Worse than Death (Anna Southwood Mysteries)

by Jean Bedford

  “Could be.” He was clearly unconvinced. “Anyway I certainly can’t talk to you about it now. We’re on different sides. Just keep away from my client, that’s all.”

  I was stung. “Well, she seems to have told Graham a lot more than you’ve got out of her. We might even be able to help you…”

  “Not if you’re working for Rex. My advice is to drop it, Anna. This isn’t a novel — these are real people with real lives getting messed up. You could be one of them, playing games with arseholes like Rex Channing.” He rang off.

  I stared at the phone and then at Graham’s concerned look. “Paul Whitehouse,” I said. “He hung up on me. The arrogant shit.”

  I made coffee and took it out with me into the garden where I sat and stared bleakly over the choppy bay. I wondered if Paul was right — I’d certainly been out of my depth the last few days. I examined my conscience, as the nuns had often told us to do. No, I was serious. I did want to find out what had happened to Beth Channing and I was prepared for wherever that might lead, I thought. I lit a cigarette and tried to bring my mind back to the details of the Channing case. I was just about to go in to talk to Graham when Lorna came bursting through the back door.

  “Anna! You’re safe!” I stood up and we gave each other a big hug.

  “Shit Lorna, I’m sorry,” I said. “They made you drop the story…”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” she said cheerfully. “It’ll keep.”

  “But Graham said they’ve got your files. It’ll take months to build them up again.”

  She grinned. “They think they’ve got them. I’ve still got the duplicates, or at least Paul has. No, that’s all right. I just felt like a real dickhead having to go on air and deny everything. I’ll get them for that, too, don’t worry. Now tell me all about it.”

  She sat on the bench beside me and I went through it all again for her.

  “Birkett, huh?” Lorna said when I had finished. “We can really pin him to this, then.”

  “That’s what’s so puzzling,” I said. “Why did he let me go after I’d seen it was him? And I could identify the others, too, if I saw them again. They must figure that you’ll get back to it, that they haven’t frightened you off for good. And now you’ll have my evidence to back it up. Why didn’t he just kill me?”

  “I don’t know.” Lorna was thoughtful. “They must have some reason to think they can keep us quiet. Or that you can’t prove anything.”

  “Yes. I just remembered Birkett saying something about the alibis being already in place. Still, it’s a risk…”

  “Yeah.” Her vivid blue eyes squinted in concentration. “You know, I reckon I might take a closer look at what Birkett’s doing now. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s thinking of a little overseas trip. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t care. He’ll piss off and take a new identity… Then we can accuse him all we like. He must think Tarno named some names…”

  “Who the hell is Tarno?”

  “This little creep who was picked up in the cells by the public solicitors for possession. He started muttering about the Motor Squad and bent cops and people in high places, then a fancy lawyer appeared and took him away.”

  “Did Paul pass that on to you? Was it connected with Holmes?”

  “Yeah. There’s still a few missing links, but I’ve been getting hints of Birkett being mixed up in that for a while. This more or less proves it. I still don’t think he’s one of the big guys, though.”

  “Who is, then?” I asked. “Rex?”

  Lorna’s smile was ferocious. “Jesus, I hope so. And that we can pin it on him, too. Perhaps Birkett’s gone out on his own over this, but I don’t think so. He’s usually Rex’s boy.”

  I looked at her curiously. “You really hate Rex, don’t you? Why?”

  “Because he’s a creep. I told you in that resume — drugs, under-age prostitution, you name it. Jesus, Anna, what more reason do you need?”

  “I don’t know. He’s become our client.” Her look of shock was almost comical. I wondered if I was going to lose Lorna’s friendship through this, as well. But she laughed and shook her head.

  “Well, make sure he pays you in advance,” she said. “Before I manage to get him.”

  “Lorna,” I said, relieved, “will you come in and talk with me and Graham? I really want to sort out what to do next about Beth Channing.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Why not? Then you can both come and help me with the mail-out of the Rag.”

  *

  But when we went back inside, we found Graham just paying off a taxi at the door and juggling with plastic bags full of take-away containers.

  “It’s after three,” he said cheerfully, “but they sent them anyway.”

  The smell of curry and spices was overwhelming. All I’d had to eat that day was a couple of sweet biscuits. It had been one of those days that seems to last for weeks — impossible to believe that when it began I’d still been kidnapped.

  We fell on the food like locusts, hardly saying a word until it was finished. Then I sat back and lit a cigarette. Lorna hadn’t mentioned my smoking — she smoked so much herself I doubt if she’d even noticed when I’d given up two years before. She looked at her watch.

  “Sorry chaps, I really have to get back,” she said. “But I tell you what — I’ll take over looking into Birkett’s connection with Rex and Holmes. It’s part of what I’m already working on, anyway. Then you two can concentrate on the missing girls. Okay?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thanks, Lorna.”

  “’S’nothing. We’ll liaise. See you.” When she’d gone I got the list I’d made before Paul’s phone call.

  “The Johnsons,” I said. “We need to talk to them. And Joe Kominsky’s mate at the tip. There’s Mr Digrigorio at the cemetery, too.”

  “Well, I can’t really go to Melbourne, love,” Graham said. “I’ve got to be here in case there are any run-throughs before rehearsals start…”

  “Okay,” I said. I thought perhaps an interstate trip might do me good.

  Graham booked me a flight for the next morning and we decided to call it a day. I went upstairs with the cat and got together a travelling bag. I put Haydn’s piano trios on the tape deck and settled down with a fresh bottle of dry white to see if I could drink myself out of the blues and into sleep. I was angry that what Paul Whitehouse thought could affect me so much — after all I hardly knew him, but I’d thought we were becoming friends. Get real, I told myself, you were starting to fancy him, girl. This made me even angrier, and more depressed. Fancying someone who clearly thought you were a meddling nitwit was a dead-end street.

  By the time I’d uncorked the third bottle and was playing the Haydn for perhaps the tenth time I was maudlin. I sat on the couch trying to hold a struggling Toby on my lap, assuring him he was the only one who loved me, the only one I loved. He was so furious with this treatment that when he finally escaped he streaked out onto the balcony and down the bougainvillea to the yard. So I wouldn’t even have the dubious comfort of his large, obtrusive weight on my bed that night. By the time I’d cried myself into false sobriety I was so exhausted that I kicked off my shoes and went to sleep on the couch.

  I woke to find Graham standing over me, blocking the early morning sunlight from the open French windows. My right frontal lobe was throbbing and my mouth felt like the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag.

  “You’ve got half an hour,” he said. “Looks like a great party.”

  I gulped the Berocca cocktail he was holding out to me and while I staggered to the shower and trembled over a handful of Panadols, Graham tidied up the bottles, the overflowing ashtray and the spilled wine. Toby was nowhere around — if he was deeply offended he sometimes stayed away for days.

  “You okay?” Graham said when I finally emerged, grasping my bags. “I must say the green face goes beautifully with your hair.”

  “Shut up,” I said creakily. Going down the stairs was a nightmare; so was the trip to the airpor
t as I suppressed a constant urge to throw up. Graham’s car was back in the workshop so he was taking mine to Windsor to try to trace the Digrigorios. He dropped me outside the Australian Airlines terminal, where my flight was already being called, and I thought of asking for a wheelchair to get me to the departure gate. By the time we were in the air I was fervently praying that the plane would crash and end it all.

  When I got into the taxi at Tullamarine I realised I didn’t have a clue where I was going. Three black coffees and some anti-nausea pills on the plane had cleared the hangover somewhat but I was still shaky. I’d intended to go straight out to Hawthorn, where the Johnsons lived, in the hope that someone would be at home. Now I knew I wasn’t capable of that.

  The cabbie waited patiently.

  “Oh God,” I said. “Just a decent motel. In Carlton or somewhere.” I lit a cigarette as he pulled out.

  “There’s a $200 fine for that in Victoria,” he said, grinning at me in the rear-vision mirror.

  “It’s worth it,” I said. He laughed and lit up a fag himself.

  “Getting as bad as Queensland here now,” he said, and for the rest of the journey he filled me in on conditions in what he referred to as the Wowser State. I half listened and murmured yes and no and really at appropriate intervals, while I tried to work out what I was doing. All I knew was that I needed a bath and something to eat before anything else.

  Melbourne was having one of its rare hot spring days, but the motel room was blessedly dark and cool. I ordered coffee and sandwiches from the restaurant and ran a bath. An hour later I thought I might survive the day and I rang the Johnsons’ number. Mrs Johnson was there and she said she would see me at two o’clock. That gave me a couple of hours to fill in and so I set off to walk down Lygon Street.

  I’ve always liked Melbourne, particularly Carlton, where I used to spend school holidays sometimes with a pair of elderly spinster aunts. I’d hoped they might leave me their little sandstone doll’s house with its formal rose gardens, but of course they’d left it to the nuns. I’d got an astonishingly ugly set of amber jewellery instead.

  It was years since I’d last been in Lygon Street and it had become even trendier than I remembered. Boutiques and shops full of expensive knick-knacks had replaced the old Italian tailors and shoe shops, and Tamani’s, where I was taken by my aunts for hot chocolate on Saturday mornings, had been renamed and its old owners had moved across the road to a large and modern restaurant. But the delicatessens and the shabby coffee lounges where the old men played cards and gossiped over lethally dark coffee were still there. So was Johnny’s Green Room, in a side street, and the Café Sport, I was pleased to see.

  I browsed, bought a silk shirt that would just about break my bankcard and then on a hangover craving went up the cracked lino stairs to the Café Sport for osso bucco. By the time I hailed a cab to take me to Hawthorn I was ready for anything.

  Chapter 9

  The Johnsons’ house was one of the mellow red brick Edwardian mansions that area of Melbourne is famous for. Bay windows curved gracefully away from broad tessellated verandas decorated with wooden fretwork under a mossy slate roof. The lawn was lush and green, and established lilacs and camellias and roses burgeoned in the well-kept garden.

  Carol Johnson, when she came to the stained-glass door, was a small energetic woman in her mid-thirties, with bright brown eyes. She led me into a room where pamphlets and envelopes and lists lay in profusion over all the surfaces. From a window you could see a golf course sweeping away to clumps of trees, like an English nobleman’s park. It seemed a far cry from the cheap suburban sprawl of Liverpool.

  As if she’d sensed what I was thinking, she said, “We’ve done very well here. Frank has his own contracting business now.” She sighed. “He’s got very ambitious.”

  She swept away some leaflets from a chair and apologised.

  “I’m doing a mail-out,” she explained. “I run the newsletter for Parents Of Murdered Children.”

  “Mrs Johnson,” I said, sitting down, “as I said on the phone, I’m investigating the disappearance of Beth Channing. I hope it’s not too painful for you to talk about it, but there are similarities with your own daughter’s case…”

  “Oh, it’s not painful anymore,” she said, perching on the edge of a table. “In the group,” she gestured towards the papers behind her, “we talk a lot about our children. We laugh a lot, too — does that surprise you?” She went on without waiting for an answer. “Grief can be funny, too, you know. But it’s hard for others to understand — in the group we can let our hair down, without worrying about what other people think or expect. Now — what do you want to ask me?” She cocked her head like an intelligent bird.

  “Well,” I began. I was slightly disconcerted by her, she seemed too articulate and bright to have come from the same background as the Kominskys and the Channings.

  “Well,” I said again, “the girls were close friends, I gather? They spent a lot of time together?”

  “Yes,” she said. “They’d played together since Beth was a baby. Kylie was two years older, but they were always together at home. Though,” she said thoughtfully, “they’d started drifting apart a bit before Kylie was killed. You know — Kylie was twelve and starting to get into teenage things and Beth was really still only a little girl at ten.”

  “You’ve got no doubt at all that Kylie’s dead?”

  “No, none. Frank — that’s my husband — still thinks she ran away with someone, that she’s become one of those homeless kids roaming the Cross. We talk about that in the group, too. It’s amazing how many of the fathers refuse to admit their kids are dead.”

  I was startled. “Why would he think that? Had she ever threatened to run away?”

  “No, not really — just in arguments, you know. If we wouldn’t let her go to a party or something like that.” She sighed. “She was a bit precocious, Kylie. I used to think she’d be a real handful later on.”

  I tried to remember the newspaper photos at the time. The same picture had been used in most of the reports — a little girl in school gingham with her hair scraped back into plaits. I asked Carol Johnson if she had any other photos of Kylie.

  “Yes, lots,” she said. “I keep them in a drawer because Frank can’t bear to look at them.”

  She got off the table and went to a grey filing cabinet under the window. She came back with a couple of bulging folders.

  “These were mostly taken when she was about eleven or twelve she said, pushing papers around the desk to make room.

  I stared. Kylie had been nothing like her little dark sparrow of a mother. She was large-boned and blonde, with already noticeable small breasts and a pouting, sensual face. In some of the pictures she’d taken deliberate cheesecake poses, clearly modelled on page three of the Mirror. There were also a few more natural shots of her playing with a dog, and one of her sitting on the railing of the football field with Beth Channing. In these she appeared more like a normal twelve-year-old. In the others she simply looked like what Clyde had called jail bait.

  “She must have taken after her father,” I said lamely. I was starting to think that perhaps Frank Johnson had good reason for what he thought had become of his daughter.

  “Yes,” she said, packing the photos away again. “In more ways than one.” She gave a tolerant smile.

  I waited. I was interested in her background — I liked her and I hoped she would tell me a bit about her life. “You’re different?” I said.

  “It was attraction of opposites, I suppose,” she said. “I’d been educated by the nuns. My parents were migrants from Poland — they both worked at rotten jobs all through our childhood so we could have a better life than theirs. We were taught that hard work got you somewhere.”

  “Which nuns?” I asked with interest.

  “Mercy,” she said and we both laughed. The Sisters of Mercy were one of my first examples of the meaning of the word oxymoron. It explained a lot about Carol Johnson �
� you had to be resilient to survive that.

  “I’d nearly finished training as a nurse when I met Frank,” she said. “He was a shearer then. We had to get married, of course. Then he got a job at the mobile home factory in Liverpool — we lived with my parents for the first couple of years.” She laughed. “I’d never met such an easy-going, lazy, ‘she’ll be right’ sort of person. I found it very attractive.”

  “And now he runs his own business?” I said.

  “Yes. He’s changed since we lost Kylie. I can’t have any more children, you see,” she said simply. “So when Rex offered him the chance, he jumped at it.”

  “Rex? Rex Channing?” Talk about ubiquitous, I thought.

  “Yes. You’re working for him, didn’t you say?”

  “Yes — but how is he involved with your husband’s business?”

  “He can be a kind man, Rex,” she said and I gaped at her. “Oh, I know a lot of people think he’s hard, but he was terrific to us after Kylie disappeared. He organised private search parties after the police had given up, and when it was clear she’d never be found, it was his suggestion that we move away, start a new life. He lent Frank the money.” She made a sad little face. “And now the same thing’s happened to Beth. It’s a cruel life.”

  “You think Beth’s definitely been murdered too, then?”

  “Oh yes. I’ve always thought it would happen again. It’s the usual pattern, you know. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the subject — I want to do counselling eventually. I’ve finished school at Adult Education and now I’m doing Social Work part-time. I want to work with other people in our situation.”

  I looked at her with admiration, but I wondered if perhaps she wasn’t the slightest bit dotty on the subject, too. It was as if she’d found a set of answers that satisfied her and she managed to fit everything into that pattern. Still, I thought, that sort of grief would need something to cling to, something that apparently made sense of random loss.

  “Did you ever think you knew who did it?” I asked.