Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(5)

I guessed a lot of women who ended up in a cell at the Parramatta Police headquarters thought what I was thinking in that moment. That their lives were over. That they’d had some fuck-ups in their lifetime, sure, but this was a whole new level of idiocy. Holding cells are where mistakes are offered up for evaluation. This is it. This is where all a person’s chickens come home to roost.

Detective Inspector Nigel Spader was at the door to the holding cell now as I sat cracking my aching knuckles. He leaned on the wall and looked through the bars at me, folding his hairy ginger arms.

‘Harriet,’ he said. ‘What a mess you’ve got yourself in.’

Spader had spearheaded the case against my brother. During the active investigation, I’d fought hard for entry onto the Georges River Task Force team, annoyed and confused as to why I was being kept away from what was possibly the nation’s most important case. I had the skills. I had the enthusiasm. I’d had no idea that I was being shut out because the main suspect was Sam. I’d always hated Nigel anyway, had got into a few fistfights with him in the past.

‘What’s the word?’ I asked.

‘Mr Woolfmyer’s going to be fine. He’s got a mild concussion.’

‘Is he going to go for an assault charge?’

‘Of course he is,’ Nigel snorted. ‘You knocked him out cold.’ ‘Woolfmyer, the lawyer?’ the girl on the ground broke in. ‘You punched a lawyer?’

I turned towards Nigel and tried to signal that my conversation with him wasn’t for public consumption. But the other women in the holding cell were watching me with interest now.

‘If they’re going to lock me up, I want my notes on Sam’s case,’ I said. ‘They’re in my handbag. I’ll still be able to work on his defence.’

‘Harry.’ Nigel shifted closer to the bars. ‘Your brother is a killer. You’re going to have to move past the denial phase and wake up to what’s happening here. I know you and I have had our differences. But we didn’t lock him up to spite you. We locked him up because he murdered three girls.’

I grabbed a handful of the magazines from the stack beside me and hurled them at the bars. Nigel flinched. The girls in the cell around me cheered. I was shocked by the noise, brought suddenly out of my fury. I realised my jaw was clenched so tight that my teeth were clicking as they ground together.

‘I reckon you forced that confession out of him,’ I told Nigel, giving my fellow inmates a warning look. ‘There was a lot of pressure to catch the killer.’

Nigel shook his head. ‘Harry, you and Sam are violent people. I’ve experienced your family’s violence personally.’ He touched his brow, an old scar I’d given him about the seventh or eighth time he’d parked in my designated spot.

The girl on the floor had shifted closer to me, her grin spread wide.

‘Wait a minute,’ she chirped up. ‘You mean, you punched this guy, too?’ she said, flicking her chin at my colleague.

‘I did,’ I said. I looked at Nigel. ‘And he cried like a baby.’





Chapter 7


I WAS TEACHING the women in the cell how to land a left hook without fracturing their wrists when I noticed Pops standing at the door, waiting for the guard to unlock it.

My chief. My friend. My boxing trainer, a man who’d also seen the hair-trigger aggression that thrived in the very marrow of my bones. Pops said nothing as we walked down the sterile hall towards the offices. I tottered on my ridiculous heels. Eventually I stopped, reached down and pulled them off. We were standing between the row of holding cells and the doors to the bullpen where my colleagues worked, a corridor between two worlds. My brother existed in the world we’d just walked through, the criminal world. My own life, until then, had been ahead of us, in the swirling blue universe of police and their struggle against evil-doers. Here I was, balancing on the tightrope connecting the two.

‘I had a private chat to Judge Steiner,’ Pops said. ‘We went ahead and held the assault hearing in your absence.’

‘ What?’ I said. Suddenly, I could hardly find words, which was unusual for me.

‘Woolfmyer agreed not to push forward with an assault conviction, but he applied for an AVO, and Steiner granted it.’

Still no words came.

Pops raised his bushy eyebrows. ‘Yeah. You’re banned from the trial. You’re banned from the entire courthouse, in fact. You’re not allowed to come within five hundred metres of Prosecutor Woolfmyer. Which means anywhere he regularly goes is off limits to you. The prison where your brother is, for example. Sam’s lawyer’s office.’

‘This is …’ I was shivering with rage.

‘This is perfectly reasonable.’ Pops shrugged, angry. ‘Judge Steiner could have recorded the conviction and granted Woolfmyer the apprehended violence order. But he didn’t. Because I convinced him you were going to get your arse out of town.’

A young probationary constable was walking up the hall with my handbag, confiscated from me when I was arrested. I snatched the stupid pink bag off him and started rummaging through it for cigarettes.

‘I told Steiner I’d find you a case. Send you off into the desert again for a couple of weeks so you can cool down.’

‘I’m not going back out there,’ I snapped. ‘I’m going to sit on the front steps of the courthouse. If I can’t go inside, I’ll still be there. I’m not leaving Sam.’