Evil Under the Stars

by C. A. Larmer

  “Sorry!” she blurted, stepping away from the bed. “Just habit, I guess.”

  It couldn’t be her imagination guiding her actions again, could it? Was the honeymoon over on that?

  “Did they leave a message?” His tone was light; he didn’t seem too annoyed. She apologised again as she shook her head.

  “It was a woman. She hung up. She seemed a bit nervous.”

  He stared at her for a moment. “So do you. Are you all right?”

  She nodded quickly, wrapping her arms around herself.

  He scooped the phone from the bed and checked the number, his lips puckering up. He had no idea whose number that was.

  “Excuse me a moment.”

  He pressed redial as he stepped out of the room. Two minutes later Jackson was back, reaching for the trousers he had dropped by her bed very early that morning.

  “That was Azaria Joves, the mother who was sitting behind the victim at the film. I’ve been waiting for her call. She’s finally agreed to meet me, at her place, in half an hour. I just texted Singho, and she’s going to join me there. I’d better get my act together.” He glanced around. “Where’d I dump my shirt?”

  Alicia deflated a little. She had been hoping they could grab breakfast before he rushed off, but she tried not to show it as she helped him find the rest of his things.

  This was the first time Jackson had appeared at her door so late after a shift, and she had been thrilled by the visit, but now she couldn’t help wondering whether she should be offended or irritated or both.

  Was that just a booty call? Was that all it was?

  “You sure you’re all right?” he asked again.

  She tried to smile. “Great, yes, never better.”

  Snap out of it, Alicia, she told herself.

  “You all right?” came the question for the third time that morning, and Alicia looked up from her cup of tea to see her sister staring at her sleepily from the kitchen door.

  She nodded unconvincingly.

  Lynette yawned, scooped her long hair up and into a messy bun on the top of her head, and then shuffled over.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  Lynette stared at her sideways, so Alicia sighed and told her about Jackson’s visit.

  “So what’s the big deal? He missed you, he dropped over, then he had to run off for work.”

  “I know. I know. It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s the fact that my mind is now playing up on me again.” She sniffed. “I thought I was cured. I thought Jackson was my saviour.”

  Lynette pulled her sister into a bear hug. They stayed like that for many minutes until Max came bounding over and jumped up, turning it into a group hug.

  *********

  “Shall I prepare a pot of tea?” the woman asked as soon as Jackson and Indira were shown through the front door of the small cottage located in the block behind St Thomas’s Church.

  The house was tucked around behind the main building, hidden from view by a wall of banksias and a large ironbark.

  “Tea would be lovely, thanks,” said Indira, remembering the steaming cup she had to abandon when her colleague’s text came through.

  “Ditto,” said Jackson, adding, “We both take it with plenty of sugar and milk.”

  As Azaria Joves got busy making a pot in the kitchen, the detectives busily inspected her living room where, among the fussy, ornate furniture, framed family photos wrestled for dominance with religious paraphernalia. There was a shiny cross on one wall and a framed picture of Mother Mary on another, as well as school photos, stiff holiday snaps, and images of the girls looking like miniature brides.

  “First Holy Communion,” Indira explained.

  She reached for another photo just as Azaria reappeared with the tray of tea.

  “Nice-looking lad,” Indira said, and Azaria glanced at the photo and seemed to start a bit, the teacups clinking on the tray.

  “Ye-ees?” she said.

  Her rising inflection added to the sense of nervousness, so Indira held on to the photo and sat down with it, noticing that the woman eyed the picture as she did so.

  Eventually when the tea had been poured and Azaria had taken a few deep breaths, Indira sat forward in her seat and looked at Jackson, giving him the nod.

  This case was going nowhere fast, so today they would play by Jacko’s rules, she had decided. Softly-softly could take a hike. Besides, she had a feeling this woman was accustomed to answering to authoritative men.

  “We’re here to talk about Ezekiel,” Jackson said, launching straight in and causing the woman to blink rapidly.

  “Ezekiel?” she squeaked, glancing back at the photo which was still in Indira’s hands. It was of her eldest son in his full school uniform, a cheerless smile on his face. “Wh-why? Is everything okay?”

  Indira went to jump in then, to tell this anxious mother that her son was perfectly fine, but she bit her tongue and let Jackson continue.

  “I don’t know,” he was saying. “You tell us.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Good boy is he?” Jackson asked, before taking a loud slurp of his tea.

  “Ye-es?”

  “Ever give you any trouble?”

  She blinked rapidly again. “I don’t think so? Er, not really.”

  “So why was your husband doling out the punishment two days ago?”

  The words were like a fresh trigger on the woman’s nerves, and she rattled her teacup onto the table and then placed her hands in her lap.

  “Excuse me?” she managed again.

  Again, the upward inflection indicated either serious nerves or something to hide. It was time for a sudden change of tack.

  “Mrs Joves, we’re investigating the death of Kat Mumford last Saturday night, and we’re wondering whether you might have any information to assist us in our enquiries.”

  “I… er, I don’t think so. I thought you spoke to Jacob, er, Reverend Joves?”

  “Yes, and now we’re speaking to you.” He smiled. “Anything you’d like to tell us?”

  She glanced at the photo in Indira’s hands again. She had a terrified look in her eyes.

  “It has nothing to do with my Ezekiel, surely?”

  He said nothing this time, and she looked from him to the picture and back again.

  “I mean, he can be a bit naughty at times, I know that. Sometimes he takes it a little too far, but the school has been very good about it, have been working very closely with us on that. They’re helping us guide him in a much, er, safer direction.”

  “Safer for whom?” Jackson asked, but he didn’t get his answer.

  Azaria’s cheeks suddenly paled, and she stared down at her lap, her lips wedged tight.

  “Good morning, Detectives,” came a deep voice behind them, and while Indira swung around expectantly, Jackson just closed his eyes.

  Damn it. They were so close!

  He opened them again and turned to face the doorway. “Good morning, Reverend Joves.”

  Jacob stepped across the room and stood behind his wife’s chair. “I hope my wife has been cooperative regarding the incident on Saturday night.”

  They nodded, noticing that Azaria had not looked up.

  “And I assume you have asked her all the questions relevant to that night?”

  Jackson sighed. He stood up. This was pointless.

  “That will be all for now, thank you, Mrs Joves.”

  Indira looked at Jackson, confused for a moment, then followed his lead and walked out.

  “She was never going to tell us anything with him hovering over her,” Jackson explained as they dissected the conversation back at their base. “In fact, I bet he was there all along, eavesdropping in the shadows.”

  “Creepy bastard,” Indira replied. “Notice how she went quiet and submissive the moment he walked in?”

  “Yep. Bit like the son.” He rubbed at his head. “I think she
was about to come clean on us. I think we might have got more out of her if he hadn’t bloody walked in.”

  “Yes, but she was talking about something that happened at Zak’s school, not the film night.”

  “Okay, so what happened at school? Could it reflect on this case? Maybe Zak was caught peeking up some girl’s skirt? Maybe he has a pattern of abusive or aggressive behaviour towards women.”

  She shrugged. “Well, good luck getting the information out of either of them. I have a feeling creepy hubby is going to stick very close to his wife in the future. I think you’re spot on. Whatever Zak—or Jacob for that matter—have been up to, that woman will never spill the beans. Not now.”

  He stopped scratching and dropped his head to one side. “No, but I wonder whether someone else might.”

  Chapter 23

  Jackson manoeuvred his vehicle through the tight entrance gates of St Matthew’s College and then parked in the main quadrangle in front of a grand sandstone building, right beside the No Parking sign. As far as Jackson was concerned, there were few perks in being a copper, but illegal parking was one of them.

  After a few wrong turns, he and Pauly found the school principal in a small garden behind the admin block, watering a prickly rose bush.

  “Stress relief,” he told the detectives after the introductions were made.

  “Kid’s a bit of nightmare, hey?” said Jackson.

  “Not at all. It’s the parents that get my blood pumping.” He smiled apologetically. “Just had a meeting with a ‘Mommy Dearest.’ Suffice to say she was not buying the argument that Prince Boofhead could possibly have been smoking cigarettes down behind the gymnasium. Not her son! Never!”

  And to their looks of surprise, he said, “What can I say? I’m six months shy of retirement, and it can’t come fast enough. So what can I help you gentlemen with?”

  “We’re here about another Prince Boofhead. An Ezekiel Joves.”

  Principal Taylor stopped watering and turned to face them. “He’s not so much a boofhead as a broken spirit that one.”

  “Oh?”

  “His parents are the polar opposite of the one I was just referring to. Or at least his father is. Reverend Joves believes that all children are evil and must prove themselves innocent. Has insisted I keep a firm eye and an even firmer hand.”

  “Spare the rod, spoil the child?” Jackson suggested, and he nodded.

  “Except the research has never borne that out, and Ezekiel Joves is the living proof of that. I shouldn’t be saying this, but Jacob is a tough master and his son is a direct reaction to that. Rather than keep his child in line, his rigid discipline has made things much, much worse.”

  “Worse? How so?” Jackson asked, but Taylor had a question of his own.

  “Can I ask what this is regarding?”

  “He and his family were witnesses to a murder at a park in Balmain two weeks ago.”

  “Yes, I was informed.”

  “We’re just chasing up leads.”

  “And Ezekiel Joves is one of those leads?”

  Jackson said, “I hope not but, yeah, maybe. We know he was in trouble here recently, and we’re wondering what that was about. Whether it might help shed light on the case.”

  Taylor thought about that for a moment, then placed the watering can aside and led them down the cobbled pathway, back towards admin.

  “He was a good kid to start with,” Taylor was saying. “A sweet twelve-year-old, like most of them are, but there’s been a lot of angst at home, I gather.” He swung open the front door and headed straight for the reception desk where a young woman smiled up at him.

  “Can you get the Joves file for me please, Sonya. It’s E. Joves. Year 8H.”

  She nodded and he led the way into his office, which was large and plushly decorated, in keeping with private school tradition—including two stiff, high-backed chairs in front of an antique office desk. The only oddity: an enormous fish tank bubbling away in the corner.

  He headed straight for the tank and picked up a jar of fish food. “More stress relief,” he explained just as Sonya appeared with a manila folder.

  He thanked her and then abandoned the fish and sat behind his desk, offering them the chairs in front.

  “Right, let’s see…” He glanced through the folder and back up again. “I guess I should be demanding warrants, that kind of thing.”

  Jackson and Pauly looked at him sheepishly and waited.

  “But you caught me in a good mood, Detectives. I’m on the side of the righteous today, and by that I don’t mean the pastor. I am quite convinced you will find that young Mr Joves had nothing to do with your case, and by helping you today I am, in effect, helping my student.” He paused and stared into the distance, frowning a little. “Or at least I hope I am.”

  He continued scanning the file. “That’s right, yes. Well, if you were to chat with your colleagues at the local area command, you would be able to verify this information yourself anyway, so…” He dropped the file to the desk, leaned back in his chair and said, “Ezekiel Joves was caught trading iPhones last week.”

  “Trading iPhones?”

  “It’s a bit of racket that emerges every now and then, thanks mostly to the millennials’ obsession with devices. He had a bag full of smartphones and was selling them to students for about a hundred a piece.”

  Jackson whistled, thinking Bingo!

  He said, “How very industrious of him. And this is against school rules, I gather?”

  “Absolutely it is. Students may not solicit any material for sale, whether it be a peanut butter sandwich for fifty cents or an iPhone for a hundred dollars.”

  “How many did he have?”

  “Six, I believe. We know his father is a strict Luddite and keeps his son on a tiny ‘stipend’—his word, not mine—so we can only assume he did not buy them with his own money. Where he got them from is anyone’s guess.”

  “Ooh I think I have an idea where he got at least one of them,” Jackson said, and the principal frowned.

  “I was afraid of that.” He closed the file. “He’s not such a bad kid, Detective. He’s just trying to keep up with the Joneses, or in our case, the Packers and the Murdochs.”

  “So those Nikes,” said Pauly, finally cottoning on.

  Jackson nodded, explaining to Taylor. “We saw him remove some expensive trainers before meeting his dad.”

  “The proceeds of crime no doubt. The poor lad is usually in second-hand clothing, a regular in our charity uniform shop. In any case, we made him pay back the money to the students, and we retrieved all the phones, so he’s probably not the most popular person around here at the moment. But my guess is that’s nothing compared to the wrath of his father.”

  “We saw him doing some work around the churchyard,” Pauly said.

  “If that’s all he gets, then he got off lightly this time.”

  “Has Ezekiel been in trouble before?” The man nodded. “Ever had any issues with female students, aggressive behaviour, that kind of thing?”

  Taylor seemed surprised by the question. “Not at all. He’s usually very polite to the girls, almost scared of them I would suggest. As for aggressive behaviour? Only towards himself.” He sighed. “We discovered him cutting himself in the boys’ shower block about six months back. We’ve attempted to get him some counselling, but his father will have none of it.” He shook his head sadly.

  Jackson also felt some sympathy for the muddled-up kid, but he couldn’t think about that now. He needed to focus. “And what happened to the phones, Mr Taylor? Where did they end up?”

  “We dropped them down to your mob, at the local police station. If they don’t find the original owners, we have asked that they go to charity.”

  Jackson nodded, but it wasn’t those particular phones he wanted. He needed the last phone Ezekiel was clutching, the one he now suspected Ezekiel had sold to a young girl fresh off the bus.

  He got to his feet.

  “Thanks fo
r your candour, Mr Taylor, you’ve been most helpful.”

  Taylor stood and shook both their hands. “Like I said, Zak’s not such a bad egg, not when you consider the nest he’s come out of. I’m all for rules, Detective, and am a deeply religious man at that, but Reverend Joves is too Old Testament even for the likes of me.”

  They left the jaded principal to stare gloomily into his fish tank as they made their way out of the building and back to the car.

  “Now what?” Pauly asked just as the final school bell began clanging.

  “Now we see if we can’t crack an egg.”

  It took all of two minutes for Ezekiel Joves to admit to stealing the smartphone from Kat Mumford and another two before handing over the name of his last buyer, a fifteen-year-old student from Meadows Public High School called Shayna Jones.

  She was the girl they had spotted embracing Zak when he got off the bus a few days earlier. They were not actually hugging; they were making the exchange.

  “But I wouldn’t have taken the phone if I’d known that chick was dead,” young Zak cried after they had bailed him up outside the school gate. “I thought she was just sleeping. Honest I had nothing to do with that.”

  “And the glasses?”

  “Huh?”

  “What did you do with the white Gucci glasses Mrs Mumford had on?”

  “What? I didn’t take any glasses. I promise.”

  Jackson stared at him.

  “No way, man, honest. I mean, Ray-Ban I could shift, but Gucci? Too old for my buyers.” He frowned. “And I only took the phone cause it was just lying there. Like she didn’t want it, and she looked so rich, and I bet she’s on some plan where they would’ve given her a free replacement one anyway and…”

  Jackson stopped him there. He didn’t want to hear Zak’s justification, and he certainly didn’t want any more of this backyard confession. He wanted this done properly. Reluctantly he put a call through to St Thomas’s rectory and waited a further ten minutes before Jacob Joves arrived at the school, his face a black blanket of fury, most of which was directed at his son.