Dangerous to Know

by Anne Buist

  The main room was filled with smoke. The roof above her was glowing and the smoke was heavy around the spiral staircase. Half of the wall behind it was missing. She went back to the main staircase, knowing it was the smoke that killed you. The mezzanine was still intact; most of it anyway. Vesna’s room was at the end furthest from where the flames had taken hold.

  Natalie burst in and found Vesna, heavily medicated, drunk or both, fast asleep.

  Natalie shook her hard and she stirred. In the bathroom she found a small plastic rubbish bin, tipped out the empty pill packets, filled it with water and threw the entire contents over the older woman.

  She woke disorientated. Pulling away from Natalie in fear.

  ‘We have to go, now,’ said Natalie. ‘There’s a fire.’

  Vesna looked panic-stricken, curling up tighter under the bedclothes. Natalie grabbed her arm and pulled her hard, but made no headway against the woman’s dead weight.

  ‘Shit.’ Natalie heard a car starting up. She tried to sound calming, the way she spoke to her patients. ‘Come on Vesna.’

  ‘I want Frank. Where is he?’ If she was surprised that Natalie wasn’t still locked up she didn’t show it. Maybe she’d forgotten.

  ‘Mala’s with him. We’ll meet them. I need you to come with me, Vesna.’

  She took the woman’s hand and pulled again. Vesna tentatively edged forward, bare legs slipping over the end of the bed.

  ‘We need to be quick, don’t look, just run.’

  Vesna nodded, but when they made it to the landing she stopped and cried out. Above them, leaping flames licked down across the ceiling. The smoke was thick now, sealing over them as a death trap.

  ‘Down on your knees.’ The smoke was slightly less at floor level but made it impossible to pull the older woman. Natalie saw immediately that Vesna wasn’t following.

  ‘Vesna!’ Her voice was firm, a command: mother to child. Or perhaps, in Vesna’s case, father. ‘Move. Now.’

  For a moment she wasn’t sure it would work. ‘Antonije would want you to leave, Vesna.’

  This time Vesna started to crawl and Natalie fell in behind her, pushing gently, all the way to the main staircase. Vesna took her hand again, cowering against her as they went down one step at a time. They got to the bottom and had made it to the hall when Natalie heard the car pulling away. She left Vesna and ran to the door, but too late. Drago and his family were heading out in what looked like Frank’s car. Shit. Pushing Vesna out the door, she guided her to a bench far enough away to be out of immediate danger.

  Then she heard something. Someone moving around inside. She froze. Jasper?

  Natalie headed back to the front door, from which smoke was now billowing in large black waves. She started coughing as she called out. No response. But there was the unmistakable noise of someone banging into furniture. Natalie took a deep breath, and against her better judgment, ran back inside.

  Mala was standing in the living room, just visible, in silhouette. The calm of the dead, floating Ophelia. No sense of hurry or alarm. As if in slow motion, she looked at Natalie, then moved towards the staircase.

  ‘Mala, your mother’s with me,’ Natalie managed to say between coughs.

  Mala kept walking. Natalie saw her smile. She went after her and grabbed her arm. ‘We need to get out now.’

  ‘No. I have to get something first.’

  ‘No possession is worth dying for,’ said Natalie.

  ‘This is.’

  Mala pulled her arm away and Natalie watched in despair as she went up, towards the flames.

  62

  As soon as Natalie left I opened my eyes. ‘I told her.

  About the sleepwalking. And the olanzapine. I said it was in the tea I gave her.’

  Mala looked at me with the same perfect eyes she had as a newborn. She smiled, her hand caressing my head.

  ‘Make sure Jasper gets put away for this, promise me.’

  ‘You’ll be there Frank, to see it for yourself.’

  I shook my head. Already that was difficult. ‘You’ll be fine Mala; you’re a survivor. Start afresh, let the house burn and start a new life.’

  We both looked up at the house of our childhood, the one we had thought would be there for our old age.

  ‘I need the paintings.’ She pulled away from me.

  Antonije had won. Again.

  63

  Fuck. This whole family seemed determined to put her out of action one way or another. Maybe the last of them would finally achieve it. Natalie watched Mala disappear into the smoke. Wait or go after her? Natalie didn’t trust Mala’s judgment, but as she followed, she knew her own was also in question.

  Mala went to her room. When Natalie got there they were both coughing but Natalie was faring better, crawling at floor level. Mala was pulling the picture off the wall. Rather than argue, Natalie grabbed it out of her hands. At least a metre wide and a little higher with a heavy gilt frame, it wasn’t light. But Natalie wasn’t worrying about scratching anything. She dragged it after her, onto the balcony and threw it over to the room below. Mala was behind her, dragging the matching picture, which had been propped next to it. She looked on in horror as Natalie hoisted the second.

  ‘We can get them from below, let’s go.’

  Mala didn’t have to be told twice. Unlike Vesna, she now seemed to understand the danger. The two crawled quickly and then ran down the staircase. In the main room there was still a metre or so of air that was largely free of smoke. They dragged a picture each and made it to the front door, where Natalie dropped hers just as the front door burst open.

  Damian. She’d never been more pleased to see anyone in her life.

  The hospital wanted to keep her overnight but she refused. They had done blood tests, rehydrated her, patched the cuts and scratches and prescribed antibiotics. The CFA were still containing the fire Jasper had started at Mount Malosevic. They were winning the fight now, largely because the heavens had finally opened. The fireballs from the boathouse explosion had done their work, however, and the house was gutted. Jasper was being charged with arson. As a starting point. Drago and his family had vanished. Vesna and Mala had booked themselves into a local hotel and Frank was still alive; just. He was in an induced coma and had been given a fifty–fifty chance. The Ducati was history.

  Damian arrived at the stilt house late morning, as she knew he would. She had waited up, watching the sunrise.

  ‘You know you’re fucking crazy, right?’

  She nodded.

  He shook his head wearily. ‘It’ll be days before we can interview Frank. We got Jasper at Eliza’s and he isn’t making much sense, except he seems to have been under Mala’s influence. Can you explain? Because no one else seems to be able to.’

  Natalie looked out across the ocean and wondered if anyone would believe what she had deduced.

  ‘Have you seen the paintings?’

  ‘The ones you and Mala nearly died getting?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Sick.’

  Yes, they were certainly that.

  ‘It’s the same old story in many ways,’ said Natalie. ‘Antonije liked children. You knew I suspected that he had an incestuous relationship with his daughter? But it went further.’ In the paintings his wife, daughter and granddaughter were all in their early teens. Wife and daughter pregnant—with his child, as Natalie now knew—and the other? Mala’s expression in the painting, as represented by her grandfather, had been hard to fathom. ‘Underneath the boathouse…well where the boathouse was…look for the remains of a dead baby.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Frank knew about three dead babies. Babies Vesna had to her own father. Hidden pregnancies, the babies left to die. I thought it possible when I saw the paintings and reflected on the pet cemetery. When Frank said there were three, and there are three crosses, it seemed even more likely’

  ‘You thought they were buried there?’

  Natalie nodded. ‘I imagine Alison thought so t
oo—except she thought that they were miscarriages due to a genetic abnormality.’

  ‘The DNA test.’ Damian rubbed his head.

  ‘You got the final result?’

  Damian nodded. ‘Eliza didn’t lie. Frank isn’t Jasper’s father.’

  ‘No, Antonije was. But she escaped. He couldn’t control Eliza like he could his family. I suspect she told Jasper about it the night he tried to kill Frank and me.’ Natalie paused. ‘Did the DNA suggest Antonije was Frank’s father too, as well as grandfather?’

  Damian smiled. ‘How did you know?’

  Natalie shrugged. ‘I couldn’t be sure. I imagine Antonije liked the idea of Vesna pregnant; his own virility perhaps. But there was the awkward reality of babies and whose they were, which he couldn’t allow. I think it’s what Wendell Moreton found out and why he tried to take his son with him when he killed himself. Well, the boy he’d thought was his son up until then.’

  ‘Does this tie in with why Frank killed his wives?’

  She paused a long time before nodding. ‘You need to get

  the records from Bethlem hospital in the UK. He sleepwalks.’

  Damian groaned. ‘You aren’t going to tell me he can use a sleepwalking defence are you?’

  ‘Okay, I won’t, but I’m sure his lawyers will. Narcissistic rage against the perfect baby he wasn’t. Or against the baby that survived the crash that his father had died in.’

  It was a week before she was allowed in to talk to Frank. She found him in his hospital bed, the table beside him overflowing with flowers, more on the windowsill. On the floor she noticed the bag that had been in his office fridge, the one that she had never seen him use. She wondered what was so important that he needed it now. It still looked empty. His face was bandaged and she felt a pang of sympathy for him. He had been beautiful. Mala was at his side. She looked so perfect that it would surely make it all the harder.

  Mala held Frank’s one good hand as they both watched her; she saw wariness in Frank’s eyes but Mala was impossible to read.

  ‘I understand the police are involved again,’ Natalie said. ‘I told them what you said to me.’

  Frank nodded. ‘I know.’ His voice was a hoarse whisper, probably also damaged in the fire.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Frank, and something doesn’t make sense.’

  She watched for a reaction. The bandages and burns hid any expression that might have given Frank away. And Mala?

  Natalie thought over Scott Beamish’s story. He’d been in a relationship with Mala during her brief stint at Oxford. She’d met him and his friend Wei at the same time, and both had adored her. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, Beamish said. But I never knew her.

  And when Mala told Beamish she was pregnant, he never knew whether the baby was his, either. He had been prepared to marry her, believed he loved her. He had no idea that Wendell Moreton, the man driving the car that had killed his mother, was Mala Malosevic’s father: Mala told him as a parting gift. Presumably she shared this with Wei as well. She laughed. Said I had survived, but no way was this baby going to. She returned to Australia—with Wei, who, like many men and women in her life, she used as she needed to—dumped Scott and told him she’d had a termination.

  First Wendell Moreton had killed Scott’s mother, albeit inadvertently. Now Mala had deliberately killed his child. If indeed it was his.

  Beamish still sounded bewildered by the whole encounter. Mala had set him up, no doubt. But of course in all pathological relationships both partners contributed. Natalie thought briefly of Georgia and Paul. In this relationship, though, Mala was the dominant one: a consummate psychopath with no need to hide guilt because she felt none. She was the type who passed lie detector tests effortlessly and played with people for the fun of it.

  Natalie was still looking at Frank. ‘You see, I always knew you were a narcissist,’ she mused. ‘And I knew you thought you were dying. So why on earth would you confess? A narcissist would rather die thinking they had outsmarted everyone. Particularly me; you needed to be smarter than me. Unless…’

  ‘Unless what?’

  Mala was beautiful, but her beauty was on the surface. Underneath she was envious and outraged that Frank had been preferred by Antonije. Frank was the great man’s child while she was only his grandchild—and a woman to boot. Which in that family meant a chattel to be used.

  And Mala would not want to be owned and used. The more Natalie had thought about the toxic atmosphere at Mount Malosevic, the more she had been sure that, while it had originated with Antonije, it was Mala who kept the evil alive.

  ‘Unless, Frank, you were protecting the perfect relationship. And Reeva and Alison were never perfect, were they Frank?’

  Never perfect; but he would not have killed them. Any more than he had drugged her. When she thought of the timing it was obvious. It takes oral olanzapine some time to work, particularly in someone with enzymes that are well able to metabolise it. It had been in the champagne, not the tea. Mala had known she was in the cupboard, had poured the champagne and told her mother to give it to Natalie. It was Mala, not Vesna, who had told Gordana to lure Natalie to the garage, Mala who had organised the menu that so antagonised Alison. Mala who pulled Jasper’s strings. Frank had guessed and tried to cover for the sister he adored.

  Ultimately Natalie had been right; Frank was narcissistic, and not the malignant variety that blurred into psychopathy. His love for Mala was not one a psychopath felt, and he did care what others thought about him. Mala, on the other hand, was devoid of feelings for others and had little concern for what they felt or thought about her. ‘You were Frank’s perfect relationship weren’t you Mala?’

  Mala snickered. ‘You have a vivid imagination.’

  ‘Perhaps, but try this. Frank was surprised when I told him about the baby under the floorboards. And he thought there were three, but there weren’t, not there at least. Frank let me think the baby I found was Vesna’s, but it couldn’t have been. The underground tunnel was a late addition, long after Vesna had returned from the UK. I think her dead babies are in the pet cemetery. The babies she left to die, or maybe suffocated. But the child I saw—barely a child, maybe twenty-eight weeks?—had its head caved in. Your baby, Mala. Was it yours and Scott’s? Or yours and…?’ She looked at Frank. Wondered.

  ‘I never wanted a baby. Ever.’ The smile that accompanied Mala’s words made Natalie feel a sliver of ice had pierced her insides and then twisted like a knife.

  She wondered what it was like being brought up by a paranoid mother, knowing that her father had killed himself and tried in the process to kill her brother, a half-brother who was also an uncle. In a family where secrets like the suicide of an adolescent grandmother and multiple miscarriages or self-induced terminations were mere icing on the cake.

  For Frank, Antonije had offered a role model; but for Mala? An abuser and a master one at that. One who taught Mala to be an even greater manipulator. Right down to being prepared to kill Frank’s wives so they could not bear the heir she wasn’t permitted to.

  I never wanted a baby. Ever. If her baby had been Frank’s child, it was only to show that she could. That the power was hers. She wouldn’t have shared the power with an heir.

  Mala, Natalie thought, was Frank’s weakness, but the reverse was not true. Mala had Frank’s measure. She had only ever failed once—and that was where her vulnerability lay. Natalie thought of Antonije’s painting and the expression on Mala’s face she hadn’t been able to work out. Now it came to her with a clarity that was startling: Antonije had been a narcissistic abuser, but he had also been a keen observer. She gambled on his observation—and her intuition—being accurate.

  ‘Really Mala?’ Natalie heard Damian’s voice in her head: just keep her talking. But Mala wasn’t her patient, and was not only not stupid, she was frighteningly brilliant. Could she be goaded? Maybe. But Natalie’s instinct said she had one chance, and one chance only.

  ‘You n
ever wanted a baby,’ Natalie repeated slowly, never taking her gaze from Mala. ‘But you and I know that’s not true, don’t we?’

  Frank eyes went to his sister. ‘No, Mala…’

  Mala’s smile was supercilious, smug.

  ‘But it wasn’t Frank’s baby you wanted was it?’

  There was a flicker of uncertainty in Mala’s expression. Frank’s was impossible to read, his eyes never leaving his sister.

  ‘You wanted Antonije’s.’ Natalie leaned in towards her. Thought of the painting where the only female who wasn’t pregnant was Mala. ‘But he rejected you didn’t he? To him you were tainted. The offspring of the man his daughter had left him for.’

  The slap was so fast Natalie didn’t see it coming, and powerful enough to send her reeling back against the wall.

  ‘He never rejected me!’ Mala screamed, as Frank’s hand gripped around her forearm in an effort to restrain her. ‘He was just too old, that’s all.’

  ‘So you got pregnant to show him you were the new generation’s life blood, didn’t you?’ Natalie continued, standing upright. ‘But he died before you could tell him, so the baby no longer mattered and you killed it.’

  ‘I never wanted that baby! I’d smash its head in again if I had to.’

  ‘You couldn’t bear Alison and Reeva having what you couldn’t—or wouldn’t—have could you?’ Natalie wondered. ‘Did Frank know?’

  Frank let out an anguished moan as Mala, now cool and in control, said, ‘Antonije was wrong. He thought Frank would look after the family. But it was always going to be me. I am the one who doesn’t let emotion rule me.’

  Because she didn’t feel like most people. Maybe genetic, but it was also because in the toxic family she had been born into, it was the only way to survive. Put herself first and use others with one goal in mind: to meet her own needs. She had undoubtedly targeted Wei and Jasper and Scott Beamish, largely because she could. She needed to be adored to fill an emptiness in the soul that even Frank’s adoration, if the glow in his eyes was anything to go by, didn’t come close to satisfying.