She scowled at the mirror and increased the angle on her incline bench to forty-five degrees. As she started on six sets of fifty sit-ups, she realised she missed the pain. Her mind drifted back to work.
Following her phone call from the Rice residence, Superintendent Last had arranged for a tech truck to travel to the house. He'd called her at home at eight with the results. Not only had luminol fluoresced all over the floorboards and the rug in Justine's bedroom, revealing the presence of organic matter, but Justine had also presented the techies with a plastic shopping bag.
'What was in it?' Jill had asked her new boss. What else did this girl have to tell them?
'A bath towel,' he'd said evenly. 'She kept it after wiping up the blood and semen. Can you believe it?'
'She wanted to tell us what happened. She just couldn't put it into words the first time, and then the lie got too big,' said Jill.
'Great work, Jill.' His voice was exhausted. He sounded old. 'We should get results from the sample tomorrow afternoon. What they get from the other trace you found out at Capitol Hill with Gabriel should follow.'
Jill lost count at one hundred crunches, caught up in her thoughts. Before leaving Justine, she'd helped the girl to tell Ryan and her mother what had happened upstairs. Ryan had taken off, hate and tears in his eyes. She wondered whether he'd returned yet, and what would happen between the young couple.
She'd seen it all before. Sometimes the male ego couldn't take the blow when his partner had been sexually assaulted. All of her tears following a rape were, in some men's eyes, accusations of weakness, reproaches because he hadn't been able to protect her. When the victim also held a corresponding unspoken belief that her partner should have been there, stopped it, the couple rarely made it. When they did, sometimes Jill felt they shouldn't have: the anger would eat them alive.
Jill had ensured that Narelle Rice had all the phone numbers for the community services that could help. She'd follow up and urge Justine and Ryan to have counselling. It had taken a few years and a couple of different therapists for Jill to gain some relief following her own ordeal. Still, killing her rapist years later was what had given her the most release. Now that was something you never got told in therapy. The memory of his death was still a strong, clear image. She tried to tell herself that the healing came from the knowledge that he could never hurt her again. She forced herself not to relive the satisfaction of kicking him to death.
She unhooked her ankles and rolled off the incline bench onto the floor. Nine-thirty. She longed for the shower and her bed. Instead, she walked the well-trodden path to her hand weights and took them back to the bench. Three sets of dumbbell flies first.
11
'I'M NOT GOING.'
'Isobel. I told you. He'll come here. I can identify him.'
Joss stood in the kitchen facing his wife, her arms folded in determination; his, to keep from throwing up. Fortunately, Isobel became very quiet when angry. His hangover was a living entity this morning.
He'd decided last night that he had to tell his wife the truth – that he had recognised one of the men from the home invasion, the most violent of all of them, the man who had almost cut her boss's legs off. He had told Isobel the man's name, Henry Nguyen, Cutter, and that he had known him from his childhood in Cabramatta.
'I understand that we've got to do something about it,' Isobel said. 'But I'm not leaving you. Charlie and I are staying right here. We've got to tell the police. We'll tell them now.'
The most reasonable statement in the world, thought Joss, except that telling the police would change their lives forever, maybe even send him to gaol. He'd left all that behind him. The old Joss was dead. He had to do everything he could to hang on to the new world he'd built for himself.
'I've only told you half the story,' he said.
'You're kidding.'
His eyes showed he was not.
For the first time in his life, Joss told someone what had happened to Fuzzy.
In her kitchen, Jill prepared herself some lunch to take to work, emptied her dishwasher. After stacking her breakfast dishes inside it, she looked around for her handbag. She spotted it near the front door. When she bent to pick it up, she groaned with the pain from her stomach muscles. After a couple of attempts she managed to grab the bag using just one handle. Its contents tipped out onto the floor. For the second time, the vegetables from the Asian food store spilled everywhere, and she remembered the scene from yesterday.
Laughing aloud, Jill squatted to retrieve them, and was still smiling when she left her apartment.
Joss heard the empathy in his boss's voice when he told him he'd be taking a second day away from work. His dangerous 'accident' would be the topic of the lunchroom again today. His colleagues had clucked with alarm when he'd told them he'd fallen from a ladder, leaving him relieved he'd not told them the real reason for his bruised face. It reminded the assessors of the other freak-accidents-around-the-home they'd processed over the years. Apparently, more people died in their bathrooms than in motor vehicle collisions, he'd heard at lunch on Monday.
Isobel had insisted that she would go to work.
'I might be able to find Cutter,' she'd reasoned. When he'd told her about Fuzzy, and explained to her why he couldn't tell the police about his connection to Cutter, she hadn't flinched. Instead, she was in problem-solving mode, and he wished he'd trusted her earlier.
Isobel worked for one of the three largest law firms in Australia. Her role included investigating the paper trail of anyone who wasn't on their side, and sometimes those who were. She had access to almost every piece of electronic information the police did. Privacy meant little if you had the technology and resources to get around the flimsy obstacles set up to protect it.
For his part, Joss was going to see his mother. Back to where it all began.
Tiptoeing up from the loungeroom last night, with most of the second bottle of bourbon rendering the staircase a roiling escalator, Joss had wheeled a chair from the study out to the hallway in front of the linen closet. He'd positioned the swivel chair under the manhole cover and held onto it until the floor stopped moving. Managing to climb onto the seat of the chair, he stood with his feet slightly apart and his hand on the wall to stop the spinning.
As quietly as possible he'd popped the manhole cover, sliding it back into the roof. Ordinarily, he would easily have been able to pull himself from the chair up into the dark cavity overhead. Last night, however, when he'd gripped the edge of the manhole and tried to launch himself up, his feet had propelled the wheeled chair into the closed doors of the master bedroom. With Isobel standing over him holding a tearful Charlie, he'd summoned as much dignity as he could muster and made his way to his side of the bed, where he found himself this morning.
Problem was, now he couldn't keep his mind off the toolbox in the ceiling.
The knife had gone into the box when he'd returned from Rwanda. He'd moved the box from the ceiling in their former home to this house when they moved in five years ago, and as far as he knew, no one else knew what was inside.
Isobel had some idea of the horrors of the genocide in Africa. He knew that when he'd come home, she'd read everything she could find about the Australian peacekeepers' role there. She knew that Joss was one of the thirty or so Australian soldiers who'd been on-site during the Kibeho massacre, when four thousand Hutus had been slaughtered over the course of four days in a displaced person's camp of one hundred thousand people. Thousands more had been horribly wounded. She knew that the rules of engagement for the Australians had prohibited them firing their weapons unless they were directly fired upon. They were expressly forbidden from using their firearms in defence of the civilians.
Two battalions of Tutsi warriors had surrounded the camp, convinced it was harbouring Hutu fighters. In fact, the majority of the camp consisted of women and children, but that had not stopped the bloodlust. The Tutsis had mostly used machetes in order to save bullets. The carnage would have sent
any witness mad, but for a soldier, trained to defend and attack, the horror of the utter helplessness had been unspeakable. Literally. Although Isobel knew the facts released to the media, no one knew what Joss had seen and done in those three days. His brothers and sisters in arms had their own unspoken memories; he read them in their eyes on the rare occasions they caught up, but only Joss and the dead Tutsi soldier knew why he kept the knife locked in the toolbox.
He turned his eyes away as he washed his sodden, uneaten Weetbix down the sink, rinsed the breakfast dishes and left the kitchen.
Then he went back upstairs to get his knife. Despite the humidity, Joss kept the hood up on his jacket when he changed buses at Wynyard. The bruising on his face was at its most livid this morning, and he noticed that people averted their eyes when he glanced in their direction; today that suited him fine.
As always, he felt guilty on the way to his mother's place.
His maternal grandparents had moved Joss and his mother out of Cabramatta after the car accident. The fight had left her after that. The much-loved only child of Richard and Joan Preston-Jones, lost to schizophrenia, and later heroin, was finally home.
The house in Mosman evoked a confusing mix of nostalgia and pleasure for Joss. After six months of half-arsed rebellion, he'd settled with relief into the quiet habits of his grandparents, happy to swap the chaos of his childhood for their structure and normalcy. The house was the first real home he'd ever had – he and his mother had bounced between rental units, her friends' loungerooms, squats and refuges for his first thirteen years. The sedate mansion that had smothered his mother when she was growing up was, for him, the first place he could breathe.
It hadn't been that way in the very beginning, though.
Now, staring through the rain into his childhood, his breath fogging the window on the bus, Joss thought about the only time he had tried to unite his Cabramatta past with his Mosman present. He'd been living with his grandparents for three months or so, and although he'd made a few friends at his new school, Sandhurst College, the other boys had had a great time at his expense, filling every moment outside of class with stories of his ignorance of the social etiquette they took for granted. After fighting three of the loudest on the oval after school, they began to make comments only when they were in groups so that he couldn't distinguish the speaker, and they developed codes that sent them into fits when he walked by, like raucous packs of birds.
He had missed his brothers from Cabra. Their escapades became heroic adventures in his mind, adventures that he knew the pissants at his new school would never have survived. He remembered his face pushed into the gravel one night, squashed with Fuzzy against a railway wall while a train passed above them, deafened, aware that he would be decapitated if he raised his head just a fraction. Just when he'd thought that the screaming monster above them would suck him up, the last carriage had passed, and he and Fuzzy had risen, their legs trembling in the dark, to finish their graffiti piece on the side of the wall. They'd been legends for a year for that piece, sprayed onto a virgin wall that everyone else had assumed was untouchable.
He remembered running from the transit cops with Cutter, Hendo and Tatts, jumping fences, dropping level to level in carparks, turning back to laugh at the fat fucks running behind them. He remembered, after trashing a school, the searchlights of a police chopper turning night into day. His friends had scattered in all directions, but he'd chosen the worst route – across the school quadrangle. Two cops behind him, guns drawn, shouted at him to stop or they'd shoot. He'd imagined the bullets entering his back, but he didn't stop. He still wondered at his indifference to death that night.
And so he'd invited them over. And, unbelievably, Tatts, Esterhase and Cutter had come to Mosman. Hardly anyone knew Tatts's real name: Guo Qi Xu. Even the teachers couldn't say it properly, so they also called him Tatts. Tatts's uncle, this mad motherfucker who sold smack from his tattoo parlour, had been practising on his nephew since Tatts was six. Tatts loved the body art, and hated his real name, so everyone was happy. Mouse and Cutter wanted Tatts's uncle to do all of their crew with spiders crawling around their necks. Joss and Esterhase had copped some shit from the others when they'd refused.
Joss remembered his grandmother's face when she'd first seen Tatts, but to her credit, she'd welcomed his friends, preparing them sandwiches and juice to eat in the garden by the pool. She'd provided them with tennis racquets and left them alone to spend the day together. Joss had known that inviting them was a mistake from the moment they arrived. Tatts had pulled out a joint as soon as she left. But it was when he'd caught Esterhase with his grandfather's camera in his jacket that Joss told them to leave. He'd never felt so alone. He was no longer one of them, but he didn't want to be a Sandhurst boy.
He got off the bus on Military Road and walked the last couple of blocks to the house. Aged, overhanging trees kept most of the rain off his shoulders, and he breathed in the smell of the wet road, remembering cold, damp afternoons and the welcoming warmth of home. Smiling, he put his hands into his pockets.
His fingers brushed against the knife.
The light left his eyes as he walked up the path of his grandparents' house.
The nurse stepped back and let him in without a smile. He'd seen her here before, but couldn't remember her name. She didn't offer it. She was one of a rotating shift of healthcare workers from an agency paid for through his grandparents' estate.
His mum looked just as she had for the past twenty years. She was sitting by the wide bay window in the main loungeroom, rocking slightly. She looked up when he came in. Her mouth stopped working for just a moment before her tongue continued its rhythmic exploration of her teeth and lips, endlessly pushing in and out of her mouth. Tardive dyskinesia, caused by three decades of antipsychotic medication – no wonder she hadn't wanted to take the shit, he thought for the thousandth time, bending to catch her head with a kiss as she rocked.
He pulled a heavy armchair over next to hers, and sat down. One of the kinder nurses, Kathy Lin, had told him that his mother liked to be touched, to have her arm stroked, her hair brushed. He watched the rocking slow as he communicated with his mother in the only way they had left. He talked to her, the usual one-way conversation, and wondered what she heard, what she took in, just as he always had.
When it was time for her medication, Joss left her with the nurse and the production line of pills and went upstairs to his old bedroom. When he'd left home, his grandmother had not changed his room. There had been no need: there were far more rooms than she could use in the house, and she knew how important stability, the absence of change, were to Joss.
He knew the house now technically belonged to him, but he thought of it as his mother's. He knew he'd never live here again.
He dropped onto his old bed with a pain in his throat; it felt like he'd swallowed an apple, whole. The skin on his mother's arms was almost see-through now, soft like tissue. Her eyes were lifeless; he almost missed the madness that used to shine behind them. At least there'd been energy there.
The rain plashed quietly on the windowsill outside.
At last he rose from the bed and walked over to the cupboard in his room. He'd lived here for more than a year before he'd found the door on the inside wall of the cupboard that opened to a smaller, hidden cavity. Over the years, the space had held liquor, poor report cards, and once or twice a bag of pot. Now his old school backpack filled the space completely. He took the bag back to the bed and opened it. From inside his old pencil case, he unfolded a faded newspaper page. Smiling up at him from the top half of the page was Fuzzy, dressed in school uniform, curly hair completely out of control.
Teenager's Throat Cut! screamed the text below the picture.
12
ISOBEL THOUGHT ABOUT Joss as she scribbled shorthand. Her direct boss was updating the senior partners on their world domination progress since the last monthly meeting. His account was longwinded, as always. When he finally sat, she stretche
d her cramping fingers and peered through the rain at the bridge.
From the boardroom on the twenty-third floor, Sydney Harbour was typically a gaudy showgirl, but this morning she seemed to have gathered her shawls around her to hide. The mist rendered the wide window a mirror, and Isobel caught her boss, Bob Shields, staring at her in the glass as she watched the rain. She dropped her eyes back to her notepad and held her pen as a pointer, pretending to read over the notes she had taken.
Instead, she worried about her husband. This morning she'd felt the return of the impenetrable emotional barrier he'd brought home with him from Rwanda. For eighteen months after his return from deployment, Isobel had felt she was living with a different man, a soulless robot who ate and drank – a lot – but had no ability to relate as a human. She'd missed her best friend. But then when the barrier had eventually started to come down, she'd almost wanted it back. Joss had spent months alternating between angry tyrant and melancholy drunk. Isobel had used humour and reason, patience and sex to forge brief moments of connection with the man she'd married. But with Charlie's birth she finally felt him come fully home to her. She'd woken from her first sleep after the eleven-hour labour to find him leaning over her. One look in his eyes had told her.
'I missed you,' she'd said. 'Where've you been?'
'You've only been asleep an hour,' he'd smiled, smoothing her hair from her face, his mouth almost touching hers. 'I've been here the whole time.'
'Yeah? Anyway, welcome back.'
But this morning he was a soldier again: his body in the kitchen, his mind guarding the wire. She wondered whether he was correct about the man at Andy's. She prayed he was just being paranoid. That monster couldn't be the guy he'd grown up with. Could he? She flipped a page in her notebook and stared at the name. Henry Nguyen.
Finally, the meeting was drawing to a close. Isobel forced herself to remain seated until the first of the group left the boardroom before joining the others making their way through the doors. She swallowed her impatience as the two men ahead of her stalled in the doorway to make a final inane joke, the more junior of the two throwing his head back and braying falsely. She'd almost reached the end of the corridor when she felt a hand touch the small of her back.
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