Silent Fear (27 page)

TWENTY-THREE

H
olly sat in the sun on a low brick wall by the front door of Cardello Realty feeling sick and full of dread. She checked the screen of her mobile every minute, rang the house every five and listened to it ring out. She’d passed two minutes phoning in sick to work, asking the Control officer to tell Maida Quartermaine in Rozelle they’d have to meet some other time, had killed ten staring unseeing at the properties listed in the window, managed to spend another five buying and choking down a coffee from the cafe next door, left messages for Lacey, and now was simply waiting. She had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. It was hard to breathe.

A thin man in his early seventies came towards the door. He wore a powder blue suit with a tie and was sorting through a bunch of keys.

Holly stood up and said, ‘Hi, Mr Cardello. I don’t know if you’ll remember me, we met at last year’s Christmas party. I’m Norris Sanderson’s fiancée.’

He focused on her. ‘Holly, hello. Of course I remember. How are you?’ His hand was dry and it made her aware of the clamminess of her own. He looked into her face. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Norris is missing.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Let me unlock and let’s go in.’

The inside of the office was stuffy and warm. He closed the door and relocked it, then went to a switch on the wall and turned on the air conditioning. He pulled two chairs from behind desks and motioned her to sit.

She stayed on her feet. ‘Have you heard from him? Has he called in sick or anything?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’

‘I haven’t seen or talked to him since yesterday afternoon. I’ve told the police. I think he’s with my brother, and they’re keeping an eye out for his car, but they can’t do much else.’

‘You’ve tried his phone, of course?’

She brushed that aside. ‘I need to know what’s going on with our house.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Norris let slip that there’s some arrangement with the rent,’ she said. ‘I need to know what it is.’

Cardello rubbed his chin. ‘He specifically told me that he doesn’t want you to know.’

‘He’s missing,’ she said. ‘I need to know everything.’

‘I can promise you it’s not relevant.’

‘I don’t care if you think it is or not. He could be caught up in something, he could be hurt somewhere –’

‘Okay,’ Cardello said. ‘All right. I’ll tell you, but when he turns up he’s not going to be happy.’

‘Just –’

‘Okay,’ he said again. ‘When you’re on nightshift he cleans in here, and he also cleans some of our properties when the tenants move out.’

‘Cleans?’

‘He does some of the accounts as well. The money he earns goes to pay off your house.’

‘Wait,’ she said, trying to understand what she was hearing. ‘We rent that house.’

‘He’s buying it from me. He’s been doing the extra work for almost a year.’

Holly sat down.

‘He’s going to tell you on your wedding day. Do you think you can act surprised?’

‘I can’t believe this.’

‘This is a good thing,’ Cardello said. ‘He loves you very much.’

Holly put her face in her hands. ‘I thought he was hiding something bad, something like –’

‘Like what?’

She shook her head.

Her mobile started to ring and her heart lifted. This would be him, he was fine, everything was okay, she would tell him that she knew, and tell him everything about herself, and it would all be fine. Like Lacey said, if he loved her, nothing else would matter, and she’d just heard how much he really did love her.

But the screen showed a number she didn’t immediately recognise. ‘Hello?’

‘Holly, it’s Ella Marconi. I need to talk to you.’

‘Did you find him? Is he okay?’

‘Where are you now?’

‘In Leichhardt, but –’

‘What’s the address?’

Holly told her. ‘But can’t you just tell me now?’

‘Sit tight. I’m on my way,’ Ella said.

Holly lowered the phone to her lap. ‘She didn’t answer me.’

‘Who was it?’ Cardello said.

‘I asked if he was okay and she avoided the question.’

‘Holly, my dear, please relax. Let me try his number.’

Holly drew a trembling breath. The air felt icy on her skin. She could hear the hum of the air conditioner and of cars on the street outside, the beep of buttons as Cardello dialled on the desk phone and then slowly shook his head, and somewhere in the distance a siren. She thought about the times she’d been the one in control of that sound, how she’d never really grasped how it felt to be waiting for what might be the absolute worst news, how you hoped and hoped that everything was okay, and how you both wanted and dreaded to see the person behind that sound, because they might tell you things weren’t great but they were going to be okay, or they might look at you and say, sorry, nothing can be done, everything you know is gone.

*

Ella drove as fast as she could, parked in a no-standing zone and hurried up the path to the real estate office door.

Holly jerked it open before she could knock, and her eyes searched Ella’s. ‘Oh my God.’

‘Let’s sit down.’

An elderly man in a blue suit took Holly’s hand and led her like a little child to a chair. Ella sat down opposite. Holly stared at her, her eyes welling with tears, her fingers white on the arms of the chair, her breath coming in starts.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said.

Ella began as gently as she could. ‘I’m really sorry.’

‘Don’t look at me like that!’

‘We found Seth’s car. Their bodies were in it. I’m very sorry.’

‘Stop saying it.’ Holly shook her head. ‘Stop. Don’t say it any more.’

‘They had an accident?’ the old man asked.

‘No,’ Ella said.

‘This isn’t real,’ Holly said.

‘What happened?’ the man said, then when Ella looked at him, added, ‘I’m James Cardello, Norris’s friend and boss.’

Ella hesitated. ‘It appears they were murdered.’

Holly made a sound like a dog being hit by a car. James Cardello brought a chair and sat by her side and pulled her into his chest like a grandfather, holding her head against him and murmuring into her hair. Ella shifted her gaze to the floor. She’d seen scenes like that more times than she could count, told people this kind of news so often she sometimes did it in her dreams, and usually kept her composure. Today, though, she felt tears pushing up in her throat. She moved her chair to sit on the other side of Holly, and put her hand on her heaving back and blinked hard.

When Holly’s sobbing eased a little, Ella took her hand. ‘I need to ask you some questions.’

Holly pulled tissues from the box Cardello had placed on her lap and said nothing.

‘We know people have been lying to us,’ Ella said. ‘Seth’s friends, for the most part, and detectives are talking to them again now. But I have the feeling there’s more to your relationship with Seth than you told me last night.’

Holly wiped her eyes and balled the tissues in her lap. James Cardello went out and brought them a glass of water each. Holly took hers, then glanced at Ella, then at Cardello.

Ella said to him, ‘Actually, would you mind fetching us coffee, please? I saw a cafe next door.’

‘Certainly.’ He stood up. ‘It could be busy.’ He raised his eyebrows at Ella over Holly’s lowered head. ‘I may be some time.’

Ella smiled at him. He went out and closed the door gently.

Holly put her glass of water on the floor. ‘Did they suffer?’

‘No.’ The standard answer. When would you ever say yes?

‘How were they – how did it . . .’

Ella squeezed her hand. ‘They were shot. It would’ve been instantaneous.’

Except for the minutes beforehand when they realised how bad the situation was and the terror when they saw the gun in their faces. She would never say that, of course, but she could see in Holly’s face that she was thinking it herself.

‘Did Seth do it?’

‘We don’t think so,’ Ella said.

Holly’s fingers were so tight the tendons felt like wire. ‘I’ll tell you,’ she said.

*

Holly felt disconnected, like she’d shrunk inside her body and nothing was touching her any more. She could see Ella’s hand in hers but it was like there was a gap between their skin. It seemed impossible that this could have happened and somehow she was still alive, still breathing, still feeling the beat of her heart inside her raw, raw chest.

Where did she start? With how she could still see him as a small boy, herself as a smaller girl next to him, both hiding under his bed in pyjamas while their drunken parents screamed at each other in the kitchen, his arm around her shaking shoulders and his voice in her ear telling her that everything would be okay? With the way it seemed natural to do what their parents did even as she hated how it made them behave? With how he smoked pot at twelve and laughed when she tried it too, how it felt to make him smile? But he was easy to hate when the bad memories stuck in her mind, sharp as glass and just as glittering: him shooting up again and trying to get her to do it too; shouting at her at their parents’ funeral that she’d never stay off it, and his words welding to the fear in her heart that she’d fail; and what had happened next.

She told Ella how he’d introduced her to hard drugs, how they both became addicts, how she spiralled from selling her car to selling her stuff to selling herself, how she blamed him for offering her the heroin even while she knew she was the one who’d accepted it. She told her about Caryn Lansky, about their plans to get out from under, how they went cold turkey together; and then the deaths and the funeral came, but she didn’t slip back because Caryn kept her strong.

‘I owe her my life for that,’ she said.

Ella nodded.

‘And then,’ Holly pulled her hand from Ella’s and clasped her own between her knees, ‘we were packing. We’d found a place out near the Dandenongs, this run-down farmhouse on a couple of overgrown acres. It was nothing to look at but we could see what we could do. How good it could be.’ She remembered the feeling of promise, of excitement, brightness.

‘Then Seth turned up on the doorstep. All clean and sober. I told him to leave but he said he wanted to apologise, to wish us well, to see us before we went. He said he’d buy dinner. Caryn was the forgiving type, and I felt so good, and so we said okay. He went out and got Thai and a good bottle of red.’

She remembered the first taste of both, how Caryn was laughing at some crack that Seth made, how she thought maybe this was the turning point.

‘I don’t know what he put into it, how he managed it or when, but it hit us so quick I couldn’t even speak to call him the bastard that he was.’ She stared across the room. ‘I woke up hours later, a fresh track mark in my arm, knowing by the feeling that he’d shot me up. He was on the nod on Caryn’s lounge. And Caryn herself was on the floor. Cold and blue.’

Ella said nothing.

‘I kicked Seth awake. I was screaming at him, I was going to call an ambulance even though I knew she was gone. He slapped me and told me that I’d injected both her and myself, that I hadn’t passed out but had asked him to go out and buy, and then I’d done us both, didn’t I remember? He showed me the jar we’d hidden in the bathroom with our money in it, how I’d taken out a wad of cash and given it to him to make the buy with. He told me it was all my fault and the cops would know and I’d go to prison for murder. He told me they’d think I did it for the money, that I wasn’t really off the gear and I wanted the money Caryn’d saved up.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘Between the drugs, the grief, the shock, everything, I believed him, at least enough to go along with it.’

Ella put her hand on her shoulder.

‘He said we had to leave right then, that I should stay with him in his squat for a while,’ Holly said. ‘I left all right, but I told him I never wanted to see him again and went to the bus station and spent most of the rest of my money on a ticket to Sydney. On the way I called an ambulance. I knew she couldn’t be saved but at least that way her body was found sooner rather than later.’

Ella nodded.

‘I went through withdrawal again on that bus,’ Holly said. ‘I told people I had gastro and the flu. But sitting there with the pain and the shakes and sweats was nothing compared to how I felt inside about Caryn. I felt terrible for bringing Seth into her life, but worse for believing him and leaving her there. I should’ve stayed with her until the ambulance got there, and told them and the cops what happened. I should’ve been the true friend to her that she was to me instead of the frightened loser that I was.’

Ella squeezed her shoulder. ‘No wonder you were so angry at him.’

Holly glanced at her. Her gaze was even, steady, without pity or prejudice.

‘At the park on Saturday he said he wasn’t on it any more either,’ Holly said. ‘He showed me he had no track marks on his arms. I didn’t believe him. But how could he afford to live near the beach if he was still using?’

Ella nodded. ‘He told us he worked as some kind of financial guy. We’ll find out today whether that’s true.’

‘Norris told me he said he had friends who might be interested in buying a property Cardello has for sale.’ Saying Norris’s name made the hole in her chest bigger. She felt like everything inside her was falling in. ‘I can’t believe he’s gone.’

Ella picked up the box of tissues. Holly grabbed a handful. When she could speak again she said, ‘I want to see him.’

TWENTY-FOUR

T
he bodies hadn’t long arrived at Glebe morgue when Ella walked in with a shell-shocked Holly and her friend Lacey, who they’d collected on the way. Ella spoke to the front-desk person and they were taken through the doors into a small waiting room. Holly and Lacey had just sat down, Holly weeping inaudibly in Lacey’s embrace, when there was a tap on the door and Murray looked in. He beckoned Ella out with a tilt of his head, then closed the door firmly behind her.

‘You have to see this.’ He started down the corridor and she followed. ‘They’re doing the photos before undressing them, and they found a message on Sanderson’s leg.’

‘You’re shitting me.’

She caught up and got in front. He pointed her through double doors into a processing area where she found the still-clothed bodies of Garland and Norris laid out on steel tables, their hands in paper bags to protect any trace evidence there, a technician in scrubs waiting to one side and a uniformed cop focusing a digital camera with a large lens on Norris’s left leg.

‘What’s it say?’ She leaned in beside the cop. The jeans Norris wore were dark navy and smelled of urine though the crotch looked dry. She could just make out lines in the fabric between the back pocket and the seam at the top of his thigh. ‘Is that black ballpoint?’

‘I think so,’ the cop said.

He scrolled back through the shots he’d taken and turned the camera so she could see the screen. The picture was taken at an angle using the flash, and the lines showed more clearly. The writing was awkward, lopsided, overlapping in places.

‘
Love you sorry sorry
,’ Ella read.

‘That’s what I got too,’ he said.

She thought of where Norris was sitting in the car, where the words were in relation to that, and shivered. ‘Let me bring Holly in.’

*

The floor shifted under Holly’s feet with each step. The air was cold in her aching chest and she was breathing too fast but couldn’t slow down. The sound of their footsteps echoed in her head, and she shook in Lacey’s grip and felt like she had when she was back with Caryn: that that support was the only thing keeping her going.

The detective, Ella, held open double doors and Holly walked into a room she’d been in once before, during her initial paramedic training, when there’d been an old lady lying in her nightie on one of these steel tables, as if asleep.

Now there were two bodies. The farthest one was completely covered by a white hospital sheet. On the closer table Norris lay with a sheet drawn up to his chin. His eyes were closed, his face the colour of dry bone, and two white dressings had been placed on either side of his head. She didn’t want to think about what they were hiding but couldn’t stop herself.

‘Oh my God.’ The voice sounded strange, far away, though she could feel her own mouth shaping the words. ‘Oh my God, no. No.’

Ella beckoned, and Lacey steered her around to the far side so they stood between the tables. The sheet was tucked back a little to expose Norris’s jeans leg. Holly couldn’t believe that he was just lying there, that he couldn’t open his eyes and smile and tell her he was okay. She’d broken his owl and hung up on him and lied to him and hadn’t answered when he called her for the last time.

Ella put her hand on her shoulder. Lacey squeezed her tight. She felt it, but at a distance, because she was falling down a deep, deep hole and was never coming out.

‘Can you read what he’s written there?’ Ella said.

Holly couldn’t see a thing through her tears.

Another cop handed Ella a camera and she held it in front of Holly.

Holly wiped her eyes and tried to focus. ‘Love something.’

‘
Love you sorry sorry
,’ Lacey said in a soft voice in her ear.

Holly still couldn’t see it. ‘He wrote that on his leg?’

‘He was in the front passenger seat,’ Ella said. ‘We think he held the pen down by his side so whoever else was in the car couldn’t see what he was doing.’

‘Like he knew he was in danger and wanted to tell her how he felt?’ Lacey said.

Ella nodded.

Holly couldn’t breathe. She put her hand on Norris’s sheet-covered motionless body. She could feel the contours of his chest underneath, the chest she loved putting her ear to and hearing the steady contractions of his heart, the passage of air in and out of his lungs, the rumble of his laugh. The chest she loved pressing herself to.

Her heart crumbled and she collapsed onto his body, but his arms didn’t come up to hold her, and never, ever would.

*

Ella drove Holly and Lacey to Lacey’s place in Balmain, and gave Lacey her card. ‘I’ll be in touch again later, but call me if you need anything at all.’

Lacey nodded, then put her arm around Holly and helped her upstairs.

Ella got in her car and called Dennis. He’d already heard about the message from Murray.

‘No messages elsewhere on his body?’ he said. ‘Nothing about who shot him?’

‘I wish,’ Ella said. ‘How’s it going with Roberts-Brice and Kelly and Sutton?’

‘They’re just finishing with Roberts-Brice and Kelly now,’ he said. ‘I talked to Sutton myself and went heavy on the “don’t you want to help your friend” angle, so he’s agreed to wait while we check some things out. I’m hoping he might soften up a little, because so far we’ve got nothing from any of them. I’ll try again after the meeting. You want to come in for it, then collect Trina afterwards?’

‘On my way.’

It was peak hour now and the traffic crawled, but it crawled slightly faster heading west. The sun was strong and glaring already, the light coming through the windows hot on her skin. She turned the aircon up high and sat in a queue with her hands together on the top of the wheel, staring at the back of a taxi, her mind throwing up images: Holly weeping on Norris’s motionless chest, and staring silently at Garland’s face for long minutes when Ella asked her to identify him; the back of the little girl’s head in the waiting room; the sound of Carl Sutton’s voice as he spoke on the phone to Jared Kelly; Trina taking off her sunglasses under the shade of the Cinzano umbrella; the look on the female bystander’s face when Ella told her she’d done her best; Darcy’s gaze on her in the gloom of the living room the day that Fowler died.

Ella drew a deep breath and shook her head, closed her eyes then opened them wide. This was the pointy end. She was going to find out who murdered Fowler and Garland and Norris and why; she’d tell Darcy and Holly that the bad people were going to get what they deserved; and she was going to stare hard into that bystander’s eyes while snapping the cuffs tight on her wrists.

*

Outside the office in Parramatta, traffic was backed up behind a caravan inching along the roadway. Ella checked her watch and craned her neck, hoping to see a gap that she could sneak out into, but an oncoming bus loomed.
Crap.
The caravan slowed further. She stared over the roofs of two taxis at the swaying curtains in the van’s back window and thought about the meeting that was starting upstairs without her, and wondered if Kelly and Roberts-Brice and Sutton were having second thoughts about their silence.

The taxi driver ahead of her gesticulated out the window and blew his horn. The caravan edged over into a no-standing zone and the taxis swung out and tore past, the second with another blast of his horn. Ella was about to follow them, headed for the car park under the office fifty metres further up the street, when a Sunshine Coast sticker on the back of the van caught her eye. She drew level with the white Toyota four-wheel drive towing the caravan, leaned across to the passenger window to show her badge to the grey-haired man driving, and pointed to the kerb.

She parked in front of him and walked back.

The woman in the passenger seat was crying. She and the man getting out of the driver’s side looked to be in their mid-sixties. He came around to meet Ella on the footpath and the woman lowered her window.

‘We’re sorry,’ the man began. His eyes were red-rimmed. ‘We’re trying to find a park, we need to go to the police building there.’

‘Are you Mr and Mrs Fowler?’ Ella said. ‘Parents of Paul?’

The man’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Ray.’ He grasped her hand; his palm was cool. He glanced at the woman blowing her nose in the car. ‘My wife, Barbara.’

Ella introduced herself. ‘I’m very sorry about your son.’

Ray Fowler wiped the flat of his hand over his forehead and scalp. ‘The officers who came to tell us up there said it looked like murder.’

Ella nodded.

‘I hope you have that wife of his behind bars,’ Barbara Fowler said, a bitter edge in her voice.

‘You believe she’s involved?’ Ella said.

‘We don’t know that,’ Ray said to Barbara.

She pressed her hand to her heart. ‘I know.’

*

Ella asked them up to the office but they were worried about the car and van being towed, even after she offered to leave her card on the dash, so they sat at an outdoor table at a nearby cafe.

‘Why do you think Trina might have something to do with this?’ Ella asked.

‘There’s no “might” about it,’ Barbara said.

‘Honey,’ Ray said. He looked at Ella. ‘She fell pregnant with Darcy when they were going out. Paul told us he was happy to marry her but we weren’t so sure. But even leaving that aside, he hasn’t been happy for a long time. He loved Darcy like nothing on this earth, but he and Trina – you could see there were so many problems. We’d go around there for a rare dinner and she was rude to him, cruel even, in front of us and Darcy.’

‘I always thought, if she’s like that when other people are around, how does she treat him behind closed doors?’ Barbara said.

‘Did he ever talk to you about it?’

She shook her head. ‘He’s a very private person. I did ask him a couple of times if he was okay, but he just brushed me off. Wouldn’t say a word.’ She looked out at the street, blinking back tears.

‘I know it doesn’t sound like much,’ Ray said, ‘and perhaps it isn’t, but what he told us about the break-up put a new slant on everything.’

Oh really
, Ella thought. ‘How so?’

‘The way she kicked him out then stopped him seeing Darcy,’ Barbara said. ‘May as well have cut his heart out right then.’

Ella leaned forward on the table. ‘What did he say happened?’

‘That things had been getting worse – though he didn’t go into details – then he came home from work one day and she said out of the blue that she wanted him to leave. Made him pack a bag and get out.’

‘Did Darcy see all that?’

‘Apparently she was at a friend’s house in the estate,’ Barbara said.

‘When did he tell you this?’

‘When it happened,’ Ray said. ‘Six, seven weeks ago, I guess it was. He came to stay with us for a couple of nights, then went to share with a friend.’

‘I heard him crying both those nights.’ Barbara wiped her eyes. ‘I tapped on his door but he said he was okay, so I left him alone.’ She looked at Ray. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have.’

Ray squeezed her hand. ‘What more could you have done? And how could that have prevented this?’

‘I don’t know, but at least he would’ve known how much I love him.’

A man walking past glanced over at her crying.

‘He knew,’ Ray said.

Barbara put her face in her hands.

‘So things weren’t good between them,’ Ella said. ‘Forgive me, but that seems a long way from her wanting to do him physical harm.’

‘She didn’t want him to see Darcy,’ Ray said. ‘But she wanted more and more money. He said she’d gone through his papers and knew he had life insurance. He told us that much, and that she said he was good for nothing.’

Ella thought of Murray’s question to Trina about life insurance and how she’d claimed not to know. ‘When did he tell you that?’

‘When he came to stay.’

‘Trina tells a different story about what happened,’ Ella said.

‘Of course she would,’ Barbara said. ‘She wouldn’t want to seem like the bad guy.’

‘His friends said he was vague about what happened.’

‘Because he was so private,’ Barbara said. ‘And proud too. He was ashamed. Of course he didn’t want to talk about it.’

Ella nodded. ‘Did you ever meet any of his friends?’

‘A couple,’ Ray said. ‘One named Carl, another named Seth, I think. That was last year sometime. We were at Paul’s for dinner and they dropped in.’

‘How was Trina towards them?’

‘All smiles,’ he said. ‘But she could turn it on and off like that, so who knows how she really felt.’

‘Did he mention who he was staying with after the split?’

‘No.’

‘Why didn’t he want to stay with you?’

Ray shrugged. ‘He wouldn’t say. I assumed he found it hard to be back in his childhood home as a grown man.’

‘Did you know he’d left his job?’

Barbara raised her tear-streaked face. ‘I found out when he didn’t answer his mobile and I phoned the carpet shop. They said he’d been gone for a couple of weeks. I left another message on his mobile and when he rang me back he said he was helping a friend with his computer business, doing the sales side of things. He said the money was good and he was doing okay.’

Sutton
, Ella thought.
He never mentioned that
. ‘Did that ring true to you?’

‘He did sound like things were a little better,’ she said. ‘I could hear it in his voice.’

‘Did he tell you which friend it was?’

‘No.’

A parking officer came along the street towards the van and Ella went over with her badge. The officer wasn’t happy but gave them ten more minutes.

Ella sat back down. ‘Did you have much contact with Trina after the split?’

‘Not a lot,’ Barbara said. ‘I was so angry. But it wasn’t as if we had frequent visits before then either.’

Ray said, ‘We thought we’d let the dust settle, then try to arrange a regular set-up to see Darcy. Every few weeks or so, we hoped.’

Ella chose her next words carefully. ‘Those times you did see Trina, did you get the impression that she was, uh, seeing someone?’

‘No, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised,’ Barbara said. ‘I know I sound like a crazed mother-in-law, and maybe I am. But when Paul came to stay, I asked if he thought that’s why she told him to leave, and he said he didn’t know. I thought, if he was sure that wasn’t the reason, he would say no, wouldn’t he? And with him being so private, to even admit that much meant it was significant.’