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  The cop shop was busy when I got there. People sitting on all available bench space and standing about seemed to be neither criminals nor coppers. I stated my business to the desk sergeant but before she responded, Philippoussis came out from an inner office, one arm in his reefer jacket, rattling car-keys and indicating I follow him. Standing with the passenger door of a late-model white Ford Falcon open, his hand on the handle, waiting for me to get in, he said, 'Recognise anyone?' I shook my head. I hadn't really looked, but a guy there could have been my trainer, which thought was so improbable I didn't give it credence. Philippoussis started the car. It hummed with comfort. He used the car-phone, affirming arrangements with the hospital.

  I needed to see the body I found again. I needed to see him as a male. From the main entrance, we went down the corridor past the wards, then, after Radiology, took a right turn. The temperature seemed to drop. I felt as if I'd entered a time warp where things were different and workers in lab coats moved like robots. The mortuary. The two bodies were lying on parallel gurneys covered by rubber sheets, ready.

  The hospital orderly removed the other boy's covering. Uncanny how similar the faces were, although they showed quite different deaths. The second lad's was cross-hatched with lacerations from broken glass and impact with sharp objects. Both had long unnaturally black hair, were about fifteen with pointy features and skinny frames. I suspected the lacerated one was taller. The bruising around Hugh Gilmore's eyes was real, the blackness around Neil's mascara.

  'They are left, as if it just happened.' I asked quizzically. 'Why?'

  'Why indeed?' echoed Phil.

  'Actually,' the attendant butted in, 'I was just about to clean this one up for the funeral.' He was quite jolly. 'Just waiting for the word.'

  'Phil? What about the post-mortem? What does the death certificate say?' I demanded.

  'I don't know,' DC. Philippoussis sounded hopeless. 'I'm being jerked around and the kids are left lying here. Nothing happening.'

  'Forensics is doing an analysis of the cosmetics, surely?' I got insistent. 'You've got to get an idea of where he got made-up.'

  'There's more freezing going on than refrigeration.' Phil eyed the hospital bloke, who listened.

  I exited the morgue and walked towards the front of the hospital, momentarily distracted by the colour and noise of the children's ward. The tall dark handsome plain-clothes policeman followed me. He didn't catch up. He didn't call me back. In single file we passed the main desk and waiting room and went through the self-opening doors. Instead of going back to the car, I sought a piece of grass and headed that way. I sat down cross-legged and looked up at him.

  He lowered his long body and asked, 'Well?'

  'I explained to you that Penny Waughan asked me to find out what happened to her son. She suspects he was murdered. Suicide very unlikely, according to her, and heroin-taking out of the question.' I sounded like a scolding big sister.

  Philippoussis was distracted. If there were a soccer ball about he would be dancing it on his heel, toe, elbow, shoulder, chest, toe, heel, shoulder, foot, wall and back again, idly, thinking.

  'They're pulling my resources on this one,' he told me. 'Minimum investigation.'

  'What is the problem? It's straightforward. You have to investigate accidental deaths. The magistrate has to listen to the facts and recommend pursuance on your findings, doesn't he?' I insisted. 'Or she?'

  'The Crank is a bloody riddle.'

  'Drug War Baron Nasty. You know the joke. They get more than the Armed Robbery squad.'

  'You're out of date,' he smiled weakly. 'What about the white-collar cops?'

  'Computer fraud squad?' I displayed my disbelief with a snort. 'They haven't got a prayer.'

  'He is on a drive to sign up informers. It's filthy policing. I hate the grass mentality. My grandfather was held by the fascists in Greece when they were in power. Police states finger the wrong guys.' While I chewed a blade of grass, Phillip kept talking. 'It's all politics. Ideally I'd like to be assigned to the coroner.'

  'You had a run-in with the Crank already?' I tossed him a glance.

  'Yeah.' He looked at his watch. 'About three-quarters of an hour ago.'

  I sighed. Philippoussis continued. 'He is after pederasts now. He says.'

  'But his contacts are drug-connected,' I contradicted.

  'Crankshaw, our very own J.Edgar Hoover, amassing paranoid dossiers on everybody from job to job. Even us,' he raised his eyebrows at me. 'We could use this quirk of his, Margot.'

  'You want me official, as a snout?' I asked, half incredulous, half eager.

  'Well? It might put me in the good books, to play along I mean,' he said, apologetically. 'What do you reckon?'

  'While I'm on the case. Okay,' I agreed.

  Phillip leaped up feet first. Soccer-playing body angles.

  'There is something I am not understanding here.' I tapped my head as if it were some sort of receiving transmission box. 'When you get the death certificates, will you show me? I want to know what the pathologist says, primary cause, secondary cause, and attendant conditions.'

  'Anything else?' the DC obliged sarcastically. We strolled back to the new sedan, with its impersonal cleanness and two aerials.

  I happened to say, 'I don't like rock spiders either. I know Sean Dark. He's not into it. I can assure you.' I wondered whether it was Sweetness and Light at the station.

  'It's not me you have to assure,' the detective constable said bitterly. The Crank was not giving his foot soldiers as full a briefing as he could.

  'You've got to imagine a bigger picture, Pip,' I comforted, guessing what the regional commander was up to.

  'Phil,' he corrected. 'Yeah, and what's that?'

  'Money,' I reckoned.

  'Maybe. Too much cloak and dagger for my liking.' He put his foot down sharply on the accelerator, proving, if the car itself didn't, that as a cop, he could go as fast as he liked.

  'Not a healthy state of affairs,' I responded.

  'I'll be in touch,' he said when he dropped me off near the Suzuki with its dolphin motif. Now, exactly how duplicitous I would have to be?

  No need to identify the cause of her feelings of guilt, Alison Hungerford is in a mood to let it all out. They can't find Tilly. Chandra assumes she is hiding among the buttresses of the huge fig. They look and call and call, and no answer.

  Alison loses it. Her eyes roll backwards. Her lower jaw juts forward in an effort to control her features. She releases a stream of obscenities in response to Chandra's censure about her leaving Tilly with her for so long. Chandra is cantankerous. The one place they haven't looked is the quarter-acre of sweet corn. To go in there will disturb the ripening cobs. Not on. This sends Alison to the edge. She rants. She raves.

  Chandra quietly says, 'Let her be.'

  But Alison is violent. Horrendous. She has no care for her own safety, let alone her daughter's or her friend's. Chandra tries to talk her down. 'Look at me. Look at me. What do you see? Who is there? Alison?' Chandra sighs with relief as Alison's eyes do focus and she sees tears. 'Alison, Alison,' she croons as she grasps at her with an impeded arm.

  But Alison swings away, knocking the crutch out from under her elbow, shouting, 'You are a dose of poison, a capsule of antichrist taken with vitamins, go on, go on, destroy me. I can't carry responsibility. It cracks me open like an egg. Splat. Where is she?' She walks towards the corn. 'You drive me mad. Tilly! Tilly!' She turns to abuse Chandra, who has climbed back upright.

  'Do you want me to deck you, like I did Meghan?' Chandra pants, catching her breath.

  Alison suddenly laughs, 'Of course not. You could do it, too.'

  'Tilly, there you are,' Chandra notices the pretty face peeking out from the stalks which are almost twice her height.

  'Come here, sweetheart,' Alison calls her daughter. 'Kindly get out of my head or we will all get dirtier and dirtier until we smell like saints,' she says to Chandra, but with humour.

  'What's th
e trouble?' Chandra asks in a business-like voice as she hobbles towards her verandah. Alison and Tilly follow. 'Not eating well is my guess,' Chandra calls over her shoulder.

  'You have always criticised my diet. I had seafood and salad last night.'

  'A change from chocolate and oranges.' Chandra continues, 'You don't eat enough, that's all. Your mind goes off its axis when you eat nothing.' Chandra goes into her kitchen.

  'You don't have kids!' calls Alison.

  'Oh, that's right. I forgot. Now, what is really worrying you?' Even though her dark moods suck out Chandra's energy like imploding black holes, Alison, being so dearly loved once, is allowed to claim her time. Chandra feels she can manage her. All the kitchen benches are lower than normal. Chandra heaves herself into her wheelchair and puts the kettle on. Tilly sits at the table, eyes wide.

  Alison paces. 'Why can't you be Maria's friend?' she demands.

  'Why,' says Chandra, 'should I?' She looks straight at Alison. 'I don't have to be everybody's friend. I don't have to like everyone you like.'

  'You're sizist, Chandra. That is what you are,' Alison accuses, finally taking a seat.

  'So? Who's perfect?' Chandra pours hot water into the pot.

  Alison explains what has been going on and continues, 'She is burying herself. Too many of us nutcases buzzing around. She's eating herself to death. You don't know how beautiful she is inside. So nice. Grandma's feather-bed.'

  'Why do you have to sleep with every woman you like? Maria loves being a queen bee,' Chandra claims stubbornly, putting milk, sugar and cups on the table. 'Excellent image. I'm no one's drone.'

  'Stop being sarcastic,' Alison is annoyed. 'You're still in love with Sofia, right? That's why you don't like her!'

  Ingrid Bergman looks with the grace of Grace Kelly, although skinnier than both, Alison could be playing a role in a Hitchcock movie, faking it. Chandra smiles as she sips her tea waiting for the scene inside Alison's mind to play itself through.

  'It hasn't got anything to do with Maria, has it?' she eventually asks. 'Or my being "lookist"?'

  'No. Yes. Too many things in my head. Real things, you know, things going on. Not delusions. Virtual things, as well as prophecies. Like it's, like, crazy. I feel someone's going to die.'

  'Will Tilly be all right with you?'

  'Why not? She's my baby, aren't you, darling? Go get your things, we're going back to the flat.'

  'Has Harold been around?' Chandra asks when Tilly has run off to the barn. 'What's thrown you?'

  'No, Harold's out bush, working, earning money. And,' Alison adds, 'you don't want to know what I've discovered. It's got to do with the mafia of rock spiders. I haven't worked it out, yet.'

  'What are you talking about?' Chandra finds being with Alison in conversation is laborious work, separating insight from illusion.

  'Nothing. Yet. Tilly will be fine. I'm going home. But Dello and Maz are taking Tilly for a couple of weeks. Lenny's at his granny's. I've got to be free for a while. So I'll be all right, okay?' Alison finishes her cuppa and bends down to give Chandra a peck on the cheek as she leaves.

  Alison's two-bedroom unit in a block with other demented tenants is where, when she is unstable, Alison feels most at home, however unreliable the neighbours are. For her children, the opposite is true. Chandra is not happy when she is fragile and there. She sighs as she hears the old Ford rattle the cattle grid.

  Outside the milky aqua, peachy pink and crushed strawberry mauve, tubular architecture of the accountant's building, where I had parked, I noticed that the girl holding hands with a handsome boy with tanned skin and the physique of an athlete was Lisa. I stood my ground, so they would pass me.

  'Hi Margot,' she said.

  I grinned and nodded acknowledgment. Nerds are out, it seems.

  'Hey,' I called her back. The young jock posed against a parking sign, quite happy to be bored for a while. Lisa smiled at him and shrugged expressively. She came up to me. I fished for information about boys at the high school.

  'Yeah, there were some cults,' she nodded. 'Before Hugh Gilmore left, he wore those creepy black coats like even when it was hot? Like der. Hello?'

  'Sick group?' I confirmed that I understood with a question.

  Lisa nodded. 'But dumb, you know.'

  'Was, ah,' I looked across at the boyfriend, who still affected a non-chalance by the lamp-post, 'Neil Waughan one of them?'

  'No, I don't think so,' she shook her head. 'Not at school. After Hugh left, I saw them together a couple of times. Which is weird in a way.'

  'Why?' My query tried to pierce the shadowy teenage world.

  'Neil was heaps brainy, you know, like heaps!' Lisa pressed the point as if she and her friends had discussed his death at length. 'Hugh and that just watched videos. That's all they knew about. They just loved death, you know. And fast cars. It was their thing.'

  'Thanks, Lisa.' I glanced at my watch. 'You know they both died the same night?'

  'Well, sort of,' she admitted. Her new boyfriend sauntered over to hang in the conversation.

  'I take it the death-scene wasn't Neil's thing?' I asked them both, acknowledging the youth.

  He shook his head and mumbled, 'Nuh.'

  'Neil could be fun,' explained Lisa. 'Neil was nice. But real shy.'

  The adolescents contained their energy with studied cool, moving as slowly as possible. I, busy middle thirties, proceeded to my car at a different pace altogether.

  Seeing gurls on the road, on her way out of the lands, Rory stops. Fi screws up a leaflet that she had taken out of the mailbox.

  'What's that?' asks Ana.

  'It's for the Gun Lobby. The Right-Wing White Virgin is having a rally. I'm sick of all this junk that gets in our mailbox.'

  Judith Sloane appears suddenly through the trees.

  'Where did you come from?' demands Ana.

  Judith, who never answers when she does not want to, stares back at Ana, daring her to crack her secrets. Rory watches the exchange and feels queasy.

  Judith puts a postcard back in the mailbox and walks off. Xena stares at her back, but doesn't see further than the purple, appliquéd waistcoat.

  Fi says, 'You've got to be joking.' She writes in biro on a used envelope. 'No Junk Male or Mail!! Pleeze!' The two other gurls admire her work before she goes to find a clothes peg to secure it to a wire.

  'Hey, look at this,' Dee holds up the postcard Judith put in the mailbox.

  'What?' Rory responds.

  'Well, it's to Virginia White. And says,' she reads, turning the blue and white photograph over, 'Tierra del Fuego is cold. Be in Antarctica in a couple of days. Ha ha, Gina.'

  'Her American friend,' explains Rory.

  'Who's going to give it to the Beetle?' Dee holds picture of icebergs up, and comments, 'Judith had it.'

  'I will,' says Rory. 'Why did Judith have it? But, hey, you lot are coming to the triathlon, aren't you?'

  'Yeah, staying at the motel with you.'