Birravale was sodden and calm, in the way rain seems to pat down energy as well as dust. Puddles, mud-filled potholes: water splashed up his doors as he drove. Chalk was streaked on the bakery sign, not yet corrected. Jack waited as the single traffic light blinked, looking over at the fuzzy, warm yellow light from the Royal. He shot past the turn to the B & B, and turned right into Lauren’s driveway. He parked out front. The house was dark, which was no surprise. He considered honking, but texted her instead. No reply. He looked in the backseat, itched.
After ten minutes he was ready to leave, when he saw her emerge, stride across the deck and open his passenger door. Jack realised he was messy, so he brushed the front of his jacket. Lauren climbed in and wrapped her arms around herself even though it wasn’t that cold. She looked pale, her eyes sunken. Like she hadn’t slept.
‘What do you want?’ she said.
‘I was wrong about James Harrison.’
‘Okay.’ Her fingers hunted the door handle. ‘Is that it?’
‘Did I do something?’
‘Fuck, Jack.’
‘What?’
‘That for me?’ She nodded to the back.
‘Just stuff.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I don’t . . .’ He realised he was gripping the steering wheel. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’
‘No shit.’
‘What happened? Here.’ In this car, he tried to say. Between us. But that sounded stupid. He didn’t know the words. Besides, there was no us. Just another fake connection, intimacy through a screen.
‘Of course it’s not James fucking Harrison.’
‘I know. You told me. I should have listened to you.’
‘Like I give a rats about you listening to me.’ Her voice rose and fell. ‘Goddamn it, Jack. The only thing I care about is that we’re running out of time.’
Jack didn’t know whether he saw it in her eyes or heard it in her tone but suddenly he understood. Winter had come out to her property and accused her brother again. He must have really scared her. And the only person in the whole country who was supposed to be on her side was off chasing stories at Long Bay.
‘You’re accusing people of Alexis’s murder, and it shows you don’t care what happened to Eliza. Or what happens to my family.’ She swallowed hard, and Jack saw the youth in her face. ‘Or what happens to me, Jack.’
James Harrison had motive for Alexis, but not for Eliza. By treating the murders separately, he was admitting that he still thought Curtis guilty of Eliza’s. He’s guilty, she’d said, days ago in her drive. He always will be. It doesn’t matter if he actually did anything or not. She didn’t know about the shoe like Jack did. Every new copycat they looked at rammed her family’s shame back at her. Once Andrew Freeman, or James Harrison, was out of the picture, Curtis Wade became a killer again.
And she was right, of course. They were running out of time. The older the case got, the likelier it remained unsolved. The more likely it hung around the Wade family, a collective noose. TV shows and podcasts aren’t on recent crimes, because as the stories age, so does the truth in them, bled out like the midday colour in this bleached-bright town. And you can play with that. Physical evidence decays. Conversely, and it doesn’t make sense, but memory can sharpen. Not because people remember better. But because as time wears through truth, there is less to contradict it. The real reason memory sharpens: because you can put it in hi-def, beam it into people’s lounge rooms, tell them what they believe.
But Lauren didn’t know Jack had one extra piece of evidence against Curtis. She didn’t know.
‘Lauren, four months ago —’ He felt tired. Light-headed. His stomach cramped. His acrobat had fallen, was drowning. He’d been eating more since he got to Birravale. Maybe it was because there was nothing to do but linger here, like the water on the road. Like festering potholes of wine. Or maybe it was because, in the ‘murder capital of the world’, he’d started to feel safe. Lauren was a part of that. Spit it out. She looked at him with a tilted head, tired eyes, lightly bloodshot. He ground his jaw. Realised he was gripping the wheel again, and said:
Nothing.
He couldn’t tell her. Not yet.
‘Four months ago?’ Lauren prompted.
Jack gave her a little. ‘I know you’re trying to see things from all sides, but I think you can’t. You’re blocking out the truth because it might hurt you. And it might. I understand. Four months ago, I felt the same. I was just trying to make a TV show.’
‘Now?’
‘Now I’m just trying to find the truth.’
‘Truth.’ She laughed, had enough, got out of the car. Her back was to him, but he still heard it. ‘Wow.’ It seemed for a second she would say nothing more, but then she leaned down, just before she swung the door closed, and said: ‘You hold that word out in front of you like a shield. And you don’t even know what it means.’
It comes out in order. Reversed. Like watching a movie of people going into a club, and then rewinding it. If you were really paying attention, you could pick through your day.
There, the banana muffin. That was last in, sitting on the cold rim of the bathtub. There, the bright orange of the cheesy salt-coated Doritos, the empty bag next to bright orange marks on the white sheets where he’d wiped his fingers. There, the brown of the chocolate he’d eaten while driving to Lauren’s. He’d brushed the flecks from the front of his coat when she’d entered the car. There, the scotch finger biscuits, shovelled in crumby handfuls before turning off the highway. No one in the servo had noticed his crinkling jacket, pockets full, as he signed for the food. The food he was paying for, anyway. No one looks twice when a grown man swipes snacks. They’re supposed to be better than that. Shoplifting is for women, apparently. Not a man’s crime. Not a man’s hands, knuckles scarred, shoving packets in his coat. The spaghetti now. Worms. Next, just spit and acid. A retching burn where the body wallows empty while the mind still tries to squeeze the last drop of sacrifice out of it. Eyes bloodshot, pushed against sockets. Ribs tight with pressure.
They call it a purge for a reason. With each piece of food he saw, Jack tried to vent the day, the week, the year, the life from him.
That’s what you do, isn’t it? You get people like me out of jail.
Thin ropes of cloudy spit hung from his lips, he wiped them away.
You hold that word out in front of you like a shield.
He flushed. Started again. Rewinding. Get it out.
Curtis’s guilt, laced up in his cupboard. Alexis’s hand. Soft and warm and alive.
The lies you can live with.
More. Harder. It’s not working if there isn’t pain. His fist was slicked and slimy as if freshly jellied, just birthed.
Whump.
Get it all out. Curtis. Alexis. Eliza. Dead women. Dead ends. His brother. Lauren. Andrew. His father. His brother. His brother. His brother.
Liam. In the hospital. Tubes rising out of him, bound up in a spider’s web. Bubbles coasting through the transparent plastic crisscrossed against the white of the hospital wall. A nurse coming in. Pouring a nondescript brown sludge into an upright cylinder, affixed at Liam’s hip, that sucked and gurgled as it slowly descended. Brown watermark stained on the plastic. Like filling oil in a car. After that, for the first time, food felt like paste in Jack’s mouth. No taste or colour or smell anymore. The shit that goes in, the same as the shit that comes out, just skipping a few steps. Tar to go down a chute: a throat or a tube. So he’d started avoiding it. Over-chewing. It worked. He and his brother decayed in tandem. It felt fair. Later, when people started to notice, and forced him to chew the paste into a swallow, he could always feel it inside him. Thick gunk. Remembered the brown sludge glugging down the tube. Had to get rid of it. That sludge. Unwelcome. Unwanted. His undeserved reward for still walking around. That sludge they’d literally poured into his brother.
That sludge that poured out of him now, small penance.
You’re never really
full, never really empty. There’s a point where it stops coming, though. Where your fingers dip the wooden bucket back into the well, but the bucket comes up empty. The bile and the spit has dried. But just because it stops coming out, doesn’t mean it’s not in there. Jack could feel it in his blood, in his breath. Still not empty. Something inside. No matter how hard the push. How dry the well. Sleep, maybe. Pass out, maybe. Wake fifteen minutes later, cold tile pressed to cheek. The smell of vomit settling into the room. Still there, that feeling. Not empty.
He hunted for more. Those half-finished packets. Those new ones. He’d thought about it and bought back-ups, reinforcements. Worse than the pre-planning was a trip back out to the all-night supermarket, if he was in Sydney. Out here it would be the petrol station. He didn’t think he did go back out there. But he couldn’t quite remember, now, because time had passed and there was more food and he was eating again. Because it was a cycle this, and putting more in let him get more out. Like filling a glass to float a dead bug to the rim. More in. More out. Maybe then he’d be empty. Never was. Never was.
That unachievable goal. To fill himself up enough to be hollow.
He ate a second time. Purged. Brushed his teeth. Slept. Done with it, he promised himself as he closed his eyes. You’ve slipped, but you’re okay. Once is fine. Two hours later, waking up, doing it all again. He ran out of food. Nothing left in this fucking place. He found some individually wrapped biscuits near the kettle. Fortune. He tried to remember if Mary-Anne had a fruit bowl on the table downstairs. Couldn’t. Knew he was too tired to drive. Nothing useful in the room except two biscuits and a bottle of ’61 Grange.
The bottle of Grange. That would fill him up. He got the corkscrew from the tea stand, near where he’d found the biscuits. Should he open it? It was too expensive. That would be wasteful. Waste. Like what they’d put into Liam – the stuff other people shit out. As if today was a day to take a stand on wastage. At his sickest, he was always poor. Every dollar on food. Either to fill himself up, or just to make his fridge look normal if people came over. Fancy stuff too. The best brands. A fridge full of it, turned over every week in large green bins. Just to be normal. The bottle of wine, it had no value to him.
Jack pulled out his phone. Googled the Grange as best he could, just out of curiosity. He felt weak and pseudo-drunk. Mistyped a few times. Got it up. Easy enough to find on an auction site. Three thousand. Okay. So not ten or twenty. But still, three grand. He turned the bottle over in his hand. The label was lightly yellowed. Old-fashioned type, like a newspaper. PENFOLDS splashed in cursive red across the top, bulletin type below. He chewed a biscuit, sludge in his gums. Fuck it, he thought, he’d promised not to sell it anyway.
He tilted the bottle at the toilet bowl in a grim cheers; they’d share it soon enough. Stripped the red seal that topped the neck, peeling it around in one go. Cork bare in the neck.
Three thousand. Part of his conscious brain kicked back in. Don’t open it. As if this expensive bottle was the last thinning twine that separated him from his old self. Four years sober. Fuck that. If that was what this represented, he was already doing shots, dancing on the bar. He plunged the corkscrew in. The cork came out easier than he’d expected for an old wine; he’d thought it would be soaked and swollen with time. Some of it sloshed down his knuckles. Fifty bucks, he said with a laugh. Raised the bottle to his lips. Drank as much as he could in a long swallow. Filled himself up.
His first thought was that the wine had turned. The environment had perhaps not been consistent enough. There was grit in his teeth, not the smoothness of the red Andrew had shared up the top of his silo. Of course, all wines are different. Maybe you weren’t supposed to slug it from the bottle. Of course you weren’t. That’s like taking a bite of a Black Angus standing in a field. Still. Something wasn’t right. Jack couldn’t tell the subtleties of the flavours in a regular bottle. But this bottle had no subtlety. There was something around the rim of the bottle, too. On the inside. Specks of dirt. Same as the grit in his teeth. Grit, dirt – $3000, his arse.
Something was definitely in the bottle. He pushed a finger in the neck and ran it around. It came out pale red, as if swished in bleeding gums – specks on the fingertip. Part of his brain knew this wasn’t right. Wasn’t supposed to be there.
Poison. Fuck.
How had he picked a poisoned bottle out of Andrew’s random selection? Did Andrew give him the bottle he pointed to? Or was there some sleight of hand? He tried to remember whether he’d actually seen Andrew get the exact bottle he’d pointed to.
Don’t sell it . . . It’s to enjoy.
Andrew was hiding something. Perhaps he did have something behind one of those doors. And he was killing anyone who got too close. Eliza had found it. Alexis, too. And now Jack.
Poison. Jack started to panic.
He didn’t feel ill. Then again, he’d never been poisoned before. Be rational, he tried to calm himself. Why hadn’t the others been poisoned?
And then he knew what it was. And he thought back through everything and knew the wine hadn’t turned.
Why would Andrew put something like this in a valuable bottle of wine?
Unless.
Unless it wasn’t valuable at all.
He took another slug from the bottle, just to be sure. Dropped the half-full bottle. The curve of the bathtub caught it, so it didn’t shatter, guided it into a roll up the other side, riderless in a skate-park. It came to rest, sideways, in the middle of the tub. Glugged. The air rushing in countered the liquid coming out, giving the flow an unnatural pendulumlike force: vomiting the wine in slow heaves.
And Jack Quick, the man who couldn’t tell tannin from an oak bushfire when he’d arrived in Birravale, suddenly knew what had been added to the bottle: the smell in Andrew’s car; the earthy spice in the cellar; Sarah Freeman in the street, gathering up her broken, dusted shopping.
Cinnamon.
Lauren opened the door, went to close it again with one fluid motion of her arm.
Jack got a few words in. ‘I know why he killed them now. Andrew —’
That was all he could get out before the door clicked. He was standing on the porch, in jeans and a blue polar fleece. He knew she’d open back up. He’d got enough out. He was a TV producer, after all – he knew how to build a cliffhanger. He imagined her leaning, back against the door, cursing him, while her resolve faded against her curiosity. The sun was just up, slivers of light cutting through the steaming mist, just beginning to dissolve. He’d had to wait until morning to come and tell her. He’d been too weak to see her. He needed the night to calm, to fish his acrobat, clinging to a rock and waiting for an errant ship, from the ocean. He’d slept little. Used the time for research. But he was filled with adrenaline now. Because he knew why he was wrong, and why he hadn’t been able to solve the crime. He’d thought Lauren had been emotional about her brother. But he’d been the same.
Because he had assumed Curtis had to be guilty of something. Because he needed that to justify his own regrets, to validate his own involvement, so that he could be some saviour, out here, solving a murder. But because he’d already tried and convicted Curtis in the back of his mind, Jack had never really considered that maybe this didn’t involve him at all. The only question Jack really needed to answer was the one Lauren had posed several days ago: Why would someone want Alexis dead?
He’d thought the motive was revenge. But put Eliza back in the picture, and that didn’t work. Because the motive was the key. For both murders. If they were to be linked, it had to be the same.
Eliza had worked at Andrew’s winery. Before Alexis died she would have been prepping for the pending appeal.
They’d both found something. Something big enough to get them killed. Maybe the same thing that Eliza had tried to sell to Sam Culver in her voicemail.
Four marijuana plants weren’t enough to kill over. But Andrew was peddling a different drug: Australia’s most expensive, in fact. And he wasn’t growing it
. What both women had died for was so simple: the reason why Andrew couldn’t have an insurance analyst turning over his property.
The door clicked open. Lauren stood with arms crossed, eyebrows raised as if to say this better be good.
‘Andrew Freeman’s wine’ – Jack held up the near-empty bottle of 1961 Penfolds Grange – ‘is fake.’
It was the Italian that Jack remembered first. The articles he’d read, at the start of everything when he was reading up on wineries: the Italian who’d boosted his alcohol content with methanol, killing twenty-three and leaving dozens blinded and hospitalised. Jack had never had cause to consider that as more than a slightly interesting news piece.
But he’d learned something up at Andrew’s cellar during the storm. And its meaning had sunk in as he’d accidentally slopped the Penfolds on his fingertips, immediately estimating the cash value. He’d realised the true value of Andrew’s vaults, thinking of it like a bank, but he still saw the individual bottles as drinks. He realised now. They weren’t bottles of liquid. They were gold bars. Picassos. And everything that came with those precious objects suddenly applied to wine: theft, counterfeit, forgery.
The cinnamon in the Penfolds had collided with another thought, hunkered at the back of his mind. His friend siphoning old goon-bags to impress at dinner parties. Andrew examining the label of the bottle atop the silo, assessing the value, gently placing it back in the picnic basket. It wasn’t hard to do the research once he’d known what he was looking for. Cinnamon. Elderflower juice. Lemongrass. All used as additives to cheap wine to make them feel like vintages. There were a few ways Andrew could have gone about it. Collect the empty bottles of the expensive wines and refill them. Fake the labels.
The fatal Italian wine was just the tip of the iceberg in a billion-dollar industry seriously afflicted by wine fraud. In South Africa, vegetable additives were added to sauvignon blancs which went on to pick up several awards. That was harmless enough. Some wineries, though, had started adding silver nitrate. Silver nitrate is a toxic salt – the stuff that clever vampire slayers put in bullets in movies, but instead it was being packaged up and sent out to family barbecues. People were in jail for forging wines. They were minor celebrities, it seemed, their names unspooling in the search results page by page: Rudy Kurniawan, Hardy Rodenstock.
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