Surrender

by Malane, Donna

  During my little speech, the other guys had given up all pretence of not listening and had formed an intimidating scrum around me in support of their buddy. Richard was still grinning those teeth at me but sweat had popped on his forehead.

  He held his hands out in an inclusive gesture ‘What do you say, guys? Shall I set this girl straight, do you think?’ They grinned and swaggered, not sure where he was going with this, but prepared to step in no matter what he said.

  Richard nodded at them. ‘Look at us. Do you really think it’s bad for business if our clients know we go to strip bars? That we pay good money for gorgeous girls to have sex with us? Honey, I’d be putting it out there that I was living the high life even if I wasn’t — you get my drift? But trust me, I am living the life because I’m a successful businessman.’ He moved his sweaty face close to mine. ‘You got it all wrong, babe. Clients love it and you can go ahead and feel free to tell anybody you like that Richard Brownlee buys good booty. I’m not going to deny it. It’s good for business.’

  He was a cocky little bastard.

  ‘And having Niki killed? Is that good for business too?’

  He tensed his shoulder muscles and dropped the false smile routine.

  ‘Listen. I understand you’re upset about your sister dying and all, but you’d better be very fucking careful about what you accuse me of, because I’ve got a reputation to uphold and I won’t have you coming in here to a public place making suggestions that I was involved in her being killed.’ He shrugged and threw a peanut in his mouth but that didn’t stop him talking. ‘It’s a dangerous sandpit that girl played in, but from what I could see no one was forcing her to do it. She made good money on her back.’ He grinned at his mates for support. ‘Hell’s teeth,’ he said, eerily mirroring my observation, ‘I wish that was all I had to do to make a buck.’ He popped another peanut. Warming to his subject, he indicated my glass. ‘Listen, let me get you a drink, eh? We’ll raise our glasses to Bon. I don’t mind doing that. It’s on me,’ he offered, all generosity of spirit.

  He was about to jump down off the stool but thought better of it and instead raised his arm and yelled at the young woman serving drinks to the nearby table.

  ‘Hey, babe,’ he yelled, hooking a finger at her, ‘get over here.’

  This show of finger-waggling macho seemed to give Richard back his confidence. Now he was including his nearest buddy in the joke. The guy’s jacket was a comedy routine in itself — a baby-blue number with extra-wide lapels and a faux royal-blue-silk hanky in a faux pocket — but I don’t think that was the source of their mirth. Richard had turned to his friends, effectively dismissing me.

  I said to his back, ‘One of the girls at the club told me you had a bit of a thing for my sister.’

  Richard sighed theatrically and rolled his neck to look at me over his shoulder. ‘What kind of thing would that be, babe? No offence, but she was a whore.’

  I was determined not to let him get to me. ‘She said you didn’t like other guys spending time with Niki. That you liked to have her all to yourself. I heard you were jealous.’

  Richard barked a laugh. ‘Now that would be pretty stupid, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yep,’ I agreed pleasantly. ‘But then, you see, that would fit nicely with my assessment of you so far.’

  A couple of the guys hooted at that but I kept my attention on Richard who swivelled the stool around and angled his crotch in my direction. He popped another peanut in his mouth. Not many seemed to end up in his stomach — they just got crushed up and filled the gaps between his teeth.

  ‘I’ll tell you this for nothing — Bonnie was a lot of fun. A lot more fun than you are and that’s for sure. But let me explain something. Your sister and me, we weren’t in a relationship. I paid her. I had sex with her. End of story. I don’t think she had anything to complain about with me. In fact, I’d say she enjoyed it. Maybe you should try it some time. You look like you could do with a bit of enjoying it — you know what I mean?’ All theatre now, he made a show of taking out his wallet and flipping through a couple of hundred dollar notes. ‘What would you cost? Hundred? One fifty? Name your price.’

  His mates all roared with laughter and slapped each other on the back. Richard Brownlee only stopped laughing when I poured his beer on to his crotch. I was just doing him a favour. That suit really had to go.

  I needed to walk Brownlee out of my system and I knew just the dog to help me do it. I don’t walk in the town belt at night. It’s not because I’m scared: I’m pretty confident Wolf would relish the memory of his police training and attack anyone who thought of harming me. There’s something about walking the streets at night that I’ve always loved and Wolf gets to schmoozle in and out of people’s front yards, which in daylight I can’t let him do. It’s the voyeur in me, I guess. I love to glimpse people’s lives through partly closed curtains, love the smells from dinner, the clanging of dishes, the flickering of television screens or thud of music, the sounds of little kids giggling and running up stairs, probably on all fours. It’s like that old song says, ‘homes full of people’.

  When Sean and I first moved in together we used to walk the streets. It started as house-hunting but then we developed this game where we’d each pick out the house we liked and make up a story about us in it. We’d invent a life for ourselves. We were a couple of kids playing house, I guess. Playing mothers and fathers.

  After we’d done that for a while we’d go back to our two-room bedsit and crawl under the sheets and make love until we were exhausted and aching, our limbs wrapped around each other, the heady fug of sex enveloping us. No matter how hard we tried, we knew there was no comparison. Our life together was far better than anything we could make up. Even then, right at the start, we’d talked about getting pregnant, but knew we were too selfish. We couldn’t get enough of each other and neither of us was ready to share the other person with a demanding baby. We liked to talk about it though — the idea that what we were doing could create a life made up of the two of us was an aphrodisiac. I always knew when I was ovulating and it was as if Sean’s body knew too. He’d thrust harder and deeper and then just hold himself there, deep inside me, and wait. He’d look at me and we’d both just know. Is that how it was with him and the little blonde Sylvie? Did he look at her and did they know? I had no right to ask. I had no right to even imagine how they conceived their child together. That’s the terrible thing when you let your partner go — their life’s got nothing to do with you any more.

  It was a cool night and most people had their curtains pulled tightly shut so there wasn’t much to see in the way of happy families. Wolf was cheerfully occupied trotting from fencepost to lamp post inhaling urine odours, but tonight all those lights behind curtains, those voices and thuddings on floorboards made me feel excluded. Here I was at twenty-eight, walking the streets on my own, envying other people’s lives, with only an empty fridge and even emptier bed to go home to.

  Wolf’s ears pricked up and his body tensed some moments before I saw the cat on the letter box, eyes glassily reflective, its long, albino fur translucent in the streetlight. Wolf’s training kicked in and he immediately came to heel and sat, leaning his right shoulder into my calf. Tension quivered through his body as he restrained the impulse to rush at it.

  I knew that in his own canine way he saw that cat running ahead of him, felt the hot-breath exhilaration of the chase, the final lunge and satisfaction of that warm, silken body in his jaws, the glorious, killing shake and then the heavy body, limp and acquiescent, the taste of blood. Instead, he waited for my command, straining against the invisible lead of his training. Every fibre of his being wanted to chase that cat and kill it, but he’d been conditioned not to. No physical restraint, just imposed control.

  It was both remarkable and strangely tragic to witness. He was no different from us humans, really. I cupped the bump on the top of his head.

  ‘Good dog,’ I told him. ‘You’re a good dog.’ And though hi
s tail gave one swift whack in response, his body still quivered with the effort to restrain his natural yearning.

  Usually I discourage him, but I let Wolf climb onto the bed with me. I was woken some hours later by rhythmic jolts as Wolf lightly yelped and growled. He was after that cat in a dream-chase, his paws twitching, his good eye glittering beneath the half-closed lid. I lay back, careful not to wake him.

  I really hoped he caught that blonde bitch of a cat.

  CHAPTER 9

  I spent the morning doing domestics and clearing emails, quite a few of which were a complex cross-referencing, cc-ing and no doubt bcc-ing, clutter of communications from various levels of police hierarchy, arranging my re-admittance into HQ. They promised me desk space on the third floor with a computer giving me access to missing persons’ files going back to the 1980s. If I needed earlier information I’d have to go down into the dungeons and hunt through the archived files not yet entered in the database. All of this I knew, of course; I’d been doing it for years. This was McFay’s way of reminding me I was back on trial only, and that if I strayed outside the parameters of this particular case and tried to go hunting for information about Snow’s killing, he’d know about it. McFay’s name featured in shouting capitals in all the emails.

  McFay hadn’t mentioned clearing me for access to Central. I guessed that would happen if I passed this first little test. At least at HQ I wouldn’t be banging into Sean or his pregnant girlfriend every five minutes. HQ wasn’t even within spitting distance of Central, though depending on my frame of mind I might be tempted to give it a go.

  Smithy was performing the autopsy on my John Doe at ten and, given the state of the body, I didn’t think it would take him more than an hour. My plan was to call in to the hospital around midday and see what I could get out of him. The written report to the coroner could take weeks and I wanted a couple of preliminary answers before that.

  In the meantime, while Wolf settled himself on the sofa, I sipped coffee and started a file on the Joe Doe. I didn’t get far before my first question mark. John Doe? I don’t know much about the human body. I vaguely know where my pancreas and liver are, but if I was served them both on a plate — an unlikely scenario, I admit — I probably wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.

  But I know two differences between male and female skeletons. The male pelvis is pretty much straight and parallel; females’ flared hips create a chalice-shaped cavity, and in mature adult skeletons, this difference is obvious. Less obvious, the elbows on females twist outward to accommodate this purpose-built design difference, whereas men’s elbows have no twist. Esoteric stuff but useful for the work I do. I’d get confirmation from Smithy later in the morning, but from my eyeball of the skeleton, I’d go with my amateur-pathologist assumption this was a John and not a Jane Doe.

  I slid the John Doe photos from the envelope Lou had given me, and held them under my desk lamp. The photocopies weren’t as lurid as the originals but they were sharp and had been enlarged for detail. The body in situ looked more tragic than it had propped in the wheelbarrow. The right arm was thrown up and over where the head should be, as if warding off a blow; the body was on its side and curled into itself. It looked like it had been placed in the recovery position, which, I realised, was almost identical to the foetal position. It’s also the way we lie when we’re in pain.

  I spent the next twenty minutes writing up the very few details I already knew and the little I could glean from studying the photos. The written statement from the ranger who had found the body was one double-spaced page of typed text. It told little more than I already knew: he’d been laying possum traps in a densely bushed area in the Orongorongas when he came across the body. The traps were set every 250 metres or so near a newly formed stream, watercourses being the best trap-laying points since possums come there to drink.

  The next two paragraphs waxed lyrical on the pros and cons of bait versus gin traps, with the ranger, a Scott Wilborough — I checked the signature at the bottom — firmly of the opinion that the latter were brutal and inhumane. He really went to town on this point, expressing himself with fluency and passion, and then returned to the matter in hand, i.e. the human body he’d found, reverting to a flat, pragmatic prose.

  He described tersely how he’d taken photos of the body before lifting and transporting it in the wheelbarrow. He’d walked out of the forest on what he referred to as ‘the shortcut’, wheeling the body down the wide, stony, dry bed of the Orongorongo River to the coast. I’d once done the reverse tramp from the coast road into the forest along that rocky riverbed as far as the campers’ picnic spot, and it had been neither easy nor short. Presumably Scott had been some way further in than the picnic area if he was laying poison traps. It would be quite a feat pushing a laden wheelbarrow over stones for that distance, and I was starting to look forward to meeting this guy.

  I slid out the only other document, a one-page police report giving details of the body’s arrival at Wainuiomata Police Station. Robbie had made a note that he’d given the ranger a receipt for the wheelbarrow and a promise to return it once the body had been ‘relocated’. Robbie’s delicately looped signature at the bottom of the page reminded me I’d agreed to the date with him and his mate. Sometime soon I’d have to think about which single girlfriend I could ask to be the double part of the date. Robbie’s mate was, without doubt, a cop, because cops don’t have any other friends. That goes with the job.

  I scribbled a note for Damian my dog-walker, letting him know I hadn’t taken Wolf out this morning. I suggested a good long lope would do him good. Wolf, that is. Damian lives a couple of doors down and the deal is he walks Wolf every day whether I’ve already taken him or not, but he appreciates a heads-up as to whether Wolf’s priority is exercise or company on any given day. Wolf whined and drooped his ears but it was a half-hearted performance, and since I knew Damian would be taking him out with a bunch of other dogs within the hour I didn’t take the tragedy of my leaving too much to heart.

  I found Smithy in his little office next to the autopsy room. He was bent over his keyboard, head angled at the lopsided screen of his faded cream 1980s computer monitor. I could have sworn it was made out of Bakelite. I knew he was a bit deaf so I knocked on the open door. Smithy reared up, knocking over his empty plastic water cup.

  ‘Sorry Smithy, I didn’t mean to scare you.’

  ‘No, no, come in, come in.’ He patted his pockets nervously. He’d given up smoking thirty years ago but his hands still remembered where the packet should be. ‘You’re looking grand,’ he added, though I was pretty sure he hadn’t glanced at me yet.

  Actually, it was Smithy who was looking grand. He’d dropped about ten kilos since I’d last seen him, had had his hair cut by a professional instead of his usual own-goal attempts with a scalpel, and had replaced his hand-knitted cable-stitch jersey with a plain black sweater. He’d even hedge-clipped his eyebrows and wrenched out the tufts that usually protruded from his nostrils like boar tusks. The thought made my eyes water in sympathy.

  There was no doubt about it. Smithy had gone and got himself a girlfriend. Smithy’s wife had died on her fortieth birthday and though I knew that in the subsequent two decades he’d seen a number of lady friends, as he quaintly called them, none had meant enough for him to have gone under the nasal tweezers. I took the office chair he was thrusting at me and placed it so we were both facing the computer screen.

  ‘I’ve just started to write up the John Doe now but I suppose you want a preliminary chat,’ he offered.

  In green text on a black screen was the beginning of the autopsy report. The cursor, a little black square, was blinking in mid sentence.

  ‘Smithy, this machine is truly ancient. Why don’t you order yourself an upgrade?’

  Smithy leaned forward and wrestled with the monitor. ‘I don’t need a new one. This is just fine.’ He released the monitor which rocked back into its lean. He glanced shyly at me. ‘It’s good to have you back,
Diane. I thought you might have given up on our lost-and-found friends.’

  ‘Nah, it was just me I lost there for a while, Smithy,’ I admitted. ‘But I think McFay’s got me on trial, so I’d better deliver on this one.’

  ‘Yes, right,’ he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose where glasses used to be. He blinked rapidly, a new addition to his usual tics and mannerisms. I suspected it was to moisten his new contacts. ‘Well, it’s not the easiest case to get back on the proverbial horse with. It’s a John Doe.’ He threw me a complicit smirk. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’ I took out my notepad and started making notes as Smithy talked.

  ‘Probably about six foot two in the old measurements, but without the skull that’s only an estimate. Long-limbed. Slimmish build. Had the odd fracture when he was a child, I’d say. Nothing unusual there.’

  ‘Any idea how old he was when he died?’

  ‘Early twenties.’ He watched me make a note. ‘That’s my informed guess, at this stage, nothing more.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Smithy scrolled through the text on the screen. ‘To be safe, I’d say between twenty and twenty-five. Fit and healthy too, as far as I can tell.’

  ‘Apart from having no head,’ I contributed.

  ‘Yes, well, there is that.’ Smithy looked depressed at the thought. ‘Oh, there is evidence of a fracture in the left talus.’

  I blinked. ‘Isn’t that what Doctor Who travels in?’

  Ever the gentleman, Smithy responded without a hint of sarcasm. ‘I think you’ll find that’s the Tardis, Diane. The talus on the other hand occupies the middle and upper part of the tarsus, supporting the tibia above, articulating on either side with the malleoli, and in front with the navicular, and resting upon the calcaneus below.’