The Darkest Hour (31 page)

He had
something
to tell her, of that she was sure.

T
ired and damp, Sal let himself into the house. He hoped that the girls were at school, and Nona and their dad were at Julio’s bedside, and Thomas was in the factory in Botany. He hoped he’d have the time and space he needed to think.

But suddenly there was Nona on the stairs, a basket of washing under her arm. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘What do you care?’

She came down and dropped the basket on the floor. ‘Cops wanted to know.’

He stuck his shaking hands in his pockets. ‘And?’

‘And they said they’d be back with a warrant if you didn’t get in touch with them, and Thomas was upstairs listening in the whole time, and after they left he went off his tree.’ She put one hand on her hip. ‘He told me to tell you that, quote, if you fuck this up for him he will make you pay. End quote.’

‘He’s an idiot,’ Sal said, then cast a panicked glance upstairs.

‘He’s not here.’ Nona looked him up and down. ‘I’m not washing those clothes, you know.’

‘When did I ask you to?’

She grabbed the basket and headed for the laundry.

‘How’s Julio?’ he said.

‘Dad’s with him. I said we’d be up later.’

The cops’ll have someone waiting there for me.
Sal shivered. If he didn’t go, he wouldn’t be caught. If he wasn’t caught, and he didn’t call, they’d bring a warrant and search the house, and find proof of Thomas.

He went upstairs to shower and think it through, dropping his damp clothes on the bathroom floor. The dew had been heavy in the park near Waverley Cemetery where he’d sat watching the sun come up. When the cemetery opened at seven he’d gone to his mother’s grave. Her headstone had been cool and rough under his fingers. He’d scraped grime from the carved letters of her name with a twig, and pinched off the grass at ground level along the base of the stone, and pressed his fingers into the soil. A groundsman had come past a couple of times but didn’t say anything about him lying there. Sal guessed he was used to such things.

He didn’t talk to her, either out loud or in his head. He just thought about his problems, and touched the grass, and hoped that help would come to him, in some way, in the end. And now it had.

The only problem was Julio. Sal tried to imagine himself in his position. Would he mind if his brother stayed away from his bedside in order to save them all from Thomas’s madness? He didn’t think so. Nona and Dad wouldn’t understand, of course. But it would only be for today. Julio would surely hang on that long; the doctor had said it could be a while. Said he might even pick up a bit and come back home. Sal wondered if that was the effect of the herbal shit.

Anyway, by that afternoon the warrant should be served and cops’d be swarming all over the joint. He just needed to make sure they found what he wanted them to.

When he was dressed, he dug out an old street directory from the junk in his cupboard, opened it to Botany and circled the location of Preston’s factory in red. He forced it into the back of his jeans, pulled his shirt down over it, then went to the top of the stairs and listened. The TV was on, some morning show, and he heard Nona laugh along with the studio audience. He edged along to Thomas’s room at the end of the hall. The door was closed and he spent a long minute looking for hairs stuck in the frame as telltales if anyone entered. There were none. He pulled his sleeve down over his hand and turned the knob gently, then eased the door open in case there were more telltales of stacks of glassware or who knew what behind it.

‘Thomas?’ he whispered. No answer. He turned on the light and squeezed through the gap into the room.

The windows were closed, the blinds down. The air smelled of the drug chemicals. The bed was unmade and a pair of jeans hung off the end. T-shirts lay crumpled on the floor. Sal flung the street directory right up under the bed then looked around, wondering what else he could leave. A scrap of shiny bright blue fabric poking from under one of the T-shirts caught his eye. He hooked it out with his foot. Women’s underpants. A pair he recognised from long ago.

Goddammit, Tracy.

‘Sal!’

He booted a T-shirt across the underpants, hit the light switch and rushed from the room, pulling the door shut as quickly and as quietly as he could. Three huge silent steps and he was at the door of his own room. ‘What?’

‘There’s a man at the door.’

‘Who?’

Nona came halfway up the stairs. She looked apprehensive. ‘You better come down.’

His first thought was that it was somebody from the hospice. But did they do that? When family members could just ring and break the news over the phone?

He followed her down to the front door. The screen was still locked and he had to go up close to see properly.

‘Mr Rios?’

The man was Chinese. His face was round and plump, his black hair cut sharp across his forehead. He wore a suit of shiny blue that reminded Sal of the pants upstairs.

‘Mr Rios?’ he said again.

‘Yes?’

The man held out an envelope. Out of his sight beside the door, Nona frowned and shook her head. ‘Don’t unlock the door!’ she hissed.

‘Just, ah,’ Sal said. ‘Can you put it on the mat?’

‘I have to give it to you.’ His accent was broad Australian.

Nona shook her head some more but Sal unlocked the door. The man handed him the envelope, then walked away down the drive.

‘You’re such an idiot.’ Nona pushed Sal out of the way so she could relock the screen.

The man got into the passenger side of a silver Mercedes waiting on the street, then Nona slammed the front door and cut off Sal’s view. ‘What if he’d wanted to kill us?’ she snapped.

He turned the envelope over. It was made of heavy white paper. Both sides were blank.

‘You better not open that.’

He fitted his thumbnail to the corner of the flap.

‘What if it’s a bomb?’

Inside was a sheet of similar heavy paper, folded three times. Sal eased it open and saw five lines of blocky handwriting in black ink.

Feng Xie was our man. His family made us aware of his passing and the fact that the police are looking into the circumstances. Our arrangement with you is now at an end. You may not contact us. If we find any repercussions coming our way, you will be sorry.

Feng Xie taught you wrong, by the way. Your cook will never succeed.

Nona tried to read over his arm. He held it away from her. ‘Are you Mr Rios?’

‘You can be such an arsehole.’

‘And you can be such a bitch.’
How on earth did I ever think I should hurt someone for you?

She stamped upstairs, and a moment later shouted from the bathroom, ‘Don’t think I’m going to pick up these clothes.’

Sal tried to block her out and think. If he showed the letter to Thomas, it might make him give up cooking and book his flight home. And while he was waiting for that flight, he’d be hanging out here – a sitting duck for when the cops showed up.

In the car he mapped out the steps. Give Thomas the letter, and be prepared for the shitstorm. Remembering how he’d flung the heater across the room, Sal could imagine him trashing the place. So, give him the letter and get out asap, tell him Julio’s crook as, sorry mate gotta go. Then hide out somewhere for the rest of the day. The movies! He hadn’t been to the movies for ages. He liked the thought of sitting in a cosy dark place, large Sprite in the armrest, popcorn oil on his fingers, while the hours ticked by and the detectives got sick of waiting and went to get their warrant and smashed into the house. He’d see movie after movie, and emerge blinking at dusk to get into the car, put on the news, and hear that the murderer Thomas Werner was now behind bars.

It’d be nice to be able to explain to Julio, but he just had to hope he hung on.

Wayne Rhodes burst into the office. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I was before you gave me this heart attack.’ Murray clasped dramatically at his chest.

‘Not you.’ Wayne was sweating and pale.

Ella felt a not-unpleasant flush creep over her. ‘Better have a seat.’

He grabbed the closest chair. ‘I only just heard.’

‘And what’d you do?’ Murray said. ‘Run in from home?’

‘Up the fire stairs.’ Wayne loosened his shirt from his shoulders. ‘Lifts’re full this time of day.’

‘Just to see if she’s okay.’ Murray smirked.

Ella’s skin was tingling. She kicked Murray under the desk.

‘Hey, I’m just saying,’ he said.

‘Where’s the coffee machine around here?’ Wayne said.

Ella said, ‘Murray’ll get you one.’ She looked pointedly at him. He heaved a sigh and left the room.

‘It’s just,’ Wayne said, ‘I like to keep an eye on my friends.’

Ella looked down at the diagram on her desk. ‘Thanks.’

‘And I wanted to say, maybe I overreacted a bit about Mrs Nolan.’ He picked at the vinyl on the arm of the chair. ‘I felt bad when I heard this morning, and thought that was how we left things.’

‘I’m the one who should stop accusing people,’ Ella said. ‘I think you’re right – she wants to get to the bottom of things, and the next page of that letter did go missing somehow, but not because of her. Because if she’d wanted to keep it a secret, why not hide the whole thing?’

Murray brought the coffee. ‘Kuiper just arrived. Rushed straight into his office looking all serious.’ He put the cup down in front of Wayne and turned to Ella. ‘Maybe they caught him. Maybe he came back to your house with an axe and they nabbed him good.’

‘Murray,’ Wayne said.

Kuiper rapped on the door. ‘Meeting room, now.’

‘I’d better go.’ Wayne got up. ‘Talk to you later?’

‘Indeedy.’ Ella smiled.

When everyone was in the meeting room Kuiper shut the door. ‘The net is almost over Deborah Kennedy. The local officers believe they’ve located her and we’re just waiting for confirmation now. Hopefully she’ll be interviewed by the end of the day.

‘Closer to home, however, we’ve had some significant developments.’

He told the silent group about what had been happening in Ella’s house. She kept her gaze straight ahead as he spoke. It sounded stupid now that she hadn’t reported the first incidents, but who could’ve been sure what was going on? It was always easier with hindsight to know what you should’ve done. At least Mendelssohn wasn’t here, swinging her smooth ponytail as she listened.

‘The canvass produced a few descriptions of a man seen in the street in the last few days,’ Kuiper said. ‘One man seen apparently studying the houses near Marconi’s is described as white, average height and build, aged in his thirties, wearing jeans and a blue shirt with a Broncos cap over short dark hair. He was seen twice, most recently yesterday afternoon, at which time he got into a blue sedan, with plates which turned out to be stolen.

‘The other two witnesses described a similar man in vaguer terms. Average build, dark hair, white, wearing jeans. One saw this man two days ago when she was backing out of her garage and he walked behind her and she almost ran him over because he was looking across the street – the direction of Marconi’s house. The other saw him the same day, from the end of the street, as he went into a property that was either Marconi’s or very close to it. None of these witnesses could identify the airport photo of Werner as the man they’d seen.’

All well and good, Ella thought, but it didn’t amount to much. They’d be lucky to get charges for any of it, unless prints were found, which she doubted, because Werner wasn’t a complete idiot and you only had to watch a bit of TV to know how to avoid leaving them.

Kuiper went on to describe the arson attack on Ella’s car outside her parents’ house. ‘This happened just after four this morning. There were no witnesses to the actual incident but a taxi reported nearly being hit by a blue Ford sedan close to the location. He got a partial on the plates, which we believe match another stolen pair.’

‘Car’s pinched too, no doubt?’ Murray said.

‘Probably. Twelve blue Ford sedans of the Falcon type that the witnesses describe have been stolen in the past month alone.’

‘Do we know how he got access to Ella’s house?’ Marion Pilsiger said. ‘How he knew where you lived?’

‘As best we can figure, the mole probably copied her keys at some point when they were in her bag here in the office,’ Kuiper said. ‘All our addresses are in databases here, and we’re thinking she may have been tailed to her parents’ house, or as they’re in the phone book with only a few others of that surname, that Werner checked out the locations and recognised her car.’

‘Where are we up to on that mole?’ Pilsiger asked.

‘Mendelssohn and Greer are following a number of leads,’ Kuiper said, looking at Ella. She looked right back. She knew better than to leak the names of the three targets. ‘That’s all I can tell you for now.’

Ella glanced down at her pad full of doodles and wondered how it was all going to end. Maybe Deborah Kennedy’s information would be the key. Or maybe following the trail of the mole would end with Mendelssohn marching Werner triumphantly into the office.