Death Delights (27 page)

‘What do you want?’ he said, exhaling, and his voice had the dead rasp of a heavy smoker.

I decided to go straight in. ‘I’ve heard you’ve had a letter. Maybe more than one,’ I said, ‘from a young woman called Rosie McCain. A dancer in a nightclub.’

His head jerked up. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong,’ he said. ‘You’ve got no right to poke your nose in my personal business.’

‘And I’m willing to bet you had a visit from a priest. Father Dumaresque?’

Francini’s face showed me I’d made a direct hit.

‘You might as well tell me about it,’ I said. ‘You see, I have reason to believe that same priest visited other men with similar or related interests to yours. And as soon as they got out of gaol, those men were murdered.’

Francini paled. ‘I read the papers,’ he said, greatly subdued. ‘You don’t think the father killed them?’

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘The father visited me. Just the once. I didn’t know him. He said he’d read I was a Catholic in the newspapers and might need some spiritual counsel.’ Francini lowered his voice. ‘He told me there was a parishioner of his, a young woman who wrote to lonely men in prison. He told me a few things about her. I was interested. I said I’d like her to write to me.’

‘How long ago was this?’ I asked.

Francini shrugged. ‘About a year.’

‘And?’ I prompted.

‘She wrote.’ He shrugged again.

‘What would she say to someone like you?’

Francini looked offended. ‘She said she knows what it’s like—’

‘“—to be locked up”,’ I quoted, ‘“year after year, at the mercy of your gaolers”?’

Anton Francini’s jaw dropped and he sat there, staring at me.

‘I need to see those letters.’

‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve destroyed them. She said to.’

‘We’ll see,’ I said.

He spun round in his seat and then stood up. ‘I want to go back to my cell,’ he called to the prison officer who was standing near the door.

But it was too late and he knew it. Ron Herring was approaching down the corridor. He gave me the thumbs up. ‘We found what you said we would,’ he said to me, holding up two envelopes.

Anton Francini looked first at the superintendent and then back at me, confused, angry and frightened.

‘I spoke to Assistant Superintendent Herring,’ I said, ‘before I saw you, and he has guaranteed you a carton of cigarettes a week if you cooperate with something we’re planning.’

‘A carton a week?’ he repeated, looking at Ron Herring.

‘That’s right, Francini,’ said Ron. ‘And a transfer to another prison.’

‘All you’ve got to do,’ I said, ‘is let Mr Herring know the time and the place that Rosie suggests for a meeting in her next letter.’

‘What letter?’

‘The one I’m tipping you’ll get in a few days,’ I said. ‘If you agree to do as we suggest.’

Anton Francini looked from one of us to the other.

‘Like another smoke?’ I asked.

•

Two days later found me driving south again, with two more ‘Rosie’ letters, this time in their envelopes, for Sarah to examine. They were franked ‘Kings Cross’ but now I wasn’t too concerned about tracking the killer through the letters. Already the rumour mill was churning. Beside me on the passenger seat was the newspaper with Merrilyn Heywood’s column. Ms Heywood was very concerned, she wrote, to hear that child-killer Anton Francini was due for release in the next few days.

When I knocked at Sarah’s office door, she opened it and glanced through the items in their respective bags.

‘See what you can get off these,’ I asked her.

‘While you’re here,’ she said, ‘I talked to Hugh Fullerton about the content of the anonymous letters you gave me to examine. In his opinion, it’s very likely a woman. She has a good educational level, yet feels aggrieved in some way.’

‘How would he come to that conclusion?’ I asked. Although certain people in our game and in the legal world regard both handwriting analysis and content analysis as something of a ‘black art’ and not to be taken too seriously, I knew how helpful these investigative tools could be. And very valuable later in court. I remembered the famous cross-examination of a revered document chief who, when asked how many qualified document examiners would reach the same conclusion as him, replied: ‘All one hundred and thirty of them.’

‘The use of “care”, for instance,’ Sarah was saying. ‘It’s usually a woman’s word and rarely used in this context by a male.’ The natural light of a summer afternoon flowed into the room while Sarah continued to educate me in the finer points of forensic linguistics and how these can give valuable clues about the sex, age and schooling of the letter-writer. Sometimes, even their profession.

Sarah picked up some notes and frowned as she read. ‘He also said that letters that begin “You don’t know anything about me but I know everything about you” generally come from someone who resents her perceived position
vis à vis
the recipient.’ I tried to think of someone in that position relative to me, but failed.

Sarah puzzled over something Hugh had written, then worked it out. ‘She perceives herself to be unfairly treated, humiliated even, by people—or a person—whom she believes see themselves as superior to her. Of course it’s all her projection, but she doesn’t see that.’ Sarah paused. ‘He asked me to ask you if the person who received this had employed babysitters or cleaners? People like that who can move around the home like a member of the family, but who are distinctly
not
a member of the family?’

‘I’ll have to check,’ I said. We walked to the door of her office.

‘You’re very busy,’ she remarked, ‘for someone who’s supposed to be on leave.’

‘I can’t keep away from the place,’ I joked.

Then I felt something behind me. Years of living with Genevieve had sensitised me to the awareness of a hostile presence. I turned around. Florence, wearing a lot of black and silver, was standing in the corridor, just outside the door to her office, blocking my way.

‘That’s what I heard, too,’ she said, ‘except it wasn’t work that kept bringing you down here. It was an extra-curricular activity. And this particular extra-curricular was young enough to be your daughter!’ Her face contracted into a hateful glare and she disappeared into her office, slamming the door.

Sarah looked at me, embarrassed. ‘What was all that about?’ she said.

I shook my head, rattled. I suppose it hadn’t occurred to me till now that Alix had been somewhat on the youthful side. It hadn’t been her youth that had drawn me in, but rather her keenness.

‘She’s been really off lately,’ Sarah whispered to me as we walked past the slammed door with its nameplate almost falling off, crookedly pointing downwards.

I left Sarah at the door of her room and continued outside into the hot day. The air was spiced with the scent of eucalypts and filled with noisy mynahs’ alarm calls. I wondered if Florence Horsefall had it in her to write anonymous letters. I was seeing people in a different light these days. As, it seemed, they were seeing me.

On the way home, I found myself turning off at Annandale again, and driving down the tree-lined street where Iona lived. It was evening and I was tired from all the hours in the car. I got out and stretched my legs, out of view of number 293. Then, keeping well back and using the parked cars as cover, I made my way down the street until I was opposite the house. She wasn’t there. The car was gone and the place was locked up, blinds drawn. I crossed the road and looked around. It was that time in the afternoon where the lull occurs just before everyone starts coming home. I ducked into the driveway and sneaked down the side of the house, wondering whether some good neighbour was already on the phone to the police. I walked right round the place, coming out at the front again, near the tiled veranda under the top floor balcony where I’d been put out rather smartly only a day or two ago. I had a sense that someone was watching me and I looked up suddenly, expecting to see a face at a window. But nothing disturbed the curtains behind their french doors upstairs and nothing moved apart from the slight breeze that lifted the rambling rose canes against the southern side of the house. I walked back to my car and drove to the Police Centre.

•

‘Look what we’ve got,’ said Bob, passing me a letter. I sat down to read it.

Dear Anton,
it said,
I’m longing to meet you in person. I have to leave Sydney suddenly because of a family matter, but I can meet you straight after work on Thursday 27th November before I go. I like to go skinny-dipping at night to cool off, especially on these hot nights. Can you meet me at Coogee Beach,
about 1.30 a.m? I’d love to invite you home, but my flatmate makes a fuss if I have guests that late. I’ll meet you on the stairs behind the old fishing club at the north end of the beach. There’s a chance for some privacy there. I can’t wait to run my hands all over your body and feel your hands on mine. It will be so good.
’

It was signed, like all the others, with my sister’s name.

‘I’ve spoken to the boss,’ said Bob, ‘and he’s okayed the overtime. We can get people into position well before.’ He picked up the letter from where I’d placed it and looked at it again. ‘I’m going down there tonight with Ross Llewellyn so he can have a look around. Find the good spots for his blokes. There’s a tiny park there, as I remember, just north of the fishing club.’ He paused and looked at me closely. ‘Sure you want to go through with this?’ he said. ‘I could get one of the muscle-heads to do it. They’d jump at the chance.’

I shook my head. ‘No one else knows what I know,’ I said. ‘If it’s her, I’m sure I’ll know it straight away. I know how she moves, how she walks. And I’ll be waiting for her. I can wait till she’s right on me. And I’ll feel snug in the knowledge that Ross and his band of merry men are about to drop down out of the trees.’

‘What is it?’ Bob asked. He was looking closely at me.

‘It’s not this,’ I said, touching the ‘Rosie’ letter. ‘It’s life. My life. Things are very complicated at home just now.’

‘Take it easy,’ Bob said.

‘How do you do that?’ I asked.

Bob didn’t let me in on the secret but instead went back to his desk and picked up a folder. ‘Fingerprints have picked up a partial from the Guildthorpe crime scene.’ I remembered the doctor of theology lying in his blood on his Persian rug in his mansion in Woollahra and the staccato screams from the invisible woman upstairs. ‘It’s being enhanced. Smiley Davis reckons there’s a good chance they’ll get enough to run a match on it.’

‘If whoever did it has a record,’ I said, thinking of a woman who hid prayers under statues and made cucumber sandwiches. ‘Where was the print found?’

‘He’d been struck on the head with a heavy object.’ I remembered the livid wound on the head of the murdered man. ‘A brass firedog,’ Bob was saying. ‘It’d been wiped clean, but whoever it was missed some at the base.’

‘Keep me posted,’ I said.

I drove past Iona’s house again and there was still no sign of her car. I got out and deftly lifted the lid of her letterbox. Enough of a build-up to suggest the mail hadn’t been checked for a couple of days perhaps, but inconclusive. I was tormented by sexual images of her with another man, the violent man who’d driven her to seek the help and community of the Twelve Step program. My mind took over, running rampant as I imagined her in the ‘making up’ cycle of an ugly relationship, torrid love-making turning inexorably towards contempt and sometimes violence as the so-called ‘love’ aspect was replaced by the underlying hatred. I needed to talk to my brother.

•

Charlie made me lime and soda and sat down opposite me. The house seemed oddly quiet and the atmosphere was different, hot and oppressive despite the ceiling fan above our heads.

‘Siya’s staying with a girlfriend,’ said Charlie. ‘We had a fight last night.’ He bowed his head into his hands, pushed the hair off his temples and leaned back in his chair. ‘She actually picked up a knife. It was horrible.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and even though it sounded stupid, I was. Sorry that he was suffering, too.

‘I forget,’ he said, ‘that she grew up in a war zone. It’s affected her. I think I’m the only one with family issues.’

‘We’re both having family trouble,’ I said. Charlie went out to the kitchen and poured himself a black coffee from the percolator, switching off a Chistmas carol on the radio.

‘The Christmas compulsion,’ he said. ‘Every year, mindless lemmings in shops. Christ, it’s hot.’ He came back and sat down again. ‘You look shit,’ he said to me, as if he’d just noticed.

‘So you keep telling me,’ I said. ‘I’m not sleeping too well. And there’s this whole Rosie thing. It’s wearing me down.’ I wasn’t quite sure how to phrase the next thing I said to him. ‘I hate the sense that there’s something connecting our family with those mutilation killings. The name at the end of those letters is bad enough. Then Iona’s voice on the tape, the way she swerved away from what I suspect she was going to say and then tacked on that bit about Jacinta.’ I stood up and went down the short hall to the bathroom, ran the cold water and splashed it over my face and the back of my neck, trying to wash away the darkness that seemed to connect our family to violence and murder. I straightened up and groped for a towel and came back to where my brother was sitting. ‘I’m starting to think like you,’ I said, as I dried my hands. ‘I’m seeing these resonances as you call them. And I don’t like them at all.’ I sat back down opposite him. ‘I told Bob everything,’ I said. ‘Made a full and frank admission about me and Iona.’

Charlie looked at his watch then went into the kitchen and opened the fridge door, pulling out a plate of cold cooked sausages. ‘This is all I’ve got,’ he said, offering me a sausage. I declined. He took one and ate it in two bites. ‘I’ve got a client in twenty minutes. I’m going to have to push you out the door.’

‘I can’t get the woman out of my head,’ I said, hardly aware my brother had spoken. ‘I keep seeing her. With another man. Or luring men to their deaths. I’m going crazy.’

Charlie stopped chewing the sausage. ‘I think it’s an escape for you,’ he said.