Black & Blue: BookShots (Detective Harriet Blue Series) (9 page)

‘Maybe I should just drop him,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’ll give the sexual assault to one of the probationary detectives and jump over onto the Georges River task force. Oh, wait! I forgot! I don’t have a penis!’

Nigel sighed.

‘Did you seriously shut me out of that case because I’m a woman?’ I asked. ‘Or do you actually have a reasonable motive? Like, do you have a suspect? Why don’t you think you can trust me with your suspect?’

Both men were quiet. Again I felt that strange tingling up the back of my neck that told me something was very wrong here. That there was something very important being hidden from me. But one look at Nigel’s face convinced me it was just him and his team being misogynistic assholes. He looked like one.

Soon I would know how wrong I was.

IT TOOK FIVE
minutes just to get the mop across the room, shuffling the thing with his knees and feet, knocking it against the walls, the shower cubicle, his sleeping wife. Another hour to get the handle through the screw loop over and over, turning the screw just a quarter-inch at a time. He sat triumphantly in the middle of the tiny room, exhausted, looking at the porthole propped open with the mop, the glorious blue sky outside. His face had swollen with pressure around the duct tape gag, sweat pouring down his neck. He tried to rouse Jenny. If he could get her to wake, try to slip her smaller gag off by rubbing her face against the frame of the shower, shout for help out the porthole. She woke briefly, blinked at him with uncomprehending, bloodshot eyes. No. It was up to Ken to save them both.

The big man stood, steeled himself and climbed up onto the toilet seat. He looked outside and saw no one. Never mind. There might be people only yards away, out of view. He got down and kicked the second shelf of the cupboard down. Jenny’s bathroom products scattered everywhere. Perfume bottles shattered. Shampoo and moisturiser and toner, all manner of women’s things. Ken grabbed a shampoo bottle awkwardly by the neck between his big and second toes and hopped over to the toilet, almost losing his balance and falling by the shower. He climbed up, and with an agonising stretch of groin and hip and thigh muscles he didn’t know he still possessed, he leaned against the shower, raised one leg and slid the shampoo bottle through the porthole.

He heard the gentle splash. Looked outside and saw no one. Ken hopped down, shuffled to the pile of toiletries and grabbed another bottle with his toes. He had to work as fast as he could. He wanted a steady stream of floating debris, more than the usual marina junk. Someone would spot his breadcrumb trail. Someone would rescue them before Hope got back from wherever she was.

It was their only chance of survival.

IT TOOK SOME
serious cage-rattling through the strip clubs, bars and brothels of Kings Cross to hunt down information on Hope. I heard fragments of her tale from homeless girls lounging in the back doorways of the supermarkets and kebab shops there. She was whispered about by conspiratorial old men in the upper rooms of Pussy Cats, Showgirls and Porky’s, where the rubber stairs glowed all day long with neon lights.

A crow-like old madam on Ward Avenue with a split lip told us her full name – Hope Stallwood – and where she’d been staying. But like most working girls, Hope moved around a lot. She pissed off her roommates with her drinking and drugs and her loud, late-night entrances. She was always broke, downtrodden, sullen, tired.

I’d known plenty of girls like Hope in my time on the sex crimes squad. Mostly they ended up dead in a bed somewhere, and I was brought in to assess whether they’d been taken advantage of before they expired. They all looked the same after a while. Bruised thighs tangled in the dirty sheets.

Tox and I didn’t talk about the night before. But I’d stopped viewing our relationship with any kind of hope that it might be extended a minute longer than it had to be. When this case was over, I was getting the hell away from him. It wasn’t the ill-treatment I was suffering from my colleagues that disturbed me. It was the calm and gentle way in which he’d said ‘Yes’ when I’d asked him if he was a killer. I replayed it in my mind, over and over, whenever I looked at him.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

It hadn’t seemed possible that a man who’d done what he was supposed to have done as a child could be so normal. Well, normal-ish. I realised that I hadn’t really believed he’d done it at the start. I felt shaken now that I could be so wrong about someone.

I followed behind him, lost in my thoughts as we moved from bar to bar and brothel to brothel. Everyone we spoke to about Hope Stallwood told us she was coming into money. Just like Claudia, she’d been on the verge of having it all.

I wondered if that meant we’d find her dead.

WHEN HOPE GOT
to pier 14, she spotted two men standing by the edge looking into the water below them. Something about their fixed stare made her blood run cold. She walked by quickly and hazarded a glance at the gentle waves below, where a shampoo bottle and four other bottles floated.

‘Where’s it all coming from?’ one of the men was saying. Hope looked, and saw he had a wet deodorant can in one hand and a bottle of styling mousse in the other.

‘Let’s go have a wander around,’ the taller man said. ‘See if we can see who’s dumping rubbish.’

‘Oh my God,’ Hope gushed, setting down her bag. ‘I’m so stupid. Those are mine.’

The two men turned and stared at her. She took the bottles from the shorter man and shoved them into her bag. ‘I was cleaning out my bathroom this afternoon. I must have left the tub of products on the edge of my boat. Oh, this is so embarrassing. It must have fallen in.’

‘There’s stuff everywhere,’ the tall man said, his face softening. ‘Couple of bottles floated over there, near pier sixteen.’

‘I saw a toothbrush,’ the shorter man laughed.

‘God,’ Hope sighed dramatically and pushed her hair back. ‘Goddamn it. I’ll clean it all up, I swear. This is so embarrassing.’

She hustled away towards the
New Hope
, glancing back to see the men laughing and muttering to themselves. Hope’s eyes were burning in her skull. If she didn’t need Ken so badly right now, his end might have come much sooner and bloodier than she’d planned.

AN OLD INDIAN
woman answered the door to Hope’s apartment. She was even shorter than me, and peered out angrily from the crack in the door. When she saw Tox, she started to close it again. My boot was in the way.

‘We’re lookin’ for Hope Stallwood.’

‘What do you want? The drugs!’ the woman howled. ‘The drugs, they ruin all of you! She’s not here. That whore! She took her drugs and she’s gone!’

Tox shoved the door open, almost knocking the woman over. We found ourselves in a tiny, filthy kitchen. My boots stuck to the linoleum.

‘I’ll call the police!’

‘
We’re
the police,’ I said. ‘Sit down. Tell us where Hope went.’

‘You’re the pimps! Pimps with the drugs! Rotten drug dealers! I’ll call the police!’

A young couple had appeared in the doorway to a short hall. I walked past them into a labyrinth of tight rooms divided into smaller rooms by hanging sheets. There were mattresses on the floor everywhere. Aluminium foil on the windows. Everything reeked of cigarette smoke and curry powder. A baby cried somewhere. I trod on someone’s foot and apologised. The owner of the foot was sleeping and hardly noticed.

I didn’t know how people lived like this. Prisons were better. There was black mould on the bathroom ceiling that could have been an inch thick. My mind was rushing with crimes as I looked around the ground. Possession of heroin. Possession of marijuana. Child endangerment. Child neglect. Rental fraud. Underage drinking.

Tox pushed aside a pair of damp towels and found a filthy, bare mattress in the corner beneath a window.

‘Hope Stallwood was here?’ he asked the young couple, who’d started following us around the flat like wary dogs. They nodded.

Hope was long gone, but she’d left a couple of things behind. A plastic container of hair ties, some underpants and clothes that reeked of body odour, a few old, stiff pairs of shoes. I picked up a magazine and let it fall open.
Yachting Today
. There were yachts circled in the For Sale section of the magazine, the pages indented with scrawled red pen.

‘What’s this?’ I showed Tox the circled boats. Was Hope lying here at night under the lamplight circling boats she dreamed of owning? Was it all fantasy, or was she actually making plans?

I held the paper close to my nose. She’d actually underlined some of the phone numbers for making enquiries. There were digits listed on the back page. I flipped forward a few pages and found a page was torn from the magazine. I ran my fingers along the ragged seam.

Tox and I realised what we were seeing at almost exactly the same moment. Goosebumps raced along my arms.

‘We could call the magazine.’ He took out his phone. ‘Confirm which boat is missing from the mag.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I know which boat it is.’

THIS TIME, SHE’D
chosen the branch at Martin Place. The streets were flush with lawyers on their lunch hour gliding around in their slick suits. As their cab drove through the traffic towards their stop, Hope kept the gun pressed against the inside of the handbag in her lap, the barrel pointed right at Ken. She had to keep the fury in her heart contained now. This was the most important part of her plan.

The man beside her sat crumpled against the side of the cab. She might have broken a couple of ribs when she came at him with the hammer after his stunt with the toiletries. She didn’t care. He deserved it. He looked pathetic sitting there, his eyes wandering over the people in the street. She could see on his face the desire to open the door and grab one of them, inform them that he was a hostage. His mouth fell open as the cab came to a stop at a set of traffic lights, right beside a police cruiser. Hope jiggled the handbag, reminding him of his situation.

‘Try anything, anything at all, and I’ll be right back on that boat with your wife before you can utter a sound,’ Hope murmured, glancing at the cabbie’s face in the rear-view mirror. ‘I’ll shoot you, and before the police can work out where you’ve been, Jenny will be dead.’

‘I’m not going to try anything,’ Ken whispered. ‘You can take the money. Take everything. Just hold up your end of the deal and leave Jenny on the pier unharmed.’

‘We’ll see if your performance is convincing enough,’ Hope said. ‘I’m not making any promises.’

They walked to the manager’s counter, arm in arm. She shot him the loving look of a happy wife, slid her hand down and gripped his rough, warm hand.

What a lovely creature he was. She almost didn’t want him to die.

The manager this time was an older, portly Asian man in a nicely tailored grey suit. He wore a small pink flower in his lapel and stuck his hand out for a shake a good ten feet away from Ken.

‘Sir, madam. How can I help you today?’

They explained their business. The manager wore genuine regret on his face that they would no longer be customers, but brightened again when they spoke of their plans to travel the Greek Islands. He waved them into his small private office as though he were welcoming them inside his own home.

‘So.’ He eased into his chair and turned the computer monitor towards himself. The nameplate on his desk read ‘Bai Yim’. ‘What’s the approximate amount of your holdings here, Mr Spelling?’

‘Eight hundred thousand,’ Hope answered for him. She felt a pulse of electricity run through her phoney husband’s body. Yes, Hope had seen their accounts, she just hadn’t been able to access them. He must have been surprised at how far her planning went. He had no idea.

‘So I imagine you’d like the amount in a direct transfer cheque?’

‘No, we’d like cash.’

‘You’re not concerned about carrying that amount of money overseas? International piracy is a real threat, you know.’

‘Oh, no, we’ve taken provisions,’ Hope smiled. ‘And we’ve got customs approval to take the amount out of Australia in cash, forgoing the ten-thousand-dollar limit.’

Ken glanced at her. She was prepared.
Of course I’m fucking prepared
, Hope thought.
This is my one shot. I’m not going back to that life. I’m never, never going back.

She pushed aside the flurry of images that swirled through her at the thought. Sweat-stained beds and needles. The crush and roar of the crowd on the strip. The hollering and laughing of men in the hallways. Money in, money out, money in, money out.

‘I’ll get our guard to escort you to your car, then,’ Yim said. ‘You can never be too careful!’

They all laughed. Hope put Jenny and Ken Spelling’s IDs on the table. Mr Yim hardly glanced at the cards. His eyes were on the computer screen as he tapped their names and numbers into the keyboard.

His expression changed in an instant.

MR YIM RUBBED
his nose, glanced at Hope and Ken, and painted on a crooked smile.

‘Everything seems to be in order.’ He rose unevenly from his chair. ‘I’ll just—’

Hope grabbed the computer monitor and swung it towards her. The screen was blinking with a bright-red warning sign. She’d seen it reflected in the shiny buttons on the front of Yim’s shirt, the light making the mother-of-pearl surfaces flash pink: ‘NEW SOUTH WALES STATE POLICE ALERT’.

There was a phone number, a brief message. Hope stood and whipped the gun out of her handbag. Yim threw his hands up.

‘Did you press the button?’

‘I—’

‘Did you press the fucking button?’ She actioned the pistol. Yim shook his head, but there was no telling if he was lying. She hadn’t seen his hand move while he was sitting, but he could easily have nudged the silent alarm under the table with his knee. She’d seen him shift awkwardly in the chair before rising.

Time to initiate Plan B.

She turned and shot Ken twice in the stomach.