The Stalk Club (24 page)

”Can I help you?” asked Soward, his rich, gravelly voice still
slightly inflected by his English heritage despite having lived in Australia for nearly forty years.

Nelson introduced himself, explained their mutual history
and waited while Soward again studied his face and tried to match it to his
memories.  Soward’s mind slowly clicked into gear and eventually a vague recognition
began to dawn.

“It’s been a while, but I think I remember you.  You were
just a kid then.  I’d heard you were a decent officer.  A shame you went back
to the city.  Anyway, what can I do for you?”

“I’d like to talk to you about a case I’m working on
Sergeant.  There might be a connection with a case you worked a few years ago.”

“It’s just John now.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to
help.  I’ve worked a lot of cases in my time, but I’ll listen to what you’ve
got to say.”

Soward organised to take a break from the bar and ushered
Nelson to a nearby table.  He seemed happy to see him now and relished the prospect
of rehashing old times.  

Nelson
told Soward about the case he was working on and as
promised, Soward listened attentively.  He had read about it in the newspaper
and was curious to find out how it might be linked to his past.  Nelson
explained that he was chasing down a possible connection between the case and a
car accident near Batemans Bay fifteen years ago that Soward had worked on.

He showed Soward a printout of a story from a newspaper
from 1997, which he had pulled off the internet the previous evening.  It
described an accident where a car had run off the road and plunged into the Clyde River at Nelligen, about ten minutes drive west of Batemans Bay.  Both parents had died,
but a teenage daughter had miraculously escaped a similar fate.  Soward nodded
and grunted in recollection as he read the article.

“You remember it,” said Nelson.

Soward looked up at Nelson and now he looked all of his
sixty-four years of age as small tight lines circled his opaque eyes and
his brow furrowed into deep valleys. 

“Yes I do.  I always hated car accidents you know.  It
was the worst part of the job.  People who haven’t seen one up close have no
idea what they’re like.”

“Do you know what happened to the girl?”

Soward laughed ironically. 

“Kylie Faulkner was her name.  I remember her.”

“Do you remember what happened to her?” repeated Nelson
hopefully.

“Some.  After losing her parents and spending a couple of
weeks in hospital with a few broken bones, she was bundled off to her only
living relatives, an aunt and her boyfriend who lived up at Cooma.  The aunt
was paid by the family trust to take her in.”

“Your memory is still good after all these years,” said
Nelson, impressed by the old man’s recall of events.

“Maybe, but some things are hard to forget.  Part of
being a copper I guess.  We were never able to identify the other car involved
in the accident.  I mean I couldn’t give her back her parents, but I was hoping
we could find out who was responsible.  We never did.”  Soward’s voice grew
thick with emotion as he spoke.  “Or should I say we were never able to prove
anything.”

“You had your suspicions?  Suspects?”

“Yeah, but nothing ever came of it.  We only had the
skidmarks as hard evidence.  There were no witnesses, and at the time the girl
barely remembered anything of the accident, probably because of her head
injury.  We questioned several people about it but the trail went cold.”

“I know how that feels.”

“Yeah I’ll say.”

Nelson noted that the number of patrons in the club had
continued to grow.  Soward’s five minute break had turned into fifteen, but he
didn’t seem to care.  It was just a job to keep him occupied in his retirement
and add a little extra cash to his pension.

“Just a couple more questions Sarge if you don’t mind. 
When I was looking at the case summary on the database I noticed you’d placed a
file note which was dated only two years ago, thirteen years after the
accident.  What was that about?”

“Yeah, it was only a few months before I retired.  A woman
walked into the station asking for me.  I didn’t recognise her all grown up,
but blow me down if it wasn’t the same girl from the accident, Kylie Faulkner,
all grown up
.  She’d turned out real nice too let me tell you. 
Anyway she spoke to me about her parents’ car crash.  She wanted me to re-open
the investigation.”

“Why? 
Did she know who was responsible?”

“No,
I don’t think she did.  From what I remember, she said she’d been having dreams
about the accident and she remembered more about it, but she didn’t have
anything substantial to go on.  I told her that unless she had something real
good for us then I wasn’t interested in reopening such an old case.   We just didn’t
have the resources for that sorta stuff.  And at the time of the accident we’d
spent a lot of time and energy investigating the case.  We couldn’t nail anyone
for it then, so I doubted we could do any better after all that time.” 

“Did
she mention any names?  Did she mention the name Craig Thoms?” said Nelson,
trying his best to contain the flutter that was growing in his stomach.

Soward
thought for a while as he rubbed his chin.

“No,
I don’t think she named anyone.  As I said, I don’t think she had anything
substantial to go on.  I do seem to vaguely remember that name though.  He may
have been one of the suspects.  It’ll be in the file.”

Nelson
stared thoughtfully out the window and briefly watched the bowls matches being
played out on the flat green rinks outside. 

“How
did she take it?  I mean, what was her reaction to you not wanting to reopen
the case?”

“She
wasn’t happy of course.  She bent my ear about natural justice for a while but
eventually gave up and left.  I think she gave herself a headache or something.
That was the last time I saw her.  At the time I remember wondering if she had
a kangaroo loose in the top paddock if you know what I mean.  Anyway, I didn’t think
there was much to it.  As you probably understand we get plenty of requests to
re-open old cold cases, but I slipped a note into the case file just in case.  You
never can tell when these things’ll come up again.  You visiting me here and
now is a testament to that. 
So does that help with the
case you are working on at all?”

Nelson sat back in his chair contemplating Soward’s words. 

“I’m not sure, but it’s something I’m going to find out.” 

After
his visit with Soward, Nelson felt re-energised.  His drive back up the
coast was at a much faster pace than the drive down had been and his Cobra growled
angrily along the highway and ate the kilometres up.  He turned his phone on
and within seconds it was beeping furiously, indicating the presence of several
messages.  He put in a call to Robards who was at Headquarters. 

“Where
the hell have you been?  Inspector VanMerle has been looking for you and he’s
about to shit out a kidney,” said a clearly agitated Robards.

Nelson
almost drove off the road from laughing.  

“Well
it’s lucky that he’s got two of them then.  Look, I’ve just been chasing
something up.  I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.  How’d you go
tracking down Harvey Petersham?”

“Good. 
Great in fact.  I found him, but I don’t think he had anything to do with
this.  He’s got an ironclad alibi for last Friday night.  Actually for most of
last week he was up at Newcastle, plus he’s small time and as dumb as dogshit. 
There’s no way he has the brain power to set Thoms up, if that’s what you were
thinking.”

“Ok. 
Anything else to report?”

“Yeah,
VanMerle says he wants you to wrap up the Fogliani case because he’s got
something else he wants us to look at.”

“What?
 We’ve only been on it two days.  Jeezus.  Just tell him I’m still tying up some
loose ends and I’ll be in soon to talk to him.” 

“Gee
thanks for letting me do the dirty work.  I’m sure that will go down real well.”

Nelson
ignored his partner’s protestations.  He felt a moment of guilt about putting
Robards in the firing line but it soon passed.  He decided to continue to chase
down his lead while it was hot, or at least lukewarm. 

“Look
I need you to do something urgently for me.  It’s important Pete.  I want you
to dig up everything you can find on a woman named Kylie Faulkner.  She’s about
thirty to thirty-two years of age and initially lived in Canberra.  Her
parents were killed in a car accident in June of 1997 and then she moved to
Cooma to live with an aunt.  See if you can track down a current address.”

“What’s
she got to do with anything?” replied Robards sullenly, yet showing a flicker
of interest in Nelson’s request.

“Don’t
worry about that right now, just get the address and I’ll fill you in.  Just
trust me ok?”

“Whatever
you say boss.”

Within
half an hour Robards phoned Nelson back.  He told Nelson that tracking down a
current address for Kylie Faulkner hadn’t been easy.  She had no criminal
history, hadn’t lodged a tax return in three years and didn’t appear on any current
databases that the New South Wales Police Force had access to.  Robards had
managed to speak to her aunt in Cooma who Kylie had been warded to in her youth,
but her aunt said she hadn’t seen or heard from her since the day she left twelve
or so years previously.  Fortunately Robards had a contact in the Roads Traffic
Authority and had managed to get an address on Kylie Faulkner’s licence. 

“It
may not be her current address though as the licence expired two years ago and
hasn’t been renewed.”

“I
see.  Nothing else then?”

Robards
sensed Nelson’s disappointment. 

“No,
it was all I could come up with at such short notice.  It seems like she just
dropped off the face of the earth about three years ago.  Maybe she’s dead?”

“Maybe,
check with Births, Deaths and Marriages or whatever they’re called now while
you’re at it,” replied Nelson.

“I
will.  Do you want me to come out there with you and check it out?”

“No.
I can handle this.  It’ll probably just lead to another dead end and anyway, I
need you to keep VanMerle and Crighton off my back for a while.”

“That’s
not going to be easy.”

“I
know and thanks in advance.  I appreciate it.”  Nelson hung up.  He wasn’t
overly hopeful that a two year old address would yield anything useful but was
still excited at the possibility of tracking down Kylie Faulkner.  He wasn’t
sure where she fitted into the scheme of things, or if she fitted at all, but
he felt compelled to find out one way or another, especially seeing that the
drug angle appeared to come to nothing.  Nelson had thought it an unlikely
connection anyway.  He reasoned that if Harvey Petersham or his connections
were unhappy with Craig Thoms wanting to pull out of supplying them with their
hospital drugs then they were more likely to have found a more simplistic way
to exact retribution, like beating the crap out him or something.  However, sending
Robards out to follow the drugs lead at Manly had afforded Nelson the time and
space to chase down the lead in Batemans Bay.

Nelson
plugged the Woollahra address that Robards had given him into his GPS unit and
followed the verbal directions through the early afternoon traffic.  He parked his
Cobra in the street, just south of where the arrow on the screen was indicating
and noticed that his car’s patched paintwork looked out of place amongst the
Beemers and Hondas that seemed par for the course there.  He double checked the
street number against what he’d written on the scrap of paper.  The address
belonged to an impressive looking group of eighteen units that had been squeezed
onto what was once three residential blocks.  Nelson briefly admired their sharp
architecturally designed lines and neatly manicured minimalist gardens and guessed
correctly that some reasonably serious money would be required to buy there,
especially seeing that the third floor units were high enough to afford their
occupants a view of the harbour and beyond.

He
took the stairs to the third floor and knocked on the door of apartment number
seventeen.  Almost immediately he heard quick footsteps move across the floor
inside the apartment.  He held his breath and felt for the Glock twenty-two in its
holster on his belt, just in case.  The door was quickly flung back and he was
faced with a slim young woman with dark shoulder length hair, blue eyes and
pale skin.  He wondered if the search for Kylie Faulkner was over.

“Can
I help you?” she asked, her voice melodic and low.

“I
hope so.  I’m Detective Sergeant Nelson from the Homicide Squad.”  He showed
her his New South Wales Police Force badge.  “I’m looking for a Kylie Faulkner,
is that you?”  He watched her face closely and noticed it blanch to an even
whiter shade of pale.

“I…I
don’t know anyone by that name Detective.  What’s wrong?  I don’t understand. 
What’s going on?”