By Garry Disher
‘It’s not that we’re smart, Sunshine, the bad guys are dumb. Detective work, investigative procedures, it’s all garbage. The reality is wrong addresses, phone numbers with the digits transposed, drinking shithouse tea in ugly sitting rooms so you don’t offend potential witnesses— who invent things anyway, tell you what they think you want to hear.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
‘Yes sir. No sir. Turn right at the next set of lights.’
‘Yes, sir.’
It was seven o’clock in the morning and we had a double homicide in Sandy Bay. It was my first homicide on Vestey’s crew. Everything I’d been told about him was true. I sat tense and buttoned-up and didn’t trust myself to speak.
‘No, boyo,’ he said, ‘most cases are broken in the first twenty-four hours. More often than not your crim is caught in the act, or his wife dobs him in, or he forgets to clean the blood off his shoes, or he gives himself up. Feeling lucky?’
‘Don’t know, sir.’
‘Don’t know, sir,’ Vestey muttered, and he settled into the icy solitude that unnerved me more than anything else about him. He was burdened with perpetual anger and a hard searching mind, and for a week now I’d been feeling the force of it.
‘Next left,’ he said, closing the street directory, ‘then two streets down.’
‘Sir.’
He was respected at police headquarters but not liked at all. He was too secretive and private for that, and too straight, somehow. He viewed everything and everyone with frank disbelief. He loathed judges, magistrates, lawyers, criminals and time-serving cops. The day I joined his team he’d been on the front page, pictured in front of the latest gun-amnesty haul, throwing a challenge at the world.
‘Rigby Street,’ he said.
It was one of those broad leafy streets where the house prices reach half-a-million dollars. Vestey didn’t have to tell me the number. An ambulance, divisional vans, and a huddle of neighbours were blocking the street a hundred metres down. I parked the Commodore and we got out.
Vestey seemed to know all about it. He led me along the side of the house to a vast garden at the rear. ‘Numero uno,’ he said.
The first body was lying half a metre inside the back door. The head rested on the outstretched left arm; a narrow watchband was visible below the cuff of a light-coloured coat. The right arm hugged the stomach. Dark hair curled to the nape of the neck. The legs were bent a little, the toe of one woven brown leather shoe appearing to chase the heel of the other.
In other words a configuration of sleep—except no-one would choose to sleep on a cold porch floor. The hand clasping the stomach had done a poor job of holding the blood in, and there was a small entry wound in the temple. A case of wrong time, wrong place, I thought, taking note of two items lying near the body: a small shoulder bag with an Ansett tag on it and a tiny rose cast in silver. The spiky metal had torn through classy black wrapping paper, probably when the woman fell.
Vestey made no move to go in so I stood there with him, looking at the body. After a while he grinned at me. On that face it was a brief, bleak spasm. ‘Okay, Sunshine, first impressions.’
‘Sir.’
I knelt next to the body. The entry wound displayed the classic stippling effect, pinpoint haemorrhaging caused when unburnt powder and tiny metal shavings are driven into the flesh. ‘Shot at point-blank range, sir.’
‘An effect of which,’ Vestey said, ‘is sound suppression. Let’s see who she is.’
He crouched next to me, wrapped a handkerchief around his hand and removed a wallet from the woman’s coat pocket. It was crammed with cards. ‘Nina Gait, of this address.’ He looked at me. ‘Ansett ID. Check the case.’
I did what Vestey had done, wrapped my hand in a handkerchief, but he curled his lip as if I was overdoing it. I found a uniform in the suitcase. ‘Some kind of flight attendant,’ I said.
Vestey returned the wallet to the coat pocket. ‘Not that it matters, poor bloody bitch.’ Then I saw him reach out, clasp the dead woman’s slender hand above the watchstrap as if to comfort her, and rotate her wrist. The watchface was cracked, the hands stuck at 7.03. ‘Time of death. Just like in the movies, eh, Sunshine?’ He stood, brushed at his knees. ‘She’s been here twelve hours, long enough for rigor mortis to come and go. Okay, give it your best shot.’
‘Sir.’ I pointed at the suitcase near the base of the steps. ‘She arrives home from the airport yesterday evening, opens the back door, goes in, and he’s waiting for her. Pops her one in the stomach, she falls, he pops her again in the head.’
‘Don’t give me pops, Mister. Why the back door?’
He was right. People generally let themselves in by the front door. I looked away, hunting for an explanation. A light had been left on above the back door. There was a small bluestone building in the garden behind us. One of the uniform boys was standing watch over it. A hundred years ago it had been a stable but now there were curtains in the windows, creepers on the walls and brass fittings on a Brunswick green door. ‘Maybe she rents the stable. She’s friends with the owner and was calling in to say hello.’
Vestey likes to drape his long frame in dark, expensive double-breasted suits. He brushed at invisible lint. He was elegant and dangerous-looking, as if he’d just stepped out of a cognac ad. ‘The rose, Sunshine. The sexy black paper. Rushing in to say hello before she even unpacks her bags. That tell you anything?’
He didn’t wait for an answer but stepped past the body and disappeared inside the house. I turned around in time to catch the uniformed constable disguising a grin. I ignored him and examined the garden, a sizeable area of fruit trees, wattles, wrought-iron chairs and a lawn that needed cutting. Instead of a fence there was a Milestone wall on three sides. A block of flats showed above the wall at the back. Apparently a woman who lived there had noticed the suitcase the previous evening, noticed it was still there this morning, and made a ‘you’ll-think I’m-being-silly-but’ call to the local station.
Vestey was back in the doorway. ‘Communing, Sonny Jim? Think the answer’s floating in the ether? Come and apply some lateral thinking in here.’
‘Yes, sir.’
I followed the powerful, fluid shape into the kitchen. Now there were five of us there, counting an ambulance officer, Sally waiting with her fingerprint kit, Mack snapping pictures.
Six, counting the second victim.
She was dressed for a Sunday afternoon in Salamanca
Place, designer tracksuit and Reeboks. She’d fallen onto her side in a foetal position. Masking tape bound her wrists and ankles and two strips of it had been pasted over her mouth. Her eyes were wide and alarmed, as if she’d seen what was coming. There were no marks on ‘• the body. There was no blood.
Without looking at anyone Vestey said, ‘The coroner? Crime-scene unit?’
I happened to be looking at Sally when he said it. She was watching him covertly. I’d seen women do that, grow distracted and covetous around him, even if they wouldn’t admit it. ‘On their way, sir,’ she said.
‘Fine. So instead of contaminating the crime scene why don’t you all bugger off outside until they arrive?’
He didn’t mean me. The others began to troop out, trying to look bored. ‘Mack,’ Vestey said, ‘there’s a crowd gathering in the street. I want you to take a few candids. Maybe our boy’s hanging around, catching the action.’
‘Sir,’ Mack said, going out.
Vestey turned to me. ‘Feel along the hairline.’
‘Sir?’
‘On the job training, Sunshine. Don’t worry, you won’t disturb anything.’
I knelt on the slate floor, steadying myself for a moment by holding the dead woman’s shoulder, then edged my fingertips from her temple to the back of her head—almost as if I were working shampoo into a lather. The hair was fine and clean; I could hear the soft scratching of my fingers at the roots.
I found it where the skull meets the spine—a small patch of sticky dampness. I jerked my hand away, stood up and stared at my fingers.
Vestey may have thawed a few degrees, for he called me by my name. ‘Well, Mr Niall?’
‘He made her kneel on the floor, sir, then shot her in the back of the head.’
I stared at my fingers as I said it.
‘Wipe them, for Christ’s sake. What else can you tell me?’
I took out my handkerchief and rubbed hard at the blood. I had it on the tip of each finger. ‘It’s a pro hit, sir.’
‘I know it’s a pro hit. I expect our esteemed Commissioner could tell me it’s a pro hit. I want to know what sort of forensic joy we can expect out of this, if you catch my drift.’
I felt my face grow hot—it was the lingering sensation of the sticky blood and Vestey bearing down on me regardless. I thought of other head shots I’d seen, the classic splash pattern of bone fragments and brain tissue. ‘As with the first body,’ I said, ‘there’s no exit wound, meaning a small-calibre weapon, probably a .22. If he used hollow-points—’
‘All we’ll get are fragments, meaning we can’t match them to any gun, meaning the brain will be porridge. Well done.’
I peered around at the slate floor. ‘Maybe he left a shell-casing behind.’
Vestey looked at me pityingly. ‘Explain the tape.’
‘To stop her from struggling?’
Vestey’s handsome lean head swung down close to my face. His white shirt looked very white inside his dark suit coat. He smelt faintly of soap. He smelt clinically clean, like a surgeon, only no surgeon was ever this sharp and glittering. ‘So why didn’t he tie the Gait woman?’
‘He wasn’t expecting her, sir.’
Vestey nudged the taped ankles with his black shoe tip. ‘Meaning this one’s the intended victim, yes, yes, but think: why the tape, why the kneeling down, why the formality?’
I snapped the word, I couldn’t help it: ‘Execution.’
Vestey relaxed. He almost smiled. ‘Give the lad a great big hand.’ He looked bitterly at the dead woman. ‘Execution. Know the rationale behind execution, Sonny Jim? You’re a university boy, you’ve got letters after your name, enlighten me.’
‘Punishment.’ I was still bristling.
‘Punishment. To teach a lesson. To restore honour. This isn’t just a shooting, it has a signature on it, it’s symbolically meaningful. It says this is what happens if you transgress the unwritten law.’
I thought I understood him. He hated criminal posturing. He hated the banality of the code behind this execution. I nodded. ‘I see.’
‘You still here, sport? We’ve got a dead dyke with connections—how else do you explain the execution— the little friend who walked in when she shouldn’t have, and you’re standing there with your mouth open?’
He said all this for the entertainment of the pathologist, who had just come into the room. Professor Quennell glanced at me sympathetically, nodded at Vestey, and opened his black bag. We watched him draw on latex gloves, hook a stethoscope to his ears and crouch next to the body.
‘She’s dead, Prof.’
Quennell ignored Vestey. He listened for a heartbeat then switched on a micro-cassette recorder and started talking: ‘Preliminary indications. The deceased is a white female, aged approximately thirty years, bearing no visible wounds, but—’ he bent over and sniffed at the woman’s head—’the hair reveals traces of cordite, and’— he touched the back of her head without hesitation— ‘there is a possible entry wound concealed under the hair at the base of the skull . . . ‘
To look useful I got out my notebook and drew separate floor plans of the kitchen and the adjoining porch, showing each body in relation to furniture, doors and walls, and marking distances and angles. Then I looked around the kitchen. It was a copper, pine and skylight kind of place, with a vast refrigerator and farmhouse-style stove. Potted ferns leaked over the edges of the pine benches.
At one end of a shelf of tattered cookbooks above the refrigerator was a shallow cane basket heaped with bills, receipts, postcards and letters. I lifted it down and began to sift through it using the tip of my pen, pausing at a postcard of a Gold Coast beach. It was a long-distance shot, the sand crowded with sunbathers. The word ‘ME’ had been scrawled breezily in red ink in the top right corner above a red arrow angling into the anonymous mass of sunbathers. I flipped the card over. It was postmarked a week earlier and said simply, ‘See you Monday.’ Yesterday, I thought. It was signed ‘Nina’. The rest of the message lay in the big red kiss and the tiny heart that dotted the i in ‘Nina’.
I put the basket back on the shelf. I didn’t want to hear the homophobia in Vestey’s voice again, the note of ugly hate, so I didn’t mention the postcard. ‘Got a name, sir,’ I said. ‘Rosemary Joyce.’
‘The silver rose,’ Vestey said. ‘The name Joyce do anything for you, Sunshine?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Let’s just say it’s known to the police. How does 7.03 p.m. yesterday grab you?’
Vestey was addressing the pathologist, who’d just withdrawn a thermometer from the dead woman’s rectum. Quennell noted the temperature and went on recording, ignoring Vestey. ‘Two factors affect this reading: the body is lying on a cold surface, slate, and the back door has apparently been open for several hours.’ He bared the woman’s waist where it met the slate. ‘Skin coloration in the region of the trunk indicates that gravitational sinking is well advanced.’
‘And we’re not,’ Vestey said. ‘Come on, Mr Niall, we’re twelve hours behind.’
* * * *
By now the rest of Vestey’s crew had arrived. While they searched outside, I took the sitting room and study, Vestey the bedrooms. I was glad of the solitude; I needed to shake off Vestey’s voice. It had been living in my head all week, didactic, withering, full of hard judgments.
I glanced around the quiet, curtained rooms. I formed an impression of good taste and the money to support it. The floorboards gleamed, the rugs were muted and thick, a smell of polish clung to the simple, expensive chairs and cabinets. The ceilings were high and the entire wall space of the sitting room had been given over to turn-of-the-century oils and watercolours. In the study I found filing cabinets, bookshelves and a massive desk topped with scuffed, ink-stained leather. A computer crouched cold and mute on a portable stand. Neither room had been disturbed. They might have witnessed nothing more violent than a sneeze.
That’s when I found the money. As I remember it, I noticed a gap at the top of the desk drawer and eased it further open with my pen. The money was fanned out over the surface of a writing pad as if it had been tossed in there carelessly. I looked, touched, gathered it up, I don’t know why. A hundred and fifty dollars in twenties and fifties. Not enough to wonder at.
‘No-one to see, Mr Niall. No-one to know.’
Vestey’s voice was low and goading but somehow a chill came off it. I didn’t move. He approached me silently, smiling a little. He stopped. We looked at the money. Neither of us earns much. ‘The job is thankless. Come on, sport, what do you say?’
He reached out and took a fifty-dollar note. He folded it, never taking his eyes off my face, and slipped it into my top pocket. ‘We could do ourselves a favour,’ he said.
I tried to read him. Almost the first thing he’d ever said to me was, ‘Give them the eye, Sunshine. Define them. Nail them.’ He was doing it now. But it was more than that, somehow. He was making me his, I could feel it. A kind of aversion gripped me. ‘Nup.’ I took the note from my pocket, handed it to him and backed away. ‘Nup.’
He half smiled. I watched him straighten the note, snap it with both hands, drop it in the drawer. ‘Incident passed,’ he said.
* * * *
He continued my instruction back at his office.
‘Always start with the victim, Mr Niall. Family. Known associates. Find me someone with motive, means and opportunity, the classic triumvirate. Don’t look startled, Sunshine, I can read. Take motive.’ He touched his forefinger. ‘Revenge? Money? Sex? One of those. Means: the gun. If you can’t find me a gun, find me someone with that signature, pow, in the back of the head. Opportunity. Find me someone who wasn’t definitely somewhere else at the time.’
I began to drift. Vestey looked like a magazine cover but he worked in a clutter of open drawers, overblown files and bent paperclips. His pinboard was famous. He never cleared it. Memos, cards and newspaper clippings were tacked on top of one another like dusty scales, all of it stirring like a forest whenever you walked past it.
‘You with me so far?’
I straightened in my chair.
‘Welcome back. Check parking infringement notices, cab companies, stolen car reports, the airlines. Talk to the neighbours. Take Mack with you to the funeral, get some snaps of the grieving mourners. Above all, concentrate on the Joyce woman. This smacks of a hired gun brought in to settle a grievance. If he’s from the mainland, his real name might be on a passenger list somewhere. I want to see every bit of information the moment it comes in. When you turn up someone who can help us with our enquiries, we pounce immediately, no farting around. We need evidence, Sunshine, physical evidence tying culprit to victim, culprit to scene. Motive, means and opportunity mean fuck-all if you haven’t got evidence.’
The voice wound through and around me. When the briefing was over I went upstairs, opened files on the victims, hassled the lab people, ground a phone into my ear, all the other things that Vestey had taught me to do. Every thirty minutes he asked me for an update. ‘We’re losing time, Mr Niall. Evidence. Find me evidence.’ I felt that I was existing on a knife edge, that I’d miss something vital and let the culprit slip away.
Sally’s report came in first: no fingerprints that shouldn’t have been there. Later ballistics called to confirm Vestey’s suspicions: no bullets, only unidentifiable fragments. The pathologist grumbled that he wasn’t ready to file a report yet, but he was prepared to say that both women died at the same time and he had no reason to doubt the 7.03 time on Nina Gait’s watch.
There was nothing in Nina Gait’s background to excite attention. She’d been renting the converted stable for six months. Her job entailed regular lay-overs in various Ansett destinations, sometimes for days at a time. The last one had been Brisbane, hence the postcard.
So I concentrated on the Joyce woman, as Vestey advised, and by mid-afternoon had come up with an inheritance and an estranged husband. The inheritance was Joyce Constructions, a shadowy outfit named in two royal commissions. The husband was a nasty piece of work called Liam Flann, who’d worked his way up from union muscle to son-in-law. I pulled Flann’s file and found convictions for demanding money with menaces, assault and resisting arrest. His photograph showed vacant eyes in a good-looking face. Rose had been twenty when she married him. Eight years later, when her father died, she’d dropped Flann’s name, settled an allowance on him, and told him to get out. He lived in West Moonah now. I rang the local CIB, who told me that Flann moved in a world defined by the TAB, corner pubs and his mother’s house in Glenorchy. He often got drunkenly sentimental about his marriage, and he gambled, got into brawls and was a general nuisance.
‘I like it,’ Vestey said. Dig a bit deeper and tomorrow we’ll go and shake his tree.’
* * * *
Eight o’clock the next morning found me accelerating past a dozy bus on Brooker Avenue.
‘Steady on, Sunshine, set an example to the citizens. You were saying about the Melbourne casino?’
There was an unusual degree of tension in Vestey. It made me nervous, made me think I’d overlooked something. ‘None of the Tasmanian casinos will let Flann play,’ I said, ‘so he’s forced to go interstate. He spent the weekend at the Crown Casino in Melbourne. On Sunday evening he was barred from the gaming rooms for being drunk and abusive. According to the phone record for his room, he called Rose Joyce three times that night.’
Vestey grew more tense. ‘Christ, I wish you’d told me this earlier. Did you check the airlines?’
‘Listed on Ansett’s 4.50 to Hobart on the day of the murder. The flight takes just over an hour, giving him plenty of time to pick up a gun and be in Sandy Bay by 7.03.’
‘His first big case, and the lad’s on a roll,’ Vestey said, finally settling back in his seat. He didn’t speak again but sat concentrated and still. I had no idea what he was thinking or what he expected. His rank meant that he didn’t have to do this sort of hackwork, but he was a coalface cop, not a pen-pusher, and I also guessed that he didn’t want me to stuff things up.
I slowed a block short of Flann’s but Vestey told me to keep going. ‘Right outside the front door, Sunshine, large as life.’ He’d become hard and sharp again. ‘It brings on the attitude. Have I explained the attitude? Defiance, the sulks, resentment, sometimes all three at once. You’ll see what I mean. You take the front. Give me a minute, then knock. If he comes out shooting, you know what to do.’
Flann’s house was the kind of cheap, two-storey glass and cement-brick structure that gets called a townhouse in the brochures. I contemplated the tasteless front door while Vestey went around to the back. I pushed the buzzer, waited, pushed it again. I pounded on the door with my fist.
I was stepping back to look up at the upstairs windows when I heard the first shot. It was the second shot that got me running.
I rounded the corner and paused, unholstering the .38 I’d signed out before we left the squad room. It was all sundeck and glass at the back of the house. The sliding glass door was open and I had a clear view across the kitchen to the bottom step of a staircase showing through an archway at the other end. Vestey stood a short distance from the archway. He was half-crouched with his back to me, tensely regarding a body sprawled at the base of the stairs. As I watched, he straightened, stepped past the body and darted a quick look up the stairs. Apparently satisfied, he began to climb them, his gun extended.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Flann might have friends there. I went in fast and low, through the archway, and into each of the ground-floor rooms. Nothing.
I returned to the body. I could see that it was Flann. He wore underpants and needed a shave. I stood back, trying to work it out. There was a gouge in the wallpaper near my head. Vestey’s first shot had missed. I wondered how he was going to justify this. I wondered what he’d want me to tell the board of inquiry. I could hear his voice winding through me.
That’s when I spotted the gun. Flann had dropped it in a patch of dustballs and shadows at the base of the stairs. It was a little Colt, a .22 revolver, the kind of gun you’d use if you wanted a quiet, clean killing.
‘As I told you,’ Vestey said, coming down the stairs. The bad guys are dumb.’
* * * *
In the days that followed, Vestey rode high at police headquarters, despite his aloofness. Even I earned a couple of friendly winks in the corridors.
But I was worried sick. There was an outcry in the civil liberties camp, Flann’s mother and brothers cried ‘set-up’, and internal affairs kept going over my statement with me. There were TV cameras, abusive phone calls, my name in the paper for days at a time.
I needn’t have worried, though. Vestey had commendations a mile long, the gun was real and loaded with hollow-points, and Liam Flann was the prime suspect in a double-murder inquiry. We came out of it with a pat on the back.
Typically, Vestey had no thanks for anyone. ‘Police culture, my son. Take a group of unimaginative, undereducated men, give them a job that sets them apart from society, make them feel overworked and undervalued, and you can rely on them to stonewall and close ranks when the outside world gets too nosy.’
I couldn’t work him out. I knew all about feeling different, undervalued, I felt it every time I walked down the street. I liked the idea of a police culture, even if bad cops did get protected sometimes. I concluded that Vestey had a kind of puritan’s distaste for excess, deviance, manipulation and dishonesty of any kind. He must have been offended every minute of every day. It made me wonder if he had a threshold.
Life went on. We still had to prepare for the coronial inquiry. ‘I don’t want any “death at the hands of a person or persons unknown” about this one, Sunshine,’ Vestey told me. ‘This isn’t going to be another unsolved mystery for a self-ordering society, a juicy story for the daily rags. We can lay this one on Flann. I want a solid, clear-cut submission, no fuck-ups.’
‘Yes, sir.’
So I went back over the material step by step, extracting the relevant evidence from the mass of detail, constructing a character and motive profile of Liam Flann, building a logical case. It was meticulous, satisfying, calming work. I double-checked everything: the physical evidence; Flann’s movements; his state of mind in the period prior to the murders.
* * * *
I came unstuck with the airline. It was the fiftieth call of the day and I wasn’t in the mood for mistakes. ‘How could it touch down at 6.55 if it left Melbourne at 4.50 and it’s only a one-hour flight? Check again.’
‘I have checked, sir,’ the Ansett clerk said. ‘It’s all to do with adjusting the clocks for summer time. Tasmania starts a month earlier and finishes a month later than Victoria. They’re synchronised now, though.’
I went cold. ‘He has to collect his luggage, get home, get a gun, get to her place. No way could he have shot her.’
‘Sir?’
‘Never mind.’
I hung up.
For some reason then I thought of the mother. After the shooting of her son, Bridie Flann went on every current affairs program. Everyone at headquarters mocked her, and Vestey had things to say about Irish clannishness, said because I was Irish I’d know what happens to the truth when mother love is involved, yet I’d been impressed by the woman. It wasn’t only her singular and unapologetic grief, it was her absolute conviction that her son was innocent. ‘Liam Michael,’ she said, ‘would do a lot of things but he wouldn’t do this.’
The thing is, it took me a while to think clearly. My first instinct was for self-preservation. I didn’t know how I was going to explain my carelessness to Vestey. I could hear his voice peeling layers off me until I was worse than nothing in his eyes, a slapdash cop who couldn’t get his facts straight. It didn’t make it any better when I thought more about it and realised an innocent man had been shot. The hassle was Vestey’s but I was implicated in it.
That brought me by degrees to thinking about Liam Flann, his mother and her grief and vehemence, the way she spoke about him in the present tense: ‘My boy doesn’t use guns. He might punch someone, but he doesn’t use guns. He’s been set up.’
It’s not that difficult for a policeman to come by an unlicensed gun. Vestey could’ve been holding onto it for years. But I needed evidence, and the most crucial, the gun amnesty inventory, was missing from the files. I kept digging, finding my answer in the proof-sheets at the Mercury’s photo library. The front-page photograph was no help—Vestey is obscuring the table on which the amnesty guns are displayed—but the photographer had shot two rolls of film that day. Several of the photographs clearly show four .22 pistols among the handguns. The guns were melted down several days later—Vestey’s orders—but according to the firm that carried out the job, three .22 handguns were destroyed, not four.
For a while I wondered if Vestey had intended to replace the gun after shooting the two women, knowing that it would be melted down and there would be no ballistics evidence to link it to the murders. He’d have assumed the murders would remain unsolved— explained as someone settling an old grievance against the Joyce family, perhaps.
Then I wondered if he’d been opportunistic. He’d seen where my inquiries were leading me, and had retrieved the gun from the storeroom and conveniently implicated Flann by dropping it next to his dead body.
But the more I think about Vestey, the more convinced I am that he’s not the sort to improvise like that. I remember the way he guided me through the investigation, pointing me where he wanted me to go. I think he had Flann marked for the murders all along. He simply waited until all the factors were right. The one thing he hadn’t anticipated was Flann’s trip to Melbourne. I remember Vestey’s anxiety about it, and the flight times, and the way he relaxed when the timing seemed to fit.
I don’t mind admitting that I feel spooked now. It’s like I’m being watched, like footsteps are behind me only there’s no-one there. I don’t know whom to approach with all this. I don’t know who’ll listen.
And until a moment ago I couldn’t even tie Vestey to the women. I couldn’t see why he wanted Rose Joyce dead unless she was very bent and he’d turned vigilante, and that didn’t seem likely.
Not Rose Joyce.
That’s how he wanted us to read it.
Nina Gait.
The evidence has been here all the time—a dusty postcard, curling at the edges, all but obscured under the yellowing clippings and notices on Vestey’s pinboard. Anyone would have forgotten they had it there. I wouldn’t have looked twice at it myself if I hadn’t noticed a red ‘ME’ scrawled in the sky above the harbour, a red arrow isolating a tiny figure on the Opera House steps. She’d sent him the card two years ago. It doesn’t take two years to fall out of love with one person and in love with another. It doesn’t take two years to learn how to hate, either. Vestey has a lifetime of hate behind him.