Dirty Weekend

by Gabrielle Lord

  ‘Lily?’ Alana Richardson thought a moment then reached behind her for a small framed coloured photograph. ‘Here she is.’

  The image quality wasn’t good, with its fading eighties Polaroid colours showing a young girl looking down at a baby in her arms. It was hard to see her features because her thick, dark hair all but hid her face. I turned it over and read the date and inscription: Jason’s first birthday 23.3.84.

  Twenty-third of March, same month as Greg’s birthday, I noted, as Alana continued.

  ‘She and Jason had the same birthday nineteen years apart. She was just a kid and I think it was all too hard for her, leaving the UK, new country, new family.’ Mrs Richardson took the old photo from me and replaced it on the shelf. ‘Then later, after she left Australia, I think she just wiped her hands of us. I know she found it hard being a mum. I did all I could to help, but she resented me a bit. The intrusive mother-in-law. Jason was a difficult little kid. Spitting image of her. And had her temper too. You know what little boys are like.’

  I felt a pang of guilt. I hadn’t been around much when Greg was a little fellow. I’d left most of that to Genevieve.

  ‘Lily never had a mother herself,’ Alana was saying. ‘She was raised by her grandmother too, like Jason. So I used to make allowances for her.’

  Family patterns, I thought. Charlie could tell Alana Richardson a thing or two about these mysterious repetitions.

  ‘I keep Mum’s and Lily’s little pieces—not that there are many—in here.’ She stood back from the living room door to let me through.

  I couldn’t help showing off. ‘I think I know where they are,’ I said.

  She turned, surprised.

  ‘They’ll be in a drawer. At waist height. I’d look for them in your bedroom. Probably your dressing-table.’

  ‘How did you know that?’ she said, shocked.

  ‘I’m an old hand,’ I said.

  ‘In women’s bedrooms?’

  We both laughed as we walked into one of the smaller rooms off the hall and, sure enough, she went straight to her dressing-table, opened the waist-high drawer and drew out a long black leather box. I could see she was still deep in thought and memory.

  ‘It must have been hard, being married to my son. Earl has some of his father’s old-fashioned attitudes about women, I’m afraid. And I think they’ve got worse since he got religion. He and Lily were staying here before they separated.’ She sighed. ‘It was a sad time. I’d been away at a girlfriend’s place and so I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye. I got a couple of postcards from Lily and then one saying she’d decided to go back home to the UK. After that, she just stopped writing.’ She opened the box without looking into it, still reminiscing. ‘And I have to say, I was angry with her for a long time. What sort of woman leaves her baby like that?’ She tried to lighten up. ‘And her jewellery? Anyway, her earrings are—’

  She stopped as she looked into the narrow container. It was quite empty.

  ‘Were they supposed to be in the box?’ I asked.

  ‘Always! With the necklace.’ She turned round and called out the window. ‘Jason? Come in here this minute!’

  She turned back to me. ‘Why? Where are they?’

  I told her where they’d been found and she was suddenly very quiet.

  ‘I don’t understand. How did Tianna get hold of them?’ She started looking around in the opened drawer, pushing underwear aside. ‘And Granny’s things aren’t here either.’

  ‘What else is missing?’ I asked.

  ‘I had a small bag of my late mother’s personal items. Nothing valuable. Her rosary beads, her glasses, good Christian Dior ones that I keep meaning to give to St Vinnie de Paul with her old dentures. And her mother’s Victorian mourning brooch with a lock of her mother’s hair in it.’ She gave a little smile. ‘Bit grisly, really. I suppose it might have some value as an antique. It was nicely set in gold, glass on both sides, a few pearls, I think.’

  We left the bedroom, and she marched over to the window and yelled Jason’s name again. Finally, he came in, dusting himself down, work boots and old hat in place.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked and then he saw me and his face registered shock. Slowly, he took off his hat, his hands clenching it in front of him. Although his grandmother was brandishing the empty jewellery box at him, it was a moment before he could focus on what she was saying.

  ‘You didn’t say anything about pinching Granny’s things. And the earrings!’

  ‘What things? What earrings?’

  I watched carefully. He looked genuinely bewildered.

  ‘I didn’t take anything else. I told you about the necklace!’

  ‘I find that hard to believe, Jason,’ I said. It was possible Mrs Richardson had mislaid her late mother’s personal odds and ends but she’d said the missing earrings had been together with the necklace in the black box. ‘Why would you take the necklace and leave the earrings behind?’

  ‘Because there were no frigging earrings to leave behind!’

  ‘Don’t speak like that, Jason!’ said Alana.

  ‘Like what? The only thing inside that case was the necklace! I don’t know anything about Granny’s other things or any earrings! Maybe Tianna came over and took them herself.’

  Alana Richardson turned to me. ‘She did ask to borrow them once, when I showed her Granny’s things. But I said they weren’t mine to lend. Now what am I going to tell Lily when she wants them back?’

  ‘Stop dreaming. She’s never going to want them back,’ said Jason. ‘She’s forgotten all about them by now.’

  There was a sadness in his voice. Peridots and pearls weren’t the only thing Jason’s mother had left behind. I felt both anger and sympathy rising in the heat at the back of my neck. Like my mother, Lily Richardson had left the upbringing of her son largely to chance.

  ‘Why did you take the necklace, son?’ I asked.

  The youth seemed embarrassed, sheepish even. ‘It wasn’t like I was thieving,’ he said finally. ‘I was going to put it back after a mate took a photo of it so I could put it on the web.’

  ‘For eBay?’ I asked.

  Jason’s eyes looked like those of an injured dog as he slowly turned his long, narrow face away from me. ‘He was going to take a photo of it to attach to my ICQ program. So I could email it. I thought if she wouldn’t come home for me, she might come home for her bloody jewels.’

  Lily, I thought, you’ve stayed away too long. You really should come home and see your son. Attend to unfinished business.

  ‘I wanted to find her,’ Jason continued. ‘Show Dad that I’m not the useless bastard he thinks I am.’

  ‘When did you take it?’

  ‘Couple of hours before you found it in my glove box. Lucky, aren’t I?’

  After we’d talked a bit longer, Jason returned to his labouring. I watched him out the window, back at work, lifting blocks onto a retaining wall. Then I thanked Alana Richardson and turned to leave.

  Suddenly I noticed that the Polaroid of the young woman and the baby had gone. Jason must have pocketed it.

  ‘Speak frankly,’ I said, turning near the front door. ‘This is just between you and me. Tell me about Tianna. What sort of woman was your late daughter-in-law?’

  Alana hesitated a moment. ‘I did my best for Earl and her. I used to invite them here for dinner at least once a month,’ she said and paused. ‘But Tianna and I, we just never saw eye to eye. Maybe it was the generation gap. Maybe it was because I wanted more grandchildren. I never actually said that, but I was disappointed and I think she picked that up.’ Her face softened with sadness. ‘But Tianna didn’t want babies. Tianna just wanted to party.’

  ‘Thanks for being so frank,’ I said. ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘Don’t be too hard on my grands
on,’ she said as she opened the door. ‘Apart from that photograph, the jewellery is pretty well all he’s got of his mother.’

  He’d got a better deal than I had, I thought, getting back into my car, thinking of the sad kid and the necklace. The only thing I’d got from my mother was alcoholism.

  Twenty-six

  As I pulled the seatbelt on, I sniffed, thinking for a moment I might have brought a memento of the Labrador with me on my shoes. But then the smell vanished.

  On the drive back to Forensic Services, I mulled over some possibilities. If Damien Henshaw hadn’t killed Tianna, it was possible Jason Richardson had. I knew more than most what it felt like to be angry with a mother—a stepmother might be even more problematic. By killing Tianna, Jason could have avenged himself twice: once for the way he was abandoned by his birth mother, and once to punish the woman who’d replaced her.

  The earrings, although they weren’t any sort of proof—Tianna could have taken them herself any time, sneaked into the house when her mother-in-law was absent—still teased me, as did the woollen skirt Tianna had chosen to wear that night. I’d held in my own hands the perfectly fitting, matching skirt that went with her ensemble, the black and silver earrings bought that day to go with the black and silver two-piece outfit. Why hadn’t she worn them? What had turned her off them? Again, I had the strong feeling that if I knew why she’d worn Lily’s earrings that night, I’d be halfway to knowing the whole story.

  Back in my office, I revisited in my mind’s eye the crime scene in the car park of the Blackspot and reviewed all I’d found there. I did the same with Tianna’s pretty bedroom. Somewhere, these questions had answers, but I just couldn’t see them. Jason, Tianna’s angry stepson, was a very credible suspect and Adam Shiner, the smooth and plausible Sydney detective who used to drive down from Sydney from time to time to visit Tianna, was also not to be dismissed too quickly. On the surface, he had no motive to kill a woman who, from all accounts, was quite happy to oblige him. But what if Tianna had threatened to tell Shiner’s wife about their liaison, as she’d done with Damien Henshaw and his fiancée? Too many people might have wanted Tianna Richardson dead and, despite the mounting evidence against Damien Henshaw, I was still uneasy. I stood up and walked to the window. The weather had turned bleak and cold and the thought of the empty cottage chilled my soul as well.

  I rang Charlie. ‘I thought about what you said and I’ve got a problem,’ I admitted, once we were through the greetings.

  ‘You sure have,’ said Charlie. ‘But what are you going to do about her?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ I replied. ‘Brian’s arrested a fellow for the murder at the Blackspot Nightclub, but there are two issues that concern me. The first is, the suspect doesn’t have a violent background—’

  ‘How do you know?’ Charlie interrupted.

  ‘His parents are Quakers,’ I said.

  Charlie considered. ‘That might be so, but it’s impossible to say that someone didn’t have a violent childhood. These things are often kept very secret.’

  ‘And the second point,’ I said, pressing on, ‘is the case keeps reminding me of something I was involved with years ago that I’ve always felt bad about. A long time ago, when I was in my old job, I did something dishonest—’

  ‘No!’ said Charlie, feigning dismay. ‘You didn’t! And you a New South Wales police officer!’

  ‘And the suspect suicided,’ I went on, ignoring him again. ‘So now I’m plagued with the thought that the kid Brian’s charged with the Blackspot murder isn’t the right man.’

  ‘So you want to make a full and frank confession concerning one of the sins of your youth,’ said Charlie and paused. ‘Did you say “murders”?’

  ‘Yes. Both victims were murdered the same night and physical evidence links them to each other.’

  I told him about the grey granite particles and I could tell from his tone that he was hearing me, taking me seriously now. I told him more of what I’d discovered regarding Jason Richardson and his unfortunate family situation.

  ‘You sure you’re not projecting our mother onto his?’ asked Charlie ‘Just because you’d like to have murdered your mother doesn’t mean that young man does.’

  I wasn’t sure what to make of this. Charlie’s remarks sometimes took me by surprise.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, ‘I ran into Genevieve shopping.’

  I was surprised. Genevieve and my brother had never liked each other.

  ‘She asked me to dinner,’ said Charlie. ‘I couldn’t believe my ears.’

  ‘She’s got a new man. Maybe she’s feeling happier,’ I said, remembering something Jacinta had told me a few weeks ago.

  ‘Maybe she wants to talk about him, run him past me. She’s hitting midlife. It’s often the time when women start looking at their pattern in choosing men. She might be seeing at last that she chooses dreadful men.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘I should have said “unsuitable”. You’ve improved a lot, Jack,’ said Charlie. ‘You’re a new man since you gave up the booze and certainly not the man Genevieve married. But you really need to look at why you’re stuffing up with Iona. It’s not too late, Jack. You could still retrieve the situation.’

  I remained silent, defeated by my own deficiencies.

  ‘Look,’ said Charlie, ‘as to your earlier confession. I’m not unsympathetic to it. In fact, it’s something I’m working with right now. I have a client at the moment who was in the job in New South Wales for over thirty years. He’s seeing me because of something a bit like what you mentioned.’

  ‘So how do you think you’ll help him?’ I asked. ‘You can’t undo what has been done.’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ said my brother. ‘But you can talk about it. Let it out of the secrets bag. He’s done that and he’s come up with an idea. Atonement.’

  ‘What?’ I couldn’t believe the word my brother was using.

  ‘That’s what I said. Or rather, what he said. Think about it. Haven’t you got a similar tradition in AA? Making amends.’

  He was right. I hadn’t made amends to anyone for awhile. And it wasn’t because I hadn’t offended anyone. It was because I didn’t know what to do—how to make amends to the woman I loved. Until I discovered how to be the man she wanted, there was little point in trying to make amends.

  If that ever happened at all, I thought, it would have to come from a very different man to the one I was right now.

  I glanced at my watch, then headed with the box of bones to the palynology building with its centrifuge and the special facilities for storing the very dangerous hydrofluoric acid used in obtaining the pollen assemblage. Hydrofluoric acid was something like the acid made by Sigourney Weaver’s aliens—capable of eating through everything.

  Carefully, I lifted out the bones and placed them on the clean white paper on the table. For this case, there were no accompanying pile of papers in a folder, no brief, no casenotes. No witnesses to interview, no suspects to follow up. Nothing except these bones, a case number and the pitifully few details scrawled and photocopied then stuck on one side: #17: unknown male, Queanbeyan, 2000.

  It was apparent that large sections of the skeleton were missing, but the skull and separated mandible were both present, as were some of the ribs, sternum, arm and leg bones, part of a pelvis, and numerous vertebrae, plus bits and pieces of the delicate hand and foot bones. These smaller bones tended to be the first ones lost to scavengers and weathering. I was no expert with bones but I could see these no longer had the waxy quality found in fresher bones and the colours ranged from fawns to browns. They were clean and old.

  In a bag at the bottom of the box was a small plastic bag containing fragments of clothing, some rotted denim, bits of a discoloured fabric and, in a separate packet, some pieces of light brown hair, fairer at the ends. I
pounced on those and looked at them more closely, observing there was no follicle attached to any of them. All tissue had perished long ago.

  From one of the plastic packages I pulled out a stiff leather sandal, turning it to see the worn sole and then back again, revealing the embossed straps of the upper, still in fair condition. I put the rotting sandal down and picking up the mandible. I saw that the teeth looked healthy and the gracile nature of the jaw indicated a slight-framed youth, like Greg had been until the last year or two when he’d started to fill out.

  After replacing the jaw bone, I turned my attention to the plastic bag again, carefully drawing out what was left of the fabric, dull blue and yellowish brown with what looked like the remnants of a floral pattern, possibly from a Hawaiian shirt. As I did, bits of soil and other traces fell to the paper. Sofia Verstoek would take samples from this as well as the bones; it would give her something to sink those fangs of hers into, besides her colleagues. An environmental profile would reveal traces from the environment where the remains had turned up. In all likelihood, that was a secondary crime scene, such as that at the Blackspot car park, but I was hoping we just might get lucky with a trace profile of the primary scene and match this against the profile from Tianna Richardson’s scene. It was time I had a bit of luck, I thought. Things couldn’t get much worse for me in the personal area.

  I returned my focus to the bones, doing my best to stack a section of vertebrae in order so that they nestled together. The spine was a beautiful piece of engineering and I sat the skull atop the atlas, where it balanced a moment, before rolling off to reveal the large anterior hole with fine radiating fractures around it. It was quite clear what had killed the youth. Someone had bashed his head in.

  Holding it in my gloved hands, I studied the back of the skull more closely, just in case there was evidence of scattered shot injuries. None showed. Until we’d discovered his identity, we didn’t have a hope in hell of finding out who might have killed him, nor the weapon used.

  Unidentified bones asked a question as poignant as the ruins of an old homestead, I thought, as I peered into the orbital sockets right through to the ruined cranium plates. Once a young man’s consciousness had lived in here and this present emptiness behind the sockets never quite ceased to amaze me. Carefully, I put the skull down and picked up one of the kneecaps, the small patella. There was no point in taking samples for mitochondrial DNA unless we had a maternal sample against which to match it. Our lab dealt only in nuclear DNA from the tissue samples sent to us by various physical evidence personnel—traces of blood, saliva, semen or shed skin cells. No one in Australia worked with mtDNA and now that the FBI didn’t do it for us any more, we had to send samples to England, to a facility where a whole lab had to be dedicated to just one sample because of the extreme sensitivity involved and the dangers of contamination.