Web of Deceit (24 page)

‘Oh.’

‘Laird told me to tell you he was sorry,’
the detective went on. ‘I asked what about, specifically, but he said, just tell her I’m sorry.’

Sorry, huh?
Jane realised she was resting her hand on her stomach again. She put it on her hip instead.

‘As for you, you were apparently quite the spectacle staggering home. Lots of people saw you. One of your neighbours heard you coming down the street just before she heard you scream
too.’

‘So you’re satisfied that I didn’t do it.’

‘I am,’ Rooney said.

‘Well, thanks… I guess,’ she said.

‘How’s it going there?’

‘As you’d imagine.’ Jane watched Alex feed the machines more money. ‘I keep thinking that we should be able to do more.’

Somebody spoke in Rooney’s background. ‘I’m sorry, I have to go.’

‘Thanks for letting me know about
Laird.’

Alex lifted another batch from the tray. Jane took it from him and stacked it with the others. She guessed they had about fifteen hundred copies. ‘This looks like plenty.’

‘The city has four million people,’ he said.

She was about to reply, then let it go. She felt useless, helpless. How many people would see the posters they’d put up? How many would actually pay attention?
She’d watched an episode of Oprah once where they’d slathered a shopping centre with posters of a supposed missing boy then had the same boy wander alone from shop to shop for hours. Nobody had noticed.

Her phone buzzed. Laird. Again.
Please give me a chance to explain.

Her thumb hovered over the delete button, then she called him.

‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘I was really worried
about you. Why didn’t you answer my texts?’

The sound of his voice made her angry. ‘I was busy then and I’m busy now. So if you were just checking whether I’m alive, job done.’

‘Can we meet sometime?’ he said. ‘Start over? I miss you, and I really need to get out of this marriage. She’s bad for me. Even my doctor says so.’

‘I don’t care about that,’ she said. ‘I need your help.’

‘Anything at all,’ he said.

TWENTY-THREE

T
here was already a police car and an ambulance in Amy Street when Ella and Murray pulled up. They hurried along the same path they’d walked to tell Chloe that Marko was dead. Ella could hear raised voices and saw neighbours watching from their balconies.
Let them be okay.

An ambulance stretcher was set up near the building’s front door. Audra sat on
one end while a paramedic put an icepack on her wrist; Chloe wept on the other end, hands cradling her belly, while a second paramedic checked her blood pressure.

‘They okay?’ Ella said to the first paramedic, who nodded.

Inside the small foyer, Simon Fletcher lay on his stomach on the tiles, turning his head from side to side in an effort to see. Two constables stood beside him and
a trampled bunch of flowers lay on the bottom step. Fletcher tilted his head back to look up at Ella and Murray. He wore a dark suit and tie over a white shirt, the collar of which cut into the back of his neck. He was clean-shaven, the skin of his cheeks pink as if he’d scraped too hard with a blunt razor, and a fresh bruise surrounded a graze that oozed clear liquid above his left eye.

‘I didn’t mean for anything to happen,’ he said.

‘Why’d you come here then?’ Ella said.

She and Murray grasped under his arms and lifted him to his feet. ‘Let’s go.’

*

At the office, they put him in an interview room and closed the door. He’d been mostly quiet on the trip over, just once saying again that he didn’t mean for any of it to happen, but Ella had cautioned him
and he’d shut up. Now, they walked away, letting him stew a little, letting him worry.

Her phone buzzed with a message from her mother.
Dinner? Please?

Poor Mum.
Will if I can, but probably not.

She’d have to cope with the bickering siblings on her own.

Gawande and Kemsley came up the corridor to meet them. ‘Hey, we heard you got him,’ Gawande said.

‘Fool was at the
flat,’ Murray said.

Kemsley held out some printed pages. ‘Here’s some ammo to help shoot him down.’

Ella and Murray leaned close to see.

‘Beautiful,’ Ella said, and they started to plan their approach.

*

Anticipation making her tingle, Ella closed the door and sat down opposite Fletcher. Murray uncuffed him and sat next to her.

Fletcher rubbed his wrists. ‘This
wasn’t supposed to happen.’

‘You didn’t mean to go there?’ Ella said. ‘Or you didn’t plan to end up in handcuffs?’

‘I never wanted to have a fight with any lady is what I’m saying.’ He put his hands on the table. The backs were scratched and the gouges were dark with dried blood. ‘Is she okay?’

‘Why did you go there?’

‘To talk to Chloe.’

Murray snorted a laugh. ‘You
can’t be serious.’

‘I wanted to express my condolences, and to say that if she needs a friend I’m there for her.’ Fletcher’s cheeks flushed pinker.

‘You’re her friend,’ Ella said.

‘I like to think so, yes.’ He smelled of deodorant over sweat and toothpaste over a dental problem. The white shirt was new, the creases from the packaging visible under the tie, and the suit was shiny
on the shoulders and elbows. ‘I thought about going to the funeral, then I thought that might be awkward, so I went to talk to her today instead. I took flowers. I just wanted to tell her I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry because you killed him,’ Murray said.

‘Sorry because she’s hurting,’ Fletcher said. ‘I didn’t kill him. I was at the pub. You know that already.’

‘Not so fast,’ Ella said.
‘We’ve been talking to people. You left the site early and got to the pub late. There’s a gap there, between two and seven. Five hours. Long time, isn’t it, Murray?’

‘Long enough,’ Murray said. ‘Plenty long enough to get into the city, harass the man who’s married to the woman you fancy, make him crash a car, push him under a train.’

‘This is such bullshit,’ Fletcher said. ‘What am
I, Superman? How’d I manage to do all that?’

‘With a little help from your friends,’ Murray said. ‘Payback for a few favours, was it? You plumb in their hydroponic system? Let them use your place to stash guns?’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Wakey, wakey,’ Ella said. ‘Your former neighbours, the bikies. How are they doing? Tell them we said hi.’

Fletcher shook
his head. ‘This is ridiculous.’

‘You think?’ Ella took Kemsley’s folded page out of her pocket and laid it, still folded, on the table.

Fletcher glanced at it then away.

‘Guess what this is,’ Ella said.

‘Why should I? You’ll tell me soon enough.’

Ella stared at him. ‘I said guess.’

‘Look,’ Fletcher said. ‘This is all wrong. I truly didn’t do anything. I went
there today to talk to Chloe, that’s all. It’s not my fault if her sister went nuts, chucked my flowers down the stairs, came at me with an umbrella. Did I hit her back? No. I don’t do stuff like that. I’m a decent guy. I threw the umbrella away, and then she started hitting and scratching me. All I wanted to do was get her to calm down. Calm the both of them down. Just so I could explain myself.’

Ella unfolded the page and read out a mobile phone number. ‘Recognise that?’

A flush crept up from the too-tight collar. ‘That’s my number.’

‘And why did you use it to call Marko Meixner at his work?’ Murray said.

‘Okay, look. I can see how it might come across as strange, but it wasn’t.’ Fletcher put his hands on the table again. ‘I’m going to come clean with you now, I
swear. I wanted to meet the man. I know how that sounds. But I wanted to meet him and see, I don’t know, who the lucky guy was. See what was so great about him.’

Ella and Murray stared at him.

‘I know it sounds stupid,’ Fletcher said. ‘I know that.’

‘So what happened?’ Ella said.

‘I’d heard Chloe tell someone where he worked, so I called up his office and asked to talk
to him,’ Fletcher said. ‘I said I had some money I wanted to invest and somebody had recommended him to me, but that I couldn’t meet in office hours because of work, and asked if we could meet after, like at a bar or somewhere. He asked how much money I had and I said I’d inherited a hundred grand. He said okay, we could meet. I said there’s this bar just off George Street and he agreed.’

‘Then what?’

‘I admit I thought about trying to set him up,’ Fletcher said. ‘I thought about paying some girl to come onto him while he’s sitting there, and getting some photos and showing Chloe, see what she thought of him then. But then I decided not to, and I went along, it was Thursday two weeks ago, and met him.’

‘And?’ Murray said.

‘And we talked about what to do with the
hundred grand. He had all these reports with graphs and shit, went on and on about shares and bonds, and I had to pretend to be interested.’

‘Did he know who you were?’

‘No. I said my name was Gary Smith.’

‘Imaginative,’ Ella said.

‘He asked about what kind of returns I was hoping for, how I felt about the security of my investment, went on and on and on. And all the time
I’m thinking, he has her.’ He stared into space. ‘He gets to go home to her.’

Ella looked at his hand on the table, the breadth of his palm. ‘When did you grab him?’

He hesitated. ‘I’m not proud of any of this.’

‘Did we say you were?’ Murray said.

Fletcher moved his shoulders in his jacket. ‘He realised that I wasn’t listening. He got suspicious, I guess. He said something
about a waste of time and got up to walk out. I followed and grabbed him. I just wanted to tell him how lucky he was. Something like that. But he yanked his arm away and looked at me like I was a piece of shit, and I didn’t manage to say anything.’

‘And then what?’ Ella said.

‘Then nothing. He was gone. I went home. I never rang him back. Next thing you two are at my door in the middle
of the night asking when did I last see Chloe and whatever.’

‘That would be the night you said you’d never met or spoken to Marko.’

‘So I lied,’ Fletcher said. ‘I guessed something had happened to him and you were looking for a reason to pull me in. I was tired and didn’t feel like hanging around a cop shop for hours while you got your shit together.’

‘But you’re not lying now,’
Murray said.

‘No, I’m not, and you don’t need to use that tone,’ Fletcher said. ‘I said I know how all this sounds.’

‘It sounds like a pitiful excuse for a man trying to tell us half the truth and hoping we’ll swallow the lot,’ Ella said.

‘It’s not,’ Fletcher said. ‘That’s all of the truth, now. That’s everything I know.’

Ella smacked her hands flat on the table. ‘Four
months ago, you start sending Chloe Meixner flowers. Then you add anonymous notes telling her how beautiful she is, how much you fancy her. Six weeks ago, you tell her in person, at work, and that little stunt gets you sacked. Two weeks ago, you call her husband and meet him in a bar under false pretences because you want to “see what he’s like”. You grab him hard enough to leave a hand-shaped bruise,
then you lie to us about ever having met him. And now you think we’re going to believe you had nothing to do with his death because you’re aware of how strange it all sounds?’

‘It’s the truth.’

‘What about the other phone calls you made to him?’ Murray said.

‘I only called him once.’

Ella pulled out more pages of the office phone records. ‘Here, and here, and here. You
were threatening him, weren’t you? People heard his end of the call, they heard him saying, “no, no”.’

‘That’s not my number.’

‘No, because by that time you’d thought about the consequences of what you were doing, you thought ahead to this time,’ Ella said. ‘We know what you did. We know you bought a SIM card from the 7-Eleven store in Pendle Hill, you set it up online with the fake
name Chevy Johnson and the address of 171 Church Street in Parramatta, which is actually Westfield.’

Fletcher shook his head. ‘It wasn’t me.’

‘What did you say to him?’ Ella asked. ‘Did you say you were going to get him?’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ Fletcher said. ‘I told you, I only rang him once.’

‘What about the hang-up calls to their home? And the lurking in the garden
outside their unit block?’

‘That wasn’t me either,’ Fletcher said.

‘How about when you parked outside their building, two nights ago?’ she said. ‘You going to claim that wasn’t you either?’

He licked his lips. ‘This isn’t right. I’m here because Chloe was upset and I wanted to straighten everything out and have her understand that I meant no harm.’

‘You’re here because
you were arrested for assault,’ Murray said.

‘I was defending myself from her sister.’ Fletcher pointed at his eyebrow and his hands. ‘She did that to me. Does she even have a scratch on her? No.’

‘You are one big tough guy,’ Murray said. ‘Only
bruising
the ladies, not scratching them. Kudos, man.’

Fletcher turned red.

‘What were you doing parked outside their building?’
Ella said.

‘I felt bad,’ Fletcher said.

‘Bullshit,’ Ella said.

‘I did. I wanted to go and see her, tell her I was sorry, but I realised how late it was and that it wasn’t a good idea.’

‘You went there late at night because you felt bad, but you never lurked in their garden? Is that what you’re asking us to believe?’

‘You can believe it or not, but it’s the truth.’
He sat back in his chair and glared past them at the wall. Ella and Murray stared at him for a moment, then Murray patted his pocket as if his phone had vibrated. He took it out and looked at what Ella knew was nothing.

‘I’ll be back in a sec,’ he said, shutting the door behind him, leaving Ella and Fletcher facing each other across the table.

Fletcher glanced at her. ‘So what, you’re
the tough one who’ll kick the shit out of me now that we’re alone?’

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Are you frightened?’

‘As if,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I want a lawyer.’

‘Sure. When Detective Shakespeare comes back, I’ll send him to get you one. We just have to wait for him.’

She made a big show of settling in her chair. Fletcher glanced at her again, then away. He looked more anxious
than ever. He touched the ball of his thumb to the lump above his eye. Ella didn’t move or speak. She felt peculiarly calm.
Like before the storm.

Fletcher couldn’t settle. He shifted his chair away from the table – away from her – an inch or so. Ella watched him.

‘You look like a nice lady,’ he finally blurted.

Just as they’d thought. Being alone with a woman put him on edge.
He couldn’t stay silent. ‘You think so?’

‘I mean you look like you understand people. Like you get them.’

‘I thought you thought I was the tough one.’

‘That doesn’t mean you don’t see under the surface,’ he said. ‘I bet you sit in this little room and listen to people like me babble on every day of the week and you know just by watching and listening who did it and who didn’t.’

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I do sit in here day after day, and I listen to dirtbags of every kind try to pull the wool, and nine out of ten come up with something way better than you just did.’

He twisted a button on his jacket. ‘I didn’t come up with it. It’s the truth.’

‘You’re trying to paint yourself as a decent person who just wants to let Chloe know he’s sorry for her loss,
but you’re right, I do see past that. I see a guy who’s obsessed with a woman he can’t have, so obsessed he sets up a meeting with her husband and assaults him, and then when he’s dead he just can’t resist visiting her.’

‘Only to express my condolences. That’s hardly –’

Ella leaned over the table and stared into his face, so close she could see the pores in his skin, the individual
droplets of clear fluid oozing from the abrasion above his eye, the uneven alignment of his lower teeth in his open mouth. ‘I see boofheads like you every day, thinking they can tell half the truth and we won’t know the difference. Thinking they’re smart and we’re stupid. Look at you, pretending to be something you’re not in your suit and tie, telling us bullshit about how much you want to help and
you just want Chloe to know how sorry you are.’ She widened her eyes to glare into his. ‘I’ve met guys like you so many times before. One day you want to talk to a woman. She snubs you. Next thing you’re in here charged with rape.’