Under the Cold Bright Lights

by Garry Disher

  AUHL FOUND NEVE, HER parents and Fleet on the courthouse steps. Neve, splotchy with tears and bewilderment, said, ‘Lloyd in his suit, looking all calm and rational, and look at me. Something the cat dragged in.’

  ‘Hush, dear,’ her mother said. Maureen Deane gave Fleet, Auhl and her husband looks of stubborn hostility, then placed an arm around her daughter. ‘Let’s get you home.’

  Neve was to spend the afternoon with her parents. But she wasn’t finished, and gently disengaged from her mother. ‘Why couldn’t the judge give his ruling today!’ She hugged herself. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling. It’s like those people think an abusive father’s better than no father.’

  Auhl nodded. Pity you didn’t have decent legal help, he wanted to say, but held his tongue.

  He asked the lawyer, ‘What’s your take on it?’

  Fleet shifted his feet, in a hurry to be off. ‘As I told Neve, single-expert assessments are not uncommon when the situation is fraught.’

  Auhl was impatient. ‘But this is a guy who comes up with so-called in-depth and professional recommendations on the basis of a few half-hour meetings.’

  Here Fleet winced. ‘He is old school, I’ll give you that.’

  He touched Neve’s forearm, said he had to be off, he’d be in touch, see her next Monday afternoon.

  ‘Thanks, Jeff,’ Neve called after him.

  Thanks for what? Auhl wanted to ask her.

  Saying his own goodbyes, he raced back into the courthouse and looked for a men’s room. Up one long corridor and down another—stopping in his tracks when he saw Kelso with Nichols, Lloyd Fanning’s lawyer. They were halfway along, heads close together, and suddenly each man was tipping back his head to laugh. Kelso clapped the lawyer on the shoulder and then they were moving off in separate directions. Mates, thought Auhl, like the backslapping fathers he remembered from school sports and speech days, the senior officers at police HQ. Secret knowledge, secret connections. Secret deals and understandings reached—often without a word uttered or written.

  Kelso was ambling towards Auhl. Auhl turned on his heel and up a flight of stairs and finally there was a men’s room.

  RATHER THAN RETURN to Melbourne just yet, Auhl stuck his head into his wife’s office at HomeSafe, in one of the government buildings near the library. There were harbour views, but not from Liz’s office. Auhl commented on that but added, ‘I’d much rather look at you anyway.’

  A misstep. He was prone to them around her. She glanced at her watch. ‘Neve?’ she prompted.

  Auhl described the morning’s events, finally saying, ‘The husband had a high-priced lawyer with him and they both looked calm and prosperous and successful, whereas Neve looked kind of ratty and high-strung, which didn’t help. Her lawyer didn’t help much, either. But the prevailing atmosphere was: any kind of father, even one with a big question mark hanging over him, is better than no father at all.’

  Liz snorted. ‘Yes, that seems to be the guiding principle. I see it all the time with the women and kids who come through the agency. Unless there’s clear evidence of violence—severe violence—it’s difficult for the mother to cut the father out. And as for domestic violence and sex abuse training for judges and lawyers, forget it.’

  ‘But you’d expect the shrink who interviewed Neve and Pia to have some experience or training?’

  ‘Don’t count on it,’ Liz said. ‘The system’s stressed, underfunded and paternalistic. Nothing works the way you’d like.’ She looked at her watch again.

  Auhl got the message. He always wanted to hang out and chat with her, but that was gone now. She was no longer his chief conversation partner and sounding board.

  13

  AUHL WAS BACK IN the city by one-thirty. He headed straight for the police complex, upstairs and into the office of a friend who worked child sex abuse cases.

  ‘Lloyd Fanning. Anything?’

  ‘Hello to you, too, Al.’

  Trina Carter was a senior sergeant, Auhl’s age, with the gaunt look of someone on the prowl for prowlers. She got him to write the name on a slip of paper, checked the spelling, and typed, her fingernails clacking rapidly on her keyboard.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Even if there were a whisper, would he show up in your system?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Who is he?’

  Auhl told her. ‘But no one’s said anything, I’m just checking.’

  ‘Let me know if you turn anything up,’ Carter said.

  AUHL CONSIDERED HIS long to-do list. First, follow up on Elphick.

  Working the phone for the next thirty minutes, he was shunted from one paper-shuffling desk drone to another as he sought Tasmania car ferry passenger and vehicle records for the period before and after Elphick’s death. In the end, he told a supervisor she was hindering his investigation into the long-term smuggling of drugs and handguns from Tasmania to the mainland by way of the ferry; that he was simply trying to stay a step ahead of reporters from the Herald Sun. He got the answer he was looking for fairly quickly after that.

  Roger Vance had taken his LandCruiser on the ferry from Devonport to Melbourne one day prior to the death of John Elphick and returned to Tasmania on the evening of the day Elphick died.

  Not enough for an arrest warrant. Would the department spring for a flight to Launceston, to question the guy? More to the point, was Vance still there? Auhl sent an email to the police station in Launceston then knocked on the boss’s door.

  ‘I thought you were taking the whole day off.’

  Auhl shrugged. ‘A quick hearing, final word next Monday.’

  Colfax was aware of Neve Fanning’s predicament. She told him once again not to let it interfere with the job.

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Don’t get too involved. Perspective.’

  ‘Yup, good.’ He was what, twenty years older than her? ‘Meanwhile, further developments in the Elphick case.’ He explained: a numberplate, a vehicle, a name, an address near Launceston, the vehicle on the Spirit of Tasmania just before and after the time Elphick died.

  Patting her pockets for cigarettes, forgetting she was an ex-smoker, Colfax said, ‘Do we know if he still lives in Tasmania?’

  ‘Still checking that,’ Auhl said.

  Colfax gathered herself. ‘Good. But Elphick can wait. Slab Man. Remember him?’

  ‘Boss.’

  ‘Get onto Angela Sullivan. I want you and Claire to interview her this afternoon.’

  ‘What about the Neill case?’

  ‘What about it? If Mrs Neill stole hospital drugs, it’s not our case. If she recently murdered Christine Lancer, it’s not our case. We’re monitoring their movements. The good doctor’s in the country, Janine’s in the city. Leave it for now.’

  MID-AFTERNOON BY THE time Auhl and Pascal had signed out an unmarked sedan and begun battling early peak-hour traffic to an address in South Frankston.

  Auhl, driving, said, ‘She knows we’re coming?’

  ‘Yep. She’s agreed to dig out what records she can find.’

  ‘Or she’s our killer and you’ve tipped her off.’

  ‘Cheers for that, Alan, but it’s not as if she hasn’t had advance warning.’

  Slab Man had been all over the news since Thursday evening, the combination of snake, snake catcher, skeleton and murder proving irresistible.

  They came to a small tan brick house tucked among others like it on a side street near Mt Erin Secondary College. The woman who answered Auhl’s knock was about forty, her face, neck and upper arms tucked, pillowed, as though she’d lost a great deal of weight. Shoulder-length greying hair, old short-sleeved white shirt over cargo pants, sandshoes without socks.

  ‘You must be the detectives. Please come in.’

  Calm, gracious, but Auhl sensed tension in her. He mustered a smile. ‘We don’t intend to take up too much of your time, Ms Sullivan. A few questions, a quick look at any paperwork you’ve managed to dig up and we’ll be out of your hair.’

  ‘Ca
ll me Angie, please.’

  They followed her into a small sitting room. Floral carpet, armchairs and curtains from another era. The late mother’s taste? Hardly Angela Sullivan’s, thought Auhl, eyeing some kind of native-art talisman on a leather thong around her neck, a strange but appealing hammered-silver ring on one finger, and hippy-market earrings. A woman slowly breaking away from her past?

  She settled them onto the sofa and dashed to the kitchen, returning with a tray, a jug of water, three tumblers. Perched herself on the edge of an armchair and clapped her thighs: ‘Now, how can I help?’

  Auhl pointed to a photograph on the mantelpiece. ‘Your parents?’

  Sullivan glanced at it, swung her head back. Guarded, she said, ‘Yes. Mum died a few years ago, Dad when I was only ten.’

  ‘According to our records, your parents bought the property where we found the dead man in 1976?’

  ‘That sounds about right. Mum was pregnant with me.’

  ‘There was a house on the property?’

  ‘Old fibro farmhouse.’

  ‘Your father worked for the fire brigade?’

  She was astonished. ‘However did you learn that?’

  Auhl and Pascal were practised at enigmatic looks and never-you-mind shrugs.

  A little rattled now, Angela Sullivan said, ‘He was stationed in Frankston, but he and Mum wanted to bring me up in the country.’

  ‘It must have been hard on you and your mother when he died.’

  Sullivan glanced down at her bony, veined hands as if they were not attached to her. ‘Yes.’ She lifted her head. ‘But we had a spare room so Mum started renting it out to farmhands, anyone who wanted full board.’ She paused, as if dismayed at the disclosure. ‘You can’t think the dead man was one of those?’

  Claire held up a calming hand. ‘We have reason to believe he was buried no earlier than 2008.’

  Relieved, Sullivan said, ‘Me and Mum weren’t even living there then. I left home to get married but that didn’t last long and Mum moved in with me after the divorce. That would have been almost twenty years ago.’

  ‘So she lived here with you from the late 1990s until her death in 2011?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Meanwhile renting out the old family home, where you grew up?’

  ‘Yes. It was handy money for her. She didn’t have much in the way of savings.’

  ‘She could have sold it when she moved in with you.’

  ‘She kept meaning to, but somehow the time or the price wasn’t right. She saw the place as security, I think. Plus the house would have needed money spent on it to make it attractive to buyers.’

  A harsh engine-revving outside and Sullivan rushed to the window. ‘Little idiots.’

  Auhl glanced at Claire. He stood and ambled across to join Sullivan. She’d yanked aside a drape of dusty, semi-transparent mesh curtain, and he could see two young men outside, wearing street-hoon caps and tatts, baggy jeans and studded belts, bent over the engine compartment of a hotted-up Subaru WRX. A third boy was behind the wheel, revving the motor, easing off, revving again.

  ‘You could ask the local uniforms to have a word,’ Auhl said.

  Sullivan shook her head. She released the curtain and returned to her armchair. ‘It’s all right. I’ve known them all their lives. They’re nice enough lads, just a bit inconsiderate. No jobs, not much education, too much spare time, you know how it is. Now, where were we?’

  ‘Still working out the timeline,’ Claire said.

  Sullivan rattled it off: ‘Okay. Bought in 1976, Dad died 1987, Mum moved in with me 1998, she died 2011, I sold a year or so later.’

  ‘To the agricultural company.’

  ‘The real estate agent handled all that.’

  ‘Did the same agent handle the tenancy agreements? Collect the rent on your behalf, that kind of thing?’

  Sullivan shook her head. ‘They’re all Scrooges, that lot. Me and Mum handled the rental side of things.’

  ‘You kept records? Tax all squared away?’ Auhl asked, wanting to show a degree of harshness now, sensing that Sullivan might turn vague.

  ‘Now, where did I put that folder?’ she said, looking about the room.

  ‘Over there on the piano,’ Claire said, sharing a glance with Auhl.

  Flustered, Angela Sullivan gathered the folder, slapped it onto the glass-topped coffee table. Some of the contents slithered out and fanned across the surface.

  ‘Perhaps you could take us through it,’ Auhl said, gesturing at the paperwork.

  Sullivan flipped open the folder and picked up the first sheet. She frowned at it, thrust it at Auhl. A name, monthly dates and amounts in smudged ballpoint.

  ‘John Allard,’ said Auhl, looking at Claire. ‘He moved in in mid-November 1998, stayed…two years.’

  ‘If that’s what it says, that’s what it says,’ Sullivan said.

  Claire scribbled the name and dates in her notebook. ‘Do you know his whereabouts now, Angela?’

  ‘You think it could be him?’ She gave herself gentle slaps to the cheeks, one side, the other. ‘No, can’t be him.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I saw him last year. He bought a place in Langwarrin. Can’t be him.’

  Auhl picked through the remaining rental records. Paltry, approximate, hand-scrawled. But he found Donna Crowther. ‘A woman named Donna Crowther rented the house from Christmas 2001 until mid-2005.’

  ‘Yes, Donna. That sounds about right.’

  Claire said, ‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

  Elaborately vague, Sullivan said, ‘I think so?’

  With a shift in his tone, Auhl said, ‘Angela, we talked to some of the neighbours. Donna had a boyfriend and they often argued, fought.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We heard the boyfriend was there one day, gone the next.’

  ‘I really wouldn’t know. I didn’t have much to do with them. They were tenants.’

  ‘Do you happen to know where Donna lives now?’

  ‘Somewhere in Carrum, I think.’

  ‘Do you stay in touch with her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you do have an address for her? Phone number?’

  ‘No,’ Angela Sullivan said, looking hunted.

  Auhl said, ‘Donna Crowther was your last tenant?’

  Sullivan glanced up and shifted her jaw from side to side as if severely taxed by the question, before nodding, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why? Your mother was still alive. Still needed the money. She let the property stay vacant from 2005 until her death, what, six years later?’

  ‘Well, if you must know, the house was a wreck. Fibro, holes in the walls for the rats to get in. Rusty roofing iron. Badly in need of a restumping. Loose floorboards, you name it. We couldn’t afford to fix it up and it wasn’t in a fit state to rent to anyone.’

  ‘So after Donna Crowther moved out, the house sat vacant for several years, then you demolished it to make the land seem more desirable to buyers?’

  She whispered, ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is very important, Angela. You would have looked inside the house before it was demolished? Taken out any valuable fixtures, that kind of thing?’

  ‘Don’t really recall.’

  ‘Angela,’ said Auhl, disappointed.

  ‘Okay, all right, I had a look through it. For the first time in years, actually. The fireplace surround was quite lovely, so I pulled it out and sold it to a dealer.’

  ‘Did you see any signs of a struggle?’

  She blanched. ‘What sort of signs?’

  ‘Blood on the floor or walls,’ said Auhl with an edge to his voice. ‘Fresh holes in the walls or floorboards. Or failing that, fresh signs that the place had been cleaned, painted, patched.’

  Looking at her gnarled hands again she said, ‘Nothing like that.’

  ‘Who carried out the demolition?’

  ‘Oh come on.’ She shook her head, a little too emphatically for Auhl’s liking. ‘It was years
ago. And I was still grieving the death of my mother, plus talking to the real estate people and I had debts to clear and my health wasn’t that good.’

  Auhl waited.

  ‘Just a name on a flyer in my letterbox,’ she said at last. ‘Some man who advertised home maintenance and repairs. All I had was a mobile number. I didn’t keep it.’

  ‘A home maintenance guy demolished the house? How? Did he have the right equipment? Where did he take the rubbish? How did you pay him?’

  ‘He said he’d recycle most of it. Lovely pressed-tin ceilings, wood mouldings, that kind of thing. Any wood that wasn’t rotten he’d turn into kindling. It was a small house. I think he got some of his mates in and they stripped it and carted it all off in trailers.’

  By now she was sounding confident. She had a story she was sticking to, and she was tired of them. She had nothing more to give them except repetition.

  AUHL COMPARED NOTES with Pascal in the car afterwards, the sun beating against the glass, a sense that Angela Sullivan was watching them from her sitting room. Or maybe she was eyeing the boys tinkering with their car. God, he was weary after a day of running around the state.

  ‘Maybe the real estate agent saw something,’ he said.

  Claire was staring at the house glumly. ‘She got twitchy a couple of times.’

  ‘She did,’ agreed Auhl. ‘The house, or maybe the demolition. And Crowther.’

  ‘The woman who told me about Crowther said she stayed on for at least a year after her boyfriend disappeared.’

  ‘Pretty calculating to shoot your boyfriend, bury him next to the house and carry on as if nothing had happened.’

  ‘Yes, but does the timeline work? And if she did shoot and bury her boyfriend and stay on in the house, she’d need to clean up, meaning it’s pointless asking anyone if they saw blood or brains or bullet holes.’

  ‘True,’ said Auhl. ‘Or Slab Man is not her boyfriend but a stranger, buried later, and she had nothing to do with any of it.’

  Claire grunted.

  They continued to muse. Auhl said, ‘What if squatters moved in after Crowther moved out?’

  Pascal groaned. ‘That means talking to the neighbours again. Or Angela is lying.’