Cold Justice (17 page)

‘So now you’re sucking up,’ she said when they came up for air.

‘You think so?’

She locked her hands behind his back and pulled him in tight. ‘I do.’

‘And is it working?’

‘I’ll have to think about it.’

He held her face in his hands and kissed her again.

She felt his breath warm against her cheek. One of his fingers stroked her earlobe. Close up she saw the flecks of light in his brown eyes and his pulse in his throat.

‘You’re pretty warm yourself,’ she said, and slid her hands under his shirt. ‘I think that if you took this off you’d be cooler.’

‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘And possibly the same with you.’

There was grass in his chest hair. She kissed it out. He stroked her bare shoulders and slid her bra straps down. She felt his erection pressing against her stomach and pushed her hands into the back pockets of his jeans and pulled him closer. He trailed his fingers around her sides and unclipped her bra in one smooth and easy movement.

‘You’ve done that before,’ she said.

‘This morning.’ He smiled. ‘You’ve forgotten already?’

‘I have a vague recollection.’ She kissed him. ‘I don’t think it happened in the kitchen though.’

‘Unlike this time, you’re saying.’ He draped her bra over the taps.

‘Yes.’

She pressed him back against the benchtop and drew her nails lightly over his ribs then slid her hands down across his stomach to his belt buckle. He bent and kissed her breasts as she popped open the button on his jeans.

A mower started up next door, right over the fence from the window where they stood. Wayne started to laugh. ‘I guess it would drown out any noise we might make.’

Ella took his hand and led him to the bedroom. She pushed him onto the bed and straddled him, squeezed his shoulders and kissed him. She felt his hands all over her and broke out in goose bumps. She fumbled beneath herself at his jeans and in a moment he was kicking them off while tugging at hers.

They rolled over. He flung her jeans over his shoulder onto the dresser. She grabbed him and pulled him close and then her mobile rang.

He pressed his head into her neck. ‘Don’t.’

‘I’m not,’ she said into his hair.

‘I felt you start.’

‘It was fright.’

It wasn’t, and she knew he knew it. The phone rang on. She bet it was Callum and wondered what he wanted to talk about. Maybe he would leave another voicemail and actually say something this time.

‘It’s the weekend.’

‘You said that already.’

The phone stopped ringing. Wayne nuzzled deeper into her neck and she brushed his hair off her ear so she could listen for the voicemail alert.

When she heard the chime she kissed Wayne’s neck, but he lay still.

‘You going to go check it?’

‘Does it feel like I am?’ She ran her hand down his back.

‘I can feel you thinking about it.’

Lucky guess.
‘But I’m still here,’ she said.

He rolled off. She let her hands flop to her sides. The back of her hand came to rest against his hip and she stroked his skin with her little finger but after a moment he got up.

‘You’re going?’

‘Garden’s not weeding itself.’ He pulled on his jeans and walked out.

Ella lay there for a moment and stared at the empty doorway. She listened to him put his shirt on, then open and close the door as he went outside. She got up and went to the kitchen herself and saw he’d folded her bra and shirt and left them in a neat pile on the table. She pulled them on, watching him out the window. The mower was loud next door and it was hard to think.

Wayne’s shirt lifted up when he bent over and the skin was pale and vulnerable underneath it.

She picked up the phone, hesitated, then dialled voicemail.

Freya’s head was killing her. She’d hardly slept, then had to face the Saturday morning shopping scrum to get groceries. Damn family, never stopped eating.

Robbie changed the radio station again.

‘Robbie, please.’

‘But I don’t like this song.’

Freya turned the thing off.

‘Aww.’

She looked at him and he sat back in his seat. She had to give him credit: he knew when to stop. Unlike Ainsley. Though that wasn’t true: Ainsley knew when to stop, she just chose not to. After not wanting to go last night, she’d then spat it when James had said it was time to leave. Freya had walked away, and by the time they came to the car where she’d been seatbelted in for twenty minutes with her mind a total mess, nobody was speaking.

Robbie brushed sugar from his lap onto the floor. She’d bribed him with doughnuts to come along, but then he’d steered the trolley into the shelves and broken a huge jar of coffee, and when she took the trolley off him he’d dragged along behind her whining.

She braced the wheel with her knee and rubbed her eyes.

‘You’ll crash,’ Robbie said.

‘And then we’ll all be dead.’

He frowned.

She didn’t know what was wrong with her. ‘Sorry, mate.’

‘What do dead people look like?’

‘Like they’re sleeping.’

His frown got worse. ‘So when I’m asleep I look like I’m dead?’

‘Actually, it’s more like they’re asleep but also different.’

‘Different how?’

‘Like something very important is missing.’

‘Where do they go?’

‘Nobody knows.’

She’d looked into the eyes of the dead and silently asked them that very question. She’d looked into the eyes of the revived and done the same out loud. Some didn’t believe they’d been dead, thinking instead they’d simply passed out for a moment, even when she showed them the ECG strip and said, ‘Here’s where your heart stopped and here’s where it started again.’ Some believed her and still said it was like passing out. A few wouldn’t talk about it. One woman wept at being back, crying out to her dead daughter who she said was smiling at her from the end of her bed. A man pulled her close and whispered in her ear that there was chewing gum on the sole of her boot, and that she wasn’t to worry, that everything would be okay in her life, everything would turn out for the best. Out at the ambulance she’d sat with her socked foot on her knee and her boot in her hands, staring at the gum caught in the tread, and thought about kneeling by the man and doing compressions, how her soles had faced up, and how he’d been unconscious the entire time she’d looked after him.

She shivered.

‘Want me to put the heater on?’ Robbie reached for the switch.

‘I’m fine.’ She looked over and he smiled at her. She smoothed the back of his head where the hair always stood up. ‘Thanks, buddy.’

Maybe everything would be okay.

She turned into their street with a lifting heart then saw a strange car in the driveway. A dark blue sedan. The detective. She gripped the wheel hard. Thoughts flooded her head –
drive straight past, just keep going, you and Robbie can find somewhere to stay, you have food to last you a week
– but she knew there was no option. She braked with a trembling leg and turned into the drive.

‘Who is it?’ Robbie said.

‘I don’t know.’

He reached over her arm and pressed the horn with three fingers. She turned off the ignition and sat with her hands on the wheel, trying to take a deep breath. The front door opened and Dion came out. Freya’s vision blurred. This wasn’t the detective but it still wasn’t good.

‘Ainsley just took a message from somebody named Philip for you,’ Dion said to Robbie through the driver’s window.

Robbie was out of the car and running up the path in an instant.

‘Sorry,’ Dion said. ‘I just brought Alice over to see Ainsley. I didn’t know James would be out.’

Freya opened the door and got out. She felt nervous having him there, as though it would be obvious to anyone who looked what had gone on between them.

At the boot, Dion stepped closer. ‘I couldn’t find you after the show last night.’

‘We had to go.’ Freya glanced up at the house.

‘Tell me about the letter.’

‘It just said to talk to the girl who found the body. The detective came to talk to Georgie at work. It’s probably a prank by some people who are hassling her.’

‘Who’s Georgie?’

‘Her surname use to be Daniels. She was in the drama class, when we . . . Anyway, she’s a paramedic now and we’re working together.’

He rubbed his face. ‘So the police think the letter is fake?’

‘That’s what Georgie told them.’

‘It has to be that then. Who could know anything?’

‘I don’t know.’

She looked into his face for a second. He shot a look at the house. ‘Nobody could,’ he said.

‘Exactly.’

He sniffed, and brushed at his nose with the back of his fingers. In that gesture and in his eyes she could see the young man he’d been. She had an urge to put her hand on his waist but didn’t.

He said, ‘It’ll be okay.’

‘Of course it will.’

But neither of them moved, and the unspoken hung in the air:
what if it wasn’t?

SEVEN

G
eorgie stared at the photo of Tim Pieters in the weekend newspaper. ‘This is the guy I was telling you about.’

Matt came onto the balcony. The breeze off the harbour flapped the pages and he moved the coffee cups to hold the corners down. ‘Does it feel weird to see him?’

‘Sort of.’

The article talked about unsolved cases and the fascination that society had with them. The journalist said that the police refused to discuss Tim’s case because of the new investigation, but quoted family members and past detectives from other cases. One said, ‘Justice needs to be served, even if it’s cold.’ The statement gave Georgie the shivers.

Matt sat down to read. She tried to focus on reading too, but couldn’t. She shifted about in her chair, then pulled his arm towards her to see his watch.

‘It’s only been forty minutes,’ he said.

‘All he had to do was get on the phone.’

‘Maybe he went to talk to people.’

‘Maybe.’

Georgie couldn’t sit still. She put her feet up on a chair then back down. She got Chris’s binoculars and inspected the ships on the harbour. She tapped her nails on the glass-topped table until Matt looked up at her.

‘Too loud?’ she said.

‘Just call him.’

The home phone rang out and his mobile went to voice-mail. ‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘You know where we are.’

She put the phone down.

‘And so we wait again,’ Matt said, still bent over the paper.

She took the phone inside and dialled another number. ‘Hey, Friendly, it’s George.’

‘Mate! How’s it going?’

‘Good. Sort of.’

She told Kaspar about the cardiac arrest and Freya’s on-again, off-again attitude.

‘She in with Ross?’

‘Not as far as I can tell,’ Georgie said. ‘You heard anything there?’

‘Just his usual spouting off about how you won’t be back, if you did he’d quit, blah blah. You better pass. We all want him gone. Oh, and you back, of course.’

She could hear his smile. ‘It’s all I think about,’ she said. ‘Listen, you seen much of the McCrows?’

‘Took Rose across to Broken Hill for her morph pump refill on Thursday. That was fun.’

‘See any of the boys when you picked her up?’

‘Only Hamish, who stood about frowning,’ he said. ‘Martita had a bit of a mutter. Faye was there too, of course, lording it about: don’t pick her up like that, what are you, an idiot, be gentle she’s just an old lady! The usual.’

‘No sign of Francis or Barnaby?’

‘Nope. Saw Francis earlier in the week in town though. Gave me the finger.’

‘Lovely.’

‘You know it. And Liam said he caught Barnaby trying the doors of the ambulance when he came out of a job at a funeral on Wednesday.’

‘Wednesday,’ Georgie said. ‘Definitely Wednesday?’

‘Yep, outside the Anglican Church.’

People were always fainting in the Anglican Church. ‘They so need aircon.’

He laughed. In the background, the job phone rang, its tones so familiar to Georgie they made her heart skip a beat.

‘Got to go,’ he said. ‘Talk to you later, okay?’

‘Have fun.’

She took the phone back to the balcony and sat facing the harbour. So Barnaby had been in town on Wednesday. She’d first seen him – or someone – on Thursday. He could’ve flown down, or caught the train or bus, or driven overnight.

She didn’t know what to think of any of it.

She would have to wait to hear what Adam said.

The downstairs intercom beeped and Matt jumped up and went to buzz James in. ‘You want me to make some space out here?’ she called.

‘Nah, we’ll stay in, I think.’

He went to put the kettle on and a minute later there was a knock at the door. Georgie heard him answer and heard James’s haw-haw laugh coming through the flat ahead of him.

‘Oh wow, look at your view of the bridge!’ He came out to lean on the railing. ‘Hi, Georgie, how are you? Isn’t this something?’

No fake punches today – that was good. She smiled at him, but then he came in close.

‘Your husband’s going to show me how to become a rich man like him.’ He waved a hand at the apartment.

‘This isn’t ours,’ Georgie said, but he was already looking back out at the water.

‘I thought we’d work inside,’ Matt said in the doorway. ‘Stop the papers flying off in the wind.’

‘And miss this view?’ James turned to the table. ‘More coffee cups and we’re laughing.’

Please
, Georgie thought,
no more laughing
.

James saw the article and pressed his finger on the photo of Tim Pieters. ‘Now there’s a school uniform I know. Freya went there, and I start teaching there in a couple of weeks.’

‘Georgie went there too,’ Matt said.

‘Oh – yeah, of course she did. You and Freya were mates.’ James smiled at her then looked back at the newspaper. ‘This kid was murdered, was he?’

‘Georgie found his body,’ Matt said.

‘Wow, really? I didn’t know that. Is that why you joined the ambos? Can’t get enough of them dead bodies?’ Haw haw.

Georgie smiled tightly. ‘I think I heard the kettle.’

‘Was this Freya’s Tim?’ James said.