‘What kind of messages? When were they sent?’
‘Messages to me. On the first and second of February. I think from a public phone. There’s the sound of traffic in the background. He didn’t have this mobile number; it’s too new. I think he tried and tried to get me on the other number. But of course I wasn’t here.’
‘Right,’ said Cass. ‘I’m not supposed to be at Sheridan Street today. My only plan was to walk this new dog I seem to have agreed to take on; it’s chewing up my backyard as we speak! But this changes everything. Can you come into the office in about, um, twenty minutes? I’ll get Jordon to drive me in. I’m absolutely fine. Drew will be there. I know he’s also got something they found yesterday, on Odile’s mobile. Maybe we’re going to understand the whole thing after all.’
‘Yes, OK. It’s eight o’clock now, that’s fine. But I have patients booked in from 9.30.’
When Cass arrived at Sheridan Street, Lyndall was already there with Drew. He had brought up coffees for all of them.
‘I decided I’d get you a double shot today,’ he said to Cass, ‘in view of your invalid status.’
‘Thanks,’ she said sweetly.
‘Here’s the phone,’ Lyndall said, putting it on the desk between them. ‘As you see it’s an old phone, I don’t use it much and the number’s been the same for years. I only listened to the first two messages. I was a bit taken aback to find them so I called Cass straight away. There are five or six more.’
‘Thanks,’ Drew said, ‘we’ll listen to them in just a moment. First let me ask you, have you seen Michel Janvier since you helped the paramedics get him out?’
‘Yes. I saw him yesterday in the hospital. You probably know, he’s got multiple injuries to both legs. He’s been moved out of intensive care. He’s more alert now but still hardly talking. I think he’s still very traumatised. And maybe his brain is affected by the septicaemia. I’ve made clear to him, as much as I could, and to everyone else, that he is no longer my patient. Given all the circumstances.’
‘Yes,’ Drew answered. ‘I understand that. And what you’ve brought in to show us, and what we have to show you, may clear up how Odile Janvier died.
‘He had mobile phones with him; we found both his and hers. But the batteries were flat in both, probably had been for weeks because he had nowhere to charge them.’
‘Who was he going to call anyway?’ asked Lyndall. ‘He had no friends, no family he could talk to.’
Drew nodded. Then said: ‘You saw that he had ketamine. So we presume he was able to self-administer that, until it was used up. Yesterday, by tracking down pharmacy records, we found he’d been prescribed some by a GP up on the Tablelands. That was twelve years ago. Michel was bushwalking by himself on Bartle Frere and fractured some bones in his hand. He found this doctor who patched him up under ketamine. It also seems that he got some more, illegally, somewhere in Cairns. Probably from contacts he’d met through Dominic. Maybe quite a lot over the years.
‘We asked Damian about it. He had no idea but then we asked him to speak to Dominic and arranged that with Wellington. I gather Dominic wasn’t prepared to say much even to Damian but he did tell him he knew their father had used ketamine at times and that he got a high from it.’
‘Yes, said Lyndall, ‘some people do. People with delusional tendencies would be particularly susceptible and that would include Michel.’
‘It’s possible Dominic put his father in touch with a dealer who got him the ketamine,’ Drew said. ‘It’s also possible that Michel found his own dealer. It makes no difference.
‘Several syringes with traces of blood were found in Michel’s backpack,’ he went on. ‘All except one match his blood.
‘We heard from the lab late last night that the last one matches Odile’s. We assume this is the one that killed her, and that he gave it to her. He was still carrying it around. Together with the scarf.’
‘So,’ said Lyndall, ‘Michel had used ketamine before. And I guess it’s good that he still had some when he needed it at the bottom of the Rock. And Odile had ketamine before she died. That sounds to me like he gave it to her, maybe at the house, then took her up into the bush. But why? What pushed him over the edge? Was he intending to kill her with it?’
‘We thought through all those things ourselves yesterday. And decided that all our other suspects could be ruled out. And the answers to your questions, well they may be in your phone. At least partly. Would you mind playing the messages for us now?’
Lyndall she reached over and turned the mobile on. It gave several shrill rings. She pressed messagebank and found the first message.
‘Doctor Lyndall.’ Male; French accent. ‘It’s … it’s Michel. I need to talk to you, I need to talk to you soon. Can you call me on this … beep!’
‘There’s only a ten second space for a voicemail message,’ Lyndall said. ‘I did that deliberately so I didn’t get people leaving me long complex messages.’
‘Doctor Lyndall, it’s Michel … I need to talk, please call me … please … beep!’
‘Doctor Lyndall, please, please, it’s Michel … I need you … I …’ Shouting now: ‘Odile is dead … beep!’
Lyndall grimaced.
‘Doctor Lyndall, Odile’s dead … she’s dead … I need to talk to you … I … Doc … beep!’
‘Doctor Lyndall … you’ll know I had to do it … she had to die … yes, yes, I had to … beep!’
Lyndall paused for a moment, looking at Cass, who nodded.
‘Yes,’ Cass said, ‘seems like, one way or another, he planned to do it and he did.’
Lyndall scrolled down to the next message.
‘Doctor Lyndall … Doctor Lyndall … it was because of Doctor Trevor … she shouldn’t have … beep!’ At this Lyndall sat up straight. What on earth had Trevor got to do with this?
‘Doctor Lyndall I had to punish her … she was going to show you the pictures … I said no … beep!’
Then a final message: ‘Doctor Lyndall, I want, I want … I have to … to be with her …’
There was a series of beeps.
‘The voicemail’s full there,’ Lyndall said. She put her head in her hands, thinking. Then, sitting up and looking first at Cass, then at Drew, she asked: ‘How does Trevor fit into this? What’s this about pictures?’
‘Well, I was coming to that,’ Drew said.
‘As you know, the Janviers, both of them, were blackmailing a number of Cairns men over about the last ten years. Mostly doctors.’
Lyndall nodded. ‘And – Trevor was one of them?’ she asked.
‘Not exactly,’ said Drew. ‘Umm … I know you’re divorced. I also know from our records that your ex-husband was found dead in a motel in circumstances that suggested he’d been there with a woman. The woman had left precipitately and the staff had no idea who she was. But anyway there were no suspicious circumstances to the death itself.’
‘No,’ said Lyndall. ‘He had a heart attack.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Drew. ‘Well, I can tell you that we didn’t find any film of your husband – ex-husband – with Odile Janvier, in Michel’s collection.
‘However, on Saturday after you found Michel, we took both the mobile phones, his and his wife’s, and recharged them. There was nothing of any interest on Michel’s phone. Nor was there much of interest on Odile’s in regards to phone messages. But she had an iPhone, a new model. And she had recorded several videos.’
Lyndall took a sharp breath in. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m afraid they are of Odile having sex with your ex-husband, last year, up until the moment of his heart attack, when they abruptly stop.’
Lyndall let out a sigh. ‘So it was Odile he was with when he died,’ she said. ‘How bizarre.’
She thought for a moment. ‘So what you’re saying is that whereas Michel was involved in all the filming with all the others they blackmailed, with Trevor it was Odile herself?’
‘Yes, exactly. I talked to Cass about this
last night. And she said you’d always been rather wary of Michel as a patient. That perhaps there was some, um, physical attraction, on his part. That led him to be protective of you.’ Cass nodded.
‘So possibly Odile wanted to try the blackmail on Trevor but Michel told her not to?’ suggested Lyndall. ‘Is that what you think?’
‘Yes. And the voicemails confirm that, don’t you think?’ Cass asked her.
‘Yes,’ said Lyndall. ‘I have to say that I was always aware that Michel had a kind of … fascination … with me. Well, I could even call it an obsession. I kept it as controlled as I could. But I can imagine that if he’d told her he didn’t want her being involved with Trevor, because he saw Trevor as some kind of extension of me, Odile would take great delight in persisting with it, to torment him.’
‘Yes,’ said Cass. ‘That iPhone footage was all recorded in August and September of last year. Up until the day Trevor died. So we think that she’d been taunting Michel with this, perhaps over a few weeks. Then her plan came to an abrupt halt – in the middle of their meeting in the motel, Trevor suddenly died.
‘So she was no longer going to be able to screw any cash out of him or threaten Michel with doing so. But she could see the effect of what she’d done on Michel. And she didn’t like the fact that he had some feeling for you. So she threatened to send the pictures to you.’
Lyndall eventually said: ‘Yes, that does fit what I know of him … and her. And that could have been enough to make him snap.’
She continued slowly, thinking it through as she spoke. ‘So he decides he’ll give her ketamine, which he has some experience of. And he’ll take her out into the rainforest, which is an environment he feels comfortable in, but she doesn’t. In fact, in a sense she was on his territory for once. And this time he’ll tie her up. With her scarves.’
Cass said: ‘You may not know that when her body was found, Odile’s underwear was missing.’
Lyndall raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s interesting,’ she said. ‘So at some stage, when Odile was either unconscious or dead, Michel must have felt enough in control to take her pants off. Something he would never have done if she was alive and fully conscious.’
‘And then,’ asked Cass, ‘could he have given her an even larger dose of ketamine? Enough to kill her?’
‘If the pathologist isn’t able to tell you that then it would be guesswork. I’m just a psychiatrist, it’s not my area of expertise. But it would seem to me that a large dose of ketamine, or that plus exposure, would kill her quite quickly. He obviously knows a good deal about ketamine.’
‘We think he must have left her there after she died,’ said Cass. ‘And maybe spent some time, maybe the night of 29 January, and other nights, in the car thinking about what to do next.’
‘There were a lot of cigarette butts, by the tree and by the road,’ Drew said. ‘We think he probably went back to where Odile was, maybe several times, thinking about what to do. The scarves that tied her up were a bit frayed at the wrists. Perhaps he tried to untie her. Certainly if he’d wanted to he could have disposed of her body and it could have been a very long time before anyone reported her missing. If ever. Yet he chose not to do that.’
‘I doubt he would have seen that as a choice,’ Lyndall replied. ‘The way I imagine he was thinking, he didn’t foresee any consequences to his actions while it was all happening. When she was dying. And once she was dead, I’m sure he was overcome with grief because she was the only person he’d ever really loved. You can see that from him saying he wanted to be with her.’
Then she added: ‘At least, I’m sure that’s how he reacted initially.’
‘After a couple of days,’ said Cass, ‘he decides to call you. Just before Yasi. But the mobiles are flat so he uses a public phone. Maybe near Davies Creek, there is one there. Obviously he regarded you as someone who would understand. And in the phone calls he tells you he killed her, one way or another. Deliberately. And that he wants to die himself.
‘But then at some point he decided to go to Kahlpahlim Rock. And apparently, to delay killing himself.’
‘Just what I’m thinking,’ said Lyndall. ‘The Rock seems to have been important to him. Perhaps that whole area of the rainforest.’
‘And then,’ said Drew, ‘he decides that instead of killing himself, with ketamine or some other way, that he’ll take a tent and set himself up in the bush.’
‘We know he didn’t come back to the Earlville house after Yasi,’ said Cass. ‘And we’ve also heard, from the men who found his car in the bush, that there was quite a lot of food and camping gear in it.’ Mareeba police had told Drew yesterday how Bugsy had suddenly recalled this information.
‘So we’re thinking,’ said Drew, ‘that maybe he spent the cyclone in the car, somewhere up there in the forest, close to the body. Maybe to protect it, if you see what I mean.’
‘Then,’ Cass said, ‘there’s a period of time in which he lives in the bush, he’s still got the car, and he may even have gone into Mareeba or Kuranda for supplies. Because no-one knows he’s missing, no-one’s looking for him, he’s just a bloke in a dirty four-wheel drive doing some shopping. And he’s an experienced bushie, he’s probably always kept camping gear in his car.’
‘Things start to go pear-shaped when the car disappears,’ said Drew. ‘By then he must have had the tent camp up on the Rock. The car had been quite well concealed in the bush. He’d walk down from the Rock, maybe each day for a while, spend some time with the body, and possibly get a few supplies. But once the car disappeared, he wouldn’t have known who took it and whether we’d found the body, or what was going on.’
Lyndall was listening intently to this. Now she said: ‘This is what’s described with folie à deux. Once the two people are separated, the one who was under the influence of the other starts to recover. So first of all Michel is overwhelmed with grief, and plans to kill himself as well. Probably next to Odile. But then she’s no longer there telling him what to do, controlling him. Michel can see that, physically, more and more of her is disappearing every day. He has his own reality now. And he’s got complete control of her, with her tied to that tree. He had a car, he had money, he’s in the bush where he’s been happy.
‘It would have been quite a slow process. It would have been logical to dispose of the body deep in the forest, go back home, work out some story for the neighbours, start a new life. A more logical person might have done that. But a more logical person wouldn’t have got into this situation in the first place.’
‘So he doesn’t kill himself after all,’ said Drew. ‘But then when the car disappears he retreats back up to the Rock and stays there.’
‘Yes,’ said Lyndall, ‘that fits with everything that’s been found, doesn’t it? And no doubt he becomes more agitated about what he’s going to do. Especially if at some stage he did try to go back to Odile, and saw that the police were there, and obviously she’d been discovered. Which leads to him ending up where he did. I’d say he fell, rather than deciding to jump. If he wanted to kill himself he would have used the ketamine. At least it seems clear no-one pushed him off the Rock.’
‘Yes,’ said Drew, ‘it all fits. You know, we had a list of suspects as long as your arm but it comes down to what we were always taught as rookies. With homicide it’s most often a family member. And more often than not, the spouse.’
Lyndall was silent, then said: ‘You know, I’m glad he had the ketamine with him. It must have helped with the pain when he first fell. And obviously, he didn’t use it all at once. He wasn’t intending to kill himself, even then. He was still hoping to live. And even though he messed up so many people’s lives, he didn’t deserve a wife like Odile.’
‘She certainly was a piece of work,’ said Drew. ‘And well out of the lives of quite a few citizens of this town. Of course, he’ll go to prison for quite a while. And very possibly be in a wheelchair for the rest of his days, as I understand it. But he is still alive. And the younger so
n is coming back up from Hobart. He sounded quite concerned, on the phone, about his dad. So it’s not all bad.’
‘And the poor dentist?’ asked Lyndall.
‘There’ll be a coronial inquiry. There was no suicide note, so probably there’ll be a finding of accidental death, which will be better for the family than suicide,’ Drew said, standing up. ‘You’ll be wanting to get to work,’ he said to Lyndall. ‘I’ll get a car to drop you home, Cass.’
Lyndall nodded and stood up.
‘Well, thank you very much for coming in,’ Drew said. ‘We’ll keep the phone for a couple of days, if you don’t mind.’
Lyndall decided to take the stairs rather than the lift, and walked slowly down, stopping for several minutes at the first landing to look out at the mountains beyond the town, now disappearing beneath the swirling clouds of a tropical morning shower. The mountains where Odile Janvier died. And, although she knew a doctor should always keep an emotional distance from her patients, she allowed herself a moment of understanding for Michel Janvier.
This evening, she would call Bernard.
Cairns, Thursday 17 March 2011
Claudine took Leslie’s arm as they made their way down the brightly carpeted stairs of the Cairns City Cinema after the early showing of Bridesmaids. He was still laughing.
‘You see,’ she told him, ‘you did like it! I told you so!’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘lots of wild women having fun. It certainly took my mind off the office. And I liked the traffic cop. He had a good attitude.’ They had reached the foot of the stairs opposite the pizza bar. ‘We could go there for Italian. Or would you prefer the Taj Mahal?’
‘A good lamb curry is what I want,’ she said firmly. ‘Besides, see who’s just gone in there. We might not be welcome.’
Peering through the window, Leslie saw Detective Cass Diamond, in jeans and silky top, with her left arm in a sling, in the company of a vaguely familiar dark-haired young man.
‘And look who she’s with!’ said Claudine.
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