by Dave Warner
Two blocks along dulled by rain slick he found the discrete brass plaque that said ARMSTRONG – Feister’s legal firm. He entered a building that had been constructed sometime in the 1890s, all dark wood and brass and the echo of leather on ancient stone. Yellow lamps fought the gloom and revealed a young woman with a severe bun, wearing a charcoal suit too expensive for a receptionist. She stood waiting for him, bone dry. The detective in him deduced an underground car-space and direct elevator.
‘Inspector Clement? Abigail Lisle.’
He shook the proffered hand. He’d anticipated a waiting room of some sort, a coffee table, copies of the Financial Review but it was an empty space. Before he could break the ice with a mention of the miserable weather, Lisle indicated a large door, one of those that reaches all the way up and you expect to lead into an old-fashioned courthouse.
‘They’re in here.’
He followed. Halfway to the door, he got it. They didn’t need a waiting room or receptionist, Feister was their one and only client. Despite their size, the doors opened with a whisper at Lisle’s touch and revealed a large meeting room. A beautiful oval table was in the centre. At one end Max Coldwell sat in a chair, picking his nails. He wore an expensive suit and tie clearly alien to him. A silver-haired man around sixty sat directly opposite facing the door and stood as Clement entered. This was no doubt the lawyer, Gleeson. Clement wasn’t sure if his boss was Armstrong or that was simply the firm name from a bygone era. At the opposite end of the table to Coldwell sat an older woman in a well-worn twin-set, pads, pencils, a recorder and computer splayed on the highly polished surface in front of her; some sort of stenographer, Clement guessed. The room was comfortably warm but there was no sign of anything so plebeian as a radiator. Lisle asked if he would like tea or coffee. Silver pots were ready on a sideboard. He declined. She shut the doors and pulled up a chair.
‘Please,’ Gleeson indicated the seat directly opposite him and began to lower himself. ‘Miss Feister will be … ah.’ He stood again as a recessed door opened in the wall behind Clement. Ingrid Feister entered. She looked hardly anything like the woman he had encountered in Derby. Her hair was freshly washed with a wave and sheen that would have done Marilyn proud and she wore a navy blazer and long pants with Marilyn’s style. If the other Ingrid was Woodstock, this one was Martha’s Vineyard.
‘Hello again, Inspector.’ She smiled and took her seat.
Gleeson spoke. ‘We are all now aware of the unfortunate incident that took place at Tenacity Hill and of the lack of judgement of a senior and trusted employee of Giant Ore, Angus Duncan. Miss Feister and Mr Coldwell are very keen to help however they can in your inquiry. I will be speaking up if I feel your questions or their answers may be inappropriate. Ms Lisle here may do the same.’
Clement found the stenographer’s scratching on the pad off-putting. He did not like being lectured to by lawyers.
‘This is a serious matter, and I will ask the questions I deem necessary to establish the truth. I thank Miss Feister and Mr Coldwell for their presence.’ He looked directly at them. Coldwell couldn’t meet his eye and fidgeted. ‘I want to assure you that we will be extremely grateful for your help and candid answers. You will not be charged for some minor offence.’
‘You won’t bust us for smoking pot.’ Ingrid Feister had a playful look on her face.
‘No. I won’t. On the night of August seventeenth you attended an afterparty at the Kookaburra Hotel, with the dance group.’
‘Yes,’ Ingrid Feister answered clearly. Coldwell slid in his chair.
‘Angus Duncan and a Chinese man, Mr Li, also attended.’
‘Yes.’ Feister was answering for both of them.
‘You met Kelly Davies there.’
They had. Things had begun to break up after midnight but the five of them weren’t ready to stop. Li didn’t speak English but it was pretty clear he was up for some fun.
‘I knew Angus flew and I wanted to see the desert at night. I suggested he fly us to Tenacity Hill so we could wake up to a desert sunrise. Right?’ At her prompting Coldwell looked up nervously and nodded. You really don’t want to be here, thought Clement.
‘What happened when you arrived?’
‘We drank, danced. Or actually Kelly and I danced. There was an old CD player there, I remember. Max smoked pot. Kelly did a kind of lap dance for Shaun. She had a handful of pills. Eccies. She offered them. We didn’t take any. Shaun might have.’
‘Do you know where she got the pills?’
‘No. It was clear Shaun appreciated her dancing. They started kissing. She was drinking Vodka neat, from the bottle.’
‘Did either of you see her take any pills?’
Feister said she saw her hand go to her mouth but wasn’t keeping tally.
‘What about you?’ Clement homed in on Coldwell.
‘I saw her swigging vodka.’
‘Max was pretty well out to it. He was tired. I said we were going to head off to bed. I didn’t want to miss sunrise. Kelly took Shaun’s hand and led him over to the other tent. I went out like a light. Max too. We woke up a bit late, just after the sun was up. Kelly was gone. Angus said he’d dropped her back to Hedland for her bus. There was a bit of a weird vibe, but I didn’t think anything of it.’
Clement looked to Coldwell. ‘You?’
‘Same.’
‘Neither of you heard the plane take off or land again?’
Feister said, ‘I might have, in the back of my brain, but I didn’t wake up.’
She was straightforward. Clement found it hard to judge the veracity of what she said.
‘The CCTV footage we found of you at Sandfire made it seem like you were both upset about something.’
With the drollness that probably scored him good points at his law club, Gleeson said, ‘They were holding titles like the silent movies?’
Clement held his gaze on Feister and Coldwell.
Feister said, ‘We’d probably been arguing. I don’t like Max smoking too much pot.’
For the first time Clement detected a false note. He did not linger however.
‘You see, you disappeared, off the face of the earth so to speak. Which is consistent with you two having knowledge of something unpleasant.’
Gleeson said, ‘It’s also consistent with the purpose of the holiday.’
Ingrid Feister played with a nail. ‘The phones don’t work up there anyway. You know that.’
‘Hitting the private detective who had been hired to find you, with a lump of wood, that’s pretty extreme.’
‘As I told you in Derby, I’ve always been warned about abduction. Max made an honest mistake.’
Clement leaned towards Coldwell. ‘Is that right, Max? It wasn’t because you knew Kelly Davies had been killed and dumped in the desert and thought people might come after you?’
Coldwell huffed and puffed. ‘No! Like Ingrid said, we thought he was going to hurt us.’
When Clement rang me I was in a sports bar in a Geraldton pub. I’d wound my way down the coast the way a royal grows bald, steadily and without the stress of pending work. By the time I made Dampier, sExcitation had already left so I’d had no chance to talk direct to Alex but over the phone I had passed on what I knew.
‘They’re not budging,’ Clement said.
It wasn’t a surprise. Angus Duncan was prepared to take the fall and one could only speculate for how much. I asked Clement for his take.
‘Turns out Ingrid is a chip off the old man. Coldwell’s a flake. They’re sticking to the drug story which means more trouble for your pal Crossland.’
I was looking at a baseball game on the wide-screen when Breaking News came on: a historic video of George Tacich leading a search in bushland, other shots of Bay View Terrace and Autostrada circa 2000.
‘It just broke,’ I said.
‘What did they last? Three days? That’s a bit longer than I thought.’
POLICE INTERVIEW PERSON OF INTEREST IN AUTOSTRADA CASE cra
wled across the screen. Clement told me about the horse tranquilliser found in Sidney Turner. It was looking more like an unrelated abduction to do with his involvement in the drug scene.
‘If only we could have interviewed him.’ I heard the bitterness in his voice.
‘Don’t beat yourself up. We’ve got the guy.’
There was a prolonged silence. I envisaged him sitting there, stewing on what might have been.
‘I better go,’ he said finally, told me to drive carefully and rang off.
I contemplated whether I should call Michelle O’Grady but judged it was better I did not, at least not yet. I’d wait a few days and let the police narrative take hold. It didn’t help that I’d been right all those years ago. It didn’t help that they had Crossland. Nothing would bring back the girls or Ian Bontillo for that matter. I wondered if Crossland had been able to stay clean all that time. Surely he had killed again, we just didn’t know where.
I hoped Crossland had the decency to talk and let the parents claim their daughters’ remains but I wasn’t optimistic when it came to psychos like that. I ordered a beer and savoured it as befits a near twenty-year wait. I thought of George Tacich, the clandestine meeting at the zoo. George had retired now. Nikki Sutton, the young policewoman on that case, was now the Super in charge of Major Crime. Craig Drummond had lost his life in a shark attack.
Yet, here I was, the last man standing … or, to be more accurate, sitting on a bar stool.
I finished the beer and watched the froth slide all the way to the bottom. I didn’t order another. I felt maybe a sense of vindication but no triumph. It was a long, awful chapter in my life but at least I could close it. But that didn’t leave me satisfied. There’s a principle we have banged into us from the days when our folks gave us lunch-money: the one about how we’re all equal under the Southern Cross, how it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor … but I am a believer in this principle born from the days of convict settlers building stone houses with their bare hands and, later, diggers on the goldfields, skin burned raw by unrelenting sun: everyone deserves a fair go. Kelly Davies deserved a fair go. I hadn’t given up on her yet.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 35
The others had long left for the Anglers or venues of choice. It was the first of the AFL elimination finals and the entire station house was empty. Even the night shift was nowhere to be seen. Probably holed up at one of the pubs watching the big screen too, thought Clement without any malice. Years past he would have gladly joined them but he was overcome by a kind of stubborn inertia, resisting cleaning his whiteboard of the vestige of the Turner–Crossland case even though he’d accepted, albeit reluctantly, they had the right guy this time. It was still cat-and-mouse with Crossland. So far he had not been officially charged with any murder and was maintaining his innocence. Clement had suggested they try to match Crossland’s DNA with the Karrakatta rape as per Snowy Lane’s original thesis. Reluctantly they agreed but it was no match and apparently the Commissioner ridiculed Clement’s faith in Lane. The fact that he himself had hounded an innocent man to his death didn’t seem to impact him. The press was frustrated. They wanted to release the suspect’s name and had stories lined up ready to go. Once they found out he’d been arrested in the Kimberley, they’d badgered Clement for details. He’d palmed them off to Risely. Snowy Lane had called: somebody had indicated he’d played a key role and the media were hounding him too. Lane of course gave them nothing. He hadn’t given up on Kelly Davies. Good for him. Clement’s hands were tied. He’d wished he could have offered Lane some closure on who he’d chased through the crocodile creek. Two days ago he had finally been able to interview Mongoose Cole in his remand cell. The AFP investigation had climaxed with the arrest of Cole and his Wyndham supplier. The reality had yet to sink in for Cole. He was still acting the big man. Clement had given him every opportunity to admit to Turner’s abduction. He’d said he could put in special requests for privileges for his cooperation. Cole was in denial: he was going to walk. He was almost swaggering.
‘Why would I need to abduct that little dickhead? He was never going to say anything because he had nothing to say.’
Clement thought it was a case of Cole rewriting history. Why else had he been around at Turner’s? He’d fished, suggested there may have been no intent by Cole. They’d taken Turner and left him in the bush as a warning. What had happened was a genuine accident.
‘What part of no don’t you get, bro?’ Cole had answered.
‘Bro’? Even in Broome, crims were thinking of themselves as LA gangstas. What hope was there for any of us?
They’d found no ketamine when they raided Cole’s place but he’d had plenty of chance to get rid of it, and there were a number of his customers who had admitted sourcing it from him in the past. But Cole wouldn’t cop, and Clement couldn’t convince himself to draw a line through the Turner case. Risely was beside himself with pride. They’d had major impact on a Feds drug case but the jewel in the crown had been cracking Autostrada. The AC had called Clement to congratulate him. Nikky Sutton, the Super, had called him too. He knew her quite well from his days at Perth Homicide. He’d deflected her praise, explaining Snowy Lane was the man who made the breakthrough.
‘Snowy Lane of Mr Gruesome fame?’ She was clearly excited. ‘I met him back at the start of Autostrada. He was too clever for them. Apart from George Tacich, they hated him.’
He’d asked if they were close to charging Crossland.
‘Very. He has no alibi for any of the times when the girls went missing. To be honest, they thought they would have cracked him by now.’
Clement had slowly come to accept that if it looked like a duck and quacked like a duck, it was a duck. He’d been thorough, no offence to Snowy Lane, but Lane was far from objective on Autostrada. Clement had needed to be convinced that there was no viable alternative suspect. He had personally gone back over the work Shepherd and Earle had done while he’d been in Perth. They had recanvassed all Turner’s earlier break-ins and found no connection with anybody who had been in Perth over the Autostrada period. Earle had even flown to Telfer to interview Henderson, the miner from the Pearl, who’d lived in Perth back in the late ’90s. Earle found nothing suspicious. Clement personally called David Grunder and interviewed him specifically about the Autostrada case. He had an alibi for Caitlin O’Grady. He was in Bali, checked and confirmed.
One constructive thing Clement had done was to call Louise. He had bought a bottle of wine and they had shared takeaway Chinese on the beach under the stars. Then they’d gone to her place and pleasured one another. He had not stayed though. He wasn’t ready for that. Maybe after the wedding. It was set for Grand Final Day. Only Marilyn and Brian – whose interest in sport was Sunday golf and, of course, basketball – could have been so ignorant as to opt for a Grand Final Day wedding. When he’d pointed this out to Marilyn in the only communication they’d had since, she started in on him.
‘It was the only date available by the time we got back to the minister.’
The implication being it was his fault for not urging her sooner to get married. Unfortunately Louise was not here this weekend. She’d flown to Perth to be with her mum. Clement picked up the wiper and cleared the board. Done, whether you like it or not, he told himself. His phone rang. It was Jo di Rivi.
‘Yes, Jo.’
‘The hospital called me. Sidney Turner just passed away.’
People are always telling me how great Kurt Cobain is. I don’t get it myself. Iggy Pop, yes, hell, even Ignatius Jones from Jimmy and the Boys, but they are adamant Kurt was a genius and I’m prepared to concede that if somebody ignites that much passion they probably are, although maybe not in the selection of their women. Imitators of Kurt Cobain however, I’m sorry, I can’t make an argument on their behalf. See, this is another reason why it’s so wrong to get rid of factories because it means people like Max Coldwell, who might have made an excellent fitter and turner, or forklift driver
, had nothing to do in his life except practise his guitar and try and write songs like Kurt Cobain and then inflict the result on the handful of us who sat in this Fremantle basement bierkeller place drinking overpriced grog. I think there were seven of us, eight counting Max, who didn’t recognise me back in the shadows. Ingrid Feister was not among the Magnificent Seven. Mercifully, the set came to an end. When Max started packing up, I walked outside and around the back lane where he would load out. It was cool, breezy but not wet, the smell of the port drifting on the wind. A few minutes after I was in position, Max emerged at the back door carrying his guitar and amp. No autograph hunters had delayed him. When he opened his boot I stepped out of the shadows.
‘Hi Max.’
He looked up with that bovine smile. Clearly he didn’t recognise me even out of the shadows.
‘I’m the guy you whacked with a piece of wood.’
He shat himself. He wanted to run but he was still holding his guitar and amp and couldn’t bring himself to drop either.
‘It’s okay, I’m not going to take it out on you.’
He was still wary. I noted this was not Ingrid’s car but an old Hyundai. I held up the boot lid while he slid in the amp and guitar.
‘What do you want?’ he asked not looking at me.
‘I want the truth. I want to know what happened back there at Tenacity Hill and I think deep down you want to tell me.’
‘I told the police,’ he said and made for the driver door. I grabbed his arm. I could have snapped it like a candy cane.
‘No, from what I heard, Ingrid told the police, you were just along for the ride. I’m not the police, Max. I just want the truth, and you owe me that. Different car, I see?’
‘Ingrid and I busted up.’
‘Yep, those rich heiresses do tend to gravitate towards the billions.’
His bottom lip was jutting, trying to be defiant. ‘Let me go, please.’
‘Or what, you’ll scream?’
He didn’t know what to say.
