Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(39)

The truth was, Kash was right to be wary of me. Most of my life I’d wavered over a very thin line between light and dark sides of my being. There were things in me that were frightening. How quick I was to anger. How much I liked hurting people sometimes. My mind was full of shadowy places where violent fantasies lived, sickening things that sometimes came out in my dreams. Vengeance I played out mentally against bad people from my past. Most of the time, my light half won out, and the shadows and smoke were sent recoiling to where they belonged, not completely driven out, but controlled.

But sometimes, the halves collided. The score came down fifty fifty, and everyone was left guessing what I might do.

Even me.





Chapter 53


WHITT HAD DECIDED he wasn’t comfortable with Tox Barnes at all. A Sydney colleague had warned him that he’d suffer consequences from associating himself with the shaggy, despondent detective. That a deep, hidden sin in Tox’s past, a double murder, some said, meant that he was an enemy within the ranks of the police, and that he was to be avoided at all costs.

It wasn’t just that, though. To be in the man’s presence felt hazardous, like a journey along a frozen road at night with rain battering the windscreen. The man spoke little, laughed almost never, and caused people who didn’t even know him to shift out of his path. He was stale-smelling and dusty all the time, as though when he went home at night to wherever in the world that might be, he simply tucked himself into an old cupboard and closed the door. Whitt’s own terrible history had caused him to become almost obsessed with freshness and newness, the cleanliness and orderliness of packaged things. He changed his toothbrush on the first of every month. He littered his sock drawer with moisture absorbers. If things weren’t exactly right, they were deeply, inexcusably wrong.

Whitt was having those familiar nervous palpitations as he approached Tox on the third floor of the University of Sydney west car park.

‘I got the CCTV,’ Whitt said, drawing a sheet of paper from the folder tucked under his arm. He handed Tox a grainy photograph printed from the security system of a hock shop in Bondi Junction. Whitt had managed to track down footage of the purchase of the video camera found in Sam Blue’s apartment, originally stolen from an apartment in Elizabeth Bay. The still showed a man in a cap exiting the front doors of the store.

‘It’s not a great picture,’ Whitt said.

‘No. It’s not,’ Tox sighed. ‘Could be Sam Blue. Could be his grandmother.’

‘I’m going to get it analysed,’ Whitt said. ‘See if we can measure the man’s dimensions against the angle of the camera and the doorway. He seems taller than Blue to me.’

‘You talk to the Simpson girl?’

‘Yes.’

‘Convinced?’

Whitt struggled. ‘She maintains everything from her last statement. The white van. The screaming. Caitlyn standing there as she ran past.’

‘We’ll soon find out,’ Tox said.

Whitt took a deep breath and looked around at the car park. They walked to the door to the fire stairs. Was this where Caitlyn McBeal had taken her last breaths of free air?

And if it was, would she ever take any again?





Chapter 54


‘THIS IS WHERE both girls allegedly entered,’ Whitt said, walking through the fire-escape door. He glanced down the stairwell. ‘I suppose the abductor might have seen Linny coming up the stairs. Decided she was his type. Thought he’d stand here, wait for her to come through.’ He walked back through the door and leaned against the wall, made like he was ready to pounce. ‘Linny comes through. He grabs her, drags her that way, over to where that white van is sitting.’

Whitt pointed to a car space fifty metres away where a white van sat with the side door open. He paused, puzzled at the sight of it sitting there, the very same make and model of vehicle the witness had described in her interviews. Tox had his hands in his pockets. He looked nonchalantly towards the van.

‘So what we want to know is,’ Tox said, ‘how likely is Linny’s story? Why did no one hear her screams and then Caitlyn being abducted? Would the attacker have been able to drag Caitlyn fifty metres to the van? Where and how might he have left traces of the crime if he did?’

Whitt was still puzzled by the van. He looked at Tox. ‘That’s the same kind of van Linny reported seeing at the abduction,’ Whitt said.

‘Uh-huh.’ Tox nodded. ‘It’s my van. I brought it here for the purposes of our experiment.’

‘What experiment?’

Tox didn’t answer. He was watching a woman walking towards them up the slope of the ramp, her enormous spike heels clopping like horseshoes on the asphalt. Whitt’s first thought was that university students sure dressed differently now to the way they did when he studied. As she got closer, however, Whitt began to notice bruises on her slender white legs, climbing all the way to the hem of the tiny miniskirt. The long blonde ponytail was clearly fake – clipped-in extensions. She put the phone she’d been texting on away in a small faux-fur handbag and smiled broadly at Tox.

‘Detective Barnes,’ she said, hardly glancing at Whitt. ‘It’s been a long time, honey.’

‘Sure has.’ Tox looked warm and friendly, Whitt thought. A sudden transformation of his usually dark being. Something was not right. ‘Whitt, this is Sandy. Sandy, Whitt.’