Текст книги "Harum Scarum"
Автор книги: Felicity Young
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9
People in various stages of physical or emotional distress lined the corridors of Royal Perth Hospital. In fact the casualty department wasn’t much different to Central Police Station on a Saturday night, Monty decided. He sat on a bench next to an old man whose chest rattled and wheezed like the water pipes in Stevie’s kitchen, and watched the parade of walking wounded. A bikie in leathers staggered by with blood streaming from his head, another followed with a bunch of reddened tissues to his nose. A couple were screaming abuse at each other near the automatic doors until a security guard came to escort them from the hospital. A listless child was wheeled past on a trolley, his mother crying and wringing her hands by his side.
God, there was no getting away from it.
For the third time in half an hour he checked his mobile phone for messages. He doubted he’d be hearing back yet from the team he’d dispatched to China Town, but his restless hands needed something to do, some kind of distraction from the misery surrounding him. He yawned, wiped tears of exhaustion from his cheeks and massaged his jaw. An intermittent toothache seemed to be flaring up again.
Izzy had shown him how to work one of the games on his phone and he wondered if he could remember her instructions. Even with his glasses on, he had trouble finding the right keys and hit several in error before he was in. Ah yes. He had to get one of the heads with the gaping mouths to devour...
‘Inspector McGuire?’
He gave a start and quickly turned the phone off. A young nurse stood above him with a look of amusement on her face.
‘Doctor Sutcliffe will see you now. Please come with me,’
she said.
He followed her past several cubicles of quivering curtains to the last one. A middle-aged doctor stooped over a trolley, finishing his notes.
‘Good of you to see me, Doc, I appreciate how busy you are,’ Monty said.
The doctor looked over the rims of his glasses. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Inspector, a hectic day.’ He pointed to the empty trolley. ‘An infarct right here, a man only about your age, your build, stressful job—chronic smoker of course.’
Monty felt himself being examined. He shifted his feet and cleared his throat. ‘You said you had some luck with my query about an Asian man with kidney necro...’ he struggled to remember the rest of it.
The doctor smiled, ‘Nephropathy.’
‘That’s the one.’
‘You suggested the patient might have been an illegal migrant. Well, you were right in assuming he might have presented here for treatment. We get quite a few at Royal Perth—no Medicare cards, just a wad of sweaty cash, and of course we treat them with no questions asked. I spoke to one of my registrars and she remembers seeing just such a man. She’d talk to you herself only she’s just come off a week of nights. I told her I’d handle it.’
‘Okay, you might start with telling me about this disease, keeping it simple, please,’ Monty said with a smile.
‘The common name for IgA nephropathy is Berger’s disease. It affects three times more men than women, with Asian men at the top of the list. It’s a kidney disease characterised by abnormal deposits of the protein IgA in the kidney’s filtering system and one of the symptoms is blood in the urine—that’s what the man presented with when he checked himself in.’
‘Did he speak English?’
‘A bit.’
‘Name?’
The doctor smiled. ‘Bruce Lee.’
Monty smiled wryly. ‘Of course.’
‘As well as the blood in his urine, he had a history of upper respiratory infection and high blood pressure. My registrar made the preliminary diagnosis and arranged tests to confirm. But when she mentioned the possibility of a kidney biopsy, he jumped off the trolley and became quite aggressive, forcing her to press the emergency button for security assistance. He was eventually escorted from the hospital, having refused treatment altogether.’
‘How sick was he exactly?’
‘Still in the early stages of the disease so he would’ve been able to function relatively normally for a while. Left untreated however, the disease would most likely have slowly progressed to acute renal failure and possibly death.’
‘Did he know the dangers do you think?’
‘My registrar explained them. She said he seemed to take them on board because he got more and more agitated with everything she said.’
Monty rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘When you tell something to patients that they don’t want to hear, what do they tend to do?’ he asked.
‘I see your point,’ the doctor nodded. ‘They usually get a second opinion.’
Monty thanked the doctor, stepped into the corridor and phoned Wayne Pickering, asking him to make some enquiries at Northbridge Chinese herbalists and medicine centres. If the guy thought he’d been let down by the western medical system, he might very well have gone down the street to one of these for a second opinion.
He pocketed his phone, about to turn on his heel and leave the hospital when an unsettling thought stopped him in his tracks. He looked back into the examination cubicle where Doctor Sutcliffe was still finishing his notes.
‘Just one more thing, Doc,’ Monty said through the parted curtains.
‘Yes Inspector?’
‘The bloke you had in here before, the one who had the heart attack. What happened to him, where did he go?’
‘He didn’t go anywhere. I’m afraid he died.’
Monty felt the blood drain from his face.
The doctor looked concerned. ‘I’m sorry, did you know him?’
Monty shook his head vigorously. ‘No, I didn’t. No.’
He tried to call Stevie as he was leaving the hospital, but all he got was a message from her answering machine. He told her to ring him.
Later that afternoon Monty caught up with Wayne, Barry and Angus Wong in his office. It seemed his hunch about their mystery victim seeking a second opinion about his diagnosis had proved correct.
‘It was about the third herbalist shop we visited, wasn’t it fellas?’ Barry checked with his colleagues.
Angus nodded, said to Monty, ‘Mr Cheng’s shop—he speaks practically no English.’
‘But he had a pretty dolly of a Chinese interpreter with him,’ Barry added.
‘Angela Nguyen is multilingual Vietnamese,’ Angus answered with a long-suffering sigh.
Barry shrugged, ‘Same diff.’
‘I went into the back room to talk to Cheng,’ Angus told Monty, ‘while Barry and Wayne spoke to Angela in the front, in between serving customers.’
‘It was interesting, Mont,’ Wayne added. ‘When we got together to swap notes, we discovered a discrepancy in their stories.’
‘Yeah, Mr Cheng told me the man’s name was Zhang Li.’ Angus spelled the name for Monty. ‘Cheng had never met him before but had heard on the grapevine that he was a money lender, an illegal who’d only been in the country for a couple of months. He wanted something for the blood in his urine and Mr Cheng mixed him up a herbal concoction...’
‘And Cheng said Zhang Li had a kid with him.’
Angus scowled, ‘Yes, Barry I was getting to that. He had an Asian kid with him of about fourteen or fifteen, a scruffy little bugger who wasn’t introduced to Cheng.’
‘But Angela Nguyen’s version wasn’t nearly as helpful,’ Wayne said. ‘She said she remembered the man with the blood in his urine, but not his name. She also denied seeing a boy.’
‘It’s because you got her all in a fluster,’ said Barry, straightening the collar of his Boss polo shirt. ‘You should have let me do the talking. You just have no idea about handling women, you have no couth.’
‘And I suppose you would have done better?’ Wayne said.
Angus muttered under his breath in Chinese, having little patience with the love-hate relationship between these two. Barry and Wayne went back years and had worked with each other long enough to know exactly which buttons they could press to good effect. Despite their constant bickering, they were a good team though, complementing each other in their differences.
Angus brought a different set of skills to the job: a cool professionalism and an almost obsessive eye for detail. Monty could see Angus being selected to take the reins should he decide to toss the job in. Tossing it in—he had no idea where that thought came from, what else he wanted to do or even what he was capable of doing.
His attention kicked back in when he heard Wayne say, ‘I’m going back to see Angela Nguyen later. Alone. She’s hiding something, I’m sure of it.’
10
EXCERPT FROM CHAT ROOM TRANSCRIPT 121206
BETTYBO: wanna meet F2F?
HARUM SCARUM: Y?
BETTYBO: I wan 2 rt Katy Enigma stories wit u
HARUM SCARUM: Me 2 but not yet. we cn rite on line 4now
It was Stevie’s turn to cook. She ran through her mental shopping list as she hurried from the lifts in Central. For seafood chowder she’d need prawns, a few snapper pieces, mussels maybe, coconut milk, coriander and crusty bread. With any luck Izzy would be out of school on time and they could pick the ingredients up before Emma came around.
She spotted Monty in the front foyer, standing half a head taller than most of the bustling figures. He held up his hand to stop her, hurrying over before she could pass through the revolving door.
‘Mont, I’ve got to go,’ she said before he could speak. She jumped into the revolving compartment and Monty joined her. ‘I have to collect Izzy then meet the new babysitter.’
They stepped outside into a wall of heat.
‘Just hang on a minute will you?’ Monty took hold of her arm to keep her in the shade.
With so much on her mind, Stevie didn’t have time for his quick words that always became long, but she listened patiently to what he had to say about Wayne’s investigations at the Chinese herbalist. As she listened, part of her brain pondered the suitability of a thirteen year old for a babysitter. She also managed to slide in a thought or two about Tash, wondering what she’d learned from Mrs. Kusak.
Talk about multi-tasking.
It seemed as if Monty just wanted an excuse to linger for a moment, but it was a luxury she didn’t have time for right now. As Monty talked on, she bounced from one bubble soled trainer to the other, scanning the car park. It was chock-a-block with overflow from the cricket ground and she couldn’t see the car she’d borrowed from her mother anywhere.
The crack of leather on willow and the crowd roared. ‘The cheek of it,’ she muttered when she finally got a word in, ‘illegally parking at a police station.’
A youth barged past them carrying a long parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. It didn’t take a genius to work out what was inside it. Monty had just introduced an amnesty on illegal weapons—they could be handed in to the police station without prosecution in exchange for tickets to the test. The scheme had been going well for everyone except the officers in charge of the armoury, who’d been so inundated they’d run out of storage space.
‘Are you listening to me at all?’ Monty asked, slapping his thigh with exasperation.
‘You said you were about to phone me but then you saw me in the lobby and decided to speak to me now. You filled me in on the latest on the floater case, then you said you wanted to arrange a team meeting for the Bianca Webster case.’ She spotted the bonnet of her mother’s white Citroen sticking out from behind a four-wheel drive. ‘Beauty, there it is.’
‘Shit, this is ridiculous,’ Monty grumbled, increasing his pace to keep up with her. ‘We never seem to get any time to talk.’
‘Come with me to collect Izzy and we can talk in the car,’ she said, and as an afterthought added, ‘She’s your daughter too.’
He reddened. ‘Yes, I am aware of that. If I organise a meeting for five this afternoon can you leave Izzy with the girl while you attend?’
‘If I think she’s suitable, yes.’
‘You should look into that after-school centre.’
‘I have. They’ve too many kids and not enough staff.’
‘And call Natasha Hayward, I want her in on the meeting too.’
Stevie looked at her watch. ‘Will do. She’s visiting Mrs Kusak now, but she should be back on time. Okay, I’ve really got to go. See you.’
Monty stood in the shade of the entrance for a moment and watched Stevie run through the glare of parked cars. Tyres squealed as she left the car park and darted into the traffic.
Tash didn’t turn up for the team meeting, nor did she answer her phone. Stevie dropped by her place on her way home, but only Terry was home, and he hadn’t seen Tash all evening. Stevie then had to spend precious moments assuring Terry that if his sister had been involved in a car accident they would have heard by now. She asked him to get Tash to give her a call as soon as she got home.
The meeting at Central had gone longer than expected and the deviation to Tash’s place meant Stevie was later home than she’d planned. She was hoping this hadn’t caused Emma any problems—Izzy tended to play up when she was late to bed. Stevie let herself quietly into the house, interested to see how the babysitting session was going.
Emma sat on the couch with Izzy on her knee, slurping on an icy pole, rapt in a blanket of attention. Stevie tiptoed closer, wanting to hear but not wanting to break the spell.
Izzy interrupted the girl’s narration by thrusting the icy pole under her nose and offering her a lick.
‘No thanks, I have germ issues,’ Emma smiled. ‘Do you want me to go on?’
Izzy nodded and snuggled closer.
‘It was a magic, fairy-tale kind of a place,’ Emma continued, ‘part castle and part luxury villa, and it was built over a lake where a billion water lilies grew. It had towers and battlements and an inner courtyard with a pond and a statue of Peter Pan for a fountain. A high wall surrounded the courtyard, and the only way you could get into it was through one of those little doors like they have in the walls of prisons...’
‘Daddy says they’re for little prisoners,’ Izzy interrupted, her whisper whistling through her missing front teeth.
‘Then he must be right, Izzy. And because of all these barriers and the very small door with the very big lock, Katy Enigma knew that in this place she would always be safe from her enemies. If by some bad luck one of them was to get into the castle, she could escape by the secret passageway hidden behind the bookcase in her bedroom, or the other one that led from one of the kitchen cabinets and ran under the lake. If they came upon her outside in the courtyard, she could climb the one thousand steps to the highest tower, the one with the dome on top of it, and throw herself off to make her escape by running across the water lilies...’
‘And the baddies would try to follow and then be drownded,’ Izzy interrupted.
‘Drowned,’ Emma corrected. ‘That’s right, because they don’t have magic powers like Katy Enigma.’
‘Or her jet-propelled backpack,’ Izzy said.
Much as she was enjoying the story, Stevie could play the voyeur no longer. She cleared her throat.
Emma looked up and smiled, flashing Stevie a mouthful of coloured braces. ‘Oh, hello Mrs Hooper.’
Izzy jumped from her babysitter’s knee. ‘Mummy’s not Mrs Hooper! She’s not Mrs anything—silly!’
Emma reddened. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ but made a quick recovery. ‘We laid the table and made a salad. Izzy said she doesn’t like fish, so I gave her baked beans on toast, I hope that’s okay. I wasn’t sure how you wanted the soup cooked, so I’ve left that for you to do. Izzy’s had her bath and done her reading.’
Stevie was almost speechless. Mrs Carlyle hadn’t been wrong when she’d said this girl was a model of efficiency.
‘Thank you, Emma, you’ve done a terrific job.’ She smiled as she looked around the lounge room, at the cushions set straight upon the sofa, the hearth rug smoothed and the toys in the toy box—the place seemed to be tidier now than when she’d left it. She rummaged in her bag and handed Emma a twenty-dollar note. ‘I’ll give you a lift home.’
‘Thanks, but I’m okay. It’s only a short walk.’
‘I don’t think your parents would want you walking home so late—it’s nearly dark.’
‘They don’t care,’ the girl shrugged. ‘But do whatever you want, it’s cool.’
Stevie would have liked the opportunity to talk some more with Emma, but the short drive was monopolised by Izzy eager to hear the rest of the story. Apparently the waterlily lake was the home of a friendly dragon with eyes like ginormous stuffed olives and a tongue which, when unfurled, could stretch the length of their school oval.
Number 64 Riviera Place dwarfed its neighbours, taking up almost every available metre of the sloping riverside block. Stevie’s headlights lit up a white, double storied, flat roofed building, easily visible through an inadequate row of pencil pines. Look at me, look at me, the house seemed to cry, but upon closer inspection, there was little to see other than the even stripes of the front lawn and the dead eyes of huge reflective glass windows. Like looking at black ice, Stevie thought.
‘What do you think of it?’ Emma asked her.
‘Your house? It looks great.’
‘Liar,’ Emma said with a grin. ‘But it looks better than it did before. When it was grey it looked like Hitler’s bunker. I got them to paint it.’
Stevie smiled, but said nothing. Talking to someone about their house was like talking to someone about their children. They were allowed to be critical, but more fool you if you agreed.
Emma jumped from the car and ruffled Izzy’s head through the open back window. ‘I’ll tell you some more of the story when I come over next, but first we have to finish reading your schoolbook.’ She turned to Stevie. ‘You wouldn’t want her watching too much TV would you?’
Stevie shook her head vigorously, the model parent to a stern schoolteacher. Shit—how old was this girl again?
‘Same time tomorrow, Emma?’ she queried.
‘Sweet.’
The return to teenage vernacular was reassuring. The front porch light came on and Stevie saw a plump figure bathed in light. She unclipped her seat belt and made to leave the car. ‘If that’s your mother, I’d better come and introduce myself.’
Emma gave a slight start. ‘Um, no, that’s not Mum, that’s our housekeeper. Mum won’t be home yet.’
Stevie relaxed back into the car seat. ‘I’d like to meet her sometime.’
‘Sure, I’ll arrange it.’ Emma turned on her heel and ran towards the house, disappearing into the light before Stevie could get a firmer commitment.
Izzy was asleep in her car seat by the time they got home. ‘Emma, where have you been and whose car was that?’
‘Oh, hi, Mrs Bamford, great to see you too.’
The housekeeper shook her head and clucked her tongue. ‘Your mother never said anything about you going out after school. I’ve been worried.’
Emma kissed Mrs Bamford on her cheek and squeezed her floppy arm. ‘Mrs Carlyle wanted me to do some extra babysitting this week. I did tell Miranda, but you know what she’s like, she must have forgotten to pass on the message. The lady who dropped me off was one of Mrs Carlyle’s friends who called in for a visit when I was there. She lives nearby and offered to drive me home.’
‘I’ll go and heat up your tea in the microwave.’ Mrs Bamford headed toward the kitchen, her slippered feet yawing inwards as she negotiated the shiny sea of marble.
Emma stopped at the stairs, gripped the wrought iron balustrade with one hand and swung outwards, making her body star shaped. ‘I ate at Mrs Carlyle’s,’ she called out. ‘When are my parents getting back?’ The balustrade groaned.
‘Stop doing that dear, it’s becoming quite loose,’ the housekeeper chastised.
Emma continued to swing; Mrs Bamford would expect nothing less.
Mrs Bamford said, ‘Your mother’s at one of her cocktail parties and your Dad’s gone to his conference in Queensland.’
You mean, Emma thought, Miranda’s off with her boyfriend and Christopher’s looking for a big chunk of Queensland sand to bury his head in.
Her father used to play with her sometimes: she had vague memories of soccer on the oval when she could barely walk, let alone kick a ball. And there were the stories too, always the stories before bed. She tried to remember when they stopped and couldn’t; it must have been a long time ago.
‘You staying over?’ Emma asked.
‘Yes. Now you be a lovey and get on with your homework. There’s a new series of “Grey’s Anatomy”, I mustn’t miss the start.’ She rolled down to the TV room on thick stockinged legs which always made Emma think of the maid in Tom and Jerry.
The babysitter being baby sat, how stupid was that. Then again, not much made sense in this strange, dysfunctional family. Emma waited until she heard the music blast from the TV. Poor, dear, lovey Mrs Bamford, just as well you’re so deaf, so trustful.
Emma strode past the TV room where the shadows flickered beneath the closed door. In the kitchen she double clicked the deadbolt and stepped into the paved back courtyard. The garden pond shone like black ink, reflecting the splayed trumpets of day lilies, golliwog heads of agapanthus and spear-shaped irises. She’d chosen and planted the flowers around the pond herself after extensive research on the Internet for the most colourful and longest blossoming. The citrus hues of the day lilies crowded with the yellow daisies and pale native orchids, gradually merging with the blues and purples of iris and agapanthus. The gaps between the stone steps leading to the pond were carpeted with tiny blue-flowered bindweed and English violets.
A jet of water from Peter Pan’s pipe carved an arc of silver through his silhouette. Miranda didn’t know who the statue was supposed to be. She’d had some men dig the pond and put up the fountain chosen at random from the garden shop. ‘What a charming little boy,’ she’d said.
Peter Pan had been Emma’s best friend. When she felt sad or lonely she would come out here and talk to him. She imagined him teaching her how to fly and taking her off to Neverland where she’d help him fight the pirates and help Wendy to look after the lost boys.
The dream had faded as she’d grown up, but the pond was still one of her favourite places, rarely visited by anyone in the household except her and the gardener. She turned on the garden light, then the green pond light, and sat on the stone bench for a moment to watch the goldfish glide, tails swirling through the water like chiffon in a breeze.
A scuffing sound from the other side of the garden wall broke into her thoughts. She looked up from the pond to see two hands clasping the top of the wall as if someone was trying to heave himself up on it. Or herself, Emma automatically corrected. You should never assume anything. She stopped breathing, her eyes strained as she peered through the shadows. The top of a dark head appeared above the wall, then a young face. It was a boy, his face pale as the moon. One of ‘her’ kids, she wondered? Squeaky? If so, how had he managed to find her here?
Emma stood up. ‘Hi,’ she called.
The head disappeared. There was a thump and then the sound of running feet on the other side of the wall.
Emma ran to the wall and stood on the pot of a cumquat tree to see over. ‘Hey stop! It’s okay! Squeaky, Howzat, Cheeky Charlie—is that you?’ The figure didn’t turn back, continued running along the river’s edge until he rounded the bend.
Emma jumped down from the plant pot feeling vaguely disappointed. It was a silly idea; the boy couldn’t have been one of ‘hers’. Sometimes she wondered if it was a mistake, remaining so anonymous, maybe if she had been more open...
She shook her head to rid it of the crazy thought. He was probably nothing to do with her, just someone casing the joint, checking to see if there was anything in the garden worth pinching.
She returned to the pond. The palm tree groaned, an owl hooted. The reticulation from the front garden announced itself with a soft fizz. She had about twenty minutes to go before the sprinklers here would be activated. Kicking off her trainers, she removed her tracky pants and reached for Peter’s hand. He helped her into the pond and warm yoghurty sludge slid between her toes.
Careful not to slip, she felt her way down the statue’s body, holding onto his leg with one hand and lowering the other hand into the water. She groped around feeling for the jut of the underwater plinth and slid the metal box from its hiding spot. The slimy bodies of fish slithered against the bare skin of her legs and the blood-warm water tickled at the sleeve of her T-shirt. She glanced around, shivered. No face at the wall this time but there were still plenty of gaps in the wall for prying eyes.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was still being watched.
