Chapter 26 #2
As though he’d been summoned, Russell’s Mustang came rumbling around the corner of the pub and pulled up in the hotel guest parking.
He climbed out, and Bridie drove on. I watched the car disappear into the night with a deep longing to talk to my niece, something that hadn’t struck me this hard in years.
There was also a flicker of jealousy about Russell’s beautiful, intelligent, apparently well-behaved daughter and my sullen, weird, girl-shooting son.
I was so focused on the pain that Russell’s arrival and greeting to Dodge and Knowles was indistinct, like distant thunder.
The appearance, then, of a young woman at the table escaped me completely.
When I came to my senses I was standing beside my brother and he was snapping his fingers in front of my nose.
I couldn’t remember if I’d been invited by Russell to speak with the girl or if I’d just inserted myself.
‘Wake up, dopey.’
‘Sorry.’ I slapped my cheeks.
The woman had both hands in the big front pocket of a black apron and was fiddling with pens and bottle openers in there. ‘It’s Yasmin,’ Russell said. ‘Have I got that right?’
‘Right.’ Yasmin had tiny tattoos all over her.
Nestled behind her ears, and in the hollows of her collarbones.
Thin letters and light little bumble bees and beetles.
‘I served the guy. The one you’re looking for.
Constable Fry was asking me about him this morning, when I was doing my statement. He showed me the footage.’
‘Tell the story again.’ Russell made an impatient gesture at her.
‘You’ve had twenty-four hours or so to think about it.
I want to hear it from your own mouth. And make no mistake, Yasmin: you could have been looking directly at our killer last night.
You understand? So, your ability to remember important details about him could be the difference between someone else getting butchered down the road tomorrow night and this guy being locked up before he can do that. ’
‘Shiiiiit.’ Yasmin widened her eyes. ‘Are you for real?’
‘Unfortunately, he is,’ I said.
Yasmin massaged her brow. ‘Um, I mean, it was just like you see on the video. The guy was young. Dark hair. Kind of ratty looking in the face, you know? Like, pointy? I think he had a lip piercing?’
I covered my mouth with my hand to hide my reaction.
‘You think he was young, or he was young?’ Russell said. ‘You think he had a lip piercing, or he had a lip piercing?’
‘I’m not a hundred per cent on the lip piercing. I just have, like, a feeling.’
‘How old was this fellow?’ Russell pressed.
‘Maybe twenty, but just barely?’
‘Clothes? Remember any brand names? Something about the cap?’
‘No, it’s all just blank in my brain. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry,’ Russell said. He seemed to catch himself almost being kind and understanding, set his jaw again. ‘How did he order? Was he chatty? Quiet?’
‘Quiet. Straight to the point. Said “Please”.’
‘Okay.’
‘He came in the two separate times.’ Yasmin shifted back and forth on the balls of her feet. ‘Pretty close together. Ordered a James Squire the first time and a Tooheys New the second time.’
I glanced at my brother. Realised he was already frowning at me but looking through me, his head cocked.
‘Two different drinks,’ Russell said.
‘Two very different drinks.’ My mind was racing ahead, but the words were tumbling out before I could stop them. Cop autopilot. ‘How far apart were the two orders?’
‘Not very. Constable Fry and me, we looked at the footage and we lined it up with the readout from the till. The drinks were ordered seven minutes apart. The first time he came in alone. The second time is when he, like, checked out Chloe’s arse or whatever.’
‘He was with someone else.’ Russell was chewing his lip, thinking. ‘Got a drink for himself; friend arrives; he leaves the drink with the friend and goes in to get one for his mate.’
‘Why would he do that?’ I asked. ‘Why not send the friend in for his own drink?’
‘The friend is underage,’ Russell said. ‘You said he was young. He’s got a younger friend.’
‘Why didn’t you card him at the bar?’ I asked Yasmin. ‘If you’re saying he was twenty at a stretch, you should have carded him.’
‘Awww, well …’ Yasmin bobbed her head guiltily. ‘It’s a country pub, you know? And we don’t get a lot of young people here, so Rob’s trying to, like, encourage more to come? We don’t want everyone thinking this place is super narky.’
Russell looked back up at the hotel behind Yasmin.
‘I know you guys are wondering if he was the guy,’ Yasmin continued. ‘But—I don’t know if this even helps—the guy I served spent his time out the front. And Chloe was out the back in the beer garden. So he wasn’t anywhere near her.’
‘He was out the front?’
‘Yeah, like, near the river, in the dark.’ Yasmin turned and pointed. ‘If you stand behind the bar, you can see directly out and across the street. Sometimes people go over there to look at the water or whatever.’
‘Did you see who he was with?’
‘No but he just walked straight out there, across the road,’ Yasmin said. ‘It’s stressful when that happens. Because that’s something else the bar staff are not really supposed to allow.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because next thing you know there’s fifty schooner glasses in the playground. And if you get caught with punters carrying drinks more than, like, five metres from your property grounds, you’ll lose your liquor licence. And without a liquor licence this pub is fucked.’
Russell turned and walked away. I gave Yasmin an apologetic look about the swift, unannounced exit and followed my brother across the beer garden.
We entered the crowd at the front of the pub, which was a hundred people strong now.
Dogs off leads. Work boots, singlets, sun-bleached hair.
There were well-dressed patrons grouped in judgemental huddles drinking white wine, and knots of young people further out, at the edges of the glow cast down from the fairy lights strung along the awning and in the trees.
I saw a bucket resting at the base of the sandwich board usually reserved for the pub’s menu.
Someone had scrawled For Chloe’s Family on it in chalk.
Colourful banknotes lay scattered like autumn leaves at the bottom of the bucket, fifties and hundreds mostly.
I guessed there was a couple of grand in there.
It felt like every eye watched Russell and me pass through and cross the road to the playground and the big stretch of grass before the river.
There were people out here in the dark, looking at the brightly lit building, which was probably doing its best night of business in years.
Russell stood, and folded his arms. I stood beside him and stared at the bare stone wall of the second floor on the left-hand side, where the hotel was.
‘Couldn’t have been him,’ I said. ‘The young guy.’
Russell said nothing, his eyes on the distant pub.
‘He could see her go up the stairwell, yes,’ I went on. ‘But there’s no view of the windows. How does he know which room she’s in?’
Russell took some side steps, changing the angle.
Marched to the end of the playground and back again.
I stood still, watching him go back and forth, the maestro listening for the out-of-tune tuba.
Eventually he charged back across the road again, into the crowd.
I jogged to keep up. We went up the stairs to the hotel section, ducking under five sets of police tape before we reached Chloe’s room.
Russell took his car keys from his pocket and used one to poke the switch just inside the door to the hallway, illuminating the space.
He looked up and around. Chloe’s door had been taken off its hinges, the room gaping open into the hall.
Russell went into the room, turning this way and that, looking up at the ceiling, down at the floor.
‘Turn the light on,’ he said to me.
‘I can’t.’ I gestured to the wall beside me. ‘Forensics have taken the switch.’
He stood gazing at the lights in the ceiling as though willing them to come on by magic.
Russell’s enormous shadow stretched up over the closed curtains against the window.
Towering legs. A big, boxy skull. Shoulders that encompassed the entire width of the room. Suddenly he waved me over. ‘Come here.’
I went. We looked at the lights.
‘Why can I see the shape of a bulb in that one,’ he pointed, ‘but not that one?’
I studied the almost identical circular oyster lights, which were rimmed with glossy white plastic. Russell was right. I could see the distinct shadow of a bulb resting behind the frosted glass of one, but not the other.
‘Maybe it’s—’ I began.
Russell marched off. He was darting into the next room as I arrived at the hall.
The lights came on. He stared at the ceiling in the room next to Chloe’s.
He marched out again so fast he almost knocked me into the wall beside the bathroom.
In the next room, and then the next, Russell went in and turned on the lights.
I ran after Russell as he ducked out the open doorway onto the stairwell.
He moved so fast through the crowd at the front of the pub that he shoulder-barged a drink clean out of a man’s hand, and I had to issue apologies before I followed Russell back across the road.
I glanced over my shoulder at the pub. Nothing seemed to have changed.
Russell was jogging across the grass next to the playground, heading for a rise in the earth that was crowned with scrubby grass, the lip of sand dunes leading down to the river beach.
Russell hit the rise and turned and looked at the pub.
He started laughing. He grabbed me by the shoulders as I arrived beside him and swivelled me on the spot.
‘Check it out.’ He pointed.
I looked. Our position on the rise of the earth gave us a thin view of the very top of the pub’s roof.
An old-fashioned style, probably designed to accommodate the falling of snow, the roof angled upwards at a sharp angle, then upwards again at a much shallower one, meeting at the top at a very slight peak.
My mouth fell open as I let my eyes drift over the three brightly lit golden ovals visible along the upper part of the roof’s length.
‘The second “light” in every room is a skylight.’ Russell was breathless. ‘You can’t see them from close in, near the pub doors. But if you stand back here, you get the right angle. A skylight in every room is leaking light up from inside. Look. There are three. We didn’t turn Chloe’s on.’
‘So he could have watched from here,’ I said, trying to hide my horror.
‘Probably right here,’ Russell said. ‘You can see the lights. You can see the stairwell. You’re close enough in that you can march up there quickly, when you have the right moment. And out here in the dark, he could have stood watching for as long as he wanted without anyone being suspicious.’
My heart was thumping in my throat.
‘I want this young guy,’ Russell said. His eyes were on the crowd at the pub.
Dodge was there, under the fairy lights, was pushing his way towards us.
‘Here comes Dodge. Between the two of you, decide who’s the least incompetent, and that person can get the image of the young guy in the cap out to all the locals.
Do a region-wide SMS blast of the picture and the description.
I’m going to start going through the traffic cams and see if I can spot him in one of the cars. ’
‘You’re not doing that,’ Dodge said as he came to a stop before us. ‘You’re coming with me. We have a problem.’