24

THE THREE NAILS that had come away with the skirting were about seven centimetres long. My plan was to remove the one at the splintered end and the one in the middle, and bind them somehow to the one I’d leave stuck in the squared-off end. I wrapped the arm of my jacket around the middle nail and began easing it back and forth. As I worked at it, I thought about what Rolfe had said earlier — about him being responsible for our abduction. I looked at him lying quietly on the mattresses. He wasn’t a bloke to accept blame easily, and his time had come to tell all.

‘Okay, Rolfe,’ I said, resting my fingers for a moment. ‘Now you can fill us in on how we got here.’

Rolfe knew this had been coming. He took a deep breath, propped himself up on his elbows, and, without looking at either of us, opened up.

‘We’re here because of a bad decision I made,’ he said, shaking his head at the thought. ‘And because of a coincidence that I had no control over. The thing is, if I’d gone to tennis on Monday night like I usually do, none of this would have happened. But my back was playing up, so I cancelled. Then I stopped at the supermarket on my way home and ran into an old contact — a senior person at the RSPCA. We chatted about the usual stuff. Man’s inhumanity to beast. The latest outrage. But I knew all the while that he was busting to tell me something. And, eventually, of course, he did.’

‘And that was?’ I said, sensing some loosening in the nail.

‘That their cat person had been analysing material that was somehow connected with your murder investigation.’

‘What?’ I said, so surprised by this claim that I dropped the skirting into my lap. ‘He reckoned his mob was working for us? Well, I can tell you now, it’s not true. We don’t use them.’

‘He didn’t say you did,’ said Rolfe. ‘No. You use a forensic vet over at the ANU, and after you found Susan Wright’s body, you sent that vet some fur to analyse. The thing is, the brief you sent with it suggested that the fur had come from one cat, but when your vet looked at the fur, she was certain it came from several different cats. Given that discrepancy, she was planning to send it off for DNA analysis, but then one of your people called and gave her a hurry along. So she asked a close friend over at the RSPCA to look at the fur for her. On the quiet, of course. And he confirmed her initial analysis — that the fur was indeed from several different cats. So that’s what she reported to you. As it happens, that RSPCA vet is a confidant of the contact I ran into at the supermarket. They’re a couple, in fact, and they share everything.’

This revelation hit hard. We’d allowed crucial evidence to fall into the hands of someone outside the loop, and they’d gabbed about it to a lover with loose lips. It meant that the fur might be useless if Joe ever fronted a jury. Then it occurred to me that Rolfe would have to escape this place before he could expose our stuff-up.

‘Now you’d already know this,’ said Rolfe, ‘but around the time you asked your vet to analyse the fur, you also sent her a dead cat. Apparently, you wanted to know the animal’s age, its gender, and whether it was domestic or feral. That sort of thing. Well, she had her RSPCA mate — he being ‘the man’ on all things feline — look at the cat as well. Then Proctor turned up dead, and there was more fur to analyse. And another dead cat. And the RSPCA vet got involved there, too. In fact, he was doing so much cat work for you, my contact was convinced that cats were central to your investigation.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say about that,’ I said, resuming work on the nail. ‘What I want to know is, how does all this connect with us being here?’

Rolfe pulled his jacket tighter around his neck. Maybe he was attempting to keep the cold at bay. Or maybe he didn’t like being brought back to the question.

‘Ahh, well, when I thought about all this cat stuff,’ he said, ‘it reminded me of a story I did years ago when I was a junior at The Digest. About cats disappearing up in Red Hill. There were twelve of them in all. Beloved moggies, fat and healthy — just like the ones the two vets had examined. Now, call it a long bow if you like, but I thought I could draw a link, storywise, between the two sets of dead cats. A tentative one, mind you, but my update of the old Red Hill story was only to be a sidebar to my lead, which of course was going to focus on cat fur, two dead cats, and the way your people allowed crucial evidence to fall into the wrong hands.’

‘When did you do the story on the disappearing cats?’

‘About ten years ago,’ said Rolfe.

I eased the first nail out of the skirting. It hadn’t bent in the process, and it was long enough to do serious damage.

‘So how does your storage unit out in Fyshwick fit into this?’ I said.

‘Ahh, so you know about the unit,’ said Rolfe. ‘Then no doubt you’ll also know that it’s where I keep my documents and old papers. And I never discard anything. So when I decided to revisit my Digest story, I went out to the unit, dug out the old notebooks, and retrieved the names of the people I’d interviewed back then. And last night I drove up to Red Hill, hoping to catch a few of them at home. I could have looked up a directory and rung them, of course. But I prefer face-to-face contact. Don’t you, detective?’

‘When you did the original story, how’d you know who to speak to?’ I said, going to work on the second nail.

‘The RSPCA gave me some names. And there were lost-animal notices plastered up around the shopping centre. And I spoke to people I met in the street up there. Everyone had something to say about the missing cats.’

‘And presumably you spoke to someone at the Beagle Street house where they nabbed us. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone back there.’

‘That’s right. I spoke to a young man. He was working in the front garden.’

‘And that was Joe?’

‘Yes. As it turns out, he was Joe.’

‘And had he lost a cat?’

‘No, he hadn’t.’

‘So why’d you go back there last night?’

‘I don’t know. I remembered he was nice looking. Very buff. And I thought that while I was up there, why not knock on his door. A fatal impulse, I guess you’d say.’

‘I know all about them,’ I said. ‘But tell me, why’d you go up to Red Hill to talk to people about cats when you knew there was a strong connection between dead cats and our investigation? Shouldn’t you have at least told someone where you’d be? I mean, how dumb was that?’

‘Ahh, but I did tell someone, detective. That’s why Jean’s here. And you, too, presumably.’

I looked at Jean. Her face was paler than ever, making her eyes seem even more deeply green. I waited, expecting her to explain, but her eyes didn’t leave Rolfe’s. She clearly thought it was his story to tell.

‘Poor Jean,’ said Rolfe, looking as remorseful as any villain I’d ever seen. ‘You see, I did think there might be something of a link between my old cat story and the cats in your investigation, so last night, before I went up to Red Hill, I got Jean over for a drink and gave her a key to my storage unit. And I told her that if anything happened to me in the coming days, she should go out to the unit and look for the ‘cat’. Yes, I was that obscure, but I’d written the word on the relevant notebooks, and I’d put them near the door out there. That way, I thought, if she did have to go out, she’d find them easily enough. And I fully expected her to call you, if and when that happened.’

‘But you didn’t call us, did you, Jean,’ I said, as I felt the second nail slip slightly in its hole. ‘You went it alone.’

‘That’s right,’ she said, her eyes defiant. ‘And why wouldn’t I? After what happened at Westbourne Woods?’

‘But this wasn’t a story, Jean. It was a police matter.’

‘I know,’ she said, her defiance waning. ‘But I didn’t see any real danger in it for me. I mean, okay, no one knew where Rolfey was, but he’s taken off before, and he’s always shown up after a day or two. And much as I love you, Rolfey, you do tend to over-dramatise things. So when I looked at those addresses, all in up-market Red Hill, I thought that whatever was going on up there wouldn’t be dangerous in any way. I mean, Red Hill? Where could you be safer? I know it makes me look like a complete snob. And a careless one at that. But if you …’

‘Come off it, Jean,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Don’t tell me you weren’t thinking about the big scoop waiting for you up there.’

‘I wanted to see if the addresses in Rolfey’s notebooks would lead me to him. And if I got a story out of it, so be it. But what about you, Darren? How did you come to be here alone?’

It was a fair question, but I wasn’t sure how to answer it. I could have said that I’d feared for her safety, and that because the boss wouldn’t give her protection I’d followed her into a trap. I could have said that I thought she’d get me closer to the killers, and I’d been dead right about that. I could have said that I had my suspicions about her, so I’d decided to keep an eye on her, but why admit to being a piss-poor protector and a bad investigator?

I had another explanation for how I’d ended up there — one that was much closer to the truth. But I wasn’t prepared to voice that one, either. It was that I was deeply attracted to her. I saw her as being at risk, and I’d used that as an excuse to follow her, to try to protect her, to be close to her. And in the process, like her, I’d taken my safety for granted and got myself into the deepest shit.

‘Well, seeing as how everyone else has had a turn in the confessional,’ I said, stopping work on the nail. ‘The fact is, Jean, I’ve been keeping an eye on you. In my off-hours. Nothing authorised. Just me. I even put a tracking device under your car. It was clear to me that you had the killers’ attention, but my seniors wouldn’t put surveillance on you. They were worried about the bad publicity if we got found out. Worried that Rolfe here, and your other colleagues, would rip into us. So, in a funny sort of way, everyone who should have protected you, effectively conspired to have you nabbed. Silly, eh?’

‘In retrospect, you’d have to say pretty silly, yeah,’ she said. ‘And silly me, too.’

‘I’ve got a proposition for you, detective,’ said Rolfe. ‘If you get us out of here alive, I promise not to expose your shambolic investigation for what it is. What do you say to that?’

The second nail came out of the wood in a rush. I looked at Rolfe and tried to muster a smile.

‘God, you drive a hard bargain,’ I said. ‘But, yes, it’s a deal.’