by Eugen Bacon
“Robbo. Missus pack that burger for you?”
“No missus yet—might wrap more than a meal if a missus did pack it. Nah, mum wrapped this up.” He licks a crumb off the side of his mouth.
A dog howls in the distance.
“Crime scene snack?”
“Boss.”
“Why not. Keep the bile in. Recall you chomping tacos at that shooting in Bellstown.”
“Solved that quick—how do you do it?” Robbo’s ocean-blue eyes below bushy brows, part silver, meet Lawfer’s.
“Secret is to listen, yeah. People talk. Someone says it’s a duck, it’s a duck.”
“Solved them all, crime sprees in Moe, Colander, Riverdale, Marsh, Kingsdale. Guns, knives, cleavers, lethal force. That guy that got necked. Reckon ducks there too, boss?”
Lawfer keeps her gaze steady. “That mouth be your downfall.” Oblivious to forensic crew bustle, she puts a solid arm on Robbo’s shoulder. She stands taller. “It’s like this: Reckon I got you now, kid. Making you my right hand in this investigation. Top more odds. Will you, Robbo?”
“But Tank always . . .”
Lawfer raises her brow. “Tank? That roughneck can do paperwork in the cop shop in Abbey Wood. Do him some good. I’m picking you to work with me. Handpicked, yeah. Problem, Robbo?”
“Nothing major. Just . . . Why me, not him?” He nods his chin in the direction of the snotty constable back from his pee.
“Snotto there will contaminate my crime scene.” Lawfer regards Robbo. “Relying on you, son. Reckon field expo will shape you.”
“Reckon . . .”
“Reckon stakes are high. Less mouth kid and we get along, yeah.”
“Boss.” Robbo moves off, heads toward the forensics crew. Hand in pocket, Lawfer watches him go.
Lawfer scrutinizes the crime scene. She wonders at the surroundings and the possibilities. “Shit way to die, yeah.”
A light mist threatens rain. It dissipates. Robbo returns. He is holding in gloved hands a crimson-stained ID card. “Says here victim is Professor William Banjo, forty-one. Brain surgeon at the hospital.”
“Say why he kill himself?”
***
6:13. Outside East Wing. Lawfer rubs dry eyes.
“Not much sleep?” says Robbo.
“Things not sweet, yeah. Today, as all other days.” A quiet morning breeze, shifting and sporadic, worries Lawfer’s hair. She surveys the gravel.
“Thoughts on it yet?” Robbo.
Lawfer straightens. “No, I won’t speculate.” She looks at Tamyka, shrugging off digital equipment. “Crime scene look ok?”
“All good,” she says. “Glenda your dog?”
“Ex-wife. Yes.”
The other forensics guy is packing bags into the back of a police van by the gate. He takes out a new kit, heads to the crime scene upstairs.
Lawfer strokes her chin. Gazes up the lofty building with rectangular blocks growing out of a central block.
“Why not just walk to a window and jump?” Lawfer asks Robbo.
“Trick question or rhetorical?”
“He jumped through glass, not a window. I say impact, and he fell through it.”
As Durham Harbour begins to stir, Lawfer looks upward and sees the shadow of monstrous feet stalk the sky.
***
6:24. Inside room, thirty-first floor of East Wing. The walls are gray and granular. Lawfer’s gaze moves to the desk in Professor William Banjo’s office.
She touches an empty glass on the desk in the main office, near a computer. She sees a happy face. The professor loved life. “Havana Club.”
“How do you know?” Robbo.
“Try the smell.” Lawfer points to another glass on a side table beside a pitcher of water. “Looks like our professor had a visitor, yeah.” She lifts the glass. Flash: a hazy image of a man, not the victim. An earnest feeling, not violence.
Robbo seals the evidence into a plastic bag and leaves the room. He returns. “Forensics lifted two sets of prints.”
“Tops, need all the help we can get,” says Lawfer. “Make sure the lab hooks into those right away.”
“Boss.”
“Fast track.”
“On it.”
Lawfer examines darkened spots in sections of the broad office: dried along the table surface, a splotch on the carpet and a sprinkling along broken edges on the window where the body apparently crashed through. She feels the violence with every touch. She feels a third person. Someone else was in this room.
“A spray of luminol will sort that,” says Robbo. “No blood it can’t catch.” He nods at the computer. “And forensics on that thing. Better visit his home.”
“Kid, let me do the directing. Witnesses?”
“Deaf cleaner on the thirtieth floor. Loud colors, apron full of roses. Tried to interview her; not much English.”
***
7:47. The forensic crew has left. Lawfer is looking out the window down below, a long way down. She is pensive, hands in pockets. She watches a crowd gathering outside the police tape.
She turns, again inspects the room. She gazes at a wall portrait of a slender sandy-haired male with almost regal features. Posed before copious light, smiling into the distance. He holds in neat hands and with tenderness either end of a white scroll. Red ribbon on the scroll contrasts with the black of his gown. A crimson cloak loosely wraps around Banjo’s shoulders beneath a jet-black mortarboard on his head.
As she moves her gaze, a newspaper clip on Banjo’s desk catches her eye.
Robbo returns with coffee. He is gobbling a pink-iced donut speckled with a rainbow of sprinkles. Lawfer stays him with a raised hand. “There’s an unsolved case. Pollute my crime scene, you and that donut.”
“I swear, boss.” Robbo holds out a gingerly balanced tray with two plastic cups on it.
Lawfer meets him at the doorway, lifts a cup and sips. She turns toward the sun rising beyond broken glass. Her gaze returns and settles on Robbo. “Get DNA on East Wing staff.”
***
8:49. Abbey Wood. Lawfer arrives alone to her workplace. Parks the Passat in a carpool near the police headquarters. Despite a bitter morning—the bite of breeze up her nostrils, its sweep in her hair—the sun is out.
Lawfer passes a woman in the driver’s seat of a parked Ford oblivious to the dire morning. Two teens in hipsters and hoodies lean against a side wall, swap puffs on a ciggie. A waft of white cloud glides toward Lawfer.
She strides over to a building that has the abandoned look of an old bottle shop. Solid stone, peeling red paint. It is, in fact, an old bottle shop. A sign near the roof says so. Somebody forgot to sort that when they relocated from CBD to the suburbs. Lawfer smiles.
Chemist warehouse next door, then a barber shop and a bunch of somber, dilapidated council houses near a children’s playground. Fratellino pizzeria and a news agency stand opposite. Next, a stack of unmarked shops—all empty—one with CLOSING DOWN SALE in white bold, then a car dealership.
The Ford starts and the woman pulls away.
Across the road, word is already out on the tabloids. Big captions. Lawfer crosses to read a news item on the paper stand outside. She steps briskly into the news agency, grabs a paper from a pile below the counter.
An Indian owner, full head of salt and pepper, regards her. “Hi Law. What you reading paper for, not catch criminals?”
“Classified’s full of crims.” She picks for change in her trouser pocket.
“Don’t miss them two outside.”
As she walks past with her paper, the hoodies refuse to meet the ice in Lawfer’s gaze.
Lawfer steps into the old bottle shop. Inside, the building has seen renovations. A line of security barriers cordons off a dull interior from the public.
At the far end of the security gates is a h
orse-shoe desk. The guard behind it perks up at the sight of Lawfer. Short all-over curls, olive complexion. Small eyes and a big upper body.
“Still fooling druggies with that bottle shop gumbo?” says Lawfer.
The security guy laughs, his mirth rounding his chin even more. “Watch them all the time. Totter in, joints in the mouth, hunting two-penny booze and witching for something. Moments before a cop sticks them up: You have the right to remain silent.”
“Whacky tobacco kids, they’re everywhere. Like an old woman’s washing. Kids with knives, they’ll stick you. Sometimes you don’t want to arrest them; you just want to cock back a fist and let it fly, yeah.”
She swipes her card, walks down a narrow corridor and climbs short stairs to her office.
***
9:35. Lawfer—still in jeans but her hair combed neat. Her work boots are polished.
She strides into pathology, touches her nape. Sniffs the eau de toilette on her fingertips.
A plastic sheet covers a cadaver on a trolley in the middle of the room.
Senior pathologist Zea Caine is setting tools, readying for a procedure. She lays flat a scalpel on the trolley’s side tray.
Nearly as tall as Lawfer, handsome with dimpled cheeks. Zea is wearing little makeup. Dressed in overalls. She has a russet crop and coffee eyes large as a deer’s.
The eyes light up when they see Lawfer. “Got your message; I’m up to my ears. What’s unusual about this case?”
Lawfer silently hands the newspaper, finger on the bolded caption.
Zea takes the paper in both hands and reads:
Nobel Plummet to Catastrophe
Brain surgeon Professor William Banjo, who only a week ago was named Nobel Prize nominee for his contribution to neuroscience, was today found dead. He is believed to have leaped from the thirty-first floor of the King George Hospital, leaving behind a faculty in bewilderment.
Zea hands back the newspaper. “A Nobel Prize doesn’t label one suicide-free.”
“He didn’t jump. You do the autopsy or not?”
They face each other.
“Not much left of the body from that height. Chat in due course.”
“In due course?”
“Do the best I can.” Zea lays a gentle palm on Lawfer’s hand.
Lawfer tries to see the men in Zea’s life. Nothing. The seeing is selective, non-optional.
“Aren’t those eyes just hanging out of your head,” Zea says.
“Probably stressed, yeah.”
“Drink later, maybe?”
“Nh’nn.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
Lawfer’s eyes feel prickly. “Got a kid tagging along.”
Zea frowns. “Constable Robert Dale isn’t exactly a kid.”
“I can’t answer.” Lawfer shakes her head. “Entire world know I got a new sidekick?”
Zea laughs. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Gaaah. Gotta look after him the same, yeah. They don’t teach kids nowadays how to take a bullet.”
“And can you? Take a bullet?” Cool fingers on Lawfer’s hand still. This time Lawfer feels the staccato of Zea’s heartbeat, a pupil-dilating kind of beat.
“Last one had a name. Glenda.”
“Sob story, DCI?”
“Fact.”
“Someone’s mending a heart.”
“I’m just a fucked-up cop. I tell anyone will listen.” Lawfer touches Zea’s chin gently and her tone goes soft. “You got a face on you.”
“But . . . ?”
Lawfer smiles. “My bullet—Glenda. She had a face too.”
Lawfer strides out the door and a cold blast hits her face. Her smile dissolves in a whistling wind.
***
12:05. Back in Durham Harbour, three floors above Banjo’s in the east wing of the King George Hospital. Robbo gobbles down the last of a meat pie outside an office door.
“Still hungry?” Lawfer, cynical. “What’s your past?”
“Nothing black, boss. I’m just eating.”
“Eat your Ma yet?”
“Boss!”
Lawfer raps on a door that is ajar, pokes her head. She steps into the room. Robbo follows. Professor Syke Patterson is a worried little man trying to look tough. Well-fitted bespoke suit, his eyes the color of fresh algae.
“Got a moment, Professor?”
“No.”
Patterson looks down his nose at their approach. The kind of look that tests Lawfer’s mettle. The professor has the scent of ylang-ylang, marjoram, sandalwood, jasmine and a complex floral nectar.
“May I?” Lawfer sits herself on a traditional visitor’s chair of black leather and sturdy wooden frame opposite Patterson’s desk. She shows her badge. “I am here to find out about a nomination.”
Patterson recovers from his startle. “Are you arresting me?”
“No one’s arresting anybody. Done my research, looks like Banjo was married.”
“Three ex-wives.”
“Like I said, done my research. You were a brain surgeon way before Banjo. You took a liking to him, quite a liking. Took him under your wing then he outdid you. You wanted him dead.”
“If you’re asking whether I killed him—” Patterson begins to rise.
“Sit down, professor.” Lawfer reaches into a side pocket, takes out a notebook. She leafs to the middle, rips out a clean page. Slides it across to Patterson. “Ex-wives. Names, please.”
Patterson scribbles.
“Last night. Where were you?”
“At home. With my wife.”
Lawfer leans forward, her gaze intense, places her palms atop Patterson’s hands on the desk. “She know about you and Banjo?”
A flash: crimson on Patterson’s face.
***
13:21. Outside her office in Abbey Wood, Lawfer gives instructions. “Get a car, Robbo. Be here in five.”
Robbo revs up with a white Falcon ute.
Lawfer opens the passenger door and slides in. “You see me drive a Passat? That’s my car.”
“That’s a car from the pool. Not yours.”
The Falcon travels several minutes along an improbable landscape—thermal springs and rock art—within the sprawling homestead in Saltair. A bright yellow 4WD Cheyenne is parked easy on the driveway.
A costumed maid by the doorway of Professor Patterson’s house offers molecular food, sounds like mozzarella di bufala the way she says it, accompanied by pastries some Michelin chef might have made.
Lawfer declines. Robbo grabs a palmful.
Inside a glass cupola, Fidelis Patterson clasps Lawfer’s palm a second too long. Flash: Fidelis in a curl, face down on a sofa, chin on hand. Eyes bottomless longing, or is it sorrow? But this Fidelis now greeting Lawfer smiles. Small and wan, in her late forties, speckled hair in a fringe around her face.
“Your husband, Mrs. Patterson, where was he last night?” Lawfer.
“A particular time?”
“Did he leave the house at any point?”
“Not that I recall.”
“You’re not sure?”
Fidelis’s face, lit by orange sunshine, bears for the moment the hint of a secret before another smile dissipates it. “Course, I’m sure.”
***
15:49. Inside Lawfer’s office.
“Call up some cops, your buds, yeah. People who get things done,” she tells Robbo.
“Boss?”
“Find out something on this Banjo.”
***
A ring, Lawfer’s mobile. Zea.
“Glass breakage on the window consistent with his fall,” Zea says. “Injury on the body consistent with falling.”
“Anything else?”
“A lump on his head, something struck him.”
“Tops.”
***
Robbo returns with lab results.
“Three sets of fibers in Banjo’s clothes. One like a piece of carpet, one definitely animal hair—dog, maybe—the third is a piece of wine-red lace or chiffon.”
“That all?”
“Lots of dust and black hair.”
***
17:23. Out the window, the fading sun burns scarlet.
Three ex-wives: Rachelle Pitman. Grecian blonde with sweet dimples. Owns a pug that matches the dog hair. Channel Wheeler. Gym instructor with large, gray eyes, auburn tousle. Has a Javanese mat in her bedroom that matches the carpet fiber. Francine Will. Brisk and professional, neat boyish figure. Mauve head. Owns a cocktail chiffon with plunging neckline. Wine red.
Lawfer rubs her brows, feeling in the woods, helpless, like Thalia. “There go our clues. Bar the ebony tress.”
“Fella was obviously plugging his ex-wives,” Robbo says.
“Not obviously, but a possibility that cannot be eliminated. Chase those blood and computer results.”
“Fast track, boss.”
Lawfer contemplates. You can’t get them all, the baddies, but like heck you try, yeah.
***
Phone rings inside Lawfer’s office. Robbo with lab results:
Blood samples taken from Banjo’s office: not Banjo’s.
Computer report on Banjo’s desktop: nothing unusual. Report on Banjo’s laptop at home: porn—men, women, gang bang, bondage; and multiple emails to Patterson.
DNA of swabs taken of East Wing staff at the King George Hospital eliminate all but Patterson. He matches the blood in the office.
Lawfer sits pensive, fingers a blue packet Robbo has managed to procure. Flash—suddenly Lawfer has a seeing
***
19:18. Lawfer bursts into Patterson’s office. Behind her, Robbo.
“Don’t you have a home to go to, detective?” Patterson looks haggard.
“Don’t you?” Lawfer tosses the blue packet across the desk. “You wrote it. The research—you bloody wrote it.”
Patterson gazes at his hands.
“You were lovers,” Lawfer.
“Banjo was a wonderful lover,” Patterson speaks to his hands. “But he loved women too.”