Crucifixion Creek (4 page)

She drives fast while he gets on the phone for more information. Unidentified white
male, stabbed to death in the street. No phone or wallet, no witnesses.

The ambulance is drawing away as they arrive, leaving the victim in a pool of blood
and the uniforms securing the scene. Harry and Deb move in, Harry shining his torch
at the body. He stops dead. He swears softly and Deb says, ‘What? You know him?'

‘Yes,' he says. ‘His name's Greg March. He's my brother-in-law.'

‘Sheez. He live around here?'

‘No…' Harry shakes his head, fighting off the sense of
disorientation. ‘No, miles
away, northern suburbs. But his yard is around here somewhere. He's a builder.' He
turns to the uniforms. ‘Car keys?'

‘No.'

Harry runs back to their car and pulls up Greg's car number on the computer, then
puts out an alert. Within seconds a report comes in of a chase in the inner west,
a vehicle driving at speed to evade a patrol car. The number matches Greg's blue
Ford.

Deb joins him and he says, ‘Give me the keys.'

She hesitates. ‘We should leave this to the uniforms, Harry.'

‘Deb!'

‘I'll go. You stay here.'

But as she starts the car he jumps in the passenger seat and buckles up.

The Ford appears to be circling back towards the south-west, fast enough that the
patrol car is ordered to abandon the pursuit. Other cars and Pol Air are being called
in. As Deb turns onto Liverpool Road they see the traffic parting up ahead and then
the blue car barrelling through towards them. She switches on her warning lights
and the approaching car makes a sudden wild skidding turn to the left into a side
street. She follows while Harry talks into the radio. The road ahead is deserted
and she slows down, then jerks her head over to the right. The sound of a crash.
She turns into a residential street and they see the car up ahead, smoking, reared
up against a tilting power pole.

Deb pulls in across the street and they run over. There is a girl in the front passenger
seat, face pressed against the blood-smeared window, eyes open, lifeless. No one
in the back or the driver's side, banknotes spilled all over the seats. While Deb
calls in their location, Harry draws his gun and sets off down the footpath, following
a trail of black spots on the concrete. Deb shouts after him, but he's already disappeared
into an overgrown front garden. He sees feet sticking out from beneath a bush and
pulls the foliage aside, gun
raised, but the figure is slumped like a doll, hands
empty. Harry crouches and reaches for his throat, and the boy's head jerks and his
eyes open. He stares at Harry, then says something. It's hard to make out, but it
sounds like, ‘He wana me do it.' Then he closes his eyes and the head flops to one
side.

Deb races up behind him, takes in the scene and cries, ‘Oh fuck, Harry, what have
you done?'

He looks up at her. ‘I haven't done anything, Deb. He's dead. I was just feeling
for a pulse.'

He gets to his feet and holsters his pistol.

‘You should have let me, Harry. You should have stayed at the car.'

‘I'm just doing my job, Deb.'

They return to the car as headlights converge from both ends of the street, and he
asks her again for the car keys.

‘What now?' she says.

‘I need to be the one to tell Nicole. I don't want some flatfoot barging in on her
in the middle of the night.'

‘Oh…right. But this is a critical incident. Are you sure you're okay? You should
wait for them to clear you.'

He nods and takes the keys.

On the way he phones Jenny and tells her to get dressed. He imagines her getting
up and taking a shower in the dark, and opening her wardrobe, every item of clothing
in its designated place. When he arrives at the end of the lane she is waiting, wrapped
up against the cold. She smells fresh and he doesn't like to kiss her, feeling contaminated.
He explains about Greg and she gasps.

‘He phoned me tonight,' she says. ‘It was a mistake—he meant to ring Nicole, hit
the wrong number on his phone.'

‘Did he say anything?'

‘Just that he was sorry for bothering me. He sounded flustered. He said it twice,
that he was sorry, really sorry, then he hung up.'

‘What time was this?'

‘About ten-thirty. I was still on the computer.'

Three hours before he was murdered. ‘He didn't say where he was?'

‘No.' She thought for a moment. ‘I think he was in a lobby of somewhere—an office
building or a hotel. I heard a lift chime. It happened a couple of times…Poor Nicole,
and the girls. What was he doing out there?'

‘I don't know. It wasn't far from his depot, but at that time of night?'

‘Maybe there was a break-in. Maybe the security firm called him out.'

‘Yes.' But he was half a kilometre away from the yard.

They stop outside the house and Jenny phones Nicole to say they have to speak to
her and not to wake the girls. She looks tousled and frightened seeing them standing
there at the door, and the first thing she says is, ‘It's Greg.'

They sit in the little sitting room just inside the front door, an odd, in-between
kind of space that nobody uses, the women on the sofa, Jenny's arm around her sister.
Nicole is in shock. Finally she looks at Harry and says, ‘Was it a robbery? At the
depot?'

He knows this mental process: if only she can find a simple answer to this, Harry
might realise it's all a mistake, and Greg will walk through the door.

‘We don't know,' he says gently. ‘Did he tell you it might be?'

She frowns, forcing herself to think. ‘He rang. I was just going to bed. He said
he had to go out there and not to wait up. He didn't say why.'

‘Do you know where he rang from?'

She shakes her head. ‘He went out after dinner, to see a client.' She puts a hand
to her eyes, whispers, ‘Oh, Greg,' and begins to weep.

*

When he gets back to the car he turns his phone on and finds a string of messages,
from Deb and from the duty inspector at homicide, all containing the word URGENT.

At Parramatta he senses heads turning as he walks through the open-plan office. He
doesn't see Deb and reports to the office of the duty inspector, Toby Wagstaff, who
gives him a bollocking for not answering his phone.

‘Sorry, sir. I turned it off—I was breaking the news to the widow.'

Wagstaff, a plump, rosy-cheeked man with curly blond hair and an Ulster accent, gives
a sigh. ‘Aye, well Harry, you have my sympathy, but you're in deep shit.' He reaches
for the phone and murmurs into it, ‘He's here, sir,' and after an uncomfortable minute
Detective Superintendent Marshall marches in. Wagstaff gets up and leaves, closing
the door firmly behind him.

Marshall turns on Harry. ‘What the bloody hell are you playing at?'

‘Sir?'

‘You attend the murder scene of your close relative, involve yourself in the pursuit
of his killer, and end up alone with your hands around the bloke's neck.'

‘I was feeling for a pulse, sir, like we're trained to do.'

‘Then you leave the scene of a critical incident, switch off your phone and pay a
visit to the victim's wife. What was going through your mind?'

‘I was trying to do the right thing, sir.'

‘No you weren't. The right thing would have been to step back as soon as you recognised
the victim and let others get on with it. You were involved, compromised, and you
knew it but you kept on doing the wrong thing, and compromised a fellow officer,
until you finally ended up compromising the whole bloody investigation.'

‘Sir, I don't think…'

‘Shut up! I shouldn't even be talking to you. The critical incident
team are downstairs
waiting to crucify you. Before you go down you will surrender your weapon to Inspector
Wagstaff.' Marshall leans forward and lowers his voice. ‘You've disappointed me,
Harry. I was a great admirer of your father. That's why I supported your transfer
to homicide. I wanted you to shine as he shone, and I feel let down. Most of the
time your performance is exemplary, then a personal issue intrudes and you're off—you
throw your training and judgment to the winds, and you do your own thing. And it
makes you a menace, Harry, a menace to your colleagues.'

‘Sir, I responded as I believed the circumstances demanded.'

‘Really?' Marshall sits back, staring at Harry, then gets to his feet and snatches
up a plastic pouch from Wagstaff's desk. ‘What's this?'

The photograph of the tow truck he took from the siege house. He opens his mouth
but Marshall cuts him off. ‘Yes, I know where you got it. Why did you ask for tech
support to follow it up?'

‘I thought it might tell us more of what the guy was up to.'

‘You're disappointing me again, Harry. I expect honesty from you. You asked them
to find out where the truck is now, yes?'

‘Yes.'

‘Because?'

Harry is silent, and after a pause Marshall continues. ‘Because you want to take
a scraping of the paint and test it against the marks on your folks' car, right?'

Harry nods.

‘You see? Secretive and obsessive. Three years and you're still diverting police
resources to your personal quest.'

‘It's still an unsolved case, sir.' He is thinking of Greg telling him much the same
thing.

‘Get out, Harry. Think about what I've said. And tomorrow, if the critical incident
boys have finished with you, you'll report to the police medical officer and the
police psychologist for a fitness for duty assessment. That's an order.'

‘Sir.'

He does as he's told, surrenders his pistol and heads downstairs, where he gets an
extended grilling from the CIT. When they're finished with him he finds a note on
his desk with the time of his appointment with the workforce safety psychologist.
In the locker room there is a second padlock on his locker door. It is the public
symbol of his humiliation—this man cannot be trusted with his gun. The others frown
at the two padlocks, looking uncomfortable as they pass by.

Deb, on her way home, puts her head round the corner. ‘Sheez, Harry, I'm sorry.'

‘Yeah, well. I asked for it, I guess. You warned me.'

‘Yes.'

‘Though you didn't have to tell them I had my hands round the bloke's throat.'

‘I never said that! I said you were feeling for a pulse.'

‘Well, maybe forensics and the PM will put them right.'

He goes home to the empty house feeling filthy, stained with aggression and death.
He doesn't want death, he wants life, he wants Jenny. As he moves through the house
there are reminders of her everywhere and of how she has to live: a little patch
of dirt and grease missed on a worktop that she has scrubbed clean, a towel abandoned
in an otherwise spotless bathroom. Most telling of all, her best friend sitting in
the corner of the living room.

Before the crash she was a researcher for a big law firm in the city. Her work mostly
involved computer searches, and she was very good at it. She'd done a part-time computer
science course and developed programs and search tools of her own. For over a year
after the crash she was unable to access her beloved computer, until a friend from
the course put her on to a new voice interface. For six months she worked at it until
she was almost as proficient as she had once been, whispering to the machine, listening
attentively in conversations that were incomprehensible to Harry. The law firm
has
started giving her work again, which she does at home, with her electronic best friend
over there in the corner. She is slower than before, but she claims that now she
has to visualise the data in her head instead of seeing it on the screen her thinking
is clearer and more creative.

Harry would like to believe it, because he feels guilty about what happened too.
It was his suggestion that she go with his mother and father on their trip up to
New England. They took the scenic route north of Newcastle across the Barrington
Tops on Thunderbolt's Way to Uralla. It was on that beautiful road, winding and lightly
trafficked, that the crash occurred.

6

Kelly missed the stabbing and police chase last night. The young lad who normally
listens in to the ambulance and fire brigade radios (not the police since they went
digital) was sick and didn't pick it up. She hasn't got anywhere with the son of
Phoebe Bulwer-Knight's friends either, but she has left a message on his phone saying
she hopes she can meet him to check a few facts before she publishes her story about
his parents' tragic ending and their relationship with Mr Crosstitch. Perhaps that'll
get a response.

And now she's daydreaming through three hours of local council planning committee
tedium. She misses the beginning of Councillor Potgeiter's item but when she does
tune in she is startled. Apparently he is proposing a new sculpture to celebrate
Aboriginal reconciliation in the civic precinct. A replacement for the old monument
in Bidjigal Park, which is in a bad way and rarely visited. Kelly blinks. Hearing
Councillor Potgeiter showing an interest in Indigenous affairs is like listening
to Genghis Khan making an appeal for the widows and orphans. Kelly wonders if she
can use that line in her column. She's never heard of Bidjigal Park or its substandard
monument, and when she checks on her phone she finds that it is a small pocket in
the north-west corner of Crucifixion Creek, not far from the siege house. The Creek
seems to be cropping up a bit these days, and she wonders if she could do a piece
on it. When she leaves the council chamber she calls in to the library next door,
the local heritage section, where she finds a slim monograph,
The Grim History of
Crucifixion Creek
.