Flare-up: a tense, taut mystery (A Cam Fraser mystery) Read online

  ‘Maybe not that close to the house, it’ll only increase the fly problem,’ Cam called back.

  ‘Okay, in the home paddock, then.’

  Cam and Jo heard Ruby disappear behind the back of the house and headed hand in hand towards their cars.

  ‘Did you post the letter?’ Jo asked Cam.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ruby thinks you did.’

  He slapped the side of his head. ‘Shit, it’s still in the car.’

  Cam dashed to his ute, opened up the cab and spent a panicky few seconds shuffling through the tools on the floor before pulling it out from under a pair of fence cutters.

  Jo regarded the soiled envelope he held up in his hand. ‘It looks like you’ve been picking up after the dog with it,’ she said scathingly.

  Cam’s shoulders sagged. ‘You’re right. I suppose I’ll have to print another copy.’

  ‘Well, it’s got to be in by early next week. You’d better get to it.’ Jo took in his despondent expression and added, ‘If you want to, that is.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that now with Pizzle’s death . . .’

  She saw a variety of emotions cross his face, struggling for release.

  ‘You feel guilty that you never replied to his phone call. You want to make it up to Rita by helping with the investigation.’

  ‘No, not guilty . . .’

  ‘You were brought up by monks, you have a doctorate in guilt!’ she interrupted.

  ‘Okay,’ he conceded, ‘but it’s not only guilt. I only have a week of leave left. I could go back to work in the force for just a couple more years and get some money together, and then I’d be more than able to buy an old place like this and do it up.’

  ‘And meanwhile, Ruby would have left school and would probably be living miles away in the city.’

  Cam rubbed his face. ‘I’ll redo the letter. Post it tomorrow.’

  Jo stretched up to kiss him. They parted when they heard Ruby’s footsteps running across the gravel driveway.

  ‘Want to come home with us, Jo? Fish ’n’ chips, on me,’ Cam said.

  Ruby interrupted before Jo could answer. ‘I need you to help me with my maths homework, Dad.’

  ‘With both of us on the case, I’m sure — ’

  ‘Jo’s hopeless at maths, you know that.’

  To Jo’s relief, a shrill stream of beeps from her pager put an end to the conversation. She unclipped it and read the message. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Cam clench and unclench his fingers.

  Ruby smiled and hurled her school bag into the back of Cam’s ute. ‘Oh, no, looks like Jo’s been called out to a fire.’

  Jo ignored the remark — tolerance within reason — but Cam’s dark look suggested his daughter’s sarcasm was not what he needed after a day like today. She noticed him absently touch the mess of scars on his neck, the reminder he’d always carry with him of the fire that had taken the lives of his wife and son. His finger moved to his deformed right earlobe, unaware of the concern he was signalling to Jo.

  She felt her frustration build. Why didn’t he just come right out and say it?

  With her back to Ruby, who was now in the ute, she whispered, ‘For goodness’ sake, Cam, someone’s got to do it. You know how undermanned the bushfire brigade are at the moment.’

  He held his palms up. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the problem,’ she muttered.

  And the problem wasn’t helped by their awareness that the opportunities they’d had for intimacy since starting their relationship could be counted on just a few fingers. Cam’s serious injury, Ruby, jobs and duties, including the bushfire brigade, had all sapped their energy and their time.

  Ruby interrupted Jo’s brooding. ‘C’mon, then, Dad, are we going? I’m starved.’

  ‘The page said it was only a small grass fire. I’ll pop in after if I’m not too long,’ Jo said.

  ‘They always say it’s just a grass fire. You know very well it probably won’t be.’

  Jo ignored Cam’s remark. ‘But if we don’t catch up tonight, do you want me to call by in the morning and give Ruby a lift to school?’

  ‘No, it’s okay, I’ll drive her.’ Cam kissed Jo distractedly on the cheek. ‘Be careful,’ he said, in a voice barely audible.

  ‘See you tomorrow, Jo. Thanks for meeting the agent with me,’ Ruby said, pleasant and polite when things were going her way.

  Cam tooted the horn and drove off without another word.

  CHAPTER SIX

  If there hadn’t been a human body in the wool bale, Leanne decided, this whole situation might have been quite funny. Keeping a straight face was a struggle as she watched Sergeant Harris talking to the pathologist. Dr Freddie McManus had large bushy eyebrows that twisted like writhing caterpillars with every inflection of his baritone voice and every ripple of his substantial jowls. His facial contortions and ghoulish enthusiasm for his job were leaving Harris paler by the moment, until Leanne began to wonder if the new sergeant had an even weaker stomach than she had.

  They were trying to work out a way to get the wool bale off the beam that would cause minimum damage. At last, after consulting with the two SOCO guys, it was decided it would be best removed in the same manner as it had been put up: with the block and tackle. The compact woollen tomb could then be transported to the morgue intact for X-rays before the body was extracted.

  Any humour Leanne might have seen in Dr McManus’s behaviour vanished as the maggots rained to the floor with the first shift of the wool bale.

  It took all four of them — Harris, the two SOCO guys and Leanne herself — to ease it off the beam and lower it to the ground. Leanne’s role was to keep it from bashing into anything on its way down. Once, when it swung towards her, she was forced to steady it with her hand. When the heat of decomposition reached her skin through her double-gloved hand, she had to turn her head and gag. She gagged again when the decaying hand brushed against her leg, and prayed the hardened SOCO team hadn’t noticed.

  But Freddie McManus had noticed. He shot her a wink before launching into one of his infamous historical lectures. This was the one about how King William the Conqueror had been so fat his corpse had split its coffin, releasing such a putrid smell that the whole abbey had been evacuated.

  Fortunately this woollen coffin remained intact, despite being stuffed into the coroner’s van as tightly as the ugly sister’s foot into the slipper. At last, with a feeling of relief, Leanne watched the red tail-lights of the convoy disappear into the night.

  She turned, looking for Sergeant Harris. He’d taken off his white overalls and over-boots and was sitting on a rock outside the taped perimeter, legs apart, hands on knees and shoulders slumped. He’d not joined in any of the good-natured bantering of the SOCO guys, guiding the procedure but otherwise keeping pretty much to himself.

  Leanne let out a heavy sigh. He was sick, she could grant him that, but still she wondered if she’d ever enjoy the same kind of working relationship with Harris that she’d had with Sergeant Cam Fraser.

  Today had been the first time she’d met up with Sergeant Fraser since she’d seen him in the hospital and he’d thanked her for saving his life. That had been awkward enough, but meeting him today in the shed had been even worse. Everything had seemed so out of context — his civvies and private ute, their stilted conversation. And the fact that she’d had to take the initiative; to question him, her ex-sergeant, who knew more about policing than she probably ever would, had made her wish the earth would open up and swallow her.

  Sergeant Harris looked up when she approached. He looked pale and tired under the glow from the shed light. In pleasant contrast to the inside of the shed, the air outside was tinged with the faint fragrance of wood smoke.

  ‘What now, Sarge?’ she asked as she peeled off her protective clothing.

  ‘SOCO will be back in the morning to resume the search during daylight. What did you do with the junk you found in
the pile of wool?’

  ‘Bagged it and gave it to the guys to take to the lab along with Mr Pilkington’s hairbrush and toothbrush. They also took a scraping of the bloodstain inside the door.’

  ‘Good.’ Harris rubbed his forehead with pale, blunt fingertips. ‘I’m knackered — you’re not wrong about how those pills make you sleepy. I’m going to have to call it a night. I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here on your own for a while.’

  Leanne swallowed. ‘By myself?’

  She turned to face the glowing shed and tried to remember the name of the sci-fi movie that had scared her to death when she was a kid. Someone had hidden an alien space ship in an old barn and it had glowed just like this.

  ‘This place needs to be watched all night, I can’t have anyone waltzing in off the streets — er, paddocks — and tampering with the evidence, either deliberately or unintentionally. Who knows, the murderer might even return to the scene.’

  A block of ice formed in Leanne’s stomach.

  Harris huffed out a frustrated breath. ‘I can’t bloody believe the lack of available resources in this place. How the hell are we expected to run a murder investigation with so few people?’

  Leanne swallowed the quiver before it reached her voice. ‘I suppose no one expects trouble in a place as small as this. Until recently all we got was pub brawls and car crashes.’

  ‘I’ll get what’s his name — the prematurely balding guy who never smiles, the one with no chin . . .’

  This description hardly fitted their other constable, raven-haired, footy playing lifeand soul of the party, Pete Dowel.

  ‘Derek?’ she asked,

  ‘That’s the one. I’ll radio Constable Derek Witherspoon and get him over here ASAP.’

  ‘Gee, thanks, but I’m sure I can manage on my own,’ she said with false bravado. Inside she knew even Derek would be better than no one.

  ‘None of that now, Constable. There’s a bushfire in some farmland to the east of here. Constable Dowel arrived not long after it started and caught the firebug fleeing the scene and took him to the cells. The volly bushfire brigade has the fire under control now, but I had to send Dowel back to man the roadblock. I’m afraid there’s no one else to help out here.’

  The bushfire was no surprise to Leanne. There’d been a plague of fires this summer, some caused by sparks off the railway track, some by lightning strikes and some deliberately lit. The area around Glenroyd was particularly vulnerable to fire, nestled as it was in the last bumps of the forested coastal hills before the landscape flattened into wheat and sheep country, stretching inland like a salty, sepia sea.

  Harris hauled himself up from the rock he was sitting on. ‘And there’s sure to be press, too. I sent one guy packing earlier, so keep an eye out for anyone else who might be skulking about — after the predators come the scavengers. I’ll come back first thing in the morning and organise a statement for them.’

  Leaving her with that, the sergeant made a sharp turn and walked smack into the overhanging branch of an olive tree. ‘Shit.’ He rubbed the front of his head.

  ‘You want a torch, Sarge?’

  Hours earlier Harris had parked on the other side of the grove, opting for shade rather than convenience, and now his car was somewhere out there in the black.

  ‘No, I’ll be right,’ he said with a yawn, and stumbled off into the night.

  Leanne climbed wearily into her vehicle and prepared herself for a long night of brooding on how much she missed Sergeant Fraser. She sat for a moment with the car door open, consoling herself with the sugary fragrance of the bottlebrush grass and the sounds of cicadas and the frogs from the nearby dam.

  A sudden crash broke through the stillness of the night.

  She sprang from the car and called out, trying in vain to discern the sergeant’s shape among the twisted silhouettes of the trees. ‘Sarge, you all right?’

  No answer. Even the cicadas and frogs had been shocked into silence. But the evening breeze brought with it smells of disturbed earth, rust and brick dust.

  And a long, low moan.

  Leanne leaped back into the car, started the engine and yanked the wheels into a sharp turn, her headlights slashing through the eerie darkness of the trees. Ghostly in the headlights’ beam, a plume of white dust wafted from the ground ahead.

  Because of the low scrub, she could go no further in the car, and made her way on foot, torch in hand. She moved cautiously to the patch of ground where the dust still floated and found herself a few metres away from the site of what looked to be an old rubbish pit.

  God almighty, she thought, taking tentative steps toward the gaping crater. He’s fallen straight through.

  Leanne strained to pick up the filtered sound through the ominous silence.

  She caught the crack of a fractured twig from behind.

  The brief crackle of footsteps on shrivelled leaves.

  And froze.

  ‘Hey, can I help?’

  Her heart stalled. She whirled in the direction of the man’s voice, shining her torch straight at him, forcing him to screw up his face with the glare. He took a step back and put his arms up in defence.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Leanne demanded

  ‘It’s okay, don’t panic,’ he said, hands still shielding his face from the torch beam.

  ‘What do you mean, “don’t panic”? I’m not panicking, I’m just bloody pissed off. What do you think you’re doing sneaking up on me like that? You nearly gave me a heart attack!’ She smacked her hand against her chest to emphasise the point.

  ‘Get that torch out of my eyes and I’ll explain.’ The man sounded as exasperated as she was.

  She lowered the torch from his eyes and slid the beam down his body. Tall, young, but with the jutting jaw of a much older man, he was wearing a pale blue shirt and dark pants, much like the uniform of a city cop. And there was some kind of a badge on the shoulder too that she couldn’t identify.

  ‘You’re not press?’ she asked, trying to keep the tremor from her voice.

  The man laughed. ‘Far from it. My name’s David Fielding. I’m an RSPCA inspector.’

  ‘But what the hell . . .’

  His hand moved to his hip pocket. Leanne’s moved to her gun.

  He stopped what he was doing and put both hands in the air. ‘Hey, whoa there. If I’d known I’d stumbled upon Annie Oakley I’d have worn a flak jacket. I just thought you might want to see my ID.’

  ‘Show me now, then.’

  As he handed her his card, the thick gold chain on his wrist jingled. He’d be quite the peacock in civilian clothes.

  His card told her the necessary details: ‘David Fielding, RSPCA’ and his mobile phone number. She put his card into her pocket, about to get stuck into him, when a pitiful cry from the bottom of the hole made her stop before she could get started.

  ‘It’s okay, Sarge, I’ll get you out.’ She turned back to David Fielding and handed him the torch. ‘This is a crime scene, you shouldn’t be here. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, mate. Meanwhile I guess you may as well make yourself useful. Hold the torch and shine it on the hole.’

  Leanne got down on her hands and knees and began to crawl gingerly toward the hole. She negotiated a few more metres of rubble and sheets of corrugated tin, then the metal on the edge of the jagged pit began to rock. ‘Cripes,’ she said. She stopped, knowing she could go no further without the risk of joining her beleaguered sergeant down below.

  Fielding let out a low chuckle. The torchlight wobbled around for a moment then settled on her bum. Creep.

  ‘Move the torch, I can’t see,’ she demanded, bracing herself for some kind of derogatory comment about how her large arse was blocking the light. Lucky for him it never came.

  ‘When this is all over, I can imagine us sitting in a pub, laughing about this,’ he said instead.

  ‘In your dreams, mate.’

  She pushed self-consciousness aside, lay flat on her stomach and tried unsuccess
fully to peer over the edge of the tin.

  ‘I think my leg’s broken,’ Harris gasped up to her.

  Leanne raised her voice. ‘I’m going to have to get an emergency crew here, Sarge. I don’t think I can get you out without hurting you more.’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake hurry, girl. There’s something dead down here and it stinks . . . Oh, fuck, I think I’m going to throw up.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  By the time Jo arrived at the bushfire’s location, the fire was all but extinguished. Her fellow volunteer, Charlie, seemed disappointed, but to Jo it was a welcome relief.

  She wondered again what had made her volunteer for the bushfire brigade. The idea of fighting a raging inferno never ceased to terrify her. But whenever she recalled the rough texture of Cam’s scars under her touch, the look on Ruby’s face when she gazed at the picture of her dead mother and brother, Jo realised it was something she just had to do, whatever Cam thought.

  They met up with their captain in a picnic area close to the fire and were given their assignment: they were to park their vehicle near the boundary fence and spend the night watching a burning stag high up on a tree that couldn’t be reached by the hoses. There was nothing left to burn under the tree, and once the smouldering branch had fallen to the ground, they could put it out, confirm all was safe and hopefully go home.

  A long night.

  Two hours later and Jo was huddled in the passenger seat of the light tanker, the acrid smell of wet charcoal exuding from the canvas-covered seats and every crevice of the vehicle’s interior. After the heat of the day it was hard to imagine feeling cold, but she’d inadvertently sprayed herself with the hose earlier, to Charlie’s amusement, and was now paying the shivering price for her carelessness.

  As she drew her knees to her chin, she glanced over at Charlie. He was asleep, emitting gentle snores in time with the blue and red flashing light on their vehicle’s roof, the hairs of his brindled beard blowing gently with each breath, his hands, as cracked and dry as the land he farmed, clasped on his lap.