Bright City Deep Shadows

by Graham Storrs

  It struck me like a punch in the gut. If someone had tried to rob Chelsea, she’d have told them to fuck off. She’d have been furious.

  Shit! I should have been there. I should have been with her.

  And who was he? Who was the bastard who thought he had the right to take that most precious of all lives? What kind of sick, twisted, evil…?

  I was standing rigid and still in the street, fists clenched, trembling with rage. I wanted to know who’d done this. I wanted to find him and look him in the eye and do things to him, cruel, violent things. I wanted to watch him suffer, hear him scream in pain. And then I wanted to watch him die, the way he had watched Chelsea. I didn’t just want it, I imagined it, every blow I’d strike, every cut he’d suffer, all the blood and snot and torn flesh, his cries, his pleading, the tears in his eyes, the piss in his pants… I wanted it all. I wanted it like I’d never wanted anything in my whole life. I would have died, smiling, if I could just have that bastard at my mercy before I went. I fell to my knees, screaming in frustration, burning with impotent fury.

  I don’t know how long I was there. The anger seemed to burn out the core of me until I was hollow and spent, sobbing on the pavement as people walked by and cars passed. I wasn’t really myself again until a vehicle pulled up beside me and the street around me began to jitter in red and blue light. I looked up and saw the white police car with its blue-and-white check patterns.

  “Been celebrating, have we?” the cop asked, standing over me.

  I climbed awkwardly to my feet. He was a young man, about my age, quite a lot shorter but stockily built. His companion, a slightly older man, had also got out of the car but hung back a bit, watching me carefully. I was suddenly hyper-aware that they both carried guns.

  “I was at a funeral,” I said. He seemed completely unmoved by the admission.

  “We’ve had complaints that you’ve been howling and screaming.”

  “My girlfriend was murdered,” I said. From the tiny frown that flicked across his brow, I guessed I’d piqued his interest.

  “Name,” he said, pulling out a notebook.

  “Chelsea Campbell.”

  He stared at me in silence. If he recognised Chelsea’s name, he didn’t show it. “Your name, not hers.”

  “Lucas Kelly. Doctor Lucas Kelly.” He looked up from his book and pursed his lips.

  “Address?” I gave him the address of the motel.

  “I need to talk to one of your detectives. Trevor Reid. He’s the SIO.”

  “What about?”

  I had the strong impression this young man didn’t like me. Maybe he just didn’t like anyone he had to deal with for being a public nuisance. “It’s… It’s about the case. I need to know what’s going on.”

  Again he weighed me up. “Detective Inspector Reid is off duty. How much have you had to drink?”

  His whole manner seemed insolent. “I don’t know. Four or five stubbies, maybe.”

  “Or maybe a dozen, more like.”

  I felt my anger returning. “And what if I had? What’s it to you? From what I hear, it’s only black fellas who get arrested for public drunkenness in this state.”

  I saw a little snarl on his lips. Keeping his eyes on mine, he put away his notebook with slow deliberation. Well, fuck him, I thought. If this little shit wants to get rough, I’m just in the mood.

  “I need you to move along, now, Dr. Kelly,” the older policeman said, putting his shoulder between his partner and me. “And I expect you to go straight home. Can I get your word on that?”

  The moment of tension ebbed away. I nodded. They watched me as I walked away up the street.

  Chapter Two

  The next morning I was woken by a knock at the motel-room door. I groped for my phone to see the time but, of course, it was switched off. It was light out but, in a Brisbane summer, that only meant it was after five am. I heard a man’s voice outside, deliberately low, saying, “He’s got a bloody nerve. We’re not his errand boys.” The knock came again.

  “Doctor Kelly? It’s the police.”

  “Hang on. I’m coming.”

  I managed to get my jeans on and opened the door. Hot air poured into my air-conditioned room and the bright light made me squint. There were two uniformed police officers standing there – not the two from the previous night, thank heavens.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir, only we’ve been having a bit of trouble reaching you.”

  I don’t know if I’ve ever been called “sir” in my life. Standing there barefoot, in the T-shirt I’d just slept in, I didn’t feel much like a “sir”. In fact, the faintly archaic word, used by these two armed men, in a power relationship to me that suggested the exact opposite of deference and respect, had creepy and sinister overtones. It made me think that I wasn’t quite human to them, not really someone like them but a “member of the public”, a creature that had “rights” that you might need to respect but for whom normal feelings like compassion were not appropriate. It was distancing. It put me in an out-group.

  “Doctor Kelly?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Just woke up.”

  “We haven’t been able to reach you by phone, sir. And we didn’t have an address for you until this morning.”

  My brain finally clicked into the here and now. “Is it Chelsea? Have you found something? Do you know who did it?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that, sir, but if you’d care to visit the station some time today, Detective Inspector Reid is keen to have a word.”

  “Well… Yes, of course. Did he say what it was about?”

  “Sorry.” He looked past me at the phone on the bed. “Maybe you could leave that switched on in future. Save us interrupting your sleep.” I glanced back at the phone and when I turned back, they were already on their way to their car.

  I took my jeans off again and had a shower. By the time I left the room and crossed the hot concrete car park to Chelsea’s car, it was eight-thirty and shaping up to be a stinking hot day. The sky was duck-egg blue in every direction and, in the shrubbery around the motel, rainbow lorikeets were shouting and squabbling. The car was already an oven. I turned on the engine and cranked up the air to max. Chelsea had a nice car, a mid-sized SUV – not because she went off-road but because she liked to have plenty of room to carry display equipment to exhibitions and customer demos. She’d wanted an electric vehicle but had to settle for petrol because there just wasn’t much option in Australia. The day she realised she couldn’t “do the right thing” but had to go on polluting the world every time she took a drive, she’d not only ranted from dawn till dusk but had called her local MP to complain, called the State and Federal Ministers, and written to every media outlet in the country to express her utter disgust. She wasn’t a green activist in any sense but she had absolute zero tolerance for stupidity, corruption, or blind prejudice.

  It struck me how much she’d have hated me sitting there in a car park with the engine running, while I reminisced, so I pushed the stick into drive and got underway. The traffic, heading into the CBD in the rush hour was so bad that I pulled over at the first strip mall I found and had breakfast in a little café. I switched on my phone, ignored all the messages, and read the news while I ate. The old guy in the pub had said Chelsea’s murder was “all over the news” but it wasn’t. Not any more. A week on from her death, the media had completely forgotten, moved on to other murders, found new political scandals, new outrage at the latest Royal Commission findings, new cats up trees and crocs in back yards. A part of me regretted not having looked sooner, to see what people had said about it, but the better part of me knew that would just have been pointless masochism. Going to the funeral had been bad enough. Chelsea’s death had been between me and her. It was no-one else’s business.

  Except, of course, it wasn’t. Chelsea’s mum had at least as much right as me to mourn her daughter’s death. And there were friends and colleagues. Some of the people she worked with probably spent far more time with her than I e
ver had. Some she’d had with her from the very beginning, people who had been by her side through all the struggles and triumphs of starting and building a new company. I hadn’t been with her at the client presentations, at the meetings with venture capitalists and banks. She’d prepared for each with a grim determination, like they were little battles, fought by a small band of heroes, and she’d celebrated her victories and licked her wounds with others, not me.

  And then there were the police. Detective Inspector Trevor Reid and his sidekick, the Italian-sounding woman whose name I’d already forgotten. To them and god knew how many others, Chelsea was now a significant person in their lives, the focus of their day-to-day activities, a deep mystery for them to solve. And, finally, there was everyone else – the reporters who’d needed to fill a few column-inches, or fifteen seconds of TV news, the politicians who’d tutted about crime on our streets and used her name to push some agenda about police numbers, or anti-gang laws, or more state surveillance, and the general public, who, for some reason I’ve never understood, liked to see stories of murder and death in their newsfeeds. Perhaps it gave them a frisson of fear and fed a self-flagellating sense of impotence and vulnerability. Perhaps it reassured them that their god was looking after them and their loved ones and they were all right, Jack. Perhaps it confirmed their moral certainties that people – especially women – out alone at night, were righteously punished for their presumption and, probably, wickedness.

  I stood up quickly and left the café. The great flood of traffic had eased back to a more steady flow and I joined it, eager to have the distraction of doing something and going somewhere. The past week had been like living in a dense fog. My thoughts had been overwhelmed by pain and misery. My actions had been undirected. Everything had seemed pointless. Now, my mind was clearing, which I supposed was a good thing, but the heavy blanket of my suffering was being burned off by a growing hot anger. I could feel it writhing in my chest, fizzing in my brain, but it was just as useless, just as unfocused as the pain.

  Perhaps when I saw Reid, I would know what to do with the rage building inside. Perhaps if there was a suspect, it would give me a target for my anger. Until then, I just had the stupid arseholes all around me who couldn’t drive to save their lives, and the money-grubbing rent-takers who owned the car parks in the city and milked everyone dry, or Detective Inspector Trevor bloody Reid who sent armed goons out to drag me into that scalding heat trap, then had the effrontery to make me sit around waiting to come and collect me at his leisure.

  “Thank you for coming, Dr. Kelly,” said Reid when he finally turned up. He offered a big, long-fingered hand. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  We went through doors and corridors while Reid made small-talk about how hard it had been to find me, how hot the day was and how the tennis was going. I kept my answers short and told him I had no interest in sports. We reached a small room. This contained a table, with four chairs around it and a couple more nearby. Reid moved a couple of chairs so they faced each other and did not have the table between them. He’d probably learned to do that on a training course. There were two cameras mounted opposite one another near the ceiling and I assumed they would be miked, Someone was recording everything that was said and done in there.

  “Where have you been?” he asked, when we eventually got down to it.

  “Nowhere.”

  “You haven’t been home. I’ve spoken several times to Mrs. Campbell. She last saw you on the day she identified Chelsea’s body.”

  “I moved out to a motel so Stacey could stay at the unit until the funeral. It’s probably hers, anyway. Chelsea bought it. Her mother is her next of kin. She’ll inherit it.”

  “You haven’t seen Chelsea’s will?”

  “What will? Why would she have a will?” She was only twenty-four – two years younger than me – and I’d never even thought about making a will. Of course, I didn’t own a thing. Chelsea had the unit, a car, her business, all kinds of stuff.

  Reid watched me carefully. “There is a will. She drew it up about six months ago. Kazima Abbas, the company’s Finance Officer, is the executor. You are the major beneficiary.”

  I was so stunned at the news that it took a while for the implications to sink in. I was probably not going to be homeless after all. I might even have a car. Thank you, darling, I thought. God, she was always so thoughtful and so together. I must have seemed like a silly child to her.

  Then it hit me.

  “You think I’ve got motive now, don’t you? That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

  “Where have you been this past week, Dr. Kelly?”

  “For God’s sake, stop being so bloody polite. It creeps me out. Especially if you’re trying to pin a murder on me. Call me Luke.” He just looked at me in silence and I remembered he’d asked me a question. “I was in my motel room, mostly, getting wasted and reading Sartre. The local bottle shop and the Chinese take-away up the road will have credit card receipts and all that. The motel cleaners will remember me as the bloody nuisance who never left his room. Anyway, what the hell do you want to know where I’ve been, for? I assume you checked my alibi for the night she was murdered. Even if I had a motive – and trust me, I don’t. An apartment and a car? I’d swap you the whole city and a dozen Mercedes dealerships for one more day with Chelsea. Even if I did have a motive, I was three hundred kilometres away. Shit. Do I need a lawyer or something?”

  “We’re just having a friendly chat. You can leave any time you like.”

  “This is insane. How could I possibly have killed Chelsea if I wasn’t even there?”

  “That sounds like you’re challenging me to work it out.”

  The guy was an idiot. In my growing anger, my thoughts became hard and clear. “So you’ve been working on this for a week and you have no clue who the killer is. Someone stabbed my girlfriend in an alley in Australia’s third largest city, in an age of ubiquitous surveillance and DNA testing, and you haven’t got any idea at all who did it. So, in desperation, in the absence of any actual evidence, you want to try and push my buttons in the hope I’ll confess? Or what? What’s your strategy here?”

  “Oh we’ve got evidence. Plenty of it. We have the murder weapon. We have the clothes the killer wore. We even have his shoes. What size shoe do you wear, Luke?” There was something shifty about him that made me think he was hiding something.

  “You have his shoes? Did he change his clothes? Is that it? He changed his clothes and dumped them somewhere – in a bucket of bleach or something to degrade the DNA. Is that what he did? Or did he burn everything, including the knife?” From his uncomfortable look, I could see it was the latter. “Jesus, you really don’t have anything, do you? No CCTV, either, or you wouldn’t have me in the frame. This guy is going to walk free, isn’t he?”

  “Your shoe size?”

  “Ten, usually. Depends on the shoe. Take a look in the unit. Search the place. Every shoe I own is there, except these.” I held up a foot for him to look at.

  “We already searched your unit. Mrs. Campbell was most obliging.”

  “So you already knew my shoe size. Jeez this is so fucked up. Look, maybe I should be talking to the smart one. The woman, Alexandra something Italian.”

  He seemed quite taken aback by that. I could see his brain churning, trying to find out how I could possibly have known. Maybe I also saw a tiny bit of insecurity there. But he came back swinging.

  “You’re a smart guy yourself, Doctor Kelly. PhD in philosophy, right? Very impressive. I bet you could easily plan the perfect murder. You’d find an accomplice, give yourself the perfect alibi, choose a restaurant away from the CBD with no surveillance cameras, arrange for your guy to meet Chelsea there, some cock-and-bull story about a business proposition or something, get her into the alley behind the restaurant on some pretence, stab her fourteen times so it looks like a crime of passion, then go almost a kilometre through deserted streets to a dumpster, change his clothes for the ones he already
left there with the bottle of metho, then douse the clothes and the knife and burn the lot. How am I doing so far?”

  I stood up. What he’d just said was loaded with facts I hadn’t known. Facts that had set my guts churning. I wanted to get out and get far away from that stupid bloody man.

  “Your idea of a friendly chat is about as misguided as your choice of suspect,” I said but my voice sounded a weak and shaky.

  He stood up too. I’m quite tall but he had a couple of inches on me and, I suspected, a lot of muscle. I guessed he must play for the police footy team, if there was such a thing.

  “I’ll get someone to show you out.” We went into the corridor and a woman came down the corridor as if he’d signalled her somehow. “Mary, please take Dr. Kelly to reception and sign him out.” To me, he said, “Keep your phone on, Luke, and let us know if you change address again. We will definitely want to be in touch soon.”

  Chapter Three

  It was weird going to Chelsea’s office knowing she would not be there but I had to see Kazima. My meeting with Reid had raised so many questions. If Chelsea was having a business meeting with someone on the night she died, why wasn’t it at her office, or his office? And why not during office hours? Did they have a meal? And did he then take her out to an alley nearby and kill her? Why? I mean a meal suggested someone she knew – an old friend maybe – or a new one. So why would they then murder her? And, even stranger, the change of clothes and the bottle of meths suggested premeditation. Who did Chelsea know well enough to dine out with who would plan to murder her in cold blood? Or a passionate frenzy?