Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(3)

I spotted my brother’s prosecutor, the enormous, broad-shouldered Liam Woolfmyer, strolling towards us with a colleague beside him. Whitt had my arm again, his other hand fumbling at his necktie.

‘Don’t say a word,’ he growled.

‘You keep pawing at me and it’ll be more than words you have to worry about.’

‘I’m warning you, Harry.’ Whitt glared over the top of his glasses at me. The gentle, fastidious detective had been mortified to hear me sneer a stream of obscenities at Woolfmyer the first morning of my brother’s hearings.

Sometimes there’s a wild Harriet in me, a woman I can’t control. She rears her ugly head without warning. The comment from the queue already had her twitching. But then I stole a glance at Woolfmyer, and the worst of all things happened. He locked eyes with me, smiled, and leaned over in mock confidence to his companion.

‘Samuel Blue won’t last a single night in Long Bay prison,’ Woolfmyer said. ‘He’s far too pretty. Someone will make him their bitch.’

The bad Harriet in me swelled, like white-hot steam, blinding and painful behind my eyes. As Woolfmyer passed I was already taking steps to catch up with him. I barely heard Whitt’s call.

The few metres between Woolfmyer and me closed in an instant. I was behind him. My hand reaching up, completely beyond my control.

I tapped him on the shoulder. Woolfmyer stopped and turned.

I punched him as hard as I could in the temple.





Chapter 5


I’VE ALWAYS BEEN a fighter. It’s necessary, when you have a childhood like mine, to know how to defend yourself physically. I was a scrappy, dirty fighter before my police chief taught me how to box. He made the mistake of honing the self-taught craft of a brutal, remorseless combatant. Size means nothing when you know what you’re doing. I swung up and to the left with a hard, balled right fist and smashed the prosecutor with all the force in my arm, shoulder and hip.

The only sound was the dull thump of his body on the pavement, the whisper of his settling robes, a big bird brought down out of the sky by a rifle blast.

My regret was instant. I looked around. Woolfmyer’s friend staggering back. Whitt nearby, his hand still out, reaching, desperate. The crowd, a huddle of journalists. Horror and guilt rushed up through my body. Cameras flashed.

I felt a bizarre impulse to reach down and help the unconscious lawyer to his feet. To brush him off, slap him on the back, pretend it was all going to be OK.

But everything was far from OK. The police officer who had been guarding the front doors of the courthouse began to march towards me, taking his cuffs from his belt.





Chapter 6


I STOOD IN the entrance to the holding cell and stared at the women there. They were like lazy, uninterested cats lounging on the steel benches. One girl was lying on her belly on the floor, a magazine spread out before her. There were more magazines in a stack on one of the benches, trashy celebrity rags. An adult slumber party in a concrete bedroom. A gaggle of arrested shoplifters, prostitutes, drug runners. I went to the nearest bench and sat down, put my face in my hands as the steel door slammed shut.

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.