The Simple Death

by Michael Duffy

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she murmurs.

  Without Stuart, her mother would still be lying in her room, her moans of pain creeping through the empty house.

  ‘Just help someone else when the time comes,’ Stuart says, gently removing her arms and pushing her a safe distance away. ‘Call me if you want to talk about it. What you’ve done is brave and generous, but you’ve taken on a burden too. Sometime you might need to talk.’

  She feels like laughing hysterically. ‘Julie’s not here. She was so good to Mum, gave her five days and refused to accept anything for it.’

  ‘She’s a saint. I suppose she’s working today.’

  ‘When I rang her on the weekend she said she’d come. But yesterday she called to say she had to do something with Carl.’

  ‘They’re very close.’

  ‘Of course. But still. Carl stayed here too.’

  Stuart clears his throat. ‘Everything is fine,’ he says, ‘isn’t it?’

  She thinks of the necklace and realises she does not want to think of it. Lets her grief block it out.

  ‘It is.’

  Someone is hovering, one of her neighbours who is helping with the food. Leila promises the woman she’ll join her in the kitchen in a moment, and turns back to Stuart.

  ‘Could I get the other bottle now?’ he says.

  ‘I gave it to Julie. She said you’d asked her to collect it.’ He blinks. ‘She met me at the airport.’

  ‘Was that wise?’

  They seem to be talking at cross purposes, but Leila is too tired to care.

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ she says. ‘She was very excited.’

  ‘Do you think you could call and ask her to give me the bottle?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘It’s Alecia Parr, she’s just come home for the last time. We’ll be needing it soon.’

  Another death, thinks Leila. One and one make two. Easy as that. Wishes her emotions at this time could be more consistently appropriate.

  ‘Julie told me,’ she says. ‘You’re sure she didn’t give you the bottle?’

  ‘No,’ Stuart says, tersely.

  ‘Do we have a problem?’

  ‘Of course not. I’d just like you to ring her. If you don’t mind.’

  Her mind drifts and she nods, doesn’t mind at all. What she really wants is to lie down in a dark room by herself, for a very long time.

  Thirteen

  On the way to Parramatta, Troy and Conti listened to Cheryl Hurst on the radio, describing the police as idiots for the chase on the harbour.

  ‘That means you,’ Conti said.

  ‘I did not act alone.’

  She laughed. He liked the sound, there was a sense of experimentation there, as though she hadn’t laughed in a long time. Not like this, anyway. He was happy himself: the media had no idea who’d been in the chase, or even which investigation it involved. This at least was good.

  Conti’s phone rang, one of the detectives working on the investigation over at Manly. The Bondi uniforms had found no one home at Valdez’s flat, and the neighbours hadn’t seen him in almost a month. McIver was applying for a search warrant, and the detective wanted to know a few details. When she’d hung up she said to Troy, ‘You think we’ll get the warrant?’

  ‘The judge would have to be in a very good mood.’

  ‘You reckon? Valdez says he’s going to kill Mark Pearson, who disappears three weeks later.’

  ‘He didn’t actually say that,’ Troy said, recalling what Paula Williams had told them. ‘He just made some general threats.’

  ‘Not what Mac’s saying,’ said Conti. Troy said nothing. He had no problem if McIver wanted to load up the warrant application. ‘Oh boy,’ she said. ‘I am not hearing this.’

  ‘Thin end of the wedge?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘McIver?’

  She looked away.

  At Parramatta they dropped by the local station and Troy waited in the car while Conti picked up a photocopied map of the local squats, showing nine properties marked with a pink highlighter pen. Then they drove to the north of the suburb and found the first address.

  Out of the car, the heat took hold of their clothes right away. It was not the weather to be searching old houses where the sanitary arrangements had likely been primitive for a long time.

  ‘He was sighted in one of the squats last night,’ Conti said, ‘before the first sweep. Problem was, uniform didn’t recognise him. The penny dropped later when they were back at the station and saw his picture.’

  ‘Nice of them to mention it,’ he said without sarcasm; it would have been tempting for the officers to say nothing.

  ‘Austin was wearing jeans and a red-checked shirt, same as Monday. Seemed relaxed, not noticeably incapable.’ Troy swore. ‘They went back, but he wasn’t here.’

  Troy didn’t like the idea of going into these places with no one but Conti. There was a pressure in the air, a heaviness, and he knew on a day like this people might do things differently.

  ‘We need to be careful,’ he said, scratching the back of his neck where the sweat had already gathered beneath his collar.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after you.’

  They walked down the street, which was straight and wide. It was an old area, the houses made of fibro, with large yards. The colour had been leached out of the buildings and the grass by years of sun. Most of the houses were boarded up, with high wire fences around them, and Conti explained the area had been rezoned for apartment blocks, with nearly all the places bought by developers. Sometimes the wire fences kept trespassers out, but not always.

  ‘Squatters’ paradise,’ she said. ‘Until they start building, no one really cares who lives here. The inspector told me it’s helpful to have so many of their minor villains in one area.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Forty or fifty, junkies mainly. Runaways.’

  They reached the first of the squats and Conti pulled on some latex gloves. Troy looked at them dubiously and examined the house, which was like the one where he’d lived with his parents. Fibro had served Sydney well, if you didn’t mind being hot in summer and cold in winter. He nodded to Conti, who went around the back. Giving her a few minutes, he climbed the concrete step out front and opened the screen and pounded on the door.

  ‘Police!’ he yelled twice.

  The street’s silence moved in on him again. He tried the door handle, but it was locked. Moving back, he walked to one edge of the yard and checked the windows down the side. No one came out. After a minute the front door opened with a screech of rusty hinges and Conti appeared. She’d been fresh when she went in but not anymore; her hair had lost some of its shape. She pushed the screen door so hard it banged on the wall and bounced back, hitting her in the face. As he laughed she fought her way free, stumbling slightly as she came down the step and brushed her nose with the back of one gloved hand. There was dirt on the shoulder of her blue jacket.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ she said.

  ‘The show.’

  She sniffed. ‘The toilet hasn’t been flushed in a long time.’

  Troy nodded. When he’d lived in squats himself, the toilet had generally been the first part of civilisation to collapse. People would stop flushing even when the cistern still worked perfectly well, as though to make some sort of point.

  She took a few steps towards the road and pulled the map from her folder. Troy walked up to the front door and closed it. He pushed the screen door shut and joined Conti out on the footpath.

  ‘You’re a very neat person, aren’t you, Detective Troy?’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘I lived in a squat for a few years. We always liked to keep the front door closed.’

  ‘You’re
kidding me?’

  ‘No. Front doors—’

  ‘You lived in a place like this?’

  ‘We all have our crosses to bear.’

  She looked at her map and just stared at it for a moment, as though she’d heard something interesting, and then led the way back to the street. He followed, and she closed the gate behind them.

  They moved on, around a corner and past some houses that were still occupied. A few had gardens out front, one containing an impressive array of rosebushes, their flowers slowly disintegrating beneath the sun. For the next hour they worked their way through most of the houses on the map. There were squatters in some of them. Once someone tried to run; other times the people just sat there, knowing as soon as the police had what they wanted, they’d be gone. Everyone was lethargic, and Troy realised the heat was working in their favour so far.

  The people they encountered had nothing to say about Austin except for one, a middle-aged woman who gave her name as Bernie.

  ‘Me and him,’ she said, ‘We were living in this place in Falcon Street a while back.’

  ‘But you don’t live together now?’

  ‘We was never a unit or nothing. I’m here now, but prior to that we were in this place.’

  Bernie was obviously on something; she wouldn’t be talking to them otherwise. The others in the room, three men and a woman sitting on old furniture, were getting uneasy. But not so they were going to do anything about it.

  ‘Have you seen him lately?’

  ‘Yesterday. He was getting out of this car, what I’m trying to tell you. It was up near the service station.’

  ‘That’s around the corner from here?’

  ‘I couldn’t be a hundred per cent sure. We had a chat, though—he told me he’d been trying to get some help with the mental health. I told him don’t waste your time, no one wants to know you.’

  ‘What sort of car was it?’

  ‘It’s the ice, you know, no good.’

  ‘The car, the one he got out of?’

  Bernie sighed, her patience sorely tested. As though there was important work they were keeping her from. ‘Red,’ she said at last. ‘Or brown.’

  ‘Model?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about cars, do I?’

  She laughed, like the idea was ridiculous, and looked at the other squatters.

  Bernie’s clothes were mismatched, but in good condition. When Troy had lived rough fifteen years ago, decent clothes had been hard to find. People tended to hang onto them and they got dirty and worn. These days, with the prosperity of the long boom and the magic of Chinese imports, the country was awash with cheap gear in good nick.

  He said, ‘Any idea where Jim might be now?’

  He put some energy into his voice, a little but not too much. You didn’t want to sound enthusiastic or they’d feed you rubbish or clam up. But they needed to see you weren’t going to leave until you had what you wanted.

  ‘We was going to go up to the KFC at eight o’clock but I met these other people. My brother came and picked me up later, we went and had a coffee.’

  ‘So you haven’t seen him since yesterday at about three in the afternoon?’ said Conti.

  ‘I told you, we had a coffee.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Troy, giving up on Bernie.

  It was like trawling an ocean for one fish. The amount of time you could spend was limited only by your own patience. Conti looked at him and he knew she was keen to continue, she believed she could pin the woman down by logic and cunning. She couldn’t see that it was all a waste of time. He figured she was intelligent, but there were some interesting gaps in the way her mind worked.

  They went to go. Bernie had stopped talking and was staring at Conti’s gloves. ‘Think you’re going to catch something from us?’ she said, looking at the other squatters. Sudden mood change. ‘The cop bitch is wearing gloves like she’s going to catch some sort of infection.’

  ‘Come on,’ Troy said to Conti.

  ‘No, wait.’ She looked hard at the woman. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Come on,’ Troy said, and turned.

  The woman had realised, dimly, that she needed to transfer her allegiance from the police back to her housemates. It was a pretty clumsy effort, but Troy respected the need. He walked out, and a moment later Conti followed.

  Outside, he breathed the fresh air and said nothing as they walked on. Once upon a time, people like these had been locked up in institutions. Sometimes they’d been treated poorly, sometimes they’d been looked after. Or they’d worked in one of the thousands of menial jobs that had now disappeared, in factories and government departments like the railways. Politicians kept talking about the need for more skills and training, but half the people police dealt with were incapable of sustained rational thought. What they needed, the men especially, were jobs where little would be asked of them and discipline provided, rough and ready. But these days, you needed training for just about everything.

  The second last house was a fibro bungalow like all the others. Troy looked at it and for a moment felt blank, overwhelmed by the thought of the millions of houses in Sydney, police work as a never-ending search.

  ‘Nick?’ said Conti.

  ‘Yeah?’ ‘Nick’ was good, he thought.

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘This will be the one,’ he said. ‘I can feel it.’

  She looked at him with the trace of a smile. ‘You can feel it?’

  ‘Instinct,’ he said. ‘Don’t you have instincts? Wasn’t your father a cop too?’

  ‘You know he was,’ she said. ‘Everyone does. I didn’t know yours was.’

  ‘He left,’ Troy said. Leaving had been uncommon back then. His father had quit the job to become some sort of manager at a mine out west. Maybe he’d been overwhelmed by all the searches. ‘He’d left by the time he was my age.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. He died before I could ask him.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Conti said. ‘What about your mother, couldn’t you ask her?’

  ‘She died too.’

  He pushed open the gate. This time he went around the back. The door was open and he yelled out his usual greeting and stepped inside. The place smelled like all the others. There was a pile of rubbish on the kitchen floor, mainly takeaway boxes and chicken bones. A piece of the rubbish appeared to move as he looked at it, and he saw it was a small brown rat. The creature peered at him and scuttled off, its claws scratching the linoleum. Otherwise the house was silent. Maybe the human inhabitants had waited until the rubbish built up and simply moved on.

  He made his way through the house. Like the others it had carpet in most of the rooms. Even though the buildings were cheap, when they’d been built fifty years ago carpet had been considered essential to civilisation. At Maroubra, Anna had ripped it up and had the boards polished, put in rugs. Here the carpet was dirty and made the rooms feel even hotter than they were. He walked down the hall to the front door and unlocked it for Conti.

  ‘Are you going to leave?’ she said.

  For a moment he wondered what she was talking about. Then he remembered his father. ‘I don’t believe so. I like it.’

  ‘Me too.’ She nodded seriously, pushed past him and into the house.

  The bedrooms were messy, with stained mattresses, twisted blankets and clothes. In a normal house you could usually tell if something was wrong, if a room had been disturbed, unless it was a teenager’s. But here the mess was impossible to read. Troy told himself it didn’t matter: all they wanted was Jim Austin, and he wasn’t here. There was no point searching for clues, which implied a rational world of logical connections. Austin lived somewhere else.

  The last of the bedrooms must have belonged to a boy. There were
posters on the walls: Star Wars, the Panthers grand final team from two years ago, and a band Troy didn’t recognise. There was no furniture apart from a mattress on the worn carpet, half covered by a few items of clothing. One that caught Troy’s eye was a shirt, dull red with brown patterns on it. He used his foot to flick the doona off the end of the mattress. The doona had been covering stains a similar colour to the shirt. Looking around the room again, more alert now, he pulled on some gloves and called to Conti. He reached down and picked up the shirt.

  It was short-sleeved and red-checked, which made the mark difficult to distinguish. But once you looked closely you could see a brown stain across part of it, and Troy was pretty sure it was dried blood. A lot of blood.

  ‘Austin was wearing this yesterday,’ he said.

  He picked over the clothes on the floor, couldn’t find any other stains of a similar colour. Conti was looking around too. After a bit she walked out into the hall, her eyes on the dingy carpet. The place was so gloomy it was hard to see, and he considered going back to his car to fetch a torch, but it was a long way off. Conti was moving down the hall and out into the backyard so he followed her, through the kitchen and outside.

  ‘Look,’ she said.

  He turned around and examined the doorframe, feeling the heat in the ground move into his shoes. Because of the time of day, the sunlight illuminated the back door as brightly as an arc lamp would have done. The patch of brown on the left of the frame was about where someone might grip it to steady himself as he came down the stairs. He hadn’t noticed it when he’d come in, but it was obvious now. Conti took a step towards it, and for a moment he thought she was going to pull a magnifying glass from her pocket. But she just peered and then nodded and looked around.