Coleman doodled with his pen. ‘What time was that?’
‘Um …’ I racked my brain. Was Karen’s the first call that night? Before or after Sean’s call? Or was it Robbie’s? Both. Both had called. But Karen had called first. I had arrived at Prego not long after eight. ‘Eight-thirty’ I concluded. ‘She called me about eight-thirty.’
Coleman made a note on his pad. His Pitman’s looked fine to me.
‘You were with someone?’ Aaron’s tone was flat. Unreadable.
‘Yes.’ He waited for me to elaborate. ‘His name is Ned. I’m not sure he told me his last name.’ I knew how bad that sounded but forced myself not to make it worse by blabbering on. I thought I detected a faint sarcastic twitch of Coleman’s freckled lip.
‘And Ned will be able to verify this?’
‘Yes. I’m sure he will.’ Shit! Can. I should have said he can verify it.
‘You’re going out with Robbie Lather, aren’t you?’
I felt my face flush. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ It sounded defensive. I felt defensive.
Aaron shrugged. ‘Robbie and I play footy together. That’s all. He’s a great guy.’
It felt like a slap, a rebuke, but that might have been my own guilt. I hadn’t told Robbie about the dinner with Ned.
‘Yeah, he is a great guy.’ As a riposte, pathetic, but it was all I could manage.
Aaron picked up the paper cup of water and knocked it back in one motion. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. Then he scrunched up the cup and dropped it into the wastepaper bin. I fantasised about un-scrunching the cup and licking the dribbles in the bottom. Now there was just the untouched letter on the desk between us. Coleman stared at a stick figure he’d drawn on his notepad, his pen poised. I was guessing that the stick figure was me. I expected him to draw a hangman’s noose around its neck any minute.
‘And you didn’t return to Wellington until the following day. Saturday?’ It was the first real question Coleman had asked.
‘That’s right. I waited for Karen to turn up for the meeting with her daughter at one o’clock. When she didn’t show, I flew straight back to Wellington, picked up my car from the long term and drove directly to her house. That’s when I found her.’ We all stared at the untouched envelope. I was determined not to be the one to speak next.
‘Karen had a visitor Friday night,’ Aaron said. So that’s why my phone call information hadn’t impressed. They had already known she was still alive then.
‘Well, it wasn’t me,’ I said, keeping it simple.
They waited, hoping for more, I think. I considered telling them about Karen’s friend Manny who was due Friday night for a prayer session, but decided against it. Normally, I would have volunteered this information. Normally, I have a cordial relationship with the police; after all, it’s from the police that I get most of my jobs. Used to, anyway. But right now, in this not-so-cordial environment, I wasn’t going to risk saying anything more than I absolutely had to.
Aaron nodded. ‘Mind if we keep this?’ he said brightly, indicating the envelope.
‘Sure.’
We all stared at the envelope. Still neither of them touched it.
Aaron shook hands with me and then Coleman led me out of the room, his palm poised centimetres over the small of my back. We waited in silence for the elevator. When it arrived he ushered me forward then leaned in and pushed the G button. He walked back along the corridor without saying a word. There is no elevator in the country that plummets at the rate of the Wellington Central Police Station’s. As my stomach lurched I pictured them back in the interview room excitedly unzipping sterile glove and evidence bags. I knew there was no point asking if I could have the two thousand dollar cheque back. Not that it would be any more use to me than the unbanked down payment cheque still in the top drawer of my desk at home; Karen’s bank account would be well and truly frozen solid.
Thinking the interview would take half an hour, I’d left Wolf in the back seat to gnaw on the prize stick he’d claimed at Lyall Bay. Instead I’d been trapped in a claustrophobic interview room for well over an hour. What I’d expected to be a friendly chat, with maybe a tolerant wrist slap for the uninvited house entry, had instead been an ambush with a double whammy interrogation. The bad cop-bad cop routine had totally unnerved me. Coleman’s silence had been just as intimidating as the CO’s pointed questions. The urge for alcohol was strong, but I fought it. No matter how rattled I felt, it was only ten-thirty in the morning.
As I approached the car, I spotted someone leaning towards the rear window. Sean. He was holding the baby in both hands so that he could see Wolf inside. Actually, it wasn’t a baby so much as a little kid. I did the sum on my fingers. Sean and the pixie’s son must be nearly eighteen months old. Patrick, they’d called him. That was Sean’s dad’s name. I’d loved Patrick. We probably would have named our first child after him. Though I’m not all that familiar with kids, I reckoned at eighteen months old, Patrick was a real person. As opposed to a baby, I mean. He waved a chubby little hand at Wolf. Luckily, I’m not the sort of person who would consider instructing Wolf to bite that little hand off. But I am the sort of person who doesn’t want to play coochie-coo with my ex-husband’s baby son. Fine. Shoot me.
I did a U-turn and sat on the bottom step of a nearby building, fighting off my urge for alcohol and cigarettes and turned my phone back on. First to appear was a three-page text from Jason, telling me the open home had gone really well and that there were two genuine buyers coming for another look at the house tomorrow. He finished with I’m confident your house will be sold within days. Well, yippee.
When I looked up, Sean had gone. He’s really good at that. In the time it took Wolf to stretch his legs and water the parched tree in the corner of the grassy knoll, I had arranged for Robbie to pick him up at the end of his shift and had booked myself a flight back to Auckland. Buying a ticket at such short notice meant paying through the nose, but, hey, what are credit cards for? I hadn’t told the cops Karen had hired me to check on Sunny’s safety; only that she’d hired me to find her. Foolishly, I’d dismissed Karen’s concerns about Sunny, convincing myself she had only wanted me to smooth the way for them to meet. But it was obvious from the way the cops treated me that Karen’s death was no accident. It was a homicide if ever I’d seen one. What if there was a connection between Karen’s murder and her fears for Sunny? What if Sunny was still in danger? I would see the job through, remuneration or no remuneration. I owed it to Karen to finish what she had hired me to do. I owed it to Sunny to make sure she wasn’t in danger. From who or what, I didn’t know, but I was determined to find out.
Somewhere inside, hidden amongst all the other little denials I was an avid collector of, was the tight little nugget of knowledge that my commitment to finishing the job wasn’t entirely altruistic. The surge of relief I felt when my flight was confirmed had as much to do with leaving Wellington as fulfilling my commitment to Karen. The real-estate agent’s confidence that our house would soon be sold had made the acid in my stomach squirt. Every time I thought I’d moved on from Sean, I discovered I hadn’t moved very far at all. Emotionally, I was still looking back over my shoulder at him. And then there was Robbie, asking me to move in with him — there was a lot going on that I needed to not think about for a few days. In short, making sure Sunny was safe was the perfect diversion from my personal life.
On my way to the airport, I decided to drop in and see my old mate Smithy. The fact that he happened to be the pathologist performing the postmortem on Karen was nothing more than a happy coincidence. Well, happy for me, that is; probably not so thrilling for Karen.
Chapter 15
MONDAY 26 NOVEMBER 2012
When I’d last seen Smithy he’d dropped ten kilos and undergone a complete makeover; contact lenses, capped teeth, the works. An actual hairdresser had done the job, with scissors, instead of his usual efforts with a scalpel. Eye-wateringly, he’d even gone under the nasal tweezers.
A new love interest when you’re in your late sixties will do that to you. With relief I saw Smithy’s little potbelly was back again and straining for attention between two perilously loose shirt buttons. The body’s biological determination to return to its natural state is impressive. He’d ditched the contacts and gone back to glasses, which was a relief. The blinking mannerism that contact lenses had forced on him was one too many an addition to his already impressive repertoire of nervous ticks and gestures he used to punctuate his sentences. Smithy’s previous glasses, those he’d stubbornly refused to replace for over twenty years, had been held together with an assortment of plasters, sticky tape and fuse wire, none of which really did the trick and had forced him to adopt strange nose-bridge prods and easily misinterpreted angled head movements to assist his focus. These new specs seemed to work fine but the habit of years of poking and shifting them around his face had clearly been hard to break. Despite all his eccentrics and oddities, Smithy was a brilliant pathologist. The best. I was very fond of him and I think he had a soft spot for me, too.
We sat in his small glass-walled office and simultaneously dunked ginger nuts into our mugs of insipid tea. After a decent passage of time dunking and slurping I asked after his love life. He sucked on his drooping ginger nut for some time before answering.
‘May-Lyn is rather demanding,’ he finally offered.
‘In a good or a bad way?’ I asked, dunking my last half crescent.
Smithy considered this as if I’d asked him about an intra-parenchymal haematoma. I was coming to that. ‘I’ve reached the conclusion that I’ve become rather selfish in my older years, Diane. I must admit to having found it difficult to include another individual in my own personal domain.’
I performed a quick translation into normal speech. ‘Oh, shit. I didn’t know you’d moved in together. Bloody hell. That was a big step.’
‘Rather bigger than I imagined,’ he agreed morosely.
‘How’s Blinky?’ I asked, hoping to cheer him up. Blinky was Smithy’s spoilt, overweight, grumpy black cat. He adored her.
‘May-Lyn is allergic,’ he said, and slumped into a depressed silence. I decided it was safer not to ask if that meant poor old Blinky had gone permanently.
‘How’s that lovely big dog of yours?’ Smithy chirped up at the thought of Wolf. I did, too. Wolf had thrown me a pathetic, hard-done-by look when I dropped him at Gemma’s. But then he’d spotted a block of sunshine by her glass patio doors and trotted off contentedly to spend the rest of the day lying in it.
‘He’s still gorgeous.’ I conjured the sweetness of him. Grey muzzle. ‘Getting old,’ I added, realising with a gulp the awful truth of it. Wolf was getting old. It occurred to me I might not have him for much longer. ‘I like old dogs,’ I added, warding off the juju of Wolf’s death. ‘All dogs are smart, but old dogs are the smartest. They’re busy when they need to be, but they’re just as happy to sit in the sun all day and have their tummies scratched. He’s definitely my kind of dog.’
Smithy removed his glasses to wipe the back of his hand across his eyes. For some reason he’d become all emotional. I hoped he didn’t think my old dog reverie was an oblique reference to him. I avoided looking at his, no doubt scratchable, little protruding tummy just in case. ‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Are you and the young policeman you were seeing planning to cohabit?’
‘It’s been suggested.’ Now it was my turn to slump. He nodded sagely and we sat in companionable despondency until he held the ginger nut packet out to me. Third biscuit and refilled mugs cheered us both up.
‘Hey, you did the post on Karen Mackie today, didn’t you?’
He wasn’t fooled for a moment by my casualness. ‘You knew her?’ His eyebrows puckered to form an unbroken hedge all the way from temple to temple.
‘Uh-huh. Professionally.’ That was true. ‘She hired me to check up on her daughter.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Smithy said. ‘How long ago was this?’
‘Last week,’ I admitted. I would never lie to Smithy.
‘I see,’ he repeated, more slowly this time. ‘And you’d like me to give you a preliminary report on my postmortem findings?’
Sarcasm noted. Silence was my only defence. I paid close attention to my ginger nut-dunking. He downed the last of his tea, stood and stretched, hands in the small of his back like a pregnant woman; in fact, exactly like a pregnant woman. Stretched out like this, his little potbelly didn’t look all that little any more.
‘It will all be public information once I’ve sent my report to the coroner and he’s ruled on it.’
I knew better than to push him. It looked like Smithy wasn’t going to share on this one. Still, no harm trying.
‘Okay, but hypothetically speaking …’
Smithy raised those generous eyebrows. ‘Oh, yes?’ he said. Very droll.
‘There wouldn’t be many situations where someone died from hitting themselves on the neck, would there?’ I said, recalling Gemma’s astute reference to my own neck bruise.
That got a little flicker of amusement. ‘Not in my experience, no.’ He stared wistfully at his empty mug. ‘But it’s not my job as pathologist to decide on whether the deceased hit themselves, or was hit by someone else. Or for that matter, whether they sustained the injury — or injuries—’ he added pointedly, ‘in a hit or a fall.’ Having segued into teaching mode he was on a roll. There would be no stopping him now. He turned his back on me and stared down the corridor at an invisible lecture theatre of students. ‘The pathologist’s job is to ascertain cause of death by meticulous examination of the body and, if required, to answer questions by authorities, such as the courts, as to whether a given scenario may or may not have been possible, or indeed plausible.’
I knew better than to interrupt. Smithy had, literally, written the manual on postmortem procedure and this sounded like a version of the preface to me. Smithy was a born teacher and would give away far more than he intended if I kept my mouth shut and my ears open. I focused my eyes on my last fragment of ginger nut but concentrated on listening hard.
‘Some causes of death are more complicated to unravel than others. Take this latest case, for example.’ I held my breath. ‘The fact that the woman sustained a number of minor injuries — in all, I counted a total of twenty-three bruises down the left side of her body — may or may not be significant. Speaking as a pathologist, they are, I believe, irrelevant to cause of death. But to the police, those same bruises may be a clear indicator of events leading up to her death, and therefore are indeed significant to their investigation. Whereas the impact or blow to the back of the head was, in my opinion, the most likely to have caused the subdural haemorrhage that killed her. But—’ he added, pointing his finger at an invisible crowd of medical students, ‘there was also evidence of a number of small prior bleeds, which muddy the waters, so to speak. Unlike the bruises to her body, these may indeed be significant with regards to cause of death. Or they may not be significant at all but, without doubt, they deserve careful thinking about.’
He lapsed into silence, doing, presumably, just that.
‘What could cause prior bleeds in her brain?’ Smithy turned to face me, blinking rapidly. I’m pretty sure he’d forgotten I was there. ‘Hypothetically,’ I added belatedly. He turned back to stare out at the corridor.
‘Well, cerebral amyloid angiopathy for one, but I don’t think that’s the cause here. Beatings. That would do it,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘But I’ve also seen little haematomas like these in sportspeople, too, contact sports in particular. Or, in theory they could be caused by something as seemingly innocuous as a migraine.’ He scratched at his comb-over before turning his attention back to me. ‘Did your client have a history of high blood pressure or serious headaches?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘But she had spent the last seven years in prison, which would fit with the beatings theory.’ He nodded, lost in thought again. It seemed a good time to take my leave. But I had one last t
hing to ask. ‘Was it quick?’ The question was no surprise to Smithy. It’s what everyone asks.
‘The subdural haematoma in her body had time to surface,’ he admitted. ‘But she wouldn’t have suffered for long.’ He threw a little smile in my direction, wanting to give me some good news, I think. ‘She was most likely in a coma not too long after the blow to the head.’
I gathered up my coat and overnight bag. ‘Well, thanks for the tea, Smithy.’
He took my coat and held it open for me.
‘I’ll be in touch when the report’s made public.’
Smithy nodded. ‘Sorry I wasn’t able to tell you more.’
He didn’t seem to realise how much he had told me. I was pleased about that. I didn’t want him feeling bad. He ushered me out, a protective arm hovering tentatively over my shoulder. I couldn’t resist giving him a peck on the cheek. He blushed at the touch.
When I turned back from the door to wave goodbye he was standing in the one little block of sunshine, deep in thought, patting his comb-over affectionately. I suspect poor old Blinky had been permanently dispatched to the big farm in the sky.
Chapter 16
MONDAY 26 NOVEMBER 2012
For a full ten minutes I weighed the ethics of staying at Norma’s place against my non-existent bank balance. Since I wasn’t being paid for the work, free board seemed reasonable. No doubt the townhouse would eventually be sold as part of Karen’s estate, but that wasn’t going to happen in a hurry. Meanwhile it was just sitting there with the key under the welcome mat. There was no sign of Ned. If he did turn up, I didn’t think he’d object to my company. As long as I didn’t attack him again, that is.
On the flight up I’d thought about what I’d learned from Smithy. Karen had bruising down one side of her body and what had killed her was a blow to the back of the head; she hadn’t died immediately and would have been in excruciating pain before slipping gratefully into a coma. And yet she hadn’t called the police. All the scenarios I could think of for why she would have kept silent relied on the notion of her having known her attacker. According to Fanshaw, someone known to Karen came to see her on the Friday night. It could have been Karen’s friend Manny, who was coming for a prayer session. Or it could have been someone else. Whoever it was, they were possibly the bearer of Sunny’s photo. No doubt there were other possible scenarios but I needed more time than a one-hour flight to Auckland to come up with them. One thing was certain: Karen’s killer was still out there and this meant there was a good likelihood Sunny was still in danger.
My Brother’s Keeper Page 10