by Ron Elliott
‘No.’
‘Here’s what’s going to happen. The police will question you, not getting very far because of your Martian defence. You’ll be in prison, no longer watched very closely and you will get a cigarette lighter from another inmate. Maybe he gives it to you, most likely you will steal it, possibly during a violence done to you. Prison is not a good place for Martians either. Maybe an inmate will trade you lighter fluid or petrol. They might give it to you just for the fun of it and you will set yourself alight in a locked prison cell. You will die in immense pain.’
Iris was less than a metre from him.
He looked into her eyes. ‘Good.’ He smiled, a nasty, twisted sneer. His eyes blinked rapidly and started to roll back, and close. He bent at the knees, sliding down the wall under the window.
Iris grabbed him by a shoulder. ‘James, why? Why would it be good? What did you do?’
James was gone. He sat against the wall on his haunches, his arms around his legs, his stare far away. He wasn’t smiling now. He wasn’t crying. He didn’t seem to be thinking anything. He didn’t seem to be anywhere.
*
Iris found a metred carpark a block from the practice. She thought she might be able to write Frank’s report on James before seeing her patients. Outside the practice, she stopped to prop her work satchel on a brick fence, rummaging inside until she found the files for the day’s patients. She must have put them in the night before when she reviewed, although she couldn’t remember. Frank was right. Going back on the sedatives was a bad idea. She’d pushed James too far, too fast. Now he was no help to the investigation, although probably he never was.
Helen shouted from behind the downstairs reception, ‘Iris! Stop.’
Iris turned, not two steps up, to see her reaching for a telephone. Other office women behind her actually stood to look over the reception counter. ‘She’s here.’
‘I have clients, Helen.’
Patricia came from her own office. ‘I need to see you, now. Immediately.’
Patricia wore a bright dress, white with lots of orangey ochre dots.
She came up the steps and took Iris’s elbow, pulling her, somewhat gently, down the stairs towards her office.
Iris said, ‘Patricia, can we do this later? I have clients to prepare for.’
‘Your phone is off.’
‘Yes, I was interviewing. At Fieldhaven.’
Patricia led Iris into her office, closed the door. The indigenous themes were here too. African artefacts. Mayan spherical calendars. Aboriginal paintings. When Patricia trekked she never came back empty-handed.
‘Rodney Fitzmorris.’
‘Biara Prison, yes.’
Patricia held Iris’s left shoulder, firmly, almost tenderly. ‘He took his own life last night.’
‘Oh.’
Patricia’s earrings were green boomerangs. A deep green not necessarily occurring anywhere in Australia, unless on a frog. Iris wanted to voice a protest about the earrings. She couldn’t put her finger on it, yet there was something politically incorrect about them.
‘You visited him yesterday?’
‘I’d have to check my notes.’
‘He put in three calls to you.’
‘I wasn’t picking up.’
Iris regarded Patricia, suddenly appreciating the implications.
‘I think I called an “at risk” watch on him.’
‘You think you did.’
‘I’d have to think about it.’
‘Notes.’
‘I’d have to look.’
‘You didn’t diarise everything?’
‘I hope so, but things have been on the fly lately.’
Patricia sat, grave.
‘They’re sure it was suicide?’ asked Iris. ‘He’d been outed as a paedophile a day or so ago. He thought he was in for a bashing.’
‘Locked cell. It looks like he choked on his towel. A coronial inquest will be held, as you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘You will need to prepare. Your contact. Any actions you took or didn’t take. Conversations.’
‘Yes, I know the drill.’
‘He was a human being, Iris.’
‘Yes, Patricia. I know. I was trying to treat him.’
‘Do you need to see Frank? Do you have family members you trust who can give you support?’ Patricia was no longer pretending. She was box-ticking for an imaginary Occupational Health and Safety audit.
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
‘Take next week.’
‘I don’t need a week, Patricia. I can prepare for an inquest in a few hours.’
‘Take the week. I want you to consider your place here. If it’s what you really want. I know this might seem like bad timing, but I can’t get hold of you, here or via telephone or email. I have concerns about Dr Chew’s patients.’
‘I have a fullish calendar.’
‘Not many of them are Irene’s anymore. The narrative therapy presents as particularly perfunctory in many instances.’
‘How …?’
‘I was forced to look through the patient files with Mary. When I couldn’t get you to participate in audits or reply to my meeting requests. Or telephone calls.’
‘Not so confidential.’
‘You know they are not. This is a practice. Our practice. We see ourselves as a team. I appreciate the timing is appalling.’
‘Bad things do coalesce around me, don’t they? Bit of a lightning rod.’
‘Yes.’
‘So, suspended?’
‘Leave.’
‘Your office, or the practice, or take some?’ Iris couldn’t help it.
‘I’ve moved today’s patients. As soon as I heard about Rodney Fitzmorris. I thought you’d be too upset to work today.’
Chapter ten
Iris drove to the Emergency Services complex. She’d never actually worked in the new building, having gone into private practice before they moved, but she had visited regularly, especially during a contract to advise on firefighter recruiting.
She found a parking spot outside and searched her purse for change.
Rodney Fitzmorris. What should she have done differently? She certainly should have sent him to prison. Might she have been more encouraging? About what? Perhaps she shouldn’t have taken him on. He might have done better with a male psychologist or social worker who was not so determined to change him, merely to get him through his jail term. Of course he would attempt to change her mind, mitigate the testimony, exaggerate the recovery, overturn the charges.
James. She should not have pushed James. That was criminal. It was unhelpful, to James, to Frank and the police investigation. Iris was obdurately refusing to face her own issues while pushing James into his. In whose name? By whose ego? Her tunnel vision made her a highly effective fool.
Georgina. Damn. Georgina burning in the upstairs window.
Iris went to the parking metre, started feeding in coins, getting rid of her small change first.
Iris had been angry with her. Georgina had been embezzling Iris for all of the five years she’d been working for her. An accountant uncovered Georgina’s ‘extra tax’, which had grown after the first year to twenty-five per cent of profits, on top of her wage. Iris didn’t need the money, but found the betrayal immense. They’d shared confidences, Georgina anyway. Iris confronted her that morning, which was difficult, because Georgina, from the start, reminded Iris of her mother. Iris had trouble with older women; red flags, roadblocks, blind spots. Gravel on the shoulder. During the confrontation Georgina stressed the primacy of her needs. I’ve told you about my sick mother. You know my son is having trouble getting work. You know he’s got a child. By the time she’d added her car repairs and a new carpet, Iris chose to leave the office. Angry.
It was conceivable, thought Iris, only now considering it, Georgina might have lit the fire which engulfed the office, the office records, Georgina, and Bradley Williams. It was unlikely, but had a twisted logical p
ossibility. She might have been covering her tracks, about to leave when Williams arrived with his shotgun.
As Frank and many others kept insisting, a psychologist cannot continually analyse everyone they know. It’s an undergraduate’s annoying trick, the continual categorisation of friends and colleagues. It’s poisonous to relationships. It is also mostly beside the point. Georgina might have cultivated a self-image of superior need, the crutch entitling her to redistribute another’s unfairly gotten gains to the more deserving. The meanness of spirit, the mild chip on the shoulder, the tendency to whinge about personal problems, were not criminal offences. Iris suspected Georgina had regarded her practice as quackery, her prominence no more than successful deception. Georgina was a tough cookie. Even if recommended for treatment, she would never have gone. Iris was not even sure she would have reported Georgina to the police, although she should have. She was sure she was about to fire her. Terminate her. Sack her.
Iris might have allowed Georgina to rip her off. This could have been Iris’s fault, but she did not cause Georgina. On the other hand, Iris felt she did cause Bradley Williams.
Iris performed many contracts for government departments after she left the Fire and Rescue Service to enter private practice. She profiled firelighters for the police, fire services and for legal teams. She testified, often amidst press as the Fire Lady. She was, ironically, finally able to treat firefighters for post-traumatic stress disorder.
It was around the time Rosemarie went from primary school to high school. The patient visits were lowering the tone of the house, according to Mathew and also, rather mysteriously, the planning folk from the shire council. Iris hired Georgina, secretary, bookkeeper and office manager extraordinaire, and moved into a modest office on the second floor of a small suburban shopping complex. Downstairs was a chemist, a video store, a vegetable market and hairdressers. At the rear, external stairs led to an outside walkway and four offices on the second floor. There was an accountant, a denture builder, a somewhat shady importer, and Iris. Iris Foster, Psychologist it said on the outer door. Inside, there were a couple of chairs, Georgina’s desk, a persistently failing fish tank and lots of files. Iris’s office beyond was far from chic. There was a couch and two very comfy chairs. Iris’s desk was against the wall. If she stood, she could look out of security mesh onto an intersection with two petrol stations and a cake decorator.
The firefighters and fire service, who were her main customers, clearly preferred the lack of femininity, the absence of charm. She guessed it felt vaguely like a temporary crib room. When Iris worked for lawyers including Mathew or the DPP, she met them at their better appointed digs in the city.
At the time one of Iris’s new clients was the community cousin of Fire and Rescue, the Volunteer Fire Brigades. Their problem was that a couple of the volunteer firefighters were starting the fires they fought. Many men and women volunteered to protect their own properties and their neighbours’, especially in country areas where distance and fuel loads increased the vulnerability to fire. The Volunteer Fire Brigades were noted for their structured training and camaraderie as well as community respect.
Worldwide investigations, however, began to show a dangerous subgroup of volunteers, the Exciters and the Groupies. Fire-fighting can be exciting. Being around people including the police and professional firefighters is also gratifying, as Iris well knew. What better place to view fire than at the battlefront. So, when home life was slow and emotionally unrewarding, a small percentage of volunteers lit the fires themselves. Occasionally, the fire got out of hand, was not so easily quelled and property was destroyed, people died.
Iris adapted a composite of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Raymond Cattell’s 16 Personality Factors and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter questionnaires, adding questions of her own. As in everything she did, however, she also used her own instincts in interviews to weed out the most obvious firelighters in the volunteer ranks.
Bradley Williams was twenty-three years old, single, employed as a forklift driver, had not finished high school, suffered from low self-esteem. He was firmly in the zone of the profile. He was also depressed, lonely. The volunteer fire service provided one of the few affirmations in his life. It meant activity and comradeship. It was his life. He also exhibited a mild personality disorder, a low-level persecution complex, which by itself should not have ruled him out of serving. The personal interview, after the questionnaire, drew Bradley to Iris’s attention. The questions in the questionnaire upset him. ‘What’s all the questions about how often I go to the toilet? I mean we all think about it, when we go, but what’s wrong with that? What are they meant to find out?’ ‘What’s the right magazine to read? If I say stick magazines, I’m a perve. It’s normal. Isn’t it? I’m not answering questions about my sex life. It’s an invasion. It’s all an invasion.’ ‘Anger. It’s another question about anger. It’s natural?’ Iris had trouble reassuring him. She had trouble getting him to move on from the questionnaire and into the live interview. ‘I know you, you’re the woman who loves fires, hates men. You’re going to fuck with me, aren’t you?’
Ironically, Iris didn’t target him for removal from his brigade. She believed Bradley when he insisted, swore, he’d never lit a fire since being a volunteer. He had, of course, when he was a child. She encouraged him to get help with his depression, to do things about his image of himself. Her report suggested Bradley Williams needed to be monitored but not ousted. If given treatment and special supervision he might well remain a very good, particularly devoted firefighter. He certainly believed strongly in his responsibilities to his fellow volunteers and the esteem from his community. It could have been seen as win-win. The Volunteer Fire Brigade played it safe, however, terminating his services.
Bradley must have come to Iris’s office while Iris was at the petrol station getting the coffee. It was later found that Bradley Williams was armed with his farmer father’s shotgun, stolen the day before. According to the fire investigators, he must have locked Georgina in Iris’s office before setting fire to the place. He must have bought petrol in the can found in the charred debris. A falling beam probably knocked him out before he perished. No shots were fired.
Iris watched the fire from the carpark below the offices. The fire spread with particular speed. The ceiling panels were especially volatile, made of a plastic compound outlawed years before. It burned as a yellow flame tinged with blue. It was estimated ignition until flashover was no more than three minutes. It was a fast fire. A conflagration. Three minutes would not have passed quickly for those inside. Not for Georgina as she appeared at the security grilled window; trapped, feeling the heat coming, breathing the toxic fumes from burning office furniture. Iris saw her hair catch alight.
A man was talking to her. He looked vaguely familiar.
‘The green button, Mrs Foster.’
‘Ross?’
It was a chief superintendent Iris had once worked with. He pointed to the parking metre in front of Iris.
Iris turned and pushed the green button where she’d loaded enough coins for seven hours parking. The coins fell heavily.
‘Welcome back,’ said the chief superintendent.
Iris put the parking ticket on her dash, then went straight up to the Fire Investigation and Analysis Unit offices. The messy desks were mostly empty. A young man was listening on a landline at the back. He glanced at her briefly, so she gave a wave. Iris saw the operations room was open. The man on the phone was writing with one hand, holding the phone to his ear with the other.
Tables had been pushed together in the centre of the operations room to form an island covered with file boxes, manila folders and hard drives. Pin-up boards and whiteboards covered the walls. They were papered and scrawled with the information, lines of inquiry. There were headings like cause, incendiary device, motive. Lists of guesses and facts were printed in a variety of marker colours underneath. Question marks, circlings, underlinings, arrows crisscrossed,
the product of officers writing as they talked, an investigation in progress. On one board were photographs of the burnt-out appliances, the closer one charred and melted in parts; the further one bent and torn. A mud map marking body positions was taped on. So were aerial photographs of the school grounds, of the crater, parched grass, torn bitumen where the gymnasium had been. There were photographs of the piles of bricks. Close-ups of the burn patterns on the bricks.
Iris went closer to read a report. The incendiary was diethyl ether, confirmed by lab reports. Someone had written the word source? Two detectives’ names were attached.
On another board was a list of interview subject headings clustered around motive. Iris read through the list: school students, teachers/workers, nutters, terrorist groups, extortion, other, with names of police officers next to each.
Some boards were assigned to the different contributing investigators: coronial investigators, Arson Squad, the Fire Investigations and Analysis Unit, local detectives, federal. There were names, mobile numbers, internal extension numbers, tasks to do written next to these headings. It was a breakdown of tasks and lines of communication for a rapidly assembled multi-agency taskforce. Superintendent Richards was high on the tree.
On another board there was a picture of James with Frank’s name, his mobile number attached. Comments were appended on James as a suspect. Unlikely, they suggested. awaiting report – iris foster.
On another board was the word zorro. Koch, his phone number written under. A smiley face had been drawn in blue.
Iris moved to a large board of drawings and photographs. They’d been rebuilding the fire scene, piece by piece, adding speculations to the evidence. She studied photographs from underneath the stage. There was an urn with burnt-out thermostat, close-ups of the charring and ignition area. There were photographs of the zed burn pattern Charles Koch talked of. More photographs showed sections of PVC pipe leading to a sealed area under the sprung wooden court. A drawing that seemed partly speculative joined the photographs so the point of origin appeared to be the urn. Zed patterns led towards the PVC. They’d drawn the pipes leading under the floor where they’d drawn packs marked de – secondary load. Someone had written gymnastic mats??? A dotted line led to a photograph of the truck on the oval, under which was scrawled secondary electronic ignition source. There were a series of photographs of a release pin in the truck passenger door. A mobile telephone. A list of potential electronic ignition devices likely to have ignited the ether.