Unfinished Business...

THREE

  WITHOUT so much as a by-your-leave, Connie barged in.

“Get dressed, Sunshine.   We have bad blokes to catch.”

We?   Connie worked in Homicide, I was in Missing Persons.    Same department, same boss, but different duties.   Different sense of importance, too.   Some Homicide blokes only spoke to us Lost Souls if they absolutely had to.   To work with us?   Unthinkable.

“Short staffed,” Connie said.   She went on to explain that our good citizens were being more murderous than usual, overstretching the resources of the Squad.   “So when this one came up, the boss said grab you.   Consider yourself grabbed.”

There went my rostered day off.  

“Have I got time for a shower?”

“No.”

“Thanks.”  I headed for the bedroom.   “What’ve we got?”

Connie followed.   “Young woman dead in a Kensington flat.    Found by a neighbour, who called the local uniforms who called the local CI, who handballed it to us.”

“That all?”

“Until we get there.”   She picked out a pair of crimson underdaks from the drawer I was rummaging in.   “These’ll look good.”

They did, too.   I could tell from the glint in her eye.

I knew Connie fancied me, knew from the moment I arrived in Missing Persons two months ago.   I’d have had to be dead not to.   She flirted outrageously – mostly the suggestive  body language stuff, rarely the physical variety, although I’d had a few lightning touch-ups  in the staff room.    Her behaviour was blatantly sexist, and she knew it.   She also knew that I considered the Department’s equal opportunity/sexual discrimination code as bullshit devised by the ugly and the unloved.   That meant she could get away with it.

Her attentions were flattering.   Connie at thirty-five had a couple of years on me, but while she might have lost the litheness of her teens, she still had the legs and figure that many a younger woman would kill for.   Everything was in the right place.   Add a generous mouth, wide intelligent blue eyes and shoulder-length auburn hair and you had a bloody good package.   She was tough in the way that policewomen have to be on occasion but no less feminine for that.    I used to wonder why she was still single until I realised not many husbands could sit still at their wives working odd hours alongside randy coppers ogling all those things that were in the right place.

On the other hand, my father’s advice, given by countless fathers to countless sons, had proven sage.    “Never poop on your own doorstep,” he’d counselled.    I strayed from that advice just once – not in the way my dad meant - and it landed me, somewhat ironically, in Missing Persons.   It left me in no position for a sexual encounter,  even if I wanted one.   And I didn’t.  

 Well, not with a superior.

Which was easier said than done.   The shameless woman even followed me into the bathroom as I ran the Remington over my stubble and brushed the locks into place.   Back in the bedroom, she never took her eyes off me as I enclosed the five eleven frame within the working gear of Crime Department detectives, a conservative dark blue suit.

“Not bad,” she offered as I attached the tie.  

“OK, let’s go,” I said.  I strode towards the front door, pausing only to sweep up my Walkman and a couple of CDs from the coffee table.

Connie snorted.   “Not more of that ancient crap?   Good God!”

I affected disdain.   I had been hooked on the music of the 30’s to 50’s since I was fifteen, and if I preferred that to the raucous gibberish that passes for music these days, it simply went to demonstrate my superior taste.    The fact that I played it more or less continually was an ongoing joke around the Crime Department, but I didn’t give a stuff.    Being considered a musical throwback was the least of my worries.

Which was demonstrated when we got to Connie’s car, Detective Senior Constable Wayne Elliott behind the wheel.   He looked like he’d lost a quid and found sixpence cents, as my old mum used to say before decimal currency took the figurative edge off her observations.

He gave me a perfunctory “Sergeant,” then busied himself starting the car while Connie got in beside him and I took possession of the rear.

Elliott looked uncomfortable at having to work with me again.  Too bad.   He disliked me, which I didn’t much mind, but he made his dislike obvious, which I did.   He probably thought that I had it in for him.     I didn’t, but it was more fun not to let on.

“And how are you this fine morning, young Wayne?” I asked the 27-year-old.  

Mess with me, will he?

Elliott’s knuckles turned white on the wheel.   Conversely, the back of his neck turned red.   In the rear vision mirror, his angry eyes were black.   He looked like a St. Kilda fan at a losing game.  

“Fine, sergeant.”   Our difference in rank demanded good manners.   “How about you?”

“Fine, too.   But hey, you’re among friends.  Call me Mark.”

The knuckles went whiter.   “Thank you,” came the obligatory response, but not a glimmer of gratitude.  

Connie’s mouth quivered in a repressed smile.   If Elliott was ever heard to call me by my Christian name, she would offer to direct traffic around Ayers Rock.    She gave me a “That’s enough!” stare, then returned to the passing vista of middle-class Hawksburn.

Give Elliott credit, his geography was good.    By keeping south of the Yarra, then skirting the city to the west, he got us to Kensington in fifteen minutes.   Another three and he had us outside a scruffy block of flats on the west of the Broadmeadows rail line.    I wasn’t even half way through The Best of Frankie Laine.

Kensington is not my favourite area.   In common with most of the suburbs ringing Melbourne, the name reflects an English heritage.   A hundred years ago, it was all very English indeed – small but solid houses for the most part with occasional groups of double-storied terraces and a smattering of ornate mansions set in large, undulating gardens, all divided by narrow, elm-lined streets.   Elegant.   But not now.   Half a century of decay had left Kensington in the balance.    Would it be restored and become ‘desirable’, a la Albert Park, or would it fall prey to the urban renewal that was replacing the ugly old factories of Collingwood and Fitzroy with ugly new ones?

Not that the appearances bothered me.   It was the demographics.    Anglo-Saxons were scarce, long displaced by south-east Asians, and while our Asian citizens’ crime rate was less than average, drug offences not included, their cooperation with us coppers was in the same category.

I needn’t have worried.    We had no sooner parked alongside the coroner’s ambulance than a young detective ran from flat six to Connie’s window.   Most people are reluctant to hand over bad news.   Not this bloke.

“Ma’am,” he almost shouted.   “The victim…she’s a member…a policewoman!”

I almost felt sorry for him.   Not long out of detective training school was my guess.   He’d have seen more than a few bodies, mostly traffic smashes and suicides.   But he wouldn’t have seen too many who’d died at the hands of their fellows, and it was a fair bet  he’d never seen a murdered police officer – if this was the case.   Whatever, he wasn’t going to be much good to anyone until he got his adrenaline down.   I switched off “Moonlight Gambler”, got out of the car and laid an avuncular hand on his shoulder.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

“Detective-Constable Andrews.”   The ID he whipped from beneath his police tabard told me his first name was Edward.

“OK, Eddie.  Calm it.  The cavalry’s here.   Tell Senior Sergeant O’Brien what you know.”

“And how she was identified,” Elliott added, imperiously waving his own ID.

He didn’t know much.   The deceased – why do we cops talk like that? – was Jodie Aston.   She’d been discovered at 0730 by the woman who lived in number five and who’d noticed Jodie’s door ajar and “something odd” about the safety chain.   It’d been cut.   She knocked, got no reply, took a peep inside, then screamed the place down.   Then she’d got on the phone, sensibly her own, and hit triple-O.   The Flemington divvy van responded.   The crew, recognising detective business when they saw it, called up the local CI.   The CI, apparently as short staffed as we were, sent young Andrews and a senior detective connie – now inside number five and taking the woman’s statement – to confirm it was a Homicide Squad job.   It was.   More so when they discovered her police wallet.

“Internal Affairs been notified?”  Connie asked.    IA overviewed all cases where a police officer killed or was killed.    I should know.

Andrews coloured.   “Not yet.”

“Do it.”

Andrews dashed to his car radio.  The rest of us ambled towards number six.     The block was shaped like an inverted and reversed capital L.    There were four side-by-side flats to our right.   At right angles to the last one and facing us were two more.   Number six was the farthest from the street.    It was also partly screened from the street by the car bays that abutted the property’s southern fence.   The end bay, marked with a ‘6’, contained an ancient Corolla that looked like someone had tried to destroy it from the inside out.

At first glance, the living room looked like it had been vandalised.   Four bookshelves had been swept on to the floor, a small video collection had joined them, the drawers of a stained pine desk had been upended, and the furniture – a sofa and two matching easy chairs – were upside down and looking vulgar with their springs showing through torn underseals.    Green foam rubber oozed through angry slashes in the cushions.

The centrepiece of all this was Jodie Aston.   She lay on her side, her face contorted with the agony of her death, a death emphasised by the obscenity of the dark pool of congealed blood her face and long dark hair were lying in.    A lot of blood had poured from her mouth to make that pool, I reckoned.    And from her right ear, too.   She was twenty-five, at a guess, and a well-stacked metre seventy tall under her pink pyjamas and white dressing gown.   She was - had been - a very pretty girl.   

“Not very pretty, is it?”

The opinion came from Martin Morgan, MBBS plus some qualification to do with pathology.   My favourite forensic medical officer was tucking away his paraphernalia before giving the nod to the Coroner’s crew.    After, of course, we had taken a look.   With him was the mandatory Forensics photographer, who was shooting the scene from every which way.  

Connie was not one for social niceties in these situations.   “Cause of death?”

“Dunno yet.”   Martin began stripping off his paper oversuit.   He was a tall, gangly individual with a shock of uncontrollable ginger hair.   His manner was laconic, which masked a razor-sharp intellect.    “But if you asked me to guess…”

“I’m asking.”

“Put it down to severe trauma to the lower body organs.”   He tore the oversuit in sudden anger.   “Some bastard’s punched the shit out of her.”    He was suddenly embarrassed at his lapse from scientific objectivity, then turned it into a grin at me.   “G’day, Mark.   Back in the good books, are we?”

“I wish,” I told him.   

He needn’t have been embarrassed.   Most cops found murders scenes ghastly.     Never mind your upbringing, they brought out pretty much the same emotions in all of us, from revulsion at the act to sympathy for the loved ones left behind.     Most times, you conjectured about the terror of the victim’s last moments – a morbid conjecture that reminded you just how tenuous your own hold on mortality was.   With it all came anger, not just at the brutal taking of a life but equally at the profound waste of it.    Most of us hid the rage pretty well, of course – it was part of the job – but I’d seen it spill over.

 “What about that ear?” I asked.

“Minor, comparatively speaking.”

“Rough guess when?”

“Better than rough.”   He pointed to the electric radiator.   “That thing’s got a thermostat so it’s kept the room heat almost constant.  That being the case, the body temperature alone tells me it was an hour, hour and a half, before midnight.   Tell you more after the PM.”   He raised an eyebrow at Connie.   “OK?”

 “She’s all yours.    Young Andrews can be the escort.”

The Coroner’s crew went into action.   They were gone within minutes, along with Eddie Andrews doing the obligatory continuity-of-evidence thing.    Only Jodie’s chalked outline on the oatmeal carpet remained to mark their passing.    The blood marked  hers.

We gave the rest of the flat the once-over.   It was in the same condition as the sitting room   And, like the sitting room, the laying waste had not been wanton or malicious.    Someone had given the place a vigorous but thorough search.

There are some coppers, me among them, who can nominate what an intruder had been searching for by reading the signs.   An addict, for example, would first turn over the bathroom.   Then he’d check bedroom drawers.   If he drew a blank, he might give the kitchen a cursory look, but generally he’d be off looking for greener fields elsewhere.    On the other hand, thieves looking for cash went to the traditional places – under mattresses, on bedside tables and in old Milo tins.    When the booty was neither of the above, you didn’t have a clue what they’d been after but you had a good idea of its size.   People who knew what they were looking for looked only in those places where it could be stashed.   Nowhere else.   Not much point sticking your fingers in a jar of Vegemite if you were looking for the St Edward Crown.

The theory held true here.   Nothing smaller than a bread crumbs packet had been touched.   Everything larger, from pikelets to Special K, had been grabbed, ripped and discarded.   The theme continued in the tiny laundry, where the floor was a crazy blue and white pattern of soap powder and detergent.   [Mental note:  If we lumber a suspect, look in cuffs, if any, and in shoes.]   In the sitting room, all the videos had been stripped from their covers.   The smaller books had been ignored but the larger ones had been opened, suggesting that the searcher had looked for one with a hiding place cut into its pages.   What it all suggested was an object no larger than a small paperback.   I was about to share my brilliant deductive reasoning with my colleagues when Elliott spoke up.

“Looks like he was after something the size of a small book.”

Smartarsed bastard.

I jumped in quickly before he could steal all my thunder.   “Like a video cassette,” I offered, nodding sagely at the heap of tapes.

Elliott was unimpressed.   “Which is why all the cassettes have been looked at, one would think.”

One might suspect a hint of sarcasm in that statement.   If one did, it was wasted on yours truly.

“I’ll lay you long odds, young Elliott, that those tapes have been more than just looked at.”    I knelt, picked up the nearest cassette and handed it to Elliott.   “What do you see?”

It took him only seconds.    “It’s been played and not rewound.”   The dawn of comprehension began to rise.   “Are the others the same?”

“They are.   Meaning…?”

“Someone wanted to make sure the tapes were what the labels said they were.”   Elliott was on his knees, flicking through the tapes.    “Our someone might’ve been looking for some re-recorded bits.”   He regarded me with something approaching respect.  

His conclusion was bullshit but I didn’t have the heart to tell him, not until I had a larger audience.   Connie was less patient.

“Bullshit,” she said.   “For all we know, she was one of those people who only rewind tapes when they want to play them.”   She could’ve added that recording one videotape on to another required specialist equipment, but she merely glared at both of us.  “First, let’s find out more about her.”     She pointed us to the police ID on the coffee table.

Senior Constable Jodie Aston’s smiling face appeared against a background of blue plastic.   The blue meant she was ordinarily a uniformed copper, and the proximity card attached to the ID meant she worked at Force headquarters.   For which department, the ID didn’t say, but it did tell us her registered number.   Given that, Personnel could tell us the rest.   Elliott and I both went for our mobiles.

“Mark can do that,” Connie told Elliott.   “You find Andrews’ mate.   I want checks on everyone living in these flats, especially anyone who was still awake after ten last night.”

Andrews almost, but not quite, hid his disappointment at scoring a footslogger’s task.   But you didn’t argue with senior sergeants if you had aspirations to higher office.   He left, to be immediately replaced by a tough-looking copper in the uniform of a chief inspector.   Gordon McDowell, no less.   First-class bastard.

“Mac!”   No rank-consciousness with Connie.   She’d been in the same squad at the Police Academy, so first names it was.    “What are you doing here?”

Bloody good question.   McDowell was the Commissioner’s staff officer.   His duty statement didn’t include looking over the Homicide Squad’s shoulder.

He moved his six feet one into the flat, a waft of English Blazer preceding him.   Pure pretension.   When he’d been a mere inspector in Traffic, he’d been happy enough with Old Spice.

“The despatcher who took the call...”   His basso profundo matched his physique and had given rise to the rumour that he had three of ‘em.    “…thought Command should know.    So, here I am.  Observe and report.”    He gave me the classical barely imperceptible nod.    “Mark.”

My nod was imperceptible.

He was quick; I’ll give him that.    He was on to the ID like a shot.

“Either of you know her?”

“Do you?” Connie asked.

“PSG.   Went there on promotion to senior connie.”  

The Protective Security Group had the thankless task of keeping the peace at sit-ins, lockouts, street marches and other forms of protest.   They also kept a close guard on certain VIPs, plus did a few covert things the general public knew nothing about.   A good reason for the Commissioner to send McDowell in.

“Also,” McDowell went on,  “the daughter of Des Aston.”

That rang a bell.   Detective Inspector Desmond Aston had resigned a couple of years ago after an exemplary career.   Ostensibly, he’d been headhunted by a major private security firm, but those in the know knew different.    Aston had once been hauled over the coals by the Commissioner after his Drug Bureau team had, allegedly, abused the civil rights of a ring of pot growers.   Later, when Aston applied for, and won, the position of OIC Drug Bureau, the Commissioner exercised his veto.   No appeal.   Aston, rightfully pissed off, considered his options, then pulled the pin.  You didn’t have to be Einstein to deduce that his daughter might also have been pissed off.   Now she turns up dead.  A bloody good reason for the Commissioner to send McDowell in.

McDowell’s frown deepened.  “But first things first.   This is a homicide we’re dealing with?”

I wandered outside.    Connie didn’t need my help giving a situation report, and I had people to talk to.    First to Personnel to confirm where Jodie had been posted, and then to the PSG to (a) give them the bad news, and (b) get an idea of her last movements.    The calls took no longer than ten minutes, and a very interesting ten minutes they were.

I wandered back inside.   McDowell was on his haunches examining the pile of videos.   To his credit, he was handling them by the edges, neither making nor smearing fingerprints.   To his discredit, he was wasting his time.   I told him so.

“Just checking,” he responded.

The untrusting bastard continued, putting the videos into one pile, their covers into a second.   If he imagined he was angering me by juxtaposing the precision of his search with my apparent sloppiness, he was right.    

I bit the tongue and gave Connie a hand with Jodie’s correspondence.   Bills and receipts, for the most part, but a fair swag of personal letters, too.    They could be vital.

McDowell eventually stood.   “Nothing,” he conceded.

Told you, smartarse.

“Listen up,” he told us.  “Two things.   Internal Affairs won’t be overseeing this investigation – I will.   Anything of consequence is to be reported to me and to me only.”   His eyes narrowed to ice-blue slits.   “Is that understood?”

Connie bristled.   “What about Mr Collinson?”

Rob Collinson was OIC of Homicide.

“He’ll be told the score.   And if the media get a sniff, direct them to me, not the media unit.  OK?”   He gave each of us a business card while waiting for our responses.

It wasn’t OK by me, but valour waited on discretion.   “You’re the boss,” I said, as if nonchalance were my middle name.

Connie nodded, but she was plainly unhappy.

“Good.” McDowell turned on his heel and disappeared.   Not even a “Good luck, gang.”  

Connie glared after him.   “I can see why you dislike him.”

She was wrong there.   I hated the bastard;  he’d helped dump me in Missing Persons.   But right now I was more concerned with why he was being devious.

“Did he tell you Jodie Aston was in the Parliamentary Protection Unit?”

Connie’s widening eyes told me he hadn’t.  

“And that she was in the plainclothes detail looking after cabinet members?   He must’ve known.   Why didn’t he say?”

Connie pondered.   “Didn’t think it was important, I suppose.”  

“Then what is so important that Internal Affairs is being bypassed?   Because the victim’s a female?”

The first-ever female senior sergeant in Homicide couldn’t suppress a grin.   “This Force could do with a bit more positive discrimination.”   Then seriousness returned.    “It doesn’t add up, I admit.   Unless the Commissioner’s trying to protect the undercover role of the PSG.”

“Possible, I suppose.   We don’t need that to become public.”   Then I was suddenly distracted.

“What?” Connie demanded.

I was counting.   McDowell had left two neat piles of videotapes and two neat piles of videotape boxes.   The bastard might be obsessively neat but he wasn’t all that observant.   One pile of tapes was shorter – by about the width of a tape.   My count confirmed what my brain had suggested – we were one tape short.

Connie caught on, then shook her head.   “Nobody would hide a tape among other tapes.   You’d have to be stupid.”

“The perp would’ve been just as stupid not to look, just on the off-chance.   It’d have been the first place he went for.”

“And didn’t find it.”

“No, but he found a spare box telling him one tape was missing.   So he does over the flat – the entire flat.”

“You trying to tell me something, Mark?”

I was thinking on the run.   It’s a perilous sport but the neurons were firing, and seemingly in the right order.   “Look at this joint.   If he found what he was looking for, it must’ve been the last place he looked.   But he didn’t find it, otherwise he wouldn’t have done over the car.   You’ve seen what that looks like.   Same theory holds.”

“You’re telling me it was in the last place he looked in the car?”

I estimated the mathematical likelihood.   Sweet Felicity Arbuckle.   “Very highly unlikely.”

“Which means it’s still here.”   Connie had been a policewoman for seventeen years.   Experience told her that most people, when they wanted to hide something, hid it in the home.    In the choice between the anxiety of a relo discovering the object in the house and the fear of a total stranger happening upon it in some distant hiding place, anxiety was better tolerated than fear.   “We’d better start looking.”

It took more than an hour, but we found it.

We were lucky.   We went over the place twice.   The first time, I was search leader, with Connie looking over my shoulder, seeing that I didn’t miss any hiding place, likely or otherwise, and making sure I was being careful - didn’t want to upset the  fingerprint blokes.   The second time, we swapped roles but came up just as empty-handed.

Until we got to the fridge.

The fridge was a pensionable Astor that demonstrated it was still alive by occasional spasms of wheezing and clunking.    It lived adjacent to the kitchen door, which meant it was no trouble to rotate it far enough to shine a torch into its workings.    Nothing but mechanicals to be seen the first time.    Same second time.   I was just about to swing it back into position when Connie spoke.

“What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“That on the floor.   Water?”

It was.   A small pool, obviously emanating from the fridge.

“How’d it get there?” Connie demanded.

I knew how it had got there.  I also knew we’d missed a hiding place.  My pulse rate jumped.   I shoved the fridge to its appointed place, opened its door and knelt.   If this thing was like my old mum’s fridge…

“What…?”   

Connie and her bloody questions!

It was like my mum’s fridge.    At the very bottom of the cabinet, stretching between the machine’s feet, was a plastic escutcheon about forty mils in height.    I wiggled and pulled, and a couple of unseen clips suddenly released their grip.   I yanked the escutcheon right off,  flung it, and explored the underside of the fridge with cautious fingers.   I encountered metal running the full width of the gap.   It felt like the concave rim of a large tray.   Just what I expected.

I pulled with both hands and the defrosting tray, overflowing with water, followed on its squeaking runners.   In the ordinary course of things, the tray would have been only two-thirds full.   It was the videotape cassette, wrapped in Gladwrap, that made the difference.

“I’ll be damned!” Connie whispered.    She was impressed, but whether with the hiding place or my discovery of it was hard to say.   She dashed to the video player.   I followed, stripping off the Glad, shoving the tape into the slot and hitting ‘Play”.

“This could be interesting,” Connie said.

Interesting!    It was bloody sensational.

What we were seeing was the interior of your average motel room;  dark brown brick on one wall, light brown wallpaper with an Aboriginal motif on the other and the furnishings in medium brown.   ‘Australian Outback’ I think the décor’s termed.   Whatever, the brown quilt belonging to the bed had been flung, its place taken by two writhing white bodies.

The lower body we recognised instantly.   Jodie Aston.    She was looking over her partner’s left shoulder, and while she didn’t appear to be in raptures, her vigour indicated a willingness to give value for money to the sinewy bloke pulsing between her legs.

Him we couldn’t recognise, not from the high point of view we had.

Jodie appeared to realise likewise.   Her eyes flicked from the man, to the camera, then back to the man.   Then, in one fluid movement, she had him on his back and was astride him.   I don’t think they missed a beat.

The man, blissfully unaware that his carnality was being recorded, smiled as he reached for Jodie’s glistening breasts.   Connie gasped, and it wasn’t at Jodie’s lapse from constabulary duty.

The man was Walter Onslow, the Minister for Essential Services.

Our political boss.

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