by Dave Warner
It was the first time Clement had seen it happen to a suspect. Regrettably there were at least three times he recalled that people had collapsed when he’d had to tell them a loved one had been killed: twice way back when he was a uniform, and once as a detective when remains of a missing person had been found. The worst time was the second. An eight-year-old girl was one of two who had perished. A class had been playing at a beach on a school excursion when a sand wall collapsed. There had been no way the mother could prepare for that news. She had cut sandwiches, applied sunscreen … tragic. Plaistowe, on the other hand, had had years to prepare, certainly weeks since the break-in.
As it turned out, the vet was only out to it for a few seconds. Thank God, thought Clement. For an instant he’d been assailed by the idea he may have taken some suicide pill. Earle found a small kitchen out the back and brought a glass of water in. Once Plaistowe had that in him, he revived. All the same, they couldn’t just proceed. They called ahead to a clinic.
‘Do you have any heart complaint or other existing illness?’ Clement heard himself asking.
Plaistowe shook his head. ‘My blood pressure’s a bit high but I’ve been resisting going on tablets. They say there are a lot of side-effects.’
A serial killer worrying about his hypertension medication. Clement wondered if he was in some surreal story.
‘We’ll get you checked out.’
The vet got shakily to his feet.
Clement unclipped his radio and told Mal Gross to send in the techs. He was pleased to see Lane hadn’t moved.
‘Snow, you better wait outside.’
Lane saluted him and shuffled out. Clement shared a knowing look with Earle, then they escorted Plaistowe gently out front. The clinic was only a block away.
Lisa Keeble and her team arrived in two separate vans.
‘You can have our space,’ said Clement. ‘We’re just having Mr Plaistowe checked out.’
They parked at the rear of the clinic. Clement entered first and spoke to the receptionist who indicated a room had been set aside. Clement then brought in Earle and Plaistowe. In the waiting room a surfer dude with a bandage on his toe sat staring at his phone. A young mother with two children looked annoyed she’d been bumped.
The doctor, a man about forty-five who probably knew Plaistowe, emerged from a different consulting room and pointed.
‘This way.’
‘I’ll leave you to it.’ Clement whispered to Earle. ‘Anything important, give me a call.’
A warrant had already been secured for Plaistowe’s house and car as well as the shop. A second tech team should be arriving at the house now. Clement left the car for Earle and walked back to the vet’s. Could this really be the culmination to nearly twenty years of police work, he wondered? All those thousands of man-hours, rolling up under a blue Broome sky while the main suspect has his blood pressure checked.
Snowy Lane was standing quietly out front.
‘Your forensic is out the back in the carpark. You think anything’s wrong with Plaistowe?’
‘Not physically.’
Clement found Keeble suited up and examining the van, rigged up with a rear cage for animals in transport. This is where he shoved Turner, thought Clement, like some large dog he was moving. Risely himself and Josh Shepherd would be accompanying the techs to the house about now. If he kept one trophy, chances were he kept more. Snowy Lane emerged after him and leaned against a car, watching on, knowing to keep clear.
Mason came out of a rear door. ‘There’s a small safe in here.’
Plaistowe sat opposite him and Graeme Earle now in the interview room. He’d been given orange juice and a glass of water, and been well mannered. The doctor had declared that Plaistowe had probably hyperventilated and would be fine if he took it easy. Goodness knows what he made of it all, the local vet and a detective in his room. They had brought him to the station and charged him with the abduction of Sidney Turner. The camera was running. They had been through the preliminaries, establishing name, date, location. An audio feed led directly to the adjoining interview room where Snowy Lane sat by himself listening in. Risely and Shepherd were still at the house dealing with a shell-shocked Mrs Plaistowe.
‘I didn’t kill Jess,’ said Plaistowe, his lips wet and seeming fleshy with the liquid he’d been drinking. ‘I had nothing to do with any of those girls.’
Clement wanted to steer him away from that for the time being. Lisa Keeble had already told him that the van had been thoroughly vacuumed. She’d found no trace of wattle in it. She was hoping for a result on Plaistowe’s clothes.
‘I’d like to talk to you about the matter you’ve been charged with, the abduction of Sidney Turn –’
‘Yes.’ Plaistowe added for good measure, ‘Yes, I admit it.’
Clement was always worried when things went this easily.
‘You admit you abducted Sidney Turner?’
‘It was stupid. I panicked. I wouldn’t have done anything. I wouldn’t have known who it was who had broken into my shop except for Jo and you talking. I panicked.’
‘Why did you panic?’
‘You know why: Jess’s pendant. I thought this would happen. If anybody found out where he got it from, they’d think I hurt Jess, but I didn’t.’
Clement was not going to allow him to drag them down that path. Not yet.
‘Could you describe how you abducted Sidney Turner?’
‘I waited in my van, thinking he might show. He didn’t have a car that I could see. I was parked in the side street. I’d filled a syringe with horse tranquilliser. I still wasn’t sure how to do it, or if I would do it, when I saw him. I jumped out and snuck up behind him and injected him. I dragged him to the van, tied him up, just his hands really.’
‘Didn’t you hit him first?’
‘Um, yes, I might have. I had a block of wood the size of a brick.’
‘So you hit him and then injected him?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘And then you loaded him into your van and drove him to an isolated creek south of Derby and what? He escaped?’
For the first time Plaistowe looked at Clement with some hostility. ‘No. I’d had time to think by then. I just left him there.’
Earle spoke with doubt in his voice. ‘You just left him, tied up, sedated, on the banks of a creek where a crocodile was known to be active. You wanted it to do your dirty work.’
‘No. I didn’t know there was a crocodile there.’
Earle played the sceptic. ‘It was in the papers.’
Plaistowe was agitated. ‘It was just bush. I didn’t know what I was doing.’
Clement found himself circling. ‘You just took Turner to the bush to what … question him about what had happened to the pendant that belonged to Jessica?’
‘That’s right.’
‘But, help me here, Robert, you already knew we had it or it had been sold on, right?’
He’s looking trapped thought Clement. He’s starting to see his error. Plaistowe said nothing. ‘And here’s the problem for me. If he didn’t know the significance of the pendant before, Turner was going to know once you questioned him. He’d be able to give us a description. And if you thought we had the pendant but hadn’t worked out its significance, then by removing Turner you removed any link back to you.’
It was not the first time Clement had made somebody confront their darkest self. That part of us we can sweep under the bed, pretend doesn’t exist.
‘You took him there to kill him. And either Turner escaped, or you changed your mind.’
‘I don’t why I took him there but he didn’t escape. I left him there. His legs weren’t tied that tight. I had no reason to kill him.’
The last sentence was strident. We are there now, thought Clement, we can talk about Jessica Scanlon.
It was a weird sensation, alone in this room, listening to the voices from next door. Like a play going on in my head. I admired Clement’s skill as an interrogator. He’d got the ad
mission from the vet he had abducted Sidney Turner and he’d all but got Plaistowe to admit that at the very least his initial intent was to kill Turner. Now we were where we were always destined to be.
‘I didn’t kill anybody. The police at the time questioned me. I was at Lake Grace the day Caitlin O’Grady disappeared.’
There was a rustling of paper, Clement making out like he was checking notes but of course he and I had already been through this.
‘You claim you were in Lake Grace the entire weekend after that Australia Day.’
‘That’s right. I have a cousin there.’
‘Three hundred and forty-five k, that’s the distance.’ It was Earle this time. ‘But you could drive that in, say, four hours. Leave Lake Grace at nine, be in Claremont around one am. Drive back again.’
‘No,’ high-pitched. ‘You’re trying to frame me. I never left the farm.’
Clement came in again, reasonable. ‘Okay, let’s say you’re telling the truth. You’re telling us you didn’t know Caitlin O’Grady or Emily Virtue?’
‘No. Only Jessica. She was friends with my brother.’
According to Clement, the safe in the shop had contained nothing but drugs Plaistowe used in his work. Last I’d heard, nothing had turned up at the house but it was early days.
‘So how did you wind up with her broken pendant?’
There was a long pause. I held my breath. Was he going to demand legal representation? No. He began speaking. Thank God.
‘I was working at the vet clinic that night, Friday, after uni. I was doing a study on the symptoms presented by animals and the likely choices of treatment by vets. That was my master’s. Just as I was arriving, Jessica got off a bus from town. She was meeting friends for dinner up the street. I always liked Jess, and I got the impression she liked me. She was flirty, you know, she’d always touch you and laugh … and I said I was here at the vet and if she wanted to after she’d had dinner, I could give her a lift home because it was dangerous out there. Everyone was freaking out.’
Because of you, I thought.
‘And, you know, the whole time I was thinking about Jess coming back to see me. I had a bottle of gin I used to mix up with lemonade while I worked. Which was mainly going through the computer and the notes, you know? And anyway, there was a knock at the back door at, whenever it was, and there was Jess. She said she was going to get a taxi but there was none at the rank and was it still okay to get a lift? I asked her if she’d like a drink while I was finishing up and she said sure. And I was at the computer and she was leaning over my shoulder and I could smell her perfume and feel her, you know her breast against my neck, and I just thought, “she likes me”. And I turned around and kind of stood up and kissed her. And she freaked.
‘She pushed me away and said, “No, what the fuck are you doing?” or something like that. And I felt so ashamed, and maybe angry because she’d kind of led me on, you know, and I reached for her to tell her to calm down and say “I’m sorry, okay”, but me grabbing her freaked her out even more and she shoved me again and I grabbed for her and got her necklet and it snapped. And I was standing there with it in my hand and she just ran out. Out the back door, it wasn’t locked. And there were some dogs there and they were going crazy and I just stood there with this thing in my hand for like, five seconds. And I thought, no, I have to give this back, I have to put things right. And I ran out and there was no sign of Jess. But there was a car’s brakelights heading out the carpark towards Leura Avenue. I knew she had to be in that car.’
Clement said, ‘You’re saying there was no sign of Jess and it was five seconds?’
‘Maybe twenty, maximum. It seemed longer but I’ve thought this over thousands of times since. It had to be less than half a minute. I know I was thinking I would see her when I ran out.’
‘And what did the car look like?’
No hesitation. ‘It was a station wagon, dark red I think.’
I was rocked. That was something I was not prepared for.
You’ve kept your secrets for eighteen years, Clement was thinking as he tried to read the man opposite. This could be just another lie.
Earle asked, had he got the registration? No, he’d wished every day for the rest of his life, to this very second, that he had.
‘I was standing there in shock. I tried to tell myself that it might be someone Jess knew, or that it was a Good Samaritan who had seen her upset. She’ll be fine, I was trying to tell myself. The car swished to the left and accelerated up towards the railway.’
Was he too convincing? There was about Plaistowe something haunted, something of the loss he’d felt, something that echoed with Clement’s own fears over losing touch with Phoebe. But maybe Plaistowe could still feel that, even if he was a killer.
‘So you’re standing there with the pendant in your hands, what did you do then?’
‘I didn’t know what to do. I went back to the vet’s and locked up. I was still telling myself, she’s okay. I didn’t have her phone number. There was a phone box in the Bay View Terrace across the road. I went there, called triple zero and reported a dark red station wagon in Bay View Terrace that had been cruising suspiciously. I didn’t give the exact location because it would come back to me.’
It seemed he was hurting, but how could you be sure?
‘And later when Jessica was reported missing, you didn’t get in touch.’
‘I’d be a suspect. I’d argued with her. The police had already interviewed me. I was in Lake Grace when Caitlin O’Grady went missing but I know how you think. I’d reported the car. I didn’t know anything else. I had no more information.’
‘You could have told us Jessica was there one second, gone the next.’
He was looking down at the table now. Clement waited for more, nothing came.
‘So why did you keep the pendant?’
He continued to look down. ‘I just felt I should. I couldn’t throw it away. It seemed wrong.’ He looked up into Clement’s face. There were tears now, for himself or Jessica or both, Clement couldn’t say. ‘I only tried to kiss her. I didn’t want to believe that something … that I …’ He regained composure. ‘Whatever you think about me, that’s the truth. I did not harm Jessica and I never had anything to do with the other girls. I kept that pendant in my safe at work. And then one day I had to fit some boxes in there and I moved it and forgot to put it back. And that was the night that Sidney Turner broke in. I think it was Jessica, Detective, I think she guided it all so you could catch the real killer.’
CHAPTER 37
Twice I’d tried to pin the Autostrada abductions on Shane Crossland, twice I’d been wrong. Crossland was nothing but a small-time drug dealer who’d been in the wrong place at the right time and now I had to face that mistake. I’d been angry at Tregilgas for his dumb stubbornness but was forced to recognise the same flaw in myself. Crossland had never had Jess Scanlan’s pendant, that had all been Plaistowe, so the question had to be: was the vet lying? Had he abducted and killed Jess Scanlan, and likely therefore Emily and Caitlin? I wasn’t going to let the myopia I’d shown with Crossland repeat. Plaistowe could have abducted Emily Virtue. According to Clement, the records of the original interview did not give him an airtight alibi. He had been in a Nedlands share house at the time but could nominate nobody who was with him that Saturday night, early Sunday morning. Caitlin was a different story. He was confirmed as being at Lake Grace, an awful long way from Perth, till around 9.10 pm. It was just possible he could have done it, got back to Claremont and abducted Caitlin but we were talking a ten to fifteen minute window, so he would have had to drive non-stop and practically grab the first girl he saw. Of course the Geiger counter clicked loud when it came to Jess. He admitted he was with Scanlan the night she was abducted, seconds before she was abducted in fact. He had even maintained possession of her broken pendant. That spoke of a violent struggle and that made him a prime suspect, with the task force and Tregilgas licking their respective lips.
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Clement told me he didn’t hear a false note in the confession. I didn’t have the advantage of seeing Plaistowe’s face but that can be a distraction too; sometimes the consummate actors work their visual emotions better than their voice, and I had to say, his voice sounded as true as a David Warner pull over mid-wicket. But, of course, if Plaistowe was the culprit, you’d expect him to be a consummate liar.
One thing I’ve learned is that if a man kills once, he won’t have much compunction about killing again. If Plaistowe killed Jess Scanlan, he would have killed Turner after abducting him. Unless Turner escaped. Was that likely? Here’s a guy who can snatch women from under the noses of police in a crowded nightclub district, wouldn’t that guy be able to deal with Turner way out in the lonesome bush? Okay, maybe he’d reformed, maybe he’d lost his knack as well as his yearn to kill, maybe he couldn’t be bothered with a male victim, it just didn’t do it for him, and so he grew slack and Turner got away. I’m sure that is what my old pal Collins at the task force and his boss, the Commissioner, would be suggesting.
On the other hand, if Plaistowe did not kill Scanlan, his account dovetailed with other facts I’d uncovered. He claimed he’d seen a dark red station wagon leaving the carpark moments after Jess Scanlan ran out. The roadie, Party Pig, saw a dark-coloured station wagon parked beside his truck the night Emily Virtue disappeared. The night Carmel Younger was raped it seemed the vision caught SAS soldier Mathew Carter on camera. At the time Carter owned a maroon wagon. Carter had been my original suspect but his DNA did not match the swab from the rape kit.
‘But the sample I got was from a hair from a hairbrush in his room. You see what I’m saying. Maybe somebody left their brush there, or used his brush. Maybe that wasn’t Carter’s DNA.’
Clement took a bite of his fish burger and chewed slowly, thinking. We were back at the Cleo post the interview.
‘But you said the night Scanlan disappeared his squad was in Northam.’
‘He could have got back. Maybe they were on some all-night exercise and he had time. Come on, Northam’s a lot closer than Lake Grace.’
