'Did you get my address from the police?' he asked, putting his key into the lock on his door.
'No,' she smiled. 'I'm pretty sure they don't know you live here. Don't be angry, now,' she said with a big smile. Her teeth are so white, he thought. 'I got your address from the sweet lady at your old house in Cabramatta. Is she your grandmother?'
Cutter grinned and the girl stepped back a little. He lowered the wattage.
'Yes, that's my grandma. Look, I don't think I can help you with any of this, but I wouldn't mind knowing what's going on. You want to come in for a moment and we can talk for a bit?'
28
JILL SAT UP quickly in bed and wished she hadn't. A ribbon of pain that began in her neck and extended down one shoulder pulled her back down to her pillow. After falling quickly into a deep and dreamless sleep within twenty minutes of arriving home from Gabriel's last night, she'd awoken at three a.m. feeling she was drowning. She'd spent the next fifteen minutes blowing her nose, and the hour after that punching her pillow into some kind of shape conducive to sleeping again. She'd ended with the pillow bunched high under her neck, a position that always left her sore the next morning.
Sunday. She could not believe that just a week had passed since she and Scotty had packed her belongings at Maroubra police station. So much had happened. They'd uncovered a lot of important information about the home invasion gang, but they still had no one in custody, and had yet to interview a suspect.
She wondered what Scotty was doing today, and smiled, certain that he would wonder the same thing about her at some stage today. Usually they went for a run or a long bike ride together on Sundays. She thought about the butterfly pendant in her underwear drawer, the jewellery so unlike her. She smiled again, but the back of her throat suddenly ached with sadness. She hoped that the butterfly did not symbolise her relationship with Scotty: a fragile, beautiful, brief life. She considered all of the relationships she'd had. Her habit had been to flit from one to the next, alighting briefly, fluttering away with any minor disturbance or change in the wind. And she'd been so careful with Scotty, never allowing more than a friendship, to try to preserve what they had together as partners at work.
So. She should do something with her day off. She could go out to Camden and see her family – she'd love to see her niece and nephew right now. Even with a red nose and headache, it would be great to have little Lily sitting with her on the bed, prattling on about the most important things in the world to her – frogs, her best friend Tracey Timmons, her Bratz dolls. But Jill could not imagine getting in the car and driving that far.
She could call Scotty. He'd love to see her, and she realised that she missed him a lot. Most weeks for the past couple of years they'd seen each other six or even seven days a week. She convinced herself that she wouldn't call because he'd want to do a bike ride, or a swim, and she didn't feel well enough today. She quickly pushed aside the real reason she wouldn't calclass="underline" she couldn't bear it if the awkwardness that had ended every past relationship suddenly materialised between them.
She pulled her knees up to her chin, unwilling yet to get out of bed and face the day. She should be able to call a girlfriend, catch up for lunch, she thought. That's what other people did with their weekends. The fact that she didn't have close friends had never bothered her until the last six months or so. In the past, there'd only been time for training and work, but even with her obsessive dedication, they had been mere hobbies compared to her fulltime occupation: keeping herself safe. Safety entailed distance from others. The fewer people you let into your heart, the less likely that one of them would rip and shred and tear it to pieces.
She sighed. Although she'd killed Alejandro Sebastian – the man who'd kidnapped and raped her as a child – his legacy lived on. She'd hoped that his death would burst the bubble that had simultaneously protected and alienated her from the world. Over the past few months she'd thought the bubble was becoming a little more permeable, but she could still feel its barricades at the periphery of her psyche.
The thought of the schnapps at Gabriel's last night suddenly rose like a spectre in front of her. Changing routines meant losing control. She thought about a story the therapist, Mercy Merris, had told her when she had been forced to have counselling several years ago. Mercy had spoken of a Vietnam veteran who'd been an inpatient at the hospital where she worked. The man had seemed to be fitting in well, participating in group sessions and joining in the 'veranda therapy' with the other vets, who swapped jokes and cigarettes, life lessons and sometimes their meds.
One day Mercy had seen the man sitting alone by the rose garden with his head in his hands. She'd approached and asked him what was wrong. The look in his eyes had been wretched.
'What are you people fucking doing to me?' the man had demanded. 'Don't you know I've killed people?'
Mercy had told Jill that the question had surprised her. She'd been working with this man so he knew very well that she was aware he had killed people.
He'd continued, 'I've been fucking laughing over there!', pointing to the veranda behind them. 'If I let my guard down like that, who knows what the fuck I'll do next? I've killed people – if you try to get me to start feeling again, what if I can't control that part of me?'
Although Jill had understood the man's dilemma when Mercy had first related the story, its meaning was deeper for her now. Her life had so long been lived in absolutes that she was not sure she could tolerate the shades of grey that other people seemed to accept. The one glass of liquor last night would be just that to anyone else, but for Jill it could mean that she'd just taken her first step into the alcoholic spiral she had lived through for a year in her adolescence. It had always been all or nothing for her.
She got out of bed, the cramp in her neck finally demanding a stretch. She picked her tissue box up from the nightstand and walked with it to her loungeroom, slipping between the blinds and sliding the balcony door open a crack. She couldn't smell the surf through her blocked nose, but the sea breeze slapped her in the face. She took a few deep gulps of the cool morning air.
It wasn't just the alcohol. Other rituals were blurring, too. The exercise, for one. It was now every second day. Was that enough? Could she still fight for her life? Did she still need to? And then there was Gabriel. A week, she'd known him, and last night she had been drinking at his house. If someone had told her a week ago the way she would spend last night, she'd have laughed in their face.
She made up her mind. Despite this head cold, she couldn't spend the whole day inside feeling miserable. She needed some groceries and she wasn't going to let the day go by without some form of exercise. She quickly showered and dressed in leggings and a long-sleeved tee-shirt.
The Maroubra shopping centre was an easy three-kilometre walk. Jill wasn't going to do easy. No way she'd allow herself to get weak, she decided. She'd go to Eastgardens at Pagewood, and she'd take the long route, via Matraville.
When her feet hit the pavement outside her unit block, she started to run. Habit. At first, her lungs burned with the effort, and her feet felt heavy, but by the time she got to Beauchamp Road, she had found her rhythm and zoned out the pain.
Her thoughts turned again to the case. She considered the answers she wanted to get out of Joss Preston-Jones and Isobel Rymill tomorrow. The time had come for them to stop screwing around. In full flight at the Anzac Parade intersection at South Maroubra, she didn't bother to stop at the lights. Dodging through the traffic, it suddenly occurred to her that Joss and his wife could be in danger. She hit the pavement on the other side of the intersection. If Joss had recognised Cutter wearing a balaclava, surely it was possible, even probable, that Cutter had recognised him.