As she powered the New Hope east out over the South Pacific, she’d jettison the images that sometimes zapped through her. Claudia’s howling mouth as she’d sailed downward into the blackness of the ocean, the anchor yanking her soundlessly into the dark. Her confused eyes as Hope had come into the kitchen after they’d secured the Spellings in the bathroom, the hammer in her fist.
I thought we were in this together …
Her squeal of disbelief as Hope had raised the hammer above her head.
CHAPTER 23
HOPE STILL CARRIED the hammer with her in Jenny’s cream Louis Vuitton handbag. She supposed she’d have to get rid of that, too. She was dreaming as she wandered along mooring number 17 and almost ran into the overweight man with the clipboard standing there.
‘Oh! Sorry!’
‘It’s all right,’ he laughed. His name tag said ‘Steve’. ‘Is this your yacht here?’
‘Yes, it is, actually.’ Hope smiled. ‘It’s just come out of dry dock. I signed in at the office.’
‘Yes, yes, that’s all good.’ Steve glanced at his clipboard. ‘I’m actually just doing a safety inspection. The coastguard makes us do spot checks now and then on all the moorings.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Hope chewed her lip. She listened to the boat beside them. Was that thumping she could hear? Could Steve hear it too?
‘Everything’s fine. It’s just … It’s so weird.’ Steve pointed with his pen to a red cone-shaped device strapped to the side of the deck. ‘I’m running checks on all the EPIRBs to make sure they’re all registered and up to date, and this one isn’t right.’
Hope shifted her handbag on her shoulder. ‘An EPIRB?’
‘It’s an emergency position-indicating radio beacon.’ Steve looked at the sky, recited the words carefully. ‘Ha, that’s what I think it stands for, anyway. That beacon gets wet and it’ll send a signal to the coastguard telling them you’re in trouble. You’ll want to chuck it in the water long before you start to sink, though!’
‘Right,’ Hope laughed.
‘They also kind of act like a microchip would in your family dog,’ Steve said. ‘They’re registered to particular people, and particular boats, in case the boat gets lost. Or the people get lost! Ha! Now, I’m seeing that your boat here is the New Hope. But when I look up your EPIRB number on the computer, it says this boat should be Dream Catcher.’
Steve tipped his clipboard, which he used to balance a thin computer tablet. Hope hardly glanced at the numbers on the screen.
‘Did you change your vessel’s name, Ms …’ Steve looked at the screen, ‘Ms Spelling?’
‘Uh, no.’ Hope wiped sweat from her neck. ‘No, this is … This is a different vessel. That we … we only recently purchased, my husband and I.’
‘Oh.’
‘I mean, I’m not even Ms Spelling.’ Hope drew a long breath. ‘Whoever that is. I’m … Uh.’
Steve waited.
‘Look, would you like to come aboard?’ Hope gestured to the yacht. ‘Come on board and I’ll show you the paperwork and we can sort all this out.’
‘Sure thing.’ Steve smiled. He turned and stepped across the small gangway to the deck.
Hope followed, sliding her hand into the darkness of her handbag and around the polished handle of the hammer.
CHAPTER 24
DESPITE THE EVENING gym session, I couldn’t sleep. I desperately needed to. I called my brother and blasted him with complaints about Tox as soon as he picked up.
‘What actually is the story with this guy?’ he said. ‘How can he possibly be a cop if you’re saying he’s killed two people?’
‘No idea,’ I grunted. ‘People are saying he was seven years old. If I had to guess, I’d say that because of his age at the time of the crime, he’d have been charged with involuntary manslaughter, if he was charged with anything at all. Apparently it was a group of boys, not just him. So his lawyers would have said he was influenced by the group, and far too young to know what he was doing.’
‘But you don’t actually know any details about it?’
‘No, the records are sealed. I tried to have a look before I left work this afternoon.’
Sam scoffed. ‘So it’s all just rumour, really?’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘Maybe he didn’t do it.’
‘If he didn’t do it, he’d have set everyone straight, right?’ I said. ‘The bosses would have set everyone straight. He must have done it.’
We fell silent.
‘I’d like to think he didn’t do it,’ I admitted. ‘But when I look in his eyes, I’m not so sure.’
CHAPTER 25
I SAT IN bed all night on the computer after speaking to Sam, clicking around, looking for Claudia Burrows. She’d recently scrubbed her social media presence clean. There were suggestions that she’d once had a Facebook page and a Twitter account, but these were empty now, the links broken. I saw a couple of pictures of her on sites that must have belonged to her friends. She was a very different girl to the one whom I’d seen washed up on the shores of the Georges River. Her hair, which had been short and dark when she died, was long and bleach-blonde, the roots dark and the ends scraggly. I learned that she sometimes went under the name Claudia Dee. Did multiple names mean multiple identities? Was it Claudia Dee who’d worn the skimpy clothes that filled most of her wardrobe, and Claudia Burrows who’d bought the more formal attire?
I didn’t like the idea that Claudia had been pretending to be someone else, and that she’d recently told her creditors that she was coming into money. Had she been conducting a scam? If so, who was the victim? Had she been planning a robbery? I put the laptop away, discouraged by all the dead ends, and tried to sleep. Ten minutes later I had it open again, doing different searches.
At midnight I called Chris Murray, the detective from the Surry Hills station.
‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’
‘Murray,’ I said, ‘you’ve got connections in the records department, don’t you? I want you to help me out. I’m wandering aimlessly around the Internet looking for anything I can get on Tox Barnes. Maybe they changed his name after the crime? Is that why I can’t find any newspaper articles about him?’
‘The fact that you’re carrying on working with that monster without looking for an out is exactly the reason I won’t help you,’ he said. ‘You should be trying to get away from him, not trying to understand him. I’m hanging up, Harry.’
‘Murray, don’t go! I need help here, man.’
‘He murdered a woman and her kid,’ Murray said. ‘He and a bunch of other kids stabbed them to death.’
‘I thought they beat them to death.’
‘Is how they did it very important?’
‘I guess not. What exactly am I supposed to do, Murray? I’ve got a homicide on my hands. You know how often I get homicides in sex crimes? I can’t just walk out on this.’
‘Feign sickness and leave the case to him,’ he said. ‘He’s good at what he does. He’ll solve it himself in no time. Probably uses his killer instincts.’
‘This is what people do?’ I shook my head. ‘They just drop him?’
‘He’s like a curse. You either find some way to drop him or shuffle him onto someone else. Otherwise you’ll look like you’re on his side, and you don’t want people thinking that, Harry.’
‘This is insane.’
‘He’s a disgrace to the force,’ Murray said. ‘He’s a disgrace to what we stand for as police.’
‘But wasn’t he only seven years old when the crime occurred?’
‘I got a six-year-old,’ Murray snapped. ‘She knows it’s wrong to kill people. Hell, my three-year-old knows that. I’m too busy for this shit, Harry. I got a couple of missing yachties from Queensland on my desk. I’m looking at hundreds of pictures of identical boats all day long. I’m seein’ boats in my fucking sleep.’
‘What are you doing with a Queensland case?’
‘Oh,’ he si
ghed. The wind seemed to go out of him suddenly. ‘Long story. It’s bad. It’s just one of those ones that gives you the creeps.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I said. I hoped by listening kindly to his problems for a few minutes, he’d take his fury down a few notches. It seemed to work. When he spoke again, his voice was softer.
‘A retired couple in their fifties was last seen on their yacht heading south out of Brisbane. They travel a lot, so the woman does her own kidney dialysis on the boat. She’s got some kidney problem, I don’t know what. But she hasn’t filled her prescription for the dialysate – the stuff she rinses her kidney with. By the family’s calculation, the couple should have dropped into Sydney a couple of days ago at the latest to fill the prescription. If they did drop in, they didn’t sign into the marina, and they haven’t filled the prescription. Nobody on the east coast has seen them. They were selling the boat. It’s possible they swung in and picked up potential buyers. But we don’t know.’
‘Jesus,’ I said, as sympathetically as I could. ‘Sounds complex. Why haven’t I seen it getting much press?’
‘It’s early days yet. And these yachties go missing all the time. Decide to change direction on a whim and don’t know their comms aren’t working. Everybody’s hoping they’ll just pop up again in Indonesia or something. I don’t know. I got a bad feeling about it. The coastguard is on the lookout.’
‘Anything I can do?’
‘No, Harry, there’s nothing you can do.’ His tone sharpened again, as though he’d realised I was only listening because I wanted his help.
‘Look, Murray, I want to understand what I’m dealing with here,’ I pleaded. ‘What exactly is Tox supposed to have done? How many people were involved? I want to know exactly what he was charged with. I’ve got to find out what kind of man he is.’
‘I don’t know, Harry, but I’m disgusted that you’re even interested,’ Murray said. ‘We’re supposed to be the good guys. He’s an insult to us, and so are you right now.’
The phone clicked dead in my ear.
CHAPTER 26
THE BLARING OF a horn woke me. When I looked out my bedroom window, Tox Barnes was sitting in the driver’s seat of his black ’69 Mustang, revving the engine. When I got in the car he tossed his phone into my lap.
‘Check it out, zombie face,’ he said.
‘“Zombie face”?’
He flipped the mirror down in front of me. He was right: I looked decidedly undead. I rubbed my eyes and raked back my apparently homosexual hair, slapping the mirror away.
On the phone screen was a video on pause. I clicked play, and the car was filled with the sound of deep-throated groaning and grunting.
‘Urgh.’ I threw the phone back at him with barely a glimpse of the bare thrusting ass on the screen. ‘You’re disgusting.’
‘I’m not sharing my porn with you. That’s our victim, Claudia Burrows.’
I took the phone back and watched. The camera panned around the ass and up the thighs of a petite blonde woman. I’d seen that mouth before, with Tox Barnes’s finger in it.
‘Where’d you find this?’
‘I was trying to figure out how she got those tits,’ he said, pulling away from the kerb. ‘Her bank account showed she’d never been able to afford them. Then I got to thinking – adult film producers will sometimes pay for larger hooters for their actresses if they agree to appear in a certain number of movies. The films sell better if the girls have got a set of big juicy—’
‘All right, all right, all right.’
‘She appears in that video as Claudia Dee.’ He pointed with his cigarette. ‘Had an old porn addict I know dig it up for me. It’s about a month old. Straight to DVD, not available online.’
‘Nice work.’
‘Maybe that’s where the big pay-off was coming from,’ he said, roaring through the traffic like a lunatic, weaving in and out of the oncoming cars. ‘Maybe there was a feature film coming up.’
‘Yeah, and maybe she pulled out of the big film,’ I said, ‘and someone decided they weren’t going to be messed around like that. I’ve met plenty of these porn guys. Women are just like horses to them. When they break down, or they go wild, you take them out the back and put a bolt in their brains.’
CHAPTER 27
DIABOLIC VIDEOS HAD a studio on the upper floor of a building on bustling George Street, up a flight of carpeted stairs that reeked of petrol. A huge pink neon sign at the top of the stairs blinded me as I arrived at the tiny foyer where a girl with too many piercings sat texting.
‘What is that smell?’ I covered my mouth and nose with my T-shirt.
‘Some girl’s ex-boyfriend came in here last week lookin’ for her.’ The pierced girl yawned. ‘Poured petrol all down the stairs. Said he was gonna light the place on fire if she didn’t come out.’
‘She come out?’ Tox asked.
‘The place on fire?’
‘We’re looking for people who know this girl here.’ I showed her a picture of Claudia her parents had provided us with. Piercings hardly glanced at it. She only had eyes for Tox.
‘You don’t look like no cop.’
‘What do I look like?’
‘I dunno.’ The girl leaned on the counter, wriggled her booty. ‘But I like it.’
‘This! Girl! Here!’ I slapped the photo on the counter.
‘OK! OK! Jeez!’
She pushed aside a curtain and led us through. The space was divided into quarters by painted black partitions. I could hear whips cracking in the furthest corner. We passed an empty bed and arrived in the middle of a film set. Two huge black cameras were manned by men. On a satin-sheeted bed, an unnaturally hairless woman was propped, the hem of a blazing-white tennis skirt flipped back over her thighs. Her cotton polo shirt was ripped across the middle and tied tight beneath enormous breasts. She twirled a blonde pigtail in one hand and licked the handle of a tennis racquet she held in the other.
Tox pointed. ‘What is she gonna do with that racquet?’
‘Excuse me!’ A man with a clipboard stepped out of the glow of the lights. ‘You’re in the middle of a live shoot here!’
‘I’m Detective Blue. This is Detective Dirtycreep. We’re looking for someone who was close to Claudia Burrows.’ I flashed the picture. ‘We know she did a film here a couple of months ago. We want to speak to anyone who has any knowledge about her murder.’
‘I’ve never seen that girl before.’ The producer turned his nose up at the picture. ‘If she’s dead, it’s her own fault.’
Someone tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around, only to be yanked face first into yet another pair of breasts. The girl hugging me was wearing six-inch silver sparkle heels, and nothing else.
‘Harry!’ she squealed. ‘Oh my God, you little doll, what are you doing here?’
I’d handled Vicky Varouma’s sexual assault claim at Surry Hills a couple of years earlier.
‘Vicky!’ I smiled up at her. ‘Hi! Tell me you know this girl.’
‘Oh man.’ Vicky’s face fell as she took in the picture. ‘Now there’s a piece of bad news.’
CHAPTER 28
‘SHE WAS TALKING about everything changing,’ Vicky said. ‘She was outta here. She asked me for some money so she could get set up, and said she’d pay me back when she came into her big win.’
‘What was the money for?’ I asked. We were sitting in the Diabolic Videos dressing room. I’d caught sight of myself in the mirror and realised Vicky’s hug had covered my face and neck in body glitter. It was proving difficult to wipe off. Tox stood nearby, examining bottles of perfume.
‘I don’t know. But I saw her near Potts Point wearing some pretty flashy clothes. I was driving by and she was with another girl. Maybe she had a job or something.’
‘Who was the other girl?’
‘I don’t know that either. They were shopping for handbags. On Macleay Street. Damn, girl must’ve hit something good.’
‘Why did you say out there
that Claudia was “bad news”?’ Tox asked.
‘Oh.’ Vicky looked embarrassed, turned to the mirrors and started braiding her hair. ‘I feel bad now. She’s dead. You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.’
‘You should if it’ll help us.’
‘She was just a slimy character, our Claudia,’ Vicky sighed. ‘The kind of girls who end up in this industry aren’t usually your silver spoon types. But I’d met Claudia’s parents and they seemed like nice, quiet people. Regular people. I couldn’t figure out how she ended up the way she was. So deceptive. She always had a scam on the go.’
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, like she’d tell you she knew where to get cheap ecstasy or something, you know, for the weekend. She’d take your money and come back crying, telling you the dealer had robbed her, smacked her around. She’d show you bruises that were non-existent, or days old. That sort of thing.’
‘Right.’
‘She lied like you wouldn’t believe, so she made a good actress for Diabolic. I think her parents thought she was a waitress or something. But she lied about things that didn’t matter. She exaggerated and exaggerated until you were basically being asked to believe she had this crazy, wild, extravagant life. She was dating movie stars and international spies.’
‘How sad,’ I said.
‘She was always on the verge of a “new life”. The big money she was supposed to be coming into? I don’t know.’ Vicky shrugged. ‘Sounds like bullshit to me. I think she’d applied to university. She was going to buy an apartment, transfer up into a law-school programme, be a criminal lawyer. She kept watching clips from legal dramas on her phone, practising them out loud. I mean please – girl could barely read.’