by Jaye Ford
Deanne’s eyebrows rose, the significance just dawning. ‘The police gave you his phone?’
‘The police have been looking for it. It was mailed to his seven-year-old son. Kate Walsh picked it up from the post office this morning.’ A brand name appeared on its glass face: the first steps in powering up.
‘Jesus, Jax.’ There was something close to accusation in Deanne’s tone.
‘No, I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you’re thinking. I told Kate what happened to Nick’s stuff. Hold on.’ There was a keypad on the screen asking for a password. She found Kate’s number in her own phone, typed a text: I need a password. Any ideas?
Jax glanced at Deanne as she sent it. She was holding to their deal but not enjoying it. Maybe she deserved more. ‘Kate said there were photos on the phone but she wasn’t ready to look at them. It was sent to Scotty – I thought Brendan might’ve left a message for them.’
‘It’s part of an investigation, Jax.’
‘Exactly. Kate should get to see it.’
‘What are you doing with it?’
‘I’m going to set up an internet storage account for Kate, save the photos, look for a message and give the phone back to her.’ Her mobile buzzed. ‘And you’re not going to talk me out of it.’
Deanne didn’t try. She sat quietly while Jax tapped in the numbers Kate had sent, swiped the face and pulled in a sharp breath as the screen filled with colour.
‘Is that him?’ Deanne tucked a long rope of dark hair behind her ear and leaned closer.
‘Yes.’
Icons were scattered over the photo but it was clear enough. Brendan, Kate and Scotty, somewhere sunny and green. Not just smiling but happy, as though the picture had captured a moment of sheer joy. Brendan was at the top, his arms encircling his family. Protective, supportive, loving.
‘What the hell happened, Brendan?’ Jax murmured.
Deanne reached out, laid fingers on Jax’s forearm. ‘This, the phone, Kate Walsh, it’s about Nick.’
‘You want to make that point as I prepare to tamper with evidence?’
Deanne lifted a hand, held it up like surrender. ‘I’m not trying to stop you.’
‘I get it, Deanne. I see myself in Kate. I see Zoe in her son. Brendan was killed on the road and no-one knows what happened to him. The parallels are flashing at me in neon … and I still want answers.’
‘Why, Jax? I mean, I get it with Nick. But why this guy? It won’t change anything.’
Jax rubbed at her forehead, irritated to be explaining herself when the explanation she wanted might be in her hand. ‘It will, don’t you see? I won’t be the person walking away without a scratch. I won’t be the fallout or the consequence or the unfortunate side effect.’ She stopped, wanting to end it there, but she had Brendan’s phone in her hand. ‘I couldn’t help him. I tried, I held on to his hands but he ripped them away from me. I couldn’t help Nick either, or … or Mum and Dad. But I can do this. I can ask questions for him. For all of them. Have something to give to Zoe or to Kate Walsh. To myself. I want to move on, Deanne, but I refuse to go without making some noise.’
47
Something shimmered in Deanne’s eyes – tears and … hesitation. Maybe she was deciding whether to debate it. Jax didn’t wait to find out. She swiped through Brendan’s screens, checking the icons for something obvious. There were the standard apps for making calls and sending texts, taking and storing photos, access to email and internet, jotting down notes, and a calendar. Plus a few extras: a torch, a fitness schedule, Skype and rugby league scores. Aside from the sport and running, it looked a lot like her own set of icons.
Jax tapped the one for his texts, ran her eyes down the list of recent senders. Kate’s name was at the top. Hugh’s was there, too. Also ‘Marty’ – the Marty he knew from the army? None from Dominic Escott. None from Nina Torrence.
‘No unopened messages from Kate,’ Jax told Deanne, taking her silence for curiosity, if not support. ‘So sometime between Sunday morning and Monday when he – or someone – put the phone in a post bag, Brendan saw Kate’s texts.’
‘Does that mean something?’
‘That he had enough reception and battery power to receive them. That he was accessing his phone. That he wasn’t texting Kate back.’ Jax shook her head. ‘I suppose he could’ve given the phone to someone else and they were checking his messages. I don’t know – except that if I wanted to leave someone a message on my own phone, I’d probably write it and leave it as a draft.’
She touched Kate’s name on the screen. A series of texts in cartoon speech bubbles came up. The last one first, Kate to Brendan: Try again. Pls. Or txt. Pls. Miss u XXX. Even in texting shorthand, there was an edge of desperation.
Jax scrolled through, finding a dozen more from Kate before there were any by Brendan. The last time he texted his wife was early on Saturday morning: Shld b home by 5. Talk to u then. Jax pointed to it. ‘He drove up from Melbourne on Saturday – he must have sent this before he left.’
Deanne watched her a second, more hesitation, maybe realising just how much Jax knew. ‘No drafts?’
‘No. Let’s try emails.’ Swiping and tapping at the screen, she said, ‘He might have sent it to himself if he thought Kate would have access through his phone.’ Except all she got was a request for a password. ‘I’ll text Kate again.’ She picked up her own mobile and held Brendan’s out to Deanne. ‘You try his notes.’
Deanne snatched her hands away. ‘I’m not putting my fingerprints on it.’
She had a point. ‘Okay.’ Jax swapped the phones around. ‘You be me and write a text asking for an email password. I’ll check his notes.’
As Deanne typed, Jax found Brendan’s app for notes, touched the screen, touched it again on the first note in the list – and the chill of an ugly memory scuttled through her.
‘Whoa,’ she whispered.
Deanne hit send, glanced across. ‘What the hell?’
The notes application was designed to look like a page from an exercise book. The one Jax had opened was pale blue with fine dark lines. There were about twenty on the screen and each one had the same words written on it: I didn’t know.
She scrolled the page up – the mantra continued for a few lines more. She swallowed, rolled her lips together. ‘He said that in the car. Over and over. Just sobbing and saying he didn’t know.’
‘He was crying?’
‘I thought he was going to shoot himself but he just hung his head and cried.’
‘What didn’t he know?’
Jax lifted her shoulders and let them drop. ‘He thought there was something stuck in his head. When he was crying, I wondered if it was something he knew or saw, maybe something he did that wouldn’t stop going around and around.’ She thought of Nina Torrence – stabbing a woman and hefting her over a cliff would stick in your head.
‘Maybe that’s the message for his wife. That he didn’t know,’ Deanne suggested.
‘I hope not because it makes no sense. Not on its own.’
Jax found the index for his saved notes, saw they were sorted by time, with the most recent at the top. She brought up the next one. It was the same but different. I didn’t know was repeated for half a page but the words were messed up: spaces in the wrong places, apostrophes replaced with quote marks or just missing, as though he was mis-hitting keys. Twice, the sentence wasn’t finished.
‘Maybe he was in a hurry when he wrote this one,’ Jax said. ‘Or panicking and trying to get it down as fast as he could.’
‘Or losing touch with reality.’
‘He wrote it again without mistakes.’
‘You think that makes a difference?’
‘Okay, but it started somewhere. It meant something.’ She tapped on the next note. Lots of repetitions, different words – and they made Jax feel like her stomach was trying to rise up through her throat. Nina Torrence. Over and over. Like a nano spider breeding in his head.
‘Nina Torrence? What
the hell?’ Deanne said.
‘Brendan did some work for Nina –’
‘And what? He heard what happened to her and wrote her name over and over? And you thought he wasn’t losing touch.’
‘Did Russell tell you about the photo?’
‘Yeah. He said you didn’t know if it was him.’
‘I lied. It was Brendan. Which means he was with Nina on Saturday night.’
‘Jesus, Jax. He might have killed her.’
‘Yeah.’ Saying it out loud made her mouth go dry. ‘Something happened between Saturday evening and Monday afternoon when he got in my car. Something that made him go a little crazy.’
‘A little crazy. She was stabbed and tossed off a cliff, for God’s sake. If he did this, he was more than a little crazy. And you’re bloody lucky he didn’t just kill you and dump your body by the motorway.’
‘He didn’t, though. He didn’t hurt me at all.’
‘Have you heard the latest on Nina?’ Deanne’s question sounded like a reprimand.
‘No, what?’
‘I don’t know the source and possibly it’s bullshit but I heard she was pregnant.’
Jax’s eyebrows lifted as though they were on strings.
Deanne nodded. ‘Only ten weeks.’
Which meant if Brendan killed Nina, he’d killed her baby, too. ‘Oh, God.’ Jax lifted a hand to her mouth. Brendan had been Nina’s bodyguard at Christmas parties. Weeks ago. How many weeks? Had he killed his own baby?
‘What?’
‘I thought Brendan might have slept with Nina. If the baby was his and someone found out about it, he might have …’ What?
‘Killed her and run?’
‘Why kill her? Why not just run?’
‘You’ve seen what he wrote. Pretty sure he wasn’t thinking logically.’
‘Yes, but …’ Jax didn’t continue. She opened the next note.
It was a single line: 17 Walker St, Woollahra.
The next one: Nina Torrence. 7 pm pick-up. Home address.
Jax went back to the previous one. ‘Is that Nina’s address?’
‘No. Her house is in Bronte. Been reading about it all week.’
Jax checked the time code on the address. ‘This note was created at 22.06 on Saturday. Ten pm, presumably when Nina was at the party and he was working for her. Being a bodyguard or chauffeur. What does that mean?’
‘Someone gave him an address and he wrote it down?’
Jax thought about complicated arrangements for a rendezvous. ‘Maybe Nina gave him the address. Can you look it up on the laptop? I’m going to check his phone log.’
Deanne didn’t move.
‘What?’ Jax asked.
‘I thought you were just looking for a message to Kate and downloading photos.’
Jax hesitated, said it anyway. ‘Don’t you want to know?’
‘Well, I do now, no thanks to you. But …’ Deanne twisted her lips – maybe-it’s-a-bad-idea.
‘I’ve already opened a dozen files.’
‘With Kate’s permission.’
‘Does that make a difference?’
Deanne shrugged. ‘No idea.’
‘Will the police know if I’ve looked at logs?’
‘Still no idea.’
Jax checked the time. It was 12.28. She’d told Kate she’d be an hour or two with the phone. It was fifty minutes since she’d dropped her off and the photo download could take a while. ‘All right, I’ll set up the internet storage and get the photos moving, then I’ll check the log and you can leave the room if you want.’
‘If you’re going to do it, I’m staying to read over your shoulder.’
‘Good. In the meantime, you look up that address.’
Brendan had several hundred photos in his gallery, but he hadn’t taken one for three weeks. The last one was a selfie of him and Scotty, squinting and grinning, their hair wet, both their noses covered in white zinc, the surf behind them on a glorious day. Maybe the last time he was in Newcastle. He didn’t look like a man who was having an affair – or who could kill a pregnant woman. Didn’t look anything like he had in Jax’s car, either.
She scrolled further, looking for pictures of Nina Torrence. If he was having an affair, it didn’t mean he was smart enough not to take photos. Jax knew two people who’d found evidence of ‘the other woman’ on a phone and another who’d been caught out. But no pictures of Nina leapt out as she whizzed through.
Jax set up an internet storage account, using her own email address and assigning a password that she’d give to Kate later – something anxious and uneasy gathering in her chest as she tapped at the keyboard. ‘I wish Nick was here to tell me where to look,’ she finally said out loud. ‘He’d know how to make sense of this. I haven’t made sense of anything since …’ Nick was gone. She glanced at Brendan’s phone. Maybe it was right there and she didn’t know how to find it. Maybe she couldn’t without …
‘Nick was hopeless with this kind of thing,’ Deanne said.
‘What do you mean? It was his job.’
‘Nick was good with stats and systems and hard data. He was hopeless about people. Without a trail, he just assumed everyone would make the same decisions he would. This,’ she pointed at the mobile, ‘is about people and that’s what you know.’
‘Then I’ve been out of it too long because Brendan is not what I thought he was.’
‘What did you think he was?’
‘A good guy.’
‘He held a gun to your head.’
‘I know. He was desperate, he loved his wife and child and he wanted to protect them. He wanted to protect me, too.’
‘He tried to drag you into the traffic.’
She closed her eyes, remembered Brendan hauling on her arms, wrenching her towards the road, the cops careering in behind them. Come on. We can still make it from here. ‘Not to hurt me. He thought he was saving me.’ She hit the key to start the download, walked to the windows and stared into the courtyard.
Was he good and bad?
‘The Woollahra address is a townhouse complex,’ Deanne said. ‘Very nice townhouses, according to Google Earth. Gardens, pool, security gate, looks like underground parking.’
Jax thought about it, turned around. ‘Is that where Dominic Escott lives?’
‘Escott in a townhouse? Are you kidding? He’s got a gobsmacking mansion in Vaucluse.’ Deanne paused, frowned. ‘Jax, no. If that’s where this is going, you’ve got to stop now. Give the phone to Kate and back away.’
Deanne didn’t need to explain. The Escotts were big fish – the high-profile politician father, one son the head of a multi-million dollar business with friends of questionable repute, the other recently making headlines when fraud charges were unexpectedly dropped.
Jax chewed her lip. Nina was having an affair with Dominic Escott. Nina was dead. So was Brendan.
She leaned on the window. Brendan was with Nina the night she died. He thought people were after him. Nina’s ‘people’ were the Escotts – or at least Dominic. Were they after him? If Brendan killed Nina, then yes, it was possible one or more of the family might want vengeance.
Brendan made tea and toast for Nina and she told him things. Personal things about being unhappy and wanting to marry her lover. Had she told him other things, about the Escotts? It was likely they all had secrets. Brendan had signed a confidentiality agreement; Nina felt she could talk freely. Except it wasn’t only Nina who’d wanted her secrets kept safe. Dominic Escott had insisted on the document.
Kate said Brendan felt sorry for Nina. Brendan died attempting to protect Kate and Scotty. What if Brendan hadn’t killed Nina? What if he’d filled a page with her name because …
‘Jax? Did you hear me?’
‘Yes.’ She pushed herself off the glass. ‘I’ll give the phone to Kate as soon as the download finishes. I just want to check the call log.’
Deanne huffed a sigh, pursed her lips, didn’t say anything until Jax reached for Brendan’s mo
bile on the table. ‘That’s yours.’
Looking at the twin phones side-by-side, she heard Brendan in her head again. How the fuck did you get this? ‘I should take the cover off mine so I can tell the difference.’ She picked it up, started to push at the rubber, and stopped. Dropped her eyes to the one still on the table.
Brendan’s. Sent to Scotty, not Kate. A seven-year-old. Who took toys apart. Not only toys. He takes everything apart, Kate had said.
Jax put her phone down, picked up Brendan’s, fingers fumbling at the rubber. The covers were meant to be a snug fit so they didn’t come off easily – and this one was doing its job, holding on like a claw. She got a thumbnail under a top corner, stretched it up and over, dragged at the other side, peeled it back, looked inside … and adrenaline tingled in the tips of her fingers.
Stark against the black rubber was a slip of white paper.
48
Jax dragged the phone cover all the way off, saw the paper was a shop receipt, folded in half with the printing on the outside, thin enough for her to see the bleed of blue ink from something written on the inside.
Picking it up with fingertips, Jax opened it out. The receipt was from a post office: long and wide, lots of information she didn’t need – time and date, tax, terms and … It was for a padded bag and postage. Handling it carefully, heart hammering in her throat, Jax turned it over. The other side was covered with the scrawl of tiny handwriting, crammed tight with letters and abbreviations as though the author knew from the start there was a lot to get down in limited space. Jax held it closer, squinted. It wasn’t the repetitions on Brendan’s phone – and it started with, I fucked up, Katey …
Jax slid her eyes to the bottom right corner. The final words were squashed together as the space ran out: I love u, B x
‘It’s from him.’ Jax’s voice was hoarse around the lump in her throat.
Deanne was at her shoulder. ‘Should we read it?’
‘Absolutely.’ Jax picked up her phone first, though, wrote a text to Kate: I found something u should see. I’ll b at yr place in 15. Then she sat at the table with Deanne and squinted at the paper.