The fall between, p.7
The Fall Between, page 7
‘Aah, that was Falkov who showed me. He’s there, right? The guy in full dress beside the assistant commissioner?’ Delano leaned over Giles’s shoulder and pointed at the photograph.
Geez, this guy is a furnace. Giles clenched her lips. The heat of his chest and arm, the smell of sandalwood and tobacco. The back of Giles’s legs tingled again.
‘Yeah, that’s him, looking dapper.’
Delano read the label under the photo. ‘Benjamin Giles, District Superintendent.’
‘That’s Dad alright.’ Giles smiled and looked down at her short skirt and shuffled up in her seat a little.
‘So you’re not a local,’ affirmed Delano. He pulled up a chair and sat beside her, his thumb gently massaging his knee.
Giles noticed the size of his hands and felt childish for her racy thoughts. ‘Nope, I lived on the outskirts of Muswellbrook until I was twelve, then I was shipped off to Sydney. Private boarding school. After high school, I went straight into the force. I’m far from being a local.’
‘Sydney has seeped under her skin,’ said Bray, overhearing. ‘It’ll be years of living in this town before that Sydney grime is scrubbed away.’
Delano ignored Bray, smiled at Giles, and said, ‘Private boarding school, eh? That’s a bit posh.’
Giles could feel the eyes around the table fall on her. She shrugged. ‘Nah, the one thing worse than being a reverend’s daughter on a school discount is being a copper’s daughter on a full scholarship. I wasn’t popular at school.’
‘No way,’ said Delano. ‘I would have guessed you’d be in the cool crowd.’
‘Nope. Dad made the students and teachers nervous. And this was a school where most of the parents were judges, barristers or lawyers.’
Falkov laughed and nodded, as though he could picture the scene in his head. ‘That’s probably why they were nervous.’
After an hour or two, the pub was full of a second wave of customers. The music was louder, a different beat, and groups at tables had to raise their voices to make themselves heard. It was taking longer to have glasses cleared, and the empty glasses stacked on their table were proof of a good night.
Giles’s colleagues had spent the evening drinking to her brilliance. She stared blurry-eyed at the giant sea-monster on the bottle of Kraken, then back up at the old black and white photos on the wall. Returned vets. Ravaged land and livestock after bushfires and floods. Her father in full dress uniform. It was all documented up there – the people the town loved, the trials and trauma they had endured together. It was a shrine to what made the place great.
In the dark light of the pub, Giles couldn’t help thinking that not only did Delano look half decent, after a few beers and rum chasers he didn’t sound nearly as obnoxious. She drowned out the talk with shots of spiced rum, feeling a lot better for choosing to wear her spaghetti-strap dress.
The naked body is cold now that the sun is down. Her neck is a greenish blue, the colour of the ocean after a storm. Her youthful face is almost unrecognisable. In the cattle trough, the water is greasy, and the smell of death is strong in the still air.
In the moonlight, the body waits another day to be discovered.
SEVEN
Sticky Pete had cut himself shaving, twice, and Mrs Nolan had sponged out the blood specks on his shirt collar, twice. He had slicked back his hair with an old tube of Brylcreem and combed it flat against his scalp with a near toothless comb. His shirt was ironed with Crisp starch and his pants wiped over with a lint brush. So when he walked into Muswellbrook Police Station that morning, smelling of a generous splash of Proraso aftershave, he had a small bounce in his step.
With its wraparound veranda and grey galvanised roof, the police station looked more like a quaint homestead. If it weren’t for the bold silver signage stating it was, indeed, a police station, you would almost think they’d be serving tea and scones, that you could pop in and have coffee with a cop. But behind the old-world building there was a two-storey complex equipped with the latest technology – it even had a gym.
At the service desk, Sticky Pete asked a young constable if he could speak with Detective Giles.
‘Sorry, mate, she’s not in at the moment. Went out on another matter early this morning. Not sure when she’ll be back.’
‘I’ll wait,’ said Pete, looking at his nametag. ‘Constable Griffin.’
‘I can take your name and number, save you the wait?’
‘Nope. I said I’ll wait.’
‘You want a newspaper to pass the time?’ offered the constable.
‘Nup.’
Sticky Pete took a seat in the reception area and Constable Griffin shrugged. Pete wasn’t much of a reader. Nor did he want to waste the battery on his ancient phone. Instead, he sat and watched the police move about behind the counter, practising his speech to Detective Giles in his head, making sure he wouldn’t forget a word of it.
In the cattle trough the water is still. The body is inflated like a balloon, covered in vascular marbling. Layers of skin have started to lift from the hands like those of an old washer woman no longer busy with life’s chores. And while the morning is hot, Ava is still cold to the touch. But at last, she has been found.
EIGHT
It was midmorning and Giles wished she’d had an early night: the sea-monster was still swimming backstroke around her skull. Too many shots of Kraken and too little sleep. Her ears were ringing and her head felt like it was a tightly wound ball of elastic.
Giles was supposed to be down in Singleton, looking at the Royal Hotel’s CCTV footage, obtaining solid evidence of Kevin Eddy selling stolen goods, hopefully including Mrs Pruitt’s necklace and brooch. Instead she was 14 kilometres out of Muswellbrook on a cattle property, watching cows milling around a water trough containing a dead body.
Beside the trough, a concrete water storage tank stood by a towering windmill. Whenever the wind picked up and the blades spun, it groaned for want of oil. Under the windmill and around the trough, some of the cows stared, others snorted at the earth, their wet nostrils caked in the grey dust. Others still stomped their hooves and scratched at the dirt, bellowing. The cattle were thirsty, but something foreign had invaded their waterhole. They knew the scent of death. Death was soaking into their water like a teabag.
Giles had found her at last.
Judging by the state of the body, Giles guessed the young woman had been there maybe two, three or even four days. There had been no attempt to conceal her corpse, instead it was openly on display, stripped of clothes and dignity. Her top and bottom lips were clamped shut by two pieces of wire looped and pulled together; Giles recognised it as a figure-of-eight knot used in fencing.
It was a vision that, at first, made Giles flick her head back, both repulsed and shocked. She had never seen anything like it, not even during her ten years in Sydney, and she had seen plenty of rotten crime scenes there. Even though she took some photos on her mobile, Giles already knew she didn’t need to look at the scene anymore – she would never forget it.
Mr Rickard, the owner of the property and the person who had first discovered the body, looked like he’d not shaken the image either. The seventy-year-old was hunched over against the passenger door of Giles’s police car, his thin frame crumpled. He was rubbing his face with the palms of his hands, crestfallen, probably trying to wipe away the sight of her.
An animal had been gutted and its intestines were splatted around the drinking trough in a quick and messy attempt to spread gore, a scene staged to create either shock or fear. She wondered if it was satanic, a ritual of sorts. The barbed wire coiled around the girl’s legs was a mystery. What was the point of that? Was it a statement? A macabre joke? It seemed to serve no purpose in the act of killing. Was it a signature, a message? If all that had been done purely for shock value, it hit its mark – it took Giles a moment to re-focus and calm her nerves.
Giles was almost certain the gutted animal was a wallaby; there was grass in the stomach chamber. Judging by the size it could have been a calf, but it wasn’t calving season, and the entrails were too small to be from a rabbit or wombat. She knew it wasn’t human, so not the intestines of the victim.
A few metres away, an old quad bike was parked next to a clump of slaty gums amongst the Scotch thistles. Parked in shade so its rider wouldn’t burn her arse on a hot black vinyl seat. Only, the rider had never made it back.
There wasn’t anything Giles could do aside from call it in, tape off the area, and wait for the Evidence Recovery Unit to make their way from Newcastle, and for her own team to arrive. ERU would take proper photos and collect evidence, and Giles would make sure all the correct procedures took place. Until then, she wanted to stay away from the body to prevent any further contamination at the scene, and she wanted to stay downwind to avoid the smell.
She returned to her vehicle, where Rickard was sheltering from the sun. Giles’s feet were beginning to swelter in her black boots. She sniffed at the heat and wiped away the sweat beads forming on her top lip, then peeled off her dark grey suit jacket, tossed it on the back seat of the car and rolled up the sleeves of her cotton shirt. Her mouth was dry. Just like the cows, she yearned for a drink to quench her thirst.
‘Do your cows charge, Mr Rickard?’
‘Do you know much about cattle, detective?’
‘No.’ Giles wiped her sweaty palms across her arse and took a breath. She could almost chew on the air, it was that thick with heat. ‘So, do they?’
‘Nope.’
Giles stretched out her arms and tried to shoo the cattle away from the trough. She knew they weren’t going to step up for a drink when there was a dead body in the water, but she didn’t want them stomping their hoofs all over the crime scene.
Around the drinking trough, where the ground was blood and mud, where the entrails of the wallaby had been scattered, Giles had noticed a partial footprint and what looked like drag or scuff marks. A scuffle? The footprint was from a work boot, size eleven or twelve as best she could judge. There were also hoof prints from the cows, a set of wallaby prints, and a paw print that could have easily been mistaken for a scrub wallaby, except the paw pads weren’t long enough – it was definitely from a dog.
‘What size boot do you wear, Mr Rickard?’
‘Eleven. Them’s big enough boots to fill.’
‘Aha, I bet they are. Did you step over that way?’ Giles flicked her hand towards the partial print at the end of the trough.
‘Nope.’
Great. Now she just needed to keep herself, the cows and Rickard clear so the ERU could get the boot print intact.
Bloody ERU, where the hell are they?
She tipped her head towards the cattle inching up to the trough. ‘Mr Rickard, I need to secure the scene. Do you mind if we push this lot into the next paddock?’
‘Nope.’
Giles rolled her eyes. ‘Will you give me a hand pushing your non-charging cattle back through the gate?’
Mr Rickard was not happy about moving the cattle into the next paddock over, where there were already some horses, but it only took a few minutes to hustle the handful of heifers and steers through the gate. The herd was too hot and bothered to resist.
As soon as the animals were in the next paddock, Mr Rickard latched the gate and watched the mares bristle up, annoyed with the intrusion. The horses began to tramp their resentment across the barren field, their nostrils flaring and snorting. Giles couldn’t understand why the mares were wasting so much energy protesting, it had to be thirsty work showing their offence, and the air was juiceless. Everywhere around her, the ground had cracked open and seemed to be gasping. The willow trees down in the dry gully looked sullen. Even the birds in the gum trees were quiet. The place was as dead as the girl floating in the water trough.
After inspecting the scene, Giles had started gathering as much information on the victim as she could from Mr Rickard. Ava Emmerson. Somewhere in her mid-twenties. Freelance jillaroo. Paid to check on water levels, fix pumps, mend fences, a bit of branding and drenching cattle. Odd jobs and contract work. Work that Mr Rickard’s old hands, arms and back could no longer do.
Giles had asked Mr Rickard a bunch of questions and he’d answered them short and to the point as best he could. Hard worker. Reliable. Never spoke of a boyfriend. Thinks she lived with her parents in town. Not overly chatty about her personal life. Good with the horses. No bloody idea why she ended up dead in his cattle trough, in that state.
‘Was she on the books?’ asked Giles.
‘Huh?’
‘Ava. What did you pay her?’
‘Few bob, couple of pineapples.’
‘Cash in hand?’
‘Yeah, cashie. But she’s reliable, knows her stuff. No trouble.’
Was, thought Giles. She was reliable.
‘How long has she been working for you?’
‘On and off for about three months. Knew what she was doing. Quiet, respectable. I gave her access to the quad bike and the key to the shed where I keep the tools and gear.’
‘You didn’t question why she hadn’t shown up for a few days?’
‘Nope. She comes and goes. She knows what needs to be done and when. I don’t give her a list of jobs; she makes her own list.’
‘How do you know what to pay her?’
‘She tells me.’
‘That’s very trusting of you.’
‘Is it?’
Mr Rickard squinted his cloudy eyes at Giles, one more milky white than the other. He may have been trusting of the jillaroo, but Giles could tell he was not very trusting of her.
‘So, this morning. You find her floating in your cattle trough. You ring triple zero and you say,’ Giles quoted from her notes, ‘“I might have someone on my property that’s drowned, can you send someone to take a look.”’
‘Yep.’
‘Bit of an understatement.’
‘Look at her. Tell you the truth, I didn’t know what to bloody say. Figured it was best you came out and looked for yourself.’
Giles grinned and dropped her head. ‘Did Ava drive here each time she came to work?’
‘How else would she get out here?’
Giles felt her neck stiffen. ‘What type of car does she drive?’
‘White Toyota Hilux.’
‘Year?’
‘Old model, from the early nineties at a guess.’
‘Where is it now?’
‘Parked behind me shed.’
‘And you never noticed it sitting there for two, three days?’
‘Can’t see behind the shed from my house window. She parks up under a jacaranda, in the shade. Leaves the windows open and half the time she finds one of me chooks trying to nest on the front seat.’
It was the most Mr Rickard had said in one go, and Giles was relieved the old bugger was finally talking.
‘When was the last time you saw her?’
‘Dunno.’
‘At a guess?’
‘Maybe three, four days. Only, I never saw her, but the salt licks were out, so I knew she’d been on the property. The licks weren’t out the day before.’
‘Licks? What are they?’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Sydney.’
Mr Rickard nodded and then spat at the ground.
‘So, what are licks?’
‘Lick blocks.’ Rickard pointed to a light brown cube on the ground in the adjoining paddock. ‘It’s a mineral and protein supplement for cattle. Helps in the drought. Cows lick the block. They were put out a few days ago. Like I said, I never saw her, I just knew she’d been. Why would I walk round the back of the hay shed to see if her ute’s there? She just comes and goes.’
‘How does she communicate with you? Tell you what to pay?’
‘We catch up, have a coffee when we cross paths. She tells me what she’s done and I pay her.’
‘On the spot?’
‘Most of the time, if I’ve got the cash. Or I fix her up the next time I see her.’
Giles thought it a bizarre way to do business, but her opinions didn’t matter, just the facts.
A couple of bull ants scurried over a log they’d made their nest under, and Giles stepped away from the entrance hole visible in the dirt. She didn’t want ants up the leg of her trousers. With not much else to do aside from wait, Giles strolled along the barbed-wire fence that now separated the cows from the windmill, storage tank and drinking trough. Small yellowish-brown crickets sprang away from her boots with each step and burrowed deep into the grass as she ambled along the fence line. Giles ignored them, focused instead on avoiding the cow shit, circular pats of dark green, wet and pasty, and a fucker to wipe out of the tread of a boot.
It wasn’t just the heat and her hangover that were bothering her. Why did Mr Rickard call it in as a drowning? Why be vague about the situation to triple zero? Clearly, this is a murder.
Giles ran through the details she knew: the victim was naked, her clothes and any possessions had been removed, reducing the evidence. The body appeared to have been floating in the water for well over forty-eight hours, so it would be difficult to find any DNA. Plus, every time the wind had blown over the last few days, the windmill blades would have spun and pumped more water into the tank and trough, further diluting any possible evidence. When she’d first arrived, Giles had gestured towards the mechanism and asked Mr Rickard to stop the windmill from pumping water. That risked further fingerprints and footprints at the scene, but she took the gamble that it was better to stop the water flow, and she documented his movements and what he touched in her notebook.
Giles continued rattling through the details in her mind. The cause of death looked like drowning, but she couldn’t rule out strangulation or blunt trauma, with the body being placed in the trough after the act. She’d have to wait for forensics and then the autopsy to be sure.
She followed the wire fence further along. Strands of horse hair were caught and tangled in the barbs. The animals liked to scratch their hides on the fence posts, but the barbed wire caught their fur and hair now and then. As Giles walked on, there was a clump of short black hair hanging from another barb.
