'No. Aidan helped with the ordering tonight,' her father stated, staring dubiously at a jellied dish in front of him. Aidan and Cassie laughed loudly together, the area around Cassie's plate clear of the mess that surrounded everyone else's. The waiter arrived with another bottle of wine and took it straight to their side of the table. Jill's mother caught her eye.
'How was it out there today, darling?' Frances asked.
'Not bad. Pretty good, actually. Liverpool's kind of growing on me.'
'Maybe that's because the case is nearly over,' her mum said. 'Does it still look as though it'll be wrapped up soon?'
'Yeah, it looks that way,' said Jill.
Her mother smiled. 'Do you think they'll send you back to Maroubra?'
'I doubt it,' Jill answered. 'But they could send me anywhere.' Her mobile was ringing. Jill reached for her handbag. 'Sorry, ma, just hang on a second.'
'Jackson,' she said into the phone.
It was Gabriel.
'Sorry to interrupt your evening, Jill,' he said. 'I just got off the phone with Last. The coroner's got a report on the bodies. He wants us to go over to Glebe and get a wrap-up.'
'Tonight?' Jill sighed, looking around the table at her family. Her mother watched her.
'Yep. The pressure's on to let the public know that Nguyen's dead. They want it released to the media before the morning.'
'Okay. I'm out to dinner with my family. I'll be over there in half an hour.'
'Don't hurry too much, Jill. The coroner's still tying everything up. Forensics are faxing over some findings to add to his report.'
'I'll see you when I get there, then.'
She hung up.
Frances Jackson was already standing. Jill didn't think it would be long before this party broke up altogether anyway. Her father had been frowning for the past fifteen minutes. Cassie and Aidan's conversation was garnering them stares and raised eyebrows from nearby tables; they laughed and argued, oblivious.
She made her apologies and left the restaurant.
Jill made it to Glebe in fifteen minutes, parking out the front of the building on Parramatta Road. She reattached her gunbelt and showed her badge to gain entry to the Coroner's Court. At the office of the state coroner, David Mobbs, she gave her name, asking the PA if he was available. There was no sign yet of Gabriel.
'I'm sorry, Sergeant Jackson. He's not ready for you yet,' the woman said from behind a glass partition. Her face was haggard, her hair a mess. Jill guessed they would've been working around the clock since the bodies came in early on Tuesday morning. 'If you just hang on a moment, I'll try to get some idea of the wait.'
The woman made a brief phone call and turned back towards Jill.
'Going to be up to an hour, I'm afraid,' she said.
Jill thanked her and made her way back to the front of the building. A departmental vehicle pulled in behind hers, and she walked out to meet Gabriel.
'Maybe another hour,' she said to him by way of greeting. 'Want to go get a coffee? It stinks in there.'
They walked around the corner and into a side street with a brightly lit café. They were the sole customers, and the pimply waiter alternated between watching them and the plasma screen behind the counter showing a Bollywood movie. After ordering, Jill moved to a Formica table at the back of the room, and they took a seat under glaring fluorescent lights. The coffee was barely passable.
'So, do you still reckon Joss will be charged?' said Jill.
'Probably,' said Gabriel. 'But the charges will likely be dropped before it gets to court.'
'That's what I think,' said Jill. 'When all the evidence comes through linking the men in the house to the home invasion gang, it'll be ruled self-defence, and he'll get off.' She sipped the coffee slowly; it may as well have been warm water. She grimaced. 'I don't think anything will come of the incident with the death of his childhood friend, either, do you?'
'Nah,' said Gabriel. 'Too long ago, extenuating circumstances – the kid killed was involved in the robbery of his father's shop.'
'Joss has been worried about that for a long time.'
'Mmm. I've actually been wondering whether this boy Fuzzy – Carl Waterman – was Cutter's first kill.'
'I know. The thought's crossed my mind as well. I guess we'll never know now.' She pushed the cup away from her and leaned back in the uncomfortable seat. 'Bizarre, the way Joss's life caught up with him, isn't it?' she said. 'It's like you try to push away parts of yourself that you don't want to know anymore, but they always come back to be dealt with.'
'There's one part of his childhood that won't be coming back for more.'
'Cutter,' she said.
'Uh huh.'
She was quiet for a moment, and then found herself saying, 'Gabriel, I really appreciated you opening up the other day about your wife and your past.' She suddenly wanted him to know this. It could be that they would be separated by work very soon. 'In fact,' she said, 'I've really enjoyed working with you over the last two weeks. I've learned a lot.'
'Thanks. We've had fun.'
Her brow wrinkled a little. She didn't know whether she'd really describe the experience that way, but she kept going.
'I was terrified about coming out to Liverpool, to be honest,' she said. 'I have a hard time getting to know new people. You made it easy.'
'It was easy because we're both in the same boat,' he said. 'People usually find me weird.'
'So I'm weird? Thanks! '
'Yep, a bit.'
'Anyway,' Jill shook her head and laughed. 'We were talking about the past never really staying buried, and I guess I've also been through some things that make it hard for me to open up.' She coughed; her cheeks felt hot under the lights. Such conversations left her feeling as though she was walking through shadowy waters over rolling logs. She feared that at any moment she'd dislocate a knee or step into a sinkhole and never emerge again. 'Um, yeah,' she said, 'I just thought I'd say that I appreciated you being so open and easy to get along with.' There, she thought. That would do.
'You said that,' he said. 'So. What'd you go through that makes it hard for you to open up?'
Just like that. He just came out and asked things. God! She swallowed. Thought about what to say. Stared at him, then at the table. Unrolled the wax strip around the top edge of her cardboard coffee cup. This was when her words were going to fail her. She couldn't think of a thing to say. He waited, patiently.
'I got kidnapped when I was twelve,' she said. Fuck.
He sat quietly, attentive, his face neutral. Maybe it was that, she thought later. No horror or great concern, no reaching over the table to touch or comfort her. No expressions of anger and indignation about how someone could do that to a child. She found herself speaking again, in a rush.
'I was at a sports carnival,' she said. 'I was hanging out at the back fence with my two best friends. They were smoking. I was gonna try it. First time. There was a gap in the fence. It was surrounded by trees. We just slipped through.' She took a sip from her ruined cup. It was empty, but this barely registered.
'There was a guy,' she continued. 'I didn't see anything. I was coming through the gap in the fence backwards and I just got grabbed and lifted up. They put something over my head. I started screaming. I heard my friends screaming too, but he ran with me back to the car. He threw me in and the car drove off. There was another one driving.'
Jill stared unseeingly at the countertop. She was back in the car.
'He tied the thing tighter around my head and then he put his feet on me. He must've put me on the floor of the car. They had me three days, although when I got back, I thought I'd been gone, like, two weeks or something. They kept me in a basement. I was blindfolded. Alone, when they weren't with me.'
Well not really alone. Jill thought briefly about the white-eyed girl – a dissociated part of herself that had separated from her consciousness when the pain and fear had become unbearable. 'They burned me,' she said in a small voice. 'Raped me. I didn't eve
n know what sex was.' Her voice trailed off.
'They dropped me off at a school oval,' she continued, finally, in a tiny voice. 'I was naked. Still blindfolded. I often wonder who found me, and if they're okay now. I can't remember any of that last bit. There are lots of blanks.' She looked up at him. 'I suppose I should be grateful for that.' She laughed, harshly. 'Stuff still comes back in nightmares, though,' she said. 'I guess that's what I meant when I said the past keeps coming back.'
'That's fucked,' he said. 'Sorry.' Then, 'Did they catch them?'
'Nup. Not then,' she said. 'The younger one killed the older one when he got senile and started telling anyone who would listen about the sick shit they used to do to kids. They were part of an organised ring.'
And I killed the other one six months ago. She thought it, but didn't speak the words. The knowledge registered feelings of relief, satisfaction, horror. She stared at her hands.
Jill's mobile sounded, and she fumbled reaching for it.
'Jackson,' she said; then, 'Okay. Be right over.' She put the phone back in her jacket pocket. Gabriel was already standing.
'They're ready?' he asked.
'Yep.' She found her legs wobbly when she stood. 'Forensics have faxed over a copy of their findings to Mobbs. His report's being printed now.'
Fifteen minutes later, Jill's passenger door wasn't yet shut when Gabriel hooked a U-turn in front of the traffic on Parramatta Road. Tyres shrieked. She held on. He hit the siren.
'It wasn't him.' Jill said it again, third time.
'He's going to go and get them, Jill. Try to get them on the phone.'
The coroner's report had revealed that the burned bodies in the home of Joss Preston-Jones and Isobel Rymill belonged to two men named Simon Esterhase and Guo Qi Xu, AKA Tatts. Each had a substantial criminal record. They were both known associates of Henry Nguyen. Cutter.
A comparison of the organic material found at the Rice and Capitol Hill crime scenes had specifically ruled out that Nguyen was one of the dead men.
The phone rang unanswered at the Mosman residence.
34
PERFECT TIMING AS usual, Mother, thought Joss, driving through the night back to Mosman from Rozelle Hospital. He'd made the trip countless times throughout his adolescence – his grandfather doing the driving in the early days, then his grandmother. Finally, before leaving for the army, he would use the trip as practice for his driver's licence. His mother had made the trip many more times without them, in an ambulance, after hours of screaming obscenities, often naked, sometimes in front of their affronted North Shore neighbours.
Tonight, Joss's wife and child made the trip with him. He figured that his family's arrival and the disruption to his mother's routine had caused her fragile chemical stability to crumble yet again.
He stole a glance at Isobel's pale profile, and gripped the steering wheel tighter. It wasn't as though their presence in the Mosman house could have disturbed his mother too terribly. Isobel had said barely anything since they had climbed from the roof of their burning home on Monday night, two days ago. Even Charlie was quiet, listless.
Thinking back to that night, Joss could almost smell the smoke in his daughter's hair. When he'd handed Charlie to Isobel on the roof, the night air and the urgency of the situation had roused his sensibilities. Leaving Isobel clutching a wide-eyed and shuddering Charlie, he had worked quickly, the sound of the flames now audible over the noise of their smoke alarm. He had lowered the ladder to the ground and gone back for Charlie. He had prised his daughter from his wife's grip at the edge of the roof, and again clinging to her with one arm, had instructed Isobel to follow him. On the ground safely, they walked in single file towards the front of the house. A huddle of neighbours now stood in the street, mobile phones to their ears, panic painted on their faces in the streetlights.
Joss had pulled his blank-faced wife into the shadows near the Wilkinson's terrace next door, motioning her to squat with him behind the large council wheelie bins. Urgently, he'd asked Isobel what had happened when he'd left the room, and she had recounted, as dry and factual as a police officer testifying in court, what had happened in the bedroom. His relief when she had described the dead man's features had brought him to sobs. But the emotion behind the tears quickly gave way to grief for his wife. She had that night become a member of a terrible club, and it was his fault. He knew too well that killing another human being left a terrible legacy.
When he'd heard emergency services approaching their street, Joss had made Isobel narrate, three times, an alternative story: that he had killed both men in the house. When the details of her account were consistent, he had taken her hand and Charlie's, and walked with them through the smoke and out into the street.
Now, in the driver's seat, Joss steered with one hand; the other rubbed at his forehead. Either Isobel would come to believe the tale he'd constructed that night or she wouldn't. Regardless, the weight of the repression, or the horror of the truth, would burden her. His poisoned past had infected his innocent girls. He could never forgive himself. They'd probably have a better life without him.
A gentle rain smeared the world outside the car. Joss wished they could stay in here forever, that he could just drive with his family to another place, another time, where none of this had happened, and his girls were shiny and smiling again. He glanced into the rear-view mirror. The shoosh of the tyres on the night-wet road had lulled Charlie into a fitful sleep. Isobel's forehead rested on the passenger window, her breath a frosty ghost on the glass. What did she see out there with that thousand-mile stare, he wondered.
Joss accelerated carefully. He hunched forward over the wheel, staring intently through the drizzle. Nearly there. He had to get back to the house in Mosman. The ghouls in his mind were impatient, and the bourbon was waiting.
It's taking forever to get there, thought Jill.
Night roadworks had snarled the traffic, and Gabe kept the siren on until they hit Mosman.
When they finally arrived, Jill climbed carefully out of the car. The dirt-tang of the rain on the road filled her nostrils, all senses acute. Joss's phone had rung out five times on the trip over, and her neck was taut with tension. If Cutter was coming after this family, she thought, it could well be tonight. She and Gabriel had been out here until late last night finalising the statements. The police presence would've kept him away yesterday. In the car, speeding over here, Jill had tried to reason that it was more likely that Nguyen had done a runner – figured his luck had run out and gone to ground. But the intensity of Gabriel next to her as he negotiated the vehicle through the city traffic had chased the thought from her mind.
Gabriel believed Cutter was coming here.
She took several deep breaths to flood her bloodstream with oxygen and moved around the car to his side.
The mansion squatted in the darkness. If there was any moon, tonight it was obscured by the mist that hung above them. The drizzle had stopped for now, but it draped, poised, waiting to fall.
Jill led Gabriel in through the heavy iron gates, her radio in hand. The overgrown vegetation around them shifted and breathed in the dark; the garden of a madwoman. There were hiding spots everywhere, and Jill kept her other hand near her gun. The house ahead lay completely silent, but she'd expected that. There were obviously no nursing staff on tonight. The nurse, or Joss or Isobel, would've answered the phone if they were in there. If they'd been able to. She swallowed the thought, and moved closer to the house.
On the threshold of the ornate entryway, Gabriel touched her elbow, pointed with two fingers to his eyes, and then to the right of the house. Jill nodded and walked left; Gabriel moved to the right. She debated whether to call for backup. She'd wait, she decided, until they'd determined whether the perimeter was secure. She hooked her radio back onto her gunbelt, took her gun from its holster and unclipped her torch.
Most of the gravel path that must've once surrounded the house had been reclaimed by the garden; the sound of her footfalls wa
s absorbed by wet vegetation. Jill smelled rot with each step.
She'd not reached the back of the sprawling house when her tread crunched. Broken glass glinted at her feet in the torchlight. She directed the beam upwards. The small white-framed window probably opened onto a laundry or small study; the glass had been shattered, and the window hung ajar.
Jill signalled Gabriel's radio with her own, and stepped away from the window, into the grass. She made a quiet call for police assistance and waited for her partner. She watched him jog silently from around the back of the building.
'I've called for backup,' she whispered, playing the torch beam over the window and back down to the glass below to show him what she'd found.
He nodded.
It was not difficult to gain a toehold in the red brick wall for the one step-up needed to reach the window. The frame was clear of glass. Jill pulled herself in after Gabriel. As she'd guessed, the room was a laundry. A tiny one. These houses were all designed by men, Jill couldn't help but think, in the days when a male would never wash a shirt or cook a meal. She and Gabriel stood face to face in the darkness. Their breathing was the only sound she could hear.
'We should do this together,' he whispered.
'No time,' she said. The blood-spattered walls from the house in Capitol Hill filled her vision, and she felt compelled to move quickly. What if he's in here? What if they're still alive?
She couldn't decide whether the look Gabriel gave her was of relief or doubt, but he nodded, and they moved out of the room.
'I'll take downstairs,' he whispered.
Jill kept her back to the wall as she made her way to the grand staircase in the centre of the loungeroom. Cutter had no firearm offences on his sheet, but that meant nothing – he had access to the nine guns from the Capitol Hill robbery. She ran lightly up the stairs with her heart in her mouth, bolted to the cover of a wall and squatted in a crouch.
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