The Darkest Hour (13 page)

Sascha Ninkovic had worked at Newtown with Ella, way back when. Now she was with the Summer Hill detectives. Ella made her way up the stairs and paused at the top. Sascha stood with another detective on one side of the room, making notes. A Crime Scene officer was taking photographs and another one was crouched by the window. Ella looked around the room, taking in the open fridge, the open window, the shards of glass, the blood on the floor and the kitchen bench and the windowsill.

‘You’re certain she’s okay?’ she asked.

‘Shit, yeah,’ Sascha said. ‘Says she doesn’t even need hospital. Got her para mates to patch her up.’

Ella was embarrassed to feel tears of relief welling up.

Murray peered over her shoulder. ‘Jesus, what happened?’

‘He came in through a window at the back of downstairs there,’ Sascha said. ‘Pried it out of its frame and climbed on through. The occupant–’

‘Lauren,’ Ella said.

‘Yeah, Lauren, she came into the kitchen to get a drink and was attacked from behind. She had a glass jug in her hand and kept belting him as he was trying to stab her. They were right up close to the bench there next to the fridge. You can see the marks of the knife blade on the side of the microwave.’

Ella looked at the shiny scratches in the paint and the knife on the floor. It was a single-sided blade, so not the one used to stab James Kennedy.

‘Meanwhile she’s screaming out “Fire!” at the top of her lungs.’

‘Why fire?’ Murray said.

‘It gets attention quicker,’ Ella said. ‘Scream help, people are nervy, they worry about getting involved in something dangerous. Scream fire and people think it’s safe. Plus, fires are interesting. They come running.’

‘As her neighbour did,’ Sascha said. ‘He tried to belt the door down with a fire extinguisher. Eventually Lauren hurt her attacker bad enough that he dropped the knife and ran.’ She pointed to the window. ‘Went out there, across the awning, down the tree, timing it by happy accident that Lauren’s neighbour was by then inside the front door and didn’t see him. We’ve got a blood trail from his head wound heading up the street though, to a spot where we believe he had a car parked. We have people canvassing for witnesses.’

Ella said, ‘She say who it was?’

Sascha nodded. ‘Your boy Thomas Werner. She’s got more stuff to tell you too.’

‘What stuff?’ Murray said.

‘She wouldn’t say.’

E
lla and Murray went next door. The woman who answered their knock was in her mid-twenties and had long black hair tied up in a knot and held in place with a silver pin. She held out a slim and trembling hand and introduced herself as Tamsyn Saleeba. ‘It was my husband, Ziyad, who heard Lauren screaming.’

‘He really helped her,’ Ella said.

‘It’s still so hard to believe it’s happened. I don’t think it’s sunk in for any of us,’ Tamsyn said.

‘They’re all here now?’ Ella said.

‘Ziyad’s keeping the kids entertained in the backyard. Lauren and Kristi are in the living room.’ She led them to the doorway. ‘Can I get you something? Tea? Coffee?’

‘We’re fine, thanks.’

Ella went into the living room to find Lauren perched bolt upright on the edge of the lounge, her gaze fixed on the opposite wall. Kristi sat beside her, folding and refolding a damp-looking tissue. She looked up at them but Lauren didn’t.

‘Lauren,’ Ella said gently. ‘How are you?’

Lauren blinked and focused on her. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Okay.’

Ella sat down in an armchair at right angles to their lounge while Murray dragged a chair over from the dining suite that occupied one end of the room. Directly opposite Ella, French doors looked out onto a backyard where a checked tea-towel flag flew above a ramshackle cubbyhouse. A tall man with dark hair sat precariously on a tiny plastic chair, along with a stocky brown-haired boy in a school uniform and a little blonde girl. The girl sipped from a toy teacup and the boy poured nothing from a toy teapot into the cup the man held between his thumb and forefinger. Tamsyn Saleeba crossed the lawn to stroke the children’s heads.

‘I’m sorry that this happened,’ Ella said. ‘Do you feel up to talking about it again?’

Lauren nodded. ‘We need to catch him.’

‘Him being . . .’

‘Thomas Werner.’

Murray produced the photo they’d got at the airport. ‘Is this him?’

Both Lauren and Kristi looked and nodded.

Ella clenched her fists. ‘Can you first run over what happened today?’

Lauren told her the story that Sascha had already outlined, adding in the detail about how the jug glanced off Werner’s head and hit her own, causing the bruise and swelling that Ella could see on her right forehead, and how she hit her head on the chair. ‘If I hadn’t slipped, maybe my aim would’ve been better when I threw the jug. Maybe I would’ve been able to stop him.’

Kristi shook her head.

‘What other injuries did you sustain?’ Ella said.

Lauren lifted her hair to show them the swelling on her temple from the chair, then stood and turned and lifted her shirt. A dressing ran at an angle over her lumbar and right hip area, held in place by a wide bandage that wrapped around her torso. ‘It’s not even deep enough to stitch. I was very lucky.’

Kristi huddled over her knees. Ella felt shaky herself. She looked out at the yard. The little girl glanced in at them now and then, distracted from the tea party.

‘I need to tell you something else.’ Lauren sat down. ‘Thomas rang me yesterday and threatened to burn our house down if I didn’t withdraw my statement about what Kennedy said.’

Ella and Murray exchanged glances. The details of Kennedy’s dying words had not been released to the media.

‘Who had you spoken to about the case?’ Murray said.

‘Only Joe, who was there,’ Lauren said. ‘And you, and the uniformed officer at the hospital. I told Kristi today.’

Ella looked at Kristi.

‘Who’m I going to tell?’ Kristi snapped.

‘We have to ask.’

Kristi put her head down again. ‘I haven’t spoken to anyone about any of it.’

‘What’s Joe like?’ Ella said.

‘He wouldn’t tell a soul,’ Lauren said.

They had to consider a leak then. Maybe in the department, or somebody in the hospital perhaps. Ella understood why Lauren had been hesitant to tell her: a threat was a threat, and if Werner had learned that much, who knew what else he could find out.

‘There’s more,’ Lauren said. ‘Six months or so ago, I found a body in an alley.’

‘The Blake case,’ Ella said.

Lauren nodded. ‘That was Thomas too. He was still there. He attacked me and threatened to get me if I told that I’d seen him. I knew who the victim was; I thought the best thing was to do what he said. So I told the officers I saw nothing.’

Ella’s head was spinning. Thomas Werner was a double-murderer . . . Even more reason to get him. But now Lauren’s status as a witness was compromised.

‘Do you realise what you’re admitting?’ she said.

‘I felt that you needed to know everything,’ Lauren said.

‘We do,’ Murray put in.

‘When we get to court, this is going to come out,’ Ella said. ‘The defence will try to say you’re lying about everything because you lied about that. Also, the Blake case will be reopened, they’ll interview you again, you could be charged with perjury.’

Lauren took a deep breath then winced, a hand at her back. ‘I understand.’

Ella looked down at her notebook. What she didn’t say was that the risk to Lauren was probably greater than they could have imagined. She was the key witness who could put Werner away for two murders. He’d already made one attempt on her life, just a day after making the initial threat. What would he do next?

‘Kristi, I need to ask you some questions too. Are you okay for that?’

The woman nodded curtly.

‘You lived with Thomas Werner, is that correct?’

‘About five years ago, yes,’ she said. ‘We had a flat in the Cross. We were there for about nine or ten months.’

‘How did you meet?’

‘At a club in the city, the Marble Bar. I was in with a group of–’

‘Drug-users,’ Lauren said.

‘Well, yes,’ Kristi said. ‘I’m clean now, have been since the car accident. I don’t even drink. I’m a professional mosaic artisan and it’s important to keep my head clear.’

‘When did you last see Thomas Werner?’

‘Just before the car accident,’ Kristi said. ‘Just over four years ago. I was pregnant with Felise. After the accident I was kept in hospital until she was born, and then she needed heart surgery. He never showed up. Lauren went round to the flat but he’d gone. Then we got a letter from him in Austria saying that he’d been deported for overstaying his visa and he was sorry but he could never come back.’

There’d been nothing about deportation in Werner’s Immigration file.

‘We didn’t believe that but we didn’t care,’ Lauren said. ‘We wanted nothing to do with him.’

‘And there’s been no contact since? Not even a phone call?’

Kristi shook her head. ‘Until he called Lauren yesterday.’

‘Did you know he was back in Australia? Had any of your friends seen or heard from him?’

‘I don’t have any contact with anybody from those days,’ Kristi said. ‘It was a complete clean break.’

‘We’ll need their contact details,’ Ella said.

‘I threw out my address book from back then, but I’ll give you what I can remember.’ Kristi looked out the window to where Felise was laughing on the swing. ‘Alice Leslie and Reynaldo Gamboa were probably the core of our group. He was this small, intense, shaven-headed South American. Alice was red-haired and towered over him. They lived in a share-house on South Dowling Street, I can’t remember the number but it was a big purple place, on the Paddington side.’

Ella scribbled notes. ‘Go on.’

‘Chrystal Fowler – that’s spelled with an “h” – and Amos Lucas and Bekka Van Sprang – two words – had a flat in Darlinghurst, in Liverpool Street. Awful scuzzy place. Though ours was no better.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s it.’

‘And you haven’t seen any of these people for more than four years?’

‘Chrystal sent me a card in hospital when Felise was born, but that was all,’ she said. ‘I didn’t try to contact them because of the clean break thing, you know.’

Ella nodded. ‘We need to go and talk to our boss about all of this, but I’ll come back afterwards and let you know what will happen. First steps will be to put surveillance in place, along with a tap on your phone in case Werner rings again.’

‘So if he comes around again, you’ll catch him?’ Kristi said.

‘We’ll be waiting.’ Ella smiled at her but Kristi didn’t smile back. ‘Crime scene will be in your house for an hour yet, maybe two, then you can go back in.’

‘But we’re not going to stay there tonight, are we?’ Kristi said to Lauren.

Ella said, ‘I understand your fears, but it’s best if you can keep to your normal routine as much as possible. This includes being at home, travelling your usual route to work, that sort of thing.’

‘So you’re using us as bait,’ Kristi said.

Lauren said, ‘They need to catch him.’

‘Like I said, I’ll be back later to go over the details with you,’ Ella said. ‘In the meantime, there will be officers next door, and you can call me with any questions or worries. Anything at all.’

She gave Lauren another of her cards. She wanted to say something about how well Lauren did to fight Werner off, but it felt a silly comment to make when the woman had been fighting for her life.
Congratulations, you survive!
No.

‘Are you okay for now?’ she said. ‘Is there anything else you want to discuss?’

Lauren shook her head. Kristi was at the French windows, looking out at the children who were wrestling Ziyad to the ground.

‘We’ll see you soon then.’

Outside, in the car, Ella found she was shaking. The case was turning into a monster. Two murders plus an attempted, a leak somewhere, and a foreigner in the country on a fake passport. Talk about something to get your teeth into. But caught in the middle of it all was Lauren, who’d already almost paid with her life.

Murray started the car and Ella clipped in her seatbelt. She looked up at the old house as they drove away. Surveillance was good, phone taps were useful for court, but a determined man could find a way to get what he wanted.

Lauren sat in the doorway of the cubbyhouse, holding a wrapped icepack to her head. She had to keep her back straight or the wound stung. She leaned her shoulder sideways against the frame and watched Felise and Max pretending to be puppies and gambolling on the grass.

Kristi and Tamsyn were in the kitchen. Through the open doorway she could see them talking. Kristi was crying. Tamsyn smoothed Kristi’s hair back and folded her into a hug.

Lauren looked at her feet. Her first thought after it happened had been to call Kristi, but when she’d arrived Lauren hadn’t been able to handle her distress. She’d found herself keeping Kristi at arm’s length, as if to bring her close was to be dragged down into a whirlpool of panic. Kristi was hurt, and scared, anyone could see that, but Lauren felt like she was struggling for every breath, every heartbeat. That took all the energy she had and more. She was drained.

Ziyad was on the bottom step, beside her feet. ‘Sure you don’t want a beer?’

‘Thanks, no.’

He rested his elbows on his knees and picked at the edge of the label on his bottle. The late-afternoon sun shone across their roofs, making the chimneys cast black shadows on the red tiles. The pigeons preened themselves on the ridge capping. The crime scene people were still in her living room, and she felt a swelling bubble of something – grief? pain? fear? – push up inside her chest.

She tried to put her head down on her folded arms but the wound pulled at her back.

‘Hi.’

She looked up. Joe stepped down from the back door, a smile on his face and worry in his eyes. ‘Kristi called me, told me you’d been up to mischief.’

‘You know me.’ She met him with a hug, frightened a little by the strength of her emotions towards him. She made herself let go and step back.

‘Those cops are leaving.’ He pointed a thumb at their house. ‘I thought I might borrow a mop and bucket and see what I could do.’

‘I’ll help,’ Ziyad said.

‘And keel over again?’ Lauren said. ‘No way. I’ll go.’

Joe shook his head. ‘You should stay here, continue your life of luxury in the doorway of your mansion.’

‘It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.’

‘Ah, but it is.’ Joe touched the bruise on her temple with a gentle thumb. ‘You’re unbelievable, you are. I leave you alone for a few hours and look what happens.’ The tremble in his voice made her heart ache.

‘We’ll do it together.’ She looped her arm through his.

Kristi was in the bathroom when they went through the house. Lauren was glad not to see her.

Next door they found the last of the crime scene officers packing up his gear. ‘There are a couple of commercial companies who can clean up for you,’ he said.

‘We’re right, thanks,’ Joe said.

The officer shook both their hands. ‘All the best.’

Lauren closed the front door then led Joe upstairs. He went into the kitchen and looked around. Lauren saw the water, the blood, the glass, and for the first time the scrapes on the microwave. She tried to blink back her tears.