"Of course. But a psychologist's perspective…"
"Exactly." Cooper checked the maps application on his phone. "It's this one on the left," he said, and Quinn pulled into the driveway.
The Brennan's lived in a modest home not far from Haberfield High. Watching the kids walk home from school every day must be heartbreaking for Jamie's mother, thought Cooper. He asked her as much when they were settled into the living room, with Jamie's younger sister, Grace, playing nearby.
"Not really," was Jan Brennan's surprising answer. "They remind me of Jamie, of course they do. But everything reminds me of him, Detective. That's how I want it. I want to remember my son, to remember all the good things we did together, as well as the arguments. I want to remember everything about him, and those kids walking past every day help with that."
Makes sense. Cooper changed the subject. "I believe you met Jackie Rose in your support group on the weekend."
"Yes." Jan's answer was tentative.
"Jan, I'll get straight to the point. We need to take a closer look at Jamie's death," said Cooper. He didn't want to give too much away, didn't want to alter this woman's perspective of her son's life and death unless he had good cause. At the moment he had a hunch, which wasn't really good enough. Time to tread carefully. "Jan, we take all deaths seriously. Whether it's the result of suicide, accident, natural causes, or something more sinister, our job is to get to the bottom of how and why a person died. If questions are asked, we need to answer them. Jackie Rose is a grieving mother who has questions about the death of her son. It's important to me to answer those questions for her. In the course of our investigation, we've uncovered some evidence to suggest it's possible there's something in what Mrs Rose is saying. So we're here to look into that possibility. Do you understand?"
Jan Brennan sat up a fraction straighter in her chair. "I like Jackie, she seems nice. But she's got this idea in her head that her son, Lachlan, didn't take his own life. Are you telling me she's right?"
"I'm saying that's what we're looking into."
"So… so you think that maybe Jamie didn't…"
Cooper reached out and took her hand. "We don't know anything for sure yet, Jan. We just want to ask you a few questions. I'm sorry if this is upsetting for you."
Jan pulled her hand back and reached for a tissue, wiping her nose and putting the tissue in a pocket. "It's okay," she finally said. "What do you want to ask?"
"Can you tell me about Jamie? Who he was, and what he was like in the days and months leading up to his death?"
"Well, he was a typical teenage boy in a lot of respects. Do you have children, Detective?"
"Two boys, but they're both very young. What is a typical teenage boy?" Cooper prodded.
"Always with his nose stuck in a computer, for one thing. That or his damn phone." Jan looked at her own mobile phone, sitting on a nearby coffee table, as if it were an instrument of torture rather than a simple communication device.
"They're mini computers themselves, these days, aren't they?"
Jan nodded. "You can't police what they do, not all the time. You just have to trust them, don't you?" She looked at her daughter, Grace, who when she wasn't busy blowing her nose and building a pile of used tissues beside her on the lounge, was occupied by an iPad.
"It's certainly different to when I was growing up," Cooper agreed. "So Jamie spent a lot of time on his computer, then?"
"Yes. Of course a lot of it was school work. He was doing very well in math and the science subjects. He was quite gifted in those areas. His English scores weren't so great, but he was working hard to improve them so he could get into university."
"Did he know what he wanted to do?"
"He hadn't narrowed it down to a specific degree, not yet. But we talked about university a few times, and he was always so excited when we did. He has a couple of older cousins who are studying at the moment, and I think they filled his head with ideas of the university lifestyle that appealed to him. But he didn't just want to go for the sake of that, you know, all the partying and such. He wanted to get a degree, to get a good start in life."
"You talked about that with Jamie?"
"A few times, yes."
Cooper wasn't sure how to phrase his next question. If Jamie had talked about the future so much, how could Jan accept so readily that he'd thrown it all away?
"Jan," he began, "it's hard for me to ask this…"
"I know what you're going to say, Detective. Believe me, I've struggled to accept what my son did. His talk of the future, the way he worked so hard in school, it didn't fit with his actions. Why would he take his own life like that?"
Cooper nodded. "And why do you think he did?"
"I'm not sure I'll ever know, not really. But I've done some research into teenage suicide, and one thing I've learnt is there are no easy answers. As much as he was loved, as much as he was looking forward to the future, I believe there was a darker side to my son that I'll never understand."
"What do you mean?"
Jan looked at her daughter, who seemed involved in her iPad but was able to hear the conversation. Cooper took the hint and they both moved into the kitchen, out of earshot. He glanced at Quinn, who nodded and moved closer to the girl.
"Can you tell me what you mean by a darker side?" Cooper asked again.
"I was getting worried about him. It started maybe six weeks or so before he died. He spent a lot of time online, and a couple of times when I walked into his room he quickly shut down whatever he was doing before I could see it."
"Did you ask him about it?"
"I did, more than once, but he just said it was nothing, that I was being paranoid. I asked him if he was being bullied."
"And was he?"
"He said no, but I wasn't sure. He'd get upset for no reason I could figure out. Nothing at home could have made him like that. We're not a perfect family, Detective Cooper, but we're pretty happy. At least we were." Her hands were clasped tightly in front of her. "My husband works hard, six days a week, and Jamie sometimes felt that he missed out on spending time with his father. But on the whole, we were a happy, functional family. But Jamie would get in these dark moods sometimes, and he wouldn't talk to either of us. It could be days before he was back to normal again. It has to have been whatever he was doing online."
"After he died, did you look at his computer or phone? Did you try and find what it might have been that upset him?" Cooper asked.
"No. Neither Ron nor I knew his passwords, so we couldn't get in. To be honest, I didn't want to know."
Cooper didn't understand. "But, if something he was into online caused him so much pain that he wanted to take his own life, didn't you want to know what it was?"
"It wouldn't bring him back."
Cooper scratched his head and leaned back against the kitchen bench. Did that make sense? If something happened to Michael or Patrick, he'd move heaven and earth to find out why. But this wasn't Michael or Patrick. It wasn't his sons they were talking about. It was Jan's son, and every parent reacts to death and deals with grief their own way.
"I understand," Cooper eventually said, even though he didn't. "Do you mind if we take Jamie's computer and mobile phone? We have technical analysts that may be able to find something."
Jan sighed. "If you must."
Quinn walked over to where they stood in the kitchen. "Mrs Brennan, did Jamie have any enemies? Any kids at school he didn't get on with?"
"Not that I'm aware of. He was very popular. Played on the school rugby team. I don't think you could call any of the other kids his enemy." She walked back into the living room and took a seat on the lounge next to her daughter. "Do you, Grace?"
"Do I what?" She'd put the iPad aside, and was playing with a plastic toy.
"Do you know if Jamie had any enemies?"
"No."
Quinn moved closer to the girl, examining what she had in her hands. "What's that you're playing with?" he asked.
"Some stu
pid little kid's toy," Grace replied.
"Do you mind if I take a look?" Cooper watched as Quinn took the toy from the girl. From what he could make out it was some sort of mechanical butterfly. "Where did you get it?" Quinn asked.
"It was in the garage."
"Is it one of your toys from when you were little?" Jan asked her daughter. "I don't remember it."
"Nope."
"Then where did you get it?"
"I told you, it was in the garage."
The four of them exchanged glances, but only Quinn seemed to have a clue as to what the toy meant. "Grace, do you mind if I take this? I think we're going to need it."
"Suit yourself. It's a little kid's toy, anyway." She shrugged and ran off down the hall.
"What's going on?" asked Jan. "Where did that thing come from?"
"You've never seen it before?" asked Quinn.
"No."
"Your husband didn't buy it for Grace? It wasn't an unwanted gift, stored in the garage?"
"No. Ron leaves all the gift buying to me. And I'd remember if Grace got something like that recently. It's a small child's toy, not an eleven year old's."
Cooper was just as confused as Jan. "What are you thinking, Joe?"
Quinn looked from one of them to the other, seemingly unsure whether he should speak his mind in front of the grieving mother. Finally he must have decided he had no choice.
"The exact same toy was sitting on a shelf in Michelle Medler's garage, boss. She was a seventeen-year-old only child."
16
The drive home from work seemed to take longer than usual, or maybe it was just because Jackie's mind raced with thoughts of her argument with Ethan last night. She'd thought she was getting somewhere, but it had all fallen apart the minute she'd asked him not to say Lachlan killed himself. What was she going to do with him?
She pulled into the driveway, parked the car, and checked the letterbox on her way into the house.
"I'm home," she called out, surprised not to have Emma rush to greet her at the door like she usually did. On her work days Ethan picked Emma up from school and they walked home together. He was supposed to watch her for the half hour until Jackie got home, but as usual she could hear the sounds of computer games coming from his room. She left him and went to Emma's room, surprised again to see the little girl lying on the floor, deep in conversation with Ethan's friend Oscar.
"What's going on here, then?"
Emma rolled over onto her back and looked up at her mother through her blonde fringe. "Oscar's helping me make a card for Ethan," she said. "It's to cheer him up. Look, I drew a tree and our family on it."
"That's nice of you, Oscar," said Jackie, taking the card from Emma's outstretched hand. She noticed their family now consisted of just the three of them, having a picnic underneath a large tree. How the hell was Ethan going to take this?
"Come on, let's get you some afternoon tea," she said, handing the card back to Emma. "You can finish this later."
"I already have finished," said Emma, jumping up from the floor and holding out a hand to supposedly pull Oscar up as well. The teenager took her hand and did a great job of letting her think she pulled him up with her own strength. "I'm going to give it to Ethan."
"Can we have a talk about it first?" asked Jackie.
Emma pouted. "What's wrong? Don't you like it? Oscar helped me write a message inside. See? It says "Dear Ethan, I don't like seeing you so sad. I hope you feel better soon so we can play games together. Love Emma."
"It's beautiful, sweetheart." Jackie admired her daughter; at least she was trying. And who's to say how Ethan would react to the picture of the three of them? "Okay," she said. "Go and give it to him."
"Yay!" Emma skipped off to her brother's room and knocked on the open door, as he always asked her to do.
Jackie looked up at Oscar, who she noticed for the first time was taller than her. He shrugged. "Kids," he said.
"Yes. Thanks for helping her." They left the bedroom and walked out into the kitchen.
"No problem. Thanks for explaining all that police stuff to my parents."
"Did you get into trouble?"
"Not too much. Extra chores."
"What do your parents do for a living?" Jackie asked.
"Mum works for a company that makes paper products, nappies, that sort of thing. She does quality assurance for them. Dad works for a bank in the city. I don't really understand what he does, exactly. But he always works pretty late. They both do."
Jackie washed her hands in the kitchen sink. "Do you spend a lot of time home alone, then?" she asked.
"Yeah. But Mum leaves food for me to cook, most of the time." Oscar took a seat at the counter.
Jackie's heart went out to him. Yesterday he was the kid she thought had gotten her own son into trouble, but with the way Ethan had been acting lately she wasn't sure which one of them was behind it all. And it was hard having absent parents. She knew a little of that from her own childhood. It was the one thing she wanted to keep constant in her kids' lives — that there was at least one parent around for them most of the time. Considering she and Marcus had separated, she felt they still did a pretty good job.
"Would you like to stay for dinner tonight?" she asked Oscar. "We're only having meatloaf, but the kids say I make a pretty good one. There's plenty, I'm used to cooking for four." She cast a glance at Lachlan's spot at the table. No-one had sat there since he died.
"That's very kind of you, Mrs Rose. But I wouldn't want to impose." He'd noticed her looking at the place settings. She was about to say it was okay when Emma came running out of Ethan's room.
"He liked it, Mummy! He said thank you and gave me a big hug."
"That's wonderful, darling." She exchanged a look of relief with Oscar, then turned her attention back to the little girl. "Let's see about that afternoon tea, shall we?"
"Yep."
Jackie busied herself cutting slices of cake and getting glasses of juice for the next five minutes, wondering if Ethan really was okay about the card. Perhaps he was softening? Then again, perhaps she had no idea how her fifteen-year-old son's mind worked, and she really should stop trying to understand him.
"If it's still okay, Mrs Rose, I'll take you up on that offer," said Oscar, interrupting her thoughts.
"Of course it's okay. Send a text to your Mum to let her know, and I'll set an extra place."
The rest of the afternoon passed by rather pleasantly, with all the kids getting along for once. It was only at dinner that sparks began to fly.
"You can't sit there," said Ethan, aiming daggers at his friend.
"Sorry," Oscar replied, getting up to move from the seat he occupied at the table, Lachlan's seat.
"No, it's okay," said Jackie. "Stay there, Oscar."
"But, Mum—"
"Ethan, I know it's where your brother used to sit. It's hard for me, too, but we have to start accepting that he's gone. This is a good start."
Oscar couldn't have looked more uncomfortable, but he sat back down anyway. Ethan continued to stand and stare. Finally, with one last shake of his head, he took his own seat at the table.
"Meatloaf, yum!" said Emma, unaware of the tension in the room. Jackie smiled. Most kids she knew hated meatloaf. She certainly had when she was growing up. But this recipe seemed to be a winner, and these days she latched onto anything that would put a smile on her children's faces.
"Ethan, could you try and cheer up a little bit, please? Your friend is here for dinner. You could at least make an attempt to be happy."
"Why? I didn't ask him to stay, you did. It's not enough you go on about Lachy being murdered, now you're trying to replace him."
Jackie was taken aback, and Oscar flinched. Was that what Ethan really thought? "I'm not trying to replace your brother. No-one can do that. I can't believe you would say such a thing."
Ethan shrugged. "S'what it looks like." He glanced up at Oscar. "No offence, man."
Oscar became engrossed i
n his meatloaf. The poor kid must want to be anywhere but here, thought Jackie. She was considering whether to make Ethan apologise when the doorbell rang.
"I'll get it," Emma almost shouted, jumping out of her seat.
"No, you won't. Sit back down and finish your dinner, please." Jackie wiped her mouth on a napkin and headed for the front door, wondering who would be visiting at dinner time. Perhaps one of Oscar's parents had decided to pick him up?
She opened the door to find Detective Cooper standing there.
"Charlie, come on in. Goodness, you look exhausted." She ushered him through to the living area, where the kids had all stopped eating and were looking at him expectantly. "Get on with it," she said to them, gesturing towards their plates. They turned back around and continued eating. "Can I get you anything?" she asked Charlie.
"No, no. I'm sorry to interrupt like this. I just came to have a quick look in your garage, if that's alright. But I can find my own way. Please, finish your dinner."
Jackie retrieved a key from the top kitchen drawer, or the 'shit drawer' as she liked to call it: full of pens, paper, loose change, phone chargers, the usual detritus of modern-day life that got swept into the drawer at the end of each day. She held out the key to the detective. "You'll need this. I'll come out when I've finished up here."
Charlie took the key, dropping his own on the bench, then went on his way, leaving Jackie to wonder what he needed to see in the garage at this time of night. She'd figured it would be part of his investigation at some point, to come out and see where it happened, but it seemed odd for him to be doing it alone, at this hour. Surely he'd need to bring some sort of forensics people, wouldn't he?
She watched as the children finished their dinner, Emma taking an eternity as usual, then put them to work cleaning up the kitchen. The boys could wash and dry the dishes, and Emma would put them away. "No arguments," she added, before heading outside to see what Charlie was doing.
The Dark Series Page 72