The Summertime Dead

by Robert Engwerda

  Chapter 45

  If Cole ever had a worse night’s sleep, he couldn’t remember it. He was up at five the next morning, sitting in the kitchen with the door shut, the rest of the house dark. He nursed a cup of tea as he scrawled notes on a writing pad.

  It had come to him in the night, as these things often did, that unusual thing about the Holloway’s house he hadn’t been able to put his finger on. It was that there wasn’t a single picture on any wall, or a single photograph on a mantelpiece or dresser. It was peculiar, and that lack of ornamentation was the sense of barrenness he’d felt there. There was nothing familial, nothing joyful.

  But regardless of who Terry was, whatever had happened to him, he would need someone to mount a defence on his behalf, and with Audrey gone … a thought came jarringly. Suddenly the image of her driving by in Fielder’s car came to him again, as did the night of his barbecue when they had talked close in his lounge room. And then she’d left town almost immediately after Fielder had gone, too. It could have been coincidence, but it might not have been, either. But then, Fielder had raped Ruby Bunn – he didn’t doubt it for a second – and what had led to that if he was having an affair with Audrey? It didn’t add up, unless it was Fielder himself who didn’t add up.

  He teased out his priorities on the writing pad. He’d have to phone the solicitor in town and asked him to consider handling Terry’s case. He’d need to see where that went, and also speak to Terry himself and see if he could get any further information from him, about who else the priest might have molested before the Homicide Squad tried to shut everyone down under pressure from the Irish hierarchy. And there was no question that he’d get a grilling of his own once the detectives opened up the case at Euroa – what he knew, of Terry’s behaviour and actions leading up to the shooting, other questions, depending on how thorough they were.

  His responsibilities hung heavily on him, and for a moment he thought he might wake Nancy and have her listen to all his questions. But he let her sleep when she was going to have to represent them on her own at the working bee today. He knew she’d make a good fist of it, and be great company for Coral Bridges, too. He could just see it.

  But there was something else pressing, when the dots were beginning to join for him. It was just that one thing Winston Bridges had said that was starting to draw them together.

  As soon as first light appeared he walked out of the house in his uniform. He was careful to take his revolver with him, loading it cautiously and tucking it into the holster beneath his jacket. He felt uncomfortable wearing the holster, ludicrous even. This was no Western, but the town he had grown up in. But he knew, too, that he needed to be prudent. He didn’t know what he or his men were going to walk into, his informed hunch being nothing that the Homicide Squad would be interested in.

  Forrest, Hartley and Whittaker were waiting outside the station in the half-light. He took the constable into his car and let the sergeants follow them in a second vehicle after he’d briefed them on what might lie in wait.

  Cole led the way to the Jarvis property. He remembered Phillip’s odd behaviour that day at the cricket – his child-like tantrum in front of the team. Thought of his father’s release from prison more than two months ago, just before Faraday and Quade were murdered. The long history of Jarvis’s violence. Further information from the French Island prison had also revealed that Jarvis was not in custody at the time Amy Bridges had gone missing. Then there was the red Zephyr. Was that the old bomb Coral Bridges had seen? Or was it an earlier car belonging to Jarvis? And was the red Zephyr with its characteristic finned taillights the same car that the bank teller Margaret German had described?

  Every time he glanced in the rear-vision mirror, Cole saw the sergeants following close behind. Beside him, Whittaker sat tensely, his eyes narrowed as he stared ahead.

  He pulled the car cautiously off the main road and drove slowly up the Jarvises driveway. Weeds and tussocks overran the paddock alongside the track, and the narrow channel the other side of him was choked with bulrushes. Chickens and hens, too many of them, were crammed into the narrow enclosure at the top of the driveway. There was a chopping block outside the coop, a snowfall of white feathers scattered about it.

  He stopped in front of the weatherboard ruin of a house, noted the car parts strewn over what passed for a front lawn, and sensed he was being watched from behind a window curtain.

  He got out of the car.

  ‘One of you at the back door, the other up the side of the house. Watch the windows and be ready for anything,’ he told the sergeants.

  Then he rapped on the front door, the suspicious, pinched-face mother eventually appearing.

  ‘What do you want out here this time of day?’ she stormed.

  ‘I’d like to speak with Ken, Mrs Jarvis.’ Cole replied.

  She regarded him with out-and-out contempt.

  ‘He’s not here, is he? So you’ve wasted your time again, haven’t you?’

  ‘Where is he, Mrs Jarvis?’

  ‘I told you! Not here!’

  ‘The boys then. Where are they?’

  ‘Out in the milking shed,’ she barked angrily. ‘And they’re all our herd in case that’s why you came.’

  She pointed before slamming the door.

  Cole and Whittaker moved cautiously down the driveway where it ran alongside the house and down to the milking shed. He motioned to the sergeants to stay where they were.

  The Jarvises herd was shepherded into a holding pen to one side of the shed, he saw, Jersey milkers and a few Friesians.

  The shed had been built from concrete blocks, and shoddily. Cole walked inside where Phillip Jarvis had four cows in bales. Even with a small herd the morning milking wouldn’t be over in a minute, he saw, given the out-dated equipment they were using.

  ‘Phillip!’ he called out over the noise of a transistor radio and the farmer took fright, disturbed from whatever reverie he’d been in.

  He’d been adjusting the cups on one of the cows and stood up, even paler than last time Cole had seen him, his black hair unwashed and unkempt, clumps of it jutting and spiky in the bluish morning light.

  Phillip Jarvis stared at him, stunned.

  ‘You weren’t expecting me, then?’ Cole asked.

  ‘N… n… no.’

  ‘But you thought I’d come, didn’t you?’

  ‘N… no. Why?’

  ‘Don’t you know? Max Quade? Rosaleen Faraday?’

  ‘Mr Cole, I don’t … don’t know nothing about them,’ Jarvis protested.

  Cole studied his face: the deathly pallor, the desperate, frightened look in his eyes.

  ‘I think you do. I think you all know what happened to them. Don’t you?’

  ‘No Mr Cole, N…’

  ‘Where’s your dad, Phillip?’

  ‘I … I … don’t know.’

  ‘That’s what your mother said, too. But I’m sure he’s got to be here somewhere. And that I’ll find him if I look hard enough. Won’t I?’

  ‘N … n …’

  ‘You wait here,’ Cole ordered. ‘You just stay right where you are and no harm will come to you. Do you understand? Constable Whittaker here will keep you company while I have a look around.’

  But Jarvis couldn’t squeeze out a single word, his entire being contorted with fear.

  Cole stood at the dairy’s open entrance and snuck a glance across at the mess of ramshackle sheds not fifty yards away. The two rusting cars in front of the largest shed, a Hillman and a Vauxhall, told him where he’d find Phillip’s brother.

  He crept up to the building, peered through the open doors into the gloom. Gifford Jarvis had his back to him, tinkering away at something on a bench.

  ‘How come you’re not helping Phillip in the dairy, Giff? Too busy are you?’

  The young man turned. He was like his brothe
r, only a worse version of him, scruffier, fiercer and darker-eyed.

  ‘Got my own stuff to do.’

  ‘And I suppose you don’t know where your old man is either?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘It’s funny. Or odd, really. Your dad has to be around here somewhere, and yet no one seems to know where he is.’

  ‘Who gives a shit?’

  ‘I do, Giff, because I wanted to talk to him about a few things. Now I’ll have to ask you instead.’

  ‘What’re ya doin’ here anyway?’

  Cole watched him closely.

  ‘We’ll see what I’m here for. You spend a bit of time in here, do you? Doing up your cars?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You’re pretty handy with engines and mechanics, I hear. You’d know enough to have them all working I’d say, or at least working well enough to get them out on the road every now and then. And then people say you don’t know how to drive, which doesn’t add up to me.’

  As he talked, Cole scanned the shed for anything Jarvis might use against him. A heavy wrench, metal pipe, or a weapon hidden somewhere amongst the wreckage of car parts scattered over the ground, or hanging from the shed walls.

  ‘I don’t drive these cars except on our joint,’ he said, avoiding looking at Cole. ‘And you can’t stop me from doin’ that.’

  ‘But it’d be a bit hard to resist, wouldn’t it? Getting them out on the road every now and then, feeling how they go over a nice piece of bitumen? Driving them around on the farm, it wouldn’t be the same would it?’

  ‘I only drive ‘em here,’ he repeated stubbornly.

  ‘What about Phillip’s car, then?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘That car’s been seen in town, prowling around at night. You can’t really miss it, can you? What with the colour it is, and the shape of the car.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘A woman was attacked last week. By two men, one with a knife. She’s going to come in tomorrow to identify her attackers, attackers I’ll have locked up at the station for her to look at. You won’t be surprised to hear Tom Tomasulo is one person I’ll have her look at.’ When Gifford said nothing, Cole continued. ‘I should have you and Phillip in there, too, I think. What do you reckon, Giff?’

  Jarvis shrugged, turned his back.

  ‘Nothin’ to do with me.’

  ‘And one other thing, Giff. Do you know Mrs Bridges who lives on the North Boundary Road?’

  Jarvis visibly stiffened.

  Cole continued, ‘She lives out there alone. Or at least she does now. But it wasn’t always like that, was it? Her family used to be there. Her husband. Two boys.’ Cole let it hang there. ‘And then there was Amy, of course.’

  Cole heard him mumble, ‘Who?’

  ‘Amy Bridges.’

  Jarvis shook his head.

  ‘I think you know Amy, don’t you Giff? Her mother is pretty sure it was your car that was parked out near her place around the time Amy disappeared.’ Cole watched him, felt his own skin prickling when he knew Jarvis might turn and charge at any moment. ‘Of course, she’d have to come out here to make a positive identification of your vehicle, but I couldn’t see there’d be any problem with that. Do you? And then I was talking with Amy’s dad, and he said you’d been hanging around his daughter. That connects you directly with Amy.’

  ‘I didn’t do nothin’. Don’t even fuckin’ know who you’re talkin’ about.’

  ‘You heard we found her body?’

  ‘I heard nothin’.’

  ‘And there was evidence in the grave, too. Probably even get some fingerprints off the inside of the carpet she was rolled up in.’

  ‘That’s bullshit. I don’t know nothin’ about it.’

  ‘It’s no bullshit, Giff, nothing like it. They’re going to put a man on the moon soon, all that way away, and you think they couldn’t do something easy like get fingerprints off an old bit of carpet?’ Cole took only a step forward, shifted the weight on his feet. ‘But we wouldn’t even need those fingerprints, now I think about it. Not when I reckon there’d be other, even stronger evidence lying around. And people talking.’

  ‘No one’s sayin’ anythin’.’

  Cole felt the chill coming off Jarvis.

  ‘But they will. I bet Tomasulo will sing like a canary when we tell him he’ll be looking at a long spell in gaol if he doesn’t talk.’

  And then Jarvis ran, bolting toward him so Cole sprang out of his way before taking up the chase.

  Jarvis was already a good sixty yards away through an open gate and into a paddock as Cole with his revolver in hand charged after him knowing he’d have to close the gap quickly before he ran out of gas. But Jarvis was making for the railway line at the back of their farm, his arms chopping furiously as he ran, the gap between them widening.

  Cole fired a shot over Jarvis’s head and in instinctively turning to see how far the policeman was behind him Jarvis stumbled, his legs buckling beneath him as he hit the ground with no time to brace himself, his wrist shattering on impact. By the time he battled to his feet, Cole was already beside him, panting, his gun aimed.

  ‘How far do you think you’d get, Jarvis?’ Cole heaved. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  Whittaker hared toward them at the sound of shooting. As the sergeants also raced up Cole told Forrest to take care of Jarvis and hold him at the station.

  But Jarvis’s resistance had already gone. He writhed with pain as Forrest and Hartley pulled him to his feet, Jarvis cradling his wrist all the way back to the police car.

  ‘You stay here, Steve,’ Cole told Hartley. ‘This job’s not done yet.’

  Chapter 46

  ‘Come on, let’s take a look inside the house. See what other surprises might be in store for us there,’ Cole said to Whittaker and Hartley. ‘You keep by the back door again, Steve, in case someone else feels like making a run for the railway line.’

  ‘Don’t we need to do it by the book, have a warrant or something?’ Whittaker asked.

  ‘Already done,’ Cole answered, patting a folded-up piece of paper in his shirt pocket. ‘The magistrate and I go way back. Where’s Phillip Jarvis?’

  ‘He’s still in the milking shed.’

  ‘Bring him here then. I’ll have some questions for him.’

  Whittaker dashed off for Phillip Jarvis.

  While he was doing that Cole opened the front door watchfully. His gun stayed holstered but he felt it for reassurance. He wasn’t concerned about Phillip Jarvis, only for who else might still be in the house. But as he entered it was the mother he caught sight of first, stalking hard down the hallway toward him.

  ‘Stay where you are, Mrs Jarvis, right inside!’ he ordered loudly.

  And when he’d braced himself for an onslaught, he was taken aback when she obeyed.

  ‘Who else is in the house right now?’ he demanded.

  ‘No one,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  This time she didn’t answer, her lips zipped tight.

  Cole waited until Whittaker returned with Phillip Jarvis.

  ‘Right, now I want you to show me Gifford’s bedroom,’ Cole told the mother.

  She shook her head, her eyes closed. ‘Not going to do it,’ she said obstinately.

  ‘If neither of you cooperates, I’ll bring you both to the station and keep you there. Phillip?’

  ‘M … Maybe, Mr Cole.’

  ‘And is your dad in the house, Phillip? Don’t muck around with me here.’

  ‘N … n… no.’

  ‘Okay then. Show me Giff’s room.’

  Phillip Jarvis glanced to his mother and then at Cole before leading him down the hallway, Whittaker staying close to the mother. The house was still more in night than day. Cole flicked a light switch, but nothing happe
ned.

  ‘This one,’ Phillip said, turning a door handle.

  The narrow room smelled damp. The blind was up but the window was shut, looked painted in. A duvet was tossed lazily over the single bed. A rumpled and badly stained rug spread across the floor. There wasn’t much else to note except the two junior cricket trophies on a shelf, for Most Improved and Best Trainer. A cricket bat leant against the wall. When he opened the plywood wardrobe he found no clothes on hangers, just a jumble of trousers, jumpers and filthy washing dumped at the bottom.

  Cole said, ‘Nice try Phillip, but it’s Gifford’s room I want to see, not yours.’

  ‘I … I …,’ Jarvis began, his words petering out.

  ‘Let’s try …’ Cole ventured, going back out into the hallway, overlooking the next door along before turning the handle on the following one. ‘… this one.’

  ‘You’re not going in there!’ the mother objected, trying to place herself between Cole and the door, but Cole had little trouble in easing her aside.

  And this room, Gifford Jarvis’s room, stood in stark contrast to his brother’s. It was at least half as large again, and originally the master bedroom, Cole guessed. A wide-silled window with double-hung panes filled the room with early morning light. And the extraordinary thing, what jumped out at him from the moment he opened the door, was just how fastidiously tidy it was. Not an atom was out of place: the bed was perfectly made, the carpet spotless, there wasn’t a sock, shoe or shirt in sight. A desk before the window was bare of any possessions, but polished hard so it shone with light. A wooden chair tucked neatly under it. Everything in the room was in complete order, probably the only thing in his life that was, Cole supposed.

  The two wardrobes side-by-side against the wall were locked when he tried the door handles.

  ‘Do you know where I might find the keys for these?’ Cole asked Mrs Jarvis, who looked the other way. ‘Let’s try the obvious places then,’ he continued, reaching up and feeling on top of the wardrobe nearest the door. ‘Well, what do you know?’ he said as his fingers touched a tiny key.