'DO YOU WANT to get out of here today?' Jill asked Gabriel as they sat at their desks in the communal detectives' office in Liverpool. The taskforce meeting had just concluded and Jill was not looking forward to chatting with her colleagues this morning. As Gabriel's smiling eyes met hers over the rim of his coffee mug, she continued, 'It's that bloody current affairs show from last night. I don't want to hear what Derek Reid and his mates have to say about it.'
'You looked pretty tough handcuffing the dangerous assailant in the suburbs,' said Gabriel.
'Don't start, Mr Door Job.'
'Yeah, well,' he said, 'maybe we should go out and do some more interviews.'
'Who's up next?' Jill flicked through the folder in front of her.
'Um, that couple in Balmain,' Gabriel answered. He spoke without looking up, absorbed in the statements in front of him.
'Yeah, that's right,' she said. 'Isobel Rymill and Joss Preston-Jones. That was the Wu case, right?' She didn't really expect an answer and got none. 'Poor bastard, they couldn't save one of his legs, you know. Surgery didn't take.'
'Are you gonna eat that?'
Jill looked down at the banana on her desk. Morning tea. What the hell. She slid it over. He grinned, more at the fruit than at her. He peeled it with his thick fingers and ate it in three huge bites.
'So are you ready to head over there?' He arced the banana skin through the air, and it dropped into a garbage bin on the other side of the room. Reid's bin.
'Yeah, I guess.' Jill thought about the long drive to Balmain, the trip back here to Liverpool afterwards, and then at five or six tonight, the trip back to her unit on the beach. She took a deep breath and stood. God I miss working at Maroubra, she thought.
When they got down to the carpark, Gabriel walked straight to the passenger side and got in, still reading from one of the files he held in his hand.
'So, I guess I'm driving again,' she said to the roof of the car before she climbed behind the wheel.
'You know, these first interviews on the home invasions aren't that great.' Gabriel hadn't heard her. He spoke with his head down, still reading from the case files.
She didn't respond, trying to picture the best route from Liverpool to Balmain. 'Do you know a better way to get to Balmain than the M5?' she asked, tired already.
'Huh? Nuh.'
'So, we'll just take the M5 back into the city, and double back to Balmain?' I could use a little help here, she thought. New girl, remember?
'Okay,' he said.
'Off we go then,' Jill said dryly, making her way back into the traffic she'd sat through not an hour before to get there.
It wasn't until they were at tollbooths that he spoke again. Jill had already worked her way through half a litre of water from a bottle by her side.
'Reid and Tran did most of these victims' interviews,' he said.
Jill waited for his point. Finally, she said, 'Yeah, so?'
'There just seems to be a lot of information lacking. Like Rice and Temple. It didn't take us long to get more information, extra evidence from them. Some of the most important evidence in the case so far.'
Jill thought about the two kids, Justine and Ryan, and wondered how they were doing today. She wondered how Narelle Rice was coping with having her home trashed again by crime scene. In the group meeting this morning, Superintendent Last had told them that the analysis of the towel Justine had kept would be back tomorrow at the latest. She frowned; it was pretty sloppy that Reid and Tran had not discovered the sexual assault. Still…
'Maybe Justine just couldn't tell two men about the sexual violence,' she said. 'Maybe they interviewed her while Ryan or her mum was there with her. It's not easy to talk about that stuff you know.' God, she knew.
'Exactly.'
'What, exactly?'
'Well, that's Interview 101, isn't it? There just seem to be a lot of holes in all of the statements. Maybe we should tell Last that we'll reinterview all of them?'
Jill choked on a sip of water. 'Are you serious?' She could just imagine what the rest of the detectives would say: Yeah, she's been here less than a week, and already she thinks she can do it all better than us. 'It would take forever for just you and me to interview all the witnesses. There's other stuff to be done on this case, Gabriel.'
'Yeah, but the single most important determinant in successfully resolving a case is the quality of information gathered from the interviews with victims and witnesses.'
She looked over at him. His trucker cap hid most of his eyes.
'Anyway,' she said, changing the subject, hoping that he wouldn't try to insist on this, 'what do you think of that anonymous call that came though yesterday afternoon?'
Lawrence Last had mentioned the call in the morning meeting. It was from a woman, identifying a male who might be involved. It had been just one of many calls from the public since their work on the case had started. None of them to date had thrown up anything useful.
'What do I think?' he said. 'I think someone's feeling guilty.'
'Why do you say that? It's not like she was confessing to anything.'
Gabriel kept reading. Jill was getting used to these one-sided conversations. At the moment, she just felt bored and sleepy. The sun beamed in through the windscreen and her cheeks felt hot. She cracked the window a little. The exhaust fumes from the motorway blew in with the breeze. She had found it difficult to sleep last night, waking from a blood-soaked dream in which huge, biting spiders chased her. She'd lain in her bed for an hour afterwards thinking about Eugene Moser's final moments and Justine Rice's horrific confession. Who was this lunatic? It was horrible to imagine him out there somewhere, planning another attack. What could he be capable of next time?
'What was the guy's name?' Jill asked. 'The guy from the phone call? Henry someone? Asian name.'
'Nguyen, Henry. AKA Cutter.'
'That's it. Cutter.' Jill made a scoffing noise. 'Must've been real hard for her to come up with a name like that, given the stories all over the media,' she said sarcastically. 'The call's probably bullshit. Just someone who wants attention, knows nothing about the case at all.' She didn't know whether she believed that, exactly, but she was curious to know more of Gabriel's thoughts about it.
He grunted and kept reading.
Jill high-beamed a car doing eighty in the right-hand lane. It was a hundred zone, and she didn't feel like sitting on this motorway any longer than she had to. The Ford Laser stayed right where it was.
'What's in the file that's so fascinating, anyway?' she said, starting to seriously tailgate the guy in front of her. 'You've read the interview before.'
'It's not what's in here,' said Gabriel. 'It's what's not. You wouldn't believe the questions they forgot to ask this couple from Balmain.'
The truck in the lane next to her was too close to consider overtaking from the left, but the Laser could easily have moved over by now. Jill was considering putting the siren up on the dash and ruining this guy's day.
'So what did they miss out on?' She tried to curb her impatience. Scotty had hated driving with her when she was in this mood. Gabriel seemed not to notice at all.
'Well, a detailed narration of events, for one.'
'Yeah,' she said. 'I read through the interviews yesterday. They did seem a bit sketchy.'
'A bit? Reid did the Preston-Jones interview. He didn't get a description of any of the voices. He didn't ask about incidental sounds from the other room. For God's sake, there wasn't even a word-for-word account of the exact words the witness heard from each offender.'
'Mmm. Pretty sloppy, especially given they had few physical features to go on because of the balaclavas.'
'Don't start me,' he said. 'There's plenty bloody more they could have asked about physical characteristics.'
The Laser finally moved over. A young bloke in dark sunnies. He flipped her the finger before he took the River-wood exit. Dickhead. He probably thought she and Gabriel were a married couple out for a drive. She'd known how to spot an unmarked cop car from age thirteen. This fool had no idea how close he'd come to a five-hundred-dollar headache. He was lucky that Gabriel had finally started to talk and distract her.
'What questions would you have asked to get more from the witnesses about the physical details?' Jill was genuinely interested. All detectives had a different interview technique, and most tended to stick to the questions they had learned from their first supervisor. She'd always been open to learning more sophisticated methods of getting at facts.
'I always teach the witness to use their memory like a video-recording,' he said, suddenly animated. 'I tell them they can fast-forward scenes, or slow the action down. They can take it frame by frame, or just view still-shots. On any given shot they can zoom the camera in, or widen the lens to take in details at the corners of their vision.'
He closed the file but kept his finger inside, marking his place. 'Some witnesses aren't so good at processing visual information, but around a third are brilliant. You can get some people to change the camera angle to get almost any perspective, like a bird's-eye view, looking down from the ceiling, or shoe-view, the camera looking up at the action from the floor.'
'Wow. And that works?'
'Yeah. Like I said, not with everyone, but the least you'd do would be to say, "Stop the picture now. In your mind's eye, stop him right there in front of you. Okay, now tell me what he looks like from the top of his head all the way down."'
'That's good,' said Jill. 'I mean, I do try to get the most vivid descriptions possible, but I'll have to try some of those questions.'
'This,' Gabriel waved the file, 'is shit. He hasn't even asked the witness if he has any thoughts about the perps' motivations. You can get a lot of incidentals when you ask them to just let go and guess why the offenders might have behaved the way they did.'
'You want to know why the witness thinks the offender committed the crime?'
'Sure. You know that witnesses are always worried about saying something wrong, or making a mistake. They censor themselves. In a case like this, we can worry about errors in accuracy later; what we want from the witness in an interview is every little thing they can remember, even when they're not completely certain. They're our only eyes in there. They're the detective on the scene.'
'Interesting way of putting it. Do you ever say that to them?'
'All the time. You tell them you want them to guess the thoughts and emotions of the offenders. It widens their viewpoint. Opens them up. You can ask, "Why do you think he did that?", or "Do you think they planned it to go that way?" or even something like "Do you think any of them were angry with, or closer to, any of the others?"'
'Mmm.'
Jill drove silently for a while, her thoughts turning back to the anonymous phone call.
'Why'd you say the anonymous caller was feeling guilty?' she asked again.
'Well, she obviously wants us to investigate someone. You're right, it could be a bullshit call, but I thought her sentence structure was interesting when I listened to the tape this morning. She was really eager to put this guy in. And I don't think she just made up a name. If she did, it wouldn't take us long to find out he doesn't exist. Pretty pointless if it's a joke.' He pulled his finger from the file and placed the folder into the door pocket, turning towards her. 'Besides,' he said, 'I think this Henry Nguyen is real, and the feeling I got is that this caller can't live with herself without saying something to someone. She wants us to find him. But she definitely knows more about him than she's told us.'
'It could just be someone she's pissed off with,' returned Jill. 'Revenge – she might just want us to give some guy a hard time.'
Jill had listened to the call too, and she had to admit that she'd also thought there was something about it that demanded close attention. The caller's voice had been muffled; she really didn't want them to know who she was. At the moment though, Jill was more interested in the way her new partner thought than in discussing her own impressions.
'Could be,' he said. 'We'll have to wait and see. The details she gave don't sound right for that though – not just his address, but his Medicare number, where he's done time? And what she didn't say is just as important. Like, this is how I know what I know; this is why you need to get this guy; and more importantly, my name is…'
'Come on, we get heaps of anonymous tips. People don't want to get involved.'
'Yeah, but descriptive information like that is coming from someone who's just a little bit more than a helpful citizen. I think that call's for real and we're looking for a guilty woman. Guilt by association with something. And if she's got anything to do with this case, I'll know her when I talk to her.'
For some reason Jill believed him. That speech should've sounded arrogant, but instead Gabriel just sounded open, matter-of-fact.
She finished the last of her water as the traffic on the motorway slowed to a stop. There was obviously some holdup ahead. At that precise moment, she realised she was desperate for the toilet. Great. She sighed and tried to distract herself. She just wasn't used to these mammoth drives – maybe it was a conditioned response. It seemed like every time she got on this bloody road she had to go. Could be because there were no service stations: when she knew she couldn't go, she suddenly had to. Thank God, they were nearly at Moore Park.
At the end of the freeway, Jill swung the Commodore into the first service station and bolted to the bathroom. When she got back, Gabriel was standing at the bonnet, food and drink spread out on the hot car like it was a picnic rug.
'So how're we going to handle the interview?' he said, indicating that a plastic-looking salad sandwich was for her.
'What do you have in mind?'
'I want to use audiovisuals to record everything. What do you think?'
'I think,' she answered, 'that you'll completely freak out the victims. They're not going to understand why they would be taped. We haven't even caught a suspect, so it's not like a tape could be used in court.'
'These people are the only experts we have on this gang,' he said, struggling to open his sandwich wrapper. 'They know much more than they think they know. We need as many verbal and non-verbal cues as possible for a full behavioural analysis.'
'It seems like a lot of trouble for a witness interview, but I guess we've got to do everything we can think of at this point,' she said. 'You got the equipment, or are we gonna get them to come in again later?'
'Got everything we need.' He nodded at the duffle bag on the back seat, his still-wrapped sandwich in his mouth, fingers and teeth tearing at the plastic. Jill thought about offering to help, but finally, the plastic gave way. 'We can get it all done today.'
As Gabriel pulled his bag from the back of the car, Jill silently repeated the victims' names – Isobel Rymill, Joss Preston-Jones. 'What were they like when you set up the interview this morning?'
'Ah, they said no.' He walked across the street. She stared after him.
'What?' She hurried to catch up. 'Said no to what?'
'The interview.'
They were already at the front door of the freestanding two-storey terrace. Jill glared at Gabriel as he knocked. She heard sounds behind the door, and a deadbolt sliding back. She couldn't see through the crack, as Gabriel's back filled the space.
'Mr Preston-Jones? We spoke this morning,' Gabriel sounded assertive, turned slightly to make space for Jill next to him. 'I'm Gabriel Delahunt and this is my partner, Sergeant Jillian Jackson.'
The man who opened the door looked as though he'd ordinarily be of a more cheerful disposition. An open face, light grey eyes, sandy hair that was buzz-cut close to his scalp. He stood in his doorway in a faded red tee-shirt, tight across his upper chest, loose navy pants, no shoes. He stood a smidge taller than Gabe. He didn't smile. A black-green bruise marred the lightly freckled skin under his left eye.
'I thought we agreed we'd have to do this another time?' He folded tanned arms across his chest.
Gabriel held out his hand. Big smile. Seeing it, Jill couldn't help but smile as well.
Joss Preston-Jones sighed, shook Gabriel's hand, and reached for Jill's. Then he stepped aside and motioned for them to come in.
The hallway was narrow. 'Sorry about this,' she felt she had to say over her shoulder. The man smiled tightly.
Jill followed Gabriel to a bright kitchen washed in the midday sun streaming in from the small backyard. Gabriel took a seat on a stool at the breakfast bar. She waited for him to explain what they were doing there, but he seemed content to look around the room, still smiling.
'Ah, Mr Preston-Jones,' she started. Someone had to say something.
'Call me Joss.'
'Great, thanks. Please, call me Jill.' Let Delahunt fend for himself.
'I understand that you would have preferred to do this some other time.'
'My wife's at work.'
Jill stared hard at Gabriel, then turned back to Joss. 'You're probably aware of how urgent it is for us to investigate this case. You might have heard about the latest home invasion?'
'I don't watch the news,' said Joss.
'Well, we believe that the gang that attacked you at Andy Wu's house have now killed a man.' Jill noticed Joss rub his hand across his mouth. 'We need to get as much information as we can about these people so that we can get them off the streets.'
She watched his shoulders relax a little, and his arms, folded across his chest, dropped to his sides.
'I haven't really been back to work since it happened,' said Joss. 'But Isobel had to go. She's bringing our daughter, Charlie, home at about four.'
'Is that Charlie?' Jill pointed to a photo on the fridge. It showed a blonde toddler nursing a fluffy cat almost bigger than herself.
Joss laughed a little. 'Yep.' The love in his eyes looked like pain.
Jill became aware that Gabriel was unpacking his bag.
'The light's probably best in here,' he said, unfolding a telescoped tripod.
'For what?' Joss's arms folded again.
'From now on we'll be videotaping all of our interviews regarding the case.' Gabriel spoke to the small camera he was screwing to the top of the tripod.
Jill glowered at him. This guy could turn the charm on and then drop it in an instant. She guessed that they were about to be kicked out, but instead Joss offered them something to drink. She and Gabriel accepted an orange juice. Joss poured himself a tall glass of water from a filter jug next to the sink.
'Might as well get on with it then,' he said, walking back towards them.
Gabriel set up the recording equipment with more speed than she could have imagined. By the time Joss had taken a seat at the breakfast bar, the contents of Gabriel's modest-sized duffle bag had transformed the small dining area off the kitchen into a studio. He had angled two dining chairs to face one another, and a collapsible reflective screen was positioned behind one of the chairs. He ushered their host towards this chair, motioning Jill towards the other, and took up his place behind the camera.
Jill took her seat feeling nervous and annoyed. For heaven's sake, she thought, we're interviewing a witness, not interrogating a suspect. She opened her notebook and smiled reassuringly at Joss.
'Hang on a sec,' said Gabriel. Incredulous, she watched him drop to his knees and, using a retractable tape measure, calculate the distance between the two chairs. Walking back on his knees, he signalled with his hand for her to rise. She stood and he pushed her chair backwards a hand's breadth.
'Sorry,' he looked up at her.
'Um, yes, maybe we should just get on with it.'
'They were only ninety-two centimetres apart.'
Jill stared. It seemed he was apologising for not getting the measurements right the first time, rather than for the ridiculous fact that he was bothering with such details in the first place.
'Should've been ninety-seven,' Gabriel said to Joss, hands out, as if that explained everything.
I gotta talk to this guy, Jill thought.
'Joss,' she took over. His legs and arms were crossed now, and he leaned towards the back door as though he wanted to be anywhere but in there with them. 'We're here to get your full description of what you remember happening at Andy Wu's last Saturday night. Can you tell us everything that happened after you arrived? Please don't leave anything out, everything you've got to say is very important to us. You are our eyes and ears in there.'
Gabriel caught her eye, raised his eyebrows at her.
They listened quietly to Joss's account, occasionally interrupting to clarify a point.
While speaking, Joss stared at a point just beyond Jill's shoulder. She watched him reliving the horror of the night, saw his eyeballs tracking actively as the scene replayed before him. His face was grey and his voice hoarse when he finished. An electronic chime indicated that Gabriel had turned the camera off. Jill looked down at her watch. Three-thirty. The wife would be home soon, but this guy had had enough. His hand shook slightly as he rubbed the bristle on top of his head. When he stood, he steadied himself using the back of the chair, his eyes glazed and unfocused. She and Gabriel gave him their thanks and left, arranging to return to take his wife's statement the following day.
'I hope he's going to be okay,' said Jill, opening the back door of the car so Gabriel could dump his equipment. 'He looked pretty shaken up.'
The steering wheel felt warm when she started the ignition.
'He certainly did,' said Gabriel, absentmindedly struggling to fasten his seatbelt. The plug had caught in his khaki shirt, and she had to stifle an unexpected impulse to untangle the mess for him. She turned on the air-conditioner instead.
'So it's back to Liverpool, then,' she said, mentally calculating the time it would take to get there and back again.
'No. Let's just go to your house.'
'My house.'
'Yeah. I want to watch this tape back. We've got some problems here.'
'I live in Maroubra.'
'Have you got a good TV?'
'Well, yes. But… Oh, whatever. We can watch the tape there I suppose.'
She pulled the car out from the curb and headed into the city, finding herself smiling at the thought of the early mark. They travelled against the traffic for most of the trip, Gabriel staring out the window, from time to time jotting in his notebook. As they passed the shops in Randwick, she suddenly wondered what the hell she was doing. Scotty was the only partner she'd ever had in her house, and she trusted him. She'd known her new partner for under a week.
Last night on the phone, her mum had asked her what he was like, and she'd been unable to find the words. After a few moments, she'd laughed, and told her mum that she'd have to get back to her. She hadn't figured him out yet.
Jill drove towards the ocean ahead.
After seeing the detectives out, Joss found himself back in front of the cupboard in the kitchen. Describing the night at Andy's in such detail had unshackled the demons in his brain. Memories howled in his head now, each clamouring for processing, hurling up image after horrifying image. He gave in to the kaleidoscope, knowing from experience that he was incapable of stemming the flood once it had progressed unchecked to this point. He reached unseeingly for the bottle of bourbon. The interview had prevented him utilising his routine avoidance strategies – hard exercise; forcing himself to remember he was home, safe, in the present. He had only this recourse left. He swigged directly from the bottle and then reached for a glass.
Back on the sofa, he steeled himself for the show; he drank quickly to put as much distance between himself and the images as possible.
Kibeho, 1995. The definition of human depravity. From every angle someone died in agony, or, much worse, survived, a machete wound through the middle of their face; a limb or genitals missing; intestines exposed for the birds that dived sorties in screaming, black-eyed packs. He moved through the blood and body pieces, pulling a dead woman away from her wailing infant before the child suffocated under her weight, dragging a breathing body from a pile of corpses and handing him to the medics. A small team from Medecins Sans Frontieres and the medical section of the Australian peacekeeping force patched up those they could, medivaced a fortunate few, and provided morphine to many others, who would at least die oblivious to their own screams. For many years, he envied them that.
Another glass. The bourbon burned.
The boy and his family. The memory kicked in at the worst part, of course. The father lay dead, feeble spits of blood still exiting the mess of his throat. A girl, maybe ten, waited, mute, for the next act of horror life would bring her. Her mother, a baby on her hip, keened quietly, a steady, emotionless moan that conveyed more pain than a scream. And the new man of the house – the boy, younger than his sister – shaped up with a stick to the Tutsi warrior with the machete.
The devil with the knife turned to smile at Joss; to tell him with his eyes that he could cut this family to pieces, and that Joss could do nothing but salvage anyone left when he'd had his fill.
Not this time.
Joss watched himself moving forward to meet the enemy.
On the couch, feeling as though his head had played host to a wasp's nest, Joss's hand reached between the cushions, and pulled out that for which it had been searching. He wiped the knife against his thigh, and put it back in its resting place. Close.
He let his head fall back against the lounge.