Dirty Weekend

by Gabrielle Lord

  ‘You’re right,’ I said, considering something she’d said earlier. ‘They both had similar eggshell fractures.’ I’d seen the damage to Tianna’s skull, the radiating fracture lines, the massive off-centred damage, the blow-down of the superior orbital plates that Harry had pointed out to me. And I’d held Bob’s unknown male skull in my hands, noting the same set of extensive injuries. Now here was another coincidence, another oddity—same damage, same orchid. ‘That is very curious,’ I said. ‘Somehow we’ve got two cases, both linked to this very rare indicator species.’

  ‘That’s what the evidence would suggest.’

  I considered. ‘Could you do an environmental profile?’ I knew that the reconstruction of an environment was possible; traces of animals, plants, soils and sediments can yield a ‘landscape’ that an experienced interpreter can read.

  ‘It’s not an area I’ve had much experience with,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve seen orchids at one household,’ I said, trying to make sense of this, remembering Vera Hastings and her late husband’s interests. ‘Near where Tianna lived—did I mention that?’

  Sofia shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. When I say rare orchid, I mean rare. Native. There’s no way you’d find this in a house. They only grow in the wild. It’s truly weird.’

  She’d used exactly those words when making another observation and I reminded her. ‘The clothes Tianna Richardson was wearing. At the crime scene,’ I said. ‘You said there was something weird about them. Back at Tianna’s house I found a nice black and silver pair of earrings, like little chandeliers, still in their wrapping on Tianna’s dressing table. And the matching skirt that went with that suit was draped over a chair.’

  ‘So why didn’t she wear them that night?’ Sofia asked.

  ‘I can’t be sure, but I’m beginning to wonder,’ I began. ‘The skirt was a perfect fit. We tested it down at the morgue.’

  ‘Maybe she was interrupted while she was dressing. And didn’t have a chance to get the skirt on,’ said Sofia.

  ‘But she did get a skirt on. The one you described as daggy.’

  ‘You said you were beginning to wonder . . . what?’ Sofia raised her eyebrows.

  ‘You thought a man wouldn’t notice something like that,’ I said. ‘And that’s what I’m thinking happened. The killer put that skirt on Tianna.’

  ‘But why?’ said Sofia, bewildered.

  ‘That’s what I need to think more about,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a mystery,’ she said. ‘Like this orchid popping up in two places.’

  Her phone rang and she picked it up. She didn’t speak and the colour drained from her face.

  ‘Give it to me,’ I said.

  She hesitated, then passed it over.

  ‘I know who you are,’ I said. ‘And I’m Sofia Verstoek’s boss. You are not to contact her again in any way. Understood?’

  ‘It’s a free country,’ he said. ‘I can do what I want.’

  ‘Try it, pal, and you’ll find out just how free you are,’ I said.

  His voice was cocky and full of sneering. ‘You like employing sluts?’

  ‘If you attempt to contact Miss Verstoek or any of my staff members again,’ I said, ‘I’ll make sure your nightclub is closed down and that you’re out of this town so fast you won’t know what hit you.’

  ‘Are you threatening me, man?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said and hung up.

  Sofia had a hand covering her mouth.

  I was indignant. ‘A prick like that getting money out of you.’

  She raised one of those fair eyebrows. ‘I’ve had a lot of money out of pricks like that.’

  ‘If he so much as thinks about you,’ I said, ‘you let me know. Okay.’ She nodded.

  On the way back to my office, I thought about the scene with Sofia. Why was it, I asked myself, that I could act immediately and know what to do with a woman in trouble, to the point of maintaining an open-door policy, and yet when it came to my relations with Iona, I couldn’t seem to make the time?

  Twenty-nine

  This question lingered in my mind as I took the pollen profiles and soil profiles back to my office, puzzled. A rare orchid that had to be brushed against to deliver its pollen had turned up on a woman, only dead a little over a month ago, and again on a youth, dead a long time, perhaps two decades. Both were bearing similar injuries. Whichever way I examined it, as coincidence or connection, it seemed equally unlikely.

  I rang Brian and told him what Sofia had discovered, that the rare orchid pollen only appeared among the granite particles embedded in Tianna’s head, with traces showing up again on 17/2000’s hair. Then I asked him what he knew about the licensee and the manager of the Blackspot Nightclub and gave him the name Endo Bremmer. Without mentioning Sofia’s previous work history, I briefed Brian about the situation. He said he’d look into it.

  Then it was time to see if Profiler Plus had come up with anything in the way of reportable DNA concerning 17/2000. I seated myself before the monitor and opened the print program, waiting to see what the finished profile looked like as it appeared on the screen. I was no expert in reading these graphs, and I’d certainly take it down to Florence to get an expert eye examine it as well, but I could see straightaway that the program had come up with NR—Not Reportable. I was disappointed. Even though I’d known beforehand that the chances of finding any non-degraded genetic material were probably non-existent, I’d been hanging onto the hope that something had endured. But genetic material produced by the amplification process had been too degraded after all. The way our system was set up, the sex marker came right at the beginning of the profile, followed by nine other loci. In very degraded samples like this one, sometimes it was only the sex marker that could be read, but we already knew this was a male. I’d wasted valuable time and resources.

  I was about to turn the program off, when I glanced at the first locus and blinked. I hadn’t noticed it at first, being so dejected at the overall picture. It took me a second or two to take in what I was seeing.

  ‘Holy shit,’ I said to the empty laboratory.

  I checked it again. Sometimes my eyes didn’t focus all that well, especially when I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep. But I wasn’t seeing things.

  I grabbed my mobile and rang Harry Marshall.

  Harry was doing the rounds with a young postgraduate pathologist, Rosalie Hughes, when I arrived, 17/2000 in the box under my arm, the print-out of the DNA profile in my briefcase. He seemed pleased as punch, as if the young woman was in some way his work.

  ‘Rosalie will be helping me here, from time to time,’ he said.

  Rosalie Hughes was very keen to see what I was carrying, both the unidentified remains and the DNA profile.

  ‘Peter Yu, have you done with him?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘Self-inflicted gunshot to the head.’

  The three of us gowned and gloved; Rosalie, the white gown covering her pink gingham blouse, suddenly transforming into a purposeful-looking professional. We went into a spare examination room and I put the box containing 17/2000 on the table with the DNA profile beside it.

  ‘You’ll have to show me what this is all about,’ said Rosalie, moving closer, indicating the printed-out profile. ‘I don’t know much at all about how you extract and process DNA for identifying people.’

  I lifted the skull out and put it on the table. ‘I will,’ I said. ‘But first, tell me what you see.’

  Rosalie picked the skull up, studied it for a moment, then deferred to her senior colleague and passed it to Harry.

  ‘Who’s this?’ he asked, turning it round in his hands.

  ‘It’s one of Bob Edwards’ cold cases. He dug it out of a Queanbeyan gravesite some years ago and I requested it because of trace pollen evidence that showe
d up on some of the hair strands similar to that found on Tianna Richardson. He’s been listed as an unknown male,’ I said, tapping a gloved finger on the skull. ‘With severe injuries at the back of the skull. I want to take another, closer look. I want another opinion.’

  Rosalie carefully lifted out the fragments of fragile fabric and what was left of the stiff, cracked sandal soles, handling them with gloved reverence. I immediately liked her as she smoothed out the fragile fabric, holding up the front of the blue shirt, checking one of the two remaining blue plastic buttons, peering at the thin strands of hair in their packet then turning her attention to the old leather sandals.

  Harry frowned under his heavy eyebrows, his kindly eyes magnified by his glasses as he rotated the ruined skull under the gaze of his protegée. ‘Maybe the junior member of our consulting group should be allowed first examination?’

  Rosalie, looking up from under her curving fringe, demurred a moment, then took the skull back from Harry, turning it over to reveal the gaping, off-centred hole, the spidery fracture lines running away from the edges. She studied the jagged gap for a few moments. ‘Severe damage to the cranial vault area,’ she finally said. ‘Especially the superior orbital plates, with extensive radiating fracturing plus extensive base-of-skull fracturing.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘Plus blow-down of the superior orbital plates.’ He paused. ‘Suggest anything to you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Blunt instrument?’

  ‘Mmm,’ murmured Harry. ‘It’s difficult without seeing the front of the brain, but I’m thinking something different. A fall from a height.’

  ‘Male or female?’ I asked.

  Rosalie frowned and looked hard at the front of the skull. ‘Gracile, no marked post-orbital ridge.’ She turned it sideways and squinted at it, then looked at it face-on again. She put it down and sorted through the box until she found the femur and part of the pelvis.

  ‘Again, I’m not a hundred per cent sure,’ she said, ‘but from what I’ve seen, I’d say more likely to be female than male.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Harry. ‘That would be my conclusion.’

  I passed her the profile. ‘And here’s the genetic confirmation of your decision,’ I said, pointing to the single peak at the sex locus. ‘If it had been male, there’d be two peaks there, one for the X and one for the Y chromosome. Two XXs, which indicate female, stack up on top of each other, making only one peak.’

  ‘Bob’s not going to be happy about this,’ said Harry, looking over Rosalie’s shoulder.

  ‘Why?’ Rosalie asked.

  I explained that these remains had been sitting in the bone room at the Sydney morgue for the last four years, logged as male.

  ‘It happens from time to time,’ said Harry. ‘Especially if all the remains aren’t available. And inexperience plays a part in wrong identifications.’

  I remembered Bob saying Bradley Strachan was on leave when the remains were found, so it would have been a locum pathologist who’d accompanied him down to the gravesite. Then I opened the packet of hair and teased out a few more strands. I intended to ask Jerri Quill’s flatmate, Wendy, to try and reconstruct the face. I’d have to ring her straightaway.

  Rosalie was silent a moment, considering. She held the skull at eye level, gazing through the empty sockets. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  ‘At the moment, she’s missing female, 17/2000, aged somewhere between twenty and thirty,’ said Harry.

  ‘She could be me,’ Rosalie said, tracing the sutures of the coronal fissure.

  ‘You’ll make a great pathologist one day, my dear,’ said Harry, patting her arm. ‘Getting the sex right, despite the writing on the box.’

  ‘Actually, I cheated,’ said Rosalie, smiling broadly as she helped repack the bones and the accompanying items.

  ‘How’s that?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘The scraps of the blouse. Didn’t you see? It buttons on the female side.’

  Before I’d got back into the car with the box of bones I was on the phone to Wendy.

  ‘What would you say to the offer of a New South Wales cold case skull to reconstruct?’

  ‘I’d jump at it,’ she replied.

  ‘Not quite sure how we’ll pay you. But I’m sure we can come up with something,’ I said.

  ‘That’s cool. At the moment, I’m more interested in building up an impressive CV.’

  There was no mistaking the excitement in her voice and, as soon as I hung up, I rang Bob.

  ‘So now I’ve got two women,’ I said, ‘both killed in the same way and both coming into contact with an extremely rare orchid at the site of their respective injuries. But many years apart.’

  ‘Mate, you’re onto something,’ said Bob and I could imagine the grin on his face.

  ‘Yeah. Something. But what?’

  Bob’s sigh came down the line. ‘I’m going to have to go through all the missing females from the last twenty years. As well as keep up to speed with everything else.’ He was right. I didn’t envy him.

  ‘But at least with Ms Seventeen Two Thousand,’ I said, ‘you’ll soon have a face to work with.’ I filled him in on Wendy’s work.

  ‘I heard you’d already charged someone for Tianna Richardson’s murder,’ Bob said. ‘So maybe you should have another look at your suspect in the light of this new discovery. Same MO.’

  I did a quick calculation. ‘Nice try, Bob, but at the time of 17/2000’s death, Damien Henshaw would have been about five.’

  ‘So much for similar MO,’ said Bob.

  ‘It’s still similar MO,’ I said. ‘But no loading it onto Damien Henshaw. I’m not a hundred per cent happy about him anyway. I’m not sure that he’s the right man.’

  ‘I’ve got a bit of hot gossip for you,’ said Bob. ‘Earl Richardson is getting over his grief with the bereavement counsellor in ways not prescribed in the manual.’

  I recalled the lacy bras and undies fluttering on the clothes line at the back of Richardson’s house.

  ‘Well-built blonde?’ I asked, recalling the woman at Tianna’s funeral.

  ‘She lives there,’ said Bob. ‘I had a good gossip with next door. Can’t blame the man for seeking comfort with a professional.’

  I thought about those words all the way to Wendy’s place, and then again on the drive back to work.

  In my office, I tidied up my desk. Bob was back to square one with his case, and I was now convinced that Brian had the wrong man in the dock for Tianna Richardson’s death. To top it all off, the wretched forensic conference was almost upon me. People were running around organising things that the organisers should have done weeks ago. I sat at my desk, debating as to when I should next contact Iona and while I was fighting off the urge to do it right then, the desk phone rang. I prayed it would be her saying she’d made a big mistake. ‘Patrick Eadie,’ said the voice. For a moment I couldn’t place the clipped, abrupt tones of the leporid man.

  ‘I’ve got some preliminary findings for you,’ he said into my silence, ‘from my examination of those six rabbit carcases you sent me.’

  I thanked him then picked up a pen and waited.

  ‘These are the main points,’ he said. ‘I found evidence that the animals had been dead for some time prior to undergoing the pressure and heat changes due to the autoclave process—which compromised my findings considerably. But despite that, I was able to see that all of them showed some traces of disease symptoms, skin rashes, subcutaneous oedema, especially of the mouth and body openings, tissue swelling . . .’ He paused. ‘Ah, here it is.’ I heard the rustling of paper. ‘And that these findings are symptomatic of rabbit pox.’ He paused again. ‘I’ve cut and pasted a section from one of the reference texts concerning rabbit pox. That might be useful to you. Give me your fax number and I’ll fax it over to you.’r />
  I gave him the number and thanked him again.

  ‘Who gets my invoice?’

  Our budget was heading for the red and I’d committed to pay a fee to Wendy Chen. ‘Dallas Baxter,’ I said. ‘At the Ag Station. Send it to him.’

  On the way home, I drove by the Ainslie address of Iona’s friend and was sitting there, listening to the Drive Time program, watching a couple of late joggers puffing past, when I was startled by a presence by the window. I wound it down to see Iona’s friend from the college beside the car, tugging her gloves on, the disapproving frown and dark scarf over her head lending a touch of severity.

  ‘This is not a good idea,’ she said. ‘This is the second time I’ve seen you here in as many days. The word “stalking” comes to mind.’

  ‘Have a heart,’ I said. ‘I just want to talk to her.’

  ‘From what I hear, there’s been too much talk already.’

  ‘Is Iona in?’ I asked.

  ‘Please go,’ she said. ‘Iona doesn’t want to see you or talk to you. She says it’s too painful.’

  ‘So it should be!’ I said, feeling a dark pleasure that I was important enough to Iona for her to ache about me.

  ‘She said to give you this, and now I think you’d better go,’ she added, giving me a look of pure dislike.

  I wound up the window and switched on the cabin light.

  Dear Jack, please don’t try and contact me. It’s not helpful as we’d only end up having the same endless argument that we’ve been having almost since I moved in with you. I understand that you’ve done your best to change.

  I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. Her letter gave me no hope at all and I folded it up and put it in my jacket pocket, feeling the chill darkness of the oncoming night in my heart.

  Thirty

  Tuesday morning I woke and immediately started to fight the desire to call Iona, wanting to say, if it hurts talking to me or seeing me while we’re separated why don’t you for God’s sake just come home? But sanity prevailed and I distracted myself by reading Patrick Eadie’s faxed post-mortem report and making my own notes. Concerned though I was with what he had found, I was still very unsure of what the full implications were, so I put my notes aside to look over the local newspaper.