‘What’s up with the car?’ I asked him as we walked into his place, passing one of my less successful watercolours of Jervis Bay.
‘Buggered petrol pump,’ he said. ‘I just put a new one in. You can buy the little kit. It’s all finished now.’ As he washed and wiped his hands, I recalled the bits of machinery I’d noticed lying on the driveway.
‘But what about all the bits you left out? Lying on the ground?’
Charlie shrugged. My young brother, as well as having a doctorate in psychology, was also a great bush mechanic. He could pull a car apart, put it back together, have all sorts of parts still lying around and the bloody vehicle would still go like the clappers. The minute I tried my hand at mechanical repairs, something worse happened. Charlie says it’s because of my state of mind and suggests that I should examine the deeper implications of quantum physics. I shake my head when he says things like that.
‘Siya’s gone to her mother’s place for a few days,’ he offered by way of explanation as he opened the fridge and peered in. ‘I can only offer you a beer or a glass of orange drink.’ Charlie lives with a succession of girlfriends, none of whom seems to last more than a year or so and at the moment he was cohabiting with a wild Cypriot, Anastasia, who trained as a commando in the Cypriot army before coming to Australia. Charlie works very hard as a psychologist for the Health Commission and also takes some private clients.
I took the drink and followed my brother outside onto the back deck. Charlie bought this cottage just before Sydney prices went crazy and built the extra room and decking out the back. It was shaping up into a hot day with the humidity already sticky and sapping despite a weak nor’easter. We sat together in front of a display of pansies, gardenias, lavender, geraniums of every colour, gladioli, and fabulous tropical hibiscus. Bees buzzed around lavender banks and a huge black butterfly flapped through the air. Somewhere, I could hear a spangled drongo calling, its metallic polyphony chiming in the distance.
‘What’s it like, living at Lapa?’ my brother asked.
‘There was a white-faced heron fishing in next door’s lily pond last week,’ I told him.
‘You and your birds,’ he said. ‘Is the snake man still there?’
When we were kids staying with our aunt in Sydney, we went to see the famous snake man of La Perouse and his collection of reptiles in hessian sacks. I shrugged. I didn’t know.
I always liked being with Charlie. He was alive and alert, and they are two attitudes that I don’t meet very often. Sometimes I’d see it in the very rare smart crim I was interrogating; I’d notice him watching and waiting, scanning me in every way to see how much I knew. Charlie notices even more than I do. I told him about my investigations into the two murders, and what I’d just learned from the newspaper archives.
‘Interesting,’ said Charlie. ‘You think someone is waiting for them? Someone like Peter Carter?’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t be hard to find out when someone’s due for release. It wouldn’t be hard to cultivate someone from Corrective Services. Find out the exact time and date of release. Then follow the victim to find out where he lives. Find a way to strike up a conversation. In a bar. In a shop. Maybe the killer pretends to be someone of similar interests.’
But Charlie shook his head. ‘There’s no time for all that cultivation,’ he reminded me. ‘These buggers are killed within days of their release. What you’re describing takes time. Especially with men like these. Deception is their game. They’re paranoid about discovery. About who they take into their confidence.’
Charlie was right and I told him so. ‘We’ve learned so much more about aberrant sex in the last ten or fifteen years,’ I said to him.
‘Now you’re getting closer to my territory,’ said Charlie. ‘But,’ he added, ‘people don’t go wandering about in those dark places late at night unless there’s a reason.’
‘A trap,’ I said to my brother. ‘He must lure them into a trap.’ I was starting to feel the buzz of progress, of getting a sense of the pattern, the means and the way the killer might think.
‘What sort of trap?’ said Charlie.
Ideas started racing around in my head. I turned to Charlie. ‘I don’t know. This third guy’s going to be really cautious,’ I said. ‘He knows what happened to the others. And not only because of that. There’ve been a couple of recent cases of pedophiles being murdered in their homes by erstwhile victims. This third guy’s going to be very, very careful where he goes and who he meets.’
I got up and went to the edge of the timber deck. I could hear the
zissing
of wrens. I surveyed the garden, noting the tomatoes ripening on their vines and a wandering cucurbit of some sort waving its huge leaves up and over the back fence. I thought of the vegetable garden in our childhood home and the scarecrow wearing Mum’s old purple and blue dress and hat. Scare anything away, that thing would. I remembered the day I’d found her in that same dress, smashing everything in the kitchen cupboards because Dad had thrown out all her supplies and she couldn’t find a drink anywhere. I’d run away and hidden down the backyard in the shed.
‘I drove up and visited Dad yesterday,’ Charlie said, somehow patching into my thoughts like he can. I grunted. Our father still lived in the self-contained quarters he’d built for himself at the back of the big old house in Springbrook where we’d all grown up, while the house itself was rented out. ‘He said it’s a while since he’s seen you. He’s given me a whole box of Mum’s stuff. You should have it. You’re the oldest.’ He indicated a carton by the doorway near the kitchen. ‘There might be interesting family papers.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Just what I need.’
Charlie knew very well I never went near the place. I hated going back there, to that house. Even though it looked very different now, it was still the same place, the same street, the same road of my memory. I had enough trouble keeping away from the past without going back to the very place where it would jump out and hijack me. ‘And right now,’ I added, glancing at the carton, ‘I don’t need another box of paper to sort through.’
‘I know how you feel about going back there,’ Charlie said, getting up and leaning over the railing, grabbing at a marguerite daisy that was just out of reach. ‘But you
have
to go back,’ he said after a pause. ‘You
know
you have to some day.’
My breath caught at the back of my throat. The very idea of returning to that place horrified me.
‘You look like shit,’ he remarked, noticing my expression. I thanked him for his observation and almost told him about the anonymous letter I’d received. It would have been a relief to debrief with my brother. ‘One day,’ Charlie was saying, ‘you’re going to have to look at a number of things.’ Then he immediately raised his two hands in mock surrender. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘It’s not my business, not my life. But I happen to love Greg and I can see what all this is doing to him. And I don’t only mean the bust-up. Or what happened with Jacinta.’
‘Greg wants to come and live with me,’ I said finally.
‘Let him,’ said Charlie, ‘if that’s what he wants. He’ll be eighteen next year. He needs you now.’ Charlie’s tone was very serious. ‘And I’m not saying that because of the way things are between me and Genevieve,’ he added. Genevieve couldn’t stand Charlie and they’d had a terrible fight some years ago. But Charlie has always had the capacity to put personal issues aside when discussing any topic or making a decision. He has the sort of mind that sees the big picture and can override his own feelings. No wonder my wife dislikes him so much with his detached way of seeing things—the opposite of her need to take everything personally. It’s an enviable trait.
‘Look,’ said my little brother, ‘Genevieve hates you and she’s going to take you to the cleaners whether you’re a bastard or not. Greg coming to live with you can’t make her any worse.’
As usual, Charlie had homed straight in on a large part of my rather badly hidden agenda. I felt exhausted by Genevieve’s grievances and wanted it all over.
‘I don’t want to do anything that’ll stir her up. I don’t want to have to deal with all that.’
‘Why?’ asked my brother in his reasonable way. ‘What are you scared of? All she can do is yell.’
‘You are a rational and reasonable person,’ I said. ‘Genevieve is not. Her discontent was always a problem. Now it’s changed to hatred. And I can feel it coming at me whenever I’m with her. I get the feeling she only wants me back so she can punish me. I know she blames me because Jacinta was the same age—’
I couldn’t say any more, but Charlie picked it up straight away and continued with the words I couldn’t utter. ‘—Because,’ he said, continuing my thoughts, ‘Jacinta was the same age as Rosie was when
she
disappeared.’
There was a short silence filled with the twittering of a bulbul in the garden. ‘Those sorts of patterns repeat in the next generation if they’re not examined,’ Charlie said, not addressing me, but talking to the garden. ‘It’s not anybody’s fault. It’s just the way things go.’
I couldn’t say anything about that. I’m really just a chemist. The stuff I deal with is solid matter. It might be microscopic, but it’s there, in front of me, waiting to be found, fixed on a slide, or pinned in a fume cupboard. The stuff Charlie talks about, even though his very elegant doctorate was well received, is a mesh of metaphors and inferences—coincidences, I call them—that disappear like mist when I try to examine them scientifically.
We went indoors and Charlie made me a coffee in his flash new Italian espresso machine while he considered my question.
‘I think she left because Genevieve was so hostile towards her,’ Charlie finally said.
I knew what he meant. ‘I never understood it,’ I said. ‘Why would a mother be constantly criticising her own daughter?’
Charlie shrugged. ‘That happens to lots of kids,’ he said, ‘but every kid’s reaction is different. Some just withdraw. Others pretend to comply. Some kids rebel against it. Jacinta couldn’t endure it.’ The conversation was getting too close and personal for me and I could feel the discomfort tightening.
‘Another character mightn’t have been so affected,’ Charlie was saying. ‘Jass was super-sensitive. Something she said to me once indicated she felt she couldn’t talk to either of you.’ Charlie’s tone was neutral—just a professional observing something. Charlie likes to talk about issues that I find almost impossible to articulate.
‘But she could’ve rung me,’ I said. ‘Any time.’ As soon as I heard my own words, I realised how pathetic they sounded. Charlie frowned at me.
‘It doesn’t work like that, John,’ he said, perching himself on the counter. ‘Then there was the whole business around Rosie. And Genevieve’s policy about that. All the silence.’ The way Charlie can talk of Rosie in that airy way makes me feel angry. As far as he’s concerned, she’s like some dream figure, or a character from a novel or a play. But he was a baby and never knew her. I quelled the irritation I felt and remembered that Genevieve’s policy meant that neither of my kids even knew we’d had a sister, let alone what had become of her, until they were nearly adolescents themselves. And I myself found her very hard to talk about. Sometimes it seemed that I was the only person in the world who cared about her, who remembered her.
I stood up and walked out and down the steps into the garden. I heard him behind me and we wandered about in that weird silence that surrounds people who deliberately
aren’t
talking about something that’s an issue between them. I made an effort to remove both Jacinta and Rosie from my mind by concentrating on the investigation leads that I’d just gathered from the newspaper archives. I could hear music coming from the radio in the lounge room behind us. I was standing in front of some hanging baskets, throwing down the last of the coffee when the music stopped and I heard her. I swear my arm froze in mid air and I could not lower my cup. There it was again, that pinot noir voice, deep and husky, with the tremulous grainy underlay and the soft richness ‘.
.
. played by Glenn Gould,’ she was announcing, ‘on a digital remastering of the original Polygram recording.’
‘What is it?’ I asked, hurrying back up the steps and into the lounge room.
‘A Bach prelude,’ said Charlie, who had followed me indoors.
‘I mean the station,’ I snapped. ‘What station are you on?’ I was already over there, peering at the radio, unable to see where it was tuned. Charlie came over to join me, frowning. He put his glasses on and glanced at the radio.
‘2LSM,’ he said, straightening. ‘Why?’
‘Local?’
‘Yes.’
While Charlie looked on with great curiosity, I found the phone number and rang the station. It didn’t take me long to find out what I wanted to know. Pretending great interest in the content of the program, I listened while the woman on the other end of the line, as well as explaining that it was a listener-supported radio station, told me more than I wanted to know about the weekly Bach program I’d been listening to. With careful questioning, I discovered that the presenter, Iona Seymour, normally did the program live, but that this one was taped because Iona’s car had been out of action for some days. The woman I spoke to assured me that the music Iona had selected was representative of her usual taste and then pressed me to become a subscriber. Within a short while, I was all signed up and ready to go.
‘But there’s something about a live presentation…’ I added.
‘Indeed,’ said the woman. ‘And we prefer that as a rule. Iona will be back from ten to eleven presenting her program again on Friday. Sometimes it can’t be managed and then she tapes it.’
The minute I got off that call, I rang Bob. He wasn’t in but I left a message asking him to check the name ‘Iona Seymour’ on police records.
Charlie stared at me while I made the two calls. ‘What are you up to now?’ he asked.
‘A woman,’ I said, ‘rang the police anonymously with a tip-off about Jacinta. I heard the tape. That was her voice just then.’
‘That presenter?’
‘I’d swear to it.’
And in a few minutes, I’d told Charlie the whole story. Now I had a name and that’s really all an investigator needs to get started.