I, William Kirby, a registered medical practitioner, carrying out my profession at the New South Wales Institute of Forensic Medicine in the State of New South Wales do hereby certify as follows:
At 8.00 hours, on the 26th day of April, 1985 at Sydney in the said State, I made a postmortem examination of Guy Francis VALENTINE.
The body was identified to Mr P. Kennedy of the New South Wales Institute of Forensic Medicine by Sergeant Hindley of Kings Cross Station as that of Guy Francis VALENTINE aged about 55 years.
The body was identified to me by the wristband marked 045197.
The forensic assistant in this case was Miss S. Theodourou.
I had in front of me more information about my father now he was dead than I ever had when he was alive. Or at least, information about his body, in microscopic and macroscopic detail.
‘EXTERNAL EXAMINATION’ gave the body weight and length, body mass index and stated that ‘the body was that of a middle-aged male of approximately stated age. Postmortem lividity was present on the front.’ Lividity. After a person dies, the blood pools in those areas in touch with the surface on which the body is lying. He died lying face down.
The description of injuries included minor cuts, abrasions, contusions, an old surgical scar on the abdomen. And a skull fracture.
‘INTERNAL EXAMINATION’—head and neck, cardio-vascular system, respiratory system, gastro-intestinal, hepato-biliary, haemopoietic, genito-urinary and finally the endocrine system. Specimens of tissue were retained for histology and blood for storage.
Facts. More chilling in their clinical objectivity than a lurid description.
I thought that visiting my father’s grave would be enough to lay the ghost to rest but it wasn’t. First of all, there wasn’t a grave to visit, just a plaque on a brick in a wall. Second, you could know everything there is to know about a person’s life but it’s still not enough to bring them back from the dead. I was gathering documentation, visiting places. Somehow the attempt to lay the ghost to rest was becoming a case. A case in which I was both detective and client.
If I’d peeled back the layers of reasoning I might have found the real reason I was doing this-my own guilt and regret at never making serious attempts to find him while he was alive, despite the lip service I paid to that search. But peeling back the layers didn’t happen till later, till events took the turn they did.
The deaths I come across in my line of work are rarely natural causes or accidental. Even taking into account my propensity to jump to the most suspicious conclusion, by the third time I’d read this postmortem document I didn’t like it any better than the first time I read it.
I invited Lucy to lunch and brought with me the documents I’d obtained from the Institute of Forensic Medicine. I gave Lucy the postmortem report to read, minus the cover sheet which identified the body.
Lucy Lau wasn’t a specialist in forensic medicine, she was a doctor with the Allergy Centre at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, but she would at least know the meaning of the words. I kept having to go to a dictionary and then half the words weren’t there. We went to a tiny downmarket restaurant in Dixon Street, one of those places that have faded photos of the dishes pasted to the inside of the window. It was mostly noodle soup in various guises, with the solid meals all resembling crumbed pork chops.
While I fished around in my soup sorting the solids into known and unknown, Lucy managed to read the report, turning the pages with one hand and scooping pieces of fish and vegetable into her mouth with the other. Lucy was a busy person. Even when she wasn’t busy she ate like a busy person. She had a quick metabolism, the food hardly touched the sides before it was being converted into the energy that fuelled this little fireball.
Once I’d put aside those rounds of white rubber edged in bright pink, the seafood equivalent of Spam, I watched Lucy’s face. Quite frankly, I didn’t think I could have eaten while reading this kind of material, but Lucy didn’t miss a beat. When she got to the last page, she briefly referred to something in an earlier page then pushed the report aside. She frowned as she noticed that the only thing left in her bowl was a single bean sprout in a sea of chicken consomme. She exchanged her chopsticks for a spoon. ‘Looks like the guy hit his head, fell in the water and drowned,’ she announced. She put the ceramic spoon to her mouth and delicately drank the broth. ‘Of course, there is always the possibility that he was pushed. Is it murder you’re looking for?’
‘Not particularly. I just want to get a general feel for the circumstances surrounding the death.’
Lucy had finished her soup now and was looking around for an ashtray. The woman who served us placed an anodised metal ashtray on the table. She lit her cigarette and drew back deeply. ‘Only at mealtimes now,’ she pointed out to me. ‘They make it so difficult, I feel like a leper.’ She looked at me quizzically. ‘Is my smoking bothering you?’
‘No.’
‘What then?’
‘The subject was presumed to be an alcoholic. I expected the body to show more signs of damage.’
‘Well, I certainly wouldn’t have said so on a superficial reading. Normal brain. Nothing remarkable about the liver. Those are the places where alcohol damage usually shows up.’ She flipped over pages of the report and quoted. ‘The liver weighed 2850 grams. Some congestion.’
‘What’s the “some congestion”?’ I asked.
‘Mucus, fat, alcohol, pollution, whatever. With any guy that age you’d expect some congestion. If you or I died tomorrow they would probably find “some congestion”, but with an alcoholic there’s normally more extensive damage than what’s reported here. Maybe he was lucky, or perhaps he was reformed and the liver had repaired itself.’ She flipped over to the pathology sheet, and pointed out the blood alcohol level to me. ‘If he was reformed, he busted the night he died. That blood alcohol level wouldn’t have passed the Random Breath Test.’ She stubbed out the cigarette and moved the ashtray to a neighbouring empty table.
He was over the limit but not a lot over. Not so bad that he’d fall unconscious into the harbour and not be able to get out again. The skull fracture. Maybe somehow he’d fallen and hit his head in such a way that it knocked him unconscious. But he’d just fall to the ground. To fall into the harbour he’d have to have been walking along the seawall. A fifty-five year old man walking along the seawall like a kid doing a balancing act. It didn’t ring true to me, even a drunk fifty-five year old man.
But there was much much more to it than that. I felt as if I had pulled a loose thread and everything had started unravelling. The whole fabric was coming undone. The whole story that had been woven about my father. Maybe all that stuff about my father being a dero was a myth, a fabrication, a story Mina had told herself and I told myself, a blanket to soften the impact of the hard truth. Because if he wasn’t a dero, if he wasn’t an alcoholic, if he was alive and well and living in Sydney, why had he never tried to contact us? To contact me. Whenever my mother told me the story about him, which wasn’t often, it always ended with ‘and we never heard from him again’. Then she’d shut her mind as firmly as one shuts a book when the story is finished.
I replaced the missing top page of the report. Lucy gave it a cursory glance then looked at it hard. ‘Your father? I’m so sorry, Claudia.’
The woman serving us came and asked if we wanted anything else. ‘Just the bill,’ I said.
‘Claudia,’ said Lucy, ‘one of my uncles, when he died, this woman and a teenage boy turned up at the funeral. She was married to my uncle and the boy was his son. But this uncle was married to my mother’s sister, they had five daughters. No-one knew about this other wife and the boy. You can imagine the family’s surprise. Sometimes it’s not till someone dies that we find out the truth about their life.’
William Kirby, a registered medical practitioner, carrying out his profession at the New South Wales Institute of Forensic Medicine in the State of New South Wales, had now retired but he’d agreed to see me at his home.
His home, on Sydney’s North Shore, was quite large. There was a lawn out front so green and immaculate it looked like artificial turf. Along the driveway was a stand of roses as brilliant as any you’d see in the Royal Botanic Gardens. He was watering them as I pulled up outside. He didn’t look up till I closed the car door behind me. He was neatly dressed: cream slacks, white long-sleeved shirt, and a big garden hat. By the look of the skin cancer scars around his nose, he should have started wearing the protective clothing years ago.
I stood at the top of the driveway. Inhaling in long slow draughts, letting the scent of roses swish around whatever the smell equivalent of tastebuds are. I felt almost drunk. No wonder bees dive madly from flower to flower. How could he stand there idly watering? I allowed myself one more inhalation.
‘Dr Kirby?’
‘Come in,’ he invited me down the garden path. The path was edged with low-growing flowers in shades of pink and red. If they had a perfume at all it was overwhelmed by the roses. He turned the tap off and rolled up the hose. ‘I could get one of those sprinklers,’ he said, ‘but it wastes water. Besides, I like watering by hand, the spray is invigorating. Negative ions, you know.’ I knew but I let him tell me anyway. He seemed to be one of those distinguished elderly gents who like to spout knowledge. Which is just what I wanted him to do. ‘Come around the back,’ he said, ‘we can sit down there.’
The back garden was full of roses as well. The man was obsessed.
‘Cleopatra had her bedroom knee-deep in rose petals. Any movement in the room, a light breeze through a window, the idle play of her hand, and more exquisite perfume would be released. She and Antony copulated, drowning in the ecstacy of bruised rose petals. Coffee?’
I wondered what he talked about when he really got to know you. I accepted the offer of coffee and sat down at a wooden table on the back verandah. He went inside. There was a rattling of cups. He came back out again with a tray of coffee and little crescent-shaped biscuits covered in icing sugar.
‘We just don’t have a vocabulary of smell as vast and intricate as the vocabulary for the other senses,’ he said. ‘The appreciation of smell occurs in the limbic brain, not the intellect. I have spent a lifetime dissecting, analysing and naming. I find the fact that smell eludes our attempts to define it enormously satisfying, don’t you?’
‘Mmm,’ I murmured. Sure, doctor.
He poured the coffee with a steady hand and offered me the plate of biscuits. ‘Kourabedes,’ he explained. ‘My wife makes them.’ I accepted one. It was delicious, much better than the ones you buy in the shops. He was very sociable, as if he was used to people dropping in.
I made a few complimentary comments about the roses, took a sip of coffee, then placed the folder containing the postmortem report on the table. He took the cue.
‘This is what you wanted to see me about?’
‘Yes.’ I flicked my thumb along my fingers to get rid of the powdery film of icing sugar, opened the folder and turned it around for him to read.
‘A relative, Ms Valentine?’
‘My father.’
‘I see.’ He read through the report, refamiliarising himself with it. When he finished he placed his hands on it and leaned forward slightly. ‘This was a number of years ago. I hope I can still be of service.’
I didn’t want to start with the possibility of murder. After all, he was the one who had examined the body and there was nothing in the report itself to indicate that the death wasn’t accidental.
‘I have only recently discovered that my father died. I wouldn’t say there’s a problem, it’s just …’
‘The need to know, is that it?’
I nodded.
‘A common enough reaction. Even those who are present at a death go over and over it in their minds, wondering if there was anything they could have done to prevent it. They are the lucky ones. At least seeing the dead body gives a sense of finality.’
‘How well do you recall the bodies you examine?’
‘Examined,’ he corrected me. ‘I have been retired for a number of years.’ He paused for a moment and inhaled the scent of his roses, distinguishing different varieties like a conductor distinguishing instruments in his orchestra. ‘I’m sorry to say nothing immediately springs to mind with this one but let’s have a closer look at what the report tells us.’ He studied it in a little more detail then came to some sort of conclusion. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would have had to examine this body in some detail to ascertain the exact cause of death. Whether it was the blow to the head or immersion in water. Forensic medicine is a most precise science, Ms Valentine.’
‘Is it possible that he might have been killed first then the body dumped in the water?’ I voiced my suspicions.
‘No, no, nothing like that,’ he hastened to assure me, smile on his face as if I was a child who’d inadvertently said something amusing. ‘It’s obvious from the postmortem evidence that he drowned. Look,’ he turned the report around so we could both read it. ‘Oedema fluid in the pharynx, larynx, trachea and bronchi. Both lungs were oedematous. Oedema fluid noted in the nose.
‘If he had been dead before immersion there would be no oedema fluid. Oedema is excessive accumulation of serous fluid in the intercellular spaces of tissue. It occurs when the drowning person breathes in water. Even if he were unconscious he would breathe in water. If he had stopped breathing beforehand, if he had died as a result of the head wound, we would find small amounts of water that trickle in through the nose and mouth, but not enough to cause oedema.’ He sat back, as if he’d just wound up a lecture.
Then the expression of satisfaction on his face changed to one of acute interest. A slow memory that had begun its journey while he was reading the report had now arrived at its destination.
‘Actually … yes, that’s right. Of course. Anzac Day, 1985. The floods. Do you remember?’
Not till he reminded me and not through personal experience. I was in America then and didn’t hear about the floods till I returned. Like recalling exactly what you were doing when you heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated, everyone had their story about those floods.
‘The city was in chaos,’ he began, ‘some of the main roads were virtual rivers. Parking was impossible, I was late for work. My first wife was a school teacher. She hated those times when it rained for days on end. The children would get … “ratty” was the word she used. So it was with everyone during the floods. We like to believe we are so civilised, that we are immune to the weather. But every so often Nature imposes her presence on us and suddenly all our logical thought processes become unhinged.’ His gaze wandered over the beds of rose bushes, the neat clipped lawn in between, this little patch of nature be so carefully controlled.
‘I remember the coat. I’m sure this was the body. It was worn and threadbare, a couple of sizes too small for him, but it was a Burberry.’
‘A Burberry?’
‘Yes. It’s an expensive English make. I had one just like it. A present from my son the previous Christmas.’
That was all very jolly, my father and Dr Kirby having the same sort of coat. I wondered where my father came across his ‘Burberry’. Probably wandered into a St Vincent de Paul’s shop and got lucky.
‘Dr Kirby, the man wearing that coat—was he a derelict?’
He put his hand to his chin and rubbed it thoughtfully. ‘Difficult to say, really. He wasn’t clean-shaven, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a derelict. Hair and nails keep growing after death.’
‘I was thinking that for a derelict there appeared to be little alcohol-related damage to the internal organs.’
‘My discipline has taught me never to rely on assumptions. Being a derelict doesn’t necessarily mean being an alcoholic. Granted, many homeless men are alcohol or drug dependent, but not all.’
A car pulled into the drive. The engine was turned off and a few seconds later a car door slammed.
‘Sofia? I’m round the back,’ he called. He turned his attention back to me. ‘I’m sorry I can’t be more specific. Perhaps the person who identified the body might be able to help.’ He looked at the report to find the name. ‘Sergeant Hindley.’ I politely thanked Kirby for the suggestion. I’d already made enquiries in that direction. Hindley, now Detective Senior Sergeant at Parramatta, was out of the office for a few days. ‘He would have completed the Report of Death to Coroner, the P79A form. They must have sent it to you, along with all the rest of this.’ There was no such form in the material Forensic had sent. ‘Oh well, it probably got lost in the translation. As I mentioned earlier, with the floods and everything, there was so much chaos. Hello, darling. Did you have a good game?’
Around the corner came a woman in a sleeveless tennis dress, a yellow sweatband keeping her shiny dark hair in place. She was a good twenty years younger than Kirby. When she saw me she gave Kirby a subtle look of enquiry that didn’t escape my notice. They embraced, then he took her tennis racquet as if helping her with her luggage. ‘Claudia Valentine, may I present my wife, Sofia Theodourou.’ Even though he was retired he was not out of touch. Not only did he have a wife twenty years younger than himself, he had a wife with her own surname. I bet his first wife didn’t have her own surname.
She relaxed, and extended her hand to me. ‘I think we spoke on the phone,’ she reminded me. The woman who’d answered when I first rang Kirby’s home. Kirby handed the report back to me. ‘If there’s anything else we can do, don’t hesitate to call.’
‘Thanks for the coffee. And kourabedes,’ I smiled at his wife. ‘They were delicious.’ She smiled back graciously. ‘Must be heaven living with all these roses,’ I commented.
‘Close,’ agreed Sofia.
It wasn’t till I was in the car and back on the highway that I thought of the roses in another garden-the crematorium at Rookwood. Rose bushes fed with human blood and bone. Such luxuriant growth from our mortal remains.
And it wasn’t till I was on the Harbour Bridge heading back to the city that I realised why the name of Kirby’s second wife sounded familiar to me. Sounded wasn’t the right word, because I’d never heard her name before today. But I had seen it written down. Miss S. Theodourou. Kirby’s second wife was the forensic assistant on my father’s postmortem.
Rushcutters Bay is a harbourside suburb, a quiet residential area next to Kings Cross. It has views of blue water edged in emerald green, the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and you pay a lot of money for them. But it has a nice big park where even deros can enjoy the million-dollar views. I drove along New Beach Road and found a parking spot just beyond the Cruising Yacht Club. I bought a bottle of spring water from the canteen outside the club and proceeded to stroll along. Near the children’s playground, I watched a tall elegant woman in a big floppy hat trying to persuade a two year old to get back in the stroller. But the child didn’t want to know about it. He was standing on top of the jungle gym, king of the castle, master of his world. A world just out of mother’s reach. She had to sweet-talk him back to the ground and she wasn’t having a very good time of it. Ah, it took me back—all that cajoling and bribery, all that waiting around. I was certainly glad that bit was over.
I left her to it. Apart from the mother and child the only other person I encountered was a man walking his dog. Probably a procrastinating writer. People were staying out of the sun, and rightly so. Another hot day, so many of them in a row they seemed to melt together into the one long, hot day. It was too late and too early for the joggers who would inevitably be running the path around the bay, before or after work. There was a seawall a metre or so high with a two-metre drop to the water. OK, so it was the time of the floods and it was raining. Easy to slip. Hit the side of your head, lose balance, over the wall and into the harbour.
I was more than halfway round the park before I came across the stormwater canal. There was barely a trickle of water in it. It was hard to tell whether it was drain water or backwash from the harbour. I wasn’t about to bend down and taste it. There was a fair amount of rubbish where the canal met the sea—plastic bags, drink cans etc. They may have travelled kilometres down the canal to finally end up here.
The canal had a slightly deeper trench running down the middle of it. I climbed down from the footbridge into the canal. It was not unlike a river bed, with a layer of sandy soil having washed into the canal and the trickle of water. If you held a close-up camera on it, it could be a major river system. I walked gingerly along, towards Bayswater Road where the canal curved and became a tunnel under the road. It was slippery in places, the darker wet patches being silt rather than sand. Along the walls of the canal you could see the high-water mark stained mossy green. Above that grew the ubiquitous asthma weed, other scrubby weeds, then the civilised, manicured grass of the park. I walked under a second bridge.
I was closer to the road now and could hear the muted sound of traffic. See the tube of darkness as the canal disappeared under the road. At the edge of the road was a small brick building, possibly a pumping station, with a series of pipes running out of or into it. About three metres from the tunnel a bright pink and white beach ball sat grounded on a sandbank, unmoved by the trickle of water continuing inexorably to the sea. Innocent and forlorn, as if a child had abandoned the ball for more exciting pursuits.
There was a flick of movement as a cockroach scurried along the wall. On a foraging expedition to the world of light, the aboveground. Our six-legged neighbours, eternally with us. In stormwater canals, in the subterranean passages of the city, under our floorboards, in the cracks and crevices of our houses they also dwell. The human population of Sydney is almost four million. How many hundreds of millions of cockroaches are there? The cockroaches would know-they’re getting so smart they’re probably collecting their own census information.
The closer to the road I walked, the higher the walls of the canal became, higher than my head. I couldn’t be seen now from the park unless someone was specifically looking. A wire fence, rusted but still sturdy, ran alongside the canal. But you could climb over it if you wanted to. Or fall.
There wasn’t enough water at the moment to drown in but the high-water mark was at least a metre up the wall of the canal. During those floods the water level would have been even higher. You could drown then. The body float down to the harbour. It could have happened even further up, across the road and beyond, where the stormwater canal started.
I was approaching the mouth of the tunnel. From the road there was a steep little path worn into the growth of weeds and the wire fence was bent over to the ground. Then I saw where the path led. To a ledge just inside the tunnel. The ledge was deep enough and wide enough to accommodate two full-length single mattresses. Because that’s what was on the ledge. Tucked away under the road, higher than the water level, it would be safe and dry. You would get cockroaches, but the rats wouldn’t climb up here.
Anzac Day. A national holiday. Drunk and playing two-up. Maybe he’d won enough to buy an extra flagon. Coming back to the mattress. He slipped on the steep slope, lost his footing. Flying through the rain, skidding, knocking his head on the side, drowning in the water.
They say death by drowning is pleasant, as pleasant as death gets. Breathing the water in and out. Oedema fluid in pharynx, larynx, trachea and bronchi, but that wouldn’t have started yet. After the screaming, burning sensation as the unfamiliar element enters your lungs, you become briefly a water creature. The water from the streets of the city swims in you as you swim in it. Perhaps you have lost consciousness already, perhaps not. You hallucinate, dream, till finally the dreams float out of you and dissolve in the ocean.
This could have been the place where my father died but those mattresses weren’t his. They were more likely now to belong to street kids than deros. I climbed up the side, wedging the edge of my foot into one of the crevices that didn’t have weeds growing out of it. I pulled myself up and looked around before I trespassed.
It was daytime—hopefully the occupants of those two mattresses were out on a foraging expedition, or sitting in a doorway or on a park bench somewhere. I didn’t think they’d take too kindly to an intruder. You find a place like this, you don’t give it up easily. They’d probably have knives or at least broken bottles, the sharp edge of glass every bit as effective as a steel blade.
I stepped across to the ledge. On the mattresses were a couple of crumpled, dirty blankets. No pillows. Around the area a few Coke cans, other scraps of rubbish, no personal items. I crouched down. From here there was a pretty good view of the length of the canal right down to the bay. This was a place for light sleepers who didn’t toss and turn. You wouldn’t want to roll too far or you’d end up in the drink. Across the road was a highrise of luxury apartments. The tenants were paying around $700 a week for the view. The occupants of the mattresses were paying nothing. I crouched there, elbows resting on my knees. Looking at the windows across the way, the mattresses, the walls, looking at the darkness of the tunnel under the road. Waiting for the place to whisper to me the things it had seen. But the place remained still and silent. All I could hear was the eternal hum of traffic heading into the city.