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

by Felicity Young

  The room was like the inside of the Tardis, with waist-high benches of buttons and dials, and banks of monitors behind which several employees in white lab coats sat. Everything — the weighing of the abattoir stock, the measuring of the grain in the feed mills, the recording of every animal at the saleyard — was controlled and recorded from here, and linked to the substations of the individual plants, she explained.

  Their hostess accompanied them in the lift to the fourth floor and through to Wetherby’s private secretary’s office. While the women exchanged brief pleasantries, Cam took in his surroundings. Complex computers, a sophisticated switchboard system, the latest printer, scanner and photocopier, and other high-tech gadgets he’d never seen before adorned every surface of the modular workstation.

  In contrast, Wetherby’s office, when they were ushered in, proved as stark and as low-tech as you could get, the office furniture grey, utilitarian and ageless. The one exception to this was a calculator on the desk with enough buttons to launch a space shuttle. It was the only thing in the room that suggested they were in the twenty-first century at all. Wetherby might not be into computers, Cam thought, but there was no doubt that he knew the whereabouts of every red cent of his company’s debits and credits.

  Their hostess took their coffee orders, smiling at Mr Wetherby as she left. Raul Wetherby’s skin was a stiff, unhealthy grey, his hair no more than a few streamlined strands, but it was his eyes Cam knew he would never forget. Large dots stamped upon a pale background, they pivoted from side to side in their rigid sockets as he talked with the emotional intensity of a cruising shark. Never quite meeting Cam’s own, they passed from one side of Cam’s face to the other, sometimes over to Leanne sitting in the other visitor’s chair, sometimes to the colourless wall behind her.

  Before Cam could get to the reason for their visit, Wetherby launched into a history of the yards, his takeover of the company, his role in its computerisation. He spoke in one flat monotone as if he were reciting the lines by rote. Cam let him talk on, hoping he might give something away, but as far as he could see, all the man seemed to be hiding was a personality.

  Leanne fidgeted in her chair and brought her hand to her mouth, and even Cam found himself stifling a yawn. The office was airless and smelled of bran flakes: no surprise given the proximity of the feed mills. But it could have been a lot worse, with the stockyards four storeys below and the rendering factory to the right of them, presently upwind.

  Cam explained the reason for their visit, showed Wetherby the branding iron and explained how they’d found it in the Pilkingtons’ shed. Mr Wetherby looked at it for a moment, pursed his thin lips and passed it back to Cam across his desk.

  ‘Yes, it’s mine, all right,’ he said. ‘And you say you found it on the property of the dead Pilkington couple?’

  Cam nodded.

  ‘And another just like it somewhere else?’

  ‘A witness told us about it, but I’m afraid we never saw that one. We believe at one time it was in the possession of a man we want to question in relation to the Pilkington and Brock murders.’

  Pauline had not been able to describe the brand she’d packed with Ivanovich’s things, but Cam decided to work on the assumption that it also belonged to Mr Wetherby.

  Wetherby asked, ‘And that man worked for me, you say?’

  ‘Jack Ivanovich, yes. The man found dead in the pit was called Shane Brock. He also worked for you.’

  Wetherby drummed his fingers upon his pristine blotter for a moment as he considered. ‘You know, the other name you mentioned, Pilkington, that one does strikes a chord.’

  ‘Rita or Darren?’

  ‘I had a woman called Rita Pilkington work for me for a while, did some part-time bookkeeping. I had to lay her off — she wasn’t, er, suitable, never quite fitted in.’

  Cam tried to imagine Rita decked out like the hostess in reception and failed.

  Wetherby clasped his long, pale hands together and leaned back in his padded office chair. ‘Of course I’ll tell you whatever I can, although Harry Giles knows more about our employees than I do.’

  ‘Mr Giles was questioned by some of our Toorrup officers,’ Cam said. ‘He was very cooperative but didn’t give us much to work with, other than furthering our suspicions that Ivanovich had something to do with the deaths and also the stock-theft ring that Brock and Darren Pilkington were involved with. The fact that this branding iron is registered to you makes me wonder if they were passing their stolen stock off as yours through the saleyards.’

  ‘Good heavens.’ Despite the exclamation, the sandpaper skin of his face barely moved. ‘I suppose it’s a possibility, but there are measures in place that are supposed to prevent that sort of thing from happening — brands, tags, weigh bills etcetera.’

  ‘Unfortunately the system is by no means infallible. Your brand is so easily recognisable and so often seen in these yards, I doubt a fake would arouse much suspicion.’

  Wetherby let out a sigh of resignation and rearranged the strands of hair on his forehead in an almost feminine fashion. ‘Yes, I see what you mean. I’ve been campaigning for years to get the laws changed — too many loopholes, branding marks too easily changed. The National Livestock Identification System can’t be implemented soon enough in my opinion.’

  He got up from his desk and glided over to a large window. The light flooding in through the plate glass made the fashionable grey suit shine upon his slim frame. His predatory face lit up with luminous intensity as he surveyed his kingdom.

  Leanne’s cup rattled in its saucer.

  Cam moved to stand by Wetherby’s side. He took in the hustle and bustle of the saleyards below, the yards of mournful animals destined for the abattoir and the giant funnels of the grain silos against the belching black smoke of the rendering factory behind them.

  But from where they stood the scene was like a movie, few of the smells and sounds that made up the essence of the yards able to penetrate the hermetically sealed fourth floor office. Whoever coined the phrase ‘ivory tower’ must have been gazing from a similar vantage point, Cam mused.

  An aerial view of the conglomerate, a black and white photograph in a heavy silver frame, hung on one wall near the desk. Next to it was a picture of a pastoral windmill, with a lightning bolt bisecting a storm-blackened sky. Taken at one of the Wetherby stations, Cam wondered? They were the only two pictures in this otherwise sterile room, and he got the feeling they were more important to Wetherby than any family, friends or spiritual gurus.

  There was a knock at the door. A well-muscled middle-aged man entered, his close-cropped, greying hair making his head seem small in proportion to the rest of his body.

  He swayed as he walked, as if he’d spent longer in the saddle than on his feet. Through the open door Cam caught sight of a tall young man talking to the secretary, his face a pallid contrast to the angry flush of acne upon his cheeks.

  ‘This is my right-hand man, Harry Giles,’ Wetherby said.

  Cam turned his gaze back to Harry Giles, who was smiling at Leanne as if he knew her. She hadn’t put her hand out to him during the introductions, but had remained in her chair, rigid and expressionless.

  Cam shook his hand.

  Giles put a file on Mr Wetherby’s desk then turned back to the door.

  ‘Wait a minute, Harry,’ his employer said. ‘Ivanovich, Pilkington, Brock. Know if any of them have worked on my pastoral properties? It seems that some of my branding irons may have been used on stolen stock.’

  ‘Not that I know of, Mr Wetherby, but I’ll look into it if you like. I’m afraid anyone who can weld can make a branding iron, it doesn’t really mean much.’

  As he stood and waited for more instructions, he took a pipe from the top pocket of his blue RM Williams shirt and rubbed the bowl against his nose, making the dark wood shiny with grease. He looked at Leanne again, smiled and began polishing the bowl of the pipe against the front of his shirt, not taking his eyes off her.


  A peculiar habit or a gesture designed to intimidate? Cam wondered what it was all about.

  Leanne’s eyes dropped to the hands in her lap, her attention fixed on mutilating the skin around her thumbnail.

  Giles shifted his gaze back to his employer. ‘Is there anything else you need, Mr Wetherby?’

  ‘Not for the moment, thank you, Harry.’

  When he’d left the office Mr Wetherby said, ‘A good man, he’s been with me for years. Could barely write his name when I took him on at Coonawarra Station, thirty or so years ago. He’s worked his way up now to a hundred and twenty thousand dollar salary.’

  Cam whistled the air through his teeth. ‘Not bad. Who was the young man waiting for him outside?’

  ‘That would have been his son, Timothy. Harry’s training him in the business.’

  Yes, but in what aspects of the business? Cam wondered.

  Mr Wetherby walked to the door to show them out. ‘I appreciate your visit, Sergeant, thanks for coming.’

  ‘I want you to be especially vigilant, sir.’

  ‘I’ll have memos written up immediately to all my heads of departments. My agents and stock inspector will also be notified. I can’t imagine too much stolen stock passing under the radar, although I suppose nothing’s impossible.

  ‘You can’t be too careful,’ Cam said.

  ‘You’re right, of course, and please don’t hesitate to call in again, Sergeant, I hope you’ll keep me up to date. For now I have to get on. We’re having a big day in the yards the day after tomorrow: stud bulls, several I’ve bred myself, beautiful animals that have attracted a lot of interest, both local and overseas. We close operations during the sales to encourage employee participation — Harry’s idea, of course, and a terrific morale-booster. We did it last year too, turned the whole thing into a country fair.’

  He picked up the buff envelope Giles had put on his desk and extracted a photograph of a well-muscled Brahman bull. It looked like one of the animals in Jo’s Romantic Art books, all muscle and little head — a bit like Harry Giles, Cam mused.

  ‘This is Sinbad — the Japanese are interested. I’m expecting a quarter of a million for him alone.’

  For the first time during their meeting Cam noticed a gleam of light flare in the dead eyes.

  ***

  Cam turned to Leanne once they’d settled back into the ute.

  ‘You didn’t look too happy back there in the office — penny for them?’

  Leanne fiddled with her seat belt for longer than necessary.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘My Dad used to work at this place.’ She flicked her hand towards the saleyards. ‘That Harry Giles fella gives me the creeps, he’s too friendly by half. He was asking me about Dad the other day, when you were still at the hospital with Ruby. He wouldn’t leave me alone. As for Raul Wetherby, I felt cold just looking at him.’

  ‘At least he was being cooperative.’

  She turned to him after she’d done up her seat belt. ‘He has to be, doesn’t he? I’m pretty cooperative when I go to the dentist. Something’s not right about this place, is it, Sarge?’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Cam said, starting up the ute. ‘But knowing something’s not right isn’t enough. First we have to find out what it is — then we have to prove it.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Leanne knew she was safe as soon as she turned the key in the lock and pushed open her front door. Her mother lay in the lounge room, draped like a dust sheet across the green vinyl couch, the thrumming upright fan aimed between her splayed legs for maximum effect.

  ‘Hi, Mum.’

  Mavis smiled, but her eyes remained fixed on the TV.

  There would be no flying projectiles tonight, no screaming accusations or knife-edged words. Just as well; after a day like today, Leanne knew she wouldn’t be able to take it, might fight back and make things worse than they already were — if that was possible. Sometimes she felt as if she were filled with steam, the pressure building up inside her and only held down by a lid with a failing seal.

  Leanne put her keys on the table near the door, next to her mother’s wobbly stack of vinyl LPs, guts bursting with balled anti-static sleeves: Bay City Rollers, Garry Glitter, and Barry Manilow for when she was in a more contemplative mood.

  Despite the heat, Mavis was wearing her grey koala slippers — always a favourable sign, for Mavis was infatuated with koalas, even more than she was with Garry ‘he was framed’ Glitter. Every surface of their room bore evidence of her obsession: wood, crystal, pottery and plastic, even a playdough koala from the little boy down the road. Not daring to hand it to Mavis himself, he’d given it to Leanne to pass on. Most of the townspeople knew about Mavis and few ventured close.

  A ceramic pink koala decorated with tiny hand-painted blue flowers blocked the view of Leanne’s hard – won police academy pistol-shooting trophy. An evil-looking rose-quartz koala with flashing opal eyes had replaced the picture of her father on the mantelpiece. Leanne thought of Rita’s mantelpiece, the room she had died in, the brutal violence of her death, and for a moment imagined the koala covered in a fine mist of blood.

  She moved over to where Mavis was reclining and kissed her forehead.

  ‘Have a good day, darl?’ Mavis asked without looking at Leanne. She leaned over the edge of the couch and dug into the ice bucket on the floor beside her. The fresh ice cubes cracked and hissed as she dropped them into her glass of Blackberry Nip and lemonade. Holding up the glass, she acknowledged her daughter with a nod then turned back to the wrestling on TV.

  ‘Go for his balls, Titan!’ The koala slippers jerked as the crowds roared. Leanne caught a glimpse of a muscle-bound figure in a gold thong moving obscenely over the prone form of the defeated Ulysses.

  ‘Mum, I’m going to have to turn the light on.’ She moved to the light switch, needing visual reassurance of her mother’s condition. The ceiling light, with its Tiffany shade, flooded the room with a soft mauve radiance. Mavis’s only reaction was a rapid double blink at the TV. The flickering glow of the television and the cloud of cigarette smoke softened the lines on her face and the stains on the white nightdress. There was ash on the carpet. The ashtray, shaped like a koala head, spewed butts. Leanne picked it up to empty into the kitchen bin.

  Without turning from the screen, Mavis said, ‘I’ll just finish this round, then cook you up some tea.’

  And so started the conversation they’d had more nights than Leanne could remember. It was as if they were part of a scene from Groundhog Day, only in this instance Leanne knew there could be no rectifying of past wrongs.

  ‘It’s okay, Mum, you look tired. I’ll fix us something.’

  ‘Nothing for me, precious, I’ve already eaten.’

  A broadcast broke into the wrestling. It was a twenty-second flash to the discovery of a woman’s bashed body in the small town of Glenroyd, the third body found there in less than a week. With a sudden shift of mood, Mavis let loose a blue string of obscenities aimed at Superintendent Cummings’s face as it filled the screen. Leanne couldn’t hear what he was saying because of Mavis’s continued cursing. She caught a glimpse of the station front entrance then a white van disgorging more alien cops onto their patch.

  Mavis gave no indication that she recognised the town mentioned and seemed to have no inkling that the murdered woman might have been someone she knew. For all she cared it could have happened in deepest, darkest Ukraine. And even the most sensitive of viewers could have no idea of the graphic details of the scene, details she knew she would be carrying around in her head for the rest of her life.

  Flicking the switch and plunging the room once more into semi-darkness, Leanne made her way with the ashtray through to the kitchen. There she saw the evidence of Mavis’s last meal, an empty tin of low-fat, low-salt, high-fibre soup added to the rows of bottles for recycling that stood near the windowsill.

  She emptied the ashtray and crept through the semi-darkness of the lounge to
put it back on the coffee table. While she was there, she scooped up the rug so she could shake it outside the front door. Her mother hissed at her for blocking the screen when she put it back.

  Back in the kitchen, Leanne put on her packet of instant noodles to boil and started to clean up. She took a deep breath, plunged her hands into the fly-dotted water and pulled the plug. A strand of spaghetti slid through her fingers, a piece of eggshell caught under her nail.

  After she’d washed the dishes she dried them with a koala-print tea towel they kept on the handle of the oven door. She wiped the breakfast toast crumbs and the pools of ant-flecked honey from the bench top in much the same way as she struggled to wipe the last image of Rita Pilkington from her mind. The latter was a fruitless task. Blood, unlike honey, had a habit of staining the memory for good.

  A spasm of pain cramped the muscles of her neck when she bent to heft the bulging green bag from the kitchen bin and tie the ends. After she’d put it outside the kitchen door and relined the bin, she riffled through the kitchen drawer, through the Valium and Prozac, the Mogadon and the diet pills, until she at last found the Panadol. Hands shaking now, she tore through the silver foil and crunched a couple down dry.

  When her noodles were ready she strained off the scummy liquid and put them in a cereal bowl. Unable to bear the thought of joining her mother in the lounge room, she ate as she continued her cleaning in the kitchen, spooning noodles into her mouth whenever she passed the bowl. Her mind continued to race and her sore neck made her head pound.

  So much had happened in the last few days, but she didn’t seem capable of remaining focused on any one thing for more than a few seconds at a time. The Pilkington murders, the RSPCA inspector, Harry Giles. In some ways, Giles disturbed her more than the rest rolled together, and seeing him today in Wetherby’s office had only worsened that impression.

  Whenever she tried to reach for the reason for her unease, it floated away just beyond reach. Was it the insincerity of his friendliness? The concern he’d expressed for her father had to be a sham. Hell, her dad had been gone over six months; surely a well-meaning employer would have enquired about him or passed the hat around sooner than that? Men like Harry Giles were bad when they were hostile and even worse when they were friendly. She sensed she hadn’t seen the last of him.