Left Luggage
Page 15
At ten, Large poured himself a small cup of coffee from his thermos. Just a small one, he had to strike a balance between staying awake and spending all day pissing into the fruit juice bottle he had brought along for that purpose. He had a small radio with an earpiece, and was listening to a classic hits station. Anything to stay awake. He had made himself some sandwiches too, sliced sausage and tomato sauce, but he’d save those for later.
Large was finishing off his coffee when the man from the ute came back out. He stood on the footpath watching the street again for a full minute before he got back in the ute. Large watched it pull out and drive away from him. It made a U-turn at the corner then came slowly back past the village again. Large sat well back from the side curtains as it went past. Careful bastard, he thought, as he pulled out his phone and dialled Frank Martel’s number.
“Yeah?” Frank answered after two rings.
“Hello, Frank, it’s Phil Waters. How are you?”
“Large? I’m good mate, how’re you going?” said Frank.
Large had known Frank Martel for years. They used to play cricket together in the district team. Those were good times. Nowadays Frank had given up being a fast left-arm bowler and was something high up in the Roads and Traffic Department. He was a very useful friend. “I’m fighting fit, Frank. Top form. Listen I’m sorry to interrupt you on your Sunday.”
“No worries, I’m just trying to decide if I can put off mowing the grass for another week. What can I do for you?”
“Can you check out a rego for me? Usual rate.”
“Sure thing.”
Large read out the registration number. “White Hilux ute. Not very new.”
“No worries. I’ll call you back. It’ll be tomorrow morning, after I get into the office,” said Frank.
“Thanks, mate.” Large put the phone away and settled back with the radio on again, to see who else might turn up.
The street was shady, lined with big gum trees, but still the van heated up quickly as the sun got higher. Large cracked all of the windows he could, trying to get a bit of air through the back part of the van. He took off his sweatshirt, but even in T-shirt and shorts he was uncomfortably sweaty by eleven thirty. Every now and again a loud ding or clunk surprised him when a twig or gumnut fell out of the tree onto the roof of the van. Bloody gum trees were always dropping some shit. Large had cut down the two big gum trees at his place – first thing he did when he bought it. Replaced them with three silver birches. Much nicer trees. Hopefully the gum tree above him now wouldn’t drop a big branch on the van – he had to get it back to Darlene’s brother in one piece.
When the weekend sports show started on the radio, Large decided he needed some fresh air. He climbed out of the van and crossed the street. There had been no more cars visiting the village but a few more people had gone out on foot, mostly heading towards Glebe Point Road. He pulled out his keys and waited for someone to come out. It didn’t take long. A small, hunched-over woman with a walking stick came through the gate.
“Excuse me,” said Large. “I don’t suppose you live here?”
The woman looked uncertainly up at him, a big sweaty man in shorts and a T-shirt. “Yes, I do,” she said.
Large held out the key ring. “It’s just that I was walking past and I saw a young man drop these keys. He went in here, but I don’t know which unit he is in, what button to press. He was a youngish man, tall, fit looking. Some scars on his arm.”
The woman smiled. “Oh, that will be Betty’s son,” she said. “Betty Lawrence, she is. Number twelve. Her son is called John. Only the one son, I believe.”
“That’s great.” Large beamed a big smile at her. “Thank you.” He made to turn toward the gate.
“Terrible what happened on Friday,” the woman said. “Poor Betty and Ken. They’re both still in hospital apparently.” She peered up at Large. “We’re not even safe in our own homes anymore. Lucky her son was there to stop them. He’s a nice young man, John is, very polite. Used to be in the army, that’s what Rosemary Bennet said. He should be able to look out for Betty. I hope he stays close by. I’ll feel safer with him around the place.”
Large thanked the woman again and waited just inside the gate for her to hobble slowly out of sight down the road. When she was gone Large pocketed his keys and strolled back to the van. John Lawrence. Ex-army. That was good to know.
He ate the sandwiches and finished off the coffee for lunch. The afternoon dragged by, stuffy and hot in the back of the van. He listened to a match between the Sharks and the Tigers, while old people and families came and went, but none of them seemed out of the ordinary. When the game finished he thought stuff it, and started to pack up. He hadn’t learned anything new during the afternoon except how crap the Sharks were this season and how unpleasant it was to piss into a juice bottle in an overheated campervan.
John watched his mother’s eyes flick back and forth, following the nurse as she moved around the bed to pull back the screen curtains. Betty hadn’t spoken yet but she had squeezed his hand a couple of times. She was coming good and John was relieved. He was sitting beside Betty’s bed in a blue vinyl armchair, reading the online version of Le Monde aloud. It was impossible to tell if Betty was listening at all but when he read a story about the French finance minister being accused of sexually assaulting a junior clerk, she squeezed his hand so hard he was worried she was having a fit. When Betty had first started to wake, the nurses had brought some wide fabric straps to secure her arms. “Just in case. They’re often confused when they come out of the coma, sometimes they flail about with their arms, it can be distressing and they can pull out their tubes.”
“How long will it take? To wake up?” John had asked.
“It’s not like sleep. She’s not just waking up. It takes a while for the brain to recover from the trauma. Everyone is different, we’ll just have to wait and see.” The nurse’s name was Siobhan. She took the chart from the end of the bed and started filling it in. “You’re doing exactly the right thing, reading to her, talking. She’s been a lot more responsive since you’ve been here today.”
John was running out of new articles to read to Betty, when DI Walker appeared at the door.
She had a quick word with the constable outside in the corridor then came into the room and stood watching Betty from the end of the bed. “How is she? We heard she was coming around.”
“She is. Slowly though.”
“We really need to talk to her.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Any estimate on when?”
“Not really. Could be a day or two, if we’re lucky. Everyone’s different, that’s what they keep saying.”
“Helpful.”
John shrugged. “I’m just glad she’s coming around.”
“Of course.” Walker nodded. “What are you reading to her?”
“Le Monde. I’m down to the sports section now. Getting desperate, two Frenchmen have made the quarter-finals of some tennis tournament in Dubai.” He looked at his mother’s pale face, head bandaged in white gauze, and with an oxygen tube beneath her nose. “I thought a bit of Francais might help. Something a bit familiar, but she hates sport.”
“You should probably stop punishing her then; she’s been through enough pain already.”
John laughed. “Yeah, you’re right.” He reached down to a bag on the floor beside the bedside table and pulled out a stack of Betty’s portfolios. “I brought these too. Thought they might, I don’t know, stimulate her? Get a response at least.” He opened one of the heavy black folders and showed it to Walker. “1995, Sarajevo.”
Walker fetched a chair from beneath the window and pulled it up next to John, watching him flip through the pages of the portfolio. The images were a strange mix of modern and medieval. Full of the haunted, gaunt faces of a trapped civilian population trying to live under the guns. Of blood stains on flag stones, and the deadly radial symmetry of scars left by fragmentation shells on ancient stone.
“You said Sarajevo was her last job, didn’t you?”
“Her last war. She did a bit of work after that, but only in France. Maybe a bit in Germany and Britain.”
“It was nasty.”
John gave a grunt. “Looks like it, but they’re all nasty.” The murderous civil wars that tore Yugoslavia apart had kicked off just after he had joined up. There had been a lot of chat about them during training, mainly to do with tactics and weapons. “She won an award for Sarajevo,” he said, passing the portfolio to Walker.
On one page was a certificate: News Photo of the Year 1994, awarded to Betty Lawrence. On the other page was a photograph of a body lying in a street. Bright red blood pooling in the gaps between the paving stones. In the background, a group of seven people crouched against a wall, staring at the body. The people were well dressed, they looked like they were on the way to work. Except for the fear on their faces.
“Sniper,” said John.
“She must have been standing in the open to take that shot.”
“Yes. She was lucky.”
“She’s a risk taker,” said Walker.
“Mum would say that the woman deserved to have her death acknowledged, recognised.”
“They all do, all the victims.”
“Luck always runs out,” John said, turning to his mother. She was looking straight at him, her blue eyes were wet and there were tears on her cheeks.
Betty’s eyes flicked between them as Walker passed back the portfolio and said, “Alright, I’ll leave you to it. We’ll keep in touch with the hospital and we’ll keep a uniform on the door here for the moment. At least until we find out what all this was about.” She paused at the door and turned back. “Thanks for emailing that photo, by the way. Harry has sent it out on the system. We should hear tomorrow if anyone can put a name to the face.”
“Glad to do something useful.”
“Look after your mum. That’s useful.”
Sarajevo was bad.
Betty shouldn’t have gone. She was too old, too weary. Too wary, perhaps. But it was a big story – for a while it was the only story. And it was Europe, it was home. So she called up Hubert Foss, updated her accreditations and a week later she was on a French UN-flagged C-130 spiralling into Sarajevo. And taking fire.
“Bosnian Serbs. Call themselves militia, just gangsters really.” The man next to her was a Canadian journalist called Pete something. Big guy, Canadians always seemed to be huge. “This your first time?” The plane twisted and turned on its descent, trying to make it a bit harder for the bored gunmen on the mountains to hit it. She knew he was wondering what a woman her age was doing flying into a siege.
“It’s my first time for this war. Not for Sarajevo,” she said. “I was here for the winter Olympics in eighty-four.”
“You’ll notice the changes then,” he said, bracing himself as the plane lurched again, and Betty became unpleasantly aware of her stomach.
“So I hear,” she said when the plane steadied. “How many trips have you done?”
“This is my fourth time.”
Betty nodded. “You’re hooked.”
“Yeah, I am. It’s the story for the end of the century isn’t it? A modern European city being reduced to rubble by primal ethnic hatred.”
Betty had spent two weeks in the city trying to understand the war. Trying to work out how to convey the brutal intimacy of the siege. Sarajevo had been transformed by the deadly geometries of the fields of fire. There were some places where children played in relative safety, while just a football’s bounce away was the hunting ground of the snipers. Every day people took their lives in their hands just going to and from work. Waiting for the shots, counting off the seconds, hoping they could cross to safety before the sniper reloaded. Then there was the ever present risk of being in any open area. The threat of mortar fire, called in by some hidden spotter who had decided that enough people had gathered in one place to make a target worth a expending few rounds on.
Betty photographed the many sniper alleys, capturing terrified women dressed for the office or the market, running for their lives. She photographed desperate people trapped in a ruined claustrophobic city, being terrorised and killed by people they knew, people who had recently lived beside them, but who one day had left the city to camp in the mountains and try to destroy them. It was incomprehensible, and although her photographs were as good as usual, Betty never felt that she understood the conflict, never felt that she had captured the truth of it.
Her fixer, the young woman who drove her around and translated for her, was called Aida. Beautiful eyes, she had. Shorter than Betty but dark, with black spiky hair and a leather jacket that Betty never saw her out of. Aida drove them around Sarajevo like a rally driver in her beaten-up VW Golf, complete with bullet holes in the fenders and rear doors.
The trip to Sarajevo had ended badly. She and Aida had been to a site overlooking the river to interview one of the defence commanders. On the way back they had to take a detour because of the shelling. Turning down a side street, a kid on an old dragster type of bike came out of an alley just in front of them. Aida jammed on the brakes and the car skidded across the cobbles and stalled. The kid looked back over his shoulder at them, grinning as he rode into an exploding mortar round. Boy and bike were launched into the air, landing twenty metres down the road. Betty and Aida watched him land, then Betty started to get out of the car but Aida grabbed her arm. “No! It’s too late.” She let go of Betty and tried to get the car started. But Betty was out of the car and running for the boy. Aida screamed something, getting out too, watching Betty. She was standing by the car door, still shouting at Betty when the second shell landed two metres in front of her. The explosion threw Betty headlong onto the pavement stones. It tore Aida into shreds of bloody rags and black leather.
* * *
Chapter 14
Business
Frank Martel rang Large with the address just after 9am. By nine forty-five, Large was back in the campervan, watching Lawrence’s house. It looked like a shit-hole to Large, squeezed between a new warehouse conversion and row of trendy terraces. A rotten tooth in a none-too-pleasant smile. Large would have demolished it, if it was up to him, replaced it with something nice and modern, but it looked as if Lawrence was trying to rebuild the dump.
By midday, Large was struggling to stay awake. There had been no sign of Lawrence or anyone else. No sign of life at all. Large decided to take a walk, check out the back of the house. Broughton Street was quiet: it had been closed off at one end by the local council in an attempt to stop rat-running. Just past the closed-off end of the street was a large park with shady fig trees and a sports oval showing signs of wear from a weekend of football matches. He walked down to the park, turned right then right again into a lane that ran behind the houses. It was narrow and lined with tall timber fences. Most of the fences had roller shutter doors, allowing remote-controlled access to the off-street parking that would add another $30 000 to their already inflated values. The back of Lawrence’s house didn’t have a roller shutter, it had an old timber gate. Unlocked. Large lifted the drop bolt and let himself in. The backyard was featureless, just mown grass from fence to fence and an old concrete path from the back of the house to a non-existent Hills Hoist clothes line. Along the southern fence line there was a stack of flooring timber covered with a blue poly-tarp. Steps led up to a small back veranda. Large went up them as quietly as he could and peered through the windows into the kitchen. It had new benches but the floor was just raw timber. It all looked pretty makeshift, as though Lawrence was camping in the house while he rebuilt it around him.
Large was getting a bad feeling about this guy. This was someone who planned, who was ambitious and willing t
o make sacrifices. Nothing about what he had seen of him spoke of stupidity and recklessness. He had gone after Jimmy and Brain, two armed men, without hesitating, knowing exactly what he was doing. And the way he had watched the street outside the retirement village, looking for surveillance. No, this prick was dangerous.
Large walked back to the campervan and drove to the Sailor’s Retreat in Sans Souci. It was one of his favourite pubs. A good place for thinking, dark and quiet, the pokies hidden away in a small room, and the television screens turned off unless there was a game on. It was the sort of pub where no one bothered you. He ordered a steak and took his schooner of Reschs and the buzzer for the food order out the back to the lounge. At this time of day there were few people around and most of those were on the pokies or in the front bar. Large gave the only couple in the lounge a wide berth, and sat at a table in the corner.
John Lawrence was definitely a threat. It was probably him and his mother who had brought the machine guns in. He wasn’t sure exactly what they were up to or how they had worked it, but it didn’t really matter. Lawrence just had to be removed from the equation before he did any more harm. Even if Large couldn’t get hold of the guns and money in the suitcase, it might be safer all round just to knock Lawrence rather than to try to deal with him. Not to mention whoever he might be fronting for. No telling who that might be. As he’d said to Dennis, any number of cunts. But if Lawrence were to just disappear, then things could get back to normal. The suitcase might turn up but if it didn’t, the main thing was to remove Lawrence.
How to do it was the question. Killing someone unsuspecting is easy, but this guy didn’t look unsuspecting. He always looked on edge, always watching.