Chapter 11
RUSSELL
I went into the beer garden, stood under a tree, making and taking phone calls.
My phone was running out of battery, and I reminded myself to plug it in next time I was in a car.
When I went back into the pub, the owner was there.
Rob Winter was a small, bespectacled man with wispy orange curls crowning his skull.
I found him sitting at the gloomy little bar on a padded leather stool, a notepad spread out on the stainless steel bar top, covered in handwriting that looked like rows and rows of dead and mangled mosquitos.
When I entered, Rob stood and took me in.
I didn’t know if anybody had warned him what I was like, or if the fact that he had found a murdered girl that morning was enough to unnerve him, but he tried to say hello and then thought better of it halfway through the word, so what came out was a strangled ‘Hek’.
‘Rob Winter.’
‘That’s me, yes.’
‘I’m Detective Inspector Russell Powder.’ I looked at him the way I look at the wriggling things I invariably find at the bottom of my street garbage bin when I manage to convince myself to hose it out. ‘I want you to run me through this morning’s events.’
‘Right.’ He nodded, putting his hands on the paper in front of him. ‘I, uh. I took Dodge through it. And he’s got me to start writing my statement.’
‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘I don’t care. I need to hear it all again.’
Rob licked his thin lips. ‘That’s fine. I can say it as many times as you like.’
I put my hands on the bar. He studied them, the grazed knuckles.
‘You don’t want to record it?’ he asked. I narrowed my eyes at him. ‘Because Dodge recorded it. On his phone.’
‘I don’t want to record it,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t need there to be any evidence of what I’ll do to you if I catch you in a lie, Mr Winter,’ I said.
Rob Winter stared at me. A fan came on in the beer fridges behind him, and the bottles tinkled.
‘I’m here to find out who murdered that young woman up there.
’ I raised a finger and pointed up and to my left, towards the hotel rooms. ‘And time is of the essence. If you delay me in what I’m trying to do here, even for a second, by not telling me the complete and unfiltered truth, I’m going to have to get creative with some of the objects you have back there. ’
Rob’s little green eyes dropped to the bar top in front of him.
To the muddling stick and the paring knives sitting by a glass canister of lemons and limes.
They travelled across the rows of heavy pint glasses to the wall beside him, where all the spirit bottles stood in rows.
He glanced the other way, at the glass racks and chopping boards.
His eyes finally landed back on me, and he braved a tiny laugh. ‘Are you kidding?’
‘Do I look like it?’
Rob plucked at the front of his shirt. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Think very carefully,’ I said. ‘Dodge is telling me that you saw to Chloe’s check-in. Here. Behind the bar. Four o’clock in the afternoon. You gave her one key card to her room, because that was standard procedure. All correct?’
Rob was silent for a good ten seconds, thinking. Then he said, ‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t see her again until she came down for dinner.’
Rob’s tongue unstuck from the roof of his mouth loudly. ‘I don’t think I saw her when she came down. I was in the office. Our internet was out. It was later that I saw her. She was already having dinner out the back.’
‘Did you speak to her?’
‘No.’
‘Not at all? Think carefully.’ I put my hand on a heavy glass jar, half-full of coins, that was sitting on the counter beside me.
‘No. I don’t think I did. I really don’t think I did, and if anyone is saying I did, then … I-I-I was grumpy about the internet being down. And the girls in the bar were being chatty and slacking off. So, I don’t think I’d have been very talkative with the punters.’
‘So you’re telling me that you were in an agitated state last night?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Grumpy. You used the word “grumpy”. Just now.’
‘Oh, I mean, I was annoyed. About the internet, not about … Internet out here in the valley is rubbish, it’s in and out all the time. That’s part of the reason one of the other guests is here, I think. The guy, uh—’
‘The girls. You were also annoyed at them.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you noted that in your statement?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Your agitated state.’ I glanced at the notepad in front of him. ‘On the night of the murder. In the hours immediately preceding the murder, in fact.’
‘No.’ Rob touched the notepad. His hands were trembling hard. ‘I mean, I will, though.’
‘Yes, you will,’ I said. ‘Now.’
Rob started writing. He was left-handed, which set off a cooling energy in my chest, a thing that fanned out down my shoulders and arms: the Prick Switch threatening to flip back off.
From the blood spatter on Chloe’s hotel room door, the angle of the little droplets and arcs, I was pretty sure the killer was right-handed.
But I didn’t let my switch flip all the way off.
The reason Rob Winter’s handwriting was so appalling might have been because he was faking the left-handedness.
Anything was possible. The silence and awkwardness while I stood there and watched him write made Rob actually drip sweat onto the page in front of him. ‘I didn’t see her go back up.’
‘Why were you the one to find her?’
‘I went up there,’ Rob said, taking a tea towel from a stack on the shelf to his left and wiping his face with it.
‘Every morning I do a round of the whole property. I park and go feed the peacocks. Then I go do the lines and pumps. I unlock the office and answer any emails that have come through overnight. The internet was still down, so that didn’t take very long.
Then I always do a walk-through of the accommodation hallway. ’ He pointed upwards.
‘Why do you do a walk-through of the hall?’
‘Because sometimes the guests leave little surprises,’ Rob said. ‘So I want to take a look before any of the other guests wake up and find them. Nobody’s usually awake before seven, and that’s when I would have gone up. Seven-fifteen or so.’
‘What kinds of “little surprises” are you talking about?’
‘Look, it’s a hotel above a pub.’ Rob shrugged.
‘People don’t quite make it to their rooms and they vomit or piss in the hallway.
A couple has a fight and the guy gets locked out by his missus and he sleeps outside her door.
Once a year or so somebody has a birthday party and they book out all the rooms, and everybody gets wrecked, and somebody takes a shit in the hallway. ’
‘Once a year that happens?’
‘For the past five, at least,’ the publican sighed. ‘Or they bring home weird things. I found a sheep up there once.’
‘A sheep?’
‘In the hallway, yeah,’ Rob said. ‘So, I just always go up and make sure I find the surprises before other guests do. This morning I went up and I saw the blood on the doorknob. I knocked, and she didn’t answer.
That got me worried. I came back down here to get her phone number from the computer, and I called her.
Nothing. I stood there at her door, calling her, knocking.
I didn’t like how much blood there was, you know?
Because there was a bit, the more I looked.
Splattered on the door. More than she’d have if she just fell and bonked her head or something. ’
‘When you got no answer, you went in?’
‘I went in and I found her.’ He nodded, dropping his eyes to the paper before him. He smoothed out the pages with his palms, chewing on his bottom lip. ‘Yep.’
‘You performed CPR?’ I said, unmoved by the tears springing to his eyes, having watched literally hundreds of suspects across my policing career crying crocodile tears. ‘And you called an ambulance?’
‘And the police, yep.’
‘What did the other guests do?’
‘The guy, the electrician’—Rob drew a long breath—‘he’d heard the knocking.
He came and saw briefly what was going on, but then he left.
Think it was all a bit much for him. The smell of the blood was really powerful.
You could taste it in the air. The young couple, they just went out when they got up.
The old couple got up, but they cleared out pretty quickly as well.
They never came and looked in. They saw there was some kind of drama, I think, and stayed away. ’
‘You were the only person on the floor that morning who went into the room between discovering the body and seeing the paramedics in?’
‘Yes.’
‘The blood in the carpet,’ I said. ‘Was it wet or was it dry?’
Rob looked at me. The emotion fell from his face as he tried to remember. ‘Dry, I guess.’
‘You guess?’
‘I suppose you could find out for sure,’ Rob said. ‘I mean, I was kneeling down beside her. If it was wet, it would be on the knees of my pants. And on my shoes and stuff.’
I stood looking at the little publican, waiting for him to fill the agonising silence with more, but he was so tangled up in the memory of what had happened that he just sat there looking right through the centre of my chest, as though he could see out the other side.
I snapped him out of it by saying, ‘You’re going to open the pub tonight. ’
He squinted up at me. ‘I am?’
‘Yes.’
‘Won’t that seem sort of … insensitive?’
‘I care as much about how it seems, Mr Winter, as I do about what cat litter costs in Kazakhstan. I want a big crowd of locals down here mingling and talking about the crime. Spreading rumours and innuendo, pointing fingers and getting loose lipped. Call it a vigil, if you want. Say you’ll give every dollar of the takings to Chloe’s family.
I don’t care. Just don’t say it was me asking you to open the place up. ’
‘Why not?’
‘Because then it’ll look like what it is,’ I said. ‘A fishing expedition.’
Rob put his hands in his pockets, took them out again, rubbed his mouth. ‘This is a small town, detective. A person’s standing is important around here. I don’t want people thinking I’ve used a girl’s murder as … as a promotional activity for my business.’
‘Get over yourself, Mr Winter,’ I said. ‘How good can your reputation around here be if you’re not the sort of person who’d sacrifice it in a heartbeat to aid police in catching a killer?’
Rob thought about that. Thought hard, trying to unpick the tangled logic, to figure out if doing a seemingly terrible but actually good thing made him a good or bad person. I left him to work on giving himself a headache and went out into the day.
I knew Bridie was at my elbow by the smell of her: watermelon shampoo and freshly washed linen. I struggled again not to put an arm around her neck and draw her near to me, instead finishing off my update to Gail Caplan while she waited patiently nearby. My watch said 2 p.m.
‘Sorry to bother you.’
‘You couldn’t bother me if you tried, Birds.’ I put the phone away. ‘What’s up?’
‘Do you know where we’re staying tonight?’
‘No idea.’ I rubbed my forehead. ‘I haven’t thought that far ahead.’
‘That’s cool.’
‘You’re probably bored out of your mind,’ I said. ‘And you’ve got nowhere to chill out. You’re supposed to be getting yourself settled into the room I made for you at my apartment.’
‘I have my own room?’
‘It was a surprise, which I’ve just ruined.
’ I felt tired and flustered, needed coffee.
We both fell into the awful thrumming strangeness of that concept: of me setting up a room for Bridie at my place, something only a father who was fairly certain his daughter would visit regularly and use that room often would do.
The type of father I had no right at all being, at this stage in our Great Relationship Repair Experiment.
‘It’s a really nice room.’
‘I can’t wait to see it.’
‘I’m sorry, Birds.’
‘Well, since you’re feeling sorry …’ Her mouth moved with a repressed smile. Hope and mischief. ‘How would you feel about me borrowing the ’Stang?’
A voice inside my brain started screaming hysterically. I kept my face neutral, which wasn’t an easy thing to do. ‘The ’Stang?’
‘I think I just snagged my first rescue in the region,’ Bridie said. ‘Eastern water dragon with a busted leg lounging by someone’s pool. It’s ten minutes from here.’
‘I would like nothing more than for you to borrow the ’Stang,’ I outright lied, fishing my keys out of my pocket and tossing them to her. ‘Tell me how it goes.’
I was smiling as she jogged excitedly away to drive my immaculately restored classic car to an unknown rural location and use it to transport a mangled reptile. The smile plummeted as Evan came around the corner in his Kia, pulling up in the dirt right in front of me, his window open.
‘Shouldn’t you be under a rock somewhere?’ I asked.
‘You going to see the body?’
‘Not with you I’m not.’
‘Well, I just spoke to Dodge. He was heading out to check on his door-knockers. And my eyesight isn’t great, but I thought I just saw you toss your car keys to Bridie.
’ He glanced at his rear-view. At Bridie, across the road and down the street a little, putting P plates on the back of the ’Stang. ‘That was Bridie, wasn’t it?’
I stood there, fuming.
‘She’s so tall,’ Evan said.
‘Get out of the driver’s seat,’ I barked, walking towards the car.