The Disappearances of Madalena Grimaldi

by Marele Day

  ‘How well do you recall the bodies you examine?’

  ‘Examined,’ he corrected me. ‘I have been retired for a number of years.’ He paused for a moment and inhaled the scent of his roses, distinguishing different varieties like a conductor distinguishing instruments in his orchestra. ‘I’m sorry to say nothing immediately springs to mind with this one but let’s have a closer look at what the report tells us.’ He studied it in a little more detail then came to some sort of conclusion. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would have had to examine this body in some detail to ascertain the exact cause of death. Whether it was the blow to the head or immersion in water. Forensic medicine is a most precise science, Ms Valentine.’

  ‘Is it possible that he might have been killed first then the body dumped in the water?’ I voiced my suspicions.

  ‘No, no, nothing like that,’ he hastened to assure me, smile on his face as if I was a child who’d inadvertently said something amusing. ‘It’s obvious from the postmortem evidence that he drowned. Look,’ he turned the report around so we could both read it. ‘Oedema fluid in the pharynx, larynx, trachea and bronchi. Both lungs were oedematous. Oedema fluid noted in the nose.

  ‘If he had been dead before immersion there would be no oedema fluid. Oedema is excessive accumulation of serous fluid in the intercellular spaces of tissue. It occurs when the drowning person breathes in water. Even if he were unconscious he would breathe in water. If he had stopped breathing beforehand, if he had died as a result of the head wound, we would find small amounts of water that trickle in through the nose and mouth, but not enough to cause oedema.’ He sat back, as if he’d just wound up a lecture.

  Then the expression of satisfaction on his face changed to one of acute interest. A slow memory that had begun its journey while he was reading the report had now arrived at its destination.

  ‘Actually … yes, that’s right. Of course. Anzac Day, 1985. The floods. Do you remember?’

  Not till he reminded me and not through personal experience. I was in America then and didn’t hear about the floods till I returned. Like recalling exactly what you were doing when you heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated, everyone had their story about those floods.

  ‘The city was in chaos,’ he began, ‘some of the main roads were virtual rivers. Parking was impossible, I was late for work. My first wife was a school teacher. She hated those times when it rained for days on end. The children would get … “ratty” was the word she used. So it was with everyone during the floods. We like to believe we are so civilised, that we are immune to the weather. But every so often Nature imposes her presence on us and suddenly all our logical thought processes become unhinged.’ His gaze wandered over the beds of rose bushes, the neat clipped lawn in between, this little patch of nature be so carefully controlled.

  ‘I remember the coat. I’m sure this was the body. It was worn and threadbare, a couple of sizes too small for him, but it was a Burberry.’

  ‘A Burberry?’

  ‘Yes. It’s an expensive English make. I had one just like it. A present from my son the previous Christmas.’

  That was all very jolly, my father and Dr Kirby having the same sort of coat. I wondered where my father came across his ‘Burberry’. Probably wandered into a St Vincent de Paul’s shop and got lucky.

  ‘Dr Kirby, the man wearing that coat—was he a derelict?’

  He put his hand to his chin and rubbed it thoughtfully. ‘Difficult to say, really. He wasn’t clean-shaven, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a derelict. Hair and nails keep growing after death.’

  ‘I was thinking that for a derelict there appeared to be little alcohol-related damage to the internal organs.’

  ‘My discipline has taught me never to rely on assumptions. Being a derelict doesn’t necessarily mean being an alcoholic. Granted, many homeless men are alcohol or drug dependent, but not all.’

  A car pulled into the drive. The engine was turned off and a few seconds later a car door slammed.

  ‘Sofia? I’m round the back,’ he called. He turned his attention back to me. ‘I’m sorry I can’t be more specific. Perhaps the person who identified the body might be able to help.’ He looked at the report to find the name. ‘Sergeant Hindley.’ I politely thanked Kirby for the suggestion. I’d already made enquiries in that direction. Hindley, now Detective Senior Sergeant at Parramatta, was out of the office for a few days. ‘He would have completed the Report of Death to Coroner, the P79A form. They must have sent it to you, along with all the rest of this.’ There was no such form in the material Forensic had sent. ‘Oh well, it probably got lost in the translation. As I mentioned earlier, with the floods and everything, there was so much chaos. Hello, darling. Did you have a good game?’

  Around the corner came a woman in a sleeveless tennis dress, a yellow sweatband keeping her shiny dark hair in place. She was a good twenty years younger than Kirby. When she saw me she gave Kirby a subtle look of enquiry that didn’t escape my notice. They embraced, then he took her tennis racquet as if helping her with her luggage. ‘Claudia Valentine, may I present my wife, Sofia Theodourou.’ Even though he was retired he was not out of touch. Not only did he have a wife twenty years younger than himself, he had a wife with her own surname. I bet his first wife didn’t have her own surname.

  She relaxed, and extended her hand to me. ‘I think we spoke on the phone,’ she reminded me. The woman who’d answered when I first rang Kirby’s home. Kirby handed the report back to me. ‘If there’s anything else we can do, don’t hesitate to call.’

  ‘Thanks for the coffee. And kourabedes,’ I smiled at his wife. ‘They were delicious.’ She smiled back graciously. ‘Must be heaven living with all these roses,’ I commented.

  ‘Close,’ agreed Sofia.

  It wasn’t till I was in the car and back on the highway that I thought of the roses in another garden-the crematorium at Rookwood. Rose bushes fed with human blood and bone. Such luxuriant growth from our mortal remains.

  And it wasn’t till I was on the Harbour Bridge heading back to the city that I realised why the name of Kirby’s second wife sounded familiar to me. Sounded wasn’t the right word, because I’d never heard her name before today. But I had seen it written down. Miss S. Theodourou. Kirby’s second wife was the forensic assistant on my father’s postmortem.

  Rushcutters Bay is a harbourside suburb, a quiet residential area next to Kings Cross. It has views of blue water edged in emerald green, the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and you pay a lot of money for them. But it has a nice big park where even deros can enjoy the million-dollar views. I drove along New Beach Road and found a parking spot just beyond the Cruising Yacht Club. I bought a bottle of spring water from the canteen outside the club and proceeded to stroll along. Near the children’s playground, I watched a tall elegant woman in a big floppy hat trying to persuade a two year old to get back in the stroller. But the child didn’t want to know about it. He was standing on top of the jungle gym, king of the castle, master of his world. A world just out of mother’s reach. She had to sweet-talk him back to the ground and she wasn’t having a very good time of it. Ah, it took me back—all that cajoling and bribery, all that waiting around. I was certainly glad that bit was over.

  I left her to it. Apart from the mother and child the only other person I encountered was a man walking his dog. Probably a procrastinating writer. People were staying out of the sun, and rightly so. Another hot day, so many of them in a row they seemed to melt together into the one long, hot day. It was too late and too early for the joggers who would inevitably be running the path around the bay, before or after work. There was a seawall a metre or so high with a two-metre drop to the water. OK, so it was the time of the floods and it was raining. Easy to slip. Hit the side of your head, lose balance, over the wall and into the harbour.

  I was more than halfway round the park before I came across the stormwater canal. There was barely a trickle of water in it. It was hard to tell whether
it was drain water or backwash from the harbour. I wasn’t about to bend down and taste it. There was a fair amount of rubbish where the canal met the sea—plastic bags, drink cans etc. They may have travelled kilometres down the canal to finally end up here.

  The canal had a slightly deeper trench running down the middle of it. I climbed down from the footbridge into the canal. It was not unlike a river bed, with a layer of sandy soil having washed into the canal and the trickle of water. If you held a close-up camera on it, it could be a major river system. I walked gingerly along, towards Bayswater Road where the canal curved and became a tunnel under the road. It was slippery in places, the darker wet patches being silt rather than sand. Along the walls of the canal you could see the high-water mark stained mossy green. Above that grew the ubiquitous asthma weed, other scrubby weeds, then the civilised, manicured grass of the park. I walked under a second bridge.

  I was closer to the road now and could hear the muted sound of traffic. See the tube of darkness as the canal disappeared under the road. At the edge of the road was a small brick building, possibly a pumping station, with a series of pipes running out of or into it. About three metres from the tunnel a bright pink and white beach ball sat grounded on a sandbank, unmoved by the trickle of water continuing inexorably to the sea. Innocent and forlorn, as if a child had abandoned the ball for more exciting pursuits.

  There was a flick of movement as a cockroach scurried along the wall. On a foraging expedition to the world of light, the aboveground. Our six-legged neighbours, eternally with us. In stormwater canals, in the subterranean passages of the city, under our floorboards, in the cracks and crevices of our houses they also dwell. The human population of Sydney is almost four million. How many hundreds of millions of cockroaches are there? The cockroaches would know-they’re getting so smart they’re probably collecting their own census information.

  The closer to the road I walked, the higher the walls of the canal became, higher than my head. I couldn’t be seen now from the park unless someone was specifically looking. A wire fence, rusted but still sturdy, ran alongside the canal. But you could climb over it if you wanted to. Or fall.

  There wasn’t enough water at the moment to drown in but the high-water mark was at least a metre up the wall of the canal. During those floods the water level would have been even higher. You could drown then. The body float down to the harbour. It could have happened even further up, across the road and beyond, where the stormwater canal started.

  I was approaching the mouth of the tunnel. From the road there was a steep little path worn into the growth of weeds and the wire fence was bent over to the ground. Then I saw where the path led. To a ledge just inside the tunnel. The ledge was deep enough and wide enough to accommodate two full-length single mattresses. Because that’s what was on the ledge. Tucked away under the road, higher than the water level, it would be safe and dry. You would get cockroaches, but the rats wouldn’t climb up here.

  Anzac Day. A national holiday. Drunk and playing two-up. Maybe he’d won enough to buy an extra flagon. Coming back to the mattress. He slipped on the steep slope, lost his footing. Flying through the rain, skidding, knocking his head on the side, drowning in the water.

  They say death by drowning is pleasant, as pleasant as death gets. Breathing the water in and out. Oedema fluid in pharynx, larynx, trachea and bronchi, but that wouldn’t have started yet. After the screaming, burning sensation as the unfamiliar element enters your lungs, you become briefly a water creature. The water from the streets of the city swims in you as you swim in it. Perhaps you have lost consciousness already, perhaps not. You hallucinate, dream, till finally the dreams float out of you and dissolve in the ocean.

  This could have been the place where my father died but those mattresses weren’t his. They were more likely now to belong to street kids than deros. I climbed up the side, wedging the edge of my foot into one of the crevices that didn’t have weeds growing out of it. I pulled myself up and looked around before I trespassed.

  It was daytime—hopefully the occupants of those two mattresses were out on a foraging expedition, or sitting in a doorway or on a park bench somewhere. I didn’t think they’d take too kindly to an intruder. You find a place like this, you don’t give it up easily. They’d probably have knives or at least broken bottles, the sharp edge of glass every bit as effective as a steel blade.

  I stepped across to the ledge. On the mattresses were a couple of crumpled, dirty blankets. No pillows. Around the area a few Coke cans, other scraps of rubbish, no personal items. I crouched down. From here there was a pretty good view of the length of the canal right down to the bay. This was a place for light sleepers who didn’t toss and turn. You wouldn’t want to roll too far or you’d end up in the drink. Across the road was a highrise of luxury apartments. The tenants were paying around $700 a week for the view. The occupants of the mattresses were paying nothing. I crouched there, elbows resting on my knees. Looking at the windows across the way, the mattresses, the walls, looking at the darkness of the tunnel under the road. Waiting for the place to whisper to me the things it had seen. But the place remained still and silent. All I could hear was the eternal hum of traffic heading into the city.

  TEN

  Friday night. The third night in a row I’d watched Kerry’s house. Exams finished, all that freedom, she’d have to go out sometime. I’d changed cars. Another one of Danny’s. This time it was a dark green Monaro. I preferred not to ask how it was he had access to all these cars. Parts for the Daimler were taking longer to arrive than expected, he said. I had the feeling Danny was deliberately holding back to wean me off it. Three nights, three different cars, three different parking spots. First two nights no-one came to the house and no-one left; the lights went out at eleven. But on Friday nights in Sydney everyone goes out.

  Kerry came out wearing a black bomber jacket, Blundstone boots and a short gold-flecked skirt. She walked the short distance to the bus stop and leaned against a fence, waiting. To pass time she took a small gold compact out of her pocket, flipped it open and checked her face in the mirror. There appeared to be a small skin blemish under her chin. She rubbed her finger over it a couple of times but before any permanent damage could be done the bus came along.

  I followed the bus to Riverwood station where everyone alighted. I grabbed my leather jacket and made it to the platform just as the train arrived. It had only gone two stops when Kerry got up and went to the door. But instead of getting out when the train came to a halt she waved to someone waiting on the station platform. It was her friend from school, Tamara, but I barely recognised her. The hair that had been neatly held back in a ponytail was now running rampant. If you lost something in that hair you’d spend a week looking for it.

  When the train started up again, Tamara took out a pair of big gold earrings and put them on. ‘What did you tell her?’ I heard Kerry ask.

  ‘The movies. That was cool, but guess what?’ Tamara grimaced. ‘Midnight curfew.’

  ‘Bummer,’ sympathised Kerry.

  ‘She gave me money for a cab home but.’

  ‘Great,’ said Kerry, ‘maybe we can buy our own drinks for a change.’

  ‘Come off it,’ retorted Tamara. ‘It’s only for a cab from Strathfield.’

  Fifteen years old trying to look eighteen. Acting tough and being cool. I hoped that’s the way it would be if they got into any trouble.

  They alighted at Kings Cross, where trouble is easy to find, even for those not looking for it. I followed them up the escalators and out past a shoe shop. Tamara was briefly diverted by a pair of red patent-leather platform shoes but when she saw Kerry striding so purposefully along, she quickened her step. They stood at the traffic lights, waiting for the WALK sign.

  This was the hour when the Cross was at its best. The night was young by nightlife standards, some of the clubs were just getting going. There were bright lights, pleasant rich garlicky smells emanating from restaurants. The people up here for a ni
ght out wore an air of hope and expectancy for what the night could bring. The touts and hustlers hadn’t yet started working the street with that quiet whispering desperation.

  Kings Cross drew street kids and deros like a magnet. It was the place you came when you no longer had a home to go to. The public space that people who have homes only ever visit. In a way it was the village green, the kind of village green you might find in hell. A sick and seedy place that only really looked good when all the lights were on. In the glare of bright lights the tourists, partygoers, couldn’t see the homeless. They were invisible, blending into the shadows of side streets and darker areas off the main drag. Once the partygoers went home, they would reclaim the streets.

  When you become homeless you develop cockroach habits. Scavenging, hunting for food in bins, wherever you can find it. You enter a parallel universe, living in the buffer zone of the drugs you take to numb the damage caused by the hard edges. You become the truest citizen of the city, inhabiting its streets and public spaces, its parks, its doorways and recesses, the cracks in the wall. Its stormwater canals.

  Kerry and Tamara walked a little way down Bayswater Road and went into a large terrace house converted into a club, from which music was faintly emanating. A neon sign above the doorway-Horn of Africa—pulsated red light. I hung back and made a few adjustments to my person. I mussed my hair up, letting the front section drift over one eye. Then pulled the collar of my leather jacket up and walked in.

  Horn of Africa was a serious music venue with a live band, tables to sit at down the front for the people who wanted to listen rather than talk. Mostly though, everyone hung around the bar area. I made my way to the bar and held out a ten-dollar note. Being tall, I got served almost straightaway.

  I spotted Kerry and Tamara with a couple of guys. They were leaning up against a side wall. Not the best place to listen to the music but it was a nice safe corner in the dark, where they didn’t look as underage as they would have in the light. They were all chatting away but in between sips of what appeared to be rum and Coke, Kerry would look around, as if expecting someone. When she finished her drink she excused herself and went to the rest rooms. She came back amidst applause—the band had just finished a number.