by Dave Warner
Clement wiped his mouth carefully with a napkin. ‘We’d need an ally to approach the army.’ He put the napkin down, still thinking.
‘Nikki Sutton helped me once before. You said she likes me.’
‘She’s a superintendent now.’ He said it like somebody tells you the nag you just put a fifty on has a bad limp in the mounting enclosure. For good measure he added, ‘You’re poison as far as the Commissioner is concerned.’
‘Maybe she cares about truth more than the Commissioner’s approval.’
Clement mulled. ‘Alright. I’ll ask her. Any idea where Carter is now?’
‘No. He had two friends, well not exactly friends, but guys in the squad. I don’t remember their names but I have my notes. There are also the other two guys he shared the house with. Filbert and Hinton or Holton, some name like that. I’ve got all the files still.’
We agreed I’d run my old contacts while he followed police records on Carter.
‘What’s going to happen to Plaistowe?’
‘The task force guys are picking him up tonight.’
We finished up our burgers and Clement dropped me at the airport. I kissed goodbye to Broome in the hours of dusk, its scent lingering in frail air. We’d had a short yet tumultuous affair: crocodiles, lingerie dancers, beers on the beach. I hoped we’d see one other again sometime when the guns were silenced and justice had been served.
Everything was in a frenzy as the footy season climaxed. After that Australia would hit a lull until the Melbourne Cup. It was a time when the bees start to buzz again and all the corporate bigwigs take holidays so they don’t have to stand in line at airports with the December plebs. It’s a great time to be outside but today I had to forgo the pleasure. I was in my poky office. It took me hours to find my old computer files on backup disk. The files I needed were on floppy disks of the era before I’d instituted the better strategy of simply keeping an old computer forever. This reminded me why. It took me hours to locate possible backups and half of them didn’t work on the new computer. I had a vague memory of printing a hard copy and eventually I found what I was after in the second of my lever-arch folders marked simply CAITLIN. I’d never stopped thinking of Caitlin and the O’Grady family but I’d kept them in the background, not wanting to give false hope. I was glad I had. I would have blown it with Crossland. For now they could find out whatever the cops wanted to tell them.
By the time my plane arrived in Perth the night before, there was a text from Clement to say Sutton was on board. I’d driven home, slept till 6.00 am and come straight to the office, so it was around midday before I found the names I was after. The two men who had hung with Carter in Timor were Luke Whitmore and James Feruggi. Whitmore I’d met. I remembered him now, fair hair, slim face. I guessed he wouldn’t look anything like that seventeen years on. I tried the old number I had on him and got a woman with an Indian accent who had never heard of him. Clement would be the surest way of locating him but I was going to have a stab at Facebook first. I got lucky. There was a photo of the guy I remembered, not that different, still sinewy, hair slightly thinner but wavy. I was going to apply to be his Facebook friend but I thought there might be a quicker way. His profile photo had him wearing a Cottesloe Rugby Club jersey and there were other guys behind him in the same shot. I had an old pal, Manto, who was associated with the club. Manto was no gazelle, and as far as I knew had never excelled on any sporting field, but he was an excellent sportsman when it came to off-field activities like carrying an esky or organising smart, attractive women for the trivia night. I called him and we swapped long losts.
‘I haven’t played for years,’ Manto said, ‘but if he’s a member somebody will know him. Call you back in ten.’
He was true to his word. The Whitmore number was a mobile. I rang and got voicemail. I said he might not remember me but we’d met once before years ago and I wanted to speak to him about Mathew Carter and would he mind calling me. I was about to pack it up but figured I may as well try Feruggi. There weren’t too many James Feruggis in Australia. One looked about eighteen. The other was the right age and lived in Darwin. I sent a friend request. My phone rang: Clement.
‘Mathew Carter was bashed to death in a lane in Richmond, Victoria, in two thousand and three. He’d left the army and had joined the Hells Angels.’
I’d never caught wind of it and that surprised me. Mind you, it was over in Victoria and I remembered that in 2003 Tash and Grace and I had gone on a holiday to Vietnam, so maybe that coincided.
‘Suspected biker related but never established,’ embellished Clement.
I’ll admit, the first thing I thought was good riddance to bad rubbish. The next was, we’re never going to find what happened to those girls. Not for the first time on the Autostrada case, I felt I’d been punched in the guts. But this wasn’t about me.
‘I’d still like to close out the case,’ I said. ‘The families need it.’
Clement agreed. ‘They’ll have some sample of his DNA on file in relation to his death. Sutton has put in a request to the army for files relating to Northam exercises.’
I brought him up to speed on my efforts and suggested if I could get onto Whitfield I might be able to get some idea of what they did at that camp.
‘It’s a long time ago,’ he said with naked scepticism.
That was true but who knew how long before the army would respond. If they were like most government departments, it would drag on like a school presentation night.
We agreed to keep each other informed and rang off. Our conversation had left me in an emotional no-man’s land. If Carter had been dead since ’03 it might go some way to explaining why there’d been no repeat. No more abductions and murder was a good thing but part of me still felt cheated in the way a man who has prepared himself to defend his house against a bushfire suddenly finds the fire has swung in a different direction and the day is saved anyway. I wished Tash was there for me to bounce off. I went back home, cooked an omelette and hoped the phone might ring, the way I would in my youth after a nervous first date. To milk the mood I put on an Esther Phillips CD and got deep blue stewing on what had happened to Kelly Davies. I drank a Heineken, something I couldn’t have done in my youth because we were a one-beer town, Swan. Supposedly we had become sophisticated but allowing imported beer wasn’t a pass mark. You don’t get sophistication by copying glossy photos of piazzas. Like everything else in life you have to earn it the hard way, and sometimes that means change from within, a lot harder process. Wherever I looked, I still saw one big pit. Whether it was gold or nickel or iron ore didn’t matter, in this state power still came from who held what land where. We weren’t an ideas city, or a tourist mecca, we could let Sydney or Melbourne hoodwink themselves into that lie. Sure, every now and again there’d be some campaign featuring the Bungle Bungles or red wine and surfing in Yallingup but that was like the donation a rich man gives to the beggar outside the opera. It helped us hide who we really were from ourselves. When it was founded the city had a governor, a polite word for a state-appointed dictator. Nelson Feister was no dictator but he wielded just as much power. I didn’t mind him being rich. I didn’t care if he shot skeet with plates of pearl but I didn’t go much for letting his business associates get away with homicide. The ringing phone pulled me out of my funk. It was Luke Whitmore. He said he remembered who I was, though he was pretty vague on our last meeting, it was a long time ago. I asked if he might be able to meet with me and talk about his time in the army with Mathew Carter.
‘You wanted to speak about him last time. Why?’
I explained I was a private detective working for the family of a missing young woman. Carter was a suspect back then and still was.
‘Day after tomorrow I’m off to Timor, and tomorrow I’ll be pretty busy but I’ve got an hour or two now.’
That suited me fine.
‘You know Carter is dead, don’t you?’
I said I’d heard that but would still like to see h
im. He was up in the hills, Parkerville way. I arranged to meet him at the Tavern. For some reason the hills east of Perth had always fostered a few arty types and a lot of fleecy check shirts and large dogs. It must have been low on dentists though, judging from the clientele of the tavern this night. The wind had kicked up. It was a few degrees cooler up on the escarpment and a log fire was going in the bar. Whitmore hadn’t changed at all from his Facebook photo. I bought us each a dark beer and we moved closer to the fire. It was a bit too warm for Whitmore who stripped off his jacket and sat in a t-shirt. I remembered when I had a taut body like that.
‘You’d be pleased,’ I said, nodding at the Eagles tattoo. Down to the last four now, they could win the whole thing.
He smiled. ‘I grew up in New South Wales. I’m still a rugby man at heart but I thought I should fit in.’
‘You settled here?’
‘Met a local girl. I wasn’t into a long-term relationship when I was in the army. Not fair on your woman. I did two tours of Afghanistan then I’d had enough. I quit, was going to go back east but met Karen. We shacked up. It lasted eleven years before it turned to shit.’
‘So you’re going to Timor?’
‘I always liked the place. I applied to an NGO. Anyway, Mathew Carter. I heard he was bashed to death. I hate to say it but it’s no surprise.’
‘Did he stay in touch with you?’
‘Briefly, after we left the army. He went back to Victoria. We weren’t close in Afghanistan but we were still connected. He emailed me a few times. He called me up once or twice from a phone box. I think he was lonely, lost. I heard he got in with a biker crowd. You think he might have killed this girl?’
‘There are some indications he may have, nothing concrete though, which is where I thought you might be able to rule him out, or in.’
He told me to fire away. I asked him about the Northam camp in August of 2000. His shoulders slumped.
‘That’s so long ago.’
I asked him to try and remember. ‘It was just before the Olympic Games.’
That brought him back. Everybody seemed to remember where they were when Cathy Freeman won. This was just a bit before of course.
‘I don’t recall a lot. We were doing a lot of training at that time because of Timor.’
I asked him if he could recall if there would have been any opportunity for Carter to leave the camp and get to the city and back undetected. He let out a low whistle.
‘That’s a real stretch. We did occasionally have bivouacs where you’d be out a couple of nights but there was always somebody nearby. We might be in three-man or six-man teams …’ He shook his head. ‘I just think, well, it’s not impossible if you had a car standing by, but …’
He let his doubt smother my hope.
‘Is there any chance Carter didn’t go on that camp?’
‘Well, if he was sick or copped an injury. That’s possible. The girl, you got a photo? That might help.’
Maybe I shouldn’t have shown him, but he was going in two days. I’d brought my case folder. I showed him a photo of Jessica Scanlan without any identification.
‘She’s familiar.’ Then I saw it in his eyes. ‘Isn’t she …?’
‘Yeah.’
I let it sink in.
‘I never saw him with her. To be honest, she’s way out of his class. Any of us for that matter. What about the other girls?’
‘Your squad was in Perth. You remember what you did the weekend after Australia Day that year?’
‘Probably beach cricket. I’m sorry, it’s so long ago. I don’t think Carter could have done it though.’
‘He was violent.’
‘But not that smart. If he pulled it off, I don’t think he could have kept it a secret.’
I asked Whitmore to please keep my inquiry confidential for the families’ sake. He said the Taliban had helped him learn to keep a low profile. I wished him well in his new job.
I drove back down along the slumbering backbone of the city. It had been a while since I’d been up here at night. The lights seemed brighter, the city much bigger. But we’re still just a big hole, I thought, and we’re not done with digging yet.
…
Like a PSA reading that tells you you’re off for another visit to the urologist, my meeting with Luke Whitmore was far from what I wished. Even so, I wasn’t without hope. Yes, it might have been extremely hard for Carter to have got to the city from a training exercise in Northam some hundred k away, abducted and killed Jessica Scanlan and then got back without being detected, but it wasn’t impossible. And his memory wasn’t exactly sharp. Maybe Carter was off on some special exercise. Then again, maybe Carter never made the camp, maybe the army records we’d got the first time were wrong. I wanted to view an actual roll before I conceded Carter was not my guy. Clement called for the bad news. The task force guys were still interviewing Plaistowe. He was maintaining his innocence.
‘Maybe Plaistowe just made up that bit about the station wagon. Perhaps there was one nearby and he just improvised a story we’d swallow.’
What Clement said could be true but I wanted to be certain I had tried every door before I declared the castle empty.
‘The DNA result won’t be in for a few more days. And the army records are still “in the pipeline”. ’
My guess was that pipeline could make the Perth to Kalgoorlie pipe look like a popper straw.
The next two days I pottered, dividing my time between home repairs and office work. Two jobs came in but I palmed them off, my heart wasn’t in it. Tash and Grace skyped and I felt better hearing their adventures. I even took myself off for a swim at North Cott. On the Friday, eve of the big knock-out final, Barry Dunn sauntered in and planted himself in the seat opposite me.
‘I hear you did good work for Nelson Feister.’
His macchiato arrived promptly.
‘Not from any moral perspective.’ I was sulky, I admit it.
‘Maybe Feister’s guy is telling the truth.’
I deadpanned him. He sipped.
‘They’re talking sixteen billion dollars, Snowy. For that kind of money they’d gloss over Mother Teresa being killed.’
I pointed out she was long dead.
‘And that’s my point, Snowy,’ he said, and finished off his cup.
…
‘No dice, Snow, it’s no match.’
I stood rooted to the spot, a bad sense of déjà vu about this. Clement waited on the line.
‘Snow?’
‘I’m processing,’ I lied. My processing machinery was busted and smashed and waiting by the bin. Clement went on.
‘I even had them compare the DNA you took from the hairbrush back in two thousand with the sample from the Vic police. It was Carter’s. He didn’t rape Carmel Younger.’
‘Maybe he was there?’
‘It’s possible. We’re still waiting on the army to come back with exactly what the training exercises were but it’s looking more like Plaistowe is our guy. Thanks to you.’
I told him I appreciated the pep talk, but I didn’t.
‘I’ve suggested they run Plaistowe’s DNA against the DNA on the Carmel Younger kit.’
‘The Commissioner is going to break a leg on that … not.’
‘Sit back and enjoy the footy.’
As if. I hung up and mooched. The game passed before me in a fuzz, like I was disconnected from my body. At half-time I turned it off and cracked a bottle of white. My phone buzzed. James Feruggi had accepted me as a Facebook friend. What the hell. I messaged him, said I was an investigator in Perth and I wanted to call him about Mathew Carter. To my surprise, he messaged me straight back with a Skype contact. I skyped immediately.
He was early forties, thick dark hair, tanned and lined face, serious. He was wearing some kind of work shirt like maybe he worked ground staff for an airline. The room was bare, a spare computer room, I guessed. I got through the formalities.
‘Look, James,’ I said, tired of circumv
ention, ‘I’ve been on the Autostrada case for years.’ He knew what I was talking about. ‘I red-flagged Mathew Carter as a prime suspect back in two thousand. There was a girl raped near Karrakatta Cemetery.’ I ran him through video vision, the SAS tattoo. I told him how a number of people had fingered Carter. ‘Luke Whitmore told me about the Timor tour and what went on. I know Carter owned a maroon station wagon back in ninety-nine.’ I watched him reach for a smoke and light up. I was guessing he might be single because he grabbed a soft-drink tin for an ashtray. ‘I was wondering if you remember by any chance a Northam training bivouac in August of two thousand, the weekend Jessica Scanlan went missing. I know it’s a long time ago.’
He nodded slowly. ‘I remember.’
‘You remember if Mathew Carter was there?’
He took a long draw on his smoke. My hopes lifted.
‘He was there. We talked football. It was near the finals.’
My hopes crashed and burned.
‘What did Whitmore tell you about Timor?’
I ran him through the story, how Carter had possibly assaulted the woman. He raised an eyebrow.
‘That’s not how I remember it.’
‘How did you remember it?’
‘The three of us were there. Whitmore and Carter took the suspect woman into this little hut. I stood guard. I heard a woman sobbing. I yelled at them what’s going on? There were eyes on us, the men of the village weren’t there but the women and kids were. Carter came out, agitated. Carter was an arsehole but Carter was a puppet. Then Whitmore came out looking, I don’t know how you’d describe it, like, beaming. I think he said “sweet” or something like that.’
I was riveted, I couldn’t move as he talked.
‘I said something like I was going to report it. Whitmore said it was two against one. Carter got some balls then and told me I might find my rifle going off accidentally. Some shit like that. I never reported it because I figured in the end they were right. It would be their word against mine. I’ll tell you something else. That August camp was just before we went away again, to the Middle-East. Carter was there but Whitmore wasn’t. He was playing rugby against Navy the weekend before, and hurt his ankle. If you’re looking for a stone-cold psycho, Whitmore’s your man.’
