The Darkest Hour (17 page)

‘One slight problem,’ she said. ‘What if he has a knife?’

‘That gets tricky. You have to accept that you’ll probably get hurt, and defend yourself with whatever’s at hand. Or your hands themselves.’

She grimaced.

‘It’s better to have cut hands than to be dead,’ he said. ‘You need to get facing him as soon as you can – you need to see what he’s doing. Use whatever’s in reach as a weapon. Throw stuff. Scream and shout. But you know that already.’

Lauren’s heart pounded.

‘If he’s taking big swings, try for the old kick to the groin,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you’re okay? This makes me feel funny and I wasn’t even there.’

‘Do you know, I’d wanted to move that microwave. Kristi wouldn’t let me because it hides a rust pattern on the side of the fridge which she thinks is in the shape of a ghost.’

‘Jesus, Lauren.’

She was dizzy. ‘It’s so strange. We see people all the time who are alive or dead because of coincidence. But now that it’s happened to me, I can’t believe it.’ She laughed, a hollow sound. ‘Although that’s what they all say, don’t they! “I can’t believe this has happened.”’

Joe pulled her into a tight embrace. ‘Don’t talk about it any more.’

She felt the warmth of his skin, caught a hint of the morgue on him still, but underneath that was the clean smell of soap and shaving foam. She pressed her head against his chest. She wanted to reach up and touch the smooth skin of his cheek. She wanted to slide her hands around the back of his neck and pull his face down to hers.

She wanted to kiss him.

He said, ‘I don’t think we should do any more of that.’

She could almost feel his lips on hers.
Close your eyes, reach up, do it!

‘Not today anyway.’ His voice was a low rumble in his chest.

Do it!

‘It’s too soon. And we don’t want to hurt your back.’ He still held her but she felt him relax his grip. ‘Here, sit down. Have a break. I’ll get you a drink of water.’

She sank into the chair and listened to him turn on the tap in the station’s tiny kitchen. The pain from her wound pressing against the seat was nothing compared to the pain in her heart. She had almost kissed him, and she only regretted that she hadn’t. Because who knew what he would do? Maybe he would kiss her back! Even as she imagined this, she knew it was silly. Joe was a caring man who was good at looking after people who’d been through traumatic experiences, and that’s all he was doing now. Besides, he was engaged. People didn’t get engaged and then start kissing their co-workers. If they loved their co-workers, they didn’t get engaged. Simple – and devastating – as that.

‘Here you go.’ He sat on the edge of the other recliner and watched her drink. ‘Are you really sure you’re okay to be at work?’

Movement behind him startled her and Joe whirled around as Claire stepped into the room. ‘Jesus,’ he said.

‘Not quite.’ She looked around. ‘What’ve you two been up to?’

There was no way in the world they could tell her. Even forgetting about her jealousy, the detectives had asked that they tell nobody what was going on. Saying that Joe was teaching her self-defence would only set off a whole string of questions that Lauren knew she couldn’t answer.

‘There’s talk of us getting a new lounge,’ she said. ‘We were seeing how much room we’d have, if it’d fit in okay.’

Claire eyed them.

‘What do you think, we’ve been dancing?’ Joe said with a laugh.

Claire looked at the carpet. The pile was scuffed up from their boots, but that could have been just as easily caused by dragging the lounges, Lauren thought.
And she can’t read your mind, she doesn’t know you almost kissed him. Just relax
.

‘How was your night?’ Joe said.

‘Can I talk to you outside?’

Joe followed her out to the plant room. Feeling sick, Lauren took her glass to the kitchen and poured the rest of the water down the sink. She could hear the tones of their voices but the traffic rumbling on the bridge overhead drowned out their words.

After a couple of minutes the sensor in the doorway buzzed. Lauren guessed that was Claire crossing the beam as she stormed out of the station, and realised she’d never heard it buzz when she came in.

Joe came into the kitchen looking thoughtful. Lauren finished drying her glass and put it away. ‘She okay?’

‘She wants to move the wedding.’

‘To when?’

‘March.’

‘But I thought you were planning for the summer honeymoon, the beach, all that, in December next year,’ Lauren said.

‘Now she’s talking Tasmania in autumn.’

‘Bit of a change.’

‘I told her my holidays are locked in, but she wants me to try to swap.’

Lauren’s holidays were in March.
Please don’t ask me
. . ..

‘She’s seen the holiday roster, she knows that’s when yours are, but I said you’re going away,’ Joe said. ‘Anyway, March is too soon. You know how much stuff we have to organise?’

‘Nope. Never got married.’

‘There’s no way we can get it done in time.’

They were silent for a moment.

‘You know, I never heard the buzzer go when she came in,’ Lauren said.

Joe frowned. ‘Maybe it’s on the blink. We should keep the door shut, anyway. Safer.’

The buzzer had never been on the blink before. Lauren wondered whether a suspicious fiancée might stoop to crawling under the thigh-high sensor beam in the hope of catching certain parties out. She was offended by the thought, but knew she had no right to be. After all, Claire nearly
had
caught them.

‘Has she said anything more about that train job complaint?’

‘Nah. I reckon she’s over that.’

Lauren wasn’t so sure. ‘If she puts that in, it could be the last straw.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I looked up the policies folder the other night,’ she said. ‘If I get charged with perjury for the Blake thing, the service can sack me. I figure the only reason they might not is because of my good clinical record. If she complains about the tube, there goes that.’

Joe shook his head. ‘She hasn’t said a word about it. I’d say she’s completely forgotten. She probably forgot it by the end of that shift.’

But she might remember it if she gets jealous enough, Lauren thought, and starts casting about for some tool of revenge.

M
urray took a hand off the wheel to fiddle with the stereo and soon the booming voice of the Family Man filled the car.

Ella raised her voice over the noise. ‘What is it about him that you like so much?’

‘He’s interesting.’

‘
Murder rates are up, assaults are up, gun crime is up – where are we living, the States? Tough action is what we need, but what does the government give us?
’

‘He gives me a headache,’ Ella said.

‘
They give us fudged statistics, they give us long-term forecasts and planned outcomes and target scenarios. Take the drug amnesty. They say it’s too early to know how it’s working, that no figures are available yet. I say, take a look at the stats on violent crime. Has anything dropped?
’

Ella said, ‘You like him because he’s anti-amnesty too.’

‘What?’

She turned the volume down and said it again.

‘You wait,’ Murray said. ‘After the next election it’ll be scrapped.’

She snorted. ‘Everything gets scrapped after every election.’

‘And what do you think they’ll find in the wash-up?’

‘Perhaps that it would’ve worked if people got behind it, if people gave it time.’

Murray shook his head. ‘It’s like the Broken Windows thing in the States.’

‘This isn’t another poetry thing, is it?’

‘In the eighties in New York, they found that by fixing up the little things that bother people in a community, like graffiti and broken windows and public disorder, it changed the atmosphere so much that all their violent crime dropped way down. It’s the same thing here: to say that we accept and forgive the small-time dealer is to create an atmosphere in which criminals feel it’s okay to do anything.’

‘But we’re not accepting and forgiving,’ Ella said. ‘We punish them less, sure, but they have to give us names and information in return. They pay their debt to society that way.’

‘It still creates that atmosphere though, and the atmosphere is the problem.’

‘But surely letting the small guy stay free on the streets with us chasing our tails behind him is the equivalent to leaving the windows broken? With the amnesty, at least we’re starting to patch them up.’

He mumbled something.

‘I missed that,’ she said pointedly.

‘My dad said you’d take that stance.’

‘Did he.’ Good ol’ Frank Shakespeare. She doubted he’d have much to say about her that was complimentary. So she hadn’t recognised him at that crime scene all those years ago, thought he was a nosy civilian and said he could fuck off or be arrested. Would he never get over it?

‘He said people who are pro-amnesty are goal-orientated–’

‘Nothing wrong with that.’

‘–and overly so,’ Murray went on. ‘Such people believe that the end result justifies the means, but in police work so much depends on sound means.’

‘Do you guys talk about me across the dinner table often?’

‘The means are the ways by which we as police establish and maintain our relationship with the community. This has to be a constant, so people know where they stand. If we start changing the rules, if we let some people off for doing wrong, nobody knows what’s going on. Us included.’

Ella cranked the stereo back up.

‘
I’ve seen these things first-hand! My home country of Canada is following the United States just as your fine country is doing, and I’m here to tell you the time to turn back is now!
’

The afternoon was cooling by the time she stamped along the footpath behind Murray to Rosie’s, the club where Jules Cartwright said she’d seen Thomas two or three years ago. There were so many odds stacked against anybody who was there then still being there now
and
remembering Thomas. She wanted to go take their information from Helen back to the office and find out what had shown up on Kennedy’s mobile records, but Kuiper had said for them to come past here first.

‘Stupid long shot,’ she muttered at Murray’s back.

He ignored her.

The front of the club was tinted glass and steel. A skinny man stood in the late-afternoon sun wiping fingerprints from the glass doors.

‘Excuse me,’ Murray said.

‘We’re not open yet.’ The man turned and saw their badges. ‘Oh.’

‘We need to speak to your boss.’

‘Boss isn’t in.’

‘Who’s in charge at the moment then?’ Ella said.

‘Martin, assistant manager.’

‘Then we’ll speak to him.’

The man gave a final cursory wipe to the glass then pulled the door open.

They followed him inside to a roomy bar area where the air smelled of carpet cleaner and spilled alcohol and Ella could feel the deep bass beat of the techno music in her chest. A lone man behind the bar rattled about in a glass-fronted fridge. A short corridor on one side led to three closed doors. The man knocked on one and waited. When a voice said, ‘Yes?’ the man turned the knob and went in. ‘Pleece to talk to you.’

Ella caught a muttered
fuuuck
and she stepped in behind the skinny man. ‘Detectives Marconi and Shakespeare, Homicide.’

The man behind the desk was jowly and sallow-skinned, in his early forties Ella guessed. He wore a black T-shirt and a silver signet ring and kept his veined hands curled together on a closed red binder.

‘How can I help you, officers?’

‘Your name is?’

‘Martin Everly.’

From the corner of her eye Ella saw Murray write this down. ‘How long have you worked here?’ she asked.

‘Bit over two years.’

‘What about your superior? How long’s he been here?’

‘Less than that,’ he said.

‘And the owner?’

‘It’s owned by a company. They own a few clubs, have done for years. Ten, fifteen years I think.’

‘We’ll need some information on this company.’

‘I don’t have much here.’ He opened the desk drawer to his left and shuffled through some papers, finally producing a sheet of paper with a black and red letterhead. ‘You can contact them through there.’

Ella took the page. It gave the address and phone numbers of a company called Clubs Inc. She handed it to Murray then looked back at Martin Everly. ‘Do you know a man named Thomas Werner?’

‘Never heard of him.’

Murray got out the photo from the airport tape. ‘Seen this man before?’

Everly studied it briefly then handed it back. ‘Nope.’

‘Mind if we speak to your staff before we go?’

‘There’s hardly any here. We don’t open till later.’

‘We’ll need their home contact details then.’

‘Certainly.’

He pulled a ring binder from a desk drawer and took three pages out, fed them into a fax and gave them copies. Ella ran her eye down the list. No names jumped out at her, but they’d take it back to the office and run the names through the system.

They were almost back at the car when Murray’s phone rang. Ella took the keys dangling from his hand and ensconced herself in the driver’s seat. He got in putting his phone away, looking distracted. ‘Deborah Kennedy’s disappeared.’

‘What?’

‘We’re to help search the flat.’

Ella was already pulling away from the kerb. ‘Circumstances?’

‘Kuiper didn’t say.’ Murray tugged his seatbelt tight.

‘I mean, do they think she’s kidnapped or dead?’

‘He really didn’t say.’

She saw his foot working the floor, looking for the nonexistent brake, and smiled to herself, and went a little faster.

Ella felt strange walking into the Kennedys’ flat again. It looked bigger now, though that might’ve been because Mrs Kennedy wasn’t there to fill it with her grief.

Detective Rebecca Kanowski talked to Kuiper in the middle of the lounge room. ‘If it wasn’t for the neighbour who heard me pounding on the door, and had a key, I would never have gotten in.’ She was sweating. ‘I thought they’d suicided.’

Ella peered into the other rooms. The double bed was neatly made, the wardrobe doors closed, the bathroom looked and smelled clean, with a towel hanging neatly over the rail. Nothing was upturned or dishevelled. Even in the lounge room everything looked normal; the TV remote was on the coffee table, the flowers that Ella guessed had been delivered after Kennedy’s death were ranged along the sideboard. The silver butterfly was still there.

‘That neighbour didn’t see them go,’ Rebecca continued. ‘We found a spare key to their garage and checked it but their car’s gone.’

Kuiper nodded. ‘Marconi, Shakespeare, canvass the other neighbours in this block and the ones either side and across the street. See if anybody saw them go, or if there was anyone with them.’

Ella and Murray divided the work up. Nobody that Ella spoke to, either in the Kennedys’ block of flats or elsewhere, had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. She returned to the flat to find Murray already back. Rebecca and Detectives Matt Lyons and Prue Hoskins sat on the lounge going through piles of papers. Kuiper stood listening to Murray.

‘In their car, and definitely just Mrs Kennedy and her daughter,’ Murray finished.

‘So they’ve done a runner,’ Kuiper said.

‘Got it.’ Rebecca held up a bank statement. ‘It’s in both Mr and Mrs Kennedy’s names.’

Kuiper looked it over. ‘Let’s get down to the bank before they close, see what she’s been trying to hide from us.’

‘I wasn’t certain that she was,’ Rebecca said.

‘We’ll know soon enough.’ Kuiper turned to Ella and gave her a sheet of paper with
Simply Sydney Funerals
in fancy script across the top. It was a receipt for money paid. ‘Hop on over to these blokes, find out when the funeral’s on. The morgue only released the body yesterday, so with any luck Mrs Kennedy’s still in town.’

A call to a collapse in the Cross turned out to be a heroin overdose. Lauren gave the unconscious woman a shot of naloxone, and after she woke up she abused them roundly then took off through the crowds up Darlinghurst Road. ‘Yeah, you’re welcome!’ Lauren shouted after her.

‘Hey,’ Joe said. ‘People are watching.’

Lauren threw the gear into the truck. Wherever paramedics went, whatever they did, people watched. It made her feel vulnerable, a target, especially in a crowd like that where who knew who could be working his way through to get close to them. She got in the cabin and slammed the door. ‘Can we go?’

They were passing the museum when Control called. ‘Thirty-four, I have a man behaving strangely in the traffic on Market Street. Cross street is given variously as Pitt or Castlereagh. Police on way also.’

‘Thirty-four copy, on the case.’

Joe flicked on the lights and sirens. ‘Fake or genuine?’

‘Genuine.’ Lauren pulled on a pair of gloves and got out a pair for Joe, reaching over to tuck them under his thigh. ‘Drug problem.’

‘That’s not fair,’ Joe said. ‘Drug problem covers a million things.’

She managed a grin. ‘You have to be fast round here, mate.’

They turned right onto Elizabeth Street then left onto Market where the traffic was hardly moving at all. Joe pushed along bit by bit, waving at cars to inch over so he could manoeuvre the ambulance through to where a man yelled and flailed his arms in the middle lane.

Lauren picked up the mike. ‘Thirty-four is on scene, no sign of police yet. I’d say we’re going to need them too.’

‘I’ll call them again,’ Control said.

Joe said, ‘Ah, shit.’

Half out the door, Lauren said, ‘What?’

‘It’s the same fucking guy.’

Lauren looked again and her heart sank.

Joe came around to her side of the ambulance. ‘He’s even wearing the same bloody clothes.’

The football shorts were low on the man’s hips, and the slash in his Nirvana T-shirt flapped in the breeze.

‘How’s he out on the streets?’

‘Psych wards must be full,’ Joe said. ‘Worse one comes in, out he goes.’

Lauren yanked the mike from its hook. ‘Thirty-four.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘This is the same patient who assaulted both officers five days ago while armed. Require police as soon as possible, please.’

‘Copy Thirty-four,’ Control said. ‘Stay clear if you can.’

The man pounded on the bonnet of a car with his fists. Lauren could see drivers elbowing down the lock buttons on their doors.

‘We have to do something,’ Joe said. He was close by her, standing inside the open door. She could rest her arm on his shoulder if she wanted. ‘At least this time we know what he’s like.’

The man clambered onto the bonnet then roof of a car and jumped up and down. Lauren could feel people looking at them, and she slid reluctantly down from her seat. She could hear a siren, somewhere far far away. Perhaps they could distract him long enough to stop him. She walked beside Joe. The cut on her back hurt. It was hot on the street with the exhausts of all the cars going, and she could smell the stink of the man’s body odour even over that. ‘We never found out his name.’