On the way into town, I made a quick diversion, calling at the address of Claire’s doctoral student, Jerri Quill, who lived in one of the apartment buildings along Northbourne Avenue.
It was her flatmate who answered my knock—a sweet-faced Asian youngster, glossy hair pulled back, no make-up, wearing a man’s cardigan over her crop-top and jeans so low on her hips that I held my breath.
I explained who I was and how I’d come to talk to her flatmate.
‘Forgive me for not shaking hands,’ Wendy Chen said after I’d introduced myself. She held up fingers dusty with what looked like plaster or clay. ‘I’m working on something.’
‘I’m sorry to interrupt.’
‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘Just let me wash my hands. Jerri’s not here. She left Monday night.’
‘Business or pleasure?’ I asked.
‘Definitely not pleasure,’ said Wendy. ‘I need a coffee. Want one?’ She poured herself a cup from a nearby percolator, then vanished a few moments.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked on her return.
‘Anthropology,’ she said. ‘Doing my thesis, like Jerri.’
I followed her into a bright room where a tall pot stand supported the sculpture of a human head, its back to us.
‘You’re a sculptor as well?’ I asked, walking round so as to view the head face-on.
‘Sort of. This is part of my doctorate. It’s not so widely used now that electronic reconstructions are cheaper and quicker. But it’s a skill that’s still needed.’
Wendy was working on a facial and cranial skull reconstruction, building up thicknesses of ‘flesh’ using soft clay. I studied the young face forming in the soft fawn clay. This head was almost finished, awaiting the final touches of colouring, hair and eyebrows. It was an eerie sensation. Because this wasn’t an imagined face—it had been built up on a plaster cast of a human skull according to anatomical statistics, tissue depth, nose length, eye orbits. This was the face of a real person. Someone no one had missed. No one had noticed that she’d vanished.
‘Where did you get her?’
‘I was able to get a cast taken from the skull of one of the cold cases the New South Wales police have reopened. I’m hoping it’ll assist someone to put a loved one to rest. It would be wonderful if I could get a result from her.’
‘A friend of mine is involved with those cold cases,’ I said, thinking of Bob. ‘I’ll let him know that this face is on its way.’
‘Not sure exactly when that will be,’ she said.
I walked around the young face. Lashes hadn’t yet been put around the blue glass eyes, nor did she have any hair yet. But with the addition of these refinements, someone, somewhere, might say, ‘That looks like my daughter.’
‘So why did Jerri go away?’ I asked, turning my attention away from the facial reconstruction on the stand and noticing a vase of very early violets in a vase on the windowsill. ‘I thought she was a doctoral candidate too.’
Wendy shrugged. ‘She had a big fight with her supervisor.’
‘Dr Dimitriou?’
Wendy nodded. ‘Yes. Well, actually not a fight, but some huge blow-up between them. Now Dr Dimitriou’s dead. Murdered. Jerri might not even know.’ Her voice was almost a whisper.
I leaned forward so close I could feel the warmth rising from her; if I’d had clear sinuses, I could have smelled her. ‘The fight,’ I said. ‘What do you know about it?’
‘She was really upset when she came in after being out at the research lab last Monday. She came home very shaken and said she was going up the coast with a friend and then she was going back to Sydney. To her parents’ place. She’d had enough. She was even talking about giving up uni for good.’
I noted all this down. ‘Tell me, Wendy,’ I said. ‘What was the blow-up with Dr Dimitriou about?’
Wendy tipped up her coffee and emptied it in a couple of long swallows.
‘That’s just it,’ she said, shaking her head and putting her cup down. ‘Jerri said she’d done absolutely nothing to warrant such behaviour. Even if she had made a mistake, no one would tell her what it was. And she said Claire had always been so kind before.’
I knew about ‘mistakes’ in the world of science, knew all about a year’s work being wiped by a bumbling neophyte, or painstakingly gathered notes being shredded by mistake. The sorts of mistakes that even old hands sometimes still made. I had to admit to a couple myself over the years.
‘What she really couldn’t understand,’ Wendy continued, ‘was why Dr Dimitriou was so unhinged about it. I mean, Jerri was really distressed. I was quite shocked at her appearance. She was almost hysterical when she came home.’
‘Did she say what she’d done?’
‘She said she’d done exactly what she always did, but that Dr Dimitriou implied she’d done something terrible—used the wrong thing.’
‘What wrong thing?’
She frowned, trying to remember. ‘She didn’t say.’ She spread her hands. ‘Sorry.’
Could be a lot of things, I thought. Glassware of some sort, the wrong assay plate, the wrong reagent.
Wendy wandered over to the young girl’s sculpted head, eyeing it critically from the side. ‘And it wasn’t just the mistake, Jerri said. What really upset her was the way Dr Dimitriou behaved afterwards, the way she’d questioned her. Jerri said she felt she was being interrogated by the secret police!’
I couldn’t imagine a journeyman mistake creating the need for close questioning. But I already knew Claire Dimitriou had been under a great deal of stress—a woman straining under the weight of a huge decision, a burden she couldn’t deal with. A burden that was making her act out of control. A burden she felt she had to do something about.
‘Did Jerri ever talk about anything between Dr Dimitriou and her colleague Peter Yu?’
‘Like what?’
‘Something that would indicate they were more than just workmates?’
Wendy considered. ‘I can’t really say. I’m not even sure Jerri would have told me if she’d seen anything interesting like that! She’s a quiet type. Doesn’t gossip. Bit like me, really. We’re happiest when we’re just working quietly by ourselves. That’s why we’re such successful flatmates.’ She paused and the smile left her face. ‘But, boy was she upset. I’d never seen her cry before. She said Dr Dimitriou attacked her as if she’d done something absolutely dreadful—unforgiveable!’
Wendy sat back on her heels. ‘And Jerri didn’t deal with it at all well. It’s the sort of thing you need to take up with your supervisor when things calm down. But Jerri didn’t go back to the university or the Ag Station after that. I was worried about her. And then she up and left. She’s been really hurt by this.’
‘Do you have the address where she’s staying?’
Wendy came back with her address book and gave me the details of Jerri’s parents in Lane Cove. I finished my coffee, stood up and made my farewells, taking one last look at the young, half-completed anonymous girl.
‘She’s shaping up to be such a lovely creature,’ Wendy said. ‘Hard to believe that no one loved her.’
We walked together towards the door and Wendy passed me her card. ‘Give Jerri my love,’ she said, opening the door for me. ‘And if you ever need a facial reconstruction done . . .’
‘I think it’s too late for that,’ I said.
On the way to the Cat and Castle, I rang the Quills at Lane Cove only to discover that Jerri had gone bushwalking with a girlfriend and wasn’t expected back for a couple of days. Her mother promised to leave a message with my details on her daughter’s voicemail. But she couldn’t promise Jerri would use her mobile.
The Calvinist barman wasn’t working at the Cat and Castle that afternoon. In his place was a golden girl with wide grey eyes, whose accent revealed her as
a visitor from England. I introduced myself, showed her my ID, ordered a lemon, lime and bitters and we chatted a while. She worked there most weekends, I learned, as part of a six-month savings stint to get enough money together to move west to Adelaide and then on to Broome and Perth.
‘Sounds great,’ I said. ‘But no hitchhiking.’
I pulled out the photograph of the mystery man and showed it to her.
‘That was taken here!’ she said. ‘You can see the timber fittings. Are these your friends?’
‘Not exactly. In fact, I was wondering if you knew who they were, and him in particular,’ I said, pointing to the mystery man.
‘You should know him,’ she said. ‘I thought all you coppers knew each other.’
‘I’m not police,’ I said. ‘I work with the police. You say he’s in the job?’
‘I’ve seen his warrant card,’ she said. ‘He was trying to get free drinks.’
‘You sure about that?’ I wondered why Brian hadn’t recognised him.
‘He’s been in here a couple of times. He always gives me a dirty look now. Knows he can’t get around me.’
‘Can you tell me anything about him?’
She shook her head. ‘Just that he’s a New South Wales copper,’ she said, sounding like an extra from The Bill and revealing why Brian hadn’t known the man.
‘It’s men like him who give the police a bad name,’ she said, turning to lift a tray of washed glasses up onto the counter behind her.
I took the photograph back with me to Forensic Services and rang Bob Edwards, telling him I was about to fax a photograph of a man thought to be a police officer. ‘He flashed a New South Wales warrant card to a bar attendant,’ I said.
‘If it was genuine, we could have a name for you in twenty-four hours,’ said Bob.
On the way back to the office, I dropped in on Heronvale Police Station and found Brian on the verge of leaving. He looked exhausted.
My mobile rang and when I heard Sofia Verstoek’s voice I signalled Brian to hang on a moment, in case she had something he should know about.
‘I’ve just completed a long series of pollen assemblages and soil profiles,’ she said. ‘From both the Kincaid Street address and the Ginnindera Road house. Then I went on to that house at Kingston where your suspect has been working. I’ve got a negative result from all three places. None of them reveal any of the large grey particles you gave me as reference samples. Those particles look to me like some sort of granite and the soil around the other three properties has a completely different composition. I then took the analysis a step further and had another look at the samples taken from Tianna Richardson’s head wounds. I did find something unusual there. A rare native orchid pollen.’
The phrase ‘rare native orchid pollen’ found a hit somewhere in my memory, but failed to surface.
‘Thanks, Sofia. That could be very helpful if and when we ever locate the primary scene.’
‘Just doing my job,’ she said. ‘Pity about some people. And as for your mate Brian Kruger—’ she started but I cut her off.
‘He’s right here with me,’ I said. ‘Do you want to talk to him?’
‘No way! I’m not overly impressed with the samples he sent. I’ve told him I should be given priority. He didn’t let me know about the Ginnindera Road scene until his lot had tramped all over it.’
‘Sofia, you just wouldn’t know what it’s like working crime scene, night and day on call, reports backing up behind you, new work coming in every few hours and—’
The line clicked. The little bugger had hung up on me.
‘What’s she on about?’ Brian asked.
‘She’s done some soil profiles and hasn’t found any trace of those grey particles anywhere at either Kincaid Street, the Ginnindera Road crime scene or Damien Henshaw’s place of work,’ I said. ‘Almost certainly they’ve been brought in from somewhere else. And so has some rare native orchid pollen. That’s the main news.’
‘That’s not news. It’s fucking heartbreak,’ cursed Brian. ‘It reminds me all over again of the time and energy we’ve wasted.’
‘Not entirely,’ I said, trying to cheer him up. ‘If we find a site with the grey particles and the rare orchid, we could have the place Tianna met her death. Or at least a link via the killer to the primary scene. That’s got to be very helpful. Could be our killer’s backyard.’
The phrase ‘rare native orchid pollen’ was still worrying at my memory. I frowned, trying to remember. Was it just that I’d seen orchids recently at Vera Hasting’s place, I asked myself. I didn’t think so. I remembered a conversation at the Sydney morgue and someone remarking about pollen evidence. I racked my brains trying to remember which case it was but could not dislodge the memory. Bob had been there too.
‘It’s puzzling that the same coarse sandy particles showed up in the head wounds of Albert Vaughan,’ said Brian, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Could be the same killer.’
‘It’s a connection,’ I said. ‘I’ve also discovered there’s a Blue in the partner-sharing group.’
‘That’s it. I’m going to have to move on that lot,’ said Brian.
‘Just give me a couple of days,’ I begged. ‘I’m working on a way in. I’m hopeful I can get what you want without you blowing the whistle on the group. This is a far more intelligent way to do it,’ I argued.
‘I’ll give you till midday tomorrow. Then it becomes a police matter,’ he said. ‘Maybe,’ he went on, taking his car keys out of his pocket and thinking aloud, ‘some woman who’s not in the group, sees her man, Sixteen Blue, at a place he shouldn’t be. Or the other way round—a man sees his woman somewhere she shouldn’t be. How would you feel if you saw your woman coming out of a motel room with some strange man?’
‘I wouldn’t like it,’ I said.
‘Hey, Jack, I’ve got it,’ he said, his voice becoming animated. ‘Claire Dimitriou has been somewhere having sex with Blue whoever he is, and the two of them are spotted coming from somewhere they shouldn’t. And whichever woman it is who sprung them, she goes home, gets the Browning she’s put away for a special occasion, buzzes Claire out at the lab that night, goes down to the lab with her and shoots her.’
‘Then does a huge steam-clean of the whole lab,’ I said, ‘and gets rid of the laptop, the mobile and the lab book? Why do all that?’
My mind turned to the earlier researcher. ‘Any news on Cheryl Tobin?’ I asked.
‘Nothing so far,’ said Brian.
There was a silence. Then Brian’s voice, angry and frustrated: ‘What else have we got?’
I passed on the contact information for Jerri Quill and Brian said he’d talk to her as soon as he could get a few hours free to drive to Sydney. I told him she’d been so upset by the fight with her supervisor in the Faithful Bunnies lab that she was thinking of leaving university. We conjectured what the dispute in the lab might have been about. We didn’t get very far.
‘She could have been the party who saw Blue,’ Brian said. ‘Maybe she’s in love with Blue and pissed off that her boss is rooting him. That’s why she’s left town.’
I thought about that. There were just too many possibilities, too many ways to stack the deck. We needed more evidence.
‘Maybe we’ll have a better chance to work it out once we know who Blue is,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to track down Ellis Smith. And I’ll be sending him samples of the coarse grey sand as soon as I can. If anyone can discover where that comes from, it’s him.’
‘What about that rare orchid?’ Brian asked. ‘If it’s that rare, it might suggest some places to start looking.’
‘I believe the palynologist is on the job,’ I said, voice deliberately neutral. ‘Do you remember a case involving a native orchid?’ I asked him. ‘Unidentified skeletal remains found some years back?’
‘It’s ringing a bell,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got a feeling it was New South Wales jurisdiction anyway. Why?’
‘I’m curious, that’s all.’
‘You think there might be a connection with one of these murders?’
‘Doesn’t seem likely,’ I said. ‘The case I’m thinking about had been dead about twenty years.’
‘I’ve spent most of the day trying to find a murder weapon out at Ginnindera Road,’ said Brian. ‘No luck.’
I glanced at my watch. It was getting late. I reminded myself that I was on a promise—and I’d better deliver. All I had to do was catch up with my notes and I could go home and cook dinner for Iona—and my family.
Fifteen
Back at Forensic Services, I secured the trace evidence Harry had given me from the wounds of Albert Vaughan, wondering how long it might take to track down Ellis Smith. I’d certainly take a look myself as well.
Then, while the information I’d gathered recently from Harry, Kevin Waites and Jerri Quill’s flatmate Wendy was still fresh in my mind, I hurried to my office and started writing up fuller notes from the jottings in my notebook.
I drew up a list of the prime movers in the murder of Dr Claire Dimitriou. I conjectured all sorts of possibilities trying to link the flight of Jerri Quill with the Blue Sixteen incident. This code could cover any amount of people, male or female. Was Blue Claire’s lover? Like Brian, I tried out a variety of different ways to fit the jigsaw pieces together. Cheryl Tobin, the rage she’d contained for over two years finally exploding, making her way to the laboratory, killing the woman who’d replaced her and the man who had betrayed her then using her skill as a scientist to make sure no trace evidence of her presence would ever be found. But how did she dispose of Peter Yu’s body? And where? Maybe the killing was carried out by a twosome and not an individual?
Then I considered the idea of Jerri Quill stumbling onto something she shouldn’t have seen—Claire Dimitriou and Dr Peter Yu, clothing in disorder, writhing in passion, going hell for leather on the easy-clean vinyl of the old Level Four lab. But it didn’t work. Surely, these days, anyone walking in on something like that would just discreetly back out again. It was inconceivable, then, that Jerri would tell Anthony Dimitriou. In my experience of suburban adultery, the partner is the last person to be told by anyone. And if all of the players were involved in the colour-coded sex group, a discovery like that shouldn’t have been an issue anyway. Consensus infidelity. And then there was the husband. Was it only grief that made Anthony Dimitrou OD? I stood up, restlessly walking around the office. I had no reason to link the flight of Jerri Quill with the Blue Sixteen incident. She may not have been the ‘she’ who ‘saw’ at all. Had Cheryl visited after hours and seen something she shouldn’t have?
Dirty Weekend Page 17