felt winded. I hadn’t realised that I was
hurting
her.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realise.’

‘Jack, I’ve been asking you for months. I’m starting to feel like some pathetic supplicant, begging for favours. I’m not doing this any more and I’ve made my decision to go.’

‘But where will you go?’ I said when I could speak. ‘Where will you stay?’

‘I’ll look around for a short-term lease in town. Finish the term up at the college. Then I intend to go back to Sydney. I’ll stay with a friend for the rest of the year and then move back into my house when the lease runs out.’

I went over to her and held her. Tears were running down her face.

‘Please, Iona. Please,’ I said. ‘Give me another chance.’

She gently disengaged from me, searching her pockets for something to wipe her eyes.

‘Here,’ I said, passing her my handkerchief. ‘Use this.’

She took it and wiped her eyes and blew her nose, tucking the balled-up hankie into her sleeve. ‘I’ll take these things with me in the morning and come back for my other stuff later,’ she said, indicating the scattered possessions. Then she gathered up her towel and dressing-gown and headed for the bathroom, leaving me sitting on the bed, my head in my hands, exhausted and with no words left. I wasn’t used to this sort of ending. The end of all my other affairs had exploded with screaming accusations, recriminations, pent-up fury finally unleashed. Not this sad and resigned dignity.

When I could, I stood up and walked out through the front door onto the verandah overlooking the garden. The night air was sharp with frost and an eroded moon hung over the hills, etching the edges of trees along the skyline. Small night creatures rustled in the old hedges. I couldn’t remember when I’d last felt so bad. This was so different from all previous separations and I didn’t know how to deal with this sad, steely resolve of hers.

Aware of a presence, and for a moment absurdly hopeful, I swung round but it was only Charlie.

‘I’m leaving tomorrow, bro.’

‘So’s Iona, Charlie.’

A long pause.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘What can I do, Charlie? She’s made up her mind.’

Charlie put a hand on my shoulder and I was grateful for its warmth. ‘You know what to do, Jack. The problem is, you won’t do it.’

‘Jesus, Charlie, I 
can’t
! I’m in the middle of three really tough cases. I can’t just walk away from them at this stage.’

‘I guess you can’t,’ said Charlie. ‘And that’s the whole problem in a nutshell.’

I looked up at the sky to see a shooting star sliding through the immense and silent blackness. In ancient days, such things were seen as bad omens and that seemed very apt just now. Charlie left me and I stood a little while longer in the cold night air then I went back into our bedroom.

It looked sad and stark because Iona had taken down her paintings and stacked them, faces against the wall, and her other personal items, like the old-fashioned silver-backed hairbrush and mirror set that I’d first seen on the Victorian cedar dressing-table in her house at Annandale, were missing. Iona was kneeling back on her heels, wrapping tissue paper around something fragile.

‘This can’t be the end, Iona. I’ll meet you tomorrow. We can find a way through this.’

‘Don’t, Jack,’ she warned. ‘The time for talking has come and gone. Several times. I’m starting to lose my self-respect.’

‘But you can’t just go like this,’ I said, watching her helplessly as she battled with the lid on the bulging second suitcase. Instinctively, I went to help her.

‘Why am I doing this?’ I said, pulling back. ‘I’m not going to help you leave!’

But I ended up zipping the suitcase all the way round while Iona sat on it.

‘This is crazy,’ I repeated. ‘Don’t go.’

‘I’m weary, Jack. I can’t keep arguing like this.’ She walked to the door. ‘I’ll sleep in Jacinta’s room tonight.’

‘You’ve got to tell me where you’re going,’ I said.

‘I’ll be staying with a friend in town.’

‘What friend?’

She told me. It was one of the women she taught with who had an apartment in Ainslie. I scribbled down the address, vaguely remembering the place from the time we gave Anne-Marie a lift after school.

And that was it.

I looked at the two bulging cases and rebelled against carrying them out to be near the front door. Charlie could do that, not me.

I tossed and turned and once even got up and went down the hallway, wanting to knock on the spare bedroom door and talk her out of it. But I knew when I was beaten. There was a steel in Iona that had helped her survive the events of her life and now she was using it against me.

At about 3 a.m. I got up and went out to the lounge room and rebuilt the fire. Even when it was crackling along, I felt cold to the bone and I couldn’t tell if my head cold had turned into a fever or if I was just sick and cold with grief.

I ended up dozing off on the lounge and woke just as dawn was streaking the skies above the eastern hills. I wrapped one of Iona’s mohair throws around me, went out to the kitchen and put the kettle on. I didn’t think I could bear being here when Iona moved out so, while it was still dark, I wrote a note, rolled the car down to the gate and left for work. I made a plan that I’d go round to Anne-Marie’s later in the day. Maybe by then I might have found the words that would make Iona change her mind.

At Forensic Services, there was no one else around at this hour on a Saturday, just the soft hum of automated processes moving through their cycles behind closed doors. I was relieved because talking to anyone just now would have been a strain.

I sat at my desk, staring at the Venetian glass paperweight, a gift from Iona in happier days. Restlessly, I got up and paced around. Finally, I rang the cottage then killed the call. There was no point and I didn’t want to become a nuisance. Work, I told myself. The old standby.

I pulled out the results I’d got back from Vic, laying them out on the low coffee table together with my own findings and those of Sofia Verstoek: the tables of soil analysis from around the grounds and gardens of three houses—one in Kincaid Street, another from a tiny hamlet on the Ginnindera Road and the last from Damien Henshaw’s place. Apart from botanical variances, the statistical measurements for the soils at all three places shared certain characteristics of the locality: various degraded metamorphic rock mixed with mineral inclusions, as well as diatoms, pollen both fresh and fossilised with clay fractions. But there was no explanation for the coarse grains we’d found embedded in the head wounds of both Tianna Richardson and Albert Vaughan. Someone had brought those particles in. From somewhere else. And that someone was their killer.

I glanced over the soil analysis from Damien Henshaw’s place; stapled to it was a fourth profile, from the house he was currently painting. Finally, I read and reread through the complicated graphs and charts. Nothing Sofia had found matched the coarse sandy particles. The rare native orchid pollen could not be accounted for either, in any of these locations. I threw the report down. The soil profiles would not help us locate even the general area of the primary crime scene.

My mobile rang. It was Brian, wanting my company on a visit to the remand centre. ‘Damien Henshaw tried to off himself last night. I told you he’s guilty as hell.’

‘Is the remand centre open for business already?’ I asked, looking at my watch.

‘Crime never sleeps,’ said Brian, ‘and neither does the remand centre.’

‘Could be hopelessness,’ I said, thinking of Anthony Dimitriou as well as the hanged man whose death still haunted me. ‘I had a case once where a suspect suicided when we confronted him with bootprint evidence.’

‘Case closed,’ said Brian. ‘Good as a guilty plea and saves the state a motza.’

‘Except the evidence didn’t exist,’ I said. ‘I was just a youngster then. And when I did examine his boots, they were completely different.’

That took Brian aback a little. ‘Then why did he off himself?’

I paused, though I’d had years to consider this one. ‘Because,’ I said finally, ‘he knew he couldn’t win against the cops. He was a nobody, a petty crim. It was despair, not guilt.’

‘Don’t let that get in the way of your dealings with this little shit,’ said Brian. ‘This isn’t just any old bootprint, remember. We’ve got other ways to hang him out to dry. The bootprint, the admitted argument, the dodgy alibi. Shit, Jack, I reckon it was him. When you get the DNA results we’ll able to nail him.’

I couldn’t argue, but something was still worrying me.

I recalled part of my earlier conversation with Charlie. ‘Did Damien Henshaw grow up in a violent household?’ I asked.

‘His parents are Quakers,’ said Brian. ‘Complete pacifists. So the little creep’s got no excuses. But I’m determined to find out why he killed Albert Vaughan, and I want him to tell me. I don’t like mysteries.’

‘Albert Vaughan was out late Monday night, remember,’ I said. ‘He told the pharmacist he’d just seen someone he knew.’

‘Yes, but who?’

‘He saw something that he shouldn’t have,’ I went on. ‘And that’s why he had to die.’

‘If
you’d
just seen someone murdered, you’d say to the pharmacist “ring the police” or “I’ve just seen a woman murdered” or something like that, asthma attack notwithstanding,’ said Brian. ‘All Vaughan said was he’d just seen someone he
knew
. It could’ve been anyone.’

I climbed back into my car and drove to the remand centre where I met Brian and sat with him and Damien Henshaw in one of the sterile visiting rooms, a staff member of Corrective Services standing discreetly nearby. Opposite me, Damien Henshaw, no longer the cocky little rooster I’d seen last time, sat hunched in his too-big jacket. His hair was cut short back and sides and he looked like he’d already lost weight.

‘Damien, you’d feel a lot better if you just got this whole business off your chest,’ said Brian. ‘You don’t look well. I hear the medical staff are concerned about your mental health. You tried to kill yourself last night? Tell me why you killed Tianna and Albert.’

Damien looked up from under his eyebrows. ‘You don’t know what it’s like in this place. I’d rather be dead than in here.’

‘Answer the question.’

‘I didn’t fucking kill anyone,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t
be
in this place.’

‘I believe you’re in the right place, Damien,’ Brian said. ‘I just want to know why. What happened the night you killed Tianna and poor old Albert Vaughan?’

‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ Damien repeated.

‘I’m still not quite clear on a couple of things,’ I started.

‘But we’ve got the big moves sorted out,’ interrupted Brian.

‘There weren’t no big moves,’ Damien muttered. ‘Not by me, anyway.’

‘You took Tianna to the Blackspot that night, but you’d had enough of her,’ said Brian. ‘She was threatening to tell Kylie about your casual infidelity and you couldn’t risk that. You really love Kylie, don’t you?’

I saw Damien tear up but pressed on. ‘So, to protect Kylie from knowing the truth about what you’re really like, you had to shut this woman up.’

I tried a line that had worked for me with suspects over the years when I was a detective. ‘You didn’t mean to kill her. You’re not really a murderer,’ I said. ‘But Tianna wouldn’t shut up. She wanted to go to the Blackspot with you. She was sick of being hidden away. She was going on and on about it. So, finally, you took her to the nightclub. You even had a joint with her outside. Maybe you tried to sweet-talk her, change her mind. You hoped that with a bit of dope in her, she might forget her threats and the whole thing would blow over. You could keep dropping in and up-ending her once or twice a week, just to keep her on side, and Kylie need never know.’

I paused. Damien’s head had sunk lower on his chest. I wasn’t even sure if he was listening.

‘This part I’m not too clear on and I’ll need your help,’ I continued. ‘But you took Tianna somewhere else—somewhere where there are rocks or stones comprised of coarse grey sandy particles—and you caused her to fall back against something hard, at speed, or you pushed her in such a way that she bashed the back of her head in. You panicked. Look, if you just admit it we can try and get the charge reduced to manslaughter. We know you didn’t mean it.’

Still no response.

‘You decided to dump her back at the Blackspot, but somewhere between picking Tianna up and dumping her back at the club, you realised something. Somewhere, Albert Vaughan had seen you!’

As I said this, Claire Dimitriou’s words flooded my mind. ‘She saw! She saw!’
I had to deliberately refocus my mind. I wanted this man to confess, too. Maybe that way I could get the death of that old lag all those years ago out of my mind for good.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Damien muttered. ‘Who’s this Vaughan?’

‘You knew that Albert Vaughan would dob you in, one way or another. Even if what he saw didn’t seem ominous at the time, once the murder became public he’d remember what he’d seen and mention it to someone. It would get back to the police. This all raced through your mind. Your adrenaline was pumping, you’d already murdered one person. Once you’ve stepped over the homicide line, it’s easier—all the old crims say so. So you knew you
had
to shut him up before he could do this. And it had to be done immediately. So after you’d dumped Tianna’s body at the Blackspot, you went back to deal with Albert Vaughan and found that you were in luck. It was a golden opportunity—you didn’t even have to break into the house. Harry Marshall thinks the weapon used was probably a tyre brace. One of your work tools? Then off you went and you believed that no one would ever know what happened.’

‘I never killed anyone.’ The monotonous, hopeless voice. ‘Never touched her or the old man.’

‘It was such rotten bad luck, wasn’t it?’ said Brian. ‘Old Mr Vaughan spotting you like that. Old invalid like him. Just happened to be out and about at the wrong time. Maybe he saw you with her in the car? Maybe he saw something more damning? But he saw something and he had to die.’

Again, the strange dialogue from Claire Dimitriou intruded in my brain: ‘She saw! She saw!’ And so had Albert Vaughan.

I’d been at similar interviews and watched a perpetrator’s eyes get rounder and rounder as someone recounted a reconstruction of the sequence of events leading up to a crime. But that hadn’t happened here.

I looked at Brian then looked away. From somewhere came the liquid notes of noisy miners. We waited. Nothing happened.

Later, outside the remand centre, we walked towards our cars.

‘It was worth a try,’ said Brian. ‘Save the people a lot of money if the little shit would just sign a confession.’

‘Brian, maybe we’ve got the wrong man,’ I said.

Brian gave me a look. ‘You put him there, mate, with your physical evidence. There’s no way round that. This isn’t like the incident you feel guilty about,’ he said. ‘“This is physical evidence that cannot lie,”’ he quoted.

‘“That cannot perjure itself,”’ I said, and continued with the Edmund Locard quotation: ‘“Physical evidence cannot be wrong; it cannot perjure itself; it cannot be wholly absent. Only its interpretation can err. Only human failure to find it, study it and understand it can diminish its value.”’

‘But why then hasn’t your team found any trace of the large grey particles at Damien’s place or in his vehicle? And I still haven’t heard anything back from Bob about the photograph I sent him of Tianna’s mystery man.’

‘We’ve got enough,’ said Brian.

I brought him up to date about how I planned to find a home for the mystery keys we’d found in Peter Yu’s cartons and we parted.

The mystery man and Locard’s words continued to trouble me as I stopped the car at a phone box and, miraculously, found an intact phone book. I went back to the car and made a list of the local real estate offices. This was one of the times I wished I had a fifteen-year-old junior back at the office to send out on an errand to track down which office used the red and white plaited tags. I looked at my watch and saw it was past nine so started ringing around. By the fourth call, I’d discovered that Fletcher Daley Real Estate used red and white thongs for their keys. I double-checked the address and headed straight over. As I drove I realised Locard’s words kept running through my head like a mantra to keep my mind from turning to Iona.

At Fletcher Daley I spoke to a pretty young woman who confirmed the keys did belong to one of their rental properties but because the identifying tag was no longer attached, she couldn’t really say which property. She thought one of the managers might know.

‘Could you ask him?’ I suggested. But Mr Vernon was on holidays.

‘I’ll leave them here and if anyone remembers or has any information on them, please ring me immediately,’ I said, leaving my card with all my phone numbers circled. She promised she’d see to it.

I arrived back at my office and, as I passed Sofia Verstoek’s closed office, was reminded of the palynologist’s final words before I’d hurried away yesterday. They kept replaying themselves in my mind and my body couldn’t help but respond to what had been a clear invitation. For a moment, I tried to tell myself that having a lust-driven affair with her might take my mind off Iona, and tried to suppress this idea by remembering that her invitation to sexual favour was somewhat indiscriminate. I also recalled how my last lust-fuelled affair had ended and rejected the idea completely. However, even rejecting the idea unfortunately took me straight back to the vision in Suite 12 at Olims.

I picked up the desk phone and dialled Bob on his mobile. ‘Any luck on that photograph I faxed you?’ I asked, dispensing with pleasantries.

‘Yes,’ said Bob. ‘I tracked him down and he was going to ring you. Has he?’

‘Not so far,’ I said. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Adam Shiner,’ said Bob and I noted it down.

‘He said he was going to call,’ said Bob, ‘but here’s his number in case.’

‘I owe you one, Bob.’

‘You’ll keep,’ Bob replied.

‘Before you go,’ I said, ‘do you remember a conversation at the Glebe morgue about pollen? Bradley Strachan, you and me. I’d just dropped in because you’d been working on a case of unidentified remains and there’d been some rare pollen found on what was left of his clothes.’

‘Do I remember?’ said Bob. ‘Mate, I helped dig him
out—
what was left of him. Remains of a young male found near Queanbeyan wedged under a rock shelf and covered over. A dog brought his jaw bone home and that’s when the local cops called the forensic pathologist. You know what bones are like when they first turn up—filthy, lots of dirt and other accretions. Bradley was on leave at the time he was found and we brought him up to speed when he came back. You arrived while we were talking about it.’

‘That’s right,’ I said, relieved now that I’d remembered.

‘Unknown Male 17/2000. He’s on my UHU list,’ Bob said.

‘Because of the pollen?’

‘That, and a few other bits and pieces that are in the box with him that might yield something,’ said Bob. ‘Why?’

‘I want him. Tianna Richardson’s head wounds also carried traces of a rare species, although there’s been some contamination apparently. I’d like to check out the pollen in both cases. Might help us with a primary crime scene in her case. Just maybe your unknown male was killed in the same area and the physical evidence accompanying him might give us some more ideas.’