by Tony Black
‘You’re not aware of any secret payments to your department?’
‘God, no.’
‘What about threats to competitors from Fullerton?’
‘That’s bloody ridiculous.’
‘And you’d swear in court that you didn’t get any advantage from Fullerton landing the tender?’
All smarm was gone from Swanson’s voice. It sounded like he was now forcing civility; he raised a hand, levelled it at his breastbone. ‘I’d swear on a stack of Bibles this high.’
Clay shot his best just-doing-my-job smile – a wry, almost gummy grin he reserved for the easily pleased, or easily fooled. ‘Sorry to ask all that, Wayne, but you know I’ve got to.’
Swanson’s features softened once back in the familiar territory of flattery, albeit with beads of sweat at his temples. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. He slapped Clay playfully on the shoulder and turned to walk to the approaching car. ‘If you’re done breaking my balls, I’ll be off. This Rotary Club luncheon speech isn’t going to give itself. I might see you at the Warrny for a beer later.’
One of Swanson’s minders, quickly exiting the black government sedan, rushed to open the car door and Swanson dropped himself into the back seat. As the car pulled out, revving hard, the politician looked to be barking orders at the driver: Clay guessed he wanted the air-con on full.
‘Do you really go drinking with him?’ asked Bec.
‘Not if I can bloody well help it,’ said Clay.
Chapter 5
Autopsy done. See Gabby.
The text was from Senior Constable Eddie Boulton. Forcing thumbs onto too-small keys, Clay tried to reply on his antique Nokia:
Thanks mate. Make that two beers I owe you.
Clay was grateful for Eddie’s update, because Detective Frank Anderson could hardly be bothered to pick up his phone. Ten days had passed since the body washed up at the Bay of Martyrs and the story was in danger of becoming old news.
‘Watching you text is painful,’ said Bec.
‘How about you watch the road instead,’ said Clay.
They were on their way back to Warrnambool from Port Fairy, where the day’s story was a local woman celebrating her hundredth birthday. Tudor was torturing Clay, he knew it. The poor old dear had lost her marbles years ago, so there was nothing for a reporter to report.
‘Seriously, watching you text is like watching a monkey play that board game, Operation,’ said Bec. ‘Do you have that game here? You know, the one where you get zapped when you touch the sides while trying to remove a bone or kidney or something?’
‘Yes, we have that game here. The analogy isn’t wasted.’
‘Good. Because it’s a good analogy. Accurate.’
Clay smiled in spite of himself. Tudor might have been punishing him by sending him on increasingly inane jobs – a man who’d found an egg with three yolks in it had been the worst so far – but at least Bec was there to lighten the load.
‘We need to make a detour. Take me to a bakery, then take me to the cop shop,’ said Clay.
The town’s police prosecutors were housed in a separate building from the rest of the force. While all the other cops were in the new glass and chrome police station next to the equally flash new courthouse, the prosecutors were stuck in a badly renovated unit nearby. The heating system didn’t work, the cooling system didn’t exist, and the tiny building seemed like it was held together by huge grey filing cabinets, ageing desks, and an invisible will power.
Clay was about to chance his luck, he knew it, but buried his nerves as he knocked on the door. A speaker box near his head squawked to life, almost making him drop the box of fresh bakery biscuits he had under his arm. He could sense Bec watching him from the car and tried to regain his composure.
‘Yes?’ said a voice shrouded in lo-fi distortion.
Clay pushed the button marked ‘talk’ and moved his mouth closer to what he presumed was the microphone. ‘Ah, it’s Clayton Moloney. I’m here to see Gabby.’
There was a long silence and Clay’s fears rose up. What if she doesn’t want to see me? Did we end on bad terms? I can’t remember. I don’t think we ended on bad terms. Maybe she’s been told not to speak to me. Maybe Frank Anderson told her not to speak to me.
The door made a loud clicking sound and opened a fraction. Clay took a deep breath and pushed it open, stepping into a small entrance hall that was even warmer than the summer’s day outside.
The door swung closed behind him, clicking back into place. He stepped forward out of the atrium and into the main room of the apartment. At some point, the room must have been a lounge and a bedroom, but a wall had been removed and about twenty tonnes of paperwork and a few desks had been installed.
No one was sitting at any of the desks except for a young woman with a bob haircut that was dyed the colour of Merlot. She had small features to go with the bob, giving her a vaguely pixieish appearance when paired with her petite frame. A nose ring in her left nostril added to the exotic look.
‘Hey, Gabby.’
‘Clayton Moloney. What’s it been? A year?’
‘I would have said a couple of months, but then my memory never has been good.’
‘Right.’
‘I thought you moved away.’
‘No. You just stopped calling me.’
Clay winced. ‘I’m sorry… things have been busy.’
‘For a year?’
‘Umm. Yeah.’
Gabby let out a huge laugh that made Clay jump a little. ‘You’re a dag. I’m just messin’ with ya. I’m not gonna break your balls.’
‘You’re not?’
‘No! Why should I? We had some fun, we moved on. Whatevs.’
Clay repressed a sigh of relief, while simultaneously cringing at the trendy mangling of the word ‘whatever’. It served as a reminder of one of the reasons why he’d stopped seeing Gabby Petrie – the age difference of twelve years had become increasingly evident and gone from being a cute and playful thing to a general annoyance.
But he still liked Gabby. She was fun, a free-spirited young woman, and he was glad she didn’t hate him, if only because he wanted something from her.
‘I brought you a present.’ Clay placed the box of biscuits on her desk.
‘Ooh!’ she squealed. ‘Chocolate chip cookies. You remembered they’re my favourite.’
She called them cookies, Clay thought. Aussies called them biscuits. Damn Americanisms. That was almost as bad as ‘whatevs’.
Gabby’s face took on an expression of playful suspicion. ‘Wait a minute. What do you want? I don’t just roll over for chocolate chip cookies. That at least costs cookies, a cake, some dinner, and probably a bottle of wine.’ She laughed that huge laugh again, although this time Clay didn’t jump.
‘Ha, sorry, Gabby, no, I’m after a report. A certain preliminary autopsy report.’
‘An autopsy report? Well, this is serious. I’m afraid that’s going to cost you a lot more than a box of cookies.’
Clay suppressed a laugh, but wondered what he was getting himself into.
Bec had all the windows down on the Subaru; one arm on the ledge soaking the sun, fingers tapping to Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues. The sound of the passenger door startled her.
‘Well, that went well,’ said Clay. He expanded on the escapade.
‘You swapped some biscuits for an autopsy report?’ said Bec.
‘And dinner. I have to take the prosecutor’s assistant out to dinner.’
Bec laughed deep. It was a whole-hearted laugh, a foreign laugh that Clay had never heard before. It was a laugh that seemed out of place in the ’Bool that had become so ordinary to him.
‘You whore,’ she said between gulps.
‘It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.’
Clay’s plan was to duck out of the office at lunchtime and read the autopsy report at the café beneath his apartment, but Bec insisted she tag along, so he directed her to Cannon Hill. He wasn’t r
eally sure why he’d picked that spot. At night, it was the make-out point, but by day it had the best view in town, sweeping out across the winding channels of Lake Pertobe, rows of Norfolk pines, and the cool blue waters of Lady Bay.
‘What a view,’ said Bec.
‘As good a place as any for sandwiches and some not-so-light reading, I thought.’
Clay opened up Gabby’s photocopy of the report; it was three pages long.
‘Bit brief…’ he said.
‘You did say it was only a preliminary report, but three pages does seem a bit short. Anyway, hurry up, give me the pages as you read.’
Clay passed each page on to Bec when he’d finished it. After reading the whole report, both sat in silence. The view seemed to have lost some of its appeal to Clay.
‘There’s something not right about all that,’ he said.
‘I agree.’
A full minute passed.
‘Give me another look,’ said Clay.
Bec handed the pages back to him and he slowly went through the report again, line by line.
‘Warrnambool girl, Kerry Collins,’ he read. ‘Eighteen years old. Death by drowning. Victim appears to have been in the water for approximately seven days.’
‘The toxicology screens are clean, no drugs or alcohol, although it notes that alcohol would have passed from her system in seven days,’ said Bec.
‘You get the loss of limbs, believed to be a result of shark attack, occurred posthumously.’
‘Yeah, I saw that.’
‘But some bruises on her forearm and a wound to the back of the head appear to have occurred prior to death. Head wound possibly caused concussion, likely followed by death by drowning.’
‘So she hits her head and drowns,’ said Bec.
‘On what? Some passing driftwood? And what are the bruises on her arm?’
‘OK, she hits her arm and her head. What am I missing here?’
Clay looked up from the report and out across the bay. ‘Probably nothing. It’s probably a simple, straightforward accident. The cops will ask a few questions of friends and family and the coroner will issue a nice and easy finding. Accidental drowning. Probably fell off a boat. Whacked her head on the way down. Drowned. Shark bait. The end.’
Bec looked at Clay. Could she hear his brain ticking over? It wasn’t the end, nothing like it.
‘But… I’m hearing a but,’ said Bec.
‘But how did she end up in the water?’ said Clay.
‘You said a boat.’
‘Was she on the boat by herself?’
‘I guess so.’
‘I don’t know many eighteen-year-old girls who go sailing by themselves. And if they did, they would be the safety-conscious competitive boating types. Life jackets, that sort of thing. But, more importantly, she would have told someone she was going out sailing.’
‘And let me guess – in the week prior to Kerry Collins washing up, no missing sailors were reported?’
‘Spot on. A sea rescue is a big deal around here. People come running from all around – the water police, the regular police, the rescue chopper, marine rescue, state emergency service. You name it, they’re there. We haven’t had one of those for a long time. And by my calculation she went missing between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. That’s the paper’s quietest time of the year, because just about everything’s closed. A girl in a boat reported missing at sea would have been front page news.’
‘So she wasn’t on a boat by herself. Maybe she was swimming by herself.’
‘Possible. We can’t rule that out. But then what did she hit her head and arms on?’
‘Rocks?’
‘Maybe. But what if she wasn’t alone? Maybe she was swimming in a group. Or on a boat with other people.’
‘There still would have been a search.’
‘Right. So, we know there wasn’t a search – we would have heard about it at the paper – so that means someone perhaps didn’t want a search.’
‘Surely someone would have notified the authorities she was missing.’
‘If they did, I’d like to know when that call went through. It could tell us a lot. Because I’m seeing a few possibilities here.’
Bec looked into Clay again. He knew she was reading him.
‘You’re pretty worked up about this, Mr Reporter…’
‘If I am, I’m the only one.’
‘That doesn’t sound right.’
‘It’s not bloody right… pretty far from it.’
Bec folded over the report, handed it back. ‘I meant, you’re not the only one who’s worked up about this.’
Chapter 6
Clay hated the death knock. Even when Tudor ladled on the false flattery, telling him he was good at them, Clay always felt the unwholesome flutter of guilt that came from poking your nose into the privacy of grief.
He preferred the old-fashioned approach of visiting the home, rather than hiding down the phone line. It felt more sincere, more human. And if it meant burning a whole afternoon with a poor old dear who wanted to talk about losing the love of her life, so be it. He had precious few opportunities, beyond tipping waitresses and wearing a poppy, to feel good about his actions these days.
‘You set?’ he said.
Bec raised her camera case, nodded. ‘As I’ll ever be.’
‘You’ve not done too many of these, have you?’
A frown. ‘Not on the job. But I’m Irish. This sort of thing’s a national pastime.’
Clay knocked on the frosted glass. He’d doorstepped plenty of relatives of the recently deceased, but could never say he’d got used to it. No two were the same. You never knew whether you were turning up to tears and hearts turned to mush or walking in on a wake – which he’d managed once, taking a drink and pretending to be an old friend of the departed.
‘We can’t compare down here, then?’ said Clay.
‘How could you, with all this sunshine? We have the Holy Trinity of grey skies, Arthur Guinness, and “Danny Boy”.’
‘Sounds like a barrel of laughs.’
‘Trust me, I know, there is nothing like an Irish funeral.’
‘Something you want to talk about?’ He’d made the remark flippantly, but Bec’s expression said it hadn’t been taken that way. ‘Sorry, did I touch a nerve?’
Bec narrowed her gaze. ‘I think we’ll leave it there for now.’
Clay brushed down his shirtfront as he spied movement in the house. Usually, by the time he arrived, the family members were resigned to the deceased’s passing. A quiet acceptance kept what he’d seen of the grieving measured and thoughtful. The departed were always missed, but it was their time; hopefully they’d had a good run; hopefully they were somewhere better. As Brian Collins opened the door Clay knew he was dealing with a different situation entirely.
‘Thank you for coming,’ said Brian, once Clay had introduced himself and Bec. Kerry’s father’s gaze was unfocused, wandering the room, whilst his hands seemed to be searching for something to touch. He acted as though he had invited Clay and Bec to his home, not like they’d just shown up unannounced, looking for a scoop.
Clay saw Brian’s grief was wild and unhinged. This was a new kind of loss – the Collins family’s hurt was raw and tangible, hanging in the air like a pall. The house was unnaturally silent, and here and there were the traces of a family out of its usual routine – unopened mail, dirty dishes, limping houseplants.
‘Through this way, please.’ Brian led them into the lounge room. It reminded Clay of his parents’ house back in the early Nineties: lots of polished pine, decorative plates, and softly-coloured walls co-ordinated with the drapes. Framed photos everywhere, pictures of Brian, his wife, two boys, and a girl who appeared to be the youngest member of the clan had to be Kerry. She had an infectious teenage smile that told Clay she was likeable, the girl next door, taken too soon; he looked away quickly.
‘We’re sorry for the intrusion,’ said Clay. ‘I realise the funeral was onl
y yesterday, but we thought you might like to tell us a little about Kerry so we can share her story, particularly for those who couldn’t make it to the funeral.’
The funeral had been hastily arranged. It had taken place the same day Clay and Bec had read the autopsy report. The Collins family had been told about Kerry’s death only two days earlier, just as the body of their only daughter was arriving back in town following the post-mortem in Melbourne. The Collins wasted no time in sending off Kerry, who had already been missing for more than two weeks.
‘Yes… Yes, I’d like that,’ said Brian, in a clear, gentle voice. He trailed a hand through his dark, thinning hair. ‘We have family up in Queensland who couldn’t get down in time. They’d like to read about Kerry. I have a copy of the eulogy here somewhere you can have. It might be useful. She was such a bright kid.’
Brian walked into an adjoining room, returning soon after with a folded square of paper, which he handed to Clay. As he read, the room’s heavy silence was interrupted by a clock on the mantelpiece; it seemed to take an age between each tick.
The eulogy was the usual – it would make Clay’s job of writing up a tribute piece all the easier. Kerry was adored by her family and everyone who knew her. She was kind and generous. She was funny and caring. And like all those who die young, she was filled with a potential that would remain forever untapped.
Brian wrapped his hands together, looked at Clay as he read, then rubbed the back of his neck. It was as though he would never sit still again. ‘She was working as a waitress,’ he said. ‘Kerry always had a good work ethic. She used to work at the ice cream shop here in Port Fairy on weekends and on school holidays, and then she started waitressing.’
‘Where was she working?’ said Clay.
‘She worked at a few places. Fishtails Café some days, Proudfoots Restaurant at night, and she did some function work on the side. I think she was heading out to waitress on the last night anyone saw her. It was just after Christmas.’
‘Do you know where?’ Clay was straying from the newspaper tribute now, fishing.
‘No, I don’t. Sorry. The police asked me that, too.’
