Dirty Weekend

by Gabrielle Lord

  ‘We weren’t a couple,’ he said. ‘You’re not listening!’

  Brian spread his hands in appeal. ‘I know this is tough for you, but we have to ask these questions.’

  The moment passed and I saw Damien relax.

  ‘So just tell us,’ I said, ‘in your own words. Your own time.’

  ‘Like I said, I went to the pub, then I went to Kylie’s place. I stayed there all night.’

  Further down the track, all this would have to be checked. But I didn’t want to mention that just now. ‘See?’ I said, with a friendly smile. ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about. We appreciate your cooperation.’

  ‘We’ll get you downtown at a convenient time over the next couple of days and you can make a statement. I’ll need to talk to your fiancée too. Okay?’ said Brian.

  ‘No way,’ said Damien. ‘Don’t drag her into this!’

  ‘Hey, take it easy,’ said Brian. ‘We won’t mention your extra business with Mrs Richardson. We just need her to alibi you.’

  Damien stood up, still wary. ‘I’ve left a bit of gear here. I need to pick it up.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible for a little while,’ said Brian. ‘We’re required to keep the house intact just for the moment. I’m sure you understand.’

  Damien looked alarmed. ‘But it’s gear that I need. Work gear.’

  ‘We’ll get it back to you as soon as possible.’

  Damien anxiously looked from one of us to the other. ‘When? When can I get them back?’

  I noticed the change in language. ‘What have you left here?’ I asked.

  ‘My boots. I need them for work.’

  ‘We’ll make sure you get them back as soon as possible,’ said Brian. ‘And we’ll need to get a sample from you, for DNA testing.’

  He didn’t like that. ‘Why? I haven’t done anything wrong. What do you want to test me for?’

  ‘Cops and doctors have their fingerprints on record,’ I said. ‘Mine are on the database. It’s for elimination purposes only.’ I gave him a reassuring pat. He wasn’t much older than my son and for a moment I felt sorry for him. ‘Because of your association with the deceased, there are legitimate reasons for your genetic material to be around this house.’ I leaned on the word ‘legitimate’.

  ‘Don’t worry, the samples are routinely destroyed once they’ve served their purpose,’ I added. ‘You have no reason for concern. It’s normal procedure.’

  While Brian took down Damien’s details and made a time for him to come down to the station at Heronvale for a statement, I studied the young man, thinking again of how he was young enough to have been Tianna’s son. Which reminded me.

  ‘Did Mrs Richardson ever talk about someone called Jason?’ I asked.

  Damien nodded. ‘I knew about him. She mentioned he was travelling around Australia. He’s a surfer. Follows the surf.’ He shrugged. ‘She said I reminded her of him.’

  He glanced at his watch. ‘I have to go,’ he said.

  ‘No worries,’ said Brian. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

  Brian took him to the door and saw him out. Outside, the ute revved up and took off.

  Brian returned, closing the front door behind him. ‘What do you make of him?’ he asked.

  ‘Your average opportunistic young bloke,’ I said, wandering around the living room, looking for items of interest. ‘Steady relationship, older woman on the side.’

  ‘Half his bloody luck,’ Brian muttered as I followed him into a small room, fresh and light with white-painted furniture and pale pink and white curtains billowing from the window behind the double bed.

  Tianna Richardson might have liked low-cut tank tops and high-heeled shoes, but her bedroom resembled that of a little girl.

  ‘We need to find Jason Richardson,’ said Brian, looking around. ‘And talk to Damien Henshaw’s fiancée.’

  ‘What about the neighbours?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve already had a chat to number seventeen,’ said Brian, indicating the neighbour on the right.

  ‘And the other side?’

  Brian shrugged. ‘The woman’s away, apparently. But I’m told she’s the street watchdog and knows everything that goes on. I’ve got her name here somewhere.’ He flipped through his notebook. ‘Vera Hastings.’

  Unlike the rest of the house Tianna Richardson’s bedroom was untidy, with shopping bags on the floor and swathes of tissue paper issuing from empty boxes. She’d opened those boxes like a whirlwind. Shopping frenzy?

  I surveyed the scene, trying to work out what this room revealed about the woman, what was important to her and where she put her energy. Except for the dark brown bedspread, everything was pink and white and very feminine. It was a little too frilly and had too many bunches of artificial flowers for my taste, but it was still a pleasant room.

  ‘You can see how pissed off she was,’ said Brian, following my gaze to the shopping. ‘The place is really tidy except for this room and the parcels. She’s just ripped things open, put the gear on, left the mess where it was and driven straight to the Blackspot.’

  ‘And somehow, between doing all that and us finding her, she goes and gets herself murdered,’ I said. Brian stooped to lift the corner of a square of tissue paper and squinted under it.

  ‘Tell me what you think about young Damien’s story,’ I said.

  ‘I think it probably happened like he said it did,’ said Brian. ‘Mrs Richardson gets the dirts because her young boyfriend prefers to go off to the pub alone and drink with his mates rather than go dancing with her.’ Brian lifted up another piece of tissue paper and peered under it. ‘My problem with him as a suspect is that I can’t see he really has a motive.’

  ‘That we know about,’ I added. ‘Have you checked to see if he’s got a record?’

  ‘I’ll do that next.’ Brian made a face. ‘But, Jack, you’ve got to care to kill someone. This was just a casual root with an available woman. He just dropped around now and then.’

  ‘That’s what he’s told us. He admitted that they fought and he was pretty protective of the girlfriend. What if Tianna had threatened to tell her that Damien was playing out of school? People have died for less than that.’ I knew that the best way to lie was to tell the truth, but leave out the last part. ‘What if the fight wasn’t about staying in and watching a video but about going dancing? Let’s say they did go to the nightclub but kept on fighting and she threatened to tell Kylie, and late at night, when all is quiet, he takes her out to the car park, smokes a joint with her, then kills her? That take-it-or-leave-it attitude might change dramatically if he felt threatened.’

  I recalled some of the people I’d spoken with in the aftermath of a violent death, with the body lying in another room, the ghost of a just-dead lover, spouse, or friend hovering around the edges of our dialogue. I’d witnessed the range of human emotions: rage, grief, despair, hatred, terror, numbness, denial, and shock to the point of hysteria. But the carelessness I’d witnessed in Damien Henshaw—apart from one expression of disbelief—made me wonder.

  I looked up at Brian, who was lost in his own inner discourse. Not wanting to interrupt him, I pulled on a pair of gloves I always carried and picked up a framed photo from the bedside table. In it, Tianna was cuddling up to a fair-haired man who was neither Earl Richardson nor Damien Henshaw. The entwined lovers sat with a group of people gathered around a table on which glasses and wine bottles stood. Behind them, the timber of the banquette they were sitting in was carved in fake Jacobean twists. Some bar or hotel, I thought. Tianna seemed to have been a very busy, sociable girl.

  Brian must have broken from his trance because he moved over and looked at the framed photo too. ‘We need to know who this guy is,’ he said.

  ‘We sure do,’ I replied. ‘She’s keeping him in the bedroom, for private
display only, not out in the living room with the family and the friends.’

  ‘Maybe the family and friends didn’t know they were an item,’ Brian suggested.

  I checked the frame of the photograph, prising it open in case Tianna had further secrets locked behind it, but found nothing. I passed it to Brian who bagged and labelled it then went over to study the dressing-table.

  It looked to be just as Tianna had left it—hairbrush lying on its side, three different perfume bottles standing in a row and a Cecil Peabody jeweller bag. I peered inside to see a smaller, maroon velour jewellery pouch and a receipt. First I opened the drawstring of the little pouch. A pair of earrings winked up at me, fancy dangly things, silver sprays dripping with black crystals of some sort. I hooked one out and stared at it for a moment before examining the receipt.

  ‘Look at these,’ I said, turning to show Brian.

  ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘They’d really suit you.’

  ‘She didn’t wear them that night,’ I said. ‘Yet they would have gone perfectly with her outfit.’ Sofia Verstoek’s taunt came back to me, yet again.

  Brian shrugged dismissively. ‘She probably just liked those little green and gold numbers with the pearls.’

  I picked up a docket lying on the floor near an open cardboard box and read the details of the purchase. ‘She bought this gear only the day before she died,’ I said. ‘Stewart Chambray cocktail suit, $489. That’s a lot of money for a doctor’s receptionist.’ I put the docket back in the empty box.

  ‘What are you suggesting?’ Brian asked, puzzled. ‘That she’s a working girl?’

  ‘Not that,’ I said, recalling the spangled black and silver top I’d seen on Tianna Richardson’s body, under the black and silver jacket. The black and silver shoes, the beaded handbag. Black and silver. I looked again at the docket and over to the smart black and silver skirt I’d noticed lying over the back of the bedroom chair. I picked it up and checked the label—it was the bottom half of the Stewart Chambray cocktail suit.

  ‘I don’t know much about women’s clothing,’ I said, turning around to Brian, ‘but I’ll swear this is the skirt that goes with the jacket she was wearing at the Blackspot. Same fabric. This is the skirt from that suit.’

  ‘But she was wearing a long winter skirt,’ said Brian.

  ‘That’s right.’ I recalled the charcoal woollen skirt bunched up mid-thigh.

  ‘It’s hot work dancing at a nightclub’s disco,’ said Brian. ‘So who’d wear a long woollen skirt like the one she had on when she could’ve worn this?’

  ‘Usually I don’t ask questions about what women wear,’ I said, remembering how my daughter and her mother had dressed on occasions. ‘Yet I can’t stop wondering why the hell she didn’t wear the matching skirt and the matching earrings she’d just bought. Everything else she had on her was black or silver. And judging from this room, she seemed to be into matching colour schemes.’

  ‘You’re an artist,’ Brian said, frowning. ‘Isn’t there something called contrast?’

  I nodded, considering this.

  ‘Well, she wanted some of that,’ Brian added.

  ‘But remember what Sofia Verstoek said. If a woman draws attention to something odd in another woman’s clothing, it’s usually just bitching. But it’s a different sort of comment at a crime scene.’

  ‘Yeah, but the Kiwi Krait is in a league of her own, she’s so poisonous,’ said Brian. ‘But even if what she decided to wear is weird, what the hell does it mean?’

  I tried to imagine Tianna Richardson, alive and well, dressing for what would turn out to be the last night of her life. I saw her taking the new clothes out of their boxes, angry and hurt by her young lover’s rejection, pulling them on, enjoying their newness like women do. Damn you, she might have been thinking. I’m going out dancing by myself. I’m an attractive woman even if you don’t think so. I’m going to wear my cute new outfit and damn you. Then I tried to imagine her rejecting the sexy matching skirt and digging out a heavy dark woollen one that came down almost to her ankles. Then doing the same with the black and silver earrings, choosing the antique interlinked gold filigree hearts with the peridots and pearls instead.

  I held the docket out to Brian, indicating the skirt hanging over the chair. ‘So why didn’t she wear the skirt of her new suit, or her earrings?’

  ‘I don’t think we’re qualified to even think about those questions,’ said Brian. ‘I wouldn’t dare question anything about women’s fashions.’

  ‘The palynologist did. She questioned and she’s a woman,’ I said.

  Brian was deep in thought. ‘Tianna decides to go out dancing by herself,’ he said. ‘She puts on her smart new gladrags—’

  ‘—not all of her new suit,’ I corrected. ‘Her new shoes and half a new suit. She doesn’t wear the skirt of her brand new outfit. Or the earrings that match.’

  ‘Maybe the skirt was too small, so she’s grabbed something else that fitted better,’ said Brian, coming over to check out the earrings more closely. ‘My girlfriend put three different outfits on the other night before we went out and asked me which one looked best. I told her they all looked great, so she decided not to wear any of them. Then she got really pissed off with me.’

  I knew what he meant. I went to the painted wardrobe and opened it, leafing through the hanging clothes. ‘There are two black skirts here and even I can see that either of these would be a better match than the woollen one she wore,’ I said, pulling them out and swishing them around near the unworn skirt, then holding the waistbands against each other. ‘They’re all the same size. Why would she pay almost five hundred bucks for a skirt that she couldn’t fit into?’

  ‘My girlfriend does it all the time,’ said Brian. ‘She calls it motivation.’

  ‘And at the nightclub, decked out in half a suit and a woollen skirt, she meets a stranger—’

  ‘Or someone she knows,’ interrupted Brian.

  ‘Right,’ I said, thinking of Damien Henshaw. ‘And he goes outside with her, drops her on her head. At speed.’

  ‘And after he’s dropped her, he gets down and bites her with his deformed jaws.’ Brian’s eyebrows hit maximum altitude. ‘Mate,’ he said dryly, ‘there’s something we’re missing.’

  We continued our search, going through the wardrobe and the chest of drawers, but didn’t find anything that could throw any light on either the mystery of the spurned new skirt or the unknown fair man.

  Under the lining of the underwear drawer—a favourite place for women to hide their love letters and other secret things, as I’d discovered over the years—I dug out an envelope of polaroids. Tianna Richardson keeping company with the fair mystery man again, this time naked and doing all sorts of fun and interesting things.

  ‘Athletic, isn’t she. I wish my girlfriend would do that,’ said Brian, bagging them while I blew my nose. My head cold seemed to be getting worse.

  ‘We definitely need to find this fellow. I’ve seen more of him than I need to.’

  ‘Already we’ve got four potential suspects,’ I said. ‘Damien Henshaw; her husband, Earl; her son, Jason. And the mystery man in the photographs. You’ll be busy checking all of them out.’

  It wasn’t long before we found some things that were not Tianna Richardson’s—a pair of men’s underpants and overalls.

  ‘These must belong to Earl,’ said Brian.

  ‘Or Damien. Or the other one,’ I said. ‘Or someone else we don’t even know about.’

  We went over the living room again, opening drawers, looking through the photo albums.

  ‘I spent a while with the staff at the Blackspot,’ Brian said as we flipped through the photographs. ‘We’ve only got one person who remembers Tianna Richardson. And she couldn’t tell us much. The doorman says he doesn’t recall what time she arrived, but said s
he could easily have just walked into the place without him noticing. It was one of their busiest nights and he had a couple of fights to deal with.’

  ‘What’s the name of the person who remembers seeing her?’ I asked.

  Brian pulled out his notebook and scrolled pages until he came to it. ‘Here she is,’ he said. ‘Danby. Michelle Danby.’

  I took the details, deciding I’d have a quiet chat with this witness. Sometimes people remembered things after an interview and never got round to contacting the police again.

  I checked outside in case there was a hungry, thirsty animal languishing forgotten on a chain—a situation I’d come across more than once at a murder victim’s house. On the way back inside, I noticed a pair of work boots standing near the back door. I could see at once that, although they were far from new, they’d been recently cleaned. Carefully, I picked one of them up with my gloved fingers, turning it upside down. These could be the work boots young Damien was so keen to recover.

  ‘We need to check these against that partial bootprint you fixed in the nightclub car park,’ I said to Brian as he joined me outside.

  Brian turned the boots over. ‘Sure looks similar,’ he said before bagging them.

  Similar wasn’t good enough. We would need an exact match and fit. I watched Brian label and log the boots before he was interrupted by a phone call. It sounded as if there’d been a delay with the food, but Debbie was now on her way.

  I looked around the neat backyard; it was surrounded by a fence with double gates opening onto a quiet lane. I hauled myself up and looked over, seeing only other fences and garages and garbage bins that hadn’t been collected. I dropped down again. On the clothes line, jeans, shirts and pretty underwear waved in the light breeze, a load of washing that would never be brought in by its owner. I stood staring at Tianna’s clothing for a few moments.

  Brian’s intermittent grunts into the phone were punctuated by the shrieks of a plover. If CrimTrak didn’t have tabs on the semen depositor, this could turn out to be a very complex job, I thought, especially now we’d turned up a third man. I glanced over the fence and saw the plover running with its wings outstretched towards something that had either disturbed it or stepped too close to its eggs or young.