by Garry Disher
‘Why don’t we sit, Mrs Neill,’ Colfax said, taking her arm gently and leading her from the kitchen to an area of easy chairs: two sofas, coffee table, armchairs.
When they were seated, Debenham, his scruffy bulk sinking into the far end of a sofa, said, ‘Your husband has made certain allegations, Mrs Neill.’
She was astonished, bewildered. ‘What? Allegations? About me? What allegations?’
Debenham put up a hand to silence her. ‘But first I must advise you of your rights.’
‘What? My rights? Why?’
Debenham delivered the spiel, then said, ‘Doctor Neill came to us yesterday claiming that you have a dangerous hospital drug known as sux, or succinylcholine, concealed in your car and that he feared for his life. Is there anything you wish to say in regard to this matter?’
‘What? What?’
Auhl could see that she was completely floored. ‘As Sergeant Debenham said, Mrs Neill, you are entitled to have a lawyer present.’
Debenham shot him a shut-the-fuck-up look, turned to Janine again. ‘Furthermore, Mrs Neill, your husband claims that you used this drug to murder his second wife, Siobhan. Is there anything you wish to say in regard to this matter?’
‘What? Siobhan? No. Why? She died. It was a heart attack.’
‘Finally, your husband claims that you used this drug just a few weeks ago to murder his friend, Christine Lancer.’
Janine went tight, putting her bewilderment to one side. ‘Friend. Is that what he called her?’
She’d started to look faintly unhinged to Auhl. She’d scooted to the front of her chair, knees together, her hands rubbing the tops of her knees. ‘He was sleeping with her, the bastard.’
She turned to Auhl, another expression chasing across her face, a hard certainty. ‘You were right,’ she said, and the words tumbled out, how it all made sense to her now, the new mistress, the mystery drug… ‘He murdered Siobhan so he could have me.’
Debenham sensed the interview getting away from him. ‘Mrs Neill, kindly answer the questions I am putting to you.’
‘I want a lawyer to sit with me while I answer your fucking questions.’
Debenham shook his head wearily, got to his feet—just as one of the uniforms entered, holding aloft a clear plastic evidence envelope containing the little Velcro bag that Alec Neill had photographed.
‘Excellent,’ Debenham said. ‘You’ve logged it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And where was it found?’
‘Under the drivers seat.’
‘Photographed in place?’
‘Yes.’
‘Opened, contents photographed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Describe the contents.’
‘Two small glass tubes, both labelled succinylcholine’—he stumbled over the word—‘one full, one half-full, and a syringe.’
‘Help the others search the house,’ Debenham said. He turned to Janine. ‘Your husband made serious allegations against you, Mrs Neill, and already we have confirmation of one of them. Can you account for the presence of this drug in your car?’
Janine Neill jiggled as if in panic. For a brief moment she seemed to zone out. She swallowed and blinked, looking pale, her face greasy with perspiration. She turned to Auhl. ‘Alec must have put it there. You told me all those years ago he’d try to kill me. I’m sorry I doubted you.’
Auhl nodded.
She said, ‘I don’t feel too good. How does this drug work? What does it do?’
She swayed where she sat, her spine flopping against the back of her chair, then gathered herself, rose unsteadily and hurried to a doorway at the end of the room. Bathroom, thought Auhl, glimpsing white tiles.
She’d not shut the door. Auhl listened for retching. Meanwhile Helen Colfax smiled tiredly at Auhl and Debenham. ‘We need to lay off now. Take her in for more questioning, yes, but no more of this.’
She entered the bathroom behind Janine Neill, the men heard murmured voices, and eventually both women re-emerged, Helen supporting Janine.
Who announced: ‘I want to say a few things.’
She looked clammy, spent. ‘You don’t need to, Janine,’ Auhl said, earning himself another scowl from Debenham.
‘Context, okay?’ Janine said.
‘Okay.’
‘On Wednesday, I served divorce papers on Alec.’
Auhl settled in to listen. ‘Uh huh.’
‘A while ago I learned he’d been having an affair with that Lancer person.’
‘How?’
‘His phone. It was on the kitchen bench, he was out in the garden. It buzzed: incoming text. From her. Christine. Sounding pissed off about something. I didn’t touch the phone, let the screen go blank, went about my business. But when Alec was asleep I looked at his messages—he never deletes, the arrogant shit—and I looked at his emails. Dozens, hundreds, full of lovey-dovey stuff except that the more recent ones had become quite demanding. “When are you going to divorce her?” and “If you don’t leave her soon I’m going to tell her what’s going on” and “Unless you start divorce proceedings right now I’m going to tell everyone everywhere what kind of person you are.” Et cetera, et cetera.’
‘So you injected her with a drug you stole from the hospital,’ Debenham said.
Silence while Janine shut her eyes and put her hands to her temple. She recovered and said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t you see what’s happening?’
‘Enlighten us. If we pretend for the moment that your husband stole the drug to get rid of you so he could marry her, why would he want to bump her off? He decided he didn’t want her after all?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying,’ Janine Neill said tremblingly. She fished for a tissue and dropped it. Stared at her hand in astonishment before picking it from her lap and delicately blotting her face.
‘He changed his mind because of the inheritance.’
A strange calm settled in Auhl. He waited.
Janine took a deep breath, exhaled. ‘Just recently I was told my grandfather’s dying. Weeks rather than months, but you never know. The thing is, I stand to inherit quite a lot when he goes, being the only grandchild.’
‘Your husband knows?’
‘Yes. So now he needs me alive, not dead. So he bumps off the meddlesome girlfriend and gets all cosy with me, thinking of all that cash coming my way.’ She searched their faces to see that they understood. ‘Don’t you see? He must’ve found out I’m going to divorce him.’
Debenham was sceptical. ‘But you only told him a few days ago.’
‘He’ll have been snooping, knowing him.’
‘He feared losing access to your inheritance if you divorced?’
‘I’d say so.’
‘And if you hadn’t started divorce proceedings?’
‘He would have continued the loving husband act. Bided his time until he could arrange an accidental death of some kind. Take me rock climbing. Shoot me or something.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s clear to me now.’
‘Or it’s clear that he knew nothing of divorce and was having a great old time with his little love interest,’ Debenham said. He placed a meaty hand over his mouth, stifling a burp. ‘Meanwhile we have you—royally pissed off with your cheating husband and his little tramp of a girlfriend—stealing a hospital drug, knocking off the girlfriend, intending to knock him off. Whoops, bad luck, he finds your stash.’
‘He planted it.’
‘Why did you say your husband might shoot you?’ Helen Colfax interrupted. ‘Does he own a firearm?’
‘He has this old twenty-two rifle. For shooting foxes. He can always stage something.’ Janine shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
Auhl said, ‘There are foxes on your St Andrews place?’
She nodded.
Debenham was getting impatient. ‘Mrs Neill, we just found a dangerous drug in your car. Probably stolen.’
‘I gave you a good reason for that! He’s framing me!’
‘But
why? Why not hide the drug and use it on you a few months or years down the track?’
‘He’s a very nasty man,’ muttered Janine. ‘And maybe he thought if I was in jail he’d have a claim on my estate.’
Colfax said, ‘Did any of your work colleagues know about his affair with Christine Lancer?’
‘Not that I’m aware of, but who knows? I do know he wiped his phone and his email history.’
Debenham said, ‘You checked, I suppose.’
She gave him a long, unimpressed scrutiny, then seemed to swallow down a bad taste in her mouth. ‘I found out he was cheating on me. So, yes, I checked.’
Auhl leaned in. ‘Janine, where does your husband store the rifle?’
‘In a metal box under a workbench in the shed. Why?’
‘We may need to speak to him again and it’s important we know that kind of thing.’
Debenham was fed up. ‘Getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we?’ But he did ask for the St Andrews address.
Janine Neill, watching his notebook, his ballpoint scribble, drawled, ‘Don’t sweat it, I know my husband and he’s not going to shoot it out with you. For you, it’ll be high-priced lawyers.’
She paused. ‘How did he seem when he spoke to you? Emotional, right?’
They said nothing.
‘It’s an act,’ Janine said, a hand over her eyes as if to bar the light.
Helen said, ‘Let’s say it wasn’t. Would he ever self-harm?’
‘You mean, shoot himself? The thought of how he’d look afterwards, all that blood and guts, would be enough to stop him. He’s too pumped up with self-regard to hurt himself.’
Words to be engraved on many a headstone, thought Auhl.
11
DEBENHAM DIDN’T like it but accepted Colfax’s suggestion to investigate further. Did Neill know that his wife intended to divorce him? Check hospital CCTV and drug-safe records. Talk to the pathologist who had performed the post-mortem on Christine Lancer. Check the syringe, glass vials and Velcro bag for prints and DNA.
And so Auhl was released from further duties that Saturday and took a tram home to Carlton. He felt weary, jostled, drowned in voices, ringtones, beeps and pings, yet Janine Neill’s story was vivid in his mind, her words and accusations winding through his memories of the previous day’s interview with her husband.
He alighted at the university and headed along Grattan Street. The spring air was mild, and the youth of Carlton were out in shorts, T-shirts and other scraps of lightweight cotton. Eyes were down, thumbs busy on devices. One young man in a Ned Kelly beard looked particularly self-absorbed. Auhl blocked the footpath. Juvenile, but fun.
No one seemed to be home, and meanwhile the noonday sun was painting his backyard so he took a sandwich and the Age to the wrought iron garden setting and ate, read, dozed. Then he washed windows, picked trash from the front garden, cut off dead bits of jasmine from the laneway fence and later played backyard tennis at a friend’s place in Northcote.
HIS TURN TO COOK dinner—somehow, it usually was—Bec and Pia joining him at the table before Bec headed upstairs to her textbooks, folders and laptop and Pia eventually to bed. Neve was at work, evening shift. Who knew where the others were. Meanwhile Auhl hadn’t heard from Liz. He wanted to call her. Didn’t.
The evening deepened and the house creaked around him, and he read his event-free novel. That lasted until ten, when he closed the book and contemplated bed. Inertia defeated him. A deep silence suffused the house. It was a peaceful silence, a healthy silence. Nothing like the silences he knew the Fanning womenfolk had endured. He stroked Cynthia’s black fur absently.
Just as he was wriggling free of his armchair, Neve returned from her cleaning job. She stood in the doorway, deeply fatigued, too tired to be shy or awkward. She hovered.
Auhl, used to her ways, knowing she’d speak eventually, took charge. ‘Hungry, Neve? Plenty of leftovers.’
Into the kitchen: a bowl, cutlery, wineglasses, leftover pasta heated in the microwave. He poured two glasses of shiraz, grated some parmesan, served up. ‘Dig in.’
She wolfed it down. She’d denied herself, he realised. He wondered how often she did that.
Finally, falsely unhurried now, she pushed her bowl away, the base bumping over the joins in the old tabletop. Eventually lifted her gaze to his. ‘I’m worried about court on Monday.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ Auhl said.
She gave him a pleading grimace, a woman used to disappointment. ‘You’re still coming?’
The arrangement was she’d spend Sunday night at her parents’ and Auhl would make his own way down to the new Family Court building in Geelong. ‘But all I can offer is moral support,’ he said. ‘I can’t influence the outcome.’
He had no experience with the Family Court. The split with Liz hadn’t troubled the legal or judicial fraternities. He sipped his wine, let Neve Fanning talk through her doubts. How her husband had money, a house, a good lawyer. How he was sure to come across as rich and successful—and meanwhile look at her, a cleaner, no decent clothes, represented by a Legal Aid lawyer who was rushed off his feet.
‘And Doctor Kelso’s report,’ she said, hugging herself. The same tight body language she always displayed when she talked about her husband. Auhl wondered who this Kelso was and why he made her so tense. And why this tendency to withhold information, which he’d noted before? Shame? Carelessness? Maybe she didn’t think he’d find it important.
‘Who’s Doctor Kelso?’
Neve gave him a faintly impatient look. ‘The psychiatrist.’
‘Right.’
‘I was only with him about half an hour but he didn’t like me,’ Neve went on. ‘He was kind of distant.’
‘I’m sure you’re wrong,’ said Auhl inadequately. ‘Did he interview Pia and your husband?’
She nodded. ‘And watched Pia interacting with me and with him.’ She shot Auhl a tormented look, about to speak, but thought better of it.
Auhl cocked his head. ‘Maybe it would be a good idea if Pia attended court, too, and had her own lawyer?’
Neve drew herself up. Auhl sensed that, in this regard, she was very clear: ‘I’m not going to put her through any more ordeals.’
‘Right.’
Neve went to bed after that, and Auhl ran an internet search on Kelso. A psychiatrist experienced in medico-legal matters—meaning he was an authority figure, meaning Neve would be intimidated by him while automatically deferring to him. Among other things, Kelso was a ‘single expert’, one of a small number of specialists who might be called upon to assess parents and children caught up in fraught contact and custody issues. This required him to consider police and Child Protection evidence, interview the main parties and their friends and family, and report to the court.
Yawning, bone tired, too scattered to read more Google entries, Auhl shut his computer down, wondering what kind of impression Kelso had formed of Neve if he’d spent only half an hour with her. Let’s hope the guy spent more time grilling the husband, he thought. And listening closely to Pia.
ON SUNDAY MORNING he checked his email.
A reply from Tasmania: the letter-number combination that John Elphick had scrawled in his notebook belonged to a 1997 Toyota LandCruiser registered to a Roger Vance, at an address outside Launceston.
Auhl called the older Elphick daughter, conjuring her in his mind. A leggy, horsey woman in loose pants and a check shirt, horses in the paddocks all around.
‘Erica, don’t get your hopes up, but there’s something I need to check. Was your father in the habit of keeping notes?’
Sad regret in her voice. ‘Poor Dad, he’d started to forget things. Not dementia exactly, but sometimes he’d be embarrassed when he realised he’d repeated himself or forgotten he’d spoken to someone the day before, that kind of thing. He started using a little notebook for reminders. What he’d done, who he’d seen, what needed doing. He’d check it all the time.’ She laughed, a laugh ending with a sob. ‘
When he remembered to.’
Neither Auhl nor the daughter said the obvious, that a time would have come when John Elphick would have forgotten he had a notebook, let alone written in it or consulted it.
Next Auhl read out the numberplate. ‘It’s Tasmanian. Does that mean anything to you at all?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘No Tasmanian connection involving your father?’
‘No.’ A pause, then her voice vibrant in his ear: ‘Wait! We had a trainer who moved to Tasmania. He and Dad had a bad falling-out, but it was, oh, years and years ago.’
‘Trainer?’ said Auhl.
‘Horse trainer.’
‘His name?’
Another pause. ‘I’m thinking Vance, but I don’t know if that’s a first or a last name.’
12
ON MONDAY MORNING Auhl walked Pia to school then caught a train to Geelong. Neve was waiting on the steps of the new regional Family Court building. She looked presentable in a navy skirt, white blouse, grey cardigan, tights and black slip-on shoes, but a little makeshift, as though she was wearing someone else’s best clothes. Her hair was a stiff, hairsprayed helmet and her face was gaunt. Auhl went to give her a bolstering hug, but she pulled away. Right, he thought: her husband or his lawyers might be watching.
A small huddle waited with her. Neve, still flustered, made the introductions. ‘Alan, this is my mum and dad, and this is Jeff, my lawyer.’
‘Jeff Fleet,’ the lawyer said, shaking Auhl’s hand.
He was young, more tired than fleet, wearing a threadbare gown over a sharp cheap suit and pointy shoes. Balding prematurely. Smeared glasses on the end of his nose. The parents, Doug and Maureen Deane, uncomfortable in their best clothes, ducked their chins shyly as they shook hands.
Auhl took Fleet and Neve aside. ‘Did Neve tell you her husband sent their daughter back on the train by herself on Friday? No warning, no one to meet her, no one to keep an eye on her.’
Neve gave a little twittering laugh. ‘It’s what he’s like.’
