Sleight Malice (21 page)

Monday morning. Desley had
survived the weekend, but had Helen Escott? Why wasn’t she returning her phone
calls?

Unable to focus
on the project on hand, a revamp of a new client’s existing website, she
checked her emails yet again, pressing the send-and-receive button on the off
chance a new email had arrived in the last nanosecond. Nothing. She then sent
herself a test message, the email equivalent of checking a phone for dial tone.
No problems there.

Abandoning her
computer, she gathered up her mobile phone, shoulder bag and keys. She could
ill afford the time, but she also knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on
her work until she had spoken to Helen and assured herself everything was okay.
For all Desley knew, Paul Escott had done more than contact his estranged wife
by phone. Alcohol changed people. What if he had been on a drinking binge,
morphing from the sober teddy bear Helen once thought he was to some raging
monster capable of God knows what. Or not.

Forty minutes
later, her overactive imagination in check, she turned into Helen’s street. She
slowed but then sped up again when she recognized the car backing out of the
Escott’s driveway. What were the police doing there? What had happened?

She drove on,
monitoring the unmarked police car in her rear view mirror. Pulling into a park
four houses down, she stayed in her car until she was sure it was clear. Once
out of the vehicle, she didn’t dawdle, marching straight across the street and
up to number 58. Except for it being a brighter day, the weatherboard bungalow
looked just the same.

Not so, Helen
Escott. In the week since Desley last saw her, she had aged ten years, the
lines around her sunken eyes etched deep. Even her mahogany mane, tied back
from her face, seemed to have lost its vitality.

“Piss off!”

Desley’s jaw
dropped. Not exactly the welcome she had expected. The door slammed in her
face. “You weren’t answering my calls or emails,” she called through the door.
“I just wanted to make sure you and the boys were okay.”

“Don’t you
think you’ve caused enough trouble?”

“Sorry?”

“I phoned you
to tell you about Paul being in contact because I thought you genuinely cared.
Silly me thought if you were a friend of Laura’s then you had to be okay.”

“I don’t get
it, Helen. I do care.”

“What’s not to
get?” The pitch of Helen’s voice hit screech point. “I call you and the police
turn up.”

“No!” For the
second time in as many days, she was being accused of sicking the police onto
someone. “Helen, I didn’t tell anyone about your phone call. I swear the police
being here had nothing to do with me. You have to believe me.”

“Why should I?”

Good point. She
and Helen were little more than strangers. “What would I gain by snitching to
the police?” She coughed, her throat scratchy from having to shout.

“You knew Paul
hated Ryan for what he did to us.”

“Yes, but that
doesn’t mean I think he’s capable of murder.”

“Well, the
police do. And someone told them he had been in contact. You were the only one
that I told. Now go away. Leave me alone.”

Not knowing
what else she could do, Desley retreated. If Helen was telling the truth and
the only person she had told about Paul’s phone call was her, how had the
police found out? Only two possibilities came to mind and she didn’t like
either of them. One: the police had Helen’s phone or Desley’s or both tapped.
Two: Fergus had told them. She had almost forgotten he had been there when the
answering machine picked up Helen’s call.

She came to an
abrupt halt. A gangly teenage boy on a skateboard screamed past her, two
fingers thrust in the air. She turned around, took two steps and stopped again.
She wanted to warn Helen about the possibility of her phone being tapped, but
if it wasn’t, it meant Helen was right and she had been the source of the leak.
Intention didn’t come into it.

She headed back
to her car. Phone tapping or double-crossing, she couldn’t risk blundering in
without all the facts. She could only pray that underhanded police methods were
to blame. Whatever, she needed to talk to Fergus. And if they were tapping
landlines, then email and mobile phones wouldn’t be secure either.

On the way
home, she rang Fergus, leaving what she hoped wasn’t too cryptic a message:
“When you can spare the time, I need a few questions answered about the final
layout of your website before I upload it.” Cryptic because having signed
everything off days before, his website was already live. “I should be home by
eleven, so anytime after that.” That would give her time to check her phone for
obvious bugs, not that she knew what to look for.

But all
thoughts of phone taps were vanquished the instant she pulled into her driveway
and saw her front door ajar. She certainly hadn’t left it that way; she never
left it open. What’s more, it was fitted with one of those automatic locking
latches. She knew; she had locked herself out on more than one occasion.

Leaving her car
parked in the middle of the driveway, she approached the house, her heart
thumping so hard it hurt. She nudged the door with her foot and stepped
backwards. “Hello, anyone there?” she called out, feeling stupid and not at all
brave. As if any burglar in his right mind would reply.

She forced
herself to move. A strong metallic taste filled her mouth as she stepped into
the hall, her pulse off the Richter scale. Sticking close to the walls, she
peered around the edge of each doorway. Her breathing had only started to
steady when she realized she hadn’t checked upstairs.

Standing at the
bottom of the stairs, she took a deep breath and grabbed the handrail. She
needed all the support she could get. Another breath.
Coming, ready or not
,
she thought. She meant herself.

At the top of
the stairs, she stood rooted to the floor, every muscle tensed. A delicate honey
scent, a leftover of her morning shower, mingled with the dryness of the
landing’s wool carpet. The only sounds came from outside, distant traffic, a
pigeon cooing to its mate.

Somehow she
persuaded her feet to move. She did okay until she neared the doorway to her en
suite, visions of the shower scene in Psycho flashing into her mind. She almost
laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. She could see straight through her
shower curtain, a clear glass panel, and no one could mistake the orange-billed
fluorescent-pink rubber ducky staring out at her as a body. She breathed out, a
throttled giggle escaping.

Still on edge,
but convinced that whoever had been there was no longer there, she returned
downstairs to check what had been taken. Except after checking and
double-checking each room, she couldn’t find anything missing. Her computer,
printer and scanner were as she left them. The television, DVD player and
recorder, and CD player in the living room hadn’t been touched. Yet someone had
been there, that she knew. She felt tainted, as if it were her body and not
just her space that had been violated.

Then she did
what she should have done in the first place: she called the police to report
the break-in. With nothing more to be done until either the police or Fergus
turned up, she went to put her car away. Letting herself out into the garage,
she pressed the green button on the wall near the door and ducked under the
opening tilt-a-door.

It took her a
second to realize what she was seeing, or rather what she wasn’t seeing. The
driveway was empty, her beloved Peugeot hatchback gone.

“Thank God you’re okay.” Without
thinking, Fergus enveloped Desley in a bear hug, crushing her to his chest.

She squirmed.
He felt the vibration of her voice against his shirt and relaxed his hold. “I
missed that.”

With a gasp,
she pulled back, her hand at her throat. “I couldn’t breathe.”

“Sorry, I
didn’t mean to suffocate you. I’m just so relieved to see you’re not at death’s
door.”

She looked at
him as if he had lost his mind. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“The car
accident, the phone call…”

If her eyebrows
arched any higher, they would meet her hairline.

“I got a phone
call from someone using your mobile, a woman who said she had witnessed the
accident and stayed with you until the ambulance arrived. She found the phone
near the wreckage and pressed redial. She told me the Peugeot – she even read
out the license plate number – was a write off and that you were in a bad way.
Touch and go. The phone cut out before she could tell me what hospital you had
been taken to. I rang every hospital I could find with an emergency
department.” Desley’s mouth gaped. He grabbed her hands. “But obviously it
wasn’t as serious as she thought. What happened? Anything I can do?”

“Yes, tell me
what planet I’ve landed on.” She leaned sideways, peering past him. “Here come
the aliens now.”

He turned to
see two male uniformed officers he didn’t recognize striding across the street
toward them. He gave Desley a questioning glance, but her attention was
elsewhere.

“Senior
Constable Ewen Adair,” the tall, gaunt-faced officer said, extending a hand
first to Desley, then to Fergus. “And, this is my colleague, Constable Luc
Nguyen. I understand you reported a burglary and the theft of a motor vehicle.”

Fergus’s back
stiffened. What burglary? What car theft?

“Not burglary
exactly,” Desley was saying. “As far as I can tell, nothing’s missing.” She
threw her hands up, her face hardening. “Except of course, for my bloody car.
Can you believe that?”

Senior
Constable Adair gestured at the open front door. “We need to take a statement,
inside preferably. Somebody should be here shortly to dust for fingerprints, so
until then please try to avoid touching any hard surfaces, especially doors and
the like.”

His mind still
abuzz, Fergus entered the house last. Someone had broken into Desley’s home,
but hadn’t taken anything. What had they been looking for? Had Desley come home
unexpectedly or had they been waiting for her? Why steal her car? And the phone
call telling him Desley had been seriously injured, what had that been about?

He knew from
experience that unless the offender already had a criminal record or a
sharp-eyed neighbor saw something, dusting for prints and Desley’s statement
were simply formalities. Just one more to add to the almost ninety per cent of
unsolved burglaries. Not that he intended telling her that.

“Excuse me,
sir. Would you mind not touching anything.”

Without turning
around, Fergus held his hands high in the air and kept walking. He heard Desley
tell the two uniforms that he used to be a police detective. They ignored him
from then on, to the point he felt he didn’t exist.

Using it to his
advantage, he lurked in the background, listening without interfering.

“From the time
you entered the house to when you went back out and found your car gone was how
long?”

Desley’s chest
heaved. “I’m not sure. Twenty, thirty minutes tops.” Her eyes widened, her
hands clapping the top of her head. “Oh shit, my bag was still in the car.” She
bounced to her feet. “My life is in that bag: my phone, my driver’s license,
all my credit cards, everything.”

She whirled on
Fergus. “Didn’t you say something about a woman phoning you from my mobile?”

He didn’t think
it had sunk in at the time. “It certainly came up on caller ID as your number.
When the woman told me you had been involved in a major car accident, I took
her at her word. I didn’t for one second think she might not be telling the
truth.”

“Why would
someone do that? You don’t think this has something to do with that email, do
you?”

Fergus didn’t
respond to the two officers’ bemused expressions. “This has gone far enough.
Let me call Grant,” he said, already dialing. “And if I can’t get him, I’ll try
Kim.”

Standing up,
the Senior Constable towered over Fergus. “Mr Coleman, please, we have a job to
do. There’ll be time to call friends later.”

“Detective
Inspector Buchanan,” he said loudly, when Grant answered, only addressing him
by rank for the benefit of the uniforms, “Fergus Coleman here.”

“Yes, Fergus.”

He quickly
filled Grant in about the break-in, the theft of Desley’s car and the malicious
phone call. “Your call, but I think you’ll agree this isn’t a crime of
opportunity.”

“Let me be the
one to decide that. Give me an hour.” Click.

Grant arrived
at the same time as the forensics technician, a young, button-nosed woman
weighed down by the hard-sided kit case she was lugging. “No sign of forced
entry here. Anywhere else,” he asked, hands behind his back as he leaned in to
check the doorframe.

“No. She came
home to find this door open.”

“So, she
could’ve forgotten to shut it.”