Judgement day, p.14
Judgement Day, page 14
She called Aaron, trying to remind herself of the wonderful reasons why she had tethered herself to this life they had. ‘You two looked so cute together this morning, I should have taken a picture,’ she told him when he picked up. She didn’t tell him that sometimes her heart ached so badly for the days when it was just the two of them that she thought there might be something physically wrong with her. As far as Aaron knew, she was better now.
‘Yeah, he was tricky to get down in the middle of the night, in the end I just fell asleep while he cried. Little dude’s definitely getting more teeth. We’ve run out of teething gel and Panadol,’ he added, half to himself.
In the background Jillian could hear children’s music and Ollie babbling.
‘Hey listen,’ Aaron said, ‘my mum just called, she wants to come over on the weekend, says she’ll bring lunch. What do you reckon?’
‘You didn’t tell her I’d gone back to work, did you?’
There was a pause, just long enough for her to deduce that he had indeed. ‘But you are back,’ he said. He sounded almost testy.
Just breathe. One. Two. Three.
‘But I don’t want her knowing that,’ Jillian snapped, despite herself. Aaron’s mother had become a sore point of late. It wasn’t that Margot was malicious, or even passive aggressive; Jillian knew that in many respects she had won the mother-in-law lottery. But Ollie’s birth had brought out nostalgia in Margot, and her rose-coloured recollections of Aaron’s childhood reminded Jillian of her own parental shortcomings.
‘What, you want me to lie?’
In another life Jillian had found Aaron’s inability to lie to his mother endearing. Now she resented it. ‘You know what she’s like. I’ll never hear the end of it. She’ll be all “I stayed home until Aaron went to school because being a mum is the best thing in the world.” Like she’s the bloody mother-of-the-century.’
‘I don’t think that’s fair.’
‘Well, it’s true, regardless.’ Jillian hung up without waiting for a response.
Nice one, Jillian, instead of yelling at your colleague you yell at your husband.
She turned around to find McClintock standing a mere metre away, paper sandwich bag in hand.
‘Jesus! You’re like a cat,’ she said, silently admonishing herself for letting her emotions get the better of her in public.
McClintock at least had the decency to look slightly guilty. He proffered the bag and they sat on a long bench that ran the length of the cafe’s front window. She concentrated on the minutiae of eating, the taking of a bite, the tasting, the swallowing, as she tried to push Aaron and his mother from her mind.
Her phone beeped with an email notification. ‘A bloke called Ranjith from the cab company just spoke to Des,’ she told McClintock, relieved to have a diversion. ‘Said he dropped a fat drunk man off at Meyers’ address in Kew very early on Thursday. So that’s probably him out, unless he killed her before they left for their nightcap. But we know they were all there by midnight, and we think she wasn’t killed before then. What do you reckon? I suppose he could still have come back into the city?’
‘Seems unlikely,’ McClintock conceded reluctantly. ‘Probably just passed out. He’s a fucking idiot though, Tomir will lose his job, surely. And all because some spoilt old man didn’t want to inconvenience his friends.’
‘I know. Tomir could have told us though instead of screwing us around for five days,’ Jillian said. ‘We wouldn’t even know now if it wasn’t for Phillips. I guess the good thing is that really, our list of other suspects isn’t that impacted – I doubt many people outside the court knew about the absence of security. If Meyers emailed the other judges, it can only be one of them, someone they told or someone who accessed their emails.’
‘Or, a very lucky stalker.’
‘To Hawthorn and back again,’ McClintock sighed as they walked into the station. It was late afternoon and the Homicide unit smelled like deodorant, microwave lunches and the portable heater that Des kept running under his desk from the first fall of leaves in autumn until daylight savings began.
‘Didn’t pick you for a Tolkien fan,’ Jillian said, surprised.
‘What can I say? I was very uncool at school.’
Jillian was sceptical that McClintock had ever been considered uncool. She thought of Ama, and her mother’s view of Saul Meyers: ‘a bit of a coaster’. She wondered if this was in part the reason for her antipathy towards McClintock – was she perhaps slightly jealous of the ease with which he was able to move through the world? She foresaw that with moderate effort and a few contacts he would progress to heights she would have to fight tooth and nail to reach.
She could see Des in heated conversation on his phone. He raised an arm in greeting as he saw them before rolling his eyes dramatically. Jillian switched on her computer, thinking of Tomir Staniak, his lies and his open dislike of Judge Bailey. Next to her, McClintock was reading furiously, his eyes inches away from his computer screen while simultaneously eating raw cashews.
‘Have you done any reading on O’Neil?’ he asked, without turning to look at her.
‘Only checked LEAP, saw there was a guy with that name with a drink driving history. I assumed it wasn’t him but seems like it might have been the more we hear about him. Wasn’t a Fitzroy address and we didn’t have the date of birth.’
‘All this stuff about him as the Byronic hero, the kid in rehab, the deaths of both wives sounds really fishy to me. Here, I’m emailing you something.’
‘You reckon Kaye Bailey was murder number three?’ Jillian asked as she refreshed her emails. McClintock had sent her a link to an article from The Herald Sun dated 4 April 2008 with the headline: ‘Drunk Barrister’s Private Pain’.
Prominent barrister Michael O’Neil has faced court for sentencing in his high-level drink driving case. O’Neil pleaded guilty to two counts of drink driving on two consecutive days in September 2007. In sentencing submissions today, Sonja Marchetti QC for Mr O’Neil told the court that at the time of the offending, Mr O’Neil was suffering a significant depressive episode as a result of the death of his second wife, Andrea O’Neil, who, as reported by this masthead, died in a suspected suicide earlier that year. Mrs O’Neil was well known as the public face of the Tarquinio coffee family. Ms Marchetti further submitted to the court that this trauma was compounded by Mr O’Neil’s son being recently admitted to a rehabilitation facility. Mr O’Neil lost his first wife in a bushwalking accident in 1984.
Psychiatric evidence tendered to the court by Mr O’Neil’s barrister noted that his offending was the result of a ‘significant mental health crisis’ from which he has made concerted efforts to recover. The court heard that Mr O’Neil had admitted himself to a private rehabilitation facility. Two stalking charges against Mr O’Neil were dropped.
‘That’s interesting,’ Jillian said when she had finished reading.
‘Interesting? Come on, lightning doesn’t strike three times. Suspected suicide and bushwalking accident! Not to mention the stalking.’
McClintock’s eyes were alight. How quickly he’d forgotten his conviction that the chief judge was responsible.
‘Well,’ said Jillian, ‘we’re looking into him. We just need to find him first.’
‘Where we at?’ Des called from his doorway, beckoning to the detectives. They followed him into his office and McClintock immediately began on his new theory regarding Michael O’Neil.
‘We know from Tim Buxton he was mad about her, we now know O’Neil could easily have got up to chambers – Bailey probably told him to just let himself up when he was done with his conference, he didn’t need a card. We found that out today from Grant Phillips,’ he explained when Des raised an eyebrow in question. ‘We also know he was somewhere near chambers at around eleven-thirty that night and that his phone doesn’t get used again after that. We’re still waiting to unlock Bailey’s phone, but maybe he’s proposed, she’s turned him down and he cracks it. We know he flies a bit fast and loose. Seems obvious.’
Obvious . . .
Jillian hated the way some men did that, declared things to be obvious simply because they believed them to be true.
Well, okay, some women do it too, but not as many . . .
Des was silent for a moment, then he turned to Jillian. ‘Thoughts?’
‘It’s a definite possibility,’ Jillian said. ‘I’m fairly comfortable ruling Meyers out after your chat with the cabby. But it’s also completely possible he conspired with someone to let them get in to her. His phone records should confirm either way. The business with the security passes explains why he was being so evasive, though. I went through Bailey’s work emails and I don’t remember seeing one from Meyers about the proximity cards. We’d need to know that she knew about it for her to be able to tell O’Neil. I guess we can get a copy of whatever the chief judge sent out fairly easily.’
‘Who else are we looking at?’ Des asked.
‘We’ve got Virginia Maiden, potentially – there’s something I find quite shifty about her. And there was no love lost between her and Judge Bailey – that’s for sure.’
‘I don’t reckon –’ McClintock began.
‘Nor do I necessarily,’ Jillian agreed, ‘but she remains a possibility. She and Meyers claim they left the party together at around eleven with two other mates. The mates were both plastered. Maiden says her husband picked her up from the Danish Club, so we should confirm that. There’s a rumour that she wanted a tilt at the top job, even though her age is against her, and she’s a nasty piece of work . . .’ Jillian sighed. ‘And of course Brian Shanahan is far from ruled out. Kaye Bailey was worried about her safety – she moved house for that reason. Meyers didn’t want to disrupt his own schedule to deal with it, so while she was getting threats we know that he did bugger-all to stop them. We know it was probably Shanahan who let himself into her chambers on a previous occasion. We’re trying to get his phone records. He’s on his honeymoon at present, if you can believe it.’
Des snorted loudly.
‘I know,’ Jillian agreed.
‘You happy to rule out everyone else at the party?’
Yes, if only to ensure I never have to talk to any mates of Saul Meyers again.
‘I think so,’ she said carefully.
‘Me too,’ said McClintock quickly.
Des ignored him. ‘You think so, but there’s a but?’
‘The Phillipses say they went in to see Kaye at ten-fifteen or thereabouts, so at this point they’re the last two people to have seen her alive, that we know of, killer aside, of course. They’re each other’s alibis. I don’t think it’s likely to be them; the husband adored Bailey, though the wife is definitely a bit weird. Then there are the associates. My gut says no to them.’
‘Mine too,’ McClintock said, sounding a little desperate.
‘Aside from that,’ Jillian went on, ‘we got that message from the ex-wife in the judgement Kaye was working on – Lisa Nettle. The husband is Rahul Sharma – that TV doctor. No luck getting back on to her yet.’
‘I was just about to mention that I took a call from her half an hour ago, saying she was sure her ex-hubby did it,’ Des said. ‘Sounded a bit frantic and, to be honest, a bit sauced. She couldn’t give me any specifics, just said she knew what he was like and what he was capable of. And she refused to come in or say where she was calling from. I got a bit of a fruit loop vibe.’
‘Since his face is all over the TV, I don’t reckon he’s gonna risk waltzing up to chambers –’ McClintock said.
Des cut him off again and moved on. ‘Where are we otherwise?’
‘We’re still trying to confirm the source of the death threats Kaye received at chambers. The techies are working on that as we speak. We’ve also got this business with her payment to the law firm. The firm won’t tell us anything at this point. We’re gonna talk to Legal about issuing a subpoena, although Legal reckon the firm will fight it tooth and nail.’
‘What a doozy.’ Des leaned back in his chair and rubbed the back of his head, his habitual movement in moments of intrigue. If things were stressful he would rub his stomach instead. Jillian sometimes contemplated what it might take for him to do both at the same time. ‘But we’re getting there,’ he said. ‘Good-o. Don’t stay later than you need to tonight. I’ll brief upstairs. Okay?’
They returned to their desks and did not speak for the next two and a half hours. As Jillian sent another harassing email to their techies regarding access to the dead judge’s phone, she occasionally looked at McClintock’s screen. He was consumed with Michael O’Neil. Her colleague’s shoulders sat at a tense angle and Jillian wondered if he was sulking.
At seven they took the lift down to the carpark together. ‘You doing anything tonight?’ McClintock asked, still sounding slightly wounded.
Good for him to be jealous.
She gave a tight smile. ‘Nah, just heading home. You?’
‘Going to watch the footy training with a mate. I’ve got a good feeling about this week. We might actually get up.’
‘You got a partner?’
He shook his head but didn’t elaborate.
They parted when the lift opened. Jillian got into her messy car and looked at her face in the rear-vision mirror. Her skin was dry and her eyes were slightly pink at the edges. She pulled at a strand of the too-dark hair that she now hated and knew looked dreadful. She felt panicked. It was too early to leave. Ollie would still be awake when she got home. She wondered whether Aaron would have forgiven her for their tiff. She wondered what excuse she could come up with not to see her mother-in-law.
As Jillian reversed out of her park, she caught sight of McClintock, not returning to his car but instead letting himself into the bike cage, where he proceeded to change into a riding kit in full view of the carpark.
Chapter 16
Judge Bailey’s funeral took place on the 1st of May, an appropriately grey and atmospheric morning. It had been a week since their meetings with Judges Phillips and Maiden, a week since the revelations that level twelve had been a free-for-all on the night of the murder, and since McClintock had begun cultivating his Michael O’Neil theory.
They had exercised a search warrant on Michael O’Neil’s house that had produced nothing more than a classical guitar, several CDs of guided meditation and some very amateur oil paintings. They had tried Lisa Nettle again without any success and they had confirmed that Brian Shanahan – like Michael O’Neil – had not used an ATM on his honeymoon and that his phone had last been used in rural New South Wales. The local police had been alerted but there had been no sightings of him.
O’Neil had still not surfaced, which Jillian agreed with McClintock could very well be indicative of a man lying low. It was odd, though, she thought, that no one else had sighted him, that they had received no tip-offs. She knew that the legal fraternity, like police, looked after their own, but she doubted that that applied in circumstances as dramatic and serious as the death of a judge.
Her investigation of Tomir Staniak had met a dead end. The security manager and his wife had been at a local club until ten pm on the night of the murder and CCTV from their own system, and that of their equally paranoid neighbours, showed no one leaving the house after they arrived home at ten-thirty until the next morning when Tomir had left at his usual time.
Judge Bailey’s mobile had been another source of ongoing frustration. When the phone had been successfully unlocked and its contents downloaded to their computers, it was to find that all the files had been corrupted. Their ‘techie’, a man of few words and fewer social skills, had told them to leave it with him but not to ‘expect a miracle’.
‘So Saul Meyers’ phone records are possibly the most boring I have ever seen in my life,’ Jillian told McClintock in the car on the way to the funeral. The records had arrived after several days and many irate phone calls, just as they were leaving the station, and she had quickly printed them off to read as her colleague drove. ‘Looks like sometimes he calls two different golf clubs on the same day, sometimes a restaurant, sometimes one of his daughters or one of his cronies. But that’s really it. There’s no joy here. Doesn’t call Shanahan by the looks of it. He could have another phone? He doesn’t really strike me as a burner phone type of bloke. What do you reckon?’
‘Well no,’ McClintock conceded, ‘but he also isn’t a total idiot. He got to be chief judge somehow, right?’
‘True. Maybe it’s a generational thing – his phone records are as boring as O’Neil’s bank records.’
‘True that.’
McClintock parked on High Street in Northcote. They had ample time before the funeral was to begin.
It was just after nine-thirty and an aggressive southerly flicked Jillian’s hair into her eyes, making them smart. McClintock led the way into a cafe that might also have been a tattoo parlour where they ordered coffees from a bald female barista with pierced cheeks. Just as Fitzroy had succumbed to designer prams and vertical gardens, Northcote had clearly also ridden the wave of gentrification.
They walked the block to the funeral parlour slowly. ‘Do you reckon Phillips and Bailey might have had something going on?’ McClintock asked, draining the last of his coffee and throwing the cup into a bin.
‘That thought did occur to me,’ Jillian said. ‘Everyone says they were very close. And the ex-husband thought Phillips was keen on her.’
‘Maybe O’Neil got wind of it.’
‘Possible, I suppose. But Ama was living there until pretty recently and didn’t mention anything, and Kaye and Grant had been friends a long time. Why now? And everything we hear about Bailey – she doesn’t sound like the type for an affair, does she?’
