Frank had been flat out since he got back from Geraldton: interrogating prisoners, interviewing witnesses, dealing with the media, meeting with the police prosecutor, and generally doing everything possible to build a watertight case. Thankful that he had something so demanding to focus on, he’d worked long hours and fallen into bed each night mentally and physically exhausted. Now, in the passenger seat of a squad car heading back to the station after interviewing another possible witness, he was in an emotional and psychological no-go zone in which he operated mechanically, feeling nothing but detachment. He was numbed by what had happened with Marissa, by his own stupidity and the role it had played in that awful night. Whatever had overwhelmed her, he knew that his message had been the catalyst, and if he needed any confirmation of that, it was in Marissa’s reaction to him at the hospital.
Accident and Emergency was busy with the usual Friday night parade of injured drunks, road accidents and suspected heart attacks. Frank was used to hospitals, particularly emergency wards, used to facing the injured victims and perpetrators of crimes, their faces a mass of wounds and stitching, or heavily bandaged, tubes and masks connecting them to drips and oxygen. He was used to the smell of fear, to weary, stricken relatives and overworked medical staff, and he had learned to manage it all by focusing on the situation and what needed to be done, leaving his emotions at the door. But that night it was different. Objectivity and detachment had evaporated the moment he opened the door of Marissa’s room – he’d been a seething mass of raw nerves and chaotic feelings.
‘She’s in here, Inspector,’ the nurse said, opening the curtains. ‘Not too long now, please.’
Marissa, propped up on pillows, eyes closed, was attached to a drip and her wounded wrist was heavily bandaged.
‘Marissa,’ Frank said softly. ‘Marissa, how’re you doing?’
Her eyes shot open and he could see that it took her a few seconds to focus. ‘Hi,’ he tried again, moving to take her hand. ‘So you are awake.’
Her eyes were black with fear – or was it anger? ‘Go away, Frank,’ she said, turning her head away from him. ‘I don’t want to see you. Please go away.’
He shifted his weight and drew back his hand. ‘I just wanted to see if you were okay . . . I . . .’
‘Well, you’ve seen me, and I’m okay. So now you can go.’
Frank hesitated. Nothing in his life until now had felt like this, the yearning to make it right, the agony of understanding some of what had happened, along with the pain that neither logic nor understanding could dispel.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Sure, okay. I understand. If that’s what you want. I’ll . . . I’ll come back tomorrow –’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t come back.’ She paused and turned to face him again. ‘You probably saved my life . . .’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I ought to be grateful but gratitude isn’t what I feel.’
‘I don’t want gratitude –’ he began.
‘Fine. So just go,’ she’d said. ‘Just go, Frank, and don’t come back. Please don’t come back.’
Frank brought his mind back to the present as the uniformed constable slowed the car at the traffic lights, and slipped into the left hand lane to wait for the green arrow.
‘We were down here last night,’ he commented as the lights changed. ‘Great big house along here on the left.’
Frank straightened up and glanced at where the officer was pointing. ‘That place?’ he asked. ‘Slow down, constable.’ Letting down the window he peered in through the open gates of the property. It was Gayle’s place. He’d driven in and around that circular rose bed the morning he’d given her a lift to the airport. ‘So what was the trouble?’
‘Odd, really,’ the constable said. ‘Got a call from the lady, a Mrs . . . er . . .’
‘Peterson?’ Frank supplied.
‘Peterson, that’s it. Know them do you, sir?’
‘Just get on with it.’
‘Yes, sir. Well, we got this call saying that she and her husband had had a bit of an argument. She was outside the house and he was inside smashing the place up. She was afraid he might do himself some damage. We were the nearest car so we came in and had a chat with him.’
‘And?’
‘It seems that she’d told him she was leaving him and he wasn’t real keen on the idea, so he was laying into the furniture. Anyway, we calmed him down. He’s a big bloke and he’d done quite a bit of damage – hurled a few chairs through the windows, thrown a lot of stuff in the swimming pool, cut his foot on some broken glass, but nothing serious. He was all right when we left.’
‘And Mrs Peterson?’
‘She went off to wherever she was staying.’
‘Which was?’
Constable Ng screwed up his face. ‘Como, I think. She did give us the address.’
Frank took his organiser from his inside pocket and keyed in Sonya’s name. ‘Twenty-three Antrim Street?’
‘That’s right, Antrim Street.’
‘Okay, constable. Just take the next left, will you, and run me over there now.’
‘Ah, you heard about last night,’ Sonya said. ‘Gayle’s just gone down to Fremantle to see Marissa. She’s fine, though – Gayle, I mean. I think she feels the worst is over now she’s told Brian. From this point on it’s just a matter of hanging in there and getting the legal stuff sorted out as soon as possible.’
‘Must have been pretty hard for her, though,’ Frank said. ‘From my brief encounter with Brian Peterson he’s not a bloke I’d want to take on too often. If she’d let me know I could have hung around in the background in case it got nasty.’
Sonya smiled. ‘Aren’t you a knight in shining armour? Oh, get off with you, I’m only taking the piss. Why don’t you come in? Gayle’ll be back soon. Have a glass of wine. I’m making risotto, there’ll be plenty for three. Oh . . .’ she had just looked past him to the car. ‘What about the young bloke?’
Frank hesitated, then said, ‘Well, if you’re sure, I can send him back to the station.’
‘What’ll you have?’ Sonya asked, opening a packet of rice when he came back.
‘A beer, please,’ Frank said, looking around the kitchen. ‘Nice place.’
‘In the fridge, help yourself,’ she said, reaching up to a high cupboard and lifting out a salad bowl. ‘Yes, it’s nice. I was thinking of moving somewhere a bit fancier but now I’m not. Getting away for a while helps sort out the priorities. Anyway, you’re probably dying to know how Marissa is.’
Frank walked to the other side of the workbench and pulled out a stool. ‘Obviously. Subtlety is not my thing, and I clearly don’t know when to leave well alone.’ He twisted the top off a VB stubby.
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Sonya said, sitting down opposite him and reaching for her own glass. ‘Quite subtle, I think, and sensitive. Maybe too sensitive for your own good at the moment.’
Frank shrugged and looked away. ‘So how is she?’
‘Fragile, I’d say. Still fragile, but improving. Physically she’s fine, her wrist is healing well, but emotionally it’s going to take a while. Do you think it was a real attempt to kill herself? If so, she wasn’t very good at it.’
Frank took a swig of his beer. ‘I think it’s hard to tell. She was in a bad way and she had a panic attack. Sometimes people freeze. They become totally detached and cut off from everything around them. Others harm themselves and it’s not really clear whether it’s suicidal in intent or something to do with the belief – conscious or otherwise – that physical pain will kill the emotional pain. My feeling is that it was the latter, and I don’t think she’d done it before – but then, what would I know?’
‘Quite a lot, it would seem,’ Sonya said. ‘Anyway, I stayed there with her for a couple of nights and despite her protests I think she was glad of it. I’ve been down to see her every day since then and so has Gayle, and we’ll keep doing that for a while. That house means a lot to her – it’s almost like a cocoon and she feels safe there. We’ve talked to her about counselling but she’s resisting that pretty strongly at the moment.’
Frank nodded, tracing patterns in the condensation on the beer bottle.
‘Would you like a glass for that?’
He shook his head.
‘So what about you, hon?’ Sonya asked quietly.
He shook his head again, swallowing down the great wave of self-pity that her sympathetic tone had triggered. ‘Not the best,’ he said. ‘I mean, I’m used to seeing a lot worse than that, but I’m . . . I guess I’m not used to caring.’
‘And you care quite a lot, don’t you?’
‘Yeah! Yeah, I do, a helluva lot. More than I realised. Not that it’s going to do me much good now, I suspect.’
‘Hey, come on,’ Sonya said. ‘It’s early days. She freaked out, you were the one who found her. She doesn’t know how she feels about that yet. You have to give it time.’
Frank nodded. ‘Maybe.’
‘Definitely. Look, Frank, none of us knows what Marissa’s demons actually are. She doesn’t give much away but until that night she had a lot riding on you. It was obvious in the way she talked about you, the way she looked for your calls even if she didn’t return them.’
‘Maybe. But I stuffed that up, and at the hospital . . .’
‘At the hospital she was in crisis. She needed a scapegoat and it’s hard luck it was you. I know you think it was your fault with some message you left –’
‘I’d had a few drinks, I was high on tying up the case . . . I was over the moon and I didn’t stop to think,’ Frank said, the words tumbling out of control. ‘All these months I’ve been so careful, both of us have, sort of feeling our way. We both knew the other was a mess, screwed up by things from the past, and then I go and blow it.’
‘So you’d had a few drinks and you didn’t leave the most appropriate message. And then at the pub you had a few more, but there’s no way you were drunk or crude or anything. I can’t imagine what you think you could have said to –’
‘I said I was in Geraldton and wanted to see her. I told her . . . I told her I loved her.’ He looked straight at Sonya, aware that his eyes were full of tears. ‘I love you, Marissa, that’s what I said. I love you.’
There had been days in the past when Oliver had seen a semester, a week, a day – even a single lecture – stretching ahead of him as prolonged torture. Teaching, although he was apparently quite good at it, was the price he paid for the framework in which he could do his research and writing. Before each lecture and class he had always suffered from bursts of crippling performance anxiety, unable to sleep the night before a morning lecture, unable to eat lunch before an afternoon class. The fact that he knew many of his colleagues suffered the same anxiety did nothing to alleviate it.
Now, as he parked in a shady corner of the university car park, he marvelled at his new enthusiasm for his work. Was it exercise, or therapy, or a combination of the two? Whatever it was, he rose earlier and went to bed later, he slept better and his daytime hours seemed more rewarding than they had for years. Students of whom he had despaired seemed to be responding to him better – somehow he was managing to challenge them, spark their curiosity, even laugh with them. So it seemed almost obscenely unfair that he should be enjoying this personal and professional rebirth while his dearest friend was tunnelling through the slough of despond.
‘Don’t be so silly, Oliver,’ Gayle had said when he mentioned this dilemma at their first breakfast on campus after many months. ‘It’s wonderful to see the change in you. In fact, it’s wonderful to see you, and to be back at work. And I’m not in the slough of despond. I won’t say it’s not difficult at the moment, especially Angie’s reaction, but, frankly, the relief of leaving Brian is enormous, and I’ve got my son back.’ She fished a package of photographs out of her bag, pulled two off the top and handed them to him. ‘Josh and Dan,’ she said. ‘And that’s the three of us together.’
‘He’s so like you,’ Oliver said, genuinely surprised. ‘And you all look so happy.’
‘I was. You can’t imagine what it was like to see him, to feel forgiven. I know forgiveness is supposed to be best for the forgiver, but I’ve got to say it’s pretty amazing to be on the receiving end.’
Oliver smiled. ‘I’m sure. But what about Angie? Any sign of a truce?’
Gayle shook her head and took back the photos. ‘Afraid not. She’s very angry, and very hurt, and of course she has every right to be. It’s a bit hard to see her canonising Brian, though. She’s grumbled about him as much as I have in the past. And now she’s even taking it out on Sonya for being a bad influence on me.’
Oliver raised his eyebrows. ‘How extraordinary. You didn’t even know Sonya when . . . well, when you . . ..’
‘When I had the affair and got pregnant – no, of course not. There’s no logic to it. I guess she just needs to lash out and I know that I have to cop that, but it seems unfair on Sonya. Angie’s even asked for a transfer out of her section. Anyway, what about you? The dancing, the swimming – you look so much better.’
Oliver smiled. ‘I’m ready to bore you with my new routine,’ he said. ‘Less caffeine, lots of raw food and less red wine.’
‘A little is supposed to be good for you.’
‘But almost two bottles over the course of an evening and resultant embarrassing phone calls are not,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I guess you heard – of course, you answered the phone.’ He was moved, quite suddenly, by the ease of their conversation and the feeling that their friendship now had a depth that it had previously lacked. ‘I haven’t been a good friend to you, Gayle,’ he said. ‘If I had, you’d have been able to talk like this before. I’m sorry. I was so much up my own bum. I seem to have spent my life trying to reach some higher plane of political correctness and being totally unaware of the dilemmas of the people I cared about.’
She put her hand on his arm. ‘There were two of us, Oliver. Both cut off, both struggling. Perhaps that’s what drew us together, even though we couldn’t talk about it.’
‘And now?’ He wasn’t sure why he’d said it, or what he expected.
‘Now there’s still two of us and we’re still struggling, but we understand each other much better, and we can talk about it. That means a lot,’ she said. And to his enormous surprise she leaned across and kissed him on the check. ‘An awful lot, Oliver, really.’