‘Clarkson Lieu’s body has been found at your office. We’re going to need you to come down to the station with us, Ms Barbarani.’
8
Nella
‘Only fools represent themselves,’ Avery told Nella as he half-filled a Styrofoam cup with black, burnt coffee.
‘Where did you get that line from?CSI MiamiorThe Good Wife?’
‘Suit yourself, Barbie-rani.’
‘Cheap shot.’
‘I know better than to play verbal scrabble with you.’ Avery’s eyes crinkled. ‘I am but a mortal man.’
His attempt to ‘get the suspect onside’ crawled over her skin. ‘What do you need to know, Avery? Do you want a timeline of my movements since I left Perth? DNA? Want to do a strip search in case I’m hiding the murder weapon in my—’
‘That won’t be necessary. And that’s highly illegal.’
‘It’s so cute when you guys pretend to know the law.’
She was stalling. He knew she was stalling. Surely Noah Avery didn’t actually think she’d killed Clarkson Lieu. He was the one who’d held her as she’d started to shake uncontrollably once the paramedics separated her from Jett after the gala. And she’d sobbed and garbled nonsensical incantations at him – asking for Jett, asking for her sister, and then, in one particularly deluded moment, her mother. She knew he had just been doing his job, but she hadn’t forgotten how, after soothing her into a semi-sitting position, he’d turned away to wipe a hand across his glassy blue eyes.
Avery didn’t pass her challenges, but he had that kind of lumberjack, teddy-bear vibe that she could definitely find attractive in the right mood.
Her mind was doing that thing she’d trained it to do in situations like this, she realised. It was only a temporary dam and soon the true weight and heaviness of Clarkson’s death would flood and drown her. But as Avery sat down, that tiny self-preservation pixie inside her tried to imagine how his beard would feel between her thighs. It wasn’t enough to hold back that strange feeling she couldn’t name, though, which had been festering since she’d learnt Jett was leaving.
She gave Avery her timeline, all the boring details sans bowel movements. She skipped over the part where Jett had caught her with her mouth around some guy’s penis and she’d thrown her vibrator at him. She also didn’t tell Avery that they’d fought about him leaving, or how Jett had basically called her spoiled and selfish. She did try to be as specific as she could about the time she arrived at her office, and was careful not to go overboard with details, because she didn’t want her words to be twisted into something else later on – like providing the real killer with a plausible alibi. Witness testimonies were rarely enough to convict someone with, because human memory was one of the most unreliable factors in a murder case. There were innocent people on Death Row who’d been wrongfully convicted by someone’s faulty memory.
‘So, you knew Clarkson before today?’ Avery frowned at his notes.
Nella chose her next words carefully. ‘We were in undergrad law together. Shared a few classes. He came to the burger joint I worked at sometimes. Saw him at a few parties.’
‘And your interactions with him were entirely platonic?’
‘Are anyone’s interactions at uni parties ever entirely platonic? I’m pretty sure we kissed once.’
They had, definitely. And it was Clarkson she’d been waiting for in her bed at the Easter-break party she and Eliza had thrown at their share house. But his roommate was the one who’d turned up, throwing himself onto her mattress, nudging her with his foot. She’d pretended to be asleep. At the start.
It wasn’t rape, she’d chastised herself as she pressed her head against the glass of Jett’s car as he drove her back to Bindi Bindi that morning. It was rape if you said ‘no’, if you fought back. Rape was violent and painful and didn’t count if it was just his fingers. Nella hadn’t said ‘no’. She hadn’t pulled away when he’d tried to kiss her. She didn’t get to be upset about that. She had a voice. She knew how to use it. And she hadn’t.
But she’d never seen Clarkson again, because she didn’t want to see his roommate. It was a shame, because Clarkson had been a really good kisser, and he was rich, because his dad owned a successful tour company. Being rich meant Clarkson wouldn’t only want to kiss her because of the family she came from.
Avery cleared his throat. ‘Antonella? And you didn’t see him again for ...’
She focused on being a good witness. ‘Six years.’
‘Even though he worked on your father’s legal team?’
Hewhat?‘I didn’t know that. I thought my brother hired him based on his reputation.’
Avery frowned. He flicked through his brown folder of notes. ‘Hard to believe you were unaware of their connection, seeing as you work in law too.’
‘I’ve done everything within my power to separate my career from my father’s.’
‘But you haven’t totally separated yourself, have you?’ Avery’s finger ran over a heading that Nella couldn’t read despite the blinding fluorescent light of the meeting room. ‘You represented Francesca two years ago when she was charged with destruction of property.’
‘Francesca, yes, but not my father,’ Nella said. The taste of her sister’s name on her tongue was caustic. ‘I don’t ... didn’t ... ever get involved in my father’s affairs.’
