Black & Blue Page 4

  Her first stop when she got the money was going to be shopping, for herself and for the boat. The galley needed new curtains, and the bridge needed a lamp. Hope tried to contain the excitement bubbling up inside her, taking a deep breath before she walked into the bank.

  She went directly to the manager’s desk and sat down on the chair there. A young man with a big Adam’s apple came wandering out, his face spreading into a smile.

  ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘Oh, hi.’ Hope extended a hand. ‘I’m Jenny Spelling. I’d like to make a transaction from my savings account, please.’

  ‘Of course.’ The young man glanced towards the queue waiting at the counters. ‘Is this a large transaction?’

  ‘I’d like to empty the account and close it, actually,’ Hope said. ‘Nothing to do with your bank. You’ve been wonderful to my husband and I, but we’re moving overseas and we’ll be starting a local account there.’

  ‘Well, congratulations!’ the young man said. ‘What an exciting time. Let me just get your identification, Mrs Spelling, and we’ll have a look for you.’

  Hope opened Jenny Spelling’s clunky leather wallet and extracted her driving licence and credit card. She kept a hand up near her eyes, playing with the edge of her low, heavy bangs, as the young man looked over the cards.

  It worked. He went to the computer beside him and started tapping. Hope could feel sweat running down the backs of her calves. She squirmed in the older woman’s shoes, trying to keep a straight face.

  ‘So it’s your main savings account that you’d like to close? Or would you like to close your everyday account as well?’

  ‘Oh, all of it,’ she said. ‘I’ll take all of it, please.’

  CHAPTER 17

  HOPE GLANCED AT the screen and noted the amounts in the accounts. The everyday was petty cash, but the digits in the main savings account made her heart twist in her chest. So close to her dream. So close to everything she’d ever wanted. She needed to play it cool now. She touched her eyebrow as a muscle began to twitch there.

  ‘Um, so it says heeeere …’ The young man frowned and clicked. ‘Says here this is actually a joint signature account.’

  ‘What?’ Hope choked.

  ‘Right here.’ The young man turned the screen towards her, tapped its glossy surface. ‘When you and your husband opened the account, you made a provision that you could only extract more than a thousand dollars from this account if you both came into the bank and signed for it.’

  ‘Fuck!’ Hope blurted. She covered her mouth. ‘I mean oh dear. Um.’

  ‘You don’t remember making that provision?’ the young man asked. Hope scratched at her throat. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Where did you open the account?’

  He turned the screen back towards himself while Hope shifted in her chair.

  ‘Oh God, it was such a long time ago,’ she laughed. ‘Look, let me get a thousand dollars, and I’ll get Ken down here to empty the main savings with me some other time.’

  ‘Right.’ The young man was looking at her very closely now. Hope turned her face away, glanced at the people waiting in line at the counter. ‘Would you like to empty the everyday as well? That account is yours alone.’

  ‘I know that,’ Hope snapped. She shoved her hands into her lap. ‘I’m sorry. Yes. I know that. I’ll empty that account too. Mmm-hmm.’

  The young man made some movements with his mouse. While he clicked and scrolled, Hope watched his face, until his eyes slid over and met hers.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Yep.’ Hope smiled.

  ‘All right.’ The young man got up and gave a cheerful smile. ‘I’ll be back in just a minute.’

  Hope could hardly wait for him to count out the bills. She grabbed the money and her cards from the desktop and practically ran to the door.

  In the street she paused and looked at the men and women passing by, their eyes on their phones. She’d hoped no one else would have to die for her plan to be completed. But something inside told her that more blood would be needed to wash away the life she was trapped in.

  CHAPTER 18

  I GOT OUT my gun and kicked in the door of Claudia’s apartment, slamming it against the guy who’d just closed it on us. He fell into a coffee table covered in beer bottles, scattering them everywhere. There was another guy at the entrance to the kitchen. I pulled my gun up and shouted but he ran in there, hoping for an exit. There was none. Tox grabbed the first guy, picked him up out of the ruined coffee table and threw him into the television stand, crunching DVD boxes and splintering the screen of the cheap plasma. I went to the kitchen doorway and was narrowly missed by a flying frying pan. Two saucepans and a handful of cutlery came sailing out after it.

  I put my gun away and grabbed the frying pan from the couch where it had landed. When I rushed into the kitchen the guy cowered into the corner near the blender as I wielded the pan above my head.

  ‘How do you like it?’ I yelled. His arm was raised against the weapon, eyes squeezed shut.

  ‘Don’t! Please! I’m sorry!’

  I let him up.

  ‘Shit, man! You’re one crazy bitch!’

  ‘Get out there.’ I yanked him towards the door. Tox had the other guy on the floor beside the glass heap that had been the coffee table. Bright red blood was pouring down Tox’s chin and neck, making a neat column on his chest.

  ‘Little prick kicked me in the face.’ Tox looked at the blood on his hand.

  ‘What are you dickheads doing here?’ I kicked my guy along the floor until he was beside his friend. ‘You know Claudia Burrows is dead, right?’

  ‘We heard about it.’ My guy was holding his head of black dreadlocks, his eyes welling with tears of panic. ‘She borrowed some money from our boss three weeks ago. We were told to come get it before the police swept in and took everything.’

  The intruders had gathered a small pile of cash and electronic goods and put them on the couch, with some jewellery clumped into a Chinese takeaway container.

  ‘How much did she borrow?’ Tox asked.

  ‘Not much. Five grand. It was a short-term loan. She said she was coming into some big money and she’d get it right back to us.’

  ‘Shh, dude.’ Tox’s guy nudged his friend. ‘Fuck, man. Who you talkin’ to?’

  ‘Pfft, they don’t care.’ Dreadlocks waved dismissively at me. ‘They just care who killed her.’

  ‘How did you hear she’d been killed? Her body was only found last night.’

  ‘My brother’s a patrollie in Newtown.’ Dreadlocks waved again.

  ‘Your brother’s a cop and you’re a loan shark’s bitch?’ I snorted. ‘No guessing who got all the hugs.’

  ‘What did Claudia borrow the money for?’ Tox asked. ‘Did she say?’

  ‘We’re not talking any more. That’s it. We’re done.’

  ‘All right, well, it’s down to the station with both of you for breaking and entering.’ I took the cuffs off the back of my belt. ‘And maybe assaulting a police officer.’

  ‘She needed clothes!’ Dreadlocks wailed as I dragged him up and threw him on the couch. ‘Good girl clothes.’

  ‘What do you mean, “good girl clothes”?’

  ‘Shut up, Ray! Fuck!’

  I cuffed Ray and left him moaning in regret on the couch, his face pressed between the pillows. In the bedroom, Claudia’s things had been thrown about, drawers emptied onto the bed and her jewellery tipped onto the floor. I went to the closet and pushed open the doors, and immediately I could see what Ray meant. Claudia’s clothes were scant – tiny tops and tight leggings, plenty of sequins and beads and the odd strip of gold leather. I pulled out a complicated black corset of velvet, the buckles jangling as I set it on the bed.

  At the very end of the closet, there were three new outfits hanging, long-sleeved silk blouses and pencil skirts in plastic sheaths. Beneath them on the carpet was a pair of brand-new sensible leather court shoes. I checked the brands of
the outfits, tugged a price tag that was still attached to one of them. Damn. These were certainly ‘good girl’ clothes. Against the rest of her wardrobe, these outfits seemed like a disguise. I bent down as one of the jackets slid off the hanger and gathered it up from the floor, spotting a dusty white powder on the wrist. I gathered it up and tasted it, expecting cocaine, but I was surprised. It was dry salt. Slightly fishy-tasting. Sometime recently, Claudia had worn these clothes by the sea.

  CHAPTER 19

  I NEEDED COFFEE. All the calm and contentment I’d managed to generate last night by giving Ben Hammond a pounding was gone now. My shoulders were as hard as stone. We stopped at a cafe on the way back to the city and Tox dragged out an ancient black laptop.

  ‘Claudia’s parents said nothing about her being a hooker.’ I rubbed my eyes. ‘Maybe she was just dipping into the industry briefly to raise some money to go to uni.’

  ‘So why borrow the five G’s then?’ Tox asked. ‘Why spend them on conservative clothes?’

  ‘I don’t know. But while we’re on the subject of clothes, you’ll need to change before we go much further.’

  The waitress was so distracted by the blood on the front of Tox’s shirt that she hardly managed to get our order down. My new partner’s eyes were steadily blackening and there was a graze above his nasal bone. Tox glanced at his shirt.

  ‘Eh,’ he said.

  ‘You’re going to go to uni,’ I mused. ‘Start fresh. Make something of your life. You’re twenty-four years old, so you’ve left it late, but not that late. You’ve been accepted. What do you do?’

  ‘You go out and buy textbooks,’ Tox said.

  ‘Right. Textbooks, a laptop maybe. Not expensive clothes. And where’s this money coming from in the first place? The big money she says she’s about to come into?’

  An email came up on my phone and I checked it. It was a brief summary from the medical examiner, a quick review of his initial findings before the full autopsy on Claudia Burrows. Tox had been right about the livor mortis, and the pulmonary oedema, and the fact that Claudia had likely been dead a day, in the water about twenty hours. He was also right about the breast implants. I saw him smiling at his laptop screen. He’d probably just got the same email.

  ‘This is interesting,’ I said. ‘She’s had her hair dyed and cut no more than a week ago. And she’s taken a good bonk to the back of the head.’

  ‘Feet are showing blisters from the new high heels,’ Tox added.

  ‘So whatever she needed to jazz her appearance up for, she’s done it in the last week or so. Parents didn’t mention any job interviews. Weird.’

  Our coffees came. I gulped mine and ordered another.

  ‘“Skin slippage around the right ankle suggests ligature, ante-mortem, for a short amount of time, pulling downward over the front of the foot towards the toes,”’ I read. ‘So she was weighed down when she went in the water.’

  ‘How do you figure that?’

  ‘Well, weight goes into the water.’ I drew a circle on the greasy tabletop with my finger, a line rising from it. ‘Rope goes up from the weight, ties around Claudia’s ankle. Claudia floats upward, pulling the rope down towards her toes. The rope doesn’t bruise her too badly because it comes loose in the storm, letting her body float away.’

  We fell into silence to consider the images before us, the cold medical text detailing Claudia’s horrific last moments on earth.

  ‘This is a pretty nasty killer we have here,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine why throwing her in alive was necessary. By the time you’ve got her tied to the weight, she’s under your control. Why not put her out of her misery? Why make her think about the journey down to the bottom of the sea? It’s so vicious.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Tox said. ‘Think about it. Putting her out of her misery is extra effort. Extra consideration. What we might have here is someone who isn’t even that thoughtful. Someone who never thought about what the victim would or wouldn’t feel. I think we’re looking for a killer whose priority is getting the job done, ticking the boxes. Just my opinion.’

  I pushed my phone away and studied his face as he checked through the rest of his emails. I couldn’t help but feel an icy heaviness in my chest at his talk of priorities and getting the job done. He’d shown himself to be just that kind of man. Unconcerned with what people feel. I wondered if he was just talking about Claudia’s victims, or his own ones too.

  CHAPTER 20

  MY KNUCKLES STILL hurt from the impact against the back of Ben Hammond’s skull, but I wasn’t focusing on that as I smacked my opponent in his ribs, his chest. I surged forward and drove an elbow into the side of his padded head. Pops backed up into the corner of the ring. I didn’t think of him as the old, squat man that he was. In the ring we were equals. I gave him a couple of jabs in the face and backed off to let him out of the trap he’d fallen into.

  ‘Mind that back step.’ The Chief pointed at my foot with his red boxing glove. ‘Don’t cross.’

  Pops had been training me since I’d arrived at Sydney Metro to take up the grand position of the only woman on the sex crimes squad. There hadn’t been a female in my role for five years, but the department had wanted someone victims could relate to, someone who wouldn’t accidentally intimidate them with their masculine hulk in the tiny station interview rooms. It wasn’t long after arriving that I’d decided I needed some form of self-defence, my days filled with horrific stories of attacks in alleyways and empty parking lots, young girls ensnared walking home across darkened parks by fiendish predators. I was probably getting too swift for Chief Morris, who had been training boxers since before I was born. But I trusted his advice. He’d made me strong, and he didn’t take less than full commitment in his sessions.

  ‘Tell me about the Georges River case,’ I said, batting away his swing at my face. ‘Why were your guys so sure my girl wasn’t one of the victims?’

  I’d given up on the idea that Claudia Burrows was a Georges River Killer victim. But something was nibbling at me about the certainty with which Nigel had shoved me away. Nigel hadn’t even been called to Claudia’s crime scene for a look. How could they know their killer wasn’t responsible?

  ‘Have you guys got a suspect?’ I asked.

  ‘Leave it, Harry,’ he said.

  ‘You must be pretty set on this suspect if you’re certain he didn’t kill Claudia,’ I said. ‘Maybe because you were watching your suspect when Claudia was killed. Am I right? Have you got enough for an arrest?’

  ‘I didn’t even say we had a suspect.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t have a suspect, I have to assume you’re letting Nigel and his band of asshats push me away because they want it to be a men-only case.’

  I punched Pops in the stomach. He fell against the ropes.

  ‘Harry—’

  ‘I’m a good cop, you know.’ I thumped my chest with my boxing glove. ‘Being a woman shouldn’t exclude me from anything.’

  ‘No one’s excluding you.’

  ‘The Camden strangler? Dennis Yama? David Paris, that cannibal guy? They were all me, Pops. Homicide got the credit, sure, but it was the sex crimes side of those investigations that put them on track.’

  ‘Harry, no one’s doubting your abilities.’

  ‘Then why the fuck am I being shut out?’

  I pummelled Pops with a series of hits to the head. Without warning, he clutched at his chest and fell into the corner of the ring. I watched in horror as he collapsed.

  CHAPTER 21

  ‘OH SHIT!’ I tore my gloves off. ‘Shit! Pops! I’m sorry!’

  I dragged the old man to his feet. He unclipped the padded helmet and let it fall to the mat. His face was red and drenched in sweat. He thumped his chest as though he had heartburn and shook his head.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I got carried away.’

  ‘You’re too good for your old trainer, Harry.’ He batted me
on the shoulder with his glove. ‘You’re a good cop, too. You’re not being shut out of the Georges River task force because of your abilities, or your gender. You gotta let it go. OK?’

  ‘Why?’ I followed the old man to the stool at the opposite corner of the ring. I handed him the bottle of water sitting there. ‘I just don’t understand. I feel like there’s something you’re keeping from me. And we’ve never been like this, Pops. We’ve never kept things from each other.’

  The old man sucked at the water bottle and regained his breath. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. I ducked my head to try to see what was hidden there, whether it was guilt or shame or concern cutting him off from me. But he wiped his forehead on the back of his arm and turned away.

  ‘It’ll all come out in time,’ he said. ‘And when it does, you’ll … You’ll be grateful for all the time you didn’t know the truth.’

  CHAPTER 22

  HOPE NEEDED TO stay calm. It was rational planning and control that was going to get her through this. As soon as she had the Spellings’ money, she was out of here. Off towards the sunrise on the gentle waves. She’d never look back on Sydney, on the feast of horrors the city had provided over her life. This town deserved to burn. She walked along the pier between the yachts and looked at the glowing city towers reflected in the black harbour. Soon she’d be underway.

  Her plan was to leave the memories of what she had done to Jenny and Ken Spelling behind, along with the memories of her father and his sweaty, grabby hands. She’d try to replace the night beast he’d become after her mother’s death with the man she remembered from her early childhood, his eyes set on the horizon, one warm hand on hers as he taught her to direct the helm, taking them out towards the edge of forever. She’d leave them behind with the memories of her almost skeletal mother curled up in the tub she’d died in, with the smoke-saturated bedrooms of the Black Garter hotel where she’d worked for almost all of her adult life. If she closed her eyes, she could still see the red lamplight out the front of the house of horrors, the men smoking there, looking at their phones, talking about the girls inside and which ones provided which services. Soon, when she closed her eyes, it would be the Caribbean sun burning red light there. Or maybe Key Largo. She hadn’t decided yet.