Ryder made a right-hand turn at the hospital, then pulled off the road as a call came through from Flowers.
‘Did we get DNA?’ Ryder asked.
‘Yes, from the teeth. We searched the familial database hoping to get a match with her parents, but nothing came up.’
‘Was there a file note saying swabs were taken from the Delaneys?’
‘Not that I remember.’
Ryder frowned. That was odd. Surely Lewicki would have arranged for Celia’s parents to give DNA samples in case her body was discovered after their deaths. It was standard practice for families in missing person cases to come forward.
‘What about cause of death?’
‘Still working on it. It’s complicated. There are multiple injuries.’
Ryder rested his head on the back of the seat. He wanted to speak to Lew, but it was getting late and he was minutes away from Eunice Delaney’s home. He didn’t want her to retire for the night before he could speak with her.
‘Sarge?’
‘I’m here.’ He pulled onto the road, his mind racing. Going by the age, gender and size of the remains, there was little doubt they were Celia’s. He could tell her mother it was highly likely they had found her daughter’s body, but he would need a positive familial DNA match before he could confirm it one hundred percent. ‘Where are you now, Flowers?’
‘Still in Canberra.’
‘Tell Harriet to keep working on the cause of death then head back to Charlotte Pass. Vanessa Bell has offered to make a list of people who’ve lived in the village for a long time. Get that list and start making appointments for me to interview them. Someone paid their respects to Celia up there on Mount Stillwell, and we need to find out who.’
‘What do I tell the media?’
‘A body’s been found, that’s all.’ Ryder flicked on his indicator and turned left. ‘I’ll update Homicide.’ He’d speak to Lewicki, too.
‘Any chance of the Coroner re-opening the case, Sarge, if we find out there was foul play?’
Flowers was already thinking like a future police prosecutor. ‘Don’t worry about that now. Our priority is coming up with compelling evidence that we can show Inspector Gray. Homicide won’t throw resources at a case if they think there’s little chance of us getting a conviction.’
‘Right.’
‘I spoke to Benson, too. The search along the Alpine Way turned up zip. The Hutton case is on ice, for now.’
‘Got it, Sarge.’
‘And, Flowers, make sure you copy Monaro in with everything. We need to keep Senior Sergeant Henderson on our side in case we need extra resources. I think that’s it.’
‘I’m all over it, Sarge, and I’ll take pleasure telling Di Gordon we’ll be needing our rooms for a few more days. I don’t know—there’s something about that woman I don’t like.’
Ryder smiled. Maybe there was hope for Flowers yet. His partner might be a pain sometimes but he was showing he had good instincts about people. ‘Ask if they can finish the work in my suite before I get back. Tell them the paint’s giving me a headache.’
There was a pause, like Flowers couldn’t decide if Ryder was joking. Then an amused chuckle reverberated around the cabin, temporarily lifting Ryder’s spirits. ‘Too easy, Sarge.’
Five minutes later, a feeling of dread settled on Ryder’s shoulders as he parked the unmarked car in front of Eunice Delaney’s brick home. The police file stated that Celia’s parents’ marriage had broken down a few years after their daughter’s disappearance. A further file note written in Lewicki’s careful handwriting noted that Arnold Delaney had re-married, though Ryder had been unable to find a current address. So, Ryder would start here, with Eunice. He only hoped the ninety-year-old was cognisant enough to understand what he was about to tell her.
He needn’t have worried.
‘Come in,’ she said, unlocking the security door after he’d shown his badge and identified himself. The woman was tiny but sure on her feet. She swung her walker around, and Ryder followed her down a long hallway, passing a print of the Virgin Mary and a silver crucifix hanging on the wall. In the sitting room, a skeletal man was propped up in a recliner rocker, a multi-coloured crocheted blanket covering him to the waist. A television with the sound blaring flickered in one corner, and a gold picture frame holding a black-and-white photograph of Celia sat on the mantelpiece above a large oil heater.
‘I apologise for calling unannounced.’
‘You might have to speak up a bit, Detective.’
‘I said I’m sorry for dropping in unannounced, Mrs Delaney.’
She smiled. ‘Call me Eunice. And that—’ she waved a hand towards the elderly man, who picked up a remote and muted the TV ‘—that’s Arnold, Celia’s father.’
The man lifted an electrolarynx to his throat and spoke in a strange, metallic voice. ‘It’s been a long time since the police have been here.’
Ryder nodded and gently shook the old man’s frail hand. He had been fearful of finding Eunice Delaney not of sound mind. Breaking news of her long-lost daughter to an impaired nonagenarian mother was something Ryder hadn’t been able to bring himself to do over the phone. So, as frail as the old man was, Ryder was relieved to find him here with Celia’s mother. ‘I’m pleased to meet you.’
‘I took him back after his second wife died.’ Eunice peered at Ryder through her magnified lenses as though expecting praise for her selflessness. ‘Couldn’t depend on the two layabout children he had with her to look after him.’
When Ryder didn’t say anything, she waved him towards a green velour lounge with lace covers draped over the arms. ‘I refused to move from this house.’ She pressed down the brakes on her walker then slowly sat on the flat, black seat. ‘At first, I told myself that Celia had run away. I thought she wouldn’t be able to find us if she decided to come home. Then later, after the Coroner’s hearing—’ the old woman’s voice cracked ‘—I wanted to stay here in case you found her. This is where she lived for twenty years, Detective. I remember her in these rooms.’
Ryder inhaled a deep breath, his heart an ache behind his ribs. ‘I understand.’
They nodded, as though his words were a token statement they had heard many times. But he did understand. More than they would ever know.
Arnold stared at him through rheumy eyes. ‘Have you found her?’
‘We may have.’
He gave them a minute, watching as they groped for each other’s hands—this former husband and wife, reunited in their dotage by the same tragedy that had torn them apart in their younger years.
Ryder watched them, not knowing what kind of a life they had led. What good things they might have done or what mistakes they had made. He only knew that he wanted to give them answers, so they could die in peace.
‘The remains of a body was found at Charlotte Pass. An initial examination of the remains has taken place in Canberra today. DNA has been extracted. We’re hoping to keep it out of the press for as long as we can, but it’s going to be hard. There’s a crowd down there right now.’
‘They searched that place for years and turned up nothing,’ Arnold said.
‘Who found her?’ asked Eunice.
‘A ski patroller. She was working on the mountain at the time.’ A fleeting image of Vanessa came into Ryder’s mind. Efficient. Natural. Effortless.
‘Where … where was Celia?’
‘On Mount Stillwell, above the village.’
A faraway expression came into the old woman’s eyes, as though she were picturing Charlotte Pass in her mind. ‘Oh … she was high up?’
‘Yes. Is there anyone you’d like me to call? Someone who could come and stay with you?’
Eunice shook her head. ‘There’s no one, but we’re all right on our own, aren’t we, Arnie?
Arnold nodded, and Ryder gave them a few more moments to come to terms with the news. When neither of them said anything, he went on. ‘I’d like to have a detective from Newcastle arrange for
you to give DNA samples. It’s a simple mouth swab, nothing intrusive. It will help us with identification.’
‘Again?’ Arnold asked.
Ryder blinked in surprise. ‘You’ve already done it?’
‘Roman arranged it.’ Arnold looked at his former wife. ‘When was that?’
‘Oh, I can’t remember. Sometime in the nineties, when that new testing came in.’
Ryder frowned, confused. So Lewicki had organised mouth swabs, but the Delaneys’ details weren’t in the database. And why was there no documentation on file? Ryder cleared his throat. ‘Look, anything could have happened to the DNA results. It’s probably something simple, like the search didn’t pick it up first time round.’
‘Maybe they got lost,’ Eunice offered.
Maybe they had. It had been known to happen. ‘It’s unlikely, but it’s not a problem, we’ll just take another swab.’ He pointed to the photograph of Celia. ‘May I take a look?’
The old woman nodded. ‘I’m lucky it’s black-and-white. The coloured photos fade.’
Ryder picked up the tarnished gold frame and studied the photograph. Dressed in a light-coloured sleeveless shift and white gloves that came to her elbows, Celia stood smiling at the camera. Her eyebrows were darkened, her eyeliner heavy, her hair piled on top of her head in keeping with the fashion of the day. ‘She looks a bit like Priscilla Presley.’
‘A lot of people used to say that, and Celia did marry a musician, like Priscilla.’ Eunice gave a sad smile. ‘That was taken the day she moved to Sydney. We were just about to take her to The Flyer.’
Ryder smiled at the old-fashioned name used for the train linking Newcastle and Sydney. ‘Can you tell me anything about Nigel Miller?’
The Delaneys exchanged glances. Arnold was the first to speak. He raised the metallic voice box to his throat. ‘He was okay.’
‘You thought he was okay,’ Eunice countered. ‘He was a philanderer.’
The venom in Eunice’s tone made Ryder wonder if Arnie might have been a bit of a philanderer in his day, too.
‘You didn’t tell me that, Eunice, until years later.’
‘Celia didn’t want you to know. She swore me to secrecy.’
‘You should have told me. I could have done something, and she mightn’t have run off in the snow like that.’
The silence was laden with mutual blame. Despite the passage of time, emotions were close to the surface.
‘Have you had any contact with Nigel Miller?’
Eunice shook her head. ‘I haven’t seen him since the inquest. Only in the paper, when The Other Miller Band are playing up this way.’
Ryder blinked as his brain made the jump. ‘The Other Miller Band?’
She nodded. ‘That’s what he calls it now. I don’t know how many name changes they’ve had.’
Ryder’s mind raced. He and Flowers had watched the band unload musical equipment off the snowcat this morning. What were the odds of the band arriving at the inn the very day Celia’s body was discovered? Slim to negligible, at best.
He looked again at the photograph of Celia. Had she been murdered and buried, this beautiful girl with the trendy sixties hairstyle? And who was the person who cared enough to leave flowers on her grave?
The murderer?
Unlikely.
In Ryder’s experience, it was only arsonists who returned to the scene of the crime, though it had been documented on occasion in crimes of passion. Was this one of those times? If so, was the perpetrator local, or an occasional visitor like the members of The Other Miller Band?
Of course, there was another possibility. What if she was killed unintentionally, and the person responsible buried her to cover it up?
Ryder knew all about manslaughter.
‘Mrs Delaney, Eunice, how long was Celia’s hair?’
She stopped briefly, looking surprised by the question. ‘How long? Oh, well, up until she was sixteen it was down to the middle of her back. But later she cut it to her shoulders, so she could flip up the ends.
‘So, this “nesty” style she has in this photo,’ he asked. ‘Did she need a hairpiece to get that look?’
‘You can’t do that style without one. She had the hairpiece made from her own hair, when she cut it.’
Ryder’s heart was pumping harder. ‘Do you still have it?’
‘The hairpiece? It’s in her wardrobe.’
‘Do you mind if I take a look?’
‘I don’t mind.’
Celia Delaney’s room was a 1960s time capsule. Blue curtains with scattered images of kittens hung at the window, and a fluffy-dog pyjama bag with spaniel ears sat on the pink ruffled quilt. Faded posters covered two walls, their edges torn and curled where they had been pinned with thumbtacks. Elvis, Bobby Darin and The Everly Brothers covered one wall. Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash the other.
‘She had good taste in music, your daughter,’ he said, watching as Eunice dipped her fingers into an angel-shaped holy water font on Celia’s dresser before making the sign of the cross. ‘Some of the best are up there.’
‘She was boy mad when she was a teenager.’ Eunice pointed to a small poster of The Beatles stuck to the inside door of the lowboy, an advertisement for their Melbourne concert in June 1964. ‘She was at that concert. I was so pleased she got to go, because a month later she was gone.’
‘Did Nigel go with her?’
‘Yes, he went. And a couple of Celia’s girlfriends, too. They were at school together and they all turned twenty-one that year. One of them had a birthday around then—Pam, I think. I remember them being very excited.’
Ryder took his notepad from the breast pocket of his shirt. ‘Do you remember the names of Celia’s friends?’
‘Of course I remember,’ she said with a scornful snort. ‘They grew up here in Stockton. Pamela MacAuley and Gail Williams.’
Ryder jotted down their names. ‘Did they change their names when they married?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t be sure of that.’
‘Do you know if they still live here?’
‘No, they both moved away.’ Celia’s mother shook her head and reached inside the lowboy. Taking out a wig stand, she set it down on a dressing table beside another small china statue of the Virgin Mary. ‘It’s the only part of her I have left,’ she said, stroking a dark piece of hair hanging from the Styrofoam head. ‘I didn’t have any other children. My mother said it was punishment for marrying a Protestant.’
A lump formed in Ryder’s throat preventing him from speaking, so he busied himself putting his notepad and pen back inside his suit coat.
‘Eunice,’ he said after a while, ‘when we do familial DNA checks, sometimes they are only seventy-five percent positive. That’s usually enough for us to identify a person. I know Celia’s hairpiece is precious to you, but would you entrust it to me for a short while?’
‘Would it help to identify her?’
‘It could. It’s cut hair, which means there’s no follicle, so we can’t extract nuclear DNA. But provided there’s enough of it, it’s sometimes possible to extract mitochondrial DNA from the hair shaft. People inherit their mitochondrial DNA from their mother.’
‘Does that mean we don’t have to do mouth swabs again? Arnie’s not well … and with his throat?’
‘I understand. Look, there’s every chance the old ones will show up when they do another search, so how about we just take yours for now? You’re the most important parent in the identification process.’ Mrs Delaney looked up at him, her faded blue eyes glimmering. ‘Just as well I’m still alive, then.’
Ryder held her stare, knowing she didn’t understand the science behind what he’d just said. Not that it mattered. The most important thing for Eunice was learning whether or not it was her beloved daughter who’d been found on that lonely mountainside.
Ryder ignored the headache lurking behind his eyes that reminded him he should eat. Bittersweet memories resided in this city, and they were more important to him than a
hastily consumed hamburger and coffee. In his darkest hour, when his life had turned to shit, he’d clung to the happy memories, revisiting them time and time again. Later, he read that it was normal practice to do that when life became unbearable. People comforted themselves by looking back to earlier times when they’d been happy.
Deciding to do a circuit of Newcastle’s beaches, he drove along the harbour foreshore towards Nobbys Lighthouse. The place had changed in recent times. Cranes hovered above the skyline, testament to the boom taking place as the city went about reinventing itself. Whiskey bars and cafes had sprung up. Even the bitumen beneath his wheels was as smooth as a European autobahn thanks to the track laid down for the V8 supercar street race.
Ryder glanced at the briefcase in the passenger footwell and thought about the valuable contents inside. If he dropped the hairpiece at the station in Queanbeyan tonight, one of the boys could deliver it to Harriet in Canberra in the morning. Hopefully by then he would be back at Charlotte Pass.
He accelerated up Watt Street, passing the police station where he had worked a decade ago, before skirting around the perimeter of King Edward Park. At the top of High Street, he turned right into Memorial Drive then began the winding descent into Bar Beach. In a nod to the city’s steel-making history, the Anzac Walk towered above the headland, an ambitious monument dedicated to the memory of fallen World War One soldiers.
He pulled into the beach carpark and killed the engine. As he lowered the window, memories rushed in on a breeze, tangy with the scent of salt and seaweed. He’d taught Scarlett to swim here, in the toddler pool between the rocks. He could feel the fabric of her pink-and-white–checked sunhat against his cheek, the softness of her arms around his neck as he carried her across the sand. Ryder held the happy memory in his heart, sustaining himself with the love he’d shared with his child, the sweet memories rarer than the nightmares that left him shattered. Stark flashes of him throwing open the car door. Scarlett’s lifeless body in the driveway, beneath the wheels of his car.
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