The Summertime Dead

by Robert Engwerda

  Chapter 40

  Terry Holloway trudged into his house, barely able to make another step.

  He slumped down at the kitchen card table. He heard the sound of the washing machine, craned his neck toward the laundry but couldn’t see Audrey, who came in from the passageway instead.

  ‘I thought I heard something,’ she said, striding briskly about. ‘Are you home for lunch?’

  ‘I had some cake at the station,’ he said.

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  His hands were cupped on the table.

  ‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

  ‘Tell you about what, Terry?’

  ‘Tell me about whatever is the matter.’

  ‘Whatever do you mean? Aren’t you well? You should have gone to hospital you know. Or at the very least have seen a doctor.’

  ‘I don’t need a doctor to tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘Then I’m glad you’re feeling better. Would you like some lunch?’

  ‘No. I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Well, I might have something,’ she said, going to the refrigerator.

  He watched her open the door and peer inside.

  ‘Fielder’s gone back to Melbourne,’ he said more loudly.

  ‘Oh?’

  But she kept her back to him as he watched her every movement.

  ‘Just before. With the other two. Their work here is done, they say.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, fussing about for something inside the fridge. ‘Things will be a little quieter at the station then. Does that mean the murder case is closed?’

  ‘No. Lloyd is going to keep looking.’

  ‘And he wouldn’t do that unless he thought there was good reason to keep doing so.’

  ‘No. He wouldn’t.’

  She found a plate, tore up lettuce leaves, sliced a tomato, and shredded cheese over the top of it, adding a sprinkling of salt and pepper. As she held the plate in her hands she realised she had no option but to join him at the table.

  ‘You sure you don’t want something?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  There was a long silence as she ate – awkward, embarrassing and tense – while he watched her like a hawk, until she could stand it no longer.

  ‘Really Terry, you don’t need to keep staring at me.’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  He tapped a fingernail irritatingly on the table.

  ‘When I was walking home Fielder came up behind me in his car.’

  ‘Didn’t you say he was leaving?’

  ‘He was. Has. But they were hanging out the car windows, all three of them. Hurling abuse.’ He hung off, observing her eat. ‘Do you want to know what he said to me?’

  ‘Who? Fielder? I wouldn’t pay any attention to him. He sounds like he’s nothing but a troublemaker.’

  ‘But even troublemakers speak the truth sometimes. Don’t they?’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on that.’

  ‘No, you probably wouldn’t. Especially not when Fielder was making the insinuations he was.’

  ‘Really, Terry. I don’t know why you pay any attention to that man,’ she said, her skin prickling. ‘He didn’t solve the murders as he claims. He was probably more responsible than anyone for Lee Furnell’s death. He lies like nobody’s business.’

  ‘How would you know he does?’

  ‘He spoke to me at Lloyd and Nancy’s party, didn’t he? All wind. That was how he struck me then. And now he’s heading back to Melbourne leaving the town in a worse state than when he arrived.’

  Holloway laughed grimly.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you would say that. But I didn’t tell you what he said, did I? I thought you might like to hear it.’

  ‘I don’t need to hear it, Terry.’

  ‘But you do, you see? You do.’

  He leant over the table and she feared he was going to reach over and grip her arm. There was a glint of something – not quite anger, not quite menace – in his eyes. Her fingers began to fidget in her lap.

  ‘If you’re going to insist on telling me, then tell me,’ she said, her heart beating.

  He paused, drumming his fingers on the table.

  ‘So. How does Fielder know we have a red couch?’

  ‘He said that? Who knows? Although he did drop by one day looking for you. He must have seen it through the window as he was coming up the path. Or when he was at the door. Oh, now I remember. It was a hot day and he asked for a glass of water. He was inside for just a moment.’

  ‘You didn’t ever tell me he came here.’

  ‘I must have forgotten.’ She glanced up. ‘Being forgetful isn’t a crime you know, and I don’t know why you’re subjecting me to this … this criminal examination.’

  But he was terrier-like now, she saw. He had some grievance between his teeth, probably the one she had feared all along, and he wasn’t about to let go of it.

  ‘The way Fielder and those other two were talking there was something going on between you two.’ He let the statement hang and when she didn’t answer he pressed, ‘So was there?’

  She tried to be dismissive, ‘I don’t think I’d ever be that desperate I’d want to be with the likes of Mr Fielder.’

  ‘Then you deny you ever had anything to do with him?’

  ‘Besides talking to him on the occasions I mentioned, yes,’ she snapped back.

  ‘I don’t believe you! Any of it!’ he began to roil. ‘The way Fielder said it – about taking care of you – they all knew what he meant, the way they laughed!’

  She shot back savagely, ‘Men like to boast don’t they? I expect you’ve heard a lot of that at the stations you’ve worked at over the years, all the stations you’ve dragged me around to, including this one. They talk and talk and they don’t care at whose expense it is. And if they can hurt someone while they’re doing it so much the better. So very much the better, Terry!’

  Tears sprung to her eyes and she jumped hurriedly from the table, gathering her plate and throwing it with a clatter into the sink, the back door slamming hard behind her.

  Chapter 41

  Nancy Cole slipped quietly from her bed. Lloyd slept on and she was careful not to wake him. She dressed in the clothes she’d left in the kitchen the previous night and soundlessly opened the back door, closing it the same way.

  She’d slept poorly, waking and glancing about in the dark every other hour. Her mind turned uneasily. The bottles. She’d been worrying he’d find them. So now she tiptoed by the side of the house, lifting the wheelbarrow handles and guiding the barrow to the front yard where red geraniums grew thick against the house’s black baseboards. She reached behind the bushes and drew out the empty gin bottles, settling them quietly in the barrow before covering them with clumps of paspalum and capeweed, using her fingers to snap off stalky pieces of geranium.

  When Lloyd was at work, and when next door’s had gone out, she’d quickly bury the bottles at the bottom of their rubbish bin where no one would be any the wiser.

  Satisfied her deception was complete, she watered the geraniums and roses by the side fence. She plucked weeds from the ornamental pond that needed draining and a good mucking out. As a start to that she scooped handfuls of mud from its bottom and dumped them on top of the barrow load, further discouraging anyone from sifting their hands through her garden waste.

  Lloyd came out into the yard later as she was raking leaves from the lawn and adding them to the overflowing barrow.

  ‘You’re up early.’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘It’s such a lovely morning that I thought I’d make a start on our yard before we go out to Coral’s tomorrow.’

  Saturday was the day of the Rotary Club’s working bee at Coral Bridges’ place and a dedicated team of volunteers was going to
cut a swathe through the jungle that was the property’s garden.

  ‘Are you ready for breakfast?’ she asked as she parked the wheelbarrow by the side fence.

  ‘Just when you are. Do you want me to get rid of that for you?’ he said, indicating the barrow.

  ‘No, it can stay where it is,’ she said, hands on her hips. ‘The garden is my job.’

  But as he wandered back into the house with Nancy following him, it was Lee Furnell who was on Lloyd Cole’s mind, not Coral Bridges. He’d taken Fielder’s case file home with him before the detective had returned with it to Melbourne, making painstaking notes as he scoured it for anything of significance. He had to go back to the start, he decided, go back to that paddock where the bodies had been found and try to look again at the way they’d been killed. He had to return to that place the killer was in the night he shot Max Quade and bashed and raped Rosaleen Faraday. He had to put himself in that man’s shoes. Where he’d come from. How he knew about the youngsters drinking by the lake. How he knew their movements the night of their death.

  Was it plain opportunism then or cold, calculated murder? He could see arguments for both, but the neat stacking of Faraday’s clothes in the paddock and the distance between the two bodies – the murderer had let her run a while before he’d chased and caught her, making a game of it – indicated he’d been thinking about what he’d do long before he did it. It was as though he’d been savouring the grim pleasure of what he was about to do, even while he was in the act of killing them. He doubted now that the murder was carried out for the quick thrill of it, but either way, he was leaning toward it being a local now and not some transient fruit-picker or cannery worker. Too much was suggesting the couple had been closely watched, that there was perhaps something personal in it. And there was something eerily similar, too, to the way Amy Bridges’ clothes had been stacked in her grave. For the dentist had confirmed it was Amy’s remains buried in the Ranson plot. Coral Bridges had been inconsolable, the child’s remains withheld for further examination, with emotions heightened because of that. Tomorrow’s working bee would come at a good time. Some human activity around her might help distract Coral from her grief, he thought.

  ‘Does she still want to go ahead with it?’ Janice had asked.

  ‘She says so.’

  ‘It’s a mess.’

  ‘It’s a whole lot of mess,’ he’d concurred.

  The file he’d taken home showed Fielder had concentrated his efforts in the town and around it. There was no mention of any investigation north of the border, nor any real attempt to liaise with colleagues there when he should have run a thorough search on the Mossberg, or looked for a match with anyone who might have a history of similar crimes. Fielder’s approach seemed to be that if the killer were an itinerant the search would have been akin to finding a needle in a haystack given the numbers of casual workers flooding the region every summer. So why bother? Fielder’s approach was also stubborn. His bulldog refusal to believe anyone other than Lee Furnell might have killed the pair.

  The more Cole stared at it, the more failings he saw.

  ‘Lloyd? I asked if you wanted eggs this morning?’

  ‘Pardon? Yes, sure. That’d be good.’

  But the other thing he kept returning to were the photos of the murder scene. The photographer had made multiple sets of prints, one of which remained at Mitchell station. He’d dreamt about those photographs, was haunted by them: Max Quade under the shade of the eucalypt, his maggoty eyes opening, his rotten limbs about to shamble him to his feet. The filthy deterioration of the girl’s body, a white shard of bone poking through her smashed skull, flies massing on her privates. They had the horror of war photographs: the casual and careless dumping of bodies, lives worth nothing. He shuddered at the recollection.

  Though the most perplexing thing was the way the girl had been killed. Bashed first, but not shot outright like the boy had been, and bashed with a length of wood. They’d found nothing at the scene that could have been used for that purpose. And why the bashing when it would have been much easier and simpler just to shoot her? It fitted with the notion of the killer wanting to string it out, but it also said a lot about his attitude to females, or humanity full stop. What turned someone like that, he wondered?

  After breakfast he walked to work, allowing himself to shrug away for a moment the Lee Furnell case, because he thought of it now as it being about justice for Lee Furnell, as much as it being about learning the truth for the Faraday and Quade families, however painful that truth might be for them. There was also his own nagging disquiet he wanted to lay to rest.

  ‘Any news?’ he asked Janice as he came into the station and took a seat as his desk.

  ‘Not unless you want me to go and stick up the bank for you,’ she said.

  He smelt paint and noticed the window frames had been given a fresh coat since Ray Furnell had gone berserk.

  ‘Good job on getting the windows fixed,’ he said, knowing it would’ve been she who had taken the initiative.

  ‘I thought you’d never notice,’ she replied.

  It was a quiet morning. One of the sergeants, Steve Hartley, had returned from leave. The senior constable and constables breezed in and out of the station having dealt with the usual minor infractions: shoplifting from the hardware store, an angle grinder and other tools stolen from a backyard shed, a wheelbarrow borrowed from a nature strip, an escalating dispute over a plum tree overhanging a fence, the last two offences occurring at the same property.

  ‘Where’s Terry?’ he asked Janice.

  ‘Sorry, Lloyd. I forgot to say he wants to take a day’s leave. He said something had come up and he was sure you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘He wasn’t too good yesterday,’ Cole mused.

  ‘Or the day before that,’ Janice added.

  But as Cole buried himself in the paperwork on his desk he thought of Holloway’s fragile state, his illness the last week and how he hoped there wasn’t going to be another collapse. Perhaps he needed a few weeks off. The fight with Ray Furnell wouldn’t have helped either.

  He’d asked Forrest and Hartley if they knew anything about the police Mossberg, but both professed ignorance of it.

  The contents of the gun cupboard still in his mind, just after midday he walked home to find Nancy washing the car in the driveway, both of them laughing about her newly found enthusiasm for motoring. The driving lessons were going well. She was battling through the kangaroo-hopping phase on the dirt roads out of town and was beginning to discover a happy balance between clutch and accelerator, her confidence growing all the while.

  They had lunch together and then on an impulse Cole decided to wave the force’s flag in Main Street, calling into shops to say hello.

  He stopped by the chemist, the post office, the State Bank.

  He pushed through the door fly strips of the London Milk Bar and startled Ruby Bunn behind the counter.

  ‘I’ll get Dad,’ she said, panicky, and her father appeared at almost the same time.

  ‘It’s alright,’ he steadied her. ‘It’s just Lloyd.’

  ‘I know. But it’s … ,’ she faltered, staying close by him.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve interrupted anything,’ Cole said. ‘I was just taking a walk and thought I’d say hello. That’s all.’

  ‘Give the tables a wipe down, Ruby. I think we’re about done for lunch,’ Bunn told his daughter.

  The girl glanced at Cole nervously and deliberately skirted around him to the table furthest away from him, dishcloth in hand.

  Cole gave Bunn a quizzical look and the shopkeeper said, ‘Come outside a minute.’

  They stood in the street by the door.

  ‘What was that about?’ Cole asked.

  ‘I told you. She’s had a bad fright about something.’

  ‘She knows me though. She’s always been as ch
irpy as a sparrow with me, but right then she couldn’t even look at me.’

  ‘It’s not you. It’s just how she’s always been since what I told you about.’ He waited for a pedestrian to pass. ‘But her little sister said something to me that’s got me worried, Lloyd.’

  But now he looked nervous himself and was reluctant to go on.

  ‘Well? You can say it to me, Jack. You know that.’

  Bunn glanced at his daughter through the window. She had her back turned. He looked again at Cole, wondering if he should say it.

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s something or nothing, but her sister said something about a policeman.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her sister said something about a policeman. That what happened to Ruby had something to do with one of yours. ’

  ‘Someone from the station?’

  ‘I don’t know. I asked her and she cried and screamed at her sister for telling. She wouldn’t say anything to me, but if we give her some time she might.’ He stared blankly along the street. ‘And now this other girl they found.’

  Chapter 42

  Cole wondered if there would ever be an end to it. Someone from his police station involved with a young kid. That something happened to the girl he had no doubt. He’d seen for himself how a bright, effervescent kid had become a mouse in the blink of an eye, and a change like that didn’t come without good reason. At the same time, he couldn’t in a million years imagine one of his own men being behind it. They could be cheeky, yes. Lazy, yes. They might bend the rules here and there like every copper did, but a crime against a girl? If filled him with disgust just thinking about it. And this on top of everything else, when he couldn’t help but string a line connecting Rosaleen Faraday to Amy Bridges to the woman attacked with the knife right through to Ruby Bunn.

  He’d follow up with Jack Bunn soon, when it was clear to him that the girl’s problem was something sexual. It was a shame, too, that there was no mother to help the girl.