Double Madness

by Caroline de Costa

  Mellish visibly deflated. Was he out for the count?

  ‘Will my wife have to know about this?’ he asked.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ answered Leslie. ‘We do need to ask you some questions. We’re still in the stage of documenting all the evidence we’ve taken possession of in the past few days. The good news is that you can stop putting fifty-dollar notes into plain envelopes. Wherever Mr Janvier is, he won’t be collecting any more.’

  ‘Her husband was The Controller?’

  ‘He used that term with you? We think yes, or that both he and his wife were equally complicit. There doesn’t seem to have been anyone else involved. And let me tell you, Doctor, our society despises blackmailers.’

  ‘Well,’ Mellish brightened up. He was beginning to take to Inspector Fernando. He liked the cut of his jib. Why, it was almost like talking to a white man.

  ‘This is a new ball game all right,’ he said. ‘I can’t say it’s been easy, the past few years. But,’ he hesitated, flushing again, ‘are there, um, copies of …?’

  ‘Yes. Copies of everything, I’m afraid. They had very good equipment and understood the technology to make sure the images were compelling for their victims. Well, you know that. But we will be keeping all this locked up. And I can also tell you, Doctor, there are some of your colleagues involved. She was very practised at what she did.’

  ‘You mean – the scarf …?’

  ‘Yes – she always used one or more. And that was what was used in her killing. Or so we think.’

  Mellish’s head jerked back and his mouth opened as understanding slowly dawned upon him. For once he resorted to plain speech.

  ‘You don’t think …? My God, man, I was blackmailed, but I didn’t kill her!’

  ‘No, no, I’m not suggesting that for a moment. I take it, though, you were in Cairns at the end of January?’

  Mellish thought for a moment, then reached into his breast pocket and retrieved a College of Surgeons black leather diary. ‘No, we were in Sydney. At least, I went there on the afternoon of 30 January. That was a Sunday. That’s right, bit of a worry about the cyclone even then. Winifred was already down there, she’d been staying with her sister since the previous weekend, doing shows and whatnot, arty things, you know. And then we were supposed to be going to London, until we got wind of the cyclone really coming. So Winifred went on anyway, she’s still there, with her mother, but I came back here on …’ he turned a page, ‘1 February, to help with the evacuation and whatever else was needed. Batten down the hatches. Clear the decks. Sat it out in a cyclone shelter in case anyone needed help. Bit of a sticky wicket for a while all right. We were bloody lucky.’

  Leslie took a deep breath. ‘So in that week before you went to Sydney you were working as usual?’

  ‘Yes. Flat chat actually. Because I thought I’d be away more than two weeks, had a conference in London I was going to. Missed that. Didn’t miss seeing my mother-in-law too much, though. Ha!’ He passed the open diary to Leslie.

  ‘Consultations and clinics all that week except Australia Day, and I was in and out of the hospital the whole 24 hours, a lot of sick patients. Is that … do you think that was when she was killed?’

  ‘We’re not sure yet,’ answered Leslie evenly. ‘We’re waiting on some more forensic evidence. Can I ask you when was the last time you saw Odile Janvier?’

  ‘You mean, as a patient? I haven’t seen her at all since the day – the evening when …’

  ‘I see,’ said Leslie comfortingly. ‘Can I ask, did she call and say she had a problem after her operation, and arrive late so that you’d be there alone?’

  Mellish’s features brightened. ‘Yes – are you saying she’s done the same thing to other chaps?’

  Leslie nodded.

  ‘By Jove,’ said Mellish, ‘how many? At a thousand dollars a month, she must have been raking it in. She had me by the short and curlies. Threatened to send – well, pictures, to Winifred. And the Medical Board. Um – will you be having to tell the Medical Board?’

  ‘I understand,’ answered Leslie, ‘that a complaint to the Medical Board needs to be made by or on behalf of a particular patient. That doesn’t seem to me a likely outcome.’

  Mellish gave a sigh of relief.

  ‘So,’ asked Leslie, ‘when was the last time you saw her, for any reason whatever?’

  ‘Just as I told you. That night.’

  ‘You didn’t meet her again?’

  ‘Good God no! She suggested meeting in a motel. Can you imagine it? I’d walk into a place like that in this town and there’d be someone at the desk whose appendix I’ve removed. Everyone knows me even if I don’t always remember them. Besides – just horse sense, really. I won’t say I don’t know the lie of the land. Was in the Army Reserve, had a few big nights out. And once in Bangkok. That’s years ago. But I knew with that filly, I could really come a cropper.’

  Leslie glanced down at Mellish’s diary. Against Saturday 29 January was a pencilled note: ‘E Creek.’

  ‘E Creek?’ he asked Mellish. ‘Is that the name of a patient?’

  ‘No that’s our farm, outside Kuranda. Emerald Creek. Let me see …’ He leaned over and stared at the diary.

  ‘Saturday. That’s right, I went up there to check the house was closed up, because of the weather.’

  ‘So you went up to Kuranda that day?’ Leslie asked. ‘What time?’

  Mellish thought for a moment. ‘Mid-afternoon,’ he said firmly.

  ‘You went alone?’

  ‘Yes, my wife was in Sydney. As I said. I didn’t stay long.’

  ‘Did you see anyone else? Anyone who could confirm that you were there?’

  Mellish looked intently at Leslie. The implications of his presence near the Davies Creek rainforest that day were sinking in. Suddenly he brightened.

  ‘Yes. Tegan. The manager’s daughter. They live next door. We have mangoes, macadamias and so on but only smallscale. Tegan’s family manages it for us. She drove past and stopped for a moment. I think she talked about the cyclone coming.’

  ‘Well,’ said Leslie, ‘I’ll be asking you to talk to Detective Barwen. We’ll have to get a complete record of where you were, you understand, what you were doing that week, and proof that you were in Sydney. We’ll be asking quite a few people the same thing. But I think that at least you can stop worrying about paying the Controller now.’

  Leslie’s second interview of the day was with Tim Ingram. Tim was coming back to Sheridan Street to sign his typed statement.

  Leslie had found himself thinking quite a lot about Tim since the start of this case. It was interesting that he was the one who’d found the body.

  Leslie had never forgotten the rape case of a young Chinese student and the assault on Kaine Nancarrow. The Chinese student had been treated by Dr Ingram. Leslie had always had a gut feeling that Tim Ingram knew more about the assault of Nancarrow than he’d let on.

  Nancarrow had been brought into the hospital that night having rolled a stolen car on the Yorkey’s Knob road. He’d fractured his femur so he hadn’t been able to run away like his mate. However, they’d caught up with him and the two of them were now in Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre in Brisbane.

  In the hospital, though, in the Emergency Department, Nancarrow had nearly died. Not because of any lack of medical care but because while the constable on guard had gone to get a cup of tea, someone, never identified, had gone into the room and stabbed Nancarrow repeatedly. Someone who knew exactly where to find him.

  Nancarrow had been doped with morphine and was able to describe his assailant only as a ‘slitty-eyed bastard’. There was CCTV in the ED waiting room but none in the corridor of the ward where Nancarrow had been held. Leslie had no sympathy for Nancarrow but the incident had made the duty policeman look foolish and they’d never been able to solve the case. They could find no evidence to charge the most obvious suspect, the girl’s fiancé.

  When Tim was interviewed by Leslie’s team
he denied knowing anything about Nancarrow, but there had been something in the way events had unfolded that had suggested to Leslie that he’d anticipated how things might turn out. Leslie could never quite put his finger on why he thought this. And for some inexplicable reason whenever Leslie thought about Tim Ingram he seemed to smell the scent of frangipani flowers.

  Now Tim again sat in Leslie’s office overlooking the Inlet.

  There was no record in Michel Janvier’s collection of Tim having been one of Odile’s victims, and he was a generation younger than most of them. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t tried. There was another possibility too – that Henry had taken Tim into his confidence, despite his having told Leslie he’d told no-one. And then Tim might have decided to help Henry in some way. If Tim knew Henry was being blackmailed then he might even have helped him kill Odile and Michel.

  It quickly became clear that Tim had never met Odile, professionally or otherwise, until he found her body.

  ‘All my work is in public obstetrics,’ he explained to Leslie. ‘That woman was never in that category in the time I’ve been in the hospital. I’m certain the first time I ever saw her was in the rainforest.’

  ‘The woman was obsessed with doctors,’ Leslie explained. ‘So we’re asking all Cairns doctors where they were around 28 to 30 of January.’

  Tim produced his phone and showed Leslie his rosters for the week before Yasi. He’d worked every day, up to sixteen hours a day, in the week leading up to the cyclone. And he and Henry had been called back into the hospital the minute it was safe after Yasi, when he’d worked every day up until the Saturday when he’d gone to the Tablelands with his wife. It seemed unlikely he could have fitted in a complicated double kidnapping and murder.

  Leslie’s eyes lingered a moment on the phone. Then he asked: ‘30 January – you had a meeting with Henry? Dr Jolley? That was on a Sunday?’

  Tim looked puzzled for a moment, then his face cleared. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘we met in the hospital, to go through all the perinatal deaths for 2010. We had to prepare a report and we could never find time during the week. So we both went in after dinner that night. I remember it was just before Yasi so we had a lot to talk about as well as going through all the medical charts for the report.’

  ‘So this was in your office? Or Dr Jolley’s?’

  ‘In Henry’s. Next to the outpatient clinic.’

  ‘I see. How long were you both there?’

  Tim considered this for a moment, then said: ‘Well, I must have arrived about 8.30 I think. Bedtime for my daughters is eight o’clock and I remember my wife and I put them to bed, and we were talking about the cyclone. Then I went to the hospital. Henry was already there.’

  ‘And the meeting took, what, an hour or so?’

  ‘Oh no, much longer. We went through a whole year’s charts. I think I got home about midnight.’

  ‘Did you talk about anything else?’

  Tim eyed Leslie for a moment. What was the Inspector getting at? ‘We also discussed the cyclone,’ he said finally. ‘Whether Yasi was coming. How to prepare for it, with so many women scheduled to give birth. Henry was planning how we would cope.’

  ‘Well,’ said Leslie, nodding, ‘you all did a fine job.’ But going through his mind was the question, Did you also talk about Odile Janvier? He leaned forward.

  ‘I take it,’ he asked Tim, ‘that you consider Henry Jolley a person of integrity?’

  Tim looked directly at him, his head tilted a little to one side. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘I’ve worked with him as a consultant for four years now. In some quite tight situations, because we don’t have a lot of back-up here, so far from Brisbane.’

  There was no doubting Tim’s sincerity. Leslie decided this was enough.

  ‘Thank you very much indeed for coming in,’ he said, standing up and offering his hand.

  Leslie’s final visitor of the day was Jim Hewitt. Jim was a Cairns identity well known to Leslie, a generous benefactor of police charities.

  Jim had first come to North Queensland as an accountant for a mining company. After a while he bought the company. He’d branched out since then into apartment blocks and supermarkets, and everything he touched prospered. He ran his affairs as a family business with his sons.

  Leslie was not surprised when he heard from reception that Jim had dropped in and asked to see him. Waiting for him to come up in the lift, he found the Glenlivet and a tumbler and placed these on his desk, together with a glass of water for himself.

  ‘Jim! Good to see you!’

  ‘Leslie, you too. How’s the golf? Still playing Wednesdays?’

  ‘Every week I’m in Cairns. You should try to get out and join us some time!’

  At seventy, Jim was trim and fit. Clearly much was invested in private medicine, cosmetic dentistry and tanning salons but he’s worked hard, thought Leslie, he’s earned it.

  ‘Look, Leslie,’ Jim said, ‘I’ll come straight to the point. This woman Janvier who was killed up in the rainforest. I used to know her. She worked for me – though “work” is probably stretching it. Bloody useless. Good-looker though.’

  ‘This was recently?’

  ‘Lord no! Fifteen years ago. More, maybe.’

  ‘And you had some involvement with her?’ Leslie knew what Lyndall had told Cass about Hewitt and Odile.

  ‘Well, yeah. Briefly, you know the kind of thing. Only she was difficult. Thought it was serious, that I was going to leave Natalie for her! Nuts! Turned up at the office with her bags! Next thing her husband and two little kids were there as well. The husband jabbering away in French.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Oh, I paid them off. Only thing to do. The husband was threatening to shoot me and she was threatening to tell Nat. Nat and me, we’ve been through a few things, I would have survived, but I really didn’t need any of it. I told them I’d give them five thousand bucks in cash, which I did, but they wouldn’t get a cent more, and if I saw either of them again I’d come down here to Sheridan Street and report them for threatening me. And I said I had a lot of friends in high places. Which I do.’

  ‘So this would be the reason that, ah,’ Leslie consulted the notes on his desk, ‘on the evening of 3 March, two persons known to work for Hewitt Constructions were arrested breaking and entering a property owned by Michel Janvier in Portsmith?’

  ‘Yeah. Jesus, Leslie, your woman, the detective, really gave them the once-over.’

  ‘They attempted to assault her. She’s one of my best operators. They’re lucky the charges are minor, Jim. They could have got serious assault. Or even grievous bodily harm.’

  ‘Well they exceeded my instructions.’

  ‘And what were those instructions?’

  ‘Well, to make sure there was nothing compromising me or any of my family in Janvier’s office.’

  ‘And can I ask how you knew that was Janvier’s office?’ Leslie was intrigued. There had been nothing related to Jim Hewitt found among the videos or emails.

  ‘OK. I’ll tell you the lot. But … this is confidential, right?’

  ‘Well, provided no crime’s been committed. No further crime. I mean by you. You ended up paying her more?’

  ‘Not me! My son. Aidan. You’ve met him.’ Leslie remembered Aidan Hewitt. Nice lad, but not half as engaging as his father. Or as bright.

  ‘Ah yes. Aidan.’

  ‘Well. Seemed that Madame had Aidan in her claws as well. While she was still seeing me!’

  ‘Ah. I see.’

  ‘Yeah well I didn’t see. Not at first. Then about two years after I’d paid off the Janviers, Aidan comes to talk to me. Odile had given him the flick.

  ‘“Good,” I said, after I’d said a few other things about Odile two-timing me. Aidan was married then, to Shona. His first wife. Lovely girl. Would have been hell though if she’d found out.’

  ‘And Aidan was paying Odile Janvier?’

  ‘Yes. Because somehow they’d recorded – made a
video – of Aidan and Odile at it. The husband must have been involved. Sick stuff really but they used it to threaten him. Said they’d send it to Shona. I think it was Odile who did it. He – Aidan – got sent an anonymous copy of the video with a letter. That had been about a year before he talked to me. In that time he’d paid about $6000 in cash to them.’

  ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘Well you see I knew where she lived, because she’d been employed by us. So I went to our lawyer, you know Curt Bailey. And he wrote them a letter saying there would be no payments in future and if they so much as looked in our direction again we would go to the police and have charges of blackmail laid. And that put a stop to it.’

  ‘So this was when, exactly?’

  ‘This would have been about 1999.’

  ‘So why would two of your employees be at Michel Janvier’s back door in 2011, four days after his wife was found dead in highly unusual circumstances?’

  ‘Because I didn’t know … Shit! Leslie – you don’t think I got someone to kill her?!’ Jim was suddenly aghast.

  ‘No, no. I’m just asking why you sent your blokes to Michel Janvier’s unit.’

  ‘Because we asked, at least Curt did, that they destroy all copies of the video. But of course we never knew if they did. There’d been no trouble from them since, but when I heard Odile was dead I thought this might come to light. And it could be embarrassing for Aidan. He’s in Aspen, skiing. With the third wife. So I sent the guys down to have a look around. They stuffed up, though, badly.’

  ‘How long has Aidan been away?’

  ‘Um, he left the day before Australia Day. 25th. Comes back next week.’

  ‘OK, Jim. Let me tell you that we have gone through everything we’ve found in Michel Janvier’s set-up and there are no videos or photos of Aidan. There are many of other people though, and all with the same story.’