by Jaye Ford
Goose bumps rose on the back of her neck as though the ghost of Brendan had reached out and touched her. How much was real, Brendan?
Jax pulled her hat lower. ‘Time to go now, Zoe.’
15
Tilda was on the phone when they spilled through the front door, breathing hard from their walk up the hill. As they discarded thongs and hats, Jax heard concern in the ‘mmm’s and ‘yes-yes’s that drifted down the stairs before Zoe ran up and made their presence felt.
‘Here they are now,’ Tilda said into the receiver. Then, to Jax: ‘It’s Deanne.’
‘Take your shells out to the deck,’ Jax told Zoe as she took the phone. ‘Hey, Deanne.’
‘Russell said you sounded exhausted last night and I thought I’d let you sleep, but I figured you’d had enough by now. How are you?’
Jax smiled at the voice of honey and vice in her ear. Blessed with extraordinary vocal cords, Deanne was the only one of the four friends who’d left the print media for electronic news and had suffered the ups and downs, and hirings and firings of a career in radio. She was currently between jobs and had spent Friday and Saturday with Jax at the house helping with the packing.
‘I don’t know,’ Jax replied. ‘A little numb, a tad jumpy. It feels like a bad dream I can’t switch off.’
‘It was no dream. You knocked Nina Torrence off the front page.’
‘Not sure that’s any claim to fame.’
‘At least you’re alive.’
‘There’s that.’
Nina Torrence was a high-profile solicitor who’d been found stabbed and thrown from a cliff in Sydney on Sunday. They’d both known her years ago – Nina the clever new lawyer at a criminal defence firm, Deanne and Jax trying to make a start in the print media. She’d given them a few leads, they’d put her name in the newspaper, and the three of them had bought one another drinks. Nina’s career shot onwards and upwards; theirs took different paths.
Two days ago, when Deanne heard the news, she’d rung the house. Jax had paused among the boxes, shocked and saddened and trying not to think about another promising life cut short by violence. Right now, she wasn’t sure if Deanne’s point was that there was plenty of reason to feel better than she did – but, well, it was probably a point worth making.
‘You should see someone, Jax.’
She pushed the heel of a palm against the ache in her forehead. She’d talked to someone six months ago, decided she couldn’t cope with the dredging up of every damn tragedy in her life. ‘How about Hugh Jackman?’
‘I’ve got his agent’s number. You want me to put in a call?’
Back in the day, the four of them had joked they could reach just about anyone in the country if they’d pooled their contact lists. ‘Is he doing trauma counselling now?’
‘Oh, yeah. In big demand. It’s the smile – hard to feel like shit when you see it up close. No, really. Do you want me to get you a number?’
Deanne would find her a world expert on trauma and grief counselling. It wasn’t that Jax didn’t appreciate the offer – or the potential expertise – but they wouldn’t live in Newcastle and she wasn’t getting back on the motorway for a consult in Sydney anytime soon. ‘Thanks but no. Apparently there’s a victim support group here.’
There was silence for a moment. ‘If you’re sure.’
‘I am.’
‘It’s only a couple of calls if you change your mind.’
She’d been telling Jax that for months. ‘Deanne.’
‘Okay, okay. But if you feel like talking, you know I’m always good for it. Anytime, Jax.’
Deanne was a good friend and ‘anytime’ had meant exactly that for both of them. The last time Deanne took up the offer was at 3 am two years ago when she phoned from hospital after her third miscarriage. Jax took advantage of it a week ago, in the wee hours with cold feet about moving, which was a shift in topic from her usual obsessive back and forth about Nick.
Deanne knew what the last shock had done to Jax – she probably deserved more than thanks-but-no-thanks. ‘I’ve been thinking about his wife and son,’ Jax told her.
‘Whose?’
‘Brendan Walsh’s. He told me his wife would be just like me when he was dead.’
‘That’s a little close for comfort.’
‘Yeah, but they must be feeling like Zoe and I did a year ago.’
‘Six degrees of separation, I guess. We’re all connected in some way.’
‘I know. His wife must have questions.’
There was a beat before Deanne spoke. ‘Not everyone needs to know it all, Jax.’
‘I keep thinking about what she must be going through.’
‘Maybe you should see someone. Before it gets on top of you.’
She knew what Deanne meant: before she couldn’t stop thinking about it. ‘It’s not like that.’ At least, it wasn’t yet.
‘Do you want me to come up? I could help with the unpacking.’
And try to get Jax’s mind off it. ‘No, I think I need to do it myself.’ Prove to herself she could achieve something.
‘Try to rest. It gets worse when you’re tired.’
‘I’m okay, Deanne.’
‘There’s no point buying food for lunch if you haven’t found plates to eat off,’ Tilda told Jax. ‘How about I throw something together while you try to get a bit more organised down there?’
It felt a little like being told to tidy her room but it made sense – so much for setting boundaries on the first day. So, for two hours, Jax opened boxes and shoved furniture about with Zoe’s help, chatting, laughing, trying to be a happier mother.
Russell rang as they were eating upstairs behind sheer blinds that kept the view in sight and the one o’clock heat at bay – and Jax was more than ready to talk this time. Victims of crime she’d interviewed had told her the process helped, that even talking to a reporter could put the experience into perspective, and she was hoping it might drain away the ready-to-run sensation she couldn’t shake. Leaving Zoe at the table with Tilda, Jax took the phone downstairs, sat on the floor with her packing cartons and watched the ocean as she talked.
Russell asked how she’d felt, what she’d thought, feared – nothing like the recounting of facts with Aiden Hawke. She remembered more details – Brendan telling the radio to shut the fuck up; how he’d let her open the window after going ballistic; saying, Yeah, look, sorry about all this; that his son wrote his letters backwards. And other things – ‘colour’ she might have called it, if she was writing the story. Not the kind of facts she thought would influence a police investigation, just specifics her brain hadn’t been ready to dredge up before.
The dredging didn’t help, though. It just reminded her of the hours of loud, frenzied confusion and that, in the end, she hadn’t known what was real. Or how to help Brendan. It might have to be you. You might have to tell her. Like Nick, Brendan had known death was coming for him and he’d tried to reach someone. He hadn’t held a phone in his dying hands, just a message in his head. It was the same result, though – cut off halfway there.
‘Anything else you want to add?’ Russell asked.
‘I don’t know anything else. Tell me what you know.’
As he ran through the facts collected by reporters working the story, Jax found a pen and scrawled notes on the side of a packing carton. Brendan had lived in a share apartment in Ryde, on the northern reaches of Sydney, and had worked in security for four months at a business called Secure Force, operated from an office in North Sydney, not far from the approach to the Harbour Bridge. The company employed former police officers and military-trained personnel for private investigations, debt collection, personal security and other related work. Management wasn’t commenting on Brendan’s role. The Department of Defence hadn’t released the dates of his Afghanistan tours or any details of conflicts he’d been involved in, but it did point out that he left when his time was up, not because of a stress-related issue.
‘Can I get a pho
tographer to you?’ Russell asked when he was finished.
Jax ran a hand through messy hair, spoke more sharply than she’d intended. ‘Give me a break, Russ. I’ve had about four hours’ sleep, I’m weeks past needing a haircut, almost everything I own is packed up in boxes and I look like crap. You’ve got enough pics of me on file. Just choose something nice, not one of those Miranda-Jack-outside-the-inquest ones.’
Silence for a second. ‘You all right?’
‘Yep, sure.’ She tried to sound like she meant it, but he’d sat with her through a lot of bad days in the past year and his silence told her he wasn’t convinced. ‘It’s just …’ She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand, wishing she could slow the circuit of her thoughts. But instead of easing it, the gesture sparked a fresh memory of Brendan.
I can’t get rid of it now though, can I? Once it’s there, it’s there. And it’s right there.
Yeah, he was right about that. He was in her head and she couldn’t get rid of him.
‘What is it, Jax?’
‘He talked about nano spiders and missiles and they’re obviously not real, but he also talked about his family and Afghanistan and the article I wrote – and they are real. He thought people were after him, he said they wanted to pick him off, that I was a target because I was with him. I just wish I knew which camp that part of it was in.’
‘Do you think someone could be after you?’
‘Out on the motorway, at the end of it all, he almost had me convinced … but no, not really. I mean, he thought they had missiles. It’s just …’ She let the sentence trail off, irritated that she couldn’t explain it.
‘Just what?’
‘Well, if some of it was real and some wasn’t, then maybe there are parts that are a bit of both. That could happen, couldn’t it?’
‘Yeah, I suppose. I imagine there aren’t hard and fast rules on how people lose touch with reality.’
She wrapped an arm around a knee. ‘What if he followed me to Wahroonga then got confused about it or forgot, and when he realised who I was, thought it was fate putting us together?’
‘Followed you, as in a stalker?’
‘No, not like that. I wondered if he knew Nick, maybe met him when he was in Afghanistan and – I don’t know – wanted to talk to me now that he’s not around. You know how some of Nick’s stories started, people just turning up and giving him information.’
‘You think it might have something to do with Nick?’
She pushed out a breath, her jaw tightening with anger. ‘No, not really. But I can’t check his notes because the Homicide cops still haven’t released his stuff.’
‘Jax –’
‘Yeah, I know what you’re going to say. It’s just another opportunity to be pissed off about his case and the files I want back.’ And the mobile he’d been clutching, and the contents of his car, and the notes and diary they’d claimed from his office.
‘Okay, look,’ said Russell, ‘I know someone who might be able to get the dates of Brendan Walsh’s tours in Afghanistan. We can see if they could’ve crossed paths. Nothing like checking a few facts to make a couple of old reporters feel like they’re doing something useful, hey?’
‘Thanks.’
‘No problem.’
‘By the way, only one of us is old,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you turning forty soon?’
She hung up, running her eyes over the notes she’d made, details and new thoughts sitting like unformed questions in her head.
The Department of Defence was claiming no knowledge of PTSD, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there when Brendan left the army or that Afghanistan wasn’t the cause.
He was working in security, using skills he’d learned for war.
He lived ten minutes from the motorway on-ramp where he got in Jax’s car. If he went there from home, he didn’t shower or change his clothes first.
16
More calls interrupted the unpacking. Friends who got Tilda’s number through Deanne or Russell, and Jax’s real estate agent, who saw the news and phoned with her condolences, then asked if there was any chance Jax left a spare key behind.
‘There was a vandalism spree in your street last night,’ the agent told her, talking fast while she walked. It was probably just to get coffee but it sounded as though she was at the scene, managing the public information. ‘Some cars were damaged, pickets ripped off a fence, a few windows smashed and the bastards got into your old place.’
Jax pulled in a sharp breath. One of the new owners ran a design business from home and had planned to set up his computers in Nick’s study after she left yesterday. ‘Did Graeme lose anything?’
‘They didn’t take anything, they just smashed it up. Hard drives, monitors, a filing cabinet, book shelves. Graeme had dropped off some boxes and they were sliced open. There were even a few holes in the walls. Like I said, a spree.’
Jax got a brief, horrible picture of what it might’ve been like if she’d been there with Zoe. ‘Shit.’
‘Just as well you left when you did. Well …’ She paused. ‘You know what I mean. Anyway, Graeme is worried you might’ve left a key somewhere, under a rock or something, and is wondering if he needs to change the locks.’
‘No, there was no spare.’ Just violence in store whether she’d stayed or left. If she was after an omen about moving to Newcastle, she wasn’t sure what that meant. She hung up as Tilda appeared at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Fuck you,’ Jax told the phone.
‘Who was that?’ Tilda asked.
‘Not who, what. Life being heartless again.’ She passed the handset to her aunt. ‘The answering machine can pick up the rest.’
Tilda pointed at her watch – its big, funky dial both fashionable and easy to read. ‘Don’t you have to see that handsome detective soon?’
‘Handsome detective?’
Tilda made an indignant face. ‘I’m sixty-one, not blind.’
Jax was thirty-five and the detective had pointed a gun at her. Handsome wasn’t a description she’d thought to apply. ‘In about half an hour.’
‘Well, Zoe’s fine upstairs. Why don’t you go have a shower, do your hair and put on something nice?’
Jax glanced down at her dusty shorts and old T-shirt. ‘Gee, do I look that bad?’
‘You look like you need to be kind to yourself. So when you’re finished with the police, you should go and treat yourself. Something to mark the end of … all that, and the start of something better.’
Knuckling at the tight muscles in her shoulders, Jax told herself it might help. Nothing else had so far. ‘What kind of treat?’
‘I don’t know. A chilled glass of chardonnay in the bar at The Beach House. It’s the perfect day for it.’
Jax made a face, not convinced the company of happy drinkers would do anything to relieve the apprehension that was still hanging about. But she thought Tilda might be right about putting on a better face for Aiden Hawke. Her role as distraught, grieving widow hadn’t done anything to include her in the investigation into Nick’s death, and the stonewalling by the cops had only made her more dogged.
If she could make a better start with Aiden, if he could put Brendan’s paranoia into perspective, maybe she could put a full stop at the end of that particular mystery and get past it. This one didn’t need to be an obsession.
A dress and blow-dried hair felt better than she’d expected. Like the first shower after a bout of the flu, a step out of the mire towards better health. But as she pulled her aunt’s old Jaguar into the street, something clammy crept up her spine. She scanned the street ahead, flicked her eyes at the rear-view, then hit central locking, wondering if she’d ever be able to sit behind a steering wheel without expecting a gunman to climb on board.
In the waiting area at the police station, she eyed the uniformed cops nice and safe behind a glass partition and felt the apprehension in her gut squirm like a stomach bug threatening to do its worst. She held a hand to her belly and clenched her jaw,
jumping when a door clicked open.
Aiden Hawke watched her across the foyer like he had over the roof of his car and suddenly it wasn’t because she wanted perspective that Jax cared what he thought of her. For twelve months she’d been fragile, off balance, angry, obsessed. Last night she’d been confused, suspicious and half-crazed – and the remnants of it all were still filtering through her. Right now, she didn’t want the cop who’d saved her to find her weak and brittle. She didn’t want to be that, too.
She stood and met his eyes with a lift to her chin. There was professional courtesy in his brief smile – something more in his gaze. He kept it on her as she walked across the room: not a blokey ogling of the girl in the bold stripes but an evaluation. Maybe he was reassessing the tear-stained, dishevelled victim on a better day. Maybe that’s what you needed to do when you’d saved a stranger’s life.
He held out his hand for her to shake. ‘You seem better than you did last night.’
Same firm palm that had patted her down for weapons. ‘That wouldn’t be hard.’
‘It was a tough day.’
‘Yes, tough is a good word for it.’
‘Did you manage to sleep?’
‘Off and on between crazy dreams.’
His pale eyes flicked over her face as though he was deciding if that was good or bad. ‘We can talk upstairs.’
He led her into a large open-plan office, past the kitchenette she’d occupied the night before to a smaller interview room – just a table, four chairs and a row of windows looking out to the work space. To watch or be watched?
As he closed the door and arranged the seating, she made her own perusal of him on a better day. No spare flesh under his dark-grey business shirt; his legs in black trousers looked long and fast; something alert and well-sprung about him, as though his normal state was ready-for-action. And, well, thank God for that, or she might not be here. The tautness she’d seen in him last night was gone, his movements more fluid, the planes of his face not so firm. Up close, as he sat and placed a folder on the table, she saw tiredness around his eyes and wondered if he’d been working late on the contents of the file, or whether he’d tossed and turned with visions of her and a gun.