Ella and Murray reached the Durhams’ house to find a silver Toyota parked in the driveway.
‘Told you,’ Murray said.
‘That’s not his.’ Ella went back through her notebook. ‘He drives a black Holden Cruze. This belongs to Marie Kennedy.’
‘Oh,’ Murray said. ‘Huh.’
They knocked on the front door. The dog barked and someone shushed it. Ella heard the locks turn, then Marie looked out.
‘Have you found her?’ she asked.
‘Not yet, I’m afraid,’ Ella said. ‘Is James here?’
‘No, he isn’t.’
‘May we come in?’
‘Certainly.’
Once inside, Ella could see her better. Her eyes were red and puffy, her skin grey with exhaustion. ‘Are you all right?’
‘You looking at me and asking me that feels like deja vu all over again.’ Marie sat on the lounge and tucked her feet beneath her. The dog jumped up next to her. ‘I came to see how James was doing, then let myself in. I can’t believe she’s out there somewhere and nobody can find her. I’m so frightened for her.’ She wiped her eyes.
‘You have a key?’ Ella said.
‘I know where they keep the spare.’
‘Has James been here?’ Murray asked. ‘Or have you spoken to him on the phone?’
‘I haven’t seen him this morning; I assume he’s at work,’ she said. ‘I called his mobile but it went to voicemail.’
‘Did you come to talk to him about anything in particular?’ Murray asked.
‘Just to offer a bit of moral support. And get some for myself, I suppose. I thought I might cook something to go in the freezer too, but I haven’t collected myself enough to start yet. I’ve taken some time off work, and Paris is on duty, so rather than hang about at home I thought I’d come here.’
‘Where do you work?’ Murray said.
‘At a physiotherapist in Bankstown.’
Ella nodded. ‘Excuse me a minute. I have to make a call.’ She went into the hall and as she pressed to ring Dennis, she heard Murray say, ‘Have you had any new thoughts about what might’ve happened?’
‘Orchard,’ Dennis answered.
‘He’s not here now and he hasn’t been here all morning.’ She lowered her voice. ‘So Marie Kennedy tells us. She came over and let herself in.’
‘To do what?’
‘Wander about and cry by the looks of it,’ Ella said. ‘Is his phone visible?’
‘No. It’s turned off.’
Ella’s radar went nuts. ‘Why would he do that unless he knows we’re keeping an eye on him and decided to hide?’
‘Or his battery went flat,’ Dennis said.
Yeah, right, Ella thought. ‘So the alert?’
‘Is being put into place now,’ Dennis said.
Back in the lounge room, Marie was talking about the trouble she’d had getting to sleep and the dreams that swamped her when she did. ‘I kept seeing this man with no face. When I’m awake, I can’t imagine who would want to hurt her, and it’s as if the same happens when I’m asleep.’
Ella scribbled a note about James’s phone being off and handed it to Murray. ‘Marie,’ she said, ‘is there anywhere James might go if he wanted to get away from people? Somewhere special to him, or to him and Stacey perhaps?’
‘Nowhere springs to mind.’
‘Where they honeymooned maybe?’ Murray said, stuffing the note in his pocket.
‘They went to Bora Bora. The place they liked best was here. This house.’ She looked around sadly.
Ella took out the photo of the cyclist. ‘Does this person look at all familiar?’
Marie studied it. ‘Where was this taken?’
‘It came up in the investigation,’ Ella said.
‘Is this who took Stacey?’
‘We don’t know. Do you recognise her?’
Her knuckles white, Marie stared at the picture as if she could leap in and throttle the woman. ‘I don’t know who this is,’ she said finally.
Murray said, ‘Nothing about it that’s familiar? Person, bike, helmet?’
‘None.’ She held it out as if she couldn’t stand to look any longer. ‘James told me that someone texted and said he knew what it was about. Is that true?’
‘Someone did say that, yes,’ Ella said.
‘Is James behind what’s happened?’ Her eyes were intense, her jaw tight.
‘We don’t know.’
‘She’s my sister,’ she said. ‘Tell me the truth.’
‘I am,’ Ella said. ‘We honestly don’t know.’
It was so frustratingly true. They finished up and left her there, twisting her hands on the lounge, the dog still sitting patiently beside her.
At the car Murray said, ‘Why would James turn off his phone?’
‘More importantly,’ Ella said, ‘where is he, and what’s he doing there?’ The idea that he was sneaking around drove her up the wall, but until they got a lead on his location, they had to keep going. Jonathon Dimitri, dentist, was next on their list.
*
Paris squeezed the side of her seat, out of Rowan’s view, as he drove them to the accident. His voice sounded like it was coming down a long tunnel as he asked her about potential hazards – power lines down, fuel leaks, and other cars crashing into them because the drivers were gawking – and reminded her about response, airway, breathing and circulation. She tried to focus, but what if the wreck was so bad she couldn’t get to the trapped person? What if there was more than one code nine?
The cars in front pulled out of their way, a bunch of kids on the footpath waved and smiled, the gardens flashed green as Rowan accelerated. She was breathing too fast. She took in and held a breath, but it made the pounding of her heart reverberate in her chest even more. She didn’t even have Stacey to talk to when it was all over.
The traffic grew clogged, and Rowan cut onto the wrong side of the road. There it was. Two cars, a T-bone collision by the looks of it, someone failed to give way. A woman in her fifties in a flowered dress stood in the road screaming. Paris couldn’t see into the cars.
She picked up the mike with a trembling hand. ‘Thirty-seven’s on scene, will report shortly.’
‘Copy, Thirty-seven.’
She got out. Sunlight glinted off the shattered glass on the asphalt and crunched underfoot. The Oxy-Viva hung over her shoulder, the thick padded strap reassuring in her hand. The woman was still screaming. A couple of bystanders tried to catch her hands to stop her tearing at her hair. Holy crap. What could make someone do that?
Calm. You can handle this. Just stay calm.
‘Who was in the cars?’ she found herself saying.
A man raised his hand and pointed to the car with damage to the front. ‘I was driving this. I’m okay. She was driving that.’
Paris looked at the car with the crumpled rear passenger-side door.
‘She just pulled out, right through the give way,’ the man was saying. ‘I was only doing fifty but I had nowhere to go.’
Paris could see a shape inside the car, beyond the shattered window in the back passenger seat, unmoving. She realised the woman was not just screaming but screaming words. ‘Nicholas! Nicholas! Nicholas!’
Rowan was at the car, opening the back door on the driver’s side, leaning in to the motionless child. Paris took a step closer and saw that he was blond-haired and about nine. His eyes were closed, his head back against the seat, his throat thin and pale and defenceless. The crushed door pinned him to the seat.
‘Nicholas! Nicholas!’ The woman screamed and sobbed and fought off the bystanders. She fell on her knees and howled. The sound and all its horror and despair struck Paris like a slap.
‘Paris,’ Rowan said, but she was already walking towards the woman.
The woman looked up at her, face haggard with grief, tears like rivers. ‘He’s dead. I killed him.’ She grasped Paris’s arm with icy-cold hands. ‘I killed my own grandson.’
Paris crouched and hugged her. The woman clutched her like she was drowning. Paris had a pain in her chest and a lump swelling in her throat and she felt the woman’s sobs against her neck, the sweaty anguish and wretchedness of her shaking body. She felt for her beyond words, but she also felt in that moment that this was what she wanted to do: provide comfort, even if it was just a hug in the terrible hell of a grandmother’s guilt and loss.
Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned her head to see a bystander as he bent close to her ear. ‘Your colleague said to come back because the boy’s not dead.’
Shame swamped her. She tried to look back at the car but the woman wouldn’t let her go. She pried the woman’s fingers off and tried to direct her grip onto the bystander, tried to get away without saying anything. She didn’t trust herself to speak, because what if she told her he wasn’t dead and then later he did die?
The woman clung on. There was no other way.
‘I need to go and look after him,’ Paris said.
‘He’s dead, he’s dead.’
‘He’s not,’ Paris said. ‘I need to go and help take care of him.’
The woman looked at her, shock and fear and hope in her eyes. Paris pulled free of her grip and hurried back to the car, feeling the eyes of the growing crowd, embarrassed to face Rowan in the car.
She reached the window. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Later,’ Rowan said tightly. ‘He’s only pinned by the legs. If we push the seat cushion down we can get him out.’
Paris leaned in. The boy was still unconscious, but Rowan had fitted a cervical collar to protect his neck. He wore a robot T-shirt and red shorts, and cubes of shattered safety glass dotted his lap and chest. Rowan had put an oxygen mask on him, the sphygmo was wrapped around his thin right arm, and monitoring leads snaked from under his shirt to the monitor propped in the front seat.
‘Press,’ Rowan said.
Paris pushed down on the seat. The boy’s legs were narrow, his knees exposed below his shorts, one bruised and oozing blood onto the back of her gloves.
Rowan worked to get his hands under the deformity in the door. ‘A bit more.’
Paris forced the cushion down hard. Rowan eased the boy’s legs out and free. He palpated them for evidence of fractures. ‘Go get the spineboard and stretcher.’
‘And tell Control we don’t need Rescue?’
‘I’ve already done it.’ The rebuke in his voice was clear.
She hurried to the ambulance and pulled out the stretcher, then laid the spineboard on top. In the time it took her to hug that woman and get stupidly, idiotically, ludicrously proud of herself, Rowan had done so much. In addition, she was the treating officer and she’d walked right past a trapped and unconscious child to his screaming relative. How many times had they gone over that in school? It was the quiet ones you needed to check; by their noise, the others were demonstrating how good their airway and breathing were. For fuck’s sake. For fucking fuck’s sake.
She positioned the stretcher beside the driver’s side of the car, then leaned in behind Rowan. ‘What else?’
‘Move the front seats as far forward as they’ll go, then have the board ready,’ he said.
The child was semiconscious and moaning, the woman sobbing in a police officer’s arms on the footpath in front of a fascinated crowd. Paris knelt on the driver’s seat and pulled the mechanism under the passenger seat, heaving it forward, then did the same on the driver’s side. Her hands shook and her arms felt weak. She got the board and leaned it against the car, then saw another ambulance pulling up. She didn’t recognise either officer.
They came over and glanced at her, standing there not knowing what to do with her gloved hands, then bent to the car. Rowan issued a list of instructions that Paris couldn’t quite hear. The crowd craned their necks as the other officers moved, one into the front seat, the other squeezing in beside Rowan.
‘Board,’ Rowan said, and Paris fed it between Rowan and the other officer and felt one of them take hold.
She supported the end while they manoeuvred it into position, changing their stances so they could place it flat on the seat. The one in the front had jammed herself between the front seats, her hips holding her there so she had both arms free to help lift the crying boy. Paris stood with her hands on the board, envious of the way they worked.
‘One, two, three,’ Rowan said, and she felt the board dip under the child’s weight. He was still crying, and his grandmother was calling his name again.
People in the crowd murmured and took photos with their phones. Fire officers stood by with a charged hose. The air smelled of hot metal and oil and asphalt. She looked at her hands gripping the end of the board and wondered if this was the last case she’d do.
Rowan pointed Paris to the resus seat in the ambulance. It was at the head of the stretcher and out of the way. She got in and sat down, feeling small and stupid. The backup crew loaded the stretcher and Rowan climbed in alongside it, making sure the IV line and oxygen tubing didn’t tangle, talking to Nicholas like everything was fine.
Nicholas was properly awake now, but still crying. ‘Where’s Nanna?’ he hiccuped.
‘She’s fine,’ Rowan said, ‘she’s right outside. She’s going to follow us to hospital in the other ambulance.’ As he talked he reconnected the monitor leads, ran a strip, checked the blood pressure. ‘You are looking fine, my man. How do you feel?’
‘My head hurts.’
‘Yep, you’ve got a bit of a bump there. Do you know where you are?’
‘In an ambulance.’
‘Ten out of ten,’ Rowan said. ‘Do you remember what happened?’
‘I remember we were in the car, but I don’t know what happened then.’
‘That’s okay. Can you tell me where you were going?’
‘To the shops,’ he said.
‘Goodo. And here’s a tough one: do you know what day it is?’
‘It’s Tuesday.’
‘Brilliant. High five.’
They slapped hands. Paris looked out the side window. Where did you get this ease with strangers? And now Rowan was starting on the case sheet, asking Nicholas his date of birth and whether he took any medicine, checking his pupils again, asking whether he liked his teacher at school. How did you become that person?
*
At the hospital, Paris stood around as they unloaded, watched the other officer help the still-shaking grandma out of his ambulance and then the tearful kissing of the grandson’s face, and tagged along as the pair were taken inside. She hoped she might be able to help transfer the kid onto the hospital bed, but ended up somehow elbowed out by a couple of burly wardsmen and took it as a sign to drift back outside.
She climbed into the empty ambulance. It was so spacious when the stretcher was out. The sun lit the tinted side window and the white plastic of the side lockers was smooth and shiny. She started cleaning up, looping the monitoring leads and packing them into their pouch, replacing the oxygen mask in the Viva and turning off the cylinder after checking that it was still over half-full, restocking the drug box with the IV pump set and fluid bag and making sure there were enough cannulae, swabs and tape.
‘Paris,’ a female voice said, and she turned to see a woman at the open back door. She was in her late forties, her dark hair pulled back in a smooth bun, her uniform neatly pressed, and her epaulettes bearing both the paramedic supervisor and area superintendent markings. Paris’s stomach fell.
‘I’m Kathryn Beattie,’ the woman said. ‘Mind hopping out so we can have a chat?’
*
Blocks of units lined the street in Campsie where Jonathon Dimitri lived. Music poured from a dozen different places, including open garages and doors. Electrician, locksmith and plasterer’s vans were parked fifty metres away outside a building with smoke stains on the wall above a broken ground-floor window. Leafy trees shaded the long grass on the nature strips from the midday sun, clean washing hung on racks on balconies, and three grinning children under five rolled on plastic tricycles along the footpath followed by a man in dark sunglasses who talked in another language on a mobile. As he passed their car he removed the phone from his ear long enough to shout, ‘Jasvinder, not so fast!’
Dimitri’s block was set back from its neighbours. Ella and Murray crossed the concrete forecourt and followed the path down the side. The entry door was held open by a brick, and they went in and climbed to the third floor, past doors behind which babies cried and TVs blared. Someone was cooking marinated meat, and Murray said, ‘I’m hungry.’
Ella knocked on the door to unit nine. She waited a minute, raising her eyebrows at Murray, then knocked again.
‘Not home,’ Murray said.
‘The sign on the surgery said closed due to illness. He shouldn’t be out if he’s sick.’ She tested the knob but it was locked.
‘Who are you, his employer?’ Murray started back down the stairs. ‘He’s probably taken his girlfriend away for a few days and didn’t want to say that to his patients.’
Ella leaned close to the peephole, hoping to see a change in light and dark that would indicate movement, but saw nothing. She crossed the landing and knocked on the neighbour’s door.
‘Who is it?’ The woman sounded nervous.
Ella smiled at the peephole. ‘Detective Ella Marconi, New South Wales Police.’ She held her badge up, then smiled again. ‘May I talk to you for a moment?’
‘Is something wrong?’
‘I’d just like to ask a couple of questions about your neighbour in unit nine. Can you open the door, please?’
A moment’s hesitation, then the lock turned and the door opened. The security chain was still in place, and the woman who peered through the gap had frightened eyes. She looked at Ella, then past her to Murray, standing at the top of the stairs.
Ella smiled at her again. ‘Do you know your neighbour?’ She pointed over her shoulder.
‘Only a little,’ the woman said. She looked about thirty, and wore a bright blue hijab. To Ella’s inaccurate ear she sounded Russian. ‘We say hello. His name is John. He said he is a dentist and will check my family’s teeth if we like him to.’
‘Does he live alone?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Or I should say he has done so as long as I have known him, that is six months that we’ve lived here ourselves. But he has a girlfriend, I think. I don’t know her name but I have seen her a few times in the last few weeks.’ She blushed.
‘When did you see John last?’
‘On Friday afternoon, maybe five o’clock. He was cleaning his car in the space at the back, and we said hello. But I have been working, so maybe he’s here and I didn’t see.’
‘Cleaning the inside or outside of his car?’
‘Both,’ she said. ‘The outside was wet, and he had the little hand machine.’ She made vacuuming motions.
‘Thank you,’ Ella said. ‘I appreciate your help.’
The woman looked past her at Murray again, nodded, and closed the door.
‘What’d she say?’ Murray asked. ‘I couldn’t hear.’
‘She saw him cleaning his car inside and out late Friday arvo.’ Ella started down the stairs. ‘And she’s seen a girlfriend visiting the last few weeks.’
‘I told you. He’s gone for a long and dirty weekend.’
Ella didn’t answer. At the car she googled the bike shop on her phone and rang the number.
‘Mike’s Bikes, this is Mike,’ a gruff voice answered.
‘This is Detective Marconi,’ she said. ‘We spoke earlier. I was wondering whether you’d been able to find Zaina’s details?’
‘I’m still looking, I’m afraid. Some of the paperwork’s at home, it could be there, I just don’t know.’
‘Can you remember her last name, or anything about where she lives?’
‘It’s a foreign-type surname, but I can’t recall it,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll keep looking and trying.’
‘Please call as soon as you know,’ she said.
*
Rowan stood inside the glass doors of the Emergency Department, watching Kathryn Beattie talk to Paris. Paris’s head was down, her back against the wall, and she scraped at the bricks with the heel of one boot. He felt a tug inside. He wasn’t sure if he’d done the right thing. At the time he’d thought he had no option, but now that he wasn’t so angry he thought maybe he did. She wasn’t the first to be drawn to a screaming uninjured person, and she wouldn’t be the last. It was why they talked specifically about that during training.
Wayne Loftus came up behind him with the stretcher. ‘She lost it big-time, huh?’
‘She was okay.’
‘Mate, I heard what you said on the air.’
‘Her aunt’s missing,’ Rowan said. ‘None of us would be at our best in those circumstances.’
‘“You need a supervisor at the hospital because Officer Kennedy might need to sign off”? There’s only one thing that means.’
Rowan rounded on him. ‘Yeah, that she might need to sign off, and someone has to run her home.’
Wayne grinned and shrugged. ‘Hey, whatever. You were there.’
‘Exactly,’ Rowan said. ‘So don’t say anything to her, all right?’
Wayne hit the button to open the doors and wheeled the stretcher outside without answering. After a moment’s hesitation, Rowan followed.