Redemption Point

by Candice Fox

  Jay’s face had reddened steadily. Before Amanda had finished talking he grabbed her by the throat and pinned her.

  “You’ve got a big fucking mouth,” he snarled, lifting her by the neck and banging her head against the floor. “But you’re not telling me what I want to hear.”

  “About the money.” Amanda struggled to sit up again when he let her go, then reeled as the room spun. “You heard the story after you became cellies. A smart crook would have kept something like that to himself. But you both heard it at the same time. Sticking close to each other for protection. Someone chatting to you in the chow hall. Talking shit. Talking about corrupt cops in the 1970s. Maybe it was an old lifer. Someone convincing. Someone who was there. They told you about Police Commissioner Tom Songly, the top dog. How all the money flowed upwards from the beat cops on the street, and he was one of the few people to come out of the train wreck of a royal commission unscathed.”

  Amanda looked across the living room at Victoria Songly’s body, the reeking, stiff half-mummy with the blue hands.

  “It would have been a lot of money. He was in power during the key years. And a couple of his lieutenants, they might have asked him to take care of their shares while they went away so they didn’t have to leave it with their wives. A big honey pot that no one believed in, no one was brave enough to go after. They told you the old man was dead. That he’d become paranoid in his twilight years and concreted his cash into the garage floor. They told you that there were millions waiting for the right person to come along. Nothing standing in your way except a sick old lady. An easy job.”

  “Who told her this?” Bran whispered harshly, grabbed his partner’s arm. “Jay, she knows. She fucking knows. And if she knows, someone else knows.”

  “She doesn’t know it.” Jay spat on the floor. “She’s guessing. A good fucking guess. If she’d known it she wouldn’t have come here alone.”

  “It’s hardly a guess when there’s so much evidence.” Amanda frowned.

  “Right.” Jay shoved Amanda’s shoulder with his boot, knocked her over hard. “So where the fuck is the money?”

  “Well, it’s not concreted into the garage floor.” Amanda gave a bloody grin as she righted herself again.

  “We fucking know that!” Bran snapped. He gritted his teeth, growled. “For fuck’s sake, woman. He’s going to kill you. This man here is going to kill you.”

  “No way,” Amanda said. “He wouldn’t dare. Jay’s smart. Aren’t you, Jay? You’re not going to kill me until you get what you want.”

  “So tell us!” Jay screamed.

  “No way,” Amanda said again. “What do you think I am, an idiot? If I tell you, you’ll kill me.”

  Jay snapped. He grabbed Amanda by the hair.

  I called Pip Sweeney. She answered in a couple of rings.

  “Where’s Amanda?”

  “I was just going to call and ask you the same thing,” she said. “I haven’t seen her all day. Her phone’s off. She’s not at the office. Are you okay?”

  I hung up and got back into the big black car. Linda followed, confused.

  “Where to?” Sharon asked.

  “Just drive,” I said, tapping on my phone. I opened the email from Frankie giving me access to the motor registry database, but my hands were so shaky and sweaty I could barely go further, and I didn’t know what to search for in any case. I had a name. Kevin. I applied the search for Ford Falcon XF utes registered in the area of Claire’s abduction on that date and brought up the list of names, scrolled painfully through them. No Kevins. The car might have been in his girlfriend’s name. His mother’s. Anyone’s. There was probably CCTV footage of Kevin at the Lord Chesterton Hotel. But the police weren’t going to put out a bulletin for him, not on my word alone. And the media weren’t my friend right now. I called Fabiana. Linda was turned in the front passenger seat, watching me. When Fabiana answered her phone, I started speaking before she said hello.

  “I need you to go through your list of attendees for today’s event,” I said. “Tell me Kevin’s surname.”

  “What?”

  “Please.” I held on to the handle above the car window, closed my eyes, forbade myself to scream at her. I repeated my request. Heard papers shuffling.

  “There are no Kevins on this list,” Fabiana said helplessly. “What do—”

  I hung up. Sharon was driving us east, toward the beaches. I went back to the car search. Stared helplessly at the names.

  Doherty, Richard. Mount Annan. Ford Falcon XF Ute. 1988. DDB 451. White.

  Dubbs, Matthew. Camden. Ford Falcon XF Ute. 1987. SHF 111. White.

  French, Anna. Woodbine. Ford Falcon XF Ute. 1988. AL 29 EE. Red.

  The list went on and on, little buttons at the bottom of the page taking the search out wider and wider from my selected location, Mount Annan. I adjusted the dates for my search. Nothing. Fabiana tried to call back. I ignored the call. Trying to search on my tiny phone was giving me motion sickness. Sharon pulled the car over on another grassy strip and I climbed out. I felt helpless, furious. A text came in from Kelly asking when my flight was leaving. I had a flash of myself in my old house, Lillian in my arms, Kelly at my back, everything that had been stolen from me. I screamed and kicked over a road marker, threw the phone onto the grass.

  “Bro, calm down,” Linda was saying. I grabbed him, just to have something to grab on to, my fingers biting through the fabric of his suit jacket. It was a mistake. I smelled his heavy cologne as he pushed me up against the side of the car with the effort of a man subduing a child, knocking the wind from my chest.

  “Chill, bro. Just fucking chill. What did the dude say?” Linda held me pinned against the car with a single hand against my chest. It was impossible to move. “What did he look like?”

  “He was young,” I said. I squeezed my eyes shut. Twenty-five, I guessed. Closer to thirty maybe. I had a flash of Dale Bingley in my kitchen in Crimson Lake. His words coming out of my mouth. The description of the man who had adopted the white dog from the British couple on the day of Claire’s abduction. “Young man, maybe twenty-five. Neatly dressed, brown hair. Polite.”

  How can he be twenty-five? Dale had pleaded. These people are telling me the guy who raped my daughter is twenty-five years old.

  Linda let me go. Cars were whizzing past us on the road. A golf course split down the middle, cyclone fencing. I retrieved my phone, went to the diamond wire and held on to the fence. I watched old men meandering across the immaculate greens, their long, pressed trousers.

  “He interrupted the old guy,” I whispered.

  “Huh?” Linda was behind me. I turned.

  “The old guy. At the pub. What was he saying? Did you hear? He was talking about Ford Falcons. About … badges. Car badges? Kevin came and interrupted him, cut him off. The old guy was saying the … the Aussie car companies had been trying to fight off foreign … foreign car sales?”

  “Rebadging,” Sharon said from the car, his arm over the back of the passenger seat, watching us. I ran to the open door.

  “What?”

  “The car’s badge is the little picture on the front and the side.” He pointed to the bonnet of the car. I looked and saw a silver shield with red and yellow blocks. “Sometimes companies, they used to swap designs of cars. Saves time, money. They just take the same car and put their own badge on it.”

  I was trembling all over. I looked to Linda, who seemed as confused as I was.

  “So two cars can look exactly the same but be different brands?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Sharon sniffed.

  “Oh Christ.” I went to my phone, struggled to find the internet browser. “Oh Jesus. Then maybe it wasn’t a Ford Falcon. Maybe it wasn’t a fucking Ford Falcon. Maybe it was something else.”

  I searched Ford Falcon XF 1988 rebadge.

  The Nissan ute was a badge-engineered version of the XF Falcon utility sold by Nissan in Australia from August 1988 to 1991 …

  “The Nissan u
te.” I opened my email. Followed the link to the database search engine. My fingers were making damp prints on the screen. The keyboard wasn’t working. “The Ford Falcon was the same as the Nissan Ute.”

  Carroway, Chloe. Glen Alpine. Nissan Ute. 1988. REN 555. Blue.

  “Blue.” I shoved Linda in the chest. “Blue! Blue! It’s fucking blue!”

  The beating was short, but hard. Amanda tried to curl into a ball, but Jay kicked her in the back, legs. She shuffled across the floor, trying to escape him. She could barely hear Bran in the background, his voice moving as he paced.

  “Come on, man. Oh Jesus. Come on, bro.”

  When there was a pause, Amanda rolled onto her knees. There was glass on the floor here, small pieces of it working their way into her exposed arms and legs.

  “What kind of a pussy,” she huffed, “beats a woman with her hands tied?”

  That really broke him. She could hear the breath coming out of him in low, heavy growls as he pounced on her.

  “Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” He was frantic, flipping her and ripping the tape off her wrists. “I’ll show you a fucking pussy!”

  His hand on her skull, a death grip, banging.

  * * *

  Pip stood on the bank of the creek behind the Barking Frog Inn, looking at a pair of pink Converse sneakers sitting, side by side, on the soil. She’d begun to grow concerned with Amanda’s silence on the phone at around midday. The two had planned to meet at the Shark Bar, Amanda in the seat she owned, Sweeney trying to distract her from the day’s many newspapers. There were good leads she wanted to follow up on. Conkaffey had passed on some interesting criminal links he’d discovered in the backgrounds of a couple of the bar’s regulars. She wanted to bring Amanda in to reinterview the men at their houses. Then there were the shell casings found in the forest a kilometer from the Barking Frog. They were waiting on analysis of them. Michael Bell had asked for another meeting. There was much to do, and Pip felt invigorated after a good night’s sleep. But Amanda was missing in action. She might have pressed on without her weird, unpredictable little partner. But Amanda had become like her magic feather. She felt more confident, more in control with the woman by her side. She’d wondered as she dozed off the following evening if a partnership between her station and Conkaffey and Pharrell Investigations might be possible. Maybe through Pip, the hostility of the Crimson Lake force toward Amanda might be lessened. Her colleagues might be able to truly see Amanda’s value. Anything seemed possible.

  Pip had gone to the office on Beale Street and looked in the window at the cats lying in the sunshine. When they’d noticed her standing there, a couple had pawed at the glass, meowed angrily. Were they hungry? She’d knocked, called, received no answer.

  A part of her was worried that Amanda was gone because of their meeting at the bar a day earlier. That moment, as they’d stood almost where she stood now, and Pip had felt her whole body infected with urgency. Driven to move. She’d looked into Amanda’s eyes. Had Amanda known what she was thinking?

  She looked down the length of the creek. Back toward its source. No sign of Amanda. But these were, unmistakably, her shoes—mud-spattered from bike riding, grass tangled in the laces. There was relief now mingling with the concern. Sweeney looked up and saw that a paling was missing from the fence across the way. The unmatched one, snapped in half, lying on the opposite creek bank. Puzzled, she crossed the creek. A sound from the house, a crashing. The renovators. Amanda might have gone to requestion them. A good idea. Pip walked around the side of the house to the front door and raised her hand to knock as the sound of paper crumpling came from beneath her boot.

  I stood at the wire, watching the golfers, and called Frankie. Didn’t explain anything, just told her the name of the girl and asked for the number. She could hear how disturbed I was. How frantic. She didn’t ask questions, just logged in to her computer and accessed the phone company databases, extracted the number, read it to me as I typed it into my phone.

  I called. Both goons were in the car now, watching me as I paced back to them, then to the fence again, my head down and shoulders aching with tension.

  “Hello?”

  “My name is Ted Collins. I’m a member of the New South Wales police,” I lied. There was no time to explain the truth of who I was. “Is this Chloe Carroway?”

  There was a pause. I tried to breathe.

  “Mal, is that you?”

  “Listen to me very carefully,” I said slowly. “Is this Chloe Carroway?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m Senior Sergeant Ted Collins.” I could hear a tremor in my voice. I tried to talk slowly. “I’m from the New South Wales police department.”

  “Okay…”

  “I need you to answer some questions for me.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes, right now.”

  “It’s the police.” She’d turned away to talk to someone in the background, muffled the mouthpiece with her hand. “He says he’s the police!”

  “Can you please tell me,” I said, “if last year, on April tenth, 2016, you were the owner of a Nissan ute? A blue one?”

  “Um. April? Yeah, that’s right. But I don’t own it anymore. We sold it.”

  “Do you have a person in your life named Kevin who had access to that ute at that time?”

  “Yes, that’s my ex-boyfriend.” She muffled the phone again. “Oh my god, he’s asking about Kev.”

  “Chloe, tell me Kevin’s last name,” I said.

  “Driscoll,” she replied. “Is he in trouble?”

  “Driscoll? Kevin Driscoll?” I turned toward the car. Saw Linda and Sharon exchanging a look with each other. “Can you spell that? D-R-I-S-C-O-L-L? Chloe, how old is Kevin?”

  I reached for the handle of the open back passenger door but it shut before I could grab it. Linda had pulled it closed from the inside. I watched him shut his own door, glancing at me, emotionless. I reached for the handle again but the car was moving. They sped off without me.

  “Hey!” I ran a few paces after the car. “Hey!”

  I stood by the side of the road, confused, the phone hanging in my hand. All of a sudden, the road had emptied of cars. I could see an intersection in the distance. I started running, putting the phone back to my ear.

  “Hello? Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” I huffed.

  “He’s twenty-five,” Chloe said. “No, he’d be twenty-six now. Is he in trouble?”

  “Do you know where he lives now?”

  “No, I … We broke up.”

  A flash across my mind, the girl in the picture, Kevin holding the phone, looking down at her like there was no one else in the world. Something in me had stirred, some primal recognition of the danger of this man, of the ruin he had wreaked on my life, on Claire’s life, on Dale’s life. I’d sensed his badness. His hand on my fate. And now all I could think of was that little girl in the picture in his hand, the face in his fingers. She’d looked so much like Claire. Jesus. She’d looked like her twin.

  You’re a true inspiration.

  Having met you I feel kind of free.

  Free to do what?

  “Where do his parents live?” I asked Chloe.

  “His parents?” The girl laughed nervously. “Is this a joke?”

  “His sister. Kevin’s sister. The little blond girl. He showed me a picture on his phone.”

  There was a long pause. I got to the intersection, waved madly at a taxi. It sailed past me.

  “Kevin doesn’t have a sister,” Chloe said.

  Amanda’s plan had worked. Stupid boys. Prison boys, still strung out on the incredible bravado they’d had to display on the inside, a door opened on a world of animalistic instinct that they could never close again. Jay had ripped off the duct tape on her wrists. Amanda waited for a pause in the punches raining down on her before throwing herself upward and wrapping her arms around him, entangling him like a snake. She bit. Her nails tearing into his shoulders. Her heels diggi
ng into his legs. Her teeth biting into the tender flesh at the side of his head. She got what she was aiming for. The warm, salty, hard flesh of his ear. Her own ear thumped with the pitch of his scream. When he tried to pull away, she gripped on harder, followed, let him drag her with him. They rolled together like lovers, and when she was on top Amanda rose up and balled her fist, brought it down hard on his nose. The bone crunched.

  “I told you!” She laughed as he gripped at his broken face. “You fucking arsehole!”

  Bran had her by the arms and was dragging her back. Jay rolled, fumbled for the gun that he’d discarded by the couch when he started to beat her. Amanda tried to lunge forward, to reach for it at the same time, but Bran’s arms held firm. As Jay’s fingers came within inches of the barrel they froze at the sound of a wail.

  “Nobody move!”

  Sweeney was in the doorway to the back garden, having slid the glass open silently, her gun at the ready. No one breathed.

  “Back the fuck up!”

  Her aim was on Jay. The man with the bloodied, crooked nose was sprawled on his stomach, fingers hovering unsteadily over the barrel. Sweeney was panting now, her eyes wild. “Don’t even think about it!”