Cold Justice (10 page)

John shifted in his chair. Ella felt for him.

‘I will look into it,’ she said gently. ‘Thank you.’

John stared at the notebook. ‘I was supposed to protect him. That’s my job as his dad. But I didn’t know he’d gone. And even if I knew he was going, what could I do? Should I have grabbed him, locked him inside? Is that even right?’ He looked despairing. ‘But why worry about that, when anything would have been better than what happened?

‘I went out looking, I searched and searched. And to know that at the same time, somebody had him, somebody was hurting him and he was dying, makes me feel . . .’ His hands shook. ‘It just about kills me.’

Ella nodded.

‘I think about it,’ he said. ‘I wonder if I drove past in the car. I wonder if Tim saw me and cried out for me to help him.’ Tears poured down his face. ‘He was my son, and I let him down.’

Ella saw a box of tissues across the room and brought it over. It was good that he let it out, that he get comfortable with her. She put her hand on his shoulder.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a couple of minutes, wiping his eyes. ‘This isn’t helping you.’

She handed him his cup of tea. ‘Where did Tamara go just now?’

‘Out the back.’ He sipped. ‘She spends a lot of her time in the granny flat there. She has problems, as you probably saw on the news last night. She likes to spend time alone. She doesn’t sleep well and her restlessness affected my sleep too.’

‘So she moved out there?’

‘It was the best thing,’ John said.

Interesting
.

‘You’ll have to forgive her for being a little hostile,’ he said. ‘She put all her hope into Tynan and Constantine, got close to them, I guess, but then over time the case went nowhere. Eventually the detectives were changed – which I understand, it happens, people move on to different jobs – but one night she said to me with this awful realisation spreading across her face that this is just a job for them.’

‘While to her it’s her whole life,’ Ella said.

‘Exactly.’ He put his cup on the table. ‘There’s no doubt that it’s changed the whole family, but she in particular has found it extremely hard. She said to me once that she sees the world differently now, that the fact that Tim could be killed changed her relationship to everyone. She said she still walks through shopping centres looking at people, thinking, is it you? Is it you? It haunts her that the person is out there but will probably never be identified.

‘I still have some hope, though she tells me I’m a fool,’ he said. ‘I know what she’s saying, everyone knows that the longer a case goes unsolved the less chance there is of solving it, but I can’t help it. I have to hope for justice for Tim, and also, I guess, I hope that if the killer is found then some part of my heart might be repaired. Just a little.’

Ella nodded. ‘It makes sense to me.’

Her mobile buzzed in her pocket. ‘Excuse me.’ She checked the screen. Her parents’ number. She let it go to voicemail.

‘You can take that if you need to,’ he said.

‘It’s fine.’ She hesitated before going on. ‘John, I need to ask you some questions.’

‘I know. Ask away.’

‘I’ve been reading about the argument you and Tim had at the barbecue. Tim seemed angry about something before it all started, but none of the statements say what it was.’

He nodded. ‘We’ve all asked ourselves the same thing. I remember he was in a bad mood that evening and didn’t want to be there, but it’s a family tradition and I told him he had to. Also, I guess maybe my pulling him up about getting on with the job of manning the barbecue, which he usually enjoyed but that night was terrible at, put him in a worse one.’

‘Had something happened in his life?’

‘Again, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘He was going through an uncommunicative stage and it was almost impossible to get more than a grunt out of him. I talked to his friends after it happened and they said he’d been moody that night, they presumed about the argument, but he hadn’t confided in them. He never really did.’

‘Except Damien Millerton.’

‘You’re talking about the gay thing.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know,’ John said. ‘I didn’t know about it then, and I’ve thought and thought about it since, and I never saw any indication that he might have been that way, or that the experience Damien thought Tim was talking about had actually happened.’

‘Do you think one or both of them was lying?’

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I think Damien might have either misunderstood him or . . . I don’t know. I just can’t see it.’

It wouldn’t be the first time parents had no idea what their kids were doing. They’d already said in their statements at the time they hadn’t known about his drinking, and sexuality was something that kids kept even closer to their chests.

‘Do you know if Tim had a girlfriend?’

‘Not that I knew about,’ John said. ‘There was nothing to indicate anything was going on: no phone calls or letters that I knew of, and he wasn’t sneaking out at night or anything like that.’

Ella nodded. In 1990 there’d been no email, no IMing, no mobile phones to ask about. ‘Have you kept in contact with his friends?’

‘Damien and Gareth stayed around for a while; they’d drop in and see us every month or so at first, then, on Tim’s birthday, and then when they finished high school,’ he said. ‘Tamara couldn’t stand to see how they were growing, that they were young men by the end of high school and Tim hadn’t got that far. It was hard for them too, I’ve got no doubt about that, and I always told them how grateful I was that they took the time to come around.’

‘When was the last time you had contact?’

‘About five years ago we got a card from Damien saying he was getting married. Haven’t heard from Gareth for probably eight, maybe ten, years.’

‘They haven’t been in touch now that the case is in the news again?’

He shook his head.

‘Did Tim have a family doctor?’

‘His uncle, Tar’s brother-in-law,’ John said. ‘Alistair McLennan.’

‘Was he aware of what Damien had said?’

‘I don’t know. I never talked about it with him. I’m not sure if he ever brought it up with Tar; if he did, she never told me.’

‘Does he live locally? I’d like to speak to him sometime.’

John crossed to a hutch and took out a business card. ‘That’s his surgery address and phone number.’

Ella saw it was in West Pennant Hills, just five minutes away. But first a quiet word with Tamara. ‘Thank you.’

‘Anything to help.’ John’s eyes were wet with tears. ‘Anything.’

Georgie glanced at Freya, who was hunched, frowning, behind the wheel. ‘You okay?’

‘What?’

‘Are you all right?’

Freya made a face. ‘Stuff on my mind. Domestic stuff, you know.’

Georgie almost made a crack about James and his haw-haw laugh but caught herself. ‘I know the feeling.’

Freya overtook a bus. ‘Would you mind if I asked you something?’

Georgie put her elbow on the sill. They were on the highway, heading west to pick up a patient at Nepean Hospital for transfer to Royal Prince Alfred. The morning sun shone through the rear windows, lighting the inside of the ambulance. The sky was burnished blue and Georgie felt good, even though she knew what Freya was going to ask. ‘It’s about the accident, right?’

‘Huh?’

Georgie glanced across at her. ‘The accident that got me sent here. The one where I hit the guy lying on the road.’

‘I heard about that,’ Freya said.

Usually people wanted all the details so they could imagine themselves in her place and think how they wouldn’t have done what she did, how they would’ve stayed calmer and not got into the same situation.

‘That’s not your question?’ she said.

Freya shook her head and something lifted inside Georgie.

‘I wanted to ask how long you’ve been married.’

‘Eight months,’ Georgie said. ‘You?’

‘Fourteen years,’ she said. ‘Ainsley’s fifteen going on twenty-one, and Robbie’s ten, and sometimes I wonder who the hell’s life I’ve stepped into. My mother once said to me that my turn would come, that I’d realise when I had kids of my own what I put her through, and wouldn’t you know it, she’s right.’

‘I remember your mum,’ Georgie said. ‘How’s she doing? And your dad?’

‘They’re okay. Yours?’

‘Same.’

Freya pulled out to overtake a truck heaped with tyres. ‘So.’

Here it comes
. ‘The accident.’

‘Well, yeah. D’you mind?’

‘Not so much any more,’ Georgie said. ‘It was three weeks before our wedding. I was on call, and I’d been out and done a chest pain with my mate Kaspar. The job was past his place so I’d picked him up on the way to save him driving his ambulance, you know? Afterwards I’d dropped him back at his house and was driving home in my ambulance about midnight. It was dark, I mean really dark: no moon or anything. Our house is eleven kays out of town so I was on small country roads, no lights, no traffic around, nothing. I almost hit a roo and was swearing about it – we had ambulances in the workshop all the time because of roos – when I rounded a bend and hit something lying on the road.’

Freya was silent.

‘I thought I’d run over another roo, one that somebody else had hit,’ Georgie said. ‘I pulled over to check for damage to the ambulance. As I got out I looked back along the roadway but it was too dark to see anything. At the front of the ambulance I bent to see the grille and bonnet.’ She’d said these words so often, in her statements to police, to management, to her union rep. It never got easier. ‘There was a bit of green cloth caught in the edge of the numberplate. A bit of T-shirt.’

‘Shit.’

Georgie left out the shakes, the stumbling run back to the driver’s door, the screeching U-turn. ‘I hit the high beams when I turned and saw him lying on the road.’

‘Oh shit, Georgie.’

‘He was unconscious, hypoventilating. He had head and abdo injuries. I screamed on the radio for help.’ They’d played that back to her and she’d hardly recognised her voice, words running into one another,
dilatedpupilsfacialfracturesavulsedjaw
. ‘There were tyre marks on his skin. I couldn’t get the tube in so had to bag him. I got the monitor on and his rate was slowing. I couldn’t stop bagging to cannulate. I screamed into the portable for the back-up to hurry.’
Getmesomefuckinghelp!
‘An ambulance finally pulled up but nobody got out.’

‘What?’

‘Kaspar was driving, he had his door open a little bit so the cabin light was on. I could see that the S/O, Ross Oakes, was in the passenger seat. He had hold of Kaspar’s arm so he couldn’t get out.’

‘What? Why?’

‘Ross said later that he was concerned about where I’d parked my ambulance and whether they should move theirs to protect the scene more,’ Georgie said. ‘Kaspar said that was right, Ross was indeed going on about that, while he – Kaspar – was yelling that they needed to help me and worry about the vehicles later. But Ross wouldn’t let him go.’

‘Holy crap.’

‘I guess it wasn’t long, one or two minutes maybe, but it was long enough for me to see absolutely red,’ Georgie said. ‘I ran over to the ambulance and screamed at Ross to get out and help. He did, but later that night he reported me for leaving the patient, said I’d panicked and I wasn’t fit to do the job. The man died and the area super came out and I was suspended. Ross claimed that I could’ve stopped the ambulance before running over him, I was probably looking at myself in the mirror or something and not watching the road, and I should be charged. The police investigated and found it truly was an accident and didn’t charge me, but the dead man’s family, who are related to Ross through some distant cousin, believed him and between them all they started this campaign to get me sacked.’

‘What the hell was his problem?’

‘He’s one of those old-school guys who reckon girls shouldn’t be in the job,’ Georgie said. ‘When I got engaged, he bitched about how first I’d take maternity leave and then would be wanting to go part-time and expect special treatment like not having to work overtime because I had a baby at home. He reckons girls get priority treatment from the bosses and get promoted faster, and cause problems on the station because nobody can relax and be themselves while there’s a girl around. Two previous female officers had left after making a heap of complaints about him and finding that management just didn’t want to know. It was easier for the bosses to sweep it under the carpet than try to deal with it, especially when you tried to explain the things that were happening – like that he was pissing on the toilet seat in the ladies and, yes, I could be certain of that because it was only him and me on the shift and it wasn’t there before and I sure hadn’t done it; or that he’d use a distinctly different tone of voice with me than with the others. The bosses told me I was being silly. Or else it came down to his word against mine. Especially when he’d done such outrageous things that they found it hard to believe me. Like that email I supposedly sent to every officer in the state: that was him.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll never keep my password in my locker again. I should’ve guessed he’d have a master key.’

‘I remember that email,’ Freya said. ‘We all just figured it couldn’t be real.’

‘I wish management had felt the same way.’

‘How on earth could they have thought you wrote it? Who would say they fantasised about stabbing their patients and colleagues?’

‘They said because I was just out of the psych ward I could have sent it and “not remembered”.’

‘Oh, I didn’t – I mean, we honestly thought the whole thing was a hoax.’

‘No, I really was in a psych ward,’ Georgie said. ‘Because of a job I did where this girl died. You know how it is. Sometimes one gets through your defences.’

Freya nodded. ‘Sorry again.’

‘It’s okay,’ Georgie said. ‘But as I said, that was nothing in comparison to some of his other stunts. A few months after the accident, we collected an old lady from a nursing home and took her to hospital for treatment for a UTI. She had pretty bad dementia, so she didn’t speak or interact, just lay there in her own little world. Ross was driving –’