“The bastard was bragging about it, Chief Inspector,” Stanley had said. “And that’s not right. Gloating, he was. I got away with murder, he was saying with every drink. Cut the bastard’s throat like a sheep. He spent the whole time boasting. Big-noting himself. Little prick. If my situation wasn’t how it is,” he’d shrugged, “I’d swear it in court. But you understand, given the work I do... I can’t do that.”
I did understand, and that was when I swore I’d get this bastard one day. Stanley’s moral code has always been ambiguous, but even a gig has his standards. And the deliberate murder of a defenseless man, already bashed into unconsciousness, was obviously something that offended his particular standards.
My fishing companion is a piss-weak swimmer; sadly, we’ve lost several rock fishermen along this stretch of coast over the last few years — and it would be easy to just shove him into one of the big swells we get along here when the weather rolls in with powerful waves, but I have other plans for him. Murder meant nothing to him; in fact, he was a gratuitous murderer, cutting his victim’s throat just to show his brothers how “tough” he was. To me, as to the law, murder is the ultimate crime — the taking of a life and all its potential, the young man’s future, the wife and kids he never got to have, the grandchildren — a whole family tree cut off. So I have other plans for Ronald Leslie Twigg. The Latin motto on the New South Wales Police Force badge underneath the sea eagle translates as, Punishment swiftly follows crime. My companion’s punishment has not been swift because it’s taken almost two decades for a suitable incident to arrive, yet punishment will certainly follow. The vengeance I’m planning isn’t simple revenge; it’s applying the law. Belatedly, because the law failed nineteen years ago.
“Fuck!” shouted my fishing companion. “Bastard!” The flathead he thought he’d hooked had bitten through his line, which now drifted around as he reeled it in. He swore some more over the loss of his flathead rig and I suppressed a smile.
As far as he’s concerned, I’m just a retired bloke who likes to fish. I was not involved in the investigations or the following trials, which sent his brothers away for life, yet acquitted him. I saw him once or twice in court, but I was just one face in a packed public gallery.
The evidence of the eyewitness to the attack was hazy. She’d only seen the two older brothers in the streetlight near her window. Nor was there any physical evidence to link him to the crime. None that couldn’t be explained away by the defense lawyer as transfer DNA from the other two men, his brothers. Nothing conclusive to put him at the murder site. The grub wore gloves. Didn’t want to get blood under his fingernails.
My companion was clearly calling it a day. Or at least a morning. He packed up his gear, grunted about the poor fishing — “Not enough to feed the bloody cat” — and started walking away, toward the beach and the parking area. I packed up too. I already had everything I needed, and unlike my companion, I’d caught two nice-sized bream.
I was making my way back to the car when I took a phone call from my daughter.
“I’m calling from Pigling Bland’s phone,” said Kerryanne. Immediately I knew she was speaking from a public phone, which she always did when she wanted a secure line; in fact, I even knew which public phone. When the kids were little, there’d been a fading advertisement on the wall of the long-gone corner shop for Pinkerton’s Brand Dyspepsia Mixture. Kerryanne, as a little one, had thought the sign was about the character in a Beatrix Potter book.
“We’ve got one, Dad,” she said. “Reported earlier this morning. And it could be the one we’ve been waiting for. The story should break within the next few hours. So far, the press isn’t onto it. But that won’t last. I’ll be going out there shortly.”
“What do you need from me?” I asked, adrenaline shaking my hands.
“Anything helpful. I’ll be searching the exhibits and doing some of the analyses. I’ll report on what I find. That’s my job. And the people at Lidcombe will do the rest,” she said, referring to the government laboratories. My daughter’s sharp intake of breath came down the line. “Dad, we’ve been waiting for so long. We might never get another chance.”
“I know, honey. I know. Okay. I’ll gather up the doings and leave it in the designated spot.”
This was in the boot of my daughter’s car. I held a spare key to that as well as a key to her house.
“I expect to be called out any time now. The local uniforms have called in the homicide people and they’ll call me. It’s down on Vale Street. I’m just finishing another job but I’ll take my car home and pick up some extra gear on the way there.”
I could barely speak. “Yes,” I finally croaked. “You do that.”
Over the time I’ve been fishing with Twigg, I’ve gathered up a bloodstained rag from when he’d cut himself on his knife while gutting a fish, and I also have an old chisel that he’d used on his catch, whacking them on the head with a killer blow. He thought he’d lost the chisel when a big wave broke over the rock ledge we were fishing from. He doesn’t know that I dropped it into my tackle bag.
Over the years, Claire, Kerryanne, and my surviving son Tim, now away in the west with his wife and family, had discussed the plan with me until there was no further doubt in anyone’s mind that what we were formulating was morally acceptable, if not legal. There is a higher law, as Claire had once said. “So we’re all agreed?” I asked, last time we got together to talk about it.
They’d all nodded and Claire wiped away a tear. “It’s the right thing to do,” she said, and I put my arm around her.
I turned to my daughter. “Kerryanne, you realize the risk to you? You could be prosecuted. You would lose your job and you’d never get another job anywhere in your field. You could face prison for perverting the course of justice. You’re the one facing the biggest risk.”
“No one will find out, Dad,” she’d said. “How could they? No one here will speak about it, and no one else knows. And I won’t be conspiring to pervert the course of justice. I’ll be doing the opposite.”
Back home, I washed up, cleaned the two bream I’d caught, and put the bream, minus their heads, loosely covered into the fridge. Claire was making my favorite, macaroni and cheese, for lunch.
“Kerryanne called,” I said. “I need to duck out now.” I took a deep breath. “Today’s the day.”
Claire looked up from grating cheese, fixing her brown eyes on mine as the significance of what I’d just said hit her. “What will I do if you two end up in jail?”
“Not going to happen, love,” I said, kissing the top of her head. “Kerryanne knows her job. She’ll do the job and do it well. And she’ll make sure she does it in a way that’s undetectable. I’ll suggest to her to make sure the items are in situ when the video unit people start. Or she’ll do the photographic work herself.”
“But what about the other one? The real perpetrator?”
“Kerryanne and I will work something out.”
I had wrapped the bloodstained rag and the small chisel very carefully without touching them, using my fish-scaling gloves. I knew that I’d need to be quick now.