Blood Tears (25 page)

“
You
kept working Wattling Bay? In competition with Merrick?” I couldn’t
hide my surprise at their imprudence, but she didn’t seem to
notice.

“
Yes.
But one day we were spotted by one of the gang members. It became
too dangerous for us to stay here.” She leaned back on her pillows
and grabbed my hand. “Officer Tess, I’m terrified of being back
here. What if he comes for me and Jamie? He thinks she’s his. He
might try to hurt her again.”

“
I’ll
talk to the social worker and see if we can move you to somewhere
safer than here. Especially now you’ve told me all of
this.”

“
Thank you so much.”

“
Maybe even somewhere in the city. It’s easy there to lose a
couple of people in amongst all the others.”

“
Thank you. I knew it was the right thing to ring
you.”

“
Maybe, Annabel, but I am a police officer, and you’ve told me
about a criminal gang operating in this town. That’s not something
I can ignore. I will be talking to the detectives about what we’ve
discussed today.”

She nodded, her eyes
downcast. “I understand.”

“
I
know it can’t be easy for you to confess all this to me. I just
need to ask you one more question. Where was the gang staying here
in Wattling Bay?”

She rattled off an
address that I wrote down, but then said, “There won’t be any point
going there.”

“
Why
not?”

“
Merrick would have moved them on when we left. I don’t even
know if the gang are still here. They might be in another town by
now. He’s very cautious.”

“
Okay. I’m sure the police here will want to investigate
anyway.”

“
Not
you?”

I laughed softly. “No,
not me. My area is Mount Big Town. I’m not supposed to do police
work here. I get in trouble when I do.”

Though perhaps I
might just take a spin around that neighbourhood when I’m finished
here
, I thought to myself, knowing only too well the Super
would ream me if she ever found out.

“
There’s something else I need to tell you.”

“
What’s that, sweetheart?”

“
We
stole some things from Merrick when we left.”

“
What
kind of things?”

“
Valuable things. Precious things. Things that he hadn’t had a
chance to pawn. Things that he decided to keep for himself because
he liked them.”

“
Like
the bracelet and ring you gave us the other night?”

“
Yes.
That’s part of the collection.”

“
Hmm.
Could that be more the main reason he was trying to find Jamie,
rather than hunting you down?”

“
I
don’t know. Maybe, or maybe it was both. I sometimes feel like he
thought I was one of his . . . things. One of the things he’d
decided to keep for himself.”

That sounded reasonable
to me – she was a very pretty girl.

“
Where are these things now?” I asked.

“
I
had to leave them where we were staying in your town. I had to find
help for my baby.”

“
You
did the right thing for your baby,” I agreed. “Just look at her.
She’s perfect and safe.”

“
She
is perfect.” She leaned over to kiss her baby’s forehead. “Do you
have any children?” she asked me.

“
No.
Maybe one day.”

“
Do
you have a boyfriend?”

“
Yes.”

“
What’s his name?”

“
Jake.”

“
I
like that name. Is he cute?”

“
He
sure is.” I steered the interview back to safer waters. “Annabel,
just a few more questions before I leave you to rest. Why didn’t
you sell those items? It sounds as though they would have fetched a
decent amount of money for you. Why did you need to rob the man who
gave you the lift? And Jamie had just held up the grocery store
when the accident happened. I don’t understand.”

“
We
tried to sell those things, but we didn’t know Merrick’s dodgy
friends, and all the pawn brokers we approached demanded ownership
documents. We couldn’t shift anything. We were left with all these
valuable things, but had no money to buy any food. We had to keep
stealing to eat.”

“
Okay, that makes sense. Can you remember where you stayed? I
could go and retrieve those items you took. They could be used as
evidence.”

“
I
don’t know, Officer Tess. I was so scared at the time.”

“
Try
to remember. It would be so helpful.”

“
After the ute broke down, we walked for a little while trying
to hitch another ride. But we didn’t have any luck. Jamie spotted a
shed on a property, so we headed there. But some dogs started
barking at us and we were afraid we’d be spotted, so we hurried
into the property next to it. Eventually, we found an old shed that
looked pretty abandoned. It was really rundown, almost falling
apart. There were holes in the ceiling, so all the weather came
in.”

I froze as I wrote,
remembering my dream of having a baby in an old shed just as she
described.

“
I
don’t know any more. I’m sorry.”

“
How
did you survive when Jamie disappeared?”

More tears. “We had a
bit of food with us and some water. I had to ration it. I wasn’t
eating much at all in the week before Jamie was born. I tried to
find things to eat in the bush.”

“
Annabel, that’s so dangerous. There are a lot of poisonous
plants out there.”

“
I
was hungry,” she said, defensively. “But I couldn’t find anything
that looked edible.”

“
And
when the baby was coming, why didn’t you go to the property next
door?”

“
I
tried, but nobody was home. I walked into town. Jamie had stolen an
old bike from one of the farms, but I couldn’t ride it feeling how
I did.”

Oh God
, I
thought. The poor girl, walking all that way while in labour.

The baby started
fussing, and I thought that was a good time for me to leave. “You
have my number if you need to tell me anything else, sweetheart.
And all my best wishes for you and Jamie in the future. I hope
everything works out great for you both.”

She barely heard me,
fully occupied with her now crying baby. I sneaked off without
saying anything else, spending the walk to the carpark trying to
decide whether I should risk the Super’s wrath going to the station
again to let Mr X and Zelda know what I’d learnt, or just ring them
from a safe distance.

My 4WD had a ticket
neatly tucked under one of the windscreen wipers.

“
That’s bullshit,” I muttered, reading I’d been booked just
five minutes previously for parking in an emergency vehicle
space.

My phone rang. I
groaned when I saw my caller.

“
Yes,
ma’am?” I asked, wondering again if she had some psychic sense that
told her when I was in Big Town.

“
Bum
told me he saw your shit bucket of a vehicle parked at the
hospital. Fuck knows his dick’s sharper than his brain, and that’s
not saying much, so my jaw won’t hit the ground if he’s wrong. Is
he?”

“
No,
ma’am,” I reluctantly confessed, cursing the distinctive graffiti
covering the Land Rover, courtesy of the Bycrafts, of
course.

“
Good, saves me ordering you to get your arse up here. We now
have a date in my office in about two minutes, and don’t fucking
keep me waiting. I’m not in a good mood today.”

Oh, great
, I
thought gloomily. She had to be in a really bad mood for even her
to notice.

My day went quickly
downhill.

Chapter
17

As soon as she
screeched at me to enter her office, I threw the parking ticket on
her desk.

“
Can
you make this disappear for me, please? I was on police business at
the hospital at the time, and the Sarge wouldn’t let me take the
patrol car. And besides, I can’t afford to pay it.”

She breathed out a huge
haze of cigarette smoke, regarding me thoughtfully through it.

“
I
thought I gave you a particularly precise direction not to show
your face in this town for a long time.”

“
That’s a hard direction to keep, ma’am,” I said, with more
than a hint of tartness, “when you constantly keep calling us
here.”

“
Where’s Maguire, anyway?” she snapped, not tolerating my mood
for one second. “You’re usually as close together as two arse
cheeks.”

“
He’s
back in Little Town participating in a teleconference on road
safety. As you ordered him to do.” Her light blue eyes pierced me.
“Ma’am,” I added belatedly.

She made some sound of
contemptuous dismissiveness – impossible for any normal human to
replicate – before taking another drag on her cigarette. “About
time
one
of you did what you were fucking told for
once.”

“
I
think I might have some information on your spate of petty
thefts.”

She stubbed out her
cigarette, reached for another, taking her time to light it. She
inhaled deeply, savouring the moment, before exhaling. “I’m
listening.”

Without an invitation,
I pulled up one of the chairs across from her desk, and told her
everything that Annabel had said to me. And though she had her eyes
closed and kept smoking, she was true to her word – she
listened.

When I finished, she
made her judgement.

“
That
bastard’s probably long gone by now,” she decided, having
extinguished her cigarette, and now studying her nails with a
deceptive level of disinterest in our discussion. “But, if he’s
anywhere close to being the criminal ‘mastermind’ that this girl
thinks, with all his connections, he’ll have easily kept tabs on
these two kids. Especially if they were trying to hawk stolen gear
to various pawnbrokers. I have connections with most of them here
in Wattling Bay, so we can check on that part of her
story.”

“
Ma’am?” I asked in surprise. As far as I knew, she earned a
decent salary, so had no need of a pawnbroker’s service.

“
Oh,
for fuck’s sake, Tess. I don’t know them because I’m selling off
the fucking family silver. You’ve met my mother – in her house
you’re lucky to find plastic cutlery to eat with. I’m talking about
when I was a dee. Use your fucking brain. You know that most of an
ordinary dee’s work is break and enters or assaults. I spent half
my career interviewing pawnbrokers.”

“
Sorry, ma’am.”

“
So,
it was when our pair disappeared that this Merrick’s balls started
quivering with fear that he might have lost his precious things for
good.”

“
That’s what it sounds like. Then I suppose he started hunting
them down. I guess he caught a lucky break when one of his gang
spotted Jamie and Annabel still hanging around here in
town.”

“
Dumbshits. They should have run for it as soon as they left
his clutches.” She sighed heavily with utter weariness. “Fuck knows
I’ve seen a lot of bad shit in my career, but this case just
reminds me how much this world is fucked ten ways to tomorrow. You
say her baby might be his?”

“
That’s what she told me, ma’am.”

“
Poor
kid,” she said in a rare moment of sympathy.

“
Do
you really think he’s left town by now?”

“
He
didn’t manage to find the kids, and as far as we know, he hasn’t
got his shit back. He’s probably cut his losses and pissed off.
Only a crazy fucker would stay in town knowing that if the girl
ever showed up here, she could squeal on him.”

“
But
if he hasn’t left, Annabel could be in danger. It really sounds as
if they stole some things he values more than anything. And
according to her, she was one of his things. She’s a very pretty
young girl, and she seems quite compliant too. It’s easy to see why
some control freak of an old perv like him would want to keep her
around as his plaything. She’s afraid he’ll find her. She wants to
protect her baby from him.”

“
She’s safe enough in the hospital for now. If this guy is as
cautious as she says, he won’t hang around waiting for her to spill
the beans on him. Like I said, he’d have to be a crazy fucker to
value property over his freedom. That’s not the thinking of a
criminal mastermind.”

“
Can
you pass on all this info to the dees you have working the petty
thefts? I gave Mr X and Zelda a description and a photo of this
Merrick guy.”

“
I
haven’t assigned a dee team to those thefts. I was managing it in
an
ad hoc
way, while I decided what to do about it. But now
that you’ve told me all this, I suppose I’ll have to give it to
someone. Fuck knows who, though. If only those arse-twats in the
city would give me more fucking staff. Every dee I have is already
flat out working multiple cases.”

“
At
least you have a description and a name now.”

She snorted in
derision. “I suppose I should be grateful for fucking small
mercies.” Her sharp eyes pinned me again. “Now, there was a reason
I wanted you here today. She stubbed out her cigarette, and said in
her blunt way, “Denny Bycraft’s body is being released to the
family tomorrow.”