by Clare Kauter
“Great,” said James, putting his arm around my shoulder and steering me back towards the staircase. “Let’s hang out upstairs for a bit, Charlie.”
“What?” I said as we walked along. “Why? I haven’t had a chance to talk to Adam yet. Not that I’m sure I want to after today… Have there been any developments? Do they know who did it or why they dumped the guy here?”
“They haven’t really found out much, but let’s go somewhere quiet and I’ll fill you in.”
I pulled free of his arm. “What are you talking –”
It was at that moment that I caught sight of a certain police officer standing in my foyer and felt my upper lip curl into a snarl. Three guesses who it was.
“No,” I said. “No. He’s not allowed in my house.”
“I’m sorry, Charlie,” James said, sounding genuinely apologetic. “He kind of has to be here. You don’t have to talk to him, though. Come on.”
Reluctantly, I let James lead me back upstairs. While I wasn’t particularly comfortable with having Harcourt in my house, I figured he probably wasn’t going to do anything while there were so many other cops around, not to mention Adam. Besides, he could search my house all he wanted – he wasn’t going to find anything. At least not downstairs.
We walked into the study upstairs. I sat down in the armchair in the corner while James sat at the desk. After a moment of silence, James spoke.
“Nothing new has come up. Adam only came here because he’d run out of files to look through and wanted to go over what you and I had found out. He must be getting desperate seeing as he already knows we’ve found nothing.”
I nodded. As worried as I was about Gracie, right at that moment my thoughts were consumed with the image of Harcourt rifling through all my belongings.
“Charlie?”
“Hmm?”
“How you holding up?”
“Yeah, good,” I said, not at all convincingly.
James raised his eyebrows. He didn’t believe me.
“OK, not great, but I’ve only had one panic attack and one vomit today, so personally I think I’m doing reasonably well.”
James smiled sadly. “Yeah. It’s been a pretty rough day.”
I nodded. “That it has.”
We were silent for a moment.
“I talked to Adam while you were with the police.”
“I know,” I said slowly. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to care about that, but it looked like James was working up to something.
“It was… kind of weird, actually,” he said.
“How so?”
“I dunno, he was just… really friendly.”
I cocked my head to the side. “Wow, that must have been awful for you.”
“That’s not what I mean. It was just really odd. Like, we’ve worked together before but he’s always been so professional about everything. Today he was just having a chat with me, and I don’t know why.”
I frowned. That was odd. Well, now that he’d fired me he was down a friend, so maybe he was working on making another one.
“Probably trying to distract himself. He’s pretty close to Gracie. She calls him her uncle.”
“She calls you her auntie and you only met her two days ago.”
“OK, so maybe she’s not that discerning, but I still think they’re close.”
He nodded. “That makes sense.” He hesitated, as if he were going to say something, but then stopped.
“What?”
“Um…”
“James,” I said. A warning. He knew better than to not say what he was thinking.
“He asked me about… about Topher and Harcourt and everything,” he said.
I was surprised. “Really? What did he ask?”
“I dunno. Why you hated Harcourt so much. I think that was how it started, and then I guess we just got talking.”
“What about?”
“He told me he’d read up about it when you first started working for him.” I nodded. “You don’t seem surprised.”
I shrugged. “With someone like Adam, you sort of assume.”
“I guess. It was weird, you know. Like we were friends. I guess I finally understand why Tim hangs out with him.”
“You didn’t like him before?”
He frowned. “No.”
“No, me neither. Not at all. I can’t imagine ever being friends with him. Why would anyone like him? He’s so… Nope, not a chance. Never. He fired me and I didn’t even hate him for it because I was already hating him at maximum capacity.”
OK, cool it down Charlie. No need to overcompensate.
“Exactly.”
Luckily James didn’t seem to notice.
“Right, anyway, so he was asking you about Harcourt.”
“Yeah. Well, more about Topher, really. What he was like.”
We made eye contact and shared a moment of discomfort at the use of the word ‘was’. Then we broke the eye contact and both sat in uncomfortable silence for what felt like hours. I thought back to my conversation with Tim. I needed to see McKenzie’s letter. Another piece of the puzzle.
“Do you want to see the rest of my letter?” I asked.
James looked at me in shock. “Seriously?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, if you show me yours I’ll show you mine.”
He leant back. “Ah, of course. The caveat.”
“I’d say it’s a fair trade.”
“My letter wasn’t meant for you,” he said.
“And mine wasn’t meant for you. Fortunately my brother’s not around to object.”
James shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Why?”
“I just… It just isn’t. Besides, we have a more pressing missing persons case to attend to. Topher’s been gone five years. He’s not really that high a priority.”
My jaw dropped. “What did you just say?”
“He’s not. Not today.”
“I want to see that letter.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Why were you going through my drawers before?”
“What?” To his credit, he looked genuinely confused.
“What were you looking for?”
“Clothes,” he said slowly. I could see that he was starting to get annoyed with me.
“Really?”
“Yes. What did you think I was looking for?”
I shrugged.
“No, really. I’m curious,” he said. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“What do you think?”
I shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe you wanted to sniff my underwear or something.”
“I don’t think that’s what you were getting at, Charlie. You really think I was searching your room for that letter? You didn’t think I would maybe try asking first?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think you would be such great buddies with the weirdo detective who was in charge of my brother’s case, but here we are. Maybe I just don’t know you at all.”
“He’s my boss. We work together. Like you and Adam.”
“I’m not friends with Adam.”
“And I’m not friends with Harcourt.”
“Also, I don’t work with Adam anymore, seeing as you got me fired.”
James sighed. “Look, Charlie, I don’t want to fight with you. I really wasn’t going through your stuff. I’ve known that you had that note for a long time, and I figured you’d share it with me eventually if you wanted to. Today’s been a bad day, and I think we’re both just a little tired and stressed. Let’s just move on, OK? We’re friends.”
I was silent for a moment, contemplating how to respond.
“Yeah, of course. Sorry,” I answered finally.
He smiled. “Don’t worry about it. Now, back to the matter at hand. Any idea why someone would dump a corpse on your front lawn?”
I shrugged. “
Maybe someone knew we were looking into Gracie’s disappearance and decided to head us off.”
“Wouldn’t they just threaten to hurt Gracie?”
“You would think so, but it’s not like this is a normal kidnapping.”
James tilted his head to the side. “You do have a point. The kidnappers haven’t even made contact yet. Still, the dead body on the step thing seems like a stretch – then again, you do have a tendency to piss people off. Badly.”
“I thought we just decided to stop fighting?” I snapped.
He held his hands up. “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to stir you up,” he apologised. “You do have a lot of enemies.”
I sighed. He was right. Suddenly a thought occurred to me.
“James…”
“What?”
“This whole time we’ve been assuming that they took Grace to go after Tim, right?”
“Yeah…”
“But what if someone was following me the past couple of days? They would have seen me with Grace.”
James nodded slowly. “They would have.”
“It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. And the florist said they were told to drop off those flowers at the front desk. It didn’t have a card or anything. Maybe they were meant for you.”
“Oh, fuck.”
James walked towards me and sat down on the arm of the chair I was sitting in, placing his arm around my shoulders.
“Are you sure you don’t know who that guy downstairs is?”
I glared up at him. “I didn’t get a great look at his face, considering someone atomised it with a shotgun.”
“Sorry. Just thought maybe you’d recognise something…”
“What? His neck skin? That shitty suit? His tie?”
I stopped.
“What is it?” James asked, noticing my pause.
“Shit,” I breathed. “I do recognise his tie.”
I guess I’d been distracted by the bloody, oozing mess that was his face and hadn’t paid real attention to what he was wearing, but now that I thought about it, that blue tie was familiar. I needed to have another look at it.
“I need to look at the body again.”
“Charlie…”
“I need to.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? I mean, if it’s someone you know –”
“Don’t worry. It’s not someone I like. It’ll be fine.” Although he’d known me my entire life, James still looked slightly shocked by what I’d said. Did that come out sounding a little callous? Whoops.
We headed downstairs. Harcourt was now sitting at my dining table with Joe, Sarah, Adam and Arnold. I swallowed my anger and approached the table.
“I think I know whose body it is,” I announced.
Everyone turned to me.
“Is this a confession?” Harcourt asked. I ignored him.
“It’s that guy,” I said to Adam. Right, so that reveal hadn’t been as dramatic as I’d hoped. “From the thing we went to.”
“Are you being intentionally vague?” James whispered. “Because it sounds like you’re describing a drug deal or something. Next time maybe don’t do that in front of four cops.”
“You were there too,” I said. “The political thing.”
“Who is it?” Adam asked.
“I think it’s Ralph.”
“Ralph?”
“The guy who thought we were waitstaff.”
“Doesn’t really narrow it down.”
“He was with that obnoxious American guy.”
Adam nodded. “Right, yeah. I think I remember him.”
“I remember the American guy,” said James. “But the rest of the faces kind of blur together.”
“Ralph was wearing a ridiculous Australian flag tie. That’s the only reason I remember him.”
“Not exactly incontrovertible evidence,” said Harcourt, sounding bored. I wondered momentarily if he’d organised this whole kidnapping and murder thing to freak me out, but then I realised that would be totally psychotic. Surely that was a step too far, even for him. At least I knew that if he did have something to do with it, James wasn’t in on it. I could see James spying on me if he thought it was the right thing to do, but kidnapping a child and killing a guy? Not so much.
“Worth checking out,” said Adam. “Let’s go and look at the body again, Charlie. See how sure you are.”
He stood and made his way to the door. James, Sarah and Joe followed, and Harcourt trailed behind reluctantly. (Arnold was too young to see things like that, so I fetched her a bowl of the pasta James had cooked and shut her in the laundry with it.)
We walked back to the front door and I took a deep breath. Time to see if I could put a name to this lack of face.
The sun was hanging low in the sky by now, casting an orangey-pink light over everything. I wasn’t allowed to get close to the body since the SOCOs were still doing their thing, but even from a few paces away I could see that it was the same tie Ralph had been wearing yesterday. (God, was it really only yesterday? This had not been a good 24 hours.)
“That’s him,” I said.
“You’ve got quite an eye for faces,” Adam said.
I snorted with laughter. Everyone else looked ashamed to know me. Apparently laughing while standing over a corpse is ‘weird’ and ‘actually kind of maniacal’. Whatever. I was sure this was Ralph from the political rally, and I was worried about the implications of that. Why was he here? What did he have to do with Gracie? The only connection I could come up with was me. Adam phoned the offices and had someone look up the guest list for the political luncheon. They found out who Ralph was and ran his name through the system.
“Ralph Matheson,” said Adam, hanging up the phone. “I’ve got Panther looking into him.”
Adam sent Tim and Ellie a picture of Ralph’s face (a photo from Panther, not one he’d snapped at the crime scene) and they both responded that they didn’t recognise him. James and I made eye contact and he bit his lip. The situation was so dire that I didn’t even get that much of a heart flutter from the lip bite. We were both thinking the same thing. Maybe this whole thing wasn’t about Tim at all. Maybe whoever was responsible was coming after me.
When all this was over, I really needed to take a look at the way I was living my life.
Chapter Eighteen
By the time the sun had fallen completely, Adam, James and I had relocated to McKenzie’s house. He lived alone in a giant mansion in the richest area of town, Madison Hill. (Of course, I also lived in a mansion on Madison Hill, roughly two blocks away, but I shared with a housemate so somehow it seemed less extravagant.) There was plenty of room for three adults and a piglet, but it still felt kind of claustrophobic tonight. I didn’t want to be hanging out at McKenzie’s place. I wanted to be doing something.
There was also the niggling worry in the back of my head that Harcourt was going through my house in my absence. The thought of him sifting through my underwear drawer was almost enough to make me vomit. Now that we’d all left, there was no one there to keep an eye on him. I’d messaged Lea to stay at her mum’s for the night, although I’d told her it was because of a burst pipe. If she knew someone had dumped a body in our front yard there was no way she would stay away.
On top of it all, I was exhausted. The fact that I hadn’t even been awake for 12 hours yet was mind-boggling. I’d lived through months that didn’t seem as long as today had.
I was watching House on Netflix, which was doing absolutely nothing to lift my mood, while James and Adam made phone calls and kept working from the kitchen. At least now we had a lead. Of course, that was assuming the murder was in some way related to the kidnapping. I hoped like hell it was, because they were not the kind of separate life events you wanted to have occurring concurrently.
I tried to focus on the television but I failed, so instead I focused on the case at hand. Could I have met Ralph at some other point? What exactly had we said to each other at the convention? My mi
nd wandered to Gracie. Had she been taken because of me? Why, though? Who would target me? Most of the people I’d pissed off that badly were in prison by now. Except Harcourt, of course. Who was at this very moment searching my house top to bottom for any information connected to my brother. And that, of course, was what my mind kept coming back to.
I knew I was being selfish. Gracie was top priority, no question. But now this carrot was being dangled in front of me, hinting that maybe I could find out where Topher was. What was I supposed to do – ignore it? We needed to find Gracie, but I couldn’t focus. All I could think of was James and Harcourt and those notes.
One of which was currently sitting at the bottom of my handbag, pressed between the pages of Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion’. (What, you expected me to just leave it there while Harcourt turned my house upside down? I think not.)
Arnold was whining again, so for lack of something better to do (and definitely not because I was trying to overhear what was going on with the case so I’d stop going crazy) I went to the kitchen to get her a snack.
James and Adam fell silent when I walked in.
“Talking about me?” I asked, trying to raise one eyebrow.
“What is your face doing?” James asked.
“Looking quizzical.”
“Sure it is,” he responded. “And no, we weren’t exactly talking about you.”
“Then what were you talking about?”
“The people who want you dead,” Adam said.
“Why? No one’s tried to kill me yet.”
Adam shrugged. “I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re building up to.”
Eek. “We’ve got the obvious ones so far,” said James. “Ruslan Volkov and Jeremy Martin. They’re both locked up, though.”
“And this doesn’t seem their style. I’m pretty sure both of them would just kill you the first chance they had,” Adam said. “And why go after Gracie and Ralph? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Can you think of anyone else you might have pissed off recently?”
“How long do you have?” I asked. James grimaced. “In all honesty, no. Not anyone I’ve pissed off that badly, at least.”
“Right,” said James. “Back to square one, then.”
“So you haven’t found out anything more about Ralph?”
They shook their heads. “He’s nobody,” said James. “I didn’t know it was possible for someone to live such an unnoteworthy life. He’s so average in every way it’s kind of extraordinary.”