by Tara Moss
‘Jimmy, Mak left. She was gone when I got back. She said she’d be gone, but…I didn’t think she’d really do it.’
Skata.
‘Oh mate, that sucks dogs’ balls.’
In Jimmy’s eyes, Makedde Vanderwall was pretty cool for a chick. Plus she was a former Sports Illustrated cover model, for godsake. But she was a handful. Andy seemed only to like the stubborn ones. His ex-wife, Cassandra, had been full of fire, too. Theirs had been a tumultuous relationship, to say the least. And Jimmy had thought he and his wife had some serious fights.
‘I’ll be round to drop my bag off in a few hours,’ Andy explained. ‘Thanks, mate. I’m driving…I gotta get off the phone.’
‘Yeah, it won’t do for the police to pull you over. See you when you get here.’
Jimmy hung up and frowned. They’d split again? It seemed like yesterday that the two were in love all over again, and she was moving to Canberra to set up house with him.
Jimmy resumed interest in his Mars bar and before long it was nothing but a sticky wrapper. Rhys had been drinking some energy drink, and he chucked the empty can in the bin. He was the type who liked to spend time in the gym. He liked getting ‘ripped’. Jimmy didn’t understand him. They drove the two blocks to the O’Connor house, and Jimmy felt especially heavy as they walked up the drive. He was worried about Andy, and he was almost as worried about this death knock.
After several raps on the door, they were faced with a scowling woman in her late thirties. Her hair was askew, and a bit greasy through a grey part. She stood her ground in the doorway, a cigarette dangling from her lower lip. ‘Whaddya want?’
‘Are you Madeline O’Connor?’
‘Who’s askin’?’ When she spoke, the cigarette wiggled slightly. Her arms were crossed, and a deep crease divided her forehead into hemispheres.
Skata. ‘I’m Detective Cassimatis, and this is Detective Morrison,’ Jimmy explained with an unusual level of patience. ‘May we come in?’
‘I’ve already spoken with you guys.’
She had.
‘There has been a development. We’d like to come in, Mrs O’Connor.’
At this the woman stepped back from the door, and gestured down a hallway towards a small kitchen. She moved past them and pulled a chair out for herself with a screech, sat and leaned heavily on her elbows. An ashtray made a pungent centrepiece on the table, and she tapped her cigarette against the rim, building a greater pile of grey ash. With thinly veiled hostility, she waited for what they had to say. Rhys and Jimmy pulled chairs out for themselves and sat down.
‘I’m afraid we’ve got some bad news, Mrs O’Connor,’ Jimmy said.
This was the part he hated the most. The look on people’s faces when they first discovered that their husbands/wives/children / parents would never be coming home again.
Mrs O’Connor put her cigarette out, crushing it in the ashtray, where it joined its discarded twins, twisted like white corpses in the ash.
‘Your husband, Warwick O’Connor, is dead. We are sorry for your loss.’
Madeline swallowed. Her lip trembled slightly. ‘When?’ she asked. Her hand reached out for the crumpled cigarette, and then retreated.
‘His body was discovered in his burned-out vehicle,’ Rhys said, joining in. ‘He was identified yesterday from dental records.’
‘In his car? That was him in his car this whole time?’ she cried.
Her husband’s burned-out car had been discovered seven months earlier in a massive shipping yard. They had been able to establish ownership through the serial numbers and registration, but the badly burned and decomposed human remains found in the trunk could not be so easily identified. The only hope had been a dental match on the corpse’s teeth. As Mr O’Connor was missing, and it was reasonable to fear that it might be his body in the car, the match should have been made months earlier. However, O’Connor’s teeth had been inexplicably ‘misplaced’ for over six months. Jimmy had no idea how.
‘That body! It took you seven months to find out it was my honey! Seven fucking months!’ she screamed, enraged. Her eyes bulged, moist and on the edge of tears.
‘We do apologise, Mrs O’Connor. We understand this must be difficult for you—’
‘Difficult! He was murdered and you took seven months to identify him!’
Her words hung in the air.
‘In these circumstances, a positive identification can take a great deal of time.’
Jimmy had seen the car, and the charred corpse in the trunk. What remained of Mr O’Connor could probably fit in Mrs O’Connor’s ashtray. His eyes drifted to the smouldering mess, and, seeing images of burned bone fragments and teeth, he quickly looked away. She wouldn’t need to cremate him.
‘We are sorry for your loss, Mrs O’Connor,’ he repeated.
Her husband had been no hero. The police knew of Warwick O’Connor long before his burned-out car—and corpse—turned up. He had been a run-of-the-mill thug. And around the time of his disappearance he had been implicated in the violent stabbing of a young woman named Meaghan Wallace. But now he was dead, and his wife was understandably angry about the circumstances of his identification.
‘Fucking pigs,’ Madeline bellowed.
Nice.
Under different circumstances, Jimmy might have snapped back. But he couldn’t. It was a death knock so he was on extra-good behaviour, something somewhat foreign to him.
‘Is there perhaps someone you could call?’ Rhys suggested. ‘Any friends or family who might be able to come over—’
‘Fuck off, pigs!’ she screamed. ‘Get out of my house!’
‘We’ll leave you to your grieving, Mrs O’Connor,’Jimmy said, managing a lacquered composure in the face of her insults.
They left the widow cursing and crying into a fresh cigarette.
CHAPTER 6
Andy Flynn sounded like he was standing in a stadium being circled by revved-up monster trucks.
Makedde held her phone to her ear, frowning. She regretted having answered the call, but she could not bear the thought of ignoring him any more. Somewhere she heard diesel brakes. She cupped the phone more tightly.
‘How are you?’ her ex continued, sounding distracted. ‘Look, I’m just near Goulburn.’
‘Um, Goulburn?’ she repeated, not quite masking her alarm.
Goulburn was a small city in south-eastern New South Wales, nestled between Canberra and Sydney. Her ex had no relatives there. Unless some serial killer had recently been busy in Goulburn and he had been sent there to do a profile, there was only one reason Mak could think of for him to be there.
‘I’ll be in Sydney in a couple of hours,’ he confirmed.
Mak’s stomach shrank to a small fist. He was taking a pit stop in Goulburn because he was coming to see her. This would be the confrontation she had been avoiding. ‘I see,’ she replied, trying not to encourage whatever he had in mind. She was not ready to see him, and she knew it. She wanted to settle in first. She wanted to get her strength back.
‘I need time.’
‘We haven’t seen each other in three weeks,’ he snapped back.
There followed an excruciating silence: him not asking to see her, and not asking her to come back, let alone convincing her in some romantic manner that she was mistaken in leaving him. She had become used to silences like those in recent months.
‘I…’ he began, and his voice dissolved into static.
Mak’s ambitious effort to move to Canberra and make a home with her on-and-off lover had been a disaster, by any measure. In the more than five years they’d known each other, it seemed that every time they made a serious commitment it triggered yet another breakdown in communication; he would hit the bottle or bury himself in work even more than usual, or worst of all, they would begin having flat-out hideous fights on a weekly basis. Moving in together in a new city had always been destined to be too much for them. To his credit, Andy had reasons for difficulties with commitment. His wi
fe, Cassandra, had left him, and their bitter divorce battle had been interrupted when she was slain—a murder that in part seemed to be aimed at getting to Andy, who was the profiler tracking the killer responsible for a string of previous violent murders. Mak did not even need to be a psychologist to understand that such things were not easy to get over. For all his brilliant abilities in the field, Andy was riddled with issues of guilt and personal failure. The fact they had launched into their affair shortly before Cassandra was murdered probably did not help things. It was as if their union had been hardwired for problems from inception.
After much soul-searching and one final fight that somehow felt more emotionally devastating than all the other fights combined, Mak had come to the conclusion that their problems weren’t ones she could fix. It simply wasn’t going to work, and she had to get on with her life. It would not be easy at first. She had known that.
And here it was, not being easy.
‘Andy, I thought we agreed that we both needed some time to heal.’ She spoke with a steady voice. The difficulty was that she sensed she still loved him, perhaps even desperately at times. But they simply didn’t work, she reminded herself. She didn’t need to get pulled back into all that tumultuous emotional impossibility. Too much had gone wrong, and she no longer believed it could be made right. The last thing she needed was to see more of him while she was vulnerable and they were both still hurting. It was hard doing the right thing as it was. Already, his attempt to come to see her gave her a dangerous glimmer of hope for some romantic reunion that she didn’t even want. She just needed to stay away from him for a while, until such emotional traps were no longer so potent.
‘…Sydney…you…’ His voice was crackly, his words making no sense.
‘What was that? You’re breaking up,’ she replied, annoyed.
‘The re–p–tion is bad–this stretch–o–road. I—’
The line went dead.
‘Oh come on!’ she shouted to the cramped bedroom, and pocketed her phone, tense. She paced back and forth, feeling ready to punch something.
Don’t get sucked back in…Don’t…
In a week she would feel better. In a month she might even feel okay, she told herself. This feeling is temporary. There was no need to be dramatic. Break-ups were never easy at the best of times, and when exactly was the best of times, anyway? She could easily find more jobs with Marian, and she could probably get herself a date or two if she wanted the distraction. She had things to do. She was thirty, she had her PhD and there were no excuses. For much of the past year she had been foolishly focused on saving the last of their floundering relationship. She was not going to spend any more energy on that losing battle.
Mak resisted the urge to call her ex-lover back.
She had a rental to pick up, and background information to check on her case. That Andy was on his way to Sydney made no difference to that.
Mak had work to do.
It was right on three o’clock as Mak Vanderwall arrived in St Ives, a middle-class suburb on Sydney’s leafy North Shore. She pulled up in a rented dark blue sedan outside a pleasant faux-Tudor two-storey house, the home of Mrs Hart and her missing son. Mak walked towards the house with her full briefcase of tricks.
One of Loulou’s lines came to mind. ‘You are like…Jane Bond!’
Mak did not exactly feel she was living the life of a James—or Jane—Bond. Instead of an arsenal of high-tech gadgets and fast cars, she was prepared for her rather routine assignment with a notepad, compact digital camera, pocket dictaphone, packet of tissues and slimline laptop. Her car was an anodyne rental—thankfully not orange—rather than an Aston Martin. In the movies you never saw a private eye doing paperwork, printing out statements and getting signatures, but that was precisely the sort of thing that took up most of the job. And then there were the exhaustive reports that had to be filed, the tissues to hand to the upset client, the door knocking, the uneventful hours of surveillance. But Mak did have her own tricks. On this occasion she wore carefully chosen smart-casual clothes—a pair of dark jeans, rubber-soled black boots that she could run, jump fences or attend decent restaurants in—a bit like a modern, feminine version of the gum-rubber shoes worn by ‘gumshoe’ detectives of early days—and a lightweight suit jacket she’d had fitted with a small microphone, unobtrusively installed where a button would normally be. This last detail was near enough to the stuff of Bond that she didn’t dare tell Loulou for fear her friend would not be able to stop talking about it. It was a trick she had been told about by an experienced investigator and former undercover cop, Pete Don, who had lectured during her Certificate III course in private investigation. She could ensure her all-important contemporaneous notes were absolutely accurate by transcribing such recordings, but most importantly, if ever there happened to be a debate about her professionalism in handling a particular situation…voilà. Proof of professional conduct, pure and simple. It was a precaution to cover her arse. Recording for that purpose was perfectly legal and acceptable so long as she didn’t broadcast the recordings to anyone else. You never knew when a routine job might turn to trouble.
‘Hart household, first interview,’ she said and gave the date and time for the benefit of her button.
She knocked.
The door of the family home opened, and Mak was met by a woman in her forties, her face crumpled into a sad smile. ‘You must be Macaylay. I’m Glenise Hart.’
The two women shook hands, and Mak felt the hard edge of diamonds on the woman’s fingers. Her baubles were the size of small doorknobs. By now Mrs Hart’s eyes were moving speedily over her, measuring her up as she stood in the doorway, a stranger. Perhaps Mak did not fit her image of a private investigator, or perhaps this woman wanted to know at a glance that she had hired someone capable of bringing her son home safely. Adam Hart’s mother was a fair few inches shorter than Mak and wore a pair of light pleated slacks and a brown, round-necked shirt with a simple gold pendant. Her hair was cut politician-short, her smooth skin ruddy from the summer heat. Mak imagined her face would be pleasant under normal circumstances, but now tension bubbled behind the eyes. It was clear she had not been sleeping well. According to the file, she was a widow, and worked as a teacher. That was a lot of bling for a teacher.
‘Thank you so much for coming. Please come in, Macaylay,’ the woman politely murmured.
Mak smiled, ignoring the mispronunciation, pleased that she had passed the first test. She handed Mrs Hart one of Marian’s business cards as she stepped inside.
Although Mak was only really interested in one room of the house—Adam’s bedroom—she smiled graciously throughout a tour of the ground level of the home and yard. Mrs Hart was clearly houseproud, and everything appeared very tidy and well kept. The tour ended in the living room near the front door, where Mak was invited to sit alone with her briefcase on a loveseat. Mrs Hart sat opposite her on one end of a long, empty couch. A low coffee table separated them.
‘Would you like some tea, Macaylay?’
‘I’m fine, thank you. Actually, my name is pronounced Ma-kay-dee,’ Mak said, gently correcting her. ‘But you can call me Mak if you prefer.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘Please don’t be. I get it all the time. Actually, I don’t know what my parents were thinking, giving me a name like that.’ Mak smiled broadly, which seemed to help her client relax. She took out her notepad and placed it on the coffee table. ‘Glenise…may I call you Glenise?’
A nod.
‘I know you’ve been through a lot in the past week, and you may have gone over most of this with the police already, but it would be very helpful for me to hear your view of what’s happened. Please don’t leave any detail out.’
Glenise took a breath and sat forward. ‘Well, I guess you know that my son, Adam, has disappeared,’ she began, her voice strained, as if the mere mention of the subject made her throat close up. ‘I don’t know what could have happened. I am really concerned.’
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br /> ‘I understand. Can you tell me a bit about yourself to begin with?’ Mak prodded, encouraging her. This sometimes made for an easier entry than the problem at hand.
However, her client’s first statement was anything but light.
‘My husband, John, was an accountant. He was killed at work. He hailed from London originally…’ The woman spoke in a rush, as if to get her wretched story out of the way as fast as possible.
Mak’s eyebrows went up. ‘Oh, I am sorry for your loss.’
‘You might well ask how an accountant dies at work,’ Glenise continued. ‘Well, he fell thirty-four floors down the elevator shaft. It was stuck between floors for over an hour, and rather than wait he squeezed himself out of a tiny gap and jumped to the lower floor, which would have been fine except that he fell backwards into the shaft, and…’ She trailed off. ‘That was two years ago.’
‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ Mak repeated, temporarily stumped. And your son has been acting out since?
Thinking again of those diamonds, Mak guessed there had been a substantial pay-out.
Now widowed and single, her son, along with her teaching career, appeared to be Mrs Hart’s whole world. Though an adult at nineteen, Adam was described by her as a ‘good boy’, upstanding and pure. She painted a suspiciously simple picture of an innocent, thoughtful son, inexplicably missing.
‘We are very close,’ she insisted. ‘He did not run away. He didn’t,’ she repeated. To her, this seemed to be an important point—that he had not abandoned her. Mak was sure that the police would already have suggested the possibility to her, to be met, no doubt, with the same firm denials. ‘The police said they can’t do much until someone hears something from him, but what if he’s out there somewhere needing my help?’ Her eyes clouded with pain and bewilderment.
When citizens are not satisfied with what the law is doing, or able to do, private investigation agencies like Marian’s often come into the picture, Mak reflected. The predicament was more common than people realised, until they themselves became somehow embroiled in trauma. Mak knew she would probably do the same were she in this woman’s position. Despite having a respected cop for a father, her faith in the law was limited. As it was with many of the police officers she knew. Mak suspected she too would insist that her child was faultless in his or her own disappearance, that everything was utterly normal and harmonious except for this one sudden, unexpected incident, and that the police were not doing enough. None of these assertions was necessarily true, however. And Makedde had to disregard such statements in favour of facts, none of which she had yet ascertained.