Bright Air - Barry Maitland [18]
‘Anyway,’ he said with a sigh, ‘I’ve done what you asked.’ He opened the briefcase he’d been carrying and handed me a thick spiral-bound document. The title read INQUEST INTO THE DEATH OF LUCY CAROLINE CORCORAN. I hadn’t heard of the Caroline before. ‘This is a copy of the complete police report to the coroner. It wasn’t that easy to come by, but anyway, I pulled a few strings and managed in the end.’
‘I really appreciate it, Damien.’
He sat back and took a deep draw on his beer and wiped his mouth. ‘Well, good luck, but don’t let Anna drag you into some morbid soul-searching is my advice. It was a shocking thing, but there’s nothing we can do about it now. Oh, by the way, I ran into one of your old mates the other day. One of your BBK London pals, Brian Friedland.’
‘Oh yes? I didn’t know him well. He’s in Sydney, is he?’
‘Passing through. No, he said you hadn’t been in the same office, but apparently he’s moved over to Risk Management now, working as right-hand man for Lionel Stamp, your old boss, under Sir George whatsisname.’
I felt a chill deep inside me. His voice was casual but he was watching me closely, and smiling. ‘Small world, isn’t it?’
After he left I sat on the terrace with the report. It weighed heavily on my lap, hundreds of pages, tens of thousands of words devoted to Luce’s last hours, but I just couldn’t face it. What was I supposed to make of all that? I remembered the judge sitting in this same cast-iron chair, as reluctant to open the report on his knee, as uneasy perhaps at the futility of finding some needle of truth in such a haystack. I compromised with myself, reading the index. It listed the dozens of statements, diagrams, medical reports, telephone records and other documents compiled by Detective Senior Constable Glenn Maddox of the Homicide Unit, Major Crime Squad, based in Kings Cross, Sydney. Even allowing for the press interest in the case, he seemed to have been extraordinarily thorough. I wondered if it was usual for an accidental death to be investigated by someone from the Homicide Unit.
Then Mary called to me from the kitchen window, having trouble with a blocked sink, and I closed the report thankfully and went to help. Later I decided to take it to Anna at her work the next day. I was curious to see her in that setting, imagining her at the hub of a smoothly operating enterprise, surrounded by crisply uniformed minions and genteel clients. It took a few phone calls to track her down to the Walter Murchison Memorial Nursing Home at Blacktown, and the next morning I drove out there. I didn’t warn her I was coming. I thought I’d surprise her—it was what she had done to me, after all, that first Sunday evening at the hotel.
The original house had been enveloped by a confusing aggregation of new wings and extensions, and these so filled the site that car parking was pushed out into the surrounding suburban streets. I found a space, eventually, and walked back to a driveway that seemed to lead into the nursing home. It ended in a yard blocked with two skips and a row of bins smelling of kitchen waste. Beside them was a large clear plastic bag, filled with shoes. To one side a ramp led up through a small densely planted courtyard. There was a steel gate at the top with a locking mechanism designed to foil the infirm. Eventually I managed to open it without dropping my bulky package, and stepped onto a broad veranda. Clearly I hadn’t found the main entrance. After following the deck around the building for a while I came to a set of glass doors, through which I could make out elderly people seated in a lounge room. There was a keypad beside the doors and a sign that said RING BELL FOR ENTRY. I couldn’t see a bell.
Eventually a tiny grey-haired woman appeared through the glass and tapped in the entry