Under the Cold Bright Lights

by Garry Disher

  ‘Who knows?’ Malesa shrugged.

  ‘Thing is’—Duggan chewed his gum, stopping long enough to rub his palms together, slyly satisfied—‘old Slab Man here is very dead. As in, very, very dead. Not our headache.’

  ‘Yours,’ confirmed Malesa.

  Slab Man, thought Auhl. Everyone’s going to call him Slab Man. ‘Your boss spoke to our boss?’

  Malesa grinned. ‘Got it in one.’

  Duggan chewed happily. ‘So if you two lovers don’t mind, we’ve got a recently dead carcass up in Lalor. Lebanese on Lebanese so no great loss, but we do have to hit the road.’

  ‘Kind of you,’ Pascal said.

  ‘We aim to please.’

  Auhl nodded at the house, where a man, a woman and a small child watched from a set of veranda chairs. ‘They live here?’

  ‘They do,’ Malesa said.

  ‘And yes, we’ve fucking talked to them,’ Duggan said. He took out his notebook, tore off a sheet, handed it to Claire. ‘They own the joint. Moved in just over a year ago. The house was already here, brand new, never occupied.’

  Auhl peered over Pascal’s shoulder. Nathan Wright, 28, Jaime Wright, 29, Serena Rae Wright, 19 months. Two other names: Baz McInnes, snake catcher, Mick Tohl, concreter. He glanced across at the truck, two heads aboard, feet propped on the dash, both cabin doors open. They’d be keen to get this done with.

  ‘Okay, thanks,’ Pascal said.

  ‘Don’t tire the old bastard out, Claire,’ Malesa said. Then they were gone.

  ‘Fuckwits,’ she muttered.

  Auhl couldn’t have put it better himself. ‘How do you want to do this?’

  ‘Talk to’—she referred to the paper scrap—‘McInnes and Tohl first, so they can be on their way?’

  ‘Exactly my thoughts,’ Auhl said.

  THE SNAKE CATCHER and the concreter had nothing new to add, but Auhl was curious about the snake.

  Baz indicated the tray of the concreting truck. ‘Mate, the poor bastard’s been in that wheat bag all morning. I need to release it.’

  Claire shot a nervous glance at the bag. Took a step back. ‘Quick question. Very quick. Do you know who used to own the place?’

  ‘No idea. Never been out this way before.’ Baz turned to his mate, who was rolling a pinched-looking cigarette, tickled pink at the drama. ‘Mick?’

  The concreter finished rolling, wet the tip, patted his pockets for a lighter. ‘Wouldn’t have a clue. Ask the neighbours.’

  Half of police work was asking the neighbours. Claire and Auhl let the men drive away and wandered across the yard to the house, Auhl thinking that properties changed hands regularly in districts like this, a world of smallholdings rather than big acreages that remained in a family’s hands for generations. Young families moved in, prospered or didn’t; moved on again, chasing a different job, a larger—or smaller—house. Kids finished school and fled to the city for jobs or study, never came back.

  Claire was on the same wavelength. ‘Might be looking at a few changes of ownership.’

  ‘We might.’

  ‘And it could be days before we know how long the body’s been there…’

  ‘So given we’re here, let’s see what a doorknock turns up before we head back to town.’

  She shot him a look. He’d completed her thought.

  They reached the veranda, where the little family waited in gloomy acceptance of their new state: under suspicion, the yard a churned-up mess, snakes lurking, death present. Nervous smiles as Auhl introduced himself and Claire.

  ‘We understand you moved in about a year ago?’

  ‘Thirteen months,’ Nathan Wright said. He was late twenties, a large, soft man with freckled, hairless forearms. His wife was also stocky, a scowler, brown-haired with blonde streaks, dangly earrings. The child on her lap eyed the earrings and Auhl tensed, expecting to see a little hand yank hard on one of the pretty baubles.

  ‘What was here when you moved in?’

  ‘What you can see,’ Jaime said, as if it was obvious. ‘House, that big shed, fences.’

  ‘We put in the little garden shed,’ her husband said.

  ‘You didn’t dismantle any old buildings?’

  ‘Like what?’

  Auhl said patiently, ‘Was there a chook shed built over the concrete slab, for example?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘You didn’t wonder what it was doing there?’

  ‘Not really,’ the wife said.

  She was like her husband, given to the short view, to immediate concerns. Perhaps she was like most people in that regard, Auhl thought. No inquiring minds anymore.

  ‘Who did you buy the house from?’ Claire asked.

  ‘You mean, the agent?’ Nathan said. ‘Bloke called Tony.’

  ‘You didn’t meet the previous owner?’

  ‘Oh, right, I get you. Some agricultural company owned all this’—he gestured at the wider neighbourhood—‘and they built our house as like a manager’s residence. Then they had second thoughts and subdivided. The agent’ll be able to tell you more, I guess.’

  ARMED WITH THE AGENT’S details, Auhl and Pascal wandered back to the crime-scene tent. The air inside was dense, disturbed soil and faint decomposition.

  ‘Sweating like a pig in this gear,’ Freya Berg said, stripping off her gloves and stepping out of her disposable suit. ‘Someone else will do the autopsy, probably tomorrow or the next day. Meanwhile, like I said, young male, with what looks like penetrative injuries.’

  ‘Shot, then?’ Auhl said.

  She waggled her hand, non-committal.

  ‘Anything in his pockets? ID? Wallet? Keys?’

  ‘If you’re wondering how long he’s been buried, not before 2008,’ Berg said. ‘Found a 2008 five-cent coin.’

  ‘Where was it?’

  ‘On the ground under the body, possibly originally in the back pocket of his jeans.’

  Pascal glanced at the remains. ‘Any chance of extracting DNA?’

  ‘Enough for a profile? Yes.’

  ‘How are his teeth?’ Auhl asked.

  ‘Intact and in good shape. No fillings, so I doubt you can ID him through dental records.’

  ‘He looked after himself.’

  ‘He was young, Alan,’ Freya Berg said.

  4

  THE FIRST RESPONDERS, a pair of uniformed constables, were still at the house. Lounging in the patrol car, looking bored. Our police force in action, scowled Auhl. Their senior officer hadn’t thought to follow up and they’d shown zero initiative, just stayed put.

  So Auhl cleared it with a phone call to the local station and put them to work. One to drive Claire Pascal in the patrol car, the other to drive Auhl in the unmarked.

  ‘That way we cover more ground,’ he said. ‘If we’re lucky we might find someone with a long memory.’

  Pascal shrugged. ‘Soon be peak hour, Alan.’

  ‘Just until we get a name,’ Auhl said. ‘Or names. Going back ten or twelve years.’

  ‘We could just check property records. There’s no hurry on this one.’

  ‘I get that,’ Auhl said tensely. ‘We can spend all of tomorrow looking at databases. But that won’t give us local intel. Maybe there was another house here once, and if so, what happened to it? Maybe someone lived here in a caravan. A shed. Maybe someone noticed people coming and going.’

  ‘You’re the boss.’

  He wasn’t. But he did have the authority of some experience. ‘Let’s meet back here in an hour.’

  HIS DRIVER WAS named Leeton. Young, shy, round-cheeked; mouth permanently ajar. It would take more time than Auhl had to put the kid at ease. They mostly did the house-to-house in silence.

  A woman with a toddler on her hip answered the first knock. She lived in a kit home, faux gingerbread with a steeply pitched roof, plonked on a raw new lawn. Fruit tree saplings here and there. She remembered the Wrights’ house being built.

  ‘Two, maybe three years after we moved here?’r />
  ‘What was there before it was built?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Anything at all, like an old house, sheds…’

  ‘It was just open paddocks, I think.’

  ‘Do you know who owned it?’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  ‘Did you ever meet anyone coming or going when you first moved here? See any activity?’

  ‘Only the builders.’

  A similar story at the next property, an old weatherboard farmhouse. After that a dusty converted Melbourne tram, nobody home, then a 1970s brick house where a teenage girl just home from school said, ‘Mum and Dad might know, but they don’t get back till late.’

  Auhl left his number with her and returned to the car. Leeton started the engine, then sat, looking embarrassed.

  ‘What?’ said Auhl.

  ‘Sir, my shift ends in half an hour.’

  Auhl checked the time: three-thirty. Half a kilometre ahead was a garden supply yard; it suggested the presence of a town and other small businesses beyond it. He pointed. ‘A quick word at the garden centre, then back to your partner, okay?’

  ‘Sir.’

  They turned in past heaps of firewood, gravel, mulch and soil. Sheds, a weighbridge, a small, high-sided truck. Leeton parked at a log cabin marked OFFICE and Auhl got out.

  An old man emerged. Wearing overalls, moving stiffly. Stooped, giving Auhl a view of a lumpy scalp under a thin scrape of greying hair. Watery eyes dismissed Leeton at the wheel of the car, focused on Auhl. ‘You here about the body under the slab?’

  ‘News travels fast.’

  The man smiled. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘I’m interested in anything you can tell me about the property. Who owned it. Did anyone ever live on it. Vehicles coming and going. Anything at all. Going back ten, fifteen years.’

  The old man whistled. ‘That long? The rest is easy. Bernadette Sullivan owned the place for donkey’s years. Then some foreign agribusiness bought it and built the house that’s on there now, then they had second thoughts and subdivided. That’s when Nathan and his missus bought it.’ He paused, cocked his head. ‘You met her, the missus?’

  Auhl smiled. ‘I did.’ Then: ‘Tell me about Bernadette Sullivan.’

  ‘Like I said, lived there for donkey’s years, her and her husband and daughter. Then the husband passed on and the daughter got married and for a while there, before she sold, Bernie went to live with her daughter and rented the old place out.’

  Auhl was confused. ‘Rented the land for farming?’

  ‘No, rented the house.’

  ‘An earlier house? Before the present one?’

  The old man shot him a look. ‘That’s what I’ve been saying. An old fibro place, there one day, gone the next.’

  ‘Pulled down?’

  ‘Far as I know.’

  ‘Do you have an address for Mrs Sullivan, by any chance?’

  ‘Won’t do you much good, she’s dead.’

  Auhl said patiently, ‘What about the daughter?’

  ‘Angela. Married and divorced,’ the old man said. He jerked his head. ‘Lives South Frankston way.’

  ‘Address? Phone number?’

  ‘Come in the office.’

  Warped floorboards, ancient calendars and, behind the main counter, a pot-belly stove and a writing desk crammed with a laptop, a phone, a printer and a spill of invoices. A large cat was balanced on the thin upper rail of the firescreen. It blinked at Auhl.

  ‘Here you go,’ the old man said, checking a battered ledger, scribbling onto the back of a torn envelope.

  ‘Do you remember any of the tenants?’

  ‘Not really. I think the place was empty for a couple of years towards the end. Before that a couple lived there, but the bloke shot through on the woman, not that I blame him, she was ugly as a hatful of arseholes and nasty with it. Anyway, after a while she left too. And before that a family lived there. Freezing place in winter, I was always delivering wood.’

  But Auhl was thinking of the man who’d shot through on his girlfriend. ‘What do you recall about the couple?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Names. Personalities. Incidents. Anything about them that bothered you.’

  The old man shrugged. ‘They were all right. Argued a bit, apparently.’

  That’s all Auhl was getting. ‘You say the house was empty for a time before it was pulled down. How many years before that did they live there?’

  ‘Five? Ten?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know where either of them lives now?’

  ‘Not a clue. Angela might know.’

  ‘They were the last tenants?’

  The old man looked exasperated. ‘They could have been, I wouldn’t know. All I know is, I didn’t deliver any more wood to the place after the woman left, okay?’

  MID-AFTERNOON BY THE time Auhl and Pascal headed back to Melbourne, comparing notes. Claire driving; the outer freeways fast, becoming sluggish by the time they reached the inner city. She had few facts to add to Auhl’s, except a name for the woman supposedly left in the lurch by her boyfriend: Donna Crowther.

  ‘She did babysitting around the district, house cleaning, gardening. The woman I spoke to got quite friendly with her.’

  ‘They still in contact?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anything about the boyfriend?’

  Claire’s eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror, the wing mirrors. She changed lanes. A horn blasted. The car twitched. Her hands tightened on the wheel. ‘Sorry.’

  A nervy driver, Auhl realised, riding the brakes, timid when a bit of push was needed. He rethought his earlier assumption that she avoided driving with a man in the passenger seat and decided she wasn’t worried about male criticism or wandering hands. She simply didn’t like driving.

  ‘The boyfriend?’ he prompted.

  ‘His name was Sean, and apparently he and Donna were always fighting.’

  ‘In which case there could be records,’ Auhl said. ‘Police, ambulance… We need his surname.’

  ‘You think it’s him under the slab?’

  ‘We need to rule him out,’ Auhl said. ‘Or in.’

  ‘Find Donna Crowther,’ Claire said.

  5

  THE CAR LOGGED in, they headed upstairs to the Cold Case Unit where the boss waved them into her office. There was a vase of coral-tinted roses on the crowded desk. A dozen cards.

  Auhl said, ‘Birthday wishes in order, boss?’

  Helen Colfax gave him a don’t-bullshit-me half-smile. The senior sergeant was big-boned and sceptical-looking. Wearing black pants today and one of her range of strangely patterned shirts. Brown hair, apparently uncombed; bright red lipstick. An inquiring tilt to her chin.

  Hers was a face that could stare down a cavalry division. Auhl had occasionally seen her express genuine warmth, especially with victims and helpful witnesses. Otherwise she was pretty much unimpressed by the world. She appreciated Auhl’s long record, but was quick to remind him that a) he’d been out of the game for more than five years and b) this was her show.

  ‘Sit,’ she said now.

  Claire Pascal took one of the visitors chairs, Auhl remained standing, his shoulder against the jamb. His life was full of futile strategies for countering sedentariness. Not to mention backache, after almost three hours in the car.

  Seeing that he intended to remain standing there, Colfax said, ‘Who’s on first. Claire?’

  Pascal delivered a clear, economical report, at the end of which Colfax said, ‘You think Slab Man is Donna Crowther’s boyfriend?’

  There it was: ‘Slab Man’ had made it back to base already.

  ‘Could be,’ Auhl said. ‘Could be the third corner of a triangle. Or it’s someone totally unrelated to either of them.’

  ‘And he was shot?’

  ‘Doctor Berg thinks so. Shot somewhere else, then buried.’

  ‘Run a detector over the whole yard, you never know.’

  ‘Under wa
y,’ Auhl said.

  ‘And the original house was pulled down? Pity; it might have been the crime scene. The whole shebang: blood, DNA, prints, shell casings, the bullet itself.’ She paused. ‘Stating the obvious.’

  ‘Someone has to.’

  Colfax gave him a look: was he being a smartarse?

  Claire Pascal cut in: ‘The daughter of the woman who owned the house is probably still around, boss.’

  ‘Talk to her. Soon. She might have seen something. Blood, signs of cleaning, painting or plastering…’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘Speculating for a moment,’ Colfax said, ‘why would you hide a body under a slab rather than dump it somewhere?’

  Asking for speculation was one of her tactics. Dutifully, Auhl said, ‘To stage a disappearance.’

  And Claire said, ‘Conceal a link to the killer.’

  ‘Conceal forensic evidence, manner of death, for example.’

  ‘Throw us off the scent.’

  ‘Inspirational,’ Helen Colfax said, ‘seeing two powerful minds at work. Throw us off what scent?’

  ‘Killer and victim were involved in something illegal,’ Claire said. ‘They attracted unwanted attention and one of them panicked.’

  ‘Or got greedy,’ Auhl said.

  ‘Okay, see what the local plods have to say—if anyone remembers back that far. Why a slab? Why not just a hole in the ground?’

  ‘A slab’ll sit there for years,’ Auhl said. ‘Who wants to dig up a slab?’

  ‘But laying a slab takes time and effort. And knowledge and… you know, cement, et cetera.’

  ‘This is a quiet back road, boss,’ Claire said. ‘No traffic, an old house set back from the road. Plenty of privacy, and potentially plenty of time.’

  ‘Anyone who’s done a bit of do-it-yourself patching up of a wall or a veranda knows how to mix concrete,’ Auhl added.

  ‘Okay.’ Colfax shrugged. ‘Ask around about this Crowther woman. How strong was she? Was she the Backyard Blitz type.’

  ‘Did she have help,’ Auhl said.

  ‘So on and so forth,’ Helen Colfax said, concluding the briefing.

  AUHL RETURNED TO his desk and went online. If the configuration of numbers and letters scrawled on John Elphick’s notebook was a numberplate, then it was probably Tasmanian. He clicked the contact link on the Tasmanian roads department site and emailed a query.