‘But not in mine,’ said Earl. ‘Praise the Lord. You know, I wanted to get back with Tianna. Marriage is a sacred sacrament and yet she wanted to party all the time. I kept trying to interest her in going to Mass again and saying the rosary. She was raised a Catholic, you know. Had the faith and threw it away. Threw me out, too.’
The image of party girl Tianna saying the rosary with her estranged husband almost made me laugh out loud.
‘You know,’ Earl was saying, ‘I read in the press that people with religious beliefs are much healthier than people who don’t have faith. I’ve never been healthier in my life. Did you know that? Religious faith has the power to keep you healthy.’
I bit my tongue.
‘I hear some scientist down your way went mad,’ Earl continued. ‘Ended up shooting a colleague.’
‘He was a man of religion, Earl.’ I couldn’t resist.
‘Not the true faith,’ he said.
I could have recited a few facts about some luminaries in the IRA but decided it was better to just let Earl Richardson go away.
‘So what do you say we meet up with a few of the fellers and knock over a couple of beers for Auld Lang Syne? Then we can have a good chat. You need God in your life, Jack.’
I managed to remain professional. ‘Earl, I gave up the booze over twelve years ago. I don’t drink at all these days. Can’t make the piss-up.’
‘Jack, I’m sorry to hear you can’t hold your liquor. But I want to drop around while I’m down here and thank you in person. Without you, I could’ve been in all sorts of trouble. I’ll swing by sometime.’
I hung up. Earl Richardson left a bad smell in the air, I thought. Then realised it was dog shit I could smell and it seemed to be coming from under my chair. I must have trekked some in by way of one of my pairs of shoes.
I pushed myself out from the desk and peered down. The smell was definitely stronger the closer I came to the floor. I was about to straighten up, intending to go and get disinfectant from the cleaning station, when something caught my eye.
Right there, in the place I’d been sitting, where my shoes would have been resting on the floor as I spoke on the phone, I could see greyish particles of coarse sand. I didn’t need any microscopic examination. I’d seen this material so frequently recently that I knew straightaway what it was. But I had to be sure for the records so I pushed my chair right back, tape-lifted the grit from under my desk and took this and my bagged shoes into a nearby examination room.
It wasn’t long before I had recorded that the greyish particles on my shoes were indistinguishable from those we’d collected from Damien Henshaw’s workboots and the head wounds of both Tianna Richardson and Albert Vaughan. I straightened up from the stereo microscope, trying to recall how long it had been since the cleaners had done my office. Over a week, I realised. I wrote up my findings and padded back to my desk. Somewhere, in the last week, I’d come into contact with Universal Cement’s defunct Roman White aggregate blocks. I was going to have to retrace every damn step I’d taken in this pair of shoes because, somewhere, I’d been at or very close to the primary crime scene where Tianna Richardson met her end.
I sat at my desk, walking through my recent days again. The crime scenes I’d visited could be eliminated because I’d been wearing protective gear or gumboots which I had never worn in this office. I’d worn these shoes every day to work and the only places I’d visited that couldn’t be eliminated from my list of possible sites were the cottage where I lived, Wendy Chen’s flat and Alana Richardson’s house. It definitely wasn’t the cottage because I knew the soil type round there.
I rang Brian and told him.
‘Doesn’t really make much difference to me,’ he said. ‘Wherever the crime scene is, Damien Henshaw’s been there too. And smoked a joint there. And had sex with the victim. He left his DNA at the Blackspot Nightclub, Jack,’ he reminded me. ‘Not just the grey particles.’
He was right. The DNA results proved that Damien Henshaw had smoked the joint we found near Tianna Richardson’s body. Bob had checked his house again and found a couple of joints in a tin rolled in the identical way, with little twists at both ends, like a Christmas cracker. I doubted, given all the other evidence, that the defence could raise a plausible ‘reasonable doubt’ in a jury’s mind. I rang off. Despite all the evidence pointing to Henshaw, my suspicions about someone else would not go away. Regardless, I was going to check out the two other places. I couldn’t imagine Wendy Chen being a murderer on the side, but it was possible that she might use or have lying around some of the disused blocks. But I had been to a house recently where a young man, Jason Richardson, had been labouring, laying blocks on a retaining wall. I wanted to check that out.
As I was thinking of this, the desk phone rang. It was Jerri Quill. ‘I’ve decided,’ she said, ‘to come back and discuss my situation with the nuclear biology people.’
‘I’m happy to hear that,’ I said, and I was.
‘I visited Wendy the other day, before you took the reconstruction away. That made me think of the re-enactment. Even though it was upsetting, it was a good example of the work you do—the work I hope to do one day. Take the facts and examine them. Put disconnected things back together again. See the pattern. Find the truth.’ There was a silence on the line before she spoke again. ‘I realised for the first time that this really is the work I want to do.’
I was about to compliment her on her choice when she was interrupted and I could hear Wendy’s voice in the background.
‘Wendy wants to know when will you be bringing La Incognita back again?’
‘Very soon,’ I said. ‘Wendy can take her home after she delivers her talk to the Sydney police tomorrow. I won’t need her after that.’
It had been a long day, I thought, as I closed my notebook.
As soon as I could get away tomorrow, I wanted to go back to Alana Richardson’s place at Sparrows Ridge Road and take a closer look.
I swivelled round in my chair and stared back at the lifelike head, thinking about women, especially the first woman in my life, just as Charlie had suggested I should. Sitting there, doing nothing, just being, as Charlie had also suggested I do. I allowed the restlessness to build. He’d asked me to watch what happened if I didn’t take my usual habitual action, that was, get up and get busy. The restlessness grew and grew and changed into something much more unpleasant. I was aware of a creeping anxiety growing in my stomach and chest, an unpleasant shuddery feeling that lay hidden under the cover of always being busy. This is why I can’t lie around on river banks idling, I thought, spending aimless time with a woman. Because if I did, this was exactly what would happen.
I sat there staring at the come-hither expression on the sweet three-quarter profile of the unknown female. No wonder I didn’t want to spend time with a woman, because, out of the anxiety, the first part of the challenge Charlie had put to me was starting to form. Why would you ever open up to a woman again, it began.
I didn’t let it finish. I had work to do.
Early the next morning, skipping the first sessions of the conference proper, I was back at Alana Richardson’s cottage. This time, only the little blue hatchback was there. As she opened the door, I saw her expression change from polite surprise to puzzlement and then concern.
‘If you’ve come to talk to Jason, he’s not here,’ she said.
‘I noticed,’ I said. ‘But that will keep.’ I smiled to ease her worry. ‘What I’d really like to do is take a look around here. The grounds. The garden.’
Her slight frown betrayed her anxiety. She knew people like me didn’t look around houses and gardens because of aesthetic interests.
‘Of course. Please,’ she said as she ushered me in. ‘Whatever you need to do. I’ll be here in the kitchen if you should need anything.’ Before, in our brief dealings, there’d been jus
t a hint of flirtatiousness underlying her manner. Now, however, she was all formal courtesy.
Alana led me through the house and out to the back garden—a wide, rambling area, with old fruit trees and various old-fashioned briar roses bordered by a photinia hedge. But it was the back fence I was interested in, the area where I’d seen Jason working, rebuilding a partly tumbled-down retaining wall. Behind this I couldn’t see much, just the odd native scrubby bush.
I walked right down to the end of the long garden to inspect the building blocks. It was clear that the newer ones didn’t quite match the old ones and it wasn’t just a matter of the accretions and dulling of age. The first five or six courses had been built at a much earlier time. I squatted beside the wall, took a small tool and plastic bag from my pocket and scraped the sides of several of the original blocks. I would have to test them, but I had the same sense of sureness about these as I’d had back in my office when I’d collected the coarse sandy particles from under my desk. I was willing to bet my career that the lower courses had been made from Universal Cement’s discontinued blocks.
I sealed the scrapings, pocketed them and stood up, looking around. Jason had been adding two new courses of a similar type of block along the top of what I saw now was quite a long retaining wall, sweeping around in a slight curve. The bushes just beyond obscured the valley view and I jumped up on top of the wall to get a better view of what lay beyond. The block I was on shifted a little, throwing me off balance. I teetered a moment then looked down on the other side of the wall. The shock made me swear out loud in terror as I realised I was swaying on the edge of a precipice. Less than a third of a metre of solid ground lay beyond the wall on the other side and the bushes had somehow curved their roots into fissures in a sheer cliff wall. If I hadn’t regained my footing, I could have fallen to my death on the rocks many metres below.
Shaken, I stepped down and walked the length of the wall until I found a place where I could more safely climb up onto the old blocks and look down. The drop must have been around fifteen metres or so. I jumped down on the wrong side of the fence and, holding on tightly to an old acacia, took another look. From this angle, I could see the dusty fire trail that ran below, hugging the cliff side. I stared down thinking, yes, things are falling into place.
Climbing back over the retaining wall, I walked back up the garden.
‘Did you see anything interesting?’ Alana asked, trying to sound light-hearted.
‘Hard to say,’ I said. ‘When will Jason be back?’
As if on cue, I heard the sound of a car slowing down out the front and wished I’d followed Adam Shiner’s example of parking outside another house. I heard the car accelerate and, although I sprinted as fast as I could round to the front of the property, I only caught a glimpse of Jason’s old panel van and his surfboard disappearing in an explosion of dust. I raced to my own vehicle and jumped in, gunning the motor and screeching off after him. But he’d had just enough time to take advantage of the T-intersection at the end of Sparrows Ridge Road. My guess was that he’d be heading right, driving north to Sydney, where the pond was bigger.
I took the south road and drove fast to Heronvale.
‘They must know each other,’ Brian said when I told him what I’d found. ‘Damien Henshaw and Jason Richardson. They must have been in it together. Somehow got Tianna there and pushed her over.’
‘It would take two of them,’ I said. ‘Then they dress her up in her party gear and dump her back at the Blackspot to make us think what we thought at first. That she’d met someone at the nightclub and been killed there in the car park.’
‘It’s a reasonable assumption,’ said Brian. ‘But they didn’t bother with the skirt because it was too hard to get on. They used another, easier-fitting skirt. She must have been dead in the car—’
‘We’ve no evidence of that from Henshaw’s car,’ I reminded him.
‘Maybe she was wrapped in something. And the evidence is pointing that way,’ said Brian.
‘We just need to discover the connection,’ I said, thinking of the unseen circuitry.
‘Tianna’s the connection,’ said Brian. ‘Stepmother to one, the other screwing her. I’ll get some people together and we’ll examine the area beneath Jason Richardson’s grandmother’s place. We’ll also put the word out on Jason’s vehicle. And I’m going to have another chat with young Damien and tell him that not only have we discovered that Jason Richardson was in it with him, but that Jason is now telling us everything, saying that he tried to stop Damien. But Damien did both killings. That should get him going.’
‘I didn’t hear that,’ I said, in a hurry to leave. ‘I’ve got some particles I want to analyse. I’m confident what I have here will lock in the physical evidence we got from the head injuries beyond dispute.’
Brian nodded, then frowned. ‘But I still don’t get how Albert Vaughan fits into this, how he comes to have the same coarse granite sand embedded in his head wound?’
I couldn’t answer that one. There was a lot I still didn’t get.
It didn’t take me long to demonstrate to my own satisfaction that the particles I’d scraped from the old Roman White blocks at the end of Mrs Richardson’s garden were indistinguishable from those found in the wounds of Tianna Richardson, Albert Vaughan and unknown female 17/2000. I’d arrived at certain conclusions about how the body of Tianna Richardson might have gathered these particles. As to the other two, I had not been able to form any conclusion. In short, I had no idea.
My head was aching and I needed a break. I walked down the corridor to the staff common room to make myself a coffee and have a look at the newspaper headlines. As I was stirring too much sugar into the cup, I became aware of a lot of traffic in the car-park area. I remembered the Sydney detectives were here for the conference lectures and guided tours of the labs and museum over the next couple of days. It would be a good idea, I thought, for people to stay out of town tonight, as carousing Sydney personnel would be piling into the Cat and Castle. For a split second I envied them. I couldn’t go and join them in standard operating procedure—getting wasted to take my mind off what troubled me. All I could look forward to was another early, lonely night back at the cottage.
I finished my coffee and went back to my office but, before going to my desk, I stood a moment, studying Ms 17/2000’s sweet face. How the hell, I asked her, did you get yourself mixed up with a rare orchid and granite sand particles?
And how did an old man living out on the Ginnindera Road get those particles in his head wounds too? In this game, there were always far more questions than answers.
In my absence, a whole lot of new mail had been dumped on my desk. I was about to make a start on the paperwork but the mess on the desktop was dispiriting. I put the Venetian glass ball safely away on top of the filing cabinet, next to Ms 17/2000. Inside its fragile mysterious world, frozen coloured spirals, energy immobilised in glass, shone. Somehow I knew something similar had happened deep within me a long time ago, caused me to freeze up when it came to intimate relations, and this had driven Iona away. But I couldn’t just lose her like this. If I wanted to win her back, I knew I must find the way to change so that I could offer her what she wanted from me.
I made a start on the different trays, using my triage system of those that demanded immediate attention, those that could be left a while longer and those I could safely give to someone else to handle. I was making some headway, aware of all the noise in the building, of people moving around in the corridors and bursts of laughter. The Sydney boys were on their tour. Finally, I had cleared some space and could work with some dignity.
My desk phone rang and I grabbed it, relieved by the distraction.
‘Bob,’ I said. ‘Where are you?’
‘Sydney,’ he said. ‘I’ve just come away from a crime scene.’
‘No way am I involved in this one,�
� I said. ‘Keep this case all to yourself. From now on, I’m keeping my nose right out of other people’s investigations. I’m way overdue for long service leave. Any news on young Shaz?’
‘Sorry, Jack. Sharon Lockhart was found dead in the backyard of her boyfriend’s flat.’
‘Shaz,’ I said, recognising the full name. ‘What happened?’
‘It’s a horror show,’ Bob said. ‘She’d tried to get away from him, but he’d followed her through the house, down the stairs and out into the yard. I’ve been picking up pieces of her all morning.’
Jacinta, I thought. This is going to be very hard for her.
‘We’re still trying to trace her family to inform them,’ said Bob.
‘What about the boyfriend?’
‘He’s wandering around somewhere with a nine-inch blade. We’re out hunting him right now.’
I rang off. I could feel the anger sweeping up my spine. Another young girl had died because nobody cared about her.
I called Charlie, grateful to hear his voice, and told him.
‘Shit,’ he said.
‘Pick up Jacinta, wherever she is,’ I said. ‘Our address might be somewhere in Shaz’s personal effects. Don’t let her out of your sight till I get there.’
‘She’d better stay at my place,’ said Charlie. ‘Or her boyfriend’s.’
‘I’ll get going the minute I can get away,’ I said. ‘I hope they lock up Shaz’s family too. For not loving her.’
‘You’d have to lock up most of the world on that charge,’ said Charlie.
I sat still, lost in my thoughts. It came as a shock when I realised I was part of such a family system and that Iona could reasonably charge me with the same offence. But this admission didn’t quench my anger. I thought of my alcoholic mother, whose first and only love eventually was ethyl alcohol. I thought of Jason who shared the same birthday as my son Greg, and his absconding mother.
Dirty Weekend Page 37
