The Simple Death

by Michael Duffy

  ‘I’ve told them to wait, let us know when he gets home,’ she said. ‘The Dogs aren’t available until this afternoon, so we’re covering it ourselves.’

  Troy disconnected, and began to walk back to the car park, skirting the Downing Centre, the District Court complex, inside a former nineteenth-century department store, that took up most of a city block. McIver had once described it as a vast machine for manufacturing justice. Troy hadn’t been inside for several years; murder trials were held elsewhere. It reminded him of cases from his early days as a detective, of simpler crimes, more comprehensible aspects of human nature.

  He looked at the faces of the people hurrying up and down the broad stairs out front and recalled Burns’s eyes from yesterday’s interview. A feeling of unease had settled on him since the meeting with Kelly, so gradually that only now did he become aware of it. He realised the balance of his thinking about Burns had shifted. He was certain now the man was a killer.

  The problem was, he couldn’t identify what it was that had tipped the balance. He felt like ringing McIver and insisting they pick up Burns, put out an alert, but he had nothing to add to the arguments he’d heard that morning. He stopped on a corner, waiting for the lights to change, looking at the crowd as though Burns might suddenly appear. He didn’t, of course. He might be on the run already, on a flight overseas. Or he might be preparing to kill again.

  There’d been a bleakness in Burns yesterday, a sense of desperation Troy had assumed related to Julie Cornish’s death. Now it struck him as something bigger, wilder. He wondered how he could have been blind to this, but what you knew affected what you saw. The information from Queensland had changed the way things looked. As though Burns was a figure in a darkened room, and lights were being switched on, one by one.

  He took out his phone and dialled the Department of Education, hardly knowing what he was doing. A minute later he was talking with Leila Scott, asked if he could see her in confidence, to talk about Carl Burns. Told her he knew about Mexico, knew it was all more complicated than she’d said, he needed to understand it if he was to stop old people from being killed.

  He was expecting he’d have to beg, but it didn’t turn out like that at all.

  ‘You promise it will be in confidence?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Every word.’

  ‘All right.’ She said it without hesitation, as though she’d been expecting the call. ‘I’ve been thinking about Carl a lot today. It fits, what you’re saying. Maybe. Do your superiors know about this call?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You promise they never will?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Promises, Troy thought. You never intended to end up in a place like this, walled in by promises. But here you are, and there is no alternative.

  He told Scott he’d be right over.

  Fifty-six

  For Leila, Troy’s call is like a gift, although not because of Carl Burns. Over the past few days, she’s come to realise she is no longer the person she was years ago, no longer a rebel. She needs to confess, to make some sort of peace with authority. When Troy arrives at her office, an unsatisfactory confessor in a grey suit, but the only one on offer, she shuts her door and they talk for half an hour. Realises soon he is actually a good confessor because he seems to know it all already. She sees this is the way it must be with confessions: people prefer to tell things to those who know them already.

  She goes through it with him, her mother’s decision to kill herself, the advice from Stuart, the trip to Mexico. Julie and Carl are difficult to talk about, but he seems intelligently interested in them. As she tries to describe them clearly, she stumbles and is reminded again of how little she knows them, despite the big role they’ve come to play in her life.

  At the end Troy just nods. She decides he can probably be trusted. He might be leading her into danger, but he will do his best to help if it happens. Leila is surprised at how relieved she feels.

  He gets her to go over the break-in at her house, and the attack that occurred the next day, when Carl was there.

  ‘Might it have been him the night before?’ he says.

  ‘Don’t . . .’ She feels sick. ‘It might,’ she says. ‘I can’t say why though.’ She hopes she never sees Carl again. Realises she is scared of him, the big man with skin like dough, sniffing her mother’s roses. Alone in the house with her. ‘You have any reason to think this?’

  ‘I’m thinking about the diary, that’s all.’ He shrugs, and she knows there’s something he isn’t telling her. But she doesn’t ask what—she has no right.

  Says, ‘Why would Julie have left it in my house, for me to find?’ She shivers, realising she knows the answer. Troy knows too, maybe. But they aren’t going to talk about it. She sees he’s noticed her trembling. He must see a lot of people react to horrible news. She wonders what it would do to you.

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be found,’ Troy says, although she can tell he doesn’t really think that. ‘Perhaps she was hiding it from him. She might have planned to recover it later.’

  In his job it must be important not to get locked into one story. Historians say that too, but few manage to avoid it.

  ‘What about the bottle of Nembutal?’ he says.

  ‘Carl must still have it.’

  Then he tells her about Carl Burns, the things he might have done. Realising the nature of the people she allowed to be alone with her mother, Leila collapses inside, although she stays sitting in her chair, just looking at the detective.

  After a while it comes back to her that Julie said she was afraid of Carl. Just a sentence or two on the phone the day before she’d died. Leila can hardly remember the words, she must have forgotten them because she didn’t want to know about Julie’s problems. Now she tells Troy what she remembers, and he looks disturbed. This time he doesn’t nod.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,’ she says.

  But it was a different story before, and that story had its own shape. Not everything that happens can fit into any one story.

  Troy seems to accept her apology, and tells her about a technique that might have been used to kill Julie. It involves the inhalation of nitrogen, and Leila nods. She vaguely remembers hearing about it at the lecture on assisted suicide she attended in Chatswood.

  ‘But there was no equipment at Julie’s,’ she says. Then: ‘Carl tidied up?’

  ‘It’s a possibility, whether he killed her or she did it herself. Would you say Carl is intelligent?’

  ‘He is smart and he thinks he’s not appreciated for that,’ she says, seeing it for the first time, seeing how this might explain some things about him.

  She tells him about the money Julie said she’d lost while she was away, the antique necklace that went missing from her mother’s house.

  ‘Carl stole it?’ he says, looking interested.

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

  These things come to mind readily enough now, because they fit so easily into the new story. She sees how uneasy she always was about Carl and Julie, how much she repressed because it didn’t seem to fit. The amount of self-deception in her life is distressing.

  ‘You think he controlled her?’ Troy says, standing up.

  Since she mentioned the necklace, he’s seemed different. She gets up too, looks at him more closely than before, seeing him afresh. The tension in him is powerful, but she knows it will wear down with time. Probably he plays sport, lots of sport. He is an unexploded bomb, or a stunted plant, or a long wait for good weather that will be too late when it comes. Patient because he lacks the imagination to be anything else. He is everything she hates about this country, and she knows it is in herself too.

  ‘What do you think now,’ he says, ‘about what you did to your mother?’

  He seems curious rather than accusing.
r />   ‘I did the right thing,’ she says.

  The fact she acted means a great deal to her. You can never know for sure what is right. But the world is full of confused alarms of struggle and flight, made up of these things, and you have to be a participant. And she is that, now.

  She goes and stands by the window, looking across the street, and he joins her. A city council ranger is booking a blue Ford in a No Stopping zone.

  ‘That’s mine,’ says Troy.

  ‘I think Carl ran Julie. I think she might have been rebelling against that, which can be dangerous.’

  Troy considers this and nods. He looks at his watch. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Do you think I’m in danger?’ It sounds more pathetic than she intended.

  ‘Someone might be,’ he says. ‘I doubt it’s you.’

  Fifty-seven

  When he’d got the ranger sorted out, Troy called Mac, explained he’d just talked to Scott in confidence. The sergeant expressed his displeasure, but his mood lifted as Troy described Julie’s fear of Carl, also the jewellery missing from Scott’s house.

  ‘Sounds like Dr Scott might have fallen in with bad company,’ McIver said.

  ‘The necklace is good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Our efforts to recover it will be unremitting. You get the warrant.’

  Burns lived in one of a dozen flats in an old three-storey block built of dark brick. Conti had already arranged the physical evidence people and a locksmith by the time Troy arrived with the search team. Burns’s unit was on the top floor, and when they got inside Troy saw it was neat and clean. A lot of crime was solved because the perpetrator was lazy or disorganised. Carl Burns didn’t seem like that.

  There were two bedrooms, one with a double bed. Troy wandered through the place before the others got to work, hoping something would strike him. Decorations were minimal, apart from a few empty vases and a poster he must have seen in twenty places he’d searched over the years, waves crashing over a lighthouse on a lonely rock. There was also a pot of small cactus plants in the lounge/dining room. As he gave the word for the search to begin, he looked at their green and orange flesh, sitting in a bed of white pebbles, and wondered how anyone could have something like this in their home. But he’d seen plenty of cacti over the years, too.

  From the number of cookbooks in the kitchen, it looked like Burns was a bit of a gourmet. Troy stepped aside as two detectives came into the small space, the cameraman hovering just outside the door. He squeezed out of the way, back into the main room, which was furnished with a table and six chairs and a leather lounge suite, plus audiovisual equipment. The CDs and DVDs suggested a perfectly ordinary taste: there was nothing about euthanasia or forensics, nothing creepy about old people. One of the officers was going through the cases, making sure they contained the discs indicated on their covers. There were a few books among the discs, a guide to removing stains, a movie guide, an expensive illustrated book on roses.

  ‘What do you think?’ Conti said.

  ‘Not a lot.’

  She shrugged. A detective who’d been in the main bedroom appeared, holding a cheap wall calendar in her gloved hand. She said she’d found it on the back of the wardrobe door; Troy saw it was this year’s.

  ‘Probably his shifts,’ Conti said.

  ‘But he’s not working today.’

  Across a line in the box for that day’s date was the letter C.

  ‘Who’s “C”?’ said Conti.

  Troy remembered something. Ian Carter had said oncology nurses did casual shifts at Charity Hospice, welcome there because they were good at pain management. He called Carolyn Moore at Charity. She started to tell him Luke was having a good day, but Troy interrupted and explained why he was calling. She confirmed that Carl Burns was doing a casual shift there at the moment, as he did every few weeks. Telling her not to say anything about his call, he hung up, explained.

  ‘This is good,’ said Conti. ‘At least we know where he is.’

  Troy wasn’t so happy. ‘If Burns is a killer, it would make more sense if he was on the run.’

  ‘He doesn’t know we’re on to him. Thinks he’s made us believe it’s Julie.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Or maybe he’s waiting for the diary.’

  He walked through the flat again, peering into the small bathroom where an officer was standing on a ladder, the top of his body out of sight through a manhole. Troy went into the second bedroom and looked through a box of books that had already been checked. Nursing texts, a few Lonely Planet guides and popular thrillers, one self-help book on how to be happy. This was their chance to find something that would permit them to pick up Burns. Speak to me, he thought as he went back to the lounge room.

  Five minutes later he murmured to Conti, ‘This is not looking good.’ No diary, no nitrogen. Two officers who’d been knocking on doors in the rest of the block had found three residents at home, but none had had anything out of the ordinary to say about Carl Burns. He didn’t have a garage, parked his car around the back but it wasn’t there now.

  Then the search was finished. They’d found nothing at all.

  ‘So,’ said the inspector, ‘we’ll be off then.’

  ‘There’s got to be something here,’ Troy said, feeling angry and stupid. ‘I want to do it again.’

  The inspector looked at her watch. ‘I’ve been told to hurry back. We’re short-staffed.’

  Troy watched as the officers trooped out. He knew he was being unreasonable, wanting them to stay, but his mind was blank, he had no argument. The inspector was about to follow them when her phone rang, and she took the call in the hall. Troy had one last look through the flat.

  He was back in the lounge room when Needham from Marrickville called. He’d just talked to his contact at Fine Thai.

  ‘Carl Burns didn’t pick up the takeaway on the fourth of February,’ he said cheerfully. ‘It was Julie, she used Carl’s card—apparently she’d done it before, they’d been going to the restaurant for years.’ Needham paused. ‘Are we happy?’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘My contacts at the restaurant are good. I’ve put in the hours.’

  Troy hung up and looked wildly around the room as he told Conti the news. The inspector had returned, said, ‘So he killed Mark Pearson?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Troy’s gaze came to rest on the big pot of cacti. He grabbed a newspaper lying on the table and spread it on the floor, took hold of one side of the pot.

  ‘Help me with this,’ he said.

  The ceramic pot was about sixty centimetres wide and almost as deep. They got it onto the newspaper and removed the cacti and the pebbles, finding dirt underneath. Troy began to dig with his fingers, and soon came to something in the soil. He pulled out an object wrapped in a plastic bag. It was the size of a small shoebox, and made of wood. Putting it on the ground, he pulled off the plastic and removed the lid.

  The box was half-full of pieces of jewellery, jumbled together, and Conti snapped her gloves back on and took them out gently, disentangling a long coral necklace that was wrapped around a brooch and a bracelet. She laid the items on the table, and when she’d finished Troy counted twenty-four pieces. None resembled the expensive necklace Leila Scott said had been removed from her mother’s house: in fact, none of these pieces looked expensive. They were the sort of thing that might not be missed, or not much.

  ‘It’s a trophy box,’ Conti said.

  Troy knew some serial killers kept souvenirs, but he’d never seen a trophy box before. Homicide had never come across one in the years he’d been there.

  He said, ‘Any chance this is Julie’s jewellery?’

  Conti smiled grimly and picked up a pair of purple plastic earrings. ‘There are certain stylistic differences,’ she said, replacing them and touc
hing a subdued golden bracelet. ‘These did not belong to one woman.’

  ‘I’ll go pick him up.’

  ‘I’ll come too.’

  He shook his head. ‘We haven’t even started here.’ He said to the sergeant, ‘Get the others back now, please. We need to rip the place apart, find the diary.’ He looked at Conti. ‘If we don’t get more, we might never work this out, not fully.’

  ‘We’ve got his trophies!’

  ‘We think that. We don’t know it yet.’

  ‘The others can finish up here.’

  She wanted to be there when Burns was arrested, wanted it desperately.

  ‘It’s too important.’

  ‘I have to come,’ she said.

  The smile was gone now. He looked into her eyes and saw the ambition there.

  ‘This isn’t about you,’ he said.

  And left.

  Fifty-eight

  Leila is in a meeting with a dozen colleagues, Lewis Mowbray presiding for the first time in his new position. The working group has just approved the state review of the proposed new national syllabus, and there is a mood of quiet jubilation in the room.

  ‘New South Wales has made a vital contribution to the future,’ Lewis says, his voice quiet and firm. This is what leaders do, they state the obvious. Leila understands that: if she’d got the job, she would be giving the same speech. ‘I think this is something in which everyone in this room can take a certain amount of satisfaction.’

  There is a murmuring around the table. The person sitting on Leila’s right says something she doesn’t hear and she replies, ‘It’s been a long road.’

  From his reaction, her response seems satisfactory.

  Last night she’d gone into Lewis’s office, his permanent office now, a big room with good furniture and a small balcony. He’d been out there when she’d come in.

  ‘You bastard,’ she said when he looked in through the drapes, then came in, holding a joint.