Double Madness

by Caroline de Costa

  Suddenly his attention was caught by a photo at the bottom of the page. ‘Former infection-control nurse Joy Bulmer,’ ran the caption, ‘now in charge of marketing for Ascham Medical, will be at the College’s Hobart meeting to demonstrate the new range of fourth-generation autoclaves.’

  Joy Bulmer! He’d often wondered what had happened to her. It must be eleven, no, twelve, years. He studied the photo carefully. If that was taken recently she wasn’t looking too bad. She’d always been a bit plump. Podgy even. Size 16, Lyndall would have said, though not disparagingly. Of course, she’d never met Joy. Lyndall. Better not to think of Lyndall. Lyndall was always size 10, back to size 10 within weeks of the kids’ births, he remembered that. No, better not to think of Lyndall. In the photo Joy’s hair was streaked blonde, as it had been when he knew her. Her pubic hair was dark brown, though, he knew that, ha ha! She’d kept her name … perhaps she’d never married? Though you never knew these days. And she was going to be at the Hobart meeting!

  Trevor lounged in his chair, stretched his legs, and thought back to his days in Weipa. A mining town, two hours’ flying time away, always in need of doctors. He’d started off just flying up for the day once a fortnight, helping out the single doctor in the public hospital. Then, as he got busier, once a week. Joy was the head honcho in the hospital then.

  First of all it was just one or two drinks together in the pub before his flight back, no harm in that. Then he began to think there was enough work for two days – he could go up at lunchtime on Tuesdays, stay at the Albatross, come back to Cairns on Wednesday evening.

  But of course the real reason for the overnight stay had been Joy. Not that he hadn’t been getting on with Lyndall. That was one of their better patches. But a bit of variety never did any harm, he’d thought. Joy was a jolly sort of girl, didn’t seem to be looking to settle down or anything like that. Taking the Pill, so he wasn’t the only one. Lyndall never twigged, not that time. Weipa, he told her, it’s as dry as a lizard’s back. It never occurred to her he might be going there for sex.

  And Joy had been willing, more than willing, from that very first night. Here I am alone in a strange place, he’d said, I need you to show me around. After a steak and a few beers they’d gone back to her flat next to the hospital. He’d given her ten out of ten for her pelvic floor muscle control. Of course she’d never had kids. Lyndall by then was a bit slack in that department, after two forceps deliveries, not her fault of course, but a bloke did appreciate a bit of tightness when he could get it. And, later, Joy started doing things he’d never even thought of suggesting to Lyndall. Momentarily, the image of Joy’s ample buttocks, milky-white in the dying light, came to mind.

  It had lasted several months. Each Tuesday, by the time the plane had crossed the mountains and was heading north-west over the grey-green countryside, he was already in a state of semi-arousal and had trouble concentrating on his afternoon’s surgery.

  But then she’d got difficult. True, he had hinted, just hinted, that his marriage was packing up and he might shortly be separated. When he’d said he couldn’t meet her in Cairns, she seemed to realise the separation wasn’t going to happen. Asked more questions. Started to insist on condoms. Talked to a mental health nurse who worked with Lyndall. So that one Tuesday it was all off. Joy had called him a lot of unfair names, he remembered. Said he’d lied to her; of course that wasn’t true. So he gave up Weipa altogether, switched to Cooktown. No obliging blonde nurses there, unfortunately.

  Well, he wouldn’t mind seeing her again. Especially now, with Lyndall gone. Just for old times’ sake. Enough water’s flowed under the bridge, he told himself, for her to be pleased by a chance meeting. And Hobart seemed the perfect place for that. At coffee and lunch breaks there’d be a crowd around her stand. All the chaps were going to have to buy these new sterilisers. They’d be wanting to look. He’d be able to locate her, look at her in a crowd first, then wander up and seem surprised to see her. ‘Bubbles’, that was what she’d liked him to call her, as they’d rolled around her queen-sized bed. He’d remember that, ha ha!

  In the following week, before the Hobart conference, Trevor Symonds thought quite a lot about Joy Bulmer, and in the plane on the way down to Hobart, he thought about her even more. The sound and movement of the aircraft recalled his Weipa trips, and there was that familiar surge of excitement in his loins. He thought how good it would be to get into bed with someone he felt physically familiar with. Like Lyndall. But it was no use thinking that. I might be losing my touch a bit, he told himself, maybe drinking a bit much lately too. Not surprising, being left like this, what do you expect? Looking for new women at this stage of my life, I shouldn’t have to do that.

  Arriving in Hobart, he took a taxi direct to Wrest Point. The convention centre was the site for the conference, located within the casino and next to the hotel. At the casino bar he found both Johnnie and Martin and their wives.

  After some initial pleasantries and backslapping and do-you-remembers, he told them about Lyndall. There was an awkward silence. The women exchanged knowing glances, and Trevor remembered he’d never liked those two. Just wait till tomorrow, I’ll meet up with Joy, he told himself, and to cover the silence said loudly, ‘It’s my round’. But after two drinks Johnnie and Martin and their wives excused themselves, and Trevor was left to drink with two blokes from South Australia whose names he couldn’t recall, and who’d left their wives at home, and who, like him, wanted to celebrate a bit.

  The next morning he woke with one hell of a headache, and found he’d been sleeping in his only decent pair of trousers, which were now crushed and smelling of stale booze. He had to put on an old pair of corduroys, and a shirt he didn’t know how to iron, and he didn’t get down to the conference until after eleven. Coffee was already being served in the sponsors’ display room, which was crowded with his medical colleagues. He couldn’t even get near the Ascham stand, and then he had an argument with the smartarse redhead who was running the registration desk – nice legs and a low-cut top showing lots of cleavage, but a real little Hitler. She said he couldn’t sign in for the first morning session and get his College points because he was too late.

  So he had no chance to look for Joy then, and because the redhead was watching him so intently, probably to see if he really was going to attend the lectures in the second session, he had to finish his coffee and go into the conference hall, instead of idling inconspicuously among the stands of blood-pressure meters and urine-testing kits, trying to get a look at Joy.

  At that moment Joy Bulmer was in front of the mirror in the pink-marbled ladies’ room of the Wrest Point Convention Centre, touching up her makeup in preparation for the lunchtime rush of potential Ascham customers.

  Alone in front of the glass, she studied her reflection. All in all, she felt happy about the way she looked. Happier than she’d ever been when she’d been married to Barry. Barry Snodgrass, who’d hassled her constantly about her weight, especially after Brendan was born. It was true, she had put on a bit during her marriage, now fitted more easily into a size 22 than a 20. But in Ascham’s corporate outfit of stylish navy skirt and jacket, teamed with a blouse patterned with tiny blue sterilisers, she looked good, she knew. Authoritative but still feminine. Today, knowing how conservative most of her medical clients were, she’d added a double row of pearls and her smart but sensible Diana Ferrari navy heels. Indeed, her size was an asset in her job, not the liability it might be in some other businesses or organisations. Selling sterilisers and surgical instruments, Joy had found, meant meeting directors of nursing, infection-control supervisors, meant talking to a lot of women who were physically big as well as having big personalities. Women who were used to running their own show, to holding the purse strings. They could relate more easily to Joy than to some stick of a twenty-year-old. Ascham knew well what a prize they’d got. Her sales last year had outclassed everyone else’s, and she’d been rewarded with a lovely holiday in New Zealand for herself an
d Brendan.

  Life had indeed taken a turn for the better since her divorce from Barry. She’d been fond enough of him when they’d married, and thought she could learn to live tolerably with him. But then Barry had become so boring. He never wanted to go out. He hadn’t much liked her going back to work even once Brendan was in primary school. He didn’t like her friends or her socialising. Joy liked to be busy, to be where things were happening. She liked the atmosphere of hospital work, of being part of a team. Liked working hard, then relaxing completely when she went off-duty. Lunches on Fridays that lasted till tea-time, bottles of champagne. That was how she’d earned her nickname, ‘Bubbles’.

  One Friday, Joy came home by taxi, having left her car in the station car park. She knew she’d had more Seaview Brut than was good for her, and she was late collecting Brendan from after-school care. Barry arrived home to find his dinner not ready. He had shouted at her, had said she was extravagant. Even though she paid half the mortgage and all the housekeeping before spending anything on herself. They’d had a huge fight and Joy had taken Brendan to her mother’s, as she’d done several times before, only this time she didn’t come back.

  Brendan had been unhappy and withdrawn at first. When he realised he could take Joy’s maiden name – drop the hated Snodgrass and become Brendan Bulmer – his unhappiness disappeared almost overnight. And his mother was more than ready to revert to Joy Bulmer.

  After her divorce, Joy took a course in infection control. She found a short maternity-leave replacement post, and was looking around for something permanent when the job with Ascham came up. She wouldn’t have been able to do it if she’d still been married to Barry. So much travelling. But living with Mum, who at seventy was still fighting fit and a formidable bridge player, Joy could go off at any time and leave Brendan happily at home with his nana. And go off she did, all over Australia, talking up Ascham’s products and accumulating frequent flyer points.

  What’s more, she’d found she was getting more sex than ever before. It had been surprising to Joy how many male doctors, nurses and theatre technicians were available, even though she’d put the weight on. Maybe even because of that. Here, in Hobart, she knew she’d have offers. A few men from previous flings might be around, too, without their wives. Joy was finding that she liked things this way. Some drinks, dinner, bed. Joy had done with commitment, thank you, and she always remembered to pack protection.

  Joy applied L’Oréal’s Pearly Pink to her lips, took a last contented look at her reflection and dropped the lipstick into her bag. She made her way past the papier-mâché potted palms, false rocks and waterfalls decorating the casino that completely obscured the cool beauty of the Derwent beyond the windows. Beyond some fake Mexican cactus she could see the Ascham stand. It did look striking. She, Jill and Melanie, Ascham’s permanent reps in Hobart, had spent the previous day setting it up, using ribbons and crepe paper in Ascham’s brand colours, and their efforts had been worthwhile. The new model DSK 440 steriliser was steaming away at the front, with its special glass door that Joy herself had thought of, so doctors could see the instruments sparkling inside while the microbes perished. Health departments everywhere were insisting on these new all-in-one, computer-controlled, laser-printing sterilising systems. This was good news for Ascham. In the morning coffee break Joy had taken the names of at least twenty doctors who wanted to place orders. A huge number of Ascham’s brochures, designed by Joy herself, had been picked up, together with all the free Ascham pens and notepads. Joy lifted more boxes of pens from behind the stand and began to spread them out, waiting for Jill and Melanie to return from their coffee break.

  Trevor sat fidgeting through the morning session of the conference. The talk was way over his head, a talk about some bug called Clostridium difficile. When question time came, Trevor bumbled along his row of seats and out the door. It was half past twelve. He could just, casually, find the bar again. Have a quick gin and tonic before lunch, to steady himself. Maybe a double. And he could look for Joy.

  From behind some rubber Mexican cactus he peered across at the Ascham stand. There were three women behind the stand in the Ascham corporate uniform. He sidestepped into a display of gynaecological speculums and found a point behind a cardboard cut-out illustrating the latest insulins, from where he studied the Ascham set-up.

  All three women, he saw, were blonde. He pushed his bifocals more firmly onto his nose to get a better look. Two, he could see, were under thirty. Not bad-looking, the two of them. But Joy must be forty by now. At least.

  The third woman he could see only partially. She was busy talking to a GP he knew vaguely, a man from the Gold Coast. She was mostly concealed behind a pile of boxes. That could be Joy. She turned her head and he thought yes, she looks quite like how I remember her. He was about to move casually forward when the woman stepped sideways and more fully into view, and Trevor Symonds realised it couldn’t be Joy Bulmer after all.

  She’d been a biggish, bubbly girl in Weipa. But she wasn’t – she couldn’t be – as fat as that. That must be someone else.

  Disappointed, Trevor retreated back past the gynaecological display and its surprised attendant, past the cactus, away from the world of medicine, and on to the welcoming ambience of the bar.

  Having set out her brochures, pens and pads, Joy was busy again with enquiries even before the doors of the conference hall opened for lunch. Out of the corner of her eye, Joy had noticed a man behaving rather oddly. Kind of skirting around Ascham’s display. Almost how some men looked outside adult shops, she thought. Of course Ascham had some rivals in the marketplace, but it was hardly likely that Surgical Standards or Australab would have reps behaving like that. Between chats with clients Joy took a better, more focused, look at the man. A doctor, possibly, but with a slightly different air about him. That sense of professional authority, of being well cared for, so familiar to Joy, was somehow lacking. This man looked rather seedy, a bit frayed at the edges.

  Come to think of it, he looked a bit like … Terry? Trent? No, not Trent; Trevor, that was it. Trevor Symonds. A doctor Joy had had a bit of a fling with when she was working up in Queensland for a while. It had been in a small mining town, not much social life, so she’d been glad of the diversion. She’d dumped him though when she found out that he had two small children, and that his wife, a psychiatrist, was working full-time and having to manage the kids on her own while her husband chased skirt around the countryside. Before she’d agreed to anything in bed, he’d told her he was divorced. It wasn’t that Joy had been interested in any kind of long-term relationship with him. She just didn’t believe in getting involved with married men.

  No, that couldn’t be Trevor Symonds, he’d only be in his late forties by now, and this man looked at least sixty, and showing it.

  Joy returned her attention to her client, a Gold Coast doctor with two practices, who was interested, most interested, in installing the new sterilisers in both his practices, and when she looked up again, the strange, seedy man had gone.

  Cairns, 1 March 2011

  Questions came flooding in from reporters, once the police media release had gone out on Monday evening. Detective Borgese would not comment on whether there were similarities between this case and the still-unsolved death of Wayne Buscati. He simply repeated that police inquiries were proceeding.

  Police inquiries were indeed proceeding. At eight on Tuesday morning, while Detective Barwen trudged through the mud of the Davies Creek National Park and Detective Borgese sat at his desk trawling through databases and organising a search for middle-aged-but-stylish European women who may have entered the country through Cairns Airport, and not yet departed it, Detective Cass Diamond sat in the office of Dr Leah Rookwood.

  Piles of journals and patient notes were strewn across the office. On Leah’s desk stood a small glass jar compressing a very large tapeworm, and above the coffee machine was another jar containing a human hand. Fortunately, that machine was turned on. Cass always need
ed the coffee but as well the aroma helped counter the pungent fumes of formalin preserving Leah’s specimens.

  Cass was also glad that at the centre of the discussion were Leah’s laptop photos of the remains of their unidentified victim, meaning that today she did not have to enter the mortuary itself. While forensic pathology was an important adjunct to any detective’s career, she felt she had seen quite enough of the dead woman in the past two days.

  ‘Fascinating,’ Leah said. ‘Adipocere. I don’t often see it.’

  To Cass’s raised eyebrows she explained: ‘Saponification. The flesh literally turns into a kind of soap. Instead of just putrefying. With putrefaction, there’s decomposition and decay, due to bacteria – mostly from the bowel, but also bugs brought by flies and a whole raft of other insects. With adipocere there’s hydrolysis, breaking down of the fat in the subcutaneous tissues. Then, aided by water and heat and some bacteria, the tissues form a soap or wax. See here,’ she said as she scrolled through the photos, ‘her cheeks and buttocks have this greasy soapy greyish-yellow appearance. They haven’t decomposed and liquefied like the contents of her skull or the liver and bowel have.’ Helpfully she clicked onto her photos of these organs, which were indeed quite fluid.

  ‘So what does that tell us?’ asked Cass, moving her gaze to a point just above the computer.

  ‘Well,’ said Leah, ‘not all that much. That there has been abnormally hot wet weather on the Tablelands for the past few weeks! Heat and water are needed for adipocere. It doesn’t help very much with fixing the time of death. Although most books agree – I’ve just been having a look – that it takes weeks not days even in the most favourable circumstances to produce adipocere. So she’s been dead at least four weeks.’

  ‘Is that what the smell is?’ asked Cass.