Times of Trouble (30 page)

‘
Liam Kingsley. He
sent an email threatening the victim of a blackmail scam. I can
hook you up with our computer people here so they can get the
message sent to you. You can no doubt do an ISP search etcetera to
make sure it is this fella’s real name.’

‘
Yes, yes, I’d
definitely do that.’

‘
I’ll fax you the
case notes we have so far, and obviously I would need to be kept
updated on any interviews you do with Kingsley. We are not sure
whether he is an outlier, or if he is directly involved, so the
more information you can get out of him, the better.’

‘
Of course, give me
your details, and I’ll get onto it right away.’

Wolcott recited his
details, reminding the detective of the time difference between
London and Adelaide, and hoping he took this as a hint not to call
him on his mobile in the middle of the night. Wolcott lived by the
assumption that everyone is dumber than you expect them to be, and
he didn’t make any exceptions for Detective Sergeant
Conroy.

As is often the case,
his assumption was correct and he did receive a call back from the
detective less than an hour later, when he was sound asleep.
Sounding annoyed, he took the call sitting up in bed.

‘
Sorry to call you so
late, but I wanted to get back to you about what we’ve
found.’

‘
I'm sure I'll
eventually nod off again. Have you interviewed
Kingsley?’

‘
No, that’s just the
thing. We were able to track him down from his email address and
ISP. But when we contacted him, he told us he was in Sydney,
working. He wouldn’t give us any specific details of what he was
doing, but it would appear he is a private investigator, from the
information he did give us. We had some other records on him
though.’

‘
Records?’ Wolcott
was just enough awake to put together a coherent thought
pattern.

‘
He was involved in a
criminal case here, a year or so back. He used to be a lawyer. He
worked in a criminal law outfit, and made the big mistake of
becoming romantically involved with a female client. She ended up
doing time for knocking off her ex-husband, but Kingsley wasn’t
through with the relationship at that point. The silly fool
smuggled contraband items into the nick for her: a mobile phone,
some prescription drugs, and other bits and pieces. Nothing too
serious, but it went on for long enough that he got caught. ‘Course
he got fired from his job. The case against him ended up with a
slap on the wrist. But he got disbarred. We didn’t know until now
that he’s trying his hand as a private investigator. But he seems
to have scraped a licence somehow. He’s not a great friend of the
police, after what went on with this woman.’

‘
So how did he
respond when you gave him a call?’

‘
He didn’t exactly
volunteer for an interview. He said he had no idea about any email,
and no idea who Harrison-Brown was. He said he was working when I
spoke to him, but he refused to tell us anything about what he was
doing. Very arrogant he sounded. So I got on to City Central in
Sydney, and they said they’d look into it and call you
back.’

Wolcott couldn’t help
but smile at Detective Conroy’s eager persona. But there was no way
he was going to take another pre-dawn phone call.

‘
Can you get them to
call me when I’ll be back in the office tomorrow? I’ll be in a
better mood for an update then.’

‘
Yeah, sure. My
apologies, I should have checked the time before I
rang.’

Wolcott eventually
went back to sleep, though it was a restless slumber, interrupted
by niggling thoughts about the case. Why did it always seem that a
straightforward case, when handed to him, became a cacophony of
different tangents and criminals? It was as if the Chief Inspector
had some psychic ability to see which cases would take this path,
and handed them to Wolcott, knowing how desperately sick of his job
he was. It originally seemed like it would be an easy one to close,
the perpetrator Sporalli caught, his partner in crime dead, and the
politician kept well out of the media as requested. But with murder
comes more attention and Wolcott couldn’t guarantee the politician
his name wouldn’t get leaked to the press as part of the
investigation.

At 1:00 am, he woke
up again when his phone rang again. He cursed that he hadn't turned
it off after speaking to Conroy.

'Who is
this?'

‘
This is Detective
Inspector Williamson.’

Another Australian
accent. Didn't these Aussies ever check the time before calling?
This one wasn't as cheerful as the last. He sounded older than
Conroy, more Wolcott’s vintage, and his weathered voice had the
same unenthused ring to it that he chose to use himself. Wolcott
respected him immediately, despite the late hour, and got straight
to the point. He didn’t want to be conversing in his pyjamas for a
minute longer than necessary.

'So what have you got
to tell me about our friend Liam Kingsley?’

‘
Looks like he’s just
one piece of the jigsaw. It’s quite a long story.’ Wolcott sighed
audibly, but Williamson took no notice. ‘It’s no coincidence that
this got put in my in tray,’ he went on. ‘We got the fax from you
guys about the possibility that a prostitute called Molly Lane you
were looking for in London, for involvement in a blackmail scam,
had travelled to Sydney. I noticed it, but didn’t think much on it.
Finding someone like that in Sydney is, just like London, finding a
needle in a haystack. But then this girl drops into the station
unannounced yesterday, and tells me she is worried about her
sister, Sophie Goddard, aka Molly Lane, who she thinks is running
from some people who may have killed two of her friends. One in
London, one here in Sydney that we are treating as a suspicious
death.

Wolcott interrupted. ‘I
know about the one here. Danny Wright.
We
never found the girlfriend, Molly Lane, or the other woman
involved, Katie Easton. Next thing we hear, they're in
Sydney.
So where does Kingsley come
in?’

‘
I’m getting to that.
The sister told me she is working with a private investigator to
locate Sophie – your Molly, that is. They are all from Adelaide.
The private investigator is Liam Kingsley.'

‘
That’s interesting
to say the least.’ Wolcott perked up a bit. Maybe someone else was
going to do his work for him. ‘What else did you find out from the
sister?’

‘
That’s the thing, I
told her about her sister’s involvement in blackmailing the MP, and
she clammed up. I guess if Sophie could end up nicked, the sister
didn’t want us to be involved anymore.’

‘
And she ran off and
told Kingsley, who emailed Harrison-Brown to warn him off,’ Wolcott
concluded.

‘
It looks more like
she sent the email off her own bat. I had one of our units pick
Kingsley up. He was staking out the Royal North Shore Hospital,
convinced this Sophie would be visiting there with a
child.’

Wolcott tried to
smother a yawn. 'What happened?’

‘
He denied knowledge
of the email. But he tried to do a runner when the uniforms turned
up to ask him a few questions. So they brought him in. He was
acting very strangely in our interview. He wasn’t at all interested
in giving information away that might help us to find Sophie. Same
as the sister, Ellen. His line is that he is employed to find
Sophie, and has no interest in any other related investigations. We
questioned him for about an hour and didn’t get anywhere. He had no
reason for absconding from the police, other than a claim that he
had to stick around to find Sophie. He seemed to be taking the case
extremely seriously. Almost personally.'

‘
That’s odd. I can
understand the sister being protective, but what would Kingsley
have to gain from keeping the police out of the investigation?
Surely he doesn’t care if she is found and arrested, as long as he
gets paid for the work he is doing?’

‘
Did Conroy in
Adelaide tell you about his past?’

‘
With the criminal
girlfriend?’

‘
Yeah, we think it is
possible he has become emotionally involved again. With either
Ellen or Sophie, or both.

‘
Do you believe him
about the email?’

‘
Yeah. The sister
could have been using his computer and his email account. He claims
to have left his laptop in her possession throughout the entire
day. The thing is, as I’m sure you know, she’s right that the
blackmail and the deaths have to be connected somehow. It obviously
isn’t the MP, but it could be someone else they tried to put the
squeeze on. Unfortunately she hasn’t got any information that could
help us work out who. She was probably just testing the water with
this Harrison-Brown. Either way, I don’t think the sister, or the
private investigator, is involved with your fraud case. You can
tell your Harrison-Brown he can forget about the email. We let
Kingsley go. There was nothing to hold him on.’

‘
So where does this
leave us with the murders? Is there any chance of you picking up
Sophie?’ asked Wolcott, still hoping there was something more in it
for him.

‘
We are obviously
interested in talking to her because of her involvement in your
blackmail case, and we’d also like to find out what she knows about
the murders – yours and ours. At this stage though, we have no idea
where she is. I’ll keep you updated on that situation.’

‘Good man. I’ll let you know if
anything else crops up here that might be of use.’

Wolcott hung up, satisfied to
have spoken to someone who was obviously a highly skilled
detective. If he was going to have to coordinate with foreign
detectives, he would rather it be someone like Williamson, who was
very thorough, than someone like himself, who was not. Even if he
did ring in the middle of the night.

Chapter 26

She wasn’t used to
having so little money. It wasn’t long ago that she had more than
she knew what to do with. Danny didn’t believe there was such a
thing as too much money. He even had enough spare cash to buy
ridiculously expensive drugs, for his increasingly erratic party
life. She hated watching him snort her hard earned cash up his
nose. And even with all this money, he wanted more. But look where
that had got them. And now there was none coming in, she felt
stressed even spending a dollar. She’d only just paid the first
week's rent when she had to run from the apartment. The $2,000 she
had found with Charlie was a huge help, but even added to what she
had left, she knew it wouldn’t last her much longer. The passports
had cost them most of the money she got from Allen, and she had
spent $500 on a bomb of a car, feeling it safer to drive than use
public transport. And now Katie was gone, and the men were in
Sydney, she was no better off than before.

She had been tempted
to go straight to Adelaide; her mum would have happily taken her in
and looked after her. But she couldn’t put her family in that
danger, not after what had happened to Danny’s parents. She was a
curse and she needed to stay away from them. She even regretted the
email she’d sent from London; it must have worried them so
much.

She had so many
regrets these days it was hard to know how she could start again.
If only she had never been in that revolting movie. Or perhaps if
she had never mentioned to Danny the under-age girls they were
using for it. Maybe if she’d tried harder to convince Danny that
using the information was a mistake. Or left him once and for all,
like she had been thinking about doing for months. But she hadn’t
saved enough money to start on her own. It all came back to money.
Or so she had thought at the time.

As she pulled into
the hospital car park, Charlie started to pull the seat belt over
his head, making it far too easy for him to slip off the seat. She
felt like a terrible carer, driving around with a baby on the front
seat, the seat belt wrapped dangerously across his little body. Car
seats were one of the first things people organised for their
babies, to show they going to look after them properly. But she
hadn’t had any sort of preparation time for Charlie’s arrival.
Getting him out of the station was the one glimmer of luck she’d
had in months. Everyone’s attention was on the accident that had
happened on the tracks. She shuddered when she thought of what had
happened at there. They’d got Katie. She could never erase the
scene from her memory. Or the guilt she felt for letting it happen.
The least she could do was to protect Charlie.

When she got him back
to her flat, her new sanctuary, she thought for a while that he was
fussing because he missed his mum. He wouldn’t stop crying, and his
little face was pink and sweaty. When she tried to get him to
settle in her bed, he was grizzly, and his whole body was hot. Then
he started to cough, but not like a baby usually does: more like an
adult, his body shuddering with the effort. She had looked after
him for Katie in the past, but never known him to be so difficult.
And she had no idea what to do about his fever.

She hardly got any
sleep that night, crying for Katie, and listening to Charlie
coughing beside her. First thing the next morning, she had taken
him to the medical centre she had seen on the main road, and from
there, she had been directed to take him to hospital for tests. The
young paediatrician told her it was like croup, but more serious -
a
bacterial infection that needed to be
treated with some sort of steroids.
If being on the run had been difficult before, now it was
an absolute nightmare. The flat was no longer safe. They had come
to her door, and she had bolted without any of her things. How
could they possibly have found her there? Last night she had curled
up with Charlie on the back seat of the car, terrified that the men
would somehow find her parked in the beachside car park. But she
had to look after Charlie, and if the nurse couldn’t come to him,
that meant taking him back to the hospital.