Already Dead

by Jaye Ford

  Jax understood how it might have come up in the news conference. A photographer or desk editor sorting through pictures of Nina, taking a closer look at the most recent ones. Maybe the same person – someone who’d looked at photos for a job, who had an eye for faces and detail – had also sorted through the ones of Brendan and made the connection. And the photo had gone to the meeting and they’d discussed the implications, deciding the first thing was to confirm the identity.

  What were the implications? That Brendan was a bodyguard for Nina on the weekend she was murdered. Jax’s gaze slid from the screen, unfocused and drifting as words she’d written in her notebook found new places in her mind.

  Brendan was unaccounted for after Saturday afternoon, except for CCTV footage of him driving back and forth over the Harbour Bridge. His car was set alight sometime after that. He didn’t go nuts in Jax’s car – he was already off the rails when he opened the door with a gun in his hand. It hadn’t started there, it had started sometime between Saturday evening after he argued with Kate and Monday afternoon.

  Saturday to Monday.

  Nina Torrence’s body was found on Sunday, after the night Brendan was snapped in a photo with her.

  I’ve been holding it off for two days.

  Jax closed her eyes and saw Brendan again. Yelling, rambling, his paranoid, panicked phrases coming back-to-back as though they’d been cut out of the whole and edited together: holding it off, nano spiders, Scotty, Kate, trained people who won’t stop. The phone, the radio, knives and missiles, cops.

  Jax shook her head, stood up, walked to the window and stared into the courtyard. The glow from Tilda’s rooms above spilled into the darkness, casting pale light around the edges of the garden. The view of the ocean beyond was prettier but Jax wasn’t looking.

  She was trying to pull everything apart and put it back together in a different context.

  Brendan had PTSD but he was getting better. He’d gone off his medication, he was working – then something unravelled him.

  Brendan’s version was that people were after him. He knew he was going to die and he wanted to get to his family first. To protect them. He had a gun. He’d tried to hold something off for two days. He couldn’t get rid of what was in his head. He’d shouted: You don’t want to know anything I know. When they’d played Zoe’s what-if game, he’d said, Gun or knife? Then he’d cried like a child, repeating words like a mantra: I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t.

  Jax rested her forehead on the cool glass, agitation and uncertainty prickling inside her. She’d thought it was about Afghanistan, something he’d seen or done that came back to haunt him. She’d wanted Brendan to be a good man. He’d loved his wife and child and she wanted that to be enough. The proof of his goodness.

  She watched the reflection of her eyes and asked herself what she’d really wanted. Was it about Brendan or Nick? Had she wanted to believe in Nick, and Brendan was her proof? That no matter what had taken him to that road, Nick would’ve been thinking of her and Zoe in his final moments. That he would have tried to protect them despite the outcome. Like Brendan.

  Or was it about her? Her need to be clever and whole again, not the wife obsessed with an unsolvable case, or the idiot taken in by someone else’s paranoia.

  Pushing away from the window, she thought about Hugh Talbotson’s story. The one in which Brendan wasn’t so good. Where he made bad choices and mixed with the wrong people and slept around like he didn’t give a shit about his wife and child. Maybe his love was just deathbed regret.

  And maybe Brendan Walsh was a bad guy. A very bad guy. Maybe he spent two days evading people who were after him, got a gun, set his car alight to destroy all the evidence and made it as far as the motorway on-ramp.

  Maybe he did something that made people want to hunt him down.

  Maybe he murdered Nina Torrence.

  Jax paced the room, edgy, restless. It was more conjecture. Trying to make the pieces fit a picture that possibly didn’t exist. That she’d invented because she was a Miss Marple wannabe heading for a breakdown. Christ, she didn’t have enough pieces to make any kind of speculation.

  Tiptoeing fast across the tiles, she went back to her laptop and started a search for Nina Torrence. Jax had watched the TV news reports of the murder on Sunday night, sitting alone in her old house, drinking red wine and feeling miserable after leaving Zoe with Tilda. She’d been aware of radio reports the next day, too busy packing and cleaning and locking memories in her heart to listen to the detail. Then she was carjacked – and she’d read about herself without the stomach or the concentration to think about anything else that might have made headlines. Now, as she scanned the stories on the internet, she saw she’d missed a lot.

  Nina Torrence had topped the TV news on Sunday night and the print headlines on Monday, slipped on Tuesday in the wake of the carjacking, then shared the lead for the rest of the week with other stories, including the Brendan Walsh/Miranda Jack drama. The media coverage began late morning on Sunday, as a series of breaking news items and continued on the following days with angles on the police investigation, calls for information, and background details on the life of a woman who’d mixed in both social and criminal circles – a tale just waiting for a dirty, sexy TV series.

  Jax tried to skim the information, having no desire to think about what had been done to someone she’d known, especially after her own brush with violence. But she was drawn in, horrified and fascinated, perhaps more so because of Nina’s connection to Brendan. Whether or not he’d killed her, within two days of each other Jax and Nina had both been in his company – and the company of serious, headline-making aggression.

  Nina’s body was found around sunrise on Sunday morning by a fisherman clambering around the base of a cliff on Sydney’s South Head. Media was there by the time a recovery operation winched her up to the park above, photos showing a covered body on a swinging stretcher. Within hours, there were unconfirmed reports she’d been stabbed. That night, police detailed a single stab wound that punctured the diaphragm on the way to her heart, announcing they were now conducting a homicide investigation.

  Later stories discussed the unfolding case, talking about defensive wounds to Nina’s hands, arms, face and neck – scratches and bruising that suggested she’d put up a fight. Witnesses at the party on Saturday night said she’d arrived with a driver, told friends she was meeting someone later and that she liked to make an entrance but preferred to leave unseen – to ‘let people think she was still holding court long after she’d gone’. It might’ve been good for her reputation, but police were unable to establish exactly when and how she’d left the party. Conflicting statements ranged from Nina being seen walking to a car by herself, getting into a vehicle with one man, with two men and a woman, and driving herself away, alone at the wheel.

  There was also speculation about what had actually happened at the top of the cliff. Forensics determined the murder took place in an area that was more suburban bushland than park – no grass, no seating, just a dense patch of native growth: cliff-top path on one side, a road on the other, and a hundred metres from a parking zone at a nearby viewing platform. Questions centred on whether Nina went there herself or was taken there. Was it a random attack as she contemplated the view or was she waiting for the mystery ‘someone’? Was the original plan to throw her to her death and make it look like suicide? Had her struggle forced the killer to end it quicker – and perhaps quieter? Had he – ‘he’ for the strength required to lift her over the chest-high railing – expected the tide to wash Nina and her tell-tale stab wound away?

  Still more stories suggested a link to the upcoming trial of a notorious gang member, others that the fatal injury was the kind inflicted by someone who knew how to kill with a knife, someone who might be employed by the sort of people Nina had defended – and socialised with, if the gossip was right. Jax had heard more crudely phrased rumours from journalists over the years, using nouns like ‘affai
r’ and ‘mistress’ and ‘fuck money’. Not the kind of stuff anyone wanted in their obituary.

  It took time to find the information Jax was after, but she eventually tracked it down among the thousands of words already written on Nina. Police were quoted as saying her death occurred in the early hours of Sunday, sometime in a five- to six-hour period from when she was thought to have left the party around eleven-thirty and when she was found shortly after 5 am.

  Jax pushed away from the keyboard, scrubbed at her eyes, got up and walked. At the sink, she picked up a sponge and started wiping benches. Hard, forceful strokes. Brendan had been at the party and the chances were slim he was there as an off-duty bodyguard who happened to get caught in a photo with Nina. He’d crossed the Harbour Bridge heading north at 2 am on Sunday morning – the direction he’d drive if he was going from South Head to his flat in Hornsby. He’d crossed the Bridge twice later in the day, south then north again. Then, almost twenty-four hours later, he’d got in Jax’s car wearing crumpled clothes, smelling of old sweat, panicked and paranoid, and using a gun to get the hell out of Sydney.

  She threw the sponge at the sink, angry, appalled, nauseated. Why would he do it? There were any number of reasons but she didn’t want to think about them. She’d wanted Brendan to be the one who was wronged because … because of Kate and Scotty, because there was something stuck in his head, because Nick was …

  She caught sight of the laptop on the dining table, checked her watch. Ten-thirty. Russell was at the office until late. She grabbed her phone, hit speed dial.

  ‘Did you get my email?’ He sounded stressed.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve seen the photo.’

  ‘What do you think? Is it him?’

  She opened her mouth, ready to blurt out everything that was careering around in her mind, and hesitated. In front of her were the sofas, Zoe’s toy box, the packing cartons, tidier than they were this afternoon – but reminding her someone had been there, someone who possibly was worried about a reporter writing a story.

  ‘It’s like him, yeah, but it’s not a clear image by any means. I wouldn’t want to call it. Sorry. I wondered about a bodyguard, though. The guy looks kind of serious. Was Nina Torrence a client of the company Brendan worked for?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They confirmed that?’

  ‘They’re not saying who their clients are. No surprises there. But our guy got talking to one of their guys. He wouldn’t give names but said Nina Torrence was definitely not on their books.’

  ‘Is anyone saying she needed a bodyguard?’

  ‘It’s been mentioned she used one occasionally. There’s a suggestion it was PR, to make her look dirty or clean, depending on the angle.’

  ‘Dirty because there are criminals who are pissed off with her?’

  ‘Or clean because there are criminals who are pissed off with her.’

  And it was possible she’d needed to be protected from her bodyguard. ‘Have the police seen the photo?’

  ‘They’ve got it – I don’t know whether they’ve seen it. They asked for everything we shot at the party the day they found her. We did the usual, “If the murderer is in one of ours, we want the exclusive,” and handed over all seventy-eight shots. But you’ve seen the photo, it’s easy to miss the guy in the back. It only came to our attention when the photographer was going over the stuff from early in the night. We’ve been using the later ones for our “last shots of Nina Torrence”.’

  Easy to miss if they weren’t looking for Brendan Walsh. Possibly easy to miss unless you’d been in a car watching him swing his head from front to back. ‘Will you point him out to the police?’

  ‘A decision hasn’t been made on that yet. There’s no reason to if it’s not Walsh.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ Jax rubbed the back of her neck. Should she confirm it? To the media? It was Russell, but it was also out of her hands once he knew and she wouldn’t be able to stop it becoming a story. It wouldn’t have her by-line but her name would be on it by inference: Nina Torrence, Brendan Walsh and Miranda Jack, linked by death and circumstance.

  ‘You sound exhausted.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘It’s not too late for Deanne to cancel work and head up. She could take Zoe for a while. And you could take advantage of my wife’s predilection for drinkies and have a few later. Relax, get shitfaced, forget all this.’

  ‘Not you too?’

  ‘Yeah, me too.’

  ‘Exhausted is no state to be having guests.’

  ‘Okay. You gotta give me points for trying, though.’

  She smiled a little. ‘You get one.’ He hadn’t mentioned the kiss. She hoped that meant Deanne hadn’t told him. She could do without discussing it with Nick’s best friend, regardless of where he stood on the issue.

  Hanging up, she took a restless, agitated tour of the room, a thought repeating in her head: Nina Torrence, Brendan Walsh and Miranda Jack, linked in death and circumstance.

  Jax was the only one of them still alive.

  41

  She needed to sleep but she couldn’t sit still, let alone lie down and drift off. Tilda must have gone to bed – the courtyard was black and the clusters of lights from ships off the coast floated in a mass of darkness. Jax checked the locks and the alarm, peered in at Zoe and took her mini laptop to bed. She’d told Russell she wasn’t opening new files, but fuck it. He didn’t have to know. No-one did – unless she came up with more than conjecture.

  She started with Brendan, collecting everything she had on him. Newspaper articles, the story from the airbase, the photo Russell had sent. Then she typed in the lists from her notebook, updating, adding, making notes in the margins with the same program she’d used for Nick’s files.

  Then she started a file covering her own account of the carjacking. It didn’t take long to write: she just closed her eyes, saw it in her mind and hammered on the keyboard. No emotion or narration this time, just each chronological step of Brendan’s unravelling, simplified to bullet points:

  – Order to drive

  – Lashing out at the radio

  – Confused by the phone

  – Surveillance, head back and forth

  On and on until she got to:

  – Runs into traffic

  Starting more files, Jax included newspaper articles and web links for Nina Torrence, as well as information she’d gleaned from her conversations with Kate and Hugh. While she was at it, she Googled Hugh, finding little more than references to genealogy sites listing Hugh Talbot, son of various old-English ancestors.

  It was 1.27 am when she shut down the last file. If nothing else, the process had taken the edge off her agitation. Stretching, yawning, she slid under the sheet, propped an elbow on the pillow and pulled the laptop closer for one last search.

  Two weeks after Nick’s death, when the channels of communication with the Homicide unit showed signs of trauma, Jax began documenting meetings, conversations and phone calls. She also searched the internet for references to Anita Lyneham, finding articles on investigations, court appearances, police media releases, and her Facebook page. At first, it was to understand who Jax was dealing with, an attempt to find some common ground. Eventually she used it as a weapon when she wanted the cop to appreciate Jax wasn’t sitting on her hands waiting for a detective to tell her when to breathe.

  For the same reasons, and a few others, Jax now typed: Aiden Hawke.

  He wasn’t the only Aiden Hawke – real or simulated – but the one she was interested in had no Twitter account or Facebook page. Which meant nothing except that he hadn’t been updating his status on his phone as she left him tonight.

  There were plenty of photos and stories mentioning him and the dramatic, gun-wielding end to the carjacking. Jax skipped past them, looking for anything pre-Brendan Walsh.

  Ten search pages in and she found Detective Aiden Hawke, of Serious Crime, Sydney, quoted in a four-month-old story about a series of stabbings. A year earlier, he was talki
ng about an arrest in a long-running and particularly nasty arson case. Before that, a vicious assault on a train. He was also mentioned twice in stories around an investigation into the disappearance of a three-year-old girl that made headlines for its outpouring of neighbourhood emotion. And again two years later after the little girl’s body was found in bushland and her stepfather charged.

  Snippets of conversations with Aiden came back as Jax read. Crying loved ones and bloodied bodies; how long, unproductive cases were frustrating for everyone; Bethany, the young girl who’d tried to kill herself. Jax wondered whether the end of an investigation ever felt like a victory.

  Thinking again about Bethany, Jax started a new search for a report on that attack. What she found was a story about an assault – not the one she’d been aiming for, but two names within a single paragraph jumped out at her. It was a court report: Detective Sergeant Aiden Hawke was a prosecution witness; the solicitor for the defendant was Nina Torrence.

  Aiden knew her too?

  Jax rolled onto her back, pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, her head thumping. Was it weird that Aiden knew Nina?

  Or was it understandable, predictable even? Aiden had arrested people for serious crimes, would have interviewed them in the presence of a solicitor, followed them all the way to court. Nina was a criminal lawyer, and Jax knew from her days as a reporter that both sides of the courtroom could share a drink. Some ate together; sometimes they slept together. She’d known a cop whose public prosecutor wife had become a better-paid criminal defender.

  It was 2.13. She should sleep, she told herself. She should. She tried one more search: Aiden Hawke + Nina Torrence. Three court cases. The last one concluded two weeks ago, something about a fraud and a restaurateur. Jax couldn’t hold on to the details, couldn’t get her fingers to hit the right keys, too exhausted to do anything but let it all float in her brain.