The Dark Lake

by Sarah Bailey

  Anna is making comments as she works, detailing her findings and Rosalind’s general health. ‘Non-smoker, I think, but the liver is a bit of a mess. She had dinner before she was killed.’ She scrunches up her face while she works through the stomach and intestines. ‘Some kind of dessert too. Maybe strawberries. And definitely alcohol in the hours before she died, judging by the digestion.’

  Anna moves to the next stage of the examination. More robotic now, she reports her findings like she is reading a textbook. Jonesy peppers the procedure with unnecessary conversation before grabbing me around the shoulders and saying, ‘Sorry, Woodstock, I keep forgetting she was your mate.’

  I shrug him away. I’m so used to the autopsy table chitchat now that I barely notice it.

  Anna continues, ‘She definitely struggled. Though it doesn’t look like too much. I’d say she was already on the ground trying to scramble away rather than fighting back. This is dirt, not skin.’ Anna is inspecting Rose’s fingernails, bagging the slivers that she has carefully clipped off. ‘Definitely some recent bruising on her thighs but nothing conclusive.’ Then Anna starts to examine her genitals, looking for signs of sexual assault.

  I deliberately tune out and begin counting the rubbery scratches on the floor.

  It isn’t until Anna says, ‘Mm, well, this is interesting,’ that I snap back to the present.

  ‘What is it?’

  We all lean forward.

  ‘Seems your dead girl was pregnant.’

  Chapter Eight

  Sunday, 13 December, 3.43 pm

  I call Scott to tell him I’ll be home late. Then I spend the afternoon poring over what I can access of Rosalind’s social media accounts, phone records, medical records and financials but because it’s a weekend, there’s a lot of information that I can’t get hold of yet. The field crew is at the school trawling over the grounds looking for any signs of a struggle or a murder scene, but so far they haven’t come up with anything. Charlie calls just after 4 pm to let us know that a small bag has been located down the back of the oval, deep in some tall grass, with Rosalind’s phone, purse and lip balm inside.

  ‘They’re all wet,’ Charlie tells me. ‘Must have gone into the lake with her to begin with and then I guess the killer ended up dumping them here.’

  ‘Did you search the stormwater drain?’ I ask him. ‘The one near where she was found?’

  ‘’Course.’ Charlie sounds like he’s eating an apple. I can picture his big ruddy face covered in freckles as he marvels over the unsavoury delights hidden on the grounds of my old high school. ‘Did that first thing. It was empty apart from water, dead animals and a shitload of graffiti.’

  ‘So nothing unusual then?’

  He laughs. ‘Gem, it’s a high school—there’s heaps of weird shit everywhere but nothing that seems relevant. We’re still looking though.’

  ‘Thanks, Charlie.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to tell you it’s a picnic. It’s fucking hot out here. Mossy can’t handle it. He’s sitting in the shade under a tree fanning his face with a chip packet.’

  ‘Tell him he’s weak.’

  ‘Will do.’

  A fresh team had gone back to do another search of the lake and the car park this morning but nothing has turned up yet. I get started on Rosalind’s phone records.

  ‘Anything?’ Felix comes over to my desk just before 5 pm and places a milky-looking mug of coffee on the edge. He’s nibbling on a muesli bar and I realise I’m starving.

  ‘Not really,’ I say. ‘She’s not on Facebook, only Instagram. It’s just photo after photo of pretty things. Flowers, cute animals, rainbows and quotes. Mainly Shakespeare and dead poets that I remember from high school. It’s all very vanilla. But there is a photo of that heart-shaped rock you found. She wrote LOVE when she posted it. That was two months ago. The only other thing that’s vaguely interesting is an arty shot of a rotting apple and a close-up of red lips. I think they’re hers.’ I hold the phone out.

  Felix takes a quick look and raises his eyebrows at the image. We ran the rock for fingerprints but only found hers and a few other blurry half-prints that were no use to us.

  ‘What about family? Friends?’ he says, still looking at the lips.

  ‘Zilch. No people in the shots at all. It looks like some of her students follow her, though, which might be worth checking out.’

  I think of all the family photos on Felix’s pin board. I have photos of Ben and my dad all over the house, and Scott has snaps of his brother and parents. Even Phelps, our prickly old ME, used to have a photo of his wife on his desk at the morgue—the two of them at a Halloween party dressed as zombies.

  ‘Just like her house,’ says Felix. ‘Did you notice how there were no photos there either?’

  ‘Mm. Yeah, most people display at least a couple of happy snaps. Also, her phone records are the leanest I have ever seen. I need to get the names but there are only about six numbers.’ I show him the printout. ‘And she didn’t have a landline, only a mobile. The email address linked to her Instagram account has virtually nothing in it.’

  ‘Maybe she had a secret email address and accessed it from somewhere else,’ says Felix.

  ‘That’s what I’m thinking.’ I open my drawer and get out a packet of sultanas. Chewing them, I continue, ‘Someone called her just after ten-thirty on Friday night. Probably around the time the play finished. Maybe just after.’

  Felix’s eyes widen slightly. ‘Okay, good. And?’

  ‘It’s a dead end so far. She missed the call and it was a blocked number. Probably a pre-paid SIM. Local, but that’s all we know. So basically I’m getting nowhere.’

  ‘And we don’t know who her gentlemen callers were either,’ he adds.

  ‘You’re right,’ I agree. ‘It would be good to know who the man in the fancy car was.’

  Felix is looking at a crime scene photo that is poking out of the manila folder on my desk. ‘She seemed very frugal on one hand—especially when you consider her family home—but then there’s the wine and that make-up.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  My thoughts are cloudy. I can’t quite work out what’s tugging through my consciousness. Rosalind’s blood-red lips keep interrupting my thoughts.

  ‘You know,’ I say, swallowing more sultanas, ‘her bag was found at the school, tossed into some bushes. So it’s most likely that the killer either followed Rose down to the lake or led her there, killed her, dumped her in the water and then took her bag—maybe trying to delay us ID’ing her, or maybe they thought there was money in it, whatever, but it means they made their way back through the school after she was dead. It just feels to me like that points to someone who was watching her all night. Maybe they’d planned to confront her about something after the play finished or maybe they’d arranged to meet and something went wrong. Maybe she had a stalker. I don’t know. It’s almost certainly got something to do with the school, though, don’t you think?’

  ‘It does make sense. We’ll hit the school tomorrow,’ Felix says. ‘We need to talk to the other teachers, the students, work out who was at the play on Friday and if anyone saw her afterwards. We need to get our hands on the CCTV—if there is any. Hopefully we’ll get something.’

  He opens his mouth as if to keep talking, but ends up just smiling at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He looks at me longingly before saying, ‘I’m going to do some digging into Timothy for a bit. Marcus is clean, by the way—his alibi checks out. He didn’t leave Sydney until Saturday morning. And Bryce’s girlfriend, Amelia Posen, has confirmed she felt unwell and cancelled their plans. She says they spoke on the phone late on Friday evening, which matches the story he gave us though it doesn’t exactly let him off the hook. But I still think it’s Timothy that’s off.’

  I nod, fighting a wave of tiredness. ‘I’ll look into George Ryan.’

  He nods and I watch him walk back to his desk. Despite the ache in my gut I want to be able to
kiss him; pull him on top of me. Have him inside me. The desire is so overwhelming sometimes that it hurts.

  Instead, I start to trawl the net and our records for anything I can find on Rosalind’s father. Jonesy was right; George Ryan is a minor celebrity in the business world. Over thirty stories load, referencing him and his companies. Years ago he launched a recruitment company for low- and mid-tier health roles. One of the first in Australia, it had benefitted from the sudden influx of women and migrants into the workforce. He sold it in the late eighties for over a million dollars and then moved into property development. The successful company, simply called RYAN, has an office in Sydney as well as Smithson, and has projects all over regional New South Wales.

  I recall Rosalind’s poky apartment: the almost empty fridge and the Kmart bedspread. We’re going to need to speak to George Ryan again. I tap my pen against the side of the computer, trying to make sense of what Rose’s brothers said about her.

  Marty Pearson looks up at me from the other side of the desk. ‘Cut it out with the pen, can you?’ he says gruffly.

  ‘Huh? Oh, sorry,’ I say, putting the pen down. Looking away from the screen is making everything seem slightly too bright. I lean back in my chair to stretch out my spine. Marty gives me his standard disparaging look before he disappears down behind the partition again, shaking his head. If Marty had his way, no one under forty-five would be a cop.

  There’s a commotion at the front desk, and vague wafts of swearing and crying roll into the main room. Someone has put on the radio in one of the interview rooms and Bon Jovi is softly belting out ‘Bad Medicine’. I return my eyes to the computer screen and read through a few more articles about George Ryan’s business ventures. It seems that Marcus was involved in the business for a short stint but there is barely a mention of Timothy and Bryce, or of Rosalind. There are, however, several photos of George and his sons at various local industry nights. There is nothing on Rosalind apart from a local newspaper story about the upcoming school play.

  Just as I am about to shut my computer down, I find a small article in the local paper from January 1985 covering the death of Olivia Ryan. In the photo, taken on their wedding day, the woman from the mantelpiece at the Ryans’ stares out at me. Her thick dark hair frames her heart-shaped face, and her crystal eyes are reminiscent of Elizabeth Taylor’s in her heyday. A tragedy, declares the paper. It seems thirty-three-year-old Olivia suffered a haemorrhage two days after giving birth to her first daughter, Rosalind, and fell unconscious from the blood loss. She died two days later. George Ryan was quoted as saying that he was devastated by the sudden loss of his precious wife and would do everything in his power to look after their three young sons and brand-new baby angel.

  Chapter Nine

  Monday, 14 December, 7.32 am

  Jonesy has called us together to officially kickstart the investigation. We had trouble getting resources: a murder/kidnapping took place on Saturday afternoon, a few kilometres out of Paxton, and all spare bodies in the region were allocated to finding the newly motherless seven-year-old girl and her violent father. Fortunately, she was found unharmed late last night in her dad’s ute on a long stretch of country highway. Her father was discovered about fifty metres away in bushland, his brains blown to pieces.

  Rosalind’s death has formed a blanket over Smithson: mixing with the relentless heat, it’s a creeping, vapour-like cover that sticks to everything. Voices are low and theories are exchanged in clusters outside the newsagent and the post office. Eyes dart around as if seeking a killer in the shadows. Beautiful piles of flowers form little mountains of love and grief at Rosalind’s front door, the lake and the school. It’s true what they say, that death unites us, pulls us together, though I see beyond this primal unity and think that perhaps we pull each other closer to check that we are who we say we are. We are all trying to work out what went so horribly wrong.

  The energy is frenetic, buzzing with the newness of a bona fide mystery. There is nothing like this feeling, the hard fact that a death must have a story. We detectives must fill in the blanks: we have the ending but not the beginning or the middle. We need to know what happened in reverse. I usually love this stage. The satisfaction of problem-solving makes my soul sing. But this is different. I feel a flatness. And a mild flutter of fear. In many ways I’m scared of going backwards through Rosalind’s life in case it merges dangerously with my own. My past is something that I’ve always been happy to leave be.

  There are about fifteen uniforms in plainclothes seated at the tables in the Waratah Room, underneath the overworked ceiling fans. Matthews, Kingston and Pearson are also present. The uniforms are mainly from Gowran and Mt Lyall, though two are from Corburn and two flew in from the city. Eager and desperate for murder experience, I picture them fist-pumping at the first sign of carnage on the nightly news. Jonesy is pacing at the front of the room, stopping sporadically to rock back and forth on his heels. The bottom of his belly winks out and I can tell he wants a cigarette. Large prints of Rosalind—dead and alive—dot the pin board behind him. Several sets of her dark honey eyes stare out across the room. In one of the shots she’s dressed in a soft mauve jacket with her hair pulled back, exposing her delicate throat. Her face is arranged into a sad, knowing smile. I fight the strangest urge to smile back.

  One of the uniforms is fiddling with the venetian blinds, trying to get them to drop, and the rustling sound is slowly driving me spare. I look down and realise my hands are in fists. I didn’t even get to see Ben this morning. He was still asleep when I left; his arm wrapped around his soft-toy fire truck. Scott asked me whether I’d be home for dinner as he handed me a plate of toast. I told him I wasn’t sure.

  I need a coffee. I start to walk towards the kitchen to make one just as Jonesy slaps his hand down on a desk and yells, ‘Right!’

  I move back to my spot just inside the door; I don’t feel relaxed enough to sit down.

  ‘Here.’ Felix appears, placing a takeaway coffee from Reggie’s in my hand. He keeps looking straight ahead. We’re very careful at work, but we are partners and this means a certain level of intimacy is expected. Plus, we both have kids and most of the people we work with simply aren’t imaginative enough to assume we have time for anything as frivolous as lust.

  ‘Thanks,’ I whisper, gently glancing my knuckles against his.

  Jonesy begins. ‘Right, by now you all know that Rosalind Ryan, a twenty-eight-year-old female, was found dead in Sonny Lake on Saturday morning. Beaten and strangled. Suspected sexual assault. She was a teacher at the local high school and by all accounts very popular. No witnesses and no clear motive or suspect. No partner that we can tell at this stage and no obvious beef with anyone. The media is already crawling like flies on shit over this’—Jonesy pauses to jerk a thumb at Rosalind’s photographs—‘for obvious reasons.’

  He breaks into a mild coughing fit and grabs the ledge of the whiteboard to steady himself. ‘So we need a solve and fast. Being a teacher, the school parents will start to be pains in the arse too and we don’t want this kicking around for months. The mayor called earlier and he’s putting the pressure on as well.’ He hikes his pants up, which only serves to highlight the flabby skin around his waist. ‘Now, not for a moment do I think that this is a serial, but you know how these things play out. If we don’t pin someone for this, then it may as well be the next Jack the Ripper and we’re all fucked.’

  He coughs again. ‘One other thing. Our victim was pregnant at the time of her death. Approximately ten weeks along, according to Anna. We have no idea whether it’s relevant to our case or not but keep it in mind. And for the love of god, keep that information to yourselves.’ He looks around the room in what I assume is an attempt to appear stern. ‘Woodstock and McKinnon are leading. We’ve got you lot for at least a week, maybe more, but let’s plan not to need it. Now go. And no overtime. I mean it.’

  He exits the room, stumbling on a bin and flailing into the wall. His muttered swearing fades as
he walks towards his office. There’s a smattering of laughter and at least one ‘dickhead’ whispered.

  I make my way to the front of the room with Felix close behind.

  ‘Right, guys, this is how the next couple of days look.’ My voice is strong and clear. Matthews rolls his eyes and I give him a swift glare. ‘We meet every morning at eight and again at three to check in. If you can’t make it, you have a good reason and you ring in your progress to myself or McKinnon—no excuses. One of us will always attend.’

  There’s nodding and a few of the guys get out their phones to log the appointments in.

  ‘We’ll review the hotline calls at every check-in, and follow up anything that seems legit. We’ve done the basics but there’s a lot to be getting on with. The primary search is complete. We’re not clear about her exact movements on Friday but we know she was at the school in the evening no later than seven. She was there for a play—kids from the school were performing a version of Romeo and Juliet. Our victim wrote and directed it, and apparently it was very impressive. And a big deal for the school. We know there were issues in getting it happening, so maybe she put quite a few noses out of joint along the way. We’re looking into everything right now so keep your ears open about any tension.

  ‘Sonny Lake is not a direct route to her home, so there was no obvious reason for her to be at the lake after the play. Our guess is that she was either meeting someone there, or she was lured there by someone she trusted. It’s possible that someone physically forced her there but that seems unlikely based on the post-mortem. Plus, someone would have noticed if she was grabbed at the school.’

  Sets of alert, shining eyes flick between me and the photos of Rosalind. I think of how much more beautiful she was than I am and wonder whether they are all thinking the same.

  ‘We’ve only spoken to the immediate family so far. McKinnon and I will be heading to the school shortly to cover off the principal, colleagues and hopefully some students. I want you guys on this side of the room—’ I gesture to my right ‘—to begin working through the audience from Friday night. Start with the students. Tread carefully with minors. I want parental consent for any formal questioning if they’re under eighteen. You know the drill, and if you don’t, then get up to speed. Offer counselling whenever you think it’s necessary.’