Flare-up: a tense, taut mystery (A Cam Fraser mystery)

by Felicity Young

  Ruby threw back her shoulders and looked the man in the eye.

  ‘It’s okay, I don’t need your help now. Mum’s here.’

  He shook his finger at her. ‘You need to watch out, girl. You nearly got cleaned up then.’ He turned to face Jo as she approached. ‘Not a good idea to be letting your daughter out here by herself, Mrs,’ he said.

  ‘She’s a naughty girl. I’m always telling her not to go out riding on her own.’

  Jo had an angry spark in her eye, but when she extended her arm, Ruby couldn’t help moving into her hug. As she bent her head into Jo’s shoulder and wiped away the dust and tears, she heard the Ford Bronco start up, and soon the ugly sound of its engine had faded into the distance.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Leanne’s timing couldn’t have been worse. Cam slammed his fist down on his metal desk, making his empty coffee mug rattle. Standing in front of him, she visibly flinched.

  ‘Gone? What do you mean the dog was gone?’ he bellowed, annoyed at the interruption of his gloomy reverie.

  After he’d finished on the phone with the pathologist, he’d shut himself in his office to think and tried unsuccessfully to diminish the dark cloud that had settled over him since he’d received the ID on the body in the wool bale. Rod had been right: he had been in denial. The way he’d latched onto the evidence of the dog’s tooth, his theory that the dog wouldn’t attack her master, had been like a man falling down a precipice, desperately reaching out to grab a twig.

  And on top of all that, now they’d lost the bloody dog.

  He stood up and stepped away from his desk, trying literally to step away from the disturbing thoughts filling his mind. He knew it wasn’t fair to take his frustration out on Leanne. The scare over Ruby’s illness must have left him more drained than he’d imagined.

  As Leanne stuttered and started over her narrative of events, Cam grabbed his exercise ball and stood with his back to her, facing his small office window. With his other hand he scissored the Venetian blinds apart and stared into the street. A stooped old gum tree stood to the right of the path leading to the station entrance, the dirt underneath it swept clean by the circular motion of the gum nuts hanging heavily to the ground.

  He exhaled and let go of the Venetians. At least with the discovery of the Q fever they had a link to tie the murders to the stock thieves, a link that was a lot more concrete than a stolen branding iron and some circled magazine advertisements. In the overall scheme of things, he supposed it was a big consolation.

  ‘It’s okay, what’s done is done.’ Pointing out the spare chair to Leanne, he sat down behind his desk again, rested the exercise ball on the mouth of his coffee mug and leaned back with his hands behind his head. ‘Sit down and tell me again from the beginning.’

  Leanne swallowed and dropped into the chair on the other side of his desk. ‘I met up with the RSPCA bloke at the saleyards, like you told me to, and questioned him about why he was hanging around the Pilkington place. He said he was investigating allegations of animal cruelty. He was real dodgy, Sarge, asking all kinds of questions he shouldn’t have been. He was just too nosy by half.’

  ‘Go on.’

  She seemed to relax a little and rested her hands on her lap. ‘I asked him to help me with the dog. I thought it would be a good idea. I mean, I could suss him out more — you know?’

  Cam held up a hand. ‘It’s all right, you don’t need to justify it.’

  She gave him a tight smile and blew a strand of hair from her face. ‘But when we got to the farm, we asked Rita for the dog and she said we couldn’t have it because it’d run off.’

  ‘And you believed her?’

  ‘Well, no, not really, but what could I do? She said she’d taken it for a walk and it had taken off after a kangaroo, and not come back when she called. We had a look around the property, searched all the outbuildings, but couldn’t find it anywhere. I did tell Superintendent Cummings. I thought he would have told you.’

  Cam said nothing, just pushed himself up from the desk and grabbed his peaked cap. She followed him from his office. He lifted the Commodore keys from their hook on the wall near the front desk and tossed them to her.

  ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘You drive.’

  ***

  The days were getting shorter as autumn progressed. The road they drove down was laddered with tree shadows and striped with golden light. The blossoms on the banksia bushes at this time of year always reminded Cam of fat altar candles.

  Cam mulled over the best way of handling Rita as they made their way to the Pilkington farmhouse. He wouldn’t pussyfoot around this time, he decided. It was several days since the discovery of what they’d believed at the time to be Pizzle’s body, (now confirmed) and Rita’s initial shock. If there’d been any genuine shock at all, it should have dulled by now. He hoped Leanne’s presence would help. She seemed to have recovered her spirits after the ticking off and was back to her bouncy self.

  He wished he could recover his own spirits so easily.

  She extracted a crackling packet of toffees from the glove box and offered him one. When he shook his head she popped one into her mouth, twisting in her seat to put another in her pocket.

  ‘Bit of a sweet tooth, Leanne?’ His lightweight tone was a struggle; it sounded artificial even to his ears.

  ‘Fantales,’ she said with a self-deprecating smile. ‘They used to be my dad’s favourite.’

  He noticed her use of the past tense and wondered how often she dwelled upon the subject of her absent father.

  They turned into the Pilkingtons’ long, rutted driveway. On either side of the gate, Pizzle had placed huge concrete culverts in a failed attempt at a grand front entrance. Hammered into the ground on the right-hand side of one of the culverts, a wobbly, hand-painted sign read ‘Welcome to DarraRitaVille’.

  The metal mesh farm gate was unlocked and stood wide open.

  ‘After everything that’s happened, you’d think she’d keep her gate locked,’ Leanne commented.

  ‘Locked gates only keep out the honest.’

  A car approached them from the house end of the driveway, driving too fast for safety along the corrugated gravel track. Leanne pulled over between two gum trees to let it pass. ‘Someone’s in a hurry, must be one of Rita’s Salvo visitors,’ she said as she glanced in her rear-view mirror.

  Cam fumbled in his pocket for his notebook, twisting behind to look at the disappearing car. ‘Number plate?’

  ‘Alpha, foxtrot, tango — bummer, missed the rest, but it’s a blue Nissan four-wheel drive.’

  ‘Floor it to the house, Leanne. Something’s not right.’

  Cam lifted the handset and radioed Pete on traffic, telling him to get himself to the crossroads at the edge of town and stand by to stop a blue Nissan for speeding. ‘Just in case,’ he said to Leanne as he replaced the mike.

  They screamed to a halt outside the Pilkington house. The front door and fly screen hung open at an unnaturally wide angle on broken hinges.

  A familiar feeling of dread clutched at Cam’s throat and tightened his voice.

  ‘Stay there, ready to move,’ he said, climbing from the car and rushing towards the house. Back in an instant, he gripped the outside rim of the car window, trying to control the spasms of his gut. ‘Follow that Nissan,’ he gasped.

  For a second all Leanne did was gawp. ‘But what about Rita, the dog?’

  Cam struggled to hold back the rising bile. ‘Rita’s dead.’ He thumped the side panel of the police car then waved her away, yelling, ‘Go now. Go!’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The only evidence of the racing blue Nissan ahead was the moving rooster-tail of dust. Even that disappeared for a moment as the four-wheel drive turned out of the driveway onto the gravel road, lost amid the dull green foliage of a tall stand of gums. Leanne took the corner too fast and fishtailed, narrowly missing a drainage ditch. She forced herself to slow down. Slow is fast, the sarge was always telling her.
The four-wheel drive had the advantage on the sliding gravel, but the Commodore had the speed. Provided she could keep the other car in sight and her car on the road, she should have no trouble catching up once they hit the bitumen.

  Pete was heading towards the Nissan from the opposite direction and they’d soon have it boxed in. She called him on the radio to confirm his position. In a voice that was reassuring and calm, he told her he’d wait at the highway intersection and nail them then. No heroics, he said.

  As if.

  The telephone poles passed by in a blur, the fence posts as white as Sergeant Fraser’s face when he ran back from the house. But Leanne felt strangely calm and focused as she watched the Nissan approach the T- junction. If it turned left it would be heading straight for the highway and Pete; if it turned right it would arrive at a dead end and the beginning of the state forest. If the driver knew the district at all, he wouldn’t turn that way.

  The Nissan swung left, just as she’d anticipated. ‘You beauty, yes . . .’ Leanne hissed between her teeth. This was like driving cattle: move ‘em on, head ‘em out . . .

  Then the Nissan spun into a one-eighty and Leanne couldn’t help but continue left on her predetermined course. She passed within metres of the whirling four-wheel drive, catching a glimpse of two men, vague white faces through dark tinted glass. The passenger grimly held on to the strap handle with his shoulder jammed against the window while the driver wrenched the wheel around.

  Leanne shot on past them, skating on the gravel like it was ice, losing control of her back wheels to pirouette into a tree, rear end first. The car jolted to a halt with a sickening crunch, snapping her head from one side to the other. She cursed aloud, rubbing her neck as she craned to get a glimpse of her target, bucking its way down the bumpy track towards the dead end.

  Her hands shook as she held the mike to call Pete for assistance. She had no intention of cornering the men on her own.

  She extracted the car’s rear end from the tree and muscled the wheels around to face her disappearing quarry. It seemed like an age before Pete pulled up alongside her.

  He radioed her to move ahead slowly. They eased their cars side by side along the road at a funereal pace, the only sound the gentle crackle of gravel under their tyres.

  But when they reached the dead end, the Nissan was gone.

  ***

  They caught up with Sergeant Fraser in Darren Pilkington’s lean-to. He was fossicking around in a pile of rusting junk that stuck out from a forty-four gallon drum like an abstract sculpture.

  Pete took his hand from Leanne’s elbow as they approached.

  ‘We lost ‘em, Sarge. They disappeared up an old track leading into the state forest, a track we didn’t even know existed, it was that narrow. I’ve put out an APB but there are a dozen or more paths they could take to rejoin the main road. We’ve got a snowball’s chance of catching them.’

  Leanne rubbed her neck. Cam straightened and looked her up and down, his forehead as furrowed as the gravel road she’d just been skidding along. ‘You all right?’

  She felt a whoosh of heat in her face. ‘I dented the Commodore.’

  ‘Yeah, but are you all right?’

  ‘She has whiplash,’ Pete butted in.

  Leanne turned sharply to look at him and winced. ‘I’m fine.’ It felt as if a red-hot poker had replaced the bones in her neck.

  ‘Did you manage to get a look at the blokes in the car?’ Cam asked.

  She reminded herself not to shake her head. ‘The windscreen was tinted, I hardly saw them. Everything happened so fast.’

  ‘It’s all right, Leanne. Take a deep breath, stop and think,’ he said.

  She screwed her eyes shut for a moment and tried to relive the scene. ‘White males, hats I think — yes, hats. The driver had a bush hat; something with a peak on the other bloke, maybe a baseball cap.’

  He patted her shoulder. ‘That’s good, you’ve done well.’

  ‘You want us to check the house, Sarge?’ Pete asked, with none of his usual enthusiasm evident.

  Cam nodded. ‘Come with me, but don’t touch anything. There’s not much we can do for the moment. I’ve informed Superintendent Cummings in Toorrup, and SOCO and the pathologist are on their way.’

  Leanne stepped through the front door of the darkened house and braced herself for the worst. But no amount of bracing could have prepared her for the sight before her eyes.

  Minor details could break the case, that was what they’d been told at the Academy. Concentrate on the minor details, the things that could easily be missed, then work inwards in a circular pattern to the more obvious.

  The curtains were floral, orange and yellow, and they’d left been left closed, blowing gently inwards on the warm breeze. The leaves of a garden shrub tapped gently against the half-open window, casting flickering patterns of yellow and green. The carpet was a sensible grey with speckles in it to hide the dirt.

  But the speckles did nothing to hide the blood, and it was everywhere.

  A spray of it had reached one of the beige walls, dripping off a framed picture of a woodcutter above the fireplace and dotting a square plastic clock on the mantelpiece below. Next to the clock stood a photograph of Darren Pilkington, also sprayed with a fine red mist.

  Despite her best efforts at limiting her observations to the surrounding room, Leanne found her gaze unintentionally drawn to the body in the centre of the floor.

  Her hand shot to her mouth. Why, she asked herself as she took in Rita’s broken form, did she have to end up as a police officer in her own town, where the victims of crime were invariably going to be people she knew? Pete had never met Rita, and he was white enough. The ragged edged of his breath tore through the thick atmosphere, competing for air space with the gentle hum of the fridge in the kitchen, and the tick of the red plastic clock.

  On the outside, Leanne thought, Cam seemed calmer and more distanced than she and Pete did, though he gave himself away with the rapid flexing of his fingers.

  Leanne exhaled and all the energy seemed to drain from her body, leaving behind it an empty, dizzy feeling. Pete put his hand on her arm and she pulled away, trying to keep her expression as neutral as Sergeant Fraser’s, knowing she was failing.

  Breathe. Breathe in and out, slow and steady.

  She repeated the calming mantra in her head and made herself look again. Rita was in worse condition than any car-accident victim Leanne had ever attended. She was lying on her stomach, her head turned to one side, her face a bleeding mass of minced flesh and splinters of bone. One arm jutted from her body at an unnatural angle. Angry welts stood out like fat worms across the backs of her legs. The cheap summer dress was crumpled at her waist and showed the rumpled folds of her white cotton knickers.

  ‘Oh, God.’ Leanne gulped and turned away.

  ‘It looks like she’s been worked over with a baseball bat.’ Pete spoke as if he were in church.

  ‘She was,’ Cam said. ‘And a stock whip too. They’re on the other side of the body. She took a while to die. Look at all the bruising on her legs. Turn around, Leanne, and look at her. You’re both going to write a report on this. Don’t get any closer, just take in as much as you can, then join me back at the tool shed.’

  He turned on his heel and left the house.

  The constables gazed around the lounge room. Pete wrote something in his notebook. ‘Sexual assault, you think?’

  Leanne shook her head — it didn’t look like it to her, not many rapists would bother to put the knickers back on — but she couldn’t answer him. Every fibre of her body fought to control the swell of nausea. She inhaled deeply through her nose, unable to bear the idea of the metallic fug filling her mouth.

  Flies had already settled on the pulped face. She fought the impulse to shoo them away and cover it.

  Concentrate on your job, she told herself, dragging her eyes from the body to scan the trashed room. The pine furniture had been upended, the mattress dragged to the loung
e from the bedroom, gutted and slashed. Papers were strewn from scattered drawers. She could see through the open kitchen door. The floor was crowded with spilled pantry goods.

  Evidently the men, the same murdering sadists she’d pursued and lost, had been looking for something. Failure pressed down upon her shoulders.

  When she’d seen enough, she squeezed Pete’s arm and returned into the sunlight outside. Eyes blinking like a mole’s, she spotted Cam standing once more in the lean-to.

  ‘Did you and David Fielding walk the property when you looked for the dog?’ he asked as she approached.

  The question surprised her: what did this have to do with Rita’s murder? She said they did.

  ‘Apart from the dam, did you notice any other watercourses or muddy areas?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  He looked thoughtful for a moment, giving no explanations for his questions, and she felt too drained to ask for them. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Pete tying the crime-scene tape to the posts of the front veranda, where it flickered in the gentle breeze.

  Cam reached into the forty-four gallon drum and pulled something out with a clunk and a clatter. Leanne had to block the glare from the sun with her hand to see what he was holding.

  ‘You think they might have been looking for this?’ he queried, handing her a rusty branding iron.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A couple of hours later, Cam and Leanne were making their way through the Wetherby complex, to the four-storey administration building looming over it. Cam had made no appointment, always preferring these kinds of visits to be accompanied by the element of surprise. As they stepped into the foyer, a receptionist as glamorous and charming as an old-fashioned air hostess welcomed them then buzzed Mr Wetherby in his office. Cam watched her body language as she spoke into the phone. No raising of sickle eyebrows, no pursing of waxy red mouth, no indication at all that Wetherby was put out or surprised by the visit.

  As she led them to the lift, she pointed through some double glass fire doors. The control room, she announced, and the heart of operations.