‘Maybe Gumley was more a situational pedophile rather than a total devotee like Nesbitt seems to have been,’ I said, bringing my painful thoughts back to the discussion and using the psychiatrists’ labels. Bob shrugged. Either way, we still had two dead men who’d committed horrible crimes against youngsters.
‘What did you think of Dr Strachan’s feelings about the killings?’ I asked my friend.
‘That they’re homosexual?’
I nodded.
Bob shrugged. ‘Could be. Or could be some sort of revenge. We’d have to know a lot more about Nesbitt and Gumley’s past. They’re hardly the sorts of murder victims who arouse much sympathy. No one’s going to be breathing down our necks to find their killer, if you know what I mean.’
I did. There is a hierarchy to murder investigations. The more public emotions are stirred, the more manpower we get. And the only exception to that is a cop killing. Bob turned round at a roar of student laughter behind him.
‘In my fantasies,’ said Bob, tapping the face of one of the kids in the photographs, ‘someone like this little fellow grows up to be a millionaire kung-fu expert who dedicates his life to tracking down bastards like this and getting rid of them.’
I grunted at Bob’s dream and continued my own line of reasoning. Revenge was certainly not to be discounted. ‘If Nesbitt was abusing kids in Asia,’ I said, ‘you can be sure he was doing it right here at home, too.’ Less than a year ago I’d spent a lot of time at work with a stained piece of fabric full of jagged holes, the shirt of a man stabbed to death by a youth who had been a past recipient of the ‘fatherly love’ this man had bestowed on him and several hundred others over a decade ago. But that type of revenge murder was still a rarity. And just as well, I was thinking, because if all the kids in the world grew up to seek homicidal vengeance on all the men who’d ever stuck their cocks in or at them, the male population of this planet would be decimated. Looking around, I saw that Bob’s grey eyes were on a gorgeous young woman in a filmy top and no bra. I couldn’t help looking, either. We didn’t say anything for a while as she bounced past, laughing up at a pimply youth who wouldn’t know what to do with it.
‘Nesbitt only went after little girls,’ Bob reminded me. ‘And as far as we know, Gumley went after older girls. But somehow, I can’t see a woman growing up to do this.’
I remembered the man stabbed to death by two lesbians, and the fifteen centimetre nail driven through his ballbag. ‘If it was a woman,’ I said, ‘she may not have worked alone.’
But Bob was already reconsidering. ‘However,’ he added, ‘it’s possible.’
‘And,’ I went on, ‘young girls have brothers.’ The words were out before I realised what I was saying.
But, in a minute or two, I had everything under control again.
‘So what else have you got so far on these two murders?’ I asked him.
‘Almost nothing,’ said Bob, as he put down his plastic fork. ‘That’s why I want you to have a look.’ He picked out a burnt chip and put it to one side of his plate. ‘Some loony from the Greens rang this morning, saying they had proof that the Federal Government has been carrying out illegal experiments with DNA. And that’s what killed Gumley and Nesbitt.’ For a moment, I wondered what on earth he meant, then I remembered the woman on talk-back radio.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘A genetically modified murderer?’
I finished the rest of my lunch and later we walked back through the grounds of the University, crossing the pleasant lawns with their European trees. ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘there was some kid that they both knew. Someone who grew up and never forgot or forgave.’ Bob nodded in agreement. We were at that stage of an investigation where anything was possible. Slowly, painstakingly, my job would be to keep peeling away these possibilities until there was only one left. Indian mynahs picked around the rubbish bins and I was aware of the monotonous whooping call of a koel. Bob walked on but I stood, looking around until I eventually spotted it. They are usually almost impossible to see, but this one flew to a higher branch and I was able to spot the movement. I know the koel drives a lot of people crazy, especially in the night with its fever-bird call, but I’ve always felt a kindred feeling for them, perched high and solitary, cursed with insomnia and their monotonous, rising whoop.
I said goodbye to Bob and as I watched him walking towards his car, I switched to the message on my mobile: Genevieve.
I drove across the Harbour Bridge back to what used to be my home, passing places that hold vivid memories for me of my working days in this part of the city. Almost every street and corner, particularly around East Sydney, is filled with the ghosts of people I bailed up in my early days, or squatted or knelt beside later in my Crime Scene years, pulling my rubber gloves on, opening my murder bag. Even after all this time, I still can’t drive through Oxford Street without recalling the pretty young woman who jumped from a tenth floor building, catching her legs in an awning on the way down. The resulting neat amputations of both legs made an odd corpse. When I knelt beside her with my little suitcase, one leg was lying crossways over her head and the other several metres away. Her upper body lay with the back of her head flattened, and her once pretty blue eyes half-closed, the whites discoloured with blood, the result of
contrecoup
damage to the front of the brain. You never forget something like that. Not, as some people mistakenly assume, simply because it’s horrific. After years in the job, what might strike an outsider as shocking is simply what we come to expect; people fall or jump, their bodies get injured, bits come off or disintegrate and it’s not remarkable. It was what would have been her beauty if it hadn’t been broken and bloody and her wasted life that haunted me. I recently did a painting of her, putting her all together again, lying on a bed of fallen jacaranda blossoms. As I worked on her, my eyes filled with tears, and I knew it was a memorial to two little girls—my daughter, Jacinta, and for what happened to our family in the summer of 1975.
In more recent years, at Forensic Services, I analysed specimens and samples as part of a team of chemists, physicists, biologists, ballistic experts and document examiners. Our laboratory in Canberra has an excellent international reputation. The great French criminologist, Edmond Locard, taught that whenever two objects collide, particles are transferred from one locus to another. Traces I’ve examined and analysed—paint from cars, glass from headlights, fibres and skin cells found under fingernails, hairs, timber, seeds, vegetation, fabrics, carpets, poisons, drugs, carbon residues, bomb fragments, whatever they may be—connect me to the very origins of a crime. Even though much of my work over the last few years has been concerned with examining interstate and overseas evidence, I’m bound to this city by blood and memories in a weird, funny, painful mutuality. And stuck above the screen where I write up my findings, is a quotation from the famous nineteenth-century medico-legalist, Dr P.C.H. Brouardel:
If the law has made you a witness, remain a man of science. You have no victim to avenge, no guilty or innocent person to convict or save—you must bear testimony within the limits of science.
I wish I had a wise pronouncement regarding the ending of a marriage that I could stick up over my desk. It is so much harder to remain a man of science in such a situation. Old angers and resentments get in the way of clear-sightedness. But I knew I had to be free of Genevieve. She always blamed Jacinta’s problems on the last few years because I was a weekend father, away in Canberra from Monday to Friday. Whenever I pointed out that it was she who insisted that I take the job, and that it was also she who decided she didn’t want to live in Canberra after all, she’d become completely enraged, demanding to know if she was supposed to do my job as well as her own, or did I expect her to live in two places at once. Then she’d rush straight on to blame me for coming
back
to Sydney as she’d wanted. Because, according to her version of events, my return interrupted a paradisiacal state of mother–child bliss, as she would have it, existing between Jacinta and herself. It’s true I wasn’t there Mondays to Fridays. But I didn’t see much sign of mother–daughter bliss in the two days a week that I
was
home, and Greg occasionally makes comments about some of his mother’s behaviour towards both him and Jacinta that I can’t discount either. It’s too painful to revisit these memories and I don’t feel so much rage any more since Jacinta ran out of our lives. Sometimes I wonder if it is all still there, deep down in me just like a volcano waiting to erupt.
I was thinking of all this as I backed the car up towards the house in Lane Cove that, apart from the last few months, had been my home for many years. Always reverse in, someone had told me years ago. You never know when you might need to get out fast. The place was already looking neglected as if my departure had made an impact on the building, the garden, the lawn and rockery at the front. Two noisy mynahs hopped about in the grevillea bush outside Jacinta’s bedroom. She’d painted her room completely black the summer she ran away, with weird figures lurking on the walls and dark red lights in cobwebby shades. It was like going into a witch’s cave. Charlie told us it was all part of the adolescent need to make an impact on her world and suggested we enjoy it. But I was uneasy and Genevieve went hysterical the first time she saw it, although I must say, the pink and mauve she’d chosen a few years before for her daughter’s room would’ve made any red-blooded human being take a stand.
My thoughts were interrupted when Genevieve herself ran out to greet me, looking youthful in a soft-fitting long singlet with her dark hair falling over her shoulders. She still has the slim figure she had when we married eighteen years ago and I can’t deny that my estranged wife is a good-looking woman.
‘Jack,’ she said, ‘it’s so nice to see you.’ She came up and kissed me, pressing herself against my chest, letting me smell her perfume, trying as hard as she could to play down our recent fight about Greg. ‘Have you eaten?’
She looked a little disappointed when I told her I’d already had lunch with Bob. But she stood back sweetly enough while I stepped into the house. Since I left, I noticed the new stuff cluttering surfaces. Genevieve loves to collect things. I didn’t mind even though I couldn’t share her enthusiasm. She can spend hours in those shops in country towns, full of over-priced rubbish, picking up and turning over little cups and saucers, egg cups, plates, teapots, ornaments, little china people. Now I saw that the mantelpiece over the gas fire in the lounge room had a row of plates, each featuring the same bamboo pattern in different pastel colours, seven of them, all standing the same distance from each other, like a line-up. The several little tables that drove me mad—she was always picking them up and putting them in different places—now had new little china people on them with frilly pantaloons and dresses.
‘I rang,’ she said, ‘because I’ve got some big news.’ I looked at her. Genevieve has always been almost impossible to read. So often her face is a mask and I have no idea what’s going on behind the smile.
I stood waiting, shaking my head at her offer of a chair. I didn’t want to settle in this room ever again. She frowned, but it wasn’t only at my rejection of the chair. She was having great difficulty in saying the next words.
‘John has heard…’ she began, looking at my face, wondering at my reaction to the name. In spite of all the business that’s gone on between us, the misery of our mismatched marriage, the staleness and resentment, the downright hatred that’s exploded between us from time to time, I still felt the cold shiver of jealousy at the sound of that name. I’d disliked and distrusted Kapit since I’d worked with him years ago, but I kept my face impassive as I’d learned to do in the job and waited till she continued. ‘He’s heard something. Something about Jacinta.’
The shiver went from my chest to my legs and it suddenly didn’t matter about John fucking Kapit, ex-cop, now private investigator. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘What’s he heard?’
‘Kings Cross police had an anonymous call. A woman. A tip-off. Said she knew where Jacinta was.’
‘And?’
‘John felt it was a very genuine piece of information. He’s following it up and he’ll let me know if anything comes of it.’
I didn’t say out loud I already knew what came of John Kapit’s following up—dropping in on my wife too often. Then shafting her during the week for good measure. I still don’t know when it started. I’ve never asked. I know it was well before the time I developed what I jokingly called a ‘convenient association’ of my own in the nation’s capital.
In the first six months of my daughter’s absence, alleged sightings of her came thick and fast, anonymous or otherwise. Our sad story made page three of the
Sydney Morning Herald
and her photo accompanied it. A beautiful picture from the end of Year Eight, Jacinta smiling at the thought of the summer holidays spreading ahead of her. And every now and then, one of the newspapers would do an update on Sydney’s missing teenagers and the phone would ring for a day or two. Eighteen months ago, I ran myself ragged chasing up every little tip. I met kids in squats, I talked to crims, I flew to Perth and also to Nimbin. I even went to Christchurch because someone reckoned they’d seen her auditioning for a dance chorus. I handed out bribes, paid for dozens, perhaps hundreds of beers and coffees, while people told me about how they’d seen her, or spoken with her. But everything fizzled out. Now I knew better than to get too interested. These days, I was more selective, better defended against the inevitable disappointment. Now I concentrated on what Genevieve was saying rather than dwelling on my own messy thoughts about my failed marriage.
‘Do you have the name of the officer who spoke to Mr John Kapit?’ I said the name without expression. Genevieve shook her head.
‘Please get that name for me and I’ll follow it up,’ I told her. There was no way I was going to contact that little shit. ‘No,’ I added, ‘don’t bother. I’ll get it myself.’
‘Jack .
.
.’ she started.
I stared at her. I could feel her wanting me back, so as to punish me. It filled the room like the atmosphere of a crime scene and I couldn’t wait to get out of that house.
‘Jack, why are you getting yourself mixed up in those two killings? They’re nothing to do with you.’
‘What
I do now is nothing to do with you either,’ I said.
I saw anger fill her eyes. I wondered at the same time how she knew about my newest investigation and guessed that Kapit had passed it on.
‘Why won’t you see someone?’ she said. ‘Talk to someone? You are impossible! You know yourself you need to…I don’t know…do something about what happened in your bloody family.’ She looked as if she was about to cry, but it didn’t touch me. Her distress was not about me, but the nuisance my absence created in her life. ‘You’ve always been so superior. As if you know everything,’ she was saying. ‘It’s not just Jacinta and what happened with us.’
I wasn’t going to let her get away with that. ‘True,’ I said. ‘A certain John Kapit does have some bearing on the matter.’
‘Jack, please,’ she said. ‘That’s not what I meant. You need help. I hardly recognise you any more.’
Genevieve’s solicitude always made me nervous. It was true I’d changed. I’d started taking responsibility for my behaviour and feelings. Genevieve was light years away from this: blame was her favourite word, essential to her constant air of injured innocence. For years she’d wanted me to get help because in her eyes, every problem in our marriage was my doing. It was as if the past fifteen years of sobriety, hard work and making up for my sins had never happened. But I’d had enough of always being the bad guy.
‘Why don’t
you
get help, Genevieve? Find out what lies under your hostility towards your own daughter?’
I thought she was literally going to explode at that one. Her lips and eyes narrowed into hard lines.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked between gritted teeth.
‘You drove her away,’ I said. ‘I gotta go.’
That did it. The explosion erupted. ‘You blame me?’ she screamed. ‘You blame me for Jacinta’s decision to leave?’
I reined in my anger and turned to face her again. ‘Jacinta didn’t make a “decision to leave” for chrissake! She just bolted.’ I can’t forget what happened that night. ‘You know you were screaming at her,’ I said. ‘She was only a kid, Genevieve. She was only
thirteen.
’ I had to harden my voice to stop it wobbling on that last word. I could see all her defensiveness rear up like a copperhead, snaky old Genevieve attacking anything that might challenge her unqualified belief in her own perfection.
She started shouting. ‘So now I’m to blame for trying to raise my children in a decent—’
‘Stop it!’ I roared. ‘I don’t want to hear it,’ and I raised my hand like a traffic cop, glad that Greg wasn’t around to witness more of this endless awfulness.
‘Don’t you dare raise your hand to me!’ she screamed, her eyes blazing with triumph that I might be going to do something as stupid as that. But she had to call it out after me because I was slamming the door behind me and gunning the motor before she knew it.
I could hear the two noisy mynahs’
‘Quick quick quick!
’ alarm call even over the sound of the car and the New Holland honeyeater who’d been flicking around the bottlebrush I’d planted a few years ago shot out of the bush, collided with my windscreen like a tiny missile, then vanished. I drove straight out, taking the corner at the bottom of the driveway too fast, so that the back of the car swung wildly around.
As suddenly as it had risen, the anger left me and I settled down to drive with more care. I’d talk to anyone, I was thinking, even shit-for-brains John Kapit, if this recent sighting had any substance. I’d talk to the police concerned and I’d chase up whoever passed on the information. I’d do anything to get my daughter home.
I pulled up outside my place and got out of the car. A tiny bundle of black, yellow and white feathers slid from somewhere off the bonnet and the honeyeater lay dead at my feet. It felt like a bad omen.
•
I’m renting a house in La Perouse, the Sydney suburb named after the French explorer who anchored in nearby Botany Bay for six weeks before disappearing forever with his two ships sometime in the late eighteenth century. Until Genevieve and I try to sort out the financial end of things, I’m not in a position to buy anything. Lapa, as the locals call it, was never regarded very highly as a desirable address. But prices have started to surge ahead now like any coastal area close to the city. I can leave the central business area of Sydney and be sitting on an almost deserted beach in half an hour. The hoists of the huge power station form the backdrop against which aircraft land just across the bay, but all that industry is far enough away to be romantic rather than a nuisance. At twilight, the calm bays become molten gold and by night the power station is decked with fairy lights.