A divisional van had arrived first, followed by an ambulance, a second ambulance, several police cars. A policeman removed her cuffs, poured her a brandy. She was numb and grieving and robotic. Crime scene officers photographed the bodies, the safe, the open drawers. They dusted for prints. The ambulance officers got restless, said in future call the pathologist before you call us. The pathologist when he got there was irritable, methodical, a white coat over his dinner jacket. Homicide detectives took her to the kitchen, a policewoman made a pot of coffee, they said, ‘A few questions, if you don’t mind.’ They questioned her, questioned her again. Armed robbery detectives questioned her. Homicide again, the same questions worded differently. Finally she said, ‘This is intolerable. I’ve told you all I know,’ and put her head in her hands. She didn’t see Bax again.
It was ten o’clock before they let her go. They wanted to know where she’d be staying, a number where she could be contacted. She gave them the South Yarra apartment, let a woman detective take her there. It was curious: she was scum in their eyes, the family was scum and the world a better place now, but once or twice the police seemed to remind themselves that her husband and her brother-in-law had been executed before her eyes and that she must have looked death in the face, for they showed her little kindnesses, which she gravely accepted.
She fitted the role to herself like a cloak and it stayed with her even when the detective was gone and she was alone in the apartment. She felt sombre, reflective and tragic. She poured Scotch over ice in a glass, put Marianne Faithfull on the stereo and pictured all the lonely women driving through Paris in sports cars.
Bax dissipated all that soon enough. He showed up just before midnight, standing white and agitated outside her door. She took him into the main room and pushed him down onto the sofa. He was like a clockspring ready to break and there it was again, questions, questions.
‘I told you not to come here,’ she said. ‘It’s too risky.’
‘No one followed me, Stel.’ He leaned his face toward her imploringly. ‘I had to find out what they said to you, what they wanted to know.’
‘What do you think? They wanted to know did I get a look at the two men? Could I describe them? Did I have any idea who they were? Did I think robbery was the motive here, or was it murder made to look like a robbery gone wrong? What enemies did the family have?’ She laughed. ‘I told them yeah, sure, only the entire police force. They wanted to know how much was in the safe. Did the two men say anything? Etcetera, etcetera.’ She stopped. ‘What about you? Did they swallow your story?’
‘A stolen car inquiry. They bought it.’
‘They weren’t curious as to your timing on the scene?’
Bax rubbed his face with his hands. ‘They were, but I told them the evenings were the only time I’d find the Mesics at home, I gave them Coulthart’s name, told them I’d been working your case for a couple of years.’ He stopped dry-washing his face and said, ‘God, I can’t believe it, you were so cool.’
Stella looked at him, wishing he would go away.
‘The investigation will drag on for a while,’ he said. ‘It will be a few weeks before they stop sniffing around. Meanwhile we’ve scared off the opposition and we can quietly put the firm back together again.’
The apartment lighting was turned low. Beyond the thick curtains the night was black. Bax, sitting stiffly at the far end of the sofa, edged imperceptibly along it. Stella backed away until her spine was against the arm rest. She tucked her legs under her and clamped a cushion to her chest, body language aimed at telling him to keep his distance. There was a vast gulf between them and it wasn’t only the empty space on the sofa. ‘I don’t know, Bax,’ she said finally.
He pricked up at that. ‘What do you mean?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know, I just feel different, things have changed. I feel I could pack it all in, sell up and go overseas or something.’
He looked away and there was a catch in his voice. ‘Where does that leave me?’
‘The Mesics are finished now. That should get your boss off your back.’
‘I don’t mean that. I mean me and you,’ Bax said.
Somehow she didn’t have the energy for this. There was silence and she let it lengthen, waiting for him to find the answer in it.
‘I’d better go,’ he said at last.
She nodded.
He got up, seemed to wrestle with the idea of kissing her, and said, ‘I could call in tomorrow afternoon.’
‘I might not be here.’
‘I’ll give you a ring,’ he said.
She nodded.
At the door he said, ‘I’ll let myself out.’
When he was gone she realised that she should have asked him to return her key. She unplugged the telephone, got ready for bed. She didn’t want hassles with him, she didn’t want to see his pained face or see him maudlin or violent or however it would affect him, so when she heard his key in the lock a short time later, real anger flared in her. She marched out to confront him.
But the man standing in the main room was one of the men who’d robbed her, and the look he directed at her was full of hard and unnerving intelligence. Bax and two strangers were with him. He pushed them toward her. ‘Your new partners, Stella,’ he said. ‘Meet Mr Towns and Mr Drew.’
Thirty-nine
After he left them, Wyatt drove back across the river. Everything led to the house in Abbotsford. Rossiter knew about the Mesic job, there was that unexplained release of Niall from prison, and only the Rossiters knew he’d be at Ounsted’s surgery.
He left the Peugeot under a plane tree on Gipps Street and entered the alley on foot. There was no easy way about the next step other than to storm the place. He stopped when he reached the granny flat. Its rear wall was incorporated into the alley fence. There was one dusty curtained window, a light on and a radio playing inside. Wyatt went in noiselessly over the fence.
He was ready for the killer dog. It came at him across the yard, thick and low-slung, as meaty and hairless as a pig. Wyatt wrapped his belt around his left forearm, feinted with it, flicked open the switchblade in his other hand, sliced open the straining throat. The heart and lungs worked briefly, inhaling blood, discharging a scarlet-flecked froth, then life went out of the dog and it dropped like a stone, the canines tearing the skin of Wyatt’s wrist.
He stepped back from the animal, his heart hammering. This death only a metre from Niall’s window was harsh and liquid, and Wyatt instinctively backed into darkness as Niall appeared in the doorway, backlit by a bare light bulb in the room behind him.
Wyatt stepped out again. He let Niall see the.38 in his hand. ‘I’ve come for my money.’
Niall had been smoking and drinking. His eyes were slitted against the smoke drifting from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and he held a beer can near his thigh. He recognised Wyatt and dropped the cigarette. Then, when the dying dog made a last tremor, shooting out its legs, expiring on its side, Niall dropped the beer can.
Wyatt expected Niall to go to the dog. He was prepared to let that happen. Instead, Niall jerked back into the flat and slammed the door.
Wyatt knocked, tried the handle, slammed his shoulder against it a couple of times. ‘Niall,’ he said, ‘just give me the money.’
The crossbow bolt came through the window at him. Weakened and deflected by the glass, it plucked at his thigh and fell uselessly to the ground. He dropped into a crouch and edged away from the light.
Then he heard glass again, only it wasn’t the window facing him but the one on the alley. There was a sound of cotton tearing and then footsteps stumbled away from the house.
Wyatt stepped onto the kennel roof and vaulted over the fence into the alley. He crouched for a moment until he saw Rossiter’s son show clearly in silhouette in the streetlights at the end of the alley. He set out after him, loping easily, the.38 where it couldn’t be seen.