Linda clearly knew the drill. She opened the sliding glass door to the balcony, waved Charlie through, then shut the door behind him to provide privacy.
“What the hell are you and John Small playing at, Charlie?” No preamble, no conventional exchange of greetings – just straight for the jugular.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean, Sir,” Charlie replied, brain wide awake now and whirling as he tried to figure out how he and the cowboy constable could be linked in anything at all.
“You don’t know?” The voice was scathing, bitter. “Then let me refresh your memory, Sergeant. Did you not insist that Small arrange to have some fingerprints sent to the forensics lab in Hobart? Fingerprints from a knife that was found in some bloody cave or another? Not from any crime scene. Not from anything that involved a crime or even looked like a crime scene. And did you not also personally request a hurry-up from Hobart on the identification of those prints?”
Bugger-bugger! But why such a bloody great flap about it?
“I didn’t actually ask for a hurry-up, Sir. I merely asked to be kept in the loop,” Charlie replied. “It . . . sort of involves this woman who’s apparently been abducted. Or at least I thought it might, Sir. Seemed proper strange that the knife would be found right where she was on a caving trip, and then have her abducted . . . apparently abducted . . . only a few hours later.”
“By a dead man?” Who couldn’t have been deader, flatter, more obviously road kill than the voice that uttered those four words. And Charlie’s career with it, perhaps. A funereal tone, the tone that in police circles almost inevitably preceded a demotion, if not worse.
Charlie cringed, inwardly, but tried to keep that out of his voice. “Dead, Sir? I don’t think I understand.”
“Well I do, Sergeant. I understand that the fingerprint technician in Hobart is right royally pissed off as a result of you and that cowboy Small playing silly buggers – sending her a dead man’s fingerprints to examine. As if they aren’t busy enough in the forensics lab. As if the woman doesn’t have enough to do – except raise a ruckus that went right to the upper echelons of the department, Sergeant. And you know what that means, don’t you?”
Indeed Charlie did. It meant his superior was even more royally pissed than the fingerprint techie, having been shat upon from dizzying heights – hence this unloading of the cumulative shit storm at he and Constable John Small. But why?
“I want an apology to the technician in Hobart. Personally, first thing tomorrow morning. By telephone . . . none of this email shit. In person would be even better, but I do recognize the time factors involved in that. And I want a written report on the whole matter. In detail! Is that clear?”
“Yes Sir, except that—”
“Except nothing! So far all I can see is that our entire department’s been suckered into some sort of bizarre publicity stunt and you and John Small are playing games. Alleged abductions are one thing, Sergeant, but fingerprints from a dead man are something else again.”
“But—”
“Just do it!”
The phone went silent and Charlie was left no wiser than before. He snapped his phone closed, returned inside, and sat down again at the table, where he was able to stare at the plate in front of him, but couldn’t remember for the life of him whether he – or Linda – was expected to carve the cooling crown roast of pork that graced the center of the dining room table.
“Bad?” Linda’s voice was soft, unobtrusive. Her demeanor showed no impatience, merely a knowledgeable and genuine concern. She’d been married to a cop, knew how suddenly things could come up to change one’s plans.
“I don’t know,” Charlie replied. “It makes no sense at all. Am I supposed to carve this roast?”
Her smile warmed up the room. “Are you safe with a carving knife when you’re this distracted? I gather whatever’s up doesn’t mean you have to dash off without eating. That’s a bonus.”
“I don’t know what it means,” he said, repeating himself, speaking to himself as much as answering her question. “Okay . . . I’ll carve.”
He picked up the carving utensils, reached out to draw the platter over to his side of the table, then nearly dropped it when his cell phone chirped again. Louder, this time . . . the dreaded sparrow now poised to dump another, bigger, load. Or maybe that was only his imagination.
“Now,” he said, nodding sagely at Linda as if about to impart some great wisdom, something truly profound. He managed to get the platter safely down again, then handed Linda the carving utensils. “Now it will be bad.”
It was Constable John Small’s petulant, whiny voice, which was bad enough.
Then it got worse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“What’s going on with your little mate Kendall?” Small asked, but didn’t wait for a reply before whining on, his voice screeching in Charlie’s ear like fingernails on a blackboard.
Linda half-rose, one arm waving toward the balcony door, but Charlie waved aside the gesture with a grimace he intended to have been a smile. He planted himself firmly in his chair and stared at the abandoned, cooling pork roast while Small’s voice whined in his ear.
“I tried to warn you it was all some sort of publicity stunt. Well now we’ve got the proof, I reckon. Fingerprints from a dead man? Jeeesus! We’re in the shit over this one, Charlie. They’re talking about sending me to Burnie, for God’s sake. Burnie! Nothing but endless domestics and mind-numbing paperwork guaranteed to turn your brains to tapioca, Charlie . . . you know that. And once you’re there, they never let you go. There’s fifty guys ahead of you on the transfer list, and you’d have to kill them to get out.”
“Settle, damn it. The way you’re rabbiting on, I think your brain’s already tapioca.” Time enough later to commiserate. Charlie did, indeed, understand John Small’s concerns. Small was a country copper – having been posted to Launceston must have been tough on him. But Burnie? Charlie had known good, experienced career cops to go white and trembling just at the thought of being transferred to the Burnie city watch. From a policing point of view, the small city on Tasmania’s northern coast was boredom personified. And once there . . .
Charlie shuddered, forced the thought from his mind. Small’s whine droned on in complaint until Charlie once again called for calm, reason, answers!
“I’ve just had my rocket from the brass too,” he said. “Which told me precisely two-thirds of five-eighths of sweet fuck all. Typical, but I expect better from you, John. What’s the story on these damned fingerprints and why is everybody so stirred up about them?”
“They didn’t tell you?”
Charlie could only sigh heavily, grit his teeth and throw a helpless glance across the table at Linda, who was unashamedly eavesdropping. Maybe she could make some sense out of this, Charlie thought.
“All I got was some blather about the prints belonging to some bloke who’s dead,” he said, keeping his voice level, hiding his frustration, fighting to keep his temper.
“Not just some bloke.” John Small’s voice rose a full octave as he added in a heaping tablespoon of smugness, or so Charlie imagined. “That Stafford bloke – the Specialist in your mate Kendall’s book? That’s whose fingerprints they were.”
Kendall’s book – and Charlie’s storehouse of nightmares. Charlie’s mind flashed to the abandoned mineshaft on Blue Tier, the charnel house where Stafford had disposed of the pieces of his dismembered victims.
“But he’s dead!” The words emerged before Charlie realized that he’d just voiced the crux of the problem. Talk about stating the obvious! The fingerprints on a knife found only days before were those of a man who’d been dead for more than a year.
“Dead or not, it was his prints on the knife that Mole Creek mob said they found. The prints you insisted I send in for testing. Somebody’s playing silly buggers, Charlie. And if I catch up with them, they’ll wish they hadn’t. That mob from Mole Creek are mixed up in this somehow, but I’m damned if I can figure
out how. I’d have sworn they were fair-dinkum about their part of it. Bloody oath, Charlie – Burnie? It’s bad enough being posted to the Launceston watch, for God’s sake.”
“Put Kendall on the phone.” Charlie wanted to reach through cyberspace and throttle away Small’s whine.
“Can’t. He’s gone. While I was in getting fitted for a new asshole, your little mate did a runner on us, Charlie. Not surprising, now that we know this whole thing’s some sort of publicity stunt.”
“What do you mean he did a runner? And how do you know? Maybe he got a ransom demand of some kind. Maybe . . .” Charlie’s mind whirled, trying to make sense of it all. He stared fixedly at the pork roast in front of him, trying to focus. But all he saw was the rotted remains that had emerged from Stafford’s grotesque disposal bin, and he floundered up from the table, choking back sickness.
“He’s scarpered, Charlie. I’ve already talked to the desk, and he left not five minutes after I was called away.” Charlie heard the words as he rushed out through the balcony doors.
“Wait!” Charlie gasped, leaned over the balcony rail, then found he had nothing to be sick with, save for the one glass of wine he’d consumed. He gulped, swallowed a few times, then – thankfully – found his equilibrium returning. Still, he gripped the balcony rail tightly with one hand as he continued the discussion.
“He left? But he was supposed to be waiting for a ransom demand. Did you find out if he left alone, or—?”
“Way ahead of you. I asked at the desk, then I double-checked on the security tapes. He left with some woman. And it wasn’t under duress, either, he was twice her size and she was practically running to keep up with him, in some shots.”
“And you’re sure it wasn’t Kirsten?”
“Short, with long dark hair, about the same age as Kendall’s bird, but definitely not her. Really good-looking Sheila, though . . . great figure, built like a brick shithouse. They drove off in what must have been her vehicle, a white or light-colored SUV. Honda, I think.”
Rose! I’d bet my soul on it. But why?
“They’ll be pulling you off this, then, I expect,” Charlie said. “But if they don’t, nose around and see what else you can find out. This is no publicity stunt – I’d stake my career on that. There’s something totally amiss, John, and I fear it’ll be serious.”
“Okay. And you promise you’ll speak up for me, Charlie? I mean . . . Burnie? Jeeeezuz!”
“The way this is shaping up, you mightn’t be there alone if it all falls apart in a screaming heap, but yes, I’ll speak up for you. For both of us, I reckon.”
Charlie hung up, then returned inside and sat down again, unspeakably grateful to find that Linda had carved the roast herself, and the neat slices were tidily interspersed with potatoes, green beans and baked carrots. Just normal food, arranged to titillate his taste buds, not torment his imagination. He sighed.
“I’m sorry about . . . that,” he said. “I just . . .” There were no words to describe what he’d felt, or at least none that belonged at the dinner table. All he could do as he stared across the table at his hostess was to try and look properly abashed.
“It isn’t a problem, Charlie,” said Linda. “Now please, try to get some of this tucker inside you, where it belongs.” She paused, gathered succulent pork and bits of potato onto her fork, forcing Charlie to follow suit. One forkful followed another as she guided him through the dining process in a delicate, unobtrusive but deliberate dance.
Charlie felt about ten years old, being instructed by Mum to eat all his veggies or forfeit dessert. Only this experience, for some reason, felt . . . more comfortable. So much so, that he opened up while enjoying his lemon meringue pie dessert and explained to Linda why the whole issue of Kirsten’s abduction had his mind in such a twist.
“And now this fingerprint thing! Bloody oath, Linda – think on it. If this abduction thing is some sort of prank or publicity stunt – and I damned well don’t think it is; Teague’s not the sort to play silly buggers like that – then how the hell could anyone manage that fingerprint trick? It’s beyond me.”
“Maybe it isn’t a trick. Did that occur to you?”
“Well, it has to be some sort of scam. The bugger’s been dead for more than a year.”
Charlie’s lovely hostess thought for a moment, then strode over to a bookcase, where she consulted a well-thumbed copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. After a minute, she returned and placed the tome open in front of Charlie, one lacquered fingernail guiding his eyes to the quote she obviously wanted him to read.
Charlie would have preferred to concentrate on the exotic scent of her, the quickening stir he felt from her leaning over his shoulder. Then he looked at the quote, more than a century old and originating halfway around the world, and something pinged in his subconscious. It pinged and pinged and kept right on pinging as Linda put the research book back on the shelf and returned to her place across the table from Charlie.
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Sign of Four. 1890.”
“It’s impossible, never mind improbable,” he sighed. “It can’t be possible.”
Linda raised an eyebrow, but said nothing for a moment. And when she did speak, it was to change the subject entirely. “I’ve been meaning to mention this, Charlie,” she said, and her tone might have sounded ominous but for a lightness, a sort of buoyant tone Charlie couldn’t identify.
“It’s about Alan,” she said. “I know the role you played in getting him caught, Charlie. I’ve known it right from the start. And I didn’t hold it against you then or now. He was a bent copper and he needed catching!”
Charlie was struck dumb, unsure whether he should reply, even less sure what he should say if he did. So she’d known all along, which meant he’d been worrying about nothing for months. Or . . . ? Thankfully, Linda didn’t keep him in too much suspense about that.
“You’ve been so careful to avoid mentioning him, Charlie,” she said with a slight grin. “It wasn’t hard to figure out what was bothering you. I also know, just so that you know I do, what he said to you when you . . . when you nailed him.”
“The bastard accused me of—”
“I said I know, Charlie. It’s over . . . let it lie.” Then she smiled, and it was the usual warm, genuine smile Charlie had always associated with Linda. “Besides, it’s sort of . . . nice to think you’ve been lusting after me all these years.” She said it in a voice that was velvet soft, then her grin dissolved into helpless laughter at the look on Charlie’s face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Charlie tried his best to stave off having to phone Hobart on Tuesday morning and apologize about the fingerprint issue, but it niggled at him. Worse, it kept him from concentrating on the other things that niggled even more. Such as Kirsten’s disappearance and now Kendall’s. Like how such a thing with the fingerprints could have been accomplished. Where had the fingerprints on the knife come from . . . and how? Important things . . . maybe, although he couldn’t quite make enough sense of them all to actually know why.
But he hated the notion of apologizing. It hadn’t been him who’d sent the prints through the system, hadn’t even been him who’d suggested it. Or had it? Now he wasn’t sure. Therefore, he was suitably grateful for the reprieve provided when old Viv Purcell dropped by to have a yarn. If nothing else, it gave him an excuse to put off the call for another few minutes.
Viv, atypically, was direct and to the point, marching into Charlie’s office with a mental list of what he wanted and foregoing his normal habit of beating around the bush for half an hour before getting to some obscure point or another by such a roundabout track that the point got lost in the process.
“Give us your cell phone number,” he said as he approached the front counter, his disreputable dog trailing at his heels and already – in Charlie’s mind – looking around with his evil yellow eyes for some pl
ace to sprinkle.
Charlie was about to ask why Viv wanted the number, had his mouth half opened, in fact, when the old man whipped out a shiny new cell phone of his own and stood there, poised like a grotesque caricature of a garden gnome playing stenographer, not looking at Charlie but clearly prepared to key in the number when it was given him.
“My God, Viv . . . you’ve got a cell phone?” Charlie couldn’t resist the jibe. In his mind, the old reprobate was the antithesis of the modern world, a throwback to a slower, totally different era in Tasmania’s often turbulent history. To Charlie, Viv belonged in the nineteenth century, not the current one; he was a character straight out of a Banjo Patterson poem about drovers and ne’er-do-wells and cattle-duffers and sheep thieves.
“And why not? I’m not getting any younger, you know. Might need it for an emergency or some such.”
“Fair enough.” Charlie recited the number, watched as the grizzled old bushie punched it in with surprisingly agile fingers. “What’s next,” Charlie asked then. “I suppose you’ll be getting a computer, too, so you can surf the Net? And maybe a fax machine?”
Both ridiculous suggestions, on the face of it. Old Viv – unless something had been changed and he hadn’t bothered to tell Charlie – was still camping in an abandoned shepherd’s hut on “Misery” bush run, in at the foot of Blue Tier on the extreme edge of a huge sheep station. With no electricity available for miles and no proper tenancy agreement that would have allowed him get the power in if he’d been able to afford it.
Viv had been living there when his dog Bluey had found the bones that started off the hunt for Dr. Ralph Stafford, the Specialist of Teague Kendall’s book, and Bluey, referred to by Charlie as that damned dog, had been instrumental in finding the abandoned mine shaft where Stafford had been dumping his victims’ body parts and gear.
The old man had made the most of his moment of glory, but Charlie doubted even that would have convinced the landowner to bring in the power for a squatter he’d be at loggerheads with over some damned thing or another every other month. Much as Charlie liked old Viv, he considered him famous for his temperament – Viv was cantankerous all the time.
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