by Pamela Hart
‘Okay,’ she said. Suddenly she looked very young and very scared. I put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her.
‘I can’t tell you that it will all be all right,’ I said. ‘But I’ll try my best to help.’
‘Thanks.’ She managed a watery smile.
I dropped Patience at Marrickville and watched her go inside before I called Tyler and agreed to meet Terry and Dave at the Carters’ house. Carter himself was at the electoral office, trying to pretend nothing had happened, but I wanted to see Eliza.
‘Carter is the story,’ Tyler objected.
‘Carter is as smooth a piece of work as you’ll ever see,’ I retorted. ‘We won’t get anything out of him. Eliza, on the other hand, is a worried mum.’
‘Hmm. She won’t talk to you.’
‘Then we’ll go beard Carter in his den. Let Jennifer Jay know where I am, will you?’
He grumbled, but it was the least he could do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Terry, Dave and I rendezvoused down the road from the Carters’ and went to the house in the ABC car. Detective Chloe’s car was pulled up at the front door and they had private security guards at the entrance keeping the media out. I rang Eliza from the driveway. The answering machine picked up.
‘Eliza, if you’re there, it’s Poppy McGowan.’
She snatched up the receiver. ‘Poppy? Do you know where she is?’
‘I think we’d better have a talk, Eliza. Tell your goons to let me in.’
I passed the phone over to the head goon, who looked barely old enough to shave but was full of self-importance and bravado. He grandly waved us through.
‘Good job,’ Terry said.
‘She may not agree to talk to us,’ I cautioned.
‘I’m rolling,’ he said. ‘Either way, we get footage.’
Spoken like a true NewsCaffian.
Detective Constable Martin answered the door. ‘Leave the camera crew outside,’ he said.
Terry got what he could through the open door: Eliza, Chloe, Samuel Stephenson and his wife, and Amos Winchester, all looking up from their chairs and frowning.
‘Out!’ Martin said more forcefully.
I shrugged at Terry and went in and Martin shut the door behind me. Winchester looked up at me with a set jaw, as if he were afraid I’d start throwing accusations around. I nodded to him. A pact, a reassurance. His secret was safe with me. He nodded in return, fighting back some strong emotion which set a muscle in his cheek jumping. What would he do to protect the church? How far would he go? A man who could deny his sexuality for his entire life was a formidable person. But then he turned to Eliza and his face gentled. I was suddenly sure he would never hurt anyone. Not physically. Not deliberately.
Eliza was distraught. She ignored Winchester and Detective Chloe and came over to me, clutching at my arm.
‘Where is she? That detective says she’s all right, but she won’t tell me where she is. Have you seen her?’
Chloe cut in. ‘Why do you assume that Patience would go to Ms McGowan?’
‘Where else would she go?’ Eliza cried. ‘None of her friends have heard from her. No one in the church. This woman has been a terrible influence on Patience! She would never have left otherwise.’
It wasn’t the first time I’d been called a terrible influence. Mrs Dickens, the head of the altar society at my old parish church, had warned my friends about me in exactly the same terms when I was thirteen. I had the same reaction now as then: a mixture of outrage at the idea that I could be a bad influence on anyone, and a tinge of pride because of who was doing the accusing. I hadn’t like Mrs Dickens’s take on things any more than I liked Eliza’s. Now that I thought about it, they agreed on a lot of things.
I looked at Chloe and she made a small shushing motion with her hand, so I didn’t snap back at Eliza.
‘I’m sure that, wherever she is, Patience is fine, Eliza,’ I said soothingly. ‘Isn’t that so, detective?’
‘She was when I spoke to her this morning,’ Chloe said.
Eliza burst into tears. ‘Why did she go? Why won’t she come home?’ she wailed.
The Stephenson sparrow woman patted her back ineffectually and Stephenson himself said, ‘Now, Eliza,’ in an intimidating tone, as if the woman was acting in bad taste by caring about her daughter.
Chloe and I exchanged glances, and she nodded at me. Apparently she wanted to let me put the boot in. Good.
‘She doesn’t want to come home because she thinks you killed Julieanne Weaver,’ I said.
Eliza dragged air in with a kind of whoop that almost had me laughing. It was a reaction of total shock. Mrs Stephenson gasped, too. Even Winchester was startled. But not Stephenson. He just watched Detective Chloe watch Eliza. That was the most interesting thing I’d seen in days.
Eliza sprang forward. ‘Get out of my house! Get out of my house!’ she shouted at me. She came at me with her fists raised. ‘Jezebel! Whore! Handmaid of Satan! Out!’ Her face contorted with hatred. Maroon with rage, mouth gaping—and the truly horrible part was that the rest of her was as neat as always, perfectly groomed, well shod, tidy. It seemed as though someone had CGIed this screaming fishwife face onto another body.
Chloe stepped in between the two of us. ‘Out,’ she said to me.
Martin took my arm and led me to the door, and it was only then that I realised I was shaking.
As Martin closed the door behind me, I heard Chloe ask, ‘Is that why you killed Julieanne Weaver, Eliza? Was she a handmaid of Satan too?’
I so wanted to hear her answer. I met Martin’s eyes and, bless him, he delayed closing the door long enough for me to hear. But Eliza didn’t answer. She just burst into tears and sank to the ground.
Winchester bent over her and said something softly. That was all Martin was prepared to give me. He shut the door definitively, leaving me still shaking on the other side.
‘What’s happened?’ Terry asked.
‘I’m a whore and a handmaid of Satan,’ I said, trying to sound flippant, ‘and I’m no longer welcome.’
‘Better get to Carter’s office, then,’ Terry said phlegmatically.
But Carter passed us on our way to the electoral office, driving fast and looking worried.
‘They’ve called him home,’ I said. ‘Go to the party offices.’
Something was worrying me. There were two things I couldn’t get out of my head. One was the fact that Carter had come home from his meeting two hours later than he said—but he couldn’t have been with Julieanne, because Julieanne was dead by then. And Samuel Stephenson hadn’t been at all surprised that Eliza might have killed Julieanne.
I struggled to remember what Paul Baume had said about the man who had been meeting Julieanne. ‘The guy from the church,’ he’d said. And that he was in the story I’d done for The Daily Report. It fitted Stephenson as well as Carter. There’d only been a couple of shots of Stephenson, which was why I hadn’t immediately thought of him, but Paul could have seen him, even though Tyler had chosen not to use that revealing little moment in the car park.
Julieanne, Paul had said earlier, wanted to get married. Had implied that she had someone lined up, more important than Paul. Which didn’t fit Tol at all. But Stephenson was already married, and even Julieanne couldn’t have imagined that he would divorce his little sparrow wife to marry her. The scandal would have killed the party and any political aspirations either of them had. Julieanne was Psycho Woman, but she wasn’t stupid.
So maybe I was being stupid. What was I missing?
Who was I missing?
If Carter wasn’t sleeping with Julieanne … who was he with?
If Julieanne had planned to marry someone—who? Surely not Amos Winchester? That was just laughable, for all sorts of reasons. The only thing I was sure of was that Amos Winchester was proof against far more fatale femmes than Julieanne. And if she’d held his sexuality over his head like a sword of Damocles—no. She might have demanded preselectio
n as the price of silence, but not marriage. So who? Who was the father of her child?
The party offices had a couple of camera crews and three print journalists waiting in the reception area. Terry, out of habit, shot a minute or so of footage of the receptionist, Samantha, who recognised me but was in full ‘we will fight them on the beaches’ mode.
‘I’m afraid no one from the party is available to comment on anything at the moment,’ she informed me, loudly enough for the others to hear. They rolled their eyes. One of the camera operators, who looked about fourteen, was playing his Switch and didn’t take any notice. I heard Pokémon music. It was clearly irritating Samantha. She glared at him, but of course he didn’t notice.
‘Annoying, huh?’ I said, leaning a little closer as if to speak over the music.
‘He’s been playing that for two hours!’
‘I know Mr Stephenson’s not here,’ I said. ‘I just saw him at the Carters’.’ As if I was his best friend. ‘Eliza’s not coping well, is she?’
Samantha tried to put on the sympathetic friend face, but a flicker of contempt came first. Aha!
‘Well … she’s always been a bit high-strung,’ she said. Non-committal tone, but ‘high-strung’ is polite-speak for ‘neurotic as hell’.
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘That must be hard for Matthew.’
‘Oh, it is,’ she said. ‘But he’s so loyal to her. He won’t hear a word against her, you know.’
A tinge of bitterness there all right. Could Samantha be Carter’s lover?
‘Were you taking the minutes for the preselection meeting last Tuesday?’ I asked, pulling out a notebook.
‘Oh, I can’t reveal anything that was said at the meeting!’ she said immediately.
‘So you were there?’
‘I take the minutes at all confidential meetings.’ Proud as a peacock.
‘Matthew must trust you a great deal.’ I positively purred it.
She sat a little straighter, as any trusted employee might at such a compliment, but the small smile on her mouth was full of private satisfaction. Yep, Samantha was my girl.
‘What time did the meeting end?’
She hesitated. ‘Around one, I think.’
‘And what time did you and Matthew leave, Samantha?’
This time, I put all my secret knowledge into the question, leaning in and looking meaningful. My tone was spiced with just a little prurience. My smile was conspiratorial.
And God help me, it worked! She blushed fiery red, the tide sweeping up over her pale skin as though she was a bottle being filled with wine.
She fought it. ‘Just after one,’ she managed to say.
‘Mmm. But he didn’t get home until three, did he?’
She blinked at such intimate knowledge. ‘How—’
I changed course. ‘Mr Stephenson’s wife—’
‘What? What about her? You’re not going to tell me she was killed? It was cancer!’
I backpedalled mentally. Stephenson’s wife was dead? Then who was sparrow woman?
‘Perhaps I misunderstood,’ I said. ‘The woman I saw with Mr Stephenson at service on Sunday?’
She relaxed. Off the hard subjects and onto something easy. ‘His sister,’ she said pityingly. ‘Ruth.’
‘Thanks, Samantha,’ I said. I turned and signalled to Terry and Dave that we were leaving. They stopped an animated conversation with one of the other sound guys about Australia’s chances in the World Cup and picked up their gear reluctantly.
‘We going?’ Terry said in surprise. ‘We haven’t got anything yet.’
‘Oh, yes, we have,’ I said, smiling sweetly at Samantha, who was white-faced, wondering whether she was going to be plastered all over the evening news as a home-wrecker, an adulteress, a handmaid of Satan.
I was seriously tempted. Seriously. But I had no evidence, and Australia has the most draconian defamation laws in the Western world. Making that accusation without proof was a shortcut to a lawsuit.
‘You’ll have to do another piece to camera,’ Terry said as we left the building. He set up his tripod on the footpath so he could shoot me in front of the party headquarters sign.
Oh, shit. I hate pieces to camera. In education TV, you can avoid them almost entirely, but reporters lived and died by them. Well, if I did it badly enough, maybe Tyler wouldn’t want to use me any more.
But when it came to it, I couldn’t deliberately botch it. Just couldn’t. And I wanted to be fair to Patience.
‘Patience Carter, the daughter of Australian Family Party MP Matthew Carter, has been missing since Wednesday afternoon. The police say that she is safe and well, but will not reveal her whereabouts. She is clearly not prepared to come home. Party representatives are not commenting. Is this a simple case of a teenage runaway? Or is her absence linked to the death of Dr Julieanne Weaver last week? Dr Weaver was seeking preselection with the Australian Family Party in the seat of North Hughes, and was a friend of the Carters. Eliza and Matthew Carter are barricaded in their home with police questioning them and security guards excluding all media.’ Tyler could sit Terry’s footage from the Carters’ house over that bit. The less they showed of me, the better. ‘Poppy McGowan, for the ABC.’ I finished off a little fast, maybe, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say that Patience wouldn’t read as a betrayal of her.
‘Wonder where she is?’ Terry mused. ‘She seemed like a nice kid.’
‘Yeah, she did,’ I said shortly. I didn’t like withholding information from my team, but if Tyler got the idea I knew where Patience was and hadn’t interviewed her he’d have gone ballistic.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
After the guys had dropped me at my car and taken the footage back to the ABC, I called Fiona’s and left a message on the answering machine warning Patience that I might be on the news talking about her, but that I’d done my best to make it okay. I paused, hearing the buzz of the machine. ‘Your mother’s involved, but I think maybe she didn’t kill Julieanne.’
Because if Carter was screwing Samantha, why would Eliza kill Julieanne? Unless, of course, she’d made the same mistake I’d made and assumed that Julieanne was the guilty party. But surely Julieanne would have set her straight?
I sighed, suddenly exhausted. All I wanted to do was go home and collapse. I couldn’t believe it was only lunchtime.
I picked up a sandwich and went back to my little house to make phone calls to the various recyclers we were featuring in the next episode. I sat on the floor in the square of sunlight from the western window and brooded, phone in hand. I didn’t have the mental energy to work. I couldn’t be chatty and efficient with strangers. I just couldn’t.
Instead, I rang Paul Baume, to check which ‘guy from the church’ he’d seen get into Julieanne’s car. But he’d gone out into the field to assess some woman’s collection of antique washing machines. And he refused to use a mobile phone because of the supposed health risks, so all I could do was leave a message.
I was sitting there in a stupor, not sure what to do next, when I heard the front door open and my dad say, ‘There you go. Just shut the door when you leave.’ Oh, no. I didn’t have the energy to talk to Alain Parkes.
A moment later, Tol’s voice floated up the stairs. ‘Poppy? You there?’
Relief swept over me. Tol. He must have seen that I’d dropped my bag at the foot of the stairs. I felt reprieved, somehow.
‘Up here,’ I called.
He came up the stairs and appeared in the doorway, looking down at me enquiringly. I tried to smile but I don’t think I did a very good job because his face changed and he sat down next to me.
‘I heard about Patience Carter,’ he said. ‘Are you worried about her?’
‘Not exactly,’ I said. I needed to talk about all this, and Tol had arrived like a blessing from heaven. So it all came out: Patience. Eliza. Being a handmaid of Satan (he laughed at that), Samuel Stephenson, Samantha the receptionist, Paul’s belief that Julieanne was planning to ma
rry someone important …
He heard me out, head bent and eyes studying the floor as he took it all in.
‘So you’re torn between Eliza Carter pushing her into the pit because she thought Julieanne was having an affair with her husband, and Samuel Stephenson pushing her because Julieanne was blackmailing him into marrying her?’ You’ve got to love a man who can actually think. Particularly when it was his girlfriend we were talking about.
For some reason I wanted to be fair to Julieanne. ‘She might not have seen it as blackmail,’ I said. ‘Probably she thought he’d jump at it. She was twenty years younger than him, after all. And she may have been more interested in preselection than marriage.’
I pulled my phone out and called Chloe.
‘Prudhomme,’ she said, sounding harassed. I could hear Eliza Carter in the background, still crying. And the PA system from the police centre. So they’d arrested Eliza. Or at least taken her in for questioning.
‘Get a DNA sample from Samuel Stephenson,’ I said baldly. ‘Carter wasn’t screwing Julieanne. He’s on with the receptionist. So Stephenson’s the most likely guy from the church.’
‘Not a chance in hell,’ Chloe said. ‘He’s already refused.’
She hung up.
‘I’m sorry, for the daughter’s sake,’ Tol said, ‘but I have to say I think Eliza’s more likely. Carter could easily have been having an affair with both the other girl and Julieanne.’
That was true. It didn’t feel right, somehow, but it fit the facts as well as any other theory. We talked it over a few minutes more, but until we could talk to Paul, we had no proof either way.
The doorbell rang.
‘Probably Alain,’ Tol said, getting to his feet and pulling me up. ‘Or maybe the councillors.’
‘What?’ I was so surprised I almost stumbled going down the stairs. Tol put out a hand to steady me and smiled, a little nervously.
‘Er, this morning I called the permissions guy at the council—what’s his name?’