Janice came by his desk.
‘I was able to get some information on Winston Bridges for you. Beside his address and telephone number, there’s a surprise or two in there,’ she commented, hovering close by after handing him a manila folder.
Cole opened the folder and flicked through its pages.
‘You’re certainly right about that,’ he said. ‘The odd conviction for receiving stolen goods, though going back some way. Suspicion of car theft and funny business with licence plates.’ He turned over the next page. ‘And then carnal knowledge of a minor. Put on a good behaviour bond for that.’
She added, ‘When he was eighteen and the girl fifteen. If you charged everyone who did that, half the town would be locked up by now.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Cole said. ‘Still, it’ll give me a bit more to talk to him about when I see him later today.’
With the Homicide Squad men digging deeply into the Bridges case, and with Fielder and his cronies gone, he felt free to pursue his own leads now.
‘And here’s something else I found,’ Janice said, dropping another file on his desk. ‘I was cleaning out the back room now our friends have gone, and found this sitting all by its lonesome on a shelf. They must have forgotten it and I thought it should go to you, Lloyd, rather than I throw it out.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
When he opened the file he saw it was Detective John Risdale’s file. His accounts of interviews and observations of the town surprised him, a degree of detail in them he wouldn’t have found in Fielder or Quattrochi’s work.
His curiosity aroused, he slowly leafed through the file, beginning with Risdale’s first entries. His record of interviews with Lee Furnell were masterpieces of understatement and brevity – Under questioning, the suspect admitted nothing … Following heavy questioning … Cole assumed the latter meant a bashing. But Risdale was more forthcoming in his accounts when recalling the more incidental chores he’d been assigned: conversations with fruit pickers and tomato pickers, public hotel staff, the bloke pumping petrol at the garage, Lee Furnell’s friends. Risdale had spoken with Conor Quade and Trevor Boland, among others. In the interview with Boland, the panel beater claimed he hadn’t been at the dance the night Max Quade and Rosaleen Faraday had gone missing, in a direct contradiction to what Boland had told him just days ago.
Leafing forward through the file, he also found notes on cars the detectives had stopped in Main Street, and one scribble jumped out at him immediately.
As he knew, Thomas Tomasulo had been questioned outside the Albion Hotel, but what he hadn’t been told was that it was in the company of the Jarvis brothers. Phillip Jarvis had been the owner and driver of the vehicle they were riding in, a red Zephyr. Only the driver and Tomasulo possessed driver’s licences. Tomasulo had been taken to the Mitchell police station for further questioning.
The day Tomasulo had been taken to the station and interviewed by him, Cole recalled.
The car. Tomasulo. The itinerant had denied any involvement in the recent spate of thefts, the knife threat to the woman, and perhaps his denial had been partly true, in that he didn’t own a car. But what if he’d been in someone else’s vehicle at the time of the attack, Jarvis’s or someone else’s?
And where was Ken Jarvis in all of this? Why had no one seen him?
Cole checked his watch. He wanted to catch Winston Bridges after he was home from work, so he took the road to Echuca and then over the border to Deniliquin, a road he hadn’t travelled in years.
A snatch of a Gene Autry song came into his head as he drove – South of the border, down Mexico way. Only he was travelling north, marvelling yet again at the level of neglect the New South Wales authorities had managed to achieve with their roads, his car succumbing to one bone-shaking pothole after another.
He had both working and living addresses for Winston Bridges in Deniliquin, but when he’d phoned Bridges the man had requested they talk at his residence, so he pulled his car to a stop outside a plain, yellow-bricked house close by the Cobb Highway.
After all the years, the number of people he’d interviewed for crimes both great and small, Cole had a good sense of who was being truthful when he spoke with them, and who was telling lies. Usually, he could read it in their faces even before they’d even uttered a word. The way their eyes wandered everywhere but on the person asking the questions. The way they squirmed on their seats. The exaggerated calm or disdain they affected.
He had no recollection of ever meeting Winston Bridges, but from the minute Bridges opened his front door there was an honesty and warmth he took to.
‘The kids are coming home a bit later. Playing with mates after school,’ Bridges explained with an embarrassed smile. ‘I’ll be in strife if the icy-poles haven’t set in time. Even at their age, they still want icy-poles. Can you believe it?’
‘I probably could.’ Cole said as he was led down a timber passageway to the kitchen at the rear of the house, watching this thickset man with delicate hands warming a teapot and laying out cups and saucers on the kitchen table.
‘Take a seat,’ he turned his head and said. ‘They’re good kids. Besides the usual ups and down of teenage years, they don’t give me much trouble. And they like being with me. You’ve got to be grateful when your kids still want to be with you, don’t you? But I suppose it’s Amy you want to talk about, though?’
He said it with a sense of dread, his words heavy.
‘Yes, my condolences to you, Winston.’
Bridges gazed down. ‘I don’t even know what to think. I’m numb. Those detectives have been to see me already. I told them all I knew.’
‘I know. I didn’t come to question you about that. I’ve had a few talks with your wife, and I wanted to see how you were going.’
‘Yeah, I’m alright. At least I think I am.’
‘All that time Amy was missing though, didn’t you expect the worst?’
Bridges studied his hands.
‘Maybe, but you never want to think of your children as dead, do you? Probably you kid yourself, think they’re always the child you remember them being.’
‘What about your boys? How are they taking it?’
Cole saw his heartbreak then.
Bridges said, ‘It was hard at the start when she went missing, no question about that, but the years the kids and I have been gone from Mitchell have rubbed off the edges. It might be a different matter next week or whenever when we finally get to have the funeral, but who knows? They’re settled here. They like the school and they’ve got good friends.’
‘Would you ever consider going back to Mitchell?’ Cole asked, thinking of Coral Bridges.
‘I don’t expect so, but who can tell?’ he answered, pouring their tea. ‘I’ve got a good job here, and I like it. That’s why I didn’t want you coming to my work. If they saw a copper coming for me they might start wondering who they’ve employed.’
He smiled apologetically.
‘It was no skin off my nose,’ Cole said. ‘I appreciate you taking the time to see me.’
‘But it’s not pleasantries you came to see me about though, is it, senior sergeant? You want to ask me something, something fairly specific?’
‘Yes,’ Cole admitted. ‘I’ve just got this feeling, Winston, that whoever killed Amy is probably still living in Mitchell. And that the person responsible for it might even have been involved in the double murders there in early February.’
‘I thought they’d got him? The boy that did himself in?’
‘Some people think that. I don’t.’
‘I have to say,’ Bridges said, rubbing his forehead. ‘When I heard about those murders, it brought Amy right home to me again. I couldn’t sleep all that night. It made me remember her going missing all over again. And whatever you might say to yourself, you never expect the worst, and then when
it happens …’
‘And that’s what I’m hoping you can help me with.’
‘I’ll try, senior sergeant. But I’m not sure I can be of help to you. I said the same thing to the detectives.’
Cole pulled his chair a little closer to the table.
‘That’s fine. We’ll do our best. But before I get to Amy, I want to talk about some other things.’
Bridges looked at him uncertainly.
‘I think I know what you’re going to say,’ he ventured.
Cole nodded.
‘We’ve learnt you’ve got a record with us, Winston, for a few different things. Let’s go back in time. What can you tell me about your conviction for sex with a minor?’
‘I was eighteen,’ he said regretfully. ‘I wouldn’t even have been thinking about what I was doing. There was a girl I liked, and she liked me. There was nothing more to it than that, or so I thought.’
‘And there’s been no other trouble in that way since?’
‘No. It took me years to even raise the courage to ask another girl out. It made a mess of me, to be honest, made me feel like a pervert or something, at least in other peoples’ eyes. I’d be playing footy and people would yell out to me from over the boundary line. It wasn’t good.’
‘No, I’m sure it wasn’t. What brought you into the car business then? The car theft and switching of licence plates?’
‘I was young then, too,’ Bridges said, sipping at his tea. ‘Seems like I was young a long time, doesn’t it? But I had this job at Gott’s Garage in Mooroopna, and everyone there had a sideline in one way or another. Doing deals with the panel beaters. Swapping plates to avoid paying rego. Respraying cars to give them a new identity. I guess I just kind of fell into it. Doing what everyone else did, though I know that doesn’t make it right.’
‘And how long have you been on the straight and narrow then?’
‘From that time on,’ he said with conviction. ‘From the time I met Coral. She was great to me and I thought I’d met the girl of my dreams. We got on like a house on fire. But then … It was just when Amy … when Amy went missing, that our lives fell off the perch. Coral. She just couldn’t take it. And why should she have? Who could? I don’t blame her for anything, not a single thing.’
‘Can I ask you to go back to what was going on around the time Amy disappeared. Who her friends were. What troubles she might have had.’
Bridges sat back.
‘It seems like a long time ago. I wasn’t in a good state then, I was working so hard. Long hours. Long days. I had a few concerns about Amy, who she mucked around with, but I let them go. I told one of your blokes.’
‘Do you mean the detectives?’
‘No, earlier. At the time Amy disappeared.’
‘That’s odd, then,’ Cole interrupted. ‘Because I couldn’t find any record of an interview with you in Amy’s file.’
‘Someone did speak to me about it. Once. I can’t remember who it was.’
‘Alright. Go on about Amy, though.’
‘Yes, Amy. She was a lively girl and we used to laugh about it, Coral and me, because we didn’t know where she came from, had no idea, and we put her spark down to her real parents. When she hit fourteen it was like a bomb went off inside her. She’d sneak out and we’d catch her in town. Cars would pull up on the road outside our place and at first I didn’t know what they were up to. Later I put two and two together, though,’ he said wryly. ‘Still, your kids are your kids. We did all we could to keep her on the straight and narrow, even if we didn’t always get it right.’
‘The people she was with. Who were they?’
‘Boys from town mostly, so far as I could tell. ‘One or two from farms. I told the sergeant – a sergeant, that’s who it was – I told him all I knew.’
‘Can you remember any of these boys specifically? Their names or what they looked like?’
‘There were just kids, and I wouldn’t want to get anyone into trouble. But you’re saying everyone thought the Furnell kid was responsible, and now that he didn’t do it? I don’t want to drag anyone else through the mud, either. We’re just trying to get on with it here.’
‘And I can appreciate that. Whatever you tell me, I’m only using it as a way of understanding what happened to Amy. I’m not here to charge you for anything, Winston, or bring you into any kind of strife, deliberately or otherwise. I’m sure you’d understand I want this thing put to bed, just as you would for Amy’s sake. Whoever did that to her has to be answerable in some way.’
Bridges sat twiddling his thumbs, glanced up.
‘Yeah, I know. So I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.’ He looked up tiredly. ‘Amy used to like going to the footy. She knew some of the players well. The boys in the seconds and thirds, I mean. She knew the Quade brothers, though more so the older one. I caught them out once, and stopped her. He was too old for her, and she was too young for most of them. It was just for company, I think. She was outgoing, you know what I mean? But, if I think about it, let me see … there was Mark Kane, the Boland kid, Bill Highgate’s boy. These were all kids I saw her with at one time or other, just innocent like, talking up the street and what have you. The Jarvis boy who was a bit of a ratbag, I saw him once or twice.’
‘Phillip Jarvis?’
‘It could have been him. He had a car. Maybe that was the attraction. I don’t know why she always chased the older boys though. That Jarvis kid, you wonder how he got a licence in the first place.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, he wasn’t the brightest star in the sky, was he?’
‘No, he probably isn’t. Was there anyone else you can think of, who might have been with Amy?’
‘I actually did see her with Lee Furnell once. He was a good kid, like his dad is a decent bloke. The Quade boy, I think I mentioned him. He even showed up at the house one day. He thought we were all out except for Amy, and it was a hell of a fright for him when I opened the door and he saw me standing there. He blabbered on about something, looking for a job, he said. Can you imagine that? A kid like that would go all the way out of town and then just lob at someone’s place asking for work? I wasn’t fooled for a minute.’
‘What did Amy say about it?’
‘She said she didn’t know him.’ Bridges laughed softly. ‘She had a bit of a wild streak that girl, I’ll say that. It’s like I hardly know her now. Like I can barely remember her.’ He grew pensive. ‘And now we’re going to bury her next week, finally lay her to rest. This whole thing – life – it’s just unbelievable, isn’t it?’
‘You won’t get any argument from me on that score.’
Chapter 43
It was almost five o’clock when Cole returned from Deniliquin with the intention of driving straight home, but as he approached Mitchell habit or instinct had him passing by the station where he was startled to find Constable Whittaker waving him down.
He jumped out of his car. ‘What’s up?’
‘Inside. Janice will tell you,’ Whittaker exclaimed, the high pitch of his voice betraying trouble.
The constable chased him in, where Janice was leaning against the counter, for support it looked like. She was pale, stricken.
‘What’s the matter?’ Cole demanded.
‘I’m so glad you’re here now, Lloyd, so glad,’ Janice said. ‘Something terrible has happened. I had a call from a fill-in senior sergeant at Euroa and I’ve already forgotten his name, I’m sorry. But you’re not going to believe this …’ It was as though she’d been winded. ‘Terry… Terry’s got himself into some awful trouble over there.’
‘At Euroa?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was he doing over there?’
‘Don’t ask me. But this is really bad, Lloyd. Worse than anything you could imagine.’
‘Go on.’
‘The sergeant said – I still can’t believe this – he said that a priest has been shot dead…’
‘Shot dead? What’s that got to do with Terry?’
She stood closer.
‘It was Terry who shot him. That’s what I’m saying. They found him just sitting by the kerb. He still had the gun in his hand.’
Cole stared in disbelief.
‘Terry’s shot a priest? By accident?’
‘It was no accident from what they’re saying. But they want you over there, Lloyd. As quick as you can.’
‘I’ll go. But don’t say anything about this here. I’ll talk to everyone when I get back, if it comes to that.’
‘Everyone here knows already, and they’ll be gone by the time you’ve returned,’ she said.
‘Outside of the station, I mean. No one else has to know for the moment. And can you phone Nance please, Janice? Tell her I’m going to be home late, probably really late.’
‘You want me to stay here till you get back?’
‘If you don’t mind. Everyone else can go home. But I want the two sergeants and Whittaker back here first thing in the morning. At six a.m. sharp. Make sure they’re clear on that time. It’s really important.’
‘You know it’s Saturday tomorrow?’
‘I do. I still want them here.’
‘You want to say what it is?’
‘No. Not yet.’
As Cole slung himself into the police car and steered a course for Euroa he wondered what the hell was going on. And as he pushed further away from Mitchell it occurred to him that he’d have to get in contact with Audrey Holloway if it was true about Terry, and if she didn’t know about it already.
But it had to be a mistake.
As he drove and pondered it further, he thought of Terry’s breakdown, of his recent ill-health, and especially of that brooding reserve he had. There was only a fraction of him capable of being understood. The rest of him was something unknowable. Like that time he’d laid into Lee Furnell. Like at other times, too.
But why Euroa? And why a priest?
The drive to the town passed in a blur. He was barely conscious of anything beyond his own jangling thoughts and it came as a relief when he finally pulled up in front of the Euroa police station.
The Summertime Dead Page 24