Fatal Liaison (33 page)

She shivered, pulling the blanket in tighter as she sunk onto the
backseat, the wool fibers bristly against her hot skin. The vehicle’s interior
light cast a ghostly pall over the two faces staring down at her.

When soon-to-be-wed Tanya Clark is
confronted with her fiancé's naked corpse hanging from a wardrobe rail in the
upmarket Melbourne apartment they share, her life is torn apart. Two months
later, distraught and unable to cope, she drowns her sorrows in a lethal
cocktail of alcohol and prescription drugs.

On the other side of Australia, a grieving
Jemma Dalton struggles to come to terms with the suicide of her only sibling.
Despite there being no evidence to the contrary, Jemma refuses to accept Tanya
had intended to kill herself. Not her sister. Then the coroner's report reveals
that at the time of her death she had been six weeks pregnant. The will, too,
raises more questions than it answers. How did a young woman on a personal
assistant's wage amass shares worth in excess of $1,000,000?

In a desperate bid to uncover the truth,
Jemma puts her own life at risk and starts to probe the shadows of her sister's
life. But shadows, like bones, grow brittle with age. The consequences can be
deadly.

PROLOGUE

One foot inside the apartment, the smell hit her. Sour, like
cat pee. Except they didn’t own a cat.

“Sean?” she
called, her voice cracking. She cleared her throat. “Sean, honey, are you
home?”
Louder this time.

Not a sound. Only that putrid smell.

She dumped her heavy satchel on the floor, kicked the door closed,
and surveyed the room.

The late afternoon sun streamed through the balcony-facing
floor-to-ceiling windows. Long shadows from the life-sized, headless bronze
nudes standing sentry sliced the living area. The Age newspaper lay open at the
business section in the middle of the narrow glass-topped dining table, Sean’s
mobile phone next to it. Apart from one of the eight chairs sitting askew from
the table, she could have stepped into the pages of Home Beautiful.

She crossed the carpet toward the short hall that led to the
bedrooms and stuck her head into the apartment’s galley-style kitchen.
Tomatoes, red onions and a cling-wrapped tray of meat – the makings of what
looked to be one of her fiancé’s specialties, Spanish steak – sat on the
stainless steel drainer next to the sink. Further down the bench, she spotted a
bottle of red wine together with two wine glasses, one of which was already
poured. She sniffed the air and moved on.

Usually wide open, the door to the guest bedroom was half-closed.
Hoping Sean hadn’t offered a bed to one of his boozy mates, she hesitated for a
moment and then gave the door a sharp shove.

The door swung in, releasing a rush of sour air. Pinching her
nostrils together, she leaned into the room, ready to beat a hasty retreat if
anyone was in there. Her gaze went first to the queen-sized bed. Although the
quilt looked rumpled, the bed itself didn’t appear to have been slept in.

Breathing out through her mouth, she glanced across the bedroom to
where sunlight, filtered through the window’s upward angled Venetians, striped
the ceiling.

She took another step into the room and turned around. The leather
strap of her handbag slid from her shoulder. She didn’t try to stop it,
couldn’t stop it. Unable to move, all she could do was gape at the open
wardrobe, her eyes bulging almost as much as the vacant ones staring back at
her.

A silent scream blocked her throat. She couldn’t breathe in; she
couldn’t breathe out. Her lungs wanted to burst. The purple, bloated face of
the naked man hanging from the wardrobe’s steel rail on a belt, his swollen
tongue protruding from his mouth, was almost unrecognizable. Almost.

She stumbled backwards, snaring her handbag as she landed in a heap
next to the bed. She scrambled in the bottom of her bag, her mobile phone
eluding her like wet soap in the bathtub. When she did manage to get hold of
it, she struggled to still her shaking hands. Her fingers felt fat and clumsy,
the buttons on her phone tinier than she remembered.

“Emergency. What service do you require? Police, Fire, Ambulance?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but a magazine page stuck to her leg
now had her attention instead. She peeled it off, dangling the magazine at
arm’s length as if it were a dirty sock. She had never seen anything quite like
it. Naked flesh. Entwined bodies. Explicit sex scenes.

If she had thought things couldn’t get any worse, she had thought
wrong. She shook her head, unable to come to terms with what she was seeing.
Her fiancé, her lover, her partner was dead; dead and surrounded with hard-core
homosexual pornography.

PROLOGUE

She stirred, her hand seeking her husband’s reassuring
touch. Cold sheets. Panic fluttered in her chest and then died. She remembered
now. What had happened to them that they could no longer talk? Her splayed
fingers caressed the empty space next to her, as if searching for some imprint
of the man she’d married, the father of her two children. What or who had come
between them?

From downstairs, she heard a thud, followed by what sounded like a
muffled grunt. She gritted her teeth. He daren’t wake the kids. It had taken
all her wiles and half the night to convince little Oliver there were no
three-eyed, boy-eating monsters living under his bed. Kayla hadn’t been much
better, getting up at least once every hour to ask for a glass of water and a
cuddle. Damn Warren. Didn’t he know by now children picked up on every vibe?

Another thud. Closer this time. She held her breath, listening.
Footsteps. She rolled over, feigning sleep when she sensed his presence in the
doorway. Her breathing didn’t falter.

A slight movement of air brushed across her face. She inhaled. Her
breath caught, the sharp smell registering in the same instant the cold metal
kissed her temple…