by Peter Cotton
The only other possible screwdriver was my pen. I figured that if I could flatten the writing end of it, it should be tough enough to turn the screws without shearing. I removed the ink cartridge and reassembled the empty barrel. Then I put the pointy tip of the barrel between the two shoe buckles and pounded the metal sandwich with the heel of a shoe.
When the flattened tip looked a fit for the screws, I gave it to Jean and repeated my warning not to touch the ceiling. Rolfe and I got her onto our shoulders, and twenty seconds later she let out a triumphant ‘Yes!’ Not only did the pen fit the screws, she said, but the rubberised coating made the barrel very easy to grip.
I felt like cheering when the first screw hit the floor at our feet. The second one came down a minute after that, but then Rolfe said something about his back, and began moving unsteadily from foot to foot. I tried to steady him, but he was like a drunk trying to mark time. Jean moved her weight onto my shoulders, I helped her down to the floor, and Rolfe dropped to the carpet, jerking in shallow breaths, his eyes closed tight. It was his lower back, he said, and, no, there was nothing we could do. He needed to rest it. We helped him to the mattresses and laid him on his back. He closed his eyes and brought his knees up to his chest. Jean squatted next to him and stroked his forehead. Then she looked up at me.
‘We’ll have to do this without him,’ I said. ‘Once you get the rest of the screws out, you can tackle the vent cover. The trick is to get your fingers up inside it so you can ease it out. One side, then the other. But remember, don’t mark anything up there.’
Jean stood under the vent. I bent down behind her so she could straddle my shoulders, and I hoisted her up to the ceiling. She was light enough, so, given Rolfe’s bad back, I probably should have lifted her alone from the start.
She rocked on my shoulders as she worked away. The third screw soon hit the carpet. Then the fourth. The vent cover took a little longer, but she eventually handed it down to me and I lowered her to the floor. I put the cover face-up on the mattresses. Then I examined the square hole in the plasterboard, and the silver ducting that arced away into the ceiling cavity.
‘What now?’ said Jean, buoyed by her success.
‘Next, you use the pen to shred the ducting,’ I said. ‘But you have to hold the ducting steady with one hand, and shred with the other, okay? We don’t know how Joe’s got it rigged up at the other end. If you put pressure on the ducting, or give it a big tug, who knows what it’ll do back there. We don’t want to alert him in any way to what we’re doing. And once you’ve shredded the ducting, I want you to see how far you can reach up into the ceiling cavity. So, you right to go?’
‘Ready when you are,’ she said.
Jean felt a bit heavier this time, probably because my energy levels were down. Bits of silver paper fluttered past my eyes as she wriggled and chopped. By the time she stopped to assess her work, my right shoulder had had enough of her.
‘I’ve hacked right around the ducting,’ she said. ‘I’ve separated it from this metal plate it was attached to, and I’ve put big holes in it as far back as I could. Now let’s see what’s up inside here. I can feel some sort of wiring. And now some long wooden beams, but I can’t see them. And that’s as far up as I can reach — about thirty centimetres into the ceiling.’
‘And you can’t feel anything else?’ I said.
‘Nope. Just fresh air.’
‘That’s great,’ I said, and lowered her down.
Rolfe was still lying on his back, holding his knees to his chest, but he’d stopped groaning. I flexed my shoulders for a while, and then Jean and I picked up the bits of silver paper and shoved them under the mattresses. Next I asked them to give me their socks and undies, and any other small bits of clothing they had. We’d need it all if we were going to block the vent.
Rolfe and I faced the back wall while Jean removed her smalls. Then she and I turned away while Rolfe removed his. After I’d added mine to the pile, I shoved all the smalls into a leg of Jean’s pantyhose and compressed the lot into a small, flat bundle. Then I carefully forced the bundle into the back of the vent cover, and used one of the shoe buckles to shape it into a tight, thick seal that I finished off with some wads of toilet paper.
Jean felt heavier than ever when I lifted her to the ceiling for the final time. I handed her the cover, and she wriggled as she manoeuvred it back into the hole and screwed it into place. My shoulders were really aching when I lowered her to the floor. I flexed them for a bit, and then checked the ceiling and the cover. They looked untouched, which meant that Jean had done a great job, and I told her so.
‘But what if Joe has other plans for us?’ she said, scrunching her face. ‘And what if those plans don’t include pumping gas at us from up there?’
I gave her a pained smile, but said nothing. I’d already considered that possibility, but all we could do was nullify obvious threats and stay ready for the unexpected. I pulled the top mattress over to the bucket and wrapped the flopping thing around myself while I took a badly needed piss.
‘So what now, Mr Fixit?’ said Jean when I returned the mattress to the pile.
‘Now we convert our skirting into a weapon,’ I said.
‘And what did you have in mind?’
‘I was thinking of something like a morning star — one of those medieval clubs with all the spikes sticking out of them. Only ours will have three spikes, not forty-three. But if it’s well put together, it’ll be effective enough.’
‘So, a homemade club, which you’re still to make, against their guns,’ said Rolfe. ‘Mmm. Sounds like a fair fight to me.’
‘Sorry, but that’s not quite right,’ I said. ‘It’s their guns against our club, plus our natural advantage.’
‘And that is?’ said Rolfe. ‘The fact that we outnumber them?’
‘No. What we’ve got going for us is the element of surprise. Eventually, they’re going to come in here thinking we’re dead. And when we suddenly get up and take them on, they won’t be expecting it. That’s when we’ll give them some of their own back.’
24
THE THREE NAILS that had come away with the skirting were about seven centimetres long. My plan was to remove the one at the splintered end and the one in the middle, and bind them somehow to the one I’d leave stuck in the squared-off end. I wrapped the arm of my jacket around the middle nail and began easing it back and forth. As I worked at it, I thought about what Rolfe had said earlier — about him being responsible for our abduction. I looked at him lying quietly on the mattresses. He wasn’t a bloke to accept blame easily, and his time had come to tell all.
‘Okay, Rolfe,’ I said, resting my fingers for a moment. ‘Now you can fill us in on how we got here.’
Rolfe knew this had been coming. He took a deep breath, propped himself up on his elbows, and, without looking at either of us, opened up.
‘We’re here because of a bad decision I made,’ he said, shaking his head at the thought. ‘And because of a coincidence that I had no control over. The thing is, if I’d gone to tennis on Monday night like I usually do, none of this would have happened. But my back was playing up, so I cancelled. Then I stopped at the supermarket on my way home and ran into an old contact — a senior person at the RSPCA. We chatted about the usual stuff. Man’s inhumanity to beast. The latest outrage. But I knew all the while that he was busting to tell me something. And, eventually, of course, he did.’
‘And that was?’ I said, sensing some loosening in the nail.
‘That their cat person had been analysing material that was somehow connected with your murder investigation.’
‘What?’ I said, so surprised by this claim that I dropped the skirting into my lap. ‘He reckoned his mob was working for us? Well, I can tell you now, it’s not true. We don’t use them.’
‘He didn’t say you did,’ said Rolfe. ‘
No. You use a forensic vet over at the ANU, and after you found Susan Wright’s body, you sent that vet some fur to analyse. The thing is, the brief you sent with it suggested that the fur had come from one cat, but when your vet looked at the fur, she was certain it came from several different cats. Given that discrepancy, she was planning to send it off for DNA analysis, but then one of your people called and gave her a hurry along. So she asked a close friend over at the RSPCA to look at the fur for her. On the quiet, of course. And he confirmed her initial analysis — that the fur was indeed from several different cats. So that’s what she reported to you. As it happens, that RSPCA vet is a confidant of the contact I ran into at the supermarket. They’re a couple, in fact, and they share everything.’
This revelation hit hard. We’d allowed crucial evidence to fall into the hands of someone outside the loop, and they’d gabbed about it to a lover with loose lips. It meant that the fur might be useless if Joe ever fronted a jury. Then it occurred to me that Rolfe would have to escape this place before he could expose our stuff-up.
‘Now you’d already know this,’ said Rolfe, ‘but around the time you asked your vet to analyse the fur, you also sent her a dead cat. Apparently, you wanted to know the animal’s age, its gender, and whether it was domestic or feral. That sort of thing. Well, she had her RSPCA mate — he being ‘the man’ on all things feline — look at the cat as well. Then Proctor turned up dead, and there was more fur to analyse. And another dead cat. And the RSPCA vet got involved there, too. In fact, he was doing so much cat work for you, my contact was convinced that cats were central to your investigation.’
‘I’ve got nothing to say about that,’ I said, resuming work on the nail. ‘What I want to know is, how does all this connect with us being here?’
Rolfe pulled his jacket tighter around his neck. Maybe he was attempting to keep the cold at bay. Or maybe he didn’t like being brought back to the question.
‘Ahh, well, when I thought about all this cat stuff,’ he said, ‘it reminded me of a story I did years ago when I was a junior at The Digest. About cats disappearing up in Red Hill. There were twelve of them in all. Beloved moggies, fat and healthy — just like the ones the two vets had examined. Now, call it a long bow if you like, but I thought I could draw a link, storywise, between the two sets of dead cats. A tentative one, mind you, but my update of the old Red Hill story was only to be a sidebar to my lead, which of course was going to focus on cat fur, two dead cats, and the way your people allowed crucial evidence to fall into the wrong hands.’
‘When did you do the story on the disappearing cats?’
‘About ten years ago,’ said Rolfe.
I eased the first nail out of the skirting. It hadn’t bent in the process, and it was long enough to do serious damage.
‘So how does your storage unit out in Fyshwick fit into this?’ I said.
‘Ahh, so you know about the unit,’ said Rolfe. ‘Then no doubt you’ll also know that it’s where I keep my documents and old papers. And I never discard anything. So when I decided to revisit my Digest story, I went out to the unit, dug out the old notebooks, and retrieved the names of the people I’d interviewed back then. And last night I drove up to Red Hill, hoping to catch a few of them at home. I could have looked up a directory and rung them, of course. But I prefer face-to-face contact. Don’t you, detective?’
‘When you did the original story, how’d you know who to speak to?’ I said, going to work on the second nail.
‘The RSPCA gave me some names. And there were lost-animal notices plastered up around the shopping centre. And I spoke to people I met in the street up there. Everyone had something to say about the missing cats.’
‘And presumably you spoke to someone at the Beagle Street house where they nabbed us. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone back there.’
‘That’s right. I spoke to a young man. He was working in the front garden.’
‘And that was Joe?’
‘Yes. As it turns out, he was Joe.’
‘And had he lost a cat?’
‘No, he hadn’t.’
‘So why’d you go back there last night?’
‘I don’t know. I remembered he was nice looking. Very buff. And I thought that while I was up there, why not knock on his door. A fatal impulse, I guess you’d say.’
‘I know all about them,’ I said. ‘But tell me, why’d you go up to Red Hill to talk to people about cats when you knew there was a strong connection between dead cats and our investigation? Shouldn’t you have at least told someone where you’d be? I mean, how dumb was that?’
‘Ahh, but I did tell someone, detective. That’s why Jean’s here. And you, too, presumably.’
I looked at Jean. Her face was paler than ever, making her eyes seem even more deeply green. I waited, expecting her to explain, but her eyes didn’t leave Rolfe’s. She clearly thought it was his story to tell.
‘Poor Jean,’ said Rolfe, looking as remorseful as any villain I’d ever seen. ‘You see, I did think there might be something of a link between my old cat story and the cats in your investigation, so last night, before I went up to Red Hill, I got Jean over for a drink and gave her a key to my storage unit. And I told her that if anything happened to me in the coming days, she should go out to the unit and look for the ‘cat’. Yes, I was that obscure, but I’d written the word on the relevant notebooks, and I’d put them near the door out there. That way, I thought, if she did have to go out, she’d find them easily enough. And I fully expected her to call you, if and when that happened.’
‘But you didn’t call us, did you, Jean,’ I said, as I felt the second nail slip slightly in its hole. ‘You went it alone.’
‘That’s right,’ she said, her eyes defiant. ‘And why wouldn’t I? After what happened at Westbourne Woods?’
‘But this wasn’t a story, Jean. It was a police matter.’
‘I know,’ she said, her defiance waning. ‘But I didn’t see any real danger in it for me. I mean, okay, no one knew where Rolfey was, but he’s taken off before, and he’s always shown up after a day or two. And much as I love you, Rolfey, you do tend to over-dramatise things. So when I looked at those addresses, all in up-market Red Hill, I thought that whatever was going on up there wouldn’t be dangerous in any way. I mean, Red Hill? Where could you be safer? I know it makes me look like a complete snob. And a careless one at that. But if you …’
‘Come off it, Jean,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Don’t tell me you weren’t thinking about the big scoop waiting for you up there.’
‘I wanted to see if the addresses in Rolfey’s notebooks would lead me to him. And if I got a story out of it, so be it. But what about you, Darren? How did you come to be here alone?’
It was a fair question, but I wasn’t sure how to answer it. I could have said that I’d feared for her safety, and that because the boss wouldn’t give her protection I’d followed her into a trap. I could have said that I thought she’d get me closer to the killers, and I’d been dead right about that. I could have said that I had my suspicions about her, so I’d decided to keep an eye on her, but why admit to being a piss-poor protector and a bad investigator?
I had another explanation for how I’d ended up there — one that was much closer to the truth. But I wasn’t prepared to voice that one, either. It was that I was deeply attracted to her. I saw her as being at risk, and I’d used that as an excuse to follow her, to try to protect her, to be close to her. And in the process, like her, I’d taken my safety for granted and got myself into the deepest shit.
‘Well, seeing as how everyone else has had a turn in the confessional,’ I said, stopping work on the nail. ‘The fact is, Jean, I’ve been keeping an eye on you. In my off-hours. Nothing authorised. Just me. I even put a tracking device under your car. It was clear to me that you had the killers’ attention, but my seniors wouldn’t
put surveillance on you. They were worried about the bad publicity if we got found out. Worried that Rolfe here, and your other colleagues, would rip into us. So, in a funny sort of way, everyone who should have protected you, effectively conspired to have you nabbed. Silly, eh?’
‘In retrospect, you’d have to say pretty silly, yeah,’ she said. ‘And silly me, too.’
‘I’ve got a proposition for you, detective,’ said Rolfe. ‘If you get us out of here alive, I promise not to expose your shambolic investigation for what it is. What do you say to that?’
The second nail came out of the wood in a rush. I looked at Rolfe and tried to muster a smile.
‘God, you drive a hard bargain,’ I said. ‘But, yes, it’s a deal.’
25
APART FROM ARMING yourself as best you can, they say that the key to winning a fight is to know your enemy. I didn’t have a clue about what made Joe tick, and it was almost time to find out. But first I needed a weapon. It would be no use getting to know him if I didn’t have some way of taking him on.
The materials at hand were very basic: a metre-and-a-half of skirting, three long nails, and two shoelaces. I put the two loose nails on either side of the one I’d left in the skirting, and pinched the three of them together, along with the tail end of one of the laces. Then I wound the long end of the lace tightly around the bundle and worked it round and round, all the way down to the wood.
Next, I wound the lace over itself and brought it back up towards the pointy ends of the nails. Halfway there, with the lace running out, I looped it under itself and pulled it tight. I knotted it a couple of times. Then I did the same with the other lace.
When I tested my handiwork, the nails were remarkably firm, and their shiny points looked like little silver teeth. I stood up and swung the club, left and right. It felt well balanced, and was surprisingly heavy. I flailed the air, visualising the fight and the moment of impact.