Already Dead

by Jaye Ford

  Jax noted he’d ditched the Homicide cop’s first name, wondered if it was shop talk or if he was siding with Jax. ‘About four months ago, she heard I’d been knocking on doors. She asked me into the station, made me wait an hour, then told me to cease and desist.’ Jax slid Zoe’s bread fingers and a tub of yogurt onto a plate. ‘Zoe, honey, come and get your lunch.’ Jax watched her skip across the room, relieved the break-in hadn’t left her daughter quiet and frightened. It was just Jax who felt like her lungs had forgotten how to breathe.

  ‘Did you?’ Aiden asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cease and desist.’

  She gave him a look: You think?

  He huffed a brief laugh. ‘Is that the problem between you and her?’

  ‘No. It started long before that. From the first day, I asked too many questions. She didn’t like them and it went downhill from there.’ The kettle reached boiling point and clicked off. Jax passed him a jar of coffee grounds and pointed at the plunger on the bench. Then watched, impressed as he filled it. Okay, so the guy knew his way around fresh coffee. He nodded at a table-and-chair set in the courtyard, out of the sun in the shadow of the house: his ‘outside’ meant all the way outside. She followed him through the door with mugs.

  It was just past midday and the air was humid and hot but an early afternoon breeze was keeping it moving, bringing a briny tang and the distant rumble of surf up the hill. Aiden sat and waited until Jax was opposite him, two filled mugs between them. ‘Is it because you don’t trust Lyneham to do her job?’

  Was that why they were here? He wanted another chance to explain he ran a different kind of investigation, to say, Trust me and stay out of it. Well, she could make use of an opportunity too. ‘I can’t make a judgement on that. She won’t tell me anything.’

  A fleeting frown. ‘She won’t share the details of a police investigation, so you run your own?’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Then what are the files about?’

  She’d been here before, was tempted to tell Aiden it was none of his damn business, but he was her only link to the investigation into Brendan Walsh – and she wasn’t ready to give that up. Not yet.

  She took a breath, willed herself to keep it together. ‘My husband was an investigative reporter. He worked on complicated stories that other people gave up on. He didn’t do it because it was a job. He did it because people needed justice and closure. And because once he’d started, he couldn’t stop. He had a compulsion to understand, to unravel the details, to uncover the truth. If someone brought the Nick Westing story to him, he’d pull it apart until he found out what had happened. If it was me, if I was the one who’d been run down, he wouldn’t let it go. Not ever.’ She jerked a thumb in the direction of her bedroom. ‘Those files in there are for him. Because he’d want to know. Because he’d want me to know and because he’d want his daughter to have something more than the easy, throwaway explanation for why she has no father.’

  Tears were blurring her vision by the time she finished. She lifted her coffee mug to her mouth to hide the tremble in her lips, looked away from Aiden towards the huge expanse of ocean. She’d given the same speech to worried friends. Russell and Deanne listened to her theories without adding to them. A few days ago, Tilda had fingered through the box of files with concern in her eyes. Across the table, Detective Senior Sergeant Aiden Hawke leaned on his forearms, his eyes pinned to Jax’s face. If he thought he was going to convince her to give it away, he needed to revisit his Psychology studies.

  ‘My first case as a detective involved a twelve-year-old girl,’ he said. ‘She got up one morning and found her mother almost beaten to death in the kitchen. I held that girl’s hand for three hours. Her name is Bethany and she’s nineteen next week. Her mother has brain damage and is in a wheelchair. The perpetrators haven’t been found. Once a month, I go back through the files, then I ring her and we talk. She tells me what she’s been doing, I tell her what’s new. I want to find out what happened. For her. So she can move on with her life.’

  Jax sensed the solidarity of a quest. She hadn’t expected that. Not with a cop. Not with the cop who’d told her to keep out of it. She wanted to ask him why – and tell him not to lose hope. But he took a breath and she let him speak.

  ‘Are you trying to honour Brendan Walsh?’

  She frowned: at the switch in subject, at the assumption underneath it that she couldn’t grasp.

  ‘He held a gun to your head, Jax. I saw it.’

  ‘I know. I was there.’

  ‘You don’t owe him anything.’

  ‘I’m not paying him back.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  The sadness that had overlaid her thoughts since she’d found the files was bumped aside by anger and umbrage. She leaned forward, hands gripping the edge of the table. ‘Brendan Walsh was in my car. He almost killed me. I thought people were after me – I believed him. I tried to hold on to him but he slipped through my fingers and I watched him run into the traffic and die. I want to know why that happened.’

  Aiden waited a beat. ‘Is that all?’

  Not even close, but if his need or duty or whatever it was that made him ring a young girl every month didn’t give him a clue, Jax wasn’t going to tell him the rest of it. And she didn’t think it was what he meant. Last night, he’d accused her of omitting details, told her it would be bad for her when he figured it out. ‘Is this why we’re out here having coffee in the shade? So I’ll tell you everything?’

  ‘I’m giving you the chance to do it now, Jax. There might not be another one.’

  Did that mean he was close to working it out? If he thought she knew something that would make a difference, he was way off. But he’d passed her the baton – it was time to run. ‘All right, I’ll talk to you. I’ll tell you what I know, but only if you’re straight with me.’

  ‘As straight as I can be.’

  ‘You’ll answer my questions?’

  ‘Where I can.’

  She huffed. ‘You think that’s going to do it?’

  ‘How about this, then? I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine.’

  She’d been answering his all along. ‘Fine. But I get to ask the first one.’

  He held up his hands. ‘Go for it, Miranda.’

  She smiled to herself. He’d called her Miranda: surrender with a reminder of who was the cop. ‘What do you think is going on?’

  It made him hesitate. She understood why. If he told her what he thought, she could tailor her answer to suit – but she needed him to say it before she laid it all out.

  ‘Okay,’ he started, as though he’d decided to uphold his end of the bargain, ‘I think Walsh got in your head. I think you deliberately omitted details from your statement and that you know more than you claim about Brendan Walsh’s situation. And I think you’re involved somehow in whatever he had going on.’

  It wasn’t complimentary, but he’d tried to give her a way out. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘that’s the obvious conclusion – I won’t hold it against you. How do you think I’m involved?’

  ‘Nuh-uh. My turn to ask a question.’

  ‘We didn’t agree on tit for tat.’

  ‘Give me a break here, Jax. I’m making all the concessions.’

  She let a smile turn up one side of her mouth. She liked him better this way – a little pushy, an edge of humour, his energy not locked up in his professional suit of armour. ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Walsh’s car was found burnt out in Sydney last night,’ he said. ‘I went down to look at it this morning. An accelerant was used, there’s not a lot left. It’s in Hornsby, one suburb from Wahroonga, walking distance to the motorway on-ramp. Did he contact you? Did he tell you to meet him there?’

  ‘That’s two questions.’

  ‘Are you dodging?’

  ‘No. And no, he didn’t, but …’ She frowned, trying to work out the connections Aiden had made. She’d told him she didn’t know
Brendan before he got in her car but Aiden had read a little of the files on her bedroom floor; she’d given him an impassioned speech about why she was investigating Nick’s accident; she’d told him she was with Kate Walsh again this morning.

  ‘You’re putting the wrong pieces together. I didn’t lie to you about knowing Brendan and it’s not about Nick’s accident or my files. If it was, they wouldn’t still be on my floor. Whoever was here would’ve taken them with my laptop. But I think Nick’s got something to do with what’s happened since.’

  ‘So your husband knew Walsh?’

  ‘No. You’re on the wrong track. But it’s the same track I think others are on. That’s the point.’

  ‘What track?’

  ‘Okay.’ She moved the coffee mugs aside, shuffled her chair closer, still sorting the ideas in her head. ‘If I’m a former reporter and my husband was an investigative reporter, the assumption is that we were a team. Both of us involved in the investigating and reporting. At the very least, I was the sounding board for his ideas. I’m certainly capable of asking questions and writing about the answers, and possibly with the same insistence as my famous husband.’ She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Okay.’ It meant go on, not agreement.

  ‘What if Brendan Walsh actually had information of some variety? He was reported as leaving Sydney in a car driven by Nicholas Westing’s wife, so the first guess would be that the transport arrangements weren’t random. The second might be that his intention was to pass on said information. The third, that I planned to do something with it.’

  Aiden’s eyes narrowed. ‘So you’re saying Walsh gave you information?’

  He thought she was confessing? ‘No. It’s conjecture.’

  A flash lit his eyes for an instant. ‘Come on, Jax, you think conjecture’s going to do it?’

  ‘I’m trying to tell you –’

  ‘Listen to me. I’m crossing a line by giving you this opportunity. Tell me or I go.’

  She rubbed a hand across her face. ‘Look, four days ago my name was in every newspaper and on every news bulletin. But not just my name. I’m Miranda Jack, wife of Nicholas Westing. Nick is the adjective the media uses to describe me. Not single mother, not 35-year-old woman, not former journalist. I’m Nick Westing’s wife. He was an investigative reporter, he was famous for it and he’s famously dead. You’re not the first person to wonder if all of this had something to do with him. And I have, too. I mean, what are the chances of someone hijacking a driver and ending up with an investigative reporter’s wife. It’s a big coincidence, right?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a big coincidence.’

  ‘The thing is that it is a coincidence. Brendan chose my car at random. He didn’t know who I was until I told him and I haven’t omitted anything from my statement. But what if someone else is making the same assumptions as you – that we were in communication, that the pick-up was arranged, that Brendan was rational when he got in my car? I’ve just been robbed but the TVs are still here and so is some cash I left on the fridge. Two computers, digital DVD players and an iPod are gone. Items that store electronic files. They can also store video and voice recordings. My phone does too and it’d be a reasonable assumption that it was in my car on Monday and in my bag yesterday when I was chased.’ She paused, let the details settle. ‘What if someone is worried about how much Brendan said when he was in my car? And how well I listened?’

  32

  It was a full minute before Aiden said anything. He filled the time watching the sludgy remains of his coffee, scratching his head, dropping his elbows to his knees and staring at the view. Jax left him to it, knowing his brain was picking at her theory. He’d been convinced she’d done something unlawful, he’d tried to help her out of it. Maybe he was shifting ideas and evidence about to make her theory fit. Maybe he thought he was being conned and was deciding he’d given her enough chances.

  He finally folded his arms on the table, cop-look in place as he took a breath. ‘If your original statement is accurate –’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘– then Walsh didn’t mention having the kind of information you’re talking about.’

  ‘He said a lot of things that I didn’t understand. He wanted to get to his wife and son. If he didn’t make it, he wanted me to tell her something. He thought people were after him, he said he was a target and that someone had called him “Already Dead”.’

  ‘He had PTSD. His doctor says it was a psychotic episode.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean what he said isn’t true.’

  ‘Jax –’

  ‘No, wait. PTSD doesn’t explain it all away. I did some reading and yeah, it was a Google search and that doesn’t make me an expert, but I didn’t find anything that claimed PTSD sufferers were prone to inventing whole new lives. Their issues are about real things, things that happened to them, memories that won’t find a place to lie down. They have bad dreams, they get hyper-vigilant, they can feel numb. All things Kate Walsh told me Brendan suffered at various times. She said he’d had flashbacks, too. Recently. A couple of months ago when he caught up with some mates from the army.’

  ‘And you think he was having a flashback in your car?’

  ‘No, if he had a flashback, it happened before he got in my car. The thing is, flashbacks are memories thrown up from the depths of your mind that are so intense it feels like they’re happening. They can occur out of the blue or be triggered by a sound, a smell, anything.’ She motioned with a hand, palm up, as though trying to show him. ‘Maybe he remembered something. Maybe it was about Afghanistan. And maybe someone knew he remembered.’

  Aiden sat back in his chair. ‘If he did have a flashback – which can’t actually be proved – it might’ve been something that happened ten years ago. His wife might know all about it. He might’ve told her twenty times already. Every time he had a flashback.’

  ‘Except that two guys chased me yesterday, someone broke into my house today and the house I sold in Sydney was vandalised.’

  A frown creased his forehead. ‘Today?’

  ‘No. The night of the carjacking. Apparently there was damage along the street, cars scratched, a brick thrown through someone’s window. My house was the only one broken into.’ She pulled in a breath as she remembered the details. ‘The new owners had computer equipment smashed and boxes sliced open. A door was kicked in and there were a couple of holes in the walls, too, so vandals or someone trying to make it look that way.’

  ‘When did you hear about this?’

  ‘The morning after.’

  ‘There’s no report in the system.’

  She couldn’t tell if he doubted her or the efficiency of his colleagues in Sydney. ‘My name won’t be on a report. The sale went through the day before I left. I wasn’t the owner. It was the agent who told me.’

  Aiden got to his feet in one fast movement, as though the information had driven him from his chair. He stalked to the edge of the small rectangle of grass, stood at the view over the neighbour’s roof, his back to her.

  ‘There’s more,’ Jax said. ‘Wait there.’ She took the mugs inside, suggested Zoe play on the grass, grabbed the notebook from her bag. Aiden was where she’d left him when she returned, fingering the screen of his mobile phone. ‘I made some notes,’ she told him, taking them to the table and flipping through to her original lists.

  Aiden kept his phone in one hand as he stood at her shoulder. ‘A lot of notes,’ he said.

  ‘Once I got started …’ She lifted her shoulders and let them drop.

  He took her arm, turned her to face him. ‘I told you I’ll keep you informed. You don’t need to do this.’

  He was close enough for her to count the fine, dark stripes in the pale blue-grey of his irises. ‘Yeah, I do.’

  ‘Did you call the victim support group?’

  ‘I don’t need support. I need to work this out.’

  ‘It’s not the best way to get closure.’

  ‘Have you been a victim?’<
br />
  ‘No.’

  ‘Then don’t tell me how to get closure.’

  His fingers softened on her arm. ‘I’ve seen it before, Jax. Victims, people hurt by circumstances out of their control. They think if they can understand it, they’ll be okay. But understanding can be worse. You need to let it go.’

  She nodded. ‘And let the police handle it?’

  ‘I know that’s not what you want to hear, but yeah.’

  Lifting her chin, she let sarcasm swim into her words. ‘And you’ll tell me all about it when you’ve figured it out.’

  ‘It’s my job to protect people. I’m trying to protect you.’

  She took a step back, folded her arms. ‘What would you do if you were in my position? If you’d had a gun to your head, if you’d been chased, if someone had trampled through your home. If you’d had to run with your child in your arms.’

  ‘I’m a detective. Of course I’d want to do something.’

  ‘Well, guess what? That just makes you human. You don’t get the right to feel that way because you’ve got a badge and you’ve done the training. My father taught me to ask questions and find answers. That’s what I’m doing. So are you going to look at what I’ve got or leave?’

  A long, tense silence hung in the air between them. She didn’t have the patience for it. He looked like he could do it all day. What was with him? He jumped into action when a gun was involved, but needed to cross every mental ‘T’ to piece a concept together. Did he tick off a checklist before he got laid?

  Their silence was interrupted by Zoe pushing a plastic wheelbarrow full of dolls through the door, giving instructions for them to hold on as they bumped over the step.

  Jax picked up the notebook, held it in front of Aiden. ‘I wanted to work out how much of what Brendan said was real. This is the Real side. Two pages of it.’ She ran a finger down the list, flipped over to where it continued.

  Aiden glanced at Zoe tipping her dolls onto the lawn, at the uniformed cop walking through the house, at his phone, maybe deciding how much time he had.