Текст книги "Take Out"
Автор книги: Felicity Young
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SUNDAY
CHAPTER NINE
‘I’d kiss you only I’ve just washed my hair,’ Monty slurred around the ET tube. Well, that’s what it sounded like, Stevie thought as she reached for his hand among the morass of lines. She didn’t ask him to repeat it; doped to the eyeballs he immediately fell back into a deep sleep.
Despite the several months she’d had to psych herself up for this, nothing had prepared her for the shock of seeing Monty post-op. His face was that of an old man, his skin the colour of a corpse. It was as if after draining his blood they’d forgotten to put it back again.
Thank God kids were not allowed in the ICU. Izzy would have had a fit if she’d seen her father looking like the living dead.
They could have been on a brightly lit tanker moored with several others on a quiet black sea. Night time in the ICU: raised, oversized beds with lifeless people buried somewhere amongst the bleeping machines and wires, the tread of crepe-soled doctors and nurses, the scratching of pulled curtains, the clanging of stainless steel and the low rumble of trolleys. How she hated hospitals.
Yesterday’s operation had been an unmitigated success, the surgeon had told her earlier. Monty would remain in the ICU for another day or so until the breathing tube was removed and then transferred to a single room in the coronary care unit. Barring complications he should be home in just over a week.
Barring complications. Stevie had made the mistake of looking up the complications on the Internet: thrombosis, infection, myocardial infarction; the list went on and ended with ‘death’.
Some complication.
The glass-panelled nurses’ station glowed like a captain’s bridge. Behind the glass she saw a tall man with wiry hair like a mad professor talking to one of the nurses. A strange time for Wayne Pickering to visit, she thought. Didn’t he know that only close family members were allowed in the ICU?
He saw her looking his way and indicated for her to step outside the ward. They met at the lifts.
Wayne clasped her arm. ‘How is he?’
‘He’s doing fine. They won’t let you see him though, the nurse in charge is tougher than Central’s desk sergeant, she—’
‘No,’ he cut her off. ‘It’s you I need to see. C’mon, I’ll buy you a coffee. You look terrible, the bags under your eyes could pack for a family of five.’
Wayne had always been a charmer.
A few minutes later they were sitting in the hospital canteen with cappuccinos and an oozing jam and cream doughnut for Wayne.
‘You shouldn’t be eating that,’ Stevie said, ‘think about your arteries.’
Wayne ignored her. ‘Do you know someone called Emily Williams?’
‘Emily Williams,’ Stevie repeated, thought for a moment. ‘No.’
‘She’s a nurse.’ Wayne took a bite of doughnut.
‘Oh. I know a nurse called Skye Williams.’
Wayne swallowed before he’d chewed his mouthful properly and appeared to be in pain. ‘That would be her.’ He patted himself on the chest. ‘Her mother calls her Emily.’
A cold stone dropped in Stevie’s stomach. ‘Wayne, what’s this about?’
‘Your name was in her phone. MCI called Sex Crimes trying to contact you. Sex Crimes knew your phone would be off so they called me, knowing Mont was off sick.’ Wayne reached for Stevie’s hand across the plastic table. ‘I’m afraid your friend was killed in a car crash on Friday night.’
Stevie shook her head as it filled with discordant thoughts. ‘No, you said Emily, not Skye. I don’t know an Emily.’
Wayne continued to squeeze her hand.
‘She called herself Skye. According to her mother she thought Emily Williams far too pedestrian.’
Stevie did not immediately respond. She sat still, her gaze switching from Wayne’s hand to a blob of cream on his psychedelic tie. Skye had changed her name, she would. It would be her way of distancing herself from her conservative farming family. When she was older she’d probably change it back again. But she wasn’t going to get older now.
‘They think she had an asthma attack while she was driving, lost control and hit a semi,’ he murmured.
‘She was only twenty-five,’ Stevie whispered to the air between them. She couldn’t cry. Like wheatbelt rain, the tears evaporated before they fell.
‘I’ll drive you home,’ Wayne said.
Stevie pushed hair from her face. ‘No, I have to stay with Mont.’
‘He’s out of it Stevie. He’ll need you later, but not now.’ Wayne would allow no further argument. He pulled her up by her arm and guided her towards the exit.
Twenty-five; the thought would not leave her head. You’d think she’d get used to it, in her line of work, but it was a different thing altogether when you knew the person, were friends with the person. And then her thoughts shifted to Monty: if The Old Man Upstairs could take Skye, He could take anyone. (Image 9.1)
Image 9.1
MONDAY
CHAPTER TEN
For much of the next morning, Stevie went through the motions as if her mind were disconnected from her body. She had breakfast with Izzy who was temporarily staying with her mother, Dot; she told everyone Monty was doing fine and dropped Izzy at school with a kiss and a smile as tight as stretched leather.
When she arrived at the ICU, she discovered a wizened old monkey of a man in Monty’s bed. She clung to a hunk of curtain, staring at the unconscious man as the pressure inside her began to build. She found herself gripped by an unreasonable sense of rage. How dare they move him without telling her!
The nurse responded to Stevie’s snapped enquiry with a flinch.
‘Mr McGuire is doing extremely well,’ she said nervously. ‘We moved him to the ward first thing.’
Stevie attempted to pull herself together, tried to make it up to the nurse with a deep breath and an awkward smile of apology. She mustn’t let Mont see her in this state and on no account would she tell him about Skye. If she tried to explain, she knew she’d lose it.
He was high as a kite on painkillers when she at last found him on the ward. He wouldn’t have known anything was wrong, even if she’d thrown herself on his pillow and sobbed her heart out—which was what she felt like doing. But soon he’d be back to his perceptive self and she had a lot to sort out before then. She stayed with him in his room for the rest of the morning, helped him eat an unappetising bowl of green jelly for lunch, put up with some moaning and a lot of swearing, then hurried off to meet Luke Fowler at Mrs Hardegan’s. On the way she remembered she’d volunteered to take a reading session at Izzy’s school. She rang the teacher and cancelled.
Fowler was napping in his unmarked police car when she pulled up alongside him in front of the Californian bungalow. She tapped on his window.
‘You’re late,’ he said buzzing the window down to look at her through cool blue eyes.
‘I’ve been at the hospital. My partner’s recovering from surgery.’
He grunted out a stock reply of sympathy, attempted some small talk. It seemed he did remember doing the course with ‘Inspector McGuire’ in Adelaide. ‘Where’s Skye?’ he finally asked.
‘She’s dead.’ In a tone as emotionless as a police report, she told him what happened.
He gave her the same stunned look she must have given Wayne.
‘We’d better go and see Mrs Hardegan and tell her about Skye,’ Stevie said briskly, giving him no time to absorb the news. She hurried on bubble-soled trainers toward the house, anxious to get the next unpleasant task over and done with. She stopped when she realised he wasn’t following.
Fowler hadn’t left the car. He turned his face away when she opened the passenger door and leaned in. ‘Are you coming?’ She paused, regarded the turned back and hunched shoulders and let out a sigh of impatience. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me, Sergeant Fowler?’
He put on his mirrored sunglasses and released a heavy sigh of his own. ‘Just a shock,’ he said as he climbed from the car.
The old lady took the news better than either of them, though it was hard to tell quite what was going on behind the thin skin of the veined forehead. Every now and then though, Stevie caught a glimpse of something in her eyes, a look she’d only noticed in the eyes of the very young or the very old. She couldn’t have explained what it was, but it spoke of some kind of privileged, hidden knowledge.
‘Silver Chain will be organising someone else to come and see you soon,’ Stevie told her.
Mrs Hardegan pulled her gaze back from the window. ‘They murdered him,’ she said in her forthright way.
‘Bloody Japs, bloody Japs!’ The parrot in the corner screeched. It ruffled its sparse covering of feathers, making the dust motes fly, releasing a sweet, seedy smell.
Fowler ceased his search of the kitchenette for tea making equipment and met Stevie’s eye.
‘Tell the feathered one to shut up,’ Mrs Hardegan said, glowering at the cage.
‘Who murdered who?’ Gripped by an urgent state of panic, Stevie had to hold herself back from shaking the old lady into some kind of coherency. ‘Skye? Someone killed Skye—who?’
Mrs Hardegan responded to Stevie’s impatience with a sharp snap. ‘How the hell should we know? Don’t want tea.’ She turned to berate Fowler. ‘Brandy, need brandy!’
‘What makes you think Skye was murdered? It was a car accident.’ Fowler moved to the tall cupboard to which Mrs Hardegan pointed a knotted finger. When he opened the door, Stevie glimpsed rows of unopened bottles of cheap brandy.
Mrs Hardegan caught Stevie’s look. ‘We’re saving them for the Big Push.’ She took the glass from Fowler, her hand a lot steadier than his. ‘The boy knew about the snoodle pinkerds, we told him and they killed him. Now you know about them and they might kill you too.’
Snoodle pinkerds? Stevie shook her head in exasperation.
‘Now, go. Leave us alone. We have a headache. And you...’ As if with an afterthought, Mrs Hardegan thrust her glass towards Fowler’s chest. ‘Take one of our bottles, go and get drunk.’ She turned to Stevie. ‘In love with him, stupid boy.’ (Image 10.1)
Image 10.1
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘She speaks like the fucking Queen: we this, we that...’
‘She can’t help it, Fowler. She’s not in control of the words that come out. It’s the stroke she had. Expressive dysphasia. Skye explained it to me.’
Fowler flinched.
Stevie noted it, and wondered why. ‘I’d like to see what you’re like when you’re that old,’ she said, a bit more gently. ‘What’ll you have? My shout.’
‘Perrier.’
She ordered the water for him and a Crown Lager for herself—he might not need the pick-me-up, but she certainly did.
The barman tilted her glass to the tap and she watched the amber liquid rise. ‘I’ve just started three weeks leave,’ she said though this hardly felt like a celebration.
‘Time off so you can look after Inspector McGuire?’
God he was irritating. Why did he have to call Mont ‘inspector’ all the time? ‘Yes, if he lets me,’ she said, scooping the beer from the counter. The delicate green bottle of water looked incongruous in Fowler’s thick hand.
They carried their drinks to the only free table in the lounge, rammed against a sidewall near the loos. The place was more crowded than usual, many of the clientele fixated on a soccer game on the wide-screen TV above the bar. Fowler poured his Perrier into a glass and Stevie checked her missed calls, an emergency call from the hospital foremost in her mind. There was nothing from the hospital, she discovered to her relief, but she did find a voice message from Skye.
Stevie stared at her phone. The message had been sent the day Skye died. The illuminated screen swam before her eyes. Her first tears for Skye could not have come at a worse time. Swivelling in her chair she turned her back on Fowler, took a steadying breath and dialled 101. After listening to the message she placed the phone on the table and slid it toward him.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked stiffly.
Stevie sniffed, swiped her eyes with a table napkin. ‘Do I look it?’
Frowning, he picked up the phone and glanced at the screen. ‘From Skye?’
‘Have a listen,’ Stevie said, lifting her glass and swallowing several mouthfuls of beer.
He listened, unmoving, then put the phone back on the table. The sparkling water in his glass ticked through the silence between them.
‘She said she thought there was a connection between Ralph Hardegan and the Pavels,’ he said at last.
Stevie kept her eyes on her glass of beer. ‘And Mrs Hardegan thinks she was murdered.’
There was another long silence as they considered Skye’s last words, both floating in their own private bubbles of misery. Everyone else in the tavern seemed to be laughing and flirting, roaring at the soccer game, getting on with having a bloody good time. Someone put a coin in the jukebox. The noise hammered at her ears and sank into her chest.
‘I thought the old lady was talking crap,’ Fowler shouted above the racket. ‘But I’m not so sure now—she might be right.’
Stevie pushed back her chair and stood up. ‘I can’t think in here. Come outside.’ He followed her into the street where she turned and asked abruptly. ‘You still on the Pavel case?’
Fowler leaned into the brick wall of the tavern as if he needed it to stay upright. ‘Only helping out now. When the pathologist IDed the body and confirmed that it belonged to Delia Pavel, I handed the case over to the Serious Crime Squad. The officer in charge is an acting DI called Angus Wong; he seems very efficient. I’ve been delegated some tasks. ’
Stevie ignored the bitterness of his words; she had enough problems of her own without worrying about Fowler’s shattered career and flimsy ego, although she did agree with his assessment of Angus’s efficiency. ‘He’s Monty’s right hand man, “acting up” while Monty’s on sick leave.’ She paused, rested her hands in the back pocket of her jeans and considered the possibilities. ‘What tasks have you been given?’
‘Mainly reinterviewing the neighbours and the people Jon Pavel worked with. I think it’s worth mentioning the disappearance of Ralph Hardegan to Wong, even though the man might just be away on business. He was interviewed when Pavel first disappeared, but not by me. I don’t think he was able to shed any light on it. I’ll see if I can get clearance for an APB and a nationwide search. We need to talk to him again.’
Stevie nibbled at her bottom lip; maybe it was time to put aside some pride. Through the closed tavern door she heard The Panics singing ‘Don’t Fight It’—maybe they had a point.
‘Need a hand with these tasks?’ she asked, keeping her gaze fixed on the dirty slabs of the pavement.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Fowler pull away from the wall and straighten. He looked at her suspiciously, as if she must have another agenda, as if maybe she’d organised this whole thing for the sole purpose of spying on him—some people, Jesus.
‘You’re on leave,’ he said.
‘Mont’s officer in charge of the SCS, I know the guys there well—used to work with them.’
‘Going to pull some strings?’
Stevie gave a non-committal shrug.
He relaxed slightly and reached inside his jacket pocket. ‘Well, you’re not the only one with contacts. There’s got to be some perks to the job,’ he muttered as he punched numbers into his phone.
Stevie listened as he spoke to a mate in the Major Crash Investigation Squad, one finger in his ear to lessen the din from the tavern. When the phone was back in his pocket he pointed in the direction of their parked cars at the back of the building. ‘C’mon, I’ve made an appointment to see someone about this.’
It occurred to Stevie that Fowler was as determined to get to the bottom of Skye’s death as she was. Like her, he seemed to believe what Mrs Hardegan had said about Skye being murdered. As she followed him along the pavement to their cars, she recalled what else the old lady had said. In love with him, stupid boy— maybe Mrs Hardegan had been right about that too. (Image 11.1)
Image 11.1
CHAPTER TWELVE
Senior Constable Tony Pruitt met them outside the locked yard. The blue police overalls with the single stripe on the shoulder did nothing to complement his physique. Short, fat and balding, he looked about ten years older than he probably was. Perhaps this is what working in the MCIS did to a person, Stevie reflected. God only knew it was a joyless branch of The Job.
Pruitt unlocked the gate and she and Fowler followed him into the yard, threading their way through the morgue of wrecked cars: countless, inanimate reminders of death. Over the years, she’d seen her share of grisly and unusual forms of death, and more murder investigations than she cared to count. But there was something about the very randomness of death through car accident that made her bones turn to jelly. You might be the safest driver in the world, but if fate puts you on the same stretch of road as someone over the limit, or whacked out, or asleep at the wheel, or simply not concentrating, there’s not one single bloody thing you can do about it. And most people faced these risks on a daily basis without giving the matter a second thought.
If she were Pruitt, she probably wouldn’t drive at all.
‘The wrecks in here have all involved fatalities,’ Pruitt explained in a tired voice, the oily gravel crunching under their feet as they walked. The spring sun had quite a kick today, a taste of the coming summer. Stevie peeled off her denim jacket and slung it across her shoulder.
‘We conduct our investigations on behalf of state or district coroners,’ Pruitt went on. ‘And keep the wrecks until the investigations are finalised and the cause of death determined. Once we’re finished with them, they’re usually released for scrap.’
They reached Skye’s crumpled Hyundai lying next to a burned out Lamborghini. The strip of cartoon graphics on the side panel of the small white car stood out jolly and bright from the twisted metal surrounding it. Stevie swallowed hard, reading the Silver Chain logo: ‘Every minute, every hour, every day.’ Not any more, she thought, not for Skye.
‘I’m sorry,’ Pruitt said awkwardly, looking from one to the other of them. ‘She was a friend, yeah?’
Stevie nodded. Someone had tied a large white label to the crumpled bumper and it reminded her of a toe tag.
Fowler put on his mirrored sunglasses, not only to protect his eyes from the glare of metal, Stevie suspected. ‘What happened, Tone?’ he asked.
‘She was driving fast, but the speed, according to the intermittent skid marks, was pretty erratic. It was a dark night, but the road was dry. According to the truck driver, one minute her lights were on the correct side of the road, the next they were heading straight for him.’
Stevie noticed then that the roof of the car was missing, sliced through like the top of a boiled egg.
Oh, Christ, no, not that. She felt herself begin to sway.
Pruitt put his hand out to steady her. ‘It would have been very quick,’ he said softly.
Fowler kept his face like a mask. ‘Any other witnesses?’
‘The truck driver did see another pair of headlights, but the other car didn’t stop,’ Pruitt said. ‘We’ve put out a media bulletin with no luck so far.’ The Senior Constable regarded them through brown, hound-dog eyes. ‘Let’s get out of the sun, have a cuppa. I’ve got some other things to show...’
‘Wait on,’ Stevie said. She’d moved to the other side of the car while he was talking. ‘What’s this from?’ Squatting on her haunches she pointed to a slash of green on the driver’s door. The surrounding dent had been circled in black marker pen.
‘Yes, we thought the dent looked recent, last couple of weeks, anyway—that’s why we highlighted it,’ Pruitt said.
‘Can you take a paint sample?’ Stevie asked.
‘Not at this stage, no.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because everything points to this being an accident. Tests like that cost money.’ He hesitated. ‘Let’s get out of here, continue this in the office.’
Stevie and Fowler exchanged glances and followed him to a demountable in the middle of the yard next to a large tin-roofed workshop with open sliding doors. ‘That’s where we do the inspections,’ Pruitt explained. A pair of booted feet stuck out from underneath a jacked-up concertina of metal. The frenetic sound of a horse race from the radio followed them into the adjacent office until the closing door cut it off.
The air in the room was oily and close. It would have been more comfortable outside. Stevie flopped into a worn swivel chair.
With the flip of a wall switch an air conditioner rumbled to life and Stevie took a gulp of musty cool air. Pruitt poured them tea from a thermos flask. ‘Kettle’s broke,’ he apologised as he rested the thermos on a grey filing cabinet. An out-of-date calendar hung on the wall above it. Faded and flyspecked, Miss November 2001 had seen better days.
Pruitt must have seen Stevie glancing at the nude. ‘The public don’t get to come in here,’ he said, colouring slightly.
The tea tasted of unwashed thermos, the milk suspect. Pruitt, sensing her squeamishness, slapped his thigh as if to say bad luck and all that, and gave her a look as suffocating as the office in which they sat. She knew the man meant well, but like any morgue technician, he wasn’t used to handling grieving friends and relatives.
He hefted a cardboard box from the floor and placed it on the grey metal desk. ‘These are the possessions retrieved from the boot of her car.’ Professional once more, he was easier to take. Stevie watched him closely as one by one he withdrew an assortment of items from the box: a clipboard with patient files, a medical bag with an inventory of contents, all appearing to be there, he said. A small overnight bag held jeans, T-shirts, underwear and toiletries.
‘And these,’ he placed a large evidence bag upon the table, ‘were in the front of the car.’ He began to extract the bag’s contents, placing them on the surface of his desk. ‘We have a handbag found with the clasp still closed. In it were some cosmetics, a purse containing credit cards and ten dollars twenty-five cents in cash, a hairbrush, a near full packet of cigarettes and a Ventolin inhaler. The phone we got your number from, Sergeant Hooper, was on the passenger side floor, along with a takeaway food container, a towel and an empty can of Coke.’
‘The Ventolin was in her handbag you say?’ said Stevie..
‘Um, yeah.’
‘And where was the bag found?’ Fowler asked.
‘Also on the passenger side floor, though it could have easily fallen from the seat during the impact.’
‘And the autopsy clearly stated that an asthma attack was the cause of death?’ said Fowler.
‘No, not exactly, just that her lungs indicated she was having an asthma attack when she died—that’s what caused the accident. Her phone shows that she had attempted to call emergency services, but couldn’t get through. Death itself was by...’ he stopped, slapped his thigh again and sighed. ‘Well, do you want to read the report yourself?’
Stevie made eye contact with Fowler and they shook their heads simultaneously. She attempted to detach, to force herself to think like a detective. As she sat on the swivel chair in the poky office, she swung from side to side, running her ponytail through her fingers. ‘I’ve seen her have asthma attacks before. As soon as she feels one coming on, she reaches for her inhaler.’
‘But the inhaler was still in her bag,’ Fowler said. ‘And the bag was found closed. It’s like she didn’t even attempt to reach for it.’
‘Why didn’t she pull over to the side of the road and get it? Surely she would have done that before dialling 000?’ Stevie directed the question to both men.
Fowler shrugged. Despite the cool air rattling around them, crescents of sweat stained the underarms of his white shirt.
Something caught Pruitt’s eyes from the demountable’s window. He got up from his desk and peered through the security screen. Stevie followed his gaze. A police four-wheel drive towing a mangled wreck pulled up outside the locked gate. ‘Make yourselves at home, folks,’ Pruitt said as he thumped across the hollow floor to the door, opening it to a stream of sunlight. ‘Another delivery; I’ll be back shortly.’
The detectives sat for a moment in silence after he’d gone. Stevie’s mind travelled back to the mild asthma attack Skye had suffered in the Pavel house just before they’d discovered the baby. ‘Why would Skye have a sudden, severe asthma attack when she was driving?’ she asked.
Fowler shook his head. ‘I guess people get asthma for a variety of reasons: allergy, exercise...’
‘But she was in the car; there can’t be too many allergens in there. And driving could hardly be called strenuous exercise.’
‘What are you getting at, Hooper?’
‘Skye had her attacks when she was frightened or anxious. Something must have frightened her out of her wits when she was driving, making her too scared to pull over to get the inhaler from her bag. That’s why she had the crash.’ She looked Fowler in the eye. ‘Pruitt’s a mate of yours, right?’
Fowler opened his hands. ‘Well...’
‘Reckon you can get him to delay that report to the coroner for a few days?’ She eased off the swivel chair and felt in her jeans pocket for her penknife. The demountable’s floor bounced under her feet as she headed for the door, not waiting for Fowler’s answer.
‘Hey, wait, Hooper, where are you going?’ He moved to follow.
She indicated for him to stay put. ‘When he comes back, just tell him I’ve gone to find the ladies room, okay?’ (Image 12.1)
Image 12.1
