Authors: Katherine Howell
‘Shit, yeah.’
‘Good.’ He pulled up outside her house. ‘Wouldn’t be the same working with someone else.’
She again felt the urge to tell him, but then he looked past her and waved. Lauren turned to see Felise at the front door, waving back.
Protect them
.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she said.
‘Betcha.’
Kristi wrinkled her nose when Lauren came up the stairs. ‘Now there’s a smell.’
‘Don’t even ask.’ Lauren tilted her head surreptitiously at Felise.
‘Oh. Okay.’ Kristi continued packing her knapsack.
‘Where are you working today?’ Lauren asked.
‘That flashy place in Point Piper.’
‘How far along are they with the building?’ she said. ‘I mean, the doors are on, you have to buzz to get in, that sort of thing?’
‘Hardly. Place is crawling with tradesmen. They just prop the doors open.’
Crawling with people. That was good. Safe.
‘Why?’
Lauren shrugged. ‘Just curious.’
Kristi came over to hug her goodbye then stopped.
‘We’ll just wave today,’ Lauren said.
‘You ready?’ Kristi called to Felise. ‘Got your bag?’
‘Coming.’
Lauren saw them into the car and away. She glanced up and down the street but spotted no lurking man, nobody slumped low in a car. Inside she locked the door and went up for another shower, trying to plan what she’d say to the detectives and how she’d say it.
Please make them accept it
.
‘I
’ve got a good feeling about today,’ Ella said. ‘I think we’re going to catch him.’
‘Benson Drysdale?’
‘And maybe Thomas Werner.’
Murray braked for a red. ‘I’ll settle for Drysdale.’
That was where they were headed now. Ella wound her window down and rested her arm on the sill in the sunshine. It was amazing what a good sleep could do. She felt bright, cheerful, energetic; she felt she could work sixty hours straight. She felt like chasing somebody – as long as they caught him in the end, of course.
Her mobile rang.
‘You’d better get back here,’ Kuiper said. ‘Your paramedic’s turned up and wants to speak to you.’
‘About what?’ Ella gestured for Murray to turn around.
‘She won’t say.’
Ella didn’t like his tone, and at the office, when Kuiper met them in the hallway, she liked his expression even less.
‘Whatever it is, she’s nervous.’ Kuiper knocked on the door to a small meeting room and opened it for Ella to go in, then closed it behind her.
Lauren stood on the far side of the wide table. She looked pale and had dark circles under her eyes. She wore a blue T-shirt with
000 Club
printed on the chest, and stuck her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans.
‘I’m sorry if I smell,’ she said. ‘I’ve come pretty much straight from work.’
It was an odour Ella recognised from jobs she’d done over the years. Burnt person, overlaid with deodorant and perfume. ‘It’s okay. That one’s particularly hard to shift.’
Lauren nodded.
‘Have a seat,’ Ella said. ‘Can I get you something to drink? Are you hungry? There’s a café downstairs, I hear they do a blinder of a cinnamon roll.’
‘I’m okay.’ Lauren dug her hands further into her pockets. Her arms were pressed tight to her sides. ‘I need to talk to you about something.’
‘Shoot.’
‘It’s about my statement. I’m not sure that it’s right.’
Ella blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘I think I was wrong in what I said in my statement.’
‘Which part?’
Don’t say it, oh god don’t say it!
‘What Kennedy said.’ Lauren glanced at Ella then looked away.
When Ella was able to breathe again she said, ‘You signed those pages. You declared they were all true and correct.’
‘I know,’ Lauren said. ‘It’s just that the more I think about it, the less sure I am of what I heard. What Kennedy actually said.’
‘You wrote it down.’
‘He was kind of mumbling.’
‘Your partner heard it too.’
Lauren made a face.
‘Have you talked to him?’ Ella said. ‘Is he still sure of what he heard?’
Lauren hesitated. ‘As far as I know.’
‘Well then,’ Ella said. ‘You were sitting next to the man, your partner was in the front of the vehicle, is that right? So how come he can be certain while you’re apparently not?’
‘He had the siren on and that would have affected what he heard. Just because he feels certain doesn’t mean he’s right,’ Lauren said. ‘People do make mistakes.’
Ella tried to keep calm. ‘I don’t understand why you feel so differently all of a sudden.’
Lauren looked at the floor. ‘I know somebody by that name. And I think that may have affected what I heard. Made me think I heard that name when really it might have been something different.’
‘You know a man named Thomas Werner?’
Lauren looked around the room as if hoping for escape. ‘He used to go out with my sister. He’s a deadbeat.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘That’s the thing,’ Lauren said. ‘I’m positive it can’t be him because he’s from overseas.’
‘What country?’
‘Austria,’ Lauren said. ‘I also wondered if Joe had heard me mention him, years ago when he was with my sister, and kept that name in his subconscious, and when he heard Kennedy yelling something that
sounded
like that, he just filled in the gap, same as I did.’
‘Why didn’t you bring this up before?’
‘I thought it didn’t matter.’ Lauren scraped her teeth over her lip. ‘I thought it couldn’t be him, he’s overseas, so why even trouble you with it?’
Ella’s head was spinning. She struggled to pull herself together and focus on what she needed to do. ‘It’s unlikely that it would be him, but I’d like to take some details anyway.’ She fetched an A4 pad from a cupboard at the end of the room, and got out a pen. ‘How and when did you first meet this Austrian Thomas Werner?’
‘When he started going out with my sister, Kristi, about five and a half years ago.’ Lauren sat down and put her folded arms on the table. ‘My sister used to be a different person. She had a drink and drug problem, and she hung with a group of people who spent most of their time partying. She met Thomas through these people. They kind of lived together for a while.’
‘Here, in Sydney?’
Lauren nodded.
‘Then what?’
‘They broke up and Thomas went back to Austria, about four years ago, or a bit longer ago than that I guess, just before Felise was born.’
‘Felise being?’
‘Their child. My niece.’
‘Does he keep in touch? Does he visit?’
Lauren shook her head. ‘He has nothing to do with our lives now. He’s never tried to contact us. He’s never even seen Felise, and we don’t want him to.’
Ella wrote quickly. ‘Where does your sister live?’
‘We share a place in Summer Hill.’
‘Is she home today? I’ll need to talk to her.’
‘Why?’
‘To check if she knows whether this Werner’s in the country, whether he’s been in touch.’
‘He hasn’t.’
‘I still need to talk to her.’
‘She’s working today.’
‘Does she have a mobile?’
‘No,’ Lauren said quickly.
‘What time does she get home in the afternoon? I’ll drop round.’
‘About five would probably be okay.’
Ella made a note.
‘So,’ Lauren said, ‘about my statement.’
Ella looked up.
‘It’s withdrawn now? Do I have to sign anything?’
‘You can’t withdraw it,’ Ella said. ‘It’s done. You can’t.’
Lauren sat perfectly still for a moment. ‘So there’s nothing I can do.’
‘It’s a legal document,’ Ella said. ‘Look, I’ll keep your concerns in mind, and talk to my boss and your sister, and we’ll check out this Werner. You know how it is – a big investigation like this, we have to chase down even the thinnest leads, just to be sure.’
‘Okay,’ Lauren said weakly.
‘We’ve already found more than five Thomas Werners in New South Wales alone. Just because you know one doesn’t mean it’s not the same name that Kennedy said.’
‘I guess so.’
Ella slid a card from her purse. ‘Any more worries or problems, give me a call, okay? My mobile’s on there. Day or night, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Thanks.’
Lauren got to her feet and Ella held the door open for her, then walked her down the corridor.
‘I’ll see you this afternoon, about five?’
Lauren nodded and got in the lift.
‘Cheers,’ Ella said, smiling in at her, and not failing to catch the way that Lauren’s very forced grimace of a smile dropped from her face before she was fully gone from view behind the closing doors.
Kuiper’s office door was shut and she could hear him talking to somebody. She went to her desk and booted up her computer. She opened the Central Name Index, looked in her files for Lauren’s date of birth, and typed it and her name into the database.
The screen showed that the paramedic had no criminal record, but had been a victim in an assault and hostage situation by a violent and psychotic drug-user just last week, a witness in a homicide earlier in the year, and a witness in a couple of assault cases in the last five years, all related to her job. Ella typed in the case number of the homicide to bring up the full description of the event. The investigating officers had written that Lauren was first to come across the scene, had been alerted to the fact that something was wrong by two men running onto the road in front of her ambulance in which she was alone. She’d stopped, but both men ran away, one jumping into a car down the road, but she couldn’t see the numberplate. She’d then gone to look in the alley and found one Stewart Blake deceased on the ground. She’d called it in to ambulance Control and waited there until police arrived.
Ella sat back in her chair. It didn’t give her much detail. It didn’t explain why Lauren had looked in the alley, although two men tearing away from a location would surely make anybody wonder what they’d been up to.
The case had gone to Coroner’s Court recently and Lauren had more than likely testified there. Ella scrolled back to the top of the page to see the investigating detective’s name. Lance Fredriks had been in Homicide but now worked out of the Sydney Police Centre in Surry Hills. She dialled the number of the Centre’s switch.
Fredriks remembered Lauren well. ‘She was great,’ he said. ‘A perfect witness. I guess being a paramedic helps you be cool and calm, and she was exactly that. She described what she’d seen, described the guys who ran out of the alley, how she then found the body there.’
‘How about when she was on the stand?’
‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘I wish they were all so stable.’
Stable. Huh
. ‘So those guys were the culprits, do you reckon?’
‘We never found them,’ Fredriks said. ‘She didn’t get much of a look at them, couldn’t see the rego of the car, but it sounded like they were a male prostitute and his customer who’d just stumbled across the body. There were no other witnesses. Coroner said it was homicide by an unknown person. But you know about him, about Blake, don’t you? He was a real pervert. Child molester. He just escalated until he killed that little girl near Eastwood, twenty or so years ago. Lucky they nabbed him then, put an end to things.’
Ella remembered the ruckus in the papers when he was released. ‘So is anything else happening with the case?’
‘Technically it’s open, but realistically – well, there’s always something else to do.’
Ella thanked him and hung up. So Lauren was all cool and collected then, but wanting to back out of her statement now. Was she thinking ahead to the time when she’d be on the stand again but this time retelling Kennedy’s words while Thomas Werner was sitting there? Ella had dealt with a lot of witnesses over the years and they weren’t usually so nervous until right before the court date. Here they were now, without anyone in custody, and Lauren was acting like somebody was skulking about her house at night with a big knife, threatening to cut her head off if she didn’t withdraw her statement.
Ella turned back to the computer and entered Kristi’s name in the database. The screen showed her that Kristi had once been convicted of negligent driving occasioning death and driving with alcohol and cannabis in her blood. She looked up the case details and read that Kristi’s car had collided with an oncoming car four and a half years ago, resulting in the death of the nineteen-year-old male driver, who tests had later found to be also over the limit. Kristi, heavily pregnant, had suffered only minor injuries. She’d had the child and been through rehab by the time her case came before the courts, and because of that, her remorse and her newborn’s heart condition, she was given a suspended sentence, a fifteen-hundred-dollar fine and lost her licence for two years.
Ella heard Kuiper’s door open. She hurried to catch him in the hall. ‘Can we talk?’
Once they were sitting down he said, ‘It’s not good, is it?’
‘She asked to withdraw her statement,’ Ella said. ‘She said she’s no longer sure about what Kennedy told her. Specifically the name.’ She explained about the Thomas Werner that Lauren knew.
Kuiper jotted notes as she talked.
‘I’m just not sure what’s really going on, though,’ Ella said. ‘When she did her statement she was clear about what Kennedy said. She’d written it down, for god’s sake. I don’t understand why she’s reconsidering now.’
‘How did you leave it?’
‘I said she couldn’t withdraw her statement – she’d signed that it was true and it’s a legal document. I’m going to meet her sister this afternoon at five – they share a house. I’ll see what she has to say, if she knows anything, and also talk to Lauren again then, feel her out a bit more.’
‘Maybe she’s just a bit scared,’ Kuiper said. ‘Apprehensive about going to court some day.’
It didn’t jell with what Ella knew of the paramedic from the Blake case, but he could be right. ‘I gave her my contact details, said if she was concerned she could ring me any time.’
‘Good,’ Kuiper said. ‘Now, you and Shakespeare are going to look for that Benson Drysdale again, right? After that, slip on over to Coogee and check out Alan Harvey. His wife died in the car accident with Kennedy.’
Ella took the file he held out.
‘Meanwhile I’ll get onto Immigration and so on, put out a feeler about this Austrian,’ Kuiper said. ‘Just in case.’