Salt and Blood (23 page)

‘Hardy? They tell me DI Sexton left the station a short time ago in the company of a woman. Where the fuck are you?'

‘Almost there. Anything else?'

‘No. Get there!'

I re-checked the directory and found the street.

I'd been in the Court not the Avenue. I skidded around the corners as the rain fell heavily and the harbour mist rolled in. I got to the right street, entered it and saw a car pull into a driveway halfway along, about where the right number would be. I gunned the motor and reached the house in time to see a tall man escort a woman in a light coat up the steps and into the house.

The adrenalin was pumping but I forced myself to drive past and stop. Not a bull-at-a-gate time. I tried to recreate the scene in my mind. I'd only glimpsed them through some shrubbery, but the body language had been clear enough—the man forceful, aggressive, the woman, resistant, impelled. The glimpse had been enough to confirm that Sexton answered Craig's description of the man who'd broken into the Bondi flat, if confirmation was needed. It wasn't hard to guess what had happened. Glen had made a head-on run at Sexton and he'd come out on top. Now she was under the control of a torturer and murderer. Great work, Hardy. Great work, Sherrin.

I parked across the street and two houses back and surveyed the set-up. Fashionable middle-class neighbourhood, wide blocks, bungalows, deep-fronted gardens, two-car garages, boats, satellite dishes. A secure and comfortable place, suddenly not so secure and comfortable. Sherrin's Pulsar turned into the street at speed. He slowed down when he saw me, U-turned and stopped a car length behind me. His cop instincts were intact. He closed the door of his car quietly, took in the numbers of the houses and walked up to
my car on the passenger side. I wound down the window.

‘I was a second too late,' I said. ‘Saw them go in.'

The rain was light now but persistent. He ignored it.

‘Was she all right?'

‘She was walking.'

He opened the door and sat with his upper body inside the car and his legs and feet in the rain. His usual high colour had paled and with his thin hair damp and flat on his head he looked older and harder. He unshipped his mobile phone.

‘What're you doing?'

‘You'll see. I'm in charge of this, Hardy. You do what I say.'

His voice was firmer and his manner more confident than I'd ever seen. I nodded and watched him punch the buttons on the phone. The house across the street was dark.

‘Inspector Sexton, this is Superintendent Kevin Sherrin, Eastern Division. I'm outside your home. I know you have a woman inside and I believe she's there against her will. I want you to allow her to leave.'

The answer was brief and evidently surprised him.

‘Okay,' Sherrin said.

‘What's he say?' I whispered.

Sherrin ignored me and spoke into the phone. ‘What? Yes, he's here. Okay.'

He rang off and pocketed the phone. ‘He wants
us to go in. You too. He says he doesn't intend to hurt anyone.'

‘But he won't let Glen go?'

He stood. ‘No. Coming?'

He watched as I unclipped the Smith & Wesson from under the dashboard. ‘You do anything with that unless I tell you to and I'll fucking shoot you myself.'

I had an old bomber jacket in the back of the car. I stripped off my blazer and put the jacket on. The gun fitted easily into one of its pockets. I followed Sherrin across the street, trotting to catch up with his long strides. Lights came on in the house as we went through the gate. The path was slightly overgrown and already wet from the rain. We got wetter as we pushed past the shrubbery.

A set of concrete steps led up to a wide, deep porch with a tile roof. We stepped in out of the rain and I wiped my face on my sleeve. The old jacket smelled of sweat and dust. Sherrin barely broke stride; he jerked open the flyscreen, turned the handle on the door and walked into the house.

29

‘In here.'

We tracked the voice through a dim entrance and passage to a living room where lights were shining brightly. The man sitting on the two-seater couch fitted Craig's description exactly—tallish, early middle age, fit-looking, balding, cop moustache. He held what looked like a Glock eight-millimetre pistol. Held it steadily. Glen, in her smart dress and jewellery and minus her coat, was sitting on a chair to his left. She was handcuffed to the arm of the chair by the left wrist. She held a half full glass in her right hand. There was a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label on a low table beside Sexton.

He moved the pistol a centimetre, no more. ‘Weapons on the floor or I shoot her this instant.'

His voice was vibrant and steady and he looked perfectly capable of doing what he said. Sherrin took his service pistol from an underarm holster and dropped it on the carpet. I followed suit with the .38. With his eyes fixed steadily on us, Sexton took a pair of US-style ratchet plastic restraints and tossed them to Sherrin.

‘Cuff
Hardy to the chair with those around both wrists and the chair arm. Then you sit down in front here.'

‘You said you didn't want to hurt anyone,' Sherrin said.

The Glock moved again. ‘Did I? Do it!'

I sat in an overstuffed chair about two metres away. The whole room had a fussy, over-elaborate feel as if the effort made to decorate had been struggling against the drawback of bad taste. Sherrin fastened the restraints and then sat where Sexton had directed. He was doing everything by the book in a hostage situation, except that we had no back-up.

Glen was watching all this as if it were something on a screen and she wasn't really present. She raised the glass to her mouth and took a slug.

‘Glen!' Sherrin yelped.

‘Shut up!' Sexton lifted his own glass and took a solid drink.

Sherrin drew in a breath and I could feel the effort it was taking him to calm down from across the room. ‘How are we going to resolve this?'

‘It's resolved, Super,' Sexton said. ‘There's nothing left to say.' He turned his head fractionally towards Glen but the pistol didn't move. ‘You ready?'

Glen finished what was in her glass and closed her eyes. ‘Yes.'

Sexton shot her through the temple.

‘No,' Sherrin screamed. He dived for his gun and Sexton shot him through the top of his skull where his hair was thinnest.

I didn't move a muscle. The air in the room filled with the smell of cordite and the strange, salty tang of blood. Glen's head was a pulpy mass and bone and brain matter spewed from Sherrin's wound. Blood flowed freely from the part of his head that remained and he twitched for a few seconds before becoming still. The sight fascinated me until I managed to blink and look elsewhere.

Sexton let the pistol drop as he poured himself some more Scotch. He drank and looked across at me as if I'd just arrived and had taken a seat. ‘She asked me to do it,' he said. ‘Begged me.'

I forced down the nausea and nodded at Sherrin. ‘What about him?'

‘Poor bugger,' he said. ‘Obsessed by her and with no fucking chance at all. I know all about that.'

Plastic restraints have to be cut off. There's no other way. I was hoping that Sherrin hadn't fastened them properly, had given me an out. But he'd played it by the book right to the end. I could've got to my feet and gripped the chair arm and swung it … and been dead before I had it off the floor. How loud had the shots been? Quite loud, but in a brick house on a big block with rain falling and the TVs on all around? No chance. I was sitting in a room with an armed multiple murderer who was holding all the cards. If I was religious I'd have been saying my prayers. I wasn't. I was very afraid … and very curious.

‘So,' I said. ‘What now.'

He sighed and looked around the room. ‘My life
turned to shit a while ago, Hardy. My wife left me and took the kids. Not much of a wife and pretty hopeless kids, but still … And the crap's hit the fan at the station. I'm for the chop. Nothing much. A few bucks here and there but you know how it is when the hunt's on. I'm gone.'

‘Harkness?'

He knocked back some more Scotch. Would he drink himself blind before he could shoot me? Not likely. ‘All this happens and I hear fucking Rodney St John Harkness is getting out of the loony bin.' He laughed. ‘I'd been trying to find ways of getting to him for years. Then I met these dickhead civil liberties lawyers and I gave them the steer. It took a fair while but they did the job.' He laughed again, a cracked, broken bark. It gave me something else to think about.

I could see then that he was quite mad, thrown way off balance by adversity and stress mixed with booze and guilt and God knows what else. It didn't help. He was still a killer, skilled with guns and obviously with no thoughts of the future. Despite the jacket and the warm moist air, I began to feel cold.

‘You killed them quickly,' I said. ‘Why did you do what you did to Harkness?'

‘Your lady friend here told me you've found out about Juliet and Lucille. Harkness killed Juliet as surely as if he'd driven over her, and what he did to Lucille and Rose … She was my daughter, not his. Lucille told me. She was going to leave him …'

‘But why torture him?'

He didn't answer for what seemed like a full minute but probably wasn't. ‘I wanted to know where he'd put them and he wouldn't tell me. So I burned him. Then he said he hadn't killed them, so I cut off his finger. Then …'

He was close to some kind of nervous collapse and the odds were that he'd make a clean sweep. I didn't know whether to encourage him to keep talking or try to steer him in some other direction. But I knew it was out of my hands when he laughed.

‘That poor bastard. What a couple of losers. He told me … he told me that Lucille killed Rose and herself. She was all fucked-up with antidepressants and booze and other stuff and she fed Rose the pills and took them herself and she died. He buried them and he went mad. I believe him. Yeah, the way he was by then, I believe him.'

‘But you killed him.'

There was another long pause and I had to break it or fall to pieces myself. ‘Glen just fronted up to you?'

He nodded. ‘With her little gun. But she didn't care. Scarcely resisted. She wanted out and Harkness, he was the same. Begged me in the end.'

I felt he was working himself up to it and I wanted to delay it as long as possible for no good reason.

‘How did you find Harkness? How did you know what to feed the lawyers?'

‘I had help. A volunteer. You work it out.'

‘What about the kid?'

‘Kid?'

‘The junkie who saw you break into the flat in Bondi.'

‘Don't know what you're talking about.' He glanced at Glen and then down at Sherrin and he smiled. ‘You know something? The old saying's wrong. Three's company.'

He put the Glock under his chin above the Adam's apple and pulled the trigger.

30

‘D'you need counselling?' Jerry asked.

‘No.' I said.

‘I'm not sure. You spent over an hour in a room with three dead bodies, one of them your former lover.'

We were in her yard four days later after all the cop comings and goings, fending off the journalists, catching up on sleep. I was still dealing with the grief over Glen. Jerry was nervous.

‘When I was a soldier,' I said, ‘I had people shot all around me and shot some myself. No lovers, I admit, but we didn't do counselling. We just got on with it.'

‘No scars?'

‘Who knows? Do you see me twitching, having nightmares?'

‘No,' she said. ‘I guess your stoicism's intact.'

‘Is that what it is, Jerry? How's yours?'

‘What d'you mean?'

‘You know what I mean. Sexton as good as told me. Rod came here and you held him somewhere for Sexton.'

She turned her head away to look out at the
water. Her voice seemed to be coming from a different set of vocal cords. ‘He raped me in Rutherford House. Should I have let him get away with it? I knew Sexton from some time ago when I counselled him after a police shooting. I knew about him and Lucille and … Rodney. I knew Sexton wanted him out and I helped. Willingly. We thought he'd come to me sooner or later.'

She'd changed her tune on sex with Rod. I gathered my car keys from the table and stood up.

She looked at me. ‘You've got no proof, Cliff. And the rest of it, between us, was real.'

‘It's a shitty world,' I said.

I'd given the police a statement that went back to the beginning and followed all the ins and outs of the Harkness business. Almost all. It ended up so long I got writer's cramp initialling the pages. Warren Harkness came to see me after the police had interviewed him.

‘You were less than generous towards my mother and myself in your statement.'

‘I don't feel generous towards you.'

‘Nevertheless, we are prepared to be generous to you in return for information.'

I didn't say anything. We were in my office and I hadn't invited him to sit down. He stood in front of my desk and I waited for him to go on.

‘Yes, if you can tell us anything about the disposal of the bodies of …'

My look stopped him right there. He cleared his throat, turned and walked out. The broadsheets covered the case clinically; the tabloids had gone
to town. Neither treatment made the Harknesses look good. It was a small compensation to go with one other—apparently I hadn't made Craig a target for Sexton.

I gave evidence at the inquests but I didn't go to the funerals. I decided to give up on funerals. The one I'll have to go to can wait.