Ninety minutes later, Falk and Raco watched the school from the front seat of the station’s unmarked police car. They were parked up a hill on a side street, their vantage point offering a decent view of the main building and front playground.
The back door of the car opened and Constable Barnes climbed inside. He’d jogged up the hill and was out of breath. He leaned through the gap between the front seats and held out his palm, proudly displaying two brand new Remington shots.
Raco picked up the ammunition and inspected the make. He nodded. It was the same brand found in the bodies of Luke, Karen and Billy Hadler. Forensics could probably match it more closely, but for now, that was good enough.
‘It was locked away in the caretaker’s shed, like you said.’ Barnes was almost bouncing in his seat.
‘Any trouble getting in?’ Falk asked.
Barnes tried and failed to look modest. ‘I went direct to the caretaker. Used the old “routine inspection” line. Licences, safety bullshit. He let me straight in. Too easy. I managed to find enough wrong that he’ll keep it to himself. Said I’d turn a blind eye if he got it sorted before my next visit. He’ll be telling no-one.’
‘Good work,’ said Raco. ‘As long as he doesn’t tell Whitlam for a few hours we’ll be right. Backup from Clyde’s about forty minutes away.’
‘I don’t see why we don’t just roll in there and lift the bastard,’ Barnes grumbled from the back seat. ‘Clyde hasn’t done anything to deserve the credit.’
Raco looked over. ‘We’ll get credit where it’s due, mate, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘They’re not going to get much glory for securing his house and grabbing his bank statements.’
‘Wish they’d hurry up then,’ Barnes said.
‘Yeah, me too,’ Falk said.
All three turned back to stare at the building in the distance. A bell rang and the school doors opened. A gaggle of children trickled out, forming groups, running around, revelling in their temporary freedom. Behind them, Falk could make out a figure leaning against the main doorway. Hat on, coffee mug in hand, a flash of red tie visible against his shirt. Scott Whitlam. Falk felt Barnes shift behind him.
‘Fifty grand. It’s a grubby amount to kill three people over,’ Barnes said.
‘It’ll be less about the money than you’d think,’ Falk said. ‘Gamblers like him are always chasing something else. I’ve seen it get pretty desperate pretty fast. They think every roll of the dice is a second chance. The question is, what was Whitlam chasing?’
‘Doesn’t matter what it was. It can’t justify this,’ Barnes said.
‘No, but that’s money for you,’ Falk said. ‘It can get bloody disgusting.’
Whitlam stood in the school doorway cradling his mug between his hands. The wind was up again. He felt the dust stick to the sweat on his skin. The kids shrieked and ran in the playground in front of him, and he wondered if he could start to breathe again. A couple of days and Falk would be gone, maybe sooner with any luck. He would breathe then, he decided. Not before.
A few more months. Keep his head down, keep his luck up and he could disappear to that job up north. Part of him couldn’t believe he’d made it to this point. He’d nearly had a heart attack when Raco had mentioned they had security footage from the Hadlers’ property. He’d had no idea the farmhouse had a camera, and he’d sat in a cold sweat between the two cops as he contemplated how near he’d come to being discovered.
He had to get away from here. He would have to convince Sandra to give him one last chance. One more fresh start and this time he would stop gambling. He promised. He had said the words to her last night, and through his tears he’d felt that for the first time he really meant them. She had watched in silence. She’d heard those words before. Right before they’d moved to Kiewarra, and at least twice before that. But this time he had to make her believe it. More than that, he told himself, he had to do it. He had to stop. Because this time there was so much more at risk than he could bear to lose.
Just the thought of it made his guts churn. Sandra was so worried, and yet she had no idea of the real weight of the axe dangling over them. She thought having a bank account constantly in the red was the worst of her problems. The secret shame of having to buy the weekly groceries on credit cards. Having to keep up appearances behind a veneer of rented houses and hire-purchase coffee machines. She thought the problems ran day to day, but not much further. She didn’t know about the trail of debts that stretched from here to Melbourne. Or the horrors waiting for her and their daughter at the end of that trail if he didn’t pay.
Whitlam almost smiled, a wild loopy grin at the idea of telling her the truth. The promise of the nail gun alone would be enough to send her racing up north.
They had delivered the message to his house. Here in Kiewarra. Two thick-necked steroid junkies from Melbourne, showing up on his tidy suburban-like doorstep in person to tell him their boss was getting twitchy. Pay. They’d brought the nail gun with them to show him. Whitlam had been paralysed with fear. Sandra and Danielle were in the house. He could hear the sounds of his wife and daughter chatting idly in the kitchen as the two men detailed in low tones what they were going to do to them if he didn’t come up with the cash. It was a horrific soundtrack.
The notification of the Crossley Educational Trust funding had come through two days later. The letter was addressed to Whitlam directly. It had arrived with the claim form on Karen’s day off and landed on his desk unopened.
He’d made the decision in less than a heartbeat. They gave away millions. Fifty thousand was a drop in the ocean for those rich bastards. He could earmark it for something vague and tricky to quantify, training courses perhaps, support programs. That would tick their boxes. For a while. But that was all he needed. A while. Borrow it now to pay Melbourne; repay it, well, later. Somehow. It wasn’t enough to clear his debt, not by a long way, but it was enough to buy him some breathing space.
He hadn’t let himself think about it too closely as he’d diverted the money. He’d simply swapped the school’s account details for his private one. The one Sandra didn’t know about. He kept the school’s account name on the form. Banks used only the numbers, not the names. Whether the two corresponded was never checked, he knew. The plan had been OK, he told himself. Not great, not even good, but holding water. Then Karen Hadler had knocked on his door one afternoon, holding that Crossley Trust form.
Whitlam remembered the look in her eyes and, making a fist, he lightly, discreetly, punched the wall next to him until his knuckles were raw and weeping.
Whitlam watched Karen leave. As his office door clicked closed behind her, he rotated in his chair and silently vomited into the wastepaper bin. He could not go to prison. He couldn’t pay off what he owed in prison and the people he owed weren’t the kind to care about why. Pay, or his family paid. That was the deal. Signed and sealed. He had seen the nail gun. They’d made him touch it. Feel its leaden weight in his hand. Pay, or his – No. There was no alternative. He would pay. Of course he would pay.
He sat alone in his office and forced himself to think. Karen knew. Which meant she’d probably tell her husband, if she hadn’t told him already. How soon would she blow the whistle? She was a cautious woman. Almost overly diligent in many ways. It slowed her down. Karen Hadler would want to be one hundred per cent certain before she committed herself to action. Luke, however, was a different story.
He didn’t have much time. He couldn’t let this get out. He could not let this get out. There was no alternative.
The end of the school day came and went, but brought with it no real answer. Whitlam waited as long as he could, then did what he always did in times of stress. He took all the cash he had, and some he didn’t, and went to the pub’s pokie room. It was there, cocooned in the glow of the lights and the optimistic jangling sounds, that the first stirrings of a solution came to him. As they so often did.
Alone and tucked out of sight among the pokies, Whitlam heard Luke Hadler’s voice from a table round the corner. He froze, hardly daring to breathe as he waited for Hadler to tell Jamie Sullivan about the school money. He felt sure it was coming, but the secret remained unsaid. Instead, they bitched about rabbits, planned a shoot on Sullivan’s land the following day. Times were arranged. Luke would bring his own shotgun. Interesting, Whitlam thought. Perhaps the game was not quite over. Not yet.
Another hundred dollars in gold coins pushed through the machine and he had the skeleton of a plan. He ran it over and over in his head until there was some flesh on the bones. It was OK. Not perfect. Not a sure thing. But maybe fifty–fifty. And Whitlam would take those odds any day of the week.
Down in the playground, Whitlam watched as a group of tiny children hurtled past him, his own daughter in the mix. For a second he thought he saw Billy Hadler in the crowd, not for the first time. Whitlam’s head jerked involuntarily, a sort of spasm from the neck. He still felt sick when he thought about the boy. For what it was worth.
Billy was never supposed to be there. Whitlam’s scraped fist clenched around the coffee cup as he made his way back to his office. The boy was supposed to be out of the house. It was all arranged. He’d made sure. He’d deliberately dug out that badminton set. After that it had needed only a subtle suggestion from him for Sandra to get on the phone and organise that last-minute playdate with Billy. If the boy’s stupid mother hadn’t cancelled, stuffed up the plan, then Billy wouldn’t have been caught up in it. She only had herself to blame.
Whitlam himself had tried to save that kid. No-one could say any different. He took a swig of coffee and winced as the liquid burned his mouth. He felt it trickle down his gullet, turning his insides sour.
Guts writhing, Whitlam had left the pub and passed a sleepless night picking holes in his plan. The next day, he sat in his office in a blank-eyed stupor, waiting for the inevitable knock on the door. Karen would have spoken up. Surely. Someone would come, he just didn’t know who it would be. The police? The school board chairman? Karen herself again, perhaps? He both feared and longed for that knock. A knock meant Karen had told. It meant it was too late. And he wouldn’t have to do what he was planning.
He didn’t need to ask himself if he could go through with it. He knew he could. He’d proved it with the guy in the Footscray alley. That was a guy who should have known better. He was supposed to be a professional.
Whitlam had come across him once before. Then, the man had cornered him in a carpark, relieved him of his wallet and delivered his message via a sharp blow to the kidneys. It was supposed to play out the same in Footscray, Whitlam guessed. But then the man had grown angry, started waving the knife around and demanding more than they’d agreed. Things got messy fast.
The guy had been sloppy, and almost certainly under the influence of something. He’d heard the word ‘teacher’ and underestimated Whitlam’s athleticism. A poorly timed lunge was countered with a lucky rugby tackle and they hit the concrete with a crack.
The blade had flashed orange in the streetlight and Whitlam felt the point slice across his belly, leaving a warm red line. Adrenaline and fear rushed through him as he grabbed the man’s knife hand. He held and twisted it, using his own weight to force it back towards his attacker’s torso. The man wouldn’t drop the knife. He was still holding it as it slipped into his own body. He grunted wetly into Whitlam’s face as the teacher pinned him down, feeling the slowing rhythm of the blood pumping out onto the road. He had waited until the man had stopped breathing, then waited a full minute more.
Whitlam had had tears in his eyes. His body was trembling and he was terrified he might pass out. But somewhere, buried many layers down, was a pinpoint of calm. He’d been driven into a corner and he’d acted. He’d done what was needed. Whitlam, so familiar with the sick free-falling sensation every time he reached for his wallet, had, for once, been in control.
With shaking fingers, he’d examined his own torso. The cut was superficial. It looked far worse than it was. He bent over his attacker and dutifully performed two rounds of CPR, making sure his fingerprints smeared in blood reflected his civic actions. He found a house in a neighbouring street with its lights on, and let forth the emotion he’d been holding back as he asked them to report a mugging. The attackers had fled but quick, please, someone was badly injured.
Whenever Whitlam now thought about the incident, which was more often than he expected, he knew it had been an act of self-defence. This new threat may involve an office rather than an alleyway, paper instead of a knife, but at its heart he felt it was not so different. The guy in the lane. Karen on the other side of the desk. Forcing his hand. Compelling him to act. It came down to them, or him. And Whitlam chose himself.
The end of the school day came and went. The classrooms and playground cleared. No-one came knocking on the office door. She hadn’t reported it yet. He could still salvage this. It was now, or it was never. He looked at the clock.
It was now.