Dirty Weekend

by Gabrielle Lord

  I went up to the front door and banged loudly. ‘Mr Vaughan?’ I called.

  I tried the door to see what sort of lock it was and found to my surprise that it turned and opened. Mercifully, at this hour, the blowies were absent and I shone the torch down the hallway, continuing to call his name. I didn’t have to go too far into the house. I could see the body lying at the other end of the short hall, face down and sprawled away from the front door so that I could see his boots. An asthma attack, I thought, walking up to see if there was anything I could do. Then I saw the bloody dark red mess at the back of his head and the brown pool around his neck and shoulders. I backed away and out, slammed the door shut and called Brian.

  By rights, I should have stayed on the dead man’s property but I kept an eye on it from Mrs Allen’s place while having a cup of tea with her.

  I rang Iona once more, apologising, and suggested she and the others have dinner and leave something for me. I could tell from the tone of her voice that she wasn’t impressed with this arrangement, but when I told her why I’d been held up, she sounded resigned.

  Force of habit caused me to ask questions and I discovered that Mrs Allen thought she’d heard a car sometime Monday night. ‘It woke me, but I went back to sleep,’ she said, explaining that sometimes motorists used her or Albert’s driveway as a place to turn their cars and so it may not have been significant.

  By the time Debbie arrived with her crime scene gear it was getting on for nine, and it was well after by the time I arrived back at the cottage, but not before Debbie had organised me to make a statement first thing next morning.

  ‘Thanks for being so patient,’ I said to Iona as she sat with me while I tucked into one of the dishes Charlie had cooked, frozen and brought with him—a lasagna, by now somewhat dried out but still tasty. She’d eaten earlier and Charlie and Greg were in town taking in a movie Greg wanted to see.

  ‘I had to stay until the police arrived,’ I explained. ‘And it took them nearly an hour. Otherwise I’d have been home in time to eat dinner with you.’

  ‘You could have told Brian to get someone else to go to the house,’ she said. ‘What is it with you that people assume they can call you out like this? Why do you feel so responsible for everyone?’ She paused. ‘Well, not quite everyone,’ she added. ‘Everyone else seems to take priority before your family. Before me.’

  I dropped my fork. ‘Don’t say that,’ I said, seizing her hand. ‘You lot are my priority! Especially you.’

  ‘Jack, I came to Canberra to be with you,’ she said, the sadness in her eyes going straight to my heart. ‘To live with you. Not share a cottage with you like some flatmate. I left my life in Sydney, my music students, my job at the radio station, my friends, to come down here because I believed that you and I could live a loving and honest life with each other. I’m not some foolish girl—expecting you to make a life for me—but I was expecting that you’d be a whole lot more available than you are. I keep wondering when we’re going to start being together.’

  I picked up my fork but I’d lost my appetite. From a decade ago, I heard my ex-wife voicing something similar and a familiar sinking feeling accompanied my words. ‘It’s the nature of my work, Iona. It’s very demanding. It takes me away. It requires me to work late. Often.’

  I groped for words to explain. It was necessary. The dead have no voice. They need me, I wanted to say. But somewhere, another small voice was saying, Bullshit Jack. That’s not the whole story. There’s some part of you that makes choices that take you away.

  ‘Darling, Iona. Living with you is so good. I didn’t know a man and a woman could live together in this peaceful way. Come on,’ I said, standing up. ‘Come to bed. The house is nice and quiet.’

  She shook her head. ‘You’re changing the subject,’ she accused, levelling her gaze straight into mine. ‘Just tell me this. How is it different from last year—having me living here? Apart from us sleeping in the same bed every night. I want you to tell me what changes you’ve made to include me in your life here.’

  She walked past me while I considered her question, watching her as she went into the kitchen to get herself a glass of wine and returned to sit with me again.

  ‘It’s made a huge difference,’ I said. How could I explain that the very cottage was scented with her, that it felt different in every way, that my heart lifted every time I saw one of her belongings on a chair or smelled the fragrance of the coffee she was making. That even the light seemed different now that she was here. ‘I love having you here,’ I said finally.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ I repeated. ‘Because I love you. I want you to be here with me.’

  I saw one of her fine eyebrows lift. ‘I think you’re living in exactly the same way as you did before I came. Me being here has made no difference to you—apart from you having more regular sex,’ she said. ‘You want me here, but you don’t seem able—or is it willing?—to make any of the changes necessary to accommodate me in a life lived together.’ She stressed the last three words. ‘I’ve seen it in a couple of my girlfriends. So often I hear them say they want a man in their lives, but when they get down to it, they’re actually not willing to make even the slightest change to accommodate this. They don’t want their nice tidy lives and houses mucked up by a man. As if the man should somehow be able to squeeze himself to fit any convenient little empty crack in all their busyness. Like a book or a piece of sewing that you have lying around and just pick up when there’s nothing else to do.’ She looked straight into my eyes. ‘My sense is you’re doing exactly the same thing with me.’

  Her words stung me. Women could do this. They seemed to be able to feel and say things that I didn’t seem to know about until I heard them. Then I recognised the truth of them.

  In the first few months that Iona had come to live with me, I’d been working very long hours, trying to catch up on everything the outgoing chief scientist had been dealing with; some projects barely started, others needing my input to oversee and sign off, others still ongoing. All of it demanding. Some nights, I hadn’t been able to get away till very late at night. And now, just as I’d almost got on top of things, I had somehow become entangled in two demanding murder investigations.

  ‘I’ll have to think about this. You could have a point,’ I said.

  She stood up.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I said, suddenly fearful.

  ‘To have a bath,’ she said. ‘Before the boys get back.’

  I took her hand again.

  ‘Tomorrow night, I’ll make dinner. We’ll have a family night, a proper meal around the table, all of us,’ I said, still holding her hand.

  ‘That would be nice,’ she said. ‘And a good start at least. I’ll be late tomorrow—staff meeting. I may as well work if you are.’

  Later, before we went to bed, I took her in my arms and kissed her, pulling out the blue and red silk scarf I’d bought, concerned that my behaviour had hurt her. ‘See?’ I said, handing it to her. ‘I’m always thinking of you.’

  She took it from me and opened it out, floating it onto the bed. ‘It’s beautiful, Jack,’ she said, picking it up and holding it near her cheek.

  ‘It’s been a long time since I lived with a woman. It might take me a little while to get back into the rhythm of it.’

  When we got into bed, she leaned up on an elbow, dark hair around her neck, her nightgown slipping from a shoulder, regarding me. ‘You’re a good man, Jack, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. You say you want me and yet almost every time we’ve planned to do something together over the last few months, you’ve taken on something that prevents you doing so. Are you aware of that?’

  She paused, lying back down again, staring up at the ceiling while I thought about what she’d just said.

  ‘I look at you and think of your history. I’m frightened, Jack.’r />
  ‘Of me?’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Your mother. Your ex-wife.’

  ‘Iona, I don’t understand.’

  ‘You have great relationships with your kids,’ she said. ‘What about your women?’

  I thought of Genevieve’s self-centredness, my late mother’s addiction and the eerie way Iona’s comments reflected not only some of the things Charlie had said to me but also the failure of the relationship between Annette Sommers and Peter Yu.

  ‘There’s something in you that holds back from me,’ she concluded.

  ‘Not true,’ I said, running my hands over her warmth and softness. ‘I can’t remember when I’ve wanted a woman as much.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about sex,’ she replied smartly.

  ‘Neither was I,’ I said, suddenly very tired.

  I cuddled her into me as she settled down to sleep and lay awake, my mind filled with Iona’s considered words but mixed with images of Tianna Richardson lying sprawled on the asphalt of the car park, Dr Claire Dimitriou’s squashed, cold face on the smooth vinyl of the Faithful Bunnies lab. Now they were joined by the figure of an old, asthmatic man, brutally murdered in his own hall. Maybe I’d worked with the dead for too long and forgotten how to exist with the living.

  Unable to sleep, my mind played around with the murders of the two women, putting them together, teasing them apart, trying to make them fit some sort of pattern. The two women could be connected via the Cat and Castle. Despite my tiredness, my brain wouldn’t rest, recycling the possibilities. The killer of Tianna Richardson could be an outsider, a random pick-up gone wrong. Or, equally, someone she knew. Despite the evidence we were gathering against Damien Henshaw, it was essential to find the unknown man in the photograph. Maybe he was part of the partner-swapping group? The killer of Claire Dimitriou could have been her missing work partner, either of two women he’d been involved with or another party, perhaps someone connected to the partner-swapping group. All the participants of that particular club would have to be interviewed. But if we came down hard, people would close ranks, duck and run. We needed a soft approach. Then I caught myself. After all that Iona had said earlier, I was doing it again, planning more investigative work on cases that could be dealt with by other people. None of us were indispensable, I knew.

  Finally, listening to Iona’s steady breathing, I slept.

  Twelve

  By daylight, the Mill Hill house where Albert Vaughan lived looked depressing, badly in need of a coat of paint. Putting Iona’s comments and questions of last night out of my mind for the moment, I pulled up beside the forensic unit wagon, listening to the thornbills and weebills twitching in the thickly overgrown hedge, feeling the cold morning breeze moving over the dry hills where a pair of wedge-tails marked out their skyway in lazy arcs.

  Brian had called as Iona was getting ready for work and, because I’d been first on the scene, I couldn’t avoid meeting him and Debbie at the house to describe what I’d found and make my statement.

  I was stepping into a spacesuit when Brian came out of the front door.

  ‘I’ve gotta go to another call-out, but take these with you when you talk to Michelle Danby,’ said Brian, handing me a plastic sleeve with copies of two photographs, both head shots, one of Damien Henshaw and the other of the fair man cropped from one of Tianna’s hidden stash of intimate pics.

  I frowned. ‘Where did you get the shot of young Henshaw? Is that from a mugshot?’ I said, slipping the pictures into my pocket.

  ‘Yep. Deb’s back there,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of the house. Before I could question him further, he’d jumped into his car and was on his way.

  Before going inside, I took a look around the area I’d navigated the night before with my torch—patches of long grass surrounded by dusty earth and a scrappy low hedge separating the house from the roadside.

  The flies that Mrs Allen had heard humming in the house the day before were still around, but the body had been removed and only the large blackening stain at the end of the hall, the stench and the blood-splash patterns on the surrounding walls and ceiling reflected what had happened. Debbie was seated on the lounge in her stiff new blue police overall, writing something in her laptop while it balanced on her knees.

  ‘Come and have a look,’ she said. ‘Then I’ll write up your statement.’

  Reminding myself I was here only to tell of what I’d seen and done the night before, and not to get involved in a case, I followed Debbie around Albert Vaughan’s neat, dull house. A bloodstained white paper bag lay stuck to the carpet and Debbie prised it up in her gloved fingers. ‘Brian was just about to write this up when he was called out,’ she said. She peered inside the bloody bag and, frowning, lifted out a brand new asthma inhaler together with its box and a cash register docket . . .

  ‘This was purchased from O’Halloran’s 24-hour Pharmacy at 11.40 p.m. on Monday night,’ she said, studying the docket. ‘We found the old one on the floor near his bed. It was empty.’

  I knew O’Halloran’s Pharmacy. It was a big corner shop near the city centre, and just about the only place—apart from the hospital and the police station—open at that hour on a weeknight.

  I wondered if Albert had woken up fighting an asthma attack, grabbed his inhaler, found it empty, and managed to get to the all-night pharmacy where he’d purchased a new one, used it, then shoved it back into the paper bag, gone home, parked the car and let himself into his house. Perhaps the killer was waiting for him. Or had he followed him home?

  Poor old fellow hadn’t even had time to put his package down.

  ‘Robbery?’ Debbie asked, squatting back on her heels. ‘His wallet and watch are missing.’

  The smell of stale blood, like the stench from old kidneys, was in my nostrils as I walked through the rooms of the house, which clearly hadn’t been changed since the sixties. Beige walls, fawn shag carpet and brown furnishings were relieved only by some faded orange cushions on the lounge and a clump of creamy-pink flower orchid spikes in a large pot.

  ‘Has anyone had a talk to whoever served him at O’Halloran’s?’ I asked.

  ‘The locum chemist said he remembers the old man coming in, wheezing badly,’ said Debbie, nodding. ‘He sat him down with the new inhaler until he could breathe better. Then he assumed he went home.’

  If someone had followed Albert Vaughan into his house, that person just might have been hanging round in the street near the pharmacy and there was a chance a security camera might have captured something useful. Might be worth dropping round and checking out what sort of security cameras were operating in the area. Also, it would be good to get Sofia Verstoek in to take soil samples from the garden and check them against lifts from the carpet in the hall. I recalled a case in the UK where police had caught a killer with pollen traipsed in on his shoes from a rare plant growing in his backyard.

  ‘Any photos of the deceased?’ I asked Debbie, curious as to what the old man had looked like.

  She passed me a framed picture of a couple. ‘That was taken some years ago, according to Mrs Allen.’

  I checked the photo out. Vaughan’s face reminded me of an El Greco icon, gaunt and shadowed, his frailty clear to see.

  ‘He’s only got a daughter and a couple of grandchildren and Mrs Allen says they don’t visit often. Once a week he liked to go into the city centre and do some shopping. Sometimes he had a bet. According to her,’ Debbie continued, ‘Mr Vaughan had been quite ill the last couple of months and occasionally she’d done some shopping for him, but he tended to keep to himself.’

  Debbie looked around at the sparse furnishings. ‘From what we’ve noticed here,’ she said, ‘and from what Mrs Allen and the people across the road say, Mr Vaughan was living the life of a semi-invalid.’

  I followed her to the bedroom door and peered in. On the surfaces
and tables of the old-fashioned dark veneer furniture, a clutter of prescription medicines, bottles and boxes of pharmaceutical mysteries looked as if they’d been building up since about 1958.

  ‘Mrs Allen told us that the deceased has lived here for the last year or two, since his wife died. Before that he lived closer to town.’

  Finally, I sat down with Debbie and gave her my official account of exactly what time I’d arrived here last night and my subsequent actions. I left her still making notes and taking photographs.

  Another senseless brutal act, I thought, as I stashed the used spacesuit in the back of my wagon, transferring the photos Brian had given me to my briefcase. A harmless old man killed for a few bucks and the proceeds probably already up some terminal junkie’s arm.

  I rang the number Brian had given me for Michelle Danby, the woman who’d seen Tianna at the Blackspot Nightclub, and told her I was on my way to her place—if it was convenient.

  Half an hour later, Michelle Danby, a pretty woman with hair pulled back from her face and gold hoops swinging in her ears, let me into her townhouse.

  Declining her offer of tea or coffee, I said, ‘Tianna Richardson, the woman who was murdered, may have been with a man. I’ve got some photos here. It would be helpful if you could look at them.’

  She frowned at the two photographs for a long half minute then shook her head, passing them back, her gold hoops swinging. ‘I’ve never seen either of them before.’

  I put my notebook and the photos back in my briefcase and was about to take my leave when Michelle stopped me near the front door. ‘You know, I’ve been having second thoughts. I might have made a mistake,’ she said.

  I waited.

  ‘I’m actually wondering now if the woman I saw really was Tianna Richardson,’ she added.

  ‘My colleague said you seemed very sure earlier.’