‘How can you say these things to me?’ I turned to Brandis, brooding away in the corner. ‘Is he allowed to talk to me like this?’
Brandis blinked a few times like he was just waking up. I tell you, I understood a little then how someone could commit murder. For real, I did.
‘Easy, Mikey,’ he said.
Mikey raised his hands again. ‘Listen, I’m not judging. I don’t care about anything except finding whoever did this to Bella. If that’s what you care about, and I know you do, Chris, then I’d ask you to spend the afternoon having a good long think. See if you can’t dredge up some of those names from your memory bank, eh?’
Brandis stood up. ‘Press conference isn’t for a few hours yet. If you’d like to stay back here, gather your thoughts, I can organise someone to bring you a cuppa and a sandwich or something?’
‘Nah, I’ll go home now, I think.’
‘Up to you. Important that we have you back here before one, though. I’ll send a car to get you at twenty to, alright?’
Nate was in the waiting area, playing around with his damn phone. Reading the news or texting his woman. I didn’t know which would’ve been worse, so instead of asking him I just believed both and shook away the hand he offered me as we walked out to the car.
‘What did they want to talk to you about?’
‘Just more bullshit about who she might have been seeing. Can’t get it through their fucking heads that she isn’t like that.’
Nate started the engine, looked over to check that I was strapped in. He did that every time and every time it softened my heart towards him for the moment. I reached across and patted his leg.
‘Thanks for being here, babe.’
Nate nodded and released the handbrake. ‘Long as you need me, only . . .’ He drove out of the car park, heading for my place. ‘I hav’ta head back up to Sydney later today. After the press thing, I’ll –’
‘I thought you said you had time off.’
‘Yeah, yeah. There’s just a coupla things I need to do.’
‘Things.’
‘Babe, come on. Be fair.’
‘I never asked you to come in the first place.’
His giant hands slammed palm first into the top of the steering wheel. ‘She was like my sister.’
‘Yeah, I know the feeling.’
He sucked in his breath, drummed his hands, gently now, on the wheel. He was taking the long way, avoiding the street where Bella lived. These were the parts of Strathdee the tourists never saw, lined with red-brick and fibro rentals with squat steel fences out front. It was a few minutes before ten on a breezy, sunny Wednesday and most of the front yards we passed were occupied: I exchanged glances with a chain-smoking teenager half watching two toddlers beating each other with plastic tools, a pair of ancient Italian immigrants in wife-beaters and dress pants staring blankly at the road, and a middle-aged women in track pants and thongs watering weeds. A town’s worth of dogs howled and barked, but I couldn’t see any of them.
‘You can just drop me off and go on your way now,’ I said when we turned into my street.
‘What about the press thing?’ Nate pulled on the handbrake but left the engine running.
‘Brandis said he’d send a car to get me.’
‘It’s a big thing to handle alone.’
‘I’ll ask Lisa to come.’
He looked at me in that way of his. Jesus, that man.
‘I want to be here, you know that, but she was expecting me yesterday and I didn’t show up. Didn’t call until . . . She understands and all, but she’s . . . I just need to go and calm her down, let her know it’s all okay between us. Her and me. I’ll be back tomorrow first thing. We’ll need to . . . Funeral and all that.’
‘It’ll be days, a week maybe. Because it’s a criminal investigation, it takes longer for them to release the body . . .’
He closed his eyes, drummed the wheel again. She was like his sister. He loved her. He was hurting, badly. It made me hurt for him and it made me worry.
‘Does she, your woman –’
‘Renee.’
‘Does Renee know about you, your drinking?’
Fists squeezed shut, opened, shut. ‘It’s how we met. At a meeting.’
‘Oh. Okay. Good. That’s good.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Alright. You go on now, drive safe. I’ll see you later.’
‘Tomorrow,’ he said, still looking out the window.
I leant over, pecked him on the cheek, felt all the hurt in his clenched jaw. I couldn’t get out of that car fast enough.
As she approached Strathdee police station, May could see her competition out front. She’d been dreading a horde, but this wasn’t too bad. A small knot of photographers weighing their cameras, looking at the sky. There was a reporter each from the Telegraph and the Herald, plus two others May recognised but couldn’t place. The 7, 9 and 10 vans were there, but not ABC or Sky.
She parked around the corner, had a smoke and touched up her make-up. She timed her walk to the station perfectly, arriving just as a uniform was welcoming them all to Strathdee. Behind him stood two men in suits, two other uniformed officers and a dark-haired woman in a light blue tracksuit – the tight, velour kind that was hip ten years ago – white high-top sneakers and pink pastel lipstick. Her head vibrated. She blinked in rapid bursts. The poor woman seemed surprised to find herself being gently pushed forward towards the cluster of reporters. May doubted that the woman would be able to get through a single sentence let alone a press conference. She cringed at the unkindness of it all and then elbowed her way to the front so she could get some good pictures of the collapse when it happened.
*
In the car, May played back the recording and made brief notes on the few actual details the cops had released. She scribbled down a list of story angles before she called Andrew to convince him to let her stay a few days despite there being no news apart from ‘woman dead, sister sad, police know nothing’.
Reactions/recollections of:
Family (esp. sister)
Boyfriend
Friends
Neighbours
Colleagues
Implications for town – women’s safety, tourism, nightlife (is there any?)
Similar crimes (murders in this town or recent rape/murders elsewhere)
‘Yeah, good,’ Andrew said while she was part way through her first idea. ‘Look, the piece we have up is still going nuts, being shared all over, so we need to build on that. Give me a straight-up report first, focus on the sister, use whatever scraps the police gave. Then I want an atmospheric overview of the place; give a sense of what it’s like where she was killed, what the vibe is around the town. Jim reckons there was a famous massacre there back in settler days. See if you can work that in too.
‘I want to get the first up this arvo, get it shared around before the others have a chance to even file, and then have the second ready to go early tomorrow. So, an hour for the report and before six for the other, okay? Cheers. Talk in the morning.’ He hung up.
Cross-legged on the hotel bed, having just sent off the second of her stories five minutes before deadline, May wrote a quick email to her neighbour Jack asking him to keep an eye on her place until she returned. Jack was actually three doors down, but he was the only person in the terrace row she ever spoke to. The woman on her direct left was a whiny bitch who complained about mail sitting in the box more than one day, a bin left out overnight, music played just loud enough to be heard by someone with their ear to the speaker. On the other side of May was an elderly man visited by home-care every midday and taken away by ambulance at least once a month.
Sitting in this odourless, brown and beige box, May was stabbed with longing for the little rental on Devonshire Street. Her pale green walls and retro-printed green and purple cur
tains, white-barred windows open to the night, the scent of Malay spices from the restaurant on the corner, the sound of trucks, bicycle bells, laughing and fighting and the occasional bottle smashing outside the pub one street back. And May seeing, hearing, smelling all that, lying on her too-squishy but so gorgeous vintage iron-framed bed and especially, yes, God, Craig’s head between her legs, his tongue –
‘Fuck.’ She closed her laptop, yanked her runners out of her unpacked suitcase and pushed her bare feet into them. She pocketed the room key and strode out into the Strathdee dusk, thinking, if he turned up here I’d be on my back in seconds I have no dignity I have no pride. If I called would he come just for a night just for old times? He can’t be satisfied with her, pregnant and angry, and I’m here so ready and full of wanting.
May struck out in the direction she’d driven that morning. Six or seven lone men smoking on the verandah of the pub ignored her while a cluster of three made a point of stopping their conversation to watch her pass. The car rental agency next door was in darkness, the service station empty except for the teenage attendant casually fagging away ignition distance from the pumps.
Foreseeing a main road lined with staring smoke-machines, May turned left at the preschool and breathed easy down a quiet street lined with neat fibro cottages. She chose turns at random, keeping mental track of her route, focusing on her breathing and the feel of the road beneath her pounding feet, driving out the thought of Craig and his licking, lying, goddamn tongue for as much as thirty seconds at a time.
‘Hello!’ a child called from behind a wire fence four or five houses ahead on her left.
‘Hi.’
‘Do you need a hiding place? We have a shed.’
May slowed. ‘No. I’m just doing some exercise.’
‘Oh. I thought those men might be chasing you.’
‘What men?’ She stopped, bouncing on her toes, looked into the little face. A girl of maybe five or six with a home bowl cut, dressed in grey track pants and a faded Superman t-shirt.
‘The ones what kilded that lady. Did you know? A lady got kilded.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘My mum says the police will get ’em but not yet, so if you see them you should hide and if they find you, you have to shout really really really really loud.’
‘Good advice. Bye now.’
‘Bye. Have a nice exercise time.’
Craig’s middle child would be around that age. May rarely thought about them, those blameless kids. She knew no children, had only ever been able to visualise Craig’s as better-dressed and fed versions of herself and her brothers. The girl, wan and frightened-looking, features too big and old for her squished-up face. The older boy, fine-boned and long-lashed, mistaken for a girl so often that he stopped correcting people, threw up his pretty hands and said ‘whatever’ in a way that made Mum giggle and Dad squeeze his face closed. The youngest boy, his father’s pride, stocky and gruff, able to tackle his older brother to the ground by the age of three.
She could’ve loved them. Even if they turned out to be nothing like her and Max and Jason, she could’ve found enough of Craig in each of them to love. He’d never given her the chance. He’d never intended to, she knew now. The fourth child, forthcoming, was proof of that. The family going from strength to strength while the mistress waits herself to oblivion.
‘Hey. What you running for, sweet girl?’
May’s pace didn’t alter, her head remained high, her gaze trained six feet ahead. She was used to running in the inner city, where dickheads calling from cars were background noise.
‘Aww, just a question. Why you running? Sweet arse like that, don’t wanna go running it away.’
She kept moving, taking the next left, focusing her mind on retracing her route, determining whether to loop back at the next corner or go another few blocks. She realised only two or three cars had passed since she’d left the main road, tried to picture the town map, figure out a more direct route back to her hotel.
A car turned from the opposite corner, came towards her, headlights on high beam, then no headlights at all. May’s vision flickered and swam. She noticed how dark it was, how few houses there were on this street, how much yard and driveway in front of each one. She ran harder, but only slightly, kept her pace steady as the lightless car reached the other end of the street and executed a screeching U-turn.
‘C’mon, girl. Stop for a second. Just a second.’
The car was right behind her, engine revving, keeping pace. Up ahead, end of the street, maybe a minute away, was a lit-up house. She struck out hard.
‘Aww, why you keep running like that? Jus’ gimme a second, gimme a second.’ The patter kept up, friendly, almost gentle, like she was a wild dog being coaxed into the back of the pound van.
The concrete driveway metres away was too far. She made a sharp turn onto the lawn, ran hard towards the brightly lit porch. The car sped away, tyres screeching as May knocked on the door.
A man answered, late thirties, striped pyjama pants and a white singlet. He raised his eyebrows, didn’t speak. Behind him, the theme music to Friends blasted and children’s whines rose and fell.
‘I’m really sorry,’ May said. ‘I was out for a run and someone started following me. I just . . . Your lights were on and so I . . .’
The man peered behind her. ‘Gone now, looks like.’
There was something familiar about him. For a mad second she thought he was the man in the car and her heart stopped before sanity kicked it back to life again. ‘Yeah, um. I wonder if . . . I didn’t bring my phone with me and –’
‘That wasn’t real smart, was it?’
‘No. I didn’t think I’d – Can I use your phone really quickly? Call a taxi?’
‘A taxi? Where ya going to?’
‘Strathdee Inn. It’s just –’
‘Yeah. Look, give us a sec and I’ll drive you.’
‘Oh, no, I didn’t want to –’
‘One sec.’ He disappeared down the hallway. May heard a woman’s voice, the kids piping up, a child’s giggle. More muttered conversation and then he reappeared dressed in footy shorts and a navy blue t-shirt, keys and phone in hand. ‘Come on then.’
His face and voice clicked into place. ‘You’re, um, you were at the press conference today? Constable Riley, isn’t it?’
‘Senior Constable Riley,’ he said, then smiled very slightly. ‘Tom, if you like.’
‘I’m May Norman. I’m –’
‘A reporter, yeah, I know.’ He walked past her towards a grey station wagon, held the passenger door open while she climbed in.
‘This bloke who followed you,’ he said once they were out of the driveway. ‘He in a shit-brown Ford? Number plate ROX111?’
‘Um, brown car, yeah. But I didn’t – I didn’t notice the make or plates.’
‘Nah? Thought that’s what you lot did? Notice stuff – details and that.’
May bit back the apology. ‘I thought it best to ignore him. Keep my eyes straight ahead. Usually works to get rid of pests like that.’
‘Yeah. Thing is, fella you’re dealing with here, Dean Rockford – Rox – he’s all piss and wind. If it happens again, tell him to bugger off, give him the finger, something like that and he’ll go on his way.’
‘Does this a lot, does he?’
‘When he has the chance. He’s harmless, though. Take it from me, if you’d so much as looked him in the face he’d’ve sped off like nobody’s business.’
They pulled into the hotel car park. May’s heart rate was back to normal, but her chest ached and she couldn’t seem to stop swallowing. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘What if it wasn’t this bloke, or if . . . I mean, whoever killed –’
‘Wasn’t Rox.’
‘But how can –’
‘Can’t say more, you know that. But trust me that it w
asn’t him. Like I said, he’s harmless.’
‘Okay, but . . .’ He was looking at her as though she were a child refusing to believe in the absence of the werewolf in the wardrobe. ‘What if it wasn’t this Rox guy? Just now, I mean. I didn’t get a good look at the car. It could have been . . .’
He sighed, grabbed his phone off the dash, dialled, smiled at her as he spoke. ‘Rox, Riley here. Yeah, yeah, shut up for a sec and listen. You been out making a nuisance of yerself? You know what I mean. Hollering and kerb-crawling? Scaring girls.’
May sat still, hot all over. The tinny braying from the other end of the phone scratched at her spine.
Riley guffawed, shook his head. ‘You’re a right grub, mate. Need to cut that shit out, yeah? I mean it. If I catch you creeping around like that I’ll – You better believe it . . . I’ll . . . Yeah, yeah. Just keep your dirty thoughts to yourself from now on.’ He slid the phone into his pocket. ‘Okay?’
‘What?’ May said.
‘Definitely Rox. And he’s nothing to worry about.’
‘If you say so.’ She opened the door, put her feet on the ground.
‘But hey, just ’cause he’s harmless doesn’t mean it’s safe for you to be running alone like that. Especially at night. Good-looking girl, no phone, no nothing. Not real smart given the current circumstances.’
‘Okay. Sorry.’
‘I’m not having a go. You do what you like, free country and all that. Just that we don’t want another Bella Michaels on our hands, do we?’
‘No.’ She got out of the car. ‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said, thinking inside inside inside inside.
‘Not a problem. You stay safe now.’
May closed the door and then jumped and fell back against it when she saw the body wrapped in plastic poking out from underneath the bonnet of the four-wheel drive next to where she stood.
‘You right?’ Riley called from inside his car and she blinked and saw it was only a lazily dumped bag of garbage. She felt his eyes on her back and more eyes digging into her from inside the hotel reception. She couldn’t bear to walk all the way across the car park to get to the path to her room. She cut across the metre-wide strip of pebbles and native plants, shuddered as fronds tickled her ankles like soft strands of hair.