by Garry Disher
Then it was 5.30 p.m. and he’d promised to collect Pia Fanning from after-school care. He took a tram back across town to the university and walked through the side streets to the gates of her primary school, where he waited with a handful of others—mothers, the odd father and grandparent. He didn’t talk and no one talked to him. They barely knew him; he’d rarely had the opportunity to walk Pia to school or pick her up. Besides, she’d only been at this school for three or four months.
Suddenly she was there, hugging him around the waist. Ten years old, a tall, pale, mostly silent child, seemingly ninety per cent elbows and knees. ‘A. A.’ she called him now, which he considered a good sign. When she’d first moved into Chateau Auhl with her mother, she’d been timid as a mouse.
‘Learn much today?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘Excellent.’
He walked, she skipped, in the general direction of his house on Drummond Street. ‘Ice-cream?’
They got ice-creams.
And then Auhl was putting on his conspiratorial voice and murmuring, ‘Incoming,’ meaning pedestrians, and he and Pia stood stock-still, taking up two-thirds of the footpath, while a straggle of three approached, heads down, thumbs working at their phones.
‘Mayhem and chaos,’ murmured Auhl. ‘Total head-on collisions.’
Pia narrowed her eyes. ‘Uh-uh. They have, like, feelers. They can sense us.’
One collided. Two looked up and veered away at the last moment. All were deeply affronted.
‘One out of three’s not too bad,’ Auhl said.
‘You’ve done worse.’
Then, as they neared the house, her playfulness evaporated and she seemed to shrink. Glued herself to Auhl’s side, her steps growing smaller, slower. To cheer her up, Auhl said, ‘Pupil-free day tomorrow. No school.’
‘I’m going to Dad’s tonight,’ Pia replied, barely audible.
Auhl had been told a fair bit about the father but hadn’t yet met him. ‘He’s picking you up?’
‘Yes.’
‘What time?’
‘He said six.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll have to pack. I won’t have time to watch crap TV with you.’
An anxious child made more anxious. ‘Do we watch crap TV?’ asked Auhl lightly.
‘That’s what you call it.’
Auhl reflected that Pia had been badly in need of crap TV when she moved in. Anxious, solemn, barely knew what fun was.
They reached the house. Chateau Auhl was a three-storey tenement built during the boom that followed the 1850s gold rushes and was at the end of a row of four. The other three—home to a lawyer, a celebrity professor and a pair of surgeons respectively—were well kept. Auhl’s was scruffy without quite being a disgrace—apart from the footpath wall. Thigh height, crumbling brick, it leaned inwards and enclosed a narrow front garden of weeds, random litter and dying rosebushes. He’d drawn up a roster but no one paid it any attention so he was the one to clean the little patch of its accumulated cigarette butts, empty wallets, supermarket bags and the occasional tiny sock or children’s shoe.
Eyeing the front yard critically, he opened the gate. A McDonald’s bag this afternoon. He picked it up gingerly and offered it to Pia. ‘Yum.’
‘Eeew.’
‘I grew up in a hole in the road,’ he told her.
After many weeks of sharing a house with him, she was familiar with the old routine but she didn’t respond this time. Heart not in it.
Auhl unlocked the front door, a massive slab of wood painted black and decorated with a tarnished brass knocker, tossed his keys into the bowl on the hall table and told Pia to make herself a snack. Then he dumped his wallet in his room, a vast, silent, high-ceilinged chamber with a king-sized bed taking up the centre and a massive wardrobe brooding against one wall. He’d inherited bed, wardrobe and house when his parents died.
Then he opened the curtains and window, admitting air just south of toxic, stepped back into the hall and headed down to the kitchen. A med student occupied the first room after his; he rarely saw her. Then a small room with a spare bed piled with junk, followed by the shared bathroom, the sitting room, the kitchen, the laundry.
Beyond all that was a little suite of rooms: two tiny bedrooms and a mini-bathroom. Known to the household as Doss Down, it faced the tiny concreted backyard and alleyway fence and was cast in a permanent shadow by the terrace row behind Auhl’s. He’d lived in it during his teenage years—it was the furthest distance from his parents’ bedroom and offered a covert way in and out via the alley—but now it housed waifs and strays.
The tradition began early in Auhl’s married life, when Liz’s sister-in-law left her husband and needed a place to stay. Then, when she’d sorted herself out, one of Auhl’s nephews moved down from Sydney to go to RMIT and stayed for a semester before he found himself a student hovel. And it went on from there. Schoolmates of his daughter, fleeing trouble at home. Old friends between jobs. An aunt from the bush, recuperating after surgery.
And lately, women and kids escaping abusive partners—like Neve and Pia Fanning.
Auhl poked his head into the shared kitchen. Pia was there, smothering bread in Nutella and pouring juice into a glass. He stepped back into the hallway and listened. Above him were two floors and a complex arrangement of stairs, landings and rooms. His student daughter Bec lived at the top, sharing a bathroom with a visiting Sri Lankan biochemist and her husband, who rented a bedroom and a study on the same corridor. Liz lived on the middle floor when she was in town. She had a bedroom, a study, a tiny sitting room and a bathroom.
All those rooms, all those residents, but the house was silent just now. No voices, devices, floorboard creaks. Auhl called out anyway, hands making a megaphone around his mouth: ‘Honey, I’m home.’
Presently a muffled clatter and Bec peered down from the upper landing. She held Cynthia the cat to her chest, freeing one hand long enough to waggle her fingers at her father.
‘You’re home early.’
‘No I’m not,’ she said.
Well, what would Auhl know? His hours were a mess, and so were hers: lectures, boyfriends, part-time work in a Lygon Street gift shop. ‘You in for dinner?’ he called.
She shouted yes and disappeared again.
‘To be loved and needed,’ cried Auhl.
‘Cherish it.’
Auhl realised he was hungry. He poured a beer, placed a slice of cheese on a slab of bread and sat at the wrought iron table in the backyard. Some schoolkids walked by on the other side of the alley fence. The jasmine was dying off. Distant cars and voices on the mild spring air, jet streams above. Still hungry, he returned to the kitchen just as the front-door knocker started to reverberate like gunshots along the hall.
Pia’s father?
Auhl answered the knock. Found a bulky man on the front step, a towering, soft-looking figure, rolls of flesh above the collar of an expensive grey suit.
‘Can I help you?’
All semblance of softness vanished the moment the man opened his mouth. ‘Tell Pia I’m here.’ Didn’t introduce himself. Barely registered Auhl, simply turned around to survey the street. Tapped his polished toecap, shot his sleeve to check his watch. Busy man.
‘And you are?’ Auhl asked, just to be a prick.
‘Me?’ Lloyd Fanning swung his great, truculent head around. ‘I’m her father, dipshit. I’ve got her for three days, or didn’t the slag tell you?’
He thinks I’m sleeping with Neve, Auhl thought. He opened his mouth to speak but Fanning ploughed on: ‘I haven’t got all day. Traffic’s going to be murder.’
Fanning had stayed on in the marital home and he was dead right. Peak hour down to Geelong, the traffic would be murder. Auhl walked back through the house, knocked on the Doss Down door.
‘Pia? Your dad’s here.’
And off she went, meek and silent. An unhappy little girl with a well-dressed brute.
6
BY 7.0
0 P.M. AUHL had cooked tagliatelle in one pot, bolognese sauce in another. He prepared two bowls of the mix, called up to Bec and took his dinner through to the sitting room, where he ate on his lap, watching the ABC news with Cynthia curled hard against his thigh. Bec clomped down eventually, kissed the top of his head and stood behind his armchair, drawn to the movement on the screen.
‘Where’s Pia?’
‘Gone to her father’s.’
‘Neve?’
‘Still at work.’
‘Did Mum get away okay?’
Auhl said, ‘Yes.’
Bec patted his shoulder, an action she’d repeated many times since her parents split, conveying infinite sorrow, hers included. But the pat also said I’m okay, you’re okay, everything’s okay. Auhl joined her in the kitchen to chat and watch as she reheated her pasta in the microwave, filled a glass with water, threw torn-up lettuce into a bowl and dripped olive oil and balsamic vinegar over it. ‘See, Dad? Greens? Roughage?’
‘Impressive.’
She was reddish blonde, with a keen, narrow face. Slight but not fragile, capable of fierce judgments or raucous humour but mostly equable and focused. Black leggings and a loose white T-shirt, nothing on her feet, silver here and there: fingers, ears, one nostril.
Then she was trudging upstairs again. Such was the pattern of Auhl’s life. Absent-minded love, reasonable stability, a few secrets.
The best possible outcome of his mistakes and inattention.
NOT IN THE MOOD for crap TV, Auhl curled up in an armchair and read an exquisitely written novel in which nothing happened. He was about to hurl it across the room when the front door opened and closed with a soft click. Neve Fanning appeared from the hallway.
‘Oh, Alan,’ she said, sounding, as usual, tentative, discomposed and surprised to see him.
‘Neve,’ said Auhl. ‘Hungry? There’s leftover pasta.’
A thin, tense, worn-out woman of thirty-four, Neve Fanning ducked her head shyly. ‘No, thank you.’ She paused. ‘Any word from Pia?’
‘No. Should there be?’
Neve hovered, expressing apology and neediness, then disappeared into Doss Down. Auhl was betting she wouldn’t come out again. Didn’t want to be a burden, she’d said, the day she moved in.
Her footprint was pretty small. Used a laundromat on Lygon Street, never took long showers, never left lights on. She worked at the university, cleaning; irregular shifts, the only job she could find after moving to the city. She insisted on paying rent, Auhl insisted it wasn’t necessary, and that meant there was now about fifteen hundred dollars in the Neve and Pia Fanning Emergency Kitty.
*
IT HAD TAKEN HER weeks to trust him.
He knew some of the story from Liz. Back when it was all going to hell in the Auhl marriage, Liz, a Ministry of Housing bureaucrat, sought a transfer to Geelong, where she helped set up HomeSafe, a community housing agency for victims of family violence in the south-west region of the state. On the day Neve and Pia came in seeking emergency accommodation, all of the HomeSafe properties were occupied. Why don’t you move up to Melbourne? Liz suggested. Away from your pig of a husband. More job opportunities.
Chateau Auhl, with its little apartment out the back.
After a few weeks in residence, Neve Fanning began haltingly to confide in Auhl. ‘No one really knows what goes on behind closed doors,’ she said one evening.
She wanted him to coax it from her. Auhl obliged, deploying a professional dexterity in the techniques of coaxing and grilling.
Neve Fanning, Pia Fanning, Lloyd Fanning. Lloyd was an accountant, Neve a ‘homemaker’. Pia was at primary school, and the little family appeared to lead a charmed life in a spacious house in Manifold Heights, one of the better suburbs of Geelong. ‘Everyone thought I was so lucky,’ Neve said. ‘Married to a great guy—successful, well educated, life of the party, knew all the right people.’ She shrugged. ‘A nice house here, another in Bali.’
But.
Lloyd Fanning had a temper. Liked to punch and kick Neve, throw her against walls and over tables and chairs, hold a knife to her throat—once when Pia was watching. Not to mention the belittling and controlling.
‘One year when I was at a Christmas lunch with the other school mums he came and got me. Dragged me out, saying I couldn’t trust those bitches, it was just him and me.’
He didn’t allow her to keep a job or make new friends or see her family. She had no money of her own and he’d scroll through her emails, her mobile-phone call log and texts, needing to know who she’d been in contact with. When he wasn’t with her he’d call, text, up to fifty times a day.
Eventually Neve found the courage to apply for a one-year intervention order. She left Lloyd and took Pia to live with her elderly parents in Corio. Under the provisions of the IO, Lloyd Fanning’s time with his daughter was tightly supervised.
But when the order lapsed, Neve didn’t apply for another. Ducking her head as she told Auhl this, as if expecting him to disapprove, she said, ‘Lloyd was really trying to make an effort, and it is important for Pia to have a relationship with him.’
‘You went back to him?’
She shook her head. ‘I thought about it, and God knows he put the hard word on me, but in the end I didn’t.’
And so Lloyd took his revenge—by way of his daughter. He broke promises, cancelled plans at the last minute, arrived late, returned Pia long past her bedtime. Once when he took Pia to Bali for a holiday, he hired a nanny and left her to it—ignored her for ten days.
‘And the way he spoke to me and my poor parents if it was his turn to have her. Threatening. Arrogant. Or he’d sit out in his car and toot the horn. Poor Pia, she’d get in such a state.’ Neve shook her head. ‘She started wetting the bed.’
Neve, her parents, her daughter—all terrified, so Neve had applied to HomeSafe for emergency accommodation, and to Legal Aid for help in obtaining a no-contact order through the Family Court. The HomeSafe application led her to Auhl’s house. The Legal Aid visit was more disappointing.
‘The lawyer told me no-contact mums are seen as malicious and I’d need much stronger grounds than just Lloyd being rude or destructive.’
‘Neve, he hit you.’
She ducked her head again. ‘Anyway, I’ve asked for restricted time.’
Until that was granted, Lloyd continued to see Pia when it suited him. He’d also hired a very expensive lawyer.
THAT WAS THREE MONTHS ago and in the early days the Doss Down suite of rooms was the Fannings’ cave. They hid there for hours. Auhl understood: all those weird strangers in the other rooms; Auhl himself.
But it went deeper than that and Auhl came to realise how unprepared Neve was for an autonomous life. She didn’t know how to socialise, was baffled and intimidated by the competence of others, and in awe of Auhl, Bec, Liz, the academics who floated in and out of the house. Auhl’s domestic situation she found deeply confounding. If she happened to encounter Liz and Auhl together in the same room, an expression of bewilderment, almost pain, crossed her face: what kind of man puts up with a wife who walks out on him and thinks she can blithely continue under the same roof, coming and going when it suits her?
What she really yearned to comprehend, Auhl realised, was how other people negotiated and managed their friendships and relationships. The life she’d known with Lloyd Fanning was one of hidden shoals and vicious resentments.
No wonder mother and daughter had seemed meek, silent, blunted when they first moved in. Everyone at Chateau Auhl had been patient, however. Not that it was easy. Even now, when Auhl managed to reduce Pia to a fit of the giggles, Neve would dart out and say, ‘Pia, shush!’ in a clenched voice, as if Auhl was a man whose temper might turn.
Thinking these things always made him sigh.
Monday was Neve’s Family Court hearing, and he’d said he’d attend, moral support. He sighed again, went to bed, set the alarm for 6.00 a.m.
7
AUHL’S REGULAR morn
ing walk took him around the Exhibition Gardens and often up and down the backstreets of Carlton. He hadn’t a lot of weight to lose, and wasn’t losing it anyway, but the exercise toned his mind.
When he arrived at work that Friday, Claire Pascal raised her head absently, nodded hello, returned to her phone call. Joshua Bugg was also there. Auhl hadn’t seen him for a few days, was generally glad never to see him. There was something bug-like about Bugg: soft, round, downy. Right now the young detective was leaning back in his chair eyeing Auhl, his pulpy abdomen ballooning against his shirt buttons, flesh gaping like a row of wounds.
‘If it isn’t Old Man Time.’
‘Hello, Josh,’ Auhl said.
Bugg heaved away from his desk and over to Auhl’s, yanking out Auhl’s chair. ‘Here, Gramps, let me help you get seated, you look worn out.’
He grinned conspiratorially at Claire, who gave Auhl a faintly sympathetic grimace and said tiredly, ‘Give it a rest, Josh?’
Bugg looked put out. ‘No skin off my nose.’ He returned to his desk.
Auhl was checking his emails—nothing from Tasmania—when Helen Colfax appeared and told him not to get comfortable, they had a post-mortem to attend.
SHE DROVE, CROSSING THE city to the Forensic Science Institute. A fast driver, focused, but even so she spotted the old file on Auhl’s lap and wanted to know what and why.
Auhl shifted uncomfortably. ‘It’s the Elphick post-mortem report. I thought Doctor Karalis could give me a second opinion.’ Seeing her scowl he added, ‘Two birds with one stone.’
The boss’s gaze returned to the road. ‘Elphick isn’t urgent, Alan. The verdict was open, if I recall.’
‘Five minutes, that’s all. Fresh eyes.’
Colfax grunted and flicked the car through the traffic.
UNDER THE COLD BRIGHT ceiling lights and in the chilled air of the autopsy room, they pulled on ill-fitting smocks and overshoes and waited. A tap dripped. Finally, the pathologist entered with his assistant. Better-fitting gear, and slightly more flattering: pale green pants, a smock and rubber boots, face masks dangling beneath their chins. The assistant hovered in the background; the pathologist came forward briskly, saying, ‘Helen, hello. You’re attending for the police?’