The Way It Is Now

by Garry Disher

  ‘What are you doing? Leave us alone. You’re not wanted.’

  Nadal, turning up the wattage on his smirk, stepped away from the car, spoiling for a tussle. ‘Keep your shirt on.’

  ‘First you turn up at my mother’s service,’ Charlie said,

  ‘and now this? Fay’s got enough on her plate.’

  Deamer fronted up to him. ‘If you must know, she contacted us.’

  Charlie went still. Giving himself time to regroup, he said, ‘What do you mean?’

  Holding up both hands, warding him off, Deamer said, ‘Let’s not do this out here. Too hot, for a start. Hop in.’

  ‘And go where? You must be crazy.’

  ‘Pub,’ she said. ‘There’s a pub round the corner.’

  Charlie expected a hipster joint, pretentious cocktails and a themed décor, but they drove him to an old corner pub with a vast, dimly-lit, high-ceilinged lounge and islands of club chairs on a floral carpet. The kiddies had lemon, lime and soda, Charlie a beer—which seemed to confirm something for Nadal.

  They had driven in silence and ordered in monosyllables. Now it was time to talk.

  ‘What do you mean, Fay contacted you?’

  ‘She’s concerned to know the truth,’ Deamer said. ‘Same as me and Will.’

  Charlie brushed that aside. ‘The truth about what?’

  Ashleigh Deamer scooted her chair around until it was elbow-to-elbow with her boyfriend’s and took his hand in hers. ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘You went to see Karen Wagoner a while back?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘She’s my grandmother.’

  Things started to slot into place. ‘Oh. And?’

  ‘She and Mum don’t get along.’

  Charlie stared at Deamer without seeing her. What he saw were lines of familial affection and disaffection. ‘And you don’t get along with your mother either, but you’re close to your grandmother.’

  Deamer shrugged. ‘She looked after me a lot when I was little. And Mum’s bi-curiosity…’ She gave a little grimace that suggested contempt and bitter amusement amidst the usual fallout of family breakup.

  Bi-curiosity. Grandmother and granddaughter, collaborators in disapproval, thought Charlie. He recalled his conversation with Wagoner and could have kicked himself. She’d mentioned, with pride, a granddaughter, Ash. In television.

  ‘Okay, so Granny told you things, is that what you’re saying?’

  Deamer jerked Nadal’s hand up and down emphatically as if unaware she still clutched it. ‘In particular, about her Menlo Beach friends.’

  Charlie watched a woman at a nearby cluster of club chairs get to her feet unsteadily, cross the thick carpet, rest one hand on the jukebox, sway her bum, ponder her selection. John Denver leaked into the room. I’m in a time warp, Charlie thought—in more ways than one.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Bent cops,’ Nadal said in his sleepy way.

  Deamer hushed him, sending Charlie an apologetic look. ‘We don’t know for sure and we’re trying to find out.’

  ‘What do you mean, bent?’

  ‘An armed holdup, the Medicare branch in Rosebud. Half an hour before opening, the security system was breached, and two men came in through the back door.’

  ‘How does that involve police corruption?’

  ‘The police did the robbery, the same police investigated.’

  Charlie’s first mouthful of beer had been hugely welcome, a balm to his soul. He’d have sighed in pleasure if he hadn’t been with the podcast twins. Now the taste was flat, tepid and he pushed his glass away. ‘Is that right.’

  Deamer said, with a pretty twist to her mouth, ‘Your dad was investigating it.’

  ‘Is that a fact.’

  ‘We think the other man was Mark Valente,’ Nadal said.

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Yes, really.’

  Deamer cut in. ‘Let’s go back a bit. Nanna says it was a bit of a wild time. Heavy drinking, gambling, sleeping around.’

  She watched Charlie tensely. He remained expressionless, thinking: She suspects her grandmother was a willing player.

  ‘So?’

  ‘A particular kind of culture,’ Deamer said. ‘Old school. Very blokey.’

  Nadal leaned in. ‘We found two women who were junior constables when Valente was at Rosebud. They said the sexual harassment and abuse was ongoing.’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t have involved my father,’ snarled Charlie, ‘he was based in the city when Valente was at Rosebud.’

  ‘We’re not saying your father was into that kind of thing,’ Deamer said. ‘We’re trying to paint a general picture. Macho culture: rules don’t apply.’

  If Karen Wagoner had been a player, Charlie thought, she might have tried to hook up with my old man, or Valente, and been rejected. She’s stewed on it for years, and now she’s after revenge. ‘Twenty years ago the whole damn culture was macho. It doesn’t add up to armed holdups.’

  ‘I haven’t finished. It was more than drinking and gambling and whatnot. We think they did things that were actually corrupt. Including evidence tampering.’

  ‘You think, or you know?’

  ‘They were friends with a man called Shane Lambert. Your mother’s lodger, right? He knew how to break into places, bypass alarm systems.’

  Charlie tingled. ‘Your grandmother told you this?’

  ‘He was arrested a couple of times and let go.’

  ‘I repeat, your grandmother told you this?’

  ‘Nanna said sometimes there’d be a bit of money floating around and a kind of nudge, nudge, wink, wink about where it came from. Then suddenly a lot of money. Enough for your dad to pay off the mortgage and Mark Valente to buy a house in Noosa. A win at the horses, they said.’

  ‘You just said they were gamblers. Maybe they did have a big win. Did you even check?’

  ‘Nanna said it happened the same time as the Medicare robbery.’

  ‘A Medicare branch carrying enough cash to buy a house or pay off a mortgage? Come on.’

  ‘Maybe enough for a down payment,’ Deamer said. ‘The thing is, they were friends with a guy who knew how to bypass security systems and one day they were all rolling in money.’

  Nadal showed his disdainful teeth. ‘And it happened on Valente’s turf. And your father was assigned to investigate.’

  Investigate, thought Charlie, or ‘investigate’? When Mum disappeared, he’d been investigating a security van holdup. Useful cover then, too?

  Swallowing, he said, ‘I’m not convinced, and no one listening to your pissy little podcast will be either.’

  ‘Don’t be a prick,’ Nadal said. He looked down his nose. ‘Ash has a Master’s in media studies.’

  Deamer touched his forearm; turned to Charlie again. ‘Sometimes context can be compelling. Nanna had a feeling things weren’t right. Suddenly with all that money floating around there was tension, maybe a falling out. Then your mother disappeared, and she got frightened and left. She’s been thinking about it ever since, putting two and two together.’

  ‘And coming up with five. Context isn’t enough, all you have is vague conjecture. And isn’t it a basic rule of reporting that you double-check your sources? Have you asked yourselves why your grandmother wants you to dig into it? For the greater good? Or so she can settle some scores?’

  Deamer flushed. ‘Context does matter. Part of that is skillset—your father belonged to a specialist squad, he was trained by Mark Valente, and they were friends with Shane Lambert.’

  Nadal leaned in. ‘We’re not the enemy, Charlie.’

  ‘You’re someone’s enemy. My father, for a start.’

  ‘Maybe he was influenced or duped,’ Deamer said. ‘It would be useful to talk to him.’

  ‘Is that what Fay promised?’ Charlie said, feeling disloyal.

  A shake of the head. ‘Actually, she just wanted to pick our brains. She said to leave your fath
er alone and concentrate on others in that circle.’

  ‘Good on her. My father’s ill, and he won’t talk to you anyway.’

  ‘We’d just like his side of the story.’

  That old chestnut, thought Charlie. ‘And what was Mark Valente’s side of the story when you rocked up and said, “Hey, Mr Valente, did you rob a Medicare office twenty years ago?”’

  Charlie, watching their faces, saw that’s exactly what they’d done. And been told to fuck off. But then he recalled Valente’s edginess yesterday. Maybe they’d buttonholed him again; maybe this time they’d struck a nerve.

  ‘Ashleigh,’ he said, ‘what exactly did your grandmother say? How were you going to find out anything?’

  ‘She said Shane Lambert was the weak link. Find him and we’d be up and running.’

  Charlie started to tell them where Lambert was but thought better of it. ‘You’ve been hitting brick walls, right? His cousin? A guy he used to work with?’

  Deamer was startled. ‘How do you know?’ Her face cleared. ‘Never mind. Anyway, he was going to be our way into the story.’

  They hoped Shane Lambert, locksmithing and security expert, would betray Rhys Deravin and Mark Valente? Charlie wondered why he was even talking to them. Because he’d begun to suspect there was something to their theory? Because his father was evasive?

  He said, with more feeling than he intended, ‘Forget the Medicare robbery for the moment: does anything you’ve heard or discovered have anything to do with my mother’s murder? Billy Saul’s murder?’

  Deamer shook her head and looked about ten years old as she picked up her glass with both hands and drank. Placing it on the coaster again, she reclasped Nadal’s hand. ‘Our prime focus is on police involvement in the Medicare robbery. We think Lambert bypassed the security system so the others could get in. We don’t know how he relates to your mother or that little boy.’

  Nadal leaned in. ‘She’s not our way into this story,’ he stressed.

  ‘Nor is my father,’ Charlie said. ‘Leave him out of it.’

  ‘Maybe we can’t do that,’ Deamer said.

  ‘You’d go after a sick man?’ Charlie asked, and watched her wince. Guilt? Embarrassment? She’s the principled one, he thought, snatching a look at Nadal, who still seemed merely smug.

  ‘He’s not going to talk to you,’ he went on, ‘and neither is Mark Valente. One thing you learn in the police, play your cards close to your chest. You need hard evidence.’

  ‘Like this?’ Deamer said, releasing Nadal’s hand and working her phone.

  She set it down, nudged it across the table. Charlie peered at a photograph; a two-storey house on a waterway. Palm trees, a dock, a motor cruiser. ‘Mark Valente’s little Noosaville shack.’

  ‘Currently valued at two point four million,’ Nadal added.

  Charlie slid the phone back across the table. ‘But maybe valued at a lot less twenty years ago. Or maybe he still owes two million.’

  ‘Owns it outright.’

  ‘Proves nothing. A win at the horses, a purchase when the market was on a downturn…’

  But Charlie was troubled suddenly. Rhys and Fay had never seemed rich—but never poor, either. The Warrandyte house wouldn’t have come cheap. Two incomes—or a string of armed holdups? He recalled the scene outside the Balinoe Hall, the apparent contact between Fay and the twins. Had she been starting to wonder where the money came from?

  ‘Show me that photo again.’

  Deamer handed him her phone wordlessly, thinking she’d convinced him, but he cleared the screen and went directly to messages. ‘You texted Fay this afternoon.’

  ‘Give it back!’

  Charlie shook his head; read through the message history. ‘How did she know your number?’

  Deamer’s hand floated in the air, waiting for her phone. ‘We first made contact last November—had she heard any rumours, that kind of thing, but she told us to get lost.’

  ‘Good for her,’ Charlie said, returning the phone.

  ‘Yeah, well, she must’ve held on to our business card,’ said Nadal in his lazy way. ‘She contacted us on Sunday.’

  ‘Except we were at a family thing,’ Deamer said, ‘which is why we tried to talk to her yesterday.’

  ‘At my mother’s memorial service,’ Charlie said. ‘Tactful.’

  Deamer flushed. But she was defiant. ‘Like I said, she approached us, Charlie.’

  To be young and stupid, Charlie thought, feeling old—or somewhat old, somewhat wise. ‘Okay, what did she want?’

  ‘Like I said, to pick our brains. She seemed a bit lost, like she’d heard things. She asked what we’d meant last year when we asked if she’d heard any rumours.’

  Maybe Rhys—suddenly infirm, aware of his mortality—had wanted to unburden himself?

  ‘We told her what we just told you,’ Nadal said. ‘She didn’t really want to hear it and said we should be looking at others.’

  Charlie shivered a little in the air-conditioning. The pub lounge less like a dim, non-threatening cavern, more like an icy cell, the walls closing in. His mind raced: the possibility that Valente and his father had pulled an armed robbery—or many robberies. The possibility that his mother had found out—and had to be eliminated. But would Rhys have hurt a kid? Would Valente? And why was Billy Saul there, anyway?

  ‘The fact remains,’ he said, staring at Nadal, ‘no one’s going to talk. You need evidence.’

  Then he heard himself: he was helping these idiots now?

  Deamer was looking at him musingly. ‘Charlie, we’re at cross-purposes. You want to know who killed your mother, we want to know if there was, you know, criminal behaviour by your father and others back when she was killed. Maybe the two are linked, I don’t know. But it seems to me that Shane Lambert might have information that helps both of us. I mean, why did he vanish? Is he dead? Did someone shut him up, and if so, who?’

  Charlie had no intention of putting her straight. He had hard questions for Lambert, though, and one thing Deamer had said began to resonate with him: the rumoured existence of a police culture capable of turning a blind eye, tainting evidence and arresting people only to release them later. He needed to delve into the records again.

  Oh, right: he was suspended.

  48

  ‘MY SYMPATHIES AREN’T boundless,’ Susan Mead said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Pretty much used up,’ she added, but not unkindly.

  ‘I know, thanks, sarge,’ Charlie said.

  They were nursing glasses of lemon, lime and soda in a Docklands bar. Four o’clock, and homeward-bound workers were beginning to stop in for a drink. Charlie’s old Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigation Team was headquartered nearby, and there was a chance one of his SOCIT workmates might stroll past, but, as the sergeant had just informed him, they were less likely to toss him into the sea now. Much of the stink had faded, with Luke Kessler pleading guilty that morning, and Allardyce off on sick leave.

  ‘I expect you feel vindicated?’ she said.

  ‘I’m magnanimous,’ Charlie said. ‘No intention of rubbing it in your face.’

  ‘Big of you.’

  ‘I hardly covered myself in glory, sarge.’

  ‘Running background checks using the LEAP database? Shoving the boss over his desk? You could say that.’

  Charlie saw that she was waiting for him to get to the point. In the dim lighting she was expressionless, her hair escaping pins and clips at the end of a long workday, but when she aimed that expressionless face on anyone—subordinate, victim, culprit—she generally got the truth out of them.

  ‘I’m thinking of quitting,’ he said.

  She nodded, unsurprised. ‘Your life’s become somewhat full of distractions.’

  Charlie wanted to say, That’s not the reason, but she went on: ‘You’ll go out on a high. We got Kessler.’

  ‘A lot of that was down to Anna Picard. She did something we should have done from the start.’
/>
  ‘Like what?’

  ‘She found another victim.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Kessler’s teammates and family friends and even his old girlfriend were character witnesses, right? We accepted that, it’s par for the course in he-said, she-said cases. Meaning we had to depend on Gina Lascelles, who was pulled apart on the stand.’

  ‘Charlie, there was more to the investigation than Gina’s story. We looked pretty hard for a self-clustering rape culture in that club.’

  ‘I know, I did some of the digging. But everyone clammed up, we couldn’t find anything. Anna, on the other hand, did something that paid off. She found enemies of the ex-girlfriend.’

  Including one who had also partied with the team and was prepared to testify to her own rape. Her story differed from Gina Lascelles’ but was no less horrific: she’d awoken at a party to find herself naked, Kessler’s penis in her mouth, his hands choking her, calling her ‘bitch’ and ‘slut’, his mates watching, cheering on. And Charlie would have bet his best surfboard that one of the onlookers had been Jake Allardyce.

  The bar had become noisy. Running his fingers up and down his glass abstractedly, soothed by the condensation, he watched Mead absorb what he’d said. Maybe she’d start making it customary to approach the enemies of the main players in future rape investigations.

  Then she was fishing an iPad from her bag. ‘This favour you ask for,’ she said abruptly.

  Charlie gave her the details: Shane Lambert, arrested for public drunkenness in Rosebud, Victoria, on 4 February 2000, and held overnight in the station lockup. ‘If you could dig out all the circumstances,’ he added, ‘including contemporaneous notes if they exist—anything that might not appear on an ordinary arrest record.’

  ‘Who is he?’ she asked, her fingers flying on the screen.

  ‘He was my mother’s lodger for a while.’

  Mead stopped; looked up at him. ‘I’m sex crimes, Charlie. How do I cover myself if there’s any follow-up?’

  Charlie had expected that. ‘The Peninsula paedophile ring we’ve been tracking?’

  She put her head on one side and paused. ‘So I tell professional standards I was wondering if Lambert might have snatched the boy who was buried with your mother?’