Digging Up Dirt by Pamela Hart

Author:Pamela Hart [Hart, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin Enterprises (Australia) Pty Ltd
Published: 2021-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘Do you think women are naturally evil, Mum?’

My mother snorted and handed me the teapot and the milk. ‘Original sin’s in all of us,’ she said, and paused. ‘But if you think about who causes the most misery in the world …’ She looked at the photo of her brother George on the wall. George had been killed in Vietnam. Mum shrugged, as though she didn’t have to finish the sentence.

I considered it as we watched the news and drank our tea. Were men more likely to kill? Statistically, yes, no doubt about it. I’d written an episode on unlawful death for the Legal Studies program, and the statistics had been fascinating. The person most likely to die by violence in our society is a young drunk man. They get into fights, and they get killed. The interesting thing was that it didn’t matter who started the fight. That doesn’t have any correlation to who gets hurt.

For women, the statistics are more sobering. The most likely person to kill a woman is her partner, especially if she’s about to leave or has just left. The most likely place is her own bedroom, closely followed by the rest of her house. Which made Tol and Paul the most likely suspects in Julieanne’s death. But why couldn’t she have been killed in her own house? I thought bitterly.

The thought stayed with me. Yes, why? And why hadn’t I considered that before?

I went to bed wondering why Julieanne had been in my house late at night. In her dress-to-impress blue outfit, and her respectable expensive court shoes. She wouldn’t have gone there to dig dressed like that, and the police hadn’t mentioned other clothes being found there. Would they mention it? I decided to ask Detective Chloe. She might even tell me.

The most reasonable explanation was that she had gone there to meet someone. An empty house was a great place for an assignation. I really hoped nothing physical had happened before she was killed. Somehow I found the idea of Julieanne having illicit sex in my house more off-putting than the memory of her corpse. But surely the police wouldn’t suspect me if there was evidence of Julieanne’s sexual activity?

I would scrub the upstairs floors when the police let me back in, though. Just in case.

The next day I spent doing interviews with workers at Luna Park. It was Saturday, when Luna Park is at its best. That’s the way it works during the shooting season for a show. You do the work when you need to, and take time off later. It was a hectic, full-on day and I found it very restful. No one died. No one called me unexpectedly. No one questioned my motives or my innocence.

I came home cheerful and spent a few hours knocking together a rough script for the archaeology show from Mirha’s production notes of what shots we had. Working a way around the footage with Julieanne in it was tricky, but fortunately Terry’s

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