The Vet from Snowy River

by Stella Quinn

  ‘I was wondering if you fancied having lunch later? Maybe a picnic down at Googong?’ She pulled his glasses away from his nose so he wouldn’t miss the saucy look she was giving him. ‘I’ve bought myself a new bikini that I am pretty sure you are going to want to see.’

  ‘Um-hmm,’ he said.

  His phone was more interesting than the promise of a bikini? She must be losing her mojo. Perhaps an update on her investigation would spark his interest?

  ‘Hopefully there’ll be someone who doesn’t hate me on duty. Some of the staff were pretty cheesed off after my first opinion piece was published. I don’t think they understood it wasn’t them I was angry with. It was the system. A casual workforce, no continuity of care … I mean, it’s just so poorly managed.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Be interesting to see if they’ve read today’s article yet.’

  ‘Yeah, er … Vera, look, I didn’t want to get into this now, but I’d better tell you—’

  She’d cut him off, too wrapped up in her own thoughts and agenda. ‘Speaking of, what time does your Sunday paper come?’

  Aaron was pulling on his jeans. ‘You know, this is all you talk about now, Vera.’

  She’d paused then. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Your aunt, old people, staff-to-patient ratios. It’s starting to give me the shits, if I’m honest.’

  ‘My worry for my aunt, who is potentially being neglected by the people who are being paid to mind her, is giving you the shits?’

  He’d shrugged.

  ‘And my investigation? My exposé on the aged care industry that you were all supportive and gung-ho about, is that giving you the shits too, now?’

  ‘Vera, honey, let’s not overreact.’

  ‘This is not me overreacting, Aaron. This is me getting angry. Getting upset. Getting let down.’

  ‘I just think we’ve all had enough of drama and bad news stories. I think the South Coast Morning Herald needs some levity at the moment.’

  ‘Fluff pieces.’

  ‘Hey, I don’t answer to you, Vera, I answer to the shareholders. If they want levity in the Sunday issue, they get levity, all right?’

  ‘But Aaron … I thought you were with me on this.’

  The look on his face made it clear he wasn’t with her at all. A horrid thought struck her. ‘Wait a minute. Did you even print my story this week?’

  He came around to her side of the bed, where she was flinging back pillows and doonas and twisted damn sheets and trying to get the hell up. ‘Vera, listen—’

  She ignored him. She hauled on her jeans and t-shirt and took off for the front door of his house. There, safely wrapped in plastic against the dew of dawn, was the Sunday paper. She ripped through the layers of plastic and flicked through the pages. Sports, furniture advertisements, the national stories they printed on syndication from the big city papers … but on her page, where the article she’d laboured over for days should have been, was an advertisement.

  For Acacia View Aged Care.

  Where care and respect, she read wrathfully through the tears in her eyes, comes first.

  She could feel him standing behind her on his front step, and she looked up. ‘What the actual heck, Aaron?’

  ‘I had to make a choice, Vera. The newspaper needs the advertising revenue, and when Chris Sykes contacted me—’

  ‘You’ve been cosying up with the general manager of Acacia View and you didn’t even tell me?’

  ‘I haven’t been cosying, as you put it. I’ve been running a newspaper. Which means earning money through advertisements so we can pay your wages, and not pissing off the businesses in town who are keen to advertise with us.’

  ‘So you threw my article under the bus for financial gain, is that it?’

  ‘It was a good business decision.’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘Wait … how did Chris even know I was running a second article? The one that should be in this newspaper, today, where I discussed my aunt’s care at Acacia View?’

  Aaron raised his hands as though he was placating a wild beast. ‘Come on back inside, Vera. We need to talk about this.’

  ‘Correction. I need to talk about this. I need to talk to whichever newspaper in this country still gives a damn about reporting facts fearlessly. Which was it, Aaron? Did you squeeze an advert out of them in return for not running my article? Or did they squeeze you? I bet that was it, wasn’t it? Where’s your damn spine?’

  ‘Are you threatening me, Vera?’

  ‘I’m promising you, Aaron, the way I promised my aunt I would campaign for change. And unlike you, I keep my word.’

  Of course that was when he sacked her. She’d been barefoot on the front step of his house and he’d pulled her job out from under her feet.

  The prosecution charge came later, after Aaron ratted her out to his new best buddy Chris Sykes by telling him she’d hidden a camera in her aunt’s room at Acacia View.

  That had been when her belief in herself disintegrated.

  Sue dug a lacquered talon into her leg and it snapped her back into the present. ‘You’re up,’ she hissed.

  ‘We’ll now hear the matter of Vera De Rossi,’ said the magistrate. ‘Is Vera in the courtroom?’

  She stood up. ‘Yes, Your Honour.’

  ‘The charge against you is brought about by private prosecution; do you understand what that means?’

  ‘Yes. The police haven’t charged me with an offence, instead a private citizen has done so.’

  ‘Do you understand that the Department of Public Prosecutions can step in at any stage and take over prosecuting these charges?’

  ‘Yes, Your Honour.’

  ‘And you have legal representation, I see.’

  She was beginning to feel like a parrot—an anxious parrot in a black wool dress slightly moth-eaten on one sleeve. ‘Yes, Your Honour.’

  ‘You have been charged with a crime under the Surveillance Devices Act of 2007, namely installing a listening device to record a private conversation. How do you plead?’

  She swallowed. This was it, the crossing of the line. ‘I plead not guilty, Your Honour.’

  The magistrate nodded. ‘Trial date will be set in due course. Dismissed. The court will take a short recess and be back in session at ten am.’

  ‘Okay, that’s done, let’s go,’ said Sue.

  ‘That’s it? So quick?’

  ‘That’s court for you. Wait six hours for a two-second appearance. Come on, you can buy me a coffee and we can begin our two-day strategy blitz.’

  ‘Can we wait a moment? Just until Aaron and Sykes get clear of the building. I can’t face them.’

  ‘Vera, my pet, my love, my girl. A word of advice.’

  Oh heck. Sue was going to make her be brave.

  ‘You’ve got to look at that dickhead ex-boyfriend of yours, and look hard, Vera. Get used to it. The more you face him, the easier it will be for you, and guess what?’

  ‘What?’ She whispered it, because the court clerk was frowning at them.

  ‘Here’s the icing on the cake bit … the more you look at him, really look, the harder it’s going to be for him. That’s the thing about being a scumbag. Deep down inside, below that reptilian part of his brain where his advertising revenue means more to him than his self-respect, he knows he’s just a scumbag now. And you looking at him is going to remind him of that every time. Use that power, Vera.’

  Crap. Okay, she could do this. She stood up, turned, and her eyes looked straight into his dark brown ones.

  His hair was short, almost soldier short, and his suit snappy, as though he’d ditched journalism to sell upscale real estate. The other thing that struck her was how … weak he seemed. As though the outer slickness was a showy cover to stop people seeing the lack of substance beneath. She tried to imagine him running into a burning building to bundle baby animals into his pockets and snorted. He’d never do it. Not for an animal, not for a person. Never for her.

  Their relationship had sparked into e
xistence shortly after Aaron moved to the newspaper. Flowers, drinks, a crazy Sunday date laughing their way through food trucks and music gigs at a local brewery open day. Promises hadn’t been spoken, vows hadn’t been said … but promises could be made in other ways, and she’d made them; thought he’d made them in return. When she made breakfast for a guy in her sun-filled apartment, wearing nothing but his shirt, she was promising ‘I care for you’. She thought she was being promised ‘you can trust me’ in return. Why else give her flowers? Hold her hand on afternoon walks through Tallaganda National Park? Plait her hair, cook her risotto, bring her almond croissants from a bakery all the way over in Canberra?

  He’d not meant any of it.

  Vera wiped her damp palms on her skirt. ‘Okay, eye contact made, but I think that’s my bravery just about worn through, Sue. Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘You got it.’

  CHAPTER

  26

  ‘Thanks for meeting us, Sergeant King,’ said Josh. ‘I didn’t get a chance to speak to you at the fire, but Tom Krauss speaks highly of you. I’ve lived away for the last decade and a half. Old Reg Grady was in charge of the Hanrahan Police Station when I left.’

  ‘Call me Meg. Old Reg still pops in to the police station from time to time and brings a batch of biscuits he’s made himself. He likes to talk war stories about the good old days when no-one had mobile phones and the tracks up past Crackenback were so bad in winter he had to go on horseback.’

  ‘He was a good guy.’

  ‘He was a drunk for the last ten years he was in office and used to pat the office staff on the backside according to Kev Jones. He wouldn’t last a day on my watch.’

  ‘Good on you,’ said Hannah.

  Josh crossed his ankles under the picnic bench in the park where he and Hannah and the sergeant had arranged to meet. He was beginning to understand why Tom had suggested he call Meg King. She might look like a sweet-as-sugar tuckshop mum, but she had the flat-eyed stare of a street cop.

  ‘We want to talk about the fire,’ he said. ‘Lorraine told us it was no accident.’

  ‘Have you seen the fire brigade’s preliminary report?’

  ‘Yeah, Lorraine rang us this morning. She said it was too soon for definitive results, but she could give me the gist of what they discovered last night. Deliberately lit, but no accelerant. Some weird pyrotechnic device was found in the ground floor.’

  ‘Yep. First I’ve seen like that. Your garden variety arsonists want a light show, but they also want destruction. Your fire was different.’

  ‘There’s plenty of destruction in the front room.’

  ‘Yes, the reception area behind the plate glass windows was ground zero all right. Smashed glass, lit device chucked in, and the pyrotechnic device thrown in with it. So the flooring and furniture caught alight, window treatments, doors, skirting, paperwork—enough to cause you a lot of heartache, but not enough to destroy the building. The pyrotechnic device made the blaze look far worse than it was—like a firework in a contained space.’

  ‘It’s nuts, all of it.’

  Meg opened the file she had in front of her. ‘That’s not the most nuts thing.’

  ‘It’s not?’

  ‘I spoke to the dispatchers at emergency after I read your statement. You said Graeme Sharpe, the café manager from The Billy Button Café, put in the first call to triple zero.’

  ‘That’s right. He had a sense something was up; we arrived just after the blaze started.’

  She nodded. ‘Thing is, Josh, he wasn’t the first to call it in.’

  He scratched his head. ‘Crap. The arsonist?’

  ‘We think so.’

  ‘Because he—’

  ‘Or she.’

  He grinned, for what felt like the first time in days. He wished Poppy had been by his side to hear the sergeant correct him. Equality for all, arsonists included. ‘Thank you, Meg. Because she or he wanted to make sure the building wasn’t destroyed in the fire?’

  ‘Bingo. Which brings me neatly to the other nuts thing.’

  He raised his eyebrows at Hannah, who shrugged.

  ‘Why,’ said Sergeant King, ‘have I been the lucky recipient of a Crime Stoppers call, suggesting that the owner of the Cody and Cody Vet Clinic might have burned their own building down?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something to do with’—Meg’s eyes dropped to a printed page in her folder—‘sour grapes because of a refused building permit.’

  ‘No freaking way,’ he said.

  Hannah was shaking her head. ‘That bloody council. What is up with them?’

  Meg frowned. ‘What do you mean? Have you had other problems before this?’

  ‘Er, sure. A few nuisance complaints have been coming our way. They seem trivial, but we have to address them, or our business licence renewal is under threat. It’s been a headache, but it’s not been a problem. Some animal activist who doesn’t like us working with farm animals, perhaps, wanting to stir up a bit of trouble.’

  ‘You want to tell me why this is the first I’m hearing of it?’

  ‘We were frustrated, sure,’ said Hannah, ‘but we didn’t think anything illegal was happening, so we didn’t think to call the cops.’

  ‘Harassing law-abiding people in Hanrahan is always my business. The fire just makes it more so.’ Meg looked down at her notebook. ‘I’ll have to investigate the claim that you torched your own building. I’ll need alibis, a copy of your planning permit and so on. What about these nuisance complaints, have you got copies of those?’

  ‘I can drop them round to the station.’ A thought struck him. ‘I’ve just remembered something. When the refusal came in, I rang a mate, an experienced developer. He’s working on my objection letter for me. He told me—but I’d forgotten about it—that objections to a development proposal are public documents. Somewhere at the council office there’s got to be a letter in from someone with a name on it.’

  Meg nodded. ‘It’s a start, and until we get forensics back on the clinic fire, it’s the only lead we’ve got. You get the name, and if they give you any grief, you call me, all right?’

  ‘Will do.’

  He kept his eyes on the policewoman as she strode off back to her car. She was pursuing the arson investigation, his mate Frank was writing up his objection to council’s refusal, but what was he doing? Sitting here like a shag on a rock in a park in the middle of a workday with the charred ground floor of his building mocking him from fifty metres away.

  His eyes wandered from the Cody building, along Dandaloo to the art deco cinema, back to Salt Creek Flats Road where the stately three-storey Victorian buildings glowed in the midday sun. Holy sh—

  He cut his eyes across to his sister. ‘I’ve just had an idea.’

  ‘I hope it’s a good one.’

  It was. It absolutely was.

  ‘Some dickhead objects to our reno on the grounds of it being out of character.’

  ‘Yeah, I know this, Josh.’

  ‘Hear me out. I’m going to gather some ammunition of my own.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Between us, we know a lot of people in this town, right? Let’s speak to them. Let’s walk around the town park and ask the other business owners what they think of our plans. We’ll ask tourists, couples eating out at the winery, the people down by the lake queueing up for sunset cruises on the steamboat. I’ll show them my sketches of the restoration we’re planning, and ask them to send in their opinions to council.’

  ‘Sure, that’s going to help with the building permit, but is it going to stop this vendetta someone has against us?’

  He leaned forward and squeezed his sister’s arm. ‘That’s why we go public.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘What’s the one thing about Hanrahan that I was worried about when I came back here to live?’

  ‘Being outclassed in veterinary skills by your bad-ass little sister?’

  ‘Besides that.’ />
  ‘Gossip. Everyone knowing your private business and blabbing about it.’

  ‘Correct. And I was right to worry; the Hanrahan Chatter has splashed my personal life all over its column, and god knows what else. Well, guess what?’

  ‘I dread to think, but that evil smirk you’re wearing isn’t boding well for anyone in your path.’

  ‘I’m calling Maureen.’

  ‘Mrs Plover? Condom guardian and gossip columnist?’

  He gave his sister a wink. ‘The very same. I’m going to invite her to do an article on me and my mad heritage restoration skills currently being volunteered to restore the ceiling of Hanrahan’s community hall.’

  Hannah sat back on the bench seat. ‘Josh, that is brilliant. You can work in your plans for our building … share a bit of Cody history from the gold rush era … it’ll be like thumbing our noses at whoever this idiot is who thinks they can destroy our home from under us.’

  ‘Marking our territory,’ he said with relish. Finally, something he could do to protect his family. ‘You going to be okay if I spend a bit more time at the hall the next couple of days? The electrician’s done, so if I can get in there now and finish the project before I contact Maureen, she’s more likely to take the bait. Maybe I can persuade Marigold to perform a little ribbon-cutting ceremony or something.’

  ‘Sure. I’d offer to help, but I’ll be more use on the road visiting sick animals in their homes than mixing up plaster.’

  ‘Thanks. Last question: you know where I’ll find Kev this time of day? He and I have a deal going. I fix the hall ceiling, he does my archive research for me. I’m going to need that research done, too, if I want to track Maureen Plover down in her lair and convince her to direct her evil skillset towards a win for us.’

  Hannah grinned. ‘Kev will probably be down at the cemetery tending his roses. You tackle him and Mrs Plover, and I’ll go rearrange your appointments.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He pulled out his phone, found Marigold’s number, and typed in a message.