Chapter 57
ROB
He came in just as the rain eased up and the sun started setting, lighting puddles in the gravel beyond the pub door a blazing gold.
Rob looked up from behind the bar, where he was checking off the stock list before the afternoon crowd of locals was joined by the evening gaggle of out-of-towners.
He felt a whump of terror hit his sternum, sharp and painful, like a thrown rock.
Russell Powder wiped his boots off on the rug Rob placed there when it was wet, and came in.
He was wearing a navy-blue collared shirt with the cuffs turned up, and seeing the dressy sort of shirt gave Rob the first uneasy inkling that he wasn’t, in fact, about to be roasted alive again by the enormous detective.
And if that wasn’t going to happen, Rob didn’t know what was.
He glanced sideways, towards the kitchen, wondering if it was too late to simply walk away and get one of the girls to deal with Detective Inspector Powder.
But Millie was frying chips and Yasmin was in the dining room, and he was on his own to face the devil at the door.
‘Mr Winter,’ Powder said with a nod, and Rob swallowed, hoping the next words weren’t going to be You are under arrest on the suspicion of …
He couldn’t imagine what. But that didn’t matter.
Rob nodded back, gripped the beer taps for dear life, tried to say ‘Good evening’ and ‘Hello’ at the same time and instead said, ‘Good-o.’
Powder sat down at the end of the bar, only two metres or so to Rob’s right. Uncomfortably close. Although, in this situation, Rob pondered, several hundred kilometres was also uncomfortably close. ‘Can I get a schooner of the lager?’
‘Yes.’ Rob numbly took a glass from the rack. ‘Of course. Yes.’
‘And what’s your most expensive whisky?’
Rob baulked. Looked for tricks and traps within the question. Couldn’t see any. ‘Uh … my most expensive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, uh, well, uh, I actually … I have a bottle of Glenfiddich Grande Couronne under the counter somewhere. Twenty-six years old. But that’d be … It’d be a hundred bucks a shot, sir.’
Powder pulled his wallet from his back pocket.
Rob took the bottle of whisky out, trying not to tremble, and poured a generous shot in a nice tumbler he dug up and dusted off.
The detective paid for the drinks, took them and sat sipping, looking out at the puddles and the park and the river beyond, a big arm on the counter.
Rob shifted around the bar, doing busywork, trying to decide when this was going to turn into whatever it was going to turn into.
An ambush. A nasty prank. A campaign of intimidation.
Twenty minutes passed like twenty years.
The detective drank the beer and nursed the expensive whisky.
People came and ordered their drinks, and nodded in acknowledgement to the man at the end of the bar without trying to engage him in conversation or stepping too close.
Everyone knew who he was. The entire nation did.
The son of what was being reported as one of the country’s worst serial killers had been all over the news for a solid week in the aftermath of what happened.
As had his dead brother, the disgraced Evan Powder, who the papers were saying had gone a significant way towards covering up for his father’s crimes before he snapped and murdered the old man.
Rob found himself thinking, as his heart rate slowed, that, actually, it was sort of a big move for Detective Inspector Russell Powder to show up like this.
To sit at this bar. To show his face to these people.
A man who seemed to have slithered, from birth, from a viper’s nest and into the world.
Because surely it was humiliating, all of it.
Some of the less classy papers had noted that Russell Powder was a gay man hailing from Newtown, in Sydney.
(Rob was so affixed to the story that, like most people, he’d read all that was written about the case, whether classily written or not.) What was Russell Powder doing here, now?
In the open, and far from home. Where he was just as likely to be attacked for the homosexuality as he was to have to explain that he hadn’t known about either his father’s or his brother’s dirty secrets?
But was that, in fact, what this was all about?
Coming here, of all places. Showing his face.
Sitting politely and quietly at the end of the bar, drinking hundred-dollar-a-glass whisky and passing the minutes—a decent number of them, now—without issuing a threat or insult or snide remark to Rob Winter?
Was this … a gesture of apology? Rob told himself to get real.
He watched the detective from the corner of his eye as he finished up his drink, gazing now through the glass doors to the dining room, where Rob knew one of Dodge’s people was with his mates.
Nathan Fry. Rob expected the detective to go in there, join the group, order dinner maybe.
But instead, he pushed his glasses back towards Rob and smiled as he turned to leave. ‘Thanks. See you.’
‘Yeah, see ya, mate,’ Rob said. He watched the detective go, and felt the band of fearfulness that had been around his chest snap free.