Horrible as her encounter with Todd had turned out, it had led to her changing, to understanding the world around her so much faster. She would not squander it. These were her last months of school. After she aced her exams she planned to literally get out of town. She reached into her school bag and switched on her transistor, walked with a swing of her hips. They were calling for auditions for the school play: this year South Pacific. Perfect.
Blake walked to the back of the red-brick post office and waited. Doreen had offered to do this, and while he was sure the kid would be putty in her hands, he already had an angle that he thought was likely to win cooperation. It was about fifteen minutes before the kid he figured was Sommerville freewheeled down the path to the rear door. This was better than if he had been going out. He got off his bike, threw a curious glance Blake’s way and was about to enter through the back door when Blake said, ‘We need to talk, Paul.’
Sommerville looked both wary and curious but more the former. He edged over. Blake gave him no time to stabilise.
‘You were at Tom Clarke’s eighteenth,’ he stated.
Sommerville swallowed, guilty. Almost certainly he’d been underage drinking there.
‘What of it? Who are you?’ He grouped the sentences together like that would give him more protection.
‘You could be in deep shit, kid, so a few manners wouldn’t go astray.’
Sommerville was nervous now. Blake remembered when he was this kid’s age. He remembered which guys scared the crap out of you and which guys didn’t. Well, it was pretty easy. Any of Repacholi’s guys scared the crap out of you and they just told you, do this, do that, knowing you dare not refuse because the last thing you wanted was to be on the wrong side of those men. Blake had the kid where he wanted.
‘The night of the party, around eleven at night, there was an accident. Property was damaged by a speeding car.’
Sommerville was eager to distance himself. ‘I don’t know anything about that. I crashed at Tom’s at about nine-thirty.’
‘You were pissed?’
A sulky look. The back door of the post office banged and a man with scaly, Celtic skin and wispy hair came out wearing a PMG sweater. He threw a look at them and then started walking off: morning tea-break most likely.
Blake continued, ‘I have a witness says the car was a Chevy Bel Air. I don’t need to tell you old man Clarke drives one of those. But he wasn’t driving that night. Another witness puts you and Tom in town around nine.’
‘I wasn’t there, that’s a lie. I was pissed. I stayed at the house.’
‘Tom was wearing a shirt with crayfish and crabs on it, right? What did he do, wait till his dad fell asleep then nick the car?’
‘Listen, I don’t know anything about an accident. That’s the truth. Tom wanted to head into town. He was trying to impress some girl.’
‘Which girl?’
‘I don’t know. Some older bird, a prossie.’
‘A prostitute?’
Sommerville gave it up quickly. ‘Tom borrowed money off me, three pounds. That’s why I had to sleep there anyway. I didn’t have enough to get home. I wasn’t the only one he hit up.’
‘He was getting money to pay the woman?’
‘Yeah. But he said it all fell through and next day he gave me my money back. He never said anything about any accident.’
‘He wore his father’s shirt?’
‘I think so, yeah. Look, I haven’t done anything wrong.’
Blake laid it out in his head: Tom Clarke had worn his father’s shirt, he’d borrowed his father’s car, met with Val Stokes out the back of the Surf Shack where they’d had sex before he’d followed her to the Ocean View. He had left in haste and collided with a trash can a hundred yards from the murder scene. Tom Clarke had viciously killed Val Stokes and now he was going to pay.
The Sommerville kid was the clincher. Blake Saunders had been thorough and lined up all the ducks for him. If he was ever going to write his name in the town’s history, this was it. He put on his sergeant’s cap, walked to the post office and called the kid out of the delivery-men pool. Outside he swore him to secrecy, gave him a tip: tell anybody at work who is nosy, that we’re speaking because you were witness to a traffic accident. After Sommerville’s official statement was taken, confirming what Saunders had said, there was nothing for it but to go after Thomas Clarke. It could backfire of course. Anything could backfire. If life had taught him one thing, it was you can’t count your chickens. However, life had also taught him you had to seize the day. What were those pumped-up pricks at the golf club going to say when he, Leslie Nalder, the local plod, delivered the killer that the Homicide boys had missed?
What they were going to say was: please do us the honour of joining our club, sharing in our nineteenth hole conversations, eat our salami and sweet gherkin savouries and rest your expended toothpick with ours.
Edith would be proud. That would, in turn, make him happy. For years they had been looked down upon: the local cop and his missus, not clever enough or smart enough to be asked into the inner sanctum. That would change. According to the Sommerville kid, Thomas Clarke was going to be staying at his dad’s place for the weekend, arriving Saturday morning.
At ten thirty a.m. Saturday, he picked up Saunders. They cruised past the car yard. Winston Clarke was attending to customers under little triangular red, blue and white flags that fluttered in a light breeze. That was good. It would be much better to have the kid alone. They rolled out of town and up Belvedere Road.
Nalder didn’t look at Saunders when he said, ‘You’re here as a favour. Don’t get out of the car.’ He’d already made the ground rules clear but it didn’t hurt to reiterate.
‘How did you go with the bin and the fender?’
‘Bumper bar, mate, we’re not in Texas. Sent if off yesterday. Couldn’t make it look like I had too much advance knowledge or they’d say I should have alerted them earlier. We’ll check out the house first, see if he’s there yet.’
They drove in silence, and turned up the long driveway. They were in luck. A Holden was pulled up near the back steps. He cruised in behind it.
‘You wait here.’
He climbed out of the car and put on his police cap. He stretched, savoured the morning air. Though summer’s sharpest point was blunted, it was still hot and the eucalypts were bone dry. Thunderstorms had been absent for a few weeks now.
He slowly ascended the steps and knocked on the screen door. He could smell toast. A shape emerged from the gloom of the kitchen: Thomas Clarke mid-bite, peanut butter from the looks.
‘Dad’s not here. He’s at work.’
‘This isn’t about your dad, Tom. May I come in?’
The kid looked worried now, the toast drooped. He opened the door.
I’m gonna scare the shit out of you, son, he thought as he squeezed in. He pulled out his notepad, slowly, watched the kid track it. Tom Clarke was a big lump of a kid, broad across the shoulders, slightly pudgy.
‘What’s the problem?’ he asked. He must have noticed that the toast was shaking so he put it down.
‘Your birthday party …’
‘Dad was here the whole time. It was just a private party.’
The kid still hoping it was about underage drinking.
‘I have a report that you were driving your father’s car.’
‘What? No.’
The kid was a bad actor.
‘Son, best you tell the truth here. It was involved in a minor accident and we know it wasn’t your father driving, but you.’
He sensed the kid’s relief. ‘There were no other cars involved. I hit the kerb, that’s all. Knocked a bin over.’
‘Almost directly outside the Ocean View Motel.’
He wasn’t prepared for it. The kid was quicker than he looked, lunging straight past him and ripping open the back door. By the time he moved to follow, the kid had vaulted from the back steps and was running through fruit trees towards the bush.
>
Blake was sitting there drumming his fingers when he saw Thomas Clarke burst out the back door, jump from the stairs, land on his feet and dash into the bush. Without thinking, he threw open the car door and went after him. The kid might have looked big and unfit but sometimes body shapes lie. He was fast, probably a school athlete who had softened up during the long break but could still power. He didn’t bother about paths but just went crashing off into the dense bush that sprawled over uneven terrain. Blake followed. Spiky vegetation ripped at the back of his neck, the pockmarked ground pitched him like a rolling deck. He couldn’t see Clarke ahead but the sound of him was Blake’s compass. Then he heard a startled deep oath and a thump of body hitting dirt. He broke through a curtain of brown foliage in time to see Clarke getting back to his feet and trying to continue but he’d done something — twisted an ankle, bruised a knee, whatever — and couldn’t accelerate in time. Blake threw himself at him, smacked into his back and pulled them both to ground. Clarke tried to break free but Blake had him. Somewhere in the background, Nalder was calling out for them.
Blake’s chin ground into the back of Clarke’s shoulder. He snarled into the kid’s ear, ‘You killed her, you son-of-a-bitch. You chopped her up and let another guy take the fall.’
Clarke managed to roll over, his eyes were wide with fear and he had ceased to struggle.
‘No, no. I didn’t kill her. When I got there, it was horrible, like an abattoir. She was already dead.’
The drycleaner was a thin man. Too thin. Blake figured him for an alcoholic or a cancer sufferer. He looked suspiciously at Blake like he just knew he wasn’t the same guy who had left the article of clothing there. But Blake had the ticket.
‘I’ll just go and check,’ the drycleaner said before slipping out the back through a dusty salmon-pink curtain. The story the Clarke kid had given them was plausible. Plausible in exactly the same way that a killer who’d had nearly two months to prepare his story would make it. The kid had admitted in front of both Blake and Nalder as they stood over him in the bush, that he had indeed spied Val Stokes leaving his father’s house as he had arrived. He’d caught her as she was about to jump into her car, assumed she was a pro servicing his old man and asked how much for sex. She’d looked him up and down and told him twelve pounds. He’d hastily arranged to meet her in the Surf Shack carpark around nine thirty that night. Because he didn’t have twelve pounds on him he’d been forced to borrow from his mates.
The drycleaner emerged. In his right hand was a coathanger. On the coathanger was a shirt featuring crabs and lobsters. So much for the incinerator theory.
Now the shirt hung in a room in the police station. Blake assumed the sparsely furnished room was Nalder’s office. He’d never been in here before. They’d entered via the back door, a back lane direct into a rear carpark. The two constables were out. Down the hall in a bare brick cell was Thomas Clarke.
Blake said, ‘Do you believe him?’
Nalder snorted. ‘That he didn’t butcher her? Of course he’s going to say that.’
‘He says he threw up after he saw her. That would account for the vomit out the front of the motel unit.’
‘He might have done that after he slaughtered her.’
‘True. But the shirt would have been soaked in blood, right? I mean, his story that he took the shirt to the drycleaner because it got some puke on it, makes sense. He wanted to hand a clean shirt back to his old man when he noticed it missing.’
‘He might have taken the shirt off, fucked her, killed her, put the shirt back on, puked when he went outside.’
That was a possibility Blake could concede. But would Val Stokes have had sex with the kid unless he’d paid? And he’d given the money back. Mind you, he could have got that in the meantime.
‘Your trouble is, you don’t want anybody to be guilty,’ Nalder said. ‘This is sure as shit going to get Crane off unless you kybosh it. You start saying the kid didn’t do it, Vernon is going to go straight back to theory number one. Your beach bum mate got a lift with Stokes and killed her. The kid turned up and found her.’
All that was true.
‘Listen,’ the big cop leaned in, elbows on his desk, knuckles like boulders rolling against their brothers. ‘His old man will pay a shitload for a lawyer. You don’t think he’s not going to go through all this too?’
It was true. Blake didn’t figure it was his job to get everybody off.
Nalder picked up his telephone receiver. ‘I’m going to call Vernon. Tell them they might have the wrong bloke. You want to stop me?’
As Nalder’s fat finger turned the rotary dial, Blake got up and slipped back out the way he had come, walking through the open rear area of the building.
‘Hey, Yank.’
Blake looked around and saw pale skin behind a small barred window, high up. It was Thomas Clarke. Blake just wanted to get out of there but he relented, and walked over.
‘The shirt checked out, right? I told you I didn’t burn it. She was fucking dead.’
‘Save it for the cops.’
Blake turned and started walking.
‘I didn’t kill her. I didn’t.’
The words bounced off Blake. It wasn’t the first time he’d walked away from a desperate man. It got easier. Thomas Clarke continued to scream his innocence but all Blake heard in his brain was the rush of the past.
13. Glow
My worst fears have nothing to keep them at bay but the limp pages of an out-of-date Post. That’s what Doreen thought as she turned the pages while sitting on a chrome kitchen chair. Surgeries were all the same. Surely no-one read these things, they were just something to do with your hands. She soaked a minute or two with the spot-the-difference sketches but some selfish prior patient had circled most of them in biro. Anyway, once you’d tried a few you knew where to look: the fingers on one hand, whether one shoe was further forward than the other, if somebody was wearing glasses. The other woman in the room sat perfectly still, her gloved hands resting on her matching handbag. From the region of the doctor’s rooms came an annoying and persistent cough. It was autumn now, Anzac Day only a week away but the sun was still strong. You think things are going well and then you get punished for relaxing. You wind up here on a chrome kitchen chair with an out-of-date magazine in your hands. Her mind drifted back over the last six weeks: the sense of shock when they arrested Thomas Clarke. Nalder had taken to strutting around town. Even places where he’d never been spotted before got paid a visit so townspeople could pay homage. There was never any mention of Blake but she knew that’s what he wanted. He’d gone back to surfing in the morning, rehearsing with the band and mooching around his house at night. It was colder now on the sandhill but not so chilly she’d broken the habit. Kitty had finally found her feet. She was enjoying school, short-listed for the lead role in the school play, loving life.
I can take a little credit for that, Doreen thought.
It made her feel better about herself. Right now she needed that. The nights could be so lonely. The television helped. She’d had it for nearly a month. The picture still seemed odd, egg-shaped, but what did it matter? For too long she had driven past silent houses, the blue-grey glow of the screen sneaking out of the curtains, beckoning. The salesman had suggested Pye. Maybe he was on a commission but she didn’t mind. Everybody does what they have to. It had been so much more fun than she had imagined. There were a lot of westerns but surprisingly she enjoyed them. Maverick was her favourite and yes, that’s because James Garner reminds you of Blake, she told herself. Paladin on the other hand wasn’t a thousand miles from Nalder. Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke was of course, herself, and Andy was kind of like Chester but she couldn’t see Blake in James Arness.
The door from the inner surgery opened and both she and the older woman with the straight back looked up expectantly. Doreen had arrived first but she’d been early and you just never knew about appointment times. The nurse-cum-receptionist exited with the cough culprit, a middle-
aged woman in a dowdy cardigan. That’s how we treat each other, Doreen was aware of thinking, like other people are just some impediment, the sooner they are out of the way the better. The cough woman shuffled off.
The nurse announced, ‘Mrs Waters?’
The other woman got up and followed her in. The door closed. Doreen was back alone. She drummed up enough empathy to consider this must have been how Crane had felt, alone in a cell. Now Thomas Clarke would be experiencing the same fear: a life that was essentially over. In his case, he deserved it. Poor Valerie Stokes, knife blows raining down on her, thump, thump, thump. Doreen shuddered. A life was supposed to be sacred but Valerie Stokes had found fame as a subject of lurid gossip. Some ghastly people, as many women as men, had decided she’d got what was coming to her — and so far the information about her starring in a blue movie had not come out. No doubt that would emerge in the trial that hadn’t yet started. Nalder had revealed Clarke was pleading not guilty. She’d expected Crane to return on his release but when he didn’t, she’d asked herself, why would you? With the exception of Blake, everybody here, including her, had judged him guilty on the flimsiest of evidence. Guilt. A distorted, friendless word. It implied sin, crimes committed. In truth, guilt was only experienced by somebody who cared about the lives of others. Her mind drifted: her primary-school playground, the war still fresh, boys arms extended for Spitfire wings, girls clustered under the big gum playing doctors and nurses, pushers and prams everywhere when the handbell was rung and mums came for their brood. Baby boom. Her own class of 1939 births swamped by little ’uns conceived in the frenzy of peace. Finding yourself a minority before you knew it. Rural families. Kids who walked home and fed chooks and horses, bathed brothers and sisters, helped get tea on, chopped wood. All the older girls like her doting on the grade ones. Most of her classmates would be mothers now. Hell, half of them were married before she’d finished school. She on the other hand had loaded up with jet fuel, torched everything on the way out of her past.
River of Salt Page 22
