Cold Cuts

by Calder Garret

  ‘No. It doesn’t have to be like that. Just tell him you’re worried. Does he know about Peter Crawford?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Well, start with that.’

  ‘You make a better D than I do,’ said Arbor, enjoying her touch.

  ‘Years of watching cop shows,’ said Jenny. ‘Believe me, it helps.’

  MONDAY

  He slid his work along the counter, getting as close to O’Reilly as he could manage without getting in the sergeant’s pocket. This way, he figured, they could exchange a few words without the detectives listening in. They were important words, too. Arbor had decided to follow up on Jenny’s suggestion and lay it all on the table.

  ‘Hey, Sarge,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ said the sergeant.

  ‘I know you told me not to bother Susie Crawford. But I did. The other day. I figured it couldn’t hurt so I took a run out there.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And what did you find? The Wicked Witch of the West?’

  ‘She might have been … But I had a good chat with her. Did you know her brother? Peter?’

  ‘Yeah. Sort of. Poor bloke. He was only a young ’un when he died.’

  ‘They reckon it wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘Susie. And some of the footy blokes.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know. I was on leave at the time, if I remember right.’

  ‘The thing is, Sarge …’

  Arbor could see Burke looking up from her work, a look of suspicion on her face. Arbor did all he could to turn his back to her.

  ‘The thing is,’ he continued. ‘All of them, Susie included, seem to think that Butch Paterson might have been involved.’

  ‘What? Butch murder him? Bullshit.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I mean.’

  O’Reilly was wearing a scowl now.

  ‘Well, cut to the chase,’ he said. ‘You know, sometimes it’s like picking scabs with you. What is it you’re getting at?’

  Here goes, thought Arbor. Boots and all.

  ‘More than one person I’ve talked to, Sarge,’ he said, ‘has suggested that Paterson was interfering with kids. Specifically the Nippers. And that Peter Crawford was one of them.’

  The look on O’Reilly’s face changed. Now he registered a kind of pain.

  ‘I thought,’ said Arbor, ‘that with that brochure I found, we might now have something to go on.’

  O’Reilly thought deeply. Arbor half-expected him to deny the brochure’s existence. But he didn’t. Instead, he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk.

  ‘Leave it with me,’ he said, laying the evidence bag on the desk before him. ‘I’ll bring the Ds up to speed. But if it’s all the same to you, it was me that found it, okay? And we won’t say when it was.’

  ‘Yeah, all right, Sarge,’ said Arbor.

  There was a gust of wind as the front door opened.

  ‘Hey. Are you Arbor?’ came a voice deep and loud.

  A man in his fifties had entered. He was large, thick-set and hardened by years in the sun. Warren Simpson came in behind him.

  ‘Yes, sir. That’s me,’ said Arbor. ‘And I take it you’re Mr Simpson?’

  ‘Too right I’m Simpson,’ he said. ‘So what’s the story?’

  ‘What is it, Constable?’ asked O’Reilly.

  ‘It’s Warren here, Sarge,’ said Arbor. ‘The other night, I was looking after Amira Rashid’s place. I caught Warren and a couple of his mates about to tag the front of the house. What with the brick through the shop window last week, I thought enough’s enough.’

  ‘Gerry?’ said O’Reilly. ‘It seems like your Warren has some explaining to do.’

  It seemed that Simpson and O’Reilly were on more than speaking terms.

  ‘You’ve no bloody proof,’ said Simpson. ‘There’s enough folks around here who don’t like these foreigners, but my Warren would never get up to rubbish like that.’

  ‘I’ve got evidence,’ said Arbor. ‘I’ve got pics. And I’ve got the spray can, too. I’m sure I could get some dabs off that, if push came to shove. He was lucky I didn’t charge him on the spot.’

  ‘But I …’

  Warren was silenced by his father’s glare.

  ‘Show me them,’ said O’Reilly.

  Arbor opened his phone and scrolled through the photos. He passed the phone to O’Reilly.

  ‘They look pretty conclusive to me, Gerry,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Give it to me,’ said Simpson.

  Arbor passed him the phone.

  ‘What’s the penalty for this?’ asked Simpson.

  ‘A hefty fine if he’s charged,’ said Arbor. ‘And probably community service. Worse if we link him to the actual vandalism and threat at the newsagent’s. But it might be worth his while to come clean and tell us who else was there. He said it wasn’t his fault.’

  ‘No way,’ said Simpson. ‘No son of mine’s a snitch.’

  ‘You can play it that way, Gerry,’ said O’Reilly. ‘Go the distance. See how it pans out. But the constable’s right. If it wasn’t Warren’s idea, then—’

  Simpson glared sternly at the phone and then at his son.

  ‘You little dickhead,’ he said.

  He passed the phone back to Arbor.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘And you, too, Constable. We’ll be in touch.’

  Warren Simpson wore a hot ear on the way out.

  O’Reilly offered Arbor a grin.

  ‘Nice work, son,’ he said.

  They laughed.

  ‘Look at them go,’ O’Reilly continued. ‘We get all sorts here. Some of them think they own the town and Gerry Simpson’s one of them. Honestly, I don’t know what’s worse, the cockies who think they run the place or the little bastards they spawn.’

  ‘Will we end up charging him, Sarge?’ said Arbor.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said O’Reilly. ‘But keep on it. You’ll get the names. I’m sure you will. Gerry will make sure of it. They’ll come through some backchannel somehow, but they’ll come. Look for a way of squeezing the little shit. You’ll see.’

  It wasn’t long before O’Reilly told Arbor to make himself scarce. Arbor took the opportunity to wash the paddy wagon. Despite all the rain, all the driving on country roads had left a coating of bright red dust over the vehicle. He drove to the rear of the station, parked on the small patch of grass and collected the bucket, chamois and soap from the residency’s laundry. He had been at it about ten minutes and had just used the hose to spray away the worst of the dirt, when the back door of the residence opened. It was Burke.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ve a job for you.’

  That was it. No explanation. No please. No thank you. She headed back inside.

  Arbor turned off the tap and followed. What the hell, he figured. Anything has to be better than this.

  Anna Burke was barely half Arbor’s size, but she led him a merry dance up Palm Street. If he was not mistaken, she even made bodily contact as she ploughed through the locals. She was as angry as he had seen her and, up until now, he had thought he had seen her worst. Thankfully, she waited until they were inside the butcher’s shop before venting fully.

  ‘You fucking yokels,’ she said. ‘You’ve all got your little secrets. Your little angles. This idea that Paterson might have been a paedo. It was yours, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Arbor. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘I thought so. Your sergeant is a bit too old school and a bit too much in bed with the rest of them here to have come up with it. You do know, don’t you, that by not being upfront, you’ve wasted days of this investigation? God only knows what evidence and leads have gone cold. It’s like we have to start again. I’ve a good mind to report the pair of you. Get you sent back to Perth for reprogramming, or whatever it is they do with pricks like you.’

  ‘Tell me what you know,’ she continued. ‘Half-arsed as you are, you’re obviously the only one who does
a scrap of work around here. That sergeant of yours has hardly moved since we got here. And that evidence … that brochure … It was you that found it, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘So spill,’ said Burke. ‘Tell me what I don’t already know.’

  Arbor didn’t know where to start. From the beginning, he decided.

  ‘It seems that Butch Paterson has been coaching the Nippers,’ he said. ‘The kids’ footy team … for as far back as anyone can remember. And along the way, he’s been singling out kids for … You know … special treatment. One of them was a guy called Peter Crawford. It appears he topped himself a few years ago. His sister still lives out Whitney way.’

  ‘The witch?’

  Arbor nodded.

  ‘Do you reckon she had it in her?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Arbor. ‘She might have, but I don’t think so.’

  Burke grunted, in a plain show of dismissal.

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ she said. ‘Anyone else? Anyone else you’d put in the frame?’

  ‘I can’t think of anyone yet, Sarge … I’ve been looking at the footy club. The Blue Tongues. They’ve asked me to coach, so I’m getting pretty close to them. A few of them might be possibles.’

  ‘Yeah, well, keep at it. Now, get upstairs and search the place. From top to bottom. Tear the place apart if you have to.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Burke. ‘Something, anything that might confirm this theory of yours. I’ll be in the shop. Shout if you need me.’

  Yeah, that’ll be likely, thought Arbor. She was back to her best.

  He climbed the stairs, put on a pair of latex gloves and looked around. Maybe somehow, somewhere, he thought, amongst all this chaos, he’d find some meaning.

  Arbor was drawn immediately to the bed. But he was approaching it with a very different set of eyes this time. His exploration with Burke the other day had been superficial. At that stage, they had had no idea where the investigation might lead.

  He started with the sheets. They were clean, at least as clean as he expected, given Paterson’s age and habits. Arbor stripped the bed. The mattress was old, but it too offered no obvious clues. He lifted it.

  The department store catalogue lay exactly where Paterson had placed it, on the edge of the bed base. Arbor lifted it carefully. It was much like the other, he figured. The pages seemed glued together. It was another nail in Butch Paterson’s reputation. Arbor slipped it carefully into an evidence bag. He would show it to Burke when he had finished his search, he decided. For now, he was on a roll.

  Next was the bedside table. In the top drawer lay just a few run of the mill medications. In the second, a few paperback novels. Paterson liked Westerns, it seemed. Finally, in the bottom drawer … It was empty. A wave of disappointment hit Arbor. He got to his feet and turned to the dresser.

  The dresser surface looked like it hadn’t been dusted in years. Arbor etched his name in the silt. On the surface lay a bottle of after shave, empty, a hairbrush and comb, curious additions considering Paterson had no hair, and a clothes brush, one of the electrostatic variety.

  The drawers led to more disappointment. There was just the usual collection of effects to be found in the dresser of a middle-aged man – jocks, socks, handkerchiefs and, rolled up in the bottom drawer, the odd belt or two. Arbor closed the drawers and opened the wardrobe.

  At first glance, it appeared as if Butch Paterson possessed no more than half a dozen sets of clothes. Hanging side by side, in no particular order, were a nylon jacket, a weathered acrylic jumper, three white short-sleeved shirts and a grey polo. Alongside these items hung three pairs of black pants and a pair of jeans. Although he had doubts about any success, Arbor went through the pockets. They were empty. He looked to the floor of the wardrobe. Side by side lay a pair of cheap runners and a pair of square-tipped black leather shoes. Arbor got to his knees to examine them. One by one, he lifted the shoes, felt inside and then laid them to one side.

  He sat for a moment, thinking, still unbeaten but a little peeved. Apart from the brochure, he had drawn a blank. He lifted the shoes and threw them back into the wardrobe.

  A thump.

  The shoes had dislodged the strip of plywood that formed the basis of the wardrobe. There was something underneath. Arbor pulled the plywood free and reached in.

  ‘Sergeant!’ he shouted, as he pulled out his find. It was an old knapsack, of the type a Pommy schoolboy might use.

  He heard Burke pounding up the stairs. She took one look.

  ‘Have you opened it?’ she asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said.

  ‘Good boy,’ said Burke. ‘Here, put it on the bed.’

  She sat on the bed beside him, opened the latch and poured out some of the knapsack’s contents. First to come were half a dozen pairs of underwear, children’s, boys and girls.

  ‘Shit. Trophies, you’d reckon,’ said Burke. ‘I think you’ve found what we’ve been looking for, Constable. Well done.’

  He could feel a sense of approval from her. Warmth, even. But he felt a kind of nausea too. Burke tipped the knapsack further. Out spilled a collection of photographs.

  ‘Christ,’ said Arbor.

  ‘This was one sick bastard.’

  They flicked through the photos, each in their own way. Burke had her eyes set on evidence. Arbor was looking for clues.

  It took him ten or fifteen photos, a few girls, mostly boys, each image breaking his heart, before he found what he was looking for. It was a date-stamped Kodak moment. 25-6-1988. A ten-year-old boy wearing nothing but a pair of spectacles. Arbor couldn’t be sure, but he had the strongest feeling he was looking at a photograph of someone he knew. He was looking at a photograph of Benjie Wood.

  This is turning into a right mess, he thought. But he didn’t think for long, before burying the photo back into the pile. At all costs, he wanted to avoid a rush to judgement, or the possibility that Burke and Cole would start singling out individual members of the Blue Tongues. Especially before anything solid was determined. He knew that secreting evidence was what had just earned him a roasting, but, to be plain, he didn’t much care. He much preferred, in his own way, to talk to Matt Todd, maybe dip his proverbial toe in the water a bit further and, if anything came of it, talk to Benjie himself. Only then, if the lead looked promising, would he mention it to Burke. And, anyway, he told himself, one lurid, badly-focused, thirty-year-old snap would hardly pass the high-water mark of suspect identification.

  ‘I found something else, Sarge,’ he said. ‘Another one of those brochures. I think he’s been using it to … You know.’

  ‘Sick fuck,’ said Burke. ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘Under the mattress.’

  ‘I tell you what,’ Burke continued. ‘I’ve just about lost all sympathy for this prick. I know he was a mate of your sergeant’s, but, well, it seems to me he was an absolute arsehole. Through and through.’

  You’ll get no argument from me, Arbor thought but didn’t say.

  ‘Pack it all up, Constable,’ Burke said. ‘We’ll take it all back to the station. We can go through it all there. It’ll all be a bit of a surprise for Sergeant O’Reilly, but that can’t be helped.’

  You’d be just the type, thought Arbor, to rub O’Reilly’s nose in it. Just the type.

  And she was.

  ‘Take a gander, Sergeant O’Reilly,’ Burke said, leafing through the contents of the knapsack. ‘The man’s been using this town as his own private amusement park for, what, thirty years, and all the time it’s been under your nose. Slack, Senior. Slack.’

  ‘Careful, Sergeant,’ said O’Reilly. ‘Just remember. You may like to forget it, but I am your superior. And show some respect. Those are people’s lives you’re playing with there.’

  Arbor, for once, could see his point. Burke was striving for a new low.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ said Cole, ever the follower.


  ‘What we do now,’ said Burke, ‘is we draw up a new list of suspects. We go through them one by one until we get some joy. So who’ve we got?’

  Arbor resisted rolling his eyes. Were they slow learners? They were retracing the steps he had made with Jenny two days ago.

  ‘That Snippy Lawrence still has to be high on the list,’ said Cole.

  Brownie points for that one.

  ‘We’ll pay him another visit,’ said Burke. ‘And that Crawford sheila. We’ll head out and see her, as well.’

  ‘It’ll be easier,’ said O’Reilly, ‘if l give her a call and invite her in. She knows me. Trusts me, I reckon. Two city suits turning up on her doorstep might put her back up.’

  ‘Yeah, all right,’ said Burke. ‘Whatever. See if she’ll come in tomorrow.’

  She looked at Arbor.

  ‘What about you, Constable?’ she said. ‘Those footy mates of yours. Any you fancy amongst them?’

  ‘Not that I can think of,’ said Arbor.

  The front door opened. It was Jenny. The blast of air sent the photographs flying. Arbor bent to collect them.

  ‘Hey, Constable,’ said Burke. ‘Your mum’s here.’

  Arbor rose to see Jenny glaring past him at Burke. Good, he thought. He was just in the mood. If she wanted to start something, he would gladly join in.

  ‘Hey, babe,’ she said. ‘I’ve just finished my last session. I thought I’d see how you’re going.’

  ‘We’re visiting Mr Lawrence in a few minutes, Constable,’ shouted Burke. ‘You’d better be ready.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll be ready,’ said Arbor.

  He continued in a whisper to Jenny.

  ‘It’s been another hell of a day.’

  Then he turned to O’Reilly.

  ‘Sarge, I’ll just be a couple of minutes, okay? I’ll be out front with Jen.’

  ‘Sure, go for it,’ said O’Reilly. ‘Take your time.’

  Arbor took time for a brief glance at Burke and then he opened the door. In one swift move, she had been put in her place. And she didn’t like it.

  ‘I can’t stay out for long,’ said Arbor. ‘Things have gone crazy.’