Malicious Intent (22 page)

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beaten her, broken her bones, locked her up and thrown her out on the street.’

Dan Brody called the guard but Deab stood up and spat on the ground, barely missing Anya’s legs.

Deab was a bully. He’d used force to control everyone around him. And it had to stop. She remained sitting to defy his attempts to frighten her.

‘I’m advising you not to say another thing, Mohammed.’

Brody stood and pushed back his chair.

‘You made sure she didn’t have a life from the day she was born. What more could you have done to her when she had nothing to live for?’

Deab raised a hand to strike Anya as Brody yanked her from the chair and moved to block his client. Two guards burst into the room and Deab raised both arms in the air.

‘You think you are so smart, lady? I tell you. I kill her. I did what I had to. I kill my slut daughter and make sure she never shames me again.’

Brody stood holding Anya’s arm in silence as the guards led him out of the room. Anya shivered. Being physically threatened didn’t frighten her nearly as much as seeing Mohammed Deab proudly confess; a father who had murdered his child to save his reputation.

28

She saw another white light, this one bright and warm as moist air brushed her face. Something pierced her shoulder as the light swung to her other eye and back. More pain.

Now she could only make out white spots when she closed her eyelids. And the sounds of chaos all around. Beeping noises, squeaking shoes, voices in the background, plastic crinkling.

This place smelled like sickly disinfectant, the same nauseating smell she endured at Nanna’s nursing home. She tried to roll over but couldn’t move her head.

‘She’s rousing!’ a male voice declared, and someone else shone lights in her eyes.

‘More O Negative. Blood pressure’s dropping. Get the surgical resident down here NOW!’

‘I’ll get the blood cross-matched right away. The wardsmen is already waiting. Blood bank knows it’s urgent.’

‘Where the hell is X-ray?’

‘Right behind you. You’re not the only ones having a bad day, you know.’ The whirring of a machine stopped and a clunk sounded on her left.

‘We’ll need a cervical spine, chest and pelvis for starters.

And make sure no one else goes into CT. This girl’s going as soon as she’s stable.’

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‘No breath sounds on the right,’ someone else said. ‘We’re going to have to put in a chest tube.’

‘What about the chest X-ray?’

‘No time. Can we have a chest drain set pronto?’

‘Right here, Phil.’

She tried to focus but struggled to make sense of anything.

‘BP is eighty over fifty. Oxygen saturation’s ninety-three percent.’

A woman with moist breath put her face about thirty centimeters from hers and spoke gently.

‘You’re in Casualty. You’ve got a lot of injuries from the fall.

Don’t try to move; we need you to keep still for now. We’ve got a collar on your neck until we’ve had the X-rays done. Dr. Tan is going to put a special drain in your chest to help you breathe.

One of your lungs has collapsed and isn’t working properly.’

The smell of antiseptic filled her nostrils as someone said,

‘This might hurt a bit and you’ll feel some pressure.’

She felt a stab beneath her armpit and held her breath. It hurt like hell, then he pushed hard where it hurt. She thought he was trying to pop the other lung with whatever he was ram-ming in.

‘Nearly there. Nearly . . . Good. Drain’s in.’

A loud splash sounded and then she realized it came from her side.

‘Let’s connect your end to the water seal before I get any more blood on my shoes.’

The female voice said, ‘This looks bad. I’ll get thoracics.’

‘Thanks. Tell them large hemopneumothorax. We’re okay for X-ray. Can we get some more neuro obs, please?’

The woman’s face appeared again and so did the light in her eyes. Were they trying to blind her or keep her confused?

‘Can you squeeze my hand?’ the face said through minted breath.

‘I can’t feel my legs, where are my legs?’ she said, looking up from the bed.

‘That’s okay, darl. What’s your name?’

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Her mouth was too dry to form words. What did it matter?

She wanted to die. Why wouldn’t they leave her alone?

‘Just try to squeeze my hand.’

She made what she thought was a fist and pain shot through her shoulder again.

‘Did that hurt, darl?’ the woman asked, as she felt a cool rush beneath her collarbone.

‘We’re giving you some blood through a tube into your vein. Your breathing looks easier already. Now, we’re going to have to roll you for an X-ray. Everyone, on the count of three.

One, two, three.’

She felt herself tip over, like a log rolling, and something cold and hard slipped behind her back. All she could see were the chests of the people moving her, and a silver curtain rail over the bed. They rolled her back. Pain ripped through the top half of her body.

‘Jill, can we put in a catheter? I want to know if there’s any blood in the urine,’ a man said.

There must have been six people rushing around her, shoving tubes and needles anywhere they could find.

Everything went quiet for a moment. She was alone, which frightened her more. Then they came back.

‘We’ve got to move you again, darl. Get the X-ray plate out.’

They rolled her again.

‘Okay, darl. I’m going to put a thin plastic tube into your bladder so I need to cut off your knickers and sterilize the skin between your legs. This will feel cold.’

Cold? She couldn’t feel anything from the waist down, especially not her legs. The voices kept talking, as though she wasn’t there.

‘Oh my God.’ Then there was a silence as the nurse called,

‘Philip, you’d better look at this. I can’t put a catheter in, not with this.’

‘What is it? Blood?’

‘No, it’s – you’d better look at the whole area.’

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‘Shit. Blisters everywhere,’ said the man who gave all the orders. ‘All right, there’s only a small chance of spreading the infection if we catheterize, but at the moment she’s going to die if we don’t get her more stable. BP’s still only seventy-eight. The reasons for catheterizing far outweigh the risks at this stage. Let’s do it.’

‘They must be agony,’ she heard the nurse say. ‘How on earth did she shave there?’

‘I don’t think they’re causing pain now. She can’t feel anything below her ribs, and there’s no movement. My bet is it’s a complete spinal cord injury. With the hypothermia she suffered, blood loss, and multiple fractures . . . Find out if the police have contacted her family. They need to get here fast.’

They talked about her as though she couldn’t hear. ‘No, no,’

she muttered. ‘No family.’

Someone bent over her. ‘What are you trying to say?’

‘No family. There’s no one.’

They ignored her.

‘Better get some fluid from those vesicles,’ the man said, ‘and send it to micro just in case. And get orthopedics down here.

Where the hell are thoracics?’

29

The following week, Dan Brody thanked Grant Bourne, Vaughan Hunter and Anya for agreeing to meet over the Deab case.

‘Vaughan, Anya suggested that you become involved at this stage and I think it’s a good idea. As you all know, Deab confessed to killing his daughter in the toilet block. So far he refuses to disclose any details, such as how he acquired the drugs or how he injected them. I have to say the confession was unexpected, but I suspect he has said something to his fellow inmates. If he did it for honor, he has to let people know, to keep face.’

Grant curled his lip. ‘In all the years I’ve been working for him, he’s claimed innocence, even after he ran into that police car with a blood alcohol level double the limit.’

‘Something bothers me about this,’ Brody said. ‘It just doesn’t seem like his style.’

‘It isn’t violent enough?’ asked Anya as a quiet knock on the door interrupted them.

‘That’ll be our cultural expert. Maybe she can answer that.’

Brody stood as an attractive, middle-aged woman dressed in a turquoise sari tentatively entered. She looked as though she had been born into the highest possible caste.

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‘Dr. Gupta, please come in. You’ve met Mr. Bourne. This is Dr. Vaughan Hunter, psychiatrist and profiler, and Dr. Anya Crichton, pathologist and thumb screw expert. She’s the one who elicited the confession from my client.’

Dr. Gupta shook hands with the group and stopped at Anya, lifting half-glasses from a chain around her neck onto the bridge of her nose for a better look.

‘I believe you encouraged Mr. Brody’s client to discuss his feelings and he admitted to killing his daughter. That does not surprise me. You represent everything he wanted to protect his daughter from.’

Hardly a compliment, thought Anya.

‘No, no, please do not misunderstand me,’ Dr. Gupta added, obviously reading Anya’s face. ‘I’m afraid I chose my words poorly. What I meant to explain was that men like Mr. Deab feel they are morally superior to those they deem unworthy, which is how he appears to view Western women.’

Brody found her an extra chair.

‘Dr. Gupta is an associate professor in social studies from Sydney University and specializes in cultural differences. She knows a lot about honor killings, which is what I’ve asked her to discuss in relation to this case. She thought, and I agree, that it would be more efficient to meet together.’

The Indian expert removed her glasses and sat down. ‘To give you some background, honor killings are recognized in many cultures, not just those of Islamic faith. It is estimated that five thousand women are killed by family members each year because of rumor or innuendo. Most commonly these killings occur in rural areas where the literacy level is low and fundamentalism has its strongest numbers. Many of the Islamic perpetrators kill, having never read the Koran, and hence are unable to understand the difference between indoctrination and the Prophet Mohammed’s teachings. That makes the women in these communities extremely vulnerable.’

Deab’s coldness had shocked Anya. He might as well have been slaughtering a lamb for dinner, the way he spoke. ‘Are 178

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these men torn at all, having to decide what to do, or is it like a reflex action?’

Dr. Gupta wound the chain from her glasses around her finger. ‘If they are torn, they don’t seem to show it. Most deny remorse and boast about their preservation of honor. In this country, we do not understand that to these men, honor is everything. In places like Pakistan, more often than not the men who kill family members get away with it, and suffer no punishment. The threat of jail doesn’t deter them either. If they are imprisoned, they become heroes in their own communities.’

Brody doodled on his pad again. ‘What exactly constitutes dishonoring a family?’

‘Well, it may involve a woman being seen in the company of a man other than a family member, or even rumored to have been seen. It doesn’t matter if the woman is in a public place when she commits the alleged indiscretion, this still could affect a man’s perception of honor. Of course, having a relationship with a man outside marriage or prior to marriage is deemed unacceptable, and in some areas, punishable by death. There have been instances in which women are accused of sexual relations when autopsy shows an intact hymen.’

The concept of an intact hymen confirming virginity was misleading, but Anya didn’t wish to argue the point. She’d heard about honor killings but didn’t believe they happened in a country where women supposedly had equal rights. ‘Do other relatives, like the mother, have any say in the killings?’ Anya couldn’t believe they kept quiet about it.

The three men in the room listened intently as Dr. Gupta explained.

‘None at all. They may not even know until it is too late.

They cannot report their husbands to authorities. They fear for their own lives if they do. In some instances, mothers agree with the killings, just as they do with female circumcision.’

Vaughan Hunter leaned forward. ‘I understand that these killings are usually by means such as stabbing, strangulation, or gunshot. Is that correct?’

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‘Yes, the deaths are particularly brutal and the woman endures suffering as well as seeing the face of her father, husband or brother when he kills her.’

‘Well, I have an uncomfortable feeling about the confession,’ Brody said. ‘Deab is a hothead. Killing Fatima with drugs would have taken time, planning, and then he had to make sure everyone knew what he’d done, anyway.’

‘Maybe he wanted to avoid police involvement at the start,’

Grant considered, ‘which is why he made it look like a suicide for the coroner while he bragged about it to his Lebanese mates. I heard that a lot of people think she died of AIDS

because of the toilet block, assuming promiscuity and drug use.

If he killed her for honor, the message didn’t filter through.

Maybe he needed to let the world know by confessing.’

‘Under the alleged circumstances,’ Dr. Gupta said, ‘the mode of death is most unusual.’

Brody gripped the arms of his chair. ‘Exactly my point. He bashed Galea after his daughter died a relatively peaceful death by injection. Wouldn’t he have made it more obvious that he’d killed her if it was to show his community he valued honor?

Why go to the trouble and suffer the indignity of having people think she died of a stigmatized sexually transmitted disease?’

‘Criminals don’t always think things through, as you know,’

Anya said. ‘Could Mohammed have said he killed his daughter to remove some of that stigma? I know it sounds crazy and illogical to us, but maybe it doesn’t to him.’

Dr. Gupta nodded. ‘We are not dealing with what we consider logic in these matters.’

Brody turned in his chair to Vaughan. ‘The question is whether or not we can argue provocation and mitigating circumstances in the Galea assault and the daughter’s death. Is he capable of telling right from wrong?’