Lethal Factor

by Gabrielle Lord

  Mother Anacletus glanced at her watch. ‘I must go. I’ve already missed midday prayer.’ She hesitated, and I took advantage of the moment.

  ‘I know you don’t like leaving your friend here with us,’ I said. ‘But we’ll do our job as quickly as possible and get out of your way. And I’ll need to talk to Sister Felicitas,’ I added. ‘In fact, I would like to meet the entire community because it’s quite possible that someone else heard or saw something that might be helpful.’

  ‘I can organise that,’ she said. ‘If you would give me some warning. That way I can be sure everyone is present.’

  ‘By the way,’ I said, consumed with curiosity, ‘what did you do with the picture of the prince of darkness?’

  Anacletus glared at me. ‘Burned it, of course,’ she said, but her expression wasn’t quite as hostile as it previously had been. She swept out of the room, rosaries rattling.

  The whole atmosphere changed without her charged presence. Brian Kruger remembered to race after her to get the details of the dead nun’s relative, leaving Bob and me like in the old days in Sydney years ago. I squatted down and noticed more tiny fragments of what looked like plaster or chalk marking the dead woman’s black habit. I looked again at the fleck of white near her eye and wondered if it was from the same source. I suddenly thought of all the samples we’d had to deal with lately, concerning suspicious white powders. Here was another one. I looked more closely and decided it was a crumb of something chalky. One of the woman’s dead hands clutched a small mother-of-pearl covered prayer book with a tension that looked like cadaveric spasm while the other seemed to point under the bed. I raised the white bedspread and looked underneath.

  ‘The local fellows vacuumed every surface,’ said Bob, noticing my interest in the tiny white particles. ‘There was nothing under the bed.’

  ‘What’s this stuff?’ I asked Bob, pushing another minute white crumb lying near the pearly prayer book with the end of my pen.

  He shrugged. ‘I’ve just sent a good sample of it off to your lab,’ he said. ‘It looks like chalk or something. I’m hoping you can soon tell me.’

  ‘If you look closely,’ I said, ‘you can see traces of colours on one surface. It makes me think of plaster statues.’ I recalled the statues around the corridors. ‘I’d really like to know where this plaster came from.’ There was nothing in the room that could account for it. ‘Bashed to death by a plaster saint. Or maybe it’s from a cake of coke. The sisters might be doing a bit of drug-running. After all, they’ve all got a habit.’ It was irreverent of me but I couldn’t resist. I’ve heard a lot worse said at times like this.

  ‘Her finger is in the prayer book,’ I said, more serious now. ‘What is she marking?’

  ‘We’re going to leave that for Doc Marshall,’ he said. ‘He can take a look when she’s down with him.’

  I recalled pornographic magazines I’d found at crime scenes, opened at a particular page, and sometimes throwing some light on the mind of the killer or suicide.

  ‘You can see what killed her,’ said Bob, lifting the dead woman’s head with practised, gloved hands, so that I could see the left side of her neck. Under the bloodied veil and just behind her ear, a savage wound gaped—revealing a glimpse of the silvery periosteum around the cervical vertebrae under the muscle layers. The spinal cord would have been badly damaged, I thought.

  ‘Nasty,’ I said.

  A very decent watercolour hung on the wall, showing cattle grazing in a paddock with the gold hues of late afternoon lighting the grass and rocky outcrops. I made a decision that I’d unpack my paints and brushes from the box that was still taped up in the garage at Malabar and start painting again. I hadn’t picked up a brush for months. But apart from the watercolour, and a sentimental plastic-framed print of what I remembered as ‘the holy family’ on the bedside table, there was no other plaster object, pious or not, in the nun’s cell. I walked over to the doorway because something had caught my eye. I could see a paler square of wall next to the painting of the grazing cattle where something, another picture from the look of it, had recently been removed. An empty hook trapped dust and fluff against the wall and, at my approach, some of the dust fell. Something had been removed very recently.

  I turned my attention to the dead body again, and was taking a closer look at the messy laceration near the ankle when I heard the sound of someone approaching. An elderly nun appeared near the doorway.

  ‘Mother Anacletus said you wanted to talk to me?’ she said.

  We followed Sister Mary Felicitas back through the twists and turns, past the saints in their niches until we were near the entrance and she took us into a sitting room furnished with cane chairs and a low table. Plastic flowers in a cut glass vase stood on a plastic doily. Sister Felicitas walked to the windows where a particularly nasty lime-green net curtain hung. She stood in front of us, arms folded neatly under her scapular and now I could see she was probably into her eighties, yet she still had the pink, waxy look of someone on whom the sun rarely shines. Her eyes, magnified by the thick rimless glasses, reminded me of olives in a jar, but there was an expression in them that surprised me. Whatever nuns are supposed to have in their gaze when it comes to men was most definitely missing. What I saw was defiance, and I recognised it by matching it to the same place in myself. She stood primly enough, stooped, hands clasped, as Bob positioned himself a little behind me.

  ‘Perhaps we should sit down,’ I suggested, indicating the chairs, but she shook her head.

  ‘I prefer to stand,’ she said.

  I let a little silence open up between us—to allow a little pressure to lean on her, but she stood calmly and I realised that she lived in a place where silence was the natural habitat.

  ‘I’d like you to describe exactly what happened,’ I said.

  ‘Where shall I start?’ she asked me.

  ‘From the beginning,’ I said, determined not to lead.

  There was another long silence and Sister Felicitas looked away from me and out the window. I saw a couple of lorikeets swinging in a winter-flowering native outside.

  ‘Ah,’ she said after a pause. ‘Who knows where this began?’

  At the time, I didn’t take enough notice of this question of hers, because I was too busy being smart-arsed and thinking: Hey sister, your lot are very sure about where everything began.

  ‘But I can tell you something about the events of yesterday and last night,’ she continued.

  I nodded and she said, ‘We’d all just finished up a three-day retreat with Father Oswald.’

  ‘Who is Father Oswald?’ I asked.

  Felicitas’s expression softened and for a second I saw the young girl in the old face as she glanced at the wall where the ascetic profile of Pius XII hung. ‘He’s my spiritual director,’ she said, still looking at the portrait. ‘I met him in Rome when I took my first vows.’

  I guessed her long-ago trip to Rome had been the highlight of a sheltered life because Felicitas seemed lost in reverie. Muslims go to Mecca, Hindus go to the Ganges, Catholics go to Rome. I don’t know where detectives go.

  ‘Please continue, with what you were saying about last night,’ I said.

  ‘The retreat finished with night prayer,’ she said. ‘We all went to our rooms. It’s what we do every night. That is when the Great Silence starts.’

  ‘What is the Great Silence?’ I asked.

  ‘It is part of our monastic tradition,’ she said. ‘It starts after evening prayer and continues all night. It is broken only after morning mass.’

  Last night, I thought, something had well and truly broken the Great Silence. ‘You were saying, Sister?’ I prompted.

  ‘I retired for the night,’ she said, turning her attention back to me. I noticed the old-fashioned language. Maybe talking about going to bed wasn’t considered seemly when there
were men around.

  ‘And then?’ Getting information out of her wasn’t going to be easy. Already, I could sense her unwillingness. Was this just the normal reluctance to talk about a terrible event to a stranger or was it something more? I could hear Bob moving around behind me, pretending to look at the other prints on the walls and the unskilled original oil painting that dominated the parlour. It was a portrait of a nun—the Blessed Marie-Josephine Castignac, Foundress of the Sisters of the Assumption according to the small brass plate—kneeling in prayer, face uplifted in what was supposed to be rapture. Unhappily, the inexpert rendering of the subject’s heavy-lidded and masculine features reminded me uncomfortably of one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Between the windows hung a large wooden cross with the tortured figure of Jesus nailed to it.

  ‘I was awoken by a noise,’ Felicitas was saying. ‘I think it was a scream. Then I heard another sound.’

  ‘First things first, Sister,’ I interrupted. ‘You think a scream woke you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Or it could have been some other sound.’

  ‘What sort of sound?’

  ‘A loud—I don’t know. Just another noise,’ she finally said.

  ‘What time was this?’ I asked, my notebook in hand.

  ‘A little after one. My first thought was that it might be that same person who’s been attacking the woman students at the university.’ She walked to the window, turned around to face me, tucking her hands invisibly into her sleeves, like a muff. It looked as if she could stand like that forever.

  Again, I waited. I found myself wanting to shake the woman. I was sure she was prevaricating, censoring what she said. Some witnesses are overtalkative and it’s difficult to slow them down, get the details accurately. Sister Felicitas was not one of them.

  ‘I don’t think a bag snatcher is going to come out here,’ I said to her. I tried softening the process a little for her. She was, after all, an old woman and no doubt very set in her ways. ‘Sister, I realise this is hard for you. But it’s essential we get as much information as we can. The more we get, the more likely it is that we can find the person responsible for this.’

  She raised one of her arched brows at me. ‘I ran out of my room and across the hall,’ she said. ‘Sister Gertrude’s door was open and I ran straight in because I could hear a choking sort of noise—’ She stopped, collected herself and continued. ‘I thought she might have been having a fit.’

  She paused to blow her nose in a big checked man’s hankie. ‘I found her lying on the floor near her pre-Dieu.’

  ‘Is that what you call the kneeler?’ I asked.

  Felicitas nodded. ‘She was still fully dressed and I thought she’d perhaps fainted from prayer. Or taken a fit as I said. Then I saw the blood under her.’ Her voice shook. ‘She couldn’t move her head, but her eyes were alive and she was looking at me, trying to say something. I knelt down beside her and took her hand.’ Sister Felicitas’s voice faded as she remembered. When she continued a few moments later, her voice was barely audible. ‘The wickedness—the evil—’ she whispered, ‘has come here.’

  I was aware of Bob’s voice close beside me. ‘What evil is that?’ he asked in the same low voice

  The air of the fusty nuns’ parlour was charged with some strange energy, a presence so strong I almost felt compelled to look behind me.

  ‘Tell me about the evil,’ Bob said, matching his voice to the elderly nun’s low tones. Bob is very good at moving in like this.

  The old nun took a few moments to consider, looking up at both of us, appealing. There were tears in her eyes behind the spectacles; the olives magnified. ‘I didn’t know what to do. Whether to run for help or stay with her. I could feel she was very close to death. So I stayed. I knelt down beside her and she tried—’ Sister Felicitas stopped. She looked at me and again I saw the defiance. ‘I prayed,’ she continued in a louder voice.

  Alerted, I interrupted.

  ‘You said “she tried”,’ I prompted her. ‘What did she try to do?’

  Again, a silence. And I could sense the resistance so I decided to tack around it. ‘You said you heard a loud crashing noise. What made that?’

  Felicitas didn’t speak but her eyes darted towards the crucifix hanging between the windows. Was she seeking heavenly aid?

  ‘It must have been poor Gertrude falling,’ she said at last.

  I thought again of the fragments of plaster but I let her get away with this for the time being. ‘Sister,’ I said, ‘can you tell me something about the paintings on Sister Gertrude’s wall? The ones that hang near the door?’

  This surprised her. ‘The paintings?’ she repeated.

  I nodded. ‘She has a couple. There’s a nice watercolour, some country scenes and a few saints.’

  She paused. ‘What does that have to do with anything?’

  ‘Something has been taken off the wall. Maybe someone took it away. Maybe you took it for some reason?’

  ‘I most certainly did not!’ she replied. Her surprised denial was very convincing. ‘Why do you ask such a thing?’

  ‘Let’s go back and Sister can tell us what was there,’ said Bob and so we trooped back again, in an unnatural silence, following the stout old woman. When we arrived back at Sister Gertrude’s room, Felicitas hurried in and checked the walls.

  ‘So it has,’ she said. ‘One of them has gone.’

  ‘What was it?’

  Felicitas cocked her head on one side. ‘I can’t remember exactly,’ she said. ‘We don’t go into each other’s rooms unless strictly necessary. But I do remember that everything was in the usual place yesterday. I ran across to Sister’s room and shut windows during the big storm. It was there then.’

  ‘So you were in here yesterday?’

  Sister Felicitas was staring at the dead woman on the floor. ‘She’d left her door open and it was pelting down.’

  I brought the interview back to its earlier focus. ‘You were telling us, Sister,’ I said, ‘about the events of last night. Of how you came into your friend’s room and found her lying on the floor.’

  Felicitas averted her eyes from the dead body and blessed herself, muttering something under her breath. ‘When I saw she was no longer with us, I ran to wake Mother Anacletus and that’s when I noticed the fire stairs door was open. We were very frightened so we went outside and woke Jeremiah—’

  ‘Jeremiah?’

  ‘The gardener. He lives in a small cabin around the back, past the kitchen garden. The three of us searched the house and the grounds with torches. We didn’t see or hear anyone. We didn’t hear a car. Whoever it was must have been on foot.’ She gave me a final ‘Will that do?’ look.

  I let her think she’d finished and walked over to Bob at the window. The lorikeets had gone. I kept my voice low. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘She’s leaving a hell of a lot out,’ Bob said in his quiet way. That was exactly my feeling, too. I turned back to Felicitas. ‘Tell me, Sister. What about the incidents last year,’ I said. ‘Mother Anacletus mentioned Satanists.’

  That shocked her. ‘I heard about that,’ she said stiffly. ‘It’s better not to speak of such things.’

  I rejoined Bob at the window. ‘I’ll leave her for a while,’ I whispered. ‘Then we’ll go through it all again.’

  I returned to the doorway, aware of Felicitas standing a little way down the hall, waiting for us to finish up. I touched the painted surface of the wall and turned to my colleague.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Who do you want to see next?’

  ‘Jeremiah,’ said Bob.

  ‘You bet,’ I agreed.

  A few moments later, Felicitas was taking us to meet Jeremiah, a thin, rangy fellow of indeterminate age, hard at work mounding potato plants in the kitchen garden. The muscles moved in his po
werful arms, left bare by a sheepskin jerkin. As he stooped, the shadow from the leather hat shielding his eyes from the low winter sun moved to cover his face. He could have stepped out of any century, I thought, with his name and his rustic costume. He was wearing a pair of well-worn work boots and I thought of the footprints in the garden outside the dead nun’s room.

  As I took down his details and then looked around at his garden, I sensed the man’s deep unease. His eyes flickered around, taking me in, weighing me up. But his garden was neat and well-maintained with a large simmering compost pile in a brick-lined bed. In several places, large piles of stones had been collected into cairns that rose waist high and I wondered what they were for. There were no stone edges or trims to the garden beds. Maybe they’d been dug out and were awaiting removal.

  Jeremiah repeated how the Mother Superior and Felicitas had woken him in the middle of the night. ‘We all hunted around the grounds. But he must have already got away,’ he said, straightening up from his digging.

  ‘You all thought it must be an intruder?’ I asked.

  My question seemed to puzzle both of them.

  ‘You mean,’ said Jeremiah, ‘it might not have been? Are you saying it might have been one of us?’ He looked so shocked at this suggestion that the brim of his hat lifted slightly with the raising of his eyebrows.

  Felicitas patted him on the arm. ‘The police have to think like that,’ she said, as if excusing a child’s bad behaviour.

  ‘At this stage,’ I said, ‘we don’t know who it might have been. We have to keep our options open.’ There was another long silence and from somewhere in the kitchen garden I could hear the fine trilling of a cuckoo-shrike.

  ‘Sister Felicitas,’ I asked, pursuing Bob’s earlier question, ‘what evil do you mean has come here?’

  Felicitas was taken by surprise. She opened her mouth to speak but nothing happened. She cleared her throat and I could see the effort she was making to collect herself. This line of questioning was definitely touching a nerve in the old woman. I wondered if I’d been too hasty dismissing the Satanist line. Speak of the devil, I remembered, and he’s bound to appear.