Silent Fear (29 page)

TWENTY-SIX

T
he detectives and uniformed officers gathered in a corner of a sportsground car park two streets from the car renter’s address in Kingsford. The trees along the perimeter of the ground were full of the sound of cicadas but no shade reached the group. Ella pushed her sunglasses tighter on her sweating face and tried to shield herself from the sun with her forearm.

Dennis stood on a kerb to see them all. ‘Alvis Brankovic is forty-nine years old. Six years ago he was convicted of attempted murder after shooting and wounding a man in a neighbourhood dispute. The year before last he was charged with carrying an unlicensed weapon and assaulting police. He has a brother in a motorcycle gang in Victoria and there’s a strong possibility he has weapons in his home.

‘We’ve shown his photo to the staff of the car rental place and they’ve confirmed him as the hirer of a dark blue Kia. This was the car snapped by the speed camera in Earlwood shortly after a similar car sped from Marrickville Golf Course car park and was seen to hit the brick wall by the gate and leave paint soon after the time of the murder. The rental’s missing paint from the right fender. It was dropped back this morning before the office opened, the keys left in a lockbox.

‘Drive-by of his home shows a black Commodore registered to Brankovic in his driveway and the house’s air conditioner running. The left side of his property borders a vacant block so we need to be prepared that he might make a break for it.’ He looked around. ‘Let’s go.’

They put on vests, then drove to Brankovic’s street and parked a few doors up from his place. Ella peered past a banksia tree to see the red-brick house with the Commodore in front of the closed garage door. Dennis said, ‘Right,’ and they got out. The other officers gathered around and Dennis gave some quick final instructions, then they moved.

The birds fell silent and the sun beat down as Ella followed Dennis through the rusting gate in the low brick fence and up the steps to the front door. From the corners of her eyes she could see officers moving down either side of the house and through the empty block next door. An air conditioner in the front window dripped water onto the stained concrete patio. She and Dennis drew their weapons and took one side of the door each. Two uniforms stood alert at the bottom of the steps, then Dennis pounded on the wood with the side of his fist. ‘Police! Open the door!’

Ella heard a crash inside the house, then shouts at the back. She leapt down the steps, Dennis close behind and telling the uniforms to stay put. She ran down the cracked concrete path beside the house, bushes whipping her arms and neck, to burst into an overgrown backyard where three cops struggled with a kicking man. She dived in and grabbed one bare foot and Dennis seized the other as cops scrambled over the fence from next door and came through the long brown grass at a run. Brankovic shouted and swore and someone pressed his face into the ground and someone else managed to squeeze between the cops on his back and cuff him.

One by one they let him go and got to their feet, breathing hard and brushing themselves off. Ella wiped sweat from her face with her forearm and Brankovic scowled and spat dirt from his mouth. ‘Fucking pigs.’

‘Whatever,’ someone said.

*

Ella and Dennis took Brankovic back to the office and sat across from him in the interview room. He slouched in the chair and looked at the side wall. ‘This is bullshit.’

‘Where were you on Saturday?’ Dennis said.

‘You assault me in my own garden, drag me down here, and think I’m going to cooperate?’

‘It was hardly a garden,’ Ella said.

‘It’s not half as dried up as you.’ He snorted mucus in the back of his nose.

‘You know your house and garage and car are being searched.’

‘On what grounds?’

‘Where were you on Saturday?’ she said.

‘Wanted a bit, didja?’

‘Why did you hire the Kia?’ Dennis said.

‘To drive,’ he said with exaggerated slowness.

‘Better than the Commodore, is it?’ Ella said.

‘As if.’ He snorted again. The sound turned her stomach.

‘You know Paul Fowler?’

‘Nope.’

‘Where were you on Saturday?’

He looked at them. ‘You think if you ask enough times I’ll tell you?’

‘Where were you?’ Dennis said.

Brankovic shifted his gaze back to the wall. ‘Call my lawyer. His name’s David Wells.’

‘Fine,’ Dennis said. ‘You don’t mind waiting if he takes a while?’

Brankovic shrugged. ‘Doesn’t bother me. Sitting here’s like eating out, cos you have to bring me food. Though the waitresses look like shit.’

Ella controlled herself and didn’t slam the door on the way out. In the corridor she said, ‘They better find something in his house.’

‘We’ll soon hear if they did.’

She said, ‘Have Sutton and Trina called each other yet?’

‘Not so far. And he went home, not to her place.’

‘What about those clients he was going on about?’

‘Maybe he’s fixing their computers at his place,’ he said. ‘Meantime I’ve sent a couple of people to visit Garland’s workplace then his home, and let Gerard out of the intercept room to track down Henreid’s so-called girlfriend.’

There were so many trails leading in different directions. Ella wondered which ones were going to solve the case.

Detective Louise Brooks hurried up. ‘The stuff about Seth Garland and the Audi went out on morning news not long ago, and we just got a call from a guy who thinks he saw it being carjacked.’

*

Holly stared over the roofs of Balmain. Nothing felt real: not sitting here when she was supposed to be at work and also in a meeting at Rozelle; not the memory of squeezing Norris’s hand at the morgue and getting no squeeze back; not the knowledge that he lay cold and dead in a drawer and would soon be cut up as she’d seen others cut up in the past. Not the knowledge that Seth was cold and dead in a drawer close by.

Lacey came out onto the balcony and put a cup of tea into her icy hands, then sat opposite with a cup of her own. Down the street a short round woman reached out of a second-storey window and rubbed at the glass above her head with a cloth. It felt unbelievable to Holly that life was just going on. She’d experienced that before: returning to the station after some horrific case to find the place the same as ever, the next shift coming in and laughing and joking, her thinking of the mangled person or their family or even the way she herself felt a little different and being somehow surprised that the whole world didn’t feel it too. She watched the woman lean out and reach up and wondered why she didn’t fall, because the world had shifted on its axis and nothing – breathing, gravity, life itself – was ever going to be the same.

She wiped her eyes on her arm. ‘This is a nightmare.’

‘I’d wake you up if I could,’ Lacey said.

‘The only thing that feels real is that Seth was somehow involved.’ Holly placed her cup on the tiles. ‘I knew something would happen. Only one day he was back in my life, and I was doing my best to kick him out again but everything collapsed before I could. I told Norris he was trouble. I told him and told him.’

‘You did everything you could,’ Lacey said.

‘I didn’t,’ Holly said. ‘I went to the beach yesterday when I should’ve gone home. I could’ve been there and stopped Norris from going out with him. Norris called me and I didn’t answer, but I should’ve, and said I was sick and needed looking after and he had to be at home for me.’

‘He might’ve gone out anyway.’

‘He might not have.’

Lacey bumped Holly’s foot with her own. ‘I’m just saying, this isn’t your fault.’

‘My brother got my fiancé killed,’ Holly said. ‘Of course it’s my fucking fault.’

In the flat Holly’s mobile rang.

‘Want me to . . . ?’ Lacey said.

Holly shrugged.

Lacey went inside. Holly watched the round woman wipe down the sill then move along to the next window, and listened to the murmur of Lacey’s voice. The only thing she wanted to hear was that there’d been an awful mistake, Norris wasn’t dead at all, he was on his way over in a taxi. And that was never going to happen.

‘I wish I was dead too,’ she said softly.

Lacey came back. ‘That was Lissa in Melbourne. She said to tell you she’s head of records now, and that your file is fine and nobody would find out anything.’

‘That feels so long ago,’ Holly said.

‘Twelve years,’ Lacey said.

‘I mean when I was worried about it. Let Kyle find out and tell everyone. I don’t give a shit.’

Lacey knelt beside her chair and hugged her. The gaping black hole in Holly’s chest sucked the air from her lungs and the blood from her heart.

‘I keep seeing him,’ she hiccuped when she could speak. ‘In that car, knowing things were bad. Writing that message. Imagining him deciding to write it in the first place, then writing it there.’

‘Maybe some things are better not imagined,’ Lacey said.

‘I can’t not,’ Holly said. ‘That’s the effort he went to to tell me how much he loved me. How can I ignore it? Forget it?’

‘I didn’t mean –’

‘He must’ve been in danger to have to write on the side of his leg.’ She moved her own hand along the side of her thigh. ‘Down the side of the passenger seat, he must’ve been hiding it from someone. Someone who might’ve had a gun at his head.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘He did that for me.’

Lacey nodded.

Holly stared down at her trembling hands. ‘And what am I doing for him?’

‘You told the police everything you know.’

‘But I’m not
doing
anything.’ She grabbed Lacey’s arm. ‘Seth is the cause of this, right?’

Lacey nodded again. ‘And the police will be looking into him.’

‘But I know him better than they do, and I might be able to see what they can’t.’ She jumped to her feet. ‘Is your cordless drill charged?’

‘Always,’ Lacey said.

‘Get it.’

*

The caller lived in a street three blocks from the eastern side of the Princes Highway in Tempe. Ella got out of the car and heard the clank and grind of the heavy bulldozer in the vacant block behind the caller’s house and breathed the hot dry odour of the dust it stirred up. Over the roof she could see stacked orange and white shipping containers in a storage yard on a hill and a jet coming in to land at Mascot.

Louise Brooks came around from the passenger side, pulling her shirt away from her body and blotting her forehead on her wrist. ‘They say there’s a southerly coming sometime.’

‘Believe that when I feel it,’ Ella said. ‘Hey, you ever heard of someone called Dante Novak?’

‘Nope. Is he tied up in this?’

Ella shook her head. ‘He’s nobody.’

The house was on the corner, semidetached, painted white with a green corrugated-iron roof. Ella went through the space in the low brick wall where a gate had once hung and onto the green-painted concrete patio, and knocked on the frame of the security grille. The door inside stood open and she could see down a hallway to the edge of a table and chair in a kitchen. A scattering of children’s books lay on the hall floor and she could hear a baby crying.

A small girl of two or three appeared in the kitchen doorway and stared at them.

Ella waved and smiled. ‘Is Daddy here?’

‘Hi darlin,’ Louise said over Ella’s shoulder.

The girl smiled. The baby’s crying reached a new pitch like a kettle going off. The girl picked up a book and came to the door and held it out to them, then tried to push it underneath.

‘That’s okay,’ Ella said. ‘Can you go and get your daddy, please?’

The girl banged on the screen with the flats of her hands and a man appeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘What – oh, hi.’ He balanced the screaming baby in the crook of his arm and came towards them.

‘Detectives Ella Marconi and Louise Brooks.’ Ella held her badge against the screen.

He looked at it, unlocked the grille and beckoned them in, then relocked it behind them. ‘Thanks for coming.’ He motioned them into a sitting room on the left of the hallway, jiggling the baby. ‘Please have a seat.’

Ella lifted a pile of freshly washed baby clothes onto her lap and sat in a faded brown armchair. Louise perched on the edge of a matching lounge that was dotted with toys and the little girl climbed up next to her and handed her the book.

The man swayed the screeching baby back and forth in his arms. ‘I just have to get her bottle off the stove.’

‘No worries,’ Ella said.

He disappeared. The baby quietened seconds later. He came back and stayed standing as she gulped the milk down, her hands tiny on the bottle’s sides.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m Elijah Finley, this is Minette and that’s Polly.’

Polly reached over Louise’s hands to turn the pages faster.

Ella said, ‘You rang in and said you saw something?’

He nodded towards the doorway at the back of the room. ‘I’ll show you.’

They followed him into a playroom where a blanket was slung over three chairs and held down by piles of books. Polly dived into the cubby and started singing to herself. The room opened onto the kitchen on the right side and the table there was covered in bibs and bottles and finger paintings, and the air smelled of cooked pasta. The window looked over a sparsely grassed backyard with a Hills hoist and a swing set. The fence was old palings, and beyond it the bulldozer chugged in the vacant block.

‘See that house?’

Ella looked where he was pointing, diagonally across the corner of the block into the next street. A shrub blocked some of the view but she could see a front door, two windows and part of the driveway and garden.

‘I think that’s a brothel.’

‘Really,’ Louise said.

He nodded. ‘I called council but they did nothing. I called you guys and got told it’s a council matter. I called the council back and they waffled on about needing proof and being busy and blah blah. So I started taking photos, to try to get some sort of proof, and last night I was taking some snaps and I saw a black Audi pull up and something funny happened – there was some sort of carry-on, maybe a carjacking, I’m not really sure – and then this morning when I saw the news about those guys in a black Audi killed over in Botany and you wanting information I thought I better call.’