The White Tower

by Dorothy Johnston

  That day at the hospital, I’d watched with admiration as Fenshaw comforted a young patient, but was struck by his readiness to conclude that Niall had lost his professional competence to an interactive game.

  . . .

  Bill McCallum’s eyes were blue, deep-set, fringed with dark blond lashes. He smiled and half stood up, shaking hands across a desk piled with papers. I felt a kindliness approach, then fix itself on me, as though whatever I’d done wrong would be understood and eventually ­forgiven.

  ‘I had a bit to do with Moira Howley around the time of the inquest.’ McCallum settled himself back down behind his desk. ‘How’s she doing?’

  ‘Not too well.’

  I suddenly noticed that McCallum had no neck. His shoulder pads, with their Federal Police insignia, bunched his shoulders up to short grey hair, which, cut straight above his ears, added to the squashed effect. The band of his black trousers sat too high on a non-existent waist.

  ‘Of the forty or so suicides we’ve had in the last year,’ he was informing me, ‘only two have been jumpers. Most people gas or hang themselves.’

  Forty seemed a lot for a population of three hundred thousand.

  My expression must have shown what I was thinking. McCallum said, ‘Oh yes, it’s more common than most people think. There are ­traditions. Not something ordinary folk think much about. Well of course suicides aren’t reported in the press. Jumping’s a tradition. Top of the Currong flats. Last year we had two brothers. Terrible that was, the second following the first.’

  ‘Why didn’t—?’ I began.

  ‘Block it off? Knock it down? They’d find somewhere else.’

  I wondered about the people living there, the non-suicides, and for a farcical, stupid moment pictured a young woman looking up through the window and saying to her toddler, ‘There goes another one.’

  Under his thick eyelashes, McCallum was returning my gaze shrewdly. I thought of Brook, how when ill, bald, chemoed to the eyeballs, Brook had had that cocky manner, that okay you might have got me but I’m still breathing you bastard look about him.

  ‘Jumpers,’ McCallum was saying. ‘Jumpers are—well, in my experience jumpers are always badly disturbed. They choose to jump because it’s so violent.’

  He flashed me another quick, assessing look. ‘That seems odd to you, doesn’t it? You’re thinking that all suicide is by definition a violent end to life. But only a very particular type of person chooses to jump. I’ve never come across an exception to that in all my years of police work. And never from the Telstra Tower. That’s a first.’

  His eyes, transforming his pale scrunched face, watched me, not impatiently, not accusingly, but offering knowledge based on experience and waiting to see what I did with it.

  ‘And it’s an awful thing. Just now I mentioned tradition. Well, ­traditions have to, you know, augment themselves, become more elaborate, and in the traditions of suicides and potential suicides, more crazy from our point of view. They have to go one more, do better than the last fellow.’

  ‘You think that’s what could have happened with Niall Howley?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘But there’s a puzzle, isn’t there? How did Niall clear the lower platform?’ I took my brochure of the tower out of my bag and put it on the desk between us, pointing to the broadcasting platform with the large white discs. ‘The width here—the difference between this, where Niall’s supposed to have jumped from, and this, is over a metre. How did he manage to jump out far enough to clear it?’

  ‘I agree it seems unusual. Howley was very disturbed and very ­determined.’

  But that doesn’t make him Superman, I thought, biting my lip, determined to stay on the right side of McCallum since that was how I seemed to have started off.

  ‘Did you consider the possibility that he jumped from the lower platform?’ It was one of my frustrations with the report that there was no discussion of this.

  ‘It certainly occurred to us, but there’s no evidence to suggest Howley gained entry to any restricted area. You need a pass for that and Howley didn’t have one.’

  Perhaps I was right in assuming that, on this point at least, the police had made only superficial inquiries. Why go looking for unnecessary complications? Had this been their reasoning? I reminded myself that it hadn’t just been this man, that he’d had detective-constables knocking on doors and asking questions. But it had been McCallum who’d read through all the answers, collated them, drawn his conclusions, and influenced the coroner, in turn, to draw his.

  ‘Going back to this platform,’ I said, indicating the higher public one. ‘Were any bits of Niall’s clothing found on the spikes? Or maybe blood, where he’d scratched himself climbing over?’

  McCallum shook his head. ‘You see, they don’t think like you and me, these young guys. It all seems crazy, unbelievable to you, but that’s because you’re looking at it from the outside.’

  ‘Have you had much to do with computer addicts before?’

  In his experience, McCallum said, addiction was addiction. It mani­fested itself in different ways, but there was an underlying psychology which was depressingly the same. He told me the story of a young man who came to Canberra from Thailand to go to university.

  ‘A mate found him dead in his room a week before his third year exams. Heroin overdose. Parents flew straight out here. I drove them to the morgue and left them with him. Of course we’re not supposed to do that. If any of the blokes out there had dobbed me in—but they needed to be with their son to pray.’

  ‘Where were you while they were with him?’

  ‘Waited outside. Got a chair and sat down by the door.’

  I pictured McCallum hunched on his chair, nervous, but not too nervous, of a reprimand. I rephrased my question. ‘Have there been other suicides associated with over-use, or—addiction—to computers?’

  ‘You mean computer games?’

  I nodded, thinking that in Niall Howley’s case I did, but I could think of other instances, cases that had been reported in the press, of boys who’d become so hooked they’d been unable to get up from their computers to eat, or sleep, or use the lavatory.

  ‘Not here in Canberra.’

  ‘Did you contact any of the other players, or the guy who ran the MUD?’

  The answer had to be no, I thought, otherwise they would have been referred to in the report. There was also Fallon’s no, but I still wanted to hear McCallum say it.

  He frowned. ‘Police resources are tight enough, without wasting them on no-hopers like that.’

  ‘Was the coroner satisfied that playing the game led to Niall’s death?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I heard a noise, turned round and there was Brook, appearing from behind a perspex partition, its wavery reflections and the angle of the light multiplying his new suit.

  He winked at McCallum, and kissed me on the cheek.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Are you on your way to court?’

  ‘After lunch.’

  I thanked McCallum and shook his hand again. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  ‘Not too gruesome?’

  ‘If it is, that’s hardly your fault.’

  ‘This old man remembers.’

  ‘Too well,’ Brook said with a grimace.

  McCallum leant back in his chair. ‘Remember that time we were sent out to the Cotter? There’d been that double suicide and they couldn’t find the head? We were on bikes and I raced you.’

  ‘You always raced me.’

  ‘One of the heads was in the back of the ute and they were beating the bushes for the other one,’ McCallum explained for my benefit. ‘This young couple tied ropes to a tree and then around their necks. Going down this slope to the river. Ropes ripped their heads off. Back of the ute was covered in blood. Sharp eyes here found the second head. It’d rolled more than fifty metres down the hill.’

  Brook said, ‘We were too young to be doing that.’ He was dressed for an outing. His
skin shone, and he seemed ready to lift out of clothes and buildings, grey skies and a downpour.

  ‘I’d go to the pictures with him,’ McCallum said, noting my appreciation. ‘But he’d have to buy me popcorn and a coke.’

  ‘It’s a date,’ Brook answered, grinning. He squeezed my arm. ‘Phone me tonight. I should be home by eight.’

  ‘You haven’t forgotten?’

  ‘Peter’s birthday? How could I forget?’

  . . .

  On my way out of the building, I met Sophie going in. I was putting up my umbrella and she almost ran into me. Her umbrella still up, me struggling with mine. We stared at one another. Sophie was taller, but I was two steps higher, which should have given me a momentary advantage. Her dark hair looked darker, not bedraggled, in the rain. She wore a suit and shoes with heels so high that, had I tried to wear them, I would have fallen over. Brook wasn’t a particularly tall man, short, in fact, for a policeman. Was Sophie trying to outreach him? She must have found a park close by, or else was far more adept than I was at negotiating puddles.

  I silently congratulated her. She looked me up and down and I had a flash of Mikhail Litowski doing the same at the Telstra Tower—a sharp, confident, masticating look. She was Brook’s age and a widow. She’d had her kids very young, so now, conveniently, they were off her hands. So much compatibility in what seemed a record time. But who was measuring? Anyone could see they’d hit it off. Had he told her how his wife had left him, taken their two children, not returned to visit even when he was in hospital?

  We said hello, smiled, passed each other.

  Meeting him at work. A lunch date. Now she was with him, he with her, a lightness that two, three flights of stairs did not account for. But wasn’t Sophie too matt, too sharp, too limited? So careful with me. A mask that umbrellas and the rain, the awkward steps, excused. Brook laughing, glowing. I used to think his chemotherapy had made him transparent. The bad blood might come back, trick him and the doctors. But the other stuff, the stuff that made him Brook, that he walked about on, breathed with, felt with, had been made see-through by his illness and its cure.

  I checked the time and sloshed back to my car. Three minutes left on the voucher.

  . . .

  After dinner and homework and Katya’s bath, which Peter took charge of—Ivan was late, though he hadn’t said anything about being late that morning—I sat down with a medical dictionary to re-read the post mortem the police forensic pathologist had performed on Niall Howley.

  The first time I’d read it, my eyes had glazed over at lists of Latin names. Now I made myself slow down. The post mortem began with the doctor’s name and address. A Federal Police logo occupied the top left hand corner of the page. The preamble said that this was to be a three cavity post mortem: chest, abdomen and head. It began with three more subheadings: heart, pericardium, aorta.

  Again, I found the list mind-numbingly long. It began to seem as if the body parts, named one under the other on clean pages, had never belonged to a human being. Niall’s brain had been sawn open, and the injuries it had sustained took up half a page all on their own. I contrasted the report with the castle scene he’d left on his computer. The young man perhaps uncomfortably asleep. How often had I gone in to check on Peter late at night and found him twisted in bed, feet on the pillow, sheet all nohow?

  I flicked back over Bernard Howley’s statement. It was even terser than I remembered from my first reading.

  The deceased was identified by his father, Bernard Patrick Howley, at 11.15 am on 23 June.

  Mr Howley stated that the deceased had left home on the evening of 22 June at 7.30 pm and had not returned. He had been wearing a black shirt and black jeans. A car found in the Telstra Tower visitor’s car park was identified by Mr Howley as belonging to the deceased. In the car was a black umbrella, a grey woollen blanket and a wallet also belonging to the deceased. In the wallet was a Commonwealth Bank Mastercard, a Medicare card, a Video Ezy and a library card, a photo pass identifying the deceased as an employee of the Monaro Hospital, and $48.35 in cash.

  The statement went on to outline some of the background—how long Niall had been living at home, his relationship with his girlfriend, Natalie Rowan, his interest in Castle of Heroes, how many hours he’d been spending online, his withdrawal from ‘reality’. I assumed that this was Bernard’s choice of words. Reading through his statement again reinforced the view I’d formed the first time, that there was nothing to tell me how he’d really felt about the manner of his son’s death.

  . . .

  Dr Marian Huxley, the forensic pathologist who’d performed the autopsy on Niall, lived in a part of Canberra I’d always liked, and had always known would be beyond my means.

  In our landlocked capital, suburbs nudged each other for the right to squat around an artificial lake. And it was part of the curse I shared with many Canberrans, the curse of having grown up within smelling distance of the sea, that the sight of this lake, coming upon it round the shoulder of a hill, brought a lump to my throat. It was an experience at once pleasant, even exciting when the light fell on the water in a certain way, and deeply disappointing.

  I wound the window down, sniffed and there it was—dank weed, flaccid water, no salt, no wind to lift salt spray. But the lake was an expanse of something other than buildings, roads, something other—or at least the possibility was there. It was this that kept me hoping, and why I would have moved to Yarralumla like a shot had I been able to afford a house there, or even the deposit.

  Dr Huxley lived in a part of the suburb where the house extension people hadn’t yet moved in to create skylighted upper storeys, family rooms and double garages. Hers was a shabby, cement-rendered, mean windowed place in comparison with its glamorous neighbours.

  The former police doctor opened the door to me herself. At once I understood that she lived alone. The house had the unmistakable feel of a person who’d long ago chosen solitude.

  She was of a type I recognised from books and television, manners of a gallant Englishwoman, grooming slightly ragged round the edges now, the lean height, reach of empire in the eyes. I wondered how many of her kind could possibly have ended up working for the Australian Federal Police.

  We circled each other conversationally for a few minutes. Dr Huxley spoke carefully, her English accent giving her words what might, or might not, be an ironic edge. Hers was an old English, as old as the spread of England’s language to its colonies, yet Australian colloquialisms sat easily within it, as weeds sit easily within the lawn that holds them. I admired her beautiful floor rugs, her polished dark wood ­furniture, Turner reproductions on the walls, the view through the windows of the morning mist over the lake—even these a comment on the relationship between motherland and colony.

  If the doctor was as perceptive as she looked, she probably saw straight through my flattery. She had coffee ready on a tray, with milk and sugar in silver dishes, so there wasn’t that space afforded by her having to go and get it ready, a few minutes for me to nose around the room alone.

  I asked her what she’d done when she got the phone call to examine Niall’s body. She described the scene at the Telstra Tower on the morning of 23 June much as Olga Birtus had described it, thick fog bringing visibility down to five metres or so, hiding the tower so that the top of the mountain might have supported anything at all.

  By the time she arrived, the police had taped off an area around the body, and a photographer was already at work. Dr Huxley had studied Niall’s body for a few minutes before kneeling down and going through the formality of feeling for a pulse. She estimated that Niall had been dead for between eight and ten hours, taking into account the sub zero temperature of the previous night.

  ‘In your post mortem,’ I said, ‘you give the cause of death as cerebral haemorrhage.’

  ‘Probable cause of death.’

  ‘Why probable?’

  ‘The extent of that boy’s injuries indicate that he died on impact. He hit
the ground on the right side of the head, right shoulder and leg.’

  I wondered how recently Dr Huxley had read her report. Did she recall it in detail? There’d been that slight body waiting for her on the cutting table, face up his injuries all too obvious.

  ‘The most severe injuries were to the right side of his head and body,’ Dr Huxley repeated in her careful voice. ‘There was no indication that the young man died of heart attack before he hit the ground.’

  ‘Would you have expected him to?’

  ‘It happens. People who jump from the tops of buildings do suffer heart attacks before they reach ground level.’

  ‘Did Niall die straight away?’

  ‘Death could have been instantaneous, but not necessarily.’

  These were the words the doctor had used in concluding her post mortem.

  ‘You’ve seen this?’ I handed over a colour printout of the castle scene.

  Dr Huxley inclined her head and smiled. Her smile surprised me. There could have been a hint of complicity in it, but if so it was brief, gone before I could be sure.

  ‘A forensic pathologist has no business with coincidence,’ she said. ‘Or with speculation. He or she examines the evidence and records it.’

  ‘Was there a sharp stone, a rock, on the ground where Niall fell that could have caused the laceration on the back of the head that you refer to in your post mortem?’

  ‘There were many lacerations.’

  Dr Huxley smiled again. This time I thought it was to warn me. She had dry, pale olive skin, even white teeth that showed to advantage when she smiled.

  ‘I mean the one on the back of Niall’s head. If he landed on his right side as you say, then how did he hit the back of his head?’

  ‘It could have been, as you say, a stone.’

  ‘Did the police find a stone Niall might have hit his head on?’

  ‘Ms Mahoney, you must understand that, in the context of the young man’s injuries, the one you’re referring to was slight, it—’

  ‘It couldn’t have killed him?’

  ‘No.’