Death Delights (39 page)

I stared back at her, my mind coming to an amazing realisation as Florence spoke the words. ‘What you’re looking at are two clear and distinct individuals, both present in the Holden.’

Stunned, I looked at the screen, then again at the suspect’s graphical profile in my hand. Florence was right.

‘It’s the same person,’ said Florence, looking at the profile from the knife handle, ‘as the other person in the Holden.’ I watched while her fingers traced the peaks and troughs, pointing to the identical tabulation. ‘Identical result at every locus.’

We looked at each other. My mind was already unpacking the implications and I barely noticed that the fax on the bench near the fridge door had come to life and was churning out paper. Florence went to it, standing a moment to see what it was.

‘Here’s Jane’s result just coming through now,’ she said, ‘from the toothbrush.’

She tore the fax off and brought it back to me, glancing down at it herself. She frowned at the tabulated numerical sequences on the profile in her hand.

‘What is it?’ I said, alerted by her straining concentration. Florence held it up to me, speechless. The same peaks and troughs, the exact sequence of numbers as the profile shimmering on her screen and the same as the faxed result in my hand from the hilt of the knife.

There have been a few moments in my life when the ground beneath my feet seemed to shift and slip as if the fabric of the planet was dissolving under me. We had three perfectly identical samples from three totally different sources, the murder weapon, the toothbrush and one of the beer bottles from the Holden. Julian Bower had been at all three locations. For a second, the laboratory seemed to sway. I put out my hand to steady myself and Florence took it, holding me for a second. I now understood why Mrs Bower had lied to the police. I remembered ‘Julie B.’ in Bevan Treweeke’s list of ‘birdwatchers’. And the Bowers’ phone number in Treweeke’s book, which didn’t refer to the Reverend as Debbie Hale had thought, but to Julian.

‘It’s the same person,’ I said. ‘The murders. And Rosie.’

‘Yes.’ Florence nodded, forgetting her animosity in this moment of truth. ‘Julian Bower was in the car that took your little sister.’

I walked outside into the afternoon. Gangs of lorikeets shrieked overhead and the sun shone into my face, blinding me. Knowing part of what had happened was no comfort and I found myself standing stupidly in the yard with tears running down my face. Suddenly I was a quarter of a century away with my sister Rosie running up the backyard, away from our mother’s hateful words, out through the house and onto the footpath at the front where the Holden was about to snatch her up and take her out of our lives. But now, I knew who was in that car. When the car drove away with Rosie in it, the pedophile Bevan Treweeke had a younger companion, Julian Bower, with him, an adolescent boy whose mother, cleaning the windows in the tall rectory building at the corner, saw her son’s new car, the one he’d just acquired, collide with the white rails, and later, discovered that the same car was wanted in connection with the abduction of Rosie McCain.

I drove back to Sydney and it wasn’t until I drove past the stone walls of Long Bay Gaol that I realised I’d done almost the whole trip from Canberra on automatic pilot.

When I came in at the kitchen door, Charlie took one look at me, sat me down and made coffee while I told him and Greg about the DNA result. The man who stalked and killed men in Sydney, who wrote letters signed with our missing sister’s name, was the same man who’d taken Rosie. Now the reason why Julian Bower had signed the letters that lured sex offenders to their deaths with her name made sense.

‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘he was doing it to atone.’

Charlie nodded. ‘You’ve got it,’ he said. ‘He projected his guilt onto them and killed them. Because he’d done something similar and
he’d got away with it.’

I stood up. ‘Talk about projection,’ I said. ‘This is a classic case.’

Charlie agreed. ‘Julian Bower seeks out men like him, who look as if they’ve “got away with it” too, because they all had relatively light sentences for very serious offences. By punishing them, killing them, he somehow punishes himself, feels less guilty about his crime, about “getting away with it” and at the same time he feels self-righteous about it. Even superior. He’s doing the right thing, as he sees it.’

I frowned. ‘But, Charlie, I don’t fit his profile.’

‘He’d have to get you,’ said Charlie, ‘eventually. You’re an aggrieved person. It’s as if you stand pointing a finger at him throughout the years. The injured brother, then the frustrated investigator.’

Greg looked to the vacant spot on the wall where the photograph of the anonymous youth had been. ‘He must have freaked when he saw the old picture of himself on the wall,’ he said. ‘He must have thought you were right onto him and it was only a matter of time.’

‘But I didn’t know that,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that at all.’

‘He would have thought you did,’ said my brother. ‘More projection.’

I thought of what Rosie’s ghost had said when she came to me in the night: ‘Apply the new knowledge to the old.’ She hadn’t been talking about scientific breakthroughs at all—she was talking about our new understanding of the workings of the human mind. I suddenly remembered the old saying that for every finger you point at another, three fingers are pointing back at yourself.

I went to the shoebox of old postcards and photographs and took out the one of Rosie. ‘I’m going to get this enlarged and copied for each of you.’

Greg came over and gave me a hug, then he stepped back and looked at me. ‘You look tired, Dad. Look after yourself,’ he said. ‘We need you.’

The phone was ringing and I picked it up. It was Iona. I could hear the noisy mynahs alarming outside.
‘Help! Help! Help!’
they piped.

‘My mother’s died,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘I didn’t ring for sympathy,’ she said, ‘but to tell you that she kept saying your name.’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I know what she wanted.’

‘Can you tell me?’

‘I will,’ I said. ‘But you could tell me something. Do you remember any old postcards or photographs from your family that might have ended up in a secondhand shop?’

There was a slight pause before she answered. ‘After Dad died I did a lot of clearing out. Furniture, ornaments. Things like that. There were boxes and boxes of all the postcards he’d collected from his travels. There could have been old photographs mixed up in them. A fellow came up from the antique shop at Blackheath and gave me a cheque for the lot.’

I didn’t know what else to say to her. Sometime I had to tell her the awful truth about her brother. My heart had to get around the fact that she was the sister of the man who’d taken my sister.

‘I’ll call you,’ I said, ringing off.

Greg and Charlie decided to go to the pictures in town and Greg said he’d stay over at Charlie’s.

When they’d left I went to the carton my brother had foisted on me and stared at it. This was the moment I’d been putting off; I needed to get stuck into this now and clear it out of my life. For a long moment, I stood there, undecided. Reluctantly, I opened the top flap and peered in at the sight of my mother’s paraphernalia. My heart sank. The carton was filled with exercise books. I opened one and flipped through it. It was hard to read the writing, especially towards the end of the various entries, because I could quite easily see where the incomprehensibility of drunkenness was reflected in the indecipherable handwriting. Some bits she must have written in the darkness, because page after page was over-written in a tangle of scribble. Or blind drunk, I thought bitterly. The readable sections were the usual laments of the alcoholic: feelings of alienation, isolation, of being on the outside looking in, the general sense of betrayal by everyone and everything. I pulled out a few more of the books and skimmed through. More of the same. Give or take a few negative attitudes, it was something I myself could have written fifteen years ago. Lamentation, darkness and victimisation. I put the books back and closed the box. I knew now exactly what I had to do. I carried the box out to the recycle bin in the cypress-lined side passage, lifted the lid, and upended it, shaking it. Books poured into the bin except for one that escaped, falling open at my feet. I bent to pick it up, my eyes catching sight of something she’d put quotation marks around. The writing was execrable. But gradually I made it out.

After I’d read it, my eyes filled with tears and I leaned against the recycle bin for a moment. Then I tore out one page, folded it carefully, and put it in my pocket. Goodbye Mother, I said to her. I’m sorry things went the way they did in your life. I’m sorry things were never resolved for you and I’m sorry you died the way you did, unable to choose another way of living.

I was about to go back to the house, when I became aware of another presence signalled by four plaintive notes in the air. I looked around but couldn’t spot him. The kingfisher can sit motionless for as long as it takes to notice a slight movement in the grass or in the water. I waited for him to move but if he did, I didn’t see him. After a while, I went inside.

•

‘You can take her home,’ said the consultant, Andrew Somersby, when I visited the hospital the following day. ‘I mean that metaphorically,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘She’s adamant about not going back to her mother’s place, but she’s ready to leave.’

Jacinta was up, dressed and sorting through clothes and toiletries when I knocked on her door. She gave me a kiss and patted a chair for me to sit on.

‘I’ve just had a terrible fight with Mum’—she sighed, hands on hips ‘—again.’ Then she zipped up her washbag and handed it and a little overnight bag to me. ‘I wish I could get on with her.’

I was about to say that no one could, and not to worry, but I knew I was biased.

‘There’s no way I can go back and live with her again.’

‘What are you going to do?

‘I’ve talked with Greg,’ she said, ‘and I know he’s got reservations about me staying at your place.’

I looked at my daughter with renewed respect, pleased that she and her brother were starting to negotiate with each other in an adult way.

‘You’re always welcome to live with me,’ I said. ‘You two kids could have the bedrooms and I could get a daybed set up for the lounge area for myself.’ I went over to her and clasped her hands. ‘I’m seriously thinking of moving, anyway, because I want to take some long service leave and a few other things. This time next year, we might be living in a big house again.’

Jacinta shook her head. ‘I’ve been talking to some friends in NA,’ she said. ‘I’m going to the Sallies’ re-hab place near Brisbane. I’ll need some money, though.’

Amazing to think that with everything going on, I’d almost forgotten the matter of over two hundred thousand dollars. ‘I don’t know what to do about that money,’ I said. Jacinta laughed. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Just give it back to me.’ She scooped old flowers, bits of paper, sweet wrappers into a bin. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you’d better decide. Just give me what I need for the next six months and bank the rest. I’ll be able to make a better decision when I come home again.’

I sat on the chair and she sat on the bed. Her colour was back and there was a light in her eyes that I hadn’t seen before and although the arms that poked out of the pink tank top were pale and thin, there was no mistaking the strength of the spirit in front of me. Outside, I could hear white cockatoos shriek.

‘Being here,’ she said, ‘and being so out of it like I was—’ she looked around the small room ‘—was like a rapid de-tox. But I have to look at why I got into such a mess in the first place. If I don’t do that, I’ll end up using again.’

I nodded. I knew exactly what she meant.

‘I had to do the same,’ I said. ‘I’m still doing it.’

Jacinta laughed. ‘Yeah. You had a lot of stuff, too.’

I raised my eyebrows.

‘Your mother,’ she reminded me. ‘And your father.’ She hopped off the bed and went to the window. Outside it was a beautiful afternoon and noisy mynahs sang and swooped despite the traffic and filth of the city outside. ‘One day,’ she said, ‘I’d like to hear some of your story. Maybe do a meeting or two with you.’

I wanted to give her a hug, tell her that I didn’t blame her in the slightest for how she’d been living the last year and a half. I wanted to tell her that children learn addictions and neuroses from their parents, just as they learn language and other things. But now wasn’t the time.

She leaned forward out the window on her thin arms and squinted up at the sky. ‘The world,’ she said, ‘is such an amazing, horrific, astonishing place.’

All I could do was nod my agreement and pat her hand. ‘I’m staying at Charlie’s until I go to Brisbane,’ she said. ‘I’m flying up next week.’

‘How long will you be away?’

My daughter looked down at the street. ‘It’s a six month suggested stay,’ she said. ‘One month intensive and if people want to, they can stay up to a year. I’ll have to work on the place. It’s a farm.’

Like imagining Staro, I had difficulty picturing Jacinta carrying out the eggs and milking routine.

‘Would it help if I flew up with you? Helped you settle in?’

She smiled. ‘I think it would,’ she said. ‘I’ll think about that.’

‘It’s not going to be easy,’ I said cautiously. ‘Do you think you’ll be able to fit into that sort of environment?’

My daughter turned around to me and her face was suddenly old and tired. ‘I managed the environment of being a street addict,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t very easy either.’

I came over to her and put my arms around her then. My street addict was home and I kissed the top of her head. ‘What time do you want me to pick you up?’ I asked.

‘Don’t worry,’ she replied. ‘Charlie’s organised all that. He said come over and have tea with us tomorrow night. Be sure and bring Greg.’

•

I bustled around with salads and table-setting like a housewife, wearing an apron left in the kitchen by one of Charlie’s ex-girlfriends, while Charlie dealt with a baked lamb shoulder and rosemary potatoes. The two kids sat out on the timber deck and we brothers decided to leave them as much time alone as possible.

‘Here we are,’ said Charlie, piling the potatoes onto a plate and putting them back into a low oven. ‘Two crusty old bachelors again. Doing it hard.’

I smiled at that and heard Greg’s laugh from outside. He was standing against the railing looking down at his sister stretched out on the cane lounge chair, and she was looking up at him. They were talking together, laughing together.

I pulled out the piece of paper with our mother’s scrawled writing on it and passed it to him. ‘Here’s something for you,’ I said.

‘
If Claire hadn’t died,
’ Charlie read out loud, ‘
my life would have been very different. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
’ Charlie raised his eyes to mine. ‘Claire,’ he said. ‘There was a sister in our mother’s family who died. It could be her.’

I nodded. ‘It won’t be hard to check,’ I said. ‘And it’s not hard to guess what age Claire was when she died,’ I added.

We were silent together, each lost in thought. On and on it goes, I thought, generation after generation. Until somebody notices it.

Charlie came over to me and put his hands on my shoulders. ‘You’ve done a wonderful thing,’ he said. ‘Stopping the buck being passed.’

‘Shucks,’ I said. But I stopped my jokey awkwardness. ‘I can only hope it holds,’ I said to him. I changed the subject. ‘I’ve got all this money. Even if I go halves with Pigrooter, I’ll still have over a hundred grand.’

‘Why should you go halves with someone called Pigrooter?’ said Charlie. I told him the story. ‘I’ve thought about it,’ I said, ‘and I think it’d be fair to give you twenty-five, each of the kids twenty-five and put the rest away for a while and think about it.’ Charlie gave a funny little grin and cocked his head. ‘That’d be nice,’ he said. Then he started serving up the meal.

‘Come and get it!’ he yelled out the door.

Later, the four of us sat around finishing up the
rizogalou
, the rice and milk pudding that Siya had taught Charlie to cook. Greg and my brother shared some beers; my addict daughter and I sat with our mineral water and coffees. Jacinta looked more comfortable than I’d ever seen her. She’d always been an itchy, worrisome sort of child.