I nodded.
‘And haven’t you considered that if she knew something about Jacinta,’ said Charlie, ‘she might also know who you are? Might have known all along?’
This hit so hard that I sat down to consider both this suggestion and the fact that something so obvious hadn’t occurred to me until now.
‘And if she didn’t know me all along,’ I said, ‘my bloody photo was in the paper two days ago. She rang the day after and changed the meeting from the café to her place.’
‘Where there was a nice big double bed,’ said my brother drily. ‘Mate, you’ve been done like a dinner.’
My cool, logical brother, who never let personal issues confuse the truth of how things were, stood there, looking at me. What could I say? Charlie had me cold. I’d really stuffed this up. My brother came indoors and flung himself down on the floral couch opposite me, hunched forward over his drink.
‘It’s no good crying over spilt milk,’ he said. ‘Let’s just do damage control, go over what you’ve got. First, what do you think will come of the ink and paper examination?’
‘I can’t really say until—’ I started to say, but he brushed that aside.
‘I’m your brother, so forget the scientific niceties,’ he said impatiently. ‘Just tell me the likely outcome.’
‘Sarah will examine it,’ I said, ‘and from what I saw, she could find that it’s indistinguishable from that used in the “Rosie” letters. But that’s not enough.’ I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about the prayer I’d taken from under the
Pietà
and subsequently lost. ‘Even if we could get a sample of handwriting, and it looks similar, it’s still not enough.’ I thought ahead further. ‘Just say we get ESDA enhancements—’
‘What are they?’ Charlie asked.
‘It’s one of our magic boxes with flashing lights,’ I said, ‘originally invented in order to bring out latent fingerprints though it isn’t much good at that. What it is good at is enhancing slight impressions, especially the sort left by the pressure of writing on a pad of paper. We’ve obtained clear readings five pages down from the written-on surface.’ Charlie nodded and I continued. ‘So even if we could actually
read
the last “Rosie” letter on the piece of paper that I’ve taken, that still wouldn’t be enough. Because all she has to do is deny writing it, deny owning the pad, and she’s established reasonable doubt. It’s still only circumstantial.’ I paused. ‘But if she
is
involved, and we’ve pulled her in prematurely over evidence that is inconclusive, then we’ve alerted her and destroyed the possibility of her further implicating herself.’
‘Like killing someone else?’ said Charlie.
‘I somehow doubt—’
‘—that she’s implicated? Why?’ my brother demanded.
‘Look,’ I said to my brother, ‘maybe this will sound strange.’ I took a deep breath. ‘She doesn’t fit the profile of a savage killer,’ I said. ‘She’s a bloody vegetarian and she goes to a Twelve Step group.’
Charlie looked at me as if I was a lunatic. ‘Are you serious?’ he asked. ‘Are you suggesting a negative correlation betwen vegetarianism and murder? Do I have to remind you, of all people, that men and women who go to Twelve Step programs are
addicts
! They’re capable of anything.
’
‘It just doesn’t fit,’ I said. ‘It’s not right.’
‘You know that practising addicts hate themselves deep down—
and
everyone else,’ Charlie said.
I shook my head. ‘It’s still not right,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t fit.’
‘This killer may well see himself,’ Charlie said, ‘or herself, as some sort of avenging angel. With a moral dimension. The worst are full of passionate intensity,’ he reminded me, quoting Yeats, and I remembered Merrilyn Heywood’s remarks and the words of Jeremiah.
A whirlwind of the Lord is gone forth in fury, even a grievous whirlwind
. ‘Some sections of the press,’ said Charlie, ‘are suggesting that if the courts genuinely matched the sentences with the crimes these criminals committed, then these three men would still be alive. Alive, and locked up tight like they should be.’
I stood up. Now that the initial shock had worn off, I found I was unable to be still. If Charlie’s surmises were right, I’d been badly burned. At the very least, it was looking more and more as if Iona was
the most recent in the line of witches with whom I’d become involved.
‘My taste in women hasn’t improved,’ I said. My AA sponsor used to say, ‘For at least the first five years of your recovery, when you feel yourself attracted to a woman,
turn around and walk the other way.
Fast.
’ But I’d always felt safely smug, married to Genevieve. I couldn’t see then that I’d already married the witch queen.
‘I think your taste is getting worse,’ said Charlie. ‘Maybe the only reason you didn’t end up sliced and dead is because you were in her house. I’d be very wary of future meetings with Iona Seymour, Jacko, if I were you. Especially if the invitation is for somewhere secluded late at night.’
I sat down again. It was like finding myself starring in a real-life
film noir.
‘There won’t be any more meetings,’ I said.
During the silence that followed, I pulled the photograph of Rosie out of my pocket and put it on the table between us. ‘I found this,’ I said, ‘in a box of cards and postcards sold to an artist.’ I filled Charlie in about how I’d tracked down the creator of the triptych and started pulling out the other photos and postcards from the box.
Charlie picked up the photo of our sister, holding it close to him, studying her. ‘I don’t remember her at all,’ he said, ‘although there was someone who used to play in the bath with me, swimming the face cloths around like fish.’
I remembered that, too. ‘That was Rosie,’ I said. ‘Our mother was too sick by that stage to play with anything except the whisky bottle and Dad had pretty well moved into his parallel universe down the back shed.’
‘What happened?’ said Charlie in an odd voice and I was surprised to see his eyes were filled with tears. ‘What happened to our family? In one generation, a young girl is abducted, in the next, she runs away. You make relationships with witches and here I am, in a combat zone with Siya.’ He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose loudly.
‘I thought things were okay with you and Siya,’ I said, surprised. ‘You always seemed happy—’ I stopped because Charlie gave me a look and I remembered how we didn’t talk about personal things until they were crashing down around us and there was no alternative. I leaned back in my chair, stumped by the enormity of the question. ‘Christ, Charlie,’ I said eventually, ‘
I
don’t know what happened in our family. That’s your territory.’
‘But you must have memories,’ he said, ‘of what happened and how it all went to hell. Maybe you even remember a time when it wasn’t?’
I considered. ‘Sometimes I think I do,’ I said, ‘but I’m never sure. I remember always being anxious about Mum’s drinking, and wishing she wouldn’t. I remember always trying to impress Dad. But nothing worked. He always knew more. He always competed with me and he always won.’
‘That’s how fathers destroy their sons,’ said Charlie. ‘Competing with them and beating them instead of being a good parent.’ I wasn’t sure what he meant and made a note that one day I’d ask him.
In silence, we pulled out the other black and white photographs and matched them with the snap of Rosie. These other images were all obviously from a different source, some of them the professional work of high street photographers, with their scribbled initial or other marks on the back and long defunct studio address, others of different sizes and print quality. We’d just about given up when I pulled out almost the last one, of a slight, adolescent boy standing near a stone wall.
‘I think that’s the same wall,’ said Charlie, ‘that Rosie’s standing near in this one.’ And he put the photo of Rosie beside the young man. Together, we studied the two pictures. ‘Look here.’ He pointed to something in the stone work. He went to a drawer and pulled out a magnifying glass. He studied the photograph and then passed me the glass. ‘Take a look,’ he said. With the aid of the glass, I could see part of a wrought-iron grille, cut off by the edge of the exposure. ‘There it is again,’ said Charlie, ‘you can see a bit more of it in this photo.’ I looked from one picture to the other. The wall was built of sandstone, well shaped and hewn and probably laid down in the late nineteenth century when stonemasons were affordable and not the rare and expensive artists they had become in our times, and there was at least one, possibly more, decorative grilles set in it, allowing light and air to circulate from one side of the wall to the other.
Charlie was staring at the two photos. ‘I think I know this wall,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve seen it. It’s from somewhere up there.’ I knew he meant Springbrook and I picked up the photograph of the youth.
‘So who’s the guy?’ said Charlie.
I studied the frowning face: young, good-looking in a sharp, thin-lipped way, but I shook my head. ‘No one I know,’ I said. ‘Or knew.’ I looked more closely. There was something. ‘And yet .
.
.’ I added, my voice trailing away. My brother waited, impatient for me to finish what I was going to say, but I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s no one I know.’ I put the photo down and picked up the one of Rosie again. ‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘there’s something I’ve never told anyone about what happened just before Rosie went up to the front of the house. It parallels almost exactly what happened to Jass.’
Charlie was all attention. ‘Rosie had a crush on some boy. She’d written him a note and our mother found it and came down to where Rosie and I were playing. I’d seen Mum crazy and drunk before, but never as bad as this. She was screaming at Rosie, calling her a slut and a little whore. It was horrible. Even Dad came to the doorway of the shed, and nothing usually got his interest. I yelled at her to shut up and leave Rosie alone and when she turned on me Rosie ran away up the backyard and I thought she’d just gone into the house. She used to lock herself into her room when things were grimmer than usual. I ran up after her to try and comfort her, but she wasn’t there. I didn’t know where she’d gone. We didn’t have any friends. We couldn’t ever ask anyone home, not the way things were. So I thought she was just hiding somewhere and would come out when Mum had passed out.’
In my mind’s eye, I saw my little sister stumble, crying, over the unmown grass in her pretty yellow sun dress, wearing the necklace I’d given her, running away into eternity. ‘And that’s what happened with Jacinta,’ I said. ‘Genevieve was yelling at her to go and wash her face, that she was wearing too much make-up, and that she looked like a whore. Forbidding her to have her ears pierced.’ I stopped, recalling the ugly scene. ‘Hell, she was just playing around with make-up like young kids do. I don’t know what else had been going on, but it must have been the final insult. That’s when Jacinta bolted out the door and we didn’t see her again.’
Charlie was staring at the photograph of Rosie. ‘Do you think,’ he said, ‘that our mother could have killed her?’
I was stunned at the idea. ‘I’ve never thought of that,’ I said.
In the silence that followed, I reviewed the past investigations I’d been involved with. Apart from cases of infanticide, women rarely kill older children. Fathers and brothers feature more prominently in the murder of their daughters and sisters.
‘I very much doubt it,’ I said. ‘How would she have done it?’ I recalled my mother and how towards the last days, she was barely capable of disposing of her own body, apart from staggering from the kitchen to her bed. ‘She was skin and bone and bruises, as I recall.’
‘We need to break the family spell,’ Charlie was saying, as I came out of the trance of the past.
‘If I can find out what happened to Rosie,’ I said, bringing my attention back to the here and now, ‘I somehow feel that we can.’ I stood up, ready to go. ‘I promised Rosie something a long time ago. If I keep the promise, I can redeem things.’ I think I was as surprised as Charlie at my words.
My brother stood up, taking my cue. ‘I hope so. Otherwise,’ he said, ‘we’re going to end up two lonely old men living behind someone else’s house with our girl children run away and our sons defeated and conflicted.’ He flashed me the ghost of a smile. ‘That’s if we’re not knifed first.’
I collected the box of postcards and the photographs and picked up the gym bag. ‘I want to leave some stuff here,’ I said.
Charlie raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m always worried when a cop says that,’ he said.
‘I’m not a cop,’ I reminded him. ‘It’s just some gear.’
‘I don’t want to know,’ said Charlie, opening the tall built-in linen press in the hallway.
‘Stick it up there,’ he said, pointing to the top shelf where he’d stashed the boxes of cards containing the index for his doctorate.
I shoved the gym bag in as far as I could on the top shelf and closed the doors. I turned round and my brother was very close to me.
‘What is it, Jack?’ he asked. ‘You look terrible.’ I gently pushed him out of the way and went back to the living room. ‘I’ve got the phone number of someone you can talk to. I’ve heard she’s really good.’
I took it from him without looking at it.
I drove away and I hadn’t felt so desolate since the earliest years of sobriety.
Next evening, after a day spent completing fiddly bits of paperwork connected to several cases I’d worked on, and chasing up reports, I got home late and Greg was lying in bed reading, with just the sheet over him. I stood at his bedroom door and he looked at me briefly, then his eyes went back to the book. While I was making the tea, I decided to talk to Greg so I opened a packet of hidden chocolate Montes and knocked on his door.
‘May I come in?’ I asked.
He lowered the book and looked at me.
‘What is it?’ he said.
I came in and sat down beside him on the bed. ‘What you said to me the other day is right,’ I said. ‘I do need to do more parenting. So now I’m here,’ I said, gently taking the book from his hands and putting it face-down on the bed. ‘And this is the whole story about Rosie.’
I had all his attention and I told him everything, even the bit I’d never told anyone except Charlie. I told him about the terrible days after she’d gone, the police interviews, the nights of lying awake, and how, when Jacinta left us, it had been just like a replay of that earlier loss for me, only worse, because this time there were two losses to deal with, and the first still as raw and unresolved as ever. I told him about the murders I was involved with and the ‘Rosie’ letters, written by someone to lure these men to their deaths, and how I’d found the car that had abducted Rosie in a garage behind the hanged body of an old perv in Blackheath. I brought him up to date with everything, even the strange apparition I’d seen in the night. ‘She was standing in that room,’ I said, pointing towards my bedroom. ‘I saw her as plain as I see you now. She said: “Apply the new knowledge to the old.”
Greg lay back, wide-eyed, listening without interruption. ‘Wow,’ he said finally, ‘what a story!’ For some moments he just lay there, taking it all in. ‘A family ghost. That is heaps cool.’ He sat up higher in bed. ‘Do you think you really saw a ghost?’
‘I don’t know what I saw. All I can say is that it happened. Or that I had an experience. I don’t know how it happened.’
‘But what do you think she meant,’ said my son, ‘when she said that bit about applying the new knowledge to the old?’
‘I thought I knew. And I’ve been trying to do as she asked.’
‘Like how?’
‘Like screening for DNA traces. Like not losing sight of the facts we now know about pedophiles. About how driven and compulsive they are. Once, I think there was a tendency to believe that if you gave one a good scolding, locked him up for a while and he promised to be a good boy in future, that was it. It was finished. It’s taken us a long time to really see that they are slaves to a compulsion over which they have no control. They are devious, cunning and manipulative.’
‘You mean they can’t help it?’ My son’s face was incredulous.
‘Charlie and I have talked about this over the years,’ I said. ‘They can help it in the sense that they know what they’re doing isn’t acceptable. But they project their desires onto the child and say that children have a “right” to be sexual. They say that community values are out of whack, and it’s the community that needs to change its attitudes, not the pedophiles. And if a man’s going around saying, “I’m a fixated pedophile and I’m proud of it,” he’s hardly going to see that
he
needs help.’
‘You were always paranoid about those men,’ said Greg, ‘when we were kids. I remember how you used to point those weirdos out to us. It used to piss Mum off heaps.’
‘I was a cop in those days,’ I said. ‘It was always in my mind then.’ I stood up.
‘But little kids are sexual,’ Greg said. ‘I remember mucking around with a little girl when I was about four.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Kids with kids. That’s natural curiosity.’ I tapped the book on the bed. ‘It’s late. Don’t read too much longer.’
‘I won’t be reading at all,’ he said, putting the book on the floor. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep either. I come from a truly weird family.’
I tucked him in like I used to do when he was little and kissed him on his forehead. I remembered how when he was born I’d got drunk because I thought that’s what fathers did and I felt a sense of sorrow that was seventeen years long. Genevieve certainly had grounds for serious complaint.
I searched through the box of cards and photos and found the picture of the youth again and studied his frowning face. I couldn’t work out where he fitted in, what part he played in the combination. I don’t know who you are, I said to him, but you’re standing where my sister stood in the previous shot. And I want to know if you took her photo and then she took yours. I need to know how you knew her, and what you were doing when she was snatched off the street a couple of days later. I want to find you. I have to find you, if you’re still alive. I found some blue tack in a box of odds and ends and stuck the young man’s photo on the wall opposite the table where I worked.
Outside, it was still hot and the air was heavy. I walked down to the bushes at the back fence, wondering when I’d get the time to do the gardening I’d planned when I first moved here. I knew the invisible ocean would be flattened by the westerly and I could see the occasional flicker of a distant storm in the southwest. A terrible foreboding overcame me. I looked up at the night sky and felt myself to be a tiny, lost and unimportant dot on the face of the planet.
I walked back inside, my head filled with ideas, memories, regrets and sadness. I stared at the photo on the wall. Who are you, I asked him. Where do you fit in?
By the time I lay down on the bed, I’d reached a decision. Tomorrow, I’d go and tell Bob everything about my association with Iona Seymour. Then, as atonement, I had a plan. It was dangerous, but it might trap the killer. After my fall from grace, I felt it was the least I could do.
•
Next morning after Greg had gone to school and I’d cleaned up, the phone rang. It was Detective Senior Constable Debbie Hale from Child Protection.
‘We’ve finished cross-referencing the phone numbers in the Treweeke notebook,’ she said. ‘They’re mostly a group of peds in the mountains and western suburbs and we knew of most of them already. Springbrook police knew them too.’ She laughed. ‘Except for the clergyman.’ I asked her to explain. ‘One of the phone numbers in the book turned out to be one we had in our old records,’ she said. ‘Belonged to a reverend. An old listing, long before all the numbers were changed over to the new system.’
‘Another dirty old clergyman,’ I said.
‘Not necessarily,’ she replied. ‘It turns out that one of the old buggers on our list used to talk about his problem to the clergyman there, the Reverend Bower. Didn’t do him a scrap of good as it turns out.’
‘Bower,’ I said. ‘That’s a name from the past. I know the old rectory. I lived down the street from that place.’ Immediately, the Bower rectory came to mind, the fateful corner where the Holden had skidded, but driven away again, with my little sister inside.
‘Now you’re showing your age,’ said Debbie. ‘We checked the Reverend out years ago and he was above reproach.’
‘Well?’ I said.
‘That’s about it, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘He’s dead now, and as I said, all the guys in the notebook were already known to us. Not to me, personally,’ she said, ‘but to the older guys who work here. Some are inside. Some we haven’t heard a squeak from in years, so they’ve probably left the district. Some of them are dead. It’s quite possible one of them had something to do with your sister’s disappearance, especially considering the car was hidden in Treweeke’s garage. He could’ve been doing a favour for a friend. Or maybe he genuinely didn’t know anything about that car, though that’s hard to believe. But after all this time, I just don’t see how we could do anything anyway. You know how it is. Unless someone comes forward and gives us something. That’s really the only way we get anything going in these old cases.’
She was right. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘just send the book back to me.’
‘I’m sorry we couldn’t be more helpful.’
Another dead end. It was very dispiriting and I hadn’t realised that somewhere, I’d been pinning a lot of hope on the hanged man’s notebook. He had been the only link I’d had to the car that had taken my little sister. And now that link hadn’t connected anywhere.
I rang Bradley Strachan. ‘You did the PM on a Bevan Treweeke?’ I reminded him unnecessarily: Dr Strachan never forgets a customer. ‘I did,’ he said.
I wasn’t even sure why I was asking him for this. It was just a gut feeling and because the Holden and Treweeke were connected, it had to mean something, somewhere. I knew that after his post mortem, bits of Bevan Treweeke lived on in bottles of formaldehyde.
‘I want some tissue from him,’ I said, ‘in case I need to eliminate him from a crime scene.’
Dr Strachan promised to courier this to Florence at Forensic Services as soon as possible. I felt a little better. The disappointment of Treweeke’s notebook going nowhere had hit me hard, and even though I was probably clutching at straws, the fact that I was doing something that might be useful one day cheered me up a little.
I had another plan in mind as well, and I rang Ron Herring at Goulburn Gaol. In front of me, I had the notes I’d taken from the newspaper archives.
‘You’ve got an Anton Francini as a guest at your establishment?’ I asked Ron.
‘We do,’ said Ron. ‘Nice quiet-living old child-killer,’ he said. ‘Not a spot of bother. I’ll bet he’s pleased he’s not due out for a while, too,’ said Ron, ‘considering what’s happened to some of his friends.’
‘I want to talk to you about that,’ I said.
I told him what I was setting up and what I wanted and after a bit more chat he arranged a time for me to visit and interview the killer. Then I rang Merrilyn Heywood and put something to her. She said she’d speak to her editor, and let him know that Bob would be ringing him.
After that, I went to the hospital. I bought some pink roses from the shop and was relieved to find that Genevieve wasn’t there. Jacinta lay, thinner and paler than I remembered from last time, and it crossed my mind for the very first time that she might not come out the other end of this, that she might be dying. I threw out the drooping yellow daisies and arranged the roses in the blue vase on the bedside cabinet. Then I sat beside my daughter and massaged her wasting arms. Her wrists were so thin now, and her fingers lay inertly in my own. I’d just got sober when she was born and so, unlike my behaviour at the time of my son’s birth, I had clear memories of the feelings of fear I’d experienced as she was laid in my arms. This is a whole person, I remember thinking to myself, a whole new person who has to live in this world for perhaps another eighty years. It seemed an enormous and terrible thing to do, to bring a whole new person into being and I’d done it twice now, without any thought.
‘I’m sorry, Jass,’ I whispered to her unmoving features, ‘that I was such an indifferent father. I didn’t understand what I was doing. I didn’t know what life was about. I’m seeing now I don’t know much at all.’ I thought of my irrational attraction to Iona Seymour. ‘In fact,’ I whispered, ‘I’ve just done another stupid thing and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to live it down.’ I heard a sound and looked up to see a plump, pretty nurse had come in and I felt self-conscious and foolish, caught out whispering to myself.
Afterwards, I drove to the Police Centre to tell Bob the whole story about me and Iona and to face the music. Bob took it very well, considering. He looked at me after I’d finished speaking, not saying anything for a minute or two.
‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ he said finally in his mild way, ‘and it won’t be the last that something like this happens to someone like you.’ He looked up from the notes he’d been jotting down. ‘But if it turns out she’s a killer and the defence gets hold of this’—he tapped his notes—‘and they bloody will, she’ll walk.’
I nodded. There was nothing I could say so I showed him the ink-stained paper that I’d taken from her desk. ‘I’ll give this to Sarah,’ I said.
Bob nodded. ‘It’s something to start with,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, we’d better keep a discreet eye on Ms Seymour.’
I saw again how my association with Iona had distorted my thinking. Bob hadn’t wanted to pounce on her at all. He’d used the word ‘discreet’. Everywhere I looked I saw only my own foolish misjudgment of everything. Including the wisdom and expertise of my old friend.
I stood up and went to his office door, looking around. A few other people worked at their desks and seemed out of hearing range, but I pulled the door closed, just in case. ‘If you can get permission from the boss to do what I’m about to suggest, Bob, I might be able to redeem myself. Give the killer to you, red-handed.’ I thought of that image and changed it immediately. ‘
Almost
red-handed,’ I added. I told him what I intended to do. Again, my old colleague heard me out in silence.
‘It just might work,’ he said, ‘if our killer is consistent.’
‘So far, he has been,’ I said.
‘Or she,’ said Bob, stressing the pronoun. He stood up and went to look out his window. There was nothing to see except another grey cement wall with windows in it just like his and I could dimly see my old friend’s face reflected back at me. ‘There’s been a thirty per cent increase in the number of women in prison,’ he said to the window. ‘Nothing’s like it used to be.’ He turned round and sat down again, frowning. ‘It’s a dangerous plan,’ he said. ‘If anything went wrong you could get yourself cut up badly.’
‘If you’re in charge, I think I’ll be pretty safe,’ I said. ‘I worked with you for years. I know how good you are.’
Bob looked surprised. ‘I didn’t know you cared,’ he joked.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m going to gaol.’
•
Anton Francini had a crouching quality to him. He sat hunched in a chair opposite me, looking up at me because his head poked forward like a turtle’s. It seemed impossible to imagine him harming anyone, let alone a kid. After I’d introduced myself and shown him my ID, he hunched up even further. He gripped the arms of the vinyl chair with fingers that were stained with nicotine. I’d bought a pack of cigarettes and offered him one. He grabbed it, and lit it immediately with his own lighter.