Death Delights (24 page)

She smiled at the word I’d used, and pleased, pushed me back onto the bed so that her silky hair fell against my face and neck, and her sandalwood scent filled my nostrils even more. Then she was undressing me and all the time my body was saying yes, my mind was saying no, asking questions. Was it a genuine situation, coming from the fear of rejection? Or was it just a way for her to get me into her bed? My interest in Alix had been purely physical, but the woman now in my arms had drawn me to her with more mysterious filaments. Finally, I got to the stage where my brain stopped its interrogation. Just for the moment, I no longer cared.

‘There are condoms in the table beside the bed,’ she whispered. We spent the rest of the afternoon in bed while our sandwiches staled and the tea turned sour and cold in the pot downstairs. Outside, in the old fruit trees and rose canes, noisy mynahs called, ‘
Careful! Careful! Careful!
’

I lay back while Iona massaged every inch of my body with sandalwood oil. Again and again I returned to her, and each time she responded.

‘I want you to know me,’ she whispered, as our eyes locked together. ‘I want you to see right into my soul.’ No woman had ever said anything like that to me before and even though I was physically finished, my body felt light and weightless.

Later, we lay back, she with her head on my chest and her hair spread around while I stroked her back and her arm, and the room grew darker. It was then I noticed that there was something hidden behind the curtains to the left side of one of the french windows. A piece of furniture, I thought. A table and chair.

‘I feel I’ve known you for quite a while,’ she said. ‘I felt that straightaway about you.’

I couldn’t tell her the truth, that I’d been keeping an eye on her for some time, that I’d stolen a desperate prayer she’d left under a statue, that I knew she’d made two anonymous phone calls to the police. That even now, while she was believing that I was a kind man, she was, in fact, the subject of my investigation.

‘I want to know what happened to you,’ I said. ‘That cut on your breasts.’ She sat up, throwing her hair back, holding her breasts with her two hands, examining the scar that ran across them, almost like the line of an evening gown.

‘Glass,’ she said. ‘I was running down some stairs and I didn’t see a glass door. I ran straight through it. Stupid of me.’

I let that go for the time being. ‘It must have given you quite a shock,’ I said, smiling to myself.

‘You’re smiling,’ she said. ‘I can hear it in your voice.’

‘I feel good,’ I said, and it wasn’t a lie although it wasn’t the reason for the smile. ‘I haven’t felt this good for a long time.’

‘I don’t normally behave like this with men,’ she said, but I turned over towards her and laid two fingers gently against her mouth, looking into her shadowed eyes.

‘It’s not my business,’ I said, ‘how you behave. You don’t need to say anything.’

I reminded myself why I was here. Invisible interrogation, Bob used to call it. The mutual membership Iona and I shared in Relations Anonymous as well as the fact that we were in bed together gave me the right to make enquiries that, in other cases, may have seemed too probing. I rolled onto my back again.

‘Tell me something about yourself,’ I said casually. ‘Do you have a family?’

She stroked my arm and I liked the feeling. ‘I don’t have children,’ she said. ‘And my parents aren’t around any more.’

‘No husband?’ I asked, fishing. She shook her head.

‘Why not?’ I said.

‘Let’s just say I had another interest,’ she said.

‘A married one?’ I asked, wondering if this was the problem in her life. Some women, I realised, put their lives on hold waiting, year after year, for some forsworn man.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not like that.’

Now I had her. Her use of the present tense suggested to me that the situation was ongoing. I was thinking of how best to take this further when she sat up, modestly pulling the sheet across her breasts and most of the scar. ‘Did I tell you already that my father was a clergyman?’

I nodded. ‘You said he was studying for the priesthood. On the island of Iona, but he met your mother. When you were telling me about your name.’

She was silent for what seemed a long while, then she started stroking my neck and shoulder. It tickled a bit but I didn’t tell her. I didn’t want her to stop.

‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said, ‘but did you know that over seventy per cent of the members of those European terrorist organisations in the ’70s like the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof groups were the children of Protestant clergymen?’

I admitted I didn’t.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘and that the great gunsmiths like Browning and Gatling were also the sons of clergymen?’ There was a passionate tone to that voice of hers.

‘Why do you think that might be?’ I asked, still enjoying the half-irritating movements of her fingers on my skin.

‘Because being a clergyman’s child means that certain things are forbidden,’ she said. ‘Certain ordinary human things.’ She paused a moment before continuing. ‘Or at least the expression of them is forbidden.’

‘Such as?’ I asked, wondering why she was telling me this.

‘Anger, for instance,’ she said. ‘Anger is one of the seven deadly sins. When I was growing up, childhood misdemeanours were offences against God. Everything was a sin. My mother was always telling me that things weren’t “nice”.’ She moved away from me a little.

‘It’s quite true that a lot of life isn’t nice,’ I said to her.

Iona shook her head. ‘That’s not what my mother meant,’ she said. ‘She was referring to the ordinary everyday things’—she briefly covered my penis with her spread fingers—‘things like this. Normal body functions. It was very difficult,’ she said, taking her hand away, and I sensed from her voice that she’d closed a door on something. I lay there, wondering what Charlie would have to say about her conversational jump from parents to terrorists.

‘What about yours?’ she asked. ‘Your family? Your father?’

I lay back, considering. ‘My father was .
 
.
 
. is .
 
.
 
. a science teacher.’ I thought of him in his shed behind the house at Springbrook and realised that soon I’d probably have to visit him.

‘What do the children of science teachers become?’ she asked and her voice had lost its serious undertone and was now more playful.

‘They become kids who believe—this one believed—they can understand the language of birds.’

‘Like Merlin,’ she said. ‘Where do you work?’

‘I used to work in Canberra. For the government,’ I said. ‘I’m currently reviewing my life. I analyse things.’

‘What sort of things?’ she wanted to know.

‘Particles,’ I said. ‘Fragments.’

‘It sounds very refined work,’ she said. It was a very accurate remark. ‘And your mother?’ she was asking. ‘Did she have a profession?’

‘Not what you’d call a profession.’ It was an obsession, and one that I understood more than most people. ‘My mother…’ I paused. ‘My mother was also a teacher at one stage, but she had a drinking problem.’ I was getting uncomfortable with this conversation. I had never liked talking about my family. ‘What about brothers or sisters?’ I asked, to move away from the subject of my family.

Iona stretched over, reaching to get her robe from where it lay, half on a chair near the bed, half on the floor. ‘I have a couple of cousins,’ she said, draping the robe around her shoulders. There’s got to be a man around, I thought, creating a problem for her. An ex-husband. Or lover. I knew enough from my days in the job about the way some men can behave when a relationship comes to an end. And I knew first-hand how some women behaved in the same situation.

‘It can be a real problem,’ I said, fishing cautiously, ‘when one party doesn’t want the other to go. I’ve just been through that myself.’ I rolled over to face her, stroking a shining strand of hair that glossed the side of her face. ‘Something you said at the meeting,’ I said, remembering her desperate prayer, ‘made me wonder if you were going through that particular problem.’

She propped herself up on an elbow and looked down at me. Strike one, I thought to myself. Her whole demeanour had changed.

‘I didn’t think I’d end up in bed,’ she said with a laugh that I didn’t like very much, ‘with someone from one of the meetings.’

It was a warning to keep my distance. She’d steered me away from the subject. It was like a dance between us, me seeing how close I could go before she’d deflect me.

‘Do you have any kids?’ she asked.

I realised I wasn’t getting anywhere with the subtle approach, so I lined her up for a direct shot. ‘I have a seventeen-year-old son,’ I said, ‘who is in Year Eleven.’

She nodded and murmured, waiting for more.

I moved closer and looked straight into her eyes; I didn’t want to miss anything that might happen there. ‘And,’ I said, ‘a sixteen-year-old daughter who is in Intensive Care.’ I saw her flinch, and yet recover so quickly that had I not known already about her calls to Chris Hayden, I might have thought her response was no more than that of any compassionate stranger.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘how awful.’

‘It is awful,’ I said, carefully choosing my words. ‘She was found unconscious in someone else’s flat. She’d overdosed. So far, she hasn’t regained consciousness.’

I thought of the money hidden under my bedroom floor and made a decision it had to go from there, and soon.

Iona was edgy now. She sat up and swung her legs out of bed but I pulled her down to be beside me again. She looked startled, unsure of what was happening. Her robe had fallen aside.

‘You should have given me a better explanation for this,’ I said to her, running my forefinger along the scar. ‘Shark attack would be more credible.’

I watched her colour as she jumped up again, hastily grabbing the robe around her body. Contact injuries such as she’d described occur at the leading edges of the body—the forehead, the nose, the hands—and not in its concavities, under chins, in eye sockets. Just like people who lie about walking into doors to explain black eyes, Iona’s story contained no element to account for how a recessed area, such as the area
beneath
her head could have been injured. If she’d really run into a glass door, she’d have had facial injuries and other cuts.

Now her voice was cold. ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ she said. ‘Please feel free to have one when I’ve finished but then I’ll have to ask you to leave. I have rather a busy evening ahead.’

I kept up the pressure. ‘You said you trusted me,’ I said. ‘And in return you lied to me.’

She half-turned on her way out the door. In the dim light, I couldn’t help noting that the curve of her powerful body as she twisted back, away from the direction she was moving, would have made a beautiful charcoal study.

‘It’s ancient history,’ she said, ‘and none of your business.’

I was about to say I wished in future she’d say just that, rather than insult my intelligence, but I seriously doubted now that there’d be any future for us. Was Iona one of those deeply masochistic women who stay with men who ill-treat them? I’d met some of them over the years when I was getting sober and I’d come to understand how they might derive feelings of superiority and even nobility from this distorted behaviour.

I sat up. A heavy feeling of depression and sadness enveloped me in the darkening room. I had a sudden moment of clarity and it was less than comforting. The whole Iona interlude, my strong attraction to her, the way I’d followed her, our lovemaking, was nothing but an escape from the sadness and confusion of my life. I tried to tell myself this with conviction. All I’d needed to find out from her was how she’d known the whereabouts of Jacinta. But now that Jass had come back, everything had changed. The need to know had dropped from absolutely essential to idle curiosity. It was just good fortune that Jass had turned up when she did because I’d allowed emotional issues to get in the way of business—a trap as old as law enforcement and I’d fallen straight in. It was humiliating.

I got up, listening to her shower rattling through the pipes of the old house, wanting to be out of the place as soon as possible. I pulled on my clothes and it was when I was searching for one of my shoes that I pulled back the curtain to reveal an elegant Victorian lady’s desk in an alcove beside the windows. I found the shoe and was about to push the curtain back when something caught my attention. On the desk was an old-fashioned bottle of ink. Intrigued, I picked it up. I heard the silence as the shower stopped. She’d have to dry herself, I reasoned. I had a few minutes. It was then I slid open the shallow drawer at the front of the escritoire and saw the expensive, linen-based paper. I looked at the bottle of ink again. The manufacturer’s name was printed on it in filagree lettering:
Les Frères Brunairds, Paris,
and before I’d even unscrewed the lid, I knew the colour of the ink would be sepia black. For a second I froze. Then I told myself to stop being paranoid. Lots of people have fancy notepaper. Lots of people like extravagant inks. There was nothing to say that this was the ink and this the paper on which the ‘Rosie’ letters had been written, except my imagination. And it was working overtime. This very minute, the killer could be on her way, with the knife.

First I froze, then I was frantic with terror. She’d lured me up here to kill me. I recalled how helpless I’d been in her bed and remembering that restored me somewhat. If she’d wanted to kill me, she’d have done so already. But my hands were still trembling so much as I unscrewed the lid that I thought I might tip the ink all over myself. Somehow I managed to press it upside-down against some of the stiff paper, pour some out, fold it up and safely take a sample. I scrambled to the cedar wardrobe and pulled it open. There in front of me was a red jacket and, lying on a shelf above the hanging space, was a wig of long blonde hair.

Almost in the same moment I heard Iona coming back down the hall. I barely had time to shut the wardrobe and bend down so as to be seen harmlessly tying my shoelaces when she came back into the room. I hoped she wouldn’t notice that the curtain over the escritoire was hanging at a different angle. All the time I’d been trying to draw her out, had the shoe been on the other foot? She wrapped the towel around herself, then came over to me. I stood up fast.