Asylum

by Amos, Gina

Jill put down the phone. If Perris knew anything he wasn’t about to share it with her. If Rimis ever found out she’d spoken to Perris, he’d read her the riot act, again. And in the end the phone call had been a complete waste of time. Jill checked the time on her phone. Adam Lee would have to wait until this afternoon.

  Jill left Chatswood Station and thirty minutes later she walked through the automatic glass doors to the offices of Access Security. The receptionist asked her to take a seat. Five minutes later she was led down a corridor and into the manager’s office. After the introductions, the manager handed Jill a series of photos. She laid them out in front of her on his desk and studied them. ‘What? This is all you’ve got?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, but it’s obvious from the quality and number of photos, the CCTV coverage on the site is grossly inadequate. I know you’ve got foot patrols at regular intervals, but what happened last night may have been avoided if…’

  The manager raised both hands. ‘I agree with you one hundred percent, Detective. I can’t tell you how many discussions and meetings I’ve had with the university about increasing the security at Callan Park, but it’s all about budgets and cost-cutting these days. There’s talk the Federal Government plans to axe $2.5 billion dollars from funding to universities and student support programmes in the next budget. The reason the CCTV is there at all is because a few of the students and lecturers had their cars vandalised a few weeks ago.’

  What else was there to say?

  On the way back to the car park, Jill stopped and looked at the grainy photos again. They’d been printed on heavy gloss paper and showed a lone figure in a hooded tracksuit. The face was obscured and it was hard to tell if it was a man or a woman. It could be Robbie, but Jill knew there was little, if any chance of a formal identification based on these photographs.

  Once she was behind the wheel, Jill threw the envelope on the passenger seat and punched Fin Calloway’s address, which she’d committed to memory, into her GPS. She looked at the display. She was nine kilometres from Fin’s apartment. The GPS told her she’d be there in eleven minutes.

  TEN

  Fin Calloway lived on the third floor of a six-storey apartment block. The lifts were out of service so Jill took the stairs to Fin’s apartment. She knocked on the door, waited a full minute before she knocked again. A bolt clunked, a chain rattled and the door inched open.

  ‘Fin? It’s Jill Brennan, I was a friend of Robbie’s. Can I come in?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Jill could see Fin through the gap, silhouetted against subdued lighting. A tall figure. ‘I wanted to talk to you, see how you are.’ The chain was still on the door.

  Fin unlinked the chain and opened the door. She stepped back. She was tall like Robbie, six feet, one hundred and eighty centimetres. Jill remembered Robbie telling her he hated it when Fin wore heels because she towered over him.

  Jill immediately caught a whiff of Fin’s boozy breath and sour body odour.

  ‘Come through, I was having a drink.’

  Jill trailed behind Fin down the narrow hallway past a navy rain jacket and an assortment of hats on brass coat hooks fixed to the wall. Jill noticed the clothes Fin was wearing: a long skirt and a jumper two sizes too large for her. Her feet were bare and even in bare feet, Jill felt like a midget next to her.

  Fin turned the television off and poured herself a whiskey from an almost empty bottle. ‘Did you see The Morning Show?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jill said.

  ‘Reporters keep ringing me. I told them all to fuck off.’ Fin aimed the glass in Jill’s direction and sat down on a stool at the kitchen counter. ‘You want one? I know you’re not s’posed to drink when you’re on duty. You are on duty, aren’t you? That’s why you’re here, right?’

  ‘I am, but even if I wasn’t, I would have come. Robbie would have wanted me to be with you.’

  Fin threw back the contents of the glass tumbler. Silence.

  ‘Look, Fin, I know we’ve only met once, but I just wanted to say how sorry I am and if there’s anything I can —’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I know.’ Fin’s face tightened. ‘I’ve heard it all before. You think this is the first time I’ve lost family?’ Fin made a loud sniffing sound, wiped stray tears away with her thumb.

  Jill gave her a few moments. She wanted to cry with her, but held back, knowing it wouldn’t do either of them any good if she broke down now. Jill rummaged around in her bag for her notebook, realised it wasn’t there. It must have fallen out in the car. She sat down next to Fin and realised she hadn’t even thought about the questions she was going to ask. She looked at Fin’s face; it was expressionless. She tried to think of something to say, something to console her. But there was nothing.

  ‘Grab yourself a glass.’ Fin nodded towards the sink. ‘Robbie always said it was never a good idea to drink alone.’

  Jill was grateful for the distraction and rinsed a glass before she filled it with tap water.

  Fin poured herself another shot of whiskey while Jill looked around the apartment, taking in the clothes strewn across the floor, the stains on the carpet, and a vase filled with dead tulips on the timber sideboard.

  Jill took a sip of water. ‘I need to ask you a few questions, Fin. I’m sorry, I really am. I wish they could wait.’

  Fin massaged her temples with her knuckles.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ Jill said.

  ‘Got a headache, won’t go away.’

  ‘Can I get you something?’

  ‘Already had half a dozen paracetamol.’

  ‘What about a cup of tea?’ Jill looked at the almost empty bottle of whiskey. No wonder Fin had a headache.

  ‘No, I’ll stick to this.’ Fin raised her glass.

  Jill paused, then said, ‘There’ll have to be an autopsy and a coroner’s report.’

  Fin examined her hands, searched the lines of her palms and dug her fingernails into them.

  Jill persevered. ‘Do you have any idea what Robbie was doing at Callan Park last night? And in the tower of all places. We both know he was scared of heights.’

  ‘No idea. If I’d known he was going there, I would have stopped him and…’ Fin banged her head on the kitchen counter.

  ‘Sorry, Fin, I…’

  Fin looked up, her forehead already red and swollen, a bruise in the making. ‘Just ask yer questions, then you can piss off and leave me alone.’

  Jill wondered how many whiskeys Fin had knocked back today. ‘When did you last see, Robbie?’

  Silence.

  ‘A week ago.’

  ‘Did he seem depressed or act in any way that made you think something was troubling him?’

  Fin drained the whiskey in one neat gulp, slammed the glass down. It almost missed the counter. ‘Could have been. He was fidgety, came for dinner, didn’t eat. Knew there was something. Wouldn’t tell me, would he? Thought it was because of Gracie. She died a few months back. They were close. He was missing her.’

  ‘Your grandmother?’

  Fin nodded. ‘She brought us up after our parents died, we called her Gracie, better for us, she said, you know, around our friends and that. She died; she was old and sick. Sick of living more like it. Robbie said it was her time.’ Fin pulled a cigarette from a crumpled pack, looked at it between her fingers. ‘Gotta give these things up, as well as the drink.’ Fin’s hand trembled as she lit the cigarette. She held her breath for a moment before she blew the smoke out through her nose. ‘Can’t stop thinking about him, though, lying there in the mud. Wonder if he felt anything? Your lot told me he’d have been unconscious when he hit the ground, but they wouldn’t know for sure, would they?’ Fin wrapped a lock of hair around her finger. ‘If I hadn’t known him so well, s’pose I wouldn’t have noticed the change in him. He was good at covering things up.’

  ‘What sort of change?’ Jill met Fin’s eyes and could see the pain and anger there. Her w
orld had just been torn apart and Jill knew how that felt — and understood why she wanted to drink herself into oblivion.

  Fin ignored her, took a drag on her cigarette instead. Her face crumpled. ‘Should have made him tell me what was going on, could have talked it through.’ She threw her head back and blew smoke into the air.

  ‘Look, Fin, I know this is difficult for you, but it would really help if we knew what Robbie was doing at Callan Park last night and why he’d moved from Collaroy.’

  ‘Robbie? He moved? I thought he was still living in Collaroy.’ Now the tears were flowing. ‘What business is it of yours, anyway? It was suicide, wasn’t it?’

  Jill said nothing. She knew Robbie’s death had all the hallmarks of suicide but she still couldn’t come to grips with the idea of it.

  Fin shook her head and wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands. ‘It’s a family matter, but then you wouldn’t know about family, would you? Robbie told me you didn’t have one.’

  Jill shut her eyes, opened them, and picked up the glass of water, thought about adding whiskey to it. She ploughed on. ‘Do you know if Robbie was gambling again?’

  Fin had stopped crying. ‘I wouldn’t know even if he was.’ Fin drew on her cigarette, tossed her head back.

  Jill moved onto her next question. ‘Ever heard of an organisation called The Friends of Callan Park?’

  ‘Nope.’ Fin flicked ash at a saucer then poured two fingers of whiskey into Jill’s glass. She grabbed her own glass, stood up and walked over to a set of windows. The wild wind outside thrashed through the tree branches. Sheets of rain slammed into the windows.

  ‘Quite a day out there,’ Jill said as she watched Fin. She’d be on her own now, the last of her family gone. Jill knew what that felt like.

  When Robbie introduced them, Jill thought Fin was cold, unfriendly, but looking at her now, she felt sorry for her.

  ‘The last time I saw Robbie he’d just been promoted,’ Jill said.

  ‘Robbie was in a good place then.’ Fin spun around, half smiled. ‘He was the happiest I’d seen him since the two of you split up.’ She sighed. ‘But around the time Gracie died, something happened between us, don’t know what it was, but he stopped calling me. No texts or emails either. I had a go at him about it, but he wouldn’t tell me anything. Last week was the first time I’d seen him since Gracie’s funeral.’ She took another drag on her cigarette. ‘Maybe there was a woman in his life, but I don’t know for sure.’

  ‘Did he mention anyone? A name you hadn’t heard before?’ Jill got up from the kitchen counter and crossed over to Fin. ‘Try to remember Fin, it’s important.’

  ‘He might have.’ She ran her hand through her greasy hair. ‘Been having trouble remembering things lately.’ She stared at Jill. ‘You’re a detective now, aren’t you?’

  Jill nodded.

  ‘Robbie always said you’d go far. Said it was always the job before anything else with you.’

  Jill wasn’t sure what to make of that. Was it supposed to be a compliment or a criticism? She changed the topic. ‘We haven’t been able to find Robbie’s gun. It should be locked up at the station, but it’s missing. He didn’t say anything to you about bringing his gun home, did he?’

  ‘Like I said, I’ve only spoken to him once since Gracie’s funeral. Anyway, Robbie didn’t talk to me about his work. He knew it upset me.’ Fin gulped down another mouthful of whiskey.

  Fin looked past Jill. She seemed to be in a world of her own.

  ‘We used to drive past the asylum when we were kids. You could see the clock tower for miles. It was on a ridge. Gracie talked about Annie Calloway, great, great something or other… she was one of the lunatics. She hanged herself from that tower. She worked in the laundry, made a rope out of bed sheets.’ The ash on her cigarette was getting longer, threatening to spill onto the floor but Fin didn’t seem to notice. ‘Robbie and I used to nag Gracie to take us inside to see it up close, but she said the place was full of crazy people and we weren’t allowed.’

  Fin glanced at her cigarette and stubbed it out before continuing. ‘Robbie and I played these silly games, made up stories. He called me Mad Annie and promised to take care of me, no matter what.’ Fin’s eyes glazed over. ‘Kid’s stuff. It was all just kid’s stuff.’ Fin returned to the counter for another cigarette and lit it.

  After a couple of drags, she looked Jill up and down. ‘I don’t understand what you’re doing here, anyway. Robbie killed himself, end of story. Shit happens.’

  Jill hesitated. ‘I thought you might like to see Robbie.’ She lowered her voice. ‘It will help you deal with your grief, accept his death. I could take you.’

  At least he’d be cleaned up at the morgue, Jill thought. And Fin would just see his face. Then she’d realise he was really gone.

  ‘Okay.’ Fin’s eyes brimmed with tears.

  ‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning. Around nine?’ Fin nodded.

  Jill took a breath. ‘But maybe you should go easy on the whiskey?’ Fin gave a non-committal nod.

  ‘I’ve got one more question before I go.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where were you last night?’

  Fin crinkled her brow, scrunched her face slightly. ‘Here, of course.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She stared into her whiskey. ‘I’m always alone.’

  Jill gave little nods, then said: ‘I’ll let myself out.’ She drifted towards the front door, and then turned back. ‘Fin?’

  ‘I thought you were leaving.’ Fin looked up, wiped a tear away.

  Jill had been about to float a different theory…ask Fin if she thought Robbie was mixed up in something serious enough to get him killed. But the look on Fin’s face stopped her.

  ‘Take care of yourself,’ Jill said instead.

  She needed more facts before she pulled the grieving sister down that rabbit hole.

  ELEVEN

  Fin’s mobile phone buzzed and made her jump. She opened her eyes, rolled off the sofa and fell onto the floor. She tried to stand. Felt sick. Far too much whiskey. Where was her phone? It had been sitting on the coffee table the last time she’d seen it. There. She reached for it; surprised the battery wasn’t dead because she couldn’t remember the last time she charged it. This isn’t going to be good, she thought. Probably Jill Brennan checking up on her or that reporter woman again, the one who claimed she knew Robbie. She was after a human-interest story, a close-up account of a grieving sister who’d lost her copper brother to suicide. She looked at the screen. It was Adam. She hesitated then answered it.

  ‘Fin? Fin, it’s me.’ His voice was panicky. ‘Are you okay? I just saw Robbie on the news. Man, why’d he go and do a thing like that?’

  Fin couldn’t speak. Her heart thumped. The only thing she could think of was Robbie lying in the mud.

  ‘Fin? Are you there? I know you must be freaking out. Why don’t you come and see me. I could do with some visitors. I’ve got all these tubes in my chest. They make me look like some sort of freakin alien. They’re supposed to suck the blood and air from my chest to get my lungs working again.’

  Fin closed her eyes. ‘Fin? You there?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘So, you wanna come and see me?’

  Fin swallowed. ‘No, can’t face anyone now.’ She pressed the end button through a drunken fog and slumped back on the sofa.

  TWELVE

  Jill tossed a copy of the forty-page report on the Red Cave Gang to one side of her desk and leaned back in her chair. Instead of concentrating on the report she’d been going over the conversation she’d had with Fin. She kept thinking about Robbie and Fin’s distant relative who’d hanged herself from the tower. An eerie coincidence…what else could it be?

  After she drained her fourth cup of green tea for the day she leaned back in her chair and looked at her in-tray. There was a backlog of requests from the DPP for further statements to review, call-back messages, and witness subpoen
as on a cleaning business fraud case she’d been working on for the past three months.

  She decided to tackle the call-back messages first, picked up the pile, but then put them aside. Thoughts of Robbie, again. Even though they were still waiting for the autopsy, Robbie Calloway was now a suicide statistic as far as Rimis was concerned.

  She’d gone over and over all the things that didn’t add up. Like why Robbie had moved from Collaroy on the Northern Beaches to Rozelle, to a dump. And why, within only two weeks of his moving, he’d jumped to his death from the clock tower in the grounds of Callan Park? And why would he have even gone up there when he hated heights? It didn’t make sense. And there was his gun. What had happened to it?

  Jill pushed back her chair and went in search of Jenny Choi. When she walked out into the corridor Jill almost collided with her. She had a bundle of files in her arms and Jill offered to help her carry them back to her desk.

  Choi dumped the files on her desk. Today, Jenny Choi was wearing a denim jacket over a striped pink and white jumper, a short black skirt, black tights and red boots with heels that boosted her height so she could look most of the other detectives in the eye. Jill imagined she got away with wearing outrageous clothing because she had an almost movie-star status among the Chinese community, especially with the druggies down at the Train and Bus Interchange.

  ‘I need to talk to you about Adam Lee,’ Jill said. ‘The boss wants us to go to the hospital and see if we can get a name or at least a description of his attacker from him.’

  ‘Crap, I was planning to go through these files this afternoon.’

  ‘Rimis said it was a priority,’ Jill said.

  ‘What’s not a priority around here?’ Choi sat back in her chair and put her feet up on her desk.

  Jill shrugged. ‘I’ve been trying to bring myself up to speed on the Red Cave Gang. I read high school students are being recruited by friends and branded with a gang tattoo on their stomachs to mark their initiation.’

  ‘Yeah, and it isn’t just Asian kids anymore, they’re recruiting across cultures.’ Choi reached into her pocket and threw her phone on her desk. ‘Overtime’s been approved, so expect to work extra hours on this one. The leader is a guy called Vincent Wan. He’s a slimy bastard and the sooner he’s deported the better.’ Choi grabbed a bottle of water from her desk drawer. ‘He’s into everything: drug distribution, extortion, kidnapping, identity theft, and child prostitution. You name it; he’s got a finger in it. He needs to be put on a slow boat back to Malaysia, preferably one with holes in it.’