The Ringmaster

by Vanda Symon

  I raised my eyebrows and added a wee eye-roll.

  ‘What? Was she waiting up for you like you were some sixteen-year-old out on a date, or something?’

  I gave a slow nod. ‘Or something.’

  Maggie’s face gaped. ‘You’re kidding me. She really was waiting up for you?’

  ‘Caught in the act of slinking in. Although, to give her credit, it was an unhappy coincidence she was up at the time. Unhappy being the operative word. And let’s just say someone noticed my attire was somewhat askew.’

  ‘Oh. That explains a bit.’

  ‘Yeah. Hence the frosty nostril this morning and her hasty retreat to the hospital. Apparently, I am the worst daughter in the world.’

  ‘So what are you going to do to redeem yourself?’

  ‘She’s not the type of woman to be swayed by gestures, no matter how grand, so I shall have to suck it up, take my punishment as it comes and go face the consequences.’

  50

  ‘Shit.’ I fair jumped out of my skin when my cellphone double-bleeped the arrival of a text message. Heart still racing, I looked at the screen. It was almost noon. I must have been absorbed – I’d been working almost two hours. So much for a lazy Sunday morning.

  Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. It was Paul. I texted back the obvious one-symbol answer, ? and put the phone down on the desk beside me.

  Even though I expected the reply, its arrival still near sent me through the roof. My neurones seemed to be set to frazzle. I’d forgotten how much a wooden surface amplified sound, especially as the phone was set to vibrate mode too and danced a wee jive across the table. So much for technology being our friend.

  Am outside. Let me in.

  Oh. Bugger. Maggie, as usual, was right; she’d get her flaming cinnamon pinwheel, after all. Okay. I could always ignore him, but that would be the height of rudeness. Then it hit me. He was probably outside home, not realising I had turned into one of those sad creatures that went into work on a Sunday for something to do. Brill. I texted back At work. But I couldn’t just leave it at that, so extended a tentative invitation: Catch up later?

  The reply boomeranged back fast. He must be a damned sight better than I was at pushing the right buttons.

  Look out the window.

  I went over to the window and had to stick my face right up to the glass and stand on tiptoes to get the right angle to see out front of the building. But yes, there he was, making a dick of himself, waving in my general direction from the other side of the road. There was no avoiding him any longer, so I headed for the stairwell and trotted down to the Watch House to greet him.

  He stood in the foyer, looking at the flash artwork on the wall. ‘Gidday,’ he said, exaggerating the word’s Kiwiness and accompanying it with a wink. It sounded more Aussie than Kiwi.

  ‘Gidday, yourself,’ I replied, without the wink and raised my eyebrows.

  ‘Are you going to invite me up or are you going to just stand around here getting weird looks from the sergeant over there?’

  I toyed with the continued-weird-looks option, but thought better of it. ‘You’d better come up, then.’

  He pointed behind him, in the direction of the entranceway at the cause of a fair amount of amusement for the last few days – God knew, we’d all needed a spot of comic relief, even if it was from a recalcitrant gatecrasher. ‘What’s the story with that frigging seagull and the door? I just about stood on the thing and killed it.’

  ‘Station mascot,’ I said, with a smile. I swiped my card and let him into the main area of the building. ‘Rapunzel?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, this place is kind of like a castle.’

  ‘But I don’t have long hair.’

  He reached out to touch it in a way that was a bit too familiar, so I made to turn and headed towards the stairs.

  ‘You know, some refer to it as the Dunedin Hilton,’ I called behind me. ‘Urban myth has it that a number of tourists over the years have rocked up to the front counter to enquire after a room for the night.’

  ‘I’m guessing the cells weren’t what they had in mind.’

  ‘Correctamundo.’ The Dunedin Central Police Station with its grand-looking entrance and marble finish was one of the flashiest buildings in the city. I didn’t mock it though, because, all told – well, if you removed a few individuals – it was a terrific working environment. After the tiny little box of a station at Mataura, this was the Ritz. Modern, light, good views, gym, staffroom and bar; other than said individuals and the lack of cutting-edge technology, it was nigh-on perfect.

  ‘Hasn’t this place got a lift?’ he asked

  ‘Yes, but that’s for unfit lazybones.’

  That said, my words came back to bite me and I was slightly peeved to see it wasn’t Paul puffing the most when we got to the second floor. I put that down to the fact his legs were twice as long as mine, so I had to work harder. Bastard had a smug look on his face. ‘Do I get a good morning kiss now?’ he asked, pulling me in close. I could hardly not, so gave him a cursory peck before pulling back.

  ‘Not here, someone might see us.’ I was a bit annoyed at how even the little peck had rendered my tummy warm and fuzzy.

  There was no sign of DI Johns, much to my relief. A few bods were around, but mostly we had the place to ourselves. I plonked myself down at a desk, and logged back into the network to check some details.

  ‘I see you’ve been elevated to getting a desk with a computer,’ Paul said.

  ‘Not quite.’ There were only two computers in an office shared by five detectives and I sure as heck didn’t qualify for one. Budgets didn’t extend to the so-called luxury of a computer each. ‘This is Smithy’s desk. I’m still the underling.’

  I’d been reading the reports and statements completed by the end of the week. Other work was continuing over the weekend – I was aware of DI Johns and others following up on the animal-rights activists – but the typing pool got Saturday and Sunday off, so any interview transcripts wouldn’t be available till Monday.

  It had been an exercise in futility. There were no obvious suspects, several different lines of enquiry and a growing sense that this was going to be one hell of a long investigation. We were just going to have to cover all bases and be thorough. The killer would make a mistake. We would spot it. Media attention on the case had brought forward more people with information on the murders in the other towns, which offered some hope of fresh leads. All it needed was one person with the right piece of information to make it all come together. Legwork and persistence were what would crack this one. It wasn’t glamorous, and it wouldn’t keep the top brass and politicians braying for a quick result happy, but thems was the breaks.

  It would be easy to get distracted by all the satellite issues, spreading my mental resources too thin, so I was back to concentrating on Rose-Marie, setting aside thoughts of any connection to the other murders. For me, for now, it was all about her.

  Paul had wandered off, I presumed to the loo. I’d been so engrossed in looking over the photos of Rose-Marie’s bedroom and belongings that I hadn’t realised it had been longer than a comfort stop until he announced, ‘I’m back’. I swung the chair around and resisted crushing his ego by admitting I hadn’t noticed he’d gone. He had something hidden behind his back and was looking quite pleased with himself.

  ‘Here, close your eyes, hold out your hands.’ I obliged and held my hands out cupped together, eyes closed and fervently hoping it was something involving chocolate. I felt something warm lower into my hands and at the same moment felt a cold chill shoot down my spine. The chill spread to my face and I gasped in surprise as my hands flew apart and my eyes flashed open in time to see the takeaway coffee succumb to gravity, bouncing off my knees and hitting the floor rolling.

  Simultaneous ‘shit’s exploded into the air and Paul dropped to his knees in a mad scramble to rescue the cup before too much spilled on to the carpet. Thank God, the lid had stayed on. He grabbed the offending contai
ner and plonked it back on to the desk beside me. ‘There’s gratitude for you. A simple “no thanks” would have sufficed.’

  ‘God, Paul, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. Shit.’ My mind groped at the mental images running through my head. Replays of Rose-Marie’s body in the Leith, the photos I’d been poring over, the scene that had just played out in this room. ‘He knew her, that’s how he … he must have, oh my God … he did it.’

  Paul, still on his knees, placed his hands on mine and said, ‘Slow down, Sam. What? Who?’ The transient look of anger on his face was replaced by confusion.

  ‘The killer. That’s how he could have got the tie around her wrists with no struggle.’ I thrust my hands out towards him again, palms uppermost, cupped side by side, like they had been, obediently waiting for my surprise.

  Paul looked from my face, to my hands and back to my face again, and the sight of him on his knees before me, hands resting on my legs, eyes burning into mine, brought another awful realisation.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I uttered in a whisper. He leaned forward, even closer. ‘It was a proposal, I bet it was a proposal. She wouldn’t have had a chance. She was with someone she trusted, someone she loved. We’d all said she probably knew him, but she knew him, Paul. He would have asked her to close her eyes, just like you did, hold out her hands and she would have, holding her hands together, expecting a gift, a ring, anything – not betrayal, not death.’

  My brain tried to comprehend what Rose-Marie would have gone through, her emotions leaping from exquisite joy to utter terror in one mind-blowing moment, and my heart couldn’t cope. I shook my head to try and ward off the tears, but they came all the same.

  ‘That bastard, that utter, utter bastard,’ I said, voice hoarse.

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Paul’s voice echoed my disbelief. ‘The boyfriend. He’s had everyone fooled all along with his grief-stricken act.’

  Something else clicked into place as another mental image vied for attention. ‘No, not that boyfriend. There was someone else.’ I stood up from the chair and reached over to grab one of the photographs I’d been studying. ‘Check this out.’ By now, Paul was back on his feet and beside me. ‘Look at her personal belongings.’ I pointed to a tell-tale sheet of tablets.

  ‘Oral contraceptives, which you’d expect, since she had the boyfriend.’

  ‘Yes, but the boyfriend maintained that they were a good little Christian couple and weren’t having sex. They were doing the saving-it-for-marriage thing. So if she was saving it for marriage with him, why did she need these?’

  ‘He could have been lying, just another part of the act – throw doubt.’

  ‘If you’d seen him, you’d realise he was telling the truth. He comes across as rather … flaky, I suppose. Very Christian.’ I was sure there were plenty of good Christian folk out there who would resent that comment, but it was the best description. ‘She was on the Pill for a reason. It wouldn’t be for fun, believe me. Those things screw your body up.’

  He gave me an indecipherable look. ‘Don’t some women need them to regulate periods? Or even acne? Perhaps she was on them for medical reasons.’ It was a good question.

  ‘That could be the case, but I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘The boyfriend said they hadn’t seen that much of each other lately, too busy and stuff like that. Maybe they hadn’t been seeing each other because she was seeing someone else, someone with a penchant for murder. She could have been weaning off contact with him or been avoiding him because she felt guilty because she was sleeping with someone else.’

  ‘I thought it was only guys who did things like that.’

  ‘Guys wouldn’t feel guilty about it.’

  ‘True,’ he said. ‘Did the post-mortem results mention any sign of sexual assault or activity?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of, the prelim just talked of cause of death. I can make a phone call to get more details there – I have a friend in the morgue.’

  ‘Alive, I presume.’

  ‘Last time I checked. Of the pathologist variety.’

  ‘Handy. So we’re back to looking at this murder in terms of her direct associates. If you’re right, and she was duped by the killer because she was expecting a gift or proposal even, then relationships take time to reach that kind of level where you can look at commitment.’ I could feel Paul’s eyes on me, but I stared fixedly down at the desk while he continued. ‘If the boyfriend talked of them being a bit distant for a while, then the relationship with the killer could have been going on for some time, which then begs the question: is this murder related to the other murders at all, or is it just a coincidence of timing? We may have completely separate cases here.’

  I grabbed my head in my hands and pushed it from side to side. ‘Argh, I feel like we’re going in one big circle. So – well, yes, you do have to ask that question. But then, what if they are related? We’ve looked at the other deaths in terms of a progression, each being more directly physical than the previous one, the murderer getting bolder each time.’ My hands made a chopping motion, marking off each death. ‘By the time we got to Rose-Marie it was very up close and personal, which fits that pattern. And we predicted that if there was another, the next one could be even worse, an escalation of violence. So what if the other murders were random victims, who fitted the killer’s experimental needs as a practice run in killing the ultimate target, Rose-Marie? What if she was the focal point?’

  ‘The apprenticeship, building up the skills to deal with this young woman here in Dunedin?’ I saw the shudder pass through Paul’s body.

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Well, that’s one special kind of sicko.’

  It didn’t bear thinking about that there could be such a calculated, reptilian person out there. ‘We need to look at what kind of mind could set up such an elaborate and gruesome decoy in order to hide the murder of a harmless young woman. I mean, they basically set up the circus to be their fall guy.’

  ‘What if the young woman wasn’t that harmless?’ Paul said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What if someone had a lot to lose because of her? She was putting on the guise of being the chaste young woman, but what if she had been having another relationship and was the other woman? Civilisations have fallen because of the other woman.’

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘You’d have thought she’d have told or given some hint to her flatmates or girlfriends. No one’s given any indication of even a rumour of such a possibility. A young woman in love, how could she have contained it all?’ Paul’s mouth curled into a smile and I regretted my poor choice of words. ‘But then, if you come from a good Christian family and belong to a church, the last thing you’d want revealed is that you were shagging your boyfriend, let alone someone else’s husband. They tend to frown upon such things, although, I think they’ve stopped the practice of stoning now.’

  ‘Well here, at least. So the husband has enough of his young toy and needs to get rid of the evidence? Murdering the mistress, let alone four other people to hide it is a pretty extreme way of dealing with your extra-curricular problem. Most people would break it off, or pay them off, or send them all-expenses-paid overseas.’

  ‘Why, is that how you afforded that time in Europe, Paul?’

  He gave me a bum shove that sent me sideways. ‘Not even going to grace that one with an answer,’ he said. ‘She could have been a too-significant other, or perhaps not. Perhaps we’re putting too much weight on relationships here. What about her cellphone records? Was she texting anyone other than friends, family and her boyfriend?’

  ‘No, no messages to an unidentified lover, unfortunately. But that doesn’t mean anything. Hell, lots of people have two phones now, using different networks. She could have had a second phone, dedicated to him, for all we know. He could have taken it when he killed her.’

  ‘I suppose that’s possible.’

  ‘Well, I’m certain it had to be someone she knew, someone she knew intimately. There’s no other signs
of a tussle, other than at the end, so whoever it was lured her down to the river with no resistance.’

  ‘What if they’d carried her down? What if she was already tied up and unconscious and they carried her to that place to dump her?’

  ‘For a start, someone would have noticed. The walkway is often used by students or joggers, and it would be too far to carry someone. You haven’t been to the crime scene, have you?’ Paul shook his head. ‘She was a standard-sized girl, probably around sixty kilograms, so even someone with your build would find it difficult to carry her the hundred metres or so from Gore Place to the spot at the river. And it would be too risky. The evidence all points to a struggle at the end, skid marks in the grass, head smashed on the rock, that kind of thing. She was murdered there.’

  There were simultaneous sighs. We looked at each other and exchanged smiles.

  ‘Where to next?’ he said. I was pretty sure he wasn’t asking about the case, but I wasn’t ready to address that other issue right now.

  ‘Look at the circles she was moving in, where she could have met this man.’

  ‘You’re still assuming it’s a man.’

  ‘Honey,’ I said to him, in a jokey voice, ‘if it was a woman lover, she was hardly going to need the contraceptives, was she?’

  ‘So I’m your honey now?’

  ‘No,’ I said and moved back to the point. ‘She was involved with the university, her church and her friends and flatmates. I think I’ll let someone else tackle the walking on eggshells involved in finding the possibility of a lover in her church.’

  ‘Yeah, that would take a special kind of subtlety you lack.’

  I gave him a thump on the arm for being so rude. ‘That’s ripe coming from Mr Overt Flirt. You wouldn’t know the meaning of the word subtle.’

  ‘It worked on you.’

  I felt the heat rise up my face and once again changed the direction the conversation had taken. ‘Smithy and I will probably head back to the university tomorrow, start at the place where she spent most of her time. I’ve met a couple of her peers and her professor – interesting dynamics there. DI Johns is working on the activists and I pity the poor sod who gets to approach her church. I’d really like to get a conversation with her boyfriend; I’ve seen him on video, but not face to face. But I don’t know that my leash would extend that far.’