Chapter 27
RUSSELL
Dodge led us to his Hilux. The rural cop was jittery, his eyes a little too wide, the adrenaline pumping. Adrenaline that probably didn’t have to do that very often. ‘Fry and Lee went out to Branchy’s place, and they’re calling for backup.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know yet. It was Lee calling. She said they’re both unhurt, but just to get there quick.’ Evan slid into the back seat behind me. I felt a prickle of anger as Dodge started the car.
‘Evan, no one invited you. Hold down operations at the pub until I get back.’
‘Fuck that.’ My brother tapped Dodge on the shoulder, urging him to go. ‘I want to be where the action is.’
‘It’s probably “Fuck that, sir,” isn’t it?’ Dodge asked. He started driving reluctantly.
‘Tell me what’s going on.’ I turned back to the front.
‘Look, we’re getting plenty of gossip from the fishing expedition at the pub.
’ Dodge made a right at the main intersection of town and passed the darkened cafe, heading for a solid wall of bushland with a dirt road cutting through.
‘A lot of it has focused on Branchy. Rumour has been spreading, as you intended it to, that he spoke to her on the night she was killed. So that’s caused some … other stuff … to come to light.’
‘What other stuff?’
‘Well …’ Dodge struggled. And I sensed immediately he was trying to back-pedal on the team’s obvious affection for ‘Branchy’ earlier that day.
‘I knew he was a little odd. But everyone out here is odd. Okay? That’s why you live here in the first place.
Because your eccentricities don’t necessarily slot into suburban life.
And as the local cop, people don’t always tell me things. ’
‘Would you just spit it out, Dodge?’
‘There’s some behaviour that’s been talked about,’ Dodge said. ‘Someone was saying Branchy had the contract to remove a woman’s water tank at a property just up the road. He was tasked with installing a new one. But the relationship with the customer went south.’
‘I thought he was the local pest inspector.’
‘It pays to be multi-talented out here. You go to a property for one job, try to scoop four or five more jobs while you’re there.’
‘Okay.’
‘Anyway, the woman got impatient with him. He kept saying the land was too soft to get the digger in, because of all the rain. It rains here a lot. He kept pushing the job back. Long story short, she’s cancelled him and flicked the job to someone else.
There’s talk down at the pub that once the new guy had the tank up and running for the woman, Branchy’s gone and put entrails in it. ’
‘Entrails?’ I turned and looked back at Evan.
‘Guts,’ Evan said.
‘I know what entrails are, you fucking numpty!’ I barked. ‘I was expressing surprise and dismay!’
Evan sighed.
Dodge continued. ‘They dunno what animal they came from. But there was enough of them to say, Oh, this isn’t just some creature who’s climbed in the outlet pipe and drowned.
A possum or a snake will do that, on occasion, you know.
This was … there was an amount. Enough for the water to taste funny. ’
I pinched the bridge of my nose. ‘Jesus. And you didn’t hear anything about this?’
‘Nope. Not my people, either. Not until tonight. Folks like to handle things themselves out here. And with something like that, the woman might have figured she’d make things worse by involving the local jackos.’
‘It’s the wild west,’ I said. ‘It really is.’
‘There’s more,’ Dodge said. ‘There have also been a couple of snafus with Branchy and women down at the pub. Miscommunications, rebuffed advances, inappropriate jokes. Nothing violent.’
‘Kalowski said she thought he was a creep,’ I said.
‘Yes, well. It might have been more than just one woman’s intuition.’
‘Any official charges?’
‘He was cautioned by my predecessor about showing a pornographic image to a teenager. Said he thought she was older than she actually was.’
‘You didn’t know about that until now?’
‘Oh—I mean, I did,’ Dodge said sheepishly. ‘But it just slipped my mind. It wasn’t an on-the-books thing.’
‘What’s his charge sheet say?’
‘Drugs. A car theft. Nothing recent.’
We rode in silence. Out of town, through the bush, across rolling, moonlit fields and into another dense slab of bushland.
The front of the Branch property was a sheer wall of Murraya hedge—twenty feet tall, dense as brick—and as we stopped and I got out of the car I could see the reason for that.
Blackberry vine was interwoven throughout the hedge, tumbling out of the structure like a waterfall, lethally thorny, spilling right up to the edge of the road.
Fry was sitting on the ground in the light of their cruiser, his knees up, clutching at the throat of his police uniform shirt.
It had been only four minutes since Dodge had grabbed me and Evan from the front of the pub in town.
‘What happened?’ Dodge ran to Lee, who was standing helplessly over her colleague.
‘I don’t know!’ Lee turned terrified eyes on me as I approached.
‘We went in through the gates, maybe, you know, fifty metres in? We were on foot—too narrow to get a car in. I turned back, because I’d left my phone in the car.
I was only gonna be gone a second! Before I can lock the car up, Fry running comes out like … like this.’
Lee gestured to Fry. Fry was heaving, trying to suck breath into a closed throat.
I knew the symptoms. The gates to the Branch property were just beyond the back of the patrol car and stood cracked open, tall wrought-iron woven with razor wire.
I grabbed Fry by the biceps and yanked him to his feet, pointing at Dodge and Lee and Evan with my other hand. ‘Move the cars back. Get out of sight.’
The group ran to comply. I marched a gasping and trembling Fry across the road and into the bush.
He was sweating so hard it was running down my fingers.
I pulled us to a stop where the bush became impassable, but we were hopefully out of view of any cameras affixed to the front of the Branch property.
‘Fry,’ I said. ‘You’re having a panic attack, mate.’
He nodded, gripped my arms, mirroring my hold on him. We stood there in the dark, the bush ringing with life all around us.
‘You had one before?’
He shook his head. No.
‘I’m gonna ask you a question,’ I told the younger officer. ‘And I want you to focus hard on it. Think it over. Be careful with your answer. Keep your eyes on mine. Hey. Look here, okay? Good. Eyes on me. Only talk when you’ve got it locked in.’
Fry nodded hard again. I saw glimmers of his huge eyes in the hard moonlight. The whites were robin’s-egg blue and wet.
‘What’s seven times seven?’
Fry drew a huge breath. ‘Uh! What? Uh! F-f-f-f—’
‘Focus on the question.’
‘I can’t!’
‘Yes, you fucking can.’
‘F-f-f-forty-nine.’
‘What’s six times six?’
‘T-t-t-thirty-six.’
‘And four times four?’
‘Six’—Fry swallowed. Gasped. Swallowed again—‘teen.’
‘Divide that by two.’
‘Uh … uh … uh …’ Fry shook his head. His breath was coming back, but the shaking was still there. ‘Is it eight?’
‘It is.’ I let him get off ten breaths, each slower and deeper than the last. When he was okay enough I said, ‘What happened in there?’
‘Lee l-l-left.’ Fry let go of my arms, wiped the sweat from his face onto his palms, then onto the front of his police uniform shirt.
Two long handprints that I could see even in the relative darkness.
‘I was just standing there. Waiting for her to come back. And I s-s-s-saw him. He was standing in the dark, watching me.’
‘Who?’
‘Branch,’ Fry said. ‘He was holding a gun. A rifle.’
‘Was he pointing it at you?’
‘No but he … He was smiling, with his teeth, and …’
I waited. Fry struggled.
‘What are you telling me, Fry?’ I pressed, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck slowly start to stand on end. Goosebumps rushed down my arms as the officer spoke.
‘It’s him,’ Fry shuddered. ‘I saw it in his eyes. It’s him.’