Web of Deceit (12 page)

‘And yesterday?’

‘We were here in the shed until six.’ Canning looked at them steadily. ‘But you know that already, don’t you? How is Mrs Michaels?’

‘What about earlier in the afternoon?’ Murray said. ‘Can anyone apart from Natasha vouch for you then?’

Natasha Osborne had stuck the spanner in her pocket and now folded her arms. ‘I’m not enough?’

‘Answer the question, please,’ Murray said.

‘We had no clients come in,’ Canning said. ‘I don’t know if anyone else saw that I was here or not. I guess you’ll have to trust me.’

They let that drop into the silence, then Ella said, ‘How did you two meet?’

Osborne eyed her. ‘We were penpals. We hit it off. Plus he was interested in my work, and I’d been thinking about taking
on an apprentice for a while.’ She shrugged. The straps of her black singlet were snug over her shoulders.

‘What kind of cars do you drive?’

‘I don’t own one and I don’t have a licence yet,’ Canning said.

Osborne nodded across the yard. ‘That’s mine there. The F250 ute.’

The truck was pale blue with huge white wheels and rust bubbles along the bottom of the driver’s door.
A hulking piece of machinery sat in the tray.

‘And you live here too?’

‘Over the shop.’ Canning pointed up. Ella saw rain-specked windows with white net curtains.

‘When did you last have contact with Marko Meixner?’ she said.

‘Seventeen years, give or take,’ Canning said.

‘So you remember him.’

‘I remember his name. I’m not going to lie and say I don’t.’ Canning
took the dirty rag from his pocket and wiped his hands again. ‘I remembered it even before the cops came a few weeks back and asked if I’d been stalking him. I’m not proud of what I did, and I can’t bring the dead back to life, but I’ve paid my debt and now I plan to be the productive member of society I wasn’t able to be before.’

‘Because of the drinking and the drugs,’ Murray said.

‘Yes, because of the drinking and the drugs, and I don’t do those any more.’ Canning stuffed the rag away.

‘So you didn’t write any letters to Meixner while you were in jail, you didn’t call him up at his home or work when you got out, you haven’t been following or threatening him or planning to harm him?’ Ella said.

‘No,’ Canning said. ‘What would be the point? I’d be the prime
suspect. I’d be caught and locked up again, and that’s the last place I want to be. I’ve wasted enough of my life already. Besides, I hold no bad feelings towards the man. The whole thing is in the past and that’s where it will stay.’

Ella studied him. His stance and gaze were open, his chest moving easily as he breathed, not too fast but not too controlled and slow either. His face was
empty of tics and his hands hung apparently relaxed by his sides. Lots of prisoners got good at hiding what they really felt though – it was how you got by inside, and sometimes how you landed parole. She looked at Natasha Osborne. The woman dropped her gaze. She shifted her weight on her feet and took the spanner back out of her pocket. Ella couldn’t see any bruises on her arms, but that didn’t mean
there were none elsewhere. ‘You feeling okay? You seem on edge.’

‘We’ve got a lot of work to do, that’s all,’ Osborne said. ‘Clients expect their stuff fixed and we’re standing here wasting time.’

Ella guessed it was more that she was uncomfortable talking to them, but there was nothing more they could do anyway. Evening was approaching, they were due back at the office, and there
was nobody on the rain-soaked dock to ask about the previous evening. The cop on the original case, Paterson, hadn’t called her mobile, but she hoped there might be a voicemail on her office phone. She put her notebook away.

Murray got the signal and nodded. ‘Okay, right,’ he said, and walked away.

Ella took a last look at the pair, who stared back at her in silence, then followed.

*

Jane stood by the fax machine, feeding the pages in. They’d caught a case on the way back and she’d only now been able to get her proof together. Take that, she thought, and that, and that: a copy of the case sheet of the job they’d been on at the time of the alleged incident, which showed they were nowhere near St Vincent’s but instead at a house in Double Bay; a summary she’d typed
up of all their cases that day, showing that they only went to Vinnie’s once and that was early in the afternoon, not 3 pm when she’d supposedly done the dastardly deed; and finally a statutory declaration from Alex, witnessed by the JP owner of the jewellery store across the street, stating that on every case they did that day he was the driver.

She took out her mobile. Still nothing from
Laird. She typed in
Looking forward to tonight
and sent it, then checked the screen on the fax.

‘All pages received,’ she read out. ‘Now what are you going to do, Gittins?’

‘He’s probably gone for the day,’ Alex said.

‘Then he’ll have a lovely present waiting on his desk in the morning.’

Jane folded the pages and went to put them in her locker. While in the locker room,
she typed a smiley face and sent that to Laird as well. It was odd that he hadn’t replied at all. Even when he was flat out he’d always managed to grab five seconds to send her something. She saw in the mirror that she was frowning.
What are you, a fretting adolescent? He’s just busy!

When she came back to the muster room, Alex was staring at his mobile.

‘Everything okay?’ she asked.

‘Mia’s not answering again.’

‘Ah, the teen years.’

He pressed the call button and put it to his ear. ‘Every day she scares me more.’

‘Wait till she can drive.’

He made a face then frowned again, and Jane heard Mia’s voice as her voicemail picked up.

‘It’s Dad again,’ Alex said, poorly controlled irritation in his tone. ‘Call me back.’ He put the phone in his
lap and rubbed his forehead. ‘Last night she started talking about her mother again. She said I should’ve tried harder to keep in touch, that it wasn’t right that she was growing up without knowing her.’

‘They’re experts at making you feel guilty,’ Jane said.

‘And then the doubts start. Perhaps I should’ve tried harder. But for what? If Helen didn’t want anything to do with us, why
should I put in any effort to track her down?’

Jane perched on the edge of the desk. ‘She was the one who left.’

‘Exactly,’ Alex said. ‘Yet I understand what Mia means. Helen’s her mum. Of course Mia wants to know her, wants to have her in her life.’

‘But what more could you have done?’ Jane said.

Alex stared out the window and didn’t answer. Jane watched emotions cross
his face.

‘I’ve looked for her online now and then over the last couple of years,’ he said. ‘Just to see. Do you know how many Helen Churchills are out there? That’s if she’s even using that name still.’

‘But even if you found her, even if you got them in touch with each other, what kind of mother is she going to be? Listen, Alex.’ She rapped her knuckles on the desk to get him to
look at her. ‘Helen’s an adult and she made her choices. Didn’t you say she told you she didn’t want that domesticated life? She couldn’t be bothered to stay in touch, and never mind that you’ve moved a couple of times – you’d be easy enough to find. You’re in the phone book, for goodness sake.’

‘I wanted her to be able to call.’

‘You’re too soft on her,’ Jane said. ‘Listen. Mia will
get through this stage and eventually she’ll understand. She’ll know what she means to you. She’ll grow up and move on, and so will you.’

The job phone rang before he could reply. He grabbed it up. ‘Alex Churchill, The Rocks.’

Jane watched as he scribbled down the details of a cardiac arrest in a Darlinghurst flat. She could feel her phone like a stone in her pocket; she knew it hadn’t
buzzed with a text but couldn’t resist taking it out anyway. Five bars of service, battery close to full. Well, it was okay. Look at the time. He was probably preparing for the broadcast. There might even be a problem: someone had gone home sick and everyone was working harder to fill the gap. Or he’d left his mobile at home. No big deal.

Alex hung up the phone. ‘Ready?’

Jane stood
up straight and nodded.

ELEVEN

M
urray looked up from his computer. ‘Osborne owns that ute and nothing else, and has no record. There’s no vehicle in Canning’s name. Bill Weaver owns a white BMW and has no record either.’

‘According to what I could find,’ Ella said, turning from her own monitor, ‘Weaver’s worked high up in financial companies for years, and there was no mention of anything
shady.’ She heard Brad Langley’s voice down the corridor and checked her watch. ‘Shit.’

They hurried into the homicide meeting room. The lights were on, and the late afternoon beyond the windows was growing gloomier by the minute. Ella sat down next to Murray and the three other detectives, and Langley closed the door.

‘Gawande, you first,’ he said.

Yes, why waste time on niceties?
Ella folded her arms.
It’s not like we’re a team or anything.
It was another thing to irk her. Paterson hadn’t called. She’d ring his station again tomorrow.

John Gawande flattened his notebook on the table. ‘Meixner caught a taxi from RPA to Town Hall at quarter past five. The driver, one Mohamed Shalim, said Meixner was acting strange from the beginning. First he walked past the rank a
couple of times, looking in at Shalim, then when he did get in, he lay on the back seat. During the drive he kept changing the destination – first it was Centrepoint, then it was the QVB, then Hyde Park – and kept peering out the back and asking Shalim to change lanes and put his indicator on like he was going to turn. Shalim said as they were passing Town Hall, where there were hordes of people
going down into the station, Meixner told him to pull over. He threw a fifty at him and jumped out and disappeared in the crowd.’

‘Did Shalim think there was anyone following them?’ Ella asked.

‘He said the traffic was really thick and he couldn’t tell,’ James Kemsley said.

Gawande said, ‘Then we went into Town Hall and watched more CCTV footage. We found Meixner entering the
station via the stairs outside Town Hall itself at twenty to six. He looked frightened and kept checking over his shoulder, but it didn’t look like he spotted the person or people he was worried about. He went into a bathroom on the concourse level and stayed there for eleven minutes, emerging very tentatively at nine minutes to six. We couldn’t see anyone who had been hanging about there, but by
this time the crowds were really thick. Meixner started weaving through the people, pushing and shoving a little, still looking over his shoulder.’

‘It was impossible to know if he was being followed because so many people were going the same direction,’ Kemsley said. ‘We focused on looking for people with caps, and saw a few but none matched the man on the platform later.’

‘Easy to
slip one on and off,’ Ella said.

‘We looked for someone doing that too,’ Gawande said. ‘Didn’t spot anyone, but not all of the station is covered by cameras, and not all the cameras are working.’

‘So next thing we see is Meixner on the Bankstown line platform,’ Kemsley said. ‘And there’s the guy with the cap, and it all unfolds: smoke, panic, push or fall.’

‘Or jump,’ Langley
said calmly.

Ella looked at him. ‘Did a witness call in to say that?’

‘Not as such,’ Langley said. ‘There’s been a number of calls but none certain one way or another, and nothing helpful about the car accident either.’

Hmph.

‘Well, whatever happened, he didn’t take a big leap,’ Gawande said. ‘We could see that much.’

‘Jumps can be small.’ Langley straightened his
cuffs. ‘As small as stepping off into space.’

Ella pressed her feet hard against the floor.

‘After the incident, we couldn’t spot the capped man,’ Kemsley said. ‘Again, the masses of people and the panic made it impossible to pick a single person out, and I’m guessing the cap was off by then.’

‘So he was deliberately hiding,’ Ella said.

‘That’s my feeling,’ Gawande said.

‘Let’s not leap to conclusions here,’ Langley said. ‘Good police work involves evidence, not hunches.’

Ella bit her tongue.

‘Hossain?’ Langley said.

‘You were right about the patrons of the Thorn and Thistle,’ Aadil Hossain said. ‘Nobody could remember a thing, right down to whether they’d been there yesterday afternoon or not. The staff has the same attitude. One of them
recommended that George and I leave.’

‘Charming,’ Murray said.

‘Fletcher’s offsider, Daley Jones, was more talkative,’ Hossain said. ‘The worksite’s closed because of the rain so we tracked him down at home. He said he left work yesterday at two, because his daughter was sick and his girlfriend doesn’t drive so he had to take them to the doctor.’

Ella and Murray looked at each
other. ‘That’s not what Fletcher told us,’ Ella said.

Langley held up his hand. ‘In a minute.’

Ella wanted to scream.

‘Jones doesn’t seem to like Fletcher very much,’ Hossain went on. ‘Says he can be a bit of a bully. Reckons if he gets offered one of the other jobs he’s applied for, he’ll be out of there like a shot. He’s never heard him talk about Chloe or Marko Meixner, and
said that he’s seemed his usual self lately, not upset or angry about anything. We planned to talk to the other tradies at the worksite tomorrow, if it stops raining, and see what they say.

‘George’s knee started to play up then, so he had to sign off. I talked to Meixner’s friends. Henry Marsden said they play tennis together most weeks, and he was concerned when Marko didn’t show last
night, but he knew about the pregnancy so thought maybe something was up with that. He rang Marko and left a voicemail at about eight. Never got a reply, obviously. Tim Raye and Lucas Ellison both said they hadn’t heard from Marko in a week or so. Last time they spoke, he’d been talking about the baby, and wanting to buy a house and not having enough money. They assumed he was busy working extra hours
to earn a bit more. None of them knew about the murder he witnessed, and none had noticed anything amiss in the last few months, the time frame in which Marko knew Canning was getting out.’

Langley nodded.

‘Last thing I did this afternoon was check the toll system on the motorway between Fletcher’s worksite and the city to see if his van was registered going through,’ Hossain said.
‘It wasn’t, but he could’ve taken the minor roads, of course. That’s it.’

‘Shakespeare and Marconi?’

‘Fletcher never told us that Jones left at two,’ Ella said.

‘He didn’t tell us what time Jones left specifically, but led us to believe that they’d both been there until four,’ Murray said.

Langley’s eyes were flat. ‘I mean, can you tell us what progress you made today.’

Ella felt like steam was coming out of her ears. She seethed in silence as Murray summarised their visit to Marko’s GP.

‘So three suicide attempts all up,’ Langley said. ‘Interesting.’

‘She also said he was thrilled about the baby,’ Ella put in.

‘Babies can add pressure,’ Langley said. ‘But go on.’

‘Then we went to Marko’s workplace,’ Ella said, ‘and spoke first to
his boss, Bill Weaver, who then tried to kill himself when we were talking to the other staff.’

‘Get out,’ Hossain said.

‘Hung himself with his tie on the back of his office door,’ Murray said. ‘Ella cut through the tie. Saved his life.’

‘Nice one,’ Gawande said.

Ella felt a flush creeping up her neck. ‘We also met Daniel Truscott, colleague of Meixner’s and owner of the
car he crashed yesterday. He hadn’t given Meixner permission to use it, and couldn’t understand why he’d taken it as he’d never done so before.

‘One interesting thing we learned is that yesterday afternoon around two or two thirty Marko was heard to get a phone call in which he sounded strange enough to catch the attention of his workmate, Roger Saito, and was heard to repeatedly say “No,
no”. Bill Weaver’s PA said that Weaver too has had calls in which he says the same thing, the most recent last Friday.’

‘Calls in which people say “no”,’ Langley said. ‘Fascinating.’

Ella stared at her boss, impassive in his blue tie.
He hates me. He hates me and I do not care. I just want to catch who did this. And yes, maybe prove to him that Marko didn’t kill himself, and that his
desire to move us onto something else is completely idiotic. But mostly catch who did this.

‘Another staff member told me that he’d seen Weaver and Meixner having quiet chats in the hallway on more than one occasion,’ Murray said. ‘When we talked to Weaver this afternoon in hospital, he denied any memory of that.’

‘And he said he tried to kill himself for personal reasons,’ Ella said,
trying to regain her cool. ‘He got touchy when we asked about his wife though. And he made a phone call just before he hung himself, to the office of an accounting company called Holder and Byron. We spoke to one Miriam Holder there this afternoon, but she denied taking Weaver’s call, then did a runner.’

‘Huh,’ Kemsley said.

‘I know,’ Ella said. ‘We didn’t get to visit her at home,
however, but instead met Paul Canning’s parole officer, Grace Michaels.’

She summarised the meeting, including details about the timing of Michaels’s impromptu visit to Canning at the boatshed.

‘Then we checked on Canning himself,’ Murray said. ‘His version of yesterday’s events matched hers. He was working all afternoon, and Michaels turned up at about half past five and stayed for
twenty minutes. He went on about how he’d paid his debt and was moving on. Said he held no grudge and didn’t even think about Meixner.’

Langley nodded. ‘The officers at Ryde told a similar story. Canning recognised Meixner’s name when they spoke to him, but said he had no idea where the man lived, nor did he care. Said he’s focused on work and getting his life sorted.’

‘What were his
alibis for the times Meixner felt he was being followed?’ Ella said.

‘His employer and partner, and a boatie the officers spoke to on the dock.’

Kemsley looked at Ella and Murray. ‘Was he crying harassment? The ex-crims I’ve dealt with would be by this point.’

‘He was a bit surly but polite enough,’ Murray said. ‘The girlfriend was surlier actually. I’m guessing he’s used to
being asked questions and told what to do. She’s not.’

‘She better get used to it quick,’ Ella said. ‘So we still need to talk to Weaver’s wife, find and talk to Miriam Holder, trace the phone calls made to Meixner and Weaver, and check further into Fletcher and Canning. Fletcher especially, now that we know he lied in his answers.’

‘Did he lie, or did you fail to ask the question?’
Langley said. ‘You yourself just said that he never actually stated what time Jones left.’

‘Regardless, I think we should bring him in for a formal interview,’ she said. ‘Sooner rather than later.’

No matter what spin Langley put on it, Fletcher deserved a grilling in a small windowless room. And if she got overtime, she’d not only avoid the family dinner, she could text Callum and
cancel their conversation. It might just delay the inevitable, but that was still something. But Langley shook his head.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Go sign off, people. Let’s keep this budget in the black.’

Ella gripped the arms of her chair. ‘So people can lie, and practically flee an interview, and it doesn’t matter any more?’

But Langley was on his way out the door and didn’t even
glance around. ‘Tomorrow.’

*

The unlit stairway was narrow, the carpet-covered steps creaky and sagging. Jane could hear someone panting and crying up ahead. She squinted through the gloom to an open door. She carried the Oxy-Viva and monitor, while Alex had the drug box and portable radio.

‘Hello?’ She didn’t wait for an answer but walked straight through the door into a living
room stuffed with armchairs and side tables.

‘In here!’

Jane hurried into an even more cramped bedroom to find a white-haired humpbacked woman in her eighties on the floor doing CPR on a motionless man of the same age. The woman was crying as she clasped her shaky hands together over the man’s bare and skinny chest, and counted aloud as she pressed down. ‘One and two and –’

‘Let me do that,’ Alex said, kneeling beside her and doing compressions one-handed while lifting the radio. ‘Thirty-five to Control. Confirm arrest, confirm backup required.’

‘Copy, Thirty-five.’

The man’s face was bony white, his eyes half-open in that dead stare, his lips and ears turning purple. He wore pyjama shorts and nothing else. His white hair was thin, his elbows and knees
and ribs knobbly under pale skin. Alex attached the monitoring dots one-handed, switched the machine on, and ran a strip, while Jane unzipped the Oxy-Viva and pulled out the bag and mask. The woman leaned stiffly back on her knees and put her hands to her own chest, tears running down her face.

‘Do you have chest pain?’ Jane said, alarmed.

‘It’s just angina,’ the woman gasped. ‘Is
he going to be okay?’

‘How long have you had it for?’

‘Since he collapsed. When I phoned you.’

Eleven minutes. ‘And you did CPR anyway?’

‘I wasn’t going to stop just for a little pain. Please help him.’

The monitor was showing the flat line of asystole, meaning the heart muscle had stopped beating, with just the occasional intermittent blip, the agonal rhythm that
signalled the last electrical activity of a dying heart. Jane and Alex exchanged a look. In this kind of situation, with a person this age who’d been collapsed for over ten minutes and had this cardiac rhythm, and who looked this… well, dead, the family often understood what had happened before you told them. This woman though… Jane couldn’t shake the thought of her doing CPR for those
long minutes while her own heart was cramping in her chest, and worried that to break the news to her without even trying to resuscitate him might send her into arrest too.

‘Alex is going to take care of you and your chest pain while I look after your husband,’ she said.

‘Please don’t let him die.’

The woman let Alex help her up from the floor and tottered beside him as he dragged
an armchair across the living room. Jane did some quick compressions, held the bag and mask to the man’s face and inflated his lungs, then did more compressions. As she worked, she saw Alex put an oxygen mask on the woman, give her an aspirin, check her blood pressure, and pop an Anginine tablet under her tongue, the two of them talking all the while. When he came back, stretching another length
of oxygen tubing to connect to the bag Jane was using, she had a tourniquet in place, ready to cannulate a vein, and the intubation kit unrolled.