The Heat

by Garry Disher

  ‘I want you for murder. I have you for murder. Whether or not you go down for it alone is up to you.’

  Trask collapsed onto the bench that ran between the banks of lockers. Batten remained standing but rested one shoe on the bench a couple of metres away, looking down on Trask like a vengeful priest, his trouser leg riding up, revealing a bony, hairless shin, cheap socks, a shiny black shoe.

  ‘Did Leah Quarrell ask you to kill Wurlitzer? Or was it your idea?’

  ‘Lawyer,’ said Trask, tying his shoes.

  ‘You do know Wurlitzer was talking to us, Al?’

  Trask could feel the walls and ceiling moving in on him. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘He told us how it worked: your girlfriend would spot the target house, you’d provide police intel, he’d do the break-in. Then the nasty little prick became a liability.’

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ Trask said.

  ‘He taped his last meeting with you,’ Batten said, hissing the words, his prim mouth a slash, his teeth small and sharp.

  Trask rubbed his nose again, knuckles coming away sticky with blood. ‘I need a doctor. I need a lawyer.’

  ‘Nose bleed. It’s nothing.’

  ‘Police brutality.’

  Trask stood to help himself think, felt dizzy, and placed his palm over his eyes briefly.

  ‘Quit faking it and start talking,’ Batten said.

  ‘I could be hurt internally.’

  ‘You are hurt internally,’ Batten said, rapping a pebbly knuckle on Trask’s skull.

  Trask blanched, wondering if Batten had spotted an actual symptom, maybe the pupil of one eye wider than the other. Then he realised it was simple nastiness. ‘Maybe you could tell me,’ he said, ‘why Christians always act less Christian than the bulk of the population?’

  On the ride to the station, Batten in the front passenger seat, Trask in the back, between a pair of uniforms, a yellow VW sped past.

  Leah Quarrell, running between appointments? That’s what Trask thought every time he saw a yellow Beetle. He stared gloomily at houses, cars, pedestrians. The police car, caught between Quamby Place and the bridge to Lions Park, was travelling at a walking pace in stop-start traffic, and he wondered if he had a fighting chance of escape. Punch the guy on his left, scramble over his lap, run off down the street.

  Except that his hands were cuffed together, and then Batten turned around and said, ‘You know how it’s going to look, Al. When we put your girlfriend on the witness stand, a little wisp of a thing, tears in her eyes, who’s going to believe your version of events?’

  Jesus, that routine? thought Trask. Get Leah to talk, get me to talk, lie to both of us, promise nothing concrete.

  Nevertheless, when it came to trial, who was going to believe him over her?

  Better to get in first.

  24

  Wyatt started the morning with surveillance on his apartment building, where the Mazda was parked underneath.

  Nothing excited his interest. He breakfasted at a nearby backpacker hostel, seated at an outside table shaded by vines. Stillness, mildness in the air. He ate and drank sparingly. He’d become irritable if he denied himself food and drink before the job, sluggish if he overdid it.

  A radio played behind the bar. He listened with half an ear and caught one item of local interest: police searching heavy bushland near Eumundi in search of a missing toddler had found a shallow grave. It contained the body of a man who’d been shot in the head. Known to police. Convictions for burglary, aggravated burglary and sexual assault. There were no leads.

  Now Wyatt walked along the river. With four hours until the centre bounce at the football final two thousand kilometres away, Noosa was gearing up for the game. Wyatt had little interest in sport of any type, but did understand the herd instinct in people. A car went by, a black and white scarf flying from the window. Collingwood colours. Reminding him of his childhood in the Melbourne suburb. Before gentrification, a limp football and loyalty to your home team was pretty much all you had in life. A pedestrian wearing a Lions jersey jeered at the car.

  That’s what the day would boil down to: the Victorian holidaymakers barracking for Collingwood—if they could bring themselves to. The locals cheering the Queensland team, radios broadcasting a sub-literate analysis.

  Wyatt cared nothing for the outcome. Collingwood was his birthplace, where he’d struggled and learnt to wait and think before he acted. Where nothing was given him, and so he’d taken it. But it was only an early stage of his existence, not a chapter in some story. He had no story, unless you could conjure one out of the fact that he now existed, and once hadn’t. And one day wouldn’t.

  The thing that mattered to Wyatt, as he walked beside the water, was that Noosa and Noosaville, and maybe even the entire country, would be distracted for the next few hours. He walked with the long strides of a predator along the river to the boat house and back again.

  He set up surveillance on his holiday apartment a second time that morning, watching and listening from the playground beside the complex before going in. Nothing had changed in the past ninety minutes.

  He had no intention of using Leah Quarrell’s TV carton. He shredded it, shoved it in a recycle bin on the ground level, then returned to the apartment and wiped everything down. Finally he jammed his towel and pistol inside the backpack, along with the spraycans, tarp, lock picks and glass-cutter, and stowed the overalls, hard hat and security jacket in the Styrofoam cooler. He pulled on the op-shop shorts, shirt, hat and shoes and, with the cooler on one shoulder, left the building for the last time, dropping the keys in the box beside the office.

  Now the hire car. Anticipating that the police might link the Mazda to both the Sandford name and the apartment, he’d not bothered to keep it clean but had allowed beach sand and food wrappers to accumulate. It would require a thorough clean, inside and out. Even so, he’d worn gloves all week. Wore gloves now, for the short drive to the Budget office in Mary Street.

  Then he carried everything back to the river. Stopped at a shack with a huge red sign, Q-Craft Hire, where he selected a little runabout with a canvas hood. He paid for the whole day and puttered across to Goat Island, on the other side of the water.

  Here it was damp, silent, verdant. All of the wealth and glitter was back on the opposite bank. Hiding the boat in a mangrove inlet, he spray-painted over the Q-Craft logo and sewed the length of tarpaulin to the underside of the canopy, like a shoplifter’s concealed pocket.

  Back across Noosa Sound and into the system of inlets where the wealthy lived. Saturday, and he was invisible among the other craft on the water: kayaks, canoes, tourists in rentals just like his. Dressed as he was, under a canopy that stretched the length of the little boat, no eyewitness would be able to describe him with any accuracy. There was nothing to describe. He was just some man in a boat. No wife or kids with him, but so what? Maybe they were shopping, sunbathing, hated fishing, weren’t talking to him today.

  He steered far into the network of canals and out again and in his two sweeps of Ormerod’s house saw only a grey shadow behind the glass façade. Curtains.

  Just then the mobile phone vibrated in his pocket. He glanced at the screen. Wyatt had ignored two calls from Minto during the week, but he thought he’d better take this one. He knew Minto wouldn’t risk an unsecured phone.

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Depends. I’ve had someone watch Ormerod. He arrived at the football a short while ago, but just now took a phone call and hurried out.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Who knows? I don’t know what your plans are but if he’s flying back, you’ll have to move soon.’

  ‘Okay,’ Wyatt said, and cut the call. It would take Ormerod up to an hour to reach Melbourne airport, check in and take off. Then two hours in the air, then the taxi or limo to Noosa. Wyatt was going in now.

  He made a last pass of Iluka, checking and double-checking. He could smell charred meat and onions, hear radio
s and TVs tuned to the football, but there was little movement now, everyone was indoors. All Wyatt saw was a couple of kids in a kayak and a man apparently turning chops or sausages on his barbecue, his back to the river. The atmosphere was lazy, benign, despite the mania of the broadcast commentators. No one else was that hysterical, or would ever want to be.

  Finally, he tied the boat to Ormerod’s floating dock, grabbed the cooler, staggered up the slope of lawn as though burdened by the weight. ‘Hi!’ he called.

  Then he was slipping along the eastern wall, where the shrubbery pressed in. Identifying the phone and power lines, he cut both. As soon as he broke into the house, the battery backup would set off the alarm and automatically dial out to report it, but the call would never connect and he’d rip the keypad and speaker from the wall as soon as he was through the upstairs window and down the stairs. A neighbour might hear the alarm over the roar of his TV and his drunken guests, but he’d also hear it cut out again and he’d raise a beer to the Magpies or the Lions and forget about it.

  Wyatt pulled on the overalls, hard hat and yellow security jacket, climbed the next-door scaffolding, extended a ladder over the gap, crossed to Ormerod’s veranda roof. No one saw him walk around to the dormer window. No one yelled.

  A forgotten window for a forgotten room.

  Peering through the gap, Wyatt saw junk. Smaller than the window and roofline suggested, the room was furnished with a single bed, a chest of drawers, a built-in wardrobe and a sewing machine on a card table. Flaps-open cartons of paperbacks, Christmas decorations and vinyl LPs littered the floor, snow skis and golf clubs leaned into corners, and the bed groaned under tennis racquets, a cricket bat, bundled tent poles and an unwrapped tarp. All covered by a fine layer of dust.

  Children had once lived here, and their mother, presumably, but Wyatt wasn’t interested in that. He removed the insect screen, placed it at his feet and tugged upwards on the bottom edge of the window. Not too abruptly; he didn’t want the pane to shoot upwards.

  It moved stiffly, then stopped. Wyatt gauged the dimensions of the gap. Slipped the backpack into the room, then pulled in his stomach and began to slither through to the other side.

  The house was silent. No alarm on the window. He didn’t know about the door, passageway or stairs.

  He sniffed the air, keeping very still, and glanced around the room again. He felt it more strongly now, the sense of odd dimensions. The room was much smaller than the external wall and roofline suggested, and the window was off-centre.

  But he didn’t have time to think about that. With a faint squeak of the door hinges he was through to a long passageway, a U-shape around the house with a staircase leading down to the base of the U.

  He paused to examine the skirting board and the ceiling. No infra-red beams or cameras that he could see, and still the alarm was silent. He waited, his senses hungry, reaching for sounds, any sensations at all, and finally registered a thin odour trace in the house.

  25

  Fat lot of good having a receptionist. Leah was back in the office, checking her mobile for a text or missed call from Trask, wondering if something had gone wrong, when a woman with the dress sense of a fundamentalist door-knocker walked straight in.

  ‘Detective Constable Snyder, Miss Quarrell.’ She dragged a chair across from the wall and seated herself directly opposite Leah.

  Leah’s first thought: it’s all gone wrong at Ormerod’s. ‘What? I don’t understand,’ she said dazedly. An innocent woman overtaken by events.

  ‘We’ve been asked to detain you here for a short while,’ Snyder said.

  And there behind her, in the corridor, stood a uniformed cop. ‘But why?’ said Leah, dragging her gaze back to the woman.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Batten would like a word.’

  Batten? It made no sense to Leah. What did he have to do with Ormerod? ‘About what?’

  ‘Let’s wait, shall we?’ the woman said.

  Short mousy hair, a wrinkled blouse, black polyester pants. No jewellery.

  Dyke, thought Leah. What if Trask called right now? She found herself standing, coming around from behind the desk, hand at her throat, hyperventilating.

  The dowdy detective hooked an arm around her. ‘Breathe slowly.’

  Hating the contact, the sensation of the other woman’s warmth, the cheap staticky sleeve brushing her neck, Leah jerked free. She saw lights in her vision, tiny flaring pinpricks.

  ‘You’re feeling faint,’ the detective murmured, the smell of her deodorant gusting over Leah. ‘A dizzy spell. Breathe deeply and evenly. Count to ten, one, two three…’

  Leah listened finally, her head ticking with tension. The sparks disappeared.

  ‘Better?’

  Leah’s skin felt clammy.

  ‘Sit here,’ Snyder said, helping her into the stiff-backed chair in front of the desk. ‘Detective Sergeant Batten will be along shortly.’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘No, sorry. We need to ask you some questions.’

  ‘I want a lawyer.’

  Supposedly the magic words. The woman smiled, showing crooked, yellowing teeth. ‘All in good time,’ she said, taking Leah’s chair behind the desk.

  ‘That’s my chair,’ Leah said.

  ‘Not anymore,’ the detective said, with that disgusting smile again. Get those teeth seen to, Leah thought. Meanwhile, hold off on smiling at people.

  ‘Scared I’ll jump out the window?’

  Snyder smiled. ‘Possibly. And make phone calls and wipe hard drives and shred paperwork.’

  ‘I am trying to run a business, you know.’

  ‘But what business, Leah? Your pretend one or your real one?’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘We’ll sit quietly and wait for Sergeant Batten to get here.’

  Leah jerked her head to indicate the fresh-faced constable lurking in the corridor. ‘What about your boyfriend? Oh, sorry, you swing the other way.’

  The insult fell to the carpet and Snyder sat immobile behind the desk. Unused to stillness, Leah twitched. She stared at the walls, ceiling, floor, window. She needed to do something. Pace up and down and make arrangements and sort people out.

  ‘Well,’ she said after a while, ‘this is boring. Can I play a game?’ She held up her phone.

  Snyder snapped her fingers. ‘Let’s see.’

  Without thinking about it, Leah handed over the iPhone, about to point out the Flappy Bird icon, when the detective pocketed the phone and said, ‘No, sorry.’

  ‘You bitch.’

  The woman showed her teeth.

  Flinching, Leah said, ‘What’s this all about? What am I supposed to have done? All I did was—’

  ‘Look, Leah, time will pass more pleasantly if you just shut up and wait. Save your breath, okay?’

  Leah sulked, her mind racing. The dyke had mentioned real and pretend businesses. Were they moving in on Uncle David? Would he save her or sell her out? And why hadn’t Trask called? She couldn’t say or do anything until she knew who was alive, or what had been said or thought, and where the key players were.

  She must have muttered some of this. The cow behind her desk said, ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Wasn’t speaking to you.’

  The detective shrugged and shifted to get comfortable. Leah actually heard the woman’s clothing crackle. I mean, make an effort, she thought. What are you wearing, recycled carpet?

  ‘I want my phone call.’

  Another crooked grin from the other side of the desk. ‘All in good time.’

  ‘I want a lawyer.’

  ‘You haven’t been charged with anything.’

  ‘So I’m free to go.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘I could report you to internal affairs.’

  ‘This is fun,’ Snyder said, ‘isn’t it?’

  Leah directed a furious stare past her shoulder at the window, the view to the rear yard of the agency. She half expected to see Wyatt or Trask out
there, concealed by the dumpbin against the side fence, ready to put a bullet in her brain.

  Then Batten arrived, looking like a constipated banker, his tiny god-botherer’s cross in the lapel of his jacket. He nodded hello to the ugly butch and took her place behind the desk. She stood by the closed door, a spectre at Leah’s back.

  Leah said, ‘What’s going on? You know Saturday’s my busiest day.’

  Batten acknowledged that with a scrape of a smile and Leah was beginning to see a sharp edge behind the blandness. She was reminded unaccountably of Wyatt, whose eyes gave you the same sense of focusing on a spot inside your skull. But Batten’s force was more intellectual than physical. With Wyatt you had both at once, fully loaded and ready to fire.

  ‘A few questions, Miss Quarrell.’

  ‘Do I need a lawyer?’

  ‘Remains to be seen.’ A pause. ‘How’s business?’

  Leah was put off her stride. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Things are tight? You need to pad your income?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Leah, who did. Wurlitzer had already talked to Batten; they’d been too late.

  ‘A few days ago you and your boyfriend visited a house on Iluka owned by a Mr Thomas Ormerod. What can you tell me about that?’

  Leah closed her eyes, swayed in her chair and wanted to tear at her hair. Either we were followed, she thought, or they have Trask. Or both.

  Opening her eyes, she said, ‘Why?’

  Batten had a sneaky rat’s face, a hard, precise, suspicious, quivering sort of guy. ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘It was a business call.’

  ‘Business call. Apparently a young girl was there. What can you tell me about that?’

  Leah swallowed. They have Trask, she thought. Or they’d had Ormerod under surveillance. No: if they feared for the safety of a kid, they’d have acted.

  ‘His granddaughter,’ she said.

  ‘Mr Ormerod doesn’t have a granddaughter.’

  Leah put her hand to her mouth. ‘You mean—’

  ‘Cut the crap, Leah. You were back at his house this morning, I understand?’