'Joss has been worried about that for a long time.'
'Mmm. I've actually been wondering whether this boy Fuzzy – Carl Waterman – was Cutter's first kill.'
'I know. The thought's crossed my mind as well. I guess we'll never know now.' She pushed the cup away from her and leaned back in the uncomfortable seat. 'Bizarre, the way Joss's life caught up with him, isn't it?' she said. 'It's like you try to push away parts of yourself that you don't want to know anymore, but they always come back to be dealt with.'
'There's one part of his childhood that won't be coming back for more.'
'Cutter,' she said.
'Uh huh.'
She was quiet for a moment, and then found herself saying, 'Gabriel, I really appreciated you opening up the other day about your wife and your past.' She suddenly wanted him to know this. It could be that they would be separated by work very soon. 'In fact,' she said, 'I've really enjoyed working with you over the last two weeks. I've learned a lot.'
'Thanks. We've had fun.'
Her brow wrinkled a little. She didn't know whether she'd really describe the experience that way, but she kept going.
'I was terrified about coming out to Liverpool, to be honest,' she said. 'I have a hard time getting to know new people. You made it easy.'
'It was easy because we're both in the same boat,' he said. 'People usually find me weird.'
'So I'm weird? Thanks! '
'Yep, a bit.'
'Anyway,' Jill shook her head and laughed. 'We were talking about the past never really staying buried, and I guess I've also been through some things that make it hard for me to open up.' She coughed; her cheeks felt hot under the lights. Such conversations left her feeling as though she was walking through shadowy waters over rolling logs. She feared that at any moment she'd dislocate a knee or step into a sinkhole and never emerge again. 'Um, yeah,' she said, 'I just thought I'd say that I appreciated you being so open and easy to get along with.' There, she thought. That would do.
'You said that,' he said. 'So. What'd you go through that makes it hard for you to open up?'
Just like that. He just came out and asked things. God! She swallowed. Thought about what to say. Stared at him, then at the table. Unrolled the wax strip around the top edge of her cardboard coffee cup. This was when her words were going to fail her. She couldn't think of a thing to say. He waited, patiently.
'I got kidnapped when I was twelve,' she said. Fuck.
He sat quietly, attentive, his face neutral. Maybe it was that, she thought later. No horror or great concern, no reaching over the table to touch or comfort her. No expressions of anger and indignation about how someone could do that to a child. She found herself speaking again, in a rush.
'I was at a sports carnival,' she said. 'I was hanging out at the back fence with my two best friends. They were smoking. I was gonna try it. First time. There was a gap in the fence. It was surrounded by trees. We just slipped through.' She took a sip from her ruined cup. It was empty, but this barely registered.
'There was a guy,' she continued. 'I didn't see anything. I was coming through the gap in the fence backwards and I just got grabbed and lifted up. They put something over my head. I started screaming. I heard my friends screaming too, but he ran with me back to the car. He threw me in and the car drove off. There was another one driving.'
Jill stared unseeingly at the countertop. She was back in the car.
'He tied the thing tighter around my head and then he put his feet on me. He must've put me on the floor of the car. They had me three days, although when I got back, I thought I'd been gone, like, two weeks or something. They kept me in a basement. I was blindfolded. Alone, when they weren't with me.'
Well not really alone. Jill thought briefly about the white-eyed girl – a dissociated part of herself that had separated from her consciousness when the pain and fear had become unbearable. 'They burned me,' she said in a small voice. 'Raped me. I didn't even know what sex was.' Her voice trailed off.
'They dropped me off at a school oval,' she continued, finally, in a tiny voice. 'I was naked. Still blindfolded. I often wonder who found me, and if they're okay now. I can't remember any of that last bit. There are lots of blanks.' She looked up at him. 'I suppose I should be grateful for that.' She laughed, harshly. 'Stuff still comes back in nightmares, though,' she said. 'I guess that's what I meant when I said the past keeps coming back.'
'That's fucked,' he said. 'Sorry.' Then, 'Did they catch them?'
'Nup. Not then,' she said. 'The younger one killed the older one when he got senile and started telling anyone who would listen about the sick shit they used to do to kids. They were part of an organised ring.'
And I killed the other one six months ago. She thought it, but didn't speak the words. The knowledge registered feelings of relief, satisfaction, horror. She stared at her hands.
Jill's mobile sounded, and she fumbled reaching for it.
'Jackson,' she said; then, 'Okay. Be right over.' She put the phone back in her jacket pocket. Gabriel was already standing.
'They're ready?' he asked.
'Yep.' She found her legs wobbly when she stood. 'Forensics have faxed over a copy of their findings to Mobbs. His report's being printed now.'
Fifteen minutes later, Jill's passenger door wasn't yet shut when Gabriel hooked a U-turn in front of the traffic on Parramatta Road. Tyres shrieked. She held on. He hit the siren.
'It wasn't him.' Jill said it again, third time.
'He's going to go and get them, Jill. Try to get them on the phone.'
The coroner's report had revealed that the burned bodies in the home of Joss Preston-Jones and Isobel Rymill belonged to two men named Simon Esterhase and Guo Qi Xu, AKA Tatts. Each had a substantial criminal record. They were both known associates of Henry Nguyen. Cutter.
A comparison of the organic material found at the Rice and Capitol Hill crime scenes had specifically ruled out that Nguyen was one of the dead men.
The phone rang unanswered at the Mosman residence.
34
PERFECT TIMING AS usual, Mother, thought Joss, driving through the night back to Mosman from Rozelle Hospital. He'd made the trip countless times throughout his adolescence – his grandfather doing the driving in the early days, then his grandmother. Finally, before leaving for the army, he would use the trip as practice for his driver's licence. His mother had made the trip many more times without them, in an ambulance, after hours of screaming obscenities, often naked, sometimes in front of their affronted North Shore neighbours.
Tonight, Joss's wife and child made the trip with him. He figured that his family's arrival and the disruption to his mother's routine had caused her fragile chemical stability to crumble yet again.
He stole a glance at Isobel's pale profile, and gripped the steering wheel tighter. It wasn't as though their presence in the Mosman house could have disturbed his mother too terribly. Isobel had said barely anything since they had climbed from the roof of their burning home on Monday night, two days ago. Even Charlie was quiet, listless.
Thinking back to that night, Joss could almost smell the smoke in his daughter's hair. When he'd handed Charlie to Isobel on the roof, the night air and the urgency of the situation had roused his sensibilities. Leaving Isobel clutching a wide-eyed and shuddering Charlie, he had worked quickly, the sound of the flames now audible over the noise of their smoke alarm. He had lowered the ladder to the ground and gone back for Charlie. He had prised his daughter from his wife's grip at the edge of the roof, and again clinging to her with one arm, had instructed Isobel to follow him. On the ground safely, they walked in single file towards the front of the house. A huddle of neighbours now stood in the street, mobile phones to their ears, panic painted on their faces in the streetlights.