I lay in the hospital bed, staring up at the ceiling and trying not to move. Every shuffle or adjustment I made drove another salvo of pains out of the woodwork. My scattered agonies: they’d rear their ugly heads, run around my body and go back down. Even having a wee was agony. A crap would have been nice but the mere prospect scared the shit out of me, which may have amounted to the same thing.
I’d been here for a couple of days, mostly drifting in and out of sleep, or consciousness. The dark was not a pleasant place to be, infested as it was with red-bearded spiders with fists like sledgehammers and boots like jackhammers. Nothing broken, apparently, but my ribs may have begged to differ.
I felt like Kursk had unleashed a herd of wildebeest to stampede across the Serengeti of my skull. Concussion, the doctor said. My tongue, swollen and bloody, gently probed the hole where my top right incisor used to be. The bastard! I’d had quite nice teeth, if I do say so myself. The doctors assured me the dentists could give me another as good as new. My most satisfying moments came when I lay back and fantasised about my next encounter with Neddy Kursk, when – hopefully with the help of a few colleagues to even the odds – I’d do what I could to rearrange his own teeth.
People came and people went. Once I was vaguely aware of a man who would have looked a lot like Neville Wallace if he hadn’t seemed so worried. His face was traversed by sympathetic grimaces or smiles – it was hard to tell which was scarier. I decided to find out if he was real.
‘What’s cooking, Nev?’ I asked.
He glanced at the half-eaten mush on the table beside me and sneered. Soup and mush had been the order of the day after the damage Neddy Kursk inflicted upon my mouth. ‘Something that’ll make your hair turn green.’
I grunted, still unsure of whether he was a dream, then floated away.
I had a vague recollection of other people dropping in: my mother picking at the buttons on her cardigan and fretting, asking why I ever joined the force, why couldn’t I find a nice, respectable job? My father crunching his hat and grunting. At least they weren’t arguing, which they tended to do on the rare occasions they bumped into each other. It wasn’t until late the second day that I was able to manage a halfway decent conversation. Maybe it was more of an interrogation and not particularly decent – it was with Neville Wallace. He asked how I was with an air of concern that puzzled me. I had no idea he was such a brilliant actor.
He wanted to know if I was ready to talk. When I said I was – just – he pushed for more information about the attack. I gave him as much detail as I could manage. I told him about Kursk’s hiding place round the side of the house, the firewood I’d been carrying, the details of the fight. I answered his questions as best I could, given the missing tooth and the unpleasant memories the discussion was stirring up. That poker, that blood, the hammer-horror vision of his face smeared across the car window.
Nev listened carefully, then said everything I’d given him tallied with their own reading of the scene. They had a cigarette butt Kursk had flicked away as he waited, the blood-stained (twelve centimetres deep, he was keen to inform me) poker, the scattered logs, fingerprints on the light globe.
He asked for more details about my previous contact with Kursk, but when I fessed up to my earlier visit to Smash and Grab, he already knew about it, of course. He said the other employees of the company had corroborated my story. The investigators had found CCTV footage of me entering the property. The drivers confirmed that my visit had left Kursk pissed off and punching the walls. They said he was never more than a punch away from a free-for-all. Then I asked what Kursk himself had had to say.
‘Not much,’ Wallace grunted. ‘But then you wouldn’t expect him to, him being dead and all that.’
‘Shit. What happened to him?’
‘You,’ he said dismissively.
I dropped back into the pillows. Somewhere beyond the window a big winter bird ploughed a lonely furrow through the sky. I’d had a few dust-ups during my career, but I’d never actually killed anyone. All things considered, Neddy Kursk wasn’t a bad place to start.
‘They found him at daylight,’ Neville continued. ‘On the road to Greendale. Went over an embankment and hit a tree. Not sure whether it was the crash or the poker that killed him. Bit of both, I imagine. He was making a run for it after you got away. Tried to staunch the blood with rags, made a mess of it. Looks like he lost consciousness, blacked out, bled out.’
The multitudinous medical devices attached to my body clicked and pinged. I imagine the BP monitor was going haywire.
I asked if they’d figured out why Kursk wanted to kill me.
‘Still putting the pieces together,’ he answered. ‘Working hypothesis: he was an accomplice to his brother during his killing spree, wanted to relive the glory days. Apparently you really pissed him off.’
‘He had a poker up his arse long before I put one there. Are you looking at him for Raph Cambric?’
‘We are. We’ve discovered he was at the scene at Wycliff.’
I tilted my head, and raised a brow. ‘I didn’t see him there.’
‘Yes you did. He was driving the tow truck.’
I ran a hand across my temple. How unobservant of me. I remembered the driver now. He’d been hunched up in a jacket with his cap low and I’d had other things on my mind, but I should have recognised him when I spoke to him at Smash and Grab.
‘That’s how he got the tow job,’ Neville said. ‘He must have been waiting in the vicinity. We’re thinking he wanted an excuse to be at the scene legally, in case we picked up evidence of him being there.’
I lay back in the bed and gazed at the flowers on the table.
‘Why would he want to kill Raph though? Where’s the motive? His brother was into killing women, not apple growers.’
Neville shrugged. ‘We’re still speculating. Maybe Raph spotted him trying to snatch someone from the side of the road. We’re checking the missing person reports, but there’s been nothing in the vicinity so far. We do know Kursk was engaged in other illegal activities: we found packets of meth, a pistol and a stash of cash in a safe in his office. Maybe Raph came across a lab in the bush, threatened to report it. Kursk had worked around there for years. Operating as a towie was the perfect cover for a distribution network. He even knew some of the local police, through the job. He must have heard Nash Rankin lived nearby. He’d had a grudge against Nash since his brother’s trial, figured he’d make the perfect patsy.’
That all made sense – sort of. Still plenty to be untangled but better minds than mine were working at that. Maybe we’d never know. Most crimes leave unanswered questions of one kind or another.
I did have one more question, though, and it was an important one.
‘What does all this mean for Nash?’
Wallace smiled. Maybe he was just being friendly, maybe he was embarrassed by the fact that I’d been proven correct – sort of. Maybe neither of those; as a general rule, Wallace was neither friendly nor embarrassed.
‘Charges are being dropped. No way the prosecutor will be able to mount a case now that such an obvious alternative candidate has appeared. Have to run it by a judge, but Nash should be out in a day or two.’
I breathed a sigh of relief, an exhalation tinged with joy. That had been my goal all along: to see Nash set free. I wished he were here; I’d have loved to see the look on his face, to kiss the look on his face.
But then I had another thought.
‘What about the Professional Standards investigation into, er, yours truly?’
‘Ah. Right.’ Wallace shuffled uncomfortably. ‘That’s not so easily dealt with. You barrelled through an ongoing investigation like a runaway road train, drove a suspect to suicide – allegedly.’ He stood up. ‘Maybe they’ll go easy on you. I’ll certainly put in a good word. You seem to have solved Raph’s murder and saved the taxpayer the cost of a trial and a lifetime’s board and lodging for his killer.’
He offered another scary smile.
‘Some of us think you did the world a favour.’