Double Madness

by Caroline de Costa

  Caroline de Costa is a professor at the School of Medicine at James Cook University, Cairns.

  Her publications include Hail Caesar, which was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards (Science Writing) in 2008, and a number of health books for women.

  Double Madness is her first crime novel.

  First published in Australia in 2015 by MRPCrime

  an imprint of Margaret River Press

  PO Box 47

  Witchcliffe

  Western Australia 6286

  www.margaretriverpress.com

  email: info@margaretriverpress.com

  Copyright © Caroline de Costa 2015

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission.

  Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available from the National Library of Australia

  ISBN 978-0-9943167-2-1 eBook;

  http://www.margaretriverpress.com/catalogue/

  Cover and text design by Anne-Marie Reeves Edited by Deb Fitzpatrick

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, descriptions and incidents are used in a fictitious manner and are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Digital edition distributed by

  Port Campbell Press

  www.portcampbellpress.com.au

  eBook Conversion by Winking Billy

  For Jane Patrick, with thanks for everything

  Delusion – a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that persists despite evidence to the contrary.

  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

  American Psychiatric Association, 2000

  Folie à deux – Induced Delusional Disorder

  A. A subject must develop a delusion or delusional system originally held by someone else.

  B. The two people must have an unusually close relationship with one another, and be relatively isolated from other people.

  C. The subject must not have held the belief in question prior to contact with the other person.

  Diagnostic criteria in International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) – World Health Organisation, 1994

  The intervention most likely to be helpful (in folie à deux) is separation of the subjects.

  Wehmeier, Psychopathology, 2003; 36: 37–45

  Cairns, Far North Queensland,

  27 February 2011

  If it hadn’t been for Cyclone Yasi, it would have been much, much longer before anyone found Odile Janvier.

  Yasi had roared into town around midnight. When she reached the rainforest on the mountains to the west of Cairns, she let rip. She plucked giant paperbarks from the earth like a child picking daisies. She tossed branches from high in the canopy onto the forest floor below. She swept great piles of timber down the mountainside, carrying tiny animals far from their loved ones and carving deep gullies in the mud.

  Sheltered by an old fig, her back against an ironbark, Odile Janvier was protected from the worst of Yasi’s wrath. Her dark hair was slicked wet but stayed tightly pinned back above the perfect arches of her eyebrows. A Hermès scarf fluttered wildly. Her pearl necklace and earrings were undisturbed, as was her shirt of peach silk by Gerard Darel. So, when an oyster-coloured dawn broke through the treetops, she was still there.

  If it hadn’t been for Tim and Chris arguing about whether to take the back road from Davies Creek through to the Copperlode Dam, it would have been much, much longer before anyone found Odile Janvier.

  The road was a dirt track that wound through old rainforest, pristine and unpeopled. It was water catchment land, closed to the public, but Tim’s brother Kieran, who had once worked for the water authority, had shown it to them, and how to get in on a sidetrack. Ignore the signs, he’d said.

  They were coming back to Cairns on a Sunday evening, three weeks after Yasi. Just the two of them, the kids left with Chris’s parents.

  ‘We could take the forest road,’ Chris said to her husband. ‘We haven’t done it in ages. We can stop at the café near Lake Morris for a coffee, see how high the water is in the dam, before we go down the other side.’

  ‘Love, after Yasi, there’ll probably still be trees down. It’ll be a mess. We won’t get through,’ Tim countered. He tilted his head sideways like he always did in an argument.

  ‘Mmm,’ she said, turning directly towards him, her eyes wide open, her own strategy for getting her way. ‘You always say you like that drive. The car’s done it heaps of times. And there’s two hours of daylight left.’

  After a few moments he gave in. ‘We can just go and see how it is,’ he said. ‘Turn back if the road’s blocked.’ She was right: he loved that drive through the steaming forest, so grand and yet so intimate. Loved the big-dipper descent on the other side, with its views right across Cairns to the ocean. The rain had eased up and the air was clear.

  When the biggest storm ever to hit the Australian coast had been brewing out in the Coral Sea – category five, the highest risk – there had been panic down south in Brisbane, where people were still mired in floodwaters of their own. In Cairns, the engineers couldn’t promise that the hospital could come through a Cat. 5, and there were 230 patients inside. The Premier ordered them all evacuated and the hospital shut down. The entire staff worked for twenty-four hours solid before Yasi’s arrival. Tim’s task was to triage the pregnant women. Imminent labour and an impending cyclone were a potent mix. He and his team induced labour for some women, caesared others, and sent as many as possible home. The rest had to be airlifted to Brisbane. In scenes not witnessed in Far North Queensland since World War II, army corporals in jungle fatigues, every last cop in the place, and medical students high on excitement helped ferry stretchers into ambulances and out to the airport for the trip south.

  Outside the hospital, the sky grew lower and darker every minute. In the emptying wards, every television showed the weather, and every computer was tracking Yasi. On the screen the cyclone was half the size of Queensland. The small red circle at the centre was the most dangerous, moving slowly, deliberately westward. Though nobody said so, they were all hoping that red circle would turn south. Not that they wished any harm to the people of Innisfail or Cardwell, who’d already been through Larry five years ago; they just wanted that eye to shift away from Cairns. People hugged each other before going off to sandbag their homes. They’d heard it was going to be bigger than Hurricane Katrina in the US and there was a rumour that the army had flown in 10,000 body bags.

  At home, Chris and the girls moved furniture and toys off the veranda, taped windows, and shopped for whatever was left in the supermarket (tinned turkey and condensed milk). Chris put a casserole in the oven so there would be something to eat when Tim came home – who knew when the power would go? She pushed family photos into storage boxes together with her most treasured pieces of china, and stashed the lot in the boot of the car. You had to accept that if you lived in a Queenslander, with timber walls and floors and an iron roof, that roof might go in a big blow. And if the roof went, everything went.

  Tim had come home exhausted just as the first winds arrived. They moved with the girls into the under-the-house, where solid concrete blocks sheltered the laundry and the playroom. Matty’s dog was tied up where he couldn’t get at Dora’s rabbits, whimpering in their cage on top of the washing machine. As night fell, they lit candles and listened to the radio on batteries and the booming
wind outside, the four of them wrapped up together in sleeping bags on the floor.

  Then, as she reached the coast, Yasi relented and turned south, coming ashore at Mission Beach. Cairns and its suburbs were spared the worst, although Yasi did not neglect them entirely. At Tim and Chris’s house, she tore the blinds from the front veranda and dropped them fair and square on top of Mt Whitfield. She uprooted the lipstick palms along the front fence and hurled them into a swimming pool three blocks away. As Tim and Chris and their children huddled together the old Queenslander sighed and groaned above them like a labouring woman ready to push. There were sudden sharp bangs that Tim couldn’t identify, that later proved to be the barge boards on the side gable detaching themselves.

  When it was light, the wind dropped. Tim clambered up the flooded back stairs and saw that his house still had a roof. On the veranda was a disorientated tree python, as unhappy as Tim at their meeting. The snake slid hastily through a gap in the stairs and vanished into the gloom of the rain-sodden garden. At that same moment a police car pulled up at the gate.

  ‘Mobile phone towers are out, Doc,’ the cops said. ‘The hospital’s reopening and they need you back at work. We’ll take you; the road’s not in great shape just now.’

  ‘OK,’ he answered. ‘But my wife’s not going to be happy.’

  It seemed to Tim that day that every pregnant woman in North Queensland had held off overnight. He and Henry and Susanna did fourteen emergency theatre cases in 24 hours before he could finally crawl into bed.

  So they’d been delighted when Chris’s parents turned up on the first flight from Sydney once the airport was reopened, to help clear up, and then offered to stay on so that he and Chris could have a weekend together on the Tablelands.

  On their way home now to Cairns, they passed the Davies Creek picnic ground, heading south toward the Water Board fence. Chris took a quick look around as they reached the gate marked ‘Closed To The Public’. Tim nosed the Toyota through the scrub covering the sidetrack, then onto the dirt road beyond the gate. Of course it was mud, not dirt, now – ponds of mud, lakes of mud, a vast, quivering mousse of mud stretching far into the bush. But in the big Toyota it was an easy drive for the first few kilometres, winding through flat rainforest country. Splintered branches and piles of wet leaves lay on the road but no trees had fallen across. The late afternoon sunshine filtered down between the tree trunks to alight on a thousand raindrops on a thousand viridescent leaves, so that the forest sparkled in every direction. Huge spiders were busy recasting their webs high up between the branches. From the car’s CD player the mellow notes of the oud of Joseph Tawadros spread out to entertain them in their work.

  The road headed down towards a creek crossed by a narrow wooden bridge. The water swirled just to the top of the planks and the trunk of an ironbark had fallen partway across, its feathery topshoots trailing in the stream. Tim stopped the car and got out. His boots squelched as he tested the timber of the bridge, felt the current, measured the distance around the obstacle.

  Leaning out, Chris asked, ‘Is it OK? We can go back if it’s not.’

  ‘I don’t want to go back,’ he said, getting into the car again. ‘We can make it alright.’

  He put the Toyota into low gear then edged forward. The front wheels rolled onto the bridge and Tim slowly manoeuvred around the treetop. There was a sudden lurch as the planks gave way beneath the weight of the car. It plunged a metre onto the creek bed and came to a shuddering stop, nose down, just as the American bass player in the Tawadros band reached his crescendo.

  ‘Shit!’ He turned off the ignition and, abruptly, the music died with it. ‘Can you climb out the window and get out onto the road?’

  She was already doing this. ‘You come too!’ she said. ‘Right now! That current could take it away any moment.’

  Tim grabbed his mobile, climbed across to the passenger seat and in a few seconds they were out on the road, wet but unharmed. Brown floodwaters eddied about the car and forest flotsam began to pile up against the doors.

  ‘Sorry, sorry love,’ she said. ‘It was a stupid idea.’

  ‘No, it’s OK. I agreed to come.’

  ‘So …’ she asked after a moment, ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘I think – give Kieran a call.’ Tim flipped open his mobile and punched in his brother’s number.

  ‘Hi Kieran, yeah, good thanks. Um, spot of trouble, mate. Up on that Davies Creek road, you know the one you showed us. Why what? Yeah, yeah, right, I am a silly bugger. Because about five k’s down the track, you know that little bridge, well that’s now an ex-bridge, and the car’s fairly in the middle of it. Gave way when I was crossing. Yeah. Luckily it’s only about a metre deep, otherwise we’d be halfway down the mountain by now. Yeah, it’s going to need a tow, at least to get it out, and given how water’s pouring over the bonnet maybe more than that. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s water catchment … yeah, well nothing I can do about it, I’ll just have to wear the fine. Yeah, no, you never said a thing about it, we just decided to wander in here today, Chris and me… Yeah, that’d be great. We’ll walk back toward the main road and I’ll keep my phone on.’

  He shut the phone and looked at Chris. ‘He’s coming up but he doesn’t have the Pajero, only the Camry, so he can’t get right in. He wants us to walk back to the gate. Plus he’s going to get onto someone he knows in the Water Board and do some fast-talking. Because a towie will need their permission to come in here. And I don’t think we should try to take anything out of the car, not even that CD you like. The bridge is too likely to break up completely and that current’s quite strong.’

  She looked at the flooded creek again. Hell, they really had been lucky. ‘We’d better start walking,’ she said. ‘At least we haven’t come far. By the time we get back to the gate Kieran will likely be there.’

  He took her hand for a moment as they made their way up the shallow slope and onto the flatter track leading back to the picnic ground and the highway. A fragile mist hung between the trees deeper in the glades of the forest. As they rounded the bend an echidna came snuffling out of the shrubs at the roadside, black and white spines erect. He raised beady eyes above his long pointed nose, examined them carefully, then returned to his search for ants beneath the vegetation. They stopped for a moment to watch him.

  That was when they noticed it. The smell. Chris was the first to turn her head towards the bushes at the side of the road.

  Tim knew the smell. You didn’t forget it. He’d talked to pathologists he’d worked with about the smell and they all had the same reaction: morose recognition.

  He’d first come across it as a junior doctor in Port Moresby. The Boroko cops had asked him to look at a fellow who’d been pulled out of Waigani Swamp. After some weeks at the bottom. They needed a doctor to be sure he was dead, they said. There’d been other occasions too, before he’d started his obstetrics training and had been working in general practice in country towns where doctors had to get involved in these things, and the smell had been there too. Now that he spent his days delivering mostly healthy babies to mostly healthy women in an immaculate hospital he didn’t come across the smell. But he hadn’t forgotten it. He clutched Chris’s hand again and he could feel the goose pimples spreading down his back.

  ‘Urgh, a dead animal,’ she said. ‘A tree kangaroo?’

  He shook his head slowly and handed her his mobile.

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s coming from beyond that big fig. Can you hold this? Give me a minute. You stay here. I’m going to take a look.’

  As he stepped off the road into the bush the echidna took fright and scuttled away on short stumpy legs. Chris watched Tim push his way past ferns and low palms until he vanished around the side of the fig, climbing over its wide buttress roots. She realised she was trembling. He was gone for perhaps thirty seconds. Then he reappeared, and ran stumbling towards her. When he reached the road he was white and shaking. He crouched down in the mud and vomited.

&nb
sp; Chris reached out a hand to his shoulder to steady him. With the other she flipped open the phone and hit redial.

  ‘Kieran!’ she said, and she realised her voice was wild, hysterical. ‘Kieran! We don’t only need a tow truck up here. We need the cops.’

  That afternoon, Detective Senior Constable Cass Diamond sat at her desk in the Cairns Criminal Investigation Bureau. The CIB, Cass had been pleased to find, was on the top floor of the Police Department building in Sheridan Street. Like her boss, Detective Inspector Leslie Fernando, Cass had dragged her desk next to the window, so that between compiling reports of gunshot wounds and composing allegations of serious bodily harm she could look up for a moment and contemplate the view.

  This view was like nothing she’d ever had at any of her many and varied workplaces down south. Admittedly, as views went up here in Far North Queensland, Leslie’s was much better, taking in extensive swaths of the Coral Sea. But Cass’s view was of her own personal fairytale mountains, often mysteriously wreathed in cloud, framed within the window space like the pages of a picture book. One particular mountain was a perfectly symmetrical cone, just as she remembered from a book Jordon had loved as a child. (And now he had climbed that mountain, Walsh’s Pyramid, almost as soon as he’d arrived in Cairns, just before Christmas.) On that mountain, she imagined, there would be wizards and goblins, witches flying through the mist of clouds, working magic spells. Though these thoughts she kept to herself.

  In those mountains, in fact, had been found the subject of the file she was now working on. According to his grieving mother, who’d reported him missing the previous September, Wayne was a sweet boy who at twenty-eight was spending a few months between proper jobs, had never touched drugs in his life, and wouldn’t harm so much as a moth. According to others, who were not grieving, Wayne (aka Jumbo) was a 150-kilogram small-time dealer, in e and weed mostly, who’d double-crossed several people in his time, and finally paid for it. But none of these people, who were all seeking to use this information to their own advantage with Detective Diamond, knew who or where or when, or indeed anything about what had actually happened to Wayne. Or if they did, they declined to impart that knowledge.