The South Pacific Murders

by Sylvia Massara

  Of all the things I expected to hear from Dobbs, this was the last one—something to do with my father, who had now been dead for over ten years, and somehow involving Smythe. “What’s my father got to do with any of this, Dobbs?” Even after so long, talking about Dad pierced my heart with a burning pain I could barely stand. Dad had gone quite young, riddled with bone cancer. He’d never reached sixty, like his best friend in the force who now sat opposite me.

  “Mia...” Dobbs hesitated for a few seconds as if he didn’t know how he was going to put this to me. I felt sudden concern.

  “What’s wrong, Dobbs? You’re worrying me.” I was on tenterhooks. My intuition told me whatever he was about to share with me would change something in my life that up until now had played a big part.

  Dobbs sipped his coffee while mine remained untouched. I drummed my fingers impatiently on the tabletop, waiting for him to continue. He put his cup back down on its saucer and looked straight into my eyes. “Okay, here it goes. Your application to the police force was not rejected because of anything Smythe did. It was a bit more complicated than that.”

  It took me a few moments to recover my power of speech at this bit of news, but when I could speak, I exclaimed, “What are you saying? Of course Smythe was the one who convinced them not to take me on. My father told me so!” Anger started to bubble away inside me.

  Dobbs shook his head. “Rosario—Ross—didn’t want you to know the truth. He thought you’d think badly of him.”

  My eyes flashed as I banged my fist on the table, attracting curious looks from a couple of patrons in the café. I took a moment to compose myself and lowered my voice on purpose, even though all I wanted to do was to scream. “You’re confusing me, Dobbs! You better tell me straight out what in blazes is going on.”

  Dobbs drained his cup. My coffee still remained untouched. He eyed it, and I shoved it across the table toward him. He took a sip from it, frowned because it was lukewarm by now, and put the cup back down. “You knew Ross was passed over for promotion and Smythe got the job instead. Since that time, they never saw eye to eye on anything; and they had a number of run-ins after this.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I knew that. Dad told me he hated working for a younger man, and that Smythe was an arsehole.”

  “Well, what you don’t know is that around this time Ross found out about his illness. He didn’t want to tell you yet and made me swear I wouldn’t say anything. But he changed, Mia. He was angry at life and very bitter. Of course, I don’t blame him for feeling this way; but he took it out on Smythe. I guess he felt Smythe robbed him of the chance for promotion and that he now had little time left to do anything else in the force. So to cut a long story short, Ross received a few disciplinary letters because of his antagonism toward Smythe.”

  I was stunned and remained silent as Dobbs proceeded to reveal more of the story.

  “When you went in for your interview, the recruitment panel made a bad decision. They were against you because they believed you’d end up being just like your dad. In those days, things were quite subjective when it came to recruitment, especially where it concerned women.” Dobbs paused as if gathering his thoughts, and then continued, “They turned you down, Mia—and contrary to what you believe it was Smythe who actually tried to convince them to change their minds. He knew about Ross’s illness and understood why your old man was having so many problems. But like me, he also respected your dad’s wish to maintain silence over his health issues. In the end, though, Smythe could only push so much against the panel’s decision, and they ended up overruling him.”

  I placed my elbows on the table, my head between my hands, and my eyes gazing straight into Dobbs’s. “So you’re telling me because of Dad’s declining health, his work performance suffered. As a result, he had run-ins with Smythe. On top of this, because of those run-ins, he received disciplinary warnings and the recruitment panel was biased toward my joining the force because they thought I would have the same attitude as Dad. Smythe, who knew about the illness but couldn’t divulge the true reason for Dad’s attitude, tried to persuade the panel to give me a chance, but they rejected me all the same. Right?”

  Dobbs nodded, a grave look in his eyes. “I admit the department treated your father badly, but Ross didn’t want to escalate the situation. He knew his time was short and he made me promise to stay silent.”

  “But why? I would never have condemned him. It wasn’t his fault the bloody cops turned me down!”

  “I know. But he didn’t see it that way.”

  I sighed with exasperation. “And if Smythe knew all this time, why did he let me go on believing I missed out on a police career because of him?” I knew the answer even before Dobbs told me, but I didn’t want to feel beholden to Smythe.

  “He had too much respect for Ross,” Dobbs echoed my thoughts. “He didn’t want to cause you pain, either. He knew your dad was ill and that he hadn’t told you as yet. So he played the part of the baddie. And I guess afterwards it was all too late to do something about it.”

  I felt close to tears for my dad, for Dobbs, and even for Smythe. They’d all kept this a secret to try to protect me from knowing about how my father felt. As a result, I’d gone on believing Smythe was the one who had influenced the recruitment panel against me, hence the reason I hated his guts. Now, I felt mortified.

  “This happened so long ago,” I uttered in a hoarse whisper. “Why didn’t Daddy tell me he found out he was ill at the time? Why did he want to keep it a secret for longer than necessary?”

  Dobbs reached across the table to rest a hand upon mine. “For what it’s worth, he was told there was a small chance that they could do something about treatment. So he didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily. Then, when the doctors tried everything and couldn’t help him, he was forced to tell you. But he couldn’t bring himself to explain the panel’s decision about you. He knew it was due to his own attitude toward Smythe, and that this was the strongest factor influencing them against your application.”

  I freed my hand and ran shaky fingers through my hair. “I need time to digest all this, Dobbs.” I smiled weakly. “Thank you for telling me. But why now?”

  “Because I’m fed up seeing you and Smythe going at it all the time. I thought you’d get over your antipathy eventually, but you didn’t. So I had to tell you.” Suddenly, he grinned. “It’s amazing what the ocean air can do for one’s conscience, huh?”

  He stood, patted me on the shoulder, and went on his way.

  ~~~

  I didn’t want to deal with what I had just learned. Therefore, I went straight to my cabin and telephoned Chris.

  “I was just about to call you,” he said when he picked up. “Where were you?”

  “Caught up with Dobbs.”

  “Any news?”

  “Actually, we didn’t talk about the investigation. We chitchatted, that’s all,” I said, not wanting to reveal the subject of our discussion. “Look, it’s getting close to dinnertime.” I glanced at my watch and saw it was almost five. “What say you we stay in, order room service, and keep working on finding this elusive website? I really don’t feel like socialising tonight.”

  “Works for me,” Chris replied. “I couldn’t be bothered getting all cleaned up for dinner.”

  “So you’d rather stink up the cabin?” I jested.

  “No, silly! I meant getting dressed up. I’m comfortable in a T-shirt and shorts right now, but I assure you they’re clean.”

  “Okay. I’ll come over at six. How’s that?”

  “Perfect,” he said. “But tonight, we’re ordering pizza.”

  “Nothing could please me more. See you soon.” I rang off and headed for the shower. I needed to wind down, and the hot water would help relax my tense muscles.

  After a long shower, I dried off and slipped into khaki shorts and a white T-shirt. Then, I made my way to Chris’s cabin and we ordered two pizzas, a ham and pineapple for me, and a pepperoni for Chris.

&nb
sp; We sat at his desk while Chris powered up the laptop. “I thought we’d run a search using all the horse names at once instead of trying combinations of them.”

  I nodded. “Excellent idea.”

  Chris tried this, but still didn’t come up with anything except for a number of porn sites with some very explicit videos and photos that picked up namely on the words ‘deep throat’ and ‘erotic’. For a while, Chris seemed glued to the screen of his laptop; and I began to feel rather uncomfortable.

  “Um... shouldn’t we try something different? I don’t think this is where you’ll find any clues.”

  Chris managed to peel his eyes off the screen. “What are you talking about? Any of these sites could belong to the cheaters’ club.”

  “But there are no names, no blogs, and no comments. So we won’t be able to find any worthwhile information, except for a whole lot of filth.” I didn’t mean to sound prudish, but this was how it came out.

  Chris smiled. “You disappoint me, Ferrari. I thought you liked hot sex.”

  I glared at him. “What? Where the hell did you get that impression?”

  “Well...er... You know... The younger men and such...” A shade of red started to creep up his face.

  I slapped the back of his head. “Hey! Just because I sometimes like younger men doesn’t mean I’m into porn. Now, start a new search or I’m leaving. I didn’t come here to watch porn movies, Chris Rourke!” I stood with the intention of walking out.

  Chris shut down the site he’d been leering over and threw me a penitent look. “Sorry. I kind of lost my head.”

  “You’ll lose more than that if you keep watching such crap!”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean, Ferrari?” He challenged me.

  I warned him in a serious tone, “You’ll become a sex pervert that plays with himself.”

  Chris exploded into laughter and couldn’t talk for a while. Thankfully, the pizzas arrived at that moment and this broke the tension between us. I answered the door and signed for the pizzas; then deposited them on the coffee table.

  “Let’s eat, shall we?” I said in my normal tone, grabbing a couple of small plates from the mini-bar and some paper napkins.

  Chris joined me and took a seat on one of the stuffed armchairs that were placed on either side of the table. I sat on the other one, and we started to eat.

  “Any Coke?” Chris was himself again.

  I got up and took two cans out of the small fridge.

  “Thanks,” Chris said as I handed him one.

  We ate without talking for a few minutes. Then, Chris said, “I’m sorry, Mia. I guess it’s a guy thing. Anyway, I promise I won’t turn into a sex pervert and play with myself.” He couldn’t help the smile on his lips as he spoke.

  I grinned. “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have overreacted. You’d think working in a hotel that’s located in the red light district I would have seen it all. I really don’t know what came over me.” But I did know. It was the unsettling information I had learned from Dobbs. Suddenly, I was overcome by grief for my dad again; but this time, nursing a new hurt because he hadn’t felt he could confide in me about what had happened with the recruitment panel. I also felt mortified for how I’d behaved toward Smythe all these years.

  “Mia?” Chris waved a hand in front of my face. “You okay?”

  I managed a smile. “Yes, of course. It must be all these murders on my mind.”

  “Well, let’s get back to it. We can eat while we work.”

  We did this, and time flew. By eleven, we were spent. We’d tried all we could think of, but nothing of interest came up.

  Chris rang room service for fresh coffee as we had already consumed a whole jug of it earlier. While he did this, I played around on the laptop, entering different search words in Google. On impulse, I added the word “horse”. I came up with a mix of results, most of them to do with horse breeding, racing, and betting. Then, something jumped out at me. It was an article about horses that had won the Melbourne Cup over time. I clicked on the link and it took me to a list of the actual horses that had won the famous race in the last thirty years. I scanned the list of names, not really knowing what I was looking for. At least, none of the horses Martha had told us about had run this particular race. Then, I saw it.

  “What is it?” Chris noticed the look of incredulity in my eyes.

  I turned to him, trying to quell my growing excitement. “This is really farfetched, of course, but you may call it one of my hunches. Look at the name of this horse.” I pointed on the screen to a particular horse, which had raced in the early ‘90s.

  “Superimpose,” Chris read out the name. “Yeah, so?”

  “So think of the meaning of the name—when you superimpose one thing over another, you see something different. This could be a drawing over another drawing or a string of words over another. The way you look at it changes its meaning.”

  Chris looked confused. “Okay, but I don’t see what this has to do with ‘NE’ or the names of the horses we’ve been searching.”

  “That’s right. It has nothing to do with it.” My eyes sparkled, and I couldn’t wait to try out my theory.

  “Man, what drugs are you on? Because I’d like to take some, too.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at his smart comment. “Focus on this: the inscription we found in van Horn’s book was NE PW NE1952.”

  Chris nodded. “Yes, and?”

  “And we’ve been looking for a site that has at least two words—one beginning with the letter N and the other with the letter E. We also tried the inscription itself as a URL earlier on with no results.” This was the first thing we’d tried after we discovered the inscription in van Horn’s notebook, all the while knowing it couldn’t possibly be that easy. “What would you say if we ‘superimposed’ the order of the characters in the inscription?”

  I looked on in silence as realisation dawned on Chris’s face. “My God! Why didn’t we think of this before?”

  “Because we focused too much on the order in which the line was written. But if you superimpose the inscription over itself, or rotate it back to front, you’d get 2591EN WP EN.”

  Chris shoved me out of the way and planted himself in front of the laptop. He typed in the URL: www.2591EN.com.au, and a sign-in page came up only asking for the password. He entered EN. An error message came up, telling us password was incorrect. Chris tried again with WP and was unsuccessful. He then tried WPEN; and when this didn’t work, he entered ENWP. Again, no success.

  “Try ‘eroticneurotic’,” I suggested.

  He did this, and suddenly a new page came up prompting us to enter the username. We held our breath. “We’re almost there! The site seems to have accepted the password, but what is the username? What does ‘WP’ stand for, I wonder?” Chris ran frustrated fingers through his hair.

  “Well, if you look at it logically, it should stand for the word ‘password’, but the other way around—first word last, last word first,” I answered.

  “Aw, c’mon, Mia. That doesn’t make sense,” he argued. “Besides, we already guessed the password. It’s the username we need now.”

  “But it worked with the actual password, didn’t it? It was the reverse order of ‘neurotic erotic’. So we must presume van Horn also reversed the order of the words for ‘PW’, which is hopefully the username. Therefore, ‘WP’ should stand for ‘wordpass’.”

  Chris looked skeptical but followed my advice, entering the word I suggested in the username prompt. As soon as he hit ‘enter’ the page changed to a dark purple colour and a button reading ‘Click to enter’ appeared at the bottom of the screen.

  “Yes!” Chris exclaimed excitedly as he clicked on the button to enter the site.

  The page changed to a deep midnight blue; and with delighted looks on our faces, Chris and I read the words that flashed before us in large white letters: “Welcome to the Neurotic Erotics Club”.

  Chapter 15

  Chris and I spent a long
time in front of the laptop, our eyes glued to the screen while we scrolled through the website. The purpose of the site was “To unite members of the medical community and their spouses or partners in order to explore the delights of illicit liaisons and other sexual practices.”

  “It’s a forum,” I remarked, looking at the summary page that was full of discussion threads.

  “And it has chat rooms as well.” Chris pointed to an icon at the bottom of the screen where members could enter into public or private chats.

  I glanced through some of the thread topics: spouse swapping; threesomes; men with men; women with women; fetishes; S&M; interracial; oral sex; anal sex; hardcore; illicit liaisons; and the list went on.

  “Good God!” I exclaimed, my eyes still on the screen. “Where do we begin?” The task of finding a common thread for the victims was going to be immense if we had to explore the whole site and all its threads—not to mention the members would have avatars hiding their true identities.

  “Since Martha mentioned a cheaters’ club, I would start with ‘illicit liaisons’,” Chris suggested. “But before this, let’s look at who the administrator is.” With a few strokes of the keyboard, Chris went into another screen that told us the administrator was Neurotic Boy.

  “Great! So how the hell do we confirm Neurotic Boy is really van Horn?” I sighed with frustration, still taking in all the information we would have to wade through. And this was only a hunch. We could very well be barking up the wrong tree.

  “Seeing as Martha was the one who overheard the conversation about van Horn running the cheaters’ club, we have to assume Neurotic Boy is van Horn,” Chris’s voice cut into my thoughts.

  “True; but we also know Neurotic Boy is the name of a horse, which Barry bet on. So who’s to say Barry is not the administrator?”