Black & Blue: BookShots (Detective Harriet Blue Series) (8 page)

Tox was holding his own against the guy he’d targeted originally. It looked as though it was all about to be over when five uniformed officers burst into the room, one of them leading a huge German shepherd on a leash.

‘On the ground! On the ground!’

I flattened against the stinking carpet. The dog was standing right over me, barking in my face, slobbering in my hair. I realised I’d left my police-issue phone on the counter by the window when I’d run in to assist in the fight. As I lay being cuffed I saw a homeless man shuffle along to the window, pick up the phone and continue shuffling.

We were dragged to a police van, which had been parked hastily on the street outside the pub. It was really raining now. Tox and I were shoved into the back of the van while the other fighters were herded up against the wall of the pub for a lecture about public brawls.

The lead patrol officer stood in the doorway and wrestled the keys into the lock on the van door.

‘We’re cops,’ I said. ‘We’re both cops.’

‘We know,’ he replied, and slammed the door.

WE SAT IN
silence for a long time while the Kings Cross patrol cops drove us out of the city. Tox seemed genuinely unconcerned with our situation. He leaned back against the wall of the vehicle, watching me calmly as I worked through several levels of blinding rage.

‘What the hell brought that on?’ I asked eventually.

‘We were in the academy together. Think he left the force a few years ago. He spotted me when we walked in. Started giving me the stink-eye. I thought he probably wanted a fight. So. You know.’ He shrugged.

‘My life is becoming more difficult by the minute because of you,’ I snapped. ‘I can’t even get people to answer the phone to me any more. Now you’ve pulled this shit and I’ve lost my phone altogether.’

‘Meh. They’ll issue you a new one,’ he rasped.

‘Maybe!’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe they’ll just ignore me!’

‘I’m hard to work with.’ Tox shifted, his cuffs clunking on the metal bench. ‘You must’ve guessed that.’

‘Well, I didn’t know it’d be
this
bad.’

‘No one’s forcing you to continue.’

‘Are you
kidding
?’ I shook my head. ‘I’m supposed to drop the case completely because you’re a murderer? This was my case to begin with, asshole!’

‘You need to calm down,’ he said. ‘You’re going all pink.’

I tried to hold my tongue, but I was mad, and when I’m mad the words tumble out. If I get mad enough I start swinging. I was already imagining giving him a bop on that nose just to remind him how inconvenient he was.

‘Did you do it?’ I blurted, shifting to the edge of my seat. ‘Did you kill that mother and child?’

He looked up and held my gaze. ‘Yes,’ he answered.

‘WHY?’ I ASKED.

Tox just looked at me. I wasn’t going to get an answer that easy.

I shifted against the wall and sighed, let the rumble of the van rock me back into tired numbness. We seemed to be driving for an hour. I got up and tried to look through the slats in the door and figure out where we were.

‘Where are they taking us?’ I wondered.

‘Not the Kings Cross police station,’ Tox said.

‘Of course not the Kings Cross police station!’ I sneered at him, fell into whining. ‘God, I should be in bed asleep now. I should have had a nice hot shower. I should have my lovely soft pyjamas on.’

‘Pyjamas?’ Tox snorted.

The van stopped. I looked out the slats but could only see darkness, the occasional orange light. Two officers came around the back of the van and opened the door.

‘Get out.’

‘I can’t get down there with my hands cuffed behind my back.’

‘Get. Out.’

I noted the names on their badges – Demper and Loris – and then gave up and let them have what they wanted, the humiliation they thought would make them feel like heroes. I made a jump for the ground, landed badly and fell on my face. It sounded as if Tox didn’t fare much better. I heard him slump onto his backside, try to slide off the edge and stumble.

One of the cops dragged me up. I’d bitten my lip. My mouth was full of blood. I sat on the ground as instructed, next to my partner. I was just getting an idea of where we were – some sort of industrial area near a canal – when blinding torchlight flashed in my face.

‘Obviously you have no idea who this is.’ The cop flicked the light from my face to Tox’s. My vision was clouded with green explosions.

‘It’s Tox Barnes,’ I said. ‘I’m well aware.’

‘Well, clearly you need an information session on who you’re working with here, because you couldn’t possibly know who he is – or you wouldn’t be hanging out in bars with him. No one with any self-respect would,’ the cop carried on.

I sighed. Tox was squinting into the torchlight with one eye open. The light flicked between us, blinding us over and over.

‘Tox Barnes and a few of his friends beat a woman and her young son to death.’

‘I know! I know!’

‘Aren’t you in sex crimes?’ The second cop jabbed me in the shoulder with his boot, causing me to topple over. ‘How could you dismiss the gang rape and vicious beating of an innocent—’

I looked at Tox, thinking he’d jump in and correct an accusation as outlandish as this. He hardly seemed to be listening.

‘Gang rape too now?’ I struggled upright and squinted at the cop before me. I felt strangely defiant on Tox’s behalf. ‘I can’t keep up with all the versions of this story. What’s next? Cannibalism?’

‘She’s on his side,’ one of them sneered. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘Where’s your badge?’

‘What?’

‘Where’s your fucking badge, bitch?’

I was shoved to the ground. The cop took my wallet from my back pocket and tore out the detective’s badge. They took my cuffs off my belt, and my gun too. Tox they left alone. He watched, passive, from the dark beside me.

‘You’re an embarrassment to the force,’ the cop said, giving me a good kick in the ribs. He uncuffed me roughly and shoved my head into the dirt. ‘Have some dignity and leave this vicious dog alone.’

They left us there in the dark, miles from the road.

KEN SPELLING WASN’T
going to die, not at the very moment he and his wife were beginning to settle into their well-deserved retirement. He was not going to die at the hands of some psychopathic freak who wanted to trade out of her shitty life the easy way.

Convincing her not to chloroform him had been easy – he’d simply not responded when she’d called from the doorway, having feigned a sluggish fever from around midnight. When he was sure Hope had left the vessel, he went to work. Ken kicked off his shoes and wriggled out of his socks. He stood in the middle of the tiny bathroom cubicle and stared down at his sleeping wife, trying to think of a plan. Jenny was sleeping for longer and longer periods now, and when she was awake she didn’t make sense, her words slurred and delirious, her eyes unable to settle. Ken needed to act now, before it was too late. He took a deep breath.

All right, the door. That was a dead end. Though the bulkhead had wheels on either side, he’d heard Hope looping a rope through her side of the door every time she’d left them, probably tying it off against a pipe to lock them in. He experimented, turning his back to the door and shoving the wheel sideways with his bound hands. The wheel turned an inch or so and then clunked into place. Ken went to the wall beside the shower and kicked, listening to the sound ripple up through the iron hull. Yes, maybe he could signal someone by kicking. He lay on his back and kicked madly. Jenny barely stirred. In ten minutes he was drenched in sweat. He stopped and listened. There was not a sound from outside the vessel. He panted and stared at the ceiling of his prison.

Maybe if he kicked in a rhythm. Three fast, loud kicks, three slow ones, and three quick again. SOS. There had to be dozens of yachties wandering back and forth along the piers outside. Surely one of them would hear his signal.

But how long would Hope be gone? How long could he wait for his signal to be heard? Ken wasn’t even sure all his racket was making it through the double hull of the boat to the outside world.

He stood again and looked at the porthole high on the wall behind the toilet. It had a single eye screw holding it shut. There was no way he could get it open with his hands tied. Or could he? Ken looked around the tiny room and spied the mop standing against the shelves of toiletries.

I’m not going to die
, he thought.
I refuse to
.

MY MAJOR BREAK
came at midnight, but I ignored it. I was trudging up the stairs to my apartment block, scratching dried glitter and blood off my neck and trying to remember which key unlocked my front door. I’d lost my phone, but upstairs in my apartment I could hear the sound of my laptop jangling with a phone call. The ringing was finished by the time I reached the apartment. I ignored it and fell face down onto the couch.

I’d walked away from Tox in the dark of the industrial area without saying anything about the trouble he’d got us into. In truth, I was more horrified by his admission in the back of the van than I was by the rough-housing those idiot patrollies had given us. It had taken fifteen minutes to find my wallet in the dark, up against the side of one of the warehouses where the officer had thrown it, and an hour to walk back to a major road. I’d stood there waiting for a cab for another half an hour, then had slept all the way home in it.

The laptop jangled again. I didn’t know how long I’d been out. I crawled to the screen and tapped.

‘What?’

‘Harry? Vicky.’

‘Yep.’

‘I was telling someone here what happened to Claudia and I might have a lead for you,’ she said. I fumbled blindly in the dark across the cluttered coffee table for a pen. ‘One of the other girls said Claudia had been hanging around a prostitute from the Cross named Hope.’

‘Huh,’ I laughed. My instincts about Kings Cross and its connection to this case were right. The Cross was where dreams, lives and promises failed. Claudia had been cooking up some kind of dream, and it had got her drowned at the bottom of the ocean.

‘“Hope”,’ I said. ‘That’s all you got?’

‘That’s all I got.’

‘I’ll take it. Thanks.’

Almost immediately, an instant chat message popped up on the screen from my brother, wondering why I hadn’t been answering my phone all night. I gave him a brief rundown of my experience out in the sticks, my fingers dancing over the keys.

SamBluDesigner77:
Are you OK? Should you go to a hospital?

BlueHarry:
I’m fine. It was just a rough-housing. No worse than the guys used to give each other at the academy.

SamBluDesigner77:
You should report those cops! Not only is it assault, but if they didn’t arrest you, dragging you out there against your will was probably abduction, right?

BlueHarry:
You don’t rat on your colleagues in this business, Sam. No matter what they do. We deal with our problems in-house.

SamBluDesigner77:
God, it’s all so pathetic.

BlueHarry:
Speaking of abductions, how’d the second interview on the Georges River Killer thing go? What did they ask you?

I watched the screen for an indication that Sam was writing back to me. He started, and then mysteriously the speech bubble he was writing in disappeared. I waited for whatever was distracting him to go away, but he didn’t start typing again. I had a strange urge to call him. My sisterly senses were in overdrive, but I told myself it was just fatigue.

TOX DIDN’T HAVE
any kind of desk. No police station would officially lay claim to him, so he would wander from station to station picking up cases as he liked. I’d heard his old department over in Auburn had started processing a transfer to North Sydney for him, and then the paperwork had ‘stalled’. They’d been waiting for the police officer in the transfer position in North Sydney to transfer out, apparently, and then he hadn’t. They’d filled Tox’s spot in Auburn. So he existed in administrative limbo, not really Auburn’s problem, not really North Sydney’s. He might have complained and had the whole thing cleared up, but I got the sense that the wandering life suited him. He was basically a freelance detective, a consultant, but without the extra pay consulting detectives receive. Sometimes he would nab cases from the police scanner radio which he kept in his car. That’s how he’d got onto Claudia’s crime scene before me. He’d been out driving, and had heard about the find.

When I arrived at Surry Hills station he was perched on the corner of one of the coffee-room tables, tapping away at that old, broken laptop. A group of my colleagues glared at the back of his head. I wondered if he’d gone home at all – he was still wearing the bloodied shirt. He didn’t see me come in. Chris Murray was scrolling through pictures of boats. His computer screen was littered with CCTV footage of yachts. He looked at me guiltily as I went right to Pops’s office and threw open the door.

‘I need a gun, a badge, some handcuffs and a phone,’ I said.

Pops glanced up. Detective Nigel Spader, whom I hadn’t noticed sitting in the chair behind the door, burst out laughing.

‘Oh yeah,’ I said, slumping into the chair next to him. ‘It’s really funny when police-issue items go missing. It’s hilarious. Laugh it up.’

‘How did this happen?’ Pops asked.

‘How do you think? I’m radioactive from spending too much time with Tox Barnes. I’m practically glowing. Cops are coming out of the woodwork to mess with me.’

‘Who?’ Pops asked. ‘Which cops?’

I sighed. Pops knew I’d never snitch.

‘No one’s forcing you to stay with him.’ Nigel shrugged. ‘Just drop him. He’ll solve it himself. There’s a new sexual assault on the case board this morning. Tell him you’ve got to prioritise that.’

I closed my eyes and revelled in a private fantasy in which I thumped Nigel’s head back into the wall behind him.