Felicity Young - Take Out

‘Bag!’ Hurst snapped and dropped the small crustacean into the hastily proffered bag. ‘Okay put it in with the body bag,’ she told the constable.

‘Like something from fucking Alien,’ Burridge muttered.

As if this was their call, two hovering mortuary attendants took a step closer. Fowler held up his hand. ‘We’re not ready yet.’ He turned back to Hurst. ‘Was the wound inflicted before or after death, doc?’

‘I can’t tell for sure, not until I open her up. Information from bruising would be inconclusive after more than a day or two in the water. How long has Delia Pavel been missing?’

‘Last seen a week ago,’ Fowler said.

Hurst said, ‘Let’s have a look at the rest of her. We’ll have to remove this covering.’

The body was wrapped in a waterlogged doona secured by thin wire ties around the ankles, waist and chest. ‘This’ll be the missing cover off her bed,’ Stevie said under her breath to Fowler. She wondered what had led to the gruesome transformation of something so domestic and banal. Though discoloured by river slime, the small blue flowers on the fabric stood bright under the spotlight’s beam, undoubtedly matching the pillowcases on the Pavels’ bed.

Fowler nodded and took the pliers a constable handed him. ‘Okay, here goes.’ He carefully snipped the lengths of wire wrapped around the torso and ankles. Hurst peeled open the sodden doona. The woman wore jeans that swelled at the belly from the build up of bodily gasses. A long-sleeved T-shirt stretched tight across the distended abdomen. The exposed skin of her neck, hands and bare feet was pale and loose; her fingernails, barely keeping a grip upon her skin, looked like fakes about to come unstuck. Stevie caught a whiff of putrid gas, took a step back and pulled the neck of her jumper over her nose and mouth.

‘Washerwoman’s skin,’ Hurst remarked, pointing to the dimpled flesh on the feet. ‘How was she found?’

‘A couple taking their dog for an evening walk saw what they thought was a log floating near the bank,’ said Joe Burridge. ‘The guy reckoned it might be a danger to small boats and attempted to pull it ashore. Then he realised it was a body—she’d been weighted down with this.’ He shone his torch on what appeared to be a car axle next to the body. ‘It was tied on with a length of old rope. The river level’s risen over the last few days because of the rain. The body must have been dislodged by the increased water flow and floated free.’

Hurst sighed. ‘There’s not much else I can do here. Let’s get her back to the lab.’

Fowler agreed with the pathologist. ‘We’ve collected some of Delia Pavel’s DNA from the house.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I can use it as a comparison.’

Lights from an approaching vehicle cut through the darkness. The divers had arrived to search the river for more evidence and potentially the body of Jon Pavel.

‘Have you seen enough?’ Fowler asked Stevie.

Stevie nodded, cold to the bone. Clasping her arms across her chest, she followed Fowler back to the car. She looked back at the decaying mass on the riverbank. Delia Pavel had been a wife and mother of a young child. Stevie wondered what she had done to deserve this. (Image 7.1)

Image 7.1

FRIDAY

CHAPTER EIGHT

An emergency hospital admission and several new patients on her round meant the more independent Mrs Hardegan had been bumped to the end of Skye’s afternoon list. Technically speaking, she barely qualified to be on the list at all, but Skye knew the old woman looked forward to her visits and had promised to keep them going as long as she could. At the recent case review meeting, Skye had emphasised the point that although Mrs Hardegan had improved physically, she still needed to be monitored for signs of depression, a common occurrence in recovering stroke victims.

When dealing with her patients Skye always strove to see the person behind the disabilities. They all had stories to tell which reflected their lives and well-being and consequently influenced their nursing care. But other than the barest biographical details gleaned from her son (at best, disinterested, at worst, sleazy), Mrs Hardegan’s story remained a mystery. According to Ralph, his mother was born in Perth in 1923, served as a naval nurse during the war, was married in 1950 and widowed in 1955, his father dying not long after his birth.

He’d told her that his mother had worked in various hospitals around the state when he was growing up and had attained some senior positions—exactly what, he couldn’t say. When Skye had asked if she had ever been a matron—she seemed the type—Ralph shrugged. He remained indifferent when she questioned him about the crisscross pattern of scars she’d noticed on the old lady’s back.

See-through frail, but her wits as sharp as ever, there was a lot to admire about old Lil, and a helluva lot more to find out if Skye was to give her the emotional support she required. Barely able to talk any kind of sense when they’d first met after the stroke, the old lady had answered Skye’s questions about the scars with strings of neologisms—nonsense words of her own invention, a typical characteristic of many stroke patients with expressive dysphasia. Even though her speech had improved greatly, Skye still couldn’t understand everything the old lady was saying, and encouraged her to practise her speech whenever they were together.

They were chatting away now as Skye placed the weekend’s medications into the plastic pill tray. They’d been discussing Ralph who had gone away on business and left no forwarding phone number.

Busy with her parrot, Mrs Hardegan seemed not the least bit concerned about Skye’s dilemma about who to leave on the contact list. After filling up the seed bowl, she replenished the bird’s water supply, using a jug with a long spout. Skye assessed the way she carried out these tasks, noting how barely a seed or drop of water was spilled. The old lady’s fine-motor skills were improving daily, she noted with satisfaction.

‘Our good boy, our little feathered friend,’ Mrs Hardegan muttered to herself as she put the feeding paraphernalia back in the drawer of a heavy oak sideboard at the far side of the room. ‘We are the same age as the feathered one. We were given him by a sea captain when we were just a boy.’

‘I know, and he’s very beautiful,’ Skye said; she’d never seen anything more endearingly ugly in her life. The old lady seemed a lot fonder of Captain Flint than she had ever been of her son. But Skye could hardly list a parrot as the emergency contact.

‘Is there anyone else we can put on your list, Mrs H?’

‘Liar. Not beautiful, ugly as sin.’ Mrs Hardegan must have noticed the exasperation on Skye’s face and answered her question with a shrug of her bony shoulders before shuffling back to her chair by the window. Still saying nothing, she pointed to the Pavels’ house.

‘I know, it’s a shame they’ve gone,’ Skye said. ‘They could have gone on the list. They were good neighbours to you, weren’t they?’

‘Used to be. Not now.’

‘Well ... no, not now.’ Stevie had rung Skye the previous night and told her about the discovery of the body in the river, which she said more than likely belonged to Delia Pavel. Although Mrs Hardegan hadn’t mentioned it, she couldn’t have missed it; it had been all over the TV news. The news didn’t seem to have affected her. She sat as she usually did, rigid in her chair, hands clasped, buttoned tight as a pair of winter combinations, as Skye’s gran would’ve said. When she was dying in hospital, Gran had said how strange it was to be old and sick on the outside, yet still feel twenty-one on the inside. Mrs Hardegan was very much like her gran, Skye decided.