Dangerous to Know

by Anne Buist

  Her progress was slow. Pain and fear intermingled with a feeling of wooziness. Shit. Was there a problem with oxygen? She tried to take deeper breaths, struggled and couldn’t work out why. Nearly there. Don’t stop. Don’t let them win. One hand in front of each other. Keep going. But the need to close her eyes, to rest, began to dominate. She wasn’t certain she was still moving. Was there a light somewhere ahead? A noise? She no longer had the luxury of waiting to work out if it was Jasper or not.

  ‘Help.’

  Had she made any sound? She tried again, feeling lightheaded, nauseated. Pushed herself further, sure now that up ahead was the faintest of lights. The tunnel widened out and she could just make out a change in the tunnel floor. Stairs. The boathouse. And someone was in it, moving around. She crawled the last two metres to the foot of the stairs but something stopped her going any further. She stared and reeled back. Through the gaps in the stairs was a skull. A tiny human infant skull—with a large hole in the side where it had been crushed.

  58

  ‘Where the hell is she?’

  Mala looked at me. ‘Whoever do you mean?’ ‘I’m not playing games.’

  Mala frowned. ‘Really? I rather thought she was.’ Seeing my expression she softened, ran her hand over my shoulder, digging into the muscles that were now set to give me a migraine. ‘Well I know where she was. I just assumed she’d follow us down when the coast was clear. I…’ She bit her lip.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I told Vesna to expect her.’

  ‘Vesna?’

  ‘You don’t think…?’

  ‘No I don’t.’ Or did I? Vesna had been known to act on her conspiracy theories before. Usually just by abusing people on the phone. Occasionally taking the Bentley to the council, where she now had her own personal liaison officer. She had already taken it upon herself to visit Natalie. What had she done this time?

  I took the stairs two at a time, banged on Vesna’s door and entered without waiting for an answer. My mother was out cold on the bed; I shook her but it merely induced her to hit out at me. I wasn’t about to get anything sensible from her.

  Mala watched me return.

  ‘I’ll search the grounds. If she turns up, text me.’

  Mala waved her champagne at me. ‘She’s probably waiting for you in the centre of the maze or something terribly romantic.’

  Mala knew perfectly well she wasn’t. The question was whether she knew where Natalie really had disappeared to.

  We both turned as thunder rumbling overhead sounded, in time to see lightning open up the sky.

  59

  ‘What the hell?’

  Another crack of thunder and the sky lit up, a white crack dissecting the heavy black clouds, as ominous as the shadows. The air was still, waiting for the heavens to open. Natalie could see Frank, standing in the doorway, stop and listen; he had heard her gasp.

  He looked astonished as Natalie emerged from the trap door in the floor of the boathouse. She didn’t stop to worry whose side he was on. She had to have a better chance if she wasn’t in a tunnel, particularly one containing a dead baby. Never mind it had been dead for some years. Frank helped hoist her up. She lay panting on the floor and watched his face. If she was reading it right, she looked even worse than she felt.

  ‘Can I get you something to drink?’

  Natalie nodded, slowly sitting up and taking a glass of water from him.

  ‘If it isn’t too stupid a question, just what do you think you were doing?’ There was a terse edge to his voice.

  ‘Trying to avoid getting killed.’

  ‘Killed?’

  ‘Yes, you know. Strangled, beaten, maybe smothered.’

  Frank turned back towards the sink, wet a cloth, and returned with it. ‘You’re bleeding.’

  Her knees and hands were raw, and the cut on her head had closed her eye and filled one ear. She took the cloth but it was soon evident that it wasn’t enough. Frank helped her over to the sink and watched as she tried her best to make herself look less like she’d crawled out of a First World War trench.

  ‘Sit,’ he said. ‘I’ll make you some tea.’

  ‘Tea, Frank?’ The level of her voice was rising. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? Someone tried to kill me. Aren’t you a tiny bit interested who? And why? Also, that there’s a dead baby down there?’ She looked to the trapdoor, half-fearful that the baby would emerge.

  Frank lit the heater and filled the kettle as she looked around the room, baffled. There were two wide armchairs, and a sofa was pushed against the wall. Paints and canvases were stacked in one corner, an unfinished portrait on the easel. The gas heater—the one that had killed Alison—was working flat out. Already the room felt hot. Outside another bolt of lightning split the sky. A shiver went through her—it was as if Antonije, godlike even in death, was fulminating at what she was about to do: uncover his world for all to see.

  ‘Of course.’ Frank’s voice was measured, polite. And disbelieving.

  ‘You don’t really think I’d have crawled through a half kilometre of tunnels without a good reason do you?’

  ‘I’m sure you think there is and I’d be happy to hear your theory.’

  ‘What?’ Natalie stared in disbelief.

  ‘Have you been taking your lithium Natalie?’ Frank was trying to look concerned. It took Natalie a moment to be able to put words together coherently.

  ‘You condescending bastard.’ Natalie gripped the edge of the bench to steady herself. ‘You don’t really think you’re going to be able to get away with blaming all this on me being ill do you?’

  ‘You do seem rather emotional.’

  ‘Emotional?’ Natalie screamed. ‘I’ve been locked up by your mother and threatened by your son, and I’ll have nightmares about small enclosed spaces stacked with skeletons. So yes, you could say I’m a bit fucking emotional.’ ‘Natalie…please. I didn’t mean to…please sit down. I need to hear what happened.’

  Natalie eyed him suspiciously, moved away to the windows, peering out into the darkness. It was hard to see anything. No reason to believe that Jasper knew where the tunnel finished. But what if he did? She rubbed her temples, suddenly feeling very tired. It made no sense that Jasper and Frank were working on this together. Frank would protect her from his bastard son, even if he was treating her like she was unstable. Wouldn’t he?

  ‘How did you know I was on lithium?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘We couldn’t find you so I checked your room.’ Frank poured water into a teapot. ‘Your pills were on the bed.’

  Natalie shook her head. It didn’t really matter, she supposed. She wasn’t going to work with Frank anyway. But it didn’t make her feel any better.

  ‘The secret family recipe.’ Frank handed her a mug and sat down in one of the armchairs, sinking deep into the faded fabric splattered with paint.

  Natalie took a sip. This concoction had a little more taste than most of the herbal infusions she had tried lately, but it was bland nevertheless. She felt herself shaking. Frank was right—she was cold and in danger of going into shock. The tea would help.

  ‘It must be the British part of me,’ said Frank. ‘I’ve always enjoyed tea.’

  Was he trying to calm her, or to distract her? Natalie took a breath. The dead baby was foremost in her mind, but that wasn’t what was putting her at greatest immediate danger.

  ‘Did Jasper kill Reeva and Alison?’

  Frank didn’t seem to hear the question. ‘I used to sit here and watch my grandfather paint.’ He looked around the boathouse and gestured to the artwork. ‘Not mine. My mother and Mala both paint when it takes their fancy.’

  ‘Frank, Damian McBride is going to listen to me. He’s not going to think this is my imagination or mental illness no matter what you say.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose he will.’ Frank fiddled with his cuffs. ‘Humour me. I need to tell you about my grandfather, so you can make sense of it.

  ‘Antonije.’ Natalie th
ought of the Family paintings she had seen, and let Frank speak. Her hand was trembling as she held the teacup.

  ‘Wendell hated Antonije,’ said Frank. ‘My father wouldn’t let me study art, it was all about maths and science and sport. But I didn’t have the talent anyway.’

  ‘Why did he hate your grandfather?’

  Frank smiled. ‘The eternal question as woman marries man: does her husband usurp her father in her affections, or will he always be second rate?’

  ‘They were rivals?’

  ‘Well, let’s just say…’ The smile held stories that he had no intention of sharing. ‘My grandfather always won in the end. We all adored him.’

  ‘Your father died.’ Natalie felt increasingly tired. The heat was oppressive.

  ‘We all do eventually.’

  Despite the heat Natalie felt cold inside. Frank sounded more sad than threatening, true; but in the shadows it was hard to read him. She thought of Eliza. Beware Eliza Vesna had told her. But apart from being paranoid, Vesna would ultimately be concerned to protect her family. That was probably why she had told Gordana to lock her up. But who had told Jasper she was there? Not Vesna surely.

  She needed to stop herself from falling asleep. How could she be so tired? She pulled herself up and moved to the canvases; Vesna’s, she assumed. The eyes were haunted. After seeing Antonije’s Family Natalie knew why.

  ‘Eliza imagines the camps haunted your grandfather’s work, I think. Here they seem to haunt your mother’s as well.’

  ‘I don’t think my grandmother ever recovered, nor Vesna from her death.’

  ‘And Antonije?’

  ‘Antonije was a partisan. He wasn’t incarcerated in the camps. He liberated my grandmother. But I think what he saw, yes, that haunted him.’

  ‘Your grandmother was at Stara Gradiska, you said?’

  ‘I rather think she was at Sisak.’

  ‘Sisak?’ She couldn’t recall this from her reading. Her hand went to the wall to steady herself. Outside the ominous low grumbling continued. Frank stood. Took an arm and guided her back to the armchair.

  ‘A children’s camp,’ he said, after he watched her take another sip of tea. ‘I rather think they liked to pretend she was a little older than she actually was.’

  Frank was watching her. Like a cat, she thought randomly, and wondered why. The tension in his hands? The feeling he was about to pounce? And why did she just feel tired rather than wanting to flee? It occurred to her that the mouse rarely got away.

  She stared back, feeling he knew she had pulled the photo out of the picture. Or else believed that Eliza had told her more than she had, perhaps the information that Eliza had shared with Alison the night she died. The information that had revealed the family secrets, rather than the red herring Alison had been chasing with the negative genetic tests.

  ‘The Ustase had escaped Stara Gradiska before the partisans arrived. I think Antonije told Lyuba that story because she couldn’t remember her mother. It comforted her.’

  ‘How old was she when he rescued her?’

  ‘Does it matter? My grandfather was her saviour. They fell in love and married. Emigrated to Australia. We have photos. My grandmother was tiny. We were told it was because of the malnutrition. She couldn’t recall her mother, let alone her date of birth.’

  ‘Could she remember if Antonije was actually a partisan, or one of the Ustase that ran the camp?’

  Frank didn’t skip a beat. ‘Eliza’s paranoia? She can’t prove that. Antonije was not a stupid man. And he was lucky. I’m not saying he didn’t find a way to souvenir some of the spoils of war, but who are we to judge? We weren’t there. He was investigated. In the end there was no one left alive to say one way or another.’

  But Natalie knew he knew: either he’d guessed or Antonije had told him. In the end Frank had admired him as a survivor, regardless of what he had done along the way. ‘What about how old Lyuba was?’

  ‘It’s not like there were a lot of records.’ Frank shrugged. ‘She was Romani so her birth probably wasn’t recorded anyway.’

  ‘Too young to become a mother?’

  ‘Too young and too traumatised.’ Frank bent over and picked up one picture then another. ‘Life was very different back then.’

  ‘What about with Eliza, Frank? Was she young and traumatised?’

  ‘Eliza?’ Frank’s expression hardened. ‘Eliza always knew exactly what she was doing.’

  ‘Really?’ Natalie took a deep breath. ‘She was what? Eighteen? Your grandfather was a hero to her. You don’t think he wielded power over her?’

  ‘He wielded power over us all.’ Frank was smiling but there was no warmth in his eyes.

  ‘How was that for you?’

  Frank smiled, a faraway type smile. Chilling.

  ‘What about five words for your relationship with him when you were a child, Frank?’

  ‘Five words?’ Frank looked at her calmly. ‘Magnificent. Powerful. Challenging—but always because he wanted the best of me and that was what I wanted to give. Frightening.’ He noted at Natalie’s peeked interest and laughed. ‘No, he didn’t frighten me. I was only scared—then—that I might not be worthy of him.’

  ‘And fifth?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  Except it wasn’t of course: Frank’s relationship with Antonije was idealised, even in the face of him knowing, as an adult, how much pathology was there between them. Between all the family members. Watching her reaction, Frank grimaced. ‘I know it wasn’t perfect Natalie, I’m not stupid. That was what I thought then.’

  Yes, he’d rationalised. He thought he’d worked it through; Natalie could see he hadn’t. But she couldn’t be sure how much of his knowledge of the family secrets was conscious, how much subconscious. He must have suspected an incestuous relationship between Antonije and Vesna. She certainly had, when Frank had spoken of Antonije expecting too much of his daughter after her mother had died; when the sexual undercurrents in his painting left Natalie uneasy. Vesna had been six when her mother died; somewhere in the intervening years, probably by the time she was eight if statistics meant anything, Antonije had replaced Lyuba with their daughter.

  ‘What about the dead baby under the floor Frank?’

  ‘But…’ Frank frowned and rubbed his temples. ‘Before my mother went to England…she was…I don’t know if anyone knew about them. No one ever knew she was pregnant.’

  Denial of pregnancy. Uncommon but not unheard of. Natalie had seen it once: a young girl panic-stricken when she went to the toilet with gastro, so she thought, and instead delivered a baby. The child had been lucky to survive.

  ‘Really?’ Natalie watched him closely. She replayed his words. Them. ‘How many?’

  ‘Three.’

  Three times Vesna had conceived before she gave birth to Frank. Three times she had killed the child. Were the other two skulls below, with the one she had seen? Natalie suppressed a shudder. The police could look. ‘It is uncommon to occur more than once. And usually in religious families, with poor sex education.’ And in strong patriarchal households where emotions weren’t discussed.

  ‘Lyuba died when Vesna was a child. I doubt she had any sex education.’ He looked directly at her, clear eyes. ‘And she was terrified of my grandfather.’

  So much for them all adoring him. In Frank’s ambivalence, some true feelings surfaced from beneath his determination to paint the perfect family picture. Antonije. The patriarch. With his own set of rules and values. Family he had titled the series of paintings where he had shown just what his values were clearly: one absolute dominance.

  ‘So she escaped to England.’

  ‘Yes. She told Mala the babies never cried, that she thought they were dead, but I imagine she dissociated and just left them.’

  Frank clearly hadn’t seen the skull. That baby hadn’t died of starvation.

  ‘So when I arrived,’ Frank continued, ‘and did not die, the guilt resurfaced and fuelled her psychosis. The medicatio
n treats that—but the guilt and fear have always remained.’

  And the paranoia. Justified, Natalie would argue. ‘So when did you find out? Was this what Reeva and Alison discovered?’

  He leaned forward and spoke so softly she barely heard him. ‘Why are you here, Natalie?’

  ‘Because you invited me.’ She put her cup down, aware that her shaking was risking it spilling all over her.

  Frank stood up abruptly. ‘My sources tell me you are not quite as demure as you make out. Alison certainly didn’t think so.’ He stood over her, and now in his voice she heard the anger. ‘Your current attire seems to attest to that.’

  Natalie rose slowly. Standing made her feel dizzy. She shook her head. Frank looked at her oddly. She didn’t think he would hit her, but what did that prove? Neither Reeva nor Alison had died as a result of direct physical violence. She didn’t know what this man was capable of.

  He stood only centimetres from her and she willed her body not to tremble, steeled her mind to block out thoughts of the Worm. Of the immobilising powerlessness. She gritted her teeth and let her anger bubble—if anything could activate her, anger would.

  ‘I could tell you weren’t attracted to me.’ Frank’s hand strayed carelessly up her arm. ‘Not initially, anyway. Which made me wonder what you were up to.’ She wondered if those middle-aged women were still packing up. The music had stopped long ago. Would anyone hear her if she screamed? Even if they did, would the staff and family just ignore it? Perhaps they’d all grown to accept that what happened here had its own set of rules. Her head felt fuzzy, tiredness and the heat almost overpowering the adrenaline that was starting to pump through her. Had he put something in her tea?

  ‘Which was a relief on one level.’ His hand now was stroking her cheek. ‘I certainly don’t want another wife.’

  ‘But a fuck wouldn’t go astray, right?’

  She had surprised him. He laughed, hand frozen mid-air. ‘Now that you mention it…’