The Housemate Page 7

  He scampers off, and Oli breathes a sigh of relief.

  She’s surprised to see Constable Rusty Frost arrive. She hasn’t seen him for well over a month; he’s been on leave. She saw photos of South America on Facebook, shots of him and a mate in Vegas. She sidles up to him, notices his hair is shorter. ‘Rusty, hey. Welcome back. What can you tell me?’

  A soft-pink blush spreads from his cheeks toward his ginger hairline. ‘Hey, Oli.’

  ‘Good break?’

  ‘Great break.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. What can you tell me about this?’

  He shakes his head and groans quietly. ‘Sorry, Ol. Not today.’

  ‘Come on, Rusty. Can you confirm if it was a suicide? Please?’

  He keeps his mouth closed, little muscles in his jaw clenching.

  She drops her voice. ‘But it’s definitely Nicole Horrowitz? That’s what I’m hearing.’

  ‘Jesus, I haven’t even been inside.’ He straightens his shoulders assertively, then seems to get flustered again. He still won’t look her in the eye. ‘That’s what I’ve heard, okay?’ His voice is almost a whisper.

  Oli’s heart begins to hammer. ‘And she hung herself, is that right?’

  ‘Oli, enough.’

  Angry voices erupt behind them: more media have arrived. Someone is standing in someone else’s shot, and everyone’s complaining about the reception. Half of them are on the phone, the other half madly texting. Modern journalism at its best, Oli thinks wryly.

  ‘Bowman’s coming.’ The rumour spreads through the crowd like a virus. But after a few moments, everyone breathes out. False alarm. There’s no sign of the chief inspector.

  Cooper returns and looks at Rusty then back at Oli in a way that suggests he somehow knows about their romantic past.

  ‘Hello.’ He sticks out his hand without introducing himself.

  Oli rolls her eyes. ‘Rusty, this is Cooper Ng. He works with me at Melbourne Today. Cooper, this is Senior Constable Frost.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Cooper,’ Rusty says, shaking his hand.

  ‘You too.’ Cooper pulls a business card from his pocket and hands it to Rusty before darting off again, snapping shots like a tourist.

  Rusty raises his eyebrows and shoves the card in his pocket. Mildly embarrassed, Oli smiles up at Rusty. ‘He’s very green,’ she says. A female cop is now standing in earshot and gives her a dirty look. ‘I’ll come find you later,’ Oli says, while Rusty studiously ignores her.

  She cuts across the front of the crowd to find Cooper, discovering him about twenty metres along the property’s wire fence, standing in dense shrubbery.

  ‘What are you doing?’ She ducks to avoid a stick scraping her face.

  ‘I was hoping there might be a line of sight to the house, but there isn’t. I got a couple of good pics of the police before, though. They were talking ominously.’

  ‘Ominously?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He steps toward the road, lifts the camera, and takes a few covert snaps of Rusty and his colleagues through the tree leaves. ‘You know, like serious cop chat. They’re good shots. The uniforms look great against the bush.’

  Fighting the urge to roll her eyes again, Oli pulls up an aerial view of the property on Google Earth. Number 9 Laker Drive looks to be about half a hectare. A stream cuts across the rear-right corner, and there’s a small square of grass at the back of the house. But aside from that, the block is thick with trees.

  ‘That’s the house?’ Cooper peers over her shoulder.

  She zooms in, peering at the rickety roof. ‘I guess so. It looks more like a cottage.’

  ‘Weird to think Nicole was hiding out here, huh? I wonder if she’s been here the whole time?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ Oli kicks the ground and loosens some stones from the dirt. ‘How many years was Alex in gaol for? Three, right?’

  ‘Just over. She got out in April 2009, and she was sentenced in January 2006. I still can’t believe you were at the house that morning,’ he says whimsically. ‘And now we’re here. That’s some full circle stuff, huh. I mean, there’s no way you would have thought you’d be covering the same case all over again a decade later.’

  There’s no way Oli could have foreseen any part of her current life ten years ago. ‘I guess you just never know which stories have more to give.’

  ‘It’s actually just dawning on me how crazy it is that I have the interview lined up with Alex on Sunday. Everyone’s going to be gunning to talk to her now.’

  ‘No shit,’ Oli mutters, looking again from the image on the phone to the trees in front of her.

  ‘We might even be able to get advertisers in a bidding war to sponsor the first episode.’

  ‘The guy who found Nicole was jogging,’ Oli says, ignoring Cooper as she scans the borders of the property. ‘But I doubt he was jogging through this.’ She indicates the thick bracken surrounding them.

  ‘Maybe he was running on the road. Or up the driveway?’

  Oli scrolls back over the map. ‘No,’ she says, straining her neck to look further up the road. ‘Come on.’

  Cooper glances back at the crowd. ‘Everyone else seems to be staying over there.’

  ‘Exactly.’ She stomps through the long grass, hoping it’s too cold for snakes. As she follows the thin wire fence through the trees, she steps between tufts of native grass. An old memory settles over her. Dry grass scratching her plump legs as she scrambles to follow Lily and her father. They were bushwalking somewhere on their grandmother’s farm before she died.

  ‘Come on, girls, keep up!’

  Lily bounds ahead, disappearing over a ridge. Oli is exhausted, her muscles aching, arms covered in welts. She sits on a rock. Adjusts her sock so her blister doesn’t rub against her sneaker. Pulls a biscuit out of her pocket and starts to eat it. She is always so hungry.

  ‘You okay, kiddo?’ Her father appears, his face ruddy as he swats flies away. ‘Want me to carry you back to the house? Maybe your mum will be awake by now.’

  ‘No.’ Oli quickly gets to her feet, the blisters on her soft skin stinging as she rushes past her father to catch up with Lily, praying he won’t pick her up.

  Behind her, Cooper’s panting breaths drive the memory away, leaving her feeling empty. Ravenous. Her stomach rolls.

  She pushes past a sapling, and it slingshots back, hitting Cooper in the face. ‘Ow!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  They’ve reached a fence corner. There’s a narrow gap between the post and another fence corner, which Oli assumes marks the border of the next property. A thin dirt path cuts into the ground between them.

  ‘He must have been running along here,’ she says. ‘Unless there’s a path on the other side as well.’

  A bird lets out a low call that seems to soak into the ground before whipping back to the sky. They walk down the narrow corridor, the smell of eucalyptus thick in the air, trees stretching toward the clouds. It’s pretty, but for the first time today Oli’s glad of Cooper’s company. The thought of being out here alone is unsettling.

  He mirrors her thoughts. ‘I reckon it could get pretty creepy out here.’

  ‘I’m not much of a nature fan,’ she admits. ‘With the exception of indoor plants.’

  ‘I have a virtual pet. Two, actually.’

  She focuses on picking up scraps of information, little details that will allow her to describe the place where Nicole Horrowitz chose to die. Then, still scanning the scene, Oli comes to an abrupt halt. Through the trees she spies the distinctive blue-and-white chequered police tape and, beyond that, a cluster of people. Two cops in uniform and two male detectives in suits and winter coats stand a little further along.

  ‘Bowman.’ Cooper points to the right of the group, where Gregory Bowman’s white hair glows through the trees.

  Oli’s pulse picks up again. She ducks down and creeps further along the fence.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Cooper whispers.

  She doesn’t reply but ke
eps moving parallel to Bowman. He’s homing in on something. She starts to jog, still bent at the middle. Not far from Bowman there’s a blur of white: forensic technicians clad in body suits. She trips on a tree root and stumbles against the flimsy wire fence.

  Bowman has stopped. Two of the techs are on their hands and knees a few metres from him, crouched over a synthetic sheet, but his face is fixed skyward. Oli knows what she is about to see.

  She closes her eyes. Opens them. Allows her gaze to scan up.

  A woman hangs in midair. Rope loops around her neck and over the lowest branch of a giant gum. The cord twists slightly in the wind and makes a faint creak.

  Cooper stops short next to Oli and draws a sharp breath. ‘Holy shit.’

  Oli’s own neck feels tight, sore, as she tries to swallow past the lump that has formed in her throat.

  Cooper’s hands shake as he lifts the camera.

  MARCH 2006

  Hundreds of people call her name. This must be what it’s like to be a movie star, Alex thinks, taking in the swarm of faces. Mouths open and shut like squawking birds, and words blur into an indecipherable mass of noise. Alex flinches as something large and black is shoved in her face. A microphone. Hundreds of circles glint in the crowd, the shine from the camera lenses catching in the sun. Alex keeps her head down, looks at her feet. Black boots, no scuff marks, cheap but new. Her eyes drift to a reporter standing to the side of the courthouse, and the one next to her.

  Alex imagines being at home on the couch with Evelyn and Nicole, speculating about the girl on the news.

  She looks guilty, Evelyn would say.

  One hundred per cent, Alex would agree.

  Ugly outfit, Nicole would add.

  ‘This way, head down, good girl.’

  Alex’s lawyer, Ruby Yeoh, is a tiny but terrifying woman with a fringe as straight as a builder’s level. Alex has spent a significant portion of the past few months looking at Ruby’s face, which is generally twisted with disappointment. ‘You don’t make my job easy, Alex Riboni,’ Ruby says often, shaking her head.

  But they both know that Ruby loves the cut and thrust of the law, the drama of court. She has been on a high this past week, counting down the days until she can perform on stage. Alex is her reluctant co-star, incapable of learning her lines no matter how many times they go over them.

  ‘Almost there,’ Ruby barks, as she pushes Alex along, reassuring in an aggressive way.

  They break through the crowd and step into the revolving door at the front of the courthouse. Alex is herded through security, holding up her scrawny arms as she’s scanned for weapons.

  The fuzziness lifts for the first time since that night at the house. This is it, she thinks. Funny, when it all comes down to it, that what goes on record in a court of law is simply a version of reality just like everything else. Alex wonders how many people lie on the stand. A quarter? Half?

  She looks around as Ruby tugs her toward a large wooden door. It will be over in no more than a fortnight, maybe less. An overwhelming sense of relief slams through her, and she trips, stumbling to the floor. Ruby’s tiny mouth turns down at the edges as she grabs her shoulders, holding them for a second as if some sanity can be passed on.

  ‘Sorry,’ Alex mutters.

  ‘Just keep it together,’ Ruby hisses. ‘Please.’

  The security guard shuffles his feet. High heels click on the tiled floor behind Alex. Someone coughs. She can’t stop noticing every tiny detail. All she wants is for it all to stop. To sleep through the rest of her life and be born into a new one. To go back in time and choose the other path.

  ‘Ready?’

  She looks at Ruby blankly. All she can see is Evelyn on the hallway floor. Her twisted left leg. Evelyn had told her she broke that leg as a teenager when she fell off her horse. Evelyn’s poor leg looked broken all over again, but Alex never found out if it was. No one cares about a broken bone when you are dead.

  Alex hears panting, then a desperate sound of panic. If only they could take it all back.

  She is back in the hallway again. Everything is tinted red with Evelyn’s blood.

  ‘Alex?’ Ruby grabs her shoulders, shakes her. ‘Alex?’

  It’s her making the terrible noise, panting like a wounded animal, just like she did at the house that night.

  Ruby shakes her again. ‘Alex, come on. It’s time to go in.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  TUESDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER 2015

  BOWMAN SEEMS TO LOOK DIRECTLY AT THEM.

  ‘Down,’ Oli hisses, pulling Cooper to the ground by the tail of his shirt.

  Even though she’s crouching, she feels dizzy, catapulted back in time to the moment that will always be seared onto her brain. The body hanging from the tree has caused the old panic to flood back. The heightened state of awareness returns, the painful intensity. The feeling, the knowing, what is at stake and not wanting to think consciously about what she’s doing, just needing to do it. Don’t think, just fix this. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe, please breathe. The bushland blurs into the pale, upturned face of her mother. Dry lips, glassy eyes. Oli barely registers the empty pill bottle on the floor, just presses her hands against the bony chest, hands sliding in sweat and vomit. Please, Mum, breathe. Please.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Cooper whispers, oblivious to Oli’s turmoil.

  ‘What?’ The greens and browns of the bush comes back into focus, the old scene slipping away. ‘We just stay here,’ she murmurs, peering around the rows of tree trunks.

  Bowman is still there. The forensic team are wielding a ladder and a stretcher. A large black bag. He gestures to the tree, and they all look up at the body. Oli does the same, properly this time. Long brown hair. Army-green Converses. Small white hands. Bloated face.

  Bowman speaks to the group for a few moments, gesturing to the right before he walks back the way he came, phone to his ear.

  The forensic team approach the gum tree with a ladder, their faces set in hard lines.

  ‘Come on.’ Oli’s legs are jelly as she stands again.

  They walk back along the track in silence.

  ‘Was it her?’ Cooper asks as they reach the turn. Then, ‘It was her, wasn’t it?’

  Oli mentally sifts through the three photos of Nicole Horrowitz that ran in the news coverage. ‘I think so. She used to have shorter hair, lighter. That …’ Oli pauses. ‘That woman had long hair.’

  ‘I guess it grew.’ He clicks on the image. Zooms in. ‘I don’t know why I took this,’ he says. ‘I’m not going to do anything with it.’

  ‘I know.’ During the first year Oli worked at the paper, she took an earring from a crime scene. She knew it belonged to the victim; it must have fallen on the ground and been kicked across the hotel car park amid the attack. The woman died in hospital two days later. Oli kept the earring in her wallet for years, would occasionally get it out, look at it. ‘I get it,’ she adds.

  He gives her a grateful glance.

  They make their way back to the driveway. The crowd is bigger now, and Oli recognises several journos from competitor papers and news sites. ‘We need to find out if she was living here with someone.’ Oli ignores a pointed look from Melissa Warren, who is applying a hideous shade of coral lipstick.

  ‘How are we going to do that?’

  ‘We meet the neighbours.’ Oli’s eyes land on the letterbox. ‘We go to the local shops, maybe the post office.’

  Pia calls, but the connection cuts in and out, and Oli hangs up in frustration. Then Pia texts her. ‘It looks like the house belongs to a couple who live in Tasmania,’ Oli tells Cooper. ‘It was left to them four years ago when their elderly uncle who lived here passed away. There’s no apparent link to Nicole Horrowitz, but Pia’s trying to contact the owners.’

  ‘Maybe she was renting it from them?’ Cooper offers.

  ‘Maybe.’ Oli thinks about the small strip of shops they passed through earlier, the huge blocks of land. It’s so isolated out here. Residents w
ould certainly notice a new face, but they probably wouldn’t question a long-lost niece or distant cousin. Nicole could have pretended to be anyone and slipped fairly quickly into anonymity—forged a new life, or stolen someone else’s. But why? Was she so scared of Alex that she fled, or did guilt drive her away?

  ‘I read about this person once who was renting a house from someone who died, and they just kept living there for years,’ Cooper says. ‘All the relatives just assumed she was paying, but no one was tracking the money. That was somewhere in the States, though.’

  ‘Shhhhh.’

  Bowman is walking down the driveway toward the media pack, his stocky body moving in calm, even strides. He stops just as the sun emerges from behind a cloud, and hands shield faces from the glare, giving the impression of a collective salute to the chief inspector.

  Oli spies Rusty up the back behind an ABC cameraman. Even from here she can see a little tic pulsing under his left eye. She edges around the crowd, reaching him just as the press officer calls for attention. ‘Quiet, please.’

  Cameras are adjusted on shoulders, or fitted and locked into place on tripods, their lenses aimed at Bowman like guns.

  ‘Any updates?’ Oli murmurs to Rusty.

  ‘Oli,’ he moans under his breath. ‘Stop.’

  Cooper is climbing onto the raised earth behind them, trying to capture an image of Bowman on the dirt stage looking out at the desperate swarm. It will be a great shot, Oli thinks begrudgingly. Perfect for tomorrow’s front page.

  ‘I appreciate that there is a lot of interest in our presence here today,’ Bowman begins, ‘but I am not in a position to share many details at this stage. There are family members who need to be informed.’

  About seven people shout questions, all variations on a familiar theme: is Nicole Horrowitz dead? It’s been asked on and off for the past ten years.

  Bowman waits for the noise to die down, rocking gently from his heels to the balls of his feet. ‘I can confirm there is a deceased person on the property, and we are in the process of determining the sequence of events. We are not yet in a position to confirm the cause of death or the identity.’