Before It Breaks (25 page)

At some point he must have dozed off. He woke feeling chilly. The hospital was deathly silent and he was gripped with a fear that his father had passed while he slept. Edging over to the bed, he looked down and froze in horror. Dieter Schaffer lay there chopped and bashed, blood congealed over his wounds. Terrifyingly his face turned towards Clement, his dark eyes fixing on him as he tried to speak. His hand reached out to pull him closer for the whisper of dead breath.

Clement recoiled and then blinked awake, woken by the actual jolt of his body. It was three fifty a.m. His father was as before, still breathing regularly. Clement's heart rate slowly returned to normal though he was aware of the irony that his reality was a bigger nightmare than the nightmare. His father may never regain consciousness. He might join Dieter Schaffer in the land beyond where they could both talk about his failings. The dream made its point. He owed Schaffer. Somebody had murdered the man in the most brutal fashion. Watching over his father, Clement assembled in his head everything he knew about the case thus far, everything he knew about Dieter Schaffer.

It was like holding sand.

The biker took a long slug of semi-warm beer. They were looking for him. Let them look. The Dingos were solid. He had no doubt about that. He could have run but that was piss-weak. It was only another couple of days before the shipment from Adelaide came. He would finish off the business and get out of there. Even if they learned his name he'd be a ghost, they'd never track him down. He drained the beer and crushed the aluminium can. There had been a time the heat up here had sucked every sip of life out of him. Coming from where he grew up, where you woke up to frost on the ground, what could you expect? But eventually his body and the heat had equalised. Like a siege back in days of swords and armour, neither side gaining ground, neither relenting. A truce had been settled. Now the heat just bored him. He wouldn't mind getting overseas, the States. These shit places got to you eventually. He looked around the shithole where he found himself, sagging furniture, asbestos sheet walls, a tiny box of a kitchen. He wanted to go into town, find a woman, but that would have to wait.

Forty more hours. It hadn't been so bad with the Dingos boys hanging here too. The pool table was scarred and tilted but you could still knock out a game. But with the cops asking questions they'd had to piss off.

All because of that stupid, fucking Kraut.

The only plus was the garage. He could keep his bike out of sight and store the gear when it arrived before shipping it on. This used to be a mechanic's place. He imagined living here, working in the garage fixing trucks. Not much of a life, too fucking hot and boring. He pulled his big frame out of the chair and stretched. No TV, nothing except his iPod. The air-conditioner was one of those ones you wheeled. It was old but it worked, sort of. The front windows were boarded up so there was nothing to look at, but in the back where the pool table was there were louvered windows. They let
in a breeze and cooled the place down but of course then insects came in too. There was no way to pass time except to drink and walk around outside looking at the stars. That was risky during the day but it would be safe now, it was mostly hidden from the passing traffic and too late for the kids who walked about or rode bikes during the day. He picked up his iPod, opened the door and strode out.

It wasn't too bad tonight. The edge was off the heat and it smelled clean, unlike the house. The nearest houses were about half a k away, no street lights, so even if he passed somebody, they couldn't get a good look at him, and they were most likely high on glue or petrol so what would they see? He jammed the headphones in and started walking east. Slayer belted into his brain. He'd gone maybe a hundred metres towards the road when a small green flash caught his eye about fifty metres to his left. He stood quietly and stared. There it was again. Something on the ground was flashing on and off. For an instant he thought about heading straight back to the house but curiosity got the better of him. He scanned around him. No vehicles that he could see. It was nearly pitch dark out here with a thimble of moonlight only. Cautiously he headed over, confident of the knife he kept in his boot and his ability to use it. It occurred to him that it could be a message from the Dingos, perhaps worried to come to the house. He pulled the headphones out and listened to the air around him, the faintest drunken voices from the closest houses, nothing else.

Whatever it was flashing over there, it was small. He advanced towards the tiny light which continued to flash regularly. Finally when he was right on top of it, he was able to see it was a small digital clock in the shape of a turtle. A kid's toy, the sort you buy from a servo to get the discount on a tank of petrol.

As he bent to pick it up, some black shape raised itself from the earth. It made his heart jolt, this black demon sweeping up like smoke, and he reached for his knife; ghost or not, he would fucking gut it. His hand closed on the handle of the hunting knife and whipped it out. His head exploded. Then he was on his back looking up at a vault of stars only to have them blotted out by the black demon and its green eyes looking down. Slayer played his requiem through the headphones and the green turtle flicked on and off, on and off. On.

And off.

Rhino was partial to a colourful shirt and Clement had to admit a colourful shirt liked Rhino. Some men couldn't carry it off. They would forever be accountants wearing a souvenir. Rhino on the other hand looked like he'd come back from killing Japs at Guadalcanal with a new lust for life and become a trader on the Fly River. He was tearing into sausage and egg and swiping at flies. He had been happy to catch up with Clement to talk about the case but had resisted suggestions they meet at the lab.

‘I spend too many hours there as it is. Come after my swim, I'll see you at Swanbourne.'

Rhino had swum his way from Swanbourne to Cottesloe and back, a good four k, and they were dining now on a rickety garden table out the front of a newsagent-cum-café in the Cottesloe backstreets. The sun was still only a hot needle, by midday it would be a branding iron. A tad under one hundred and eighty centimetres, Rhino was shorter than Clement but he was broad, the physique Disney used for those guarding dungeons, a ball of muscle, and he weighed something in the mid-90s. He normally wore his hair in an absurd 1960s left-hand part, fringe sweep like Troy Donahue, but he'd mutilated it after a Pernod binge, being too cheap to pay a barber. Post-swim it had fallen like Moe of the Three Stooges. The man looked more like he worked an odd-job at the races, sweeping butts or shoving horses into barriers, than a professor.

There had been no change in Alan Clement's condition by the time Clement had to leave Albany. He'd had no chance to shower the funk of the cramped night from his person but the air-conditioning had managed to contain the unpleasantness. Clement had changed into a new shirt and jocks and breakfasted on a museli bar before farewelling his mum who had arrived just after five a.m.

‘I'll call you. I'm sorry I can't stay.'

‘Your father wouldn't expect it.'

‘You still have the mobile phone I bought you?'

She flushed ever so slightly, guilty. ‘Yes.'

‘It would be a lot easier if you brought it with you.'

‘I will, love.'

‘You know how to charge it?'

‘I'll bring it in. The nurses will help.'

He spared her the lecture on how busy they might be.

‘Charge it and keep it on you, that's all you have to do. I can ring you anytime. It's much easier.'

At the airport waiting for his plane he'd rung Earle but there was no more news. There were no definitive sightings of the biker, though a couple of maybes. Marchant was staying put. Lisa and the techs had been going through Karskine's clothing and vehicle. Their initial tests showed the tray of the truck had traces of blood, to be expected given his fishing expeditions. So far nothing human had revealed itself.

Clement had finished his serve of bacon and eggs in record time. A light breeze spun the scent of pine around the little table. He sat back as Rhino confirmed things he already knew.

‘He was killed between ten p.m. and one a.m. by an axe. He was probably struck and incapacitated, then kicked and beaten, but he might have been beaten then killed and more trauma inflicted postmortem. One thing that's curious: there wasn't much blood on the t-shirt.'

‘That's what Keeble said: it was put on after he was beaten and hit with the axe.'

‘Not only that but whoever dressed him tried to keep the blood off it. I mean Schaffer would have been soaking in blood. He would have to have been wiped down. Maybe your killer used Schaffer's old shirt.'

‘Any idea why?'

‘Isn't it because they have some respect for the victim? That's what the crime shows say but I'm not a cop, you tell me.'

‘How about the killer's blood?'

‘Nothing we could find.' Rhino shoved a large piece of toast in his mouth and gulped black coffee. ‘Something else, the t-shirt was printed in nineteen seventy-nine for Hamburg's championship. The one he was in was an original.'

‘From nineteen seventy-nine?'

Rhino nodded as he ate, managed room for words. ‘I had a German mate send through an analysis of the original batch of tees. This one matched. It had no signs of ever having been worn before.'

‘A collector's item?'

‘I guess so. It was tight on Schaffer. I'm guessing he added a few kilos in the last thirty-five years.'

Why had somebody re-dressed Schaffer? Why in that t-shirt? Were they mocking him? Had he owed somebody money and they'd thought he'd wasted it on football ephemera and he should be made to suffer that final humility? But then why go to the trouble of wiping blood off Schaffer? Rhino's gaze had drifted to a brace of bronze women walking past. Rhino had a passion for women with strong, muscular thighs and these two made his cut.

‘Choice. Is that the sort of thing he'd carry around in his car?'

Clement took a moment to get he was back talking about the t-shirt.

‘Can't see why. Most people keep those things at home.'

He wondered if the shirt could have been in the drawer with the computer. But that would mean the computer was stolen before Schaffer was killed.

‘He could have been trying to impress some babe,' offered Rhino.

Clement supposed that fitted with Schaffer trying to chat up young women by the offer of free dope. Even so, it was odd, but Schaffer was odd too. Rhino had an alternative.

‘Or maybe he was going to sell it?'

‘Hardly the kind of thing you'd take with you fishing.'

‘Unless you were selling it to your fishing companion.'

‘But then why park so far away? If they were mates, you think they'd park together. You didn't find any sign of another person in the car?'

‘Just the kid you picked up and cleared.'

‘And the DNA from the skin attached to the shovel?'

‘Onto it as we speak. It's viable.'

That was some good news.

‘You were holding out on me.'

‘Waiting to see if you were going to shout my brekky. How's Phoebe?'

‘Out on the ocean.'

‘Best place to be. She know about your old man?'

‘Not yet.'

‘They close?'

‘They don't see much of one another.'

There wasn't time for much more chat. Clement had to get back to the airport for the Broome flight. He called a cab. Rhino, despite his previous quip, shouted him the meal and waited till he was on his way.

While his father's fate hovered in the background like a good soundtrack, present not intrusive, on the flight back Clement crammed all the things they knew about Schaffer's killing in a blender and hit go. The killing had been brutal but careful. There was none of the detritus that a mad impulse killer might have left. No, it had been planned. If the killer had chosen Schaffer for a reason, they had more chance of snaring him but for now the reason was obscure. Why change the shirt? Had the killer felt a sudden pang of guilt and grabbed the first thing available? What of Rhino's idea that Dieter Schaffer took the shirt to impress a woman? Well, she'd probably have to be German or a soccer nut. Could there be a woman in league with somebody else? Maybe they were trying a shakedown of some sort on Schaffer? The young woman at the café, Selina, popped into Clement's head. Selina and her boyfriend working as a team? Clement hated this part of himself. Trust nobody, turn over the rock of people's lives and see what crawled beneath.

It was a little after midday, Sunday, when he stepped off the plane. The air was so much thicker here, rain imminent. Scott Risely was waiting, fresh from a game of golf. Clement's immediate reaction was that something in the case had broken but it was simply Risely checking in face to face. They sat in Risely's car and, after he'd answered the usual polite inquiry about his father, got down to the case. Risely had one piece of new information.