‘Did you like Peter?’ I asked.
She hesitated. ‘I like all the people who work here,’ she answered.
I smiled quickly. ‘That’s nice,’ I said, matching her bland response. ‘Have you had any luck finding any details on Cheryl Tobin’s records?’
‘I can give you her last known address.’
Two years ago, Cheryl lived at an address in Turner. I took the details and thanked Pauline, then turned as I heard the door to Dallas Baxter’s office opening. Kevin Waites emerged smiling and I felt I’d done something good. Maybe it evened up the balance a bit for the undoubted damage I’d already done to my relationship with Iona. I wanted to send a text message to her, something romantic, but I feared hitting the wrong note. I sometimes wondered if women knew how much we worried about—feared, even—their reactions to our well-intentioned mistakes, perhaps they’d be kinder.
‘He offered me my old job back,’ said Kevin. ‘Said he’d been misinformed about me.’
I congratulated him and said, ‘Before we go to the laboratory, I’d like you to show me where you were when you overheard the disagreement between Dr Dimitriou and Dr Yu.’
By this time Dallas had joined us and the three of us walked along the corridor down to Claire Dimitriou’s former office, her name still on the door.
Kevin stepped back a few paces.
‘Just here,’ he said turning and looking upwards. ‘I was just here on the stepladder.’
Standing a couple of metres from the doorway, he went through his story again, pointing to the light fitting he’d replaced.
‘Okay,’ I said when he’d finished. ‘Let’s go and have another look at the lab.’
‘What on earth for, Jack?’ Dallas’s pink cheeks flushed. ‘Surely a cleaner isn’t going to be able to assist you!’
‘Kevin might notice something you or I might have missed,’ I said.
‘Like what?’ Dallas’s voice was icy.
I gave him a look. ‘Like the subtle changes that can be easily overlooked,’ I said. ‘The sort of thing someone who’s in and out of an area all the time and is familiar with it is far more likely to notice.’
I could see that Dallas wasn’t at all happy about this and it made me wonder why.
The three of us walked through the building towards the old Level Four lab. As we went outside to cross to the Faithful Bunnies building, I turned to Kevin. ‘She must have come back over here to the lab not long after you’d overheard them. Or maybe they went over together.’
‘I can’t say,’ he said. ‘Like I told you, Dr Yu closed the door, I finished fitting the light, then climbed down the stepladder and carried it back to the storeroom. It was time for me to start cleaning the labs at the other end of the station.’
They must have gone over to the lab, I thought, where they were isolated from everyone else. That’s when he could have shot her. Or maybe he drove away, still brooding over the argument, and came back later. With a weapon. Or he drove away and never came back, because someone else came into the lab. Annette Sommers? Cheryl Tobin? And was the murder witnessed by Peter Yu who then bolted? Maybe the killer followed Peter Yu and dealt with him later. Doubtless, Claire Dimitriou would have opened the security doors for either of the women.
‘If she worked back,’ said Dallas, echoing part of my thoughts, ‘Claire would have had to let him in. She wouldn’t have let in a stranger.’
Maybe she didn’t have to let anyone in, I thought. Maybe the killer was someone else already working in the building who didn’t bother filling out the Working Alone register. I glanced at the array of cleaning and antibacterial agents stored in the annexe before the negative pressure chamber. We stepped through. No negative airflow was necessary, nor the need for any precautions.
Dallas and I walked straight through into the laboratory, past the door with the silly little cartoon on it, leaving Kevin behind. As I stood there, looking around the sterile lab, something occurred to me that I should have thought of a hell of a lot earlier.
‘What if Peter Yu didn’t leave the premises?’ I asked.
Dallas swung round at me from his slow pacing alongside the central workbench. ‘Of course he’s left the premises. Surely he would’ve turned up by now if he were still here! There were police crawling all over the place.’
‘Hey,’ said Kevin standing stock-still and staring at the corner. ‘What’s going on here? They’ve all gone!’
I turned to see him pointing.
‘What’s all gone?’ Dallas snapped.
‘The rabbits. They’ve all gone! They were all in their cages through there, in the dirty room.’ Kevin stared with disbelief. ‘Dr Dimitriou’s rabbits.’
I followed his gaze into the corner where the stacked cages gleamed, as clean and empty as they’d been on my first visit. I turned to Dallas. ‘You didn’t tell me anything about any rabbits.’
Dallas blinked. ‘I didn’t know about any rabbits! I’d have to check the records.’
‘But you must have known they had animals here,’ I said, finding his denial unconvincing. ‘You’re the boss! You’d have to sign off things like that.’
Dallas Baxter’s ruddy cheeks suddenly paled.
‘I can’t believe you didn’t know,’ I continued. Either the man was a liar or a total incompetent.
‘Of course I know that Claire had animals,’ he said, flustered. ‘She’d applied for some and been allocated them. But that was ages ago. Now you mention it, I do remember the ethics committee meeting. But I’d forgotten about that. How was I supposed to know how many damn rabbits she had? I’ve got enough to do keeping up with staffing levels and administration without knowing where every damn mouse, sheep and rabbit is in the complex!’
‘I know the staff who have animals,’ said Kevin, obviously relishing this discussion—the cleaner knowing more than the boss. ‘Dr Claire had six rabbits. Nice little fellows. They had numbers instead of names—1 to 6 with the initials RP.’
Rabbit pox, I thought. Six different strains. ‘When did you last see them?’ I asked.
‘They were all here last Friday when I cleaned out the cages. Any day I come in to clean, I always give them a pat.’ He threw a deadly glance at his erstwhile boss. ‘Well, I always used to.’
‘Six rabbits in separate cages?’ I checked.
Kevin grinned. ‘They’ve got to have separate cages. You know what rabbits are like.’
‘They’re not here now,’ I said. ‘So where are they?’
Dallas glared at me, his polished pink brow darkening. ‘I don’t know. Under the circumstances, Jack, the murder of one of my scientists, rabbits were the last damn thing on my mind!’
‘Where might they be?’ I persisted. ‘In another lab? Maybe the tests were discontinued and they’ve gone somewhere else? You know as well as I do that every experimental animal must be accounted for. They must have gone somewhere else. They can’t have just vanished.’
‘If they’re not in their cages,’ said Kevin, his voice sad, ‘there’s only one other place they’d be.’
Of course. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to me earlier. I did need a break, missing obvious things like this.
I looked at Dallas and, although his glare was still in place, I had no doubt he was thinking the same thing.
‘We’ll have to have a look,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to check it out.’
‘But I don’t quite see—’
‘The animal pit,’ I interrupted him, impatient. ‘We have to examine the animal pit.’
A long silence in which Dallas seemed stricken. ‘You don’t think that Peter Yu is in the animal pit?’
‘I’ll get Brian and the crime scene people back here straightaway,’ I said. ‘This should have been checked out earlier. Where is the animal pit?’
&n
bsp; Dallas shook his head. ‘I can’t take you there.’
This was getting ridiculous. ‘You don’t have any choice,’ I said, my voice hard. ‘This is a murder investigation. The police must be informed.’
‘You don’t understand. I’m not refusing to take you.’ His voice faded away. ‘I can’t take you. I’ve never actually known where the animal pit is.’
He must have seen the look on my face because he said, ‘I know, I know. It seems unbelievable. But I’ve made it my business not to know. I’m very squeamish about things like that.’ He waved an arm vaguely. ‘I know it’s somewhere out there.’
‘I’ll show you where it is,’ said Kevin.
I called Brian and left a message for him to call me urgently, while Dallas and Kevin went to get the keys from the key cupboard. While I waited for them, I castigated myself. The animal pit was one place that should have been checked out thoroughly and as soon as possible after the murder of a scientist—of anyone—on these premises. I’d be having a serious chat to Brian about the search he and his crime scene team had made of this place.
But then, thinking more about it, I realised he wouldn’t have known about the pit. And if no one mentioned it, Brian wouldn’t know what questions to ask. Even so, this was not my job, not my case. But the second I thought about leaving the Ag Station and driving back to Forensic Services and the pile of administrative jobs that awaited me, the Brazilian filled my mind again, distracting and deterring me from anything sensible. This case was my only hope of distraction from the primal scene of last night and the mess I was making of my relationship with Iona.
Kevin and Dallas returned with the keys and I followed Kevin outside, Dallas bringing up the rear. Crickets fell silent at our passage through the sun-burnt grass. After following the path for a minute or two, we arrived at a three-metre cyclone fence topped with barbed wire. Set in it was a padlocked gate and through the wire, I could see a large, circular clearing. In the centre of the clearing the ground level had sunk to a smaller circle, about the size of a small dam, which was now surfaced with sticky mud after the rain. It looked as if the pit had been dug by a backhoe, the dug-up soil then pushed into a circular rim, like that on a shallow dish, so that animal corpses could be dropped into the pit and then soil either bulldozed or backhoed in on top of them. A shovel stood by the fence; a few scoops with it would have covered lab mice and rats. The larger beasts might need a tractor.
Brian rang as I was contemplating the pit and I told him where we were. I could hear from his voice how tired he was. He’d told me earlier how he’d spent most of the night at a suicide call-out.
‘I didn’t know about any damn animal pit!’ he said.
‘You’re not the only one,’ I said. ‘Even the boss here didn’t know where it was.’
‘Damien Henshaw’s still denying everything. We’ve let him go for the time being but I’m determined to nail that little prick.’
I listened to Brian ventilate for a moment and then explained a little more about the animal pit and how I hoped that digging it out might throw more light on the death of Claire Dimitriou.
By rights Brian should have come straight over, but I knew he probably hadn’t slept for twenty hours. ‘I’ll send Debbie over with the camera,’ he said.
‘I’ve got my video camera with me,’ I replied.
‘We still haven’t been able to interview Anthony Dimitriou,’ said Brian, as if reading my thoughts. ‘They found a whole lot of antidepressants in his gut. I’ll get to him as soon as I can.’
‘If you were going to murder your wife,’ I said, ‘would you get a third party to do it while she was at work?’
‘That’s what I’ve been thinking,’ said Brian. ‘It hasn’t got the smell of a third-party killing.’
‘Would you be happy if your wife was sleeping around with your workmates?’ I asked.
‘I wouldn’t hire someone to kill her,’ said Brian. ‘Too messy.’
‘And remember, it was a consensual thing,’ I said. ‘They were all in agreement about it.’
‘Things can start out consensual and then they change. Ask a few rape victims.’
‘My gut feeling is that he had nothing to do with it and is the sort of guy who can’t live without his wife.’
Unaccountably, a memory surfaced from my crime scene days of a farmer whose wife had left him—the guy had tied a rope around a large tree trunk in a paddock, attached the other end around his neck, pointed the car away from the tree, then accelerated like crazy. He’d calculated it would break his neck and he was right. The rope had sheared his head right off. I’d come to the scene and stood staring for some minutes, trying to make sense of his torso still sitting up in the driver’s seat. I’d found his head on the back seat.
‘I’ll talk to you later,’ Brian was saying.
Kevin sorted the key to the gate from a crowded key ring but I told him and Dallas we had to wait. Debbie and a young bloke arrived about an hour later. Before unlocking the gate, I went back to the scullery and washed up, getting my spacesuit on and borrowing a pair of gumboots from the Ag Station stores.
Inside the wire, I filmed the surface of the animal pit. Debbie, her suit and shoes already muddied, squatted down, taking stills. The glittering bodies of flies coated the surface of the pit with a moving burnish. Despite the layers of earth moved by a front-end loader, the stink of rotting animals permeated the surrounds. Finally, I grabbed the shovel and slowly started turning the earth over, in methodical sections.
‘Can’t we wait till the earthmover comes?’ Debbie’s companion said.
‘No earth-digger,’ I said. ‘That could destroy valuable evidence.’
‘Evidence of what?’ he challenged.
‘That’s just it, Mark,’ Debbie called back from where she was discarding her filthy shoes and pulling on a spare pair of gumboots. ‘Dr McCain is right. We have to do it by hand. Layer by layer.’
After Mark got his gear on, the three of us stepped into the surface muck and started to work slowly and steadily, sectioning off the area into manageable slices. Even though I’d been in this game for too many years, I still found the stink revolting. Digging around in putrefying, maggot-seething material was not how I’d intended to spend my time.
Over the next few hours, apart from grunts and curses, we generally worked in grumpy silence. Despite the autumnal weather, sweat streamed down my body as I shovelled heavy, maggoty, muddy soil aside, while Debbie carefully picked over the piles. We took turns with the hose to wash down anything interesting.
Finally, we’d dug over the whole area and all we’d discovered were dead sheep in various stages of putrefaction. The more recent burials were the worst, with stomach bags bursting their contents under the pressure of our booted feet.
‘How am I going to get this filthy stink off me?’ Debbie wailed, jumping back to avoid one of the last shovelfuls thrown by Mark. ‘I’m supposed to be going out tonight. My boyfriend’s coming down from Sydney this afternoon for a dirty weekend.’
‘Give him a shovel and he can help out here,’ I said, unearthing a particularly nasty conglomerate of flesh, maggots and filth. ‘It doesn’t get much dirtier than this.’
‘Know what I hate most about maggots?’ said Mark.
‘I’ll be the mug. Tell me,’ I said, leaning on my shovel.
‘When you touch the infested area, it’s warm,’ he said.
When emptied of its loosened soil and animal remains, the sides and bottom of the pit showed the unyielding subsoil, a dull grey colour, hard as stone, untouched by rain for aeons.
‘We’ve dug over the whole area,’ I said, ‘and it’s clear that there’s nothing human here.’
‘No missing scientist, that’s for sure,’ said Debbie, trying to wipe sweat from her face with the back of her filthy gloves.
; I made one last foray through a pile of rotten intestines and my shovel knocked onto something hard. Maybe a large animal’s skull or pelvis, I thought. But just in case, I squatted and used my double-gloved hands and a small garden trowel. Gradually, I uncovered something wrapped in stinking mud-covered plastic.
It was a large once-white plastic bag, the size of a green garbage bag, and, although filled with bulky objects, too light to contain a human body. Carefully, Debbie and I started freeing it from the surrounding mud while Mark videotaped the process. Finally we had it up on the edge of the pit, where Mark hosed it down.
‘I don’t know what’s in there,’ I said, looking at the strange shapes whose angles had torn holes in the plastic in some places.
‘Something stinks,’ said Debbie, moving back at a whiff.
‘Let’s bag the whole thing up and take it away for a good look,’ I said.
I lifted it into the waiting bag and we carried it back inside to the scullery, put it in one of the deep stainless-steel tubs and washed it down thoroughly. Now that it was cleaner, I could see that it was tightly tied off at the top with black and white striped tape. Mark filmed while I lifted it out of the sink and placed it on a nearby bench top.
‘I’m going to take it away to an examination room and do it properly,’ I said.
‘I can’t stand the suspense,’ said Debbie tearing off her filthy suit.
‘You’ll be the first to know,’ I replied.
Debbie gave me a look. ‘That was a joke,’ she said.
I cleaned up and finally took the bag to the back of my wagon.
‘Mark, you mind the exhibit book and finish up here,’ said Debbie. ‘I’m going home for a long hot soak in my tub.’
Mark and I used the facilities at the Ag Station to hose ourselves down and took showers in their wash-up area. On my way out, I called Pauline from her office and showed her the keys we’d found among Peter Yu’s possessions. She looked at them and at me.
Dirty Weekend Page 23