by Anne Buist
‘You guys didn’t encourage the arsehole reporter did you?’ she asked Damian.
‘Hardly.’
‘I’m sorry, just…I know Chloe’s got to be dead but somehow…it would be nice to find her one way or another.’
‘We followed up on what you said.’
Natalie frowned. ‘What?’
‘The morning.’ Damian’s tone suggested a degree of respect; one she had yet to win from Liam regarding her involvement on the case.
‘And?’
There was a pause. ‘She said she couldn’t remember. That she got her mornings mixed up, that it was all the meds, that she was bombed out and maybe she hadn’t even given Chloe breakfast.’
‘And Travis had?’
‘No. It was clearly bullshit.’
‘And you’re thinking what?’
‘She was scared. Told us Travis has been hounding her to go home to him.’
‘So,’ said Natalie slowly, ‘you still thinking she’s covering up for Travis?’
‘Yes. We’re putting the screws on. She’ll crack soon.’
Georgia arrived flustered and on edge, dressed in a slimline pink and black tracksuit ensemble. On the way to the gym, presumably. Rather than sitting down, she walked to the window and stared out. Natalie tried not to let her frustration show. There were too many unanswered questions and even if she asked them she couldn’t be sure the response would be genuine. How to even attempt therapy when she was still struggling with diagnosis?
‘He sent another card.’
‘Paul?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he say anything on this one?’
‘No. I mean, yes. A message.’
‘Why don’t you sit down and tell me about it.’
Georgia turned around, putting her hands in the pockets of her jacket, head down.
‘He doesn’t write anything,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t want to incriminate himself.’
‘So the message was conveyed how?’
Georgia looked up. She sighed, walked over and sat in the armchair opposite Natalie.
‘I told you he was attentive. We had an extremely close relationship. He always made me feel special. Right from the start he sent me bunny cards.’
For once Natalie was grateful for the medication slowing her thoughts. It took a few moments to formulate a neutral response. ‘Why bunny cards?’
Georgia shrugged.
‘What was the message this card gave then?’
‘The last one was an Easter one. Just meant he was thinking about me, knew I’d been released, knew where I was.’
‘What about this one?’
Georgia picked up her bag. Hands shaking slightly, she pulled out a card and handed it to Natalie.
It was blank: no printed or handwritten message. The picture was a scene from what looked like an eighteenth-century painting. A hunter with a shotgun in one hand and three dead rabbits in the other.
Natalie struggled to concentrate for the rest of the day. Was she seeing connections that didn’t exist? Rabbits were commonplace, including on mass-produced greeting cards. She shifted her attention to trying to make sense of Georgia. Was this the Amber nightmare all over again? Or was Georgia working an angle, responding to conscious or unconscious prompts from the lawyer? Even if Paul was toxic to Georgia, already vulnerable from her background, would it matter in court? Would Natalie even be allowed to mention it? Just what did Jacqueline Barrett think would be ‘helpful’?
She looked at her appointment book, counting down the time before she could leave. Tiphanie’s parents had an appointment for Wednesday, but it was the message stuck to the page that drew her attention.
‘From Liam O’Shea,’ Beverley informed her. Please direct any questions re the Chloe Hardy case to my colleague Carol Karnell.
‘What do I make of the cards?’ Natalie wasn’t sitting. Holding her glass in one hand, she paced around Declan’s office, knowing she needed to demonstrate that she was well and not quite able to achieve it. ‘I left a message with Paul and his lawyer got back to me and said bugger off. So all I have to go on is secondhand information.’
Declan viewed her with his usual level of calm. ‘Look at it as a fascinating array of possibilities,’ he said.
Natalie paused. ‘Such as?’
‘My dear, there is a fundamental problem here.’ He paused and in the silence made it clear she needed to sit down. How did he do that? She sat down.
‘You are being seduced,’ Declan explained. ‘By the dark side.’
Natalie suppressed a laugh, a picture of Liam naked in bed flashing into her thoughts.
‘By that,’ Declan continued, ‘I don’t mean the criminal element of your patients. I mean the law.’
Now he had her attention.
Declan leaned forward, hands as expressive as his face and voice. ‘In law, everything is black and white. You think the decision is between good and evil, but it is a far more basic duality. Win, lose. Ms Barrett has a client she is representing and she needs to find a way for her to be innocent. She has less interest, if any, in whether she is innocent. A narrative will emerge in court. It may or may not resemble what actually happened but it will be the basis of the judgment.’
‘Fine; I get that sometimes criminals get away with it. But there’s an innocent child in all of this. What if Miranda is actually in the care of a murderer?’
Declan shook his head. ‘When you’re my age you will know there are degrees of justice and they don’t always bear much relationship to the truth. We can only do our best.’
‘That’s what we must do isn’t it? Find the truth. Protect the innocent?’
Again Declan shook his head. ‘Truth? You know people can have very different recollections of exactly the same event. We filter our memories, see things as we want to through our own lenses.’
‘I know all that,’ said Natalie, ‘but there’s still facts. Either Georgia and Tiphanie killed their children or they didn’t.’
Declan took a sip of wine. ‘Are you sure it’s that simple? What about intent? Society is often unsympathetic and sees the woman as Medea. Is that really what infanticide is?’
‘Medea,’ said Natalie, trying to remember the Greek classic. ‘Killed her children to save them? Like Andrea Yates?’
‘You’re referring to the Texan woman who drowned her five children during a psychotic episode?’
‘She believed she was saving them from the devil.’
‘Let it never be said that I have left my children for my foes to trample on. But I suspect Euripides had a lawyer’s mind, not a physician’s. Medea killed her children to punish her husband.’
‘That’s usually more the male thing,’ said Natalie. The classic murder–suicide associated with family breakdown: sporadic weekend access and new de facto replacing the father in the home. If I can’t have them, nor will you. ‘I don’t think that fits most of the cases I see.’ It could fit this one, though.
‘Think about Amber Hardy,’ said Decla
n.
Natalie started at the mention of Amber’s name. He couldn’t possibly know that she had seen Amber, could he? She willed herself to calmness, not breaking eye contact.
‘She was technically responsible.’ Natalie was starting to feel weary with the angst of these women and the weight of their cases. ‘Certainly guilty from a legal point of view.’
‘As far as we know. But was Travis innocent?’
‘No. Most definitely not. He’s a weak bully. Leeches his strength from those more vulnerable. She did it for him as much as if it had been his hand, yet he got off scot free. She didn’t do it out of vengeance.’
‘No,’ agreed Declan. He was looking at her carefully. Natalie looked away. ‘I wonder what he then takes with him through the rest of his life. Into other relationships.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Natalie.’ There was a warning edge to Declan’s tone.
‘Yes?’ said Natalie willing herself to stand up, not able to meet his eyes.
‘Take your medication.’
Natalie didn’t bother with the speed limit. Her mind was ahead of her, already wondering if someone would be outside her house. She cut the Ducati’s engine half a block before she got there. The street loomed before her, eerily silent, the shadows holding nothing but a couple of cats that were as startled as she was when they leapt off a bin and sent it teetering and falling, rubbish spilling out across the road. Her doors and windows were intact. The new locks were un-breached. She went back, got the bike and resolved to put aside the niggling anxiety. She wasn’t paranoid, she told herself. She was normal, felt fine. Maybe he’d achieved what he wanted, getting under her skin, and now would give up.
She didn’t believe it. She was alone and isolated. The cops couldn’t help her without her telling them everything, and even then she had more faith in her own abilities. She knew she could call Tom but hated the weakness that would impute. Declan couldn’t be told the whole story; Liam had ditched her as too much trouble. There was only her, at the end of the day, same as always. She looked at her pills. Thought of the green and gold filaments and Declan, and took the full dose. But it wasn’t enough to stop the wind across the rooftops interrupting her sleep.
Chapter 17
Tiphanie’s parents were fifteen minutes early for their appointment. Natalie watched them from the doorway, wondering why they were there. To help Tiphanie? To help them deal with the loss of their grandchild? Or to defend themselves?
Sandra Murchison was probably mid-forties. She looked uncomfortable in a brown jacket and skirt that didn’t fit. Her hand went under the waist band to try and ease the squeeze, exposing the pantyhose beneath. She made a striking contrast with Beverley, who today was in a spectacular leopard-skin pantsuit.
Her husband, Jim, looked equally lost. Long skinny legs, a beer-gut and rounded shoulders, jeans with shirt half tucked in and a sense that life weighed heavily on him.
‘She spells her daughter’s name with a ph,’ said Beverley to Natalie in a loud whisper. ‘And an ie. I’m surprised there isn’t an h in Sandra.’
Natalie met their smiles as she introduced herself, and hoped they didn’t think she was laughing at Beverley’s take on bogan spelling. The Murchison’s smiles were markers of a social code that stipulated politeness to doctors you didn’t want to see and a pretence that all was well, no matter how bad things actually were. Australian country folk at their stoic best. Through a decade of drought, the men had done what they always did, not asking for help, drowning their sorrows at the local pub. And in epidemic numbers ending their lives with a rope or a gun.
They wanted to come in together, which was fine by Natalie, at least to begin with.
‘Things must be pretty difficult,’ said Natalie.
‘Impossible,’ Sandra replied, sitting on the edge of the chair. ‘This has been going on for over two months now. We’re all under enormous pressure and the police seem to be no closer to finding our Chloe.’
Our. Interesting.
‘Poor Tiph’s beside herself,’ Jim added, patting his wife’s hand. She didn’t seem to notice.
‘If they’d listened to me none of this would have happened.’
Jim looked like he had heard this spiel before. ‘Now, Sandra, we don’t know—’
‘Yes, we do. As much as the police and probably more.’ Sandra was unstoppable and Jim gave up trying. ‘Travis is a piece of shit and his friends are no better. Do you know he got thrown out of school?’
Natalie tried to look neutral. ‘So you think Travis was somehow responsible for Chloe’s disappearance?’
‘Of course. Him or his dim-witted mates.’
‘This would be…the night before?’
‘Yes,’ said Sandra. ‘Last I saw her before all this, Tiphanie was exhausted. I’d lay bets that Travis took Chloe with him to his mate’s place.’
Natalie frowned. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘Because he had before. Not that I thought it was a good idea, mind. He usually made Tiphanie drop him and pick him up so he and his mates could drink. And when Travis said jump she’d ask how high.’
‘This night Tiphanie was home in bed.’
Sandra made a dismissive gesture with her hand. ‘As I said, just before all this she was behaving like one child was too hard to manage. As if.’
‘Now Sandy that isn’t—’ said Jim. Andie’s Mr Beige.
‘We need to be honest here,’ Sandra said. ‘Tiphanie has always avoided arguments and doing the hard yards. The pills for instance.’
Natalie didn’t think taking medication for an illness was an easy way out but this wasn’t the moment to defend Tiphanie nor to explain a possible depressive disorder.
‘So tell me about Tiphanie,’ said Natalie. ‘What was she like as a child?’
‘Tiphanie was the baby and always spoilt.’ If there was any motherly love underpinning Sandra’s words, it wasn’t apparent. ‘She was a cute kid, don’t get me wrong, but being cute she thought she could get things easily. Her teachers liked her, always gave her good marks and she thought that made her special. They encouraged her to do Japanese for God’s sake. By correspondence.’ She sniffed loudly. ‘What use was that going to be to her?’ Glancing at her husband she added, ‘Had him around her little finger.’
‘Jeez, Sandra,’ said Jim, ‘she liked helping out at the service station, that’s all.’
Probably to escape her mother.
‘What about her brothers and sisters?’
‘Kiara is twenty-seven. She was always looking out for Tiphanie, you know, at school and the like.’ Kiara, according to Andie, was Sandra’s daughter, not Jim’s.
‘She’s a nurse,’ Jim added, straightening up in the chair. ‘Works on the children’s ward at the base hospital.’
‘Married?’
‘She lives at home with us,’ said Sandra.
‘And your son?’
‘William has cerebral palsy,’ said Sandra. ‘He needs around-the-clock care.’
‘Sandra’s wonderful with him, but it’s not always easy,’ Jim added. ‘The girls do what they can.’
Sandra sniffed. ‘Kiara does. She was helping when I went into premature labour with him and no one else was around.’ The look at Jim was unmistakable: Sandra blamed him for whatever had gone wrong with their son.
Natalie drew her thoughts back to Kiara. Kiara with the bruises in the school change room. ‘Did she rebel at all as a teenager, Kiara?’
‘Just the usual. We got that under control pretty quickly.’
‘Did you believe in smacking in your family?’
‘There were rules and consequences. The girls knew what happened if they played up.’
Rules and consequences were important, but for healthy development there had to be an underpinning of unconditional love. Tiphanie had tried to find the love she craved by escaping, but lurched, as so often happened, from one abusive relationship to another—in this case from her mother to Travis. Maybe Travis’s weakness had reminded her initially of her father’s passivity. Instead, Tiphanie’s low self-esteem had been fuel for Travis’s abuse. If Tiphanie had been like her mother, perhaps Travis would have become like her father.
‘What I’d like to do now,’ said Natalie, ‘is to ask Jim to step outside. Then after speaking to you, Sandra, have a word with him alone.’ Before Sandra could object, Natalie continued, voice firm. ‘I can see how much you want to protect each other and I want you both to be able to be blunt.’
Sandra’s jaw slackened. Jim patted her hand then made a dash.
‘Tiphanie needs to start taking some responsibility for herself.’ Sandra had recovered. ‘She left once before, you know; at fifteen I caught her reading filthy magazines. Well, not in my house. I had enough of that from the deadbeats my mother used to bring home.’
‘What did you do?’
‘More like what did Tiphanie do. She went to stay with Jim’s mother. Took her Cleos with her.’
Cleo? Jesus, the male centrefold wore a fig leaf. Natalie found it hard not to stare in disbelief. Sandra should have seen what Natalie had been reading—and doing—at fifteen. Her own mother had hung in there despite her disapproval of Eoin, nights out drinking and a request from one headmistress to remove her because ‘she didn’t fit in with the values of the school community’. It sounded like Sandra, reacting against the negatives of her own troubled childhood, had taken it way too far in the other direction.