Текст книги "Take Out"
Автор книги: Felicity Young
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
THURSDAY
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
After a good night’s rest, Stevie felt energised for the first time in days. She dropped Izzy off at school and did some grocery shopping, stocking up the pantry and freezer with Monty’s favourites in preparation for his return from hospital. She bought soy sauce and egg noodles, Asian greens and coriander. It seemed a shame to condemn the fresh tiger prawns to the freezer, but she wasn’t exactly sure when he would be discharged and couldn’t risk food poisoning on his first day home. Wait a minute, prawns were full of cholesterol, weren’t they? Vegetable curry with lots of healthy chickpeas, she decided, that’s what they’d have, and enough chilli to blow the tongue off a giraffe.
She pulled up outside their house and looked seaward. A row of conifers guarded the coarse lawn of the beachfront near the café. Before their curry, if Monty were up to it, they’d sit there on the bench near the swings and watch the sun set, talk about anything but work, talk about Izzy, talk about their new house.
She found the revised extension/renovation plans waiting in a cardboard tube in her letterbox. The architect must have dropped them off while she was out—God only knew she hadn’t been home much over the last few days. There was a note saying that he’d implemented the changes they’d discussed at their last meeting, and as a result these plans would have to be re-submitted to the council. Christ, when was all this red tape and dilly-dallying going to end? Just as well she didn’t have a sledgehammer close at hand or she would’ve been tempted to start the demolition herself.
She spent the afternoon at the hospital with Monty, but omitted to tell him the latest developments with Mrs Hardegan and what she’d found out about the baby’s illegal adoption. Under normal circumstances she would have valued his input, but now she wanted him to think she had withdrawn or lost interest. She didn’t think she could cope with any more staged heart attacks.
They discussed the revised plans, which lay stretched over his bed like an extra sheet. She’d also brought in some interior decorating magazines and they pored over them together, selecting fittings and furniture, trying to balance the old-world feel to which they aspired with the comforts of modern life.
‘We’ll need air-conditioning,’ Monty said.
‘I don’t think so, too expensive and not necessary—besides, those things on the walls are a terrible eyesore. I’d prefer ceiling fans and sea breezes.’
‘It doesn’t have to be on the wall. I have a mate in the business, Frank Caravello, he’ll be able to give us a good deal on ducting.’
‘You have friends everywhere.’
Monty shrugged. ‘All ex-cops who left the job early enough to start again with new careers...’ He broke off and gazed at the blank TV screen above his bed.
Stevie knew the direction his thoughts were going. ‘I don’t think you should be thinking about that now. The doctor said you should take one day at a time. You’re still recovering; you mustn’t start making crucial decisions just yet. The house should be giving you enough to think about for the moment.’
‘If I’m not working, how can we pay for the house? We can’t borrow any more money from your mother.’
Stevie rolled up the plans and slid them back into the cardboard tube, her way of indicating that the conversation was over. Her mother was a wealthy woman, having sold the family cattle station when prices were high. She’d be beside herself if she knew how stretched they were despite her generous loan, and it was something they were both determined to keep from her.
Once more Mont insisted that she and Izzy stay at her mother’s for the night. ‘And then after that, they’ll be letting me out of this place and I can protect you.’
She smiled back at him, ‘Sure you can,’ and relaxed back into her chair. ‘God, I’m looking forward to getting back to normal again.’
‘I need to find some stairs.’ He wriggled his eyebrows suggestively; money worries apparently forgotten.
‘Our house has no stairs. Bad luck.’
‘Then I’ll practise on the beach steps.’ He took hold of her arm and pulled her toward him, cupping her breast in his large hand and giving her a full kiss on the lips. ‘Y’know,’ he murmured as he continued to knead her flesh. ‘I don’t think I’m going to need to practise for this at all.’
The door whooshed open. ‘Feeling better are we, Mr McGuire?’ the soft-faced Irish nurse said as they quickly pulled apart.
‘Home soon,’ Monty said.
‘Only if you behave yourself.’
For many years Stevie and her mother, Dot, had lived on the same street. It was a convenient arrangement that suited them both when Izzy was born and Stevie still very much on her own. Now, Dot’s was almost half an hour’s drive from their new place near the beach, though it still served as a home away from home for Izzy. Dot had a large backyard with a fishpond and a small gazebo. Her house was immaculate with deep spongy carpets, vanilla cream walls and a tasteful collection of antiques.
As if in keeping with the civilised surroundings, Izzy tended to behave like a model child when she stayed with her grandmother. Sometimes Stevie felt that Dot had no inkling about what the kid could be like at home, as if her tales of horror were exaggerated or made up. Which was why she couldn’t help smiling when she opened the front door to the sound of Dot’s raised voice and her own child wailing back at her.
‘What’s going on?’ Stevie asked her mother, who appeared red-faced from the kitchen, blowing a loose tendril of silver-blonde hair from her eyes. Stevie gazed into her own clear-blue eyes looking back at her. They had the same colouring, were physically alike in so many ways other than height. Dot Hooper was ballet-dancer petite, whereas Stevie took her height from her father’s side of the family. If she aged half as well as her mother, she reflected, she’d be happy. This reminded her of something. She hadn’t yet seen the age-enhanced picture of Jennifer Granger, and made a mental note to ask Col if it was finished.
She tuned back in to what Dot was saying.
‘She’s had a bad day at school; said she got in trouble with the teacher for not bringing her reading book back this morning. She wanted me to drive all the way to your place and get it. I told her no, and now she’s refusing to do her homework. The plumber didn’t come, you know, the guest room loo is still blocked, and I can’t find anyone to cart away that tree branch over the fence.’
‘Sounds like you’ve had a bad day.’
‘Tell me about it. About the only good thing that’s happened is that one of Izzy’s friends’ mothers thought I was you. When I explained I was the grandmother, her eyes nearly popped out of her head. Maybe those herbal skin pills really are working.’
Or maybe, Stevie thought guiltily, I’m so rarely at school for pick-up, no one knows who I am.
I am a bad mother.
‘I’ll go and have a word with Izz,’ she said, hiding the pang of self-knowledge.
Dot slipped the apron over her head and hung it over one of the hall hooks. ‘You do that. I need some fresh air, won’t be long—keep an eye on the roast will you? It’ll need turning down soon.’
Dot closed the door behind her and Stevie let out a sigh of relief. She never liked disciplining Izzy when Dot was around: Dot who’d raised four children in the middle of nowhere and always knew best.
She found Izzy in the kitchen, head in her arms at the Baltic pine table. The oven sizzled gently, the delicious aroma of roast lamb wafting around the room.
If she hadn’t known otherwise she’d have thought her daughter had sneaked a peak at Gone with the Wind —she was sobbing up a storm worthy of Scarlett O’Hara. When Stevie asked what was up, Izzy repeated what Dot had said, and more. ‘I left my book at home, that’s why I couldn’t hand it in. It’s stupid living here with Nanna, stupid! I want Dad to come home so we can go back to the beach. I need my reading book and I need to go home now!’
The sizzle from the oven began to intensify, the roast snapped and crackled. Stevie turned the temperature down and swung sharply on her daughter. ‘Enough of that—it’ll take too long to drive home and get it now. It’s getting late and Nanna’s put a roast in the oven. Try and calm down, having a tantrum won’t help.’
Izzy slapped her palms upon the table. ‘But I have to do my reading!’
‘Then we’ll find something else for you to read.’ Keeping her cool, Stevie reached for the Barbie backpack hanging on the back of the kitchen chair. It weighed a tonne, the amount of stuff these kids were expected to cart around on their backs never ceased to amaze her. She took the half-empty lunch box to the sink, binned the mashed contents and gave it a rinse, then dug into the bag again to see what else she could remove to lighten the load. Smelly sandshoes needed for PE tomorrow would have to stay; a Beanie Kid surely not needed at all, she left on the bench top. She reached for a bag of marbles, which weighed a kilo at least. With a petulant look Izzy told her to put them back, marble season had only just started—didn’t she know anything?
Stevie pulled out a picture book. ‘How about we read this?’
‘Too babyish,’ her daughter replied. Then she remembered something and her mood instantly brightened. ‘But there’s something else down there Mum—here.’ Izzy grabbed the bag. Delving to the bottom she handed Stevie a folded magazine. ‘Maybe I could read this—it’s got some really pretty ladies in it doing funny stuff.’
Stevie snatched the magazine from Izzy’s hand and jumped to her feet, knowing immediately what the high-gloss magazine was about. Attempting to hide her fear she unfolded it at the sink with her back to her daughter. Her stomach churned as she leafed through the hard-core porn, the nausea soon replaced by flaming anger. She took a calming breath and put the magazine face down on the kitchen bench
‘Izz,’ she turned back, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘A man gave it to me while I was waiting for Nan to pick me up from school. Can we read it now? Some of the pictures look sooooo weird, there was even a dog...’
‘What did this man look like?’
Izzy shrugged. ‘Tall.’
The man who’d threatened her outside court was tall, Stevie remembered. ‘As tall as Dad?’
‘I dunno. Come on Mum...’
‘Did he give anything to any of the other children?’
‘No, he came straight over to me.’
Hairs stood up on the back of Stevie’s neck. ‘As if he knew you?’
‘Yeah, I think so,’ said Izzy, ‘But he didn’t speak so it was hard to say.’ She frowned. ‘He just looked as if he knew me.’ She lunged toward Stevie’s pocket and tried to snatch the magazine. Stevie sidestepped and caught Izzy by the wrist harder than she’d meant too. The girl whined, more from frustration than the pain of Stevie’s fingers. ‘But I need to do my reading!’
The journey to their house by the beach passed by in a blur. Stevie could think of nothing but the filth she’d found in her daughter’s backpack. The magazine was obviously a message. It told her they knew everything about her, even her daughter’s name and where she went to school. It meant they must also know what she did for a living; that she dealt daily with the scum-of – the-earth who got their rocks off by preying on other people’s children. They would know the effect this kind of message would have on her.
Now we have our sights on your child, Stevie Hooper.
The stakes couldn’t be higher, the message clearly telling her to back off. But who was responsible? She racked her brains. The obvious contenders were the three paedophiles she’d recently helped lock away—but it was a bit late now, wasn’t it? Surely the victimisation would have been carried out during the trial and not after. Unless of course, the motive was revenge, acted out by one of the many men involved in the paedophile ring still on the wrong side of the bars—God knows there were enough of them still lurking about. She’d not told her boss about the man who’d approached her outside the courtroom; it had seemed so trivial at the time, and she wasn’t sure if she’d heard him correctly, let alone be able to describe him. Tall and fair, that was all she could remember.
Alternatively, this might have nothing to do with her previous case. Could the people traffickers be behind this? Unlikely, when they had no idea about her involvement with the Pavel investigation. The Crow was supposed to be Eurasian, which meant he was probably dark-haired, so he wasn’t the man outside court. But he might be the guy who gave Izzy the mag—maybe the people traffickers couldn’t be eliminated after all?
As she drove she took the magazine from the passenger seat and locked it in the glove box. She’d have to report the incident to Inspector Veitch and Angus Wong in the morning and cover all bases. Even if the offender turned out to be merely a random perv from the street, the matter would not be taken lightly. No matter how much irritation her interference on the Pavel case was causing, especially to Angus, cops always looked after their own.
It was dark by the time she pulled up outside her picket fence. In the distance she could hear the rumbling of breakers on the shore. She looked around the deserted street as she locked her car and walked cautiously toward the front gate. It was a corner block, the block next door vacant pending building and the neighbouring houses seemed a lot further away than they were. Her house was in darkness. She cursed herself for not thinking of leaving the lights on when she’d visited that morning.
She stopped before she reached the gate. Bloody hell. She clenched her fists as she looked down her front path. How dare they—no one was going to make her afraid of approaching her own house at night! She straightened her shoulders and forced herself to concentrate on what she’d come here to do. Izzy had said her reader was somewhere in the lean-to, maybe on the rug in front of the TV. As she placed her hand on the latch of the gate, she tried to remember if she’d seen the book there earlier.
A flickering in one of the front windows caught her eye. It wasn’t there a moment ago. Simultaneously she became aware of an indistinct, smoky odour on the sea breeze. Then the light in the window blossomed.
A bright orange flash blinded her.
A deep boom hammered through her skull.
She dropped to the ground and covered her head with her arms as a sear of pain ripped into her left shoulder. The blast drove the air from her lungs and replaced it with choking black smoke. Shock waves rumbled through the pavement. Building materials whizzed and clattered in the air from all directions, thudding heavily to the ground around her.
The noise ceased as suddenly as it had started. Lights turned on in the neighbouring houses, windows stared at her like unfocused eyes. Dogs barked, doors slammed.
Still curled into a protective ball on the pavement, she heard the sound of running footsteps above the crackle of flames. Someone shouted, ‘My God, what’s happened?’
A female voice answered. ‘Look, there’s someone over there!’
Footsteps pounded the pavement towards her.
Stevie slowly began to uncoil, first her legs, then her back. Other than her shoulder she could detect no other areas of damage. Deafened by the explosion she had trouble hearing what the man crouching by her side was saying to her. The roar of flames filled her head. A sudden crash of falling timber made her gasp and crushed the words struggling to leave her mouth. She tried again to gather her breath. ‘We need to get away from here ... there might be another explosion,’ she panted.
Shaking arms pulled her to her feet. She hissed an expletive when a hand was placed on her shoulder. ‘Sorry, dear,’ an elderly male voice said. ‘Needs must.’ He guided her wobbling steps further down the street. She looked to the sky. Above them, peeping through a cloud of oily smoke, the moon glowed.
‘It’s your house, isn’t it? Susan and I have been meaning to introduce ourselves,’ the old man said, a pattern of flickering flames dancing across the crevices of his face. ‘But we never expected it to be like this. I’m Ted. You’ll be all right, don’t worry. Susan’s called an ambulance. The police and fire brigade are on their way too.’
‘My house.’ Stevie struggled to free herself from the man’s grip. Our house. She tried to turn her head but pain shot up her neck, causing her to hiss out an expletive. She shook herself free of the man’s guiding arms and almost stumbled at the sight that confronted her, her house that was no longer a house. The blown front window was awash with fire, the central part of the roof collapsed. A quick glimpse around told her that none of the other houses in the vicinity had been affected by the blast—she had to be grateful for something, she supposed.
Susan hurried over. ‘We must get her off the street.’
Ted agreed with his wife, then said to Stevie, ‘Never trust the wiring of these old houses.’
Stevie knew too well it wasn’t the bloody wiring, but she’d let the old man think what he liked. Susan gave her a gentle push and attempted to guide her away from the inferno. Anger flooded through her, then an enraging sadness. Ignoring the pain from her shoulder, Stevie shrugged herself free from the fussing woman. She wanted to scream out, had to hold herself in check. Bloody bastards, look what you’ve done to my house!
The police and the fire truck pulled up simultaneously. With her left arm clamped to her side, she ran over to them, telling the firemen which parts of the house to save first, begging them to go easy with the foam. She yelled to the police, telling them her house had been the target of an attack. Her sentences, she realised were running ten to the dozen in a gabble of nonsense worthy of Mrs Hardegan. She fell silent. Froze. Gazed at the sympathetic faces surrounding her. A strong arm supported her waist and she found herself propelled toward the open door of an ambulance. The attendant gritted his teeth and firmly helped her in, probably having already pegged her as one of those silly, hysterical females.
‘I’m not going in that,’ she yelled before collapsing on the trolley. ‘Our house,’ she heard herself repeating again and again until the attendant silenced her with an oxygen mask.
What the hell was she going to tell Monty? (Image 23.1)
Image 23.1
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Just after midnight, against medical advice and with sixteen stitches in her shoulder, Stevie discharged herself from the hospital and caught a cab back to her ruined home. The fire trucks had left, but a police incident van remained. She heard voices, members of the arson squad sifting through the wreckage, looking for clues as to the cause of the explosion, and called to them across her front garden. Yesterday her garden had been filled with lavender, frangipani and oleander; now it looked like something from the Gaza Strip. A man in black police overalls appeared through a hole that had once been the front door.
‘I thought you were in hospital,’ he said through the rising tendrils of smoke that separated them. He picked his way through the rubble towards her and said his name was Paul Aubin. He squinted back at her through the spotlight. White lines threaded through the soot around his eyes, etching out his concern.
‘I had some glass in my shoulder; they pulled it out and stitched me up. There’s was nothing more they could do,’ she said.
His pause told her he didn’t believe a word of it. ‘And you’re with Central, yeah?’
She had trouble hearing what he said; her ears were still ringing with the sound of the explosion. She asked him to repeat himself and studied his lips carefully. ‘Yes, Central.’ After a moment’s hesitation she said, ‘I think this might be something to do with a job I’m working on.’
‘That figures.’
‘Why, what have you found out?’
He scrutinised her again. ‘Are you sure you’re okay? You’re as white as a sheet.’
‘Halle Berry would look pale in this light.’ She shouldn’t have shrugged; the local anaesthetic had worn off and the pain in her shoulder jabbed raw again. She masked it with a smile.
He chuckled, became serious one more, absently peeling the charred paintwork from her front picket fence. ‘You opened the gate and...’ he smacked his hands together, ‘Boom.’
Had she only imagined the flicker of flames in the windows immediately prior to the explosion? She tried to remember as she stared at the gate. Smoke-blackened and blistered on the inside and hanging on only one hinge, the frame was still relatively intact. ‘Surely the gate wasn’t booby trapped—it would’ve been blown to smithereens,’ she said.
‘No. The bomb was in the house. If the gate had been booby trapped, or if you’d been home five minutes earlier, we’d still be scraping you off the rubble.’
Stevie swallowed, rubbed her face with her hands. Despite having been cleaned up in hospital, she could still detect the acrid smell of smoke on her skin. ‘I would normally be home at this time, only tonight I was staying with my mother. My daughter would have been here too...’ The ground began to sway. She steadied herself with a hand on the fence.
‘You were very lucky,’ Aubin said.
She bit her bottom lip until she tasted salty blood and deliberately flexed her shoulder. The pain helped her focus. ‘So what caused it?’ It was a relief to hear the steadiness of her voice.
‘I’ll show you if you’re up to it. You might be able to help us out with a few things, anyway.’
He offered her his arm and she took it without hesitation. To hell with keeping up appearances—right now she really was a helpless female. They negotiated the rubble of her front path, climbed the singed steps and he steered her around a ragged patch of splintered timber on the front veranda. They entered the black hole where the front door had been. The heavy jarrah door with the colourful leadlight was one of the original features they’d planned on saving. Some of the leadlight had ended up in her shoulder. She wondered where the rest had landed.
In the front passage, the wallpaper—ugly stuff put up by the previous owners—was soggy and smoke-blackened, but the bedrooms and lounge room, apart from water damage, still appeared to be structurally stable.
‘It gets worse, I’m afraid,’ Aubin said as he led her to where the kitchen had been. She stood in the middle of the crater and turned a slow circle, trying to get her bearings. Some twisted pipes were all that remained of the sink, but the oven and the kitchen furniture seemed to have vanished into thin air. Above them, stars winked through a jagged hole in the roof.
‘The stove’s in the backyard,’ Aubin said as if reading her mind. ‘Funnily enough it doesn’t even look damaged.’
‘Where was the bomb placed, do you know?’
He walked over to an intact sidewall, bricks peeping through torn plaster, and pointed to the ground. ‘You had a cupboard here, right? It looks like the bomb was placed on one of the lower shelves. We’ve found explosive residue on the ground.’
‘A cupboard?’ Stevie queried, her mind racking to what was here before. ‘No. Monty’s fish tank was there.’
Aubin looked to be assessing her for shell shock. ‘No way was that bomb in a fish tank.’
‘The tank was on top of a cabinet with doors and shelves for the pump and other paraphernalia.’
Aubin relaxed. ‘That makes sense, a good place to hide it.’
Someone had been in her house, poking around in the cupboards, violating her home. The nausea rippling through her stomach was the same as when she’d found the porn magazine in Izzy’s bag. She gritted her teeth and prayed she wouldn’t throw up.
‘We think it was an incendiary bomb,’ Aubin continued, ‘but can’t be certain until the chemical tests are back.’
‘Incendiary?’
‘We’ve found fragments of a metal tube which had been filled with a chemical mixture. An inverted glass vial of sulphuric acid is put in one end and its hole blocked up with cork or paper. The acid eventually eats through to the mixture of chemicals, resulting in a very hot fire. It’s a crude device, but effective never the less, often favoured by Special Forces or arsonists who don’t care for the high tech alternatives.’
‘Old school?’ said Stevie.
‘Possibly. Or cocky to the point of stupidity. It’s an inexact science.’
‘And the explosion?’
‘Gas cylinders, wiring, aerosols, pool chemicals, paint tins ... there’s all kinds of household things that could have exploded on contact with such a hot fire.’
‘But how did the guy know when I’d be home?’
‘Maybe he knew you wouldn’t be home, it wasn’t meant to kill you, just warn you.’
Or play with me, Stevie thought; it was the kind of thing The Crow seemed to enjoy doing, and there was more than one way of being burned alive. There was no denying it now. The attempt on their lives in Fremantle, the magazine in the backpack—they knew exactly who she was and that she was on to them. Mamasan and The Crow, it had to be them. ‘They’ve attempted to kill me before,’ she said quietly.
‘Well then...’
‘Look,’ her voice rose, she gripped Aubin’s arm. ‘It’s very important that this isn’t mentioned to the press. Have you given them a statement?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘We can’t have the offenders thinking we’re onto them, can we? When you do speak to the press, tell them that it was most likely faulty wiring which caused the fire and explosion—it’s what the people in the street seem to think, anyway.’ Her grip on his arm was too tight, she realised. She quickly let him go. Right now she couldn’t have cared less what the offenders thought; it was Monty’s reaction that worried her. She couldn’t hide the fire from him, but she would sure as hell try to prevent him from finding out what had really caused it; for the moment, anyway.
She picked her way to the edge of the crater and stood on the edge, gazing across at the blackness of her back garden. Something was missing, but she couldn’t work out what. She pointed helplessly into the void. And then a thought struck her. ‘It’s gone,’ she said shaking her head and gazing around with wonder. Aubin moved to stand next to her. ‘What is?’
‘The lean-to: the most ugly, jerry built structure you could ever have imagined. We were going to knock it down...’ Stevie laughed. Aubin gaped back at the tears of anger, shock and mirth rolling down her face. (Image 24.1)
Image 24.1
