'I hope he's going to be okay,' said Jill, opening the back door of the car so Gabriel could dump his equipment. 'He looked pretty shaken up.'
The steering wheel felt warm when she started the ignition.
'He certainly did,' said Gabriel, absentmindedly struggling to fasten his seatbelt. The plug had caught in his khaki shirt, and she had to stifle an unexpected impulse to untangle the mess for him. She turned on the air-conditioner instead.
'So it's back to Liverpool, then,' she said, mentally calculating the time it would take to get there and back again.
'No. Let's just go to your house.'
'My house.'
'Yeah. I want to watch this tape back. We've got some problems here.'
'I live in Maroubra.'
'Have you got a good TV?'
'Well, yes. But… Oh, whatever. We can watch the tape there I suppose.'
She pulled the car out from the curb and headed into the city, finding herself smiling at the thought of the early mark. They travelled against the traffic for most of the trip, Gabriel staring out the window, from time to time jotting in his notebook. As they passed the shops in Randwick, she suddenly wondered what the hell she was doing. Scotty was the only partner she'd ever had in her house, and she trusted him. She'd known her new partner for under a week.
Last night on the phone, her mum had asked her what he was like, and she'd been unable to find the words. After a few moments, she'd laughed, and told her mum that she'd have to get back to her. She hadn't figured him out yet.
Jill drove towards the ocean ahead.
After seeing the detectives out, Joss found himself back in front of the cupboard in the kitchen. Describing the night at Andy's in such detail had unshackled the demons in his brain. Memories howled in his head now, each clamouring for processing, hurling up image after horrifying image. He gave in to the kaleidoscope, knowing from experience that he was incapable of stemming the flood once it had progressed unchecked to this point. He reached unseeingly for the bottle of bourbon. The interview had prevented him utilising his routine avoidance strategies – hard exercise; forcing himself to remember he was home, safe, in the present. He had only this recourse left. He swigged directly from the bottle and then reached for a glass.
Back on the sofa, he steeled himself for the show; he drank quickly to put as much distance between himself and the images as possible.
Kibeho, 1995. The definition of human depravity. From every angle someone died in agony, or, much worse, survived, a machete wound through the middle of their face; a limb or genitals missing; intestines exposed for the birds that dived sorties in screaming, black-eyed packs. He moved through the blood and body pieces, pulling a dead woman away from her wailing infant before the child suffocated under her weight, dragging a breathing body from a pile of corpses and handing him to the medics. A small team from Medecins Sans Frontieres and the medical section of the Australian peacekeeping force patched up those they could, medivaced a fortunate few, and provided morphine to many others, who would at least die oblivious to their own screams. For many years, he envied them that.
Another glass. The bourbon burned.
The boy and his family. The memory kicked in at the worst part, of course. The father lay dead, feeble spits of blood still exiting the mess of his throat. A girl, maybe ten, waited, mute, for the next act of horror life would bring her. Her mother, a baby on her hip, keened quietly, a steady, emotionless moan that conveyed more pain than a scream. And the new man of the house – the boy, younger than his sister – shaped up with a stick to the Tutsi warrior with the machete.
The devil with the knife turned to smile at Joss; to tell him with his eyes that he could cut this family to pieces, and that Joss could do nothing but salvage anyone left when he'd had his fill.
Not this time.
Joss watched himself moving forward to meet the enemy.
On the couch, feeling as though his head had played host to a wasp's nest, Joss's hand reached between the cushions, and pulled out that for which it had been searching. He wiped the knife against his thigh, and put it back in its resting place. Close.
He let his head fall back against the lounge.
18
'YOU SEE, HE'S doing it again,' said Gabriel, cross-legged on her floor. The glow of the TV screen lit up his face. They otherwise sat in shadow, the gathering gloom of dusk waited on the balcony.
'So that would be another cluster?'
'Yup.' He kept his eyes on the screen, but she saw him make a mark in the notepad perched on his knee.
There hadn't been time to be awkward. Gabriel had walked straight to the TV upon entering Jill's apartment and had wheeled it around to expose the leads at the back. Before she'd even offered coffee, the Balmain room and Joss Preston-Jones had filled the screen. Gabriel had been animated from the start.
'I don't get it,' he'd said to her. 'I've got to see it again. This guy was throwing up deception cues all over the place. Come in here and watch this.'
She'd taken a seat on her chocolate leather sofa and leaned backwards, her arms across her chest, an eyebrow raised.
'You're sceptical,' he said.
'You think he's lying?'
'He's not telling us the whole truth. He's being deceptive again and again and again.'
'How do you know?'
'Same way I can tell that you think I'm full of shit right now. Incriminating and discriminating stress cues; verbal and non-verbal signs.' He turned back to the TV. 'You gotta watch this.'
Jill had always been interested in the principles of interrogation, and had thought she had a good sense of when a subject was lying. She knew well that most of the time what a suspect actually said during an interrogation was only half the story. The way they said it, their body posture and movements told the rest. What she learned in her loungeroom over the next two hours, though, surpassed all of the behaviour analysis training she'd had to date, and gave words to a lot of her instinctual knowledge and hunches.
'Okay, so we know that no single behaviour can tell us whether someone is being truthful or deceptive, right?' He continued without expecting a response. 'But when we repeatedly observe some kind of stress reaction, or even better, a cluster of stress reactions when a particular issue is being discussed, then we can assume it's not a random behaviour.'
From Jill's point of view, anyone speaking about a brutal home invasion would radiate stress signals. Preston-Jones was wrecked after the interview, as was almost every victim she'd ever talked to. Gabriel's eyes and voice were compelling, however. She leaned forward in her seat.
'Of course, even innocent subjects will be nervous, and we'll detect that every time. But Joss exhibits markers suggestive of poor credibility at several key points through the interview, signals that I wouldn't expect in subjects who are telling the whole truth. What we've got to figure out now is what he's omitting from his statement. What he's not telling us. But more importantly,' Gabriel turned his eyes from Jill back to the screen, 'why he's omitting it.'
Jill finally found herself on the rug next to Gabriel, propped cross-legged with her back against the lounge to better see the screen. He paused the tape at key moments and time and again showed her movements made by Joss that stood out from his typical signs of tension.
'I'm picking up more evasion than deception,' he said.
She estimated that they were around halfway through the tape.