Fifty Fifty: (Harriet Blue 2) (Detective Harriet Blue Series) Read online

  ‘How does he have so much of it?’ Kash asked. ‘You couldn’t find this much all in one go. It must represent years, decades, of fossicking with a metal detector.’

  ‘Maybe he did find it all in one place,’ I murmured, losing myself in thought. ‘Maybe that’s why it’s hidden.’

  ‘We’ve got to put this back.’ Kash took the nugget from my hand and tucked it back into the package. ‘There’s nothing to prove it doesn’t legitimately belong to Theo Campbell. He might have hidden it in case of a break-in.’

  ‘If Theo found it legally, Olivia would know about it, right?’ I stood, holding the package against my chest. I pulled a strip of tape from the dispenser Theo kept beside his monitor and sealed the package shut. ‘Olivia, can we borrow you for a minute?’

  Theo Campbell’s wife heard my call from the living room and came in. She’d been crying again, probably urged on by Snale’s kind, accepting face, her warm hands.

  I stood holding the package under my arm in full view. I even stepped aside so that Olivia could see that the secret panel in Theo’s desk was hanging open.

  ‘We were just wondering if Theo had a … a diary?’ I asked casually. ‘A calendar or something? We just wanted to check out his forecasted appointments.’

  Olivia ignored the package in my arms, the door of the desk. She went, bleary eyed, to the laptop screen.

  ‘He used the desktop calendar,’ she sniffed, waking the little machine with a tap of her finger. She opened the calendar and pointed. ‘Here.’

  I put the package on the desk, right beside her hand. She glanced at it, uninterested.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, forensic stuff. Tools. They keep them packed up in little baggies. Keep them sterile.’

  ‘This bloody desk.’ Olivia bent and popped the little panel at the front of the desk shut. ‘It’s a million years old. Theo’s father’s.’

  She sighed and made for the door.

  ‘Well, that answers that question,’ I told Kash, hefting the gold off the desk again. ‘She had no interest in it. She’s never seen it before. I’m convinced.’ I offloaded the package to Kash. ‘We’re taking this with us. I’m going to make a bet Theo Campbell wasn’t the only person who knows about it.’

  Chapter 40

  DETECTIVE INSPECTOR NIGEL Spader was the God of Gotham. It was one of his only hobbies, constructing his dark city, a place where good and evil clashed violently over hand-painted sidewalks and green flocked grass. The sprawling table in the centre of the concrete garage barely contained the complex miniature model city. Artistically warped and leaning buildings crowded over a long, narrow headland jutting into a model harbour filled with black waves. The miniature city had everything. Uptown, the narrow streets held neat brownstone townhouses and apartment buildings lined with tiny fire-escapes. Downtown, he had constructed the imposing city hall with hundreds of steps, homeless people glued in and around its buttressed sides with their trolleys of garbage. Men in suits with long black coats froze mid-stride on the sidewalk, briefcases swinging, passing the tiny models of prostitutes on the corners.

  Nigel sat on a leather stool by the sprawling Wayne Manor, gluing the side of the ancient building to the front with the careful strokes of a nail polish brush. The battery-operated subway train emerged from the tunnel at the side of the harbour and wound around the corner by his elbow, then over an ornate gothic bridge that had taken Nigel four weeks to create. He felt happy. The world beyond the reach of his garage light, the wet Sydney streets, was nothing. He was the lord of this place, and at this moment, in his universe, everything was well.

  The sensation did not last long. Nigel jolted as the garage door slid up just enough to allow Tox Barnes to emerge into the light. The man walked into the garage like he owned it. Nigel found his mouth was hanging open.

  ‘Evening, Detective.’

  Nigel felt a splinter of pain in his brain. He knew Tox Barnes. Everybody did. The man was rumoured to have murdered a mother and young son when he was a child himself, an eruption of violence from a group of boys who must have been frenzied with rage. Nigel didn’t know how much truth there was behind the rumour. All he knew was that Tox Barnes was poison, and that anyone who worked with the man was stained.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘Oh, you know, I was in the neighbourhood. I’m working on the Samuel Blue case. Understand you were head of the task force.’ Tox’s eyes wandered over the enormous model city. He bent and looked through the windows of an office building, noting the tiny people at the desks on the fourth floor. ‘Jesus Christ, this is some set-up you’ve got here. You’ve spent a lot of time on this. I thought you were married? You should marry someone.’

  ‘I’m not going to discuss a single aspect of the GRK case with you.’ Nigel looked at his hands. He was holding the glued pieces of Wayne Manor together. He could not put them down now, before the glue set, or it would be hours sanding the lumpy glue back off again. ‘Get out of my garage.’

  ‘Look, I’m really only interested in Sam Blue’s confession,’ Tox said. ‘I know you’ve muscled suspects into confessions before. Did you lean on Blue?’

  ‘I’m not …’ Nigel was almost blind with rage. ‘Get … out … of my …’

  ‘Huh! Look at this!’ Tox said. He reached into the city, somewhere around Third Avenue, and plucked up a prostitute. Nigel heard the snap sound of the glue securing the model woman’s feet to the sidewalk. ‘You’ve got tiny little prozzies!’

  ‘Stop! Don’t touch that!’

  ‘Oh shit,’ Tox examined the figurine’s stiletto heels. ‘Was that attached? Sorry.’

  Nigel put down Wayne Manor, wincing as the still-wet sides became unwed and flopped apart. He shoved Tox in the chest and rescued the miniature prostitute, looking at the space where she’d been ripped from the model.

  ‘Did you lean on Sam Blue, Nigel?’ Tox asked.

  ‘We lean on everyone, arsehole,’ Nigel snapped. ‘This is a fucking serial killer case.’

  ‘Well, there’s leaning and then there’s leaning. Did you guide him into the confession? Did you drop hints about what happened to the missing girls so his story would line up?’

  ‘We did nothing unprofessional.’

  ‘Come on.’

  Nigel gave an exasperated growl. ‘I wasn’t there for the entire interrogation, OK? We took shifts. It’s possible someone else dropped hints.’

  Tox put a finger on the train tracks. The train stopped at his finger, the tiny wheels grinding in their slots.

  ‘Stop! You’re going to break it. This is not a toy, you fuck! This is very expensive shit!’

  ‘Did you reveal anything …’ Tox said slowly, ‘that would have led Sam …’

  ‘I left the autopsy photos with him, OK?’ Nigel breathed. ‘He’d have known the girls suffered certain injuries from the pictures.’

  ‘So you forced the confession?’

  ‘We encouraged it. There’s nothing wrong with that. We provided him with materials to help him along. That’s all.’

  ‘Did you starve him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you beat him?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Did you leave him in the custody of people who did do those things?’

  ‘Get out!’ Nigel grabbed a cricket bat from beside the garage door. ‘Get out of my garage!’

  Tox took the train from the tracks, detaching the battery-pack carriage, making the internal lights flicker and die. He threw the train over his shoulder so that it crashed onto the cluttered table against the wall.

  ‘I wasn’t there for the whole Blue confession, alright?’ Nigel begged. ‘No one was. We didn’t keep a log. It was twenty-two hours. People came and went. The tape wasn’t always on. It’s possible Blue was leaned on too hard.’

  ‘It’s possible?’

  ‘It’s possible, yes.’

  Tox nodded, wandered around to the harbour, making sure he was always on t
he opposite side of the table to Nigel. He spied the miniature model of the Joker standing on steps of the town hall, a Tommy gun in his hands. Tox snapped the Joker from his place on the model landscape, smiled at the tiny purple-jacketed figure in his fingers.

  ‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘My favourite.’

  Tox threw the Joker up and caught him in his palm, put the little man in the pocket of his leather jacket. He winked at Nigel as he ducked back under the garage door and out into the night.

  Chapter 41

  LINNY SIMPSON CUT a dejected figure at the back of the cafe, staring into a stained coffee cup as Whitt entered. He went to her table and stood there expectantly, perhaps a couple of seconds too long, before she broke from her reverie.

  ‘Ms Simpson?’

  ‘Hi,’ she said, watching him sit. The inch of coffee at the bottom of her cup that had so fascinated her looked cold. ‘I don’t have long to talk to you.’

  ‘That’s perfectly fine. I’m grateful for you giving me any time at all.’ Whitt caught the eye of the waitress and ordered for them both. ‘I understand you’ve stopped cooperating with the officers you’ve been dealing with. Detective Spader and his team.’

  ‘They don’t believe me,’ Linny said. Though it had been almost five months, Whitt could hear astonishment lingering in Linny’s voice. Flickers of rage. ‘No one believes me. My own family are starting to think twice about my story. I’m getting messages online from people I don’t know saying I’m lying about all this.’

  ‘Are the messages threatening?’ Whitt asked.

  ‘They’re abusive,’ Linny said. ‘People think I’m making up what happened because I want to free Sam Blue. Or because I want attention. My fifteen minutes of fame.’

  ‘There are some difficulties with what you’ve said,’ Whitt said carefully. ‘Your story changed in subtle ways.’

  ‘Well, it was hard to remember,’ Linny pleaded. ‘I mean, in the beginning. I remember it clearly now.’

  Whitt nodded though his thoughts were grave. That wasn’t how memory worked. The longer Linny waited after the actual event, the more degraded her memory of it would become. An inference here, a suggestion there, a few sleepless nights running the thing over in her mind, and the whole story would become unrecognisable.

  ‘Why don’t you take me back to that day?’ Whitt took out his notebook, slid a collection of papers across the page. ‘I have your police statement here. You say you’d just finished an ethics class …’

  ‘I walked over to the parking garage.’ Linny said. ‘Up the fire stairs. There was no one around, not on that level anyway. I think I’d seen some people before I went up, but I’m not sure. He was waiting just next to the door. When I came through, he grabbed me around my throat.’

  Whitt made notes. Linny Simpson was the Georges River Killer’s type. Brunette. White. Slim, petite. Student of the university, a motivated, budding business undergrad. The way she described being grabbed was convincing. An inexperienced abductor might grab a woman around the middle, allowing her to scream, to throw her weight forwards, her centre of gravity keeping her upright. If he swept his arm around her throat instead, made a headlock, and yanked her backwards, he’d have her off balance and silent.

  ‘He tried to drag me towards a white van parked to the right of the door,’ she said. ‘I was screaming.’

  ‘How could you have screamed when he had you in a headlock?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘I was so shocked. It happened so fast.’

  ‘Was the van indeed white?’ Whitt asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your initial police statement says it was green.’

  ‘I was mistaken,’ Linny said. ‘I remembered later that it was white.’

  There had been no green vans in the car park lot that day. There had been a white one, but it had come and gone well outside the times necessary to line up with Linny’s story.

  Whitt made a noise in his throat. It sounded more dismissive than he planned. He jumped when Linny banged the table with her palm.

  ‘Hey,’ she snapped. ‘I thought I was going to die, you understand?’ Whitt looked at her eyes, searing with furious tears. ‘When was the last time you thought you were going to die?’

  Chapter 42

  ‘I DID SCREAM,’ Linny insisted. ‘I screamed my lungs out.’

  Whitt glanced at the police statements lying on the page beside him. Beneath Linny’s statement was one from the security guard on the boom gate on the ground floor of the car park lot that day. He had not heard Linny’s screams, despite the car park making the perfect echo chamber, the building hollow down the middle through the ramps and the sides open to the buildings around it.

  ‘You say you fought him beside the van,’ Whitt said. ‘And you got free somehow.’

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  ‘Maybe you kicked him? Maybe you punched him?’

  ‘I said, I don’t know.’ Linny took her coffee from the waitress, hugged it with her hands as she had the other cup. ‘I was scared.’

  ‘Did he actually get you into the van?’ Whitt asked. ‘Did you get in and then somehow get out?’

  ‘The van door was closed,’ Linny said.

  Whitt wrote furiously. His mind was churning, pumping like an engine. He dipped his shirt cuff in the coffee as he reached for the sugar, cursed himself.

  ‘OK. You struggle, you get free, and you run, and it’s then that you notice a girl watching what’s happening.’

  ‘A black girl,’ Linny said. ‘Caitlyn McBeal.’

  ‘Now, I mean, we’ve got to be careful here,’ Whitt warned. ‘You say it was Caitlyn McBeal. How do you know that?’

  ‘I’ve seen pictures of her. She’s missing.’

  ‘But you didn’t know her personally before you saw her there that day. You didn’t say to yourself as you ran past her, “Oh, that’s Caitlyn.”’

  ‘It was fucking Caitlyn!’ Linny yelled. People at the tables near them stopped their conversations, stared. ‘This is bullshit! Yes, I was confused in the beginning. I’d hit my head. I got knocked out.’

  ‘Yes,’ Whitt said. ‘Initially you said there were two girls watching. Caitlyn and another girl. A blonde.’

  ‘No, the blonde wasn’t there,’ Linny said. ‘I made up the blonde.’

  Whitt felt a muscle in his jaw twitch. When she was seventeen, the woman sitting before him at the cafe table had made a statement to police that her ex-boyfriend was stalking and harassing her. A couple of weeks later, she withdrew the complaint, her relationship with the boy obviously repaired. In her secondary statement, Linny had said that she’d ‘made up’ the stalking allegation.

  Linny seemed to know what he was thinking.

  ‘I mean that my brain made it up,’ she said. ‘Not that I made it up … deliberately. Consciously.’

  ‘You fled the scene and ran back down the fire-escape stairs,’ Whitt said. ‘At the bottom you slipped, and you sustained a head injury. You believe you lost consciousness temporarily.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Linny said. ‘It couldn’t have been long, right? Someone would have found me.’

  ‘However long it was, no one found you. You regained consciousness on your own and went to the university’s administration office to report what had happened,’ Whitt said. ‘And in that initial report you didn’t mention that you’d seen Caitlyn or the blonde girl. You only mentioned her when police arrived, twenty minutes later.’

  Linny didn’t answer.

  ‘In fact, I have a statement here from one of the administration ladies, Michelle Stanthorp, who says that she and another assistant sat you down behind the counter and while they were hearing your story, she received a call transferred over from the security department. It was from Caitlyn McBeal’s mother telling them she was trying to get in contact with the girl. She was concerned for her daughter’s safety, worried because Caitlyn had hung up on her unexpected
ly and now wasn’t answering her phone,’ Whitt said. ‘Michelle Stanthorp says that while she was on the phone to Mrs McBeal, she drew up Caitlyn’s student file, including her photograph, on a computer in full view of where you were sitting.’

  When Linny didn’t answer, Whitt looked up. The girl’s head was bowed into her hands. In all his determination to find the truth, Whitt realised he had slipped into interrogation mode. This girl was not a criminal. At worst, she was a liar. He reached over and took a hand down from her face, squeezed it.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ she said.

  ‘I believe something happened to you,’ Whitt said gently. ‘Something bad. And you didn’t deserve me to be so cold about finding out what it was. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was supposed to have been me,’ Linny said. She was suddenly distant, staring out the cafe’s front windows to the busy street. Her teary eyes wandered back to Whitt. ‘Whatever happened to her, whether she’s dead or alive, it was supposed to have been me.’

  Whitt closed his notebook. Sighed.

  ‘You’ve got to find him,’ Linny said. ‘Before he does it again.’

  Chapter 43

  THE DAY WAS filled with interviews. Zac Taby had said that there were four other Last Chance Valley kids who sat in on the explosives lesson with the visiting student teacher two years earlier. Of those four, one, Brandon Skinner, had died of a drug overdose the year before, home alone and experimenting with meth. The remaining three were called to Snale’s place, two of them with parents in tow. Snale and I sat them down on the couch and picked their brains. Had they participated in the spate of firecracker mischief that had ensued after the ill-fated lesson? Did they know anyone who had? How did they feel about the town and its people? How did their friends feel? Did they know anyone who owned a bright red backpack? The answers to our questions, from all of the kids, were a consistent no. These were the bored, hopeless rug rats of Last Chance. They got up to trouble. It was what kids did out here. None of them were going to admit anything.