You can tell a lot about someone from their voice. Kit had told her that, Gemma thought, as she listened to Findlay Finn say hello. How a person speaks tells you something about how they live, Kit had said. Are they breathless? Energy-depleted? Is there a hard edge around the voice? Is the voice strong or weak? Hesitant? Bold and confident? Soft and diffident?
Under the circumstances, Findlay Finn sounded as if he was bearing up rather well, thought Gemma.
‘I’m puzzled as to why Natalie thinks getting a private investigator on board is a good idea, given that my family has already been overrun by interrogators and investigators – our privacy completely violated – as well as by the press. It makes the grieving process very difficult,’ he said, a little too aggressively.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Finn,’ Gemma said, determined to be as civil as possible. ‘I realise it must be a terrible time for you. If you’d like to wait until the worst of the shock has settled, please just say so. I’m very sorry about your loss. If it’s any comfort to you, I’m determined to do everything in my power to uncover what happened to your wife and your brother. And young Donny.’
There was a long silence and Gemma wondered if Findlay Finn had simply walked away from his phone.
‘I’m not going anywhere or doing anything in the foreseeable future, Ms Lincoln. I can’t start making funeral arrangements. I have no idea when I can even get my wife’s body back .
.
.’ Gemma heard a catch in his voice, ‘.
.
. for burial.’
‘Would tomorrow be convenient?’ she asked, after a judicious interval.
‘Why not tonight, Ms Lincoln? No time like the present. Tonight would suit me.’
‘And where will I find you?’ Gemma asked, taken aback.
‘At home. Where else?’
Gemma rang off after agreeing to leave immediately for Killara. She couldn’t imagine being able to stay in the house where a sibling and a partner had been shot dead only the night before. The thought of Kit lying dead from gunshot wounds was almost unbearable. She had thought Findlay Finn would be staying with friends or family.
She drove north to Killara, thinking alternatively of Natalie and Martin Trimble, and it wasn’t until she turned off the highway into the quiet suburban streets that she gathered herself, reminding herself that the house she was about to visit was the scene of a terrible multiple crime. She slowed her descent into the cul-de-sac, taking in the tall trees and clipped hedges surrounding the paved driveways up to gracious old homes. At the turn-around, she spotted the number ‘28’, shining in brass, hanging from a graceful angle-joint over the mailbox.
Gemma parked the car, wondering if the killer had also parked here, on the street just outside.
She walked up the dim driveway to the house, a spreading two-storeyed mix of white weatherboarding atop a brick and sandstone ground floor. Three wide sandstone steps led to the fine Georgian-style portico and the large front door with its semicircular skylight above and two glazed vertical panels running down each side.
No security here, she noted, not even a spyhole drilled through the door timbers. A good professional would follow a target around for a while, Gemma knew, gathering SA – situational awareness – getting a sense of the comings and goings of the marked person, finding the weak spot in security, the quiet time without witnesses, the best place for a kill. This entrance portico to a house in a tree-studded garden, hidden from view and in a street in which there was no through traffic, provided an almost perfect setting for the hit.
Feeling the hairs prickling on the back of her neck as she duplicated the killer’s movements, Gemma rang the doorbell then stepped back. She glanced behind her. The killer was probably too focused on the work to be done to take time to look back. All Gemma could see from here was the tall hedging that ran along the boundary to the street.
Footsteps approached and the frosted glass revealed colour and movement as the door was opened by Findlay Finn. Gemma knew it was him immediately. She was surprised at how well she now was able to recall Bryson Finn’s handsome features, seeing them again in a slightly different arrangement in his brother’s face. Findlay Finn’s face seemed sharp and edgy. As well, a large birthmark, well hidden with some sort of concealing agent, spread from his left ear halfway across the cheek. His skin, though, was pale and dense and sweaty. The less beautiful brother, Gemma thought, as she extended her hand to him, introducing herself and noticing his moist handshake and the heavy canvas dropsheets on the floor behind him.
‘Don’t trip on this stuff,’ he said, ushering her inside. ‘I’ve been trying to organise cleaners for the floorboards. And between them. Blood is very invasive.’
Gemma avoided looking at the walls, stepped over the dropsheets and followed him into a living area where cushioned benches ran under the windows that enclosed the room on two sides. This house was very different from Natalie Finn’s modern luxury. This place reminded her of old holiday homes in the Blue Mountains, where sandstone and dark timber married cane furniture and plush curtains. Following Findlay further into the house, Gemma was aware of the smell of linseed oil and something sharper, an acetone of some sort, lingering in the air.
‘Again,’ Gemma began awkwardly, ‘I thank you for seeing me at such a time and I’m so sorry about what happened.’
‘You probably think I’m the prime suspect,’ he said, standing with his legs apart, challenging her. Behind them, piles of books towered in corners and art gear was everywhere in evidence: boxes of withered tubes of oils, stacks of canvases and a paint-spattered table covered with finished and half-finished drawings, paintings and notebooks.
‘Why do you say that?’ Gemma asked.
‘Are you pregnant?’ he said suddenly, frowning.
Gemma was taken by surprise. ‘Pregnant?’ she repeated.
‘Bettina had that same look around the eyes,’ he said, ‘when she was pregnant. It’s a sort of beady, brooding look. Like you’re looking for a nesting box.’
The man was truly odd, Gemma thought. ‘You must have kept birds,’ she said, wondering what had happened to Bettina’s pregnancy since there were no children.
‘I’ve kept a lot of things in my time,’ he said, his voice edged with the anger she’d noticed during their phone conversation.
Perhaps it was shock, Gemma thought, creating this odd humour in him.
‘I didn’t know you had children,’ she said.
‘The pregnancies never went full term,’ he said. ‘Decided to bail out early. Probably with good reason. I’ve never liked kids myself.’
Enough not to shy away from shooting one, was Gemma’s instant, unvoiced question.
‘Mr Finn –’ she began after a pause.
‘Call me Findlay,’ he cut in. ‘What a name! You can see what sort of a fool my mother was. Who’d call a child Findlay when the surname was Finn? At school they called me Finny Finn. Sounds like some character out of a kids’ book or some peculiar game played by foreigners.’ He picked up a brush and dug it savagely into a drying worm of vermilion paint. ‘Almost as silly as Bettina and Bryson.’
Already Gemma was getting the impression of a man with a lot of reasons for resentment.
‘I know you’ve already made a statement to the police,’ she said, pulling out her notebook to put him on notice.
‘How come you know that?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow, his tone hostile.
‘Because your sister-in-law, as you know, has asked me to work for her,’ said Gemma, ‘and I’ve had to liaise with the police even if I don’t have access to their records.’
‘I thought there were privacy regulations covering that sort of thing,’ he said, stirring the vermilion-loaded brush into a small pile of brownish oil paint, curled like a tiny turd in the paint-spattered baking dish he was using as a palette.
‘I have a contract with your sister-in-law,’ said Gemma. ‘She was happy to give me the details.’
‘Ah, yes. Natalie and her contracts,’ he said. ‘So what else do you need to work effectively?’
He touched the brush to a small stretched square of canvas, highlighting the tones in a study of bottlebrush spikes. A larger canvas of sprawled figures lay flat, taking up a lot of room on the massive work table.
I must get back to sculpting, Gemma thought, recalling the intense and pleasurable absorption of creativity – something she’d lost for too long now. If you don’t take appropriate action quite soon, she heard a tiny inner voice say, you’ll be absorbed in one particular form of intense creativity for a couple of decades.
‘You stated to police that you were out all day and also part of the night?’ Gemma queried.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I did state that. Because that’s what happened.’
‘And you didn’t get back until late in the evening – well after the .
.
. incident here?’
‘That too,’ he agreed, returning to the botanical study. ‘Don’t you love the gold-dust finish on each bottlebrush filament?’
‘You also remarked just now,’ Gemma said, ignoring his floral observation, ‘that you were being considered a prime suspect. Can you give me any reasons why I should be thinking along those lines?’ Sometimes, Gemma knew, people gave away important information with their answer to this sort of question.
‘The answer’s obvious,’ he said, putting the brush down and spreading his hands. ‘I’m the dead woman’s husband, the dead man’s brother. Isn’t murder a family affair?’
‘Often. But not always,’ Gemma said. She would have rather he’d said something more revealing. Instead, he’d simply acknowledged a statistical probability.
‘There’s no room in here,’ he said, looking around the room, ‘otherwise I’d invite you to sit down.’
‘I’m okay standing,’ Gemma said. The thought of what had happened in this house, just metres away from where she now stood, didn’t invite relaxation.
‘Tell me about what you did on the day of the murders. You said it was a painting day?’
‘I started work almost as soon as I got there,’ he nodded. ‘Bit after ten. I found a nice sheltered ledge overlooking the Jamison Valley at Medlow Bath and I got stuck into it. I did a lot of sketches first, then, when the light was most intense and the contrasting shadows darkest just after midday, I started putting the colour on. I kept painting and painting. I took several shots with the digital camera to keep the colours in my mind because the light’s always changing.’
‘When did you leave?’
‘When the light started to fade. Until I couldn’t take any more decent shots.’
‘Can you be more specific about the time?’ Gemma asked.
‘Around five, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t paying particular attention to the time, just the light.’
‘Do you make a living out of your art?’ Gemma asked.
‘I make enough,’ he said.
‘Enough for what?’
‘That’s not really any of your business,’ he said, face flushing. ‘You aren’t entitled to know that sort of thing. That’s private.’
‘What I’m trying to ascertain is –’
‘Oh, I know what you’re trying to ascertain. And the answer is no, I didn’t live off my wife – my late wife. We didn’t mix our finances. Keeps things much easier and cleaner this way. No kids, no joint bank accounts. Nice and straightforward.’
It was hard to believe, Gemma thought, from the way Findlay Finn was behaving, that his wife and brother had been fatally shot barely a day ago, and that his nephew was even now lying in intensive care, hovering between life and death.
‘And yes,’ he continued, ‘you’re probably going to ask this – there is an insurance policy somewhere. The police asked all this too. I don’t even know whether something like what happened .
.
.’ again his voice cracked and faltered just as Gemma had first heard on the phone, ‘.
.
. might preclude the insurance being paid out. We both took out policies but I can’t remember reading anything about whether one is covered in cases of homicide.’
No doubt he’d find out soon enough, thought Gemma.
‘You didn’t get back to this house until after ten o’clock that night,’ Gemma continued. ‘You say you stopped work sometime around five; the drive from Medlow Bath to here is no more than two or three hours. So what did you do in the remaining two hours?’
Findlay Finn’s shoulders lifted and fell away in a huge sigh. ‘Like I said in my statement, I headed back down the highway. I stopped at Katoomba and had a bite to eat.’
‘Where was that?’
‘A little café on the main road. I can’t remember its name. Orange and white gingham everywhere. Plaster parrots on swings in the window. I was there for about an hour, read the newspaper, chatted to the woman about the oil paintings on the walls and then took my time the rest of the way back.’
It was a good enough description, Gemma thought, to make the café easy to track down.
‘That still leaves an hour,’ she said.
‘According to whom?’ he said, throwing the brush down and raising angry eyes to hers. ‘I don’t have to account for every bloody minute of my life!’
‘I’m sorry to say that under the circumstances, you actually
do
have to account for your time that night.’
‘Not to someone like you!’ he spat. ‘Some little nobody with a Mickey Mouse private investigator’s licence!’
Gemma bit her tongue and Findlay picked up the paintbrush again. She had to admit, the bottlebrush painting was very good. She decided on another strategy.
‘You’re very good,’ she said. ‘That’s a lovely study.’
He bared his teeth in a smile. He’d won that round, she thought. Or thought he had.
‘When there’s no real reason to hurry home,’ he said finally, ‘a person tends to dawdle. Especially when the person is returning to a woman who no longer loves him. If she ever did.’ He put the paintbrush down again. ‘Make sure you write that bit down: marriage on the rocks. Is that how you’ve put it?’
‘Is that how it was?’
‘That’s how it was,’ he said. ‘But don’t go thinking that because of that I decided to kill my wife. If every man did that when love turns sour, there’d be a chronic shortage of women, wouldn’t there?’ He made a funny sound that Gemma presumed was a laugh.