Chapter 18

DUSK WAS APPROACHING by the time Searle left the station and returned directly to the top pub. Sparrow escorted him back, insisting on ensuring the headmaster’s safe passage, and complaining of dehydration.

Searle had replied he was ‘in bed sleeping’ when Manolis asked his whereabouts the night Molly died. His wife could verify.

‘Happily married for as long as I can remember,’ Kerr later said. ‘No kids. Maybe that’s why.’

The headmaster had looked aghast when Manolis queried him, offended even. It was a concern that seemed to grow when Manolis added that he would confirm his alibi with Mrs Searle.

‘You don’t suppose I had anything to do with it?’ Searle stammered.

‘We just need to rule people out,’ Kerr said quickly.

Manolis stared at Kerr coldly. He reprimanded her only after the headmaster had left. ‘You can’t say that. You’ve got to be objective. Look at your community as an outsider.’

From the vacant look in her eyes, Manolis wondered if he was asking the impossible of Kerr.

‘And what do you think, is he telling the truth?’ he added.

‘Can’t see why he wouldn’t.’ Kerr tightened her hair tie, fixed her ponytail. ‘What about you?’

Manolis rubbed his sandpaper chin. ‘Not sure yet. It’s all very neat. Very neat and tidy. That usually sets off an alarm in my head.’

Kerr huffed. ‘Christ, not everyone’s a suspect.’

‘Everyone’s a suspect…’

Manolis grabbed his car keys with one location in mind. Kerr said not to bother, that everyone would’ve already gone home for the day, except for the two disinterested security guards on the front gate who monitored curfew and read pornography.

‘Tomorrow, then,’ Manolis said. ‘Right after we interview a sober Shrewsbury.’

A thorough search of Molly’s house was absolutely essential. But experience told Manolis that searches were best conducted in daylight; fumbling about at night risked missing clues or contaminating evidence.

Kerr wanted to call it a day. Her frail mum was waiting, and the witching hour was approaching. The old woman often went wandering at dusk, looking for her childhood home or dead relatives, and Kerr sometimes encountered her en route, inching forward in her lavender nightgown and house slippers. On other occasions, finding her mum missing when she got home, Kerr had spent hours traversing the town in darkness before discovering the old woman sitting patiently on a park bench, waiting for a bus that never came.

‘I understand,’ Manolis said. ‘You can go. But before you do…’

MANOLIS WAS FAMILIAR with the notoriety of Cobb’s decayingly murderous base hospital: a string of recent fatalities, doctors and nurses suspended, the coroner always investigating. The community’s trust was gone; they would sooner drive hundreds of kilometres to the nearest neighbouring hospital than visit their own. At least there they stood a chance.

Adding further strain to the hospital’s stretched resources was the detention centre. The detainees were rumoured to receive better medical care than the locals – comprehensive health checks, specialist doctors, access to prescription medicines, sterile bandages, clean needles. Not to mention all the paramedic callouts to the centre when a detainee was found hanging from plaited rope or bedsheets. It all came from the duty-of-care arrangement, which meant the government could be sued if they failed to discharge their duty. This was why an adult detainee with a cut finger got priority over a newborn local baby struggling to breathe.

Kerr showed Manolis through the hospital’s emergency department, which better resembled a shantytown. The waiting room smelt of urine and carbolic, held a deepening chill. Families camped out on long gang chairs, huddled in each other’s arms, subsisting on a near-empty vending machine in the corner of the room. At the triage counter, a woman – dragging a child behind her and carrying twins within her – argued with an overtired, disinterested nurse.

Manolis recalled the one time he’d been brought to this hospital as a child. It had been late at night with a raging fever, his body limp and carried by his father while his distressed mother spoke hurriedly to doctors. He remembered seeing, through half-closed eyes, the emergency room as uncrowded, clean and calming. He was seen to promptly, given medication and rest, and he went home the next morning with colour restored.

Kerr led him down darkened corridors where barefoot in-patients trailed intravenous drips and blood. Bypassing a lift stuck between floors, they took the stairs to the basement that was reserved as the morgue. There Kerr stopped, at the heavy double doors, refusing to go any further. She spoke hurriedly and splashed back through water puddles along the corridor, picking up speed as she walked. It was clear that she felt uncomfortable. Manolis reasoned that she’d probably identified the body of her fiancé beyond those double doors.

An Aboriginal man with coarse hair and an iron-grey beard appeared from the gloom. Manolis instantly recognised him as an elder. He wore a patriotic T-shirt in the national colours of red, black and yellow. Manolis introduced himself and shook the man’s hand firmly. The man carried with him an air of indifference as he handed Manolis a clipboard, pointed to a wall freezer and trudged away. Manolis tried to talk to him but his queries went unanswered.

The detective looked around. A corroded mortuary slab swallowed the middle of the room. The farthest wall housed a collection of rusted bone saws and bottles of embalming chemicals. It was immediately clear to him that the room was not washed frequently – if ever – and had poor ventilation. The odour was overwhelming: dense, wet, vile and almost shockingly sweet. Manolis felt it coat his skin in a thin film. Feeling nauseous, he considered exiting the room. Instead, he just retched.

‘Be strong,’ he told himself in Greek. ‘Thynami.’

Composing himself, breathing into a cupped hand, he consulted the clipboard under a fizzing fluorescent light. It contained a number of reports, most notably Molly’s medical records and the autopsy report. Her medical history was uninspiring: no mention of antidepressants or abuse of prescription or illicit medications, or history of major illness. The external examination revealed a pair of tattoos on her calf and upper back. Compression marks around her wrists and ankles indicated that she’d been bound during death. Manolis wanted to see toxicology results but there were none; it was still too soon after death. He was, however, concerned there was no record of specimens being collected and sent for analysis – that would ordinarily have been done for any suspicious death.

The internal examination was the briefest autopsy report he had ever seen. The body cavity and internal organs remained untouched. He imagined that broken bones were likely, a clavicle or ribs. Not all the rocks would have hit their desired target, even at a close range. He often missed the bin at work with his banana peel from half a metre; stones were much heavier, and if flung with enough force introduced a greater margin of error. It was simple physics.

He was most interested to see if the injuries suggested blows from two or more sources, as was the case with ‘traditional’ stonings. This approach sought to diffuse responsibility; to prevent an individual in the group from being identified as the one who dealt the death blow. It was the same in a firing squad where one or more members were issued a blank cartridge. Or an electric chair with two activation levers so neither guard knew if they were flipping the actual switch.

Unsurprisingly, the autopsy report contained no mention of blows from multiple sources. It listed the time of death as ‘between midnight and dawn’, the cause of death as ‘homicide’, and the mechanism as ‘blunt trauma, head injury, stoning’. Death came from a range of medical issues including ‘intracranial haemorrhage, swelling to the brain, exsanguination’. Mercifully, there were no signs of sexual assault.

And that was it. Manolis leafed through the pages a second time but found no more to the report. He was annoyed that it had taken so long for such a short report to be finalised. It was signed with an indecipherable scribble, but at least it was signed. To his knowledge, there was no electronic copy.

Breathing deeply, he took a moment to find his centre, to compose himself. Over his career, he’d seen more dead bodies than he cared to count, examined victims killed in the most gruesome and cruel of ways, even small children. But he’d never seen the outcome from a stoning before and suddenly felt unsure that he was adequately prepared. For individuals who dispensed stoning punishments, this wasn’t murder – it was an act of moral self-righteousness. It was also a twisted mode of entertainment that came with a party-like atmosphere. Like picnics at Wild West hangings or packed Roman coliseums for the throwing of Christians to lions.

Manolis shook his head lightly, as if to erase his weary brain of its thoughts. He badly needed a smoke.

The fluorescent light continued to flicker with maddening irregularity. Deep in the bowels of the hospital, the morgue’s eerie silence now hurt Manolis’s ears. He held his breath, clasped the freezer handle and twisted.

The metal tray slid out in one swift motion, making a cold, hollow clank. He exhaled and finally let his tired eyes fall upon the dead body of much-loved local schoolteacher Molly Abbott.

His breath escaped like he’d been king-hit in the guts. ‘Theos kai Panagia…’

It wasn’t often that Manolis invoked God and the Holy Virgin. But he did then.

The woman’s head and chest were gravely bloodied and bruised, her forehead split open. Her lips were swollen, she had lost teeth, and her head drooped at a grotesque angle. A purple halo ringed her neck, the dead blood trapped, unable to seep down into her back with gravity.

And yet, Manolis could not help but feel surprised. He’d expected the victim to be more disfigured. Perhaps he’d built stonings up in his mind. Were they, by their nature as a punishment, somehow less injurious than an aggravated assault? More controlled, with a purpose, and thereby less violent?

Manolis stopped. He reminded himself that this was no retribution or entertainment. This was murder. An appallingly vile and savage homicide perpetrated by a sick, sadistic individual. It could be nothing else. At that moment, in that silence, Manolis vowed to Molly, to her body and memory, that he would catch the party responsible and bring them to swift and severe justice.

‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,’ he whispered to himself.

Casting his eyes down, he examined the torso and limbs: covered in dried blood, but largely untouched, incredibly. He scrutinised every inch of her lifeless body, the yellow-white skin, looking for something, anything – a cigarette butt, a fingernail, toenail, piece of skin, eyelash, stray hair. Whatever jot of foreign matter might provide another lead. But she was, regrettably, incredibly, clean.

Something doesn’t add up here, Manolis thought. What was he missing…?

Fast running out of ideas, he worked his way back up the body. Delicately, he lifted the fragile head and inspected the underside.

And then he found his first real clue.