The House on Hill Street by Judy Nunn Page A

his bid for her children’s company repellent nonetheless. Her response was polite, but unequivocal.
    She appreciated the offer, she said, but her mother would never forgive her if she accepted it. Her mother had shifted interstate to be near her grandsons and lived only ten minutes away in Lenah Valley. ‘Mum can’t get enough of the boys, I’m afraid,’ Eileen said apologetically.
    ‘Of course, most understandable,’ Timothy hauled himself to his feet, ‘just thought I’d make the suggestion. Well, cheerio then,’ he said.
    Eileen waved goodbye and returned to her book
    The subject was not mentioned again.
    Over the ensuing weeks, there were two more visits to the park, after which Timothy saw little of Eileen and the children. Winter came unseasonably early, as it so often did, icy winds sweeping up from the Antarctic, and parks became the realm of only the hardiest Hobartians. But by that time Timothy had lost sight altogether of Eileen. He occasionally saw the professor arrive and depart the house at the far end of the terraces, but there was no evidence of Eileen or the children. He wondered whether there may have been trouble in the marriage – perhaps she’d left her husband and taken the boys to her mother’s. Timothy worried about Eileen.
    Then, in August, he was confronted by something far more worrisome than a neighbour’s possible marital problems.
    It all started upon a visit to the bathroom.
    Timothy’s bowels had never performed well, but he’d come to accept constipation and a painfully chronic haemorrhoid condition as a way of life.
    On this particular morning, after a more or less successful evacuation, he followed his customary procedure. He flushed the toilet, washed his hands and turned to check that the bowl had cleared – he was a fastidious man. But upon gazing down at the lavatory, he froze in horror. A sickening sight met his eyes. The bowl was a mess of blood. There were even pieces of something floating about that looked like intestines. He felt the bile rise in his throat. This was not the result of ruptured haemorrhoids. Something shocking was happening to his body. His very insides were falling out. He was a dying man.
    He staggered from the bathroom to the lounge and sat sucking in air, trying not to faint. Then, when he felt strong enough, he took himself directly to the emergency wing of the Royal Hobart Hospital.
    Over the next day or so there were others in Hill Street who suffered similar unnerving experiences. The common plumbing system shared by the conjoined houses produced alarming results in a number of lavatories. People were understandably terrified.
    As the fretful residents of Hill Street wondered what on earth was going on, workers in the nearby sewage plant made a gruesome discovery. A severed finger was found amongst the sewage. They reported their find to the police, and a fingerprint of the digit was telexed to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Canberra. A match was found on record and the finger was identified as that of a woman who’d been convicted of a drink driving offence in Queensland in 1980. The woman’s name was Eileen Elizabeth Jameson. Further investigation revealed that she and her husband, Professor Bradley John Jameson, currently resided in Hill Street, West Hobart.
    The inexplicable mystery of the bloody lavatories was about to be revealed.
     
    Lucas Matthews, just turned thirty, had recently been promoted to Detective Sergeant. His senior partner, CIB Inspector Max ‘Curry’ Carruthers considered the promotion well-deserved: young Luke was a good cop, diligent and reliable, albeit a little overly academic when it came to the interrogation process. Luke was of the new breed who believed in the psychological approach. Curry, who had a good ten years on his partner, belonged to the old school. ‘Frighten the shit out of them,’ he’d say, ‘no point trying to reason with crims.’
    Max Carruthers had always been a tough cop. The