by Joy Dettman
And Freddy turned and caught him staring. Ross raised a hand in a salute, the barrister returned with a sweep of swamp-green frog’s eyes and a partial nod. An odd couple, definitely a couple. She took his hand as they walked towards the building Ross called the office, and when he judged them far enough away, he walked across the grass to the kerb to admire the lines of Freddy’s thoroughbred, and to make an educated guess at its value – and another as to where the money had come from to pay for it. Lady Cynthia paid her grandson’s bills. Since the night of his arrest, Frederick Adam-Jones had been in Lady Cynthia’s pocket.
A beautiful-looking car, it screamed class from its wheels to its luxurious interior. A fair replacement for a six-year-old Commodore. Ross was thinking insurance, thinking that what an insurance company might pay out on the Commodore may just about pay for the Ferrari’s wheel trims – which got him to wondering how much his own Commodore would be worth as a trade-in on a four-wheel drive. His was older, and it had a couple of cigarette burns in the upholstery but a bare seventy thousand kilometres on the speedo.
His smoke down to the butt, he dropped it into his peppermint tin. Until a few years ago, smokers dropped their butts anywhere. Do that today and you’d cop a fine. The lid of the tin secure, he shook it to cool the new ember with the ash of the old, then dropped the tin back into his pocket – and his phone, sharing that polluted pocket, protested.
‘Who?’ he said.
‘Roy. We’ve struck paydirt, Sarge. The data bank’s come back with a biological match—’
‘Biological?’
‘From degraded DNA, biological is good.’
‘Whose?’
‘Clarence Daniel Jones, a petty crim. We’ve got his details coming up now.’
‘Hoon?’
‘Fifty. Where are you?’
‘Walking. What’s his form?’
‘Amphetamines. He served time in Fremantle in 2007 … Jesus H. Christ! You’ve got to see this, Sarge. He’s got something of Baldy Plaid Skirt in him.’
‘I’m with you,’ Ross said, his mind doing triple jumps. Lisa had given them that DNA. She wasn’t one of Plaid Skirt’s.
He dropped his mobile back into his pocket, his mind pole-vaulting then to the ex-con, a Ron someone who’d called Crime Stoppers identifying the dark-headed Plaid Skirt mock-up as a crim he’d served time with in Western Australia; he’d known him as Indiana Jones. Johnson had likened that shot to Harrison Ford who had played the role of Indiana Jones – and Han Solo.
A crowd had gathered around the screen. Ross, taller than most, looked over Clair’s topknot and Constable Whiz-kid’s clipped scalp to view Clarence Daniel Jones’s mug shot, and he did have something of Plaid Skirt about him. He had a record going back to ’86.
‘An ex-wife and four kids,’ Ross said.
‘Three sons and a daughter,’ Clair said. ‘A daughter he last saw wearing a pink t-shirt and denim skirt, sir?’
‘Wrong eyes,’ Ross said. ‘Wrong build.’
Clarence Jones had rolled his double wheeler up north of Perth and had walked away from it with enough amphetamines in him to choke a horse, and enough in his cabin to supply a hundred truckies. He’d been locked up in December of 2007 and released in July of 2009.
‘The timing’s right,’ Johnson said. Nancy Yang was abducted in July of 2010.
‘He’s taller and no lightweight.’
‘Didn’t appreciate prison food,’ Constable Whiz-kid surmised. ‘Came out thinner than he went in.’
The crowd segmented. Ross stood on, staring. They had a six-year-old address for Clarence Jones. Ex or not, his wife and kids could still have been living there.
Johnson wanted the name of the chap who’d made that call to Crime Stoppers about Indiana Jones but Ross stood on, staring at the mug shot’s eyes, protruding eyes he knew well.
‘Fat Freddy,’ he said. A few turned. ‘Frederick Adam-Jones. I saw him coming in here.’
‘His kid was picked up last night doing wheelies in his mate’s mother’s car, blind drunk and carrying a fake ID,’ Constable Whiz-kid said. ‘He came clean when they came at him with a needle to take his blood.’
Ross’s sinuses itching, his neurons tripping over each other, he turned again to the screen. Clarence Daniel Jones: Frederick Adam Jones: Good biblical names, both. Similar ages; an ex-con and barrister, one short, one tall, but identical eyes.
A biological match …
Freddy’s Commodore torched. His hoon son picked up doing wheelies in his mate’s mother’s car – his hoon son who didn’t like needles.
Or didn’t want to give up his DNA.
Ross’s sneeze was an explosion. It shook the office.
‘You need to give up the smokes,’ Johnson said.
‘Why do five carjackers drive a hundred kilometres—’ He sneezed again ‘— drive a hundred kilometres out of Melbourne to torch a stolen car? How did they get home?’
Clair’s expression suggested Detective Senior Sergeant Hunter may have finally blown his brains out of his nostrils. His next words didn’t alter her opinion.
‘Why drop Freddy off next door to where they torched his car?’
‘It’s his psycho sinuses,’ Constable Whiz-kid said. ‘They’ve got a bad habit of making quantum leaps.’
‘Put them to work in tracking down that caller – and the ex-wife. They’ve got four kids. You don’t move around when you’ve got kids,’ Johnson said. He’d know. He’d bought a house when he’d married and was still living in it. ‘Jones lost his licence. Find out if he got it back. By nightfall I want to know what Clarence Daniel Jones ate for breakfast and where he ate it.’
Ross wanted to get a look at the burnt-out husk of Freddy’s wife’s Commodore.
He wasn’t able to contact Clarence’s ex; he had found out where the Commodore was, though the day was done before he got a look at what was left of it.
It was a blackened hulk but most of its panels were intact, and the dents in its bonnet and hood were consistent with those he might expect to see on a car involved in a hit-and-run, and when added to fat Freddy’s disinterest in identifying his attackers – they’d lined up a few for him to take a look at and had trouble getting him in there to point the finger – because the little bastard hadn’t been carjacked.
Who does a sixteen-year-old hoon call when he’s in trouble, other than dear old Dad – or a solicitor. Freddy’s hoon had got the two for the price of one, and a devious little bastard into the bargain.
Ross could see it playing out, see fat Freddy taking that late night phone call, getting into his Ferrari and driving off to save his hatchling, and Ross wanted that car gone over by the experts. He wanted Freddy’s phone records. He was about to use his phone when it rang.
‘Who?’
It was Johnson. Clarence Jones’s ex-wife had been located at the same address. She’d been evasive about the current whereabouts of her ex-husband.
BACKPACKS
Ross was the last to board that early morning plane and made it only by the skin of his teeth, and he heard his bellowing seatmate before sighting his aisle seat. There were two squawking ankle biters, his fate for the next four hours. He stowed his luggage, sat and buckled in. Neither infant appreciated being buckled down – and Ross didn’t appreciate either infant, or their mother, probably flying on his tax dollars.
They were up, the plane levelling out, when a flight attendant took pity on him. Leaning low, she suggested Ross might like to move to a rear seat. Like? You’ve never seen a big man move as fast as he’d done it. Grabbed his luggage so damn fast he almost dropped his bag on the major bellower’s head. Good reflexes saved him.
And he’d hit the jackpot. His new seatmates were slim, fresh-faced girls who had to be sisters. He stowed his bag for the second time, making space for it between matching black backpacks, then sat, sighed with relief and took a few notes from his breast pocket.
‘Turn them off, Mum,’ the younger of the two sisters – obviously
not sisters – said, and she caught him staring. ‘Not the engines,’ she added for his benefit.
He nodded and turned back to his typewritten pages, thinking Mum, thinking a few more of his tax dollars were being squandered on a quick trip home for the holidays. We feed them hormone-laced chicken and they go clucky in the schoolroom, he thought.
Five minutes later when he glanced their way again, he caught them in deep conversation, their mouths going ten to the dozen but no sound issuing from their lips. Intrigued, he stared – until the younger girl caught him again.
‘We were just saying that you’re that policeman we saw on television, and that you look different when you’re not wearing a suit and tie.’
‘Most of us do,’ he said.
‘Does the Freeway Killer really look like those photos in the newspaper?’
‘We believe so,’ he said.
‘Danni went to my school for a little while. It’s horrible not seeing her there and knowing that he’s got her.’
He nodded and turned his eyes back to his notes.
‘Is she still alive?’ the girl asked.
‘I believe so,’ he repeated.
‘Are you having a holiday?’
‘Work,’ he said.
‘We’re going on a tour. Mum lived in Perth until she was eighteen but she never saw anything, except the city. We’re going on a ferry to Rottnest Island, where the quokkas are.’
‘How long since you’ve been home?’ Ross asked Mum.
The girl replied for her. ‘She’s deaf. She wears hearing aids, but the pressure or something was hurting her ears.’ She nudged Mum. ‘The policeman spoke to you.’
And Mum looked at him with a pair of big brown worried eyes, no black paint marring them and no paint necessary, and Mum or not, she looked like a pretty clean-faced girl.
He’d dealt with the deaf on a couple of occasions; he’d interrogated a deaf chap once in a four-way conversation, through his solicitor and a hand-signing translator. He knew no signs but had seen her reading her girl’s mouth, so he tried his question again, and this time she replied.
‘Fourteen year,’ she said.
‘You fly home often?’
‘First time,’ she said.
‘It’s the first time both of us ever flew. Mum came over on a bus and it took two days. We’ll be there in less than four hours, and we get like two hours back when we land. Do you fly very much?’
‘Only when I have to. I plan to drive across the Nullarbor one of these days.’
‘Mum’s father drove an old car across it from Adelaide, or almost across. It broke down and they had to leave it on the side of the road, out in the middle of nowhere, and get a lift the rest of the way with a truck driver.’
He was on this plane because of another truck driver – or the truck driver’s wife, who’d said on the phone that her husband was driving up at the mines and staying out of trouble and to leave him alone, that he wasn’t a bad man, just a bit of a larrikin. She’d said too that he had umpteen brothers and that Frederick Adam-Jones was one of them, and an up himself little shit of a man. Ross agreed with her on that point.
It does the heart good to be proven right. He knew he was right about Freddy’s hoon son too, and he would have preferred to stay at home and follow his nose than be up here and not too certain he’d get down again.
But the flight attendant was offering him breakfast, and he needed it.
‘We have two already,’ Mum said.
‘I’ll eat yours,’ the girl said.
‘You got hollow leg.’
Again the girl caught him eavesdropping. ‘Have you got any kids?’
‘No,’ he said, and slid his notes back into his pocket and put his table down. The smell of coffee activated his smoking reflex. There’d been a time when you could smoke on planes.
‘School holidays,’ he said.
‘For one more week.’
‘What year are you in?’
‘Seven.’
Which made her around twelve years old. Her face wasn’t a kid’s, her slim frame could have been. Mum had left Perth fourteen years ago. How old had she been when she’d left? She was as slim as her daughter. Their eyes were similarly shaped, but Mum’s were more watchful, worried eyes, working hard to take in everything, to work out what was about to happen before it happened. The girl’s eyes spoke a different language. Hers were taking in the world and loving every minute of it.
He drank his issue of coffee in two swallows and looked for more. He drank his juice, ate his omelette, and when the flight attendant returned to offer more coffee the girls passed their cups across for refills.
‘You’re too young to drink coffee,’ he told the daughter.
‘I saw a documentary on television that said it was good for asthma.’
‘You’re an asthmatic?’ he asked.
‘No, but maybe coffee is the reason why I’m not,’ she said, and he smiled and looked at deaf Mum who’d raised a kid unlike any twelve year old he’d previously come across.
She offered him a mint when their tables were packed away. He accepted her offer, and she continued quizzing him and offering mints to keep him replying.
They talked their way to Perth and he did his own fair share of quizzing Mum, who only replied when he asked her a question. He asked if she’d travelled alone to Melbourne on the bus, asked where she worked, and raised his eyebrows when she told him. He’d been to Crow’s office twice. He hadn’t seen her there.
Watched her slip two hearing aids into her ears when they were back on the ground, then he quizzed her on how much she heard with them.
‘Big noise. Not much.’
He lifted their matching backpacks down, shuffled behind them to the exit, then walked at their side to the taxi rank where he queued behind them.
‘Where are you staying?’ he asked.
‘At a hotel in the middle of the city tonight,’ the girl said. ‘We get on our tour bus in the morning. How long are you staying?’
‘I’ll be flying home while you’re touring,’ he said. ‘How would your mum feel about sharing a taxi?’
‘She likes saving money,’ the girl said. ‘Mum. He wants to share our taxi.’
Mum wanted to pay her share of the fare when he unloaded their backpacks outside the hotel. He told her his boss was picking up the tab.
‘Find Danni soon,’ the girl said.
He had no reply to that, then with a wave of their hands they were gone, and he didn’t know their names.
He knew that Mum was a senior payroll/accounts officer at Crows. He knew they lived in a granny flat behind an elderly tyrant’s house, that they’d left her home alone for ten days and were worried about her already. He knew they were going to buy a car after their holiday, if Mum got her licence. He knew there was no father on the scene, that he was buried in Perth, that they were going to visit his grave before they flew home. He knew, too, that had he been less set in his ways, he would have asked their names, got their phone numbers. That’s what people did these days, met on planes, in bars, online.
For much of his life, Ross had been making snap judgements about those he met in odd places. He liked or disliked, trusted or distrusted on sight. He liked that girl. He liked her Mum’s worried eyes.
He didn’t like the desk clerk when he fronted up at the reception desk to check in and was told his room wouldn’t be ready for occupancy until one o’clock. He was, however, welcome to leave his luggage.
Ross’s laptop was in his sports bag, and, having no intention of being separated from it, he walked out to the pavement where he lit a smoke and wondered if his seatmates were having the same difficulty at their hotel. It was only a block or two from his, so he walked back, telling himself he’d ask their names if he found them wandering the morning streets.
A small world, he thought. What was the likelihood of flying across the country to speak to the ex-wife of an ex-con who was probably driving up at the mines and keeping his nose cle
an, then being seated by default, or the fault of two out-of-control brats, beside a kid who’d gone to school with Danni?
He knew where she’d gone to school. He’d been there. He knew where she’d lived. Been there too. His seatmate’s granny flat would have been in that general area.
*
He had a busy day. It was after five before he checked into his room, and the first thing he saw in it was the No smoking sign and the fine smokers would incur should they light up in that hallowed space. He tossed his bag on a bed, made certain his door was locked then walked around the corner where he bought Chinese for dinner.
Space and time are good teachers. He found a card game on his phone and flattened his battery playing it and when he checked in so he could charge it, he couldn’t find his charger. No more card games – and his borrowed bed was as hard as the hobs of hell.
He turned on the television and flicked around until he found a movie – and was asleep before it ended.
A ratbag morning show woke him – and probably his neighbour, and when he failed to find the remote to turn it off, he dressed and got out, checked out, which took as long as it had to check in – and no, he had not attacked their minibar. Maybe they sent someone up to check, which could have been why it took so long to check him out.
Annoyed by the dictates of those at the top of the tree, he lit up a metre from the hotel door and hoped his smoke infiltrated their sterile space.
His flight home left at ten, and with hours to kill, he went sightseeing, or mind travelling through yesterday.
He hadn’t found Clarence Daniel Jones but had eaten a ham and pickle sandwich with Jones’s ex-wife, who ran a childcare centre for five grandkids. Their conversation was interrupted half a dozen times while she broke up fights, but between the fights he’d learnt that Clarry had worked at Bridgestone Tyres after they’d let him out the last time, but that they must have given him back his truck licence because the last time she’d heard from him he’d been driving up at the mines.
She’d said she had no way of contacting him. She said again that he was never a bad husband, just unreliable. He still sent her money when he thought about it and he never forgot the kids’ birthdays, or hers. She still loved him, she said. ‘Just couldn’t live with him.’
