Our hair colour, our clothes, our names, even our facial features can be altered, but our genes don’t change. Deoxyribonucleic acid is the stuff genes are made of. In the biochemistry of a person’s chromosomes are features unique to that individual. Blood, semen and other body fluids present at the scene of a crime can be analysed and matched with a suspect’s unique DNA patterning.
DNA analysis was first used to establish paternity. Some of an individual’s unique features are shared by family members and are passed from one generation to the next. It was paternity I was thinking about as I drove to the morgue. There’d been a message from Sofia Theodourou. She had a result on the blood tests. Could I come and see her at my earliest convenience?
The Glebe morgue, as well as housing the Institute of Forensic Medicine also houses the Coroner’s Court. The brown brick complex is on Parramatta Road opposite Sydney University. You can get a degree in medicine or law then pop across the road for a job.
When I walked in off the street, however, I wondered if I’d come to the the wrong place. It was chaos. The foyer was filled with people whose average age was eighteen, milling around, dressed to kill, chattering on to each other like long-lost friends. Disregarding the policeperson who was endeavouring to get everyone’s name and address. She was fighting a losing battle.
I made my way through the throng. ‘Why the big crowd?’ I asked one of the sheriffs. ‘It’s a drive-by matter,’ she said tersely, as if she’d told me too much already.
The inquest into a drive-by killing. I remembered it now, happened about six months ago. A drive-by shooting outside an all-night cafe in Marrickville. It had to be the same one. Drive-bys are rare in Australia.
I left the Coroner’s Court section, walked through the door to Forensic Medicine and told the woman in the office I was there to see Dr Theodourou. She asked for my name then picked up the phone. ‘A Claudia Valentine to see Dr Theodourou,’ she said. ‘Won’t be a minute,’ she said, putting down the phone.
Less than a minute later a door opened and a man wearing glasses over a lean tanned face appeared. ‘You’re looking for Dr Theodourou?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Come this way,’ he invited.
I went that way. He led me down a maze of corridors and left me in a room with a tea urn, fridge, chairs, a table and magazines. It must have been some sort of common room but there was no-one else there at the moment. I flicked through a couple of the magazines. Still no-one came. I went for a little walk, wondering what was behind all those closed doors I had passed. I pushed a set of double doors, which let out a draught of cold air, and found myself looking in a storeroom with rows and rows of bodies in bags on shelves.
‘Looking for anyone in particular?’ I heard a voice behind me. It was a woman with steely grey hair and a steely grey face. She wore nurses’ shoes and a watch pinned to her ample bosom. If she wasn’t a matron she had a strong desire to be one.
‘It’s OK,’ I assured her, ‘I’m waiting for Dr Theodourou.’
‘You can wait at reception,’ she went on in her authoritative yet matronising tone.
I’d already got this far, I wasn’t going back to reception. I started to head towards the common room. She came with me. Then parked herself in the doorway so I couldn’t get through. ‘This is for staff only.’
What was wrong with the woman? ‘A member of staff showed me to this room,’ I glared, starting to lose patience with her behaviour. ‘If you don’t mind.’
We stood there glaring at each other. The stalemate was broken by the sound of another voice. ‘Hi. Sorry you had to wait.’ It was Sofia Theodourou. ‘Beryl?’ she said to the matron. ‘What are you doing up here, is everything all right?’
‘Yes, doctor, perfectly all right.’ Beryl skulked away down the corridor.
‘What a morning! I’ve got to get a cup of coffee, do you mind?’ I thought Sofia would open a cupboard, drag out a jar of Nescafe, but no. She meant a takeaway coffee from up the street. She led me out the back way, past the delivery dock. ‘Beryl wasn’t annoying you, was she?’ Sofia asked when we were outside.
‘Only mildly. What does she do?’
‘She does the laundry.’
Sofia took me up to a tiny cafe on a corner. There were hessian sacks on the floor opened to reveal their cargo of coffee beans. There was coffee from Eastern Europe, from Italy, from Brazil and Nicaragua. The place smelled like heaven.
‘Cappuccino to go,’ she told the woman behind the counter.
‘I’ll have the same,’ I said.
We were on our way back when Carol walked round the corner. ‘Well, well,’ Carol greeted us. We looked at each other quizzically, each wondering what the other was doing there but, in the presence of a third person, too cool to ask. I was about to introduce her to Sofia but they seemed to know each other already.
‘You haven’t brought me more bad news, have you?’ Sofia said to Carol.
‘Not today. I’ve got business in the other half of the building. See you later.’
‘You know Inspector Rawlins?’ Sofia sounded surprised.
‘Quite well,’ I said.
Sofia dropped me at the common room then disappeared. She came back with a folder under her arm, and a moustache of foam from the cappuccino, which she deftly licked away. She laid the folder down on the table and took out something that looked like an X-ray.
‘This is an autoradiograph,’ she announced. ‘DNA analysis. People call it genetic fingerprinting but it’s more akin to blood grouping, a highly specific and individualised blood grouping. Do you know how it works?’
I had the feeling she was going to tell me anyway, whether I knew or not.
‘The testing involves a polymerase chain reaction. The polymers show up like this,’ she said, holding the autoradiograph up for me to see. I saw vertical blotches of varying length, similar to the barcode on goods at the supermarket. ‘This is your DNA patterning.’
She took a second autoradiograph from the folder. ‘And this is … well, analysis of the blood sample from the body identified as Guy Francis Valentine.’ She superimposed one DNA patterning on the other. ‘You can see for yourself, not the remotest resemblance. To check, we also tested the histology sample.’ Yet another autoradiograph came out of the folder. ‘These two are identical—the tissue and the blood specimen from 1985. They’re definitely from the same body. But neither of them remotely resembles your patterning. I don’t know who that person was, but he’s not your father. There’s no way the two of you are related by blood.’
Even though I had gone over this possibility in my mind, told myself this was the only logical explanation, it was still a shock to actually hear someone say ‘He’s not your father.’ The sentence seemed to echo like a sonic boom.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sofia sympathetically. ‘I hope I haven’t upset you.’
‘To tell you the truth, I’m not sure how I feel. It’s not as if I wasn’t anticipating this result. I wouldn’t have asked you to do all this otherwise. Thanks,’ I said.
‘Not a problem. If there’s anything else, just let me know. I’ll take you out the back way,’ said Sofia. ‘It’s quicker.’
She accompanied me as far as the delivery bay. There was now an ambulance in the dock. Two men were lifting out a body on a stretcher. There was a sheet running the length of the stretcher but the corpse beneath it was small. A child.
‘Sofia, there is something else.’ I showed her the photo of Madalena. ‘Her name’s Madalena Grimaldi.’ I didn’t have to explain any further.
‘No,’ Sofia shook her head. ‘In fact in the last few weeks there’ve been no unidentifieds at all.’ She handed me back the photo. ‘Good luck.’
‘Claudia!’
It was Carol. I must have walked straight past her car without realising it.
‘He’s not my father.’ I explained about the DNA testing. ‘Not even a remote connection.’
‘Claudia,’ Carol said with gravity, ‘I know this is really an outside chance but it’s something you should at least consider.’ She paused, as if it was something she didn’t even want to consider herself. ‘Is it possible that Mina … I mean, perhaps the person she was married to wasn’t your father. These things happen.’
I knew the answer to it without even thinking.
‘No. Definitely no.’ If there was any way she could have disavowed him she would have. ‘Are you sure you’re not just denying the possibility? I’ve seen that photo you have of him, there’s no family resemblance.’
‘So?’ I didn’t look like Guy but David did. The short robust build, the freckles.
‘You all right?’
‘Yeah, thanks Carol.’
‘I’m off to Melbourne for a couple of days. We’ll have a game of pool when I come back, OK?’
I watched her drive off then continued on to my own car.
But I didn’t go home. At the Darling Street-Victoria Road intersection, instead of turning right into Balmain I went straight ahead. Before the Iron Cove Bridge I turned left and drove down one of the quiet backstreets. Then I got out and walked. Across the oval to the waterline of Iron Cove. Not fast enough to call it power walking but briskly. My intention wasn’t to exercise, it was to think. The left-right movement, the coordination of limbs. Walking balances the brain.
The body found at Rushcutters Bay on Anzac Day, 1985, was not my father. I would probably never know who that body belonged to. The chances of it being someone else with the name Guy Francis Valentine were one in a million. I was almost sure that the man who died that night had somehow ended up with my father’s Social Security form. Hindley had botched it. Either he’d not checked it out thoroughly or he’d somehow got hold of the form and planted it on the body. To save himself the paperwork. I’m sure he’d even managed to justify it to himself. One dero is the same as the next, why not save the taxpayer some money? Conveniently, the Report of Death to the Coroner was missing, the body was cremated. No way of checking this little misdemeanour.
So if my father wasn’t in the wall at Rookwood Crematorium, where was he? Was he buried somewhere else, under someone else’s name? Or was he still alive?
I had passed through the quiet gardens of Rozelle Hospital and was walking beside the traffic roaring along Henley Marine Drive. There were a few other walkers and joggers around, even though it was now midday and the day was hot.
Off the road now and on the Drummoyne side of the cove. All I had to do was cross over the Iron Cove Bridge and I’d be back at the car, the circle completed. I climbed up to the walkway. It was windy on the bridge and the traffic was even louder. Through the gaps in the safety railing I could see the murky blue water below, flowing all the way in to the city. Somewhere along the way was an invisible line where the water stopped being the Parramatta River and became the harbour. Only real estate agents knew exactly where that demarcation lay.
I had come this far, I couldn’t back off now. I was going to look for him. All these years and all these streets I’d walked, I’d never made a concerted effort to seek him out. Because always in the back of my mind lurked the fear that I might not like what I found. But now I was determined to find him.
I turned off the bridge and into the street where the car was parked. There was a car parked behind it now, a Holden Commodore with tinted windows, the owner no doubt down here for his lunchtime jog around the bay. Suddenly the door opened and in this quiet street I felt a small round pressure in the middle of my back.
‘Get in the car.’
It was Hindley. I was trapped in a square of footpath. The open door blocked my way ahead, a brick wall on one side, the length of the car on the other. Behind me stood Hindley with a gun in my back. I thought it best under the circumstances to get in the car. I was dismayed to see who was sitting in the driver’s seat. The lovely young cop from Parramatta, hands gripping the steering wheel, looking straight ahead.
The small round pressure was gone from my back but had now found a new home near my left ear. Without moving my head I glanced sideways and saw Hindley’s hairy hand holding a Smith & Wesson .38 Special. Police issue. Carol had one just like it. Despite the heat of the day the metal was knife-edge cold, as was the interior of the car. They were running the airconditioning. Despite the coolness of the air I could smell Hindley’s stale sweat as he leaned forward.
‘So maybe we didn’t try as hard as we could have but that matter is now dead and buried.’ His hot wet breath turned to ice on my neck. ‘I’m looking at retirement in a couple of months and I intend going out with a clean slate. I’m not having some dero from ten years ago stuffing it up for me. There’ll be no further enquiries made, understand? You keep pursuing this matter, it’ll be more than just a friendly little chat, missy.’
The lovely young cop was still looking ahead, face rigid. Like he’d rather be anywhere else than here.
‘This giving you a hard-on, Hindley?’ I enquired.
The answer to that was a whack across the back of the head. The door was flung open. ‘I’ve said all I’ve got to say to you. Get out of the car.’
‘But I was just beginning to enjoy the conversation.’
‘Start the car,’ he ordered the driver.
The lovely young man did as he was told.
‘You can get out while the car is stationary or we can drop you off on the bridge. Literally. Take your pick.’
I took my pick. The car drove off, leaving me standing on the footpath. A jogger came by and crossed to the other side of the street, looking at me strangely.
How could Hindley do that? Bring that kid out here and make him take part in this? Job training, I suppose he’d call it. I guess that’s the way the corruption starts.
I returned to the van. I went to put the key in the door but my hand was shaking like a leaf. I tried to calm myself. Hindley was showing me his muscle, that was all. I got the door open. I sat sweating in the hot stifling air of the van. But it was better than the cold sweats I had in the police car. With the DNA results I had good grounds to get the coroner to reopen the case if I wanted. Under other circumstances I might have done it. But right now I wasn’t interested in having slack cops like Hindley get wrapped over the knuckles. I just wanted to find my father.