Under the Cold Bright Lights

by Garry Disher

  Sullivan sat again and stared despondently at the tabletop. She wet a fingertip and rubbed at a spot; said in a low voice, ‘I’d rather forget that period in my life.’

  ‘Well, you can’t, Angela,’ Claire said. ‘Not at the moment. We need to know all about Robert and Mary.’

  Sullivan looked up at her, swung her face to Auhl, back to Claire. ‘I barely knew them.’

  ‘Angela, was this rent income you weren’t declaring? We’re not interested in that. That’s ancient history. We need to know something about the backgrounds of these two kids and who they hung out with and what you saw and heard. Anything at all.’

  ‘Okay, okay. But like I said, I barely had anything to do with them. Robert used to do a bit of general maintenance in the district and I was at Pearcedale one day, mowing the grass, and he called in and said did I have any handyman work for him, and we got talking and he said he was looking for a place to rent and I said why not this place. It was a bit of a dump, but anyway, he moved in. Later I saw him there with his girlfriend, and I knew they wouldn’t stay long. He might have if he’d been single, but no woman would’ve put up with it.’

  ‘How long were they there?’

  Sullivan shrugged. ‘Six months?’

  ‘Did you ever chat with Mary?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you ever see other people there?’

  ‘No. Like I said, I left them alone.’

  Auhl said, ‘What did the police tell you at the time?’

  Anguished, Sullivan said, ‘That maybe Rob wasn’t such an angel. He might have been dealing from my old house and he probably killed Mary. It made me queasy, if truth be known. I couldn’t wait to pull the place down.’

  27

  HALF-FEARING DEBENHAM would detain him for another ‘chat’, Auhl left work at five. He boarded a crowded tram on Swanston Street, jostled and clenched in stale, sick air. A solid toecap clipped his ankle and Christ, it hurt.

  And he found Neve Fanning on the edge of an armchair in the unlit sitting room, rocking her torso. She glanced up at Auhl, tear-streaked. ‘Now Lloyd’s put in an application.’

  After a moment, Auhl understood. ‘Family Court?’

  ‘He rang me, gloating. His lawyer has already filed the paperwork. He’s applying for Pia to live with him, and me to have limited time with her.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘I’m unfit. I need counselling, to quote Doctor Kelso and the judge. I removed Pia from his legitimate right to have time with her.’

  ‘I’ll call Fleet.’

  FLEET LISTENED AND said, ‘Look, I’m about to leave the office. What is it you think I can do?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, a challenge of some kind. Lloyd’s behaviour, the drunken party, et cetera, et cetera.’

  Auhl could picture Fleet at his desk, his all-encompassing, ineffectual regret: ‘It’s not that clear cut. You were there—without stating it outright, Kelso argued that Neve planted suggestions in her kid, and Justice Messer seemed to buy it. And Mr Fanning’s legal team can play nasty with that abduction business.’

  Auhl could have strangled the guy. ‘It wasn’t an abduction.’

  ‘A small step at a time would be my advice,’ Fleet said. ‘But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll talk to my colleagues and get back to you.’

  HE GOT BACK HALF an hour later. ‘I’m afraid Legal Aid cannot commit to further representation of Mrs Fanning.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Fleet sounded like a recorded message. ‘Our resources are overstretched as it is, and I’m afraid we are not satisfied as to the merits of representing her further. I’m sorry, Mr Auhl.’

  Auhl said sourly, ‘If you can’t help, tell me who can. A good lawyer. Family violence.’

  ‘Mrs Fanning can afford to pay a lawyer?’

  ‘Don’t be a prick. I can,’ Auhl said, hanging up on the man.

  As if reading his mood, Cynthia stepped onto his lap, circled his crotch, stretched her forefeet up onto his chest and stared at him, purring thunderously. ‘You wouldn’t let me down, would you, Cynth.’

  He glanced at his watch and called Liz.

  ‘A good lawyer?’ she said, her voice sounding as far away as always when he used the landline. ‘Georgina Towne. We were at Monash together. I’ll get back to you.’

  She called late evening: Georgina Towne would see him first thing in the morning.

  AT 8.00 A.M. WEDNESDAY, Auhl and Neve alighted from a tram at the bottom end of Collins Street. The city rang to the sounds of traffic and shoe leather. Everyone looked trim, combed and a little bleary.

  Towne occupied a small suite of offices near the corner of Collins and Russell. The reception desk was unoccupied, but the lawyer appeared in the corridor behind it as soon as Auhl and Neve stepped through the door. She was slight, guarded, dressed in a white long-sleeved shirt and grey skirt. Combed, trim, not bleary at all.

  She came forward, shook their hands, looked steadily into each of their faces, made some small talk about Liz, then indicated that they should follow her to her office.

  With Auhl sometimes prompting, Towne sometimes interrupting with a penetrating question, Neve outlined her predicament. Gradually Auhl relaxed. There was something reassuring about Towne. She had authority and calmness. Her face was serene, close to austere. The only expressions he saw were fleeting: scepticism, anger, pity, calculation.

  ‘Did Doctor Kelso use the term Parental Alienation Syndrome?’

  ‘Too clever for that,’ Auhl said, ‘but if that’s the theory behind his thinking, Justice Messer didn’t quibble about it.’

  ‘They might not like their words quoted back to them, however. Do we know why a single expert was brought in rather than a family report writer?’ Seeing Auhl’s puzzlement, she explained: ‘A social worker or psychologist selected by the director of counselling and mediation.’

  Auhl said, ‘No, I don’t know,’ but had an inkling: that encounter he’d witnessed between Kelso and Nichols.

  ‘Anyway, it’s done now,’ Towne was saying. ‘Meanwhile let’s set the legal machine in motion. Alan? Ask around, see if Mr Fanning’s lawyer has in fact made an allegation of abduction to police.’

  Auhl winced, but nodded.

  ‘I thought if Pia and I went away for a while,’ Neve said, ‘where she’s safe and…’

  Towne shook her head vigorously and stiffened her expression. ‘Don’t on any account do something like that, Mrs Fanning. Let the court process follow its due course. Meanwhile, legally, you continue to have significant time with Pia and are the primary caregiver. If you get arrested on an abduction charge, you’re looking at a custodial sentence and probably a psych evaluation and your daughter placed with your husband.’

  ‘Not with my parents?’

  ‘Possibly. Or possibly with your husband’s parents, have you considered that?’

  Neve shook her head. ‘Lloyd’s parents are dead.’

  ‘The thing is, let’s tackle this in court. Be patient.’

  Neve was sobbing. ‘It’s so unfair. The system’s against me.’

  ‘Well, let’s see what we can do about that. I’ll get things started today.’ She paused. ‘You might think about separate legal representation for your daughter.’

  Neve sniffed, straightened her shoulders. ‘No, thank you.’

  Towne glanced at Auhl, gave him a minute shrug.

  AUHL TEXTED COLFAX that he wouldn’t be in until mid-morning and walked Neve back to Carlton, that simple act helping to calm her. They found a table at Tiamo’s, drank strong coffee. Quite soon, Neve lapsed again, a stunned, mute presence opposite him. He found himself doing most of the talking. It was a strained, bereft hour. A part of Auhl wanted to shake her, ask why she hadn’t played it smarter; another blamed himself for not hiring Georgina Towne much earlier.

  But after a while he was aware of tension in her upper body, the slight movements of each arm, the way she kept glancing at her lap…

  ‘Neve, what a
re you doing?’

  She looked up. ‘What?’

  ‘Who are you texting?’

  She shrugged, avoiding him.

  ‘Neve, are you texting Pia?’

  ‘It’s just to send my love. I’m not doing anything wrong.’

  ‘Please be careful what you say. What if Lloyd checks her phone and finds texts he can use against you in court?’

  ‘He doesn’t know she has a phone.’

  Auhl derived no comfort from that. ‘But he sounds to me like someone who’d search her things, looking for ammunition to use against you.’

  Neve snorted. ‘He barely knows she’s alive. He’s just playing mind games with me, this whole parenting time business.’

  Auhl wanted to yell at her to wake up. ‘Have you told Pia to delete your texts?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Auhl thought it unlikely. ‘Tell her again. And you delete everything.’

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ she said.

  Auhl derived no comfort from that, either.

  28

  LATE WEDNESDAY morning. Auhl heading out, with Bugg this time, to Warrandyte in the hills north of the city. Bugg drove like he was watching TV, sprawled in the drivers seat, one hand on the wheel. The unfolding road was in some way soothing to Auhl, but there was also Neve: he continued to feel uneasy about her state of mind. And Warrandyte was not so far from St Andrews. His mind kept flashing back to the struggle in Neill’s garage, the stumbling walk to the back fence. Flashing on Debenham, an old cop like Auhl himself, preternaturally suspicious.

  Bugg’s phone directed them to a house surrounded by gum trees on the kind of precipitous slope that would funnel a bushfire if the conditions were right—like today’s hot northerly wind, a taste of the summer ahead.

  The house was owned by a retired inspector named Rhys Mascot. He’d been the lead detective in the Mary Peart murder investigation.

  Auhl and Bugg were expected, a bustling woman greeting them at the door and taking them to a sitting room where a lumpish, greying man sat with a pen in his mouth and a newspaper open at the form guide. A vast glass wall overlooked the canopies of hot, wind-gusted gumtrees. Auhl felt nervous, more trapped in Mascot’s house than he ever did among the towers of Collins Street.

  After the handshakes the woman left the room and Mascot ushered them onto a three-seater sofa. He took an armchair on the other side of a coffee table; darted a look at the file in Auhl’s hands. ‘Mind if I have a squiz?’

  Auhl placed it on the coffee table and the old cop leaned over and turned the pages. ‘This takes me back,’ he said. A gingery, weather-beaten character, his legs bony in faded khaki shorts, his chest small and belly large. A loose thread in the V-neck of his faded Lacoste shirt. Auhl itched to get out the scissors.

  Mascot glanced keenly at Auhl. ‘You were Homicide? I don’t recall you.’

  ‘It would have been after you moved to Traffic,’ Auhl said.

  Mascot winced, and Auhl wondered if the move to Traffic had been some kind of punishment. He said, ‘Back then the theory was the boyfriend did it.’

  Mascot nodded. He frowned through a couple of pages and then his face cleared. ‘Shirlow, that’s right. Robert Shirlow.’

  ‘Well, he’s surfaced, so to speak,’ Bugg said. ‘Last week, out near Pearcedale—the body under the concrete slab?’

  Mascot raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘We’re not a hundred per cent sure. An anonymous tip gave us the name, which gave us the Peart case and the contents of Peart’s wallet, including a photo that matches the facial reconstructions we had worked up by the lab.’

  ‘So he kills the girlfriend and then someone kills him?’

  ‘Or someone killed both of them,’ Auhl said, ‘but constructed a scenario that had us chasing the boyfriend.’

  Mascot cast him a darkly dubious look. Auhl almost welcomed it—Mascot’s sitting room, like his wife, was over-fussy, a mess of flowery fabrics. It needed the salty corrective of cynicism, suspicion, doubt.

  ‘We didn’t find a “third man”,’ Mascot said, his fingers supplying the quotes. ‘The little shit was into a bit of low-level dealing and thieving, but the people he hung out with didn’t seem to be the type to commit a double murder and cover their tracks. Not a bright spark among them.’

  ‘But you were ready to believe he was bright enough to pull it off?’

  ‘The theory was he’d struck it lucky somehow. Ripped someone off bigtime and wanted it all for himself. Killed the girlfriend so he didn’t have to share. Or the girlfriend got cold feet or wanted to turn him in or had become a millstone…’

  ‘You had no reason to think he might have been a victim too?’

  Mascot gestured at the folder of reports and statements spread over his coffee table. ‘You know all this. You trying to catch me out? Someone—and to our thinking it had to be Shirlow—cleaned out the house, cancelled the newspaper and mail deliveries, emptied the fridge, et cetera. Gone to Sydney, where he used his credit cards and phone a couple of times before going off the grid.’ He shook his head. ‘Looks like you’ve got one smart cookie here, taking the time and effort to stage all that.’

  Sooner you than me, Mascot seemed to be saying. I’ve got my retirement house and my golf and my superannuation and you have a major headache.

  Auhl said, ‘Files are always suggestive. You sometimes get a sense of undercurrents. But they’re also devoid of…flesh, so to speak. I was hoping to hear if you had any doubts or wild guesses you couldn’t put down on paper.’

  It was cop speaking to cop. They each knew what it was like to entertain private hunches about old cases, even those apparently done and dusted. There was always more to be said. There was always a sub-strand not followed because a newer, hotter case had come along or the budget was tight.

  But Mascot grimaced. ‘Wish I could help you. The kid didn’t have a violent history, wasn’t even in the system, but there were rumours. You know what these kids are like. Blameless and harmless until they start using and dealing, then they run up against harder types, so they become hard just to survive. They take risks, arm themselves. Become suspicious and paranoid, often with good reason. They also start looking for the big score—but so is everyone else, and they can’t all win.’ A shrug. ‘Maybe that’s what happened here.’

  Auhl nodded. The police image of Shirlow was always going to differ from the sister’s. ‘Now that you know both kids were murdered, is there anything about the time or the place or the people that puzzled you back then but makes sense now? For example, one of them was the intended target, the other collateral damage?’

  Mascot shook his head. ‘We found her body, not his. Everything pointed to him killing her and then covering his tracks. As for why he wanted to kill her, I’ve already told you what we thought back then. Not that there appeared to be any logic to it. She seemed pretty harmless. Her parents were dead, she and her sister were taken in by someone—friends of the family—and she got itchy feet and ran off to be with her boyfriend. Eventually he killed her, end of story. But given that he was also murdered, I wouldn’t know where to start. Who knows what drives people? Best thing you can do is look at whoever they both spent time with.’

  Mascot seemed a little defensive, so Auhl changed tack. ‘You spoke to his mother and sister?’

  ‘The sister was just a kid, from memory. Lived with her mother in Cranbourne? Neither of them knew what the boy was up to.’

  ‘According to a Cold Case follow-up five years ago, they moved to Brisbane,’ Bugg said. ‘Fresh start.’

  ‘We treated them both with kid gloves.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  Mascot’s wife came in with a tray. Shortbread biscuits on a plate, coffee in a plunger. A small jug of steaming milk, a bowl of sugar, three mugs.

  ‘Thanks, love,’ Mascot said. She bobbed at him, at Auhl and Bugg, and left the room.

  Mascot eyed the coffee plunger. Reached out a hand, withdrew it. ‘Better give
it another couple of minutes.’

  He usually drinks instant, Auhl guessed, reaching for a biscuit. He was starving. ‘Anything linking Peart or Shirlow to the nature reserve?’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Mary Peart was found shot dead in a car owned by Shirlow, parked at a botanic reserve near Berwick.’

  Mascot’s face cleared. ‘Right. Yes, I was always of the opinion she wasn’t shot in the car. She was shot elsewhere and driven to where she was found—a location that’s not often teeming with people, incidentally. The house she shared with Shirlow? We didn’t see any indication it happened there, but then again, we didn’t luminol the place either. We saw it had been cleaned and emptied and that’s as far as we took it.’

  He shook his head, self-critical. ‘If I were you I’d test for blood. Might still be able to lift something from some of the surfaces.’

  ‘Can’t,’ Auhl said. ‘The owner pulled it down.’

  Mascot shook his head again. He depressed the coffee plunger, poured, offered milk. Auhl took his and sipped. Lukewarm. Weak.

  ‘How do you factor in the gun?’

  Mascot frowned. ‘What gun?’

  ‘The murder weapon.’

  ‘A mystery to me, pal.’

  Of course: Mascot had been transferred to the Traffic Division soon after the murder. Apologising, Auhl told him how the gun was found. Handed him the report.

  ‘Ah, prints,’ said Mascot.

  ‘But not in the system,’ Auhl said.

  Mascot looked up at him with a fatalistic cop look. ‘Let’s hope he fucks up sometime soon.’ His lips pursed slightly. ‘Or she, of course.’

  BACK TO THE COLD Case office, where Helen Colfax called a briefing.

  Auhl recounted the conversation with Mascot. ‘If we work on the assumption they were both shot at the same time, then there’s a good chance the house was the murder scene. Both victims lived there, Robert Shirlow was buried there. Set back on a quiet road, no one around to see or hear anything.’

  ‘And it had been thoroughly cleaned,’ Bugg said.

  Claire Pascal said, ‘But think of the time it all took. Shoot two people, drive one to a nature reserve in the boyfriend’s car, get back to the house and dig a hole and pour concrete over it, clean up blood and brain matter, stage a disappearance.’