My Brother’s Keeper by Donna Malane Page A

Karen had gone from being a person to being a dead body. Or, put moresimply, Karen had gone, full stop. I marvelled again at the stillness. The beseeching upturned hands continued to beseech. The exposed brown nipple was a rebuke, but I was pleased now that I hadn’t prudishly tugged the dressing gown over it. Maybe it was the presence of Aaron or the sound of hushed chatter as police and technicians gathered. Maybe it was that rigor mortis had begun to set in and the limbs were stiffening in the unmistakable rictus of death. Whatever it was, there was no mistaking this was a crime scene with a dead body at the centre of it. I thought I could smell death, but that was probably just the cloying smell of peppermints. Funeral directors, morgue staff, crime scene cops; they’re always surrounded by the ubiquitous scent of peppermint. As I described to Aaron how I had approached the body, felt for a pulse, squatted and looked up into Karen’s face, it was like watching a slow-mo film version of myself. I assured Aaron I hadn’t touched any part of Karen’s body except her neck where the carotid pulse should have been. And wasn’t. When I finished speaking he ushered me back outside, ensuring I kept to the narrow plastic runner on the floor. His comfortingly warm hand remained on my shoulder the whole way. Oscar Fa’atua, a detective I knew from police barbecue days with Sean, was running crime scene tape across the doorway to the bedroom. He raised his eyebrows in a ‘wassup?’ gesture as I was ushered out. Oscar must have been put in as OC Scene then. Good for him. Aaron walked me down the path past a duck line of white disposable boiler-suited ESR technicians, each carrying their own little trade toolboxes. There was an unmistakable, barely suppressed air of excitement amongthem — homicide. In police bars and forensic scientists’ and lab technicians’ morning tea rooms, they would admit openly that homicides were the best crimes to land. Unless the victim was a child. I’ve never met anyone involved in a case who was blasé about the murder of a child; I hope I never do. As soon as we’d stepped outside the house, Aaron was besieged by cops, all needing answers to questions. I left him to it after promising to come into the station on Monday to give a full formal statement and fingerprints.
    Sean was leaning against my car. He held out a paper cup.
    ‘I’d rather it was a cigarette,’ I said, but gulped the coffee anyway. Trim milk, two sugars. He remembered.
    ‘You alright?’ he asked, looking away from me.
    ‘I’m fine,’ I said and looked away from him too. I felt his gaze turn back in my direction. He was waiting for me to speak.
    ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’
    I was feeling guilty about the photos I’d taken and had a paranoid notion Sean knew about them. My mobile seemed heavier than usual in my back pocket and I was excruciatingly aware of it. As if sensing the attention it was getting, it rang. It wasn’t a number I recognised.
    ‘I’d better take this,’ I said, and waited for Sean to move away. He didn’t. I gave him what he used to refer to as ‘a look’. My phone kept on ringing. He took his time, looking from me to the phone and back to me again. I returned his look with a bug-eyed one of my own. It did the trick. He walked away with one hand raised. It was either a casual wave goodbye or him warding off the juju of my bug-eyes. I flicked the phone to answer.
    ‘Is this Diane Rowe?’ I knew immediately who it was. ‘It’s me. Sunny.’ I walked quickly down the street, trying to put as much space between the phone and Sunny’s dead mother as I could. It wasn’t that I thought Sunny would overhear anything significant, and I knew Karen was past hearing anything at all, it was more a sense of decency.
    ‘Have you seen her yet?’ she asked. As I scrambled for an answer, I had a flash of Karen’s exposed brown nipple; the beseeching hands in her lap; the oily gleam