Blood Ties (54 page)

Stanley Murchison took the next fifteen minutes to look it over carefully and thoroughly without making any comment, flipping back and forth between the pages to re-read something or to check a fact, jotting down his own notes. When he had finished, he had a thoughtful expression on his face and wheeled himself over to the huge picture window to stare out at the lovely bay. I would have wagered my next fortnight’s pay though, that he wasn’t registering the view at all.

“The evidence is quite conclusive, Sergeant,” he eventually said in a quiet voice. “There’s no point denying it. Miss Greville is being cheated by my law firm.”

The Sarge was taken aback. He clearly hadn’t been anticipating a confession as easy as this. Perhaps Murchison’s guilt at ripping off Miss G was overwhelming him?

“Her touching faith in me has been sadly misplaced,” he said sorrowfully, almost to himself. A genuine moment of remorse or more fine acting?

“Yes, it has,” the Sarge agreed.

“I’m sure you can see this is a troubling day for me,” Murchison mused and wheeled himself back to his desk. “This evidence you’ve shown me has come like a sledgehammer blow to me. It was very clever of you both to figure it out.”

“Personally I find it extremely gratifying when a person’s crimes are exposed, not troubling,” said the Sarge, unsympathetic.

Murchison tapped on the folder holding the paperwork with his finger. “Lionel Mundy wasn’t the director of this company, Traumleben Pty Ltd. He passed away three years ago and was
non compos mentis
for at least five years before that.”

“We know that,” Sarge dismissed impatiently. “That’s why we’re here.”

“And I appreciate you warning me first, Sergeant, before you make your arrest. Otherwise it would have come as quite a shock to me, I can tell you. Especially at my age and in my condition.”

The Sarge stood up, ready to take Stanley Murchison into custody.

“Do you know what Traumleben means?” he asked, out of the blue.

“No,” said the Sarge frowning, momentarily distracted by the question. “What?”

“It’s German for ‘dream life’. I guess all that money would have funded a nice dream life.” His voice turned hard. “That dream life’s come to an end though.”

Their whole conversation was tweaking my antennae. It felt as though they were talking at cross-purposes. Then it struck me with a jolt – they were.

“You’re not the one who did this, are you, Mr Murchison?” I blurted out, just as the Sarge reached the other side of the desk, handcuffs out. He looked over at me appalled, as if I’d tipped his hand.

“What?” Murchison spluttered, his face a study in sheer, honest astonishment. “Me? How dare you even
suggest
that I would commit fraud against my own client? How dare you?” His face turned dangerously red and I feared he was going to give himself a massive stroke with his incredible anger.

“Senior Constable, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” barked the Sarge at me, colouring up red himself in fury. He thought I was ruining his arrest. I suddenly feared that I’d just made an enormous mistake in front of the two men, but pressed on regardless. I’d gone too far to retreat now.

“You’ve been talking about
Graham
, haven’t you, Mr Murchison? Graham’s the one who’s been ripping off Miss G?”

“Of course that’s whom I’ve been talking about,” he said emphatically, as if I was a cretin of the highest magnitude. “He’s always been a weak lad, looking for the easy way in life. I only wish I’d been firmer with him about –”

I didn’t hear any more of what he said, a scuffling noise in the hall outside the study attracting my attention. I poked my head out and saw Graham edging backwards, not as quiet as he thought he was being. He must have been eavesdropping on us. His rabbity features were distorted with fury. He no longer looked like a harmless little furry animal, his big teeth and huge glowing eyes reminding me instead of a predator. He had really fooled the Sarge and me with his gullible nephew act.

“Hey! Stop!” I yelled and then it all happened so fast.

He pirouetted and ran off down the hall. I sprinted after him, ignoring the screaming pain from my hip. I caught him before he escaped through the front door by grabbing hold of the collar of his work shirt and hauling him backwards. He twisted around and threw a punch at my head, my grip on his shirt loosening as I ducked.

I attempted to get my handcuffs out of my belt with my left hand, my right still straining on his shirt when he threw another punch my way. I dodged and his fist merely slighted off my chin. He shoved his palm in my face to push me away causing me a great deal of agony as his hand pressed against my bruised nose and busted lip.

“That’s not very nice, Graham!” I protested, my voice muffled by his hand.

I tried to bite his hand as I pulled him closer to me by his work shirt. He responded by ramming my face even harder with his palm and I was thrust backwards, losing my grip on his shirt. I floundered and managed to take hold of his upper arms instead, pushing back at him. But he was stronger than he looked, and the week’s injuries had taken their toll on my strength and endurance.

And on my mental processes as well evidently, because he hooked his foot around the back of my ankles and tripped me, making me fall heavily on my back. He turned to run again but I twisted over on the floor and wriggled to reach out to grasp one of his ankles, causing him to stumble and fall to his hands and knees. I let go of him and struggled to my feet but he was faster and dragged himself upright, racing to the door again.

“Don’t move!” shouted the Sarge in his loud voice, his gun out covering Graham. I shifted out of his way, up against the entry wall, fumbling for my own weapon, somewhat dishevelled from the preceding scuffle.

Graham turned to glance back at us, his face twisted with ugly rage. He kept moving.

“Don’t do this, Graham,” implored Mr Murchison in a shaky voice, shock on his face. He’d wheeled himself up behind the Sarge. “Please hand yourself over to these officers. You’ll only make things worse for yourself if you don’t.”

“Shut up, Uncle Stanley!” Graham hissed with unconcealed hatred. “You talk too much. Especially to cops.” But instead of going through the front door as I expected, he slipped through a door to its left, slamming it behind him. We heard the lock click into place.

“God damn!” cursed the Sarge, dropping his arms, then said to Mr Murchison, “Where does that lead?”

“It’s the garage,” he informed us at the same time that we heard the unmistakable slam of a car door and the rattling sound of a garage door opening automatically.

The Sarge and I exchanged glances and both of us bolted to the door.

Chapter 28

It was locked of course – we’d heard him fastening it. The Sarge lifted his foot and rammed it against the door in an attempt to kick it in. I abandoned him and ran out the front door, around the path to the entrance of the garage, just as Graham came squealing out in a late model silver Toyota Camry, its tyres spinning up smoke in his haste to escape.

“Stop!” I yelled at him, but it was pointless. He couldn’t hear me and I had to jump out of the way or risk being hit by my second car this week. He roared down the driveway and onto the road at the same moment that the Sarge kicked the door open and stumbled into the garage.

I wasn’t finished with Graham yet and knelt down on the driveway on one knee to steady myself, pulling out my Glock. Aiming it carefully with both hands, I pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession and blew out his right rear tyre.

“Great work, Tess!” the Sarge shouted, jogging down the driveway.

The Camry immediately swerved and smashed into a red Mitsubishi Lancer parked at the side of the road, stopping its momentum. The Sarge and I sprinted over to it.

In a panic, Graham threw the Camry into reverse and freed it from the tangle of twisted metal, before putting it into forward again and driving off, his speed limited by the shredded mess of black tyre at his rear. I caught up with the car first and it was going slowly enough for me to jog up next to it and smash a hole in the driver’s window with my baton. I quickly cleared enough glass away to reach my left hand through, my fingers making contact with the ignition key. My plan was to turn the car off so we could arrest Graham. But looking back on the whole incident later, I’ll be the first to admit that it wasn’t the smartest plan I’ve ever had in my life.

Graham clamped his right hand around my wrist and pulled it away from the key. He was being careful and driving slowly, finding it tricky to steer the wonky car with only his left hand while he held onto me with the other.
We could go on like this all day
, I thought, jogging easily next to the car.

A neighbour came running out of his house towards the car, arms waving, perhaps thinking to stop Graham. But that only frightened him and his foot instinctively pressed down on the accelerator in response. The car thrust forward at double the speed it had been doing. My arm was caught inside the car, Graham’s fingers still clutching me.

“Let me go!” I shouted in panic, struggling to run fast enough to keep up with the speed of the car. He stared out at me with huge dumb eyes, immobilised by wild fear.

My hip sent a horrible stab of pain down my leg and my right knee buckled under me. I lost my footing and couldn’t recover it, the car starting to drag me beside it down the road. Graham let go of my hand and fumbled for the automatic window button, perhaps thinking to make it easy for me to free my arm by lowering the window. But I’d made a hole in the glass with my baton and had slipped my hand through that hole, so when the window lowered all it did was succeed in fully trapping my arm between the glass and the door. Desperately I clung to the side mirror with my right arm, trying to keep my body off the bitumen while my feet, clad securely in my strong boots, dragged uselessly on the road.

“
Graham!
” I screamed. “Stop the car, for God’s sake! You’re going to kill me!” I briefly registered more neighbours scrambling to the footpath, alerted by the crash and my screaming, their shocked faces a blur in my side vision. I began to panic about slipping under the tyres of the car. I didn’t want to be run over.

Flustered, Graham pressed harder on the accelerator instead of the brake and, helpless, I was towed next to the car, the road flying beneath me at an alarming speed. Simultaneously, I tried to keep calm, wrench my arm free from the window and make sure that the only part of me in contact with the road was my boots, while I clung to the side mirror, my right arm straining with my weight. I prayed that my boots would bear up under the friction. They were tough leather, but they sure weren’t designed for this sort of action.

I slipped once, falling down, my knees scraping on the bitumen of the road, making me scream in pain as the material from my cargo pants and the first couple of skin layers were forcibly removed by its roughness.

The Sarge sprinted after us, pulling up and running alongside me. He slipped his right arm under my chest, providing my body with much appreciated extra support and frantically tugged on my trapped arm with his left hand in an attempt to free it from the window. All this while running madly next to me.

“Wind the window up!” he shouted at Graham, who looked back at him with a stunned rabbit expression. “The window! Wind the fucking window back up, you dickhead!”

He ran hard for another hundred metres next to me, between us managing to keep all of me except my boots off the road, while his words finally penetrated into Graham’s frozen brain. He hastily reached for the electronic window button, pressing it. The window slowly made its way up and the Sarge and I yanked my arm free from the hole, scraping it badly as we did. The car continued on its path, but we both fell backwards onto the road in a jumbled heap, panting wildly with adrenaline and exhaustion.

Without thinking, I freed myself from him, rolled over onto my stomach, pulled out my Glock again and aimed it, shooting off five rounds before I hit the front right tyre. It exploded noisily and Graham veered crazily right, jumping the curb over the grassy footpath, ploughing through a beautiful patch of snapdragons before crashing into a brick letterbox. Both the car and the letterbox fared badly from the impact.

Graham flung open the car door and made a run for it. The Sarge and I both jumped up to chase him, but I wasn’t capable of anything faster than a painful limp and reluctantly let the Sarge bring him down and cuff him. Another patrol car turned up at that point, called by the concerned neighbours. We left those two constables to deal with the smashed cars and shocked witnesses while we frogmarched Graham back to our patrol car, shouting and struggling all the while.

Mr Murchison had wheeled himself to the front yard and stared with utter desolation at the destruction in his neighbourhood, his ruined car and then at his nephew.

“Graham, how could you defraud Miss Greville? And how could you disappoint me like this, after everything I’ve done for you?” he asked sadly, disillusioned.

“Just shut the fuck up, Uncle Stanley!” Graham shouted at him with bitter hatred. “It’s all right for you! You have this beautiful house, respect, a good career and money to burn. I have nothing!” Selfish tears of frustration fell from his eyes. “And I wanted my share. I wanted my dream life.”

“For once, you should shut up if you know what’s good for you,” snarled the Sarge and manhandled the still shouting Graham into the back of the patrol car. “You need a lawyer.”