Clementine flicked the pencil torch on, shielding the tiny beam of light with her hand, flicked it off again and started scrubbing. Torrens’ two-day-old blood had stuck fast.
She switched the torch on and off again. Damn. Tiny crusted patches of dark brown clung to the cracks and ridges of the rock. She pulled out her pocketknife, started picking at them.
Her fingers were clumsy with the cold, and the chill bit at her face, exposed between beanie and scarf. At this rate I’m going to have to invest in a balaclava, she thought.
The police might have found the blood already, of course, but she was counting on them being under-resourced, no time to do the detailed work. But what if she was wrong? She couldn’t risk leaving the blood there, couldn’t risk implicating him. God, how could she ever have involved him in the first place? He’s on parole, for Christ’s sake.
She picked away with the knife in the darkness, too afraid to use the torch again.
The dog barked from a house a few doors up. She stopped scraping and waited, gripping the torch so hard her fingernails bit into her palms. The moon was hidden behind the clouds, only the faintest glimmer betraying its position. The barking stopped and she went back to her work, scratching at the tiny scabs.
A door opened, a light came on. The Holts’ house next door. She dropped flat to the ground, pressing herself into the cold earth, hiding the pale of her face behind a patch of long grass.
In the glow of the porch light, she could see two figures. By his stance, she knew one was Gerard, but she couldn’t see the man who stood behind him. Their voices carried in the still night air, fading as they made their way down the front steps, out of view.
A light flicked on at the side of the house. Clementine held her breath. A woman’s silhouette appeared at the window—Bernadette, staring out across the vacant block, her gaze hovering over Clementine’s motionless form. Clementine felt the blood pulse in her ears, sharp grains of gravel digging into her cheek. It seemed like an eternity. She had to breathe—a tiny puff of steam as she exhaled. Surely she would be seen. Holding her breath again. Then silhouetted arms reached out wide, grabbed the curtains and drew them shut.
Clementine gulped at the air, sucking specks of dirt into her mouth, pushing them out with her tongue, her heart thumping into the earth beneath her.
She could still make out male voices in the front yard behind the fence. She eased herself up on her elbows and crawled forward, low to the ground like a goanna, close to the fence, and looked through a crack, no more than a thumb’s breadth wide. Gerard was standing with his back to her only a few metres away, facing the other man, who was partially obscured by the branches of a tree.
‘Yeah, well, I’ll have someone look into it,’ said the man.
‘Who?’ asked Gerard.
‘You don’t need to know that.’
‘Good point,’ said Gerard.
The man nodded. White, short, stocky. She strained to see his features between the leaves of the shrub. Possibly bald.
‘I should take the tapes,’ said the man.
‘No. I need to hang on to them. For now, anyway,’ Gerard said.
‘Give ’em to me. Safer that way.’ The man walked back up towards Gerard, standing on the front steps. He didn’t sound like he was used to accommodating objections.
‘No, no.’ Gerard held up one hand. ‘They’re my insurance. He’s just as likely to do something stupid. Get pissed, start running off at the mouth if I don’t give him more money. I want to be able to show him the footage, make him realise how it will look to the police. It’s best I have it on hand.’ Gerard’s voice had a deferential, entreating tone Clementine had never heard before.
The man grunted and started down the steps. ‘Your funeral,’ he said. Then, as he walked towards the front gate, he said, ‘See you next week.’
‘Right. Not here though, Brose. I don’t want you coming here.’
The overheard conversation in the office. Bernadette objecting to someone coming to their home. And that name—Brose. Where had she heard it before? The tattoo parlour…the guy who’d interviewed Ricky for his job. Ambrose.
‘If you pay on time, I won’t have to come chasing you, will I?’
The man, Brose, opened the gate. Gerard followed, stuck his head out and checked the street. Clementine was safely behind the side fence separating the house from the vacant block.
She heard a motorbike start. Gerard closed the gate and walked towards the front steps as the motorbike roared up the street. She inhaled sharply, not even aware she’d been holding her breath again. A tiny flying creature of the night flew into her mouth, hitting the back of her throat. She gagged silently, saliva dribbling from her lips. She despised herself, crawling about in the dirt like an insect, like a cockroach.
But through her insect eyes she could see the strands of a web in front of her and a spider, Gerard, at the centre.