Again, Jack was stunned that a bottle of wine was enough to kill two people over. But like Sarah had told him, these weren’t just bottles of wine, they were art. Rudy Kurniawan had sold an estimated $550 million of counterfeited wine. He’d eventually been prosecuted by the FBI and was now serving ten years in prison.
Enough to kill over? Jack would drink to that.
Christ, Lauren had even told him Eliza was partial to flogging bottles.
He explained this to Lauren, standing on the deck, with her leaning against the doorframe. She held out a hand without saying anything. Jack handed her the bottle. She sipped the remnants, rolling her tongue over her gums.
‘Yep,’ she said, examining the bottle, ‘that’s a 2018 Penfolds Strange all right.’
‘Does that look real?’
‘The bottle? Sure.’
‘So he’s recycling them?’
‘Maybe. Maybe he gave you this one because at least it was in a real bottle. The question is why he gave it to you at all.’
Jack thought about his friend bringing his faux-expensive bottles to dinner. The lines he’d told Jack he loved to use: Oh, I just picked that up in Tasmania; You know, they’ve just come off a strong vintage; Of course, you haven’t really tried merlot until you’ve been to the Southern Highlands. Relishing in the approval of his friends. Andrew was the same – telling Sarah to go back and get more wine, the ones in her arms not good enough for his VIPs. They were good enough, sure, but they weren’t fun enough. What’s life without a few thrills? Andrew had asked Sarah then, and later, Jack himself in the cellar. He’d sauced his collectors up on real wine and then fed them the fake shit. Then he’d sat back and laughed as they guzzled Andrew’s bravado in the form of cinnamon and elderflower juice. And then Andrew had washed the bottles out and sold them again. Give them what they’ve paid for.
The restaurant wasn’t a restaurant. It was a turnstile.
He thought of Andrew hesitating in the cellar. It wasn’t because Jack had picked a too-expensive bottle: Andrew had hesitated because he wasn’t sure what was actually in it. But he’d given it to Jack anyway. Perhaps because Jack knew nothing about wine. Perhaps for the thrill. He wanted Jack to hold Andrew’s guilt in his hands and, quite literally, piss it away.
Serial killers leave calling cards – those masterminds Lauren hated. They take pleasure in dangling clues, sitting just out of reach. The famous Zodiac Killer left letters, for example. Andrew Freeman just smiled at his collectors with red lips. Patted himself on the back for his own cleverness as his marks drank away their own evidence.
‘He likes to brag.’ Jack shrugged.
He could see Lauren had reached the same conclusion. It was hard to disagree with Andrew’s pomposity. She still had questions.
‘What about the phone?’ she asked. ‘And I think we still need to get the axe back, to build our case.’
‘Andrew wouldn’t have had time to come down from the silo. But Sarah would have. That’s why he came and got me. He knew that I’d been around here, too much probably. They must have tried before, but I was getting in the way. He wanted me up there, distracted, so that she could go and put the evidence back.’ Andrew had fucked up though, he hadn’t kept Jack occupied long enough.
‘Who’s Hush?’
‘Maybe him. Maybe it’s irrelevant.’
‘I think he’s still important.’
‘Maybe,’ Jack said. There was so much he didn’t know about Alexis. If Andrew was Hush, there were two motives, Sarah may have wanted her husband’s lover dead. She could have talked him into it, if Alexis knew about the wine. ‘But I think this bottle is the most important. We now know the meaning of Eliza’s voicemail – why she had something big but wasn’t sure if it was technically illegal. This would do well in the tabloids.’
‘It’s convincing. I’ll give you that.’ But Lauren still seemed unsure, the look on her face like she was trying to join all the dots, make it work. ‘I’ll come with you. Five per cent, by the way.’
‘What?’ Jack thought she was talking about the alcohol content of something.
She turned back inside to grab a coat of a hook. ‘The problem with wine fraud is that once the bottles are in circulation, you don’t know if you’ve got a real one or a dud one. It’s not like a Van Gogh, where Andrew can only paint one copy. You also can’t open a twenty-thousand-dollar bottle of champagne just to check if it’s real. People like Kurniawan fucked the industry good, crippled the market, and now all their wines are still out there. They reckon that five per cent of any collection is fake. That’s why we don’t collect here.’
She looked at him knowingly. Jack stared at his toes. He didn’t need her to state the implication. I know about this shit.
She said it anyway. ‘If we’d worked together properly, we would have figured this out ages ago. Of course I know about this, Jack. I run a fucking vineyard.’
She stepped on the porch and buckled her coat. Jack thought he might have cooled her down a bit. But she was still pissed. She’d even called it a vineyard.
‘I’ll go to the police. If that’s what you want,’ Jack said.
‘And miss out on your finale?’ Lauren dropped her guard to flash a smile. ‘No way.’
‘We can’t go just yet,’ Jack said.
‘Why not?’ she asked.
‘Because of that.’ He nodded behind her.
There was a creaking and then Curtis was in the doorway. He sized up Jack, swung his gaze to his sister, who gave him the look of calm Jack had become accustomed to between them.
‘So,’ Curtis growled, ‘you here to apologise?’
‘Not quite.’ Jack looked at Lauren, then back to Curtis. ‘I’m here to borrow your gun.’
Jack knew Andrew would run.
The rifle hung by Jack’s side as he and Lauren walked up the drive. Curtis had elected not to come. In case someone gets shot, he’d said. Jack couldn’t tell if Curtis meant that he didn’t want to get mixed up in the aftermath, so he had plausible deniability, or he didn’t trust himself not to pull the trigger. The gun was light, but after walking up the hill, it was hanging heavy and pulled taut on his shoulders. He swapped hands. Sweat slicked the stock, where Jack gripped it like a club. He’d been too embarrassed to ask Lauren how to actually use it. He wasn’t planning on shooting anyone, he just wanted the threat. But if events turned, the gun was about as useless as a baseball bat. So. Club grip.
It was too early for tourists, but Andrew’s Forester was in the driveway. Jack jiggled the handle on the restaurant. Locked. Lauren walked around the side of the building and opened the recycling bin. Jack leaned over her shoulder as she rifled through it. There wasn’t a single bottle. Odd, Jack thought, a winery that doesn’t put wine bottles in their recycling. There was a regular bin next to it, filled with food scraps. Then compost. Next to that was not a bin, but a crate made out of wooden slats. Inside, was a plastic tub with a sealed lid. Inside that, standing on end, were rows of bottles. Jack lifted one out and ran a finger over the rim. It came off reddened. Andrew must clean them in the cellar, Jack thought. Behind one of those doors.
Andrew hadn’t even bothered to hide the empties very well. But maybe he didn’t have to. There had never been a flicker of suspicion. Did people in town know? Probably some of them did. Andrew gave the word and the townsfolk fell into line. He’d given Brett Dawson a job he was unqualified for, and new doors for his hotel. He’d repainted Mary-Anne’s house. Jack didn’t know what he’d done for people like Alan, but it wouldn’t surprise him if the handshake deal with the pub persisted, cash in hand fines for drunk drivers. So maybe they knew. Maybe they also knew that they depended on Andrew’s benevolence. This town, as Curtis had said, was not a town: it was Andrew up the top and a rubble of houses at the bottom. Perhaps a few bottles of fake wine were forgivable when that wine is blood in the veins of the community.
But Curtis was an anomaly. He’d come into town an instant millionaire with no need to be bought
. And then all the attention Curtis brought with him, Andrew’s wine suddenly a source of much interest, seeing as half the town was dipped in it. If Eliza had found out the truth, and Andrew had killed her for it, maybe he wanted to nail two birds – and send Curtis away too. That had worked until Jack’s documentary had popped the cork again. Andrew declined to be interviewed, clearly hoping it would come and go, watched by few, cared about by fewer. But as the series went on, and it grew more and more popular, and then it started to look like Curtis might get out . . .
Worried that the documentary might shine an extra light back on him, it wouldn’t have been hard for Andrew to slip Eliza’s shoe in the bushland. Then there’d be no need for the cops to crawl over his counterfeit operation. Probably the only thing Andrew hadn’t counted on was Jack covering it up.
Sarah made sense now too. She’d had to stand by and watch Andrew disassemble her family business. Forced to keep his secrets while the man that married her for the view bled her legacy dry.
The fingers in Eliza’s mouth. That worked too, he supposed, if construed as a message. Maybe after slamming in a very heavy hydraulic door. Don’t speak my secrets.
And then Alexis must have found out. Andrew had only one way out then, again. Someone had to die, and the suspect, again primed and perfect for him, fresh out of prison. Jack had once asked Curtis: What’s the point in framing you twice?
‘Heads up,’ Lauren yelled, and Jack looked up in time to see an empty plastic bottle sail towards him. He couldn’t catch it without dropping the rifle, so he let it hit his hip and ricochet to the ground. Lauren walked over, picked it up and held it out to him.
Diethylene glycol.
He looked at Lauren and shrugged. Didn’t mean anything to him. Alcohol is chemical, Sarah had said. I’m not cooking meth.
‘It’s brake fluid,’ she said.
‘In the wine?’
‘It’s used to give cheap wines a richer flavour.’
‘Poisonous?’
‘Unlikely in these quantities.’ She turned the bottle over. ‘But you wouldn’t want brake fluid in your glass if you knew it was in there, I’m guessing.’
‘How do you know this?’
Lauren shot him the same withering and exasperated glare as back at her house. Five per cent. Jack had no desire to get into an argument about his lack of teamwork, so he let her have her moment.
‘Someone used this in Austria, back in the eighties,’ she said. ‘No one got hurt. But the entire wine industry was fucked, because you just don’t know, you know? It took decades to recover.’
‘Andrew’s serving people brake fluid?’
‘Looks like.’
‘This is worse than cinnamon,’ Jack turned the container in his hands. Laymen don’t give two fucks about a counterfeit ’61 Grange, they’re not the one’s drinking it. Brake fluid, though, that was another level entirely. That would have mums stopping in the supermarket, seesawing over that bottle of cab sauv. Vanessa Raynor would gorge on it. She loved the dodgy ones. Discover! magazine made much more sense. ‘At least it’s not actual poison.’
‘Still. It might be just as deadly.’
Behind them, at the house, there was the clatter of a door closing. They both turned. Andrew was standing there, cracking his neck; he hadn’t noticed them yet. When he did, he paused a second. Jack felt his shoulders tense. The gun came up. An accident. A reflex.
Andrew saw the gun and ran.
Lauren and Jack bolted after him. Jack didn’t know about Lauren, but he knew he’d be spent on the foot chase quickly. Especially after last night. His knees wobbled in their joints, calves trying to find the energy to push himself forward. Luckily, Andrew hadn’t gone far. He was by the silo, only twenty metres away. He seemed to be levitating, which was odd. Then Jack realised he was standing on the ladder and reaching up. He was unlocking the grate to the top. It fell open with a clatter. Andrew pulled himself into the chute, then stooped and pulled the grate back into position. He pulled the padlock inside the grill and locked it.
Lauren and Jack were under him now. Only a metre below, but unable to get to him.
‘Andrew, come out,’ Lauren said.
Andrew looked down at them. He seemed tired, scared, behind the bars. An animal in a cage. He kept looking at Jack’s gun. It was harmless at his side now. Harmless if raised to sight, too, but Andrew didn’t know that. Andrew seemed to be debating something with himself. Then he started to climb.
‘Fuck,’ Lauren said, ‘should we shoot at him?’
‘What? Jesus. No.’
‘I said at him. Not in him.’
‘I’ll miss.’
‘You’ll miss trying not to shoot someone?’
‘He’ll come down.’
‘Give me the gun.’
‘He’ll come down.’
‘What if he jumps?’
The implication was petty, but it incensed Jack: We might never know the truth.
He slung the rifle strap over his shoulder and mounted the ladder. People aren’t scared of heights, he reminded himself. He climbed a few rungs, until he was under the locked cylindrical cage. He leaned out, forced himself to peel a hand from the ladder, stretched out from the wall. He curled his fingers through the side of the chute. It was made of slatted bars, so there were lots of hand-holds. He repeated the motion with his other hand. Once he had a fair grip he walked his feet up the silo wall. The corrugation made it easier; his feet found purchase in the grooves. Then, when his feet were high enough, he reached up to new hand-holds and swung backwards from the wall. The soles of his shoes grappled with the metal, then lodged inside the bars. And he was there, hugging the outside of the chute, like a koala hugging a tree trunk. Andrew was above him, halfway up. Jack knew he’d already made the decision to follow him. He started to climb.
Andrew must have felt the ladder shaking, because he glanced downwards. He seemed surprised that Jack was following him by climbing the outside of the safety chute. Jack didn’t look down. People aren’t scared of heights. His heart whumped in his chest. Whump. Whump. It was stupid. But he had to be the one to catch Andrew Freeman. He had to solve this properly. He’d started it. He’d end it. Whump. Whump. The ladder shook, and Jack lost a footing. He scrambled and got it back. Andrew was kicking the chute, hanging on to the ladder. It rattled and shook. Jack clung to the bars, rust biting into his fingers, vibrations shaking up his forearms. Giving up played through his mind. You can still get down safely. Andrew will climb down. He’ll have to. Or he’ll jump. Either way.
But Jack knew he wanted to be up there. This was his last chance to get the answers. The truth. That shield. His last chance.
An outstretched hand in his mind: Last chance – you coming up or not?
Jack gritted his teeth and kept climbing. He countered the shaking metal by making sure he had three points of contact at all times. Two feet and one hand; one foot and two hands. In this way, because Andrew was busy shaking the tower, Jack started to gain on him. He grew confident. Get there. Get there. Andrew stopped kicking, turned back to his climb. Jack was almost close enough to reach out and grab the hem of Andrew’s jeans, but he’d have to reach through the bars. Then Andrew disappeared, and Jack realised that they were at the top. The wind was roaring at his ears. He hadn’t noticed the temperature drop, but it cut through him now. He shivered. The entire scaffolding was shaking in the wind. He had to go higher than Andrew, to go over the lip at the top of the cage. His sightline reached the top, and he half-expected Andrew to be waiting for him, to push him off, pinwheeling into the void. But Andrew was sitting, hunched, with his back to Jack, on the hatch in the middle. The picnic basket still in the corner. The Brokenback Range behind him, jagged knuckles. Like people’s spines in the clinic. Jack reached over the top. He tried to quickly scramble over the lip and lower himself to the roof, but stuffed it up and fell the last bit with a jolt. He steadied himself, planting both feet flat, though one leg wouldn’t stop jumping, up and down, up and d
own. He was exhausted – the climb filled with adrenaline and adrenaline only. The wind pushed him around up here, light as it was.
He stood as far away from Andrew as he could, which was difficult seeing as he was sitting in the middle of the small roof. Jack steadied himself by the chute, raised the gun, and pointed it downwards. At the back of Andrew’s head.
‘Olives,’ Jack said. He couldn’t think of anything else. ‘You’ve been skimming off the top. I know about the wine.’
Andrew looked up. His eyes were red. From the wind. From the tears. His face was different from James Harrison’s, he looked like a tyre someone had pricked, bled him partly out. Filled him back up again with brake fluid.
‘You don’t need that,’ he said.
‘Don’t I?’
‘Are you going to call the police?’ said Andrew.
‘I’ll have to.’
‘You don’t. No one has to know.’
Andrew must know he had the shoe. If he’d left the shoe to be found, and then the shoe had disappeared and he’d known Jack had been rooting around . . . He would have known Jack had taken it. Lied. He must think Jack would do it again. For him. That’s why he’d been on Jack’s side since he got here. Because he thought they were in it together.
‘Money,’ Andrew said, as if that explained it all. So rich that he didn’t even need to beg. Just spat a golden promise into the air. ‘I can give you —’
‘I’m not here for money,’ Jack said.
‘Well, then.’ Andrew seemed defeated. ‘So we talk.’
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