The Twisted Knot (21 page)

61

Janine Postlewaite was holed up in her office as usual. They'd ended up giving her her own space after the Black case. It wasn't a promotion, but she took what she could get. It was really more an operation room than an office, but it offered a degree of peace and quiet away from the constantly ringing phone in the detective's dayroom. Not that Janine's phone was silent. But most of her work these days revolved around Black. Although the matter involving Sammi had been finalised, she was lead investigator on the four other murders connected to him. They had made so much progress, investigating every line of enquiry and verifying every detail. She had promised Sammi they'd nail him for each murder, make sure he never saw the light of day. That thought flitted through her mind every time she sat down at her desk at the start of a shift.

There was a framed photo on her desk, to the right of her computer monitor, where some people might put a photo of their husband or children. It was a picture of a river. It wasn't any river. It had been taken by a forensics officer at Captain's Creek State Forest. It looked like a scenic photo from someone's photo album. Shafts of morning sun streamed through the trees, striking the water in bursts of golden sparkles. It looked serene and relaxing. It was also the spot where Sammi had outsmarted Black, the killer pursuing her. It was the point where the balance had shifted, and Sammi had moved from victim to survivor. To Janine, it signified hope and courage. When her shift dragged and the work seemed tedious or pointless, she stood up and took the photo in her hands. Then she would walk across the room to the doorway – only a short distance. And she would remind herself that every victory was a series of steps. Sometimes slow and tedious, but always moving in the right direction. One more step, just one more step.

The phone rang and Janine recognised the number immediately.

‘Hi, darl'. Haven't talked to you in a while. How are you?' she asked.

‘Hey, I'm good,' Sammi replied. ‘I finally got back on the road.'

‘Good for you. How's that going?'

‘Would you believe the first job back and we're looking at murder?' Sammi replied.

‘Oh no! That's not what you want. You want to ease back in. Start with a shoppie, a couple of breaks,' Janine exclaimed. ‘Then you can work up to murder,' she joked.

‘It's been all right,' Sammi said. ‘I kind of fell into this job at the start, now I want to see it through. It's a branch job but I've been involved from the beginning. It looks like a woman killed her husband and her brother-in-law. They were interfering with her little girl so she took matters into her own hands. She's been very smart about it too.'

‘Sounds interesting. But you didn't ring up to chat, did you? Did you need some advice or something?'

Sammi laughed. ‘You saw right through me. Might need a favour off you. Looks like the woman might be hiding out at her mother's house. In your division.'

‘I've got enough murderers to chase at the moment,' Janine said with half a snort.

‘We want to do it ourselves. I mean, the bloke from our CIB wants to do it. We just need a local crew to do a reccy and maybe back us up on the warrant. It will only be two of us coming down. But I thought this might be the only opportunity we ever get to work on a job together. Do you know how much I'd love to work on a job with you?' Janine could hear a note of excitement in Sammi's voice which she hadn't heard before.

‘Please? I'll buy the coffee,' Sammi added. They had met frequently in the early days after Sammi had been released from hospital, when Janine was piecing together all the evidence against Black. Then there had been the trial – lots of hours waiting in the courthouse. And lots of coffees. But they hadn't seen each other in weeks.

Janine smiled down the receiver. ‘I'll have to clear it past the boss,' she said.

‘But you will ask?' Sammi pressed. ‘It's not a dangerous job. The woman was only ever a threat to the men who hurt her daughter. But she'll be playing ducks and drakes. I doubt she'll walk out with her hands in the air. Once we've got her, that will be it. She's not going to rush us or box on or anything.'

Janine had taken the river photo into her hands while they were speaking. She would love to see Sammi again. See her in uniform, working. It would be fantastic to see how she had put herself back together again after what had happened. She'd had no doubt that Sammi would do it. Sammi had an iron will that could get her through anything.

‘So no punching on, and I might meet another murderer?' Janine asked.

‘And you get to work with me!' Sammi replied.

‘You've sold it to me. I'm in.' Janine laughed.

62

Things had not all gone to plan for Belinda on the night she became a murderer. A Friday night had been the obvious choice because Peter often came around to their house for dinner. Barry had been keen to see his brother regularly and Belinda had felt a little sorry for Peter, living by himself with only the dog to keep him company. So she would cook a roast and they'd sit down as a family. Sometimes Faye would come too. After dinner, Belinda would put a movie on for Nici. If Faye was there, they'd play cards. Otherwise the men would drink rum and talk, while Belinda curled up on the couch with her daughter. It had seemed like a harmless ritual, unwinding in the company of family, the sort of thing everyone does. Now it made Belinda's skin crawl.

She had organised one last dinner. With two exceptions. She had dropped Nicola to the safety of her best friend's house for a sleepover. Then she had stuffed toilet paper down the toilet until it backed up. She had apologised to Barry and suggested that maybe they could go to Peter's house for dinner. The roast was cooking in the oven already. They could bring it along. And a bottle of rum to thank him for hosting them. Barry had agreed without hesitation.

Peter had the sharpened self-preservation instincts of a guilty man. He had regarded Belinda's apparent generosity with some suspicion. She had tried so hard to act normally throughout the evening. It had been torture, sitting opposite the two men who had abused her daughter. When Barry leant over to kiss her, it had taken all her resolve not to spit in his face. She had poured the first rums immediately. She never drank rum, so they had not given it a second thought when she only poured glasses for them. She had been free to tamper with the bottle in the kitchen. Barry had passed out from the potent combination of rum, cola and bovine tranquillisers before he'd even finished his dinner. His last meal.

But Peter, cagey and cautious, clearly had not drunk enough rum and ran the moment Barry passed out. Brotherly love only stretched so far.

Despite the unexpected events, Belinda kept her nerve and re-thought her plans. She knew Peter wouldn't go to the police. But now he was aware that she had found out about Nicola. He would run and hide, possibly interstate, and probably never be heard of again. She hoped so. He might as well be dead. The police might even suspect he was dead, especially when his brother disappeared at the same time. The police might think Barry had killed him. No one but her knew that Barry was as bad as Peter.

A germ of an idea had formed in her mind. She breathed evenly and looked at this new plan from every angle. What were the possibilities? What were the consequences?

She knew no one would be looking for Peter any time soon. He kept to himself, working on the farm. Peter and Barry were a similar size and shape. In the course of her work as a nurse at the hospital, she had seen a decomposed body before. She knew the bloating and discolouration that inflated and disfigured a person. She could guess what Barry would look like if he spent two or three days in the hot shed.

She took Barry's watch off, then changed his shirt for one out of Peter's wardrobe. It was hard work, heaving around a dead weight. As a nurse, she was used to moving incapacitated people though, and this was similar. It was also a body she knew well. She dragged him out of the house by tipping him back on the chair he was sitting on, and pulling it out like a wheelie bin. It was inelegant, trying to keep him balanced, with limbs dragging and head lolling. But she made it out to the shed.

Although the logistics had changed, the actual killing had been premeditated. She had gone through many different variations of the same plan in her head, but the end result was always the same: murder. But those plans had been for her foul brother-in-law. As she stood in the shed looking at her husband of six years, it all seemed suddenly impossible. This was her husband. She wasn't a murderer. How could she kill this man, or any man?

She looked him up and down. He needed a shave, brown and grey hair was speckled across his chin. A strip of paunch escaped from the gap between his pants and his brother's shirt. Its white softness repulsed her. There was no love there anymore. She focused on the hate. Her gaze settled on his hands. One was in his lap, the other was swinging close to the floor. He had the rough, stained hands of a mechanic with black under all the fingernails. Hands that had once caressed her body and touched her in ways that had made her moan. These rough, dirty hands had also touched her tiny daughter in the same intimate way.

She let the pictures that she hadn't wanted to imagine flick into her mind's eye. Him naked and hard with Nicola in their bed. The ugliness and wrongness of the picture revolted Belinda. A red fog of hatred descended on her and she fed on it, fuelling her anger. She slapped Barry's face, nearly knocking him off the seat. Then, without dwelling any further on it, she tied a noose – like the one she had sent to the police station – slipped it over her husband's head and strung him up from the rafters. He made some choking noises as she turned her back on him and walked out of the shed.

Belinda returned the chair to the kitchen and erased all the drag marks she had made. Then she took her and Barry's dishes, and every other trace of their visit, and packed them into the car. She poured the poisoned rum down the sink and took the bottle and the empty glass to the shed. She'd written the note as an afterthought. She couldn't say why exactly. She justified it in her mind that she was adding to the illusion that it was a suicide. But perhaps she had written the apology she wanted from the man she married. Part of her wanted remorse, and explanations, a way to understand and maybe even forgive. But there was no explanation she would accept. It was criminal, immoral and downright disgusting. The single word scrawled in block letters with her left hand had seemed fitting.

She didn't feel like a murderer. In her mind, she put herself into the same category as women who were abused by their husbands and found the courage, and the means, to kill them. It was self-defence for every defenceless child. It wasn't revenge or even punishment. It was doing the job the legal system should be doing.

It was justice.

63

Sammi was pleased to pull into her driveway that day. It had been a busy shift, and she was still not completely comfortable back out on the road. She had chosen the jobs carefully, where she was unlikely to get into any sort of physical confrontation. But after the mob at the front counter, it wasn't like the station was a safe bet either. She was still turning the events of the day over in her mind as she parked her car in the carport. Whoever got home first got the carport, the other one parked on the front lawn. Because of the eight to four shifts, Sammi's car pretty much hogged the covered spot. She heard the dog bark twice, acknowledging her arrival as she wandered out to check the letterbox.

There was a large white envelope folded in half to fit in the slot. Sammi unfolded it and the police service emblem in the corner immediately caught her eye. Her chest tightened slightly. She regarded official mail with apprehension. She wriggled her finger behind the envelope's flap, but as she started to tear it open, the name on the front caught her eye. This wasn't her mail. This was Gavin's. Official police mail for Gavin. Could only be one thing.

She unlocked the house and went inside. She put the half-opened envelope on the kitchen bench. When Gavin came home soon after, that's where it still was, at the edge of Sammi's field of vision as she prepared their dinner. It made her uneasy, not only the idea of Gavin applying for the police, but the conversations they were going to have before the matter was decided one way or another.

He saw the mail, immediately grabbed it and ran his finger across the ripped flap.

‘Sorry,' she said. ‘I saw the QPS emblem and thought it was for me. I didn't mean to pry.' She sounded so prissy, as if they were flatmates, not a couple of five years.

‘Doesn't matter. You could have looked. You've probably guessed anyway. It's the recruit application package. I'm going to apply. I think I've got a good chance of getting in and I think it's a job I'd really enjoy.'

Sammi didn't know how to reply, didn't even understand how she felt about it. Her silence lengthened like a shadow at dusk. Gavin rustled the papers out of the envelope. Made a show of flicking through them. Still no one spoke. The silence was heavy. Suffocating.

With an inaudible pop, something tightly knotted came undone inside Sammi. She raised the wooden spoon she was using to stir the gravy and smacked it down on the kitchen, splattering a circle of hot brown spots.

‘Fuck, Gav. I just can't do this anymore,' she said, the words splattering like the gravy. The months of restraint and readjustment and re-evaluation crumpled into raw emotion.

‘Well, fuck, Sammi. Neither can I. I don't even know where I friggin' stand anymore.' Anger suppressed for too long.

‘I'm in the dark too. Give me a fucken hint so we can sort this out.' Her rising volume gave him permission to reply in kind.

‘You don't know? Let me explain. This . . .' he said, smacking the application papers on the edge of the counter, ‘. . . this isn't about you. The last year and a half might have been about you. But this bloody well isn't.' He slammed the ream of papers onto the kitchen counter. They fanned out, some floating to the floor. ‘I need to do something for me. I want to be someone too. I want to take back something I've been fucken losing all these years.'

Sammy's anger flared, fanned by inferences. ‘You act like this is some sort of solution to everything. You're applying for the cops not the friggin' Avengers. It's just a fucken job.' She was shouting now. ‘It's not a free pass to anything.'

‘It's a damn sight better than being up to your elbows in oil every day. You don't know what a fucken job is.'

‘How dare you!' She let the indignation sweep her along. ‘You think I sit around all day reading the newspaper? You have no idea how
hard
being a copper is. You think it's all car chases and beers after work.'

‘You don't think I'm smart enough, do you? I'm some dumb mechanic you can push around. Because you're a cop.' He had squared his shoulders against her and she could see his biceps flexing as he leant on the counter to yell at her.

‘Like I've ever pushed you around,' Sammi said. ‘You're behaving like a child.'

‘A child? And, what? I need to grow up before I can join the police? Fuck! What the hell do you think of me?' There was a look of absolute outrage on his face.

‘I think you need to piss off out of my sight for a bit.' As she spoke these words, she swung abruptly away from Gavin back towards the stove. Her elbow clipped the handle of the colander where the pasta had been draining, knocking it off the hotplate and tipping it sideways onto the counter. She jumped backwards quickly as the spaghetti cascaded to the floor.

‘And dinner's off now too!' she yelled. She stared angrily at the mess on the floor. Before the tears sprang to her eyes, she pushed past Gavin and dashed into their bedroom, slamming the door behind her. The air vibrated with their anger.

She threw herself on the bed, hot tears soaking into the pillow. She didn't even know what she wanted anymore. She breathed deeply, pushing up against the shapeless black mass looming over her.

The psychiatrist had said this was still normal, even after what Sammi considered to be a long time since the incident. The offender had only recently been sentenced after all. What was ‘normal' though? How many people had been through anything close to what she had endured at the hands of a psychopath? How could they come up with a benchmark of what was and wasn't acceptable?

All she wanted was a normal life. Days at work, maybe frustrating and disappointing days, but normal days. A relationship where the balance of power was equal and transparent. An average boring life, where she knew where she stood.

‘Hey.' Gavin was standing at the door. He held the application in his hand.

‘Say the word and I'll put these in the bin. Our relationship means more to me than this.' He waved the papers dismissively.

Sammi shook her head slowly.

‘Sorry. I'm confused. I guess I want everything to go back to the way it was.'

Gavin sighed. ‘That's never going to happen. Neither one of us will ever be the same person we were before your abduction.'

‘It didn't only change me. It changed everything. It changed my job. It changed you. It changed us.'

‘But that doesn't have to be a bad thing. There's no reason we can't come out of this stronger. As people, as well as a couple. We can work it out if we still love and respect each other.' He hesitated and lowered his voice. ‘Do you still . . . love me?'

‘Yes.' Her answer was spontaneous and wholehearted.

Gavin smiled. ‘Then the rest is minor details,' he said.

Sammi drew herself up from the bed and walked across to Gavin. He opened his arms wide to embrace her. They pressed against each other and the tension ebbed away. Completely. Till it was better than it had been for a long time. They kissed like they meant it.

‘There's still one problem,' Sammi said.

‘What's that,' Gavin asked softly.

‘What are we having for dinner now? And who's cleaning up the mess?'

Gavin went to the back door. He threw it open. ‘Jess!' he called. ‘Grub's on!' The dog galloped up the back steps and skidded into the kitchen, delighted to see the food on the floor.

‘How's pizza sound?' Gavin asked Sammi.

Sammi moved across to Gavin to embrace him again, to the sound of the dog gobbling spaghetti.

Gavin squeezed her. ‘That's the first fight since . . .'

Sammi cut him off. ‘I know. How could I forget?'

‘You're not going anywhere this time.'

They kissed again.

‘I've kind of missed it. The fighting,' she said.

He nodded. ‘There's nothing quite like getting it off your chest.'

She smiled and ran her hand over his pec. ‘You don't need to get anything off your chest. Except this shirt.'

He laughed, the deep throaty chuckle she loved so much. He slid his hand against the small of her back under her T-shirt and pulled her against him.

He'd make a good copper.