‘It’s made a huge difference,’ I said. How could I explain that the very cottage was scented with her, that it
felt
different in every way, that my heart lifted every time I saw one of her belongings on a chair or smelled the fragrance of the coffee she was making. That even the
light
seemed different now that she was here. ‘I
love
having you here,’ I said finally.
‘Why?’
‘
Why
?’ I repeated. ‘Because I love you. I want you to be here with me.’
I saw one of her fine eyebrows lift. ‘I think you’re living in exactly the same way as you did before I came. Me being here has made no difference to you—apart from you having more regular sex,’ she said. ‘You want me here, but you don’t seem able—or is it willing?—to make any of the changes necessary to accommodate me in a
life lived together
.’ She stressed the last three words. ‘I’ve seen it in a couple of my girlfriends. So often I hear them say they want a man in their lives, but when they get down to it, they’re actually not willing to make even the slightest change to accommodate this. They don’t want their nice tidy lives and houses mucked up by a man. As if the man should somehow be able to squeeze himself to fit any convenient little empty crack in all their busyness. Like a book or a piece of sewing that you have lying around and just pick up when there’s nothing else to do.’ She looked straight into my eyes. ‘My sense is you’re doing exactly the same thing with me.’
Her words stung me. Women could do this. They seemed to be able to feel and say things that I didn’t seem to know about until I heard them. Then I recognised the truth of them.
In the first few months that Iona had come to live with me, I’d been working very long hours, trying to catch up on everything the outgoing chief scientist had been dealing with; some projects barely started, others needing my input to oversee and sign off, others still ongoing. All of it demanding. Some nights, I hadn’t been able to get away till very late at night. And now, just as I’d almost got on top of things, I had somehow become entangled in two demanding murder investigations.
‘I’ll have to think about this. You could have a point,’ I said.
She stood up.
‘Where are you going?’ I said, suddenly fearful.
‘To have a bath,’ she said. ‘Before the boys get back.’
I took her hand again.
‘Tomorrow night, I’ll make dinner. We’ll have a family night, a proper meal around the table, all of us,’ I said, still holding her hand.
‘That would be nice,’ she said. ‘And a good start at least. I’ll be late tomorrow—staff meeting. I may as well work if you are.’
Later, before we went to bed, I took her in my arms and kissed her, pulling out the blue and red silk scarf I’d bought, concerned that my behaviour had hurt her. ‘See?’ I said, handing it to her. ‘I’m always thinking of you.’
She took it from me and opened it out, floating it onto the bed. ‘It’s beautiful, Jack,’ she said, picking it up and holding it near her cheek.
‘It’s been a long time since I lived with a woman. It might take me a little while to get back into the rhythm of it.’
When we got into bed, she leaned up on an elbow, dark hair around her neck, her nightgown slipping from a shoulder, regarding me. ‘You’re a good man, Jack, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. You say you want me and yet almost every time we’ve planned to do something together over the last few months, you’ve taken on something that prevents you doing so. Are you aware of that?’
She paused, lying back down again, staring up at the ceiling while I thought about what she’d just said.
‘I look at you and think of your history. I’m frightened, Jack.’
‘Of
me
?’ I said, surprised.
‘Your mother. Your ex-wife.’
‘Iona, I don’t understand.’
‘You have great relationships with your kids,’ she said. ‘What about your women?’
I thought of Genevieve’s self-centredness, my late mother’s addiction and the eerie way Iona’s comments reflected not only some of the things Charlie had said to me but also the failure of the relationship between Annette Sommers and Peter Yu.
‘There’s something in you that holds back from me,’ she concluded.
‘Not true,’ I said, running my hands over her warmth and softness. ‘I can’t remember when I’ve wanted a woman as much.’
‘I wasn’t talking about sex,’ she replied smartly.
‘Neither was I,’ I said, suddenly very tired.
I cuddled her into me as she settled down to sleep and lay awake, my mind filled with Iona’s considered words but mixed with images of Tianna Richardson lying sprawled on the asphalt of the car park, Dr Claire Dimitriou’s squashed, cold face on the smooth vinyl of the Faithful Bunnies lab. Now they were joined by the figure of an old, asthmatic man, brutally murdered in his own hall. Maybe I’d worked with the dead for too long and forgotten how to exist with the living.
Unable to sleep, my mind played around with the murders of the two women, putting them together, teasing them apart, trying to make them fit some sort of pattern. The two women could be connected via the Cat and Castle. Despite my tiredness, my brain wouldn’t rest, recycling the possibilities. The killer of Tianna Richardson could be an outsider, a random pick-up gone wrong. Or, equally, someone she knew. Despite the evidence we were gathering against Damien Henshaw, it was essential to find the unknown man in the photograph. Maybe he was part of the partner-swapping group? The killer of Claire Dimitriou could have been her missing work partner, either of two women he’d been involved with or another party, perhaps someone connected to the partner-swapping group. All the participants of that particular club would have to be interviewed. But if we came down hard, people would close ranks, duck and run. We needed a soft approach. Then I caught myself. After all that Iona had said earlier, I was doing it again, planning more investigative work on cases that could be dealt with by other people. None of us were indispensable, I knew.
Finally, listening to Iona’s steady breathing, I slept.
By daylight, the Mill Hill house where Albert Vaughan lived looked depressing, badly in need of a coat of paint. Putting Iona’s comments and questions of last night out of my mind for the moment, I pulled up beside the forensic unit wagon, listening to the thornbills and weebills twitching in the thickly overgrown hedge, feeling the cold morning breeze moving over the dry hills where a pair of wedge-tails marked out their skyway in lazy arcs.
Brian had called as Iona was getting ready for work and, because I’d been first on the scene, I couldn’t avoid meeting him and Debbie at the house to describe what I’d found and make my statement.
I was stepping into a spacesuit when Brian came out of the front door.
‘I’ve gotta go to another call-out, but take these with you when you talk to Michelle Danby,’ said Brian, handing me a plastic sleeve with copies of two photographs, both head shots, one of Damien Henshaw and the other of the fair man cropped from one of Tianna’s hidden stash of intimate pics.
I frowned. ‘Where did you get the shot of young Henshaw? Is that from a mugshot?’ I said, slipping the pictures into my pocket.
‘Yep. Deb’s back there,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of the house. Before I could question him further, he’d jumped into his car and was on his way.
Before going inside, I took a look around the area I’d navigated the night before with my torch—patches of long grass surrounded by dusty earth and a scrappy low hedge separating the house from the roadside.
The flies that Mrs Allen had heard humming in the house the day before were still around, but the body had been removed and only the large blackening stain at the end of the hall, the stench and the blood-splash patterns on the surrounding walls and ceiling reflected what had happened. Debbie was seated on the lounge in her stiff new blue police overall, writing something in her laptop while it balanced on her knees.
‘Come and have a look,’ she said. ‘Then I’ll write up your statement.’
Reminding myself I was here only to tell of what I’d seen and done the night before, and not to get involved in a case, I followed Debbie around Albert Vaughan’s neat, dull house. A bloodstained white paper bag lay stuck to the carpet and Debbie prised it up in her gloved fingers. ‘Brian was just about to write this up when he was called out,’ she said. She peered inside the bloody bag and, frowning, lifted out a brand new asthma inhaler together with its box and a cash register docket .
.
.
‘This was purchased from O’Halloran’s 24-hour Pharmacy at 11.40 p.m. on Monday night,’ she said, studying the docket. ‘We found the old one on the floor near his bed. It was empty.’
I knew O’Halloran’s Pharmacy. It was a big corner shop near the city centre, and just about the only place—apart from the hospital and the police station—open at that hour on a weeknight.
I wondered if Albert had woken up fighting an asthma attack, grabbed his inhaler, found it empty, and managed to get to the all-night pharmacy where he’d purchased a new one, used it, then shoved it back into the paper bag, gone home, parked the car and let himself into his house. Perhaps the killer was waiting for him. Or had he followed him home?
Poor old fellow hadn’t even had time to put his package down.
‘Robbery?’ Debbie asked, squatting back on her heels. ‘His wallet and watch are missing.’
The smell of stale blood, like the stench from old kidneys, was in my nostrils as I walked through the rooms of the house, which clearly hadn’t been changed since the sixties. Beige walls, fawn shag carpet and brown furnishings were relieved only by some faded orange cushions on the lounge and a clump of creamy-pink flower orchid spikes in a large pot.
‘Has anyone had a talk to whoever served him at O’Halloran’s?’ I asked.
‘The locum chemist said he remembers the old man coming in, wheezing badly,’ said Debbie, nodding. ‘He sat him down with the new inhaler until he could breathe better. Then he assumed he went home.’
If someone had followed Albert Vaughan into his house, that person just might have been hanging round in the street near the pharmacy and there was a chance a security camera might have captured something useful. Might be worth dropping round and checking out what sort of security cameras were operating in the area. Also, it would be good to get Sofia Verstoek in to take soil samples from the garden and check them against lifts from the carpet in the hall. I recalled a case in the UK where police had caught a killer with pollen traipsed in on his shoes from a rare plant growing in his backyard.
‘Any photos of the deceased?’ I asked Debbie, curious as to what the old man had looked like.
She passed me a framed picture of a couple. ‘That was taken some years ago, according to Mrs Allen.’
I checked the photo out. Vaughan’s face reminded me of an El Greco icon, gaunt and shadowed, his frailty clear to see.
‘He’s only got a daughter and a couple of grandchildren and Mrs Allen says they don’t visit often. Once a week he liked to go into the city centre and do some shopping. Sometimes he had a bet. According to her,’ Debbie continued, ‘Mr Vaughan had been quite ill the last couple of months and occasionally she’d done some shopping for him, but he tended to keep to himself.’
Debbie looked around at the sparse furnishings. ‘From what we’ve noticed here,’ she said, ‘and from what Mrs Allen and the people across the road say, Mr Vaughan was living the life of a semi-invalid.’
I followed her to the bedroom door and peered in. On the surfaces and tables of the old-fashioned dark veneer furniture, a clutter of prescription medicines, bottles and boxes of pharmaceutical mysteries looked as if they’d been building up since about 1958.
‘Mrs Allen told us that the deceased has lived here for the last year or two, since his wife died. Before that he lived closer to town.’
Finally, I sat down with Debbie and gave her my official account of exactly what time I’d arrived here last night and my subsequent actions. I left her still making notes and taking photographs.
Another senseless brutal act, I thought, as I stashed the used spacesuit in the back of my wagon, transferring the photos Brian had given me to my briefcase. A harmless old man killed for a few bucks and the proceeds probably already up some terminal junkie’s arm.
I rang the number Brian had given me for Michelle Danby, the woman who’d seen Tianna at the Blackspot Nightclub, and told her I was on my way to her place—if it was convenient.
Half an hour later, Michelle Danby, a pretty woman with hair pulled back from her face and gold hoops swinging in her ears, let me into her townhouse.
Declining her offer of tea or coffee, I said, ‘Tianna Richardson, the woman who was murdered, may have been with a man. I’ve got some photos here. It would be helpful if you could look at them.’
She frowned at the two photographs for a long half minute then shook her head, passing them back, her gold hoops swinging. ‘I’ve never seen either of them before.’
I put my notebook and the photos back in my briefcase and was about to take my leave when Michelle stopped me near the front door. ‘You know, I’ve been having second thoughts. I might have made a mistake,’ she said.
I waited.
‘I’m actually wondering now if the woman I saw really was Tianna Richardson,’ she added.
‘My colleague said you seemed very sure earlier.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s not very nice, getting mixed up in a murder investigation.’
It’s not very nice being murdered, I thought but didn’t say.
‘And it’s real dark in there. The lights do funny things. Maybe I saw Tianna Richardson. Maybe I didn’t. You know.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘I’d hate to give information that was wrong.’ We continued heading for the door and she stepped in front of me and opened it. ‘I hope I haven’t wasted your time.’
She had, but there was little point in telling her that. Instead I thanked her for trying and stepped outside, going back to the wagon to think about what I should do next.
After ringing Brian with the bad news that the positive identification of Tianna’s presence at the Blackspot was now seriously in doubt, I had a question. ‘We know now that there’s a prior, unidentified crime scene,’ I said. ‘What if Tianna was never at the nightclub at all? Just dumped there?’
‘To make us suppose she was there?’ said Brian.
‘Right. And who was in a position to do just that? Who knew she wanted to go dancing that night?’
‘It’s a no-brainer,’ said Brian. ‘Damien Henshaw. And I’m on my way to see the magistrate to get a warrant to search his place. Wish me luck.’
‘You have it,’ I said, ringing off.
Next I drove to O’Halloran’s 24-hour Pharmacy, where I found Brian had already taken delivery of the relevant security tapes. I asked after the pharmacist who was on duty during the night and was given his phone number.
I sat back in my wagon, feeling a headache starting. I reached into the glove box and found a couple of old aspirins that I chewed up, flinching at their bitterness. If I was smart, I could do the next thing I’d undertaken to do for Brian and then go to work. Sort that mail. Find out what new samples needed urgent examination. Just do
my
work. That way, I could go home at five and spend a happy, relaxed evening with Iona. Spend time with the people I loved.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about the vicious way Tianna Richardson had been murdered and dumped and I wanted to know—I
had
to know—whether she’d died at the hands of the likes of Damien Henshaw or the unknown man in the photographs, or if being in the partner-swapping mob had created the conditions that led to her murder. Nor could I walk away from the cold-blooded shooting of a fellow scientist. How could I leave Claire Dimitriou and her peculiar cry, ‘She saw, she saw sixteen blue!’ Was it possible that these two women were linked to the partner-swapping group that the Calvinist had told me about? I needed to find out. Dallas Baxter had been forthcoming with information about the Terminator Rabbit project, but very evasive, I recalled, when the subject changed to that of sex. This could be the result of natural or conditioned reticence but I was keen to explore another—and much more likely—possibility. Almost on automatic, I checked to make sure I had Baxter’s phone number. I already knew his address. Finally, I had been touched by the killing of an old man in his house. It wasn’t in me to simply walk away from these people. It wasn’t just that I was as consumed with curiosity as a kid who’s spotted interesting parcels hidden on top of a tall cupboard a week before Christmas; my very humanity demanded that the persons who’d murdered these three people be brought to trial. And if I could help bring this about, I was going to do everything in my power.
After ringing Sofia Verstoek and having an almost civil conversation with her in which she assured me she was on her way to the crime scene on the Ginnindera Road, I gave her the address of Damien Henshaw’s current painting job, a house in Kingston.
‘I want soil samples from there,’ I said, thinking of the coarse sandy particles.
Sofia acceded in a surly tone, but I thanked her heartily before heading for the Cretan’s café and grabbing some takeaway souvlaki and salad for lunch later. Then I called the nightshift pharmacist and introduced myself.
‘He was in a pretty distressed way,’ he said. ‘Said he’d woken up with a bad attack only to find his inhaler empty. I gave him an immediate dose from his new inhaler and then put it back in its box for him. His breathing improved within a minute or so.’
‘Did you talk to him?’
‘Oh yes, once he could speak. He said something about it being a small world—that he’d just seen someone he knew while he was waiting at the red light.’
I felt myself tense with anticipation. ‘Did he say who?’
‘Unfortunately, I had to answer the phone. Woden Hospital rang and by the time I’d finished the call, Mr Vaughan had gone.’
I wasn’t going to get any more than that. Maybe Harry’s post-mortem would yield further information.
Ringing the secretary at Forensic Services, I told her I was out on fieldwork and would be in my office later in the day.
‘Is Sammy Samways back yet?’ I asked her, using Gavin’s more usual nickname.
I held a moment while she checked. ‘Not yet. He’s on the roster for tomorrow,’ she said.
‘Please ask him to pop in and say hello when he gets back,’ I said.
She promised she would and then I called Dallas Baxter at the Ag Station. Every instinct told me that this man was withholding something important and I was determined to winkle it out of him. I got through to Pauline and she told me he was having a flex day so I turned my wagon round and drove to his home.
Airlie House, one of the best addresses in town was on a slight rise just on the other side of the city. An elegant Victorian mansion set in wide gardens, it had a three-storey tower and turret, verandahs running around two sides and wrought-iron lace everywhere. Despite the drought, both Dallas Baxter and his wife were passionate about restoring the grounds of Airlie House to their former glory. The old stables-turned-garage housed two cars and, when I looked over at the house, I noticed one of the French doors onto the marble tiles of the wide verandah stood slightly open. I hurried up the steps, passing the nymphs surrounded by falling late red roses, and pressed the brass doorbell on the imposing front door.
‘Yes?’ came Dallas’s voice from inside.
‘Jack McCain. I need to talk to you, Dallas.’
Dallas’s anxious face peered out at me through the half-opened French door. He was clearly not keen on my idea. Nevertheless, he stepped back, allowing me through into a front room dominated by a huge chandelier, with a magnificent equestrian painting of a thoroughbred and its rider over the marble fireplace.
‘This
is
a surprise,’ Dallas said, looking more uneasy every moment as he ushered me towards some chairs. Even though the newspaper near one of the club chairs was upside down, I could see it was opened at the report of Claire Dimitriou’s death.
‘You’d better sit down then,’ he said, indicating a stiff brocade lounge opposite the cushiony club chair from which he’d clearly just risen.