Chapter Three
Every Monday at noon, Crime Command held an all-hands briefing in the canteen.
Eddie Fraser did not usually attend, but his deputies ensured that most of the rank and file showed up by the simple expedient of providing catered sandwiches and sausage rolls.
Judith attended the first half of the meeting—long enough to grab a coffee and snag a chicken bap—but when Superintendent Sawhill started banging on about resource management and the need for a more flexible approach (by which she meant, Hey plebs, please keep working overtime but stop claiming for it, yeah?) Judith slipped away.
She returned to her desk, picked up her jacket and took the lift down to the basement car park where she’d left her bike that morning.
Judith drove first to Robert Walker’s clinic on Haines Street, where his secretary told her that he worked from home on Mondays.
Walker lived in Hawthorn, a suburb of tree-lined streets and period properties.
It was not a neighbourhood that Judith knew well, and her bike did not have sat nav, so it took her half an hour and a stop for directions before she arrived at his home, a two-storey red-brick Victorian with bay windows, large balconies and ornate iron fretwork.
The property also had gates and a security camera. Judith locked her helmet to her bike and hit the button for the intercom. A male voice answered.
‘Hello?’
Judith held her ID up to the camera. ‘Detective Sergeant Judith Lee. I’d like to talk to Robert Walker, if he’s available.’
The lock buzzed and released. Judith pushed her way through the gate and walked up a short path between rows of manicured hedge to the front door.
It opened as she got there and she recognised the man waiting for her.
Robert Walker. She’d never met him before, but she’d seen photographs.
He was older now, in his late fifties. His hair and beard were more grey than brown, and his face and forehead were heavily lined.
He was dressed in slacks and a linen shirt under an oatmeal cable knit cardigan.
Robert was an attractive man with an easy smile. He used it on Judith.
‘Detective. How can I help you today?’ His eyes went to the bruise on her face, and the smile dimmed a little.
‘If you’ve got ten minutes, Doctor Walker, I’d love to tell you.’
He ushered her inside and offered her coffee.
He brought her to his study, a beautiful room with solid oak bookshelves and a big window overlooking a large back garden.
The window had a view over the trees and the city’s rooftops to the Dandenong ranges far off in the distance.
The bookshelves were not overly burdened with books.
Mostly they were used to display photographs in silver frames, and those random little bowls and jugs and sculptures that rich people like to collect.
On the wall behind the desk there was a painting in bold, dark colours, of a man with a distorted face. It was unsettling.
‘You’re admiring my Ben Quilty?’ Walker said. He took a seat behind his desk, and gestured for Judith to sit opposite him. ‘A gift from my wife.’ He rested his elbows on his desk, pressed his hands together and steepled his fingers. ‘How can I help you, Detective?’
If he was afraid, if he knew what was coming, he gave no sign of it. His expression was approving and encouraging. He was every inch the urbane, wealthy professor, every inch the latte liberal, ready to support the blue collar cop as she goes about her ugly, but necessary, business.
Judith gave him a benign smile.
‘Can you tell me where you were on Friday morning at nine a.m.?’
* * *
At the same moment that Judith was settling into her early questions, Robert’s wife, Vanessa, was making her way home from the studio.
Vanessa had been the anchor on Australia’s most popular morning television show for twelve years.
For twelve years, five days a week, Vanessa had climbed out of bed at four-thirty a.m., worked out, showered, and made it to the studio for six a.m. for hair and makeup.
Let’s Talk, Australia went out live five hours a day, and anyone watching the show might imagine, if the only input they had to go on was Vanessa’s lovely, smiling face, that the job was a joy, a breeze, a walk in the park.
It was not.
It was a hard-scrabble, screw-you, take-no-prisoners battle to survive and thrive in the face of falling ratings, butchered budgets, and icy little bitches coming up behind you with contour on their faces and knives in their hands.
And Vanessa loved it. She was made for it all, the smiles on camera and the battles behind the scenes. The studio was the one place that she truly felt alive.
Home, on the other hand, was often lonely, and too quiet.
Particularly now that the boys had all but grown up.
Henry, her oldest, had moved to Sydney to study economics, and had never come home.
He worked for a bank now, and lived in a beautiful apartment with his very sweet kindy-teacher girlfriend, who adored him in an uncomfortably uncritical way.
Lachy, the baby of the family, was in the second year of his engineering degree.
He’d stayed at home for university, but he came and went as he pleased, and Vanessa could almost feel the last of the sand slipping through the hourglass.
She wasn’t sure what would be left, when Lachy was ready to move on. She tried not to think about it.
Vanessa’s driver dropped her home at exactly one-thirty p.m. She thanked him and got out of the car. There was a courier waiting at the gate to the house; a short woman in motorbike leathers and a fluoro jacket. Her helmet was still on and she was carrying a parcel in her hands.
‘I can take that,’ Vanessa said.
The courier turned. ‘Oh. Great.’
Vanessa reached out and took the parcel.
It was the size of a shoebox, wrapped in embossed black paper with a crimson velvet ribbon.
Vanessa’s name and address were handwritten in beautiful, flowing calligraphy.
There was a flower too, a little coastal daisy, tucked with the card under the ribbon.
The delicate flower didn’t quite work with the wrapping, which was almost gothic. ‘Do you need me to sign something?’
The woman held out a clipboard and pen. Vanessa scrawled her name, and flashed the courier a quick smile. ‘Thanks so much.’
Vanessa let herself into the garden, and then into the house. Milo, their little sausage dog, greeted her with enthusiasm. She leaned down to pet him.
‘All right, little guy. You’ll shred my tights if you keep that up.
’ Vanessa scooped Milo up, and slipped off her shoes.
She’d planned on a run—not with Milo, sausage dogs not being made for mileage—but her urge to get some exercise was fading.
She was hungry, and lunch was suddenly much more appealing.
She carried the parcel and Milo through to the kitchen, where she put the dog on the floor, and the parcel on the table.
She turned on the coffee machine and, while she waited for the machine to warm, untied the ribbon and started to unwrap.
Vanessa received a lot of gifts. Flowers and expensive wine, mostly.
Chocolate and fruit baskets, occasionally.
And then of course she received beauty products and clothing, sent in the hope of endorsement.
Most of those went to the studio, but occasionally someone would do some digging, and find her home address.
Vanessa opened the box and found that it was full of white packing peanuts.
She dug carefully inside, and found only a single sheet of heavy, linen-finish paper folded in two.
In the centre of the page, written in the same beautiful calligraphy as the card with her name and address, was a single line of text:
I tried to get help, but that was a huge mistake.
Vanessa frowned and turned the sheet over. There was nothing on the other side. She dug into the packing peanuts again, this time allowing them to spill over the kitchen table. Inside the box, tucked in the bottom left corner, she found a small black USB drive. Nothing else.
Okay. Weird. Vanessa looked at the paper again.
Was this marketing of some kind? For a TV show maybe?
Usually TV marketing came in full gorgeous colour, with a handwritten note from the producer or directors or even a key cast member, if they were really trying.
This—a one-line note and a USB drive—was beyond spare, but then, maybe that was the point. It was kind of intriguing.
The coffee machine beeped its readiness.
Vanessa made her coffee, a long black with a dash of hot milk, and her toast, rye bread with peanut butter, and brought both to the table.
Her laptop was already open. She took a sip of coffee and pulled the machine towards her.
She logged in and inserted the USB, then scrolled through Instagram while she waited for it to load.
This was what life was, nowadays. She moved through her days in a two-screen haze.
Her laptop screen brightened and a video began to play.
And Vanessa found that she was no longer distracted.
Because this wasn’t just a high-definition trailer for a new TV show.
Instead she seemed to be watching footage of a bird’s eye view of her husband, Robert, in his consulting rooms. She was watching him unbuckle his belt and pull down his pants.
Watching him smile as he welcomed another woman into his arms. Watching that woman drop to her knees.
And then Vanessa was running. Running for the bathroom, feeling the nausea rising, and knowing that she wouldn’t make it.