I was driving Amy Burroughs home after the negative identification of Ross Browne. Sutty was chasing down his military records, or at least confirmation that Browne had lost his leg abroad. I was rattled. Tired and confused. I couldn’t quite shake Amy’s reaction to the body, and it filled me with uncomfortable questions. Either she was lying about the identification or, worse, something even more complicated was going on with the dead man.
‘I need to know what happened in there.’
‘Nothing happened,’ she said after some time.
‘That was quite a reaction for nothing.’
‘It’s not him,’ she said, definitively.
But my patience was gone. ‘You’re keeping something back. What did you see?’ I pulled up around the corner from her street, remembering that things were sensitive at home. When I killed the engine and looked at her she was watching me out of the corner of her eye. She turned to face me fully.
‘You’re imagining things, Detective.’
‘I didn’t imagine catching you in there.’
‘My hero …’ She looked away.
‘Well, answer me this at least. Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine, I’m just overworked. Just tired.’
‘I’m not asking about your constitution. I’m asking if you’re safe, if your boy is.’
‘From what?’ she said, toying with the mass of thick, plastic bracelets at her wrist.
‘From whatever just scared you out of consciousness.’
The set of her jaw hardened and she smiled bitterly. ‘I get it,’ she said. ‘You’re here for me …’
‘I—’
‘My husband’s not home so you want to come inside? Very subtle …’
‘What?’
‘You’re not as slick as you think you are,’ she said. It sounded like she was talking to someone else but it still landed. ‘I want to get out, I want to go home.’
I started up again and turned on to her street. When I pulled up she left the car without another word, not looking back until she’d got her front door open and stepped through it. Standing there in the hallway alone, I thought she looked like a woman with a secret. She paused inside the house and then turned, took a step, as though there was something she wanted to say to me. Then she disappeared inside, leaving the door ajar.
I was thinking about following her to continue the conversation when there was a knock at the window. I turned to see an elderly woman in a dressing gown, a neighbour of Amy’s. I buzzed down the glass.
‘Can I help you?’ I said, a little too sharply. I was tired and the question marks were ganging up over my head. I wasn’t in the mood for rubberneckers.
‘Oh, sorry to bother you,’ she said, pursing her lips. ‘But you are a police officer?’
‘No, I’m sorry,’ I said, really meaning it. ‘I am a police officer, yes.’
‘Yes,’ she said, restored somewhat by my gesture towards civility. ‘I saw you and your partner sitting out here the other night with nothing better to do …’
‘How did you know we were police?’
‘Shifty eyes,’ she said. ‘Put it this way, you’d both go hungry as salesmen. Do you not need to speak to me?’
‘Speak to you about what?’
‘About the prowler.’
I got out of the car and walked her back to her front door. ‘What prowler are we talking about here?’
‘Well, like I told her,’ she said, nodding towards Amy’s house. ‘He was sniffing round like a dog with two dicks. Shuffling up and down the street, staring at her house. Except, when he thought no one was watching, his shuffle went away. He’d look through the windows and the letterbox, then when he saw someone coming, he’d shuffle off again.’
‘When was this?’
‘Last Friday.’
The day before the smiling man died.
‘Can you describe him for me?’
‘Well …’ She paused for maximum effect. I tried to stay calm. ‘Now let me see. He was a good bit older than you. Wore a brown suit, asylum-seeker tan. There was something about his eyes, though …’ She frowned in concentration. ‘Blue. Very blue. They didn’t go with the rest of him. Stood out from across the street.’
I kept my voice level. ‘Did this man speak to, or otherwise interact with, Ms Burroughs?’
‘Not that I saw, sweetheart, but I told her to report him to the police. Men these days—’
‘You’ve been a great help,’ I said, crossing the road to Amy’s house, where the door remained ajar.
The smiling man had been here, and on the day before he died.
His secondary connection to Amy Burroughs was already established. Her phone number found in his possession. The book that she claimed she’d given to someone else. There were possible mundane explanations for that. Theft. Obsession. But a visit here was too much to overlook, especially given that Amy’s neighbour had told her about a suspicious man watching the property. Especially given that she’d failed to mention it. I pushed the open door and stepped into the hallway.
I felt glass cracking under my shoes.
The picture frames lining the walls had all been smashed in.
‘Amy,’ I called out.
There was no answer.
I couldn’t decide if I was looking at a psychotic breakdown or an intruder. I was about to call for back-up when I saw that the person in each of the smashed picture frames was Amy’s little boy. I felt certain she hadn’t done it herself.
As I took another step I heard whimpering from further inside. When I reached the end of the hall I saw her. She was pale, sweating, with tears streaming down her face. Her hand had been nailed into the wall. As I stepped around the corner I saw a man in a black balaclava holding a nail gun to her temple. He turned and I took a step back. He hissed a few more words into her ear and bolted through the kitchen.
‘Try not to move,’ I said, approaching her. She was clearly in pain but nodded. I followed the man through to the kitchen and out the back door. I was just in time to see him vault over the fence. When I got to it and looked after him he was gone. I went back into the house, called Dispatch for back-up and an ambulance for Amy. As I tried to talk to her she continued to stare over my shoulder in shock. Following her eyeline I saw that all the photographs of her little boy above the mantle had been nail-gunned into the wall, through his eyes.
4
Amy had been taken to hospital and officers had been sent to secure the safety of her boy. He was fine, still with the friend who babysat for her while she and her husband were at work. Both of them would need protection until the threat, whatever it was, had passed. The man with the nail gun had got away and Amy was too traumatized to tell us anything. When I’d asked what the man had been saying, hissing, into her ear she’d started to tell me something and then stopped. Her eyes had settled on the pictures of her boy.
The nails sticking out of his eyes.
‘He didn’t say anything,’ she said.
I returned to the station to fill Sutty in, finding him on the phone, mid-conversation. ‘Yeurgh,’ he said. ‘Yeurgh. Actually, someone just arrived who I’d like you to talk to. Thanks for your help.’ He threw the receiver at me and I caught it, then he dropped into his chair like a depth charge and watched.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Can I ask who I’m speaking with?’
‘This is Ross Browne.’
I rubbed my face and glanced at Sutty, who was smiling. Browne confirmed everything that Amy Burroughs had told us. They’d dated, briefly, five years before, when he’d rotated out of Iraq with an injury. When the city’s insomnia started amplifying his own, he’d moved to the coast and they’d split up. He’d never been back since, so he claimed, and had an airtight alibi for the events of Saturday night, and for all the incidents since.
For fuck’s sake, I thought.
He didn’t even know she’d had a kid, so I left questions of paternity unasked.
Sutty waved for my attention. ‘Ask about the book …’