Clement scrutinised David Grunder’s face for any tell as, along with his wife and daughter, he peered at the pendant inside the plastic evidence bag. With her usual efficiency Lisa Keeble had been through the Autostrada files and confirmed that identification markings listed by the Piccadilly jeweller on Jessica Scanlan’s original piece were indeed present. It was not a copy. Grunder, fried egg perched on his fork, looked towards his wife, Yvonne, as if for guidance. She was shaking her head.
‘No. It’s very stylish but not mine and too old for Keira. And it was stolen too?’
‘Yes, but we can’t be sure it was from the motel.’
Despite what Clement told himself about being impartial, he was deflated. While Grunder, if he was indeed Jess Scanlan’s killer, would have had plenty of time to prepare for this confrontation, his reaction seemed entirely natural: a husband who wasn’t sure exactly what jewellery his wife and daughter might possess. Clement had received the call from them just before 10.00 am and had arranged to see them while they had breakfast. He wanted Yvonne Grunder and the girl there when he produced the pendant so that if they had ever seen it they might drop Grunder in it. Grunder seemed the kind of gormless, well-fed, soft type who littered the offices of multinational financial giants, did the winter sleep-out at the behest of his boss, occasionally made it to the corporate box when the home side was playing a less popular team, Melbourne or the Bulldogs say, travelled business class, and had a salary twice that of Clement’s. Not that this ruled him out of being a killer. Clement agreed with what Lane had said, if the killer – and of course this assumed Bontillo was innocent or not alone – was an obvious type, he probably would have been found already. Of fair complexion, Grunder’s skin was pink from unaccustomed sun, and his hair, still quite blond, receding but relatively thick. Clement had ordered himself a coffee to give him an excuse to linger. He pretended he was interested in their Beagle Bay trip, and in truth when he looked at Keira, the Grunder daughter, he recalled fond days with Phoebe at that age. But any emotion piggybacked on his pragmatic intention. A small child at a nearby table was emptying salt all over it. The parents ignored it while they checked different phones. What was happening to the world?
‘So is this your first time to Western Australia?’ he asked. Yvonne Grunder explained that her husband was from here. She had grown up in Newcastle and Keira had been born in Sydney.
Clement smile pleasantly at David Grunder. ‘You didn’t grow up here, did you?’
‘Perth.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Willagee.’
A southern suburb that had been housing commission in the old days and was now quite gentrified.
‘So you went to uni?’
He had done a commerce course at UWA. Fortunately he was almost the same age as Clement, who was able to draw on shared experiences of bands.
‘Every Friday I’d be at The Sheaf in Claremont,’ he lied.
Grunder acknowledged he’d gone there more than a few times. If he was the man who had killed Scanlan he must surely get the hint that he was suspected. However he showed no anxiety, no change in manner.
‘And when did you go to Sydney?’
‘Just before Nine Eleven,’ he said. ‘Awful, but it’s something you don’t forget.’
Later Clement sat in his office trying to lay out the threads of the pendant discovery, making sure he had the possibilities covered. The pendant was that which had belonged to Jessica Scanlan. It was ninety-nine point five percent certain it had been stolen by Sidney Turner. It was eighty percent certain it had come from the motel where the two main persons of interest were Bruce Henderson and David Grunder. Both had been in Perth in 2000 at the time of Jessica’s disappearance. Neither had suspicious criminal records. Mal Gross had located Henderson working at the desert goldmine Telfer. Clement had interviewed Grunder and could not establish anything astray. He was waiting on Lane’s files to see if either was interviewed back at the time of the original investigation. He bore in on Turner. He may simply have run, not caring about his aunt. Ice quickly weeded out any decency in its addicts. Alternatively, he could have been silenced, either by Mongoose Cole, or by Scanlan’s killer who, having realised what had been taken, found it imperative to silence Turner. How would that person have known, though, that Turner was the thief? His arrest had come pretty quickly from the time they learned his identity. Nonetheless Clement had to concede, people talked – and here he immediately thought of Josh Shepherd shooting off his mouth – although it could have easily been word spreading from the hockey club. It could even be somebody present in the court. Shit, thought Clement, I still haven’t followed up on Louise. It had all been so promising with her in what seemed an age ago.
He struggled to get back to the case. His life was a mess, so be it, but it must not interfere, not with this, the only thing he’d ever been really good at. Suspects … When Turner disappeared, Henderson was already back at Telfer and Grunder was in Beagle Bay. Clement still favoured Cole as the solution to Turner’s disappearance. Cole admitted having been at the house. He could have had a second vehicle standing by. It would be worth going back over the CCTV, see if any cameras picked up Cole’s Subaru before he arrived at Olive Pickering’s house, see if he was accompanied by such a vehicle. He made a note for follow-up then checked his email and saw that while he had been breakfasting, the Pearl Motel had sent over the names of all guests on the night of the robbery. He printed two copies. At a glance there were seven rooms and ten names. Damon Kelly and Shane Shields were in the right age group. He would need to look over all the other burglary victims before the motel job too. He couldn’t assume the pendant came from the latest robbery. Turner may have been delayed in selling it for some reason. His phone rang. It was Snowy Lane. He now had the original task force files.
‘Come into the station,’ Clement said without elaboration, and then called Mal Gross into his office and handed him one of the printed lists. ‘I need background checks on these people. I also need checks on the other victims of Turner’s burglaries.’
Scott Risely squeezed in as Gross exited. Before he could speak Clement updated him.
‘A couple of promising leads from the motel but they haven’t paid off yet.’ He elaborated on Grunder.
‘If there’s any suggestion this is too big for us, I’ll have to inform Perth.’
‘At the moment there’s nothing they could have done that we haven’t. We’ve established the veracity of the jewellery, we’ve got people looking for Turner, Graeme is checking Cole, and I will shortly have a copy of the original task force files … You don’t want to know,’ he warned before his boss could ask him how he obtained them. Risely was no fool, he’d guess Lane was the conduit.
‘Don’t let it come back to bite us; glory is one thing …’
‘It’s not glory. Can you imagine if the media got hold of this? And if it goes to Perth it will. Someone will talk. Believe me, I know, I worked there twenty years. Once it’s out of the bag, our killer is going to be very careful.’
‘You’ve got my support,’ Risely said. ‘Do you need any more bods on the ground?’
‘Stay on Parks and Wildlife re Turner. He’s still the key.’
‘Done.’
Risely left. Clement needed a coffee but it would be cutting it fine to make a café before Lane arrived so he headed to the kitchenette. Jo di Rivi and Nat Restoff, recently promoted to senior constable, were chatting. All of a sudden Clement remembered the pooch.
‘How was she? Did you get the biopsy back?’ He carefully measured the instant powder.
‘The vet rang this morning. It’s cancerous. He says it will kill her eventually.’
Clement felt confused, duped. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. It was supposed to be one of those things where the vet goes, ‘It’s benign.’ He felt hollow, like the world had let him down. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Di Rivi was handling it calmly. ‘We think she’s about nine. She’s probably got another three years.’
‘Can he operate?’
‘It’s expensive.’
‘We could all chip in,’ offered Restoff.
Di Rivi seemed to have made up her mind. ‘She’s going to be thoroughly spoilt for the rest of her life. I’d rather we put the money to finding homes for some of those other abandoned dogs out there, give them a few years of quality life.’
Clement admired that matter-of-factness. He was too sentimental: an observation that threw back to Marilyn. He was due to have Phoebe Saturday. The pick-up might present a chance to talk to Marilyn? But maybe that would be a mistake. He’d enjoyed his time with Louise. If he left it too long …
He pulled himself out of the deep ditch of his navel back to the present. The kitchenette now had the vibe of a de facto morning-tea break. Manners, the IT guy, had wandered out of his area holding his giant-sized mug. To Clement the size of the mug was inverse to the personality of its owner. Manners was somebody you didn’t dislike but had to force yourself to be interested in. His mug read MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU and was decorated in the motif of check crime tape: a pun no less. Clement suspected Manners was one of those who dressed up in Star Wars or Doctor Who costumes and went to conventions to mingle with mirror images of themselves. He remembered his mental note to himself.
‘I want you to try and find Cole’s vehicle on CCTV preceding Turner’s disappearance, see if it was travelling in company with any other vehicle.’
‘Any one in particular?’ Manners slurped more than sipped.
‘No.’ Another thought jumped into Clement’s head. ‘Those phones that were stolen from the Pearl. There were no sim cards were there?’
‘No. He stripped them all out.’
‘There are a couple I want you to run the records for me. Grunder and Henderson.’
‘Sure,’ Manners helped himself to a soggy biscuit and kept looking at Clement, expecting to be briefed on why. Clement, who had no intention of informing him, saw Lane being shown through into the squad room by Meg and went to meet him. He was about to offer him a coffee but saw Lane had supplied his own.
‘Wise man,’ he said and beckoned Lane follow him, wishing now he had taken the time to head outside for a shop espresso. For years he’d been more than happy with instant but lately the unthinkable had happened and he’d decided he preferred the other. Maybe it wasn’t too late? Maybe he could change big things in his life as well? Images of Marilyn and Louise flashed up side by side as if it were some TV reality show. He banished them. Lane placed his laptop on the desk. They waited while it fired up.
‘Slower than a bishop’s apology,’ Lane cautioned.
‘How did you sleep?’ Clement asked out of politeness, his whole focus now on the computer.
‘Not well. Your parting shot worried the shit out of me.’
Clement struggled to recall exactly what his parting shot had been, caught it, wriggling away. ‘Oh, about Ingrid Feister.’
Lane sipped his coffee. ‘On the positive side, I realised this morning that Grunder wasn’t in WA when she went missing, right?’ The computer had loaded up. ‘Needs your internet password,’ Lane reminded him.
Clement pulled it towards him and punched in the password, probably against regulations but he was too fired up to care about bureaucracy.
‘That’s right. Henderson too, I’m pretty sure. Think he was at Telfer. I can check.’ He swivelled the computer back to Lane.
‘Haven’t looked at these for a while,’ Lane admitted. Clement walked around to the other side of the desk and stared over Lane’s shoulder as he scanned the list of those interviewed in the original investigation. Neither Dave Grunder nor Bruce Henderson appeared. There was a Thomas Henderson, and Clement made a note just in case he might be some sort of relative. He slid the list of the other motel guests over to Lane. Clement had highlighted the names Kelly and Shields.
‘No bells,’ Lane said, ‘but it’s been a while.’ But when they punched the names into the Autostrada files they also returned a blank.
‘I’ve got Mal Gross looking for any criminal history.’
A tap on the door swung them around. Scott Risely stood there. He looked grim. ‘A body has been found in the desert.’
The body may as well have been on the moon, thought Clement. It was a fluke it had been found at all. A geology team had been heading west from no-man’s land in the desert after a week’s surveying and sampling and had almost driven over it. There were no roads here, just a few tracks of compacted red earth if you were lucky. Outback four-wheel drives were the only vehicles that you would trust, and even then you’d want to have a couple, each with a big water supply. The heat desiccated you, gave your clothes the crispness of dry gum leaves. Mind you, Clement counted himself lucky, this was one of the cooler months; he put it at about thirty-seven degrees Celsius. He chug-a-lugged a canteen and threw a sideways glance at Lisa Keeble and her assistant, a bald guy named Mason – Clement had never been sure if that was his first or last name – who were working the corpse and the surrounds. He’d already interviewed the three men who had found the body – a geologist, a surveyor and dogsbody – and let them be on their way. He felt sorry for them stuck out here for the nearly four hours it had taken him to get here, and that with a chopper. It could have been much worse. The location of the body, a little over three hundred k south of Broome on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert was just within the helicopter’s range. Clement had thought hard about driving instead. The chopper would be conserving fuel, taking it easy, while the highway south would be as fast or faster, but then you had to cut inland for another hundred and fifty k of scrubby, red nothing.
He concluded these hours might be critical and that he and the two techs should fly in the chopper with two vehicles following. He called in Graeme Earle and Josh Shepherd from their Mongoose Cole inquiries and told them to take Snowy Lane. Shepherd looked none too impressed and Clement guessed this time Lane would have to sit in the back. Jo di Rivi and Nat Restoff were also coming, bringing a van into which the body could be loaded, although there was an option to chopper it.
En route, plenty of thoughts ran through Clement’s mind but the one sticking its chest out for the tape was that the corpse was either the Feister girl, her boyfriend, or Turner. The geology party, who had got through on a sat phone, were finally raised again just as he and Keeble were getting to the helicopter. From what he could tell, they were saying the corpse looked like it had been there a while. He’d told them to wait and leave the remains intact. When the chopper eventually got there, flying low over endless rust-coloured dirt, not a living creature in sight, he directed the pilot to land a good distance from the site so as not to disturb the ground with its rotor. They then trudged through the furnace. Some days it got upwards of forty-five degrees C here so this was practically air-conditioned.
One glance told him this wasn’t Sidney Turner. The heat and wind of the dry desert had mummified the remains, which looked not unlike some of those images from Howard Carter’s tomb-raiding expeditions: leathery skin stretched over bone, teeth and nails intact. And hair. There was plenty of it. Clement reminded himself that Max Coldwell had long hair. The body was not totally intact, chunks were missing. Snap judgements could come back to bite you so Clement held off on any interpretation as to the cause. For the same reason he did not rule out the corpse being that of an Indigenous person. There were no reports of other missing persons, however, so he knew what odds a bookmaker might give. The loudest gong of doom playing in his head was the body appeared to have been nude. Maybe animals had carried off the clothing but he’d just completed a hundred metre radius sweep without finding a scrap of fabric. He’d already had the pilot take the chopper up for a quick sweep of the area in case there was any sign of another person or body. Unfortunately the fuel limitations meant that the search had to be circumscribed.
He checked his watch: 4.40 pm. He thought the others might still be an hour off. The pilot was stretched out under his chopper in the little shade there was. Keeble, in her tech suit despite the heat, strode towards him.
‘Looks like wedge-tailed eagles and lizards got to her.’
‘Her?’
‘Definitely female.’
‘How tall?’
‘One seventy.’
He wished he could remember Ingrid Feister’s size. Lane would, surely.
‘No clothes?’
‘Not a stitch. These will be helpful.’ She produced a small jar of beetles. ‘I’m thinking two weeks. Rhino will want a look.’
Rhino will love those, he thought. Keeble had learned most of what she knew from Rhino. She might have outstripped him on ballistics and other technical areas but he was the insect specialist.
‘You think all that damage is animal activity?’
‘Three years ago I had a case near Shay Gap. Rider came off his bike, nobody missed him for a week. I saw that body, I thought it was Jack the Ripper’s work but it was just our desert creatures doing what they do. The smell those first few days, it would have been like an invite to a smorgasbord.’
Clement could have done without the simile but every tech he ever knew who worked bodies adopted the same black humour. He was a detective, he had the luxury of thinking of the dead as their living selves, the techs had to treat the body as an inert site from which to scientifically extract evidence.
‘Having said that …’ she had pricked his interest, ‘… lots of bones seem to be broken.’
‘Like what? She was beaten?’
‘More likely run over.’ She obviously wasn’t prepared to hazard any further opinion. ‘You’re thinking it’s the Feister girl.’
Now it was his turn to be coy. ‘Not until you get me her DNA.’
She made a short snort. ‘Good luck with that.’
‘You don’t think we’ll get anything?’
She pointed at the sun, sulkily heading down but with a way to go yet.
‘Better than bleach. It’s going to be a real long shot.’
He’d half expected as much.
‘Might be a chance with fingerprints.’
That was something.
‘You got casts of the geologists’ tyres?’ He’d asked her to do this for elimination in case they found tyre tracks.
‘Mason did. But I haven’t seen any other marks at all. They probably blew away.’
Or somebody dumped the body and then wiped them.
I was in a far-off mental state, part of a surreal landscape of burnt orange, bumping over ground, alternately sandy and scrubby rock. I could have been one those emperors of olden times being carried on the shoulders of odd-sized servants. In front, Shepherd and Earle were exchanging a few words but not so loud as I could hear clearly, even had I wanted to. My mind was still back at the station when my fingers had played over the computer keys, the years peeling away to a time when Grace was in a highchair and Perth gripped by mistrust and fear. It might have been baseless but I felt I’d let myself down, my colleagues down, my city down, my clients down, and most of all those girls. This was supposed to be my second chance. Out of the ether, there it was, the missing pendant, in front of me, somebody who would recognise it, maybe not instantly but soon enough to follow the trail. It was as if the whole case centred around me, like I’d been specially chosen; I was the young King Arthur. But then in an instant that stupid egotism of mine was used against me, like a judo flip. I was twisted in mid-air so what was up was now down and vice-versa. Then I was dumped on my arse. I was supposed to be looking for Ingrid Feister but I’d sidelined her, belittled her importance. Now I was being punished for my neglect. Only at the last minute did I save myself from praying the body was not hers. In my rush for self-preservation, that would have been a new low. Whoever had died out here, accident or murder, deserved my prayers, not me. Maybe I was too old, maybe I was already past it seventeen years ago. If that was the case, I should just get out of the way.
By the time we reached the site, the sun was nearly done. Clement warned me the remains were far from pristine. I didn’t try to get too close, didn’t need to. He sent the others to drive around in their vehicles in case there was a survivor or, more likely, another body. At some point I heard the drone of the light aircraft he’d called in to look further out than he’d managed with the chopper.
‘Keeble says female. How tall are Ingrid and Coldwell?’
I’d brought my folder just in case but didn’t need it.
‘Five eight and five ten and a half.’
Clement did the calculations. ‘That’s definitely not him. We’ve got the victim as five seven.’
Bones were broken, scavengers had attacked the corpse and I couldn’t be certain how accurate the given height was anyway; everybody makes themselves taller if they can and the data could simply have been copied from a form Ingrid herself had filled in sometime. In the absence of any other missing persons I had to assume it was her.
‘I suppose the DNA will tell us for sure.’
He explained we might not be that lucky. Now I felt ignorant as well, a virgin in Victoria’s Secret.
‘If there’s a way, the Feisters will pay, I’m sure of that.’ I asked if he had to tell Perth.
‘I suppose I could wait, see if we can get a cause of death but we’ve got two missing persons and a body. It’s up to Risely. I’m guessing he’ll call Feister, see if they want to go public.’
When the cars returned without having spotted anything, Clement went off to talk privately with Graeme Earle. I waited around kicking dirt. There was a lot to kick, which was just as well. It was a while before Clement came back.
‘We’ll load the remains in the van with the uniforms. They’ll drive to Derby and leave them at the hospital. By the time they get there it will be too late to fly them out today. You, me and Keeble will fly back in the chopper. Lisa will go to Derby first thing and accompany the remains to Perth. Earle and Shepherd will head back now. They’ve got some stuff happening with Mongoose Cole. The other techs will stay here and do another search first thing tomorrow.’
No matter how much life wants to grind you down, you can find something that reaffirms your place on the earth as blest. For me it was savouring a slice of pepperoni pizza sitting on Cable Beach under the stars. For now the horror of the desert had been parked, along with contemplation of our own mortality. I had flown back in the chopper mired in dark thoughts, postponing calling Dee Vee until the morning. A late-night call was only going to have people worrying. By the time we’d got back to the station it had been near 10.00, and Clement and I were starving. Clement suggested pizza. So here we were eating slices out of the box, the waves breaking softly in darkness. Keeble had politely declined an invitation to join us as she was looking at a 5.00 am start to get to Derby and ride shotgun with the body. Which was probably a more entertaining prospect than joining two losers feeling sorry for themselves. It had been too noisy to talk on the chopper so apart from our short parley at the site we’d not really checked the scoresheet since before we’d left for the desert. Now there wasn’t much else to do except swallow.
‘Earle hasn’t made much progress on Cole.’ Clement licked a piece of cheese off his bottom lip. ‘They didn’t find any footage of his Subaru with any other vehicle before Turner went missing. All we have is that CCTV of his car heading out to the airport around one-thirty.’
‘Was he alone?’
‘That’s what it looks like. He didn’t go to the main terminal but to the light aircraft area. There we got more vision of him meeting with the pilot of a plane that flew in from Wyndham. We’re thinking drugs. The Feds have found evidence of a drug trail from Malaysia to Timor. It leaves Timor by boat, mid-sea swap, then maybe it goes to Wyndham and Cole collects this end.’
‘How long was he at the airport?’
‘All up, around half an hour. We’re trying to find some eyewitness who might have seen him park, load, or leave. Then we lose him and pick him up in the chicken place buying a burger at two-fifty.’
‘Maybe he hid Turner in the back, organised Turner a flight out?’
‘I just don’t see Cole being that worried by a little meth-head. It’s possible he dropped Turner off somewhere, then collected him after the airport and did God knows what after that. Earle is solid. He’ll keep looking for those missing hours.’
‘So we still have Sidney Turner unaccounted for,’ I said. ‘The body is not his. Coldwell and Feister are also missing and have not been seen now for three weeks. Their car has also vanished. The possibilities with Feister and Coldwell haven’t changed much. The best case scenario: they’ve dropped out and tuned out. Alternatively, one or both have come to harm.’
He said, ‘The likelihood of an accident, I think, is receding. Even if that body is not hers, we’ve had planes, choppers and eyes on the ground searching for them. They could have met with foul play and the vehicle has been deliberately hidden for some reason. Agree?’
‘Yes. Foul play possibilities if we assume the body is Ingrid’s: Coldwell has killed Ingrid, deliberately or accidentally. Question then, where is he? Interstate? Or somebody has killed both of them.’
‘You don’t think he’s been abducted?’
‘I can see why you kill the guy to keep the girl but not vice versa.’
His turn to agree. I spun it out. ‘Now, if they are dead, we have some evidence – the pendant – of a serial abductor-slash-killer having been in the area. Is that a coincidence? Do we have a Bradley Murdoch opportunistic road-killer type out there and a serial killer who so far as we know is still dormant? Or is it the same guy?’
‘She fits the profile of the Autostrada victims: young, affluent.’
‘Except she was with a guy.’
Clement pulled a face. ‘Maybe he couldn’t help himself this time. Maybe he didn’t realise there was a guy?’
I could concede those points. ‘If it’s the same killer, it is not Grunder or Henderson, right?’ I like to go over a scenario again and again.
Clement dusted his hands. He was done for pizza. ‘Correct. But then, maybe we are jumping the gun and it isn’t the same killer. Feister withdrew six grand in cash. For a lot of people, that’s a million bucks.’
He stood. I think he was as annoyed as me we were chasing our tails.
‘Time to go and check on those previous Turner burglaries. I haven’t had a chance yet.’
We started to trudge back to the car when he stopped and said, ‘Shit.’
I would have been less surprised at Margot Fonteyn twerking.
‘What’s up?’
‘I’m supposed to have my daughter. Now with all this stuff …’
He checked his watch, pulled out his phone. He was going to cancel.
‘Don’t. The body won’t be in Perth till midday or something. You’ll be wasting a day you could spend with your kid.’
‘There’s Turner to follow up, the other burglary victims.’ He wanted to hear me but his professional duty was like a pair of headphones clamped on his ears. I spied an out for him.
‘Why don’t we hit the pubs now, ask around about Turner? I’m guessing Friday night just about everybody in town is out and about.’
The next two hours we canvassed every venue in Broome showing photos of Turner, Feister and Coldwell. A couple of people recognised Turner but hadn’t seen him recently. Clement asked them who Turner normally hung out with, just in case the police had missed them in their earlier inquiries. I had some young South Americans who reckoned they might have spied Coldwell at one of the gorges the previous week. They thought it was Manning Gorge but couldn’t be certain. He seemed to be fishing, they said. Other than a cursory ‘hello’, he hadn’t spoken to them and had left fairly quickly. That in itself was suspicious. Up this way human interaction is usually cherished. They had not seen his vehicle. I took their details and passed them onto Clement when we were back in his office. It was close to 1.00 am now. A few of the night crew were coming and going. Even though neither of us had consumed alcohol, we were both struggling. The day seemed to have lasted longer than a Geoff Boycott fifty. He pulled out the list of other burglaries Turner had committed, mainly businesses. None of the victims seemed a likely demographic match to the Autostrada killer but we checked the old police files anyway, to no avail. There is an old Mental As Anything song, ‘Spirit Got Lost’. That was how I felt, split into two, half of me floating away.
‘Stumps?’ I suggested and he agreed. Later I would have to call Dee Verleuwin and give her the bad news. Somehow I felt I would not be enjoying a swim and a bacon breakfast.
After Lane had gone, Clement walked to the car at the rear of the building, opened it and sat for what seemed a long time. He could not remember ever feeling so alone. This, he imagined, must be what it is like for a shipwrecked sailor drifting in an unfathomable vastness. It was not his work that precipitated this. If he applied himself methodically, he knew over time this miasma would be defined into discrete, potentially understandable elements. The core of his problem was Marilyn, yet he could not blame her entirely.
What was her crime: to seek him out and ask his opinion? Of course it was insensitive, she knew how he felt, but that did not make it wrong. Meanwhile, he’d had ample opportunity to call Louise back. Indeed, he should really have interviewed her about Sidney Turner, seen if Turner had let anything drop in the course of their deliberations that might give a clue as to where he was now. Instead he had avoided her, like he was some monk whose sole duty was to worship Marilyn. He thought back to the night at the Pearl Motel. He drew his mind across the naked curve of Louise’s body; the easy conversation echoed even now.
Just a few minutes later he was out the front of Louise’s house, still in his car, without any real memory of how it got there. He thought of criminals he had interviewed, murderers, rapists: ‘I don’t remember when I got there. I was just there.’ How many times had he heard that? Now he was forced to trawl back in his brain to actually bring back the physical sensation of turning the car key and driving out of the station. Tiredness? Perhaps. Her mother would have returned home by now. ‘Two days longer and I get my house back,’ she’d said over dinner.
There was no light on but that didn’t matter. In fact it added some bravado and a whiff of romance. He could call her now, apologise for disturbing her, tell her he’d had one hell of day and he was out the front. The worst that could happen would be she would scream at him and say she never wanted to see him again. Or perhaps the worst was that she was with somebody else. But then he’d be off the hook and not torn north and south. And if she didn’t reject him, if she sleepily said, sure come in, would that not be the sail on the horizon, the rescue? He would curl into her and not be alone.
For one night at least.
But then, perhaps the next night and the one after, he might find himself in the same situation, dependent, and that was something he would not live with. Clearly there was something lacking within himself, some flaw that kept him forever balancing on a dividing line, an emotional twilight. Fear? Insecurity? Distrust? This was not a result of Marilyn, it had been part of him in that relationship too. And yes, you could blame his ambition and his addiction to his work, her restlessness and sense of entitlement, but it did not alter the fact that until he changed something fundamental within himself all he would be doing was creating another need. He should be with Louise, or any other partner for that matter, because of what he could offer them, not what they might offer him.
While he had been thinking all this, his phone had been warm in his palm like the beating heart of a dove. He placed it down in the console of the car. Then he started up and drove home.