Dirty Weekend

by Gabrielle Lord

  We bumped along for a few kilometres until the land fell away even more and we were on the valley floor, driving back in the opposite direction along the dusty track, peering up for signs of houses on the ridge above.

  It wasn’t hard to find the bottom of the gully directly beneath Sparrows Ridge Road. Some householders had used the steep ravine as an ad hoc rubbish tip. We stopped just off the fire trail and got out, craning our necks to see glimpses of the dull white retaining wall right at the top of the ridge above, noticing the tumbled spill of several blocks that had fallen away over the years to lodge halfway up the drop and were now partly covered in growth.

  We both went to the back of my wagon and pulled on Tyvek suits and shoe protectors. I shoved some gloves and a magnifying glass in my pocket and we discussed how best to proceed. It was a relief knowing that the official team had been there and done their job. I was here to see where Tianna had fallen before being dumped at the nightclub car park. Some part of me insisted that I see this primary crime scene for myself. Despite the advances in video recording, for me there was no real alternative to life experience—to being there.

  It didn’t take us long to find the points of impact. Once we’d climbed up to the area where the fallen blocks lay half-buried in soil and vegetation, I could see with the naked eye an area that had been recently disturbed. Samples had clearly been taken and there was even still a smear of something dark along the side of one of the blocks. I straightened up and looked around. A couple of young saplings had been snapped in half, knocked down by something heavy hitting them.

  Sofia climbed higher until she could go no further because of an arching overhang. Without proper climbing equipment, there was no way she’d be getting up and over that.

  ‘How do you think it happened?’ she asked, standing some way above me, hands on hips.

  I considered, looking around at the fire trail a little distance beneath us and the ridge high above. ‘I believe they somehow got her here—Damien might have suggested they go to a friend’s place for more dope, for a threesome—I don’t know. Maybe for baked beans on toast. He couldn’t take her back to his place because of Kylie. Then, with Jason’s help, he threw her over the wall, drove like we did just then along to the end of the ridge and down the hill, along the fire trail until they found her and collected her body. Took her home, dressed her up in her disco gear and drove the body back to the Blackspot to make it look like she’d come to grief there.’

  ‘But why?’

  I looked up at her, standing there on the hillside, a frown on her face.

  ‘Make it look like she went out and picked up the wrong man,’ I said. ‘Throw the investigation onto the wrong track. And it worked—for a while.’

  ‘Jason Richardson is still on the loose,’ she said. ‘And Damien Henshaw is still denying he knows him.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you? Under the circumstances?’

  ‘But how come the techs found no trace of her in either of their vehicles?’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘I found a necklace that matches the earrings she was wearing that night in Jason Richardson’s glove box.’

  ‘And Vic still has a packet of fibres from a car that don’t fit anywhere,’ she insisted.

  ‘They could have come from anywhere,’ I said. ‘We can’t join all the dots all the time. They could have pinched a car for the occasion. Until we get a confession, we’ll never know. And that day may never come.’

  ‘Brian Kruger told me you’ve never been happy with charging Damien Henshaw.’

  ‘You’re talking to Brian?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, you’ve never been happy about it, have you?’ she repeated, ignoring my question.

  It was true. ‘I wasn’t. But in view of the evidence I have to change my mind.’

  ‘And you’re not even a blond,’ she joked.

  ‘You’re going to need climbing equipment if you want to go higher than that overhang,’ I said, pointing.

  But she wasn’t listening and had almost disappeared beyond the overhang.

  ‘Hey!’ she called back, her voice edged with excitement. ‘I’ve found the orchid! Most of the flowerets are gone but I can still get the idea.’

  She was pointing to a dark-green-leafed plant attached to some rocks in the shelter of a small hollow formed under the bole of one of the larger eucalypts. I waited while she took shot after shot of it with her digital camera. Then she took a container and brushed the tiny orchids into its mouth, quickly capping it, capturing pollen.

  Pollen, I remembered, that wasn’t windblown. That must be brushed against to leave its mark.

  ‘Sofia,’ I said as we drove back to Forensic Services. ‘Surely we’d expect to find some traces of that pollen on Damien Henshaw and Jason Richardson?’

  A few moments passed before she responded. ‘Not necessarily. Not with this particular species. It doesn’t produce a great deal. Unless they touched the body in the place Tianna had collected it, they could be home free.’

  It made sense, I thought. No traces on the killers unless they’d touched the wounds on the back of Tianna’s head.

  We bought some fish and chips for lunch and ate them in the gardens near the lake. As I lay back on the grass with Sofia in the distance checking out an unusually bright pink callistemon, I realised this was the sort of pleasant break I never thought to take. My heart was heavy as I gathered up the empty containers and dumped them in a garbage bin.

  Later, as we arrived in the car park at Forensic Services and I was backing into my usual spot, there was Vic Agnew again, about to climb into his car. He watched as Sofia swung out of the passenger seat.

  ‘We’ve been out looking at a rare orchid,’ I said, goaded into defensiveness by his wordless leer. Sofia gave me a look.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I could have phrased that differently.’

  I heard him laugh as he drove away.

  We disposed of our used gear and walked up the stairs together, preparing to separate at the entrance to the floor.

  ‘Sofia,’ I said. ‘I’m speaking as someone who’s been in this game a very long time. Next time there’s a crime scene you need to attend, ring Brian and ask if you can be included. Speak to him nicely. Say, please can you have first go at the pollen traps.’

  She frowned, transferring her carry case to the other hand, about to push the door to the floor level open.

  ‘Brian is an overworked crime scene examiner, like I used to be once,’ I continued. ‘On call twenty-four hours a day, often dragged away from trying to get his cases ready for court by yet another crime scene demanding his attention. Always behind in his work. Always being loaded up with more. You’ll be working with lots of young police like that. The fact that he makes so few errors given the huge pressures under, which he’s constantly struggling to manage, is a tribute to him. Do you think you can give him a break?’

  I waited with some trepidation. But she gave me the beginning of her rare smile.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll try. After all, I owe you one.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s not me you owe. It’s you. In this job, you need other people. Alienate too many people and you’ll end up completely isolated. And maybe even out of a job.’

  She cocked her head on one side, and the large brown eyes regarded me, appraised me. With a swift movement, she leaned forward and kissed me fast and hard on the lips, then turned and hurried away.

  I watched after her as turned the corner of the corridor, vanishing towards her end of the building.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon getting on top of a stack of invoices and it wasn’t until I was on my way out of the building, bracing myself to finally face the loneliness of the cottage, that my mobile rang.

  ‘Jack McCain? It’s Alana Richardson,’ said the voice on the line. ‘I probably sh
ould be ringing the police. But seeing as I know you . . .’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Jack, I’ve just come back from the hospital. Earl discharged himself a while ago. But that’s not why I’m ringing. While I was out, my house has been burgled! Someone’s taken every cent from the place!’

  ‘Don’t touch a thing. Ring the local police,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know where my grandson’s gone and then I come home to this! . . . Oh God,’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, ‘I just heard something. I think someone’s in the house!’

  ‘Call the local cops,’ I said. ‘I’ll alert them too. I’m on my way. Either lock yourself in a room or get out of the house. Now!’

  I hurried back up the stairs and ducked into my office, intent on grabbing an old baton that I’d stashed away ages ago and a hand gun I had locked in my bottom filing cabinet drawer. It had been a long time since I’d handled the prohibited item and I didn’t want to introduce it into a domestic scene unless lethal force was required.

  I snatched up the baton, hid the gun inside my jacket and hurried back downstairs, letting myself out of the building, the baton close alongside me, my brain going as fast as it could, trying to put things together.

  I jumped back in the car, placed the gun under my seat and tried getting through to Brian again as I drove to Sparrows Ridge Road, but failed so I left a message. As the kilometres clicked by, I wondered what I would find. Images of how I’d tried to stack the vertebrae of 17/2000 the very first time I’d seen them came to mind. Making structural sense from disordered array. The unknown male had turned into a woman and swung the investigation around 360 degrees.

  Just as I’d done with Claire Dimitriou’s murder, I started again with the Tianna Richardson investigation. I was rerunning the case from my first glimpse of her lying on the asphalt to the last time I’d seen her, when Harry and I laboriously dragged her perfectly fitting skirt onto her cold corpse. I examined all the disparate pieces of information, the way an intelligence group interpreted seemingly unrelated incidents and responses. My mind reached desperately to find the subterranean connectors whose invisible conduits linked all the pieces, perfectly. But they remained out of view.

  I considered everything that had happened, right up to the events of the last few days—the carefully pegged-out muscle and skin measurements that Wendy had crafted over her cast of 17/2000’s skull. Locard’s caveat about physical evidence jumped into my mind. ‘Only human failure to find it, study it and understand it can diminish its value.’

  I was getting closer to Sparrows Ridge Road for the second time that day and I glanced at the strong steel baton lying across the passenger seat, street lighting slipping strobe-like over its shiny black surface. And I knew in that moment why I’d been so sure that 17/2000’s face was familiar to me. Because now I knew who she was. This afternoon’s incident in the corridor with Adam Shiner and Earl Richardson and the group of visiting detectives now became perfectly clear. It had been there all the time, right in front of me. Bob had first drawn these facts to my attention. And Rosalie, the young pathologist, and Harry Marshall had pushed them even closer to me. But I hadn’t been able to see then. I had failed to understand—I’d looked straight at the features of 17/2000 and knew I recognised her, yet failed to make the right connection. In that instant, the truth stood clean and clear in my mind: I knew who 17/2000 was and I knew who’d killed her.

  Speeding towards the rising country where Tianna Richardson had been murdered, I berated myself. Now it was becoming abundantly clear why Tianna Richardson had been wearing a daggy woollen skirt and pearl and peridot earrings that did not match anything else she was wearing. It became easy to understand why the Stewart Chambray skirt still lay on top of its wrappings, still unworn, the label still attached.

  Switching off the headlights, I swung round the curve in the road and approached the dozen or so households before Alana Richardson’s cottage. I parked and got out, closing the door silently, gripping the steel baton. The streetlights here were dim and a light drizzle had started, chilling the air further. Someone nearby was playing very loud rock music and I moved as quickly and lightly as I could, grateful for the cover of the music. Peering over the hedges that constituted the front borders of Alana’s place, I looked around in vain for Jason’s car. The front garden was easy to see from the light shining out of the open front door.

  The music stopped and, in the sudden silence, I heard a car idling. I ducked down the side of the house and found Alana’s car in the driveway, rear door raised, and in the dim interior light I glimpsed the tartan rug, dusty with masonry particles and tools—remembered the fibres with unknown origin that had shown up in Tianna’s case.

  He hadn’t left yet.

  The music started up again and I stole towards the front door of the cottage, baton at the ready, using my other hand to open the door a little more. But something was blocking it. I pushed it a little harder then looked down to see what the problem was; Alana Richardson lying in the hallway.

  I edged around the door, came in and was bending over, about to check her vital signs, when a sound from behind made me swing round, too late. The hall light clicked off, but in the shadows I could still make out his face.

  And just before whatever he was swinging connected with my head, I had time to say his name.

  Thirty-four

  I woke up swaying from a nightmare blackout where I’d been trying to swim up through pitch-dark water to a surface that forever eluded me, reduced to a graph spike of consciousness on a broad black ground: no past, no future, just this awful moment of pain and confusion.

  I struggled towards consciousness and reality. It was hard to do, like coming out of anaesthetic, with everything garbled and a long way away.

  ‘You’ve got a nasty head wound, mate,’ said my companion.

  I was in the back of an ambulance. ‘Brian? Is that you?’ That was what I intended to say, but when I tried to make the words, all I could hear were peculiar noises.

  ‘You’re alive. Welcome back to life.’

  ‘What happened?’ I tried. ‘After he hit me?’ But again, although I knew what I was meaning to say, the way it came out was another series of groaning noises.

  ‘He pissed off in your car, we think,’ said Brian, trying to second guess my concerns. ‘Probably passed him coming down on the way up here. He could be in Sydney by the time we get you sorted out.’

  But that wasn’t right. In vain, I tried to formulate the words. The prohibited item.

  ‘His grandmother’s okay,’ said Brian, thinking that was my concern. ‘She’s in another ambulance on her way to hospital. He’d whacked her hard too. Little bastard.’

  Little bastard. That’s what his father had called him when we spoke in another world, another time.

  ‘No,’ I tried to say. ‘No, that’s not right. He’s got my baton. And the handgun if he finds it.’

  ‘Take it easy, Jack. You’re not making much sense.’

  Then my line to the world dropped out again and the fear in my mind and the strange sounds I was trying to make swirled away.

  Next, I was being hauled upright to sit swaying on the edge of one of those green fake leather examination tables in Casualty at Woden Hospital. ‘Just a couple of stitches,’ said the young resident, who looked younger than Jacinta. ‘You’ll feel a little prick—from the local.’ She smiled at her wordplay.

  I looked around. ‘The police officer who was here. The one in the ambulance. Where is he?’ Relief. I could speak again and the words came out reasonably well.

  ‘Hold still, please,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to ask someone at the desk.’

  I blinked. I couldn’t really leave right now, dragging this young woman and her sewing kit behind me, leading her with my stitches. I fumbled for my mobile.

  ‘Plea
se,’ she said, quite sharply. ‘You can’t be seriously trying to make a phone call while I’m attending to a bad laceration on your scalp.’

  ‘They’re after the wrong man,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to tell someone.’

  Then the local anaesthetic must have hit the spot, and the young resident must have misjudged the dosage given my frail state, because I heard her yell for someone to come and help hold me and her voice came from a long distance while I vanished down the wrong end of a black vortex.

  ‘I want to keep you here for observation,’ she was saying as I came back. This time, I was flat on my back. ‘Just overnight. We need to watch injuries like these. You could have a slow bleed in there, between your brain and your skull. I want to send you down to X-ray if you can walk.’

  ‘I’ve got to get out,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to make a phone call.’

  This time, I was able to sit up and dig my mobile out. I called Brian.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t Damien who killed Tianna. And I know who 17/2000 is.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Brian’s voice. ‘You’re not making any sense, mate.’

  ‘Come and pick me up. But first, go to my office and bring the reconstructed skull from the top of my filing cabinet. Take great care of her. She’s very precious.’

  ‘Jack. Take it easy. You’ve got a head injury.’

  ‘So did she. So did Tianna. Listen to me. This is what happened.’

  I told him about the break-in at Alana’s place and the tartan rug in her car with its dusty particles and tools. ‘If you test them, particularly the tyre brace,’ I suggested, ‘you might find it has granite particles on it. As well as trace blood residue.’ I told him that my car could provide a mini-armoury. I told him about the baton and fudged a bit about the prohibited item. And most of all, I told him about the moment when the three noisy Sydney cops had turned the corner and started walking past us while Earl Richardson and I stood in the doorway of my office.