Silent Fear (8 page)

Laughter ran through the crowd and she looked up to see the young man toppling slowly to the side. He swayed for a moment around the forty-five-degree point, then fell right over, his head hitting the platform with a dull thud and his knees collapsing together. Holly could see the top of his head and half of his face, and memorised his skin colour. A woman nearby said something to her friend about fucking idiotic junkies and Holly pressed her lips together. It was true and not true at the same time.

A group of four mid-teenage girls came along the platform, looking down at the young man with a mix of curiosity and distaste on their faces. One pretended to trip over him. He didn’t move.

Holly watched his skin. Was it . . . ?

One of the girls said something to the others and they all laughed.

Holly stared harder. His colour was darkening, she was almost certain. She started to push her way through the crowd.

The train guard came back. ‘Hey.’ He poked the young man with the toe of his shoe. ‘You can’t lie here.’

The young man didn’t respond. Holly popped free of the crush of people and crossed the platform. His face was dusky now.

The guard poked him again. ‘Hey.’

‘Stop doing that and call an ambulance,’ Holly said.

She dropped to her knees on the blazing hot asphalt and tilted the young man’s head back. He was deeply unconscious. His skin was hot and sweaty. He wasn’t breathing.

The guard hadn’t moved. Holly glared up at him. ‘Call an ambulance!’ He rushed off.

The young man turned a darker shade of blue. His wispy moustache was beaded with sweat. Holly supported his head with one hand, his ear hot against her palm, and unfolded his lanky limbs with the other to lie him properly on his side. She pushed her thumb against the arch of his eye socket, compressing the nerve and causing pain that sometimes roused an overdose victim, but he was down too deep.

The guard ran back up. ‘Ambulance is coming.’ He was out of breath with excitement.

Holly clenched her fist and rubbed her knuckles up and down the young man’s sternum. He still didn’t move.

‘Got any first-aid gear?’

‘I’ll get it.’ The guard rushed away again.

Holly could feel the eyes of the crowd on her. She fumbled one-handed in her backpack, grabbing out her keys and the attached green nylon packet containing a tiny plastic sheet that could be used as a mask. She let the young man’s head rest on the platform, ripped open the packet and unfolded the sheet. But it was old and had split along the folds and was useless.

The guard put a plastic box by her side and flipped the clips. She scrabbled through plastic-wrapped bandages, feeling the seconds tick past for the second time that day.

‘This is it? Just bandages?’ she said.

‘Yep.’

The young man was bluish-grey now. It’d only been minutes but it felt like hours. There was no siren in earshot, nothing to hear but passing traffic on the other side of the lines and the magpie still calling from the roof.

She rolled him onto his back. His arms fell to his sides and she saw track marks inside his elbows, old bruises, a scab from a localised infection and a fresh red spot. All the stuff she’d done and she’d somehow never caught a thing – surely it wouldn’t happen now. She tilted his head back, pinched his nose with her fingers and gripped his chin with her other hand. She lowered her face and sealed her lips around his.

The first breath tested his airway and lungs. Clear, easy, pliable. She watched his chest rise from the corner of her eye, and made the second breath a little smaller. Too much would send air into the stomach and make him vomit. She gave him three more, raising her head enough to see the colour of his face lighten and pinken, aware at the same time of the taste of his sweat on her lips, waiting a moment to see if he’d been prompted into taking a breath on his own. But he lay motionless. She pressed her mouth against his again, gave him another breath, and heard someone in the crowd say, ‘That’s disgusting.’

‘Hey,’ the guard said. Holly glanced up but he was glaring at the watching people. ‘She’s saving his life. What’re you doing?’

There was no answer.

The young man’s face was oily with sweat under her hand. She adjusted her grip and heard the distant wail of a siren, and breathed into his lungs again.

FIVE

T
he search of Garland’s flat turned up nothing of interest. Fowler evidently hadn’t brought much with him. There was no diary and no notebooks in either bedroom or anywhere else. Ella felt that Garland had agreed too readily to the search to have anything incriminating lying around, but that didn’t mean he was off her list.

They locked the door behind them and went outside.

‘Maybe he’s flexible enough that the mess doesn’t bother him,’ Murray said.

‘You saw his pantry,’ Ella said. ‘I reckon people who store their food by size like control and lots of it.’

The car was in the shade now. Ella stood beside it, thankful for the slight sea breeze, and called Dennis. She told him about the apparent mismatch between Garland’s and Fowler’s living habits and that they’d found nothing else.

Dennis said, ‘Crime Scene’s still in the park but don’t have much. Can you head round and join the canvass?’

They drove through the mid-afternoon traffic back to the scene. Gawkers had gathered along the street and someone who Ella guessed was a journalist wandered among them with a notebook. A couple of Scene techs stood at the site where Fowler had lain, while others combed through the grass under the trees and walked on the bridge over the river. Ella spotted the detectives, Tom and Anthony, at the door of a house facing the field. She parked on the street and crossed to join them. The sun was sliding lower, turning the sky orange-brown with heat haze and dust, but it wasn’t yet below the trees and she could feel it harsh on her face.

Murray walked beside her, checking his mobile.

‘Any news?’ Ella said.

He put it away without answering.

Fine
, she thought.
Whatever
.

The detectives were coming down the house’s front path when they got there. Anthony looked cool and at ease but Tom’s face was flushed and the collar of his shirt was dark with sweat. ‘Hey, blisters. How was that air-conditioned hospital?’

‘You’re finished?’

‘One each to go.’ He pointed to the houses at the end of the block.

‘Find out anything about that light-coloured car Fowler’s friend saw leaving?’

‘It was nothing,’ Tom said. ‘Old guy who lives there heading out to the hardware store in his white VN Commodore. He even had the receipt still in his pocket and the fresh paint on his hands. Apart from that, nobody saw or heard a thing.’

‘Great,’ Murray said.

‘You do better then, mate,’ Tom said, and turned and walked to the next address.

Ella jabbed Murray with her elbow. You couldn’t get information out of people if they had none to give.

She walked past the white-painted gate that Tom held open for Anthony and stepped onto the brick paved path leading through a jungle of a garden to the front door of their final house. The door opened before she knocked.

‘Yes?’ The speaker was a tiny crooked-backed old woman in an electric wheelchair. She sat almost bent over, with one hand on the door and the other on the chair’s controls. Her eyes were deep in her wrinkled face but sharp.

Ella got out her badge. ‘Detectives Marconi and Shakespeare, New South Wales Police. May we speak with you for a moment, please?’

‘You betcha.’ The woman moved the lever on the controls and the chair buzzed backwards and spun around. She drove it left, into a roomy living room, and pointed a crooked finger at a floral lounge. ‘You, sit. You,’ she looked at Murray, ‘go to the kitchen and make some tea.’

He said, ‘It’s important that we’re both here to –’

‘Oh, go,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to miss anything.’

He glanced at Ella, then went.

‘Sit,’ the woman said again. ‘What are you, deaf?’

Ella sat. ‘May I have your name, please?’

The woman rolled close to her and looked her in the eye. Their faces were level. Ella could smell Dencorub and was that a hint of rum?

‘Mary Hyde,’ the woman said. ‘You can call me Mary.’

‘I’m Ella.’

Mary put out a wizened hand and squeezed Ella’s fingers hard, then reversed the chair to park by a table that stood before the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the unkempt front garden. The surface of the table was cluttered with newspapers and books. An air conditioner hummed on the wall, the breeze riffling corners of pages, and Ella breathed the cool air with relief.

‘Where’s that boy with the tea?’

‘Sometimes he needs time,’ Ella said.

‘Oh. Ah.’ Mary laid a finger alongside her nose. ‘Gotcha.’

Ella looked out the window, then at the table again. Mary wasn’t wearing glasses and Ella couldn’t see a pair lying around. She sneaked a glance at Mary but couldn’t spot any telltale dents either side of her nose where the frames would sit. The view from the window was perfect. Ella could see all the way across the park to the path on the far side. She could see the mangroves along the river swaying in the hot wind. She could see the curved back of a Scene tech as he bent to study something on the bridge, then he disappeared as the old woman rolled into her field of vision wearing a great toothy grin.

‘That’s right,’ Mary said. ‘I saw everything.’

‘You don’t wear any kind of glasses?’ Ella said. ‘Nothing at all?’

‘Nope. Got me cataracts done last year. Good as gold now.’ Her eyes were bright.

‘So what did you see this afternoon?’

‘First of all these boys turn up,’ Mary said. ‘Well, I say boys but I mean young men. In their twenties.’

Ella nodded.

Murray hurried in with three cups in his hands. ‘You started without me.’

‘Where’s the milk and sugar?’ Mary said.

‘I didn’t know where they are or how you take it.’

‘Milk’s in the fridge, sugar’s in the pot marked “sugar” on the bench.’ She rolled her eyes at Ella as Murray hurried back out. ‘Reminds me of my deadbeat nephew. So anyway –’

‘Better wait,’ Ella said.

Mary sat back in her chair, her twisted hands grasping the armrests, her eyes fixed on the doorway.

Murray came back, milk carton in one hand, sugar canister in the other.

‘Spoon?’ Mary said.

The muscle in his cheek popped. ‘One second.’

While he was gone Ella said, ‘He’s having a rough day.’

‘Diddums.’

‘He really is.’ She was surprised to find herself standing up for him.

They sat in silence until he came back, holding three spoons aloft.

‘A slop of milk and a big spoonful of sugar for me, please,’ Mary said, gentler now.

Murray made it for her, then handed her the cup. He made Ella’s, black with one, then his own, then sat down.

Mary sipped, then rested the cup on her knee. ‘So these boys turn up. A bit before lunchtime, it was. Let’s say about twenty to twelve. I noticed them because I was reading the paper there.’ She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. ‘I like to get the
Herald
, it’s a good big read of a Saturday, you know? And so I looked up and saw them there. Thought how crazy could they be? Hotter than a fevered pig out there.’

Ella nodded. Murray nodded.

‘They were doing their usual thing – running a bit, standing about talking, tossing a ball back and forth. Then one of them bent down – doing up his shoe, I guess – then he fell over.’

‘You’ve seen them before?’ Murray asked.

‘What’d I just say?’ Mary said, then glanced at Ella. ‘I mean, yes, they’re there every week.’

‘You’re here in your window every week?’ Ella asked. ‘You’d see if they were there or not?’

‘I sit here and I read the paper, start to finish, every Saturday. Takes me all day.’

‘So one fell over,’ Ella said. ‘Did you see anyone else around at that time? What were the others doing when it happened?’

‘I didn’t notice anyone around, not that I was really looking,’ she said. ‘The other boys went to check their friend, then a couple of other people ran up from down near the river and started that CTP thing, and then a bit later the ambulance turned up. They were there for a while, then another ambulance arrived, then the police, and then the ambulance took the hurt one away.’

‘You watched it all?’

She nodded. ‘Marked my place in the paper with a pencil so I could be sure to come back to it.’

‘If you think back a bit earlier in the day,’ Ella said, ‘did you see anyone else hanging about? Walking up and down, sitting in a car? Anything like that?’

‘Or running or driving away after the man collapsed?’ Murray said.

‘None of those things,’ Mary said. ‘What happened to him? I’m guessing that since you’re here and asking about it, he didn’t just get heatstroke like I thought.’

‘It appears that he was shot,’ Ella said.

‘Oh no. Is he okay?’

‘Unfortunately he died.’

‘The poor young man.’

They all gave that a moment’s silence.

Mary adjusted the position of the cup on her knee. ‘He have a family?’

‘A wife and a little girl.’

‘That’s terrible. So close to Christmas too.’

Out the window Ella saw Tom and Anthony walk along the footpath from the house next door and stand talking at Mary’s gate.

‘Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary going on in the neighbourhood in the last few weeks?’ she asked the old woman.

‘There was one thing,’ Mary said. ‘A fair few nights back. Monday, I think. Yes. I heard this car coming along slowly, it had one of those bubbly kind of exhausts. Noisy, burbly, you know?’

Ella looked at Murray, thinking of the golfer’s story of the noisy car that had left the paint on the wall by the clubhouse gate. ‘Did you see what kind of car it was?’

‘It was little, like a hatchback, I think.’

‘Colour?’

‘Dark. I saw that much when it went under the streetlight there.’

‘Black? Blue? Dark red?’ Murray asked.

‘I can’t say.’

Ella knew how that was. She’d tried to identify cars in the dark before too. You really were often limited to ‘dark’ or ‘light’.

‘What happened?’ she said.

‘I was sitting here watching TV, but the curtains were open a little, for the breeze, you know, and I could see flashes of light. I went over to open the curtains wider and see what was going on. The car was stopped a little way along and the light was coming from inside it, in flashes, like someone in there was taking pictures.’

‘Of someone in the car?’

‘Well, maybe, but I thought they were taking them of the park. Because it was lit up in different directions each time the flash went off.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I turned the light off to see if I could see more,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d be able to see the car better, see if somebody got out. It looked strange, you know, taking photos of the park. Why would somebody do that?’

‘Then what?’

‘Then it stopped, but the car was still there, and next thing the flash went off in my direction.’

A shiver ran down Ella’s back. ‘Like they were taking a photo of your house?’

‘Yep,’ Mary said. ‘Then they burbled away down the street, in no kind of hurry. I couldn’t see them when they got to the end, but I heard them stop for a couple of minutes then turn the corner and go.’

Ella stood up. ‘Show me where the car was parked.’

Mary buzzed her chair to the window and pointed. ‘Next to that crooked tree.’

There was a clear view from the window to the spot – which meant there was a clear view from the spot to the window. Ella looked up and around. The curtains were open wide.

‘Were these all the way back?’

Mary nodded.

‘And you were standing here with the light on first, then off.’

‘Well, not standing,’ she slapped the chair’s armrests, ‘but yes.’

Ella looked out the front again. The window’s sill was low. Even in the chair Mary was tall enough to be seen. She watched Tom and Anthony cross the street near the spot where Mary said the car had parked, then step up onto the field.

‘Could you see how many people were in the car?’ she asked.

‘Nope.’

‘Get any of the numberplate?’

‘Nope.’

‘Have you seen or heard that car around before, or since? Including today?’

‘Not that I remember,’ Mary said. ‘And I would’ve noticed. That burbly exhaust stands out. Even when the windows are closed and the air’s on.’

Ella nodded. ‘Thanks so much for your time. We’ll be back to talk to you again in the next couple of days.’

‘I’m always here.’

Ella thought of the couple of steps they’d climbed to the front door. ‘You get out sometimes though, don’t you? Somebody comes to help you? Family or neighbours or someone?’

‘Ramp at the back. I whiz down and away I go. No bastard arthritis is going to stop me.’ She leaned forward a little. ‘And speaking of neighbours – careful of that one in there.’ She pointed next door at the house Tom and Anthony had just left. ‘Completely crazy. Can’t trust a word he says. He’s called the cops a couple of times, reckoned there was someone in his house, and what do you know, nobody was there.’

Ella smiled. ‘Thanks again.’

*

Outside, the air was as hot as ever, the bite of the sun as strong. Ella wiped sweat from the back of her neck as she and Murray crossed the brown field towards Tom and Anthony who were talking with the Scene guys.

Murray took out his phone, looked at the screen for a long moment, then put it away.

‘I bet he’s doing fine,’ Ella said.

Murray didn’t answer. The collar of his shirt was dark with sweat. He stared straight ahead. She clapped a hand on his shoulder and he tensed. She let her hand drop away.

‘You could hang back and call your mum, if you want.’

‘She said she’ll call me.’ The dry grass crunched under his feet. ‘Her phone’s off. Hospital rules.’

Ella nodded.
Well, I tried.

Tom and Anthony turned to face them as they arrived. ‘Anything?’

Ella told them about Mary Hyde’s description of the events surrounding Fowler’s collapse, then about the car she’d seen and the flash photography going on inside it.

Tom said, ‘Our guy said not to listen to anything she says. Reckons she’s nuts.’

‘Really?’ Ella said. ‘She said the same about him.’

‘He seemed completely compos mentis.’

‘So did she,’ Ella said. ‘Did he give you anything apart from that handy advice?’