Worse than Death (Anna Southwood Mysteries) (4 page)

“Well — can’t we try? She can only refuse.”

I stared at him. Thoughts of Paul Whitehouse’s reaction if he heard about it made me anxious. I wondered why it mattered to me what he thought.

“You do it,” I said. “And make up a good cover story. I don’t want it getting back to Paul.”

“Okay, leave it to me,” and he picked up his jacket and went out, whistling. I watched him with awe, thinking this was a new and determined Graham. Then I shrugged and looked at last night’s notes. Rex’s business dealings. I should ring Lorna. I was reaching for the phone when it rang under my hand. I hesitated, wondering if it was going to be another threatening call, then picked it up. I didn’t get a chance to go into my receptionist’s act before Trent’s most exaggerated queen’s voice overrode me.

“Anna,
pet
! I looked under the loose brick and then I banged and
banged
on the door, but no one came. Not even me, and I love a good bang…”

“Oh shit,” I said. “I forgot to get the new key made. What time was it?”

“I don’t know — yesterday afternoon some time. Want me to come over now?” His voice had reverted to its normal pleasant baritone.

“Yes, please.” I thought of the messy kitchen upstairs. Trent was a law unto himself, and could be a complete nightmare if he was having any sort of emotional upheaval, which was often, but he did clean a good house. He was also always losing the key to my place. I sometimes thought I should just make a weekly ritual of getting a new one cut, except that I got the shudders when I thought of how many were already lying around Sydney’s main beats. And probably some outside Sydney… I worried about his habits — particularly his penchant for rough trade. I expected him to get beaten to death one night, or, if not that, then it would be the ghastly vigil in the AIDS ward. I really wished he’d meet a nice bloke and settle down.

“Okay, I’ll be right over.” He sounded cheerful, anyway, I thought. I put the phone down and looked up the
Rag’s
number again. It was so like my old one at Glebe that I kept forgetting it. Again the phone rang before I could dial, startling me. This time it was Rita — I’d forgotten all about our tennis date. I hadn’t done very well with Monday’s list — my clothes were still waiting to go to the dry-cleaner’s, too. I listened to her rattle on for a while, apologised for keeping her waiting at the courts and laughed at her enthusiastic description of the man who’d finally offered her a game of singles, ended up driving her home, asking her to dinner and sending her flowers. It was the sort of thing that was always happening to Rita, a fluffy blonde who looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. In fact she worked as a counsellor for transsexuals in the Cross. I arranged to call her when I was less busy, and, finally, dialled the number of the paper.

Lorna’s cool, cigarette-husked voice came on, “Yeah?”

“Lorna, it’s Anna. Can you tell me about Rex Channing’s business interests?”

“Sure can.” Lorna had developed her laconic style early. At school she was always being berated for her ‘yes/no’ answers, particularly in essays. It was one of the many things that had infuriated the nuns — they knew she was having them on, and she did brilliantly in all the important exams.

“What d’you want to know?”

“Oh, who he owes, who might bear him a grudge, that sort of thing. A general run-down.” I hoped she knew what I meant — I didn’t have a clue.

“Okay.”

“Lorna.” I was wary. “Was he… were he and Clyde very closely connected?”

“Who knows? They knew each other, that’s for sure. Get back to you. Okay?”

I sat back, smiling, then I got up and made a fresh cup of coffee.

*

An hour later, with Trent upstairs bustling the vacuum cleaner around, I sat doodling on my notepad, yet another coffee beside me and the cryptic all done except for a chemical formula meaning the silicate of something I’d never heard of, somehow combined with an African monkey, and wondered how to fill in the rest of the day. Then the fleeting, half-grasped thought of the night before came back and hit me — Glenn Sheedy! He’d been in charge of the investigation into Clyde’s death until suddenly called off and we’d become sort of friends in that time. He knew Lorna quite well — he was one of her ‘good’ cops. I could see he’d known there was something shady going on, and that he wanted to find out what it was. He was really pissed off at being taken off the case — we’d had a bad argument when he accused me of pulling strings. By then I had my little briefcase full of names and dates, and I was sorely tempted to pass it over to Glenn. But I hadn’t. What good could it do? Clyde was dead.

Since then Glenn and I had had a few lunches and he’d given me advice about setting up the agency — mostly along the lines of ‘Don’t do it’. I liked him a lot, and he seemed to like me, too, in a heavily avuncular way.

Glenn wasn’t in, but I left a message. I needed to know exactly what the police claimed Leonie Channing had said, and I also wanted to trace the Johnsons and learn a little more about Kylie’s disappearance. Meanwhile, I thought, heaving myself into action, I could at least go to the library and look up the other newspaper archives. I got as far as the garage and then thought of the ferry. It was a beautiful day, and why live in Balmain if you never take the ferry? I felt better at the thought of the strong salt wind that always seems to cut across the harbour. Blow away the cobwebs, I thought.

Chapter 4

The next few days are such a blur that it’s hard to put them in order. From the moment I felt the push in the back as I moved towards the ferry ramp, to the moment I woke up in Balmain Hospital with concussion, multiple abrasions and a few broken ribs, is a complete blank. Twenty-four hours of my life gone. I should have been thankful — remembering being crunched between the ferry and the wharf and nearly drowning probably wouldn’t be all that great. I had a peculiar sort of partial amnesia at first. I could remember my unmarried name, but not my address or phone number. I knew I had a white cat called Toby, which wasn’t much help.

But the sight of Graham’s familiar face helped a lot. He’d rung nearly every hospital in Sydney until, on the second try, Balmain had admitted having someone of my general description.

“You look terrible,” he said, over a huge fragrant bunch of Tasmanian hybrid freesias. I usually don’t like the hybrids, but these were lovely.

“Graham! Graham… Connelly,” I said triumphantly. Then, “Graham, what’s
my
name? They can’t find any Anna Neville in the phone book.”

Looking at his shocked, sympathetic face, other things came flooding back.

“Leonie Channing,” I said. “Did you talk to her?”

“Yes,” he sat down on the vinyl chair near the bed, “but I’m not going to talk about any of this until you’re a bit better. What happened, Anna? They said an accident on the ferry…”

“Oh,” I said. I remembered the wharf, the queue to the ramp. There had been a large group of school children coming off. I couldn’t really remember much about the others waiting to get on with me — I’d been reading my Dorothy Sayers. A young woman with small kids, I thought; a couple of men; an elderly woman with a shopping trolley. But the school party had been swarming everywhere, and we’d had to shuffle over near the stanchions to give them room. I remembered the push and then the utterly helpless feeling of falling.

“Graham — I was
pushed
! Didn’t anyone notice?”

He didn’t want to believe me. “No,” he said slowly. “Some bloke saw you trip and said he’d put out a hand to catch you, but you were already over the edge. The ferry captain called the ambulance and gave you mouth-to-mouth. That’s all I found out here. I haven’t spoken to the ambulance driver…”

“I wonder if he gave his name?” The picture of a dark-haired man in jeans and a thick jumper was gradually forming in my mind. I wondered if I’d remember his face if I saw him again.

“Graham, we have to get the accident report,” I said urgently. “Someone’s trying to kill me.”

A nurse came in and told Graham he would have to go. She seemed pleased that I’d remembered who I was and told me I was being moved to a ward now that I was recovering. I looked around the little bare room and I was relieved. Any would-be murderer would find it a lot harder with other patients around.

Graham gave me a kiss and said he’d probably come in again that night.

“The accident report,” I said as he went out the door. “Don’t forget.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, and bowed.

*

I slept for most of the afternoon, except for the uncomfortable routines of having my temperature taken every hour and the dextrose drip replaced periodically. Then I lay in a drowse, trying to put it all together. If the threatening phone call and the ferry incident were related, which it seemed they must be, then whatever it was about must pre-date our involvement in the Channing case. I was aware of vague anxiety stirring underneath the sedatives. What was it I was meant to keep out of? Could it be something to do with Clyde?

Graham’s visit later, after a half-hearted hospital meal of soup and custard, which was all I could force past my damaged ribs, didn’t do much to cheer me up. He’d managed to get the gist of the accident report from the ambulance driver, but it was unhelpful. One of the ferry workers had actually dived in after me. He’d checked him out, and the names of the other witnesses, and they all tallied except one — the man who’d said he’d tried to stop me falling.

“The phone number he gave was one of those ‘dial your own horoscope’ things,” he said. “And the address was a school in Marrickville. They’d never heard of a Jack Robinson, funnily enough.” We made a face at each other.

He’d obviously been busy, and I squeezed his hand gratefully.

“Someone who lives in the inner west and has a penchant for astrology,” I said, trying to be funny. “He shouldn’t be hard to find.”

He also had little to report about Leonie Channing. He’d pretended to be a social worker from a new ‘prisoners outside bars’ self-help organisation. I had an immediate picture of a chain-gang sinking schooners outside some pub like the Riverview, and laughed. It hurt, and Graham looked offended.

“No,” I said, “it was a brilliant idea. So what was she like?”

“I didn’t take to her,” he said. “She’s a dour piece — hard face, black hair, lots of makeup. And she wouldn’t say a word. I said if the police had lied about her admissions we could do something, and she just laughed. Then I asked her if she felt she was being treated properly, if she had any complaints, and she said she didn’t care. She had no complaints about anything. It was a dead loss.” He shook his head. “Awful house, too, full of
things
. Ornaments and photographs. Here,” he remembered something. “I nicked this when she wasn’t looking. Is that Rex?”

“Graham!” but I took the photo eagerly. It showed Leonie Channing with a grim smile in the background and Rex grinning at the rather sulky-looking little girl on his lap. I was surprised at the love in his face. It made him look like a different person.

“It was on the back of the shelf near where I’d put my briefcase,” he said. “It was the only one with a man in it. She must have forgotten it was there.”

“Well, that’s Rex. Rex the family man. But it doesn’t help much, does it?”

“Oh, by the way, Glenn Sheedy rang,” he said. “Said he was returning your call.” he looked at me suspiciously.

“Good.” I told Graham what I wanted Glenn to find out for us and he promised to get on to him in the morning. I also asked him to send a case of good beer to the ferry workers. The same nurse came in to shoo him out — she must have worked a twelve-hour shift — and I was so tired I was glad to be alone.

I was taken off the drip and allowed biscuits with my supper-time tea. It still hurt to swallow. The others in the four-bed ward seemed to be permanently asleep, except for a pretty Aboriginal woman in the next bed to me, who had a constant stream of visitors and kept escaping outside with them for a cigarette. She smiled and gave me the thumbs-up signal as I settled down to sleep.

“Domestic?” she asked knowledgeably.

I shook my head. “Accident,” I said. “I fell off a ferry.”

She was impressed, but I was too tired to talk, and switched off the light. I closed my eyes against the image of her sitting bolt upright in her bed, edgy and bored and energetic. I wondered, in a vague way, what was wrong with her.

*

Two days later I was allowed home, after a battery of tests had tentatively established there were no clots or fragments of bone in the brain. I was sore all over but my head had more or less stopped aching, and the bruises round my eyes were barely noticeable under liquid makeup. I said goodbye to Francie in the next bed — she was being moved, too, over to the cancer ward at RPA. She’d come into Casualty with severe back pain; now it was diagnosed. It had knocked off some of her bounce, but she was still slipping out for a smoke whenever she could. Her husband, a stocky little lair, had gone grey in the face overnight. On the way out I ordered flowers to be waiting for her when she got to her new bed. Graham helped me to his old Holden, which he’d finally got out of the garage after six months of what he called minor cosmetic work.

“I’ve arranged for a security guard,” he said, wincing at the clanking sound that started up under the bonnet as soon as we drove off. “He’ll just keep watch outside the house — he won’t follow you about.”

I was touched. Even more so when I met him — a wiry Welshman called Evan Kingdom, with a black belt in karate, he told us. He was sitting on the front step with Toby on his lap when we pulled up and I took an instant liking to him.

Graham drove off again after he’d introduced me to Evan, saying mysteriously that he ‘had a lead to follow up’. I promised I’d take things easy and be careful, but as soon as I’d changed my clothes I headed for the office. I felt jumpy after my enforced rest. On my desk was a summary of what Graham had got from Glenn Sheedy on Kylie Johnson’s disappearance. I made coffee and settled down to read it.

Kylie, then twelve, had said she was going over to Beth Channing’s after school to play tapes and stay for tea. At about seven-thirty she’d rung her mother and asked if she could stay the night. Apparently this wasn’t unusual — the girls went to the same school, although Kylie was older and two years ahead of Beth — and Mrs Johnson had agreed. When Kylie didn’t come home at the usual time the next day, her mother had rung Leonie Channing, thinking perhaps she’d gone back there again. The police had been called as soon as it was clear that Kylie hadn’t been at the Channings’ at all.

Beth knew nothing about it — she hadn’t seen Kylie since the day before. They were home friends, and played with girls from their own years at school. She hadn’t been asked to lie for her — she said she had no idea of Kylie’s plans. The police had finally been satisfied by her denials, and no other kids at the school seemed to be in Kylie’s confidence.

It was clear that she was meeting someone she knew — it was a deliberate and premeditated story — and the investigation centred naturally on family and friends, finally homing in on poor old Joe, the last to talk to Kylie before she supposedly went over to Beth’s house. He’d thought the girl seemed ‘happy, excited’, but assumed that was because she liked ‘going out to play’. He couldn’t provide an alibi after 6 p.m., which is when Mrs Kominsky went out for her euchre evening. There were no witnesses to back up his story that he’d eaten the supper left by his mother, watched TV, fiddled with a kite he was building and gone to bed. He’d been vague about what he’d watched on television — ‘No. 96’ and then a film, but he couldn’t remember its name and clearly hadn’t followed the plot very well, either.

The most damning thing of all was that he’d gone out in his Ute very early the next morning to dump the Johnsons’ garden rubbish at a tip where a friend of his worked. It was one of those places where they crush and pulverise all the trash, then plough it into the ground somewhere. By the time the police got around to following it up there’d been no hope of even knowing where to look for the possible remains of Kylie Johnson. In the end, after questioning Joe extensively, taking him in several times, there was just not enough evidence to prosecute on. The case had been listed ‘unsolved’ and filed away.

The Johnsons had moved to Melbourne, and Glenn had provided their last known address and telephone number. Apparently Mrs Johnson was now active in a ‘Parents of Murdered Children’ organisation down there, though her husband refused to admit that Kylie was dead, even after four years. Glenn had also provided the name and address of Joe’s friend at the tip, with a note saying he’d also been taken in for questioning, but hadn’t had anything to add.

I sat back and thought about it, enumerating the things that might make the two cases possibly connected — that the girls had been friends, that they lived four streets apart, and, I had to admit, that they both knew Joe.

But there the similarities ended. Graham had also taken up my intention to check all the newspaper reports on Beth’s disappearance, and the photocopies lay under Glenn’s information. I started at the lurid headlines of the Sunday papers, all running the same unflattering, grim-faced photo of Leonie. The earlier edition carried fairly detailed reports of the bail hearing.

Leonie Channing hadn’t reported Beth missing. It had been Rex, checking at her school, who had established when she was last seen alive. She’d gone out for one of her regular meals with her father on a Friday night. Neighbours had seen her at the newsagent’s on the Saturday morning, and after that, nothing. She hadn’t gone to school — Leonie had rung them once to say the girl had bronchial flu. She’d told Rex Beth was too ill to go out and couldn’t see him. He’d rung several times to talk to his daughter, and Leonie’s excuses had got weaker. As he’d told me, he’d thought Leonie was playing games, trying to up the maintenance, or just to make him squirm. Their divorce had been acrimonious, according to the papers. He’d driven over twice, he said, and waited for Beth at the school, finally asking one of the kids, who said she hadn’t been there for weeks.

That’s when he’d apparently panicked and called the police.

I wondered about Leonie and Rex. Who’d divorced whom? And why? I decided to ring Lorna, who hadn’t reported back yet about Rex’s business interests.

“Hi,” she said. “Info on its way. Should get it tomorrow. Sorry it took so long but I was flat out on something else. Haven’t even read the papers. How’s Rex’s missing kid going?”

I was relieved that she didn’t seem to know I had been out of circulation. I was trying to put my ‘accident’ to the back of my mind — perhaps hoping that if I ignored it then it would go away.

“She’s still missing. Listen, Lorna, d’you know anything about his divorce?”