Before It Breaks (21 page)

Clement nodded. ‘I thought it was ugly and I didn't like the people.'

‘How are we doing?'

Mal Gross was probably twelve years his senior. Clement shifted his weight. ‘You're doing well. How am I doing?'

‘That's like when the missus asks what's her worst feature.'

They shared a smile. Clement's phone pinged. Manners had sent him the video via some link. He checked it worked, then went back to Marchant. Clement knew the bikie had been watching them on and off.

‘One more thing before we go. Something we want you to take a look at.'

‘I'm busy.'

‘It won't take long.'

Clement crouched down into the pit where the phone screen was visible.

‘This is the guy and the bike.'

He watched closely while Marchant looked.

‘Not one of ours.'

‘You don't know the guy?'

‘He's a fucking blur.'

‘You really want to rethink the cooperation, Dean.'

‘I don't know the guy or the bike, satisfied? Now let me do my job.'

Clement pocketed the phone and they slowly walked back to the car.

‘What do you think?' asked Gross.

‘I think he's lying.'

At the station, Earle had made progress. Immigration had come back with a contact number for Dieter Schaffer's sister but so far she hadn't answered his calls. Clement suggested Earle get his translator friend to help.

‘She left for Bali this morning.'

Clement suppressed a groan. Of course she had. ‘Give it to me I'll see what I can do.'

Earle handed the numbers to Clement as Shepherd walked in the door.

‘I left Jared and Angus out there checking for any earth that looked turned.'

Clement directed him to the list of vehicle owners he had prepared for him. ‘Any of those ring a bell?'

Shepherd scanned, pouted, shook his head. ‘Not offhand.'

‘I'm going to try the shops, see if anybody saw anything more. If you get through it, call me.' Clement turned to go and found Mal Gross waving a printout.

‘Email from the Hamburg Police.'

It contained a brief synopsis of Dieter Schaffer's time as a policeman rather than a full service record and was written in German. There was also more information in the email body and a name, Mathias Klendtwort, the Mathias of the letter, no doubt.

‘You copy this to me?' asked Clement.

‘Yep. You should have it.'

In his office, Clement opened the email and ran it through the translator before printing. Then he sat back to read it. The email noted Hamburg Police had sent officers to the home of Mathias Klendtwort, a former Hamburg police colleague of Schaffer. He was not at home when the officers called but they left a note asking him to contact them about the death of his friend Dieter Schaffer. Clement decided the short CV would occupy him while
he got a coffee. He left the station and out of habit started walking to The Dolphin but changed his mind and headed for the Honky Nut instead. A few tourists in shorts and shiny new caps strolled the streets. Most of the locals were probably still sleeping off a big Friday night or picking the form for later in the day. He thought of Phoebe and how excited she might be on the boat. A holiday they had spent at Rottnest Island came back to him. How old had she been then, six? No more like five. It was a pleasant time, the three of them, a real family; the scent of Moreton Bay figs like incense. Fish and chips. He'd cooked a curry and Marilyn and he had made love after too much red wine and had not even fought the next day. They rode bicycles around the small island, Phoebe at first tentative and then after a few days becoming a terror on two wheels.

The Honky Nut was busy, nearly all the tables occupied, a smell of fried eggs and bacon permeated. Fortunately the counter was free. Selina was not present. A young man with a sleek body served him. Clement was pretty sure this was the boyfriend whom he had seen in the distance last night at the Mimosa. He found himself envying the young man. It was an emotion foreign to him and it suggested to him again that coming back to Broome might have been a mistake, like it would magnify his weaknesses. He ordered a flat white.

‘You're the detective?'

A slight accent, Clement couldn't pick it but thought it probably European.

‘Yes. Dan Clement.'

‘Lex. Selina said she didn't see the guy in the photos.'

‘No. But the information was important.'

‘I hope you get him.'

‘Did you know Dieter Schaffer?'

‘The German guy? Na. I served him a couple of times. He used to chat with Selina a bit. He liked to chat up the girls, you know.'

‘You never saw him with anyone in here?'

Lex handed over Clement's coffee. ‘He would talk to people, especially girls, harmless, not a pest, but I don't remember him coming in with a friend. He was one of those older guys … solo, you know?'

It was a description Clement realised might apply to him in years not too distant. A male customer came up to the counter and Lex left to take his order. The man wore socks and clean sneakers with a polo shirt, white, forty, a successful banker on holiday would
be Clement's guess. He saw the man's wife or partner sitting at an outside table taking a quick check of herself in a compact. Maybe she was like Clement a few hours earlier wondering how long that same face would be the one she knew as her. Ridiculously the idea of a stranger's fragility comforted him. We walk on eggshells together, he thought. He grabbed one of the bench stools and dragged it over to the corner of the counter. The coffee was excellent, not that Clement considered himself a connoisseur. It irritated him when people talked about coffee as if it were a wine, and promoted themselves as experts insisting that they could only meet at one particular café with ‘the best' coffee. He had felt the same in his youth when his colleagues had waxed lyrical about one beer or another, as if drinking a particular brand imbued you with any other quality beside inebriation. It was a pose. The key to successful detective work was often just zeroing in on that, the false note, the conceit, the façade. Perhaps that was why he was good at this. He knew his own false notes so well, plenty to practise on.

Dean Marchant had lied to them about the biker. Maybe the man they were looking for wasn't a Dingo but Clement sensed Marchant knew something. He wondered if they should try to follow Marchant: did they have the manpower?

Clement let the question hang while he read the synopsis of Dieter Schaffer's service record. Schaffer had joined the Hamburg state police in April 1970 as a Schutzpolizei attached to the Davidwache station in the Reeperbahn: Clement read that as shit-kicker uniform posted to a tough station. Schaffer was commended in 1972 and 1973. One of these commendations clearly related to the newspaper clipping he'd kept. In 1976 he was elevated to Kriminalpolizei and there was mention of Vice investigation. Clement concluded Schaffer was now in a detective post. In 1978 Schaffer was involved in Narcotics investigation. Whether this meant transferring to a different squad or the same squad with a specific operational focus was unclear but Clement was immediately interested in a drug detective who winds up growing pot. In May 1979 Schaffer was working in auto-theft. Five years later he moved to the Water Police. He finished his service with the Wasserschutzpolizei in August 1991. He would have been a little over forty, half his life up till then in the Force, pretty much where Clement found himself right now. What did he do in the intervening years before coming to Australia, wondered Clement. What would he do himself if he suddenly quit? Did he have any other skill?

The answer so far as he could judge was no.

Clement had to speak to somebody in Germany who knew Schaffer, preferably the sister, but for that he would need somebody who could speak German to interpret. Just at the inflection point where his mood was ready to pitch blue he realised he did know somebody who spoke German: Gerd Osterlund.

He dwelt on Osterlund for a moment. Could he have been one of Schaffer's dope clients, a little grass to smoke while relaxing watching the sunset? Call Clement shallow, but IT exec, espadrilles, Bali; it fitted.

He looked about him, Lex flat out making coffees, making money. He recalled speaking to an ex-con who had turned his life around and gone into the café business. There was a much bigger mark up from coffee than booze and a lot less regulation. He doubted he could do that, run a café, wait on people, even if he could afford to set one up. His thought jumped tracks as he wondered whether Brian was one of those who compared the quality of coffee, café to café. He doubted it. Wine would be more his milieu. Clement paid for his coffee, waved to Lex who was busy serving another customer, called Earle and asked him to meet him outside.

The small array of shops contained a pharmacy, bottle shop, lunch bar, podiatrist, laundromat and shoe store. Except for the podiatrist, custom was pretty evenly divided between tourists and locals. Earle was there in under five minutes.

‘You want to split up or do it together?' he asked.

‘There's not that many, we'll do it together.'

There was no such thing as rush hour in Broome, so a cop asking questions was not an irritant as it may have been in a big city. In fact everybody was curious. They started with the pharmacist, a young guy with thinning hair and glasses. He weaned himself away from flogging disposable nappies to a female French tourist in sarong and bare feet and examined the photos they offered—a Schaffer close up, and a still of the carpark altercation—but didn't recall Schaffer or the biker and couldn't find Schaffer's name on his computer. The girl who worked for him, bubbly with black curls, was also a no go. It wasn't a complete waste of time; Clement forked out for a tube of toothpaste that supposedly was the ants' pants for sensitive teeth. Seeing the pharmacist also gave Clement the idea they should try the various health clinics. He called Shepherd who had so far struck out with the vehicle owners, and told him to ask around at the clinics to see if Schaffer had visited a doctor and if so
what he may have confided. For close on an hour they canvassed the shops but the only person they got a hit off was the bottle-shop guy, a dude about twenty with a goatee. He remembered Schaffer as buying the odd bottle of cheap red, and sixpack. But like all the others he never saw the altercation and did not remember the biker.

Clement wanted to call Germany but it would still be too early.

‘Let's head back out to Jasper's, take another look,' he suggested.

It seemed eerier now. If the media had been out there, they had left. The crime scene was cordoned off by tape, which was always ominous, suggesting something criminal had happened, something that was permanent and couldn't be taken back. This time Clement and Earle had circled the creek and come in from the opposite direction, the direction Dieter Schaffer had taken. Clement stood approximately where the tent had been, looking down towards the mud and gloom of the creek. Some insect was biting him.

‘He was gamer than me,' said Earle standing beside him. ‘You can almost smell croc in there.'

Clement turned and walked up to the area he'd found the first time here.

‘This is where Sebastian parked. Our killer parked way over there.' He'd familiarised himself with Lisa Keeble's crime scene sketch and was pointing about forty metres north-east. ‘You have to figure he didn't come with Schaffer or arrange to meet him here. Otherwise he'd have parked closer.'

Earle understood. ‘He was planning to ambush him all along.'

‘I believe so.' Clement trudged back to Earle, thinking on it. ‘He sneaks through the bush. Dieter is listening to his radio, eating chicken, getting his boat ready. Our killer comes out of the brush here Clement raised an imaginary axe, ‘… and pow!'

‘Then he kicks the shit out of Schaffer.'

Clement nodded as he imagined the scene but couldn't work out why the killer replaced Schaffer's shirt. Earle sighed like it had him baffled.

‘He must have known Schaffer, felt guilty or angry or something.'

‘Unless he made a mistake, meant to take that first shirt with him, lost it in the dark.'

Either way he'd be hoping Rhino could find something off them.

Earle speculated the killer may have transferred his own DNA during the bashing.

Clement said, ‘I think they're analysing the clothes but the creek probably degraded any DNA.'

They didn't stay long. They'd travelled to the creek in near silence; on the way back Dr John was playing. Clement drove, thinking about Dieter Schaffer and the loneliness of death.

‘So what's the story with your ex?'

Clement looked across at Earle, surprised he'd ventured into that territory.

‘You think there's a story?'

‘That nurse at Derby is hot for you and she's undeniably fit.'

Clement smirked at Earle's turns of phrase. His offsider continued.