by Anita Bell
Her memories of Dommie were dim now, but never gone. It had been six years since she’d felt rocks against her face and stared down a gully to see a fireball engulf her father’s battered Volvo — but it seemed longer. She could still see the face of her elder brother Marko against the window as he tried to get out, and hear her mother’s screams as she attempted to get close to the flames to help them. She remembered it every day, and her fingers played with a hole in her left ear lobe, empty now, where a baby angel should have hung to remind her that their souls were at peace, even if there had been no bodies left to lay to rest.
She got up and paced the floor. Her feet found a white sheep-skin rug at the foot of her tall queen-sized bed and she flopped backwards, letting her toes play in the wool while she waited in vain for the fan to spin her world to a nicer place.
She hadn’t thought to ask the old woman at the employment agency how old her employer’s kids would be and she regretted that now. Thorna’s Bobby and her Dommie looked exactly the same age.
She pushed her eyes closed with her palms. The pain wasn’t buried. Sedation, medication, psychotherapists and psychologists had all failed.
The bed was soft, and the breeze beneath the fan hypnotic. She listened to the blades stirring hot air with their rhythmic hum, until the growling from her belly drowned the melody. She waited another hour, but she could still hear noises coming from the kitchen. Her empty stomach gurgled with acids churning, which urged her to the door.
The voices were louder as she opened it. There were three, and two of them were arguing over vegemite. She followed the conversation down the hall past the scowling portraits and found Thorna in the kitchen dumping rotten apples from a fruit tray into the rubbish. The kitchen sparkled now, all except the cold wood stove, which Thorna was reaching into.
‘Hello,’ Nikki said.
Thorna looked up and frowned, then went back to fighting with the steak grill in the wood stove. It didn’t want to come out.
Nikki saw a large plate and an empty glass upturned on the sink. Suds defied gravity halfway down the glass while the kids still had glasses of half full orange juice in front of plates of barely nibbled vegetables. No-one could make food look less appealing than a six year old Nikki thought, but that didn’t stop her from drooling over the contents of their plates. Her stomach snarled and she wondered if part of that was because she hadn’t been invited.
Thorna Maitland thumped the steak grill in the wood stove with her hand and yelped. She sucked on her fingertip and tried again to pull it out.
‘Need help?’ Nikki asked.
‘I can manage.’
Nikki held her tongue still between her teeth and fought the urge to rap her fingernails on the counter.
At the other end, the noisy twins sat perched on two piles of packing cases. Their noses were almost level with their soggy vegetables and they patted their mashed potato flat like a mudcake, watching her, then they decorated the potato with squashed-up peas and argued about the sandwiches they’d each had at school that day.
‘It’s bee poo,’ the boy said. ‘Honey is bee pee and vegemite is bee poo that’s been factry-ised.’
‘No it’s not!’ Tina said. ‘Mum, tell him vegemite’s not bee poo that’s been factry-ised!’
‘Not factry-ised,’ she corrected. ‘Man-u-fact-ured. And vegemite is not bee poo that’s been manufactured. Now be quiet. Eat your dinner.’
The grill tugged free with a clang and Thorna dunked it into steaming suds, put her hands into rubber gloves and scrubbed. Above her, clouds of night bugs tapped the window like cheering spectators at a circus.
‘See, I told ya,’ Tina shouted.
‘Tina!’ her mother scolded.
‘Well I did,’ she said, poking her tongue out at her brother. ‘Told ya, told ya, told ya,’ she sang.
‘Mum!’ Alex whined.
‘Tina, stop teasing Alex. Eat your broccoli.’
‘Actually,’ Nikki whispered, sliding to their end of the counter. ‘Vegemite is dried dinosaur blood.’
‘Cool,’ said Alex.
‘It is not!’ Tina said, turning her nose up.
‘What’s your name?’ Alex asked. ‘I forget.’
‘Nikki,’ she said, grinning at them. ‘And it is blood.’ She held up her fingers like Dracula drooling over his next victim. ‘They chop up the dinosaurs into iddy-biddy pieces and then they stick them in a roasting pot and cook them. Everything that drips out of them is boiled and boiled and boiled until it’s all dry and that’s vegemite.’
‘It is not,’ Tina cried. ‘There’s no such thing as dinosaurs.’
‘Is too,’ said Alex. ‘They all got cooked.’
‘Did not.’
‘Did too.’
‘Did not.’
‘Did too.’
‘Well, all right,’ Nikki said, aware that her boss was frowning again. ‘Maybe they don’t use dinosaurs anymore. It’s made from cows now. Ever heard of beef extract?’
‘Sure,’ Alex said.
‘You have not,’ said Tina.
‘All right, all right,’ Thorna ordered. ‘Leave them to eat their dinner. It’s hard enough getting them to bed in this heat without getting them so excited first.’
‘How’s the baby?’ Nikki said, wondering how she was ever going to get along. ‘Did he go down okay?’
‘Bobby,’ Thorna said, glaring as if she’d just declared war, ‘is just fine.’
Nikki smiled on the inside, realising that even if rocking him on his belly had worked, the woman wouldn’t admit it if you rolled her in dirty nappies and staked her to an ants’ nest.
‘Your dinner’s in the microwave,’ Thorna said caustically. ‘Two minutes on high should do it.’
Nikki followed her instructions, and her stomach growled loudly while she waited, making the twins laugh.
‘Your tummy’s grumbly!’ Alex said.
‘Have my broccoli,’ Tina offered, pushing her plate away.
‘Tina! You eat your broccoli,’ Thorna said, raising her voice.
Then the timer binged and Nikki tested her potato with a finger. She sat beside the twins, eating overcooked chicken slowly to enjoy the flavour as it slid down her throat. Ten minutes later, the kids still hadn’t touched their broccoli and she wondered how long it would be before their mother noticed.
‘Aren’t you going to eat your baby dinosaur trees?’ she whispered, leaning over.
The boy’s eyes widened as he searched his plate. ‘Baby dinosaur trees?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Nikki said. ‘Big long-neck-a-saur-uses used to eat big dinosaur trees like the ones outside, and baby long-neck-a-saur-uses used to eat baby trees like that.’
‘She means a brachyosaur,’ Tina said. ‘You don’t have to talk to us like babies, you know. We’re nearly six.’
‘Six? You’re very tall for six.’
‘Nearly six. He’s still five, you know.’
‘You’re still five too!’
‘Yeah, but we’re big kids,’ Tina said, starting to munch on her baby trees.
The boy ate the whole top off one broccoli stalk and reached for another one, pushing bits of green leaves back between his teeth when his mouth got too full. ‘Are you Eric’s wife too now?’ he asked, smiling.
‘Okay,’ Thorna ordered. ‘Bedtime!’ She swept the children from the kitchen and marched them down the hall. ‘Off to bed,’ she shouted, ushering them up the stairs in front of her.
Nikki didn’t finish her meal. She listened to Thorna upstairs, chastising her son for calling his stepfather by his first name and obviously not for the first time. Nikki tidied their plates away, scraping the food scraps into a little rubbish bin beside the sink, and washed and dried the dishes before putting them away. She waited until after eight thirty, but Thorna Maitland didn’t come back downstairs, and as much as she wanted her to, Nikki thought she could see why. What she couldn’t see, was how her life could possibly get worse.
Nikki woke hearing b
umping somewhere in the house and then footsteps in the hall towards the stairs. She lay silent in the darkness, not sure if it was only her imagination refusing to let her settle into a new bed. There was another bump, closer this time, and she looked at the dim digitals on her bedside clock.
10.38pm.
The gap beneath her door lit dully, like a torchlight flashing in the hall. She flung back the covers and hurried quietly to the door, pushing her weight and ear to the cool timber.
Footsteps.
Nearer now.
Her hand clasped the knob. Was it Thorna come to talk?
No. The footsteps were heavier, like boots. The door felt like ice and her cheek froze to it, listening.
Closer, then further, backwards and forwards up the hall. Whoever it was sounded busy. The walls bumped again down the hall, more footsteps and more bumping. As the sounds drew progressively nearer to her room, Nikki’s hands clasped tighter around the knob. Her fingers found a privacy latch. She pressed it, wincing at the noisy click.
The footsteps, already close, fell silent for a moment and then they moved closer.
She tightened her grip on the knob. There was breathing on the other side of the door, but no sounds, no smells, no hint of who it could be.
The knob twisted inside her hand, turning as far as the lock allowed.
Silence. And the footsteps moved off, much quieter this time, as if deliberately staying on the rugs. The gap beneath her door grew dark and the stairs at the end of the hall creaked.
Nikki let out her breath, realising only then that she’d been holding it. She sat back in her bed, staring at the door and listening to the sounds of the night.
The timber floorboards somewhere above her creaked. A door closed. And the house fell silent.
She lay there with her sheet pulled up beneath her chin and her eyes fixed permanently on the door. But the only sounds she heard after that were from outside — a hollow thumping in the stable and a defiant whinny at the moon. Somehow, the sound brought her comfort — the thought that other living creatures were just as restless in the night as she was.
Locklin saddled Jack in the moonlight and took his beach towel from behind the seat in the Bedford. He pushed it gently into his saddlebag and fastened the straps loosely so his treasure wouldn’t be crushed. Then he slid up into the saddle.
He kept his horse off the gravel, but the stallion was full of himself to be home and pranced and snorted, begging for wind in his mane. Locklin stroked Jack’s neck and eased him into the trees on the east side of the house, furthest from Thorna’s bedroom. Then he clicked his tongue once and they were off, settling into an easy gallop for the boathouse.
It had been a long night.
At midnight Sydney time, Senior Detective Parry pulled his reading glasses from his chest pocket and looked at the two photos again. The first was of a girl, who Underwood told him was nearly seventeen. She didn’t have the eyes of a killer, which was the other thing the sergeant was trying to convince him of.
The second photo was more detailed. Parry pushed his glasses higher onto his nose, flicked on Burkett’s desk lamp and stooped under it to study the image closely. What he saw made his stomach churn, even after a lifetime of looking at murder scenes.
It wasn’t the amount of blood that made him sick or the sight of a body curled up in the foetal position after rigor mortis had set in but the woman’s eyes, glazed and lifeless now. Only hours before the photo they’d looked at the world from a living, breathing, beautiful woman who had a daughter, a husband and a successful career. She had eaten breakfast the day she died, talked with her family — just like his own beautiful daughter had done on the day that she’d been murdered.
And the victim liked to cook and to paint, so the file said. She wasn’t very good at it, but it helped her think. That’s all she was now. Recordings in a police file, memories for those who knew her, and a fresh mound of earth somewhere in a cemetery plot. So alive one minute, and so dead the next.
No. It wasn’t the gore that made his gut feel hollow, he realised. Or even the smell of death that always clung so heavily to everything it touched that he could almost smell it in the photograph. It was having to reconstruct the crime, to relive every murder through the eyes of the victim in order to solve it. Trying to see what they saw, think what they thought, and all the while trying not to be affected by it.
There were questions about his daughter’s death that he could not answer. Her body had been lost in the fire that took the meaning from his life when it took hers. If he could have known that she died quickly without pain or fear, it might have been easier. But as there had been no body, there was no closure to his constant wondering. She was just gone, and the drug dealers responsible — the three who had torched his home in payback for a case he’d been working on — had only two more years left to serve in jail.
Parry stared at the photo again and saw another innocent life that had been stolen — an innocent life like his daughter’s, which he had sworn to avenge.
There had been seventy-four innocent victims between his daughter’s death and this one — seventy-four innocents who would rest in peace because he’d put their killers behind bars. And still, he couldn’t sleep at night.
This particular woman he remembered seeing on the news about a week earlier — some literary award or something that she’d been presenting in her role as Minister for the Arts. But now, in the photo, he saw her in the only way he would ever remember her, as a corpse lying in a crimson tide of blood and shattered crystal.
Her fingers gripped a tiny silver angel attached to a necklace. And behind her, low on the wall, was scrawled some kind of symbol, much like a triangle on a stick, perhaps a knife, or a sketch of the murder weapon, followed by four jagged but very legible letters in the victim’s blood. They were the first four letters of her daughter’s name. And as far as Sergeant Underwood was concerned, the intent of the message was clear.
‘An open and shut,’ he told Parry. ‘The daughter did it. I don’t see why either CIB or the Fraud Squad would be interested. No offence, sirs,’ Underwood said, looking from Parry to Burkett with every indication that he was the one who had taken offence.
‘The murder case is still yours, Sergeant,’ Parry said. ‘That’s as much as I can tell you right now.’
‘What about this necklace?’ Burkett asked. ‘Can I see it?’
Underwood shook his head. ‘It’s missing,’ he said. ‘It disappeared from the crime scene at the same time as the girl did. That’s another point against her,’ he added, handing Burkett the next photo while Parry was still looking at the first.
Burkett slumped against a wall and took his time with it.
More like a postcard from a museum, it obviously hadn’t been developed in a police lab. This one was the size of a holiday snap, but it was of a glass-like church statue sitting on a sheet of purple velvet for contrast. Beside the statue was a gold plaque inscribed with dimensions of the artifact and contact details of the craftsman, which were top small to read from the photograph.
‘We’ll need this enlarged,’ Burkett said, flipping it over to read the captions on the back. The first was a valuation and he whistled at the number of zeros after the dollar sign. The second said ‘murder weapon, before’ with a date only two weeks earlier. ‘Where did this come from?’ he asked Underwood.
‘Aaron Fletcher took them for insurance purposes the day his wife died. Coincidence, though. He said he bought it as an anniversary gift for her and needed to forward a photograph to the insurance company so they could underwrite the policy. That writing on the back’s mine.’
‘This Belgian artist,’ Burkett said, reading it again, ‘the guy who crafted it. He might have another set. Have you contacted him to verify authenticity of the valuation?’
‘No,’ Underwood said. ‘I didn’t see the point. We’ve got a copy of the original valuation certificate.’
‘Is that how much it cost?’ Burkett said, pointing
to the number with all the zeros. ‘A hundred and twenty thousand?’
‘Yes, but it’s worth more than that. The craftsman cut a deal expecting to get more work for the gallery.’
‘Or a cut from the insurance money,’ Burkett said, crossing his arms.
‘Don’t go there,’ Parry suggested. ‘The Commissioner may still have coals hot for you after the mess with the misplaced paintings.’
‘Oh, well what am I supposed to think?’ Burkett said, unhappy with his new partner behaving like a mother. ‘The guy pulls the same trick last month over a few stolen paintings, and we’re not supposed to investigate a perfectly logical conclusion? Come on!’
Underwood’s temple throbbed while Parry tried not to smile. He was thinking the same thing.
‘I’ve heard of churches,’ Burkett said, ‘being held responsible for a lot of terrible things in my time, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of an actual church being the murder weapon in a murder case. Where is it now, in forensics?’
Underwood took a step back before answering. ‘What’s left of it, yes. The lab technicians picked up most of the fragments at the murder scene. A few more they had to get from the morgue after they were fished out of the Minister’s chest. The others, well …’
‘I need it reconstructed,’ Parry interrupted.
‘Sir?’
‘A whole piece of evidence usually tells more tales than a fragment, sergeant.’
‘Yes, sir, but … I mean … Have you ever dropped a drinking glass on a tiled floor?’
‘No, but my little girl was an expert.’ Parry didn’t add it was before she was murdered. He looked at Burkett, wondering if he knew what it was like to be family man. The boy wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but that didn’t count for much these days. He still could be paying maintenance somewhere and Parry made a mental note to check on that later. He wouldn’t put a kid’s father in the line of fire if he could avoid it, no matter which side Burkett was playing. Which meant he might have to change his plans a bit. ‘Crystal doesn’t just shatter,’ he added. ‘It’s more like a spectacular explosion. But I still want them to try to reconstruct it.’
