The Summertime Dead

by Robert Engwerda

  ‘She’s got a few marks. We took photographs. But it was mainly the fright she had. The woman was terrified.’

  ‘The knife, the way she was pulled up, she was lucky to get rid of them,’ Cole said, frowning. ‘It’s an escalation if it’s the same people responsible for the clothesline thefts and break-ins, that’s for sure. What did she tell you?’

  ‘It was fairly dark, but she got a decent look as much as they tried to mask their faces. One had hair like Shirley Temple, she thought. Blonde and curly. The other one was dark, but she couldn’t really be sure. The two were about the same height. Both were foul-mouthed and she thought she smelt alcohol on them.’

  ‘Blonde and curly hair. Do you think that might be Tomasulo?’

  ‘It could be’

  ‘Was there anything else distinctive about the men? What about the car?’

  ‘She was still shaking when I spoke to her. But she thought the car was red. She didn’t know enough about cars to say what make.’

  ‘The bank teller. Margaret German. She saw a red car near her place, too, didn’t she?’

  ‘She did. There are an awful lot of red cars about, though. Finding the right one might be easier said than done.’

  ‘Not necessarily. You remember what Whittaker said about that? The teller, whose line had underwear stolen from it, thought the car’s taillights stuck out, or something like that. She probably meant the taillights were on a ridge, or fin. That would mean a particular make or model.’

  ‘Or makes, and models. And that’s assuming the two episodes are connected.’

  ‘Whether they are, or not, it gives us something to go on, and with a reasonable description of one of the offenders. See if you can find Tomasulo, Terry. See if he owns a car and what he’s got to say about the attack on that woman. We can organise a search of wherever he’s staying if we need to, and have the woman identify him.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And while you’re doing that, I’ll pay the Jarvises a visit.’

  Cole left the station and headed out to the Jarvis property.

  Ken Jarvis was a good-looking bloke in his younger years, Cole remembered. Tall, well-built and with thick black hair oiled right back. In town they called him Glamour Boy for his habit of appraising himself in shop windows, his Brylcreem’d hair, and for the fine cut of his clothes. But what happened to him after that was the result of his resentment at having made a girl – now his wife – pregnant, resentment compounded when she gave birth to twins. His married status also soon dragged him well clear of any other girl who might have been interested in him, and he hated that, too, without it ever stopping him from trying to bed them. But the public knowledge of his attempted conquests made him a laughing stock, and with it he progressed from being a steady to a heavy drinker. From the Jarvis home came fights, attacks, drunken rampages, vandalism and theft, and then, when the law’s levels of tolerance couldn’t be stretched any further, prison for Ken Jarvis.

  It was a relief to everyone when he was locked up, especially his family.

  Cole pulled his car to a stop just outside the house, saw a curtain being momentarily drawn back.

  ‘What this time?’ the mother demanded. ‘Didn’t I tell you to ring if you were coming? And I don’t know where the boys are, Phillip’s gone to get something in town.’

  ‘It’s not the boys I wanted to see, Mrs Jarvis. It’s your husband.’

  ‘Ken?’ she laughed nastily. ‘Why would you want to see him?’

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘What business is it of yours?’

  ‘Mrs Jarvis. We shouldn’t fool ourselves about what Ken might do and you know that better than anyone.’ He tried to look behind her, into the house. ‘Can I come inside a minute?’

  ‘No, you can’t!’ she snapped. ‘You haven’t got a piece of paper, have you? What makes you think you can just march into someone’s house?’

  ‘So, Ken’s living here with you, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I’m not saying anything.’

  ‘We know he’s out of prison, Mrs Jarvis. He was let out two months ago, so he has to be here, doesn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ she said.

  ‘Then I’d be surprised if you haven’t. No one’s seen hide nor hair of him in town. He hasn’t been in any trouble, which is a bit of a surprise in itself. He usually goes on a bender when he’s let out, doesn’t he?’

  ‘You seem to know all about it.’

  ‘Look, Mrs Jarvis, if he’s with you, that’s fine. I just wanted to check you were all alright, that’s all.’

  ‘We’re fine, thank you, and we don’t need you to sticking your nose in where it’s not wanted!’

  And with that, she slammed the door shut.

  Interesting, Cole thought. If he was there, why wouldn’t he show himself? Or was there something else in the house they were doing their best to hide?

  As he made his way to his car, he glanced across to the garage and saw Mrs Jarvis had been truthful about Phillip being out – the garage doors were flung open but there was no car inside.

  Cole drove thoughtfully back to town. It was on the hour and he turned the car radio on to hear the news, taking his eyes off the road for just a second as he tuned the radio in.

  He almost missed Phillip Jarvis whizzing by him on the opposite side of the road. And while he didn’t catch the young man’s passenger clearly, he did see enough of the car to note its colour and guess its make.

  Interesting again, he thought.

  Chapter 34

  Summer’s first good fall of rain came during the night and it continued falling as Cole woke to hear it on the roof. For a while he just lay there listening to it, wondering why there had been no sign of Ken Jarvis since his release from prison. Nancy was still sleeping and he delicately brushed the hair from her face and kissed her cheek. A vague smile came to her lips and he could see she was elsewhere in her dreams, her eyelids quivering.

  Cole moved stealthily from the bed so as not to disturb her. He shaved pensively in front of the bathroom mirror, the rain outside somehow unsettling. He thought he should have been grateful for it after the long, dry spell they’d had, but it seemed a poor omen instead. He wouldn’t bother going to the station this morning either and didn’t care whether Fielder was going to report him for it or not. When was the last time he’d missed a morning’s work, anyway, for any reason at all? He couldn’t remember.

  He’d done his best with Fielder, but the simple fact was that the two of them were in every respect poles apart. And Fielder had committed the cardinal sin of police work – putting his own reputation and standing ahead of the evidence before him. Vanity, not valour, had driven him all the way through the Furnell case. But he felt bad for letting that family down, the boy in particular. He was determined now to make inroads in the case, and with Fielder’s departure imminent, he knew the odds would return in his favour.

  He thought back to that Holden flashing by him the other day. For some reason its occupants crystallised in his mind and he was certain it had been Audrey Holloway in the front passenger seat with Fielder. But why? When he thought about it again, he recalled them talking at his barbecue, but other than that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her. She appeared to keep to herself a lot and of course Terry never wanted to go anywhere or do anything. It was curious, then, that his wife would be out of town in Fielder’s car. The only reason he could think of for her being with Fielder was the obvious one. He hoped he was wrong.

  He rinsed his shaving brush and held the shaver under the running tap, listening again to the drum of rain on the tin roof. It had become heavier with daylight, a clatter that sounded like it wasn’t going to end any time soon.

  As he squeezed himself into a white shirt Cole poked his head by their bedroom door and saw Nancy’s eyes half-open.


  ‘Is that rain?’ she asked dreamily.

  ‘Afraid so. It’s going to be fairly soggy for Lee’s funeral.’

  ‘Oh, I’d forgotten. Of course it is,’ she said, fumbling around for her watch on the bedside table without finding it. ‘But how beautiful that it’s raining. What time is it?’

  He came over by the bed and kissed her on the lips.

  ‘It’s heading toward nine. But take your time, the service doesn’t start till eleven.’

  ‘But shouldn’t you be at work?’

  ‘I’ll go in after the funeral and stay back later tonight.’

  He didn’t say it, but he wanted to wait until Fielder had left for the day before taking Lee Furnell’s station file out for a closer look.

  He made a pot of tea, placed cups and saucers and small plates on the table for breakfast, brought the butter dish and jam from the refrigerator and took the loaf out of the bread bin. Nancy came out in her dressing gown and sat quietly at the table.

  She was always frowsy in the mornings and he let her take her own good time in waking, pouring her a first cup of strong, black tea and then a second before she was properly awake.

  ‘Are you wearing your suit?’ she asked even as she realised he was wearing it.

  He extended his arms in answer.

  ‘What about you?’ he added.

  ‘I’ll need something warmer,’ she said, nodding to the window. ‘Just the idea of standing by the graveside today gives me a chill.’

  ‘This won’t be a good one,’ he agreed. ‘If any funeral was ever good.’

  ‘Are you worried something might happen?’

  ‘Maybe. But I couldn’t tell you what.’

  The rain was still pelting down when it came time to leave for the church. They ran to the car, Nancy holding a newspaper over her head to protect her newly permed hair. The rain had left a sheen over the roads and as they drove the whole town seemed slick and slippery with the wet.

  They quietly took seats half-way down the pews in the Anglican church. Though the day of Rosaleen Faraday’s funeral had been sweltering with a hot northerly, today was sombre with rain. Cole saw the Furnell family had already taken their seats in the front pew and a crowd larger than he might have expected was building. In life the boy had been vilified; in death they all felt sorry for him.

  Nancy touched his arm and handed him a hymnbook as the priest appeared from an anteroom and moved to stand in front of the altar. He was dressed in white vestments and stared down at his hands as he opened the service.

  As he glanced around, Cole was relieved to see none of the detectives had come to witness Lee Furnell’s burial. It would have been a step too far given Ray Furnell’s current feelings about the force. As he kept looking around, Cole also noticed many of his cricket team in attendance, including Blackie and a distraught Trevor Boland. As the priest droned on one or two people were still shuffling inside. Cole heard an umbrella being shaken out behind him at the church’s entrance steps.

  The service began uneventfully, dully, as if the spoken words and prayers should add to the numbness the congregation was already feeling. Lee Furnell’s eldest sister Karen rose to give a reading and Cole saw the events of the last few days had left their mark; she appeared in tremulous voice, and as pale as a ghost. She read and sniffed and cried her way through the reading so everyone wished it swiftly over to spare her any further torment.

  The priest doggedly pursued the service in a monotone voice, offered a eulogy for the dead boy that provided little illumination of his character. A hymn unfamiliar to Cole was sung and then one of Furnell’s relatives gave the second reading. Cole found himself listening to a gurgle of rain through a downpipe outside, lost in his thoughts as he turned the events of the last weeks over in his mind: the murders, Lee Furnell’s hounding, the nocturnal thefts, the summertime crowd, stolen cars and fights, Ken Jarvis and having to keep an eye on his family, the Quades’ financial problems. And then Coral Bridges came into his mind. Amy and her father.

  Ray Furnell walked to the lectern to deliver the final reading and as he stood before them, his eyes raking the audience as if to sniff out anyone who had slighted his family in the past or now, Cole saw his arms stiffen and his eyes turn hard. Even before Furnell commenced speaking, Cole knew what was coming.

  Ray Furnell held a sheaf of paper in his shaking hands and placed it on the lectern, a page fluttering to the floor that he didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘I came here today to see my boy buried,’ he began. ‘And to make sure it was done right. Because none of it’s been done right so far.’

  A look of alarm crossed the priest’s face as it suddenly dawned on him that the deceased’s father wasn’t giving a reading, but was instead intent on making a speech when the eulogy had already been delivered. He went to object, but a fierce look from Furnell kept him sitting down.

  The mechanic was barely recognisable in an old brown tweed suit, a hand-me-down. Everything about him looked gaunt and uncomfortable.

  ‘That there in that box …,’ he said, pointing to the coffin. ‘… is Lee Keith Furnell, aged nineteen years old and born here in this town. His father was Raymond Laurence Furnell and his mother Lois Daisy Furnell, nee Baker. His sisters were Karen and Melissa.’ He glanced about the church. ‘If I had to say anything about Lee it was that he was a good boy to his mother and his father, and not the kind of boy who was smart to them. He grew up in the Golden Fleece Garage and it was a credit to him that he took on the work that his old man did and he was a natural at it. He was like any other boy his age and liked his sport and made a 38 for the Mitchell cricket team that we were all proud of him for it.’ He tugged at his suit coat as though it was itching him. ‘He was good with cars and there will be a lot of vehicles driving around town now with a grease and oil change that Lee did.’ He looked up in recognition of a few nodding heads. ‘But here is the real thing I wanted to say. One month ago he was accused of the murder of his girlfriend Rosaleen Faraday and his friend Max Quade.’ Cole saw most heads in the congregation dip as he said it. ‘And I can say with all the truthfulness in my heart that he never did it. Lois knows it too. So do his sisters. And there might be people in this church who know it too, but won’t pronounce themselves because they only think what other people think and are too scared to say. But those people ought to do the right thing when they know it in their heart and pronounce it too.’ He gave them pause to consider it. ‘The police in this town and the ones that came from Melbourne pestered our boy and beat him and cursed him.’ Nancy took Cole’s hand and squeezed it. ‘They drove him and they drove him until he did what he did. He didn’t do it out of remorse or guilt but only because he was driven to it, don’t you see? If he were of the right frame of mind he wouldn’t never have done it because he was loyal to his parents and to his family. But when you get bashed like he was bashed and live in fear there is no thinking straight. In the end for him there wasn’t no one he thought believed him even when there was.’ He bowed his head then and the congregation thought he had said his piece, before he raised his eyes and addressed them directly. ‘People think this town is a bed of roses, but it isn’t. It makes me sick, this place. Look what it did to my boy. Look what it did to other parents’ kids. It wasn’t Lee, and never was. See there. That boy in the coffin is Lee Keith Furnell. I hope you don’t forget who he was.’

  An unearthly silence fell over the assembly as he resumed his seat, a silence that quivered throughout the church as the priest got to his feet tentatively and forgot his place, stumbling on with the service, red-faced and flustered.

  The remainder of the service passed as a blur to Cole, but there was an ache in him for the dead boy’s family. If it came to it, would he be even able to manage a word or two in his own children’s honour like Ray Furnell had done for his son? There had been more dignity than he’d expected about the man, he thought, a de
termination in him not to let his emotions get in the way of the message he had to send to the town.

  It was as the casket was leaving the church, the Furnell family following it gravely down the aisle that Cole’s head turned and spied a flash of blue near the rear doors – Terry Holloway standing beside the aisle at the back of the church bright and obvious in his police uniform.

  Oh hell, he thought, stunned. What fool of a reason had Holloway thinking that coming to the funeral in his uniform was a good idea?

  And Ray Furnell had spotted him, too. As the casket was carried through the church Cole saw the mad look in Furnell’s eye and he pushed by Nancy and the others in his pew to hurry down the side aisle. But as alert as he was, he wasn’t fast enough to get to Holloway before Ray Furnell leapt at him and wrestled him to the floor, the bottleneck of mourners at the rear of the church erupting in outrage at the unseemly spectacle of the two men brawling.

  Chapter 35

  With their departure from Mitchell in sight, the detectives’ celebrations began early at the Casablanca Motel.

  Fielder, Quattrochi and Risdale crammed into Risdale’s room with wine, a dozen bottles of beer and the whisky Fielder brought from his unit. Cold toasted cheese and ham sandwiches oozed on greaseproof paper on a low table between them.

  ‘Here’s to us!’ Fielder said after Risdale found dirty glasses to pour beer into.

  ‘There’s still no blot on my copybook. There wasn’t a case yet that I couldn’t crack,’ Fielder boasted, cigarette in hand. ‘But how come you’ve got three chairs in your room Johnny and there’s only one in mine? Aren’t I the king, The Finisher?’ he laughed. ‘Aren’t I the man who shot Liberty Valance, the greatest of them all?’

  ‘You’d never had done it without us,’ Quattrochi said. ‘We do all the dirty work while you sit back and lap up all the credit.’

  ‘Like a pussycat,’ Risdale said.

  ‘That’s what being a leader is, boys. It’s a game of cat and mouse,’ Fielder said. ‘You’ve got to let the other guys understand that the power of your ideas and convictions are always going to win out in the end. Find your quarry and then hunt them into a place you want, until they’re backed up with no escape. That’s what a winner does.’