Squally rain lashed the window of Clement’s hotel. Winter’s last gasp, he thought, as he gazed out on the Swan River. A couple of sails were visible through the grey. The water was flecked with whitecaps. It had been a little while since he’d been back to Perth in the cooler seasons and he felt disoriented, as if it were a different country. The sensation rekindled thoughts of when he’d first come here from Broome as a teenager. How strange everything was, how rushed. Prostate cancer. What could you say without seeming inhuman? He didn’t want Brian to have cancer. He didn’t want him to have a cold. He didn’t want him to have Marilyn, that’s who he didn’t want him to have but it was moot, even cancer had conspired against him. He checked himself in the mirror. His shirt was brand new, his suit drycleaned. In his days down here on Homicide, he’d found that you got better results if you dressed like them. Budget restrictions had meant he’d not been able to bring Graeme Earle but he chuckled now as he thought of what Earle might have looked like, probably wearing his shorts. Risely had been very cautious about the whole idea. His boss really would have preferred Perth detectives to do the interview. Nobody wanted Nelson Feister as an enemy because that meant the Minister and Commissioner would be your enemies too. In the end, the boss had supported him, agreed it was their case and only appropriate he do the interview, but Risley’s concern bubbled close beneath his skin. It was Clement’s job to try and get Ingrid Feister and Max Coldwell to admit they knew what exactly had happened to Kelly Davies. That might incriminate them and the client, Li. Of course Clement would offer them a deal for their cooperation. Otherwise he’d get nothing. Risely had got a call suggesting a meeting at 9.00 am sharp at Feister’s lawyer’s office on the Terrace. That meant heavy monitoring and little chance to appeal to the better nature of the two hippies.
Clement strode to the elevator and mingled with the businessmen and women out to joust for the day in the corporate tournament. He wondered if he could ever have made a go at that life. At school he’d done well at math and there was an attraction in the impersonality of numbers. They couldn’t hurt you like people. The elevator travelled smoothly. Its surfaces were clean and shiny and brought to Clement’s mind the pristine water in the Kimberley gorges. Leaving the hotel he joined the foot traffic and passed a parking inspector booking a courier van in a no-standing zone. I don’t miss that, he thought. Nor the rain which, though weak as the shower in a cheap motel, was surprisingly cold and dreary. A few pedestrians chanced their luck with umbrellas far too flimsy for the wind. Most preferred to jostle each other for the lee of the buildings and Clement quickly got into the swing. He had the size to take the best line and, apart from the top of his right shoulder, remained dry.
Two blocks along dulled by rain slick he found the discrete brass plaque that said ARMSTRONG – Feister’s legal firm. He entered a building that had been constructed sometime in the 1890s, all dark wood and brass and the echo of leather on ancient stone. Yellow lamps fought the gloom and revealed a young woman with a severe bun, wearing a charcoal suit too expensive for a receptionist. She stood waiting for him, bone dry. The detective in him deduced an underground car-space and direct elevator.
‘Inspector Clement? Abigail Lisle.’
He shook the proffered hand. He’d anticipated a waiting room of some sort, a coffee table, copies of the Financial Review but it was an empty space. Before he could break the ice with a mention of the miserable weather, Lisle indicated a large door, one of those that reaches all the way up and you expect to lead into an old-fashioned courthouse.
‘They’re in here.’
He followed. Halfway to the door, he got it. They didn’t need a waiting room or receptionist, Feister was their one and only client. Despite their size, the doors opened with a whisper at Lisle’s touch and revealed a large meeting room. A beautiful oval table was in the centre. At one end Max Coldwell sat in a chair, picking his nails. He wore an expensive suit and tie clearly alien to him. A silver-haired man around sixty sat directly opposite facing the door and stood as Clement entered. This was no doubt the lawyer, Gleeson. Clement wasn’t sure if his boss was Armstrong or that was simply the firm name from a bygone era. At the opposite end of the table to Coldwell sat an older woman in a well-worn twin-set, pads, pencils, a recorder and computer splayed on the highly polished surface in front of her; some sort of stenographer, Clement guessed. The room was comfortably warm but there was no sign of anything so plebeian as a radiator. Lisle asked if he would like tea or coffee. Silver pots were ready on a sideboard. He declined. She shut the doors and pulled up a chair.
‘Please,’ Gleeson indicated the seat directly opposite him and began to lower himself. ‘Miss Feister will be … ah.’ He stood again as a recessed door opened in the wall behind Clement. Ingrid Feister entered. She looked hardly anything like the woman he had encountered in Derby. Her hair was freshly washed with a wave and sheen that would have done Marilyn proud and she wore a navy blazer and long pants with Marilyn’s style. If the other Ingrid was Woodstock, this one was Martha’s Vineyard.
‘Hello again, Inspector.’ She smiled and took her seat.
Gleeson spoke. ‘We are all now aware of the unfortunate incident that took place at Tenacity Hill and of the lack of judgement of a senior and trusted employee of Giant Ore, Angus Duncan. Miss Feister and Mr Coldwell are very keen to help however they can in your inquiry. I will be speaking up if I feel your questions or their answers may be inappropriate. Ms Lisle here may do the same.’
Clement found the stenographer’s scratching on the pad off-putting. He did not like being lectured to by lawyers.
‘This is a serious matter, and I will ask the questions I deem necessary to establish the truth. I thank Miss Feister and Mr Coldwell for their presence.’ He looked directly at them. Coldwell couldn’t meet his eye and fidgeted. ‘I want to assure you that we will be extremely grateful for your help and candid answers. You will not be charged for some minor offence.’
‘You won’t bust us for smoking pot.’ Ingrid Feister had a playful look on her face.
‘No. I won’t. On the night of August seventeenth you attended an afterparty at the Kookaburra Hotel, with the dance group.’
‘Yes,’ Ingrid Feister answered clearly. Coldwell slid in his chair.
‘Angus Duncan and a Chinese man, Mr Li, also attended.’
‘Yes.’ Feister was answering for both of them.
‘You met Kelly Davies there.’
They had. Things had begun to break up after midnight but the five of them weren’t ready to stop. Li didn’t speak English but it was pretty clear he was up for some fun.
‘I knew Angus flew and I wanted to see the desert at night. I suggested he fly us to Tenacity Hill so we could wake up to a desert sunrise. Right?’ At her prompting Coldwell looked up nervously and nodded. You really don’t want to be here, thought Clement.
‘What happened when you arrived?’
‘We drank, danced. Or actually Kelly and I danced. There was an old CD player there, I remember. Max smoked pot. Kelly did a kind of lap dance for Shaun. She had a handful of pills. Eccies. She offered them. We didn’t take any. Shaun might have.’
‘Do you know where she got the pills?’
‘No. It was clear Shaun appreciated her dancing. They started kissing. She was drinking Vodka neat, from the bottle.’
‘Did either of you see her take any pills?’
Feister said she saw her hand go to her mouth but wasn’t keeping tally.
‘What about you?’ Clement homed in on Coldwell.
‘I saw her swigging vodka.’
‘Max was pretty well out to it. He was tired. I said we were going to head off to bed. I didn’t want to miss sunrise. Kelly took Shaun’s hand and led him over to the other tent. I went out like a light. Max too. We woke up a bit late, just after the sun was up. Kelly was gone. Angus said he’d dropped her back to Hedland for her bus. There was a bit of a weird vibe, but I didn’t think anything of it.’
Clement looked to Coldwell. ‘You?’
‘Same.’
‘Neither of you heard the plane take off or land again?’
Feister said, ‘I might have, in the back of my brain, but I didn’t wake up.’
She was straightforward. Clement found it hard to judge the veracity of what she said.
‘The CCTV footage we found of you at Sandfire made it seem like you were both upset about something.’
With the drollness that probably scored him good points at his law club, Gleeson said, ‘They were holding titles like the silent movies?’
Clement held his gaze on Feister and Coldwell.
Feister said, ‘We’d probably been arguing. I don’t like Max smoking too much pot.’
For the first time Clement detected a false note. He did not linger however.
‘You see, you disappeared, off the face of the earth so to speak. Which is consistent with you two having knowledge of something unpleasant.’
Gleeson said, ‘It’s also consistent with the purpose of the holiday.’
Ingrid Feister played with a nail. ‘The phones don’t work up there anyway. You know that.’
‘Hitting the private detective who had been hired to find you, with a lump of wood, that’s pretty extreme.’
‘As I told you in Derby, I’ve always been warned about abduction. Max made an honest mistake.’
Clement leaned towards Coldwell. ‘Is that right, Max? It wasn’t because you knew Kelly Davies had been killed and dumped in the desert and thought people might come after you?’
Coldwell huffed and puffed. ‘No! Like Ingrid said, we thought he was going to hurt us.’
When Clement rang me I was in a sports bar in a Geraldton pub. I’d wound my way down the coast the way a royal grows bald, steadily and without the stress of pending work. By the time I made Dampier, sExcitation had already left so I’d had no chance to talk direct to Alex but over the phone I had passed on what I knew.
‘They’re not budging,’ Clement said.
It wasn’t a surprise. Angus Duncan was prepared to take the fall and one could only speculate for how much. I asked Clement for his take.
‘Turns out Ingrid is a chip off the old man. Coldwell’s a flake. They’re sticking to the drug story which means more trouble for your pal Crossland.’
I was looking at a baseball game on the wide-screen when Breaking News came on: a historic video of George Tacich leading a search in bushland, other shots of Bay View Terrace and Autostrada circa 2000.
‘It just broke,’ I said.
‘What did they last? Three days? That’s a bit longer than I thought.’
POLICE INTERVIEW PERSON OF INTEREST IN AUTOSTRADA CASE crawled across the screen. Clement told me about the horse tranquilliser found in Sidney Turner. It was looking more like an unrelated abduction to do with his involvement in the drug scene.
‘If only we could have interviewed him.’ I heard the bitterness in his voice.
‘Don’t beat yourself up. We’ve got the guy.’
There was a prolonged silence. I envisaged him sitting there, stewing on what might have been.
‘I better go,’ he said finally, told me to drive carefully and rang off.
I contemplated whether I should call Michelle O’Grady but judged it was better I did not, at least not yet. I’d wait a few days and let the police narrative take hold. It didn’t help that I’d been right all those years ago. It didn’t help that they had Crossland. Nothing would bring back the girls or Ian Bontillo for that matter. I wondered if Crossland had been able to stay clean all that time. Surely he had killed again, we just didn’t know where.
I hoped Crossland had the decency to talk and let the parents claim their daughters’ remains but I wasn’t optimistic when it came to psychos like that. I ordered a beer and savoured it as befits a near twenty-year wait. I thought of George Tacich, the clandestine meeting at the zoo. George had retired now. Nikki Sutton, the young policewoman on that case, was now the Super in charge of Major Crime. Craig Drummond had lost his life in a shark attack.
Yet, here I was, the last man standing … or, to be more accurate, sitting on a bar stool.
I finished the beer and watched the froth slide all the way to the bottom. I didn’t order another. I felt maybe a sense of vindication but no triumph. It was a long, awful chapter in my life but at least I could close it. But that didn’t leave me satisfied. There’s a principle we have banged into us from the days when our folks gave us lunch-money: the one about how we’re all equal under the Southern Cross, how it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor … but I am a believer in this principle born from the days of convict settlers building stone houses with their bare hands and, later, diggers on the goldfields, skin burned raw by unrelenting sun: everyone deserves a fair go. Kelly Davies deserved a fair go. I hadn’t given up on her yet.