Twenty-two
C
arly slept badly, dreaming about Alicia, how she’d helped her after Brooke died, how she’d looked lying dead, then waking up and staring at the ceiling and thinking about Chris, stuck in a Canberra hospital, and about the rest of the Bayliss family. By the time the night turned grey with morning, she was exhausted, her eyes were sore and she had a headache. She snuggled up to Linsey’s warm back, feeling her arm reach over to pull her close, and shut her eyes in the hope of at least a little rest. When she woke again, the sun was streaming in the window, Linsey was in the shower, and someone was knocking at the door.
Carly hurried to the bathroom. ‘Someone’s at the door.’
‘Shit, really?’
‘Linny, you there? Sorry I’m early.’
Carly recognised Zoe’s voice.
‘Oh crap.’ Linsey rinsed off shampoo. ‘Crappy crap.’
‘What if I get it?’ Carly asked.
‘You’re kidding,’ Linsey said through the streaming water.
‘It’s one way to tell them.’
‘I’ll be like half a minute. I’m coming,’ she shouted. ‘She can wait.’
‘Let me,’ Carly said.
‘In your bed hair with Maya standing there? I don’t think so.’ Linsey cranked the taps off. ‘Quick. Go hide in the bedroom.’
‘Maya’s going to see me anyway once she’s inside. You think she’s not going to let that slip later?’
‘She won’t, because I’ll bring her back in here while I clean my teeth and you’ll sneak out then,’ Linsey said. ‘Please don’t pressure me.’
‘I’m not. It’s just this seems like it’d be an easy way to do it. Like, hey, here we are, everything’s fine,’ Carly said. ‘I’m not pressuring you, truly.’
‘You might not mean to, but you are.’
Zoe banged on the door again. ‘Linz?’
‘Coming,’ Linsey yelled again, grabbing her terry-towelling robe from the back of the door. ‘Quick. Go.’
Carly let herself be shoved into the bedroom. Linsey went to yank the door shut, then stopped and leaned in for a kiss.
‘I’m sorry, but you get it, don’t you?’ Her eyes searched Carly’s. ‘Please don’t be hurt. I’ll tell them today, I promise. Just not now.’
Zoe knocked again and Linsey pulled the door closed. Carly felt ridiculous standing there naked with her heart aching and tears pricking her eyes, hearing Zoe and Maya and Linsey talk at the front door. She sat on the side of the bed and pulled on the jeans and shirt she’d worn last night, thinking about what she’d asked of Linsey and how it was unfair to be angry when she couldn’t give it. She understood how Linsey felt. The problem was fear – fear of how her family would react when she told them about an important part of her life that she’d so far kept hidden. They thought they knew her but they’d realise they didn’t. She’d be revealing herself, letting them see who she really was, and the thought that they might be disgusted was naturally terrifying. Carly herself had been fortunate – her parents and brother and sister had taken it completely in stride, and she’d felt bad later for worrying that they wouldn’t, as if to even think that of them was to let them down. But she’d heard enough stories of the opposite reaction to know there were plenty who didn’t have it so easy, and she remembered in stark detail her own anxiety before she told her family, despite having decided that she was who she was and that she would walk away from them if they rejected her.
Maybe Linsey would never be able to out herself; or maybe she would, but not yet. And that was okay. Carly loved her no matter what. In or out, Linsey was the person she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. She thought of how caring she’d been last night. She thought about the married reference too.
She wouldn’t go to Manly today, but she needed to distract herself somehow, and a plan started to form in her head.
She heard Zoe leave. Linsey led Maya into the bathroom and shut the door, talking loudly about cleaning teeth. Carly pushed her feet into her runners and lifted her keys, phone and wallet off the dresser, then eased open the bedroom door. She sneaked to the kitchen, pausing to draw a smiley face and write
come over later
on the notepad high up on the fridge. She opened the front door, checked that Zoe and her car were nowhere in sight, and crept out.
*
Robbie Kimball’s car hadn’t been located overnight, nor had the man himself gone home. Ella thought they’d check his work then take another run at John Morris, but Dennis shook his head. ‘Noela Cross called back.’
On the drive to her home in Ermington, Murray said, ‘I see Alistair McLennan’s in hospital.’
Because Callum had been an MP at the time of his father’s arrest, the case had been high profile. Ella hadn’t been surprised that the stabbing had made the morning’s news.
‘Yep,’ she said.
‘Shanked in the shower.’
‘Something like that.’
She kept her gaze straight ahead but from the corner of her eye saw him glance across.
‘That must be tough,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said, grateful for the sympathy in his voice. ‘It is.’
*
Noela Cross lived in a red-brick duplex with a faded green awning pulled low over the front window and one of those multi-holed terracotta herb pots on her narrow patio. All the herbs were dead, the soil dry and cracked. Dead leaves had collected in the corner of the patio by the door. The air smelled of cigarette smoke.
Ella pressed the buzzer and smiled at the peephole.
‘Who is it?’
‘Detectives Marconi and Shakespeare.’ She held up her badge. ‘You spoke to our boss, Dennis Orchard?’
Silence. Ella felt they were being inspected, assessed. Then locks turned and the door opened.
‘Come in,’ Noela Cross said.
The curtains were drawn, the only light in the dim and smoky room coming from a reading lamp by an armchair and a flatscreen TV opposite. Cross picked up the remote and turned off the breakfast program.
Ella knew she wouldn’t be able to see her notebook, let alone write in it in the poor light, and motioned to the switch by the door. ‘May I?’
‘Go ahead.’
In the cold brightness of the fluorescent bar Ella saw that Cross was a fleshy woman in her early thirties. She wore sagging ugg boots, faded jeans and a long-sleeved sloppy joe with
NYPD
stamped on the front. Her dark hair was wispy and hung in her face, and she brushed it back as she gestured for Ella and Murray to sit.
‘Thank you for getting in touch,’ Ella said.
‘When I realised it was about John Morris I had to.’ Her voice was hard. She brushed her hair back again. ‘What’s he done now? Who’s he raped?’
‘Nobody,’ Ella said.
‘But he’s done something, hasn’t he?’
Ella smiled. ‘Can you tell us a little of what happened between you?’
‘Between us. Shit.’ Cross got up and lit a cigarette. ‘That makes it sound like a romance. Nothing happened
between us
– he assaulted and raped me.’
‘I’m sorry for my choice of words,’ Ella said.
Cross flapped a hand in the smoke. ‘I wouldn’t have known what to say either until it happened to me.’ She sat again and crossed her ankles. ‘It goes like this: Morris was a creep from the day I started working with him. We were introduced, and he looked me up and down and I could see in his eyes what he thought. I overheard him calling me a dog that same day. I know I’m not the most attractive woman in the world, and hey, that’s how it goes, we can’t all be Scarlett Johansson. But I can work very fucking hard, so that’s what I do. I decide to be the best hardest-working cop ever, the best this guy has ever seen. I study, I ask questions, I watch and listen and soak it all up. How does he respond?’ She took a deep drag on the cigarette. ‘He mocks my questions. He belittles me in front of other cops. He gives me deliberately wrong instructions then laughs or yells when I follow them. I try to talk to him sensibly, like adults, mano a mano, but he tells me I’m oversensitive and have to toughen up. This in the same station where a little blonde girly-girl officer cries when some drunk yells at her and the boys trip over themselves to comfort her.’
Ella knew exactly the kind of thing she was talking about.
‘So I think, okay, all right, if I have to be one of the boys, I will. So I come at it harder. I confront him. I shout. I
insist
that he listens to me and acknowledges what he’s doing. I behave like a man demanding respect from another man.’ She squashed the butt in a saucer full of them and lit another. ‘Like a fool, I do this on a nightshift when we’re in the car. I thought it’d be better there than in the station with people around; I thought he might feel like he was losing face that way. I considered his feelings, can you believe that?’
Knowing what was coming, Ella felt her scalp tighten. Murray sat motionless beside her.
‘So.’ A deep, deep drag. ‘Dark night, we’re alone in the car, he’s driving. He hasn’t said anything while I’m shouting. At first I think I’m getting through to him, then I see his muscles working, here.’ She pointed to the side of her jaw. ‘He’s clenching his jaw, and he’s driving us into some backstreet, roaring down there like he knows exactly where he’s going. He stops and turns everything off and I realise I’m in trouble. I try to get out but he grabs me, which is how I get the bruises on my back. He pulls his weapon and presses it under my chin and says he could shoot me and make it look like a suicide and everyone will say how they knew I was never cut out for the job, that they could see I was never going to be able to hack it.’ Her fingers trembled on the cigarette. ‘I did what he said. Got in the back seat. He raped me. I shut my eyes. He made me open them. He held the gun on me with one hand and had his other fist up, like this.’ She held it up, balled tight, white at the knuckles.
Ella couldn’t breathe.
‘He fake-punched, and when I flinched he laughed. He watched me get dressed afterwards,’ Cross said, staring at her feet. ‘He said nobody would believe me. He said, look at yourself, you’re pig-ugly, who’d want to rape you? He said if I told anyone anything he’d tell people I asked him for it and he gave me one out of pity.’
The back of Ella’s neck burned with anger.
‘He drove us back to the station, and I went to the shift supervisor and reported him straight away. I went to hospital and they did the rape kit, took photos of the bruises, the lot. He stuck to his promise, said I’d asked for it, that the bruising was from the drunks we wrestled in a pub arrest just before, because even though we screwed he wasn’t into hurting women, no siree.
‘The talk started. People oinked and woofed behind me. Bosses asked if I was sure about what had happened, said this kind of thing was divisive in a station and looked bad for the service.’
‘Jesus,’ Murray said under his breath.
‘They rostered me with another guy, but he was on Morris’s side.’ The cigarette had burned down to her fingers and she started and stubbed it out. ‘Morris said I was failing and the complaint was blackmail to force him into passing me. He said I’d planned it all, and between my lack of vaginal injury, which fucking everyone seemed to be talking about, and his story about the bruises, nobody believed me.’
She stood up. ‘Give me a minute. I always need to wash after talking about that.’
‘Take your time,’ Ella said. When the bathroom door closed she turned to Murray. ‘That arrogant little prick.’
He dry-washed his face with both hands. ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘He wanted to punch her,’ Ella said. ‘He knew Alicia knew about his dealing, and that she might not keep quiet after they broke up. This is it, this is fucking it.’
‘We have to help her,’ Murray said. ‘He can’t do shit like that and not pay.’
‘We’ll get him for both,’ Ella said.
Noela Cross emerged from the bathroom red-eyed and drying her hands on her shirt. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘Don’t be,’ Murray said, startling Ella with the force of his voice. ‘Don’t be sorry.’
‘You believe me.’
‘We’re going to get him for you,’ he said. ‘I mean it. Whatever it takes.’
‘You’ve helped us with our other case too,’ Ella said. ‘Thank you.’
She wanted to say more, to comfort and reassure this woman who’d just wanted to do her job, to say she’d done well here. But it sounded patronising even in her head, and she saw a glimmer of pride in Cross’s eyes and didn’t want to do a single thing that might change that.
*
Ella called Dennis to tell him what Noela Cross had said. ‘Is Morris rostered on today?’
‘He was, but he called in sick,’ he said. ‘He’s not answering his phone, and his flatmate said he went out earlier this morning. He hasn’t heard from him since.’
Ella frowned at Murray. ‘No sign of Kimball either, I take it?’
‘Nothing,’ Dennis said.
‘We’ll go talk to his sister then.’
The traffic was a constant drone as Ella knocked on Tessa Kimball’s door, Murray standing one step down behind her. It took two minutes for Tessa to answer – during which time Ella wondered how Callum’s dad was going, whether Callum had seen her text – then less than a second for the scowl to fill her face.
‘Heard from Robbie yet?’ Ella asked.
Tessa folded her arms. ‘Why would I?’
‘Because he’s still not turned up at work or at home,’ Murray said. ‘Mind if we come in?’
‘I do actually.’
‘It’s just to talk,’ Ella said.
‘I’m busy. And my mum’s not well.’
‘How about we just ask her if she’s heard from him?’
‘She hasn’t,’ Tessa said.
Ella noticed that she was making no move to close the front door. ‘In that case we’re going to need you to come to the office.’
‘What for?’
‘Follow-up statements on Alicia’s case.’
The scowl deepened. ‘I can’t. Like I just said, my mother’s sick.’
‘It’s important for the investigation,’ Ella said.
‘Why, have you figured out who did it?’
‘Maybe,’ Ella said, watching her face.
Hesitation. A glance over her shoulder. ‘I can’t leave my mother.’
‘Does Robbie look after her when you’re at work?’ Murray said.
‘Sometimes,’ Tessa said.
‘When was he last here?’
‘Tuesday night.’
‘Why?’