Oh boy. 'He doesn't have a wife.' As far as I know. 'We had to watch some videos from the case. His house was close and he cooked. Lunch.'
'So what did you eat?'
'Fish. Look, Mum, tell me what's happening out your way. How's Dad?'
'Your father – I don't know what's got into him lately. He hasn't been himself.'
'What do you mean? Is he okay?' Jill sat up straight at her breakfast bar.
'Oh, he seems healthy enough. But he's… well he's doing a lot of shopping.'
'Shopping. Dad?'
'I know. Stuff for the house. Clothes for him. Yesterday he bought me a swimming costume.'
'He did not.'
'With parrots on it.'
Jill felt her eyebrows rising. Her father could not be dragged into a shopping mall, and had always made her or Cassie buy his presents for their mum. He had no difficulties at the hardware shop – but visiting a store that sold women's clothing? She couldn't imagine it.
'I know what you're thinking,' her mother continued. 'Midlife crisis. I bought a book today.'
Jill smiled. Pop psychology. Her mother had a library.
'Oprah recommended it. He's a little old for it all, according to the book, but I'll finish reading it and let you know.'
'How's everyone else?'
Frances Jackson sighed through the phone.
'Cassie.' Jill guessed.
'I don't know, love. I think she's not eating again.'
Jill's younger sister made a living as a swimsuit model. Like the rest of her colleagues, she perennially flirted with anorexia nervosa. Jill shifted on the barstool. Not a lot she could do about it: she found it harder to talk to Cassie than almost anyone, and when she tried to discuss weight with her sister, Cassie would scoff – Jill's own struggles with food from time to time made her concern seem hypocritical.
'Bob and I called around there on Tuesday,' Frances continued. 'It was after lunch, Jill, and she was still in bed.'
'She'd probably been on a shoot, Ma.'
'That's what she said, but it looked more like she'd had a party over there. It was a mess.'
'Good for her,' said Jill, suddenly almost envying her sister's glamorous lifestyle.
'Mmm.' Jill's mother did not approve. 'Some of her friends had stayed the night.'
'Uh huh.'
'They're all very beautiful, Jill, but none of them seem very… diligent.'
'Diligent?'
'Oh, I don't know. I just wish she'd settle down a bit. She's thirty now. And you should have seen the empty bottles everywhere.'
Jill rubbed at a non-existent smudge on her breakfast bar. 'Well, you said it was a party.' None of them spoke overtly about the fact that they rarely saw Cassie without a drink in her hand.
'Yes. Anyway, darling, I don't want to worry you. I'm sure things will be fine. How's Scotty? Have you seen him since you started at Liverpool?'
'No. Oh, Mum, I just got call waiting.' Jill lied. 'I'll give you a ring again tomorrow.'
Jill hung up feeling slightly guilty about lying to her mother. But speaking about Scotty was the last thing she felt like tonight. Right now, she just wished he was here scoffing food in her loungeroom, his huge feet overhanging her lounge.
She walked dispiritedly around her empty unit and finally found herself in her gym. She got to work.
25
SATURDAY MORNING SAW Jill at a computer terminal in the detectives' quarters of the Liverpool police complex. She and Gabriel had decided to split tasks; the pressure from the media upon the investigations team was huge. Jill would've preferred Superintendent Last to get angry, scream at them – anything other than having to watch his stoop deepen. He had chewed through half a packet of antacid tablets in the meeting yesterday morning.
Jill and Gabriel knew they needed to find the connection between Henry Nguyen, Isobel and Joss. At the same time, because they had learned so much from re-interviewing the victims of the home invasions, they'd decided they couldn't afford to abandon that process. The logical choice was for Gabriel to continue the interviews, while Jill investigated Isobel and Joss's backgrounds, looking for links with Nguyen.
She'd expected another warm day, and now Jill sat freezing and miserable in shirtsleeves in the squadroom. The temperature on the air-conditioner, she was convinced, had been set by some demented maintenance guy who hated cops. She knew without checking that her top lip would be blue; she had the kind of headache she usually got when she ate icecream too quickly. No good trying to get someone to make the thing warmer. In these buildings the thermostat was always 'centrally controlled' and adjusting it 'a major drama'.
She stuck her hands under her armpits for a moment and then turned her attention to Henry Nguyen, creating a file of what they knew about him already. The anonymous caller – Isobel Rymill, they were almost certain – had rattled off a series of his convictions and sentences. Jill opened another window on the computer and called up his sheet. There was a long list, as Superintendent Last had indicated yesterday, and the caller had missed a few. Juvenile record, Jill noted. Career criminal. She copied the information and tidied it up a little; pasted it into her own file.
One of the juvie cases caught her eye. Nguyen had done nine months at Dharruk for a smash and grab that had left an adolescent dead, his throat cut. She calculated dates and figured young Henry had been thirteen. The charge was break and enter – with the actions leading to accidental death – but she wondered whether there had been more to it. What did they call Nguyen? Cutter. Maybe he'd started early? His record did not include murder or manslaughter, or anything involving serious knife attacks, but she knew that a charge sheet generally only reflected a fraction of what an offender had been up to.
She searched the COPS database for the juvenile case and scanned it quickly. She copied it, deleted irrelevant notations, and pasted it into her file. The smash and grab had been at a bike shop; the deceased, the owner's son. Henry Nguyen's fingerprints, already on file even at that early age, had been found at the scene, and when they'd gone around to his grandmother's home in Cabramatta to pick him up, they'd found one of the stolen bikes in his bedroom. Jill could remember nothing of the story at the time. She'd have been about eleven when this went down. Eleven. A year before her own world went to hell when she was abducted.
The victim, Carl Waterman, had been around the same age as Nguyen at the time; the cops investigating figured that the boy, who lived with his father above the bike shop, had heard the noise when Cutter broke into the store and come down to investigate. There were ten COPS entries on the same event.
According to the files, Nguyen had told the investigating officers that he'd broken into the store alone by smashing one of the two glass panels at the front of the shop. He'd told the officers he hadn't seen the Waterman boy in the shop and couldn't explain how the kid had come to be impaled by a large section of the glass. He also could not explain how he'd managed to steal five bikes on his own.
Jill skimmed the wrap-up on the case. The officers assumed that Nguyen had committed the robbery in company with at least a couple of older youths, possibly adults – people smart enough not to leave fingerprints. They believed the second panel of glass, destabilised when the first had come down, was what had killed Carl Waterman. The prosecutors had had to ask for a committal, given the child's death, but Jill figured that the relatively light sentence reflected a belief that Nguyen had been led astray by more seasoned criminals.
She wondered whether the smash and grab had really gone down that way. The case could actually establish a very early propensity for this Cutter to make people bleed. They knew he liked blood a hell of a lot nowadays. She thought with horror of young Justine Rice watching this sicko bring himself to orgasm by cutting himself. They had to find him fast.
