Chapter 12
EVAN
‘What have you got?’
‘You first,’ my brother said. ‘Tell me that the geeks are into Chloe’s accounts.’
‘Got her bank account, no trouble at all,’ Gail said.
‘The banks are always quick to pony up. Someone’s going to send you a couple of years’ worth of statements.
But the social media and the email are proving difficult.
They’ve got to go through the security centres for each individual company, and they’re all on US time. ’
‘Have you briefed the press?’
‘Yeah. Kept it vague. There’s interest, but the journos are absolutely flocking to Paddo’s double-bludgeoning on the Esplanade, so hopefully you won’t have too many vultures pecking at you. Did you speak to the family?’
‘Not yet. Going to see the body first.’
‘Then what?’
‘I’ll hold a briefing with the gormless nincompoops I’ve been saddled with as investigative staff here in about an hour.’ Russell glanced at me. ‘But I’m looking at it as being targeted. A silencing.’ He explained the crime scene to Gail in detail, talked about the potential missing notebook.
‘So, what did she know that she shouldn’t have known?’ Gail asked. ‘What was she working on? Was she out there for work?’
‘We need her call list. Her emails. Yesterday, Gail.’
‘Yes, yes. Don’t get your knickers in a knot.’
‘I’m going to set up a public thing for tonight, a fishing expedition.’
‘What, like, a vigil?’
‘Nothing as formal as that. I’m just going to let it evolve naturally and see what it turns into. Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll drag out the local sicko, he’ll confess and the mob will stone him to death, and I’ll be home by lunchtime tomorrow.’
‘If only,’ Gail said. ‘What are you going to do? Open the pub?’
‘Yep.’
‘Will the pub owner go along with that?’
‘The pub owner will do what he’s told,’ Russell said. ‘And I’ll have divers set to go in the morning looking for the knife or the laptop and phone in the river. But without access to those accounts—’
‘Without that access, you’ll just have to hang tight.’ Gail’s voice was singsongy, like she was soothing a tantrumming child. ‘What ended up happening with Bridie? Is she at home?’
‘She’s here.’
I heard a laugh on the other end of the line. ‘Oh, wow. Someone likes to live dangerously.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Georgia finds out you took your kid on a murder, she’s going to wear your skin as a party dress.’
‘It’s a delightful weekend of family fun. Just what I always wished for.’ Again, I felt Russell’s eyes on me. ‘The accounts, Gail.’
Russell hung up and started dialling someone else. I reached over and pushed the phone down. ‘Don’t make another call.’
‘Touch me again and I’ll snap your fingers like bread sticks, Evan.’
‘We need to talk.’
‘No, we don’t.’
‘Russell,’ I said. ‘That day—’
‘Are you deaf? I said—’
‘What did you want me to do?’ I shouted over the top of him.
We were rolling through fields of tall trees towards the ferry stop.
Sunshine through the leaves. ‘Huh? What was the correct course of action that day, Rus? I got a call from you saying you’d just slugged our father so hard he was unconscious on your doorstep and bleeding everywhere.
You told me I could go and find him at the local hospital. ’
‘Right.’
‘That’s exactly what I did. And suddenly I’m the bad guy?’
‘You became the bad guy when you left the hospital, came to my home and admonished me for hitting him,’ Russell snapped.
‘You stood there looking down from your ridiculously high horse, taking the time to tell me that I was the one in the wrong for hitting him. After what he said to my child, Evan.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘What?’
‘Has smacking someone in the head ever worked out for you as a life strategy, Rus?’ I kept my tone cheerfully patronising. ‘You keep doing it. You look like you’ve done it just recently. Has it ever made your personal circumstances better than they were?’
‘I’m thinking about how it might improve my personal circumstances right now, actually.’
‘Just try.’
‘You’re doing it again. You realise that, don’t you? You’re up on that horse.’
‘Russell.’
‘While you’re over there, prancing around on your self-righteous, peace-loving pony, you might like to take a moment to reflect on all the times you came running to me, needing me to jump in and save your hide after you started brawls with kids at school who were too big for you.’
‘Oh, here we go.’
‘You remember that, right?’
‘Yes, let’s all keep doing the things we did as teenagers and pretend they’re okay to do in our mid-forties. I’ll go jerk off into a sock and you can go tipping cows.’
He wasn’t even listening. ‘Then you have the gall to go and bring cigarettes and books and outside food and fucking clothes to Arthur when he’s laid up in hospital.
’ Russell shook his head, his lip curled in repulsion.
‘Daddy, can I spoon-feed your raspberry jelly to you? Daddy, can I rub your tootsies for you? I’m a good little boy, aren’t I, Daddy? ’
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Despite it all, the baby voice was so absurd coming out of this huge hairy beast of a man, with his scars and his mean eyes and his enormous scabbed knuckles on the steering wheel.
And Russell’s fury got to a place like that sometimes—a place beyond sanity, into darkly comic levels of vitriol.
Now I was thinking of all the fights we’d ever had.
All of them over stupid shit. ‘You really are something else, you know that?’
My brother didn’t answer. He was staring at the river, the houses that lined it as we approached the ferry.
Hamptons style, two storey, all white trims and boats rocking gently in their moorings.
When we were kids we’d walked these houses in the summer, going door to door selling oranges from the farm.
Each of us holding the handle of a laundry basket heavy with fruit.
‘You know, I don’t think any of this is about how I treated Dad after you slugged him,’ I said.
‘What’s it about then, Dr Phil?’
‘I think it’s about you not knowing how to tell me that you’re gay.’
The humour in the car evaporated, snatched from the very air, replaced by a hateful energy that clouded out from the other side of the car.
Russell slowed at the lineup for the ferry, watching the big vessel beyond the boom gate making its way towards us.
‘Be very careful what you say next, Evan,’ he said.
‘You didn’t even try to tell me.’ I shrugged.
‘You told Georgia, and Georgia told her family, and they told people, and they told people, and it gradually drifted over to Dad and me. But you never called me up and actually told me. Do I get to be pissed off about that? After everything you and I have been through together, I had to hear about what happened on the fucking grapevine?’
‘No.’ He glared at me. ‘You don’t get to be pissed off about that.’
‘I think you didn’t tell me because you were afraid of what I’d say.’
Russell said nothing. He was squinting at swallows twisting and spinning around the ferry, landing on its lines and railings, hurling themselves headfirst into the wind.
I went on. ‘By the time Dad had gone and pulled his bullshit at your front door, you must have been terrified about what kind of bullshit I was going to come out with. So, you found a way to be angry at me, so I’d never have the chance to tell you what I think.’
‘Let me explain something to you, Evan,’ Russell said. He pointed at himself, at me, the car around us, the ferry, and the boats beyond. ‘This? This whole weekend? This is not that chance. In case you were thinking that it is.’
‘Oh, it isn’t?’
‘No,’ he said. His voice was low, rumbling, the growl of a male lion warning a potential rival not to come close to the pride.
Eyes full of dark experience. ‘It isn’t.
You want to give me an exhaustive breakdown of what you think about it all?
You want to list it all out? Whether you think I was faking it with Georgia.
Whether you knew, when we were growing up.
You go right ahead and do that, Evan. Write it all down.
And when you’re done, take the paper, fold it neatly and shove it up your own arse. ’
I nodded. ‘This is what he always wanted, you know,’ I said. ‘Dad. He always wanted us to hate each other. You’re sitting there fulfilling his dream.’
‘I guess I really am the better son, then.’ Russell gave an icy smile.
The boom gate lifted, and Russell drove us onto the vessel.