Take Out (29 page)

Stevie made them tea, told by Mrs Hardegan to use the best cups—this was a celebration, wasn’t it, boy? The old lady herself poured out small measures of brandy into balloon glasses and they alternatively sipped tea and spirits. Stevie sat on the footstool at her feet and told her what they had learned about Mai’s life in the Perth brothel, and then the bus crash.

‘But you knew Mai, didn’t you, Lilly?’ Stevie didn’t think the old woman would mind the use of her first name. ‘That was why she came to you when she discovered that her baby had been left alone in the house.’

‘We tried to call the smudgin’ fulletts but they wouldn’t listen to us.’

‘But why does Mai deny ringing the police from your phone? In fact, she denies knowing you at all.’

Mrs Hardegan ran a finger over a bushy grey eyebrow. ‘He is a good boy; he is trying to look after us. We’ll tell you, but it won’t be easy. Wait there for a few days, we need to gather up bits and bobs.’

Stevie’s phone rang. It was Col, wanting to tell her about his interview with Lin. She rose from the footstool, turned her back on the bustling Mrs Hardegan and gazed absently at the darkening view from the window. The girl was highly traumatised, Col told her, and the doctor had suggested a psych consult. My, my, Fowler would have approved of Lin, Stevie thought. Lin the innocent would fit perfectly into his checkerboard view of life where everything was black or white, innocent or guilty. She was still brooding on this when two startling silver-blue eyes cleaved the blackness of the street. Through the closed window she heard the predatory growl of a powerful car’s engine. Her mind flashed back to the Freo alley.

‘Stevie, are you still there?’ Col’s voice prickled at her sudden silence.

She blinked, looked into the street again. The headlights had gone, but their imprint continued to glow on the inside of her lids.

‘How’s the search for the Jag going, Col?’ she asked, apropos of nothing he’d been talking about.

‘Nada.’ He blew air down the phone. ‘But have you been listening to anything I’ve said?’ Of course she had, she said. He continued filling her in on Lin’s background: she was an orphan who’d been hoodwinked into believing she was being sent to Australia to manage a reflexology centre for Jon Pavel.

Stevie stepped into the back garden with the phone clamped to her ear, listening to Col. She explored the space behind the wood shed and the back fence, climbed on a plant pot to peer into the neighbour’s yard. The freshness of an early spring evening filled the air, mingling with the sweet aroma of night-scenting shrubs. Not a breath of wind stirred the leaves of the flame tree in the corner of the garden, but despite this, she felt a chill. Absently, she undid the folds of her sleeves, pushing them over the goose bumps on her arms.

Scanning the street on all three sides of the garden fence, she saw nothing resembling Pavel’s green Jag. At a large house down the road, automatic doors opened for a silver BMW. Another smaller car pulled up opposite—commuters coming home from work.

Back in the house she forced herself to give Col her full attention.

When Lin regained consciousness, he said, she’d backed up everything Mai had told them about the death of the Pavels, as well as confirming that Mai was the mother of the baby. She’d been unable to remember much about the bus crash other than that she’d seen the men arguing just before it happened and Mai trying to pull the knife away from Rick Notting’s throat.

‘That’s what Mai said, too,’ Stevie said. ‘It could easily account for her print on the handle. Mai flatly denied getting off the bus and killing Notting. Even if she’d wanted to, she said she couldn’t because her leg was too painful. I believe her.’

‘But she was covered in red dust, how can that be explained?’

Stevie reached for the brandy balloon and took a sip. ‘That dust could have come from anywhere within a wide radius of the crash site. She told me she’d got dirty when going for a walk during their last rest stop.’

Col sighed down the phone. ‘You’re beginning to sound like a defence lawyer, Stevie.’ And you’re beginning to sound like Luke Fowler, Stevie thought. How much easier it is to blame the whore.

Stevie forced herself to loosen her grip on the brandy balloon. Even if a lawyer could argue provocation or self-defence, the thought that Mai might have to stand trial for murder after everything she’d been through was almost too much to contemplate. She took a calming breath and said to Col, ‘After the crash, when Mai came to, she was disorientated and wanted to find out where they were. She managed to pull herself up on a seat and look out the bus window. She saw the two men, Jimmy Jack Robinson and Rick Notting, lying outside the bus, and a third man stooping over Notting.’

‘Who the hell was that supposed to be? SOCO found no prints other than those belonging to police and paramedics.’

‘Tracks could easily be wiped away from that thin dust.’ Stevie paused. ‘She thinks the man was The Crow.’

‘Bullshit, how come he was there? Why didn’t he go and finish off the girls too?’

‘Maybe he was following the bus; maybe he knew he couldn’t trust Notting? Robinson might easily have called him. Mai said that after she saw The Crow bend over Rick, he walked over to the bus. She ducked when she saw him coming and played dead.’

‘She must have been very convincing. Christ, Stevie, and you believe her?’

Stevie nibbled on her lip and said nothing. Of course she believed her, but why? Because she wanted this version of events to be true, that was why.

‘Where are you now?’

‘Mrs Hardegan’s—telling her about Mai.’

‘Hopefully you can get some sense out of the old lady this time, find out what she has to do with all this.’

Stevie turned from the window, watched Mrs Hardegan purposefully shuffle around the room, banging doors, opening the drawers of her oak sideboard; filling up their brandy glasses. Stevie lifted hers in a silent toast and Mrs Hardegan raised her glass back.

‘You know, Col, this time I think I might.’

Stevie disconnected and dropped her phone on the sewing table next to a stack of recently placed objects: picture cards, magazines, the tapestry, which in the days since she’d last seen it, had taken on Bayeux-like proportions.

‘We said it was all our fault and now we can show you why.’ Mrs Hardegan unfurled the tapestry and placed it across the things on the sewing table. Stevie hastily moved the stool and positioned herself alongside the tall armchair and stared at the tangle of coloured wool before her.

Then, like an optical illusion, the pattern of colours and small exes began to take shape and a crude tableau appeared. A row of blue exes depicted the sky, green, the earth, peopled by stick figures sewn from wool. Mrs Hardegan pointed to one of the figures that stood out from the others because of the messy nest on its head—a hat or thatch of hair—Stevie couldn’t tell.

‘There we are,’ Lilly said, solving the mystery. Next to herself she had sewn three identical figures. ‘The boys,’ she added.

‘Jon, Delia and Ralph?’

‘That is correct.’

The old lady made walking motions with her knobbly fingers across the tapestry from one depiction of herself to another, ending up at a fluffy yellow orb sewn onto the sky.

‘The sun?’ Stevie queried.

‘Yes, the sun—they sent us there to play. It was wintertime here. Cold.’

Stevie stared blankly at the old lady. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

Mrs Hardegan’s pursed her lips. Flexing her fingers she took on an impatient tone. ‘They sent us to that place that has the animals with long noses, very sunny, and we went on a car with wings.’

Leaving the tapestry for a moment, she riffled through her picture cards, withdrawing a child-like picture of an aeroplane. ‘A car with wings,’ she explained as she pointed to several cross shapes hanging upon her tapestry sky.

‘You went on a plane?’

Mrs Hardegan briefly turned her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Yes, clever boy,’ she said as if talking to her parrot. ‘They put us on the car. Paid for us to go here...’ The picture card she reached for now depicted a holiday scene: sea, sand, buckets and spades.

Ah, of course, the sun. ‘They paid for you to go on holiday—where did you go?’

She pointed to a circular tangle of grey wool situated on the brown exes of earth. The grey blob had something long and thin sticking out from its top. ‘We went to the land of the long noses where the snoodle pinkerds live.’
Christ,
sounded like something Dr Seuss might have dreamed up. Stevie massaged her brow and tried to think.

Long noses, elephants, Thailand—they sent her to Thailand! Oh God, now she understood. Jon and Ralph had used Lilly as an unknowing escort for their girls, generously paying for her holidays to Thailand. What immigration official would question the papers of a young girl who couldn’t speak English, escorted by an innocent old lady? They’d used her as their mule, in the same way dealers planted their drugs in the luggage of innocent passengers to move them from A to B.

‘We were told they were coming here to work in those zoos belonging to the boy,’ Mrs Hardegan said.

Stevie stared at her hands as she puzzled this out: a zoo, a place where a variety of creatures live. ‘You were told they were going to work at Jon Pavel’s nightclub?’ That was an easy one.

The old lady nodded. Maybe Stevie was getting the hang of this after all. Much of Mrs Hardegan’s language, she realised, did contain a strange kind of logic.

‘And food places,’ Mrs Hardegan said. ‘He makes long-nose food too.’

‘A Thai restaurant?’

‘Indeed. And the boy with the small boy was bringing him over for them to adopt.’

‘So, you escorted several girls over here. But when it came to the girl, Mai, you thought she was bringing the baby over on behalf of the adoption agency?’

‘That is correct.’ Lilly sniffed and pulled a tissue from her sleeve. ‘And then I thought he stayed on to help as a maid person. We did not know he was a prisoner. And then he left and the small boy stayed. We are a stupid, ignorant old boy—all those poor snoodle pinkerds. The boy told us what we’d done and then we had the brain thing. We had to help that snoodle pinkerd and his small one—so very small. He came to see us and asked for our help and when we tried, no one would believe us.’ Mrs Hardegan closed her eyes for a moment. They flew open again as an electrical sound clattered through a speaker in the wall near the chair. The doorbell.

‘Food,’ Mrs Hardegan said in response to Stevie’s raised eyebrow. ‘We have an order—every week we like to have long-nose food.’

She lifted her tapestry and opened the sewing basket underneath, peeled some notes from a rolled up wad of cash and attempted to press them into Stevie’s hand.

Stevie patted the wallet in her jeans pocket and said, ‘No, Lilly, this is on me.’ Paying for the old lady’s takeaway was the least she could do. ‘I’ll get it.’

The old lady accepted the offer, settled back in her chair and closed her eyes again.

Long-nose food. Stevie shook her head, smiling, and made her way down the passageway towards the silhouette on the other side of the frosted glass door. (Image 29.1)

Stevie opened the deadbolt and smiled at the face under the porch light. The woman from the deli smiled back and held up a plastic bag of takeaway.

‘Great service—Eva, isn’t it?’ Stevie asked.

‘That’s right, love. And this is pad thai, the old dear’s favourite. I’ll bring it in, like to say hello if you don’t mind. Haven’t seen her for a while.’

Stevie reached out to relieve Eva of the food. Stopped. Her hand hung in the air and she looked at the woman through the sepulchral light.

Shit.
She knew that face.

When she’d first met the woman, the gapped front teeth made her think Madonna. Now she saw it as the sign of Venus, the goddess of love. Of all the surgical changes, this would be the one original feature someone in her profession would choose to retain.

Stevie took a quick step forward to bar the woman’s entrance. Hooking her foot around the door she attempted to close it, hoping the deadbolt would buy Lilly some time.

A blow like a bag of wet cement to her shoulder cut off her warning cry. She fell back into the hallway and cracked her head on the corner of the bookcase. Barely clinging to consciousness, she heard a loud crash. The door was kicked fully open, books toppled to the ground. A tall man stepped through the doorway and turned on the light. Stevie moaned and attempted to move. A kick to the stomach drove the wind from her. Curled into a ball on the musty hall carpet she closed her eyes and fought for breath.
Oh God, we’re going to die.

When she opened her eyes again she was looking at a pair of grey-booted feet and grey dress pants. Looked like expensive material—Zegna? Monty had always fancied a Zegna suit. She never understood why, he’d have wrecked it within a few days, spilled sauce or red wine down the front—Jesus, the things that go through the mind when you’re about to die.