'What was in it?' Jill had asked her new boss. What else did this girl have to tell them?
'A bath towel,' he'd said evenly. 'She kept it after wiping up the blood and semen. Can you believe it?'
'She wanted to tell us what happened. She just couldn't put it into words the first time, and then the lie got too big,' said Jill.
'Great work, Jill.' His voice was exhausted. He sounded old. 'We should get results from the sample tomorrow afternoon. What they get from the other trace you found out at Capitol Hill with Gabriel should follow.'
Jill lost count at one hundred crunches, caught up in her thoughts. Before leaving Justine, she'd helped the girl to tell Ryan and her mother what had happened upstairs. Ryan had taken off, hate and tears in his eyes. She wondered whether he'd returned yet, and what would happen between the young couple.
She'd seen it all before. Sometimes the male ego couldn't take the blow when his partner had been sexually assaulted. All of her tears following a rape were, in some men's eyes, accusations of weakness, reproaches because he hadn't been able to protect her. When the victim also held a corresponding unspoken belief that her partner should have been there, stopped it, the couple rarely made it. When they did, sometimes Jill felt they shouldn't have: the anger would eat them alive.
Jill had ensured that Narelle Rice had all the phone numbers for the community services that could help. She'd follow up and urge Justine and Ryan to have counselling. It had taken a few years and a couple of different therapists for Jill to gain some relief following her own ordeal. Still, killing her rapist years later was what had given her the most release. Now that was something you never got told in therapy. The memory of his death was still a strong, clear image. She tried to tell herself that the healing came from the knowledge that he could never hurt her again. She forced herself not to relive the satisfaction of kicking him to death.
She unhooked her ankles and rolled off the incline bench onto the floor. Nine-thirty. She longed for the shower and her bed. Instead, she walked the well-trodden path to her hand weights and took them back to the bench. Three sets of dumbbell flies first.
11
'I'M NOT GOING.'
'Isobel. I told you. He'll come here. I can identify him.'
Joss stood in the kitchen facing his wife, her arms folded in determination; his, to keep from throwing up. Fortunately, Isobel became very quiet when angry. His hangover was a living entity this morning.
He'd decided last night that he had to tell his wife the truth – that he had recognised one of the men from the home invasion, the most violent of all of them, the man who had almost cut her boss's legs off. He had told Isobel the man's name, Henry Nguyen, Cutter, and that he had known him from his childhood in Cabramatta.
'I understand that we've got to do something about it,' Isobel said. 'But I'm not leaving you. Charlie and I are staying right here. We've got to tell the police. We'll tell them now.'
The most reasonable statement in the world, thought Joss, except that telling the police would change their lives forever, maybe even send him to gaol. He'd left all that behind him. The old Joss was dead. He had to do everything he could to hang on to the new world he'd built for himself.
'I've only told you half the story,' he said.
'You're kidding.'
His eyes showed he was not.
For the first time in his life, Joss told someone what had happened to Fuzzy.
In her kitchen, Jill prepared herself some lunch to take to work, emptied her dishwasher. After stacking her breakfast dishes inside it, she looked around for her handbag. She spotted it near the front door. When she bent to pick it up, she groaned with the pain from her stomach muscles. After a couple of attempts she managed to grab the bag using just one handle. Its contents tipped out onto the floor. For the second time, the vegetables from the Asian food store spilled everywhere, and she remembered the scene from yesterday.
Laughing aloud, Jill squatted to retrieve them, and was still smiling when she left her apartment.
Joss heard the empathy in his boss's voice when he told him he'd be taking a second day away from work. His dangerous 'accident' would be the topic of the lunchroom again today. His colleagues had clucked with alarm when he'd told them he'd fallen from a ladder, leaving him relieved he'd not told them the real reason for his bruised face. It reminded the assessors of the other freak-accidents-around-the-home they'd processed over the years. Apparently, more people died in their bathrooms than in motor vehicle collisions, he'd heard at lunch on Monday.
Isobel had insisted that she would go to work.
'I might be able to find Cutter,' she'd reasoned. When he'd told her about Fuzzy, and explained to her why he couldn't tell the police about his connection to Cutter, she hadn't flinched. Instead, she was in problem-solving mode, and he wished he'd trusted her earlier.
Isobel worked for one of the three largest law firms in Australia. Her role included investigating the paper trail of anyone who wasn't on their side, and sometimes those who were. She had access to almost every piece of electronic information the police did. Privacy meant little if you had the technology and resources to get around the flimsy obstacles set up to protect it.
For his part, Joss was going to see his mother. Back to where it all began.
Tiptoeing up from the loungeroom last night, with most of the second bottle of bourbon rendering the staircase a roiling escalator, Joss had wheeled a chair from the study out to the hallway in front of the linen closet. He'd positioned the swivel chair under the manhole cover and held onto it until the floor stopped moving. Managing to climb onto the seat of the chair, he stood with his feet slightly apart and his hand on the wall to stop the spinning.
As quietly as possible he'd popped the manhole cover, sliding it back into the roof. Ordinarily, he would easily have been able to pull himself from the chair up into the dark cavity overhead. Last night, however, when he'd gripped the edge of the manhole and tried to launch himself up, his feet had propelled the wheeled chair into the closed doors of the master bedroom. With Isobel standing over him holding a tearful Charlie, he'd summoned as much dignity as he could muster and made his way to his side of the bed, where he found himself this morning.
Problem was, now he couldn't keep his mind off the toolbox in the ceiling.
The knife had gone into the box when he'd returned from Rwanda. He'd moved the box from the ceiling in their former home to this house when they moved in five years ago, and as far as he knew, no one else knew what was inside.
Isobel had some idea of the horrors of the genocide in Africa. He knew that when he'd come home, she'd read everything she could find about the Australian peacekeepers' role there. She knew that Joss was one of the thirty or so Australian soldiers who'd been on-site during the Kibeho massacre, when four thousand Hutus had been slaughtered over the course of four days in a displaced person's camp of one hundred thousand people. Thousands more had been horribly wounded. She knew that the rules of engagement for the Australians had prohibited them firing their weapons unless they were directly fired upon. They were expressly forbidden from using their firearms in defence of the civilians.
Two battalions of Tutsi warriors had surrounded the camp, convinced it was harbouring Hutu fighters. In fact, the majority of the camp consisted of women and children, but that had not stopped the bloodlust. The Tutsis had mostly used machetes in order to save bullets. The carnage would have sent any witness mad, but for a soldier, trained to defend and attack, the horror of the utter helplessness had been unspeakable. Literally. Although Isobel knew the facts released to the media, no one knew what Joss had seen and done in those three days. His brothers and sisters in arms had their own unspoken memories; he read them in their eyes on the rare occasions they caught up, but only Joss and the dead Tutsi soldier knew why he kept the knife locked in the toolbox.