Lethal Factor Read online

  I had a lot of calls on my time, I thought, with the kids, the delicate negotiations still required to keep—if not the peace, at least a smouldering truce with the ex-wife. My work at the moment was also extremely interesting and busy—and promising to become even more so.

  My mobile rang and I found the earpiece and applied it. ‘McCain,’ I said, my mind still not quite free from the landscape of a tiny island off the west coast of Scotland.

  ‘I’m just letting you know,’ said my colleague Florence Horsefall, ‘that those clothes have come in from the most recent campus assault with a request to search for DNA material.’

  We do a lot of DNA profiling as well, providing the Crown with evidence essential for convictions. Sometimes we are cross-examined on our findings and if a person wants to term himself or herself an expert in any forensic field, they had better be good. And have thick skins. Because the defence will do everything in its power to destroy us and our evidence. That is its job in the adversarial system we’ve inherited.

  Florence’s call reminded me that two women students had, on separate occasions, been attacked while walking late at night along a path connecting the university union buildings with the residential colleges. After knocking them to the ground the assailant had pulled their trousers or skirts and underwear right down to their ankles. Their handbags had been snatched, resulting in more work for the Criminalistics section. The first attack had been two weeks earlier; the second only a day or so ago. I wondered if there’d been other, unreported incidents.

  ‘You asked me to let you know when the clothes arrived,’ Florence was saying. ‘And so I am.’

  Florence is a tricky personality, but there’s no doubting her scientific fastidiousness and integrity. She’d recently undertaken an interstate conference on DNA strains in weaponised pathogens so I might be calling on her expertise if the worst came to the worst.

  ‘Thanks, Florence,’ I said. ‘I’m actually on my way down. Are you going to run the samples?’

  ‘I was,’ she said, sniffing ever so slightly, ‘unless you wanted it otherwise.’ Our lab has an automated DNA extraction and testing system that can run overnight or over the weekend, capable of running nearly a hundred samples at a time. In profiling, we use what is known as ‘junk’ DNA; material that seems to play no part in anything we know about. Although all humans are 99.9 per cent identical, our genome has three billion different pieces, so the difference of even a fraction of a percentage will create millions of variations. In our system, we use ten points of comparison, the first one being the sex marker.

  ‘I’d be grateful if you’d do it,’ I said. ‘See if it matches up with the first assault.’

  She rang off and I unplugged the earpiece, thinking of the walking track at the university used by the students on their way back home to their various residences where both assaults had happened. Despite the corner of the track being cleared of all overhanging shrubbery and the installation of a powerful light near the murkiest part of the pathway after the first attack, whoever was carrying these assaults out hadn’t been deterred. I put the earpiece and the postcard in the glove box, glancing again at the peaceful ruins of the ancient convent, now roofed with wide blue sky instead of slate or timber. It was impossible to imagine the lives of those women eight hundred years ago.

  It wasn’t much easier to imagine the lives of the nuns who lived in the convent I was about to visit and, as I drove, I couldn’t help wondering about why a nun might end up murdered.

  All over the world, or at least the parts of the world where such investigations are tolerated, the sexual predatoriness of clerical males on children and the systematic corruption in religious hierarchies that sheltered them for so long was being well and truly exposed. But the sisters, although some of them had been guilty of cruelty and ill-treatment of those in their care, hadn’t received anything like the same attention. It was far too early for any theorising on my part, but a motive of vengeance seemed as possible as anything else.

  The mist was still around the hills and slopes near Canberra, and Lake George was a shimmering mirage of pastel striations as I hurried south. In what seemed no time at all I was turning off at the Heronvale exit, past the township and out onto the highway again. A fading signpost directed a sudden left-hand turn and there I was, in the broad dead-end with the stone pillars and wrought-iron letters spelling out the name of the Convent of the Assumption.

  I drove through the wrought-iron gates and around a circular driveway where a ghostly and eroding statue of the Blessed Virgin treading on a new moon and the serpent stood on an island surrounded by severely pruned rose bushes.

  I followed a hand-lettered signpost directing me around the back of the building where I found a small cement parking area adjacent to a chicken coop and a decent kitchen garden area. Business-like raised vegetable beds contained straight ranks of broccoli, cauliflower, spinach and onions fenced off behind chicken wire. I parked beside a police car and made my way back to the front entrance, passing the brick two-storey building, an L-shaped wing off to my right, and a small cloister on the left. Several small honeyeaters splashed themselves in a stone birdbath. I guessed the building to be seventy or eighty years old, only saved from complete gracelessness by the established grounds and rose gardens. Apart from their grounds, most church buildings in Australia are irredeemably ugly.

  I stepped up into the porch and pressed the bell. After a long silence the door opened to reveal a small woman, dressed in black, with a short veil pinned to her head. I remembered that in some enclosed orders, the extern sister, the doorkeeper, takes less restrictive vows than the fully professed nuns, and wondered if this was the reason for the simple habit. She had the waxy damp look of someone who doesn’t get out much and I put her age at about sixty plus.

  ‘Jack McCain,’ I said, showing her my ID. ‘I’m a scientist with the Federal Police.’

  ‘Another policeman?’ she asked, squinting at my wallet. She stepped back to allow me inside and I stood there a minute while she relocked the door. I took in the surroundings, the polished floorboards, the walls with framed and faded prints of sentimental religious art mixed with dark copies of the old masters and the odd faded Cézanne and Monet prints. A tall grandfather clock donged one o’clock as we walked down the echoing corridor.

  ‘It’s been a terrible shock,’ said the nun. ‘We’re all very distressed about it. Sister Gertrude was a great favourite. I don’t know why such a terrible thing should happen here.’ Then she put her head down and charged ahead, perhaps thinking she’d said too much—and to a man.

  ‘I’m here to find the answer to that question, Sister—’ I said.

  ‘Ethelbertha,’ she offered as I followed her around corners and up and down steps, where we passed statues of various saints whose names I could probably still call to mind if I searched, and I wondered again if nun’s names in this order were chosen or foisted on them by sadistic superiors. I couldn’t imagine a young woman choosing ‘Ethelbertha’.

  I realised we’d come to the end of the L-shaped wing of the building I’d noticed as I rang the doorbell, passing closed doors on each side of the corridor, rather like an old country hotel. No one had bothered with crime scene tape here. There was simply a chair blocking the passage with another hand-lettered sign, this one reading ‘Private—No entry.’ I could see the last doorway on the left was open and I heard voices and movement.

  I was delighted to hear the sound of Bob Edwards’s voice as I walked to the door and looked into a pleasant enough room, with a wooden table and chair near a wide window, a spotless white candlewick counterpane on the bed, a white basin and taps against one wall and a wooden kneeler, standing almost against the far wall. Alongside this was the victim who, stretched out in death, from this angle looked like little more than a mound of dark material. Another nun, alive although very still, stood beside the window and turne
d with a start when I knocked. Bob, in spacesuit and gloves, closed his bag of tricks and looked up. My friend’s frown turned to his rare smile as he recognised me. We didn’t shake hands.

  ‘Jack, I thought I might miss you,’ he said and nodded across the room.

  ‘You know Brian Kruger from Heronvale Police?’ he continued. ‘He’s really in charge here. I’m just the monkey.’

  Brian, his thick eyebrows arched in what I used to think was constant surprise but had come to realise was simply his normal expression, greeted me. ‘We’ve done the housework so you can come in,’ he added. ‘Sister here has just arrived, too.’

  The tall nun turned from the window. ‘Who is this?’ she asked, hostile about yet another strange man invading the sacrosanct cell of her murdered sister.

  I introduced myself. She remained tightlipped as I studied the dead woman on the floor, arms and legs outflung from under her long black dress, the surfaces of her eyes drying out under the semi-closed lids, veil askew, a dark pool near her neck and a lot more blood on the floor. I’d seen many dead bodies, male and female, young and old, perfectly intact or broken and mutilated. But I’d never had a dead nun on my books. Her face had an odd expression. Often the dead assume a collapsed mask-like look, or sometimes their features are frozen in horror or fear. Occasionally, they look blissful. Sister Gertrude’s expression was ambiguous. Because of the way she was lying, it even looked as if she were just about to smile at some private joke.

  From this angle, I couldn’t see any injury until Bob lifted the hem of the black serge habit. I stared. On her left leg, just above the black lace-up shoe, was a deep laceration, a slashing cut, or cuts, that had bled profusely. It would be interesting to see what Doc Marshall had to say about that, I thought. It looked to me like a knife cut. I looked more closely because there was something odd about the laceration—too complex for a mere hacking blow.

  ‘Take a look at this, Bob,’ I said. My former colleague came over and squatted beside me. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Looks like there’s more than one wound,’ he said finally. ‘And it looks like knife injuries.’

  ‘It’s been shaped deliberately,’ I said. ‘If you look carefully, you can make out an upstroke and a downstroke.’

  Bob peered more closely then finally stood up again. ‘Might be more to it than meets the eye,’ he said in his cautious way. ‘It’ll have to wait till the autopsy.’

  I turned my attention to the dead nun’s face again and noticed a tiny fleck of some white substance in the orbit of her left eye and a smear of blood near her chin on the right. I turned back to the living nun. ‘I’m very sorry, Sister,’ I started to say, attempting condolences, but I was interrupted.

  ‘Mother,’ the tall nun corrected me. ‘Mother Anacletus. I am the Mother Superior here.’

  Anacletus. Where do they get them from? I walked around the dead woman, taking her in from as many angles as I could.

  ‘The doc has been and gone. And Photographic,’ said Bob, referring to the video boys. ‘We were just about to leave ourselves.’

  ‘Any sexual interference?’ I whispered.

  Bob shook his head. ‘Not that we can tell so far. Have to wait till she’s down at the morgue and they can take a proper look.’

  ‘When can we attend to our dead sister?’ said Mother Anacletus, distressed at our conversation. ‘It’s dreadful, leaving her just lying like this.’ She gave a little cough as if to cover a break in her tightly controlled demeanour. ‘We are a contemplative order. We live a simple, prayerful life. I can’t understand how this could have happened.’

  I wondered if her last sentence was logically connected to the preceding ones. I moved to reassure her where I could.

  ‘As soon as possible,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid the body will have to be removed for autopsy.’

  Anacletus looked shocked. ‘Removed?’ she said. ‘Removed where?’

  It was taking some time for the reality of the situation to become clear to the Mother Superior. I explained to her in my nicest public relations way how every dead body becomes the property of the coroner, who must examine any suspicious death. There would have to be an autopsy and a full report delivered to the coroner’s office. ‘Mother Anacletus,’ I concluded, ‘what is this woman’s background?’

  ‘Her name in religion is Sister Mary Gertrude. She was once Katica Babic. She’s been a sister here for just under thirty years.’ I made a note of the Slavic-sounding name.

  ‘Family?’

  ‘Both her parents are dead,’ Anacletus said. ‘May they rest in peace. They were wonderfully devout people.’

  I wrote down these words, underscoring them heavily. Whenever I hear phrases like ‘wonderfully devout’ I worry. I made a mental note to ask Charlie, my clinical psych brother, why this might be. ‘Any other relatives?’ I asked, pen poised over my notebook.

  ‘She has an aunt,’ said the tall nun. ‘Her mother’s sister. As far as I know, the aunt is a maiden lady and there is no other family.’

  It had been a long time since I’d heard anyone described as a maiden lady. ‘May I have her name?’

  ‘I just can’t think of it at the moment,’ said the tall nun. ‘I can get all the details for you from the office.’

  I looked at the pale dead face again, the darkening blood, the tiny fleck of white. ‘Is this exactly how you found her?’ I asked.

  Anacletus’s grey eyes fixed on mine, but there was a pause and I had the distinct impression that she was playing for time.

  ‘I was not the first on the scene,’ she said. ‘But I came as soon as Sister Felicitas woke me.’

  ‘Sister Felicitas?’ I queried.

  ‘Sister Felicitas found her,’ Bob said. ‘Her room’s across the hallway.’

  ‘And where is Sister Felicitas now?’ I asked.

  Mother Anacletus looked out the window. ‘She’d be about,’ she said.

  ‘How did he get in?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re not sure yet,’ said Bob. ‘There are some tool marks on the fire stair door that we’re treating as the point of entry for the moment.’

  I stepped out into the hallway again and noticed that the fire stairs were only a few metres away. If this was, in fact, the killer’s point of entry, I thought, he’d penetrated the building as close to his victim as he could. I turned that fact over in my mind.

  ‘We took wipe samples and even got a few partials from the door,’ said Bob, pointing with his pencil. ‘Might be useful once we’ve compared them with everyone who has rightful business here.’

  I walked up the hall and found the fire stair door. It had been jemmied open from the outside, but if someone on the inside had murdered the woman, the killer might have deliberately done this to point investigators in the wrong direction.

  I looked closer at the damage, hoping to find some fibre from a jumper, anything, but all I discovered was splintered wood and paint fragments.

  I gathered some of them up in case we ever found the jemmy or breaking tool he’d used; maybe there’d be a trace of this paint. After eliminating those, any strange print would indeed be the subject of intense scrutiny by NAFIS, the national fingerprinting database.

  I went back into the room and looked out the window.

  ‘The local blokes found some footprints outside in the garden,’ Bob was saying. ‘They’ve taken them away too.’ Casts of footprints are only helpful if we ever find the shoes that match them. ‘Sister Gertrude hadn’t locked her door,’ said Bob, indicating the door to the corridor. ‘According to the Sister who found her.’

  ‘We take security quite seriously,’ Mother Anacletus said. ‘We had some rather unpleasant incidents last year.’

  ‘What were they?’

  Anacletus pretended not to hear me. ‘But it’s up to the individual sister as
to whether or not she locks her own room,’ she said.

  ‘The unpleasant incidents?’ I persisted, sensing a secret.

  Mother Anacletus frowned, lowering heavy black eyebrows as she answered me.

  ‘There were some sort of nasty goings-on. They’d break in and leave things. Or take things.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  Anacletus’s face tightened with angry distress. ‘Once they left cow dung in the chapel. Another time they got into the sacristy and took one of our most beautiful chalices. The police said it might have been local—’ she lowered her voice, ‘Satanists.’

  ‘Satanists?’ My disbelief showed in the tone of my voice. Those silver and gold chalices studded with semi-precious gems would be worth a bob or two, never mind Satanists. I know how easy it is for a determined thief to break into a place, and the nuns’ idea of serious security was probably no more than standard deadlocks. Muddying the water with stories of Satanists just seemed to me to be plain silly. The local bobbies must have stayed out too long in the hot sun.

  ‘They were interrupted one night,’ Anacletus continued, ‘and left a picture of—’

  I could see she was having troubling enunciating the name.

  ‘Of the prince of darkness,’ she finally allowed. ‘And since those incidents,’ Anacletus continued, the colour returning to her face, ‘we make sure everything’s locked up all the time.’