Death Delights, page 28
part #1 of Jack McCain Series
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
My son stood opposite me, looking around the wreck of our place. ‘Why have you got it stuck up there? What’s going on, Dad?’ he demanded.
‘There are a couple of things that I can’t really talk about now,’ I said to him.
He rolled his eyes heavenwards and stomped off into the wreck of his room, slamming the door.
I went to it and knocked. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Come with me to Charlie’s and we’ll talk.’
For a while nothing happened, then I heard him slowly walk across the room and open the door. ‘Come on, Greg,’ I said. ‘You’ll just have to trust me on this one.’
How could I begin to tell him about the mess I’d landed myself in? About the fact that I might be finished as a scientist, out of work, my reputation in tatters? I could hardly bear to think about it.
I drove us to Charlie’s place and told my brother what had happened.
‘What are you talking about?’ said Greg. ‘What package?’
‘An amount of money,’ I said, carefully choosing my words, ‘was found in Jacinta’s gear. My feeling is that whoever owns it came looking for it.’
‘Great!’ said Greg, swearing and throwing down his school bag. ‘This is exactly what I mean about Jacinta coming home.’
I went to say something but Charlie put a hand on my arm.
‘Now my life’s turned upside-down again,’ Greg said, ‘and my place’s wasted because she’s done some stupid thing and dragged all of us into it. That’s just so typical of her! I’m sick of my family. I hate it.’ He stormed out onto the timber deck.
I went to go after my son, but stopped short. Bob was right. There were a hell of a lot of things I just didn’t know.
‘Greg,’ Charlie said, following him out, ‘you look like you could do with a beer.’
Greg swung round on him. ‘I don’t want a fucking beer,’ he said. ‘I just want to belong to a normal family. And not one where my sister’s a junkie in intensive care, my mother runs round with other men and my father lives at bloody La Perouse—in a daggy house that’s just been fucking trashed heaps.’
‘Reggie, Reggie,’ said Charlie, ‘sounds just like what I used to say. With a couple of differences. Your father and I are driving up to Springbrook to the scene of the crime. I think you should come.’
‘What crime?’ said Greg. Charlie put a cold beer in front of my son, a lime juice for me and waved his hands around. ‘Just the crime. Every family commits crimes against their members. It’s a well-known fact. I’m always listening either to the confessions of the perpetrators, or the misery of the victims. That’s my work. We have to go back to the past to understand it. You should know that,’ he said, turning to me.
Greg tore the lid off the beer can. I could see he was interested, despite his anger. He’d always got on well with his uncle.
‘Families,’ said Charlie, ‘have rituals and spells. And enchantments and curses. So if you know where they come from, you’re halfway to undoing them. Come with us and we can talk about the patterns in our family. And how to get rid of the witch.’ He went over to Greg and put an arm around him. ‘You’re absolutely right to be pissed off. It is the rational response to a hostile situation.’
I felt irritated with my brother and my voice was sharper than I intended. ‘Now,’ I said to Charlie, ‘you’re turning our trip tomorrow into some psychological vision quest. Have you forgotten that the point of the trip was to see if you could recognise that wall behind Rosie in the photograph?’
‘That, too,’ said my brother. ‘But we’ll have to drop in on Dad.’
I went and sat down in a deep armchair. Our father. Not him, not now, not with everything else going on.
‘No way,’ said Greg, ‘am I going round to visit that miserable old bastard.’
My mobile rang and I walked into the hall to take the call from Sarah, leaving my son and my brother in serious discussion, looking at the collection of scabbarded throwing knives Siya had fixed to the wall of the bedroom. They were an improvement on flying ducks, even if somewhat ominous given my present investigation, and my eyes took them in as I listened to Sarah’s voice.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’ve tested that piece of paper with the ink stains on it.’
‘And?’ I asked her, remembering the panicky way I’d grabbed it from Iona’s bedroom. Now, after finding the knife, I wondered what might have happened if the woman herself had come into the room and seen what I was doing.
‘And,’ Sarah continued, ‘you’ll be interested to know that I find them to be indistinguishable from the paper and the ink used in the series of “Rosie” letters.’
I wasn’t surprised.
‘Where did you get it from?’ Sarah was asking. She usually takes no personal interest in the evidence she tests, just does her work then moves on to the next test sample. But the notoriety of the mutilation murders even had someone as cool as Sarah wanting to know more.
‘At a house I was visiting,’ I said.
‘Golly,’ said Sarah. ‘Strike that address off your visiting list.’
‘I have,’ I said, ringing off. Even as I said it, I knew I didn’t mean it.
I walked back down to join the others and when Greg came back inside with Charlie, he looked at me. ‘I won’t go up to Springbrook with you two,’ he said. ‘Like I’ve told Dad, I’ve got important school stuff on.’ He slumped down in a chair and looked at the beer he’d been drinking. ‘Don’t know what you ever saw in this,’ he said to me, putting it down on the table. I saw that he was joking.
Twelve
Charlie drove us to the mountains early next morning, after dropping Greg off at school. I’d suggested he stay at Charlie’s or at his friend Paddy’s place. I’d wanted him to come with us, as a security measure as much as anything else—that two hundred thousand dollars plus was scorching all of us—but I knew it wasn’t possible to force a six foot seventeen-year-old male to do something he doesn’t want to.
As we turned onto the freeway, I told Charlie about the knife and the way we’d set up the meeting with ‘Rosie’ and me masquerading as Anton Francini. And how we’d lost the figure in the red jacket.
‘It is very strange,’ I said to him, ‘about Rosie’s name being used like that. If it’s Iona, it’s as if she’s involved with our family in some way. Using our sister’s name to set them up and ringing with information about Jass. We know the killer either impersonates a priest or works in tandem with someone who poses as one. And her father was a clergyman. She talks about how the children of clergymen figure in terrorism. What does all that say to you?’
Charlie kept his eyes on the road. ‘It’s your mind that’s putting all these things together,’ he said. ‘Like when a woman’s pregnant she suddenly sees that everyone seems to be pregnant. It’s your own preoccupation that makes certain things stand out. Of all the possible bits of information you’ve gathered concerning our family, that woman and the investigation you’re involved in, you’ve chosen these particular bits. It’s like you’ve dipped your hand into a huge jar of beads and you’ve threaded a necklace out of some of them and you’re saying to me, “Look, isn’t it amazing! These beads make a pattern!”’
I shook my head. ‘Charlie, I’m not making bloody necklaces. These are facts I’m talking about. Facts. Not your resonances and veiled inferences.’ On the radio someone was talking about steam trains which I found unreasonably irritating.
‘Okay,’ said my brother, ‘let’s go at it another way. ‘The name Rosie McCain is hardly unique. There must be millions of Rosies and McCains. Bound to get them running together more than once, so that one can be put down to coincidence. There’s no fact involved. And if it’s not Iona who’s killing the men, then she’s not writing the letters anyway. And if that’s so, there goes her spooky connection with our sister Rosie. It’s a fact that she knew Jacinta’s name. But, Jack, so does most of Sydney.’ He pulled out and passed a utility loaded with cartons, settling down in front of it. ‘The story about Jacinta was widely reported. And there were several articles about teenage runaways and her name kept cropping up. There are probably tens of thousands of people who know about your daughter and know her name.’ He turned to me. ‘It’s you that’s putting it all together. Take one link away and the whole thing dissolves into a series of random events.’ He concentrated on the driving again. ‘And you know and I know that women almost never do serial killings. They have other ways of doing payback. They’ve got kids to knock around.’ Over the years, Charlie and I had talked about these matters and he was absolutely right on this point. Women don’t do so-called ‘random’ killings.
‘But Charlie,’ I argued, ‘these killings aren’t random. A very specific type of victim is targeted.’
‘Only in the same way,’ said Charlie, ‘that some killers target prostitutes. It’s not an individual he’s killing, it’s a type.’ He slowed down as we came to the lights at Glenbrook. ‘Women don’t kill types,’ Charlie continued. ‘They go for a particular person.’
Most of the traffic was coming the other way and we had a good run, arriving there a bit after nine. It was a perfect mountain summer day, without the sultriness of the coastal heat, the air fragrant with pine and eucalypt. I was not feeling any easier than I had in the last twenty-four hours. The thought that my career was probably finished was bad enough. Now the idea of meeting up with my father again made my neck and shoulders tense up even more.
I pulled out Bevan Treweeke’s little black book and looked again at an address that had caught my attention. I’d previously rung a retired medical practitoner whose name I’d found in Treweeke’s book and asked if I could have a chat sometime and now we were driving to his house. Dr Arnold Gulliver lived in an old-fashioned mountain cottage, with a garden to match. Tall hollyhocks and digitalis speared up around the front door that I knocked on, while Charlie read the newspaper in the car.
Dr Gulliver was a brisk, white-haired gent in his eighties who welcomed me and seemed pleased with the distraction. He took me through the house to his living room at the back where I stood a moment in wonder, watching the brilliant red and green king parrots feeding at a bird table outside the window.
‘I remember him well,’ the doctor said. ‘Poor, sad bastard. He always had some sort of lower gut complaint.’ He offered me a cup of tea and I felt mean refusing. I explained to the doctor that this was business, not pleasure, but that if he invited me up again to watch the king parrots, I’d be happy to bring a sponge cake from Mrs Ferguson’s cake shop to go with morning tea.
I opened Treweeke’s address book and showed him his name. ‘When was he your patient?’ I asked.
‘I saw him on and off over a few years,’ said Dr Gulliver. ‘He talked to me about the police charges against him. He tried to convince me that it was natural, that there was no harm in it and that the kids liked it. But I knew he wasn’t convinced. I don’t have the records here any more, but I can give you a rough idea of the years when I saw him. We talked about aversion therapy once or twice. Hadn’t seen him or heard about him in years till I heard he hanged himself.’ Dr Gulliver sighed. ‘I wasn’t really surprised. Some people have terrible lives.’ Outside on the bird table, two black cockatoos had flown in, disturbing the king parrots who flashed away.
‘You may also remember the abduction of my sister, Rosie McCain,’ I said, ‘in 1975.’ Dr Gulliver nodded.
‘Everyone who’s old enough round here remembers that,’ he said. ‘It was a dreadful business.’ He looked up at me and I saw the compassion in his face and the life in his eyes. Some people have good lives, I was thinking, and this man was one of them. We started walking back towards the front door, through the neat house.
‘We can confirm that Treweeke was serving a four month sentence at Devondale Correctional Centre when my sister was taken,’ I said. ‘That’s why he was never interviewed about her disappearance.’
‘He damn well should’ve been,’ said Dr Gulliver emphatically. ‘Devondale was a joke in those days. The men used to go out of an afternoon to the pub. Some of them used to stay out all night. As long as they were back for roll call.’
I was stunned. ‘So he could have been out when my sister was taken?’ I asked.
Dr Gulliver looked at me as if I was stupid. ‘From Devondale he could’ve been out whenever he wanted.’
I was still stunned after telling Charlie what I’d just learned. We both sat in silence as the implications settled in and I felt vindicated that my gut feeling about Treweeke was justified. If he’d been able to go over the wall from the correctional centre, he’d have to be a prime suspect in my sister’s abduction. I felt like I was getting somewhere after all these years.
Finally, Charlie turned into a street I remembered well and I realised that it must have been nearly ten years since I’d been here because last time we’d visited Jacinta was in her first year at school. Then, I’d driven up in the middle of winter with a bleak sky and skeletal trees. But today the tall trees were in full leaf as they had been that other long past November when Rosie disappeared. All I could think of was Bevan Treweeke as Charlie cruised down the street, past the once familiar houses, now sporting renovations and additions and gardens top heavy with magnificent trees. He drove very slowly past our old house. Now it looked even more miserable than my memories of it: rented houses are rarely loved and it showed. It needed a coat of paint and the windows were closed, despite the summer day. There was no sign of life. Nor was there much of a garden anymore; a hedge almost hid the house and although on either side flowers bloomed in adjoining gardens, our old house had nothing flowering except some bushy daisies near the front fence.
Charlie continued down the road to the corner where the Holden had clipped the guard rail. The course of the road had changed since then, the corner widened and sealed, the new work cutting into what used to be a gradually rising grassy bank in front of the gates of the rectory, so there was no trace anymore of the timber railing that had been hit when the car skidded. Nor could I identify anymore the young eucalypt gouged by the rear bumper bar when the Holden reversed. Unless it was the giant that now stood a little to one side in front of the cutaway bank.
‘Stop the car,’ I said to my brother. I got out and looked around. I hadn’t stood in this spot since I was a boy of fifteen. The bank hadn’t risen so sharply as it did now since the corner had been widened, so I had to go down the road a way and find a place where the slope was navigable. I walked up past the low stone wall of the rectory garden, where a row of deep green native cypresses, had since grown up, hiding the rectory completely. I remembered a time when in place of those trees, beautiful orange roses bloomed in bunches, and the handsome stone rectory dominated the corner and the street. I looked in at the gates. The rectory was still well kept, although the gardens were simpler than they had been when I was a boy. According to her statement, Mrs Bower, the vicar’s wife, had been cleaning the louvred windows when she heard the crash and had come running down from upstairs, just in time to hear a car disappearing left around the corner at the other end of the street. She hadn’t been able to give any details, because she said she hadn’t seen, only heard, the impact. I looked around and I considered. Then I looked again, imagining the place as it had been all that time ago. Finally, I turned to my brother. ‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘come up here.’
My brother climbed up from where he was standing near the car and stood next to me expectantly, looking at the rectory through the gate. ‘If you were up there,’ I said, pointing, ‘cleaning those louvred windows, and these cypress trees weren’t there, tell me what you’d expect to see from up there.’
Charlie looked up at the second storey of the rectory where the white-painted louvre window frames that ran the length of an enclosed balcony faced down the road. ‘I’d expect to see everything,’ he said. ‘We can see everything from here as it is, so the view would be even better higher up.’
‘And this corner wasn’t so deep then either,’ I said. ‘A person up there would see quite clearly anything going on down here.’
‘Sure they would,’ he said. ‘What are you getting at?’
I wasn’t ready to reply. We walked back to the car and drove into the Mall.
Fortified by a good country breakfast, we returned to the house of our childhood. Charlie parked out at the front and together we crunched down the gravel driveway towards the brick garage that my father had built and then converted to his living quarters. His battered utility was parked outside the roller door, so we knew he wouldn’t be far. I walked round the side to the door, and knocked on it.
‘Who is it?’ he called.
‘Your two sons,’ I said.
Nothing happened and I thought for a moment he was refusing to acknowledge our presence. When he did finally open the door, I was shocked. Ten years makes a lot of difference at each end of a life. The powerful presence he’d been in my childhood and adolescent years was gone, and in its place was a frail old man with blue veins showing through skin transparent as an embyro’s. He was wearing an old sports coat that I remembered from another lifetime, his nicotine-stained fingers rested on the door knob. He no longer towered over me.
‘I didn’t think I’d ever see you knocking on my door,’ he said, looking at me with his pale eyes. There was no welcome in his voice, nor was there any hostility. Just the words without flavour. Like he was now, I thought, hollowed out, emptied and nothing much more than a shell.
‘Here I am,’ I said, feeling foolish and stating the obvious.
My father looked past me to nod at Charlie. ‘You’d better come in, then,’ he said. I stepped inside and looked around his world. Another, newer kero heater gurgled, because it was still chilly in here despite the month, with the cement slab floor and the trees shading the roof. He’d placed a few rugs and bits of carpet here and there, beside the narrow bed, in front of the bookshelves and under the sparse furniture. His worn old chair was covered by a crocheted rug I remembered once gracing the end of my mother’s bed.
