Chapter 26
EVAN
Dodge was standing by the edge of the little marquee at the back of the beer garden, studying the pub in the distance, the sandstone chimneys and the four hotel windows, all dark.
All the activity was at the front of the pub.
It occurred to me as I approached with my backpack slung over my shoulder that for years to come people were going to crowd into this sprawling, tree-lined place and gaze up at those old windows and talk about the young woman who had been murdered there.
As the centuries passed an urban legend would almost certainly develop, about Chloe appearing and waving to punters down below from the shadows, or about the temperature in the room plummeting suddenly, waking any guests who dared to stay in room four.
Doors slamming and lace curtains twitching and all that bullshit.
I stood beside Dodge for a while and let the fantasies wash over me as a way of staying out of the real world.
The awful, awful present. Because I was filled with a numbness now.
A careful detachment from what was happening around me.
I knew that could break at any second, when it finally hit me; that I was nearly certain about two life-changing, soul-destroying things.
That my son had been there the night Chloe was murdered.
And his DNA had somehow ended up on her body.
‘Your brother’s right, you know,’ Dodge said.
‘About what?’
‘He really couldn’t have watched the windows from the beer garden.’ Dodge pointed to the space before us. A fifty-metre-square stretch of cleared grass and picnic tables. ‘Not without being seen.’
Dodge beckoned me. I went. We stood so that we were aligned with the stairwell to the hotel rooms, and we could see the windows of the rooms as well. ‘You could only really watch from here,’ Dodge said. ‘Look.’
He beckoned again. I followed, my mind tangled in other things, thinking about DNA and fathers and sons. ‘You come back here,’ Dodge says. ‘See what happens.’
We went into the dark at the roadside. In the shadow of bright and twinkling stars, we crossed the narrow dirt road to arrive beside a barbed-wire fence.
There was a house on the hill, maybe a hundred metres up an incline.
Almost immediately, two slick black mixed-breed dogs came sprinting down the hill, barking madly as they went, skidding to a halt on the damp grass a stone’s throw from the wire.
The dogs planted their front paws and dropped their heads low and snarled and snapped at us.
‘No watching from here, that’s for sure,’ Dodge said.
We started walking back to the tables and the marquee.
‘This is good. It limits our suspect pool considerably. It was either someone in the beer garden, or it was Rob. Or it was someone she knew, someone she invited to the room. Jesus, I wish we had those bloody phone and email accounts.’
‘Okay, but people saw Chloe going up, and the electrician coming down,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t they see the killer going up or coming down?’
‘Oh, now, that’s an interesting sort of thing, isn’t it?
’ Dodge sighed. ‘Because it depends on the moment. People just don’t notice things sometimes.
Trust me. It’s a thing. You can have fifty people at a picnic and somebody walks up and abducts a kid from the edge of the gathering and not one person sees it.
That happened. Happened to us, over at Wisemans, couple of years ago.
It was the kid’s dad in the end who took her, and we got her back safely.
But nobody saw the grab. Fifty people there, they all missed it. ’
‘How?’
‘He was super close but just out of sight, waiting for the right moment,’ Dodge said.
‘The people here, they were cutting and handing out pieces of cake.’ He demonstrated with his hands, making a cluster in the air.
‘Over here, you had two kids having an argument and some parents trying to break it up. Over here there was a game of cricket going on. Just for a few seconds, everyone was occupied with something else. Broad daylight. He snapped her up like a snake and disappeared into the bush.’
Dodge snatched the air in front of my nose.
We fell into silence, watching the stairwell.
‘There’s also a thing called “selective attention”,’ Dodge said. He almost blurted the words, embarrassed, rubbing his eyes. ‘If you’re … uh. If you’re interested.’
I turned to him. ‘What?’
‘Well, my Patsy is a psychologist, you see.’ Dodge dropped the hand from his eyes, the gate open and the horses of enthusiasm bolting out. ‘And her PhD thesis was on attention. Different types of attention. There’s this phenomenon called “selective attention”, and …’
I stood there watching Dodge, listening to him talking about distractions, intuition, neurological pathways, human habits, the dynamics of attention, and an experiment involving a person dressed in a gorilla suit, for a good ten minutes without taking a pause, regretting my decision to give him free rein so thoroughly that I could barely follow what he was saying.
‘Basically,’ he said in summation, ‘a person walking up and down that stairwell isn’t an out-of-place enough stimulus to arouse that part of your brain. ’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘Patsy’s a genius.’ Dodge gave a satisfied sigh. ‘I’m very proud of her.’
We looked at the stairwell.
‘How’d you go, anyway?’ Dodge said eventually. ‘At the lab?’
I tried to open my mouth. It seemed glued shut.
‘Evan?’
‘No match,’ I said.
‘Ah, nuts. And was there a notebook in the handbag, in the end?’
Not really knowing why, just having the all-body sense that I needed to stop the motion of the investigation until I could catch up, I shook my head.
‘Zero from two.’ Dodge blew out air. ‘What about the traffic cam data?’
‘Uh, yes. I … I have them on my laptop.’
‘Great.’ Dodge pointed to the fold-out table beneath the marquee. ‘I’ve gotta go syphon my python. You get set up. I’ll be right back.’
I let my backpack slump onto the fold-out table.
Watched Dodge march off across the empty beer garden towards the pub’s bathrooms. Through the gap between the pub’s two main buildings, I could see the crowd out the front of the pub was growing.
It was an odd set-up. Cops at the back. Locals at the front.
I guessed that had been Russell’s plan, for the townspeople to be in view of us, talking about us, passing around their theories and rumours, a swirling pit of speculation.
A few were standing in the gap now, arms folded, watching me.
I had known cops who would encourage this sort of thing: a curious crowding in at the edges of tragedy.
Yes, it was voyeuristic. But once one person put down their shame and bent to their curiosity, everyone tended to follow suit, and a few inconspicuous officers placed within that crowd could sometimes pick up useful whispers.
I opened my laptop, navigated to the list of vehicles that had come in and out of Redbelly the previous evening.
I exported the list into a word document.
It appeared in a table. I glanced towards the pub, watching a peacock traversing the gravel path between the buildings, giving the people a wide berth, heading for an awning at the back.
As I watched, the bird crouched and then leapt up, landing with a clatter on the corrugated iron.
Dodge appeared between the buildings, drying his hands on his trousers and heading towards me. I selected the row of the table that contained the Uber driver’s vehicle. The one that had almost certainly carried my son into Redbelly the night before. I deleted the row from the list.
A hand fell on my shoulder. I yelped in surprise.
‘Coffee-coffee-coffee-coffee-coffee!’ Knowles chanted. ‘Can I make you one, sir?’
‘Urgh, Jesus. Yes.’ I rubbed my eyes hard. ‘You trying to give a guy a heart attack, Constable Knowles?’
‘Apologies.’ Knowles reached past me to grab the sugar canister. ‘Anything good on the traffic cams?’
‘Dunno yet.’ I watched Dodge as he arrived at the table and looked at the list. ‘We’ll have to match these vehicles up with the punters at the pub.’
‘That’s Branchy.’ Dodge pointed at a vehicle in the list. A white Mitsubishi ute.
He stood looking at the list, taking a coffee from Knowles as he finished making it.
I felt a strange dread that Dodge could tell somehow that a line was missing from the table.
‘That’s all I recognise off the top of my head. ’
‘Hey, where’s Grumpy Smurf right now?’ Knowles asked.
Dodge nearly spat out the coffee he was drinking. ‘Just mind yourself there, Knowlesy. Detective Inspector Powder is Senior Sergeant Powder here’s brother. And both are your superiors.’
‘He’s a “Powder” as well?’ Knowles’s eyes widened. He turned to me. ‘The detective?’
‘Yes, Knowles.’
‘Oh my god. I’ve been hearing it all day as “Fowler”!’ Knowles clapped a hand to his forehead. ‘Christ. Lucky I didn’t say it to his face. Huh! How about that, then? Powder and Powder, a crime-fighting super team. You work with your brother often, do you, Sarge?’
‘Apologies on Knowlesy’s behalf, Evan.’ Dodge sighed. ‘Too much coffee makes him even chattier than me.’