White Eye Page 7

  “That’s where you’re stopping while you’re in Sydney, isn’t it, sir?”

  “It is.”

  “How long do you expect to be in Australia this time?”

  “Depends on my fiancee.”

  “Then back to Thailand?”

  “Or Antarctica.”

  The immigration clerk had orders to identify frequent travelers between Thailand and Australia. Parker was a borderline case; he had arrived from Bangkok four times in the past twelve months. He hardly seemed the type to be a heroin courier—tall and vague, like a tatty English aristocrat. But as the training manual warned: “Be Safe. Obey Instructions. Leave Interpretation to Others.” The clerk pressed a button under his desk. A light came on behind him, invisible to Parker, who took his passport and customs declaration card with a gracious word of thanks.

  Sergeant Susan Miller, dressed to resemble a ground hostess, was loitering with a junior male colleague behind the row of immigration booths. She was playing the role of someone available to help travelers who did not know where to go next when they had passed through Immigration. Her colleague, wearing gray trousers and a blue shirt, looked like some sort of airport attendant. When the light went on, Susan murmured to him, “Gawd! What d’you reckon he’d be carrying?”

  “Dandruff?”

  “Check him out.”

  “Right, Sergeant,” he muttered.

  When all the passengers from the Bangkok flight had left the airport, the Surveillance Squad people joined Immigration and Customs officers who were already gathered in the Operations Room.

  “What happened with the tall geezer with the dirty hair?” Susan Miller asked.

  “He had a brass elephant hidden in a sock. And some soap and shampoo.”

  Chapter Seven

  In Kalunga, people talked about the murder morning, noon, and night, making a day seem as eventful as a year. The tractor dealer advertised burglar alarms for sale, and the woman who bred bull terriers sold a whole litter of pups in one afternoon. Grilles were placed over the doors of houses that had not been locked in twenty years. Townsfolk told each other, “Now it’s a waiting game.”

  The Golden West Motel was completely booked with detectives and “forensic experts,” who went to the Kalunga Arms in the evening after spending the day at the Research and, when questioned about the investigation, answered, “It’s going okay” or “Wooden know about that.”

  On Tuesday, news leaked back to town that threatening anonymous letters had been sent to the Research. It was said that two women had resigned on Monday after reading their mail.

  When the detectives sauntered into the Arms on Tuesday evening, men sidled up to them to ask, casually, about the letters. The postal clerk said he felt guilty because he had placed the letters in the mailbag that went out to the Research. He had a vital clue: all the letters had been posted in Sydney. “They’ll want to take my fingerprints,” he said, which irritated the barmaid who had pulled beers for Carolyn and her male companions on Saturday night. Before the postal clerk’s fingers, her beer-pulling arm had been the most envied body part in town.

  But on Wednesday morning, before anything was resolved, the whole murder team departed on Kalair’s seven o’clock flight to Sydney, carrying away witness statements, things in paper bags, and plaster casts of prints they had found at the scene of the crime. The town seemed to collapse like a punctured balloon. People took each other aside on High Street to say, “If you hear anything …”

  At nine-fifteen Wednesday morning, Diana left her house in Fig Tree Gully Road and drove three blocks to the post office. Months ago, she had ordered a new book on the world’s eagles, and it had just arrived, according to the postal clerk who rang her to say the detectives were making a big mistake in not taking his fingerprints, and by the way, there was a newsletter for her, and a parcel from London.

  The post office was opposite the Kalunga Arms and next door to the courthouse and police station. It was built of stone and had “1873” engraved on its entablature. Diana drove up in a hurry; she was on her way to Canberra, where she would be briefed on the responsibilities and rights of the Ethics Committee by someone from Senator Olfson’s department.

  She had requested a briefing because she wanted to find out how far she could go in asking for information about experiments on animals at the Research. Senator Olfson’s principal private secretary had said, “The committee chairman will tell you that.” When Diana asked who was the chairman, the secretary put his hand over the telephone briefly, then came back on the line and said, “He’s stepping down. Perhaps you should have a briefing—but we can’t pay your traveling expenses.”

  She had a few minutes to collect her mail before leaving for Canberra, where her appointment was for 2:30 P.M.

  With the eagle book under her arm, she went to her mailbox, where she found a few bills, what looked like a check for a central desert painting Grace had sold last week, and an envelope addressed in childish printing. Kids wrote to her from all over the district with questions about animals. Others sent her photographs of the birds in their gardens, asking which foods to give them. From the bulk of this envelope, there was a picture inside it.

  The letter contained a neatly folded sheet of paper. She spread it out, and her heart pounded. At the top was her own face, cut from last week’s Kalunga Shire Chronicle. Her head had been snipped off at the neck and joined to the naked golden torso of a Playboy beauty, who, in place of legs, had an eagle’s feet stuck onto her hips. Above the collage was printed in the same childish hand. “CW =.” Next to the equal sign was another colored picture cut from a glossy. It was of a mallard drake pasted onto the sheet upside down, so that its legs stuck stiffly into the air. It meant, presumably, “dead duck.” Next to the mallard was another equal sign. And next to that, the letters DP: “CW = a dead duck = DP.”

  Diana walked to the police station, where the junior constable was eating a doughnut and reading yesterday’s Telegraph Mirror. “Breakfast,” he mumbled, and took a final bite. “What’s up, Diana? Some villain been shooting ducks again?”

  She placed the letter on the counter. “I’ll ring Sydney,” he said.

  “I can’t wait. I’ve got a meeting in Canberra. I’ll be back this evening.”

  The constable rang Homicide and described the letter.

  “Grab her!” a detective told him. But when he ran out to the pavement, Diana’s yellow van had already disappeared.

  In Joe Miller’s office, on the top floor of the Research’s administration building, there was a bookshelf where sporting trophies celebrated two phases of his life now gone forever: agility and marriage. Surrounded by football cups, Sandra’s thin face smiled diffidently from a photograph. It was four years since she had died, and people said it would take him five to get over it.

  Out above the lake he saw an eye wink in the sky. He locked his office and galloped downstairs. His was the only Land Cruiser still in the car park, because all the other directors were already at the weekly meeting. He had telephoned the chairman, the director of administration, to say he would be late. “The murder?” Administration asked. “Maybe.” Admin was on the suspect list. So was Finance. Both had confessed to affairs with Carolyn, and both had been around the Research on Saturday night. Admin said he was reading, and his wife backed him up. Finance had told detectives he spent until 2:00 A.M. doing cryptic crossword puzzles. Since Finance had grown up on a farm, he might know how to handle a big hypodermic. The murder weapon, which had not yet been found, was believed to be a 50-ml syringe with an 18-gauge needle. Vets had hypodermics that size to aspirate blood from horses, but for human use they were rare. “You might find one in an intensive care ward for injecting dextrose into a diabetic who’s OD’d on insulin,” one of the forensic team said.

  The junior constable from Kalunga to whom Diana had given her dead-duck letter that morning had permission to go by air taxi to the Research to show the letter to Joe Miller, who had copies of the other threa
t letters on file. As head of security, and a former Homicide man, Joe had certain privileges.

  The constable had never seen the lake from the air, and his first view of it was so astonishing that for a while he forgot why he was flying. The world below was a patchwork of gold and brown autumn paddocks, thirsty for rain. Set on this dry background was a long, pale opal of water, its colors shifting between silver, sky blue, and pale green as the aircraft’s altering course shifted his perspective. He had never known that within the lake there was an archipelago of green islands, where thousands of birds lived. He could see them diving, swimming, and flying about. He peered out the window, wonder-struck like a kid at the zoo. The pilot gave him a nudge.

  “I said, d’you want me to wait?” Kerry Larnach bellowed over the noise of the engine.

  “No,” he shouted back.

  “Something interesting?”

  The constable shook his head. “Routine.”

  Like hell, Kerry thought. “Joe Miller’s come out to meet you,” he yelled.

  The Land Cruiser was already parked at the airstrip, and Joe was standing beside it, looking up at the sky.

  “I do appreciate this,” Miller said as they shook hands. He grasped the constable’s elbow lightly, an old trick for gaining the confidence of the person he was meeting. On the drive back, Joe pointed out to his visitor some features of the Research. “See the solar panels?” he asked as they passed Sonja’s house. The constable nodded politely. “There’s a laboratory under the house, Underground One. It used to be a dam.”

  The road went on for almost a kilometer through dry, weedy paddocks that had been allowed to return to bush and were already dotted with saplings growing from seed. The laboratory complex was farther on. “We had a lot of pilfering before I put the booms in,” Joe said.

  At the administration building, there was a small courtyard coffee shop, with bleached canvas umbrellas over the tables. A couple of typists were drinking cappuccino and smoking, which was not allowed indoors.

  “Morning, Champions,” Joe greeted them.

  “Morning, Coach,” they replied.

  “My basketball team,” Joe said to the constable. “Twelve-thirty sharp on the court, right?” he called over his shoulder to the women.

  Upstairs, he pulled on thin rubber gloves and handed a pair to the constable. When Diana’s letter was smoothed out on his desk, he sat nodding at it. “Similar writing,” he said. “Same sort of idea.” His chair was on casters. With a push, he was away from the desk and at his filing cabinet. Another push brought him back with colored photocopies of the death-threat letters. They, too, were made from bits and pieces of people and animals cut from newspapers and magazines. In place of heads they had a circle, a square, or a triangle, and the young woman’s name was in letters clipped from a magazine. Underneath, one had a fox’s body, another a rabbit’s, the third a pair of scissors.

  “This is the Williams billet-doux,” Joe said. “I had to go through about fifty Penthouses to find the original picture.”

  “Tough,” the constable murmured.

  Carolyn’s letter, found by the detectives in her apartment on Monday, had a rabbit’s head in profile. Joined to that was the naked body of a woman viewed from behind, on elbows and knees, her backside raised in the air. The message said: “You root like a rabbit, you deserve to get myxo.” In the letter to a lab technician, in place of a body there was a pair of open scissors with small, high-heeled shoes stuck on as feet. Its message was: “Scissor Woman: You think you can cut up life and stick it back together again? See how you like it when it happens to you.”

  “What’s that about?” the constable said.

  “This lass works with enzymes called gene shears. What she does is inhibit the function of genetic material. We think it’s a reference to that.”

  The constable nodded as if he understood. The pictures were fierce and unrelieved, as if the person who made them had felt things too dark to express openly.

  “These days, they can take, say, human genes and put them into a pig, and the pig will grow faster,” Joe said. “Or firefly genes in tobacco plants will improve the tobacco. People here are altering the myxo virus so it’ll make rabbits sterile.”

  They contemplated the weird composites in silence. Then Joe cocked an eyebrow. “Spotted the difference yet?” He pointed to the message on Diana’s letter and the messages on the others. Diana’s was hand-printed. “And look at the difference in the cutting,” Joe said.

  When the constable paid attention, he realized that the cutting out in the Research letters was skillfully done, while in Diana’s letter it was rough.

  “I’d reckon it’s a local copycat,” Joe said. The whole of Kalunga knew about the death-threat letters. Trying to keep things quiet in a country town was like trying to tell birds not to sing. “Posted locally,” Joe added, turning over the envelope. “The originals were all posted in Sydney.”

  The constable did not look convinced about the copycat idea.

  “Definitely by a different person,” Joe said.

  “By a different hand,” the younger man objected. “Not necessarily a different person.” His frank gaze appraised Joe Miller. It was the look of a younger man realizing that he has the measure of a master who, suddenly, seems to him a has-been.

  After half an hour’s earnest description of “the legislation” and “the department’s view,” the mandarin with giant shoulder pads who was briefing Diana grinned suddenly and said, “Just go for it. That’s what the minister wants.” She flicked her fine, straight hair off her forehead. It was career woman’s hair, the sort that did not lose its cool.

  “You mean …?” Diana hesitated.

  The mandarin gave the impression of an IQ of 140 and no time in her schedule for fools. “The minister’s hot to stop government funding to the Research. Any ammunition will be welcome. If I were you and I wanted to get duck-shooting licenses restricted, I’d go at it … sideways.” She waited a beat. “That’s only a personal opinion.”

  “Of course,” Diana agreed, straight-faced.

  Across the desk, the young woman suddenly leaned forward. “This government is in deep doo-doo with the Greens. My department’ll do anything to appear friendly to the environment, as long as it doesn’t cause unemployment in marginal seats. Now’s your chance.”

  Diana frowned. “I’ve been wondering why I—”

  “It’s got nothing to do with you. You’re just a dice they can roll.” The woman gave another flick of her shiny, quick-witted hair. She was very young to be so high on the public service ladder, and she liked to think of herself as having balls. “The fuckers,” she added with a grin.

  Four hundred kilometers away in the old homestead at the Research, the directors’ meeting had just reached Item 7 on the agenda.

  The homestead, with its green iron roof, its wooden verandas on three sides, and its hushed, dark interior, was a relic of the convictions of an earlier age. Its slender veranda columns and wooden walls made it seem frail and out of place beside the rugged brick condominiums, and admin buildings.

  Five white Land Cruisers and a bicycle were drawn up on the gravel drive in front of it. Inside, in what had been the living room when Diana was growing up, the directors were seated at a long, polished table littered with papers and coffee cups. Four of the men wore beards and spectacles; Joe was clean-shaven. Sonja was seated halfway down the table and was hitting it with the flat of her hand, like her sister, but Sonja’s hand was small and freckled, and the gesture was shrill rather than authoritative. Some of the men exchanged covert glances. Administration, at the head of the table, had fixed a bleak smile on his lips, which, partly hidden by his beard, looked like a little pink boat in a brown sea.

  “Diana Pembridge is not a ‘highly regarded local conservationist,’ as the minister claims,” Sonja said. “She’s a ratbag! She’s a radical animal activist! She’s totally wrong for the Ethics Committee, and we, as a board, should refuse to rubber-stamp thi
s ministerial inanity. We must refuse!” She slapped the table again.

  The chairman said in a plaintive tone, “But, Sonja, I heard you say last week that the anti-duck-shooting campaign she started was a terrific idea.”

  “That’s wild animals!” Sonja shouted. “We’re talking about laboratory animals. We need someone who understands lab animals!”

  The director of finance rolled his eyes. He had a woolly red beard and was notorious for running onto his front lawn early in the morning to shout at the sulphur-crested cockatoos. “Monsters! Flying dogs! Stop that barking!” he would yell. He enjoyed stirring Sonja up. “Surely animals are animals,” he said.

  “They are not!” she answered fiercely. Laboratory animals were merely equipment, as everyone around the table knew. But she could not make that point, in case it was recorded in the minutes and then dug out by some troublemaker using the Freedom of Information Act. “I warn you, if Pembridge gets on the Ethics Committee, she will turn this place upside down.” She gave a final slap to her papers and jumped up, muttering, “I need a cup of tea.”

  The others sat in attitudes of thunderous silence. They had much serious business to consider before 5:00 P.M., but it looked as if the director of personnel would stall the whole meeting on this footling issue of the Ethics Committee. The thing that irritated them all was that she was such a mouse socially, yet in meetings Sonja became unyielding. “Can’t handle power,” they said among themselves. “Or grog.” There were jokes about how she had bullied John Parker into marriage. Speculation on their sexual practices remained a favorite pastime, for among the junior female staff John was known as a lecher. No one was surprised that he had kept his apartment in the residential area and stayed only a couple of nights a week with his wife.

  “What’ll we do?” Administration whispered to Finance.

  “Let her rave on for a bit,” Finance whispered back. “God knows what’s really upsetting her.”

  At the sideboard, Sonja was making herself a cup of raspberry leaf tea and taking deep breaths to calm down. She had noticed a little rash in the fold under her breasts that morning and feared she would have another outbreak of boils. The fact was, she was terrified about everything at the moment. If Diana’s appointment to the Ethics Committee went through, how long would it be before she demanded an inspection of U-1? Under existing legislation, committee members were entitled to visit laboratories and animal houses unannounced. That morning, Sonja had rung John, who was still in Sydney, and in veiled terms had described to him this latest threat to his research.