Chapter 9

I woke late, after dreaming one of the women from the Peekaboo launch had been killed, with a headache thanks to the blow from the blackjack. I felt a lump at the base of my skull as I contemplated the laziness of a quiet Sunday spent swimming at the continental pools, and maybe hitting the gym.

I sparked up a burner on the stove top for the percolator, turned on the ABC Sunday morning news, paid some bills online, and heard the percolator. As I retrieved a mug from an overhead cupboard, the news reader announced the body of a woman had been found murdered in Camperdown Park.

‘...grisly discovery was made by a council worker in the early hours of Saturday morning. The twenty-one-year-old woman, a university student in Australia on a student visa, had been stabbed, and her body partially covered. Homicide squad commander Detective Superintendent Corey Vinyard said police have recovered her mobile phone in an effort to establish her last known movements.’

‘We’re piecing together some pertinent information, and ask for anyone who spoke with or saw the victim to get in touch with us as soon as possible.’

A Crime Stoppers phone number appeared, and the news reader moved on to the next story. An ache in my gut told me it was Tamsin, and I pushed the thought away as I retrieved Ivers’ card from my wallet in my bedroom, called his mobile, and went through to his voicemail, where his gruff voice said to leave a name and number.

The switch at the Sydney Homicide Squad put me through to his voicemail, and I hung up. I brought up the Glebe morgue website and read the FAQ’s. One of them said it was possible to have a general viewing of a body in special circumstances, if arranged prior to the post mortem process.

I retrieved my knuckledusters from the bottom drawer of my tallboy, got into my car, and stopped at the closest Shell to check the oil, water, and tyres. I took Mount Ousley, and sped through the southwest section of Sydney until reaching the CBD. I squeezed into a tiny spot a block west of the Glebe morgue, to go the rest of the way on foot.

The morgue itself was a plain-looking, single-storey affair built in the seventies and attached to the local coroner’s court. Three people stood before me at the counter. As I waited, one of the people in line, a heavy-set Maori woman with cropped hair, in a navy pants suit, collapsed heavily to the floor.

The young blonde woman she’d been talking to screamed and stood over her in a panic.

I ran to the woman on the floor, knelt beside her, and told the other woman to take a step back. A silver bracelet on her right wrist had a plate with the word ‘Epilepsy’ engraved on it.

I looked up into the panicked eyes of the blonde woman. ‘She’ll be okay. She’s got epilepsy. We need to wait it out.’

I took out my phone and started the stopwatch feature. After two minutes and forty seconds, the woman’s convulsions stopped. I gently rolled her onto her right side, being careful that her head didn’t flop against the floor. It was another minute before she came to and her eyes focused on me.

‘Think so,’ she said between gritted teeth. She rubbed her lower back. ‘Just another bruise for my big arse.’

The other woman gasped with relief and leaned over the both of us. ‘Aunty? You okay?’

Aunty rolled onto her back and lifted her arms straight up. ‘Yeah, I’m good Cherie.’ She glanced up at me. ‘Muscles, be a darl’ and help ten-ton Tessie up, will ya?’

I put my phone away, grabbed her by the wrists, and heaved her to a vertical position.

She tightened her grip as she struggled to regain her balance. The top of her head came to my chest. ‘Thanks, Muscles. I’m lucky there’s still angels like you in the world.’

‘My ex-wife’s brother is severely epileptic. My wife showed me how to time his fits.’

She readjusted the strap of her handbag, brushed her suit jacket down, and swept her hands down the backs of her legs. ‘You a cop? Built like one.’

I fished out one my cheap knockoffs and handed it to her. She glanced at it, then shoved it into her oversized handbag. ‘What’s a nice boy like you doing in the stiff shop?’

‘I’m investigating a missing person, and I think she might be tied to the recent murder victims—the two women killed in Camperdown.’

‘I need to find out their names. I’m hoping there’s a connection to my case, but I’m blocked by red tape.’

‘Steady on, Sunshine. Unless you’re family, you’ve got buckleys chance of getting through those doors. Tell you what. Hang about. I’ll see what I can do for you.’

She elbowed my arm, then re-joined Cherie at the front counter. I took a seat in the waiting area and watched as the receptionist provided the women directions, and as they made their way down a long hall and through double doors that read, ‘Authorised personnel only. No public access.’

After forty minutes, they reappeared. Aunty held a manila folder. Cherie said something to Aunty, then made a beeline for the female toilets.

‘Relax, Muscles. I always suss out my peeps. Your name popped up at Cash and Hendrix in Wollongong. Nice place, always wanted to go there. Talked to an American bloke. He was only too happy to spill the beans on you. Hope he’s not a mate of yours.’

‘That’s Reggie,’ I said. ‘He’s a little bit left of center, but mostly harmless.’

‘You checked out. Listen, there’s a park up on Glebe Point Road, not far from here. Meet me there in ten minutes for a smoke.’

The Foley Rest Park was a little oasis of ferns, Moreton bay fig trees, and a children’s playground nestled amongst the busy streets of Sydney. I found a bench seat under a stainless-steel cable trellis.

Soon Aunty approached and sat next to me. She opened her ginormous hand bag and pulled out a manila folded that had been roughly folded in half.

‘I ran into one of the morticians I went to uni with, and he printed copies of the autopsies.’

She opened the manila folder and pulled out photocopies of two autopsy reports. She scrolled the text with her index finger as she read the handwriting near the top of the page in the first report.

‘First victim: Renee Prestwidge, nineteen-years-old. Time of death estimated between 10:00 PM Friday night and 1:00 AM yesterday morning. Cause of death due to massive blood loss due to multiple stab wounds from a single-edged butterfly knife. No sign of blunt trauma.’

‘Second victim: Pavali Singh, twenty-one-years old. Time of death estimated between 12:00 AM and 3:00 AM yesterday morning. Died from three stab wounds in the abdomen, one close to the umbilicus, two in the... what the frick is that word?’

I pointed to the third paragraph on Pavali’s report. ‘Look at this... stab wounds caused by a single-pointed end showing a unilateral “fish tail” split due to the blunt back edge on the knife blade. These characteristics were related to a knife with a single sharp edge, consistent with something like a butterfly knife, a single sharp edge with a squared-off back, approximately twenty centimetres long. Stab wounds show square skin abrasions at the ends. These ‘hit marks’ resulted from the knife’s handle contacting the body surface when the knife was vigorously plunged into the flesh. Can I see Renee’s report again?’

Aunty flipped back to the first page, and I pointed to the last paragraph, written in a messy scrawl.

‘Wounds consistent with a butterfly knife approximately fifteen to twenty centimetres in length.’

‘Which implies both girls were killed by the same killer. Did either of the girls have alcohol in their system?’

‘If either of them was drinking socially, I might be able to trace back to where they were socialising and make enquiries.’

Everything pointed to a connection between the three women—Renee, being Tamsin’s roommate, and Pavali, killed on the same night as Renee and dumped a block from the dormitory.

What were the odds of two women from the same college, living in the same building, being murdered by stab wounds within twelve hours of each other?

I imagined the horror Pavali must have experienced at the hands of her killer, and felt a profound sadness for her parents, no doubt thousands of kilometers away and feeling utterly helpless and devastated.

I laughed, and she folded the manila folder and shoved it into the blackness of her hand bag.

She glanced at the toilets. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Bitch-face is taking a shit, so we’ve got at least fifteen minutes. I’m former ASIO, but I packed that shit in four years ago. I work freelance now. Cherie’s got me on a three-month contract, but she does the fun shit and leaves the bullshit admin work to me. I’m fucking braindead. You ever thought about taking on a partner? I need some action.’

‘Honestly? No. Only because it’s not something I can afford to do, so I’ve never considered it seriously.’

‘You ever take on cases where you need private information you don’t have access to?’

‘I’ve got contacts—Roads and Maritime, State Revenue, Social Security. They’re embedded, real deep. I’m talking fifteen years. Trusted family types, you know? The kind that avert suspicion. They take ten percent from my commissions and they relay everything cryptically on Linux. No bastard can hack it. You take me on, my cut’s twenty percent.’

She gave me her card, an otherwise blank rectangle of cardboard with a handwritten phone number. ‘Call me if you hit a wall.’

‘And if you can’t use your brains, use what God gave you. Hottie like you, should be a snap.’

I got up to leave, and Aunty gripped my wrist. Her eyes held mine. ‘Do me a favour? Don’t try to find out my name. You try, and I find out? I get a bunch of pipe-beating mothers on your arse, lay you out flat. We clear?’

On the drive back, I tried to draw connections between Renee and Pavali, and possibly Tamsin, but couldn’t match A to B to C. Millions of maybes ran through my head like wild horses. Maybe the girls were friends and met the same man. Maybe it was a love triangle gone wrong. Maybe Tamsin walked in on something and the girls were taken out, or Tamsin was dealing drugs and it went wrong, or the girls saw a criminal’s face in the building and were taken out.

Weary from the second drive from Sydney in two days, I relaxed late that afternoon in my flat and updated my notes to include Renee and Pavali. I walked down and bought a kebab for dinner, and indulged in two baklavas back home.

My mobile rang at 11:40 PM, and I stumbled from the lounge into the darkness of my bedroom to answer it. The screen said private number. ‘Hello?’

‘I told you to forget about Tamsin Lyons,’ growled a familiar voice. I matched it to my assailant at Clovelly on Saturday.