The Silent Inheritance

by Joy Dettman

  She gave him the names of Clarry’s six brothers, told him all about fat Freddy’s hyphen.

  ‘He added it when he got his scholarship into university. He thought he was too good to be a common Jones. I only met him two or three times but he always came across as a smart-arsed little runt. His mother thought he was Jesus Christ himself.’

  She’d given Ross the addresses of two of her brothers-in-law. ‘We send Christmas cards,’ she said.

  He’d spoken to his Perth colleagues. If Clarence Daniel Jones was driving up at the mines, they’d find him. They’d had no luck to date in tracking down the ‘Ron’ who’d called Crime Stoppers about Indiana Jones.

  Ross was standing with a group waiting to cross at a traffic light, a smoke in hand and a woman looking at him as if he were a terrorist carrying a load of explosives. He butted out in his peppermint tin and considered what he might do on these streets if he had a week of space and time.

  And he saw them, the girls from the plane, waving at him from the far side of the street. He smiled and waved back, didn’t cross over when the lights changed. Waited for them to cross to him.

  ‘Are you tailing me?’ he greeted them.

  ‘We didn’t pay for breakfast at the hotel,’ the girl said. ‘Mum thinks she can remember a McDonald’s near where we catch our tour bus.’

  ‘Would Mum mind if I joined you? I don’t mind a bacon and egg McMuffin.’

  ‘It will save us wearing ourselves out trying to keep you in sight,’ the girl said, and he laughed, halfway in love with that middle-aged twelve year old.

  THE HOUSE

  Clarence Daniel Jones was still missing. Bill Jones hadn’t seen Clarry since their father’s funeral but kept in touch with John, who’d lost his wife six months ago. Joe he’d last heard from a few months after their father’s death. Bert was overseas somewhere, Gordon was a widower with a buggered back, and then there was Freddy. You only needed to look in a newspaper to find Freddy.

  Ross had run his hoon theory by Johnson. It took a better imagination than his to visualise Frederick Adam-Jones and his son digging a grave and burying that girl then returning a week later to dig her up – and maybe a better imagination than Ross’s. He put it aside, pushed it aside but it ate at him, so he gave in and paid Freddy one of his social calls.

  He owned a nice-looking house but a common doorbell. The woman who opened the door wasn’t common. She was taller than her husband and looked as if she kept in shape, dark hair, shoulder-length and tied back at the nape of her neck.

  Ross introduced himself, flashed his ID, and told her he’d appreciate a word or two with her husband.

  ‘Freddy,’ she called.

  He came, in his shirtsleeves.

  ‘We’re attempting to contact your brother, Clarence,’ Ross said for openers.

  ‘I’m unable to help you,’ Freddy replied. He didn’t invite his caller inside.

  ‘When were you last in contact with your brother?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We believe he may have information …’ Ross gave his spiel. Freddy, disinterested, wanted him to go, but in no hurry, Ross turned the conversation to the carjacking. ‘I hear you’ve had no luck yet identifying the carjackers?’

  ‘The night was dark. They were dark.’

  ‘You saw the tats on the big bloke with the knife.’

  ‘As I was being tossed into the boot, Sergeant. There is a light – was a light – in the boot of the Commodore.’

  He was good – and he looked bored, so Ross stopped boring him and walked back to his car, thinking that should there come a day when he decided to murder Melvin Sloan for cutting down that avocado tree, fat Freddy would be the bloke he’d want defending him.

  *

  The elusive Ron was still missing, but the Perth cops found an ex-crim who’d served time with Indiana, not at Fremantle, but in Perth, back in ’99.

  ‘He was doing time for manslaughter, and a dead ringer for Indiana Jones. There was this big old blonde bird who used to come in once a week, a volunteer supposed to be learning us good English but who spent more time saving our souls and eyeing off Indiana. She called him Indie. I never heard anyone call him by another name. Don’t know what his real name was.’

  Clarence Daniel Jones hadn’t served time for manslaughter. It was another piece of a puzzle where none of the pieces fitted.

  Ross’s trip to Perth had achieved little but much. He’d become proficient at the card games on his mobile and had some inkling of why every kid over three spent half of their life staring at a screen.

  He’d heard his own laughter at McDonald’s, and had damn near looked around to see who it was that was laughing. He’d heard Sarah’s laugh. It hadn’t sounded deaf. Her daughter would have made a cat laugh that morning.

  They’d exchanged names over egg and bacon McMuffins and he’d felt himself shedding years with his skin cells. Could have sat with them all day, talking about everything and nothing, with a deaf woman and her daughter, but they’d had a bus to catch and he’d had a date with a plane.

  He’d walked them down to their tour bus, where they were met by a guide and a dozen elderly citizens.

  ‘Enjoy your trip,’ he’d said.

  ‘We’re going to enjoy every second,’ Marni said.

  He hoped they had, but feared they’d spent their week tripping over walking sticks – and he wouldn’t have minded spending that week with them, tripping over those walking sticks.

  Loved their eyes, big, wide, chocolate-brown, honest, innocent eyes, and if he hadn’t flattened his mobile battery playing cards, he might have asked for their phone number.

  Back here in his own world, he’d regrown those lost years fast, had stopped laughing and told himself when he thought about those girls that he was eight years away from fifty and that cops died young, and that he should have been making a new will, not googling the streets adjacent to the Burwood Heights high school and searching backyards for a granny flat.

  HEAT

  Cheryl had replaced the Commodore with a grass-green Honda hard pushed to hold four, the perfect little city runabout, she’d claimed until yesterday, until her Vermont mate’s seven-seater four-wheel drive was run over by a tram.

  The ‘girls’ had been planning a trip to Canberra in it, a long weekend of hilarity, and now they’d have to split up and travel there in two cars. That had been the plan, until Cheryl hired a replacement seven-seater she was not accustomed to driving.

  ‘Take it slow,’ Freddy warned. ‘Don’t take your eye off the roads.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me. You worry about Rolly. Don’t take your eyes off him this weekend,’ she’d warned.

  Blame teenage hormones, mixed with grog, weed and maybe worse, but that kid had gone to the dogs. Freddy watchdogged him. Cheryl phoned him. He hadn’t got away on Saturday. He’d made a break for freedom on Sunday afternoon but Freddy cut him off at the pass, and with his mother on the phone for back-up, he’d got him back to the house where he’d deadlocked the doors and put the keys in his pocket.

  Cheryl had enrolled him at the local high school, bought him the right uniform, and when school went back on the Monday, Freddy drove there, pleased with his son’s appearance and his pleasant manner. He liked the Ferrari.

  ‘Good luck,’ Freddy said when he’d dropped him off at the school gate.

  ‘You too,’ Rolland said. Then that shit of a kid took off running in his new school uniform, and Freddy had to go. He had a client depending on him.

  He phoned Cheryl. She phoned back during the lunch recess. She’d spoken to Rolly. He’d been nervous about fronting up at a new school and was currently out at Steve’s place, at Vermont.

  ‘He said he’ll see you at dinnertime,’ Cheryl said. ‘Take him out somewhere nice, Freddy.’

  Freddy ate a frozen dinner, lasagne, alone – or with his phone. Cheryl wasn’t answering, and nor was Steve’s mother, with whom he’d left three messages.

  Eight o’clock be
fore she called back. ‘Steve said that they’re meeting a couple of girls at Forest Hill then going to a movie,’ Steve’s mother said – and if she believed her son, she was a bigger fool than he’d previously believed her to be. It was all he had to go on though, and at eight thirty, Freddy left the Ferrari at risk in the top-level car park at Forest Hill. The theatres were on the top level.

  He had a look around there. No sign of Rolland or his ratbag mate. He looked at the list of films playing. There were a couple that a bunch of sixteen-year-old kids might consider cool. He walked out and glanced at Vegas, and his heart started its palpitating dance. Every time he thought about that night it started dancing.

  They had his DNA in their data bank. He’d sweated that night, he’d cried, puked, worn the skin off his hands in gouging a hole deep enough, long enough to bury that girl – and it hadn’t been deep enough. He only had to see a woman wearing yellow and his pulse lost its rhythm. And it hadn’t been his fault. He’d had a few drinks, but not enough to affect his driving. He hadn’t been speeding. She’d run out of nowhere, had run into him, and now his DNA was with that of his deadbeat brother in the national data bank’s computers – and he needed a drink so he bought one.

  Vegas had balcony tables which offered a view of who went in and who came out of the theatres. Freddy chose a seat that also allowed him to look down on the escalators where he’d see Rolland and his rat pack, either coming or going.

  He saw a group of Islander youths – and he had a flashback to his carjacking, or to the pair of carjackers he’d been called in to have a look at. He’d damn near identified the larger of the two. He’d had tattoos down one arm. Could have. Should have.

  Freddy sipped, his eyes turned to a television screen on the far wall. No sound coming from it. Nothing was allowed to disturb the song of the pokies.

  Couldn’t believe he’d done what he’d done but knew why he’d done it. He’d seen everything he’d worked his guts out to achieve disappearing into a sinkhole. It was disappearing anyway. Cheryl spent her life disappearing, as did her son. He’d done it for them – and for himself. He’d been the best and it had taken him a bloody long time to climb to the top of the pile.

  You can’t make silk purses out of a sow’s ear, his father used to say. Leave the lads alone and let them be lads.

  One way or another, his mother hadn’t done much of a job of raising sons. Bill had taken off at sixteen. Clarry might have taken off younger. John had hung around long enough to get an education. Joe had stuck it out for years. Bert hadn’t. He’d gone overseas and never returned. Gordon was up in New South Wales with a buggered back. He’d phoned Freddy a while ago wanting to sue someone but couldn’t afford to pay a solicitor.

  You’re my brother, for Christ’s sake, Freddy.

  His brother who hadn’t gone near him. Frederick Adam-Jones was a self-serving bastard.

  Should have identified that tattooed Islander and got him off the street. He’d threatened a young mother with a knife and would kill someone with it one day – and Frederick Adam-Jones would end up defending him – if the price was right.

  Who’ll defend you, Freddy?

  A group of three approached with their drinks. Freddy watched them sit at the table to his right.

  Had Ross Hunter put a tail on him? Did they know more than he thought they knew? He looked at his glass. They could get his DNA from that glass. They could get it off this table, from a hair fallen from his head, a skin cell.

  He’d turned that corner, seen that flash of yellow movement. Then THUMP, and he’d been blind. He’d killed her. He’d buried her, but he hadn’t gone back and dug her up, and that’s what was giving him palpitations, the knowing that whoever had dug her up and tied her into those garbage bags had taken Danni Lane. He had to tell someone.

  He knew who’d inherited that land, back in 2002. He could find out who she’d sold it to—

  He could, but he couldn’t. Chasing up property owners left a paper trail, or a computer trail and he couldn’t take the risk of it leading back to him, which one way or another it would.

  The voices of the trio to his right were loud. ‘The family need closure,’ one of them said.

  Closure, the word of the moment, and Freddy wanted some of it. He sipped, and as the whisky settled soft and warm in the swamp of his gut, he lifted his bad foot up to a vacant chair.

  He’d had trouble with his feet since his boyhood and his walk that night had done for the big toe on his left foot. It needed his podiatrist, but he couldn’t shed his nail clippings there. He needed to see his GP about the palpitations, but the last time he’d seen him he’d demanded blood tests for cholesterol, diabetes and Christ knew what, and no phial of Frederick Adam-Jones’s blood was getting out to the public arena.

  ‘They’ve got an interview on with the family of that Rowan girl next Sunday night,’ one of the trio said. ‘We saw a commercial for it and the mother looked fifty. Back when it happened I remember her being a good-looking bird.’

  ‘You’d age too if you went through something like that,’ a second replied.

  ‘How the fuck could a kid ever get over something like that? I mean, if they found young Danni alive now, she’d never be the same again.’

  Freddy eyed them, wondering if they were cops attempting not to sound like cops. They were succeeding – and two of them looked like brothers.

  Freddy looked like a couple of his brothers. At their mother’s funeral, Cheryl had walked straight up to Bill. She hadn’t picked John, who, like Freddy, had done what he could to disassociate himself from the family. John the Baptist, they’d called him. He’d done the funeral service. Freddy had paid for it.

  The trio at the next table was discussing Lady Cynthia Swan’s face, and if Cheryl had been at Freddy’s side, she might have joined in that conversation. She’d had her own words about Lady Cynthia the last time they’d seen her on the box. ‘Silly old bugger,’ she’d said. ‘She’d look better with wrinkles than with her mouth pinned up behind her ears.’

  At thirteen, Freddy had wanted that silly old bugger to be his mother. He was eighteen and driving his own car the day he tried to turn his mother into Lady Cynthia. He’d bought her a fancy outfit for her birthday and taken her to one of those photographic studios where a makeup artist turned clients into something they were not. Paid dearly for that session, but when he’d picked up those photographs he hadn’t resented the bill.

  He’d bought her a second outfit and paid another artist to work her magic before introducing her to Cheryl and her parents, at a restaurant. He’d introduced her to his son at a restaurant. She might have shown more interest had Rolland been a granddaughter. She might have been in the early stages of Alzheimer’s too.

  The trio’s conversation had turned to parolees, released early to murder or maim. ‘It costs the taxpayer hundreds of dollars a day to keep a crim in jail. That’s why they let them out,’ one said.

  ‘You can buy a couple of metres of rope for a few dollars. Bring back public hangings, I say. String the bastards up at the MCG and charge fifty bucks a head to watch the show. I can think of a few who’d draw a bigger crowd than the Boxing Day cricket.’

  ‘Good for tourism,’ one said, and they laughed, and their laughter was loud and Freddy flinched from it and sipped his whisky – and listed a few candidates likely to pull a crowd. Cheryl would pay a scalper’s price for a front-row seat to watch Michael Swan swing. The bastard who’d killed Lisa Simms would pull a crowd—

  His foot back on the floor, and Freddy stood staring at his empty glass, almost seeing his DNA crawling all over it.

  He did it fast, his bulk guarding his action – dropped the glass into his pocket and walked, one hand disguising the bulge.

  PADLOCKS

  Her bath was filling, but slowly. He’d turned on only the hot water tap. It wasn’t hot. The stove had been burning now for two hours and the water in the reservoir was barely lukewarm, but he could wait no longer. He’d fed her. O
nto her habit of leaving half of her meals, he’d doubled the dose of Valium. His week had been too bloody hard. He needed easy tonight. He was waiting now, counting down the minutes, giving those pills time to work.

  The refuse in the gully had been a warning he’d misread. The leaking stove, the artist and her dog moving in; all were warnings he hadn’t heeded.

  Too late now. He’d set the ball rolling and he had to roll with it.

  ‘You.’ That pointed finger. The disbelief. ‘You.’ She’d seen the photographs of the cars and the mock-up of him. ‘You.’

  He’d got rid of her. To date there’d been no repercussions and he wasn’t expecting any. He had to get finished out here, deliver the gazelle tonight, get rid of the Kingswood and be home by one thirty tomorrow for the funeral.

  The hurricane lantern shed little light to his kitchen, barely enough to allow him to see the hands of his watch. The kettle was boiling, and when his watch told him he’d waited long enough, he took the kettle up the passage to the bathroom and emptied it into the less than half-full tub. That hot tap was too slow. Everything was too slow tonight. He wanted it done.

  The kettle refilled, he pushed a lump of wood into the stove’s maw. His epoxy repair was the one thing that had gone right since he’d taken that little Yank; his repair and the rain. His water tank was full.

  Opened the pantry door then, guided the narrow beam of torchlight to her bowl. Empty? She’d been hungry tonight. All to the good. He swung the beam up to her face, hidden by her mat of hair. She didn’t move. He used the torch to prod her elbow, and not a flinch out of her – and with twenty milligrams of Valium in her, she wasn’t likely to flinch.

  Got the padlock off, looped its clasp over the top bar, eased the side down to the floor, then gently moved her out. A long lightweight, this one, and limp in his arms as he carried her into the bathroom, where he eased her slowly down to the water.