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The attack on Reggie confirmed Lyons’ connection to Poulson. Without the lawyer intervention back at the hospital, Lyons wouldn’t have known I’d discovered Tamsin’s location until I suggested they talk to Reggie. It cast enough doubt to sic Poulson onto Reggie, beat him up, and find out where his daughter was. I never imagined Tamsin’s own father wanted her dead.
At the hospital, Brenda sat next to Reggie’s bed and fed him chili con carne. She smiled when I came in.
Reggie looked ten years older. His left eye had swollen shut and cuts lined his face. His thinning blond hair flopped over his forehead, and his usually ruddy cheeks looked like hardened custard under the fluorescent lighting. His left arm was elevated and encased in plaster.
Theirs was a true ‘opposites attract’ story. Reggie, the chubby-cheeked, loud-mouthed, pencil pusher from Arizona, married a quiet-spoken Portuguese woman who worked with her hands and always smiled and embraced me when we met.
A surgeon came in, sat with Brenda, and explained that Reggie needed pins to reset his fingers, and over time regain use of his hand.
Poulson’s words from the brothel rolled around my head: ‘a 50K bonus for taking her out by the end of the week.’
I crunched numbers and researched flight times on my phone. From the time I called Reggie at 3:45 PM, up to the time I found him unconscious in his office after 6:00 PM, gave Poulson a two-and-a-quarter-hour window to visit the Cash and Hendrix offices and carry out the assault. If he wanted the cash bonus from Lyons, he’d have to consider flying out of Sydney. Adding the eighty-minute travel time to Sydney’s Kingsford Smith airport brought the minimum time for Poulson to get to the airport to 7:30 PM.
I checked Thursday flights to Cairns and the last two flights left at 9:10 PM. I checked my phone. The time was 9:34 PM.
The next flight was Friday morning at 6:00 AM.
Poulson no doubt wanted the bonus, which meant he was in the air right now... and I’d led him right to her. I booked a seat on the 6:00 AM, said goodnight to the Cashes, went home, and set the alarm for 4:00 AM.
The only sobering thought that helped me rest was that he only knew where she worked, not where she lived.
I woke up every hour, and got up half an hour before the alarm went off. In the shower, a question that had been floating around, half formed, came into focus. Would there be another reason why Lyons would want Tamsin dead? Nothing fitted into that one.
I packed my gym bag with shoes and a change of clothes, my shaving gear, and some cash, and made my way to the airport.
After a slight delay and an expensive coffee, the wheels of flight QF 413 left the tarmac of Sydney Domestic airport at 11:35 AM. I had just over an hour to check my emails, and was surprised to see an email from Reggie in my inbox.
He’d sent it an hour before they got him, an attachment:
Justice_Draft_MorrisonH_Final
I opened it in Word and scrolled though the document until I found Tamsin’s chapter, and started reading from a random place:
I remember sitting on Dad’s lap at the breakfast bar of our kitchen while Mum made sandwiches. Suddenly, Dad’s hand was between my legs. I started to fidget and move away, feeling uncomfortable. I didn’t know what was happening, and I didn’t know what to say.
‘Mum! Dad touched my bum.’
What happened next would continue to happen until I was twelve. Dad would say, ‘No, I didn’t.’ And Mum would say, ‘Don’t be so ridiculous!’
Mum and Dad went on and talked about other things, while I was left there to sit and think about what just happened. Even to my brain at eight years of age, something wasn’t right, and I felt like crying.
It was at this stage that I started to seriously doubt myself and what actually happened. Maybe Dad didn’t mean to touch me there?
I didn’t think more of it until a few weeks later, when we came home from Saturday shopping and Mum took the groceries inside. I was allowed to sit in the car with Dad and listen to his CDs. After a while, Dad would reach over and rest his hand on my leg, and I immediately thought about what happened in the kitchen before, and all my self-doubts came back. If I ran out and told Mum, she wouldn’t believe me, so I decided to just sit still and let it happen.
Dad’s hand continued up my leg and under the skirt, until he had his fingers resting on the outside of my knickers.
I’d never felt so much confusion before then. Dad was loving and caring and always took my side against some of my more strong-headed relatives, including Nan, who wanted to work me to the bone at her house. So, I thought this couldn’t be a bad thing. It was the only way my innocent mind could rationalise something so strange. Suddenly, Mum came back in the garage, and Dad quickly withdrew his hand. That told me what I needed to know, that this was going to be our little secret and Mum mustn’t know. Mum was brought up very strict and couldn’t bare talking about reproduction or sex education or any of that stuff, or she would get verbally aggressive. I know now that it was only because she had a sheltered upbringing and hated feeling stupid for not knowing the facts of life.
The touching became a regular thing. After shopping, I would sit in the car and listen to Dad’s Cs, and he’d run his hand up my leg and rest his fingers on my knickers. I’d concentrate on the song or think of school to get away from what was happening in the car. For a time, it almost became normal. I felt shame and humiliation, because I adored Dad, after all, and didn’t know what he was doing. Soon, Dad would get bolder, and he started putting his fingers inside my knickers and rub my vulva. I didn’t know what was down there, but I knew that when Dad did this, it felt ‘funny.’
I sat and looked out the window at the darkening cloud layers below. The account explained plenty and helped put things in place. It painted in the gaps and provided a more complete picture of Lyons, and it explained his heart attack at the mere mention of the book back at The Birches.
If true, the text gave Evelyn a strong reason for blackmailing Lyons. It explained why Zara filed for divorce and he settled for millions out of court. It also explained her strange relationship with Tamsin. I had no doubts that more had been said during Tamsin’s visit at Clovelly than I’d ever know.
I considered how it all started, with Tamsin meeting and falling for Heather, a writer wanting to expose abuse victims, spurring Tamsin to want to disclose her past.
Maybe she told Evelyn she’d been interviewed for the book, and felt the time was right to disclose everything, make it public, and expose Lyons for what he truly was. The book may have been the catalyst for Evelyn to gain leverage against Lyons and blackmail him. She may not have had a copy of the book, but it was enough to perpetuate a lie, and to have Mr. Bandana extort Lyons to the tune of twenty thousand dollars a week.
And then there was the small matter of Poulson.
As soon as the wheels touched the tarmac, my fellow holiday makers were already releasing their belts and anticipating leaving the plane. Usually one to wait, I did the same and managed to elbow a few out of the way.
At a rental counter, I booked a Hyundai Tucson, and my sunglasses fogged up at the threshold between air conditioning and the humidity of tropical north Queensland. The rental appeared unscratched on the outside, and smelled musty on the inside. With bag loaded and seat pushed back, I pulled out of the car park and turned north onto the Captain Cook Highway with my heart hammering in my throat.
Tall Alexandra palms covered the surrounding mountain ranges, making lime green, spiky hills, and the highway’s median strip hosted swathes of Zamia palms, each dotted with bright red berries. A massive storm front quickly blotted the afternoon sun, heading in from the west like a formidable enemy, it’s strata of clouds ranging from near black to dark grey. Companies of Rainbow lorikeets fled from the menace, with the occasional roll of thunder promising an onslaught of torrential rain.
A hidden police car tempered my speeding and I dropped back. The hour drive felt infinite, until a large sign decorated with palm trees and blue water welcomed me to the town of Port Douglas.
Fat raindrops thumped against the windscreen as I turned onto the street of Tamsin’s gym and meandered into the car park.
I parked at the far end, between cement bollards holding palm trees, and observed as the usual gym crowd made their appearance—middle-aged woman with towels over their shoulders and colourful active wear, making a beeline for a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop on the opposite side of the road; and young men freshly showered and dressed in work clothes, hair still wet. I worried about my vantage point, the middle extreme left of the car park, with a clear view of the rear entrance. At twenty-five-minute intervals, I’d get out and scout the perimeter, making sure to seek cover whenever a new car entered the car park.
I headed in to ask.
Heavy raindrops hit random patches of my shirt and smacked against my shaved head. The drops felt cool against the mugginess. I made my way up a long ramp, and a singular automatic sliding door opened to reveal another ramp, which led to a front desk. A mezzanine area looked down over a half Olympic-sized swimming pool, and adjacent to the reception, seen through glass, men lifted weights on various machines.
A tanned woman in her twenties with ‘Kylie’ on her name badge smiled a perfect smile. ‘Hi! Is this your first time at Bull’s Gym?’
I said it was, and Kylie proceeded to give me the basics. I asked about personal trainers, and Kylie said there were three: Michael, Anastasia, and Fern. She confirmed all three would be at the gym tonight if I was interested in starting a program with either of them. I got acquainted with the machines—an orbital trainer, and a treadmill for forty-five minutes—all the while scouting the reception area and anyone who came into the gym.
I climbed off the orbiter, wiped it down, and took a tour of the gym.
A woman wearing an official Bull’s Gym uniform spotted a man on the leg press. It was Tamsin. She’d cut her hair into a bob, and had gained muscle in the shoulders, arms, and legs.
After grabbing a pair of dumbbells, I lay on a rack and did three sets of twelve reps straight up.
Tamsin spoke with an encouraging, patient voice and counted each rep along with her client. They made a round robin of the equipment as I kept myself occupied and out of the way. With the session over, she updated her client’s file and walked to the front counter.
I followed a sign down some stairs to the men’s room, where I toweled down, checked each cubicle and shower recess, and then returned to the mezzanine. I smiled and waved goodbye to Ally behind the reception desk.
Outside, I walked around the building and found another entrance on the western side. Stairs led up to an automatic door that opened into the reception area from another angle. I picked a Gatorade out of a fridge, paid for it, and crossed the mezzanine to survey the pool. I watched as a woman dried off a child’s hair. My eyes went up to the gym, where three men worked the lat pull-down machines. Each had different styles: the one on the left lifted too heavy and dropped the weights with each turn; the middle one lifted in long graceful movements both ways; the last one had stopped, and the angry eyes of Gavin Poulson stared directly at me.
