by Berry, Tony
DEATH BY DIAMONDS
Tony Berry
© Tony Berry 2017
Tony Berry has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2017.
Table of Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
FORTY-SIX
ONE
THE gardens are a small and secret place, known to very few locals and rarely stumbled upon by strangers. They are dotted by tall alien trees and hemmed in on three sides by a low hedge of deep green shrubs. Instead of grass there is an uneven surface of bluestone pavers, relics of the suburb’s glory days as a thriving industrial hodgepodge of factories, tanneries and breweries.
The woman was alone in the gardens, seated placidly on a metal bench beside a small ornamental pond. She seemed mesmerised by a continuous flow of water streaming from the sculptured cherub poised on a moss-covered plinth in the centre of the pond. She took no notice of the birds scrabbling at her feet for the crumbs of the lunchtime muesli bar she had dusted from her skirt. One hand listlessly fondled the furry white shape nestled at her side. The unexpected balmy warmth of the springtime day was making her drowsy and listless but she dared not risk nodding asleep. There were other places to go, appointments to keep. Today was a milestone; an end and a beginning. For a few seconds, however, she briefly lost the battle against the drowsiness. Her eyes closed.
The man seized the moment. He took three rapid strides in from the garden’s iron gate and snatched the ball of fluff squeezed hard up against the woman’s hip, one hand throttling hard around the dog’s neck, the other drawing a long, thin blade from his waistband and slashing viciously into the animal’s belly.
The woman pushed up off the bench, her mouth open wide to let loose a scream that never came, arms stretching out to the dog, now being dangled high out of reach by her assailant. The man slashed again, severing head from body, oblivious to the woman, confident her petite frame and light weight were no match for his height and bulk. He tossed the dog’s head into the pond and plunged the blade into its body, carving a single neat incision along its length before dangling it centimetres from the woman’s outstretched arms.
His frenzy stopped as suddenly as it had begun. As the woman later recalled, all the man’s power and rage seemed to evaporate. He looked bewildered. It was like a balloon being pricked, she said. He appeared deflated and confused. The woman shrunk away from him. Her assailant continued staring at the ripped open pile of limp fleece as he calmly folded his blade back into his waistband. Briefly he looked at the woman. She remembered his eyes as light blue, glazed and watery, like some pale icy drink. Chilling. Sparse hair receded on either side of a widow’s peak. There was a dark blue T-shirt showing under a grey V-neck jumper. She recalled him as wearing jeans and light tan desert boots that scuffed up gravel as he ran. His voice surprised her with its gentleness, and by its accent. Germanic, she thought.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Wrong fucking dog. Bloody things all look the same. They’re everywhere, all over the place.’
The ice-blue eyes focused on her frightened face. He raised one hand to his chin, fingers clenched except for a single unfolded digit pressing against his lip. He loomed over her.
‘Shush,’ he said. ‘Don’t even think of opening that pretty little mouth. Say nothing. Not now, not later. Stay safe and tell no one.’
He departed even faster than he had arrived, running through the iron gate and out into the street beyond. The woman spun round in his direction and took a few tentative steps as if to follow. She shouted after him in a thin soprano voice that carried no threat. ‘You’re a monster. You should be locked up.’
No one heard. She was alone and the man had gone. Her words bounced into the high brick wall shielding the garden’s northern edge, lost and ineffective.
She sank back on to the bench, the shock of the past few minutes suddenly hitting home. She looked at the dog’s head bobbing among the leaves on the pond, rippled by the cupid’s stream of water. Its body lay at her feet.
She decided there was nothing she could do. The remains could stay there. Someone would be along to sweep up the leaves and empty the litter bins. They could take care of it. Her problem would be explaining the dog’s disappearance – and finding the time and money to buy a replacement.
TWO
THE woman’s five-minute walk back to the office passed in a blur.
She was unaware of the lunchtime crush of people on Bridge Road, with its footpath narrowed by the intrusion of an endless line of café chairs and tables. Idling shoppers bumped and nudged her but she was oblivious. She stepped on to the road to avoid a woman aggressively trundling twin girls in a double stroller and the blast of a motorist’s horn briefly startled her out of her daze. As always, she glanced up to check the town hall clock high on its glowing white tower, the Australian flag fluttering at the top of its mast and the Aboriginal flag standing out above the portico. Today the time showing on the clock’s face failed to register. Her head was overflowing with visions of the man slashing at the dog’s life-like form.
The woman turned down a narrow side street and pushed through the wooden front door of a low brick building identified only by a small brass plaque etched with the words “Global Products and Marketing”. She walked down the corridor into her cubicle, speaking neither to Natalie Cordoza glaring at her from the front desk nor to her fellow sales consultants whose heads were visible above the sound-absorbing partitions. She sat motionless, staring at papers on her desk. Her distress was obvious yet it made the other women wary. Tamsyn Chong was the quietest member of their team and the one who revealed least about her life beyond work. To venture into her space might be taken as an intrusion; going where they were not wanted.
Natalie took the initiative. She picked up a couple of folders from her in-tray and used them as a quickly contrived excuse to slide quietly into the woman’s workspace. Tamsyn Chong looked up, a slight frown creasing the otherwise smooth skin between her thinly plucked eyebrows. Natalie noted her watery eyes, awash with tears not yet fully formed.
‘What’s wrong, Tam? What’s happened?’
Tamsyn plucked a tissue from a box on her desk. She wiped her eyes, sniffed and dabbed at her nose.
‘Nothing. I’ll be fine. Just had a bit of a shock, that’s all.’
Natalie placed the folders gingerly on the desktop. She stayed and said nothing. Her presence and her silence were asking the questions for
her, urging Tamsyn to expand beyond what was already obvious. Tamsyn continued to resist the unspoken demand for more information. The demonic look and threatening words of the man in the garden dominated her thoughts. She shuddered. Her voice emerged as a whisper.
‘Leave it Nat,’ she said. ‘Please. I can’t talk about it.’
‘Oh.’
Natalie bridled and smoothed a tight black skirt over long slim hips. Again the silence hung between them. Tamsyn reached for the folders.
‘Are these for me? I didn’t expect to be working on my last afternoon but they’ll give me something to do. Take my mind off it.’
Natalie stood her ground. Her stolid presence and long silences demanded answers. As office manager she maintained it was not only her duty to know what her staff was up to, but also her right. She stepped closer to the desk and lowered her voice. It had the hacking timbre of a lifelong pack-a-day addict.
‘It’s the dog, isn’t it? You’ve lost it, haven’t you?’
Tamsyn stared down at the folders, looking but not seeing. She took a deep breath to still the quiver in her voice.
‘It’s dead.’
Natalie’s reaction almost achieved the impossible – a silent screech. Then words tumbled out, rasped and rough at the edges, the volume down but the intensity at top pitch. Anger in a whisper. The words were for Tamsyn alone. Natalie could sense the other women straining in their cubicles to hear every word. For once her tantrums were not for sharing.
‘Dead? Dead? What do you mean, dead? It’s a bloody fluffy toy we gave you as a going-away present because you can’t have the real thing in that flat of yours. That’s why I suggested you take it for a walk on your lunch break and—’
She came to an abrupt stop, a juggernaut out of gas. Tamsyn looked at her, aghast, shaken by the outburst, puzzled by the aggression, hurt by Natalie’s lack of sympathy. This wasn’t how she had envisaged spending her last day at Global. There was a rigid formula for such occasions: a cake for morning tea; a collection for a gift; and a card signed with weak witticisms. Later there would be the formal handing over of keys and security pass and an after-work gathering for drinks in the back bar at Dargo’s.
Everyone had enjoyed the cake – a spongy high mound of chocolate and cream from the bakery in the Plaza. The frail and ageing man they knew only as “The Boss” had emerged grudgingly from an upstairs room to utter a few barely sincere words of farewell to this staff member he hardly knew, and Natalie and the girls had laughed and giggled at the presentation of the card and the fluffy white dog.
The dog was no surprise. There were boxes of them in the warehouse out the back. They were sent to all customers whose order for the parent company’s pills and potions exceeded a hundred dollars. But it was what Tamsyn wanted. She didn’t care if Natalie had simply taken one out of stock or put it through the books at a heavily discounted price: she valued it immensely. It was the nearest she could get to what she cherished most. So many girls of her background and generation were accompanied by small white dogs. She pined after them in the street, watched them cuddling them on their laps, toting them in their shoulder bags. She yearned to have a bichon frise or a lhasa apso as a loyal companion. Her second choice would be a spitz or bolognese terrier. Even a highland white would suffice. She knew them all, had pictures in books and on the walls of her apartment where the real live version was strictly banned. She had never understood the landlord’s attitude to dogs and couldn’t even attribute it to a difference between his Western and her Asian culture. All landlords were the same. ‘Dogmatic,’ said one of the girls, but Tamsyn didn’t get the joke.
‘Where is it?’
Natalie’s curt question shattered Tamsyn’s reverie. At first she didn’t understand.
‘Where’s what?’
‘The dog.’
‘In the park. In the pond.’
‘What were you doing in the park? I thought I told you to go to Domo’s and take the dog with you.’
Tamsyn shrugged her shoulders and frowned. Natalie’s questioning puzzled her. It was insistent, demanding. Of course Natalie had told her to go Domo’s, even suggested there would be people there wanting to stroke and admire her new friend. She thought it slightly odd at the time, patronising even; but that was Natalie’s way - always commanding, domineering, claiming she knew what was best. Tamsyn felt as if she had disobeyed orders rather than taken a break for lunch. She was being put on the defensive.
‘It was too nice a day to be indoors. Domo’s was crowded. I got a takeaway. Lots of people were. The park was lovely and quiet. Until …’
Her voice trailed off. She resisted going into detail. It was too close to reality. The toy was too life-like. The incident too fresh in her mind. Yet it was only a toy and she struggled to understand Natalie’s outburst. There was no concern for the fright she’d had; only anger over the dog. Natalie leaned into her, expelling peppermint fumes from the pastels she sucked to disguise her nicotine breath.
‘Until what?’
‘A man grabbed it, slashed it—’
Tamsyn sobbed at the memory. Her head drooped forward, her brow resting on her palms, her elbows propped on the desk. Natalie waited as the sobbing eased. Her voice suddenly softened.
‘I think we’d better keep this to ourselves. You must have had a shock, Tam. Say nothing more about it.’
Tamsyn was surprised by Natalie’s shift in tone. She tried to adjust. The show of concern was more welcome than her earlier anger but too confusing. She replayed Natalie’s words. They echoed those of her attacker. She looked up at Natalie.
‘Say nothing,’ she repeated. ‘That’s what the man said. He told me to keep quiet.’
‘Yes, well he would, wouldn’t he? He doesn’t want the police getting on to him.’
‘Perhaps you could tell the police, Nat, then it won’t come from me.’
‘Yes, perhaps I could. Probably a waste of time though.’
Natalie turned to leave the cubicle, again smoothing her skirt’s tightly stretched linen. She patted a few errant strands of her precision-cut brown hair back into place. She oozed complacency. Tamsyn felt abandoned by her sudden lack of concern, unable to cope with the past hour’s whirlpool of emotion. She willed herself to speak.
‘Natalie, you must do something. He said it was the wrong dog. Seemed to think it was real. That could mean someone’s pet could be in danger.’
Natalie looked back at Tamsyn. She allowed a brief smile to cross her face, highlighting the furrows a thick layer of make-up had failed to fill.
‘God, Tam, you really are weird. Get it into your head, it’s a bloody toy. Stop fretting. I’ll take care of it.’
Her smile faded as quickly as it had appeared. Her lips curled down, eyes narrowed.
‘It’s not the dog you’ve got to worry about.’
THREE
BROMO Perkins wondered what the hell eight down could be. He looked around the tram. No one else had the paper open at the crossword. Fellow puzzlers were in short supply. Passengers’ preference was to plug their ears with headphones, gaze blankly into the distance and let the aural senses be bombarded with endless music. He felt he’d been trapped into riding the Zombie Shuttle on a jerky stop-start journey into a land of torpor and listlessness. No one spoke, no one smiled or even looked at those around them.
He consoled himself with the thought it wasn’t always like this. Often he caught the Number 75 during the day when the hordes of shoppers were out and about, or when there was footy at the MCG, and would be embraced by a mobile party full of chatter and chiacking. It was then that community lived and the iPod could go to hell.
But not tonight. They’d hardly left the Spring Street stop on the city fringe when Bromo decided his 20 or so fellow passengers riding the last tram out to the suburbs were welded by a common denominator. All were at the end of a long day and wearied by work, study or booze. Not a spark of life or interest glimmered among them. The tram driver announced each stop over t
he intercom but no one seemed to be listening even though tonight the information could be understood. Her voice was strong and clear. Not like those of the linguistically challenged imports who spoke in Chinglish or the thick rapid notes of the sub-continent and made each stop a conundrum. Yet why complain about their poor pronunciation? At least they were willing to do a shit job that brought more abuse in a day than their passengers would expect in a year.
Bromo wished he’d left the after-party when Liz decided to go. At least he would have had some lively conversation on the journey home. She announced she’d decided on an early night just as a waiter topped up his glass. Why waste a good red – or even one of the Arts Centre’s mediocre bulk-buys? Liz noted his hesitation, gave him a peck on the check and said: ‘Give me a call sometime.’
He’d certainly do that. Liz Shapcott sent his libido soaring every time their paths crossed. Which wasn’t often enough for his liking and too often in the past it had happened in strained circumstances. Yet there was hope. Tonight she had invited him. And that was a first. A spare ticket, she said. His reaction was to assume he was second best, an also ran to some other lucky sod. What the hell, it was one step in the right direction. Liz’s reasoning had been that he should get out more. So much truth in a trite phrase. Put some culture back into your life, she added. Maybe even more truth. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone to the theatre solely for the pleasure it brought.
Bromo had one stop to go. He gave a final look at eight down: ‘Goodman right! Speaks for the arrogant walkers’. Of the nine letters, he had filled in five and still couldn’t work it out. He put the paper to one side, leaving it on the seat. Maybe someone further down the line would pick up the challenge. They had all the way to East Burwood to think about it.
The tram juddered to a stop at the intersection. Bromo waited for the doors to open and bent in towards the driver’s cabin.
‘Thanks a lot. Goodnight.’
She smiled back, eyes deeply shadowed, grateful for any positive words. A shift-worker’s weary face. Bromo stepped down into the road. A low white saloon whooshed past, centimetres from his left foot, forcing him back against the tram as the car accelerated through traffic lights turning from yellow to red. Bromo gave a two-finger salute and yelled uselessly at its tail-light, illuminating the yellow licence plate of a New South Wales vehicle.