Deserving Death (19 page)

*

The Vardys lived in Haberfield, in a sturdy brick house in a quiet street lined with flowering gums. The surveillance team were parked at the kerb a few houses away and Ella and Paul Li drove past without acknowledging them. Two older white Holdens, one a wagon, the other a sedan, sat on the Vardys’ paved driveway. The path to the front door of the house led along the side of the garage. The roller door was shut but the small side door was open, and Ella looked in.

‘Hello, Mark.’

He got to his feet, holding a miniature engine and a polishing cloth and looking unnerved.

‘We’ve come to talk to Anne,’ Ella said.

Vardy looked past them at the closed front door. ‘Please don’t tell her.’

‘We’ll do what we can.’

‘But you won’t promise anything.’ Vardy shook his head. ‘I should never have admitted it.’

The front door opened. ‘I thought I heard voices,’ Anne Vardy said.

She was in her late thirties with fading ginger hair cut to touch her shoulders. Her dark eyes were anxious, her jeans and pink blouse creased, and she looked like she’d been awake all night.

‘Thanks for agreeing to talk to us,’ Paul said as Mark turned away.

‘Well, we need to clear this up,’ Anne said. ‘Come on in.’

Ella and Paul followed her into a cream-carpeted living room where black armchairs were arranged around a flatscreen TV.

‘Can I get you something?’ she said. ‘Tea? Or coffee? Water?’

‘No, but thank you,’ Ella said. She and Paul sat down.

Anne took a chair facing them and tucked her hands between her knees. ‘I don’t know what I can tell you.’

‘How about we just start with some questions,’ Ella said. ‘You and Mark have been together some years, is that correct?’

‘Thirteen, and married for eleven,’ she said. ‘We met at work. I worked at Bankstown Hospital Emergency then and he would bring patients in. We’d laugh and joke. He asked me out. I was thrilled, I thought he was wonderful. I still do.’

Ella wondered if she’d feel the same when she found out about Mark’s affair with Maxine Hardwick. ‘Go on.’

‘We got engaged, and the wedding was lovely. So many hospital and ambulance staff were there. People said we were a match made in heaven.’ Anne smiled. ‘Eighteen months later, Hamish was born.’

Ella didn’t know they had children. Mark hadn’t mentioned any. She looked around for photos, but the frames on the sideboard stood at an angle away from her.

‘Poor little guy,’ Anne said. ‘The cord got compressed during the birth and he was brain damaged from lack of oxygen.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Ella said.

‘He’d lie among the other babies and they’d cry and he’d do nothing. We brought him home and he was like a little doll – eyes open but nothing really there. They said they didn’t know how long he’d live, but that he’d never walk or talk or eat, would probably never even know that we were there. People said we were foolish, that we’d only get attached. Mark’s own mother told him we should put Hamish in a home and forget him, have another, that we could never be a proper family with a child so disabled. But we thought, well, we’re smart people, we know a lot, surely between us we can help him. We set up our shifts so there was always one of us home with him, and researched the best way to support him with therapy and equipment and early learning, and he became our main job. Not that it was a job. You do whatever you need to for someone who you love.’

Ella wondered if that meant she was going to lie about whatever she knew of the wallet.

‘Go on,’ Paul said.

‘He did improve,’ Anne said. ‘He knew we were there, he would grunt along when we sang to him. He couldn’t smile but you could see emotion in his eyes. He knew us and he loved us, and we loved him, so very much.’

Past tense, Ella thought. Oh boy.

Anne looked at the carpet. ‘He got chest infections a lot. He couldn’t cough well, and was fed through a tube straight into his stomach’ – she touched her own abdomen – ‘and that site sometimes got infected as well. He’d go into hospital for IV antibiotics, and one of us would be with him all the time. He’d get better and come home, and we’d go back to our normal routine – the kids’ programs on the TV, lots of reading and singing, physical therapy. But he grew weaker, and the stays in hospital got longer and the time at home shorter. Then he got pneumonia, and they threw everything at it, every treatment they could, but his poor little body . . .’

Ella and Paul were silent.

‘We told him we loved him before they put him on the ventilator,’ Anne said eventually. ‘The last things he would’ve heard were our voices telling him that. Telling him he would always be our precious boy, and Mummy and Daddy loved him so much. It was the anniversary yesterday.’

‘We’re so sorry,’ Paul said.

‘He was five years old,’ Anne said, as if that was the final answer to everything.

Ella guessed that in some way it was. She paused, thinking about how to get the topic back onto Mark, how to bring up the affair after all that. How it felt rude to be thinking of those things when little Hamish’s death still hovered in the room.

‘That’s when Mark had the affair with Maxine,’ Anne said.

Ella almost fell off her chair. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘He thinks he’s good at hiding stuff but he’s not,’ Anne said. ‘It was all over his face. He also doesn’t have a good sense of smell, so he didn’t know her perfume was on him. Not much, but enough for me to tell.’

Ella tried to unscramble her thoughts. ‘How did you know it was Maxine?’

‘His face would change when he mentioned her name,’ Anne said. ‘His roster was on the fridge so I knew who he was working with. I saw how happy he was going off to work those shifts.’

‘And you never said a word to him?’ Ella asked, thinking of Mark’s worry that she’d find out.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s my husband. Because we’d been to hell and back together. Nobody knows me like he does, and nobody knows him like I do. Losing Hamish tore something out of him and I thought, if he needs this to help fix himself, then okay.’

To Ella it sounded disingenuous, if not ridiculously naive. ‘You know that Maxine was married too.’

‘I can’t say anything about the state of her marriage, but she must’ve had her own reasons.’

Ella studied her. ‘So you were fine with your husband sleeping with someone else?’

‘I wouldn’t say fine, but I understood. I made the decision that I’d accept it, because one day it would end and we’d go on with our lives. As best we could, I mean, after losing Hamish.’

Ella couldn’t decide if she was highly evolved or a downtrodden idiot.

‘You know that Maxine died,’ she said.

Anne nodded. ‘It was all over the news. Mark was upset. He told me they’d worked together and she was a good friend. I told him to cry all he wanted. We went to the funeral.’

‘Did you ever think he might’ve had something to do with her death?’ Paul asked.

‘Never.’

‘Not the slightest tiniest suspicion or doubt,’ Ella said.

‘No,’ Anne said. ‘He’s the softest and kindest-hearted man I’ve ever met. He has trouble at work sometimes when he has to give injections or straighten fractures – he hates hurting people even when it’ll make them feel better in the end. Hamish had bad nappy rash for years and Mark would change him so gently and with tears in his eyes. I was at that funeral and I know how much he was hurting.’

Still, Ella thought, to be so upset when the affair had finished five years ago?

Paul said, ‘Who has access to your garage?’

‘Mark, me, and because the lock is broken, technically anyone who wants to go in,’ Anne said.

‘Can you get from the garage into the house?’ Ella asked.

‘No. If you could, I would’ve paid someone to come out and fix it long ago.’

‘Why hasn’t Mark fixed it?’ Paul said.

‘He has trouble getting around to things like that.’

‘Even though his trains are in there,’ Ella said. ‘Anyone could go in and steal things or smash things up.’

‘It makes no sense, I know,’ Anne said. ‘I told him once that I’d fix it myself, but he said, no, no, he’d do it. I’m not great with handy things anyway. So I thought if he’d rather play with the trains than fix it, so be it.’

Ella considered her. Life was sometimes like that – you put things off even though you knew you shouldn’t, and you never imagined that you might look guilty or innocent for doing so.

‘Did you ever meet Maxine?’ she asked.

‘Once, at a station barbecue when Mark worked at Parramatta. That was before they started up. We took Hamish in his wheelchair and everyone made a big fuss of him. She seemed nice, like the others.’

‘Have you ever met Alicia Bayliss?’

‘A couple of times,’ Anne said. ‘Again, on social nights with The Rocks officers. We didn’t talk much. She seemed okay. I was sorry to hear that she died.’

‘Did you ever notice Mark’s face change when he mentioned her name?’ Ella said.

‘No.’

‘Was he happy when going to work with her?’

‘There was never any difference.’

‘If you don’t mind me saying so,’ Ella said, ‘you sound like you’ve thought this through.’

‘When they found the wallet, I knew there’d be all kinds of questions,’ Anne said. ‘I thought everything through.’

Ella would’ve done the same. She said, ‘Had you ever seen that wallet before?’

‘Never.’

‘How often do you go into the garage?’ Paul asked.

‘Hardly ever,’ Anne said. ‘We park outside, and Mark does the oil and so on for the cars so I have no need to go in there.’

‘Could you guess when you went in last?’ he prompted.

‘A month or two. Something like that.’

Ella said, ‘Mark said you were at work on both the nights the women were killed.’

She nodded. ‘I remember coming home from nightshift and finding Mark in tears when Maxine died. And the other morning I was in bed asleep after my shift and he’d gone to Ikea to get bookshelves when Control rang to tell him about Alicia. He came home completely shattered.’

‘Did he ever have people visit when you were on nightshift?’

‘Not usually,’ she said. ‘He gets out there in the garage, puts on his music and builds those trains. I’m a bit the same with my scrapbooking and family history. I think it’s because we deal with people so constantly at work, it’s nice to be alone.’

‘Would you be bothered if we checked with your boss that you were actually at work on those dates?’ Paul asked.

‘Do what you like,’ Anne said.

‘You’ve thought about that too,’ Ella said.

Anne nodded. ‘I read a lot of crime novels.’

In which case, Ella thought, she had possibly guessed about both the surveillance and the tap on the phone, and if she was in cahoots with Mark she’d have warned him to watch his words and actions.

Twenty

C
arly drove into Mark Vardy’s street and slowed. She’d been to his place once before, for his fortieth birthday a couple of years ago, and knew it was the third house from the corner. Parked in the driveway was an unmarked police car, unmistakeable from close up with the emergency lights tucked down low on the dash, and further along the street sat a white van with tinted windows.

She’d wanted to talk to Mark’s wife, Anne, but now was clearly not a good time. She turned the wheel towards the city.

*

Lily was finally clean and dry and dressed in the fresh nightie, her hair shiny and still warm from the blowdrying. She walked shakily to bed with just one hand on Tessa’s arm.

‘I’m better already,’ she said.

Tessa helped her into bed and propped her up on the pillows. ‘How about a cup of tea and some toast?’

‘Sounds lovely, thank you.’

‘I’ll be back.’

Lily smiled. ‘I’ll be here.’

While the kettle boiled and the bread toasted, Tessa assembled the detox and rehab information she’d collected. She put the pamphlets on a tray along with the buttered Vegemite toast and their two cups of tea.

She took it into the room with a smile and a hopeful heart. ‘Here we go. I’ll just grab a chair.’

She came back to see the pamphlets had been turned face down and the quilt was rumpled, like Lily had been feeling around underneath it.

‘Looking for something?’ she asked.

‘Like what?’ Lily said.

‘Beats me.’

Lily squinted at the window. ‘Can you pull that curtain across? It’s very bright.’

‘Let’s leave it open for a little longer,’ Tessa said. ‘The fresh air’s good.’

Lily frowned but said nothing more. She lifted her cup with a trembling hand.

Tessa took hers and a slice of toast. She could feel her heart banging in her chest. Everyone at Al-Anon said to take it slow. ‘I’m really glad you said you wanted to get better.’

Lily sipped and didn’t answer.

‘I think about it a lot,’ Tessa went on. ‘I see people at work in terrible shape and I think about . . . I mean, what I mean is, I worry about you.’

Lily’s gaze was fixed on the wall beyond Tessa. ‘You said that before.’

‘And I think the best way to get better is to get some help. There are some really good places around here. You go and stay, they look after you, they help you get better. Then you come home and have a normal life again.’

Lily said nothing.

‘It’s like going to hospital when you’re sick.’

‘I am sick.’

‘Well, that’s why I think you should go.’

‘I’m not sick like that,’ Lily said. ‘I just need to rest.’

‘But you want to get better.’

‘And I will, when I rest.’

Tessa bit into the toast. It went down like a hard dry lump. ‘Mum, I love you.’

‘I know, and I love you too.’ Gaze still on the wall.

‘Will you at least read the pamphlets?’

‘I don’t think that’s necessary.’

‘To humour me?’

Now Lily looked at her. ‘You need humouring?’

‘Would you please just read them?’ Tessa could hear her own desperation. Everything had been so good in the bathroom. She’d felt like if this part of her life got fixed, she could cope with the rest. Now it was all collapsing again.

‘I’m too tired,’ Lily said. ‘Maybe some other time. Right now I need to rest.’

‘That makes me worry too,’ Tessa said. Caution to the winds. ‘All you do is rest. It’s not normal. A doctor needs to check you out. I think I should take you to hospital, right now.’

‘I’m not one of your patients.’

‘If you were, I’d be saying the exact same thing.’

‘But that’s the thing,’ Lily said, steel creeping into her voice. ‘I’m not.’

‘You keep telling me you’re sick, so let’s go get some help.’

‘I’m telling you I need rest, and to my mind that includes peace and quiet. And a closed curtain.’

‘I’ll get a doctor to come here then,’ Tessa said. ‘Lots do house calls around here. We’ll see what they say.’

‘You will not.’

‘Mum, you can’t even wash yourself.’

‘If you call someone here I’ll refuse to see them.’

‘That’s on you. I’ll pay their bill either way.’

‘No, listen, listen.’ Lily put her cup back on the tray and her hand on the pamphlets. ‘I’ll read them, okay? I will. I just can’t do it today. I’m tired out. I need to rest. But I’ll look at them tomorrow.’

Tessa stared at her.

‘Tomorrow,’ Lily said. ‘I promise.’

Tessa walked out. She should’ve known. She shouldn’t have believed. She went to the phone and picked it up, then put it down again. She’d been to homes where the patient wouldn’t speak to her, wouldn’t acknowledge that anything was wrong, and she knew how awkward and painful it was for everyone involved. But more than that, the person couldn’t be made to do anything as long as they had their wits about them. She’d ring a doctor to come here, and for what? To hear her mother tell lies and try to banter and then have the doctor come out of her room and shrug. The problem was clear. Her mother was an alcoholic and needed to stop drinking, that was all there was to it. Nobody could help.

Nobody could help her with anything.

She went into her own room and lay on the bed, feeling like if something didn’t change soon her head was going to explode.

*

The man in the front office of the CCTV control centre didn’t look particularly interested in Carly’s request to speak to Andrew Janssen. He picked up a phone and a few minutes later Andrew stepped out of a lift. His hair was combed, his shirt crisp and he smelled of fresh cologne. He was at the start of a new day and Carly felt like she’d been awake forever.

‘Did you hear about Mark?’ she said.

He nodded. ‘Let’s get coffee. You look like you need it.’

They found a cafe nearby. Andrew ordered for them then sat down, his knees bumping Carly’s under the tiny table.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

She waved it off. ‘Have you talked to him?’

‘He called me. He can’t understand what’s going on, how the wallet got there.’

She told him how the police had come to the station. ‘Was he under arrest when you spoke to him?’

‘No, he was back home.’

‘So that must mean they have no other evidence, right? They’d lock him up if they had something big, if they really thought he did it.’ Pinching her wrist under the table, Carly paused while the waitress delivered their coffees. ‘So that’s a good thing.’

‘Unless they’ve bugged his house and think he’s going to talk about it and drop himself in it,’ Andrew said.

‘Do you think they’d do that?’

‘They want a conviction. They’ll do whatever they have to.’

Carly opened three packets of sugar and stirred them in. ‘How did he sound?’

‘Stressed,’ Andrew said. ‘As you’d imagine.’

Carly nodded. The conversations of the people around them drilled into her head. She found it hard to think straight. ‘How could it have got there if he didn’t hide it himself?’

‘I guess that’s what the cops have to work out.’ He put down his spoon. ‘But listen, how are you doing? And Tessa – how’s she?’

‘I can’t begin to answer that,’ she said. ‘Did you talk to her yesterday at the Grove?’

‘Briefly. She was pretty wound up.’

‘She’s more wound up every day,’ Carly said. ‘And she won’t tell me why. I think something strange is going on.’

‘Like what?’ Andrew said.

Carly rubbed her forehead. ‘I don’t know. That’s the problem – I just don’t know. Everything was bad before, but now this thing with Mark.’ She shook her head. ‘Do you think he could really have done it? Because I just can’t see him ever hurting anyone.’ She gave in to the deeper fear. ‘But if they think he might’ve killed Maxine, they’ll be wondering about Alicia too.’

She thought about Mark turning up to Alicia’s house on the morning they’d found her, about his emotion last night. Grief and despair squeezed her chest.

Andrew placed his large hand over hers. ‘It’s okay to cry.’

She pressed the paper serviette to her eyes. ‘Nothing feels solid.’

‘Because you feel like you might not really know who he is.’

‘That’s it exactly,’ she said. ‘But you’ve known him for longer than I have; do you think it’s possible? I can’t even believe I’m saying that.’

‘Some people are good at hiding their true selves,’ he said. ‘Some people can hide like that for years. So I guess I don’t know.’

Carly folded the serviette and wiped her eyes again.

‘If he did it, the cops will find out,’ he said.

‘But Alicia will still be dead.’

She needed another serviette. More than one. Now that she’d started crying she couldn’t stop.

‘It’s okay.’ He leaned across the table and hugged her. ‘It’s all going to be okay.’

*

‘Think he did it?’ Ella said to Paul Li on the way back to the office.

‘Hard to say. You?’

‘I’m leaning to yes. Though it’s going to be a hard fight unless we get more. Dixon’ll grab onto that faulty door latch as doubt.’ The surveillance or the phone tap might turn up something, and the lab was examining the wallet for prints and collecting Vardy’s DNA from the swab sample.

When they reached the office Paul returned to the Hardwick files to reread statements from her neighbours, workmates and friends in the hope of seeing some scrap of information in a new light, while Ella went to her desk. If Mark Vardy hadn’t hidden the wallet in his garage, who had? Who might want to set him up, and why? Anne Vardy had a reason, but she seemed fine with his affair.
Seemed
could be the key word, though. Ella remembered a woman who’d asked to see her dead husband’s body and then punched him in the face. That had come completely out of the blue.

Murray sat at his desk. ‘So did Bayliss’s boss do it?’

‘That’s yet to be determined, grasshopper.’

‘Funny.’ He clicked his mouse and opened a file. ‘How was the birthday bash?’

‘Interesting in every sense of the word.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Just what it sounds like.’ She’d been careful with her make-up that morning and knew the slight bruise from the slap didn’t show, but still struggled not to turn her face away from his gaze. ‘How was your big event?’

‘Great,’ he said. ‘They ate her up with a spoon. Chatting, laughing. Dad even asked her advice about writing his memoirs.’

Jesus, Ella thought. That’s all we need: the life story of retired ex-assistant commissioner Frank Shakespeare, written down for the masses.

‘And Nan pulls me aside and says, you should marry that girl.’

Ella looked at him. ‘What’d you say?’

‘I said maybe I’m planning to.’ A blush touched his cheeks.

‘Really?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’ The blush deepened.

‘Coy really doesn’t suit you.’ She turned away and scowled at her monitor. ‘What did I miss at the meeting this morning?’

Murray straightened a few things on his desk before answering. ‘Kristen Szabo insists that Daniel Macintyre is the man who spoke to her and Bayliss in the club, even when shown the CCTV photos. So we’re staying on it to check his whereabouts on the night in question.’

They’d have to anyway, if he died, Ella knew, for the coroner’s brief. ‘And?’

‘No reply from Noela Cross, the woman Morris was training; various piddly things on the hotline; people are tracking down Morris’s neighbours and Robbie Kimball’s housemates to see who heard them come home on Sunday; and the Castro’s CCTV images of the blond guy have gone out, but nothing’s come back yet.’

‘That’s it?’

‘You sound like you think we do nothing when you’re not around.’

Before she could answer, Dennis walked in with a handful of CCTV prints.

‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘Taken the night Bayliss died, at 12.39 am.’

The first showed a service station, with cars at bowsers and people frozen getting in or out of their cars, pumping fuel, going to pay. Right in the middle was a man putting petrol into a car with a numberplate Ella recognised.

‘That’s Dave Hibbins’s car,’ she said.

‘So he was telling the truth?’ Murray said.

‘Yes and no.’ Dennis slid the image aside so they could see the next few.

Hibbins had paid, then driven out to the street but pulled into the kerb. The next shot showed a man leaning in the car door and something being exchanged.

‘He’s buying drugs?’ Murray said.

‘It would appear so,’ Dennis said.

Ella examined the image, then turned on her desk lamp and held the picture close.

‘Want me to find you some glasses, Grandma?’ Murray said.

‘I think this is Robbie Kimball,’ she said.

‘What?’ Murray said. ‘Let me see.’

She handed it over. ‘Round face, needing a haircut.’

‘Same slumpy posture.’ He frowned. ‘It could be.’

‘Start with Hibbins,’ Dennis said.

‘On our way.’

*

The radiology department at RPA wasn’t hard to find. The woman on the desk raised her eyebrows at their badges then asked them to have a seat. Ella and Murray stayed where they were.

The woman picked up a phone and spoke to somebody in a low voice. Ella watched the door at the back of reception, then glanced around the busy waiting area. She wasn’t sure from which direction Dave Hibbins would appear, but she wanted to be watching his face when he did.

When he stepped into the waiting area he looked neither startled nor surprised. Of course, she thought; the woman had told him they were cops and he’d taken a moment to compose himself.

‘This isn’t a great time,’ he said, gesturing past them at the collected patients.

He was a little pale. That was something, Ella thought.

‘Here or down at the station,’ she said.

He glanced at the woman on reception, who was watching with interest.

‘Come on back,’ he said.

He led them into an X-ray room and shut the door. ‘Could this really not wait?’

‘You brought it on yourself when you lied to us,’ Ella said.

Paler still. But he said, ‘I didn’t lie.’

Murray handed him a still shot of the man they suspected to be Robbie Kimball bending in the window of his car.