by Garry Disher
She hung her head, moved futilely to get comfortable.
‘What was it about our visit that upset them?’
She looked anguished. ‘It’s partly they’re tired of all the attention, they hate people snooping around. And then knowing Robert and Mary were both killed. But mainly it’s what I said.’
Claire said, ‘I don’t recall you saying anything.’
‘Remember? I said about Robert and Mary doing up the old house?’
Auhl was baffled; he could see Claire was baffled. ‘Let’s start with why you wanted to meet with us.’
With another little gasp of pain, Ruth Peart said, ‘Until you came yesterday I had no idea about Robert.’
‘That his body had been found?’
She nodded.
‘The others didn’t tell you? You didn’t see it on the news?’
‘No. We don’t watch the news.’
‘It’s against your religion,’ Auhl said sourly.
Ruth didn’t register the tone, simply nodded ingenuously. ‘That’s right.’
Claire gave Auhl a look. ‘But you’ve always known about Mary’s death. That wasn’t hidden from you.’
‘It was awful,’ Peart said. She paused, looking into the distance, concentrating. ‘Half of me believed Robert killed her but the other half didn’t. Does that make sense?’
Auhl smiled. ‘I’m forever holding contradictory positions in my head, convinced they’re equally valid.’
The smile didn’t work. Ruth Peart said, ‘Everyone said he did it. Adam and Judith and the Father and the elders, everyone.’
‘When you say the Father: is that Warren?’
A middle-aged man was approaching the car, carrying supermarket bags. Ruth Peart froze, sank in her seat, not relaxing until he was past. ‘Yes.’
Claire said gently, ‘When you say a part of you didn’t think Robert killed your sister, what do you mean?’
‘Because he was so in love with her. And Mary was in love with him.’ She looked away. ‘I…’
They waited. Presently Claire prompted: ‘What was it you wanted to say?’
It came out in a rush. ‘Back then everything was upside down for me. I know it’s wrong but I was confused and hurt by what Mary did.’
Again, they waited. Auhl said, ‘What did she do?’
‘Turned her back on us. Me. Left me behind to suffer.’
Auhl chose his words. ‘I understand that when your parents died, you and Mary were taken in by Mr Hince and his family?’
She gave him a complicated look. ‘My parents didn’t die.’
He waited. Eventually she said, ‘They were excommunicated.’
Claire said, ‘Can I ask why?’
‘Falling out with the elders.’
The elders again. Auhl said, ‘What kind of falling-out? Was it over doctrine?’
‘Over a computer. Mum and Dad bought us a computer.’
Seeing their bafflement, she went on, faintly exasperated: ‘The Assemblies doesn’t allow computers or TV. No immoral behaviour, no going against the elders’ decisions, no going to university.’
‘I see,’ said Auhl, who didn’t yet.
‘So Mum and Dad were excommunicated.’
‘What exactly did that entail?’
Ruth looked at Auhl, astounded. ‘They were excommunicated. They were banned.’
‘In effect, they were dead to the church?’
‘Yes. I’m in touch with them now, though. They still kind of believe in the faith.’ She clutched Claire’s sleeve. ‘Please don’t tell Adam or Judith.’
‘We won’t.’
Auhl said, ‘Ruth, if you’re being mistreated, leave. Surely your parents would have you back?’
‘I can’t go against my husband,’ she said wretchedly.
Ah. ‘You’re married to Adam,’ Auhl said.
‘Yes.’
‘Are your parents nearby?’
Ruth gestured languidly at the hills around them. ‘Not far.’ She winced again, the pain physical and emotional. ‘Why didn’t they try harder?’
Claire touched her wrist. ‘How old were you when the Hinces took you in?’
‘Nine. Mary was twelve and about to start high school and that’s why Mum and Dad thought we needed a computer.’
‘Were you ever allowed to see your parents?’
‘No. But last year Mum saw me in the street and I’ve seen her a couple of times.’ Again she beseeched them, ‘Don’t tell Adam.’
Auhl wondered what might have happened if police had followed up on the Peart family back in 2009. Would Ruth have stayed with the Hinces? But even if Rhys Mascot had found and interviewed the parents, they still ‘kind of’ believed. He might not have got anything from them anyway.
‘Have you been married long?’
‘A year.’ Looking away awkwardly she said, ‘He used to be in love with Mary.’
Auhl exchanged a glance with Claire. ‘It must have made him mad when she ran off with Robert.’
She glanced at each of them as if regretting that she’d spoken. ‘He’d never kill anyone.’
Famous last words. Before Auhl could follow up, Claire leaned close to Ruth Peart, placing a hand over the young woman’s forearm. ‘Ruth, you said Mary turned her back on you, left you behind to suffer.’
Peart looked away. ‘Father could be strict.’
Auhl exchanged another glance with Claire. He said, ‘Mary ran away because he was strict, leaving you behind. You felt betrayed.’
Ruth Peart’s knuckles as she clenched her fists were white pebbles. She ground out the words: ‘She ran away because she was in love.’ A pause. ‘They took me with them.’
Sensing anguish and guilt, Auhl trod carefully, ‘You went to their house with them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you stay long?’
‘Only a day,’ she whispered.
‘How did you get back?’
‘Rob drove me.’
‘Why didn’t you stay?’
‘I hated the house, for a start.’
‘Describe it.’
‘It was horrible. I mean, Rob was doing it up but still, there were floorboards missing everywhere and holes in the walls and it was freezing cold and there were rats. I hated it. Plus…’
They waited.
In a burst she said, ‘Plus it felt so wrong. I thought Mary should come back with me. I thought God would punish us.’
Ruth Peart stared at her lap. Auhl wondered what she was hiding. He said, ‘If Mr Hince was strict, why not live with a different family? Or ask Mr Hince to mend bridges with your parents?’
Ruth looked at him in wonderment. ‘In the Assemblies, children belong to the church, not their parents.’
‘Oh,’ said Auhl, as though he should have known.
Claire said, ‘Are you in love with Adam?’
‘He’s my husband.’
Then Claire said, ‘Did he abuse you, too?’
It was a clever question, well placed in the flow, and got a result. Ruth Peart slumped. When she lifted her face to them it was filled with pain. ‘Can we please not talk about that?’
Auhl said, ‘Ruth, we’re police officers, we’ve heard everything. We don’t judge. We don’t need details. We simply need to know: were you and Mary abused by Mr Hince?’
‘Yes.’
Claire said, ‘Sexual abuse, Ruth? More than a sharp word or a slap on the legs?’
A nod that was barely there.
‘But Adam wasn’t part of it?’
A tiny headshake.
Auhl tried to provide a summing-up that would help her. ‘You were still young when Mary asked you to run away with her. You were, are, a good person, an obedient person. You still believed in the church. A part of you thought it was wrong of Mary to run. And she took you to live in a horrible old shack and it was all too much so you went back to live with Mr Hince.’
‘Yes,’ a mutter, almost inaudible.
‘You went back to being abused,
’ Claire murmured.
Ruth Peart shrugged. ‘Only for a while.’
Got too old? wondered Auhl. ‘You did nothing wrong, Ruth.’
Those clenched fists again. ‘That’s just it: I did do something wrong.’
Claire touched her forearm.
Ruth Peart’s eyes spurted. ‘I told Father where they were living.’
There’s our killer, Auhl thought. But the timing puzzled him. Mary had run away with her boyfriend in May. Murdered in September. A slow-burning fuse?
‘When exactly did you tell him that?’
‘As soon as Rob dropped me back.’ She shifted in her seat. ‘I sneaked in, which was stupid because of course Father knew I’d been gone.’
‘That was a few months before the murders. Do you know if anyone, Mr Hince or Adam or Judith or the elders, tried to visit Mary and persuade her to come back?’
Ruth Peart shifted uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know. I’ve kept my head down ever since.’
Claire said, ‘Was Robert also a member of the church?’
‘No.’
‘What did Mr Hince say when you got back?’
‘He hit me. He said it was my fault.’
Auhl said gently, ‘I hope you don’t feel any blame now, Ruth.’
More tears. ‘But I do! I was so confused about everything. I couldn’t just walk away from what had been my whole life. It was like I couldn’t think.’
‘If Father was angry with you then he would have been furious with Mary.’
She shook her head. ‘He was, like, good riddance to bad rubbish.’
Auhl tried not to seem dubious.
Ruth looked at each of them, distressed. ‘I don’t know if he killed Mary and Rob or not.’
‘Let’s pretend he did. Was his anger mounting, festering, by any chance? Or maybe something else happened to set him off?’
‘He was always great at festering,’ Ruth muttered with a harsh laugh.
Starting to show some backbone, Auhl thought. ‘Who hit you, Ruth? Yesterday or this morning?’
She looked at her lap. ‘I had to be punished.’
‘Who?’
‘Judith. And Adam.’
‘Come with us, Ruth, right now.’
‘Not yet. The time’s not right.’
Claire said, ‘Just let us know when and we’ll help, won’t we, Alan?’
Auhl nodded. ‘We now think Robert was murdered at the same time as Mary, probably by the same person, who staged things to look like Robert was to blame. Keeping all that in mind, is there anything that puzzled you at the time that makes sense now?’
Ruth shifted again, uttered tiny huffs of pain. ‘One day Judith gave me a big slap and said, “Were you in on it?”’
‘When was this?’
‘One minute she was telling me Mary had been found dead and the next she was hitting me.’
‘What did she think you’d been involved in?’
‘I have no idea.’
Auhl had been thinking about the house. ‘When you say Robert was renovating—’
She cut in. ‘He’d finished. Mary said he did a terrific job.’
Some witnesses told you everything, others nothing, and there were those who dribbled information and misunderstood the importance of crucial facts. Auhl said patiently, ‘When did she tell you that?’
‘When she tried to get me to go with them the second time.’
Auhl said patiently, ‘Ruth, you’ll have to be a bit clearer.’
Ruth Peart took a deep breath and said, ‘I always go to the chapel when I get up in the mornings and one day they were there waiting for me.’
‘When?’
She hunched her shoulders as if it pained her to say the words. ‘The day before Mary was killed.’
‘Did anyone see them?’
The replies were increasingly monosyllabic. ‘Don’t know.’
‘But you still thought it was wrong to leave the church?’
She was impatient with Auhl’s dimness. ‘Well, yes, but they wanted to take me across to Perth, make a fresh start there.’
Then she hunched again, wouldn’t look at him. Survivor guilt, thought Auhl. If she’d gone with them, she’d be dead now.
‘Why leave,’ said Claire, ‘if the house was fixed?’
Peart frowned. ‘Because it had been sold.’
The answer came to Auhl, a cold sensation, and it explained the panic in the Hince household. ‘The house wasn’t pulled down, was it?’
Ruth seemed to think that was self-evident. ‘Rob said it would be cut into three sections and then put on trucks to take it to a new location.’ She began to weep. ‘You think the Father killed Mary and Rob, don’t you?’
‘Ninety-nine per cent sure,’ Auhl said.
‘I don’t want to go back.’
35
‘THE MONASH MEDICAL Centre,’ said Auhl, speaking to Colfax on his mobile. He was in the passenger seat, Claire driving, out along Eastlink again. ‘They’re keeping her in for observation.’
‘Blood in the urine? Must have been quite a beating.’
‘I’m glad we had her checked,’ Auhl said.
‘She’ll make a statement?’
‘Possibly. Probably.’
Colfax was silent. But she was on a golf course and Auhl could hear voices, birdsong. Then she was saying, ‘Doesn’t matter, we can press charges. Meanwhile see what Angela Sullivan has to say for herself, find the house and have it forensically examined—that’s if it’s still standing.’
Arrests would mean fingerprints, thought Auhl. Then they could run those prints against the prints on the gun. ‘Boss.’
OUTSIDE SULLIVAN’S HOUSE Auhl stretched the kinks in his spine. Too much charging around the countryside in a car. He followed Claire to the front door, pressed the bell. Nothing. Pounded his fist. Nothing. ‘Let’s try around the back.’
The side path took them to a typical suburban yard: small garden beds, flowers, shrubs and a vegetable plot, all showing some semblance of design—rock borders painted white, a wooden garden seat artfully angled beneath a small gum tree, a wheelbarrow doubling as a flowerpot. Neat, but in an ongoing war with nature—Sullivan apparently happy for that to happen, thought Auhl, noting the weeds, the moss on the rocks, the dead stalks and bird shit.
Mostly he was interested in the sliding glass door beyond a stretch of sun-faded patio boards. It stood open.
Auhl shouted, ‘Police,’ as he followed Claire up onto the patio and now he heard a muffled voice and thumping sounds.
Angela Sullivan was in her kitchen, duct-taped to a chair.
‘DO YOU NEED A doctor?’
Sullivan, ashen, trembling, said, ‘I’m all right.’
A bruise coming up on her cheek, finger bruises on her upper arms. No blood or broken bones. Smudged and reddened skin where she’d been taped. ‘He punched me in the stomach and had me on the chair before I knew what happened.’
‘Describe him.’
She cocked her head at Auhl. ‘About your age.’
‘Did he tell you his name?’
She shook her head. Auhl took out his phone and showed her the picture of Warren Hince. ‘Is this him?’
‘No.’
A photo of Adam Hince.
‘No, too young.’
Claire handed her a glass of water. Sullivan clasped it in both hands as though fearful it might abandon her. It was the body language of a child.
‘Just one man. No woman.’
‘No.’
‘Okay, moving on,’ Auhl said, pocketing his phone. ‘My colleague and I think you’ve been giving us a lot of bullshit, Angela. What did your visitor want?’
‘What else? Money for drugs.’
‘You can do better than that.’
He moved behind her, rested his rump against the bench. She would need to turn her head to see him and he could see she hated that.
Claire took over. ‘Angela? Look at me. What did he want?’
A shrug.
<
br /> ‘This involves two murders, Angela. You don’t get to play dumb.’
Sullivan finally looked at Pascal, then around at Auhl, less sulky now, a little conniving hardness in her face. ‘If you must know, he asked about the old house.’
‘Now we’re getting to it. The house you’d demolished.’
She looked away. ‘Yes.’
‘Angela, look at me. You lied to the police in a murder investigation. The house was not demolished. Robert Shirlow fixed it up, then you sold it and it was moved to a new location.’
‘So what? No law against it.’
‘There is against lying to the police,’ Auhl said.
‘The house was—is—a crime scene,’ Pascal said. ‘It might still contain evidence.’
Sullivan gave a little scoffing grimace. ‘After all this time? Don’t be stupid.’
Auhl said, ‘Why did you lie?’
Craning her neck, she shot him a quick, hunted look.
‘Angela,’ Auhl said, a touch of the whip in his voice, ‘why did you lie about the house?’
She shouted, ‘Because of the asbestos.’
The air went out of Auhl. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’
Still heated, Sullivan said, ‘It was a fibro house, meaning asbestos, and I would’ve needed a permit to demolish it, which would’ve cost ten thousand dollars because of the biohazard regulations and whatever. So I sold it.’
Auhl understood. ‘You didn’t tell the new owner.’
She stared at the floor.
‘Who bought it, Angela? Where is it?’
It was as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘You can’t blame me. I was scared back then. All those police questions, did I know what was going on in my place, did I have anything to do with the killing, did I know where Robert was.’ She hugged herself. ‘Now I’m scared all over again.’
‘Angela.’
She jumped.
‘Who bought the house and where did they put it?’
She gave them a name and an address in Skye. And, as if they were merely chatting, said, ‘Not that far from here, really. I drive past it now and then. It’s amazing what Mr Lang’s done with the old place. It actually looks quite pretty,’ she added wistfully.
36
AUHL DROVE. PASCAL worked the radio, calling for backup, a standby ambulance and a firetruck.
Skye turned out to be a region of small acreage hobby farms and rural businesses set back from the road on slightly undulating country. They passed an alpaca farm, an alternative healing clinic, a haulage contractor. Neat, modest properties alongside a sprinkling of hideous starter castles and hovels landscaped with rusted washing machines.