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.