Eden (18 page)

Dollimore looked about to deny this, then said, ‘I—all right, yes, it was. I was trying to protect him,' he continued woodenly. ‘I suspected the appointment had something to do with the promise he'd made. I had to get to him first and find out what it was.'

‘Why didn't you tell the police?'

‘I should have, I know. I was going to, then I felt ashamed. If I hadn't rung the senator's office, Ed would have kept the appointment. He wouldn't have gone to that club. He'd still be alive.'

‘It would be easy enough for the police to find out.'

‘I thought they would. I keep wondering why they haven't asked me.'

‘Perhaps because they're satisfied that your friend's heart would have got him sooner, rather than later,' I said gently. ‘Was Carmichael going to recommend that Senator Bryant include
CleanNet
on his department's list?'

Dollimore's shrug said that this was a possibility he'd thought of and discarded.

‘You're thinking that alone wouldn't have accounted for Carmichael's distress.'

‘And McFadden didn't need it. He was doing a perfectly good job of lobbying on his own.'

‘Could someone have given Margot Lancaster some shares? If they were a gift, they wouldn't show up on ASIC's records.'

‘Yes, but who?'

We exchanged another glance. It was possible that Margot had been given shares by a grateful client, but the chances of either of us tracing such an individual were slight. And from what I'd seen of Margot, it seemed unlikely that she would have involved Eden Carmichael for such an indirect, elusive gain. Margot wanted to sell her club, and she might need extra money for some reason as yet unknown to me. But still.

‘All I can do is keep on looking,' Dollimore said in a voice that was suddenly exhausted.

A few minutes later, I showed him to the door and watched him walk away, hunched and slow, with none of his confidence or style.

I longed to get into my car, not stop or slow down, until I reached the sea. I went back to my office and typed up our conversation. I did not switch on any lights. The computer gave off just enough, and it was a story suited to the darkness.

Eighteen

I checked my email first thing the next morning, hoping for one from Ivan. Instead, there was a message from Andrew Glover, my contact at the Australian Securities and Investment Commission. He apologised for taking so long to get back to me, and for not being able to answer all my questions.

My eyes took in the two short paragraphs at once. Stan Walewicz had begun his movie business in 1991, taking advantage of the repeal of laws against the production and distribution of X-rated material in the ACT.
Artysta Limited
had operated until 1996, when he'd expanded, launched a website and a monthly magazine, and registered the new company under the name
Zabawka Entertainment
. The largest investment to
Artysta Limited
had been made through a trust fund in the name of Emily Purvis, Richard McFadden's wife.

I emailed Andrew back to thank him, and asked if anyone else had requested similar information from ASIC in the past few weeks. I also asked if he could find out what had happened to the trust fund.

When I phoned Lucy and told her the news, she said with satis­faction, ‘Got him!'

I asked her to keep McFadden's investment to herself for the time being. She argued with me; it wasn't my job to tell her what to do. I interrupted to say that I was building up a picture of connections between Walewicz, McFadden, and Simon Lawrence. It would make more impact once the full story was known, and if the lobby group accused McFadden publicly and prematurely, then they might lose the opportunity to get it.

Lucy wasn't happy, but I got her to agree to wait at least a few more days. I didn't think I'd been exaggerating, but it was possible that I'd learnt as much about the three men as I was going to, that there was no ‘full story'.

. . .

Brook dropped by at lunchtime, bringing a transcript of the inquiry into the death of John Edward Penshurst, who'd breathed his last in a Sydney brothel called
Full House
. My personal request to the NSW coronial office had been refused.

I was touched that, in spite of our differences, Brook was still taking the trouble to bring me material that I would not otherwise have access to.

He gave me a crooked smile and said that if I stayed home reading, I was less likely to get caught up in a car chase.

‘That reminds me,' I said, and told him about my conversation with Brian Picoult.

Brook asked me to put it in an email. I brought him up-to-date on what Ken Dollimore had told me, and the investment made in McFadden's wife's name, while he gulped down a sandwich and three cups of tea.

. . .

I read until my eyes crossed. The coroner had been tough on Evelyn Burns, alias Eve, alias Margot Lancaster, but a strength and steeliness came through her testimony, and the way that she presented it. I picked up more than a hint of pride in her professional abilities, in spite of the fact that she'd been having sex with a client when his heart had stopped.

John Penshurst had been forty-eight years old. Eve had not been aware that he suffered from any health problems. He'd been a heavy smoker. But so many people smoked in the early 1970s that this point, though mentioned, was not dwelt on by the coroner.

The post-mortem had revealed arteries so clogged with cholesterol that it was a wonder his heart had lasted as long as it had.

There was some dispute as to the time of death. Penshurst's sister claimed that Eve had waited too long before calling for help. It seemed the sister had conducted her own investigation. She'd spoken to the ambulance people, and the doctor who'd pronounced her brother dead on arrival at St Vincent's hospital. She'd questioned a girl who'd worked with Eve, who'd been at the reception desk when Eve had walked out and said she needed to call an ambulance. Eve hadn't run, nor had she seemed distressed.

Eve didn't come across as someone who was liked by her co-workers. Reading their testimony, and their answers to the coroner's questions, I was struck by the fact that no one spoke up for her. None of the girls who'd been at
Full House
that night offered evidence in support of her claim that she'd acted responsibly.

‘What was the point of getting into a flap?' Eve had asked at one point. ‘It wouldn't have helped him, would it?'

Had she been too proud to call for help? Hadn't she considered that it might be necessary, or at least prudent, to have one person on her side?

John Penshurst had been drinking before his visit to
Full House
. When asked whether she would describe him as drunk, Eve had replied, ‘More or less.' When asked to explain what she meant by this, she said many of the clients she saw were ‘tanked', or ‘half tanked'. It struck me as a phrase the Margot I knew would not have used.

John Penshurst had collapsed on top of her. She'd thought it was the booze. She'd had to struggle to get out from underneath him, believing he'd passed out, and wasting valuable seconds wondering whether it would be better to leave him to sleep it off, or try and revive him. She'd fetched a mug of water from the bathroom and thrown it over him, but he hadn't responded. She'd checked to see if he was breathing, and tried to find a pulse, then walked to the front desk.

The coroner had questioned her closely, making her go over every detail several times. She said she didn't know what happened when a person had a heart attack. No one had ever told her, but she'd had plenty of experience with customers who'd had too much to drink. How was she to know the difference? Because the coroner could accept hearsay evidence, Penshurst's sister had said things that would not have been permitted during a trial, repeatedly calling Eve a slut, a whore, a murderer. The coroner had reprimanded her, but hadn't shut her up.

I imagined Eve replying, deferential to a point, but determined to stand her ground. I pictured the dead man's sister abusing her, and her colleagues snubbing, or perhaps abusing her as well. I thought of her getting up in the morning to newspaper headlines shouting, ‘Guilty!'

The physical evidence—alcohol in Penshurst's bloodstream, extremely high cholesterol—had won the day. The matter had not gone to trial.

I needed to get outside, so I took Fred for a walk across the road. It was overcast and windy.

Back home again, I checked my mail. Andrew Glover had replied. He said that no one had approached him personally, but one of the other officers had received a request for information about
CleanNet
. I rang to ask if he could find out who, and he said sorry, he didn't think so. It would be a breach of client confidentiality.

I rang Brook, who'd glanced at the coroner's report, but not read it thoroughly.

We talked about it for a few minutes. Brook had already passed on the information I'd obtained from ASIC. I wondered if the police would apply for a warrant. I'd love to know who the other enquirer had been. I thought I had a pretty good idea.

‘Whoever chased me on the highway was warning me to back off,' I said. ‘My office was broken into, and my computer.
CleanNet
's investors won't want it broadcast that McFadden put money into porn movies, and that makes it difficult for them because the information's sitting there. Anyone can find it, provided they've got the authority, and they know where to look. And I've been told by my contact at ASIC that there
was
another enquiry.'

‘You're thinking of the Bishop girl?'

‘Why not? Lawrence and Walewicz go back a long way, and recently put that website together. Now it turns out there's a business connection between Walewicz and McFadden. Jenny Bishop hated Lawrence. What's to stop her paying someone to do the research, then challenging him with it? Maybe she even tried to blackmail him.'

‘But there's nothing connecting Lawrence to McFadden's company, is there?'

‘Maybe I haven't found it yet. Could you get me Jenny's lab results and crime scene photos, do you think?'

There was a short silence, then Brook said, ‘I'm not a solitary animal like you, Sandra.'

‘I'm not a solitary animal either. Not by choice.'

‘You put me in a difficult position.'

I bit my tongue. Be damned if I was going to apologise for that.

Nineteen

In front of me were Jenny Bishop's post-mortem results, plus the crime scene photographs and video.

The post-mortem was definitive. Jenny had died of asphyxiation caused by an overdose of heroin. All the outward signs were there—burst capillaries under the eyelids, blueness round the mouth. I'd never been close to anyone who'd been killed by heroin, but I knew that it was similar to death from suffocation. There'd been half a gram of the drug in her bloodstream, enough to kill a person who was using regularly. She had probably died within minutes of it being injected. There were also high levels of alcohol. The estimated time of death was between midnight and 2 am on Friday, December 31st. She'd been a healthy woman, if prematurely aged—no problems with her heart, lungs, liver, or any other organs.

The photographs taken in Jenny's bedroom made me feel sad, angry and helpless.

Her legs were wide open. That was the first surprise. It was hard to believe she'd died like that. In the thick summer light of that bedroom—I felt the heat again, increasing as I'd climbed the stairs—Jenny's spread legs, and the shadows they cast on the mattress, reminded me of angel's wings. It was terrible, that private space made public for the police photographer. I hoped someone had closed her legs as soon as possible. How sentimental, when modesty could no longer help.

Jenny lay on her back, arms by her sides, head resting on a pillow, face towards the window. She looked impossibly young.

Her prints and DNA were the only ones on the syringe. The needle had been new. There were old bloodstains on the sheets. Tests on the mattress had yielded a few more bloodstains whose type matched hers, and semen stains, that, as far as I could tell from the information in front of me, had not been matched to anybody. The only other ­fingerprints in the room—on a number of places including the door jamb and the bookcase—belonged to Ian and Francesca.

One partial print, possibly Jenny's, and another complete, but smudged one, had been lifted from the glass left in the kitchen sink. The bottle of Fosters had a number of overlapping prints around the neck. No other liquor bottles had been in the garbage.

The only piece of good news was that the Glebe police had taken out a warrant for her phone calls. Brook had told me when he'd dropped the package off. He hadn't said so, but I hoped he'd had a hand in pushing for some further investigation into the circumstances of her death.

I'd left the video till last.

There was the bedroom I'd looked into through an open doorway, conscious of Ian's thin, reluctant presence by my side. The camera caught a hand in a latex glove, then began a slow circuit of the room.

There was the mattress on its base underneath the window. The curtains were drawn back, exactly as I'd seen them. The camera swung past objects on the floor, a syringe and what looked like its crumpled wrapping next to the bed, the stack of three books with the top one open and face down, the bookshelf with its meagre assortment of literature texts.

Suddenly Jenny was there, sharply in focus, legs open to the world. I caught my breath and looked away, then forced my eyes back to the screen. Why were her legs open like that? The camera kept on moving, after it had established the position of the body, its relation to, and distance from, other objects in the room. And movement gave, for a few seconds anyway, the illusion of life.

. . .

Brook called round that evening as I was about to start my solitary omelette. I divided it in two, ignoring his protests that he wasn't hungry. He looked tired and drawn and I felt a stab of regret that I'd begrudged him his holiday.

Brook ate so fast, I was sure he'd missed out on lunch. In between mouthfuls, he told me Simon Lawrence had an alibi for the night of Jenny Bishop's death.

I began making a fruit salad, while I said that Lawrence had told me he'd been working on December 30th.

‘But hardly in the middle of the night.'

Brook nodded. ‘He was with a prostitute.'

‘That figures.'

‘It does.'

Brook sighed, stretching back in his chair, and said he'd questioned Stan Walewicz that afternoon.

‘You know, I busted him a few times?'

‘Really? Why didn't you tell me that before?'

Brook flexed his fingers with another sigh. ‘Me and Bill McCallum. Before all this X-rated stuff was legal. God, it was tedious. And a waste of time. We'd drive away with a truckload of videos. They'd pay the fines, be back in business within twenty-four hours.'

‘What did you do with the videos?'

‘Buried them.'

‘Did you watch them first?'

‘A few.'

‘Did Walewicz pay you?'

‘I never took money off him. Nor did Bill. I'd swear to that.'

‘Do you think he'll go offshore now?'

‘Dunno. I get the feeling he likes the challenge of operating under the censors' noses.'

‘But why would his service provider take the risk?'

‘Money?' Brook suggested. ‘You may or may not dismiss him as a scumbag, but he doesn't appear to have broken any law.'

‘There's the rosebuds.'

Brook smiled.

I leant forward and handed him a bowl of fruit salad. I wanted to reach out my hand and touch his shoulder or his arm, test my fingers along his too prominent collar bones. It was suddenly ridiculous that I could not. How many women knew their men by bones? I'd learnt to know this one, when the hope of flesh returning had seemed as impossible as the act of stretching out my fingers now, to test that flesh was there.

I sat down opposite him and picked up my spoon.

‘Did you ask about Richard McFadden's investment?'

‘Stan didn't turn a hair. Said that Richard was a generous man, bless his heart. Denied having any more recent business dealings with him. Denied that McFadden was paying him to keep quiet. “Did me a good turn once, and I'm not about to cruel his chances with these filter gizmos now.” Words to that effect.'

‘What about business dealings with Margot Lancaster and Simon Lawrence?'

‘Stan paid Lawrence for the use of his website. Said he did it for a laugh, and to prove how easy it is to get around the new law. Claims never to have done business with Lancaster.'

Brook picked at his dessert with a preoccupied expression.

‘He reckons he's had nothing to do with the Bishop girl since that movie. He was at Mossy Point with his girlfriend on December thirty. Ditto January four.'

‘That's convenient.'

‘It is. On the other hand, half of Canberra was down the coast on those dates.'

Brook's glance at me was wary.

‘Eat up,' I told him.

‘I'm not hungry.'

‘Just a few more mouthfuls.'

‘You sound like my mother.'

‘Pretend I am your mother, then. She who has to be obeyed.'

‘What about Eden Carmichael?' I asked after we'd chewed together in silence for a while.

‘Stan knew him by reputation.'

‘But that's all?'

‘He says so. Says he might have met Carmichael at some big social gathering, but he can't remember talking to him.'

It occurred to me that I was missing something obvious.

‘Where's Sophie?' I asked.

‘Gone back to her daughter's.'

‘You had an argument?'

‘Not really. I don't want to talk about it.'

. . .

Scarcely more than an hour after nightfall, and the temperature had already dropped fifteen degrees. The sky was clear, the air very thin and still. It seemed foolish to shut up the house soon after I'd opened it, but that's what I did. I spoke to Fred through the gate, telling him he was better off outside.

My car was low on petrol. I pulled in to the Lyneham service station. Even in my quiet suburb, at nine o'clock at night, there were plenty of people out and about, walking dogs, or just themselves. The tables outside
Tilleys
were practically full. I heard a sound like a small explosion, then a burst of laughter.

At the bar where I'd met Mieke, I bought a beer and sat by the open door to drink it. Though the ceiling fans seemed to be working well enough, the room was hot and stale-smelling. The barman was watching the soccer on SBS. At a break in the match, I pulled out Jenny's photo and took it over.

‘Gone missing has she? What are you, a cop?'

‘No.'

He peered at me more closely. ‘Mother?'

‘No. Have you ever seen her?'

‘Why do you want to know?'

‘She died just after Christmas.'

‘Overdose, was it?'

‘Why do you say that?'

The barman shrugged.

‘Seen any of the girls from
Margot's
lately?' I asked.

‘This one work there, did she?'

‘For a while. Have they been told to stay away?'

‘I wouldn't know.'

I finished my beer and left, glad to be out of doors again. I stood by my car and breathed in the long night breath of the city, thinking that Jenny may well have liked a liquid dinner, to fortify her for a night's work. But there were better, surer ways to blunt sensation. Why would she bother with a tacky, lifeless pub? I was surely on a wild-goose chase, an excuse to keep moving, in my imagination, away from Brook's house with its well-made curtains thrown back, covers off the bed, moonlight soaking down through layers of skin.

There were three cars parked in the street, but no one around. I was reminded how much Mitchell was a place of day trading. With the exception of the brothel and video hire customers, few people had a reason to be there at night.

. . .

The third bar I went into had a curly neon sign above the entrance that reminded me of Margot's club. The barman stared at Jenny's photo and asked, ‘What's she done?'

‘She died. I'm looking for her friends.'

‘You don't look like police.'

‘I'm not.'

‘What did she die of?'

‘I'm trying to find out.'

‘If you're a cop you ought to say so.'

‘I'm not.'

I pulled out my card and handed it across.

The barman read it without comment, then looked up at me.

‘What did you say her name was?'

‘Jenny Bishop.'

‘She didn't come here that often, but I thought she was nice—nice smile, knew how to enjoy herself.'

‘Who did she come with?'

‘Different people.'

‘Was there a regular night of the week?'

‘Monday. Tuesday sometimes.'

‘Who with?' I asked again.

‘Girls from
Margot's
. That Dutch girl.'

I asked the barman to call me if any of Jenny's friends came in. His answer was an almost imperceptible nod.

Energy drained out of me. I sat in my car, arms crossed over the steering wheel. Who hung around in Canberra, in January? Surely Jenny's friends were down the coast, at Batemans Bay or Ulladulla, surfing, partying, smoking dope and having sex on bunk beds, drinking in crowded, salty, effervescent beach hotels.

I could knock on Margot's door and give her an excuse to complain again. I could turn my back on Canberra, head down the coast myself.

The impulse to drive, and keep on driving, seemed to come from the blue-black-purple of the hills beyond Belconnen. The bush had its fingers up everyone's backyard. Bush capital—the resilience of that—the sense of moving on and out, of highways running through. Belconnen. Civic. Urban cul-de-sacs. Burley Griffin's mazes that infuriated newcomers with one dead end after another, tracing and re-tracing an outdated geometric pattern.

Perhaps the fluid boundary between bush and capital city had appealed to Jenny. Those mountains out beyond Belconnen—how they teased perspective, how we called them mountains, knowing that, in wider contexts, they would be regarded as no more than tree-covered rocks. I recalled driving out to them, to the Ginninderra Falls—another euphemism since the falls were usually dry from September to May—with Peter and his father, one spring when there'd been a lot of rain. The climb was too steep for Peter, and very slippery. We could hear water in the distance, and he kept asking where they were. Derek carried him on his back, while I took the food and rug, though I knew by then that Derek had no intention of sitting down in such inhospitable surroundings. As we slipped and slithered, dirtied our clothes and scratched our hands, Peter had begun to cry, not only with discomfort, but taking in, as he often did, the lack of accord between his parents. Derek had snapped at him. There could be nothing worse, sometimes, than half-knowing what was wrong.

I started my car, thinking that if Carmichael in his blue dress had made himself into a patch of Canberra's night sky, then so had Margot, with her helmet of black hair. I could feel Margot's story beginning to unravel, the story she'd carefully constructed with Denise. That morning in the carpark, when she'd been sitting in her car with her arms on the steering wheel, and I'd dropped by on impulse on my way to Sydney—I wondered where she'd been going, at that hour. Had she been planning to sit in her club all day with only the crossword for company, listening in the silence to the phone that didn't ring, the customers who obstinately stayed away?

Margot's camouflage had served her well, much better than Carmichael's, but then he'd died, leaving her to fit together what pieces she was able to, make a story plausible enough for the police and press. And she'd done all right. She would have done all right if it hadn't been for Jenny Bishop.

At home, I opened all the doors and windows, then sat with Fred panting on the front step beside me. The house breathed out heavily behind our backs. I was tired, but afraid of the faces that would appear as soon as I lay down—Carmichael's ghost, stepping out of the photograph I'd finally cut from the newspaper and pinned up in my office. I would see Jenny's flung open body. Then that other man—I'd see him clearly too, waiting for an opportunity to slam my car into a concrete wall.