by Dave Warner
Clement felt bad for thinking the worst of his constable. He was proud of the whole team, Risely included. They were out on their feet but grinding on till the last. Mal Gross was hovering.
‘Yes, Mal.’
‘I sent photos of the ecstasy tablets through to the strippers in Dampier.’
Clement didn’t bother to correct him on the job description, it was far too late and he was too tired.
‘The girls confirmed them as the same tablets Crossland offered them. I’ve spoken to Hedland and they are chasing up the Hedland phone numbers on the Lipton phone. They recognised at least one as a drug user.’
‘Check out the others. If he’s telling the truth, he did Newman, Karratha, Dampier. My guess is he used Lipton’s phone when he was dealing. Any news from Keeble?’
‘She’s still going but her initial examination of the hut revealed no belongings relating to Kelly Davies and no blood in the car. There was also a message from Snowy Lane.’
We’re just puppets in a big shadow play somebody has written, thought Clement as he sat on his bed in the small flat above the chandler’s. We think we’re the star but then we’re sent off stage while the next scene plays out with new characters. Sidney Turner thought he was the main man but he’s no more than inert sticks and string now. And what was Clement if not a bit-part player?
He lacked even the energy to make himself supine and for now just sat. When they had been alone, Graeme Earle had asked his opinion of Stroghetti and Collins. Average, that’s what he thought, Commissioner’s choice to filter everything through him. Collins was a misanthrope who had finally made inspector by sucking up to Tregilgas. Stroghetti was hewn from the same lump of wood.
Lane’s message, which he picked up after he’d spoken to Risely, had been another kick in the guts: he’d interviewed a barmaid from the Hedland pub who had told him Crossland had spent all night with her, Thursday August 17 through to the morning of Friday August 18. This confirmed Crossland’s alibi. She said she’d had to wake him close to 10.00 am and there was no chance he’d slipped out anywhere during the night. Lane felt she was credible and totally unprompted.
Trust Snowy to be a step ahead. It was theoretically possible that Crossland could have gone outside while the woman slept, encountered Kelly Davies, killed her, stuffed her in his boot and dumped the body the next day. But the vehicle worried him. It was no four-wheel drive. It couldn’t have made it into the desert where the corpse was found. So what did that leave? Either Crossland didn’t kill Kelly Davies or he killed her, and gave her body to somebody else to dispose of. Back to an accomplice.
Clement finally found the energy to stretch out on his bed but not to remove his jocks and singlet. He’d untied his shoes and slipped out of his suit earlier. Once he relaxed he remembered Marilyn had called him. That fact had almost been lost in the crush. He’d had to brush her off. His brain flickered. Sidney Turner might be the only …
He was out before he could even finish the sentence.
CHAPTER 33
I was back in the same unit at the Kookaburra Hotel I’d been in around a week before. I was too wired to sleep, especially after my late snooze. What did I know for sure? Well, Mal Gross had said they’d got Crossland in Wyndham. I clicked on my computer and checked distances between Derby and Wyndham. No way he was swimming croc creek at 6.00 am and getting all the way there. Plus there were cops along the Gibb River Road almost immediately after that, on the lookout. He was not the guy. But who was, and why would you take that risk to get away? If you were poaching crocs you’d just stick your hands up. Maybe they had something to do with Turner. Maybe Crossland had hired a third party to get rid of him and they’d stuffed up. I liked that theory. Crossland would know criminal types for sure. I made a note to run it by Clement: check Crossland’s phone calls. Probably he was already on it. My brain jumped to the body in the desert: the girl we now knew was Kelly Davies, tracked back to here, the night Kelly disappeared. The bar girl was a hundred percent credible. She’d played hide the sausage all night with Crossland. She hadn’t thought he was weird in any way. He was a normal sort of guy, no mental genius but well built. I could see the penny dropping when I kept asking about him but I deflected her questions. I wasn’t going to say she had a close shave with a serial killer. It was possible that at some point when she slept – even though she denied that, people do drop off without realising – Crossland had slipped out, killed Kelly Davies, stuffed her in the back of his car, returned to bed and coolly driven off the next morning to dump the body in the desert. Okay, his car wasn’t perfect for the job but if he was careful maybe he borrowed a car. There was something about the body I should have been homing in on but I had too many ideas pushing and shoving. I forced myself to play devil’s advocate.
Could Crossland be innocent of Kelly’s death? Could it be a coincidence? Who was the last known person to see Kelly alive? According to the accounts I had, Sierra. She said she had seen her in the ladies. Could the girls be lying to me? Jealousies on tour, where would they lead? I only had their word Kelly had said she was going to quit anyway. But like Crossland’s car, their van would never have made it into the desert to dump the body. They’d need help and, unlike him, they weren’t criminals.
I suppose I could check their time lines but I just couldn’t sell it to myself. I was starting to get antsy. I wondered if Crossland had confessed already. Doubtful, Clement had promised me he would let me know right away and I believed him.
It was just after 2.00 am I reckoned that was around 8.00 pm in Barcelona. My computer was running. I signed up for the pub internet and launched Skype. Presto. A little icon told me Tash was online. And then I was looking at her beautiful face and wanting to hold her and realising all over again how deeply I missed her. We chatted for ten minutes about their adventures. Gaudi had become their hero.
‘It’s as if he takes our stupid modern lives and turns them into a beautiful mystical tale.’
We talked about her work. She found Barcelona inspirational. She asked about my case. I trimmed: successful outcome, big payday. She read me even via an internet cable.
‘So what’s the problem?’
I spilled on it all: the body in the desert, Crossland – leaving out his name – I trusted her but was paranoid of speaking into anything electronic. I told her I’d recognised the pendant. I told her it was so clear and obvious and a vindication of my work way back when … except it wasn’t. Things didn’t add up. She listened for a good twenty minutes. We didn’t lose the connection. It was like I had my personal therapist. When I started going over everything the second time, she interrupted me.
‘You told me, Dad told you once, a poor detective doesn’t reach, but a good detective can be guilty of the same error in reverse and reach too much. You remember that?’
I have to be honest, I didn’t remember telling her that, but I did recall her father Dave Holland, the best detective I’d ever known, giving me that piece of advice when I first started. My memory was fading, I guess. She was still talking.
‘You mustn’t fit the case to your theory, no matter how beautifully it seems to work.’
And now it was like she was inside my head, decoding the intuition I’d felt over the last fifteen or so hours.
‘If the facts say it’s not your suspect, maybe it isn’t.’
‘But …’ I started. It was as far as I got.
‘Yesterday Grace and I were walking down Las Ramblas and we’d been talking about her getting her licence. I told her about how the first time I drove as a licensed driver, I broke down in Barrack Street. There I was, middle of the city. I was petrified. I didn’t know what to do. And there’s a knock on my window and there was John Norton, her grandfather’s friend, and he helped me.’
I knew there had to be some point to the story. I held my tongue.
‘We had lunch and walked around and started back to the pensione and who do we see? Oliver. I’m not joking. Oliver Norton, John’s grandson. He
’s on a break from uni. Coincidences happen, Snow. Maybe the girl decided to quit the troupe, was hitching and got picked up by the wrong guy.’
Later I lay in bed with those thoughts still zipping through my head. What Tash said could be true. The coroner had said Kelly’s body had been crushed. A big rig would do that. She could have hitched … coincidences happen …
Stop it, I told myself. You’re grasping at straws and you know it. I hadn’t told Tash about my swim through croc creek. Maybe one day I would. I conjured her beside me, became drowsy. I saw Grace’s life in flashes: in a highchair, face covered in yoghurt, wobbling on a bike, the first time she won a school prize. I drifted. I was in dappled light, on the edge of a mangrove swamp. There was a big croc right in front of me, I had to get out of there but I was frozen. Clement, no Dave Holland, was there too but couldn’t see me or hear me or was paying no attention. Someone else was in the shadows on the other side of the swamp. If I wanted to see who it was I would have to get past the croc. There were magical shapes, buildings. Tash was taking photos. It was a city, it was Gaudi, but somehow it was right next to where I was in this mangrove swamp. Dave Holland was saying something, mumbling numbers, distances, repeating that it was impossible, it didn’t add up. The shadowy figure was getting away from me. They were more lit now but only their back. I wanted to advance. The croc was getting ready to spring at me. I realised there was a branch above me. Perhaps I could jump for it …
I woke with my legs jolting from the imagined leap. Light streamed through a gap in a blind. Outside a cleaning trolley jolted. Reality smothered me. I checked the time on my watch on the bedside table: 7.50. First thought, check my phone. Yes, a text from Clement. I was lucky, I didn’t need glasses yet. Well, maybe I did, my eyes got a bit blurry when I got tired. I’m sure I held my breath.
No dice. Only admits to phone theft. Perth have him tom.
Shit. I suppose I more than half expected it but I’d always thought there might be a chance he’d cop to Autostrada. I lay there enfeebled by the dream and the text.
A proper breakfast was calling.
The weather was glorious, the sky the colour blue I remembered from old Westerns. It was warm but with a freshness you no longer got in Perth where every summer was more humid than the one preceding. I wandered the streets. Cars, front and back, had been feasting on red dust. The gentrification of Port Hedland was well underway. I knew this as soon as I spotted a Dôme café. Dôme was born in Perth, a sophisticated version of Starbucks. The originators hit the zeitgeist full on: baby boomers – who had travelled OS where they’d bought leather jackets in Manhattan, boots in Milan, and gallery prints in the Tate – had slowed down, generated families and traded Jim Beam for espresso. Dômes carried the spirit of Singapore’s Raffles, ceiling fans, rattan-themed furniture, open space where cutlery clatter ascended to the cupola, the underside of the eponymous dome. Those who played bongos in parks, sucked fire and still rolled their own shied away, too middle-class. Everybody else thronged. This Dôme sported an impressive, long, latticework veranda replete with hibiscus. Inside, the place was thriving with morning trade, white collar and hi-vis vests evenly split. I ordered tea and the big breakfast, out of sentimentality selected my old guernsey number fifteen for my table number, and found an unoccupied two-seater. A previous incumbent had left half an Australian and the local rag. I skimmed the Aus – terror and taxes – and turned my attention to the local as the tea arrived. The Hornets had flogged Karratha in netball. Front page told the town it would be shortly be welcoming the Premier and Federal Minister for Industry for the inking of the big deal between China and my former employer Giant Ore. I thought there was supposed to be a glut of the red stuff but I suppose I was wrong. Nelson Feister was clearly still able to make a buck. The big breakfast arrived: bacon, eggs, sausage, tomato. Barcelona could keep its tapas. Unfortunately it still had what I truly treasured, my girls.
I sat back as the food hit and contemplated my next move. I could drive back to Perth, that’s where Crossland would be heading. On the other hand, there was unfinished business here. What had happened to Kelly Davies? Who had led me through croc creek, and why? The phone rang. Clement. I wondered if he’d caught any sleep or been working through. I answered through bacon and tomato.
‘So he didn’t put his hand up.’
‘No. He admitted to the phone, denied the drugs. I showed him the pendant. He hardly noticed.’
Crossland was practised. He’d been there before.
‘Where are you now?’ I asked.
‘Sitting on my bed getting dressed. Sounds like you’re out and about.’
‘Big breakfast, Dôme. You got some sleep?’
‘Three or four hours. Tell me about the bar girl.’
I told him everything she’d told me. ‘She’s not lying. She’s genuine. Okay, it’s possible he snuck out in the middle of the night …’
Clement cut in. ‘I know. But it’s a stretch. And the car bothers me. I wondered if he could possibly have had an accomplice.’
I told him the same thought had crossed my mind. I remembered what Tash had counselled about reaching too far and then promptly ignored it. ‘Maybe he had a trail bike or something in the car,’ I said.
‘Or one of those James Bond jet packs he strapped to his back.’
Okay, I was asking for it.
Clement said, ‘Perhaps Crossland being at the Pearl really is a coincidence.’
I was poked by the absurd thought that Tash and Clement were in cahoots.
‘I don’t like coincidence.’
‘Me either, but probability is a weird thing. If you have twenty-three people in a room, what do you reckon the probability is of two having their birthday on the same day?’
‘Really, Dan?’
‘Indulge me.’
‘Three hundred and sixty-five days to a year, twenty-three people … what’s that about one in fifteen? Seven percent.’
‘Fifty percent. See, you have to work out the probability of having that many people who don’t have a birthday on the same day. There were a lot of people interviewed over Autostrada. Perth isn’t that big a place. Maybe one of them was bound to be in Broome when we found the pendant.’ He sounded liked he was trying to convince himself.
‘You don’t have twenty-two other people, just Crossland.’
I think it worked. He sighed. ‘Keeble’s going over his clothes and car but there’s nothing obvious. Are you heading back?’
‘I haven’t decided. I want to help with Kelly Davies. I’ve got money in the bank from the Feister job. I’m not in a rush.’
He had to go. I told him I’d let him know if I was staying. We ended the call and I finished up my breakfast and ordered a coffee. I was waiting for it to arrive and replaying in my head my conversation with Clement when wham.
Sometimes you say something as a joke and have no idea of its significance. Out of the mouths of babes and all that. I called Clement back.
‘I’m driving,’ he said.
‘Can you get me into Hedland police, or better still the AFP?’
He heard it in my voice. ‘You’ve got something.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Should I drive down?’
‘Let me have a look first.’
‘At what specifically?’
‘CCTV of the airport road.’
I could almost hear his brain clicking. ‘I’m coming.’
‘You’ll be hours.’
‘I’ll fly.’
Apparently we were lucky. The Crossland arrest could have buggered up an AFP drugs operation but Crossland hadn’t actually made contact with the drug supplier before his arrest, so Clement was still in good odour with the Feds. Now we sat in front of a computer screen watching road traffic to the Hedland airfield at midnight August 17. Clement had flown in from Broome by himself. The rest of his team had been working non-stop so he’d given them the morning off. I’d been waiting at the airfield and we’d discussed my reasoning on
the way to the Federal Police building.
‘When I asked who Kelly spent time with that night, the dancers all said Ingrid Feister. Angus Duncan told me she and Max Coldwell had an early start and had left early with him and his Chinese client. But I rang the girls again and Sierra, who is the most reliable, was sure that when she and the other girls left, all four of them and Kelly were still there.
‘So, what, some threesome that got out of hand?’
I didn’t see Coldwell as that kind of guy or Feister as that kind of girl.
‘You know what it’s like: go to the character of the victim. The girls said Kelly wanted the life of the rich: big house, international travel, kids, horses. She was attracted to bankers not would-be pop stars.’
‘And what made you want to look at the airport road?’
‘Her injuries.’
So here we were perched in front of the computer looking at the screen showing night, no traffic. Clement was dubious.
‘The airfield is closed this time of night. You can’t fly.’
‘You mean you’re not supposed to. This is still the Wild West. It was you talking about having a jet pack that got me thinking.’ Minutes ground by, all the same: dark, nothing.
‘There.’
Clement sat up and pointed at the screen. A car had pulled up at the gate, the logo on the door clear even with this low-res: Giant Ore. A driver got out. Angus Duncan. He punched a keypad and climbed back into the vehicle. It slid forward through the gate, Ingrid in the front passenger seat, Max Coldwell behind her closest to the camera, two other people in the back blocked by Coldwell. The gate glided back, the car faded into black.
It was literally the middle of nowhere, thought Clement, as if the tableau of his internal life had been externalised in these physical surrounds, this moonscape. Tenacity Hill was an arid hump in a bunch of arid humps. It was mild today, around mid-thirties. The sun would get higher yet and beat down on these tents. There were three of them. Two were smaller three-man tents; the other larger, rectangular, serving as some kind of mess tent. Two four-wheel drive vehicles sunned themselves adjacent to two Cessnas parked nose-to-tail on a long, thin roughly graded strip. Stephanie, the pilot, was drinking water in the largest of the tents.