Cold Justice (9 page)

She closed her eyes and counted with one-half of her mind while the other focused on Wayne prodding a stirfry in the kitchen, a towel around his waist, his hair still wet from the shower they’d shared.

He came into the room, spatula in his hand. ‘Mind if I put the news on?’

‘Go ahead.’

Nineteen, twenty! Wayne’s bare legs below that towel!

The newsreader’s voice blared into the room:
‘– Pieters, mother of Tim, found murdered in Pennant Hills in 1990, chained herself to the fence of Parliament House in protest over the police response to her son’s case.’

Ella let go of the rubber band as the screen filled with the image of Tamara Pieters in the same blue dress she’d been wearing at the school, her wrist chained to a metal fence and security guards and police conferring behind her.

‘Shit,’ Ella said.

‘Tim lived for fewer years than it’s taken the police to solve his case,’ Tamara called to the camera. ‘And even though the government’s saying it wants to clean up the state’s messy past, that it’s putting money into investigating past crimes so the families can have so-called closure, they give us one detective who’s brand new to this type of case, injured and working alone, and today when we met she couldn’t explain a single step of what she proposes to do.’

‘She never asked me that,’ Ella said.

Wayne put his hands on his hips.

The news cut to the Minister for Police looking harassed on the steps of Parliament House. ‘Mrs Pieters is mistaken,’ he said. ‘There are two detectives working on her son’s case and between them they have considerable experience in the field. The case was only recently taken up by these officers, and it is against policy to discuss the steps of an investigation with anyone.’

‘Two?’ Ella said.

Wayne looked at her. ‘Who’s he talking about?’

‘Oh God.’ Ella sagged in her seat. ‘What if it’s Murray?’

The newsreader was on again, describing the details of the case, Tim’s face from his high school picture smiling over her shoulder. She finished by asking for anybody with any information to contact the Unsolved unit.

‘That’ll bring all the nutters out of the woodwork,’ Wayne said, and went back into the kitchen.

Ella put her wrist back through the band but she’d lost heart for it now. What if she went in tomorrow and found Murray perched on her desk? She thought back – he’d stayed on the floor when she’d left. Oh no. He could have spoken to Galea. They might know each other. Oh crap – his father. That would be it. Frank Shakespeare was sprinkling shit into her life once more. He’d made it his mission to trip her up ever since that time on her first homicide case when she’d barked at him to get the fuck out of the crime scene before she had him arrested. It wasn’t her fault: he’d been wearing civvies and it’d been
really
dark, and she dared anyone to recognise the Assistant Commissioner under those circumstances. He’d been retired a few years now but the blue network didn’t stop at pension age.

She yanked the band off the door and shot it across the room at the TV.

FOUR

E
lla straight-armed the door of the Unsolved unit and walked in tall. She and Wayne had talked during the night and before they’d gone their separate ways from her house that morning, and she was resolute. The chances were slim that her new partner would be Murray, but if it was, well, she hadn’t taken crap from him before and she wouldn’t do it now. She had a plan for how to work the case and knew where she would begin. Let him read the file and try to catch up.

Her good mate Detective Dennis Orchard – working with him would be a different story. He’d get a laugh out of her problem, no doubt about it, but he was on long-service leave, trekking in Nepal with his wife, Donna, and wouldn’t be back for weeks.

She knocked on Galea’s closed door but there was no answer. She went into the office. Jackie Fitzhugh was there with Simon Casey, both drinking from steaming takeaway cups. ‘Morning,’ they said.

Ella put her bag down. ‘Anyone else here?’

‘Just us,’ Jackie said. ‘Who’re you expecting?’

‘Nobody special.’

Ella sat at her desk and opened the file. This morning she was going to approach John and Tamara Pieters on their own turf, and in order to be across the entire family’s versions of what had happened that evening when Tim and John had fought, she needed to finish reading the statements.

Tim’s sister, Haydee, had said she’d heard their father telling Tim off for being rude to their Uncle Alistair and Aunt Genevieve. ‘Then when Dad said Tim couldn’t go out that night, Tim lost it. He started shouting at them, saying they never listened, they didn’t let him talk, just told him to shut up and get on with whatever they told him to do, all they ever did was boss him around.’

‘Then what happened?’ Detective Tynan had asked.

‘I was in the kitchen and he came rushing through and almost knocked me over,’ she’d said. ‘I said something like, watch it, idiot, and he told me to fuck off. I said he was being a little shit and what exactly was his problem and he should pull his head in. He said I was a complete bitch and stomped upstairs. I heard his bedroom door slam and his radio go on. That was the last time we spoke, because an hour or so later Dad went up to talk to him and found the radio still on but Tim gone. He must’ve sneaked out when we were all outside. Dad was furious. He was storming about, and Mum was telling him to calm down, it would do no good to go after him, he could be anywhere. I only found out the next morning that Dad did go out looking but couldn’t find him.’

Ella felt sorry for her. She read to the end, learned that Haydee knew of nobody who might want to harm Tim, then turned to the statements of Tim’s aunt and uncle, Genevieve and Alistair McLennan.

Genevieve had said that she’d asked Tim to cut her a slice of the birthday cake and he’d muttered something like ‘Get it yourself’ and walked away. ‘I asked him to come back and repeat himself but he refused,’ she’d said. ‘Alistair heard this and asked what was the matter. Tim just stood there not saying a word. Alistair tried to make him apologise to me but he wouldn’t. Alistair tried to reason with him, saying there was no need for attitude, we were all family, there to care for each other, all he needed to say was sorry and that would be the end of it, but Tim turned and walked away.’

Ella flipped forward to see what Alistair had said about that.

‘Teenagers,’ he’d said. ‘Their brains are different, they have all these hormones rushing through their systems, they don’t consider consequences or other people’s perspectives or feelings. I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Tim walked off.’

‘What happened then?’ Constantine had asked.

‘As I got Genevieve her piece of cake, I heard Tim and John start to argue. I heard John say that they hadn’t raised him to act that way towards his family, and Tim said that family wasn’t worth shit. Olive – that’s Tamara’s and Genevieve’s mother, she lives with us, and it was her birthday the day before – heard that and gasped, and John really hit the roof. He told Tim to go to his room and stay there, that he was grounded until further notice. Tim started shouting how that wasn’t fair, nobody took any notice of what he wanted or needed, they just told him what to do. John told him to go, and Tim rushed into the house.’

Ella leaned back in the chair and stretched her shoulder. Across the room Jackie and Simon were collecting their stuff to go out.

‘Any idea when Galea will be back?’ Ella asked.

‘Sorry.’

That was fine. She could wait to find out who she was going to be teamed up with, and in the meantime work a little faster.

Olive’s statement added nothing new. Ella scanned her page of notes one final time and decided she was ready.

The Pieterses still lived in the same house. Ella wondered about that as she raised the brass knocker and let it fall to strike the wood, a hollow sound.

Tamara Pieters opened the door, John coming down the stairs behind her.

‘Good morning, Mrs Pieters, Mr Pieters. May we talk?’

Tamara frowned. ‘Where’s your partner?’

‘Busy with other inquiries.’

It wasn’t a lie; whoever he, or she, was, they were doing something somewhere.

‘Come in, please, Detective,’ John said.

Tamara Pieters moved just far enough for Ella to step in. ‘I’m not apologising for yesterday.’

‘There’s no need to,’ Ella said.
You can chain yourself to whatever you want.

‘I’ll do whatever it takes, you know,’ Tamara went on. ‘I’ll kick up as much stink as I have to to get this case looked into properly.’

‘I completely understand.’

Ella smiled at her but Tamara kept her eyes on the door, which she pushed shut with a bang the instant Ella was clear. Ella followed John down the hall, trying to imagine Tamara’s feelings: your young son is killed, the police come up with nothing, you struggle on somehow, maybe sometimes you forget it for a while, and now, almost twenty years later, you have to rehash every painful detail once more.
But then
, she thought, taking a seat on the lounge John indicated,
wouldn’t you be keen to catch the killer, no matter what? Wouldn’t the pain of raking over old graves
– she held back a shudder at her use of the old cliché –
be worth it, if we manage to solve it this time?

Of course, that was the problem, right there.
If.
Tamara, standing now in the doorway, her eyes straying from Ella across the room to the framed pictures of Tim and his siblings that filled the opposite wall, probably didn’t believe the case would be solved.
The older the case, the colder the trail.

‘Coffee? Tea?’ John Pieters asked.

Ella blinked. ‘Black coffee with one, thank you.’

John clinked about in the kitchen. Tamara stayed in the door-way, one white-knuckled hand gripping the jamb. Ella looked at her, then at the photos. ‘May I?’

Tamara shrugged.

Ella crossed the beige carpet. The wall was a chronological record of the family’s life, starting with a couple of early pictures of John and Tamara, young and laughing on a seawall somewhere, then waving from a white Mini, then smiling in a formal portrait at their wedding. The next picture was of a hugely pregnant Tamara, followed by her and John, grins from ear to ear, a swaddled sleeping baby held between them. That would be Haydee. There she was again, aged about three, planting a kiss on the head of a baby Ella guessed was Tim. Then there was Tim as a toddler and Haydee in school uniform with baby Josh. His Down’s wasn’t so evident there, but in the next picture, taken when he was about two, the condition was obvious.

The photos progressed through Christmases and birthdays, new bikes, plaster casts on Tim’s arm at one point, Haydee’s leg at another. There was Haydee at the end of high school, her uniform covered in signatures, carnations behind both ears; and there was Tim holding his School Certificate – and then Tim was gone. A picture of the family without him, around Haydee in a gown and mortarboard, everyone’s smiles except for Josh’s appearing forced.

‘It tore the heart out of our family,’ Tamara said, right at Ella’s shoulder.

‘I can understand that.’

Tamara studied her. ‘Can you.’

Ella held her gaze. ‘I can’t imagine it, but I can understand it.’

Tamara turned away and sat down as John came back with a tray of coffee cups and a heavy-set young man.

‘This is our son Josh,’ he said.

Josh put out his hand and Ella took it in hers. ‘Nice to meet you.’

‘You’re going to catch the bad man who hurt Tim?’

‘That’s the plan.’

He smiled at her. She smelled chocolate on his breath.

‘I’m going to my room, Dad,’ he said, and headed upstairs.

Ella sat down opposite John. Tamara was in a chair to one side, her body angled away from Ella, her chin in her hand and her eyes on the ceiling.

Ella said, ‘I know this is upsetting to have to go over again, and I’m sorry about that.’

John held up a hand. ‘May I show you something first?’

‘Of course.’

He took a box from under his chair and set it in his lap, and Tamara muttered something. It looked to Ella like a plain cardboard shoebox, decorated long ago with paint in blue swirls. He held the corners like it might fly away if released.

‘Tim made this when he was in fifth class for his Matchbox collection.’

Ella nodded.

John lifted off the lid and took out a thick spiral notebook, two hundred pages Ella guessed, made even thicker by the clippings he’d glued in. ‘I’ve been making some notes.’ He handed it over.

The first page was blank, as if to give the reader an extra second to reconsider their actions and close the book again. The second page held a glued-on, folded-up sheet of newspaper, and as Ella carefully unfolded it she realised it was the original report of Tim’s murder from the local paper. The paper was yellowed and soft with age. She stared down at the page and heard Tamara Pieters get up and leave.

‘If you turn to the back,’ John said, leaning towards her, ‘you’ll see.’

Ella refolded the newspaper clipping and closed the cover, then turned the notebook over and opened the back.

MILAT. The word was black and stark, underlined and boxed in with heavy strokes of a biro, as if the lines could contain the word and what it meant.

James Gibson, missing in 1989 – his body found in Belanglo in 1993 – his backpack and camera found in GALSTON GORGE in Feb 1991.

‘It’s possible, don’t you think?’ John said. ‘Milat was all over the place, working on the roads. Galston’s not far north, and if you come down the Old Pacific Highway from there you go straight past the pub where Tim was that night.’

Ella looked up at him then back at the page.

‘I told the police about it six years ago. They said they’d take it into account but I never heard any more. I just wanted to let you see. I wanted to show you. I mean, it’s possible, that’s really all I’m saying. It’s not impossible.’

‘No,’ Ella said. ‘It doesn’t fit Milat’s known actions, though.’