by Candice Fox
I followed the barren cream hospital hallways under huge signs filled with directions to surgery wards. Right. Left. Left. Right.
I found the front counter of the Queensland Health Forensic and Scientific Services Department at the end of a long hall of sticky brown linoleum. The young woman behind the counter was picking her nails. An older woman stood at the counter with her back to me, filling in a sign-in sheet.
‘Morning,’ Fingernails said to me.
‘Morning.’
‘How can I help?’
‘My name’s Ted Collins.’ I felt the older woman beside me glance at my face. ‘I’m hoping to talk to someone about the Jake Scully case.’
‘Are you with the police?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Who are you with?’
‘I’m not really,’ – I cleared my throat – ‘I’m actually not really with anyone. Well … I mean, I’m with my partner.’ My own words were sounding very contrived, even to me. I would need to get some decent practice in at this lying business, and fast. The receptionist forgot about her nails completely and examined me. I turned profile on her. There hadn’t been too many media shots of my profile. ‘My partner and I are investigating the Scully disappearance independently. We’ve been hired by the family.’
‘Mr Collins, I don’t have anything down in the appointment book about –’
‘Yeah, I haven’t made an appointment.’
‘What agency are you with?’
She was looking at the phone receiver now. I backed away from the counter. How had this got so complicated so fast? Was she recognising me? Why hadn’t I planned what I was going to say? There was no way I was mentioning Amanda’s name. My chest was suddenly tight. If she picked up the receiver, I decided, I’d just walk away. There was no telling who she might call about the strange guy at the counter asking about the Scully case, who wasn’t really with an agency and wasn’t really with the police. I was deep in the bowels of the hospital. I looked at the fire escape by the entrance to the corridor.
‘Kayla, it’s all right,’ the old woman beside me said. I watched her hand go out towards the young receptionist, white and strong and lined with blue veins. The hand of a saviour. She turned to me. ‘I think I can help you, Ted.’
I followed the little woman back down the corridor towards the front of the hospital, hardly listening to her pleasantries about the humidity, the heavy afternoon rains. I was wondering if I’d just been on the edge of a panic attack. Flopping on the floor with a panic attack every time I thought someone was going to recognise me in public would not go well for our inquiries into the Scully case. You have a panic attack in public and ten people rush to your side. I imagined hearing those inevitable words from the chaos above me. Wait a minute … isn’t he that guy?
Before I’d really wrestled myself from the tangle of my panicked mind, I was sitting in a chair adjacent to one occupied by the woman at an outdoor table. The staff inside at the cafe were turning on the big black coffee machine, running steam through the valves and grinding the beans.
‘So, Mr Conkaffey,’ the woman said, ‘you’ve begun again.’
I paused, trying to decide if I’d really heard what I thought I had. Then I pushed my chair back and stood.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ the woman said. She pulled at my hand. ‘I can’t chase you. I don’t have the knees for it.’
I sat and wiped my face with my hands. The skin felt taut and sore. The hunched, bird-like creature beside me pulled a pack of cigarettes from her coat and shook one out, put it between her thin lips. She offered me one and I took it. I hadn’t smoked in years. Her hair was blazing white in the morning sun, shorn short around her huge, dangling elephant ears. Her wide lobes held blue sapphires.
‘I recognised you from the papers,’ she said. ‘I followed it on the television, yes, and online. But the pictures in the papers. They stay with you.’
I smoked. If I just concentrated on smoking, I figured I’d be all right.
‘I’m Valerie Gratteur. Val.’
I nodded.
‘You okay?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Take a minute. Let me tell you a story while you put yourself together.’ The waitress came out of the cafe and set an ashtray down between us. ‘One of my first cases on the job as a young medical examiner was a murder. Bludgeoning. A Kiwi woman named Kimba Sorrano. She was seventy-one. Sixteen grandchildren. Can you believe that? Each one of them more devastated by her loss than the last. This was up here, in Cairns, but the case made the papers down in Sydney. They splashed it around everywhere. Had pictures of the little ones crying in Nanna’s garden. Senseless slaughter: grandmother dies in violent home invasion.’
I tapped my cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. Relished the warmth and familiarity of the paper roll between my fingers.
‘When I got Kimba Sorrano on my table, I was relieved,’ Valerie said. ‘It seemed pretty open and shut to me. Her head was split right down the middle like a watermelon, and everything inside had been rattled around to sludge. The autopsy was just a formality. It was going to be a homicide – blunt force, traumatic brain injury. This was about my third case ever, so I spent a lot of time looking at Kimba. I couldn’t help myself. She was such a tragic figure lying there on the slab. Just … wasted. Wasted life. It used to get to me, back in the old days. But I dried my eyes eventually and started cutting.’
The waitress came and presented two coffees to us, both black, and a jug of milk. We hadn’t ordered. I supposed hospital staff were assumed to need caffeine straight up in the morning hours, no matter what they did.
‘So who killed Nanna?’ I asked.
‘One of her mules.’
‘What?’ I laughed. The sound was uneasy. ‘Mules?’
‘Kimba Sorrano had red phosphorous on her fingertips,’ the old woman said, barely containing a smile. She patted her sternum with nicotine-stained fingers. ‘And corrosion blisters inside her lungs. I found the phosphorous first, and when I did, I looked for the blisters. If you don’t wear the right protective equipment, and you wander around in drug labs long enough, you start breathing in all the shit they use to cook the product. Classic overexposure to methamphetamine production. Kimba Sorrano was a drug lord.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘Nanna was a narcotics queen?’
‘Exactly.’
‘This is insane,’ I said. I felt my shoulders lowering. My heartbeat returning to normal. ‘I was in drug squad for five years. I met two female drug lords. Two. They were both in their twenties. How did you even think to look for the signs?’
‘Well, people think that when you do what I do, you look at the bodies and you fill in some forms and that’s it. But it’s far from it. I look at the body, I look at the crime scene, and I look at the artefacts leftover from the person’s life before I make my decision on a cause of death. My job includes a lot of detective work. Far more detective work than my peers give me credit for. I examine photographs. I talk to the family. I spend half my work time pondering mysteries. Just like you.’ She pointed at me, the accusatory grandmother with the empty cookie jar.
‘So how’d you put it together?’
‘Took me a while,’ Valerie said. ‘But I found out Kimba Sorrano worked at Cairns Airport. She was a cleaner. So I thought about it, and I realised she had access to all areas – the aircraft, the offices, the control towers, the staff areas, the bathrooms. Kimba wandered in and out through the customs barriers all day long, six days a week, wheeling her cleaning cart back and forth, back and forth.’
‘Oh my lord,’ I said.
‘The drugs come in. She goes onto the plane to clean it. Does a sweep through, picks up the package and walks it through customs. There’s no telling how long she’d been at it, but I’d suggest from the cash they found in her breadbin it would have been a while.’
‘That’s amazing.’
‘It is amazing.’ Val
smiled, showing me her big white dentures. ‘Are all your pieces back in place?’
I exhaled slowly. ‘I think so.’
‘So from my story, you can probably tell, I don’t take things on face value. I didn’t take your case on face value. Not at all. It interested me very much. From the moment I read the medical reports connected to the little girl, and then I saw your mugshot in the paper, I was hooked.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that the medical report said the tips of Claire Bingley’s fingernails were ripped off. Every single one. That girl scratched her attacker for her dear life. And yet, not a mark on you. Not so much as a nick.’
‘The prosecutors tried to explain that,’ I said. ‘They said I might have worn multiple layers of clothes to protect myself during the act. That theory supports the fact that there was no foreign DNA on Claire.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘So you wore a jacket tied up to your neck, gloves, something to protect your face and ears and eyes? You committed this act in a beekeeper’s suit, did you?’
‘Maybe a hazmat suit,’ I mused.
She laughed. I found myself smiling. But my eyes were aching with the desire for tears. I wiped my face again, felt the beginnings of my beard.
‘You’re pretty cool, Dr Gratteur.’
‘That’s what they tell me.’ The old woman blew a smoke ring over her shoulder.
‘Can you tell me anything about Jake Scully?’ I said, trying to get away from my own case before my nerves completely frayed.
‘Jake Scully? He’s dead.’
‘Is he?’
‘The creature didn’t leave me much. What I got from the police of Jake Scully’s remains, sans the crocodile stomach in which they were originally housed, could have fit into a school lunchbox. But among the mix I found a fragment of his iliac crest. The wing-shaped bit of your pelvis.’ She poked me in the hip. ‘If I’d found a finger bone or a tibia maybe I could have speculated that there’s some chance he’s still alive. But no. He is as the proverbial doornail.’
‘Right.’ I had momentary visions of Jake Scully dragging himself through the mangroves of some forgotten corner of the tropics, his body missing from the stomach down, trailing his own bowels. I didn’t place much stock in the idea that he was out there alive somehow, either.
‘Do you concur, Mr Conkaffey?’
‘I concur, Dr Gratteur,’ I said, and smiled. ‘And I think, with a surprising amount of relief, that I’m out of a job.’
‘Not necessarily. I assume Mrs Scully hired you for insurance purposes.’
‘You assume correctly.’
‘Well, unfortunately, I just can’t say whether this was a homicide or death by other means,’ she said. ‘And the insurance company will want to know Mrs Scully herself didn’t bump off her hubby for the cash, or if it was suicide-by-croc.’
‘What’s your gut tell you?’
The old doctor shrugged her shoulders. Her watery eyes gazed off towards the parking lot.
‘Look, I haven’t had a genuine crocodile attack victim on my table in my thirty years on the job.’
‘What? This is the top end, though! Don’t they happen all the time?’
‘No,’ she laughed. ‘No, they don’t. There are about five near misses every year, and two fatalities. Saltwater crocodiles are very lethargic creatures. When they do attack humans, it’s for a variety of reasons – it’s mating season and the big males are defending their territory, or it’s aestivation season and they’re stocking up for the big sleep. Maybe they’ve become so accustomed to humans wandering in and out of their area that they just can’t help themselves. They like routine. If you wade into the water to put a boat in from the same wharf at the same time every day for a couple of weeks you might have one pull your leg out from under you – if you’re in the right season. But you were asking for it, weren’t you?’
‘I guess so,’ I said.
‘Jake Scully was a big man. About your size, actually. Now, it’s not unknown for crocs to take big game. They’ll drag a cow into the water every now and then. But they’re not voracious killers. They’re lazy, and they’re opportunistic. They’re more about lying in the mangroves staying somewhere warm and snapping up a waterbird when it wanders too close than taking down a full-grown man.’
‘Okay.’
‘Most human fatalities are children. They’re the right size, they won’t put up much of a fight, and they’re usually already in the water making a commotion when they attract the creature’s attention. Now, you’re telling me big Jake Scully went out that night and blindly wandered into some enormous male croc’s territory, managed to hang around on the bank long enough to coax the thing out of the water to eat him? Maybe he was in the water. More likely that way. So are we to assume he went for a midnight swim? I don’t know. Sounds pretty weird to me.’
‘I’ve looked at some stills from the CCTV outside the Scully house,’ I said. ‘Seems to me like he walked to his car in a bit of a rush.’
‘Rushing out to meet someone?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But how did they call him out? There’s no phone call to the house or his mobile. No text message or email.’
‘Could the meeting have been a prior arrangement?’
‘Maybe. But why the rush, then?’
‘You’ve got me,’ the doctor said, smiling. ‘I can’t say I’m not enjoying trying to work it out, though.’
‘Could you murder someone with a croc?’ I asked. She squinted at the sun.
‘What a question.’
‘Yeah,’ I laughed. ‘I know.’
‘You’d have to train the thing,’ she said. ‘Go to a certain spot and feed it every day. They’re not unintelligent, crocodiles. I mean, you’d have to find one first – without being eaten. They’re not travellers, so if you found one, and you survived, you’d be pretty assured that it’s going to be in that area again if you come back looking for it. They tend to haunt certain plots of water. So I guess you’d make a certain noise on the shoreline and throw in a chicken every day at the same time and you could train it to come over when you were around.’
‘That’s a lot of effort,’ I said.
‘It’s got to be the most inconvenient and unpredictable murder weapon in the world,’ she said. ‘Why do it that way? Why not just use a gun or a knife or a big fat rock? Hell of a lot more assured of getting the job done.’
‘Maybe you’re a complete sicko and you want Jake to experience it. Being hunted. Being eaten.’
‘Oh dear.’ Valerie slid her eyes to me. ‘You do have a dark mind, Ted.’
‘Maybe Jake was shot or stabbed and thrown in, and the croc just got lucky. Picked up the corpse before anyone else could find it.’
‘Could be,’ she said.
I sat back and took a good look at Val while she stubbed out her cigarette. I’d heard her speak, experienced her turning my mind over completely and emptying it of all the thoughts I’d been accumulating since I saw her there at the morgue front desk. I found myself smiling at her. She tapped her cigarette packet and I nodded, and we lit two more.
‘Are you working alone up here?’ she asked.
‘No, I’ve got a partner.’
‘Well, that’s something,’ she said. ‘Who is he?’
‘She’s Amanda Pharrell.’
‘Right.’ Val huffed smoke through her nose with a laugh. ‘Right.’
‘What’s your non-face-value assessment of that one?’ I asked. ‘Do you know anything about her case?’
‘I had Lauren Freeman on my table, yes,’ Valerie said. She looked me up and down with her watery eyes. ‘Whoever killed that pretty little girl hated her very much in that moment.’
‘You said “whoever”,’ I noted.
‘I did.’ She smiled.
Driving back to Crimson Lake, I went through the James Cook University campus, thinking I’d stop at the Co-op and see if they had copies of Scully’s books. The concrete campus was nestled in the cur
ve of lush green hills, a secret garden of manicured lawns being used here and there by man-sized kangaroos as lounging spots. I parked and followed the wide pathways shaded by curved corrugated roofs, past the big glass cube of the dentistry building, where I could look in on white-jacketed students taking notes, playing with white pieces of machinery at white tables. I felt a little sad pressing between the young students returning from the cafeteria. The campus was very much like the Goulburn police academy. I remembered my youthful ambition, my keen desire to be a justice-maker.
All of that was gone now.
The air-conditioning inside the Co-op was a relief. It didn’t take long to find a pile of copies of Burn, Scully’s first, under a sign from management expressing the bookstore’s dismay at the disappearance of the much-loved local author. I took a copy and weighed it in my hands, flipped through the pages. I supposed I should get them all. It was possible there were clues to Jake’s vanishing in them, in any of them, but I’d always been a fast reader and wasn’t intimidated. I headed down the fiction aisle and scooped up a stack from the end of the row, checked the book list in the latest one to make sure I had all four.
On the way back to the counter, I browsed the bookish things section, admiring the mugs and book cushions, the literary-themed dolls. I picked up a stuffed Edgar Allen Poe and thought about buying it for Lillian. I’d really liked Poe as a teenager. Maybe I’d encourage her to read some as she entered those people-hating years when the lure of the Gothic takes hold.
And then I remembered it was possible I wouldn’t see Lillian ever again. That was the reality. Even though my charges had been dropped, people would get in the way of me seeing her while she was a child. If Kelly herself didn’t step up to stop me, her parents would. All it would take is one visit from child protection officers to deem me unsafe. Officially, they’d probably say it was something about my home, its bare and hazardous state, the vigilantes who targeted it. Maybe they’d say that as a private investigator I attracted the kind of dangerous people into my life that precluded the safe care of children. If they couldn’t find anything they could photograph or video or point to on paper, they’d say they found me in an agitated state when they visited and they’d order a psychological evaluation. I’d have to get a magistrate to undo any restrictions they imposed on me. It was that easy to stop someone from seeing their child. I knew. I’d seen it happen to drug dealers, their vindictive ex-wives calling in anonymous tips about the men to hotlines, taking photos of them drunk to submit to judges.
