Prime Cut

by Alan Carter

  Cato watched a magpie swoop a morning walker as he patiently listened to Hutchens rant. The bugger was that, already, there had been journo inquiries to Police Media in Perth. Crime or no crime, sharks were big enough news. Head office wanted it played down until they knew more about what they were dealing with. So far the media were being fobbed off with what appeared to be a ‘drowning’ and the probability that the so-called ‘shark attack’ was most likely post-mortem curiosity. In the meantime Hutchens had to be seen to be doing something just in case a grieving relative popped out of the woodwork. And now the pathologist was suggesting foul play. Hutchens punctuated his monologue with another expletive.

  One of his detective sergeants was due back on duty on Monday from a family holiday in New Zealand but had phoned in saying he’d slipped on a glacier and snapped his ankle.

  ‘A fucking glacier. Prick.’

  The next one due back was a week later and she’d cleverly kept her phone turned off while she no doubt partied hard in Bali. Everybody else was too fucking busy. There was a stagnant, ill-tempered pause. Cato wanted a crack at this so he let the silence hang. And hang. And was rewarded with an exasperated grunt.

  ‘I hope I’m not going to regret this. Reckon you and Buckley can hold the fort for a week or so?’

  Cato made sure nobody was looking, punched the air and grinned. Hutchens sucked in a breath as if he’d seen the gesture down the phone.

  ‘Just look and act like real detectives but don’t actually try to find anything out. We don’t need it. Just walk the walk, okay? Then, a week Monday, walk away. I’ll have someone else down there by then.’

  ‘Won’t let you down, boss.’

  ‘Too right you won’t.’ Hutchens cleared his throat. ‘In effect you run it, Cato. Work out whatever you need to with Buckley to keep him sweet. Any journos come sniffing, send them my way or just tell them to fuck off. Mate, keep your nose clean on this. Don’t stuff up and I’ll owe you one. I might even bring you back in from the cold.’

  Cato didn’t intend to hold his breath on that.

  Hutchens made some scratching and rustling noises. ‘Give me the number of that boss of yours. What’s his name again?’

  ‘Saunders. Brett Saunders.’

  ‘Oh yeah, “Colonel” Saunders, Sheep-Shagging Squad. I hope he can spare two hotshots like you and Buckley.’

  So did Cato.

  Cato went back inside to get some breakfast. Miraculously two rooms had been free at the Fitzgerald River Motel, directly over the road from the police shipping container, now a de facto ‘Murder HQ’. It was a miracle because everywhere, including the caravan park, had been full for the last two years. Life in a mining boomtown, apparently. Yet to Cato this place still seemed tiny, quiet and unspoilt. Mining boom to him conjured up the vivid red earth of the Pilbara and mile-long trains. If this was a boom then – first impressions anyway – it seemed to be a muted one.

  The two rooms had become available because, according to Pam the bustling receptionist who seemed to know everything and didn’t mind sharing it, the previous long-term resident, a middlelevel accountant at the mine, had just been sacked for downloading extreme porn. Pam’s lips pursed disapprovingly at that one. The second room had just come back into service after being trashed the previous month by a party of contractors ‘celebrating’ the end of their tour of duty. Either way it was a big relief to Cato. The idea of bunking in with Jim Buckley for the next week didn’t appeal. Pam’s eyes had widened when they presented their police ID and gave Albany CIB as the billing address.

  ‘That’ll be the body on the beach. They reckon he’d been involved in drugs.’

  ‘That right?’ said Cato.

  ‘Oh yes, since that mine opened the dealers have been targeting this place. Eastern States cartels out to make a killing. You mark my words.’ Pam gave a what’s-the-world-coming-to shake of the head and disappeared out back.

  Buckley was freshly showered and shaved and finishing off a big fry-up. Cato joined him at the cramped table overlooking Veal Street and Murder HQ. Buckley glanced up from the remnants of brekkie and mopped up some egg yolk with a corner of toast.

  ‘What did your mate Hutchens say then?’

  Cato thought he detected a note of resentment there. He savoured it for a second but almost immediately felt guilty. Maybe his soon-to-be ex-wife was right, he did have a mean streak and a chip on his shoulder. He tried to shake it off and stay bright and positive.

  ‘We’re on the case, temporarily seconded to Albany Detectives; they’re over-stretched. We’ve got just over a week before Hutchens sends one of his regulars over to run things.’

  Buckley didn’t seem that excited, even less so when Cato told him just who Hutchens wanted in charge. Cato sweetened it so that it sounded like Buckley would maintain a ‘managerial overview and inter-agency liaison role’.

  All bullshit and they both knew it.

  Buckley squinted out through the lace curtains. ‘Go get ’em, Jackie Chan.’

  Something was burning. There were blood spots in the sink. Stuart Miller muttered his third ‘fucking hell’ of the day, chucked the disposable Bic into the scummy water and rushed through to the kitchen to rescue his toast. The timer on the microwave read 8.20. Days when he woke up after The Dream were usually like this: accident-prone, out of sorts, pissed off. He hadn’t had The Dream for months: just as well, too many mornings like this and he’d have topped himself by now. He tried scraping some of the black stuff off the toast. He didn’t actually mind the taste that much but Jenny kept warning him he’d get cancer if he ate it. He gave up, binned it and slotted two more in the toaster.

  Miller switched on the radio. Somebody was wittering on about the cost and quality of a cappuccino in Perth versus Fremantle. He usually preferred the ABC talk over the ads and crap music on the other stations but lately the chat seemed to get more and more trivial and giggly. Alien. Sometimes when he woke up from The Dream he felt as if he’d just landed like those poor wretched asylum-seekers in the leaky boats up north: desperate, unable to fully understand what was going on, isolated, not knowing what the day would bring. He went back to the bathroom and peeled his daily pills off their foil – blood pressure, cholesterol, blood thinner, beta blocker – chucked them down without the water and got back to shaving. Why shave? He no longer had a job to go to, no longer had appearances to keep up. Jenny had left him a list of things he might do to occupy his dotage, provide him with a meaningful and active retirement. The backyard needed weeding, a few things to be got from the shop, he could walk or cycle into town and back, and there was always retirees tennis for fun, fitness and friendship.

  ‘Fucking hell.’

  That was the fourth for the day.

  Everyone was gathered at Murder HQ for the first official squad meeting on Operation Flipper. Cato had passed on the news from DI Hutchens and noted a raised eyebrow and half-smirk from Tess when he explained the operational arrangements and line of day-to-day command. He kept to himself the bit about Hutchens wanting them to just go through the motions and not actually achieve anything. He had a point to prove, if only to himself, that he could be a good cop. Just once more. He’d called Jane to let her know something had come up at work and that he wouldn’t be able to have Jake this weekend. Jane sounded particularly bright and carefree. Cato got the message: she was already moving on.

  He outlined, for Greg Fisher’s benefit, the essence of the pathology findings so far. The body would be on its way to Perth in a cold box on the next flight out from the recently expanded airstrip at Ravensthorpe. In the absence of proper freight facilities the torso was in a sealed body bag, in an old chest fridge supplied by the Ravy butcher. In Perth it would undergo further examination and tests. Cato was well aware that the flight from Ravy to the Perth PathLab would be the only fast-moving thing about the investigation. This wasn’t a high priority – an unidentified person who nobody seemed to be making any noise about. Meanwhile, in and around Perth, there
were at least four murders, a handful of rapes and half a dozen violent home invasions ahead in the forensics queue. He pointed this out to the faces in front of him and told them not to hold their breath. Jim Buckley smiled benevolently and promised he wouldn’t. Cato felt the need to explain himself.

  ‘This might just seem like a lump of rotting meat to some people...’ – as expected, Buckley held his gaze; he wasn’t the backing-down type – ‘but he is somebody’s son, or brother, or even father. And I’d like to think that, if he belonged to me, somebody would do their job and find out what happened to him.’

  Buckley winked and mimed applause. Cato, point made, signalled it was time to move on.

  Young Greg Fisher was like a puppy, almost widdling himself with excitement. His first murder, Cato surmised. Greg reported on the two jobs he’d been following up yesterday. There were three missing-person reports within the Great Southern and South-East Coastal districts over the last two weeks. None of them matched. The first, a thirteen year old girl from Albany, had returned home the next day having proved some point to her parents. Tess grimaced at that one. The second, a thirty-six year old farm labourer from nearby Jerdacuttup, had looked promising but he had been located by Kalgoorlie police three days later when they arrested him for disturbing the peace in a Hay Street knocking shop. He reckoned he hadn’t got his money’s worth. Finally, a seventy-three year old woman with Alzheimer’s had gone walkabout the previous Saturday and been found the next morning under Esperance jetty, sleeping dangerously close to Sammy the Sea Lion.

  ‘So we’re no closer to finding out who Flipper is,’ concluded Greg.

  Tess looked daggers at him. ‘Don’t forget to pop over to the town hall and pick up those room dividers when we finish here, okay Greg?’

  Cato pushed on.

  ‘Let’s widen the trawl through the mispers. Get the whole state, no time limit. Meanwhile what about the tides and weather, anything there?’

  Greg was looking pleased with himself. ‘The prevailing conditions around here are south-westerlies. Anything dropped in the ocean would tend to travel eastwards. But for the last four days it’s been easterlies. As the body ended up that side of the groyne we can assume it was dropped in somewhere east of here in the last few days. The Sea Rescue guys have a chart on the wall over there.’

  They all got up and gathered around it. Greg continued, rapt at being the centre of attention.

  ‘It was mainly strong easterlies in the late mornings up to midarvo and then it moved around to the south and west by late arvo and evening. Dropping right off to practically nothing overnight. Averaging fifteen to twenty knots at the height.’

  All of which meant very little to Cato. ‘Where do you think the body went into the water?’

  ‘After talking with Sea Rescue I’d say anywhere between Mason Bay and Starvation Bay.’ Fisher pointed to dots on the map. ‘Starvo’s about forty kilometres from here, Mason’s maybe halfway? There’s a boat ramp at Starvo and easy beach access at Mason but my bet is Starvo.’

  He looked over to Tess for approval. She nodded agreement. Cato was duly impressed. Not being a boatie or a local, he didn’t know any better anyway.

  ‘Good work, Greg. Can you follow up any unusual activity in those spots over the last week – any strangers, any boats going out at unusual times, stuff like that? We also need to check known shipping and other boat traffic. Our friend could have been dumped by a passing tanker or trawler for all we know. Let me know how you go.’

  Greg beamed and reached for the phone.

  Buckley and Tess both looked expectantly at Cato.

  ‘We don’t know much but let’s look at what we do know,’ said Cato.

  ‘Dead,’ shrugged Buckley.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Cato.

  ‘No head,’ mused Tess.

  Cato nodded. ‘Somebody wants to make it hard for us to work out who he is.’

  Buckley sniffed. ‘Detection 101, so that’s what they teach you on the Golden Boy Fast Track these days.’

  Cato ignored the dig and turned to Tess. ‘Any Chinese restaurants in Hopetoun?’

  Tess and Buckley looked at their watches and at each other. It was just gone nine o’clock in the morning.

  Cato patted his stomach. ‘Hungry as.’

  The temperature hovered in the low thirties for the third day running. It was bloody October as well, unbelievable. In Sunderland this would be a ‘Phew What a Scorcher’ tabloid heatwave: riots in the streets, prisoners on the rooftops, questions in Parliament. In Busselton it was ‘fine, sunny, temperatures slightly above average’. My arse. The only room in the house with air conditioning was the bedroom but he knew if he was caught in there he’d be in trouble. Stuart Miller had to put on a show of being an active and happy retiree and not laze around in a nice cool bedroom and read the paper like he really wanted to. He could hear Jenny’s words now in the prim Edinburgh Miss Jean Brodie schoolteacher’s voice she used for the bad kids: You’ll be a long time dead, plenty of time for sleeping then, Stuart Miller! Stuart Miller was well over it: the heat, the healthy, active retirement. The lot.

  He put the fan on full blast, sat down heavily at the kitchen table and opened up the day’s West Australian. The headlines screamed global financial crisis and meltdown like they had for the past week or more. Then he turned to page four.

  $200,000 reward for family’s killer

  Police today announced a $200,000 reward in a bid to catch a man who allegedly murdered his wife and three children in 1981. Homicide detectives have released a digitally enhanced photofit image, which aims to show how the prime suspect Derek Chapman would look 27 years after the killings.

  A 1981 inquest found Chapman electrocuted and bashed his pregnant wife Maureen, 32, and their children Kevin, 6, Penny, 4, and Mark, 2, in their home in Norwood, Adelaide.

  Miller’s ears were roaring, his temples throbbing ... electrocuted and bashed. He looked at the photograph again: it hadn’t registered at first, probably because it bore no resemblance to his Cup Final killer, Davey Arthurs. The face in the 1980 photograph was more groomed: hair short and styled, tinted glasses with big frames, a thick Ian Botham moustache, and the face fuller, fleshier. Miller wouldn’t have picked it except for the MO. Could it be the same man, thirty-five years later, here in Australia? The one who still crept into his dreams at night with a bloody hammer and jump leads? He read on.

  Chapman, now aged 63, placed the bodies in his Holden ute and left it parked in bushland in the Adelaide hills area. The bodies were found the next day...

  Homicide detectives flew to Perth yesterday following reports Chapman may be living there. Police Media have also released an image of Chapman, based on information from a woman who knew him and who reported a sighting of him in Bunbury in the state’s south-west in 1998, 17 years after the murders.

  He looked at the photofit of the way they thought the killer might look today. The Botham mo was gone, the glasses now had slim steel frames, the face was rounder and with a few more wrinkles, a bit less hair, and it was grey. Everybody’s grandad: except he’d killed his pregnant wife and their eight-year-old son on Cup Final day in a dreary terraced redbrick in Sunderland. Then, eight years later, it seems he’d gone and done it again in Adelaide on the other side of the world. Derek Chapman – Davey Arthurs. Here in WA? The most recent sighting was in Bunbury just fifty kilometres down the road from Miller’s Busselton home. The hairs fizzed on the back of his neck.

  Detective Senior Constable Tim Delaney of the South Australia Police homicide squad said he hoped the reward and the image would produce the information police needed. ‘There have been a number of sightings of Chapman over the years, which leads us to believe that he is still alive and living interstate,’ he said. ‘The fact we are revisiting this case shows how seriously we are treating the West Australian information.

  ‘We hope to encourage Chapman to give up. Twenty-seven years is a long time to live with such a crime hanging over your head.
It would have to be weighing heavily on Chapman’s conscience.’

  Miller smiled grimly at that one. ‘You wish.’

  ‘It’s horrific that a father could slaughter his own wife and children in their own home. We really want to try to get closure on this.’

  ‘Wouldn’t we all.’ Stuart Miller reached for the phone.

  6

  Thursday, October 9th. Midmorning.

  No. There weren’t any Chinese restaurants in Hopetoun. There was a cafe, The Taste of the Toun, but it was closed. It was a squat, drab, brick thing, the last but one building in Veal Street. The last building was a pub, the Port Hotel, a one hundred year old two-storey sandstone fortress, also closed. After that it was all Southern Ocean as far as Antarctica. Cato took in the sweep of sparkling water and made a mental note to see if the Hopey shop sold bathers. Across the road from both buildings, a couple of toddlers rotated sleepily on a kiddie roundabout in McCulloch Park while their mums sipped Diet Coke at a picnic table. There was a shelter overlooking the beach. According to Tess it was a hangout for the disaffected youth of Hopetoun to do drugs and experiment sexually.

  ‘Come to think of it, I haven’t seen him for a while,’ she said, frowning.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Disaffected Youth.’

  ‘Just the one?’

  ‘Since his big brother got a job at the mine, yeah.’ She paused to consider the situation further. ‘Well some of the teenagers get a bit excitable now and then but there’s only the one kid in town who’s shaping up to be a future statistic.’

  ‘Particularly if he’s sexually experimenting on his own,’ observed Jim Buckley.