‘It’s alright, I’ve got you,’ Cole soothed as he pulled a blanket from the cot and draped it around the boy. ‘I’ll get you a drink, okay?’
Cole walked back along the hallway, retracing his steps, at once trying to settle the kid while taking in the house. The door at the end of the hallway opened into the large lounge he’d seen from outside, the kitchen running off it. He settled the boy down in front of the television and found a baby’s plastic cup he poured milk from the kitchen refrigerator into.
They’ve gone, Cole thought. They’ve gone and left the kid thinking they’d be back in ten minutes. Nothing around him looked unusual, or odd in any way, except for the television being on. Though, Cole told himself, the noise of that could’ve been reassurance for the child in case he woke in their absence. But if that was so, it meant the Colstons had to have left the house before eleven-thirty when television programming shut down for the day.
To his surprise, the boy accepted the cup and drank from it, quietened down.
What to do now, Cole wondered? He glanced around the kitchen. There were cups and bread and butter plates, four glasses nested on their side in soapy water in the sink, the water cold to his touch. Washed cutlery and plates were dry on the draining board.
A telephone sat at one end of the oak kitchen bench top. The bench top overhung on his side with three wooden stools beneath it. Beside the phone was a Teledex. Cole perched on a stool and flicked through it searching for relatives. He began with ‘C’. There were four listings for that letter, one entry scrawled simply, Linda.
He remembered then. Linda, who was now a Fantasio through marriage to Gianni, was Harry Colston’s sister and a hairdresser in town.
He drew a deep breath and dialled her number.
He pressed the telephone to his ear. At the other end it was picked up more quickly than he might have expected at this hour of the morning.
‘Who’s this?’ a woman’s voice answered suspiciously.
Cole told her. When she asked why he was calling, he answered, ‘I’m sorry to say, we think your brother and his wife may have been involved in a serious accident tonight. Can you come to your brother’s house please?’
‘Are they alright?’
‘No, I’m afraid they’re not. It looks like their car collided with the goods train. They still need to be positively identified, but on the surface of things I’d say it has to be your brother and his wife.’
‘Both of them are dead?’
‘Yes. They had no chance. The train hit them at speed.’
There was a pause, before she asked, ‘Was their boy in the car, too?’
‘No, he wasn’t.’
‘Who’s looking after him then?’
‘At the moment, I am,’ Cole answered, watching the toddler drink from his cup. ‘I’m at your brother’s house.’
For a while there was a stunned silence at the end of the line, before Linda Fantasio asked, ‘How did you get in? Was the door left open?’
Cole shrugged apologetically, as if she was standing right next to him. ‘No. I had to break the laundry window, I’m afraid.’
‘Don’t leave him alone then. I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ she said and hung up before Cole could say another word.
Don’t leave him alone. What did she think he was going to do? It was clear to him, too, that the woman didn’t believe much of what he’d just told her.
Cole unlocked the front door and sat in a chair close by the boy, tiredness clinging to him like his wet clothes. He found himself staring at the rolling static on the television screen before he dragged himself from the chair and turned it off.
The boy began crying again and Cole picked him up, jogging him around in his arms. Where was the house’s heating, he wondered?
Linda Fastasio arrived fifteen minutes later, barging into the house in a flurry of noise as she scooped up the boy. She was bold, even brash with her questioning of Cole and in striding about the room, her red woollen coat beaded with rain and her long chestnut hair falling in ringlets down her back. The mascara she’d applied to her eyelashes before leaving her house had already run with tears, darkening her brown eyes so she looked other-worldly and already in mourning. Cole didn’t know what to make of her as she leapt from one topic to the next.
‘Little George,’ she cooed to the boy. Then looking at Cole she cried, ‘Where is he now, then, if you’re so sure it’s my brother?’
‘The fire brigade was trying to get them out of the car when I left. There’s nothing else I can say but that I’m sorry.’
‘You saw with your own eyes that it was Harry?’
‘No, but …’
‘Then how did you know it was him?’
‘Some of the boys at the scene recognised the car. Someone will have to make a formal identification later, once they’re at the funeral parlour. But we’re pretty sure it’s them. The car …’
In Mitchell, a man’s car was as good as his fingerprint, something Linda Fantasio knew. She barely fought back a fresh round of tears. She jogged the boy about the room.
‘Alright,’ she thought and quivered. ‘When can I see him?’
‘As soon as everything has been attended to at the railway line. I have to warn you, though, it won’t be a pretty sight. Perhaps your husband or …’
‘My husband, fooey!’ she snapped. ‘He faints at the first sight of blood. No, Harry was my brother. If it’s him I’ll be the one who has to do it.’ She paced back and forth with the boy still in her arms, growing more agitated. ‘But you’re absolutely sure it’s them? There can’t be any mistake?’
‘No, I don’t think so. But when I was at the accident site I made some notes on the car. You don’t happen to know the car’s numberplate off by heart, do you?’
‘Yes, I do. I’ve a good memory for things like that. It’s HFK 584, a brown Ford Falcon. Was that the car you saw?’
‘It was, unfortunately.’ He regarded the baby. ‘Do you have other sisters or brothers? Anyone else who can help take care of the boy?’
But Fantasio barely heard his questions. She returned her attention to the boy, drinking him up with her black eyes. ‘Poor little baby, I’ll have to take you home.’
‘Is there anyone else?’ Cole asked again.
‘My father was deceased last year. My mother long before that. I have no sisters. My brothers both live in New South Wales. What’s with all the questions? Don’t you think I can take care of him?’
‘I didn’t say that. I was just thinking of the boy.’
‘Who I’ll take care of.’
‘There’ll be a process …’
‘That I’ll have nothing to do with, sergeant. If you can think of someone better to take care of George than me then you should tell me now. Well?’
‘That’s not the point. I don’t doubt you could. But the law …’
‘Has its head so far up its backside it wouldn’t know what day it was. Don’t tell me anything about the law, sergeant. I’ve had it up to here with the law,’ she said, the boy still full in her arms.
‘Anyway,’ Cole said. ‘It’s good that you can look after him. Nothing has to happen right away.’
‘And I need to get him out of here right now,’ she told him. ‘This boy needs to get back to bed and Gianni will be wondering where I am.’
‘Your husband’s not at home then?’
‘Who knows? He had something on at the Italian Club and I got sick of waiting up for him. I don’t know why we’re waiting around here either. I need to take this boy home and then get to the undertakers.’
‘Sure.’
‘After you then,’ she said, to make it clear it was going to be her doing the locking up.
As Fantasio waited by the front door for him to leave, Cole remembered, ‘Hang on. I nearly forgot my coat and boots. They’re in the l
aundry. I won’t be a minute.’
He walked back through the house to the laundry, gathered his coat and slung it over his arm. He carried his boots and quietly ducked into the kitchen to slip the Teledex into a deep coat pocket.
‘Got everything now?’ she asked impatiently when he returned.
‘I think so, yes,’ Cole said, casting a final glance back through the house.
‘You better have. Because don’t expect that you or anyone else will be allowed back in. Dianne’s family will be swarming around here like the flock of vultures they are as soon as they hear the news, and I’ll have to lock all the doors and bolt all the windows.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because those people have no respect for the living or the dead, that’s why! They tricked my brother into marrying Dianne when no one else in town would take her. My brother was naïve like that, sergeant. My father always kept him under his wing, far too long for it to be normal, and then when Dad was gone Harry fell for her hook, line and sinker. You would’ve thought she was the first woman to ever strut the face of the earth.’
‘And was that a problem?’
‘It was when half the town’s male population had already been through her, and when she was only interested in what she could screw out of him. My brother was a sucker, sergeant, a dead-set sucker.’
Chapter 3
By the time the bodies had been freed from the wrecked car it was half past two in the morning. By the time the undertaker had prepared them in their coffins it was nearer to four.
‘There wasn’t much I could do with them,’ undertaker Alistair Renton apologised, extending his arm at the coffins side by side in the mortuary.
He crossed his arms and stood anxiously as Doctor Guy Browning examined the dead. The undertaker and doctor were good friends, between them having been witness to more tragedy than the rest of Mitchell’s population combined.
‘As always, Alistair, you’ve done well,’ Browning said. ‘Where would the town be without you?’
The doctor was a tall, serious man in his sixties, pounded into weariness by his insistence on maintaining a one-man country practice for decades, and by his adherence to habits such as home visits at any hour of the day or night as the need demanded. He was much loved by the town for it, but also eternally fatigued because of it.
Cole stood respectfully beside him while they examined the bodies.
‘We don’t know what speed the car was travelling at,’ he said.
‘It wouldn’t have mattered,’ Browning said as he leant closer to the coffins. He carefully lifted the sheet away from what was left of Harry Colston. ‘If the train takes you under, that’s it.’
He silently continued his examination, before Cole said, ‘The cause of death seems obvious enough’, Cole beginning to feel uncomfortable that he’d dragged the doctor here in the early hours, when the signing of death certificates could have waited until daylight.
But the doctor wasn’t to be rushed, and he painstakingly pulled back the sheets from both Colstons, tugging on plastic gloves when he wanted to move limbs and gain a closer look at the deceased.
‘Hmm,’ he mused, after a while.
‘What is it?’ Cole asked.
‘The back of the head, both heads, seem to have suffered particular trauma,’ Browning said. ‘It could have been that they were thrown around the vehicles during the impact, you’d expect that of course, but you’d still think most damage would have occurred to the front of the face where they struck the windscreen or the side windows. Curious.’
‘So you think there might be something out of the ordinary then?’
Browning stood back and slowly peeled off his gloves.
‘The inside of that car would have been like a washing machine in the seconds immediately after impact, but if it were the case that there had been some pre-existing injury…,’ he said, glancing back at Cole. ‘… neither you or I would be able prove it now. On the weight of it, though, I’d say those wounds were likely caused by the train. Come on, it’s time for us to let Mrs Fantasio come in for a formal identification. After that I’ll address the certificates.’
Cole kept staring at Harry Colston’s corpse. Nothing about it resembled a living being. When you were dead, you were well and truly dead, and for some there was neither dignity or peace in their passing.
‘Before we bring Mrs Fantasio in, I’d just take a closer look myself, if you don’t mind,’ he said, the doctor nodding his assent. ‘I’ll want some photos made of them, as well, before you nail the lids down. I’ll have someone come over first thing when the station opens,’ he told Renton.
Cole, too, pulled on gloves and lifted Colston’s head, trying to avoid looking at his bloodied eyes as he did so. He saw what the doctor meant about trauma to the back of the head. Blood had matted the hair at the top of Colston’s skull and run down the back of his head. Besides the crumpled body, the pulverisation of his internal organs and sheer blood loss would have contributed to his death, if the injury to his brain hadn’t already killed him first. To his untrained eye, Dianne Colston’s head injuries appeared similar, though not as severe as her husband’s.
‘It’s getting late, senior sergeant,’ Renton said with a trace of annoyance. He saw that the manhandling of the bodies was messing up his careful arrangement of them, and the clean, white sheets he’d arranged over and beneath them. ‘I’d appreciate it if we could get this thing over and done with. Would you mind pulling the sheets back up over them please?’
‘Yes, of course. Thanks,’ Cole said.
He’d have the car wreck taken to the yard behind the police station later in the morning and examine it himself.
They called Linda Fantasio in. She was still wearing the clothes Cole had seen her in earlier and he guessed she hadn’t taken the opportunity to catch a few hours sleep. Reasonable in the circumstances, he thought.
‘Thanks for coming in,’ he said.
‘It’s not as though I wanted to,’ she replied coolly. ‘Shall we do it now?’
The undertaker silently ushered her forward to the coffins. Cole watched as she drew a handkerchief from her purse and put it to her face. For a long moment as she stared into the first coffin, that of her brother, Cole thought she was holding her breath. And then her eyes pinched shut and she looked away.
‘It’s him. It’s Harry,’ she said, her face pale.
‘And would you mind confirming that the body in the other coffin is that of Dianne Colston, please?’ Cole asked.
‘Yes, I would actually,’ she replied so sharply Cole was taken aback. ‘Of course it would have to be her. But that doesn’t mean I have to look at the bitch.’
With that, she stalked out.
‘A nice way to talk about the dead,’ Renton said. ‘Guy, can you still sign a death certificate for her?’
‘Of course,’ the doctor answered. ‘Dianne Colston has been a patient of mine in the past. I’ll do it right now.’
They tidied up the formalities and walked out into the night. The rain had eased, settling into a misty drizzle. Cole glanced at his watch. It was almost half past four now, so was it worth even going back home and to bed?
He decided it was and drove home, leaving the car at the bottom of the driveway so as not to wake his wife. Instead of slipping into bed, however, he changed into dry clothes from the ironing basket, made a cup of tea and mulled over the events of the night, something still registering in him as being not quite right. The other thing that occupied his thoughts was the arrival today of his new senior constable.
The replacement of his long-time sergeant, Terry Holloway, with this new man seemed like the marking off, the closing of a very sad episode. For the murder of the priest in Euroa, Holloway had been sentenced to ten years imprisonment, the judge showing some leniency in light of the circumstances surrounding the murder by allowing for the
possibility of parole after five years. All the same, nothing altered the tragedy it was. Holloway’s wife, Audrey, had settled into a new beginning in Melbourne but rumours abounded that she was considering a move back to Mitchell if she could find suitable work. She and her husband’s house had yet to be put up for sale, which was probably the reason behind the rumours, Cole thought.
And it was typical of the force’s penny-pinching hierarchy in Melbourne that they would replace a sergeant with a senior constable.
He mulled over the Holloways, the conflict he’d had with Detective Fielder the previous year, the continuing trouble simmering over that business when the charge of rape against the detective had resulted in Fielder being suspended from the force, while the charge itself continued to hang in limbo. Outside of Mitchell, there was ongoing hostility for his role in the matter, with many regarding him as a rat in the ranks. While the antagonism of others didn’t unduly worry him, his promise to the girl Ruby Bunn that her attacker would be punished for his crime, did.
Cole was still stuck in his thoughts when he fell asleep in a lounge room chair. It was barely two hours later when Nancy woke him.
Chapter 4
Even a long, steaming shower before leaving for work hadn’t been able to unclog the tangle of black dreams, broken bodies, and remembered conversations mired in Cole’s head. He walked into the Mitchell police station befuddled from lack of sleep.
He made a strong, black tea and sat at his desk. The station’s secretary, Janice Fullbright, set some station correspondence down in his in-tray.
‘A terrible crash last night, I hear,’ she said. ‘You look like you’ve had about an hour’s sleep.’
‘You’re not far off the mark, on either count. It was the Colstons the train made a mess of this time. Can you make sure their car gets brought back here, please? I want to take a proper look at it in daylight.’
‘Sure, Lloyd. I suppose Linda Fantasio is going to have a field day with this.’
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