She watched his shoulders relax a little, and his arms, folded across his chest, dropped to his sides.
'I haven't really been back to work since it happened,' said Joss. 'But Isobel had to go. She's bringing our daughter, Charlie, home at about four.'
'Is that Charlie?' Jill pointed to a photo on the fridge. It showed a blonde toddler nursing a fluffy cat almost bigger than herself.
Joss laughed a little. 'Yep.' The love in his eyes looked like pain.
Jill became aware that Gabriel was unpacking his bag.
'The light's probably best in here,' he said, unfolding a telescoped tripod.
'For what?' Joss's arms folded again.
'From now on we'll be videotaping all of our interviews regarding the case.' Gabriel spoke to the small camera he was screwing to the top of the tripod.
Jill glowered at him. This guy could turn the charm on and then drop it in an instant. She guessed that they were about to be kicked out, but instead Joss offered them something to drink. She and Gabriel accepted an orange juice. Joss poured himself a tall glass of water from a filter jug next to the sink.
'Might as well get on with it then,' he said, walking back towards them.
Gabriel set up the recording equipment with more speed than she could have imagined. By the time Joss had taken a seat at the breakfast bar, the contents of Gabriel's modest-sized duffle bag had transformed the small dining area off the kitchen into a studio. He had angled two dining chairs to face one another, and a collapsible reflective screen was positioned behind one of the chairs. He ushered their host towards this chair, motioning Jill towards the other, and took up his place behind the camera.
Jill took her seat feeling nervous and annoyed. For heaven's sake, she thought, we're interviewing a witness, not interrogating a suspect. She opened her notebook and smiled reassuringly at Joss.
'Hang on a sec,' said Gabriel. Incredulous, she watched him drop to his knees and, using a retractable tape measure, calculate the distance between the two chairs. Walking back on his knees, he signalled with his hand for her to rise. She stood and he pushed her chair backwards a hand's breadth.
'Sorry,' he looked up at her.
'Um, yes, maybe we should just get on with it.'
'They were only ninety-two centimetres apart.'
Jill stared. It seemed he was apologising for not getting the measurements right the first time, rather than for the ridiculous fact that he was bothering with such details in the first place.
'Should've been ninety-seven,' Gabriel said to Joss, hands out, as if that explained everything.
I gotta talk to this guy, Jill thought.
'Joss,' she took over. His legs and arms were crossed now, and he leaned towards the back door as though he wanted to be anywhere but in there with them. 'We're here to get your full description of what you remember happening at Andy Wu's last Saturday night. Can you tell us everything that happened after you arrived? Please don't leave anything out, everything you've got to say is very important to us. You are our eyes and ears in there.'
Gabriel caught her eye, raised his eyebrows at her.
They listened quietly to Joss's account, occasionally interrupting to clarify a point.
While speaking, Joss stared at a point just beyond Jill's shoulder. She watched him reliving the horror of the night, saw his eyeballs tracking actively as the scene replayed before him. His face was grey and his voice hoarse when he finished. An electronic chime indicated that Gabriel had turned the camera off. Jill looked down at her watch. Three-thirty. The wife would be home soon, but this guy had had enough. His hand shook slightly as he rubbed the bristle on top of his head. When he stood, he steadied himself using the back of the chair, his eyes glazed and unfocused. She and Gabriel gave him their thanks and left, arranging to return to take his wife's statement the following day.
'I hope he's going to be okay,' said Jill, opening the back door of the car so Gabriel could dump his equipment. 'He looked pretty shaken up.'
The steering wheel felt warm when she started the ignition.
'He certainly did,' said Gabriel, absentmindedly struggling to fasten his seatbelt. The plug had caught in his khaki shirt, and she had to stifle an unexpected impulse to untangle the mess for him. She turned on the air-conditioner instead.
'So it's back to Liverpool, then,' she said, mentally calculating the time it would take to get there and back again.
'No. Let's just go to your house.'
'My house.'
'Yeah. I want to watch this tape back. We've got some problems here.'
'I live in Maroubra.'
'Have you got a good TV?'
'Well, yes. But . . . Oh, whatever. We can watch the tape there I suppose.'
She pulled the car out from the curb and headed into the city, finding herself smiling at the thought of the early mark. They travelled against the traffic for most of the trip, Gabriel staring out the window, from time to time jotting in his notebook. As they passed the shops in Randwick, she suddenly wondered what the hell she was doing. Scotty was the only partner she'd ever had in her house, and she trusted him. She'd known her new partner for under a week.
Last night on the phone, her mum had asked her what he was like, and she'd been unable to find the words. After a few moments, she'd laughed, and told her mum that she'd have to get back to her. She hadn't figured him out yet.
Jill drove towards the ocean ahead.
After seeing the detectives out, Joss found himself back in front of the cupboard in the kitchen. Describing the night at Andy's in such detail had unshackled the demons in his brain. Memories howled in his head now, each clamouring for processing, hurling up image after horrifying image. He gave in to the kaleidoscope, knowing from experience that he was incapable of stemming the flood once it had progressed unchecked to this point. He reached unseeingly for the bottle of bourbon. The interview had prevented him utilising his routine avoidance strategies – hard exercise; forcing himself to remember he was home, safe, in the present. He had only this recourse left. He swigged directly from the bottle and then reached for a glass.
Back on the sofa, he steeled himself for the show; he drank quickly to put as much distance between himself and the images as possible.
Kibeho, 1995. The definition of human depravity. From every angle someone died in agony, or, much worse, survived, a machete wound through the middle of their face; a limb or genitals missing; intestines exposed for the birds that dived sorties in screaming, black-eyed packs. He moved through the blood and body pieces, pulling a dead woman away from her wailing infant before the child suffocated under her weight, dragging a breathing body from a pile of corpses and handing him to the medics. A small team from Médecins Sans Frontières and the medical section of the Australian peacekeeping force patched up those they could, medivaced a fortunate few, and provided morphine to many others, who would at least die oblivious to their own screams. For many years, he envied them that.
Another glass. The bourbon burned.
The boy and his family. The memory kicked in at the worst part, of course. The father lay dead, feeble spits of blood still exiting the mess of his throat. A girl, maybe ten, waited, mute, for the next act of horror life would bring her. Her mother, a baby on her hip, keened quietly, a steady, emotionless moan that conveyed more pain than a scream. And the new man of the house – the boy, younger than his sister – shaped up with a stick to the Tutsi warrior with the machete.
The devil with the knife turned to smile at Joss; to tell him with his eyes that he could cut this family to pieces, and that Joss could do nothing but salvage anyone left when he'd had his fill.
Not this time.
Joss watched himself moving forward to meet the enemy.
On the couch, feeling as though his head had played host to a wasp's nest, Joss's hand reached between the cushions, and pulled out that for which it had been searching. He wiped the knife against his thigh, and put it back in its resting place. Close.
&nb
sp; He let his head fall back against the lounge.
18
'YOU SEE, HE'S doing it again,' said Gabriel, cross-legged on her floor. The glow of the TV screen lit up his face. They otherwise sat in shadow, the gathering gloom of dusk waited on the balcony.
'So that would be another cluster?'
'Yup.' He kept his eyes on the screen, but she saw him make a mark in the notepad perched on his knee.
There hadn't been time to be awkward. Gabriel had walked straight to the TV upon entering Jill's apartment and had wheeled it around to expose the leads at the back. Before she'd even offered coffee, the Balmain room and Joss Preston-Jones had filled the screen. Gabriel had been animated from the start.
'I don't get it,' he'd said to her. 'I've got to see it again. This guy was throwing up deception cues all over the place. Come in here and watch this.'
She'd taken a seat on her chocolate leather sofa and leaned backwards, her arms across her chest, an eyebrow raised.
'You're sceptical,' he said.
'You think he's lying?'
'He's not telling us the whole truth. He's being deceptive again and again and again.'
'How do you know?'
'Same way I can tell that you think I'm full of shit right now. Incriminating and discriminating stress cues; verbal and non-verbal signs.' He turned back to the TV. 'You gotta watch this.'
Jill had always been interested in the principles of interrogation, and had thought she had a good sense of when a subject was lying. She knew well that most of the time what a suspect actually said during an interrogation was only half the story. The way they said it, their body posture and movements told the rest. What she learned in her loungeroom over the next two hours, though, surpassed all of the behaviour analysis training she'd had to date, and gave words to a lot of her instinctual knowledge and hunches.
'Okay, so we know that no single behaviour can tell us whether someone is being truthful or deceptive, right?' He continued without expecting a response. 'But when we repeatedly observe some kind of stress reaction, or even better, a cluster of stress reactions when a particular issue is being discussed, then we can assume it's not a random behaviour.'
From Jill's point of view, anyone speaking about a brutal home invasion would radiate stress signals. Preston-Jones was wrecked after the interview, as was almost every victim she'd ever talked to. Gabriel's eyes and voice were compelling, however. She leaned forward in her seat.
'Of course, even innocent subjects will be nervous, and we'll detect that every time. But Joss exhibits markers suggestive of poor credibility at several key points through the interview, signals that I wouldn't expect in subjects who are telling the whole truth. What we've got to figure out now is what he's omitting from his statement. What he's not telling us. But more importantly,' Gabriel turned his eyes from Jill back to the screen, 'why he's omitting it.'
Jill finally found herself on the rug next to Gabriel, propped cross-legged with her back against the lounge to better see the screen. He paused the tape at key moments and time and again showed her movements made by Joss that stood out from his typical signs of tension.
'I'm picking up more evasion than deception,' he said.
She estimated that they were around halfway through the tape.
'It could also be embarrassment,' he continued, 'but it's more likely to be guilty knowledge: withholding information.'
The discriminating stress cues, once Gabriel had pointed them out, began to appear obvious.
'Negation!' Jill pointed at Joss on screen, once again rubbing his palm up and down his nose, briefly covering his mouth. Negation behaviour, Gabriel had reminded her, was a subconscious effort to hide leaks of emotion from the face. In the video, Joss repeatedly put his hands up to the facial touch zone – the area from mid-nose to mid-chin – hiding his mouth when he spoke about the ringleader of the gang.
'Right. And what's that?' he asked her, tape paused on Joss making a sweeping gesture in response to a question asked by Gabriel.
'Aversion behaviour? He's blocking you, isn't he?'
'Figuratively, he's sweeping the question away. Remember I asked him to expand on what happened when the leader was questioning him on the ground. He used a bridging phrase: what did he say?' Gabriel looked down at the pad on his knee. '"The next thing I knew they were gone." The next thing I knew . . . It's a typical phrase used to cover gaps and omissions. He doesn't want to talk about what happened just before the offenders left.'
Gabriel paused the tape again and performed a yoga stretch on the loungeroom floor. His khaki shirt stretched tight over the muscles in his chest and back. Her shoulders felt stiff and she considered copying his pose, but instead she contented herself with stretching her neck from side to side.
'What else do we know about this guy?' he asked.
'Just the basic demographics, I think,' she answered. 'Age, address, family, his job. Probably we should look deeper.'
'Definitely. Look at the screen now.' Gabriel again sat up, cross-legged. 'See. That's another control behaviour. He's sitting on his hands. I think that he knows about stress cues and he's trying to suppress his nervous behaviours. Problem for him is that this tells us just as much – he's trying to be deceptive about his true emotions. When he freezes, or grips the chair, or sits on his hands within three to five seconds of a hot topic, he might as well have just let his hands do what they wanted to.
'But what I really want to know,' he said, standing and clicking off the TV, 'is where he learned that he should be monitoring his signals. I don't think he's always been a civilian, Jill.'
Jill also stood. She walked into the kitchen, and for no reason felt suddenly self-conscious. She wiped her hand across the four switches in the panel on the wall and flooded the apartment with light. What was it, six o'clock? She glanced at the clock on her wall.
'It's almost seven,' he said. 'What do you want to eat?'
'Ah . . .'
'We could just go grab some laksa?' He seemed to notice the startled expression on her face. 'Or maybe you're too tired. That's okay. I'll head off.'
'Where do you live?'
Was she supposed to offer to drive him home? This sucked. She didn't even know this guy, and now she felt responsible for getting him home. What do you do in these situations? The awkwardness of such personal exchanges was almost physically painful for her.
'Bus to Central. Central to Ryde,' he answered. 'I live in Ryde. It's an hour from here. I come out here all the time. I love the Thai restaurant up the strip.'
'Hang on a sec,' Jill surprised herself by saying. She suddenly realised she was starving. 'I'd love some laksa.'
She walked into her bathroom, splashed her face and fixed her hair in the mirror. Just before leaving, she turned back and slicked on some lip-gloss. What are you doing? she asked herself in the mirror. She left the room quickly and grabbed her handbag, not looking at Gabriel.
'Let's go,' she said, walking out of her flat.
19
'YOU LOOK LIKE you know your way around a gym,' he said.
It was only 7.45 a.m., and Jill had made the mistake of entering the taskforce meeting room without considering that she might be alone in there with Derek Reid. He'd moved on from his first-day suit to more casual clothes, and the three buttons undone at the top of his thin beige shirt showed too much tan and too little hair. She couldn't help but look twice. Yep, he waxed his chest. His sleeves barely contained his biceps. His eyes took her in, whole.
'You look like you could stay away from it for a couple of weeks,' she said. Stupid! Where did that come from? Oh my God, he thinks I'm flirting, she thought, horrified.
Reid's mouth turned up. The sheen on his copper skin caught the light as he actually flexed one bicep, pushing the fabric of his shirt almost beyond its limits.
'Maybe we could work out together this afternoon, what do you say?'
Maybe I could throw up now, she thought, but answered, 'I don't think so. I'm booked in for a sp
ray tan.'
The corners of his smile dropped a little as he thought that through, and Jill turned to see David Tran entering the meeting room, leaning on his cane. She smiled, more than pleased to see him.
'Superintendent Last asked that I apologise for his being late this morning,' Tran spoke to them both. 'Apparently there's been a step forward in the case.'
'Do you know what it is, David?' asked Jill.
He shook his head, and they fell silent for several moments.
'So I wonder what Delahunt's excuse is for being late,' Reid said. 'I guess the Feds can show up whenever they're ready, huh?'
Jill ignored him. The service was full of people like Reid – always looking to put someone or something down. She found the constant negativity boring. She wondered what Tran was like. He certainly didn't seem to fit the usual mould. She decided to try to find out more about his experiences when he interviewed some of the past victims.
'So what did you think of Justine Rice?' she began. She directed the question to David Tran, but Reid answered.
'She gave us nothing,' he said. 'Not surprising, really, now it turns out that she was sexually assaulted by these freaks. She's not going to speak to a couple of blokes, is she?' He sounded defensive.
'There was more to it, I think, Jill,' said Tran. 'She and Ryan Temple took an instant dislike to me in particular. While it's often an advantage being an Asian cop around these suburbs, I'm afraid that it's alienated some of the vics in this case.'
Jill nodded. She could see his point. Even people who'd denounced racism all their lives could find themselves fearful or hostile towards people of a particular nationality when they'd been attacked by a member of that community. She knew from experience that when violent crime was paired with a certain ethnicity, many victims forever after avoided all members of that race.
'I have already made the observation to Superintendent Last. It is probably a good thing that some of these interviews are repeated,' said Tran. 'Because of my presence, there could be other things people are holding back.'
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