Mary put a hand on his forearm and gave it a squeeze, a glint of a tear in her eye. I thought guiltily that I might have gone to see Suzi too, but it hadn’t occurred to me. I had no idea it was the boy’s birthday. Frankly, I was amazed at Damien’s thoughtfulness, and began to wonder if I’d misjudged him. Mary was obviously impressed. She said she had things to do in the kitchen, and gave him a big hug when she left.
‘Anyway,’ he said with a sigh, ‘I’ve done what you asked.’ He opened the briefcase he’d been carrying and handed me a thick spiral-bound document. The title read INQUEST INTO THE DEATH OF LUCY CAROLINE CORCORAN. I hadn’t heard of the Caroline before. ‘This is a copy of the complete police report to the coroner. It wasn’t that easy to come by, but anyway, I pulled a few strings and managed in the end.’
‘I really appreciate it, Damien.’
He sat back and took a deep draw on his beer and wiped his mouth. ‘Well, good luck, but don’t let Anna drag you into some morbid soul-searching is my advice. It was a shocking thing, but there’s nothing we can do about it now. Oh, by the way, I ran into one of your old mates the other day. One of your BBK London pals, Brian Friedland.’
‘Oh yes? I didn’t know him well. He’s in Sydney, is he?’
‘Passing through. No, he said you hadn’t been in the same office, but apparently he’s moved over to Risk Management now, working as right-hand man for Lionel Stamp, your old boss, under Sir George whatsisname.’
I felt a chill deep inside me. His voice was casual but he was watching me closely, and smiling. ‘Small world, isn’t it?’
After he left I sat on the terrace with the report. It weighed heavily on my lap, hundreds of pages, tens of thousands of words devoted to Luce’s last hours, but I just couldn’t face it. What was I supposed to make of all that? I remembered the judge sitting in this same cast-iron chair, as reluctant to open the report on his knee, as uneasy perhaps at the futility of finding some needle of truth in such a haystack. I compromised with myself, reading the index. It listed the dozens of statements, diagrams, medical reports, telephone records and other documents compiled by Detective Senior Constable Glenn Maddox of the Homicide Unit, Major Crime Squad, based in Kings Cross, Sydney. Even allowing for the press interest in the case, he seemed to have been extraordinarily thorough. I wondered if it was usual for an accidental death to be investigated by someone from the Homicide Unit.
Then Mary called to me from the kitchen window, having trouble with a blocked sink, and I closed the report thankfully and went to help. Later I decided to take it to Anna at her work the next day. I was curious to see her in that setting, imagining her at the hub of a smoothly operating enterprise, surrounded by crisply uniformed minions and genteel clients. It took a few phone calls to track her down to the Walter Murchison Memorial Nursing Home at Blacktown, and the next morning I drove out there. I didn’t warn her I was coming. I thought I’d surprise her-it was what she had done to me, after all, that first Sunday evening at the hotel.
The original house had been enveloped by a confusing aggregation of new wings and extensions, and these so filled the site that car parking was pushed out into the surrounding suburban streets. I found a space, eventually, and walked back to a driveway that seemed to lead into the nursing home. It ended in a yard blocked with two skips and a row of bins smelling of kitchen waste. Beside them was a large clear plastic bag, filled with shoes. To one side a ramp led up through a small densely planted courtyard. There was a steel gate at the top with a locking mechanism designed to foil the infirm. Eventually I managed to open it without dropping my bulky package, and stepped onto a broad veranda. Clearly I hadn’t found the main entrance. After following the deck around the building for a while I came to a set of glass doors, through which I could make out elderly people seated in a lounge room. There was a keypad beside the doors and a sign that said RING BELL FOR ENTRY. I couldn’t see a bell.
Eventually a tiny grey-haired woman appeared through the glass and tapped in the entry code on the pad on her side. The door opened to a gust of Elvis Presley from a loudspeaker somewhere inside, and I said, ‘Thank you. I seem to be lost. I’m trying to find the manager.’
‘Mr Belmont?’ The woman was smartly dressed in a white blouse and dark suit, and I took her for a member of staff.
‘No, my name’s Ambler.’
‘No, I mean you’re looking for Mr Belmont, the manager?’
‘Oh.’ I wondered if I’d come to the wrong place. ‘No, Anna Green.’
The lady chuckled. ‘Ah, you mean our activities manager. Do you have an appointment?’
‘No. I’m, er, here to deliver something she’s expecting.’
‘Follow me.’
I stepped into the room, my eyes adjusting to a dimmer light. The old people, seated in a circle of assorted armchairs, seemed either asleep or deep in thought, and oblivious to both my arrival and Elvis’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. There was a doorway on the far side, but to reach it we had to cross the circle of vinyl floor, in the middle of which lay a large white blob of something wet. A very shrivelled old man was hunched forward in his chair staring at it, white dribble running down his chin.
‘Oh, Stanley!’ the lady said. ‘What have you done?’
Stanley didn’t respond. At that moment a woman in a green apron passed the door and my helper called out, ‘Maureen, Stanley’s done it again.’
‘That’ll be right.’ The woman swept in with a mop and set to work while we skirted the circle and made for the door.
‘I’ll take you to the library,’ my friend said. ‘I’m Rosalind, by the way.’
‘You work with Anna, do you, Rosalind?’
‘Not exactly.’ She gave another chuckle. ‘I’m seventy-nine-I’m one of the residents. But I do work with her in a way. I help her look after the library.’
‘And Anna’s in charge of activities, is she?’
‘Yes, she organises the bus outings and bingo and sing-alongs. She’s very efficient. I don’t know what we would do without her. Are you in the aged-care business, Mr Ambler?’
‘No, no. I’m a friend of hers. We were at university together.’
‘Really!’ She stopped and turned to examine me more closely, obviously intrigued. ‘How very interesting. Do you see a lot of each other?’
‘Not exactly. I’ve been abroad, and I’m just catching up with old friends.’
‘Ah. We love Anna dearly, but she is something of a mystery to us. We’d like to learn more. For instance, is it true she was a mountaineer?’
‘Yes, we used to go rock climbing together.’
‘Ah! The two of you?’ She gave me an eager glance.
‘A group of us.’
‘With a rather striking blonde girl?’
‘That’s right. How did you know that?’
‘She used to have a photograph on her desk. You weren’t in it, though.’
She was leading me through a confusing labyrinth of corridors in which every wall seemed to be painted a different colour and none of the furniture matched. In places we came across seated figures whose appearance shocked me, as if a Nazi doctor had administered some grotesque experimental poison that turned people into shrivelled wrecks. Naive of me, but I just hadn’t seen anything like this before. The Nazi doctor was Nature, of course, and the poison was old age and its crushing diseases. There was nothing like this in EverQuest. My guide must have noticed my reaction, because she smiled at me and said, ‘Don’t worry, not much further.’
Finally we reached a door marked LIBRARY, and she stopped and indicated another door nearby with a label ROSALIND on it. ‘My room is close by, you see? So convenient.’
The library door opened into a small room lined with bookcases on three walls, the fourth with tall French windows leading onto another veranda and dense greenery beyond.
‘The library is Anna’s special baby,’ Rosalind said. ‘There were no books here before she came. We used to sit like zombies in front of the TV, but now we have a reading group. We have a section of normal-print books …’ she indicated one wall, ‘as well as large-print books, and over there audio books.’