by Dave Warner
‘I’ve been working with Inspector Dan Clement in Broome and Superintendent Nikki Sutton.’
‘Bullshit. Nobody believes in you Snowy, except me, and I don’t count.’
‘No, you’re the most important person of all.’
People usually want to be flattered. Maybe I could string out time. He looked down at me, his lips twisted. He half-realised I was trying to play him but his arrogance knew no bounds.
‘If you say so,’ he said.
‘Why did you do it, Luke? You were abused by your father? Your mother was a prostitute? Come on, you’re not going to get this chance again.’
The moon was pale as an Irish track star but his narcissism was luminescent.
‘Because I could. Anybody can, they just don’t know it. I didn’t know it until I came here that first time. We were called into a village on the border with the West. The men were supposedly out in the fields but we knew they were on patrol against us. I went into a hut. The woman had a knife hidden. She pulled it when I had my back to her. She might have killed me but something warned me. I turned, grabbed her hand. It was like a switch went off then and I understood: there’s no good or bad, there’s just life and death and an instant where that’s in your power. Maybe it’s the only time anything in our lives is in our power, wholly.
‘I disarmed her. I smacked her and her mouth bled and I … felt totally alive. Every knot in every piece of wood, I could see. Every scent I could separate and smell. She understood then that whether she lived or died was up to me. She was … forthcoming.’
‘Why did you dob in Carter?’
‘I knew she wouldn’t say anything, but Feruggi was a problem. Be prepared, Scout’s motto. Be prepared if somebody talks, create doubt. Carter was an arsehole, people wanted to believe he was guilty. So I quietly shopped him. Insurance, I guess you could call it. The dumb bastard never realised. But after that, going back to Perth was like … sepia. And those girls at the OBH and Autostrada didn’t even look at you, like you were a clear space, a blurred face at the end of a pool cue. It was insulting. Those shallow little bitches had no clue that I’d been on that thin skin of ice, life, death, On, Off. They’d laugh at jokes with their stupid college boys with their fringes and designer singlets, without any idea the one who could suck their life from them was right there. But you get it, Snowy Lane. I’ve read about you. Life, death. You get it.’ His turn to flatter me. ‘I could let you go, but I won’t. Because then it would be me that would suffer, right?’
‘You kill me, there’s no way you get out of the corner. It’s an admission. With a good lawyer you could still walk. Like you said, there are alternative suspects. There’s mitigating circumstances.’
‘PTSD?’ He laughed. ‘That’s a good thing. That’s a great thing. I’m not going to say I killed because action fucked me up. The opposite, it liberated me. And what about this? How do I explain all this? I brought you up here to … dance?’
‘You were angry. You thought I had some agenda against you. You wanted to know why I was hounding you.’
He reached behind him. When his hands returned pointed in front of him they were holding a pistol. I think it was a Beretta but I’m no gun expert. I didn’t care what killed me to be honest, I just did not want it to happen. But it seemed my appeal had fallen on deaf ears.
‘So long, Snowy Lane.’ He aimed. I think I wet myself.
‘You killed Carter, didn’t you?’
He cocked his head. ‘Carter was a liability. I thought I could trust him. He was dumb, he was loyal, but finally the dumbness outstripped the loyalty. Soon as he left the SAS he blew his dough. He demanded money from me. I flew over. I paid him out.’
‘Why did you stop? Did you stop?’
He regarded me seriously. ‘If you really want to prove you are God, that you hold life and death in your palm, you have to be stronger than all those who have gone before you. You have to be strong enough to say, I can stop, I can do whatever I want. I can take life, I can choose to not take life. Combat helped. Afghanistan, shit, man, that was the peak. Intense. But, you stay there too long, you fucking die. I’m not that stupid.’ He tapped his head. ‘I could visit up here whenever I wanted. But you know how it is, old habits die hard. Sometimes you take a nibble here and there, to keep your hand in.’
He chuckled. I kept pushing.
‘So you have killed since?’
‘You’re boring me.’
‘What did you do with the girls? You’re still just as smart if you tell me.’
‘No point telling you is there?’
‘So what have you got to lose?’
‘I’m bored, bored, bored with this, Snowy.’ He raised the pistol again.
‘At least tell the parents. Hurting them, that’s not being strong.’
I’d pushed too far. I saw his eyes go dead.
‘Shut the fuck … up.’
The shot rang out.
I thought I was dead. Then I thought he’d missed. Then I thought … No, he didn’t fire! Another shot rang out. A piece of branch flew. I heard him yelp in pain. I dared to look. A piece of wood the size of a pencil had speared his skin just under his eye. He clawed at it, gun grip loose for an instant. I mule-kicked his knee as best I could, the pistol dropped. Another shot went high. We both dived for the gun. Hostage training, six hundred and sixty bucks worth: seizing a gun with hands tied behind your back. My hands closed on it. He drove his chest into me. I pulled the trigger. His weight knocked us both forward, we went rolling in one ball for a few metres, the gun dropping from my grip. Then suddenly I was lighter. Voices like arrows in the dark. One sounded like Clement.
It couldn’t be.
I’d come to rest kind of on my side with my left arm sprawled down the hill. I twisted my head to look back up the hill. Whitmore was on his back a metre away. From him came a sucking sound. I wriggled towards him. This is what I experienced in a late-’60s experimental-film montage: ink spilling from him, I guessed blood; gaping chest cavity; that constant sucking sound growing weaker, while footsteps grew stronger.
Clement and Feruggi ran in. Feruggi pointed a pistol.
‘Call an ambulance,’ I said without thinking.
‘We don’t have a phone,’ said Clement, ‘or a knife.’ A reference to them being unable to do anything about me being trussed.
‘He’s ex-SAS,’ said Feruggi, who felt down Whitmore’s leg, pulled out a serious blade and sliced through the plastic ties binding me. Clement had some keyring torch. He shone it in Whitmore’s face. His eyes were glazed but there was still a whiff of life.
‘His car,’ Clement said, ripping off his shirt and shoving it in the chest cavity.
I’d been through this before with Craig Drummond, the switch poised between on and off. We picked Whitmore up – actually, they picked him up, my circulation was still a ghost – and carried him towards the back seat. Just as we were about to lay Whitmore down, he expelled a gasp. By the interior light of the car I saw life had vanished from his eyes. We all knew it at the same instant. There was no longer any rush.
‘He wouldn’t tell me where they were,’ I said, ‘even though he was going to kill me.’
And as I said it I felt a terrible shame. I had survived but the misery of Whitmore’s victims’ families continued.
CHAPTER 39
Later Clement told me it was ‘sheer arse’, but from what I heard he was selling himself short. Feruggi had remembered the track that led up to the hill. They’d caught the shape of a vehicle in a clearing between trees, abandoned their ride lest it alert Whitmore, and closed on foot under the low moon. Feruggi had secured an old Glock. They were trying to get closer when they saw Whitmore draw down on me. Feruggi aimed but was scared of hitting me. The pistol hadn’t even been tested. Clement told him to fire. He missed but without it I was deader than the wicket in a Sheffield Shield final. Not for the first time Clement was furious with me. I don’t blame him but I still think, deep down, he knew I did him a favou
r. Whitmore would have told him nothing. It took a week for Whitmore’s DNA to come through. It matched the Carmel Younger rape. They ran airline records and found that Whitmore had flown from Perth to Melbourne the day Carter was bashed to death. Army records confirmed Feruggi’s assertion that Whitmore was not at Northam when Jessica Scanlan disappeared. They searched anywhere and everywhere that Whitmore had lived in Australia. The Dili police searched there. No physical evidence of the girls was found. Without Plaistowe breaking that pendant chain and keeping it for a reason he probably couldn’t even explain himself, we would never have got a sniff. The huge weight of evidence against Whitmore mitigated the political fallout of foreigners running around Dili with guns. We were all questioned. Feruggi was deported but otherwise not chastised. I think they had a fair idea of what Whitmore might have got up to under the guise of his aid work, especially after Sutton’s people traced his movements post-Autostrada looking for unexplained disappearances. Whitmore had indicated that combat in Afghanistan had satisfied his death lust for a time. He’d returned to Perth but the fever inside him had remained dormant and there had been no similar disappearances. He settled down with his girl, Karen, still nothing. Then that relationship had fallen apart. According to the ex, she had no idea about the monster he was, but found him ‘like a mirage’. There was a point beyond which you never got closer. He had not threatened her. He had told her she had been a ‘disappointment’ and that he had given up a lot for her. In retrospect that was a chilling reference.
After they busted up he’d spent six months travelling through Thailand. Two female tourists and a number of local girls disappeared during his time. Most had simply vanished but the body of one of the locals had been found. The police were looking into Whitmore as a suspect.
The media had a field day. This time we couldn’t keep my name out of it. I suppose I got written up again as some kind of master hunter of psychos. I ignored the constantly ringing phone, hid as best I could, but skyped Tash and Grace daily. Tash urged me to join them. I was tempted but somehow it felt like running away. I wasn’t going to let Luke Whitmore get that satisfaction, even if he was dead, so I kept my head down and swept leaves.
There were repercussions against my old pal Tregilgas who had refused to take my leads seriously back in 2000. A ‘source’ – I suspected George Tacich – had dropped a bucket on the Commissioner. He had ‘arrogantly dismissed my suspicions regarding an SAS suspect while hounding an innocent man to suicide’. The Commissioner came out swinging, justifying his actions, pointing out I’d wasted their time on Crossland but the media had nailed him with the fact that his own team had also interviewed Crossland at length just recently. After that, Tregilgas kept his mouth shut but according to Clement, the Minister was already involved and Nikki Sutton had been tapped for the job. Once a face-saving amount of time had passed, Tregilgas would retire and plead having to leave ‘to spend more time with his family’.
My nose was indeed broken but it excused me from having to visit the O’Gradys right off. I knew they must have been desperate for every detail. Carmel Younger called me and thanked me on behalf of herself and her mother who was still alive, now in a retirement village. After that I felt a lot better.
Nikki Sutton personally briefed all the victims’ families but I owed the O’Gradys a firsthand account. Grand Final eve I found myself back at the O’Grady house in the same lounge room where I had first sat nearly twenty years earlier, this time my nose in a splint, my eyes black. The house had been remodelled, given that more open look that Australians were crazy over now. It was a different sofa with different colours. Soupy had long since moved on to the great field in the sky but a new model had taken his place, some little bitsa. It had not been that long since I had seen Michelle and Gerry at Craig Drummond’s funeral so there was no shock in how they looked but nobody was more aware than me that all of us were on the same ride. The pubs and clubs of our youth were now waiting rooms and MRI machines. Caitlin’s photo was displayed as before, forever young, as Neil Young sang and never did it ring in my head more poignantly. I imagined she could be sitting alongside her parents, the same age, just back from walking Soupy, listening in with curiosity.
Gerry made the tea, he had semi-retired, he said. I asked after Nellie, the younger daughter. She was still overseas. I sipped my tea and ate a fancier biscuit than I had back in the day, and then I told them everything germane that had happened from the time I walked into a Broome police station and recognised the pendant of Jessica Scanlan. I jumped back and forth in time, shaded some stuff and highlighted other business. I explained what I had learnt from Feruggi, that Whitmore often took Carter’s car. Carter had a habit of getting blind drunk in the afternoon and Whitmore would just take the car and go out. The police couldn’t rule out Carter being a party to the abductions of Emily or Caitlin but thought it unlikely given he was involved in neither Carmel’s rape or Jessica’s death. Eventually my account meandered its way to the Timor hillside. I told them what had transpired,
‘That bastard.’ Michelle was shaking her head. ‘He was never going to tell, never going to give us that satisfaction.’
And then the tears started. Not hers, mine, out of nowhere. I felt them running down my face. I was sobbing but I had no control. It was weird. I could taste my own tears and yet it was as if I might have been in somebody else’s body. I’d had nearly twenty years to get it right, I still couldn’t manage it. I had risked hurting Tash and Grace, risked losing them all for nothing. Gerry O’Grady put down his cup and walked over to me and hugged me. And that made me weep even more.
Initially Clement had planned to wear the same suit he always did, the one he’d last worn in the meeting with the Feister lawyers. It had originally been bought for Phoebe’s christening because Geraldine had pressured Marilyn that he shouldn’t be in some disgusting old work-suit, as if he were likely to turn up covered in bloodstains and fingerprint powder. It still fitted fine but wearing it would feel like an admission of defeat, that his life had stalled for eight years. So, while back in Perth tying up the Whitmore business, he strolled up St George’s Terrace to a menswear shop and asked the assistant to fit him out. Clement was lucky. He had not put on weight, in fact he’d lost weight these last couple of years, and he could pretty much buy off the rack. The shop owner – a tailor, Clement presumed, because he was balding and wore a tape measure around his neck, with the chain to which his glasses were attached – was insistent however on measuring him up.
‘These days everybody except you is carrying too much weight so they make the waist a fraction too large.’ He pointed to a couple of other areas he could improve on the standard model. ‘It’s a service. It won’t cost you anything.’ Clement produced the plastic magic.
‘I need it by tomorrow,’ he cautioned.
‘It will be ready by five this afternoon. Wedding?’ asked the tailor as he wrote left-handed.
‘Yes.’
‘Not yours?’
No, thought Clement, the exact opposite.
He sat in his little flat now, the brown paper package wrapped in string in front of him like some message from the past. It made him think of Olive Pickering. Perhaps he should have gone to her? Or would that have seemed patronising? He opened the parcel and took out the suit. It looked good, it smelled good. He was almost vain enough to think that it would so impress Louise he should invite her as his guest after all but he dismissed that idea as quickly as it arrived. He hated that people might think he was showing what’s good for the goose was good for the gander. He’d been to functions where the ex-married couple were both squiring new partners. Phoebe wouldn’t like it. And it was Marilyn’s day. Plus he wanted to savour the terrible hollowness that he would inevitably feel, all by himself, without the solace of a companion. He pressed the suit; the shirt he had already ironed, his shoes he had polished to an impressive sheen. He wondered if this new state of affairs would increase pressure from Louise. They were sleeping together more regula
rly yet he had still not stayed over.
He showered and dressed. Time was on drugs, inching forward. The wedding was for 2.00 pm on the lawns overlooking the ocean at Geraldine’s house. The day was almost perfect. This time of the year you felt the air growing progressively humid but it was a long way off being oppressive just yet. His choice of aftershave was telling, the sort she always liked best, also the only one in his tiny cabinet.
What’s Snowy Lane doing this minute? he thought idly as he straightened his tie in a mirror he’d salvaged from out the back of Traffic. He guessed he’d be sitting back to watch the big game. They’d not really ever had the chance to celebrate their case, too much to and fro with the East Timorese cops, the Commissioner, the media. But they’d cracked it, Lane and him – okay, more Lane than him. The memory of sharing beers and pizza on Cable Beach returned. If only life could be like that all the time.
The Waifs accompanied him out of town and along the road north to the homestead property Marilyn’s father had selected and built off the proceeds from natural pearls. At the foot of the long driveway were tied satin bows and white balloons. 1.56, perfect, he’d judged his run so as to have no time to mingle. They’d have somebody valet parking. He’d get to the back of the crowd as Marilyn stepped out of the house seven minutes late. He knew it would be seven minutes, not six, not eight. He took his foot off the accelerator and let the car glide until it could no longer match the gravity caused by the incline, then he pulled the wheel so the car slid to the side of the driveway.
Did he really want to do this?
No.
Phoebe would be disappointed.
But Phoebe would get over it.
He could not.
‘You can’t, can you?’ he asked himself there on the side of the road. 1.57 now. No. He didn’t want to give her up. If he had to, he certainly did not want to witness it like some POW forced to watch their flag torched. He did not want to see Brian beaming with happiness, or shake his hand over a delicious canapé and French champagne. He did not want to be a good sport, an honourable ex-husband, a considerate father, not in that moment. 1.58. Be honest, some part of you wants her to stop the ceremony, to look over at you and say, ‘This is a mistake, this is the only man I ever loved and I’m sorry about your cancer, Brian, but no can do,’ and then run into his arms. Yes, yes, yes. Part of him wanted that. The rest, the great bulk of Daniel Clement, knew it would not happen, that she would gaze into the eyes of Brian and say ‘I do’ under a cloudless sky to a ripple of applause and that everything from then on would be changed, and he would be an interloper.
