Double Madness

by Caroline de Costa

  ‘No. Because of our culture, she will feel too much shame. She cannot see him, she cannot be married now.’

  Tim felt out of his depth. He said: ‘The staff will be asking him to wait anyway, while they get her ready for theatre.’

  He stepped out of the cubicle. He was badly in need of some fresh air. He saw the boyfriend being shepherded into the supervisor’s office, clearly distressed, weeping and angry, struggling in the hold of two friends.

  He crossed the ED waiting room where the TV screen beamed an American hospital drama over the waiting public slumped on plastic chairs. At the door, the ED registrar joined him, shaking his head.

  ‘Shocking injuries … difficult to repair, I imagine?’

  ‘Physically, it should be all right, though the bladder may be a problem. Psychologically and emotionally … maybe not. How could you ever be counselled into accepting that?

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. And you know what, I think we’ve got one of the blokes who did it in here too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah, the cops came in with the ambulance. The story is, he and his mate stole a car at Smithfield then dragged her into it. They were high as kites on something. After they threw her out, they crashed the car on the Yorkey’s Knob road. The other bloke managed to run off but this one hit the dashboard and fractured his femur. The orthopods are looking after him. I put him in the single room down the corridor. Nancarrow’s his name. There’s another cop guarding him. I told the cop, don’t worry mate, he’s not going anywhere with that leg.’

  ‘Well … I’m going outside for a minute, for a breather.’

  Tim stepped out into the cool night air. A police car with Leslie Fernando and the woman constable in it was just pulling away from the kerb. By the Emergency entrance the pale flowers of a frangipani tree glowed in the darkness. Tim stood in the shadow of the tree and the perfume wafted around him. There was that pain again. Behind him he heard the fiancé and his friends emerge, speaking heatedly. Though part of the conversation was in Chinese, Tim understood instinctively.

  ‘Man, you’ll have to wait to see her, like the nurse said. She’s got to be stitched up. You know she just didn’t want to see you now. She’ll get over that.’

  ‘I’ll kill him, kill him!’

  ‘Yeah, this is Australia, man, just cool it, you’re not killing anybody. The cops will find him, take him to court. We know how you feel but just cool it now.’

  The three crossed to the parking lot, climbed into a late-model Mazda, sat and lit cigarettes.

  Tim stood in the darkness, reflecting. Cops, courts, social workers, counsellors … was that going to be good enough? He thought again, of Chris. Of their last days in Port Moresby, soon after they’d been married. It was seven years ago now, and still they thought of it every day. Tim stood a while longer, thinking, before turning back into the hospital and making his way to the operating theatre and the girl.

  Now, as he worked his way through the morning’s clinic, three years on, Tim’s mind kept turning back to the events of that night. He’d written the report the police had requested, and had personally taken it to Sheridan Street, where he’d met briefly with a young detective constable who’d taken a routine statement. Tim confirmed that he’d first seen the girl in Emergency, had treated her in the operating theatre, and was still caring for her now in the hospital ward.

  Then the constable had said: ‘Doctor, Detective Fernando, who you met the other night, wants me to ask you one more question. Did you at any time during that night meet Kaine Nancarrow?’

  Tim had frowned. ‘Who?’

  ‘Nancarrow. That’s the man charged with the girl’s assault. Well, one of them. He was in the Emergency Department as well that night.’

  ‘I believe he was brought up to the operating theatre after we had finished our case. But no, I didn’t see him there, or in Emergency, or at any other time.’

  ‘You didn’t speak to him?’

  ‘No, I had nothing to do with him at all. The orthopaedic surgeons were looking after him, not me.’

  ‘OK, thanks, Doctor. That’s all. We really appreciate your help. Shouldn’t have to bother you again.’

  Tim had made a brief appearance in court. He was asked again, by the defence, whether he had seen Nancarrow that night. He had replied, truthfully, that he had not. Nancarrow and his mate were convicted of rape and grievous bodily harm and sentenced to eight years. Not long enough, in Tim’s opinion.

  He had not seen Leslie Fernando for years, or thought much about that case. Now he’d had a personal call from the Inspector, who seemed to remember him quite well, and who wanted to talk about the woman in the rainforest. Was he just planning to ask him about the events of last Sunday? Or was he also going to bring up that night in the Emergency Department, three years ago?

  Cairns, 2 March 2011

  Cass dropped off Odile Janvier’s dental records to Leah Rookwood. Then she drove to the post office in Bungalow. A post-office box key and tag had been found in the Earlville house. The key fitted easily into box 113C, but there was little of interest inside. Paris Match and French Vogue, circulars, bills for electricity and mobile phones. No personal mail. Looking at the postmarks and dates, Cass confirmed the mail hadn’t been collected for at least three weeks.

  Back at the station, she got herself another coffee and took a moment to look at her phone. There was a text from Jordon: gran called, bella had her puppies she said do u want one??? She texted back not possible and had just sat down at her desk when her phone rang. It was Leah.

  ‘The woman is definitely Odile Janvier,’ she told Cass.

  ‘Right,’ Cass replied, at the same time noting an incoming message on her mobile. ‘Now we can let the sons know, and then we can go public. Hopefully we’ll get some tips.’ She opened the message – no text, just a photo of a very small, very new and very cute dog that was clearly at least half border collie. She texted again not possible sorry ☺, turned off the mobile and was soon on her office phone calling interstate.

  Hobart Police would contact Damian. The prison manager in Wellington would talk to Dominic.

  An hour later, Cass took a call from Damian Janvier in Hobart.

  ‘I’ve just heard about my mother,’ he said quite calmly. ‘And that my father is missing. I’ve spoken to my boss and he’s giving me time off so I can come up north. I’ll be there on Friday evening. Is that soon enough? Is there anything I should do before then?’

  ‘Are you in touch with your brother?’ asked Cass.

  Damian hesitated a moment then said: ‘Well, you probably know this anyway – he’s in jail. In New South Wales. We only have contact when he can call me and only for a few minutes. We talked last week. I should go and visit him on my way up to Cairns.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cass. ‘I think that’s a good idea. Do that, and then come in and see us on Saturday morning. It looks like we’ll be working through the weekend on this.’

  Once Odile Janvier’s identity had been made public, information began to trickle in. Late afternoon, Drew held a meeting to gather everything they knew so far. Leslie sat in on this.

  ‘Michel Janvier first,’ Drew said. ‘The man is missing and probably has been away from home since at least 29 January. But he has not touched any of his known bank accounts, nor apparently has he left Australia. Troy, tell us what you know about his record.’

  Troy had been making inquiries through Interpol. Janvier had first come to Australia in 1975, when he was twenty. There were charges of fraud against him in France.

  ‘He ran away from them, all the way to Western Queensland. The charges were later withdrawn by the complainant. So there’s not much detail on the records about what happened. Anyway, he stayed here three years and got citizenship. Then he returned to France. Worked there for a while. Then – this is more interesting – he gets a conviction in 1981 for attempted blackmail involving a relative. Suspended sentence. A year later he marries and comes back to Australia and
has apparently lived here ever since. No further convictions in Australia or elsewhere that I can find. The family in France is well-off and seems well respected. They live in a place called St André, his hometown.

  ‘We’ve got his tax records from the Earlville house,’ said Drew. ‘Last tax return was in 1995 when he claimed an income of $20,000 from part-time work as a cleaner. After that he seems to have dropped under their radar. Nevertheless, as we know, around $4000 a month is going into his bank account from a Paris bank.

  ‘Odile Janvier has a tax file number but she is only recorded as having worked as a receptionist for a few weeks in 1995. Otherwise she’s never paid tax. When she was employed she worked for Hewitt Constructions.’

  Leslie looked up. ‘She worked for Jim Hewitt?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, for the company,’ Drew replied.

  ‘Interesting,’ Leslie remarked. ‘I wonder if Jim knew her? Anyway, go on about the husband. Michel.’

  ‘He owns his supposed business premises outright,’ Drew went on. ‘Pays his council rates on the Earlville house and the Portsmith unit in cash. Unusual, eh? Conducts no visible business. Seems to have no employees or business associates and certainly none who have missed him. Has two sons who seem to have had nothing to do with him or their mother for a considerable amount of time.’

  ‘He lives an apparently quiet life in suburban Cairns with his wife, respected by his neighbours,’ Cass put in. ‘Insofar as they know anything at all about him, which they admit they don’t, really.’

  ‘Looks like he spends a lot of time body building,’ Drew commented. ‘Has no known friends and apparently no business associates. He does seem to have some interest in bushwalking and that may hold a clue. He has maps of the Davies Creek area and bushwalking gear, but he has maps also of every bushwalking area in Far North Queensland.

  ‘Despite being a fitness freak,’ he added, ‘Michel Janvier is a heavy smoker. There’s an overwhelming smell of tobacco in that shed. Not weed, just tobacco. Lots of discarded butts in wastepaper baskets and ashtrays. Smokes Philip Morris. There are cartons of them at the back of the shed.

  ‘We know a lot of cigarette butts were found in the mud close to the road, near where the body was found. Disintegrated but identifiable. Probably at least ten butts. We’re waiting on the analysis to see if they could be Philip Morris. There was another one behind the fig tree – between it and the road. Maybe Janvier waited a while behind the tree and then longer at the road after tying up his wife. If it was Janvier … Or maybe he was arguing with her in the car before he killed her. If he killed her.’

  Detective Barwen had been given the task of sorting through the small collection of pornvideos also found in the shed. He rolled his spaniel eyes.

  ‘Nothing too way-out,’ he said. ‘Some Lolita porn. Completely hairless waxed dolls, hopefully in their twenties but made up and with pigtails like thirteen-year-olds. Tiny tits like strawberries. All of it heterosexual. Pretty ordinary stuff; what you’d expect in Earlville. Nothing weird.’

  ‘There were handcuffs and a couple of whips in the main bedroom, the woman’s bedroom,’ said Drew. ‘But this stuff is everywhere these days, like Troy said. There’s a dozen adult shops in Cairns that would sell it to you. I don’t know that it’s got much significance.’

  ‘So not many leads in any of this,’ said Leslie. ‘But this man, who may or may not have killed his wife, and who may or may not have been killed himself, has totally vanished, together with a white four-wheel drive. Apart from the cigarette butts, which may or may not be his, there’s no trace of him in the area around where his wife was found, or of his car. An alert for the car went out yesterday but so far it hasn’t been picked up.’

  Cass had spoken to the prison director in Wellington. Dominic had been there for the last year, they said. No doubt about that.

  ‘Definitely there since Christmas. He’s actually a model prisoner. Studying and working. So we can rule out Dominic as being involved in whatever has happened.’

  ‘But I don’t think we can rule out an associate,’ Drew pointed out. ‘He might have organised a mate to do it. Bearing in mind, for example, that with both parents dead the two sons would inherit the two properties. Probably two-fifty or three hundred thousand bucks for Earlville, and maybe a hundred for Portsmith. Dominic himself with a perfect alibi. Damian probably with a good one as well, since he lives in Tassie.’

  ‘Yeah, Damian is getting together an account of himself for the week before Yasi,’ Cass said. ‘He told me that he hasn’t been out of the state since last September, when he went to see his brother and holidayed in Sydney with his girlfriend. He works Wednesdays to Sundays in the restaurant in Hobart, except in January he also worked Tuesdays because they were short-staffed. His girlfriend does the same. They live together and usually go to her family out of Hobart on their days off. He’ll probably have good confirmation of all of that from several people.’

  ‘And if he has,’ said Drew, ‘while he might have had time to fly to Cairns and back from Hobart, pausing long enough to take his mother up to Davies Creek and tie her up, and be given an alibi by the girlfriend, could he have also disposed of his father and the car? Hard to believe. Or at least he’d have needed an accomplice. I gather he didn’t seem too distressed by his mother’s passing, when you spoke to him, Cass?’

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ she answered. ‘But he didn’t sound indifferent either. And we know he’d left home years ago. On the phone he sounded, um, intelligent, straightforward. A nice guy who’s had some not very good news. We can see for ourselves on Saturday. Although from what Dr Symonds said in her report, Dominic might have wanted his mother dead, Damian seems to have just decided to get on with his life.’

  There’d been several calls from members of the general public who’d known Odile or Michel Janvier at one time or another. But none shed any light on what might have happened to them.

  Michel had been a member of a gym in central Cairns until four years ago.

  ‘The manager’s a guy called Brett,’ said Drew. ‘He called in and we talked. I know Brett, went to school with him, he’s been manager there for years. He remembered Janvier well. Said he was a fanatic. Spent several hours a day on solo work. Never talked to any of the other regulars much. He quit after an argument with Brett because he was in the habit of going outside for a smoke and standing close to the club’s door. Others complained and Brett asked him – politely he says – to move away from the front of the gym while smoking. Not good for the image, clients don’t want to be breathing in smoke when they are coming and going, etcetera, etcetera. Janvier became very het-up, quite aggressive, threatened violence but as soon as the police were mentioned he shut up, left and never went back. I got the impression that Brett wasn’t too unhappy with that. But he hasn’t seen him since and he doesn’t know anyone else who might have.’

  Bob Willis, who managed a cattle station to the west of Cairns, was pretty sure he had worked with Janvier in 1977 when he was in his early twenties. ‘But he called himself Mick January then,’ he’d told Barwen. ‘What I remember is that there was something not quite right about his story. He was supposed to have a scholarship from the French government or something to study in Australia but then he’d decided he wanted to stay and live in the outback. He was quite good with his hands – we worked together building a house on the property – and he told me he’d picked up some building skills in Cairns. Then one day the local cop from Normanton turned up about something quite minor, an unregistered vehicle or whatever, and Mick just shot through. Blokes evading the law, the tax department, wives and girlfriends, is just run-of-the mill out there. I hadn’t given Mick another thought until I saw his photo on the telly and it hit me – that’s the bloke I knew.’

  A French teacher from Baptist College had told Barwen that she’d known the couple briefly.

  ‘They participated in some activities many years ago, barbecues for our French national day, things like that, but
they didn’t really socialise much.

  ‘She’s not a teacher. I don’t believe she even finished secondary school in France. She had a small job speaking French to students at Baptist, before I was working here. She was asked to leave. I don’t know why. Maybe because of their children. Expelled from two private schools, including Baptist, at least the older one was. For drugs. He’d been suspended from the high school for the same thing. I hear he went to jail. It doesn’t surprise me.’

  Tom Stewart from the Friends of the Bush walking club had spoken to Leslie. ‘Michel Janvier was in the group years ago,’ he said. ‘Sort of – he wasn’t very communicative. A solitary character who never really fitted in. We’re a pretty convivial group as you know, so we found him hard-going on a four or five hour walk. Once he went up Bartle Frere alone, to stay the night. Took a tent. A guy rope snapped and broke his finger and he had to walk back out alone next day, having the spent the night in a lot of pain, I imagine. We told him he should follow the rules – walking with others, letting people know where he was going. He didn’t seem to appreciate the advice. We saw him less and less although I did see him a few times out walking with his sons. On Glacier Rock once. That would be twelve years ago at least. I never met his wife.’

  ‘So he might well have known the way into the rainforest road at Davies Creek,’ Drew now said.

  ‘And so might his sons,’ Cass put in. Leslie nodded.

  Amy, the manager of Louise’s Hair Salon, told Cass she was shocked to hear what had happened. She’d known Mrs Janvier. ‘I’ve done her for the past three years,’ she said. ‘She seemed like a very nice person. Talked about her garden, about fashion. She seemed to know who’s who in Paris fashion, like she went there often, knew people there.’

  ‘Did she actually say she went to Paris at any time? To France?’

  Amy thought for a moment. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know how it is. You talk to clients to pass the time. About everything and nothing. I don’t think she did ever say she’d been there in the time I was doing her hair. She had colour every two weeks and a treatment. Eyebrow wax and shaping every week. And facials. She uses a lot of makeup, always the best. At least – she did – Clarins, Chanel, Lancôme. And she has such beautiful clothes. I never saw her in the same outfit twice. So different from most women in Cairns. You got the feeling that getting dressed each day was a big performance. I got the impression that she had a lot of friends and a hectic social life. She was always wanting her hair to look exactly right, like for some special occasion – she’d often come in twice during the week for a shampoo and blow-dry and style. But no, I don’t recall her going away for any length of time.