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

by Felicity Young

  You shouldn’t let people get to you like that, Cam would’ve said. Don’t take things so personally. But despite her best efforts, she knew that Harry Giles had crawled from under her skin and into her mind in a way that would take a lot more than a new episode of Neighbours to erase.

  Glancing at her watch, she saw she only had ten minutes before the start of her favourite show. She loved her TV, a small colour set she’d bought with her first lot of holiday pay. If not for the TV and the computer tucked away in her bedroom sanctuary, she would’ve turned as mad as her mother a long time ago.

  The ringing of the phone on the kitchen wall broke through her thoughts and she lunged for it, hoping to beat Mavis, who had the hands-free on the table next to her drink.

  ‘Leanne Henry,’ she said into the receiver, listening out for the telltale click from the hands-free in the other room.

  Not a sound.

  Nor was there one from the other end of the line. She waited, expecting to hear the sound of heavy breathing or a torrent of filth.

  ‘Don’t say a word, love,’ the familiar voice said at last.

  ‘Dad?’ she mouthed without a sound.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The short dusk had already given over to night and the moon rose large and round. Sitting on her back veranda, Jo lifted her glass from the pitted surface of her outdoor table and took another sip of red wine. The lowering level in the bottle was a testimony to the good drop it was. She picked it up and read the label aloud: ‘A deeply scented fragrance of cassis, violets and dark plums with lightly polished chocolate oak overlying a background of gravel and mocha.’

  A kookaburra in the ghost gum at the bottom of her garden joined in with her laughter.

  The bite of the red wine continued to work its magic, shivering along her jaw and neck into her shoulders, easing the tension of the day. And what a day, her policy of tolerance within reason sorely tested.

  She’d never had any intention of leaving Ruby alone on the side of the road. After doing a U-turn on the highway when she was out of sight, she was already on her way back when she saw the man from the Bronco approach. Luckily she’d timed her reappearance perfectly. The experience had left Ruby quite shaken. Jo had taken her back to Cam’s house seeming contrite and solemnly promising that she would try no such thing again. Jo promised in turn not to tell her father.

  It was a start. All she could do now was wait and see.

  She selected a prawn from the plate in front of her, snapped off its head and began to peel away the whiskery legs, cracking the shell and tossing it over the veranda fence into the gardenia bed.

  She’d never been a strict vegetarian; eating seafood was no problem for her, although she knew plenty for whom it was. HK, for instance, wouldn’t eat anything with a face. Jokingly she’d once asked him if it meant he’d eat worms — worms didn’t have faces. He hadn’t spoken to her for the rest of the evening. If you can’t laugh at yourself, she mused, whom can you laugh at? A relationship that began at an anti-logging protest and ended the same day over an argument about worms was surely doomed before it had even started.

  She dipped her peeled prawn into the bowl of homemade chilli sauce and popped it into her mouth, sinking back into the cushions of her chair to enjoy it. Cam would be over any minute. He’d said on the phone he’d had a bad day. With Ruby settled back at his house with a stack of DVDs, and her own fridge well stocked with Swan Lager, Jo was sure she could rectify the problem.

  In the shower she’d taken extra care; bugger the water restrictions for this one night. She’d scrubbed, loofahed, plucked and pampered her body until her skin was ringing. She’d even found time to dash to the chemist and pick up a colour rinse, restoring her short fiery locks as near as dammit to their natural burnished chestnut.

  After strategically placing scented candles around her bedroom, she’d slipped into a pair of slinky black evening pants and a seductive strappy top, now sparkling under the flickering lantern like royal icing. A fine woollen shawl would have been handy, though; the autumn nights could turn nippy, and she regretted not buying the one she’d eyed off the other day in Toorrup. She’d have to make do with the cardigan she’d knitted a few years ago. Made from thick homespun wool with wooden buttons, it was a passion-killer of a thing that Tenzing Norgay could have worn on his way up Everest. She hoped she wouldn’t need it.

  With her pager conveniently left in the car, the rest was up to him.

  Soon she heard the front door open and close and the fly screen clapping after it. She turned towards the sound, her dangling glass earrings casting kaleidoscopic patterns of red and green across the table.

  His footsteps thudded down the bare floorboards of her hall. Then they faded into muffled vibrations as he walked across the carpeted lounge into the kitchen. She heard the whoosh of the fridge door, the crack of a ring pull. A few seconds later, and he was standing in front of the light seeping through the veranda door.

  ‘Come and sit down, have a prawn!’ she said, flinging her arm out towards the chair next to her own. Her voice sounded slightly slurred, even to her ears.

  He moved across the boards towards her, bending down to kiss her cheek. Still in his uniform, he smelled of sweat, but it wasn’t unpleasant. He took a swig of beer and collapsed into the chair next to hers, his breath escaping in a long exhale, then put the cold can of beer to his forehead as if he had a headache.

  Jo looked at him for a moment. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she asked as she felt her expectations for the evening begin to crumble.

  He took the can from his head, took several swallows. ‘There’s so much, I don’t know where to start.’

  ‘Try working backwards.’ Just as well she hadn’t lit the candles in the bedroom yet, she thought with a sigh.

  He bit on his lip as if trying to organise his thoughts. ‘Rita Pilkington’s dead — murdered.’

  Jo brought her hand to her mouth, gasped. She stared at him blankly until he turned his head away towards the vague shadows of the garden.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she whispered. What was happening to their isolated little town, the quiet, safe haven where city people came to escape the rat race and the crime?

  ‘Leanne and Pete chased the suspects, but lost them in the state forest. Their car was found in there a few hours later. They must have legged it onto the highway then been picked up by another party.’

  Jo took a slug of red wine and almost choked, the gravel mocha turning to acrid bitumen on her palette. When she at last found her voice she asked, ‘Was it the same people who killed Darren, do you think?’

  His words shot out almost before she’d finished her own. ‘How did you know it was Darren? We’ve only just got the DNA tests to confirm it.’

  She trod carefully; he was as upset over this as she was, maybe more. ‘Well,’ she whispered, ‘everyone just assumed it was.’

  ‘Everyone except me,’ he said, slamming his empty can onto the table with a force that made her start. ‘The biggest sucker of all.’

  She reached over and squeezed his hand, but he remained immobile, making no attempt to touch her fingers with his own. Despite the insect zapper and the citronella lantern on the table, she began to feel the prick of mosquitos on her ankles.

  There was a fizzle and a pop from the zapper. It seemed to kick his thoughts down a different track, a track that, while not as shocking as the murder, was just as unexpected.

  He crushed the empty beer can in his fist. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about you and the vet?’

  She withdrew her hand, reached for Norgay’s cardigan and drew it tight around her shoulders. It wasn’t so much what he’d said, more the way he’d said it.

  ‘Are you still brooding about that? Stay by all means and tell me about your bad day but don’t try to make me feel responsible for it.’

  Cam stood up. In the flickering light of the lantern his eyes were as fixed and rigid as new denim. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you saw him on the night o
f Pizzle’s disappearance?’

  ‘I explained that to you before. The thought didn’t cross my mind, why should it? I only told Pete because he asked me.’

  ‘HK has a criminal record and he’s spent time in prison. He also hates the police. Didn’t it occur to you that he might have had something to do with the murder? Didn’t it occur to you to discuss the fact that you’d seen him just after Darren’s disappearance with me?’

  ‘HK, a murderer? Don’t be so ridiculous, he wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘So I’ve discovered, but it made me seem a total idiot while I was waiting to find out.’

  ‘So, if I’d told you that I saw him for about half an hour that night to discuss the school work-experience programme, I would have saved you some embarrassment further down the track? How silly of me, I must have forgotten to consult my crystal ball. For God’s sake, Cam, it was days before the body was discovered. I’m not a policeman. I’m not as good at connecting the dots as you are. I told Pete when he asked, I thought that was good enough, and then I totally forgot the matter.’

  ‘The man does have a criminal record,’ he said, still clinging to this fact as if it might justify his overreaction.

  ‘So you’ve said. For something stupid he did over fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Well, you’ll be pleased to know he has been eliminated from our enquiries. Anyway,’ he slapped his hands against his thighs before putting them back in his pockets, ‘This whole thing isn’t so much a question of my embarrassment, it’s about your lack of communication.’

  That was it; she should have guessed it. His anger over the vet was merely a prelude to something else. Jo drained her wine and slammed the glass on the table. Her long earrings whipped against her cheeks as she faced him full-on.

  ‘My lack of communication? You’re a fine one to talk about communication, standing there with your hands jammed in your pockets, changing the topic whenever the subject of the fire brigade comes up, never asking me about it, never listening when I try to tell you something important.’

  Cam frowned for a moment, looked at her. He adjusted his footing on the veranda floor. ‘But we weren’t talking about the fire brigade.’

  ‘But that’s what this is building up to, isn’t it? I’ve been waiting for weeks for you to bring it out into the open. This is something we need to discuss, Cam.’

  He spoke to the gardenia bushes, which were quivering in the soft breeze. ‘We will. When this case is over.’

  Jo blew out a breath of frustration.

  Cam drew himself up to full height and forked his fingers through his hair, whipping up the curls like whitecaps in a stormy black sea.

  ‘Okay, if this is how you want it. I don’t like you in the fire brigade. It’s too dangerous. I want you to resign.’

  She stared at him for a moment, her mouth hanging open, her policy of tolerance within reason shattering in the air between them. She’d expected him to say that he didn’t like her doing it, but he wanted her to resign? No, he was telling her to resign. Did she need this at her time of life — to be sandwiched between a father and daughter who between them had more heavy baggage than the cargo hold of a jumbo jet? Was it always going to have to be she who compromised?

  Beyond anger, her voice when she found it was cold enough to burn. ‘I’d like you to leave now.’

  He looked at her for a moment, the muscles in his jaw flickering. A fleeting look, almost of hatred, passed across his face before it dissolved into a pain she knew he was unable to share. She moved to reach out to him but he’d already turned his back.

  With his hand on the knob of the veranda door, he hesitated, his broad shoulders taut as a new wire fence. ‘What were you going to tell me about the fire the other night?’ he asked, his back to her still.

  The job, dammit; he was back on the job.

  She slumped back in her chair, kept her voice void of expression. ‘During the fire the other night I saw two men behaving suspiciously near a bogged two-decker truck. My captain brushed it off as nothing and you closed off your ears as soon as you heard the words “fire brigade”.’

  He turned and squinted at her through the soft light, jammed his hands back in his pockets. ‘Well, then, tell me now.’

  ‘One was middle-aged, the other youngish. The older one had a solid build and walked like a cowboy. They both had hats.’

  Cam frowned, dwelling on this information for a moment. ‘Harry Giles?’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  He sighed. ‘Would you recognise the man if I showed you a picture?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  Cam closed his eyes for a moment, opened them again. Then he moved over to her and gently put his hands on her shoulders, squatting down to her level. His face softened. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not handling this well. I want you to sit there, relax and try to tell me exactly what happened at the fire the other night. Tell me from the beginning.’

  Jo pushed his hands away and turned her eyes up to the flickering shadows of the veranda roof. Dirty spider webs hung down in dusty sheets. She recounted the series of events that had led her to the men and the bogged truck — without emotion, without embellishment. The perfect witness.

  He shook his head in exasperation. As if talking to himself, he said, ‘Maybe I’m just clutching at straws again. A man I met today behaved strangely, walked like a cowboy — then again, I guess half the men in this town do. Can you think of anything else about him, any mannerisms?’

  ‘A pipe. He kept fiddling with a pipe, rubbing it against his nose.’

  Cam put a hand on each arm. She didn’t shrug him off but remained rigid under his touch.

  ‘Did you notice a car when you saw these men?’

  ‘Yes, they had a four-wheel drive,’ she said coolly.

  The colour drained from his face. ‘What make?’

  ‘I have no idea, you know I don’t notice car brands. It was a darkish colour.’

  Cam’s grip on her arms became tighter.

  Her curiosity got the better of her. ‘Why? What’s the matter, what’s wrong?’

  He let go of her arms and headed for the door, this time without turning back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Too keyed up to return to Ruby, Cam opted for a solitary walk along the bank of Glenroyd’s stagnant river. Harry Giles . . . Harry Giles . . . the name kept spinning in his head with nothing concrete to weigh it down but a vague description and an unusual mannerism. But still it was enough to make him feel the need for further investigation. He would pay the man a visit tomorrow morning and ask him what he had been doing on the night of the fire and on the morning of Rita Pilkington’s death.

  But first he had to pull himself together, think rationally about all this; his emotions had been all over the place, misdirecting him.

  Some crazed animal liberationists? Good God, what had he been thinking? Perhaps he was washed up and ready for retirement after all. He’d allowed his personal prejudices to taint his opinion of the vet, setting his mind along a bizarre network of digressions, which had come close to compromising not only the case, but also his relationship with Jo — or had he blown that already? God, he hoped not.

  Her ability to bring things up out of the blue never ceased to amaze him, to unbalance him sometimes. As for that left-field remark about the fire brigade, even Shane Waugh couldn’t have caught that. Why was she so insistent that he bring his fears about the fire brigade into the open? His wife and son had been killed by fire; surely it was obvious why he was afraid for her. She was stirring up emotions in him that he had been trying to put to rest, emotions that had always provoked weakness and vulnerability.

  For one splinter of a moment on her back veranda, he’d hated her for it. But as he’d turned away from her, forcing his mind onto the case, a small distracting voice at the back of his mind had been telling him he’d left something undone, something that he would regret later.

  He continued along the riverbank, his mind switching from Jo to
thoughts of Pizzle. Unpleasant as they were, they were still safer. The DNA proved that it had been Pizzle’s body in the wool bale, proof for which he’d been so desperate and now wished he’d never seen. He wondered what other aspects of the case he’d been blind to. If he’d been able to see more clearly, would he have been able to prevent Rita’s death?

  He trudged on. It wasn’t a dark night and the bright moon dazzled his eyes when he tried to look at it. Even some of the clouds were visible; small and high, they spread their dark shapes across the grey like the ragged paintwork of an Italian restaurant.

  Cam glanced down the embankment to the river below. The stagnant pools were petering out, sucked down by the highway of dry sand or blotted up by hot summer winds and searing sun. Climbing down the bank, he jumped the last bit, his feet pitting into the powdery surface. The temperature was several degrees cooler down here and there was a damp, tropical feel to the air.

  When he and Pizzle were kids at St Bart’s they used to explore this stretch of dry riverbed, searching for treasure. Pizzle once found an old bottle, which he cleaned under the tap in the school garden. It had shone as blue as sapphire until one of the other boys snatched it from his hand and smashed it against a rock.

  The sharp silhouette of Cam’s moon shadow cast a stain upon the pale sand as he walked. The surface texture of the riverbed began to change, the sand under his feet slowly turning tacky with mud. A stagnant pool, black as tar, glinted ahead. It made him think of the black, staring eyes of Pizzle’s dog. Looking at it again he saw Pizzle’s blood on the shed floor, imagining it still fresh and glistening before the wooden slats had sucked it up.