Expectant, page 6
‘Pass the detective a biscuit, Timi,’ Sina said as she placed the mugs of tea onto woven coasters atop the coffee table and sat down in the armchair opposite. I’d hoped I’d get to speak with Timi alone, but, small consolation, at least it was just his mum sitting in, as Felipo Senior was at work.
‘Would you like a biscuit, miss?’ Timi asked as he proffered a plate of shortbread.
‘Take a couple,’ Sina said, ‘You’ve got more than one mouth to feed there.’
There was no argument from me and I popped two onto the saucer.
‘You sit next to the detective, Timi.’
The boy looked slightly embarrassed, but none the less plonked down onto the sofa next to me. It was only half past three so he hadn’t had time to change out of his school uniform. It was good that he was back in the classroom. The routine of day-to-day life was hopefully helping him to process the trauma he’d been through. I felt a twinge of guilt that I was about to try and bring it all back.
‘How are you feeling about everything now, Timi?’ I asked.
He shrugged in that awkward and extended way only teenage boys seemed to manage. ‘I guess I’m feeling better. I just still feel really sad for the lady, and her family, you know. Especially when I found out about the baby. That’s really bad.’
‘Yeah, everyone is doing their best to try and find the baby. Hopefully whoever did this is looking after her, keeping her safe.’
‘Do you really think that? They haven’t hurt the baby?’ he asked. He was twirling the shortbread biscuit in his hand round and round with his fingers, like one of those fidget gadgets that were all the rage not so long ago.
‘I honestly think the baby is safe somewhere. I don’t think they would have gone to all of that trouble, done the awful thing they had done, to not keep the baby safe. And that is one of the reasons I’m here again to talk with you. We have to find the person who murdered that woman, and we have to find the baby and return her to her family. They need justice, and she needs to be with her loved ones.’
Timi nodded, still spinning the shortbread. I noted the rather large crumbs detaching themselves and falling down to the floor. I glanced over at his mum, her eyes followed where mine had come from, and when they returned to mine she merely gave a tight smile and a small shrug of the shoulders. I was grateful she let it lie.
‘You’ve had a few days to think things over, and I’m sure you’ve replayed everything in your head time and time again. But looking back, is there anything that comes to mind that you didn’t tell us on the night? Anything else that seemed out of place or odd? Were there any people that you recall being around near the alleyway?’ It was too many questions at once, but hopefully they would start the ball rolling’
‘No, not really. There definitely wasn’t anyone else down the alleyway except her.’ He took a wee gulp, and I could see his eyes start to fill. ‘There were a couple of cars parked down there. That’s why we didn’t see her at first, because she was down and around the corner, in that bit off the side where the bird picture is.’ I had no recollection of a bird picture anywhere down there, even though I’d been down that alleyway before to go to the Pequeño Bar, and I’d looked at the scene photos. I was going to have to go down and check it out in person, get a feel for the scene, but it wasn’t something I was looking forward to. The place was forever tainted now.
‘And one of those cars was a big car, an SUV, so it really blocked the alley so you couldn’t see down that bit. The only reason I found her was because I heard her, you know, groaning.’ He was beginning to punctuate words with sniffs.
‘You okay, Timi?’ his mum asked gently. Sina appeared to have gotten over her initial upset that her son had been out tagging and vandalising property in the middle of the night. Time and hindsight had put things in perspective.
‘Yeah, I’m good, Mum,’ he said. He flicked the tips of his fingers, causing a wee cascade of crumbs to shower the woven mat. ‘I don’t know that I can help much more than that.’
The big SUV he talked about must have been the victim’s car. According to the reports she had a white Kia Sportage that had been located at the scene. It was a favourite SUV of the school-run mums so there were plenty of them doing family duty in Dunedin. Aleisha had worked as a manager at the nearby Etrusco restaurant and had use of a carpark down the alleyway, but she had finished up for maternity leave two weeks earlier. Her husband had said she was out at a book group that evening, so was baffled as to why she had been back in the vicinity of work. She hadn’t mentioned to him, or the group, that she was going to pop in to see anyone or pick something up on the way home. And the restaurant had closed up by 9.00pm that night anyway. So why on earth was she there?
‘Going back to Monday night, when you were walking down Moray Place towards the alleyway, did you notice any other people about?’
‘There were a few people around, you know. I guess coming out from the bars around, mostly guys. There were lots of cars though, all the carparks were full.’ That made sense as there’d been a seventies tribute band in concert on at the town hall that night that didn’t finish until after 11.00pm.
‘No one out with a baby pram?’ It was a long shot, and I felt slightly foolish asking it. You’d look pretty obvious out at that hour of the night when most people would have babies tucked up in their beds, except for the poor parents who had the ones that didn’t do sleeping. I hoped to God my one did sleeping.
‘No, it was late.’
‘So what time would that have been again?’
‘That was around half-ten, I suppose, when we went back to the alley.’
My ears pricked up at his wording.
‘What do you mean by “when we went back to the alley?” Had you been there earlier?’
‘Yeah. We’d been hanging out around out the front of the library for a bit, in the plaza there with the whirligig sculpture thing, cos the first time we went to check out the alleyway we couldn’t go down.’
This was new.
‘Why couldn’t you go down there then?’
‘Too risky,’ he said. ‘There were lights on in that little bar as you go down the tunnel, so too much of a chance someone might see us, so we kept on walking down the street and found somewhere to hang out for a bit.’
‘Could you see who was in the bar?’
‘Nah, you can’t see that much of it from the street, and we didn’t want to be obvious, so didn’t turn around and take a look. When we came back later, they had all packed up and gone home. The lights were off.’
‘How much later?’
‘Half an hour, I guess.’
‘And when you went back and everything was closed, there were still some cars down there?’
‘Yeah, that’s right. There was the white SUV, and another smaller, dark-coloured car in the courtyard. I don’t know about any in that carpark under the building, it was too creepy in there so we didn’t check.’
So if the bar had still been open, there would have been a few people around who may have gone further down the alleyway if they were parked there, especially if there were no spaces on the street. I wondered where the staff parked? Indigo Room wasn’t usually open on a Monday, so they must have had a private function on. It was another of those atmospheric, quirky little restaurant bars that Dunedin did so well. I’d seen it described as a Bohemian space, and I’d enjoyed an evening or two in there before. One of its features was the distinctive views out of the windows that lined the sloping alleyway. You didn’t really pay any attention to cars going up or down the tunnel-like covered entrance passage, but people walking always caught your eye. It was a bit like that pretending to go downstairs gag, but in reverse. You couldn’t help but track people progressing from full body view to feet because the last window in the row was pretty much at shoe level. If the killer had walked out with a freshly minted baby while the bar was open they might have been noticed, but if they had been parked down there it would have been easier for them to drive out of there without turning a head. Cars were handily soundproof too.
But it still seemed so incredibly risky, if you were planning a crime, to have a location with only one escape route and such a high chance of being seen. Going back to the bar patrons and staff was something worth pursuing, and reviewing traffic movement again on any security cameras in the vicinity. Timi’s information potentially narrowed the time frame for searching cars. Even if the number was high – Moray Place was busy – there could be a chance that there was a vehicle registered to someone with a connection to the victim. We could get lucky, and at the moment we’d take every bit of luck we could get.
CHAPTER 16
Café visits were going to become a lot more of a logistical challenge in the very near future, so I was making the most of their services while I could. Maggie had a convenient break between lectures so didn’t need much convincing when I texted her to suggest a quick cuppa. This time it was at RDC, one of those quirky little places accessed from a carpark or down a dodgy-looking brick corridor off George Street that you didn’t know was there unless you knew it was there. Its courtyard and eclectic cave-like interior made it a bit of a sanctuary from the semi-bright lights of the city. It was a fave of mine because it took the usual notion of a cinnamon scroll – one of my café staples – and tipped it on its head by making it a cardamom scroll. Genius. It also had one of the largest collections of VHS movies I’d seen in Dunedin. They played on one of the smallest TV-video players known to mankind. Today Sarah, Ludo and her rag-tag friends were trying to negotiate the labyrinth in search of baby Toby. Considering the current situation, the timing seemed perfect. Although, for me it was a case of mixed feelings about the villain. Ahhhhh, Jareth.
I tore my eyes away from the pint-sized screen and returned my attention to the business at hand.
‘You were really quite sure this baby was a girl, weren’t you?’
Maggie smiled as she bit into a butter-slathered chunk of her perennial favourite, the cheese scone. It had been toasted in the sandwich press, and the delectable smell of all that caramelised cheese was making me drool.
‘Not a doubt in my mind,’ she said. At least she had the decency to chew and swallow before replying. ‘Was happy to wager the house on it.’
‘You don’t own the house.’
She shrugged. ‘Minor technicality.’
‘But seriously, how did you know. I mean, really know? It wasn’t just a lucky guess?’ The girl-or-boy thing was a fifty-fifty chance, so anyone could make a lucky guess, but Maggie’s luck ran at one-hundred-percent accurate as far as I was aware, which even with my fairly average understanding of maths I realised was statistically improbable.
‘I just do.’
‘Well, that’s not much of an answer,’ I said. ‘It’s up there with “just because”.’
‘You’re not going to let this go, are you?’
‘Nope.’
‘Any particular reason? Are you planning on employing me down at the station as a baby-gender screening device?’
The thought had crossed my mind. ‘Well, you’d be a cheaper than some of the other tests. All we’d need to do was feed you a scone and a coffee every now and again. And you’d be a lot friendlier.’
She tapped on the table, clacking her nails, which were painted orange today.
‘Firstly, my rates would go up, and secondly, it doesn’t quite work like that. I have to know the woman, have a connection with her. Can’t turn it on and off on demand.’
Typical – up the pay rate.
‘We could probably stump up a wine and chippies salary,’ I said. ‘Although with the current budget, it could be a stretch. Pity your ability isn’t on tap though. And you still haven’t said how you know. Come on, I’m curious.’
Maggie let out a sigh, like the question was the biggest imposition in the world. The cheese scone had now gone south, and she reached over for what remained of her large flat white to wash it down. ‘Well, if we’re going to thrash this one out, let me start with the knowing you were pregnant thing.’
Cool, I was going to get double bang for my buck. I leaned back in the chair and reached for the last quarter of my cardamom scroll before Maggs tried to claim it. Someone had to finish it, and it was going to be me. She looked at it heading to my mouth, gave a little frown, then clearly realised it wasn’t safe standing between a pregnant woman and her tucker.
‘Realising you were in the family way, that was like a visceral, physical thing. It’s the same with everyone. I’ll look at a woman, and it’s like I really see them, they come into this amazing sharp clarity and the world blurs out around them, and then it’s like … well a tilt-shift is the best way to describe it. It feels like the entire Earth tilts beneath me, in a vertigo kind of a way.’ She looked up at the ceiling, as if finding the right words, then looked back at me intently. ‘And it’s a two-way street. It’s as if the baby is reaching out and moving Papatūānuku, Mother Earth, to let me know they are there. They want to be seen. When your girl reached out, it was really strong, the tilt. We felt each other, connected. And she felt like a girl. Boys feel different.’
‘You know, Maggs, for a scientist, you can be freakily airy-fairy.’
‘Who ever said that science and being attuned to nature had to be mutually exclusive?’
It was a good point.
‘That’s true. Down on the farm Dad always talked about having a feel for the land, and that his love for it was lodged under his skin, deep in his bones. He knew when something wasn’t right, when an animal was ailing, or the soil was lacking in something. It was a feeling in his gut, both instinct and experience. I even watched him do dowsing – you know, that water-divining thing with the forked stick – and always thought it was a load of tosh until they drilled down for a bore and sure enough, there was the water. I guess that’s the same kind of a thing.’
‘Yeah, like it or not we are connected to this earth in so many ways. Although, I think more people are starting to realise that it’s a facet of life we ignore at our peril. And I think if people took more pleasure in and notice of nature they’d be a damn sight happier.’
She paused for a bit to check her coffee cup, looking crushed that it was empty.
‘Your dad was such a cool man. He would have been so proud and excited for you, you know that?’ She gave me a rueful smile.
‘Yeah, I know.’
The thought of Dad and what he was going to miss out on brought a lump to my throat, and Magg’s face swam out of focus. She reached across and gave my hand a squeeze. His loss still felt so raw. There wasn’t a day passed when I didn’t wish I could hear his really bad jokes one more time, eat his signature super-crunchy, borderline burnt apple crumble, or share a conspiratorial eye-roll with him behind Mum’s back. I wished with all my heart he could have been here to meet his granddaughter.
‘He would have spoiled this little girl rotten,’ I said.
‘He sure would have. He’d have loved her to pieces. But don’t you worry. She’ll get plenty of spoiling. I am going to be that kind of aunty. The kind that will spoil her worse than rotten, the one that will teach her all the bad tricks and how to wind up her parents, provide her with a repertoire of smart-arse comebacks fit for any occasion. And I promise to guide her in making totally outrageous fashion statements.’
I could just imagine. It made me wish I’d had that kind of an aunty to grow up with.
‘It’s what I’m counting on,’ I said with a laugh. ‘That way when she turns into an opinionated and stroppy young woman, my mum can blame you.’
CHAPTER 17
My catch-up with Maggie had left me feeling a damn sight chirpier and had rekindled my usual optimism about the world. Alas, the benefits quickly evaporated when I got back to work and some of the team reported on what they’d been working on.
The citizens of Dunedin had embraced the call-out for information and had responded with unbridled enthusiasm. Having an anonymous hotline was both a blessing and a curse. In this instance it was resulting in a lot of running around and following up, with not much reward. People had phoned in with ‘critical information’ that ranged from the crack-pot to the downright malicious. And of course there were the ‘why haven’t you caught them yet’, ‘why haven’t you found her yet’, ‘you suck’ brigade. The reach was not limited to Dunedin – reports of suddenly appearing offspring were popping up in towns and cities across the country. It wasn’t quite mass hysteria yet, but I could see how it could easily get there.
On the crack-pot end, someone who must have been smoking way too much of something trippy had reported that their rural neighbour was baby-farming at scale, to supply an international black market for babies, and had even built proper facilities to do it. They were convinced they were making their millions from it. When Otto had paid a visit to the pretty flash facilities, he found that yes, there was baby-farming going on – of the puppy variety, and not to supply international black markets, but Kiwi’s insatiable demand for Labradoodles. At least that waste of time had a cutesy factor.
On the not-surprised end of the scale, as predicted, there was a Dunedin family that had been blessed with an out-of-the-blue adoption in the most scrutinised week of the year. Back in my Mataura days, a friend and her husband were on the waiting list to adopt. They had been trying to conceive for years, but after several failed rounds of fertility treatments and lost pregnancies had decided that trying for adoption was the least heart-breaking way to go. I always thought they would make amazing parents, but they had to prove it to the powers that be, which was fair enough – you wouldn’t want to place a baby in a completely inappropriate and unsafe environment. But the checks and screening process they had to go through was pretty intense, including me being interviewed as a referee, and some of it was outright intrusive. It was worth it in the end, because we got to toast their acceptance as prospects. Essie and Jack had been warned a baby could arrive at short notice, and, boy oh boy, they meant short notice. She got the phone call from Oranga Tamariki while at work in the pharmacy in Gore and had literally two hours before a new addition to the family would be delivered to their door. It was a hell of a mad scramble, but a joyous and slightly shocked one. Best day of their lives. I imagined some well-meaning neighbours of the newly insta-family in Dunedin, not being in the know, had taken the good-citizen approach and reported the sudden appearance of a newborn. I hoped it hadn’t tainted what should otherwise have been a time of celebration.
