by Dave Warner
‘You’ve shaved your beard off,’ I said.
‘Shaved it off a week ago.’
I hadn’t noticed. And bam. There it was. We see what we expect to see, what our memory of something is, not how it actually is. I almost ran out of the pub and back up to my office and started rechecking the video surveillance. An idea was taking shape. Despite the cameras we’d put up, you could take a jacket from lots of places inside the factory without being seen. The thing was, that didn’t do you much good because you had to get it out of the factory and we had cameras all around the perimeter and at the gate, as well as the physical search. Bags were searched on the way out, even at lunchtime.
It wasn’t the guard, my guy had missed it too, but now armed with my new insight I went back and looked at every worker coming and going.
It took about thirty minutes for me to spot him: a young guy, general dogsbody. Every morning he arrived on foot in his own leather jacket, one of the factory ones the employees could buy for a discount. Every lunchtime he left the factory to get his ham and salad roll. Wearing a leather jacket. When he returns, nobody is thinking to check what he’s wearing. Genius in its simplicity. He arrives at work in his own jacket. Before lunch he steals a new one from the rack and replaces it with his older one so nobody will notice the rack is one short. Bold as brass he slips on the new jacket and walks out. He’s not carrying anything to be searched. The guard ‘sees’ him in his original jacket. Nobody is looking at him when he comes back from lunch without a jacket, all the focus is on the heading out part of the equation. So now all he has to do is retrieve his original jacket and walk back out at day’s end. Again, the guard sees him in his own jacket and this reinforces the guard’s memory.
We busted him the next day.
‘No hard feelings, boss,’ he’d said when I marched him into Pete’s office.
‘No hard feelings! I mean he’s ripped me off about thirty thousand dollars.’
Pete shook his large head and laughed as he swizzled Diet Coke and ice. He drank a big gulp and placed the heavy tumbler on the glass coffee table that separated our sofas.
‘So what is it you want me to do for you, Snowy?’
‘Let me break your window. I’ll pay of course.’
‘You better.’
But he was curious not angry. We were alone, his wife and daughters out putting his credit card through its paces.
‘So why am I letting you break my window?’
‘Cops need a reason to hassle a guy who is likely a real arsehole. You’re going to say that as you arrived home from a short drive to the beach, you saw a car, this car,’ – I showed him a photo of Carter’s Holden Commodore – ‘pulling out of your driveway and heading down the street. This gives them a reason to check on similar cars in the area.’
He grabbed a handful of salted peanuts from a plastic dish he’d found at the bottom of a kitchen drawer after much rummaging. I had the impression Pete didn’t know his way all that well around the working side of his kitchen. He gave a slight shrug of his shoulders. ‘Go for it.’
I asked him to point to the window furthest from any neighbours. He suggested the window in the spare room on the ground floor.
‘One more thing,’ I told him as I hefted the half-brick I had brought with me in anticipation. ‘When you returned you found the window broken and jewellery missing. Not a lot, just a few pieces: diamond earrings, a gold bangle, a Rolex.’
‘You’ve been through our drawers already!’ He slapped his thigh at his joke. ‘I guess I don’t get to claim insurance?’
‘Prefer you didn’t.’
‘Okay, Snowy, go ahead, rob me.’
I walked around the side of the house, aimed and hurled the brick. It broke the window with a satisfying thwack. Then I dialled Nikky Sutton.
Carter was in play.
CHAPTER 9
‘They were all home when we turned up.’
‘We’, Sutton explained, was her and Detective Roylan. Detective Constable Sutton sat in a chair in my office sipping a glass of red I’d poured. I was pacing, occasionally glancing out my window at the bored hoons of North Perth squealing rubber. It was close to 10.00 pm. This was the first chance she’d had to communicate with me. Earlier we’d agreed my office was the best place to meet. She’d told Tregilgas there had been a break-in near Carter’s place and wanted to use it as a pretext. As long as he didn’t know how she knew about this break-in, he gave her the green light to investigate. He still didn’t buy Carter as a suspect for Autostrada but was happy to nail a rapist as a by-product. Sutton continued now.
‘I told Carter and his pals there had been a burglary and we had been given a partial number plate consistent with Carter’s.’
This is what we’d worked out: a good reason for the police to visit but not so much as to put Carter on his guard.
‘How’d Carter and his mates react?’
‘No problem. Carter said he owned the car but hadn’t been out for a few hours. He explained he was in the SAS, as were his housemates. I empathised, said I understood but we still had to follow up. Then I asked if we could take a look around as there had been some things stolen and it would help us greatly if we could clear them of any suspicion then and there.’
Time for me to pour myself a drink.
‘That set off any alarms?’
‘Carter was sanguine enough.’ You had to admire a cop with that kind of vocab. ‘Filbert wasn’t rapt. He thought it was going a bit far. I said fine: why don’t you just let us take a quick look over your dressing tables or drawers? They agreed.’
‘And?’
‘The metal box was there as you’d suggested. We got Carter to open it. It contained a pistol and a small amount of bullets. Turns out he belongs to a gun club. He has a licence, all in order.’ My disappointment at there being no serial killer “trophies” was counterbalanced. He could have used the gun in the abductions. I mentioned that.
‘Same thing crossed my mind.’
‘Nothing else?’ I hoped maybe she was holding out on the good stuff for dramatic effect.
‘Nothing. No knife, no jewellery. I glanced through the photos. They were standing there watching.’
My deflation must have been obvious.
‘Hey, we still have the DNA. I’m also waiting for the army to get back to me with movements of his squadron on the nights in question.’
‘What can I tell the O’Gradys?’
‘Absolutely nothing.’
Which of course I knew but the sadist in me needed it confirmed. I really wanted to give them some sense that we were progressing.
‘Can you get eyes on Carter?’
‘The boss won’t go for that. But I’ve circulated his photo and description to all our task force and the patrolling uniforms in Claremont. Also his car and rego. Of course, if somebody else wanted to put eyes on him …’
Sutton stood, found my pathetic basin and rinsed her wineglass.
‘Thanks for the vino. I’m thinking overall it’s positive, the gun especially. I’m running down the station wagon, will let you know when I’ve tracked where it is now.’
Once people have imparted what they need to, my office rarely tempts them to stay. She was already at the door by the time I spoke.
‘What did you think of Carter?’
‘Arrogant, smug. I don’t know about Claremont, but I think you’re right about Carmel Younger. If the DNA agrees, party-time.’
After Sutton left, I sat and moped. Halfway through another slug of red I told myself not to be despondent, my expectations had been too high. Soon the police could point to Carter as the man who assaulted Carmel Younger. Then they’d be able to bring real pressure to bear. In the meantime, starting tomorrow, I’d be devoting more of my attention to Mr Carter. If he was the Autostrada guy I’d need to check him in the dark hours. Eventually I settled on this routine: surveillance 5.00 pm to 3.00 am, home for a sleep till 8.00 am, time with Grace and Tash before she left for work, after wh
ich I’d do all the domestic stuff I had to do and any more research into the case I could before grabbing another hour of sleep between 3.00 and 4.00 pm, which was when Sue would come over to hold the fort with Grace until her daughter returned. Carter was at the barracks till 5.00 pm, so I’d try and pick him back up as he left. If he was keeping the girls or their bodies somewhere, maybe he’d go straight there before heading back home?
Three days into my surveillance of Mathew Carter I had nothing to show but bad eating and sleeping habits, and developing piles. I wished I had the power of the police department at my disposal and could check on whether Carter had ever been involved in any training or bivouacs in Jarrahdale where Jessica Scanlan’s body had been dumped. I wished I could trace the station wagon myself and run forensics on it. As it was, my resources were a surveillance van fitted out like a plumber’s, my old Magna, a Sony Walkman and a bunch of old cassettes. Sure everybody else now had portable CD players but I came from a tradition where furniture was varnished, verandas oiled and tyres retreaded. The old man had drummed into me that you looked after and maintained, wringing every last drop of service before discarding or contemplating replacement. I’d only bought a CD player four years ago, a decade after almost everybody else, still had my vinyl and still played it. Unlike my record collection – which consisted of some albums I’d saved for as a teen, others I’d bought through the ’70s and ’80s but each carefully chosen – my cassette library was physical evidence of the haphazard, the unplanned, the whim. Prince rubbed shoulders with a Reader’s Digest Bill Haley & His Comets I’d bought at a garage sale, Linda Ronstadt found herself in a Dugites cover, Loaded Dice was sandwiched between Honky Château and Born Sandy Devotional.
The plumber’s van I had parked in advance on the street opposite Carter’s. My routine was to tail Carter from the barracks in my car. If he did drive off somewhere, the car was far less conspicuous than the van. So far that hadn’t happened, he’d driven straight home. I would then park the car in a nearby street and walk back to the van. The van’s only bonus was neighbours couldn’t see you camped in the front seat like they could with a sedan. In a place like Perth with its low-traffic streets, you’d arouse immediate suspicion. The first night, Carter emerged with the other guys around seven. I tailed them in the van to the Swanbourne Hotel where they had a counter meal before returning home. I parked the van on the other side of the street. Lights were all out by midnight. I spent the night with my cassettes, beginning to hate every last one. At 3.00 am I called it quits, locked up the van and walked back to my car.
Day two was a carbon copy of day one except this time they drove to the Captain Stirling Hotel on Stirling Highway, under ten minutes by car from Autostrada. Once again, however, they all returned.
The morning of day three, Nikky Sutton rang to tell me the latest.
‘The army got back to me. Carter’s squadron was free and in Perth on the dates Carmen Younger was raped, and Emily Virtue and Caitlin O’Grady disappeared.’ I restrained my excitement, I felt a ‘however’ coming on. ‘However …’ – there it was – ‘… the night Jessica Scanlan disappeared the squadron was in Northam on a training exercise.’
It was a blow but not fatal.
‘Maybe he was able to get back? Northam’s what, an hour or so away. It would be the perfect alibi.’
She had considered the same thing. ‘I haven’t been able to speak to anybody in person yet, this just came through as a fax.’ She would keep trying, she assured me, as she would for the station wagon. It had been located but from now on it was a logistics matter as the wagon was in Esperance, hundreds of ks away, and a tech had to be peeled off to examine it thoroughly. I told her about my surveillance and she was grateful. We agreed to talk if either of us had any news.
The rest of the day panned out pretty much like its predecessors. It was 9.00 pm, and I was in the back of the van listening to Johnny Warman’s only hit so far as I was aware, ‘Screaming Jets’, when my phone rang.
It was Gerry O’Grady. He sounded agitated but I wasn’t sure if it was excitement or anxiety.
‘We just had a call from Tregilgas. Did you know about this suspect?’
I was about to say ‘I’m watching his house as we speak’ but Gerry ran on. ‘Ian Bontillo.’
My heart sank. I was surprised Tregilgas would have mentioned Bontillo.
‘I interviewed Bontillo. He was cooperative. He didn’t ring any bells.’
Gerry was keen to get it all out. ‘The police took him in for questioning. Apparently a reporter got wind of it so they wanted to call us to warn us. They told us he had lied about his alibi. They said a history of sexual misconduct with students had come to light.’
‘That’s gilding the lily.’ I set him straight on what I knew. But for the first time in months they had some hope.
‘Snowy, he lied. He has no alibi for any of the nights the girls went missing and he taught them all.’
It was a strong point of course, and I wasn’t sure I ought to dissuade him just because I had my own hobbyhorse.
‘I’m following up on something else. It’s promising. I think I should keep going but it’s up to you if you want me to stop.’ I knew when I said that I was putting myself between a boulder and a canyon wall.
‘What is it? You’ve got a lead?’ You could taste the eagerness in his voice.
I told them I’d come right over.
‘So, this Mathew Carter could be involved in the other rape?’
Michelle O’Grady spoke for both of them. We were sitting in the lounge room that now felt almost as familiar to me as my own. Nellie was in her room doing homework. In deep slumber, Soupy lay side-on, his flank rising and falling. I’d laid out everything with the care of a mother packing for junior’s first school camp.
‘Yes. That will give the police a much stronger reason to check everything about him.’
Michelle bit her lip. Gerry leaned forward. ‘Is there any evidence he might have known the girls? Other than playing pool at the OBH?’
‘No, but I don’t think that’s critical. We’re talking SAS here.’
I could sense his reservations.
‘Look, I’m not saying it’s not Bontillo, only that I didn’t get that vibe. But maybe that’s why he has gone undetected. I honestly don’t know. But I don’t think there’s anything to lose following Carter.’
They looked at one another, then turned to me.
‘You better get back.’ It was Gerry who spoke. I reminded them that it would be better for everybody if they didn’t mention all this to Tregilgas.
‘He’s not obstructing the line of inquiry,’ I hastened to point out. ‘But he might if he knew I was involved.’
We agreed to communicate the next day. I stepped back out and, even in the dark, felt the hot breath of summer on my neck. Bill Hayley and I drove back to Carter’s house and I resumed my vigil. The car was still in the driveway. I watched until around 2.00 am before calling it a night.
Tash was fast asleep when I got home. I made myself a toasted sandwich, showered and climbed into bed beside her. Lately I’d spent no time with her and I missed her company. For a long time I couldn’t sleep. My brain kept picking back through images of Caitlin, the dark station wagon, a figure approaching out of the dark. It stuck Bontillo’s head on the shoulders of the figure, then Carter’s. Finally I fell asleep.
When the phone woke me there was no sign of Tash next to me. The clock radio showed 9.07. The house was too quiet for Grace to be around. Tash had gone to work and taken Grace with her to drop at her mum’s; that’s what my brain was somehow churning through as I fumbled for the phone.
‘It’s me.’
‘Snowy? It’s Nicole Sutton.’
I sat up. ‘Any news?’
‘Yes, not good, I’m afraid. The DNA isn’t a match.’
My brain wouldn’t register what my ears were being told. ‘What? Sorry, say that again?’
‘Carter’s not your guy. He didn’t rape
Carmel Younger.’ The words were like knuckles, driving my hope down. My innards were crushed.
‘You’re sure?’
Of all the lame lines to come out with – but I couldn’t help myself. I’d been so wedded to the idea that I had cracked not just Carmel Younger’s case but the whole Autostrada thing.
‘Yes, I’m sure. I double-checked with the lab. If that is Carter on the tape he’s probably going to say he was simply out walking.’
