by Harper,Jane
“I’m so sorry, Gretch,” Falk said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “If it helps at all, no one called me either. I found out when I saw his face on a news site.” Falk could still feel the shock at seeing those familiar features attached to that terrible headline.
Gretchen nodded, and her gaze suddenly focused on something over his shoulder. Her expression clouded, and she hastily wiped her eyes.
“Christ, watch out. Incoming,” she said. “Mandy Vaser. You remember her? It was Mandy Mantel back then. Jesus, I cannot be bothered with this right now.”
Falk turned. The sharp-faced, ginger-haired girl he remembered as Mandy Mantel had morphed into a neat, tiny woman with a shiny red bob. She had a baby strapped to her chest in a complicated sling that looked like it would be made from natural fibers and advertised as “organic.” Her face was still sharp as she marched across the yellow grass.
“She married Tim Vaser. He was a year or two above us,” Gretchen whispered as she approached. “She’s got a couple of kids in the school. Also got her hands full as the self-appointed spokeswoman of the anxious mothers’ group.”
Mandy stopped in front of them. She looked from Falk to the ham sandwich he was holding and back again, her lip curled in distaste.
“Hi, Mandy,” he said. She pointedly ignored him, other than to place a protective hand around the back of her baby’s skull, shielding it from his greeting.
“Gretchen. Sorry to interrupt.” She sounded nothing of the sort. “Could you pop over to our table for a moment? Just a quiet word.” Her eyes flicked smartly to Falk, then away.
“Mandy,” Gretchen said without enthusiasm. “You remember Aaron? From the old days? He’s with the AFP now.” She emphasized the last words.
He and Mandy had kissed once, Falk remembered. At a youth disco, from what he could recall. She had surprised him by poking her fourteen-year-old tongue deep into his mouth, tasting strongly of cheap lemonade as mood lighting glowed against the walls of the school gym and a stereo blared in the corner. He wondered if she remembered. From the way she crinkled her brow and avoided eye contact, he was certain that she did.
“Nice to see you again.” Falk held out his hand, not because he particularly wanted to shake hers but because he could tell it would make her uncomfortable. She stared at it, making a visible effort to resist the automatic polite response. She succeeded and left him hanging in midair. He almost respected her a little bit for that.
“Gretchen.” Mandy was losing patience. “A word?”
Gretchen looked her straight in the eyes. She made no attempt to move.
“The sooner you say it, Mandy, the sooner I can tell you to mind your own business, and we can all get back to our Sundays.”
Mandy stiffened. She glanced over her shoulder to where a gang of mothers with similar hairstyles were watching from behind sunglasses.
“All right. Fine. I—we—don’t feel comfortable with Aar—with your friend—being so close to our children.” She looked straight at Falk. “We’d like you to leave.”
“Noted,” Gretchen said.
“So he’ll leave?”
“No,” Falk and Gretchen said in unison.
Falk actually thought it probably was about time he headed to the station to find Raco, but he wasn’t about to be pushed around by Mandy bloody Mantel. Mandy’s eyes narrowed. She leaned in.
“Listen,” she said. “At the moment it’s me and the mums asking politely. But it can easily be the dads asking not so politely if you’d find that message easier to understand.”
“Mandy, for God’s sake,” Gretchen snapped. “He’s police. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, and we also all heard what he did to Ellie Deacon.” Around the playground, parents were looking on. “Seriously, Gretchen, you can’t really be that desperate, can you? That you’d expose your own son like this? You’re a mum now. Start acting like one.”
The man who had eventually become Mandy’s husband had once written and publicly recited a poem for Gretchen one Valentine’s Day, Falk recalled. No wonder the woman was relishing having the upper hand for once.
“If you’re going to be spending time with this … person, Gretchen,” Mandy went on, “I’ve half a mind to alert social services. For Lachie’s sake.”
“Hey—” Falk said, but Gretchen spoke over him.
“Mandy Vaser,” she said, her quiet voice like iron. “You think you’re so all-knowing? Then do something smart for once in your life. Turn around and walk away.”
The woman straightened her spine, unwilling to yield ground.
“And Mandy? Watch yourself. If you do anything that causes my son to lose a single minute of sleep or shed one tear—” Gretchen’s icy tone was one Falk hadn’t heard before. She didn’t finish the sentence, letting it hang in the air.
Mandy’s eyes widened.
“Are you threatening me? That is aggressive language, and I take that as a threat. I can’t believe you. After everything this town has been through.”
“You’re the one threatening me! Social services, my arse.”
“I’m trying to keep Kiewarra safe for our kids. Is that too much to ask? Haven’t things been bad enough? I know you didn’t have much time for Karen, but you could at least show some respect, Gretchen.”
“That’s enough, Mandy,” Falk said sharply. “For God’s sake, shut up and leave us in peace.”
Mandy pointed at Falk.
“No. You leave.” She turned on her heel and stalked away. “I’m phoning my husband.” The words floated across the playground in her wake.
Gretchen’s cheeks were flushed. As she took a sip of water, Falk saw that her hands were shaking. He reached out to touch her shoulder, then stopped, aware of people watching, not wanting to make it worse.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have met you here.”
“It’s not you,” she said. “Tensions are high. The heat makes everything worse.” She took a deep breath and gave Falk a wobbly smile. “Plus Mandy’s always been a bitch.”
He nodded. “That’s fair.”
“And for the record, I didn’t not like Karen. We just weren’t close. There are loads of mums at school. You can’t be friends with all of them. Obviously.” She nodded at Mandy’s back.
Falk opened his mouth to respond when his phone buzzed. He ignored it. Gretchen smiled.
“It’s OK. Get it.”
With an apologetic grimace he opened the text. He was on his feet almost before he’d finished reading it.
Five words from Raco: Jamie Sullivan lied. Come now.
20
“He’s in there.”
Falk peered through a thick glass panel in the door into the station’s sole interview room. Jamie Sullivan sat at the table staring miserably into a paper cup. The farmer seemed somehow smaller than when they’d been sitting in his living room.
Falk had felt guilty leaving Gretchen in the park. He’d wavered as she’d looked him in the eye and said it was fine. He hadn’t believed her, so she’d given him a smile and a push toward his car.
“Go. It’s OK. Give me a call.”
He’d gone.
“What’ve you found?” Falk asked Raco. The sergeant told him, and Falk nodded, impressed.
“It was there in plain view the whole time,” Raco said. “It just slipped through the cracks with everything else happening that day.”
“Yeah, well, it was a busy day. Especially for Jamie Sullivan, it seems.”
Sullivan’s head shot up as they entered. His fingers were clenched around his cup.
“Right, Jamie. I want to make it clear to you that you’re not under arrest,” Raco said briskly. “But we need to clear up a couple of things we talked about the other day. You remember Federal Agent Falk. We’d like him to sit in on this chat, if you’re willing for that to happen?”
Sullivan swallowed. He looked back and forth, not sure what the right answer was.
“I suppose. He’s wor
king for Gerry and Barb, right?”
“Unofficially,” Raco said.
“Do I need my lawyer?”
“If you like.”
There was a silence. Sullivan’s lawyer, if he even had one, probably spent fifty weeks of his year dealing with property disputes and livestock contracts, Falk thought. This could well be fresh territory for him. Not to mention the cost per hour. Sullivan seemed to come to the same conclusion.
“I’m not under arrest?”
“No.”
“All right,” Sullivan said. “Just bloody ask. I’ve got to get back.”
“Good. We visited you two days ago, Jamie,” Raco began. “To talk to you about the day Luke, Karen, and Billy Hadler died.”
“Yes.” There was a fine sheen of sweat on Sullivan’s upper lip.
“And during our visit, you told us that after Luke Hadler left your property at about 4:30 P.M., you stayed behind. You said”—he checked his notes—“I stayed on the farm. I did some work. I had dinner with Gran.”
Sullivan said nothing.
“Is there anything you want to say to us about that at this point?”
Sullivan swiveled his eyes between Falk and Raco. He shook his head.
“OK,” Raco said, and he slid a piece of paper across the desk. “Do you know what this is?”
Sullivan’s tongue darted out and ran over his dry lips. Twice. “It’s a CFA report,” he said.
“Yep. You’ll see here on the date stamp it’s from the same day the Hadlers died. Every time the firefighters are called out, they log one of these. In this case, they were responding to an emergency alert. You can see that here.” Raco pointed to typed lines on the paper. “And below, the address they were called to. Do you recognize the address?”
“Of course.” A long pause. “It’s my farm.”
“According to the summary”—Raco picked up the report—“the fire crew was called to your farm at 5:47 P.M. They were alerted automatically when your gran activated her panic button. They arrived to find your gran alone in the house with the stove alight. It says here they put it out, calmed her down. Tried to call you, got no answer, but then you arrived back at the house. That was at 6:05 P.M., according to this.”
“I was in the fields.”
“You weren’t. I called the guy who wrote the report. He remembers you approaching from the main road.”
They all stared at each other. Sullivan broke away first, looking down at the table as though an answer might appear. A lone fly circled over their heads with a tinny drone.
“I was in the fields after Luke left at first, but then I went for a bit of a drive,” Sullivan said.
“Where?”
“Nowhere really. Just around.”
“Be specific,” Falk said.
“Out to the lookout. Nowhere near the Hadlers’ place, though. I wanted some space to think.”
Falk looked at him. Sullivan tried to meet his gaze.
“That farm of yours,” Falk said. “How big is it?”
Sullivan hesitated, sensing a trap.
“Couple of hundred acres.”
“Pretty big, then.”
“Big enough.”
“So tell me why a man who spends twelve, fourteen hours a day on a couple of hundred acres of fields needs any more space to think?”
Sullivan looked away.
“So you reckon you went for a drive. Alone. What’s your excuse for keeping that quiet?” Raco said.
Sullivan glanced at the ceiling, considering and rejecting his initial response. Then he held his palms out and looked them both in the eye properly for the first time.
“I knew how it would sound, and I didn’t want the hassle. To be honest, I was hoping you wouldn’t find out.”
For the first time, Falk felt like he was hearing the truth. He knew from the file that Sullivan was twenty-five years old and had moved to Kiewarra ten years earlier with his late father and grandmother. More than a decade after the day Ellie drowned. Still.
“Does the name Ellie Deacon mean anything to you?” he asked. As Sullivan glanced up, a look flashed across his face too fast for Falk to read.
“I know she died. Years ago. And I know—” He nodded at Falk. “I know Luke and—and you—were friends with her. That’s about it.”
“Luke ever talk about her?”
Sullivan shook his head. “Not to me. He mentioned her once or twice, said that he had a friend and she drowned, but he didn’t talk about the past much.”
Falk thumbed through the files until he found the photo he was looking for and slid it across the table. It was the close-up of the interior of Luke’s truck’s cargo tray, zoomed in tight on the four horizontal marks near his body.
“Any idea what they are?” Falk said, and Sullivan stared at them.
Four lines. In two columns of two on the interior side of the tray, about a meter apart. Sullivan didn’t touch the photo. His eyes ran over the image, as though trying to work something out.
“Rust?” he ventured. He was neither convinced nor convincing.
“OK.” Falk took the photo back.
“Look, I didn’t kill them.” Sullivan’s pitch rose. “Luke was my mate. He was a good mate to me.”
“Then help us,” Raco said. “Help Luke. Don’t make us waste time looking at you if we should be looking somewhere else.”
Wet circles had seeped out under the arms of Sullivan’s blue shirt. The whiff of body odor drifted across the table. The silence stretched out.
Falk gambled. “Jamie. Her husband doesn’t have to know.”
Sullivan looked up, and for a second there was a ghost of a grin on his face.
“You think I’m shagging someone’s wife?”
“I think if there’s anyone who can confirm where you were, you need to tell us now.”
Sullivan went very still. They waited. Then the farmer gave a tiny shake of his head. “There’s not.”
Not quite right then, Falk thought. But he also got the feeling he wasn’t entirely wrong.
“What’s worse than being fingered for a triple murder?” Falk said half an hour later as they watched Sullivan get into his four-wheel drive and pull away. The interview had gone around in circles until Sullivan had folded his arms. He’d refused to say a word other than insisting he needed to check on his gran or call someone to make arrangements.
“Yeah, he’s scared of something,” Raco said. “Exactly what, is the question?”
“We’ll keep tabs on him,” Falk said. “I’m going to head back to the pub for a while, go through the rest of the Hadlers’ files.”
When in doubt, an instructor of Falk’s had always said, follow the money. It had been sound advice. Raco lit a cigarette and walked with him to his car, parked on a patch of land behind the station. They rounded the corner, and Falk stopped dead. He stood and stared, waiting for his brain to process what his eyes were seeing.
Across the doors and the hood of his car, the message had been carved over and over into the paintwork. The letters flashed silver in the sun.
WE WILL SKIN YOU KILLER SCUM
21
Gretchen stopped whatever she’d been saying, her mouth frozen mid-word as Falk drove his damaged car into the pub parking lot. She was talking to Scott Whitlam on the pavement as Lachie played around her feet. In his mirror, Falk could see them staring as he parked up.
“Bugger,” he said under his breath. It was only a few hundred meters from the police station to the pub, but it had felt like a long journey through the center of town. He got out of the car, the silver scrapings in the paint winking at him as he slammed the door.
“Oh my God. When did that happen?” Gretchen ran up with Lachie in tow. The little boy waved at Falk before turning his wide-eyed attention to the car. He reached out a stubby finger to trace the carved letters, and to Falk’s horror began sounding out the first word before Gretchen hastily pulled him away. She sent him to play on the other side of the parking lot, and he reluct
antly sloped off to poke things down a drain.
“Who’s done this?” she said, turning back.
“I don’t know,” Falk said.
Whitlam gave a low sympathetic whistle as he walked slowly around the car.
“Someone really went to town. What did they use? Knife or screwdriver or something?”
“Yeah, I really don’t know.”
“Bunch of bastards,” Whitlam said. “This place. It’s worse here than in the city sometimes.”
“Are you OK?” Gretchen touched Falk’s elbow.
“Yeah,” Falk said. “Better than the car, at any rate.” He felt a stab of anger. He’d had that car for more than six years. Nothing flashy, but it had never caused him any trouble. It didn’t deserve to be wrecked by some country moron.
WE WILL SKIN YOU
Falk turned to Whitlam. “It’s about something from the past. This girl we were friends with—”
“It’s OK.” Whitlam gave a nod. “I’ve heard the story.”
Gretchen ran a finger over the marks. “Aaron, listen. You need to be careful.”
“I’ll be fine. It’s annoying, but—”
“No. It’s worse than that.”
“Yeah, well. What more are they really going to do? Skin me?”
She paused. “I don’t know. Look at the Hadlers.”
“That’s a bit different.”
“Are you sure? I mean, you don’t really know.”
Falk looked to Whitlam for support, but the principal gave a shrug.
“It’s a pressure cooker round here, mate. Little things become big things faster than you expect. You’d know that, though. It wouldn’t hurt to be a bit careful. Especially with both things coming on the same day.”
