Chapter 23 #2
‘Oh, uh …’ I looked at the image of my father on the screen.
I’d seen the article plenty of times before, but not for twenty years or so.
Hero cop injured in shootout with killer husband.
Bridie was shrivelled up beside me, one leg pulled against her chest, her chin resting on it, eyes restless.
‘It just popped up while I was searching.’
‘It’s okay, Bridie.’
‘Sorry. I was curious.’
‘Don’t be sorry,’ I said, as casually as I could. ‘You’re allowed to be curious,’
‘It says Pop went around there to question the guy about his wife’s murder,’ Bridie said. ‘And the dude just shot him?’
‘From the way Dad tells it, there were a few shots fired,’ I said.
‘The wife was missing. Dominique Fine was her name. She’d been gone for a good while.
Husband said he was at the pub when she just up and disappeared.
Left the back door swinging open and potatoes cooking on the stove.
He didn’t report her gone until the next morning.
Dad went around there maybe six months later.
The Wisemans Ferry boys hadn’t been able to close the case, so he thought he’d give it a crack. ’
Bridie listened, her lips pursed.
‘He shouldn’t have been there alone,’ I said. ‘And he should have left when the questioning got heated. But, being who he was, Dad wanted to run a one-man interrogation right there in the guy’s house. He got a bullet for his troubles. And so did the husband. Dad survived and the guy didn’t.’
‘Do you remember it?’
‘No. I would only have been three or four.’
‘How bad was he injured?’
‘Bad enough to remind everybody about it every ten minutes for the next fifty years.’ I shifted in my seat, stretched my back.
It popped loudly. ‘He took it in the meat of the shoulder. Stopped being able to raise his arm all the way. Apparently. He held out for a while, but it got worse as he got older, and they took him off the force and gave him a pension.’
‘Wow.’ Bridie’s eyes wandered over the screen.
We sat in silence for a while, Bridie thinking whatever she was thinking, me trying not to say terrible things about my father.
Eventually she said, ‘So, anyway, going back to this sort of stuff …’ She clicked away from Dad’s picture, back to the murdered women, Linda and Marian.
I felt like a collar had been loosened from around my throat.
‘What do you think about my theory? There are so many other good cases. I only just started digging. The more I dig, the more I find.’
‘It’s a very imaginative theory, honey.’ I smiled.
‘But?’
‘But it’s just … weak,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’
Bridie deflated beside me. Physically slumped a good couple of inches. I felt my stomach sink with her, then turned to her, tried to lighten my tone. ‘I mean, it’s a good idea! It is, Bridie. It just needs to be so much stronger than this for it to be an avenue worth going down.’
‘Why, though?’ She shrugged sharply. ‘You know she’s come out here to write something. Something worth being killed over. What else would you kill someone over?’
‘Oh, Bridie,’ I said, ‘I’ve seen people kill each other over who gets the last slice of pizza.’
‘But they stole her laptop and her phone. So, they must have been trying to cover something up.’
‘Where’d you hear that?’
‘It’s all over town.’
I wasn’t surprised. ‘Not only that, but he stuck around looking for something else. A notebook, probably.’
‘So, my theory makes sense.’ Bridie put her hands up. ‘It makes perfect sense, Dad.’
‘It does, but it’s not strong enough,’ I said.
‘I’m not discarding it. I’m just saying we need to make it stronger.
A demonstrated interest in true crime, and this town being steeped in true crime cold cases, isn’t enough for us to say that’s definitely or even probably what she was doing here.
It’s not enough to go rushing off down that path.
It just doesn’t work like that. We tread carefully and choose our paths with real caution.
Because if we pick the wrong one, we’ll be wasting time that we just don’t have. ’
Bridie nodded but she hadn’t reinflated yet. I glanced at my watch. Time was on my mind. Wasting it. Cherishing it. Losing it. My daughter sitting here before me, her heartbeat ticking in her neck, and not on a slab in a medical centre waiting to go in the ground.
‘Hey, listen,’ I said. ‘Dodgy Dodge and his Travelling Troop of Ding-Dongs are getting ready to kick things off down at the pub.’
Bridie shook her head, amused and dismayed at the same time.
‘I can’t attend that right away,’ I went on.
‘Everybody in town will know who I am by the sight of me. I want things to heat up a little first. So, between now and when I can sidle in, I have fifty more phone calls I have to make. Are there any quick wrangles nearby? Something we could get done in an hour or less?’
She whipped out her phone, slowly reinflating. Her eyes darted down the screen. She nodded. ‘Unknown animal in a chimney. Ten minutes from here.’
‘You drive.’ I grabbed the keys from the edge of the table and slid them over to her.