The Darkest Hour (22 page)

She got out of the shower and looked in the vanity cupboard, but there was no spare. Back under the water, knowing the clock was ticking and there was no way she’d miss the delivery, she shoved her fingers through her hair. Not too bad, but what could she do anyway? She could run a bit of conditioner through, perhaps. Or could you wash with soap? She remembered the dolls she had when she was little, how their hair went ropey after a good scrubbing.
Yeah, but that’s plastic, idiot.

Stuff it. It wasn’t so bad. Just think of those mushrooms.

Once towelled off she went into her bedroom and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. There was a hard lump in the pocket of the jeans. She felt it on the outside, then slid her fingers in gingerly.

A stone. A white pebble, from somebody’s decorative garden perhaps, but with two black dots drawn on it.

Eyes.

She held it on the palm of her hand.

Face to face.

‘Oh, grow up,’ she said aloud, wanting suddenly to chase away the silence in the house. ‘What are you thinking? Somebody sneaked in and left this here?’

It’s looking at me.

She squeezed her hand into a fist around the stone.

‘You think somebody left this here and took your pizza leaflet and your shampoo? Are you nuts?’

She stamped into the kitchen and kicked the lid off the plastic bin in the corner. It was empty, a fresh liner in there from that morning.

She went to the front door. It was getting dark. She hit the switch for the security lights. She checked the peephole then opened the front door, went out and locked it behind her, testing it twice before she stepped away.

She held the stone tightly in one fist, the keys jutting through her fingers in the other. The wind was picking up and it touched the back of her neck. She could hear a TV in the neighbour’s house, smell the roast somebody was cooking. She turned the corner to the backyard with the hair prickling on her arms, but there were only the two bins, the empty garden beds and the long and straggling grass.

With the tip of one key she flipped back the bin lids. Denzil wrapped his rubbish in newspaper. His bin contained only a few small parcels. Hers was messier, some things inside plastic bags and some dropped in individually. She pulled the bin down so she could reach inside it, using the keys to shuffle items apart, looking for the striking red and green of the pizza flyer and the pale pink of the shampoo bottle. They should be on the top if she’d chucked them that morning, but they weren’t. She ripped into the plastic bags, the air filling with the smell of the sardine tin from three days ago and the eggs she’d tossed when she’d noticed they were weeks out of date.

They weren’t there.

She shoved the bin upright and slammed down the lid. The keys bit into her fingers, she was gripping them so hard. The rock was smooth and rounded and didn’t bite at all.

Back in the house she locked the door, then did the rounds of the windows. Each one was secure, as was the back door which was deadlocked and chained. She stood on a chair and tugged at the padlocked bolt on the manhole in the ceiling.

‘Nobody can get in,’ she said aloud. She put the rock on the kitchen table and stood with her hands on her hips.

A knock at the door almost stopped her heart.
Pizza, that’s all. Just relax!

Through the peephole she saw a girl in her late teens holding a pizza box. She unlocked and opened the door.

‘Hi.’ The girl smiled at her. ‘It’s fifteen bucks.’

Relieved, touched in some way, Ella gave her a twenty. ‘Don’t worry about the change.’

‘Thanks.’

The box was hot in Ella’s hands but she was reluctant to let her go. ‘Be careful.’

The girl looked at her. ‘Sorry?’

‘I’m just saying.’ But Ella knew there was no point trying to explain. ‘Good night,’ she said instead.

‘Yep.’ The girl was already walking away.

Ella closed and locked the door again. She sat at the table to eat straight from the box. The pizza was hot and good and made her feel a little better. As she ate she stared at the rock, which stared back, until finally she moved it under the box lid.

Sal knew they were humouring him. Tough guys took no notice of such things, however. He pushed his dinner plate out of the way, cleared his throat and opened the notebook he’d bought specially for the occasion. He felt his father’s eyes on him and looked up, but his father immediately shifted his gaze to Julio who sat picking fluff off his beanie, his bald and skeletal head shiny in the light.

‘Can we bring this thing to order?’ Sal said.

Thomas sucked food from between his teeth. He was slumped sideways in his chair, his arm over the back and his eyes fixed on the TV in the next room, though Nona had the sound so low it couldn’t be heard at the table. Upstairs, Nona’s kids, Lizzie and Mardi, were meant to be doing their homework, but Sal could hear them arguing.

He clicked his pen. ‘Okay. We don’t have an agenda, so I think it’s best if we just take turns to bring up issues. Dad, you go first.’

His father licked his thumb and picked up a crumb from the tablecloth. ‘Things are going pretty well.’

Sal frowned. He always had a lot to say when Paulo was alive and chairing. ‘What about today’s . . .’ He couldn’t think what to call it. ‘Incident? Development?’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘The police coming into the club and asking about a phone call is not nothing.’

‘It’s a phone that every man and his dogs have access to.’ His dad stood up and started to collect the plates. ‘They can’t pin that onto any one person. So it’s nothing.’

‘Dad,’ Sal said, but he didn’t respond. He took the plates out to the kitchen and Sal heard the tap running.

‘It’s okay.’ Julio pulled his beanie back on. ‘He knows what he’s talking about.’

‘We should still discuss it. Develop some kind of contingency plan.’ Sal had imagined that a big part of it would be making Thomas leave, but everything was going on as normal. Thomas was still sucking his teeth, even.

Julio elbowed Sal gently. ‘Go on, bro. It can be your turn now.’

‘Turns’ made it sound like they were just playing games. ‘It’s done on seniority. That means you go next.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Tell me about the money,’ Sal said. ‘Uncle Paulo taught you about how we move it, and now you can teach me.’

Julio shifted on his chair. ‘It’s not urgent.’

‘No, but it’s best if two of us know,’ Sal said.

‘Two of us do know,’ Thomas said, his gaze still on the TV.

‘Thomas,’ Julio said.

Sal stared at Julio. ‘You taught him but not me?’

‘You’re stressed.’ Julio laid his bony arm across Sal’s shoulders. ‘We didn’t want to bother you with that stuff when you’ve got so much on your mind.’

Sal’s skin prickled under his brother’s touch. ‘We’re family.’

‘Still are,’ Thomas said.

Sal lowered his voice. ‘We’re supposed to come first.’

In the kitchen their father dropped something and swore in Spanish.

Julio smiled at him. ‘You’re still my little bro, you know that.’

Thomas burped.

Sal rounded on him. ‘What about you? You got anything to bloody say?’

‘Sal.’ In the lounge room, Nona raised her eyes to the ceiling, to upstairs where the girls were.

Thomas said, ‘I’m taking care of things.’

‘If you take one step near that paramedic, the cops’ll bloody know, you know.’

‘Who said it’s her?’

‘Who else? The bloke she works with, who heard what Kennedy said too?’ Sal shook his head. ‘She’s the key.’

Thomas didn’t answer.

Sal clicked his pen back in and slapped the notebook closed. What was the point in having a meeting if nobody took it seriously? Tough guys valued their time too much to waste it in such a situation.

Upstairs in his room he left the lights off and sat on his bed. Lizzie and Mardi had stopped arguing and Lizzie was back at her guitar again. He thought of her frowning over the chords. She was so like Nona at that age, with her wide eyes, long honey-coloured hair and a kind of lanky elegance that she didn’t know she had. It was no wonder that Nona freaked out when Blake was released from jail, right when Lizzie turned thirteen. When she’d first moved back home, after her marriage finally imploded, she used to stay up late talking to Sal, and one night over too much red had told him about Blake. Sal had listened in shocked silence. He’d been at the same school, two years ahead, and it hurt to think of his sister being assaulted and suffering in silence while he went merrily about his schoolboy life.

She hadn’t blamed him, or Julio, two years older again, or their parents for not realising what was going on. But he’d still felt responsible – she was his little sister! – and for that, and some vague notions of payback and prevention, he’d found himself in that dark alley, hands sweaty on the axe-less axe handle, Thomas nudging him from behind while Blake sidled in, anticipating a meet with another paedophile bearing a gift. Thomas had set things up, and when it was obvious that Sal was frozen with doubt and fear, Thomas took the axe handle from him. Sal had cowered by the skip, hearing the blows, not realising that the spirit of Blake would follow him from the scene or that he’d just joined himself with Thomas forever.

And now the cops were looking into who made that phone call.

He felt the heat of tears, and gritted his teeth.

E
lla was thankful to find the Sunday morning traffic light as she drove to the Homicide office. Her eyes were dry and sore from her crap sleep and now were blurry as well from the eye drops. ‘Eye relief, my arse.’

For the first time in her adult life she’d left a light on overnight. She felt silly about this, but she felt even sillier for having shut the stone away in the microwave. This morning she’d opened the door and looked in at it, thinking she should nip down to the river on her way to work and hurl it in. But something in her whispered that it could be evidence, and anything with even the slightest whiff of evidence about it brought out her hoarding instincts. She didn’t want to think about what it was evidence of, but she’d shut the door on it and left it there.

She sat up straighter in the seat and tried to concentrate on the case. This morning they’d divvy up the list of names Paul Davids had given them, then do a bit of door-knocking. The list of all the staff they’d got from Martin Everly hadn’t produced any criminal record hits, but at least now they had a reason to talk to these ones, actual questions to ask. She checked her watch and moved into the right lane to overtake a slower car.

When she reached the building she found Murray pacing the car park. He jumped in the passenger seat. ‘What’s with your phone?’

She pulled it from her bag and checked the screen. ‘Flat. Shit, I’d better call Lauren.’

‘I just did, trying to find you. They’re all fine.’ He yanked on his seatbelt. ‘You owe me for this.’

‘Where are we going?’

He pointed cityward. ‘You owe me so seriously. You owe me like you’ve never owed anyone before.’

A flicker of excitement built inside her. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Detective Simon Bradshaw rang about a homicide he’s doing,’ Murray said. ‘He’s going to meet us on the scene. Kuiper wanted to send somebody else but I said you’d be here soon.’ He gestured impatiently at the exit.

Ella accelerated. ‘And?’

‘They found a link to Quiksmart in Bradshaw’s victim’s place.’

The laneway outside the decrepit building in Chinatown where Bradshaw was meeting them was narrow and jammed with cars, vans and dumpsters. The air smelled of cooking from the restaurants that backed onto the lane, Sunday being peak yum cha day, and as Ella picked her way along the broken asphalt a young Chinese man emerged from a door and threw a bucketful of garbage into one of the dumpsters.

A green Ford sedan was parked in a no standing zone. Detective Simon Bradshaw climbed out of the driver’s side as they neared it. Ella recognised him from the office, though she wasn’t sure they’d ever actually spoken. He was tall, slim, in his mid-thirties with curly hair and a constant smile.

‘Thanks for waiting,’ Murray said.

‘No probs.’ Simon led them between parked vehicles and over a choked-up gutter. ‘This started as a diver found dead in the water on Friday. Initially it appeared a possible accidental death, but the PM showed bruising consistent with a struggle. The scenario we’re working on is that his scuba regulator was pulled from his mouth and he was held underwater until he drowned. He had no ID on him, and we couldn’t find a car near the dive site, and nothing showed on missing persons or matched his fingerprints. So basically we had to sit and wait until somebody rang in to say their mate was missing. Somebody did, yesterday – his chemistry professor. Said this guy had an important experiment to complete, and when he didn’t show the prof knew something was wrong.’

Ella followed Simon into a narrow doorway then up a dark stairwell. It stank of chemicals and sour food. The building looked like it might have been a warehouse at some stage, then was haphazardly divided into separate flats. The stairwell walls were unpainted gyprock, stained, graffitied and full of holes.

‘This professor ID’d the body as Feng Xie, Chinese national, twenty-two years old. He was studying chemistry, and had been here almost two years. The professor was the guy’s mentor or something, said he was a really intelligent guy, quiet, didn’t have many friends. Serious, got on with his work, careful with his money, only recently started diving – went on a freebie trial trip with the uni dive club and loved it, apparently. Still had another student’s borrowed gear.’

They reached the third-floor landing. Four closed doors waited silently.

‘So the professor gets us Feng’s address from student records,’ Simon said. ‘We come around here and as soon as we hit the stairs we can smell the chemicals. We retreat and get the equipment and everything that we need, Hazmat and that, come back, pop the lock and find one shitbox little flat with a panel from the bathroom to the meth lab out the back.’

‘A meth lab,’ Ella said.

‘It was mostly cleaned up, but some of the stuff had been spilled – that’s what we could smell – and the rest of the place had been done over, I guess clearing out anything incriminating. Hazmat then crime scene did their bits, and then during the search we found a box with half a Quiksmart courier’s label. When we plugged that into the system, your case popped up. I ring. And here you are.’ He put his hand on the doorknob. ‘Shall we?’

The door opened into a small room. Ella saw more walls of unpainted gyprock, the plaster crumbling from old gouges in its surface. A camp bed lay upturned on the floor, a grimy brown sheet and worn army blanket hanging off it. There was no pillow. A couple of pairs of underpants lay in the corner along with a pair of black trousers and a grey shirt. The single window had no blind and the glass was cracked and held together with peeling brown tape. Above a small sink with a single tap hung a plywood cupboard with no door. Ella could see tins of baked beans and polystyrene cups of instant noodles, some on their side, some fallen to the floor. There was one chair, its back missing, and next to it on the floor lay four chemistry textbooks, pages torn and spines broken.

‘Lab’s through there.’

A doorway with no door led to the bathroom. It was about twice the size of the average toilet cubicle. The floor was bare wooden boards that moved under Ella’s feet. There was no bath or shower, just a toilet and another small sink. The window was covered with black paint. Fingerprint dust covered the toilet and the sink edges.

Along the wall beside the toilet a panel had been cut out of the gyprock. Simon took a torch from his pocket and shone the light into the space. Ella saw the missing panel on the floor. Simon bent low to squeeze through, and Ella followed, her nostrils full of the stink of the drug.

Once through the opening she found she could stand up again. It was a long narrow space, and she guessed it ran along the side of the makeshift flats. Along the wall were a couple of benches made of rough planks laid over stacked milk crates. There was broken glass and a chemical stain on the floor. An industrial fan was lodged in a hole cut roughly in the sloping roof.

‘What’d the neighbours say?’

‘The way they scarpered when we got here, a lot are illegals or up to their own kind of no good. We’ve got a number in custody now, and are trying to get whatever info we can about Mr Feng and his regular visitors.’ Simon waved at the benches. ‘The action obviously took place there, and we figure he got rid of the waste by flushing it or chucking it in one of those dumpsters downstairs. All the other gear was taken, probably by whoever killed him.’

Ella looked around. ‘So where’s the Quiksmart thing?’

Simon shone the torch beam at a hole in the wall, down low under the sloping roof. ‘It was cut in half and jammed across there. We figure they either missed it in the clean-up or it’s not significant. Might’ve been there from before, even. Anyway, we have the logo and half a barcode, and it’s getting fed into Quiksmart’s system now.’

Ella thought of sweaty Daniel Peres and the pressure he’d feel from this.

‘Of course, even if the victim did put it there, it still could mean nothing,’ Simon said. ‘He could’ve picked up the box out of a skip behind one of those restaurants down there, or got it from uni.’

Murray said, ‘Have you found any witnesses to him going into the water?’

Simon shook his head. ‘People are canvassing. We’ve contacted his parents in China, through Interpol, and we know he’s got no record. But talking to the professor, young Feng was quite the brain. He was destined for great things in the chemistry world, or so the prof reckons. Why he was wasting his nut cooking up ice, the professor has no idea.’

Back at the office they found everyone was out. A note was sticky-taped to Murray’s computer monitor. ‘Strongy left us three names from the Rosie’s list.’ He typed the men’s names into the database and wrote down their addresses. ‘Should we call Kuiper about Feng Xie?’

‘It’s all a bit vague so far,’ Ella said. ‘I reckon hold off till the meeting. We might have some clearer info by then.’

She sat at her desk and yawned. She had to focus on the tasks ahead, not on how tired she was or whether she was developing dementia. She would push the stone and all the rest of it to the back of her mind and get on with the case. This afternoon there’d be a meeting, and they’d hopefully know more about Feng, and find out the latest on Deborah Kennedy, and who knew what the detectives who were looking into the other names from the Rosie’s list would’ve found out.

‘Ready?’ Murray said.

‘Let’s get coffee on the way.’

Dan Sommerson lived in a tiny flat under the flight path in Tempe. He opened the door to Murray’s knock with a spatula in his hand. ‘I already have a religion.’

Ella pulled out her badge. ‘Dan Sommerson? We’d like to speak with you.’

He stepped back to let them in. Bacon and eggs sizzled on the stove. He pointed with the spatula towards the kitchen. ‘Do you mind if I just . . . ?’

‘Go ahead.’

He poked at the contents of the frypan then turned off the heat. ‘Sorry.’ He wore pilled navy tracksuit pants and a faded Newtown Jets T-shirt. His feet were bare. He tucked his hands into the rear waistband of the pants. ‘What’s happened?’

‘You work as a roadie, is that right?’

‘Actually I’m a food technology student. I do a bit of roadie work in the evenings.’

‘We’re trying to trace a phone call that was made from Rosie’s club in the Cross on Wednesday the fourth. The manager told us that you were there that evening.’

Sommerson nodded. ‘I was working for a DJ called Steve Fonti.’

‘Did you use the phone behind the bar that night?’

‘No.’

‘Did you see anybody use it?’

He shook his head.

‘How long were you there?’

‘Only about twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘I would’ve been gone by probably half-seven, then back again about two to pack up.’

‘How many people were there in the evening?’

‘Not many.’ He furrowed his brow. ‘Me and Steve, a couple of staff wandering about. I’m too busy to look around much.’

Ella said, ‘Ever noticed any weird stuff going on at that club?’

‘Like what?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Nothing apart from the usual,’ he said. ‘People off their faces, you know.’

‘Ever see anyone selling drugs there?’

‘I thought this was about a phone call?’

‘It’s about the club,’ Murray said.

‘I guess people are selling,’ Sommerson said. ‘I don’t pay any attention. I just do my work and go. I’m doing honours this year, I don’t have time to fart about.’

Ella showed him the photo of Thomas from the airport cameras. ‘Recognise this man?’

‘Nope.’

‘Okay,’ Ella said. ‘Thanks for your time. Hope we didn’t stuff up your breakfast.’

He smiled. ‘Quick refry and it’ll be fine.’

Back in the car, Ella opened the street directory to look up the next address. ‘Seven Cowley Road, Maroubra. This is Sal Rios, the supposed manager slash supervisor.’

‘Son of one of the owners, I remember,’ Murray said. ‘Maybe he’ll know who made the call, seeing as the forty cents is coming out of his family’s pocket.’

Lauren and Joe did a couple of minor cases on the trot – a woman with abdo pain, a man with the flu – then headed for the station. Joe sat in the passenger seat looking out the window. Lauren was sure he knew she was glancing at him from behind the wheel, though he gave no sign.

‘Nice day,’ she said.

‘Mm.’

‘Maybe wash the truck this morning if we get a chance.’

He didn’t reply.

She reversed into the station, and he got out and went inside without a word. She turned the engine off and sat there for a moment, watching the tourists walk along the street and stare up at the bridge.

When she went into the muster room Joe was at the bench, a form in front of him. He covered it half-heartedly with his arm.

She smiled. ‘You putting in a complaint on me?’

He smiled sheepishly back but said nothing, and she looked over his shoulder.

Transfer application.

‘That’s a joke, right?’

‘It’s Claire,’ he said.

Lauren dropped into the chair next to him.

‘It’s not like I want to go.’

‘Then don’t.’