I left Dallas Baxter in his office, probably succumbing to a third brandy, while I hurried back to my car and rang Brian. I told him about the partner-swapping group and also stressed that I didn’t want any dickhead detectives charging in and frightening the horses. I didn’t tell him my plan to infiltrate the group and I had to bargain extremely hard to buy a little time from him. I asked him about Vera Hastings, the street gossip who lived next to Tianna Richardson’s place.
‘I’ve contacted her,’ said Brian. ‘She’s expecting someone to call round. Let’s hope she’s the busybody she’s supposed to be.’
‘They can be goldmines,’ I said.
I drove a little distance until I came to a pleasant roadside spot with a cement table and two cement benches on two sides. I pulled out the souvlaki and salad containers and sat down to have some lunch, noticing a ‘missed call’ on my mobile. It was my daughter, asking me to call her about something important, but before I had the chance, a call from Harry interrupted me.
‘Come over,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something to show you. I want you to take a look at what I’ve found on Albert Vaughan.’
It didn’t take me long to get to the morgue where the receptionist called through to Harry.
‘He’s being cleaned up now,’ Harry said, arriving a few minutes later and leading me through the secured door. ‘I need to leave here quite soon but I wanted to give you this in person.’
Harry passed me one of the two gowns he’d picked up and I entered the main post-mortem area, following him down to the table where the pale body lay, waiting to be bagged. On the counter behind it, the samples Harry had taken and weighed stood in labelled specimen jars.
‘What did you find?’ I asked. In death, all Albert Vaughan’s fragility was visible; the skin on his face and neck translucent as an embryonic bird’s.
Harry pulled gloves on and checked one of the specimen jars, then put it down again, before turning to me.
‘Very strange,’ he said, rolling the head over to one side to reveal the damage at the back. ‘I found something here that will interest you,’ He pointed with a pair of long-nosed scissors. Then he looked about, frowning. ‘Now where is that bucket?’
He was looking for the brain, which he’d previously removed and weighed and which was now hardening in solution before it could be sliced and examined by the neurologist.
‘It’s okay, Harry,’ I said, raising a hand. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’ Just at this moment, with my head aching and stuffed up, brains in buckets weren’t my cup of tea.
‘A severe wound to the back of the head.’ He turned and waved his gloved hand over the body. ‘I’d say it was made by some blunt instrument—maybe a piece of timber or metal. Delivered from behind, as your crime scene people found. I found evidence of three separate events.’
‘Whack, whack and whack,’ I said.
‘And I found coarse sandy particles embedded in the wounds. I think you’ll be very interested in these,’ he said, frowning over his bifocals. ‘You’re going to have to take soil samples from around Albert Vaughan’s place and Tianna Richardson’s.’
‘I’ll get our palynologist on the job,’ I said, making a note.
I pulled gloves on and took the specimen jar Harry passed to me. ‘I took two samples of these particles from the head wounds one for me and this one for you. I knew you’d want your own,’ he explained.
I looked down at the fluid in the tightly sealed specimen jar, gently shook it, then held it up close to my eye, watching the large particles swirl around in the fluid. Then I refocused to see Harry’s intelligent eyes magnified through the container.
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I’ll need to analyse them officially. But I’d put the rent on this being the same material we found in Tianna Richardson’s wounds.’
Somehow, an elderly man living on the outskirts of a small hamlet north of Canberra and Tianna Richardson, murdered in a suburb over thirty kilometres away, seemed to be connected.
After getting rid of our sterile gear, I walked back to Harry’s office with him, double-bagging the specimen jar and then slipping it into a thick envelope. I could feel myself being drawn further into this investigation. Now that their deaths were linked by unique evidence, I had to know everything I could glean about the last hours of Tianna Richardson and Albert Vaughan.
‘So who’s going to do the fine work on this?’ said Harry, interrupting my thoughts.
‘I’ll try to woo Ellis Smith out of retirement for it,’ I said. ‘I think he lives somewhere in Sydney these days.’
‘Good idea,’ said Harry, pushing open the door for me. ‘We’ll need the best man for this.’
Back in my car, I found the number of Ryan Holbrook, a smart, young detective I’d met on an earlier case in Sydney, and asked him to track down Dr Ellis Smith. Ryan promised he’d ask around and get back to me.
All the way to Tianna Richardson’s street, I wondered about how these two murders might be connected. Was it conceivable that Albert Vaughan was a member of the partner-swapping group? I dismissed the notion smartly as I tried to imagine him throwing a leg over Tianna. He looked so frail in death that I couldn’t imagine life would have made much difference.
Vera Hastings, a fair woman with her hair pulled tightly back from her forehead in a high bun near the top of her head, had two grey, tadpole-shaped lines drawn above her eyes instead of eyebrows. After I’d identified myself, she walked ahead of me in a bright purple tracksuit, showing me through into her living room. Several striking orchids displayed their floral spikes in pots and containers around the room.
‘It’s good of you to help us, Mrs Hastings,’ I said, looking around past the orchids. Too much heavy dark furniture cluttered the room so that when I sat opposite her, I felt too close.
‘Please, call me Vera. My late husband was in the job,’ she said, turning to a portrait of a chubby man in uniform hanging on the wall, ‘so I know how important it is to get as much information as possible. It’s a terrible thing to have a neighbour murdered.’
I made sympathetic noises and she lowered her voice. ‘I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but just between you and me, I’m not so surprised about Tianna coming to such an awful end.’
‘Why is that?’ I said, as if surprised.
‘Since Earl left, Tianna’s been out with quite a few different men. I feel sorry for him. He wanted her back, you know. Came up just a week or two ago,’ she said, offering me a ginger snap. I declined and she took a couple herself. ‘She wasn’t a bad girl, you know. But she was left on her own a lot.’
I had a sudden vision of a woman eating her evening meal alone and it wasn’t Tianna Richardson.
‘And Tianna liked to party,’ Vera Hastings was saying. ‘Loved dressing up and going clubbing and dancing. That sort of thing. She asked me if I was interested once, but I’m a bit beyond that.’
I took out the photograph Brian had removed from Tianna Richardson’s bedroom of Tianna with the unknown man. ‘We were wondering if you might have seen this man?’ I said, passing it to her.
She studied the photograph a few seconds, frowned and then I saw recognition dawn on her face. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘That good-looking fellow. He dropped by from time to time. Always parked his car way down the street and then walked to the house. But he didn’t fool me.’ She looked up from the photograph. ‘He was here not so long ago.’
‘What sort of car did this man drive?’ I asked, taking the photograph back from her.
‘A white one,’ she said. ‘Ford, Holden, I don’t know. An ordinary sort of big white car.’
‘Sedan?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It was a station wagon, like yours.’
‘And you never heard his name?’
She shook her head. ‘Tianna and I didn’t talk all that much, just a nod hello from time to time. Or we’d bump into each other in the Plaza shopping.’
‘Mrs Richardson had a son that we’re trying to locate,’ I said.
‘The surfer?’ she asked. ‘Jason?’
I nodded.
‘Oh dear, oh dear. He visited once.’
I nodded again, encouragingly. This woman clearly kept the entire street under constant surveillance.
‘You’re wondering how I know?’ said Vera Hastings, reading my mind. ‘The whole street knew! There was a terrible row. Ended up with him storming out of the house. Everyone was screaming and carrying on.’
Interesting, I thought, and made a note of it. ‘When was that?’
Vera shrugged. ‘Can’t really say. Sometime last year. July, August.’
‘Did you hear what they were arguing about?’
‘Can’t really say.’ She frowned. ‘And by the way, he was her stepson, not her own blood.’
I made another note, more interested than ever in finding Jason Richardson. He might have had more than a filial interest in his father’s wife. ‘Any idea where Jason might be now?’
‘Who can say? He follows the surf, I heard. Lives all over the place apparently.’
‘What does he drive?’ I asked.
She gave me a vague description of a van with a board on top. It wasn’t much. Clearly, her nosey-parkering didn’t include cars. ‘If you think of anything else,’ I said, handing her my card.
‘Thanks,’ she said, propping it up against a pot plant.
As soon as I’d taken my leave, I rang Brian, passing on the information about Jason Richardson and agreeing he should now alert the police in other states too. Sometimes this worked. Jason Richardson was certainly shaping up as a potential suspect. Then there was the mystery man. If he was part of the partner-swapping group, he might very well have visited their favoured pub. I pulled the photograph out of my pocket again and studied it. The know-all barman at the Cat and Castle might be helpful.
On the way into town, I made a quick diversion, calling at the address of Claire’s doctoral student, Jerri Quill, who lived in one of the apartment buildings along Northbourne Avenue.
It was her flatmate who answered my knock—a sweet-faced Asian youngster, glossy hair pulled back, no make-up, wearing a man’s cardigan over her crop-top and jeans so low on her hips that I held my breath.
I explained who I was and how I’d come to talk to her flatmate.
‘Forgive me for not shaking hands,’ Wendy Chen said after I’d introduced myself. She held up fingers dusty with what looked like plaster or clay. ‘I’m working on something.’
‘I’m sorry to interrupt.’
‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘Just let me wash my hands. Jerri’s not here. She left Monday night.’
‘Business or pleasure?’ I asked.
‘Definitely not pleasure,’ said Wendy. ‘I need a coffee. Want one?’ She poured herself a cup from a nearby percolator, then vanished a few moments.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked on her return.
‘Anthropology,’ she said. ‘Doing my thesis, like Jerri.’
I followed her into a bright room where a tall pot stand supported the sculpture of a human head, its back to us.
‘You’re a sculptor as well?’ I asked, walking round so as to view the head face-on.
‘Sort of. This is part of my doctorate. It’s not so widely used now that electronic reconstructions are cheaper and quicker. But it’s a skill that’s still needed.’
Wendy was working on a facial and cranial skull reconstruction, building up thicknesses of ‘flesh’ using soft clay. I studied the young face forming in the soft fawn clay. This head was almost finished, awaiting the final touches of colouring, hair and eyebrows. It was an eerie sensation. Because this wasn’t an imagined face—it had been built up on a plaster cast of a human skull according to anatomical statistics, tissue depth, nose length, eye orbits. This was the face of a real person. Someone no one had missed. No one had noticed that she’d vanished.
‘Where did you get her?’
‘I was able to get a cast taken from the skull of one of the cold cases the New South Wales police have reopened. I’m hoping it’ll assist someone to put a loved one to rest. It would be wonderful if I could get a result from her.’
‘A friend of mine is involved with those cold cases,’ I said, thinking of Bob. ‘I’ll let him know that this face is on its way.’
‘Not sure exactly when that will be,’ she said.
I walked around the young face. Lashes hadn’t yet been put around the blue glass eyes, nor did she have any hair yet. But with the addition of these refinements, someone, somewhere, might say, ‘That looks like my daughter.’
‘So why did Jerri go away?’ I asked, turning my attention away from the facial reconstruction on the stand and noticing a vase of very early violets in a vase on the windowsill. ‘I thought she was a doctoral candidate too.’
Wendy shrugged. ‘She had a big fight with her supervisor.’
‘Dr Dimitriou?’
Wendy nodded. ‘Yes. Well, actually not a fight, but some huge blow-up between them. Now Dr Dimitriou’s dead.
Murdered.
Jerri might not even know.’ Her voice was almost a whisper.
I leaned forward so close I could feel the warmth rising from her; if I’d had clear sinuses, I could have smelled her. ‘The fight,’ I said. ‘What do you know about it?’
‘She was really upset when she came in after being out at the research lab last Monday. She came home very shaken and said she was going up the coast with a friend and then she was going back to Sydney. To her parents’ place. She’d had enough. She was even talking about giving up uni for good.’
I noted all this down. ‘Tell me, Wendy,’ I said. ‘What was the blow-up with Dr Dimitriou about?’
Wendy tipped up her coffee and emptied it in a couple of long swallows.
‘That’s just it,’ she said, shaking her head and putting her cup down. ‘Jerri said she’d done absolutely nothing to warrant such behaviour. Even if she
had
made a mistake, no one would tell her what it was. And she said Claire had always been so kind before.’
I knew about ‘mistakes’ in the world of science, knew all about a year’s work being wiped by a bumbling neophyte, or painstakingly gathered notes being shredded by mistake. The sorts of mistakes that even old hands sometimes still made. I had to admit to a couple myself over the years.
‘What she really couldn’t understand,’ Wendy continued, ‘was why Dr Dimitriou was so unhinged about it. I mean, Jerri was really distressed. I was quite shocked at her appearance. She was almost hysterical when she came home.’