Текст книги "Take Out"
Автор книги: Felicity Young
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The evening was damp and breezy. Stevie buttoned up her denim jacket and trudged toward her car at the farthest end of the hospital carpark, towards the railway track. Considering how packed the carparks were, there were surprisingly few people about. The lights of the hospital dimmed as she left them behind, the occasional street lamp impotent in the grainy light of dusk. Several years ago a series of attacks on hospital staff had prompted increased security patrols, but she’d seen no sign of them so far this evening.
As she walked, she thought back to the conversation with Col and Monty. Col thought that the Pavels had been the victims of some kind of gangland revenge killing, something to do with their involvement in a people-trafficking racket. It seemed her suspicions about an internal power struggle had been close, but on a much larger scale than any she had imagined.
Col had continued to fill her in once Monty’s malfunctioning machine had been seen to. The organisation sounded huge, efficient and structured like a business with primary producers, retailers, suppliers and middlemen. The various hierarchical levels weren’t arranged in a logical pattern though, but via a confusing maze of passageways and dead ends, with members linked to those immediately below and above them on a need-to-know basis only. It was unlikely that even Mamasan and The Crow would know who was at the very heart of the labyrinth.
How could their under-resourced authorities cope with something like that, she wondered as she wound her way through the obstacle course of parked cars. How could she cope?
And Monty seemed to think that now the Feds were involved, she could simply step back and withdraw. He obviously didn’t know her as well as he liked to think he did; didn’t know that the only way she could shake this overwhelming feeling of helplessness was to fight it. First the baby and now Skye; she couldn’t just get up and leave now even if she wanted to.
Sorry, Mont.
Her first task was to discover the truth behind Skye’s death. With the evidence as it stood, they had virtually nothing to prove she had been murdered at all, let alone by whom. There was even a chance that the people traffickers weren’t involved at all, that her death was just a fluke accident. All she had to fuel her suspicions were a dysphasic old woman, an unused Ventolin inhaler, and a paint scrape that could have been caused by a carpark bingle.
A carpark bingle. Stevie thought back to the conversation with Fowler when she’d been dressing his head wound in her kitchen. He’d mentioned that his father’s green vintage car was at the panel beater because of a ‘carpark bingle.’ Could Fowler have run Skye off the road that night? Surely not. He may have had an axe to grind with Skye, but he wouldn’t have killed her because of it—would he? His father’s vintage was green, but so was Pavel’s Jag. She shook her head; amazed at how her mind could wander when she was tired and overwrought; this was hardly a logical thought process.
The wind scythed through her thin jacket, the hairs on the back of her neck prickled with cold. She turned up her collar. A distant streetlight illuminated the roof of Monty’s pitted Land Rover near the back fence. Monty’s car was also green. Note to self: never buy a green car.
She increased her pace.
A man climbed out of a car on her right. She couldn’t see his face.
His door slammed.
Instinctively she pulled her keys from her pocket and held one like a shank in her hand. The man beeped his car locked and turned. His face was still indistinct in the darkness. In the next instant he was looming over her. She saw him lifting a blunt object, ready to strike. She made a feint toward him with the key, stopped and drew up short. ‘Fowler, what the hell!’
Out of the shadows, the blunt object became a bunch of broken-necked daffodils. Fowler took a step back. ‘Jesus, Hooper, you’re not going to stab me are you?’
Stevie’s smacked a hand against her thigh. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Looking for you. Your phone was off so I figured you’d be at the hospital. I was heading up to the ward, hoping to catch you, when I saw your car over there.’ He indicated the far fence with the drooping daffodils and must have sensed her incredulity. ‘Oh, these are for the Inspector,’ he explained.
Stevie pressed a palm to her forehead and gritted her teeth. ‘Shit.’
‘Jittery, huh?’
‘I think we both have reason to be, don’t you?’ She unlocked the Land Rover, hurled her bag onto the passenger seat and turned to face him.
‘ You’re okay,’ Fowler said, carefully placing the flowers on the bonnet of the car. ‘It’s not your name all over the papers and in the case notes—it’s me that should be worried.’
Stevie paused and tried to compose herself. ‘So ... what is it you want?’
Something in Fowler seemed to deflate. He leaned back against the car. ‘Hooper, please—I need you to come with me to see Mrs Hardegan.’
She folded her arms and regarded him coolly. ‘I’m not used to this humility; it doesn’t suit you.’ Then a thought struck her. She looked back at him with surprise. ‘Wait a minute. You mean you haven’t even told the old lady about her son yet?’
‘No. That’s why I wanted to catch you here.’ He pointed to his car. ‘This is a hire car, we don’t have any spare in the pool,’ he said as if that somehow explained everything. His eyes dropped to his shiny shoes. ‘I don’t think the old lady likes me much. I’m not sure what to say, how to handle her—you’re, er, quicker on your feet than I am.’
This was the nearest he’d got to sheepish about their near miss the other night. Guess I should be grateful for what I can get, she thought, rolling her eyes in much the same way Skye might have done. ‘And why might she not like you, I wonder?’
Fowler plunged his hands into his pockets and looked toward the railway track. A train hooted and the ground beneath them shook as it slowed toward the station.
‘Well?’ Stevie prompted.
‘I think she knows. Knows about Skye and me, how we used to, er, go out. Skye must have told her about the assault, that I didn’t do anything about it.’
Stevie said nothing.
‘I’d do anything to make up for that now, you know that?’ Fowler shook his head at her lack of reaction, waved a questioning hand. ‘You don’t seem very surprised about any of this.’
Stevie expelled a breath. ‘That’s because I already knew.’
‘You knew?’
‘I’m a detective.
‘How...?’
‘I detected it.’ She didn’t want to go into what she’d discovered from Skye’s mother, not when there was still that other niggling matter to sort out. ‘Wait here a moment. I need to make a phone call.’
Out of Fowler’s earshot, she called Mark Douglas on his mobile number. ‘That paint sample,’ she said when he picked up.
‘Has anyone ever told you you’re a terrier, Stevie?’
‘Frequently.’
‘I thought it could have at least waited till office hours.’ A woman laughed in the background—Blood-Spatter Jane?
‘Does that mean the results are through?’
‘Faxed to me from Canada just before I left work this evening.’
Shit, he knew this was urgent, he could have at least texted her. It was gratifying to know he was at last getting a life—but did it have to be right now?’ Mark laughed down the phone as if he knew what she was thinking. ‘Green Jag XK.’
‘Definitely not a vintage?’ She looked to where Fowler sat slumped against the bonnet of his hire car.
‘No,’ he said.
Stevie felt her shoulders sag with relief. ‘John Pavel had a green Jag,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘and it’s still missing.’
‘Same model?’
‘Can’t remember. I’ll have to look it up.’
‘Mark, the movie’s starting,’ the woman called out.
Stevie thanked him, unable to keep the smile from her face. Still smiling she returned to Fowler and tapped him on the arm. ‘C’mon, we may as well go together. I’ll drop you back here for your car when we’ve seen Mrs Hardegan.’
As she drove she told Fowler about the paint results and he reminded her of the model of Pavel’s Jag, an XK convertible, 2006. ‘A match.’ Stevie said. ‘Pavel might be alive after all.’
‘If he is, and he thought Skye was onto him, he’d have reason enough to kill her, wouldn’t he? But surely the car would have been spotted by now? There’s a statewide search going on for it.’
Stevie shrugged. Number plates were easy enough to swap. A cop would only run a check of the plates if he had cause to be suspicious of the vehicle. ‘I’ll have to contact Angus, get him to trace every 2006 convertible Jag in the state—no make it country, irrespective of plates.’
‘You’ll be popular.’
‘I’m hardly flavour of the month right now.’
‘How the mighty have fallen.’
‘Have you always been such a jerk, or has it taken a lifetime of cultivation?’
He gave a small grunt of what might have been amusement.
They turned from Thomas Street onto Stirling Highway. The university’s clock tower glowed brighter than the moon. Stevie’s thoughts jumped from Jon Pavel to Skye as the car idled at a red light. Perhaps now was finally the right time to ask Fowler what had happened between them. People tended to find it easier to talk in a car, especially when it was dark.
She voiced the question. He turned his head away from her toward a garrulous group of students near a bus stop, playing soccer with an empty beer can. His shoulders moved as he took a breath to speak, stopped, as if changing his mind and thinking better of it.
‘Go on,’ Stevie prompted gently.
‘I suppose you have a right to know, she was your friend after all.’ He let out a resigned sigh. Stevie took off from the lights and proceeded down the highway just under the speed limit. Mrs Hardegan’s was only a few kays from here and she knew he’d need time for this.
‘We’d been going out for a few months,’ he said at last. ‘I thought we were getting on well. I liked being with her; it was more than the sex, you know? She made me laugh, I always felt, well, lighter when I was with her. I think she liked me too. I helped her with things, boring things she couldn’t be bothered with like finance for her first car, tax forms, that kind of thing. Her landlord was giving her some hassles so I had a word with him and got her out of the shit. Even took her to Bali for a short break.’
You were being used, mate, Stevie thought. That was the contradiction that was Skye—kind, considerate and compassionate to everything and everyone except the men in her life.
‘She also took me home to the family farm to meet her folks. I mean, that’s a good sign isn’t it?’
Stevie kept her eyes on the road, nodded.
‘One night I called round to her place on spec and caught her at it with a guy in her flat.’ He returned to the view from the passenger window. ‘I tried not to yell, asked her calmly who he was. She said she didn’t know and then she smiled. The smile triggered something in me that I couldn’t help. I lost it, grabbed the guy, was going to beat his brains out, but he pulled a knife from the bedside table before I could get the first punch in.’
Stevie frowned and indicated to the scar on the right side of his cheek. ‘Is that how you got that?’
He turned back to her, brushed the scar with the tips of his fingers, seemed surprised by her question. ‘That? Oh, no—a dodgy mole. I think the surgeon must’ve been drunk.’
She hoped the darkness of the car’s interior would hide her smile—some Action Man.
‘No, I didn’t do anything once I saw the knife,’ he continued. ‘Turned my back on the pair of them and walked out. Skye laughed, I’ll never forget that sound, it followed me all the way down the stairwell...’
Stevie bit her lip and concentrated on her driving.
‘But that’s no excuse for me ignoring her assault complaint,’ he added.
‘No, it’s not.’
They turned into Mrs Hardegan’s long street. Federation mansions, modern reproductions and concrete houses with flat roofs cast shadows over the remaining stunted originals. An architectural survival of the fittest, Stevie decided as she regarded the quiet street. The buildings in it were as competitive for space as trees in a rainforest.
Fowler filled Stevie in on the details of the Marius and Rodika interviews. ‘After a bit of prompting they both admitted to suspecting that Pavel and Hardegan were in the skin trade, although both denied any involvement with that side of the business. Legitimately, they were on a pretty good wicket anyway, didn’t need to break the law. Rodika was apparently Delia’s cousin and an old employee of Pavel’s from their Romanian days.’
‘No surprises there, an old tart if ever I saw one—I wonder why she didn’t speak up and claim the baby: she is his only next of kin.’
‘Because she knew she’d be questioned, I guess. She wasn’t involved in Pavel’s people trafficking, but she was still here illegally. If the immigration authorities found out she’d got into the country on false papers, she’d have been deported. She probably will be now, anyway.’
‘If Rodika is Delia’s cousin,’ Stevie said after she’d driven another block, ‘she must know something about the baby’s origins. Surely Delia confided in her? The poor woman had no other friends or family in this country.’
‘I asked Rodika that, but all she said was that as far as she knew he was legally adopted from Thailand.’
‘Are the results back on her prints?’
‘Yes, but they don’t match those found in the baby’s room.’
‘Bugger, but it was worth a try. And Marius,’ she asked. ‘How involved is he?’
‘He knew what they were up to all right, but won’t admit it, probably just turned a blind eye. He’s very keen on the restaurant and club. I get the feeling he’ll be approaching his bank for a loan provided he’s cleared of any involvement with the traffickers. Reckon he’s secretly delighted about all this.’
Stevie tapped her fingers against the steering wheel and thought for a moment. ‘Do they have any idea who else is behind the trafficking operation?’
‘Only that they are very powerful, unscrupulous operators.’
She told Fowler what she had learned from Col Zimmel about The Crow and Mamasan. He listened with interest. ‘So you think Pavel and Hardegan had been doing the dirty on the Mamasan, ripping her off?’
‘At first I thought they’d both been singled out for some kind of retribution. Now I’m wondering if Pavel escaped before they got to him, and left Hardegan to carry the can.’ She continued to dwell on the matter. ‘Did anyone check further into that house fire from last year?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Then find out as much as you can, contact the arson squad. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Mamasan was behind that too. If Pavel was as valuable to her as Col thinks he was, she might have thought she could just pull him into line with a warning. There’s a chance she even let him go this time, just killing his wife instead.’
Fowler paused. ‘You always this bossy, Hooper?’
His earlier humility seemed to have disappeared, she noticed. She ignored him, busy concentrating on another thought tugging at her mind, one that hadn’t left since the whole business had started. ‘And the baby—has anyone found out how they managed to acquire him?’
‘Not sure.’
‘Then find that out too.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he saluted—still the same old dickhead.
‘But what about the book-cooking?’ she asked.
‘Marius is feigning ignorance, blaming Pavel.’
‘He’ll probably get away with it too.’ Stevie drew up outside Mrs Hardegan’s. Someone nearby had been burning leaves in their backyard, filling the air with a smoky tang. She found her gaze drawn to the empty shell of the Pavel’s house and thought of The Crow. Her mouth dried. ‘I guess there’s a lot worse people in the world than Dominic Marius,’ she said. (Image 21.1)
Image 21.1
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
To save Mrs Hardegan the effort of walking to open the front door, Stevie and Fowler approached the house through the neat back garden, down a crazy paving pathway bordered with terracotta pots of blooming geraniums.
Mrs Hardegan appeared to be asleep in her chair, but sat bolt upright at the sound of Stevie’s tap upon the glass. Stevie called from the other side of the window and asked if they could come in. The old lady heaved herself up and opened the back door, white hair awry, skin paper-pale.
They apologised for waking her.
‘We weren’t sleeping,’ Mrs Hardegan said, ‘We were writing a letter.’
Stevie’s heart gave a leap. Could she write after all? If she could their problems would be solved. Her hopes were dashed when she glanced toward the table and saw no sign of letter writing paraphernalia. The sewing table had been rearranged since her last visit. A man in a silver frame looked out at her; a handsome man with a smooth young face and prominent cheekbones, dressed in naval uniform—her husband?
‘You remember who we are, Mrs Hardegan?’ Fowler asked as she settled once more into the easy chair by the window.
She glanced up at him, a shadow of contempt falling across her sharp features. Stevie sat down on the footstool and took the soft bony hand in hers. ‘I’m afraid we’ve got some bad news.’
Mrs Hardegan pulled her hand away, leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. ‘The boy, our boy ... he’s dead,’ she said.
Stevie and Fowler exchanged glances. ‘You already knew?’ he asked.
Her eyes flew open. ‘Of course we didn’t know!’
‘We’re sorry for your loss,’ Stevie murmured. ‘I’ve spoken to a social worker. She’ll be in contact with you.’
‘We’ve brought you some flowers.’ Fowler produced the daffodils from behind his back and waited for a thank you that never came. Stevie caught Fowler’s eye. Was he really expecting thanks at a time like this? she wondered.
‘I’ll put them in water,’ he said, hurriedly moving to the kitchenette.
Mrs Hardegan shot Fowler a sceptical look and tossed her head with a humph. ‘Dead flowers.’ Then to Stevie she said, ‘They killed him, didn’t they? Just like they did the other boys.’
‘Yes, we think so.’
‘No surprises there, we saw it coming, we told him. Lie down with dogs and you get carrots.’
‘Can I get you anything ... brandy?’ Fowler asked. He’d put the flowers in water in the sink and was heading toward the liquor cabinet.
‘No, get us this.’ Mrs Hardegan pointed to her sewing basket, which Fowler dutifully lifted from the table.
‘No, not that, stupid boy!’
‘This?’ Stevie said, extracting the tapestry from beneath the basket and handing it over. A mess of tangled wool, it was almost impossible to see which side of the tapestry was which. ‘We know Ralph was involved with Jon Pavel’s activities,’ Stevie went on, ‘and we think we now know what those activities were. They were bringing girls over from Thailand to work against their will as prostitutes.’
‘Snoodle pinkerds — we told you that.’ Mrs Hardegan didn’t look up, carefully pierced the fabric with her needle, her face a lined study of concentration.
Stevie frowned. ‘Snoodle pinkerds? You mean girls—prostitutes?’
The soft expulsion of breath said yes, of course that’s what she meant.
‘Is there anything else we should know about this? Can you tell us anything at all about the people who killed Ralph and Delia?’ Stevie asked.
Mrs Hardegan finished her stitch and looked thoughtfully at the picture on the table. Finally she said, ‘The Japs killed him.’
‘Bloody Japs, bloody Japs!’
The sudden racket made Stevie clap her hand to her chest. She’d forgotten all about that damned bird hanging in its cage in the far corner of the room.
‘Cover up our feathered friend,’ Mrs Hardegan commanded. Fowler placed the blanket over the cage. The parrot gave a squawk of protest and fell silent.
‘But it’s still our fault,’ Mrs Hardegan continued. ‘We couldn’t help it, couldn’t love him—no wonder the boy turned out like he did.’ She paused, her mouth was turned down but Stevie could see no evidence of tears in the age-washed eyes. ‘We’ll tell you soon what happened, we’ll tell our story, but only when we’re ready. You must have hours and minutes.’
Hours and minutes: patience. This was something Stevie found to be in very short supply. ‘But Mrs Hardegan, please, tell us. Do you know who killed your son?’
‘The Japs did—didn’t we just tell you that?’
Stevie looked toward the parrot cage, waiting for the nerve-grating echo, but it remained silent, thank God, cage gently swinging from the roof beam. She’d better steer the conversation to smoother waters. ‘The baby, Joshua, what can you tell us about him?’
Mrs Hardegan began another laborious stitch. Fowler sighed, put his hands in his pockets and started to pace to and fro. Stevie bit her lower lip. ‘Fowler...’
‘They stole him,’ Mrs Hardegan said at last.
Fowler stopped pacing and met Stevie’s eye.
‘And when the boy found out about it,’ Mrs Hardegan continued, ‘he went quite mad. He was always stupid, only a poor uneducated peasant, but nice, we liked him despite all that. But then stupid turned to mad.’
‘What boy, Mrs Hardegan? Jon Pavel? Skye? Ralph?’ Stevie asked. ‘No, that boy.’ The old lady pointed to the Pavel house with the tip of her needle.
‘Delia Pavel, you mean Delia Pavel went mad?’
Mrs Hardegan stabbed the needle into the tapestry and left it there, as if she’d had enough of her sewing. ‘He came to us and told us what the boys were doing and then that boy of mine said yes they were when we asked him. And then we went mad too.’
With a rush of excitement, Stevie sprang up from the footstool and began to speak rapidly to Fowler. ‘Maybe Delia didn’t know the baby was illegally adopted—although with the upstairs bedroom as it was, she had to have an idea of her husband’s other activities. Somehow she found out that the baby was stolen and the knowledge tipped her over the edge. The madness must be the depression Skye suspected Delia of having and the reason for the house being kept in such a mess. Delia must have confided her fears to Mrs Hardegan, telling her about Ralph’s involvement in her husband’s illegal activities, which Ralph later admitted to his mother when she questioned him.’ No wonder the old lady had had a stroke, Stevie added silently.
Mrs Hardegan nodded her head; all her words had escaped her now. The news of her son’s death had taken its toll, despite her efforts at hiding it. She put her tapestry back on the table and sank back into her chair.
‘Mind waiting for me in the car?’ Stevie said to Fowler. ‘I won’t be long.’
Fowler hesitated before nodding a sombre goodbye to the old lady. He was about to move when she held up a finger. ‘No, wait where you are,’ she commanded. ‘You are to come back another time. We have some books belonging to the boy and we want you to take them to his parents.’
‘I can get them now if you like, it’s no trouble, I’ll be seeing them at the funeral.’ Fowler made as if to move toward the book-crowded hallway.
‘We said not now. Later. You will have to take them to that place, where they live, that place with all the dust and woolly animals. It’s a long drive but you will do it.’
Fowler said he would. They watched him as he opened the back door and stepped into the garden, shoulders sagging under his creased suit jacket. Mrs Hardegan looked at Stevie and let out a breath. ‘Stupid is as stupid does. But not a bad boy.’
Stevie agreed, tried again to clasp the old woman’s hand. This time she didn’t pull away. ‘Are you going to be all right?’ she asked. ‘Can I get you anything, anyone I can ring? A priest maybe?’
‘We’ll miss the boy.’
Skye, Delia or Ralph?
Stevie didn’t ask.
Stevie called in at the deli and paid the girl Leila for the DVD. Fowler curled his lip when she climbed back into the car and tossed Gone with the Wind into his lap. ‘What you watching this crap for?’ he asked as he held the cover up to the interior light.
‘It helps me relax. Don’t you have a favourite movie you watch over and over again, something you can just veg out to?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve watched Saw 3 a few times, I guess.’
Right.
After dropping Fowler back at the hospital for his car, she returned to her mother’s house, read to Izzy for a while and then settled on the couch in front of the TV. She’d had little sleep over the last few nights, her mind spinning like a hamster on a wheel even when she did get the opportunity. Tonight she was asleep before Scarlet and Rhett could fall into their first clinch.
Lilly Hardegan continued to sit in her chair well after her visitors had gone. She didn’t feel like writing any more of the letter tonight and anyway, the Thai girl knew the rest of it. She wondered if Mai would see the irony of it all.
As she gazed at the picture of Percy on her sewing table, grief wrenched her to the core. She’d refused the policewoman’s offer of a priest, didn’t need one. What good was a priest, she thought, if you don’t have the religion to go with it? Lilly Hardegan had lost her faith in the jungles of New Guinea some sixty-odd years ago. (Image 22.2)
Image 22.2
