The Silent Inheritance (17 page)

He sneezed Barbara Lane out of his system before entering the interview room where the boyfriend, an eighteen-year-old kid looking scared, sat beside his lawyer.

He talked. They couldn’t shut him up.

‘She’s been cheating on me for weeks. I found out who she was cheating with on Friday night. Liam someone. She got a message from him. I snatched her phone to read it and she hauled off, belted me in the eye, then took off. I pitched her phone and went to bed, and Mum knows I was in bed and knows where that phone was. She found it when she came in to get my washing. It was flat, so I put it on my charger, then her boss rang.’

Before that Tuesday ended, Daws had arrived in Melbourne, the Lane brother’s boat had been accompanied into port and the Townsville police had been over it with a fine-toothed comb. Martin Lane was currently flying south, or would be shortly. Ross had spoken to him. He claimed that his ex-wife had pulled this stunt because he was going after full custody of their daughter.

It was looking bad for pretty Danni Lane, though her mother refused to admit it. She’d confirmed that the schoolgirl in the car park shot was Danni, but was convinced that her ex had sent someone there to pick her up. She’d had an explanation for the shopping bag too.

‘Her father would have got money to her to buy what she needed. That’s why she didn’t take anything from home.’

No use trying to tell her that nine minutes wouldn’t have given Danni enough time to go shopping, and if she had she would have shown up in the shops’ security videos. No use telling her that nine minutes wouldn’t have been enough for her to buy the shopping bag, though wasted breath or not, he told her.

‘Then whoever she was meeting bought it – and he was carrying her schoolbag,’ Barbara said.

She’d glanced at a shot they’d found of full-faced Granny Plaid Skirt standing behind Danni in the supermarket queue, and had waved a manicured hand at the image she didn’t recognise and had no desire to.

Granny Plaid Skirt had been pushing a shopping trolley at the checkout. If she’d had a walking stick, it had been in the trolley.

Why ditch that trolley? The car park was on the same level as the supermarket. There was something not quite right about Granny Plaid Skirt, something very not right about her winter skirt and cardigan on a day like last Friday. There was something wrong about Danni’s environmentally friendly shopping bag too – and something more wrong about her mother.

She’d come in here today wearing an ice-blue frock and looking fragile enough for a breeze to sweep her off her feet. A gale wouldn’t move that woman. To date Ross hadn’t seen her shed a tear, or look capable of shedding one.

He’d watched her Sunday night interview. She’d looked as if she’d been interrupted on her way to a modelling assignment. He’d become obsessed by her hair, by the way it moved as she’d moved, as if each hair had been trained to know its place. He’d thought wig. Today he’d taken particular note of her parting. Her colour may not have been natural but her hair was her own.

She had the complexion, the delicacy, of a porcelain doll, a collector’s item, to be handled only by those wearing white gloves. The Sunday night interviewer, one tough lady, had taken her gloves off. She’d chipped away at Barbara Lane for fifteen minutes, determined to squeeze out a tear. They were good for ratings. She’d failed. Delicate Mrs Lane was more vitreous enamel than porcelain.

He’d learnt a lot about her in the days since Danni had disappeared. He’d spoken to her boyfriend, who’d denied any personal relationship with Mrs Lane – which was not so according to a couple of his undervalued employees and young Samantha Smith had seen Danni’s mother’s boyfriend come out of the downstairs bedroom wearing only a short dressing-gown.

‘She used to live with him at Docklands, in his penthouse, until she brought Danni down from her grandfather’s place and he moved them into the Barbie’s doll house. That’s what Danni used to call their house,’ Samantha had said.

Crow didn’t own a penthouse at Docklands. He rented a classy two-bedroom unit there. He owned, or he and his wife owned, a ten-acre property at Pakenham and a beach house at Mount Martha – a beach house Johnson’s team had searched. Crow was the right age to fit the killer’s profile, was a lying, cheating bastard of a man, and Danni would have got into his car willingly.

Ross hated admitting it, but Crow was innocent of abduction. At the time Danni had gone missing, he’d been with his wife and kids, preparing to leave for a weekend in Echuca, which he’d spent at his in-laws’ place. His wife and their seventeen-year-old daughter backed up that part of his story. His wife, who owned half of the business, had refused to discuss their payroll/accounts officer.

Ross looked at his watch. A direct flight from Townsville to Melbourne took around three hours, so he went outside to pollute Melbourne’s evening air.

He knew who had Danni. He’d known on Friday night. She was the killer’s type. A pretty immature kid, as fair as her mother, blue eyed like her mother but very different. Danni’s eyes had warmth behind them, laughter, the hint of a rebel.

March now, mid-March. Given a warm autumn, unless they found that murdering bastard, they’d find Danni’s body in May, beside a freeway, double-bagged, her long pale hair shampooed and tied high with pink satin bows.

‘Fight him, Danni. Stay strong and give me time.’

P
itch dark. Airless. Everything hot, metal bars and floor beneath straw which stank of wee and vomit, and because she couldn’t see where she’d vomited, she smelled the same as the straw. Couldn’t see anything. Like a blind mole locked in a cage.

Didn’t know who had put her in it, or how. She’d woken up in it, had screamed until she’d had no more voice to scream. Didn’t know how long. Seemed like weeks, except it couldn’t have been weeks or she would have died of thirst before she’d found the water. Two big Coke bottles full of water, on the floor outside the bars, on normal floorboards. She’d felt the grooves between those boards.

They were the only things that were normal. The wall behind the bottles wasn’t a wall but spongy, like the walls of padded cells in old movies about insane asylums. The mad people they’d put in them could stand up. She couldn’t even sit up, not straight up, or her head hit the top bars.

She’d thought she’d been blind when she’d woken up. She wasn’t blind, because opposite to where she’d found the water she could see a slit of grey, like light seeping through the gap between two floorboards. And there was something else that came and went, near where she’d found the water bottles. It looked like a smudged circle with a tail like a comet.

Nothing to see now, only a dead blackness like there’d been a storm and they’d all had to go down to Nan and Pop Lane’s basement, then the powerlines had blown down and they’d waited in that solid black for hours. There’d been air and space down there. She’d heard things, heard the wind roaring, things banging against the outside of the house. Couldn’t hear anything in here, except her own noises. It was as if even the sound of her breathing was trapped in that cage, her swallowing sounds, her growling belly.

She’d drunk too much water too fast when she’d found those bottles and it had come up just as fast and gone everywhere, in her hair, the straw, on the bars. She sipped water now, had sipped all of one bottle and started on the other one.

And thoughts were coming back, and they made her panic, and when she panicked, she couldn’t breathe. Better to pretend she was in Nan and Pop’s basement and when the storm was over she could get out.

They’d sold it. Sold the house, the land and the horses—

Didn’t want to think about that either, but if she didn’t fill her head with something, then the words from the television came at her.

Psychopath.

Paedophile.

Monica Rowan.

Emaciated.

She knew, knew, knew.

Body found beside the Hume Freeway … identified as that of Monica Rowan …

‘Don’t scream. Don’t scream. Don’t scream.’

Heard that, like a husky whisper.

If Samantha had agreed to go home when she’d wanted to go home—

‘Stop!’

Apples spilling everywhere, big pink lady apples. Grapes, falling out of their plastic bag—

Monica Rowan had been found dead in a garbage bag beside the Hume Freeway, and there’d been three more before her. Penny. She remembered Penny because of Grandpa’s pennies. In Sydney. He had an album full of the old money from before her mother had been born and he’d shown her a penny and a half penny and a tiny silver threepenny bit, and old paper money.

Good times in Sydney. Her father had been there … then they’d gone to court and he’d gone to Townsville and Grandma had died and everything changed.

Like in America after Nan and Pop Lane’s funerals. It was as if funerals were some sort of catalyst.

Her back was aching and her stomach was starving.

Emaciated
.

Psychopath.

Paedophile.

If people had water they could stay alive in the Australian desert for days. She had water. If people who were lost had water, if they kept their heads, they stayed alive until someone found them. Panic made people do stupid things, and it was doing the stupid things that killed them. She had water. She had to pretend she was lost in the desert, and if she kept her head, her father and Grandpa would find her. She had to stop herself from screaming so her vocal cords could recover, then wait until she heard someone out there.

Out where? Didn’t know where she was. Didn’t know for how long people could stay alive on only water.

Refugees who went on hunger strikes didn’t die fast. Their bodies ate up their fat, then ate up their muscle.

Emaciate: To reduce to flesh and bones.

She’d been running down the escalator to catch the four-thirty bus. Escalators throw people off at the bottom and that stupid old lady had stopped—

She could hear something out there, or beneath her. A refrigerator motor maybe. Something. Then it stopped. Like a car when someone has turned off the motor.

Did what she’d told herself not to do. She screamed. Had no voice in her lower register but could still make a high shrill scream. She made it long. Then listened.

Nothing.

Her mother would have come home late on Friday night, with him. They wouldn’t have noticed that she wasn’t in her room. They would have gone to bed. They would have noticed on Saturday, would have phoned the police.

If you gave a police dog a piece of clothing the missing person had worn, the dog could track that person’s scent.

They’d had two months to track Monica. They hadn’t found her, not until she was dead.

And there was someone out there. She could hear scratching, scraping now, and close.

‘Help,’ she tried. Just a husky whisper, so she did the high-pitched scream again.

And a door slammed, like Grandpa’s screen door used to slam, and there was a light, proper white light where she saw that grey slit, flashing light, like it was signalling. She grabbed for the empty water bottle and ran it backward and forward against the bars. Only plastic. Not noisy enough. Reached between the bars to hammer on the wooden floor with the side of her fist. Someone was out there and they had to be able to hear that.

A wolf heard it. It howled. Then a door opened and she was hit in the face by a blast of light, and whatever was holding the light was howling, and she screamed and huddled in the corner, hiding her face from the light and that inhuman thing that had put her in this cage.

‘I have gags for squealers,’ it said, and she screamed again because the voice sounded like Mr Watts, her maths teacher, and because knowing who he was made her know something she’d been refusing to let herself know. She’d done something stupid.

Saw a white hand inside the cage. It was emptying something from a can into a bowl and she screamed at it because she knew she was going to be dead before 22 April and that Daddy would go home to America without her.

‘You won’t like my gags,’ he said. Then he was out that door and gone with his light, and the black was back and it was everywhere.

Not everywhere. Her eyes had photographed his light and his hand. Now her eyes played that image back, played it green, played it orange, and she sat quieting her breathing by watching it, clinging to it until it grew small and dissolved. She cried for its absence and because he was probably Mr Watts who had given her and Samantha a ride home from the shops two weeks ago and he hadn’t been like a teacher. He must have offered to drive her home on Friday. She must have got into his car alone – and she’d called her mother a fool for being tricked by David Crow?

She was sitting on her hair and it was hurting, and that real hurting stopped her tears. She’d had an elastic band around her ponytail at school. Lost it, and her hair was everywhere. Her hands reached up to gather and plait it. Useless fingers in the dark – until she closed her eyes against the dark, which didn’t change what she could see, except maybe her brain knew why it couldn’t see so it sent different messages to her fingers. She got her hair plaited, got it tucked down the neck of her uniform. There was little enough space in his cage without tangling herself up in hair.

Tried then to think of getting into Mr Watts car, but all she could remember was almost knocking that old lady down, then chasing her spilled shopping, chasing an apple beneath a food court table and knowing that she was going to miss the four-thirty bus.

She could remember the couple sitting at the table an apple had rolled beneath. They’d been eating a huge plate full of fish and chips, at half past four in the afternoon – and if she could remember what they were eating, why couldn’t she remember getting into Mr Watts’s car?

Because she was starving hungry, that’s why, because her stomach was aching so bad for food, she’d have eaten a raw fish if she had one.

He’d put something from a can into a bowl. Probably dog food. There were too many stinks in here to smell anything. How long would a starving person starve before she ate dog food?