Blood Ties (55 page)

Mr Murchison was clearly devastated by the ingratitude and blatant greed shown by his nephew. His face crumpled with emotion and I could see the glint of tears in the wrinkled creases of his face.
The poor man
, I thought. It was never easy to find out that someone you cared for was untrustworthy. I’d learned that myself from bitter experience a few years ago.

I glanced down at my shredded cargo pants and bleeding knees with resignation. They were stinging like a bitch, and I couldn’t possibly look worse if I tried. Fiona would be proud of me in court later. I only hoped there weren’t any photographers or TV cameras hanging around outside the courthouse. I wouldn’t want any reminder of today.

“I’m so sorry, Senior Constable,” I heard Mr Murchison say hesitantly. “I swear that I didn’t realise what Graham was up to.”

I shrugged, looking down at him. “You’ll have to convince us of that, Mr Murchison. And Miss G as well.”

“I’ve been ill. Very ill.” He sighed. “I suppose I was too proud to admit that to my clients, and instead trusted a lot of my work to Graham, even though I wasn’t completely convinced that was the right thing to do.”

“You let Graham look after Miss G’s trust account?” I couldn’t hide my disbelief.

A pause of shame. “Yes. I thought it was a safe assignment for him. Nothing in it had changed for years.
Years
, Senior Constable! I thought all the property was sold. It was merely a matter of administering the interest each year and delivering it to Miss Greville’s bank account and answering any queries she had. I had that account audited carefully every year as well.”

“Graham found more Greville property to sell, Mr Murchison. How do you account for that? He set up a company using his deceased father as the director. This is not somebody who’s lacking in forethought or brainpower.” We were both silent for a moment. “Maybe you’ve underestimated Graham too. Just like his parents.”
Just like the Sarge and I had as well
, I thought humbly.

“Yes,” he said regretfully. “I always knew he was a feckless lad, but I didn’t expect him to be so conniving and dishonest. I’m distraught at the thought of Miss Greville believing that I’ve been robbing her. We’ve known each other all my life. Will you please tell her that it wasn’t me? I doubt she’ll feel like talking to me for a while.”

I told him I would and advised him that some detectives would be in touch soon to question him.

He nodded. “I must admit a certain reluctance to give evidence against my only nephew,” he replied sadly.

“You can’t choose your family, Mr M,” I consoled sympathetically and patted him on the shoulder, before heading at a snail’s pace to the patrol car.

The Sarge was leaning against the car, talking to someone on his phone, paying no heed to Graham who was yelling and banging on the divider in the back seat of the car. He looked up when I approached and wrapped up his phone call, walking over to me.

“We have to get you to a doctor, Tess,” he said, concern on his face. I told him that I’d get myself patched up back at the Big Town station. I was fairly sure I didn’t need medical attention. It was only a couple of grazes.

Although not forgetting how angry I’d been with him earlier, I felt a flood of warm gratitude towards him. I looked up at him earnestly, “Thank you so much, Sarge. You just saved my life.” I closed my eyes briefly and exhaled heavily. “That was a terrifying experience. I felt so helpless.” I breathed in and out again. “And I hate that.”

His eyes searched my face, his hand reaching up towards it before lowering again without making contact. He shrugged, embarrassed, not sure what to say or do. We stood in front of each other awkwardly, uncertain if we should embrace each other in sheer relief or not. So we didn’t, keeping our hands firmly to ourselves.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked solicitously.

I avoided his glance, eyes on the ground, suddenly feeling shy, every part of me reminding myself that I was no oil painting at the moment. “I’ll –”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he interrupted rudely. “You’ll live.”

I smiled reluctantly at his knees. “I’m pretty sure that I will.”

“Your shooting skills are very impressive,” he complimented.

It was my turn to shrug as I peered intently at the paving in the driveway. There were weeds poking through the pavers. “So are your running skills,” I mumbled.

“I’m worried about something now, though.”

I spoke to my ruined boots. “What?”

“I’m worried about what the Inspector will say to me when she finds out that I was trying to arrest an innocent, sick old man in a wheelchair,” he said, with surprisingly charming self-mockery.

Despite myself, I laughed and peeked up at him. “Don’t forget he was an innocent sick old man in a wheelchair armed with a box of tissues.”

He pulled a miserable face. “You’re a cruel woman, Fuller, you really are.”

I laughed even harder, feeling better already.

He gave me a half-smile and held out his hand. “Truce?”

I regarded his hand thoughtfully, before reaching out to take it.

“Truce,” I agreed and we shook on it.

“I didn’t mean to be such a jerk before, but –”

“It just comes naturally?” I suggested, with a smile.

“Tess,” he complained in an injured tone. “I was going to say that I will answer your question when I know you better. It will change the way you think of me permanently, so that’s why I don’t want to answer just yet.”

Whatever
, I thought to myself dismissively, as if finding out about my mother’s death and my near-death hadn’t changed the way he thought about me. Noticing that he still had a firm grip on my hand, I extricated mine from his and turned to glance unenthusiastically at Graham. He was still carrying on in the back seat, banging on the window.

“We’d better get Graham down to the station before he bursts a blood vessel with all that shouting. Do you think we’ll have time to interview him ourselves before I have to go to court?”

“If not, he can just wait for us to return. I don’t want to hand him over to the dees yet. I want to hear firsthand what he has to say for himself.” He climbed into the car and I followed suit, wincing when I bent my knees. “Oh, by the way, I was talking to forensics when you came over. They managed to lift one fingerprint from our safe-cracking job and you’ll never guess who it belongs to.”

“Is it our little friend in the backseat, by any chance?”

“It certainly is. Doesn’t he have a lot of interesting questions to answer?”

Back at the watch house, Senior Sergeant Yu was in charge again and exclaimed loudly in disbelief when the Sarge and I dragged Graham, still kicking and screaming, in the door.

“Oh gawd, not him again!” she groaned, covering her ears. “Doesn’t he have an off button?”

“Apparently not,” said the Sarge loudly over Graham’s racket.

“What’s he done now?”

“He’s been ripping off a sweet little old lady and he just dragged poor Tess down the road with his car. Look at her! She’s bloody lucky he didn’t kill her.”

I wasn’t pleased that he’d drawn attention to my further injuries, everyone crowding around and tutting over my poor knees.

“You bastard,” Daisy said, staring at Graham in disgust. “Not happy with just perving on her now, huh? Now you’re trying to kill her.”

She processed him into the system, and had one of the watch house officers take him to a holding cell, him shouting all the while.

“He’ll be wanting a lawyer again, I presume,” she said.

“Probably,” I responded. “We should try to get that woman he had before. She was sensible and calmed him down a lot.”

“You two better hand this over to the Inspector to deal with, especially now you have a conflict, Tess,” she ordered. “You shouldn’t interview someone who’s tried to kill you. And don’t forget you have court this afternoon. You’ll barely have time to interview him anyway, particularly if he intends to continue carrying on like that for some time. It could also take ages before a lawyer can be found for him.”

The Sarge and I exchanged glances. I knew he really wanted to finish this case himself, but I didn’t think we had much choice. I used the counter phone to ring Fiona, giving her a brief rundown on events that morning. After listening to me with unexpected patience, she made a decision to take it over and promised to send a couple of dees downstairs to us as soon as possible.

“We’ve lost it, sorry Sarge,” I said apologetically. “She’s sending down a team. We’ll brief them and then maybe we’ll have time to bring Miss G in to identify the suitcase.” I hesitated, unsure whether to ask or not. “Are you coming to court with me?”

“Of course I am, Tess. Did you really need to ask?” he replied, offended again.

Daisy cut off his further ire by looking me up and down scathingly, declaring that I wasn’t fit for court and would be an embarrassment to the entire force in my current scruffy condition. She handed over to her sergeant, Roger MacNamoy, a handsome, reserved and competent man that I didn’t know well. He gave me a sympathetic smile as he took over, leaving Daisy free to bustle around me like a very bossy mother hen, finding me a clean spare pair of cargo pants that were reasonably close to my size. She pulled off my boots, throwing them to a startled probationary constable and ordering him to polish them back to some semblance of respectability. He didn’t look happy about it – it wasn’t what he’d joined the police to do. But he sure wasn’t going to argue with her.

The Sarge took me into the watch house staff room and forced me to sit down on one of the comfy sofa chairs they had clustered together in a corner. He retrieved the first aid kit from the wall, and with an unwelcome audience of cops who seemed to have nothing better to do, he proceeded to torture me for fifteen minutes by giving me first aid. He began by patching up my scratched arm and then moved onto my knees. When I flatly refused to take off my cargo pants as he requested, he was forced to cut them away above my knees so that he would have good access to my wounds. It didn’t matter though, because my pants were ruined anyway. My knees were badly grazed, gravel embedded deep in the wounds. Blood was still seeping out, now joined by some icky clear fluid as well.

When he doused the first knee in antiseptic spray and dug around to remove the gravel with a pair of tweezers, I screamed out some extremely rude words, the pain was so intense. I leaned back against the chair, eyes squeezed together tightly, teeth clenched and clutched the armrests with such a death grip that I had sore shoulders the next day and would have sworn that I left my fingerprints permanently imprinted in the material. Tears of pain sprang into my eyes and I blinked them away furiously, but a few stray ones managed to trickle down my cheeks.

“I’m so sorry, Tess,” the Sarge said regretfully, before doing it to me again with the other knee. Then he puffed antiseptic powder on the sores, watching as the liquid oozing from the grazes made it all wet again. He added more and more powder until all the liquid was soaked up and padded each knee with a non-stick gauze before expertly bandaging them.

He held out his hands and pulled me to my feet. I walked around in my socks and ragged new shorts like a Frankenstein monster, my knees so stiff from the bandages that I could hardly bend them. I clumped over to the kitchen to make myself a coffee, grabbing a mug from the collection of mismatched spares that huddled on a shelf. The mug I grabbed was plastered with the logo from some conference on deviant criminology held in the city all the way back in 1988. The Sarge followed me and did the same, randomly choosing a black mug that had
Sextravaganza ’04
plastered on it in gold letters and a suggestive silhouette of a man and two women copulating enthusiastically underneath. When he noticed, he hastily put it back on the shelf and took down a plain green mug instead. Smothering a laugh, I opened all the cupboards, peering inside hopefully.

“You got any Tim Tams round here?” I yelled out to Daisy. After today, I thought I deserved one.

“Sorry. That fathead Bum ate the last of them yesterday,” she yelled back, then groaned. “Oh shit, speak of the devil.”

I turned around, spotted Bum and another man I hadn’t met before heading straight for us. I groaned in dismay.

“Not you again,” I complained. “Please,
please
, tell me that the Inspector hasn’t given you our case to finish?”

Bum smiled smugly and leaned against the fridge looking down at me, his gigantic muscles straining against his business shirt when he crossed his arms, blocking my access.

“Get out of the way. I need some milk,” I said grumpily. He shifted only far enough for me to open the fridge door ten centimetres and awkwardly reach my arm in to grab the milk carton, bringing me into uncomfortably close contact with him. I could even smell his minty breath.

“You decided to dump that loser Jake Bycraft yet and go out with me instead?” he strutted in front of everyone.

“I’d rather die than go out with you,” I replied honestly, stirring my coffee with unnecessary vigour.

“Tessie, Tessie, Tessie. It’s only a matter of time. You know you want me,” he chuckled to himself as if I was flirting with him. God, he was so self-deluded!

“Bum, I want you as much as I want syphilis,” I smiled sweetly and took a sip of my coffee. “Which, incidentally, I probably would catch if I did go out with you. So thanks, but no thanks.” I indicated the man next to him who’d been watching the whole exchange in amused silence. “Who’s your new friend?”