Felicity Young - Take Out

Stevie walked back towards his desk, her interest in the case now piqued more than her desire to stamp him further into the ground. ‘I heard someone had been feeding the baby—for some of the time anyway.’

Fowler’s jaw dropped. ‘You heard? How?’

Surely it was obvious to him who her source at the hospital was. When she failed to elaborate, he said, ‘Yes, the doctors think that’s the case.’

‘Any idea who had been feeding him?’

‘There’s some speculation. As we’ve only found Delia’s blood in the house, it could mean Jon Pavel killed his wife and returned to feed the baby himself. On the other hand, neighbours did report seeing a woman around the house on two separate occasions. They didn’t know the Pavels were missing at that time and took her to have been a visitor.’

‘Description?’

‘Vague.’

‘But why would this person quit after two days?’

‘Well if it was Pavel, or a woman he was in collusion with, they might have known the baby would survive because they knew when it would be found.’

‘But how would they know that?’

Fowler shrugged. ‘Pavel was going to call us himself after he’d skipped the country?’

They both paused for thought; the theory did make a certain amount of sense. Finally Stevie said, ‘I’d like to look at your phone log.’

‘Why?’

‘Just bring it up on the computer please, Sergeant.’

Fowler frowned at his smudged monitor. ‘System’s a bit slow at the moment—I’ve got someone working on it.’

He rang for the log and it was brought up to his office by a uniformed constable. Stevie leaned into the desk and carefully traced her finger down the computer printout of a month’s worth of calls.

‘I can see Skye’s call listed, then mine after we found the baby; apparently Mrs Hardegan’s son Ralph also rang on behalf of his mother, but there’s no record of his call here,’ she said.

Fowler asked her to hand the printout over so he could have a look for himself. ‘Christ,’ he exclaimed after a moment of sifting through the wide ribbon of reports. ‘Ralph Hardegan might not have cracked a mention, but read this.’

Stevie left her chair and looked to where his finger pointed, to a day dated two days before the baby’s discovery.

‘Anonymous female,’ she read, ‘called 1345, very distressed, unintelligible, officer could not understand complaint.’ Stevie paused. ‘The same message was repeated the next day. And you mean to tell me your guy didn’t report this to his supervisor?’

Fowler smoothed his hands over the wheat stubble on his head. ‘Shit.’

‘What is it with you Peppermint Grove people—are you The Misfits, The Dirty Dozen or what?’

‘I’ll have the desk sergeant’s head on a platter.’

Stevie puzzled over the problem aloud: ‘But who can this anonymous female be—Mrs Hardegan perhaps? Her speech is pretty unintelligible at times, some might think she has an accent.’

‘Or this could tie in with the theory that Pavel killed his wife to be with someone else. Can another Romanian woman who couldn’t speak English have been feeding the baby? Can she be the one who made the phone call?’

Their speculation was put to a halt by the ringing of the phone. It was a courtesy call from Swan Detectives. A body had just been found in the river at Middle Swan. They knew Fowler had been searching for the missing Pavels—would he be interested in joining them at the scene?

In the station’s ladies room, Stevie changed into spare clothes stored in the boot of her car, then accompanied Fowler in his own car, a silver-green vintage Bentley.

Stevie sank back into the soft leather seat, appreciating the walnut dash, the leg room, the smooth slap of the wipers as they headed into the rainy night.

‘Belongs to my old man,’ Fowler said somewhat self-consciously. ‘He wants me to buy it so it stays in the family. Thinks if I drive it for a while I’ll get to like it. I wouldn’t normally have it at work, didn’t think I’d be going out tonight...’

They said little else on the drive, settled into an uneasy truce, Stevie luxuriating in the car’s opulence, Fowler sitting stiffly behind the wheel. By the time they arrived at the riverbank the rain had weakened to a drizzle but the wind had become a gale, bending the red gums on the riverbank into the shapes of poor distressed souls. This stretch of the river at Middle Swan was familiar to Stevie, close to the hostel where she’d boarded as a high school student.

Powerful lights erected at a parking area near the scene reflected on the choppy water, a moving palette of glaring brightness and sinister shadows.

Low voices, muffled shapes.

A burst of lightning morphed into the flash of a police photographer’s camera.

The wind blew fresh and moist against Stevie’s cheeks. Turning up the collar of her waterproof jacket she followed Fowler to the police vehicles clustered near the river’s edge. His shape was illuminated in the yellow cut of headlights as he walked, his hands deep in the pockets of his Drizabone, shoulder flaps blown by the wind. They picked their way across the slippery grass, the scent of mud and algae stronger with every step. A tree grew on the riverbank, one branch stretching across the choppy water, a swinging rope dangling. They used to play truant at this stretch of the river, Stevie remembered, swinging from the bank, their tanned bodies plopping like sinkers into the brown water.

But the tree hadn’t seemed sinister then.

Next to the four-wheel drives a group of police, in yellow coats with luminous armbands, were gathered around the bundled body. One man left the group to shake Fowler’s hand. Stevie wasn’t introduced to the Swan detective, Joe Burridge. She knew she should be appreciating this feeling of unlicensed distance, the lack of responsibility, but with no procedural guidelines and no fixed role to play in the investigations, she found her emotions heightened, drowning the objectivity on which she usually depended.

The photographer, having finished his task, stepped back to give Fowler some room.

‘Is it her?’ Burridge asked Fowler who squatted down next to the sodden form. Stevie looked for a moment and then averted her eyes.

‘Not decayed enough if you ask me,’ Burridge said.

‘It’s impossible to tell.’ Fowler sighed as he looked at the pale, almost translucent head of the corpse. ‘Longish hair, could be a woman.’

‘Bodies decay a lot slower in cold water than on land; with so many variables at play, it’s almost impossible to tell at this stage how long the body has been in the river.’

The female voice belonged to the pathologist, Melissa Hurst, who emerged from behind the white coroner’s van acknowledging Stevie and Fowler with a nod of her curly grey head.

‘You’ve already examined the body?’ Fowler asked Hurst.

‘No, only got here a few minutes before you.’

Hurst beckoned him back to the body. The other officers stepped aside. Fowler shone his torch at the slurried face and empty eyes. Decay and aquatic scavengers had eliminated any hope they had of a visual identification. The view from the forehead up told its own story.

‘A shotgun to the head,’ Hurst said. ‘See the peppering of shot on either side of the wound?’

Stevie forced herself to look. The top of the woman’s head was split down the middle, the skin on either side of the wound peeled back, exposing the remnants of waterlogged brain tissue and ripped blood vessels. Fine shotgun pellets formed a smoky rash along the torn sides of the pale skin.

And then something moved.

‘Oh, fuck.’ Fowler turned his head and expelled a sharp breath. Hurst lost no time scissoring her gloved fingers into the cranial cavity. Stevie stepped back, horrified to see the yabby flicking back and forth between the pathologist’s thumb and finger.