Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(29)

‘He used the desktop calendar,’ she sniffed, waking the little machine with a tap of her finger. She opened the calendar and pointed. ‘Here.’

I put the package on the desk, right beside her hand. She glanced at it, uninterested.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘Oh, forensic stuff. Tools. They keep them packed up in little baggies. Keep them sterile.’

‘This bloody desk.’ Olivia bent and popped the little panel at the front of the desk shut. ‘It’s a million years old. Theo’s father’s.’

She sighed and made for the door.

‘ Well, that answers that question,’ I told Kash, hefting the gold off the desk again. ‘She had no interest in it. She’s never seen it before. I’m convinced.’ I offloaded the package to Kash. ‘We’re taking this with us. I’m going to make a bet Theo Campbell wasn’t the only person who knows about it.’





Chapter 40


DETECTIVE INSPECTOR NIGEL Spader was the God of Gotham. It was one of his only hobbies, constructing his dark city, a place where good and evil clashed violently over hand-painted sidewalks and green flocked grass. The sprawling table in the centre of the concrete garage barely contained the complex miniature model city. Artistically warped and leaning buildings crowded over a long, narrow headland jutting into a model harbour filled with black waves. The miniature city had everything. Uptown, the narrow streets held neat brownstone townhouses and apartment buildings lined with tiny fire-escapes. Downtown, he had constructed the imposing city hall with hundreds of steps, homeless people glued in and around its buttressed sides with their trolleys of garbage. Men in suits with long black coats froze mid-stride on the sidewalk, briefcases swinging, passing the tiny models of prostitutes on the corners.

Nigel sat on a leather stool by the sprawling Wayne Manor, gluing the side of the ancient building to the front with the careful strokes of a nail polish brush. The battery-operated subway train emerged from the tunnel at the side of the harbour and wound around the corner by his elbow, then over an ornate gothic bridge that had taken Nigel four weeks to create. He felt happy. The world beyond the reach of his garage light, the wet Sydney streets, was nothing. He was the lord of this place, and at this moment, in his universe, everything was well.

The sensation did not last long. Nigel jolted as the garage door slid up just enough to allow Tox Barnes to emerge into the light. The man walked into the garage like he owned it. Nigel found his mouth was hanging open.

‘Evening, Detective.’

Nigel felt a splinter of pain in his brain. He knew Tox Barnes. Everybody did. The man was rumoured to have murdered a mother and young son when he was a child himself, an eruption of violence from a group of boys who must have been frenzied with rage. Nigel didn’t know how much truth there was behind the rumour. All he knew was that Tox Barnes was poison, and that anyone who worked with the man was stained.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

‘Oh, you know, I was in the neighbourhood. I’m working on the Samuel Blue case. Understand you were head of the task force.’ Tox’s eyes wandered over the enormous model city. He bent and looked through the windows of an office building, noting the tiny people at the desks on the fourth floor. ‘Jesus Christ, this is some set-up you’ve got here. You’ve spent a lot of time on this. I thought you were married? You should marry someone.’

‘ I’m not going to discuss a single aspect of the GRK case with you.’ Nigel looked at his hands. He was holding the glued pieces of Wayne Manor together. He could not put them down now, before the glue set, or it would be hours sanding the lumpy glue back off again. ‘Get out of my garage.’

‘Look, I’m really only interested in Sam Blue’s confession,’ Tox said. ‘I know you’ve muscled suspects into confessions before. Did you lean on Blue?’

‘I’m not …’ Nigel was almost blind with rage. ‘Get … out … of my …’

‘Huh! Look at this!’ Tox said. He reached into the city, somewhere around Third Avenue, and plucked up a prostitute. Nigel heard the snap sound of the glue securing the model woman’s feet to the sidewalk. ‘You’ve got tiny little prozzies!’

‘Stop! Don’t touch that!’

‘Oh shit,’ Tox examined the figurine’s stiletto heels. ‘Was that attached? Sorry.’

Nigel put down Wayne Manor, wincing as the still-wet sides became unwed and flopped apart. He shoved Tox in the chest and rescued the miniature prostitute, looking at the space where she’d been ripped from the model.

‘Did you lean on Sam Blue, Nigel?’ Tox asked.

‘We lean on everyone, arsehole,’ Nigel snapped. ‘This is a fucking serial killer case.’

‘Well, there’s leaning and then there’s leaning. Did you guide him into the confession? Did you drop hints about what happened to the missing girls so his story would line up?’

‘We did nothing unprofessional.’

‘ Come on.’

Nigel gave an exasperated growl. ‘I wasn’t there for the entire interrogation, OK? We took shifts. It’s possible someone else dropped hints.’

Tox put a finger on the train tracks. The train stopped at his finger, the tiny wheels grinding in their slots.