Dirty Weekend

by Gabrielle Lord

  ‘I believe you’re in the right place, Damien,’ Brian said. ‘I just want to know why. What happened the night you killed Tianna and poor old Albert Vaughan?’

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ Damien repeated.

  ‘I’m still not quite clear on a couple of things,’ I started.

  ‘But we’ve got the big moves sorted out,’ interrupted Brian.

  ‘There weren’t no big moves,’ Damien muttered. ‘Not by me, anyway.’

  ‘You took Tianna to the Blackspot that night, but you’d had enough of her,’ said Brian. ‘She was threatening to tell Kylie about your casual infidelity and you couldn’t risk that. You really love Kylie, don’t you?’

  I saw Damien tear up but pressed on. ‘So, to protect Kylie from knowing the truth about what you’re really like, you had to shut this woman up.’

  I tried a line that had worked for me with suspects over the years when I was a detective. ‘You didn’t mean to kill her. You’re not really a murderer,’ I said. ‘But Tianna wouldn’t shut up. She wanted to go to the Blackspot with you. She was sick of being hidden away. She was going on and on about it. So, finally, you took her to the nightclub. You even had a joint with her outside. Maybe you tried to sweet-talk her, change her mind. You hoped that with a bit of dope in her, she might forget her threats and the whole thing would blow over. You could keep dropping in and up-ending her once or twice a week, just to keep her on side, and Kylie need never know.’

  I paused. Damien’s head had sunk lower on his chest. I wasn’t even sure if he was listening.

  ‘This part I’m not too clear on and I’ll need your help,’ I continued. ‘But you took Tianna somewhere else—somewhere where there are rocks or stones comprised of coarse grey sandy particles—and you caused her to fall back against something hard, at speed, or you pushed her in such a way that she bashed the back of her head in. You panicked. Look, if you just admit it we can try and get the charge reduced to manslaughter. We know you didn’t mean it.’

  Still no response.

  ‘You decided to dump her back at the Blackspot, but somewhere between picking Tianna up and dumping her back at the club, you realised something. Somewhere, Albert Vaughan had seen you!’

  As I said this, Claire Dimitriou’s words flooded my mind. ‘She saw! She saw!’ I had to deliberately refocus my mind. I wanted this man to confess, too. Maybe that way I could get the death of that old lag all those years ago out of my mind for good.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Damien muttered. ‘Who’s this Vaughan?’

  ‘You knew that Albert Vaughan would dob you in, one way or another. Even if what he saw didn’t seem ominous at the time, once the murder became public he’d remember what he’d seen and mention it to someone. It would get back to the police. This all raced through your mind. Your adrenaline was pumping, you’d already murdered one person. Once you’ve stepped over the homicide line, it’s easier—all the old crims say so. So you knew you had to shut him up before he could do this. And it had to be done immediately. So after you’d dumped Tianna’s body at the Blackspot, you went back to deal with Albert Vaughan and found that you were in luck. It was a golden opportunity—you didn’t even have to break into the house. Harry Marshall thinks the weapon used was probably a tyre brace. One of your work tools? Then off you went and you believed that no one would ever know what happened.’

  ‘I never killed anyone.’ The monotonous, hopeless voice. ‘Never touched her or the old man.’

  ‘It was such rotten bad luck, wasn’t it?’ said Brian. ‘Old Mr Vaughan spotting you like that. Old invalid like him. Just happened to be out and about at the wrong time. Maybe he saw you with her in the car? Maybe he saw something more damning? But he saw something and he had to die.’

  Again, the strange dialogue from Claire Dimitriou intruded in my brain: ‘She saw! She saw!’ And so had Albert Vaughan.

  I’d been at similar interviews and watched a perpetrator’s eyes get rounder and rounder as someone recounted a reconstruction of the sequence of events leading up to a crime. But that hadn’t happened here.

  I looked at Brian then looked away. From somewhere came the liquid notes of noisy miners. We waited. Nothing happened.

  Later, outside the remand centre, we walked towards our cars.

  ‘It was worth a try,’ said Brian. ‘Save the people a lot of money if the little shit would just sign a confession.’

  ‘Brian, maybe we’ve got the wrong man,’ I said.

  Brian gave me a look. ‘You put him there, mate, with your physical evidence. There’s no way round that. This isn’t like the incident you feel guilty about,’ he said. ‘“This is physical evidence that cannot lie,”’ he quoted.

  ‘“That cannot perjure itself,”’ I said, and continued with the Edmund Locard quotation: ‘“Physical evidence cannot be wrong; it cannot perjure itself; it cannot be wholly absent. Only its interpretation can err. Only human failure to find it, study it and understand it can diminish its value.”’

  ‘But why then hasn’t your team found any trace of the large grey particles at Damien’s place or in his vehicle? And I still haven’t heard anything back from Bob about the photograph I sent him of Tianna’s mystery man.’

  ‘We’ve got enough,’ said Brian.

  I brought him up to date about how I planned to find a home for the mystery keys we’d found in Peter Yu’s cartons and we parted.

  The mystery man and Locard’s words continued to trouble me as I stopped the car at a phone box and, miraculously, found an intact phone book. I went back to the car and made a list of the local real estate offices. This was one of the times I wished I had a fifteen-year-old junior back at the office to send out on an errand to track down which office used the red and white plaited tags. I looked at my watch and saw it was past nine so started ringing around. By the fourth call, I’d discovered that Fletcher Daley Real Estate used red and white thongs for their keys. I double-checked the address and headed straight over. As I drove I realised Locard’s words kept running through my head like a mantra to keep my mind from turning to Iona.

  At Fletcher Daley I spoke to a pretty young woman who confirmed the keys did belong to one of their rental properties but because the identifying tag was no longer attached, she couldn’t really say which property. She thought one of the managers might know.

  ‘Could you ask him?’ I suggested. But Mr Vernon was on holidays.

  ‘I’ll leave them here and if anyone remembers or has any information on them, please ring me immediately,’ I said, leaving my card with all my phone numbers circled. She promised she’d see to it.

  I arrived back at my office and, as I passed Sofia Verstoek’s closed office, was reminded of the palynologist’s final words before I’d hurried away yesterday. They kept replaying themselves in my mind and my body couldn’t help but respond to what had been a clear invitation. For a moment, I tried to tell myself that having a lust-driven affair with her might take my mind off Iona, and tried to suppress this idea by remembering that her invitation to sexual favour was somewhat indiscriminate. I also recalled how my last lust-fuelled affair had ended and rejected the idea completely. However, even rejecting the idea unfortunately took me straight back to the vision in Suite 12 at Olims.

  I picked up the desk phone and dialled Bob on his mobile. ‘Any luck on that photograph I faxed you?’ I asked, dispensing with pleasantries.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bob. ‘I tracked him down and he was going to ring you. Has he?’

  ‘Not so far,’ I said. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Adam Shiner,’ said Bob and I noted it down.

  ‘He said he was going to call,’ said Bob, ‘but here’s his number in case.’

  ‘I owe you one, Bob.’

  ‘You’ll keep,’ Bob replied.

  ‘Before you go,’ I
said, ‘do you remember a conversation at the Glebe morgue about pollen? Bradley Strachan, you and me. I’d just dropped in because you’d been working on a case of unidentified remains and there’d been some rare pollen found on what was left of his clothes.’

  ‘Do I remember?’ said Bob. ‘Mate, I helped dig him out—what was left of him. Remains of a young male found near Queanbeyan wedged under a rock shelf and covered over. A dog brought his jaw bone home and that’s when the local cops called the forensic pathologist. You know what bones are like when they first turn up—filthy, lots of dirt and other accretions. Bradley was on leave at the time he was found and we brought him up to speed when he came back. You arrived while we were talking about it.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, relieved now that I’d remembered.

  ‘Unknown Male 17/2000. He’s on my UHU list,’ Bob said.

  ‘Because of the pollen?’

  ‘That, and a few other bits and pieces that are in the box with him that might yield something,’ said Bob. ‘Why?’

  ‘I want him. Tianna Richardson’s head wounds also carried traces of a rare species, although there’s been some contamination apparently. I’d like to check out the pollen in both cases. Might help us with a primary crime scene in her case. Just maybe your unknown male was killed in the same area and the physical evidence accompanying him might give us some more ideas.’

  ‘It’s a bloody long shot,’ said Bob.

  ‘I’ll pick him up. I have to come to Sydney to talk to someone,’ I said, thinking of Jerri Quill. While I was telling Bob about her I was interrupted by Sarah knocking on the door of my office. I rang off as Sarah came in.

  ‘You’re here too?’ she said. ‘I thought you were supposed to be taking some time off?’

  Her words made my heart ache but I shrugged. ‘You know how it is,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve finally had a chance to dry out that lab book and, seeing as you’re here, you might as well come and have a look. Got a minute?’

  ‘Sure,’ I replied and accompanied her back to her examination room, donned a pair of gloves and took a look at what she’d done.

  ‘The pages dried easily enough,’ she said, carefully lifting the lab book out on its supporting plate. ‘We’re in luck. It’s very good quality, acid-free, with a calcium-carbonate buffer. It’s been produced to resist deteriorating. And the whole book has been well bound in sections. Last for a hundred years, this stuff would.’

  ‘Did you use a drying cupboard?’ I asked, impressed.

  Sarah shook her gleaming head. ‘I used my special forensic tool,’ she said, nodding to a hairdryer residing in its box on the bench. ‘That plus a lot of patience did the trick.’ She drew the lab book closer and carefully, using gloved fingers and the tip of a small probe, teased open one page then another.

  ‘Well done, Sarah,’ I said.

  She looked up at me. ‘Give me a pay rise then.’

  ‘If it were in my gift, I would,’ I replied. ‘You deserve it.’

  ‘Here. This is the bit I want you to see.’

  Sarah had opened the lab book to the most recent entry. I picked it up and studied what seemed to be the results of standard assay runs on the ELISA system. ‘This looks okay as far as I can tell,’ I said, deciding that, just in case, I’d visit Dr Leonie Pringle and make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

  Sarah said, ‘Look at the date.’

  I looked closer. ‘These results are from the week before Claire Dimitriou was killed,’ I said. ‘Where’s that Monday? The day of the upset with Jerri Quill?’

  Sarah nodded. ‘At first, I just thought they’d been a bit lax and hadn’t got round to writing up the day’s work. But then I noticed this.’

  She took another probe from a glass flagon and, using the two probes like chopsticks, pulled the centre of the page open. ‘Look closely there and tell me what you see.’

  She passed me her magnifying glass, a dramatic lorgnette edged with diamantes.

  I looked closely at the centre binding of the page. I could see tiny irregularities, little worms of paper just discernible near the cotton binding thread. ‘A page is missing,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. That’s why he or she would have to dump the book. I’m relieved—and amazed—they didn’t shred the damn thing. Have you ever worked on restoring shredded documents?’

  I hadn’t, but I’d seen colleagues sitting in piles of the stuff, week after week, trying to find the matching pieces.

  ‘Probably couldn’t afford the time,’ I said. ‘It’s Monday’s page that’s been ripped out.’

  ‘And it’s just too bad,’ said Sarah. ‘I can work miracles routinely, but even I can’t materialise missing pages.’

  Before I could ask her the next question she’d already answered it. ‘I tried ESDA on the preceding pages but it wasn’t possible to get any clean impressions of the missing page. The last few pages have been done with a felt tip, not a ballpoint. Not enough pressure exerted.’

  I straightened up, frustrated and pissed off. We’d come so close. Now we’d never know what had happened in that laboratory on Monday.

  ‘So,’ Sarah asked, ‘what does it all mean?’

  I considered.

  ‘Why would someone rip out a page?’ I asked before answering my own question. ‘Because there’s something on it that they don’t want anyone to see.’

  ‘What other reason could there be?’ asked Sarah, poking the corner of the page with her probe. ‘But the supervisor would have noticed anyway, because the pages are numbered. A missing page would stick out.’

  ‘I’m sure an excuse could be found,’ I said. ‘Like spillage ruining the page.’

  ‘Whatever it was, we’ll never know now,’ she said.

  I went back to my office, feeling defeated. I needed to track down Jerri Quill and find out what that fight had been about.

  I looked through my diary, checking the best time to get away for a day or so and talk to her. I was ambushed by a pencilled note in my diary concerning Iona’s upcoming birthday. I’d planned to take her out for a surprise dinner and present her with the little leatherbound daybook she’d admired. Now, there’d be no dinner. No gift.

  Grief was a dangerous emotion for alcoholics because it could undo the sort of sobriety that merely capped the deeper wells of sorrow and kept them pressed down. I knew I had to allow my grief to flow if I wanted to heal fully. These grave thoughts were interrupted by a call on my mobile, this time from one of the most revered forensic scientists of the generation before me. Ellis Smith said he’d just typed up his official report on the grey particles we’d found embedded in the wounds both of Tianna Richardson and Albert Vaughan, but he’d decided to ring through his basic findings and say hello at the same time.

  I thanked him for his generosity in working on a Friday night and Saturday and picked up my pen, ready to take notes.

  ‘Those large particles come from an aggregate that was around fifteen or twenty years ago,’ Ellis Smith said. ‘I remembered it as soon as I saw the samples and when I went to compare it with my old records, there it was. It was manufactured by a company in Victoria called Universal Cement. They used to make a block that was basically a mix of granite chips and cement. It was mainly used for gardens and outdoor constructions—ponds, steps, retaining walls, that sort of thing. The blocks came in two shades, a golden one called Colonial Classic and this one, which I’m convinced the particles came from, a grey-white called Roman White. It was discontinued some time back. They went into liquidation. But you could check local outlets. See who used to stock it. If they remember.’

  ‘Thanks, Ellis,’ I said, immensely grateful.

  ‘How’s it all going? Have you locked up the case?’ he asked cheerfully.

  ‘Not quite. Someone’s been charged but there’s a whole trial t
o go yet,’ I said. ‘How’s retirement treating you?’

  ‘Marvellous. Should have done it years ago. Although it was interesting looking at your samples. Haven’t had any business put my way in ages.’

  ‘That’s why you were so prompt,’ I said.

  When I rang off, I leaned my head in my hands. Normally, I’d have felt elated at such an easy breakthrough and would have started ringing around to see if local stockists remembered these two composite blocks from Victoria. But I had no enthusiasm. Instead, I rang Brian and passed on what Ellis Smith had told me. Keep busy, Jack, I told myself. And go to an AA meeting. I looked at my watch. There was a midday one at St Kelvin’s church hall. I had to make myself go.

  Even the meeting, with its mix of suffering newcomers, old dinosaurs and smart youngsters with a good grasp on sobriety, couldn’t take my mind off the images in my mind of Iona collecting her things and packing her bags. But at least I was reminded by listening to them all that I wasn’t alone. That loss and separation was part of our lives. Still, I didn’t know how I was going to face the cottage now that Charlie had gone, when every room now held memories of Iona.

  After the more formal proceedings, I hung around with a couple of people I hadn’t seen for a while and had an Iced VoVo and a cup of teabag Ceylon while I listened to a newcomer telling me he didn’t really have a drinking problem.

  ‘See, I can stop whenever I want to,’ he said.

  I passed the plate of Iced VoVos to him. ‘We can all do that,’ I said. ‘But obviously you haven’t tried staying stopped yet.’

  He stared at me.

  ‘That’s the hard part.’

  I picked up a souvlaki roll from the Cretan and drove back to Weston where I ate it in my office as a late lunch. I made myself another tea and rang Jerri Quill’s parents.

  She was there and she was willing to talk to me. She’d only just heard of Claire Dimitriou’s death so she was pretty shaken up. Being a log-keeping scientist, she’d already written an account of the events of that Monday and she’d read over it to refresh her memory. I told her it would take me several hours to get to her parents’ place but I’d be there as soon as possible.