‘Great!’ Whittaker exclaimed. ‘We get to do something!’
The sergeant stared at him doubtfully. ‘Just be careful. Who knows what that nong might be up to.’
They parked the car a hundred yards from where they’d seen the suspicious activity and crept out of the car without completely closing the doors.
‘Quiet as you can,’ Forrest ordered, as they kept themselves hunched over while darting up a grassy strip alongside the new Jehovah’s Witnesses church. ‘If he’s still there he should be out the front of the property, over this side.’
It was near midnight and with infrequent street lighting, and few houselights on, it was an exercise being able to see anything clearly at all. It was only when the figure moved again that they knew they hadn’t lost him.
‘Over there. See him?’ Whittaker whispered.
‘Near the front fence. I’ll stay here, you cut in behind the house and come up around the other side of it. When you see me moving in, go. Got it?’
‘You bet,’ Whittaker said, scuttling off as the sergeant shook his head.
But Forrest edged his way slowly along the grassy strip until he had a clear view of the front yard where he saw the figure crouching amongst the gloom and rough foliage of the garden.
‘Go!’ he yelled as he clambered over the short wire fence and blundered into the garden, the suspect taking flight just as Whittaker charged in felling the figure in a tangle of limbs and bodies.
‘Got him sarge, got him!’ Whittaker cried as they rolled the man onto his stomach and handcuffed him.
‘Good job,’ Forrest panted. ‘Now let’s see who we’ve got.’
They pushed him onto his back. The sergeant shone a torch in his face.
‘Holy shit,’ he exclaimed. ‘The things you see.’
It was Lee Furnell.
They walked him back to the car and bundled him into it. At the station, they locked him in a cell.
‘What do we do now?’ Whittaker wondered.
‘The senior will want to know about this right away,’ Forrest said. ‘I know it’s late, but I don’t think this one can wait.’
And he listened impatiently on the end of the line for Cole to get out of bed and take the call. He apologised for waking him, but said, ‘I thought you’d want to know about this first.’
Cole mumbled something in reply, and was on his way.
Ten minutes later he marched through a cloud of insects swarming about the police station’s front light.
‘Where did you find him?’ Cole asked.
‘Down near the end of Turner Street, beside where that new church is,’ the sergeant answered.
‘Where exactly, in relation to the church?’
‘You know where that bit of grass is beside it? Opposite that. We caught him in the front yard. I reckon he was trying to perv in the windows.’
‘Wait a minute. You mean the house beside the church? On the other side of the narrow lane, but on the same side of the street?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Oh, bloody hell then,’ he blew out. ‘That’s the Faraday house.’
He complimented his two officers on their work and sent them home.
But he needed a moment to think. He made a cup of tea in the kitchenette, gathering his thoughts. They’d caught Furnell, but he hadn’t forced entry into any property. Nor did he have any stolen items on him. There was nothing, only the possible trespass into the property, which was hardly worth charging anyone over.
Cole still had the cup in his hand as he ventured down to the cells.
‘Lee?’
Furnell was sitting on the cell’s bunk, staring into space.
Cole unlocked the cell, stood inside it.
‘What were you doing at the Faradays?’
The young man shrugged despondently.
‘I need to know, Lee. I don’t want to do it, but I’m going to have to call Detective Fielder in here. Whatever you can tell me now, I can use it to help you.’ He sank down to his haunches to see Furnell’s face the better. ‘What about it?’
‘You wouldn’t believe me,’ Furnell said, his slumped position unchanged.
‘If you tell me, and if I think it’s the truth, I will believe you.’
‘No one’d believe it.’
‘Why don’t you try me then?’
Furnell half-glanced up.
‘I went to Rosy’s,’ he said, his voice dead. ‘I thought it might be like she was still there or something.’ He raised his eyes fleetingly. ‘I didn’t go there to take nothing.’
‘You were taking a risk weren’t you? You know what people might think if they saw you around there.’
‘Yeah. But I didn’t care. It was just Rosy …’
‘She’s gone, Lee.’
‘I know. But it doesn’t feel like it. Not really.’
Cole stood up to his full height again.
‘I think I know what you mean. And you’ve never stolen anything from another property? You have to be straight with me about that one, too, Lee. Because you being found at the Faradays tonight isn’t going to cast you in a good light.’
‘Like it would make a difference, anyway.’
‘Everything counts,’ Cole said.
‘I’ve never taken anything that didn’t belong to me. Ever. My dad taught me that.’
‘Fair enough.’ Cole hovered, torn between whether he should call Fielder or not. Everything in him railed against it, but he knew, too, that if he didn’t and either Forrest or Whittaker blabbed then Furnell’s position might be further compromised, not to mention his. It sat in his throat. ‘I’ll have to call the detective now, in case it has any bearing on his investigation,’ he finally said.
And then Furnell did look up plaintively.
‘They’ll get me again, won’t they?’
‘Who?’
‘The detectives. They’ll bash me again.’
Cole turned and left.
He felt sick to his stomach. He phoned Tilly Beecroft at the motel and had to call three times to get her to the phone. She wasn’t impressed, but went to rouse the detective.
It was a full half-hour before Fielder made the two blocks to the station.
‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘Where is he?’
As if you had to ask, Cole thought.
He tagged along behind Fielder, but hung back as the detective grilled Furnell, their prisoner having even less to say than before, only reiterating that he’d done nothing wrong, that he was only there to … He couldn’t explain. For Rosy… Every word from him was a tangled agony. He soon clamped shut completely.
‘You don’t learn do you?’ Fielder spat a final tirade at Furnell when he refused to elaborate. ‘You think you’re going to run rings around us and make a fool out of me? This is the end of it, you hear me?’ he shouted. ‘This is going nowhere now but to the end for you, you little piece of shit!’
Fielder stalked away to the front counter.
‘Are we going to let him go?’ Cole asked when it was clear Fielder wasn’t going to continue the questioning.
The detective paced up and down, walked the length of the room to calm himself, to not allow Furnell to get the better of him.
He eventually responded, ‘Why would we?’ so it took Cole a few seconds to realise what it was in answer to.
‘He hasn’t actually done anything wrong, except wander into someone’s front yard.’
‘Are you forgetting that little weasel’s murdered two people? And probably stealing from houses on a nightly basis?’
‘I don’t believe he has.’
‘And you haven’t charged that Tomasulo yet either, have you?’
‘No, I haven’t. There was nothing to charge him with. If something else turns up, then we’ll weigh it up on the basis of t
he evidence. So, with regard to Furnell, are we going to …’
‘No, Cole, we’ll leave him right where he is!’ Fielder snapped. ‘Goddamned police around here. You’re the only one who believes that. So he can have the night to think about it. And then …’ He pulled a rumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one, as if savouring what he was about to say. ‘… Then I’ll have Marco and John interview him again in the morning.’ He smirked nastily at Cole. ‘I’ll get them to drive him so hard he’ll never want to see the likes of us again. Enough is enough!’
Chapter 28
With the previous night’s conversation with Fielder still ringing in his head, Cole had been called out early next morning by a farmer reporting a shooter on his property, but he could find no one and guessed whoever had been doing the shooting, if anyone had, had already disappeared before his arrival. He and the farmer agreed he was wasting his time by staying.
Lee Furnell came back into his mind – how he’d made things worse for himself now – as Cole spent the morning working his way through a pile of routine correspondence. Furnell had been released from the cell after being worked over by the detectives. The look on Janice’s face when she saw the boy said it all.
‘Has the French Island mob gotten back to you about Ken Jarvis yet?’ he asked her.
‘Not yet. But I’ll chase them up again, because it looks like I’ve got nothing better to do. Speaking of which, have you done the weapons audit yet?’
‘No, can’t someone else do it?’
‘Sorry, Lloyd. It has to be the head honcho apparently, and that would be you.’
‘It doesn’t feel like that’s me just at the minute. Do we know where the keys to the cabinet are?’
‘Search me,’ she said, head down over her typewriter, adding quietly. ‘If you’re game.’
The murder investigation had put his paperwork way behind where it should have been, and among his backlog of chores was the audit of the station’s firearms, a new task courtesy of Melbourne headquarters.
Cole eventually found the gun cabinet keys hanging on a hook in the kitchenette. It was a good thing they didn’t have to worry about security, he thought, although he wouldn’t leave them hanging there in plain sight in future.
There were more keys on the ring than locks on the cabinet in the back store room. But when he found the right one the cabinet opened with a creak when Mitchell’s officers rarely needed to carry a gun. The only time he’d shot a gun himself was in putting down a dog hit by a car, or in relieving other wildlife of injuries sustained accidentally or otherwise.
And the wide cabinet was a jumble of weapons. An inventory of sorts had been taped inside the door, but half of it had been torn away rendering it useless. So he began from scratch, listing the weapons in his notebook for Janice to type up later. At the top of the cabinet were pigeonholes for revolvers and beneath them two shelves, and under that a locker the breadth of the cabinet. He marked off the revolvers first, some of them so old he doubted they’d fire even if ammunition could be found for them. They looked like museum pieces.
One by one he recorded the weapons, breathing in the faintly dusty smell of gun oil as he jotted down their details in his notebook. At the bottom of the locker disused and obsolete rifles had been thrown one atop the other, and he was just about to consign them as To be destroyed in his notebook when his eye caught lettering cut into the top of a barrel – O.F. Mossberg & Sons Inc, New Haven, Conn. U.S.A.
He stood up in astonishment. That they’d even have one of those .22’s here was a surprise to him. He picked it up before even realising what he was doing and then stood it against the wall. It probably meant nothing, he thought, and there was no way of telling if it had been fired lately, but in his own mind he was still investigating a murder.
He’d bag the rifle and send it off for testing and prints.
‘Any skeletons in the cupboard?’ Janice asked when he returned to his desk.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘Just more typing for you.’
‘Thought so,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do about you-know-who? He shouldn’t have belted that boy like he did.’
‘I know, Janice, and I don’t know. He’s got rank on his side, and he’s the Homicide Squad.’
‘And you’ve got right on your side. Don’t forget that. And we all know which side is most important, or at least some of us do.’
‘Don’t worry. I haven’t given up on this.’
‘Good. That’s all I wanted to hear.’
But there was no disguising the enormity of the obstacle before him, Cole thought. Having to make his own inquiries around Fielder was no easy task. Nor was there anything to be gained by talking to Quattrochi and Risdale, who were the blind being led by the blind. But he knew Fielder was escalating his battle with Lee Furnell, too, and he wondered how much longer that could go on. Would the boy crack as Fielder hoped, or would he make a run for it and disappear up to Queensland, or lose himself way out West? If he caved in under the pressure, his options were likely to be equally bad.
His contemplations were cut short by the detectives appearing in the building, all carrying their lunches in brown paper bags. Fielder was still testy with everyone and his two offsiders kept their distance. Cole thought he’d keep the discovery of the Mossberg to himself for the moment. It was one piece of information he didn’t need to share with Fielder just yet.
*
At one o’clock the same afternoon, Audrey Holloway stood waiting on the hot footpath at the usual place. He was running late, and she was worried. The lustre was already wearing off their relationship. Who even knew if he was taking someone else to his motel room? Once or twice she considered going there and spying on who was coming and going. But that would be stupid of her, she knew. She had to maintain some semblance of dignity, and not carry on irrationally. In the end, wasn’t it as much about what she wanted, as about him?
The other thing she’d been trying to push away, too. Neither she or Gene had been taking precautions and while she never expected to fall pregnant, there was no guarantee she wouldn’t. She didn’t know why they weren’t being careful. Or perhaps she did know why.
There had been a rumour at the shops this morning that the Furnell boy had been apprehended in the middle of a crime last night, and people were happy that the case was going to be settled once and for all. She wondered what Terry would say about it when he got home, if he said anything at all. He was going through one of his phases, saying nothing, retreating. Or did he have an inkling about what was happening between she and Gene? It only made her all the more anxious now.
And where was he? She checked her watch and began walking slowly along the footpath, feeling the hot sun on her arms. If she kept moving it would look like she was on her way somewhere, rather than waiting for someone. Him.
She strolled down the street to where it met Churchill. She peered both ways, searching for his car. Then she walked back to her original waiting point under the shade of a nature strip’s plum tree. But there was only so long she could wait before her being there became too obvious. Now and then a car would pass by, the driver noting her in a quick glance.
She returned home, dropping her purse on the table. Had he simply forgotten, or had he already ended their affair? A sudden panic gripped her as she built a mental argument for the latter. She drank a glass of water. Perhaps, though, it was just the Furnell business that had held him up. Yes, that had to be it.
But she needed to know, because that other possibility was crawling there just beneath her skin.
She looked at the telephone. She could call the station and see if he was there. If she lowered her voice no one had to know it was her calling.
The first time she dialled the police station’s number, there was no answer. Five minutes later, the secretary picked up the line.
She asked for Detective Fielder and
was abruptly asked, ‘What’s this about?’
‘Some information … about a case he’s working on.’
‘I’ll get him,’ came the answer.
Though no one came to the phone for minutes, and she was beginning to think she shouldn’t have done it, that Janice might have guessed it was her.
‘Yes? Fielder speaking.’
She sighed with relief, and told him she’d been waiting and waiting. What had happened to him? Why hadn’t he come?
‘I was up all night, if you want to know,’ he said, his voice cool, distant.
‘I was worried something had happened to you. Or …’
‘Or what?’
‘I don’t know. We had an arrangement and …’
‘Listen Audrey,’ he snapped. ‘I have lots of arrangements with lots of different people. Which is how it goes when you have a job like mine. And there’s plenty on my plate at the moment so I’ll get back to it if you don’t mind. I’ll see you tomorrow. Same time,’ he said before jamming down the phone.
Chapter 29
The police station was about to begin its day when Constable Whittaker raced in breathlessly. His news struck the building with all the force of a truckload of dynamite going off.
‘That kid Furnell! They found him!’ he cried.
Cole jumped up, as did others. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Dead in his old man’s garage! Swinging from a metal bar across the grease pit. I was just up the street when I saw all this fuss and ran up to see what was going on. We called the ambulance and everyone else but they couldn’t do anything for him.’
‘Hell! Who’s with him now?’
‘No one. Just the ambulance blokes and the family.’
‘Where’s Terry?’ Cole asked.
Janice was on her feet now too. ‘He’s sick this morning. He’s at home.’
‘Phone him then. Tell him I want him to go straight to Furnell’s garage. You come with me now,’ he told Whittaker.
In his haste, Cole fumbled about for what he’d need to take with him. Camera. Notebook. What else? He couldn’t think straight. It was as though he’d taken a blow.
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