Into the Night

by Sarah Bailey

  ‘It seems like it but they obviously weren’t able to make an arrest,’ Chloe says. ‘Also, there had been another fire the week prior. An old shed a few streets away from the Shorts’ place was torched when the family was out of town and the circumstances were similar, so it had them wondering if a firebug was in the area.’

  I remember Kit Short’s protective grip on his sister’s hunched shoulders at the hospital. The unmade bed that day we went to Lizzie’s apartment, both sides slept in.

  ‘Chloe,’ I say abruptly, ‘you definitely never found anything in Lizzie’s finances that could have been a payment for that engagement ring, did you?’

  ‘Not as far back as two years. We checked all her accounts. It certainly didn’t come from the Wades either—we checked with his parents. Or the Beaufords. He must have paid cash for it. Unless it was stolen.’ She emits a little laugh.

  ‘Or it was a gift,’ I say.

  ‘A gift,’ she repeats, trying to work out what I’m saying.

  ‘You have a picture of the ring, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Lizzie was happy to help, though she obviously didn’t understand what it had to do with Sterling’s murder.’

  ‘I’m not certain that it does,’ I tell her, ‘or that she’s done anything wrong, but I want you to dig up everything you can on Jenny Short, especially photos in which her hands are visible.’

  The rain stops as abruptly as it started. I shower and dress, desperate to get out of the apartment. The air is ice-cold and damp, and people in suits making the transition from the week to the weekend cast nervous looks skyward. The homeless have shifted to the main thoroughfares, taking refuge under the larger shop awnings where they join the stoic buskers. Reaching the lobby of the hotel I frequent, I order a drink and lean back into the blissful softness of an armchair.

  Scenes from yesterday sift through my mind, culminating with my head hard against the brick wall. But as the wine goes down I push the memories away and focus on my steadily firming theories.

  I remember Kit Short exclaiming that he’d come straight from the airport when he reached the hospital, but I can’t recall this being substantiated. Was that for our benefit? I realise that every time I’ve seen Kit he’s been touching his sister. Is their closeness sinister or am I reading too much into it? Is he obsessed with Lizzie, feeling bonded to her by their tragic adolescence?

  I wonder if Sterling mentioned his proposal plans to Kit. Maybe Kit gave his mother’s engagement ring to Sterling for him to pop the question. Did Kit then discover what his sister hadn’t—that Sterling was involved with Brodie? Did he kill Sterling?

  Has he done something to Brodie?

  I finish my wine and order another. The pounding ache in my temples urges me on. I get out my notebook and scribble down the timeline.

  Was the engagement the trigger to this whole thing? But how would the attack on Walter Miller fit in? Maybe Sterling was somehow involved. Could he and Kit be in cahoots? Lizzie says she was home with Sterling the night Miller was attacked, but what if she’s lying and covering for her boyfriend and her brother? Or maybe Sterling and Brodie were involved in something and she’s protecting them. We might have been looking at this all wrong—Sterling might have attacked Miller. Could that be why someone killed him?

  I press the pen into the page of my notebook, looking at the list of names and dates. Murder is always about upside. Who benefits from Sterling’s death? It’s all there, I know it—I just don’t quite see how it fits together.

  ‘Is this seat taken?’

  I look up to see a man with neat auburn hair and a sweet fan of crinkles on either side of his blue eyes.

  ‘Ah, no,’ I say.

  ‘You look busy,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry, I have work to do too. I just didn’t want to be stuck in my room all night.’

  I nod politely, keeping my eyes on my notebook.

  ‘That’s the shitty thing about travelling alone,’ he adds a few minutes later. ‘It sounds so great when you’re young but it ends up being pretty lonely sometimes.’ He takes a sip of his drink and looks up at me, smiling.

  I return his smile.

  He gets out his laptop and spends the next fifteen minutes tapping away, his brow furrowed.

  I relax back into my thoughts, trying the puzzle pieces one by one.

  ‘Do you have to work all night?’ asks the stranger.

  ‘Pretty much,’ I say.

  My phone rings. Isaacs.

  I give the stranger an apologetic look. ‘Hello,’ I say, my voice cracking.

  ‘Woodstock. Fleet tells me you went home sick today?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I need you in here tomorrow,’ he continues, his voice firm. ‘Let’s meet at 11 am. There are a few things we need to discuss. I assume you will be feeling up to it?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I say as he hangs up.

  This is it, I think. An icy terror fills me from the feet upwards.

  ‘Everything okay?’ asks the man.

  ‘What?’ I reply. I’d forgotten he was there.

  ‘You look like you need a drink.’ He puts his laptop on the coffee table and leans forward, his intent clear. ‘Let me get you one. Maybe we can take a break from work for a while.’

  ‘I don’t want a drink,’ I hiss, grabbing my notebook and standing up.

  ‘Fuck, lady,’ he says, reeling backwards, his mouth in a nasty sneer. ‘I just wanted to buy you a drink. There’s no need to turn into a frigid cow.’

  As I walk away, he mutters, ‘Stupid bitch.’

  Saturday, 1 September

  10.32 am

  The online news is abuzz with the break in the Jacoby case. Josh’s face fills TV screens, his head down as he exits the station the day before. Shots of Jacoby outside his Toorak mansion shooing away the press are also played on a loop. Washed clean, the city welcomes the looming scandal, with Ginny’s death apparently considered a worthwhile exchange for the salacious events.

  Another article details Lizzie’s new part in The Street. ‘The Most Challenging Role of Her Life’ reads the headline, with a picture of her at Wade’s funeral, crying as his coffin is carried past.

  Sitting down at my desk, I stare straight ahead at my reflection in the black of the computer screen. I feel oddly calm.

  In contrast, Nan is like a hungry spider, ready to pounce on Jacoby and devour him whole at the first opportunity. Her phone is glued to her ear as she paces the carpet outside Isaacs’ office, her eyes gleaming. Calvin is also on the phone and sits at his desk radiating a similar inner glow despite his pale complexion. It’s the special shine you get when you’re close to solving a case and holding the last few puzzle pieces in your hand.

  Fleet is nowhere to be seen, for which I am grateful.

  The time is dragging. I just want to get my confrontation with Isaacs over with.

  Chloe appears around the corridor and rushes toward me, hands on her belly. ‘Do you have a moment?’ she asks.

  ‘Just a few minutes,’ I say, glancing at Isaacs’ closed office door.

  We head to the case room and she shuts the door behind us. ‘I think it’s the same ring,’ she says excitedly. ‘I found three photos of Jenny Short where you can see her hands. Look.’ She lays them out.

  Jenny was a nice-looking woman with an enthusiastic eighties haircut. In two of the photos, she has her arms around two toddlers and I recognise Lizzie and her brother. Both images are grainy, lifted from a newspaper article about her seaside-based artworks. It’s hard to see her ring.

  ‘That’s when she was still married to Lizzie’s dad, before he walked out on the family,’ Chloe explains. ‘And look at this one.’ She points to the third photo, this one in colour: Jenny is on a community stage receiving some kind of prize. Clearly visible is the engagement ring that Sterling gave Lizzie Short.

  I breathe out air from deep in my lungs and lock eyes with Chloe.

  ‘Take this to Detective Fleet,’ I say to her.

 
She looks confused. ‘Don’t you want to tell him?’

  I hesitate before saying, ‘I’m tied up with something else right now. You help him out today. See if you can check Kit Short’s alibi for the Wade attack—he told us he was about to get on a plane for a work trip, but I don’t know if this was ever confirmed. Find out if there’s any evidence that he had tickets or was at the airport.’

  ‘Okay.’ She nods, pulling herself tall. ‘Leave it with me.’

  ‘Thanks, Chloe,’ I say with a genuine smile. ‘I appreciate your help.’

  Alone in the case room, I feel annoyed that I never looked into Kit’s alibi, but there’s nothing that can be done about that now. I take a few deep breaths before I turn my back on the photos of the dead men and head toward Isaacs’ office.

  ‘Come in!’ he barks after I knock.

  I take a seat and place my hands neatly in my lap.

  ‘Well, Woodstock, this is less than ideal.’

  ‘I know,’ I say.

  ‘I admire your gumption but I’m sure you know this wasn’t the best way to go about it.’

  I fix my eyes on his face and try to understand. ‘No, sir,’ I say.

  He comes around his desk and leans back against it, folding his arms across his chest. ‘Fleet explained the situation, said you’d made yourself sick with worry over it. Now, there are a few ways we can spin this, which we’re still working through. But I want to be clear: I am not comfortable with your vigilante efforts. You should have shared your suspicions and the information you had on the Jacoby witness with Nan and Calvin. They were the leads. And you put yourself in danger, which I’m not pleased about either.’

  I nod, trying to breathe. Fleet has somehow made it look like I was onto Josh the whole time and had taken it upon myself to go undercover, to placate him into a confession.

  ‘This obviously won’t be the last of it,’ Isaacs continues, ‘but, as you know, the physical evidence is extremely poor, so Josh Evans’s statement is critical. It’s a good outcome, Woodstock, despite the method.’ ‘Thank you, sir,’ I say, feeling dazed.

  ‘For now I suggest you keep your head down and focus on Wade. Find that missing Kent kid. And look after yourself. There are a lot of people around here who can help you if you need it. You need to get better at knowing your limits.’ He gives me a meaningful look. ‘Just something to think about.’

  Leaving his office, I feel disconnected from everyone around me and so overwhelmed with rage that I think for a moment I will be sick.

  How dare Fleet confuse everything like this?

  I sit at my desk for over an hour doing little more than stare at the screen. Restless, I stand up with a flourish and then pause, unsure what to do next. There’s no case meeting today. I look over at Fleet’s desk, which is crowded with mugs and half-drunk water bottles. A folded newspaper lies across the keyboard, a sliver of a photo showing. From this angle, I can’t tell whether the blond head in the image belongs to Sterling or Josh.

  I head into the tearoom to make a coffee. I flick through the latest news updates as the kettle boils. ‘Ava James Returns Home from Nightmare Film Shoot’ screams a headline. When I click the link, a video pops up of several burly men trying to keep a huddle of reporters at bay as Ava leaves LAX, dark sunglasses wrapped around her face. ‘A total nightmare,’ she says in response to being asked about her time in Australia. In the article the journalist notes that James fell out with the film director after Wade’s death and accused him of assault, a charge that the actress has now decided to drop. ‘It was a big misunderstanding,’ she’s quoted as saying. ‘I just want to get on with my life.’

  I stir sugar into my coffee while I think, giving my brain the chance to play with all the pieces of information dangling in front of my eyes.

  I rinse the mug then head back to my desk to pull everything I can on Kit Short. I study his driver’s licence photo. He definitely looks like Lizzie, but without her glossy long hair he is plain. Forgettable.

  I wander back into the case room and check the latest hotline calls, which have dropped to fewer than ten a day. Scanning the log, I see that one of the zombie cast members was arrested for assault last night. Brodie’s phone and bank accounts remain untouched.

  The attack on Ava is bothering me. What motivated it? Is it linked to Wade’s death?

  Touching the side of my head, I trace the bruise as I recall the hands sliding down my body in the laneway. I shudder, knowing it could have been a lot worse. Did that have anything to do with Wade or was I just in the wrong place at the wrong time? I’m not sure why it seems so important to keep it a secret—perhaps I feel like enough of a victim already.

  Just as I go back to my desk and sit down, my phone rings.

  ‘Woodstock,’ I answer, seeing that it’s Chloe.

  ‘Hey,’ replies Fleet.

  I pause. ‘Hi,’ I say stiffly. ‘You’re with Chloe?’

  ‘I sure am,’ he says cheerily. ‘She’s driving right now. She’s a better driver than you, I think, at least so far. Anyway, I’m liking your ring theory. Makes sense.’

  I don’t respond.

  ‘So…’

  ‘So what?’ I reply, refusing to thank him for what he said to Isaacs.

  He clears his throat awkwardly. ‘Well, we looked into Kit Short’s travel plans based on his little airport clue. He definitely bought a return ticket to Sydney and checked into the flight online, but there’s no evidence that he was there that day.’

  ‘What about taxi receipts? Uber transactions? SkyBus?’

  ‘Still waiting on those,’ says Fleet. ‘But we did track down his boss, some big shot in IT at the security firm he works at. He says Kit didn’t apply for any annual leave that week and has no idea why he would have gone to Sydney. So it wasn’t anything to do with work. Kit finished his night shift at eight that morning.’

  My pulse quickens. ‘What do you think?’ I ask Fleet.

  ‘I’m not sure, I just wanted to get you across it all,’ he replies, and the way he says it makes me wish so badly that we could go back in time. ‘On paper he could be our guy, especially if he found out Sterling was screwing around on his sister. Problem is, he was working the nights when Miller was murdered and Miss Ava was shoved into the Yarra.’

  ‘Could he have left his workplace unnoticed?’ I ask. ‘How many people work that shift?’

  Fleet sighs. ‘Possibly. We need to look into it.’

  ‘Or maybe the incidents aren’t linked. He might just have found the knife that was used on Miller, and the attack on Ava was random like we originally thought.’

  ‘Dunno,’ says Fleet and I can tell he’s running his fingers through his hair. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t look like we’re about to find out. He’s not home.’

  ‘You’re at his house?’

  ‘Yep. There’s a bike out the front but no answer. He’s not at work today either but I’m thinking we might swing past his office and have a proper chat with his boss.’

  ‘Did you try Lizzie?’ I ask. ‘Maybe he’s with her. She mentioned he’s been staying at the apartment a lot lately.’

  ‘Lizzie’s not answering her phone but we’ll swing past her place after this. I think it’s time to bring her into the station. We’ve got more than enough evidence.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I say, readying myself for the awkwardness of the unavoidable goodbye.

  ‘Gemma?’ he says.

  ‘What?’ I snap.

  I hear him breathing. Picture him sitting in the passenger seat, legs spread, as he tries to work out what to say. ‘I was just wondering if you’ll be around later today.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Okay. Well, maybe we can catch up?’

  ‘I’ll be around,’ I repeat. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  I hang up before he can say anything else.

  Trying to shake the excruciating discomfort I now feel every time I interact with him, I flick through Ava’s original statement about Cartwright. I google the TV intervie
w she did on the day she was attacked and watch it through twice. She seems so confident and assured, nothing like the shell of a woman we spoke to at the hospital.

  I get up and go to the video suite. ‘Edo?’ I say, pushing open the door.

  ‘Yo, boss lady,’ he replies.

  ‘Did you get all that footage from around the Yarra the other night, when Ava James was attacked?’

  ‘Sure. Did.’ He drags the words out with an American drawl. ‘We’ve gone through it already. It doesn’t look like any dudes were following her. There’s just the guy in the hoodie—I sent you the freeze-frame of him already. He was hanging around the river when she was attacked. And there’s a chick and a couple who pop up a few times along the route Ava took. But I doubt they’re good for this.’

  ‘Can you see the woman’s face?’ I ask him.

  ‘Not really. She has a scarf wrapped around her head. Not religious or anything—I think she was just freezing her arse off that night.’

  ‘Send it all to me, please,’ I say.

  ‘Your wish is my command.’ He snaps his fingers before they fly over his keyboard at an impressive speed.

  Saturday, 1 September

  3.37 pm

  Hours of footage and two coffees later, I am fairly certain: Katya March pushed Ava into the river. On the tape provided by the restaurant where Ava met her friends, I spotted Katya and a friend drinking cocktails at the bar. Katya was tucked away behind a large column but she knew Ava was there—she kept throwing looks her way. Katya left long before Ava. The sharp jut of her hips is recognisable on the shadowy figure watching from a doorway opposite the restaurant as Ava exits with her friends at around 10.15 pm. The same figure appears on another stretch of footage recorded about twenty minutes later, walking a block behind her. The woman’s face is obscured by the scarf Edo mentioned, but I’m almost positive it’s Katya.

  Emerging from the small meeting room I’ve been holed up in, I go to the case room to see if Chloe and Fleet are back but I can’t find them anywhere.

  Knowing I don’t have the energy to deal with Katya today, I tell two uniforms to arrange to bring her in first thing tomorrow.