by Amos, Gina
Chapter NIne
Ashleigh discovered an envelope addressed ‘to our new neighbour’ on her front verandah. Inside was an invitation carefully written on cream coloured note paper from Edi and Rhoda Blake, inviting her to sherry and scones on Sunday afternoon, at three pm sharp.
*****
A cool breeze slapped at Ashleigh’s legs as she stood waiting on the marble doorstep. Three green tomatoes were neatly placed on the window sill, waiting for time or the sun’s rays to ripen them. As a grandfather clock chimed the hour inside the house, Ashleigh caught sight of a grey, wrinkled face peering out from behind a lace curtain. A moment later the same face reappeared at the front door.
‘Can I help you?’ the woman asked politely in a quiet and gentle voice through a crack in the door. Her smell was faint and old-lady sweet.
‘Hello, I’m Ashleigh Taylor. I’m your new neighbour from across the street. You invited me in for a drink.’
‘Who is it, Edith?’ came a shrill voice from the back of the house. ‘It’s the neighbour, she wants us to go out for a drink.’
Ashleigh smiled and wondered if she had made a mistake by coming.
It’s all right, Edi dear, it’s our new neighbour. We invited her over, you remember don’t you?’ Rhoda moved her sister gently away from the door. ‘Come in dear, I’m Rhoda and this is Edith. But you can call her Edi if you like. You must excuse her, she gets a little confused at times.’
Rhoda was a fine looking woman who looked as if she was approaching her eighties but could easily have passed for a woman ten years younger. Her hair was thick and grey; china blue eyes looked out from behind expensive glasses and around her neck she wore a pearl necklace. A set of matching earrings hung from her baggy lobes. She was dressed smartly in a mauve jumper and a check skirt and a pair of thick stockings covered her sturdy legs.
Edi on the other hand, looked frail and confused. A cardigan covered a crisp, white blouse and a pair of moccasins poked out from under her slacks. Her smart appearance did little to disguise her fish-like eyes which gave her a look that said to the world that she was unaware of who she was. Ashleigh wondered how long Edi would be able to live in the house before her sister could no longer take care of her.
Ashleigh attempted to make herself comfortable on the lumpy, red lounge. The gas heater was set on high, the room was stuffy and a little too warm for the time of day. The sun was beating through the front windows, which Ashleigh noticed were nailed shut. At her feet, a stain the size of a fifty-cent piece stared back at her from behind the faded pink swirls of carpet.
‘Now, dear, I’ll get you a sherry and we’ll have a nice, long chat.’ Rhoda moved towards the timber sideboard and poured the syrupy liquid from a crystal decanter into three glasses and placed them carefully on a tray. She offered Ashleigh a glass.
‘Cheers,’ Ashleigh said and smiled across at the two women.
‘I suppose you have heard about our neighbour?’ Rhoda asked as she put down her glass on the coffee table. ‘Extremely tragic, such a pleasant woman you know.’ Rhoda looked down at her lap and fiddled with her handkerchief, twisting the corners into little balls. ‘Rose Phillips was a very private person. We invited her in for a sherry when she first arrived in Eden Street, didn’t we Edi dear? That would have been a few years ago. I can’t quite recall but it would have to be at least ten, don’t you think Edi?’ Edi was staring at the gas heater and made no attempt to reply. Rhoda paused and tried to remember. A look of irritation crossed her face as she attempted to recall the year but decided it wasn't an important fact in the telling of the story and continued. She looked at Ashleigh. ‘I’ve lost track now. Of course, one does you know, when you get to our age.’ Edi nodded in agreement.
The Blake sisters raised their glasses to their lips in unison and sipped. Rhoda placed her glass down on the coffee table and paused for a moment. Ashleigh imagined she did this in order to gain her attention or it may have been that she was trying to recall a vital piece of information she felt she should share with her.
‘Poor Rose, something awful must have happened between the two of them. I blame it all on the son. Rose became distant almost overnight. She just didn’t want to know us and wasn’t the same woman at all. Before all the business with her son, she would often drop in for a chat and a cup of tea on her way home from the shops and every Sunday morning she would walk with us to St Michael’s to celebrate Mass. She was very involved in the Church activities, arranging the flowers, helping with the morning tea. But after the falling out, all that changed. I know she didn’t like her daughter-in-law, she told us that much, but she was very proud of him you know. William was his name, but she always liked to call him Billy. She told us that he was a very important barrister and worked in a bank in the city.’
Rhoda gathered her thoughts and wiped her lips with a white linen serviette and continued. ‘She died alone, right under our very noses. We were home last Friday; we could have helped had we known. You know dear - she was in her kitchen, drinking tea. Thank heavens for that real estate agent. It must have been quite a shock for such a young girl. Kevin told us all about it. He is very upset, the whole street is.’ Rhoda wiped away a tear from the corner of her eye. ‘We’ll be going to the funeral of course. I suppose it will be sometime next week.’
Edi sat quietly, gazing out through the front window nursing her glass of sherry in her lap, watching for any movement in the street. A dog barked a lonely bark in the distance.
‘Kevin said she died from pneumonia. Have you met Kevin?’ Rhoda asked but didn’t wait for Ashleigh’s reply. ‘Charming man, Kevin, and helpful too, always popping in to check on us, doing little odd jobs for no reward. He nailed our window shut last winter when we complained of a draught. He doesn’t seem to have many visitors though, does he Edi?’
Rhoda offered another sherry and a jam covered scone which Edi had brought in on a plate from the kitchen. She wouldn’t take no for an answer and as Rhoda refilled her glass, Ashleigh swallowed a mouthful of doughy scone and caught a whiff of her scent, a combination of sickly perfume and beeswax polish. The room was musty and damp. A nest of stackable timber tables, once popular in the sixties was pushed into a corner of the room. Crocheted doilies littered every flat surface like discarded sheets of notepaper. They looked as if they had been caught up by a sudden gust of wind and had landed there by luck, rather than by design. Landscapes by unknown artists hung from the picture rails together with prints of subdued English hunting scenes of muscled horses and their handsome red suited riders. A sequence of scenes at various stages of the hunt was strung out along the picture rails along the back wall of the room. Ashleigh moved into a more comfortable position on the lounge and shifted a cushion to one side.
Perhaps it was because Rhoda had finished talking that Edi’s face suddenly brightened. She appeared to emerge from a fog, smiled and asked politely, ‘Now Ann, it’s your turn. Tell us something about yourself.’
Rhoda winked at Ashleigh.
Ashleigh realised she had their full attention and as the sisters sat perched like cockatoos on their straight-backed chairs, they stared at her expectantly, waiting for her to speak. Ashleigh looked into their eager faces and wondered where she should begin.
Chapter Ten
It was Monday morning. Ashleigh hoped this week she would be able to catch up on some of the backlog of paper work sitting in her in tray. She walked at a leisurely pace along the corridor of the Glebe Mortuary, carrying a coffee in a polystyrene cup, ignoring her footsteps as they echoed on the polished linoleum floor. A bank of fluorescent lights lit the corridor and the cool light bounced off the bluish-green walls; she was headed for the autopsy suites. The double doors slid open as she keyed in the security code and walked into the white tiled room. She looked around for Sam. It was seven-fifteen, she was early. She knew the other pathologists and technicians wouldn’t start arriving until at least eight-thirty.
The autopsy suite had two rows of seven metalli
c examination tables and the only difference between the room and a hospital operating theatre was that here, all the patients were dead. Ashleigh checked her phone for any messages before switching it off. She sat down at her desk and pulled out a muesli bar from her top drawer and unwrapped it. She was about to take a bite when Sam Lewis walked into her office.
‘Mike’s called in sick. Looks like you’ll have to take his cases for today, Doc.’
Ashleigh returned the health bar to the drawer and stood up. ‘Well let’s get on with it then,’ she sighed and looked at her in tray. It was going to be a long day. Ashleigh followed Sam into the examination room. A pair of pale blue surgical gloves hung out from one of the pockets of her scrubs. She reached over and grabbed a glass jar from a row of specimen bottles lined up against the side wall. The contents of the jar offered little resistance as she dug her index finger into the solidified eucalyptus oil. The jelly like substance helped to mask the smells of the examination room, the disinfectant and the stench of decomposing bodies. This was something she had learnt from Doctor Ian Markham, her predecessor, who had introduced her to this trick of the trade on her first day on the job. The substance seared the inside of her nose. Sam Lewis suddenly appeared beside her. The morgue technician was holding a clipboard in his hands. He had been going through the day’s list before Ashleigh had arrived and now he moved closer to her, close enough to feel her breath on him and smell her French perfume. ‘No double dipping now, Doc,’ he laughed as he inserted his finger into the jar and proceeded to prod the white substance up his left nostril. ‘That should do the trick,’ he said as he returned the jar to the shelf.
A gust of foul smelling, chilled air struck Ashleigh in the face as she opened the stainless steel refrigerator doors. The freezer held up to ten bodies at a time; today it was a full house. Sam came over to her and pulled out the first gurney. Ashleigh looked down at the orange body bag in front of her and read the tag through the transparent label pocket. Phillips, Rose and her date of birth. She grabbed the clipboard from Sam and looked again at the name at the top of the day’s list. Ashleigh caught her breath.
Ashleigh followed the outline of Rose’s body with her eyes. She reasoned that Rose Phillips wasn’t a relative, not even an acquaintance – she was a neighbour, someone she’d never met or spoken to. Chewing her top lip, she silently reminded herself that she was a professional and had a job to do.
‘You okay, Doc?’ Sam asked, as he noticed the look on Ashleigh's face.
‘Yep, I'm fine. Let's just get on with this, okay? It’s going to be a long day.’
Sam rolled the gurney into the high risk suite at the far end of the room where autopsies were performed on badly decomposed bodies. Ashleigh wondered how many bags she had opened, three hundred, four hundred? She was reluctant to open the zipper at first, knowing that once she did, all the horror of death would be exposed. It was always like this. Ashleigh never knew what she would find until she mustered the courage and opened the bag, but once she did, she accepted what she was dealing with and just got on with the job. Time of death, cause of death, mechanism of death. These were the questions, she just had to find the answers.
The tang of rotting flesh escaped as Ashleigh unhooked the zipper and dragged it carefully down the length of the bag. Sam transferred the body onto the cold metallic table and set about removing and bagging the clothing. He washed the body while Ashleigh went over the day’s list which now also included Mike Cole’s list. When Sam was finished, Ashleigh returned to the examination table. She pushed her arms into her white lab coat, strapped her mask over her face and pulled on the pair of blue disposable gloves. She began her initial examination and pressed the button on her Dictaphone. Bacteria had already started its work on the tissues and the skin had taken on a greenish-red colour. She turned to Sam.
‘She’s been deceased for at least four to five days.’ Maggots crawled on the outside of Rose’s body and gas had already formed in the cavities and beneath the skin. She began to pick the maggots off with her gloved hand and deposited a small sample of them in a vial. She touched Rose’s abdomen, the skin was splitting and leaking fluid. Ashleigh thought it ironic that she was now about to know more about Rose Phillips in death, than she would ever have known about her while she was still alive and living two doors down from her in Eden Street.
Sam began taking photos of the body. Ashleigh’s lips tightened. She was silently annoyed that Rose’s hands had not been bagged at the scene and sighed in resignation as she began the first part of the physical examination. Ashleigh looked over at the plastic bag and the coat that Rose’s body had been wrapped in, the same woollen coat she’d been wearing the day she saw her walking up Eden Street with her shopping trolley. The timing was right. She cleared her throat and spoke in a professional and monotone voice into the Dictaphone. She stretched and tugged at the surgical gloves before she took Rose’s hands in hers and lifted them gently, rubbing them as if to reassure the woman, even though her lifeless body was beyond reassurance. She examined Rose’s fingernails searching for any skin or paint residue. Using an ultraviolet light, she scanned the body, searching for anything which she may have missed. Sam was taking hair and nail samples when Ashleigh sensed someone's presence behind her. Detective Senior Sergeant Nick Rimis entered the viewing room, a glass mezzanine enclosure above the autopsy room.
‘How ya doing, Ash?’ he said in his usual sardonic voice through the room’s microphone.
‘Fine, perfectly fine, Senior Sargeant,’ she replied with a frown. Ashleigh tried to ignore him for as long as she could. She was annoyed by the interruption his presence had caused and didn't bother to look up at him. Instead she continued recording her observations and concentrated on the notes she had already made. She could do without interruptions right now and wondered what he was doing here. Nick Rimis always had a habit of turning up in places she wished he wouldn’t. Like the time he turned up drunk at her apartment after his last girlfriend, Laura dumped him.
Frown lines surfaced on Ashleigh’s forehead. They became more pronounced now as she placed her pen and clipboard down on the stainless steel counter and pulled the mask and safety glasses away from her face. She stripped her hands of her gloves and threw them with the mask in the yellow bin marked ‘toxic waste’.
Rimis looked up from his newspaper when she entered the viewing room. He was reading the sports section. The Roosters were at the bottom of the league table two seasons running. ‘What’s up?’ Rimis said, sensing something was troubling Ashleigh.
Ashleigh looked down at the body on the examination table. ‘She’s my neighbour, or rather, she was my neighbour.’ They both looked at Rose’s body. ‘She lived two doors down from me.’
‘I didn’t know you’d moved. Why didn’t you tell me? We could have had a house warming party.’
‘That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you.’
‘So who’ve you got down there?’ Rimis tugged at his tie as if was strangling him.
‘Her name’s Rose Phillips.’
Rimis raised his eyebrows. ‘She’s one of mine. I’m working on her case.’
‘So, do you want to join me? I’ve got a spare pair of scrubs. You can fill me in, answer any questions I might have.‘
‘You know I’ve got a sensitive stomach, Ash. I only dropped by to see if you feel like going for a drink and something to eat after work?’
Ashleigh knew Nick Rimis well enough to know that he wouldn’t take no for an answer. She also knew that by the end of the day she would probably need a drink and knew he was probably the only person capable of filling her in on the missing pieces of this case.
She looked down at Rose’s body. ‘I should be finished here around seven. I’ll meet you at Otto’s, but only for a drink, okay?’
Rimis placed his hand on her arm, smiled and wondered what it was about the Phillips’s case that was getting to Ashleigh. She was usually so cool and detached. Ashleigh returned to the autopsy room and Rimis returned
to his newspaper. He had time to kill before meeting up with his new recruit Jill Brennan, and he hoped that she wasn’t going to be as raw as he had been when he joined the unit. But he doubted it; she had acted like a real pro when he met her for the first time at the Phillips’s house last Friday.
‘Caucasian, female, mid eighties, grey, shoulder length hair, brown eyes, one centimetre birthmark on left cheek, scar, two and a half centimetres below her right knee, a vertical cholecystectomy scar on the abdomen, bruising on the forehead and chin, signs of poor circulation. Overall condition of the body – undernourished.’ Ashleigh pulled her safety glasses on, plugged in the Stryker saw and opened the chest cavity. She lifted off the sternum and the attached ribs releasing with it a foul smelling odour of blood and offal. She placed it on the stainless steel tray and then examined the exposed lungs and heart. Systematically, she removed the organs, weighing each as she went.
‘Got any big plans for tonight, Doc?’ Sam asked.
‘Yep, lots of paperwork,’ Ashleigh lied. Sam was good at his job, a little too good. He enjoyed working with dead people, probably because they never complained. She thought he was ghoulish and wondered if he had a girlfriend. Ashleigh made an incision from behind the left ear over the crown of the head to the right ear. She examined the brain in situ and then severed the cranial nerves and spinal cord, lifted the brain gently from the skull so she could examine it further. It was a long process and Ashleigh’s legs were aching. She methodically recorded her findings. She looked up at the viewing room and realised that Rimis had left. A finding of death from suicide or natural causes would make him happy she thought to herself, but a finding of homicide would not. ‘Sam sew up for me and tidy up here will you? I’m going to my office.’
