Prime Cut (4 page)

He put the fan on full blast, sat down heavily at the kitchen table and opened up the day’s
West Australian.
The headlines screamed global financial crisis and meltdown like they had for the past week or more. Then he turned to page four.

Miller’s ears were roaring, his temples throbbing ...
electrocuted and bashed.
He looked at the photograph again: it hadn’t registered at first, probably because it bore no resemblance to his Cup Final killer, Davey Arthurs. The face in the 1980 photograph was more groomed: hair short and styled, tinted glasses with big frames, a thick Ian Botham moustache, and the face fuller, fleshier. Miller
wouldn’t have picked it except for the MO. Could it be the same man, thirty-five years later, here in Australia? The one who still crept into his dreams at night with a bloody hammer and jump leads? He read on.

He looked at the photofit of the way they thought the killer might look today. The Botham mo was gone, the glasses now had slim steel frames, the face was rounder and with a few more wrinkles, a bit less hair, and it was grey. Everybody’s grandad: except he’d killed his pregnant wife and their eight-year-old son on Cup Final day in a dreary terraced redbrick in Sunderland. Then, eight years later, it seems he’d gone and done it again in Adelaide on the other side of the world. Derek Chapman – Davey Arthurs. Here in WA? The most recent sighting was in Bunbury just fifty kilometres down the road from Miller’s Busselton home. The hairs fizzed on the back of his neck.

Miller smiled grimly at that one. ‘You wish.’

‘Wouldn’t we all.’ Stuart Miller reached for the phone.

No. There weren’t any Chinese restaurants in Hopetoun. There was a cafe, The Taste of the Toun, but it was closed. It was a squat, drab, brick thing, the last but one building in Veal Street. The last building was a pub, the Port Hotel, a one hundred year old two-storey sandstone fortress, also closed. After that it was all Southern Ocean as far as Antarctica. Cato took in the sweep of sparkling water and made a mental note to see if the Hopey shop sold bathers. Across the road from both buildings, a couple of toddlers rotated sleepily on a kiddie roundabout in McCulloch Park while their mums sipped Diet Coke at a picnic table. There was a shelter overlooking the beach. According to Tess it was a hangout for the disaffected youth of Hopetoun to do drugs and experiment sexually.

‘Come to think of it, I haven’t seen him for a while,’ she said, frowning.

‘Who?’

‘The Disaffected Youth.’

‘Just the one?’

‘Since his big brother got a job at the mine, yeah.’ She paused to consider the situation further. ‘Well some of the teenagers get a bit excitable now and then but there’s only the one kid in town who’s shaping up to be a future statistic.’

‘Particularly if he’s sexually experimenting on his own,’ observed Jim Buckley.

Cato pondered the career and psychological merits of Stock Squad versus a posting to Hopetoun. Touch and go.

‘By the way, is that Hope’toon or ’town?’ he asked.

‘The older locals call it Hopet’n, lose the last vowel. But they’re outnumbered by the blow-ins these days and you can call it whatever you like as long as you’re paying.’

There endeth lesson one from Tess Maguire. She added that the pub also did meals.

‘Chicken and rice on the menu?’ asked Cato, his mind on the lastknown stomach contents of Flipper. They really had to find a better name for the poor bugger, preferably his real one.

‘The pub and cafe are more your steak or fish and chips kind of places. Chicken, yeah, maybe for the girlfriends. Not much call for rice though.’

It seemed that in the relatively short time she’d been in Hopetoun, Tess could pretty well recite both menus off by heart – not a big ask. She’d never seen rice on either menu, ever. So there was no point in talking to the proprietors about any of their recent customers; Flipper’s last meal didn’t come from any of these salubrious Hopetoun eateries. He was most likely eating homecooked, but where was home?

All this talk of food had them more than ready for their midmorning break. They bought coffees from the mobile Snak-Attack, a caravan converted into a food kiosk and parked on a vacant block just up from the general store. A chocolate hedgehog for Jim Buckley was thrown in for free when he seemed to recognise the young guy behind the counter.

‘On the house,’ chirped the host with exaggerated bonhomie as he focused on spooning froth into the cardboard cups. Dark curls, blue eyes, used to being admired by his customers. His name was Justin, apparently.

‘Been here long, Justin?’ asked Buckley, conversationally.

‘About six months; nice spot eh,’ Justin replied with a ready smile.

‘How about before that?’ Buckley pressed.

Justin’s smile was becoming more fixed by the minute.

‘Freo, Margaret River; my girlfriend used to live in Margaret River. She owns this joint.’

The girlfriend rolled up. A stunner. She blessed them all with a prim smile and a flick of her long dark locks.

Buckley beamed appreciatively. ‘Looks like you’re doing very well for yourself, Justin.’ He winked and waved the hedgehog.
‘Catch you around.’

Cato raised a questioning eyebrow at Buckley and got a second wink in reply.

They rolled down to the groyne in the Stock Squad four-wheel drive. Tess warily eyed the bull’s-head logo on the car door. When Cato gunned the engine he thought he heard her go ‘brrmm, brrmm’ under her breath. Now they were looking out over Seal Rock, about three hundred metres offshore. The early morning stillness was long gone. The sun was still out but a stiff breeze had blown up from the southwest. It would only get stronger as the day wore on. On the rock three or four brown shapes huddled together against the wind and the spray from the whitecaps. Cato assumed they were seals. Buckley paced around outside having his smoko and talking on his mobile. The wind gusted in a different direction and Cato overheard a brief snatch of the conversation.

‘Too busy for that, just tell me now for fuck’s sake.’

Cato was in the driving seat, Tess in the back. Both were taking a great interest in the view. Spectacular. You couldn’t fault it. Ocean, mountains, beaches. Ocean. Mountains. Beaches.

Ocean. Mountains. Beaches.

Cato broke the silence. ‘Is it always this windy?’

‘Pretty much.’

He looked in the mirror. Met her eyes. ‘So how have you been? Since ... then.’

‘Since when? Since you left me? Or since I nearly died?’

‘Both.’

‘Good. Thanks for asking.’

‘No worries.’

Well that seemed to go well, Cato thought to himself.

Tess’s mobile buzzed: a resident near the pub complaining about beer bottles in his front yard, broken glass in the street, and the aerial and wing mirrors snapped off his car.

‘And wondering when the police were going to do something about those bloody mongrel miners,’ Tess relayed to Cato. ‘Life goes on.’

She looked relieved to be getting out of the bull-mobile and into
a proper police car. Cato suspected that was not all she was relieved about. Jim Buckley wrapped up his call, flicked his cigarette away and climbed back into the Land Cruiser with a troubled look.

‘Everything okay?’ Cato said.

‘Yup. Where to now maestro?’

‘Back to Murder HQ; let’s see what Greg the Wonder Boy has been up to. Do a bit of thinking.’

‘Suits me.’

‘So when are you buggers going to put a stop to it?’

Donald Rundle glared up at Tess from behind bushy eyebrows. He had gone on for about five minutes and, despite her best efforts and her training, Tess still hadn’t managed to get a word in edgeways. At one point she’d found her hand straying towards the taser stun gun clipped to her belt but she checked herself. Rundle shifted his weight on to the other foot, crunching more broken glass as if to prove his point. As far as he was concerned, an Englishman’s home was his castle, blah blah blah. Jeez he was a Pom-and-a-half. Tess held up a hand to try to stem the torrent of whingeing.

‘Okay Don, look, I’ll make another report but you need to also talk to the pub and let them know.’

‘Money-grubbing bastard, as long as he’s making a quid he couldn’t give a toss about the rest of us.’

‘And put in a complaint to Liquor Licensing,’ Tess said. ‘I gave you the name and number last time. Do you want me to write it down again for you?’

Tess had adopted her slightly raised ‘aged-care’ voice and was trying to rustle up some semblance of sincerity. It didn’t help.

‘I’m old, not deaf or senile. There’s a difference.’ Rundle glowered. ‘I came down here for a bit of peace and quiet and I had it until that bloody mine opened and that toerag took over the pub.’

Toerag? Tess was beginning to feel like she was in an old episode of
The Bill.
She glanced at Don Rundle’s million-dollar view across the road to the Southern Ocean; yes she was still in Hopetoun, not Sun Hill. Don was off again pointing out his snapped wing mirror
and aerial. Tess was saved by the trilling of her mobile: Greg wanting to know if she fancied a ride out bush. She put a hand up to halt Rundle’s tirade.

‘Sorry Don, got to go. Urgent police business.’

Stuart Miller’s first call was to directory inquiries: Adelaide Police. He assumed Detective Tim Delaney would already be in WA but hopefully they’d be put in touch. They put him on hold; the hold music was AC/DC, ‘Highway to Hell’. He hadn’t heard that one for a while. A fragment of music trivia dislodged from deep in his cranium: didn’t AC/DC now have a Geordie for their lead singer? Then again, he was from Newcastle, not Sunderland, and there was a world of difference in those twelve miles. He used to sing a ditty called ‘Geordie’s lost his Leggie’ about a young lad losing his marble ‘doon the netty’, the toilet. Exactly. Miller wondered how the singer communicated to the rest of the band with a killer accent like that. Hand signals? Mind wandering on to anything but the task at hand, Miller felt rusty and awkward. This was no longer his world.

He’d left the police within two years of the Arthurs murders. As the case grew colder he felt less and less like staying. He drifted into private security, like many ex-cops, but didn’t have the lack of imagination required to do the job properly. One blustery northern winter’s day he was walking past Australia House near the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle and he once again saw the posters of Sydney Harbour Bridge bathed in sunshine. This time he walked through the door. Jenny’s younger sister Maggie, a nurse, had emigrated the previous year and kept on sending postcards peppered with words like ‘sunny’, ‘warm’, and ‘beach’. The last one, just a fortnight before, had two new bits of information: ‘boyfriend’ and ‘cop’. Jenny had rolled her eyes at that news. Anyway he and Jenny and Graeme, by then eleven, were on a plane to Perth within six months – landing on a cold, blustery Perth winter’s day. He’d laughed out loud that day and never looked back.

Somebody finally decided to answer the phone in Adelaide. Miller told his story to the uppity little wanker in South Australian
homicide who made it clear that he thought Miller was a crank; yes, the ULW promised, he would pass on the details to DSC Delaney as soon as he could. Miller slammed the phone down and glared at it. He looked at the clock on the wall, figuring out what time it would be in Sunderland. Four in the morning – wasn’t that a line from a song? He dialled another number.

A 1981 inquest found he electrocuted and bashed...

The same findings as in the Arthurs case.

Davey Arthurs had disappeared off the face of the earth. All they found out about him was that he was born in 1946, almost exactly nine months after VE Day, the original post-war baby boomer. He had worked in the shipyards as an electrician, had a couple of criminal convictions for drunk and disorderly, a self-drawn tattoo of the letters CK on his left forearm. His mother and younger brother were still alive and living in Sunderland and couldn’t understand why he would do such a terrible thing, and his mother-in-law thought he was a nice enough lad. Considering he’d slaughtered her daughter and grandson. Nobody knew who ‘CK’ was; maybe an early girlfriend?

Electrocution, it took a good deal of cold calculation to do that. Bludgeoning someone to death, even your own child, seemed to have somewhere in it the hint of reason, however remote, however mad. Even losing control is a reason of sorts. But fixing jump leads to your wife and child, positive and negative, negative and positive – was that what evil was? Stuart Miller had given up seeing a point to his work while somebody could do something like that and still at large, walking the streets. Free, to do it again. Nobody was answering at the other end but Miller couldn’t bring himself to put the phone down. He just listened to the hypnotic ring-ring, ring-ring. Then came a click, a fumble, a rustle and a grunt.

‘Lawton speaking, who’s this?’

‘Chris. It’s Stuey Miller here.’

There was a slight delay or echo in the voices as they travelled across the world. They’d kept in touch over the years, Chris Lawton still seeing Miller as a bit of a mentor even after all this time and all those promotions. Now he was Assistant Chief Constable,
Northumbria Police, and a shoo-in for the soon-to-be-vacant top job. Lawton dropped the big-boss tone when he heard who it was.

‘Stu. What’s up? It better be good at this time of morning ... Christ, 4.00a.m.!’

‘I think I might have found Davey Arthurs.’

Miller knew that placing Arthurs in WA meant placing him in a geographical area approximately the size of Western Europe before the Iron Curtain came down, but decided not to trouble Lawton with that little detail.

‘Fucken hell. Where? You sure?’

Miller told him all he knew and took down a fax number to send the newspaper article through. Lawton had talked about scanning and emailing but Miller didn’t know what he was on about. He promised to pass on Lawton’s details to South Australian Homicide so they could liaise and compare notes. Speaking of which.

‘Chris, what’s the chance of me getting another look at the Arthurs case history?’

Lawton assumed his Assistant Chief Constable voice. ‘You’re retired and well out of it, Stuart. Let’s keep it that way eh? Protocol and all that; we need to do these things by the book these days.’

Miller knew there was no chance of changing the man’s mind; Lawton was headed for career greatness and wouldn’t jeopardise that for anyone or anything. He summoned up a bright no-hardfeelings voice.

‘No worries Chris, but keep me in the loop okay? It’d mean a lot. Old times’ sake?’ Miller almost pleaded, hating himself and Lawton as he did so.

‘No worries? You’re sounding more and more like an Aussie, mate. Yeah we’ll stay in touch. And Stu, thanks for that.’

Miller put his phone down. So that was it. After thirty-five years he gives them a solid lead on Sunderland’s most notorious unsolved, one that remained at least a smudge on Lawton’s otherwise unblemished CV.

Yeah we’ll stay in touch.

He recalled an image, an impression from the day: Detective Constable Chris Lawton dry-retching in the backyard of 11 Maud
Street. The case that had killed a pregnant young woman and her little boy had also killed Miller’s belief in the job and in himself. Damned if he’d be sidelined on this one.

Greg Fisher had left a note for Cato. He and Tess were off to the bays out at Starvo and Mason to talk to the boaties, they had their mobiles and the UHF switched on to take any routine calls. Greg had crosschecked the state mispers reports and a summary of ‘possibles’ was sitting in Cato’s email inbox. Cato logged in. There were about a dozen males on the list fitting the age range. Some had disappeared up to ten years ago. Some were last seen standing in remote locations up north or on the outskirts of desert outposts or stumbling out of outback pubs at closing time. Travellers, station hands, mineworkers, waiting for a lift, waiting for help with broken-down vehicles, waiting for somebody to save them. Some had probably started walking and never came back. He crossed off four of these as doubtful. The times, distances and circumstances didn’t add up. He opened up the photos of three others. They seemed either too big, too small, too old, too young or too pale. Too pale? Although Dr Harry Lewis wouldn’t commit, Cato had already convinced himself that the dead man he saw was not Caucasian. Any more than that was purely guesswork. That left five on Greg’s list. Out of the corner of his eye, Cato could see that Jim Buckley had his feet on the desk and was flicking through the day’s newspaper with its lurid ‘We’re all doomed, doomed I tell ye’ headlines. He didn’t seem to be reading anything; he was miles away.