Under the Cold Bright Lights

by Garry Disher

  ‘We’re sorry,’ Claire said.

  ‘I never killed no one. I never buried no one. Me and Sean never killed no one. Wouldn’t have a clue who you found at our old place, all right? Would’ve happened after we moved out.’

  A photograph on a little side table of a man—presumably Sean—astride a big Harley, Donna riding pillion.

  ‘We had to check, Donna,’ Auhl said. ‘People were saying Sean left you. Disappeared.’

  ‘Yeah, he did. After he took the intervention order out on me he pissed off and I didn’t hear from him for nearly two years. Then I got word he come off his bike over in WA. I mean, I wasn’t going to just wash my hands of him. Me and him were best mates since high school.’ She gave a minute shrug. ‘His family’s useless.’

  Feeling obscurely that he didn’t match up to the goodness in anyone, Auhl shook hands, thanking her. They returned to the car, Auhl choosing the passenger seat.

  ‘I’ll drive, shall I?’ Claire said.

  ‘There’s no steering wheel on this side,’ Auhl said, leaning against his door and closing his eyes.

  They laboured through the traffic. Returned the car, reported to Colfax, went downstairs again and left the building. Early evening now, a queer half-light, some motorists running on headlights, some on sidelights, the others yet to make up their minds. Claire Pascal scanning the street for her husband.

  20

  WHEN THE HOUSE FELL quiet around him later that evening, Auhl sensed rather than heard Neve Fanning’s tense presence in the sitting-room doorway. He was glad of it. Without distractions, the St Andrews moonlight and the struggle for the rifle and the shot itself and the tangling fence kept echoing in him. He said, as he always did, ‘Hungry? Help yourself to leftovers.’

  Stir-fry cooked by Claire. Auhl sat with Neve while she ate, polishing off the rest of an Elan merlot. Presently she pushed her plate away and said, ‘Lloyd wants Pia to stay with him this weekend.’

  ‘Does she want to go?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Do you want her to go?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But…?’

  She was a woman of shrunken options. With great weariness she said, ‘He’s playing a game. He senses victory and he’s rubbing it in. He doesn’t care one way or the other about Pia coming to stay, he knows I won’t object because we go back to court on Monday and he thinks I won’t do anything to jeopardise the result. And it makes him look good.’

  ‘And a corner of you thinks if you do win in court on Monday, and his time is reduced, you were at least magnanimous about this weekend.’

  She grimaced. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  She shrugged. ‘I spoke to Mr Fleet. He thinks it’s a good idea.’

  Auhl said nothing.

  THURSDAY, AUHL WAS barely settled at his desk when Helen Colfax jangled car keys at him.

  ‘You’re coming with me. Slab Man has a face.’ Today she wore a faded belted denim tunic over Lycra cycling pants, managing to look rakish and reckless as she drove in her expert manic way across town to the Forensic Science Institute. ‘By the way, Doctor Berg called with a preliminary time of death for Alec Neill. Sometime Monday night.’

  Auhl swallowed. ‘And Janine?’

  ‘Harder to ascertain. She was at work Monday morning, but went home, saying she felt ill. She’d felt ill all weekend, according to people who saw her at the conference. So, sometime Monday.’

  ‘Was she poisoned?’

  ‘The results aren’t in yet.’

  Auhl sighed and hoped it sounded philosophical, not edgy. ‘At least we can wipe that one from the books.’

  ‘Unless a third party was involved,’ his boss said, and he stiffened, his muscles and tendons locking up as the car rolled relentlessly along the streets.

  AT THE INSTITUTE THEY were shown to the forensic anthropology office and a man named DeLisle. Hearing his accent, Auhl thought: American. Amended that when DeLisle said ‘out’. Canadian.

  DeLisle ushered them into his lab and introduced two of his PhD students. ‘Tin Kyaw is from Burma,’ he said, beaming, ‘and Lily from Scotland.’ The women shuffled awkwardly, but DeLisle wasn’t finished. ‘These young ladies have worked all weekend, and I think you’ll agree they’ve done a very fine job.’

  The Burmese woman gestured. She’d made a clay model of Slab Man’s head. The Scottish woman also said nothing but indicated a large computer screen, where a 3-D head turned constantly. Suddenly she announced, ‘I can give him long or short hair, facial hair, any colour you like.’

  There was another figure in the room, a slight woman with piled-up red plaits, glasses perched on the end of her nose. She’d been working at a corner desk but now wandered over. ‘As you can see, there’s a remarkable similarity between the two reconstructions, despite the different techniques.’ Anna Weston, according to her ID tag.

  ‘Our consulting artist,’ DeLisle said, beaming again. ‘When she’s not painting portraits for a living.’

  Weston shrugged. ‘It’s not really a living.’

  After the handshakes, Auhl studied the facial reconstructions. Slab Man had a narrow head and a strong, bony nose and jaw. A face that probably commanded attention rather than indifference. A strange warmth came from the clay model, as if from living flesh, but the eyes were dead. Conversely, the eyes in the computer-generated reconstruction were lively enough but the flesh looked flat and unconvincing.

  Auhl glanced at Helen Colfax, who gave him a tiny nod. ‘The TV stations and daily papers won’t know what to do with too much art,’ he said. ‘I’m suggesting you show them the clay model with short dark hair, the digital model with a shaved head, with a beard, and with long hair. But perhaps release a wider range of alternatives on YouTube and Facebook.’

  ‘That can be arranged,’ DeLisle said. ‘When?’

  Auhl deferred to Colfax, who said, ‘We’ll schedule a media conference for the weekend.’

  She wandered towards a quiet corner, fishing out her phone. Auhl heard her say, ‘Media office, please,’ and then Weston, DeLisle and the students were drifting away, leaving him to wait with the reconstructions. He stared, trying to dream his way into the skull of the dead man.

  Colfax came back. ‘All set. I’m afraid you’re going to be swamped by cameras and reporters.’

  DeLisle beamed. Auhl doubted it was for himself or the students. It was for the science, the chance to talk about it.

  KARALIS WAS WAITING for them.

  ‘I’ve sent a sample for DNA profiling, but that will take time. Meanwhile one of our lab assistants wants a word.’

  He took them to meet a kid in dreadlocks and a lab coat who gestured at a metal table covered in bits of concrete. ‘Behold, the slab.’

  Helen Colfax was impatient, her hair getting wilder as the morning progressed. ‘What of it?’

  ‘You were puzzled why the slab looked so old, am I right?’

  Seeing the impatience on Helen’s face, Auhl said, ‘You found something?’

  Dreadlocks invited him to peer at the largest chunk of the slab. ‘I’m thinking dirt and grit were sprinkled over the surface before it dried.’

  Auhl straightened, began to nod. He had a sense now of a shadowy mind at work. ‘To age it?’

  ‘To give the appearance of age. To give a weathered appearance.’

  If you were unfamiliar with the property—a policeman, say—and saw what looked like an old slab, you’d think it had been there for years and had once served some kind of farm function. The floor of a shed, say.

  The Sullivan women hadn’t been in the habit of visiting. If they had visited, and seen an old slab in the grass, they might have wondered why it was there, or doubted their memories. Anyway, who wants to dig up a slab?

  ‘No pristine fingerprint in an unadulterated corner of the cement?’ Colfax asked.

  The tech grinned. ‘Live in hope.’

  As they left the lab, Auhl remembere
d to ask Karalis about the dental findings.

  ‘Nothing to tell you. A young man with healthy teeth, that’s all.’ He walked them to the car. ‘I’ll need a report for the coroner eventually.’

  The coroner’s task—with assistance and information from the police and the forensic science experts—would be to ascertain Slab Man’s identity, the cause and circumstances of his death, and the particulars needed to register his death. As things stood now, the hearing would be brief.

  ‘All in good time, doc,’ Helen Colfax said.

  In the car she said, ‘Now we wait.’

  21

  AUHL SPENT FRIDAY contacting hospitals where Alec Neill had worked, requesting drug storeroom records and CCTV footage. Then report writing, Vance arrest paperwork, more calls to real estate agents in the Pearcedale area.

  After work, he met Neve and Pia in the Bourke Street Mall, Neve wearing a little backpack for her weekend with her father. He took them to a phone repair shop on Elizabeth Street and bought Pia a used iPhone, case and charger, along with a cheap monthly plan.

  Neve gave Auhl a teary hug then knelt before her daughter. ‘Sweetheart, it might be a good idea if you…’

  Her voice trailed away. Pia finished for her: ‘Don’t tell Dad about the phone.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Avoid a shitload of grief,’ Auhl said.

  ‘You said “shit”.’

  ‘Shit, did I?’

  He accompanied them to Southern Cross, saw them onto the Geelong train. Poor old Neve—as soon as Pia had been delivered to her father, she’d have to travel back again. But, as she said, she didn’t trust Lloyd to be there at the other end.

  THEN, AS ARRANGED, Auhl met Claire at a rooftop garden bar above a tiny boutique hotel on Flinders Lane. No one else was over forty. Designer wear, emphatic conversations, expensive handheld devices. Friday evening, but it was quiet. Music that barely registered with Auhl.

  ‘I stick out like a sore thumb.’

  ‘Who cares? No one’s looking. They’re all trying to pull.’

  Claire seemed then to realise what she’d said. She blushed. ‘I chose it because I knew it wouldn’t be crowded yet.’

  He grinned. ‘That’s okay, you can go on the pull if you like.’

  They got quietly sozzled, talked shop, talked marriage and love and the dying and death of love.

  ‘Getting back to your wife,’ Claire said.

  ‘To be exact, estranged wife, sometimes resident under the same roof,’ Auhl said, wondering if he’d risk visiting Liz in her office again after court on Monday.

  ‘Do you have a type?’

  Auhl swung his head around, searching the room. ‘Not some youngster in a pickup joint, anyway.’

  Claire swiped at his shoulder. ‘You use jokes as a way of avoiding questions you don’t want to hear. I’ve told you all about Michael—now you can tell me about what went wrong with your wife.’

  ‘I wasn’t paying attention,’ said Auhl after a while. ‘It seemed to happen while I wasn’t looking.’

  Claire Pascal weighed that up. She probably found the answer insufficient, but didn’t pursue it. She said, ‘Michael wasn’t paying attention either.’

  ‘Or not to you.’

  ‘Exactly. He claims his fling was a one-off, but does anyone ever believe that? Even if he never sees Bitchface again, he’s now more likely to try it with someone else.’

  ‘But you’ll give it one more go?’

  ‘Probably. Maybe.’

  Auhl looked around at the bar again and guessed it was the kind of place her husband took her to. Maybe she was trying to reassess that part of her past. Her phone pinged. Again, Auhl realised. At least half-a-dozen times now.

  Claire saw the look on his face. ‘Michael’s love-bombing me.’

  ‘He wants you to go home.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Undecided.’

  Auhl said, ‘Is he…’ He trailed away.

  ‘Is he unhinged? Violent? Would it be a terrible mistake? No.’

  ‘Okay. What do your friends say?’

  ‘Oh, everything: give it another shot, dump him for good, trial separation.’

  ‘Helpful.’

  ‘I’ll say.’

  SOME MADDENED FOOL fist-pounded Auhl’s front door at six-forty-five on Saturday morning, then rapped the brass knocker a few times, the sound snapping like shots along the hall and into the far reaches of the house.

  Auhl, just back from his walk and intent on a shower and breakfast, caught the brunt of it.

  He flung open the door. ‘What?’

  Michael Pascal, weaving blearily. ‘You’re fucking my wife.’

  ‘Deja vu all over again,’ Auhl said.

  Pascal blinked. ‘What?’

  His eyes were bloodshot, shirt untucked, face a mess of rasping overnight whiskers, broken capillaries, vomit flecks. Auhl took a step back from the smell. ‘Go home, mate. Stand under the shower for a few years then sleep it off.’

  ‘I said, you’re doing my wife.’

  ‘No,’ Auhl said. ‘Claire needed a room while she sorts out what she wants to do. Now go home.’

  ‘Fucked if I’m going home till I—’

  Claire was there at Auhl’s shoulder. ‘Michael, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  She’d padded silently along the corridor from the bathroom, wearing tracksuit pants and a T-shirt, her hair turbaned under a blue towel. The neck and shoulders of the shirt were damp. Auhl had a powerful sense of shower-damp recent nakedness close beside him. He wanted to say, ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ but neither the hour nor the husband were civilised enough for him to risk shutting them out on the footpath.

  ‘Claire,’ begged Pascal, ‘for fuck’s sake, Deb doesn’t mean anything to me. It was just a one-off thing.’

  ‘Have you been up all night?’

  ‘So what if I have? You just piss off and leave me, won’t even talk about it. I need you, Claire. I’m under a lot of pressure, you know that. I’ve got this huge project to complete and I, er…’

  The words trailed away as if he’d lost track of the subject. After a while a ghastly besotted expression suffused his face. ‘Claire, we’re a team. Mate. Come on. Please. I’m begging you. I’m suffering here.’

  It was like a bad movie. Claire flinched, flicking Auhl a sidelong apology. ‘It’s okay, Alan. I’ll talk to him. He’ll calm down in a tick.’

  So Auhl dragged the hall table and a couple of kitchen chairs out onto the veranda, fuelled husband and wife with coffee and toast, and went to have his shower. He heard murmurs on the other side of his window as he finished dressing, the voices fading as he walked down the hallway to the kitchen for breakfast. There was no shouting. Presently Claire re-entered the house and ran lightly up the hallway, where Auhl heard her call a taxi from the landline. He heard the front door open and close again. Then, as he was rinsing his cereal bowl, Claire was there in the doorway again. ‘I sent him home to sleep it off.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Jeez, I need a coffee.’

  LATE MORNING, AUHL left to play tennis, coming back mid-afternoon to find his newest tenant seated at the kitchen table with Neve, Bec, Shireen and Tiv. The table was a mess, full of lunch plates and empty bottles; faces full of sleepy goodwill.

  ‘Lunch is almost over,’ Claire said.

  He frowned at her in confusion. ‘Which one are you? Visiting professor? Uni dropout? Parolee?’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  Auhl bent to kiss his daughter’s forehead. ‘Er, exam pressure?’

  ‘I’ve only got one more. I’m allowed to unwind a little.’

  One by one they drifted to other parts of the house. Auhl, dead tired, sprawled in his armchair and fell asleep with Cynthia curled against his hip.

  THE HOUSE FELT EMPTY, composed of silence and closed doors, when he awoke. His daughter, his tenants, they might well have been nearby, pecking away at laptops or watching TV, bu
t there was no human ripple in the air that Auhl could discern.

  He chopped onions, ginger, garlic, snow peas, bean shoots, capsicum and broccolini and sliced chicken for a huge stir-fry, and watched the news while it marinated. A brief marination. He was starving.

  Claire Pascal wandered in as the sports round-up started. ‘Sorry about this morning.’

  Auhl waved that off. ‘There’s enough stir-fry if you’re interested.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m still full after lunch with your other tenants.’

  She was idly kicking at the furniture, so Auhl said, ‘Spit it out.’

  She said in a rush, ‘I think I’ll stay at my place tonight.’

  Auhl nodded. ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘I need to hash things out with Michael.’

  ‘I understand.’

  She kicked a table leg. ‘But can I come back if it’s a disaster?’

  ‘The room’s yours, any time,’ Auhl said.

  THEN SHE WAS GONE and Auhl walked up to the Nova Cinema. A local film and, not for the first time, he had a sense of actors acting and accents broadly, unnaturally Australian. He didn’t speak like that. Knew no one who spoke like that.

  When he got back, Neve was watching TV, still wearing her work outfit. She turned it off guiltily. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What’s mine is yours, Neve,’ he said.

  So they sat there and stared at the dead screen. ‘About Monday,’ Neve said.

  ‘You’re worried?’

  ‘Yes. What if Justice Messer cuts my hours instead of Lloyd’s?’

  ‘He’s not going to do that. But he might enforce equal time.’

  She bit her lip and shortly afterwards said goodnight and wandered through to her room.

  A HAND SHAKING AUHL’S shoulder and a voice hissing at him. ‘Alan. Alan.’

  The queer glow from the streetlight leaking around his bedroom blind, the murky darkness and the aches in his bones, and Neve Fanning, a spectre leaning over him. He thrashed awake. ‘What. What?’

  She wore threadbare cotton pyjamas and her face was creased. ‘I have to get Pia. Can I borrow your car?’

  Auhl shook off the bleariness. ‘Sorry, start again?’