by Garry Disher
‘Yeah.’
‘Might fly,’ she muttered, her gaze returning to the iPad.
He watched her peer at the screen, scroll down, scroll up again. ‘Well, like you say, he was arrested and locked up overnight. But if you knew that, why are you looking at him?’
‘Just double-checking.’
She stared at him for a while. ‘Uh huh. I’d have thought homicide would have already done that.’
Charlie indicated the iPad again. ‘Any other details? Take your time.’
A mistake. She pushed the iPad away. ‘No, Charlie, I won’t take my time. I do have a life.’
‘Sorry,’ Charlie said. Maybe sorry was his default state.
Eventually she sighed; looked at the screen again. ‘There’s nothing much on him. A couple of early arrests, a short prison term when he was young, and his DNA’s in the system, that’s about all.’
‘But the actual day of the arrest…’
She shook her head, weary of him, and scrolled up and down the screen. ‘He was arrested for being drunk and disorderly—he even took a swing at a uniform but wasn’t charged for that.’
‘Who arrested him?’
She looked again. ‘A local.’
Charlie tensed. ‘Mark Valente?’
‘No. A Constable Riggs.’ She scrolled down. ‘Picked him up in the front bar of the Rosebud Hotel, and…Yeah, brought him in at four in the afternoon.’
Charlie began to rock; he didn’t know he was doing it. Why hadn’t that been noticed before? Why hadn’t he noticed it?
‘Earth to Charlie: what’s wrong?’
‘He was cleared of suspicion and never looked at again because he was in the lockup—about the most watertight alibi you can get. But the thing is, the murders happened well before four o’clock.’
49
PRIOR TO THAT news, Charlie might have wandered back to the hospital. Instead he was stuck in peak-hour traffic on the Monash Freeway. He’d cleared it with Fay: Rhys was in good spirits, in good hands. He should go on home, come back tomorrow.
He touched the accelerator, rolled four metres, stopped again, the world reduced to close-ups of brake lights, and called Bekker.
This time she didn’t give him the brush-off. ‘You on speaker?’
‘I’m in the car,’ Charlie confirmed.
‘Look, Charlie, we’re really sorry about your father. We pushed too hard today; we should have waited a few days.’
‘You can say that again. McGuire shoved photos of my mother’s body under his nose.’
Charlie had visualised it, not only the eye sockets, the dirt and rotted fabric clinging to the bones, but also the cold, satisfied gleam in McGuire. And Bekker had allowed it. He was beginning to see how they worked.
‘As I said, we’re sorry. How’s he doing?’
‘Is he under arrest?’
‘We didn’t actually complete the process. How’s he doing?’
‘Well, you put him back in hospital.’
‘Obviously, we have no intention of troubling him while he’s unwell. But the investigation continues, and when he’s up to it we do need to speak to him again.’
‘Oh, so you’re not going to arrest him after all?’
She lashed back at him. ‘You called me, remember? Is it to give me a hard time or is there something else?’
Charlie rolled a few more metres, braked, rolled again. It was unlikely there’d been an accident; it was just the Monash. ‘The reason I called,’ he said, ‘is I think Shane Lambert needs to be looked at again.’
‘We’ve been over this. He was cleared at the time—about the only thing the original investigation did right—and we’ve cleared him again this time around. He didn’t leave his DNA on anything, and he couldn’t have done it anyway, he was locked up.’
‘Yes, he was locked up, but did you check the arrest report?’
‘Bev McGuire did. She confirmed everything.’
‘Yeah, well, she did a shitty job,’ Charlie said. ‘Lambert was roaming around free until four in the afternoon. He has no alibi for earlier in the day. The murders probably happened between one and two-thirty. It fits with finding Billy Saul’s stuff on the beach mid-afternoon, around the same time my mother’s car was reported.’
There was a silence, Charlie imagining Bekker’s mind at work. Eventually she said, ‘I won’t ask you how you obtained that information.’
‘That would be best.’
‘Rest assured, I will look into this, Charlie.’
Charlie shook his head; eased the Skoda the length of a cricket pitch with semi-trailers on either side, blocking out the sun. ‘Rest assured’: like ‘Don’t worry’ and ‘I’ll get right on it’, a phrase to sap your confidence.
‘Can I rest assured that you’ll give McGuire a bollocking?’
Bekker said coldly, ‘Lambert was jailed for drunkenness, don’t forget. He’d been drinking for hours, presumably, to get to a state where the police locked him up for his own good. So explain to me how he was able to murder and bury two people, plus lay down a bit of misdirection?’
He faked the drunkenness, Charlie thought, or binged for an hour on spirits. He might look like a beaten-down old alcoholic now, but he’d been around. He was banking on the psychology working for him: if the police record showed he was arrested and jailed, why dig deeper?
‘Okay,’ said Charlie, completing the call. Maybe Bekker would double-check now. Maybe she wouldn’t. Or maybe she’d check, and the wheels of justice would turn just as slowly as they always did. As for Charlie, he had more thinking to do—the shunting, stalling and sandwiching of the traffic a kind of wholesale representation of his conclusions and counter-conclusions.
50
A FREEWAY HOUR passed.
Assume Lambert had nothing to do with the murders. He simply went on a bender and got locked up for public drunkenness.
That left Rhys, or Valente, or both, and Charlie couldn’t see either of them as killers.
Not really. Not yet.
But reluctantly—assuming the podcast twins were correct—he could see them pulling an armed robbery. Robberies.
What if none of them was responsible—it was a stranger or strangers? But this didn’t feel like that kind of crime. Strangers wouldn’t go to the trouble of a burial and two sets of misdirection. They wouldn’t need to.
Or Lambert had been involved in the murders. Knowing he’d be a suspect, he’d staged being drunk and disorderly so he’d be locked up—an alibi gamble that had paid off for twenty years. But could he have done it all by himself? He’d have needed help from someone capable of creating a smokescreen, capable of misdirecting. That mystery DNA sample.
Yet Charlie kept returning to one simple conviction: neither Valente nor his father would murder anyone. He could almost hear Valente’s voice: ‘Me break bread with the godless? Bend to the wills and ways of evil?’
On the other hand, he was certain Valente was responsible for the Jake Allardyce hit-and-run. Valente was a man who took care of his flock. Had he needed to protect his flock against Rose Deravin, too? Maybe Fay’s appearance on the scene and the resulting separation had let loose a vengeful streak in Rose or liberated her sense of justice. Maybe she was threatening to talk; and Lambert was monitoring her, placed there by Valente. And then Liam and I came along and turfed him out.
But why would Lambert and Valente go to her house in the middle of the day?
Charlie could think of one reason: to collect the cash from the security-van holdup—or some other robbery or series of robberies. Plenty of good hiding places in that old house. They go back for the money—and Rose comes home unexpectedly, Billy Saul wanders past unexpectedly. And the slab house is a convenient burial site because Valente knows who owns it; knows they won’t be coming back.
Or Lambert went there alone, everything went wrong, and he put in a panicky call to Valente.
If Valente was involved, then the unknown DNA sample was his. He’d have been careful handling
Billy Saul’s possessions, and he’d have gloved up in Rose’s car—but somehow he’d been careless with her keys. Had he stowed his bike in the boot and ridden back? No—too slow. Lambert had followed on his Ducati, then given him a lift back to Rosebud and the next stage of the story.
Or none of the above. Maybe Lambert, or Valente, had tried it on with Rose Deravin and been rebuffed.
Or it was all bullshit, all false, Karen Wagoner sowing mischief because of hurt feelings all those years ago.
This was Charlie thinking like a cop, as the traffic eased on Eastlink, bunched again on Peninsula Link and dwindled to a handful of cars on Balinoe Road. But old habits of love, loyalty and fealty to the past die hard. He’d been partly forged by Mark Valente. A source of both intimidation and encouragement for a young kid. The special thrill of being egged on and singled out: you felt loved, wanted, recognised. Us against them. A big man, a big presence. Charlie recalled summer evenings when he should have been in bed but sat unnoticed in the garden shadows as the barbecue cooled and bottle tops somersaulted: Mark Valente telling a string of Irish jokes or leading the song when there was a birthday. Or—Charlie’s favourite—telling his thirty-minute duck-shooting story, except that in his version it was ‘dulfuck shoolfooting with his trulfusty gulfun dolfog Rolfover’. Charlie almost grinned now; he was almost a kid giggling in the corner again.
A kind of love. A kind of fear—but respectful fear, of a man who looked out for you.
The king of Menlo Beach. Clever, graceful, arrogant, wealthy.
Help you if you got into strife. Save you. Avenge you. You felt loved, wanted, recognised. Us against them.
Until you dropped a catch, cried when you’d been hit on the hand, gave up and curled into a ball. Was it Valente’s voice shouting, Jesus, what a mummy’s boy. Go home to Mummy, you great sook. I’ll give you something to cry about? Or was it Dad, or one of the other men? Liam had borne the brunt of it, but Charlie had walked on eggshells too. For entire summers. Year after year.
Rhys had said, ‘Look what they did to your mother.’
Meaning they’d shut her up. And Rhys heard the warning. He’d left the Peninsula and never returned.
Please god he hadn’t been forced to witness it; hadn’t been told—by Valente, Lambert?—‘This is how we deal with weak links.’
That unidentified DNA. DNA is used to prove, and it’s used to eliminate. All Charlie needed was a couple of evidence bags—brown paper bags would do—and access to Valente’s garbage and recycle bins.
He was drawing into Menlo Beach by 6.20. The sun was low above the water but a couple of hours short of smearing the horizon. He parked in his driveway, unlocked the house and paced for a while, thinking. Take Valente’s DNA to a private lab, he thought. Present Bekker with the results and kick up a fuss if she doesn’t test the profile against the unknown sample found on Rose’s car keys.
As the gums, shrubs and tea-trees lost definition, he changed into dark hiking pants, runners and a long-sleeved shirt—the colours of twilight—and folded a few brown paper bags into his pocket. Then he stepped out onto Tide-pool Street and the evening absorbed him.
He turned left, away from the beach, then left and right until he reached the entrance to Sargasso Lane. He paused there among a cluster of nature strip hakeas and banksias, eyeing Valente’s house, a big Cape Cod on a corner block. The position was good: he could see along the front and left-hand-side walls. Two lights were on, one towards the rear, the other upstairs. Kitchen and bedroom, he thought.
He crossed the intersection and stepped into denser shadows, tea-trees and a flowering gum in Valente’s front yard. Then he ran lightly to the side wall and along it to the rear of the property. Poked his head around the corner, trying to spot Valente’s bins, but they weren’t against the wall and a motion-detector light came on.
Heart thumping, he scurried back to his corner observation post. A dog barked next door, someone was playing Norah Jones, someone else was watching evening TV. Smells wafted: sausages on a barbecue. The sensory impressions of summer and Charlie was rooted to the past, he had no future.
He was about to move again and saw, at the house across the road, a pair of bins at the kerb. It was bin night. He’d been intent on Valente’s side wall and backyard, not the leafy stretch of kerb at the front of his house.
He ran across the road again, keeping low, waiting for a voice to challenge him. No one walked by, no one opened a door to look out, as he reached the footpath, then the driveway entrance. The rubbish bin first. Opening a paper bag with a rustling fit to wake the dead, he flipped back the lid and slid his hand into the messes there, torn garbage bags that spilled eggshells, cellophane, cling wrap, chicken bones. And a tissue. He bagged the tissue.
Then the recycle bin. A mineral-water bottle this time, a takeaway coffee cup marked Tulum Store and a Fanta can.
All of it into separate paper bags. Enough DNA to sink a killer. Then he jumped: his phone had buzzed in his pocket.
He took it out, heart hammering. Murmured, ‘Sarge?’
‘You owe me a drink or two,’ Susan Mead said. ‘I tracked down Riggs for you. He remembers the Lambert business because an outside cop made the actual arrest. An off-duty sergeant named Noel Saltash, now retired.’
51
RELIEF WASHED OVER Charlie. As he replaced Mark Valente’s trash and checked that he had sufficient paper bags for a dive into Saltash’s bins, he began to substitute the latter’s name in the narrative he’d woven around Valente.
Saltash had been an arms instructor at the police academy, so he’d had access to handguns. And the job would have enabled free movement about the place: no partner to monitor his whereabouts; several periods during the day when he wasn’t required in the classroom. Plenty of opportunities to pull armed holdups.
With Rhys? Valente? Charlie didn’t want to think so. It was more likely he worked with Lambert, a guy who could get him past security systems and who would hide the proceeds for divvying up later—until one day they lost ready access to it and their way around the problem had resulted in murder—followed by a clever cop’s cover-up.
Lambert had vanished a few days later. Charlie was betting that Saltash had paid him to stay away, thinking he was unreliable. Except he’d come back. With his hand out for more money? To blackmail the old cop?
Charlie closed the lid on Valente’s recycle bin and wiped his hands on his pants. But it wasn’t easy reconciling Saltash the killer with the Saltash of his childhood and of the past couple of months. The glum, drab man he’d known as a kid had morphed, barely altered, into a glum, drab shire ranger.
He’d barely registered with Charlie back then, barely registered now. A man always on the fringes of ordinary life—as if he were a fumbler, as if he disapproved. Never married; a man who hovered, irresolute, in a passageway or a corner of a garden with a glass in his hand from which he barely sipped. Cautious and uninspiring compared to wry charmers like Rhys Deravin and Mark Valente. If you addressed him, he flinched. His opinions—if sought—never sounded deeply felt or hard won and were expressed with all the verve of a corpse. Even Charlie’s mother—tolerant, forgiving—had said damningly of Saltash: ‘He’s quite a nice man.’
Ha. What he’d been all along was a sly killer driven by panic and greed.
Charlie turned to leave but paused, realising he felt unnerved by the stillness of Valente’s house. The stillness of someone watching him from a darkened window, the stillness of empty rooms, the stillness of some shit about to come down.
And so he was listening intently and heard a thud. Glass shattered, followed by silence. Then a stutter of desperate thumps, as of someone drumming their heels on a floor.
First he darted a look through each of the ground-floor windows. The unlit rooms were full of shadows that moved bulkily if he watched them for too long, but the kitchen, starkly lit, told a suggestive if banal story: Valente had been interrupted at dinner. A centimetre of wine in one glass, water in another;
a fork paused mid-scoop in an omelette; a napkin tossed aside; his chair at an angle.
Someone had knocked on his door, thought Charlie, or his landline rang, or he needed to change the CD. No, not a CD: flickery colours washed the room; he’d been watching a little kitchen-bench TV as he ate his evening meal. A lonely life interrupted.
Charlie waited: one minute, another, but when Valente didn’t return to the table, he went right around the house again, still hearing the thumping sound, less frantic now. Softer; helpless.
The back door was unlocked. Charlie opened it and stepped soundlessly into the house, finding himself in a mudroom hung with coats, the laundry door on one side, the kitchen on the other, Shane Lambert stretched out on the floor. He’d been shot in the back, the blood dark on his Levi’s jacket. Charlie knelt, felt for a pulse, didn’t find one.
Jittery now—registering, in air still warm from the day’s blinding sun, an old, familiar, police firing-range odour—he eased through the kitchen and into the hallway. Valente was halfway down, slumped against the wall, one hand cupped around his stomach, the other clasping a mobile phone. His lap was full of blood. He’d kicked over a slender antique hallstand, toppling a glass vase, now in shards on the floor.
‘Saw you out there,’ Valente whispered, barely a thread of life in his voice.
Charlie glanced at the front door. Glass. And beyond it the front yard, the spindly shrubs and kerbside bins illuminated by a distant streetlight. ‘I was after your DNA.’
‘Thought so.’
‘Should be going after Noel’s.’
‘Yes and no,’ Valente whispered.
Charlie crouched, reached out a hand. ‘Let me look.’
And he encountered weak resistance, Valente saying, ‘Gut shot—twice. Can’t do anything about it.’
‘Bullshit, Mark. I’ll call triple zero.’
‘Done that,’ Valente said, lifting his hand, letting his phone thud to the floorboards.
Charlie looked back the way he’d come. Looked at the staircase, the hint of a light burning dimly above. ‘It was Noel? He’s still here?’