Chapter 9: The Jane Doe Dons Designer
The Fountain Cafe was Oliver Horowitz’s favorite haunt. Nestled in the heart of Sydney’s seediest suburb, Kings Cross, and next to the iconic El Alamein Fountain, it offered a lively view of neon-lit Macleay Street with its sleazy strip joints and 24-hour bars, and the hoards of ogling guys and giggling tourists who wandered through all day and all night as though on some perverse pilgrimage. Roxy wasn’t particularly fond of the place which fringed her own suburb like cheap, unwashed lace, and usually walked the extra distance along the back streets to bypass it altogether. But today was unavoidable. Oliver Horowitz had a soft spot for the ’Cross. As an ex-newspaper man it once provided him with a good deal of his material, and he still enjoyed watching news in the making.
Roxy increased her speed as she maneuvered her way through, the crowds heavy despite the hour. She spotted the police station and then the spurting fountain, which served to split the area between Kings Cross and the once posh suburb of Potts Point. Of course it had gone the way of its neighbor soon enough, but several stately old brick buildings reminded anyone who cared to notice that it once had class, too many broken promises ago. Oliver was sitting on the seedier side of the fountain. Two plates of half-eaten sandwiches were in front of him but he appeared to be alone and Roxy frowned as she pulled up a plastic chair beside him.
‘Relax,’ he said, pushing his untouched water glass towards her. ‘Kay’s just powdering her nose. Be back in a minute. You been jogging?’
‘Speed walking, actually.’ She tried to regain her breath. ‘What has she said so far?’
‘Oh, well, she’s breaking up with her boyfriend, which is kinda exciting because—’
‘About the Musgrave case.’
‘Nothing.’
Roxy’s eyebrows furrowed.
‘I was waiting for you. Didn’t want to seem obvious.’
‘Oh I’m sure she won’t suspect a thing.’ Roxy took a good gulp of the water and then frowned again. ‘It’s not even cold, tastes like chlorine.’
‘I’ll tell you what is cold, the friggin’ service around here. Hopeless today. Where is that bloody waiter? You want something? Coffee? Oh, here you are, Kay.’ He made a feeble, fat man’s attempt to pull out her chair and the petite Asian woman sat down, glancing curiously across at Roxy and poking her cat’s-eye spectacles back into place.
‘Kay, this is my friend—’
‘Hello,’ Roxy interrupted. ‘I’m Roxy. I was just walking past and saw poor old Olie here sitting all alone.’
‘Oh,’ the woman stammered, ‘Really?’
‘Yep.’ It wasn’t such an unlikely coincidence. Roxy and Oliver frequently ran into each other. His art deco apartment was on the other side of the Cross, in the terrace-lined Victoria Street that overlooked the city.
‘You into walking?’
‘Um, no, not really.’
‘Roxy’s a mad walker,’ Oliver chirped, trying to do his bit.
‘Mmm,’ Roxy glanced at her watch. She didn’t have much time for small talk. She decided to plunge right in. ‘Oliver tells me you work in forensic science?’
The woman nodded yes.
‘I am intrigued by your sort of job. I was thinking about taking it up myself, except I just don’t think I’d be strong enough, you know?’ She patted her stomach. ‘Or smart enough. You guys must be just so cluey. Worked on any exciting cases lately?’ She tried not to wince as Oliver kicked her under the table.
The woman, who was probably more accustomed to looks of abhorrence when she mentioned her profession, blushed a little, flattered. She cleared her throat. ‘Oh there’s always something exciting going on,’ she said. ‘What do you do?’
Roxy hesitated, she didn’t want to scare her off.
‘Rox is one of my clients, she ghostwrites autobiographies,’ Oliver replied quickly. ‘People’s life stories, that sort of thing.’
‘Yes, in fact, I just lost a big job.’
‘Oh?’
‘I was going to write the biography of Beatrice Musgrave. But she recently died, so ...’
Mrs Musgrave’s name did not bring any change in Kay’s features and, instead, she seemed more interested in the menu than the conversation.
‘Yes I read about that,’ Oliver was saying. ‘Suicide.’
‘Mmm. Very shocking, quite unexpected. You didn’t happen to work on that case did you, Kay?’ Roxy tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice but the other woman shrugged no and turned towards the waiter who had miraculously—inconveniently—turned up to take their orders.
‘I would like the iced chocolate please.’
‘A latté for me,’ Roxy added, feeling bitterly disappointed.
As though sensing this, Kay announced, ‘But I did work on the mutilated corpse that has been in all the papers. The Jane Doe.’
Roxy cheered up enormously. ‘The one-handed corpse!? Now that was fascinating. And you got to perform the autopsy?’
‘Well, I assisted. But you know, she—the deceased, that is—did have both hands, it was just the fingers on the right hand that were missing.’
‘Had they been cut off? Or was it a deformity she already had?’
Kay looked at her surprised. ‘That’s a very good question because, actually, the answer is, both.’
‘Huh?’ Oliver was not keeping up. The smaller woman cleared her throat and edged her spectacles back on her nose.
‘It’s hard to explain, but Dr Omah, my boss, he said that it looked like the hand had already undergone surgery and, judging from the scar tissue, some of the fingers had probably already been removed.’
‘When? How?’
‘Oh many, many years ago, probably from an accident or something.’
Roxy’s lips pursed a little and nudged to one side. She wanted to get it straight.
‘So her fingers weren’t cut off by the murderer at all?’
‘Oh yes they were cut off, well, some of them were freshly cut off you see? The others had been removed earlier. We concluded that at least three fingers were not there to begin with.’
‘So let me get this straight. Three had been removed a long time ago, and then the last two were sliced off before she was killed?’
‘Got it in one,’ said Kay. ‘Very strange, hey?’
They all nodded their heads and then the waiter appeared with their drinks, lazily placing them down.
‘Have they identified the body?’ Roxy asked when he had gone.
‘Not as far as I know,’ Kay replied, scooping some cream from her drink. ‘And I doubt that they will.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, she was clearly a derelict of some sort. Probably had no fixed address and relatives close by.’
‘How did you know she was a derelict? Her clothes?’
‘Oh no they were very flashy.’
‘Flashy?’ A thrill ran down Roxy’s spine.
‘Yes, good quality material, obviously quite new.’
‘Really?’ Oliver was showing interest now. ‘Then what makes you think she was homeless?’
Kay gulped her drink down and smiled widely, proud to have them both intrigued. This was her defining moment, her chance to impress. ‘Because her body was filthy and covered in ulcers and other skin conditions you find on people who have lived on the streets for too long.’
During this exchange Roxy had almost forgotten to breathe and she gulped the air in hungrily before asking, ‘But she smelt like a derelict, right?’
‘Oh Roxy,’ Oliver chided, ‘I reckon anyone would smell like a dero’ when they’ve been decomposing on the banks of Rushcutters Bay for half a day.’
‘No, Roxy is right,’ the scientist replied. ‘She had a definite derelict aroma. Decaying flesh is quite a different scent altogether.’ Her eyes began fluttering then. ‘This is all top-secret, you know? I get in big trouble if you tell anybody, especially you Mr Agent Man.’
‘Hey, discretion is my middle name,’ he replied with a suave smile.
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All of a sudden, the sky gave out an almighty roar and then broke into giant sobs of rain, forcing the trio to abandon their drinks and seek shelter under the cafe’s awnings.
‘I’m going to make a dash for it,’ Kay was saying, groping for her umbrella and acting as if she had not just made the most astounding announcement. ‘Nice to meet you Roxy.’
They shook hands and then Oliver leant down and planted a quick kiss on her cheek. Kay smiled meekly and skipped off into the rain.
‘I’ll call you later in the week,’ Oliver called after her and then, ‘Thanks, Roxy! You said one question. Not a hundred.’
‘Sorry, Olie, but that was fascinating what she said about the poor old lady.’
He shrugged. ‘But you didn’t get anything on your other old lady, Beatrice Musgrave.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that exactly.’ And to his perplexed expression she added, ‘I’ll explain it all later. I gotta go, too. We’ll talk.’
He waved her goodbye and called out, ‘Be careful!’ as she dashed back past the fountain, across the cement park and the police station and on to Elizabeth Bay Road again. Oh she’d be careful, alright. She had lovely long, thin fingers and she intended to keep them. All ten of them.
Later that afternoon as lightening and thunder played havoc with the sky, Roxy read through her Heather Jackson feature and, feeling somewhat pleased with the result, emailed a copy to Maria at Glossy. Then she shut the computer down, brought out her journal and began to jot down her thoughts. She had embraced the computer age wholeheartedly but there were times when scribbling words on a blank page provided all the clarity in the world. She jotted down the words ‘Beattie’ and ‘Derelict’ and then drew bold black lines from each word towards a box in which she wrote ‘Ronald Featherby’. From the moment Kay had described the mutilated corpse’s clothes as ‘flashy’ she just knew it had to be the same woman Mason Gower had spotted cursing Beattie’s name and threatening to ‘spill the beans’ in the lobby of Ronald Featherby’s law firm. How many designer-clad bag ladies could there possibly be wandering the streets of Sydney?
The real question was, what was the woman’s connection to Beatrice Musgrave? It seemed pretty obvious she had something over the socialite and Roxy suspected it was linked to her supposed daughter. Perhaps she was blackmailing her. That would certainly explain the fancy threads—they could have been hand-me-downs from Beattie, intended to appease her. Blackmail might also explain why the derelict had been murdered. But it didn’t explain the chopped fingers. And none of it, not one little iota, sounded like something Beatrice Musgrave would ever be party to. Roxy had only known Beattie a month but she couldn’t see her carving off a woman’s fingers and then holding her down in the murky bay. She didn’t have the strength for it, let alone the character. And she couldn’t see an old, faithful lawyer friend doing it for her either. Besides, Beattie was clearly intending to tell all. She’d hardly kill, or ask Featherby to kill, for a secret she was about to reveal just a few months later in her own autobiography. Roxy knew all about exclusive rights to a story, but that was too ridiculous a notion.
She drew another black line down the page and underneath it wrote the word ‘police’. Had they already connected the two women? Had they, like Roxy, jumped to the seemingly improbably conclusion that Beatrice killed the dero’ to shut her up and then, out of remorse, threw herself into the sea?
Roxy tossed her pen down impatiently. It was all so absurd. Beatrice Musgrave was not a murderer. She glanced back at the page. Ronald Featherby. She picked up her pen and circled his name over and over and over. He might not be a murderer, either. But he might know someone who is. Perhaps he had set the whole thing up, as a favor to an old client? She needed to see him and soon. But first, there was the matter of the unfinished biography.