Whistle Down The Wire

by Robert Engwerda

  ‘I’ve written down a couple of addresses you might be interested in. Personally, I would avoid going anywhere near Madigan Street. I hear there are some bad types there,’ she told Sheridan, knowing full well that Sergeant Forrest, who just happened to be listening in, lived in Madigan Street.

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Sheridan said, winking at Forrest.

  Cole came in and sat down with Sheridan as everyone else went back to work.

  ‘Any luck with the wheels from Harry Colston’s car?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet, boss,’ she answered. ‘I went to Brown’s Body Works as you suggested, and the bloke there said they did tow the wreck back here, but he didn’t know what had happened to the wheels. Maybe check the fire brigade boys, he said, and I’ve been chasing them down this morning, too, but no luck so far I’m sorry.’

  ‘Keep at it then. We need those tyres for a match. I’m going out to the Colston property soon and I’ll keep my eyes open for tread marks there, too, while the ground’s still wet. And speaking of the Colstons, I’d like you to talk to Linda Fantasio. She’s Harry Colston’s sister and owns the hairdresser’s shop in the main strip. Snip, it’s called. She’s looking after the Colstons’ little boy. See if he’s alright, would you? I’d also be interested in hearing what you make of Linda.’

  ‘Do you want me to do that now?’

  ‘Why not? And one other thing Chris, I’d like you and Constable Whittaker to make some phone calls today.’ He reached into his pocket and handed her a slip of paper. ‘These are the numbers I need to attach names to. Don’t identify yourself to whoever picks up the phone. Once you’ve found out who you’re speaking to, just say you must have dialled the wrong number. When you’re done let me know. Okay?’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  He watched her leave, Whittaker and Forrest waving her out.

  Janice came over and left a cup of tea on his desk, at the same time filling his in-tray with more paperwork.

  ‘Thanks. I think,’ Cole said.

  Janice sighed, ‘What is it about men, Lloyd? Any time a female comes into the station the boys are falling over each other to get to her first. Can I help you, madam? Anything you need from us, just ask. Grinning like Cheshire cats when they’ve got no idea how silly they look. A woman can pick that sort of thing a mile away. I don’t know why they even bother.’

  ‘It’s just human nature, I suppose. And they do that to you, too, I’m taking it?’ Cole asked, smiling.

  ‘No, they don’t. They know better than to try that stuff out on me. I’d slap them down in two seconds. But watch them around Christine. Talk about bees around honey, if you could call her honey.’

  ‘Come on, Janice. You know that’s not her doing. She’s just doing her best to fit in with everyone.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But I tell you what. I’m glad I never married. Imagine having to put up with all that carry on twenty-four hours a day.’

  With enough paperwork out of the way to convince himself that he was making progress, Cole gathered his coat and drove out to Hilltop, imagining version after version of what might have taken place there. Could it have been a dispute between farming neighbours? That was something he hadn’t considered yet, and in farming communities squabbles amongst neighbours were as common as amongst neighbours in town. The critical difference between the two was that farmers had more reasons as well as the means to escalate disputes: arguments over access to water or the spread of weeds, stock that wasn’t inoculated or that went missing, the disputes brooding over generations, irrigation channels a man might be drowned in, rifles discharged by accident or otherwise.

  Something else to look into, he thought.

  As Cole drew up to the farm gates he found them shut and padlocked. Undeterred, he pulled himself through the wire fence beside the gate and with camera and notebook in his pockets marched through a stiff wind toward the new but barren-looking house on its green, artificial mound.

  It would have been Linda Fantasio who had locked the gates, but there was no one here now. The first thing he looked for were tyre marks but the lightly gravelled driveway hid any clue as to who may have driven over it. His car and Fantasio’s were the last to venture down it, anyway.

  Out of habit he tried the front door first, feeling it locked as he’d expected. The back door was also locked but the window hadn’t been repaired yet and he had no trouble slipping his hand through the gaping hole and reaching inside to unlock the door.

  The house looked somehow altered as he threw curtains open to allow in sickly grey light. A house bereft of people was a house inhabited by ghosts, and he felt the little boy’s presence when he spied the television in the corner and a toy wooden lion on wheels rolled against a skirting board. The parents were here somewhere, too, in the dishes left by the sink and in the man’s jacket left draped over the back of a chair. There was an almost palpable sense of the place having been deserted in haste.

  Cole walked from room to room with notebook in hand, searching for anything out of the ordinary. In the master bedroom he found a made bed, so he knew the Colstons hadn’t made it that far the night of their death. The bathroom was unremarkable: a dark brown bathmat hung over the edge of the bath, a matching towel hanging over the shower screen, with another on the gold clothes hook on the back of the door. He got down on his knees and inspected the bath for any trace of blood, but besides a few stray hairs he supposed belonged to Dianne Colston, the bath appeared otherwise clean. He delicately lifted the hairs and put them into one of the tiny envelopes he carried with him, the same envelopes he’d seen golfers drop their green fees into at the local course.

  The child’s bedroom was unchanged from his previous visit, and as he inspected the clothing and toys it seemed more than a day and a half had elapsed since he’d first been here. He searched the third bedroom before he found himself in what building companies like A.V.Jennings were now calling a Parents’ retreat. He wouldn’t have earned a prize for guessing whose retreat this room was.

  It was the smallest of the four bedrooms and decorated with feminine, floral wallpaper in tones of muted green and orange, except for the one exposed, brick feature wall. The room was as yet uncarpeted and the concrete floor slab oozed a chill that the seagrass matting laid over it couldn’t dispel. There was a Singer sewing machine on the small table beneath the aluminium window and a red, velour sofa against the wall to Cole’s left as he took it in. A chair and a slightly larger pine table, a filing cabinet flush beside it, made up the remainder of the furniture. There were photographs of Dianne’s family, the Bramleys, on the wall, two rows of them demonstrating a pride in her family if not also the dinginess of the surroundings they customarily found themselves in. Many of the photos were shot at the family home, a single-fronted, paint-peeling weatherboard with a front veranda held up by metal poles. No baseboards on the house, he noticed. Long, unmown grass. For Dianne Bramley, Hilltop was a big step up from where she’d come.

  Only her clothes hung in the built-in wardrobe. On the shelf above were two photo albums and Cole drew one down. Virtually every photograph had men posing in the uniform of the second war, a man he didn’t know consistently appearing in most of them. Dianne Bramley’s father, Ken, he wondered? The other album was a typical book of family snaps and baby photos, two photos from which were replicated on the wall. Whatever Linda Fantasio had said about her sister-in-law, the Bramleys looked a plain, simple family such as you might see anywhere. But he’d thought that about others in the past, too, he mused, and he’d been wrong.

  The four-drawer filing cabinet key had been snapped off in its lock but with a little force Cole managed to open it. The top drawer was all household bills with scraps of notes thrown in – workings out of mathematical additions and banking calculations. The next drawer down had various sized books and booklets related to the breeding of horses and Hereford cattle. When he perused several publication
s he discovered the pages as crisp and clean as the day they’d been bought, one even with its sale receipt still inside the front cover. But whatever logic went into the contents of the two top drawers, it was nowhere to be seen in the bottom pair. Every hanging file looked to consist of random bits and pieces, often at odds with what the file label indicated, where there was a label at all.

  One file, labelled 1967, looked promising, but when Cole rifled through it the file contained clippings of toddler George’s birth notices and hospital photographs, that had to be from 1966 if not 65. There was a wedding place card with Dianne’s name misspelt – Dieanne – , and when he flipped it over he saw the word bitch scrawled on it. Why keep that, he puzzled? A thin bundle of Christmas cards addressed to the Colstons included festive messages barely two sentences long. When Cole glanced at the photos of the unsmiling Bramleys on the wall, they seemed a family that might be economical with words, and thus possibly the authors of the cards. Scraps of paper with no obviously useful purpose also lay in the file: shop receipts, a chocolate bar wrapper with a phone number written on it that he took down in his own notebook, a letter written to Dianne from someone on holiday, unremarkable in itself, but signed You Know Who, that gave him cause to think. A dress pattern. A blue serviette with doodles all over it.

  Another file was labelled, Dad’s Stuff, but it contained nothing. Whose father, he pondered, and what had happened to the contents of that file?

  But then he found a bulging file at the rear of the drawer, chock full of tax return information and correspondence. From the tax office statements he could see that the farm was turning over a solid but not spectacular income. The returns had been filed promptly, and the signature on the last page was always Harry Colston’s father, John, but the last two year’s returns were missing.

  Cole went back to the parents’ bedroom, and rifled through the bedside dressers either side of the bed. Harry Colston’s personal effects and clothes were crammed into one dresser, his wife’s in the other. As he searched through Dianne’s effects in among her underwear he found a photo of Mitchell’s A Grade premiership cricket team of 1961, the last year any Mitchell sporting team had won a premiership.

  As he was wondering what it might be doing there he heard a car rolling up the driveway.

  He hurriedly closed the curtains and shut the filing cabinet, getting into the passageway just as he heard a bunch of keys jangling in the front door lock.

  ‘Who is it?’ he called as he marched to the door to see Linda Fantasio striding in.

  ‘I might ask you the same question. What are you doing here?’ she glared at him.

  ‘I dropped my notebook here the other night, at least I thought it must have been here. There’s confidential information in there I can’t have lying around.’

  ‘So you just let yourself in then?’

  ‘The same way as I did the other night,’ he explained.

  ‘Why are all the curtains open? How long have you been here?’

  ‘Not long. And I did find the notebook. Must have dropped it in the baby’s bedroom when I was getting him out of the cot,’ he said, drawing it from his coat pocket. ‘So I’m glad I came back.’

  ‘I’m sure you are,’ she countered acerbically.

  Dressed in a russet shirtwaist dress pulled in with a belt, she looked as though she might be on her way to the salon. She threw her head this way and that in order to see what might have been disturbed.

  ‘How’s the little fellow going?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s fine,’ she answered tartly, as if her mind was on other things – him, and what he’d been up to in the house.

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘He turns two next month. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I’m just curious. It’s a good thing he’s got you to look after him then, the kid being so young,’ Cole said. ‘Something you might be able to help me with, though. I was wondering if you had any idea where your brother might have been going to the night his car hit the train.’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you that. How would I know?’

  She put a hand to her hip.

  ‘It just seems a bit odd that both of them would be out like that in the middle of the night and leave the little boy at home alone. Do you think that was in character for them?’

  ‘You’re asking questions I wouldn’t have a clue about. They’re dead. That’s all I know, and now someone’s going to have to take care of the farm and tidy up all the mess that’s been left behind. And guess who you think that might be?’

  ‘Who says it’s a mess?’

  She huffed. ‘Harry had his good points, or so they tell me, but he couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag. Or work in an iron lung. Dad built this place up through good years and bad, and Harry was frittering it away like there was no tomorrow.’

  ‘How do you know he was?’

  ‘Look around you!’ she snapped, as if he were a simpleton. ‘You think this place got built all by itself? I’m living in a dump and here he was living the high life like Lord Muck. With Lady Muck egging him on every inch of the way!’

  ‘Who’s going to manage the farm now then? Will one of your brothers come down to do it?’

  ‘That’s hardly likely. They’re doing very well for themselves over the border thank you very much. Why should they? No, it’ll have to be me, won’t it? Just like I’ve always had to step in every other time there was a disaster in the family, and when no one else wanted to think about anyone but themselves.’

  ‘Maybe your brothers will come to the party, help you out. This terrible business might bring out the best in everyone.’

  ‘I’ll tell you how it will go. I’ll have to wade through a forest of paperwork and my brothers will be too busy with work, their wife is sick, they promised the kids a holiday, or what have you. But you watch, as soon as I’ve done all the sorting out and the time comes up to divide the spoils they’ll be all over me and this place like a rash. If there’s anything left after the bills have all been paid, that is.’

  ‘Well, I hope you get some support from them,’ he told her, tapping his notebook in his hand. ‘Anyway, I better get back to the station. Plenty to do.’

  ‘Not as much as what I’ll have in front of me here,’ she said. ‘I’ve got Harry to thank for nothing.’

  Except for a new house on prime agricultural land, the milkers and the dairy, some horses and a herd of well-fed Herefords, Cole thought to himself as he drove away.

  If there was anything more to be learnt from being inside the Colstons’ house, his opportunity to do so was now gone, he realised. Linda Fantasio catching him out like this had put her on guard and if he were to be caught a second time his suspicions would be well and truly exposed. The odds were stacked against him ever having the evidence that would convict anyone of the Colstons’ murders. It was only likely that a confession would do it, and Linda Fantasio didn’t strike him as being the confessing type.

  Chapter 8

  As she made her way to Linda Fantasio’s salon, Chris Sheridan remembered Cole’s advice and delayed her visit by introducing herself to a number of shopkeepers and business people in the shopping strip. Just dart in, say hello, and duck out again, she told herself. At the post office she purchased stamps and from the florist a pot plant she’d collect later. She dropped into the stock and station agent, who also doubled as a real estate agent, and was surprised to hear that a new property a little way out of town had just come onto the rental market. The agent gave her the address, told her the front gate would be left wide open and invited her to ‘have a look around’.

  So it was with a light step that Sheridan sauntered into the State Bank to be greeted by the bank manager in person, and to hear that her new account was in hand, and that if there was ever anything they could help her with, she only needed to ask.

  With everything falling into place fo
r her she strolled into the Snip salon, only to be deflated when told the manager wasn’t in. She walked back to the police station feeling vaguely unsettled.

  She explained it to Cole, ‘I went into the hairdresser’s but the two other women there told me it was Linda Fantasio’s day off. They said day off like it was a private joke between them, which gave me the impression that the owner might take days off whenever she feels like it.’

  ‘Which could be often,’ he said.

  ‘They weren’t exactly helpful. When I asked where I might find Mrs Fantasio, the tall one put on a voice like the queen, and said, Madam may be shopping. Or you may find her ensconced at her private residence, which set the other one off cackling like an old chook. But they also kept looking toward the door while they were having their little joke, and I got the idea they wouldn’t dare talk like that in front of the woman’s face. So I tried Mrs Fantasio at home, but I struck out there, too.’

  ‘I know. I ran into her at Hilltop. Who knows what brought her out there but it was bad timing for me.’

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘I didn’t see any tyre tread marks. There was no trace of any violence so far as I could see. But then I didn’t get to look at everything before she arrived. The place had the feel, though, of the Colstons going out, as opposed to someone coming in and dragging them from their home. There was nothing turned upside down, no sign of any struggle.’

  ‘So what should I do with Mrs Fantasio now?’

  Cole tapped his pencil, a short burst on the desk, before looking up at her.

  ‘I think …,’ he said slowly. ‘… I think it’s time you had your hair cut.’