Dangerous to Know

by Anne Buist

  Opposite them a thin woman in her forties lay back in a chair with her eyes closed; on the arm of the chair sat a dark-haired man with a craggy face and a grim expression who watched proceedings furtively. Both wore jeans and jumpers. At their feet a pyjama-clad teenager was biting her fingernails. The staff?

  Frank hadn’t registered her arrival. The slim blonde looked her over, her expression too guarded to interpret. Natalie hesitated and then walked towards the police sergeant. ‘I’m Dr King,’ she said, extending her hand. ‘What happened?’

  Pengana took her to the kitchen.

  ‘What happened?’ she repeated.

  ‘Professor Moreton went to check on his wife. Found her unresponsive. Tried to revive her.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Unsuccessfully.’

  Natalie knew what it felt like when time stood still. She’d had an odd dissociative experience once on antihistamines. This was a little different, though. Now it was if everything around her faded away, the pots and pans and hanging utensils no longer part of her reality, instead a slideshow of images flashing through her head. Alison prim and proper, Alison looking uncomfortable as Rocky-Horror Janet in her underwear, Alison crying, laughing…Living. The last picture seemed to sear itself into Natalie’s memory: Alison accusatory, bitter and angry, and Natalie felt overwhelmed with shame.

  Sergeant Pengana shifted uncomfortably.

  The blood had drained from Natalie’s face. She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down.

  Alison was dead. Natalie had failed her totally. She looked at Pengana. ‘The baby?’

  He shook his head.

  For one horrific moment she pictured Declan pontificating, suggesting she had fantasised about being Alison, just as he had once mused about her putting herself into the shoes of Lauren, Liam’s wife.

  No every pore of her body screamed. Frank was not a replacement for Liam, not at any moment, ever.

  Natalie felt the tears coursing down to her chin. Alison couldn’t be dead. She was about to live the dream. Have the baby and live happily ever after. And what were the odds of one man’s two pregnant wives both dying at thirty-nine weeks?

  She waited until her breathing steadied. ‘Do you have any idea what caused her death?’

  ‘Mm.’ Pengana scratched at a light chin stubble. ‘We do.’ The downward intonation didn’t leave much opening for expansion. Nor did Pengana’s squint as he pulled out a notebook. ‘Did you know the deceased?’

  Natalie ignored the question. ‘Is it being treated as suspicious? Has Frank…?’

  Pengana clicked his pen. ‘The family are waiting for a lawyer to arrive.’

  This wasn’t good. Or maybe it was. Better safe than sorry. ‘Can I speak to Frank?’

  ‘Certainly, but please do so in the living area. At least until the homicide squad have spoken to him.’

  Homicide. Her stomach dropped and she felt an urge to ring Declan. Could this much madness be so well hidden? She’d been starting to question things about Reeva; what had she missed?

  Pengana took her name and details, including when she had last seen Alison, and let her return to the living area. She went directly to Frank, kneeling down in front of him. His head was still in his hands. ‘I’m Natalie King. I’m a doctor. I work with Frank,’ she explained to the two women.

  The older woman focused briefly then looked away with a fatuous smile. The pigtailed woman smiled minutely. ‘I’m Frank’s sister Mala.’ She nodded to the older woman. ‘Vesna, our mother.’

  Natalie’s smile was sombre and brief. ‘This is obviously…a traumatic time.’

  Vesna gave her a tight smile, suddenly focused. ‘Would you like a tea?’

  Natalie was about to say no when Mala intervened. ‘What a good idea. Gordana?’ The woman opposite returned the gaze with a sullen expression and pushed the younger girl with her foot. The sullen expression did not alter as the girl leapt up, using the request as an opportunity to escape.

  ‘You say you work with Frank?’ said Vesna.

  Frank didn’t appear to be listening.

  ‘Yes,’ said Natalie, ‘Research. I’m a psychiatrist, though.’ Neither Vesna nor Mala was giving much away, but it was hard to assess anyone for the first time in circumstances like this.

  Mala seemed to sense Natalie’s unease. ‘Frank found Alison. Out in my grandfather’s boathouse.’ She shook her head, as if she still couldn’t quite believe it.

  ‘She had been quite hysterical you know,’ said Vesna. ‘What on earth was she thinking, making Frank tramp out there to check on her?’

  Frank. ‘Had anyone else checked on her?’ Natalie had asked before she realised how it would sound. But everyone appeared too distracted to worry.

  ‘It’s freezing out there. She shouldn’t have been there.’ The dismissive tone suggested there was no love lost between these women and Alison.

  ‘We couldn’t persuade her to stay in the house,’ Mala added, leaning into her brother to comfort him. ‘Lord knows Frank tried.’

  ‘Can I do anything to help? Frank?’

  Frank lifted his head. His skin looked curiously pale, perhaps the light, and though he looked dazed, he also seemed years younger. All of them in fact had remarkable complexions; even Vesna looked like an older sister rather than their mother.

  ‘She’s dead.’ There was bewilderment in his voice, but also something else she filed away to reflect on later. She thought momentarily of Anders Breivik, his cool calm in the dock after he had murdered all those children in Norway. If Frank had killed his wife and child, his acting was at award level. And his psychopathy just as profound.

  Natalie took his hand as much for her own comfort as his. Their eyes locked. She heard the door from the balcony open. Voices. She looked up, recognising one immediately.

  Damian was staring at her. And he didn’t look happy.

  18

  ‘When were you going to tell me, Frank?’

  Alison had insisted she wanted to sleep in the boathouse.

  ‘Come back inside Alison, you’re being irrational. It’s cold.’

  Alison hugged herself, arms resting on her distended abdomen. She had been crying and her eyes were puffy slits. Her skin was mottled in the lamp light. ‘I’ve had enough of you and your family.’

  I had told her to stay with her mother. Now she was here for at least the evening. Perhaps tomorrow I could drive her back into town. Alison’s parents had become increasingly distant with me as the pregnancy had progressed. Or, more pertinently, since Alison had become increasingly irrational. I understood it was because they had Alison’s interests at heart and were too over involved to see the situation in perspective.

  ‘You can have our bedroom and I’ll take the spare,’ I said calmly. The spare room Reeva died in.

  ‘The bed here is fine.’ She tried the defiant-little-girl look. It must have worked in the past but she had failed to register that it had never done so with me. She didn’t know what else to try. We are all creatures of habit. Even though I knew it was pointless I reiterated my previous position. ‘There is nothing between Natalie and myself. This…situation has been stressful for us both. I needed someone to talk to.’

  There were fresh tears. ‘Of all the women in the world why did you have to pick her?’

  Of all the woman in the world I could have picked Angelina Jolie. We were talking about what was practical and who had skills, but my wife wasn’t capable of being rational.

  ‘I could hardly have been expected to know you two had history.’ This wasn’t entirely true. I had noted when reading Natalie’s CV that her intern year had been at the same hospital as my wife.

  ‘But I told you, that first day!’ Alison had started to shiver. She sat on the couch bed and pulled the quilt over herself. The boathouse had been my grandfather’s studio. It was never intended to accommodate someone overnight, or at least not in winter. The large windows onto the lake offered little insulation but at least were well sealed from the wind gusting around the wooden s
tructure.

  ‘If you hadn’t kept on about her’—and Reeva, Mala, my mother, the internet’s ten tips for expecting fathers and any number of other tedious topics—‘I wouldn’t have been under so much stress, would I?’

  ‘I’m the one who’s pregnant!’ Alison screamed at me. Or had that been Reeva?

  I didn’t lose my temper. I greeted this type of ridiculous behaviour, as always, with silence. I turned and went to the gas heater. It took several minutes to get going; it wasn’t even possible without a long match, now the pilot didn’t work. It had probably been years since we’d last used it. If she insisted on being irrational I needed to do what I could for the wellbeing of Harry. Harry. I hoped he took after my side of the family and not the Cunninghams or, and it was hard not to shudder, the British prince that Alison found appealing. Really? I had given up arguing about the name; it wasn’t what was going to be on the birth certificate, and my family and I were certainly not going to call him Harry.

  ‘I know,’ she said finally. She sounded surprisingly calm.

  When I stood after lighting the heater and glared back at her she gave a look of triumph. ‘What is it that you imagine you know?’

  19

  They were waiting for the arrival of the crime-scene officers. And the funeral director. Natalie frowned at this—surely it was too soon to confront the family with funeral details?—then realised that, Alison’s death having been reported to the coroner, the hearse was required to deliver her body to the morgue for an autopsy. Involuntarily, Natalie found her gaze being drawn to the boathouse. Alison was still there. Natalie still couldn’t work out why she had been there in the first place. Frank could barely string two words together and Damian was ignoring her.

  As the CSOs unloaded equipment and descended on the boathouse, she had plenty of time to wonder what she was doing there, and why Frank had called her. But the Moreton-Malosevic family’s lawyer arrived and sequestered herself away with the family, and the police finally acknowledged Natalie’s presence.

  The family were in shock, none more so than Frank. Vesna was reacting defensively and Mala had taken on the role of holding them together. Natalie had the feeling she had done it before. With Vesna, particularly, there was a sense that Mala was the parent. The staff, too, looked to Mala to take charge. In other circumstances perhaps Frank took control but with the loss of a second wife and child, no one was expecting too much of Frank. The police were polite, deferential, but only to the family’s grief. Damian didn’t look like a newbie. He wore the homicide mantle like a glove.

  ‘I’m just going to speak to the doctor,’ Natalie heard Damian tell his colleague, who was about to take statements from the staff. Damian walked over to her. Took her firmly by the arm and led her into a room on the other side of the hallway. She picked it as Frank’s study: books lined the walls and the desk was covered in paperwork.

  ‘Care to explain what you’re doing here?’ She couldn’t quite make out his expression in the light of the sole lamp, except that he was working hard not to give anything away.

  ‘I work with him. He called.’

  Damian waited.

  Time to turn things back on him. ‘Did you recognise his name when you got the call?’

  This produced a reaction. ‘Yes. As it happens I was down at my mate’s, local detective’—hoping to see you was the unsaid implication—‘and he said I could tag along.’

  It was her turn to wait.

  ‘So you were working for him, and you were curious about his first wife. Please tell me you had no idea that his second was going to die. I’m already going to have a difficult time explaining why I was asking for the first coroner’s report two weeks before the second wife dies in suspiciously similar circumstances.’

  ‘You can say I mentioned Frank and Reeva and thought her death unusual. That you wondered about the case. Coincidence, nothing more. I’m still registered as a forensic psychiatrist so it could have been a semi-official discussion. If anyone notices, which I doubt.’

  ‘You avoided my question.’

  ‘No, I confirmed the circumstances. As to the question…’ Natalie thought about how she’d failed Alison. Again. ‘I was an intern with Alison. I’d like to help.’

  Damian raised an eyebrow. ‘I could see that.’

  ‘He’s in shock. I wasn’t referring to helping Frank.’ Though he would need it and she would offer it and maybe she could help him. But it was Alison she owed.

  ‘How did…Alison die?’

  Damian hesitated.

  ‘I know Frank, he confides in me,’ she said softly. ‘If you and I work together I can tell you if I think he’s guilty. More to the point, why he did it.’ Well, she hoped she could.

  ‘I thought you guys were hung up on confidentiality.’

  ‘If he was my patient, yes,’ said Natalie. ‘But he’s my supervisor, and then only in an informal way.’ Even if Frank had been a patient, if he was also a serial killer of wives then she had a duty of care to any future wife—theoretically anyway.

  She watched Damian process the information. She thought of his steadiness with her. Remembered that even sex with her after a drought hadn’t entirely enabled him to drop his guard. An introvert, a man who would be hard to read when he chose to hide his feelings. Unknowns there. But she doubted they would be as surprising as Frank’s depths.

  Could she work with Damian? She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  He ran a hand through the short spikes of his hair. ‘This has to be completely confidential.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Faulty gas heater.’

  She would have gone to sleep and not woken up. There were worse ways to die. ‘And…the baby too?’

  Poor Alison. Natalie turned away, didn’t want Damian to see her vulnerable. Grief, she told herself, not depression. Loss of two lives, one not yet lived and the other cut far too short. But whatever this feeling of vulnerability was, she didn’t want it. Not before a man she was sleeping with, it gave away too much power. And her need for sex already did that.

  When she looked up Damian nodded, expression grim.

  ‘So it…Could it have been an accident?’

  ‘Yeah, but two wives? Both pregnant?’

  They looked at each other. Georgia Latimer came to mind: surely this wasn’t a coincidence? What Oscar Wilde had said about losing parents was even truer for wives. One—unfortunate. But two? Careless at the very least.

  It was seven in the morning before Natalie made it back to the stilt house. Bob and his friends were waiting.

  ‘Champion of the Universe!’ Bob serenaded from the gutter.

  ‘Not sure they agree Bob, but keep on trying.’

  She made herself a coffee and drank it slowly. Tried to make sense of what had happened. Alison was dead. Frank’s marriage had been under pressure; she knew also that unresolved grief for Reeva, as well as Alison’s antipathy towards Natalie herself as Frank’s confidant, had added to the tension. She wished she had done something differently. Wasn’t sure what.

  Natalie stood up suddenly and flung her coffee cup. ‘Fuck!’ It smashed against the wall, sending Bob screeching across the patio in alarm as the dregs formed Rorschach blots. ‘I will not fucking get depressed over this,’ she screamed, and went to change into running gear.

  Five kilometres later she was feeling better, her head clearing. She had not caused this and had not missed anything. But if there was something to find, if Frank had thought even for a minute that he could play her, then he was going to find out he was wrong. And if he was a victim of an improbable but not impossible double tragedy, then he deserved to be innocent until proven guilty.

  Natalie broke the news to Wei.

  He stared at her. ‘Poor Mala.’

  Mala? Wei saw her frown and shrugged. ‘She came back from Oxford you know, when her grandfather died. Then Reeva. The house is cursed. I’ll go and see if I can help.’

  ‘I’ll lock up,’ Natalie assured him. And she would.
After she’d searched Frank’s office.

  She had no idea what she thought she might find, just that she needed to know everything she could about him and Reeva. She hadn’t slept, but one night surely would be okay? Tonight she’d take extra quetiapine. And a dose of lithium after missing this morning’s. Maybe more antidepressants? She wanted to ring Declan and swear she hadn’t done anything to cause this, but that she couldn’t walk away. She really had tried to find a quieter life.

  Frank’s cabinets were locked but the key was in his top drawer. Everything was labelled. All his research articles and grants, patient files from research projects with data de-identified but keyed to a code, to be accessed if needed. Wei’s CV was also there. She took a quick look. He’d studied at Oxford, which was presumably where he’d met Mala. She had probably asked Frank to give him a job. Frank’s CV was impressive, and there was a file full of newspaper articles and DVDs of television appearances. In two of the articles there were photos of Frank with Reeva. In the first they were looking at each other rather than the camera, but it was clear she was an attractive woman. Slim; slight build like Natalie’s. Blonde, though, like Alison. She exuded an aura of confidence and calm. A certainty about her place and her future.

  Natalie felt a surge of mixed feelings; a foreboding sense of the unknown hazard just around the corner, that even someone as smart and worthy as Reeva hadn’t been able to prevent. It seemed such a waste. A meaningless waste of potential. But there was also another feeling. In the other photo Reeva was pregnant. Natalie folded it away quickly.

  The desk was no more personal. A workplace that still had traces of Reeva but no strong sense of her presence, no hint of the hold she still had on Frank nor the answers Natalie felt she would offer, if Natalie just knew where to look. The only slightly incongruous item in the room was a small bar fridge containing a bottle of white wine, another of champagne, and two chilled glasses. A celebration that had never happened—and if it was for Harry’s birth, never would. There was a small leather bag in the bottom; Natalie opened it to find it empty. She couldn’t remember ever seeing Frank with the bag. Maybe a present he had no use for; but why in the fridge?