My new home is an old weatherboard cottage that’s been partly renovated by the owner and then abandoned in favour of the new brick two-storey house he’s built at the front of the large block. Between the new building and the old is a jungle of palms that creak and rustle in any light breeze and the remains of a neglected rose garden. On my right is another humble cottage, hidden from sight by a wall of tall dark cypresses, stark against the local coastal scrub, while on my left is a glamorous batch of four town houses, no doubt replacing a house similar to the one I’m renting.
This house has been partly renovated over the years, the floorboards polished and sealed and a good-sized skylight of opaque polycarbonate allows daylight to fall directly over the table at which I work these days. There are a few areas of incomplete renovation such as my bedroom, where the job’s only been half done and some of the new floorboards barely tacked into position, still unsealed and unpolished.
The hallway and living areas are stacked to the ceiling with folders and cartons, the result of a huge and overdue cleanup. Old briefs and case notes that I shouldn’t have, my reference library, piles of science magazines, the personal albums that I always make up about any particularly interesting case, the books that I never have time to read, and shelves of compact discs and crime scene tapes. It’s hard to keep orderly, but over the last few days I’ve started sorting it out and I was filing it away in chests in the tiny third bedroom I’m using as a sort of office cum storage area, but if Greg’s going to be coming to stay with me from time to time, I want to make a reasonable area for him. I can give him the second bedroom, currently filled with more of my boxes and files and move my work back into the living-kitchen area.
I’ve tried to make the place a bit homely with the few odds and ends I hold dear: a painting Jass did of me when she was three, all glasses and hair, one of Greg’s Fathers’ Day cards, depicting me in a lab coat with a giant lab rat on my lap, and on the sideboard where there’s a little clear space, the fierce bronze figure of Kuan Ti, Chinese god of detectives, prostitutes and triads, robes flaring, wields his pole-knife. Bob had given him to me years ago.
I made myself a coffee as soon as I arrived home again, and the ugly case I was now working on took a back seat while I sat in the shade outside my front entrance, and listened to the birds around me. La Perouse is a good place for birds; there’s still plenty of coastal heathland for them to hide away from predators. And through the sonic pipings of honeyeaters and the rattle and clacks of wattlebirds, I could hear something else. I stood and walked closer to the brush at the back of the overgrown yard and beyond the derelict paling fence. Four clear, plaintive notes, repeated. I listened again. Sometimes three, sometimes five, but almost always four clear piped notes. It was a song without words from the sacred kingfisher and my heart lifted to hear it. It is my favourite bird, with its azure blues and soft golden buff colours, sharp flat forehead and keen fishing bill. I stood listening to its call, then I walked down the backyard and looked over the neighbouring fence on the right. They had a small pool where goldfish hung in the dappled water and the odd frog called during rain. I stood still, trying to spot the kingfisher. He’d be motionless, watching the water, waiting for a careless flash of gold too near the surface. I couldn’t see him so after some minutes I walked back to my door. Knowing that he was around went a long way to redeeming the death of the honeyeater.
The backyard didn’t have much to recommend it, except for its northern aspect, being mostly neglected lawn and weeds. It was only small but very private, the high bushes and shrubs of both adjacent gardens forming a dark green enclosure for my small patch. A previous resident had started making a brick patio that petered out halfway, swallowed up by unmown grass and the thicket of brush near the back fence. I’d already put two large tubs of tomatoes at the edge of the brickwork and marked out an area for a vegetable garden. I’d also bought several good-sized native shrubs and trees still in their pots that I planned to put in with the other natives after I’d cleared the overgrowth at the back. It’s good to plant trees, even in rented accommodation, putting something back into the earth. To my right, several limbs of next door’s huge camphor laurel hung over into my yard and the scent of it filled the night air. Over the back fence that formed my northern boundary was a bank of thick grevilleas and bottlebrushes and behind that, when I peered through the bushes, was a small park with a bubbler, two swings, a slippery-dip and a couple of rustic seats that no one ever seemed to use. I was transported to those summer night games we played when I was growing up in Springbrook. We’d had a huge backyard in those days and baby Charlie, imprisoned in his little playpen, used to stand on tiptoe to watch us playing. Sometimes when we played hide and seek, I’d drive Rosie crazy by climbing up a tree when it was my turn to hide. I didn’t do it very often, so that she’d spend ages looking for me in all the usual places before turning her attention to the trees. The memory had popped up unbidden. To keep the thoughts away, I walked to the front of the house to check my mail. The mailbox yielded three bills and a letter addressed to me. It was very brief and quite anonymous, printed on a laserjet printer.
You don’t know anything about me, but I know everything about you
, I read.
People like you just don’t care. But don’t worry, you’ll be made to. And soon.
I was startled at the shock it gave me. In the past, I’d investigated letters like this, but I’d never been on the receiving end. Its anonymous malice hit my stomach and I instinctively turned round. Someone out there didn’t like me. My immediate thought was Genevieve but in the years I lived with her, I’d never seen anything to indicate she’d turn to anonymous threats and abuse. God knows she did them well enough face to face. I turned the letter over and placed it and the envelope that housed it in a plastic bag. Neither the paper nor the envelope gave anything away: name and address printed on a label, the postmark illegible. I knew there’d been a lot of recent work done using plasma-mass spectrometry to isolate trace elements in computer paper, so as to determine its place of origin. But without the ream of paper owned by the suspect to match it against, even the most sophisticated physical evidence is just something with a certificate in a labelled bag. I carefully put the letter away in a drawer in the sideboard, then poured myself a blackcurrant drink with ice, surprised to find how hard my heart was beating.
I went outside and walked around on the half-built paved area. Just doing this made me feel less targeted. It’s an unpleasant feeling, to know that someone holds such animosity towards you, and wants you to know it without letting you know who they are. Oddly enough, I also felt a little ashamed, that I should be the target of something so childish and spiteful. I didn’t like to think I knew someone like that. Even if I didn’t know anything about them, as they claimed. I wanted to talk to someone, to hear someone say, ‘It’s nothing. Just some silly ratbag. Don’t worry about it.’ I tried ringing Alix, my ‘convenient association’ in Canberra, but couldn’t raise her on either her work or home number. Charlie, when I tried him, wasn’t answering either.
Next morning I was still restless; the anonymous letter had agitated me more than I cared to admit so I drove to Kings Cross and walked into the police station. At the counter, I showed my ID and if the young constable recognised my name and raised an eyebrow, I didn’t notice. In a few minutes, I had the information I wanted. The bloke I needed to see was out crewing a patrol car and it didn’t take me long to track him down. We met just as he was about to knock off his shift.
‘You can listen to the caller,’ said Chris Hayden, the keen young senior constable with cropped ginger hair and a good-humoured face who’d happened to pick up the phone. ‘I remembered your name and the case very well. I ran off a tape of it for you.’
All incoming calls to police stations are monitored by logging tapes that mostly just go round and round with nobody taking much notice of them, except when something like this happens. Alix often enjoyed making fairly explicit remarks about what she wanted to do to me when she rang me at work just for the tapes. I quite enjoyed it, too.
I went with Chris into the meal room where he set up a radio tape deck. There was a moment’s tape hiss and then a woman’s melodic voice, low and shaky, as if she were stressed, sick or hungover. Maybe all three. I’d heard those strains in my own voice over the years. And there was something else, a deep and rich underlay to the voice. For a second I even wondered if she might be a he.
‘I want to talk to someone in charge of the investigation dealing with those two…’—then she paused and her voice changed—‘I want to talk to someone in charge about the fact that under-age girls are working at the House of Bondage. Someone should check it out.’ Then came the click as she rang off. I waited, but that was it.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘I was told that my daughter’s name had been mentioned. Jacinta McCain.’
Chris took the tape out. ‘It was. But not on this one,’ he said, indicating the tape as he rehoused it. ‘Your daughter’s name came up on the second call.’
‘There were two calls?’
He nodded. ‘The first one four days ago.’ He looked at his screen. ‘November 14th at 5.07 am, to be precise.’
November 14th. My heart stilled. The older you get, the more tombstones there are on certain dates of the year. ‘She’s an early bird,’ I said as casually as I could, ‘ringing at that time.’
The young man pulled another tape out of his drawer. ‘This is the second one. It came yesterday.’ He slipped the second tape into the cassette player. ‘I want to tell you,’ the voice said, ‘that missing schoolgirl Jacinta McCain is working in a brothel. The House of Bondage.’ Again, the click as she rang off.
‘Public phone,’ said Chris. He leaned back in his chair. ‘That’s it.’ He saw my face, so continued. ‘We made inquiries in the right places, but there’s nothing happening with under-age girls in that place. We watched who came and went last night. The woman who runs it invited us in and we had a good look around. She doesn’t want any trouble, she says. It’s bad for business. Everything seemed in order. We didn’t see anyone who remotely resembled your daughter. I’m sorry.’
My mind was racing. Girls come and go in those places. They don’t turn up for a shift. They ring a friend who goes instead. It would take months of very close scrutiny to discover the identity of everyone who worked there. And even then you could still miss the girl you wanted if she was in Detox or had moved on. Or was recovering somewhere from an overdose. Or in gaol. Or dead. I couldn’t even begin thinking about how my daughter might be working like that, in those places. She was fifteen in May. I indicated the tapes. ‘Can I have these copies?’
‘Be my guest,’ said Chris.
•
My next engagement was a drink with Staro. He’d earned his nickname by starring in an advertisement years ago for a decongestant. Staro had always been associated with drugs one way or another, mostly of the illegal variety. Our meeting was at a bar miles away from where either of us lived. As I drove, I tried to remember his real name, but it escaped me for the moment. Staro was one of my gigs from years back and we still keep in touch. I’d contacted him when I first came back to Sydney, just to pick up where we’d left off and for him to give me the feel of the place and any changes I should know about now that I was possibly going to be living here again. My thoughts still wandered to the anonymous letter back home, but the power of the first impression was fading. Surely it was just some idiot out to punish me. Some minor crim from the past who wouldn’t have it out with me in a straightforward way. Really, I should have just chucked it.
Staro was on methadone and trying to go straight but it was an uphill battle. The money in dealing is just so good that if you’re an addict you’ve got to have a very good reason not to do it. But if he could live past thirty-five and wean himself from one drug to another, ‘switching the witch for the bitch’ as the Alcoholics Anonymous program terms it, he’d make it as an alcoholic rather than a heroin addict, and that way at least, the supply is reasonably cheap, plentiful and freely available. And he’d most likely live longer.
Sydney crime is very different now from how it was over twenty years ago when I joined the wallopers and the crims mostly had Anglo-Celtic names, apart from a light sprinkling of Italian and Greek. Now the Lebanese and Vietnamese battle it out with the old hands, cutting out their slices of the crime pie. And Staro, too, was no longer the handsome surfer boy he’d been when I coerced him with an inducement because he had information we needed and he was facing seven to ten years and was understandably shit scared. After a short period of reflection, Staro had given me several names, the Drug Squad cleaned up a couple of middle-sized baddies and Staro walked. Since then, he’s lived the narrow, anxious life of an addict informer, looking over his shoulder, never knowing whether it would be the cops, the crims or the gear that’d finally do for him.
‘Have you heard anything about under-age girls around the traps?’ I asked him after we’d exchanged the usual pleasantries.
Staro shrugged over his double vodka while I watched him through my raised soda and bitters. ‘You can get anything you want,’ he said, ‘if you’ve got the dough. And you don’t even have to have much of that round here. There are plenty of under-age addicts who’ll do anything for what they need.’
‘We had a tip-off. The House of Bondage. My daughter’s name was mentioned in connection with that place.’
He shook his head. ‘Nah. I haven’t heard anything about that. I’ll keep an ear out for you.’ Staro tossed back his vodka and ordered another. ‘How come you never drink?’ he asked, poking his head forward between his hunched shoulders, looking puzzled.
I picked up my glass. ‘What do you mean?’ I was teasing him a bit. ‘This is a drink,’ I said, swishing the fluid around in the glass.