Slaughter Park

by Barry Maitland

  And then a sudden burst of music—the Bee Gees, ‘Stayin’ Alive’.

  They shrink into the shadows as a man comes around the corner of the building, lugging equipment, and kneels down by the edge of the pool.

  ‘Jesus,’ Kelly says. ‘It’s Craig Schaefer. Look at his left eye.’

  Harry sees the black patch. ‘So Karen Schaefer will be around somewhere too. The caretakers. I wonder who else.’

  Kelly says, ‘What’s the plan, Harry?’ She tried to raise this on the boat coming over, but Harry refused to be drawn, saying they had to assess the place first.

  ‘If there are people here it’ll mean that alarms are off, doors unlocked. I want to go inside, have a look at that office suite that Pascaline mentioned.’

  They circle back to the kitchen side of the main building, where, sure enough, they see a door now standing open. It looks as if the Schaefers are just starting their daily chores.

  ‘You stay here, Kelly.’

  She tries to object but Harry is adamant. Two people double their chances of being spotted, he says. He leaves her there, hiding in the bushes, lopes silently across to the open door and then listens. There is a faint sound coming from within the house, one he can’t identify.

  He pulls on latex gloves and steps inside, moving through a utility room, looking quickly into the extensive kitchen that Lydia described, then going on, pausing to listen at each place that offers cover. That sound again, quite close. He guesses that it’s someone cleaning a window. It stops and he slides in behind a door, hears someone walking past, the soles of their shoes squeaking slightly on the tiled floor. He waits, then steps out again, into a corridor. There’s a bucket on the floor up ahead. He hurries past and finds himself in what must be the entrance hall of the house. The front doors are on his right and a huge lounge room to his left, overlooking the pool and beach. Four other doors lead off the hallway. Which one? He tries them in turn, discovers a home theatre and a games room. The third door opens into the office suite, with a room for staff and a more luxuriously appointed office with a large oval table with a dozen seats, and, at the far end, the boss’s desk and high-backed chair. Harry hurries to that end, looks around the computer, the desk drawers. There is a small safe beneath the drawer on one side, an empty file cabinet on the other. He searches rapidly and entirely without result. There are no security codes, diaries, spare hard drives, letters or files. Then he tries to check the computer itself, which starts with an alarmingly loud musical chord and requires a password he cannot guess. After a fruitless search of a bookcase and a sideboard he admits defeat. He goes to the door, opens it, and freezes.

  A woman is standing in the hallway. She has her back to him, and is arranging a large bunch of flowers in a vase. She is not Ni-Vanuatu, and Harry guesses that she is Karen Schaefer. He glances to his left, sees an open door and quickly steps across to it. He finds himself at the start of a corridor with doorways up ahead. Trying the first, he enters a bedroom with en suite bathroom. The next room is identical but reversed, equally anonymous and clearly unoccupied. The third is more interesting, with a panel covered in photographs and two framed and signed football shirts hanging on the wall. Harry goes in and examines the photographs, a catalogue of bragging moments in a young man’s life—grinning alongside a football player holding aloft a cup, on a yacht with two beautiful models with familiar faces, in black tie and white tux at a roulette table. This room must belong to the other of Nordlund’s sons, Harry guesses—Hayden.

  There is a computer on a desk next to the window, through which he can see Craig Schaefer still working at the side of the pool. He doesn’t try to start it for fear of being heard. Instead he goes through drawers. They are untidy, and there are a few items—printouts, some bills, business cards—that he stuffs in his pockets for later examination. It’s disappointingly meagre stuff. He sits down at the desk, trying to imagine himself here, the owner, his hands resting on the keyboard. Without looking he lets his hands explore, running them across the desktop, then underneath, and in a corner his fingers touch something small and hard. He crouches down and sees a flash drive taped to the underside.

  He pockets it, sets the chair back as it was and heads for the door. In the corridor he hears squeaky footsteps coming from around the corner and sprints in the opposite direction, towards an external door. He opens it, turns the corner of the building and runs straight into Craig Schaefer.

  57

  Deb hammers on the door, and after a moment Nicole cautiously opens it. ‘Oh, what is it now?’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘It’s not convenient. I’m changing the baby’s nappy.’

  ‘That’s all right. We can talk while you’re doing it.’

  ‘No thanks.’ That defiant look. ‘You’d frighten her.’

  Deb sighs. ‘Harry took a flight to Vanuatu yesterday morning.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Come on, Nicole. You knew that, didn’t you? I could arrest you for obstructing my investigation.’

  ‘What investigation is that?’

  ‘Murder, that’s what I investigate, and you’re being obstructive and uncooperative.’

  ‘Should I be calling a lawyer?’

  ‘Just tell me what his plans are.’

  ‘I don’t know. I remember him talking about someone advising him to get away and have a complete break. Maybe that was it, an impulsive thing.’

  ‘Harry is never impulsive, Nicole. He always thinks things through, and he wouldn’t have gone off and left you with his baby without discussing it with you.’

  ‘Sorry, I can’t help you.’

  She starts to close the door, but Deb stops it with her foot. ‘Get him to contact me. It’s for his own good.’

  Deb pulls in to the car park in North Ryde, shows her badge at reception and is directed through to the chief’s office. Bob Marshall is standing by his desk, gathering up files.

  ‘Ah, Deb. Just in time. I’ve got meetings. The TV campaign, the schools’ program—’

  ‘Have you heard about Detective Sergeant Eden Grimshaw?’

  He looks at her with a sharp frown. She realises she sounds as if she’s talking to a subordinate instead of a superintendent.

  ‘He was murdered Sunday night,’ she says, more measured.

  ‘Grimshaw. Oh yes?’

  ‘Stabbed through the heart. Forensic evidence all over the place, and all pointing to Ken Fogarty. In fact you could say it’s almost a copycat of Terry Palfreyman’s murder…’

  Marshall stares at her, face impassive.

  ‘Which Harry Belltree insisted was a frame,’ she says.

  ‘Where is Harry?’

  ‘You haven’t heard from him, sir?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Skipped the country. Caught a flight to Vanuatu yesterday. We’ve asked the Vanuatu police to find out where he is. Could be anywhere by now. His sister-in-law is saying that he spent all Sunday night at her house, with the baby. Unfortunately the baby can’t talk.’

  ‘There’s no need for sarcasm, Deb.’

  ‘Actually the whole thing would be hilarious if it wasn’t so bloody serious. We’re being taken for a ride.’

  ‘You don’t know that for a fact.’

  ‘No advice you can give me?’

  ‘How about, don’t jump to conclusions?’

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I thought I should let you know.’

  ‘I appreciate it. Scandal and rumour take longer to reach us out here.’

  58

  From her hiding place Kelly hears Schaefer’s cry as he falls, hitting his head with a crack on the coral rocks edging the garden bed. Harry runs towards her and grabs her arm. As she spins around she sees Karen Schaefer standing open-mouthed at the front door, staring. They race off down the drive among the palms, reach the helicopter landing pad and find the small path beyond, plunging on until they realise they must have gone past the place where they cut through from the mangroves. Harry turns into the dense
bush, crashing a way through tangled vines and roots. Kelly is behind him, but she feels her feet sinking into increasingly boggy ground.

  ‘Harry,’ she cries, gasping for breath, ‘we’re lost.’

  ‘Keep going…’

  She sees the sparkle of reflected light up ahead, and they force their way through to open ground, the spikes of mangrove shoots sticking through the mud like nails. Across a patch of heaving water they see the dinghy, tugging at its rope, and Harry splashes through the waves to it. She looks out across the water—choppy now—towards a darkening sky.

  ‘Come on!’ Harry reaches out a hand to Kelly as she struggles through the shallows, hauls her aboard and gets to work on the motor. Nothing. He pulls, adjusts the throttle, coaxes, waits, tries again, until, in an angry roar, it comes to life. He casts off and turns the boat out into the breakers. Behind them she hears a man’s shout.

  As they emerge into the open water they both turn to gape at the huge black storm front bearing down upon them from the north. Ahead in the distance the green hills of Pentecost are momentarily caught in a lurid bright light that fades as they stare at it. Harry teases the throttle and they bounce forward over gathering waves. Their concentration on the sea is suddenly broken by a crack and a zing. Kelly turns and catches a glimpse of Craig Schaefer on the mangrove beach aiming a weapon at them. A wave catches them and pitches them down as another bullet zips overhead. Kelly crouches in the hull, clutching the side, and prays the motor doesn’t get hit. They are shipping water now and Harry bends down and reaches beneath his seat for the plastic bucket. He thrusts it at Kelly. ‘Bail us.’ She stares at him for a moment, uncomprehending, then nods and gets to work.

  The heaving water saves them, tossing them in and out of sight until they are far off in the middle of the straits and struggling towards the Pentecost shore. As it comes closer Kelly makes out the figure of Emanuel, standing immune to the tugging wind and scattering rain, waiting for them. He lunges into the shallows as they approach and hauls them up the beach. His huge grin fades a little as he spies the puncture hole in the aluminium stern plate. Harry claps him on the shoulder and helps Kelly climb up onto the grass bank.

  Later, during a hair-raising drive to the airstrip to catch their plane, Kelly says, ‘Did Schaefer get a good look at you?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Harry says. ‘I hit him on his blind side.’

  ‘I think Karen got a glimpse of us.’

  They are just in time to catch the return flight to Port Vila, where they check in to their hotel on the harbour. In her room Kelly has a shower, changes her clothes and quickly checks her emails. Among the trash is a message from Brendon Pyle at the Times:

  re: Fogarty

  Kelly,

  Sorry to have been so long getting back to you on Fogarty but things have been hectic as you know. I finally tracked down that story we discussed, spoke to old Houlahan who retired yonks ago. He told me that the Police Integrity Commission opened a file on Fogarty and his partner in the drug squad at the time, a detective called Grimshaw. Got that? The same Eden Grimshaw who was murdered Sunday night. The word is that Fogarty has been spending a lot of time since then helping the police with their enquiries. Also that the forensic evidence is compelling. What’s this all about, Kelly? What do you know? Houlahan heard a rumour that the PIC investigation of Fogarty/Grimshaw was shelved after political pressure was applied. It would have to have been high-up political pressure. This was back in Warren Dalkeith’s time as premier. So come clean, Kelly. Spill the beans!!!

  Brendon

  Kelly blinks, then goes to the Times website and reads the reports of the fatal stabbing of Eden Grimshaw in a rented flat in Bondi on Sunday night. She googles Grimshaw and comes up with pictures of a very tall man in police uniform. She reads other reports of the murder online, and thinks of Harry’s sudden phone call at 4:00 am on Monday to say that he’d bought two tickets for the morning flight to Port Vila and would collect her in an hour.

  She picks up the phone and dials the number of the room next door. ‘Harry,’ she says grimly, ‘we need to talk.’

  59

  It’s half an hour before Kelly hears a knock on her door and Harry comes in, carrying a bottle of scotch.

  ‘Your call sounded serious,’ he says. ‘I thought we might need this.’

  ‘After the day we’ve had we deserve it, but I want to be sober while you tell me about this.’ She hands him her iPad with the email from Brendon Pyle.

  He takes his time, reading it through twice, expressionless, then hands it back to her. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Very, especially the timing. Grimshaw was stabbed just a couple of hours before you rang me out of the blue and told me we were catching the next flight out of Sydney.’

  ‘What are you suggesting, Kelly?’

  ‘Am I an accomplice, Harry? Are you a fugitive? Is that why we’re here? Did you kill Grimshaw and frame Fogarty?’

  Harry looks at her for a moment, an unnerving, steady look, then gets to his feet and searches her cupboards for two tumblers, which he half-fills with whisky before sitting down again.

  ‘That’s four questions. The answers are no, no, no and what if?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What if Jenny’s story of looking through Palfreyman’s window and seeing him being tortured and murdered by Fogarty and a tall, thin accomplice was true? Do you believe it was?’

  ‘How do you know Grimshaw was tall and thin?’

  He smiles. ‘Good try. Because I’ve met him in the past. Answer my question—did Jenny tell the truth?’

  ‘How can I tell? She never told me her story. I’ve only heard it from you. Maybe you made it up to protect her.’ Kelly hears a wobble in her voice and realises how rattled she is—the Maturiki business, the rush for the plane, and now this. Harry is holding out a glass of whisky to her. She’s reluctant to take it because she knows that her hand will be shaking. She uses two hands and takes a gulp.

  ‘They almost caught her on Friday night,’ Harry says. ‘After you called me about the new victim in Slater Park I went to check on Amber. She’d disappeared, and I found the man she’d been staying with dead. I called Jenny and told her to run. She managed to escape just as the police arrived where she was hiding in Marrickville.’

  Kelly stares at him, decides he’s telling the truth. She feels her heart pounding and whispers, ‘You killed Grimshaw.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ He reaches for his glass. ‘It’s a war, Kelly, and they aren’t taking prisoners. If you hadn’t called me so quickly there would have been two women killed that night.’

  They fall silent. Harry is staring down at his drink, a look of resignation on his face. Kelly wonders what’s happened to her moral compass. What would her housemate, Wendy, make of her, sitting here drinking with a confessed murderer and feeling sorry for him? No, not sorry, more than that. Devastated. Over the past two years they have been on a long journey together, and this is where it’s brought them.

  ‘What will you do, Harry?’

  ‘I’ve done what I can for her. The best thing for everyone now is for me to disappear.’

  ‘Out here? Or back up north?’

  He shrugs. ‘You should catch the first plane tomorrow for Sydney on your own. Tell no one that you were here with me.’

  ‘We achieved nothing, did we?’

  He reaches into his pocket and brings out some folded documents. ‘I found these in one of the bedrooms of the house. It probably belonged to one of Nordlund’s sons, Hayden.’ He nods at her laptop. ‘Can you find out what he looks like?’

  Kelly brings up some images. Harry recognises some of them from the enlargements on the bedroom wall. ‘That one.’

  ‘Hayden, the younger brother, age twenty-five.’

  ‘Right.’ Harry spreads the stuff from the drawer on the table and they go through it. The computer printouts are web pages of online outlets for sunglasses and electronic gadgets; a couple show aerial views of unide
ntified buildings, images of luxury yachts. The bills and most of the business cards are for restaurants and clubs in Vanuatu, Sydney and Melbourne, but Kelly picks one out and shows it to Harry: Doggylands Dog Breeders, Boarding Kennels.

  ‘I’ve been there,’ she says.

  ‘Me too. How come?’

  Kelly explains about the leaflet she found in the Schaefers’ mail, and then they tell each other about their visits to the kennels. ‘Something’s going on there, Harry,’ she says. ‘Something bad.’

  They sip their drinks, staring at the bits and pieces on the table. Harry says, ‘Not much for all that trouble going to Maturiki. There was also this…’ He shows her the flash drive he found hidden beneath the desktop.

  She takes it, a slender plastic stick. ‘We’ll need something with a USB port.’ She tugs at the key ring at one end and the drive slides out of its case to reveal its body, studded with small keypad numbers. ‘Oh, it’s encrypted. We’d need the PIN number.’

  Harry shakes his head in frustration. ‘It’s probably just porn, pictures of his girlfriends.’

  Kelly sags back in her chair. She has the skeleton of a great story, which she can’t use. ‘Give me another drink, Harry.’

  Later, back in his own room, Harry uses the hotel phone to ring Nicole. It’s poor security, of course—Deb Velasco is probably monitoring her phone—but the whisky has given him a cold sense of fatalism.

  ‘Harry, where are you? That detective, Velasco, has been to see me again, looking for you. She knows you left for Vanuatu yesterday. She says she needs to speak to you urgently.’

  ‘Any news of Jenny?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Abigail okay?’

  ‘She’s fine—you don’t need to worry about us.’

  ‘Good. I’m afraid you won’t hear from me for a while. I just wanted to thank you for everything.’

  ‘That’s no problem, but—’

  ‘I’m afraid I have to go.’ He ends the call.