Dirty Weekend

by Gabrielle Lord

  I carefully put the skull down again, placing it together with the rest of the bones and sweepings from the paper, making sure nothing was lost.

  If only we could get a useful environmental profile, I thought, recalling a couple of recent interstate cases where forensic palynology had swung a conviction. Living things were not distributed randomly but had very specific needs, which restricted them to areas that matched those needs. With a little luck there was an outside chance that Sofia might come up with a possible location that matched the botanical, sedimentary and mineral distributions found on Tianna Richardson’s clothes and, by refining this further, we might gather a little more information about the rare native. It could help narrow down a potential primary crime scene. And this in turn, if it was the same orchid, could help with the unidentified youth’s case. Of course, it might turn out to be a completely different species and then my efforts with 17/2000 would have been in vain. But, right now, I needed to keep busy like never before.

  For a split second it occurred to me that Iona had left me because I was always busy and that my defence against her leaving had been to increase my level of busyness. But I brushed that insight aside and focused on the bones in front of me. I had another hope about examining these remains: that there would be sufficient nuclear material left for me to produce a DNA profile. This could then be matched against any families who’d lost an adolescent son about twenty years ago.

  I took the packages that had come with the bones and carefully cut samples from the anonymous floral shirt as well as probing and scraping the inner sole of the cracking sandals. These were very lightly made, but I hoped that perhaps there’d still be some trace genetic material in the grooves of the discoloured stitching that ran around the edges.

  Finally, I was satisfied that I had enough material to reveal whether or not any nuclear DNA had survived the elements. DNA breaks down rapidly with radiation, but this body had been stashed under a rock ledge and then partially covered. There was just a chance.

  I took the samples from the examination room and soon had the system up and running. I could get on with all the rest of my life while Profiler Plus worked its automated magic.

  I was degowning in the disposal area when I saw Sofia Verstoek approaching. I wasn’t expecting to see anybody—least of all her. I cleared my throat.

  ‘I have a job that I need you to do. From unknown bones,’ I said. ‘I’m wondering if you have time to look at it.’

  She came right up to me and this time her face and voice were soft. ‘That’s not a problem.’

  I was relieved at this turn of events. Maybe our physical collision had done something to the energy between us. ‘I’ve got them right here,’ I said.

  She put on her protective gear and took what she needed away.

  I went back to my office to catch up on paperwork until her results came through. Finally, there was knock on the door.

  ‘I’m running it all again,’ Sofia said. ‘This is the third time. I wasn’t satisfied with the first soil profile.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Ever since the Kincaid Street property was contaminated by foreign pollen from those wretched floral tributes I’ve been doing everything at least three times so as to cut out the exotic contaminants. But, in spite of that, I keep getting an anomalous result. I’m going to keep redoing the assemblage until I get a result that makes sense.’

  My mobile rang and I snatched it up, nodding to Sofia as she left. It was Mr Vernon from Fletcher Daley Real Estate. I was surprised to hear from him on a Sunday but was pleased when he told me he could help me with the provenance of Peter Yu’s set of keys.

  Twenty-seven

  An hour later, I was in Brian Kruger’s car driving through the late afternoon, the address Mr Vernon had given me written on a piece of paper in my pocket, together with the keys.

  ‘Anthony Dimitriou went home from hospital,’ said Brian. ‘We’ve crossed him off the list of suspects.’

  I was silent a moment, thinking how quickly life could change from the routine and predictable. Then I brought Brian up to speed.

  ‘Mr Vernon told me it’s not really one of their lettings but they act as a drop-off point for keys. It belongs to a cocky and it’s a peppercorn rental.’

  Brian turned off the road, through an open wire gate and roared up a short dirt track. He pulled up outside a small weatherboard house, the sort built around the turn of last century for a married stationhand.

  ‘This place has no power and only tank water,’ I said, as we got out and looked around. ‘Usually only hippies live here, according to the real estate agent.’

  I could hear a low humming from inside the house and, because I’d been out of constant crime scene work for years, didn’t immediately recognise it. Then Brian looked at me and I remembered what it was. As we turned the corner to the back of the house, the humming grew louder. It was the unmistakeable sound of massed blowflies and, sure enough, there they were, coating the back wall in their teeming numbers, clustered and swarming, or buzzing in and out of the louvre windows, which were positioned too high to look through.

  As I approached the back door, the stench grew and when I looked more closely at the door, I realised it wasn’t completely shut. With my shoe I touched it open, then ducked as blowflies hurtled past. But I’d seen enough of what lay on the floor ahead.

  ‘Looks like a job for you,’ I said to Brian, retreating.

  ‘Thanks, mate. Just what I need.’ He grimaced as he looked through the half-opened back door. Over his shoulder, I saw a black cloud of flies rising from something on the floor in the corner, disturbed by the dim light and movement created by our presence and the opening of the door.

  We climbed back into the car and Brian drove up the bumpy dirt track and around the paddocks until he came to the landowner’s comfortable house. I waited in the car while he informed the landowner, who, shortly afterwards, climbed into his Range Rover and followed us down the track, locking his gates behind us.

  ‘Are you going to go inside?’ he asked.

  ‘We can’t really,’ I said. ‘We haven’t got the equipment we need for this.’ I’d noticed a generator near the back wall but its fuel gauge showed empty. ‘There’s no power source here. We need lights and crime scene gear.’

  ‘I’ll need to go and get my stuff,’ Brian said.

  ‘I can wait here,’ I told him, realising I’d do almost anything not to go back to my empty cottage.

  ‘I’ll be back at the house if you need me,’ said the property owner and walked back to his 4WD.

  As the sky darkened, the sound of the blowflies eased and finally stopped. It would be more merciful for us inside later rather than in daylight.

  Despite my best intentions, I rang Iona’s mobile without result and the line at the cottage as well. But she hadn’t changed her mind and the call rang out in an empty room. I didn’t let myself think too much and busied myself making other calls. I spoke to Dallas Baxter, reminding him of the staff lists he’d been promising me for some days now and telling him that we’d probably found Peter Yu but to keep it to himself until it became official.

  ‘I’ll drive over to work,’ he said, sounding shaken, ‘and meet you there later.’

  Finally, Brian returned with a wagonload of gear. ‘I didn’t bring Debbie with me because I’ve got you, mate,’ he grinned, passing me a Tyvek suit and shoe covers and getting me to help him lift the generator out of the back.

  When I told him I didn’t mind, I wasn’t being dishonest—I needed the distraction because my mind kept turning to Iona and her words of two nights before and my heart ached hearing them afresh in my memory.

  Once the police generator started up and the powerful lights beamed into the back area of the farmworker’s weatherboard, Brian and I went inside. At this stage, we didn’t know what we
were walking into—another murder, a freak accident, a suicide or a sudden natural death. But we took every precaution, not touching anything, leaving doors and surfaces for the fingerprints people.

  ‘He’s bloody overripe,’ said Brian as I followed him in, flinching at the intense stench, wielding one of the powerful flashlights in my gloved hands and using it to penetrate into unlit corners and black shadowed areas cast by the bright lights.

  The body of the man I presumed to be Peter Yu lay on the linoleum floor in the kitchen near the doorway to another room in a pool of stinking body fluids, discoloured and swollen. Harry Marshall would give a much better estimation of how long the man had lain dead, but my guess was that he’d died not long after Claire Dimitriou.

  The place looked unloved, just short of derelict; dusty and neglected, with two or three pieces of old, cheap furniture that no resident had wanted standing in the kitchen. In the cramped, walk-in pantry off the main area, Dr Yu had set up an ad hoc darkroom, I realised, as I peered in at the trays and the battery on the floor from where he’d run lights.

  The ancient black range looked like something my grandmother might have used, and near it stood an old kerosene fridge. Kerosene lamps hung from large butcher’s hooks on the walls and low ceilings. Ancient linoleum peeled from the floors.

  ‘Looks like he might have shot himself,’ said Brian, raising his camera, standing on the other side of the corpse.

  I came round to take a look and saw the hole in the right temple that had leaked matter onto the floor.

  ‘There’s that Browning you’ve been looking for,’ I said, as Brian took photos of the body and the weapon lying loose in Peter Yu’s right hand.

  I looked around the kitchen and tried to open some of the dusty windows. Once, they’d slid open, but not for a long time. The timbers had distorted and swollen over the years and they were jammed shut or open, whichever way they’d been left.

  On the floorboards, I could see the black stains where Peter Yu had first fallen and the blood splash on the walls.

  Carefully, I stepped through the doorway of the room near the body and flashed my torch around the walls. I stood there, stunned for a few seconds. Peter Yu must have slept here, I thought, looking at the sleeping bag on the floor, the small camp stove in the corner and its bottle of liquid gas. But it was the walls that had captured my attention.

  ‘Brian, step in here a moment.’

  Brian appeared in the doorway and, like me, stood stock-still before joining me further inside the room.

  ‘I never got my head around that giant multi-crystal business,’ said Brian. ‘But what the hell is this? Is that how science thinks of God?’

  ‘I don’t think it had much to do with science or God,’ I said. ‘I think it’s in the realms of complete emotional breakdown.’

  ‘You mean he was Captain Rats?’ Brian asked.

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I said.

  It was like walking into an art installation. Every surface, including much of the ceiling, was plastered with blown-up images of galaxies, landscapes and pathogens, enlarged scanning electron microscope images of bacteria, medical imaging of viruses, rampant in their toxic beauty. I thought I could discern what Peter Yu had been aiming at, the intelligent sense of design touted by theists, of repeating patterns, like fractals, of unfolding fern leaves next to a sagittal section through a trumpet shell revealing an identical symmetry.

  When I painted, I often marvelled at the way nature used and reused a successful structure, noticing repeat patterns in the macro and micro worlds. The flaky bark of pine trees appeared almost identical with microscopic images of flaky hair shafts. Spirals repeated themselves throughout our world, from the misty twists of galaxies millions of light years away, right down to the intimacy of the way the DNA wound in our chromosomes. For a split second, I touched the edges of what Peter Yu might have been trying to compose.

  ‘This was his chapel,’ I said. ‘This is what he was struggling to explain to Annette Sommers.’

  ‘Okay. Quite apart from all the giant crystal business, where does the death of his colleague fit in?’ said Brian, dispelling the light out of my insight somewhat, so that now only a jumble of miscellaneous images jostled together on a grubby wall.

  Slowly, I walked around the small room.

  ‘What do you think, Jack?’

  ‘I’m not a psychic, Brian. I don’t get it either.’ It wasn’t quite true, but I sure wasn’t getting the reason for the crime. ‘We might never know what happened in the Faithful Bunnies lab.’ I paused, reading the contents of a note pinned to the wall under a huge enlargement of the horse head nebula. ‘Although this might help us understand more.’

  Brian came up to read it out. ‘I had to do a terrible thing to stop a blasphemy. I’ve cleaned up everything. Forgive me.’

  Blasphemy. What a word. He certainly had cleaned up everything. ‘It sounds like an admission,’ I said. ‘But it’s still ambiguous.’

  We poked around a little longer. ‘If your team finds anything that resembles a torn-out page with scientific processes written up on it, let me know,’ I said to Brian.

  ‘The missing lab book page? I don’t think we’ll ever find that.’

  I didn’t hold much hope either. Whoever ripped out that page had wanted its contents hidden, never to be seen.

  Brian finished his recording and photographing and called up the contractors to come and pick up the body while I rang Sofia, inviting her to take samples in the morning.

  ‘God,’ said Brian, overhearing me. ‘Make sure you give me plenty of warning, so I’m not here when she is.’

  After we’d secured the place as well as we could and reloaded the wagon, Brian drove me to the Ag Station so I could pick up copies of the staff lists.

  ‘I want to know what happened,’ said Dallas, as soon as he let us into the station. ‘Did Peter Yu kill Claire? And then suicide?’

  ‘We did find a note that suggests what you’re saying is likely,’ said Brian. ‘It looks like a murder suicide.’

  ‘It’s too early to be definite,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to wait on Harry Marshall. But I think that whatever happened in that laboratory—the reason it was so thoroughly cleaned up to the point of murdering Claire and destroying the page in the lab book—has everything to do with something in that assay that caused the uproar with Jerri Quill on Monday morning.’

  ‘But how could an immunoassay of rabbits create such a situation?’ asked Dallas and in the short silence that followed I turned this question over and over.

  ‘The sixteen blue incident was the assay result we need to focus on,’ I said. ‘Peter Yu went religious I know,’ I said, thinking of the extraordinary word Yu had used in his suicide note, ‘but how long ago was that?’

  Dallas considered. ‘I don’t know. Two months maybe? People were starting to talk about him by then.’

  ‘And the rabbit immunoassays have been running all that time?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said Dallas. ‘These routine research tests go on for many months, years sometimes.’

  ‘Yet one particular assay result created a terrible scene last Monday,’ I said.

  We walked on in silence, past several stacked plastic cartons.

  ‘Look at all these,’ said Dallas. ‘All waiting for me to check them off invoices. Otherwise we end up being charged for things we don’t need or didn’t even order in the first place.’

  Through the plastic, I could see a number of stacked ELISA plates. Like me, Dallas was expected to do more and more paperwork. Once, before economic rationalisation, we’d had full-time storemen and could get on with our real jobs.

  ‘As if I haven’t got enough to deal with,’ he complained. ‘Two researchers dead, my staff being upset, police everywhere, questions, the media.’ His voice cracked
and I thought he might start crying. ‘Last month I was sent human sera plates in error and spent most of an afternoon chasing them and writing up the returns paperwork. We need animal antigens here,’ he said, his voice rising. ‘Rabbits, sheep and cattle. These days, it’s all requisition orders or countering wrong orders—I waste so much time doing that sort of thing. I’m a scientist, not a bloody clerk.’

  I felt sorry for Dallas. He was dealing with the shocking events that had overtaken his research station in his own way, projecting his distress onto less threatening problems like cartons of equipment and wrong orders. Gently, I tried to draw him back to my line of inquiry. ‘So, last Monday, you didn’t hear anything untoward about the assay result?’ I asked.

  Dallas frowned. ‘I didn’t hear anything. It was just another one in a routine series of hundreds—maybe thousands even—of rabbit pox tests,’ he said. ‘I know how these tests go. Sometimes all the wells show positive, sometimes only some of them, occasionally none of the wells show any antigen reaction. Mostly, it’s a mixture because of the different levels of infection. I’m still trying to make sense of what it was about this particular result that meant two of my best people are dead.’ He looked at me and his eyes were magnified with tears.