My Brother's Keeper

Chapter 16



MONDAY 26 NOVEMBER 2012

For a full ten minutes I weighed the ethics of staying at Norma’s place against my non-existent bank balance. Since I wasn’t being paid for the work, free board seemed reasonable. No doubt the townhouse would eventually be sold as part of Karen’s estate, but that wasn’t going to happen in a hurry. Meanwhile it was just sitting there with the key under the welcome mat. There was no sign of Ned. If he did turn up, I didn’t think he’d object to my company. As long as I didn’t attack him again, that is.

On the flight up I’d thought about what I’d learned from Smithy. Karen had bruising down one side of her body and what had killed her was a blow to the back of the head; she hadn’t died immediately and would have been in excruciating pain before slipping gratefully into a coma. And yet she hadn’t called the police. All the scenarios I could think of for why she would have kept silent relied on the notion of her having known her attacker. According to Fanshaw, someone known to Karen came to see her on the Friday night. It could have been Karen’s friend Manny, who was coming for a prayer session. Or it could have been someone else. Whoever it was, they were possibly the bearer of Sunny’s photo. No doubt there were other possible scenarios but I needed more time than a one-hour flight to Auckland to come up with them. One thing was certain: Karen’s killer was still out there and this meant there was a good likelihood Sunny was still in danger.

At nine o’clock I took a deep breath and used the landline to ring Sunny’s house. If Justin answered, this was going to be one of the shortest phone calls in history. Luckily, it was Sunny who picked up. I hadn’t spoken to her since I’d informed her of Karen’s death, and then stayed on the phone with her until Justin came home. I had wanted to keep Sunny talking until she had someone with her who she knew and trusted; someone she could really talk to. We’d covered a lot of ground in that talk. She’d rabbited on about whatever came into her head and I’d just let her talk. Precipitated by the news of her mother’s death our conversation had been unnaturally intimate. Two days had passed since that call.

‘How are you handling things?’ I asked.

‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like my mother and I were close or anything.’

‘I know,’ I said far too quickly.

The truth was I had no idea what it was like to have your mother die hours before you’re about to meet her for the first time since she tried to kill you. I kept my tone light. ‘Hey, listen, I’m in Auckland for a couple of days and I thought maybe we could meet up.’ I could almost hear the shrug.

‘Sure. Whatever. I do reception at the gym after school. Salena thinks I should work for my miserable pocket money. Not that she ever works. Not unless you call pole dancing work. Did you know that’s what she teaches at the gym? Pole dancing! And what makes it totally tragic is she’s Polish! Which is a total joke only she doesn’t get it. Anyway, you could come to the gym tomorrow, if you want. I look after my little brother Neo there too. Come at around six.’ As if reading my thoughts she added, ‘Tuesdays are Salena’s hair days and Dad’s not likely to turn up.’

The prospect of being confronted by Justin was daunting.

The remainder of last week’s bottle of wine was still in the fridge. It was worrying how happy it made me. I thought back over the last few days. It was now Monday night. Yesterday was Sunday: open home day. Shit! That reminded me — I hunted down my phone and found this morning’s text from Jason and forwarded it to Sean. Then I turned off my phone. I didn’t want to talk with him about the likelihood of our house being sold within days. I didn’t want to talk about it or even think about it. Real grown up.

In my little black notebook I drew a timeline. Working backwards I wrote Sunday and drew a line leading back to the day before, Saturday. The day Sunny and Karen were going to meet, the day I found Karen dead. I drew a line leading back to a box and labelled it Friday. I’d spent Friday investigating Justin and Salena’s finances. That night, I’d dipped into my own meagre funds to pay for dinner with Ned. Too many wines at Prego that night but not so many that I didn’t remember the phone call from Karen. She had been happy and excited about meeting her daughter for the first time since … well, since she’d tried to murder her. I had a flash of the two-door Holden drifting down through the murky water. Falcon’s pale little moon face pressed against the back window, Sunny screaming. I forced my thoughts back to the timeline. Sometime between Karen’s call to me on Friday night and her death the following day, she had got hold of a recent photo of Sunny. Karen had dropped her letter and cheque to me at my house somewhere on this timeline, too. My pen wavered between the boxes. Friday night? Saturday morning? Karen had made a reference in the letter to not knowing what Sunny looked like. She had to have written this before she got hold of the photo. I wrote ‘Dropped letter off at my place’ and then drew a big question mark beside it. When? When did she drop it off? Was it Friday night or early Saturday morning before she was due for her flight?

I left a note on the stairs warning Ned that I was asleep in the main bedroom and put my phone under my pillow for safekeeping. Until I’d deleted the photos of the crime scene, I’d keep it with me at all times. The likely interrogation I’d have to endure with Detective Inspector Aaron Fanshaw and Detective Sergeant Brett Coleman if my phone was turned in to police with a bunch of illegally obtained crime scene photos on it, didn’t bear thinking about.



I thought I’d have nightmares about death and dying, stiffened rigor-mortised zombies coming for me with outstretched arms. Marital homes collapsing around me, cops dragging me off to prison. I don’t know what I dreamed. All memory of it had gone when I surfaced the next morning.