He laughs. ‘Gem, it’s a high school—there’s heaps of weird shit everywhere but nothing that seems relevant. We’re still looking though.’
‘Thanks, Charlie.’
‘Well, I’m not going to tell you it’s a picnic. It’s fucking hot out here. Mossy can’t handle it. He’s sitting in the shade under a tree fanning his face with a chip packet.’
‘Tell him he’s weak.’
‘Will do.’
A fresh team had gone back to do another search of the lake and the car park this morning but nothing has turned up yet. I get started on Rosalind’s phone records.
‘Anything?’ Felix comes over to my desk just before 5 pm and places a milky-looking mug of coffee on the edge. He’s nibbling on a muesli bar and I realise I’m starving.
‘Not really,’ I say. ‘She’s not on Facebook, only Instagram. It’s just photo after photo of pretty things. Flowers, cute animals, rainbows and quotes. Mainly Shakespeare and dead poets that I remember from high school. It’s all very vanilla. But there is a photo of that heart-shaped rock you found. She wrote LOVE when she posted it. That was two months ago. The only other thing that’s vaguely interesting is an arty shot of a rotting apple and a close-up of red lips. I think they’re hers.’ I hold the phone out.
Felix takes a quick look and raises his eyebrows at the image. We ran the rock for fingerprints but only found hers and a few other blurry half-prints that were no use to us.
‘What about family? Friends?’ he says, still looking at the lips.
‘Zilch. No people in the shots at all. It looks like some of her students follow her, though, which might be worth checking out.’
I think of all the family photos on Felix’s pin board. I have photos of Ben and my dad all over the house, and Scott has snaps of his brother and parents. Even Phelps, our prickly old ME, used to have a photo of his wife on his desk at the morgue—the two of them at a Halloween party dressed as zombies.
‘Just like her house,’ says Felix. ‘Did you notice how there were no photos there either?’
‘Mm. Yeah, most people display at least a couple of happy snaps. Also, her phone records are the leanest I have ever seen. I need to get the names but there are only about six numbers.’ I show him the printout. ‘And she didn’t have a landline, only a mobile. The email address linked to her Instagram account has virtually nothing in it.’
‘Maybe she had a secret email address and accessed it from somewhere else,’ says Felix.
‘That’s what I’m thinking.’ I open my drawer and get out a packet of sultanas. Chewing them, I continue, ‘Someone called her just after ten-thirty on Friday night. Probably around the time the play finished. Maybe just after.’
Felix’s eyes widen slightly. ‘Okay, good. And?’
‘It’s a dead end so far. She missed the call and it was a blocked number. Probably a pre-paid SIM. Local, but that’s all we know. So basically I’m getting nowhere.’
‘And we don’t know who her gentlemen callers were either,’ he adds.
‘You’re right,’ I agree. ‘It would be good to know who the man in the fancy car was.’
Felix is looking at a crime scene photo that is poking out of the manila folder on my desk. ‘She seemed very frugal on one hand—especially when you consider her family home—but then there’s the wine and that make-up.’
‘Yeah.’
My thoughts are cloudy. I can’t quite work out what’s tugging through my consciousness. Rosalind’s blood-red lips keep interrupting my thoughts.
‘You know,’ I say, swallowing more sultanas, ‘her bag was found at the school, tossed into some bushes. So it’s most likely that the killer either followed Rose down to the lake or led her there, killed her, dumped her in the water and then took her bag—maybe trying to delay us ID’ing her, or maybe they thought there was money in it, whatever, but it means they made their way back through the school after she was dead. It just feels to me like that points to someone who was watching her all night. Maybe they’d planned to confront her about something after the play finished or maybe they’d arranged to meet and something went wrong. Maybe she had a stalker. I don’t know. It’s almost certainly got something to do with the school, though, don’t you think?’
‘It does make sense. We’ll hit the school tomorrow,’ Felix says. ‘We need to talk to the other teachers, the students, work out who was at the play on Friday and if anyone saw her afterwards. We need to get our hands on the CCTV—if there is any. Hopefully we’ll get something.’
He opens his mouth as if to keep talking, but ends up just smiling at me.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ He looks at me longingly before saying, ‘I’m going to do some digging into Timothy for a bit. Marcus is clean, by the way—his alibi checks out. He didn’t leave Sydney until Saturday morning. And Bryce’s girlfriend, Amelia Posen, has confirmed she felt unwell and cancelled their plans. She says they spoke on the phone late on Friday evening, which matches the story he gave us though it doesn’t exactly let him off the hook. But I still think it’s Timothy that’s off.’
I nod, fighting a wave of tiredness. ‘I’ll look into George Ryan.’
He nods and I watch him walk back to his desk. Despite the ache in my gut I want to be able to kiss him; pull him on top of me. Have him inside me. The desire is so overwhelming sometimes that it hurts.
Instead, I start to trawl the net and our records for anything I can find on Rosalind’s father. Jonesy was right; George Ryan is a minor celebrity in the business world. Over thirty stories load, referencing him and his companies. Years ago he launched a recruitment company for low-and mid-tier health roles. One of the first in Australia, it had benefitted from the sudden influx of women and migrants into the workforce. He sold it in the late eighties for over a million dollars and then moved into property development. The successful company, simply called RYAN, has an office in Sydney as well as Smithson, and has projects all over regional New South Wales.
I recall Rosalind’s poky apartment: the almost empty fridge and the Kmart bedspread. We’re going to need to speak to George Ryan again. I tap my pen against the side of the computer, trying to make sense of what Rose’s brothers said about her.
Marty Pearson looks up at me from the other side of the desk. ‘Cut it out with the pen, can you?’ he says gruffly.