A Devious Mind

by Brigid George

  Dusty responded with her own dazzling smile which I knew from experience was designed to soften the impact of what she was about to say.

  “As you know, Fergus,” she said, cradling her glass of cappuccino in her hands, “my expectation from this investigation, apart from the satisfaction of honouring Marcia and avenging her death by catching the fiend who tried to get away with her murder, is that I end up with enough material to write a best-selling book. With that in mind, I’ll need to interview as many people connected with Marcia as possible.” She paused, scooping up some of the froth from the bottom of her glass with her finger. “That includes your wife, Penelope.” She licked the cappuccino froth from her finger with obvious relish.

  Fergus’s smile faded and a guarded look crossed his face but Dusty pressed her point.

  “Will she be coming today?”

  “She will not. I don’t know where she is. We’re separated.”

  His mouth settled into a firm thin line. Dusty retreated.

  “No worries. I’ll try to get her details through other channels.”

  By that, I knew she meant me. One of the reasons I got the job as Dusty’s assistant was my degree in electronic engineering which made me, in Dusty’s words, a maze master. The fact that I was able to use my skills to enter locked and hidden cyber worlds sometimes had us debating whether I was an IT professional or a hacker. Obviously I strenuously deny the latter.

  “I also need you to tell me what you were doing on the morning your mother died.” Fergus started to protest, but Dusty continued. “I know what the police records say but for the sake of my readers I need to hear it from you. I’ll be asking each of your siblings as well.” Fergus raised his hands in surrender as Dusty continued. “On the morning of your mother’s murder you went to her home at around seven to return her mobile phone. Is that right?”

  “That’s correct. I knew Mum wouldn’t need her phone once she was at the retreat. In fact, they have to hand their phones in when they check in. But she liked to have it with her when she was driving so I thought I’d try to get it to her.”

  “She usually left for her morning walk around six-thirty. Is that right?”

  “Correct. I tried to call her on the landline. She didn’t answer so I thought she was out on her walk. I left a message on her answering machine. Then I decided to drive around and see if I could catch her before she left for the retreat. I calculated that she would probably arrive back at her house sometime between seven-fifteen and seven-thirty.”

  “What time did you arrive at your mother’s place?”

  “Just after ten past seven. I only discovered that she had left her phone at my house a little before seven o’clock.”

  “And when you arrived at Marcia’s, were you able to see whether her car was there?”

  “No. The garage was locked.”

  “And after getting no answer to your knock, you went around to the walking track?”

  “Correct. I didn’t feel like waiting around so I drove to the halfway mark where there’s a parking area. I could see a little bit of the track from there, the only place where the vegetation thins out. I thought I’d wait and see if she came along. Walking along the track with my foot just out of the brace would not have been a good idea. I didn’t hang around for long. Going there was a long shot anyway.”

  “Why did you assume Marcia would go for her walk that morning? After all, she could have decided to leave for the meditation centre without going for a walk first.”

  “I didn’t assume,” Fergus said tersely. “Mum mentioned it at dinner; just mentioned in passing that she would go for her usual walk before she left.”

  Since Dusty already knew this from the police reports, I wondered if she had asked the question to test Fergus, or to provoke him. However, her face gave no hint of her motive.

  “Fair enough,” she said. “What did you do after you’d been to the walking track?”

  Fergus crossed his arms and sat back in his chair. I had the impression he resented being interrogated by Dusty. He had probably expected her to take his innocence for granted.

  “I drove past her place on the way home, just on the off chance, and then came back here. The end result was that I didn’t see Mum on the track and she wasn’t at home so I assumed she’d already left for her weekend away.”

  A movement caught my eye. I looked up to see a young woman, whom I took to be Fergus’s nineteen-year-old daughter, tripping lightly down the stairs.

  Chapter 8

  In Summer’s face I saw the same classic bone structure as that of her grandmother. Her soft blonde hair was cut close to her scalp in a pixie cut which served to accentuate her cheek bones and green eyes: eyes so large and round that their colour seemed stunningly vivid.

  “I’ll make the salads, Dad,” she said when she reached the bottom of the stairwell.

  While her looks were striking, her disposition was quiet and gentle. Fergus stood up and beckoned her forward.

  “This is my daughter, Summer,” he said, taking her gently by the arm. The look on his face was unmistakeably that of a proud father.

  “And this is his son, Toby,” said a voice from the top of the stairs. With that, the owner of the voice jettisoned himself down three steps at a time and landed at the bottom with a final energetic leap.

  “How do you do?” he said with a grin that exuded a confidence bordering on cockiness. Toby Nixon was a younger version of his father except that while Fergus was starting to paunch, his son had the wiry, muscular body of a sportsman, emphasised by the T-shirt and sports pants he was wearing.

  Toby and Summer shook hands with Dusty and me.

  “I suppose you’ll want our alibis,” said Toby.

  “Not necessarily,” said Dusty, “but do go ahead.”

  “My darling sister,” Toby continued, with a sideways grin at Summer who shook her head but smiled indulgently at him, “drove me to Ballina Airport the morning our nan died.”

  “Toby had to catch the six-thirty flight to Sydney to go back to school,” said Summer.

  “College,” corrected Toby.

  Summer shrugged and continued. “I dropped him off around six o’clock and got back here about seven-thirty.”

  Interesting. When Dusty had picked me up from the airport, the drive from Ballina to Byron Bay had only taken thirty minutes.

  “It’s awful,” said Summer. “We were just going about our usual business and all the while Nan was lying at the bottom of that gully. All alone.”

  “It ought to have been different,” said Toby. “Poor Nan.”

  “If only we’d known,” said Summer. “If only we could have helped her.”

  “How could you have helped her, Summer?” asked Dusty gently.

  “If we’d noticed she’d left her phone behind that night and taken it around to her, she would have had it with her on her walk. She could have called us or called the emergency services. I can’t get rid of the horrible thought that she might have been lying there… alive…”

  “She wasn’t, Sums. She wasn’t alive,” said Toby, squeezing his sister’s hand.

  His tone was so emphatic that I felt he was trying to convince himself as much as Summer. Poor kids. How dreadful to have to think of your grandmother as a murder victim.

  “You know what the police said,” Toby continued. “The blow to her head would have been enough to… Well, it means she didn’t suffer.”

  “Toby’s right, Summer. She wouldn’t have suffered,” said Dusty. “It would have been too quick for her to know what was happening. Even if she had her mobile phone with her, she wouldn’t have had time to use it.”

  “Come on, Sums,” said her brother. “Just remember our last evening with her and the fun we had. She was really happy. Remember?”

  Summer smiled and nodded. “You were making her laugh, Tobes.” Summer looked at Dusty. “Tobes was in good form that night; making us all laugh. I’m glad. I remember Nan laughing a lot that evening.”


  “That’s better,” said Toby.

  Summer’s smile erased the sadness from her face. “We had heaps of fun that night.”

  “Dad had so much fun he fell asleep on the sofa,” said Toby with a laugh. “I had to wake him up when I came back from the beach. I just had to tell him about the whale rescue. After Nan left, I went down to the beach because I could hear something was going on, sounded like a lot of people shouting.”

  He looked at Dusty and explained, “There are steps just behind our garage that lead down to the beach.” He continued his story. “It turned out there was a humpback whale stranded further along the beach. There were about twenty people trying to help it get back into the water and a crowd of people watching. I raced up to help but the police said they had enough help and wanted to keep people as far from the whale as possible cos a crowd would only distress it. I must have been watching that rescue for over an hour. It was pretty cool. Then I raced back here to tell Dad but he was fast asleep. Naturally I had to wake him up. I wanted to drag him down to the beach so he could see for himself but he was a bit sleepy and he had his bad ankle. But at least he got the story from an eye witness, eh Dad?”

  Fergus gave his son a rueful smile. “I’m not sure I was awake enough to appreciate your storytelling, Toby.”

  “Saturday’s a strange day to go back to school, isn’t it?” Dusty said to Toby.

  “Not if you’re in the college rowing team – one of the top rowing teams in Sydney – and the team is training all weekend,” said Toby. He draped his arm around Summer’s shoulders and added, “And now, I’m going to give my beautiful sister the benefit of my expertise in the kitchen.”

  “Expertise? That’ll be the day,” said Summer, giving him a good natured shove. Laughing and pushing at each other, they retreated to the kitchen area.

  “Hello,” called a voice from the front of the house. The front door had apparently been left unlocked for the family members to let themselves in. We were soon being introduced to Fergus’s two sisters Monique and Lucy, both of whom I recognised from the press conference video. Monique was the taller of the two and her light clothing revealed a tanned, well-toned body. I guessed Lucy’s height to be around five feet four inches. She too looked like she kept in good shape through some sort of exercise. But that was the only similarity between the two women. While Monique, a fashion designer, had an air of cool sophistication, Lucy’s quick smile and bright eyes suggested a childlike innocence. The sisters each placed a bowl of salad on the table before crossing to the living area.

  “Chris not joining us, Mon?” said Fergus, after the introductions had been made.

  “No, he’ll come later if he can.” Monique turned to Dusty. “My husband has some sort of crisis at work today and couldn’t take time off for a long lunch.” I didn’t hear any resentment toward her husband in her tone when she said this. Instead, I sensed Monique’s pride and affection toward her husband. Dusty had told me he was a software developer. They had two sons who were currently at university overseas.

  A small child, engrossed in something on her iPad, wandered in from the same direction Monique and Lucy had come from. Her frizzy blonde hair was pulled back from her face, gathered into a curly coil on top of her head and anchored at the base with a red and white spotted ribbon. The colour of the T-shirt she was wearing with her blue jeans matched the red in her ribbon.

  “This is my daughter, Coco,” said Lucy.

  The child looked up from her tablet screen. Striking grey eyes gazed out at us from an extensively freckled face. She flashed a smile as Lucy introduced Dusty and me.

  “Coco,” called Toby from the kitchen area, “what’s four thousand, two hundred and seventy five multiplied by thirteen?”

  Lucy gave her nephew a look of exasperation. However, Coco’s response was quick and accurate.

  “That’s easy,” she said. “Fifty five thousand, five hundred and seventy five.”

  “Coco is not a circus act, Toby,” Lucy scolded.

  She gave her daughter an affectionate smile before turning to us to explain.

  “Coco is a Mensa child.”

  I knew enough about Mensa, the club for people with high IQs, to know that Coco must be an extraordinary child.

  “My IQ is 160,” said Coco, showing no indication she considered that to be anything out of the ordinary as she returned her attention to her iPad.

  “Coco was reading books at primary school level by the time she was two,” said Lucy with a smile. “She taught herself to add and subtract. By then I knew she was a gifted child so I had her tested by an educational psychologist. I could hardly believe it when her IQ was assessed at 160.”

  “That’s the same as Einstein,” said Toby.

  Coco tuned in to our conversation at the mention of Einstein.

  “Einstein was old,” she screwed up her nose. “Other kids at Mensa are 160. It’s normal for us.” She shrugged.

  The family quickly moved the conversation to other topics. I got the impression that they, especially Lucy, wanted to protect Coco from being a showpiece. I had been close to uttering exclamations of awe and asking all sorts of questions, which was, I think, exactly what the family wanted to avoid.

  A short time later, Toby caught our attention by tapping a spoon against a glass and announced that lunch was ready.

  “Aren’t we going to wait for Brad?” said Lucy.

  “He sent me a text, Auntie Luce. He’s going to be late,” said Summer.

  “What else is new?” mumbled Fergus, looking displeased but resigned.

  Lucy frowned at her brother. “What’s your problem, Fergus? Brad’s had the courtesy to let us know he’s running late. What more do you want?”

  “Punctuality would be a bonus, I suppose,” replied Fergus, rising from the sofa.

  Brad was obviously not the reliable kind.

  Fergus invited us to the dining area with a flourish of his hand. In the middle of the table was a platter of fish which Fergus informed us was wild barramundi he had cooked on the barbecue earlier and kept hot in the warmer. If the tempting smell of barbecued fish and freshly baked bread had not whet my appetite, the array of colourful salads and the bottles of good wine would have.

  During the meal, I contemplated the question Dusty had asked me after we watched the DVD of the press conference: If you had to pick a murderer out of those four people we just saw on the screen, who would you pick? Now that I had met them in person, I decided to test my evaluation. Was Fergus still the one most likely to be the killer?

  I looked across the table at Lucy. She was laughing at something Toby had said and looked as wholesome and innocent as a young child. For that reason alone I would have dismissed any thought of her as murderer. However, an appearance of naivety is not enough to indicate lack of guilt. I dismissed her for two other reasons. There was the fact, as Dusty and I had discussed, that the crime was most likely carried out by a male. Furthermore, Lucy was slightly built and not much taller than Marcia so she was the least likely in terms of physical strength.

  I turned my attention to Monique who was listening to Coco expounding, as far as I could make out, the beauty and mystery of galaxy clusters.

  Monique, I thought, was a possible candidate for murderer even though her sex should also rule her out. She had the physical capabilities that would have been needed. She was a couple of inches taller than her sister and her athletic build suggested strength. Also, there was a reserve about her that suggested control and an ability to keep her own secrets.

  But looking at these two elegant, obviously well brought up women, I couldn’t see either of them walking along the bush track and viciously knocking their mother over the head with a club. To be honest, I couldn’t imagine anyone doing such a deplorable thing.

  I would have to reserve judgement on Brad as I had yet to meet him in person. And so I returned to my first choice. It took no effort on my part to visualise Fergus, grim, determined and angry, cold bloodedly plann
ing and carrying out a murder. But would he murder his own mother? There was also the question of whether he had the means. With a recently sprained ankle, would he have had the required stealth to take Marcia by surprise? Probably the strongest argument against Fergus being the murderer was Dusty’s point. If he were the guilty party, why would he have called her in knowing she was highly likely to solve the case?

  Chapter 9

  By the time I’d finished my mental examination of family members as potential suspects, I had come to the conclusion that the police were right about Norman Roach. He was clearly a more likely killer than any of Marcia’s children. That thought consoled me.

  While my mind had been on Marcia’s murder throughout lunch, Dusty had relaxed and engaged in casual conversation. It wasn’t until we’d finished eating that she was ready to return to the subject she had come to talk about. However, she hesitated and glanced in Coco’s direction.

  The child was quick to pick up on Dusty’s concern. Even before her mother had opened her mouth to suggest she take herself off somewhere to play, Coco had seized the initiative.

  “You adults probably have things you wish to talk about that are of no interest to me,” said the little grey-eyed genius, enjoying the final spoonful of her chocolate ice cream. “Whatever you’re going to talk about, I’m sure it would be far too mundane for me anyway.” Pushing away her empty bowl, she turned to Fergus. “If you don’t mind, Uncle Fergus, I’d like to go up to the roof room.”

  Fergus answered his niece with the same seriousness she had addressed him. “By all means, Coco.”

  Coco slipped off her chair, picked up her iPad from the side table where she had placed it earlier and skipped toward the staircase. At the base of the stairs she paused and looked across at me.

  “What part of Ireland are you from?”

  I was momentarily taken aback as no-one had mentioned my origins. Coco grinned at me.