Authors: Katherine Howell
McLennan stripped off his gloves. ‘Police know?’
She nodded. ‘There were two on scene and they knew we were coming here.’
‘Thanks for trying,’ he said.
She smiled. It was a rare comment and a nice contrast to Claire’s attitude. ‘Cheers.’
She and the other paramedics loaded their gear onto the stretcher while the nurse got a sheet and covered Fowler’s body. McLennan was writing notes as they left the room.
Joe stood with Seth in the corridor. Seth’s face was pale, his fists on his hips.
Holly looked straight into his eyes. Blue-grey still. She didn’t know why that felt surprising. ‘Paul didn’t make it.’
Seth stared at her.
‘Sorry.’ She started to wheel the stretcher past.
‘You let him die.’
Joe put his hand on Seth’s shoulder. ‘Everyone did everything they could.’
Seth shook him off and grabbed the stretcher, pulling Holly to a stop. ‘You were wasting time out there, looking at me, looking around the park, when you should’ve been working harder and saving him.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Joe said.
‘Ignore him,’ Holly said. ‘He’s clearly feeling guilty.’
‘I had nothing to do with this,’ Seth said.
‘Yeah, right.’ Holly yanked at the stretcher.
‘You’ve changed,’ Seth said. ‘Where’s the rule that says I can’t too?’
Holly felt Joe’s eyes on her. ‘I thought this was about your friend.’
‘Fuck you.’ Seth shoved the stretcher into her hip.
‘No, fuck
you
.’
She rammed the stretcher ahead of her at the automatic doors and burst into the heat and glare of the ambulance bay. The police parking bay was empty. With shaking hands she took out her mobile and dialled Lacey but got her voicemail. She ended the call without leaving a message, then rang the main number for Control.
‘He make it?’ the controller said.
‘Dead before he hit the ground.’ Holly tried to calm the tremor in her voice. ‘Can you call police radio and give them a message about this case?’
‘Sure.’
‘Tell them I don’t know how, or why, but somehow my brother’s involved.’
TWO
D
etective Ella Marconi crossed the park in the baking sun, Detective Murray Shakespeare at her elbow. Ahead, three men and one woman sat on the ground, watched over by a pair of uniformed officers, while a fourth man talked to two detectives.
‘Let me lead the questioning,’ Murray said again.
‘No.’
He put his hand on her arm. His palm was hot and dry. Fevered. She could practically feel the rage humming in his veins. ‘I’m begging you now. Look at me. Begging.’
‘If it was up to me I’d make you go home.’ She jerked free and hurried on.
She understood why he was so upset, but he needed to get his emotions under control. And she needed to focus, because a twenty-nine-year-old male named Paul Fowler had been apparently shot during a touch football game, then declared dead at hospital ten minutes ago, and one of the attending paramedics had said her brother was at the hospital with the body and he was somehow involved. Ella glanced up at the broiling sun and wondered who the hell would play touch on a day like this, then thought about truth oozing out of people like sweat.
They were close to the group now. A blond man and one with dark hair and a round flat mole on his left cheek leaned back on their hands, their legs crossed at the ankles, while another man with what looked like a bruised face and the woman sat forward with their arms around their knees. Mobile phones and keys were heaped in a pile next to a football.
Ella glanced around. To the south stood a low-set brick clubhouse, trees dotted about, most of them with trunks just thick enough for a person to hide behind, then a car park with five cars and a motorbike, and beyond that a deserted playground and more trees in a stretch of park that followed the river around the bend. Uniformed officers stood on the edge of the car park, keeping onlookers away. On the eastern side of the playing field mangroves followed the curve of the river and a white timber footbridge led to the golf course on the other bank.
So many avenues for escape
, Ella thought.
Just before they reached the group Murray said, ‘I would consider it a personal favour –’
‘Just move on,’ Ella hissed.
The detectives looked over. Ella recognised them: Tom Cambridge and Anthony Lu. She’d worked with them at Newtown before moving to Homicide. As detectives from the closest Local Area Command, they’d been called here first, with a request then going to the Homicide office once Fowler was declared dead.
‘Ella,’ Tom said.
‘This is Murray Shakespeare,’ she said.
‘Sorry to hear about your dad, man.’ Anthony put out his hand. ‘How is he?’
‘Still in St Vincent’s.’
Retired Assistant Commissioner Frank Shakespeare had been mugged at an ATM two days before, getting himself stabbed when he’d refused to hand over his wallet. A task force had been established but they had no suspects yet. Murray was full of fury and Ella saw his jaw tighten as he looked at the interviewee. She’d have to watch him: in his state he might do anything.
The man wore a white shirt and khaki shorts and a worried look.
Tom said to him, ‘Wait here a sec,’ and tilted his head for Ella and Murray to move a few steps away with him.
‘Story so far is that the guys’re tossing a ball around when the deadie stops to tie his shoe there and goes down on his face.’ He pointed to an area in front of the waiting witnesses. Ella could see a smear of blood on the grass but the site was otherwise indistinguishable from the rest of the parched field. The female witness stared at the blood. The men all watched the detectives.
‘Our guy here and the lady were walking past when it happened and came over to do CPR,’ Tom went on. ‘Uniforms got shown a possible bullet wound in the back of the neck by the ambos, and according to their preliminary questions nobody saw or heard a thing.’
Anthony motioned towards the uniformed officers guarding the treed area. ‘Possible location of the shooter. Crime Scene’s on its way, as are bodies for a canvass.’
The top of Ella’s head was cooking. She looked back at the witnesses and pressed her arms against her sides to soak up the sweat that trickled down her ribs. ‘You hear what that paramedic said about her brother?’
Tom nodded. ‘He’s at the hospital, right?’
‘We’re going there after this,’ Ella said.
‘So those guys are the other friends?’ Murray stared at them. ‘We’ll start with the one with the banged-up face.’
‘Actually,’ Tom said, ‘could you do the woman first? Seeing as she and our guy were just bystanders. If we get done with them we can let them go.’
Ella said, ‘Sure.’ She beckoned the woman over. Murray said nothing as he took out his notebook but the muscles on either side of his jaw bulged even further.
The woman looked frightened. She was about thirty, and wore black three-quarter-length running pants and a pink singlet. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her nose and cheeks were slightly sunburned. She wore a black bumbag clipped low around her hips, and pushed an almost-empty plastic water bottle into it as she approached.
‘Hi,’ Ella said. ‘I’m Detective Marconi and this is Detective Shakespeare. Sorry to keep you waiting.’
‘Is the man okay?’
‘Unfortunately he passed away.’
‘Oh no.’
‘I heard you tried to help him,’ Ella said.
‘We did CPR.’ She glanced at the man talking to Tom and Anthony. ‘Richard – my husband – and me, we had to do a course at work – you know how they come around and teach you? But it was ages ago and you forget stuff. The ambos said we were doing this wrong and that wrong.’ She pressed her fingertips to her temples. ‘Do you think he would’ve lived if we did it better?’
‘I’m sure you did fine,’ Murray said. ‘Now –’
‘I know what you mean,’ Ella said to the woman. Murray was clearly dying to get stuck into the possibly suspicious friends but this woman deserved some care and attention. ‘I’ve felt the same way myself, thinking I wasn’t good enough.’
The woman’s round dark eyes brimmed. ‘Really?’
‘The thing you need to remember is that most people don’t even try,’ Ella said. ‘You guys did, and you gave him the best possible chance. Ask me, people like you deserve medals.’
‘I just wish he’d lived,’ she said. ‘Somebody said he had a little girl.’
‘Yes, and that’s why we need to ask you some questions,’ Murray said. ‘Do you have any ID with you?’
The woman dug into the bumbag and took out a small purple coin purse. She pulled out a driver’s licence and gave it to Ella, who read that her name was Fiona Stephens and she lived in Livingstone Road in Marrickville, then handed the licence to Murray. As he took it Ella saw Tom and Anthony shaking Richard’s hand and letting him go, then Tom motioned for the blond man to come over and Anthony turned to a new page in his notebook.
She turned her attention back to the woman. ‘So, Fiona, what did you see here today?’
‘Well, Richard and I were walking along the river – we do it most days. We talked about giving it a miss today as it’s so hot, but then decided it’d be good to get out of the house.’
Ella nodded.
‘We were coming along here and we saw these guys passing a football around. We were looking at the river, then we heard someone shout out. We looked back over and the guy was lying on the ground.’ She glanced at the blood on the grass. ‘At first I thought they were kidding around. Then you could hear in their voices that something was wrong.’
She paused and wiped her eyes. Ella could hear the wind in the casuarinas near the car park, Tom’s low voice as he asked his witness a question, a
clop
as someone hit a ball on the golf course across the river.
‘They were crowded around him and someone shouted about an ambulance,’ Fiona went on. ‘So Richard and I ran over.’
‘What did you see?’
‘He was just lying there,’ she said. ‘It was easy to see he was unconscious. But we didn’t know for sure if he was in cardiac arrest or not. We both felt for the pulse in his neck but it was really hard to know.’
Ella knew that feeling: when the adrenaline was pumping so hard in your veins you couldn’t tell if the pulse pounding in your fingertips was theirs or your own.
‘But after a bit you could just see – I mean, he was turning this awful colour.’ Fiona brushed hair off her forehead with a trembling hand. ‘So Richard started compressions and I did mouth-to-mouth. It’s really different from doing it to a plastic dummy. It was really hard. I didn’t think any air was getting in. The guy who taught me went on and on about tilting the head back, and if you weren’t getting air in to make sure you were tilting enough, so I made sure to do that, but when the ambos turned up they said I was doing it too much.’ She pulled up the neck of her singlet and pressed it to her eyes.
‘As I said before, at least you did something,’ Ella said.
‘The ambos got us to keep going, to help them, you know,’ Fiona said. ‘Then they took him to hospital.’
‘Where was he lying?’ Ella asked.
Fiona moved closer to the bloodstained grass. ‘Here, with his head that way.’ She pointed east. ‘Lying like this.’ She spread her arms, indicating the length of Paul Fowler’s body on the ground.
‘When did you notice the injury to his neck?’
‘When the ambo got blood on her gloves.’
‘You didn’t notice it before then?’
‘He was on his back by the time we got to him,’ she said. ‘His friends had rolled him over.’
Ella looked away from where Fowler had lain, thinking about where a shooter could have hidden. The sniper who’d shot thirteen people around Washington DC in the US in 2002 had been in a car boot with just the end of the rifle barrel poking out. They needed to hurry up and start canvassing those streets.
‘Did you see anyone lurking anywhere during your walk?’ she said. ‘Notice a person or car rush away? Hear any strange noises at any point?’
Fiona shook her head. ‘I didn’t notice anything beforehand. I keep thinking back to the time it must’ve happened, thinking surely I must’ve heard a bang, but I really didn’t. And then we were so busy, and I was concentrating so much on what I was doing and worrying that I was doing it wrong. Anything could’ve been happening and I wouldn’t’ve heard or seen a thing.’
Ella nodded. ‘As this is a murder investigation, we’ll need you to come into the station to make a formal and more detailed statement later.’
‘Is tomorrow okay?’ Fiona touched her forehead. ‘I’ve been so tense, I think I’m getting a migraine. They generally wipe me out for hours.’
Her formal interview – and Richard’s too – was really a matter of making sure all the boxes were ticked at every step of the investigation; that the team had statements from everyone who was involved in the case at any point. Today, tomorrow – it made no difference, and if something cropped up that Ella needed to check, she knew where they lived.
‘That’ll be fine,’ she said.
Murray handed back the woman’s licence. ‘Just need your phone number.’
She recited a mobile number and he scribbled it down.
Ella smiled at Fiona. ‘Thanks again.’
‘I just wish we’d been able to save him.’ Fiona wiped her eyes once more, then walked across to Richard who hugged her.
‘Nice to meet a decent citizen now and again,’ Ella said to Murray.
He turned to a new page in his notebook and shrugged.
‘Oh, come on. Strangers trying to save a man’s life?’ She watched Richard and Fiona walk hand in hand towards the path heading south along the river. ‘That doesn’t warm the cockles even a little?’
‘Can we just get on with it?’
‘Not everyone’s a scumbag.’
He looked past her at the two men sitting on the ground and didn’t answer. ‘Can we get the guy with the bruises now?’
‘Fine,’ she said. Murray beckoned to the man, who got up and came over, brushing grass and dirt off his hands. Up close Ella could see the dark centre and lighter edges of the bruise on his left cheek and the scab on the abrasion on his forehead. When he shielded his face from the sun with his forearm she saw another scab on his elbow. His eyes were dark, his hair light brown and matted with sweat on his forehead.
Ella introduced herself and Murray. ‘You are?’
‘Sam Roberts-Brice.’
Murray wrote it in his notebook. ‘Date of birth?’ There was an edge to his voice already.
‘Seven eight eighty-five.’
‘We’re sorry about your friend,’ Ella said.
‘I still can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘One minute we’re playing footy and the next, bam. It doesn’t seem possible that he’s actually gone.’
‘How long had you been on the field when it happened?’
‘Maybe ten minutes.’ He looked across the dead grass as if seeing it all again. ‘We’d been chucking the ball around, and he stopped and knelt down – I guess tying his shoelace. I ran past him, then next thing someone shouted out and I looked back and he was on the ground on his face.’
‘How do you play touch with just five people?’ Murray said.
‘It’s not an organised game. We just run passes back and forth, throw the ball around.’
‘Who shouted out?’ Ella asked.
‘I think it was Jared.’ Roberts-Brice pointed to the dark-haired man with the mole on his face who was watching Tom and Anthony talk to their blond friend.
‘What did you do?’
‘I went straight over to Paul but I didn’t know what to do. I freaked out a bit and started shouting for someone to call an ambulance. Then those other two people came running over, said they knew CPR and just kinda took over. Which was a good thing, cos we didn’t have a clue. I said thanks to them afterwards.’
‘When did you see the wound?’
‘Not till the ambos found it.’
‘Not even when you first got to him?’ Murray said. ‘Before you rolled him onto his back?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sure?’ Murray said.
Roberts-Brice looked at him. ‘Of course.’
Ella said, ‘Did you hear anything when he collapsed?’
‘Nothing at all.’
Murray said, ‘You know we’ll be asking the neighbours what they heard.’
‘I can’t see how they could’ve heard anything when we were all right here and heard nothing.’
‘You’re speaking for the others too?’ The edge in Murray’s voice hardened.