So distracted was I by these considerations, it took a few minutes before I realised that the singer in the band below me was Annie J, my friend from the pub. She had a raunchy voice and an earthy stage presence – not that there was much in the way of stage. I listened as the band belted out a powerful rendition of ‘Zombie’. Still in a Cranberries state of mind, they balanced the ledger by performing the mellifluous ‘Dreams’. When they took a break Annie came over to say hello.
After a compliment or two from me and a minute’s banter between us, Annie mentioned that Carina Whitaker was at the market that morning.
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘You were asking if there was anybody around who knew Leon Glazier, the victim up at Horse Thief Creek. Carina did. She went out with him for a while. She’s a regular here – got a stall selling leather goods – handbags, belts and whatnot. There is a slight problem though.’
‘What’s that?’
‘There’s no way she’ll talk to a cop. When I asked her if she’d mind answering a few questions from you, she told me to sod off. She runs around with a pretty edgy crowd: hairy-nosed anarchists, lefty sceptics, professional misfits. Said she’d never trusted the police and was even less inclined to do so after Leon’s death.’
That made me even more keen to speak to her, Inspector Dougherty’s warnings notwithstanding.
Annie gave me directions to Carina’s stall then said she had to get back to the band. I set off through the bustling alleyways and in a couple of minutes I came across a woman sitting on a log with a selection of leather goods laid out on a blanket in front of her.
She didn’t exactly have a high-powered sales technique: she had a coffee on a rock beside her and was eating from a bag of roasted chestnuts. She seemed more interested in reading her book – Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea – than in making a sale.
‘Carina?’ I asked.
She looked up at me and her eyes widened. She was around my age, with platinum hair, a black silk dress and a blue cashmere jumper.
‘Jesus,’ she said, clearly recognising me straightaway.
It took a little longer for me to recognise her. The last time I’d seen this woman she was shivering and soaked through and I’d just pulled her from a flooded creek.
‘How you doing?’ I asked.
‘Better than I would have been if you hadn’t come along when you did. I never thanked you properly – so thanks.’ Then she narrowed her eyes suspiciously. ‘You know my name . . . You aren’t the cop Annie said wanted to talk about Leon?’
I fessed up and introduced myself. She reached into her bag, pulled out a pack of rollies and studied me.
‘Why are you interested?’ she asked.
I wondered how much to tell her, decided to go with the pared-down version.
‘You heard about the murder at Wycliff Rise?’
‘Of course.’
‘And Nash Rankin’s role in it?’
‘Yep.’ She rolled a smoke.
‘I just wanted to be sure it happened the way they said it did. And to do that, I need to know more about the earlier incident, at Horse Thief. I’m new in town. Most of my colleagues seem to think I’m a nuisance, just for asking about it. Makes me think there’s something not quite right.’
She lit up and took a heavy drag.
‘I try not to talk to cops but in your case I’ll make an exception. Thank god somebody’s interested. I was never convinced we got the full story of Leon’s death.’
She had a throaty, smoker’s voice and skinny fingers. Her hard-bitten demeanour was disrupted by the occasional low laugh.
‘So what do you want to know?’
I sat down beside her. ‘Whatever you want to tell me.’
She frowned. ‘One thing we need to get out of the way before we start. You’re not being completely honest. Annie told me you’ve hooked up with Nash.’
‘If you can call it hooking up when the pointy end of the hook’s in gaol.’
Carina laughed, took another drag and watched as the smoke drifted away. She seemed to be deciding she didn’t mind me, my profession notwithstanding. The fact that I’d rescued her from the flood presumably helped.
‘Sounds like me and Leon,’ she said. ‘Bloody Nash Rankin. I never even met the bugger, but I heard Leon talk about him often enough. I was stunned when I found out Nash was responsible for his death. As if Leon hadn’t had a tough enough life already, then Nash puts an end to it like that. Terrible. But the more I heard about it, the more I began to wonder if somebody hadn’t got their wires crossed. Leon didn’t have many friends and he’d lost touch with his family. Nash was one of the few people he did have time for. They’d been in this weird church together as kids. You’ve heard about the Revelators, I suppose?’
‘I have.’
‘Bunch of fucking creeps. That was what made me sceptical of the official version. The cult experience bonded those kids. What the fuck could Leon have done to rile Nash up so much he’d want to kill him? They tried to tell me Nash was crazy, but he was the one who saved them all when they were young. That doesn’t sound crazy, it sounds heroic. I wondered if they’d arrested the wrong person, or if maybe Leon’s death might have been an accident – or a set-up. The cops – present company excepted, maybe – are a fucking brotherhood: step out of line and they’ll burn you. Maybe Nash stepped out of line. But nobody was interested in hearing what I had to say and Leon was never a friend to the people who own this country. He’d been an activist for years.’
‘What sort of activist?’
‘The usual anarcho-syndicalist schtick. Overthrow the system, hang the oppressors. Good luck with that, I’d say to him. He was arrested a few times. Chained himself to a coal train once, joined an occupation of the head office at BHP.’
When I reminded her that the investigators reckoned Nash had found evidence that Leon was involved in distributing child abuse material, she flared up.
‘No way! Any hint of child abuse, anywhere, in any shape or form – some randy priest in handcuffs on TV, that pervy prince, the smug cardinal – and Leon would go off his nut. Those boys were survivors of abuse themselves.’
Carina offered me a roasted chestnut. It was delicious, perfect for a midwinter morning.
I was still trying to get a better picture of Leon Glazier. I asked her if the two of them had been together at the time of his death.
‘I’m not sure we were ever exactly “together”,’ she replied. ‘He was a hard person to get close to. We had a bit of a fling for a few months, but he’d learned not to trust people, not to open himself up to anyone. Only thing he seemed really interested in was his political activities – and his work.’
‘I heard he was in IT.’
She said he was self-employed, providing technical support to local residents and businesses. ‘Mind you,’ she added, ‘I was never quite sure whether he was working or not. He spent an awful lot of time sitting in his room staring at a screen, and his income was sporadic at best. Even his political activities were mainly online, one army of keyboard warriors yelling at another. He was a hacker and a web-head from way back – off exploring conspiracy theories, secret societies – not to follow them, but to expose them, debunk them. To laugh at them. He loved looking into cults, cabals, keyboard crazies, online wack-jobs of every description.’
This was all news to me, and it opened up new lines of enquiry.
‘You don’t suppose he could have stirred up the crazies so much they came after him?’
She shrugged. ‘Anything’s possible. I’d be suspicious of you if you hadn’t pulled me from the flood. But Leon? I dunno. He was super careful about his privacy online, hiding behind a VPN, always changing passwords, user names. He knew a lot more about that world than I ever did. He was like a kid, and the crazies were his playground – especially cults. He’d troll them, send his dog down their rabbit holes, try to show ’em up for the bullshit they were. He would have had a ball with Q-Anon if he’d lived to see it. He talked about setting up a podcast, but that never got far. I always figured his interest was because he’d been a survivor of a cult himself, he wanted to save others from them. That’s what I told myself, but as time went by I realised how much his crusade was taking over his life. It didn’t leave room for anything – or anyone – else. We just drifted apart and I started seeing someone else. But there was nothing hostile about the split, and I hope he still thought of me as a friend. I certainly thought of him as one.’
A pack of teenagers on BMX bikes whizzed past, spraying an arc of mud all over us. Carina jumped to her feet.
‘Boys!’ she yelled. ‘No bikes in the marketplace!’
They ignored her, kept going until they turned right onto a track that disappeared into the bush. The one bringing up the rear glanced back at me. He had a full helmet on and was moving fast, but I recognised the hostile glow in his eyes. It was the crossbow boy. Bailey. I reminded myself to check with Lance, see if he’d found out anything more about the family.
‘I’ll let you get back to work,’ I said to Carina, standing up. ‘Speaking of which – I’ve been meaning to get a new bag. What would you recommend? I’m looking for something small and tough.’
She spent a few minutes showing me her wares. In the end I picked out a beautiful Moroccan leather bumbag. I thanked Carina for her time and told her to keep in touch. I gave her my number, suggested she not do any more late-night swimming in flooded creeks.
The crowd was thinning out. The stall holders were starting to pack up the tables and pull down the marquees. The food sellers were laying out their last-minute bargains, the cars were lining up at the entrance. Before I left, I went back to ask the fortune teller if she knew anything about Raph Cambric and to remind her that withholding information about a crime was a crime itself.
But when I reached the back of the market her tent had disappeared and there was no sign of her.