by Jean Bedford
She pushed his hands away. ‘Don’t joke about it, Mick. It’s a no-joke area for me. And if you’re even half serious, I don’t want to know, OK?’ She shifted over and got out of bed.
‘Where’re you going? You’re not really pissed off, are you?’ He heaved himself up on the pillows, comically anxious with his hair tufted and untidy.
‘A bit,’ she said. Jesus, Mick, don’t you take me seriously at all? What I do? The scum I deal with every day?’
‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘I was trying to communicate something to you, something about understanding the dark impulses. Perhaps it was tactless.’
‘Just a little. Keep your dark impulses to yourself in future, mate.’ She gave him a light kiss on the forehead as she passed. ‘How much did that haircut cost?’ She rumpled it further. ‘You’re not a bad bloke, for a bloke, Mick. Just remember all blokes are always on probation.’
‘Well, where are you going? It’s Friday, I thought you were doing the weekend shift.’ He patted inaccurately at his head.
‘I told Noel I’d go with her to meet Tony Voulas.’
‘Who’s Tony Voulas? Oh, I know, yeah, the cop who arrested Farrell. Why are you getting involved?’
‘I don’t know that I am. I’ve met Tony, and she wanted to talk to him. And ... I don’t know. I’m starting to think something smells about it, too.’
‘Think you’ll get bumped up to detective if you solve a real-life mystery, do you?’
She paused in the doorway, grinning at him. ‘More likely to get traffic duty if they find out about it. That’s why I arranged it for my day off.’
‘Well don’t take all the hot water — I’m due in court at ten.’
She punched two fingers into the air at him and twisted them slowly.
He lay listening to the shower running, thanking his stars he hadn’t said all of what he was thinking. He accepted, uncomfortably, that her body excited him partly because it was so small and childlike. It was a hypothetical excitement, he thought, the idea of forbidden fruits hovering somewhere. He felt like a giant beside her, and sometimes while they were making love he’d picture it in his mind, his physical bulk and her fragility, and there’d be some almost unconscious frisson of his potential power over her which would send him mindlessly into spiralling orgasm. ‘They that have the power to hurt, yet do none,’ he thought, half remembering some Shakespeare from school. He had a feeling there was something wrong with that, though — wasn’t that the one that ended with something like lilies smelling more rank than weeds? This was the sort of thing he could have discussed in detail with Fran, he thought. She’d always been fascinated by his sexual fantasies, though he’d never known if they turned her on. Sometimes he’d felt as if he was like a tame case study for her — she was much more interested in analysing their sex than actually doing it. He wondered, without much real interest, how she was. He’d overheard Carly and Rosa talking about her at the picnic and it had surprised him. He hadn’t thought she’d kept up with any of the old crowd.
‘Come on Mr Bigshot Lawyer. Get in the shower and I’ll put the coffee on.’
He stood up and put his arms around her. ‘I love you, you know. I would never hurt you.’
‘OK.’ Her smile was puzzled. She gave him a quick kiss and started to get dressed.
*
Tony Voulas lived in a yellow-brick block of flats in Ashfield, several streets back from the highway, but the noise of heavy traffic was continuous. He had his windows open, seemingly impervious to the racket outside, and though it was a cool morning he was dressed in a thin T-shirt and shorts. Noel thought he looked more like a footballer than a cop, with the athlete’s bull neck and sloping powerful shoulders. He offered them coffee and she and Sharon sat on the vinyl couch while he made it.
‘I wonder who his interior designer is,’ Noel whispered, looking at the sparsely furnished room. Apart from the couch and a matching armchair, there were only a television, video and music complex on a rickety veneered table. He’d obviously made no effort to receive visitors; a pair of balled up socks lay on the floor beside a damp-looking towel, and his breakfast plate, covered in crumbs, sat on the television. There were also crumbs caught in the meagre pile of the generic brown carpet.
‘Proves he’s honest,’ Sharon said in her normal voice. ‘And hardworking. Got no time or money for homemaking.’
Noel lifted an eyebrow. ‘Pardonme’ she said.
‘So,’ Voulas said, coming in with cups and a carton of milk on a tin tray. ‘You’ve been listening to old Albie Spinks, have you? Shit, I forgot the sugar.’ He went back into the kitchen and returned with a plastic bowl.
Sharon spooned sugar into her coffee and took a sip. ‘Tastes like the crap they have at the station,’ she said. Voulas ignored her and lit a cigarette before sitting in the armchair. He looked at Noel.
‘He does seem to have a point,’ she said. ‘He told me he talked to you about it, you and Detective Reston, but you weren’t interested.’
‘Oh, we were interested,’ he said. ‘It just went nowhere. Theory, supposition, what-ifs. We already had Farrell by the balls. Even the mother baulked at giving him an alibi for the night the kid went missing. Silly as she is, even she stuck at him killing her daughter.’
‘Wheredid he say he was that night?’
‘He said he was out looking for the little girl until three a.m. This was after the mother denied he was with her all evening, which was his first story.’ He pointed his cigarette at her. ‘You can’t use any of this, you know, it’s sub judice.’
‘Yes, I know. I just want to get it straight. What about the physical evidence? No anomalies?’
He made a snorting noise. ‘Anomalies — now I know you’ve been talking to Albert. There’salways anomalies. Always. There’s always stuff that isn’t cut and dried, stuff we never quite figure out. The perps tell you lies, for a start, that confuses the issue.’
Noel sat forward. ‘Would you tell me what the ... anomalies are here? I promise it’s off the record.’
He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. ‘I might as well. I wouldn’t be talking to you at all except Shar says you’re OK, so she’s responsible for what use you make of it. Understood?’
‘Yes. If I fuck you over, Sharon gets the blame.’
‘She gets the big shove.’ He looked at Sharon and she shrugged. ‘OK. We can’t put the whole chain of events together as neatly as we might like. We’ve got the kid going missing about tea-time, sixish, and the guy doesn’t get home from work till six-thirty. We’ve got him placed at work until six, and it takes him at least half an hour to get home to Glebe. Train and bus. We timed it — that plays. He gets home and finds the mother in hysterics because she can’t find Belinda. Around seven he goes out in the car to look for her. So he says.’ He took a long mouthful of coffee.
‘So, we reckon he either found her wandering around and just leapt at the opportunity, or he’d planned it. Told the kid to meet him somewhere and he’d pick her up. But he won’t admit to either. Says he was driving around, stopping at parks and playgrounds and calling her name and so on.’
‘Did he visit anyone’s place, Belinda’s friends?’
‘She didn’t have any friends, not like that. She wasn’t at school yet — only just turned five, and they kept her close to home. The mother’d already been to the neighbours. And that’s another little story on its own, too, what the neighbours had to say.’
‘What?’ Noel was starting to like him; he had a good narrative style. She thought he’d be convincing in court.
‘Apparently when the mother went out she’d lock the little girl in her room, but she used to escape, and she’d wander around to this wine bar a couple of streets away where she knew some of the regulars. They’d usually buy her a raspberry lemonade and some peanuts and then send her home. But she had other haunts, too. The fish and chip shop for one. On the night in question she hadn’t been seen in any of her usual refuges.’
‘Had she been locked in that afternoon?’
‘The mother wouldn’t admit it, but I think so. She didn’t know the kid could get out. It tends us to the prearranged meeting scenario.’
‘And the physical evidence? There’s no doubt about any of it?’ She was aware of Sharon frowning at her.
‘Nope. Not a skerrick. There’s more than we let out to the media, too.’ He gave her a stare and she nodded. ‘Traces of blood in the kitchen drain at his flat, for a start, Belinda’s blood.’
‘Well, what about what Albert Spinks says? The actual killing?’
He looked up at the ceiling, remembering the details. ‘Yeah. Manually strangled to unconsciousness. Raped anally and vaginally with a wooden object, nature unknown, then apparently raped again bodily by a penis wearing a condom — traces of the lubricant, no semen. Laceration and bleeding apparently from the aforesaid unknown wooden object, splinters likewise. Then strangled to death with a rope and dumped half naked in a vacant lot. Panties found in a plastic bag in Farrell’s garage.’
Noel thought for a while. ‘He was pretty careless, wasn’t he? I mean apart from Albert’sanomalies — the fact that there’d been no evidence of a condom or bodily rape before, only with objects, and the strangling was new, too; he’d usually just punched her around a bit, hadn’t he? But even apart from that, he doesn’t seem to have made much of an effort to cover his tracks.’
Voulas lit another cigarette. Noel felt herself twitching to take one, and she watched it go to his mouth and his sensuous inhalation. He caught her stare and smiled slightly. ‘Can’t smoke on duty any more,’ he said, ‘so I chain smoke the rest of the time. Does it bother you?’
‘Only because I lust after them,’ she said. ‘Two years and I could be back to two packets a day any second.’
‘Nah,’ he said seriously. ‘Don’t do it. It’s a bitch.’
Sharon finally spoke. Noel had been aware of her silence, her reluctance to question a superior officer. ‘Hewas careless, though,’ she said. ‘It is a bit strange.’
‘Perhaps,’ Voulas considered it. ‘But they get arrogant. Look, he’s been abusing that kiddie for years and getting away with it; never bothered to cover his tracks much before, why think this time’ll be any different? Dumb cops, wife’ll give him an alibi, that’d be how he was thinking. Plenty of time to get rid of the incriminating evidence. Except this time the wife jacked up.’
Noel hesitated before replying. He had relaxed, he was talking to them like a friend, she didn’t want to push him back to being hostile. ‘Well,’ she said,‘did you think of looking back through the files for the same MO with some other child? Just in case.’
‘No,’ he said flatly and she sighed. ‘We’ve got a good case, there’s no point in wasting time and manpower on Albert fucking Spinks’ magical mystery tour. Now, is that everything? I’ve got to go to work.’ He stood up, not very politely.
The women stood, too, and Sharon mumbled a thank you. Noel put out her hand and he shook it after staring at it for a moment. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I think you’re probably right, but I’m still going to look into it a bit more. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘I can’t stop you,’ he said.
‘No, but you could make it hard for me to find out things.’
‘No,’ he said, serious again. ‘I wouldn’t do that. Listen, if we’ve got the wrong guy, I’d want to be the first to know. Will you keep me informed if youdo find out anything relevant? Not that I think you will.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ She wondered what Rafferty would say to this deal, but she realised she liked the idea of an excuse to contact Tony Voulas again.
He came downstairs with them to the front entrance. When they were halfway across the street he called out to Noel and she walked back, wondering if he had forgotten something important to tell her. Sharon waited on the kerb.
‘Yes?’ she said, when she reached him. He looked embarrassed.
‘Uh ... would you like to go out one night? Or are you married or something?’
‘No,’ she said, then hastily as she saw he’d misunderstood, ‘No, I’m not married — or anything. I’d like to.’ She gave him her card.
When she got back across the road Sharon said, ‘What are you looking so smug about? Oh Jesus, he didn’t ask you for a date, did he?’ She started laughing and laughed all the way back to the car, but she wouldn’t say why.
*
Noel came up the steps to her flat after work, grinning and shaking her head as she remembered this morning’s expedition. Sharon had finally told her that Tony Voulas’ nickname round the cop shop was Shagga, and that he put the hard word on every presentable female he came into contact with.
‘You, too?’ Noel had asked her.
‘Nah. He doesn’t try it on with women who are already attached. But, go for it, Noel. You might be the one ...’
They’d said goodbye in a mood of hilarity, and female solidarity, too, Noel thought now. Nothing like it. Still, she thought she probably would go if Voulas asked her out. She wasn’t looking for a committed relationship, and she was forewarned. She fumbled in her bag for her key, and saw Paddy coming from the flight above.
‘Off to the workface?’
‘Yeah. Bastard, aint it?’ He grinned and shambled away down the stairs. ‘Catch you tomorrow,’ he called back.
She kicked off her shoes when she got inside and opened the fridge. There was some curried mince in a bowl and some cooked rice in the freezer — that’d do. She poured herself a glass of wine and wished she had some cigarettes. She lay back in the armchair and let her mind go blank. When the doorbell rang she was almost asleep.
The woman on the step was familiar but she couldn’t immediately place her. ‘Yes?’
‘You’re Noel, aren’t you? We met at the picnic. I’m Carly Brandt.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Noel hid her surprise. The scarlet woman, Sharon had called her, and explained about Tom and ... Rose? Rosa. She couldn’t imagine what she was doing here.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I was looking for Paddy. He’s not answering his bell, and then I remembered you were in this block, too. So I checked the nameplates downstairs.’
‘No, he’s gone to work. He sometimes does nights.’ Noel realised she was blocking the doorway in what might be thought an unwelcoming way. ‘Come in. Do you want to write him a note or something?’
‘Yes, I could do that, couldn’t I? Can you let me have some paper? And a pen ... I didn’t come very well prepared.’
She followed Noel into the living room. ‘Sit down,’ Noel said, shrugging herself out of her antisocial mood. Would you like a drink? As you can see I’ve started.’
‘Love one. What a great room.’ Carly stared around her in genuine appreciation.
‘I’ve only got riesling, so there’s no point in offering you a choice.’ Noel gave her a glass.
‘These flats are so ... well, awful, really, on the outside. They both laughed. ‘I never would have thought you had these views.’
‘The landlord’s an original,’ Noel said. ‘He thinks if he keeps the block looking really seedy and downmarket outside, the break-in merchants’ll stay away.’ She looked round her sparely but expensively furnished flat, with its huge window that gave a vista through the city skyscrapers to glimpses of the Domain gardens and the harbour.
‘And do they?’ Carly sipped at her drink.
Noel laughed. ‘Yeah. So I suppose he’s not so crazy. He charges a fortune in rent, though.’
‘How does Paddy afford it, I wonder?’
Noel gave her a sharp look. She didn’t appear to mean it bitchily. ‘He doubles as caretaker. I suppose he gets a discount.’
‘Is that what he does as his work? I’d lost touch with him until that picnic. I hadn’t been to one for years. You get older, and you realise your friends are slipping away ...’
‘You were all at university together, weren’t you?’ It was hard to believe that Carly was
as old as Mick and Paddy and the others.
‘Well, I dropped out after first year, and did my nursing training. But we kept in touch in those days. And of course, I lived with Tom for a few years. Do you know Tom?’
‘No. I only really know Paddy, and Sharon.’
‘Oh yes, Sharon.’ Carly smiled. ‘Very different from Mick’s ex-wife, Fran. She’s a psychiatrist.’ Carly finished her drink and put the glass on a coffee table.
‘I’ll get you something to write with,’ Noel said. She found a pen and some paper. Carly scribbled, then folded the paper over.
‘Thanks. Whatdoes Paddy do these days?’
‘Goes to the gym.’ Noel laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t know, a bit of this and a bit of that. He takes night watchman jobs, caretaker jobs, bartending jobs — they never seem to last very long. Were you good friends?’
Carly smiled. ‘We were all good friends, then.’ She stood up. ‘Paddy was considered brilliant, before he ...’ She hesitated. ‘Has he told you anything about that?’
‘His breakdown? Yeah, a bit.’
‘Yes, it was terrible. Shock therapy was very fashionable in those days. They almost turned him into a zombie. They certainly ruined him as an intellectual. Anyway, thanks a lot.’ Noel went with her to the door and watched her out of sight as she ran up the stairs.
Strange woman, Noel thought as she put the frying pan on the stove and heated oil for her curried rissoles. She remembered Tom’s wife, Rosa, clearly now, and wondered why he had gone back to her. Carly was so stunningly beautiful it was hard to imagine any man leaving her. She poured herself another glass of wine and put water on to boil for the rice. Useless to ask Sharon about it — she didn’t seem to know how to have a proper gossip. She yawned. She’d forget about the article tonight, she thought. Go to bed with a detective novel and have an early one. But all the time she was eating her dinner she was niggling at the possibility of getting hold of police records that might show an identical MO to the Belinda Carey murder.
‘What is it that you suspect? That he’s a homosexual?’ Fran’s voice was, as usual, disinterested, and she sat half turned away, her eyes fixed unseeing on the window.