‘I’m not going in that,’ she yelled before collapsing on the trolley. ‘Our house,’ she heard herself repeating again and again until the attendant silenced her with an oxygen mask.
What the hell was she going to tell Monty? (Image 23.1)
Image 23.1
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Just after midnight, against medical advice and with sixteen stitches in her shoulder, Stevie discharged herself from the hospital and caught a cab back to her ruined home. The fire trucks had left, but a police incident van remained. She heard voices, members of the arson squad sifting through the wreckage, looking for clues as to the cause of the explosion, and called to them across her front garden. Yesterday her garden had been filled with lavender, frangipani and oleander; now it looked like something from the Gaza Strip. A man in black police overalls appeared through a hole that had once been the front door.
‘I thought you were in hospital,’ he said through the rising tendrils of smoke that separated them. He picked his way through the rubble towards her and said his name was Paul Aubin. He squinted back at her through the spotlight. White lines threaded through the soot around his eyes, etching out his concern.
‘I had some glass in my shoulder; they pulled it out and stitched me up. There’s was nothing more they could do,’ she said.
His pause told her he didn’t believe a word of it. ‘And you’re with Central, yeah?’
She had trouble hearing what he said; her ears were still ringing with the sound of the explosion. She asked him to repeat himself and studied his lips carefully. ‘Yes, Central.’ After a moment’s hesitation she said, ‘I think this might be something to do with a job I’m working on.’
‘That figures.’
‘Why, what have you found out?’
He scrutinised her again. ‘Are you sure you’re okay? You’re as white as a sheet.’
‘Halle Berry would look pale in this light.’ She shouldn’t have shrugged; the local anaesthetic had worn off and the pain in her shoulder jabbed raw again. She masked it with a smile.
He chuckled, became serious one more, absently peeling the charred paintwork from her front picket fence. ‘You opened the gate and...’ he smacked his hands together, ‘Boom.’
Had she only imagined the flicker of flames in the windows immediately prior to the explosion? She tried to remember as she stared at the gate. Smoke-blackened and blistered on the inside and hanging on only one hinge, the frame was still relatively intact. ‘Surely the gate wasn’t booby trapped—it would’ve been blown to smithereens,’ she said.
‘No. The bomb was in the house. If the gate had been booby trapped, or if you’d been home five minutes earlier, we’d still be scraping you off the rubble.’
Stevie swallowed, rubbed her face with her hands. Despite having been cleaned up in hospital, she could still detect the acrid smell of smoke on her skin. ‘I would normally be home at this time, only tonight I was staying with my mother. My daughter would have been here too...’ The ground began to sway. She steadied herself with a hand on the fence.
‘You were very lucky,’ Aubin said.
She bit her bottom lip until she tasted salty blood and deliberately flexed her shoulder. The pain helped her focus. ‘So what caused it?’ It was a relief to hear the steadiness of her voice.
‘I’ll show you if you’re up to it. You might be able to help us out with a few things, anyway.’
He offered her his arm and she took it without hesitation. To hell with keeping up appearances—right now she really was a helpless female. They negotiated the rubble of her front path, climbed the singed steps and he steered her around a ragged patch of splintered timber on the front veranda. They entered the black hole where the front door had been. The heavy jarrah door with the colourful leadlight was one of the original features they’d planned on saving. Some of the leadlight had ended up in her shoulder. She wondered where the rest had landed.
In the front passage, the wallpaper—ugly stuff put up by the previous owners—was soggy and smoke-blackened, but the bedrooms and lounge room, apart from water damage, still appeared to be structurally stable.
‘It gets worse, I’m afraid,’ Aubin said as he led her to where the kitchen had been. She stood in the middle of the crater and turned a slow circle, trying to get her bearings. Some twisted pipes were all that remained of the sink, but the oven and the kitchen furniture seemed to have vanished into thin air. Above them, stars winked through a jagged hole in the roof.
‘The stove’s in the backyard,’ Aubin said as if reading her mind. ‘Funnily enough it doesn’t even look damaged.’
‘Where was the bomb placed, do you know?’
He walked over to an intact sidewall, bricks peeping through torn plaster, and pointed to the ground. ‘You had a cupboard here, right? It looks like the bomb was placed on one of the lower shelves. We’ve found explosive residue on the ground.’
‘A cupboard?’ Stevie queried, her mind racking to what was here before. ‘No. Monty’s fish tank was there.’
Aubin looked to be assessing her for shell shock. ‘No way was that bomb in a fish tank.’
‘The tank was on top of a cabinet with doors and shelves for the pump and other paraphernalia.’
Aubin relaxed. ‘That makes sense, a good place to hide it.’
Someone had been in her house, poking around in the cupboards, violating her home. The nausea rippling through her stomach was the same as when she’d found the porn magazine in Izzy’s bag. She gritted her teeth and prayed she wouldn’t throw up.
‘We think it was an incendiary bomb,’ Aubin continued, ‘but can’t be certain until the chemical tests are back.’
‘Incendiary?’
‘We’ve found fragments of a metal tube which had been filled with a chemical mixture. An inverted glass vial of sulphuric acid is put in one end and its hole blocked up with cork or paper. The acid eventually eats through to the mixture of chemicals, resulting in a very hot fire. It’s a crude device, but effective never the less, often favoured by Special Forces or arsonists who don’t care for the high tech alternatives.’
‘Old school?’ said Stevie.
‘Possibly. Or cocky to the point of stupidity. It’s an inexact science.’
‘And the explosion?’
‘Gas cylinders, wiring, aerosols, pool chemicals, paint tins ... there’s all kinds of household things that could have exploded on contact with such a hot fire.’
‘But how did the guy know when I’d be home?’
‘Maybe he knew you wouldn’t be home, it wasn’t meant to kill you, just warn you.’
Or play with me, Stevie thought; it was the kind of thing The Crow seemed to enjoy doing, and there was more than one way of being burned alive. There was no denying it now. The attempt on their lives in Fremantle, the magazine in the backpack—they knew exactly who she was and that she was on to them. Mamasan and The Crow, it had to be them. ‘They’ve attempted to kill me before,’ she said quietly.