Cam ran his fingers along the collar of his open-necked shirt. ‘But you’re a vet.’
‘Animals in my care die pain-free and with dignity in a hospice I’ve had built around the back.’
Cam blew out a breath. ‘Fair enough, each to his own, I suppose, and I can’t say I’m in any particular hurry to see the dog destroyed. You can, I hope, still provide the court with some kind of behavioural assessment?’
The vet nodded and looked away, his face loose and sad.
Another fly settled on Cam’s knee. He raised his hand and glanced again at the vet. Then thought better of it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Friday
Cam emerged from his office after spending several hours at his desk, catching up on paperwork and following up the names and addresses of the clients Ruby and the vet had visited. He’d consulted with the vet by phone on several occasions, finding HK to be more cooperative than he’d expected and surprisingly efficient in his recording of dates. During one of their brief conversations, HK had drawn Cam’s attention to one farmer in Grassy Rise, a stretch of agricultural land about fifteen kilometres from the Glenroyd town centre, whose dirty facilities and stock he felt would be particularly conducive to the transferral of Q fever. When Cam rang the farmer at his home he was given the news that the twenty-five stud Dorper rams that HK and Ruby had tested for brucellosis had been stolen the following day, just hours before they were to be trucked off to a private sale in Gunningup
Putting down the receiver, Cam thumped the front counter, making Derek look up from his crossword, startled eyes magnified behind his thick glasses.
‘I want you to take a drive up to Grassy Rise, speak to a farmer called Colin Dexter about some stolen rams.’ Cam pushed a note with the details under the constable’s nose.
Derek picked it up, sighed and looked at his watch. Cam ignored his protests about not being back until after dark and the lack of overtime and said, ‘Also ask about his health, mention the Q fever and say there’s a strong possibility that his sheep had it. And get him to list everyone else who has worked with the sheep recently. He never reported the theft, apparently.’
At one of the desks behind the front counter, Pete lowered the phone he had been talking into. ‘Well, that’s no surprise, farmers seem to know that nine times out of ten we won’t get their stolen stock back for them.’ He raised his hand to Derek, who was dragging his feet towards the front door, and after Derek had disappeared spoke to Cam from the side of his mouth. ‘He’s about as much use as tits on a bull. You should have got me to go, Sarge.’
Cam shot Pete a wry smile, and in so doing caught a flash of colour on the constable’s desk. He stared at the magazine for a moment and slapped his hand against his forehead. ‘Shit, that’s it,’ he exclaimed as he rushed over, picked up the magazine and started to flick through it.
‘What’s up?’ Pete asked.
‘I noticed this before, but didn’t register the significance.’ Leaning over the magazine on the desk, Cam found the page and tapped an advertisement ringed in marker pen. The ad was headed ‘Forthcoming Sales’ and announced a large private sheep sale in the district of Gunningup.
Pete glanced down at it. ‘So?’
‘So why do you think he would have ringed this? Why would someone like Ivanovich be interested in these kinds of sales? Stock purchased this way is usually top of the range and expensive, and added to that, he has no land to put stock on.’
Pete shrugged. ‘Sorry, Sarge, I wouldn’t know. Maybe he was just interested in the prices or in getting a job at the sales?’
Cam felt like shaking him. He took a breath. ‘Think, Pete. We have stock sale ads ringed in the magazine, we have rams stolen that have been yarded in preparation for the advertised sale, we have a paint brand missing from among Ivanovich’s possessions that probably didn’t belong to him in the first place. Add up the minor details so far, and what do you get?’
Cam couldn’t understand how Pete could miss the connections.
‘Ivanovich was involved in stock theft — and I’m not just talking about a few sheep pinched from a neighbour and stuffed in a caravan.’
Pete was still frowning when Leanne walked into the front office from their small kitchen, a tray of teas and coffees in her hands.
‘Plain as the nose on your face, Pete,’ she said, putting the tray on the counter then handing the mugs out.
Pete took a sip of his and pulled a face. ‘Yuck, no sugar.’
‘Get it yourself, then.’
Mouth turned down in a parody of misery, Pete met Cam’s eye. Leanne had been unusually irritable since Cam’s return to work today, and he could see that once the hoo-ha over the murders had settled down there were some serious personal problems among his team that needed to be sorted.
He continued his conversation with Pete. ‘This makes me think about that Mungo fella again. Do we know what he was planning to do with the sheep in the caravan?’
Pete said, ‘They still had his neighbour’s ear-tags on them. Looks like we caught him before he had time to swap them and alter the ear-marks.’
‘It was me told you that, Pete,’ Leanne said. ‘You had nothing to do with the sheep.’
‘Leanne told me that,’ Pete said, making his voice a high imitation of hers.
‘Shut up and get on with your work,’ Cam snapped. The sibling rivalry between these two had gone over the line this time, if sibling rivalry was the correct term for whatever was going on between them.
Leanne coloured and stabbed at the teabag in her mug with a teaspoon.
Without looking up she said, ‘He had a pair of marking pliers with him. It was just a question of snipping the ears, either making the old marks unreadable or changing them to suit. Once the altered marks healed, it would have been a piece of cake to pass them off at the saleyard.’
Cam rubbed his chin. ‘I’d say Mungo’s was just a bit of petty thieving, but it’s an interesting example of how easy it can be.’
‘Yeah,’ Pete agreed. ‘If a moron like Mungo can do it, imagine how well someone with brains could carry it off.’
‘Stock theft won’t be so easy once the National Livestock Identification System is implemented,’ Cam said. ‘Sooner or later all valuable stock will get microchipped and stock thieving will be a lot more difficult. I reckon there’d be a lot of people interested in taking advantage of the old laws while they still can.’ Cam blew on his coffee before taking a sip. ‘And those guys at the fire the other night were pretty bloody organised. Toorrup found remnants of a two-way radio in the burned truck. When the truck got bogged, they just radioed for another and transferred the sheep.’
‘You’re meaning Mungo might be involved in some kind of well-organised network — Ivanovich too?’ Pete asked.
‘Mungo was paid to light the fire, but I think the sheep in the caravan were probably his own initiative, too small-time for these big operators and certainly not professional enough. But Ivanovich, now, he’s a different story.’
Leanne finally stopped stabbing at her teabag and took a calming sip from her mug. After a noisy swallow she said, ‘But we still don’t have anything really concrete, do we? So far everything’s circumstantial.’
‘But gut instinct should never be overlooked, should it, Sarge?’ Pete said with a cheeky grin, quoting something Cam had said to him weeks previously.
Cam smiled. Carrying his coffee, he began to weave his way through the desks towards the back door of the station and the fenced yard beyond, where they kept their vehicles, heavy equipment and the dog pen.
‘Umm, where’re you going, Sarge?’ Leanne asked, an unusual note of apprehension in her voice.
‘Out back to check on the Pilkington dog — you fed her, yeah?’
‘Umm . . . didn’t the super — ’
The phone trilled from Cam’s top pocket, cutting her off. It was the pathologist from Toorrup. Cam held his hand up to Leanne, and walked to his partitioned office and the ope
n Pilkington file on his desk.
‘Something important’s come up,’ Freddie McManus said on the other end of the phone.
Cam sat down behind his desk, put down his coffee and pulled out his pen.
‘I wanted to tell you this in person just in case you have any immediate questions,’ McManus said.
‘I’m all ears, Doc, go on.’ He saw Leanne hovering outside his glass door and found himself wondering again what her problem might be.
‘The histology results have come back for the body in the wool bale. It looks like our victim had a severe case of Q fever — know what that is do you, Sergeant?’
The self-satisfied smile in the pathologist’s voice made Cam break into a grin himself. He spent several animated minutes on the phone, filling the pathologist in on Ruby’s brush with the disease, explaining the likelihood that she’d contracted it from sheep that were later stolen. Given that there had been no reports of Q fever in the area for several years, Cam was almost certain the dead man in the wool bale had contracted the disease through his handling of the same stolen stock. This meant that if they could find the stock thieves, they would more than likely find the murderer or murderers.
At this point Freddie interrupted him. ‘I think you might have something there, Cam, but I do want to put you clear on just one point. The DNA tests are also back. It’s a positive ID. The dead man in the wool bale is Darren Pilkington.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ruby stared at her reflection in her wardrobe mirror, disappointed to see for herself that the scales hadn’t been lying. It looked as if all the missing kilograms had come off her legs, the jodhpurs only enhancing the knobbliness of her knees and giving her the appearance of a half-starved heron.
She turned to the side to check out her profile and made herself laugh when she attempted a heron walk. She would cut a sexier figure if she’d had expensive joddies like the ones Anthea wore. With the suede on the bum they might even help her stay in the saddle a bit more — at least that was what she’d tell her dad. Being sick hadn’t been much fun, so she might as well use it to her advantage and worm stuff out of him while she still had his sympathy.
She wouldn’t have been getting much sympathy if he’d known what she was planning to do now, though. But jeez, the risk was worth it, and she was just so bloody sick of being cooped up.
In the garage she put on her riding boots and gathered her tack together. The halter and bridle she placed in the basket on the front of her bike, the lead rope she wound around her waist like she’d seen the girls at the rodeos do. Transporting the saddle proved to be a bit more awkward. She wheeled the bike onto her front verge and had to balance the saddle precariously across the handlebars before she could push herself off from the curb, heading down her street towards the highway.
Things didn’t go too badly as long as she remembered not to make any sharp turns. Once or twice she had to stop and dismount to adjust the saddle, but soon she was peddling along the dirt verge of the highway, a long straight line that would lead her to the quieter road and Sweet-Face’s paddock. Even if someone she knew happened to be passing, she was confident she wouldn’t be recognised in her riding helmet, and traffic was light, anyway.
A few trucks rumbled past and their scratchy diesel fumes made her cough, but it was nothing compared with how she’d been coughing a couple of days ago. If Jo had thought she was well enough to ride her bike, she would never have driven Ruby back to her own home to watch DVDs; Ruby would probably have been forced to read books or do something equally boring at Jo’s. As Jo’s DVD player was broken, even she could see that Ruby’s request to go back to her own place to watch movies was reasonable enough.
Until it happened, Ruby had daydreamed about Jo and her dad getting it together, had even done a bit of minor matchmaking. But now they were actually an item she didn’t know what to feel. Anthea said it was cool, said she’d be guaranteed good English marks. But that idea had fallen in a hole when she’d been given a different teacher. And Dad had changed since getting to know Jo more. He didn’t seem to be play-acting happy like he had over the last few years, this was the real-deal Happy Meal. Somehow it didn’t feel right to see him like this when Mum and Joe were no longer with them.
God, but her legs were beginning to ache. Maybe she hadn’t got all her strength back after all. If she continued at this rate, she wouldn’t have the energy even to catch her horse, let alone ride him all the way to the Rawlins place.
The helmet bobbed up and down on her head as she pedalled, sliding through the sweat on her forehead. The day had turned out hotter than she’d expected.
Ruby veered into a truck parking bay, dismounted and took off her helmet. She ran her fingers through her sweaty hair and scrabbled through her mind for alternatives.
Suddenly a beauty of a plan materialised — sick!
The bush on the roadside was thick and perfect. Forgetting her exhaustion, she wheeled her bike in and hid it out of sight. She could always come back and collect it another day, and if not, well, she’d tell her dad it had been stolen and he’d get her a new one — surely she deserved a new bike after everything she’d been through? She grabbed her gear and headed to the road.
She stuck out her thumb as a truck rumbled towards her.
And passed by without so much as a cheery wave.
Prick. She made sure the driver saw her raised fingers in his rear-vision mirror. If ten more cars ignored her like this she’d go home, she decided. Her legs were aching and the saddle weighed a ton.
She walked on, leaving her bike further and further behind. Three more vehicles passed her by. Then she caught the sound of a familiar, chugging engine.
Oh, shit.
She didn’t turn. ‘Please not her, please not her,’ she prayed, screwing up her face. But no one was listening. Looked like she was busted.
Flight or fight?
Fight. She flung the saddle to the ground and turned as Jo’s VW slewed onto the verge.
‘For God’s sake, Ruby, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Jo climbed from the car and stalked towards her. Jo’s face was taut, her mouth no more than an angry slash.
‘I’m going for a ride, what does it look like?’
‘You’re doing more than that — you’re hitchhiking! Have you no idea of the stupidity . . .? The danger . . .?’
‘Well I wouldn’t be doing this if someone had driven me, would I?’
Jo indicated the car with a sharp nod. ‘Get in.’
‘No, and you can’t make me.’ Ruby plopped onto the ground, and crossed her legs and arms like the protesters did on the TV.
Jo also crossed her arms. She stood looking at Ruby for a moment, tapping her foot in the dirt. She took a deep breath. ‘You’re right. I can’t force you, and I have no wish to. But I can still make things very difficult.’
In one swift movement she swept the saddle and bridle from the ground and began walking with them back to the car.
Ruby sat in the dirt and watched her, gobsmacked. Jo wasn’t really about to leave her, was she? What was the point of staying here if she couldn’t ride? And she’d never be able to stay on the horse without the saddle.
But as she was about to scramble to her feet and call out to Jo to wait, her pride kicked in. Stuff her, she was bluffing. She wouldn’t dare leave her on the side of the road — would she?
‘Well, are you coming?’ Jo called from her VW, snapping on her seat belt with one sharp movement.
‘You’re not my mother!’ Ruby yelled, not quite sure why. Maybe because she wanted to see the same flash of pain in Jo’s face as she’d seen at the hospital.
‘Don’t worry, I wouldn’t want to be your mother — even if you were the last child on earth!’ The VW door slammed shut, the dream catcher on the mirror shivered and the engine started up.
Wait, Ruby thought with panic, she really was going! She scrambled to her feet. ‘Hey!’ But her voice was lost in the skidding sound of tyres on gravel.
She waved her arms and ran towards the car, but Jo chose not to see her. Soon the VW was no more than a round psychedelic blob, getting smaller and smaller down the highway.
Something at the back of Ruby’s throat ached, her nose began to fizz and her head pounded.
Suddenly she wanted her dad.
It felt as if she’d been walking for hours when the Ford Bronco pulled up alongside her. The driver leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door and Ruby hurried towards it.
‘Lost your horse, eh?’ He reminded her of a slightly younger Sir Les Patterson, with the same florid face, the same sweep of grey hair and crooked yellow teeth.
‘Umm, yeah.’
‘Wanna lift?’
It was then that Ruby realised she’d been walking along the wrong side of the road. It was the road to the paddock, not the road home.
‘Umm, no, it’s okay, thanks. I need to find my horse.’
The man shifted in his seat. Against his leg she could see the salami penis through his pale-coloured pants, just like Sir Les — oh, yuck!
She stepped back from the car.
‘I’ll help you find your horse,’ he said with a leer.
The man got out of his car and moved towards her. He nodded to the bush on the roadside. ‘In there, is it? Why don’t we go and take a look?’
Ruby took several steps back and wildly shook her head. Her mouth became dry and her chest tightened. She licked her parched lips. ‘Stay away from me!’
‘No need to be like that, I only want to help. It’s not safe for little girls to be out here on their own.’ He stepped closer, and put his hand out as if to touch her.
She sprang back, eyes darting left and right as she looked for an escape. About to dash across the road, she jerked to a stop, seconds away from being hit by a speeding truck. The wind, hot on her face, almost blew her back into the man’s outstretched arms.
He laughed.
Then, to her relief, she heard it, the familiar chug-chugging sound of Jo’s car, spotted it riding in the wake of the truck’s exhaust.
Flare-up: a tense, taut mystery (A Cam Fraser mystery) Page 14
