Greenlight

by Benjamin Stevenson

  ‘Why not just build this over the old site?’ Jack said, following her to a table – they were all set up for service, which was eerie – at the centre of the parabolic windows. ‘Surely it’s cheaper to refit the cellar and restaurant than knock it down, and rebuild in a different spot?’ Not to mention, Jack thought, if you didn’t piss off the old owner making him knock down his pride and joy, he wouldn’t have ruined your land by concreting it.

  ‘Curtis wanted to make his own mark,’ Lauren said, pulling out a chair. She shot a glance up the hill and shook her head. ‘Such boys. Like dogs pissing on trees.’

  The night yawned before them and at first all Jack could see was black. His eyes slowly adjusted. From their table, he had a panoramic view of the vineyard. Andrew might prefer to look down on everyone, but the view was just as good from here.

  There was a small light up the hill, in the air. Almost a star. It was Andrew’s lantern, Jack guessed, on top of the silo. Was he up there? Could he see them?

  ‘Hope steak’s okay, we don’t really have the full menu at the moment. We’ll need a new chef when we reopen.’

  ‘You had to let them go?’ His stomach rose as if on a tide, his impact on the town confronting him again, like the wine stains in all these different houses. You ruined a lot of reputations, Andrew had said.

  ‘Thank God, actually. He was a shitty chef; we wanted to fire him for ages. I suppose that’s one good thing that’s come out of this.’ She laughed gently, and then quietened, examining Jack, whose face must have betrayed him. ‘I didn’t actually mean that. Just trying to . . . I don’t know. Just trying not to think about the worst of it. Sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine. I got the joke.’

  ‘Tough crowd.’ Lauren raised her eyebrows. ‘Are you always this jittery? No wonder you throw my brother off balance. Shall I open this?’ She stabbed the bottle at him.

  ‘Only if you want, I don’t really drink.’

  She thought for a minute and then put the wine to one side.

  ‘Well, eat,’ she said. ‘You’re too skinny. I could drink wine from those collarbones.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Jack shifted in his seat.

  ‘I think that’s in a poem I read once. If we’re going to work together, Jack, you’re going to have to loosen up.’ She started eating. Jack put half a potato in his mouth because she was watching, mushed it against the back of his teeth. Sludge.

  Work together? She thought she was recruiting him. Team Curtis.

  ‘You want me to help you prove Curtis innocent?’

  ‘No, actually. I don’t. I said I want us to work together.’

  ‘You’ll help me prove him guilty? You think he did it?’

  She shook her head, sawed a piece of steak, popped it in her mouth and spoke while chewing: ‘No. But you do. And that’s important. I figure devil’s advocates are the best way about something like this. We’ve got different information. Fuck it, I’m opening this. No?’ Another jab of the bottle.

  Jack shook his head.

  ‘Listen. My family lives under this shadow. I live under this shadow. Eliza, Alexis, they block out the sun. My surname is spit in people’s mouths. You’re not getting anywhere on your own, are you? I’ll give you everything you need. You can come onto the property. You can talk to Curtis. Never alone.’ She must have seen the look on his face. ‘I’ll be there. You can look through the house, the yard, the restaurant. Tear apart the shed if you need to. I don’t care. But in return I need your perspective and your ear. I want to know what you know. You have more details of the investigation side of things. You’ve got a link to that new detective. I know there’s more evidence somewhere.’

  Jack set his face, gave nothing away, not least that his link to Winter was more that he might be arrested by him eventually.

  ‘You can’t fit everything into one miniseries. I need to know everything behind the scenes. And you know you need me too.’ She’d rehearsed this speech, Jack realised. She opened the bottle and poured herself a glass.

  ‘Does Curtis know about this?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And if he’s guilty?’

  ‘If you prove him guilty. I’ll accept that.’

  She was right. He needed her perspective. Her access to the property and her candour. The police had overturned the property with warrants and swat teams in velcro vests with assault rifles. But they’d done it four years too late, the case solved so quickly first time around. Maybe the truth was overgrown, covered in weeds. And they’d never had the Wades’ cooperation. Maybe Lauren knew something and didn’t even know it.

  ‘Why are you really doing this?’ he said.

  ‘Do you have a brother?’

  Jack nodded.

  ‘You know what it’s like then. You’re supposed to stick up for them.’

  Whump.

  He knew.

  ‘Your brother,’ said Jack, ‘he’s quite a bit older than you. It must be an odd family dynamic.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ Lauren said. ‘I don’t really think about it. You know how some people want to know the meaning of life or whatever? Why we’re here?’

  ‘We’re getting philosophical now?’

  ‘I just mean that I do know why I’m here. Why is any child a decade younger than their sibling?’ Jack nodded in recognition. ‘You got it. I was born to save my parents’ marriage. They hoped I’d help them reconnect. And I know what you’re thinking.’ She must have seen the dark glimmer across Jack’s face as he remembered Lauren’s mother hadn’t made it through her birth. ‘How’s that for an existential crisis? My purpose was to bring my family closer together. Imagine messing up your entire existence before you’ve even opened your eyes.’

  ‘Family loyalty? That’s why you want to help your brother?’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘You’re overanalysing me. I don’t really know how I feel. But I think last night was evidence in my brother’s favour. Alexis’s killer is out here looking for something. So we need to nail this copycat fella.’

  He nodded again. She’d said previously she didn’t think it was a copycat, but it seemed she was coming around.

  ‘Listen, all I know is that women around my brother keep turning up dead.’ She paused. ‘Don’t make me say it. The killer was in my house, Jack.’

  And there was the real truth. Lauren was scared. It was so simple. But it was also a subtle guilt trip, part of her polished speech: If you don’t help me, can you live with another dead woman on your hands? Expertly done. She should make TV.

  ‘That’ll go cold, if you don’t start it. Then I know you’ve been itching to take a walk through here.’ She pointed to the window. See what I can offer.

  She was right, though; he was at a dead end without her. And if he walked away, and something happened to her . . . He ate a few bites, because he didn’t want to talk and she’d noticed how little he’d put in his mouth. Two meals today. The tightrope thrummed. Jack’s internal acrobat wobbled, one leg in the air, poised like a wishbone.

  ‘We can try,’ he said, finally. ‘But let’s be clear. I think your brother is a monster. I still think he killed Eliza, but I can’t prove it. Alexis, I’m open to suggestion. But he’s a killer. You won’t change my mind.’

  ‘Honesty is all I’m asking. Tell me everything you know. Do we have an agreement?’

  Lauren raised her glass. Jack raised an imaginary one in return. They’d work together to work against one another. A deal.

  ‘To innocence,’ she said.

  ‘To guilt.’

  Lauren and Jack circled into the vineyard. The temperature in the air had dropped, but the stones on the drive still held the heat of the day. The sky was so clear, he didn’t need a torch. The small light up the hill was gone now. Jack’s cheeks felt bunched and swollen, his eyes stinging. He’d had too much sun today.

  He’d done too much walking, too. Far beyond his supervised allowance at the treatment centre. Also more eating than he was accustomed to, managing half his
steak in prideful swallows before succumbing to the excuse of a big lunch. A fucking kid’s meal. He could feel the food inside him, acutely aware of where it sat. It swelled, an island, the seas of his stomach sloshing against it. But the cliff faces of that island weren’t eroding and falling into the sea, as they should have been. Instead they were taking hold, scuttling ships and pulling more rocks into their tide. Clogging him up. He felt it. His acrobat, arms extended, wandered from shipwreck to shipwreck, mast to mast, above the jagged outcrop and vicious seas. Twirling his baton, jester’s hat wobbling, bells ringing. The sea arced beneath the acrobat, spat up, hissed. Understanding the science inside yourself is part of accepting it, the nurses had said, so he tried to think about digestion, about food broken down. Because no matter how you prepare it, if you take away the smells and the colours and the textures: food is just sludge. The shit that goes in is the same as the shit that comes out, just skipping a few steps. The jester bells kept ringing. A small piece of the cliff crumbled and splashed into the acid. Lauren was talking to him.

  ‘Where we’re walking now, this is where the patrol car drove in.’

  ‘The first question is, why was she on your property at all?’ Jack asked.

  ‘It’s a public winery. I mean, normally we invite only the restaurant guests to wander around. But there’s nothing to stop someone else.’

  ‘Did she eat at the restaurant?’

  ‘Well I think we would have noticed if someone who’s been away for eight months came in for a meal.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘We did check, and no. The police checked our bank records, and interviewed the staff.’

  ‘So she isn’t at the restaurant, which means she comes in off the road’ – Jack pointed at the junction where the asphalt hooked right and turned to pebbles – ‘and then walks’ – he looked along the fence line, bordered by vines, down to where she died – ‘this way?’

  Jack looked along the fence line for breaks, anything odd where someone could have come in. Lauren followed two paces behind. The grass was short and lush; it folded under his feet. Even if the police hadn’t butchered the initial investigation, footprints would have still been impossible to come by unless it was wet. A few hundred metres along, the fence curved away from the road and then stopped at the patch of bushland where Jack had found Eliza’s shoe. Behind them, the vines ran up towards the restaurant. Halfway between the bushland and the restaurant was where the body had been found.

  ‘There’s no way she could have got from there to here,’ Jack pointed at the north-west corner, all the way across the yard, where supposedly her footprints had been found. The truth of that was obvious. They both knew she hadn’t been killed there.

  ‘What if she was draped over someone’s shoulder?’ Lauren asked.

  ‘It’s possible. Hard to tell, everything was so jumbled. Curtis’s footprints were all over the place.’

  ‘It’s his winery.’

  ‘I know. I’m just making the point.’

  ‘Wheelbarrow?’

  ‘Heavy, again, weighed down with a body. Those tracks would probably be clearer. Even they wouldn’t have missed that.’ And again, the problem was that all of these were relatively normal for a winery. Footprints, wheelbarrow tracks, a ride-on mower. Not incriminating.

  ‘So she fell from the sky.’ Lauren shrugged. ‘I think the question is less how she got here and more where she was really killed. If we can find that, we’ll know how she got here.’

  ‘And if Curtis put her here. The question is why.’ Jack paced back and forth, the ground alternating from wet to dry. Irrigation. It was unmown. Longish grass, knotted together. And the larger question plagued him, the one Jack had built his series on: Why would Curtis place the body here, with all signs pointing back to him?

  ‘Humour me – he planted a body that led right to him?’ Lauren must have been reading his thoughts.

  ‘That’s the tricky part.’

  ‘Andrew Freeman broke our windows,’ she said, as if that equated to murder. ‘He hated the new restaurant. This is where the old one was. Do you think it’s some kind of message? That there’s some meaning beneath the body being right here?’ She stamped her feet, in a dull thud, as if to illustrate the point.

  ‘Andrew didn’t break your windows.’

  ‘He did. I told you, it’s a pissing contest.’

  ‘Brett Dawson’s sons broke your windows. So you’d hire them to fix it. It was a cash grab, not a feud.’

  She thought about that for a minute. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Let’s keep going,’ said Jack, and they walked back to the edge of the bush, turned, and continued along the property line. They soon reached the point where Eliza had smoked a cigarette. Jack had been right in his guesswork in his kitchen – the line of sight from the Freeman restaurant windows was clear. From the top of the silos, clearer still. Jack tried to picture Eliza, arms wrapped around herself, stamping her feet from the cold. On a clear night, a small ember might have been visible from up the hill. Even if Andrew had seen someone – and he hadn’t, or so he said – there was no way he’d know who it was. Why did this cluster of footprints bother Jack? What was so interesting about a cigarette?

  ‘Her footprints were here, yeah?’ Lauren pointed at the ground.

  ‘Yeah. Well. Maybe hers,’ Jack said, poker-faced.

  ‘Gee,’ Lauren said, ‘your case would be a lot more solid if we knew that.’ She meant it as a joke, not knowing that he was the only one who could place Eliza there. Jack didn’t know what to say. He swallowed. He ran his tongue along the back of his teeth. His acrobat wobbled.

  ‘I’m thinking about all of this,’ Lauren continued. ‘And don’t some killers want to get caught?’ She was clearly more able to jump across to his perspective than he was to hers. ‘They write letters to the police. All that psycho stuff?’

  ‘Maybe in the movies,’ Jack said.

  ‘I hate that.’

  ‘Hate what?’

  ‘Serial killers in movies. They’re always supposed to be these incredible geniuses. Twisted souls, but clever, deep. Deserving of their own’ – she hunted for the word – ‘kind of, mythology, I guess. They’re celebrities now, for fuck’s sake: Zodiac, Jack the Ripper, the Nailbiter Killer. Whoever killed Eliza, they weren’t some genius. Even those other words they use for criminals – psychopath, sociopath – make them sound too interesting. This is no mastermind. This is a killer of women. Nothing more.’

  For the first time, there was a hard edge to Lauren’s tone. She hated whoever killed these women as much as he did. The world on her shoulders at the age of twenty. They kept walking, now around the house, towards the tip of the driveway.

  ‘Eliza had a story to sell,’ Jack said. ‘She said she’d seen something. I’m wondering if it was enough to kill over. Did she ever say anything to you?’

  She hesitated slightly, thinking. ‘No. Like I said, we knew each other but it wasn’t really a tight friendship. I’ll tell you what though, I have listened to that message, and the strange thing is – she didn’t sound scared.’ Jack nodded in agreement. Lauren sighed. ‘Another in a series of if-only’s. If only he’d called her back. Tell you what, I’m sick of these fucking journalists. Present company excluded, of course.’

  ‘I’m not a journalist.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah.’

  ‘And what about Andrew Freeman’s witness?’

  ‘Andrew Freeman’s full of shit,’ Lauren said. ‘I don’t know why he was so convinced it was my brother, unless he wanted it to be my brother.’

  Jack nodded again; that was what he’d said in the show.

  ‘The cops think Alexis’s murderer might be a boyfriend,’ Jack said, starting to feel he was pushing Lauren too hard. ‘So there’s no genius there. Just blind rage, a king hit.’ She looked at him dully, so he added, rotating his fingers back and forth between them, ‘In the interest of sharing.’

  ‘Now you’re getting it,’ she said brightly, momentary sullenness gone. ‘Look at
us, a regular Robin and Watson.’ He was about to correct her when she continued: ‘Because sidekicks do all the work.’

  ‘That’s why the cops don’t think it was Curtis. They’re pretty confident Alexis’s murder was staged.’

  ‘Did you know her boyfriend?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘She had a second phone. The cops didn’t know about it.’

  ‘But you do?’

  ‘They know now. But no one knows who this guy is. She took a call on it when we met up. Before —’

  ‘What does this have to do with Eliza?’

  ‘I don’t know. But that’s why I think Curtis might be low on their list of suspects.’

  ‘So they think the crimes are unrelated?’ Lauren was thoughtful. Jack assumed she’d be happy about this, but she seemed more confused.

  ‘Legally speaking, they are.’

  ‘Do you? I mean, we’re talking about a copycat now, right?’

  ‘It might have been a crime of opportunity. Which doesn’t mean it was a deliberate copycat, rather a convenient shield. Curtis might be a mask, not a target. I think knowing what happened to Eliza will help us solve Alexis’s murder. Two killers though . . .’ He shrugged.

  ‘Is that all the police are going on?’

  No, Jack thought.

  ‘Yes,’ Jack said.

  Jack could practically hear Lauren’s rolodex of evidence whirring in her brain. ‘Anything else useful you can think of?’