Winter was looking for a reason to sweat Jack. Humiliate him. Better still – though he didn’t yet know he had the means to do it – send him for a stay in Long Bay himself. That wasn’t his play, though. His intention was to try to force Jack away from the case, rather than draw him into it, even as a suspect.
‘I put my evidence on-screen,’ said Jack. ‘That’s all there was. Evidence that was independently assessed ahead of the retrial.’ The same lies he’d used on Vanessa Raynor’s show. But this time not just lies: felonies.
‘I want to know what you think, though. Personally.’
‘My opinion was expressed in the final show.’
Winter sniffed. Jack’s head ached, his nose pulsing. No more to be won today.
Winter asked some more background questions. Jack gave him the details of their meeting in the inner-west, the last time he saw her briefly at Long Bay, and what he knew about her personal life. Very little, it seemed. After he’d finished telling Winter that Alexis had left the bar to meet with a new boyfriend – or casual fling, he wasn’t sure – Winter tapped the back of his pen. Seemed interested.
‘Called her, you say?’
‘Twice. I didn’t see exactly, but that was the implication. Phone buzzed twice, anyway. Could have been two different callers, I suppose.’
Winter wrote something down at last.
‘Okay,’ said Winter, ‘now let’s talk about the breaking and entering.’
‘It was just an enter, actually. The door was open.’
‘Fine, call it trespassing.’
‘Trespassing involves private property. The owner is dead, so —’ Jack shrugged.
‘Trespassing involves you being an interfering little shit and being somewhere you’re not supposed to be.’
Jack tapped his phone, dormant in his pocket. ‘Did you record that?’
‘I don’t care. I’m not charging you.’ Jack must have looked surprised. ‘Not because you haven’t done anything wrong, but because I don’t need any more media around this thing. I walk you out of here in cuffs and my days will disappear to press conferences, petitions, more bottom-feeders like you. I don’t need it. But I also don’t need you around this investigation. I don’t want to see you, at all, unless I ask for you. If I see a single camera, I’ll find a way to charge you with obstruction. You are not a police officer. Let us do our job.’
‘I’m here to help.’
‘I look at you sitting here and I’m horrified that you genuinely don’t know what you’re doing wrong. Look around this place.’ That whispering rustle as Jack was guided into the interview room. The sprawl of desks – corkboards and photos of Alexis pinned up. Her name on everyone’s lips. ‘You want me to look into Curtis Wade because you regret your part in getting him free? And, yeah, maybe he did kill her, but you’re the one who butchered any chance we had at lining up the similarities. You’re telling me you want to help? You’re the one who’s handed him everything he needs to deny it. You’ve helped enough.’
Winter leaned over and pressed a button on the table. Recording off. Considered his words, lowered his voice. Those grey eyes were now steel.
‘You made Andrew Freeman out to be a villain, and you made the rest of the Hunter cops look like headless chooks. You fuck with one of us, you fuck with all of us. I see you snooping again, I charge you. Got that? Now’ – he pointed at the door – ‘I think you have a busy day of fucking off to take care of.’
STATE OF PLAY?
Jack tapped out a text message as he walked into the sunshine of Kings Cross. The smell hit first, the bright day encouraging the concrete to sweat out last night’s deposits. Wafts of kebabs, cigarettes. Piss. A jackhammer rattled his teeth. It seemed there was almost constant construction work in this part of town. Every day, new apartments, bars, gyms. Spires of cranes reached into the sky. Sydney gorged itself on construction. Always rebuilding itself, knocking itself down.
His father sat behind the wheel of a VW Golf across the street, jutting out of a loading zone. Jack felt his stomach roll. Not hunger. That was a sense he knew all too well. This was different – unease. Because something Winter had said spooked him. There was a buzz in his pocket, a reply from McCarthy.
NOT SUPPOSED TO TALK TO YOU. INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE TOP. CURTIS NOT A PRIMARY SUSPECT. SYDNEY GUYS INTERVIEWED HIM ALREADY. NOT FORGOTTEN, BUT NOTHING TO MOVE ON. INNOCENT, REMEMBER? COPYCAT KILLER PREFERRED THEORY. OR . . .
A car horn rippled through him. He’d had his head down while crossing the road. He looked up, copped a middle finger through a window, and hustled across. Pulling open the door to his father’s VW, he looked back down at his phone, but that was the end of the message. An ellipsis showed McCarthy was still typing.
‘How’d it go?’ Peter asked.
‘As expected,’ he said.
OR? he typed.
He could picture McCarthy at his desk, pecking at the letters with a single finger. McCarthy wasn’t great with technology. He’d never even heard of podcasts and, luckily, he didn’t watch TV. Having leaked most of the case details to Jack, that was probably a blessing. On television, Jack had edited McCarthy to look like a classically incompetent small-town cop. The comic relief: letting criminals slip under his nose while he sipped tar-black coffee out of a polystyrene cup, RMs crossed on the desk in front of him. Thank God McCarthy didn’t own a television, Jack thought. Otherwise he’d be pissed, and Jack would lose his only source.
Peter pulled away from the kerb. Jack’s phone buzzed.
ORIGINAL KILLER.
A brief pause. A second text.
DELETE THESE TEXTS.
Shit. Jack closed his eyes and let his head loll back on his neck. Shit.
Alexis’s murder couldn’t be tied to Curtis, because the only evidence the police seemed to have was circumstantial. Mainly, the matching MO to Eliza’s death. But Curtis couldn’t be linked to that, he’d been tried and acquitted. Double jeopardy, like Winter had said. In order to tie Curtis to the MO of the new murder, they needed new evidence to tie him to the first. That would enable them to try the second murder with precedent. Fresh and compelling new evidence, Jack believed was the legal-speak.
Jack was the only one with any potential physical evidence. Just like Winter had said, Jack might not only have allowed Curtis to kill again, but he might have primed him to get away with it too.
Before, even when Curtis was walking free across the Long Bay car park, Jack had always fallen back on the fact that maybe Curtis was innocent. He’d hung his hat on reasonable doubt. On his flour-dusted musings in his kitchen. But now Alexis was dead and he had the only piece of evidence that could place Eliza at the vineyard. That could show precedent and MO, and bring Curtis back into the picture on Alexis’s murder. Not reasonable doubt anymore. Reasonable suspicion.
But bringing that knowledge forward would mean admitting to tampering with the case. Obstruction, Winter had threatened. Accessory even, in the hands of a particularly cavalier prosecution. Even a vague confession would lead to warrants, searching of footage. They might find nothing. They might find everything. He would have to find another way.
But he was locked out of the Alexis investigation. He’d burned every cop from here to Byron, McCarthy was off-limits, and Winter was out for blood too. But there was no way Winter could solve the case if they weren’t looking into Curtis Wade.
Jack was the only one who knew everything about the Dacey case, top to bottom. More than every lawyer and every detective on the case. Who better to tie the two together?
‘Can you drop me home?’ he said, noticing his father about to exit the freeway.
‘I thought you could stay, until you felt better?’ Peter said, but flicked the indicator off and prepared to re-merge. His words like Winter’s. Subtext: You’re on the precipice of a relapse here; you shouldn’t be on your own.
‘I have to go away for a few days.’
Peter nodded. They both knew where he was going. Back to Birravale. To open up
old wounds once more.
There was only one way to clear that black mass in his gut, the one that couldn’t be thrown up. That fear. That guilt. That grief for himself, Alexis would have said. Because as long as her murder remained unsolved, she would weigh heavy within him. She would follow him just as Eliza had, and one ghost was enough for Jack.
He’d spent his whole adult life lying to others: to his father, to himself, to his own body. Enough.
If he was going to find out what happened to Alexis, he was going to have to find out what really happened to Eliza Dacey.
The truth, this time.
The suspension rather than the road signs told him he was getting close. It had been lightly raining the whole drive, clouds settled in low over the road. Jack had stayed an extra night at his father’s, so was doing the drive in daylight this time. The canyon-spanning bridges soared over rolling treetops, the light wind rippling them together, puffs of mist spiralling out of the rolls of green fire. Since the freeway turn-off, potholes had cropped up with more regularity. The seats shook, the road thinned and the white lines disappeared. This was a road where you pulled over to let another car pass. Where a cyclist rode in the dirt or copped a Get-The-Fuck-Off-The-Road. The cracked blacktop sloped away from the centre, eroding into the dust at the edges. A long fat snake of a road, bulbous at its middle, digesting a meal.
As he passed into Birravale proper, Jack stopped at the single set of traffic lights. There was only one road through this part of town. He’d used footage from here in his show: locals, with jeans rolled up to their knees and red-stained shoes, mops and squeegees and strong bristled brushes in their hands, pushing the miniature flood to the drains. Scrubbing the road. All out together, lining the road with bent backs like a prison working bee.
Another image surfaced in his memory – a steel table with a yellow L-shaped ruler on it. Next to that, an axe. The axe head was a dull chrome, the handle long and wooden. The handle was stained a deep maroon at the head, the colour crawling up the shaft, until tapering off about halfway. It was a powerful image: Curtis’s axe, varnished in red. But the stain was wine, not blood. Nevertheless, seeing as they hadn’t been able to match her finger wounds to any weapon at all, the prosecution clung to this image. With its own, non-verbal, power. That red-handled axe the very definition of red-handed – and it was guilty of something, all right. Of tearing through Andrew Freeman’s storage tanks, of soaking the main street in wine. But of playing a part in Eliza’s murder? Never proven.
On Jack’s left he passed ‘Australia’s Best Pies’ splashed across a plank of two-by-four hanging from the awning of the bakery’s verandah. That was the fourth such sign he’d seen on the two-and-a-half-hour drive. Inside, there’d probably be a third-place ribbon from over a decade ago: Best Vanilla Slice, Hunter Valley Showgrounds 2004. Country bakeries gave him a run for his money in the honesty stakes.
He drove past a sign for a bed and breakfast. He’d prefer the motel on the other side of town. He drove past a pub, the dilapidated cinema, then past another pub, named the Royal Stag, of course. It was curious that there were two pubs in this tiny town, though perhaps the wine drinkers needed a break every now and then, lips and teeth pink, searching for a cold one at the end of a day.
The wineries were where the real money was. There was a small constellation of them, most within a fifteen-minute drive down back roads from the centre of town. The Wades’, then the Freemans’, would pop up on the right at the edge of the town. Jack was now driving slightly uphill. The road climbed until the Freeman place, up the top of the hill, cut into the side of the hilltop like a millionaire’s treehouse, before dropping over the crest and winding downwards. Over the crest, the corners could only be taken at forty. In the wet, fifteen. A confident driver could get down the other side in thirty minutes. Some drivers, unlucky ones, had found ways to get down it faster. Crosses and flowers periodically dotted sections of mended fence.
Jack drove past single-storey flaking-paint weatherboards, rusting cars and rusted dogs scattered on front lawns, hoses curled on steps like dead snakes. Wheelie bins with yellow lids lined the kerb. The Brokenback Range sat on the horizon, the mountains hulking guardians, the lushness of their canopy looking soft like fur from a distance.
The motel owner was standing in his garden, waving a hose back and forth over the garden, disregarding the general moistness in the air. He idly watched Jack’s car pull into the lot, ceased waving the hose, the stream of water puddling in the low end of the garden and trickling over the kerb. Jack parked in front of a random room. No competition here. There was only one other car in the lot, a corroded white Holden ute. Salt’s victim.
He got out of the car and stretched. The owner put the hose down and retreated into the office. Jack could see him through the window, taking up residence behind the desk. Ready for a booking. He reached out to the wall, flicked a switch. The sign above the driveway flickered from VACANCY to NO VACANCY. Jack looked around the empty lot and sighed, got back in his car. Another lap of the single street ahead.
The pub was empty but full too, rooms booked by shadows. Though the publican at least had the decency to tell him to fuck off.
Jack hadn’t thought it would be quite so obvious. Then again, a murder ripples through a small town in ways it doesn’t in big cities. Alexis was probably already banished from the features section. But Eliza had burnt a scar through this town like fire through snow, and that takes a long time to heal. Four years hadn’t been enough. And here was Jack, ripping the bandaid off again.
His last resort was the bed and breakfast. The light was fading now and the cold was creaking through him. The B & B was a two-storey house, roof sagging with age, but freshly painted. A swinging sign on the letterbox had a phone number on it. Jack didn’t bother calling it; he hopped up the wooden stairs and knocked on the door. He heard a flyscreen rattle. The woman who opened the door did a double-take. She was elderly, and wore a lot of make-up. Sagging with age, but freshly painted.
‘Do you have a room?’ he asked without giving his name. Crossed his fingers.
‘How many nights?’
Alexis’s funeral was in two days.
‘Don’t know. Just start with two,’ he said.
‘I’ll see what I can do.’ She shuffled inside, disappeared behind a door. Jack took two steps in, stood on the rug but close to the door. She hadn’t said no, which was a good sign, but she hadn’t said yes yet either. It didn’t seem like she’d recognised him, but elderly women did passive aggression better than publicans.
‘I have two nights,’ she called. She came back into the room with a red-covered book, filled with neat ruled lines and looping cursive. ‘Four hundred.’
‘Two hundred a night’s a bit steep,’ Jack said, though he knew it was pushing his luck.
‘Is it? Gosh, sorry. Four hundred per night. Eight hundred total.’ She didn’t look up from the book. ‘I’m guessing everywhere else is full. Special rate for you, Mr Quick.’
Jack felt his shoulders drop. He imagined the motel owner and the publican calling her up, agreeing to run him round, jack the price up, split the profits. She’d be shouting them all drinks later.
‘I could go to Cessnock,’ said Jack. ‘It’s not that far.’
‘I suppose it isn’t.’
‘I suppose the motels are full there too.’
‘They might well be.’
‘Okay, then. For four hundred I hope the breakfast’s good.’ Though he didn’t care about the food, he just wanted to needle her. ‘Credit card okay?’
‘Yes, we’re not Neanderthals out here. That was without breakfast, by the way. You want the breakfast rate? Another fifty.’
‘I thought this was a B and B. Without breakfast is fine.’
‘Oh.’ She scowled at the book. ‘Have to give priority to the breakfasters. Premium bookings, you know?’
‘I’m getting the idea.’
‘Only breakfast specials left.’
&nbs
p; ‘Okay, nine hundred then.’ That seemed to make her happy. She nodded, hooked a key off the wall and gestured for Jack to follow her up the stairs. He couldn’t help himself. ‘Why let me stay at all?’
She thought about this for a second, didn’t turn her head. ‘I’m not much a fan of Brett Dawson, the bloke that runs the motel. You’ll do all right, helping me stick it to him.’
‘I’m leverage?’
‘Well-paying leverage.’ She flashed him a dark look as she opened a bedroom door. She was reading him, he supposed, trying to figure him out. ‘Besides, the cops were here yesterday, and they let him go. I’m assuming you’re here to fix that.’
‘You mean you think Curtis did it?’
‘Doesn’t everybody?’
‘Do they?’
‘Bit late to be asking these sorts of questions, is my guess.’ She raised an eyebrow. Alexis was dead. A bit late indeed. ‘We weren’t surprised, you know? They never fit in here, with their tacky restaurant and windfall fortune – everyone here works for their success.’ Jack didn’t stop her to point out she’d just ripped him off nine hundred bucks for a room. ‘And then that dispute with Andrew Freeman. He’s a good man. That’s just nasty stuff, all of it. Of course, we were heartbroken when that poor woman was found. But’ – she held open the door and gestured him inside – ‘I can’t say any of us were surprised.’
‘Were you here when it happened?’
She paused in the doorway, keen to leave. Her response was sharp. ‘I didn’t see the murder.’
‘What about when Curtis attacked Andrew’s wine?’
‘I live here, don’t I?’
‘What was it like?’
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