Late Thursday morning, and Ellen Destry was sitting across from Carmen Gandolfo in the Mornington office of Community Health, which was a converted 1940s house on a street of similar houses, some of which were residential but most were clinics now-dental, medical and physiotherapy. Gandolfo’s window overlooked a black wattle that leaned dangerously over the fence dividing it from the next property. Did Gandolfo know what a shallow root system wattles had? Should she say something? But now wasn’t the time…
‘Murdered?’ Gandolfo was saying. She looked damp and wretched, sniffing, mopping her eyes.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Ellen said. ‘I understand that you were close to Mrs Wishart.’
‘We’re best friends!’
‘I’m sorry.’
Fresh weeping. ‘You want to know who killed her? Look no further than her husband.’
‘He was violent? Abusive?’
‘Controlling. Incredibly controlling.’
And so are a lot of people, thought Ellen. She gazed at the other woman for a moment. Carmen Gandolfo was large but compact, with vast, cushiony breasts and auburn hair in a sunburst around her big head. A wry face, under the grief.
‘I know this is difficult for you, but I do need to ask you some questions,’ Ellen said.
Gandolfo said damply, ‘Fire away.’
‘Let’s start with your meeting with Mrs Wishart yesterday.’
Gandolfo opened her mouth to reply, then froze. ‘You think I killed her?’
‘Of course not,’ said Ellen smoothly, keeping an open mind. ‘But you did have lunch with her, and she didn’t return to the office.’
‘She had appointments all afternoon! So did I!’
‘You had lunch together…’
Gandolfo told Ellen where they’d lunched, what they’d ordered, what they’d talked about. ‘It was a special lunch. Her thirtieth birthday. I gave her an MP3 player.’
Ellen made a note: where had that got to? ‘And then?’
‘Then I came straight here for my two o’clock appointment. I was booked solid all afternoon and didn’t leave until six.’
‘Then you went home?’
‘No. I had two clients to see, elderly women in a retirement village. I didn’t get home until about eight o’clock. My husband had dinner ready.’
‘Thank you. Now, tell me about Mr Wishart.’
Ellen watched Gandolfo pull herself together and grow reflective, as if conscious that she should be fair and accurate, that Ellen wouldn’t want hyperbole. ‘I’ve known Ludmilla for about five years. We met at a shire Christmas function. She was going out with Adrian at the time; she’d met him when she was one of the planners, and he’d consulted with her about a building he’d designed. They married about three years ago. Mill and I became really good friends.’ She paused. ‘It was limited, though. Adrian could be very difficult. I had to see her alone, and almost never at her house.’
‘Tell me more about him. About the marriage.’
‘He’s an architect,’ said Gandolfo, and stopped. Ellen waited. ‘He’s the kind of man who’s always disappointed. He’s always being let down by someone or something. It’s never his fault: or rather, nothing’s ever good enough for his exacting standards. He could be very successful if he was willing to compromise, but naturally his clients or business partners end up disappointing him.’
‘Did his wife disappoint him?’
‘Constantly, I’d say, but not in ways that would disappoint a normal person, and not because she wanted to annoy him.’
‘Did he punish her for it?’
‘Yes.’
‘How? Did he hit her?’
Gandolfo said slowly, ‘Mill was holding herself very stiffly one day, about two months ago. She was in obvious pain, holding her stomach. She said it was her period, but she didn’t get bad periods. I think he’d hit her.’
‘Was she ever hospitalised, to your knowledge? An accident in the garden, a fall off a chair…’
‘No. Look, it was mainly psychological stress that he put her through.’
‘Such as?’
The desk phone rang. Gandolfo watched it apprehensively until it cut out. ‘Like I said, he was incredibly controlling. He chose what clothes she wore, what hairstyle. He kept a close eye on her spending-even though she probably earned more than he did. He had an awful temper. He’d yell at her, get very angry about small things, then beg forgiveness and act like he loved her to bits, so she was always on tenterhooks.’
Ellen had heard it all before. ‘You witnessed this?’
Gandolfo moved about in her chair. ‘Kind of. I mean, I saw it in him, and Ludmilla would let slip some of the things he said and did to her.’
So, nothing hard and fast, thought Ellen. ‘What else?’
‘She supported him emotionally. He was always going on about his breakthrough, which to my mind was never going to happen. He had fussy standards, like that little car. It had to be a Citroen, it had to be European, it couldn’t be something cheap and reliable like a Toyota. He turned the best room in their house into a studio and filled it with top of the range drafting and drawing equipment. All that took money, so she was always steering clients his way via her job, drawings, blueprints, proposals things like that. They needed the money, but he considered the work beneath him.’
Ellen saw a small man, a fearful man. ‘Beneath him?’
‘He gave that indication, but I think he was afraid he’d fail. And because he denigrated the work he did, he lacked a sense of purpose and control, it seems to me. Therefore he made sure he controlled Mill. He became really obsessed with what she was up to. Of course, she wasn’t up to anything, but he’d ring her six or seven times a day, send her texts and e-mails all day long, drop into the office on the stupidest pretext or hang around on the street outside. He needed to know where she was at all times. It was as if he thought she had a secret life.’
‘Maybe she did.’
‘No! She was so loyal it broke my heart.’
‘What did she do about the phone calls and visits?’
‘What could she do? She tried to talk to him about it but his line was, “You’re my wife, I’m allowed to call you” or “I just happened to be passing, sweetheart.”‘ Gandolfo paused. ‘Mill told me it was uncanny the way he always seemed to know if she’d been out making field visits during the day.’
‘He followed her?’
‘Probably.’
Ellen tried a different tack. ‘So they had money troubles?’
‘I didn’t say that. Adrian’s work had slackened off recently, but they didn’t have debts, I don’t think. Where are you going with this?’
Ellen was going in several directions. If the Wisharts had been struggling, was Ludmilla Wishart taking backhanders to finance her husband’s lifestyle? Had she delivered an ultimatum to him: It’s time you got regular work? Had he killed her because she’d left him everything in her will? Was he expecting a huge life insurance payout? Ellen didn’t ask any of these questions, merely stared and waited.
Carmen Gandolfo cocked her head eventually. Behind the rawness appeared a look of calculation. ‘Adrian already owned the land their house is on before he met Mill. He designed the house, but I think most of her money went into paying for it. Mill told me once that everything was in their joint names, the property, her car, their bank accounts. He made sure of that.’
They watched each other for a while. ‘Did she ever talk about leaving him?’
‘I talked about it,’ Gandolfo said. ‘She’d listen, agree with everything I said, then tell me that he’d fall apart if she left him, and she couldn’t do that to him.’
Ellen had heard that before, too. ‘She must have revealed things about her marriage if you were urging her to leave him.’
Gandolfo twisted her mouth pensively. ‘Well, to some degree. She had more spark when Adrian wasn’t around, she was prepared to have a bit of a laugh about him. She’d tell me things that appalled me, yet she took them for granted. He’d time her phone calls, for God’s sake. He’d time her on the loo, tell her she was using too much toilet paper. He was a bully, a control freak, and in my experience as a counsellor those men are dangerous.’
And in my experience as a cop, Ellen thought. ‘Did Mrs Wishart say exactly where she was going after you had lunch together?’
Gandolfo blinked at the direction change. ‘Only that she had to make some field visits.’
‘What was entailed in these field visits?’
Gandolfo spoke slowly, as though stating the obvious. ‘There are strict regulations about what you can and can’t do on your own land. You know. You can’t put up a five-star hotel or clear native vegetation or demolish an existing structure without a permit. Milla’s job was to follow up infringements and pursue action, which might be a fine and orders to repair the damage.’
‘A job that would have made some people angry.’
‘I know what you’re getting at. You think someone like that killed her.’
‘I have to look at all scenarios. Did she ever say that she was threatened or abused by anyone?’
‘Not really. There was a lot of public scrutiny, and it’s not as if anyone was ruined financially or went to jail.’
‘People have been killed for less.’
Gandolfo winced. ‘She did mutter something about planning deliberations being leaked to the wrong people.’
‘By an insider? A shire employee?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Did she give a name?’
‘No, but I got the feeling she didn’t trust her boss. She was pretty upset yesterday, something about a property developer who bulldozed an old house before a heritage protection order could be placed on it. That’s all I know.’
Ellen nodded. All of this could be verified easily. But Carmen Gandolfo wasn’t finished:
‘I think it was Adrian who killed her, I really do,’ she said fervently, her upper arms quivering.
Ellen waited.
Gandolfo deflated. ‘Did she suffer?’
‘It was a vicious blow, but very sudden and immediately fatal.’
There was a long pause. ‘Poor Mill,’ said Gandolfo miserably. ‘When things got too much for her she’d have panic attacks, cardiac arrhythmia.’
‘By too much do you mean dealing with people who blamed her because they’d been caught out and had to pay for it?’
‘No, I mean dealing with a jealous, obsessive stalker of a husband. Look, this man comes across as warm and charming. I’m sure he sounded genuinely grief-stricken when you talked to him this morning. It’s all an act.’
Wishart had seemed genuine. Perhaps it wasn’t an act, thought Ellen. Perhaps he’d killed his wife but was mentally unstable and able to rationalise it: ‘Someone else killed her’ or ‘Yes, I killed her, but she provoked me so it wasn’t my fault.’
‘He’s cunning,’ Gandolfo said.
Ellen got to her feet, nodding slowly. ‘I promise I’ll bear that in mind.’