Doctor Ashleigh Taylor was a senior forensic pathologist with the New South Wales Coroner’s office. From the beginning of her professional life she had been on a journey of discovery. Intelligent and astute, she had been trained in the art of observation and while searching for signs and clues left on the lifeless bodies laid out before her on the metallic examination tables, she felt responsible for every one of them and for the friends and families left behind who had loved them. Loved ones looking for answers, left confused by sudden, unexpected deaths, not knowing how to deal with their grief. It was more than a job to Ashleigh Taylor, for her it was about taking in the evidence, doing the work and knowing at the end of the day she would come up with the right answer.
Two days after Rose Phillips’s body was discovered in her kitchen, a small red van packed with ‘For Sale’ and ‘For Lease’ signs pulled away from the curb in front of 15 Eden Street. Left behind and planted firmly in the front yard stood a large ‘For Sale’ sign with a photograph of the house and a large red ‘Deceased Estate’ sticker slammed across the face of it.
‘Didn’t take them long,’ Ashleigh mumbled to herself as she peered into her letter box expecting to find a fistful of bills, but found instead two fat, slimy snails and a half eaten Pizza Hut brochure. She removed the snails and hurled them onto the road and tucked the Pizza Hut brochure into her pocket. She walked along the footpath and stopped in front of the ‘For Sale’ sign outside Rose’s house. The Californian bungalow was in a terrible state. The ramshackle garden was overgrown, an outdated shade of green paint was peeling from the timber bargeboards and window casements and a number of terracotta tiles were missing from the roof. The house was below street level and Ashleigh imagined it would be cold in winter. A section of the brick fence, according to Kevin, had collapsed into the front yard and fallen onto the row of rose bushes with a whimper during the middle of the night years before. They managed to survive for a short time before they eventually withered and died. The bricks and the roses lay dormant now, buried and long forgotten.
Ashleigh crossed to the other side of the street and noticed not for the first time that a number of the houses, including her own, desperately needed renovation. The houses, neglected, unkempt and unloved, were much like the people who lived in them. Many of the elderly residents in Eden Street peered out through their thin, white polyester curtains, stubbornly holding on to their independence, worried that their well-meaning children would ship them off to a nursing home or retirement village at the first sign of forgetfulness or personal neglect.