Shattered

by Gabrielle Lord

  ‘It’s been such a hard week for me,’ she whispered. ‘The job’s been getting me down. The pressure of being on call all the time. Getting sick. The death of . . . the cat. When that thing arrived, it was the last straw. I didn’t know I could feel this bad.’

  Neither did I, Gemma thought, already half-rising. She just made it to Jaki’s bathroom before throwing up in the toilet.

  •

  Gemma parked in Riley Street and hurried to the Police Centre. Front desk security rang Angie and it was only a few minutes before Angie herself appeared.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ Gemma said, as they walked to the lifts.

  ‘What is it?’ Angie asked, swiping them through into forensic services as Gemma handed her the bag in which the police doll lay.

  ‘Don’t touch it till you’re gloved,’ said Gemma. ‘It’s something Jaki got in the mail. She wasn’t going to tell anyone about it.’

  They hurried into Angie’s office where Angie pulled the bag open and peered in. ‘A police doll?’ she asked. ‘Have the hormones finally got to you?’

  ‘I’m not cracking up,’ said Gemma. ‘You wait till you see it. It’s not just an ordinary police doll. It’s a very specific person. And it’s sending a very specific message.’

  Angie reached over to a dispenser on her desk and pulled out a pair of thin rubber gloves, then drew the police doll out.

  ‘What the hell’s this?’ Angie stared at the spike pushed through the doll’s navy uniform.

  ‘It was sent to Jaki. She hasn’t any idea who or why. Or so she says.’

  Angie frowned. ‘A Jaki Hunter likeness with a sharp object through the heart area. Very voodoo. Very nasty.’

  ‘Take a good look at what it is that’s stuck through the heart. My feeling is that Jaki could be in danger.’

  Angie’s frown deepened as she stretched the fabric away from the spike as Gemma had done earlier. Then she looked up.

  ‘Venetian glass. Looks like a sharp broken fragment.’

  Gently, she wiggled the piece of glass. ‘It’s been pushed right into the plastic.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Gemma. ‘Someone’s gone to the trouble of making a hole through the fabric and the doll and pushing that through. The same gold leaf effect through it –’

  ‘Like the stuff they found at the crime scene,’ said Angie.

  She carefully replaced the doll in its bag. ‘This is going straight over to Lidcombe. I don’t know where this fits in but it’s got to be related somehow.’

  ‘And it’s got to have come from someone who knows all about the family – and the murders,’ Gemma said. ‘And the Venetian glass gifts.’

  ‘I want to know exactly when this arrived. Where’s the container it came in?’

  ‘Jaki said it came in a police-issue envelope. Which she threw out.’

  ‘No! Why would she do that? She’s one of my best people. No way she’d throw away that sort of evidence.’

  ‘Angie, something’s going on with her. She’s really scared about something.’

  Angie gave Gemma a long look, then, taking the doll in its bag, left the office, returning a few moments later.

  ‘Sean’s got some exhibits to take to Lidcombe so the doll’s going with him. Let the experts take a look at it. They might be able to tell us something.’

  Angie sat at her desk and scrolled through her index. ‘The Police Association website might have a link to the people who advertise these dolls. They might give us a lead on who ordered it. Or at least who paid for it. I’m surprised at Jaki.’

  ‘She’s a mess right now,’ said Gemma.

  ‘And you?’ Angie asked. ‘What about you?’

  Gemma glanced at her watch. ‘Right now, I’m too busy to be a mess. I have an appointment at Seaforth. I’m seeing the senior partner at Natalie’s firm. Then I want to talk to Findlay Finn again.’

  ‘That memory card,’ said Angie. ‘I overlooked it when I was repacking the cartons at your place.’

  ‘I’ll bring it over, or you can pick it up next time you’re at my place.’

  ‘I’d be shot,’ said Angie, ‘if it disappeared. But it’s probably safer with you, anyway. You know how things go missing round here.’

  •

  The descent down the hill to the narrow Spit bridge, the deep green water mirroring yachts and cruisers at the moorings and the soft light of the sky above the dark ridges was wasted on Gemma. She drove on autopilot, unable to appreciate one of her old favourites, ‘Heartbreaker’, as the Stones doo-doo-dooed it through the speakers. Too miserable to listen, let alone sing along, Gemma snapped it off.

  She found the offices of Greig and Yeo up a flight of steps above a home decorations business in Seaforth’s main street of shops. Mere minutes after the receptionist at the small desk had vanished to announce her arrival, Gemma was following Mr Peter Yeo, a middle-aged man with a moustache and a fawn cardigan, into his office. Piles of books stood near the already packed bookshelves in crooked towers, and the walls were decorated with framed degrees, certificates and ancient etched cartoons from Punch that only solicitors could find amusing.

  ‘We were absolutely shocked to hear about Natalie’s husband and son,’ said Mr Yeo, after ushering Gemma into a chair opposite his desk. ‘I’d surmised some sort of marital upheaval was in the wind, of course, over the last few months. But nothing prepares one for this sort of thing.’ He studied Gemma’s business card, passed on to him by the receptionist.

  ‘Natalie has asked me to help with the investigation,’ explained Gemma, ‘and while I don’t have access to any active police procedures, I’m instructed to do what I can in my capacity as private investigator.’

  ‘I understand. I took the liberty of calling Natalie,’ said Mr Yeo, ‘and I have her permission to talk to you about this case.’

  ‘It’s purely a formality, Mr Yeo,’ said Gemma, forcing a smile and taking out her pen and notebook, ‘but we need to get the times and dates straight. Natalie has said in her witness statement that she worked here till late, and then left to pick up young Donovan from his aunt’s house.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mr Yeo. ‘It was quite late when she left. Usually she ducks out for an hour or so around three. But on Monday night, it was much later.’

  Gemma frowned. Something was not right here. Natalie had said she was the last to leave, Gemma remembered. How did Yeo know that it was late? ‘You were still here?’ she asked.

  ‘She may not have realised that,’ he said. ‘I saw her leaving as I came out of the bathroom after I’d changed into my walking gear. I like to walk to and from work. I keep some sneakers and casual clothes in the men’s toilet for that purpose.’

  ‘What time was that?’ Gemma asked, pen poised.

  ‘It was just after seven-thirty.’

  Gemma noted the time down. ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Because I always time my walks. Try and do it quicker, you know. Natalie was just going out the door when I came out of the men’s.’

  Gemma put her notebook back in her briefcase and stood up. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Yeo. As I said, just a formality.’

  A heavy shower started falling as Gemma ran back to her car. She called Angie, leaving a message asking her to ring back.

  As she put her mobile away, Gemma glanced at her watch. She would time this trip, the duplicate of Natalie Finn’s drive three nights ago to the scene of her husband’s and sister-in-law’s murders. If Yeo’s times were correct, Natalie had an extra hour to account for on the night of the murders.

  As Gemma settled into the drive, she thought grimly that either Natalie had miscalculated the time she’d left her office or she’d lied. Unaware that her boss was still on the premises, Natalie had assumed she’d been the last to lea
ve.

  By the time Gemma left the highway and turned off at the lights to drive the kilometre or so of winding road down to the cul-de-sac, she knew that Natalie’s alibi was in trouble. When she pulled into the driveway of number 28, Findlay Finn’s 1920s’ sandstone and timber homestead, exactly thirty minutes had elapsed. A trip later in the day, after the school and peak-hour rushes, would have been even faster, mused Gemma.

  She parked near the front entrance but remained in the car, pulling out her notebook, making the simple arithmetical calculations.

  Natalie Finn had a missing hour and nine minutes to explain – at least.

  •

  As she got out of her car, the front door swung open. Findlay Finn had noticed her arrival.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Missing me already?’

  They walked into the foyer, where the walls had been washed and the floor scrubbed. Gemma imagined she could still smell the blood between the cracks in the floorboards.

  ‘I’m here to get a picture of your wife.’ Remembering the ghastly painting she’d seen on his work table, she rephrased this quickly. ‘I’d like to understand what her life was like. What she wanted. How she lived.’

  ‘Why? Are you applying for the vacancy?’

  ‘Mr Finn,’ she said. ‘I don’t find your flippancy amusing. Or helpful.’

  He gave her a wry look. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s get serious. I suppose I should invite you to take a seat or something. I wasn’t working just now. I was thinking of going out for a drink. You don’t want to come with me, do you?’

  It was the last thing Gemma wanted to do but it was too good an opportunity to miss. A few glasses of wine and sometimes people just opened up. She thought of Bryson Finn’s mystery girlfriend. And the equally mysterious Lottie Lander.

  She attempted a smile. Despite her intense disinclination, she managed a reasonably cheerful ‘Why not?’

  They took his car, and Gemma noticed a large duffel bag and paint-smeared upholstery in the back as she climbed in.

  A few minutes later they were seated in a red-brick pub on the highway, Gemma praying that the stale smell of cigarettes and old beer wouldn’t make her throw up.

  It was hard to relax with Findlay: one part of her mind was reminding her that this man could easily have parked his car at the picnic grounds, taken a rifle in a sporting bag and stolen along the bush track that led from the parkland to the gate in his fence, crept around the side of the house, knocked on the door, slaughtered his wife and his brother as well as critically wounding his nephew, hurried back to his car, turned back onto the highway and driven innocently down the winding road towards his house, as if returning from a long day’s painting, until being stopped by a police car parked across the road. Yet no weapon had been found, either in the house or in the bushland, so far.

  While Gemma filled him in on some of the investigations she’d undertaken, she studied his face. He didn’t have the square handsomeness of his late brother; Findlay’s features were less defined, his hair wispier. There was a goblin quality to him, the birthmark on his neck and cheek showing through the masking make-up like a stain.

  ‘Natalie told me that Bettina was involved with your brother before she married you,’ she said.

  ‘Ah yes. That was the pattern back then. Poor old Findlay ending up with big brother’s cast-offs.’

  ‘Cast-offs?’

  ‘Once he met the glorious Natalie, that was it. Bettina was chucked aside. That’s how Bryson is. Was.’

  Findlay sipped at the glass of wine he’d bought, gazing reflectively at it. ‘Women didn’t exactly throw themselves at me.’ He laughed. ‘They still don’t. And by then, I was in my middle thirties. My mother was pushing me to get married. Actually, I offered Bettina a shoulder to cry on. She used to ring me up to get news on Bryson, and after a few months she seemed to like me so we started going out and then decided to get married.’

  A shoulder to cry on, Gemma repeated to herself, thinking of Mike Moody.

  ‘You probably want to know what my marriage was like? And you probably won’t take my word for it. But the people who do know – apart from Natalie – are dead. My mother, my wife, my brother.’

  Findlay gulped the remainder of his glass of wine, then went to the bar for another.

  ‘Let’s try a hypothetical,’ Gemma said, trying to sound light-hearted when he returned. ‘If your family was here and could speak quite frankly, what would they tell me about your marriage?’

  ‘They’d say Bettina was on the rebound; that she didn’t ever love me; that I was a salve to her bruised ego. They’d say we lived in the same house but not in the same place. That Bettina was devoted to her medical writing and her own little world. She liked bushwalking with a couple of close friends. She used to write the occasional, very obscure poem. She enjoyed being with Donovan. They’d say we got along all right. No overt conflict.’

  He’d loosened up quite a bit, Gemma thought, with the wine. ‘What about covert conflict?’

  Findlay picked up his wine glass. ‘Who cares?’

  ‘Who cares?’ Gemma asked, taken aback. ‘I care! Covert conflict builds and builds over the years. Like a volcanic eruption – all subterranean, until one day the plug blows and bang!’

  Findlay cocked his head quizzically. ‘You need a lot of hot lava for that,’ he said. ‘Think glacier instead. Where’s the explosion then?’

  He actually winked at her before sipping his wine again. Or, Gemma wondered, was it just an unfortunate nervous tic?

  ‘And what would you say about your marriage?’ she asked after a silence. ‘How did you two get along?’

  ‘You’re wondering about that missing time, aren’t you,’ he said, ‘between me leaving Medlow Bath around five and arriving back a bit after ten o’clock.’

  ‘I’m wondering what your marriage was like,’ she said. ‘You’ve changed the subject.’

  ‘It was like millions of others. We’d grown out of each other, but because of inertia and habit we just went along the same way, day after day. No animosity. No bad feelings. No feelings at all, really. Just two small meteorites in their orbits, circling endlessly, never touching.’

  Hardly the sort of passionate hatred that underlies homicidal activity, Gemma thought. If it was true. Yet even glaciers could coexist with fire – ask any Icelander.

  ‘It was an odd feeling, being at the funeral parlour this afternoon,’ Findlay was saying. ‘I had to take some clothes for her to be buried in. It was very strange, going through her drawers and pulling out underwear. When I gave them the clothes, I found myself thinking that in that box is the body of the woman I lived with for seventeen years.’ He looked past Gemma, as if expecting to see someone walk into the restaurant. ‘I had the strongest wish to take a look at her – see what she looked like now, three days after her death.’

  ‘Probably best you didn’t,’ said Gemma. ‘Once we stop breathing, we go off a fair bit.’

  ‘I’m an artist. I want to document how things are with human bodies. It was a great shame, I thought, that I couldn’t paint her then.’

  Like he’d painted her dead in her blood on the floorboards, Gemma thought, with her brother-in-law half on top of her.

  ‘Natalie told us that Bryson was having an affair,’ she said after a pause.

  ‘I wondered why she’d finally chucked him out. So that was it, eh?’

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘How could I? My brother and I were hardly intimate. And I doubt old Bryson would have told me about anything he was getting on the side. He’d be too scared I’d tell Mother.’

  ‘It’s been suggested that you did just that,’ said Gemma. ‘And that’s why your mother changed her will.’

  ‘What rot!’ he said. ‘Mother felt sorry for me. Bryson and Natalie – they’r
e pulling in a fortune every year. They own that massive place outright. You could house an aircraft in that living room of theirs. When I did a painting for them as a wedding gift, Natalie gave me the dimensions between the windows. The painting was huge. Like Blue Poles.’

  He looked a little triumphant as he spoke and Gemma wondered if that was because he already knew who’d done the killings.

  ‘Gift for Jason’s Bride,’ Gemma quoted.

  ‘So you know the story?’ he asked. ‘Natalie loved it for years. Then she wanted to replace it with a gormless painting of lilies – the sort of painting you see in furnished project houses. Some 25-year-old’s idea of what might sell as a bit of decor. Safe, decorative, populist stuff. Natalie suddenly found some reason to dislike my painting to get her bloody vegetation up in its place.’

  ‘That’s not how she explained it to me,’ said Gemma.

  ‘Well, naturally. The woman’s a philistine. So that’s how come Mother left the house to me. She lived with us, you know. Because we didn’t have kids, we got the mother.’

  ‘Were you resentful about that?’

  Findlay Finn made a self-satisfied grunt. ‘She paid me out, didn’t she? I had the place valued before . . . before the incident.’

  Gemma blinked. Incident?

  ‘You’re referring to the murder of your wife and brother?’ she said, just to make sure.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘And even in today’s market, all the agents tell me it would bring over two and a half. You’ve seen yourself how large the block is.’

  Gemma flashed him a guilty look. Had he somehow discovered her visit to the house when he was busy at the Burton Street address? But he was grappling with a packet of crisps and taking little notice of her.

  They finished their drinks and Findlay drove Gemma the short distance back to her car.

  ‘Thanks for your company,’ he said. ‘It’s a long time since I went out with a pretty woman.’

  ‘What about Lottie Lander?’ Gemma asked.

  If she was hoping to take him unawares, it worked. Findlay looked startled at first. Then he threw back his head and laughed long and hard.