Surrender (9 page)

Tilly had already gone for the day but she’d left my new laminated ID card in a big envelope on the desk that I’d minded so faithfully. I checked out the photo. Yep, I was scowling again. Which just goes to show that I am, if nothing else, consistent.

A
lphonse Grigg lived on the sixth floor of an apartment block in Marion Square. By day a vaguely grubby but entertaining part of town, by night it’s where the local trannie prostitutes ply their trade in doorways. It’s definitely one of Wellington’s more colourful areas. I pushed the intercom for apartment 6B, expecting to give name and explanation into the grill, but I was buzzed in without saying a word. So far so easy.

When I stepped out of the lift I saw the apartment door open in readiness. I tapped on it, called out a greeting, and waited. Nothing. I was about to call out again when a square-shaped man in his sixties appeared, with a towel around his waist and his face covered in what I hoped was shaving cream.

‘Mr Grigg? Alphonse Grigg?’

He lifted the bottom of the towel to his mouth, revealing more than I needed to see, and wiped a hole for his lips. He looked me up and down several times.

‘You’re not my five-thirty, are you?’ he said, ducking his head to look down the hall.

I didn’t think I wanted to be his five-thirty.

I introduced myself, told him about the John Doe being found, and why I was there. Feeling like a magician with a rabbit, I produced the oblong evidence box containing the tramping boot. All the time Alphonse stood motionless in his towel skirt and cream Santa beard and stared at me. When I stopped talking, he told me I’d better come in then. He returned to what I presumed was the bathroom and shut the door.

There was only one room to wait in, so I waited in it. I placed the box next to an empty coffee mug on the tiny table, uncomfortably aware of the similarity between the shoebox and the room itself. Even the colour of the apartment, which probably had a name like
Void
or
Infinity
, was exactly the same as the interior of the box. Nothingness. The only interesting thing in the room was the splatter of snapshots above the bed. I was studying these when Alphonse spoke behind me.

‘That one on the far right is Steven. It was taken a couple of weeks before he went missing.’

Alphonse was now, thankfully, dressed in chinos and black T-shirt. The shaving cream had been wiped off except for a tiny blob on his earlobe. I resisted the urge to lean over and tweak it away. He was stalled by the table, looking at the tramping boot in the open box but not touching it.

I turned back to the photo of Steven. It was the only one I could see of the missing brother, pinned up separate from the others. Aphonse came close, enveloping me in a musk of shaving cream. He pointed out a young guy holding a surfboard.

‘That’s my younger brother, Charlie. He was only fifteen when Steven went missing. Just starting out.’ His hand pressed the photo like a blessing. ‘He was a lovely boy. And that,’ he said, touching a black and white photo of a young girl in a miniature wedding
dress and veil, ‘is my sister Robyn. This was taken at her first holy communion.’

So she
was
a child bride then. The invisible groom being good old God himself. I waited, knowing Alphonse would get there eventually; he just needed to do it at his own pace. Finally he unpinned a tiny black and white photo curling at the edges and handed it to me.

‘That was us before Steve buggered off. I’m not saying we were anything special. Just an ordinary family. Mum, dad and the kids.’

I studied the photo. The little group did indeed look like an ordinary family, their image frozen forever in the midst of what looked like a big work picnic. Mum and Dad were caught in the act of laying out food on a tartan blanket. Robyn, this time in shorts and T-shirt, was standing on one foot, clasping the other behind, her head thrown back for balance. Two boys, who I guessed were Alphonse and Charlie, were tying their ankles together with torn up pantyhose. They were sharing a complicit grin in anticipation of the three-legged race. I glanced surreptitiously at Alphonse; he’d kept the same surprised smile that he had as a kid, but that was about it.

‘We won that day. Can’t remember what we got for it. Nothing, probably.’

The smile was gone. I studied the third boy in the photo. I hadn’t noticed him the first time I looked. Older than the other two, he stood at the edge of the picnic blanket, looking away from the family towards something off-camera. No one else in the photo was seeing what he saw.

‘This is Steven?’ I asked, sure it was but wanting to keep Alphonse talking. I had a feeling this guy opened and shut like a valve. Alphonse took the photo and studied it as if for the first time.

‘He didn’t bugger off until a couple of years after this was taken, but this is the last time I remember us all being together as a family.’
He pinned the photo back on the wall. ‘He was always a selfish prick.’

The pin went in dangerously close to Steven’s head.

‘We lost our parents the day Steven went missing. I had to take over being the grown-up and I didn’t do too good at it. Charlie killed himself a week after his seventeenth birthday.’ Alphonse walked stiffly to the table and picked the boot out of the box. ‘And Robyn might as well have,’ he added cryptically.

I watched him weigh the boot in his hand, the sole flapping like the jaw of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He’d gone somewhere else — somewhere I didn’t want to follow him to. I thought he might throw the boot at me and took a step towards him just in case. The movement seemed to remind him I was in the room.

‘One day Steven just up and disappeared, and for all that Mum and Dad noticed us after that, they might as well have gone with him.’ He placed the boot carefully back in the box and held it out. ‘This isn’t his.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Steven had huge feet right from when he was a kid. Poor kids remember things like that. I wore his hand-me-downs. Anyway, I never saw him in any kind of boots. He sure as hell wasn’t a walker. My bet, he got himself killed over some drug deal, but who the fuck knows.’

I left Alphonse in his little shoebox apartment, scraping over the coals of memory, blowing on the embers of resentment. I felt bad about reviving the hurt although it hadn’t seemed too deeply buried before I started digging. And when his five-thirty passed me in the corridor I stopped worrying. From the look of her, I figured Alphonse wouldn’t be thinking about his family for the next little while. At least, I hoped not.

I grabbed a coffee from Floriditas, a café in Cuba Street with large windows. Wolf’s walker Damian works the odd shift there, so it’s a useful haunt for me when I’m in need of a bit of staring out of windows. The coffee’s pretty good, too.

I had no reason to disbelieve Alphonse when he said the boot didn’t belong to his brother, but this was an annoying dead end. There were only two missing persons on the police database that fitted the timeline and only one of them was in the probable age bracket of my John Doe. Now it looked like he wasn’t a match.

That left two possibilities: the initial autopsy evidence was wrong, or my John Doe had never been reported missing. Smithy would be the first to say his initial report to me was premature and therefore likely to be incorrect, but from experience I thought that unlikely. Smithy is the best and I couldn’t remember him ever being wrong in his initial assessment.

Which left me with the other alternative: my wheelbarrow JD had never been reported missing. That wasn’t so unusual. There are far more loners in this world than we’d like to think, and when those people disappear they can just slip-slide away, unremarked and unnoticed by anyone. What I needed to do next was try and figure out if this particular JD wanted to disappear or whether someone else wanted it. I needed to go back to where the body was found. If I could establish where he died, that could help me with how and maybe even why. With those answers in place, I might be able to have a go at the most of important question of all:
who
.

Damian wasn’t on duty at the café, so I scribbled a note asking him to drop the shoebox off at my house tomorrow when he came to walk Wolf, and handed the note and evidence box to the manager to put in Damian’s locker. Maybe it was the coffee, maybe it was that little cubicle Alphonse was scratching his life out in, or maybe it was the address I’d seen in my notepad while I was scribbling the note
to Damian — whatever it was, I needed a walk, which was handy since I wouldn’t get my car back until I met up with Robbie later.

I’d walked as far as the DeeVice sex shop when I remembered I’d agreed to bring along a friend tonight. I didn’t want to consider if there was a connection between the shop and my remembering. As I walked I rang Gemma and asked if she’d like to join me for a drink at eight thirty. It’s true I mentioned neither Robbie nor his mate, and I certainly didn’t use the words ‘double’ or ‘date’, but it was better that way for two reasons: one, Gemma would actually turn up; and two, I wouldn’t have to listen to her scornful laugh before she hung up on me.

It was also, I admit, insurance for my own safety. One of my few good points is that when I say I’m going to be somewhere I
always
turn up, unless something really serious happens to prevent it. People know that about me. If I didn’t turn up for drinks, Gemma would know something was seriously amiss — she’d know I was in trouble. And tonight, if that happened, she’d have two other cops on hand to share her concern with, though admittedly she didn’t know about the other cops yet.

I paused outside the little junk shop beside the charcoal chicken outlet at the top of Cuba Street. I knew from the newspaper report that Snow’s body had been dumped in the gutter outside this shop. With no security cameras in this part of town, and with little vehicle or foot traffic in the wee small hours, there had been no witnesses. If anyone in the apartments nearby had seen anything they sure as hell weren’t rushing forward to tell the cops.

According to Sean, the police theory, backed by minimal forensic evidence, was that Snow had been killed elsewhere and his body tipped here from a moving vehicle. It seemed such an appropriate place to drop him — in a gutter outside a junk shop — that I couldn’t help but wonder if the killer wasn’t making a
metaphorical statement. Then again, maybe it was time I cut down on my television crime-show viewing.

I looked along the gutter and the shop edge of the pavement but couldn’t see anything of significance. The shop window displayed a collection of tobacco tins, and tragically discarded soft toys leaning together as if for comfort, all covered with a thick layer of dust. The sign on the door said ‘Back in 10’ but I doubted it. It looked like the place had been locked up and deserted years ago.

I continued on up Webb Street and dodged the traffic to get to the dairy on the corner of Willis, then made my way up Aro Street, checking off the house numbers as I went. Outside the Aro Street video store I stopped and re-checked Snow’s address in my notepad. Having read it upside down in Sean’s car, it was possible I’d written an incorrect number, but this looked like the right place — a little run-down cottage up a long driveway that snaked between the video store and a block of apartments.

The bland and soulless apartments had replaced a garage called MM Motors. Rumour had it that the initials were short for Mickey Mouse Motors, an apparently fitting name for a business run by a bunch of cowboy film makers from the ’70s who specialised in ‘blowing shit up in movies’.

Under the guise of checking out the video store’s specials bin, I made sure there were no cars parked up the driveway directly outside Snow’s place.

On closer inspection the cottage looked derelict and deserted. I checked my watch. It was just after seven. I had time to have a quick look around inside the house, get back home, change, and still be on time for drinks downtown with Robbie at eight. Although I wasn’t anticipating trouble, Gemma would be expecting me at eight thirty and if I didn’t turn up she’d know something was wrong.

All I had to do was figure out how to break into Snow’s place.

I
knocked, waited a full thirty seconds, then knocked again, louder this time. Still nothing. The gravel underfoot crackled like cornflakes along the narrow alley between the house and a concrete retaining wall. I glanced at each of the windows along the side of the cottage ready to wave a confident hello if anyone suddenly appeared — but they were too thick with dust and cobwebs for me to see inside. I knocked loudly on the back door to be sure no one was inside, and then I clasped the door handle. Nothing ventured and all that, but this time nothing was gained either.

I glanced around the back porch. We’re a funny bunch humans, each thinking we’re different from the rest. That we’re the only one with a particularly bizarre fear or desire. That we’ve each got our own quirky, exclusive ways of doing things. It’s what keeps us believing we’re individuals in control of our own destiny. It’s also what keeps us lonely, but that’s another matter. The fact is, eight out of ten people put their house key under the welcome mat at the back door. Though I know it drives cops and insurance brokers up the wall, I find that little example of human frailty endearing.
A free-thinking four per cent of us put the key under a pot plant, brick, gumboot or sneaker within a metre of the door it opens. The truly maverick stick it on a ledge above the door.

I looked in all these places but found nothing, which proved that my suspicions about Snow were correct — he wasn’t like the rest of us. Then again, the cops might have taken the key from one of these ‘hiding’ places after they’d been through the place, and maybe the only thing that set Snow apart from the rest of us was that he’d stuck a knife in my little sister’s back.

A fine drizzle had started to fall, and a gloom had set in, probably a summer storm brewing. If I was going to climb in through windows I should do it before dark — neighbours are usually less suspicious of daylight break-ins. That’s another of those odd little human foibles.

I tried to wriggle my fingers under a couple of the windows along the southern side of the house but an amateur paint job had stuck the frames to the sills and it would take a putty knife to free them. I didn’t need to check my shoulder bag to know I didn’t have one of those on me.

Refusing to be daunted, I turned my phone off, slipped the bag strap over my chest commando-style, and tried the windows on the northern side. On the last one I struck gold. The bottom sill was hip height, and with the tips of my fingers I edged the frame up the first tricky couple of inches and then used my shoulder to heft it up far enough to duck my head underneath. Though nearly strangling myself with the bag strap, I finally managed to get some purchase. For one vulnerable moment the weight of the window rested on my neck while I scrabbled for a decent hold with both palms, then shoving it up, I swung one leg over the sill. Once my foot tapped the floorboard inside, I manoeuvred my crotch over the sill.

As I ducked my head inside, a voice in the room froze me to
the spot. Shit! This wasn’t only the most uncomfortable position to be caught in, it was the most vulnerable. Too late to pull out; I had to risk it.

Leaping in, I let the window fall shut after me; I’d like to add ‘in one smooth movement’, but it was far from smooth. I’d badly scraped my shoulder, and the windowsill had bruised me in a way that would have meant abstaining from sex if I’d been having any sex to abstain from.

I spun around to confront the speaker, mentally searching for my excuse. That book I’d read about worst case scenarios didn’t cover breaking and entering. I was on the point of blurting something about fire and kittens when I realised there was no one in the room to pitch this implausible excuse to. Other than me that is, and I sure as hell wasn’t buying it.

The voice was coming from a clock radio by the bed.

I breathed again in relief, and took a moment to rub my shoulder and ease the seam off my bruised clitoris, while I listened intently for any other sound in the house. The clock was flashing 7.10. I made myself stay completely still and listen for a full three minutes before I was confident that the only sounds were my own heart pounding and someone on the radio whingeing about the latest cricket team selection. When the clock flicked to 7.13, it was time to do what I’d come to do.

Until that moment I hadn’t figured out exactly what that was — I just knew I needed to look at where Niki’s killer lived. I thought that maybe I’d find something of Niki here, though I rejected the idea of any intimacy between killer and victim. Ever since I’d listened to Gemma’s tape, the one I shouldn’t have listened to, I’d had to fight against the awful fear that Snow might have taken a souvenir from Niki, something to remind him of the killing. If he’d done that, I wanted it back.

Piles of clothes were scattered on the floor. Possibly someone was sorting them for collection, or they’d been searching for something. The room smelt of dirty socks and another musty, animal smell I didn’t want to try too hard to identify. I took a step towards the centre of the room, breaking into a sweat at the creak of the floorboards.

On the chest of drawers was an empty bottle of Boss aftershave and a greasy-looking hairbrush riddled with blond hairs. It occurred to me for the first time that Snow was given that nickname because of his hair, probably in childhood. I knew I shouldn’t pick it up, but the brush was in my hand before I could stop myself.

The thing I find really hard to come to terms with about the sickos who cigarette-burn kids, or torture animals, or stab little sisters in the back with boning knives, is that they also do the same, ordinary things the rest of us do. Things like brushing their teeth or hair. Like enjoying the smell of a flower or laughing at the same jokes. Crying at the same, sad movie as the rest of us, for all I know. I can never get my head around that. I find it hard to believe people like that are the same as me, but here was simple domestic evidence of it. I didn’t like the mix of emotions it produced in me.

The drawers had all been emptied and left hanging open, and the wardrobe had been cleared out as well. Presumably everything of Snow’s was now on the floor. Keeping my hands in my pockets, I kicked through some of the clothes but there was nothing I could see of any interest. I glanced around for a possible hiding place. Lightshades are good but nothing was stashed in this one, a plain, plastic, concave number. There were no posters on the walls to hide things behind. A pale blue cotton sheet had been tacked up over the front window in place of curtains. I checked the window
ledge behind that, but I wasn’t really expecting to find anything.

Now I was just moving around the room to keep myself from freezing in panic. The bed base was a double with a single foam mattress, stained, mouldy and damp, marooned in the middle. All class was Snow. At least it was light enough to lift with two fingers which was a real bonus. So too, I guess, was the big fat joint beneath it, but I wasn’t in the least bit tempted. Obviously the cops who’d searched the room hadn’t been either.

On the floor beside the bed a pair of blue jeans with leather belt had been dropped as if their owner had just stepped out of them. They reminded me of ‘the pale green pants with nobody inside them’ from a story that I used to read to Niki when she was little. The pockets were gaping open in what I swore, and knew I might have to in court, was an inviting way. ‘Those pockets said, “Yes”, your Honour.’

I squatted beside the jeans, my knees clicking in a way the cricket selector on the radio, presently defending his choice of wicket keeper, would have cringed at. Tentatively, I inserted my fingers into the first pocket. The lining felt clammy, and as I moved my fingers around, the stink of Snow hit my nostrils. My stomach clenched. The pocket was empty. Turning my face aside, I inserted my fingers into the other pocket, pulling the lining as far away from the crotch as possible. I think I’d just decided there was nothing in there either when my head exploded.

If you’ve ever been knocked unconscious you’ll know that while you’re out there in never-never land you have no sense of time passing, and so, ‘coming to’ as it’s quaintly called is nothing like waking up from a sleep. What it’s like is, one second you’re innocently going through someone’s pockets, and a split second later you’re — well, in this particular scenario I’m lying on the floor of a different room with two scowling women glaring at
me. There’s no waking, yawning, stretching, no ‘Oh my gosh, I just had the most amazing dream’ kind of feeling when you regain consciousness. Even if half an hour has passed by, you have no sense of it passing. I guess being knocked unconscious is the closest you could get to time travelling, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

For one paranoid moment I thought that someone had used my eyeballs to nail my head to the floor, but then I realised I could see just fine. That was the good news. The bad news was what I was seeing: Snow’s twin sisters, Peaches and Cream, the former casually swinging a Kookaburra cricket bat like a cheerleader’s baton.

‘She’s awake,’ Cream said, which was useful to know, given my befuddled state and pain level.

Feeling at a distinct disadvantage lying down, I dragged myself to a sitting position. The movement induced an eerie feeling that I’d left my body on the floor — so convincing was it that I looked back to see if this was true. It was such a genuinely cool out-of-body experience that I opened my mouth to share it with the twins, but had to clench my jaw shut to hold back the vomit that threatened to spill. My head felt three times its normal size and was going to fall off completely if waggled or moved at all.

The white-out effect created by the searing pain in my head was accompanied by a high-pitched whistle, but when Peaches crossed to the stove and turned off the gas under a kettle the sound stopped, so chances are it wasn’t in my head. I eased myself into a wooden kitchen chair.

‘Jesus, Peaches, why did you hit me with a cricket bat?’

Peaches leaned the bat against the stove and poured boiling water into an old railways’ teapot.

‘There’s something else you’d rather I whacked you with?’

She grinned at me, but I was having trouble seeing any humour
in the situation. I tentatively fingered the back of my head. If it wasn’t for the pain, feeling separated from my body was a sensation I might have found vaguely enjoyable. A very tender bump was already forming at the base of my hairline.

‘Fuck …’ I managed, but the rest of the sentence whistled off into the white space called oblivion. Time passed.

Peaches swaggered across the room and planted a mug of tea in front of me. She was the only woman I’ve ever seen pull off a swagger in high heels. It was a relief she’d left the Kookaburra leaning against the stove. I’m no fashion Nazi but it wasn’t an accessory that worked with the black cocktail dress and heels. The dress was the one she’d been wearing at her brother’s funeral earlier in the day. Perhaps in an attempt to remove the funereal association of the outfit, she’d piled her hair up and clasped on big purple glass-drop earrings that rattled against her neck as she leaned towards me. She’d gone with a high-gloss lipstick the colour of raw liver, presumably to match the earrings. It wasn’t the first mistake Peaches had made in her life.

‘Oh, come on!’ she sneered. ‘I gave you a light tap and you went out like a light.’ She sounded aggrieved, as if unconsciousness had been an unreasonable reaction on my part.

Cream clearly didn’t do polite chatter. She came right to the point.

‘What the fuck were you doing going through our brother’s pockets?’

There was no point trying to bullshit these two even if my brain had been up to it.

‘I was looking for anything of Niki’s. I thought he might have kept a souvenir, and now seemed a good time to look. Him being dead and all.’

My voice sounded odd, a bit robotic and echoey, but I wasn’t sure if it was my speech or my hearing that was affected. A look passed between the women, and unless my faculties were even more damaged than I realised, it told me they’d already found something. Something of Niki’s.

Knowing I needed to concentrate, I forced myself to take a sip of the scalding tea. I asked for my bag and Peaches picked it up off the floor and passed it to me without comment. As soon as I clicked open the flap it was obvious they’d gone through it. Cream held up two twenty dollar notes which presumably she’d lifted from my wallet. Ignoring her, I took it slow, scrabbling around in my bag for aspirin, buying time for my brain to reboot. I swore at myself for having turned my phone off instead of flicking it to silent.

I was considering the odds of being able to switch it on surreptitiously and push the emergency dial number which would ring directly to the police station, when Cream banged her elbows on the table and leaned towards me.

‘You’re still trying to get Snow for killing your sister, aren’t you? You always wanted him for it.’

I moved my shoulders in a non-committal way. It seemed pointless to deny the obvious truth. Peaches leaned against the wall and studied me.

‘Were you trying to plant something? We couldn’t find anything in the bag, so maybe you’ve already done it.’

‘What? No!’ I said, genuinely affronted. ‘I didn’t come here to
plant
anything.’ I was going to add something about always staying on the right side of the law but given how I gained access to the house I decided not to go there. The aspirin retrieved, I hung the bag over the back of the chair.

‘I thought maybe he’d kept something of Niki’s as a kind of trophy. If so, I wanted to get it back. And I wanted to see where he
lived. See if I could figure out why he did it,’ I added, going again for the honest approach.

It seemed to pay off. Both women visibly relaxed. I punched two aspirin from the foil and knocked them back, using the tea as lubricant.

Peaches joined us at the table. ‘Yeah, Snow was a prime arsehole all right,’ she admitted without rancour. ‘I don’t know if he killed your sister, but I wouldn’t put it past him.’ She stared into the sugar bowl. Maybe she was remembering the time her brother broke a bottle over her head. She would have been about twelve when Snow was charged. He was fifteen and it being his first offence, he’d walked away with the judicial equivalent of a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket. Sean told me that after Peaches was stitched up, she was dealt a beating from her mother for getting Snow into trouble.