Detective Senior Sergeant Neville Wallace, from the Homicide Squad, dragged a coat from a hook near the door and passed it over to me.
‘What the fuck are you doing here, Jesse?’
‘Kind of asking the question and answering it at the same time there, Sarge. Whatever I’m doing, it’s my own business. I was invited. What are you doing here?’
He chewed hard on a piece of gum and gazed around the room with an expression somewhere between astonishment and disgust. And maybe a trace of unease – whenever Wallace and I had interacted in the past, the results had been complicated at best.
‘We came to arrest your . . . friend. Heard you’d started working in Satellite. Didn’t expect to come across you in flagrante delicious.’
I looked at his team, half of whom were still wrestling with Nash while the other half were perving at me. I clapped my hands at them and the perverts looked away. The dog, obviously a gentle soul, was looking at the newcomers with interest and a friendly tongue, his earlier aggression forgotten.
‘Couldn’t you have just knocked?’ I asked Wallace.
‘Course we knocked,’ he said. ‘And identified ourselves. But with all the bloody yelling and groaning going on in here, we thought somebody was being murdered. This bugger does have a history of it. So in we came.’
I sniffed, gathered up my clothes and my dignity and went into the bathroom.
By the time I came out, the arresting officers had removed the cuffs and were holding Nash while he climbed into some clothes. One of them was reading him his rights, three others were gripping him tightly. I listened with dismay as they told him he was being arrested on suspicion of involvement in the murder of Raph Cambric. They led him out towards a waiting van. I noticed a pair of examiners entering the garage. Nash looked round, seemed lost, overwhelmed. I was a little confused myself. I turned to Wallace.
‘He killed the guy on the tractor?’
‘Looks that way.’
Nash was halfway down the path, bending to adjust his shoes by the light of the assembled cars.
‘I presume,’ I said, ‘you’ve got something vaguely evidentiary to go with all this macho door-busting?’
‘Aside from the fact that your boyfriend’s a convicted killer whose prints were found on a chainsaw file at the Wycliff crime scene and who was heard making threats against the victim a few days ago, no, not much. We might have more by the time we’ve finished examining his house and car.’
Jesus. Nash was a convicted killer?
‘Who did he kill?’
‘Before Raph Cambric? Nash was a police officer. A detective constable who went rogue and killed a feller up in Horse Thief Creek.’
Horse Thief Creek? I’d heard the name. A small town, somewhere back up in the Windmarks.
‘Who was the victim?’
‘Name was Leon Glazier.’
‘When was this?’
‘Seven years ago. Nash has spent six of the years since then on a custodial supervision order. Banged up in the nuthouse.’
This was getting weirder by the minute. The feller I’d flung myself at was a killer, a cop and a psycho? He hadn’t seemed like any of those things. He’d seemed kind of nice, if a little reserved. Was my bullshit detector that out of whack?
There was a shout from outside, then a chorus of frantic voices. Wallace spat out a curse and ran to the door. I followed, reaching the verandah in time to spot Nash racing for the bush on the far side of the drive. Wallace was yelling orders and waving his arms around like a windmill in a cyclone. One of his elite squad lay spreadeagled on the ground.
‘Thorney!’ yelled Wallace. ‘Get off your arse and after him.’
Thorney, a heavy guy with an even heavier moustache, struggled to his feet and joined the pursuit.
Something about the ease with which Nash glided over the uneven ground had me doubting his pursuers’ chances, and so it proved. He was limping, must have been injured in the struggle, but he had the home ground advantage and was outpacing his pursuers. Just before he disappeared into the darkness, he glanced back, caught my eye and mouthed what almost looked like a plea for understanding – with a dash of despair thrown in. Then he was gone.
Wallace was bellowing like a bull with a lance up its arse, but it was obvious that his efforts weren’t going to affect the outcome. In another couple of minutes the pursuers came back, jumped into a car and raced away, siren and sergeant screaming.
Good luck, I thought.