Crystal Coffin
Authors: Anita Bell
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Crystal Coffin
ePub ISBN 9781742744971
Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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Copyright © Anita Bell 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written persmission of the Publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Bell, Anita, 1967- .
Crystal coffin.
ISBN 1 74051 752 0.
1. Murder - Fiction. 2. Art - Forgeries - Fiction. I. Title.
A823.4
Photograph of the author by John Hellewell Photographics.
Cover photographs by Getty Images.
Cover design by Greendot Design.
This book is lovingly dedicated:
To Mum and Dad, of course, who had the crazy idea of popping me out in the first place.
To Snake, Rabbit and Monkey, without whom, I'd be way too sane to write.
To Wumpkin and Squirrel for their love and patience.
To Katherene McNeil, my study buddy, for her gutsy critiques and for keeping up with me chapter by chapter.
To Author John Marsden for his workshops, advice and guidance.
To Hazel, Linsay, Glenda, Emma, Mel, Andrew and the gang at Random House for their encouragement, support and professional dedication.
And to the guys in the field, the men and women of our Armed Forces and Police, some of whom cannot be named without compromising their safety, but who serve our country every day in ways that none of us can ever really appreciate.
To those who have lost their lives defending us, and to those who will.
Lest we forget.
To RAAF Media personnel Richard Hogan and Squadron Leader Brian Richardson for helping me to find my way. To FILt Rachel King, for crawling out of her death bed to provide much of the military procedures and insights into East Timor. To SSGT Byron Hall, Military Police Platoon Investigator, INTERFET, for his technical advice and expertise in East Timor. To John Farrell and his wife Robyn, producers of Australian and NZ Defender Magazine, for their down-to-earth â and often airborne â perspective. And to Army Reserve Gunner (retired), Bruce McDonnell, who made sure that Locklin and I could lay seige to the village without getting ourselves killed.
To Police Superintendent Peter Slatter (retired), for helping me onto the right track. To Snr Constable Les Billington, Detective Sarah Martin and Jill Johnstone, Queensland Police, for technical and police procedural info. To John Taylor, Queensland Police Armourer, for translating ballistics info into something that even I could understand.
To Registered Nurse, Sharon Toohey, for helping me wound everyone properly and to her husband John, for all kinds of technical advice.
To Monica Moodie, South East Queensland Water Commission, for boating info that led me to a spectacular explosion.
To Fr Marion Free, for her insight and support.
To the Esk Shire Council and Arts Queensland for research assistance. Â Â 
To Scott and Lea Bowtell, Weona Ostrich Farm, for making sure their birds didn't kill me. To Julie, Melanie, Tammie, and Angie for letting me use them as guinea pigs. (Thanks Mick!) And to Peter and Ann Olsen, and Jaimie Ringering, for watching my back in everything else.
And to everyone I've mentioned â and to those I can't for security reasons â my sincerest thanks for your willingness to share knowledge in that which others may only dream
.
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. The characters, corporations, governments, organisations and other entities mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without any intent to describe actual conduct.
The stalker braked at the traffic lights and looked at his watch. It was midnight, which meant he had plenty of time.
He waited for a green arrow and turned left off Roma Street into the overnight car park that was adjacent to Brisbane's interstate train station. He drove up two levels until he could park his Mercedes within sight of the main ticketing gate. Then he circled slowly.
There were only eight cars on this level. One was close to where he wanted to be and he backed into the space in front of it, leaving only one space for someone to park between him and where he expected the girl to appear.
He smiled, thinking that he could watch for her through the dark glass of his driver's side window without even straining his neck. Then he set the alarm on his watch to wake him at 9.15am.
He doubted that he'd sleep that long. Taxis would start pulling in to the rank to his left after six o'clock and from then on it would only get busier. But that still gave him time to have breakfast at a local cafe, freshen up in the traveller facilities and ensure his men were in place before her train arrived. It also gave him time to make a few phone calls â from a phone booth instead of from his mobile â to add to the illusion for police, that he was still working in Sydney.
The plan wasn't foolproof, he knew. She could take another exit off the platform. There were at least four that he knew of, but he'd already taken precautions to prevent that. If the girl wanted to survive in a strange town, he knew she'd need money and a place to stay and he'd left all the right breadcrumbs to help her to do that.
She'd step out of her economy class carriage at 11.17am and see an advertisement for a reputable employment agency right in front of her. There'd be another one at the top of the steps to the subway and more along the walls of the underground corridor. Each would have a removable sticker placed over them advertising free accommodation for the first five job applicants that day. One of his men would hand her a promotion leaflet, promising that the agency was only a short walk around the corner. Another would shout similar messages to commuters until she had passed. And a third would wait outside the gates and arrange an accident for her in front of a bus or truck if she failed to take their bait and went the wrong way.
He shifted over to the front passenger seat and nestled his head against the soft leather. He slid his hand down to the electric controls on the side and adjusted the angle of the seat until it was almost as comfortable as a four-star hotel bed. Then he locked the doors. All he had to do now was the fun part, following the girl from the agency to the country town where he needed her to stay until he was ready to take care of her permanently.
And in the meantime, he could sleep.
Thursday, 2am
Jayson Locklin saw the security guards jog out from their lunch room and dropped to his belly before they could see him on the other side of the wire. To his right, horses screamed at the door to the slaughter shed, but the two men broke into a run in the opposite direction.
They were headed for the boom gates. Locklin could hear an angry crowd of activists out there, daring the authorities to drag them away, but as the two guards joined three more who were already at the entrance, they seemed unaware that their biggest problem was behind them.
Locklin was at the wire. Beside him, an overgrown gully dropped to a narrow, polluted creek and on the far side, a row of weatherboard houses marked the edges of suburbia. He'd left his father's truck there, and he could see the tail end of its livestock crate between the houses. But there was no time to go back to hide it properly. His father had been murdered, and if he didn't hurry, a good friend would be next.
He dropped a solitary bridle at the foot of the four metre security fence, shifted a pair of pliers from his back pocket to between his teeth and scaled the tightly knit wires using only his bare fingers and the tread on his army boots.
It wasn't a prison so there was no razor wire looped around the top, and the wires weren't electrified. But they were made of a heavier gauge than he'd expected and his short-handled cutters didn't give him the leverage he needed to make it an easy job.
The knuckles on his right hand bled as his skin grated against the wire. Each squeeze on the pliers tightened the muscles up to his shoulder and with every contraction, agony radiated from the ten-day-old bullet wound near his collarbone. There was a similar wound on his left thigh, where a small piece of shrapnel was still embedded beside the bone above his knee, but the stitches were drier there and they itched more than they hurt inside his jeans.
He kept cutting, working his way methodically down the mesh, focusing the pain that burned across his back and chest into a rage that he'd been trained to control. They were only civilians, he reminded himself, and there was no machine gun waiting for him as there had been on his last mission in East Timor, so the danger was less. But the stakes were higher.
The army would soon notice that he was missing. If they figured out what he'd done in that small village before he'd escaped back to Australia, then his disappearance would only make things worse. The United Nations would be informed and military police would track him down.
âHe's only nineteen,' some would say.
âBut he's a soldier who defied orders to kill eleven men,' would be their answer. And he wasn't naive.
Three years as a cadet at high school and two years afterwards in the army had opened his eyes to the fact that his own country would be forced to offer him up to the others as a scapegoat. Only his court martial could prevent the political stability of the entire region from breaking down. And to prevent war, he'd go back to let them do that. But not yet.
He still had thirty hours of freedom left and if he was going to spend the rest of his life in jail, he was going to use every minute of it for a little mission of his own.
It took seven of his precious minutes to slice the fence from top to bottom and then he slipped through, leaving the whole mesh panel kinked open by the width of a fist.
He checked for watchful eyes and looped the bridle back over his shoulder. He tightened his grip on the metal bit so that it wouldn't clink and he forced his pliers deep into his back pocket. Then he bolted for the back of a small supply shed set about twenty metres inside the wire.
The administration block and the lunch room were right in front of him and he could see the staff parking area half full of old cars to the left of that. The boom gates where the protesters shouted were another 400 metres to the north at the front.
An air horn sounded out there from the road and Locklin saw a Kenworth haul a trailer full of horses up to the crowd. An indicator flashed as the activists pushed in front of the truck, and the noisiest group clambered onto the bullbar. They shouted insults and waved their placards in front of the driver so he couldn't see the driveway, and as reporters screeched to a halt in a van beside the frenzy, Locklin saw another guard run out from the lunch room.
This one pulled a mobile phone off his belt and stabbed at the buttons. âWe've got trouble,' he shouted into it. âThe truck's early! We need two squad cars!'
The guard ran to join his mates and Locklin didn't hear the rest, but he didn't need to. The nearest squad cars were at Ipswich Police Station and he knew that made them less than twelve minutes away if they hustled.
More horses whinnied from within the yards, but not the one he was listening for. Two men shouted from beside the slaughtershed, and Locklin began to worry that he was too late.
âWe need another five,' one man shouted.
âMake it ten,' called the other. âAnd get a move on. There's more coming in.'
Locklin didn't see who they were shouting to, but he knew there had to be a rider around there somewhere. Horseback was still the best way to push most kinds of animals from one yard into another, but that wasn't good news for him. A guy on a horse would have a better chance of spotting him over the rails than anyone near the shed.
There was a large open space between him and where he wanted to be â too large to risk dashing across if there was someone galloping around out there. Instead, he worked his way around an empty refrigerated van. It was backed up under the shade of a tall grove of gums and Locklin heard the driver snore as he moved quickly alongside the cab!
He kept his head down as he looked around, and then lunged across the smaller gap to the stockyards, landing in the dirt beside a thick steel pillar.
There were five holding yards, but only three were being used.
The one closest to the slaughterhouse had an internal sorting yard that curled around into a long narrow chute, and the hungry building was fed livestock through it, like an ogre that sucked meat up to its mouth through a straw.
The chute was built with similar dimensions to one that Locklin had helped his father build at home when he was only teat high to a milking cow, except this one was much longer than the crush they'd built at home for handling cattle. An extra rail had been added around the top to handle animals that were more agile than cows, and had longer legs and smarter heads. It was the same width though, making it impossible for a grown animal of either kind to turn around or jump out â confirming the fears of the greenies at the front gate that this meatworks wasn't processing cows any more.
The holding yard was full of horses and there was a mob of about a dozen head already pushed up the crush towards the building, with another sixty waiting in the other yards. All of them, he could tell from the bloodshot whites of their eyes, could smell their own death coming.
Most of the animals were shades or grey. There were a dozen of more chestnuts and about half as many bays, so the blacks stood out, but he couldn't see the chocolate one that he was looking for. He poked his head above the top rail and looked for a broad white blaze crowned with a star, but he couldn't see it. Then he squatted, peering between the bottom rails but there were too many white socks to spot the four that looked familiar.
He edged along the yards towards the slaughterhouse and climbed over the top rail beside a loading ramp. The ramp was lined with sheet metal and he swung inside it, where he couldn't be seen by anyone unless they were in a direct line with it and also happened to be looking that way. Even if a rider did look in his direction, Locklin realised that he only had to duck into the afternoon shade cast by the sheet metal and his dark tan and black chequered shirt would camouflage him as well as his army greens usually did in the Timor scrub.
He swatted a persistent fly from the back of his neck and climbed to the highest vantage point on the ramp to peer over the holding pens. Then he heard a whip crack. Looking left, he saw a rider coming in from another yard. The man was bigger than Locklin, but it wasn't muscle. Most of it was around his belly and the palomino he rode loped uncomfortably under his weight.
The rider was having trouble splitting a brown yearling away from its mother. He cracked the whip again and the yearling veered off with another nine animals that he forced through into the pen closest to the slaughterhouse.
The yearling squealed as the rider pushed it into the bottom of the chute with the others and the palomino pushed the gate closed with its chest while the rider leaned forward to slide a bolt across to lock them in. The animals at the bottom of the chute jostled for room as the rider wheeled away to round in the next lot, and another horse at the top was pushed into the building by the new ones coming in behind it.
Locklin swore under his breath, hoping he'd come to the right place. There were two processing plants in the valley, but as far as he knew this was the only one that had started taking horses. It was also the closest one to his home farm and he figured his father's killer wouldn't bother paying extra to transport a horse over to the next valley just to satisfy his revenge.
Locklin put two fingers inside his mouth and let out a low, clucking wolf whistle. It was the low frequency call that he'd used in noisy classrooms to distract girls at high school without getting detention. He'd used it at military college later to warn his mates whenever an officer was coming, but he'd used it mostly on the farm to call a horse that his father had given him for his tenth birthday. That horse answered him from the top end of the chute and Locklin swore again.
There were only three horses left between his stallion and the door.
The horse bolted its head up, trying to look around. It pushed forward and back against the others, but it was wedged in too tight for it to move. Then another horse disappeared inside the building and a grey mare pushed the stallion from behind to get into the space.
Locklin whistled again and the stallion planted its hooves in the crush like a mule. A broad white blaze crowned with a star pointed at the sky and the horse let out a long whinny with two loud snorts at the end as it kicked at the steel rails. Fear rippled through the slaughteryards and the other horses screamed, drowning the sound of machinery that came from within the building.
Locklin jumped off the ramp, landing at the bottom of the crush and reached through the rails to unlatch the gate to the holding pen. The yearling backed out, feeling the pressure release off his rump and that started a cascade effect along the crush. The young horse was the first out and it bucked and bolted around the yard, squealing as it sooked loudly for its mother.
âIdiot,' Locklin hissed. The rider would hear it. He slid between the rails and opened the gate into the next yard. The animal saw the gap and bolted through, taking others with it. More pressure released off the other animals in the crush as each horse backed out of the chute, but at the top, the grey mare panicked as she tried to turn around and caught her head between the rails.
Locklin heard the whip crack and realised he needed more time. He ran along the outside of the yard and opened a gate to release the yearling into the car park as a distraction. The animal saw the new gap and bolted, this time with its tail up as it leapt a narrow strip of bitumen beside the lunch room. More horses followed and as the animals spewed out of the yard, the rider saw the yearling and kicked his palomino to the nearest gate to fetch it back, but the yearling's mother was already in the corner, calling to it.
He hunted her away and bent forward to unlatch the bolt as another horse rushed his palomino from behind. The rider fell. The gate flung open, and the third yard full of horses emptied into the car park.
Cheers erupted from the activists at the boom gates and Locklin ran back to the chute, scrambling up the rails, keeping his head down until he got to the grey mare that was blocking his stallion's escape. Her head was wedged between the top two rails and she was looking back towards her own rump. In trying to bring her head around, she had wedged her neck against a pillar and now it was so tight she couldn't move.
Locklin scrambled over her back and got in front of her, cooing to her to calm her down.
âG'day, Jack old mate,' he said, patting dust from his stallion's rump. âLook what you get up to as soon as I'm gone a while. Stand up for me now and I'll get you out of here.'
He sat backwards over Jack's rump, holding onto the top rails on each side while he put his boots against the mare's neck and pushed her backwards. Her ears pulled out from the pillar as soon as the pressure was released and he eased her nose out with the toe of his boot. When she settled, he slid off his stallion to stand between them.
He pushed the mare's nose up and slightly to the side so she could see behind her and then applied a gentle, poking pressure to her chest with his other hand.
âBack girl,' he said, pushing back on her nose at the same time, and the old mare took a nervous step backwards. Locklin stopped poking her chest for a second to reward her, and then he repeated the process.
This time her backwards step was longer.
âGood girl,' he said, wishing more owners taught their horses to back up. He repeated the improvised lesson twice more, and each time she stepped back he rewarded her with a release of pressure. She learned fast. Her stride lengthened and she hurried backwards towards the holding yard. His stallion started to follow with the two remaining horses close on his nose and Locklin scrambled up the rails to let Jack back out underneath him. He reached forward, offering the bit into his horse's mouth before fastening the bridle.
Voices shouted from the building and Locklin ducked against his animal's neck, holding the gate wider with Jack's rump and hissing at the last pair of mares to hurry them out.
A skinny meatworker jumped from the slaughterhouse, followed by five bigger men who came out of a side door. They circled round the horses, shouting and running as they tried to scare the biggest mob back towards the yards, but they flapped their arms and squawked like chickens running from a fox and the horses bolted in all directions to get away from them.