“Something you said the other day made me curious.”
Desiree flicked a strand of hair over a shoulder. “Was it about Nick? He’s a good guy, you know. You could do a lot worse than him.” She picked up knitting from a bag next to the lounge. It looked like lime green was in for baby jumpers right now. Either that, or she wasn’t sure of the sex of the baby and played safe with a neutral color.
Anya decided to pursue this line of conversation. “Have you known him a long time?”
Desiree smiled. “Nick and I used to go out when I was in high school. Back then, he couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants, if you know what I mean. But,” she added, “he’s changed now. That was when he was young and stupid.”
“You do go back a long way.”
Desiree stopped clicking the needles and reached for a photo on a side table. “This is me, Nick and some other friends. Luke’s the one sitting on the grass in the front. There’s Badger, Barry Lerner, he’s a real animal. He’s there with Carrot, and some others, too. I don’t like those two that much, but they’re good mates still. After all these years.”
Anya moved across the room and took the photo, returning to her seat. The faded color showed girls in shoulder-pads and teased hair and boys with mullets. Each face smiling with the promise of the future.
“When did you leave the Bay?”
“Oh, after Luke left. I bummed around fruit-picking for a few years, shacked up with a real loser and didn’t have the money to leave. A few years ago I caught up with Nick and there was Luke. We didn’t know each other that well in the Bay, but I knew right there at that nightclub that he was the one.”
Anya returned the photo to its place and took a sip of water. “Do you like Sydney?”
“Sometimes people can be a bit stuck-up, but it’s a good place for kids.” She did a couple more stitches. “We’re better off in a big city. At least our friends are all here. You know, there aren’t many of the old crowd left in the Bay.”
“I came back from England and it’s taken about a year to settle in.”
“We’ve been here three months next week.”
Anya needed to broach the idea of sexual assault, but was having trouble steering the conversation. Desiree looked tired. Black semi-circles underscored her smallish brown eyes-the kind of fatigue pregnancy always brought on.
Desiree sat forward a little, breasts folding over her abdomen. “I read in the paper you look after women who’ve been raped.”
“That’s part of my job,” she answered, relieved that Desiree had brought up the subject.
“It must be horrible. They get attacked when there are plenty of women out there just itching to have sex with anyone.”
“It is.” Anya was surprised by the comment and tried to read the expression on the face of the mother-to-be. “Sometimes memories of an assault can be triggered by pregnancy.”
Desiree nodded and unwound some more wool. “They asked me about that at the antenatal clinic. They said pregnancy could bring back all kinds of stuff about abuse and all that.”
“That’s true. It’s part of the routine questions they ask all the women who go there.”
The conversation stalled.
Anya needed to recover it. “I was thinking about what you said the other night about having to feel pain to feel love. That was quite profound.”
Desiree laughed and waved one hand at Anya. “Yeah, the boys at home used to say it before they had sex with a girl. Turns out, most of the time it was true. At least, until I met Luke. He says the opposite. But then you’re a doctor, you’d know about all that.”
It saddened Anya that young women could be coerced into accepting painful sex because “that’s the way it is.”
“Is Luke looking forward to being a father?”
“He’s getting used to the idea.” Desiree sat forward, inching herself along the cushion. “Let’s just say sometimes nature needs a little help.”
Anya didn’t follow.
“You doctors aren’t that smart, are you?” she mocked. “I put pin-pricks in his condoms.” She jabbed the air with a knitting needle, as though piercing an imaginary balloon. “Tiny holes that he’d never notice. That’s our little secret,” she said, and slid back in her seat.
Anya could not believe that Desiree would proudly boast about deliberately getting pregnant. Maybe they did come from different cultures.
Something about the photo drew her back to it. “What were they like, the boys back home?”
Desiree laughed. “They thought their shit didn’t smell because they played football. The Pit-Bull Maulers hadn’t been beaten in years so it made them all a bit full of themselves. Except Luke. He was always quiet.” Knit one, purl one. “The girls loved them. Treated them like popstars. Guess I did, too. You could always pick them with their tattoos.”
“What tattoos?”
“They got pictures of pit-bulls on the back of a hand. It was part of being on the team. Everyone except Nick did it. He whinged about how ugly the dogs were.”
“Did Luke have a tattoo?”
“Oh yeah, he was one of the boys, but was a lot nicer to girls than the others.”
Anya could just imagine a group of adolescent males in a country town, thinking they owned the place because of their sporting prowess. Like a gang, they hung together with a tattoo for membership. Sadly, young girls probably helped perpetuate their misogynistic attitudes by idolising them.
No wonder Geoffrey Willard had never fitted in.
Any one of them could have killed Eileen Randall.
46
“What the hell were you thinking, going in like that alone?”
For the second time this week, Anya was being berated by a police officer. Hayden Richards paced around the office, hands in his pockets.
Anya couldn’t really explain why she had gone to the house, except to find out about Desiree’s saying and whether she was one of the rapist’s victims. The excuse seemed feeble now, considering what she had discovered.
She sat on a chair, trying to come to terms with what she had done. She was only in the room because Hayden and Sorrenti needed to know exactly what Desiree had said. “At least now you know that Luke Platt, ‘Badger’ and ‘Carrot’ lived in Fisherman’s Bay as well when Eileen Randall was killed. Luke’s a taxidermist and had contact with, or at least knowledge of, Liz Dorman. Maybe she recognized him, which is why he went back to kill her.”
Hayden stood at a whiteboard. Across the top was a timeline with the names and dates of the rape victims. In bold were the names of the three murder victims. He wrote Luke Platt in the left-hand column.
“We know he was down the south coast at the time Dorman died.”
Meira Sorrenti stood next to a partition, jaw clenched. “The motel clerk remembers him. Said he was more polite than their usual clientele.”
“But Desiree said he bunked on couches while away. Then again, if he were paid cash, why not stay at a motel and get some proper sleep?” Anya wondered why the female detective was being more agreeable than expected.
Hayden crossed out Platt’s name. “Alibi’s rock-solid and he was interstate when Leonie Turnbull died.”
The rest of the detectives in the room remained silent. Anya suddenly felt embarrassed at trying to justify herself. She had crossed a line by going to the house alone and everyone in the room knew it.
“We borrowed the group photo from Desiree Platt last night,” Sorrenti began. “Mrs. Platt was cooperative once we explained that her husband wasn’t a suspect. So we are aware that a group of them from Fisherman’s Bay live
