Web of Deceit (4 page)

‘He shoved right past me,’ she said.

‘Did you say anything to him?’

She shook her head. ‘I thought he was crazy, and everyone knows you don’t engage with the crazies. But he was gone in a second anyway.’

‘Did you see much of his face?’ Murray asked. ‘Or his arms? Notice any tattoos, anything like that?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I only saw the side of his face, and it was for
the briefest fraction of a second. He was white, and he didn’t have a beard or a mo, but that’s about all I could say.’

‘What happened then?’ Ella asked.

‘Almost straightaway the smoke started. There was screaming and a mad rush for the stairs at the same time as the train came in. I went up the stairs too, then thought perhaps the crazy had something to do with the fire. I told a
guard on the gates up there about it and she said I should tell the police. It was after that I heard somebody fell in front of the train. Was it him?’

‘We don’t think so,’ Murray said.

‘It was just some commuter?’ She shook her head. ‘That’s awful.’

The witness in the black-and-white striped dress told them she’d been close to the spot where the smoke started. She was fifty-five,
lived in Punchbowl, and her name was Sally-Anne Petrie. She smelled of cigarettes and breath freshener, and had a tiny red stone embedded in her left front tooth.

‘I tend to notice things, you know? Things that would never register on anyone else’s radar. So I’m standing there and I heard a noise like somebody dropping something plastic. I looked around and didn’t see anything. But a minute
or so later I smelled smoke and I looked around again and saw this funny tube-shaped thing and smoke was pouring out of the end. It looked plastic and I remember thinking, ah, that’s what I heard being dropped. By then people were screaming and scrambling and I was trying to tell them that nothing’s on fire, don’t panic, but at the same time I was scared myself – who’s to say that’s not step one
of a bomb and step two is a huge explosion?’

‘Did you see who dropped it?’ Ella asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘The platform was packed, and people were coming down the stairs and squeezing through the crowd all the time.’

Ella’s wrist was aching now, her handwriting deteriorating.

‘Then what happened?’ Murray said.

‘Everyone went charging in a panic up the stairs. I went
too, then hung around up on the street until your fellas in uniform arrived, then I told them what I saw. They asked me to come back down and identify the thing, and here I am.’

As with the paramedics and Jessica Sullivan, Murray thanked her, gave her his card and told her they might need to talk to her again sometime. She smiled, the red stone glinting in the light, and went up the stairs.

Ella shook out her hand. ‘Still think Furst is suspicious?’

‘Just because the descriptions match reasonably well doesn’t mean he’s not up to something,’ Murray said.

‘Yeah, that’s why he stayed around to talk to us.’ But she remembered witnesses at another murder who’d waited in the blinding summer heat to tell a story she’d believed completely. ‘Anyway, they all described the
smoke bomb and the panic too.’

They needed to know whether Meixner had jumped, fallen or been pushed.

She pointed at the CCTV bubble overhead. ‘Time to watch a movie.’

THREE

G
rimy and exhausted, Alex walked from the car to their townhouse, his workbag over his shoulder and Mia stalking in silence behind him. He unlocked the door and held it open for her. She marched past without turning on the light and disappeared into the dark living room.

He closed the door, dropped his bag and switched the light on himself, wondering if Marko
had a family; if somebody was waiting for him to come home or if the police had already told them. He’d been called to houses where such news had been delivered and people had collapsed; he’d delivered such news himself. The girl and her parents popped into his head: her grip on his hand, her mother’s tears on his shirt.
Don’t go there.

His stomach rumbled. Frances and Donald had been kind
enough to feed Mia but he needed to eat.

‘Do you want a bit of toast?’ he asked her.

‘Yuck.’

He went into the kitchen and put the light on, then dropped two slices of frozen bread in the toaster. ‘What did you have for dinner?’

‘Chops and vegies,’ she said. ‘Yuck.’

‘I hope you said thank you.’

She didn’t answer.

Alex leaned back on the sink and rubbed
his face with both hands. They smelled of alcohol handwash; he and Jane had used half a bottle each to clean off the railway grime. He was wearing his spare uniform from his locker at work; the dirty one was rolled up in his bag to soak later. There was a big pile of washing to do, and the dishwasher needed to be emptied, and he hadn’t done the floors in a week. His plan this morning had been to get
through the day. He’d done that, but still felt like he’d failed.

His stomach rumbled again, but he pressed the button to stop the toaster and went back to his workbag, then into the lounge room. He turned on the lamp to see Mia sitting sideways in an armchair, her legs over the side. She picked at her nails and didn’t look up, but he saw her glance across out of the corner of her eye.

‘Here.’ He held out the phone charger he’d bought on his way to Frances’s place.

She took it, still without looking up. ‘Thanks.’

He sat in the other armchair and crossed his ankles. ‘I got your text earlier.’

She shrugged.

‘I understand how you feel,’ he said. ‘It’s the same for kids everywhere. When things aren’t going smoothly at home, everyone looks for a way out.
And when you’re stuck with the one parent all the time, you imagine it would be better to be with the other.’

‘I’m not a kid.’

‘Until you’re eighteen, you’re not an adult either.’

She shrugged again, a sharp dismissive move of her shoulders and head that had a practised air. He thought of what Jane said about keeping going.

‘I know you imagine that being with your mum would
be all roses, but you don’t know her. She’d be like some random stranger on the street. You’d have as much chance of being happy with them, really.’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘She’s my mother. And I should be able to get to know her.’

‘I agree,’ Alex said. ‘But she made the decision to leave, and she’s made the decision not to keep in touch.’

Mia’s cheeks were red, her eyes
fixed on her nails. ‘This girl at school said her dad has to send maintenance, and her mum knows where he is and what he’s doing because of that.’

Alex’s chest hurt. ‘Sweetheart, your mum doesn’t send anything.’

The last contact he’d had with Helen was when she stood in the bathroom doorway, suitcase in hand, and told him she was moving to Canada to meet up with an old boyfriend from
school. He’d been on his knees by the bath and had reached out a wet hand. She’d turned away. Mia, three years old, No More Tears foaming on her head, had waved. ‘Bye-bye, Mummy!’ Helen had written three weeks later from Ontario, a brief note saying she was happy and hoped they were too. He’d sent photos of Mia and an admittedly grief-soaked letter to the return address, and got no reply. The next
one he’d mailed was returned stamped ‘addressee unknown’. When he’d still been in touch with Helen’s sister, Mia’s beloved Aunty Natty, before things had fallen apart on Mia’s fifth birthday, he’d asked her to let him know if Helen ever got in touch, or to get Helen herself to call. Nat had promised. He wondered, not for the first time, where Nat was now, if she and Helen were in contact. Whether
Nat had decided to abandon her promise after what had happened.

He rubbed his chest. ‘I know you don’t believe me, but I don’t know where your mum is.’

Mia dashed tears from her eyes, her mouth set in an angry line, frown lines white on her red forehead.

‘She’s the one who’s missing out here,’ Alex went on. ‘She’s lived eleven years without you, without getting to know you and
seeing you grow. If she doesn’t want to be a part of that –’

‘You’re glad she’s not here!’ She was on her feet now, trembling. ‘If she was here she’d let me do stuff and you wouldn’t be the boss of everything! If she was here I might get to have a life, and you’d hate that!’

She rushed from the room and upstairs. Her bedroom door slammed.

Alex slumped back in the chair. She was
right about one thing: he was glad Helen wasn’t here. After the way she’d left, after she’d chosen not to keep in touch, after he’d picked himself up and made their little family work, he didn’t want to share it with anyone. The two girlfriends he’d had for a month here and there over the years had eventually gone their own ways for the same reason. It was just him and his little girl – ‘That’s
clearly all that matters!’ one had flung at him. It was. So how hard was he supposed to search for someone who’d walked out on it?

Mia was wrong that he didn’t want her to have a life though. Her life was the reason for the rules. He knew there was nobody to protect her but him. And while Jane had said he should trust her a little, it wasn’t about trust. He’d seen what could happen, and
he would never, ever forget.

*

In a stuffy control room at Town Hall station, Ella stood next to Murray behind a slope-shouldered grey-shirted security officer and watched CCTV footage.

First there was the dead man, Marko Meixner, pushing through the crowd. Three seconds behind him came a second man with a cap pulled low over his face. Ella saw the moment when he came past Neil
Furst, recognisable by his suit, then the man kept on, leaving Furst standing still.

Showing on the next screen was Sally-Anne Petrie, also recognisable in the crowd by her clothes. She stood on the platform, looking bored. They’d seen her glance around forty seconds before, and now she turned as smoke started to billow up between people. The CCTV had no sound, but Ella could imagine the
shouts as commuters rushed away from the smoke and panic ran through the crowd in a wave.

Earlier, after letting the witnesses go, they’d talked with the firefighters and looked at the smoke bomb, a short plastic pipe with holes punched in the sides and in the duct tape over the ends. Crime Scene had taken photos and were hopeful of lifting fingerprints from the pipe’s surface. Ella wasn’t
so sure.

‘Bombs like that aren’t hard to make,’ the fire officer in charge had said. ‘Instructions are everywhere online, and there’s nothing too complicated about the ingredients either. Kids are doing it all the bloody time.’

Ella focused on the next screen, where footage from a third camera was playing. This showed part of the stairs that Neil Furst had been forced up, and the narrow
section of platform where Marko Meixner had gone in front of the train. She watched people rush up the stairs, some falling and disappearing from view under the crush.

‘Lucky nobody else was killed,’ the security officer said.

Other people fled along the narrow section beside the stairs, and Ella looked for a cap on a head or Meixner himself.

In the upper corner, the train appeared
and in the next split second a body fell from the platform into its path.

‘Go back,’ she said.

The security officer clicked buttons and she saw again the commuters bolting along the narrow section.

‘Slow it down just before the train appears.’

The people ran in slow motion. Women in dresses and suits and singlet tops, men in suits and T-shirts, a few people pulling children
with them, then she spotted the slender figure of Marko Meixner moving as slowly as the rest. Nobody was wearing a cap, but it could have easily been removed. In the top corner, the train appeared again. She stared at Meixner and the people around him. The people rushed, and Meixner fell.

She let out the breath she’d been holding. ‘You just can’t see.’

‘Replay it,’ Murray said.

They watched it again, and again. Ella leaned closer but couldn’t make out any more detail. She straightened and looked at Murray. He frowned.

*

Jane tapped twice on the glass pane by the doorbell. Footsteps. Door unlocked. Laird. That smile, and those arms.

The house smelled of dinner kept warm for hours and her stomach rumbled, but she led him upstairs first. In the glow
of the lamps she studied his eyes, watched his clavicles rise as he breathed, the movement of his throat when he swallowed.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Your ears are pink in the light.’

‘Okay, weirdo.’

‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘It means you’re alive.’

He took her hand and kissed it.

‘I know these things,’ she said.

‘I believe you.’

The pulse beat in his neck.
She laid her hand on his warm chest. His heart thudded under her palm and she could hear the air move in and out of his lungs. She blinked back tears.

He pulled her into his arms. She pressed her face into his neck and breathed in his fresh soap smell.

‘Are you okay?’ he said.

She kissed him, hard, and felt the build-up begin. She used to think people were lying when they said
sex helped them after a bad day, but that was before she met this man. She felt now that they embraced in the face of death, pitting their life and energy against stillness and darkness, and the racing of their hearts and the sweat on their skin proved something that couldn’t be proved any other way.

*

Ella squatted on the track in front of the stationary train and studied the mangled
body of Marko Meixner underneath, a warm wind pushing at her back as a train approached on the other platform. Murray stood beside her with one shiny shoe on the rail. A crime scene officer lay on the black rocks and took photos, and a fire rescue team waited in silence on the platform for the go-ahead to begin extrication.

The scene officer got up. ‘I’m all done.’

Ella stood too.

Murray said, ‘Okay. He can come out.’

The rescue team climbed down with their equipment and a clean unfolded body bag. Ella scrambled back onto the platform, having no wish to watch Meixner being pulled from around the wheels, but Murray stayed.

She walked back towards the stairs, studying the platform edge. It was hard tiles overlaid with textured plastic squares patterned in
such a way as to be recognisable to people with poor sight using a cane. She thought back to the CCTV and moved to the point from which she estimated Meixner had fallen, now two-thirds of the way along the first carriage. There were no signs on the ground to indicate what had happened, no scuff marks like you might see on a cliff edge if somebody resisted being pushed over. She looked into the carriage’s
dark and empty windows, then along to the front, trying not to imagine how it might feel to fall and know that this was probably it; how it might’ve felt if the force that put him there wasn’t his own mind but a shove in the back.

‘Ella,’ Murray said, down on the track. He held a wallet open in a plastic evidence bag. ‘The driver’s licence says he’s thirty-six and lives in Ryde.’

Ella flipped through her notebook to the details she’d copied off the paramedic’s case sheet. Thirty-five, North Sydney. ‘Maybe he did hit his head in the accident and lost a year.’

‘The licence is three years old, and there’s no change of address sticker on the back.’ Murray clambered up onto the platform. ‘Makes sense that he might’ve lied to the ambos. If he was as terrified as they describe,
he might’ve worried who might overhear, who could get access to their paperwork.’

But terrified of who? Ella thought. The man in the cap? The voices in his head? Or something – or someone – else altogether?

*

They came out of the stairwell to fresh air and the flash of passing headlights. Full darkness had fallen while they were underground. The ambulances had gone and just one
fire truck remained, the crew now helping the overall-clad government contractors load Marko’s bagged body into their plain white van. Marked police cars with flashing hazard lights blocked the kerbside lane, their own unmarked one at the end of the line.

As they walked towards it, Murray handed Ella the bagged wallet and scrubbed at his palms with a handkerchief. In the plastic window she
saw a photo of a smiling dark-haired woman – a woman who, no doubt, was wondering where Marko was. Years and years on the job, and it still made her uneasy to see pictures like this and know that in the next couple of hours they’d be knocking on the person’s door, turning an ordinary day into the worst one imaginable and leaving nothing but devastation and questions in their wake.

They got
in the car. Ella put the keys in the ignition but didn’t start it. ‘You going to call Langley?’

Murray refolded the handkerchief and wiped his fingers. ‘I think this stuff’s permanent.’

He dropped the cloth on the floor, then reached delicately into his pocket for his mobile. Ella heard Langley answer and ask where they’d been.

‘We just got out of there,’ Murray said. He gave
their new boss a quick run-down. ‘We’re heading to the hospital now.’

‘So you’re thinking suicide?’ Ella heard Langley say down the line. ‘Classic paranoid-type thing?’

‘Not necessarily,’ Murray said, rolling his eyes at Ella. ‘As I said, there was a man –’

‘Pushing amongst a panicked crowed, yes, I heard you,’ Langley said. ‘Get the hospital’s diagnosis then do the notification.
Clock’s ticking.’ The line went dead.

‘You’d think he was paying for the overtime himself,’ Ella said.