Cold Justice (6 page)

She flushed at forgetting such basics. It was that man in the crowd. She turned her head just a fraction and saw him from the corner of her eye. He was behind a heavy-set woman so she couldn’t fully see his face. His arms were folded and his eyes were hidden behind reflective sunglasses. She felt under such close and fury-filled scrutiny that her skin crawled.

A police officer crouched beside them. ‘How’s he doing?’

‘Touch and go,’ Georgie lied.

‘The wife was asking if she could come over.’

Georgie looked at the man under her hands, his body shifting slightly with each compression by the off-duty paramedic. He looked like crap. He looked like the corpse he practically was.

‘She’s sure?’ Georgie said.

The cop nodded. ‘I’ll stay with her.’

‘Okay, thanks. Just give us a minute.’

‘Atropine in,’ Freya said. ‘Still asystole.’

Georgie bent over the patient’s head and took a deep breath. Going in blind was hard. You had to put your mind on the end of the tube and hope to somehow mentally guide it into place between the cords. You couldn’t just poke around because that could send the cords into spasm, which would make them close against you for what felt like forever, and might damage them so that even if the guy came back from the brink his voice could be buggered. It was better to be alive with a shitty voice than dead, no doubt about that, but best of all was, naturally, alive with the same old voice. She picked up the tube and tried to block out the thoughts, block out the man in the crowd, the copper who hadn’t waited like she’d asked but was helping the wife over just in time for her to watch Georgie muck about in her husband’s throat.

Okay.
She tilted the man’s head back and went in again.
Smooth and fast. Let’s do this. Come on, universe, help me out for once!

She felt the tube slide into the pharynx but from there it could’ve been anywhere. A thought popped into her head, a memory of being a trainee and asking her mentor what you felt when the tube went between the cords, how was it different from the times that it didn’t. All you feel is pissed off, he’d said, because you have no clue, you have to attach the bag and inflate the lungs and listen to the chest with the stethoscope, and only then do you find that it’s not in and you have to come out and try again.

The tube slid somewhere.
Oh please . . .
She connected the bag and squeezed.

Freya pushed the earpieces of her stethoscope into place and listened hard, in both of the patient’s armpits, then over his stomach, and shook her head.

Dammit.

Georgie pulled out the tube and fitted the mask into place again.

‘Will he be okay?’ The wife sank to her knees beside him and put her hand on his trousered shin.

‘We’re doing everything we can for him,’ Freya said. ‘He got excellent CPR immediately and that counts for a heck of a lot, and we’re doing all the treatment now that the hospital would give him.’

Georgie blushed with shame. It wasn’t the end of the world to miss a tube, it happened to everyone, but this felt bad. She glanced up at the off-duty paramedic who didn’t meet her eye. She would know what a shambles this was turning into and that it wasn’t just the tube. Georgie was disorganised and distracted. She was meant to be in control of the entire event and look at her – she was forgetting drugs and she couldn’t stop herself from glancing up at the man in the crowd.

He was still there, as motionless as ever. Georgie shivered.

‘Do you want to load and go?’ Freya said in a low voice. ‘Georgie?’

‘Yes.’

That too. It was her decision when they would move and she should’ve made it long minutes ago. It would be nice to explain why she was so unfocused, but to admit what she was fearing was just . . . crazy.

THREE

E
lla stood on Britannia Street with her back to the passing cars. The sunlight warmed her shoulders and the breeze brought the sound and smell of grass being mown in Pennant Hills Park as she stared into the shadowed undergrowth. She held the crime scene photos in her hand but didn’t need to look at them again to remind herself where Tim Pieters had lain. It had been a lot of years but the place hadn’t changed so much: the trees were still back from the road, and shrubby bushes and long grass still covered the ground between them and the gravelled border of the roadway. Tim had been dropped into the far edge of the bushes, at the base of a grey-barked tree. She thought of that night: somebody bringing him here, dead or dying, in their vehicle and carrying him into the grass. Had the killer dropped him? Flung him? Laid him down carefully? She knew he’d felt none of it but she didn’t like to think of him falling even the short distance from someone’s arms.

She stepped through the long grass and touched the tree’s rough bark. There was nothing at its base; no flowers, no old ribbons that had once tied flowers on, no sign of what had happened there. It was just a tree.

A car slowed on the street. She looked around. It kept going and she watched it drive out of sight. This was a residential street that led only to more of the same. The busiest days would be the weekends, when hordes of parents and kids would flood in and out of the sports fields and playgrounds. Back in 1990 there’d been fewer houses in the area, and Tim’s body had been dumped here either late on Saturday night or very early Sunday, so it was possible that the car stopped on the edge of the road had been seen by nobody at all.

At least, nobody who’d come forward.

Ella looked at the positions of the streetlights then compared them to the photos. Nothing had changed. She stared further up the street at the first house next to the park, the house the girl had run to after she’d found Tim. When the case had last been looked into six years ago, the same man was still living there. Once she’d checked out his statements, she’d be back out here on that doorstep, fingers crossed that he was a) still alive and b) still there.

She opened the car door and put the photos back with John Pieters’s second interview transcript. It had been much the same as the first – John still angry and defensive, and Detective Constantine continuing to ask about where he’d gone the night Tim was killed. John had insisted that he couldn’t remember. She had read that his car had been examined and he’d been interviewed twice more, the final time with a lawyer present, and though it was clear that the detectives had their suspicions, there was nothing to charge him over.

At the school he’d struck her as friendly and keen to help, though it was interesting that he’d volunteered the information about Tamara being unstable. Knowing that they were both going to be questioned, a canny person might do such a thing to suggest the other is unreliable. The Pieterses might still be together but Ella got the sense, even before John spoke, that it wasn’t all sunshine and flowers; and, as Galea had pointed out, when relationships changed so did what people said to police.

Callum McLennan was even keener to help. She’d known he was watching her as she talked to John, obviously aware that his uncle had been a suspect even though he himself must have only been a child at the time. She would read his statement when she got back to the office. Kids often picked up stuff that went unnoticed by others. He seemed a decent man and, judging by the emotion she’d seen during his speech, one deeply affected by what had happened.

Ella got back into the car. For now she had more reading to do, but she’d decided during Callum’s speech that she would be out this way again tomorrow for a surprise visit to John and Tamara. It took no brilliance on John’s part to work out that a detective would’ve turned up today, and maybe he would equally prepare himself for a knock on the door tomorrow, but she was still looking forward to watching him in his home environment, and talking to him – and Tamara – at length.

Georgie rested the case-sheet folder on Thirty-three’s bonnet and sighed. St Vincent’s Hospital’s ambulance bay was quiet, which pleased her because the last thing she wanted to do was joke around with other paras. She felt shrivelled after that job, sad for the man who lay under a sheet in the resus room. It wasn’t down to the tube, she knew that in her head, but she couldn’t help but feel in her heart that if she’d been able to get it things might have gone differently. If she’d been able to do that, maybe she would’ve maintained her focus, maybe she would’ve run the thing better.

Freya came out of the Emergency Department with a patient ID label on her finger. Georgie stuck it on the case sheet.

‘I’m sorry about that one.’

‘Probably a massive MI,’ Freya said. ‘Nothing anyone could’ve done.’

‘Still.’

‘What?’

‘I didn’t do as well as I should’ve.’

‘Happens to all of us.’

Georgie smoothed down the sticker’s edges. The man had been sixty-one and lived in Earlwood.
On a nice day out with his wife,
she thought.
Enjoying the weather and the harbour.
‘I stuffed up that tube.’

‘Bullnecks can be impossible,’ Freya said. ‘Don’t sweat it.’

Georgie shook her head.

‘I’m serious,’ Freya said.

‘So am I. I stuffed up.’

‘With what? So you were a bit slow off the mark with the drugs. We got them all in, we got going soon enough. We did what was required.’

Georgie frowned at the sticker. ‘I was all over the shop.’

‘So you’ll do better next time. It was probably the aftereffects of the last job. Your brain was addled by eau de Hilary.’

Her smile made Georgie feel like opening up and explaining the true reason why she’d been so haphazard. And why not? Maybe it would be good to talk about it.

She took a deep breath. ‘It’s because of this guy.’

Freya raised her eyebrows. ‘Other than your husband?’

‘Not like that,’ Georgie said. ‘This guy who was at the scene.’

‘The one who punched the truck?’

Georgie shook her head. ‘He was in the crowd, he was wearing those mirrored sunnies. You must’ve seen him.’

Freya gave her a quizzical look then glanced past, and Georgie looked around to see a young woman with a tear-streaked face stumble down the driveway.

‘Hold that thought,’ Freya said.

She went towards the woman and said a few words, and when the woman half-collapsed against her she put her arm around her shoulders and helped her towards the ED doors. From Freya’s glance over the woman’s head, Georgie guessed this was a family member of the man she’d failed to save. By her age she had to be a daughter, and Georgie didn’t want to think about her going into the ED, falling into her distraught mother’s arms, the two of them sobbing over the cooling body. Instead she looked up the driveway to the street.

A flash of sunlight off mirrored sunglasses by the wall caught her eye.

It was him.

She started running.

He took off. She reached the top of the driveway and followed him, boots pounding the footpath. He dodged the bus shelter and ran straight into an old woman who fell into the gutter with a squawk. He ran fast, elbows tucked in, and Georgie saw the distance between them growing. By the time she reached the corner she knew she had no hope. She put a hand on the wall and looked breathlessly into the next street but he was gone in the crowd of pedestrians.

She hurried back to the woman in the gutter. ‘Did you know that man?’

The woman put out a filthy hand. ‘Hello, lovey.’

Oh crap
. Georgie took a step back. ‘Hilary, did you see that man? Would you recognise him again?’

‘What man was this?’

‘The man who knocked you over.’

Nobody else had been walking on the street at the time. No people going past in cars had stopped. Hilary was her only witness.

Hilary frowned. ‘Didn’t you do it?’

Georgie took another step back. ‘It was a man.’

‘Are you sure?’

Georgie looked up at the light poles and the walls. CCTV cameras. Thank God. They would’ve captured everything.

‘Where are you hurt?’ she asked Hilary.

‘I’m fine, sweet. Just help me up and I’ll be on my way.’

‘You should get checked out properly.’

‘Don’t need to go back in there, just had lunch.’

‘You really should at least have someone look at you. Listen, I’ll bring a wheelchair out, you won’t even have to walk.’

‘Thank you, my lovely, but I’m all right.’ Hilary clambered to her feet.

‘But this needs to go on your records, so they know what happened.’

Hilary was already tottering off, and she waved one hand behind her head and kept going.

Georgie watched her for a moment then went back into the ambulance bay.

Freya was crouched by the ambulance, collecting the case sheets that had fallen out of the folder. ‘What happened to you? I come out and you’re gone and this is on the ground and blowing all over.’

‘That guy in the mirrored sunnies was here. Did you see him? He must’ve been right behind the patient’s daughter.’

‘Maybe he’s a rello too.’

Georgie shook her head. ‘He ran away when I tried to approach him.’

‘Why’d you approach him? Oh, look at this.’ Freya held up a case sheet smeared with brake dust.

‘I’ll explain later.’

Georgie went into the ED, past the family room with its closed door that failed to muffle the sounds of sobbing, and up to the nurses’ desk. ‘I just witnessed an assault on the street outside and I think you need to call the police.’

The hassled nurse barely glanced up. ‘Injuries?’

‘Patient, ah, didn’t stay.’

He frowned. ‘So there’s no complainant.’

‘It was Hilary,’ she said.

He snorted. ‘Say no more.’

‘But the police can still look into it, can’t they? They could at least look at the CCTV and see who it was.’

‘Cameras are busted,’ he said.

‘You’re kidding me.’

He shrugged. ‘We don’t have enough money to pay for the nursing staff we need. Electricians are way down the list.’

Georgie walked away, past the family room, and hesitated. Maybe the daughter had seen the man in the mirrored sunglasses. But so what if she had – what did that prove?