Читать книгу Half Past Dead - Jane Clifton - Страница 9

THIS was what people meant by an out-of-body experience. Nothing seemed to be happening to her. Ronnie could hear what was obviously herself groaning and panting like a woman in the second stage of labour but it seemed to come from someone else.

Boyd, Matt, her job, her parents, her house, garden, car and electrical appliances were all swirling through her brain like the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz, as the words 'Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out!' crawled like TV advertising across her frontal lobe.

Logic and reason, along with compassion or any sense of community spirit, deserted her as the survival instinct assumed control. She had to get out of there and it was not going to be possible through the front door. She turned her back on the corpus delicti and went stumbling through the unfamiliar house.

Past the bathroom with its much needed toilet - no time for that now - on through the lounge room, which was furnished only with a couch upholstered in faded orange bouclé, a television set and VCR perched on a milk-crate full of videos, into the tiny kitchen which, sty-like as the bedroom, was strewn with more plastic takeaway containers, open food cans and empty pizza boxes. No housemate, friendly or fearsome, was making coffee at the bench, which was lined with row upon row of used teabags, like an army of toy soldiers preparing to do battle with the platoon of polystyrene cups and wooden stirring sticks on the draining board.

The overflowing rubbish bin was black with blowflies. Just wait until the news gets through about the stiff in the hallway, she thought.

At last, the back door! With its gleaming, forbidding deadlock. Under no circumstances would she retrace her steps to the bedroom or to Lawrence's cream silk pockets to try and locate the key. There was a window in the lounge room with a simple butterfly lock holding the lower sash down. She raised it, hoisted her elegant designer skirt and clambered out.

The heat knocked the breath out of her.

It was one of those summer days which, from first light, promises a massive thunderstorm with enough lightning to strike terror into the heart of a golfer, but by late afternoon has still failed to deliver: Christmas Day weather, guaranteed to exacerbate any already heightened family tensions.

Her head was pounding, her tongue stiff and dry as a cuttlefish, and when she walked her crotch throbbed.

The tiny backyard was all cement, scattered with large cardboard packing cases and cat shit and with a high wooden fence. The stench was overpowering. She slipped the bolt of the gate and stepped out into one of the wide, bluestone-cobbled lanes which characterised most of South Melbourne and Albert Park. A mangy alley cat looked up at her from a doona of rotting leaves and litter. Witness for the prosecution.

Which way back to the street? Ronnie would have to walk back to The Empire to retrieve her car to get home and change before showing up for work. It would make her a little late but didn't Dexter always say, 'It's not the time you get in but the time you put in'? The fact that she had cut her holiday short was in her favour, but in her eagerness to do so she had left her mobile phone at the beach house. Normally she could live without it and only really used it to co-ordinate school pick-ups with Boyd, but right now it would be handy to put in a quick call to work. No matter, she'd ring from home.

Now that she was out of the house she couldn't wait another second to empty her bladder. She checked the lane and scanned the backs of houses for windows. There were dozens of them, all flashing silver in the early morning glare. It was impossible to tell if anyone could see her and, at that moment, she really didn't care. For the second time in ten minutes she hoisted her skirt, and this time she squatted.

The pain was extreme. Like pissing razor blades, isn't that what they say? These were old-fashioned cut-throats. Release, combined with pain and a total absence of dignity, crowded in on her as hot tears evaporated on her burning cheeks.

The cat sidled over and brushed up against her leg, purring like a Volvo.

She'd have to call the police. Anonymously, of course, and with a disguised voice. No, that was too absurd. What kind of movie did she think she was in? She had to get home, out of this heat, eat something, drink water, try to think straight.

It took almost twenty minutes for Ronnie to retrace the steps that seemed to take seconds the night before, in order to find her car. Her battered grey Saab was where she had left it outside The Empire, now closed as tightly as Dracula's coffin. Sandwiched between the BMWs and Land Cruisers of the film and advertising companies which proliferated around Victoria Avenue and occupying a spot which charged $2 an hour 24/7, it sported an expensive-looking parking ticket which not only provided hard evidence of Ronnie's proximity to the scene of the crime but also removed any hope of the 'home all night watching television' defence.

Her hands gripped the steering wheel as she crested the Westgate Bridge, almost aeroplane height above the chemical stacks of Coode Island on her right and the broad, cobalt sweep of Port Phillip Bay out to her left. It was one of Melbourne's favourite suicide spots. The blast of a semi's horn almost sent her over the edge.

Finally, within the safe confines of 37 Wakelin Street, she stood motionless in the shower, letting the delicious cold water cascade over her, washing away her sins, absolving her in the name of the husband and the son and the holy family.

The bathroom was her chapel, her baptismal font, sacred ground.

She washed herself carefully and ever so gently where it hurt - like a good mother - then dried herself, trying to dodge her reflection in the enormous mirror which ran the length of one side of the room, from the door to the raised bath area.

Sooner or later she'd have to make that call to the police but not now. Lawrence wasn't going anywhere in a hurry and if someone found him first, all the better. It wasn't as if she'd killed him. She wasn't involved in any way. Well, okay, she was possibly the last person to see him alive. She wished she'd never seen him at all! Him and his fake blond hair and shoulder pads. Maybe his eyes had been blue. Maybe he wore contacts. For all she knew about him, one of his eyes could have been made of glass! She wasn't about to screw up her entire life on the grounds of temporary insanity, they could still put you away for that; she was opting for diminished responsibility.

So he'd ended up dead in the hallway of his style-challenged house! She had a job to go to and, if she could just get her hands to stop shaking, she would put her face on and get going. She turned to the mirror and started applying the expensive moisturiser she'd recently started to use.

'Never wash your face with soap,' Faith admonished. 'Lather leaves you leathery.'

They obviously hadn't covered genetics in any of her mother's prime-time favourites. Ronnie was well aware that 'good' skin was either in your DNA code or it wasn't, and no amount of beauty products or avoidance of soap would alter that. As the sun was beginning to set on her thirties however, she had noticed a lack of spring in the body's largest organ. Plunging crow's feet first into denial, she had lashed out on a range of politically incorrect products with seductive packaging to stave off reality. It felt good every morning to massage the sweet-smelling cream into her face, aware that the actual effect it was having on her skin was, in the truest sense of the word, cosmetic.

In the genetic lottery that was DNA Ronnie felt she had come off pretty well, having the best of her parents' physical features to compensate for inheriting all the ethno-psychological eccentricities of her family tree.

With both parents of medium height, Ronnie's five feet five inches came as no surprise. She picked up Faith's great skin but not her continental shelf of a bosom, thus avoiding glacial fissures being dug into her delicate shoulders by overloaded underwire bras, and a dowager's hump by the age of forty. Ronnie had her paternal grandmother to thank for her pretty and more than adequate 12C breasts, which had survived the two-year conscription to maternity and breastfeeding and emerged triumphant from their lanolin- stained constraints still pointing optimistically, almost cheekily, north.

From Godwin, her father, the Stawell Gift contender, she scored a fast metabolism and a certain wiriness that helped keep her arms lithe and her stomach flat. Her longish waist dipped towards jutting hip bones and slim, straight legs with one of those gaps between the tops of the thighs that let the sun shine through. To her eternal gratitude she also inherited Godwin's cellulite-free arse, even though there was plenty of Faith's to go around.

In all, a neat, feisty package of stylish athleticism without the dehydrated, prematurely aged look of the gym-junkie.

Short, straight black hair framed her triangular face in a perfect bob, the fringe just grazing the lids of greenish-brown, almond-shaped eyes that were the star attraction on the dial. Dreamy, faraway eyes but with a constant smile waiting in the wings for a chance to flash wide then crackle with light. When she and Boyd first met, she wore her hair longer and he would introduce her to his friends as Little Egypt. Kohl pencil and mascara wand did their best this morning to disguise the fact that her best features were red-rimmed and bleary, but she took care not to apply too much concealer to the dark shadows beneath for fear of producing the koala-in-headlights effect.

Faith's wide full-lipped mouth provided the perfect setting for Godwin's Hollywood-style perfect bite and needed only a hint of colour - full make-up looked good only on the very young or the very old, Ronnie maintained - and she was done.

She wrapped her kimono around her, then bent to scoop up last night's clothes that should have gone 'straight to forensic'. She walked down to the laundry, dropped them into the washing machine with some powder and punched the switch.

Back in her bedroom the sight of her bed overwhelmed her with a desire to slide between cool sheets and sleep the last twenty-four hours away. Out of the question. She had to get dressed and resume her place in the world, as if nothing extraordinary had happened. She had to go in to Arthouse, just as she told Dexter she would, and help him to finish the 2-SWAN submission in time for their arrival at the end of the week. There was nothing she could do to help Lawrence Konitz. He was no longer her concern.

When the weather was this hot she would usually wear a strappy summer dress. Today she wanted to cover herself completely, go the hijab and burkah. Christ! If there'd been a nun's habit hanging in her wardrobe she'd have thrown it on, wimple and all.

She chose the next best thing, a lightweight, nondescript, sleeveless navy-blue pants-suit which she'd jazz up with some jewellery, so as not to draw too much attention to herself through an uncharacteristic lack of style. Her charm necklace should do the trick.

An antique gold chain of miniature hieroglyphic eyes hung with charms - the Sphinx as centrepiece bracketed by pairs of palm trees, pyramids and pharaohs - it had been a gift from Boyd, presented to her on their fifth wedding anniversary complete with a little speech. He wasn't giving it to her just because of her pet name. No, it was because, to him, she would always be as beautiful and mysterious as the Sphinx. It didn't matter how long they had been together or how familiar they had become, or even how much they loved each other, he said. There would always be a part of her that he could never reach, that would remain unknown, and this made her even more desirable.

Well, she could write the book on the lure of the unknown now.

His speech had taken her by surprise. She had never thought of herself as a secretive person. On the contrary, she accepted most people's view that she was open and frank. Her natural instinct to call a spade by its name had weeded out some acquaintances over the years, but it had compensated her by helping to unearth the few worthwhile people she could number as friends. Up to that point she hadn't felt that she had kept any secrets from him, so his speech had puzzled her. Maybe he was just projecting, seeing what he wanted to? Maybe this was his version of a fantasy lover? How sensible of him to keep it within the marriage bed. She had accepted the gift graciously, accepting with it the mantle of 'woman of mystery' while making a mental note to pursue the topic at a more opportune time. A time which, of course, never came.

Ronnie straightened the neckline of her jacket in the mirror, then returned to the bathroom for perfume and the necklace.

Where had she put it? She remembered choosing to wear it the previous day, as an affirmation of all the people and principles that she held dear. At her convent school she had worn a scapula - one of those horrible brown woolly necklace things that were supposed to remind the wearer of the inspiring life of some saint or other, or the mother of Christ, the BVM. Perhaps she hoped that the necklace would work like that. She would have been better off with a few cloves of garlic on a string.

She'd had it on in Lawrence's bedroom. She remembered now how it had dug into her neck as he pounded away. The discomfort had stopped when he had stopped and she had not thought about it again. She had no memory of taking it off or putting it back on - which didn't mean that she hadn't done either.

Ronnie looked in the plughole of the shower, the bathroom drawers, behind the cosmetics and hairbrushes. With rising panic she returned to the bedroom, checked the floor, the wardrobe, then to the laundry where she stopped the washing machine mid-cycle and plunged her hands into the soapy water. It was near to boiling and she yelped in pain. Re-armed with rubber gloves she fished out the clothes, then unscrewed and removed the agitator. She scrabbled around in the bottom of the machine, stretching yellow latex almost to the elbow of one arm, but found nothing.

The only possible conclusion was that the necklace had somehow broken and slipped from her neck, and was now lying somewhere in the bedroom of a house which was about to become the centre of a murder investigation. 'CURIOUS EGYPTIAN NECKLACE PROVIDES CLUE IN HUNT FOR KILLER.' She could see the headline now, accompanied by an incriminating photo, see Boyd reading the newspaper across the breakfast table from her, see him look up at her, puzzled, then as his legal expertise pointed him towards the truth, see a look of unbearable sadness cover his face as he turned away. Before the inevitable barrage of questions...

She could not let this happen.

There was nothing else for it, she was going to have to go back. Right now. Before she rang the police. Before she went to work. Before anything else.

The thought of seeing Lawrence's body in the hallway again was not a pretty one. In this heat it would be deteriorating fast. The flies would have come to the party by now and she imagined the smell would be bad. Not that the smell of death was something she was familiar with. It was constantly referred to in the crime novels she liked to read, but she knew as much about its character as she did about conducting an autopsy. And, like the latter, it was something she had no desire to experience first-hand.

Maybe she should take a handkerchief? In newsreel footage of major disasters the emergency workers always covered their faces with handkerchiefs, didn't they? Was that just for the smell or was it also because of the risk of disease? Could you catch your death from death? She was taking no chances.

She opened Boyd's drawer and seeing all his neat bundles of underwear and socks brought on a fresh wave of remorse. The domestic superwoman who had washed, ironed and folded everything in that drawer, in the spare time left to her after holding down a full-time job and bringing up a nine-year-old son, was the same woman who was now borrowing one of her husband's handkerchiefs to protect her nose from the smell of the corpse of the man she had thrown herself at the night before. It was too much. She felt faint. She was starting to sweat and shake. Got to eat something, drink something.

'Pull yourself together!' she hissed at her reflection, still wearing one yellow rubber glove.

Steadying herself at the kitchen sink, she fizzed a Berocca and washed down a couple of paracodeine for good measure, hoping she wouldn't throw up the lot in the next few minutes.

'So... ' she thought aloud as she made her way to the door, gathering up keys, sunglasses and handbag, 'you can't drive straight to the house... the nearest corner maybe? No. There's got to be a milk bar... buy a paper or something, find the lane again and get in the back way to his house. Christ! What if the gate's shut? Did I leave it open? Yes, yes, I'm sure I did. Unless someone else has been there. Jesus! What if someone's there! Shit! Can't think about it. Gotta do it. Gotta go, you stupid, stupid, stupid... '

The phone rang, making her jump. She stared at the receiver, unable to pick it up. After four rings the answering machine clicked on. Matt's voice was saying, in mock grown-up style, 'Sorry, we're a bit busy at the moment... ' Long pause, with her own voice cueing him in the background. 'Please leave a message after the beep.' Giggles. 'Was that all right, Mummy?'

Then Boyd's voice. 'So where are you... ? Out on the town, eh? Got lucky while the old man's away? You bad girl. I rang work, they said you weren't in yet, so... well, I guess you're on your way. Just letting you know that we're having a good time, sort of. In a minute, Matty! Okay? Just wait a sec! And, um, I dunno, has anyone called? Oh, okay!'

Then Matt's voice. 'Mum! We had pizza for dinner last night and today we're going to McDonald's after me and Dad go fishing and - Dad! Let me - ' Beep. The signal dropped out.

The two people she was closest to in the world and neither of them could help her. No-one could help her. She took a deep breath, pressed the erase button, then walked out into the heat.

The gate was no problem. It was, as she had left it, open. She entered and checked the back door. Still locked. Good. She moved across the yard to the window from which she had made her exit. It too was still open. She stuck her head inside the room and listened. There was no sound. 'As silent as the tomb,' she quipped to herself. Getting in through the window in a pants-suit was much easier than getting out in combination full-length linen skirt and hangover had been, although her crotch was still sore and she was, once again, desperate to go to the toilet. This house is a diuretic, she thought. She took out the handkerchief and headed towards the hallway trying not to breathe too deeply. The lounge room was as she had left it except for something that she couldn't quite put her finger on. Ronnie didn't have time to worry about that though - she needed to find the necklace and get out of there fast.

Now that she was inside the house she could hear a faint hum. The flies, she thought, as her gorge rose. Her skin felt chill in spite of the heat. She pressed the handkerchief to her mouth and took a couple more steps across the lounge room preparing herself for what she knew lay ahead. A turn to the left and she was in the hallway.

It was empty.