I was still in bed the next morning when I heard a car pull up in front of the house. I made it to the door just as Vince Tehlich reached the top of the stairs. He had a cardboard box in his hands. I offered him a cup of tea, but he said that this was a lightning visit. Being spotted in my company was more than his job was worth.
He did come in for a moment, though, putting the box on the table and looking around the room.
‘Nice place,’ he said wryly.
‘Just a roof over the head,’ I said. ‘Mostly,’ I added as a drop of water splashed onto his face.
‘I got a lawyer for Nash,’ he said, handing over a card.
Her name was Betty Stagg. He assured me she was good, the best in the district. ‘I oughta know,’ he said. ‘She’s given me a few thrashings over the years. Pain in the arse when you’re trying to get a conviction, but if I were in trouble, she’s the one I’d want on my side. I’ve already spoken to her – and to Nash. She’s meeting him this afternoon.’
‘At the hospital?’
‘The remand centre. He’s being transferred as we speak.’
He gestured at the box, which was full of manila folders.
‘Everything I could dredge up from Nash Rankin’s last few years in the job.’
‘Wow.’
He told me he’d focused upon Nash’s time with the Criminal Investigation Unit. That was where he’d been working at the time of his fall from grace. No guarantees, but if he’d made any enemies bitter enough to hold a grudge over so many years, I’d likely catch a glimpse of them in these folders.
‘Thanks for that,’ I said. And I meant it.
Vince extracted from me an oath that I’d never let on where the documents had come from. He warned me to be careful with them, to conceal them when I was leaving the property or expecting company. Then he left me to it. I cleared and dried a space on the kitchen table then settled down to peruse the collection, jotting down anything of interest in an A4 notebook. I was only ten minutes into the task when I paused to send him a text: ‘thanks mate brilliant work’.
He must have called in every favour and collected every debt he was ever owed. He’d gone over every significant case in which Nash had been involved, done a load of cutting and pasting, attached extra information – press clippings, records of evidence and witness statements, photographs – wherever it seemed relevant.
I pushed on, fascinated. The notes displayed the full range of criminal activities you’d expect from a police district in which the outer suburbs collided with the country. From the brick-venereal wastelands of Greendale itself, there were B and E’s, sexual assaults, child abuse, vehicle theft, domestics, and drug busts. As you moved further out bush, the offences put on their elastic-sided boots and followed suit: there was stock and machinery theft, the interception of drug couriers and the busting of labs and illicit tobacco operations. No mention of mafia or outlaw motorcycle gangs, for which the lord be praised. They were stratospheres above my pay grade.
From time to time I was moved to come across personal glimpses of Nash himself – a signature here, a handwritten note there. There were several reports in which his efforts had been singled out for commendation by his superiors. He’d clearly been a hard-working member. Of particular interest were those occasions when he’d brought his local knowledge to bear on major cases: there were several homicide investigations, the busting of a child pornography ring and some significant fraud cases in which he’d liaised with the Feds.
I stood up and gazed out the window. I was having trouble linking the diligent operator evident in the reports with the troubled individual I’d encountered on Ryan’s Road. Something had really gone awry.
There was so much information here, almost too much. How was I going to hone the word-hoard before me into a manageable document? I had to think strategically or I’d drown in a mass of detail.
Perhaps I’d best begin by looking at those cases in which I could detect unanswered questions or evidence of incomplete investigation. This was far from foolproof, of course. If whatever happened to Nash had been related to the job, it could have sprung from the briefest of interactions: some late-night loon he’d booked driving home from the pub, a vengeful puppy-breeder he’d reported to the RSPCA. There was no shortage of disturbed people out there.
But did that really make sense? I thought about the deliberation that had gone into the Wycliff incident, if it was a set-up: killing one man and framing another, all on a conveniently wild, windy night. Surely this was no random wacko?
With a bit of luck and a lot of elbow grease, the files should give me an insight into Nash’s activities at the Greendale Criminal Investigation Unit. And maybe even into his mind. Hopefully, I could find some anomalies in these old cases, a clue that had been overlooked, a suspect still out and about, a fault or fracture line that would steer me towards the truth.
I thought about my old mate from the Territory, Danny Jakamarra, and his approach to tracking. The trick, he’d explained to me once, was to look for anything out of place. Danny’s eyesight was worse than mine. But so well did he know the desert, the relationship of its cadences and inclines, he could see where things ought to be, not just where they were.
That was the level of insight I needed, but before I could achieve that, I had to get to know the lay of the local land, and the files before me were an integral part of that process. I returned to the table and got back to work, skim-reading and scribbling anything of interest into my notebook.
Time slipped by. When I checked my watch, I was surprised to find it was late morning. I’d been at it for four hours. My body felt stiff and sluggish, my eyes were seeing floaters. I stood up and stretched my back and neck. I did a set of taekwondo drills, then went for a run around the twenty-minute circuit that curved out into the state forest around my house. Running through the bush and its multitudinous smells – the good and the bad, from the native bees’ nest to the fresh deer shit – seemed to clear the decks of my mind, make room for new ideas. Flinders plodded along behind, occasionally taking time out to examine a cubic wombat turd on a log or an echidna with its head in the roots of a muddy stump. He was still getting to know the locals, but he was clearly a bush boy.
As I ran past the neighbours’ place, I saw a white van pull out from a shed at the back of the property and turn onto the road. I caught a glimpse of a woman at the wheel. The elusive egg lady, off on her rounds. She gave a curt wave as she drove past, but I could barely make her out through the tinted windows.
I sprinted the last few hundred metres home then sat on the front steps, panting and patting the dog when he eventually joined me. Maybe that was the way to cope with this freezing Victorian weather: all I had to do was keep running for the next three months.
I thought about the pile of paperwork waiting inside.
You have to start somewhere, some inner voice whispered. Choose the top three.
I went inside, resumed my seat and skimmed through the notebook.
Three cases floated to the top of the slush. I figured they must have had reasons of their own for doing so. I turned to the middle of the notebook and wrote them out, giving each a double page and a spontaneous nickname. I often do this when I’m tackling an overwhelming challenge. Seeing the facts laid out on a generous spread of paper with a new name and a host of arrows and signs somehow breathes life into them, highlights connections, gives them a structure that makes it easier to see if something’s missing.
I read the three case names out loud.
The Jeremiah thug.
The fat financial advisor.
The creepy priest.
In each case, Nash Rankin had played a peripheral but crucial role which could have roused the wrath of some unknown co-offender still lurking in the shadows.
I read over the three cases and wrote out anything that caught my eye: unanswered questions or inconsistencies, suspects still on the loose, lines of enquiry that might have been overlooked.
I glanced at my watch. Almost one. I felt like company, even if it was only company observed from a distance. Being in the proximity of other people often helps coax things out of my brain. There was a light rain falling, but that was okay: light rain was about as good as it got round here.
I dropped the notebook into my backpack, then remembered Vince’s admonition about keeping the files under wraps, so I hid them under a pile of clothes in the chest of drawers. Flinders knew something was afoot and was happy to join me as I strode into the town of Satellite.