A Certain Malice Read online

  Ruby was still reading the magazine when Cam left for his appointment.

  Now his headlights punched through the darkness of the dirt road leading to the school. He turned off the radio and rolled down the window to breathe in the sweet dusty scent of the bottlebrush grass and feel the whip of the breeze in his hair.

  The spectral shape of a frog-mouthed owl watched from his perch on a wooden fence post, blinked and turned his head almost 360 degrees to follow the car as it came to a stop at the school.

  It was dark in the deserted car park, no lights shone from any of the school buildings. Cam stood still for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust. A cloud unveiled the full moon, making the path to the photographic lab shine.

  But the sound of shattering glass made him stop mid-stride. Somewhere ahead he heard the thud of soft-soled footsteps. Then he caught the smell on the breeze: scorched wood, carbonised plastic, oxidised metal.

  Riveted to the spot, he tried to control the sudden panic that threatened to paralyse his limbs. A sharp breath caught in his throat and his gut tightened; it was what he needed to get himself moving.

  The smell grew stronger as he jogged towards the prefab. One of its windows was broken and shining with a flickering light. He stopped dead, his eyes fixed on a group of small dancing flames. A trickle of fear, a slow moving terror, began to wash through him. For a moment he wasn’t looking at a burning blackout blind, but at floral curtains billowing from a broken kitchen window. The small flames ignited with a whoosh.

  Now he could hear their screams.

  He had to get them out.

  Oh God, not again. He fought the panic that threatened to overcome his reason. Slowly, deliberately, he reached out and brushed the door handle with his fingertips.

  Still cold.

  He flung the door open and dropped to his knees. The room was alive with dancing light and flickering shadows. On the far window one of the blackout blinds writhed and flapped in the flames. Near the adjacent window, he made out Cecelia’s still form. And then that blind went up too, turning the front of the prefab into a wall of fire.

  She began to stir, then moaned and lifted her head.

  “Elizabeth!” he cried, “stay down!”

  As he crawled towards her, another whoosh set the side wall alight, sending greedy tongues of flame ever closer to the shelves of photographic chemicals. And then the door banged shut and the room filled with choking clouds of smoke.

  Cam scrabbled forward, coughing as the noxious fumes seared his lungs and bit into his eyes. On her hands and knees now, Cecelia looked at him through a shroud of smoke.

  She must have seen him though her face remained blank, her body still and trance-like. He grabbed her by both shoulders and gave her a shake. She responded with a sharp intake of breath then lurched into a fit of coughing that was drowned in the fire’s roar. On hands and knees he guided her towards the closed door, reached for the handle and twisted the knob.

  Nothing happened.

  Now it was his turn to panic. He wriggled and pushed at the knob with both hands.

  It was locked rigid.

  He sprang to his feet, took a step back and threw himself at the door, shoulder first. It still refused to budge; he might just as well have been hurling himself against a brick wall.

  “The key, where’s the key?” he gasped at her through the smoke.

  Cecelia moved her head from side to side, unable to get the words out. He dropped down beside her and cupped her face in his hands, the heat stinging his neck, pushing at his back.

  “The key!” he yelled.

  “In the lock. Outside,” she managed at last, hauling herself to her feet.

  As the fear detonated inside him, a sudden burst of clarity released a memory: a robbery case; thieves bashing through the wall of a transportable home because they couldn’t break the lock.

  With a well-placed kick Cam crunched the toe of his work boot into the fibro panel. When Cecelia realised what he was doing she started to help and soon they’d created a jagged space large enough to crawl through.

  They collapsed on to the brick path, filling their lungs with heady draughts of the sweet night air, until she gasped, “The chemicals!”

  Throat too dry to reply, Cam pulled Cecelia to her feet and half-dragged, half-carried her through the flowerbeds. They struggled on until their legs gave out and they fell on to an open patch of lawn.

  They lay still for a moment, catching their breath. She tried to speak but her words were snatched by a paroxysm of coughing. When the fit passed, he helped her to sit up.

  “Are you OK?” he croaked.

  She passed a hand across her face and nodded.

  “The chemicals you use in the lab; are they flamm—”

  The ground shook as an explosion blew out the last of the prefab’s windows, spraying glass and smoke into the night sky. Cam threw himself over Cecelia as the sound reverberated inside his chest and pushed against his head with ear-bursting pressure. Debris rocketed into the air and small particles rained on his back. He tensed, any minute expecting the big one that would tear them to pieces.

  But only the silence came.

  He looked up. Shredded photographic paper drifted down on them like confetti.

  Cecelia stirred. He eased himself off her.

  “The photographic chemicals aren’t, but the fixing agents are.”

  Her voice was low and hoarse. She attempted to smile but as he looked, the smile faltered and the tears began. She started to shake.

  He pulled her towards him and wrapped her in his arms, as much to stop his own shaking as hers. As he buried his face in her singed hair, he took deep breaths, trying to slow the pulse racing in his ears.

  He remembered the first time Ruby had visited him in hospital. One look at his bandaged face had made her tear loose from her grandmother and flee. They’d eventually found her in a city park, sobbing so much she had to be sedated. Now it was he who wanted to run. To stop himself, he clung to the woman harder and screwed his eyes shut, fighting to get the air into his lungs.

  Slow down. Breathe. Focus. Breathe.

  Focus on what just happened. Be rational; think. A firebomb in the photographic lab, but why? To destroy something – the photographs of the crime scene, perhaps? Maybe, but why the locked door? How many people knew about Cecelia’s photos? Had word of them spread to Vince? Would he kill to protect his job? Vince was a lot of things, but not a killer - or was he? Cam had been policing long enough to know there were no constants in human behaviour. He could still see the image of Vince slumped on the veranda floor of the pub, the immaculate uniforms hanging in the near empty room.

  My job is my life.

  “Cam? Are you all right?”

  He’d been mumbling. Her voice brought him out of himself. He released her from his grip, nodded and took a deep breath.

  “Are you burned at all?” he said in a stranger’s voice.

  “I don’t think so. Maybe just my hair.” She looked at him with concern. “You?”

  “I’m fine.” He responded quickly, too quickly. His abrupt reaction startled her.

  The sound of voices rose above the gentle crackle of the flames. A switch flicked and the lawn was flooded in bright light. He pressed at his stinging eyes with the heels of his hands. When he could finally focus, he saw three people standing near the smouldering remains of the prefab.

  He climbed unsteadily to his feet and stumbled forwards on rubbery legs, shouting and waving at them to get away. Movement from behind told him Cecelia was trying to follow. He turned and put a gentle hand on her shoulder, pushing her back into a sitting position on the lawn.

  “Stay where you are. I’m going to get you some help. You need to see a doctor.”

  She started to protest, but her words were choked with another fit of coughing. She probably had smoke inhalation, concussion at the very least.

  He gave her shoulder a squeeze.“It’s going to be OK, but you have to stay here.” He ha
ted to have to push her down, but she hadn’t the strength to walk and he hadn’t the strength to carry her.

  Cam made his way over to the onlookers who’d retreated to the edge of a grove of trees. The first person he saw was Jeffrey Smithson, wearing a brown dressing gown and carpet slippers. His face was grey in the spotlight, his eyes hard as pebbles as they took in Cam’s dishevelled appearance.

  “Good God, man, what the hell happened?” he asked.

  Anne clutched at Smithson’s arm. She was in a pink nylon dressing gown and had a yellow scarf over her head.

  Cam was about to answer when she interrupted in a faltering voice. “We called the bushfire brigade when we heard the explosion.” She turned to face the blackened ruins. “Though it doesn’t look like there’s much left to put out.”

  Smithson extracted his arm from her grasp and placed it around her shoulder, drawing her close in an expression of tenderness, moving in its sincerity. What was it with this couple? Cam asked himself. What could be the reasons for Smithson’s hostility towards Cam and his inquiries, other than guilt over Bell’s death? So much of his behaviour seemed driven by an almost paranoid desire to protect his wife - what was he trying to protect her from?

  “We’re waiting for your explanation, Sergeant. Have you any idea how valuable the equipment was in that lab?” Smithson said.

  He spoke as if he was holding Cam personally responsible for the damage. His accusing tone felt like a jab to a raw burn and jolted Cam back to his senses. He rubbed his sooty face with his hands and fought to keep the tremolo from his voice.

  “Ms Bowman was working in the lab when a fire bomb was thrown through the window…”

  Mrs Smithson gasped and put her hand to her mouth. “Cecelia?”

  Another voice said, “Cecelia? She was in there? Where is she? Is she all right?”

  Ruth Tilly’s staccato questions fired into Cam’s head like bullets. He paused, trying to reconcile her presence. Then he remembered that she too lived on the school campus, in a flat above the science lab.

  “She’s over there.” Cam pointed to the perimeter of the lawn.

  Mrs Smithson untangled herself from her husband, saying to Ruth, “She’ll need water. I’ll run to the school and get some.” She looked back over her shoulder as she hurried to the school’s front entrance. “I’ll bring some back for you too, Sergeant.”

  Cam thanked her, then called out to Ruth who was disappearing in the other direction, into the shadows. “Can you take Cecelia over to the medical centre, Ms Tilly?” There was no acknowledgment, and he raised his voice. “She’s not badly hurt, but I think she has concussion.”

  Jeffrey met Cam’s eye and gripped his arm. “Vandals, you think?”

  He heard the sound of coughing and Ruth’s soothing voice coming from the darkened perimeter of the lawn. “I can’t say yet,” Cam said, switching his focus back to Jeffrey.“Did you or your wife see or hear anything unusual this evening?”

  “We were watching television. Channel 2, a programme about the wildebeest migration across the Serengeti. The first thing we heard was the explosion.”

  He was on the defensive again. The question only required a yes or no answer but Cam felt as if he were being presented with another alibi.

  A siren wailed in the distance, coming closer. Jeffrey cocked his head to one side, narrowed his eyes. “And what about you, Sergeant? Who invited you here at this time of the night?”

  “I was here to pick up some photographs from Ms Bowman. The prefab was on fire when I arrived.”

  Cam turned his back on Mr Smithson and reached for his phone. First he dialled Toorrup Police Station to report the incident, then he phoned Leanne at home.

  Leanne’s mother answered. He could hear her yelling for her daughter above the clatter of dishes and the strangled violins of a TV melodrama. It seemed to take forever for Leanne to pick up and he could feel Smithson’s eyes boring into his back while he waited. When she finally came to the phone, Cam explained what had happened.

  “Are you all right, Sarge? Your voice sounds kind of weird,” Leanne said.

  “I’m fine. I want you to call Ruby and tell her I’ll be late home. Tell her I’ve been called out on a case or something, but for God’s sake don’t tell her what’s happened here.” He’d have to get rid of his shirt and jeans before he saw Ruby, have a shower at the station. Just one whiff of the smoke could set her off. “After you’ve seen Ruby, go fetch Pete and get over to Vince’s.”

  “Vince? Surely you don’t think…”

  “Just get on over there, Leanne, I don’t know what to think.”

  He sounded harsh; he knew it. The pause at the other end of the phone told him she thought so too.

  “OK,” she said, then took a deep breath. “Uh, what exactly should we say to him?”

  “Tell him something’s happened at the school and we need his advice. Tell him it’s delicate, that I’m coming over to explain. Just keep him there and stop him from doing a runner.”

  Cam replaced his phone just as Mrs Smithson reappeared with a bottle of water. After drinking half of it he poured the remainder over his head, scrubbing at his hair and face, grateful for the cool relief.

  Jeffrey moved over to his wife and put his arm around her waist. “How’s Cecelia?” Cam heard him ask her.

  “I think she’ll be all right. Ruth’s going to take her to the doctor.”

  “Thank heavens for that,” her husband said.

  Cam drank down the last drop of water then wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve. He gestured to them with the empty bottle. “You can go back home now. There’s not much more we can do until morning,”

  “I hope that’s not meant to be an order, Sergeant. I intend staying here until the last flame is extinguished,” Smithson said.

  Cam could not stop himself from raising his eyes skyward. “Suit yourself.”

  Anne Smithson gave her husband’s arm a squeeze. “There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s just leave it to the experts, Jeffrey.”

  She pressed her mouth into a thin line and indicated with her eyes that it was time to go. He made a huffing sound and smoothed down his moustache. Finally conceding to his wife’s common sense, he nodded a curt goodbye to Cam and turned his back.

  The couple moved off, arm in arm. As Cam watched their blurred silhouettes pass under the spotlight’s beam, some of the mystery, at least, became clear.

  20

  Leanne negotiated her way down the dark gravel driveway to Pete’s rented farm cottage. She could see him silhouetted in the doorway, tucking in his uniform shirt. He waved and walked over to the passenger side, filling the police Commodore with the odours of cigarette smoke and pine scented shower gel.

  He grinned as he fastened his seat belt. “You didn’t have the siren on, did you, Leanne?”

  “Siren? Don’t be a dumb-arse, Pete.” Leanne had let her neighbour’s kid give the siren a quick blast just before she’d left home. She’d figured the wondrous expression on the small boy’s face was worth the flak she’d get from Pete if he found out.

  “I thought I heard it in the distance.”

  “This is hardly an emergency.”

  “That’s what I thought. Why does the old man want us to check up on Vince anyway?”

  “Because of the fire at the school. He thinks Vince might have done it to get rid of the photos that proved he moved the body at the crime scene.”

  Pete gave a snort of disbelief. “Vince wouldn’t do anything that dumb.”

  “Best to cover all options, I guess.”

  “Jeez, you’re even beginning to sound like him.”

  Leanne aimed for a pothole and savoured the snapping sound of his teeth. After orchestrating some more jarring bumps she turned back on to the bitumen.

  “I hate the way you call him the old man. It really bugs me.”

  Pete rubbed his jaw. “Why? Because you have a crush on him? Because me calling him old man reminds you that he’s old enough to b
e your father?”

  Leanne screwed up her face and hissed her annoyance at him.

  “It’s obvious, Leanne. Don’t deny it.”

  “Shut up.” In a softer voice she added, “What would you know anyway?”

  “Only that you look at him just like the girls at school used to look at me. You follow him around with your tongue on the ground, yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.”

  She caught his smirk in her peripheral vision and went in for the kill. “Yeah, used to look at you. Doesn’t happen much these days, does it? Failure’s kind of a dampener to the old love life, eh, Pete?”

  She regretted the words as soon as they’d left her mouth. Pete had been a star WAFL player and was really going places until he did his cruciate in. He’d been chewing himself up over it for the last two years, and here she was, rubbing in the salt. God, she was a bitch sometimes.

  “Sorry Pete, I didn’t mean that.” She took her eyes from the road and risked a quick glance at him. “You’re not a failure, you just had some bad luck, that’s all.” Her face broke into a grin. “You’re such a cocky bastard; someone has to put you down every now and then.”

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Leanne.” He smiled back. “Anyway, I know something about your hero that I’ll bet you don’t know. I’ll tell you if you’re nice to me.”

  Leanne risked him another glance. “Go on, tell me. I’ll be nice.”

  “I was having a drink in Toorrup the other week, catching up with a mate who’d spent some time over east. He’d heard of our Sergeant Fraser, seems he was a detective in Sydney.”

  “Yeah, I heard that too. His wife and kid were killed instead of him, yada yada yada, that’s old news.”

  “Maybe, but when he sprung the bikie gang, he was undercover. They don’t usually like cops with families to go under cover. Sometimes they have to go under for months.”

  “So, what are you getting at?”

  “He was undercover because he volunteered, that’s why. He begged for the job apparently.”