Charlotte Pass

by Lee Christine

  ‘Every second we waste, Smythe’s getting further away,’ she heard Benson say as she shut the bedroom door. Heart pounding, she pulled the heavily insulated pants and jacket over the top of her tracksuit. Hands trembling, she closed the snaps then raked her hair back into a low ponytail. She emerged from the room in under two minutes, reaching for the boots and beanie Terry was now holding.

  Lewicki glowered, the satellite phone moulded to his ear as she slid her feet into the boots. He uttered an expletive, killed the call, and re-dialled.

  ‘If he murdered Libby, I want to go after him,’ she said, pulling on the beanie.

  Benson nodded. ‘Okay, then.’

  Terry handed her an avalanche backpack, the kind with room for an extra shovel and a pocket in the strap for a two-way radio.

  At the door, she turned and spoke to Lewicki. ‘Tell him I’m sorry, Lew, but it’s my job.’

  Thirty-two

  Ryder strode into the interview room, ignoring Lombardi’s startled look. He put the scrapbook on the table then switched on the recording equipment. After running through the preliminaries, he dragged out a chair.

  ‘Where’s the other detective?’ Lombardi asked.

  ‘Making some phone calls.’ Benson still wasn’t picking up, and Lew’s phone was permanently engaged. The fifth time it had gone to voicemail, Ryder had left Flowers with instructions to call the front desk at the inn and have Di Gordon go up to the suite.

  ‘Mr Lombardi, you changed your story from what you told Roman Lewicki back in 1964. Back then, you said a ski patroller ordered you to shut down the lift and go inside. You said prior to shutting it down, you never once left your post to assist anyone, and you never once became distracted. Then,’ Ryder consulted his notes from the interview a few days ago, ‘after Celia Delaney’s remains were discovered, you said you could have been distracted, that there was always something happening around bottom station. You said it was plausible that you’d gone to help someone, or were distracted answering your two-way radio. In addition to that, you said the ski patroller told you to put the chain across and go inside because he was going to do a final sweep, which means the chair was still going. You also said it was a self-loading chair, and someone could have loaded on by themselves without the aid of a liftie.’ Ryder pushed the notes away and stared at Bruno.

  ‘You’re asking me stuff from decades ago,’ Lombardi said with a shrug. ‘My memory’s not what it used to be.’

  ‘This looks really bad for you, Bruno,’ Ryder went on, wondering why the hell it was taking so long for Flowers to get through to Charlotte Pass. Was there a problem with the satellite? ‘You changed your story, and then you left Charlotte Pass the morning Libby Marken was found murdered. We discovered wire ties in your kitchen cupboard, the same type as those we collected from around Celia Delaney’s grave. Forensic pathologists have matched DNA from a stolen rental suit with skin scrapings from under Libby Marken’s fingernails. It’s only a matter of time until we know for sure who murdered Libby Marken, and I think at that point, we’ll also learn who killed Celia Delaney.’

  Lombardi said nothing.

  ‘Where was Aidan Smythe when you were closing the chairlift?’

  Lombardi stilled at the mention of Smythe’s name.

  ‘You know what I learned last night? That ski patrollers back then were voluntary. They were just people who could ski well. Most of the time it was the village doctor.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Was Aidan Smythe on the ski-patrol roster?’

  ‘He would have been.’

  ‘So, it’s possible he was the ski patroller who told you to go inside?’ Come on you bastard—talk!

  When Lombardi didn’t say anything, Ryder pulled the scrapbook towards him then slowly turned the pages over. ‘You must have really been looking forward to your idol coming back.’

  Ryder turned a few more pages then glanced up to see Lombardi stiffen.

  ‘I can understand why you’ve been following Smythe’s career so closely. He’s been a great ambassador for the country, hasn’t he, and for Australian skiing.’ Come on, Bruno, set me straight. Tell me how I’ve got it all wrong, and how bad he really is. ‘He’s been an idol for a lot of people, and for you too, obviously.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to him comin’ back, all right,’ Lombardi said with a snarl. ‘I’ve been looking forward to it for fifty years.’

  Sensing this was the moment he’d been waiting for, Ryder slowly looked up. The groomer was staring at him in disbelief.

  ‘You know nothing,’ Lombardi said, his eyes glistening. ‘He’s had it easy all his life. The bloke’s an arsehole.’

  Ryder almost stopped breathing, then spoke quietly, gently. ‘Then tell me what happened, Bruno.’

  ‘He destroyed my life, that’s what happened!’ He stared in disgust at the clippings he’d so carefully pasted in, as though the book itself had betrayed him.

  ‘Tell me.’ Ryder glanced at the viewing window. Hopefully Flowers had got through to Charlotte Pass, and Benson was holding Smythe.

  Several more seconds passed before Bruno was able to compose himself. ‘That afternoon, it was close to shutdown time.’

  ‘Around four-thirty?’

  He shook his head. ‘Closer to five. There was hardly anyone out. I was waiting for Smythe to come and do his sweep. I was just hanging around when Celia turned up.’

  ‘On foot?’

  ‘Yep. She was in a state, shakin’ and cryin’ and holdin’ one side of her face. She asked where Aidan was. I tried raising him on the two-way, but it had been playing up in the wind. She had this swelling on her cheek. It was starting to bruise. I didn’t know what to do. I felt sorry for her, so I told her to wait there while I went outside. I got a handful of snow for her to put on her face.’

  ‘Did she get on the lift?’ Ryder asked.

  ‘Not then. A few minutes after, Aidan turned up. He’d been out skiing. She blurted out that she’d asked Nigel for a divorce. And that he’d hit her. She was terrified. She kept cryin’ out and saying, “Get me out of here. Get me out. I’m not going back.”’

  ‘What did Smythe do?’

  ‘He told her to calm down, that it would be all right. He had his arms around her, but I heard her say, “You’re leaving soon. We don’t have much time left to be together,” or somethin’ like that.’

  ‘Did it sound like they’d been together before? That they might have been having an affair?’

  ‘It didn’t surprise me. Aidan’s a player, always has been, even when he was engaged to Carmel. The prick couldn’t keep it in his pants.’

  ‘Where did you think he was going to take her?’

  ‘To his digs in Thredbo. He didn’t stay at Charlotte Pass all the time, and Carmel had already gone home to Sydney.’ Bruno’s voice turned husky. ‘Back then, I thought Celia was safer with him than with her husband.’

  Ryder’s heart contracted. Poor Celia. She’d had no one else to turn to. Di Gordon was sleeping with her husband and, despite the guitarist she’d had a brief fling with, the band remained loyal to Nigel. So she’d gone to Smythe, who’d given her a Tiffany cigarette case. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He told me to put the chain across and to wait for a couple of minutes to make sure no one else got on. Then I could go inside. He was going to shut the lift down at the top.’

  ‘Did you do that?’

  Bruno nodded. ‘I helped them get on safely. Just before he pulled the cover down, he turned around and winked at me and put a finger to his lips.’ He scoffed bitterly. ‘As if I’d tell anyone. Smythe outranked me, and it wasn’t any of my business.’

  Ryder frowned and gave Bruno a few seconds’ break. While he was impatient to know the full story, he was wary that if he pushed him too hard, Bruno would clam up again. ‘When did you see him next?’

  ‘Not until the next morning. He bailed me up. He had a sprained wrist that was strapped up. People were running everywhere. He to
ld me … that Celia was dead.’ Lombardi ran a shaky hand over the scar on his head. ‘I was shocked. I asked him what happened. He said the fucking chairlift broke down. Those were his exact words. They were stuck in the air between Charlotte’s and the restaurant, waiting for the lift to blow over or to freeze to death. The two-way was stuffed. The liftie at the top probably thought we’d shut it down at our end. He said they had no choice in the end but to jump.’ Lombardi’s voice thickened. ‘He told me he survived the jump, but she didn’t.’

  Ryder heard Harriet’s voice. She was struck in the head first, then thrown from a substantial height. But she had it the wrong way around. They hadn’t gone down with the chairlift. They’d jumped. That would account for Celia’s deceleration injury, but …

  Ryder took a deep breath. ‘And Smythe said the fall killed her?’

  ‘He did. And I’ve always believed that’s what happened, until you told me the other day that she’d been murdered.’

  ‘I don’t understand. If you thought it was an accident, why didn’t you just go to the police?’

  ‘Because he told me that no one could find out that the two of them were together. Carmel’s father was loaded. He was bankrolling Smythe’s northern-hemisphere campaign. The family were already suspicious that he was playing around. He was shitting himself that if she found out he’d been getting it on with a married woman, she’d dump him.’

  ‘And Daddy would pull his funding?’

  ‘That’s right. He said I was the only one who knew they’d gone up there together, and if I went to the police, he’d tell them I was dealing weed.’

  ‘Were you dealing?’

  Bruno gave another bitter laugh. ‘Yeah, I was his supplier. The bastard knew my situation, so he threatened me. He knew my dad had been killed. He told me to think about what would happen to Mum and Angela if I went to jail. Angela was only in primary school, and Mum couldn’t speak English. My money was paying the house mortgage. He said they’d end up homeless. “Who do you think they’ll believe,” he said, “the golden boy or a dirty dago?”’

  ‘He blackmailed you with all this, the morning after the storm?’

  Bruno nodded. ‘Before people even knew Celia was missing.’

  ‘Where was her body?’

  ‘He’d thrown her down that tree well. I knew exactly where the spot was when you asked me about it. The snow was deep that year, deeper than it’s ever been since. He told me to go up there in the spring thaw and bury her body. I was terrified if I didn’t do what he said, he’d implicate me. So, I did it, one day when the Gordons were in Sydney. We didn’t open in summer back then. There was no one else around.’ Lombardi was staring at a spot on the wall, his eyes glazed, his thoughts in the past. ‘I knew she’d still be frozen. She was intact, but her head was caved in on one side.’

  The blunt force trauma injury.

  Her skull sustained a depressed bone fracture consistent with being kicked in the head or hit with something hard, like a hammer or a rock.

  Ryder’s scalp crawled. Had Smythe bludgeoned Celia Delaney to death to save his own skin? ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘I dug a grave and put her in. It took me most of the day, the ground was so hard. And then I left her up there, with the rabbits, and the pygmy possums.’

  ‘And you took flowers up there, held together with the wire ties we found.’

  ‘Only in the spring and summer, so they’d blend in with the wildflowers and not be noticed.’

  Jesus Christ. Ryder’s nausea returned with a vengeance. Lew had been right. Poor Bruno. The scared young man had carried out Smythe’s instructions only to keep his mother and sister safe. He looked towards the viewing window and gave the signal to arrest Aidan Smythe.

  ‘He … he … destroyed my life,’ Bruno was saying. ‘In the beginning, I lived in fear the police would find her. Roman Lewicki was relentless, but even he gave up in the end. Everyone abandoned her. Everyone except me. As the years went by, I knew if I went to the police, I’d be charged with impeding an investigation or interferin’ with a dead body, so I laid low, watching over her, and praying.’

  ‘Praying?’

  ‘For the day Aidan Smythe would come back.’

  ‘Did you recognise the skier in the rental suit the other day?’

  Bruno nodded, his eyes glistening ‘It was him, all right.’ He pulled a crumpled handkerchief from the pocket of his pants and wiped his eyes. ‘He was travellin’. He lifted up his goggles so I could see who it was. Then he took off his mitt and shook his fist at me.’

  ‘Threatening you?’

  ‘Yeah … the bastard.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘“You keep your mouth shut!” Then he dropped his mitt.’

  Ryder’s heart began to beat faster. ‘He dropped a glove?’

  ‘A leather mitten. I’d scooped it up before Vanessa came out of the trees. And then I made another mistake,’ Bruno said in a halting voice, the pain evident on his face. ‘I hid it, instead of taking it to you and telling you everything then. If I’d done that, you would have questioned him, and maybe Libby wouldn’t have died.’ He covered his eyes and wept. ‘God will never forgive me.’

  More that Bruno wouldn’t forgive himself.

  Ignoring the headache that had begun to lurk behind his eyes, Ryder waited until Bruno had composed himself.

  ‘One thing that’s been bothering me, Bruno. When we interviewed you at the inn, you said you tried to warn Vanessa to be careful, the night you waited for her near the bridge.’

  Bruno nodded then sniffed loudly. ‘I saw her give Detective Flowers a piece of paper the night of the flare run. The spotlights lit up the hill like daytime. There were people everywhere. Smythe wouldn’t have seen her because he was leading the flare run. I was going to warn her in a roundabout way not to get too involved.’

  But Bruno hadn’t wanted to implicate himself either, and he’d gone about it all the wrong way.

  Ryder sighed. ‘Okay, tell me about this glove.’

  ‘It’s leather, brown, from Smythe’s shop in Canada. It’s got a label on it.’ Bruno pushed his handkerchief back in his pocket. ‘I was still covering for him then. But no more. Not after he killed that innocent girl.’

  ‘So, that’s why you took off, when you heard Libby was dead?’

  ‘I wasn’t lying when I said I’d had enough. Plus, I was pretty sure I’d be next.’

  Ryder pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Where’s the mitt now?’

  Bruno gazed up at Ryder, a resigned expression in his weary eyes. ‘Underneath my sister’s place. Inside the aircon unit. Beside the control panel.’

  Thirty-three

  Vanessa and Terry rode side by side. Benson and the other detective followed. They roared up the face of the tube run where Smythe had been sighted fleeing the resort, a fresh layer of ungroomed snow making it easy to pick out the snowmobile’s tracks.

  ‘This way heads into Thredbo,’ Vanessa called as they crested the top of the mountain. Fog surrounded them like spun sugar. ‘Do you think he’s going to follow the old chairlift route?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Terry shouted back over the stutter of the diesel engine. He pointed a gloved finger at the ground. ‘The impressions show he’s gone towards the old restaurant.’

  Vanessa turned, her gaze tracking upwards as a gust of wind thinned out the fog. A crumbling ruin was taking shape in the lowlight, emerging gradually, like a negative in a photographer’s darkroom. Stalactites hung from battered eaves, the doors and windows boarded up with a hard-packed layer of ice.

  Benson caught up and pulled in beside them. Terry pointed to the tracks leading to the derelict Stillwell Restaurant that stood like a ghostly apparition atop the highest point of the range. ‘It’s about twenty feet to the verandah. I can’t see where the tracks go after that.’

  ‘We’d better check it out,’ Benson said, killing the engine and pocketing the key to the snowmobile. ‘Come on, O’Day.’ Then
to Terry and Vanessa: ‘You two stay here.’

  ‘They’ve got their guns out,’ Terry said, watching as the detectives waded through thigh-deep snow towards the verandah.

  ‘I don’t blame them.’ Vanessa tipped back her head and studied the sky as another wind gust tore across the mountains. ‘I can see blue up there.’

  ‘That’ll make our job easier.’

  Terry was right. On a cloudless day, and against a white backdrop, a moving target like Smythe would be easy to track.

  ‘Can you believe this?’ Terry asked, staring at her through his plastic lenses. ‘I mean, you couldn’t dream this stuff up, could you?’

  ‘I know.’ Vanessa shook her head. ‘It’s horrible.’

  Suddenly a mechanical roar split the silence and a snowmobile flew out from behind the restaurant.

  ‘What do we do?’ Vanessa cried.

  ‘Let’s get after him. The others will catch up.’

  Vanessa hesitated. ‘What if they’re injured, or …’

  ‘You’re right.’ Terry switched off the ignition and began to dismount. ‘I’ll check.’

  Benson and the other detective appeared at the side of the building, moving as fast as the deep snow would allow. But their progress was slow. If she had to wait for them, Smythe would get away.

  She stood up on the running boards, opened the throttle and took off with a burst of speed that left Terry covered in a shower of snow.

  ‘Fuck!’ she heard him yell, before the roar of the two-stroke engine drowned out all other noise. She sank into a semi-squat, knees relaxed so they absorbed the bumpy terrain like shock absorbers. She scanned the white landscape, her gaze locking onto the moving target. Smythe was following the line of the old chairlift all right, flying towards the first of a series of shallow bowls that linked Charlotte Pass with Thredbo.

  Using her body weight, and thankful for the years spent riding quads and motorbikes on the farm, Vanessa wrangled the machine through the soft snow. Smythe knew the back country. He’d told her so the day they’d stood admiring the view from up on the back track.