17

THE KILLER’S CALLING card hung from a melaleuca tree that was growing in the hard ground near the water’s edge. It was a tabby cat, this time. Forensics had erected a big tent over the cat and the tree.

Alan Proctor’s body was inside a smaller tent about ten metres away. His legs were splayed across the shoreline, and his head and torso were partly submerged in the shallows. A couple of photographers from Forensics were still inside the tent, up to their knees in water taking final close-ups. News choppers hovered high over the middle of the lake, their ceaseless whoomping adding to my sense of dread.

The similarities between the two crime scenes were obvious. The bodies had been dumped within a few hundred metres of each other, and both had had a dead cat for company. Proctor’s coat and trousers were covered in a mixture of fur and blue carpet fluff. The lividity on his cheek and chin had the same cherry-red edge as Susan Wright’s. And the body-drag path was littered with bits of blue plastic.

Also, Proctor and Wright had been hauled to the water by one person; the footprints that the hauler had left at both crime scenes were remarkably similar; and no one had any doubt that Forensics would soon be reporting that it was the same person wearing the same shoes in both cases. If it was the same person, they’d struggled a bit with Proctor. Wright had been shortish and slim, and weighed about sixty kilos. Proctor was short but pudgy, and would have weighed about thirty kilos more.

As with the Wright crime scene, we’d found a second set of footprints in and around the drag path, and in the soft ground near the water. From the look of the heel marks and the chunky soles, this second set of prints had been made by someone wearing work boots. Work boots for an accomplice who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, lend a hand.

There was movement behind me. I turned to see McHenry coming across the clearing.

‘What did you call these mongrels?’ he said as he neared. ‘“Brazen”, wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but I’ve amended that to “cocky”. I mean, assuming it is the same pair, they dump Proctor here? A stone’s throw from where they left Wright? It demonstrates a certain sort of arrogance, don’t you think?’

‘It does that,’ said McHenry, watching another chopper join the clatter over the water. ‘So, apart from the obvious, what else strikes you about it all?’

The photographers had disappeared into the cat’s tent. From the flashes bursting through the canvas, they looked to be shooting the animal from every angle.

‘Their footwear interests me,’ I said. ‘The person who did the heavy work here wore the same sort of joggers as the person who dumped Wright. Now, if the same person dragged both bodies, while wearing the same shoes, maybe he’s running the show. He gets to keep his shoes, but the accomplice has to lose his. It means that maybe the lazy one can’t be trusted to keep his footwear under wraps, or maybe he’s more exposed to us than the workhorse is.’

‘Yeah. Good. Anything else?’

‘I said I’d amended my description of these guys to “cocky”. Well, I think “cold-blooded” would fit just as well.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said McHenry, eyeing the media officer who’d emerged from the trees. ‘Well, time to face the journos again. But without you this time, okay? Brady’s a big fan of these events, and I don’t want to spoil it for him. So meet you back at the car in, say, fifteen?’

As instructed, I waited near the car, about forty metres up the road from where the media had massed in front of McHenry. I couldn’t hear a word he was saying, so I focused on Jean. She was standing in the front row again, wearing a black biker jacket and black jeans. Rolfe was next to her, dressed in a shiny black suit.

At one point, Jean caught my eye and cocked her head a couple of times at a planting of eucalypts just down the slope from where I was standing. It seemed she was directing me there for a word. McHenry finished his spiel and took a few questions, before his media officer called a halt to proceedings. As the journos and cameramen began to disperse, McHenry clapped a phone to his ear and, with a few members of his entourage still in tow, walked slowly back towards the crime scene.

Jean and Rolfe chatted briefly. Then she joined some of her colleagues and walked towards me, and I made my way down the slope to the stand of trees. A few minutes later, Jean was edging cautiously down the same bit of slope, and within no time she was standing in front of me, close enough to touch. She smiled, but her eyes betrayed a nervousness that I found reassuring.

‘I don’t envy you,’ she said, as we sat on the bench that fronted the trees. ‘What I do is a breeze by comparison.’

‘I don’t envy myself,’ I said, checking to see if McHenry was coming.

‘No. Well, ahh, look, this is probably not the time,’ she said. ‘I know it’s definitely not the time. But, I just wanted to say how I enjoyed the other night. And, you know, if ever we went out for another Guinness, we’d have to make it a rule not to talk shop.’

‘Are you asking me out?’ I said, turning to face her.

‘Well, no. I was just saying that if ever, you know, if ever we did have another Guinness together …’

‘And is that what you want?’ I said, smiling at her. ‘To have another Guinness. With me?’

‘I might like to,’ she said, her smile reflecting some embarrassment.

‘That’s a yes, then?’

‘I guess it is a yes.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ I said, smiling so broadly that the corners of my mouth felt like they might tear.

Some people might have thought it weird of us to be organising a tentative date at a major crime scene, though it was no weirder than a doctor and a nurse flirting on a cancer ward. I was mulling this over and smiling at Jean when my phone rang. It was Steve Newings from Births, Deaths and Marriages. He had news on two death certificates, he said — the one issued for Susan Wright’s former senior person, Dennis Hanley, and the one for the PM’s nephew, Mick Stanton. I indicated to Jean that I had to take the call. She smiled, handed me her card, and mouthed the words ‘call me’. Then she headed back up the slope.

Newings said the certificates were typically short on detail. Then he told me he knew the doctor who’d certified Mick Stanton. In fact, the doctor was an old mate of his, and he’d called him to see what else he knew about Stanton’s death. I told Newings that I hated interfering amateur sleuths as much as I hated murderers. He countered by saying that his mate had told him things he’d never tell anyone else.

‘You see, everyone thinks Stanton died of a heart attack,’ said Newings, ‘but that’s not what happened. My doctor mate says that when the patrol car found Stanton up on Mount Ainslie, he had a hose hanging out the window of his car, and the engine was running. The coppers called my doctor mate to certify the death, and of course they also called Stanton’s parents. And that Mrs Stanton, she can be just as persuasive as her brother. When she got down to the morgue, she took the doctor and the cops aside, and told them that her son had just broken up with his wife and that he was very depressed. Then, according to my mate, she broke down and begged them not to call it suicide. Being a Catholic himself, my mate understood why. Good Micks don’t top themselves. So he got the cops to agree, and then he certified the death as a heart attack. I can tell you it’s not the first time it’s happened. And it certainly won’t be the last.’

Good Catholics might not top themselves, I thought, but sometimes they are murdered. And if that’s what had happened to Mick Stanton, maybe our killers had form long before they gassed Susan Wright and Alan Proctor.