Digging Up Dirt

by Pamela Hart

  I sat on the edge of the pit, not quite next to Tol.

  ‘I reckon it’s because she was pregnant, and the autopsy showed it,’ I said gently. His face went completely blank for a split second. I glanced at Detective Chloe. Apart from being cross with me, she wasn’t showing anything, which meant I was right.

  ‘You can have the DNA sample,’ Tol said sharply, ‘but the baby’s not mine. I always use condoms.’

  ‘I’, I noticed. Not ‘we’.

  ‘A baby,’ I said to Detective Chloe, ‘would only be a motive for murder if the relationship was a secret.’

  ‘Nice try, Poppy,’ she said. ‘But babies bring a lot of complications, even in a marriage. Easy for a man to get angry about having a baby sprung on him.’ She held up a finger in warning. ‘Not that I have confirmed that Dr Weaver was pregnant.’

  ‘Huh,’ I said. ‘So who got angry?’ I turned to Tol. ‘Since it couldn’t have been yours—who got angry?’

  ‘The baby might not have anything to do with her death,’ he said, sounding as if he was hoping it did. I did, too. If he was so happy to give the DNA, that meant it really couldn’t be his, and he would no longer be number one suspect.

  ‘Or a man might get angry,’ Chloe said softly, ‘if he found out his girlfriend was pregnant by another man.’

  Bugger. That hadn’t occurred to me.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said to Chloe, his expression one of pure disbelief. ‘Not unless he was in love with her.’

  ‘And you weren’t?’

  He flicked a look sideways at me, and I tried to pretend that I wasn’t interested in the answer.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t.’

  But there was something in his voice.

  Chloe heard it too. ‘Was that a problem?’ she asked.

  He grimaced. ‘She wanted to—she wanted the package, I think: marriage, husband, house in the suburbs. Not because she loved me; it was more politics than anything else. She wanted—she needed to seem normal to get what she wanted.’

  ‘Normal? Wasn’t she normal enough?’

  Tol and I looked at each other, and we both shook our heads.

  ‘Not the Australian Family Party kind of normal,’ I said.

  ‘Not any kind, really,’ Tol added. ‘She was an odd woman. Beautiful, but … very intense. Very focussed.’

  ‘The sort to do anything to get what she wanted?’ Chloe prompted. Like good puppets, we nodded agreement together.

  ‘Hmm,’ Chloe said. She took out a long specimen jar with a cotton bud in it and handed it to Tol. We’ve all seen the procedure on TV. He took it, rubbed the cotton bud on the inside of his cheek, hard, put it in the jar and handed it back.

  She labelled the jar carefully across the seal and got him to initial the label. Then she tucked it into her bag and looked at the two of us. Alain had melted right into the background; out into the backyard, I thought.

  ‘I wish you two had better alibis,’ she said. ‘If we had even a skerrick more evidence you’d both be under arrest for conspiracy to murder.’

  ‘Come on, Chloe,’ I said. ‘You know we didn’t do it. Think about it logically—if Tol cared about Julieanne enough to resent her being pregnant, he wouldn’t be conspiring with me. If he didn’t care enough, he’s got no reason to kill her.’

  ‘Except to be free to be with you,’ Chloe said, as if that was obvious.

  ‘Dr Lang,’ I said, ‘is going back to Jordan very shortly to take up his permanent position as the assistant head of the Australian Institute of Archaeology in Amman. He’s hardly going to kill someone so he can have a holiday fling.’ I avoided looking at Tol.

  ‘Is that true?’ Chloe asked him.

  He nodded. ‘Next month,’ he said. ‘I was just filling in time with this job.’

  ‘So you had a very good reason to be angry if Julieanne deliberately got pregnant with your baby,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope the DNA doesn’t match. Or you might not be getting on that plane.’

  She collected Martin with a nod of the head, and they left.

  For a moment, we both stared at the floor of the pit, now free of bones.

  ‘It’s not my baby,’ he stated.

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  We looked at each other, but we didn’t smile.

  ‘You might have been a lot of things, but you wouldn’t have been a holiday fling,’ he said. His eyes were greener, today, reflecting his T-shirt, and the pupils were larger in the evening light. Or maybe just because he was looking at me.

  He was leaving, so getting involved with him would be really, really stupid.

  ‘I’ve broken up with Stuart,’ I said. More or less true. I’d text him later, but I figured he’d already know I was pissed off with him.

  Tol took a long breath and reached out a hand to my cheek. His fingers were dirty, but I didn’t care. My heart was pounding and I felt warm from head to toe. Flamingly alive, as though each separate fingertip was an energy source that flooded me with heat. I turned my face into his hand, and he moved towards me.

  Then the back door banged and Alain came back into the room, peering around the corner to make sure Detective Chloe was gone. He grinned when he saw us.

  ‘Oops!’ he said. ‘Do you want me to go away?’

  The moment was gone and I was sane again.

  ‘No,’ I said, scrambling up. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. We need to redo the interview I did with Julieanne. I’ll see you here in the morning.’

  Tol nodded without looking at me and I left as quickly as I could without actually running. Six weeks, I reminded myself. He’d be gone in six weeks.

  Detective Chloe was still standing by her car outside, talking on her phone. She saw me come out and waved at me to wait for her, so I leant against my picket fence, which needed new paint.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she confirmed with whoever was on the other end. ‘Early.’ She put the phone back in her pocket. ‘I don’t want to hear a story about Weaver being pregnant on The Daily Report,’ she said with a stern eye.

  ‘Unconfirmed sources? That’s not the way Tyler works. He likes hard evidence. It’s the ABC, after all.’

  She nodded. ‘You think Carter was the father.’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s a great motive for murder—and it doesn’t even have to be Carter who killed her. Could be anyone in the church or the party. Carter getting a single woman pregnant and then promoting her for preselection? The radio talkbacks would go mad.’ I hesitated. ‘Off the record—has Carter given a DNA sample?’

  ‘Haven’t asked him yet. We have to exclude the obvious ones first—your Dr Lang, Mr Douglas, Paul Baume …’

  ‘Gerry Collonucci?’

  ‘I thought they despised each other?’

  ‘They did. But he was very smug about his alibi. I’d check those students of hers out, too. Especially the one with acne. He and Gerry are alibi-ing each other and it stinks to high heaven.’

  Chloe looked at me with some exasperation. ‘Anyone else?’

  I thought it over. ‘Ask Patience Carter,’ I said at last. ‘If there’s been anyone at the church or the party, she’ll have noticed. She’s a smart girl.’

  ‘I doubt Matthew Carter will let me talk to her alone.’

  ‘Doesn’t have to be alone,’ I said. ‘You’re not asking her to implicate her father. He’ll probably be glad if she can suggest someone else.’

  It was a fine evening, and Chloe turned her face to the last rays of the sun as though seeking some benediction. ‘I loathe cases like this,’ she said. ‘Most murders, you know who it is, or at least you have a good idea, even if you can’t prove it. But this one—’ She shook her head wearily.

  I had the distinct impression that she didn’t think I was the murderer any more. But I wasn’t so sure about Tol.

  ‘Do you suspect anyone in particular?’ I asked quietly.

  ‘You mean, do I think Lang did it?’ She looked back at the house, where they’d turned on the light so that it shone through
the window and we could see the men’s shadows moving across the walls, huge and distorted. ‘I learnt a long time ago, Poppy, that anyone can kill, given the right circumstances.’

  It wasn’t exactly comforting.

  ‘How did Stuart go this morning?’ I asked, more to break the silence than anything else.

  ‘He gave us the sample and a statement,’ she said. ‘We’re waiting on his phone records to confirm that he went home as he said.’ She turned to look at me closely. ‘How did you two meet?’

  ‘Paul Baume introduced us at a museum exhibition opening,’ I said. ‘He and Stuart went to school together.’ I paused. Detective Chloe’s brown eyes were intent on my face. A thought was hitting both of us at the same time. ‘He and Stuart went to school together. But … Stuart never mentioned meeting Julieanne. Even before all this happened.’

  ‘Odd.’

  It was odd. Of course, Paul was odd. He didn’t necessarily follow the normal rules of social behaviour. He might not have introduced Stuart to his girlfriend. But Detective Chloe looked like she might be planning to ask Stuart a few more questions.

  ‘How do you think Stuart would have reacted to Julieanne being pregnant with his child?’

  Badly. Very badly.

  ‘It would have depended on what she wanted him to do,’ I temporised.

  ‘If she wanted marriage?’

  I shook my head automatically. ‘Stuart doesn’t want to get married.’

  Chloe smiled grimly. ‘So here’s a question for you—would you rather the killer was the man you’ve already slept with, or the man you’d like to sleep with?’

  I was too experienced an interviewer to fall for that one. ‘I would rather,’ I said, ‘that the killer was someone I don’t know.’

  She grimaced. ‘Wouldn’t we all? But it usually isn’t, I’m afraid.’

  And that was that. She drove off in that way cops have of accelerating immediately to the speed limit and I walked home slowly, half hoping that Tol would catch up with me, and half hoping he wouldn’t.

  He didn’t. But I texted Stuart anyway. Please stop calling me. I know it’s tacky to break up by text, but I was still so pissed off with him that I didn’t care. And Detective Chloe’s questions had made me realise that I didn’t really know—or trust—Stuart at all. Besides, it was Wednesday. He wouldn’t thank me for interrupting laundry night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Thursday

  I met the film crew at the house in the morning and we recreated the interview we’d done the first day with Julieanne, but this time with me asking Tol the questions. It was horrible—Banquo’s ghost was with us the whole time, and Tol’s answers were mechanical and short. I didn’t blame him.

  In the end, I said, ‘Forget this, let’s take the bones back to the museum and do it there.’

  The team all greeted this suggestion with relief and we packed up. The camera crew headed out and Tol and I picked up the remaining specimens of bones and bagged and labelled them. As we went out the door a white council van drove up and the man who’d brought the heritage order over the day Julieanne had been found got out. What was his name? Fozina, that was it.

  ‘Mr Fozina,’ I said. ‘What can we do for you?’

  ‘Are you still working on this house?’ he said suspiciously, brandishing a clipboard. ‘The heritage order is still in force, you know!’

  ‘This,’ I said, indicating Tol, ‘is Dr Lang, an archaeologist from the Museum of New South Wales, who has taken over following Dr Weaver’s sad death. And you’ll be pleased to know that he has proven conclusively that this was not the site of an early pastoral lease featuring fat-tailed sheep.’

  At last, something’s going right. I’d get this guy to sign off on the order and I could book in the electricians.

  ‘Is this true?’ Fozina demanded of Tol.

  I’d never seen Tol try to be impressive before. He did a pretty good job. Being about six inches taller than Fozina probably helped.

  ‘Certainly. There is no doubt at all. My colleague Dr Parkes from the University of Sydney has confirmed it beyond question. He is a world-renowned expert on animal bones.’

  Fozina considered this, pushing his lips out so that he looked like a baby in a grump. ‘Council is meeting on Friday night. If you want the order rescinded, you’ll have to present your case then.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I’ll get it put on the agenda.’ Clearly thought he was doing me a favour, but I wasn’t feeling grateful.

  ‘Why can’t you just accept Dr Lang’s report?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can table the report, but there’s a couple of councillors who are pretty gung-ho about heritage, so if you want to be sure the order is lifted …’

  Bugger. I turned to Tol pleadingly.

  He decided to be funny. ‘Friday?’ he said. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I might have other plans …’

  I hit him on the arm. ‘Tol!’

  He grinned and tousled my hair. Despite my anxiety over the house, I noticed how natural it felt for him to tease me—as though we’d known each other for years. The way my friend Alex and I mucked around.

  ‘What time?’ he asked Fozina.

  ‘Six o’clock sharp. And it helps if you have ten copies of the report.’

  ‘If you write it, I’ll print it,’ I said to Tol.

  ‘Who’s paying me?’ Another joke.

  ‘The museum,’ I said.

  He grinned. What was he so happy about?

  Then Fozina peered behind us to look inside the house.

  ‘Are the police finished now?’ he asked. ‘I heard she was really beat up.’

  Tol stopped smiling. ‘I’ll see you at the museum,’ he said to me, and walked to his car.

  ‘What’s with him?’ Fozina said.

  ‘It was his girlfriend.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, shit. Sorry.’

  ‘Mmm. Can I have a copy of the heritage order?’

  He detached it from his clipboard and handed it over. ‘Word of advice? Keep it simple. Some of those councillors don’t read so good.’

  Wonderful. Democracy in action.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘We will.’

  At the museum, the crew had set up in front of an archaeological exhibit, with a circle of interested schoolkids whom Mirha had warned to keep quiet. See how useful it is to have an experienced crew? Tol was sombre, but he answered the questions fluently and we got what we needed. The Tol who had joked about skeletons was gone. After Terry and the others left, I touched him on the arm.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Do you know how she died?’ he asked abruptly. ‘Was she beaten up? Was she—hurt badly?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘From the questions Chloe’s been asking, it sounds like she fell—was pushed—backwards and hit her head on the bearer.’

  Some of the tension went out of his shoulders and he let out a sigh.

  ‘It doesn’t seem real,’ he said. ‘I keep expecting her to come around a corner.’

  ‘I know.’

  We stood there in the middle of the exhibition with the kids yelling and bickering around us, and had nothing to say.

  ‘I’ll send you the report,’ he said eventually. He walked through the door that said STAFF ONLY and I went back to Artarmon feeling depressed.

  I found Paul Baume sitting in my visitor’s chair.

  ‘Paul?’ Why was he here? Surely not to confess or talk over his relationship with Julieanne?

  He stood. ‘Stuart asked me to talk to you.’

  ‘And you agreed?’

  ‘He’s very upset. He thinks you don’t really understand—’

  ‘What I understand is that he lied to me. He saw Julieanne that night and he never mentioned it!’

  Jennifer Jay perched on a nearby desk and listened unashamedly. So did Mirha and the other PAs. Fine by me. Stuart was dead meat as far as I was concerned.

  ‘I know. He didn’t want to get involved.’

  ‘And now he’s not invo
lved. With me.’

  Jennifer Jay and the girls applauded.

  Paul shrugged. He’d done his job, and he wasn’t going to push it. But he didn’t leave. He glanced at Jennifer Jay and moved closer to me. ‘Can I have a word in private?’

  I led him into the viewing room where we watched the rushes and closed the door. He looked around and apparently found the available chairs unappealing. Too dirty, maybe. Unhygienic.

  ‘Was Julieanne pregnant?’ he blurted out.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They asked me for a DNA sample. Stuart too. He thinks she might have been pregnant.’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Prudhomme wouldn’t confirm that.’

  ‘But she didn’t deny it?’

  ‘No.’

  He started pacing the tiny room. ‘It wasn’t Stuart,’ he muttered. ‘And it wasn’t me. Could have been Lang, I suppose.’

  ‘Paul?’ I asked gently.

  He whirled on me and I took a step back. In this small space I realised just how big he was. How strong. In a flash, the noir scene I had imagined between Stuart and Julieanne changed to a scene with Paul. He loomed much more believably than Stuart.

  ‘What if I knew—thought I might know—the father?’

  ‘You should tell Chloe,’ I said promptly. ‘Detective Prudhomme, I mean.’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know …’ He was pacing still, his hands picking at the sides of his trousers. ‘I shouldn’t have been watching her …’

  I felt a prickle of excitement. ‘You followed her? That night?’

  ‘No, no, I knew where she was that night. But before …’

  I could see it. She’d broken up with him, and he’d had to find out why. Who. So he followed her.

  ‘Who did she meet, Paul?’

  ‘She used to wait for him around the corner from that church,’ he said, looking at the dark row of video screens as though looking back in time. As though he could see Julieanne again. ‘He’d get in her car and they’d go—places.’

  Motels, probably.

  ‘Carter?’ I prodded. ‘Matthew Carter?’

  ‘I don’t know his name.’

  ‘He’s been on the news.’

  ‘He was in that story you did for The Daily Report,’ Paul said. ‘Stuart and I watched that.’