8 Hours to Die

by JR Carroll

  He considered whether to bring the briefcase in or not. It could stay in the car with negligible risk, but all the same he decided to come and get it later.

  After he’d dumped the box on the kitchen table, Tim went to a small shed in front of the house and opened the heavy padlock. Inside was a 5kVA Yamaha generator. It supplied all his power needs. He pressed the start button and it exploded into life. The generator was connected to the house by a steel-mesh cable that plugged into the wall at the base of the kitchen. From there, electricity flowed normally throughout the house—except when the generator decided to spit it. In that case, out came the kerosene lanterns.

  Tim went back inside. It would take a while for the fridge to become cold, so he left the meat and drink in the Esky. The groceries and other provisions he put away in the cupboards. Then he went up into the bedroom to see what Amy was doing.

  He found her gazing out the attic-style window at the million-dollar view, arms folded across her chest. This time of day, it was absolute magic. The open paddocks sloped down into a valley washed in golden sunlight and, across from the valley, the dense, dark trees of the forest stretched as far as one could see, with a range of hills in the far distance. The sky was a mix of pink and purple as the sun began to disappear over the trees for another day.

  ‘How fabulous is that,’ he said softly, sidling up alongside her. She gave a little start—so deep in thought she didn’t realise he was in the room.

  ‘Amazing,’ she said.

  ‘Almost worth the trip, huh?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Almost.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, slipping an arm around her waist, ‘why don’t we get up early and go for a walk—right over there.’ He pointed to where the green valley met the trees.

  ‘Depends what you mean by early,’ she said.

  ‘Say, about eight? Then we can come back and have the big breakfast. I’ll do it.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable,’ she said, placing her hand on his arm. He gave her a bit of a squeeze and she came to him—not much, but some.

  ‘We’ll take a bucket. I reckon we’ll find mushrooms out there.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Everything OK?’ he whispered into her hair.

  ‘Guess so,’ she said. ‘Sure.’

  ‘I love you, baby.’

  ‘I know you do,’ she said, and gave him a soft, almost chaste, kiss. He turned her around and held her properly in his arms for a good minute without either of them saying anything.

  ‘But anyway,’ he said at last, ‘that’s tomorrow. Right now it’s cocktail hour.’

  ‘I think we’ve earned it,’ she said, disengaging. He noted with pleasure the we in that.

  ‘I’m bloody sure we have.’

  She actually laughed.

  Back in the kitchen, Tim popped a Crown Lager for himself and poured a nicely chilled glass of Cloudy Bay for Amy. He was beginning to fancy his chances later on.

  And the briefcase in the car had slipped his mind.

  He glanced at his watch. It was 5.34pm.

  Amy came downstairs. They sat in comfortable lounge chairs enjoying their drinks, Tim considering the vacant space through the rear window where the decking should be by now. The stumps had been put in place, but that was it. Timber, covered with plastic sheets, was stacked to one side. It had been there for about three years. Tim was prepared to do the job himself, it was only a matter of nailing or screwing boards, but just hadn’t found the time. Everything was so fucking difficult.

  Fortunately, Tim’s background had prepared him for this; about the only things that had dropped onto his lap were problems to be solved. House renovation issues didn’t rate when you put them up against some of the testing times he’d been through in the courts.

  Like the high-profile case in which he’d defended two detectives—one of them no longer serving—accused of murdering a construction worker, name of Don Bridges. The police union was prepared to fund the defence provided both accused were represented by the same barrister, for a set fee. When he’d accepted the briefs, Tim had no idea what he was letting himself in for. He was relatively new to the bar but he knew one of the accused, Dale Markleigh, from the old days in the job; they had knocked around together quite a bit. Markleigh had been a shortcut specialist, a seasoned alumnus of most of the elite squads and one of the best ‘verballers’ in the business, but he was also bent. This reputation stemmed from the years he spent on a task force investigating the nefarious activities of Sydney’s bikie gangs, and his years in the armed hold-up squad. It was during this era, with the amphetamine trade booming, that he drew attention to himself when large cash deposits inexplicably jumped into his bank accounts. A half-hearted investigation ensued, but Markleigh had some well-placed mates, and nothing much came of it.

  A certain degree of latitude was fine in the culture of the times, but Dale Markleigh was more corrupt than Tim considered acceptable, especially since he was bedding down with known criminals. Still, he was prepared to swallow that for the sake of their friendship.

  But the more he looked into the case, the murkier and more dangerous it became.

  For starters, Don Bridges had a violent history. Tim had barely heard of him, but he was suspected of performing hits over a period of years for a criminal syndicate. As it turned out, Bridges was an ex-biker, thrown out years earlier for stealing cash reserves from the clubhouse. Tim’s gut feeling was that the two accused had in fact done the deed, but the victim was no loss to society. Question was, why had they done it? To find out, Tim had hired a private investigator—normal procedure in such cases—to see what he could dig up. The PI was an ex-cop too—another of Tim’s old mates. In his experience, life tended to be a bit of an old mates’ club.

  The investigator—a straight arrow named Jimmy Raines—decided the killing might have been a pre-emptive strike. His inquiries had led him to believe that Bridges was planning to murder one of the charged detectives: Phil Ross—the one no longer in the job.

  All this was when Tim was still in Sydney, back in ’99, Y2K fears all over the media; before Amy, during the bitter break with his first wife and subsequent estrangement from his two sons. That was the toughest part of it. ‘Before Amy’ now seemed like a separate lifetime. Yet the details of the Ross–Markleigh case remained crystal clear.

  According to Raines, the murder of Bridges had its origins eight years earlier, in 1991. That was the year a large clothing factory in Sydney went up in flames. Its owner, one Maurice Frick, showed all the mandatory grief and devastation on TV, but arson police had their suspicions. The business was in a financial black hole, and someone was seen driving from the premises just before the blaze started at 3.30am on a Sunday. With all that fabric, no accelerant was needed. But lack of evidence despite an exhaustive inquiry exonerated Frick more or less by default.

  Raines had a basic grasp of the case from his own time on the force, but his investigations turned up a complicated set of circumstances that perfectly illustrated the corrupt old culture of Sydney law enforcement in those days. It transpired—Tim didn’t know who Raines’s sources were, and didn’t ask—that Frick, realising he was deeply in debt, approached a detective mate—Phil Ross—to arrange for a firebug to burn down his place so he could get out of jail financially.

  Ross was a hard doer and a decorated cop with plenty of underworld contacts. He was prepared to help—for a price. That figure was agreed to be a cut from the insurance payout.

  The factory was duly reduced to smouldering ruins. Some months later, after the smoke had cleared and the insurance company had coughed up, Frick walked into a Double Bay pub and handed over a bag containing an undisclosed amount of cash to Ross and another detective, who was identified as Dale Markleigh.

  Phil Ross handed in his badge and gun not long after. He’d long had a shady reputation for getting into bed with the people he was supposed to be locking up, and there was plenty of loose talk about his supposed involvement in the factory fire, along with
Markleigh. His links with bikers came under scrutiny; plenty of good judges speculated that the firebug was a Hells Angel with a predilection for torching unprofitable businesses. But it was just that—rumour-mongering.

  Ross decided to get out with his pension while the going was good. This was going to be a clean break from all the garbage that dogged his past. He moved his family upstate to the coastal town of Gosford, where he bought a furniture store.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t much of a businessman. In a couple of years all his money was gone, and he had to sell the store and go on the dole while trying to support his wife and three teenage kids. He must’ve become desperate, because he approached a Sydney TV station offering to tell all about criminal dealings in the New South Wales police force, for $250 000—hardly a smart move from an experienced ex-cop, considering the inevitable fallout for him, and his family. But the TV station declined his offer, and nothing more came of it.

  Ross went back to Gosford, swimming every morning at the beach and existing on unemployment benefits as his marriage began to crumble.

  That might have been the end of it, but somehow word got out that Phil Ross was anxious to sell out his old cronies for a big chunk of money. That word even reached the ear of Maurice Frick.

  It seemed the former factory owner had a nervous disposition. He was not about to let Ross mouth off, on television or anywhere else; he was certainly not going to be dragged through the courts and shunted off to a long stint in prison.

  So he hired Don Bridges to silence Ross for good. The way Frick saw it, if Ross died violently there’d be any number of suspects because of his dodgy past. Frick would be in the clear.

  Pretty soon, Phil Ross began receiving threatening phone calls, no matter how often he changed the number. Then he started noticing someone on the beach every morning—someone who wasn’t interested in the water, and who didn’t seem to be a local. He was just there, days on end, some distance off. Ross’s detective’s nose began to twitch.

  He called on his old sidekick, Dale Markleigh, who was currently in the armed hold-up squad. They went to a pub in Pyrmont, had a few beers and a counter lunch. Ross told him about the phone calls and the lone guy suddenly appearing on the beach. Markleigh apparently challenged him about the approach to the TV station, and Ross told him it was bullshit, he was never going to do that. He said he was going out of his mind with worry at the time, and his wife was threatening to leave him but he was over that now. In any case, he would never spill his guts on anything he and Markleigh might have done. That would be wrong—and suicide.

  Markleigh was apparently mollified, and promised he’d put out some feelers regarding the man on the beach. The phone calls were nothing, he said. As Ross knew himself, people who made threats on the phone didn’t carry them out. But it was unsettling all the same, especially when his wife answered the phone. She was none too impressed. Ross wanted his mate to deal with it.

  Markleigh’s enquiries through his own criminal network fingered Don Bridges as the beach guy. The story was he’d accepted a contract from Maurice Frick to get rid of Phil Ross. The price on Ross’s head was supposedly $80 000. Frick was desperate to make sure Ross never opened his can of worms. Markleigh learned that Frick was manic-depressive, heavily medicated and incapable of seeing anything with a clear head.

  In the end, the Crown Prosecutor alleged, Phillip Ross and Dale Markleigh conspired to murder Donald Leslie Bridges. In a cop-style pre-dawn attack, they broke into his rented flat, somehow rendered him helpless and drove him to an unknown destination, where he was apparently shot trying to flee his abductors. Bridges’ body was never found.

  That was the crux of the defence’s case: no body, no case to answer. Bridges could still be alive, hiding out or living somewhere under a false identity. He had plenty of reasons to hide, from numerous people.

  Even without a body, though, the evidence against Ross and Markleigh was strong: many hours of wiretapped phone conversations; clandestine meetings caught on camera; the testimony of several witnesses.

  That was enough for the jury. After a five-hour deliberation, both defendants were found guilty of first-degree murder. Markleigh’s demeanour and body language during proceedings didn’t help his cause: he wore a permanent scowl in court and repeatedly eyeballed jury members in an intimidating manner. It also transpired that one of his associates—a biker—had approached a jury member during the trial.

  Ross caught fourteen years and nine months; Markleigh fifteen years plus change. The judge concluded he was, in all probability, the one who pulled the trigger while his victim lay on the ground, begging for his life. Forensic testing of Markleigh’s service revolver showed that it had been fired at least three times about the time Bridges disappeared.

  They both went to Long Bay deeply embittered men. Being a cop, with plenty of enemies on the inside, Markleigh was given the high-security treatment. And he was ten shades of irate with Tim for putting up such a ‘pathetic effort’ when the case was there to be won.

  Dale Markleigh was a serious concern. A not unintelligent man, he had a wicked sense of humour and was surprisingly well read, but also had a vicious, unforgiving streak. He once beat up a handcuffed prisoner in a police car after a court appearance because the prisoner called him a ‘total loser from a family of total losers’. Markleigh, a third-generation cop whose father had committed suicide, blew his stack, and the prisoner had to be hospitalised. Markleigh also once described a newly appointed police commissioner as a ‘glorified public servant without the stomach for real police work’. This was after the commissioner had publicly vowed to clean out the stables of corrupt police.

  Like every bent cop, Markleigh maintained his innocence regardless of the evidence, until it reached the point where he genuinely seemed to believe he hadn’t done anything wrong. Tim’s last meeting with him was in the maximum-security division at Long Bay in early 2002, when they were discussing the possibility of an appeal. Markleigh had expected to make bail, but when it was denied he became so livid he sacked Tim as soon as he walked into the room. They argued, and as Tim was packing up his documents, Markleigh leaned closer and whispered—so the guards couldn’t hear—his valedictory: ‘I’ve got a long memory, Tim. You fucked me over on this one. I don’t care how long it takes, but your day will come, just as surely as my arse points to the ground.’ No gallows humour, no mateship, nothing but ice-cold menace in his grey, sunken eyes.

  Now it was Tim’s turn to watch his back. Markleigh had plenty of allies on both sides of the law.

  Subsequent to Tim’s dismissal, Markleigh’s new brief launched a series of appeals that all came to naught, before he too was shown the door. Markleigh became a serial sacker of his legal team, until the funding ran out and he finished up representing himself, to no avail.

  Both Ross and Markleigh had recently been paroled. Markleigh’s last words to him now rang in his ears now more than ever. There were nights when he woke up only to be revisited by the cold fury of those unforgiving eyes.

  *

  Tim realised that Amy had said something.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Where were you then?’ she said, well aware of his penchant for disappearing into his past.

  ‘Oh … nowhere in particular. Everywhere in general.’ He took a mouthful of the Crown.

  ‘You seem rather preoccupied. More so than usual.’

  ‘Do I?’ In one way, he was pleased she’d noticed. At least that was a sign she was concerned about him.

  Then she hit him with a bombshell. ‘You’re not worried about that Markleigh person, are you?’

  Tim’s jaw dropped. He had not said anything to her about Markleigh’s release, which was not even in the papers: he’d found out via the legal grapevine.

  ‘Markleigh? Why would I be worried about him?’

  ‘Didn’t he threaten to bring down all manner of dire punishment on your head?’

  Tim laughed. ‘That’s a melodramatic way of putting it. Year
s ago, maybe.’

  ‘He seemed pretty damned serious at the time, from what you told me.’

  ‘Yes, he was. But … people who make threats—’

  ‘Never carry them out, right?’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ he said.

  ‘Then let’s hope he can’t read your mind the way I can. Or he might have second thoughts.’

  Tim sat up. ‘Amy, Dale Markleigh is a piece of shit who’s been in the slammer for X years. Now he’s free. He’s just going to get on with his miserable, pathetic life. This isn’t the movies. He’s not some sort of avenging bastard going to swoop down on us.’

  ‘Strong language. You two were thick once.’

  ‘As thieves.’

  ‘Literally or metaphorically?’ she said.

  ‘Both—the second more than the former. But I failed to realise how far he’d stepped over the line. I should have backed off that case. If it wasn’t conflict of interest, it was damn close. But I felt I owed him.’

  ‘From the good old days.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The good old brotherhood days.’

  There was silence while they both thought about it, what it meant. What it had led to.

  ‘How’d you know he was out, anyway?’ Tim said.

  ‘I work at a radio station, remember? They tend to attract news of that stripe.’

  ‘I’m not worried about Dale Markleigh,’ he told her.

  ‘Maybe you should be.’

  Tim drank some more beer. It wasn’t going down too well all of a sudden. He got up and looked out the window, listened to the silence outside. The sky was indigo. Dusk. The forest would soon be a black wall.

  ‘It’s quiet,’ he said. ‘And still. Nothing moving. No signs of life.’