Dangerous to Know

by Anne Buist

  She contemplated staying in the back room reserved for the band during the break. Contemplated a double shot of Jack Daniels before facing them, but in the end walked out sober.

  Liam lifted his glass in acknowledgment. ‘Long time no see.’

  Adrenaline surged through her system. If Liam wanted to play games, so could she.

  ‘You missing The Styx’s unique sound?’ He had to have some excuse at the ready for being there.

  ‘A happy coincidence. I’m speaking at a conference in Lorne and saw the band was playing.’

  Damian wasn’t giving anything away but she doubted he would buy that. She wondered if Liam had researched her current living arrangements. He might have been arrogant enough to assume she was still pining for him, if the last encounter was anything to go by. On the other hand, revenge didn’t tend to factor in the other person’s desires.

  Damian leaned on the bar watching them.

  ‘So what was the conference?’ Natalie asked.

  ‘Forensic science shindig.’

  ‘I thought you’d be up to your neck in the Georgia Latimer hearing.’

  ‘Tania’s a big girl, she’ll cope. Besides, we’ve got a solid case. Your patient’s never going to get off on a bad luck defence.’

  ‘Jacqueline Barrett may disagree.’

  ‘Then may the best man…or woman…win.’

  ‘I heard you were homicide now.’ Liam turned his attention to Damian as he took a slug of his Guinness.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Grant MacArthur still there?’

  ‘Nope. Retired early. I took his job.’

  ‘He was a good cop. Pity he left.’ Liam looked at Natalie. ‘Always seems to me that older guys,’ his gaze flickered over Damian, ‘can teach younger ones quite a lot.’

  Damian took a sip of his beer and refused to rise to the bait. If it was just baiting.

  Liam’s smile towards Damian as he excused himself was stiff, and Natalie was left to wonder about the longer look back at her, and whether it really did hold traces of sadness. But mostly she was left doubting her own judgment about what had happened the last time they were together and whether the evening in Apollo Bay would have ended differently if Damian hadn’t been there.

  After the last bracket she went to the bar. Unable to see Damian in the crowd as it broke up, she nursed a bourbon and wondered if it was a habit she was growing out of. She seemed to be losing her taste for it. Or maybe she was close to spiralling downhill. Nothing ever tasted as good when you weren’t high, and being on an even level was a hard place to stay. She caught sight of Jasper, who now had two young girls with him. The one sitting on his lap looked like the daughter of the Malosevics’ chef and driver. Both were focused on him in the way women focused on Frank. It was probably the eyes.

  ‘O’Shea was watching you.’ Damian came up on her other side, not looking at her, gesturing to the barman.

  ‘People do when I’m singing. That’s why I stand at the front.’

  ‘He’s still hot for you.’

  ‘I doubt it. Likes to think he has some power over me, more likely.’

  ‘Does he?’

  Natalie caught his eye and held it. ‘At a personal level? No. It’s over. He was bad for me then and he’s just as bad for me now.’

  ‘Because he’s married?’

  ‘That too.’ She didn’t feel the need to elaborate. Damian could work it out for himself.

  Natalie nodded towards the young man who looked like Frank. ‘Thought of grabbing his glass for DNA? I’m sure I can manage to get a sample from Frank.’

  Damian shook his head. ‘This isn’t CSI, Natalie. I’d have to get…’

  ‘Live dangerously,’ she said as she left.

  Damian followed her back. She took it for granted, and he no longer asked. Did it matter that they were using each other to forget their previous partners? Everyone moved on and who was to say the next partner, rebound or not, wouldn’t be more suitable than the last. Anyway, part of her liked the reassurance of Damian’s presence. And he wasn’t entirely conventional. She saw when his bag fell open that he’d removed a glass from the pub. More genetic games, but it might help make sense of what had happened to Frank’s wives. And, if not, of what was at the core of Frank’s grief.

  Sunday night Damian served a chicken casserole in her stilt house. He was heading back to town the next morning and neither had brought up the topic of what would happen between them after the case was closed. Damian told her his father’s Spanish second wife had taught him to cook. The casserole was nothing like anything she had eaten in her childhood. Red and oily, rich with flavour.

  ‘Your own mother had problems, right?’ He’d never said, but it was a party trick she could do when she felt like it. Tell them their back-story from what she knew. She generally got the broad gist right; more accurate, deeper, the longer she’d known someone. She knew Damian well enough to have worked out he had a mother problem.

  ‘The marriage certainly did.’

  Natalie looked at him. ‘She still alive?’

  Damian paused. ‘Yes. Actually, she’s pretty good now. I’m so used to playing down her problems, minimising the effect they had, I kind of forgot I probably don’t need to do that with you.’

  ‘So are you repeating patterns?’ Natalie didn’t let him off, dared him with her eyes to break off contact.

  ‘You mean are you like my mother? Or was Caitlin? Or both of you?’

  ‘Any or all, I guess.’

  ‘Sounds like a relationship-type question. But we don’t have one, do we?’

  Natalie grinned. ‘It was a trick question. You passed.’ She paused. ‘Now answer it properly.’

  Damian eased himself back in his chair. Thought. Really thought about what she had asked. ‘With Caitlin I tried to pick someone as far away from my mother as I thought was possible.’

  ‘Did you succeed?’

  ‘Yes and no. Caitlin wasn’t mentally ill, but she is every bit as self-centred as my mother.’

  ‘If you’d had kids together you’d still be there.’

  ‘Yes. But only because of the kids. I’d known for a while she wasn’t interested in me, not the me that wanted to be a homicide detective, the me that pictured us driving around Australia with the kids in the back, camping every night, or the me who was passionate about making something of my life. Luke and she are a far better match.’

  She debated asking and stopped herself, but he had seen the question on her lips, heard it in there at the start. He answered it anyway.

  ‘You are nothing like Caitlin. You’re both petite but she’s blonde and controlling as all hell. She cooks a mean curry, would rather spend her day filing her nails, gossiping and watching soapies than ever helping anyone. Do anything.’

  ‘But…you think I’m like your mother.’

  He surprised her. ‘A bit. You’re unpredictable and I don’t think that’s just that I don’t know you so well. Maybe it’s the bipolar, I don’t know. My mum? She had issues, but doesn’t everyone?’ He looked at her. She was sure he wouldn’t have been able to interpret anything in her expression. ‘I’m not a shrink Natalie,’ he finally said. ‘But this attraction is gut instinct and a lot of animal lust.’

  ‘The two aren’t mutually exclusive.’

  ‘So you think you’re bad for me and I need therapy?’

  ‘Yes to the first. Probably no to the second. We’re both on the rebound.’ She regretted her words as soon as they left her mouth. The look of hurt wasn’t about Caitlin, it was about Liam.

  ‘So I’m just the fuck until you find the next doctor or lawyer?’ He tried to make it sound light but failed.

  ‘Only ever screwed one doctor, and that was a mistake I assure you. Before Liam it was a cop. Briefly.’ Tom hardly fitted Damian’s description, either. And Eoin, even if he had lived, was never going to be establishment.

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Just raw after Caitlin.’

  �
�Don’t worry about it.’

  A lot of time passed in silence, a meal finished, dishes cleaned up. She thought she would just go to bed. Without him. He could use the downstairs bed. Easier. Let him move on.

  ‘You aren’t like my mother, you know.’

  She looked back from the frame of her bedroom doorway.

  ‘I love her and she is…well was, impossible. Made me take on too much responsibility far too early. But it made me who I am and I’m okay with that. She tried; didn’t drink like her mother did when she was growing up.’

  ‘Do you know what bipolar means? Do you know I’ve gone totally nuts a couple of times? No of course you don’t. Nearly got disbarred as an intern. Fucked Alison’s boyfriend—the one and only doctor on the score card—in the art gallery moat. Only reason I didn’t end up with a charge was because my psychiatrist said I wasn’t responsible.’ She didn’t wait to hear his comeback or see his expression. She closed the door.

  She was in the midst of a bad dream when Bob screeching, ‘Call the cops!’ woke her. It was still dark and she groaned, figuring it was probably a possum. Then the night sky lit up as a bang sounded from downstairs and flames shot up past the back deck. Natalie was down the stairs in seconds, colliding with Damian at the door. As they ran outside she saw the flames had taken over the front section, along the railings of the balcony where they’d eaten earlier.

  ‘Is there a garden hose?’

  ‘Around the corner.’

  ‘Call the fire brigade.’ As Damian disappeared to get the hose he added, ‘And the police.’

  Natalie raced back inside to get a phone. After making the call she grabbed the metal bucket by the fireplace and began to throw random buckets of water onto the flames. Luckily they were mainly in the tree. Judging from the smell, they were fuelled by petrol.

  The CFA were there first. It couldn’t have taken them longer than ten minutes, but in that time the tree beside the balcony was ablaze and the balcony had caught. With Bob serenading them with screeches, they calmly and carefully made sure every ember was out.

  Luckily none of the glowing debris that had fallen onto the neighbour’s tin roof had taken hold, and the house itself, apart from being full of smoke and drenched in water, was untouched.

  ‘You’re damned lucky you have your house left,’ the fire chief told Natalie. ‘If the wind had been going in the other direction it would have been a different story. Winter or not, this whole area is like a tinder box.’

  ‘What I think saved it,’ said Damian grimly, ‘was that whoever threw the Molotov cocktail had a bad aim.’

  They all looked at him.

  ‘I heard it hit,’ he said. ‘My guess he was aiming for the balcony, but it lodged in the tree.’

  ‘So given this looks like arson,’ said the police sergeant, ‘either of you want to tell me who might have thrown it?’

  It was 4 a.m. before the CFA finally left. Natalie was exhausted but so tightly wired she knew she wouldn’t sleep. She was too tired to clean up, and the only room totally unaffected by water was her bedroom, furthest from the back balcony. They both looked at the bed and then each other. ‘You’re safe,’ said Damian, sounding as tired as she was. But she wanted him there with her and he saw it in her look.

  The bed sagged down beside her and she rolled into him, neither of them wearing more than underwear. Skin on skin sent tingles through her; she smelled the singed hairs on his arms and the sweat from his fire-fighting efforts and wanted him.

  ‘Maybe I should sleep on the floor.’ Restraint was going to be impossible for them both otherwise.

  ‘Oh what the fuck,’ Natalie said.

  She kissed him, and any hesitation on his part disappeared. His hands went over her body, pulling her to him, and she felt enveloped in a gentleness that gained increasing force as his ardour took over. When he knelt above her she thought how very different he was in every way from Liam, and the next thought, as they both came, was that there was something to be said for survivor sex.

  46

  It was inevitable I would bump into Jasper, but it didn’t happen in the way I expected.

  ‘Now doesn’t that just take you back.’

  I knew Mala well enough to pick the sardonic lilt. It’s subtle; few others would.

  We were sitting in the living room enjoying the aircon. Both Reeva, late in her pregnancy, and Vesna had retired for an afternoon nap. I followed Mala’s gaze. Outside the distant sea was a dazzling blue and we were far enough away to enjoy it without any hint of the tourist throng. But she wasn’t looking at the sea. Her focus was on the boathouse and the two people trying to untie the small boat from the jetty. One was Senka, sitting in the boat looking up at the young man, her face hidden. Jasper was looking as much in our direction, as he was at her.

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Eliza’s brat.’

  I looked self-consciously to my room off the mezzanine. The door was firmly closed.

  ‘Has…’ I didn’t need to say more. Mala could always tell what I was thinking.

  ‘No, and I’ll make sure she doesn’t.’ Mala got up and poured us each a glass of white wine, rubbing my shoulders with the freed-up hand after I took the glass. ‘You worry too much.’

  Reeva picked there was something wrong when she joined us a half an hour later. Senka and Jasper were still on the lake and I forced myself to not look in that direction. Mala smiled at Reeva and offered to get her a cold drink. Pregnant was bad enough; pregnant and hot was worse. She was also hyper-vigilant. I had yet to make sense of her preoccupations at that stage. But I didn’t want to give her cause for them to escalate.

  Unfortunately Vesna did not have the same clarity of mind on the subject as Mala and me. When she emerged from her siesta in a drug haze, she saw him immediately.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’

  Reeva started at the venom in Vesna’s voice. ‘What’s who doing here?’ She was looking at Jasper and Senka walking up the path. Reeva frowned and looked at me.

  ‘His name is Jasper Carson,’ I said. ‘I used to go out with his mother.’

  Reeva was quick, she kept looking at me, eyes narrowing.

  ‘Eliza slept with someone after me. To upset me,’ I explained. ‘Unfortunately he looked rather like me. Give or take.’

  She didn’t believe me. But in the end it didn’t matter. She was dead two days later.

  47

  Before Liam closed the prosecution case he called Wadhwa. Channel Ten news interviewed the psychiatrist afterwards.

  ‘The woman has a clear case of dissociative identity disorder,’ said Wadhwa, beaming at the reporter, oblivious that she had taken a step back and extended the arm holding the microphone as if to distance herself. ‘Persons with this disorder are not responsible as I have reported in many articles!’

  According to the print media he had said much the same in court. And more.

  Professor Wadhwa seemed to be of the opinion that he was a defence witness and kept wanting to argue the merit of the legal case for dissociative identity disorder. Justice Miller, after a remarkable show of patience, admonished the OPP and excused the witness. Justice Miller had refused to allow the OPP to bring in experts who had used Meadow’s Law or similar discredited statistics. Now he added, and I don’t want psychiatric hocus pocus either. It might not have been a great step forward for psychiatry, but it made Natalie’s day.

  The nights that followed, she slept fitfully. The local police had no leads on who had tried to torch the place; nor did Damian.

  ‘Why don’t you stay back in Melbourne?’

  She wasn’t sure if he was hinting that they could still date. ‘I’m thinking of it,’ she said. She didn’t tell him she had spoken to her manager at Yarra Bend hospital, where she usually worked, and was planning on going back there. Even if she did continue in academe, it couldn’t be with Frank.

  As she watched Damian leave, she felt a little as if a holiday romance was ending—that things wouldn’t be
the same once she was back living in her Collingwood warehouse. There was a lot she liked about him, a lot that might even have been good for her, but she’d never once felt the spark that fired her up every time she had ever seen or thought of Liam. Even now, half-hating Liam, thoughts of him energised her. Damian’s calm influence was what Declan had recommended. It was what her mother had settled for, too. But Natalie didn’t think she could do it. Better, in the end, to be single.

  Her nights were still full of images of blood, of the Worm and the fire and dead babies in a line of cribs, each with Vesna’s haunted look, creeping into the crevices of her thoughts, taunting her. On the night before she was due to give evidence in Georgia’s defence, she woke up shaking. It took several moments for the balaclava man at the end of her bed to disappear. She knew her lithium had to be low, but at least that meant the nausea was settling a bit. She hadn’t taken her second mood stabiliser at all last night. If she took it now she would be slowed down and Liam would annihilate her on the stand.

  ___________________

  Natalie was at the court at 9.30 a.m. Jacqueline Barrett was waiting for her, looking immaculate as always. Hair coiffed into the perfect bob, tan stockings, figure-hugging suit, skirt just above the knees. She ushered Natalie into one of the rooms earmarked for lawyer–witness discussions. Her junior joined them, an attractive girl in her early twenties trying to channel Jacqueline with a less expensive outfit and not quite succeeding.

  ‘We’ve scored a reasonable judge,’ said Jacqueline. ‘Fair and not taking any of O’Shea’s bullshit.’

  Natalie wished she could ask what bullshit, but kept quiet. She’d seen Liam screw over one of her vulnerable patients on the stand, after he’d petitioned for Natalie not to testify because of a conflict of interest. The girl had crumbled. Natalie had no intention of doing so.

  ‘How’s Georgia bearing up?’

  ‘Nervous, which is understandable.’

  ‘So you’re still not going the “not guilty due to mental illness” route?’