The Silent Inheritance (41 page)

She spoke to the woman in Rolland’s room, and when she didn’t find him in his bed, she ran with the phone out to the garage.

Freddy’s Ferrari wasn’t there.

*

It took until Wednesday to formally identify Rolland Adam-Jones. It took dental x-rays and a capped front tooth. Steve, his mate, had no recent dental x-rays, but he had ankle and leg x-rays showing two metal plates inserted after a bike accident. The female passenger, seated on Steve’s lap at the time of impact, had not been identified when the youths’ names were released to the media.

That same Wednesday the plumber and his labourer arrived early to start the ripping down and replacement of guttering and downpipes, while Pop moved out of a shiny blue paradise with shiny new taps and spray rose that was the shower room. He didn’t move far. The bathroom was next door.

Mrs Vaughn’s ghost had vacated the house. It smelled of paint and tile glue now. Her old curtains had gone out in the green bin, but not her carpet, not yet.

And Pop wouldn’t give them a bill for the tiles, only for his labour, and not enough for that. Dave told Marni that when Pop had moved in he’d brought half a tonne of tiles with him.

‘Let him be, love,’ Dave said. ‘I’m getting rid of tiles and he’s enjoying himself.’

The plumber gave them a bill and a big one, but it was a big job.

Marni was watching
Deal or No Deal
, and the contestant only had four cases to open and only one was green, and it was the two hundred thousand.

‘No deal,’ the contestant said, then the channel cut to the news headlines.

‘
Dead youth identified as Rolland Adam-Jones, son of well-known barrister …
’

He was a cousin. He’d just turned seventeen. Marni hadn’t known him but she knew Uncle Fred.

The contestant lost his nerve when he had the two hundred thousand and the fifty dollars left. He took the deal, then found out that he had the green case.

Sarah came in as the news showed what was left of Uncle Fred’s incinerated Ferrari, which Marni had ridden to school in, and it felt too personal. They showed photographs of two boys in school uniforms, then the news presenter told Melbourne about the murderer Frederick Adam-Jones was currently defending, and that barrister and Hubert their angel seemed like two different people.

They sent a bunch of flowers to the barrister’s office because they didn’t know Uncle Fred’s address. Marni studied the funeral notices in the newspaper, determined to go to Rolland’s because she hadn’t gone to Mrs Vaughn’s. Her mother said that funerals were dead people in coffins, priests praying and people crying, and that kids shouldn’t go to them. There was no Adam-Jones funeral notice in the paper, or not that week.

She found it in Monday’s newspaper.

Pop had finished in the bathroom and moved into the kitchen before Rolland Adam-Jones was buried. Dave said he was snow-blind and he tried to talk them into having a feature wall in the lounge/dining room, but they’d ordered their drapes and they didn’t want colour on that wall that might clash with what they’d chosen.

Sarah drove to Camberwell for the funeral and she couldn’t find a place to park when they got there, and the only one she could find left them a block to walk to the church, and they were late.

And it was packed full of suited men and well-dressed women and boys in school uniform and priests in white nightgowns, and it went on and on forever and every time Marni thought it was over, it started again.

And their policeman was there, outside, probably to protect Uncle Fred from the family of the woman his current client had murdered, according to Marni.

*

Ross was there in a semi-official capacity. Clarence Daniel Jones hadn’t yet been located, or John Paul, or Joseph Jacob Jones. It was a big turnout. He’d expected to see a few of Freddy’s family there. He’d signed the condolence book so he might take a look at the names of earlier signers. There was no
Jones
in it.

He was thinking of a line from
Macbeth
, thinking that had Rolland Adam-Jones died next week or next month, Lady Cynthia Swan and her neurologist son might not have added their names to that book, or Freddy’s partners.

He knew the dead youth had been driving his mother’s Commodore when it hit Lisa Simms, knew it in his gut – and in his irritated sinuses. There was the damage to the Commodore’s panels, the remains of the windscreen in the boot, the charred platform-soled shoe, which looked like one of Lisa’s, or her housemate had said it did. Ross’s gut knew that Freddy’s carjacking story was a cover-up, that he’d heard his son’s call for help sometime that night and gone running.

He had no proof of it. Nothing, nix, nil, zilch, other than degraded DNA that was a biological match to that of the Jones family. He’d got hold of fat Freddy’s phone records, and all they’d proved was that Freddy’s mobile and landline had been idle for most of that weekend, that Rolland’s had been busy, but only to his friends’ numbers. They hadn’t found the accident or burial sites, and no more resources were being wasted in looking.

And he saw those girls break away from the crowd.

They weren’t wearing jeans and toting backpacks, but their hair, their I’m-on-my-way-to-somewhere walk identified them sufficiently for him to drop his butt into his peppermint tin and follow them, at a distance – until they were about to turn down a side street, when he called. ‘Marni.’

She stopped, caught her mother’s arm, and they turned, waved and walked back to meet him halfway. Marni asked if he’d put a tail on them, and he laughed.

Remembered hearing that same sound in Perth, and on that Camberwell Street the wind playing in the last of the autumn leaves, he felt a few of his years blowing away with them while they spoke of quokkas and tours and Perth hotels and things of little consequence, and the wind grew colder.

A few spits of rain suggested they move on. ‘Mum doesn’t like driving in the rain. She didn’t want to come today,’ Marni said.

‘He was a relative?’ Ross asked.

‘Mum’s cousin,’ Marni said. Ross had already placed Sarah on Freddy’s wife’s side of the family. She had the dark hair and the looks, but Marni continued. ‘Uncle Fred is my grandfather’s baby brother. See you around then – on television,’ she said.

He followed no further, until the lights of a dusky metallic blue Hyundai blinked.

‘How long have you had your car?’ he asked.

‘The end of April, and Mum needs a bravery award for driving it in here. First we got squashed between two trucks, then we couldn’t find a place to park, and when we did, she squeezed it into a space about big enough to park a motorbike.’

‘They’re a good model,’ he said.

‘It belonged to our landlady we told you about. She died while we were in Perth.’

‘Does she have a husband?’

And Marni pointed a finger at him. ‘I know what you’re thinking because I thought the same when we saw our car on television. I wanted to ring Crime Stoppers and dob in her son but Mum wouldn’t let me. He used to take that car for whole weekends – and he looks like the Freeway Killer too.’

But Sarah was in and eager to go.

‘Raymond Vaughn,’ Marni said as she got in. ‘He lives in Mooroolbark out near Lilydale.’

Gone then. Ross took shelter beneath a leafless tree while he lit a cigarette and watched them – or their car – turn left and disappear into traffic. He’d found another link to the Jones family. Better than that he’d got a name and a general area.

‘Raymond Vaughn, Mooroolbark.’

*

He found a phone number and an address in Mooroolbark for a L.R. Vaughn. He called the number but it went through to an answering machine. He gave L.R. Vaughn an hour or two to get home, then drove out to his address, and whoever he was, he was selling up. There was an auction sign on his front lawn.

O
n Sunday morning, a low dark sky pelted rain down on Melbourne, and with the bedroom curtains and blind pulled, the room was dark. Marni might have slept until ten o’clock if not for the phone, the landline phone. Her mobile lived beside her bed; she could reply to it from bed. The landline was in the kitchen, and the floor between her bed and the phone was cold on bare feet.

‘Am I speaking to Mrs Carter?’ the caller asked.

She thought it was one of the tradesmen she’d left messages for, and, wanting to be rid of him fast, said: ‘We’re right for tradesmen, thank you.’

‘How are you fixed for a bacon and egg McMuffin?’ the caller asked.

‘What?’ Forgot her freezing feet, told him that they didn’t have one of them, then asked how he’d got their phone number.

‘I have my means,’ he said.

‘Are we on the CIA’s hit list because we bought the murder car?’

‘Your landlady was the only Vaughn in your general area,’ he said.

‘When do you deliver the McMuffins?’

‘How does half an hour sound?’

‘Mum is still asleep.’

‘How late does she sleep?’

‘Ten seconds more. Don’t hang up.’

*

He didn’t arrive for their date in a police car. He drove a white Commodore which he parked behind their car. Marni was telling him about how their landlady who’d been ninety-something had died in her bed when Sarah came out – wearing lipstick and the new black sweater she’d bought to wear to the funeral, and her jeans tucked into her new boots, and they had heels. He looked impressed, and he opened his passenger-side door for her and held it until she got in. Marni got in with the junk in his rear seat then told him where the nearest McDonald’s was, and maybe he already knew because he drove straight to it.

They were seated in a cubicle with their bacon and egg McMuffins, hash browns and coffee, when he told them he’d found an address for a L.R.Vaughn in Mooroolbark, and that the house was for sale.

‘He’s already made his getaway,’ Marni said.

‘Maybe Singapore,’ Sarah said. ‘He went there for his business many times.’ She told him later that she’d bought her landlady’s house as well as her car, only to turn the subject away from her family. He spoke of his unit on the seventh floor, how he could look down on the city and see what the eagle saw when he flew the sky, then he asked again where she’d lived before moving to Melbourne.

‘Everywhere,’ Sarah said.

‘Her parents were gypsies with a tent and she doesn’t like talking about them. They got killed in a car crash when she was twelve, which is why she doesn’t like talking about them. They were Joe and Stephanie,’ Marni said.

*

He drove them home, commented on the size of the block, and when Marni asked him if he’d like to see inside, he turned the motor off and allowed her to give him a guided tour, around paint cans, rollers, cartons of tiles. He commented on the size of their rooms, on their ceilings, how the high ceilings and fancy cornice plaster had gone out of vogue in the sixties.

He stepped around a paint-speckled ladder and on empty tubes of gap filler to praise their kitchen, midway through its transformation. Pop, having finished the bathroom tiling, had got rid of his stockpiled tiny midnight-blue tiles on the worn laminated benches. Dave may have been going snow-blind, but Pop was adding colour, and between them they’d injected hope into that house.

‘You’ve bought yourselves a good old house,’ Ross said, and his phone rang.

They locked up and met him in the driveway to thank him for breakfast. He said it was his pleasure and perhaps they’d do it again. Marni told him they were having a combined housewarming and birthday party in July, and when she knew when in July, she’d dial triple zero and ask them to pass on an invitation—

‘Or I could add your number to my contacts.’

He laughed and gave her his mobile number. ‘Only to be used for invitations and emergencies,’ he said, then he left them waving in their driveway.

He’d had a good morning. He liked that kid, and if he’d let himself, he might drown in the liquid chocolate of her mother’s eyes. Watchful, honest eyes, except when he’d asked about her family. Their shields had been raised then. She was hiding something, from him or from her daughter, and he had a fair idea of what it was she was hiding.

Joseph Jacob Jones wasn’t dead, or he hadn’t died in the accident that killed his wife and three teenagers. He’d been sentenced to ten years for manslaughter. He hadn’t served those ten years. They’d let him out in late 2001. If he’d died since, Ross had found no record of his death. He’d found no record of his life either, not since 2005, when he’d reapplied for his driver’s licence.

*

‘He likes you,’ Marni said. ‘And he’s available too.’

‘You too cheeky to him … about everything. And you tell him everything.’

‘You’re not cheeky enough. He couldn’t take his eyes off you.’

‘If I want boyfriend I can have Bob.’

‘You said you don’t want him.’

A
insworth had ordered him to take some time to mourn his boy. He should have been mourning him. Freddy missed his presence – or lack of it. He missed his Ferrari – he wasn’t supposed to miss the courtroom, but he did, or the persona he wore in the courtroom. He was nothing without it.

Cheryl didn’t want him underfoot. She told him to see his GP. She’d seen her own before the funeral. He’d tested her for everything except hyperactivity, and maybe he’d tested her for that too. He’d prescribed pills to slow her down. She’d taken one and pitched the rest into the kitchen tidy. Freddy had retrieved them. They slowed him down, damn near stopped him, made him sleep like one of the dead, and when he woke up feeling guilty, he swallowed another one and went back to sleep.

‘You make me tired,’ he said. ‘Sit down and talk to me.’

‘I’m better off keeping busy, and so would you be. Go to work, Freddy.’

If she mourned Rolland, she did it in private, and made sure she was never in private to do it. She’d got herself a job, voluntary work, three days a week at the local Liberal Party office where she and her cronies willed Labor to self-destruct. They were pulling it off too, and Freddy no longer cared.