My Brother's Keeper

Chapter 19



TUESDAY 27 NOVEMBER 2012

A blindingly hot shower is a truly wonderful thing. I prescribed a glass of wine and a couple of paracetamol for my damaged internal organ and it accepted its medicine gratefully. It probably wasn’t my liver then. A cold wet cloth on my knee eased the sting, but my pride still smarted from the confrontation with Justin, followed by the smackdown Fanshaw had given me, topped off by an ignominious limp home along Ponsonby Road. Still, I couldn’t help feeling I’d got off lightly from my encounter with Justin.

My smashed phone had turned itself off again but responded to a gentle but persistent hold-down press of the on button. I’d have to get it fixed before the shattered screen fell out and I lost everything on it, including, I reminded myself, the crime scene photos. My phone seemed to have taken on a perverse life of its own since being bashed, turning itself on and off whenever it felt like it. A message from Jason had been sent directly to voicemail, not that I minded too much having missed that call. He had left an excited message asking me to ring him ASAP. He actually used the acronym ASAP instead of the words. Jesus. Okay, sure. I’d ring him. But first I wanted to check those crime scene photos. Discovering that Justin had flown to Wellington on the Friday night had seemed like a breakthrough. Learning that the police already knew he’d gone to see Karen that night was a surprise and hearing from Fanshaw that he’d discounted Justin as a suspect was a whole new curve ball I needed to get my head around.

I went through the crime scene photos one by one, careful not to dislodge the shattered glass each time I swiped my finger across the screen. My knowledge of pathology is about as good as my knowledge of anatomy, and my understanding of the process of rigor mortis is rudimentary, to say the least, but I did know that in normal circumstances, it begins to set in a couple of hours after death. The muscles on the face are the first to stiffen. I used two fingers to enlarge the image of Karen’s face on the screen. Close-up there was a definite rigidity to the set of her jaw. I remembered being aware of it when I bent down and looked up into her face. I remembered the oily gleam of her eye, the lashes weighted with mascara. Normally it takes twelve to twenty-four hours after the heart stops beating for full rigor mortis to set in. It is an unmistakable and quite shocking phenomenon. I also knew it was a chemical reaction affected by temperature and atmospheric conditions and I was pretty sure some medical conditions could alter the time of onset as well but, as a basic rule of thumb, if Karen had died on Friday night, by the time I found her late-afternoon the next day, not to put too fine a point on it, she would have been as stiff as a proverbial plank of wood.

The exposed nipple beneath the dressing gown, the strong smell of Pantene conditioner, the clothes laid out on the bed ready to wear; it was obvious Karen had showered, put on some make-up and was preparing to dress for her flight to Auckland when she was killed.

According to Karen’s note to me, she didn’t know what her daughter looked like, which means she must have written the note and dropped the cheque into my letter box sometime on Friday evening, after she’d talked to me but before Justin gave her the photo of Sunny. And in that phone conversation, she had said her friend Manny was coming over for a prayer session. I’d had the chance to mention this to Fanshaw and Coleman during my interrogation, aka interview, with me on Monday, but I had decided against it. There was no way I was going to mention Manny or anyone else to Fanshaw now. Not after my formal warning and all. Allowing an hour for the flight from Wellington to Auckland, another hour from Auckland airport to the city, plus a bit of extra time in case of flight or traffic delays, I figured Karen would have had to book a flight no later than nine a.m. on Saturday to get to our arranged meeting at Wynyard Quarter at twelve-thirty. This would mean leaving home by eight at the latest.

Putting all this together, the time of her attack could be pinpointed pretty accurately to sometime between seven and eight on Saturday morning. Smithy said she would have fallen into a coma and most likely died a couple of hours after that. This scenario was backed up by the onset of the early stages of rigor mortis when I found her late Saturday afternoon. If Justin had returned to Auckland on Friday night, which Fanshaw said he had thoroughly checked out, Justin was in the clear. One by one, I deleted the photos of Karen while I still could.

Staring into space, I thought about the bruising on Karen’s neck and remembered Smithy’s description of the previous small bleeds in the brain. Had she been caught up in something in prison? Something she was unable to escape from even after she was released? Prisons are pressure cookers for the worst of human nature, but they can also bring out the best sometimes, I reminded myself. One of the most moving and powerful shows I’d ever seen had been performed by inmates of Arohata Women’s Prison: a series of little one-act plays written and acted out by the prisoners based on the crimes they had committed. The vast majority were tragic domestic stories. Perhaps Karen knew something about an inmate; something that wasn’t safe for her to know once she was released. Or maybe she had failed to fulfil some promise, failed to follow through on something she was supposed to do once she was on the outside. Is this where the threat to Sunny came from? I could theorise forever, but what I needed was information. And painkillers. My glass was empty and my knee stiffening. Who could give me information? Karen’s ex-cellmate could, but I wasn’t keen to see Vex again. The last time I saw her was shortly after she was imprisoned. As part of a deal for a reduced sentence, Vex had agreed to provide details of how she had procured my sister’s murder. And she had agreed to talk to me — restorative justice, it’s called. It didn’t give me closure or allow me to move on. And it certainly didn’t restore Niki. Niki stayed all the way dead. I realised with a kind of guilt that I thought about her less often now. Her ghost had tired of haunting me.

The sound of a key in the lock interrupted my gloomy thoughts. Ned. I was grinning before the door fully opened. Interesting.

He admitted to being useless in an emergency but excellent help once the patient was in recovery mode. He eyed me up from head to foot and declared that, in his learned opinion, recovery was ‘without doubt the very mode I was in’. When he removed the bloody cloth from my knee we both flinched. The gash was raw and oozing.

‘Do you think it might be needing stitches?’ he asked. ‘Not that I’m offering. But I will go with you to the hospital. It won’t take long. We could get you stitched up and be back here in no time.’ The stress of seeing my injury had turned up the heat on his accent.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I insisted. The last thing I wanted to do was sit in A and E for a couple of hours while nurses assessed me, prodded me, then moved on to more serious complaints.

‘Alright then. But let me get you something nice and cold.’ He made a dismissive wave towards my knee. ‘And I’ll get something for the knee as well.’

He was, in fact, a surprisingly gentle and confident nurse, placing a towel-covered cushion under my knee and a wrapped packet of peas gently on top of the wound. ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ he said, casually wiping away an escaped dribble of ice from my thigh, ‘this is the same packet of peas I used for the injury to my eye.’ He flattened the peas between his hands before gently placing the packet back on my knee. ‘Shared intimacy with frozen peas takes our relationship to a whole new level, don’t you think?’ I didn’t think it was the legumes so much as the touch that threatened to do that.

‘I’m sorry about Karen,’ I said, only partly to call the physical intimacy to a halt. ‘No doubt you heard …’

He lowered himself onto the sofa, casually lifting my feet onto his lap to make room for himself. ‘I did, yes,’ he said, sobering. ‘The police came here actually, looking to inform next of kin. I gave them Justin’s address.’ I considered telling him it was me who had found Karen’s body but it seemed crass to mention it; besides, it would raise questions I didn’t want to answer. Ned absent-mindedly stroked my foot. ‘What a tragedy for little Sunny. It would have been a good thing for her to have met her mother,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘Mmm,’ I agreed. ‘It would have been better if they’d had a chance to meet.’ There was more I could say but I stopped myself. It all sounded trite, too easy.

Ned looked over at the photo of Norma and Karen on the far wall, his eyes soft. ‘It was quite a sum of money Norma left to Karen, you know. When she died, I mean.’

‘Really?’ I said, straightening. ‘I didn’t know that.’ This was new. I wondered if the other prison inmates knew about Karen’s wealth. ‘She told me she was giving away all her worldly goods and was going to live in a commune in LA.’

Ned shrugged it away. ‘Well, I guess it will go to Sunny now. And that’s got to be a good thing.’ My mind wandered, thinking of all the implications of Karen’s wealth, until Ned waggled my ankle for attention. ‘We’d better be looking for a new place to stay when we’re in Auckland, hadn’t we?’ He had deftly used the pronoun ‘we’ to suggest an intimacy that right now was also being expressed in the way his fingers made easy with my foot. An innocent enough act, you’d think, given the knee and all. Perhaps even an unconscious one. That’s what I told myself, anyway. Then Ned threw me a look and suddenly that touch didn’t seem innocent at all. None of it did. He smiled at me. And I smiled right back at him. It was a deciding moment …

… shattered by the loud insistent ring of an old-fashioned phone.

‘You should get that,’ I said.

He cupped his warm fingers around my heel. I didn’t pull away. ‘It won’t be for me,’ he said. ‘I’ve never given the number to anyone.’

The phone rang insistently.

‘Neither have I,’ I said.

‘Well then, it won’t be for you either.’

The phone stopped ringing. We looked at each other. The answerphone message started up in one of those robotic American voices.

‘I need to pee,’ I said.

He laughed and released my foot. I could feel his eyes on me as I hobbled unattractively across the room towards the bathroom. I didn’t need to pee. What I needed to do was remove myself from his body heat before I did something I was very likely to regret. I ran the tap and splashed cold water on my flushed neck and gave my reflection a silent talking-to. Robbie and I had never said we were exclusive but, given the recent developments, such as the suggestion to move in together, sleeping with Ned, though technically not wrong, would not be technically all that right either. As I bent to splash more water on my face, I startled. There was a woman in the living room, talking to Ned. I knew that voice well. The woman was undeniably, unmistakably, Karen.

Ned was wide-eyed. His face white, his hand pressed theatrically against his breast. I suspect the hand still hovered there from when he’d crossed himself. Karen’s voice boomed loud and clear from the answerphone.

‘ … just so excited. I know, I know you’ve told me not to expect too much, but I can’t help myself. Anyway, I’ll ring you on your cell. I just thought you might pick up if you were there.’ A faint sound in the background and Karen’s voice yelled, ‘Hang on!’ It was so loud, both Ned and I jumped. Karen laughed as if she’d seen our response. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘There’s someone at the door. I’ll ring you back in a minute.’

A click followed by a long beep ended the call. Ned and I stared at each other as the automated voice announced, ‘Call ended. Saturday 24 November, seven thirty-two a.m.’ We waited out the entire next message from a telemarketing firm in silence. Neither of us moved. I don’t think we breathed. Only when the long beep finished and the answerphone clicked to a halt did we breathe out. We knew what we had heard. The call was from Karen to me on Saturday morning. And it was her killer she had gone to open the door for. Ned crossed himself again without any attempt to hide it. Normally it’s the sort of thing I would have a person on about, but I didn’t. I was pretty close to making the talismanic gesture myself. Hearing Karen’s voice was creepy enough. Hearing her killer knock at the door was even creepier.

Ned was the first to speak. ‘I’ll take it into the police station first thing in the morning.’ He stared wide-eyed at the phone but made no move towards it.

A fraction less superstitious, I picked it up. ‘I’ve never seen one like this before,’ I said, turning it over. It was all in one piece with no obvious place for recording. ‘Where does the tape go?’

Ned lifted his shoulders but didn’t offer to check it out himself. He hadn’t seen a ghost but he had heard one and it had clearly given him the heebie-jeebies. The thought of ringing Fanshaw to tell him about Karen’s message made my head pound. It was doubtful he’d even take my call. Better to drop the phone into the station and let the message speak for itself. Ned hovered nervously as I pulled the wire out of the socket and unplugged the whole phone-answerphone contraption from the wall.

‘I’ll take it,’ he repeated, but still made no move to reach for the phone.

‘It’s fine,’ I said, hiding my amusement. ‘I’m flying back to Wellington tomorrow. I’ll give it directly to the CO.’ Ned looked puzzled. ‘The case officer. A guy called Aaron Fanshaw. I’ve met him,’ I added, hoping Ned wouldn’t ask how or when. He didn’t. Now that the phone was out of sight, he regained some of his composure, though he clearly needed the wine he was pouring with a trembling hand. I needed it, too. Hearing Karen’s voice had undoubtedly been a very spooky experience. First the posthumous letter and now the call. Karen seemed determined, even insistent, on talking to me from the grave. I gave myself a mental rap over the knuckles; Karen wasn’t trying to tell me anything, wasn’t trying to urge me to stay on the case. I was reading way more into these things than they deserved. I’d spent too much time of late in the company of a superstitious Irishman and it was rubbing off on me. That’s what I told myself anyway, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. I’ve heard of people leaving messages on the phones of the dead. Declarations of love or messages, asking them to come back. It made sense to me. I can understand why they’d ring the familiar number, listen with exquisite pain to the voice on the answerphone and then be unable to hang up without saying anything, without leaving some message of love or yearning.

Ned held out a glass of wine to me, but it wasn’t the wine I had to decide if I wanted. I’ve always been a one-guy girl. One at a time, that is. But ever since Robbie had buddied up with Sean something had shifted in my feelings for him. Ned smiled as if sensing my internal dialogue. There was no denying I wanted this man. I looked at him for an indecently long time and then leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Goodnight,’ I said.

‘Are you sure now?’

‘I’m sure,’ I lied. As I limped ignominiously up the stairs, I half expected Ned to call out to me with an offer I couldn’t refuse.