As he’d done every month now for nearly four years.
Cairns, 28 February 2011
Late on Monday afternoon, following the discovery of the body in the forest, Detective Inspector Leslie Fernando called a meeting of the team. Before signing off on a media release he wanted a complete rundown on everything known so far about what they were calling the Davies Creek case. Which, despite the flat-out efforts of Detectives Cass Diamond, Drew Borgese and Troy Barwen, was not all that much. And what they did have was mystifying rather than helpful. There was so far no clue at all to the woman’s identity.
The three detectives sat around their boss’s office while he got himself comfortable on his desk in front of them. Behind him the Coral Sea glimmered in the late afternoon sunshine. Gulls whirled and swooped outside the window. Leslie was smoothly shaven, in grey trousers and immaculate white shirt. On day one of her job, Cass had mentally filed his hairstyle under traditional-short-back-and-sides.
Now Cass sat to attention on an upright chair, her laptop open on her knees. Across a low armchair on the other side of the room uncoiled the full length of Detective Sergeant Drew Borgese, all 195 centimetres of him, like a python resting on a riverbank. His arms dangled down to the floor on each side of the chair, fingers drumming a silent rhythm on the carpet. Drew was leading this case, and Cass had already discovered that the ex-basketballer’s permanently laid-back take on the world concealed a sharp mind and a sympathetic personality. What’s more, he’d lately been delegating important parts of cases to his younger female colleague.
Detective Constable Troy Barwen sat astride a typist’s chair, leaning forward on the chair’s back, which rolled under his weight. He was short and solid, with hair cut in a flat-top, and large brown cocker-spaniel eyes. Looking at him now over her laptop, Cass reminded herself that dogged persistence was a useful character trait in a detective, and that his earnest contributions to their conversations enhanced their team efforts.
‘So fill me in,’ said Leslie.
‘Well Sir,’ said Cass, ‘the body was found yesterday afternoon by a doctor – Dr Ingram. He was driving back from the Tablelands with his wife. His car broke down and they were walking back to the main road.’
Leslie straightened up suddenly. ‘Tim Ingram?’ he asked.
‘Yes. You know him? He seems a sensible kind of guy,’ Cass answered.
Leslie nodded. ‘I met him in a case a few years back. He looked after a woman in a rape and serious bodily harm. That Chinese girl dragged into a car at Smithfield. Interesting that he found this woman.’
‘Well, we’ll talk to him and get a statement, of course,’ said Cass. ‘But it does seem he just happened to be there. His wife wanted to drive along that road, he said.’
‘I might talk to him myself,’ Leslie said. ‘Go on.’
Cass and Drew had reached the Davies Creek turnoff little more than an hour after the call had come through the previous afternoon. At the gate to the water catchment area they’d found a crowd. Tim Ingram was a tall, fair, youngish man, with tired eyes. His wife, Chris, was beside him; Cass had immediately liked her calm presence in the rather frenzied scene. With them was Tim’s brother Kieran, who’d come to bring the couple back to Cairns, necessary given that their vehicle was going nowhere immediately, at least under its own power. Also present were four uniformed men from the Mareeba station, scenes-of-crime officers, two four-wheel drives, and a number of interested bystanders who’d been barbecuing at Davies Creek picnic ground. As the Cairns contingent arrived, a tow truck pulled up and the driver jumped out, eager to see what was happening.
It was decided that Tim, Chris and Kieran would go along the forest road with the police and the towie: Chris and Kieran to help deal with the stricken Toyota, and Tim to direct the police to the corpse.
‘You don’t need to look at it again,’ Cass had told Tim in the back of the LandCruiser. ‘You only need to show us where it is, and give us a statement a bit later on. I can understand it was shocking, even for a doc.’
‘Yes,’ he’d said, ‘it was. But no worries, I’m OK now, though I’ll be happy to just have to show you where she is. It was so unexpected, and on top of the car going into the creek.’
Darkness was falling as the convoy made its way slowly along the road, churning up great gobs of mud which spattered the windscreens of the vehicles behind. The forest canopy hid the setting sun and the trees were blurred in the gloom. Only the pale trunks of the paperbarks stood out, ghosts among the shadows. By the time they reached the spot where Chris and Tim had seen the echidna they all needed the flashlights that the Mareeba police produced.
Cass knew it would be a long time before she forgot the sight of that body in the middle of the rainforest. It was one of the grisliest scenes she’d ever encountered. The dripping eye sockets, the strangely bloated flesh that still seemed to keep the shape of the woman’s face, the gaping rictus of her open mouth. Above all, the smell. Not just the clinging stench of putrefaction, which she had braced herself for, but another more penetrating and somehow horribly sweet smell that she had never before encountered. Despite the darkness there was also the buzzing of flies, many of them close relations of the maggots that could be seen feasting on the corpse as she and Drew flashed their torches up close. Within minutes, powerful spotlights were set up and the site was lit with an awful clarity. It was, Cass had thought, like a stage set. Designed around a giant doll, broken and grinning horribly, tied to the trunk of a small tree. Around that tree were the buttress roots of a huge strangler fig which merged into the outer darkness of the theatre wings. And they all had their roles in the play, as they gathered and sifted through the evidence, took photos and made notes, sidling around the silent central character of the drama.
‘The body was tied very firmly to a tree,’ Cass now told Leslie. ‘A tree that was in the shelter of another much bigger tree, so it was almost like a cave, one of those big figs. The pathologist said she must have been there during Yasi. She was not too far from the road but very well hidden from it. In a place that you’d have to think had been chosen carefully. She would have been sheltered and protected from the cyclone by the size of the fig tree. Her hands were tied behind her back and also behind the tree. I would say that in life they were tied tightly. With the … decay of the body, much of the tissue was gone and the knots were loose against the wrists but they were still very tight in themselves. The same with the legs: both ankles had been firmly tied.’
‘With rope or wire? Any clues there?’ asked Leslie.
‘No – with scarves. Silk scarves!’ Cass said. ‘Hermès. French. Four of them, altogether.’
‘I had a look at the Hermès website,’ she continued, ‘not having ever had a Hermès scarf myself. They sell in boutiques in Sydney and Melbourne, for $550 each. Of course you can also go to Paris if you want a greater choice.’
Leslie looked perplexed. ‘You’re telling me that someone tied up this woman with thousands of dollars’ worth of luxury silk scarves? Couldn’t she just have untied them or ripped them off?’
‘Well, yes to the first part of the question, and my guess is that she was alive when it happened. There’s fraying of the silk as though she’s tried to rub them against the back of the tree. But they’re strong, like parachute silk, and don’t tear easily, as you’d hope for $550. Or maybe something else happened to her as well.’
The team, detectives and scientists, had begun work at once. But the gloom of the forest at night meant the proper search couldn’t start until daybreak.
Once begun in earnest, it had continued throughout the day. The scientific staff had taken shots from every side before carefully untying the corpse and placing it in a body bag in the transport vehicle. This had then been taken to the hospital mortuary. Drew had given himself the task of following the body through and attending to confirm identity, and watching as Leah Rookwood performed the autopsy. Cass had spent the rest of the day trying to identify the victim and Troy had st
ayed at the scene in the rainforest.
‘There’s no sign of any major injury,’ Drew reported to Leslie. ‘At least, no blows to the skull or lower body, like Wayne Buscati had. No evidence of a gunshot wound. Leah will have a more detailed report ready for us very soon.’
‘So,’ said Leslie slowly, ‘is it possible that somebody, or more than one, tied her up there and just left her to die, slowly, from dehydration and so on?’
‘Yes. Terrible to think of,’ Cass said. ‘The water authority fella said that a few of their vehicles had gone along that road since Yasi, clearing large branches, but the road wasn’t blocked, so they’d have had no reason to stop for long. And it seems the bridge where the doc broke down held during Yasi, but the heavy rain afterwards wore away at the timber. Driving a car onto it was the final straw.’
‘The woman looks to have been in her forties or early fifties,’ said Drew, still dangling his arms in his corner chair. ‘But we have no idea who she is. No ID, no possessions on her at all.’
‘She might be a tourist,’ added Barwen. ‘French, maybe. As well as those scarves she was wearing foreign clothes.’
‘A black lace bra from Intissimi,’ explained Cass. ‘Also very expensive, believe me. A silk designer shirt from Paris, ditto as to price. A Donna Karan skirt. But no undies. One Christian Louboutin shoe. I had to google Christian. When I found his site I could see why we’d never crossed paths before. Our lady had chosen his Bianca range, which sell for $795 a pair. All his shoes have red soles, which apparently justifies the price. What’s more, she definitely did not walk in those shoes to where she was found, at least not along that road. The heels are skyscraper high. So maybe she was carried there.’
‘Cass has found absolutely no record of any woman like this missing from anywhere in Queensland or the rest of the country right now,’ Drew said.
‘That’s right,’ confirmed Cass. ‘I checked everywhere. No guests missing from any Cairns hotels or resorts anywhere in the state. No reports of anything at all. I called the French Embassy in Canberra as well as Interpol. Description doesn’t match anyone listed with them. The French suggested talking to the Swiss and Belgians. Another blank. You’d expect a woman like this to have someone missing her somewhere. More than that, she should have family and friends banging at our door, wondering where she is.’
‘Leah Rookwood put the death at about four weeks ago,’ said Drew. ‘Just before Yasi. Although she’s also taking samples of the bugs that she comes across in tissue remains, the larvae and pupae and so on, to get an accurate time of death. She said it’s complicated by the weather up here even at the best of times, the heat and the humidity. And the best of times it has not been.’
The ground around the site had been searched, netting a Chanel Rouge Allure lipstick and a powder compact. These were very close to the road and partly buried in mud. A team of police and emergency services volunteers was methodically combing the wider area. Tim’s Toyota had been hauled out of the creek and taken into Mareeba, and the water authority had decided that in the circumstances Tim’s presence on the land could be overlooked.
‘The lipstick and compact have no prints on them,’ Cass said. ‘Not surprising, if they’ve been lying for weeks in the mud, including through the cyclone. Close to the road-edge, like she might have been sitting in a car there doing her face, before whatever happened to her happened. Or maybe they were knocked out of her bag. Would you believe, the shade of lipstick is called Incognito! Kind of a dark red. Would have gone well with the colour of the shirt. And her fingernails and toenails, what I could see of them, were painted the same colour. This woman had style.’
‘And money, it seems,’ Leslie pointed out. ‘Or access to it. So why hasn’t she been missed? She doesn’t sound like the run-of-the-mill North Queensland drug-dealer’s partner. Even though it can’t be far from where Wayne Buscati was found, this sounds very different. Completely unrelated, I’d say. Have you looked at the scarf angle? What about these big-city boutiques you googled?’
‘Already taken care of,’ replied Cass. ‘I’ve asked Sydney to get the store to run a check on possible customers. They sell them online as well as in-store. I’ve given them details of the four scarf designs. They feature a lot of horses’ heads and gold chains. That might ring a bell with someone, or there might be a computer record.’
‘Brisbane is working on a comfit drawing for us,’ said Drew. ‘It should be ready tomorrow morning. It can go nationally then. Someone must know who she is.’
‘So this woman,’ Leslie said slowly, ‘was in no way dressed for a walk in the rainforest, even a short one. Yet somehow she either agreed, or was forced, to go to this remote spot, in high heels.’
‘Or maybe she was dragged,’ said Cass. ‘But there’s so much dirt and mud on her, plus the decomposition, it’s no longer possible to say whether she was dragged, maybe with her hands already tied. Presumably she was brought along the road in a car or at least a vehicle of some sort. Three or four weeks ago only four-wheel drives would have got in there. Apparently very few people go along that road, even from the Water Board. The killer, or killers, must have known the road and the area.’
‘Though,’ said Drew, ‘we can’t say yet that someone intended to kill her. We also don’t know yet if she was raped, or sexually assaulted in some way.’
‘Um, OK.’ Cass looked dubious. ‘Then let’s just say that someone who wanted to be playful persuaded her to let them tie her tightly to a tree in the middle of nowhere, and then pushed off and forgot to come back.’
‘Well, not very likely,’ Drew conceded. ‘But, well, we all know there are people who like to tie each other up, for whatever reason … and it can go wrong … the silk scarves give it a bit of a twist, especially with the missing underwear. But without knowing who she is or where she comes from we can’t even begin to speculate about what’s happened.’ The phone at his elbow rang.
‘Borgese here. Hi Leah! Right, thanks, we’ll be there first thing.’ He hung up.
‘Leah Rookwood will have a first report on the autopsy ready by 8 am tomorrow. You can go straight to her office then, Cass.’
‘I could come along …’ Troy Barwen started to say, but Leslie shook his head. ‘You need to carry on with supervising the site search,’ he said. ‘And Drew, what about checking the airport? Get the CCTV footage of the week before Yasi and look for a woman like this.’
Barwen sank back into his chair with an expression that reminded Cass of the pet wombat she’d had as a child when he was locked up for the night. Drew briefly caught her eye, and shrugged.
On Cass Diamond’s second day with the unit Drew had walked in on a conversation Troy was starting with the new detective. He was explaining to her how he enjoyed long walks on the beach, and solving crosswords. Drew was in time to see Cass swivel around in her chair and say: ‘Barwen, I’m happy to work with you in any way we’re asked to, but I absolutely do not mix my professional and personal lives.’ Then she’d snapped her chair back to fix her gaze on her computer screen.
‘We’ll put out a media statement, Sir,’ Drew said now. ‘A short statement. Body of a woman found yesterday in dense rainforest outside Kuranda. Not yet identified. Caucasian, thought to be in her late forties or early fifties. We’ll say we believe she may be a European tourist. May have been dead for up to four weeks. Cause of death not yet known. Police inquiries proceeding, etcetera. If any member of the public can provide information about her identity, kindly call this number. Or Crimestoppers.
‘And we’ll meet here again tomorrow morning,’ he finished. ‘Around midday. Unless something turns up before then.’
Cairns and Hobart, May 2009
Some two years earlier, on a May evening, Dr Trevor Symonds had sat sprawled at his surgery desk, idling through the pages of the newsletter that always accompanied his copy of the Australian Medical Journal. The journal itself was getting too damn hard these days, Trevor thought. Once, he’d been able to read it al
l, when things had been pretty much confined to the diseases and molecules and drugs he’d learned about in medical school, and in his few hospital years afterwards. Now there were biochemists and geneticists and every other kind of young hot-shot expert discovering new enzymes and new hormones and inventing new drugs to treat the diseases they’d created. Sometimes, now, he managed to read the abstracts at the top of the articles. After all, he told himself, it’s the top line that counts, ha ha!
Besides, he was planning to go to the College conference in Hobart next week, and he would certainly go to some of the lectures there. For one thing, he needed the attendance points to keep up his registration to practice. Mainly, though, it would give him a chance to catch up with some of his old mates. The ones who’d moved into general practice in other states. Johnnie Flanagan, for one, and Martin Scott. They’d always been good blokes. Not likely to take him to task, no matter what they might have heard about him and Lyndall. And they’d be wanting to let loose a bit, have a few drinks, play a few games in the casino, ha ha! Yes, he was looking forward to it.
You only had to sign in at the conference each morning, anyway, to get the attendance points, and all the talks were summarised in a folder they gave you the first day. Certainly they should give him something, for the nine hundred bucks he’d had to shell out.
He turned the page, glanced at the headline: ‘New Infection Control Measures to Affect All General Practitioners by 2012’. Christ, more rules, more rubbish. He scanned the article. It seemed that, on top of everything else, he was going to have to invest in a brand new computer-controlled autoclave to sterilise his surgical instruments, at around $20,000, just because his current model didn’t have laser-controlled follow-through systems to record and print out details of every single item going into it. All these regulations, they were just getting too much. His old steam steriliser worked perfectly well. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, he thought, ha ha!
Double Madness Page 3
