Paris listened to Kathryn Beattie talk and watched Rowan from the corner of her eye. He emerged from the hospital doors without looking her way, said something to the officer with the stretcher, and then climbed into the back of the ambulance, out of her sight. In there he’d be able to hear what Beattie was saying.
‘Do you follow me?’ Beattie said.
‘Yes,’ Paris answered, wanting to say, Do you think I don’t know what I did? Do you think I’m not reliving it in my head, over and over?
‘Okay then,’ Beattie said. ‘Did you drive to work this morning?’
‘I caught the train.’
‘So how about I run you home?’ She gestured to her station wagon.
‘My bag’s in the ambulance,’ Paris said.
Beattie said, ‘I’ll get it for you. Go hop in. I’ll be just one minute.’
Paris got in the front seat of Beattie’s superintendent car and clipped in her seatbelt. Through the closed window she watched Rowan climb out of the back of the ambulance and hand Beattie her bag. They stood talking and didn’t look her way.
Paris folded her arms, tucked her ice-cold hands in her armpits. Beattie would take her home and round off her little chat with . . . what? We’ll empty your locker for you, we’ll bring you your stuff and the forms to sign, you’ll hand back your uniforms and get a fortnight’s wages.
Her sight blurred. Six weeks, and it was all over.
*
Ella rang Dennis to update him on their progress so far but he cut in before she could tell him anything.
‘I was just about to call you. James has been found.’
‘Where?’
‘At The Gap.’
She caught her breath. ‘He jumped?’
‘No, no,’ Dennis said. ‘Officers on scene say he’s come back inside the fence and is talking to them.’
Ella hung up and told Murray to step on it.
*
The whole trip to Padstow, Beattie talked about what made a good paramedic: compassion combined with an ability to keep cool.
‘Mm,’ Paris said, and nodded, because she knew that already, that’s what she was trying to be. Her bag was on her lap, and underneath it she was pinching the backs of her hands, trying to gather her courage to ask what she really wanted to know. She had to: it was crazy to keep going like this.
‘Make sense?’ Beattie was saying.
Paris nodded. She took a deep breath. Here goes nothing. ‘What if you’re afraid?’
‘Everyone’s afraid. Left here?’ Beattie turned the corner. ‘You just have to put it out of your head.’
‘I mean, really afraid.’ How could she get it across to her?
‘Think about something else. Think about the stuff you do know how to do. Or distract yourself in some other way. I knew a paramedic who sometimes felt faint around a lot of blood, and he’d do times tables in his head. You’re at number ten, you said?’
‘What if that doesn’t work?’ Paris said. What if you can’t think, can’t breathe?
‘Then you try harder.’ Beattie turned into Paris’s driveway. ‘Don’t stress. It’ll get better.’ She smiled.
Like it was just that easy.
‘Car Twelve,’ the controller said on the radio.
‘That’s me,’ Beattie said. She put out her hand to shake Paris’s. ‘I’m glad we had this talk.’
‘What’s going to happen?’ Paris said.
‘We’ll let you know.’ Beattie picked up the mike. ‘Twelve’s clear in Padstow and ready for details.’
‘Stand by, Twelve,’ the controller said.
Beattie said to Paris, ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be suspended or anything like that.’
Sacked, Paris thought. The word is sacked. She looked up at the house. At least her mother hadn’t appeared. Hopefully she wasn’t home.
‘It might mean retraining,’ Beattie said. ‘Counselling perhaps.’
She smiled again, and it almost killed Paris to muster a tiny one in return.
‘Thank you for the lift,’ she whispered, and got out, just as her mother’s car turned into the driveway behind Beattie’s.
Marie opened her driver’s door. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing,’ Paris said. ‘You have to move. She needs to go.’
‘But what’s the matter? Why are you home?’
Paris could see that Beattie was annoyed and felt the hot rush of embarrassment on top of everything else. ‘Just back out so she can go!’
‘There’s no need to yell.’ Marie slammed the door and backed onto the street.
Beattie reversed past her, then waved to Paris through the passenger window as she drove off.
‘What was all that about?’ Marie said when she’d parked her car.
‘Nothing.’
‘They got you on some funny shift now, ends in the early afternoon? They drive you home at the end because you’re so special?’
‘Ha ha.’ I will not cry.
‘I’m just teasing.’ Marie looped her arm around her waist. ‘Come inside. Sit down. Have you had lunch? I haven’t. We’ll eat and you can tell me what’s happened.’ She shut the front door behind them. ‘Was work too much because of Aunt Stacey?’
‘I’m not hungry.’ Paris hated this fake interest, the smarmy voice that always accompanied it. ‘Have the police been in touch? Is there any news?’
‘Nothing.’ Marie opened the fridge. ‘What do you feel like?’
The emotions boiled up. ‘You don’t even care.’
‘Of course I do.’
‘No, you don’t. Look at you. Making lunch like nothing’s wrong.’
The relationship between her mother and Stacey hadn’t been good. Over the years Paris had heard arguments, some more heated than others. Plus there’d always been an undercurrent of . . . she wasn’t sure what it was. Resentment? Jealousy? She hardly remembered her grandparents, but her mother had hinted often enough that she felt Stacey was always seen as the special one.
‘We need to keep our strength up,’ Marie said. ‘Surely they taught you that at your sainted paramedic school? Care for the ones who care. Is that why they brought you home? Because you’re too stressed over your aunt to work?’
‘No,’ Paris said.
‘Why then?’
‘None of your business.’
Marie raised her eyebrows, then looked into the fridge again. ‘So what does “paramedic supervisor” mean?’
Of course. She’d seen it on the car.
‘Exactly what it sounds like,’ Paris said.
‘Whenever I’ve had to deal with supervisors it’s because I did something wrong,’ her mother said.
‘The ambulance service is different.’
‘So I have been told.’ She said it leisurely, each word precise, her eyes on Paris’s. ‘How lucky are you, working in such a great organisation?’
*
Old South Head Road at The Gap was all but blocked off by media and police vehicles, and Murray squeezed the car half onto the footpath. The sun was shining and seagulls whined as they hovered in the breeze above the cliff edge. The Gap was a notorious suicide spot and Murray nudged her as they crossed the road. ‘Ever done one here?’
‘Ages ago,’ she said. She’d been in the job just a couple of years but remembered the sight of the body on the wave-wet rocks like she was looking at it now. A nineteen-year-old man. She and her partner had had to tell his parents. ‘You?’
‘Same.’
They didn’t say anything more but approached the news crews and uniformed police gathered on the wide path that led along the cliff. Durham stood in the centre of the group, addressing the cameras.
‘– and yes, I came here out of despair, out of fear that I will never see my wife, Stacey, again.’ He held up a photo, crumpled as if he’d been scrunching it in a damp hand. ‘But the response of ordinary people who persuaded me back over the fence, the police who arrived to help, the paramedics who made sure I was okay, and now the news people here, have made me feel that there is hope, that someone must have seen something, and that someone just needs to look at Stacey’s photo again and take a moment to think.’ He paused and stared down the barrel of the closest camera. ‘If you’re the person who has my wife, please return her to me. I love her more than anything in this world. I’m lost without her, and so is her family. Even her dog, Gomez, is affected. He won’t eat, he’s practically pining away. Stacey’s a wonderful woman and we all need her home.’
‘Smart,’ Murray said in her ear. ‘Humanise her in the eyes of the abductor.’
Ella knew the tactic, but something about James’s tone made her doubt his reasons. The feeling made her wonder if Murray was right, if she was too suspicious.
‘I’m putting together a reward, so please get in touch. Tell me what you know. Help me find my beloved wife.’ James held the photo forward as if to make the cameras focus in on it, but Ella guessed they’d be getting close-ups of the tears in his eyes instead.
There was a silence in which she could hear the crash of the surf against the rocks at the bottom of the cliff, then journalists started asking questions.
‘How much will the reward be?’
‘I’m still working that out,’ James replied. ‘But I’m aiming for fifty thousand.’
‘That’ll bring the nutters out of the woodwork,’ Murray murmured.
‘Has the blood in the car been confirmed as your wife’s?’
‘I’m still waiting to hear about that from the police,’ he said.
‘Do you think your wife’s disappearance has anything to do with the murder of two paramedics last year?’
‘I don’t see how or why, seeing as the man who did that died,’ James answered.
Ella felt her ears go red. She’d been the one who shot and killed the man as he was trying to strangle his final victim.
‘What if it’s a copycat?’ someone said.
‘The police haven’t suggested that to me,’ James said.
‘Do you know the latest on the investigation?’
‘Do the police have any leads at all?’
Before James could answer, someone recognised Ella and Murray. ‘Detectives, can we get a statement, please?’
The camera lights were bright in her face.
‘We have nothing to say at this time,’ Ella said. ‘Our concern here is to look after Mr Durham. Feel free to call the Homicide office in Parramatta.’ Where they’d get nothing but the latest media release and perhaps a heads-up on a press conference.
The journos turned back to James and fired off more questions, but Ella pushed through and grasped his arm. He was trembling, and said, ‘I need to get out of here.’
The tremble felt real, not faked, and almost against her will her attitude towards him relaxed a bit.
‘No more questions,’ she said loudly, as Murray went to James’s other side, and between them they walked him down the stairs and across the street to their car.
He climbed in the back and put his head in his hands.
Ella got in the front and turned in the seat to look at him. ‘Are you okay?’
He sat back, rubbing his face. ‘Give me a minute and I’ll be all right.’
‘Do you need to go to hospital?’ Murray asked.
James shook his head.
‘We’ve been worried about you,’ Ella said. ‘We were waiting at the shop but you never came back from the bank.’
‘I headed that way, then I got another text, the same as the others: Tell the truth. You know what this is about. I texted back, but they just said the same thing again. You know what this is about. Tell the truth. You know what this is about. That and the grief and worry and everything were too much. I drove past the bank and kept going.’
‘How did you end up here?’ Murray asked.
‘Stacey used to live near here,’ he said. ‘She loves the beach. I guess I thought that if I came to the place she loves, where she used to live, I could maybe, I don’t know, have a revelation or something, work out what it is that I’m supposed to know. But it didn’t help.’
‘Where did she live?’ Ella asked.
He gave them an address off Campbell Parade in Bondi. ‘She always talks about how she could hear the surf when it was up, how she could smell the salt in the air.’ His stare out the window was distant. ‘One day we’ll retire to the beach. I always promised her that. That we’d go back.’
Ella said, ‘Why did you turn off your phone?’
‘I couldn’t stand the messages. I hate that they have the power. I hate that all they say is that one thing over and over, that they won’t explain or give any more information. I mean, what am I supposed to do with that? How can I confess or make it right or whatever it is they want when I don’t even know what they’re talking about?’
‘Would you turn it on now, please?’
He took his phone out of his pocket and pressed buttons. Ella heard the chimes of multiple messages. He studied the screen. ‘Three from her phone. Same as before. Plus some missed calls.’
‘May I see?’
He handed it over. She scrolled through the list of callers. Marie, the shop, her own number and that of the office. The messages sent from Stacey’s phone were the same as the one James had described. They were spaced between thirty and forty-five minutes apart, and the last one had arrived more than an hour ago. She got out her notebook and wrote down the exact times, then gave the phone back.
‘So you drove past the bank then over here to Bondi,’ she said. ‘Which way did you come?’
‘The normal way,’ he said. ‘Through the city.’
‘Took a while, did it? We were at the shop soon after nine and Nick Henry said you’d just left.’
‘Traffic was bad, but I also sat at the beach for a while.’
‘Which one?’
‘Bondi. And walked along the streets. Walked past her old place. Walked in a daze, if I’m honest. I’d keep sort of waking up and not know where I was or how I’d got there.’
‘But you still found your way back to your car?’
‘Fortunately.’
She took the CCTV picture of the cyclist out of her jacket pocket. ‘Does this person look familiar?’
He stared at it. ‘This is the same person who rode away from her car, right? I still don’t recognise them, and I don’t understand any of this. Why would anyone take her? Why would anyone keep saying I know why when I don’t?’ He looked up. ‘Do you think they’ve mistaken me for someone else?’
‘Unlikely,’ Ella said. ‘They must know your name and Stacey’s, and assuming she can talk to them, I’d imagine they would find out pretty quickly if she was the wrong person.’
‘Assuming,’ he said.
‘I’m sure she can,’ Ella said. ‘I’m sure she’s doing fine. Going by what we’ve learned about her, she sounds like one tough lady.’
‘She is,’ he said.
She studied him. He was calm now, the photo in his hand, his eyes on the camera guys filming the curious onlookers, the fence and the rocks below The Gap, while the uniformed constables looked on.
‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she said to Murray.
The constables were both taller than her, and stood with their hands tucked into their utility belts.
‘Do you think he was seriously planning to jump?’ Ella asked, looking up at them.
The senior constable shrugged. ‘Some would say if they’re serious they just do it.’
His face was peeling from old sunburn, and he looked hot and annoyed. The journos came closer, trying to listen in.
‘He was back over the fence by the time we got here,’ the younger officer said. She had a square face and a nice smile. ‘Couple of bystanders were talking to him. They’ve gone now, but they said he climbed over right in front of them and was sobbing loudly. They called out, begging him to come back, and he talked about his wife and how upset he was, and then maybe four, five minutes later he climbed back.’
‘Did he talk to you at all?’ Ella asked. ‘Tell you where he’s been for the last few hours, anything like that?’
‘Between bouts of sobbing he said he’d been driving around because she used to live near here,’ the senior said. ‘Then the media turned up and he was all theirs.’
‘Thanks.’ Ella headed back towards the car.
One of the journalists stepped into her path with a smile. ‘Detective Marconi, I’m Rachel Nisbet. Has there been any progress in finding Stacey Durham?’
‘No comment,’ Ella said, moving past her.
Nisbet touched her arm. ‘I saw you go red when the death of the paramedic killer was mentioned. Being the cause of four deaths in five years must take a toll.’
Ella stopped and looked at her. She was all ready to be filmed, in a tight black skirt and jacket and with her blonde hair tied up in a smooth bun. She was young and didn’t know when to stop talking.
‘I know they were all necessary,’ Nisbet said hurriedly, ‘all justified. Investigated and ticked off. But I’m talking personally. How it feels. I’ve been following your career for some time and I know you’d make an excellent subject for a feature article. The girl behind the gun. Girl cop takes on all the bad guys. That sort of thing.’
‘Girl?’ Ella said.
‘It carries a certain jaunty ring.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Ella turned to leave. Her phone rang and she answered. ‘Marconi.’
‘Perhaps you could think about it?’ Nisbet called behind her.
‘This is Mike from the bike shop,’ the male voice said. ‘I found Zaina’s information. Have you a pen?’
Finally. ‘Go ahead,’ Ella said.
When she hung up she hurried back to the car. James sat slumped in the back seat and Murray stood by the open front door. ‘Anything?’ he said over the roof.
‘Tell you in a minute. How about here?’
‘Nope.’ Murray made a locking gesture over his lips.
She put out her hand for the keys, got behind the wheel and started the car. Murray got quickly in too.
‘Where are we going?’ James said.
‘I thought we’d drop you back to your car,’ she said. ‘Where is it?’
‘Back down the road a bit.’
She did a U-turn and started driving. ‘By the way, you didn’t answer my question yesterday.’
‘Which one?’
‘About whether the business is in financial trouble.’
‘No, it’s not, and I’m as offended by the suggestion today as I was yesterday.’
‘What suggestion is that?’
‘That I did something to her for money.’
‘I was only asking about the business,’ Ella said blandly.
‘And only an idiot wouldn’t be able to see the subtext.’ His voice rose. ‘I’m a victim here. My wife’s missing.’
‘We know.’ She pulled up beside his car, put on her hazard lights and looked at him in the mirror. ‘Please don’t turn your phone off again.’
He got out without another word and slammed the door.
‘Right,’ she said to Murray, when James was in his car and they were moving off, ‘if you were serious about jumping, would you climb the fence right in front of a couple of bystanders and started sobbing loudly?’
‘That’s what he did?’
‘A better way to draw attention to yourself does not exist.’ Ella braked at a light. ‘So whether he did or didn’t send this morning’s texts himself, which we can’t really know because he conveniently turned his own phone off, he could’ve been doing anything in the past couple of hours. Disposing of the body. Dealing with the accomplice, whoever was on the bike, seeing as he knew we got their picture yesterday and would soon be finding out more.’
Murray frowned. ‘Then even the anonymous complaint could be a fake. Making it look like he has some rival out there, someone who wants to hurt him. Trying to throw us off his scent for when his wife eventually disappeared.’
‘Trying,’ Ella said darkly. Her phone rang. It was the office, and she put it on speaker. ‘Marconi.’
‘It’s Elizabeth Libke. I’m still working on James’s computers, but I did find something on Stacey’s Facebook page. She has a hundred and thirty friends, and I went through her profile to check for people who’d asked to be her friends but she hadn’t allowed, or who’d sent her odd messages, or who’d she defriended or blocked – anything that might suggest either stalkerish behaviour or a falling out. There were no abusive messages, but I found three people who had been her friends in the past year but aren’t any longer. Got a pen?’
‘Certainly do,’ Murray said.
‘Christine Lamarr is a paramedic based in the inner west, and her boyfriend, George Tsu, also a paramedic, works with Stacey. Stacey defriended her six weeks ago. Neither Lamarr nor Tsu have a record, and they live in Lilyfield.’
She gave them the address. Ella recognised the street, just off Lilyfield Road.
‘The second is Abby Watmough,’ Libke went on. ‘She friended Stacey after their high school reunion last year. Abby doesn’t post often, just a pic now and again of her baby, but Stacey defriended her about four months ago. No record, lives in Lidcombe.’
Murray scribbled down the street and number.
Libke said, ‘The third and final person is Steve Lynch, who Stacey friended after some posts about the reunion, but who she defriended a couple of weeks ago. They’d liked and commented on a few of each other’s posts – he runs a dog training school at Dural and the posts were dog-related – then she deleted him.’
‘She wasn’t just having some sort of friend cull?’ Ella said.
‘Nope. That’s all there’s been in the last year, and they’re spaced out. A cull tends to take out lots of people at once.’
‘Is James on Facebook?’ Murray asked.
‘Yes, in a manner of speaking,’ Libke said. ‘He has a personal page, because you need one in order to set up a business page, but it’s got no photo, no details except the link to the shop page, no friends, nothing. The posts on the shop page are all about computers: warnings about the latest viruses, software deals, the odd customer testimonial. That’s all I’ve got for now.’
‘Thanks,’ Ella said.
Libke hung up, and Ella told Murray about the information she got from Mike about the dentist’s receptionist.
‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘Berala’s near Lidcombe. We can go Lilyfield, Berala, Lidcombe, then Dural. Roadtrip it.’
Ella didn’t answer, thinking about the pieces of the puzzle and how they fitted together.