Dirty Weekend

by Gabrielle Lord

  Forty minutes later, I was driving while Brian stuffed his hamburger lunch down his throat with one hand and with the other found Annette Sommers’ address in Kingston in the street directory.

  We climbed the steep path past a low granite retaining wall, then mounted the steps leading up to the verandah. At the top of the steps, we paused to look around. A waist-high masonry wall ran along the front of the house, forming an L-shape around the left-hand side. A pile of cardboard cartons were stacked at the end. It didn’t take long for us to transfer them into the back of my wagon.

  ‘We might find something about Cheryl in all this,’ I said. ‘It would be a hard blow for a scientist to be dismissed like that. Especially when there’s also been a personal relationship.’

  I watched, back at the police station, as Brian and Debbie sorted through the contents of Peter Yu’s gear. There were several expensive shirts, casual clothes, socks, Calvin Klein underwear and piles of papers, receipts, bills and letters.

  ‘What’s this stuff?’ Brian asked, passing me a thick wad of typed pages. I assumed it was drafts of Peter Yu’s doctoral thesis, way over my head. I noticed the name of Willem ‘Pim’ Stemmer, one of the founders of a well-known biotech company in the USA, and a quick glance through a few more pages confirmed it as I noticed references to Stemmer’s work with E. coli.

  ‘I’d say these are notes for his thesis,’ I said. ‘I can’t tell you anything more than that. Except that it’s about gene-shuffling and the maximisation of genetic diversity.’

  Something rattled at the bottom of the box and I fished out a set of keys hanging from a plaited red and white plastic thong, one of them an old-fashioned iron key of the sort not seen in modern locks for decades, the other an ordinary Lockwood.

  ‘Looks like the key to a pirate’s treasure chest,’ said Debbie, pointing to the old-fashioned one.

  ‘Sign these over to me, Brian,’ I said. ‘I’ll check if they’re keys to his flat.’

  Once that was done and Brian had given me the missing man’s address in Manuka, I left them to it and continued on my way, unable to stay for the time it might take for them to find a lead, a name, a telephone number, something, out of that pile.

  On the way to work, I stopped at Peter Yu’s address, a flat in a block of six. The doors downstairs were unlocked but the Lockwood didn’t fit and a glance was sufficient to tell that the old key wouldn’t fit either. Peter Yu’s flat on the second floor had a Yale lock. Perhaps these keys belonged to a now discarded girlfriend’s flat, I thought.

  Short of trying the door of every place in Canberra, there was little chance of finding out what these keys opened. The day was more than half gone and I still hadn’t got to the office so I hurried back to my wagon.

  Finally at my desk, I wrote up in longhand my notes about my meeting with Annette Sommers. As I put my pen down, I wondered if the hurt and anger I’d seen in her eyes was fierce enough for homicide. Then I considered the dismissed Cheryl. Could she have been burning with resentment and jealousy the last two years until it festered into murder?

  I rang Pauline and told her what I’d heard from Annette.

  ‘Cheryl Tobin?’ she responded and I wrote the surname down. ‘I remember her well. She was on the Faithful Bunnies project for a short time with Peter a couple of years ago, but it didn’t work out.’

  ‘Do you know where she is now?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d have to go through old records—but they’ve been archived. It could take a while, Dr McCain. Do you think she might know something about what happened to Claire?’

  ‘If we don’t track her down,’ I said, ‘we’ll never know.’

  Pauline assured me she’d do everything she could. After I’d rung off, I finally forced myself to write up the abstract for the presentation I was due to make at our own forensic conference. When I was satisfied with my outline, I printed it out, put it in a folder and shoved it into my top drawer. Noticing the time, I realised hours had gone past. The building was quiet—most people had left for the day so the examination rooms and the laboratories would be virtually empty by now—and in the silence I could almost hear the breaking of my promise to Iona to be home early.

  Maybe if I left now, I thought, and brought something swish for dessert tonight, I might redeem myself a little. But I was keen to examine the samples of coarse grey particles both Harry Marshall and myself had noticed on Tianna Richardson’s body and compare them against the swabs I’d taken from the surrounding asphalt. I sat a moment, irresolute, until my curiosity won.

  Despite the late hour, I geared up and went into the lab. I prepared several slides from the swabbing Harry had taken from the wound on the back of Tianna Richardson’s head. Then I did the same with the sample I’d taken from her hair. After that, I made a series of slides from the third source, the surrounding car park grounds. These larger coarse particles could have blown or been walked across from bushland or roadways nearby.

  Starting off with low-level magnification, I peered down the stereoscopic lens, examining Harry’s sample first. Apart from the large particles, the fluid contained mostly blood cells and other microscopic floaters as well as botanical fragments and the occasional grass seed. I also found the same large grey particles in the sample I’d taken from Tianna’s hair. But when I examined the sample from the asphalt of the parking area, the assemblage was quite different. Although rich in debris such as soil particles, botanical fragments and the usual floaters, there was absolutely no sign of the large grey particles. Curious.

  I examined the three samples again under higher magnification, focusing the colour monitor linked up to the microscope. At this magnification, the particles looked like rocks and I took notes of their distinctive shapes and distribution. This examination only confirmed my initial findings—the large particles were only to be found in the samples from Tianna Richardson’s head, either the wound site itself or the hair around it.

  At a higher level of magnification still, I could see the delicate tracery of various palynomorphs—the pollen that Sofia Verstoek would examine. Under the scanning electron microscope, these would reveal themselves to be as delicate and detailed as snowflakes. I hoped Sofia Verstoek would prove her worth by telling us from which variety of tree, shrub or grass they’d come. She had taken multiple samples from near the body so it would be interesting to match my samples against hers and see if any of the mysterious sandy particles showed up for her. If the particles hadn’t come from the surrounds, they must have been introduced by the killer. But what were they and where did they come from? I moved back from the eyepieces and printed off copies of the magnification on the screen.

  I knew two experts on sand. One, Ellis Smith, had retired. The other, staff member Nigel Slater, was in the USA, working at Quantico with the FBI. In one case, Ellis had been able to differentiate sand from the northern and southern ends of a beach from the way the grains had been worn by the tides and this blew holes in the suspect’s story of where he found the body.

  Weary now, I cleaned up and cleared away before discarding my gear to go back to my office and write up what I’d done in my casenotes.

  As I wrote, I thought again of the coarse grey particles and the way they only appeared in the wound sites. An idea that had been circling for a few hours started to land. The question posed by the particle examinations I’d just completed demanded an answer and, as I thought about all the facts of the killing, I realised we’d been barking up the wrong tree. Well, that wasn’t quite the right metaphor—we’d been at the right tree, but the dog who’d been barking up it was the wrong dog.

  I picked up my phone to call Harry Marshall.

  Eleven

  ‘Funny,’ said Harry. ‘I was just about to call you.’

  ‘The car park at the Blackspot,’ I blurted. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s a secondary crime scene. I think Tianna Richardson was killed som
ewhere else and dumped there.’

  ‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ said Harry. ‘When I had a look at the histology slides of that large area of bruising on her face and some of the superficial cuts and abrasions on her knees and arms, I couldn’t find any signs at all of vital reactions. They’re all post-mortem injuries.’

  ‘So he’s killed her somewhere else and then gone to all the trouble of loading her up and dumping her back at the car park?’ I said. ‘But, Harry, it just doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Sense or no sense, the fact is we found Tianna Richardson at a secondary crime scene.’

  We both considered this a moment.

  ‘And we’ve found evidence of another man in Tianna’s life,’ I said, briefly detailing the few facts I knew about the man in the photograph.

  ‘She’s not making it easy for us, is she?’

  ‘I thought you liked a challenge, Harry.’

  ‘I’m getting too old for challenges. I just want a nice quiet life. Pottering in my shed. Reading all the books I’ve shelved for three decades.’

  ‘That’s not what you were saying earlier,’ I said, not believing a word of it.

  Harry grunted.

  ‘Those coarse particles of grey material. You didn’t find them anywhere except embedded in the wound site?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I took extensive reference samples from the area around the body and I compared it with the samples we swabbed from the wounds,’ I said, then paused, thinking of Locard’s caveat that ‘Only human failure to comprehend physical evidence can negate its value’. And that was what I’d done. It had taken me too long to see the obvious.

  ‘Wherever she was killed is where we’ll find those particles. At the primary crime scene,’ I said. ‘We all made the wrong assumption. Thinking she’d been murdered at the nightclub.’

  ‘But she was definitely there,’ said Harry. ‘I heard a woman identified her from photographs.’

  ‘She might have been there,’ I said, ‘but she wasn’t killed there.’ I remembered the half-smoked joint on the ground near the body and made a mental note to check if Vic or Jane had found DNA from Tianna and anyone else. ‘She probably spent time with her killer sharing the smoke. And then, after bringing her back when she was dead, he does that biting routine,’ I added.

  I recalled how Brian’s eyebrows had risen to maximum altitude when I’d made this suggestion and, echoing Brian’s ironic statement of the obvious said, ‘We’re missing something. Have you still got Tianna Richardson’s body with you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘She’s waiting to be released.’

  ‘I’ll be over as soon as I can.’

  Half an hour later I stood with Harry as he unzipped the long blue bag, revealing Tianna’s cleaned-up body lying on a trolley.

  ‘Give us a hand, Harry,’ I said, pulling the Stewart Chambray cocktail skirt out of its tissue.

  It was an awkward job, even with the two of us, getting the skirt onto the dead woman. Undertakers were experienced in dressing the dead, but we certainly weren’t. Finally, we did the button up at the waist and jerked the zipper closed.

  I stood back to get a better view. ‘So,’ I asked Harry, who’d turned away to grab a handful of cotton waste to mop up some spillage, ‘how do you think that looks?’

  ‘Perfect fit,’ he replied.

  The brand new skirt hugged the body’s contours in a way that should have made any wearer wanting to look sexy delighted with it. I looked down at Tianna’s pale, dead face, her sunken cheeks and dry white lips. ‘Why, Tianna?’ I asked, patting her hip with a gloved hand. ‘Why wear that daggy woollen thing instead of this?’

  Harry and I looked at each other across the inert body, the question hanging between us.

  I was still musing on this mystery as I left the morgue but a call on my mobile interrupted.

  ‘I don’t want to sound like I’m nagging,’ Iona began.

  ‘You couldn’t,’ I said. ‘I know I promised I’d be home early today. I’m on my way. Is there anything you need?’

  ‘Just you, Jack,’ she said and rang off.

  I got into my car and was clipping my seatbelt on when my mobile rang again. It was Brian.

  ‘Where are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Back at Tianna Richardson’s place. Just some checking. Tell you later. Listen, can you do me a favour?’

  ‘What exactly?’ I asked, wary. No way was I going to get involved in anything new right now.

  ‘We’ve just had a call from a woman who lives near Ginnindera who’s worried about her neighbour. She hasn’t seen him for a day or so and wants someone to go round and make sure he’s okay. It’s on your way home and it’d take me ages to do the round trip from here.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, resigned. ‘But that’s all I’m doing. Then I’ll ring police, ambos or the undertaker, if required. But that’s it. Okay?’

  In a weak moment, I’d already been roped in to check out Michelle Danby, the woman who’d seen Tianna Richardson at the Blackspot, as soon as I could.

  I took the details of the concerned neighbour and, from Brian’s description, realised I knew the place—one of a few houses on the outskirts of a small hamlet on the way out to my cottage. I’d sometimes stopped there in the past to pick up free-range eggs and seasonal vegetables from a rickety roadside stall that ran on an honesty system.

  Before I could tell him about my latest discussion with Harry, Brian started talking quickly. ‘I think I’ve worked it out. Tianna and Damien Henshaw have this fight, she nags and nags him, puts on her new clothes and says, “You take me dancing or I tell Kylie we’ve been playing hide the sausage.” He says, “Okay okay”, because he’s shit-scared of losing his fiancée. They go to the Blackspot. He’s saying, “You wanted to go to the fucking nightclub, well here you are, bitch.” Then he kills her. Drives away knowing that we’ll think Tianna was picked up by some stranger.’

  I waited till he finished. ‘Nice story, Brian. But Tianna wasn’t killed at the Blackspot,’ I said, then explained how we’d arrived at that.

  ‘But where’s the primary crime scene? We’ve gone over her house and grounds and found nothing. So where does he kill her?’

  ‘That’s the big question,’ I replied. ‘Some place with coarse grey particles. Maybe at Damien Henshaw’s place. You’ve got a big job ahead of you, Brian. You’re going to have to check obvious possibilities like that first before casting a wider net.’

  ‘You sound like you’re bowing out of this,’ he said.

  ‘I never really bowed in. Earl Richardson talked me into attending the crime scene—much against my better judgement.’

  And that was where I should have drawn the line. But my natural curiosity and some sense of obligation to the murdered woman had taken me a bit further.

  ‘Look,’ I heard myself say, ‘I’ll do what I can. But you’ll have to get more assistance from the local guys.’

  There was a silence. The virus or whatever bug had me in its grip was seriously moving in now, and trying not to think of all the diseases my aching head could be heralding kept my mind occupied and away from the fact that I didn’t seem to be able to walk away from either investigation just yet.

  ‘Let me know if you find anything interesting on those work boots belonging to Damien,’ said Brian.

  I thought of the careless, handsome young painter with his long blond ponytail and his two women. Maybe he was about to run out of luck.

  ‘See,’ Brian continued, ‘I’ve got a feeling about this bloke Henshaw.’

  ‘And if it’s not him we have a very wide field to examine. Like the husband,’ I said.

  ‘He’s got an alibi,’ said Brian. ‘Like supposedly being asleep in Sydney at the time.’

  ‘Anyone checked that
out further?’ I asked. ‘But even if he was, a lot of men get a third party to do their dirty work. Then there’s the son, Jason. Not to mention the man in the photographs. Plus our old mate Stranger-danger.’

  ‘My money’s on young Damien,’ Brian insisted. ‘We come up with evidence against him, bury Tianna Richardson, case closed and lots of kudos.’

  ‘Kudos doesn’t do it for me.’

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘I’ll have to think about that,’ I said.

  I drove out to the address Brian had given me, one of several widely spaced timber houses at the edges of Mill Hill, the tiny hamlet along the Ginnindera Road.

  At this time of day, the vegetable stall, little more than a trailer with an old beach umbrella over it, had neither vegetables nor the honesty box. But behind it I could see lights on in the house and I made my way through the gathering gloom and knocked on the door.

  ‘Mrs Allen?’ I asked the elderly woman who cautiously opened the door. ‘You rang Heronvale Police Station? About your neighbour?’

  I waved my ID and introduced myself.

  ‘It’s Albert,’ she said when I’d finished, indicating the house some distance away from hers. ‘I went over to give him a letter that had been delivered here by mistake, but he didn’t answer when I knocked on the door earlier and the house seems to be full of blowflies.’

  Mrs Allen knew already, I realised.

  ‘I didn’t want to go in there alone,’ she added.

  ‘Albert’s full name?’ I asked.

  ‘Vaughan. Please,’ she went on, ‘I’m forgetting my manners. Come in.’

  ‘I should take a look next door first,’ I said. ‘Do you have a key?’

  She shook her head. ‘Albert’s a cranky old fellow these days. Doesn’t go out much now that his asthma’s got so bad. Although he reckoned it was a lot worse when he lived in town.’

  I took my torch and, out of habit, a pair of disposable gloves from the glove box and, aware of Mrs Allen standing at her front door, made my way across a fallen wire fence and past some straggly shrubs until I came to the house. It was all in darkness.