AMY LIGHTS A SMOKE and inhales—thoughts firing, as she clenches and unclenches her hand—then exhales and thinks about her sister. One aspect of yesterday’s conversation keeps repeating.
‘She doesn’t like it when people pull on the leash, does she?’
Hard to know what Angela’s heard, but even if it’s absolutely nothing, it still stings like a bastard. To know any of it and do nothing—to never mention it until now—is rough, even by the Owens family standard. Then again, Angela may have landed a surprise hit. They’re both finely tuned to each other’s tender spots. They both know how to inflict pain casually and calmly. Both schooled by the master, dear old Victor.
Amy can’t let it go.
Does everyone see me like this now?
Does everyone see me as my own sister sees me?
A stronger, darker feeling lurks underneath. She wants a drink, but that’s the problem talking. It’s been years now of living and drinking and working in this cesspit. The weight of it has set in her like concrete, and yet somehow—through all the dirty work, all the stake-outs and surveillance shots of cheating husbands and troubled souls—through all that, Amy has learned the one fundamental thing about human nature: repetition is survival.
Beat by beat, hour by hour.
Stay in the moment, survive the day.
You have to ignore the tally, the history.
Forget it all, piece by piece.
One moment at a time.
Until …
You can’t.
Amy came into Colleen Vinton’s orbit from a long way out. She grew up posh: manicured gardens and housekeepers. A private school education. Victor was a monster, of course—the great vanquisher of mothers—but no one could accuse him of being cheap. He gave them luxury and money and expectations. In Amy’s youth that stuff papered over a lot of cracks.
Amy and her siblings also had each other. A strange collection of people. Will was the oldest, the one who looked after the others. Angela, the big sister. Both of them from a different father, orphaned by their mother in Amy’s house, and tolerated by Victor for reasons forever unknown to any of them. A desire for control, probably, for keeping up appearances. As ramshackle as the Owens family was, it held together like superglue. Until …
1964: Will goes to Vietnam. Signed up to get away from Victor.
Six months later: Angela disappears into a journalism cadetship.
Amy toughed it out alone with Victor till ’66. Straight from the mansion to the dormitory, living at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. It was a deep dive into student politics, free-form fucking, pot smoking, booze and zero oversight. By some miracle, she stayed steady. Two years of good grades. A major in Photography, because fuck the old man and his business brain. Those undergraduate years were the best of her life. Amy had an eye for it. A calling, as one of her lecturers said. She was free to pursue it. And for a long time, Amy liked the way the world looked through the lens of a camera.
Then, like a clock resetting, Will came home from the war. Honourable discharge. Erratic, unwell, with an arm that didn’t work. Worse still, he was completely fucked in the head. A shell of what was there before. Will could barely operate. He couldn’t fend off Victor like he used to.
Amy started going home on weekends to see him.
Her grades started declining.
Will sweated through the night, whispering to ghosts.
Angela flitted in and out, called more than visited.
Victor lurked. Working in the other wing of the house. Busy. Always busy. He had an empire to found and remake. Land to reclaim from the sea. Victor helped build the Gold Coast. He and his cronies raised the Strip.
None of it helped Will, though. Money and connections couldn’t fix him.
Nothing could fix him.
No one.
Finally: one cold Saturday night at home on the coast, things didn’t feel right. Amy got out of bed, padded through the halls.
Just a feeling. A weird sense of disorder.
Will wasn’t in his bed.
Not in his bathroom or the living room.
She yelled out.
No answer.
Where is he?
Where …
He was in the kitchen, covered in blood. Stabbed himself a dozen times with his good arm.
He’s dying when she touches him.
Dead before she can get to the phone.
‘It’s a bad way to go,’ is how the detective put it, afterwards. ‘Takes a lot of determination to go out like that.’
Victor had nothing to add. Just sneering disgust.
A week later, drunk off her face on the night of the funeral, Angela took little-sister Amy to the jet-black centre of it all. ‘Will told me once that Victor used to goad him when it was just the two of them. He told me Victor said only a coward would keep on living in the state he was in. He said, Dad wants me to die now.’
It was true. Amy didn’t need to ask or investigate.
It was exactly Victor. He was pathologically opposed to weakness. That pathology had defined their entire lives. It created the void they grew up in. Their mothers were weak creatures too, you see.
Forget it.
Beat by beat.
Amy hits her apartment. Paces and thinks. There’s work to be done. She calls around looking for Mr Sally and gets him at home. ‘How’d you go?’
Mr Sally doesn’t answer, but she can hear him moving around on the line.
‘You there?’
His breath in the receiver. ‘Twenty, fifteen, eighteen, fourteen, five, twenty-five. I’ve reset the chamber, so start by turning the dial anticlockwise to that first number.’
The combination to Bill Webber’s home safe.
‘Thanks. What’s in there?’
‘I didn’t look,’ says Mr Sally.
‘That’s the correct answer.’
‘Am I free to go now?’
‘You need to take that idea out of your mind.’
He hangs up.
Amy gets back on the line and calls Dirty Doug, her records guy. He’s much happier to talk to her because Colleen has already paid him. Dirty Doug is absolutely the last guy in Queensland you want to shortchange. He’s the orb of all knowledge. He can be trusted to fuck you back if you cannot hold up your end.
‘What’s Colleen’s money getting me, Doug?’
Doug reads his notes in a monotone drawl. ‘Detective Bill Webber is about as clean as they come. No complaints, good credit, not a piece of dirt on him. He’s a capable officer who spent his entire career away from the Joke. Hard to even put him beside it, actually, except for his stint on Strike Force Diablo back in ’80, but there were a lot of regular cops working that thing. He’s assigned to the Robbery Squad these days. Were you looking for something in particular?’
‘I was looking for anything at all.’
‘He’s an orphan. Parents died in a botched home invasion.’
‘Boys’ homes?’
‘No. He was taken in by a neighbour. Nothing sinister there. Good grades. Went into policing early. Cadetship. I can keep digging?’
‘Nah, I think I’m good. What about the other bloke?’ She means Webber’s victim from Cedar Creek.
‘Wally Stewart. A former nightclub promoter from down your way. Bankrupt now. Didn’t have five dollars to his name when he passed. I know a copper looking at his case, so I know that your bloke was beaten half to death, then had a seizure of some kind. No criminal record, but he’s not all the way clean. Lots of gossip and shit-talking. Liked them young, apparently. Never married, no kids. There’s dropped solicitation charges from back in ’78. He and some bloke called Christopher Cole nearly went down together, but it got thrown out.’
‘You wouldn’t know who blew the case would you?’
He does, of course. ‘Mark Evans and Ron Bingham were the arresting officers.’
Christ.
Evans was on the leash with Colleen. Dead now.
Bingham’s the CIB Head and known to be dirty. A big spender in some of Colleen’s joints.
‘So, Wally’s a perv?’
‘I’d say so. Has all the hallmarks of it.’
Amy hangs up.
Why is a straight cop playing vigilante?
But she knows the answer. It’s why she’s been put on Webber from the start.
The stolen files.
And because Colleen has something to lose.
It’s always the same with her.
It always circles back.