AT HER DESK in the strike force room, Riley hung up on Bowman and scratched at her scalp. The journo was going to blow up in her face on day one.
She opened the analyst’s briefing note on the drone footage and read it again. Tom Green had flown the drone on the fields below the dump site twice on Thursday. The black shape of the body could be seen on the floor of the Hay Stand at midday on Thursday. Later in the afternoon he’d launched again, but there was too much wind and he’d given up. He was heading home from this failed attempt when he had found the body and Craig Spratt had driven past. Tom hadn’t flown the drone on Wednesday.
There was nothing to suggest the kid knew anything was out of the ordinary at noon on the Thursday. The structure and the indistinct mound of the body were on the periphery of the video, and there was no sense he had noticed them. You could just catch the black hump in a few frames if you knew to look. The analyst had gone through weeks of footage, and Tom often flew from the same spot.
Riley shut the file and called O’Neil. He was at the school with Annie Tran, retracing Marguerite’s movements. He talked Riley through it. The girl was on the CCTV at Coles at North Rocks. The check-out boy remembered her from a photo and said she’d been friendly, nothing strange in her manner, behaviour, body language. The CCTV at the school gate clocked her Mazda leaving and coming back into the grounds on Wednesday morning. The cameras did not cover the Hay Stand, nor was there footage of Marguerite or her Mazda elsewhere in the grounds.
‘All we get is Spratt and his wife in their vehicles,’ O’Neil said. ‘And the times align with their statements. The same with the Greens’ car on Wednesday. Other than that, we have Preston leaving and entering on Thursday evening, the Greens’ daughter’s Yaris on Wednesday and Thursday, and then Graham Murray, the bursar, coming and going in his car on Tuesday and Thursday.’
‘The killer would have needed a vehicle to move the body,’ Riley said. ‘Have we looked at how you could get from the Dunlop house to the dump site without being seen on CCTV?’
‘Analysts are mapping it. There are lots of blind spots. It’s possible to get on and off the campus and move around the place without being seen if you know the setup. The journo proves that. From what he told you, he walked several kilometres back and forth across the campus, but he doesn’t show up anywhere on the CCTV. He’s like a ghost.’
‘He knows the place because he lived there,’ Riley said.
‘Thirty years ago. There was no CCTV then. How does he know his way around it now?’
‘Good point,’ Riley said. ‘There’s something else. Can the analysts check the CCTV from the November dates to see if Spratt was dragging his boat around?’
‘Can do.’
‘One other thing,’ she said.
‘Let me guess. Bowman?’
‘You’re good.’
‘What’s he got?’
‘Nothing. He wants.’
‘Sounds about right.’
She took a breath. ‘He knows we have drone footage.’ She grimaced. ‘From his interview with Tom Green.’
O’Neil’s silence was nasty. She held the phone from her ear.
His voice was quiet. ‘Is it online?’
‘No, I’ve told him not to publish.’
‘Will he go along with that?’
‘Not sure. We could expedite. Release that we’ve got it.’
‘What’s that get us?’
‘Say the killer knew about the CCTV and skirted the system. He’s been so careful, but he hasn’t factored in a drone. We hit him with the fact there’s footage and suddenly he’s shitting himself.’
‘Could work,’ O’Neil said. ‘Maybe we even play it up, say it gives the whole game away. Let’s sleep on it.’
He hung up and Riley worked at her desk. As the room emptied, she stretched and checked her phone. Nearly eight p.m. Sleep. She’d need a drink first, to block out the revellers at the pub across from her apartment. She packed her things and went out to the Calais and felt the buzz on the streets. A schoolfriend had got in touch on WhatsApp, inviting her to a party at Kirribilli to watch the fireworks. Riley had declined, and now felt remorse as the day burnt down and she crossed the river at Birkenhead, crowds teeming on the foreshores.
She considered her self-pity and rejected it. FOMO. Marguerite Dunlop had crossed the river as well—she belonged to Riley now. Marguerite Dunlop would see no fireworks. Waiting to turn right on Balmain Road, Riley made a resolution.
The morning streets were strewn with New Year’s garbage. Riley drove through Rozelle, past the Three Weeds and punters eating pies in the gutter. She’d slept well, nine solid hours. Her phone rang and she thumbed the button on the wheel.
‘We’ve got a work vehicle in a shed further back behind the Dunlop house,’ O’Neil said. ‘Everything scrubbed clean.’
‘Coming,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’
O’Neil was leaving Redfern. They arrived at the school at the same time. A Crime Scene sergeant led them into a paddock that sloped away from Ghost Gum in a series of fenced yards, dotted with lean-tos and outhouses and huts. Riley knew from Spratt that the school had run a small livestock program for country kids here, but it had been shut down several years ago. The area was in disrepair, separated from the Dunlop house by a windbreak of poplars and mulberry, and the gates and shacks and lockups were rusted.
They came to a bigger wooden shed within the maze of fences, its double doors flung open. Two forensic investigators in Tyvek were working inside. There was a concrete slab floor, a bare bulb on the ceiling, a succession of gardening tools propped along a wall—mattocks, shovels, pitchforks, picks, rakes. A hose was coiled and hung above a tap. In the middle of it all sat a green and yellow John Deere utility cart with a two-seater cab and a tray on the back—a souped-up golf buggy for farm work.
‘You said scrubbed clean?’ O’Neil said.
‘Not like Gladesville.’ The sergeant pointed. ‘It’s more haphazard. The slab and the vehicle have been hosed and washed—bleach and detergent. There was a small amount of brown organic matter squashed in the corner of the vehicle tray.’
‘You think it’s a match with what was on the plastic wrapping the girl?’ O’Neil said.
‘We’ve sent it off,’ the sergeant said, ‘but yes. The samples look identical. We don’t believe it’s soil. We’ll have results tomorrow.’
‘If it’s not soil,’ Riley said, ‘then what is it?’
‘We think dung.’
‘Dog?’ O’Neil said.
‘No, herbivore.’
O’Neil circled the John Deere and Riley went counterclockwise. The tray was big enough to transport a body. The key was in the ignition. ‘Was this place locked?’ O’Neil said.
‘No,’ the sergeant said. ‘But the doors were closed.’
The John Deere was out of place, a well-maintained working vehicle in a disused shed. Riley looked along the wall of mattocks and rakes. Cobwebs and dust, they hadn’t been touched in a long time—but gardening tools nonetheless. O’Neil walked down the row.
‘Does it strike you as odd?’ he said. ‘Gardening tools and a missing gardener?’
She didn’t answer. Kevin Gary Lynch was starting to piss her off. There was no electronic trail, no bank cards, no registered vehicle.
‘There’s something else,’ the sergeant said. ‘Outside.’
They followed him down the side of the shed. An orange wheelbarrow was propped against the wall.
‘It’s been washed too,’ the sergeant said. ‘Shoe and tyre have had a look. There are impressions from the wheel between here and the house. We think he used the barrow to get her here.’
‘What about John Deere tracks?’ O’Neil said.
The sergeant nodded. ‘At the entrance to the shed. We’re re-checking at the dump scene. It’s more exposed—the ground’s drier and there’s dust coverage.’
Riley caught O’Neil’s tension and concurred: it felt right. Marguerite Dunlop had been killed in her house and wheeled here in the barrow. It was easy and quiet. The killer had used the cover of the shed to wrap and wash everything and then put her in the John Deere to move her to the Hay Stand.
O’Neil sucked his lips.
‘The cart looks out of place,’ Riley said.
‘If it was here, ready, it goes to premeditation,’ O’Neil said. ‘Otherwise, he had to get it from elsewhere after he killed her. But then why dump her and bring it back and leave it here?’
She looked away, up towards the Dunlop house. There was another question, even more obvious: who used the John Deere? Lynch? Spratt? The problem was who to ask. They had to keep the discovery tight, they couldn’t have it getting out.