Sonja told him about the extra patrols around her house at night.
Two days ago, Kerry’s little brother, his best pilot, had left for Karatha in northwest Australia to collect the new chimp. He was due back with it on Friday night. “Instead of landing it here, land at Kalunga, and we’ll drive in and pick it up. It’ll be safer,” she said.
“Safer! At the airfield it will be safer?” Kerry gave an exaggerated shake of his head. He had known from the moment he met Sonja eight years ago that he could bully her. “Do you have any idea what would happen to me if we were discovered flying an unquarantined chimpanzee?” It was a rhetorical question. “I wouldn’t just lose m’license to operate, but me and m’brother’d go to jail. Are you aware of that?”
“Yes, Kerry. Of course. We know—”
“The fine is twenty thousand dollars. Sometimes I think you don’t give a stuff about the risks I take for you.”
He wants more money, she thought. Her instinct was to try to assuage him. “Would you like to come to the house for a beer?”
“Yeah. I’ve got something I need to show you. Better to do it up there.”
While she was in the kitchen, he wandered around her main room, occasionally touching the small decorated objects on display. There was a low bookshelf running the length of one wall, and on it were boxes, plates on stands, canisters, a wooden hat block, and shoe lasts, all of them decorated with colorful pictures of fruit, flowers, cherubs, gods and goddesses, insects, and birds.
“Where d’you find the time to do all this?” he asked.
“I come home and start cutting out, and I forget everything.”
He fingered the gleaming surface of a vase, his expression conveying the vague contempt of someone whose ethics do not allow time to be wasted on the arts.
When he was seated at the table near the window, he took a magazine from his attaché case and opened it carefully. “Take a look at this,” he said.
Inside was a photocopy of the Primate Rescue Organization newsletter. On the cover was a picture of someone in a balaclava, looking like the IRA and holding two baby chimpanzees. The caption read: WE RESCUE BABIES! Story page 3.
“Have a read.” He sat back with an expression of contented disgust.
She read quickly. It was an account of a raid by PRO, as the organization liked to call itself, on a commercial laboratory in southern California where “dozens of chimpanzees are kept in appalling conditions while scientists infect them with AIDS.” The story went on to explain that chimps were the test animal of choice for AIDS research, and that PRO activists had decided “to liberate these medical science slaves.” They had stormed the laboratory, breaking down a door with a sledgehammer, but in the event had been able to free only two very young chimpanzees. A legal battle for the return of the apes had now begun. Members were asked to send donations urgently and to turn to the editorial on the next page for background.
The editorial, headlined PRO ADOPTS RADICAL ACTION, explained the new policy of direct intervention to save the lives of captive primates. “We will try to avoid injury to humans,” it said, “but if in the course of saving the lives of primates injury to their captors does occur, so be it.” The organization’s logo, a pale, long-thumbed human hand clasping an ape’s dark paw, was printed above and below.
“Now look at the contact list,” Kerry said. He turned over to the back page. There were the names, addresses, phone and fax numbers of PRO representatives in various parts of the United States, and beneath them a short list of “Other Countries.” Australia’s spokesperson was “Diana Pembridge, 8 Fig Tree Gully Road, Kalunga, NSW.”
Sonja’s hands tightened on the pages. “When did she join them?”
“No idea.” He tapped the side of his nose. “A few weeks ago, I got the feeling I should keep an eye on my cousin’s mail—amazing what you can open with a bit of wire—and there it was. Found it this morning.”
“You never told us she was your cousin!”
Kerry shrugged. “Didn’t I? Must’ve forgotten. The Larnachs were the workers. The Pembridges, they were the squatters.” He grinned, but Sonja was not paying attention.
“God almighty! These activists have all sorts of tricks,” she muttered. “They check the animal food suppliers to find out what type of food is being ordered—”
“Yeah, I told you that,” he said. “And it’s Muggins here who flies in your forty-kilo bags of monkey chow, isn’t it? I bet the people who work in animal food supplies wonder what a country airline does with chimpanzee biscuits. Feeds ’em to the—”
Sonja interjected, “All sorts of animals can eat monkey chow!”
“Yeah.” He finished his beer and stood up. “I reckon this’ll have to be our last run to Karatha for you. It’s getting too dangerous. What with …” He waved in the direction of the mountain.
Sonja seized his arm. “How much do you want?” she asked.
Kerry shook off her hand. “For what?” he asked.
Sonja stared at him. “For collecting John’s chimps.”
He grinned slowly. “Aw—that. Not going to do that anymore. I thought y’might be worried about something else.”
“What?”
“Those letters.”
She looked blank.
“You’re the cutter-outer, aren’t you?” He touched the vase again. “This stuff you do. Everything cut out.”
She clapped a hand over her mouth. “You think I sent those letters!”
Kerry shrugged. “See ya.” He clattered down the front steps.
She stood in the center of her living room, almost unable to breathe. If Kerry suspected her of sending the collage letters, so could others. Everyone knew her hobby was decoupage. The police thought the murderer had sent the letters: so they must suspect her of being involved, somehow, in Carolyn’s demise. And if Joe Miller started sniffing around the house and U-1 … My blood sugar is low, Sonja thought. I must eat.
She decided to call on Joe first thing next morning, put the accusation before him, and protest her innocence.
Joe’s secretary said he was in Kalunga and would be unavailable until the afternoon.
“I’ve got to go into town for a haircut,” Sonja said. “I’m sure to run into him.”
Joe had left early to talk to Diana Pembridge, ostensibly about the letter she had received, in fact to ask her where she had been two nights ago, when the laboratories were burgled. He had not mentioned at the directors’ meeting that one of the security guards had seen a vehicle that night which looked identical to Diana’s van. Meanwhile, information on the murder had come in on the fax, sending several early theories out the window. The animal forensic experts had discovered that the hairs on Williams’s T-shirt were not human, not rodent, not canine, equine, or bovine, but from some other animal. Perhaps chimpanzee.
Joe rang Sydney immediately to say that a circus had camped on the outskirts of town on the weekend, but in College Street they knew that already and an all-stations alert for the circus had gone out. “It’s a great lead,” the detective said. But there was a gap of five hours, from seven o’clock, when Carolyn had left the pub with two duck shooters (so far unidentified), to the hour of her death, which was estimated between midnight and 3:00 A.M. The latest theory was that after leaving the Kalunga Arms, Carolyn and the duck shooters had either visited the circus or teamed up with someone who worked in the circus, or with someone who had visited it that day.… They’re groping, Joe thought.
“We’re getting good cooperation from the shooting club,” the detective added. “But they can’t work out who got back after midnight. They reckon everyone was tucked into sleeping bags by then, because the whole camp was getting up at five. We’re thinking maybe it was circus people she went off with. That could explain the method of killing. And the other injuries. Animal handlers would be familiar with what the perpetrator did to her.”
“What about the vet?”
“Plenty on him. He bought the Porsche in 1991; pai
d cash. Told the salesman he’d won some money in the lottery.”
“Did you talk to him before you left?”
“Yep. His alibi is sound. He had guests for dinner on Saturday night. They watched a video and left around eleven. We crosschecked. The guests confirmed what he said.”
“Anything on the letters?”
“About a million fingerprints. Probably none of them belonging to the person who made them. But there are traces of stuff for gas chromatography and spectrometry.”
He said that he wanted to talk to Joe anyway, because since discovering that the hair on the body was not human, dog, horse, cow, or rabbit, the murder team had decided to check all the vehicles at the Research for signs of other animals. “Can you give us access to the fleet, so we can vacuum the vehicles in the next day or so?” he asked.
The road to Kalunga was empty. There had been some good rain overnight, and the morning was fresh and bright, with a wide, pale-blue sky. Farmers were out on tractors, scarifying their paddocks while the earth was still damp. Joe tooled along, puzzling over the burglary of two nights earlier. Looked at from one angle, there was a tenuous link between it and the letters: both were protests of a sort against the work of the Research. The letters seemed hostile to genetic engineering; the burglars had pinched a biohazard sign and the bags used for sterilizing biological waste. They were amateurs. There were fingerprints everywhere, made by small, female-size hands. The question Joe asked himself was: What was the Pembridge girl up to? A biohazard sign and autoclave bags might be the things she would want as “evidence” against experiments at the Research. According to the police, she was lying about how she found the body. And then one came back to the letters again. It could seem a smart move to send a letter to herself, because “logically” that would rule her out as their originator. People got “logical” ideas when they were in the grip of an obsession. “The devil is a great reasoner,” his mother used to say.
Joe found Diana’s house at the river end of Fig Tree Gully Road. It was an old stone place, two-storied, with a sign on the front gate announcing there was an Aboriginal art gallery inside. A bus with OUTBACK EXPLORER painted on its flanks was parked outside, and a group of loudly talking, white-haired men and women were gathered beside the picket fence. Joe noted the side entrance and decided to use that.
Behind the house there was a huge, unkempt garden and a patio shaded by a wisteria vine, still holding the last of its summer leaves. He knocked on the back door and, after no answer, opened it and stepped into a big country kitchen with a gray slate floor and wood-topped counters so worn from years of chopping that they undulated like sand dunes. There was a cage of white mice on the floor in one corner. “Yoo-hoo!” he called. From the front of the house he could hear the raised, excited voices of the elderly explorers.
He returned to the patio and made his way through the dappled shade of trees toward the end of the garden. An old, gray doe kangaroo that had lost some of her tail levered her body slowly forward, then stood as still as a post, watching him with long-lashed eyes. In a dog kennel he saw the rear end of a sleeping wombat, and elsewhere in the garden, sudden movements revealed the presence of other animals hurrying to hide themselves. The trees ended in a ti-tree fence, beyond which nothing was visible.
“Miss Pembridge! You there, Miss Pembridge?” he called.
From behind the fence came a volley of quacks. A gate in the fence opened, and Diana beckoned him inside with her free hand.
Ducks crowded around his feet, weaving their long, smooth heads. All of them were crippled in some way. One drake was missing half his foot, another had lost an eye, and here and there wings drooped limply. “War wounded,” Diana said. Standing on her fist was a peregrine falcon, a gorgeous creature, that crouched and glared, then began to scream.
“Falco!” Diana said.
The bird screamed more loudly.
“What’s wrong with it?” Joe asked.
“He’s jealous because I have a visitor. Excuse me.”
Joe stayed where he was, surrounded by excited ducks. The aviary was ten meters square, lightly roofed with chicken wire, with a pond at one end and some bushes. Beside the open area there was a wooden mews for birds of prey. It was divided by a narrow space with a tiled roof, rather like a bus shelter. The mews and the shelter had concrete floors and wooden perches for the raptors. The birds could perch in the open or in the small, dark rooms behind. In one enclosure, an owl and a frogmouth, each leashed to jesses on their legs, were asleep on bow perches. Diana put the peregrine on a small block perch in the other enclosure.
“We’ll have to leave,” she said. “That bloody falcon …” It was screeching again. “The owner brought it to me because its screaming was sending him deaf.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
The falcon was bating from its perch. “Go on! Break your neck!” she roared at it. “I’ve been training it for five months.…”
Inside the house again, they went past the back of the gallery and up a flight of stairs to her workroom. It was set up with a word processor, a fax, and filing cabinets. There were paintings and photographs of animals and birds on the walls. Joe laid out a colored photostat copy of her dead-duck letter, placing a clear sheet of plastic on top of it.
“I need to ask you one or two questions,” he said.
He left an hour later, carrying a set of her fingerprints on the plastic sheet.
Since he was in town, he decided to have a look around. Country towns never seemed to change: the same old-fashioned shops, the same old-fashioned shopkeepers, the same dogs lying on the pavements, snapping at flies. He parked in Church Street, near the empty cathedral, and wandered along High Street, past the Kalair office, the news agency, the saddlery shop, the tractor franchise, and the place that sold agricultural poisons, until he reached the white-curtained window of the Sit ‘n’ Chat coffee lounge. A sign said CAPPUCCINO. He had a pang of homesickness for Riley Street, and although he knew the cappuccino would be Nescafe with fluffed-up milk on top, he went in.
Sonja Olfson was engrossed in a magazine at a table at the far end of the room. Joe, who was light on his feet, stepped outside again. He continued down the road to the hardware store, where he needed to find out if anyone had bought bolt cutters recently.
Inside the Sit ‘n’ Chat, Sonja turned the page and cursed. Her magazine had a hole cut in the right-hand page, destroying the rest of the article she was reading. Its title was “Keeping Your Man Happy—Dos and Dont’s,” and she had just come to a most interesting section on sex. She flipped the pages. There was another hole. And, further on, another. Something drew her eye to the advertising copy that remained beneath the missing illustration. It referred to scissors. She laid the magazine on the white Formica tabletop and stared unseeing at Van Gogh’s sunflowers on the opposite wall.
Chapter Nine
John Parker had been away for five days, and despite being eager to return to his lab, he boarded the Kalair flight from Sydney to Kalunga on Thursday morning in an ambivalent frame of mind.
These days, he found Sydney as obscene as every other big city: a bedlam of shops, cars, and swarms of people. People. People. Cities reminded him of the London flea plague in the fifties. His bedsheets had been peppered with fleas; on Sundays the minister held aloft the Bible and cried, “Every swarming thing! Every swarming thing is an abomination unto the Lord!” Parishioners were urged to cleanse their houses, literally and metaphorically. Ha! Look at what forty years of progress have achieved, Parker thought. Look at the insects now! Tokyo: educated professionals sitting three hours a day in their motorcars in traffic jams. Jakarta: a nightmare. Bangkok: ditto. London: a joke. Los Angeles: a time bomb. In Bogota, children had turned into cockroaches, living in the sewers. Africa was starving and swarming. In Paris, the level of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere was so high that women with dyed hair who lingered at sidewalk cafes could suffer a change of color in the space of an hour. And so on and on—a
murrain of humans on every continent. Self-extermination had now joined art and spoken language as a hallmark of the human being.
Once, the great empty spaces of the Australian bush had appalled him: the dry air, the huge skies, the glittering leather-leafed trees. Now he longed for the stillness and the absence of shops. And he longed for his work, dull and uneventful as it was most of the time. He wanted to get back to work, and he wanted desperately to escape the crowds and pollution of the city—but return to work meant return to Sonja. Parker felt a chill in the pit of his stomach when he thought of his wife. Why did I get involved with her in the first place? he sometimes wondered. There had been plenty of other women eager to oblige him—but she’d been the most persistent; the one who telephoned him and sent him presents. He found it difficult now to remember all the reasons he had used to convince himself two years ago that he should marry her. If we’re married she can’t give evidence against me in case something goes wrong with the chimpanzees. That, as he recalled it, was the most cogent argument he had when it became obvious she was obsessed with matrimony.
“For God’s sake, what difference will it make if we’re married?” he’d asked.
“I just want to be able to say, My husband.…” She had that pleading look she put on when she was determined. At the back of her Poor Innocent Me eyes, he had seen millennia of females squinting at him.
Since his return from Bangkok, they had spoken daily, conscious that eavesdroppers could be on the line, constraining themselves to pallid banalities and obscure references to work in U-1, Kerry Larnach, and the security patrols around Sonja’s house. “How are the animals?” he asked each day. A month before leaving for Bangkok, he had injected three buck rabbits and Lucy, the chimpanzee, with the ultimate version of Vaccine II. By the time he got back, they would have raised antibodies and be ready for testing with White Eye. Assuming that went smoothly, the next step would be to mate them with unvaccinated fertile partners. (Sailor would have to do his duty as soon as he arrived.) If conception did not occur, Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!
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