Louise’s shoulders slumped. She knew she was potty, one of her Mum’s favourite words, to think he would hand her the lead role on a taskforce, but Annabelle’s case was her baby. She didn’t want to hand it over.
‘That’s great news,’ she said, with false cheerfulness. ‘It will be fabulous to have extra hands on deck.’
‘Yes, it will. Right, let’s get to it. Where do you want to start?’
Louise breathed a sigh of relief; she was expecting him to tell her where to start. She pulled out her notebook and flipped to the first page, which had a list of tasks. Some with ticks but most without.
She pushed it under his nose.
‘Here’s my wish list,’ she said.
He was impressed. ‘Very good Louise, very good. You’ll make a fine detective one day. Let’s start at point four, Find a Match in the Bone Room.’
CHAPTER 47
Map matching
Louise searched frantically through her Bone Room files, trying to match up the location on the map. She had manila folders everywhere and was going at them like a bull at a gate. It wasn’t long before she lost track of which ones she’d reviewed, and which ones she hadn’t. She was in such a panic that details in the files she had read wouldn’t stick.
She wandered to the tea room to make herself a cup of tea. English Breakfast, her own personal stash. Strong, white, no sugar. Tea reminded her of home, back in Kent. It was the drink for all crises. It had a soothing, calming effect on her, like no other drink. When she was growing up, Mum always presented her with a cup of hot, white, sugarless tea when she had a drama. A schoolyard fight with the bitchy girls in her group, a less than perfect score on an exam she felt she had blitzed, when her favourite Nanna died. She cupped her hands around the warm mug and forced her feet to walk slowly back to her desk.
She then made herself finish her tea, before stacking the files into a neat pile on the left hand side of her desk. She started again, methodically opening each one and carefully searching for the details she needed. But the files she had yielded nothing.
She picked up the phone and dialled the direct line to Jaclyn in the Bone Room.
‘How you going, Lou Lou?’
‘Terrific, happy as a pig in mud to be working in a room full of people who don’t speak and interrupt my workflow every five minutes. Mind you, I give them a fair ear bashing every now and then, when the silence gets to me. Your timing is pretty good, gives them some reprieve from listening to my drivel.’
Louise giggled, Jaclyn had such a funny turn of phrase. Every time they had a conversation Louise ended up in fits of giggles.
‘Oh, you’re a crack up!’
‘What can I do for you? I can tell by the tone of your voice you’re on the verge of peeing your pants over something.’
‘Well, I guess that’s one way to put it,’ Louise giggled again. ‘I do have something, I am pretty sure it’s something big. But I need your help before I get too excited, and pee my pants as you say.’
It was Jaclyn’s turn to laugh. This young chick with her Pommy accent, trying to get her mouth around some of Jaclyn’s ocker sayings, was pretty funny.
‘Oooh, I’m excited. Spill.’
‘Spill?’
‘You know, spill it all out. Tell me about it.’
‘Ah, right! I haven’t heard that one before.’
Louise sent through a scanned copy of the map. Jaclyn was at her computer and Louise heard the sound of the email reach her mailbox.
‘Got it.’ Jaclyn was silent while she perused the email and sent the map to her printer. ‘You think there are bones here?’
‘I certainly hope so.’
‘When do you need it?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘I’ve heard that before. Everyone needs it yesterday. But you’re a good chick, and you never know when I might need to call on you for a favour. So I’ll do it yesterday for you, and have the results through tomorrow. Well, I’ll do my best, let’s say that.’
‘You’re a gem, a real gem,’ Louise gushed.
An hour later Jaclyn called back. Louise felt faint when she realised who was on the other end of the line.
‘Wow, that was quick! I wasn’t…’
Jaclyn spoke over the top of Louise. ‘Ha, ha! Yes I’m pretty quick, but before you get your hopes up, I’m not that quick. Just wanted to touch base and let you know I’m working on it. When you have unidentified human remains, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s not as straightforward as I’d hoped, to match this map with my bags and boxes of bones. You can have DNA from a bone for instance, but what do you actually match it to, to know who that person may have been? But don’t worry Darl, I’ll keep at it.’
Louise was frustrated. They weren’t working with cold cases from the nineteen hundreds for goodness sake!
‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist,’ Rafe said, wandering in at the tail end of her conversation. She filled him in where things were up to, expressing her disappointment the wheels weren’t turning faster. That she couldn’t just send Jaclyn a location, then have the computer find a match within minutes.
Rafe had more to say. ‘Bits of information, pieces of the puzzle, don’t always fit and then suddenly you get a breakthrough, like this, and you’re closer to the truth. But it takes time, and patience. Have patience Louise, have patience.’
‘Why are you being so nice today?’ Louise spoke the words before her brain had time to think them through. She instantly wanted to retrieve them and stuff them away.
‘I didn’t think I was being overly nice,’ he said, in good humour.
‘I’m not saying you’re not nice, Sir, you actually are a really nice person. In actual fact, I’d have to say you’re one of the nicest people I know…’
Rafe cut in. ‘Okay Louise, it’s okay. I know what you’re trying to say. Just so happens you’ve caught me in a good mood. It’s my birthday and I’ve got a special dinner being planned for me at home. I’m looking forward to it, and then I have a few days off, and the wife, five kids and I, we’re going to Port Douglas for a quick escape to the tropics. So, you’re the beneficiary of my very good birthday mood.’
Louise was too shocked to speak. He’d never mentioned his family before. Five children!
Chuckling at the shocked look on her face, he wandered out the door without another word, and Louise wondered if it was soft whistling she heard, or whether she was just imagining it.
CHAPTER 48
X marks the spot #2
Her emails pinged. It had been several weeks since she’d told Jaclyn she needed information yesterday. Her heart skipped several beats while she raced through the words. She read it again, more slowly.
She felt like jumping for joy. Guilt chased down her joy. How could you be joyous reading about someone’s death?
This confirmed she definitely had the map where X marked the spot. The right spot. The real spot. Not the bogus spot where Ant had taken Christine, Rhiannon and Andy.
Annabelle Brown’s bones had been housed in a paper bag for more than two decades. The bag had a number, location, and date, and matched up with a slim file containing sparse, scribbled notes. Estimated age, twenty five. Approximate time of death, June 1988. Cause of death, suspect foul play. Identity unknown.
It was so obvious now how this bag of bones was missed. Wrong location, wrong date, wrong age. Administrative errors along the way as the bones shifted from place to place, before they ended up in the Bone Room. Louise felt a surge of anger at the archaic systems of the time which made such a colossal cock up possible.
Jaclyn had sent off the bones for DNA matching. A positive match with Lee confirmed they belonged to Annabelle.
Emotion caught Louise off guard and she felt she could burst into tears at any moment. All it would take was for Rafe to walk in the door, which he did. She looked up, her eyes shining.
‘That’s a bit of good news, Detective,’ he said, his face closed off, something he did s
o well.
‘Yes, it certainly is, Boss.’ Louise’s voice shook as she worked hard to toughen up, and put her big girl boots on, so she could sensibly discuss this incredible breakthrough.
He sat down opposite and folded his arms across his chest. She waited for him to speak, knowing she couldn’t.
‘We’re a step closer to cracking this one,’ he said finally. Louise nodded, still afraid if she spoke she’d burst out with inappropriate tears.
‘This now goes from wondering if Annabelle is dead, to knowing for sure that she is,’ he said solemnly. ‘The next step is to discover how she died, whether it was an accident, whether she was murdered.’
A grin tugged at the corners of his mouth and once it started, he couldn’t stop it. ‘Save your tears Louise, this is a time to smile. Every now and then we get a win, out of the blue. Unexpected. Like the map. No time for sitting around feeling glum. Let’s get to it.’
CHAPTER 49
Bad news
‘Feels like you were only here yesterday!’ Lee greeted Rafe and Louise warmly at the gate, dogs yipping at their ankles. The awkwardness from their first visit was now gone. She let them in and hugged them both.
‘You’ve got another update?’ she asked casually as they walked inside. She flicked the kettle on and made Louise a strong, white tea, no sugar, and Rafe a black coffee, two sugars.
‘You remembered,’ Louise said gratefully.
‘Of course,’ Lee smiled.
They waited for Rafe to speak. His hand shook slightly as he reached for a piece of warm tea cake, smothered in sugary butter.
‘This is delicious,’ he said, with a mouth full of soft, pillowy cake. ‘My Grandmother used to make this cake and until now I’ve never tasted one as good.’
Lee loved seeing people enjoy her food, and glowed from the compliment.
He licked the sugar from his fingers and looked her straight in the eye. ‘Lee, we have found Annabelle.’
Lee stared at him, as though she wasn’t seeing him. The words were spinning around the outside of her head and she couldn’t grab them, couldn’t make sense of them.
‘Um, found Annabelle? Al…’
Rafe cut in. ‘…not alive. We’re sorry. She’s not alive.’
Lee couldn’t unhear the words now that they were out. The worst imaginable visions clamoured for attention and she roughly tried to push them away.
‘How did she die?’ she whispered.
‘We’re not sure, the bones are still being analysed. But it looks like she was…’ he struggled to get the words onto his tongue. ‘It looks like she was murdered, Lee. We’re so sorry, we’re really, really sorry.’
Lee crumpled in her chair. Then pushed it back and ran out of the house, down to the vegetable garden. She sank to her knees in the dirt, surrounded by beans, broccoli and cabbage. She didn’t realise she’d actually sat in the strawberry patch, and that her clothes were getting stained blood red.
The gang gang cockatoos she disturbed with her howling protested loudly as they flew away, leaving a deadly silence in their wake.
…
Rafe and Louise sat at the kitchen table staring at the beautiful food she had laid out for them. Louise nibbled on the corner of a chocolate biscuit.
‘Do you think I should go down there?’ she asked. Rafe didn’t answer. After another ten minutes Louise couldn’t sit there any longer.
She wandered around the garden but there was no sign of Lee. She spotted the old dog, the one who’d sat on her feet during her last visit, lying forlornly at a gate into an area with a high fence, covered in green shade cloth.
She pushed open the squeaky gate, coming across Lee sobbing in the patch of ripe strawberries. Louise crouched down next to her and put her arm around her shoulders. Lee leaned into her and they stayed that way for a long time.
When they stood up Lee noticed in horror the red stains on her pants. They threw awful, murderous visions of Annabelle at her, sending her into a bout of fresh crying.
‘I was expecting relief,’ Lee sniffed. ‘But I don’t feel relieved. I don’t actually know what I feel. It was such a long time ago, but it feels like it has happened just now. It’s like all those years of waiting and wondering have melted away, and she was here yesterday and now she’s dead, my little girl is dead.’
Louise didn’t reply. What could she say that would be of any comfort?
After a time Louise spoke. ‘This is an impressive vegetable garden, wow, you must never need to go to the supermarket.’
‘No,’ Lee smiled, ‘I haven’t bought fresh food for years, and it also feeds quite a few of my neighbours. I love this garden.’
‘It’s peaceful, my Dad had a vegetable patch in our yard but it was much smaller than this.’
‘Where’s home for you? I’ve been meaning to ask.’ Lee was relieved for a change of topic.
‘Kent. I hope to head over there soon, I haven’t been back for a few years and am starting to feel a bit homesick.’
What Louise didn’t say was that Annabelle had made her yearn for home like never before.
‘I need a fix of my Mum’s home style cooking and Dad’s fresh vegetables. Dad’s been feeling a bit poorly lately so I really want to see him, make sure he’s okay.’
Lee tried to continue the conversation to get her mind off Annabelle, but it wasn’t working.
‘This garden is my special place, it was Annabelle’s veggie garden.’ Her voice was a hoarse whisper. ‘We used to spend a lot of our time digging in the dirt. Every year it gets bigger, and grander. I expand a bit here, a bit there. I really love it here, it makes me feel close to her. The smell of the earth is comforting, which is ironic really, in light of…’ her voice trailed away.
‘Is there anyone I can call? Someone who can come here to be with you?’
Lee retrieved a small white handkerchief from inside her bra and blew her nose loudly. ‘Yes, my best friend Steph. She’s at work but she will be able to come…’
…
Steph called Sara on her way out to Lee’s and gave her a jumbled account from what Louise, then Lee, had said over the phone. In anticipation that this day would come, Sara had been closely analysing long-term cases, and how they’d been solved. She’d also become involved with missing persons’ groups and had spoken to families and friends of the missing ad nauseam. She had prepared a list of questions for this occasion, and emailed it through to her Mum’s phone while they spoke.
Sara’s main concern, after seeing what other families went through, was how the media were always after headlines and sensationalism. She wanted to make sure, when the truth came out about Annabelle, that Lee had some level of control over how the media told her story.
She had nightmares about the potential headlines. Teenager ends up as Kings Cross prostitute then mysteriously disappears – body found buried in the bush. She didn’t want people who didn’t know Annabelle, to write about her, or speak about her in that way, without acknowledging that she was a special person, who so many people loved and missed every day.
Annabelle’s short time in Kings Cross was such a small snippet of her life. Sara wanted Annabelle to be remembered for more than that. She was funny, kind, fun-loving, adventurous and the life of the party.
The media did not have the right to pore over the gritty details of her life as though they knew her. Sara wanted to make sure, when the truth about Annabelle hit the headlines, she didn’t just turn into a fleeting sensational story. She was determined to ensure Annabelle was honoured for the beautiful person she really was. She mattered. She was important. Her life meant something.
Sara remained calm and collected while she went through the logistics of the conversation Steph and Lee were about to have. It wasn’t until they hung up the phone that she completely lost it. The news hit her with a force she couldn’t describe. Sara would never get the chance to stay up late into the night with Annabelle, to laugh and joke about the stupid things they did in their youth, and b
e grateful that they lived to tell the tale.
It was something they had suspected for a long time, so it wasn’t new news in that sense. The finality of it was something else though. The finality grabbed hold of all the hope they’d held onto and strangled it until it was dead, dead, dead.
Sara knew that in time she’d have to transform her hope of finding Annabelle, alive or dead, into a different kind of hope. Hope for the truth, a resolution. Hope for a clear end point. Answers to all their questions, or as many answers as they could have without Annabelle being here to explain why she chose to disappear the way she did. Why she made the choices she made.
Rafe, Louise and Lee were sitting solemnly around the kitchen table when Steph arrived. Steph had brought a box of tissues, like always, and a few other bits and pieces like fresh herbs from her garden, milk and blocks of chocolate.
She squeezed Lee’s hand tightly while they listened to Rafe go through the details of what they’d discovered. He was concise and considerate, and stuck to the facts.
When he’d finished, Steph whispered in Lee’s ear. ‘Do you mind if I ask a few questions?’
Lee didn’t mind one bit. She appreciated having someone here whose brain seemed to be functioning, because hers certainly wasn’t. It was custard. Sloppy, sloppy custard.
Steph got out a blank notebook and pen and smoothed down the first page. She also opened her emails on her phone, where she’d downloaded Sara’s questions. Sara had been explicit in her instructions. Not only did Steph have to ask the questions she’d prepared, she had to note down the answers.
Sara had been clear in her instructions, because she knew Steph and Lee wouldn’t remember all the detectives told them. They would be emotional wrecks and unable to soak in specific details unless someone wrote them down.
As Rafe answered her questions, Steph scribbled furiously. Lee sat quiet and numb, wondering if the taste of vomit at the back of her throat meant it was on its way up.
The phone rang. It was Gordon. He was working in a mine in Western Australia, four weeks on, one week off. He wasn’t really due home for a fortnight but would arrive the next day. The others left the room to give Lee privacy with her conversation. When they returned, Lee had questions at the ready.
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