“Christ almighty!”
“They need to hassle him with something—misusing the post—so they can ask him for a blood sample. They’ll claim there’s blood on a letter. But actually they’ll be wanting the blood to match with semen they got from Carolyn. If Jason refuses …” Kerry gave a shrug. “It needn’t affect us, of course. But if he falls to pieces and tells ’em what a bad boy he’s been …”
Parker gripped the balcony rail and stared into the sky. The inland air was so clear one could see stars by the million out here. Night after night he had gazed at them when he was puzzling about the disease that had killed Siam’s primates. He would allow thoughts to flow into his mind unhindered while he wandered through constellations. There were billions of stars. There were billions of people. It was out here one night that the idea had come to him that if one wanted to reduce human population quickly and suddenly (there was now no time to do it slowly and gently), an efficient vector would be the air-conditioning systems of the world’s cities. Those antheaps seething with people, all of them breathing the same recycled air! And suddenly he had realized what the White Eye bacteria could be made to do. In a leap so immense it terrified him, he had seen what he could do to change the course of history.
Later, when he calmed down and came back to earth, he realized he was being naive. One would not have the manpower to use air-conditioning systems to broadcast White Eye to more than a few skyscrapers in a few cities of the world. Take two giant buildings in each of three giant cities—say, New York, Beijing, and Bombay. If each building had three thousand people working in it, one could reduce the population by nearly twenty thousand. Ten thousand eight hundred humans are born every hour. In less than two hours the twenty thousand would be replaced. And such considerations aside, one would be committing mass murder. Mass murder was Nature’s way, of course: famine, flood, disease. The Great Mother kept her wheel spinning, spewing out life and annihilating it in the next half-turn. She cared nothing for individuals. Now this abysmal creation Homo was murdering all others, but unlike Nature, it could not bring to life new forms. Except for men like me! We are the new gods! He had contemplated the glittering black sky so long that night, he became giddy from the strange vertigo caused by the pull of the stars.
None of the people he worked with, not Grossmann, not the technicians, not Sonja, and certainly not the Larnach boys or Nichols, had any idea of the grand design to which they were contributing.
“Don’t say anything about Nichols in front of Sonja,” Parker ordered Kerry.
• • •
At College Street in Sydney, a detective on the Williams case tried not to yawn into the telephone. It was past his teatime. Hunger had made him tired, and boredom made him want to yawn. “Yep, yep,” he murmured. The caller, at last, seemed satisfied. “Okay, mate. Thanks again for all your help.”
He hung up and opened his mouth as wide as a hippo, making a roaring sound. A couple of people at desks nearby looked up. “Miller on the blower again,” he said. “Now he reckons, after examining the phone records, that there’s an unholy alliance between John Parker and that arsehole who runs the airline. He says Parker is on the phone to Larnach more often than anyone else at the Research, including the girl who books travel.”
“Where’s Parker on the suspect list?” asked the woman at the next desk.
“About number … Wait on. I’ll get it on my screen. He’s near the bottom. His wife told us he was on a train going to Adelaide night of the murder. There was a ticket booked for him, via Melbourne.”
“Have we checked that? Whether he was on the train?”
The detective yawned again. “Not yet, Sweetlips. Why don’t you? Why don’t you ring Joe Pain-in-the-Arse Miller while you’re at it and tell him you’re the person he should be pestering fifteen times a day? Why don’t you—”
“You’re cranky,” she interrupted, “because he collected a set of Pembridge’s fingerprints that we should’ve got ourselves. You should’ve got yourself. So don’t take out your bad temper on me.”
“I’m not bad-tempered!” the detective shouted. “I’m just sick to death of that old fart trying to take over my investigation!”
Chapter Eleven
While Parker and Kerry Larnach discussed Jason Nichols on the balcony, and Sonja, in the kitchen, put the finishing touches to a tureen of gazpacho, Morrie was in the laundry of her house, sorting through a basket of clothes. He was looking for cloth to carry home the food he hoped to find that night. At the bottom of the basket he found a couple of pillowcases, which he pushed inside the string around his waist. Earlier he had discovered the electric light switch and had turned it on and off twenty times, chuckling with delight. Before leaving the laundry he gave the switch a few extra flicks, remembering the old days when he had rewired the stands in the shearing shed.
From the laundry he went to look in the window of the small house in the garden. A brown-skinned woman was in there, eating something that gave off a sweet smell and made him hungry. He decided to go back to the door he had seen beside the laundry, hoping it would lead to a storeroom, but the door was locked, so he set off for the homestead. Against the soles of his feet the road was smooth and faintly warm from the day’s heat.
• • •
Sonja was in an odd mood that evening, Parker noticed. “You’re knocking it back like your sister,” he remarked when, before they’d got to the salad, she demanded a third glass of wine. One was her limit.
“Wine not?” she answered, waving her empty glass at him. “Drink! Drink! Drink!” she sang in a grasshopper voice. “Drinking doesn’t hurt Hilary. She gets what she wants. Money, clothes, men. White limousines.” She turned to Kerry. “She roots like a rabbit.”
“That a fact?” Kerry said.
“Yairs!” Sonja continued loudly. “The minister for everything has a toy boy. Hasn’t she, John? Hasn’t Hilary got a man on her staff?”
“Sonja, I don’t think we should—”
“Oh, why not! I’m sick of always obeying the rules. I go without things, but other people don’t. Look at how they live up at the condos! They don’t bother with solar power. They don’t save fossil fuel. They burn it! Look at all the food wrap they use. And their garbage. They don’t have a compost pit. Not one of them has a compost pit—did y’know that, Kerry?” She did not wait for his answer. “They use disposable wooden chopsticks when they cook teriyaki! Can you imagine that?”
The men stared at her.
“Let’s go out and burn down a few hectares of rain forest!” she cried. “We could toast marshmallows on the fire!”
Parker said, “Darling, would you like me to make you a cup of peppermint tea?”
“No, but I’d love a fuck.” She covered her mouth with her hand, giggling. Kerry and Parker guffawed, as if she had said something witty.
Parker pulled her against him and whispered, “Keep it hot for me.” Then he gave her a slight shove. “Be a beautiful woman and make some coffee.” She went off to the kitchen with an air of smug obedience.
Parker paid his Kalair bills with funds drawn from a special Siam Enterprises “Scientific Research” account in Bangkok. “To keep things simple,” as Kerry put it—that is, to avoid Australian tax—they had established a system of electronic payment, which they could do themselves by punching the buttons on the telephone. Joe Miller might record that Parker had telephoned a bank in Thailand, but he could not take the next step and discover that this phone call was actually a money transfer to Kalair.
Parker and Larnach took their coffee to Sonja’s study and settled up for the transport of the new chimp.
“I’ll drive you to the airfield to pick up your Cruiser,” Parker said. He was anxious to have another few minutes alone with Larnach, out of earshot of his wife, to discuss the Nichols problem.
“Sorry about Sonja. She’s been semi-hysterical all week,” he remarked as they got into her Land Cruiser.
“The murder’s had a big effect o
n everyone.”
“What are we going to do about Jason?” Parker had reversed and turned and was now driving out from under the house.
“Funny you should ask me that.”
Parker squinted into the dark, peering past the thick undergrowth of Sonja’s garden toward an outdoor lamp that marked the turnoff to the airfield. For a moment light shone into the cabin, revealing Kerry’s coarse features, red-gold hair, and thick neck.
“I reckon he’s got to be a worried man.”
“Can you find out when the police are going to question him?”
“One thing about runnin’ an airline is y’ get to see who your passengers are,” Larnach answered. “The agent who handles travel for the New South Wales police service happened to book three seats on our first flight out of Sydney on Monday morning. Names like Fred Nerk and John Smith. Open return.”
“Let me know when Jason gets back from Sydney.”
If he gets back, Kerry thought.
On Sunday evening, Margaret McLeod needed to reassure herself that Jason Nichols was coming to dinner—just the two of them. At seven-fifteen, when he had not arrived, she wondered if she should ring him. Her telephone was an ancient black contraption with holes for dialing and letters as well as numbers. Margaret stared at it, willing it to ring, and when it didn’t she wandered back to the kitchen and took another sip of chardonnay. She had baked a peach pie for dessert, using the last of the fruit from a woody old tree in her garden. From the kitchen she went to the living room, where there were red candles on the dining table.
She moved around, straightening cushions she had already straightened, imagining the thrill of seeing Jason’s sweet face smile at her tomorrow morning. They would look out her window at the peach tree, where she had hung a wind chime on Saturday afternoon.
Unaccountably, she found herself in the dark hallway beside the telephone again.
A machine answered at his end. “Hi, this is Jason Nichols. I would love to speak to you, but I’m afraid I can’t right now.…” His voice made her so nervous she decided to have just one more glass of wine and wait a bit longer.
She waited five minutes, which was all he would need to lock up the surgery and drive to her cottage on the south side.
Outside her gate she hesitated, hoping the red Porsche would appear, but except for the bossy little fox terrier on the corner, strutting about, waiting for something to bark at, the street was as empty as usual. Margaret heaved herself onto the hard leather seat of her bicycle and set off, her violet culottes fluttering against her calves, her graying fringe lifting in the breeze, her earrings dancing rock ‘n’ roll.
Jason’s car was parked in the driveway. There were no lights on inside the house.
A concrete path with hydrangea bushes on either side ran between the house and the clinic. She was surprised to see how wilted their leaves were, as if they had not been watered all day. Jason liked to garden on Sunday afternoons. “It gives me energy,” he would say. One day he had taken her by the wrist. Her worn, coarsened palm resting in his slim hand embarrassed her. “Look at that!” he’d said admiringly. “That’s a hand that’s made things grow.” At that moment she had known they must become lovers—and when she did the tarot later, the Empress jumped at her. The Empress! That was the True Love card.
Margaret had a key to the back door of the clinic. She knocked and called “Jason!” in her most musical voice, but when there was no answer, she crossed the path to the back of the house. The door was unlocked. The kitchen was spotless as usual, without a crumb on the linoleum. It had a pleasant, very clean smell, like a health food shop, which was not surprising, for inside the cupboards there were scores of neatly labeled jars of vitamins, minerals, and tissue salts, bottles of garlic concentrate, beetroot extract, Swedish bitters, wheat grass, and essential oils. The rest of the house had a thick-pile apricot-colored carpet that muffled her steps as she went from room to room, calling, “Jason—it’s me, Margie.” He had converted the third bedroom into a study. As she walked down the hall she heard the faint hiss of his Apple Macintosh.
“Jason!” she said sharply. The person sitting in the swivel chair did not move.
• • •
Margaret McLeod, of Church Street, Kalunga, told the police that Jason Nichols had seemed depressed on the afternoon before he left for Sydney. “But I can’t believe he’d kill himself,” she said. “And … and …” She appealed to Joe Miller, who had just arrived and was mopping perspiration from his brow, although by now night had fallen and it was growing chilly outside. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly!” She sank her face into her hands and burst into tears.
Joe led her through the apricot-colored living room, where painted china animals and photographs of Jason’s parents in chrome frames rested on gleaming shelves. They went to the kitchen. “How well did you know him?” he asked.
She felt frightened.
“Why did he go to Sydney, for example? What did he do there?”
She could feel her bones shortening. She was only a meter tall. “I don’t know.”
“Where did he stay?”
“With his—I don’t know.”
The junior constable said her bicycle would fit in the trunk of the police car and he would drive her home. Joe returned to look at the body.
The right hand was hanging loose, and the torso had slumped to the left side, the left arm still on the armrest. A 20-ml syringe with an 18-gauge needle lay on the carpet beneath the limp right hand. In the crook of the left arm there was a trickle of blood where the needle had punctured the cephalic vein. On the desk were two broken ampoules, a bottle of Water for Injection, and discarded wrapping from the syringe. There was some pale-yellow powder on the desk near the ampoules. Probably Thiobarbital, Joe thought. Medicos favored Thiobarbital for suicide. Usually they reduced the water, doubled the dose, and added potassium, to be certain of the effect. He crouched down to see the labels, careful not to touch anything. The corpse was blue-gray and peaceful-looking, its long eyelashes drooping over almost-closed eyes that had immense black pupils. The postmortem would report another myocardial infarction.
Joe levered himself upright and again read the message on the screen: MY LIFE IS OVER. I CAN’T GO ON.
The senior constable, who had telephoned College Street, returned. “We’re to leave everything as it is and lock up for the night,” he said. “The Homicide blokes will arrive at eight tomorrow morning.” He hooked his fingers onto his hipbones and stared at the corpse with disgust. “Bastard!”
Joe nodded thoughtfully. “There’s some cider in the fridge. Don’t know if it’s alcoholic or not, but I’d drink anything.”
They found a couple of glasses and a bottle opener. “When I was a kid we had a yappy little dog,” Joe said slowly. “Its barking drove my father mad, especially on Sunday afternoons when he wanted to have a nap. One day he told Mother he was taking it to obedience school to teach it not to bark.”
“Yeah?”
“He took it to the vet and had its vocal cords cut. Mother never realized. She thought the dog was a genius. But I used to look at that mutt moving its jaws and think, Poor little blighter.”
“Gives you the willies,” the constable agreed. “Mate, what sort of a bastard would cut a woman’s vocal cords so she can’t scream for help, then kill her within earshot of fifty blokes?”
Joe shook his head.
The murder case against Nichols rested on four pieces of evidence. First was Carolyn Williams’s severed vocal cords. Immediately that pointed to someone with veterinary knowledge. Second was the size of the syringe used. Third was the animal hair found on Carolyn Williams’s clothing: it came from a chimpanzee. On the day of the murder, Nichols had handled a chimpanzee from the circus. The fourth fact was weaker but supported the possibility that the vet could have been in contact with Williams that night: She had been seen outside the post office in High Street, Kalunga, at about 11:00 P.M. on Saturday, several hours after she left the pub with tw
o duck shooters. She went into a telephone box and appeared to be making a call. Nichols had guests until almost eleven. He could have had a tryst after they left. And there was more circumstantial evidence: Two of the collage letters sent to women at the Research had cat dander on them. No cats were allowed at the Research. Nichols knew the women who had received letters and a month earlier had sent all three of them humorous Valentine’s Day cards.
“If he hadn’t offed himself, that crazy Margaret might have been next,” the constable added.
Joe grunted. He carried his glass of cider to the study to contemplate the scene once more. “There are two things that worry me,” he said after a while. “What was his motive for murdering Carolyn Williams?”
“Dunno. But they’ll probably find it when they read the computer files. What’s your other problem?”
“He’s left a suicide note but made no reference to the murder investigation. If he thought he was going to be charged with murder, why hasn’t he complained about it? Murderers usually whinge about being hounded to the grave.” And the third thing, Joe thought to himself, is that Nichols was a southpaw, so how did he inject himself in the left cubital fossa?
That night, Diana woke suddenly from deep sleep. She knew a noise inside the house had disturbed her, but now she could hear only the wind outside and the soughing of her curtains as they billowed out from the window and fell back again. She lay still, listening for the noise to be repeated. After a moment a floorboard creaked. Her heart pounded with fright, but her mind was clear. She rolled to the other side of the bed, near the wall, and reached down, feeling around until her fingers brushed against cool steel. She seized the rifle and hauled it to the bed. Then she slid her feet onto the floor and, with the gun to her shoulder, yelled, “I’m armed and loaded. Get out or I’ll shoot.” There was a wild flamenco on the stairs. Diana ran to the doorway and switched on the corridor light, but the intruder had escaped. When she went to the stairway, a stink as sharp as needles was in the air. She was so panicky herself, now the threat had passed, that her limbs began to quiver and she had to sit down for a moment. She looked through the gallery, the kitchen, and the ground-floor bathroom and laundry, but there was no sign of disturbance. She locked the kitchen door and climbed the stairs to her private quarters; only then did she notice a low hiss coming from the study. As she entered the room a floorboard creaked. There was a second groan of wood as she approached the computer, which she had turned off that afternoon but was now running, with her file on the Primate Rescue Organization up on the screen.
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