Web of Deceit (18 page)

Downstairs, Murray was kicking the kerb by the car. The wind blew leaves up the street.

‘Is she okay?’ Murray said.

‘No thanks to you.’ She tugged at the handle. ‘Unlock it, will you?’

He pressed the button and they got in.

‘I just don’t understand why he wouldn’t explain what he meant. He wanted her to know something was wrong, he wanted to tell her he loved her and the baby, and he would’ve known that if something did happen there’d be a heap of questions, so why not be a bit clearer?’

‘Maybe he didn’t really think he wouldn’t be here to explain.’ She was looking
at the page. ‘This could apply to Canning, but not much to Fletcher. Meixner mentions his past, not hers, and he had hardly anything to do with Fletcher. So it’s got to be about Canning, right? Maybe he found where Meixner worked and called him, threatened him. It could’ve been him that Meixner was saying “no, no” to.’

‘I guess so,’ Murray said. ‘But Langley’s going to say it’s a suicide
note. He’ll say that escaping the past is referring to his previous attempts and psych problems.’

‘So let’s not tell him yet. We know that the phone call might’ve been part of the trigger, and Kemsley and Gawande are checking all the calls at the office now. So with that end of it covered, let’s go visit Canning.’

*

Alex slept fitfully for a few hours, then woke at quarter past
three. The room was stuffy and hazy in the afternoon light. He rubbed his face with his hands, then stretched and yawned so widely something popped in the side of his jaw. Mia would be home soon, and he would be showered, shaved and dressed when she arrived. They’d have another talk, and he’d supervise her homework and assignments while making dinner, then when Louise arrived at five thirty he
could walk out the door knowing that all was on track.

In the shower, he washed and shaved, then turned the water as hot as he could stand it, then completely cold. He stepped out gasping, his skin tingling, certain that they’d get through this. He’d work on communication, get them both to counselling maybe – the service was always sending out brochures; he’d look into it tonight. It wouldn’t
be easy but they’d make it through.

He dressed in a clean uniform, then went downstairs. The clock on the microwave said it was already three forty. He put the jug on, then thought he heard a girl’s voice out the front. Mia had forgotten her key again probably, and he walked through the house to let her in. The porch was empty. He went out to the street.

Two girls in private school
uniforms chattered further up the footpath. He looked towards the corner where Mia walked up from the bus stop. The sun glinted off the windscreens of the parked cars and he shielded his eyes with his hand. Then around the corner appeared a figure in the Randwick uniform, a black schoolbag over one shoulder, a Slush Puppie cup in her hand, and something inside Alex loosened. As the figure drew closer,
however, he saw it wasn’t Mia, but an older girl who lived on the next block.

‘Excuse me,’ he said when she got level with him. ‘Were you on the three twenty-two?’

She shot him a suspicious look. ‘Yeah.’

‘Do you know Mia Churchill? Was she on it too?’

‘Blonde hair?’

‘Brown,’ Alex said.

‘Don’t know her, sorry.’

Alex glanced up the street. She could be at
the shops, getting a Slush Puppie of her own. ‘Did any other girls get off at the stop with you?’

The girl shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’

‘Thanks,’ he said as she walked on.

Down at the corner, nobody appeared. He squeezed the fencepost and stared.
So she’s late. No big deal. She’s angry, she’s gone shopping with her friends, she’s hanging out in a park, avoiding coming home. She’s
an angry teenage girl. That’s all.

Cars drove past and a horn blew. A breeze ruffled his hair, birds called and the sun warmed his shoulders through his uniform shirt. They were ordinary things happening in an ordinary street, but he suddenly felt that danger lurked everywhere; that he was being watched by some malevolent force that knew something had happened to Mia and was even now taking
pleasure in his ignorance. He stared around, searching the parked cars for someone slumped low behind a dashboard or peering out over a back seat, for a figure on the footpath half-hidden behind a power pole, for a twitching curtain in a neighbouring house, even as he told himself not to be ridiculous.

Because ridiculous is what this behaviour is. Be sensible. Go inside and ring her.

He made himself let go of the fencepost, took one last look down the street, then stopped. Another girl in uniform turned the corner, Slush Puppie in hand. He recognised her walk.

‘Hi,’ he said as she got near.

Her face was guarded. ‘I’m just a little bit late.’

He hated that she was so quick to be defensive. Had he caused that? When? How?

He nodded at the cup. ‘What
flavour did you get?’

‘Blue.’

He smiled.

‘I know, blue’s not a flavour.’ Her tone was almost hostile.

‘Yes it is, and it’s my favourite.’

‘You hate blue.’

‘Not today.’ He made a grab for the cup.

‘Dad.’ She pulled away.

‘Sharesies.’

‘You are so lame.’

‘You mean so cool.’ He grabbed again.

A smile broke through her scowl and she
ducked past him and ran into the house. He followed with a smile on his own face, thinking that from now on things would be different. He would make sure of it.

SEVENTEEN

E
lla and Murray drove into the boatyard car park just as Natasha Osborne was heading out alone in the big blue ute. Ella saw the moment when she recognised them and the expression that flitted across her face. She braked hard. ‘Let’s follow her.’

‘No, look.’ Murray pointed down to the dock where a man walked with a bucket and fishing rod. ‘First time we’ve
seen someone here to talk to.’

‘She made a face when she saw us.’

‘You go then. Let me out.’ He put his hand on the door.

Ella stopped the car and he jumped out, then she spun the wheel and headed back the way she’d come. She caught up to Osborne quickly, and saw the woman frown in the mirror. She followed her along a leafy road, through roundabouts and traffic lights, the sun
shining down on them both, then the ute slowed and turned into the parking area of a small shopping centre. Osborne nosed it into a space outside an IGA supermarket and Ella pulled in next to her.

Osborne turned off the engine and got out, a green shopping bag in her hand.

Ella jumped out of her own car and followed her into the supermarket. ‘How’s it going?’

Osborne dropped
apples into her bag, her jaw set. She wore grey shorts over black steel-capped boots, and a snug black T-shirt. She smelled vaguely of grease and oil.

‘I hate grocery shopping myself.’ Ella followed her past the deli. ‘How’s life with the ex-con?’

Lips closed, Osborne ran her tongue over her teeth. She picked up a loaf of bread.

‘Men like that never change,’ Ella said. ‘They
can promise to, they can intend to, but one day something happens and that thing inside them comes out again. That anger, that rage and fury and violence.’ She saw Osborne’s hand tighten on the bag. ‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’

‘You have no right to follow me,’ Osborne said, her voice low and hard and angry.

‘Has he hit you yet? Because he will. Probably somewhere
that nobody can see. The stomach. It hurts really bad, and once you can walk upright again nobody will know.’ Ella leaned close as they went into the cereal aisle. ‘That’s the kind of stuff he knows, and counts on.’

‘This is harassment.’

‘He’s no good, Natasha.’

‘You don’t know him.’

‘Neither do you.’

Osborne rounded on her beside the tinned fruit, plait swinging
over her shoulder, points of colour high in her cheeks. ‘What exactly do you want from me?’

She hadn’t denied it.

‘Tell me what he’s done. I can put him away again.’

‘He hasn’t done anything.’

‘Where is he now?’ Ella asked.

‘In the workshop, cleaning engine parts.’

‘Where was he at five thirty in the afternoon two days ago?’

‘Talking to the parole woman
when she came around.’

‘She look around your flat upstairs as well?’

Osborne raised her chin. ‘Yes.’

‘You don’t like it when people go through your stuff?’

‘Would you?’

Ella stared at her. ‘Why don’t you just tell me the truth?’

‘I am,’ Osborne said. ‘It’s not my fault that you cops don’t want anyone to ever get out of prison and rebuild their life.’

‘Is that what you think this is about?’ Ella stepped close. ‘A man is dead. His wife is pregnant. That family is what this is about.’

‘Paul had nothing to do with that,’ Osborne said. ‘And if you had half a brain you’d be finding the real killer instead of hassling me.’

She turned and walked off. Ella went after her.

‘You listen to me. One day this is all going to fall apart.
You might be lucky and manage to get out in one piece, or you might be unlucky and get hurt. You could find yourself facing charges too. And when that day comes, I want you to think back to this little chat and realise that I was right all along.’

Osborne turned on her. ‘And then what? I’ll regret my decision for the rest of my life? I’ll wish I’d never been born? You want me to go on with
more clichés?’

Ella shook her head. ‘Then you call me, because you want to tell me everything he did and help yourself in the process.’

She dropped her card into the green shopping bag, pushed past Osborne and through an empty checkout, then out into the sun.

Half a brain indeed.

*

Back at the boatyard, she found Murray waiting in the car park. She pulled up and he
got in.

‘That Natasha’s hiding something.’ She turned the car around. ‘You should’ve seen her. So touchy.’

‘Well, everything was calm here.’ He clipped in his belt. ‘The old guy with the fishing rod said he’s known her for a while, says she’s decent; and he’s met Canning a few times and thought he was okay too. He was walking his dog here day before yesterday, in the late afternoon,
and saw a woman drive up. The description he gave matches Grace Michaels. He didn’t notice the plates, but I called the office and had them check the white Camry he described, and it matches hers. He didn’t see Osborne and Canning, but saw Grace Michaels go into the shed and heard people talking. And he said his dog peed on the wheel of Osborne’s truck, so he knew for sure that it was here too.’

‘What about Canning? What’d he have to say?’

‘Not much,’ Murray said. ‘He was cleaning some bit of machinery in a sink. He talked about the weather, said it was nice to be able to get out in it again. I asked how he was going and he said he had no complaints.’

‘Don’t you think that in itself is strange?’ The afternoon sun was low and she flipped down her visor. ‘Like Kemsley said,
people like him are usually quick to start bitching when we drop in.’

Murray shrugged. ‘He was busy scrubbing at this thing with a toothbrush. I kept asking questions but he didn’t bite.’

They were due back for the meeting soon so she didn’t have time to go back and needle Canning herself. She waited to turn onto Military Road, eyes fixed on the approaching traffic. The whole thing
was disappointing. The responses from the old guy, from Canning and even from Natasha Osborne hadn’t helped build her argument for the meaning of Meixner’s note. This really wasn’t the way she’d hoped to present it to Langley.

They got back to the office in time for Murray to make copies of Meixner’s note and for Ella to hastily look up Fletcher and his van on the computer system. The information
on the tip was there, and she printed it out then they hurried down the corridor.

Langley asked them to begin, and Murray summarised their visits to Prue then Bill Weaver, their unsuccessful search for Miriam Holder, and the lack of information given by her colleagues, Scholler and Wei.

While she listened, Ella watched Langley. He seemed particularly uninterested today, brushing fluff
off his navy blue tie, glancing at the windows where the sun’s low angle showed every smear and mark. It annoyed her.

‘It does appear that Holder took the call that Bill Weaver made, but until either he decides to talk to us or she turns up, we’re stymied about the relationship,’ Murray said.

Ella jumped in. ‘After we left there we got a call from Meixner’s wife, because a note from
him had arrived in the post.’ She passed copies around.

Langley took one and she could see his eyes following the lines.
I hoped I could escape my past, but protecting you from it is the best I can do. I love you both forever, Marko.

‘Chloe told us it’s definitely his handwriting,’ she said. ‘And the envelope’s postmarked 3 pm on the day of his death, which means we have a timeline
that looks like this. At around two that afternoon, Meixner received a phone call at the office in which he was heard to argue with the caller, saying “no, no”. Sometime during the next half-hour he wrote this note and put it in the outgoing mail, then took Daniel Truscott’s car keys and left without telling anyone. At three thirty-five, he crashed Truscott’s car into a power pole in Wattle Street
in Glebe, and told paramedics that someone was following him. As there were no signs of a head injury they felt he might have a psychiatric problem, and at RPA the triage nurse felt the same way and put him in the waiting room. At quarter past five, he got a taxi from there to Town Hall station, behaving in a paranoid manner on the way, and was seen there on CCTV, pushing through a crowd of commuters
moments before he went under a train at six.’

The detectives were silent.

‘We need those phone records from Payton and Jones,’ Ella said to Langley. ‘Is there any way we can hurry those up?’

‘Telstra is glacial,’ he said, still looking at the note.

You won’t even tell me that you’ll try?

Murray said, ‘Because the note refers to events from the past, we followed up
with another visit to paroled killer Paul Canning and his girlfriend slash employer, Natasha Osborne.’

Langley looked up. ‘And?’

‘Nothing really to report, except that we found another witness who supports Canning’s alibi for the evening Meixner died,’ Murray said. ‘Old guy fishing on the dock.’

‘Hmm,’ Langley said.

‘Canning complaining yet?’ Kemsley asked.

‘Not yet,’
Murray said.

Kemsley nodded. ‘I bet he’s keeping it all bottled up tight. Then one day, look out – he’ll explode.’

‘Makes sense,’ Ella said. ‘The parole officer said that he’d been in trouble in prison for fighting, had anger problems, that sort of thing. She thinks now he has it under control. But if he’s been planning revenge for a while, he’d want to seem like he’s in control, wouldn’t
he?’

But Langley was waving the note gently, persistently, in the air. ‘This is more likely to be a suicide note. A reference to Meixner’s suicidal impulses. He’s tried to fight them, but now all he can do is kill himself somewhere the wife doesn’t have to be the one who either finds him or cleans up the mess. Hence the mention of protection, and hence why he first tries to crash into a
pole, then takes the foolproof method at the station.’

‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Ella said. ‘His wife said he was delighted about –’

‘The baby, yes, we know,’ Langley said. ‘Can we move on? Kemsley, Gawande, how’d you go at the office?’

‘Annie Blackwood got further with Denise Pham than we’d managed,’ John Gawande said, glancing at Ella as if apologising for being given
the floor. ‘She understood the accounting speak and gave us the summary afterwards. Basically, as in any firm dealing with large amounts of money, it is possible to hide transactions, and Bill Weaver, as the head of the office, was in prime position to be able to do so. I just got word that the warrant came through, so first thing in the morning Annie’ll go back and start going through the books properly.’

‘We talked again to the rest of the staff, but nobody had remembered anything new,’ Kemsley said. ‘Nobody had any thoughts on the “no, no” calls either. We checked on the phone records too, but they’re still being processed.

‘Then we went to Fletcher’s worksite. The man himself was working and refused to talk to us. The foreman was initially more concerned about whether we could take
details of some thefts that’ve been happening on the site. As with Daley Jones, he and the other contractors don’t seem to like Fletcher, but none of them were certain about what time they’d last seen him that afternoon. One thought that he’d left when Jones went, which we know was around two, but he wasn’t sure. Another had been at the Thorn and Thistle from around five thirty and said he didn’t
notice Fletcher there until about seven, but again couldn’t be certain that he wasn’t actually there before then.’

Ella cleared her throat. ‘I have something to add about Fletcher. I happened to check his record this afternoon and found information about an anonymous tip saying his van was seen parked in Amy Street last night, in a spot not far from the Meixners’ flat.’

Langley seemed
to be looking at her oddly. ‘Was he doing anything?’

Don’t panic, he doesn’t know it was you.
‘Not that was reported, but I think it’s a big concern. Chloe told us she’s had hang-up phone calls at home before, so perhaps Fletcher was sitting there calling her. He would’ve got no reply because she was still in hospital then, but who knows what he might’ve done if she did answer?’

Langley
looked unimpressed.

She forged on. ‘So this means we have the big handprint on the body, the fact that Fletcher’s colleagues aren’t sure whether he was on-site the afternoon of the death or not, and this suspicious behaviour last night.’

Langley shot his cuff and looked at his watch. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We’ll speak to Fletcher tomorrow, and also find Miriam Holder, review the CCTV
from the train station, and chase up forensics regarding prints from the smoke bomb and so on. If the phone records are in, we’ll track down the “no, no” calls. All jobs for tomorrow – back here at eight, thanks.’

This isn’t right.

Ella caught Langley as he reached the door. ‘What about overtime?’

‘To do what? Nothing’s what I would call urgent.’

‘Bring in Fletcher,’ she
said. ‘Look for Miriam Holder. Fletcher lied, Holder’s avoiding us –’

‘Fletcher’s still working his job, so hardly likely to flee now. And I’m sure Holder will turn up.’

‘But Fletcher knows we’re onto him now. He might decide –’

‘I very much doubt it.’

His tone was final, and he walked away. Ella folded her arms as anger sang hotly through her veins.

*

Alex
finished checking the equipment in the Oxy-Viva for the start of the nightshift, and was sliding the bag back into the ambulance when the station phone rang.

‘Sixteen-year-old girl on a roof with self-inflicted cuts to her arms,’ the controller said, before rattling off an address in Potts Point. ‘Police have been notified, but they tell me they’ve got nobody just now.’

‘Thanks,’ Alex
said.

Jane peered out the back of the ambulance. She’d told him about Deb, and about Steve coming over and how she’d fallen trying to get away from him. The bruises on her cheek and forehead were dark purple in the truck’s fluorescent lights.

‘What we got?’ she said.

‘Girl on a roof with cuts to her arms.’ He saw her blanch. ‘I’ll treat tonight.’

‘I’m okay.’

‘All
banged up like that, you’ll frighten her right over the edge.’