The White Tower (8 page)

I checked the time and sloshed back to my car. Three minutes left on the voucher.

. . .

After dinner and homework and Katya's bath, which Peter took charge of—Ivan was late, though he hadn't said anything about being late that morning—I sat down with a medical dictionary to re-read the post mortem the police forensic pathologist had performed on Niall Howley.

The first time I'd read it, my eyes had glazed over at lists of Latin names. Now I made myself slow down. The post mortem began with the doctor's name and address. A Federal Police logo occupied the top left hand corner of the page. The preamble said that this was to be a three cavity post mortem: chest, abdomen and head. It began with three more subheadings: heart, pericardium, aorta.

Again, I found the list mind-numbingly long. It began to seem as if the body parts, named one under the other on clean pages, had never belonged to a human being. Niall's brain had been sawn open, and the injuries it had sustained took up half a page all on their own. I contrasted the report with the castle scene he'd left on his computer. The young man perhaps uncomfortably asleep. How often had I gone in to check on Peter late at night and found him twisted in bed, feet on the pillow, sheet all nohow?

I flicked back over Bernard Howley's statement. It was even terser than I remembered from my first reading.

The deceased was identified by his father, Bernard Patrick Howley, at 11.15 am on 23 June.

Mr Howley stated that the deceased had left home on the evening of 22 June at 7.30 pm and had not returned. He had been wearing a black shirt and black jeans. A car found in the Telstra Tower visitor's car park was identified by Mr Howley as belonging to the deceased. In the car was a black umbrella, a grey woollen blanket and a wallet also belonging to the deceased. In the wallet was a Commonwealth Bank Mastercard, a Medicare card, a Video Ezy and a library card, a photo pass identifying the deceased as an employee of the Monaro Hospital, and $48.35 in cash.

The statement went on to outline some of the background—how long Niall had been living at home, his relationship with his girlfriend, Natalie Rowan, his interest in
Castle of Heroes
, how many hours he'd been spending online, his withdrawal from ‘reality'. I assumed that this was Bernard's choice of words. Reading through his statement again reinforced the view I'd formed the first time, that there was nothing to tell me how he'd really felt about the manner of his son's death.

. . .

Dr Marian Huxley, the forensic pathologist who'd performed the autopsy on Niall, lived in a part of Canberra I'd always liked, and had always known would be beyond my means.

In our landlocked capital, suburbs nudged each other for the right to squat around an artificial lake. And it was part of the curse I shared with many Canberrans, the curse of having grown up within smelling distance of the sea, that the sight of this lake, coming upon it round the shoulder of a hill, brought a lump to my throat. It was an experience at once pleasant, even exciting when the light fell on the water in a certain way, and deeply disappointing.

I wound the window down, sniffed and there it was—dank weed, flaccid water, no salt, no wind to lift salt spray. But the lake was an expanse of something other than buildings, roads, something
other
—or at least the possibility was there. It was this that kept me hoping, and why I would have moved to Yarralumla like a shot had I been able to afford a house there, or even the deposit.

Dr Huxley lived in a part of the suburb where the house extension people hadn't yet moved in to create skylighted upper storeys, family rooms and double garages. Hers was a shabby, cement-rendered, mean windowed place in comparison with its glamorous neighbours.

The former police doctor opened the door to me herself. At once I understood that she lived alone. The house had the unmistakable feel of a person who'd long ago chosen solitude.

She was of a type I recognised from books and television, manners of a gallant Englishwoman, grooming slightly ragged round the edges now, the lean height, reach of empire in the eyes. I wondered how many of her kind could possibly have ended up working for the Australian Federal Police.

We circled each other conversationally for a few minutes. Dr Huxley spoke carefully, her English accent giving her words what might, or might not, be an ironic edge. Hers was an old English, as old as the spread of England's language to its colonies, yet Australian colloquialisms sat easily within it, as weeds sit easily within the lawn that holds them. I admired her beautiful floor rugs, her polished dark wood ­furniture, Turner reproductions on the walls, the view through the windows of the morning mist over the lake—even these a comment on the relationship between motherland and colony.

If the doctor was as perceptive as she looked, she probably saw straight through my flattery. She had coffee ready on a tray, with milk and sugar in silver dishes, so there wasn't that space afforded by her having to go and get it ready, a few minutes for me to nose around the room alone.

I asked her what she'd done when she got the phone call to examine Niall's body. She described the scene at the Telstra Tower on the morning of 23 June much as Olga Birtus had described it, thick fog bringing visibility down to five metres or so, hiding the tower so that the top of the mountain might have supported anything at all.

By the time she arrived, the police had taped off an area around the body, and a photographer was already at work. Dr Huxley had studied Niall's body for a few minutes before kneeling down and going through the formality of feeling for a pulse. She estimated that Niall had been dead for between eight and ten hours, taking into account the sub zero temperature of the previous night.

‘In your post mortem,' I said, ‘you give the cause of death as cerebral haemorrhage.'

‘Probable cause of death.'

‘Why probable?'

‘The extent of that boy's injuries indicate that he died on impact. He hit the ground on the right side of the head, right shoulder and leg.'

I wondered how recently Dr Huxley had read her report. Did she recall it in detail? There'd been that slight body waiting for her on the cutting table, face up his injuries all too obvious.

‘The most severe injuries were to the right side of his head and body,' Dr Huxley repeated in her careful voice. ‘There was no indication that the young man died of heart attack before he hit the ground.'

‘Would you have expected him to?'

‘It happens. People who jump from the tops of buildings do suffer heart attacks before they reach ground level.'

‘Did Niall die straight away?'

‘Death could have been instantaneous, but not necessarily.'

These were the words the doctor had used in concluding her post mortem.

‘You've seen this?' I handed over a colour printout of the castle scene.

Dr Huxley inclined her head and smiled. Her smile surprised me. There could have been a hint of complicity in it, but if so it was brief, gone before I could be sure.

‘A forensic pathologist has no business with coincidence,' she said. ‘Or with speculation. He or she examines the evidence and records it.'

‘Was there a sharp stone, a rock, on the ground where Niall fell that could have caused the laceration on the back of the head that you refer to in your post mortem?'

‘There were many lacerations.'

Dr Huxley smiled again. This time I thought it was to warn me. She had dry, pale olive skin, even white teeth that showed to advantage when she smiled.

‘I mean the one on the back of Niall's head. If he landed on his right side as you say, then how did he hit the back of his head?'

‘It could have been, as you say, a stone.'

‘Did the police find a stone Niall might have hit his head on?'

‘Ms Mahoney, you must understand that, in the context of the young man's injuries, the one you're referring to was slight, it—'

‘It couldn't have killed him?'

‘No.'

‘Would it have been enough to knock him out?'

‘I doubt it.'

‘And the most likely explanation for how Niall got this bump on the back of his head is that he ricocheted, bounced from his right side to his back and then what? Back to the position he was found in?'

Dr Huxley hesitated, then nodded.

‘Could Niall have hit his head on the way down?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, I'm sure you're aware that the platform he was supposed to have jumped from. This one here'—I pulled out my now crumpled brochure of the tower. It was coming in quite handy—‘is a good deal narrower, in fact almost a metre narrower than the one beneath it. So in order to clear this lower one, Niall has to have made quite an amazing leap. I'm wondering if he could have got the bump on the back of his head, and indeed possibly other injuries as well, by hitting one of the jutting out bits of this lower platform on his way down.'

‘Can I see that?'

I handed the brochure to Dr Huxley, who studied it in silence.

‘It's not drawn to scale,' I said. ‘But you can see my point.'

Dr Huxley looked up at me and said, ‘I would have to think about that.'

‘But is it at least possible?'

‘Many things are possible. The boy's injuries all pointed to his dying on impact. They differed in severity of course. The one you're referring to is slight in comparison with those sustained by the right side of his head and body. But the bruising, bleeding and so on are all consistent with the impact.'

‘Doesn't it strike you as odd that nobody saw, or heard Niall that night? I mean, you put the most likely time of death as between nine-thirty and ten-thirty. The public galleries close at ten. Up till then, there are still people around, guards checking. After ten the doors are locked, but there are people walking to their cars. Yet no one saw or heard a thing.'

Dr Huxley shook her head and opened her mouth to speak. I knew what she was going to say. Speculation was not her job. She was, or had been, a forensic pathologist. Her job had been to examine the body and report on her findings. All very well if the case was as straightforward as everyone seemed to believe.

‘Could Niall have jumped from the lower platform? I don't mean, could he have got onto it to jump. I'm aware of the security restrictions. But could he have jumped from here, rather than up here, and sustained the same injuries?'

Dr Huxley frowned. It struck me that she was taking a long time to answer a pretty obvious question, one she would surely have considered.

‘From a height of fifty metres everything collapses,' she said at last. ‘If there is one bone left unbroken, that is something to remark on.'

I nodded, recalling the long list.

‘From this height,' Dr Huxley indicated the lower platform, ‘the injuries will also be very great.'

‘So what you're saying is that above a certain height it doesn't really matter?'

The doctor looked annoyed. I knew she didn't like me putting words in her mouth, but her answers were so cautious that I couldn't help it. I bit my lip and waited.

‘The boy would have been killed,' she said, ‘if he'd jumped from either here, or here.'

I nodded, mentally urging her, go on. Was she merely reiterating that, from the heights we were considering, the differences in injuries were likely to be negligible? Or was she expressing a deeper doubt?

She said, ‘Niall was a mentally unbalanced and a very determined young man.'

Familiar assumptions. I didn't think we were debating them either, but perhaps we were.

‘Could someone have thrown Niall over?' I asked.

She gave me a long, considering look. I could see her good manners struggling with a desire to tell me to go away and stop bothering her, leave her in peace.

‘When there is a struggle, when a person is overpowered, there is always some evidence of it. In this case there was nothing which suggested an attempt, however futile, to fight back.'

‘Any bruises or scratches would be assumed to be the result of the fall, wouldn't they?'

‘That is true. But as well as the lack of physical evidence, there was nothing pointing to murder. How could that young man have been overpowered in a public place? If he'd cried out, don't you think one of the guards or other staff would have heard?'

‘I agree there are easier ways to murder someone. Unless the ­murderer's intention was to make it look like suicide. In which case he, or she, carried the whole thing off brilliantly.'

Dr Huxley said nothing and I knew I would get no more ‘speculation' out of her.

I thanked her for her time, and added my usual request to contact me if anything occurred to her that might be of help. I was sure that she would never do this. When I'd phoned her, telling her I was working for Niall's mother, and stressing Moira's raw, abiding grief, I'd felt her reluctance to meet me, but an unwillingness to say, categorically, no. I was very conscious that one meeting was all Dr Huxley, and for that matter Dr Fenshaw, would allow.

My depression came back. Maybe I was wasting my time and everybody else's. If Niall had been attacked, he would have struggled, shouted. What did he have to lose? On the other hand, at nine forty-five on the night of 22 June there wouldn't have been anybody else on the outside platforms of the tower. Niall would have had the platform with the spiky fence all to himself. He wouldn't have needed access to a restricted area. All he needed to do was take advantage of the darkness and the time to ensure that he had no witnesses. All he needed to do, as the head security guard Litowski had said, was climb the fence and jump out wide enough to clear the lower platform.

Eight

Derek stood at my front door with a parcel in his hands.

‘Oh,' I said. ‘The party's not till Saturday.'

Anger flashed along his cheekbones. ‘I should think I could see my son on his birthday and bring him a present.'

‘Oh,' I said again. ‘Of course. Come in.'

My house was small enough for a conversation at the front door to be heard at the back. We didn't even have a proper dining room, just a table and six chairs at one end of the lounge.

Four people were sitting at the table, Katya in her high chair pulled up close so she could feel a part of the proceedings, Peter, Ivan and Brook.

We'd just finished Peter's birthday dinner, his favourite burritos with spicy mince and heaps of tomato sauce. Easy to prepare and revolting to eat, but I'd gulped mine down in deference to Peter being master of the occasion.

Katya was posting bits of bread into the pocket of her plastic bib, while Ivan and Peter watched indulgently.

‘Here's Dad,' I said.

Peter turned up a face decorated with kisses of tomato sauce, a smudge of lost burrito. His long, honey-brown hair fell into his eyes. He smiled up at his father.

Derek seemed about to kiss him, then thought better of it. He looked around the rest of us as though expecting an apology, then handed Peter a present wrapped in sailing boat paper. Inside was a box of technic Lego.

‘Cool,' Peter said. ‘Thanks Dad.'

I invited Derek to sit down. ‘We're about to have the cake.'

He'd cut his hair since I'd seen him last, short for the change of season. His neck looked shaved and reddish, though that could have been his state of mind. He was dressed in clothes that suited him, casual without being sloppy, dark green cord pants, brown boots, a brown and cream patterned jumper over an open-necked shirt. It gave me a small shock every time I saw Derek, how well turned out he was, how not so long ago he'd been my husband.

‘Thanks,' he said, accepting my invitation with his particular double-edged politeness, by a simple turn of his body showing his contempt for the slipping into middle-age approach he considered mine and Ivan's.

He frowned at Fred, who as a special treat had been allowed to sit by Peter's chair. Fred wagged his tail briefly, but kept his eyes fixed on the plates smeared with leftover burrito.

‘Take him out,' I said to Peter.

‘Mum!'

I grabbed Fred by the collar and marched him out the back door, biting my lip, thinking that two seconds in the door and Derek was already making me act in ways I didn't want to.

Brook looked at me with conspiratorial understanding over an armful of dirty plates. I scraped them into Fred's bowl while he began placing ten candles fussily around the cake.

Brook should have been graced with an apron, high under the armpits. I realised with a start that I'd never pictured him as a young man. Neither young nor healthy. It was as though he'd been born pushing a forty-something body that death was pushing from the other side. I'd never met a man whose domestic inclinations had been thwarted so thoroughly.

It was Peter who was coping. He'd undone his box of Lego, and was looking at the instructions with Ivan, at the same time talking to his father about school.

The singing and cutting of the cake passed quickly. Ivan boomed out the words in his strong baritone, with Derek's tenor a fraction of a second later. My own voice sounded like a breathy excuse offered up through cotton wool.

Peter bowed his head over his plate and smiled the birthday smile of a child being sung to. Katya whimpered, not understanding why the light had suddenly gone dim and flickering. Brook put out his hand and she grabbed it, then just as the singing finished she decided to join in, her one note loud and confident.

Peter took a huge breath and blew out the candles. We clapped and I reached for the light switch. Everybody blinked.

The evening had suddenly become uncharted territory. With a gesture that I knew was overdone, I grabbed a large breadknife and began dividing up the cake, flinging the candles to one side and plopping slices onto bread and butter plates.

Derek gave me the sort of glance he'd perfected for social occasions when I failed to measure up. I told myself that this was Peter's night. I'd said to Brook, when we were ordering the cake, that I wanted to keep it simple. After all, the party on Saturday, with seven school friends, and Derek and Valerie, was the main event.

We ate the cake, Peter still smiling, pronouncing his beautiful.

Derek asked about my new job.

‘It's to do with a computer game that went wrong.'

I glanced at Peter, who was absorbed in feeding Katya crumbs of chocolate cake from the end of his finger.

Ivan was sitting at his end of the table like an extra piece of furniture in a science fiction movie. More or less predictable, but you never knew.

He roused himself and explained to Derek, ‘Sandra's holding the mother's hand.'

‘You know it's more than that.'

I tried not to sound hurt. I didn't think that comforting Moira Howley was a trivial or straightforward task, and I wasn't about to say that I'd come to the conclusion she didn't want my comfort anyway.

Katya banged her spoon on the rim of her highchair and bits of cake flew in all directions. Peter and Brook jumped up, Brook bending for the cake, Peter taking Katya's spoon and whispering in a big brotherly voice, ‘You'll get in trouble.'

Derek looked on with an expression of disgust. I told myself that in a few minutes he'd drink his coffee and go. Maybe he wouldn't even stay for coffee. He'd go feeling he'd been wronged, adding to his store of grievances against me.

Brook said, ‘I'll get the coffee.'

I heard him opening and shutting cupboard doors. He wouldn't be able to carry everything and he mightn't find a tray.

He turned around at the sound of my step, coffee jar in one hand, spoon in the other.

‘Go on tell me,' I said. ‘Say it. I'm a rotten mother.'

‘Calm down Sandra. There's nothing to get so het up about.'

I caught my breath, but I was angry and Brook was a target within reach.

‘Niall Howley jumped off the Telstra Tower.'

‘And?'

‘And maybe he didn't jump. Maybe he was pushed.'

‘Who said that?'

‘I did. It's what I've been thinking.'

‘Bill McCallum knows his job.'

‘I'm not suggesting that he doesn't.'

‘What
are
you suggesting?'

‘There's something about the computer picture, the way it was set up. And Litowski worries me, the security guy at the tower. He's lying. And McCallum—he's had to deal with so many suicides, especially young men, he's used to treating them in a certain way, and the bizarre aspects of this one, well, so many of them are bizarre, unbelievably bizarre, yet you have to believe them because they happen. You were there when he made that point.'

‘I'm a bank Johnny. That's my job. What do you want me to do?'

‘Talk to me,' I said. ‘Let me talk to you. Think aloud.'

‘You've got enough on your hands here.'

‘Moira Howley? What about her hands? What if I feel some responsibility for them?'

‘You've got a husband and a baby.' Brook was angry too now. ‘And when you were between husbands? Wherever you were then, you didn't want me following.'

‘But you were—'

‘You think illness makes you want to be alone? Wherever did you get that idea?'

The phone rang in the hall. Ivan called Brook's name. He went to answer it and a few minutes later came back to tell me that Sophie wasn't feeling well.

‘She knows it's Peter's birthday. She apologised for ringing.'

‘You're going over there.'

‘She said not to, but yes.'

‘Of course. Tell Sophie from me I hope she'll soon be feeling better.'

In the ruins of the birthday dinner, I came up against something I'd been pedalling over without seeing. My family was fragile, held together by bits of sticky tape and string, but Brook needed it to be strong and stable. Whatever he'd needed before Katya was born, that was what he needed now.

While Ivan and Derek drank coffee and spoke civilly to one another, momentarily allied in condescension over my ‘case', I lifted Katya out of her highchair and was rewarded by a sudden perfect smile, all smear and stickiness and pleasure. I hugged her to me, not caring about the shirt that had been clean.

It was strange the way allegiances shifted. The men I had to deal with might be well-meaning, but I was more aware, just then, of the contradictions each one held within himself. Derek and Ivan. Brook with new claims on his heart. Peter growing into double figures. Ideas of what was important were a shape my son was growing into. Or Peter merely obeying orders, hiding his discomfort because he'd learnt that no one paid attention to it.

Things I hardly ever looked at, like the table, became just then distinct and solid, with edges, corners that could bruise, scratched and stained in a way I had stopped noticing. I wasn't seeing them through Derek's eyes, the way I used to. I was seeing them through my own eyes, only more nakedly, and I didn't know whether to feel ashamed, or learn a new kind of indifference.

I carried Katya to the bathroom. It was too late for a proper bath. I sponged her hands and face, and she looked at me with her father's black, unwavering eyes.

‘We won't let them get the better of us,' I whispered, remembering how simple life had looked when I was ten. My mother was nice or nasty. When she was nice, it was no more than my due. When she was nasty it was always her fault, never mine. A part of the simplicity may have been to do with numbers. I had no father, as opposed to Peter's—one? Two? One and a half? I had no Uncle Brook.

Maybe, for once in his life, Derek had acted on impulse, jumped in his car and driven over without picturing what it would be like when he got here. I sensed the battle behind his composure—resentment that Peter was spending his birthday with me, and that we'd also organised the party. But did Derek want to take over organising parties? In the past such work had been thoroughly beneath him. Was the realisation coming now that it was perhaps his own fault he was missing out? Somehow I didn't think so. I was much more aware of Derek's urge to take what he considered his, at the same time his scorn for the poor excuse for a family I'd gathered round me. Brook he saw as sentimental, old before his time, wheedling his way in where he didn't belong.

A few minutes later, I carried my daughter back for goodnight kisses.

Derek submitted silently to my implication that it was time for him to leave, only betraying, by a contraction of the skin around his eyes, his certainty that the decision ought to have been left to him.

I found Peter sitting on the back step with his arms around his dog, his face buried in Fred's rough brown fur. Fred had that special look of contentment that meant extra food, and I knew Peter had just given him a piece of cake.

I kissed my son and whispered, ‘Happy birthday.'

I didn't even want to think about the washing up. I took Katya with me to the office to give her a last drink before I put her down. Soon perhaps this too would be dispensed with. But not yet.

Katya stared at me, her wide, almost slanted eyes blacker than the night outside. On this night, ten years ago exactly, her brother had been born.

With my daughter in my arms, I looked out at the just discernible shape of the clothes line. The back fence sat where it always did, half covered by jasmine that each year died of frost and then grew back. I'd planted it thinking it would hide the fence.

Did Katya see what I did? Was there any way that I could tell?

I sat down and undid my not-clean shirt. I squeezed my nipple, then with a moment's sharp anxiety poked under it. Was there enough for even this last supper?

Katya took my nipple in her mouth and sucked, eyes still wide, the night sky before us. Time would come—how soon? when she no longer wanted, needed. Or when my body said enough—how soon? Still there would be, on my side anyway, a need of the heart.

Behind Katya's ear I found a smudge of chocolate that I'd missed with the sponge. I smiled and touched it gently with my finger. Her springy hair was damp.

I looked around the room, feeling its stillness drain into me, then realised slowly, yet with alarm, that there was nothing of Ivan's visible in the office. I'd cleared all his possessions away, stacked them in cupboards out of sight. I thought again about men, their preoccupations and obsessions. From a child's grab bag of interests on to something else, drawing the young male out into—what?

And what about Niall Howley? I couldn't rid myself of the notion that Niall's so-called obsession with a MUD was—well, silly. Even after the blood and compost of the photographs, and the intimations of cruelty that seeped through what I'd learnt about
Castle of Heroes
. It was all so silly. A part of me continued to pull back and smile in embarrassment at each new turning of the story.