Flashpoint (14 page)

Pete and Leanne were waiting for him on the front steps of Vince's house. The young man stood up as Cam walked towards him and flicked a cigarette butt into the bushes by the side of the house. He realised his mistake when he saw the set of the Senior Sergeant's jaw and the cold hard gleam of his eyes.

Cam pointed to the bush. ‘Pick it up.'

Pete retrieved the butt and stuffed it in his pocket. ‘Sorry, Sarge, I wasn't thinking. It's shocking in there.'

The neighbour's reticulation fizzed to life; there was a cool draught and the air became heavy with minerals.

Cam heard a sniff and saw Leanne standing on the steps. Under the porch light he could see the glistening redness of her eyes.

‘You all right, Leanne?'

She nodded and turned away, pulling something grey and crumbling from her pocket and dabbing at her nose with it.

Vince's old Falcon was parked alongside the curb. Cam attempted to look through the grimy passenger window.

‘The bonnet was cold when we got here,' Pete said.

‘Torch,' Cam said, putting out his hand.

Pete unclipped the torch from his belt and Cam shone it around the vehicle's interior. It was unlocked, the keys still dangling from the ignition. An Elvis Presley marionette hung from the rear vision mirror, empty choc milk cartons and hamburger wraps littered the floor.

Pete's hand moved to the handle.

‘Don't touch it yet. I want it dusted first,' Cam said.

‘Er, yes of course.' Pete glanced over to Leanne. Their eyes
met; she shrugged, then buried her nose in the crumbling tissue again.

Cam handed her his clean handkerchief, pushed past Pete and walked into the house. He came to an abrupt halt outside the main bedroom. Not expecting the sudden stop, Pete lurched into him from behind. The younger man sprang back, pushing the hair from his eyes with a nervous flick of his hand.

‘Calm down, Pete, you're as jumpy as a louse on dipping day.'

Cam turned on the light and scanned the bedroom. It all looked pretty much the same as when he'd dragged Vince home from the pub. The mattress was still on the floor, almost hidden under a tangle of sheets. A Hawaiian shirt had been added to the pile of festering clothes. But there was something different, and it took a few moments of chin rubbing to see what it was.

The cupboard door was hanging at a tilt.

‘Did you touch anything in here?' Cam said, pointing to the room in general.

‘We searched the whole house before we found the body, so yes, I suppose we did touch some things. We had no idea, we –'

‘The cupboard door. That damage is new. What do you think?' He jabbed his hand at the broken door. ‘Signs of a violent struggle perhaps?'

Pete hesitated before answering, ‘No, I did it when I was looking for him.'

Cam's stare could have frozen water. ‘You thought he was hiding in the cupboard?'

‘We were fooling around. Before we knew there was anything wrong.' Pete's voice was so soft Cam could hardly hear him.

‘We?' Cam looked over to Leanne. He had never
known her so quiet.

Pete straightened up and looked Cam in the eye. ‘It was me, Sarge. Leanne didn't do anything.'

‘First the smoke and then this. The next blue's going in your report – have you got that, Constable?'

Pete clenched his jaw.

Cam's footsteps pounded from the bedroom to the lounge and stopped outside the closed door leading to the garage. He glanced at the young officers behind him then breathed deeply, preparing himself for the first blast of the odour he could already detect creeping through the cracks in the door.

They'd left on the faulty fluorescent light, which flickered and clicked like the spooling film of a silent movie. A woman's bicycle, maybe Vince's ex-wife's, leaned against the back wall. Several old suitcases were stacked next to it, the kind you could imagine Bogart and Bacall clutching at a desolate railway station. The cement floor was stained with patches of oil, the walls lined with stacks of plastic flower pots, piles of brittle women's magazines, a wheelbarrow, crates of empties, an old tyre. The detritus of a life.

Parallel steel beams supported the pitched garage roof. A rope tied between the fishing rods and prawn nets dangled as limp as the Elvis in Vince's car.

A forty-four gallon drum lay on its side underneath the rope, and near it the body, covered by a stained white tarp. Cam squatted and drew back the tarp. He shivered and his stomach lurched as he looked upon the distorted purple face of his Senior Constable.

He turned his face away and forced himself to breathe through his mouth, beckoning to Pete and Leanne. They approached reluctantly.

‘Have you ever come across a hanging before?'

Leanne shook her head and looked at Pete. His gaze was locked on the roller door at the end of the garage.

‘I have – only one. It wasn't like this though. It's different when you know the person,' he said in a small voice, his anger at Cam now as distant as his stare.

‘Did you cut him down?'

Pete stammered, ‘I thought he was still alive. He was still warm.'

‘That's OK,' Cam said. ‘Though you shouldn't have covered him with the tarp.' He kept the accusing tone away from his voice; the kids had been through enough for one night. Pete's shoulders sagged with relief. ‘Did you try CPR?' Cam added.

‘No. As soon as we got him down we realised it was too late,' Leanne said.

Cam pulled the tarp completely off the body. Vince had put on his dress uniform; the silver buttons and polished shoes twinkled like party lights under the flickering fluorescent. Cam turned his face away, click; then back, click. He had to close his eyes for a moment.

‘Go into the lounge room, grab the standard lamp and plug it in here,' he said to Leanne as he pointed to a power point in the garage wall. ‘I can't see a damned thing. And, Pete, open up the roller door and let some fresh air in.'

The job was more tolerable with the new light and the fresher air. Cam's eyes travelled from the tip of Vince's highly polished shoes, up the sharp creases of his trousers to the top of his head. He loosened the noose. Though padded with a towel, the inverted V-shaped bruise on the side of the neck was clearly visible. He shone the torch on the neck and pointed out the telltale sign to the young constables. His latex-covered fingers moved across the uniform
jacket and came to rest on a piece of paper protruding from the top pocket. He removed the paper and read the note out loud. It was Vince's writing; he'd recognise those chicken scratches anywhere.

‘
I'm sorry.
' Cam paused and looked at the shaken youngsters. ‘
Vince.
' He let his breath out with a sigh. ‘That's all.' He shrugged and flipped the paper just to make sure.

He turned to Pete and rubbed his grainy eyes. ‘You two go on home. I'll deal with SOCO and the pathologist,' he said.

‘We don't mind staying, Sarge. You're done in, what with the fire and everything,' Leanne said.

He gave her a glance to indicate that he appreciated her concern. ‘No, I'll stay here. Off you go. And on your way home, call in on Ruby and tell her I won't be home till morning. She's probably still up watching the late movie.'

Pete nodded, ‘No probs, Sarge.'

As they turned to leave, Cam called out, ‘And make sure she's locked the house up properly.'

From the front porch Cam could hear the softened voices of the SOCO officers as they placed Vince's bagged clothes in the back of their vehicle.

One of them commented that it was the third police suicide in three months, how the Police Royal Commission was causing a big drop in morale. The other man's answer was low and muffled. Cam wondered if either man knew Vince; suicides were always grim but even worse when they involved a fellow officer. He sat down and leaned his head against the brick wall, allowing the cool mist from the neighbour's sprinkler to waft against his skin.

After a few moments he stood up and rejoined the SOCO team. He pointed out Vince's car, and they dusted it for prints inside and out with no luck; visually, all the prints looked the same. They would be run through the database, but Cam could predict that their owner would be Vince
.

The SOCO boys moved into the house and Cam held back, still looking at the car. The position of the driver's seat was bothering him. He opened up the driver's side door and sat in the seat, placing his hands upon the wheel, his eyes away from the dangling Elvis. He had to stretch his feet right out to reach the pedals, only then feeling them through the toe of his boots. Vince and he were about the same height. There was no way that he would have been comfortable with the seat this far back, even if it was only a matter of reversing the car out of the garage and parking it on the street.

Cam was pondering this as he walked back to the garage. He found Freddie McManus, the forensic
pathologist, holding a thermometer under a standard lamp, squinting in the poor light, caterpillar eyebrows furrowed with concentration. McManus had not cracked a black joke since his arrival.

‘Can you give me a time of death yet, Doc?' Cam asked.

‘I'm still working on it.'

Cam nodded and wiped the back of his arm across his forehead. ‘It's a hot night.'

‘Quite,' the pathologist replied. ‘He's a big boy, would take a while to cool down.'

‘My officers found him at about nine. He was still warm then,' Cam said.

McManus wiped the thermometer and put it back in his bag, then squatted at the body again. Pushing Vince on to his side, he pulled up his jacket and shirt. Cam shone his torch on the area, noticing the purplish skin where the blood had collected.

The pathologist pressed his gloved finger into a patch on Vince's back. The skin blanched and returned to the purple colour when the pressure was released. McManus allowed the body to roll back to its original position and moved to Vince's head. He cupped the jaw in one hand and gently manipulated the joint from side to side.

‘Lividity's not fixed yet, rigour's only just starting,' he said. He placed the head back onto the concrete floor. ‘Your man's been dead somewhere between three and five hours, Sergeant.'

Cam looked at his watch and scrabbled through his own set of mental calculations. So Vince had died at seven at the earliest, nine at the latest. If Vince hanged himself at seven, there was no way he could have bombed the photo lab.

Cam had arrived at the school at eight, just as the
bomb was thrown. If Vince had thrown the bomb then, he may just have had time to rush home, change and hang himself minutes before the arrival of Pete and Leanne. The body was still warm when they found him at nine. Then again, Cam realised, on a night like this, it probably would still have been warm if he had hung himself at seven.

Death before eight and Vince was innocent, after eight and he might still be guilty.

The pathologist gave Cam a questioning look. ‘Any the wiser then?'

Cam's hand rasped against his jaw. ‘When you do the autopsy, Doc, will you be running the usual blood toxicity tests?'

‘I always test for drugs and alcohol.'

‘Good.'

McManus regarded Cam over the top of his glasses. ‘Something tells me you're not convinced this is a straight suicide.'

‘I tend to be a fence-sitter till I see all the evidence.'

‘That's the way to be.'

‘It infuriates my junior officers.' Cam gave a tired smile and pointed to the overturned drum. ‘Is that how you'd do it then? Climb on a drum with a noose around your neck and just jump off?'

McManus stared at the drum for a moment. ‘Hell no,' he said. ‘If I wanted to do the job properly I'd want a bigger drop than that, big enough for the hangman's knot to snap against the neck and break it. With a drop like this, of about three feet, a person would slowly suffocate.' McManus shivered. ‘A horrible way to go.'

‘You'd think a police officer with Vince's experience would have learned that.'

The pathologist shrugged, stooped over his bag and began to pack away his equipment. ‘Not for me to
say.'

A thought struck Cam. ‘Wouldn't his service revolver have been quicker and cleaner? Why didn't he use that?'

***

Cam spent the remainder of the night with the Scene of Crime officers. When they'd finished collecting the evidence at Vince's house, they drove to the school to sift through the wreckage of the photographic lab. Preliminary findings indicated the cause of the fire and subsequent explosion was, as Cam had suspected, a Molotov cocktail through one of the front windows. They found the doorknob under a nearby bush and took it back to the lab for fingerprint analysis, though Cam doubted it would yield anything incriminating. Vince, if it had been Vince, was too much the experienced officer to leave prints behind.

The stick-tall and balding SOCO sergeant reminded Cam of Jacques Cousteau, but when he opened his mouth to speak, sweaty bush hats and iron ore replaced the image of glistening wet suits and salt spray. Cam tried to focus on the man's slow, soporific tones, but science had never been his strong point, and fatigue was dimming his mind. The man droned on and on about fire patterns, accelerants and chemical reactions.

‘Did you get the fax?'

Cam jerked himself awake. ‘What fax?'

The man gave a belly laugh, ‘You should be home in bed, mate. I faxed you this evening. You wanted to know about the glass we found at last week's bushfire, remember?'

Of course, this was the same SOCO guy who'd collected the evidence from the bushfire scene. Cam tried to shake the cobwebs out of his brain. Maybe Jo wasn't
the only one with concussion.

‘I wasn't at the station this evening. What did you find?'

‘We recovered glass from two Jim Beam bottles; one was broken, one complete. Both were covered with the prints of your vic, Herbert Bell.'

Cam nodded. ‘Anything else?'

‘We found remnants of twisted tin. A jam tin to be precise. It had no detectable prints, but we did find traces of gunpowder on it.' The man could see he now had Cam's full attention and gave a self-satisfied smile. ‘And it gets better.'

‘Go on.'

‘Some of the glass shards were from a magnifying glass.'

Cam's heart skipped a beat as the implication hit him. ‘A magnifying glass bomb?'

The man clapped Cam on the shoulder. ‘I thought that'd wake you up. Not a very big one, but enough to set the bush alight.'

A magnifying glass bomb, a simple but most effective timing device. Cam's voice rose with excitement. ‘A small amount of gunpowder at the bottom of a tin topped with a magnifying glass. The sun's rays shine down on to the powder and when the temperature reaches ignition point – boom!'

‘Not even much of a boom – more of a pop actually,' the SOCO officer said.

Cam thought back to Vince's interview with Ruth Tilly. ‘The witness who reported the fire said the smoke was dirty white.'

‘Well, they were wrong if they saw the fire when it'd only just started. The gunpowder, plus the fuel the body was soaked in, would have made the smoke oily black, certainly until the accelerant was all burned up.
What time was the fire reported anyway?'

‘At 11 am. The witness thought it'd only just started,' Cam said.

‘What was the weather like then?'

‘Hot, heading towards thirty-eight degrees at a guess. It was cooler the next day because of the wind.'

The man's fingers danced over the buttons of his calculator. Cam peered over his shoulder but the numbers meant nothing to him.

‘I'll keep it simple.'

‘I'd appreciate that.'

‘Taking into account the environmental conditions, the angle of the sun, and the ignition temperature of the gunpowder, it would have taken several hours for the bomb to heat up enough to explode. I'd say it would've started cooking with the very earliest of the sun's rays.'

Cam frowned and rubbed his chin. ‘So we don't need to be looking for someone skulking around the bushes that morning, because the bomb was probably dumped with the body sometime the previous night.'

‘That's right, mate. No one started your 11 am fire. The fire started itself.'