‘Did he know the dangers do you think?’

‘My registrar explained them. She said he seemed to take them on board because he got more and more agitated with everything she said.’

Monty rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘When you tell something to patients that they don’t want to hear, what do they tend to do?’ he asked.

‘I see your point,’ the doctor nodded. ‘They usually get a second opinion.’

Monty thanked the doctor, stepped into the corridor and phoned Wayne Pickering, asking him to make some enquiries at Northbridge Chinese herbalists and medicine centres. If the guy thought he’d been let down by the western medical system, he might very well have gone down the street to one of these for a second opinion.

He pocketed his phone, about to turn on his heel and leave the hospital when an unsettling thought stopped him in his tracks. He looked back into the examination cubicle where Doctor Sutcliffe was still finishing his notes.

‘Just one more thing, Doc,’ Monty said through the parted curtains.

‘Yes Inspector?’

‘The bloke you had in here before, the one who had the heart attack. What happened to him, where did he go?’

‘He didn’t go anywhere. I’m afraid he died.’

Monty felt the blood drain from his face.

The doctor looked concerned. ‘I’m sorry, did you know him?’

Monty shook his head vigorously. ‘No, I didn’t. No.’

He tried to call Stevie as he was leaving the hospital, but all he got was a message from her answering machine. He told her to ring him.

Later that afternoon Monty caught up with Wayne, Barry and Angus Wong in his office. It seemed his hunch about their mystery victim seeking a second opinion about his diagnosis had proved correct.

‘It was about the third herbalist shop we visited, wasn’t it fellas?’ Barry checked with his colleagues.

Angus nodded, said to Monty, ‘Mr Cheng’s shop—he speaks practically no English.’

‘But he had a pretty dolly of a Chinese interpreter with him,’ Barry added.

‘Angela Nguyen is multilingual Vietnamese,’ Angus answered with a long-suffering sigh.

Barry shrugged, ‘Same diff.’

‘I went into the back room to talk to Cheng,’ Angus told Monty, ‘while Barry and Wayne spoke to Angela in the front, in between serving customers.’

‘It was interesting, Mont,’ Wayne added. ‘When we got together to swap notes, we discovered a discrepancy in their stories.’

‘Yeah, Mr Cheng told me the man’s name was Zhang Li.’ Angus spelled the name for Monty. ‘Cheng had never met him before but had heard on the grapevine that he was a money lender, an illegal who’d only been in the country for a couple of months. He wanted something for the blood in his urine and Mr Cheng mixed him up a herbal concoction...’

‘And Cheng said Zhang Li had a kid with him.’

Angus scowled, ‘Yes, Barry I was getting to that. He had an Asian kid with him of about fourteen or fifteen, a scruffy little bugger who wasn’t introduced to Cheng.’

‘But Angela Nguyen’s version wasn’t nearly as helpful,’ Wayne said. ‘She said she remembered the man with the blood in his urine, but not his name. She also denied seeing a boy.’

‘It’s because you got her all in a fluster,’ said Barry, straightening the collar of his Boss polo shirt. ‘You should have let me do the talking. You just have no idea about handling women, you have no couth.’

‘And I suppose you would have done better?’ Wayne said.

Angus muttered under his breath in Chinese, having little patience with the love-hate relationship between these two. Barry and Wayne went back years and had worked with each other long enough to know exactly which buttons they could press to good effect. Despite their constant bickering, they were a good team though, complementing each other in their differences.

Angus brought a different set of skills to the job: a cool professionalism and an almost obsessive eye for detail. Monty could see Angus being selected to take the reins should he decide to toss the job in. Tossing it in—he had no idea where that thought came from, what else he wanted to do or even what he was capable of doing.

His attention kicked back in when he heard Wayne say, ‘I’m going back to see Angela Nguyen later. Alone. She’s hiding something, I’m sure of it.’

10

EXCERPT FROM CHAT ROOM TRANSCRIPT 121206

BETTYBO: wanna meet F2F?

HARUM SCARUM: Y?

BETTYBO: I wan 2 rt Katy Enigma stories wit u

HARUM SCARUM: Me 2 but not yet. we cn rite on line 4now

It was Stevie’s turn to cook. She ran through her mental shopping list as she hurried from the lifts in Central. For seafood chowder she’d need prawns, a few snapper pieces, mussels maybe, coconut milk, coriander and crusty bread. With any luck Izzy would be out of school on time and they could pick the ingredients up before Emma came around.

She spotted Monty in the front foyer, standing half a head taller than most of the bustling figures. He held up his hand to stop her, hurrying over before she could pass through the revolving door.

‘Mont, I’ve got to go,’ she said before he could speak. She jumped into the revolving compartment and Monty joined her. ‘I have to collect Izzy then meet the new babysitter.’

They stepped outside into a wall of heat.

‘Just hang on a minute will you?’ Monty took hold of her arm to keep her in the shade.

With so much on her mind, Stevie didn’t have time for his quick words that always became long, but she listened patiently to what he had to say about Wayne’s investigations at the Chinese herbalist. As she listened, part of her brain pondered the suitability of a thirteen year old for a babysitter. She also managed to slide in a thought or two about Tash, wondering what she’d learned from Mrs. Kusak.

Talk about multi-tasking.

It seemed as if Monty just wanted an excuse to linger for a moment, but it was a luxury she didn’t have time for right now. As Monty talked on, she bounced from one bubble soled trainer to the other, scanning the car park. It was chock-a-block with overflow from the cricket ground and she couldn’t see the car she’d borrowed from her mother anywhere.

The crack of leather on willow and the crowd roared. ‘The cheek of it,’ she muttered when she finally got a word in, ‘illegally parking at a police station.’

A youth barged past them carrying a long parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. It didn’t take a genius to work out what was inside it. Monty had just introduced an amnesty on illegal weapons—they could be handed in to the police station without prosecution in exchange for tickets to the test. The scheme had been going well for everyone except the officers in charge of the armoury, who’d been so inundated they’d run out of storage space.

‘Are you listening to me at all?’ Monty asked, slapping his thigh with exasperation.

‘You said you were about to phone me but then you saw me in the lobby and decided to speak to me now. You filled me in on the latest on the floater case, then you said you wanted to arrange a team meeting for the Bianca Webster case.’ She spotted the bonnet of her mother’s white Citroen sticking out from behind a four-wheel drive. ‘Beauty, there it is.’

‘Shit, this is ridiculous,’ Monty grumbled, increasing his pace to keep up with her. ‘We never seem to get any time to talk.’

‘Come with me to collect Izzy and we can talk in the car,’ she said, and as an afterthought added, ‘She’s your daughter too.’

He reddened. ‘Yes, I am aware of that. If I organise a meeting for five this afternoon can you leave Izzy with the girl while you attend?’

‘If I think she’s suitable, yes.’

‘You should look into that after-school centre.’