Under the Cold Bright Lights

by Garry Disher

  ‘Which brings me to my decision in this matter,’ Messer said. ‘I find that there are insufficient grounds to reduce Mr Fanning’s parenting time with his daughter.’

  Neve tipped her chin up. ‘But he just ignores her! He doesn’t care about her!’

  Maureen Deane touched her daughter’s forearm. Messer shot them a glance, went on: ‘The consequences of denying the daughter a relationship with her father are, in the court’s view, serious indeed.’

  Auhl shook his head. Messer continued: ‘It is a shame, Mrs Fanning, that you sought to make the ancient history of alleged domestic abuse a part of these proceedings. You are urged to put aside your resentment and prioritise your daughter’s interests.’

  He stared at her and the room was still and silent apart from a nervy cough somewhere, a fidgeting from a bored courtroom attendant in a doorway.

  ‘May I suggest that you obtain regular counselling so that you might support your daughter in her relationship with her father?’

  Neve had leaned forward to whisper in Fleet’s ear, her upper body quivering. Fleet was shaking his head. Auhl’s back and backside ached. The seat, the tension. He shifted futilely.

  Suddenly Neve was getting to her feet. She stood at rocky attention. ‘I am not the vindictive person you’re portraying me as. I’m telling the truth.’

  She pointed at Lloyd, who smirked. Her parents tugged on her arms. Messer said, ‘Mrs Fanning, please, these histrionics do you no good at all.’

  Neve said, ‘Do you know what happened on the weekend? Pia was staying with him and she—’

  Lloyd Fanning’s lawyer stirred. Seeing that, Fleet turned to Neve and her parents, spoke sharply, and Neve subsided. Fanning’s lawyer subsided. Then Neve was turning to find Auhl in the courtroom, her face showing betrayal and loss. Auhl made a tiny useless reaching-out gesture as if his arm were ten metres long and his touch might bring reassurance. She faced front again, vibrating with suppressed emotion while Lloyd Fanning sat calmly, a picture of parental responsibility.

  Justice Messer gathered his reports. ‘That concludes these proceedings.’

  Neve stood. She looked down at the top of Fleet’s head. He didn’t turn around but tapped folders and papers together. She turned to her mother, who embraced her. Auhl waved goodbye but no one saw it.

  25

  AUHL RACED BACK TO the city in time for a four-thirty briefing.

  ‘To get you up to speed,’ Helen Colfax said, ‘we were emailed these photos by the woman who claims Slab Man is her brother.’

  She turned her iPad screen around. Auhl, clustered with the others, said, ‘Uncanny.’

  ‘Perfect match,’ Colfax agreed. ‘Meanwhile Josh found separate confirmation. He ran the name, and a Robert Shirlow was indeed tied to a murder. This was in the file.’

  She slapped a small, passport-size portrait on the briefing table. A young man, full of grinning vitality. Again, a match to the Forensic Institute’s mock-ups.

  ‘The murder victim was a young woman named Mary Peart, and this was inside a wallet found with her body. Josh?’

  Bugg read from a file. ‘Mary Naomi Peart, aged twenty, found shot dead behind the wheel of a Corolla in a parking bay overlooking a lake in Wilson Botanic Park near the Princes Highway in Berwick. Ninth of September, 2009.’

  Auhl began to snap out his questions. ‘Shot in the car?’

  ‘Possibly. The forensic team couldn’t say for certain.’

  ‘Was it her car?’

  Claire shook her head. ‘Registered to Shirlow. The address: the Pearcedale property owned by Angela Sullivan and her mother.’

  ‘Presumably they were interviewed at the time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When we spoke to Sullivan the other day, she didn’t say anything about Shirlow. In fact, I got the impression no one rented the place after Crowther.’

  ‘You and Claire better have another crack at her,’ Colfax said.

  ‘Shirlow and this girl were in a relationship?’

  ‘Living together.’

  ‘And he was suspected of the murder?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do we have on him?’

  Claire Pascal read from a separate file. ‘Robert McArthur Shirlow, born August 1987, father dead, mother and sister living in Cranbourne at the time of the murder but later moved to Brisbane.’ She looked up. ‘Shirlow was questioned, but never charged, in relation to a bit of dealing and handling in 2007 and 2008.’

  ‘Then in September 2009 his girlfriend dies,’ Auhl said. ‘Are we thinking he was killed at the same time?’

  ‘Or he killed her and was then killed by someone else.’

  Auhl nodded gloomily. ‘It’s always a joy to have an unknown third person.’

  Claire continued: ‘Anyway, the car led police to the house. It was empty, cleaned out, as if no one intended to return, so they assumed Shirlow killed the girlfriend and did a runner, and all the time he’s buried under a slab.’

  ‘Anything in the house to indicate they were both shot there?’

  Claire shook her head. ‘Locked, curtains drawn, swept and vacuumed and wiped clean. The fridge empty and switched off with the door open. It gets better: someone had put a stop on Australia Post and Herald Sun deliveries and the landline was cancelled.’

  ‘Personal possessions?’

  ‘Plenty of the girl’s, but nothing of Shirlow’s. Very few prints, but no match to any database and neither kid had ever been printed.’

  ‘Someone was being slow and methodical. Doesn’t sound like a twenty-two-year-old kid,’ Auhl said.

  ‘But that’s who got the blame when his girlfriend was shot dead and he dropped off the radar. According to his bank and mobile phone records, he was in Sydney soon afterwards. A text from his phone was sent to his mother and sister, saying, I did something bad and I won’t be coming back, and his card was used to buy a Lonely Planet guide to Thailand in a Glebe bookshop and a fish dinner in Watsons Bay. Then nothing.’

  ‘Except the rumours,’ Josh Bugg said. ‘He was having an affair, he was running from creditors, he had mental health issues.’

  ‘But no way of knowing who made the whispers or how much credence to give them,’ added Colfax.

  ‘The official line?’

  ‘The official line was Shirlow murdered his girlfriend and went into hiding. We raked over the coals a couple of times in recent years, but nothing turned up.’ She smiled at Auhl. ‘Except the gun.’

  Auhl felt the old tingle. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Read about it,’ Colfax said, handing him a file.

  Auhl read the summary. In early 2010, a twenty-year-old apprentice mechanic had been sent by his boss to a Langwarrin wrecking yard to strip the dashboard gauges out of a 2007 Suzuki Vitara that had sat in the yard since the end of 2009. Tucked behind the glove box, partly held in place by the wiring loom, was a 9 mm Ruger automatic. In due course the pistol was test-fired at the Forensic Science Institute and the test slug was matched to the bullet found in Mary Peart.

  The Suzuki itself had been reported stolen at the time of the murder, but from an address some distance from the Berwick nature reserve and so the Homicide Squad hadn’t, until later, made the connection. Just another stolen vehicle, assumed to have been torched or chopped—until, just before Christmas 2009, a semitrailer loaded with hay crested a hill on a back road near Tooradin and rear-ended it. Empty, abandoned, no petrol in the tank. Declared a write-off by the owner’s insurance company, which had already paid out on the theft, the Suzuki was towed to the Langwarrin wrecking yard.

  The gun was tested for prints. Two sets, none in the system and no match to any found at the old house or in Shirlow’s car. A forensic team, sent to examine the wrecked Suzuki, found dozens of useless smudges.

  ‘We need Shirlow’s mother and sister to come in,’ Auhl said.

  ‘The mother’s dead,’ Colfax said, ‘but the sister’s arriving on Thursday. She lives in far north Queensland. Can’t organise to
get here any sooner.’

  Auhl nodded. ‘Meanwhile it would pay us to speak to Sullivan again, the team who investigated the Peart murder and the owner of the Suzuki.’

  ‘Excuse me, who’s boss here?’ Colfax said.

  ‘You are, oh esteemed leader,’ Auhl said.

  ‘Don’t forget it.’

  THAT NIGHT THEY HELD a kind of wake and celebration at Chateau Auhl. No more exams for Bec, a fuck-the-system piss-up for Neve and Pia. Three giant pizzas, cheap plonk, bodies sprawled on the sofa, the armchairs, the kitchen chairs, the carpet. Cynthia winding among them, hoping for a dropped anchovy. Liz, arriving late, looking tired, seemed removed from everyone.

  ‘Lloyd gave me this look, like he’d won for good,’ Neve said, with a glance at her daughter as though wondering if she’d said too much.

  Pia seemed to hunch her shoulders. ‘Do I have to go to his place this weekend?’

  Neve was looking at the wall clock. She had an evening shift at the university. ‘He didn’t say anything about it.’

  ‘I’ll run away if I have to go.’

  Neve gave her daughter another look, then, aware that everyone was watching her, said, ‘A step at a time, love.’

  She left the room, changed into work clothes. On her way out of the house she came to stand at trembling attention before the sofa, where Auhl sat—a metre from his wife that might as well have been ten.

  ‘I want to thank you both for all your help.’

  ‘It’s not the end of it,’ Liz said.

  But Neve shook her head. ‘I’m too tired to fight anymore.’

  26

  ON TUESDAY MORNING Auhl and Pascal started with Osprey Auto Marine in Keysborough. Auhl drove, Claire navigating, out along Dandenong Road and south onto Springvale Road. Springvale took them past a stretch of Vietnamese shops and restaurants, past some modest housing and finally to the section they wanted. A pricey private school, ugly mega-churches, and businesses for cashed-up bogans: car yards, garden centres, boatyards.

  Osprey Auto Marine sprawled between a funeral director and a building named the True Gospel Congregation Church. Speedboats and aluminium runabouts on trailers crowded the main lot, with separate smaller sections for kayaks, inflatable dinghies and jet skis. The auto section consisted of a handful of used SUVs with trailer hitches. Plastic bunting thrummed and snapped in the wind.

  ‘Not exactly a marine environment,’ Claire observed.

  But the environment of people who wanted to park a huge boat in the driveway and join a clap-hands-for-Jesus church, Auhl thought.

  They entered the showroom. Motorboats dwarfed them, racks of outboard motors and paddles, safety gear, ropes, anchors, display stands of men with beautiful teeth and women in bikinis. And, in contrast to the mercantile gleam, a depressed reception desk, one woman chewing gum and flipping through a New Idea, the other chewing gum, staring at a computer and talking into a bluetooth headset.

  The first woman swallowed a yawn, eyes watering. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘May I help you?’

  Pascal took the lead. ‘Mr Osprey is expecting us.’

  An avid glint in the woman’s eyes now. She leaned towards them, whispered: ‘You’re the police that called?’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘Just a moment.’

  She swung her chair around, stood and retreated along a short corridor. At the end she glanced back at Auhl and Claire, then tapped on a door. Waited, opened, went in.

  Then she was back. ‘Mr Osprey will see you now. Would you like to come through?’

  REX OSPREY WAS TALL, about fifty, wary, wiry, with the air of a busy executive. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, tan trousers and a white shirt, the sleeves rolled to reveal strong forearms.

  He slid a file across the desk. Addressing Auhl he said, ‘That’s all I could find on the matter.’

  Auhl pulled the file onto his lap, flipped through the contents: the Suzuki’s trade-in papers, registration and insurance papers, a letter from the insurance company detailing the payout.

  He passed it to Claire. ‘Do you remember the event, Mr Osprey?’

  ‘Not well. It was years ago. And four-wheel drives and utes and SUVs pass through my yard all the time. As people trade their watercraft up or down, they trade their towing vehicles up or down.’ Spoken as if he’d stumbled upon a vital commercial truth.

  Auhl, polite but beginning to harden, said, ‘But this one was stolen. Do you get many thefts?’

  Osprey shrugged. ‘Smaller items from time to time.’

  Auhl glanced around the office. Plain walls, apart from a small tapestry Bible verse. Filing cabinets. Photographs of Osprey and his family: wife and daughter in plain dresses, two sons brushed and scrubbed in dark suits and neck-pinching ties.

  Claire had opened the folder. Resting a forefinger on one of the documents she said, ‘Mr Osprey, it says here the building wasn’t broken into.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘And presumably the keys to the vehicles are locked away in a drawer somewhere?’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘So the Suzuki was hotwired, do you think?’

  Osprey stiffened, as though he felt challenged. ‘I imagine so. I have no other explanation.’

  Auhl asked Claire for the folder, found the document he wanted. ‘Mr Osprey, you reported the Suzuki stolen on the eleventh of September 2009?’

  ‘If that’s what it says.’

  ‘But you have no memory of the theft. Could the vehicle have been stolen some time before the eleventh?’

  Osprey shifted in his seat. ‘It’s possible. See, our business is concentrated mainly on the marine side of things. We didn’t notice the Suzuki was missing until someone came in asking to test drive it.’ He paused. ‘We had it listed online and in the local newspapers.’

  ‘You immediately informed the police and your insurance company?’

  ‘We did, yes.’

  Auhl mused on the timing. The Suzuki was reported stolen on the eleventh, yet Mary Peart was found on the ninth. The vehicle then disappeared until rear-ended near Tooradin five months later, a handgun concealed behind the dash. Peart and Shirlow were probably shot dead the same day. But was the Suzuki stolen purely for the killings? Stolen the same day, or earlier? If earlier, where was it stored? Auhl supposed it wouldn’t necessarily have attracted attention if parked on a street or in a driveway or garage for a couple of days, but surely someone clever enough to commit two murders and a cover-up would also be clever enough to torch the Suzuki afterwards? Maybe it was stolen from the killer.

  He said carefully, ‘Mr Osprey, we believe the Suzuki from your yard was used in the commission of a serious crime. We need to see a list of everyone who was employed by your firm in 2009.’

  Osprey drew himself up. ‘I can vouch for everyone who has ever worked for me. Most have worked here for years. They are like family, they’d never steal from me. They would never commit a crime of any nature.’

  Claire scratched at the scars under her sleeve. ‘Would a warrant make things easier for you, Mr Osprey? It might help you explain to people why you were obliged to give their details to the police?’

  Osprey had struck Auhl as a women-need-to-know-their-place kind of guy, and was intrigued to see him respond to Claire’s smiling tact.

  The scowl easing a little, Osprey said, ‘That won’t be necessary. If you could give me thirty minutes?’

  Auhl looked at his watch, impatient. Anxious to head down to Frankston and have another shot at Angela Sullivan. But Claire Pascal saved him. With the sweetest of smiles she said, ‘That would be perfect, Mr Osprey. We’ll find somewhere for coffee.’

  As they left, Auhl asked, ‘Did Robert Shirlow ever work for you, Mr Osprey?’

  Osprey was bewildered. ‘Who? I don’t know that name.’

  The confusion was genuine. Auhl nodded and they left to find coffee, settling on a weak but acrid brew in the local service station.

  ARMED WITH THE employee list half an hour late
r, they headed east on the Frankston Freeway. Claire, keeping up a phone commentary with Josh Bugg, finally completed the call and said, ‘Josh says everyone’s clean. Osprey, all his staff.’

  ‘It was a long shot.’

  ‘You didn’t tell him about the gun in the Suzuki.’

  Auhl said, ‘Too soon, and we probably won’t need to. But a useful lever if we ever make another run at him.’

  ‘Guess so.’ She didn’t sound convinced.

  ELEVEN A.M. AND Angela Sullivan was in a Chinese-dragon-patterned dressing-gown over pink satin pyjamas. Strong, shapely bare feet with chipped red nail polish, untidy hair, and clear fluid in the tumbler in her right hand. Not drunk, but intending to be, thought Auhl. And somehow, he didn’t think she usually started her days like this.

  ‘Are you worried about something, Angela?’

  They were seated at her kitchen table. A single woman’s kitchen, cereal bowl and cup and saucer draining on a rack beside the sink. An older-style fridge, business cards under magnets. A toaster on the bench. A glass stovetop, a black, glass-fronted oven. A tiny vase on the sill above the sink, one rosebud. Small, sad touches of a lonely life.

  ‘It must rake up old memories, a body found on the property where you grew up,’ prompted Claire.

  Sullivan drew the dressing-gown closer about her torso and shrugged.

  ‘Have you had reporters here?’ asked Auhl.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘But you will,’ Claire said.

  ‘All kinds of people might crawl out of the woodwork,’ Auhl said.

  Sullivan jerked to her feet and shot the contents of her glass into the sink. ‘Look, what do you want? I haven’t got all day.’

  ‘We thought you might want to help us find who killed Robert and Mary,’ Claire said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your tenants. The people living in your Pearcedale property in 2009. The young people paying you rent money.’

  Sullivan gave them a ferrety look.

  ‘One of whom was murdered,’ Auhl said, ‘and the other blamed for it. Are you really telling us you don’t remember?’