The Darkest Hour (27 page)

Sal frowned at the page. ‘I don’t really have much to do with the staff.’

Ella remembered Paul Davids’s words that Sal did little but sponge drinks for himself and his girlfriend. A thought struck her. ‘Was your girlfriend with you that night?’

Sal started. ‘I don’t have a girlfriend.’

‘Paul Davids told us you did.’

‘I used to.’ Sal’s ears turned pink. ‘We broke up. She hasn’t been at the club with me for a long time, long before this night.’

Murray said, ‘Of those people on the list, who do you know?’

Sal studied it again. ‘Never met this Fonti guy, or Sommerson. I know Davids, of course. Known him for a few years. He doesn’t say much. This guy Perante, I think he’s a bouncer, big boof-headed bloke. He can be a bit of a prick. These other two, Lamond and Callaghan, they’re bar staff, aren’t they? He’s friendly enough. She’s a bit stuck-up.’

Ella thought he knew them rather better than he’d let on. ‘Can you think why any of them might make a threatening phone call from the bar?’

‘Threatening? To who?’

‘Like I said this morning, we can’t tell you.’

Sal shrugged. ‘I have no idea.’

‘How long has your family owned the club?’

‘Part-owned,’ Sal said. ‘A fair few years. It’s my dad’s and uncle’s thing really.’

‘What are their names?’

Sal hesitated, just for a second. Ella’s antennae quivered. ‘My dad’s name is Guillermo, my uncle was Paulo. He died last year.’

‘Surnames all Rios?’

Sal nodded.

‘Where’s that from, out of interest?’ she said with a smile. ‘My background’s Italian, so I’m always curious to know where people’s families come from.’

‘Spain,’ he said.

‘Oh right,’ she said. ‘Yeah, it does sound Spanish, doesn’t it?’ She looked at Murray who nodded dutifully. ‘And the man who opened the door, that was . . . ?’

‘My brother, Julio.’

‘Ever heard the name Thomas Werner?’

‘Don’t think so,’ Sal said.

‘Recognise this man at all?’ Ella held out the photo of Thomas at the airport. ‘He’s been seen in Rosie’s.’

Sal shook his head. ‘The place is so full sometimes, your own sister could be there and you wouldn’t know. But I don’t think I’ve seen him before, there or anywhere.’

‘If you do happen to remember anything else, even something small and seemingly irrelevant, give me a call. You’ve got my card, right?’

He nodded, glancing down the driveway again. ‘Will do.’

‘Thanks.’ Ella followed Murray back towards the street. She heard the screen door open and close behind her, and when they got into the car she looked back up the slope. ‘He’s still standing there, just inside.’

Murray started the car. ‘Want me to wave?’

‘Turn around slowly.’ She put her sunglasses on and watched from the corner of her eye as they went past. ‘Still there. And did you see how he kept looking down the driveway?’

‘Maybe he thought his dad’d come home and he’d get busted for pinching drinks and allowing phone calls to go unpaid for.’

‘You’re so funny,’ Ella said.

‘It’s a gift. What can I say?’

They grabbed lunch from Subway on the way back to the office, and when they got there Ella typed the surname Rios into the computer while Murray went to sponge barbecue sauce off his trousers.

Sal’s father Guillermo had no record, and neither did his brother Julio or sister Nona. His uncle Paulo was a different story.

Murray came back dabbing paper towel at his thigh. ‘How’re they looking?’

‘Uncle Paulo did three years for handling stolen goods, back in the early nineties.’

‘Nobody else shows a flag?’

She shook her head. ‘There’s something off about Sal, though.’

Murray lifted the wet fabric off his leg and didn’t answer.

‘Don’t you think?’ she said.

‘We can’t go to Kuiper and tell him we have a feeling.’

‘I never said we should. But we can keep in touch. Drop round at odd times. Call him up and say howyougoingmate. See what hatches.’

‘I suppose,’ Murray said.

Strong poked his head in. ‘Meeting’s kicking off.’

When everyone was in the meeting room, Kuiper closed and locked the door. ‘First up, a few of you have asked whether there’s news of the mole. I can’t give you any specifics of the investigation’s progress, but I can assure you it’s moving along well.’

He turned to the whiteboard. ‘Regarding Kennedy, fresh links have emerged to two other men who died that week.

‘Adrian Nolan is a fifty-five-year-old man who has been identified as the man seen speaking to Kennedy the night that he died. Nolan also died that night. He was pulled over for running a red light and when the officers went to check his licence he ran. He made it to Redfern station and jumped onto a train. The officers almost had him when he apparently tried to climb up onto the roof. He fell and was killed.

‘Nolan ran a warehouse in Marrickville. He imported fairly crappy toys and plastic goods. Marconi and Shakespeare discovered that he and Kennedy phoned each other frequently, including on the day of their deaths, and that Kennedy often delivered goods to Nolan. Also, both have had amounts of money deposited periodically in their accounts – money that Nolan’s widow claims to know nothing about. We’re looking into that further.

‘The other dead man is Feng Xie, a twenty-year-old Chinese chemistry student. He was found underwater, in full scuba gear, drowned, just off Nielsen Park in Vaucluse. Investigators found evidence of a meth lab in his flat, and part of a cardboard box with a partial courier’s barcode which has been traced back to goods delivered to Nolan’s warehouse. Nolan would divide up batches of goods and send them on to retailers, one of which was called DNP Holdings. This company is nothing more than a false post office box and a non-existent street address, but examination of the records has shown that goods sent from Nolan to this supposed company were always delivered by Kennedy. The fake street address is two streets from where Feng Xie had his little operation.’

People scribbled notes.

‘The goods sent to this DNP were snow globes, which we believe may have contained the liquid substance that is the halfway point of crystal methamphetamine,’ Kuiper said. ‘We’ve found none of these globes as yet. The lab in Feng’s place was mostly cleaned out.

‘Now, Feng had a mobile phone,’ he said. ‘This phone has been found to be the one from which Thomas Werner made the initial threat to Lauren Yates.’

‘So we think Werner killed him too?’ somebody said.

‘He’s certainly our strongest suspect,’ Kuiper said.

Ella shivered. Blake, Kennedy, Feng Xie.

‘Do we know why Nolan fled the traffic stop?’ someone else asked.

‘Not yet,’ Kuiper said. ‘We know he was driving a rented car, which he hadn’t told his wife about. Possibly he was afraid of somebody, and saw the police officers as being a threat in some way.

‘In other news,’ he said, ‘we think we’re getting closer to Deborah Kennedy. Officers found a friend of Paul Roper, the man seen with her, who’s spoken to him in the last few days. He told Roper they should turn themselves in. Roper told his friend that it wasn’t how it looked; that Mrs Kennedy hadn’t done anything wrong but was afraid of someone. The officers have Roper’s mobile phone number now and are working to trace it.’

Ella drew pointy stars on her notepad. Nolan was afraid, Deborah Kennedy was afraid – of Werner?

‘Werner has once again made his presence felt against Lauren Yates,’ Kuiper said. ‘In this morning’s post she received a soft toy with its head torn off. There was no note. Scientific will do what they can with prints and so on, but they don’t hold much hope.’

Ella cross-hatched around the stars. If they got Werner for the triple murder, a threat by mail was neither here nor there.

‘Strong has located a possible match for the young man with the dislocated shoulder who Lauren saw the night that Blake was killed,’ Kuiper said.

‘Guy’s name is Matthew Flack,’ Strong said. ‘He’s had repeated Emergency Department visits for the shoulder, and also been assaulted a couple of times. Usually works on the Wall, going in men’s cars to wherever they want. The hospitals have various addresses listed for him. It looks like he spends some time on the streets, then dosses down at a mate’s for a while then out again. I haven’t caught up to him yet, but I will.’ Strong all but cracked his knuckles. Ella bit back a smile.

Kuiper nodded. ‘What happened with the people present at Rosie’s when the call to Kennedy’s mobile was made?’

Detective Marion Pilsiger flipped pages in her notebook. ‘Lambert and I spoke to Steve Fonti who was there as a DJ, Guy Perante who works as a bouncer, Tanya Callaghan and Peter Lamond who both work behind the bar. They all deny using the phone or seeing anybody else use it at that time. None of them recognised Thomas Werner’s name, although Perante thought he looked familiar and felt he may have been in the club at some point but can’t say when. He’s worked there for over a year.’

Great, Ella thought.

‘Shakespeare?’ Kuiper said.

‘We talked with Dan Sommerson who’s the DJ’s roadie. He knew nothing. Then we spoke to Sal Rios, whose family part-owns the place and who works there from time to time in a sort of supervisory role. He said he didn’t use the phone and neither did he give permission for anybody else to use it.’

He glanced at Ella. If she wanted to say more about Sal, this was her moment. She looked down at her notepad, and Murray shrugged. ‘That’s it.’

In the tiny kitchen afterwards he said, ‘I thought you were going to mention your feeling.’

‘You thought wrong.’ She held up a cup.

He nodded. ‘Thanks.’ He drummed his fingers on the bench as she started to make the coffee.

Strong leaned into the room. ‘Ella, your phone’s ringing.’

She pushed the cups at Murray and hurried to answer it. ‘Marconi, Homicide.’ Still the little thrill.

‘You like cake, don’t you?’ Wayne said. ‘Veronique Nolan just rang. She tells me she’s got some news.’

L
auren took the beer Ziyad held out. ‘Thanks.’ ‘No worries.’

They sat on the Saleebas’ back step. In the cubbyhouse Felise poured Max a cup of imaginary tea but he was too busy trying to pull down the tea-towel flag to take it.

‘Looks really sick, doesn’t he,’ Ziyad said with a smile. ‘I stay home for him and he miraculously recovers.’

They clinked bottles, and Lauren drank deeply. Kristi had grown herself a migraine after the soft toy thing and taken to her bed. Lauren and Felise went to play outside, then the rope on the tyre swing broke and Felise fell and started to cry, and Kristi had screeched something from her room, and Ziyad had heard the fuss and invited them over, and Lauren had practically hurdled the fence in her eagerness. She clinked her bottle against his again.

‘So,’ Ziyad said, ‘how’s the back?’

‘Getting there.’

He fitted his thumb into the neck of his bottle. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t help clean up.’

‘Hey, you did plenty,’ Lauren said. ‘You saved me.’

‘You saved yourself. I just messed up your door.’ He grinned. Down the yard Max managed to snag the flag, and wrapped it around his head like a bandanna, while Felise told off a toy bear. ‘Tamsyn told me that Kristi was talking about an accident she’d been in, saying this brought it all back.’

‘She said that, did she?’

‘It sounded pretty bad.’

‘It was,’ Lauren said. ‘Not so much for Kristi as for the other driver though.’

Ziyad picked at the label on his bottle. ‘You sound angry about it.’

‘Did she tell Tamsyn the guy died?’

‘Apparently she said it was fatal, but didn’t go into detail on that side of things.’

Lauren turned her bottle around and around in her hands and thought about the young man. She could hear again the bubbling of the blood in his lungs, see the paleness of his face in the glow of the headlights of passing cars and the contrast of it against the blood he coughed up. The sight through the windscreen of the other car, and Lauren’s pain at knowing Kristi sat weeping behind the wheel there, arms around her pregnant belly, drunk and stoned and uninjured.

‘I was working on my own because my partner had gone home sick.’

‘Wait – you went to it?’

Lauren nodded. ‘I recognised Kristi’s car straightaway. I pulled up and went to her car first because it was closest. She wasn’t hurt; she was sobbing and trying to get out. She was about eight months pregnant then. I told her to stay still while I checked the other car. I could see the instant I approached it that the driver was bad. His eyes latched onto me as soon as I got close. He was trapped, the steering wheel was against his chest. I managed to get his door open, and I crouched next to him with the torch, looking for how badly he was trapped, what we’d need to do to get him out.’

The young man – the boy, really he was just a boy – had reached for her. She’d taken his hand and kept shining the light over his lower body. She could smell the alcohol in his blood.

‘The car was old and it’d just collapsed around his legs. The steering wheel was almost imbedded in his chest and stomach. His jeans were soaked with blood.’

The boy had cried, squeezing her hand. She’d had to pry his fingers off to go back to the ambulance and give a report, and get more equipment. Kristi had been crawling out of her car, sobbing and calling her name. Lauren had shouted at her again to stay where she was, not to move one inch. Kristi hadn’t listened.

She blinked. ‘I called for rescue and back-up urgently. If we didn’t get him out soon he was going to die where he lay. And even if we did, when people are trapped there’s a big risk that as you release the object pinning them down, their blood pressure crashes as the blood rushes to fill the crushed part, and toxins from damaged muscle flood from the injured part into the body and they can stop the heart.’

‘So you already knew he might die?’

‘Chances were that he would.’

Ziyad stared down the yard. ‘I cannot begin to imagine how that must make you feel.’

‘You think of what you can do to help, how you’ll treat them and get them out, but there’s this . . . feeling of panic . . . deep inside you. At the same time as you plan what you’ll do, you’re also seeing what is going to happen, that the person will go paler, deeper into shock, start to lose consciousness, their pulse will rise and their blood pressure fall, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re pumping fluid into them, and you can feel all the paramedics around you pick up their speed and the air goes tense and you’re all waiting for the moment when the heart stops. You know it’s coming and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

Ziyad was silent for a moment. ‘That’s what happened to him?’

‘After a while,’ Lauren said. ‘Rescue was cutting everything in sight. I was in the back seat talking to him.’

She saw the boy’s ear, a spatter of blood on the curly cartilage, the lobe pushed up by the cervical collar she’d applied. She said his name, called him sweetie, told him he was doing fine, doing so well, he’d be out of there soon and, yes, his parents had been told and would meet him at the hospital. All of it was lies. She’d looked through the windscreen to see a paramedic helping Kristi onto a stretcher. Kristi’s face was turned their way, her mouth open. Lauren had stroked the back of his head and whispered that she was sorry.

‘And then somebody said he’d flatlined.’ She took a long drink. ‘That’s when you do CPR as best you can, and get them out without much regard for their lesser injuries.’

‘So you yank them?’

‘If you don’t get them to hospital in minutes, they’re dead. Losing half a leg doesn’t matter in that context,’ she said. ‘We got him out and worked on him all the way to hospital.’

The boy’s lanky body had rocked on the stretcher, up and down in time to Lauren’s chest compressions, side to side as the ambulance tore around corners. His head had jounced on the mattress as they’d come over the bump in the hospital driveway and she’d said ‘sorry’ without even thinking about it. The doctors had whipped him off to theatre and Lauren had fought the urge to follow and stand outside the room while they worked on him, the feeling that she was responsible for him, that having been the first one to arrive she should stay with him throughout, and that he needed her near. Instead she’d gone out to the ambulance and started the paperwork, hearing other paramedics talking and joking, feeling that a moment’s intense silence was needed, some sort of recognition for the fight that had been lost.

‘But he died.’

Ziyad touched the back of her hand, the lightest touch. She turned her hand over and clutched the ends of his fingers in hers.

‘Kristi had been taken to a different hospital, and when I went there we wept for that boy, and also for the fact that scans had shown that Felise wasn’t hurt by the crash but had a heart defect.’

Alcohol-related, the doctor had said, stern-faced. Lauren had held Kristi close, their future one of court dates and uncertainty and fear over the baby’s health and the knowledge that she’d require surgery if she lived.

‘I didn’t realise,’ Ziyad said. ‘From what Tamsyn said that Kristi said. I didn’t know it was like that.’

‘I never really went into detail about the boy for Kristi,’ Lauren said. ‘It was stuff she didn’t need to know. And I think the way she perceives it now is a bit of a protective shell against the truth. I mean, she was charged, she went to rehab, she went to court and got a big fine and lost her licence, she heard everything that was said in court and she saw his family. I’m pretty sure she marks his birthday. She’s certainly down when the anniversary of the crash comes around too. But I figured she didn’t need to know about his actual final moments.’

Ziyad squeezed her hand. ‘You’re a good sister to protect her from that.’

Lauren looked at the kids waving from the cubbyhouse steps, and wished she’d been able to protect her even more.

The Nolans lived in Concord. The house was white-painted concrete, set towards the front of a large block. When so many Sydneysiders were subdividing their land, Ella was pleased to see nothing but lawn and garden behind the house and garage.

She followed Wayne up the wide curving concrete path. A currawong perched on the edge of a stone birdbath, giving them the eye. A shiny brass bell hung beside the door but Wayne chose to knock.

It opened just seconds later. ‘Wayne, hello, come in.’ The woman was thin, and in her fifties, Ella guessed. Her hair was bobbed, brown with streaks of grey visible at the part. Her eyes were overbright and a bit starey, as if her mind was completely somewhere else.

‘Detective Ella Marconi, Veronique Nolan,’ Wayne said.

They shook hands. Mrs Nolan’s hand was bony and taut. Her skin was hot, as if she had a fever. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said.

She led them into the living room and gestured to the lounges. Ella sank into the brown velour beside Wayne. Veronique stayed on her feet. She looked nervous.

‘Are you okay?’ Wayne said.

Veronique looked at Ella. ‘You are working on the James Kennedy case?’

‘I am.’

Veronique nodded. ‘Wayne has told me about the ties between Mr Kennedy and Adrian.’ Her French accent made it sound like
Adriennn.
‘I feel bad for everything that has happened.’

‘None of it is your fault,’ Wayne said.

She started to pace, then stopped herself. She crossed her arms and grasped her thin shoulders.

‘What’s the matter?’ Ella heard genuine concern in Wayne’s voice.

Veronique reached for a box of tissues, and dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose.

‘Perhaps we should have tea first? And sponge cake?’

‘What’s upsetting you?’ Wayne said. ‘Is it this news you told me you had?’

Veronique looked at the floor then reached into the pocket of her slacks and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. She held it out to Wayne and he took it. Through her tears she gasped, ‘Excuse me,’ and hurried from the room.

Wayne unfolded the paper. Ella heard plates rattle in the kitchen. She moved closer to him and started to read.

Dear Ver, if you are reading this it’s because something bad has happened.

‘Oh boy,’ Wayne said.

I want to first of all say sorry, and say that I love you and always will. I don’t know how things finished but be assured I was not scared at the end because my final thoughts were of you.

I want you to give this to the police. Not just any of them, but one you have hopefully gotten to know a little. I have been made wary of police these recent weeks, and while what I’ve been told might not be true, I can’t risk that the information isn’t used except against you.

I am ashamed to tell you that I’ve done wrong. James Kennedy asked me to help and at first it seemed okay, not like anything too bad, it was just receive and dispatch like I do all the time. I didn’t think about what was in the boxes, I just sent them on. The money was good. I needed it, the warehouse wasn’t doing so well and I knew I couldn’t run it forever, and I wanted to take you back to France for that year, so you could experience the winter and summer of your youth again.

But Kennedy started telling me things, about the man he delivered the boxes to, about the men he worked for. The Chinese man told Kennedy what we were moving, what he was making. Ice started to be in the news all the time and I realised that our actions were part of the problem. We decided we didn’t want to do it any more. Kennedy tried to tell them, but then one day, months ago, he brought the man in charge to the warehouse.

Ella grasped Wayne’s arm. ‘Thomas Werner was seen with Kennedy in his van back in May.’

This man made it clear that there was no way out for us. He said that at the very least we would be in as much trouble as him, we’d lose everything and go to jail for a long time. He said he had people in the police who would see to it that our information about him would go no further.

He also said that if necessary we would be silenced, permanently, by these same people.

‘Maybe that’s why Nolan ran, and why Deborah Kennedy is still hiding,’ Ella said.

That man’s name is Thomas Werner,
the note continued.
He’s foreign, maybe German, from the sound of his accent. Kennedy told me once that he met him through some other cash-in-hand work he did.

Ella thought of Benson Drysdale.

The final straw was when a friend of Kennedy’s daughter almost died from using ice recently. We decided we’d really had enough. This time the Chinese man too wanted to finish. He was at university and wanted to work a proper job and support his parents back in China that way. We thought if we used the amnesty they were all talking about, it might just work. But Werner was already threatening us about it. He called the warehouse a couple of times, telling me what he could do, reminding me about his police contacts, saying that as soon as my name went into their computer system, his mates would see and come for me, wherever I was.

‘Nolan fled from the officers as soon as they took his licence back to their car,’ Wayne said thoughtfully.

‘Have you got those warehouse phone records?’