Aftershock

by Peter Corris

  ‘We’ve got a big problem, Hardy,’ Morton said. ‘Nobody’ll be happy about sheeting these crimes home to a dead man. The relations of the victims least of all.’

  Withers tapped his shirt pocket as if feeling for cigarettes. Then he shook his head. He exchanged glances with his daughter, who wasn’t smoking either. I guessed that Ted had quit and Glen approved.

  ‘They’ll feel cheated of their revenge,’ Withers said.

  Glen tidied the papers in front of her. ‘It’s more than that. The friends and relations want some details.’

  ‘Ghouls,’ Withers said.

  ‘No, Dad … Inspector. It’s not ghoulish. They need to know in order to get over it. To rule a line.’

  I nodded at that and Morton evidently thought the time was right for me to contribute. ‘Right, Hardy. Now what can you tell us?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About what you’ve been doing in Sydney.’

  Problem time. I’d given Antonio Fanfani some sort of an undertaking which would be hard to fulfil if I had to spill my guts to the police now. But four more deaths changed things somewhat. I could feel Glen’s eyes on me. I tried to remember how much I’d told her about the Costis and couldn’t quite do it. Had I given her chapter and verse, all the names?

  ‘Cliff,’ she said. ‘I had to take it higher up when the locations and probable deaths started to tally up. You understand?’

  I nodded. Withers gave us both a long look but Morton chose not to react. ‘We need information, Hardy,’ he said. ‘All we can get. Sergei Costi’s an important man in this town and prominent in the Italian community.’

  ‘What about his son, Renato?’

  Morton leaned forward. ‘Tell us.’

  I told them, without giving away any more than I needed to. I told them about Mark Roper’s fear of Renato and about the phone call to Fanfani from someone whose Italian wasn’t so hot and who might have been drunk.

  ‘Ronny,’ Withers said. ‘Has to be.’

  Glen shuffled papers and found what she wanted. ‘But he hasn’t come after Roper.’

  Morton looked at me.

  ‘Roper’s not a very reliable character,’ I said. ‘Costi might have threatened him or blackmailed him. He mightn’t have told me about it. Might have hoped I’d get Ronny off his back in some way.’

  ‘Or,’ Morton said, ‘after he killed Schmidt he might’ve got scared and gone quiet. Perhaps he thought he’d squared the account, and going after Roper was unnecessary.’

  Withers’ body language screamed impatience. He fidgeted, touched his tie knot, re-rolled a shirt sleeve. He wanted to go out and start clapping on handcuffs. Glen’s professional attitude was intact but she seemed to be reaching for some other level of understanding. ‘Could it be,’ she said slowly, ‘that Renato’s main concern was with his sister’s honour, as publicly perceived, and with Bach dead and Roper scared, the dishonour wouldn’t become known?’

  I could see sense in that, and also danger. But what we were doing now threatened to blow things apart. An irrelevant thought came to me. ‘Where’s the box and the other stuff?’

  ‘Being analysed,’ Morton said. ‘Which brings us to the next point. We’ve put a stop on the work at the Ocean Street house and our blokes have had a quick look. They say there’s blood in the bathroom.’

  20

  The telephone closest to Morton rang and he answered it. He grunted several times. I looked at Glen who gave me a half-smile before playing with her notes again. Some ground to make up there, I thought. Morton put the phone down and shifted in his seat the way chairmen do when the meeting is almost over.

  ‘The Ocean Street house is owned by Sergei Costi,’ he said. ‘He ordered the renovations to be done.’

  ‘When he heard Cliff was poking around,’ Glen said.

  Morton nodded. He seemed cool, calm and collected inside his flash uniform, even though it was starting to get warm in the the room. ‘As I say, this is very tricky in several directions. I’m declaring this group an informal task force. We have to keep a lid on things for as long as we can.’

  ‘I’m a civilian,’ I said. ‘You can’t declare me an anything, Les.’

  ‘I’m asking for your cooperation, Hardy. You’ve been the thin end of the wedge into this mess. If everything works out all right, the community will be in your debt.’

  ‘You’re a politician.’

  ‘I’m an Assistant Commissioner of Police,’ Morton said. ‘If I weren’t a politician, I’d be a Senior Constable in Woop Woop. I also want to appeal to your better instincts. This community has been through a lot—the earthquake, the bus crash up north—it’s under strain and doesn’t need any more bad news. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to cover anything up, I just don’t want rumours, and reporters going off half-cocked and citizens getting scared.’

  ‘I’ll play,’ I said. ‘But I have to tell you that I’ve got a commitment to a client to let him talk to the man who killed Oscar Bach. He’s hoping for the sort of information the Senior Sergeant here was talking about before.’

  ‘Noted,’ Morton said. ‘We’ll see what we can do. For now, I want you, Senior Sergeant, to locate the Costi girl and have a talk with her. We need to know whether she told her brother about what had happened and how he reacted.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Glen said.

  ‘I’m going to tackle Sergei. Not directly, of course. I’ll come at him through a few of our mutual acquaintances. For the moment, we leave Renato Costi alone, beyond making sure we know where he is.’

  ‘Do we know that now?’ I said.

  Morton looked at Withers who shook his head. ‘It’s being seen to,’ he said.

  ‘Right.’ Morton half-rose from his chair and then sat back. ‘You don’t look happy, Mr Hardy.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘What do you expect me to do while you’re all running around being official?’

  ‘I want you to stay close to Detective Inspector Withers. He’s going out to supervise the work at Ocean Street. I think you might find that interesting.’

  I annoyed Withers by insisting on reclaiming my pistol at the desk and strapping it on. To my surprise, Morton accompanied us to the car park and shook hands with me before going about his business. The drive to Dudley wasn’t the most comfortable I’d ever taken. I tried to think whether I’d had any dealings with the fathers of women I’d been involved with since I was about eighteen, and couldn’t come up with any. We exchanged a few grunts about the weather and Morton’s style of doing things. As if by mutual agreement, neither of us mentioned Glen, but she was in the minds of both of us. Withers had freshened himself up a bit and I fancied there was a slight tang of whisky about him. Very slight. We sat in the back of the car and let a constable do the driving.

  I was under no illusions as to why I was accompanying Withers—Morton had teamed us up to prevent me going off and doing anything on my own. Withers stared out the window. He sighed and turned his head towards me. ‘I’m three years from my pension,’ he said too quietly for the driver, a youth who looked fresh from the Academy, to hear.

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘I don’t want anything to fuck up.’

  ‘Understandable.’

  ‘Do you know what I’m saying?’

  ‘Not exactly, no.’

  Another sigh. ‘Sergei Costi’s been around for a long time. He’s had his fingers in a lot of pies.’

  ‘Business is like that,’ I said. ‘I’m a small businessman myself.’

  ‘Don’t play dumb with me, Hardy,’ Withers hissed. ‘You know what I’m driving at.’

  ‘I’m a bit slow, Ted. Spell it out for me.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be easy to squeeze Costi hard—he’d be able to squeeze back.’

  ‘What about Ronny?’

  ‘With that mob—same thing. Hurt one, you hurt ’em all. I’m worried.’

  ‘For your pension?’

  ‘Yeah, but not only that.’ He touched his shirt pocket aga
in with the same result as before. ‘Shit, I stopped smoking a couple of weeks back, Glen’s idea. I dunno … I can’t seem to think straight since.’

  The name had been spoken and it seemed to break some kind of knot in Withers. He tapped the constable on the shoulder, botted a cigarette from him and lit up. ‘Jesus, that’s better. Turn on the radio, son, and keep yourself amused. Me and Mr Hardy are talking old farts’ stuff back here.’

  The radio came on and Withers spoke quickly and urgently. He was worried, he said, about Glen. If things got sticky between the police and Sergei Costi it was more than likely that Costi would go down. He would understand that as well as anyone. ‘I don’t want Glen around if it gets to that point. If she’s with the Costi girl and everything blows up, who knows how it might all sort out? I’m going out on a limb here, Hardy, talking to you like this.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘You care about Glen?’

  I nodded. ‘But I still don’t know where you’re pointing.’

  Withers shrugged, took a last deep drag on the cigarette and threw the butt out the window. ‘Neither do I. But I wanted to put you in the picture. With a bit of luck, everything’ll sort out okay. If it gets rough, I’m looking after Glen first and myself second. Got it?’

  I didn’t reply. We zoomed through Kahiba and the constable threw the car into the last roundabout and roared up through Whitebridge towards Dudley.

  ‘Turn the fuckin’ radio off and slow down,’ Withers snarled.

  There was a fair-sized crowd assembled outside 88 Ocean Street—gawkers, police forensic men, Jeff, the renovator and his mate who’d been stopped in their tracks. Withers pushed through and I followed him down the side path to the back of the house. The activity and the number of people around made the place seem smaller and meaner. The backyard was stacked with galvanised iron, floorboards, masonite and other materials. The big bath, looking like a beached whale, sat on its claw legs in the middle of a patch of sunlight. I was surprised that they hadn’t found a reason to chop down the trees.

  Withers nodded to a few of the men and got a cigarette from one of them. ‘What the fuck’s this?’ he said, pointing at a portable power unit that had been wheeled into place. Cigarettes seemed to increase his energy but not improve his humour.

  A man, whose white overall couldn’t conceal that he was a cop, held a light to Withers’ cigarette. ‘The old lady next door’s been useful, Inspector. She reckons there’s a well under this concrete.’ With his boot he scuffed the slab that covered the space between the house and the bathroom. ‘Her place has one and she says all these houses did in the old days. A section of the slab looks fairly new.’

  ‘So it does,’ Withers said. ‘All right. Get on with it.’

  It was hot in the backyard, even under the trees, and the hammering and battering made it feel even hotter. Someone went off for sandwiches and soft drinks but I was a civilian, even if I had been co-opted, and I brought back a couple of cans of light beer. They were trying to work around the new section of slab in order to lever it out but it was thick and had some reinforcing rods through it. The work was interrupted by frequent conferences between the jackhammer operators and Jeff. The backyard filled with gritty dust that settled on the grass, making it grey and mottled. Not a cheerful place to begin with, 88 Ocean Street was getting more depressing by the minute.

  Molly from next door hung over the fence taking in every detail of the scene. She recognised me and beckoned me across.

  ‘I knew he was a wrong ’un,’ she said.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Never even had a washing machine,’ she said. ‘Washed his clothes in the bath and hung them on the line there.’ She pointed to a slack length of clothes line strung between two trees at the back of the block. ‘Always washing his clothes, he was. And never bought a washing machine.’

  ‘Was he friendly, Molly? Did you chat much?’

  ‘Nah. Never gave me the time of day. Wouldn’t have talked to him for more than a minute or two a couple of times in the whole three or four years he was there.’

  ‘What did he talk about, when he did talk?’

  ‘Are you with the police? I seen you here with Horrie Jacobs the other day.’

  ‘I’m helping the police. Can you remember what Mr Bach talked about?’

  She scratched her thin grey hair and readjusted her spectacles on her nose. Her eyes were still very blue for an elderly person and despite the specs I had the feeling they wouldn’t have missed much. Her hearing was sound too, because she could follow what I was saying over all the racket just a few metres away. ‘Didn’t say much. I remember he was very interested in the lagoon. I told him where it was and how to get there.’

  ‘The lagoon?’

  She jerked her thumb over her shoulder, indicating the direction of the football ground and beyond. ‘Redhead lagoon, that way a mile or so. Lovely spot. You walk through the Awabakal reserve and …’

  A shout from the work site interrupted her. She craned forward over the fence. The slab had cracked diagonally and they had lifted one of the sections free to expose the top of the well.

  It was almost comical to see the way every man gathered around the hole jumped back. I walked across and found out why before I’d taken more than four steps—the stink coming up from below was foul and cloying. It seemed to be almost a physical thing, like a gas and be reaching out to wrap itself around you and go up your nostrils and into your mouth to fill your head with corruption.

  Withers was the first to do anything. ‘Torch,’ he snapped. Someone handed him a big battery pack flashlight and he advanced to the hole and shone it down. I found a handkerchief in my pocket and tied it across my face before I joined Withers at the well. In the strong beam of light I saw that the well had bricked sides and was about twenty feet deep, maybe more. The walls were slimy and grey-green. I stared down, trying not to breathe, and could just make out something lumpy and misshapen at the bottom. It looked like a couple of bags of rubbish. Withers moved the torch and the light reflected off heavy, dark plastic. The bags sat in several centimetres of grey ooze. The smell seemed to get worse.

  Withers stepped back and looked over to where one of the cops was pulling on heavy rubber boots and gloves and a plastic overall. Withers tossed him the torch. ‘Have fun,’ he said.

  The team got busy rigging up some tackle to permit things to go down into the well and come up again. Withers and I retired to the shade of a tree near the rough brick barbecue. Withers had evidently sent out for cigarettes because he now had a pack and a lighter of his own. He lit up and blew smoke up into the branches of the tree. I untied the handkerchief and wiped my face with it. After the stink from the pit, the tobacco smoke smelled almost good.

  ‘Leslie Morton’s going to love this,’ Withers said. ‘This is just what we need. We’ve had a serial killer living in our midst for a couple of years and it takes a dago kid worried about his sister’s cherry to take care of him.’

  ‘Inspector,’ one of the cops yelled. ‘Press.’

  Withers lit another cigarette from the stub of his last. ‘Tell ’em to piss off. No one gets in here. No pictures. Understand?’

  There was a little commotion at the side of the house and some voices were raised. Something was being lifted clear of the well.

  ‘Fuck it,’ Withers said. ‘This is going to blow sky high.’

  ‘Can you get in touch with Glen? She shouldn’t get too close to the Costis, not if the press starts to sort out what’s going on here.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Withers summoned our driver over and issued instructions to him to contact Senior Sergeant Withers and get her to report in. The cop, looking relieved to be getting away from what was going on in the backyard, hurried off to do his bidding. Withers lit another cigarette and we went across to where activity around the hole had stopped. Two heavy plastic garbage bags, covered in slime, lay on the cement. Both had been torn; a human knee, or part of a knee, stuck out of the hole
in one bag; from the other a hand protruded. The smell was like ammonia and rotting fish combined.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Withers said. ‘But only two?’

  That’s when I told him about Oscar Bach’s interest in the Redhead lagoon.

  21

  The media were not to be denied. TV crews, radio units and print persons arrived, drawn to the scene like kids to a schoolyard fight. Their behaviour wasn’t so different either. They jostled and shouted, abused the police who struggled to keep them back, and started filming and photographing everything in sight. The neighbours, mostly elderly women, had never received so much attention in their lives. They revelled in it, inviting the reporters in for cups of tea and talking non-stop.

  Withers floundered. He tried shouts and threats of arrest, but arrest at a news point is a badge of honour for reporters these days, and they ignored him. He did manage to keep the cameras out of the backyard of number 88, but they were operating from Molly’s place—her yard and roof—so it didn’t make much difference. The youngster who’d been detailed to contact Glen came pushing through the throng, struggling to get Withers’ attention. He got mine first.

  ‘What’s up?’ I said.

  He was red-faced, sweating and worried. He had to tell someone, but was I the right person to tell? He decided I was. ‘I can’t raise Sergeant Withers. Her radio’s emitting an alarm signal.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Again, he looked doubtful about revealing professional things to a civilian. But Withers was in a shouting match with a TV cameraman and he had no choice. ‘An officer can activate an alarm signal that’ll be picked up when another unit tries to contact him. That’s what we’re getting.’