Frantic (7 page)

The sirens drew closer.

His fingers dug into the seat cushion. ‘You killed them and now I’m going to kill you.’

She’d heard that kind of threat before. ‘Look,’ she said, then Sawyer disappeared, tackled from behind so suddenly that even Sophie yelped in fright. One second he was there, the next he was gone.

She scrambled through the cabin to get out and saw him kicking on the roadway under three uniformed police officers, shouting, ‘She killed them! She killed them!’

More police joined the fracas. Sophie crouched beside Mick on the road. He blinked and tried to see past her. ‘Are you okay?’ she said.

‘I think so.’

There was a bruise and a swelling on his left cheek. She helped him sit up against the wheel and he felt his stomach gingerly. ‘I can’t believe I let him hit me twice.’

‘You were hardly expecting it.’ Sophie palpated the back of his neck. ‘Any pain or tenderness there?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You were almost knocked out, and it’s worker’s comp. You should go to hospital.’

He got to his feet. ‘It’s okay.’

‘What if you have a cerebral bleed and die during the night?’

‘Jo knows how to dial triple 0.’

‘Idiot.’

Mick watched Sawyer being hauled to his feet. His hands were cuffed behind his back and mucus ran from his nose as he sobbed.

One of the police officers came their way. ‘Hey, Soph.’

‘Allan, this is Mick. Allan works at Wynyard with Chris.’

They nodded at each other. ‘Can you come to the station later and give your statement?’ Allan asked Mick.

‘I don’t think I want him charged.’

‘Yes you do,’ Sophie said. ‘People have to know they can’t kick us around.’

‘The guy’s family just died,’ Mick said.

‘Yeah, and he wilfully got pissed and decided to get us. You can’t think it was chance that he saw us,’ Sophie said. ‘More likely he’d been driving around checking the big red numbers on ambulances for half the afternoon.’

The police stuffed Sawyer into the back of a paddy wagon. He kicked out at the open door. ‘He’s suffered enough,’ Mick said.

Allan looked at Sophie. ‘Did he do anything to you?’

‘Said I killed them, said he wanted to kill me. That was about it.’

‘Do you want to press charges?’

She felt Mick’s eyes on her. ‘I guess not.’

Allan shrugged. ‘We’ll still get him for driving under the influence.’ He went back to the paddy wagon and Sophie and Mick climbed into the ambulance.

Mick inspected his face in the mirror. ‘That was a good thing you did there.’

She didn’t want to talk about it. ‘Are you sure you’re okay to drive?’

‘I’m fine. Really.’

Sophie clambered into the back. ‘I still think you’re being an idiot. If you were a patient of yours, you’d tell yourself to go to hospital.’

He shrugged and started the engine. ‘I can’t believe that woman and her baby died.’

The old lady on the stretcher looked up and smiled at her. Sophie smiled back and patted her gnarled hand, but in her mind she was seeing the bodies of Julie and her tiny baby growing cold in the morgue.

Was she as blameless as she’d thought? Perhaps there was some way they could have got moving sooner. Maybe she could have started the fluids running into Julie earlier.

But second-guessing was completely useless when she didn’t know how they’d died. She had to call the hospital and find out. Only then could she look objectively at how she’d run the case and decide whether anything else could have been done.

But the look in the bereaved father’s eyes and his words weren’t easy to shake off.

You killed them.

Tuesday 6 May, 6.35 pm

T
he Southern Jungle was so crowded that Ella had trouble pushing the door open. She squeezed between groups of heavy-set cops to reach the bar. Everyone had had the same idea as she had, obviously: come to the real heart of the job and find out the facts.

She’d watched the five then six o’clock news but nothing was reported that she didn’t already know. Dudley-Pearson had been killed in the car accident along with a twenty-year-old university student, and injured were a fifty-year-old truck driver, another twenty-year-old uni student, and Mrs Marisa Waters, wife of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Robert Waters QC. No word about the money or why Duds and Mrs Waters were together.

There was no fresh news about Roth or the anonymous caller either. Just a rehash of what they’d been saying in the updates all day, that the robbery gang were alleged to be police, and that police management would be making a statement in the morning.

No self-respecting cop could wait that long to find out what was happening.

Detective Dennis Orchard was already at the bar. He rested his elbows on the bar towel and toyed with a cigarette.

‘Don’t do it,’ Ella said.

‘I’m not.’ He started to get off his stool, gesturing for her to sit, but she shook her head.

‘I’ve done nothing but laze around all day,’ she said. ‘You’ve been working.’

He smiled and got back on. There was just enough room for her to belly up to the bar herself. In a moment the barman placed a glass of red wine before her with a wink. ‘Thanks, Bob,’ she nodded.

Dennis drank some of his beer and looked at the bags of chips hanging on the wall behind the bar. ‘You hungry?’

‘No.’

He fiddled with the cigarette some more. ‘I can’t tell you much.’

‘Course you can.’ Being in the Crime Agencies was like being party to a gossip hotline.

He sniffed the non-filter end. ‘Eagers has been harping on about people knowing too much.’

She knew it. ‘He’s Acting Commissioner.’

‘Until everything’s sorted,’ Dennis said.

‘He loves that cone of silence shit,’ Ella said. ‘But come on, this is me.’

‘I know.’ Dennis drank more beer.

She didn’t want to put him on the spot, but neither did she want to go home knowing nothing. ‘Whatever you can, then.’

He studied her for a moment then leaned down to her ear. ‘A mate in the Robbery Squad says Roth could be the real deal.’

‘So he is a cop.’

‘Yeah,’ Dennis said. ‘So far they’ve got no witnesses to any of his story. Rumour says the bullet they dug out of him looked like a .45, which is what the guard was carrying. They checked Roth’s roster and he was off on all the dates of the previous robberies.’

‘I’ve never heard of him. Where’s he from?’

‘Padstow for the last five years, and Penrith before that. Did a couple of years plainclothes. Good at it too.’ Dennis’s breath was warm and beery. ‘Apparently he’s not saying a word about the gang. Just lies there in his hospital bed with his arms folded, staring out the window. Says he can’t remember where the alleged mugging happened or where he’d been drinking beforehand or anything. Hence the trouble finding witnesses.’

‘What about the person who rang the telly stations, promising a statement?’

‘Roth had no response when he was told about that. And Eagers isn’t saying whether he’s been contacted or not,’ Dennis said. ‘But there is a whisper that the call is for real. Don’t know who it is, though.’

‘Wow.’ Ella finished her drink and put down her glass. ‘So what about Duds?’

Dennis looked away.

She poked his arm. ‘If you clam up now, what can I think except that he is involved?’

He shrugged, his glass to his mouth.

‘Jeezus.’

Around them the bar was getting fuller. The words ‘Roth’ and ‘gang’ and ‘Dudley-Pearson’ could be picked out in the buzz of conversation. Someone elbowed Ella in the back and said ‘Sorry’ but she didn’t take her eyes from Dennis’s face. ‘Were he and Marisa Waters actually an item?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You do so,’ she said. ‘How was it kept so quiet?’

He pulled bits of tobacco out of the end of the cigarette. She grabbed it and threw it over the bar.

‘That’s not very nice,’ he said.

‘You’re supposed to be quitting.’

‘I can still play with them.’

‘Who’s investigating the crash?’

Dennis tugged at a loose thread on the edge of the bar towel.

‘I’ll find out soon enough, you know.’

‘So find out,’ he said. He looked at his watch. ‘I have to go. Tim’s doing a roast.’

Ella watched him push his way towards the door. His wife, Donna, was a professor of nursing with the wickedest sense of humour Ella had ever known, and their teenage son Tim was a) friendly, b) cheerful and c) an apprentice chef who couldn’t get enough of cooking. Ella had a microwave meal in the freezer, half a bottle of flat Coke in the fridge, and a bird cage that she hadn’t cleaned since her unnamed canary escaped two months ago. There was also a stack of photos from the fire in the takeaway shop. Case of the year. Hip hip hooray.

Perhaps she’d get another drink and a bag of chips, and just sit here with her ears open.

7 pm

Sophie and Mick worked overtime, and by the time Sophie finally got home she was wound up tight. Chris had not rung back to ask why she’d had to cut their phone conversation short, whether everything was okay, and the concern and rising guilt that she might be somehow to blame for the deaths of Julie and her baby weighed on her like a forty kilo sandbag, on top of the one she was already carrying over Angus.

She slammed the door as she entered the house.

‘How about a bit of quiet?’ Chris came hurrying down the stairs. ‘Lachlan’s asleep.’

Sophie stalked into the kitchen. ‘You eaten?’

‘Leftovers.’

Sophie yanked the remains of the lasagne from the fridge and threw it in the microwave. ‘Interesting thing happened at work today.’

Chris was washing baby bottles and didn’t look up.

‘Yeah,’ Sophie said. ‘Got my life threatened. Just after I talked to you.’

‘What?’

‘What I said.’

‘That’s not good.’

She almost laughed out loud. ‘Never mind my day, how was yours?’

He put the bottles in the steriliser, slowly and deliberately. ‘I know you’re angry that I didn’t answer your calls and didn’t ring you back.’

She stared into the microwave. The dish went round and round.

‘I went into the city to talk to Dean, not just about missing the party but also about the robbery. The guard. The whole thing.’

Now she looked at him.

‘You were right,’ he said. ‘I needed to talk to someone.’

Light burst over her head. This could be the turning point. She thought again of the promise, the possibility she’d felt when Lachlan was born.

Things could be good again.

‘I’m sorry I was nasty before,’ she said, ‘about how long you’d spent with Dean. I understand it now.’

Chris finished screwing on the steriliser lid before answering. ‘I wasn’t there all the time. I went for a walk along Mrs Macquarie’s Point. Had a bit of a think.’

Or could they?

The microwave pinged. Sophie busied herself opening the door and lifting out the dish.

‘Isn’t that hot?’

The burning in her fingers was nothing. Mrs Macquarie’s Point in Sydney Harbour was where they’d gone on their first date, and where Chris had proposed to her two years later, on New Year’s Eve, as fireworks blasted into the sky. If he was going there to walk and think, how could it not be to do with their marriage? She had the sudden image of herself coming home from work one day to an empty house. Lachlan, Chris, everything gone.

As if picking up on her feelings, Lachlan started to cry upstairs. Chris went up to him and Sophie sat at the table with her lasagne.

I should ask him if that’s what he’s planning.

But what if he says yes? And what if he asks me a question in return? Challenges me to tell the truth?

She put her face in her hands.

She looked up when Lachlan’s crying subsided. In the silence her pulse beat in her ears. She felt surrounded by trouble, most of which she could do nothing about.

She pushed her plate away and got up to grab the phonebook.

Her friend Danielle Dawes was on duty in Royal Prince Alfred’s Emergency Department. Sophie asked if she could find out the cause of death of Julie Sawyer and her baby.

‘I’ll have to put you on hold while I phone upstairs,’ Danielle said.

Sophie sat listening to what sounded like a doorbell version of ‘Greensleeves’. Damn Sawyer and his drunken accusations. Being scared that she’d stuffed up was like being new to the job all over again, when patients were a complete mystery and she was constantly terrified that each one had some life-threatening condition she was failing to recognise. Had she missed something here?

‘You there?’ Danielle said.

Sophie started. ‘What did you find out?’

‘Looks like the mother died from an amniotic fluid embolism.’

‘Oh.’ Some of the weight lifted from Sophie’s shoulders. On the rare occasions that amniotic fluid crossed into the mother’s circulation during the birth it changed her blood so that it wouldn’t clot. It could happen in a hospital just as easily as at home, and couldn’t be foreseen.

‘Yeah,’ Danielle said. ‘A mate of mine in theatre said they were pumping blood into her as fast as they could but she slipped away.’

‘And the baby?’

‘She was on a ventilator and just arrested. They couldn’t get her back. They’re not sure why. PM’s planned for the morning.’

It was an ugly thought, the tiny body being autopsied. ‘That poor father.’ No wonder he’d gotten drunk and tracked them down. ‘Thanks, Dani.’

Sophie hung up, glad now that she hadn’t made a statement against Sawyer. Impulsive death threats from drunks were nothing new anyway.

Chris came downstairs and poured himself a glass of milk in silence. He glanced at her as he took the carton back to the fridge and she thought she saw wariness in his eyes.

I should make a better effort. He might not leave if things improve.

‘So this Roth guy,’ she said brightly. ‘Is he really a cop? Do you know him?’

‘We did a course together once, I think.’

Sophie nibbled at the edge of her lasagne. ‘At that car accident, I couldn’t believe it when I recognised Dudley-Pearson.’

‘Can we not talk about this?’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m sick of hearing about the bad stuff in the job. I have to listen to it all day at work, then when I open a paper or turn on the TV it’s there as well.’ He drained his glass. ‘I don’t need it from you too.’

Like I never have a stressful day
. She scraped the lasagne into the bin. ‘So you can talk to Dean but you can’t talk to me.’

‘It’s not like that,’ he said.

‘What’s it like then?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘You mean you won’t.’

He came close to her, anger in his eyes. ‘I mean I can’t.’

She felt the blood surging in her face. ‘What’s so important that you can’t even tell your wife?’

‘Like you never have things you don’t tell me?’

By force of will she kept her eyes locked on his, but mentally she backed right off.

Chris stared at her. His dark eyes were flat, unreadable.

If it’s going to happen, it’ll surely happen now.
She held her breath and braced herself.

But Chris only turned to the fridge, poured himself another glass of milk, then went upstairs.

Sophie sagged against the table, tears blurring her vision.

Wednesday 7 May, 11.36 am

Ella flipped dully through the photographs of the ruined takeaway shop then leaned back in her chair with a sigh. She was alone in the detectives’ office in Hunters Hill Station. Of the six separate desks in the large room, four belonged to individual detectives and the other two were piled with the various dross that came with police work: forms mostly, and manuals that explained how to do stuff in the PC bureaucrat-speak that had taken over the world. There was also a copy of today’s newspaper. It was open to articles about the anonymous caller, Roth, the death of Duds in the crash, and a short piece about the bank guard whose funeral was to be held that afternoon. The statement by police management about all these matters was exactly what Ella expected: vague and brief. Investigations were ongoing, nothing could be confirmed. Blah blah.

Ella rolled up a scrap of paper and flicked it at the ceiling. Fifteen years she’d been in the job. It was funny, really, that she could recall every early step – the application process, starting then finishing at the Academy in Goulburn, her first job on her first shift – but the last four years were a blur. Sure she remembered moving into the detectives, and there had been a couple of decent homicide investigations she’d been part of (and naturally she’d never be allowed to forget the one where she’d told off Assistant Commissioner Shakespeare), but these days she was tired and bored. Whatever life was meant to be, surely it was more than this. Shouldn’t she wake up each morning with at least
some
enthusiasm?