Surrender (23 page)

T
he woman who’d emailed Robbie claiming to know the owner of the John Doe diary and its distinctive, hand-woven tapestry tie, had signed herself ‘Mrs J. O’Neill’, so it seemed unlikely this was the Lara our J.D. had written ‘sorry’ to on the wall of the cave. On the drive to her house, Robbie suggested he do the talking, at least at first, and that seemed reasonable given his police-uniform status and the email relationship they’d already formed.

When Mrs O’Neill gasped and attempted to close the door in my face, I realised Robbie’s suggestion wasn’t because of any special bond they’d formed, but because I wasn’t the greatest-looking person to go door-knocking with. I didn’t take her response personally; I pretty much did the same thing every time I caught sight of myself in the mirror. The bruises on my face had shifted into the hepatitis B colour range, and the many grazes and abrasions had reached the scabby stage of healing that sets people’s teeth on edge. I’d taken to wearing a terry-cloth ’80s-style sweatband to cover the wrist gash, but the wound still occasionally drooled blood like a stigmata — not a good look outside of Catholic
churches. I probably looked like someone who’d failed a suicide attempt, with Robbie as my police escort to ensure I didn’t give it another go.

Robbie flashed his ID at her — a bit of overkill I thought, given his full police uniform — and used his most assuring tone. When she continued to stare at me with suspicion, I lied spectacularly about my ‘recent car accident’. Finally, Mrs O’Neill told us to call her Jane, and stepped back to indicate that we should enter.

I put Jane O’Neill down at sixty plus a year or two, but she was one of those women who I suspect had embraced older-woman status some time in her fifties, so may in fact have been quite a bit younger. Her long grey hair was split down the middle and secured tightly by a rubber band in a rat-tail at her neck, the tips of her ears peeking out through her hair like little pale scallop shells. The style was aggressively unflattering. She wore a long black skirt, flat shoes, and a metallic grey blouse buttoned nunlike to the throat. It was as if she was working at repressing any spark of sexuality that might make a brazen attempt to reveal itself.

When Robbie hefted the John Doe backpack on to the sink bench, Jane’s hands flew to her cheeks and her eyes filled with tears. They just stayed there, those tears, enlarging her eyes like miniature spectacles, refusing to drop. To my horror I realised mine were filling in sympathy. This was new. I’d developed quite a thick skin in my years on the job. I’m not sure if it was working with the dead or working with the cops, but whichever it was, the result had been a definite drop in empathetic response.

I put the lapse down to recent trauma. Luckily, neither Jane nor Robbie seemed to have noticed. He placed the diary on the spotless, stainless steel sink bench beside the pack. I took a chair beside her so as not to be in her direct eye-line. I didn’t want my
face to interfere with her grieving process.

I was wondering how Robbie was going to play this. I’d done this sort of thing so many times I was interested to see how someone else went about it. Jane was still staring at the items on the bench, but showed no sign of wanting to inspect them, and no inclination to speak. Robbie waited, apparently in no hurry.

‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ she said.

It was as if she’d been waiting for this moment her whole life. The tension in the room was as powerful as at a séance, and I almost expected John Doe’s voice to answer her from inside the backpack, but it was Robbie who responded.

‘His body was found in the Rimutaka State Forest out past Wainuiomata. We suspect it’s been there for a long time. Possibly since as early as 1970.’

She nodded once, keeping her eyes fixed on the pack, and then with some effort wrenched her gaze away and spoke directly to Robbie.

‘His name is Boris Pasternak.’

I placed my notepad on the table quietly so as not to disturb her flow.

‘When his mother was still just a young woman she was standing in the front line of a Moscow parade of some kind, and the famous author Boris Pasternak saw her and leaned over the protective railing and kissed her on the lips.’ Jane paused to smile to herself. ‘At that very moment she made a vow that her firstborn son would be named after him.’ Jane let go of the image, and shrugged. ‘Or some such story.’ She glanced at the shorthand hieroglyphics I’d made on the notepad. ‘That’s what he told me, anyway,’ she said, throwing me a complicit smirk. ‘But he was a born liar,’ she added for Robbie’s benefit, though I was pretty sure he’d got that. ‘And sexy as all hell.’

I saw Robbie’s lips twitch in a grin, but he didn’t look at me. In my best Pitman’s I dutifully wrote down ‘sexy as all hell’, thinking maybe I’d been wrong about Jane.

Robbie asked if she was ever called Lara, and she laughed softly.

‘No. My name is Jane. Plain Jane,’ she added, and gave a secret smile.

So she’d been a beauty in her day. Studying her closely, I could see the ghost of it in the large luminous eyes, the high cheekbones, the full bottom lip, but now everything about her had softened and draped. ‘But I was his Lara,’ she said. ‘That’s what Boris called me. His Lara.’

She stared at Robbie again as if searching for her long-lost lover in his looks, and then she turned away, disappointed.

‘I thought your email said there was nothing written in the diary,’ she said. ‘You said all the writing was gone. So how did you know Boris called me Lara?’

She was looking at me so I answered her. ‘We think he broke his ankle and spent some time sheltering in a cave in the bush. It was there that we found a message scratched on the wall.’

She was staring at me with an intense expression of excitement, as if she thought I had a key of some kind, one that would unlock everything she’d closed away all these years. I spoke quickly to put her out of her misery, picking my words carefully, so there’d be no confusion. The message had been for her and I owed it to Boris to deliver it as he’d intended.

‘He wrote the words “Sorry Lara”. He may have written more, but that’s all that survived.’

‘Sorry,’ she repeated, flatly.

It wasn’t a question, and from her look I’d say it sure as hell wasn’t an answer either. She sat there, slumped into herself, her lip trembling with the weight of the ‘sorry’ still on it.

Robbie picked up the diary, and with one hand on top and one underneath he presented it to her like an altar boy would. She stared at his hands, and then tilted her head to look up into his face.

‘I think Boris wrote everything in here, Jane, everything he felt for you, everything he wanted to say. He’d wrapped the diary tightly and tucked it carefully in his pack. I’m sure it was all written in here, before the rain washed it clean.’

She smiled gratefully at him, and then she took the diary and rested her cheek against it. She stayed like that for a long time, her eyes closed, and a faint, secretive smile on her lips. I kept my head bent as if in prayer, but I wasn’t praying.

Finally she opened her eyes and smiled. ‘He was always so eloquent,’ she said, as if she’d heard him speak.

Jane made us tea, and told us her husband had died a month ago after thirty years of marriage.

‘A reasonably happy one,’ she added, and paused in her tea-making as if surprised by the realisation. I wrote it down, realising as I did that Jane had lost her husband about the same time as her lover’s body had been found. I didn’t think I’d draw her attention to it.

Robbie sipped his tea and crunched his way through a plateful of biscuits, helping Jane out with the occasional narrative nudge, while I jotted down the relevant dates and details for the report I’d need to write up for McFay. She was relaxed, happy to display her memories for us, like a draper throwing a roll of cloth across a table — all the flaws, the wefts and weaves on display for our inspection.

She was vague on some of Boris’s background details, but she did remember he’d told her he’d decided ‘on a whim’ to go to sea. At eighteen or nineteen, fit, strong, and keen to see the world,
he’d had no trouble signing up on a Russian fishing vessel about to set sail. Whether this was true or a romanticised version of the truth, Jane didn’t know, but she’d believed Boris when he told her that he’d left his family and his life in Russia without a backward glance, and that he would never return.

When he subsequently abandoned her, or so she’d believed until now, she assumed it was his pattern when things got tough. Boris had hated the sea, had been intimidated by the constantly drunken captain and violent crew, and when the vessel docked in New Zealand Boris had simply jumped ship. By the time Jane met him he’d already been living here as an illegal alien for a couple of years. It didn’t surprise me he could do that. It was easy to fly under the radar in those days before electronic ID and the internet. He would have been fine as long as he stayed out of trouble.

‘I’m a sixty-two-year-old grandmother now and no doubt you can’t imagine me as a young woman,’ she said, aiming it at Robbie, ‘but we were madly in love.’ She shivered at the memory. ‘He was, quite simply, the love of my life.’

I followed her gaze to a little three-legged occasional table on the far side of the room. On it was what looked like a memorial selection: a dramatic Greek-style urn of ashes surrounded by a horseshoe of family photos. This, no doubt, was all that remained of Mr O’Neill. I wondered if he’d known that Boris Pasternak was the love of his wife’s life through their thirty years of ‘reasonably happy’ marriage.

A plastic-framed photo sat proudly beside the urn. It was a snapshot of the deceased pointing to someone and smiling, beaming in their direction, but the person he was pointing to had been excised from the photo. Maybe it was Jane he’d been so proudly drawing the photographer’s attention to, but with her gone
it appeared as if he was wasting that expansive smile on his own urn — as if he was pointing at his own ashes with a boyish ‘Hey, check
this
out!’ gesture.

Suddenly the ashes, the photo, and the talk about corpses were oppressive. I slid the notepad and pen across to Robbie, excused myself, and went through to the bathroom where I threw cold water on my face, luxuriating in the sparkling wetness of it.

I didn’t need to pee, but since I was there I thought I might as well sit and fill in a bit of time. The bathroom was of the pink fluffy kind, full of female accoutrements. Chiding myself, I checked out the medicine cabinet. No shaving brush or razor. No nose hair clippers or snoring remedy.
Mr
Jane O’Neill, it seemed, had been quickly and thoroughly tidied away. Erased.

I sat on the lid of the toilet and wondered what it would be like to live in a marriage for thirty years knowing your partner always held that special place in their heart for someone else. All the time she was married to Mr O’Neill, Jane didn’t know Boris was dead, though she must have considered the possibility. If Boris had lived — if they’d married, had kids, all that — would he have remained the love of her life? I think for some people it’s easier to hold the dream or the memory of love than to put it to the test by living it.

Neither Jane nor Robbie looked up as I re-entered the room. Jane was deep in storytelling mode, and I suspect enjoying the attention of this honey-eyed man. I could understand that. Robbie slid the notepad back to me but kept eye contact with Jane so as not to disturb her flow. He’d drawn a little smiley face in the corner of the page. I flicked back through what Robbie had written, catching up on their conversation while I’d been out of the room.

‘We had what you’d probably now call “a volatile relationship”,’
she said, and then gave that secret smile again before adding, ‘Russians are like that.’

‘Can you remember the last time you saw him?’ I asked. ‘Any idea of the date?’

She shifted around to face me as if only now realising I was back in the room, and took a good thirty seconds before answering. I think she’d held these memories close and secret to herself for so long she was shocked to hear herself sharing them.

‘We had a fight. An argument,’ she said tightly, and turned back to face Robbie. ‘And, you know, over all these years I’ve tried to recall what we were arguing about, and for the life of me I can’t remember.’ Jane stared at the heavily cushioned sofa across the other side of the room. ‘He sat on the couch, put his boots on, picked up his pack, and left. That was the summer of 1972.’ She took a deep breath before continuing. ‘And that was that. I waited. He never returned. Eventually I had to accept the truth: he’d abandoned me just like he had his family.’ She glanced again in my direction. ‘That’s what I thought anyway, until I saw the piece in the paper and then the photo of his pack on the police website. I’d always imagined he was in Canada, for some reason. A grandparent, like me.’ She turned her gaze back on to Robbie. ‘I want you to tell me where you found his body. I want to know everything that happened to him.’

I listened as Robbie laid it all out for her, explaining about the body being found by the ranger, and then later our finding the pack with the diary inside. He didn’t mention the head being found at a different time and place from the rest of the body.

She listened without interrupting, her head bent, big splashes of tears dropping into her lap. She made no effort to wipe them away but just let them fall. I’d never seen anyone cry that way — it reminded me of an
Alice in Wonderland
illustration. When Robbie
reached across the table and put his hand on hers I realised I could have done that and probably should have.

‘All these years I thought he’d abandoned me, but he hadn’t,’ she said, that little secret smile appearing again. ‘He didn’t mean to leave me.’

Robbie suggested the scenario that perhaps, after their argument, Boris wanted to be alone for awhile, wanted to walk it out of his system.

‘Maybe he wanted to be alone to think,’ Jane agreed. ‘He did that sometimes,’ she added, and smiled at Robbie as if he’d given her a gift.

‘It looks like he broke his ankle and couldn’t make it back to the hut to call for help,’ Robbie concluded.