Lethal Factor

by Gabrielle Lord

  An hour later, I was sound asleep with the television still on, fully clothed, when my mobile rang. I jumped up. It was the hospital. They were ringing on behalf of a Casualty patient, Iona Seymour, and they asked if I could come as soon as possible.

  I threw some water over my face, jumped back into the car and drove to the hospital. The scene in the foyer with Digby only a few days ago seemed light years away, so much had happened between times.

  Iona lay with her face turned away from the door, in a ward with three other women. I called her name softly as I came in, and the nurse with me gently pulled the curtains around us, enclosing us in a pale blue world.

  I was shocked at the viciousness of the attack. Her beautiful face was bruised and cut and three tiny clips held a nasty gash in her left eyebrow. Her lips were deathly pale and she turned painfully at the sound of my voice.

  ‘Jack,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you for coming. I’m sorry to drag you out so late.’ She slowly moved a hand towards me and I saw the cuts and scratches on her fingers. ‘The police have just left,’ she said. ‘I’ve been swabbed and wiped and questioned, and noted down in little police books. They took my clothes away.’ She started to laugh but the laughter turned into a wince. ‘Ouch,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t talk,’ I said, dragging a chair to the bedside. ‘And don’t laugh.’ I carefully took the hand that was resting on the hospital sheet. ‘You can tell me what happened another time.’

  ‘It was awful,’ she said. ‘He was so strong. I felt this blow to the back of my neck and I was knocked down. My head hit the path and I think that’s when this opened up.’ She cautiously touched the clipped wound over her eye. ‘I’ve had ice on this eye,’ she said. ‘But it’s too uncomfortable. I’m going to have a real bruiser.’ Already, the area around her left eye was swollen, the stretched skin shiny and starting to darken. Pigrooter wanted to do something like this to Jacinta, I thought. And worse.

  ‘I felt him grab my briefcase. It was on the footpath beside me. But then he started kicking me, my back and my shoulders. And my head. It was awful.’

  ‘Did he do anything else?’ I asked, thinking of the panties that had been pulled down, trying to find some similarities with the other assaults. So far, I couldn’t.

  ‘Isn’t that enough?’ She sounded so rueful that I wanted to kiss her. Then I remembered the scene with Alix and knew I had no reason to be hopeful that kissing Iona Seymour would be happening in the foreseeable future.

  ‘The bastard,’ I said. A rage similar to the one I’d experienced when I heard that Marty Cash was threatening my daughter started a slow burn somewhere at the base of my spine and I could feel my fists clenching. ‘We’ll get him,’ I said. ‘Is there anything you need? Anything I can get you?’

  She shook her head. ‘One of my friends has done all that,’ she said. This remark was encouraging. Until then, I’d wondered if she’d contacted me because I was the only soul she knew in town. But now I realised that she didn’t need to ask for me. She’d really wanted to see me. She tried to move in the bed and winced again. ‘I can’t seem to get comfortable,’ she said and I saw a tear make its way down her grazed cheek. ‘And it stings to cry.’

  ‘Hey, what’s the matter with your throat?’ she asked, noticing my appearance.

  ‘I was involved in a bit of a scuffle earlier in the evening,’ I said.

  There was another long silence.

  ‘Jack,’ she said. ‘What is it? Are you still worried about that incident last night?’

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘That person means nothing to me. She was a real problem to me a few years ago and nothing has changed.’ I hated the way that had come out, and I attempted another version. ‘I’ve behaved very badly, Iona,’ I said. ‘I’m ashamed of myself.’

  She was silent a moment, looking at me with her bruised eyes. ‘I’m the last person in the world to be in a position to judge you, Jack,’ she said. ‘You know my story.’

  I did. It was my turn to be silent.

  ‘And I’m concerned about my daughter,’ I said finally. ‘There’s someone who means her harm. Seeing you like this has really brought it home to me.’

  Then I had to tell her the whole thing. Iona listened. A tiny detached part of my brain couldn’t help noticing what a strange conversation it was, me sitting there beside this wounded woman, telling her about my fears for my daughter. This world is a very curious place, I thought, the way it brings us together or tears us apart; each of us attacked around the same time, in the same city, me by Jeremiah, she by a violent stranger.

  ‘Where is she now?’ Iona asked. ‘Is she safe?’

  ‘She’s staying with a friend,’ I said, thinking of Andy Kelly. ‘And she spends time at my brother’s place. I have a colleague who’s an undercover operative and he’s working close to the would-be offender. I’m confident that with all this, Jacinta will be safe and we’ll get the bastard who’s trying to hurt her.’

  ‘But you have some doubts,’ she persisted.

  ‘I’ve learned there’s no way to keep anyone 100 per cent safe.’

  Iona shivered. ‘I thought he was going to kill me,’ she said. ‘I was so frightened.’

  She touched my arm and I took her hand. ‘You and I walked there only the other night,’ she said.

  I wondered if the offender even then had been skulking in the undergrowth, targeting Iona, thwarted by my presence. ‘Why don’t you bring your daughter down here?’ Iona asked. ‘She could stay with you and she’d be safe.’

  ‘You don’t know my Jacinta,’ I said. ‘She’s determined to show everyone how strong and competent she is. I’m not sure how she’d take to country living.’

  ‘You could give her the option,’ said Iona.

  I said I’d think about it.

  Seventeen

  In the morning, after a heavy sleep, I was up and readying myself to drive to Sydney. My phone rang and it was Toby Speed. I told him who I was and my involvement with the murder of Sister Gertrude.

  Speed was guarded over the phone. ‘Drop in and we’ll have a chat,’ he said. ‘I’m out until later in the afternoon.’ I took down his address in Mittagong.

  Back home at Malabar, I checked the house, watered some of the smaller pot plants out the back and then met Jacinta for our walk around the coast to Bondi. After driving to Bronte we climbed up and down the rocks, past the quiet winter beaches, with a southerly bumping us along and freshening the waves on top of a rolling swell. The Pacific stretched away forever on my right, and Jacinta walked silently on my left. When something’s going on with Jacinta, she goes quiet and lets me get away with things she’d normally pounce on. I knew my daughter was troubled. We were coming around the corner before the rise that leads to the south of Bondi Beach when a young couple heading south passed us. They were laughing and kissing each other, perfectly oblivious to anything else in the world. A couple of gulls wheeled and screamed, fighting over something that fell back into the sea.

  ‘What is it, Jass?’ I asked as we walked.

  ‘It’s me and Andy,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if it’s going to work out.’

  I wasn’t surprised. To me his self-righteous, even pompous, manner was obvious. I couldn’t imagine Jacinta tolerating it for very long at all.

  ‘I know he just wants to protect me,’ she said, ‘and I know he means well, but . . .’ She didn’t finish her sentence. A tiny blue wren, decked out in his mating colours despite the time of the year, appeared on the path ahead of us and then vanished into some scrubby bushes.

  ‘Are you thinking you won’t move in with him after all?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I’m getting used to Charlie’s place.’

  We were over the hump now, and walking towards the first of the buildings on the edge of the pathway, past the new Icebergs clubhouse.


  ‘Funny,’ I said. ‘Only last night a friend asked why you couldn’t come down to Canberra and live there with me.’

  Jacinta immediately sensed something and I had to tell her about Iona and her return to Australia after a long trip. Jacinta already knew a little about Iona Seymour.

  ‘Hey, Dad,’ she said, smiling when I’d told her. ‘Greg mentioned her to me. She’s the masseuse who uses scented oil, isn’t she?’

  I wasn’t going to pursue that line so I changed tack a little. ‘I tried to ring your brother last night,’ I said. ‘But couldn’t get him.’

  Jacinta looked sideways at me. ‘So that woman is back on the scene,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ I said. ‘I’m in two minds about it.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ she agreed.

  We walked up the rise past Bondi Beach, its creamy sands and deep-blue ruffled water arcing around beneath us. It was unusually deserted except for a few stalwarts swimming the length of the beach and some joggers along the tide’s edge. We crossed Campbell Parade, found a busy coffee shop with a vacant table and ordered drinks.

  Jacinta fiddled with the little silver bowl containing paper tubes of sugar. ‘Did you know that the sparrows and the lorikeets get addicted to this?’ she said, her fingers pressing onto tiny grains spilled near the container. ‘After a while, they stop chasing insects or finding blossom trees in flower like they’re supposed to. They just hang around shopping malls eating sugar. Then they get sick and die because their diets aren’t nourishing enough.’ She flicked her fingers. ‘There should be a Lorikeets Anonymous,’ she said.

  Our drinks came, coffee for Jacinta, fresh orange juice for me.

  ‘Maybe Canberra might be fun for a while,’ she said, looking out to the busy street, crowded even though it was mid-winter. ‘All that fresh air and space. Maybe I could go to uni down there. You and I could get a place there and just come back to Sydney at the weekends like you used to do when I was a kid.’

  ‘How’s it going with your mother?’ I asked.

  She emptied a couple of the paper tubes into her coffee then looked up at me with Genevieve’s eyes. ‘I’m divorcing Mum for a while,’ she said. ‘She’s still going on about those ridiculous allegations. She’s driving me nuts.’

  We got a cab back to the car, drove to Charlie’s and found my brother out.

  ‘Whereabouts does Iona Seymour live?’ Jacinta asked.

  I told her the address Iona had given me the night before in hospital. And then I had to tell her about the assault. Jacinta shook her head. ‘What is it about you?’ she said. ‘The dramatic women you attract.’

  ‘You should talk,’ I said, trying not to think about Alix.

  Later, after dropping Jacinta off at tech for afternoon classes, I drove south to Mittagong and the address Toby Speed had given me. It was a pretty country cottage in one of the deep streets that run at right angles to the main road, with a wintering garden and early bulbs starting to show through the mossy grass, damp and green. I knocked on the door and already I could hear from the back, the whistling and singing of finches and other small birds. Toby Speed must be a bird fancier, I thought.

  Toby Speed was an elderly man with strong large features and wild eyebrows. After the initial pleasantries, I told him of my interest in birds and he took me outside to his large aviaries. He’d netted areas of garden so that instead of sterile cages with cement floors and little else, his aviaries were microcosms of flowering shrubs, small trees and ponds with pebble-lined walkways through them.

  ‘These are magnificent aviaries,’ I complimented him as we went through, although I’ve always been uneasy about people who cage living things. Small birds flew past my head, their whirring wings making tiny zephyrs on my face. We sat in a clearing he’d contrived with a garden seat, in front of a ferny pool where finches and other small birds flew over or alighted to drink. He was immensely interested as I told him about the investigation into Sister Gertrude’s death. I thought it good policy to tell him what I knew.

  ‘Anything else?’ Speed asked when I finally came to the end of the story.

  ‘She whispered something when she was dying,’ I said. ‘Something that the nun who heard it won’t tell me.’

  ‘How very intriguing,’ he said. I wasn’t sure whether his tone was genuine or ironic.

  ‘I believe we may have found the murder weapons,’ I said, telling him about the discovery of the bloodstained hatchet and knife and the subsequent detention of Jeremiah. ‘I should know in the next day or so if Sister Gertrude’s blood is on them.’

  ‘So you have the killer?’ Speed asked.

  ‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘But as to a motive, still no idea.’

  ‘Do psychopaths have to have a motive?’ Speed asked, standing up. We left the aviary because it was becoming very cold sitting still in the shadowed garden.

  ‘What do you expect to gain from this visit?’ he asked me as we walked inside. ‘I know you didn’t come to admire my finches.’

  I had several questions for him, but I started slowly.

  ‘What sort of person was Sister Gertrude—Katica Babic?’ I asked.

  We went into a comfortable lounge room where a slow-combustion fire made a cosy retreat.

  ‘Miss Babic entered the convent as a young, naive woman not long after her brother was killed overseas,’ said Speed, going to a well-stocked drinks cabinet. I remembered Bob’s remarks about the man’s capacity for alcohol. ‘What’s your poison?’ he asked.

  ‘Any of it is my poison,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’ll be happy with a tonic water. Or just plain soda.’

  Speed poured himself a brandy and found me a tonic water.

  ‘And, of course,’ he said, raising a wild brow, ‘you’d be very curious as to why she rang me?’

  I nodded. That, most of all, I thought. I saw Speed concentrate on his answer.

  ‘The family had known me back in the old days when the father was a leading light in the émigré community. She would have seen me as someone from the Government with authority. As I said, she was a naive, inexperienced person.’

  I was aware that he hadn’t answered my question at all, but had supplied me with information I hadn’t asked for. ‘What exactly was the nature of your association with the family?’ I asked, keeping my tone natural and casual.

  ‘Like I said, I knew her father,’ he replied. ‘They migrated here after the war. I was part of the organisation that checked them out, made sure they were suitable candidates for Australia. We took a lot of people then, many of them refugees from the Displaced Person camps in Europe.’

  ‘And Sister Gertrude’s father was a displaced person?’

  Speed nodded. ‘Seemed like half of Europe was. Joe Babic had skills that Australia needed. Metalworking, machining. That sort of industry was about to boom in the new peace time.’

  ‘I’ve heard him referred to as a patriot,’ I said. ‘What does that actually mean?’

  ‘He served his country,’ said Speed. ‘He was a soldier in the NDH—the Croatian army. He marched in the Kryzni put.’

  ‘The what?’ The foreign words meant nothing to me.

  ‘It’s a Croatian term,’ Speed said. ‘It means “the way of the Cross”.’

  The cross again. My early instincts had been right on the money. Somehow, the cross was central to this investigation. Wherever I turned, there it was.

  ‘And what was that?’ I asked.

  Speed looked uncomfortable, as if my interest in the term alarmed him. ‘Oh,’ he said, vaguely waving a hand, ‘it’s some sort of religious expression. I’m not entirely au fait with it.’

  I had a strong sense that he was trying to brush off what he’d just revealed. I tried another way in, regretting my ignorance of foreign tongues.

 
‘I still don’t understand why Sister Gertrude contacted you,’ I said. ‘What’s your interest here?’

  Toby Speed bridled. ‘Interest?’ he said. ‘I don’t have an interest.’

  My disbelief must have been obvious. ‘You’ve just spent the last half hour finding out everything you could about what happened to her,’ I said, trying to keep my voice light, ‘and now you’re telling me you don’t have an interest?’

  Toby Speed didn’t falter. ‘I’ve already explained that,’ he said. ‘She had my name from those days.’

  I remembered that Toby Speed came from a world where deception and disinformation were developed and produced as art forms. Whereas in my world, although both of these were abundantly obvious, they were more in the line of collateral damage, not the main game. I put it as baldly as I could.

  ‘So you can’t offer me any other reason why Sister Gertrude might have contacted an ASIO agent rather than the police?’

  The atmosphere in the room changed; our casual discussion suddenly tense. ‘I’ve already told you.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m sorry to hurry you along, but I have an appointment shortly.’

  I wondered what it could be, down here in Mittagong. The purchase of a teddy bear from one of the tourist gift shops?

  ‘You have your killer from the sound of things,’ said Speed, walking me to the door. ‘You can close your case now.’

  ‘I’m not too sure about that,’ I said, as I whipped out my notebook, watching his face all the time. I flipped it open at my sketch of the cross.

  ‘This is the cross I described to you. It also appears on the knife hilt that tested positive to human blood.’

  I’d swear I saw recognition in Speed’s expression. But the change that flickered over his features was barely perceptible, reminding me I was dealing with a real pro.

  ‘Something occult perhaps,’ he said. ‘You said there had been break-ins at the convent. Don’t witches always have a sacred knife?’