Surrounded by local craft and artefacts, I browsed, picking up dot-painted clap sticks or silk batik scarves. A beautiful red and blue one took my attention and I imagined how good it would look on Iona, contrasting with her fine skin and soft dark hair. On the walls hung landscapes by local artists and I walked slowly along, sizing them up. Two in particular stood out, both obviously executed by the same hand, one a bush shack in the dry hills under a glaring sky, the other a shimmering expanse of Lake George, in silvers, mauves and turquoises. The rest were a mixture of the just okay down to the barely competent.
I studied the woman behind the short counter in more detail as she talked with a customer, wrapping his purchase. She was sleek in a long jersey dress, dark hair twisted up on the top of her head and held with some sort of arty comb. Her gold hoop earrings swung as the purchaser left with his package and she flashed a dark-eyed smile across at me.
‘Can I help you?’ she said.
I came straight to the point, flashing my dodgy ID and explaining the reason for my visit and my need to talk to Annette Sommers. ‘I’m a scientist with the Australian Federal Police.’
She worked it out straightaway. ‘You’re here about Peter. I really don’t want to talk about him.’
‘He could be in big trouble,’ I said.
‘I’m not surprised,’ she said. ‘He sure was heading that way.’
‘It’s just an informal chat,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to frighten the customers away. Is there somewhere we can talk? You’ll have to talk to the local detectives at some stage so why not practise on me?’
She gave the slightest smile then frowned, glancing at her watch. ‘Let’s go over there,’ she said, pointing to the coffee lounge opposite. ‘I’m ready for a coffee and lunch.’
‘I’ll buy you a sandwich,’ I said. ‘But first I want to make a purchase.’
She wrapped up the silk scarf in red and gold paper, tying it expertly with a flourish of red ribbon, and I paid for it and slipped it into my pocket.
I waited while she locked the cash drawer and as I walked across to the coffee shop with her a tiny question formed in my mind: why aren’t you leaving this to Brian and his crew? Charlie’s words of the night before came back to me and I pushed them aside—knowing they’d rise up and haunt me later.
We made small talk as we waited for what turned out to be very bad coffee. I leaned back, stirring sugar in, leaving a silence into which Annette eventually spoke.
‘Actually, it’s a relief to talk to someone—someone like you, I mean. Official.’
I nodded, pulling out my notebook. ‘Like I say, I’m only here in a very informal way. Brian Kruger will have to take a full statement.’ I flinched at the sip of coffee and put it down. ‘It’s very good of you to agree to talk to me at all.’
Annette threw her head back, pulled out the arty comb, rewound her hair and repinned it. ‘I only met him five months ago. And now . . .’
She picked up a paper tube of sugar and tore the end off. ‘Does anyone know where he is?’
‘No.’
‘He certainly hasn’t contacted me, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘I wasn’t,’ I said, watching her closely. ‘Do you know who he was seeing before you met him?’
Annette’s gaze flickered away. ‘Yes. As soon as I heard about the murder, I went straight round to her place. I was sure he’d gone back to her. Instead . . .’ She shrugged. ‘I find I’m the eighth in a series. That’s when I got really angry. He’d left a lot of stuff at my place . . . I was furious, I . . .’ Annette’s expression belied her tough words and she covered her face with both hands. ‘Sorry,’ she said, taking a paper napkin from the metal holder in the centre of the table. ‘I thought I was about to burst into tears. I’ve been so unhappy lately.’ She blew her nose on the paper napkin and the gesture touched me. ‘I hardly know a soul in this town,’ she said. ‘I got this job through a friend at the university, then soon after she left for Sydney. I haven’t had anyone to talk to.’
‘That’s hard,’ I said.
‘That’s why you’re copping it,’ she said. ‘And after being really good, things were going so awfully with Peter. And now this.’ She screwed up the crushed napkin and pushed it away.
After being really good, things went bad. A chill went through me as I thought of Iona and me.
Annette told me in more detail about getting the job at the gallery through the friend, of meeting Peter at a university function hosted by the Ag Station. ‘He seemed so keen. He used to spend most of his time at my place—and we were talking about him moving in officially.’ She paused, sniffed and wiped her eyes again. ‘I thought he was great. Funny, sexy. Spiritual. Brilliant. We had this fantastic connection.’
I had no reason to doubt that and nodded.
‘But within a few months he seemed to lose all interest in me.’ She put her head down.
‘In what way?’ I asked.
‘In every way,’ she said. ‘He was never available. We stopped making love, he was always out. He said it was the pressure of work.’
Again, the chill went through me. I’d recently heard something very similar to this from the woman I loved. Quickly, I recovered myself and focused on Annette.
‘What did you think?’ I asked.
Annette took a deep breath. ‘At first I thought he was still involved with his ex. A couple of times in the last day or so before he vanished, I walked in on him when he was on the phone and he just terminated the call like that.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘I even challenged him about it. He said I was being absurd. That it was just work. That the Terminator Rabbit project was taking up all his time and energy.’
I made a note of that. ‘It’s quite possible that he was telling the truth. It’s hard sometimes to explain to someone who hasn’t been involved in an absorbing research project.’
‘Now you’re sounding like him,’ she said. ‘I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now. When someone works like he was working, I knew he was avoiding me. Us.’
My blood ran cold. A dart of ice pierced a part of myself I didn’t know existed until now. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, glad of the distraction of the waitress bringing us our sandwiches.
‘You used the word “spiritual” in your description of Peter. What do you mean by that?’ From my experience, the word could mean anything from trekking in Nepal to getting wasted on grass instead of alcohol.
‘Peter developed some strange ideas. From having a scientific, rationalist approach to religion, like mine, he had become a believer.’
‘In God?’ I asked. She nodded. Sometimes I was, too.
The seats at the next table were taken by an enormously fat man and his small wife. We both tried not to stare and I wondered how she survived sexual intercourse without full breathing apparatus.
‘You were saying that Peter seemed to change,’ I prompted.
‘I feel foolish mentioning this. In a way, it was my fault. We’d gone to hear this American evangelist. Dr Chuck Hackett.’
You’ve gotta love those American names, I thought, recalling the poster I’d seen unfurling on the wall of the Blackspot Nightclub.
‘As I said, I actually talked Peter into it. I thought it would be a hoot.’ She paused. ‘Peter was a hardline rationalist.’
‘So what happened at Dr Chuck’s turnout?’ I asked.
Annette looked away from me. ‘You’ve heard the saying “He went to mock but stayed to pray?”’
I hadn’t, but it didn’t take Einstein to work it out.
‘That’s what happened. Peter was really quiet on the way home and I asked him what was up. “I’ve been living in the dark. Everything I thought I knew is part of that darkness,” he kept saying. At first, I thought he was joking. But he was deadly serious. He explained he’d
had a revelation during the meeting. That while Dr Hackett was preaching, something had opened in his mind and this big ray had shone in.’ She paused. ‘At that stage, I still couldn’t quite believe he wasn’t pulling my leg and I said, “Death ray or stingray?” It was when he got really angry with me that I realised he wasn’t teasing, that something had happened to him. He said he’d had this moment of brilliant clarity and the truth of everything had been revealed to him.’
Once, I would’ve been astonished by this, but at my age I’d seen a lot of peculiar behaviours, and scientists were just as susceptible. I recalled some friends of Charlie, a charming psychiatrist and his smart molecular biologist wife, who’d fallen under the spell of an entity channelled by a Californian housewife. Despite his two medical degrees and everything rational Charlie could throw at him, the psychiatrist and his wife sold his Sydney practice and their house before buying a house at Mount Victoria because the entity had prophesied a huge tsunami would hit the east coast in 2000, demolishing and flattening everything and everyone from Wollongong to Gosford right out to the foothills of the Great Dividing Range.
‘He kept trying to make me understand the nature of the revelation,’ Annette was saying, ‘that when the ray shone into his mind he understood everything and that God was like some huge morphic resonating field, constantly extruding or projecting in all dimensions and at all times, building like a multidimensional crystal, forming the universe and creation, tumbling out billions of worlds. He said he’d seen it, been given the understanding of it.’
I frowned, trying to keep up with her.
‘Peter kept saying the nature of God was co-creative, but he likened it to the nature of a virus, combining with everything and reshaping it and creating new combinations of proteins.’
I’d heard lots of interesting ideas about the nature of God, but this one took the cake. ‘Dr Chuck certainly has a refreshingly different take on God,’ I said.
‘No, no.’ She shook her head. ‘That’s just it. Dr Chuck wasn’t saying anything of the sort. He was serving up the usual evangelical repent-and-turn-to-righteousness-and-be-saved stuff, in that high-octane American way. There was nothing remotely like giant morphic resonating crystal viruses.’
‘So what did you make of Peter’s behaviour?’ I asked.
‘I was really confused at first. Now, I think it was symptomatic of some sort of psychotic state. He’d been under too much strain and the high emotionalism in the hall that night tipped him over the edge.’ She pushed a tendril of hair back behind an ear. ‘I think this so-called revelation he had was actually a breakdown of some sort. He’d stay up all night. He kept telling me that humans had been interfering in the work of God and bringing about climate changes and diseases like AIDS. He’d rave on about how humankind had become hostile to the work of God, behaving like antibodies or something, interfering with the rightful growth of the multi-universal process.’ She stopped. ‘God, it sounds so stupid! If anyone had asked me, I’d have said Peter was the last person in the world to get religion.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said, patting her hand. ‘All sorts of people believe all sorts of strange things. But what about his own research the Faithful Bunnies project? And the Terminator program? Surely that’s interfering. Trying to change the mating habits of rabbits.’
‘That was before his conversion.’ She sighed. ‘Peter thought he had some direct line to the great morphic process. According to him, selected people were chosen by God to work as co-creators. That’s why he’d been granted the vision.’
Of course he’d believe that, I thought.
‘He told me he’d been reviewing his life,’ Annette was saying, ‘and now he could see the hand of God had directed him to science. He went to tech but then found he’d been in the wrong class for nearly a month. By that time, he knew he wanted to do science.’ She made a little face. ‘He thought that was the hand of God. I suggested he have a medical check-up.’ Her face became grave. ‘That was one hundred per cent the wrong thing to say. He hit the roof. He attacked me, called me part of the forces of darkness, interfering with the multi-universal process. We had a terrible fight.’ She spread her hands on the table before picking up one of the neglected sandwiches. ‘I told him I’d had enough of his giant morphic crystal, and that not only did I think he was going crazy, I was almost certain he was seeing someone else.’
She blew her nose on another paper napkin and crushed it in the ashtray. ‘I even wondered for a time if the giant crystal business might have been some elaborate diversion hiding his infidelity.’ She made a sharp, contemptuous sound. ‘Now I realise that Peter Yu doesn’t bother with secrecy.’
‘So who did you think the other party might be?’ I asked.
Annette Sommers stared incredulously at me, as if I should have known. ‘Claire Dimitriou,’ she said and I heard the pain and anger. ‘Doctor Claire Dimitriou, long-time married woman. Who else?’
‘You sound very sure,’ I said.
‘I checked his mobile records.’ She put her empty cup down. ‘And the amount of calls he’d made to her over the weekend you wouldn’t believe! Besides, Peter made a habit of sleeping with his research colleagues.’
She slumped back in her seat and I noticed the bitter downturn of her pretty mouth.
‘Tell me more,’ I said, now on high alert.
‘I’m surprised no one mentioned it at the Ag Station. When he first worked on Faithful Bunnies, it was with another partner, Cheryl somebody. Anyway, according to Peter, she just wasn’t up to his standard.’
‘You mean academically or romantically?’ I asked, writing down the woman’s name.
Annette laughed, an expression of contempt. ‘I didn’t ask him. Probably both.’
‘So,’ I said, after noting this down, ‘do you know what happened to her?’
‘I should,’ she said. ‘Discarded, just like me. Replaced with Claire Dimitriou. At least I wasn’t considered a professional failure like poor Cheryl. I believe she’s teaching somewhere in the district. You know, “those who can’t, teach.”’
‘Where do you think Peter might go?’
Annette Sommers raised her eyes to mine. ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘I just wish I’d never met him.’
I held her hard gaze and she didn’t blink. I didn’t know what to make of this and wondered if what I was seeing was hatred.
The hard glare softened, the moment passed and her face relaxed. ‘I wish I did know where he might go. He owes me a lot of explanations.’
‘Did Peter ever speak to you about an open sexual arrangement? What they used to call “swinging” in the seventies?’ I asked, wondering if Cheryl had also been part of this.
Annette shifted in her seat. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why? Is this important?’
‘I’m involved in the investigation of a murder and a disappearance,’ I said. ‘Two murders, in fact, that may be related. A partner-swapping group has been mentioned in connection with some of those involved. It’s important.’
‘Means nothing to me. Although,’ she said slowly, putting down her half-eaten sandwich as if recalling a forgotten conversation, ‘I do remember Peter pulling the conversation round to sexual experimentation several times very early in our relationship, asking me what my thoughts were. But it never went very far.’ She tossed her hair back from her face. ‘I was in love with the man! I wasn’t interested in swapping.’
My mobile rang and I excused myself, moving away from the table. It was Brian.
‘Cop this,’ he said. ‘Anthony Dimitriou’s in Woden Hospital. In the ICU.’
‘What happened?’
‘Looks like an overdose. Some sort of narcotic. They don’t know yet.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘Not sure,’ he said. ‘I’ve only just heard the news.’
Was the man so grief-st
ricken that he couldn’t face life without his partner? Or was he one of the third of all murderers who killed themselves?
‘And that’s not all. Jerri Quill’s sunk without trace,’ Brian continued. ‘Her flatmate said she’s gone away up the coast for a few days with a girlfriend. She’ll probably ring in the next day or two.’
‘Let me know when she does,’ I said, thinking I’d like to interview the postgrad student myself at some stage.
Then I thought of the dozens of phone calls from Peter Yu. ‘Any sign of Claire Dimitriou’s mobile yet?’
‘Not yet,’ said Brian. ‘Nothing at the marital home either. Her laptop’s nowhere to be found.’
I recalled the steam-cleaned laboratory; such care didn’t entirely surprise me. ‘Did you know there was an earlier research assistant who worked with Peter Yu? Called Cheryl somebody. But she wasn’t up to scratch scientifically, and Claire Dimitriou got the job,’ I said.
‘I’ll chase that up. Who told you?’
‘Annette Sommers. I’m here with her now, having lunch.’
‘Scientists. They’re a bunch of weirdos,’ said Brian.
‘Steady on,’ I warned, ringing off.
‘I’d better get back to the shop,’ said Annette, finishing her coffee and glancing across the arcade.
I paid and we walked across to the gallery door.
‘You said Peter Yu had left some things at your place,’ I said. ‘What sort of things?’
She shrugged. ‘Papers and gear. I threw them all in a carton and dumped them on the front verandah. I rang him and said if he didn’t come and pick them up by the end of the month, I’d have to dispose of them.’
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘The police will be interested in that.’
‘With my blessing,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anything there to remind me of that man.’ She gave me her address and then excused herself as she noticed a customer carrying a statuette waiting at her deserted counter across the arcade.
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