The Housemate

by Sarah Bailey

  A long beat of silence. ‘In relation to what?’

  ‘I’m a journalist working on a story about the recent suicide of Alexandra Riboni. I know Professor McCrae taught her many years ago, and there are a few things I want to run by him. I think there’s more to Evelyn Stanley’s death than was revealed in Alex’s trial. I’d like his point of view.’

  ‘How dare you.’ The warmth evaporates from Diana’s voice.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Oli says patiently. ‘I don’t mean to upset you, I just want to speak with Professor McCrae. Can you please ask him if he will speak with me?’

  ‘No, he will not!’ Diana sounds furious. ‘He doesn’t want anything to do with those girls.’

  The phone slams down hard in Oli’s ear—the benefit of having a landline.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  OLI NOSES THE CAR IN FRONT OF A MERCEDES, GIVING THE DRIVER a half-hearted wave. This is what she hates about being a journalist, the feeling that permeates after a run-in like the one she just had with Diana McCrae. She hates people assuming the worst of her, speaking to her as if she has no empathy. Her desperate need for a narrative pound of flesh makes her seem like an enemy. What TJ said is right: journalism has become blurry, far less heroic, and even people like Oli are seen as shameless, willing to destroy lives and invade privacy for the sake of a by-line.

  It’s not like she hasn’t been hung up on before, verbally abused and even shoved out of the way, but for some reason she’s deeply unsettled. Hopefully Miles will be more receptive than Diana, even though he’s expecting Cooper.

  A horn blares as Oli veers across two lanes, spotting the sign for Stawell & Finch Accountants. She parks in a visitor bay and makes a dash for the reception. ‘Hi, hi,’ she announces on arrival, trying not to puff.

  A bored man in a headset keeps typing. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m here from Melbourne Today to see Miles Wu. He’s expecting me.’

  His eyes flit to the screen, then to Oli. ‘You’re Cooper Ng?’

  ‘Yes.’ She meets his gaze. Tilts her chin.

  ‘Okay, sure,’ he drawls. ‘Whatever. Wait over there, please.’ He points at two chairs covered in rust-coloured fabric and a coffee table that looks like a spaceship.

  Oli hovers, distractedly flicking through a copy of the Sun.

  A ding announces the arrival of an elevator, and Miles Wu steps out. Oli recognises him straight away, even though his body has morphed into that of a swimmer, broad shoulders thinning to a triangular waist. He scans the reception area, sees only Oli and hesitates. She approaches him with her hand out. ‘Hello, Miles. I’m Oli Groves from Melbourne Today.’

  He doesn’t offer his hand. ‘I think there’s been a mistake.’

  ‘No mistake. Cooper couldn’t make it, but I’m the senior journalist he reports to. I actually covered the Housemate story in 2005. I was at Paradise Street the morning Evelyn died.’

  Miles shakes his head. ‘Alex agreed to talk to Cooper. That’s why I called him.’

  ‘I understand, but he and I are like partners. We work closely together.’

  ‘Do you have ID?’ Miles crosses his arms and glances at the receptionist, who is clearly listening.

  ‘Sure.’ Oli retrieves her Melbourne Today credentials from her wallet and holds them up.

  ‘Okay.’ He brings his hands together at his mouth, exhales and nods. ‘Let’s do this, I guess.’

  The automatic doors slide open, and Cooper rushes in. ‘Sorry, I’m late! I caught a taxi here and underestimated how long it would take.’

  Creases dent Miles’s forehead.

  ‘Miles, hello. I’m Cooper. Genuine apologies for my tardiness.’

  Miles looks between the two of them. ‘I thought you weren’t coming?’

  ‘Change of plan,’ Cooper trills. ‘I moved a few things around so I could make it because I really appreciated you reaching out to speak with me.’

  Oli barely refrains from elbowing him in the ribs. ‘Shall we find somewhere to talk, Miles?’

  ‘Yes. Um, upstairs. We have an in-house cafe. It’s not fancy, but it’s okay. It has whatever kind of milk you want—almond, soy, whatever …’ Miles is babbling.

  Oli smiles reassuringly. ‘Sounds great.’

  Cooper and Oli follow Miles up the open curved staircase. Oli shoots Cooper daggers while he comments enthusiastically on the ugly décor and asks Miles inane questions about his job. The cafe consists of a dozen tables and chairs, a mismatched collection of fake pot plants arranged around a coffee machine, and a chirpy-looking waitress. A line of people are waiting for takeaway coffees, eyes glued to their phones, and a few groups of people in suits are having meetings, but there are some empty tables on the other side of the room.

  ‘Cooper, why don’t you grab us some drinks?’ Oli says loudly. ‘I’ll have a short black, please. Miles, what would you like?’

  ‘Oh, ah, green tea, please.’

  ‘Thanks, Cooper.’ Oli doesn’t wait for his reply; she simply steers Miles to an empty table furthest from the counter and sits opposite him.

  She knows he’s thirty-one, but he looks younger, with smooth, unblemished skin and dark hair without a hint of grey. He wears a cardigan and a pen in his shirt pocket that might or might not be ironic. He shifts nervously, putting pressure on his forearms then off again.

  ‘Are you okay, Miles?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He lurches forward and looks at her earnestly. Looks away. ‘Sort of. It’s just, I’ve spent ten years trying to forget all this, and now it’s … back.’ He laughs bitterly.

  ‘I imagine that’s quite hard.’

  ‘I have a wife and a kid, and someone with a camera was waiting outside our house this morning. My wife completely freaked out. She’s not used to it like I am—or like I was, anyway.’

  ‘I don’t think this will be like last time. Stories die more quickly these days.’

  Miles nods. ‘I hope so. I don’t think I can go through that again.’

  Cooper rejoins them, sitting next to Miles and ignoring Oli. ‘Drinks are on their way.’

  ‘Thanks,’ murmurs Miles. His hands drift to his cheeks, where he holds them for a second.

  ‘So, Miles,’ Oli prompts.

  ‘Christ,’ he mutters, squeezing his eyes shut. ‘Alright. The thing is, I didn’t exactly tell the truth back then.’

  As Oli watches him, anticipation fires in her belly. The waitress arrives at their table, and they exist through a few excruciating moments while she extracts the drinks from her grip and arranges them.

  ‘What do you mean, Miles?’ presses Oli, once they’re alone again.

  ‘There were things I saw … there’s stuff I know.’ His jaw wobbles. ‘Things that happened that I didn’t tell anyone about.’ Flecks of dandruff are visible in his sharply combed part, which Oli has a prime view of now that he has dropped his face into his hands.

  She waits for him to talk, sensing this conversation is ten years in the making. She glances at Cooper, whose lips are wrapped around the straw of a drink that looks revolting, some kind of brown goop. ‘We’re not here to judge,’ he says. ‘We’re here to listen.’

  It’s a corny line, but it seems to work. Miles looks back up and lets out a strange little laugh. His eyes have a slightly hysterical glint, unable to focus on any one thing. He toys with the salt shaker, picking it up and putting it down. ‘I don’t even know why I’m talking to you.’ He laughs again. ‘I really don’t. But my wife said I should get it off my chest, and I guess I feel like I owe it to Alex.’ He leans forward, and says to Cooper, ‘I told you, she called me. Last week.’

  Oli leans forward too. ‘You spoke to her?’

  He nods. ‘I was at work, and she called me out of the blue.’

  ‘How long had it been since you last spoke to her?’ Oli asks.

  ‘I hadn’t spoken to her since that night at the house.’

  ‘The night Evelyn died?’ presses Oli.

  He nods, his face pinched with guilt. �
�I wanted to talk to her—so many times I thought about it, but I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. It was all so weird. That part of my life seems like it happened to someone else. I mean, you see stuff on the news and you process it, but you just don’t think about the people being real. And then suddenly it was happening to me, my face was on the news and it was just insane. My parents totally freaked out, and I just didn’t know what to say to Alex. And I didn’t know what she would say to me. I think part of me just wanted to shut the whole thing out, shut her out.’

  Oli holds his gaze until his eyes pull away. ‘Did it work?’

  ‘No, not really. I don’t sleep very well.’ She nods sympathetically, and he sighs. ‘Something like that happens, and you just start questioning everything. I lost all faith in my ability to judge people. Looking back, I’m not sure I really knew Alex at all.’

  ‘But you feel like you owe something to her now?’ Oli asks.

  Regret ripples across his face, and he nods slightly. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Tell us about your conversation last week,’ Oli says.

  ‘Alex said she wanted to go public with new information, but that she wanted to talk to me first. We were going to meet up today.’ He fumbles with the sugar. Messages and emails cause his phone to vibrate across the table; he picks it up and frowns before placing it firmly facedown.

  ‘But why now?’ Oli wonders. ‘Why would Alex come to you now?’

  ‘She said she’d started to remember what really happened that night, and she wanted to talk.’ He takes a sip of his tea and wipes his mouth. ‘She said she was going on the record with your paper so that the cops couldn’t shut her down.’ Miles looks across at Cooper. ‘She said she spoke to you and that she was going to record an interview. I think she liked the idea of speaking for herself, being able to say it in her own words and not having it get twisted in print. But she never would have gone on TV, she was too shy for something like that.’ His gaze is still on Cooper. ‘I think she trusted you. That’s why I called. After what happened to her, I figure it’s probably what she would have wanted.’

  Chills settle over Oli’s body. Alex’s suicide is making less and less sense. If she had gone on the record and provided more information about her role in Evelyn’s death, then perhaps Oli could understand: the purging of information might have been too much. But Alex never made it that far. What happened to her between when she called Miles last week and her decision to take her secrets to the grave? And why go to Crystalbrook? Was she lured there by Nicole?

  ‘Did Alex tell you what she remembered?’ Oli asks.

  Miles shakes his head. ‘Not really, just that she wanted to tell the truth. She said she didn’t care if people hated her more than they already did, that it was time to come clean. She was really wired. To be honest, I think she might have been high.’ He shrugs. ‘Maybe she was—I mean, I guess it’s obvious now that she was pretty unstable.’

  Oli wants to prevent him from tumbling into a guilt spiral. If he goes there, this is likely to turn into a counselling session, and there’s no time for that. ‘Miles, I was at the trial. I sat through every minute. I know there was a lot of speculation about what happened, about whether Alex killed Evelyn and why—whether it was premeditated or happened in the heat of the moment.’

  Miles’s face twists in pain.

  ‘I never doubted it was Alex,’ Oli continues. ‘That’s what all the evidence suggested. The self-defence ruling a few years later didn’t change the fact that Alex took responsibility for being the one who ended Evelyn’s life.’

  ‘I know,’ Miles says quietly.

  ‘I remember thinking it was pretty bloody lucky, from your perspective, that you hauled your stoned arse to the house next door and decided to get even more wasted with your mates.’

  Miles keeps his head hanging forward.

  ‘Were you really with them for the rest of the night?’ Oli asks.

  ‘Yes.’ His voice is firm. ‘That’s true. I left the girls’ house after a fight with Alex. The guys and I went down to the shops then back to their place, and I stayed there the whole night. We had no idea anything had happened until we saw all the cops and reporters in the street the next morning.’

  ‘You were at the scene?’

  ‘Not until Alex was being taken away.’ Miles looks sheepish. ‘We’d done a lot of drugs, and there were still drugs in the house. There were cops everywhere.’ He looks down at his hands. ‘We didn’t know what to do, so we just cleaned up as best we could, and Matt snuck out the back to get rid of everything.’

  ‘Weren’t you worried about your girlfriend?’

  ‘In between trying not to puke my guts up, yeah, of course. I was in a total panic, imagining the worst. I called Alex a bunch of times, and I called Evelyn and Nic, but no one answered. I finally went out the front and saw Alex coming out of the house with a blanket over her, covered in blood. And then a detective started explaining to me that Alex was being taken in for questioning because Evelyn was dead. They asked me to come to the station too. I think I was in shock for a long time.’

  Cooper’s leg starts to jiggle in Oli’s peripheral vision. His glass of sludge is empty; he’s completely transfixed by Miles. She becomes aware of the conversations around them: budgets, growth pipelines, weekend plans. Plates and cutlery are being cleared from nearby tables, and a pop song dances around the corners of it all.

  She takes a deep breath and runs her tongue along her teeth, chalky with coffee remnants. ‘Miles.’

  He jumps.

  ‘What did you want to tell us?’

  He exhales shakily. ‘God, I can’t even explain it. The whole night was pretty weird from the start. The girls had been acting strangely for weeks, and I think Nic organised the dinner as a bit of a circuit-breaker, but it didn’t work. The guys from next door, Ren and Matt, turned up half cut, and two of our other friends, Tanya and Roy, came too. I remember they were talking to each other in Spanish because they were about to go on some holiday, and they’d been at a language class that afternoon. It was pretty annoying after a while. And some other girl was there too—Amber, some new friend of Evelyn’s, I think—but she was only there for a bit. It all went downhill pretty quick. Ren dropped a bottle of wine on the kitchen floor before we had dinner. There was glass and wine everywhere, and Evelyn seemed really pissed off. Then that professor guy showed up, and he was so awkward and nervous. I could tell Evelyn was annoyed he was there.’

  ‘Julian McCrae,’ Cooper offers.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you know who invited him?’ Oli asks.

  ‘Not sure,’ Miles says uncertainly. ‘I know all the girls liked him—they talked about him sometimes. It used to annoy me when Alex brought him up, but I think it was Nicole who was the closest to him. She was really into psychology, which is what he taught. But for whatever reason, Evelyn clearly didn’t want him there that night. Even Alex and Nicole seemed a bit freaked out by it.’ Miles pauses. ‘Like I said, the whole night had a weird vibe. Matt and Ren seemed really pissed about him being there too. I think they figured it meant we couldn’t, you know, do drugs in case he went to the cops.’ Miles laughs nervously. ‘It was shaping up to be a pretty shit party.’ ‘Did you get the feeling McCrae had been to the house before?’ Oli asks.

  Miles’s eyes narrow in thought. ‘I don’t think so. Like I said, he seemed really awkward. It was as if he felt obliged to be there. I know there were a lot of rumours about him being a creep, but he didn’t seem sleazy. He was more like someone’s dad. He brought two bottles of fancy wine like he was trying to impress everyone.’

  ‘What did Alex say about him being there?’

  ‘We didn’t really talk about it. We kind of weren’t really talking by then.’

  ‘We’ll come back to that,’ Oli says quickly, not wanting him to lose momentum. ‘What happened after dinner?’

  ‘Everyone went out into the yard. Or, I think they did. Maybe Tan and Roy were still inside—Nic as we
ll? I’m not sure, I was pretty drunk already. But that’s definitely when the fight broke out between Alex and Evelyn.’

  Oli knows all this from the trial and is itching for him to give her something new. ‘But you always said you didn’t know what they were fighting about,’ she says. ‘Is that true?’

  ‘I have no idea!’ He sounds defensive. ‘They’d been at each other for weeks. Lots of sniping and moody silences. This seemed like more of the same, but because they were both drunk it was pretty heated.’

  ‘Any chance they were fighting over you?’

  ‘No, no way. But Alex was really scatty, going off at me over every little thing. Every time I asked her what was wrong, she shut down.’ Emotion flickers across Miles’ face. ‘It was really frustrating. I was pretty close to breaking up with her. She’d turned into a different person—they all had. They were so secretive and aloof.’

  ‘So the two girls were fighting outside,’ Oli says, coaxing him back to the facts.

  ‘Yeah. They were down in the corner of the yard yelling at each other, calling each other selfish. They were being pretty nasty.’

  ‘Nicole wasn’t there?’

  Miles scrunches up his face. ‘I can’t remember her being there, but Ren was going back and forth to his house to smoke, and there was another party in the house behind the girls’, which was really noisy. I remember Tan and Roy came outside to have a cigarette, but I think Nicole and the professor were inside.’

  Alarm bells go off in Oli’s head. No one mentioned this at the trial. ‘McCrae was alone with Nicole?’

  ‘I think so. Or maybe he’d gone by then.’ Miles looks up, clearly struggling to download the memories from some far-flung corner of his brain. ‘Actually, no. No, he was still there later when Tanya was trying to get everyone to drink her punch. I remember because he went on about being allergic to strawberries and said he couldn’t drink it. He was acting really weird. And I remember Matt making some joke about him. He left straight after that—I didn’t see him again, anyway.’

  ‘What happened next?’ Cooper is literally on the edge of his seat.