Daughters of Eve, page 7
‘Abbey, I need you to give me Patty’s full name and her phone number.’
The crackle fell silent. I heard the clink of bottles in the background, the distant hum of conversation. Was she at work?
‘If you’re not comfortable giving me those details over the phone, I can get an officer to drop by and talk to you. Where are you now?’
‘I’ll call you when I get off work.’ Abbey must have shielded the phone with her hand, because her voice was suddenly breathy and loud.
‘Abbey, who is Patty?’
Her breath roared in my ear like waves crashing on the shore. ‘She’s my sister. She changed her name too. We didn’t want anything to do with him.’
A sister? Births, Deaths and Marriages showed only one child. Abbey.
‘Her name’s Jacobs now. Patricia Jacobs. She lives in Sydney—Petersham, I think.’
The line went dead. When I called back, I got voicemail.
The Roads and Maritime Services database had delivered an address and a driver’s licence image for Patricia Jacobs. Petersham was one suburb over from Marrickville and the architecture and streetscapes were so familiar I had to fight the urge to head home for a cuppa. Victorian villas and terraced houses peeked out from behind lofty gums and bushy banksias as I turned into the street I hoped was Patty’s.
Pulling up outside a two-storey terrace, I checked the address again. The immaculate facade with an iron lace balcony and stone and wrought-iron fence wasn’t what I’d been expecting. It would set you back a few million in this suburb.
As I pushed through the ironwork gate and started up the steps, I was enveloped in the deliciously sweet scent of daphne. The neat, glossy green hedge dotted with pink flowers was a stark contrast to the unruly bush that threatened to grow over the shabby dirt path at my place.
I lifted the ornate doorknocker and let it fall against the glossy red door. Listening for the sounds of movement inside, I heard nothing. Patty was probably at work.
I hadn’t bothered to check her occupation or marital status but I would when I got back. Even if she was renting, she was doing alright to afford this place, especially for someone in her twenties. If I’d been buying now, instead of back in the nineties, there’s no way I’d be looking at anything this nice, and certainly not this close in. I was lucky I’d inherited my grandfather’s estate and bought my place when I did, otherwise I’d be stuck with the long commute most of the squad had to endure every day.
I knocked again for good measure, before rifling through my bag for a business card. My fingers had just closed on one when I heard the click of a latch. The turn of a key. Another latch and a bolt sliding. Someone was serious about security.
I stood tall, assumed my bad-news face, and waited as the door eased open and stopped at the end of its security chain.
‘Can I help you?’
A nest of blue-black bed hair over heavy-lidded panda eyes peered at me through the gap.
‘Patricia Jacobs?’
She blinked twice.
‘Who?’
‘Patricia Jacobs, previously—’ Before I could say the name Prescott, the door slammed shut in my face.
‘I know it’s you,’ I called. ‘I’ve seen your driver’s licence photograph.’
Silence.
‘I’m with the police.’
The door opened, still on the chain.
‘Detective Sergeant Emilia Hart.’ I held up my warrant card. ‘Can I come in, please?’
Patty eyed me the way a mouse watches a stalking cat.
‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
What was it with these two girls? All cloak-and-dagger.
‘Just say it.’
I took a breath. This never got easier. ‘I need to talk to you about James Prescott.’
Her face hardened. ‘No, you don’t.’
The door started to close but I wedged my foot against it. ‘I understand you lived with him as a child.’
‘I thought the case was closed.’
There was a case? Was that why Robbo knew the name? Robbo had done time with major crimes, so it didn’t have to be a homicide.
Damn. I was rushing. Cutting corners in the desperate hope I’d find something juicy, something that might keep me on the case once Prescott’s death was linked to Griffith-Jones’s. Rushing was never good. Slow, steady and meticulous, that’s what they’d taught us at the academy. Now I was on the back foot with a witness who was already acting cagey. If I asked her about the case, she’d know I was in the dark. Better to steer the interview back to a topic where I was on solid ground.
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you, Patricia, but James Prescott is dead. He was found—’
But that’s all I managed to get out.
‘Good.’ She pulled her head back and shoved the door shut with so much force it pushed my foot back with it. This time I heard the latches and locks click and the bolts slide shut.
I kneeled to push my card under the door just as my phone buzzed in my bag.
I pulled it out and saw a text from Robbo. I remembered where I knew that name from. I’ve called for the file—will leave it on your desk.
Damn! If I’d done the searches and found the Prescott file, I would have been better prepared to interview Abbey and Patty. I might have understood the strange behaviour of the Prescott sisters.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I ran into school pick-up traffic on the way back to the Bunker. The roads were choked with traffic, big SUVs and sleek sedans stop-starting through side streets to retrieve children from school and deliver them to an array of after-school engagements. I was glad my girls hadn’t been interested in extracurricular activities. It was hard enough getting time off to attend school events; I have no idea how I would have provided the parental afternoon taxi service.
It was almost four o’clock when I pulled up at the boom gate and leaned out to scan my card. My stomach rumbled as I drove down into the gaping concrete maw of the station’s underground car park. I hadn’t taken a lunch break or stopped for more than a takeaway coffee all day. No wonder I felt twitchy as I pulled into my car space.
I thought about going out to get something to eat before heading up to the squad room, but compromised by stopping on the ground floor where the kitchen had a Nespresso and a vending machine for visitors.
The squad room was empty when I walked in with a long black, a packet of chips and a chocolate bar. (That was almost all the food groups covered—caffeine, carbs, salt and fat.) Even Willoughby appeared to have left for the day, his office dark and the door shut. But there it was on my desk, the file, just as Robbo had promised. He must have headed up to grab it from the file room himself, because requests were taking at least twenty-four hours since the staff cutbacks.
It was an old-school paper file. A homicide file. First impressions: it was big! Seriously big. Three fat folders stuffed with information. It had been a while since we’d used paper, but I missed those days. You could tell how serious an investigation was by the weight of paper used to document it. By the size of this file, it had been a very serious case.
I sank into my chair and started reading.
There’s an art to reading a file, flicking through the folios to find the facts buried between protocol and procedure.
I pulled out a yellow legal pad and started making notes.
Janet Prescott’s broken body was found in 2009 by bushwalkers in the Blue Mountains, directly below the Three Sisters lookout. She hadn’t been reported missing. Her husband, James Prescott—he went by Jim—told police his wife suffered with depression. It hadn’t been unusual for her to disappear for a few months at a time, he’d said, so he hadn’t bothered to report it.
The autopsy pointed to a history of physical abuse. The report read like so many others that crossed my desk. Notes indicated broken bones that had healed, scar tissue and past trauma contusions. Child services had been alerted. They’d conducted interviews with two children: Abbey, sixteen, and Patty, fourteen.
That’s when the red flags had really started flying.
There was no record of Patty’s birth and yet she and Abbey appeared to believe that they were biological sisters. A physical exam found scars consistent with long-term physical abuse on Abbey’s body, but not on Patty’s. Both children had been frightened and withdrawn, refusing to answer the interviewer’s questions.
The investigating team had worked hard. There were interviews with neighbours, Jim’s co-workers, the girls’ teachers and anyone else they could find. The picture they painted was awful but all too common. What happened behind closed doors was no-one’s business but the family’s. The team had failed to find enough evidence to support the cost of a murder inquiry. The reason for the weight of paper wasn’t just the investigation into Janet’s death—it was the mystery of Patty’s parentage. The birth certificate Jim provided was a forgery, and for all the work that Homicide and child services had done, no-one had been able to identify Patty. A DNA test had told the team who she wasn’t. She wasn’t a child of Janet or Jim. She wasn’t a sister to Abbey. Homicide detectives had searched missing child reports for every year back to Patty’s assumed birth year. No matches.
‘Now that’s one fat file, eh?’ Robbo’s voice was quiet but it made me jump.
He must have been in the kitchen or the toilet when I came in, because I hadn’t heard the lift doors open.
I swung around to face him. ‘Quite the mystery.’
He leaned over and flicked through a couple of pages of the file.
‘You can see why I remembered the name.’
‘Sure.’ I nodded, watching the lines deepen on his forehead and around his eyes.
‘I was still green, not long out of the academy.’
A twinge of envy hit me whenever Robbo talked about his career. Most of the squad had done significant time in uniform before becoming detectives; for me, it was more than ten years. Word around the squad was that Robbo’s accelerated advancement had more to do with family connections than the criminology degree he’d done at uni. Still, there was no point blaming Robbo for the easy path he’d trodden.
‘What do you remember?’
He pulled his chair over and settled next to me, letting his fingers walk through the file. ‘I had a quick look when I pulled it. Mother found dead in the bush. We liked the father for it but there was no evidence. Looked like he’d been knocking her and the girls about.’ He stopped at a picture of Patty as a child. ‘That’s right. There was something screwy about her. No paperwork. And wait, was he hitting both the kids?’
‘No.’ I opened the second file, the one with the medical reports.
‘That’s right.’ He scanned a report. ‘We couldn’t figure out why he’d hit his own kid but not touch the cuckoo living under his roof. The DCI reckoned he was looking after her for someone, someone he was scared of.’
He kept flicking through the file, his face a mask of concentration. Then he looked up. ‘So, this bloke is your vic?’
I nodded.
‘Well maybe those hippies are on to something with that karma stuff, ’cos we sure as hell couldn’t get him.’
I bit my tongue. It hadn’t been karma; it had been a killer. Probably the same guy Robbo was chasing.
‘How’d you go with the reports?’ I pointed to the stack of pages sitting on his desk.
Robbo shook his head. ‘Nothing stands out. A couple of uni students, a refugee family and a couple of owners living over their businesses. No-one with ties to crime gangs. No links to Griffith-Jones.’
I tucked my hands under my legs and sat tall, stretching my back as I tried to hide the nervous energy that was coursing through me.
Robbo still believed Griffith-Jones was the only victim. He was focusing on the individual, looking for leads, while I was pretty sure there were two victims. If he knew what I knew, we’d be cross-referencing, looking for connections.
I was holding both cases back by not telling him and the guilt of it ripped at my insides.
‘So what else have you got?’ If I could give him a nudge, something to work on, maybe it would assuage my guilt. ‘What about Fabrig8?’
Robbo shrugged.
‘Organised Crime put up a roadblock. Turns out they’ve only just popped up on the radar and they’re not sure who’s straight and who’s bent in the business. They don’t want us stomping in there on a hunch and setting off alarms while they’re getting a handle on what’s going on.’
Now I was wondering if one of the Prescotts, past or present, might have had links to Fabrig8? Something I would have asked in the hope it might give us more grunt to push Organised Crime for information.
But I couldn’t ask today, because today I was withholding evidence.
‘What about Griffith-Jones’s family?’ I asked.
Robbo started wheeling his chair back to his own desk. ‘The widow’s lawyered up, clammed up and slammed the door on us. She’s some social climber from out past Parramatta originally. And there was a prenup, so we’re looking into her but we’ve not got enough for a warrant.’
Parramatta?
According to the file Robbo had given me, the Prescotts had lived in or around Parramatta since Jim Prescott was a child. I had at least one more full day until Forensics dropped their report on the bullets. A report that was likely to link Robbo’s case and mine. It was that sliver of uncertainty that allowed me to dance on this ethical knife edge. That and the hope that I might come up with something solid—something that would make my actions defensible. At least to me.
But it felt wrong.
Sure, the connection was thin; beyond the bullets it was positively anorexic. Parramatta was a big place. What were the odds that a middle-aged social climber and a retired truck driver had crossed paths? But if they had … If they were the link between the Griffith-Jones and Prescott killings, then I was letting my ambition pervert the course of justice.
I looked at Robbo and the weight of my integrity tipped the scales.
‘There’s something I need to tell you, mate.’
‘I’ve got Chinese.’ My words echoed in the dark hall as I balanced the paper bags and pushed the back door shut with my foot. The drive home had been brutal. Forty-five minutes compared to the usual twenty. That’s why I worked back most nights, waiting until the worst of the rush hour traffic had passed.
But not tonight. Tonight, I’d left straight after sharing the information about the bullets with Robbo. It wasn’t anything he’d said or done that had driven me out the door; it was the uncomfortable feeling snaking through me. I’d let myself down by putting my career ahead of the job.
‘You’re early.’ Grace’s smiling face popped around the kitchen door and a weight I hadn’t realised I’d been carrying was lifted.
It had been almost a week since I’d picked Grace up on the side of the road, dishevelled, distressed and unable to articulate what had happened. She’d stayed home from school the next day and had seemed a bit more like her old self when I got home, but she’d refused to talk about what had triggered her.
Between then and now there was nothing I could put my finger on, just a shadowy sense of foreboding about her mood. Tonight’s bright smile felt like a breakthrough, a shaft of sunshine piercing a stormy sky.
I shrugged out of my coat and hung it on a hook before hurrying into the kitchen to be greeted by a blaze of candles. Squeezed onto almost every available surface, tall and slender and short and squat with so many tealights in their silver casings that they warmed the room as much as they illuminated it.
Our wide wooden table was draped with a crisp white tablecloth and Grace’s collection of scarves had been tied to the backs of our bentwood chairs. Rose was laying the table with our best crockery: mismatched Wedgwood that the girls had picked up from op shops and presented to me at Christmas.
Grace took the takeaway bags and began unpacking them, scooping the contents onto serving platters. The girls danced around each other in that seamless cooperation that sometimes happens in families and often happened in ours. Maybe because they hadn’t grown up together, they hadn’t had a chance to hardwire the destructive patterns of behaviour that siblings sometimes share. Whatever it was, it was beautiful to watch and totally unexpected.
‘Are we celebrating?’ I asked as Rose tucked her arm through mine and led me to my usual chair.
The girls exchanged a look, as if I’d arrived in time to hear the punchline but no-one wanted to go through the whole joke again.
‘Nothing really. Just life, I guess.’ Rose took a bottle of non-alcoholic wine from the fridge and began pouring it into three highly polished wineglasses.
‘Life?’
Grace sat beside me and took my hand. ‘I’ve been letting the past infect the present. Today I decided it was time to stop.’
I swivelled in my chair to face her as I struggled for something profound to say, but nothing came. I wanted to ask her again what had happened that day, where the mud had come from and what had caused her such acute distress. I knew so little of Grace’s past, of the trauma she’d suffered. Child services psychologists had spent hours trying to coax even the most basic information from her, but she wouldn’t talk to anyone but me. And all she told me was her name. Grace. No last name. No address.
The medical examination told us more than she ever would. Signs of physical violence and sexual trauma. Doctors estimated her age at around seven years, although they said that malnourishment might have slowed her development. I’d searched missing person’s reports from around the state and across the country, just as Robbo did when they’d tried to determine Patty’s identity. It still seemed inconceivable to me that a child could disappear without anyone alerting the police. Even if something had happened to the parents, wouldn’t neighbours or the school community have noticed her disappearance? But there was nothing, not a ripple in the bureaucratic pond to signal that she had existed before I’d dragged back that piece of cardboard and found her.
