Already Dead (19 page)

Jax's fingers were trembling as she tapped the screen of her mobile, thankful she'd shoved it in her back pocket when she'd rung the cab.

‘I'm glad you decided to call.' It was Aiden, with a hint of it's-about-time in his tone.

‘It's not what you think. Someone broke into the house. I'm not sure they've gone.'

A pause. ‘Is everyone okay?'

‘Yes. I grabbed Zoe and left. Tilda isn't home.'

Zoe had either run out of questions or was tired of her mother's I-don't-know's and was now huddled against Jax as they sat on the kerb under the shade of a tree.

‘Where are you?' Aiden asked.

She'd run to a neighbour's house with Zoe in her arms, got no answer to her knock, then stomped about in indecision for about thirty seconds. ‘In the street, outside the house.'

‘Have you called Triple-0?'

That idea had caused the indecision. ‘No. I thought it might take them forever to get here for just a break-in, and
it might be too difficult to explain the rest. I thought you'd get here faster.'

Another pause. She hoped Aiden was on the move, not rolling his eyes. ‘I'm forty-five minutes away,' he said. ‘I'll send some uniforms to you and get there when I can.'

She squinted at the house, at the road, at the midday sun, and hoped they got there soon. ‘Thanks.'

‘Stay where you are, Jax.'

Where did he think she'd go? ‘I left with a mobile phone and my daughter and your guys have my car. I'm not going anywhere.'

It was hot. Zoe was thirsty and hungry. Brendan hovered in Jax's thoughts as she watched the house from the top of the driveway. The figure she'd seen running through the courtyard wasn't a kid. He was male and adult, wearing jeans and something dark on top. Not a shirt and tie, but that didn't stop her thinking about the two men she'd seen at her car last night. The man in her house hadn't been carrying anything, at least nothing big enough that it needed to be hefted under an arm, and yet Tilda's DVD player was gone. Two men or one taking several trips?

After ten minutes, Jax phoned Tilda and left a message. Another five minutes and she was itching with tension, pacing the grass, irritated and impatient. Zoe whined about the heat and hunger. Jax wanted to kick in the front door and see what was left of her possessions – the ones she'd brought from the home she'd shared with Nick. She needed something to do to stop her fingers twisting themselves into knots. There were dandelions growing in a patch of grass by the driveway, little yellow flowers blooming in the summer heat.

‘Hey, Zoe, why don't you make a daisy chain? You can show Aunty Tilda when she gets home.'

While Zoe hummed and laced flowers, Jax pulled the notebook from her bag and updated the lists, adding what she'd learned from Kate Walsh, thinking about Kate's version of the man who'd sat in Jax's car. Nothing like the bad guy Jax had assumed was waving a gun in her face. More like the sad, sorry, distraught man she'd tried to hold on to at the edge of the motorway. Brendan
had
loved his family, it wasn't something his mind had invented. And his family loved him back. He was injured by war and he'd tried to get well; he'd wanted to make amends for the disruption to Kate and Scotty's lives. He hadn't been violent and aggressive by nature. Whatever had happened inside his head last weekend had made him think carjacking was his only resort. A good man who believed he'd been driven to desperate measures.

Which left the question: had Brendan imagined people were after him, or had they just been inside Jax's house?

Two uniformed officers arrived twenty-one minutes after Jax spoke to Aiden – longer than it took him to find her in the building site. Her adrenaline peak had sunk by then and her array of minor injuries and sore muscles felt like one throbbing mass.

‘I don't have my keys but the sliding door downstairs is wide open,' she told a tall, thin young woman with pupils that darted everywhere. It wasn't clear if the eye action was trepidation or surveillance but it made Jax wonder what Aiden had told them.

The woman disappeared around the side of the house ahead of a beefy, chummy thirty-something cop, who opened the front door a few minutes later and beckoned Jax and Zoe inside. He told them the intruder was gone,
that entry and exit appeared to be through the downstairs slider, and directed Jax to the alarm pad in the foyer.

‘Was it armed when you left this morning?'

‘I don't know. I wasn't the last to leave.' She filled him in on the living arrangements, said she'd have to check with her aunt, told him her daughter needed a drink of water.

‘A detective is organising for fingerprinting, so try to touch as little as possible. Then I need you to take a look around and start a list of what's gone. It's usually sellable items: electrical equipment, cameras, jewellery, cash if there was any around.'

Was that it? A simple robbery? Not two men searching her house after they'd failed to find her the night before?

She stood at the bottom of the stairs, her eyes scanning the sitting room. It wasn't vandalised or plundered. It looked like it had been picked up and dropped. Sofa cushions were on the floor, the table was at an odd angle, one chair was toppled, the rest higgledy-piggledy. Removalists' boxes were open, a couple were on their sides; kitchen appliances had been shunted along the bench; Zoe's box of toys lay on its side, dolls scattered like they'd been thrown from a horse and cart. It was the kind of disarray that happened when you tipped a table or lifted cushions to see what was underneath.

Did house thieves do that? Or had the man – or burglar and accomplice – been searching for something?

Zoe sat quietly in a corner with a glass of water and a handful of crackers while Jax walked the room eyeing the furniture, her arms folded, touching nothing – not to protect evidence, but because the room seemed dirty, contaminated, covered by something ugly and ominous that had swept through her home.

Her DVD player was gone, too. So was her iPod but its dock was still there, and the TV had been left like the one upstairs – even though both were relatively new, Tilda's a large and expensive model.

Zoe's room was the first door off the hallway. The only sign of disturbance was the mattress sitting skewed on its base, the sheets hanging loose as though someone had lifted the whole thing up to take a look under.

Jax paused in the doorway of her own bedroom, took in the mess with a single sweep of her eyes, and her gut tightened. He – they – had been through everything. The mattress was upturned, the bedside table toppled, packing cartons ripped open, clothes scattered. The big laptop from her desk was gone, along with its charger and carry bag. But it wasn't the mess or the theft or the mounting alarm that pushed the cry from her throat. It was the files. Nick's files. Dumped on the floor, crumpled and trampled by shoes that had left dirty, disrespectful marks.

She wanted to rush in, scoop them up, protect them like she hadn't been able to protect Nick.

‘Jax?' Aiden, at the other end of the hallway.

She swung her head towards him, felt the cool damp of tears on her cheeks.

There was caution and concern in his face as he took long strides to her side. He didn't touch her, just propped in the doorway as though he'd expected a body, blood. ‘What is it?'

She didn't know how to explain. It was just paper. She had copies saved to both of her laptops, and the mini one was still safe in her shoulder bag; there were back-ups on USB sticks and in web storage files – she was fanatical about it. But
these
were the copies she took to bed at night. She'd
made notes on them, spilt coffee, dropped crumbs, slept with them when she couldn't sleep with her husband. They were her hope for an answer. Her connection to Nick.

God, Nick
. Gasping, lunging forward, she got only a step before Aiden caught her around the waist, his arm a lasso, hauling her back until his body was against her spine.

‘There are good, clear footprints on the pages,' he told her urgently, apologetically. ‘We need to keep them intact.' It was a directive but whispered into her hair like a secret, his breath warm on her cheek.

She wanted to take comfort from the gentleness of him, let his muscles hold her up, absorb the heat and smell of him, and for half a second she did, clutching at his arm, dropping her head to his chest. But her husband was in the room with them, what was left of him was battered and abused on the floor at her feet. She lifted Aiden's hand away, sank to her knees at the edge of the spread of files, pressed fingers to her lips and sobbed.

‘Where's my mummy?' Zoe's voice came from the hallway.

Jax sucked in a breath, wiped at her face.

Maybe Aiden sensed her need to keep the tears from Zoe, maybe he would have done it anyway, but he stepped into the doorway. ‘Hey, Zoe. Do you remember me from yesterday? Detective Hawke.'

There was a beat of silence.

‘Your mum's in here.' Aiden used his body to block Zoe's view. ‘There's a bit of a mess so you can't walk all the way in, okay?'

‘Why?' Zoe said.

‘Because the police have to take photos.'

‘Why?'

‘So they can work out what happened.'

‘Why?'

‘Because –'

‘I'll explain it later, Zoe,' Jax said, glancing up at him, smiling her thanks. ‘You can come in just a little bit.' She shuffled back against the wall, cradled her daughter between her knees as Aiden squatted beside the files, his eyes moving over them. ‘What are they?' he asked.

Jax tipped her head, trying to find a way to explain.

Zoe did it for her. ‘They're Daddy's files.'

Jax nodded agreement. Aiden used the tip of a pen to slide a page around. Jax couldn't read it from where she was, but knew the shape of the words on the page. It was a statement from a resident of the suburb where Nick died.

‘What was he working on?' Aiden asked.

‘They're Mummy's files
about
Daddy,' Zoe said. ‘I'm not allowed to look at them until I'm a grown-up.' She whispered to Jax, ‘I can see them but I'm not looking at the words.'

‘Good girl,' Jax said – it wouldn't have mattered, Zoe couldn't read well enough yet. ‘It's just stuff I've been collecting,' Jax told Aiden. ‘It's only important to me.'

Aiden lifted his eyes from the page he'd been reading. ‘Did Anita Lyneham give you these?'

‘Anita Lyneham wouldn't give me anything.'

‘Where did you get it?'

‘I wrote it.'

‘I mean the information.'

‘I knocked on doors and asked.'

His focus drifted sideways to the mound of paper, came back to Jax. A small crease had tightened between his brows. ‘It's not just statements here.'

‘No.'

Another pause as he chewed on it. ‘Where were you this morning?'

She wondered where his thoughts had taken him, not sure where they'd lead if she told him. But there was no point dodging it, not after someone had broken into the house. ‘With Kate Walsh.'

For half a second, his gaze stayed on her, then his face swung away, a hand pushed through his dark hair. When he looked back, there was something new in his eyes. Something less restrained, more direct, a little forceful.

‘We need to talk. Outside. Now, Jax.'

‘I'm going to make a sandwich for Zoe first,' Jax said, waving a hand at the fridge door. ‘What can I touch?'

‘Here.' Aiden pulled a latex glove from his trouser pocket. He produced another one, slipped it over his right hand, reached for the kettle. ‘I'll make coffee.'

‘God, no. I'm already on caffeine overload.'

‘I wasn't thinking of you.'

‘You need a caffeine hit to talk to me?'

He flicked the switch, folded his arms. ‘I've driven to Sydney and back since my last coffee.'

‘So you're not about to interrogate me?'

‘I haven't decided yet.'

She wasn't sure if it was an act.

He waited until she'd cut two slices of bread into Vegemite fingers. ‘Does Lyneham know what you've got in your files?'

Jax noted he'd ditched the Homicide cop's first name, wondered if it was shop talk or if he was siding with Jax. ‘About four months ago, she heard I'd been knocking on doors. She asked me into the station, made me wait an hour, then told me to cease and desist.' Jax slid Zoe's
bread fingers and a tub of yogurt onto a plate. ‘Zoe, honey, come and get your lunch.' Jax watched her skip across the room, relieved the break-in hadn't left her daughter quiet and frightened. It was just Jax who felt like her lungs had forgotten how to breathe.

‘Did you?' Aiden asked.

‘What?'

‘Cease and desist.'

She gave him a look:
You think?

He huffed a brief laugh. ‘Is that the problem between you and her?'

‘No. It started long before that. From the first day, I asked too many questions. She didn't like them and it went downhill from there.' The kettle reached boiling point and clicked off. Jax passed him a jar of coffee grounds and pointed at the plunger on the bench. Then watched, impressed as he filled it. Okay, so the guy knew his way around fresh coffee. He nodded at a table-and-chair set in the courtyard, out of the sun in the shadow of the house: his ‘outside' meant all the way outside. She followed him through the door with mugs.

It was just past midday and the air was humid and hot but an early afternoon breeze was keeping it moving, bringing a briny tang and the distant rumble of surf up the hill. Aiden sat and waited until Jax was opposite him, two filled mugs between them. ‘Is it because you don't trust Lyneham to do her job?'

Was that why they were here? He wanted another chance to explain he ran a different kind of investigation, to say,
Trust me and stay out of it
. Well, she could make use of an opportunity too. ‘I can't make a judgement on that. She won't tell me anything.'

A fleeting frown. ‘She won't share the details of a police investigation, so you run your own?'

‘It's not like that.'

‘Then what are the files about?'

She'd been here before, was tempted to tell Aiden it was none of his damn business, but he was her only link to the investigation into Brendan Walsh – and she wasn't ready to give that up. Not yet.

She took a breath, willed herself to keep it together. ‘My husband was an investigative reporter. He worked on complicated stories that other people gave up on. He didn't do it because it was a job. He did it because people needed justice and closure. And because once he'd started, he couldn't stop. He had a compulsion to understand, to unravel the details, to uncover the truth. If someone brought the Nick Westing story to him, he'd pull it apart until he found out what had happened. If it was me, if I was the one who'd been run down, he wouldn't let it go. Not ever.' She jerked a thumb in the direction of her bedroom. ‘Those files in there are for him. Because
he'd
want to know. Because he'd want me to know and because he'd want his daughter to have something more than the easy, throwaway explanation for why she has no father.'

Tears were blurring her vision by the time she finished. She lifted her coffee mug to her mouth to hide the tremble in her lips, looked away from Aiden towards the huge expanse of ocean. She'd given the same speech to worried friends. Russell and Deanne listened to her theories without adding to them. A few days ago, Tilda had fingered through the box of files with concern in her eyes. Across the table, Detective Senior Sergeant Aiden Hawke leaned
on his forearms, his eyes pinned to Jax's face. If he thought he was going to convince her to give it away, he needed to revisit his Psychology studies.

‘My first case as a detective involved a twelve-year-old girl,' he said. ‘She got up one morning and found her mother almost beaten to death in the kitchen. I held that girl's hand for three hours. Her name is Bethany and she's nineteen next week. Her mother has brain damage and is in a wheelchair. The perpetrators haven't been found. Once a month, I go back through the files, then I ring her and we talk. She tells me what she's been doing, I tell her what's new. I want to find out what happened. For her. So she can move on with her life.'

Jax sensed the solidarity of a quest. She hadn't expected that. Not with a cop. Not with the cop who'd told her to keep out of it. She wanted to ask him why – and tell him not to lose hope. But he took a breath and she let him speak.

‘Are you trying to honour Brendan Walsh?'

She frowned: at the switch in subject, at the assumption underneath it that she couldn't grasp.

‘He held a gun to your head, Jax. I saw it.'

‘I know. I was there.'

‘You don't owe him anything.'

‘I'm not paying him back.'

‘Are you sure?'

The sadness that had overlaid her thoughts since she'd found the files was bumped aside by anger and umbrage. She leaned forward, hands gripping the edge of the table. ‘Brendan Walsh was in
my
car. He almost killed
me
. I thought people were after me – I believed him. I tried to hold on to him but he slipped through my fingers and
I watched him run into the traffic and die. I want to know
why
that happened.'

Aiden waited a beat. ‘Is that all?'

Not even close, but if his need or duty or whatever it was that made him ring a young girl every month didn't give him a clue, Jax wasn't going to tell him the rest of it. And she didn't think it was what he meant. Last night, he'd accused her of omitting details, told her it would be bad for her when he figured it out. ‘Is this why we're out here having coffee in the shade? So I'll tell you everything?'

‘I'm giving you the chance to do it now, Jax. There might not be another one.'

Did that mean he was close to working it out? If he thought she knew something that would make a difference, he was way off. But he'd passed her the baton – it was time to run. ‘All right, I'll talk to you. I'll tell you what I know, but only if you're straight with me.'

‘As straight as I can be.'

‘You'll answer my questions?'

‘Where I can.'

She huffed. ‘You think that's going to do it?'

‘How about this, then? I'll answer your questions if you answer mine.'

She'd been answering his all along. ‘Fine. But I get to ask the first one.'

He held up his hands. ‘Go for it, Miranda.'

She smiled to herself. He'd called her Miranda: surrender with a reminder of who was the cop. ‘What do
you
think is going on?'

It made him hesitate. She understood why. If he told her what he thought, she could tailor her answer to suit – but she needed him to say it before she laid it all out.

‘Okay,' he started, as though he'd decided to uphold his end of the bargain, ‘I think Walsh got in your head. I think you deliberately omitted details from your statement and that you know more than you claim about Brendan Walsh's situation. And I think you're involved somehow in whatever he had going on.'

It wasn't complimentary, but he'd tried to give her a way out. ‘All right,' she said, ‘that's the obvious conclusion – I won't hold it against you. How do you think I'm involved?'

‘Nuh-uh. My turn to ask a question.'

‘We didn't agree on tit for tat.'

‘Give me a break here, Jax. I'm making all the concessions.'

She let a smile turn up one side of her mouth. She liked him better this way – a little pushy, an edge of humour, his energy not locked up in his professional suit of armour. ‘Fair enough.'

‘Walsh's car was found burnt out in Sydney last night,' he said. ‘I went down to look at it this morning. An accelerant was used, there's not a lot left. It's in Hornsby, one suburb from Wahroonga, walking distance to the motorway on-ramp. Did he contact you? Did he tell you to meet him there?'

‘That's two questions.'

‘Are you dodging?'

‘No. And no, he didn't, but …' She frowned, trying to work out the connections Aiden had made. She'd told him she didn't know Brendan before he got in her car but Aiden had read a little of the files on her bedroom floor; she'd given him an impassioned speech about why she was investigating Nick's accident; she'd told him she was with Kate Walsh again this morning.

‘You're putting the wrong pieces together. I didn't lie to you about knowing Brendan and it's not about Nick's accident or my files. If it was, they wouldn't still be on my floor. Whoever was here would've taken them with my laptop. But I think Nick's got something to do with what's happened since.'

‘So your husband knew Walsh?'

‘No. You're on the wrong track. But it's the same track I think others are on. That's the point.'

‘What track?'

‘Okay.' She moved the coffee mugs aside, shuffled her chair closer, still sorting the ideas in her head. ‘If I'm a former reporter and my husband was an investigative reporter, the assumption is that we were a team. Both of us involved in the investigating and reporting. At the very least, I was the sounding board for his ideas. I'm certainly capable of asking questions and writing about the answers, and possibly with the same insistence as my famous husband.' She raised her eyebrows.

‘Okay.' It meant
go on
, not agreement.

‘What if Brendan Walsh actually had information of some variety? He was reported as leaving Sydney in a car driven by Nicholas Westing's wife, so the first guess would be that the transport arrangements weren't random. The second might be that his intention was to pass on said information. The third, that I planned to do something with it.'

Aiden's eyes narrowed. ‘So you're saying Walsh gave you information?'

He thought she was confessing? ‘No. It's conjecture.'

A flash lit his eyes for an instant. ‘Come on, Jax, you think conjecture's going to do it?'

‘I'm trying to tell you –'

‘Listen to me. I'm crossing a line by giving you this opportunity. Tell me or I go.'

She rubbed a hand across her face. ‘Look, four days ago my name was in every newspaper and on every news bulletin. But not just
my
name. I'm Miranda Jack, wife of Nicholas Westing. Nick is the adjective the media uses to describe me. Not single mother, not 35-year-old woman, not former journalist. I'm Nick Westing's wife. He was an investigative reporter, he was famous for it and he's famously dead. You're not the first person to wonder if all of this had something to do with him. And I have, too. I mean, what are the chances of someone hijacking a driver and ending up with an investigative reporter's wife. It's a big coincidence, right?'

‘Yes. It's a big coincidence.'

‘The thing is that it
is
a coincidence. Brendan chose my car at random. He didn't know who I was until I told him and I haven't omitted anything from my statement. But what if someone else is making the same assumptions as you – that we were in communication, that the pick-up was arranged, that Brendan was rational when he got in my car? I've just been robbed but the TVs are still here and so is some cash I left on the fridge. Two computers, digital DVD players and an iPod are gone. Items that store electronic files. They can also store video and voice recordings. My phone does too and it'd be a reasonable assumption that it was in my car on Monday and in my bag yesterday when I was chased.' She paused, let the details settle. ‘What if someone is worried about how much Brendan said when he was in my car? And how well I listened?'