The Darkest Hour (12 page)

Lauren knew it was a fury born from fear. Felise wrenched her arm free and kicked Kristi’s mobile across the floor.

‘I swear, Felise, if you’ve broken that.’

‘I don’t care!’ Felise stamped into the other room and threw herself sobbing on the floor.

Kristi was shaking, tears in her eyes. Lauren squeezed her arm. ‘I went to the detective this morning and said I wanted to withdraw my statement because I’d made a mistake. I said I knew somebody by that name and so probably misheard what the victim said, and thought he said this name when he’d really said something else. She said it was a legal document, I couldn’t take it back. And they’re going to look into him, and they want to talk to you. They want to know if he’s been in touch.’

‘You didn’t tell them that he called?’

‘I’ve only told you and Joe,’ she said. ‘Joe said I should tell them. I don’t know what to do.’

Kristi stared out the plastic-covered window. ‘What was his name again?’

‘James Kennedy.’

Kristi mouthed the name to herself. ‘Did he tell you why?’

‘He said he was a bad man, but that was all.’

‘The police don’t know?’

‘Not that I’ve heard.’

Kristi nodded. ‘I think we have to tell them. You said she’s coming over tonight? We should tell her then.’ She hugged her. ‘We’ve already lost Brendan. I don’t want anything to happen to you.’

Lauren smelled her sister’s shampoo, felt the warm skin of her cheek. ‘Okay.’

‘Why won’t you tell me the secret?’ Felise demanded from the doorway, her face red and streaked with tears.

‘We’re just talking, honey.’ Kristi held out her hand. ‘There are no secrets, I promise.’

Maybe just one, Lauren thought, about a dead man and an alley.

Immigration occupied the majority of a tall building in the CBD. Ella and Murray showed their badges to a stern woman at the desk who sent them to the fifteenth floor. There the lift doors opened to a chubby man with a broad smile. ‘Ah, detectives. We got your subpoena just now, and the files you need are being retrieved. Perhaps you’d like to wait here.’ He showed them an empty office cubicle.

‘Great,’ Murray said. ‘Thanks.’

The man left and they sat down. ‘Feels too easy,’ Ella said.

‘If they want to help us, I’m not arguing.’

‘Here you go.’ A young woman held out a manila file. Ella took it and thanked her. She put it on the desk and opened the cover, palms sweaty all of a sudden, heart loud in her ears.

They went through the immigration cards and paperwork in quick order, then stared at each other in shock.

‘He’s not even in the country,’ Murray said. ‘How can that be?’

Ella grabbed her phone and dialled.

‘How’d you go?’ Kuiper said. ‘Where is he?’

‘Still in Austria, as far as we know.’

‘What?’

‘Last recorded entry was five and a half years ago, departure almost a year later.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘I wish,’ Ella said. ‘It also puts a question mark over Benson Drysdale’s head. Was he lying when he said he’d seen Werner six months ago, or is there another Thomas Werner from Austria getting about, or what?’

‘Good question,’ Kuiper said. ‘Look, I’ve already lined the airport people up to help find him on the tapes as he came through Immigration, so head on over there and we can at least see what the bastard looks like. We’ll have to decide later whether to burn Drysdale as a witness and show him the picture, confirm it’s one and the same man.’

‘Okay,’ she said.

‘Anything in the file about what he did when he was here before? Whether he was working, and if so where?’

She thumbed through the file. ‘According to his incoming passenger card he was staying at an address in Crows Nest. There are no details of whose place it was, anything like that. He gave a mobile number as his contact while he was here – got a pen?’

‘Go,’ Kuiper said.

Ella recited the numbers. ‘Also, it says he was here on a holiday, so he wasn’t supposed to work, and it gives his emergency contact back home as a Mrs Gretel Werner in Vienna.’

‘Wife or mother, I wonder,’ Kuiper said. ‘Thanks. I’ll get onto all that. You find that photo then call in again.’

Murray had his head in his hands. ‘Where’re we off to now?’

‘Airport. Find his picture on the tapes.’

‘Even if we find it, what then? If he’s here on a false passport, he’s going to be just about impossible to pin down. He might even have left already. How can we prove he did it if we can’t prove he was here?’

‘Calm down,’ Ella said, though the same thoughts – and more – were rushing through her own head.

So much for cementing my spot in the squad.

A surly man escorted Ella and Murray through the bowels of the airport to a small room with a TV and digital player. He slapped a remote on the table and pointed at the buttons. ‘Play, stop, pause, fast forward, rewind.’ He turned on his heel and went out, yanking the door shut behind him.

Murray sat down in one of the plastic chairs. ‘Happy chap.’

Ella stayed on her feet and started the five-year-old recording. The date and time marker in the bottom corner ran forward through the minutes. ‘What time do we want?’

Murray opened his notebook. ‘Immigration stamped him through at 8.50am.’

Ella fast forwarded. The view was from a camera above the head of an immigration officer. At one edge of the screen she could see the number eight on the desk. ‘He did come through booth eight, right?’

Murray nodded.

The minutes whirred by on the counter. People rushed up to the desk, handed over passports and immigration cards, talked at high speed as the immigration officer’s head bobbed about and their passport was stamped, then they were through. Ella pressed the button to ‘play’ once they got close.

When the figures clicked over to eight fifty, a man stepped up to the counter. Ella’s back prickled. He had short brown hair, a round face and brown eyes.

‘So this is him?’ Murray said.

‘Keeps his face angled down.’

‘Sort of.’

‘He does.’

The man in the picture looked at the officer, not up at the camera, and said something in apparent answer to a question. He nodded once. His face was bland, blank. Ella tried to picture him stabbing James Kennedy, his face twisted in – what? Rage, greed, hate? They had yet to learn the reason.

The officer stamped his passport and gave it back to him, and he took it and walked away.

‘And that’s that.’ Murray slapped his notebook down on the table. ‘So now we get all the footage since, and sit for hours watching, looking for somebody who looks like him?’

Ella pressed ‘rewind’, searching for the clearest image of his face. ‘Maybe they have software that can match him up.’

Murray made a sceptical noise.

She inspected a single frame. ‘This one, do you reckon?’

The man’s face was centred in the screen, his eyes attentive on the officer, his mouth closed.

‘Looks good.’ Murray wrote down the frame number and exact time. ‘Now to ask Mr Happy for the print-out.’

‘This one you do,’ Ella said. ‘I’ll update Kuiper.’

L
auren lay in bed, exhausted. The sedative she’d taken was pushing her under but her mind was fighting hard. Each time she drifted off, images of the burnt man would fill her head and she’d lurch awake with a deep intake of breath.

She tucked herself up into a ball on her side, pulling her T-shirt down at the back, unwrinkling the boxer shorts under her hip. Across the room the top of the dresser was filled with framed photos and her unfocused gaze travelled over them. Her and Kristi and Brendan, the Christmas that they all got new bikes. Hers was a glittering red ten-speed, Kristi’s a banana-seated purple speedster with a flowered basket, while Brendan still had training wheels on his gold mini-BMX and hated not being able to go as fast as them.

Her eyes closed. Her body relaxed. Then the burnt man looked at her from his burnt eyes, clutched her with his burnt hand, and she was awake again.

She sat up and rested her folded arms on her knees. She felt bad enough before, sick with fear and worry. Fading in and out of consciousness like this was making it worse. She knew it wasn’t really because of the burnt man, who she’d helped as much as she could, but because of Thomas. The burnt man was a . . . what was the term? She was so tired she couldn’t think straight. A symbol. That was it. He was a symbol of Thomas’s threat. Every time she saw him she knew she was really seeing Kristi, or Felise. Or herself.

She pressed her chin into the crook of her arm. Maybe she should take another sleeper, really knock herself out. She’d be a zombie that evening but at least she’d get an hour or two’s rest.

She got out of bed and padded barefoot to the kitchen. The house was warm and sunlit, and she could hear cars driving past on the street outside and the hoot of a train horn up at the station. She poured a cup of water from the heavy glass jug they kept in the fridge then heard a noise behind her.

By the time she turned Thomas was on her. She caught a glimpse of a blade in his left hand slashing down towards her in an arc. She flung up her right arm and the glass jug struck his forearm, the impact jarring her hand so that she almost lost her grip. Icy water splashed over them both. His momentum slammed her into the cupboards and for a second his shoulder was against her face, his T-shirt reeking of chemicals and smothering her. Then she felt him move and knew he was swinging the knife in again. She screamed ‘Fire!’ and brought the jug up sharply to the side of his head. The jug handle was wet and slippery and she fought to keep her grip as he forced her back against the cupboards again, the blow jolting her back. ‘Fire! Fire!’

Thomas grunted and pushed her hard against the benchtop. She was hyper-aware of his left arm, aware of the movement of his shoulder, knew he’d be trying to bring the knife in from behind for a clear shot at her lungs, her heart, but the microwave at her back blocked his thrust. She worked her right arm around behind him and brought the jug up to the back of his head, but it struck only a glancing blow then hit her own face. Thomas tried to push her sideways, clear of the microwave, but his feet slipped on the wet floor.

‘Lauren?’ There was pounding on the front door downstairs. ‘Lauren!’

Ziyad from next door.

‘Fire!’ she screamed. She swung the jug up again and this time felt the thud through Thomas’s body. He faltered and she hit him again. She heard the knife clatter to the floor and felt the warm spatter of blood on her forearm behind his back.

Thomas staggered. She hurled herself at him and swung the jug at his face but he fended her off with his forearm. She slipped on the water and fell, hitting her head on the leg of a chair.

‘Lauren!’ There was heavy thudding at the door.

Thomas scrambled to the front window. Lauren struggled to get to her feet as he shoved the window up and climbed out. She clung to the back of the chair and heaved the jug at him as he clambered out the window but it smashed against the sill as he disappeared onto the awning.

‘Lauren! For god’s sake let me in!’ Downstairs, Ziyad was going hoarse.

Thomas would go from the awning down the tree, there was no other way off. Ziyad was a big guy. Thomas was injured and had no knife. Lauren stumbled down the stairs and scrabbled at the lock.

‘Watch out at the tree!’

‘Are you okay?’ Ziyad said through the door. ‘The fire brigade’s coming.’

The lock wouldn’t turn. Her fingers slipped off it. ‘The tree!’

‘What?’

The lock slid open. Ziyad burst in and knocked Lauren onto the floor. ‘Shit, sorry. Are you okay? Where’s the fire?’

‘The man.’ Lauren pointed a shaky hand to the open doorway. The sunlight was blinding in contrast to the gloom of the ground floor.

‘What man?’ He carried a small fire extinguisher with a dented bottom rim. ‘Are you all right? There’s blood on you.’

‘In the tree. Getting away.’

Ziyad went and looked. ‘There’s nobody out there.’ A siren wailed in the distance. ‘Where’s the fire?’

‘In the tree! The man!’ She felt sick and weak.

‘There’s nobody there,’ he said. He started up the stairs.

‘There’s no fire.’ Lauren lay back, exhausted. ‘Call the police.’

He pulled his mobile from his pocket. ‘I’ll get the ambulance for you too.’

‘It’s not my blood.’ She held up her arm, turning it to show there were no cuts.

‘What about that?’ He pointed to her side.

She looked down to see a spreading stain on her T-shirt. She rolled onto her side and pulled it up awkwardly, starting to feel pain now across her back. ‘How bad is it?’

Ziyad turned white.

‘Sit down,’ Lauren said. Ziyad swayed on his feet. ‘Sit.’ His legs gave way and he folded onto the floor. ‘Roll onto your side,’ she said. ‘Don’t look if it makes you feel worse. Lie there with your face near the door for the air.’

He groaned. ‘Your back.’

‘Don’t think about it,’ she said weakly. ‘Give me your phone.’

He held it out behind him with a shaking hand.

‘Big deep breaths and you’ll be okay.’ Lauren rested a shaking hand on his calf while dialling Kristi’s mobile with the other. The sirens were close, and she could hear the roar of the fire truck’s engine.

‘You have to come home,’ she said when Kristi answered. ‘You have to come right now.’

Ella opened the file on Alan Harvey then closed it again. ‘If we showed that still from the tape to Drysdale, we’d know for sure whether Werner was here six months ago.’

‘Harvey’s an equally valid lead.’

‘No, he’s not,’ she said. ‘Harvey’s just something that has to be looked into.’

Murray took a corner nice and slowly. ‘You’re so impatient.’

I’ll ignore that.
Ella opened the file again and started to flip through it. ‘Look at all this stuff.’

Murray glanced over.

‘We’ve got Alan Harvey’s record – one disorderly conduct and resist arrest back in seventy-nine. We’ve got the PM report on Karen Harvey and the hospital reports on their injured son. We’ve got the full report of the prang including copies of photos; we’ve got witness statements by every man and his dog; we’ve even got a copy of the insurance documents listing the contents of Kennedy’s van and what was damaged.’ Ella ran her finger down the list. ‘Says here Kennedy was carting supplies to a florist – one box of ornamental glass vases shattered, two boxes of something called oasis undamaged, two rolls of plastic wrap and one each of purple and pink paper undamaged; to a toy distributor – two boxes of snow domes undamaged, one of small plastic dolls and one of children’s assorted costumes ditto; and to a medical centre – a box of dressing kits, boxes of needles and syringes of various sizes, boxes of urine sample jars–’

‘Nice.’

‘–all undamaged. No computers or parts thereof.’

‘Not listed, anyway.’ Murray slowed, looking at the houses. ‘What number is it?’

‘Thirty.’

The house was small and neat, the white-painted woodwork a pleasant contrast with the red brick. Murray parked a few spaces along and Ella straightened the pages and closed the file before getting out.

The sun was hot but in the shade of the Harveys’ verandah the air was cooler. Ella knocked on the door and waited.

There was the sound of locks sliding back then the door opened. The man who looked out appeared older than his forty-seven years. ‘Yes?’

‘Mr Alan Harvey?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Detective Ella Marconi, this is Detective Murray Shakespeare. Could we come in, please?’

‘May I ask why?’

‘James Kennedy is dead,’ she said.

‘And that’s got to do with me how?’

‘It would be better if we could talk inside.’

He paused for a moment then shrugged.

The cane sofa in the living room creaked when Ella and Murray sat down. Alan Harvey took a single chair opposite but looked past them at the dark television. Ella glanced over to see the family photos lined up on top of it. The woman with her arms around the two young boys had a brilliant smile.

‘You know who Kennedy is?’ she said, just to be clear.

‘Of course.’

‘You don’t seem surprised to hear that he’s dead,’ Murray said.

‘Man drove like a maniac,’ Harvey said. ‘It was only a matter of time.’

Ella said, ‘It wasn’t a car accident. He was attacked on the street.’

‘Oh.’ Again that look at the photos.

‘How does that make you feel?’ Murray said.

‘Did he have a family?’

Ella nodded.

‘Then it’s tragic, no matter how I might personally have felt about the man.’

There was a noise behind them. Ella looked around to see a boy of about twelve standing in the doorway. His head was partly shaved and a line of staples was visible down the left side of his scalp.

‘Evan, go back to bed, please,’ Alan Harvey said.

‘But I’m hungry.’

‘Go,’ Harvey said. ‘I’ll bring you some Milo and biscuits in a minute.’

The boy turned and walked away. Ella waited a moment but Harvey didn’t speak. ‘Mr Harvey,’ she said, ‘where were you on Tuesday night, between eight thirty and nine?’

‘I was here.’

‘Can anybody vouch for that?’

‘My sons were here too, asleep in bed.’

‘Nobody else?’

He pointed at the doorway. ‘That’s my son Evan. He suffered a head injury in the crash that Kennedy caused. He’s got a shunt in his brain now, and every so often it gets blocked and he needs more surgery. Tuesday was his first day out of hospital. He’s more prone to fits in the few days after the procedures, and the fits can be fatal, so there is no way in the world I would have left him and my other, younger, son alone in the house.’

Murray moved forward on the sofa. ‘But you understand why we’re here.’

‘Anyone in my shoes would’ve made the same comments.’

‘They were threats.’

‘The man was a professional driver,’ Harvey said. ‘He should be better at it than the rest of us. He should be held to a higher standard. The man drives through a red light because he’s looking at a street directory and he kills my wife and ruins my son’s life and he gets a fine and a licence suspension. Put yourself in my position.’

Ella cleared her throat. ‘Do you know a man named Thomas Werner?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Dad.’ The boy was back in the doorway.

Harvey stood up. ‘I’m coming, Ev. We’re finished here.’

Outside in the hot car Murray put the key in the ignition but didn’t start it. ‘What do you reckon?’

‘He hated him but I don’t think he had anything to do with it,’ Ella said.

‘Coulda hired Werner as a hitman.’

‘Coulda left the kids alone and snuck out, or coulda got a babysitter too.’ Ella wound down her window. ‘And he’ll probably raise a glass tonight, but I still don’t think he was involved.’

Murray started the car. ‘Might take some of the anger away at last.’

Ella’s phone rang. Kuiper said, ‘Are you finished with Harvey?’

‘Just done now,’ she said. ‘He says he was at home on Tuesday with his kid who’d just had an operation. You want us to check that with the hospital?’

‘No. Get on over to your paramedic’s house.’

Ella’s scalp tightened at his tone. ‘What happened?’

‘Somebody broke in and attacked her.’

Murray had to park well down the block from Lauren’s house because of the police vehicles lined up along the kerb. Ella was out of the car before he’d yanked the handbrake on. She hurried up the footpath with her pulse going hard in her throat.

A uniformed officer stood guard near the step. The door was dotted with semi-circular dents, some with fragments of red paint embedded in the timber. Ella flashed her badge at the officer. ‘They’re all okay?’

He nodded. ‘They’re next door. Detectives are upstairs.’

Ella stepped carefully inside the door, avoiding the bloodstains on the floor. A woman appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘Ella? Come on up.’