Once he realised I was hooked, he started playing hard to get, the reluctant suitor. He insisted on meetings that led nowhere, and I saw that he just liked being seen places with me at his side. He smartened up a bit, shaved, got his hair cut, sort of. And of course I paid the bills because he was flat broke. Eventually I told him I’d had enough, either he told me exactly what he knew or he wouldn’t see me again.
And that’s when he told me that he had proof that Konrad Nordlund murdered his brother Martin, by sabotaging the plane he was piloting the night he died, in order to take control of the family businesses. And that your father had to die because he knew that Konrad had done this.
I know, I can see the expression on your face. I felt the same way—that this was the conspiracy fantasy of an unhinged obsessive—and I told him it was rubbish. What proof could he possibly have?
It was at the house he was living in at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, he said, and he would show it to me there. When I said that I wasn’t interested, he asked me if I was aware that your father had been present at the meeting in the Sydney offices of solicitors McKensey, Schwarz and Comfrey on the ninth of August 2002, at which Martin Nordlund and his solicitor Norman Comfrey were also present? And that it was immediately following that meeting that Martin and Comfrey took their fatal flight up to Cackleberry Mountain?
That made me think. Did your father know the Nordlunds back then? How were they involved? I thought that at least I might be able to check this part of Terry’s story. So I went back to our house and up to your father’s study in the attic and started looking. I found his old pocket appointment diaries, and sure enough, there on the ninth of August of that year he’d written: 3:30 Norman Comfrey. If Terry hadn’t told me his story the entry would have meant nothing to me, but here was at least some sort of vindication of what he was saying. But what did it mean?
I decided that the only way I could pin him down was to go to Blackheath and stay with him until he told me everything he knew. There was no way I was going to stay in his house, but I found that the cottage next door did holiday lettings and I booked it for a week.
When I got there he started playing his games again, prevaricating, avoiding straight answers, launching into long, rambling diatribes against Konrad Nordlund. I think he was just very lonely. He’d alienated everybody else, and now he had a captive audience. And he was drinking a lot, and I was picking up the bills. In vino veritas, he kept telling me—in wine is truth.
Finally, on the Saturday, I lost patience. I told him I was going to leave if he didn’t tell me exactly what he knew, and in the end he came out with it, that he had a sworn statement from a witness proving Konrad’s guilt. I said, if that was the case, why hadn’t he gone to the police with it? He said he had a reputation and the police wouldn’t listen to him. He did try to speak to Bernard Nordlund, but Bernard said Terry was just a troublemaker and he wouldn’t meet him. He had managed to interest an independent member of the New South Wales parliament, who was hot on corruption issues, but in the end he’d refused to see him too. But they would listen to me, and that was what he wanted from me, to be his advocate.
I said I would have to examine this evidence. He was very secretive about it, said it was hidden in his house, said we must have a meal first, and a drink, so we walked into town and I bought him both. Then I challenged him, who was this witness? He was becoming more voluble as he got more drunk, and he was showing off. He said, you don’t believe me? Then he leaned close to me and whispered in my ear. He said, early on the morning after the plane disappeared, Konrad sent out two men from their estate in Cackleberry Valley to search for it. And they found the plane.
Yes, I was stunned too. Every time I was about to walk out on Terry he came up with some fantastic new thing. They found the plane, the two men dead inside. It was in a very difficult location, he said, inside a deep ravine, and all they could do was try to identify the spot and return for help. Terry’s witness was one of the two men—he didn’t know who the other man was. When they got back to the homestead, they reported to Konrad, who was very pleased with them, told them he’d reward them. But Terry’s witness had seen something out there in the forest that made him realise there’d been foul play, and he got cold feet and fled. He never told a soul until Terry found him, but he’d felt increasingly guilty over the years, when he heard that everyone believed that the plane had never been found. So he made a full statement to Terry, a signed confession. That was the evidence Terry had been promising me. Okay, I said, let me see it, and Terry said he’d need to go back to his house first and retrieve it from its hiding place, and get it ready for me. So we separated, and he went home, while I walked out to the Govetts Leap lookout. It was late afternoon, the weather fine and I sat and tried to decide if Terry really had something important or was completely mad. I wanted it to be true, because I hoped that it would somehow solve all our problems. Little did I know that my problems were about to get a whole lot worse.
I walked back through town and took the bush road out to the cottages. Terry had had almost an hour to get ready for me, and it was getting dark. When I got there I saw a car parked outside his house, which was odd. As I reached the house I heard a scream, and looked through the front window. There was a light on inside, and I could see Terry on his knees on the floor, his face contorted with pain, and a tall man standing over him, doing something to him. The man was wearing gloves and those white disposable overalls that crime scene officers wear, you know, covering everything. He looked so weird, kind of ghostly and very scary.
I was horrified and reached for my phone to call for help, but just as I lifted it to my ear, a second man suddenly appeared on the other side of the window right in front of me. We stared straight at each other through the glass, and then I screamed and turned and bolted. I ran to my house, fumbling with the keys in the front door, when he came bursting out of Terry’s house and charged towards me. I turned and fled, into the trees, and they both came after me, shouting, crashing through the undergrowth. It was dark in the bush, and I stumbled and ran on, and hid in a patch of scrub, and they couldn’t find me. Eventually they gave up. After a while I saw the headlights of their car move off along the lane and disappear. I waited and waited, but didn’t dare to go back in case one of them was still waiting for me. I knew I had to get out in case they brought back more people to search for me, so I made my way to Blackheath station and got a train back to Sydney. And I’ve been hiding ever since.
Oh, Harry, it’s been a nightmare.
27
Harry holds her. She’s trembling from the memories, and he waits until she’s calmer. Then he says gently, ‘But you didn’t call for help? You didn’t ring the police?’
‘How could I, Harry? They were the police.’
‘What?’
‘When the man looked through the window at me we recognised each other immediately. I’d seen him before, in hospital after Ash Island. He came with Ross Bramley one day, a sort of official sympathy visit. I can’t remember his name. He was higher in rank than Ross, his superior officer at Newcastle.’
‘What, Superintendent Gibb? Kevin Colquhoun? Ken Fogarty?’
‘That’s it, Fogarty. Ross had a nickname for him—Foggy. Ross came into the room first and told me that I should feel honoured, Foggy was coming to see me. He arrived shortly afterwards. He brought flowers for me.’
‘Detective Chief Inspector Fogarty? This is crazy, Jenny. How could that be?’
‘It’s all crazy, Harry. All just crazy. But it was him all right. And he recognised me. That’s why I haven’t dared to go back to Nicole, or collect Abigail. Thank God I’d made preparations here.’
Harry, stunned, picks up the Blackphone and texts Bob Marshall: Ken Fogarty Newcastle police—where is he now?
He turns back to Jenny. ‘You’re sure Palfreyman was alive when you looked through the window?’
‘Yes, he was struggling, mouthing off.’
‘He was found with
a knife in his chest, from the kitchen of the house you were renting, with your prints and DNA all over it.’
She looks shocked. ‘I…I remember using it at lunchtime to make a salad. I got interrupted, just left it on the worktop, I think—didn’t wash it up.’
‘So the men must have got into your house—there was a broken window at the back—and staged a crime scene, with you as Terry’s murderer.’
They sit in silence, trying to picture it.
‘Poor Terry,’ she whispers. ‘I wonder, maybe if I hadn’t turned up they would have let him go.’
‘No, he’d seen their faces. They had to kill him.’
‘And if they didn’t find his secret evidence, they probably think I’ve got it.’
They fall silent, holding each other, thinking of the implications.
After a while Jenny says, ‘Do you know if Amber’s all right? I’ve been worried about her.’
‘Nobody knows where she is. Apparently she flew back from Vanuatu with Karen Schaefer on the fifteenth of last month, and disappeared at the airport. I’ve been trying to find her, thinking you might be with her, or she might know where you were. What I don’t understand is what she was doing with Schaefer and the Nordlunds in the first place, after all the animosity between them.’
‘She had such a hard time after Ash Island, devastated by Luke Santini’s death, terribly burned by the explosion. They gave her morphine for the pain, and I think she just gave up and let her uncle take over. I wish I could reach her.’
‘I’ve tried to contact people she and Luke might have been friends with in the environmental movement, without success so far.’ He tells her about Luke’s former partner Sol Fleischer and the possible link to James Zuckermann. ‘I haven’t checked out the address on his drivers licence yet. I was going to go this morning until I read your birthday message to Helen.’
‘We should go now.’
Harry says, ‘Not you, Jen. I’ll try it later.’
‘No, Harry, I’m going crazy here. We’ll just be careful, and if he does know where Amber is, she’s more likely to respond to me.’
He concedes and they go downstairs, where Mrs Ngô calls them a cab. She beams at Jenny. ‘At last you look happy now, Scarlett,’ she says, and they hug.
The taxi takes them to the address, Mont Street, a narrow thoroughfare lined with old terraces in variously dilapidated condition, running from Waterloo into Redfern. There is a ruined couch sitting in front of number thirty-two, on which sits a haggard-looking man with a huge black Rottweiler on one side, and a small bird in a cage on the other. As they get out of the cab and check the door number the man watches them with pink staring eyes. The dog, at least sixty kilograms, does the same.
The man says, ‘Help you?’
‘We’re looking for Mr Zuckermann,’ Jenny says, trying to sound as unlike a police officer as possible.
‘Jim?’
‘Yes, Jim.’
‘Attic,’ the man says, losing interest.
‘Thanks.’
They make to go inside but are met with several young men rushing out of the house, clutching backpacks. They wait as more appear.
‘Students,’ the man says. ‘Chinese. Four to a room.’ He gives a croaky laugh and puts a rolled cigarette of some kind in his mouth and lights it.
Harry and Jenny go into the dark interior; there is a smell of Asian food and rising damp. They climb the stairs. Harry counts five rooms—sixteen students, assuming Mr Sunshine at the front door has one to himself. At the top of the final flight a single door faces them. A tiny brass nameplate has a card with Zuckermann hand-printed on it. Harry taps on the door.
They hear the scrape of a chair inside, then a muffled voice. ‘Who is it?’
A woman’s voice.
Jenny puts her mouth to the keyhole and whispers, ‘Amber? Is that you? It’s Jenny.’
There’s a hesitation, then the scrape of a bolt, and the door opens on a chain. Amber’s pale face appears in the gap. ‘Jenny? Are you alone?’
‘Harry’s with me. It’s just the two of us. No one else knows we’re here.’
The door closes, the chain rattles, the door opens again and Jenny and Harry step quickly inside. Jenny and Amber embrace while Harry looks around the cramped room. A small table with a jug of water, two old wooden chairs, a clothes rack, a wash hand basin, a bed beneath the low sloping ceiling. It takes him a moment, his eyes adjusting to the dim light from the small grimy window, to make out the man lying in the bed, watching them.
Amber introduces them. ‘Jenny, Harry, this is Jim. He was a good friend of Luke’s, remember?’
It’s clear that Jim is not well, barely able to raise a hand to give a little wave. ‘Hi,’ he says faintly. ‘Welcome to the crack house.’
Amber laughs, pointing to the cracked walls. She goes over and sits on the edge of the bed, taking hold of his hand.
It is suffocatingly hot in the room, a big electric heater next to the bed. As they draw closer Harry sees what look like open sores around Zuckermann’s mouth. ‘Is Jim seeing a doctor?’
‘Yes,’ Amber says brightly. ‘We have a medical friend. Please, sit down.’ She looks pretty rough herself, eyes large in a pale haggard face.
‘I’ve been so worried about you,’ Jenny says, drawing one of the chairs towards the bed. ‘What happened?’
‘Oh, family.’ A brave, pained smile. ‘Just had to get away from them all.’
‘So where are you living?’
‘Here. Jim and I look after each other.’
Now Harry sees an electric wok on the floor beside the table, a box of groceries beside it.
‘Please,’ Amber goes on, ‘you can’t tell anyone where I am. Promise?’
‘Of course,’ Jenny says, ‘but can we get anything for you? Maybe we could take you out for lunch?’
‘No, no. We prefer to stay here. I don’t really go out, except to the newsagent on the corner for cigarettes.’ She laughs, as if at her own eccentricity. ‘Actually, you could do something.’ She gets to her feet and goes to her handbag on the dressing table, finds a slip of paper inside. ‘If you wouldn’t mind getting Jim’s prescription.’ Then her face drops. ‘Oh…no. Sorry. Can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Um, no money. Sorry, stupid, run out of cash.’ She looks on the point of bursting into tears.
Jenny goes to her, puts her arms around her. ‘Don’t be silly. We’ll get it. And while we’re at it we’ll get any supplies you need. Just tell us what.’
‘Well…maybe one or two basics…’ Amber haltingly begins to recite a list that Harry jots down in his notebook.
‘No problem,’ he says.
‘That’s so good of you. I’m afraid we’re just a bit desperate at the moment.’
Jenny says, ‘Is there no one we can contact? How about your uncle—Bernard?’
Amber shakes her head. ‘There’s no one I can trust. They even took Dylan, my little boy, away from me, sent him to boarding school. They said it upset him to see me.’ She begins to weep.
‘That’s terrible. What about a phone? We should keep in touch.’
Amber gives a despairing shrug. ‘I swapped it with one of the Chinese students for the wok.’
Harry takes all the cash out of his wallet and puts it on the table. ‘We’ll go to an ATM.’
‘Oh no,’ Amber protests faintly. ‘We can’t let you.’
‘Don’t be silly. We won’t be long.’
‘Thank you, thank you. The best pharmacy is on Elizabeth Street.’ Amber gives directions. ‘They know us. They’ve done this before.’
Done what? Harry wonders, as Amber lets them out and bolts the door behind them.
28
Kelly stares out of her car window at the sign with the bullet holes, hears the howl of dogs through the bush. She puts her foot down and moves on, then pulls in among the dog pens and gets out, trying to avoid getting mud on her shoes. The nearest pen contains a solitary dog who catc
hes her eye and she steps carefully over to look more closely at it, bedraggled, quivering. ‘You all right, girl?’ Kelly asks, and the dog gives a little whimper.
Kelly looks around and sees Kylie McVea sitting in her wheelchair on the veranda of the house, watching her. ‘Hello there,’ Kelly calls, and goes towards her.
‘Mrs McVea, my name is Kelly Pool. We’ve met before.’
Kylie has been reading a copy of Australian Greyhound Weekly. She lets it drop onto her lap and takes off her glasses, peers up at Kelly. ‘Is that a fact?’
‘Yes, at the inquest couple of months ago. I said hello then. I’m a reporter.’
Kylie frowns. ‘Nothing to say.’
‘I’m writing an article on the impact of violent crime on the families of victims, and I thought of your brother.’
Kylie’s face reddens. ‘My brother was not a violent man!’ she shouts. ‘The cops made all that up. They defamed him.’
‘No, no,’ Kelly says hastily. ‘I meant, he was the victim of a violent crime.’
‘Oh…yes, that’s a fact.’
‘And I remember at the inquest how deeply you were affected by his loss.’
‘He was the most important person in my life.’
‘Closer even than your husband?’
‘My mongrel husband buggered off nineteen years ago.’
‘Oh, right, so Frank was your mainstay.’
‘He was like a father to my boy Gavin. He was the example he looked up to.’
Oh dear, Kelly thought. That I must see. ‘How old is he, Kylie?’
‘Twenty-one.’
‘He must be a great consolation to you.’
‘He is. Looks after his mum. Him and Amal and Khalil. My boys.’
‘They live and work here, in the kennels?’
‘Yeah, they do all the physical work. I look after the paperwork.’
‘So you’re a successful businesswoman.’
‘Too right.’
‘Would you like to show me around? I’d love to be able to give you a bit of a plug.’
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