Chapter 12

chapter twelve

Now

‘How would you describe your parents’ marriage?’

Detective Senior Constable Christina Khoury flipped the page in her notebook and studied the man opposite her: Logan Delaney. The second of Joy Delaney’s four grown-up children. Thirty-seven years old. The slouched posture and relaxed drawl of a surfer dude, but the watchful eyes of someone with an agenda. Looked like a gardener but apparently taught business studies. She and Ethan were interviewing him in the lobby of the community college where he worked. He said his next class started in twenty minutes.

They sat across from Logan in low vinyl tub chairs with a small round table in between them. A noticeboard behind Logan’s head advertised evening courses: So you want to do your own soft furnishings? So you want to write a memoir? So you want to master small talk? So you want to get married? Some people actually did a course to get married? She must remember to tell Nico about that. Or maybe not. He might want to do the course. He had random bursts of enthusiasm for bizarre activities.

‘I’d describe their marriage as normal,’ answered Logan. ‘Good.’ He rotated his right shoulder forward and then backward. ‘They’ve been married nearly fifty years.’

‘Shoulder trouble?’ Christina pretended to care. She cared about finding out what had happened to this man’s mother.

‘It’s fine.’ He stilled his shoulder and sat up straighter.

‘So, they’ve been married nearly fifty years. That’s a long time.’

‘It is.’

‘Obviously every marriage has its ups and downs, its conflicts,’ she said, and waited.

A beat.

Another beat.

He raised a single eyebrow. Still he didn’t speak. He was very much like his father. He didn’t rush to fill the gaps.

‘Are you married yourself, Logan?’

He looked at his left hand as if to check. ‘No. I’m not. Never married.’

‘In a relationship?’

He smiled wearily. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘Would you say your parents have a complicated relationship?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘They have an excellent relationship. They’re doubles champions. You have to be good communicators to play doubles successfully.’

‘What about off the court?’

‘They ran a very successful business together for thirty years.’

‘So their marriage hasn’t been . . .’ She looked down at her notes. ‘Rocky at times?’

‘Every marriage is rocky at times.’ He peered over as if he were trying to see what she had written down. ‘Did someone actually say that to you?’

‘I believe your sister told the police officers that things had been – what was the word she used? – a little “tumultuous” lately.’

‘Which sister?’ He lifted his hand to stop her answering. ‘I know which sister.’ He seemed to come to a sudden decision. ‘Look. Can I get one thing straight? Are you guys treating my father as a suspect?’

Of course I am, mate. You know I am.

She assumed Logan had seen the healing scratch marks on his father’s face. Stan Delaney said they came from climbing through a hedge to retrieve a tennis ball. They looked to Christina like classic defence wounds.

Yesterday’s search of Joy and Stan Delaney’s home had revealed little of interest. The house was clean and tidy. It was notably clean and tidy. No signs that remotely indicated a struggle, except for one thing: a faint crack that snaked across the glass of a framed photo in the hallway. The photo was of a child holding a tennis trophy.

‘What happened here?’ Christina had asked Stan Delaney, and he said, ‘No idea.’

It was a lie. Just like the story about searching through the hedge for a tennis ball was a lie. They’d seized the framed picture in the faint hope that it might contain blood or hair.

Stan Delaney had answered all of her questions yesterday with little to no detail. He said yes, he and his wife had argued, but he refused to say what the argument was about. He said yes, it was out of character for his wife to go away like this. He said yes, it was strange that she had not taken her toothbrush, or any clothes as far as he could tell. He was obviously a smart man. He knew he didn’t have to be polite and that he couldn’t be compelled to say anything he didn’t want to say. He was good. He was bloody good. But Christina was better.

‘Your mother is missing and I’m hearing that’s out of character,’ she said to Logan. ‘So all we’re doing at this stage is collecting information.’

‘Dad is worried sick. He’s not sleeping or eating. He’s not coping well.’

Christina tapped her pen against the notepad. ‘May I say, you don’t seem that worried about your mother, Logan.’

He raised his eyebrows. Waited for the question.

‘Yet it was you and your sister who filed the missing persons report.’

Again, he waited for the question.

‘As you know, we’re holding a press conference later this afternoon. We’re putting a lot of time and effort into finding your mother.’

She saw his good manners kick in. ‘Thank you. We’re grateful. We’re worried she might have had an accident. Or that she might have had some sort of . . . episode, or something.’

‘Episode?’ Christina pounced. ‘Do you mean a mental health kind of episode?’

‘I guess so.’ He shifted in his seat.

‘Has she been showing signs of depression?’

‘Not really,’ he said. He winced and then said carefully, ‘Maybe a little bit.’

‘Can you tell me more about that?’ said Christina.

‘She’s been not quite herself.’ He looked past Christina’s head. ‘She may have been feeling a bit . . . down.’

‘What about?’

‘Well,’ he said, and she saw him consider and then discard the truthful answer. ‘I’m not exactly sure.’

‘So she sent a text to each of her children saying she was going away, but she left no message for your father. Did you find that strange?’

He shrugged. ‘They’d argued. You know that.’

She sure did know that.

‘My dad doesn’t have a mobile phone so she obviously couldn’t text him.’

‘She could have called him on the landline, she could have left a note, she could have found some other way to communicate with him, surely?’ pointed out Christina. The simplest answer is most often correct.

‘I understand how this looks to an outsider,’ said Logan. ‘But you’re wrong.’

No-one wants to believe their parents are capable of murdering each other, no matter what they’ve witnessed.

Christina pushed the point. ‘Your mother’s text message didn’t say, Please let your father know I’m going away.’

‘Her text message made no sense,’ Logan reminded her.

Christina said nothing. She waited. Sometimes her job was all about waiting.

Logan banged a closed knuckle on the edge of his chair as if knocking impatiently on a closed door. He said, ‘You can’t really be thinking that my seventy-year-old father murdered my mother, disposed of the body, and sent us all a garbled text from her phone to throw us off the scent. Jesus Christ. It’s fantastical. It’s just . . . not possible.’

‘Our records show your father never once tried to call your mother’s mobile phone,’ said Christina.

Her first murder case involved a man making authentically frantic-sounding calls to over twenty friends and family members, but not a single call to his supposedly missing wife. Why would he call her? He knew she wouldn’t answer.

‘You’ll have to ask him about that,’ said Logan.

‘So where do you think your mother is, Logan? What do you think is going on here?’

Logan continued his previous line of thought, as if trying to work it out himself. ‘So he sends the fake text, and then he hides the phone under their bed? Of all places? Wouldn’t he destroy it? If he’s capable of murdering someone, don’t you think he’s smart enough to destroy a phone?’

Christina said, ‘Perhaps he wasn’t thinking clearly.’

‘I don’t know where she is, and you’re wrong, I am worried, because you’re right, it isstrange, and it is out of character.’ Logan shifted about in his seat and gave a distracted wave to someone who had walked out of a classroom. ‘But at the same time, I feel like maybe she needed to get away for a while, or maybe she’s making a point.’

Christina said, ‘Why would your mother need to make a point?’

He lifted his hands.

‘What point would she be making?’

He shook his head. He looked at a spot on the wall and blew air out of his mouth as if it were a long thin stream of cigarette smoke.

She allowed a hint of aggression to come into her voice. The obfuscation was starting to annoy her. ‘That doesn’t make sense. You say your parents had a perfect relationship and now you’re saying maybe your mother has disappeared to make a point.’

‘I never said it was a perfect relationship. There were issues. Like every relationship. Like you said.’

‘Can you be more specific about those issues, please?’

‘Not really.’ He sighed. ‘How well could you analyse your parents’ marriage?’

‘My parents are divorced,’ said Christina shortly.

She could be very specific about the issues. They divorced over a plate. After he retired, her dad got into the habit of making himself a hummus and tomato sandwich every day at eleven am. Christina’s mother suggested he rinse the plate and put it in the dishwasher. He refused. It somehow went against his principles. This went on for years until one day Christina’s mother picked up the plate from the sink, threw it like a frisbee at her dad’s head and said, ‘I want a divorce.’ Her father was baffled and wounded. (Not physically wounded. He ducked.) He finally concluded that Christina’s mother was ‘deranged’ and remarried within the year. Meanwhile Christina’s mother got into hot yoga and The Handmaid’s Tale. ‘Under his eye,’ she said darkly, each time Christina rang her to talk about her wedding arrangements. She said she was very happy for Christina’s dad’s second wife to be at the wedding just as long as she was ‘never within her line of sight’.

‘What about housework?’ she asked Logan. ‘Any issues there?’

‘Housework?’ Logan blinked the way that men tended to blink when women brought up frivolous domestic issues in serious settings. It was just a plate, her father kept saying to Christina. He never understood what that plate represented: Disrespect. Disregard. Contempt.

‘My mother did the housework,’ said Logan. ‘That was never an issue between them. It was a traditional marriage in that way. She’s . . . of that generation.’

‘But didn’t she help run the tennis school as well?’

Logan looked impatient. ‘I’m not saying it was fair.’

She waited.

He said, ‘I’m telling you I never once saw them argue about housework.’ Was that an unconscious curl of his lip on the word ‘housework’? Did his eyes just flick over to Ethan for masculine support? Can you believe this chick? Or was she projecting her own unconscious biases? She never saw her parents argue about housework either, and yet that plate in the sink ended their marriage. He just ignores me, Christina. I ask so nicely and he just ignores me. No-one was too old or well mannered for the sudden snap of rage.

‘So what did they argue about, then?’

He looked away. ‘My dad wasn’t always an easy man. He’s different now.’

And now we’re getting somewhere. ‘Was he ever violent towards your mother?’

‘Jesus. No. Never.’ He looked back up at her, seemingly appalled. ‘You’re getting the wrong impression.’

Yet she saw a flicker of something: a question, a thought, a memory. It was gone before she could grab it.

‘Never?’ she probed.

‘Never,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve made you think that, because that is so wrong. Dad could just be . . . moody. That’s all I meant. He shut down when he was upset. Like a lot of men of his age. But he adored my mother.’ He muttered something inaudible.

‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that.’

He smiled uneasily. ‘I said, he adores my mother. He still does adore my mother.’

In a moment he was going to shut down himself.

Christina changed direction. ‘What can you tell me about this woman who lived with your parents for a while, last year, was it? Both your sisters mentioned her.’

‘Savannah,’ he said heavily. ‘Yeah, well, speaking of complicated. That got complicated for a while there.’

‘In what way?’

‘In every way.’