‘Is there anyone we can call to sit with you?’ Monty asked. Stella shook her head.
‘Are you sure? It’s not good for you to be on your own at a time like this.’ He handed them each a chipped blue mug, ladling a generous amount of sugar into Stella’s without asking if she wanted it. As gently as he could he told her that someone would pick her up in the morning to formally identify the body.
‘Where was she found?’ Stella turned red-rimmed eyes to Stevie.
‘In a half-built shopping centre in Midland.’
‘She’s never been to Midland. I don’t even like the place, never took her there. How was she, was she...?’
‘She died quickly, but I’m afraid there is evidence of sexual assault,’ Stevie said.
Stella covered her ears with her hands. ‘That’s enough, please, I don’t want to hear any more.’
Discarding her earlier caution, Stevie put an arm around the woman. ‘And we won’t tell you any more, not if you don’t want to hear it.’
Stella ignored the gesture of comfort, reached for her tea and took a shaky sip. ‘I’ll tell you anything you want, just as long as you don’t tell me anything more about how she died.’ She put her mug down and buried her face in Stevie’s shoulder.
Stevie remained with Stella long after Monty left to relieve his neighbour of babysitting duties, promising to stay until the distraught woman was asleep. She contacted the medical officer who dropped by with some sedatives, then called Stella’s sister in Esperance who said she’d arrive in Perth about lunchtime the next day. In between talking to Stella and making phone calls, Stevie briefed the team of uniformed officers assigned to question the neighbours.
Stella had taken the sleeping tablets and was now having a shower before going to bed.
Clothes scattered the floor of Bianca’s bedroom and the residual tang of salt and vinegar chips salted the air. The top of the Formica desk was scarred with slash marks and pitted with tiny holes as if from multiple compass stabbings. ‘I ♥ Daniel’— a boyfriend, a rock or movie star?—had been scratched into the surface.
Stevie cleared the desk chair of shoes and sat down to make notes of the key points of her conversation with Stella.
Bianca was the product of a one night stand with a New Zealand backpacker on a Darwin beach. Stella remembered the man’s Christian name, Nicholas, but that was it. After their brief encounter he’d returned to New Zealand none the wiser of Stella’s pregnancy.
It had been a struggle to bring up Bianca alone. Stella worked a regular shift at Lotus Lodge as well as moonlighting at several nursing homes in the metro area. She averaged a sixty-hour working week and was saving up to take her daughter to Queensland for a holiday.
Bianca grew up well able to amuse and take care of herself. Last year she’d chucked a tanty (Stella’s words), insisting she was too old for after-school care. Stella had conceded and bought her daughter the laptop which had provided hours of amusement—much more educational for her than the TV, Stella had said.
Stevie had been unable to reply.
No, Bianca didn’t seem to enjoy school much, was often teased. She was a bit of a loner—her teacher had reported often seeing her alone at lunchtime, playing with her iPod. She didn’t have many friends, despite the effort she took to fit in: the belly button ring, the dyed hair, even the rock stars on the wall. Stevie tried not to react when Stella had mentioned the belly button ring—the early sexualisation of girls Bianca’s age seemed almost the norm these days.
Stevie gazed at the posters, recognising the Veronicas, Pink and a boy band whose name she couldn’t remember. Her talk with Stella had given her enough insight into the child’s personality to make her wonder whether the posters were only there on the off chance that one day a school friend might come over to play.
Bianca had wagged school several times last term, promising her mother after their last blow up that she wouldn’t do it again. Her mother thought it was because a kid called Zoë Carmichael was bullying her. When she’d approached the school about it they’d done nothing.
Despite her absenteeism Bianca’s school grades had been improving, especially in reading and story writing, and she even had a story published in the school newsletter. Untidy piles of type-written paper formed a nest where the laptop should have rested on the desk. Stevie shuffled through the scattered sheaves, hoping she might find some printed emails, but she only found doodles of brick walls, more Daniel hearts, and piles of half finished stories. ‘Once upon a time in a place far, far away.’ Or ‘It was a dark and stormy night...’ Nothing particularly original; atrocious spelling, but not bad for a child of this technological age where DVDs and computer games were the entertainment of choice.
Stevie searched through the wastepaper basket next to the desk and found a few more screwed up stories, some used tissues, chocolate wrappings and several empty potato chip packets.
A row of sagging shelves above the desk was weighed down with paperbacks—the Harry Potter series, Alex Ryder boy detective, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, Paul Jennings and several others. Despite the strained finances of her mother, it didn’t seem as if Bianca had gone without. Next to the books were jumbled piles of CDs, an iPod and a small-screen combo TV and DVD player.
‘Did you ever see what Bianca was doing on the computer?’ Stevie had asked Stella earlier.
‘Don’t know anything about computers, all I know is I get a whacking great bill for the Internet every month.’
‘Did she use email?’
‘Yes, with her Internet friends. I encouraged it. I couldn’t write a proper letter when I was her age. I was proud of her.’
If the woman had known anything at all about kids’ activities on the Internet, Stevie thought, she would have realised the letters were probably far from proper.
‘Why’s everyone so caught up over the computer, anyway?’ Stella had queried.
‘We think it might have been taken by her abductor to cover his tracks.’
‘You mean he took it when he grabbed her? But why would he do that?’
‘This man is probably a cyber predator, a paedophile who picks up children through the Internet and tricks them into meeting him. I doubt he came here to take the computer. A common ploy is to get the child to bring their laptop, if they have one, to the meetings. In that way they can destroy the computer and any evidence of their activities.’
At that point Stella had buried her face in her hands. ‘I never knew any of this. She was always so good. So quiet.’
Stevie heard her own mother’s voice across the chasm of the years: ‘You’re too quiet, you’re up to something.’ And usually they were, either putting laxatives in the shearers’ tea or hiding the hand-reared calf from their father at market time. There were no computers then, no Internet chat rooms and no mobile phones.
Stevie was thirty-five years old, but her childhood could have been a century ago.
7
Thursday
Her parents were at it again; Emma Breightling heard them yelling at each other in the kitchen. She padded through her bedroom door, still in her nightie, and peered down into the kitchen from behind the wrought iron banister, wondering what it was about this time. Three guesses: money, money or maybe even money; Emma wasn’t usually wrong. She looked down at her mother’s head and saw the gleam of scalp shining through the dark sculptured hair. Miranda would be mortified if she knew how exposed and vulnerable—how old—she seemed from this height.