The Silent Inheritance

by Joy Dettman

  He had to shut her up! The spray pack placed down on the sink, he reached for the tap, then remembered – and he wasn’t going out there to wash his hands. He locked the door, pulled the blind, opened a can of beans, pitched its lid at the stove then popping three pills from their bubble wrap, he crushed then stirred them into the beans. Positioning the penlight between his teeth, he picked up the beans and a bottle of water and let himself into the pantry.

  Once a place of shelves, of baking pans and oversized pots, of sugar, flour and the scent of all things good. The stink of his guest’s latrine greeted him today. He placed the bottle of water down, shook the beans into her bowl, then, his hands free, he took the torch from between his teeth and played the beam into her eyes.

  ‘If you’re going to murder me like you did those other girls, what are you waiting for, you cowardly sicko?’ she said. ‘I wish that dog had eaten you alive.’

  She wouldn’t tame, not this one. He let himself out and closed the door.

  ‘People can’t live on fucking baked beans!’ she yelled.

  He heard her. Her appearance suggested that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Appearances lied. She was a rarity he wished he’d found sooner.

  ‘Other things come in cans,’ she yelled. ‘Fruit comes in cans.’

  He felt his epoxy repair again, and where he’d plastered less heavily, it had solidified. He ate a sandwich at the window, drank water from a bottle, his guest now silent.

  He gave her twenty minutes before opening the door. She’d eaten half of her beans, and now lay with her face turned to the wall and something other than straw beneath her neck – a strip of his foam lining. He moved his light around the bars, found the place where she’d removed a fifty-centimetre strip of his soundproofing. With her fingernails? It wasn’t easy to cut with a knife, and well he knew it. His torch beam returned to play a moment on his sleeping beauty.

  She would have made his eighty-three days, all he’d asked of the first of them. She’d brought her own killer with her, had been coughing her lungs out on the second day. Now this one had to leave early.

  DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN

  It had to be done. He had to get the Kingswood well away from this land, park it within walking distance of a railway station—

  His light in her face roused her. She flung an arm in its direction. The chill of cold water could have her flinging more than an arm.

  Lack of options led to haste. Haste led to mistakes. Was he making his greatest mistake? Having shaken the undergrowth to flush him out, his hunters would be patrolling every freeway. Was he planning to do exactly what they expected him to do, to run blind, run scared?

  He’d stay off the freeways, as he had when delivering the gutter’s refuse—

  His initial response that day had been flight.

  DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN

  Few looked twice at him, and those who did wouldn’t relate him to the Freeway Killer. And he was running out of time to paint the Kingswood—

  ‘Bloody dog.’

  He allowed the torch beam to play on her foam pillow.

  ‘You’ve just been given a reprieve, Miss Piggy,’ he whispered. ‘I believe we need to wait until the hunters stop shaking the undergrowth.’

  He’d bought a bag of grapes to eat during his planned night drive. Beautiful grapes, large and seedless, their skins crisp. He popped one into his mouth, then began reconstructing the stove.

  He gave her two more bottles of water before he left, and two more cans of baked beans, then, as an apology for those ‘fucking beans’, he broke off a bunch of grapes and placed them into the bowl with her leftovers.

  THE BREAK

  At seven o’clock on Easter Sunday morning, Ross rapped on the front door of a Forest Hill commission house, rapped twice more before the door was opened by a chocolate-coated four year old, who, when asked to get Mummy, pointed a portion of chocolate egg towards the east, then returned to his/her chocolate-coated companions on the floor, within touching distance of a large flat-screen television.

  A second member of the group, a definite male of six or seven, scuttled up a passage towards the east, then scuttled back, unwilling to miss the televised action.

  He came then, Shane Lourie, not wearing his Nike cap, not wearing much.

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing knocking on my door at this time of day?’

  ‘I’m on my way home from a bit of a reunion, Shane, me and a few of the old Hawthorn boys. We got talking about you,’ Ross said as the girlfriend came, clad in a purple towelling dressing-gown and half of her hanging out of it.

  She knew who he was, or what he was. ‘Are you got a warrant?’

  ‘I can come back with one and frighten the children, Mrs Lourie, or we can call this a social visit. I knew your husband in primary school.’

  ‘What do you want with him?’

  ‘We believe Shane has information which may assist us in a current investigation,’ Ross replied and stepped back as she pushed the screen door wide to look for the we.

  ‘What’s he supposed to know?’ Shane’s mouthpiece asked while he attempted to shoo kids back to their television. He’d got himself a herd of kids – or inherited them from his predecessors. Their televised show unable to compete with the live action at the door, three of them got by their mother. A crawler was currently pulling himself to his feet on one of Mummy’s tree-stump legs. She swung him up to straddle the bulge where her hip should have been.

  ‘What’s he supposed to know, I asked you?’

  ‘We can have him home before breakfast, Mrs Lourie. If I have to come back and do it the official way, it could take a while longer.’

  ‘Have you done anything, Shane?’

  ‘I don’t bloody go anywhere to do anything, and I know nothing about nothing,’ Shane said.

  ‘Go with him then. The kids don’t need to see you dragged out of here in handcuffs,’ she said, still looking for the we.

  It was obvious who wore the trousers in that house, but two minutes later, Shane came out wearing shapeless jeans, worn-out sneakers, and his Nike cap.

  There wasn’t a lot left of that once cocky kid who’d looked like Han Solo. He used to wear his hair like the movie star’s and he’d spent more time combing it than he had at school. He didn’t need a comb these days.

  Ross led the way to his car, where he opened his passenger door.

  ‘Talk here if you want to talk,’ Shane said.

  ‘I’m partial to a McDonald’s breakfast. How about you, Shane?’

  Shane leaned on the car. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

  ‘How long have you been married?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘I was wondering how many of those kids are yours.’

  ‘What if they are?’

  ‘You were seen eyeing off a couple of twelve-year-old girls, ten minutes before one of them disappeared,’ Ross said.

  ‘You copper bastard! You’re talking about that Danni Lane chick! You’re not pinning that shit on me. I never went near her,’ Shane said, and he turned to the house, to his woman, now standing on the porch, listening to what she could. To annoy her, Ross stepped closer to Shane and lowered his voice.

  ‘At four twenty-three on the fifteenth of March, we can put you on the upper level at the Forest Hill shopping centre, very near her, Shane, within a metre or two of her, Shane.’

  His woman’s hearing was acute. ‘Who seen him there?’ she yelled.

  ‘Get in the car, Shane.’

  ‘Who seen me there?’

  ‘A couple of security cameras. You still like ’em young, eh?’

  Shane got in the car and slammed the door. Ross walked around to his door and got in beside him.

  ‘I been with her for five years and those last two kids are mine, and I was eighteen bloody years old, and Willy Wilson’s bitch of a sister only yelled rape because her mother caught us going at it. And that’s a bloody fact, and no bastard would ever b
elieve me.’

  ‘She was still twelve years old, Shane. I take it that your missus doesn’t know about it?’

  ‘No she bloody doesn’t, and you keep your mouth shut about it—’

  Ross bought him a McDonald’s breakfast in Canterbury Road, and over coffee and bacon and egg McMuffins with hash browns, he told his guest what the security camera had witnessed.

  ‘We’ve got you eyeing off Danni and her girlfriend as you walked by to the escalators, then she cuts away from her friend to follow you. It looks suspicious.’

  ‘I wasn’t eyeing anyone off. I was bloody walking on air, that’s what I was doing. I’d put five bucks into one of those thieving machines while my missus did the shopping, and the bastard finally paid up.’

  ‘Pokies?’

  ‘There’s no law against them yet, is there?’

  ‘Should be – when you’re playing with the taxpayer’s five bucks.’

  ‘Try looking for a job at our age.’

  ‘I’ve got one. How much did you win?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘The bastards see me coming and start laughing before I drop in my first coin,’ Ross said.

  ‘I took two hundred and seventy-five bucks from it – and I never got closer to that girl than on the escalator. I got on it before her, but she was in a hell of a hurry to get somewhere. She goes running past me and gets stopped by that old bird you’ve been looking for. She stopped, the old bird, and when the escalator got down to the bottom, that chick bloody near knocked her over. The old bird’s shopping went flying.’

  ‘You helped pick it up, I dare say?’

  ‘Yeah, right. I went out to the bus stop to tell my missus what I won, that’s what I did, and all I bloody did too.’

  Ross drove him into the station when their coffee mugs were empty. Constable Whiz-kid typed up Shane’s statement.

  I’ve been living with my girlfriend for five years. We go to Forest Hill on Fridays. She does the shopping and I chuck a few dollars in the pokies.

  The missing chick was arguing with another chick as I walked past them to the escalators and one of them sounded like she’d come from Yankee land. If I looked at them, that’s why I looked at them. They weren’t arguing quiet either. I get on the escalator. They’ve got signs down the bottom telling you to keep moving but the old bird you’ve been showing on television got on before her and down near the bottom she dropped her walking stick and stopped to pick it up. The young chick (Danni Lane) went stumbling into her. The last I seen was (Danni Lane) picking up the old bird’s shopping.

  Me and my missus got the bus home with our shopping then phoned up a taxi and took the kids to the McDonald’s in Canterbury Road, Blackburn South. We’ll be on their security videos too.

  I seen those models you had set up over at Forest Hill and I told my girlfriend what I seen that day. She told me I’d end up getting involved in something if I opened my mouth, so I kept it shut. It wasn’t like I seen anything worth seeing anyway.

  Shane Lourie. 31 March 2013

  Crime Stoppers had taken a lot of calls, most in response to the enhanced shots of Granny Plaid Skirt. He was a doctor from Harvey Bay, an ex-prisoner from Perth, a preacher from Dubbo. He was a Benalla banker, a Doncaster schoolteacher, podiatrist, shoe salesman, you name it. They had a list of names, some familiar. Melvin Sloan was on it, and Indiana Jones.

  Ross might have enjoyed interviewing Melvin Sloan, the bastard who’d cut down the avocado tree, but he had pigs’ eyes and was as fat as a pig – and Ross was pretty certain who had made that call to Crime Stoppers. Les, his favourite newshound, had been fond of avocados. The bugger had nicked a few.

  Crime Stoppers received a second rush of calls after Danni’s grandfather’s five minutes of fame. He commanded that every viewer do his or her duty. Born to command, at seventy-five, out of uniform, but he raised a battalion of callers, one of which was a Mrs Andria Hall. She’d been in the Forest Hill car park the day Danni was abducted and had given them the possible colour and make of the vehicle Granny Plaid Skirt had been driving.

  I believe that elderly woman got out of a metallic dusky blue Hyundai i30 hatchback. It was parked opposite to where I parked in the west-side lower car park at Forest Hill. I know the model because my sister-in-law drives a twin to it. Until the driver got out, I thought it might have been my sister-in-law’s car.

  The woman was alone and looked to be around my height (seventy-two centimetres). When she walked past me and my daughter, she smiled and waved her fingers at my daughter. She wasn’t using a walking stick but she had grey hair, worn in that same style, and she was wearing a dark cardigan.

  I know the approximate time because I’d just picked up my daughter from kindergarten, at three o’clock, and Forest Hill is about a ten-minute drive from the kindergarten. I noticed her cardigan, because we had to fly to Tasmania at six and I was thinking about what to pack. My mother lived over there and she was dying of cancer.

  I spent the next week with her at the hospital then stayed in Tasmania for the funeral and to help pack up her unit, so I didn’t see a lot of television or look at newspapers at the time Danni was abducted. It wasn’t until I saw the big write-up in the newspapers and the photographs that I realised that I’d probably seen that elderly woman.

  Andria Hall. 2 April 2013

  A Janet Willmot, who’d never been to Forest Hill in her life but was a regular shopper at Chadstone, had given them a statement the same day.

  I saw that woman at Chadstone, sometime in January last year. I’d taken my children shopping to buy school shoes. We were ready to go home and my youngest was dancing with wanting to use the toilet and when I got him to the toilets, I couldn’t open the door.

  There was no sign saying that they were locked for cleaning, so I gave it an almighty shove and it opened and that elderly woman you’ve been showing on television was behind the door with her loaded trolley.

  She said something like, ‘Thank goodness you got it open. I was ready to start screaming for help.’

  She seemed very normal, very pleasant. I held the door open for her and never thought another thing about it, or not until I saw that photo and heard where and when it had been taken.

  I’ve been trying to remember what I can since. I knew she was wearing a wig, because I remember wondering if she’d had chemo.

  I remember telling my mother too that I’d seen an elderly woman wearing what could have been one of my grandmother’s skirts. After my grandmother died, Mum donated all of her clothing to our local Salvation Army opportunity shop. I remember Mum saying that she was glad someone was getting a bit of use out of it because Gran had paid a fortune for that skirt at Fletcher Jones.

  Janet Willmot. April 2013

  Crime Stoppers had taken a call from a male who’d identified himself as Ian. He’d used his mobile, which was currently being tracked. They’d recorded the phone call.

  ‘I don’t know anything at all about Danni Lane. I’m calling about Nancy Yang. My wife’s family live opposite what used to be little Nancy’s father’s milk bar. She used to serve in the milk bar and had better English than her parents.

  ‘It’s probably unrelated to anything, but for months before that little kid went missing, we used to see a white Kingswood drive up and park out the front of my in-laws’ place, and every time we saw it pull in there, my father-in-law used to say, “Not the Kingswood” – like in that TV show that used to be on. We thought the driver must have had a girlfriend in the area.

  ‘Why I’m ringing in now is because my father-in-law said last night that he spoke to the driver one night about his Kingswood, and he said that he could have looked a bit like that dark-headed photograph you’ve been showing on the box; that the guy had dark hair that was going grey.

  ‘We know he stopped parking there around the same time that Nancy went missing. We probably should have said something at the time, but until that truckie found young Monica Rowan, no one mentioned old Kin
gswoods. Cheers.’

  Ross hadn’t worked on the Yang case. Clair, the older of the two females on Johnson’s team, had, and Ross picked her brains for information.

  ‘Most of our enquiries were centred around the Asian community,’ she said. ‘After Nancy was found, and that note found in her mouth, we started looking further afield. It sounded like payback. Blessed are they that keep judgement and he that doeth righteousness at all times.’

  Ross had read it. It rang of a sins of the father sermon. ‘You looked into the father’s history.’

  ‘With a fine-toothed comb, for a connection to drugs, initially. Other than losing his licence for twelve months, he and his wife were clean.’

  ‘Licence?’

  ‘He entered Chadstone Freeway from the off ramp, caused half a dozen cars to run up each other’s backsides. No serious injuries. After Nancy’s body was released for burial, he and his wife took it home to China. I don’t know if they came back.’

  ‘Find out,’ Ross said.

  *

  The schoolkids on holiday, there was a mass exodus from the city at Easter time, the weather still warm enough to go bush or beach. To Ross that exodus meant little more than accidents on country roads but less traffic in the city, and fewer people at shopping centres. He shopped when he had to, bought in bulk and stuffed most of what he bought into his freezer.

  He looked at calendars, at long-term weather forecasts; he counted the days Danni had been missing and he told himself he had until around the end of May to find her.

  On Wednesday evening, Mrs Cindy Thompson walked into her local police station and told the duty constable she was feeling guilty about not wanting to get involved, but she’d seen that elderly woman drive out of the Forest Hill car park at around four forty-five the Friday Danni Lane was abducted, and she was having nightmares about that girl.