The Family Doctor

by Debra Oswald

  The following evening, Rohan went over to Anita’s place for a night of easy dinner and telly. They talked, only for a moment, about John Santino’s death.

  ‘Hey,’ asked Anita, ‘in the official statements, did you guys ever name the drug that killed him?’

  ‘Uh, no. We said “an opiate drug”, that’s all. But I think I told you it was hydromorphone.’

  ‘Yep, you did. I was just wondering where he would’ve got hold of hydromorphone.’

  ‘Guy like Santino would’ve had resourceful dealers.’

  Anita shrugged and nodded. She figured she must have mentioned the name of the drug to Paula earlier. That would explain how Paula knew.

  ‘And Brooke—she was injured when he pushed her against a table? Like a wooden table or—?’

  ‘No. Glass top on an ugly chrome base,’ said Rohan. ‘I’ve only seen photos, but it was definitely glass.’

  ‘But the glass didn’t break when he pushed her?’

  ‘Nah, those tables are more sturdy than they look.’

  Later, when Anita was curled up on the sofa next to Rohan, her eyes were aimed at the TV screen but her mind was far away, churning through other possible narratives. Then she realised he was looking at her, aware that she was absent somehow.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked.

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘I do. I mean, if you want to tell me.’

  ‘Silly thoughts. Nothing to do with you,’ she assured him. ‘Labyrinthine female friendship stuff with Paula.’

  Rohan did a jokey wince. ‘But you know, I can handle it if you want to tell me. In my career, I’ve seen human beings at their worst. I can take it.’

  She shoved him in the ribs with her socked feet. ‘I know you can, detective. But I’m fine. If I talk about it, I’ll inflate small stuff into a bigger deal than it should be. Have I warned you I have a tendency to do that?’

  ‘You have. And I’ve accepted that challenge.’

  The evening after that, Anita’s plan was to keep to herself. Walking up King Street from the bus stop, she passed a bar with half-price happy hour cocktails. She went inside and ordered a margarita. The rush of the tequila coupled with the astringency of the lime and the mouth-puckering hit of the salt seemed to strip away the fuzz in her head so she could think more clearly—well, at least she told herself that was so. She drank a second margarita and then a third.

  Anita knew she had a propensity to lodge a thought in her skull and whip it up into something way bigger than the thought deserved to be. It annoyed her that for years she’d wasted so much energy on paranoid fantasies and dangers that didn’t really exist. Meanwhile, she’d failed to appreciate the very real peril Stacey had been in. Sure, Anita had been worried about the situation with Matt, but she never ever imagined the catastrophe that had been brewing all along.

  The jolt of the murders in the Earlwood house had knocked some clarity into her stupid head, but Anita could still be troubled by irrational thoughts that adhered to her brain cells like burrs. Sometimes she would give in to the anxiety and scurry around to investigate if her fears were founded in any reality, checking and double-checking until she calmed down.

  A therapist had once advised her that she should not indulge in such frantic checking, but instead she should just sit with any paranoid notion until it subsided. Anita generally tried to follow that method. But sometimes, like tonight, she couldn’t manage it. She needed to march right up to her anxious thought and scotch it once and for all.

  She flagged down a cab outside the margarita bar and, en route to Earlwood, she sent Paula a text.

  Are you home? A x

  Yes. Just watching TV. P x

  I’ll be there in five mins. A x

  When Paula opened the front door, she was wearing track pants, a comfortably sagging old T-shirt and ugg boots. The blonde hair was pulled back in a scrunchie.

  ‘Sorry,’ mumbled Anita. ‘You’re in comfy-at-home-alone mode.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s great to see you. Come in.’

  The two women wandered into the kitchen to open a bottle of wine.

  ‘I’ve already had dinner,’ said Paula. ‘But I could make you something to munch on if you like?’

  ‘No. Thanks. No. I’m a bit too churned up in the guts for food.’

  ‘Un-huh,’ said Paula and looked at Anita with her worried, caring face.

  Anita wasn’t in the mood for that benign condescending shit tonight.

  By the time they settled on the sofa in the living room, Anita was already pouring a second big glass of wine.

  ‘Go easy,’ Paula warned. ‘You were already a bit pissed when you got here.’

  It was true that the three margaritas had surged through Anita’s bloodstream quite forcefully between leaving the bar and arriving here, but she didn’t feel like admitting that to Paula.

  ‘I know you think I’m a neurotic,’ Anita said.

  ‘What? I don’t.’

  ‘You do, and don’t insult my intelligence by bullshitting me about it,’ Anita snapped back.

  ‘Hey, Anita, you’re a bit pissed and it’s been an intense couple of weeks. Let’s not—’

  ‘I know you think I get a silly idea in my head and escalate it into a huge dramatic thing.’

  ‘Well, you say that about yourself. I mean, I think—’

  Anita flapped her hands, wanting Paula to shut up and listen.

  ‘What I’m going to say is absurd,’ Anita said, then she stood up so she could pace around the room. ‘But I need to blurt out this insane theory in one go, scoop it out of my head and let the oxygen in this room kill it once and for all. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Paula in that patronising, calm-down-you-crazy-person voice of hers.

  ‘First, you told me about your patient—the one who was strangling his wife and she was too scared to leave because he tracked her. Next thing you know, nasty strangling husband dies of a heart attack in your surgery.’

  Paula opened her mouth to respond but Anita put up her hand—let me finish.

  ‘Not so suspicious, sure, if sixty-something guy has a heart attack. But mighty convenient. Good news for his wife and kid, good news for the world. Anyway, I didn’t think any more about that at the time except, y’know, goodo. Couple of months later, I tell you bucketloads of stuff about John Santino—behind-thescenes intel most people don’t know. About his prior assault charges, what he said on the audiotape, the drug abuse, the name of the bar he was hanging out in after the trial, the fact that he assaulted Brooke Lester so she almost lost the baby, almost bled to death. I tell you all of that and then a few days later the guy ends up dead from an overdose of a drug a doctor would have access to. And then, somehow, you seem to know other details I never told you—like the hydromorphone—and stuff I didn’t even know, like the glass table and the baby’s name … and fuck, how would you know any of that? So then I find myself thinking: maybe the first guy, the patient, maybe he just carked it in your surgery—natural causes, whatever—but then once you saw how his wife and kid were safe and happy with him dead, that put an idea in your head. It inspired you to—and then, fuck, then I started thinking about that patient from a different angle. In theory, a doctor could have done something, induced a heart attack or … I don’t know enough about the medical side. Anyway, a doctor could kill a person and make it look like—fucking hell, how wild is that thought, right? I mean, after what happened to Stacey, after some of the conversations you and me have had about killing dangerous men—those were hypothetical conversations. We were being hyperbolic, letting off steam, but now I can’t help wondering …’

  Anita could hear she was blathering, speaking too fast, sounding like a demented person. But she could also hear that Paula wasn’t interjecting, wasn’t laughing at the ridiculous suggestions.

  ‘You’ll say I’m a nutcase,’ Anita went on. ‘I’m sure you think this is just Anita going off on one of her—Are you going to say
anything?’

  Paula sounded quite composed in the face of Anita’s ranting. ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Say it’s a crazy idea. Say you didn’t kill anyone—or, fuck, say you didn’t kill two people.’

  Paula stared at the table and exhaled slowly.

  ‘Jesus, Paula, you’re scaring me now.’

  ‘Do you want me to tell you what happened?’ Paula asked.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t going to say anything to you. Not to anyone. Maybe it’s better if I don’t.’

  ‘Fuck, you can’t say something like that and then not finish the sentence.’

  ‘Maybe I do need to tell you.’

  Over the next hour, Paula described, step by step, how she killed Ian Ferguson and then John Santino. Along the way, Anita managed to chuck in a few clarifying questions.

  ‘You decided then—on the spot?’

  ‘You signed the death certificate?’

  ‘Did anyone see you go into the building?’

  ‘Am I having a stupid and horrible dream right now?’

  But mostly Anita listened, her brain scrabbling to process what she was hearing, her chest too tight to suck in enough air to speak many words at all.

  Paula looked like a different person as she told the story. The weird blonde hair was part of it. But her friend was different in a more fundamental way, at a cellular level. Or maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she’d always been a woman capable of murdering people in certain circumstances and Anita had been too self-absorbed or too innocent to notice.

  In the course of telling the story, Paula outlined her moments of doubt, the moments she had come close to abandoning her plans. She described the day she had resolved to admit everything to Anita and hand herself in to the police. She closed her eyes for a moment as she recalled seeing Rochelle and Brody so happy, explaining how that had changed her mind about confessing.

  Paula moved on from the narrative straight into the justifications for what she’d done before Anita had a chance to catch her breath and respond.

  ‘I did what I thought was necessary. I couldn’t see any other realistic way to protect those women from serious harm,’ said Paula.

  ‘What? Sorry? What? Murder was the only answer?’

  ‘No, no, no. But I looked at other options, other solutions. I checked the facts—that’s why I went to see Brooke in the hospital, so I could be sure that—’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, you stalked that woman!’

  Paula tipped her head, acknowledging that, but then kept going. ‘I needed to establish, as surely as possible, if she was or wasn’t in danger from John Santino. I mean, look at all the trials you’ve covered, all the case histories you’ve been reading. You know the system doesn’t always protect women, not a hundred per cent.’

  ‘Well, okay, everyone knows things are … So we should—what? We should all think, “Fuck it, let’s murder the bastards”? You were so sure killing people was the only way.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure,’ said Paula firmly. ‘No one can ever be sure. I mean, in my job, I’ve always had to deal with the randomness of what happens to human bodies, the uncertainty, the unknowable stuff. In the face of that—the chaos of it—you try to be logical. I mean, if a patient comes to a doctor with a problem, the treatment can’t ever be a hundred per cent the right choice. All you can do is weigh the risks and choose the most effective course of action, accepting it’s not ever going to be perfect. I think an imperfect fix is better than doing nothing. Better than sitting back and watching harm done—watching the damage you’re fairly sure is going to happen.’

  Paula stayed on the sofa with an odd stillness, speaking with an unnerving fluency, while Anita paced and lurched around the room.

  ‘This is so messed up,’ Anita said. ‘I can’t—I can’t believe … Can you hear the deluded shit you’re spouting at me?’

  Anita could hear herself sounding strident and unreasonable. Which was crazy, given that Paula was the one killing people. Which was, by most measures, a pretty unreasonable thing to do.

  ‘How come you’re allowed to set yourself up as judge and executioner?’ Anita was almost yelling now. ‘You do know that’s wrong and egotistical, don’t you?’

  Paula nodded. ‘Yes. But look, if Matt was standing in front of us now about to kill Stacey, you wouldn’t hesitate to kill him to protect her, would you?’

  ‘Well, of course not. But that’s not what you did.’

  ‘No one got here in time to protect Stacey and Cameron and Poppy. What if we’d had a chance to kill him before he had a chance to hurt them? If we’d seen Matt walk in here with the rifle, we could have a pretty good guess at what he was going to do. It was the same with Ian Ferguson—he was going to strangle Rochelle to death one day soon, to the extent you can ever be certain of anything. Same with John Santino. I killed those men because it was very, very likely they were going to kill those women. We were too late to save Stacey, but—’

  ‘Stop saying “we”. This is you. This is fucking you, Paula.’

  ‘Sorry. You’re right. It is me. And I’m not trying to convince you to approve of what I’ve done. I just want you to understand why I—’

  ‘This is such self-justifying bullshit. On this basis—what—you draw up hit lists of dangerous people and kill them?’

  ‘Of course not. But if a situation falls across my path, if a woman is in front of me and she’s—’

  ‘No. No. This is wrong. It’s so wrong I don’t even have enough words for the level of wrong.’

  Anita’s thought process was frying to a burnt mess. Paula had been thinking about this. She had her wording prepared. But Anita—she’d been caught off guard. She wasn’t ready.

  ‘Fucking hell, Paula, I know you don’t believe in capital punishment, so how can you possibly—’

  ‘This wasn’t about punishment. Or revenge. I don’t want revenge. If Santino had gone to jail, he couldn’t have done Brooke any harm. Good. Leave him safe in jail—I don’t care. I’m not interested in making him suffer. But he didn’t go to jail. He was out and I felt I had to stop him doing any more damage.’

  ‘I see,’ said Anita sarcastically. ‘You see yourself committing “preventative murders” for the good of the community.’

  Paula didn’t say anything. Anita then tried provoking her into some response other than the weirdly calm prepared-speech thing she was doing.

  ‘Listen to yourself,’ Anita snapped at her. ‘You think you’re so fucking wise. The wise doctor who knows what’s best for everyone, better than they know themselves. You’re so convinced your judgement is right, even if—’

  ‘I’m not convinced,’ Paula countered. ‘What happened to Stacey and the kids—Jesus, that shattered any sense I ever had about being convinced of anything or being wise. But I believe that if the stakes are this high—if a woman is going to die—then me not being a hundred per cent sure is not a good enough excuse. It’s not an excuse to do nothing.’

  ‘Morally arrogant. Do you get how self-righteous this is?’

  ‘I guess I can. It didn’t feel self-righteous when I did it. It felt urgent and necessary.’

  ‘You reckon killing people is the solution? There are other ways to—’

  ‘Are there? They’re not working, not fast enough.’

  ‘So you’re slaying monsters, are you? You’re the good doctor, curing this disease. But what you’re actually doing is violating every—I mean, aren’t doctors supposed to uphold the sanctity of life?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. And that’s what this is about: the preciousness of life—the lives of women and children that anyone could see were at grave risk.’

  ‘Why did you tell me?’ Anita bellowed at her. ‘Why the fuck did you tell me now?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. I feel the pressure of it inside me and you’re the only person I could tell.’

  ‘Great. Thanks. One of the cosy benefits of friendship. Are you planning to kill any mo
re men?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I guess I should say “good on you”. It’ll just be the two murders then.’

  Paula said nothing.

  ‘Are you going to go to the police, confess?’ Anita demanded.

  ‘No. I’m not. I mean, in lots of ways that would be a relief. But I can’t.’

  ‘Because you’re a special person, the wise doctor, and the world should simply trust your superior wisdom.’

  ‘No. Not at all. But if I told the police how those men really died, that would be bad for Rochelle Ferguson and Brooke Lester. That would bring more pain into their lives because of something I did. That’s not fair.’

  ‘But it’s okay to bring pain into my life by dumping this on me?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I should never have told you.’

  ‘Well, you have. So what am I supposed to do now? I’m an accessory after the fact now,’ Anita snapped. ‘And now I have to keep your murdering secret?’

  ‘It’s up to you. For Rochelle and Brooke’s sakes, I hope you will.’

  ‘And—fuck—it just hit me! You co-opted me into your preventative murder scheme. I told you so much stuff about Santino and you used that to kill him. You used me.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t set out to do that.’

  ‘You’ve pulled me into it whether I like it or not. And now you’re sitting there talking at me like some strange creature from another dimension. What you did was dangerous and wrong. Tell me you know that.’

  Paula gave a slow oversized shrug of her shoulders. ‘I know. But I can’t regret doing it. Good things came out of those deaths. I’ll have to live with the wrongness of what I did.’

  ‘Listen to yourself. Kidding yourself. And you’ve betrayed our friendship. I don’t know who the fuck you are, lady. I’m going to go now. Please do not call me. Stay away from me. I don’t want anything to do with you.’

  Anita walked out the front door of Paula’s house and then sped up until she was almost running, around the corner and three hundred metres up the hill. The shock had burned away the last of the alcohol in her bloodstream and by the time she swung her body into the back seat of an Uber, she was brutally sober.