Digging Up Dirt

by Pamela Hart

  I groaned, but quietly. ‘I’ll talk to Tyler,’ I said. ‘But I can’t promise. Tomorrow, you reckon?’

  ‘It turned out that Gerry only sold to a couple of dealers in Italy. They’ve got one and they expect to arrest the other tonight. So they’ll be announcing a successful investigation tomorrow.’

  I filled Jennifer Jay in and called Tyler. ‘Want an exclusive?’ I said. It was like offering meth to an addict.

  So the next morning I had one of the most surreal experiences of my life: sitting in a TV studio interviewing one of my best friends. It felt like a joke; Annie and I had made films together as students, and I half-expected our old lecturer to pop out from behind the camera and correct my technique.

  The ABC lawyer had briefed me about what questions I couldn’t ask. Nothing that would prejudice a jury against Gerry. Difficult. Never make an assertion about his behaviour without putting ‘alleged’ in front. Be careful not to imply that he’d killed Julieanne, because that was defamation. Stick to the facts. I began to think that news journos really earned their money.

  ‘Go hard,’ Tyler said to me while I was being made up. ‘Museum incompetence, lack of supervision, that kind of thing.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He blinked. He really wasn’t used to being told that.

  ‘Annie’s here only because she trusts me,’ I said. ‘This is not a story about museum incompetence. It’s a story about a sleazy, opportunistic bastard who took advantage of the pure-minded but very competent people he worked with. And, incidentally, ripped off both the taxpayers of this country and the Indigenous population.’

  Maybe I looked fierce. He backed down, waving his hands as though denying all responsibility.

  ‘Go hard on Collonucci, then,’ he instructed.

  ‘Glad to.’

  I started with easy ones.

  ‘Dr Southey, what exactly have the police discovered about Gerry Collonucci’s activities?’

  We went through all the PR-sanctioned questions and answers and Annie came over as competent, thoughtful and thoroughly rehearsed. I went hard on Gerry and Annie abetted me. The Minister should be delighted. He even got a plug for funding a new security system. But then I thought I’d better give Tyler something for his cooperation.

  ‘Is it true that the first person to discover Dr Collonucci’s alleged criminal activities was Julieanne Weaver, who was murdered recently?’

  ‘Yes, that’s correct,’ Annie said. She was a little white around the eyes, but she was performing like an old hand.

  I smiled encouragingly. ‘The police haven’t made an arrest in that case, have they?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said, implying that any second now, Gerry Collonucci was going to be charged with Julieanne’s death.

  ‘Was there a history of enmity between Dr Collonucci and Dr Weaver?’

  I hadn’t flagged that question with her because I wanted at least a couple that came over as unrehearsed.

  Annie bit her lip. ‘Well, I think anyone who worked with them at the museum would say that they didn’t get on very well.’

  ‘Dr Weaver criticised Dr Collonucci’s management?’ No matter how I phrased it, there was an implied ‘And she was right, you weren’t doing your job’. But I knew Annie had an answer.

  ‘I had placed Dr Collonucci on notice that unless his performance improved, his contract would be not be renewed at the end of the financial year.’

  I had to look as if that was news to me. ‘So do you think that was what prompted him to this alleged illegal action?’

  ‘I think he was feathering his nest while he had the opportunity,’ Annie said bluntly. We were sailing close to the sub judice wind, so I changed tack.

  ‘Do you know whether the police are continuing to investigate Julieanne Weaver’s death?’ Translation: Do they think Gerry did it?

  ‘As far as I’m aware,’ Annie said carefully, ‘they are looking closely at Dr Collonucci’s movements on the night in question.’ Translation: Yes, they do.

  ‘It’s quite a scandal,’ I said conversationally. ‘Theft, fraud and murder.’

  Annie was ready for that. She smiled. ‘Poppy, the museum is one hundred and forty-two years old. It’s seen worse scandals than this come and go, and it’s survived because it has a special place in the hearts of the people of New South Wales. I’m sure they will understand that the actions of one dishonest man can’t tarnish its reputation.’

  She meant it, too, and that showed.

  ‘Dr Southey, thank you,’ I said.

  The floor manager said, ‘Thank you, everyone,’ and the sound people rushed in to get our lapel mikes.

  ‘Fantastic,’ I said.

  She was frowning.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If Gerry didn’t do it, the real murderer is going to be pretty happy tonight,’ she said.

  That was a disquieting thought.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Tuesday

  Stuart turned up at Artarmon looking incredibly respectable in a three-piece suit. The receptionist, Cherie, knew all about my breakup with him and took some delight in keeping him waiting. She didn’t even ask him to sit down, so by the time I got out there he was shifting from foot to foot and looking out the window onto the broken paving of the small and very dull courtyard.

  I’d broken up with guys before—at my age, who hadn’t?—and I’d always felt bad about it; either I hadn’t wanted to lose him or I hadn’t wanted to hurt him. So when I came out the security door that led to the back office, I delayed letting Stuart know I was there. But looking at his neatly tailored back I realised that I just didn’t care. I didn’t believe that he loved me, I guess, which meant no one was going to get hurt except for their pride—and Stuart’s pride, I reckoned, was due for a fall. I felt a lightness, a freedom, that I hadn’t expected.

  ‘Yes?’ I said as discouragingly as I could.

  He turned around and frowned at me like a schoolmaster, then glanced significantly at Cherie. ‘Can we talk privately?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I traded glances with Cherie and she nodded encouragement. Cherie’s attitude to men veers wildly between complete infatuation and complete disdain, and we were in a disdain phase, so she was right behind me. She twirled her nose ring, which she tells me freaks suits out, and sure enough, Stuart winced and avoided looking at her. Which left him looking at me.

  Even in this moment, I had to admit he cut a fine figure, but I was aware as I never had been of his small, pursed lips.

  ‘It was tacky of you to break up with me in a text, Poppy,’ he said, like a parody of Miss Manners.

  ‘You knew we were over or you wouldn’t have slammed the door at my parents’ place on your way out,’ I retorted. Attack, Poppy, I told myself. Don’t let this jerk take the moral high ground. ‘And you lied to the police!’

  Cherie made a tch tch sound.

  He was taken aback. ‘No, I didn’t!’

  ‘Seven o’clock? You were walking down my street at seven o’clock? Did you expect me to believe that? You watch the news at seven o’clock. It’s a bloody ritual!’

  His face cleared and he pulled his iPhone out of his pocket and beamed. ‘I stream it now!’ he said proudly. ‘So I can be anywhere and not miss it.’

  That verged on obsessive. Then I thought it through. ‘Do you mean to say,’ I said slowly and dangerously, ‘that you were planning to front up to my house and say, “Here’s some wine, let’s have sex but I just have to watch the news first”?’

  ‘Um …’

  ‘I have so broken up with you.’

  ‘Unbelievable!’ Cherie said.

  ‘You keep out of this!’ Stuart snarled at her.

  ‘She can say anything she likes!’ I retorted. ‘She belongs here. Unlike you.’ I stood by Cherie’s desk and crossed my arms. Cherie leant back in her chair and crossed her arms. We stared.

  ‘I think you’ll find you’ve made a very big mistake, Poppy,’ Stuart said with an attempt at dignity.


  ‘Do you know,’ I said to Cherie, ignoring him, ‘that Stuart and his old school friend meet on Wednesdays to do their laundry together? Every Wednesday. And not in a laundromat. In Stuart’s flat.’

  ‘Eughh. That is so weird,’ Cherie responded obediently, although I could see by the widening of her eyes that she really thought it was.

  Stuart stood there, reddening, as though he’d never even thought about it before. He was a lot more pathetic than he’d seemed. If I hadn’t been staying at my parents I would have spent more time with him and found that out much sooner. So I guess it wasn’t his fault he’d made me believe he was normal for so long.

  ‘Go and get a life, Stuart,’ I said, as kindly as I could.

  He went out the door without another word.

  ‘Well, he was cute, but really—laundry?’ Cherie said and I thought she’d just about summed it up.

  When I got home from work, I went around to my little house and worked in my garden. I couldn’t do anything inside because of the council order, but I could mulch and prune and plant, so I did. It was lovely—a warm spring evening with the promise of better weather to come. I turned my phone off and just pottered. Then I posted before and after photos to social media and felt quietly smug at all the admiring comments.

  That night, I watched Carmen Broadhurst trounce the independent candidate for North Hughes on a late-night political show. I hoped the big parties would get their acts together and put the boot in, or the Australian Family Party was going to hold the balance of power in State Parliament—which meant that Amos Winchester and Matthew Carter were going to be running things in my state. I didn’t like that prospect at all.

  On Wednesday night, I took my Aunty Mary to the hospital to see my cousin Stephanie, who’d just had a new baby girl. They were naming her Marie, and there was a big family fight going on over whether to pronounce it MAR-ree (traditional Aussie Catholic) or Ma-REE (French, ‘foreign’). I hated both versions.

  ‘Call her Mary,’ I said, endearing myself to no one but my aunty.

  The hospital room was full to bursting, and noisier than any new mother should be asked to bear. I shepherded them all to the coffee shop, stopped Aunty Mary giving a piece of her mind to Stephanie’s mother-in-law (Italian, wanted ‘Maria’), and zoned out. After all the tensions of the past week, a family squabble over a much-loved baby was curiously reassuring.

  I drove Aunty Mary home and got her cross-examination about the case, my work, and ‘Who is this Tol Lang your mother’s told me about?’

  Mary was an anomaly in the family. She had gone to England in her youth and then, influenced by Carnaby Street, she’d come back, opened up her own designer boutique, been picked up by David Jones and the major stores, then sold the label to a big company and retired on the proceeds. As far as I knew, she’d never sewn a stitch or picked up a sketch pad since, but she did always look fabulous. She’d married an older widower when she was in her forties, and lived all over the world with him as he advised developing countries how to breed better goats.

  This varied life had worn away the sharp edges of the family tendency to judgement; she was far more accepting of difference than anyone else in the family, which made her one of the few relatives I could really talk to.

  ‘He’s going to Jordan in six weeks,’ I said. ‘Permanently.’

  Maybe my tone said more than I thought, because she patted my leg. ‘Nothing’s permanent until it happens. If you want him, go for it. Who knows what might happen?’

  That was the voice of long experience talking. It was tempting, but really not sensible.

  ‘Until this murder thing is cleared up, though …’

  ‘Well, that’s true. You don’t want to get tied up to a murderer.’

  Can’t argue with that.

  I dropped Aunty Mary at her retirement village and went back to my house to pick up Mum’s secateurs, which I’d left there the day before.

  But sitting on the front step was Patience Carter, dressed in jeans and a hoodie and carrying a big shoulder bag that bulged in all directions. She stood up uncertainly as I opened the gate.

  ‘Patience?’

  ‘I didn’t know where else to come,’ she said. She burst into tears.

  You don’t come from a family as big as mine without learning how to deal with crying. I patted her on the back, put tissues in her hands, murmured meaningless soothing sounds and steered her not into the house, but back to my car. If they suspected she had come to me, the house would be the first place they’d look.

  Once she was in the car, hiccupping quietly, I drove down to the local harbourside park and stopped.

  ‘How can I help?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said. Now that she’d let out the tears, she seemed dazed. Quietly despairing, which I didn’t like. She looked out at Rozelle Bay, where the lights were reflecting from the Anzac Bridge in long streaks of gold.

  ‘Tell me all about it.’

  ‘I couldn’t stay there!’ she said.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘After church, there was a women’s Bible group. It meets once a month, you know? And they’re trying to get more young women, so Mum asked me to come along.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said encouragingly.

  ‘She’s such a hypocrite!’ Patience flared. Ah, there it was. The one thing the young can’t forgive.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The text for the day was The truth will set you free. She got up and started talking about truth and how Jesus wants us to live honestly and justly and I couldn’t take it any more! It was disgusting!’

  ‘What did you do?’

  She looked at me as though she didn’t understand, and I realised that even disgusted and angry, Patience Carter wouldn’t have done anything to disrupt a Bible class.

  ‘I waited until we got home and then I put some clothes in a bag and—and I just left. I got the train to the city but then I didn’t know what to do … so I came here.’ She sounded uncertain and a little afraid.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ I said immediately. ‘I’ll do whatever I can to help.’

  I was burning with curiosity about what made Eliza Carter a hypocrite, but I’d had enough to do with teenage nieces to know that it was really none of my business and Patience was more likely to tell me if I didn’t ask.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said in a small voice, and relaxed.

  There was a silence. She fiddled with the strap of her bag and I thought about what to do with her. Alex had a spare room, but was Alex the right choice? Despite Winchester’s restraint on the issue, Patience had, without a doubt, been raised to be homophobic, and Alex and Rick would shock her to the core. Would that be good or bad at this stage? Bad, I decided. We didn’t want to give her any reason to run back home until she’d confessed all.

  ‘I could take you to my parents’ place,’ I said. ‘But I’m living there at the moment, so if your family figure out you’ve come to me they’ll go straight there. Seems to me you should stay with a friend of mine until you decide what you want to do.’

  Pale as milk, she looked as if she was just realising that she’d walked out on everything. Family, school, friends. It had to be a pretty big betrayal to justify that. I pushed down my curiosity.

  ‘My friend Fiona has a spare room,’ I said. ‘Do you like cats?’

  Of course she liked cats. More than that, the idea of cats was reassuring. Homely. I rang Fiona and just said I had a young friend who needed a place to crash for a night or two, could I bring her over? Fiona is a Youth Officer with a local council, and what she doesn’t know about kids isn’t worth knowing. More importantly, she genuinely likes them, so she said, ‘Sure.’

  I took Patience over to Fiona’s little house in Marrickville and stayed with them while she settled in. Patience blinked a couple of times over Fiona’s spiked hair and pink gumboots, but her kindness and light touch soon allayed any worries.

  Fiona’s cats had avoided me ev
er since I bought my house because I always smelt of paint stripper or wood glue. But they wound around Patience’s legs and Toby, the fat tabby, deigned to sit on her lap and be stroked, a rare sign of approval. Jughead, the thin calico, perched delicately on the arm of Fiona’s chair and stared at Toby, trying to figure out if he was getting anything she wanted.

  We ordered vegetarian pizza from the organic pizza place and ate in front of the television, two things I think Patience rarely got to do. Then a newsflash came on: A search for Patience Carter, believed abducted this afternoon from North Hughes. Patience’s school photo came up on the screen and Toby squealed indignantly as she clutched him, then jumped off her lap, the bell around his neck jangling.

  Fiona hit the mute button. ‘You have to tell your parents you’re all right,’ she said firmly.

  Patience panicked. ‘I’m not calling them! They’ll trace it or something and—and—and—’ She started to cry, the jagged crying that comes with exhaustion.

  ‘I’ll ring the police,’ I said.

  Patience dragged in a great breath and started to object.

  I put up a hand. ‘I won’t tell them where you are. Just that you haven’t been abducted, you’re safe, and you’ve made your own decision to leave home. You’re sixteen, aren’t you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘That means you have the right to live anywhere you like,’ Fiona cut in. ‘Your parents can’t force you back.’

  ‘Really?’ Patience’s eyes were saucers. It had never occurred to her that she had any rights at all.

  I felt a stab of satisfaction. No matter what the outcome, Patience’s life wasn’t going to be the same after this.

  I rang Detective Chloe, of course.

  ‘Prudhomme.’

  ‘This is Poppy McGowan. I thought you ought to know that Patience Carter hasn’t been abducted.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She’d rather her parents didn’t know that at the moment, but she is fine.’

  ‘Let me talk to her.’

  It was beginning to sound like those scenes in FBI shows where they try to negotiate with the kidnappers, so I handed the phone over to Patience. Time for her to speak for herself. She took it cautiously.