Tell the Truth (19 page)

Paris took a big breath. ‘It scares me to walk in and have them looking.'

‘It scares everyone at first,' Wayne said.

‘And they don't stop looking,' Paris said. ‘I feel their eyes on me and I think they can see how nervous I am and how much I don't know and when I stuff up. I'm frightened that I'm missing something major.'

‘And then you can't think about anything else,' he said.

‘Exactly.'

‘But look how well you did today,' he said. ‘We left you there, testing you out, and you did what you had to do.' He grinned. ‘I said to Rowan in the lift on the way down, you just watch, she'll cope fine.'

Paris saw Rowan glance at her in the rear-view, and wondered what he'd said in return.

‘You have a bad case of the nerves, there's no doubt about that,' Wayne said. ‘But hey, we're all different, right? And some of the best paras around started off just the same. But the thing to remember is this. When people look at you, they don't see
you.
They see a uniform. You're a pair of hands and a smile and a uniform, that's all. You know a lot, and you have to let that knowledge kick in. You smile at them, act like you know what you're doing even when you don't, and let the uniform do the rest.
Capisce
?'

He grinned at her like that was all there was to it, and for the first time she felt maybe there was.

*

Jonathon Dimitri had been camping in a remote area of the Blue Mountains with his girlfriend, and had come back into range to find Ella's message on his phone.

‘Thanks for coming in,' Ella said when he sat down in the interview room. In the room next door, Ross Hardy was being interviewed by Pilsiger and Lawson, with Dennis sitting in.

‘It's no problem.' Dimitri was a neat and stocky man in his early thirties, dressed in jeans, hiking boots and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

‘How was the camping?' Murray asked.

‘Cold actually.' Dimitri smiled. ‘But good.'

‘We want to talk to you about a patient you saw on Monday of last week,' Ella said. ‘Stacey Durham.'

He looked puzzled for a moment, then nodded. ‘From the computer shop.'

‘That's her.' Ella waited for some comment about how he'd heard about her on the news, but none came. ‘Do you remember much about her visit? Did she mention a toothache?'

‘I remember that she didn't need to be there,' he said. ‘One look in her mouth and that was clear. She said nothing about a toothache either. Most of the people I see are well overdue, some by years, but her teeth were in excellent shape. I told her that and she muttered something about wanting a clean anyway. So I did it.' He shrugged.

‘Had you ever met her before?' Murray asked.

‘No, never.'

‘How about her husband?'

‘Well, he came in with her that day and introduced himself, but I'd never met him before either.'

‘Did you talk much?' Ella said.

‘To him? No. That was really all we said, then I took Stacey through to the room.'

‘Your receptionist Zaina Khan said they both seemed surprised in some way,' Murray said.

Dimitri nodded. ‘They did. When Stacey was in the chair she said something about not expecting to get an appointment so soon.'

‘What else did she say?' Ella asked.

‘Well, at one point she actually cried a little.'

‘In what context?' Murray asked.

‘She told me about her previous dentist, said she was looking to go somewhere else and this was handy to the shop. I said, oh, do you work there too? And she said no, that she's a paramedic, and it's her husband's business. I was getting things ready for the cleaning at that point and when I looked back at her she'd started to cry a little bit. She apologised and I said it was all right, that many people have issues with dentists, but she said that wasn't it, that things had been bad and she didn't know what to do.'

‘Meaning what?' Ella said. ‘Did she elaborate?'

Dimitri shook his head. ‘I asked her, I said, “what things?”, but she wouldn't say. She wiped her eyes and said she was fine, and lay back in the chair.'

He had nothing more to add, and Murray took him out with the aim of checking the camping story with his girlfriend, who was waiting in the cafe downstairs. Ella went to see if Pilsiger and Lawson were done with Hardy next door. The room was empty, and she found Dennis in his office. She told him what Dimitri had said, then asked about Hardy.

‘He said yes he was driving, and yes he talked to her,' Dennis said. ‘Said that he asked if she knew of an ATM nearby, and she said no and looked away.'

‘Did you believe him?' Ella asked.

‘I think so. He had an ATM receipt in his wallet from nearby just after that time, and he gave a description of the woman matching what we already have.'

‘That could all have been orchestrated though. The woman's photo's been in the news, so he could've known he had to give us that much to sound convincing.'

‘Even so,' Dennis said.

‘And why'd he run?'

‘Same story as with any criminal. If you don't know why the police are at your door, don't wait around to find out.'

Ella wasn't convinced. But what did they have? A missing woman who'd cried in front of a stranger because things were bad but never confided in her friends. Whose husband declared their love to be the greatest, who put on a show at The Gap but possibly wasn't even close to going over. Odd bits and pieces.

‘Anyway,' Dennis said, ‘where's Murray?'

He appeared at the door. ‘Here. Dimitri's girlfriend backed him up.'

‘Good,' Dennis said. ‘Aslett at Scientific called before. He wants to show you something about the blood in the car.'

EIGHTEEN

T
he nursing-home patient was a wizened man of eighty-four. His name was Aloysius Leary, he had terminal cancer, and his family had arranged for him to be admitted to RPA for investigation by a top gastroenterologist for chronic stomach ulcers.

‘Beats me why they insist on putting him through any more trouble and pain,' the nurse said out of his hearing as she handed over the paperwork.

‘You can look after him, right?' Wayne said to Paris as they loaded the stretcher into the ambulance. ‘You rocked it with Mrs Chapman, and he'll probably sleep the whole way.'

Whether he did or he didn't, Paris could manage. More than manage. She'd thought nonstop about what Wayne had said, and things were going to be different from now on. She had the knowledge in her brain and the uniform on her back. She'd fake it until she made it.

‘Absolutely,' she said.

They'd just driven out onto the street when the rain began. Rowan said something to her in the mirror but she couldn't hear over the water pelting the fibreglass roof. She unclipped her seatbelt and went forward to ask him to say it again.

‘Long slow trip,' he said, gesturing at the windscreen, grey with sheeting rain, and the mass of tail-lights beyond. ‘Make sure he's comfortable.'

‘You'll do great,' Wayne said in the passenger seat.

She nodded and went back. The patient looked up at her as she sat down. ‘How are you doing, Mr Leary?'

‘What?'

She repeated it, louder, over the rain beating on the roof.

‘Fine, thank you, I'm fine.'

His breath made her eyes water. He was shrunken from the cancer, his dentures loose in his mouth, his ribs under papery skin visible through the open neck of his pyjama shirt. His hands and wrists were big and bony and dark with bruises; his eyes deep and dark in his gaunt face.

‘We might be travelling for a while,' she shouted. ‘Are you comfortable?'

He nodded. ‘Yes, yes.'

She smiled at him and he smiled back, then thunder cracked overhead and he started and reached out. She took his hand. He squeezed her fingers with his own, cool and dry. He seemed reluctant to let go, so she didn't pull away. He closed his eyes and she settled in her seat, the rain making it feel like the ambulance was a little universe of its own, a place where she had no concerns but to look after him. Life outside was invisible beyond the road spray and the rain running down the windows, and they were a small warm space moving smoothly through it.

Wayne was right, she thought. People didn't see her, they saw her uniform and assumed the person inside was capable. It was something to stand behind, something to draw on. She knew far from everything about the job, but she knew a lot, and if she could only keep her cool she
could
pull it all together.

She thought of Mrs Chapman and Arnold, and how she and Rowan and Wayne had been able to help them. She looked at Mr Leary sleeping, frail eyelids closed, his hand in hers. This was why she'd joined the job. She squeezed Mr Leary's hand out of love, but gently, so as not to wake him up, and felt her heart expand in her chest.

*

Paul Aslett had spent years squelching through blood at crime scenes of all kinds, but he always looked cheerful, as if he'd found a way to push the emotion of each scene out of his head while adding the specific details to his already encyclopaedic knowledge of spatter patterns.

He squatted by Stacey Durham's car. Ella and Murray looked over his shoulder at the web of string he'd constructed in the front passenger footwell.

‘From the shape and size of a bloodstain we can work out where it originated, right?' Aslett said. ‘The string leads back from the spatters, and where they meet is typically the point of impact on the body.'

Ella and Murray nodded. They'd heard and seen it before, but Aslett liked to explain.

‘Here, things are a little different.' He pointed to the strings. ‘You can see they come together at a couple of different points. Those points are low down, around the height a passenger's knees would be, but these didn't come from injuries to anyone's knees.'

Ella sometimes wished he'd just get on and tell them.

‘In fact, it's probably best if I demonstrate. Step this way.' He headed for another car parked in the yard.

‘He says that like he hadn't planned this all along,' Murray murmured to Ella as they followed.

Aslett got behind the wheel and they stood in the open door, watching as he leaned over the passenger seat.

‘Imagine I have a bag of blood in my hands,' he said, then jerked his hands over the footwell, once, twice, then a third time down over the edge of the seat itself.

Ella stared. ‘That's why there's no drag marks, no smears on the sill or anywhere else.'

Aslett nodded. ‘I've seen a lot of scenes where people try to cover up what happened, think they can change how the blood looks, or move things or people around,' he said. ‘A person who knows blood can recognise rubbish like that a mile off. There was no assault on anyone in that car. Whatever happened happened somewhere else, and the blood was put here later.'

Ella's mind was racing. ‘When you say a bag, what do you mean?'

‘It was something with a small opening. A bag or bottle, or a jar, say, with a wide neck, would result in much bigger spatters than these.'

‘It had to be something the cyclist could put in her pocket,' Ella said. ‘She wasn't carrying anything, and nothing was found in or around the car.'

‘And that's what she was doing in those couple of minutes between parking and getting out,' Murray said. ‘But why?'

‘Transporting a container of blood is easier than transporting an injured or dead person,' Aslett said. ‘If you get pulled over and the bag's hidden, nothing looks awry. And you can park the car, do your thing, then get out all calm and casual. Nobody would look at you twice.'

That was it, Ella thought. That was
it.

‘It had to be planned,' she said. ‘To go to so much trouble, to collect blood in something and take the folding bike and do all of that – there has to be a purpose to all of it. Right? Everything is deliberate.'

Murray looked thoughtful. ‘So even the dump site must've been chosen.'

Ella nodded. ‘Because Rowan Wylie would see it.'

*

It rained all the way. The sound on the roof was hypnotic, and Paris wasn't surprised that Mr Leary stayed asleep. Rowan glanced at her in the mirror every now and again, and Wayne looked back a couple of times, and she gave them a thumbs up, and they smiled at her.

Rowan
drove into RPA's ambulance bay,
parked and turned off the engine. Paris squeezed Mr Leary's hand but he didn't respond. She squeezed harder, then prodded his shoulder. Mr Leary didn't move.

Wayne radioed Control that they were at their destination, and Paris pulled her hand free of Mr Leary's and touched his face, his chest, his neck. He looked exactly the same as before, but he was dead.

Rowan and Wayne got out of the ambulance and closed their doors, oblivious.

Paris was paralysed. To have someone die and not notice . . . there was no coming back from that. It wouldn't matter that he was so small and the blanket so big that she couldn't see his chest moving beneath it, nor that the colour of his lips and face hadn't changed. They were always banging on in school about cyanosis, how the lips especially would turn dark with a lack of oxygen, how dying/dead people went blueish-purple. Not that she'd seen any except the ones being autopsied when her class toured the morgue, and they'd all been cold from the fridge and pale like naked chicken. Mr Leary looked exactly the same as when they'd left the nursing home.

Rowan unlatched the back doors and swung them open. He glanced at Mr Leary, then at Paris. ‘It's good he was able to sleep.'

She was frozen. She didn't know what to say or do.

Wayne smiled at her as he released the stretcher. ‘Told you you'd rock it.'

Paris's ears thrummed, her skin prickled. Rowan and Wayne had both looked at him and not seen any cyanosis or whatever either, so that was something to point out later, right? Something in her favour? But still, when they did notice, it would mean that she hadn't.

‘Rowan,' a woman said.

Paris saw the detectives who'd talked to her about Stacey. Marconi and Shakespeare.

‘We need a chat, Rowan,' the male detective said.

‘I'm a bit busy,' he said, pulling the stretcher out of the ambulance.

Now, do it now.
Paris stumbled down the ambulance steps and grabbed Mr Leary's hand. She looked at his face. ‘He's stopped breathing.'

‘What?' Wayne said.

She pressed trembling fingers to his throat. ‘He's just arrested.'

Rowan pushed in beside her to check for himself, then whirled and grabbed the handles. The doors to the Emergency Department were right there. ‘Go,' he said.

‘You don't want to –'
Monitor
, she was thinking.
Oxygen, defib, shock
.

‘It'd only delay getting in there.' Wayne started chest compressions as they rushed inside, leaving the detectives in their wake.

‘Got an arrest here,' Rowan shouted in the corridor.

‘Into resus,' a nurse called back, and in seconds they were lifting Mr Leary across onto the clean white sheet of the bed in the resuscitation room. Staff hurried in, one grabbing a Laerdal bag and fitting the mask to Mr Leary's bony face, another tearing open his pyjama shirt to attach monitoring dots. Wayne kept on with the compressions.

‘What's the story?' a male doctor said.

‘Eighty-four-year-old man with CA, routine transfer for admission for consideration for GE exploratory,' Rowan rattled off. ‘Uneventful trip until just now.' He elbowed Paris for the rest.

She cleared her throat. ‘He said he felt fine when we left, then slept most of the way. As we got here he, ah, opened his eyes and looked around briefly, didn't seem upset or in pain or anything, then closed his eyes again, and then as we pulled out the stretcher I saw that he'd, um, stopped breathing.'

‘Found to be in complete arrest,' Rowan continued. ‘And as it happened right outside the doors we brought him straight in.'

The staff were busy and didn't acknowledge the story, but Paris guessed that was how they always worked, listening and doing at the same time. She watched Wayne compress Mr Leary's skinny exposed chest while the nurse at his head with the bag and mask timed her squeezes to inflate his lungs between them.

The male doctor looked at the screen, which showed the flat line of asystole. ‘You said he's got cancer?'

‘Bowel and lung,' Rowan said, handing over the letter that the nursing home RN had given them.

The doctor read through it and raised his eyebrows. ‘All this and no DNR?'

‘Apparently the family refused it.'

The doctor looked at the monitor again, then at Mr Leary's frail body on the bed and the nurses gathered around him, one about to cannulate his thin forearm, another drawing up drugs.

‘Stop,' he said. ‘The poor bugger's got terminal cancer. Let him go.'

The nurses put down the bag and mask, the needles and the drugs. Wayne stepped back and shook out his shoulders.

Paris welled up.

‘Time of death four-oh-three pm,' the doctor said, and a nurse wrote it on a form, and another nurse unfolded a sheet and draped it over Mr Leary, his shape still clear under it, feet and knees and hips and nose, and Paris felt a tear overflow and run down her cheek, and she swiped at it, angry, embarrassed and sick with guilt.

‘You okay?' Rowan said.

The doctor was looking now as well, and the nurses, and Wayne from the sink where he was washing his hands. Crying over some old man. They'd think she was ridiculous. A total newbie. Rowan walked towards her, and the doctor came over too. The ID clipped to his belt loop said his name was Callum McLennan.

‘It's her first,' Rowan said, squeezing her shoulder.

The doctor smiled kindly. ‘It was just his time.'

She shook her head. ‘Five minutes ago I was holding his hand. I should've . . . he shouldn't, I mean . . .' She started to cry for real.

‘He was old and he was sick,' the doctor said. ‘He was on drugs for his pain. He spent the last minutes of his life with you holding his hand, and then he fell asleep and he didn't wake up. If there's a better way to go, I've never heard of it.'

‘I should've done more.'

‘It was just his time,' Wayne said.

She shook her head again. She couldn't explain herself. Her face was wet with tears and hot with shame. The nurses looked away and busied themselves with little jobs or left the room. Mr Leary lay motionless under his sheet.

‘I'm sorry,' she said to him.

‘There's no disgrace in being upset,' Rowan said.

‘None at all,' the doctor said. ‘It shows you have a heart.'

‘Damn straight,' Wayne said.

The doctor smiled at her again, then a nurse called him to the phone.

‘Let's go outside,' Rowan said.

He wheeled the stretcher and Paris followed, Wayne walking beside her. The detectives stood talking by the ambulance's open back doors and looked up as they came out.

Rowan turned away from them to face Paris. ‘The first one is always a shock.'

She wiped her eyes. How much earlier could he have died? She was sure she'd seen him move, twitch a little, a couple of times during the trip. Maybe he really had only just gone right then, right as they were pulling into the hospital.

‘Rowan,' Marconi said.

‘Give us a minute,' he said. He looked into Paris's face. ‘Take a big deep breath. This is the job. People die. We do what we can, but people still die.'