The oars thud against the gunnels. With only fifty metres to the shore, he pulls back hard. Thunderous clouds pile on top of each other; they roll towards him like giant dragonheads. The light is fading fast; it’s difficult to make sense of the dark shape. A dolphin caught in the netting? No, not this far up the river.
Broken waves slap against the dinghy. When he draws level with the Baths, he squints, tries to make sense of the shape. The black bag splits, the rope breaks free and trails away, the blubbery contents empty into the river. The wash caresses her gently and she rolls towards him. Tendrils of long, red hair drift about her shoulders like the tentacles of a giant sea anemone. Suspended, pale, weightless, the lower part of her body is submerged. What is left of her face is staring back at him, smiling.
Detective Inspector Nick Rimis opened the boot of his car. He struggled into the white polythene over-suit, hauled the hood into place and stuffed a face mask into his pocket. He walked down the ragged steps to the pale stretch of sand. It was a few minutes before seven in the evening. He had never been here before, didn’t even know the place existed. It was an out-of-the-way Sydney suburb, at the end of a long peninsula; a dead end, leading nowhere; a place where the Parramatta and Lane Cove Rivers met. He flashed his ID at the female officer standing by the blue checkered tape and signed the log.
Apart from static chatter over the police radio, it was quiet, peaceful, a place where a group of professionals were getting on with the job. Scene of Crime Officers dressed in white hooded overalls and elasticised shoe covers shuffled around the boat sheds. Some were on their hands and knees sifting through the sand, while out on the timber boardwalk, another group had their heads down. Two divers in black wetsuits bobbed inside the netted enclosure.
Rimis stood outside the privacy tent with two male probationary officers at his side. Bruise-coloured clouds scuttled in from the east. A mortuary van had just arrived. He checked the time on his watch and wondered where Doctor Greer Ross was. Then, he saw her. She was dressed in a white SOC suit, just like everyone else, but somehow she managed to look stylish. The medical bag she was carrying was brand new. She nodded at Rimis. ‘What have we got?’ She pulled up her mask to cover her nose and mouth.
‘See for yourself.’ Rimis pulled back the tent flap and followed in behind her. The harsh glare of arc lights was trained on the bloated body. The mouth and jaw were loose and there was a hint of a smile. Some joke.
The young girl was unnaturally white, covered in Cutis Anserina, commonly known as gooseflesh. The right arm was missing. There was bruising and chafing on the left wrist.
‘Do we know who she is?’ Doctor Ross asked.
‘We didn’t find any ID on her. We’re checking the MisPer register.’
There were voices outside the tent.
‘The forensic photographer’s here, boss,’ one of the young officers called out.
The photographer walked around the body. He chose his shots carefully and with detachment. When he had finished, Doctor Ross knelt down and ran her white-gloved hands over the body. She gently pulled back the girl’s hair and looked at what was left of the face. ‘This is going be difficult. There are a lot of variables in a case like this.’ Her attention shifted to the puffy thighs. ‘Look at the puncture marks, intramuscular. Would have been painful.’
‘An addict?’ Rimis asked.
‘Can’t say.’
‘Did she drown?’
‘Can’t say.’
‘For fuck’s sake woman, at least take a guess.’
Doctor Ross didn’t look up. ‘She’s wearing joggers, so I don’t think she went for a swim.’
Rimis pulled a face.
‘Look, Inspector. I haven’t got any quick answers for you. I’m not being difficult, it’s just that I don’t believe in guessing.’
Rimis loosened his tie. A crack of thunder boomed in the distance.
Doctor Ross looked over her shoulder at him. ‘When a person drowns, the eyes glisten.’
Rimis moved closer to the body and looked into the young woman's eyes. Were they glistening? Well, they didn’t look like it, but how would he know? ‘How long do you think she’s been in the river?’
‘At least a week. A body usually floats after seven to ten days in warm water and the temp this time of year is around, what? Twenty-three, twenty-four degrees?’ She didn’t wait for him to answer. ‘There’s no sign of rigour. It’s come and gone.’ She tugged and removed one of the shoes. ‘Take a look at the skin on the foot.’
The flesh peeled away like a sock. Rimis flinched, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. If he could think of an excuse, he would leave now.
Doctor Ross moved her attention away from the foot and picked up the left hand. Rimis noticed the lacerations, the blue inky butterfly on the inside of the lower arm.
‘What’s the story with the missing arm?’ Rimis looked at the skin on the stump. It was ragged; coils of muscle were hanging loose.
‘Severed, not eaten.’ Doctor Ross removed her mask and peeled back the hood of her SOC suit, letting her dark, wavy hair tumble over her shoulders. She picked up her medical bag. ‘The trauma to the face could have happened at the same time.’
Rimis pushed back the vinyl tent flap. He ran his fingers through his dark, thick hair and walked to the water’s edge. It was high tide so he didn’t have far to go.
Tiny waves lapped at the shore. He had his back to the tent and drew in a long, deep breath to clear the stench from his lungs. The air smelled moist and salty. Christ, what he would do for a cigarette now. Times like these, he wished he had never given them up.
Doctor Ross snapped off her gloves and walked over to Rimis. The river was oily calm. The greyish blue sky, smeared with thin lines of mauve, had the look of a watercolour about it.
‘Do you fish?’ Rimis asked.
‘Never tried. What about you?’
‘Rather have them served up to me on a plate with chips.’
It was the first time Rimis had heard her laugh. Someone turned the floodlights on above the Baths and the place lit up like Christmas. The wind picked up. ‘Looks like rain,’ Rimis said.
‘We should get her out of here. I’ll be able to tell you more when I get her on the table.’ She looked up at the gathering clouds and tightened the grip on her medical bag. She started to make her way back along the beach, stopped and turned around. ‘Are you coming?’
‘Have to finish up here first. I’ll get there when I can.’
Rimis watched her go. The wind creaked through the Coral trees. He looked up at the access road which led down to the Baths and spotted the rows of curious locals, television crews, journalists and photographers. Bad news travels fast. A few people were holding their mobile phones in the air, taking photographs. Who knew? They might get lucky. Someone might capture something the police photographers had missed.
Two hours later, Rimis parked his car at the back of the morgue and made his way through the loading bay. He showed his ID to an attendant, signed the visitor’s log, and walked down the long corridor to the security doors. They buzzed open. He pulled on a white lab coat, a mask, and a set of blue shoe covers and pushed his way through the swinging doors to the post mortem room. He stood on the threshold. An exhaust fan droned in the background, but it failed to block out the smells. His sensitive nose caught a whiff of formaldehyde, rotting flesh and antiseptic.
Doctor Ross was standing over the girl’s naked body. She stopped what she was doing and turned to look at him. ‘You took your time.’
Rimis smiled, but he didn’t feel comfortable in this room; he never had. He walked up to the table, waited while she dictated into her machine.
A few minutes later, she turned it off. ‘The search turn up anything?’ she asked.
‘Nothing. Looks like all we’ve got to work with is the garbage bag. There was nothing special about it,’ he said.
Doctor Ross picked up a scalpel and removed the lungs from the chest. She placed them in a stainless steel kidney bowl. ‘I thought as much.’
‘What?’ Rimis leaned forward.
‘They’re filled with fluid.’ She picked up the soggy lungs and took a closer look.
‘She drowned then?’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘What do you mean? Not necessarily?’
‘Pulmonary foam. It can be caused by a number of things, including a drug overdose, but at this stage, I’m not ruling out death by drowning.’ Doctor Ross turned to look at him. ‘When someone drowns, they usually hold their breath and when they can’t hold it any longer, they take a couple of short, desperate breaths and water is pumped into the lungs.’
‘Fuck, Greer, tell me something I don’t already know.’ Rimis knew if Ashleigh Taylor were here, she would be more direct with him and wouldn’t be treating him like some young probationary officer.
‘No sign of sexual activity, if that helps. Overall, she was a healthy young woman.’
‘Age?’
‘Somewhere between eighteen and twenty judging by her dental eruptions. Third molars don’t usually erupt until the early twenties. There’s no evidence of them, so there’s a clue.’ Doctor Ross was taking a scraping of the tattoo. ‘The jaw’s intact and if we can get a hold of some dental records and take X-rays, it could be the easiest way to identify her. And the tattoo, it will help of course, unless it’s recent.’
Without knowing who the girl was, Rimis knew the investigation was stalled. Thirteen names had come up on the MisPer register and not a butterfly tattoo amongst them. He shut his eyes and scrubbed his face with his hands. During his career, he had seen his fair share of corpses, but never enough to become used to them, especially when it came to women and children. ‘I’ll be at Otto’s Bar if you haven’t got anywhere better to go after you finish here.’
Rimis walked out into the night air and the nausea he had been feeling all evening began to fade.