Ford’s eyes scanned the street. It was still early, and there was no sign of traffic, but the full heat of the day was on them. ‘So who made the call to you guys?’
‘One of the neighbours,’ said Eley. ‘Don’t ask me which one.’
Ford turned and saw a man standing at the end of the street, maybe two hundred metres away. He was holding a black umbrella over his head, which cast such a dark shadow that the man appeared to only exist in silhouette. He wore a black suit, a pale shirt and tie, but his face was in darkness. When he saw Ford staring at him, he turned slowly and walked around the corner out of sight.
Eley put his hand on the door to the prisoner compartment and took Ford’s elbow again.
‘Shall we?’ he said.
Ford climbed into the plastic pod, which glowed inside, an eerie light diffusing through the plastic. It had been cleaned recently, but the smell of bleach on the smooth interior didn’t cover the stench of sweat, piss and puke from the previous night’s police work.
Ford tried to keep his breathing shallow as the engine started and the wagon pulled away.
THREE
Ford had waited alone in the interview room for three hours and drunk four styrofoam cups of reheated coffee and a litre of water before Eley and Kopke came in and sat down opposite him. Kopke put a manila folder on the table, opened it, and passed the first sheet to his sergeant. They had taken off their hats and their gun belts. Without his cap, Kopke’s curly brown hair spilled over his forehead and he shook his head to flick it out of his eyes.
‘Now then,’ said Eley, stretching himself upright and pulling down his shirt where it had bunched up around his belly, ‘this all took longer than I expected.’
Ford looked through the open doorway towards the corridor. The station had been empty when they arrived and Eley had run around to the rear of the front desk to boot up the computer himself.
‘Isn’t there a detective around to interview me?’ said Ford.
Eley leaned over to shut the door, shook his head. ‘There may well be, in due course,’ he said. ‘You may get interviewed again later, if Karratha decides to send someone down. Right now you’re talking to me.’ He took the pen out of Kopke’s hand and made a note on the document. ‘You understand that I cautioned you when we arrived at the station?’
‘Yeah,’ said Ford. ‘I don’t know why you couldn’t take my statement then. I could have been home by now.’ He glanced at the dust ground into the cuffs of his shirt and caught under his fingernails and thought about how long he had been awake and the last time he had showered.
Eley snorted, then smirked at Kopke. ‘You won’t be going back to that house any time soon. It’s a crime scene, and will be until someone in Perth decides whether they want to send up a forensics team to show us how it’s done.’
‘I’ve been here too long already,’ said Ford. ‘I just got off a twelve-hour night, and after drinking your piss-poor coffee all morning, my brain is heading in the opposite direction to my body.’
Eley put down the paperwork, rested his elbows on the table and stared at Ford. ‘Well, excuse us for tampering with your body clock. It’s taken so long because when I typed your name into our big police computer, all the bells and whistles went off. It was like hitting a jackpot on the pokies.’
Ford kept eye contact with Eley, who was smiling.
‘It seems you are no stranger to police-interview rooms,’ he said.
Ford shifted in his chair. ‘This one is a lot nicer than the last one I was in,’ he said. It was a new station, built in the half-hearted post-modern Australian style that had become common in the north, curved roofs and sloping columns at jaunty angles doing little to disguise the fact that it was a corrugated-iron shed. The interview room was white and featureless and smelled of fresh paint. On the ceiling a single air-con vent directly over the table blew a stream of cold air straight onto the top of Ford’s head. They had turned up the fan before the interview began and now he felt a chill. He pulled the collar of his shirt tight around his neck and his fingers pulled his gold chain free.
Ford nodded towards the file. ‘How much of my history have you got in there?’
‘This?’ said Eley, holding up the top sheet. ‘This is just the summary, the greatest hits. We’ve spent the last few hours trying to work our way through all the material on the Gwardar robbery.’
‘I don’t see how that’s relevant to Harding,’ said Ford.
‘Neither do we,’ said Eley. ‘Not yet. But this is not the first time dead people have mysteriously appeared in your home.’
Ford sighed. ‘I had nothing to do with that.’
‘So the coronial enquiry concluded. Two men found shot to death in your apartment in September last year.’ Eley looked up. ‘It says here you lived in Scarborough. Close to the ocean?’
‘A partial view,’ said Ford. ‘Mostly blocked by that bloody hotel.’
‘How very nice for you,’ said Eley. ‘My wife tells me non-stop that I should get a posting on the coast, somewhere with a cool breeze and a low crime rate. Anywhere but this place. She’ll have to wait. I’ve got five years to retirement and already she’s discussing coastal property prices.’
Ford leaned back in his chair and stretched. ‘Maybe if you solve this business they’ll bump you to the top of the waiting list for a cushy job.’
Eley shook his head and returned his attention to the file. ‘These two dead blokes last year. One a known bikie with an arrest sheet that stretches to two pages, the other a former SAS officer whose service record has restricted access. This odd couple broke into your apartment and decided to shoot each other.’
Ford shrugged. ‘They were accomplices to the robbery. Some sort of weird alliance that reached breaking point.’
‘It isn’t clear from the bits I’ve read why they chose to have this parting of the ways in your living room.’
‘They’d taken me with them as a hostage during the robbery. I escaped.’
‘And they missed you so much they wanted a reunion. Whoever tries to recapture a hostage?’
‘You’d have to ask them.’
Eley laughed. ‘Did you know that your record has a box where the investigating officer can make notes on an interviewee’s behaviour? Normally you see warnings that a perp is violent when drunk, or depressive, or delusional. Do you know what it says here about your behaviour?’
‘Tell me.’
‘One word: annoying. Are you going to continue like that?’
‘You’re questioning me as if I were a suspect.’
‘As far as the investigating detectives were concerned, you were very much a suspect in the Gwardar robbery. Initially they liked you as the inside man, they thought you’d let the robbers into the gold refinery.’
‘The enquiry found I had no case to answer.’
‘Still, it must have been difficult finding a job in Kalgoorlie with a Gold Squad investigation on your record.’
‘That’s why I’m in Newman. Iron ore, a new start.’
‘And they stuck you on the night shift?’
‘You make it sound like a punishment. You’re wrong. I’m only on nights this week, during the maintenance shutdown. Normally I’m on days so I can fit in with my daughter. The company’s good like that.’
‘We don’t see many single fathers up here. Doesn’t suit the lifestyle.’
‘Suits mine. The company looks after me pretty well, and there’s a network of families that help out.’
‘Harding ever help out, do a bit of babysitting?’
‘You’re fishing now.’
‘You were found in the house with the victim, and you were evasive when we asked you to come in. You have a history of adorning your furniture with dead people. That makes you our only person of interest at this time.’
‘Now you’ve read my record, you’ll understand why I was nervous. You arrived only a few minutes after I found him. I was still shaken.’
‘What time did you leave wo
rk?’
‘I expect you’ll have checked with the company by now. You know what time I swiped out.’
‘We’ve spoken to the company alright. There’s one of them sitting outside right now.Very concerned she is.’
‘Can I talk to her? I might need help getting a lawyer.’
‘She’s not here for your sake, mate. Don’t make the mistake of thinking they give a shit about you. Their first concern was that Harding’s death might be work related. The woman out there is some community-relations bullshit artist looking after the company’s image, but she’s not half as big a pain in the arse as the Health and Safety Nazi who’s been bending my ear on the phone.’
‘This has nothing to do with the company.’
‘You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But these bastards still think this is a company town. You’d think I had the company logo on my shirt, not the crown, the way they talk to me.’
‘Harding had been in a fight. It’s hardly a safety issue.’
‘Every death in a mining town is a safety issue. It gets them shit-scared it will reflect badly on the company. Tell me what you know about Harding.’
‘I don’t. The company billeted him in our house for the shutdown. No room at the inn, or anywhere else. He was only here for two weeks. Severe accommodation shortage, booked solid, so they stuck him with us. He’s an electrician. Only just got his ticket and straight away he’s up here on the mines making the big money.’
‘The house is registered as being owned by the company, so you and Harding were sharing. Why did you call him the lodger?’
‘I used to call him that to piss him off. He hated living with us. He had no idea how to behave around a kid.’
‘How old’s your daughter?’
‘She’s six,’ said Ford. ‘Harding was trying hard to find another room. He wanted to get a place in a single men’s house, so he could stand around the yard with a bunch of blokes like him, burning meat and scratching his balls, building a pyramid out of empty beer cans.’
‘Harding had been drinking last night. Did he smoke?’
‘No, he was a fitness freak.’
‘What about you?’
‘Yes, I smoke,’ said Ford. He took his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and slapped them on the table and placed his lighter on top of them. ‘I don’t smoke indoors. I don’t smoke inside my house and I haven’t had a cigarette at home since before my shift.’ He stared at the packet and fought the craving. ‘If you’re leading up to asking about that cigarette butt that burnt its way across the kitchen table, it’s not mine. Test the filter for DNA and I reckon you’ll have your man.’
‘As I said, forensics haven’t yet been dispatched.’ Eley was looking tense now.
‘You haven’t taken my clothes for testing,’ said Ford, sensing that the advantage was passing to him.
‘All in due course,’ said Eley, fidgeting with the paperwork. ‘Let’s talk about the gym equipment in the bedroom. Was that Harding’s?’
Ford sighed. ‘Do I look like the kind of bloke who stands in front of a mirror each morning with my shirt off?’ He picked up his lighter and flicked it open and closed. ‘Did you take a look at Harding’s body? He spent hours every day pumping iron so he could leave a beautiful corpse. He’ll have the best developed pecs in the morgue.’
‘We’ve only just transferred him to the cool room at the Health Centre. The duty doctor is going to take a look.’
‘Do you know what killed him yet?’ asked Ford.
Eley cast his eyes down onto the paper, took another couple of sheets from the file. ‘Would you say that Harding would be able to take care of himself?’
‘Sure,’ said Ford. ‘He was into all sorts of martial arts and kung fu shit. Used to sit there late at night watching Jackie Chan movies and criticising the guy’s moves. Wanted me to go halves with him to get a satellite dish so he could watch Ultimate Extreme Fight Club stuff. He thought it was a proper sport.’
‘Not your style?’
‘Two shaved men in tight shorts wrestling in a cage? I tried to explain the homoerotic subtext to Harding, but it only upset him.’
‘So you didn’t get along?’
‘His habits irritated me,’ said Ford. ‘I’d asked him a few times to turn the TV down, not to watch violence when Grace was around, and not to exercise when I was trying to get her to sleep. There was always a lot of grunting and crashing of metal.’
‘Did you argue?’
‘Yes, but we didn’t fight. I’m confused why you’re still keeping on like this when it’s clear I was at work.’
‘I’m trying to get an idea of Harding’s character and habits.’
‘He was exactly as he appears,’ said Ford. ‘He was a young, arrogant, vain, cashed-up bogan. He liked to boast that he worked hard and played hard. The sort of guy whose police sheet would say: violent when drunk.’
The door opened and a female officer came in. She was slim and pretty, her uniform hanging loose on her as if it had been made for a man. Strands of red hair strayed from under her cap and her freckles made her look even younger than Kopke. Ford smiled at her and she dropped her eyes. She knelt down between Eley and Kopke and whispered in her sergeant’s ear. Eley scowled, then threw a glance at Ford. He leaned towards Kopke and spoke in a low murmur. Ford strained to listen, but could not make out what was said. Eley jerked his thumb towards the door, and Kopke nodded. The two young officers left and Eley slid the file across in front of him and pretended to rearrange the papers while he regained his composure.
‘We get a lot of young men like Harding in town these days,’ he said. ‘Cocky little shits who think the Pilbara is one big theme park for their own enrichment and amusement. Big wages, meals and accommodation laid on, flights in and out, short rosters and long breaks. Worse than fucking teachers. They flash their money around as if they somehow deserve it. They are easy people to dislike. Did Harding have any enemies?’
‘I don’t think he’d been here long enough to upset anyone, but it’s not like we had long girly chats. When he did talk to me it was mostly about how much money he was making, and how he was going to spend it.’
‘What about friends?’
‘Nobody I ever met.’
‘So you can see how this looks to us? He knows nobody in town. No friends, no enemies. You’re the only link we have, and you’re the bloke who likes to collect corpses in his living room.’
‘Except, of course, I have a solid alibi.’ Ford wondered how many suspicious deaths Eley had dealt with. He seemed to be enjoying it. ‘Look, Harding had been drinking. I’m off the booze. Teetotal. There’s no alcohol in the house, another thing we used to disagree about, so he must’ve been drinking somewhere else. There’s only a handful of bars in this town, and a few bottle shops. Go ask some questions.’
‘We will do, but just now we’re trying to understand you.’ Eley shuffled his papers and started reading from his notes. ‘You were working in the gold room at the Gwardar mine when it was robbed at gunpoint. You left the scene in an armoured van full of gold and then handed yourself in to the police the following day at the Kalgoorlie racetrack after enjoying a day of drinking and punting. There’s no record of any police interview, nor why you were released, but you show up two days later at a shooting at Perth Airport, where two officers gun down a man, Henk Roth, who was later charged with the robbery. Somehow this Roth guy manages to get bail, then skips the country.’
Ford felt his fingers go numb, and his shoulder throbbed at the memory. He tried to massage life back into his knuckles as Eley continued.
‘That same night those two men are found shot at your apartment in Scarborough. Nobody ever stands trial for the robbery or the shootings. The officer in charge, Detective Inspector Bill Chadwick, does not oppose bail for Roth and then gives testimony backing your evidence to a coronial enquiry. Then promptly retires from the police force and gets a cosy job in the public service.’
‘That’s in my file?’
>
Eley put the file aside. ‘No. That’s not in your file. Chadwick is mysteriously absent from your record, but he’s well known in the force. Quite a reputation, old Bill, the last of a dying breed. There was a lot of gossip when he retired. A lot of us were wondering what he was covering up. I was hoping you might be able to tell me. You seem to be at the centre of things.’
‘I wasn’t anywhere near the middle. I’d be interested to know if anyone found out who was behind the robbery,’ said Ford.
‘There’s that journo at the Gazette, Alannah Doyle,’ said Eley, warming up now. ‘She keeps digging. The inquest concluded that the guys found in your apartment were behind it, but Doyle’s been writing articles smearing Alan McCann, trying to connect the robbery to the bankruptcy of his mining company.’
‘Because I’d been on McCann’s payroll at the Gwardar mine, his lawyer represented me at the inquest.’
‘I see that. I’m just making a stab in the dark here, but I’d say there’s a lot you know that you’re not telling.’
‘I’ve been questioned a dozen times. I don’t think you’ll discover anything that the coroner and Serious Crime don’t already know.’
‘I’ll tell you what I know,’ said Eley, leaning across the table and jutting his chin towards Ford. ‘I know that you’re here in Newman, and there’s a smell coming off you, a stench of death that seems to follow you around. I don’t want you stinking up my town.’
The door opened and Kopke stepped in. He knelt down behind Eley and spoke softly in his ear. Ford watched the sergeant’s face fall into a scowl, which then compressed into a grimace. ‘Fuck!’ he grunted and stood up from his chair so quickly that it pitched backwards and would have fallen if Kopke hadn’t caught it. Eley scooped up the file from the table and stormed out without a backward glance at Ford. Kopke gave him a sheepish grin before following Eley into the corridor. The door locked behind them.
Ford sat motionless in the chair, staring at the door. After ten minutes they still hadn’t returned. He looked at the cigarettes on the table and then at the security camera in the ceiling and decided to see what would happen. He lit a cigarette and had enjoyed half of it before Eley returned, his face still dark with anger. He stood in the doorway, rubbing a hand through the grey stubble on his head. ‘Put that out,’ he said. ‘Now.’
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