Worse than Death (Anna Southwood Mysteries) (9 page)

Chapter 9

The Johnsons’ house was one of the mellow red brick Edwardian mansions that area of Melbourne is famous for. Bay windows curved gracefully away from broad tessellated verandas decorated with wooden fretwork under a mossy slate roof. The lawn was lush and green, and established lilacs and camellias and roses burgeoned in the well-kept garden.

Carol Johnson, when she came to the stained-glass door, was a small energetic woman in her mid-thirties, with bright brown eyes. She led me into a room where pamphlets and envelopes and lists lay in profusion over all the surfaces. From a window you could see a golf course sweeping away to clumps of trees, like an English nobleman’s park. It seemed a far cry from the cheap suburban sprawl of Liverpool.

As if she’d sensed what I was thinking, she said, “We’ve done very well here. Frank has his own contracting business now.” She sighed. “He’s got very ambitious.”

She swept away some leaflets from a chair and apologised.

“I’m doing a mail-out,” she explained. “I run the newsletter for Parents Of Murdered Children.”

“Mrs Johnson,” I said, sitting down, “as I said on the phone, I’m investigating the disappearance of Beth Channing. I hope it’s not too painful for you to talk about it, but there are similarities with your own daughter’s case…”

“Oh, it’s not painful anymore,” she said, perching on the edge of a table. “In the group,” she gestured towards the papers behind her, “we talk a lot about our children. We laugh a lot, too — does that surprise you?” She went on without waiting for an answer. “Grief can be funny, too, you know. But it’s hard for others to understand — in the group we can let our hair down, without worrying about what other people think or expect. Now — what do you want to ask me?” She cocked her head like an intelligent bird.

“Well,” I began. I was slightly disconcerted by her, she seemed too articulate and bright to have come from the same background as the Kominskys and the Channings.

“Well,” I said again, “the girls were close friends, I gather? They spent a lot of time together?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’d played together since Beth was a baby. Kylie was two years older, but they were always together at home. Though,” she said thoughtfully, “they’d started drifting apart a bit before Kylie was killed. You know — Kylie was twelve and starting to get into teenage things and Beth was really still only a little girl at ten.”

“You’ve got no doubt at all that Kylie’s dead?”

“No, none. Frank — that’s my husband — still thinks she ran away with someone, that she’s become one of those homeless kids roaming the Cross. We talk about that in the group, too. It’s amazing how many of the fathers refuse to admit their kids are dead.”

I was startled. “Why would he think that? Had she ever threatened to run away?”

“No, not really — just in arguments, you know. If we wouldn’t let her go to a party or something like that.” She sighed. “She was a bit precocious, Kylie. I used to think she’d be a real handful later on.”

I tried to remember the newspaper photos at the time. The same picture had been used in most of the reports — a little girl in school gingham with her hair scraped back into plaits. I asked Carol Johnson if she had any other photos of Kylie.

“Yes, lots,” she said. “I keep them in a drawer because Frank can’t bear to look at them.”

She got off the table and went to a grey filing cabinet under the window. She came back with a couple of bulging folders.

“These were mostly taken when she was about eleven or twelve she said, pushing papers around the desk to make room.

I stared. Kylie had been nothing like her little dark sparrow of a mother. She was large-boned and blonde, with already noticeable small breasts and a pouting, sensual face. In some of the pictures she’d taken deliberate cheesecake poses, clearly modelled on page three of the
Mirror
. There were also a few more natural shots of her playing with a dog, and one of her sitting on the railing of the football field with Beth Channing. In these she appeared more like a normal twelve-year-old. In the others she simply looked like what Clyde had called jail bait.

“She must have taken after her father,” I said lamely. I was starting to think that perhaps Frank Johnson had good reason for what he thought had become of his daughter.

“Yes,” she said, packing the photos away again. “In more ways than one.” She gave a tolerant smile.

I waited. I was interested in her background — I liked her and I hoped she would tell me a bit about her life. “You’re different?” I said.

“It was attraction of opposites, I suppose,” she said. “I’d been educated by the nuns. My parents were migrants from Poland — they both worked at rotten jobs all through our childhood so we could have a better life than theirs. We were taught that hard work got you somewhere.”

“Which nuns?” I asked with interest.

“Mercy,” she said and we both laughed. The Sisters of Mercy were one of my first examples of the meaning of the word oxymoron. It explained a lot about Carol Johnson — you had to be resilient to survive that.

“I’d nearly finished training as a nurse when I met Frank,” she said. “He was a shearer then. We
had
to get married, of course. Then he got a job at the mobile home factory in Liverpool — we lived with my parents for the first couple of years.” She laughed. “I’d never met such an easy-going, lazy, ‘she’ll be right’ sort of person. I found it very attractive.”

“And now he runs his own business?” I said.

“Yes. He’s changed since we lost Kylie. I can’t have any more children, you see,” she said simply. “So when Rex offered him the chance, he jumped at it.”

“Rex? Rex Channing?” Talk about ubiquitous, I thought.

“Yes. You’re working for him, didn’t you say?”

“Yes — but how is he involved with your husband’s business?”

“He can be a kind man, Rex,” she said and I gaped at her. “Oh, I know a lot of people think he’s hard, but he was terrific to us after Kylie disappeared. He organised private search parties after the police had given up, and when it was clear she’d never be found, it was his suggestion that we move away, start a new life. He lent Frank the money.” She made a sad little face. “And now the same thing’s happened to Beth. It’s a cruel life.”

“You think Beth’s definitely been murdered too, then?”

“Oh yes. I’ve always thought it would happen again. It’s the usual pattern, you know. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the subject — I want to do counselling eventually. I’ve finished school at Adult Education and now I’m doing Social Work part-time. I want to work with other people in our situation.”

I looked at her with admiration, but I wondered if perhaps she wasn’t the slightest bit dotty on the subject, too. It was as if she’d found a set of answers that satisfied her and she managed to fit everything into that pattern. Still, I thought, that sort of grief would need something to cling to, something that apparently made sense of random loss.

“Did you ever think you knew who did it?” I asked.

“No. I assumed it was someone we knew — that’s the usual pattern, too. But the police questioned all our friends and neighbours many times. No one seemed more likely than anyone else.”

“You didn’t believe it was Joe Kominsky?”

“Never.” She looked shocked. “There’s no harm in Joe. None. I’ve known him since I was a baby and he was a teenager. He used to let me play with his kites, too. He’s just a man who loves kids, because they’re like him. There isn’t a violent bone in his body.”

“Still,” I said, treading delicately, “sometimes people like that — they can develop peculiar outlets for their sexuality as they grow older.”

She made a gesture like a shrug of disgust. “No. I’ll never believe Joe was capable of hurting the girls. I’ve always thought it was someone we knew, though, someone apparently normal and decent, but underneath very sick and slimy. It’s partly why I was so glad to move here — I couldn’t bear watching the faces of all the men I knew, wondering which one of them was really a secret monster.” She shuddered definitely, then, and her dainty face darkened.

“There are some differences, though,” I said. “I mean, Kylie must have known who she was meeting — she made all those arrangements, told all those lies… Beth just disappeared.”

“Yes,” Carol Johnson said. She thought for a while. “But Beth disappeared during the day, didn’t she? She didn’t have to think up lies. Kylie had to explain being away in the evening — that was harder.”

I hadn’t thought of that. “But Beth’s mother appears to have lied
for
her,” I said. “Doesn’t that sound as if she knows what really happened?”

“People do strange things in crises,” she said. “Leonie is a strange woman anyway. She might just have been terrified and decided if she ignored it then it might not be happening. It’s a common syndrome. And she’s usually so out of it on Valium it was probably quite easy for her to pretend there was nothing wrong.”

“But now?” I said. “Now she’s acting as if she doesn’t care. She’s facing prison and she just won’t say a word.”

“She’s a born victim,” Carol Johnson said. She’d got the jargon down pat. “She always was. You know, you’d see her with a black eye and bruises all down her arms and she’d admit Rex had done it — almost proudly, as if it proved he was a real man. I didn’t like him then,” she said. “I thought — how can she put up with a bloke that beats her up? He must be a pig. Later I wondered if she wasn’t perhaps… complied.” She hesitated over the word as if she’d just come across it.

“But she said in the custody hearing that he was violent towards the child, too,” I said.

She gave me an odd look, as if she thought I was being disloyal to my employer.

“Well,” she said. “I never saw any evidence of that. Leonie was… rough… with Beth herself, you know.”

“What do you mean, ‘rough’?”

“Oh, I don’t know…” Her voice became vague. “Just a bit fond of slapping her, I thought, when she was little. No cuddles — that sort of thing. It was always Rex Beth would run to if she’d hurt herself. Leonie would be more likely to give her a smack and tell her to be more careful.”

I remembered the photo Graham had filched from Leonie Channing’s house, the love in Rex’s face for the little girl and Leonie’s sour look. Despite Paul Whitehouse’s conviction that she was innocent, I thought there was more and more of a case against Leonie. A history of mental instability, it appeared, inability to demonstrate affection, acute depression — the Valium — perhaps jealousy as her daughter started to grow up and go out having fun. Was there a final quarrel? I wondered. Beth had been out with her father the night before — he was in a position to offer her far more than Leonie, and she was of an age when the courts wouldn’t dispute her declared preference for living with him. Had she taunted Leonie with going to live in Vaucluse with all the expensive pleasures Rex could provide? I could imagine a sullen woman, with all her pent-up resentment, suddenly snapping, a hard blow perhaps, meant only to hurt; an accidental fall against something — but there I faltered. Was Leonie Channing the sort of person to keep her head in that situation? She’d have had to make fairly elaborate arrangements to dispose of the body, get rid of all the traces. Then she sat tight for a month, telling lies to Rex and the school and presumably the neighbours. I’d need to talk to her myself, I decided. It was pointless theorising about her in the abstract.

Carol Johnson was regarding me curiously and I brought my mind back to her with an effort.

“Mrs Johnson…”

“Please call me Carol,” she said, and laughed. “Mrs Johnson sounds like my mother-in-law.”

“Well, Carol…” I stopped. It was hard to frame the question. “Is it… do you think it’s possible that Leonie Channing has murdered Beth herself?”

She didn’t react immediately, as she had at the suggestion that Joe Kominsky might have done it.

“I think it’s
possible
, yes,” she said thoughtfully. “If it hadn’t happened to Kylie, too, I’d even think it was likely. But she couldn’t possibly have murdered Kylie — and why would she? It’s too much of a coincidence. No, I’m sure the same person is responsible for both.” But her voice was defensive, as if it comforted her somehow to believe that Kylie was the victim of some serial killer, that there was, as she would have said, some
pattern
to it. If Leonie had murdered Beth it left her back in the void of inexplicable randomness as far as Kylie was concerned. And perhaps with the terrible hope of her husband’s theory.

There didn’t seem much else to ask her, though something she’d said earlier was niggling at me, and I had that feeling that I’d forgotten something vital. I could always ring her if it came to me, I thought. I thanked her and she rang a cab for me.

“I hope I’ve been of some help,” she said as I was leaving. “It would make us feel a lot better if they caught him, whoever he is.” As the taxi drew away she headed back into the house, and the leaflets that were going out with their messages of support and comfort to other bereaved parents. I felt a sudden surprising surge of personal anger. Yes, I thought, I’d like to get him, too. Whoever he is. Or she.

Chapter 10

When I got hack to the motel I tried to ring Graham, but he was apparently still in Windsor.

I got out my notebook and checked through what Carol Johnson had said. If she was right, then the field was wide open. I wondered if Glenn Sheedy could get me a list of the neighbours and friends who’d been questioned about Kylie, perhaps even copies of their statements. What if it had been someone from interstate? I thought. A regular visitor to the area, with a history of molestation elsewhere, but not caught in the police questioning? I gave myself a mental shake — no point in making it harder than it already was. I kept coming back to the enigma of Leonie Channing, but I found it hard to discredit Paul Whitehouse’s opinion. He was pretty hard-headed and cynical about that sort of thing — if he thought there was a deeper mystery to her behaviour, he was probably right.

I was booked on an early flight back the next morning but I toyed with the idea of going home stand-by that night. Then I realised I was still too tired to be sitting around airports. I looked in the afternoon paper the motel had thoughtfully provided and found that there was a crime film festival at a bughouse, and
Body
Heat
was showing that night. It was one of my favourite movies, so in the end I had a toasted cheese sandwich at the café near the theatre and went to see it. I came out even more frustrated — it seemed to me there were parallels in the film, a lot going on underneath and in the past that we hadn’t found out yet. Perhaps Leonie was having us all on, I thought, like Kathleen Turner. I laughed slightly at the idea of Paul Whitehouse being the same sort of dupe as the lawyer portrayed by William Hurt, but the thought clung.

I walked back to Carlton through more typical Melbourne weather — slight drizzle — and went straight to bed. My dreams were a tangle of exploding summerhouses and little girls crying for their daddies. I woke to croissants and orange juice at seven o’clock with no sudden inspiration, nor any sense of revelation. My subconscious was apparently as confused as my waking mind.

*

When I walked into the office at home later that morning, I found the Colonel ensconced with Graham in the coffee corner.

“Another one?” I asked him. I thought guiltily that we’d done nothing about his last phone call.

“Yes,” Colonel Jansen said. “Graham here tells me we could get Telecom to put some sort of trace on my phone.”

I gave Graham a wry look. We’d meant to do that a week ago, but events had overtaken us.

We drank coffee and listened to the Colonel’s reminiscences about his war — “Involved in a bit of top secret stuff, myself, you know…” — and then we promised to get onto his problem straight away. He left reluctantly; he obviously wanted to be there while Graham rang Telecom, but we somehow managed to ease him out the door.

“I think it’s just some crank who’s got his name out of the book,” Graham said. “I think we should just leave it a few days, then we’ll tell him the best thing is to change to an unlisted number.”

“We could have told him that in the first place,” I said. “I think we should at least try and do something.”

“Okay,” Graham said. “I’ll do it later. Though Telecom’s a bit reluctant to do much unless it’s real harassment. I don’t know that the weekly deep breather’s going to excite them much. Meanwhile,” he said meaningfully, “any progress?”

“Not much.” I went over my interview with Carol Johnson, and the conclusions I had drawn from it.

“The trouble is,” I said, “that I’m inclined to think Frank Johnson might be right now that I’ve learnt a bit more about Kylie. She could have just arranged to run away. And that means the two cases aren’t connected at all, which leaves us right at the beginning again.” I went over to my desk and fiddled with the files. “So, I don’t know if it’s worth chasing up all the others interviewed over Kylie’s disappearance or not.”

“We might as well,” Graham said. “Leave no stone unturned, etcetera.”

“Talking of stones,” I said, “any luck with the Digrigorios?”

“No,” he said with a rueful look. “There’s about a dozen of them, too. All living around Windsor — talk about his sisters and his cousins and his aunts. They’re mostly into market gardening and they seem eminently respectable.” He reached for his notebook. “D’you want details, or just a summary?”

“A summary,” I said. It had seemed like a red herring from the beginning and I didn’t want to waste any more time. Beth had been missing nearly two months, and we’d been on Rex’s payroll for a fortnight, with no progress so far.

“Okay. Well, no obvious signs of undue affluence leading to suspicions that they might be tied up with the drug runners,” he said in a pompous newscaster’s voice. “None of them have ever heard of Rex Channing and they all seem to work hard for what they’ve got. Apparently buying the vault nearly broke them all. They bought it before it was built, from the construction company…” — he consulted his notes — “Drexol Holdings. And it’s got room for five more bodies. His brother, his widow, and their two sons and daughters -in-law. Dunno what the rest of the family’s going to do. Perhaps they’re planning to build more out there.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Drexol Holdings rings a bell. I’m sure it’s one of Rex’s more legitimate business interests.”

Graham looked at me. “Yeah, but Anna, if you want to buy a vault you’ve
got
to go through the building company. That’s hardly a real connection. There’s about two hundred of those crypts — they can’t all be connected somehow with Rex Channing.”

“No,” I said. “I guess he’s just proud of them or something. For all we know he puts flowers in front of a different one each week. Still,” I went on, “I’d like to see them, they sound wonderful. Why don’t we go out there on Sunday? We might even run into Rex. Then we could ask him.”

Graham looked dubious, but he agreed.

“Now.” I said. “Leonie Channing. I have to talk to her, soon. Perhaps you’d better come too, she knows you already.”

He began riffling through his book for her number and the phone rang. It was Rex, right on cue. He seemed to have an eerie sense of when he was being talked about.

“Just wanted to know if there’s any progress,” he said pointedly. I was damned if I’d apologise for not keeping in touch — it wasn’t my fault I’d been in hospital and at the mercy of kidnappers.

“A little,” I said, on the defensive. “I’ve just got back from Melbourne. I talked to Carol Johnson.”

“Why?” His voice was razor-edged.

“Because there are similarities,” I said. “She thinks the same person killed both girls. Someone they knew.” I told him that I was hoping to get the summaries of the statements from the suspects in Kylie’s case.

“Bullshit,” he said in a contemptuous voice. “It was four years ago. It has nothing to do with Beth. Stop wasting my money and find out what that bitch has done with my daughter.”

“I intend to,” I said coldly, aware that Graham had Leonie Channing on the other line. I tried to remind myself of Carol Johnson’s perception of Rex as a tough guy with a heart of gold.

“Carol was very nice about you,” I said. “She really appreciates what you did at the time.”

“Yeah,” his voice was defensive, as if he didn’t like to be reminded of kindness. “Well, I knew then it was useless. But she was Beth’s friend. I did what I could. The little slut probably ran off with some pimp.”

“Her father thinks that, too,” I said. “Rex, what did
you
think of Kylie?”

“Jail bait,” he said, echoing my own thoughts. “An accident waiting to happen, that kid. She flirted with everything in pants. Either she ran away to be a pro or she went a bit far with her cock-teasing and it got rough. If you ask me, either way, she got what was coming to her. But drop that,” he said. “I paid out good money to try and find her at the time, I’m not doing it again. I’m telling you it’s a dead end. Drop it, understand?”

“Yes,” I said. I could see his point. But I still thought I’d ring Glenn — it couldn’t hurt.

I rang off, promising Rex we’d keep him up-to-date, and turned to Graham.

“She’ll see us in the morning,” he said. “Ten o’clock. So what do we do now?”

“I’ll ring Glenn. Rex seems pretty convinced the Kylie case is a dead end, but until I speak to Leonie I might as well check it out.”

Glenn and I arranged to meet at the Malaya at one, and I spent the rest of the morning typing up my interview with Carol Johnson, while Graham did the same with his Windsor notes. I was hoping that whatever I thought I’d missed the day before would become evident when I typed it up. It didn’t.

Graham was going out to the municipal tip to try to find Joe’s friend there, so he took the Volkswagen and I got a cab to George Street.

*

Glenn was already on his second beer and starting his short soup when I walked in. He grinned at me.

“Too busy to wait,” he said. “How are you, beautiful?”

I leered at him and kissed him on the cheek. I ordered a beef sambal and a light beer and we chatted as we ate, mostly about the likely repercussions of the Fitzgerald Report. Glenn was totally cynical about the outcome.

“There’ll be yet another enquiry,” he said, “and they’ll get a few rotten apples. Not much more. They never do.” His jovial red face fell into sour lines.

Lorna had told me that in his first years in the force Glenn had been a bit of a zealot — known unkindly as ‘Elliot Ness’ among the other cops. He’d been moved from the Drug Squad a few years before I met him, apparently for reporting too many bribe attempts and disturbing too many in-place networks for police rake-offs. They’d thought he’d be safer in Homicide, but he’d never get another promotion.

These days he was taking things fairly easily, not rocking any boats. The system that he’d once believed in had defeated him and he turned a blind eye to most of what went on with the bent cops, but I thought he probably wasn’t on the take himself. He’d once told me he was just waiting it out until his pension, then he intended to grow orchids somewhere in the country. “That’s if some young punk with a gun and a stolen car doesn’t get me first,” he’d said gloomily. Being called off the investigation into Clyde’s death had been yet another nail in the coffin of his old hopes for a clean police force.

“All right,” he said, swallowing his last honey prawn and pointing to his empty beer glass as a waiter went past. “What do you want? I know it’s not just the pleasure of my company.” He belched and wheezed his bronchial laugh, then lit up a Camel.

I told him what I wanted and he squinted his pale blue eyes at me.

“Jesus Christ, girl. That’s worth more than one lunch. What about telling me what it’s all about?”

I hesitated, then explained most of what had happened over the last couple of weeks. His face brightened with interest. He picked up his new glass of beer and swallowed half of it with one gulp.

“Birkett,” he said. “I remember him from way back. He was always a creep. You reckon clearing this up might get him, too?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Lorna thinks he’s gettable.”

“Well, she’s a good girl,” he said. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do. They owe me a few favours at Liverpool. I wish I could help you myself,” he went on, “but I’m absolutely flat out over these poof killings at the Cross.”

I was relieved. I didn’t want Glenn getting on his white charger and alerting anyone. I thanked him and called for the bill. We said goodbye on the street, where he got into a car parked in the No Standing zone directly outside the restaurant. It was a very minor form of corruption, but I doubted if young Constable Sheedy of twenty-five years ago would have done it.

I went home and spent the rest of the afternoon gardening, deliberately not thinking of anything to do with the Channing case, with Toby in a kittenish mood skittering about the piles of weeds and generally being a charming nuisance. I was showering when Glenn rang to say he’d got the interviews.

“I got them to fax them through,” he said. “Told them I thought it tied up with another homicide we’ve got here.”

“Thanks, Glenn,” I said, dripping all over the carpet. “Can you fax them on to me?”

“You’re joking.” He chuckled. “We keep records of our faxes here, and there’s a lot of it. I’ll drop it off on my way home — anything that’ll help get Birkett. And that’s another lunch you owe me, mate.” He rang off sounding very pleased with himself.

I got dressed and went up the street to do some shopping — mostly cat food. My ‘lean cuisine’ lasagne and two packets of cigarettes were dwarfed by the cat crunchies and tins of pilchards and whiting in salmon jelly. I bought apples and a mango as well, walking back down the hill, thinking rather wistfully that it had been a long time since I’d had someone else to shop for.

“Shit,” I muttered when I came up the steps and saw the bulky envelopes Glenn had left on the doorstep. I hadn’t realised there’d be so much. It was going to take hours to read. I lugged them inside and went upstairs to put the shopping away. Then I went back down to the office, made coffee and started shuffling through the interviews.

First, I sorted out the names I knew, noticing that several of them had been questioned three or four times — Joe Kominsky, Frank Johnson, Carol Johnson and Beth Channing. I put these aside then added Rex and Leonie Channing and Mrs Kominsky to the pile. The others were all unknown to me — neighbours, I guessed, and other friends. Joe’s name caught my eye in the interview with a Murray Baxter, and I skimmed that. He was apparently the friend at the tip Graham had gone to see. I put it on the pile, too, and settled down with a cigarette and my notebook to go through them. I probably should have started on the bigger pile of unknowns, but it looked too daunting. I rationalised it by saying I needed to see if we’d missed anything, but I was really afraid that opening up the field any more would prove a real can of worms.